Do You Love Me? By Deus X Machina
At one o'clock in the morning, she was still awake. She pressed up against Kyon's body in some vain attempt to get comfortable. It was nights like this when unwanted thoughts got into her mind. She knew she wouldn't be sleeping tonight.
The two of them had been together for about two years now and they couldn't have been happier. At least, that was what Haruhi had thought.
Some might call it fate. Some might call it luck. Some might call it coincidence. But somehow, Kyon and the entire SOS Brigade had wound up attending the same college as her. Haruhi hadn't questioned it. She never questioned it when something good happened.
She remembered when she first confessed her feelings for Kyon. Of course, since she was Haruhi Suzumiya, it had sounded less like a confession and more like an order. "Be my boyfriend!" or something like that.
Haruhi remembered Kyon's expression that day. She had seen surprise and shock. But thinking back, his expression had contained something else. Caution. It was the look a man would wear if someone without warning handed him a large bottle of nitroglycerin. Someone who knew that one wrong move meant a very big boom and a lot of dead people.
It had been a while before she saw it. She saw how he stiffened when she embraced him and how he was always watching her out of the corner of his eye, as if she were some kind of threat. He would give her his tokens of love the way a man would throw meat to a starving wolf to keep from being eaten, or the way primitive human beings would make sacrifices to appease an angry god.
She told herself that she was being paranoid. She probably was. But she couldn't shake the feeling that Kyon saw their relationship as a burden he had to bear. Keeping her happy was just a job to him. The love of her life was afraid of her and she didn't know why.
Haruhi couldn't bear to look up into Kyon's sleeping face, so she settled for his chest. Kyon, she thought. Don't you love me anymore? Did you ever really love me?
"Haruhi?" Kyon looked down at his lover. "You're still awake?" Haruhi looked up at him. "Is something wrong?" Kyon asked, running a hand through her hair.
"Well…" Haruhi tried to work up the courage to ask out loud the questions she had just thought. Or at least make some brash, smartass, Haruhi-type comment. But she couldn't, so she settled for, "Kyon, I love you."
And Kyon answered with his well-rehearsed, automatic response. "I love you, too."
XXXXX
Wow. This fic was a bunch of firsts for me. My first one shot, my first romance, my first "introspective" kind of fic. I came up with this idea when I wondered how a relationship would turn out if it was based on keeping your girlfriend from destroying the world.