AN:

I've been flip-flopping lately between Advocating Aesop and Teaching Patience [my Avatar fic, b/c I'm a dork], and because I am getting absolutely NO work done on either individually, I'm just going to say "screw it" and work on them both. Hurray for me. .

Also: Note that there had been some teacher issues last chapter, and do try to keep up. Ms. Stevens is... not actually an OC, so don't strangle me, ok?

The chapter that could also be called, Every New Section Starts with Dialogue.

"Over here, Sohma!"

The slightly overweight brunette male caught the pass between his great bear paws before letting it bounce off the ground on his way down the court. An unfortunately averaged-sized defender at the opponent's end cringed as the other male's bulk crashed into his own like a wrecking ball. His teammates hissed in sympathy.

But the point was scored, and that was all that really mattered.

Yuki trotted away from the bursting mass of testosterone, and towards the awkwardly-low water fountain installed on the inside of the gym's wall. A group of girls congregated along the edge of the bleachers just off to his side.

As he bent down to get a drink, he could've sworn he heard one of them say his name. He paused his drinking, not moving from the awkward position as he listened for it again. Nothing. Just inane chatter about Kyo.

He just didn't get it. Kyo was loud. Horribly rude. Hell, he had come into the classroom with curses on his tongue, and yet people were fascinated by him. Girls seemed to adore him.

His hair wasn't even a normal color.

He frowned and stood, wiping stray droplets away from his mouth with the sleeve of his uniform. Maybe that was what had everyone's attention. The boy wore blood red-colored contacts (even to school!) and had almost as unnaturally colored hair as Haru. Added on top of that was his personality, which Yuki could tell (even after only knowing him for two days) was brash and untamed. Yuki couldn't fathom how this kid – whom he had only met and "saved" last night – was already messing up his life so royally.

To be fair, he could acknowlege to himself that the main reason he was so frustrated was because people accepted Kyo. Immediantly. While Yuki had never exactly been the social pariah or anything, he could count his friends on one hand and those he could really trust with less than half. The bell marking the end of Chemistry hadn't even finished ringing before Kyo was surrounded by curious students, girls asking if he had a girlfriend.

(To which Yuki overheard, was a "Hell no, and get out of my face." None of the girls had appeared the least bit daunted.)

"You still playin', Sohma?" Big-and-Tall choked the basketball between his elbow and side, and the redness in his cheeks suggested that he wasn't pleased he had to wait for the mauve-haired teen to get re-hydrated. Yuki just waved him off, telling them to enjoy themselves even as they redivided up the teams before he had given them an answer.

He didn't let himself be too bothered. Basketball wasn't really his sport, anyway.

He spotted Ms. Stevens sitting with her legs crossed before her against the gym doors, upside-down physics book propped up on her knee while she flicked through the pages with a frown. Yuki slid down the door next to her, watching boredly as the male population of the English class turned Basketball into a full-contact sport.

"Afraid of getting flattened?" Ms. Stevens leaned the book back some, enough to turn one of the much smaller pages on the book hidden behind the physics text. He caught a few words that painted a rather dirty picture with a quick skim, and jerked his now rather pink face back towards the other students. "Or are you more afraid of having a good time?"

He looked back up as she took a gulp out of the coffee cup he hadn't seen by her other side. The liquid smelled strange. "Basketball isn't really my sport," he told her honestly. "I'm more of a—"

"Book person, right?" She smirked over the top of her mug, blonde bangs falling from behind her ear to hang over one eye.

Yuki sighed, letting out a puff of air. "Right." It wasn't particularily true, but it was just easier to let people believe what they wanted to believe.

But Ms. Stevens apparently wasn't done, because she tapped her thin lips twice with her fingernail, in thought. "Maybe something graceful too – soccer? No... You would need something where you wouldn't have to rely on people." He wasn't sure whether to be affronted by her abrupt judgement of him, or amazed at how accurate it was. She smiled, tucking back those golden strands. "Martial arts, that's it."

"I, uh..." quit when I was a little kid because I wanted immediate gratification? "I took Karate some years back, yes. How could you tell?"

"You hold yourself differently than most kids your age. More confident, even though you aren't very confident. You've got self-esteem issues, you know that?"

He sputtered. The no-nonsense way she had said it hadn't sounded insulting, per se... but rather an observation made by a woman with far too much time on her hands to analyze her students. "I don't have self-esteem issues," he argued, disgruntled. "I just keep to myself sometimes." She nodded sagely, drowning whatever wisdom could have come from that statement with the last of her smelly coffee. Finally he remembered why it smelled so familiar; Shigure had come home stumbling and smelling of it far too often to count over the last year. "Have you been dousing your coffee with gin, Ms. Stevens?"

Ms. Stevens grinned, shutting both books, uncaring about the odd creases the trashy romance novel was creating in the borrowed physics text. "You're a smart one, Sohma. Catch on fast." She gave one last longing look into the bottom of the empty coffee cup before setting it down atop the awkwardly piled books. "And call me Uo when we're outside of class. 'Ms. Stevens' makes me feel like some kind of old fart."

She couldn't have been more than twenty-five, and had the legs of a model. Besides, "We're still in class, ma'am."

Uo Stevens blinked, glancing out at the basketball game to the girls re-applying their makeup on the bleachers. "Then why are we all in the gym? Oh... Right."

Five minutes into History, the woman had declared Napoleon a "crusty midget," slammed the book down on the desk of a rather frightened student and announced that they were all going to get some fresh air. Which had apparently translated to "head to the indoor gym to goof off for a whole hour." Given the gin though, Yuki was surprised she had even remembered.

"Napoleon... did seem like a crusty midget though." Ms. Stevens smiled down at him, and he felt his mission accomplished.

"You know, you're a good kid, Sohma," she said, patting him on the head in a way that came off more endearing than annoying. "Damn smart too."

Yuki resisted the urge to grin wildly at the complement – it always felt good to have some recognition every once in a while – and calmly replied, "Call me Yuki when we're outside of class. Or inside. There's too many Sohmas here as it is."

Ms. Stevens laughed, a surprisingly cheerful sound that lit up her dark eyes in a way that made him wonder why she was drinking in the first place. She stretched out her long legs before standing, holding out a hand for him to take as he got up. The bell rang and the students wandered out, knowing better than to expect a shouted assignment on one of their teacher's "off days." Why bother assign something you didn't want to correct? "That, you're right. So I hear we've got a new Sohma in the school this year, huh?"

At the mention of Kyo, Yuki bristled, wiping nonexistent dirt from his uniform pants with a scowl. "He's a jackass who everyone likes for some reason. He's staying with me right now too, which doesn't help things." The two walked back towards the main body of the school, keeping to the overhanging walls as the sky poured rain from the grey clouds.

"Living with you? Don't expect favoritism just because of that, then. I heard from my last period that he's quite the tough teacher."

Yuki frowned. Kyo was a... "Teacher? Oh! No, I was talking about the new student, Kyo? Although I suppose the Chem teacher's a new Sohma too..."

"Orangey, right?" He laughed at hearing it put so blatantly, but nodded. "He's actually supposed to be in this class right now. Guess he decided to skip. Don't blame him. I'd skip too if I were still a student."

"Your class isn't that bad. Maybe the subject material, but I'd imagine there's only so much you could do to make World History exciting."

They entered back through the back doors of the high school. Only a few students milled around, delaying going to their next class. The clock above the doors read 12:49, and Yuki waved goodbye to the unique Ms. Stevens before walk-cum-sprinting down the emptying halls to Physics. He pushed open the (only) black metal door before taking his seat in the left-middle of the class – close enough to hear perfectly well, far away enough to not be called a teacher's pet. He got enough taunts from his grades alone.

The bell rang and the classroom was still devoid a teacher.

Moments later the door sprung open again, and the pale teacher's dress blended in perfectly with the painted door. Ms. Hana scowled down at the girls of the Tohru Fan Club in the back, and Yuki would bet his grade that she only took the teaching job to scare the makeup off cheerleaders. She strode over to her behemouth of a desk and touched a finger to the electrostatic generator there long enough for her long black locks to flare out around her, then dropped into the hard wooden chair behind it.

"Today we'll be learning about electric waves and pulses. I'll also have to give you a quick lesson on a certain French war, as Uo told me a lot of you played in the gym instead." Her voice was in its usual monotone, but the residual bursts of static electricity kept long strands of her hair floating ominously around her head like a gothic Medusa. A girl in the back whimpered.

"Haru, I'm sorry, but could you find your own way home today? I seemed to have forgotten my history book in my locker, and I'd like to read up on what we should have learned in class." Ms. Hana had done her best to give a fair and accurate depiction, but as with her personality, she couldn't help but leave out key details and then went into a disturbing monologue about the kind of perils soldiers faced in the war. What was worse – she had insisted that some poor boy in the front was the reincarnated soul of one who died a particularily gruesome death.

She would've made a great drama teacher, had she not been so obsessed with her electric waves.

Haru nodded blankly and started walking without him (in the wrong direction no less), and after Yuki played the dutiful cousin and pointed the directionally challenged teen in the right direction, he turned back towards the emptying school building. His shoe sunk into the mud up over the toes, and he scowled.

Damn rain. Even when the sky's no longer crying, the ground still does its best to torture you.

He located his locker in its usual spot – drama wing, second floor – and he mentally apologized to the janitor as his mud-stained shoes left watery brown footprints on the dusty linoleum floor. On second thought, maybe the floors needed cleaning anyway. The history book was wedged in between the English book and the math book that he hadn't bothered to remove, seeing as Mr. Vilhen taught mostly through vaguely-connected lectures and powerpoint slides anyways. When he went to pull it out, though, something small and shiny fell out with it.

It was the golden coin he had found under his pillow that morning.

Come to think of it, he hadn't gotten around to asking Mr. Vilhen about its origins. He didn't even remember taking it out of his pocket. Frowning, he slipped a finger into his pants pocket, and sure enough, it was empty. Either he was losing what could be vital bits of his memory, or someone was stealing things from him. Things that were in his pocket.

His pocket that was in his pants...

Okay, so maybe he just forgot.

The book slid into his backpack easily, and he picked up the coin to slip it back into his pocket. He'd worry about his sudden onset of memory loss later – if he didn't get home on time, Shigure would be liable to order curry again. As much as he loved Tohru's food, she deserved to have a life with her friends without having to be home at any given hour to cook a special meal just for him. He could provide for his little family, dammit.

Hopefully they wouldn't mind if dinner was a little crispy around the edges.

As he was heading back towards the entrance of the school building, he passed the door to Dr. Sohma's classroom, which had been left ajar. Even though he had only met the man that day (despite being related, apparently), the no-nonsense doctor didn't seem the type to leave his classroom unlocked without him safeguarding it, much less open.

He paused just beyond the doorway when he heard harsh whispering going on within. Yuki positioned himself so his body was not easily visible through the crack, lest the room's occupants decide to look his way, and peered in through the one-inch space between door and jamb.

The room was swathed in the pale gray of the overcast skies outside the lab's windows. Being on the second floor, the rain-muted browning petals of the cherry trees brushed against the bottom half of the window, leaving trails of smeared raindrops and sticky pieces of autumn in its wake. Several of the desks were pushed back from the front of the room – fallen and jumbled forms lying dead behind the feet of one of the occupants. The teen was standing tense as an aggitated cat, fingers stressed like claws at his side. Hair caught the pale light and shone like fire.

His enemy leaned back, half sitting on the teacher's desk, looking completely relaxed in juxtaposition with the younger man. Only the annoyed crossing of his arms gave away any sort of anger the man held, for his eyes were hidden behind the glaring reflection of his glasses.

The man guestured at the empty room before him with a sweeping arc of his arm. "Do you honestly believe I'm here by choice? We're all pawns. You know that."

"I ain't no fucking pawn!" Kyo hissed. "I do whatever I fucking want. And don't you feed me those lies – he's never let you out of his sight. Why would he start now?"

Dr. Sohma sneered down at the redhead, and from Yuki's vantage point he could see that the look didn't quite reach his eyes. "Did it ever occur to you that he wouldn't just let you run away?"

From his coat pocket, Yuki's cell phone beeped once, and both of the room's occupants froze, jerking their heads towards the door. He managed to lean back just quick enough to not be seen, but by the sound of the even footsteps, one of them was coming to check out the noise. Yuki backpedeled, nearly tripping over his own feet as he darted near-soundlessly through the open door of the classroom next door and peeked through the slight opening he had left behind.

Dr. Sohma looked up and down the hallway, eyes darting by Yuki's without seeing him, and Yuki let himself relax just slightly. The doctor hadn't seen him. He didn't know why it was so imperative that he hadn't, but it was a relief regardless.

The man sure could give a good glare.

Kyo stepped out of the door behind the doctor, giving the hall a cursory sweep that seemed to last just a moment longer on Yuki's door than the rest, but he thankfully didn't point out his hiding spot. "It was probably just someone's watch that they left behind. Don't worry about it." Dr. Sohma nodded tensely, eyes still staring transfixed down the blackness of the unlit hallway. "Besides, as much as I just loved having this conversation with you, it's about time I head back anyway. About to rain and all..."

The taller man finally glanced back down at Kyo, his face expressionless, although his eyes shone with what could be humor. "Of course you would know that—"

Kyo shoved him, but had the beginings of a grin. "Oh, shuddup, Hatori."

Dr. Sohma returned back to his room, and by the sounds of metal scraping against linoleum, was returning the desks to their pre-Kyo position. Kyo sauntered off down the hallway into the blackness, and Yuki finally allowed himself to breathe, gathering up his things before heading home himself.

"I'm home!"

"Ah, Yuki. Had a good day at school?"

Yuki toed off his shoes inside the door, lining them up next to both Shigure's and Tohru's – an action the girl had insisted on, both as tradition from her home country and in keeping the floors clean. His damp backpack was dropped inside the doorway as well. He'd drag it up to his room later.

"It wasn't too awful. We have a new teacher in chemistry, though." He wandered into the kitchen, where Shigure sat with his laptop opened before him. Tohru called down a greeting from upstairs where she was cleaning – the beep from his phone earlier had been a text from her, asking if he had had any laundry that needed washing – and he yelled one up back as well. "Hey, do we have a doctor in the family?"

Shigure finally looked up from his Word document (the beginings of another smut scene for his newest novel), seeming genuinely surprised. "Doctor... Oh! Do you mean Hatori?" That was what Kyo had called him... He nodded. "'Tori and I go way back." This was not reassuring. Shigure knew inmates from 'way back'. A couple of lawyers. Once he knew a man from 'way back' that chased them half a block down the street, screaming about some debt he owed him (turns out Shigure knew one of the responding policemen from 'way back' as well).

"He's a little weird, and I never really got him, but he's family... somehow." Again, the monstrosity that was Sohma relationships struck them with confusion. "So the stoic man's teaching now? I never pegged him as the type."

Yuki couldn't help but agree. "I know. He spent most of the lesson going on about how we were all idiots, then looked frustrated when we couldn't immediantly grasp onto what he was teaching."

Tohru came down into the kitchen to put away some of the cleaning supplies. The old man made some embarrasingly lecherous comment that she blushed to, and Yuki slapped him upside the head with a half-hearted retort about what the man should be focusing on – his novel that his poor editor was expecting done by the month's end – when the phone rang. Shigure got up quickly, both to avoid another slap and to answer the phone.

Now that he was alone with her, Yuki took the time to check out the girl's outfit undetected. He wasn't sure if it was normal for girls in Japan to wear skirts or dresses while cleaning, but todays little ensemble was a petite blue skirt and light blue top that hugged her waist in all the right places. Something about seeing her in such a cute outfit made him feel extremely protective, which bothered him.

He wasn't her boyfriend, so he really had no right to feel that way.

"Is Kyo not home, too?"

The thought of the other teen – who he hadn't seen since the overheard conversation between him and the new teacher-slash-relative – made his chest tighten and heat to flare across his arms as his fists clenched. There was just something off about the boy, and even if he prided himself on his manners and control, Yuki hated a mystery he couldn't unravel.

Which was probably why he couldn't stand the guy.

He just barely managed to disguise the distain in his voice. "No, I'm afraid not. I haven't seen him since school; I wonder where he could've gone off to..." With any luck, this 'Hatori' would've done his job and brought Kyo back to wherever he had run away from.

Tohur accepted his response easily and took a pot out of the drawer with a smile. "Hopefully he comes home before dinner. What sounds good, Sohma-kun?" After discussing dinner options with the girl for a few minutes ("Anything you'd like, Miss Honda." "Um, but it's your choice, please!"), he left the kitchen to let the girl work in peace. He retrieved his backpack from the hallway and passed Shigure on his way towards the stairs, still chatting amiably with whoever had called.

It was only in his room that he finally let all the tension flow from his body, flopping bonelessly onto his bed with a great, shuddering exhale. Sometimes it felt like he was almost an entirely different person at school; he had never been the kind of person to freely say what he was thinking or even speak up in class, except for answering questions when called on. With a calmer frame of mind, he could sort his earlier jealousy of Kyo into the category of things I wish I could do, and attempt to rationalize it to himself.

And that was the beauty of home.

Here he never felt the urge to act any certain way other than how he truly felt. Well, he did find himself censoring his words more around Tohru, but that was to be expected – she was a rather innocent-minded and pure girl. He wasn't about to let anything his dirty uncle say taint her, let alone something he himself could say if caught off guard. Still, being home was like stepping into a barricaded fortress, a private garden where those who truly mattered would accept him for who he was.

A private garden that the weed called Kyo had planted its poisonous roots into...

Yuki rolled over onto his front, intending to suffocate himself in his pillows to relieve the stress, when something hard bit into the skin of his upper thigh. "Ah! What the...?" With some manuevering and flopping about, he managed to wiggle a few fingers into his pants pocket, fishing out the coin he had found that morning. It looked visibly duller in shine than it had earlier. Maybe the inside of his pocket was dirty?

"Mrowww."

He glanced up, neck cricking at the sharp angle, from the coin held awkwardly before his face, to his window. The weird orange cat from earlier was pawing at the glass, luminescent crimson eyes staring unblinkingly into Yuki's own purplish-gray ones. It didn't look pleased to be out in the rain, if the flattened ears and sharply flicking tail – no, tails? – were anything to go by.

"Sorry, cat," he told it, immediantly reddening when he realized he was talking to an animal, of all things. That didn't stop him from continuing, though. "You're wet and I don't want to hear the bitching Shigure would give me for letting you get your sticky wet fur stuck to his 'clean carpets.'"

As though in comprehension, the cat blinked once, turned around fluidly, and leapt off the roof and out of view from Yuki's partially face-down position on the bed. Yuki resolved to put strange, scarily-smart animals out of his mind, and get started on the homework that wouldn't be due until the end of the week.

"Shigure...? What's that cat doing on the chair?"

The man in question looked away from the news and glanced over to the chair as though he hadn't expected to see it curled rather comfortably in its fluffy depths. "Yuki! Did you honestly expect me to leave poor little Fluffernutter out in the rain all night? What's wrong with you..."

"Fluffernutter? You named some random street-cat after a sandwich?" No. He refused to let Shigure do this again. The man could get out of anything by distraction... "I thought you had a very firm 'no pets' rule. What happened to that?"

He couldn't help but notice that the cat didn't look fazed in the slightest by its apparent new owners' argument going over its head. In fact, it looked to be watching the news, intent on the newscastor's words. "Once again, the network would like to extend it's apologies for the blatant disregard for clothing seen tonight..."

Newspeople... At least he now knew why Shigure had been watching the news in the first place.

Yuki shook his head, tuning back in to Shigure, who was waving his arms wildly in the air. "And then," he continued with a flail of the arms that made him look like a gradeschooler, "it meowed the cutest little meow and looked up at me with those big ol' eyes... How could I possibly deny it, Yuki, tell me?!"

There was no debating with him. Yuki didn't know why he had even tried.

"Sohma-san, do you think you could—" Tohru froze at the entryway, staring at the cat with wide eyes. For its part, the cat looked up lazily at her entrance, tails flicking absently against its curled up legs. "Ano... nevermind. I can do it!"

She darted back out, and Shigure gave Yuki a look that read, 'no idea what that was about.' The cat went back to its casual observance of the news figures, and Shigure grinned suddenly, rounding on him with an almost feral gleam in his eyes. "Aya was sad that you and Kyo never came to visit him after school. I think he's planning revenge, just so you know."

Yuki cringed. In normal conversation, revenge could mean a tack on your chair. Maybe something wet and squishy in your shoe. With Ayame, it was pink and flowery cosplay dresses – and lots of them.

"Speaking of which, where is Kyo?"

"I don't have a clue," he replied honestly, wandering over to sit on the arm of the chair that the cat was occupying. It glared up at him as its cushion tilted. "He seems to just come and go as he pleases. Hopefully he found someone else's bed to hijack." Yuki reached out to pet the cat's soft-looking head, and snapped his hand back when the cat tried to bite him.

Shigure laughed. "It doesn't look like Grimmalkin likes you. Maybe you shouldn't speak so ill of others."

"Grimmalkin? I thought it was Fluffernutter?" Yuki scrunched up his nose in distaste. "What kind of name is Grimmalkin, anyway?"

"I was just joking around earlier, Yuki, lighten up. And I don't know. It was the name of Nostradamus' cat though, although I think it's supposed to be gray..."

The cat just kept scowling.

AN: done!

Okay. Seriously, everyone needs to give a round-of-applause to Terra for kicking my ass with this one. Without her, the grammar would be horrible (you should've seen all the inheritly evil red she uses to point out my errors), and it probably would've taken three times as long to type up. She's a savior in the category of motivation.

Also: she didn't edit this section, which is probably why it looks like it was typed up by a middle-schooler. Yay for Kyokichii's awful grammar skillzz!