Yeah, the next chapter. Sorry for not updating fast enough, I'm running out of drive to type things up…and I was having a problem with this story, I can't believe I started this in the first place.

Disclaimer: I DO NOT OWN DETECTIVE SCHOOL Q.

Chapter 7: Ryuu's Decision

Ryuu woke up the next morning with the rays of the morning sun dancing across his eyes.

What? It's morning already?

Kyu was asleep next to him, adding his snores to the chirping of the birds.

Ryuu cringed. Sure, he could sleep through Kyu's snores at night, but in the morning…

He sighed and got off the bed, going to the bathroom to take a shower.

"Snoooooorrrr..." was Kyu's only protest as the sheets slipped off him.

Ryuu shook his head as he watched Kyu roll over, conquering what used to be his side of the bed.

Ryuu stepped into the bathroom, undressed, and then the gush of water was heard as he took a bath.

Kyu seemed to be waking as Ryuu walked back into their room pulling a gray turtleneck sweater over his head.

Ryuu raised an eyebrow at Kyu, who still seemed to be drifting somewhere between consciousness and slumber. Kyu mumbled, "Meg…" and then rolled over and went back to snoring.

Ryuu wanted to laugh, seeing that Kyu was probably dreaming about the pink-haired girl at the moment.

Kyu's mother was in the kitchen as Ryuu came down for breakfast.

"Good morning, Ryuu," she said cheerfully as he sat down at the table.

"Good morning," Ryuu replied, smiling.

"Is Kyu awake yet?"

"No, he's still asleep...somewhere along dreams and reality, probably."

"Ah, that boy was always a late riser," she said amusedly. "Are you going somewhere today?"

"Hm? Oh, yes, I am…"

"All right, then, I'll tell Kyu when he wakes up. Eat, now," Kyu's mother told him as she set down his breakfast in front of him.

"Thank you," Ryuu replied.

Some time later, Ryuu found himself knocking on the door of Shizuko's house.

A boy, several years older than he was, opened the door. "Yes?"

"Good morning…Is Shizuko around?"

"Yeah, she is. Come in, I'll call her…are you one of her classmates?"

"Ah, yes."

As Ryuu stepped over the threshold, he could distinctly hear the faint strains of a violin playing.

The dark-haired boy ran up the stairs like a track champion. "Shizuko!"

The violin music stopped.

"What is it?" Shizuko's voice carried over to the living room.

Muffled voices conversed shortly, and a few moments later, Shizuko came down the staircase.

Ryuu stood in the middle of the living room.

She raised her eyebrow at him. "Oh, it's you."

"Hi," said Ryuu hesitantly.

Shizuko came all the way down the staircase cautiously. "Why'd you come here?"

"Well, we need to talk, don't we?"
Shizuko nodded. "Yeah, you're right. Let's go into the kitchen. We'll talk better there."

Ryuu followed her into the room, where she sat at one end of the kitchen table.

He set himself down on the seat opposite her.

So they sat there, facing each other in awkward silence.

Shizuko folded her arms on the table. "So…"

"Uh, yeah, well, first, I have to tell you…thanks for not telling the rest of Class Q that you got knocked out and that...stuff," Ryuu began. "But why'd you do it anyway?"
"It doesn't take a genius to figure it out. You're involved with Pluto, for what reasons I have no idea, and what happened in that room was obviously something that I can't know and, in turn, Class Q can't know. And since you went all tongue-tied when Kyu asked where we were, I made up something on the spot."
Ryuu nodded mutely.

"So…is that all you came here for?" asked Shizuko.

"Well, I thought things over…and you're right. About yesterday. What you said about not knowing would be more dangerous…"

Ryuu sighed. "I really don't know if I should tell you, but I figure you do deserve to know what happened yesterday."

"What did they want with me, anyway?" Shizuko asked.

"Well, they needed you. When they hit you with the dart, they planned to take you away, to make you one of them."

"And why in the world would they think I'd join them?"

"Because they know your history, and your past. They told me."
Shizuko lifted her arms from the table and leaned away from him. "So you know."
Ryuu looked down at his hands. "Yes. I know about your so-called delinquent past. Pluto spied on you and found all your records, maybe. "

Shizuko pursed her lips and turned away a little. "That's in the past now. Do I look like someone who wants to do it again?"

"No. But then, you're not the only one in Class Q with a deep secret."

"So what's your story? How do you tie in with"—she made a circular motion with her hands—"all this?"
Ryuu sighed. So it comes to this.

"Fine. You were right. I am involved with Pluto."

"Okay, that I suspected. How were you trapped inside their twisted little world, Ryuu? Somehow you don't strike me as the type who joins evil organizations for the heck of it."

"I'm not," Ryuu insisted. "I was forced into it. And I had no choice. It's in my blood."

"Your blood? You mean…"

"My grandfather is the leader of Pluto. I'm supposed to be next in line."

"What?" Shizuko looked completely disbelieving, as though she had just stepped into an alternate universe where striking, mysterious guys turn out to be heirs to malevolent secret societies.

Unfortunately, this was reality, and not a dream. She tried to digest the information. Ryuu is the HEIR to Pluto. THIS I never expected.

Now Ryuu looked a bit uncomfortable. Shizuko was staring at him with an incredulous look on her face. She shook herself mentally, bringing her mind out of its shocked state.

"Okay, I know you're not kidding me. But this is unbelievable."

Ryuu shifted his position uneasily. "It's true. But I don't want to. I told them over and over that I didn't want to be part of them."

"Now I see why you live with Kyu. How did this happen?"

"My parents died when I was still very young. My grandfather arranged to have me taken care of by one of the members of his organization. To be precise, the woman who shot you. Her name was Yurie. My grandfather sent me to New York, so that I would be isolated, in a sense.But the thing is, she was ordered to never let me out of the house. I felt like I was imprisoned. I couldn't do things a normal kid did."

"Soon, I had to leave New York. You can probably guess why."

"DDS, I assume," said Shizuko.

"Yes. My grandfather wished for me to be enrolled there. I was to be…well…their spy."

He looked up at Shizuko, expecting some kind of violent reaction. He saw the muscles in her face tighten, but still seemed to be listening, which was a good sign.

"During my time at DDS, something happened. I got into Class Q, as you know, and I had been warned not to get too close to anyone, even my classmates. So I forced to cut myself off from the rest of them. But, to make a long story short, things changed. For the better, in my opinion. I decided that I'd had enough, and refused to do any more for Pluto, because I realized that my friends were more important than some order placed before me."
"Needless to say, Pluto didn't approve of my actions. One of their leaders, Anubis, warned me that I had no choice in the matter, and that I wouldn't be able to escape my destiny. Apparently they think my destiny is with them."
"The most recent encounter we had with Pluto before this one was on the DDSunrise, which was the school's boat at the time. They had kidnapped Mr. Dan just to get me to come to them. When I refused, again, to return to Pluto, they set off a self destruct mechanism that blew up the vessel. The rest of us escaped, thankfully. I thought that Anubis and Yurie had remained on the boat and died, but I guess I was wrong. They had escaped and returned for me."
"And…It seems like they've been keeping an eye on you too."

Shizuko frowned, running a hand through her dark hair. "Why would they? Did I threaten their organization in any way?"

"On the contrary, they thought that you and I shared so many similarities that they could actually use you and hypnotize you to do their bidding. Your past was what really interested them. They figured that if they captured you, they could get you to use your rebellious side again. They were that desperate, using someone this way to try and undermine DDS. And, as a bonus, they could use you as leverage. If I refused to return, they would take you and at least have half of what they came for. If I came back, they'd let you go, and it would be like nothing ever happened. Either way, they would win. I couldn't let them do that…and I'm sorry you had to be involved."

Shizuko looked very troubled. I'm sitting in the same room with the heir to Pluto while he spills his guts out to me.

"Look, it's okay, everything seems to be back in some sort of order, anyway," said Shizuko.

"Pluto is still alive! They could do this sort of thing again!"

Shizuko ran a hand through her hair again. "I think, from what I understand of you story, is that they can't actually do anything to you to force you into their circle again."

"Yes, that's true, but it'll be a lot of trouble for DDS. They'll just keep attacking. "

"So let them attack."

"Are you crazy? They'll destroy everything!"

"Who says we're not going to do anything about it? Ryuu, their main goal here is you. And as long as you don't return, they'll never grow in power, and they'll be defeated eventually. They'll never claim you as their leader, Ryuu. I can sense that. They can't force you to be something you're not. Only you have that power."

Shizuko sighed. "You've been harboring these secrets ever since you entered DDS. When you decided that you'd had enough, why didn't you tell anyone?"

"It would have given them reason to distrust me," said Ryuu a bit testily.

"Ryuu, if you really thought we were your friends, don't you think we would accept you for who you are?"

"Someone would have informed Mr. Dan, who, in turn, would have expelled me from DDS, in order to protect his school. And there are other spies in DDS! Even though I don't know who they are…" Ryuu sounded almost like he was desperate for someone to believe him.

"Look, how do you know that all that will happen if you don't at least try to tell them?"

"Because I know!" Ryuu yelled, slamming his hand down on the table. "They'd never trust me again if I did tell!"

Shizuko, stunned by Ryuu's reaction, involuntarily pushed herself backward from him, almost falling from her seat as she did so.

Ryuu immediately regretted having exploded at her; in addition to a feeling of guilt that was eating away at his insides, he now had a throbbing pain in his hand where he had slammed it on the table.

He sat back down limply, having half risen from his seat when he lost his temper. Shizuko leaned towards him again, carefully. She was a little scared of him now, she could admit that, but she could tell that Ryuu was too much of a gentleman not to feel guilty about it.

"I'm sorry," she heard him mumble.

"I-it's okay," she said.

"I just can't believe that they're back…now I have to keep my guard up. You don't know how it feels, Shizuko, living in fear of everything around you, knowing that you're being watched all the time."

"You should trust yourself more, Ryuu. And relax. You'll do a much better job that way."

She leaned back in her chair, thinking. "Maybe it is for the best that they've returned."

"What?" he asked, looking at her strangely. Sometimes I really don't understand how she thinks.

"Well, look at it this way. Since they are here, and they're probably plotting their next move and stuff like that, well, you can finally face what you've been running from for so long. I mean, you can't avoid something forever, Ryuu. When they come for you again, you'll know what to do."

Ryuu came back to Kyu's house later that morning, in a sort of daze.

He walked through the front door and came into the kitchen just as Kyu was finishing his breakfast.

"Hey, Ryuu," said Kyu cheerfully. "Where've you been?"

"Ah, I just went to Shizuko's house…"

"What did you do there?"

Part of Ryuu wanted to tell him about what really happened, why he had actually gone there, and the whole story. But still…

No. Not yet. Kyu can know when I know for sure what I'm going to do.

He put on a casual face. "Oh, it wasn't much, really. We just talked."

Kyu blinked. "That's it?"
Ryuu nodded. "Yeah. That's it."
He walked back into their bedroom.

Kyu shook his head. Ryuu was always like that, not really sharing much about himself.

Although, before he turned around, he thought he caught a faint trace of a smile about the enigmatic boy's lips.

-:owari:-

rants: OMG is that it? to be honest, I'm not sure if I really wanted it to end this way. But then again, you know how it is, right? I suck at writing anyway, and this story makes no sense at all, even to me. I can't believe I thought up something like this.

PLEASE REVIEW!

Or kill me, if you wish. I don't blame you, since this story really sucked...