Title: Lead You To Love
Author: Nina/TechnicolorNina
Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh!: GX
Pairing/Characters: Past-life Jyuudai/Yubel.
Word Count: 4 414
Spoilers: Third season.
Story Rating: PG-13
Story Summary: Jyuudai sends a very special letter.
Notes: Another past-life fic. Same universe. Also take note, Yubel swaps pronouns in the middle. Get used to it, because s/he's as contrary as all hell.
Feedback: Would be wonderful. I can't improve without it! (And concrit is cool. Flames are not.)
Special Thanks/Dedications: For Starry.

She can lead you to love, she can take you or leave you
She can ask for the truth, but she'll never believe you
And she'll take what you give her, as long as it's free
Yeah, she steals like a thief, but she's always a woman to me.

~ "She's Always A Woman," Billy Joel

Yubel is doing very ordinary things when Jyuudai turns the world on its head. To be specific, he's hauling an armful of firewood.

Yubel's father has been ill for years—well enough to stay in trade and provide a home for his only child, but exhausted and worn by the time he gets home at the end of the day. It's Yubel's job, then, to get water and firewood and take care of the horse when his father draws up in the dooryard, and on the day everything changes he's in the middle of completing those chores, not expecting Yssaq of Angon to be home a full three hours before sundown. Yubel almost curses aloud—supper hasn't yet been started, there hasn't been time to so much as look at the hen-coop, much less collect the eggs, and there's still a trip to make to pick up a mended pair of boots. That first urge is buried by a strong wave of fear. The last time Yubel remembers his father coming home early was seven years ago, when the girl who cleaned for Yubel's mother went running into town for the midwife, and by the middle of the week following Yubel, wearing a red mourning-cord on one arm, had been rechristened into the double-identity of takhai.

"Papa?"

Yubel is silenced by a simple wave of his father's hand—not now, that hand says, and so Yubel simply takes the rein out of his father's hand, helps him to dismount, then leads the horse to her stall in the barn they share with four other families too small or too poor to have their own.

Years of practice have led to a kind of pattern, and Yubel barely has to think as he takes off and looks after the tack, getting a curious snuffle from the horse and offering part of a carrot in return. He rubs the side of the horse's neck and throws the blanket over her back before heading into the house, not sure if he should hurry to get it over with or dawdle so he doesn't have to hear whatever bad news is imminent and settling for the most average pace he can manage.

In the house the kettle is on the fire, and his father is working the meal-grinder to produce what can only be coffee. Yubel doesn't look too closely, lest he be accused of staring. Coffee is a luxury; even as a friend of the prince, Yubel tastes it perhaps a dozen times a year, more likely less. There's no point in wondering why his father is making it now. Instead he hangs up the coat the elder has left thrown over a chair and lays out for a cup, then adds another when he receives a curt nod.

The space of fifteen minutes sees them sitting on either side of the wide hearth-stone where it's become their habit to have meals in late autumn and all through winter; they are only two, after all, and money spent on extra cordwood for the luxury of a formal table outside the kitchen is a waste. Yubel takes his cup and adds some of the cream that's going to go over if it's not used anyway.

"There's vanilla-pod liquor if you want it."

The offer of something sweet in an already expensive drink is enough to make Yubel suspicious, but it doesn't stop him from adding just a little anyway. He wants to draw out the moment before they must talk, enjoying the chance to sit with his remaining parent at a time when they are not both bone-tired. When Yubel was still just "she" and small enough for an adult's lap, she spent many evenings sitting on this hearth learning to play Castle, or watching her father add accounts, or sometimes even just curled up next to him enjoying the attention, sometimes even falling asleep there. They are good memories, and if he—now a takhamin, what some people call twinned-body or man-woman, going on sixteen years old—can enjoy the ghost of the past for just a few seconds more, he will gladly do so. And so he wraps his hands around the glazed earthenware cup and sips his coffee and looks at his father's face, lined and tired and with mostly-gray hair surrounding it, remembering when there were still lines and gray hairs but less of both, and without that look of exhaustion.

"I have news."

Yubel doesn't give the kind of snappy comeback he'd offer to Jyuudai or most of the people in town who are not so very much older than he. Instead he sits quietly, waiting. His father reaches into the worn merchant's vest he wears over his shirt and pulls out something that can only be a letter. Even without reading it Yubel can tell instantly from where it's come: it's written on real paper, for one, and there's an actual wax seal, now broken, instead of a string one.

Someone from the palace has written his father a letter.

Yubel reaches for it, then stops. "What is it?"

"This is a . . . very unusual situation, Yubel," his father says. "I suppose all I can do is ask you to think logically about this."

"What is it?" he asks again, and his father puts the letter in his hand.

"The prince paid me a visit this afternoon."

"Jyuudai?" Yubel asks, opening the letter curiously, wondering what on earth Jyuudai would feel the need to write a formal letter for, much less deliver it himself—

"No."

"The final decision is to be made among all men in the household, Yubel," his father—her father, the bitter mockery of a letter in her hands makes that quite clear—says. "This is why I asked you to be logical about this."

Yubel looks back down at the letter, written in the over-careful scrawl of someone with horrible penmanship who is trying to write legibly, if not elegantly. A formal proposal of marriage. From the one man who, out of everyone in Delain, ought to understand better than any other in this kingdom why Yubel has chosen not to marry. She folds it over, not on Jyuudai's careful creases but crookedly down the middle, before she can look far enough to see how much her best friend intends to buy her for. A dark, weather-worn hand comes to rest on top of her own.

"You'll never make a better match, chanti-tam," her father says. "And he adores you. That much is clear."

"If he adored me he wouldn't have done this." Yubel holds up the letter and shakes it, slightly alarmed to realise there are tears in her eyes. Her father takes a sip of his coffee and sighs.

"He's given to neither vice nor temper," he says. "You'd certainly never go hungry in his home, and though you're of an age nobody can deny his place is a solid one. And it's fair to say if anyone in this town would let you do as you please, it's he. Why is that so objectionable?"

"Because I don't love him." It's a ridiculous excuse, and Yubel knows it as soon as it leaves her mouth. Marriage has nothing to do with love except for the very impressionable and the incredibly lucky. She should be happy—honoured, even—to accept the offer of a queen's title from someone who will at least know her name on their wedding day. But something in her protests at the idea of being Jyuudai's trophy—something he felt the need, in the end, to purchase to ensure she was truly his, instead of being satisfied with the offer of her friendship for free. Her father shakes his head.

"I think it's safe to say he loves you, chanti-tam," he says. "And if you came to his bed with no more good fellowship than that between friends, that would bother you so much?"

"I know why he did it." The words taste in her mouth like an orange long gone to seed. "Because he knew I wouldn't marry anyone else. He's pitying me and I don't want it."

"Yubel . . . how much of his request did you read?"

"Enough."

"I think not." Her father takes the letter out of her hand, smoothes it, folds it back along the creases Jyuudai no doubt put there with the letter-opener on his writing-desk. He looks down at it for a long moment, perhaps tracing the design of Jyuudai's seal-ring with his eyes. Yubel doesn't have to study it to know it; she sees it almost every single day, in the reverse form, on Jyuudai's hand.

Her father bends the letter--the kohai, as such proposals are known--to fit the pieces of the seal back together, to better hold it closed. Then he tucks it into the sash of her tunic.

"If word of this ever got out in the town I'd become the most unspeakable laughingstock," he says. "But I think . . . given, as it is, that you know the prince better than perhaps anyone else in this land . . . I'll let custom bend and leave the matter to your discretion." Yubel opens her mouth, sure she should probably say something but without the slightest idea what might be appropriate, and one of those dark, work-worn fingers comes to rest on her lips. "All I request is that you not decide now. Read his petition and think on it these next three days, and keep you from the palace while you do it. Whatever decision you make, from sunset three days oft and onward, I will accept and make known." Her father stands up and puts a hand on her shoulder. "I'll finish the cordwood."

Yubel nods off into space, feeling the letter—only two sheets thick and seemingly weighing a royal stone—pressed against her side not like two leaves of paper and a waxen seal but like a sheet of iron, not hot enough to burn but far too warm to be comfortable.

As soon as her father is out of the room she pulls the letter out of her sash and opens it. She'd rather have the worst of it out of the way now—the part where she finds out just what kind of value Jyuudai actually puts on her companionship. The standard price for a good bride, she knows, is five hundred dechres and two pieces of livestock. Her own, she has no doubt, will be a great deal lower, no matter whether it's Jyuudai or someone else who finally wins her hand. Her family background is laughable, her situation poor, her legal status complicated at best in more ways than one. Such a spouse is not a desired and desirable gift, but a burden.

Yubel is still staring at the paper when her father comes back in with the wood, lips parted in no small amount of shock, reading a single line over and over again in her head like some kind of silent holy chant.

For that privilege I offer any sum to be named by Yssaq, merchant late of Angon, excepting from it only my crown and title herein and those properties under royal protection as a matter of public trust, these exceptions being for the sake of the security and prosperity of the kingdom only.

He doesn't look surprised when she comes upstairs in a skirt.

Yubel's three days of respite are over, ended yesterday at sunset, and the most she can say for them is that her father has been true to his word. The letter in her pocket hasn't been so much as mentioned since it was put in her hand, nor does he mention it now—simply waves her to the other side of the hearth and the bowl of wheat-cereal there. Yubel sits in silence, adds a cut-up passion peach and a pat of butter to her bowl, then pours in a liberal amount of buttermilk before attacking it viciously with a spoon with a kind of grim enthusiasm that might put even Jyuudai to shame.

There is no coffee this morning of either the actual coffee or the chicory variety, but there is hot spiced loveberry-cider, and Yubel pours herself a cup.

"If we don't need wood today—"

"There's enough from yestereven."

"I'd like to go to the palace."

Her father raises his eyebrows; Yubel does not normally ask permission to go anywhere, simply finishing her chores as quickly as possible and leaving. She looks down at her cup.

"Then have you made a decision?"

"There's something I'd like to ask him first."

Her father only nods once. He puts his bowl down on the hearth and stands, puts a hand on her shoulder, squeezes. Yubel can feel the warmth of that hand, a comfort almost childish in its simplicity, through the thin cotton of her blouse. She raises her own hand to it and squeezes back. He draws his own hand gently away, and after a few moments Yubel hears the open and shut of the front door.

She does the washing-up quickly, almost distastefully, and leaves the dishes on the side to dry instead of doing it by hand. Then she pulls a heavy cloak around her shoulders to fight the late autumnal chill of Jackal-Moon, and heads for the castle.

Jyuudai smiles his usual sunny smile when she walks in, and she's not blind enough—not anymore—to miss the appreciation in his eyes. He greets her warmly, tells her he missed her, asks after her father. Yubel gets only as far as telling him her father is fine, thank you, before she pulls the letter out of her pocket and holds it up.

"Why?"

Jyuudai's smile fades, his expression growing tentative. "He showed it to you?"

"He told me to choose."

Jyuudai quickly schools his face back into light formality—if she is here on a business visit, then as the prince, it is his duty to be businesslike, even though she is his friend—but not before she sees the expression that crosses it in the single moment between her telling him that her father has declared the younger man of the family—who also happens to be the woman—the more able to reach a reasonable decision, and his face going carefully blank. I think it's safe to say he loves you, chanti-tam, her father says in her head, and at once Yubel understands two things: Jyuudai is not, and may never be, in love with her. That much she can see just looking at his eyes in that single naked moment.

He's also incredibly afraid of losing her.

Yubel holds out the letter. "I've read it a few times." A few might be understating the case a little; in the past three days she's all but burned holes in it with her eyes, trying to see if there's some meaning she hasn't yet deciphered. "I wondered if you had help writing it. Kanti would be proud."

Jyuudai shakes his head. Yubel is just fast enough to see the flush, quickly covered, when she mentions the approval she thinks it would garner from the childhood tutor she was privileged enough to share. One might as well try to count the stars as to please Kanti, she has heard Jyuudai say on many occasions, and she's highly inclined to agree with him. Praise, whether from Kanti's mouth or given on his behalf, is not given lightly.

"I told Papa I wanted to ask you a question before I answered. You didn't answer it in the kohai. And I don't want you to lie, because I'll know." Jyuudai's eyes flicker back up to her face. Yubel doesn't wait for dramatic pauses; she simply speaks.

"Why me? When you could have your pick of any girl in this entire country—and most of the neighbouring ones, if town gossip's right--why me?"

His answer is simplistic, maddening, Jyuudai from first syllable to last. "Why not you?"

Yubel stares at him, thinking to herself that his birth-star is showing, before she speaks. "Because I'm a half-blood bastard from the Yaron. Because I'm a merchant trader's takhamin and you're the prince of one of the most important countries in the entire known world. Because I'm me. Unless you're enjoying trying to start a big fuss."

"You kick up fusses better than I do," Jyuudai says, and grins sheepishly. "But I don't think any of that's important."

Yubel stares at him, sure she's heard wrong. Legitimacy, bloodline, class, legal status—unimportant?

"Have you lost your mind?"

Jyuudai shakes his head. "Listen. Do you know what those girls, the ones the town is so excited about, do you know what they do? Their servants call them 'accomplished' and because they can speak a bit of Dailish and use real silverware, they think they've got the right to say they're educated. There was a girl here last week, every time I tried to ask her a question, she asked me what I thought. I finally told her I wanted her opinion and she just said 'my will is my lord's.' It was like talking to a doll, Yubel. All the breeding in the world can't make up for not having brains."

"So you like having someone to argue with?" For once, Yubel isn't entirely sure she sees where Jyuudai is going with all this. He smiles and shakes his head again.

"Delain is one of the most important countries there is, and some day I'm going to be the one in charge of it," he says. "You said that. And it's true. I'd rather have somebody I can trust who can help me and who's not afraid to tell me if I'm making the wrong decision instead of someone who's trying to trade on nothing but looking pretty. You're smart, you know what it's like to live with the people instead of up in a castle, and you're not afraid to say what you think, even if you know the people who need to hear it aren't going to like it all that much." He grins, a little sheepish and a little mischievous at the same time. "And you're kind of cute when you're not covered in mud."

For once in her life, Yubel opens her mouth, but can't think of a single thing to say.

The dress she is wearing is a deep red, the kind of colour only available in the silks imported from Kashimin. The shoes beneath it are new, fine leather from the best supply in Amneth. Her fingernails are polished, the heavy calluses on her hands carefully smoothed away by a maid with a piece of the rough stone from the north. She is wearing more makeup today than on the only other occasion she has ever worn it, crushed charstone and mica applied by the Queen herself.

She is beautiful. And miserable.

Still, she smiles and tries to look appropriately modest and happy, her hand in Jyuudai's as he beams at the people below them, his parents on either side of him and her, all of them waving and receiving smiles and bows and marks of fealty from all sides. She squeezes his hand, hard—one of the first instructions she was given for today was to look confident, and she intends to follow it, but in truth, she is petrified, and thinks she will be quite contented if she never has to be the centre of attention ever again—and is at least a little comforted when he squeezes back.

Someone from somewhere—maybe the King, maybe a caller, she's far too focused on not passing out from a combination of heat and anxiety and the tight waist of the dress she has been put into—announces that there will be a feast and dance in the town square in celebration, with the royal family in attendance, and Yubel lets out an inward moan. She is more than tired of the dress, and she knows perfectly well that the people on the ground below them, the ones she lived and worked with until ten days ago, will be closely scrutinizing her hastily-learned table manners and dance steps, putting her once again at the centre of gossip she for once wants nothing to do with.

She watches the King and Queen leave the platform, feels Jyuudai tug lightly on her hand, follows him down and into the crowd. He helps her onto her horse—the one that has no saddle, since she is required now to ride in the hated sidesaddle position—pulls himself lightly into his own saddle, and clucks to the horse. She follows him.

"Isn't the town square the other way?"

Jyuudai grins over at her. "They'll live without us."

Yubel almost smiles. Then she sees the path he is leading her onto, and nearly gasps.

"Lord Jyuudai, you wouldn't ever!"

The grin he gives her is what her father would call sass and his mother would call cheek. "I would so, my Lady-Lord." He urges his horse to a gallop, and she abandons pretense, pulling herself astride and letting the dress ride up her legs so she can follow, relishing a little more than she thinks she should the invented title he's given her, stopping at the pool where they have for years come to talk and play. She takes his hand—not quite readily, not yet, but without the same hesitation she felt on the platform—and lets him help her slide off.

"The water's going to be freezing."

"We're not going swimming. This way." He leads her into the trees—not a perfectly secure place, but enough of a screen for whatever purposes she supposes he has in mind—and pulls the cord on the back of her dress, letting it fall to her waist. She grabs it to keep it from sliding further.

"Watch it, would you?"

"I thought you didn't care."

"I don't, but it's going to pull my belt off. Hold this." She grabs his hand with her free one and pulls it to a handful of fabric, then slides her own hands inside the fabric of the waist and ducks to pull the skirt off over her head instead so it won't snag on the thin piece of leather holding grass-stuffed cloth in place. "I hate this thing."

"I'm just glad I don't have to wear one," Jyuudai comments, dropping a tunic over her head and helping her thread her arms through. "It looks like a pain."

"It is one." She takes the sash he hands her and ties it, then reaches for the leggings she can see sitting on the bottom of the pile and slides them carefully on. "Now what?"

Jyuudai folds the dress carefully over his arm. "Late loveberries are in." He nods his head off in one direction. "The orchard's only about a quarter of an arc that way."

Yubel grins for the first time since being woken almost before dawn and stuffed into the dress and the ivory clips Jyuudai is pulling out of her hair. "Shame to let the cooks get them first."

"Funny, I was thinking the same thing."

Jyuudai drops the clips onto the dress and reaches for Yubel's hand again. This time she lets him take it, laughing with him as they run through the woods, away from their tethered horses, pulling each other over the low stone wall around the palace gardens, laughing harder when he stops abruptly enough that she crashes into his chest. He grins down at her. She grins up. Then he gets to one knee, lacing his fingers together, and she steps onto his hands, grabbing the branch of the nearest tree to pull herself up.

Jyuudai boosts her until she has one leg safely in the tree, then pulls himself up into the crotch of the tree and swarms nimbly up one branch of it while Yubel grabs another branch above herself and stands so she can walk toward the trunk, where the sweetest of the round red-and-yellow-skinned fruits play peep-and-seek. She reaches up to pick one, and blinks in surprise when she realises there's already one in her hand, a bite missing out of one side.

"What—?"

"It's a sweet one."

Yubel smiles and takes a bite of her own, then passes it back, studying the marks in the skin absentmindedly as she does, noting the way she can tell the difference between his bite and hers because of the gap between his front teeth that she does not have. Jyuudai takes it, and she lowers herself carefully onto the branch to sit.

They pass the fruit back and forth for several minutes, each taking a bite and handing it over again. Yubel bites into the core, trying to get the last little bit of it she can, and spits out a seed. Jyuudai chuckles.

"You could just pick another."

She looks at him and makes a face. "I'm sitting down."

Jyuudai makes a face back and pulls himself to his feet, stretching to pick one of the reddest of the loveberries still on the tree, sitting down next to her on her branch and putting the fruit in her hand.

She isn't quite sure how they get from hands clasped around a loveberry to his arm around her waist, holding her secure in the tree as his lips descend on hers, but she is sure of what memory it brings to mind: sitting in this same tree four years ago, her half-swimming in Jyuudai's clothes, both of them eating loveberries until their lips were bright red from sucking the pulp off the skins and, she has no doubt, ruining their suppers, her telling him that she would never have children, never marry, never fall in love. Now one is a given, one is a maybe, and the third one . . .

The wind ruffles the folds of the dress sitting near the edge of the pool, and an ivory and wood hairclip tumbles into the grass.