The silence that filled the air was thick and heavy. The two rabbits stared at each other with wide eyes and shock.

No. No, no, no! No! Yuck could not believe that this was actually happening. He had thought about it many times, worried about and feared it but always brushed it off. Now what? What to do, what to say? Charge at her? Attack her? Start this damn old routine of fighting and hiding? Yang was not around, he might even have a decent shot but- no.

He got up slowly and stayed close to the wall, the girl's eyes were still on him. He had no idea what to say to her. He didn't want to fight but the last time they officially met that's what happened. The last time she had seen him was in the heat of battle. She blinked. "You... you are Yuck, right?" As if awakening from a trance she realized that she was simply standing there, dumbfounded, so she charged her magic.

The green rabbit swallowed. "Y-Yes." He did not get ready to fight, he did not produce some kind of weapon. He didn't want to beat her into the ground, didn't want to kill her and her family. He- he had no idea what he truly wanted but that was not it. Everything felt weird and awkward. Yin was simply staring at him, ready to pounce and fight at any given second. The boy looked into her eyes and he slowly but steadily raised his hands, his palms facing her, thereby showing that he had no intention to fight. "... Let's... not fight." He said.

This caught the pink girl completely off guard. "I- what?" She sounded confused and disbelieving but her hands stopped glowing nonetheless. "You... don't want to fight?" She examined him over and over again as if searching for the trick, searching for a hint to what ruse he was trying to pull off.

But there was no ruse. No scheme. He took a deep breath. "No, I don't." He tried to sound reassuring, but he could not even fathom how she was feeling at that moment. An old enemy reappeared without the will to fight. Of course something seemed fishy about it. "Look, Yin, I... get that you can't really trust me." This was difficult for him, as well. He had never spoken to someone like this. Trying to be nice and gentle and kind was not what he knew himself to be good at. "But, um-" He hesitated, trying to form the words in his head before he spoke them. "- you don't really have to fight me, do you?"

"What the hell are you saying?" She narrowed her eyes. He had upset her somehow. This was not going his way at all. "You- you are an enemy! A bad one! The things you've done, what you've proven yourself capable of- of course I have to fight you!" She charged up her magic again and she gritted her teeth but she paused. The girl didn't appear sure of herself, at all.

"That hasn't always been the answer, has it?" Yuck stared into her eyes. He wondered about his own behavior. He could flick a powerful foo-orb at her and run for it. But something made him want to stay. As he thought about going back to his lonely life, his pathetic being, he almost whimpered. But Yin, she... had always been kind and nice. Maybe if she trusted him, maybe then he- he didn't know what would happen then. "Don't you remember? When you fought me again and again... even though I was against it?"

The girl looked at the ground for a moment. Then back at him. "You're saying things to mess with my head. You're just guilt tripping me so I'll let my guard down around you!"

"No." He became a little frustrated. "Don't you think that if I had bad intentions I would have attacked you already? Yang isn't around, is he? I'm stronger than you."

"I've gotten stronger! You don't know how powerful I am. You're being cautious." She hissed on the last 's'.

"That's not how it works, I'm always ahead of you in ways of power, don't you get that?" He had to calm down. Getting mad at her and being rude would not convince her of his pure intentions. If they were pure. He still wasn't sure about that. "You know I am fueled by aggression and impatience. Do you honestly believe that someone like me could stand here for this long without doing something if he seriously wanted to fight?"

Yin hesitated but then finally powered down again. "I don't trust you." She glared. "I don't know why you're here after all these years, but it's certainly not because you wanted to stop by and say hello or something like that." She crossed her arms in front of her chest. "I have no reason to believe or trust or think anything good about you whatsoever. But-" She paused again, only for a moment. "- no one should ever say that I don't give people chances. So explain yourself. If you don't want to fight, what do you want?"

That was the top question, wasn't it? He didn't know the answer himself. But if he said that she would blast him into next week. She was aggravated to say the least. One wrong answer and she would try to engage in battle with him. But which of all the possible answers were the wrong ones? "A home." He then blurted out. That sounded so pathetic. What a loser. That wasn't even true- was it?

"Pardon?" Yin asked. The anger vanished for a second, replaced by genuine confusion.

"Think about it, Yin. Your family and you are WooFoo, I am WooFoo. It only makes sense for me to stick around." He shrugged. That was not entirely the truth, but close enough not to get him murdered so it panned out for the moment.

"You are WooFoo, but you are a bad person. See, that's the important thing here. My family and I are good people. You are not. You don't get to 'stick around'." She sneered.

The boy fought back a growl at the infuriating girl. "But what if I'm no longer bad, hm? People can change, I thought I had proven that once and for all."

That seemed to hit Yin in a sore spot. "You did." She agreed. "But there is no way it would happen again. If anything then your anger at us, your hatred, grew because of it. It wasn't like after that incident you stayed away. You were the one to come back for more aggressive fighting. Do not pin that on me."

"You caused me to go back to it!" He yelled but then immediately quieted down again. He could not risk alerting the panda. "I was nice. I was happy with myself. Your brother and you did not pause for once second, a tiny tiny second, to consider that I was being honest. I don't know whether you were just being ignorant or whether I didn't try hard enough for your tastes, but whatever happened is on you."

The girl was speechless for a moment. She stared at the boy with anger and... regret? "Let's say -just for a moment- that you actually went and became good again. In this purely hypothetical, fantasy-like world where you are a good person, why did you come here now of all times? What have you been doing for all these years? What do you mean by you want a 'home'? Where the hell did you even come from just now? Were you hiding somewhere?"

The questions were shot at Yuck like bullets and he made an effort to memorize all of them. And more pressingly to answer her questions in a way that would make him seem trustworthy. That was the priority at that moment.
"I came here now because it only now occurred to me that I could go back." Lie.
"For all these years I have been trying to better myself. Not all the time, but piece by piece." Lie.
"I mean I want to stick around and maybe have friends and things like that." The truth?
"I was just levitating over the wall when you hit me, I knew that trying the front door would have been a waste of effort." Lie.
"No I wasn't really hiding, you simply hit me at an inconvenient time." Lie.

Yin looked at him. She seemed uncertain about whether to believe him or not. "You expect me to believe all of that?"

"Not entirely, but I was hoping that you could try to give me the benefit of the doubt which might then lead to trust." He looked at the ground for only a moment, breaking the eye contact.

The girl looked around. "I'll be honest with you -mostly because lying would make me sink to your level- I don't know what I'm supposed to believe."

The green rabbit looked at her, his eyes lit up. That was progress. She no longer had her heart set on him being a thoroughly bad person. "I really want another chance, Yin. I want the fighting to stop. I want to be able to talk to someone without getting angry." He stepped closer but stopped when he saw her stepping back, away from him.

"You can't expect me to throw all doubts and worries overboard. I mean. Freaking hell, Yuck, do you even know how long it's been since I've seen you?" She looked at him again. "And all you've done now is talk and talk about how you've changed and about how you deserve for me to trust you. I should wait for Yang to come home and- " She swallowed. "- get his opinion."

"Yin, you can make a goddamn decision on your own." He remembered what he had heard earlier. Her doubts about herself, how she felt about her brother. It had to stop. "You are the one making the sensible decisions. Or at least you make better ones than your idiot brother." He narrowed his eyes but then remembered that he was pretending not to have been there in years. "Unless that's changed, of course."

"No. You're right." She looked at him. "He would only be aggressive and unreasonable. I'm not like that." She narrowed her eyes once more and focused on him as if something would be revealed to her by staring at him. "Fine." She then muttered. "I guess I could try giving you another chance. It's what Yang wouldn't do, so maybe it's the right thing." She nodded to herself. Senseless logic. But it worked out in Yuck's favor so he could not care less.

"Really?" He smiled a little. "Awesome. Terrific. Perfect."

Before he could say any more words she interrupted him. "But I can't just let you inside the dojo. I still don't trust you, Yuck. One wrong move and you can kiss your ass goodbye." She looked at the dojo behind her for a short moment. "No there is no way I am letting you in there with all the weapons and artifacts."

"But... that was the entire point of me trying to convince you. Let me stick around, be a friend, you know." He became a little angry.

"Well, what do you expect me to do, wise guy? I'm not risking you robbing everything we own and using it for some dark, awful purpose. And even if you're really good. In that hypothetical place where you are honestly good-hearted and nice and whatnot, as soon as my bro sees you, you're out. I don't know about dad..."

"Hide me, then." Yuck shrugged.

"Excuse me?"

"Just hide me. Until you're sure you can trust me and then you have more ground to plant reasoning on when explaining to your bro why you haven't beaten me into a bloody pulp, yet." Yuck looked at her and explained.

"Even if I did you could still run around and wreck stuff. Within seconds you could set fire to the dojo." She shook her head. She didn't trust him but she wanted to take him in. She confused the green rabbit, but as he thought about it he figured that defying her brother and doing something important on her own might be enough reason to take him in.

The boy then held out his arms, wrists together. "Tie me up." He said, not sure where he was taking all the faith from that he placed in Yin.

The girl looked at him in surprise for a moment, then she looked to the side. "Dude, I don't care what kind of sick things you're into but I'm not going to-"

"I won't be able to do you or your dojo harm." He rolled his eyes as if that had been obvious.

"Oh." Yin blushed, embarrassed about the mistake she had made. "Yes. Obviously. I was only messing with you." Without any further questions she transformed nearby plants into a thick rope. She took it and looked at the boy in front of her. "How do I know one rope is enough to hold you back?" She raised an eyebrow.

"Then blindfold me if you must. Look, just do what you have to do, I don't care." He shrugged. "Unless you're the one who's into sick things, then I'm not so sure." He grinned at his playful joke, causing the girl to glare at him.

She stepped closer and began wrapping the rope around his wrists. As she did so,Yuck looked around. This was how far he was willing to go to cease his old lifestyle? Being tied up by the female WooFoo warrior he had tricked so many times? Maybe there was more to the idea of sticking around, after all. Maybe those years of solitude had uncovered something inside him that made him crave friends, family or something along those lines.

"Do you even know how to tie someone up properly?" He pointed out and grunted as he wiggled his wrists. They were capable of moving a lot within the bounds Yin had put on him.

"Shut up!" She snapped. "Of course I know how to do this..." She redid the knot but to no avail. Yuck asked her a few more times whether she was able to do it only to be snapped at repeatedly. After the nth try the rope was tightly around the boy's wrists. The pink rabbit seemed proud of her accomplishment of tying up the other. "See? I told you I knew how to do it."

"After finding it out, of course you knew." The boy stuck out his tongue.

"Do you want to be let inside or not?" The female rabbit crossed her arms in front of her chest.

He sighed. "I do."

"Then remember that you're on thin ice here. Let's go." She grabbed a hold of the rope holding his wrists together and began to tug him to the dojo.

"What about the old panda?" Yuck resisted a little, not wanting to find out what would happen when Yo discovered him. He could probably smell the lies the rabbit had told.

"His soap is still on. The end of the world couldn't get him to pay attention to things around him." She tugged more. "Now let's go or I'll leave you here like this."

"Fine, fine, sheesh." He walked along with her.

It turned out that Yin had been right. They went through the front door and hallway without the old man so much as glancing up. Yin shouted a greeting at him and he shouted one back but that was it. She seemed nervous and still uncertain about her actions, but Yuck couldn't blame her in the least. It was a strange situation. For both of them. The boy examined the dojo inside closely. He had been inside a few times but never like this. Especially not with his wrists bound. The place was clean enough, presumably thanks to Yin. There were some photos on the wall. They depicted the small family over the years. Some pictures were also with friends or Yang's girlfriend.

As they walked the girl looked at the boy ever so often to gesture for him to walk along quickly or be quiet. They reached her room soon enough. She dragged Yuck inside and closed the door. They were alone.


Please review, thanks~