Summary: Yoh knows that Anna's freakishly good mood has to come with strings attached…
Written: In about 3 hours just after midnight, 8/12/07.
Rating: T for innuendo, mild language and romantic themes.
Notes: So I lied; this is my absolute last story before I go back to school. I figured I might as well do a story that ties in with school somehow, so here it is. It was also inspired by my time as a high school tutor. It was very rushed; I don't have the time to proofread it at the moment (it's 4 am and I need to sleep in preparation for class). Let me know what you think; I'll come back to clean it up later.
Chemistry Lesson
Kiss #9
Beads of clear water glided off Yoh's smooth cheeks and down his forearms. He shook his head dry and dabbed fruitlessly at a wet spot on his shirt with his towel. He was so accustomed to the brutal summer heat that left the house feeling like an oven even in the mornings, but today was different--the temperature was, if not cool, then almost pleasant. It put him in a relatively good mood despite knowing what he had to do next; he whistled to himself tunelessly as he ambled down the staircase, making his way toward the kitchen to prepare breakfast--
Anna was standing at the kitchen table, placing a few sealed containers into a basket. She looked very strangely relaxed, even happy, as she closed the lid on the basket and looked up to the foot of the staircase with a pleasant face. "Good morning, Yoh."
"Er--" He was unaccustomed to receiving warm greetings from her, or warm anythings for that matter, with the exception of slaps that left his face stinging with heat. "Um…same to you, Anna." Not really sure of what else to do, he gave a slight bow.
Anna slung a rolled-up mat over her shoulder, covering her solid white halter top, and giggled at Yoh's formal bow. He shook his head slightly: Did she just giggle?! And I've never seen Anna wearing such provocative clothing…though I wish she would more often…
"C'mon, don't just stand there," Anna ordered, although in a much more playful tone than she usually employed to make such commands. "Here, help me carry this basket."
Yoh awkwardly grasped the thatched basket's bamboo handle, carrying it in front of him like a basinet. He was still very unsettled by Anna's cheerful, warm demeanor; it was a bit like waking up and noticing the sky had turned blood-red. But he found as soon as he stepped outside that the sky was indeed still a majestic, uninterrupted azure, the air a tad warm but not chokingly humid.
"Um…Anna?"
She turned to face him, and he had never seen her look as attractive before. Her straw-colored hair seemed to absorb the warmth of the morning sun and her happiness, and the very pupils of her eyes beamed affection into his. "Yes?"
"Erm, if you don't mind me asking…why are you in such a good mood today?"
Anna laughed heartily, as though unaware that her usual disposition ranged from cold and uncaring to downright frigid and furious. "It's perfect weather for a picnic, and it's no fun having one alone, silly!"
She said it in a cheerful, matter-of-fact tone that confused him even more. Since when does Anna bring me along for picnics?
"Look at this, Yoh. Not a cloud in the sky! And just wait till you see what I've got for you in that basket…"
Anna continued to make eerily cheerful comments and observations as they drew nearer to the park, and Yoh did his best to restrain himself from grasping Anna about her delicate shoulders and demanding, "Who are you and what have you done to my fiancée?!" After about ten minutes of the most awkward peppiness he had ever experienced, they crossed the street and entered the park.
"Aw! I forgot to bring the kite," Anna lamented as they made their way past packs of animated children with sidewalk chalk and jump ropes, several black smoke-belching barbeques, and more than a fair share of couples sitting in places all too visible and engaging in behavior all too explicit to describe in a story rated "T."
They arrived at a knoll of thick, lush grass, shaded by a crooked tree, and overlooking the placid lake just a few feet away. Anna spread out her mat and sat upon it, gesturing for Yoh to join her. He sat, tense, unable to enjoy the shade, the perfect weather, the crystal clear lake, or, most of all, Anna's totally uncharacteristic kindness.
But Anna didn't notice his inner turmoil. She simply opened the picnic basket and withdrew several bento containers overflowing with all sorts of goodies. Through the clear plastic he could see juicy marinated strips of teppanyaki, black-clad rolls of assorted sushi, pickled daikon radishes glowing a strangely appetizing fluorescent yellow…
"I made it all yesterday when you were out running. I think I made enough for both of us, so help yourself."
Yoh blinked at the feast, segregated in containers and spread out upon the mat. Anna actually cooked? He couldn't help himself any longer. Clearing his throat as casually as he could manage, he asked timidly yet pointedly, "Are…are you all right, Anna?"
"Me?" She pointed at herself with a pair of ivory-colored hashi. "Never better," she grinned.
Upon seeing her brilliant smile, Yoh hesitated for a brief moment, stunned, but forced himself to press on. "Please, Anna, be straight up with me. You and I both know we never go on picnics or anything when there's training to be done. So what's the deal?"
The smile on her face wavered, but surprisingly was replaced by an even more rarefied countenance. Her lips pursed together, her shoulders sagged ever so slightly, and her brow wrinkled in a gesture of concern, even…Pity? Yoh wondered.
"Yoh," she said, her tone serious yet still warm. "They sent a mission of Shinto priests to Shinra Private Academy yesterday. The principal sent for them after he received complaints about…troubling spirits."
"Um…" Yoh knew by Anna's tone that this was grave news somehow, but he couldn't quite comprehend why.
"Think about it for a minute. When do you usually interact with the spirits at school?"
He gave a bashful grin. "Whenever I need to take a test. If they weren't there to bail me out, I'd never pass--"
Yoh's marbleized chopsticks landed on the mat with a dull thud, echoing the heartbeats he could hear reverberating in his eardrums in time with his constricted, shallow breaths.
"Yoh…I know it seems hopeless, but I'm not completely heartless, you know," Anna said after a few moments of silence. She tried to console Yoh, placing a tender hand upon his motionless arm, but even that failed to revive him from his shock and panic.
She withdrew several thick hardcover books from the bottom of the picnic basket. Handing a notebook and pen to Yoh, she said, "I…I'm willing to get you up to speed so you don't fail, but, well…it's up to you to learn this stuff for yourself. I can't force you."
He reached out for the notebook with a pale, quivering hand; his mind had just gone blank, save for the occasional thought of his grandparents denying the existence of their buffoon of a grandson…
"Let's start with some math," she offered, cracking open the respective textbook. "Linear equations in two variables. How much do you remember from class?"
Yoh stared at the page of questions. Every number, every x and every y, seemed to crowd his brain just a little more, until the symbols and digits lost all meaning and became a muddle of unrelated, random squiggles of ink. He blinked, forced himself to take a deep breath, and reminded himself that Anna believed in him, was willing to help him in his hour of need…
"Not much," he admitted. He jotted the first problem down and, after a few seconds of calculation, scribbled (x, y) (3, -2) beneath his arithmetic.
Anna looked at the problem and gave a weak smile. "That's correct. Well, nice to know you don't spend the entire day napping at your desk. Try the next one."
Yoh tried the same approach as he had with the first one, but couldn't make any headway. Seeing his struggle, Anna suggested, "Try substitution."
He glanced up from his notebook to give Anna a blank stare.
"Don't know how to do that? How about subtraction? You just need to make sure your coefficients--"
"What did you just call me?"
Anna sighed. "Never mind. Let's move on to the next chapter, maybe it'll jog your memory," she said, impatience and the familiar coldness beginning to creep into her voice…
She jabbed at a problem with her slender index finger. "Show me what you got."
Sensing Anna's disappointment, Yoh willed the equation 2x² + 31x - 8 to take on some bigger, cosmic meaning, to solve itself, but he knew he hadn't the foggiest idea how to make it so.
"Remember the quadratic equation?" admonished Anna in a reproachful tone. She wrote it on her notepad and pushed it towards him. He squinted at Anna's flowing, graceful handwriting, but couldn't make head or tail of it.
"Negative b, plus and minus…Wait a minute, how can you have plus and minus? Wouldn't they cancel each other out? And what's this squiggly line thing?"
"Plus or minus! And--wait, you're kidding right?"
"No, what the hell is that?"
"A square root!"
"Roots aren't square! Carrots aren't square, radishes aren't square--"
"Oh, forget it!" The last remaining traces of Anna's patience evaporated as she slammed the math textbook shut. "You better remember more from your Japanese literature than you do with math."
Yoh frowned at the dense passages in his textbook, wondering how on Earth the publisher had managed to cram so many kanji with such a small font size onto a single page. He licked his lips and began reading aloud, "But…um…Shinnosuke had been raised in the outskirts of Edo, a…something…land where…something something…prevailed. The…something…code of Bushido was a mere…something…to them--"
"YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO READ THOSE KANJI?!" Anna bellowed, wrenching the book from Yoh's lap incredulously. "I can't believe…Yoh, I learned that one in fifth grade…and this one, you see all the time…This one's so important, you can't write any decent story without using it at least ten times…"
Yoh swallowed hard, blinking rapidly, looking down at the coarse weaving of the mat beneath him. His voice was small and hoarse. "Anna…I know, it's pathetic, but I swear I'll learn every last one of those kanji, and that quadratic thing, and the deal with those coefficients or whatever…so long as you're willing to teach me, I'm willing to listen."
She gave him a steely glare, but insulted Yoh's intellect no further. Instead she shut the Japanese literature text firmly and picked up a chemistry book. "Let's start from the very beginning," she instructed, trying to keep the despair out of her voice. "Balancing chemical reactions."
Yoh looked at the questions and began scribbling his answers into his notebook. Anna checked them: AgCl + NaNO3 --> NaCl + AgNO3, 2NaOH + H2SO4 --> Na2SO4 + 2H2O…
"Yoh…you're not cheating or anything?"
"Nah," he replied, feeling a mote of pride welling up in his chest at Anna's surprised tone. "I like chemistry. It's kind of cool to know about…sort of like alchemy, except it actually works."
Anna flipped several chapters ahead to polyatomic ions. She read Yoh's answers again: CH3COO, charge negative one, Acetate; CrO4, charge negative two, Chromate… Anna said nothing, but kneeled behind Yoh, watching him work, wondering how a dunce at mathematics and literature could possibly be recalling the Ideal Gas Law from memory, or know the half-cell potential of copper without checking the back of the book…
Finally Yoh tripped up slightly, solving a thermodynamics question. He wrote, Change in energy -560 kJ/mol. Reaction is spontaneous and endothermic.
Until Anna spoke, the only sound had been Yoh's pen scraping against his notebook, along with a suppressed gasp here and there where Yoh had solved an entire page of problems without so much as reviewing the "Index of Useful Information" at the back of the book. "Actually," she said, breaking the silence, sounding more surprised than disappointed at his incorrect answer, "that would be exothermic. Remember, 'endothermic' means it absorbs heat, it gains energy, it becomes colder. 'Exothermic' means it releases energy, it gets hotter."
Yoh crossed out "endothermic" on his notepad and wrote the correct answer. "Ah, that's right. I always get those two confused."
Anna looked at Yoh intently. There was something she wanted to ask him, but she hesitated, and forced herself to ask. "Yoh…Why can you do so well at chem, but not know what a square root is?"
He looked at her thoughtfully. "Chem…makes sense to me. The way atoms form molecules and interact with each other, it's like pieces of a universal puzzle. But math, and these kanji, they make no sense at all in my head. Learning them is just impossible. Like the tangent of pi over two, or finding a copy of Shakespeare's lost play Vortigern and Rowena. It just can't be done--"
Anna had frozen at Yoh's last sentence. "The tangent of pi over two, Shakespeare's Vortigern and Rowena?! Did you just say that?"
"I…"
"I don't believe it…Yoh…"
She picked up his notebook and cast it aside, then laid her hands upon his knees. "So you do learn…some things…sometimes…"
"Anna," he said, groping for the right words, "this…It means so much to me that you're willing to help an idiot like me pass the tenth grade."
"Yoh," she responded, inching closer to him, "it's the least I can do. And I'm doing it," she continued, her hands gliding up his thighs to cling upon the sides of his torso, "for the same reason you do everything that you've done for me so far."
He hesitated for a minute, but gave a nervous grin and spoke. "I think I like this warm Anna a lot more than the cold, er, endothermic one."
Yoh could feel her breath upon his cheek as she replied. "Here's a spontaneous exothermic reaction for you."
"That's about the corniest thing I've ever heard--"
But Yoh quickly forgave the corniness of Anna's joke as she grazed his jaw with cuddling fingers, guiding his lips to find hers. His legs uncoiled, and he felt all of her weight bearing down on his back; he submitted, feeling the coarseness of the mat upon his back as Anna lay down on top of him. Blond hairs wove themselves with black as their faces remained together, Yoh feeling the ridge on the roof of Anna's mouth, Anna tickling the underside of his tongue with hers. He felt the contours of her body upon his, felt a tenderness that transcended their clothing, and finally their lips parted, and they lay upon the mat beside each other, textbooks and bento containers surrounding them, peeking out at them from behind overgrown grass.
Yoh ran his fingers through Anna's windswept hair, her eyes reflecting his, thankful and wonderfully happy for having each other. "Anna…"
"Hmm?"
"You know what I am right now?"
"Happy? In love?"
"Yea, that too…but I'm your derivative, because I'm lying tangent to your curves!"
"Oh God, Yoh, that was so lame…you're lucky that I love you."
"I love you too. Hey, how about, we share a certain chemistry?"
"Yoh…I swear…"
"Okay, okay…"