A/N: And so marks the beginning of a few Yuri-less chapters. After all, this fic is Naoi-centric! And called The Potter's Son for a reason. Never fear, Yuri will be back… but when? We'll see… but I do know for sure that HC will be back on the 11th. In the meantime, allow me to bum you out with evil Kimito and a little bit of teenage angst. Also - check out Yui Hideki's "The Potter's Son" trailer on YouTube!

Enjoy!

[Chapter 11]: Beginnings of Break

It was weird to be back at school, didn't make much sense, but maybe summer break had gone by faster than he thought. Or the students had been called back in. Or maybe he'd dreamed getting out early. Now it seemed distant, an unimportant detail.

He didn't give it much thought; he had a meeting to get to anyway. With the rest of the student council. They were going to be covering a lot of material that would probably last them until after nightfall, which he wasn't looking forward to. But it had to be done, so he shoved his hands in his pockets and kept walking down an endless hallway.

For a fleeting moment, he pondered if the school had done something different with the walls. Then the thought trickled off, because it couldn't be structured or painted differently. It looked perfectly right to him, like he'd known it for decades

It was still a weird feeling, though, like he'd transferred to an old school. You don't have an old school, said one thought. This IS your old school, insisted another.

Ayato kept walking. He knew the way. There was nothing peculiar about this school to him.

Except – maybe – the sudden rumbling underneath his feet. An earthquake?!

No, an IDIOT. Or a group of idiots barreling down the hallways on all fours, emitting terrible, aggressive war cries as they charged forward. They had rags and towels that they were dragging with them, and the leader – the supreme idiot of the group – almost literally swept Ayato off his feet. He was bellowing and blue-haired and sounded like a jetliner as he stormed past him.

Ayato followed that one with his eyes even after he decided it wasn't Hejjiguchi. He was angry and flushed and his heart was pounding. What a dumbass!

"What in the world is wrong with you people?!" he hollered, after securing his cap on his head. He recognized the uniforms now. Couldn't put a name on it, but those guys belonged to a group that was ALWAYS pulling stunts like this. This caliber of stupidity shouldn't have surprised him.

Farther behind him, there came a weary sigh that caught his attention. Another guy, the newest member of their group, was still pushing along at a more reasonable pace.

"They've always been like this," said the tired student, as if he wasn't the newbie and Ayato wasn't the vice president here. His head was bowed low, focusing on cleaning, and his orange hair was falling in front of his face. "Please don't let it get to you."

Ayato still watched, puzzled, until this guy rounded the corner. Then he shook his head and kept walking. Just another confirmation that he was going to school with a bunch of clowns. It would be nice to, one day, keep them all in line. But apparently that wasn't going to happen under the current student body president's leadership.

"I WIN!" screamed a voice in the background.

"Not yet! There's still a second floor!"

Ayato rolled his eyes. So stupid! All of them! …Except, perhaps, that last person. Something about the boy at the end seemed to Ayato as a bit more respectable. He would still mentally dock some points from the impressionable student for hanging out with those fools. Stupid by association.

He vanished into the student council room and they started the meeting. Weird things could still be heard going on outside during the discussion. Yelling, additional war cries, loud music on the sports field… He could swear he even heard maniacal, villainous laughter just outside their window.

And then—another earthquake?!

Another not-earthquake. More like a hundred bodies colliding with the ground. Out there in the sports field. The idiots were out there practically killing themselves. That was one of the things they ought to cover in this meeting: enforcing curfews. Turning away from the window, he opened his mouth to make a derisive comment to the president. But she was no longer sitting next to him, she was up out of her chair and sliding the door open.

He couldn't believe his eyes. The council members exchanged the same befuddled glances with him, but they were just sitting there and letting it happen. Annoyed, he sprang up from his seat and hurried to the doorway. She was still drifting down the hall, all carefree, like she was off to get some tea or warm milk.

"Student body president!" he hollered after her in disbelief. "You can't do this! We're not done yet!"

"I'll be back soon," she said dreamily. And she floated away like a ghost, like an angel – not a good one – away from her responsibilities. It was infuriating.

Why was she the student body president if she was going to be like this? Honestly—

He stiffened. He felt a presence nearby, out in the hall. Eyes on him. It was a familiar feeling, but still suspicious. Sighing, he backed into the student council room and pulled the door shut.

When he turned around, his world began to shake again.

"What makes you think you can sleep in?"

Ayato groaned sleepily, then in dismay as he acknowledged the pain in his side. This morning, Kimito's method of waking him up was unceremoniously nudging—kicking—him in the ribs with his foot. He opened his eyes and stared up at his father blearily.

Kimito was hovering over him, looking irritated as ever. He didn't have very many other emotions to display. Irritation, impatience, fury, dissatisfaction… that was his spectrum. And now that it was summer break they would be directed at Ayato on a much more regular basis.

Ugh… summer break…

Groggy desperation had Ayato clinging desperately to his dream, to his last threads of sleep, though he knew it was futile and dangerous. Two seconds after he'd closed his eyes and reacquainted himself with his pillow, the illusion of sleep fell to pieces.

"Hey!" Kimito barked, shoving him this time so that he rolled on his side. "Don't make me get the bucket."

Ayato gritted his teeth and choked down a growl. He hated getting woken up with the bucket, even in the summer. There was no bluffing when it came to threatening him with ice water. Blankets and hair usually got the most of it, but sometimes when his shirt got soaked, Kimito wouldn't even let him change out of it. If Ayato was even the slightest bit conscious, he would do anything he could to avoid the bucket.

"Fine. I'm up," said Ayato unhappily. He shifted into a sitting position on his bed and kicked his legs over the side of the bed, then looked up at Kimito. It was the easiest method of telling Kimito, essentially, get out of my room.

Kimito gruffly nodded his approval. "Breakfast is waiting downstairs. Don't dawdle."

What, like they would be meeting around the table for a family meal this morning? Highly unlikely. But then Kimito shutting the door behind him as he left shook some of Ayato's thoughts out of slumber mode. The food would be getting cold, and if he took too long getting to it, Kimito would drag him away from the table in mid-bite. Then he'd get mad at Ayato's mother for wasting food on him, even if it made it into the fridge as leftovers.

His father was not a morning person. Ayato didn't understand why he expected everyone else to be.

Still in a haze, he fumbled around until he dug up a shirt to change into, then pants, then cap… where was his cap? He usually rested it on his bedpost. Why wasn't it—

He remembered he didn't have a cap and he was wasting valuable time. Stupid dream!

Downstairs, his mother greeted him with a yawn-filled "good morning" and continued scrubbing the kitchen windows while he sat down to breakfast. To let more light in, she always said, to make this house a little cheerier. Ayato never told her not to bother. Not because Kimito darkened every room he walked into (though he did), but because when he was particularly angry, his fury could illuminate the entire house with a light just about as blinding as the sun.

The sun, burning and pulsing and old, was a dangerous thing to look at, but life still revolved around it. It still wasn't something Ayato liked seeing first thing in the morning.

"Better not fall asleep in your food," said his mother. "You don't want to keep your father waiting."

Disoriented, he glanced over his shoulder at her. She had her back turned to him, and she was stretching to reach a spot in the corner of the windowpane. Her exposed arms were freckled with black and blue. He frowned and averted his eyes, swallowing a mouthful of tea.

Breakfast disappeared fast, wisely, and very luckily without hiccups. A common side effect of choosing "eat fast" over "eat little," they were greatly despised by Kimito because they made his son sound like more of an imbecile than usual. Apparently the public would think he was "raising a son who can't even eat and drink properly," so he'd keep him doing chores in the workshop until they were gone.

This morning they wouldn't be a problem or a delay. Ayato headed down to the workshop, fuzzy-minded but fed. The weather helped break him out of his daze as he walked, which was good. He needed to be at least 70% conscious to minimize Kimito's frustration with him.

Incidentally, Kimito didn't have much for him to do in the workshop. He cleaned out the sink and mixed slips and glazes while Kimito fired up the kiln. After he was done sweeping and wiping off surfaces, Kimito sent him off to open up the store and run it until he finished duties in the studio. It was the same as yesterday, and it would probably be the same tomorrow.

Though successful, Kimito's pottery shop was not exactly the summer place to hang, so Ayato had some time to himself after setting up. Time that last night's dream spent prodding at him.

It figured, of course. Only two days into summer vacation and he was already dreaming of being at school again. And dreaming of people who skirted their responsibilities. The school in his dream didn't look quite like Akuma's, but it was strangely comforting to think about. As if he'd been there before. He certainly had in his last few dreams. Come to think of it, his first one might have been in late June. He remembered "waking up" on the ground and then walking around a huge campus like he'd been transported to a different world. For all he knew, it could've been part of the same dream school.

There were recurring themes, too. He was vice president and had a cap that made him feel powerful, but he was second in command to some wispy-voiced girl who always seemed far away. And Yuri was there once, and Hejjiguchi—

God, no. That wasn't Hejjiguchi. His face had faded back into Ayato's subconscious by now, but he couldn't say it was Hejjiguchi. It was someone differently irritating, someone much more distracting. And then – who else was there with him? Some bare-backed bespectacled boy, a large-boned teen (man?) who could probably destroy him in one punch, and a roaring purple-haired guy who looked more murderous than competitive. And Ayato couldn't forget the lone wolf trailing behind at a sensible speed, a weary expression on his face. Even a figment of his imagination found little sense in these dream-world shenanigans.

Poor guy — he was a babysitter, a proud noble amongst lowlives. It made Ayato want to laugh, pat him on the shoulder, and apologize for dragging him into his dream.

Those other boys though, they were idiots. Especially the blue-haired one who'd almost killed him. And the purple-haired one who—

"Excuse me. Naoi?"

Ayato's head shot up – and then so did his heart rate. What the hell!

His eyes must have widened considerably, because the purple-haired teen in front of him made the same startled expression and held up his hands in surrender. It took a few seconds for Ayato to register that this guy's hair wasn't even the same shade (more fuchsia-violet than purple, but he wouldn't tell him that) and he was a bit more friendly-looking than the student in his dream.

"Hey, Masuda," Ayato said, snapping out of it. "I didn't even hear you come in."

Masuda chuckled guiltily. "Sorry about that. I've become kind of light on my feet. Stealth is… habitual for me, I guess."

"I'm the same with daydreaming. Should've heard the bell jingle."

Waving it off, Masuda said, "Not everyone is the 'constant vigilance' type. We all have our off days." His features twisted into that of reflective annoyance. "Or else I would have been able to stop my roommate's stupid ball in time. Speaking of which, I have a table lamp to replace."

Shaking his head, he sighed and went to browse the merchandise. Ayato wondered how old his roommate was. Sounded more like an annoying little brother… but he knew just what Kimito would say about it. "That's his business. Stick to ours."

His father wasn't much for making friends, he supposed. Just rich regulars. The Nakamuras.

He missed Yuri.

Masuda bought his lamp and left, replying to Ayato's obligatory "please come again" with a sarcastic "I imagine I'll have to" and a reassuringly amiable smirk. Not at all like the rag racer in Ayato's dream, he decided. Still physically close enough to be unnerving, but he wouldn't hold it against him. From what he gathered, Masuda wasn't an idiot.

More people came in after that, usually older. Young couples buying dishware for their new homes. Parents whose kids were home for the summer and playing inside the house near the fancy vases. A grandmother buying pretty figurines to give to her family as gifts. The whole town loved all the things Kimito could make. The man had a gift, just like his own father and just like Hayato. But he didn't like to call it that.

"Hard work," he'd say roughly, whenever people tried to say he was talented. "Practice and a lot of training. That's what it takes. Results show a man's character and dedication."

It was what he'd been saying to Ayato for years, except in decidedly gentler terms.

Mid-afternoon, Kimito made his grand entrance, but holed up in the back room for a couple of hours to decorate a batch of dishes. When he was confident that business had died down out there, he hollered at Ayato for just sitting out there not doing anything. Ayato took the hint and went into the back room to help out. Some of the more recent pieces they'd made needed signing, and despite what Kimito liked to think, some of the work did come from his son's hands.

Taking one bowl that had been set aside, Ayato flipped it over and grabbed a stylus, very carefully carving the lettering into the clay: 直井文人. Naoi Ayato. He felt a quiet swell of pride in his chest. This was something he created, something with his name on it, something that could be useful to the world. It made him feel like he made a difference. Did Kimito know that feeling?

Ayato spared a glance at his father, who was making his own carvings. His tunnel vision was engaged and he was staring intensely at the plate in his grip. He painted the piece with careful strokes; nothing else in this room existed to him.

Kimito might have known that feeling once, a long time ago. Now, Ayato supposed, he was numb to it.

Frowning, the younger Naoi lowered his eyes to his own creation. And then he did a double-take, because he knew the sun he hadn't spent a second in was playing tricks on him.

健人.

He blinked, and it reverted. Still, for a second there, he thought he'd mistakenly signed his brother's name. But that was strange. He hadn't been thinking of him at the time. Imagine what Kimito would have to say about him writing his own name wrong!

It was only a hallucination, but… he was more used to his mother calling him Hayato rather than his ceramics.

It was moments like these that made him wonder what would happen if they started claiming that he really was Hayato, and that "Ayato" was the dead one, for the interest of the business. He could see Kimito doing that. Switching their identities. Convincing himself that he had Hayato and that no important assets were lost.

But Ayato was the one who closed up shop and walked home with him that evening. He was the one who was there training hard in the workshop afterwards, late into the night. He was the one whose crooked pot got dashed against the wall. Kimito would never have to do this to Hayato. Hayato would never have made such a careless error.

He was Ayato, so he went to bed without dinner because Kimito was in one of those foul "Ayato" moods. He played handheld games in bed until he fell asleep.

For him, this was summer break in a nutshell.

Preview:

"You go to my high school, don't you?"

"That's not really up to me."

"I think nothing's worth your freedom."

"Did she send you to spy on me?"

"You need to get out of this place."

"It can still be of some use."

"There is nothing wrong with hope."

[Chapter 12]: Emboldened by the Boldest.