Disclaimer: Loveless is not mine.

AN: Warning there are some spoilers in here and of course Yaoi. Man sex ahead you have been warned.

More than Zero

Chapter 1

It all started for Youji and Natsuo, the male Zero pair, after they lost to Soubi and he took them in. It was the first time anyone had ever shown them compassion or mercy. Until that point they had lived under the thumb of Sensei Nagisa exclusively, she even had them homeschooled so they had almost no social skills, as far as she was concerned they were actually 'Less than Zero' and treated them accordingly. Just sets of Interchangeable biological parts that she had created to show up and if possible impress Ritsu. When they had lost to Soubi, she'd had no more use for them.

They had expected that they would go back to her and then they would be terminated, but Soubi had taken them in instead. It went against everything they had ever known up to that point, and it confused the hell out of them. They'd done some pretty awful things to him during that fight and despite the fact that he'd won and he had every right to kill them then and there, but he'd not only shown them mercy, he'd told them that once they could move again to come to his apartment for the time being. He'd taken them in when they'd had nowhere else to go, he'd even bandaged up their wounds and cared for them.

Then came the day they finally met Ritsuka, Soubi's sacrifice. He was with Soubi when they had gone to pick him up after a fight with some other Fighter Unit, a fight he hadn't won, and he'd lost because he hadn't fought back, his sacrifice hadn't ordered him too because he wasn't there. This had seriously pissed off Youji, that wasn't how a Sacrifice should treat his Fighter, but it turned out that Ritsuka knew as much about the Fighter/Sacrifice bond as they did about how normal people should treat each other, which was nothing.

So they had begun to learn from each other. Natsuo and Youji telling Ritsuka how the Fighter Units worked together the rolls that the Fighter and Sacrifice each played, specifically pointing out that Soubi was the perfect fighter as he had no will of his own and needed to be completely controlled by his sacrifice, that when he was with Seimei they had been famous among the Fighter Units.

They learned from Ritsuka in less obvious ways, by watching him and seeing how he treated everyone around him, including themselves. They saw that he was much stronger than they had originally thought and yet he had such a kind and gentle heart. He had become so angry on their behalf when the Female Zero's Kouya and Yamato had attacked them with that strange spell and Youji had gone down in an instant. It had been terrify because for one brief moment they couldn't feel each other. Soubi told them later that the Female pair had cast a spell that had switched the Zero sacrifices, the shock is what had taken Youji out. But that the real damage caused by the spell would be carried by the pair who had cast it in the first place. They didn't really understand what he meant by that, but they were together once again and that was all that mattered.

As long as they had each other, they could deal with anything.

Ritsuka became their first real friend, and thru him they began to see everything in a different light. That day when he snuck into Soubi's apartment to get some sleep, they had found him snuggled down in between them. What actually surprised Youji the most was that he hadn't woken them when he crawled in there with them, if anyone else had entered that apartment they would have been awake in a heartbeat. But Ritsuka had not only entered the apartment but had managed to crawl into that bed with them. How strange was that and what did it mean? That they trusted him even in their sleep?

Also because of Ritsuka, they realized that the way they were treated by Sensei Nagisa was considered neglect bordering on abuse. That weren't too disturbed by it, as long as they had each other it really didn't matter how she treated them. She may have abandoned them but at least they still had each other and now they had Soubi, Ritsuka and even the flighty Kio as friends. They were learning.

Then there was the day it all came to an end.

Or at least that is what it had felt like at first, Sensei Nagisa called them, called them and told them to come back to her. It was what they had thought they had been waiting for, what they really wanted, but when the call finally came, they realized they didn't want to leave. But that life, it was all they knew and they also knew they couldn't keep living here at Soubi's forever no matter how much they wanted too, so they had left and returned to Nagisa. But Nagisa didn't call them just because she wanted them back, she'd brought them back because the female Zero's had been defeated and had 'died' so they were all she had left. She sent them to the school of the Seven Moons, putting them under the care of her rival Sensei Ritsu so that they could learn the schools way of Fighting and become stronger, because she said they we're just too weak as they were now.

So they were in enrolled in the school of the Seven Moons.

They hadn't wanted to do that either, but Nagisa was a very effective convincer. She'd threaten to kill them herself if they didn't do as she asked and for all they knew she could do exactly what she said, she'd created them after all. So they had gone and there they had been separated for the first time ever, each student not only had their own room but Fighters and Sacrifices lived in different wings, some of their classes they had together but not all.

That first night Youji lay alone not only in an empty bed but in an empty room for the very first time, for as long as he could remember Natsuo had always been there somewhere nearby. His chest felt tight as if there was a large weight upon it, he didn't understand this sensation, not at all, and then water began to leak from his eyes. He touched fingers to his cheek and looked at the moisture there on his finger tips. His eyes were broken? He'd seen others 'cry' when he'd hurt them during a fight, but he wasn't fighting now and as a Zero he didn't feel pain, so why were his eye's leaking water? But it wouldn't stop and he wasn't about to go tell Nagisa, afraid that she would consider him defective and terminate him, so he let his eye's leak water until he finally tired and fell asleep. When he awoke his eye's seemed to have stopped leaking so he didn't tell anyone but Natsuo. Natsuo said he had felt the weird heavy weight also and it had taken him a very long time to get to sleep, but that his eyes hadn't leaked any water.

The nights eventually became easier and Youji's eyes eventually stopped leaking water, especially when Natsuo was able to make it over to his room for the night. They found out pretty quickly that despite the fact that the school tried to keep the Fighters and Sacrifices in separate rooms, in their separate wings that it didn't really help much and just about every Fighter unit spent as many nights together as their training allowed. Most (though not all ) Fighter units lost their ears to each other as soon as they hit puberty. The Zero's were a little perplexed by this as many of the pairs were of the same sex just as they were, they knew very little about how a person went about losing their ears They believed that to lose one's ears the two people involved were supposed to be of the opposite sex. The night they had met Soubi, they'd had the pretty Sensei Hitomi Shinonome under their control, for just that reason, they had been planning to make her tell them how to do it and then get it done and over with so they could be adults, never realizing that they were probably far too young at the time to have even carried it out even if they had known what to do. Having entered the school at the sixth grade level they still hadn't much to go on, seems sex education was covered during year 5, some students matured earlier than others, and the school thought it best to teach them before things got out of control.

For the next 2 years things went pretty smoothly for the Zero pair all things considered. After Seimei had returned and gouged out Ritsu's eyes Nagisa seemed to have lost interest in the Zero pair for the most part. Other than the occasional half hearted threat to kill them, she basically left them alone, all her attention was now focused on Ritsu. They helped Ritsuka as much as they could with the 'Beloved' problem, That Nisei was a real weird guy all right, and Seimei, they couldn't believe he was even related to Ritsuka, But Ritsuka said it was true, so it had to be. Personally they wish he had been the one that had died, instead of just staging his own death, he was putting Ritsuka and Soubi thru hell. They'd offered several times to hunt him down and to try to kill him for the 'Loveless' pair, but they refused, saying it was their problem. Natsuo thought Soubi and Ritsuka were trying to protect the two of them, Seimei was very strong and had never hesitated to kill his opponents, Youji agreed with his Fighter but that didn't mean they would ever back down if it came to a fight with the true 'Beloved' pair.