Prologue / Chapter 1
"I'm home!" a young boy with short black hair took off his shoes just inside the door. He carried a school bag inside.
"Ah, Ritsuka. You're home! How was school?" his mom asked in return.
"I got an A on my test!" His ears perked up with his excitement. His mother walked into the hallway and screamed.
"You're not my Ritsuka!"
"Mom, ah…" he realized what the problem was. The cat ears that had appeared suddenly shrank back, pressing against his skull.
"You're not my Ritsuka! You're not even human. Why are you pretending to be Ritsuka? Give him back to me!"
His mother kept screaming at him. Finally, she grabbed the nearest thing she could find, a rare vase, and threw it at him. The vase shattered against his shoulder, the shards cutting deep into the flesh.
Ritsuka retreated to the outside of the house and climbed up to his second story room. He entered through the window he always left unlocked when he was not home, incase something like that happened again. Ritsuka sat on his bed and dug the dark shards out of his shoulder, knowing it would happen again if he lost control. His ears drooped with his depressed feelings.
"Why do I have to be different?" Ritsuka asked himself. Of course, there was no answer back. He quickly retrieved the first aid kit he kept under the bed and bandaged the bleeding cuts.
Ritsuka was different. Unlike any one he knew except his older brother, Ritsuka had had cat ears and a tail since he was born. His mother had freaked out about it, but she had forgotten that part. He had learned to make the oddities disappear so he could live normally, and his mother had loved him well enough. But every once in a while, he would forget to keep the ears from appearing, and then his mother called him a freak.
"Why can't she just accept me?" Ritsuka whispered to himself. And, of course, he still did not get a response.
Someone knocked on the door. Ritsuka made a mad dash to get on the other side of the bed. "Ritsuka?" a concerned male voice asked.
Ritsuka perked up. "Seimei!"
The door opened and an older version of Ritsuka walked into the room. The young boy caught a glimpse of another person in the hall before the door shut. As soon as the door was closed, the elder's ears appeared as he smiled. The keen, brotherly eyes picked up on Ritsuka's injury.
"Again? What did Mom do this time, Ritsuka?" Seimei asked, concerned.
"Nothing," Ritsuka muttered. His ears slid backwards again.
"What did she do this time?" Seimei lightly touched the wounded area. "What did she throw at you?"
He could not hide anything from Seimei. "The vase by the door."
"We'll have to watch for that next time, wont we?" Seimei laughed as he ruffled Ritsuka's hair.
Ritsuka smiled. "Yeah."
To Ritsuka, Seimei had been what made the world go around without crashing into anything. Seimei had been the lighthouse, keeping the ship that was Ritsuka from smashing into the hazardous rocks in a bay. Many things happened, and Seimei disappeared. Their mother had snapped mentally after that, and she ended up going away too. His father had always worked a lot, and now he never came home. Ritsuka was left alone.
He spent his days at a shambley public school. All of the kids ignored him, and the teachers rarely called on him. Ritsuka was an outcast. Out of boredom, he took up book reading in any spare time, which seemed to grow by the days. Slowly, nothing mattered.
Ritsuka was reading an odd book under a tree behind some bushes. The bright sun of the spring day always made him warm, and the cool shade was a sanctuary of silence.
"Hey, why are you reading? You should be playing."
Ritsuka looked up to find a girl in his class staring at him. She was a spunky brunet who's hair flipped out like a pine tree. Her eyes were a vibrant green. He glared at her a little. When she didn't leave, he went back into the pages.
"Hey, talk to me!"
"No one wants me to play with them. You shouldn't."
"Fine then. What are you reading?" she sat down in the grass next to him.
"A book."
"I know that, silly. But…what is it called."
"I don't know."
"What's it about?"
"A lot of stuff."
"Well, that's specific."
Ritsuka tried ignoring her.
A voice cut into the falling silence. "Hey April! We're gonna play a little bit of dodge ball. You wanna play?"
"Yeah! Wait a sec!" the girl called to her friends. Turning back to Ritsuka, she asked, "Hey, you want to play with us?"
Ritsuka had stopped reading. "Would you really let me?"
"Mmhmm. Come on. It'll be fun." The girl stood and walked a few paces to the bushes. They were pretty tall, and only the top of her head would be seen from the other side.
Ritsuka had slowly been getting excited. This could be a moment of true fun. He could be normal and make friends. Those were memories worth having. Ritsuka put the book down in the grass and stood.
"Come on April! We're picking teams now!"
"Yeah, just one more sec! Hey, are you going to…?" she had turned to look at Ritsuka and she had stopped mid-sentence.
"Yeah, I'm coming. What's wrong…"
April fell backward. She had passed out. Ritsuka realized what he had done and regained control. His ears again. If only they would go away! He walked up to the collapsed girl and tried waking her up.
"April, you're taking way to long!" another girl who looked identical to April pushed through the bushes.
Ritsuka wondered if the two were twins when the girl screamed.
A.N. Ok, well, I left it at a cliff hanger. On accident, on purpose, who can say? Well, hope you enjoyed it. R&R Please! I know Loveless is pretty popular (this should tell something to the people picking anime to translate: People like Shonen AI! Yay!) so I'm hoping to get a lot of hits and a lot of reviews! Please help me to reach my goal of 10 reviews! (Sad, isn't it?)