Disclaimer: I don't own Monochrome Factor or any of its characters.

Summary: In which Shirogane is a sadist and Ryuuko the unfortunate recipient of much love who must get away from it all. Also: Sawaki the stiff, Kou the mastiff, and darling otouto Homurabi.

Author's Note: Summer classes finally over, which is why I'm all happy as hell and started to look for ways to waste my time. Hey, anyone else noticed how Shirogane is a yandere and Akira a tsundere? I know the terms normally apply only to girls, but… Well, I guess I should say they deserve each other. (Hehehe.) Akira doesn't appear here by the way, because this thing supposedly happened when Ryuuko was alive. Heh. Ryuuko. I really, really wanted to say this for the longest time: That's a girl's name!

Warning: Shirogane being a royal pain in the… Also, no pairings that I really thought about that's not just for humor, despite the creepy summary. And the only sane people are Ryuuko and Sawaki. That deserves a warning, right?

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

Chapter One: The Players

There were many reasons why Ryuuko had to die, all very different and depending on who one asked about it. Sawaki, for instance, would say something about politics, and Lulu would be sure to mention how the fashion sense of dark and light wouldn't mix anywhere except in a Japanese street.

Kou and Shirogane, of course, would say that Ryuuko didn't have to die. But Shirogane would also have been hiding a tiny guilty glee that, with Ryuuko dead, he just had to find the other again and make sure there wasn't much question anymore on who was on top. Preferably by keeping the other ignorant. And visibly younger than he was. Ryuuko would have been dismayed if he found out about that, but then he was safely dead.

At the time before he died though, Ryuuko himself could have given a really good reason why he had to die if someone had wanted to contemplate his death with him. But to say Ryuuko himself had wanted to die isn't accurate, because what he had wanted was a vacation. But that's probably getting a bit ahead of the story. Let's start somewhere closer to the beginning.

…

"He's not here?"

In the garden beyond the serious Sawaki, Ryuuko could see Kou playing a game of tag with a hakua. "No."

"He's really not here?"

Ryuuko clamped down on the urge to shout and settled on sighing instead, lifting his hand to rub between his brows and dispel the beginnings of a headache. From the way Sawaki's voice had lifted at the end, somewhere between a snarl and a squeal of appeal, Ryuuko could guess that he was in a state of panic. He didn't see why Sawaki had to come here and accuse him though.

"Sawaki," Ryuuko said carefully. "I'm not keeping him in a closet. Why would I want to keep him in a closet?"

Sawaki looked away and pulled at his gloves, his eyes darting around the room as if he expected to see Shirogane hiding behind one of the pillars. Ryuuko sighed again and dropped his hand over the armrest.

"Just in case," Sawaki now said. "You won't mind if I looked around your closets?"

"Please. Just go home."

"It's a pain," Sawaki said without Ryuuko's prompting. "I bring in paperwork that needs to be signed by him—just a little now and then—but he goes out and stays out and the pile on his desk gets bigger. And then one day there's no more desk. It had been swallowed up, the legs had given way, and then the king shows up and says 'Take care of this mess. It's an eyesore.' "

Ryuuko winced and straightened himself up in his seat. The actions of the Shin King affected him mainly because his desk was in a similar state of disrepair. He firmly believed that his desk was cleaner though, and he was by far more serious about his responsibilities as King. It was just that, sometimes, he grew tired and rested a bit, and things somehow ended up getting out of hand. He wondered if he should tell Sawaki about a good repairman he knew. Shin and Rei being what they were, it was hard to get ahold of someone to fix things like broken table legs. And it wasn't as if the Children could be bothered to fix things, seeing as they were mostly responsible for destroying them in the first place.

Sawaki muttered something too flat to be considered a curse and made a little bow.

"When he comes here," Sawaki said, "please tell him that the shadow world needs him to go back."

Ryuuko nodded once. "All right, if he appears, that's what I'll say."

"It's never 'if,' " Sawaki said darkly, and disappeared out the open door before Ryuuko could say anything else.

Ryuuko pinched the bridge of his nose. Finally he risked looking out at the garden. Kou wasn't there anymore. He stared, disconcerted, at the fat white worms like fingers wriggling from one of the potted palms. Hakua, from the looks of it, twitching away the last vestiges of its existence, but Ryuuko was more concerned with who had probably vandalized his plants.

"Kou!" He called, and heard Kou's springy voice directly behind him: "What is it, Ryuuko?"

Ryuuko's great dignity checked him from jumping a good five feet away at least. Instead, he turned around and tried not to shake too much.

"I told you not to touch the palms. And please. Don't play with the hakuas."

Kou arranged his face in something that was certainly not guilt. "But you never play with me. You're always busy—"

"I'm a King," Ryuuko said. The explanation sounded more defensive than he felt, so he added: "Affairs of the state—"

Kou snorted out a hiss like a hakua when one accidentally steps on its tail. The sound was strange enough to make Ryuuko forget justifying not playing with Kou, and instead make him stare at the sad white bundle attached to his leg that Kou had become.

"It's unfair! Why can you be with Shirogane-san but not with me?"

"I said affairs of the state…" Ryuuko trailed off and colored an embarrassing pink. He coughed and looked away. "…State business."

Kou tightened his hold on Ryuuko's leg until Ryuuko was almost sure something must have snapped. He pushed Kou's face as far away from him as he could without hurting him, but Kou remained attached to his leg.

"Why are you always with Shirogane-san anyway? And then if he's there, you won't even let me curl up at your feet and I even have to leave the room. It's too cold! Why does Shirogane-san get special treatment?"

Lord of Light, Ryuuko thought. Oh his forefathers. His unborn descendants. His leg was dying.

"We're working on a treaty," Ryuuko said, and it was only the fact that he was King and should act like one which kept him from sounding desperate. He couldn't stop from desperately attempting to push Kou away from him though. "I believe there's a way for dark and light to exist in harmony and peace. That's why—"

"Lies," Kou cried into his coat. "Ryuuko's a liar. You just don't want to play with me!"

Ryuuko paused, distracted by his own discomfort and Kou being visibly upset. Well, if the truth didn't work, it was time for the diplomatic solution and lie.

"We are certainly," Ryuuko said, "not secretly building a rocket ship from a chemistry set."

He felt Kou stiffen up and his hold relax a bit. It was all the prompt he needed to elaborate. "And I definitely do not think that it is highly entertaining to create a marvelous, colorful piece of amazing science that can take us to the stars, where we can live on love and star dust and coconut juice. And this spaceship is definitely not hidden somewhere in a secret place," Ryuuko concluded. He bit back a smile at the look on Kou's face. Oh, he had him all right.

Kou let go of his leg. "Can such a thing exist?"

Ryuuko smiled faintly and shook his head. "Definitely not," he said, and at once Kou darted away to find it. Ryuuko stood for several seconds more until Kou disappeared, and then slid down on the ground beside his potted palm without the palm now, the hakua's spider-thin legs still pumping away. Ryuuko pulled the hakua out, brought it to the edge of the garden and released it. The hakua slid over the wall in a line of disturbed moss and was gone.

"Why didn't you say you wanted a rocket ship?" Shirogane asked.

"Because I don't want one." Ryuuko looked up so Shirogane would see his frown from his section of wall. "Why are you here?"

Shirogane slid down from the wall, more graceful than the hakua had been, and shrugged his shoulders lightly. He looked very proud and stiff in his dark robe, and although his face and all the rest of him looked very delicate—Ryuuko had once made the mistake of observing he looked like a girl and regretted it—Shirogane's rough-edged drawl sounded like something he might have copied off a gangster rather than a king.

"We should be discussing the treaty, shouldn't we?" Shirogane asked. He looked at Ryuuko across him for a moment, and then his eyes trailed down to where he saw Ryuuko looking, and he snarled. Probably a few inches of one thick skein of shiny silver hair had gotten soaked in a puddle of water. Shirogane lifted his hair out and inspected it. The silver drooped, sad and wet, in his hand.

"Your garden has damaged my hair," Shirogane declared haughtily. "I demand recompense. For a fault like this from an object of yours, a kiss from you would be appropriate. I'll allow it since we share the same status."

"It's your own fault," Ryuuko said. "You keep your hair a foot too long."

"Ryuuko," Shirogane said. "Do you want me to destroy your stupid plants?"

Ryuuko flinched. But he was a king, after all, and couldn't allow himself to be threatened like this. "Don't you want that treaty signed?" he asked, keeping his ground in front of the Shin King. "Because an attack on my garden would be an uncalled-for aggression on the part of the shadow world. It would be seen as a declaration of war, Shirogane."

Shirogane's voice was cold as ice, but Ryuuko was used to it to the point that it would have surprised him if it hadn't been. "It made my hair wet."

Ryuuko sighed. "For now, why don't we just go in? I'll get you a towel. That's enough compensation, right?"

Ryuuko had turned and so missed the other's expression completely. But Shirogane's silence did make him look back, because he was afraid it meant Shirogane didn't appreciate the offer of towels and was about to run him through. He was about to say he was going to make sure they were really fluffy, when Shirogane said: "I can go in?"

"What's wrong?" Ryuuko asked. "You let yourself in my castle anyway, even if I don't ask you to."

"But now you're asking me to."

"Yes." Ryuuko paused. Shirogane's face was carefully blank, and Ryuuko wondered if he had somehow insulted the other, though he didn't see either how he could have.

"Um," Ryuuko said. "Is getting a towel all right with you?" But Shirogane, he saw, was already lifting the rest of his hair protectively over his shoulder. He went past Ryuuko to the door, where he stopped to look back at Ryuuko with one of his small glacial frowns.

"You're slow, Ryuuko."

Ryuuko sighed. "I guess that's a yes."