Summary: While camping, Yoh forages for food, but discovers that some appetites aren't satiated by eating…
Written: In about 3 hours during the night of 8/10/07.
Rating: T for romantic themes and coarse language.
Comments: This will probably be the last story I write in a little while, as I will be returning to school soon. I wanted to publish this story before I became overwhelmed with schoolwork, so it's a tad rushed. I may come back to edit if time permits. So if you think it sucks…you're probably right, I didn't have enough time to polish it as much as the others. I hope you still like it though!
"I'd buy you a little fuzzy bunny…if you…realize you don't have to be so pissed."
--The Ataris, "You Need A Hug"
The Hungering
Kiss #8
The straps of Yoh's backpack chafed as though they were sandpaper upon his shoulders, and mosquitoes lapped at his copious sweat as he trudged on, every step sapping a little more of his energy under the merciless early afternoon sun. Suddenly he felt a sharp prodding in his lower back…
"Get the lead out, lazybones," Anna ordered, jabbing at him with a walking stick that she was now brandishing like a spear.
Yoh stood a little straighter and lengthened his stride slightly, but not by much, and he swatted at mosquitoes halfheartedly as the pair came to a turn in the trail. "Why are we going on a hike anyway? Wouldn't you be more comfortable watching TV or something?" he asked, not meaning to sound bitter but sounding like it anyway. "I myself don't mind a little exercise, but the uphill, and the sun, and the mosquitoes--"
"Are exactly why we're hiking," she finished for him. "In modern-day Japan it's easy to forget that the path of the shaman has existed for thousands of years. Our ancestors never had the luxury of electricity, of running water, of microwaves and automobiles. Sometimes," she continued, her usually stoic face now looking up, with what almost looked like a joyful expression, to the thin canopy of leaves above, "we all need to get away from it all and live the way our forebears did."
"Huh? We used to own four bears?"
"Our ancestors," she snapped, shifting her gaze back down to Yoh, any trace of happiness gone. "Idiot."
Yoh rubbed his backside where Anna's walking stick had just prodded him again. "Okay, okay, geez…"
"You know, there's plenty here that even a slacker like yourself can appreciate. The seeds of these trees, for instance." The vaguely cheerful expression returned to Anna's face as she continued, "They sprout, mature, then fall from the branches, moving mere feet in their entire lifetime, yet have the potential to be reborn as new sprouts with the next rainfall…" As Anna spoke, Yoh felt the grime and sweat disheveling his hair, blotching his skin and marring his face, but noticed how pretty his fiancée still was under the same circumstances. Her skin glowed faintly with a thin layer of healthy perspiration, causing her hair to stick to her cheeks and temples in a cute fashion, and the simple white shirt she had donned was clinging to her figure, exposing to him in detailed relief the shape of her every curve, the magnitude of every contour--
"Ouch! Would you cut it out with that damn walking stick already?!"
"Yoh, you're not even listening to me!"
"I--You got me there," he shrugged.
Anna's knuckles, he noticed, whitened considerably upon her walking stick.
"Okay, you have a point there."
"That's what I thought. As I was saying, I think this'll be a nice change of pace from being surrounded by glass and concrete all day."
"Wow…" Yoh blinked. "Another good point."
They had reached a clearing, the bushes and shrubs receding to border a grassy plain, and in the center towered a magnificent tree, its trunk knurled and ribbed and mossy with age, cresting into a verdant cascade of leaves some thirty feet above.
"Right," Anna said once they had sat in the shade of the tree for a few minutes. "I'll start pitching the tent. Yoh, you better start cooking lunch."
He nodded and cast off his backpack, giving a little sigh as cool air rushed into his back cavity. "Okay. Just pass me your pack and I'll get started."
She looked up, unconsciously dropping a few tent pegs into the grass, and a delicate frown marred her brow. "Huh? What for?"
"Well, I can't cook food when it's still in your backpack." He favored her with a corny grin, but she didn't reply in kind.
"No, the food should be in yours, remember? I left all the cans on the kitchen table for you to pack."
"I…uh…" Yoh unzipped his backpack and ransacked its contents, breathing out with a surge of relief as his hands closed around several tin cans. "Huh, guess I did."
Anna picked up one of the small cans and read the label. "Sternum™ brand Fuel In A Can. Heat anything, no matches necessary…Yoh, you're shitting me, right? This is just one of those jokes you're always pulling that I don't get?"
"Well…" But his hemming and hawing was unnecessary; she knew the truth.
"Yoh." She slammed her own backpack into the grass, kicking up dead blades and motes of dirt. "I swear you were at home picking your nose on the day they passed out the brains." A hatchet appeared from the depths of her backpack and she shoved it at Yoh, stopping it mere inches before it contacted him. "You are going to find us something to eat. You will not come back empty-handed. I don't care if you have to behead a mountain lion, I don't care if you hack off your left ass cheek and tell me it's a pork chop."
Yoh's head was bowed with shame, and he took the hatchet from her extended hand without shifting his gaze from the ground. "Yes, Anna."
He heard the violent hammering of tent pegs grow fainter as he ventured deeper into the woods, the shaking hatchet in his hands an embodiment of Anna's sharp words to him…
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The mid-afternoon sun cast a brilliant golden light upon the foliage, but Yoh didn't notice. "If only Amidamaru could help me now…Stupid useless hatchet…" His stomach complained loudly, rumbling with hunger, and it didn't help any that his hunting had yielded nothing but a pocketful of questionable berries that he decided to carry uneaten until he decided whether or not they were poisonous. Soon, however, he noticed a low rumbling that wasn't coming from his stomach.
"Running water," he mumbled. With no other ideas, and realizing his hatchet wasn't likely to fell any game soon, he tracked the sound to its source. The sight of the clear, slow-moving stream imbued the exhausted shaman with a second wind, and he jogged to its bank, gazing down at his own fragmented reflection, and he saw dark, narrow shapes darting to and fro…
"Fish! If only I knew how to catch them…" And out of desperation, or perhaps the heat, or maybe even the grimy film he felt clinging to his skin, he dived in, clawing madly at his scaled prey, but they evaded his clumsy swipes. He tried again, but the spooked fish merely dodged once more.
"Crap. They make this look so easy in manga," he grumbled, fingering a drop of water out of his ear. The water was chilly, but it was a refreshing cold that kick-started his heart and stung his nerves to life. "Maybe Anna was right about this whole nature thing…it's so relaxing here, so peaceful, I feel…alive…"
His brain no longer fatigued, he thought out his next course of action. "I have no net, so I need a fishing pole, and bait, and I don't have any of those things…Wait!" Hit by a sudden wave of inspiration, Yoh crawled back out of the river, plucked a couple of berries out of his pocket, crushed one slightly, and threw it into the shadowed school of fish at the opposite bank. The black mass scattered, but slowly regrouped around the ripple Yoh's berry had made.
"Ha, guess these are edible after all," he chuckled, crushing a second berry and tossing it a few feet shorter. His prey obediently shifted their position, and in such a fashion Yoh lured them to his feet. "Here I go," he whispered, dropping the last berry into the water. He could see individual fish now, their silvery scales shining when they neared the surface, their fins pulsating as they glided forward, their gills opening and closing with the current…
Arches of water droplets cascaded off the object that squirmed in Yoh's hands, causing him to squint as he wrestled with it.
"No…" Its caudal fin undulated violently, like a pendulum on steroids, as he struggled to maintain a grip on its slimy midsection.
"You…" It gave a final, powerful jerk and flopped feebly on the grass, its gills expanding desperately.
"Don't!" Yoh picked up the fish and held it above his head triumphantly, as though he were a fireplace and the fish were stuffed and mounted. It felt gooey and unpleasant in his hands, but he didn't care, he had found something to eat, and maybe it would be enough to hold Anna over for a few hours.
Something rustled in the bushes at that moment, and Yoh picked up his hatchet out of instinct. He stared at the shrubs intently, motionless, dripping water into the grass, and two furry white ears like flower petals emerged…
"Aww, it's an usagi! C'mere, little fella…"
The leaves of the bush parted slightly, revealing the rabbit's head, then its body, until the entire critter bounded forth with an energetic bounce. Its wide, beady eyes looked at the hand that was beckoning it forth, then at the other hand clenched around the hatchet. The rabbit's perfectly white pelt quivered slightly along with its tail, unsure of what to do, but eventually leapt towards Yoh.
"That's it, little buddy, just a little closer. I'm just going to pet you…" Yoh could see its delicately wiggling nose now, and its gently wiggling whiskers, as it hopped even nearer.
There was a sudden glint of steel and flash of vegetation as Yoh's hatchet slashed before him, and bright red ichor splattered onto his hands and upon the ground…
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Yoh saw an olive green shape through the branches and gave a small sigh of relief; the sun was nearly completely below the horizon now, and the trees had all begun to look alike. He removed his damp shirt and wrapped the food he had scavenged in it, and put his backpack upon his bare shoulders. He poked his head into the tent, expecting to find a livid and starving Anna, but saw only two sleeping bags, one of them with an Anna-sized impression still in it.
Against the sunset Yoh saw a silhouette sitting on a flat rock. There was something on her lap, and she was too absorbed with it to have seen him. He crept forward, intrigued, and Anna looked up suddenly, but in the opposite direction, squinting into the orange sundown. Then she glanced back down, and Yoh saw the pencil in her hands sketching lines and shapes onto the book upon her lap.
He was only a foot or so behind her now, and he could hear the sound of graphite gliding on paper. The lines took shape in Yoh's eyes; he could make out a tree, one that looked very much like the one near their tent, and a male figure with spiky hair and a large pair of headphones standing, almost leaning, over a shorter figure with a slender waist, but that image was incomplete.
"Anna, I…I didn't know you drew so well." The words were out of his mouth before he could stop himself.
She lurched forward, nearly losing her perch on the rock, slammed the sketchpad shut and rounded on Yoh. Her eyes were colored with a mixture of embarrassment and anger, but they saw his admiring, awed face, still staring at where her sketch had been, and then she noticed his bare chest, slim but well-defined, and golden in the glory of the sunset…Perhaps she was slightly sunburned, or else there was some other reason why her skin suddenly looked so pink…
"Yoh, I would tell you to go jump in a lake," she said, after a moment's hesitation, "but from the looks of it, you already have."
"Can I…maybe, see more of your drawings?" he stammered. "That's amazing, I wish I were talented like that…"
Anna's skin flushed a deeper shade of red. "I hope you found something to eat."
"I'm not sure if you like this," he said, "but I got one." He unwrapped his shirt and pulled out the fish. It bent over limply in Yoh's hand, as slimy and unpleasant as ever.
"Not one of my favorites, but it'll do." She picked it up nonchalantly, drew a pocketknife and made an incision on its underside. Yoh gave an involuntary cringe as its entrails dripped out. "There's definitely something wrong with you. I give you a hatchet and you bring me this. Maybe tomorrow I'll give you a fishing pole and you can bring me back a bear carcass. You find anything else?"
"Yeah, I found this too. Was pretty messy to get, but I did it anyway."
As Yoh reached into the shirt to pull it out, an alabaster streak jumped out from the bushes, sniffing the air intently, looking for its friend…
"A sweet potato," Yoh finished, handing the purple lump to Anna, but she gasped.
"Look!"
The bunny looked up at Yoh with beseeching eyes and rubbed its warm fuzzy body against his smooth leg. With an affectionate smile, he reached down and gently cradled the rabbit in his arms, scratching it behind the ears and stroking its soft fur.
Anna stood up and bent over the snow-white critter to get a closer look. She tickled the bunny with her knuckles, and it closed its eyes contentedly, drawing back its ears to express its comfort. "Yoh," she asked, her voice tinged with shock and delight, "how come this rabbit came to you?"
"Well," he said, sounding a little embarrassed, "I fed it some sweet potato leaves. They have this really thick red sap, it stains everything it touches, but…Look at it! I couldn't not feed it, I mean…it's just a little fuzzy ball of joy, don't you think?"
Anna smiled at the rabbit, took it in her own arms, and looked up at Yoh, still smiling. "And you thought I'd be happier watching TV." She placed the bunny on the rock, where it sat, its pink nose still bouncing with delight.
"Nature isn't so bad, I guess," Yoh replied, smiling a little himself and giving Anna a meaningful look. "There are all kinds of cute, cuddly things to find there, that I want to hold in my arms forever…"
"Yoh, that's so…" Anna said, "…corny."
"I know," he admitted. "But I just couldn't think of any other way to describe the way you look, right now, with your blonde hair against the sunset, giving me that smile that I'd do anything to see, and how you make me feel when you look at me like that, and how I'm too afraid to tell you I love you--"
"I love you too, Yoh."
"Oops--"
Anna looked at him with the same stare she had given him so many times before, but rarely if ever had it felt so passionate, and certainly never before had her arms been around his bare back. For a brief moment they stood perfectly still, simply looking into each other's eyes, and then Anna's face rose to meet his, and she could taste the dried sweat, the essence of the effort he had expended to feed her, but a different appetite welled within her chest then as Yoh worked up the courage to place his hands in the small of her back, and the desire consumed him as well--to express and receive what they both felt for each other. The hungering had never been satiated before, but Anna gave with her tender hands and gentle lips, and it was her turn to receive Yoh's timid but affectionate tongue, his nervous but sincere caresses…
The hungering was gone, but they both knew it would resurface very soon as feelings of love are wont to do. Anna sat in front of Yoh, her back supported by his bare chest, his arms draped about her shoulders, with the veins on his compact biceps and the fine hairs under his arm tickling her slightly. She grinned and fingered his chin lovingly and said, "Well, I think the bunny's way too young to have seen that."
Yoh laughed. "Are you kidding me? You know the saying, 'mate like bunnies?'"
"I know the saying, and it doesn't apply to just rabbits…" Anna winked.
"Oh, so like…giraffes? And rhinos?"
"Sigh…Yoh, I can't believe someone so sweet can be so retarded sometimes…"