Summary: Yoh's wasting his time trying his hand at construction, Anna is snatched from her spot before the TV, and neither is exactly pleased with the other…or so it seems. Will they reconcile? Read on to find out.

Written: Over a 6-hour stretch during the boring afternoon/evening of 8/1/07.

Rating: T for some coarse language and moderate romantic themes.

A Love That Burns…Literally

Kiss #1

Yoh was breathing hard, and it had nothing to do with the twenty-five miles he had run that morning, or the three hundred crunches he had just executed after lunch. Rather, he was excited over the work he was just about to complete. He hummed in time with the music blaring over his signature headphones, a sort of musical mumbling since he was holding several iron nails between his lips.

Removing one with his fingers, he rotated the wooden object upon the table in his room, placed another plank of wood onto its side. He held the nail in place as steadily as he could, for he was palpitating with excitement over finally completing his project. He firmly grasped his hammer's handle, lined up his swing, and began to pound the nail inwards...

He didn't know what shocked him more--the fact that the hammer caught the cord of his headphones on the upswing, or a clearly annoyed voice from downstairs shrieking, "What the hell is that racket?! I'm trying to watch TV here!"

Yoh knelt to retrieve both his headphones, which were lying askew before his bed, and the hammer he had dropped in panic, and called out, "Sorry, Anna!"

Luckily he needed to leave the house to put the finishing touches on his masterpiece anyway, so it was with no annoyance that he swept up the wooden contraption and headed downstairs with his toolbox. As he passed by the living room, Anna spoke. "Yoh, have you seen the remote anywhere? As The World Rotates is on next and I can't stand that show," she explained, her eyes never wavering from the television.

"No, I haven't," Yoh answered, in exactly the opposite fashion, his eyes glued to the back of her head.

"Dammit," she spat, pushing herself off her elbow and side and getting up to change the channel.

Yoh made his way outside, smiling; he knew that the misplaced remote boded well for him, strangely enough. He laid the wooden contraption upon a workbench and hammered in the last few nails, then applied some sandpaper to smooth out the rough spots. He began to rummage through the toolbox for a woodburner, so he could write an inscription.

"Huh, I could have sworn there was one in here..." His fingertips closed upon a thin cylindrical grip. "Aha! Found--" He withdrew the tool, holding it up to his eyes to clearly see it was a screwdriver.

"Maybe not. Hell, what do I know about tools?" He briefly considered shelving the project until tomorrow, since his precious free time for the day was quickly running out, but he knew within his heart he wanted to finish it quickly. There was only one thing left to do, but at least it was one of Yoh's strengths: improvising wildly.

At the bottom of the toolbox was a first-aid kit; he ruffled through its contents until he found the book of matches he used to sterilize needles. He painfully remembered having to dig out a splinter with such a needle yesterday, and was thankful he only needed the matches now. He tore some empty bandage wrappers to shreds, and pushed them into a little pile along with the bits of wood he had sandpapered off.

Success! Yoh thought excitedly, as the wrappers first blackened, then danced with vibrant, orange-yellow flames. He placed the head of the screwdriver into the fire until it glowed faintly, then began etching letters into the wood. Never a neat writer, Yoh was surprised how naturally the engraving came to him.

Excitement coursed through his veins now as he picked up a spray can of lacquer to apply the finishing touch. He held his breath and sprized on the varnish until the natural woodgrain took on a glassy shine.

"All done!" he said to himself, rolling the can to his side and bending over slightly to pick up his completed work. "Oh crap, wait a min--"

Unfortunately, fires and aerosol cans don't wait, even for powerful shamans. A deafening KRACK!! echoed off the exterior of the En Inn, followed by the low, rumbling sound of oncoming rushing air. The invisible pressurized vapors surged into a conflagration as they passed over the open fire, and little balls of flame flew out at every angle.

Yoh didn't see any of this, however; he had ducked under the workbench once he had realized his error. The flashfire was gone as fast as it had erupted, and the only visible remnants from where he was squatting were two bloated, charred halves of an aerosol can. The only thing he feared now was repercussion from Anna for disturbing her soap operas twice in the same hour, but a slap was much better than agonizing third-degree burns.

He crawled out from under the bench. At least he had finally completed--

"Oh, shit!!"

Blind panic clouded Yoh's brain again as his eyes took in the sight. A flame was licking up the corner of his project, dancing upwards, and he acted upon instinct once more. With his bare hands he batted at the flame, smothering it out into the very wood it consumed. He surveyed the damage; the bottom right corner was blackened, but it could have been worse.

"Thank God," he sighed, as he made to pick it up off the bench at last--

"Yaaaargh!!" Yoh bellowed when his singed fingertips touched the sides of his project. He had examined it, but his burned fingers had gone unnoticed in his premature relief. Now he saw the reddened, blistering blight glowing upon them, accompanied by a dull pain that surged to agony whenever they so much as brushed another object.

To top it all off, at that moment a figure emerged from the doorway behind him. She would have been breathtaking at any other time, but now she was stunning in a completely different way. Her normally attractive eyes were narrowed to dangerous slits, a deep line bisected her otherwise smooth brow, and her delicate hands were crunched in tight fists.

"Anna!" Yoh cried out, but whether it was out of fear or sudden pain from his fingers, he didn't know.

"You're lucky it happened during a commercial," she chided. Her eyes came to rest upon the burned-out circle around the two halves of aerosol can. "Oh, for the love of..."

Yoh gulped.

"You were playing with fire?! Of all the stupid injuries...You didn't burn yourself, did you?" Yoh made to hide his hands behind his back, but the abruptness of his motion combined with the sudden grimace that appeared on his face gave him away.

"Let me see that!" she demanded, grabbing his wrist; Yoh didn't try to dodge for fear of grazing something with his blistered fingers. She turned his hands over so they were palms-up, and gave a little gasp.

Yoh risked a glance at Anna then. Her angry demeanor had dissipated, and concern shone through her widened eyes. She loosened her grip on his wrists, and he felt her fingertips gently running up, toward the bottom joints of his fingers, half massaging, half caressing, and he was thankful she was still starting at his burns, or she would have noticed the redness and heat in his cheeks that was more intense than the fire that had injured him…

She looked up suddenly and froze. The frown and narrowed eyes returned, though they looked somewhat forced. Anna released his hands and pushed them away more roughly than she meant to, out of her own embarrasment, and turned away before Yoh could notice the gentle blush that was beginning to tinge her features. "You're hopless," she said abruptly, with an anger that sounded as forced to Yoh's ears as they were from Anna's lips. "Come here and I'll get you some ice water to soak your burns in. Don't just stand there!" she implored, as Yoh stood stationary, trying to size up Anna's true feelings. "If you make me miss one second of Nights of Our Lives I swear I'll make you hurt so bad you'll forget about these blisters!"

Anna grasped Yoh's wrists again in the kitchen, plunging his aching fingers into a bowl of frosty water. Despite the sudden chill, Yoh felt a warmth flushing his face again as she guided his hands into the bowl, and noticed she pointedly looked away from him, as though she were trying to hide a similar problem from him…

She sighed, still looking at everything in the kitchen but Yoh. "Guess this means I'm cooking tonight. Honestly, if you were going to burn yourself horribly, couldn't you at least have done it on the stove?" She exited the room, and Yoh continued sitting there, the warmth gradually leaving his face, until all he could feel was numbness on his fingertips. He felt like a Buddhist meditating, sitting cross-legged on an uncomfortable stool, his hands clasped in front of him, soothing his blisters.

Soon, however, he grew bored overhearing the melodrama of Anna's favorite show. Rising off the stool and stretching out, he went to the workbench outside to retrieve his work, at long last. When he reentered, the sounds of the TV had been replaced by the jarring sound of a knife hitting a cutting board; Anna had begun preparing dinner. Yoh seized his opportunity and crept before the TV, digging his fingers under the couch cushions. Sure enough, he found the wayward remote--Anna always seemed to toss it behind her after channel surfing, where it promptly buried itself along with several hundred yen in pocket change. He even found the program listings under there. He was so wrapped up in getting the goods back upstairs that his nervously twiddling thumb brushed against the remote's buttons--

"…Bocky™ brand pretzel sticks! Now available in Horseradish flavor! Try them today!"

"Shit!" Yoh fumbled with the remote; the sudden silence lasted barely two seconds before a high-pitched cry from the kitchen interrupted. "If I have to make dinner, you don't get to watch TV!"

He made it upstairs and didn't bother shutting his door. Amidamaru was floating above his bed, but when Yoh entered, his ethereal pauldrons leapt a foot in the air, and his ghostly features brightened.

"Yoh-dono! I overheard about your injury. Are you all right?"

"Yea, Amidamaru, my fingers are fine," he said, his voice trailing off as he slammed the things he was carrying onto the bed.

"I suspect, then, that your true injuries lie elsewhere, perhaps in the ki or the kokoro--the spirit, the heart. Might I be correct?"

Yoh bit his lip slightly and nodded. "I just don't understand Anna sometimes."

The samurai shifted his chain mail bracers before speaking. "Your fiancé is…more straightforward than most people. Perhaps, when she believes in and cares for somebody as deeply as she does for you, she can only find fault with them. Maybe it's because she truly wants to iron out your imperfections so that you can become an even better person; maybe she just doesn't want to waste time lavishing kind words upon somebody who already has all the reason in the world to feel good about himself."

Yoh looked stunned. "She…and you…think that about me?" He was so shocked he didn't notice the creaking steps that signaled the approach of another person, a person whose delicate fingers smelled strongly of chopped onions and minced garlic…

"Certainly, Yoh-dono. I am honor bound to serve you and your fiancé is bound by arrangement to marry you. But neither of us would willingly leave you."

Yoh felt a warm tingle behind his eyelids and blinked. "Th-thank you, Amidamaru."

"Think nothing of it, Yoh-dono."

Blinking hard, he nodded. "I…I would be alone for awhile, please."

The spirit gave a deep bow, nodded, and melted through the wall. Yoh sat on the edge of his bed, mindlessly fidgeting with the wooden object he had made not an hour ago, wondering why his eyes were still watering--

"Alone for awhile…but not for long, I hope?"

The voice from just outside his door was familiar, yet vastly different, gentler, warmer. Yoh cleared his throat and hid the object under his sheets.

"Amidamaru is right, you know," she said softly, this time not bothering to hide the gentle blush that accompanied her words.

"Oh, Anna," he whispered, the words becoming harder to speak, "remember when we were kids? You always used to make me cry. But this time's different, it's better, I'm happy--" and he choked on the ending of his planned sentence, weeping silently into his shirt sleeve.

Anna walked over to Yoh and draped a slender arm around his shoulders. "No, it's the same. It's always been the same, Yoh. I've always felt this way about you…" She was about to take a seat next to him, but she sat down on something hard. "Eh, what's this, Yoh?"

Yoh shook off the sudden shock of feeling Anna's warm arm against the back of his neck, and the confession she had just made. "Huh? Oh…Well, um, I found the remote."

And with that he flipped up the sheets with a flourish, revealing his creation. The remote control sat next to the week's booklet of TV listings, housed in a wooden nook. At the top was a heart-shaped hole for hanging, and on its front was a burn mark. Anna looked from it to Yoh's blistered fingers and understood. "You did this…all this…for…?"

She saw more burn marks on the front, but these were controlled; they spelled words. Anna squinted her moist eyes and read Yoh's inscription:

"The channels may change but my love for you never will."

Anna could say nothing; her eyes watered and tears slid down onto her elated smile. She sat down next to Yoh, who turned towards her. Yoh's back felt warm and smooth to her hands, and Anna's felt comforting and silky to his; their faces drew ever nearer, until their lips brushed; Yoh pulled away slightly in shock but Anna advanced faster, and they kissed for the first time, slightly awkwardly but very passionately.

He was just beginning to reconcile with the fact that the slap he had been expecting wouldn't come, when Anna broke away abruptly.

Yoh was too dazed from the sequence of events to form any words, but Anna saw his utterly confounded face. With a parting peck on his cheek, she headed towards the door, calling over her shoulder, "I left the vegetables on the stove. If I leave them any longer they're gonna be a soupy mess."

Yoh had nearly convinced himself for sure that he hadn't imagined it at all, that Anna really did say she loved him, that their lips really had just touched, when a shriek from downstairs derailed his train of thought. "Yaaaargh!!"

By the time he ran into the kitchen, he knew exactly what to say and do. He poured a bowl of ice water for Anna, guided her fingers into the chill, and said, with a smirk, "Honestly, Anna, if you're going to burn yourself horribly, couldn't you at least have done it making a surprise for me?"

Anna merely smiled, looked deeply into Yoh's eyes and, with her free hand, tousled his black bangs gently. "Oh Yoh…you better believe I have a surprise for you," she whispered as she drew his face nearer to hers…