Hey guys! Sorry about the slow update. The holidays made things a bit difficult. :3 Hopefully you all had a nice end of December (as that's when I updated last), whether or not you celebrate Christmas, and a happy New Year! Yay for 2008! (Erm… I guess?)

Sorry. End of rambling now.

As promised, the fic will now shift over to Cody's little sleepover for a bit. Meaning…one chapter. xD And then back to Kyo's party, and then back to here… Sort of… Ah, don't worry, I've got it all planned out.

We're now at 94 reviews, so I'm expecting that this chapter will be the one to hit 100! (if not… I will cry. xD) The Pyramid of Darkness is at 97 reviews (even though it's about 20 chapters shorter than this fic x-x;) so hopefully that'll hit 100 too. So… I propose a race! xD Which will win? I'm updating them at the same time, hooray! Whoever wins the race will get the next update. What an exciting prize. xD

…I know, I said I'd stop rambling. Sorry. ;

Thank you to the reviewers: Khajmer, blessed-with-a-curse, ll-Persephone-ll, Depthmon, MadamePika (two reviews!), Paulagirl, flamealchemist15, and Oversized Bucket.

Specific thingers:

Khajmer: Glad to be meeting your checklist. xD Though there will still be some surprises among some of the things you listed…

blessed-with-a-curse: Wow, that's a good story. 8D Unfortunately my meeting-my-boyfriend story is nowhere near as entertaining… met through friends, blah blah blah. xD I'm glad alcohol has some good results!

ll-Persephone-ll: I'm not sure if TK and Kari will be together either. ;D It's all a mystery… But seeing as I'm a huge Takari fan, they'll probably be together at some point in the fic. :3 But who knows if it'll last?

MadamePika: Woah, I didn't know that. o-o; Yeah, I'd like to see that website if you have its name handy… That'd be interesting to look at. And thanks, I've tried to make the characters as realistic as I can. Er… I've been guilty of not doing this with Miku, but there are some girls like her. xD

Paulagirl: Sorry, I didn't mean TK was disgusting. I meant that when I was a freshman, I liked disgusting people, which is what TK is doing as a freshman (meaning Miku xD).

And here we go!

:: twenty-six : cody's world : ken ::

I was rather surprised at Cody's most gracious invitation to sleep over at his house that Friday night.

I'd never stayed at a friend's house overnight before, but I had lived in a dormitory. It wouldn't be that different, right? His parents probably had the same dreadful rules as those enforced by the hall managers at my old school. In your room by nine (except with written permission from a professor to pursue individual study or help with a group project), lights out by ten. Wake up at five-thirty, be ready and out the door by six-thirty.

I doubted there was a mess hall, though. I was quite thankful for that.

I suspected others my age would be worried about meeting their friend's parents, but I was more apprehensive about what exactly Cody and I would do. Sure, we had talked every day that week, and I sometimes was startled as the bell for the end of lunch sounded – as my conversations with Cody went unexpectedly quickly, but this was different. Would he want to watch some mindless television program or play those awful video games like most of our peers? Or would we have more discussions about philosophical topics such as existentialism, spirituality, and the true contents of cafeteria food? I secretly hoped the latter, though feared that Cody might only act like that on school grounds.

"Here we are," Cody murmured. We'd gotten to his apartment. I'd somehow thought that he would live in a house. I couldn't explain why, but I imagined him in the kind of old, traditional Japanese-style houses that had their own martial arts practice rooms. Perhaps it was because Cody talked incessantly about his grandfather, who was his kendo teacher. His grandfather seemed like the kind of person who would only exist in such a place as an old, traditional Japanese-style house. Yet here I was, at Cody's apartment, and it seemed just the same size as mine, if not a slight bit smaller.

I removed my shoes as I stepped into Cody's house, glancing around to get some sort of impression. I've noticed that going to other people's houses is kind of like having an intimate look inside their head. You can find out more things from stained carpets and books lying around than you can through interrogation, I believe. I'd read the studies of a famous psychologist who had written essays on this theory, but although I remembered his beliefs I could not for the life of me remember his name. It must have been the effect of brainless teenagers on me.

Not that Cody was a brainless teenager. He was actually neither of those.

"I'm home," he called politely. Soon, a woman appeared from the hallway.

"Hello, Cody!" she exclaimed. "And you must be Ken! Why, I've heard so much about you!" She approached me, wearing a warm smile.

I returned the smile. Unlike most my age, I am not afraid of parents. Sometimes I like them more than their children. "And I fear that I have heard nothing about you," I told Cody's mother. "Cody never mentioned he had an older sister."

Her eyes lit up and she smiled even wider. "I like this boy, Cody!"

Cody seemed embarrassed. "I can show you around if you want," he said. Soon, he was leading me around.

"This is my grandfather's room," Cody told me after we'd left the kitchen-living-dining room area and had stepped into the hallway. I peered inside, hoping I wasn't being too rude or intrusive. I didn't get much of a good look at his room, as Cody moved on to the next. However, I spotted a framed photograph on the wall of a young boy – Cody, I thought. He looked happy, a big grin with missing teeth and large green eyes.

Next, Cody showed me the bathroom, and after that came his mother's room. It was smaller than Cody's grandfather's room – strange, I thought, since it had to fit two people while the other just had to fit one. I saw more pictures in this room: a wedding picture, though it was a candid one, was the biggest, and caught my attention. In it, Cody's mother and a man who looked very much like Cody were smiling, their faces red like they'd been laughing so hard they could barely breath. She wore a white dress, the veil flung over her dark hair carelessly, and he had on a dark suit. I noticed, though, that the suit was stained with pink on one leg…

Cody saw me looking at it and smiled a tiny bit. "The pink part is frosting… Apparently, my father was so nervous during the whole wedding that his hands were still shaking when he cut the cake, and he dropped the first piece on himself. My mother says that was the only thing that lightened him up a bit during the wedding. They have a nicer picture that was during the actual ceremony, but my mother likes this one much better."

I smiled faintly. "My parents don't have a wedding picture… They had just said their vows when my mother's… erm, water broke. Two weeks early. They had to be rushed to hospital. My father said that the whole time my mother was in labor, she was screaming about wanting cake."

Cody's eyes widened and he laughed a bit. "I guess you decided to show up early because you wanted some too, then, huh?"

My smile faded. "It was my brother, actually," I said, now regretting telling the story. "He was… always early to do anything after that." Like die. I closed my eyes. Sometimes my brain seemed to love to bring the most disturbing thoughts into my head.

"My room's next," Cody said. His room turned out to be a lot like I'd expected. It was clean and neat, with no clutter anywhere. Everything was in neutral colors like beige, cream, and grey-green. A kendo bag with the stick poking out of it lay in the corner. Unlike the other rooms, Cody didn't have any pictures on the walls. I didn't think there were any pictures at all until I saw a very small one resting on his bedside table. It was Cody's mother and the same man I'd seen in the wedding picture. They were holding a toddler version of Cody.

"My mom put out a futon for you," Cody was saying as he motioned towards the neatly arranged futon on the floor beside his bed. "I hope that's okay…"

I nodded, looking from the photograph back to him. "Perfect," I said. Yet my eyes couldn't stray too far from the picture. I wasn't sure why, but it seemed like it held some sort of mystery behind it. Perhaps it was just because I'd come flying headfirst into a new world, the world of Cody's family. And every family has their mysteries… Their secrets that they don't want to share with the rest of the world, or are at least reluctant to mention. My family sure had those, and I was working the best I could to keep Cody away from them. Yes, he had let me into his world, his head, but I was in no way ready to let him into mine.

-x-

I hoped you liked it. :3 Next chapter is TK's, and we go back to Kyo's party!

Remember, if this hits 100 first it gets the next update. I mean, the updates will probably be pretty close on both stories, but whatever. xD