You're Mine

Summary: AU "Just remember that you're mine." It begins with those words, but rapidly becomes something deeper and far more complicated than a mere promise to get back the boy of her dreams...YohxAnnaxHaoxTamao.

Disclaimer: If I owned Shaman King, Shonen Jump would be /really/ sorry for saying 'mana' instead of furyoku in all the translations.

Author's Note: This update is really, really late, I am sorry! –cringe- But I hope that it's long enough to make up for it. There was a lot of stuff that I felt the need to stuff in. :) Unfortunately, the rating has been upped to PG-13 due to… Ren. Ren and the fact that he likes to swear. It's just overuse of the translated Japanese word kisuma. Try not to let it bother you.

I got Shaman King volume 5, but I'm just finishing up with volume thirteen. If anybody knows where I can get my hands on a decent scan of after volume thirteen, I would be eternally grateful.

Planned up to chapter 21 now; I should have mentioned this before, and I think I did, but I'll just mention it again. …Whee?

I also am working on a side-project: fanart of Hao and the Hoshigumi. It's just a sketch so far since I made it in math class in twenty minutes… but I like it. I'm usually a terrible artist anyway.

Whee! I'm rather pleased with this chapter, it's longer than the others… and I'm making pasta as I write it! Now let me check on the votes…

Votes: 19 Yoh x Anna, 10 Yoh x Tamao, 19 Hao x Anna, 10 Hao x Tamao.

Geck! The votes are tied completely, both as a whole and as individual categories… -shakes fist at indecisive crowd- If you don't decide by chapter 7, it becomes MY prerogative to decide! Remember, next chapter is the last chapter to vote!

Chapter Six: What Free Will Creates

She was waiting for him in the arched doorway of the cafeteria after class, standing in the corridor with the sleek arrogance that had always been her stereotype. The few that bypassed her edged carefully around her, unconsciously responding to the powerful aura that thrived and roiled beneath her smooth ivory skin. He could not blame them; he, too, had always been afraid of this medium-sized girl with the blonde hair like sunlight spun finely, and the eyes as cold as the crest of Mount Everest.

"Every memory that I have of her ends with me in tears." He had once said with blithe sheepishness to his favored companion, Manta. But the cheerfulness hid the bitterness of that truth… even from himself.

Lost in thought, for a moment he met her gaze unashamedly, with the steady ease that he had demonstrated when he had first told her of his relationship with Tamao. Ironically, in that self-same moment, as time slowed to a sluggish crawl, there was that old connection again, a powerful thing that beat at his heart and forced it down. It banished all thoughts of the pink-haired girl for a moment as, before her unwavering gaze, he was reduced to the child that he had been when he had first met her – the child who had once loved her because, even with his child's eyes, he could see that she only wanted him to be better.

Her eyes flickered with the same coldness that had always characterized the blonde, though there was a relative amount of uncertainty as her lips parted to speak. "Yoh?"

"Uh huh?"

"Just because you're dating her means nothing. Nothing here has changed." The lilt to her cold voice lent some appearance of insolence to her tones, and for a moment, the shaman-in-training felt his heart surge again as time resumed its normal course. It was not that, the dark-haired boy reasoned, he had desired her forgiveness so – merely that keeping peace with the daunting blonde was a course more easily taken than constantly opposing her.

"You mean…" Yoh inquired breathlessly.

An icy wave of darkness renewed itself within her gaze as she stared at him coldly. "What are you so excited over?"

Moments later, his head was drooping over two lunch trays, both of them piled high with victuals. Had they been in a cartoon, floods of tears would have been waterfalling from his eyes at that moment.

I should have known that she meant that I'd still have to carry her tray at lunch…

As they headed towards the cashier, a second thought snuck up on his mind and pounced upon it, thoroughly brutalizing it.

And that I'd have to pay for it too… Came the morose addition.

"Yoh!" Wide-set, childlike eyes rose to greet the newcomer, shining with the devoted fervor that Yoh appeared to inspire within all of his followers. As the tiny boy announced his name, the other heads set around the lunch table jerked up to greet him as well.

The familiar dark pompadour rose. Peering from beneath its hedge grinned a grin that was feared by all women – and anyone of female appearance – within a ten-mile radius of Funbari High. "Yoh-dono!" The twice-failed high school student greeted the younger boy, pulling out a chair respectfully, indicating that the brunet should seat himself there. An icy look from the itako at the boy's side, however, reminded the lanky man that a second seat was in order – and it was fetched with all the rapidity that one being hounded by a certain blonde might desire.

"Yoh-kun!" A green-haired lad spoke up with touching eagerness as Anna seated herself with a sniff, radiating the thought that this was an unworthy seat, but she would accept it for the moment.

"Grgrloh!" This emerged, somewhat garbled, from two heads – one adorned with blue hair, the other crowned with a microphone shaped set of deep sienna. The reason was immediately apparent as the both of them glared at each other momentarily before each downing a bowl of chili. The usual eating contest; although Chocolove appeared to be winning for once.

Golden eyes regarded the brunet momentarily before turning away with cool disdain. "Hmph."

The other denizens at the table did not greet the boy, but rather, regarded him with profoundly inscrutable intent, though a bland malice was evident upon most of their features. If enough attention was paid to each of them, however, an impartial viewer might have noted that their primary attentions were directed towards a cloak-bearing boy who looked not unlike Yoh himself. Yoh, however, deigned to ignore that motley set, grinning amiably, instead, at his companions. "Ara…" He said uncomfortably with a wry, self-depracating smile. "Sankyuu everybody for leaving me a seat."

"Master, it is nothing--" Ryu began humbly, though his distraction with the trim lines of Lyserg's uniform was apparent.
"Your friends were not the ones who got you that seat." A cool voice interrupted the procession of their conversation, shattering it with a sly ease that came with a thousand years' practice. "Or at least, not all of your friends contributed to the effort. Only one of them actually bothered trying, neh, Ren?" And obsidian-chipped eyes glinted with a conniving malevolence as the shaman shot this comment abruptly towards the spike-haired boy.

"What are you trying to prove?!" The other boy's blunted tenor resonated across the table with his swift, angry reply. Occupied as they all were in the deliberate jibe that Yoh's brother had directed towards the indigo-haired shaman, none noticed the unnaturally vivid flush that stained his cheeks bright with color.

Hao allowed his eyes to close, a gesture of sensual, casual insolence. "Oh, nothing…" he murmured indifferently. Regarding the faintly blushing shaman with half-lidded eyes, he paused dexterously before inquiring, "Is there something I should be inquiring after?"

"Kisuma." Ren sputtered at him, growing still more crimson.

The thin smile widened faintly as Hao watched him with an amusement akin to direct insolence. "Hardly. Yoh and I are twins – so unless you'd like to implicate my dear brother in that statement…" He trailed off easily with a lofty smirk. Before Ren could retort with a statement as sharp as his hair – and the spear that had materialized in his hand – the cloaked boy turned to his brother. "Yoh, do you know whether our parents were married when they had us?"

Staring up from the burden of two trays, Yoh glanced with weary, half-amused sadness at his brother. "I should think so." He replied in bewilderment. "Speaking of babies, I--"

"Yoh, I do not want to have a discussion about how children are made right now." Steely annoyance glittered in flecks within his former fiance's eyes as she glared at him deliberately. "I'm trying to have lunch. If you really want to know, go ask Faust after lunch. He's the biology teacher for a reason, after all."

Mention of the blond man made the boy gulp and straighten up abruptly. Though he knew perfectly well that there was nothing wrong with dead people aside from the minor fact that they didn't breathe and had unfinished business on earth, and that Faust was not dead, there was something distinctly sinister about Faust's appearance. Perhaps it was the somnolent hilarity reflected in his eyes or the fact that he appeared to have bags of purple eyeshadow daubed beneath his eyes. Perhaps both, and the additional fact that he spent half his class time flirting with his assistant and wife Eliza.

Whatever it was, he was the last person Yoh wanted to ask such a delicate subject of.

"Kisuma." Ren grumbled again, but under his breath as he sat. "Bastard."

"Bastard – a bass 'tard!" A sonorous voice rang out over the lunch table as Chocolove posed in the midst. His voice had dropped to below his usual range, and his expression could only be addressed as positively demented.

A tic below the violet-haired boy's left eye twitched as he surveyed the other shaman. Before anyone could react to the brunet's joke, he had prodded the other boy's nose with his spear. Pausing a moment, his lips formed a thin smile as he watched Chocolove yelp in pain and withdraw to curling into a little ball upon his chair.

"Bastard." He said again, but this time said it with a greater amount of satisfaction.

Yoh had been entirely oblivious to the drama that had been passing around him – for Tamao had arrived.

Timidly she had crept towards the table, apologizing profusely with her head bowed humbly as an accidental movement jostled her into someone's chair. And how oddly grateful she had looked when he had stood, grasping her tray with a deft hand as he guided her lightly towards the table! It redoubled the light, tender radiance of her features and lent her an appearance of ineffability, of beauty beyond the knowledge of humankind…

Tremblingly she sat, quivering like a delicate, highly-pitched instrument that required care in manipulating. And he – he never allowed his eyes to stray from her dainty figure, even as she ate. And with their separate attentions fixed wholly upon each other, they never noticed that a third pair of eyes was watching the both of them, with a cold calculation that did not dare to betray the turmoil beneath…

They wore their affections openly, like fools with pulsating hearts bleeding upon their sleeves. And though Yoh had told her, over and over, that it was no business of hers, until his warning echoed within her ears whenever she chanced to look at him, it hurt still to see them together, to see him bending to her attentions without so much as a reminder. This, she thought, is what free will creates; a readiness to listen, a loving thing that is not there when the action is forced.

The fine, clean lines of his profile were rendered starkly against the light for a moment before he turned, inadvertently summoned by the strong pull of her gaze. Eyes whose color had been diluted by dreams of love met her own, oddly translucent and inscrutable – but the moment was fleeting, fleeing him as quickly as she cringed away from his gaze.

Her mouth was a thin, humorless slice as she rose, so slender that it was almost invisible against skin that seemed as delicate and pale as porcelain. Beneath the delicately arched, ladylike brows, dark hawk's eyes stabbed him brutally, a parting blow before she left them together.

Together. The word stung, but only for a moment, like an insect's needle sliding into her skin, pumping a chilling poison through her veins. She remained still wordless, however, a blonde wisp lost in the current of time – and the present tide of people that swept past Yoh's table and sped her away.

As an automatic gesture, Yoh's knees stiffened, forcing him to rise as well. From the moment that she had stood, his eyes had never abandoned that slender figure, so illusionary and easily lost in the roiling crowd of the school. But before he could stride after the blonde, a hand caught at his arm.

Gazing backwards in mild surprise, his eyes met Hao's, and cut into them.

"She's not yours anymore." The dark-haired boy said quietly, but there was no mistaking the smirk upon his features. "So you shouldn't care... should you?"

And for the first time, anger stirred within the murky depths of his eyes; not petty anger, but a deep, burning thing that would etch its mark into the world. Impatiently, burning with that anger, he shook off his brother's hand – or attempted to. But the other boy's grip was stronger than it appeared, and it clung finely, with a woven grace but a pressure like unyielding steel. "It doesn't matter that she's not my... fiancé for much longer." He said seriously, and allowed the thread of anger to be lost within his patient, calm gaze. "She's still my friend."

"She may be your friend," Hao said, with an exquisitely timed pause. A sleek smile curled about his lips as his eyes clashed against that of his brother's. "But are you hers?"

They stared at each other for a moment longer, both of them immobile and tense with unseen pressure. Hao's companions – whom, for whatever reason, were widely known around the school as the Hoshigumi, the Star Group – sprang up from their seats alertly, quicker to react than Yoh's friends. Like a prince with his underlings, however, the long-haired boy waved their attention away with ease, eyes never breaking away from those of his twin's.

A second silence descended upon them, longer and more profound than ever the first had been. But the elder of the two was the first to break it.

"Go, then." Hao said softly, and his whisper cut at the air with a savagery that went unseen beneath his cultured expression. "Be slapped. She'll never forgive you for what you've done."

A shrug shuddered through the other boy's shoulders, and a wan smile accompanied it. Yoh was as gracious as always in his victories.

"I know," he said, "that I cannot ask for her to grant me her forgiveness."

"Then what?" Blasé amusement bored cruelly into the younger boy's eyes, probing for a response that was not his to read.

Yoh fought him squarely for a moment before allowing his gaze to drop away in defeat. "I don't know." He said, and found that a smile was making its way across his lips, across the brambles and faint scars of past training sessions with his fiancé. "But I'm sure that everything will work out, neh, onii-chan?" He flashed his brother a childish, exultant grin before darting away into the crowd, after the elusive itako.

Leaving the Hoshigumi and Yoh's own friends to wonder who had won that conversation after all…

Author's Note: Who DID win the conversation? I'm definitely not telling! ;) Read and review, as per usual… and here're the review replies. I really should just stick them on my website. -.-; They take up so much space.

Inulover4eva: No, she didn't plan it; it was a spontaneous action. However, she let it slide because it's the first time since Tamao that she's had control over Yoh. And our itako is hardly one to let opportunity pass her by.. ;) And he's a little less broken-hearted in this chapter, due to the fact that Anna's talking to him again, even if it IS to make him buy her lunch. –pets him- Dear, dear Yoh…

The Summer Stars: Envy envy envy… I spent forty dollars at the bookstore the other day to get my five Mankin volumes. –hugs them- And I don't think that it's really that he wants to go back to Anna – Tamao loves him too much for that to happen. And even if he /did/ want to, he's gentle enough so that he'd wait until Tamao found herself someone else.

asn water: -grins- Well, look at it this way; Tamao spent most of her life in love with him, and their relationship gradually built up from their childhoods. Anna, however, has never liked Hao very much. To him, this relationship must have seemed like it sprang out of nowhere. He's not jealous so much as shocked and – okay, fine, he is jealous. Just not as strongly as you might think.

Kawaii Koneko92: Yeah, I realize; the manga/anime's Anna would have never tried subtlety in attempting to win Yoh back. Thankfully, this is a sort-of-AU Anna, and she's slightly different. Which is also a convenient excuse whenever she steps out of character. D

Kaorien Otome: Since you say that you rarely ever review.. I thank you for the review. :) And I agree about Hao/Tamao. But it's not the canonity of the pairing that appeals to me (since there's none), but rather, the interaction of the characters and how they might fit together. It's the combination of their personalities, and what effect their relationship would have on the people around them, that interests me most. And if you're blocked from more chapters, feel free to send me an email and I'll send them to you.

KristiexxNguyen: Well, the preview's in here, slightly edited, but still same as a general principle. If you want your fic betaed, then sure, email me.

pandachan: You imagine yourself as Anna? I always put myself in Hao's shoes, perhaps because he's my favorite character.

dreams0123: Yoh/Anna –is- a canon pairing; there's a quality to it that can not be made evident in any fandom-derived pairing.( I.e. I can see your point. Yoh/Anna is pretty nifty.)

thefutureMrs.Kaiba: Like a fungus? –blinks innocently-

SquirrelFraulein: Thank you… and wow. You just saved Hao/Anna from being tied with Yoh/Anna again. xD Close, close, but the voting goes on…

KariHP: Thank you! For the review, the vote, and the compliment.

Angel Asakura: Thank you… and as emotionless as /Anna/? Wow.. –grins and winces- Your vote has been duly noted; you've just tied them. Again.

bow-down-to-keiko: Come on, you know the pairing's cute.. if not as canon as Yohna. And you should be happy; voting tied them again. Or maybe not, depending on whether anybody else has voted…

cam: Whee, a tiebreaker.. Yoh/Anna's winning, with only one more chapter to go…

PRoyalAngel: She didn't exactly steal him. I know I've been unspecific about how they really got together in the fic in the first place, but here goes: Yoh, being dense, took several years to figure out that Tamao liked him. When he did, he spent another two years being confused. During that time, Anna was all the more ruthless in her training, so he took to using Tamao's company as a refuge, since Manta, not being terribly necessary at the time, was being continuously hauled away by his dad to be trained to take over the electric company. This led to the two of them going out on excursions to the city with only each other for company… but he didn't figure out that they were dates until a while later. And then he told Anna.

Tamao was a surprisingly passive character during all of this.

Snow-girl: Hao's my favorite charrie. –snugs him-

Kago: Hehe.. –cough- Twenty days since my last update. Sorry! –cower-

Meisha: She's not evil so much as broken-hearted in this chapter… poor girl.

cherri-chan: My opinion is that he's not jealous because he doesn't see anything to be jealous over. What he's jealous of isn't the fact that Anna appears to be willing to enter into a relationship with Hao, but rather the fact that there's this intimacy there, and she lets it happen. Whenever he tried to befriend her when they were little, she slapped him away (mostly literally, Anna-style). To see Hao grasping it with such ease is just another realization of his childhood jealousies. Hao always came off better when they were young anyway.

Cindy Asakura: You just tied the votes again! –laughs- Gah, doom!