Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters presented here and am not making any profit off of this whatsoever.
Story Title: Sanity Optional
Chapter Title: Tricks and Challenges
Story Word Count: 3,433
Chapter Word Count: 3,433
Rated: T
Romance: Tenjoin Fubuki x Edo Phoenix
Notes: This takes place about five years after the end of Yu-Gi-Oh GX. Comments and criticism gratefully accepted.
LJ Challenge: This was written for the 4seasonal LJ challenge.
Summary: Spring, summer, autumn, winter. Four seasons, four situations, four sights of beauty, four moments between two people whose sanity is questionable.

Edo had no idea of what had gotten into his manager. He was a duelist, not an actor. Even if one of the most famous actors in the world was also a duelist. He only wanted to have his face all over the screen if he were dueling someone. He didn't even really want it then, but it was necessary so he put up with it.

But, his manager was insistent. "Not only will this be very, very lucrative, but it will do wonders for finding you new sponsors." And since without sponsors, there was no way that he could continue in the Pro Leagues, there was no way out of it for Edo. As much as he hated that fact.

So, there he was, on a perfectly beautiful spring day, staring at a script and wondering exactly what kind of a hack had written this monstrosity. There were at least four plot holes that he could see on the first ten pages already, and the dialogue read atrociously. Someone had been paid in money to write this drivel?

"They don't actually expect me to say something like this, do they?" he was asking the empty air, but oddly enough, the air decided to answer.

"What's wrong with it? I think it's pretty funny myself." That voice. He'd heard it before but he couldn't remember just where from off-hand.

He didn't bother to turn around though. Whoever it was could just come around in front of him if they wanted him to look at them. "You obviously haven't read it closely enough, then. This character I'm supposed to be playing apparently has a spine made out of moldy oatmeal and the intelligence of a retarded cucumber."

A sun bronzed hand reached around him to snatch at the script. Snatch at, not out, since Edo moved it away before the other could get hold of it. "Hey! How do you expect me to look at it if you're going to keep it?"

"Get one of your own." Edo did not share well with others.

"Why would I want to do that?" Really, Edo was quite certain that he knew that voice. He just couldn't think of where from. "It's not like I need to read the script anyway."

Edo snorted some. "What are you doing hanging around here then?" In his opinion, everyone involved in this farce should read the script, if only to know how loudly they should laugh at it.

"Waiting for shooting to start. I'm the star." And now he wandered around in front of Edo and now Edo recognized him and now Edo understood exactly why the fool had been saying what he had. No one who had any contact with Tenjoin Fubuki could ever think he would react in a way that made any kind of sense.

He'd known that he was going to run into the other man during this. It would have been impossible not to, since they were supposed to be 'co-starring' in this. He had not, however, expected that the other wouldn't even have so much as read the script. "How can you not read it then?" He refused to show any hint of surprise.

"What would I need to read it for?" Fubuki asked carelessly. There was a couch in the room, and he stretched himself out on it, one leg tossed up on the back, and one arm behind his head. "That's too boring."

Edo wondered just from that alone how someone like Fubuki could have become one the richest and most popular film stars ever to walk the planet. His looks couldn't have been the only factor responsible. Who would just want to look at someone? He'd certainly never went to a movie just to ogle a pretty face. "How do you know what you're supposed to say or do if you don't read it?"

"I don't. I make up most of it as we go along." Fubuki grinned in a way that made Edo wish he had his manager's neck between his hands and could just start squeezing.

"You make it up as we go along?" Edo repeated the words carefully. He had spoken fluent Japanese for years, helped along by Saioh and Mizuchi, but this still baffled him. Had he heard Fubuki correctly?

Fubuki nodded lazily, then reached over to the table in front of the couch to pick up an orange. Edo threw himself down into a chair opposite and stared at the script for a few more seconds before he finally just threw it to the side. If Fubuki wanted to improvise on set, then Edo would quite simply out-improvise him, finish this, and be back dueling again in no time. He glanced over to see what the other was doing, and his jaw almost dropped to see Fubuki dig his fingers into the orange and start to peel it.

It was a simple, commonplace act. Edo himself had done it more than enough times. But something in the way Fubuki's long, graceful fingers moved made it something more. Not to mention, he kept the peel itself complete until the orange was completely stripped. Then, he took a bite out of it.

Edo was three steps away from excusing himself in an attempt to get some sort of composure. Normal people did not eat oranges like that. It was all but obscene! And yet…nothing unusual was going on. Was it all in his own mind? And if so…had he been drinking and not noticed?

"Want an orange?" Fubuki picked up another one and tossed it towards him without waiting for an answer. Edo caught it reflexively, then stared down at it before looking back to where Fubuki was finishing his own. He swallowed briefly and put the orange back in the bowl.

"No." He didn't think he could do that to some innocent fruit that had never done anything to him. If it had been some sort of evil orange that had…what was he thinking? Was being around someone like Fubuki already affecting his head? "When does this ridiculous little batch of…whatever get started?" There were no words in any of the languages he knew for what he felt about this 'movie'. Perhaps he'd start to invent a few.

"Probably whenever the rain out there stops." Fubuki stretched out a little, licking orange juice off of his lips as he did. Edo was not looking. He not-looked very, very hard. Wait, what had he said?

"Rain?" It hadn't been raining when he'd come inside. Sure, there had been a few clouds, but no actual rain, and no forecast for any either. Not that he really expected the weathermen to get something right. Now, if he'd asked Saioh, perhaps that would have been different.

Fubuki turned towards him, or so Edo thought by the whisper of cloth across the material of the couch. He wasn't looking, so he couldn't be sure. "Rain. It's the wet stuff that comes from the clouds." There was more than a hint of a tease in his voice now, and Edo wondered how Fubuki would look with his features conveniently rearranged into a pattern that he himself personally found far more pleasing. Fubuki didn't need both eyes right above his nose, or his nose above his mouth, or his mouth in one piece, did he?

"I know what rain is. Why is it raining now?" He wanted to get this farce over with and find something more interesting to do with his time. The first five items on his mental list covered watching paint dry and observing how grass grew. Multiple times.

"I'm not a weather-guy." Fubuki laughed, a very rippling and enticing sound. Edo refused to be enticed. At all. Very hard. He didn't even know this guy and already he was…no, he wasn't. He would not do this even if he did know him. "But it does happen a lot." Edo promised himself that if he could arrange it, there would be an 'accident' on set at his earliest convenience.

Edo moved closer to a window, and now he could hear the faint sounds of rain pattering down outside. A spring shower, nothing too serious, but since no scenes demanded rain, and most of them did demand some sort of measure of being outdoors, shooting was apparently halted. A really good studio, Edo decided, would have made arrangements for this by filming indoors and using special effects and the like. It was just another way to prove this production was being run by idiots.

Fubuki reached over his shoulder and pulled the curtain back some, showing the gray clouds more clearly. "I bet there's going to be a rainbow after this," he said, grinning. "Those are awesome."

"I suppose." Edo supposed no such thing. Rainbows were for people like…like Johan Andersen. Not for people like him. If anything, he actually preferred the rain. It put him in mind of standing under an umbrella with someone, and that was much more comfortable in his mind than seeing some trick of the light going across the sky.

The other man appeared to be thinking for a moment. Edo wondered nastily just how hard it was for him. He turned away from the window and started back to the couch, intending to look over this script and know what he was supposed to say, even if Fubuki didn't. His earlier thoughts about out-improvising Fubuki were forgotten. Not that he couldn't do it. He just didn't want to follow this hideously bad example.

"You know what makes rainbows, don't you?" Was he still there? Couldn't he see that Edo didn't want to talk to him?

"Yes." Edo didn't lift his gaze from the script for so much as a second. He didn't want to talk, but he did suspect that if he didn't, Fubuki would not leave him alone. A little conversation was preferable to a lot of it.

And then Fubuki was sitting beside him on the couch, and one finger was pointed at his white suit. "You make a rainbow," he said dramatically, as if Edo had never said a word, "by breaking up white light. You're all white. Have you ever been broken?"

His father's body. Unmoving. Never to move again.

Saioh, consumed by the power of the Light of Ruin.

Ekou, giving up her very life for a love that would never be returned in as great a measure.

He knocked Fubuki's hand away and glared at him with the concentrated force of get away from me. "Are you insane?" He didn't expect an answer. He already knew what the answer was: an unmistakable yes. No one could have asked him that question and been sane.

"What do you think?" Fubuki moved his hand back a little and got himself more comfortable, spreading his arms over the back of the couch and putting his feet up on the table. "Do I act crazy?"

"You're not acting." Edo replied flatly, pulling himself away. Someone had to be serious around here, and it didn't look as if Fubuki were going to be up for the job at any point in the near future. Or the distant future. Or at any point until the end of time itself.

"Maybe I'm not." Fubuki quirked a grin at him. "But that's why you love me, isn't it?"

Edo froze where he was. Those words had just not been uttered. He would have been far, far less shocked to hear Saioh say them. It would have been virtually comforting to hear them, though he knew that he never would. "What did you say?" Maybe he had indeed heard something wrong. He wasn't much past his twenty-first birthday, but that didn't mean he couldn't have been developing hearing problems.

"I said, you love me because I'm crazy." That grin was still there. Edo wanted to smack it off of his face so damned hard. He could do it, too. He could have knocked Fubuki halfway through the wall if he'd put the effort into it. But what he'd heard simply kept him frozen where he was. No one had ever said anything like that to him.

"I don't love you. I never said anything like that." Maybe it was Fubuki who had hearing problems to go with his obvious problems of sanity, or lack thereof. That made much more sense, the more that Edo thought about it.

The older man only shrugged, and that grin hadn't faded for so much as a single moment. "You didn't have to. I said it for you." He started to move closer to Edo, and a lesser trained person might well have been caught by that. Edo was not such a lesser trained person, and he was on the far side of the room in a scant second or two. "Playing hard to get? That's not in the script."

"I did an emergency rewrite." Edo replied, ice rimming the edges of his words. "What makes you think I'd even be interested in you?" Edo wasn't certain offhand just who, or what, he was interested in, when it came right down to it. He'd had to have a few dates, mainly for publicity, and there had been a couple of times when he and Saioh had went out together that almost seemed like dates, but hadn't been in the end.

Fubuki just grinned at him still. Goddamn, but Edo wanted to wipe that smirk off of his face somehow, even if it was only for a second or two. He'd been off-kilter ever since Fubuki had shown up and doing that would put him back in control of the situation. "I think I'm interested in you," Fubuki replied calmly. "And I think that's all that I need."

Coherency deserted Edo just then, as did the ability to make audible sounds. He shook his head and pinched himself surreptitiously. Insane, dreaming, deaf…he didn't know what he was, he just knew that this was not supposed to be happening.

"Hey!" Someone that he didn't recognize, not that he cared since they were interrupting a moment he didn't think should have begun in the first place, poked their head into the room. "We're just about ready for you guys. By the time you're done with make-up, we'll need you on the set."

"No problem. I'll get him right over there." Fubuki said before Edo could find out if his inability to talk extended to random movie personnel. The assistant or whoever it was nodded and closed the door behind himself as he left. Edo wanted to think he heard a chuckle…no, he didn't want to think that. But he thought he did anyway.

He didn't even have a moment to try to pretend that he was interested in something else, or didn't need to be shown which way to go in order to get to the make-up crew. Fubuki just grabbed his arm, and how had he moved that fast and Edo didn't catch it that time? It shouldn't have been possible!

Though, really, most of that afternoon seemed to be impossible as far as his mental health was concerned.

Edo was not often disconcerted to the point he didn't pay attention to what was going on around him, but by the time he could actually focus enough to take note of what was going on around himself, they were out of that room and heading down towards to a trailer of some kind. At least that was where Edo thought they were going. It was hard to be entirely certain at the moment.

"Getting the make-up on shouldn't take too long," Fubuki said. Edo was also not certain if he'd even been talking before. His own inner fury had handily distracted him. "Just an hour or two. I don't need a whole lot to look at my best, and neither do you."

Now that sort of compliment Edo knew how to deal with in a sense. More than one person had told him that he was gorgeous or handsome or some variation on that. It had ceased to mean anything to him at all. "I've had to deal with make-up before." It was quite true. Being in the Pros meant at least half an hour before the duel started with powder and paint being used to make certain that one didn't look like a ghost on camera. With his natural pale coloring, he needed a bit more than most people, too.

"Hey! Look!" Fubuki jerked to a stop, halting Edo as well, and one graceful hand gestured towards the eastern sky. Edo ground his teeth. He did not want to stop for some kind of a side trip that involved admiring whatever oddly shaped cloud might have caught Fubuki's attention. Or perhaps it was an interestingly colored leaf. Or an ordinary pebble. Any of those were likely enough. "Come on! Look!"

Fine. Maybe it would make him shut up. Edo turned a little and took a look. Arching across the sky, part of it buried in a slightly red-tinged cloud, was a rainbow. Edo admitted to himself that it was rather pretty. He hadn't bothered to watch too many of them in his life before. They had nothing to do with the goals that he had set for himself.

"Isn't it gorgeous?" Fubuki all but breathed the words out, honest admiration filling his voice. "There's not much better looking than something like that."

"It's just a trick of the light." Edo said, not really understanding what Fubuki saw in it. Sure, it was pretty. But it was ultimately empty and meaningless. Heh, maybe that was what Fubuki saw in it. It must remind him of himself. They did share quite a few similarities, after all.

Fubuki glanced back at him for a moment, a strange sort of smile hovering over his lips. "What's that got to do with anything? It's still beautiful."

"But it doesn't do anything!" Edo protested. What was he doing standing here arguing about rainbows!? Didn't they need to get to make-up? This was so ridiculous! "And look, it's gone!"

Fubuki's smile only got stranger. "No, it isn't." He looked back, but the rainbow had indeed faded away as the sun moved out of the right alignment to the raindrops in the air. Edo smirked a touch smugly. He was right. Now maybe they could get moving. "It's still there."

Edo wanted to scream. Loudly. "Where?" Was Fubuki wearing rainbow vision contact lenses?

"In here." Fubuki touched his chest briefly. "That's where everything that's truly beautiful stays, even if you can't see it with your eyes."

For a moment, Edo stared at him as if he had never heard something like that coming from a human mouth. That was simply because he hadn't. He didn't know if it were extremely profound or a mark of how incredibly simple Fubuki actually was. He is crazy. Without another word, he whirled around and stalked towards the make-up trailer. He could tell Fubuki was following him, at least until the taller man caught up with him. He growled to himself; he had put on a couple of inches since first being drawn into Juudai's circle of insane people, but Fubuki was still taller than he was. Right now, that bothered him. Right now, everything about Fubuki bothered him, right down to the fact that he existed in the first place.

"Hey." Fubuki caught him by the shoulder and turned him around, and Edo was just irked enough to let him do it, just so he could glare at him. "You need to relax. Here."

In retrospect, Edo thought that he should've expected something like that. But who would have ever thought anyone would do that to him? With Fubuki's comment about relaxation, he'd expected…no, he hadn't expected anything, really.

Certainly not for Fubuki to bend down, catch Edo's chin between his fingertips, and kiss him on the lips.

And as oddly as it might have and did seem…that kiss was relaxing. And good. Very, very good. There was even some tongue involved, though Edo wasn't sure of what Fubuki's tongue was actually doing.

Then the other pulled away and calmly walked towards the make-up trailer. Edo stared after him in disbelief before he started there again himself. He expects me to relax after that? The bastard.

If that was the way Fubuki wanted to play, then he would find out Edo could play any game he could, and do it better. He was one of the best, after all. If that had been a challenge…he accepted.

To Be Continued