Wow. It's been a while, I know. But here it is, at last, after all those terrible things have settled down in my life. Now, you might wonder about where this chapter comes from? It follows after the past interlude (Sequences) within the same day as Chapter 13 (Pressed and Dry). So basically we're continuing where we left off, with plenty of angst and questions about why the heck? everyone is acting like they are. Well, that's what the story's meant to be like. Though there are a couple of amusing things in this chapter. Like Shigure crying over spilt milk. Thank you so much for the support in the last several weeks, your reviews really uplifted me and helped me to make it through. Also I want to give a huge THANKS of adoration to Kitty-chan, who drew the most beautiful fan-art for Plants/Ache. So this chapter is partially dedicated to her!

Rating: Pg-13. Slash - sensuality - violence - light incest.
Category: Angst/Romance
Pairing: Kyou/Yuki
Length: 14/18

Ache
by Lanie Kay-Aleese

Chapter Fourteen: It Wasn't

- - - -

The ensuing silence and rustle of newspaper folding made Kyou shiver, and he found himself ruffling back the orange clumps of his bangs. Something nervous urged him to scratch his left arm, above the elbow. He resisted the impulse, even though a vein was popping out from his temple.

He couldn't stand it. The stare on his back, from Shigure, whose eyes were fastened on him. He couldn't bear the plethora of smells in the kitchen, which Kyou couldn't ignore; all the smells felt too sharp, all the feelings felt so much more real now that he knew exactly who he was and where and why. He knew why Shigure was watching him eat with poorly concealed shock, and he couldn't stand it. Being paranoid and not knowing if Shigure knew, and thinking 'it must be obvious that I remember', and thinking about how he wanted to eat for once in his life.

"What are you looking at?" he asked, taking a swig of milk. The dog put down his cup of hot tea, folded down his paper, gave Kyou a pointed once-over, then grunted.

Kyou drew in his breath slowly. "What?"

"Nothing, nothing. I still can't believe my eyes," Shigure shook his head and made a tinkling laugh, "It's such a treat to see little Kyon-Kyon, downstairs, eating breakfast!"

Kyou scowled. "It's not like a big deal or something. You're eating breakfast, too!"

"But of course I'm downstairs, eating breakfast, like always, same old same old," Shigure rambled on. "But Kyon-kyon hasn't gone to school in a week, and it's just -- I haven't seen him during any of Tohru-kun's lovely meals -- so now, I'm just overwhelmed with happiness!"

Kyou muttered imperceptibly to himself, something that sounded vaguely like 'shut up'. Pausing, Shigure's eyes wandered into the distance, drifting for a moment, then snapped back to his younger cousin with a gleaming, wide surprise.

"...But factually, I haven't seen Kyon-Kyon at all for the past week. It makes one wonder if perhaps... he just... died up in his room. In my study. All alone and starving. It would have been a terrible, lonely death. Almost as terrible as his smell-"

"Quit imagine it already!" Kyou shouted, and slammed the refrigerator door shut. Then, as an after-thought, he added, "And don't call me Kyon-Kyon."

Shigure snickered. For the second time, though now with flushed cheeks, Kyou raised the milk carton to his lips. At the very moment before Kyou began to pour the milk into his mouth, Shigure shot up and yelped. Kyou jerked his arms back and the milk went flying through the air, and by that point Kyou realized that his reflex was unnecessary, but it was too late to undo the damage.

It was a cruel moment, when the carton fell through the air, milk pouring out in a ribbounous fountain before it.

When the moment passed, milk had splattered across Kyou's shirt front and onto his face. The carton lay in a murky puddle on the tile flooring of the kitchen. Taken aback, Kyou paused and let the white beads trail down his cheeks and drip onto the floor. He opened his mouth and the sour taste of milk slid from his lips to his tongue. For a moment, he was silent and confused. Then the moment passed, and Shigure began to blubber.

"You spilt milk everywhere. All over my clean, beautiful kitchen..." he hiccuped, "...But don't cry... I'll just do the crying. For my... house..."

Kyou's cheeks reddened. "What are you, ten! It's just milk!"

Shigure's wail hit a high note, and he made a motion as if to wipe his nose, "And to think that I had lived in such domestic bliss before you came downstairs. You should feel ashamed of yourself, Kyou."

"You should get a job!" Kyou retorted. A bead of sweat tricked down his neck, and he felt conspicuous with milk that had soaked through the front of his shirt. His hand held the jug out at an odd angle to his hips.

Shigure stared at the ground for a moment, then met Kyou's eyes plainly.

"You're such a bad-tempered ghost. I wish Kyou were back," he dead-panned.

"What the hell? I'm not a ghost!" Kyou jumped to his feet. "And... And I'm sick of putting up with this! I'm going back upstairs!" he concluded, turning around and stalking past his seated cousin, who had something of a pout on his face.

"You're not even going to clean up the milk you spilt?" he complained.

Kyou turned around and flung out his fists. "Hell no! It's your fault for yelping."

"So it was, so it was," Shigure laughed airily, "But I couldn't help it. I merely saw an advertisement for Aya's new After-midnight clothing line in the paper. They're all very becoming fabrics, wouldn't you like to see?"

"Hell no," Kyou yelled thickly, his voice choking as he saw a pair of dirty gloves on an overhang above the genkan. He wondered who had gone to the secret base, and why, and how could it be Yuki, when he didn't like to wear gloves. It was the itch of drying milk that pulled him back to the present, not the crunch of Shigure eating toast or the ding! of the rice-cooker that steamed from the lid.

- - - -

He wasn't ready to eat.

Not yet, anyway. The milk felt cool and heavy inside his stomach and he didn't want it there at all. There was a fucking-loud-pounding in his head and if the adrenaline didn't go away soon, just go away - he didn't know what he'd do. He'd go crazy, or crazier; he had to be insane if his life was true, and it was, and he'd done those things he'd regretted and had been better off not remembering except, now that he did, things made more sense and things made less sense all at once. He knew why Yuki was acting the way he was, and he had no idea why Yuki was acting the way he was.

It made him less lost. It made him burn somewhere inside.

All the pain and all the memory, it made him fucking nearly burst.

Kyou swiped at the perspiration on his forehead. He tugged at the edges of his shirt and pulled it over his head. He half-folded it into something of a sticky wad, then tossed it into the laundry basket beside his bed. Goosebumps rose on his arms as he dreaded taking out the laundry again, for reasons he couldn't explain even with his regained memories.

It wasn't like he could do anything. Except, get mad. At himself. Or Yuki, but he didn't know what he'd done - and Kyou damned himself for knowing, because how could he get mad at the person who he loved? And how was it even fair, that he'd cared so damn much about the rat and let himself love him, love him so much that he actually could not forget him, even when that rat didn't actually love him because he didn't remember - How was that fair? How was that love?

He stood up from his bed and he sat down, with a frustrated growl that turned into a yell that turned into quiet.

It wasn't.

It wasn't love anyway.

- - - -

When Yuki came home, Kyou knew it, and it tingled under his skin. He sat up, tangled in his sheets and the salty, sticky sweat of memory that dampened his skin, and he listened to the outside breeze rushing in through the open door, and he listened as it shut off tightly and the air currents oscillated in the stifled room. The sensory madness didn't bother him, like it had before he remembered that he wasn't completely human but his feelings were human, too human. Now he knew himself - and even though it would hurt to go through his self-revelation again - this time, it wouldn't be right to stay in bed and hide. Or ignore it. Or fight it.

After all, fighting made him sick. It had made him make himself sick.

Even now he felt his stomach churning the milk into cream, because Yuki had come home and he didn't sense love. But he didn't sense hate, either. Kyou opened the door to his room and called out to his cousin from across the hall before he could stop himself, and stop blushing, damnit.

If the prince had noticed that his cousin had called him by his name, he didn't say anything. But he did respond. His eyes narrowed and seemed to darken,and he turned his slight body towards Kyou. His hair was loose and the bangs were around his face, crowning it. Softly.

"What?"

Kyou swallowed, hearing that tone. It was a forced civility, if even. It was barely an acknowledgement that Kyou had said anything. He knew. It meant, "I don't have time for you;" it meant, "I hate you I hate you I hate you"; it meant something worse than nothing.

Kyou would've shut the door, right then, and gone back to sleep, so that the shadows would fall back into familiar patterns on the bedroom walls. He would've let the book sit, collecting dust with its' white petal-potpourri, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. His hand trembled on the doorframe. He couldn't back out.

Not when he remembered the phantom smell of shungiku crysanthemum, or the soil clinging to Yuki's hands, a husky voice that hitched, and arms around him.

Arms around him.

Kyou swallowed down, again, on the bile in his throat. And he ignored the things that were there and remembered the things that weren't.

"I found something," he said, and fastened his dilating eyes on Yuki's steady ones. "I found something that was yours."

- - - -

The French Pastry Lady says:
"Wiz ze spring tat brinz le oopdete, iz ze review tat for le mademoiselle Lanie, makez ze happy. Le happy iz ze mo good fo chapitres, non?"