Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction ❯ Our Kitten ❯ Looking Around ( Chapter 4 )

Notes: Sorry it took me so long to update this; I had to pause and reconsider where the plot was going. Anyhow, thanks for your patience, and I hope you enjoy it!



Our Kitten

Chapter Four: Looking Around


The orange-pink sun slanting through the blinds and into his eyes told him it was too early, and Yohji blinked against it as he hesitantly sat up. Before he could even make a tentative sweep of his hand to find his shades, it occurred to him that he was not in his own room. Not an amateur at waking up in strange places, he cracked his eyes open despite the light and tried to figure what warm, hopefully attractive, body had detained him from his own bed.

While his impulse interpreted it as ‘warm body,’ his mind labeled it as ‘Aya.’ The man was curled up on his side, hands tucked protectively close to his body. He had obviously come in exhausted. Ever meticulous in his cleanliness, Aya looked as if he had simply dropped his coat and fallen into the bed. He still had his boots and gloves on, not to mention the fitted black outfit. Worse, there was still blood.

It was streaked across his pale face in long, uneven marks that were beginning to flake off, like it had been halfheartedly wiped when still wet. His boots had left smudged streaks of brownish-red on the sheets, and his hair…it was in thick his hair, binding strands together in thick clumps, staining the pillow case and making him look like he’d been shot in the head, a murder victim from the six o’clock news. Or a suicide.

Yohji’s stomach lurched unexpectedly at the sight.

He swallowed hard and took a breath, suppressing bile and the wave of guilt that his body’s reaction brought. It wasn’t as if Aya was the only one of them to have passed out with a bit of work left clinging.

And it seemed Aya’s second guest had none of the reservations Yohji did. Curled snuggly under Aya’s chin was the kitten, its tiny chest rising and falling peacefully.

Maybe I shouldn’t?

Maybe he . . .

Yohji looked at the bloody assassin. He saw the exhaustion and the stains, but Aya’s face, relaxed in sleep, with those soft lips open just enough to draw in breath and dark red eyelashes resting on his cheeks made him just so damn…what? What was it?

The kitten moved.

Yohji’s philosophical side shut up and gave way to the portion of his brain that wanted to save his life. If Aya woke up to find an infamous playboy lounging in his bed, staring at him in what was a rare lapse of personal cleanliness, said playboy was going to die, or at least lose a few important limbs. Yohji was under no delusion that the fact he had been there first would help him. Kitten in the bed, good; Yohji in the bed, bad.

Bad Yohji.

Trying not to get sidetracked in his early morning mind-wandering, Yohji eased himself out of the bed. It was executed in a way that not even Aya cold find fault with; the blonde was an expert, after all.

~*~

Yohji stared at him; this was nothing new. What was new was the fact that he had a valid reason for doing so that extended beyond his own desire to grab him and strip him naked.

It was a rare occasion, but Yohji had decided to show up, on time, for his morning shift; as he assured Omi, this happened only because he was unable to sleep and was unlikely to be repeated in the next millennium so the world was not, as the younger boy suggested, coming to a dramatic end. Ken, albeit with much less fanfare, had come in, too, ready to cover in the likely event that neither of the older, scheduled members of Weiss happened to show.

With Omi off to school, Ken and Yohji had begun to open shop. Well, Ken began to open shop and Yohji watched him from behind the register, propped on his tall stool with his heels tucked against its lower rung and knees braced against the counter, quite comfortable. He planned to get up in ten minutes, just in time to turn the closed sign to open and welcome in his first fans of the morning. Before this could happen, though, Aya appeared.

Without a word of acknowledgement to either of them, he took his green apron off the hook and adjusted it over his black sweatshirt, carefully arranging the hood of the latter to lay flat over the strings. He tied it efficiently behind his back and surveyed the shop, obviously completing a mental checklist of what had and had, or more likely, had not been done.

Yohji stared, because this was the Aya he encountered on a daily basis. Shock and surprise, he was sure, were not due to this unremarkable event, but the man before him existed in stark contrast to the one he had woken up with, and the two images refused to merge in any cohesive manner. He knew, thanks to Aya’s handy-dandy time chart, that he had not drifted off for the second time until sometime after three thirty. His unexpectedly illuminated wakeup call had arrived a little after six. It was now seven fifty, uh, fifty-three. At best, the swordsman had gotten four hours of sleep, and Yohji would bet on significantly less.

The blonde wouldn’t have gotten out of his post-mission bed in less than eight, ten if no one threatened to knock down his door or tear off one of his limbs and beat him with it. And Aya had been exhausted, literally, enough to remove any concern about dropping into bed with another man. While Yohji would have loved, and had, in a few delusional moments that morning, to interpret this proximity as a sign of Aya’s trust (and blossoming attraction, inserted the fangirl-influenced, hopelessly romantic portion of his brain), reality was that the swordsman had to be on the verge of collapsing.

Now, there was nothing, no trace.

Maybe he should take this as a good sign, an indication of his teammate’s rapid recovery, but to Yohji, it spoke of his own inability to read the redhead. If hadn’t been witness to the night before, he doubted he would have notice anything out of the ordinary. It hinted at other mornings and other things he had failed to see.

It was only then that he realized it: seeing Aya in his bed, bloody, strange, exhausted innocence written all over his face–that had been the first time Yohji had really seen him.

He wondered what Aya would look like when he got lost in sexual pleasure, when he gave up, screamed Yohji’s name, and came. Somehow, he thought it would be the same, that vulnerable visibility that Yohji craved.

The blind was up now, all ice and haughty anger. The thing was, Yohji knew the trick. He had seen the magician holding the strings, and the magic was gone.

Caught up in his own reflection, he missed Aya’s gruff command to hand him the order sheets. Not likely to repeat himself, the redhead stalked over and, reaching in front of Yohji, precariously between the blonde’s spread knees, he grabbed the messy stack of papers. Not bothering to step out of Yohji’s personal space, he stood and began to sort through the hastily scribbled sheets.

Yohji, recovering relatively quickly from a circular thought pattern that ran along the lines of Aya, his closeness, and that fantastically mundane reach around the blonde’s person, turned to observe the redhead, trying to pick out the signs he knew should be there, that he had just convinced himself he could observe. But besides the light, gray-blue circles under his eyes, there wasn’t much to see.

~*~

His butt was falling asleep. Yohji noted the fact distractedly, told his ass to stop complaining, and readjusted himself on the stool. It was almost three, the official end to his and Aya’s shift. Though there was an unspoken rule that the first shift workers, barring any pressing personal circumstances, were to stay and assist with the post-school herd of girls, he thought he could possibly slip out with Aya on the grounds of kitten-keeping.

The redhead was currently pushing through his last arrangement, a big thing of pink roses and … those purple ones, Yohji didn’t remember the name exactly, something with ‘a’ maybe. When Ken walked in the door, Yohji took the opportunity to abandon his post to the brunette man, approaching Aya, leaning casually against the work bench to the man’s right and waiting to catch his attention. A stray sprig of baby’s breath trumped his presence, and Yohji was forced to clear his throat to officially achieve Aya’s notice.

“Shift’s over. Let’s head out.”

Aya stared at him silently, brows drawn together in contemplation. Yohji realized that his own habit of darting away at shift’s end with no apparent thought to where Aya took himself off to was not lost on the swordsman.

“C’mon, Ken and Omi got the rush.”

The silent why continued between them as Aya turned his arrangement, just a little, to view it from the other side. Yohji refused to be ignored in favor of flowers, especially generic flowers like pink roses. Snagging the vase, he took it to the cooler.

“There,” he returned to stand at Aya’s side. “All done. Let’s go.”

“Don’t you have plans today?” By plans, Aya obviously meant less places to go and more people to see, or, considering the particularly dark tint to his eyes, people to fuck.

Yohji took advantage of the silent portion of the inquiry to lean close, just a little closer than friendship allowed, and reply with a casual voice that ignored all the non-verbal cues, “Only with you, Aya.”

There was a beat of silence, an invitation that wasn’t one. Then Yohji let it go, stretching and resuming friendship as normal. When he walked over to the shelf by the door, he wasn’t too surprised to find Aya beside him, quietly removing his apron and hanging t up. Part of him, however, jumped for joy when Aya nodded in acknowledgment of the fact that he was going with Yohji, not just at the same time.

Shoving down the urge to turn to Ken and strike a dramatically sexy ‘Vic-to-ry!’ pose, the blonde settled for a pleasant smile and passed through the door of the shop with the younger man in tow.

He had been working up a conversation that would require response and had it almost perfected by the time they entered the living room. His efforts, however, were completely shot to hell the moment he turned around. But it was worth it.

Aya had paused to tug his black hoodie over his head in response to the heat of the room. It was an unknowingly graceful move, a crossing of his arms as he grasped the hem and slight upward stretching as he peeled off the fabric. Of course, he tugged it roughly at the end, ruining much of the effect and sending his previously calm hair into a wild fluff. Letting the sweatshirt slide down his arms and into his left hand, he reached his right to smooth the red strands ineffectually and without real effort.

Yohji stared, this time because he definitely wanted to throw Aya down for some hard and fast team building exercises. As the man reached to his hair–an incredibly cute gesture that the blonde couldn’t remember seeing before–he inadvertently exposed a strip of flesh above his jeans. These were surprisingly fitted when not hidden under the oversized black shirt, but the inch of pale flesh was not due to the jean’s particularly low cut, but rather that Aya’s shirt was tight and reached just to navel. It was a light gray t-shirt, close fitting, with an English word splashed in metallic silver cursive across the chest: ‘Rough.’

He looked young and unbelievably trim. Aya had a body that was powerful because he demanded it be; Yohji had no delusions about that. He had seen Aya kill more than one man with his bare hands. But, that body was also thin and beautiful and fucking delicate looking. The man hid it most of the time, his loose, horridly colored clothes yelling that he was big and plain and not worth the effort in order to cover up the insistent whispers his form emitted, that he was lithe and graceful and fucking dangerous but worth every bleeding wound.

“What?” Aya finally asked, not too nicely. Yohji realized he had not only been staring, but completely off in his own world. He ran a hand over his mouth and was relieved that there was no actual drool present there.

“I was trying to read your shirt.” He had used to excuse with girls more than once, and Yohji could only hope first that Aya bought it and second that it has been his chest he had been staring. He seemed to lose on both counts, but Aya easily dismissed it in favor of making excuses.

“I was supposed to do laundry last night,” he explained, one hand tugging down the shirt.

“Eh? I like it.” Violet eyes narrowed as Aya evaluated Yohji’s tone to detect teasing; he didn’t seem to find any, since it was cold disbelief rather than defensive anger that met the comment. “Seriously, you should wear shit like that.”

“Why?” It must have slipped out before he could stop it because Aya was looking distinctly embarrassed at his own question, shifting his weight under Yohji’s gaze in an unusual movement of anxiety.

“Because it looks nice,” he answered seriously, not trusting the other to interpret a playful reply.

“Hn,” he looked away, just s second, which was long enough to let Yohji ponder another victory pose. Then Aya went to walk by him; Yohji risked life and limb by grabbing his bicep gently.

“Where’re you going?”

“Upstairs. I need to feed the kitten.”

“I’ll get her. I gotta go get my –” he fished his mind for anything that might be laying in his room “–phone anyway. Why don’t you chill out for a while? You were out pretty late.”

The expression on Aya’s face couldn’t have been more confused if Yohji had just pronounced he was boning the pope.

“What?”

“Not that complicated, Ayan,” he released the man’s arm. “Rest. I got the kitten.”

“I should start the laundry…”

“Later.”

A slow nod dismissed him, but he felt Aya’s curious stare following him up the stairs. Yohji smiled; he knew the jeans he was wearing made his ass look absolutely fantastic.

~tbc~

Notes: Ah, no kitten name yet–next time, promise! Oh, and Yohji wants you to review, even if it’s just to tell him how good he looks in those jeans.