Title: Dancing for the Stars
Author: Nina/TechnicolorNina
Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh!: GX
Pairing/Characters: Jyuudai and Yubel. You could argue for the beginnings of Jyuudai/Yubel, if you wanted.
Word Count: 2 496 (now why couldn't I do that during NaNo, dammit)
Spoilers: It's past-life.
Story Rating: PG-13 because Yubel apparently likes getting naked a lot (not that way, get your minds out of the gutter).
Story Summary: Yubel is not domestic. Jyuudai is not studious. They decide to play hooky and have a conversation on . . . hair?
Notes: Bit me in the ass and wouldn't let go. May end up as part of a series. Apparently I can do all the world building I want here! So, uh -- I made up all the history and country names (except for Delain which belongs to Stephen King), and a dechre is a totally made up monetary unit. Also the whole thing with Yubel having a boy's title (tekhai -- yes, I'm reserving the right to make up a language): like I said, yay world-building and I'll probably do more? Basically she's the only kid in her family, family line must continue blah blah, so under this awesome thing called CUSTOMARY LAW that Nina totally made up (I love doing stuff like that), she has the legal status of a male even though she's a daughter instead of a son.
Warnings: Yubel apparently doesn't know that you're supposed to keep your breasts *covered* in the presence of males.
Feedback: There may be something out there that's better than a review containing concrit, but if there is, I haven't found it yet. So if you have two minutes and you wouldn't mind? Please? Arigatou. (And concrit is cool. Flames are not.)
Special Thanks/Dedications: I blame Drea. Because if she hadn't gone "YEAH! LET'S DO THAT!" I would never have started watching and getting addicted to this show.
You should go to sleep now, you should stay the night
I'll be up to watch the world around us live and die
Lyin' on the grass now, dancing for the stars
Maybe one will look on down and tell us who we are
We might fall, we might fall, we might fall, darling, we might fall
We might fall, we might fall, we might fall, darling, we might fall
~ We Might Fall, Ryan Star
It's too nice a day to be bent over a history the day Yubel climbs the wall outside his room and drops unceremoniously into a pile on his bedroom floor, part of her bare ankle showing through a rip near the hem of her dress. She stares up at him.
"Save me."
Jyuudai blinks down at her, still trying to comprehend the Half-Century's War between Delain and Terchath and how a fifty-seven-year-long war could honestly start over a horse, before he reaches down and takes her hand to pull her onto the bed.
"What's going on?"
Yubel grants the question a dark and somehow desperate glare. "They want me to learn how to sew."
He fights not to laugh--it's neither nice nor becoming for the future King to laugh at his subjects, even when the subject in question happens to be his best friend--but it's a losing battle, and finally he drops his book onto the bed and laughs so hard it doubles him over. Yubel doesn't look amused. At last he stops laughing long enough to look out the window, then back at Yubel.
"Turn around."
She turns her back to him immediately, wiggling her shoulders to free them as soon as he pulls the cord on the back of her dress. The sides of the sash part easily, and he grabs a tunic out of the clothes press at the foot of his bed as soon as her bodice falls around her waist. She takes the tunic and pulls it on, standing up and letting the skirt crumple to the floor before turning around so he can roll up the sleeves for her and give her something to wear beneath it. Trousers are not common in Delain, but they're not entirely unknown, either, and Jyuudai has a few pairs stashed beneath his normal clothes. Yubel kicks off her shoes to pull them on. She gets momentarily tangled up in the pair of leggings he's given her, then sits so she can roll up the legs to end just below her knees. She brushes a wayward lock of hair out of her face and looks up at him.
"Let's get out of here."
Sneaking out of his room is easy--he's the prince, after all, and in the servant-style clothes Jyuudai saves to play in (because teenager or not, there is part of him that very much so always wants to play), Yubel excites no comment. They leave the castle through the door into the courtyard, and then they start to run, laughing as they go, enjoying the warm breeze and the hard-packed dirt beneath their bare feet. Jyuudai reaches for her hand and catches it, and they race across the courtyard that way, hand in hand all the way to the stables near the back. Yubel brushes back another stray lock of hair that's escaped from the cockeyed braid that's coiled on the back of her head, then splashes water onto her face from the trough by the door before Jyuudai leads her inside.
At the back of the stables is the barn, and in the barn there is a ladder into the hayloft. It is to this ladder that he takes her, standing beneath it as she climbs up, eyes on her face as he climbs up himself. Jyuudai isn't afraid of heights, but the hayloft ladder always makes him feel a little dizzy.
Yubel pulls him into the hayloft, and they both tumble backward and over before landing in a large pile of loose straw from a broken bale, Yubel's head on his stomach and Jyuudai's arm pinned under her bare calf in an untidy sprawl. She sits up and starts picking the hay out of her hair while Jyuudai brushes it off his own tunic before the stray stalks can shred enough to sew themselves to the fabric. Yubel holds her hair in place with one hand, pulling on stubborn pieces of hay with the other, finally getting out the last few pieces and reaching over to pick a piece out of Jyuudai's hair, as well. Then she flops backward and lands with her head in his lap. The front of her borrowed tunic flips open, revealing her collarbone all the way down to her breasts, a pair of small additions to her silhouette that appeared in the last six months or so. Jyuudai wasn't always so much bigger than she, but in the past year or so his shoulders have broadened in a way hers have not.
"I shouldn't be helping you skip lessons."
"Help me?" Jyuudai laughs. "Aren't you the one who came in the window asking me for help?"
"If you hadn't been in your room, I would have hidden under the bed. I only asked for help because you were there." Yubel rolls onto all fours, then gets to her feet and runs out on the beam over the barn floor, so quickly and lightly Jyuudai can't quite breathe easily until she's standing over the enormous pile of hay that's been forked below for the sake of convenience. Sometimes her sense of balance amazes him. She stops there, hands on her hips.
"Are you coming?"
Jyuudai is neither as fast nor as graceful as Yubel when it comes to walking a beam only two royal hands wide, especially when that beam is set so very far above a hardpack floor that looks eager to break bones and drink thirsty blood from this angle, but at last he gets across the floor and reaches out a hand. She takes it, hers almost completely enveloped in his, and looks down to check and be sure they're both above the massive haystack.
"One--two--"
They shout "three" together and jump, Yubel's unbelted tunic flying up to her waist, Jyuudai's fluttering around his hips, until they land together with a soft and muffled thump in the haystack. Jyuudai flounders in it, finally rolling out the side, laughing and hearing her laugh answering him. He watches as Yubel picks the straw out of her hair again, wondering a little why she doesn't just let it fall loose to make the job easier. He doesn't bother wondering, though, why Yubel, no vain lord's wife, stops after every jump--if she leaves it, she has told him, it works its way deeper into her hair until she can barely find it to pull it out, and then it needs washed, and in the meantime it itches. He doesn't begrudge her, but it does give him a headstart, and by the time she's finished with the wayward stalks he's halfway up the ladder again.
It's after their third or fourth jump and a brief scuffle, ending in another tumble through the hay--the kind of thing that would have turned into a kind of wrestling match if Yubel really were a boy, instead of just having the title of one--that Yubel lets out a low curse she probably picked up from the stablehands and rubs at the side of her head.
"That hurt." She pulls something out of her hair, not a piece of hay but a small twig, and smoothes her hair back where she's dislodged it. She's sitting back-to, and for the first time, Jyuudai actually looks at her hair, paying attention to it. The braid is held in its coil with some kind of wooden pin, the end of it secured with a small strip of leather. Jyuudai reaches for the pin, curious, sliding the leather off the end of the braid as he does. Her hair spills down her back, a thick and flowing dark blue waterfall that hits the hayloft floor and then pools there in the few split seconds before Yubel gasps and spins around, getting to her feet, pulling her hair back up as she does. Jyuudai has a momentary vague impression of it ending somewhere just past her knees, and then she's holding it up, glaring down at him.
"What did you do that for?"
He gapes up at her, probably looking the world's greatest idiot, as she sits again, her hands shaking, and tries to braid it back up.
" . . . why not?"
"Because only your husband is supposed to see you with your hair down, you--you--idiot!" she says, almost moaning it out of distress. "If Papa finds out--"
"We're the only two up here," Jyuudai points out. "And since when are you getting married?"
"I'm not." She swings the braid over her shoulder to finish it, fingers working rapidly out of habit. "Ever."
"Then why do you wear it that way if it's such a pain?" He watches the braid form under her fingers, a little entranced by how quickly she moves. She looks up at him with her typical Jyuudai-why-did-you-even-ask-that expression, not quite irritated, but getting there. "You're takhai, you don't have to wear girl's hair if you don't want to. Nobody's going to care if it's cut like a man's."
"Because--" She stops.
Yubel speechless is an interesting sight, one Jyuudai doesn't think he's ever seen before. She looks down at the end of her not-yet-tied-off braid, not protesting when Jyuudai takes the leather thong from her fingers and ties it carefully at the end of the thick blue cable nearly as big around as his wrist. Then he looks up at her.
He doesn't need to ask his next question; they've been friends long enough for her to simply read it on his face, and before he can speak to ask it she's looked down at the carefully tied leather strip, and back up at him, and then she turns her back to him, sweeping the braid back over her shoulder.
Jyuudai climbs halfway down the hayloft ladder before he jumps, heading for the tack room on the other side of the barn. He picks up what he wants, testing its weight in his palm before darting back toward the ladder. Yubel is still sitting quietly at the top, head slightly bowed in thought, borrowed tunic slipping off one shoulder, bits of hay stuck in the rolled cuffs of Jyuudai's trousers, the top of her braid already coming loose again. Not for much longer.
Jyuudai sticks the tack knife in his belt and sits behind her, loosing the thong and letting the braid start to unravel from the bottom up. He slides his fingers between the wefts of braid and slides them downward, dragging the hair back into a single unbroken blue curtain, hearing a quiet gasp and feeling her shiver when his fingers get caught and pull just a little. He runs his fingers through it again--Yubel's hair is always tied back, not beaten around by wind and weather and battle training the way his is, and it feels decidedly different, almost silky, under his palm. Yubel outstrips him at archery and has more than once bemoaned the law that keeps her from carrying a dagger when she must walk alone, but there is nothing hard or warlike about the hair spilling over Jyuudai's fingers. It puts him in mind of something he either cannot quite recall or cannot quite think of because he does not yet know that he knows it, and he strokes it back from her face, burying his fingers in it and enjoying the unique texture of it spilling over the backs of his hands and down to his wrists. In spite of Yubel's moderate care with it (which is quite a lot, really, coming from Yubel), the hair he is combing through with his fingers is full of tangles, and even though it won't matter worth a horse's feed, he can't help separating them out, smoothing them, making them neat again, feeling those long strands of hair catching and moving around his fingers.
Then he pulls the knife out of his belt, putting the leather-wrapped blade between his teeth and drawing it, taking care to draw away from his face and not toward it the way some man in one of the lower military ranks was purported to have done. Jyuudai likes his mouth being exactly as wide as it currently is; he has no desire to extend it.
He slides the knife beneath Yubel's hair, pausing to smooth it one last time to be sure it's even, withdrawing the knife and dragging his fingers through her hair from beneath.
"You're sure . . . ?"
"It was your idea." Her voice sounds far away, as though she lost herself in dreaming while Jyuudai tended to her hair. Given that Yubel is capable of making up riveting hourlong stories in ten minutes (and Jyuudai should know, since she's usually doing it for his amusement), it wouldn't surprise him. "I would have said no already if I didn't want you to."
Jyuudai nods and slides the knife back under her hair, careful to make sure there are no stray locks sliding off to one side or out from above.
Then he pulls.
The knife is almost razor-sharp, and a thick lock of blue hair falls to the hayloft floor between them. Yubel draws in a sharp breath as the short new strands of her hair tickle the back of her neck. Jyuudai brushes them off to the side, adjusts the knife, and pulls again. There is a noticeable amount of hair piled between his knees now, a mound of it almost big enough to mistake for something alive in the semidarkness of the hayloft. Yubel sits perfectly still--far more still than he is used to Yubel being--to let him make the cut even as he gets to the thickest part of her hair, just at the back of her neck, and around the side. He takes the last lock of her hair in his hand and makes short work of it. Yubel sits still long enough for him to get the knife out of the way. Then she throws her head back, shaking it.
"It's strange . . . "
Jyuudai sheaths the knife and looks down at the hair that five minutes ago was attached firmly to Yubel's head. He'd bet a dechre it's strange--just sliding his fingers through her uncut hair was enough to give him a sense of its weight, and now it's gone, the slightly ragged tips of what's left just brushing her shoulders. She turns around to face him.
She looks different without her hair pulled back and tightly bound; instead it frames her face, changing her most prominent feature from her jawline to her eyes, taking attention away from her neck and giving it to her mouth. In the half-light of the hayloft, wearing Jyuudai's clothes and with her newly-short hair unbrushed and tumbled over her skin, Yubel could easily be mistaken for a young boy--a stablehand, perhaps, given their location. Jyuudai smiles.
"I like it."
Yubel never grows her hair past her shoulders again.