Hey! Thanks so much for reading! This is my first fanfic of any sort. It's not my genre of choice typically, but this game made me want to write! Please, please leave a comment if you enjoy it!

I might recommend checking out the Sayori chapter first if you're looking for something a bit heavier, as this chapter, while also pretty well-reviewed, isn't very representative of the rest. It's a bit more light-hearted, which was my goal, but it doesn't get as deep into Yuri as I'd like. I'm hoping to do a sequel or rewrite of this once all four initial stories are finished.

Regardless, hope you enjoy! Thanks again!

You're more than a little anxious at the moment and you REALLY hope it isn't showing as much as you think it is. Normally, these heat-of-the-moment jitters don't hit you this badly. Sure, you've got the whole grand-scheme fate-of-the-world oh-god-am-I-wasting-my-life everybody-hates-me anxiety every now and again. Who doesn't? But being too scared to knock on a friend's door is definitely different...

Well... maybe "friend" isn't the right term anymore. But what is?

Over the last week or so, you and Yuri have gotten really close, really, REALLY quickly. Faster than either of you were accustomed to, you think, and that's scary all by itself. Since then, she's been over to your humble abode a couple times, once while you were working on her super-amazing decorations for the club's festival booth, and then a few times socially to catch up on reading...

Reading together isn't abnormal for friends, especially in a literature club... reading the same book at the same time isn't all that odd either... well, okay, it's a little more strange when it's the same COPY of that book, each of you holding a cover, only turning onward when the other is through. You both enjoyed it, though! And it was convenient when you were both in the club. Wasn't awkward or embarrassing at all! Just two good friends sharing a very interesting piece of literature. And sure, if she didn't want to smudge the pages with any chocolatey residue, you'd occasionally gently place a piece of your candy between her soft, soft lips as she focused on the reading, trying to keep your own mind on the story as well. That's... just what considerate friends do during club time!

Of course, when the two of you started reading this way at your house, together, outside of school, in casual comfy clothes, huddled snugly in a big warm blanket, the room lit just enough to make the pages readable as you both tried to find the right balance of bodily proximity to stave off awkwardness, blushes, and the appearance of being overeager, that's when even YOU had to admit that things weren't exactly casual between the two of you anymore.

You feel like you're balancing on a tightrope whenever she's around, and something's got to give... But Yuri's just so closed off emotionally, so self-critical, that you can't bring yourself to actually make any of your feelings clear, out of a serious concern that so much blood would rush to her face at once that she'd fall backwards unconscious, then move across the country out of sheer anxiety. That's not a dig or anything; honestly, you'd probably react strongly too if she went from zero-to-sixty all of a sudden. This is a delicate situation on both ends, and though you two have managed to trade a few poems during club activities that were not-so-subtly about each other, actually SAYING anything has proven borderline impossible.

Of course, that's not the only thing on your mind as you stand in front of Yuri's door for the first time, having insisted you should get to see where she lived at some point. During your decoration-making session, you kinda keyed in on the fact that her fascination with the macabre doesn't end with her literary tastes. To be blunt, she has a thing for knives... and she let it slip that she has a collection of them, and...

Well...

Look, you're struggling to imagine that ANYBODY could learn that fact about a person they're interested in and not be spooked, especially from someone as cute as Yuri.

But she's so lonely, and so quick to judge herself when anyone reacts even a little negatively, and so warm when you're reading together, and so good at writing, and so beautiful, and so... so... so fantastic, that you've been as accepting as possible, trying desperately to never let her notice that you're a bit creeped out at the knife thing. It helps that she prefers not to talk about it, like, ever, but that hasn't stopped you from thinking about it.

Especially right now, standing at the entrance to her home for at least two full minutes without knocking, the tall wooden frame looming overhead. You can just imagine her, standing inside, illuminated by only a raging hearth's light dancing across a bizarre grinning expression stretched across her face, her eyes beady with bloodlust. You can picture the walls and all the shelves and tables covered in knives of every shape and size and variety, all immaculately sharpened and polished, reflecting firelight like a thousand little mirrors, making the whole room seem ablaze around her.

You know it's ludicrous to imagine, but you still shiver in spite of your better judgment. You consider turning for home, shooting her a text that you got sick and had to cancel. But... you couldn't disappoint her like that. You don't give yourself another second to second-guess, and knock, bold and proud.

And the door instantly swings open and Yuri's standing right there, a nervous smile on her face. It takes a second for you to realize that she must've seen you through a window or something when you first approached and had been waiting for you to knock, but instead you've just been standing here. Geez, what must she think? Now you're the creepy one.

"H-Hey Yuri! Sorry that I'm a little late, I was..." You trail off as you try to think of an excuse, but your poem-writing variety of creativity can't improvise you out of this one.

"Oh! It's, um, no problem!" She's in that sorta grey-tan cotton turtleneck you've seen her in once or twice at this point, hands tucked behind her back as-per-usual. You're both silent for a moment before she suddenly blurts "Please! Come in." as if she just realized that, for once, she was the one that needed to invite you in, not the other way around.

You shuffle through the entryway, taking in the living space around you. It's... normal. Like, really normal, thank god. There's quite a few candles, a flourish you'd expected, but none are lit at the moment. The furniture looks straight out of a high-end catalog, all perfectly organized and matching in a sort of ornate, classic vibe. It feels like stepping into one of her poems, old but new, beautiful but esoteric.

Your eyes are drawn to a massive bookshelf, and as you step a bit closer, you can see that while there's a little dust on the shelves, there's barely any on the books themselves. You get the sense that these books really aren't for decoration, and they get a lot of use. You let out an involuntary "wow" as you scan the rows, admiring the books that each manage to look about a hundred times too dense for you to handle, novels and ancient epics and plays and poetry anthologies and much more. You're looking for a specific volume, but you can't seem to locate it.

"Where's 'Portrait of Markov'?" You turn and realize she's been staring at you, but her gaze snaps away as soon as your eyes meet for a fraction of a second.

"Right here." Yuri pulls her copy from behind her back. Oh, she's been holding it back there this whole time. You resist the urge to chuckle. "I haven't had any particularly good reason to put it on the shelf lately, since I've been taking it to school and your house so often..."

"Oh. Duh." You feel like a moron, especially when she's around. Her lips curl into a cute smile that could knock you to your knees if you weren't as used to it as you are.

You go back to admiring her collection, running your fingers across the worn stretched spines and opening a few curiously. When you finally turn back toward her to ask a question about one, you realize she's slipped away without you noticing. Your eyes dart around the room, but she's nowhere to be seen. She even left "Portrait of Markov" behind on a glass end-table.

You feel that twinge of nervousness from her front step return, as you manage to stammer out a "Yuri...?" to no reply.

You clear your throat and try again, a little louder.

"Yuri!"

Still no response.

You gulp, and feel like you can't just stand there alone anymore. You start to head for a hallway leading deeper into the house, suppressing the quaking in your legs as you wander. You hit a fork, left or right. To the left, a staircase leading upward, and you really can't make out the top from here. You turn right, and realize you can hear water running that way. You steady yourself before heading for the sound.

You pass through an entryway into a room, and suddenly something large and dark flies out in front of you, filling your vision, and smacks you in the face, sending you falling backwards.

Your heart is racing in suspense, and you hear a yelp of surprise as you recover from the blow and rapidly scan your surroundings.

Yuri towers over you, silhouetted by a powerful light on the ceiling, her more precise features shrouded and obscured, your eyes not adjusted for this amount of light yet. There's something in her hand you can't quite make out. Is it...

A knife?!

You can actually feel your pupils dilate, manically trying to make sense of the shadowy contours.

Wait, no, not a knife. She's holding...

A teacup?

You hear a hiss, and your eyes shoot across the room. There's a kettle on the stove with a lit flame underneath.

Eyes back to Yuri, and she's got her free hand cupped over her mouth in shock.

Eyes straight up above you: a darkly-lacquered kitchen cabinet door hanging open, exactly where your head was a second ago.

You do the mental math, one and one is two...

Yeah, you just got smacked in the face by an ill-timed cabinet opening. As you're calming down internally, you realize that Yuri is getting upset as she nearly drops the teacup to the floor and tries to help you up frantically. As you get back to your feet, grasping her hand a little too long, she starts manically stammering "I-I didn't-I thought you were-oh no..." She isn't usually this outwardly frustrated or frantic but you can see her turmoil turning inward as her voice lowers in volume, disappearing as her face makes its transition to bright crimson.

"Don't worry! I'm fine!" You try to jump in to shift any blame away from her. You'd be lying if you said you didn't think it was a little cute when she gets flustered like this, but imagining her mind alight with agonizing fear and self-blame makes you hate yourself for even thinking about it on such a shallow level. "I just wasn't sure where you went, that's all, and you startled me a bit." You weakly laugh to punctuate your explanation, but her gaze flies back toward you.

"I- I didn't tell you I was making tea? I just assumed... Oh... you must hate me..." Her eyes fall back to the floor at double-speed.

"I don't hate you! It's fine, Yuri, it's okay, it's okay..." You grab her by the shoulders, trying to shake her out of her slump. She sniffs a bit. You can't tell if she's recovering. "Hey..." You get an idea. "Let's finish making the tea together, huh? Then we can sit down and read."

"...Okay. Okay, okay." You can see her pulling it back together, taking a deep breath. "You're right. Let's... Let's do that." She heads toward the kettle, at a full whistle by now, and you help her finish the process. You're a little clumsy, as always, and Yuri's still recovering from her shame-attack, but you manage to get the job done, and you carry the tray back out to the sitting room and place it gingerly on the table, eliciting a laugh as you give a butler/maid-like flourish upon completion. You sit next to her on the couch, not TOO close, and sip your still-hot oolong.

Yuri's purple eyes stare deep into yours, and you're not quite sure if she even realizes that she's kept eye contact this long in silence. Suddenly, she starts to speak.

"There's something about you. I can't quite place it as a sensation, really. I feel much more... unstable, much more quickly when I fail in front of you than when I fail in front of others..." Your head falls a little. That hurts a little bit, intentional or not. "But!" she blurts, sensing your reaction, "Despite that.. you make me feel much better too. You can sense when I'm feeling bad more effectively than... anybody else, really, and it feels like you know how to put me at ease better than I do sometimes. That's part of the reason I enjoy your company so much... You always know the right thing to say."

"Geez, Yuri, you really give me too much credit..." You try to hide your building joy at knowing that you're so appreciated.

"You know... I was really frightened by the idea of you coming here, but this has been very nice so far..." and her smile crashes into you like a typhoon again.

You... A part of you feels like you could spend the rest of your life around Yuri, making tea and reading books and sharing warmth. But the other part of you... the part that seized you in the kitchen earlier. It's not going to go away like this. There will always be fear in the uncertainty.

It's like when you first came here. You could take the easy way out, pretend everything's fine, read a few chapters and head back home, hanging out just like you have before. But you can't. Not today. It's time to face this head on.

She starts up again, "Well, I suppose we should start reading, if you're nearly finished with y-"

"Yuri!" You shout, accidentally.

"Y-yes?" You see her recoil a bit in shock.

"I... I want..." Bold and proud, remember. "I want to see your knife collection."

She's frozen, processing your request over and over again internally at lightning speed. "Uh... I-ah... Why? Why now? I don't... Ah... Why don't we just read today?" She's terrified, but you need to do this.

"No, I want to see it now." you grab her hand and squeeze it tight, and you can feel her heart booming even in her fingers. "Listen, Yuri. I like you... a lot. I want to be able to like you as much as I can, but... I need to know all of you. I can't stand the feeling that you're hiding something from me, something that's an important part of you. And I want to lo-like the complete Yuri, thoroughly, nothing left out or hidden away..."

She's still frozen but her cheeks are starting their shift in hue as her eyelids twitch a little bit. God, she's really petrified. Suddenly you feel bad. Did you make the wrong choice? After a few more moments of silence, you start again, backpedaling, your bravado a bit quashed. "I-I mean, you don't have to do anything if you don't want to - I don't want t-"

"No!"

Yikes, you think you really messed up here. How could you do this to her? Make her feel like she wasn't good enough... Good job, she hates you now...

"No... you're right..." Huh?

"I can't keep it all hidden away forever... You'll have to see it eventually, won't you? The cruel, miserable essence at my core..." That's... more poetic that she typically is in conversation, but it's still her in there. She stands up with a jolt. "Follow me." She says, almost coldly, and marches off.

You need to pick up the pace a little to make up Yuri's lead, but eventually you're marching too, up those stairs you saw earlier. She isn't saying anything, or even looking at you. You want to try to say... something, anything to break the silence, but the words can't escape your lips in this tense atmosphere. Your heart rate is increasing now, of course. Suddenly, you're in front of a closed door. That little anxious fire ignites again in your stomach. Are you about to see a brutal, extensive armory, the kind you'd pictured earlier? She creaks open the door to reveal...

A bedroom. Her own, from the looks of things. Twin bed, neatly kept, and a clean desk with assorted school supplies filed properly around the room. Everything feels so sophisticated, so professional for a high-school student, but you still feel her unique creativity hovering around the fixtures, their location and arrangement. She lifts a scholastic award sitting on a high-up shelf and pulls a key out from underneath, cleverly hidden, before looking you in the eye for the first time since you two got off the couch.

"I won't ask you to not hate me... I'll understand if you want to run away..." She pushes the key into a small lock above the handle of a drawer in her desk, and pulls it open, before dropping into her desk chair and swiveling away from you to face the wall in shame, leaving you alone with its contents.

You look inside, curiosity overcoming nerves, and would estimate that you're looking at about eight knives, total. There's a small whetstone, well-used, and a couple chunks of roughly-hewn wood, slightly bigger than baseballs, that you can't immediately detect the purpose of. Nothing else. You've seen one of the blades before. Yuri brought it on the day of your festival prep and you nicked yourself with it. That was what had led her to accidentally tell you about the collection in the first place, in her ensuing panic. Most are similar to that one, fancy and sleek, besides two obvious exceptions: a long butcher knife, straight out of a kitchen knife-block, and a very short practical blade with a large, ergonomic handle.

It takes about fifteen seconds of staring intently into the drawer, studying and analyzing, waiting for the horror and blood and inferno to jump out screeching at you, before it finally clicks in your head that this is all of it. The entirety of her constant overwhelming shame fits in a desk drawer. That's a good thing of course, but... huh.

You aren't even really looking at the knives anymore. You sit on the floor and just try to wrap your mind around the shock, the truly unexpectedly underwhelming reality. The more you think about it, the more it makes sense. When you first got to know her, she took completely innocuous comments as clear evidence that you must hate her. She blew everything you said up into such massive judgments, constantly acting like she was a terrible person in disguise as someone approachable, failing every expectation. This drawer... it's more of that. She does something slightly atypical, something incongruent with the world around her, and suddenly she sees it as a sickness of the soul, a burden to be carried every moment. It... Well, it sucks.

You grab the back of the office chair and spin her to face you again, but her face remains buried in her hands in shame. What do you say in a situation like this? She won't believe you if you tell her it's not that bad... and neither would you, frankly, if you'd been carrying all this around. She did something very brave here, exposing herself like this, and... you need to treat that right. This is the crucial moment that determines everything, your whole future together.

You draw a deep breath. What to say, what to say... First thing that pops into your head. Just go for it. Bold and proud.

"What's this one for?" you ask.

Her shivering stops for a second at your question and she parts her fingers a bit to see through. You're pointing at the really short-bladed one with that long handle, almost like a box-cutter in proportion, but the handle is clearly wooden, and it doesn't retract or anything. She starts to say something but stops herself, so you encourage a bit more. "I've never seen a knife like it."

"It's... that's a wood carving knife. Designed for applying a lot of force to finely shape firm materials like wood. That's why it has the long handle, so you can get a really good grip on it and precisely control the direction of the edge. It takes practice, but it's very effective." Her demeanor has completely changed. Suddenly she'd focused, aware, calm.

"Have you ever carved anything with it? A sculpture, or..." you ask, fixated.

"No... not really. I mainly use it for... stress relief, on that wood in there. It can be so satisfying to just... cut." She says with... you'd call it intensity, but not hostility. You don't feel afraid of her like this, somehow.

Without thinking, you reach in and grab the carving knife, as well as one of the several chunks of wood, and try shaping it yourself. You're a bit clumsy with your hands, and it's a dense, sturdy piece of timber, but you managed to peel some edges down, and etch in some new ones.

As you look up from your fiddling, you meet Yuri's eyes, her glare so deep and absolute, but also... stressed, like there's something about the way you're carving that's discomforting to her.

In one quick move, she snatches both objects away before you can react, and presses the knife into the wood herself. cutting so deep that you're surprised the wood doesn't shatter from the force. But she has such finesse and skill that the knifes travels as though it were moving through butter. In one stroke, every mark you made has been replaced with a smooth, almost round surface, a consistency you never would've imagined could be made with a straight-blade alone. You're stunned, and barely manage to tear your eyes away from the feat and look back at her still-concentrated face. After a second, she looks at you as well, and the spell of intensity breaks. She drops the knife to the floor and you see the crimson building on her once-again nervous expression.

"I-I'm s-"

"That's incredible!" She's taken aback at your enthusiasm, but you really mean it. "How long have you practiced that? You're amazing! I can't believe you've been hiding that... that strength! It's - you're - wow!"

"I..." She doesn't know how to react. Finally, she musters a small "...thanks", as shy as shy can be.

You point to another knife in the drawer. "What about this one? Does it have a specific purpose, like that one?"

You two spend what must be hours pouring over the collection that you lay out on her bed, and you learn the full story of each knife in incredible detail. Yuri uses her word-weaving skills to the fullest, illustrating every blade's history with imagery and detail that you can tell has been kept buried inside her for a long time. One or two of the knives were bought on vacations to Europe with her family, and she'd had quite the adventure getting them back home through customs. One was an antique letter opener, nearly a century old. The butcher-knife was a very personal gift from a grandparent when she was young. Apparently, when she was six or seven, she had become unusually fascinated with that big knife in particular when visiting her relatives, and one had though it especially cute, and sent it with her as a keepsake when they got a new set of knives to replace their old ones. She thought it in particular may have sparked her entire interest in knives, way back when. You're just fascinated, learning how this fixation of hers has been there for practically her whole life, in some form or another.

As she's elaborating on how a certain blade was expertly shaped for this-or-that specific purpose, your eyes lock again, and her story slows down more and more until you're both silent. The sun is going down through the window now, you've been up here so long, and even as she's clutching a knife in her hand, her gaze locked on you, she looks so incredible in this light, the metal gleaming in her hand like jewelry, her passion and enthusiasm showing unimpeded for the first time. She wears this kind of unbridled happiness so well. You involuntarily lean forward a bit, and she does the same, until you feel her sweet, soft lips brush against your own. You now-voluntarily lean those last few millimeters to seal the deal, and suddenly you're really, actually kissing Yuri.

You're both still nervous about all this, and the kiss reflects that, soft and tender and lingering, but you still feel like the whole world is melting away into this moment. You stay there, just like that, and absolutely lose track of time until one of you pulls away, though you couldn't really say which. And you're back to staring at each other, as your smiles grow together. You can say what you've been thinking this whole time now.

"I love you, Yuri, exactly the way you are."

Her face starts going crimson, but for once, she doesn't look away. She just falls against you, burying her face in your shoulder, the awkwardness from your former mutual personal-space concerns totally erased as her comfy cotton sweater wraps around you in a satisfied embrace, You're quick to reciprocate, and the two of you sit quietly, surrounded by scattered blades on the bedspread, no more fear, totally peaceful in each other's arms.