Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction ❯ Our Kitten ❯ Getting Ahead ( Chapter 7 )

Out Kitten
Chapter Seven: Getting Ahead


Meli. Melian. Melianthus.

Aya was laying in his bed, arms tucked behind his head and Meli curled contentedly on his bare chest. He tried to look in her direction, but it caused his eyes to cross uncomfortably, so he directed his gaze towards the ceiling, still able to feel the subtle rhythm of her tiny breaths.

Honey flower. Melianthus.

Choosing that had been impulsive. He had been thrown off by Kudou’s stupidity and, no, not hurt . . . annoyed by the man’s insinuations. Followed by that awkward discussion, Yohji’s stumbling over describing their joint ownership of the kitten, and Aya’s own inability to restrain his mind. It had jumped the moment the other man had said ‘something between us,’ grabbing an image long-floating in Aya’s mind.

Deep red hanging blooms, dark-looking in their bruise-colored bulbs before they burst into indignant scarlet.

A honey flower. It grew uncultivated, bringing forth a profusion of blooms unplanned for among depths of forest greenery. But when brought into domestication, raised in the greenhouse, it was difficult and fragile, sensitive to cold and needy of sun. The bloom was frail at first, a slender shoot that, if handled with particular care, might blossom forth into full, startling color that disguised, deep and unseen in its core, a sweet drop of wild honey.

Thankfully he had given only part of the name; that, perhaps, would save him the embarrassment of Kudou’s gloating had he the full term to find in the flower dictionary. Aya had, regrettably now, created the index for use in the shop, and he knew all too well what was printed as the meaning of the honey flower.

~*~

Yohji needed a new plan. He knew one was buried somewhere in his brain. It could be smart when it wanted. Really, it could. So he tried to bribe it, offering food and water and even a fun trip outside to look at the pretty colors. When that failed, he threatened it with beer and thought about poking it with the proverbial q-tip. It didn’t flinch, sitting stolidly in the middle of his head and refusing to give up even a single productive step.

There was potential in being helpful, but it only worked on rare occasions when Aya would allow it.

The laundry plan had been one of these instances, earning him a genuine, if forced, thank you. Of course, when he went to retrieve Aya’s laundry from the dryer, he found it already gone.

That had been nearly a week ago. Since then, Yohji had managed to successfully help Aya sweep the shop and do the dinner dishes. He had also been yelled at for touching Aya’s book, hit for going near Aya’s Porsche, and glared at for offering to put up Aya’s pruning shears, rice cooker, and dress shoes, in that order.

And he wasn’t even going to think about the whole coat incident.

Even care of Meli had been strictly handled by Aya. Under normal circumstances, Yohji was not one to lust after responsibilities, but in the rare instance where those responsibilities lead to other things, or bodies, he was in process of lusting after, he proved more than willing to take on even terrible tasks of personal obligation. Not that Meli was anywhere near terrible. Though he hated to admit it, Yohji had grown attached to the furball; however, he recalled as he looked down at the thin, parallel lines of red on the back of his left hand, the feeling was far from mutual.

If only the little lady liked him, things would have gone more smoothly. As it was, she worked to increase Aya’s unease with her wide variety of hisses, spits, and swipes which she aimed at Yohji every time he attempted to take her off the redhead’s hands. Even this, though, he thought was a victory. It was only after a pouting comment by Omi that he realized that he had been granted a special privilege. While the other two rarely saw the kitten, Yohji was frequently treated to her displeasure.

Aya avoided bringing their little Fetish downstairs when Omi and Ken were around, but he frequently toted her about when the younger two were sharing a shift in the shop. And, much to Yohji’s surprise, he had been granted some kind of tentative permission to access Aya’s room, the key being some concern involving Meli.

While delighted with this, Yohji wanted more than the ability to run up and check on the kitten when Aya was otherwise occupied. He wanted to share the space, maybe some conversation, and, should a sudden urge overtake Aya and cause the redhead to take advantage of Yohji’s proximity, the bed.

~*~

Though momentarily distracted by the complexity of extricating one of his favorite boots from the tangled mess beneath his own bed, Yohji’s thoughts took a sudden one way trip back to redheads, beds, and happy violations of the most personal of spaces. This was courtesy of the man in question who, without so much as a knock, stalked into Yohji’s room and, grabbing the blonde’s wrist, proceeded to drag him out and down the hall.

At that point, the vast majority of his brain stopped working all together, but the tiny section relegated to bodily survival–breathing, pumping blood, and keeping Aya from killing him–demanded he pay attention to the actual circumstances and cease and desist in his sudden, irrational deduction that desire had completely overcome Aya’s resistance and that he was being physically relocated to Aya’s bedroom so that they could rip each other’s clothes off and have wild monkey sex, twice.

As they passed through the doorway, the desperate shouts of this part of his mind got through just enough to keep Yohji from flinging Aya against the wall and kissing him. Barely.

Aya was speaking.

“What?”

“Look,” Aya demanded.

“At what?” Your soon-to-be-naked body stretched out over that convenient bed while you beg to be fucked?

No. Of course not.

Aya was pointing, and not at any of the fun parts of his body; Yohji started breathing again. When the swordsman released his wrist, blood began to return to his more northern regions, and he realized he was supposed to look at the kitten. Meli was currently staggering towards Aya, wobbling her way across the white carpet with her tail stuck straight up in the air.

Yohji raised an eyebrow in question.

Picking up the kitten, Aya sat her back into the cardboard box. She mewed in objection, then began scratching at the side of the box. Less than a minute later, her round belly cleared the rim of the box and she toppled over the side. Rolling around for a second, Meli righted herself and began yet another torturous journey towards Aya’s feet.

“She got out,” Aya pronounced, a touch of something in his voice. Yohji thought it might be concern or honest excitement.

“Huh,” he managed to reply. Compared to a sudden conversion to libertinism, Meli’s fumbling escape from a box did not seem world-shattering.

Aya glared at his lackluster response. Reaching down, he snagged Meli from the floor and holding her close to his chest, silently dismissed Yohji by turning his back to the blonde and concerning himself with stroking down the kitten’s fur.

Having stepped on a rare moment of eagerness and what the blonde belatedly recognized as a desire to share it with him, Yohji felt like a proper ass.

“Aya,” he began, expecting to be cut off mid-sentence by the common ‘get out’ which this time he might just obey. When Aya didn’t speak, Yohji was slightly at a loss of how to complete his though. “Uh, that’s…wow, she got out, huh?”

Getting nothing in return, Yohji cast off his dignity and apologized, “Sorry. I was kind of distracted. It’s cool, though.”

“It was stupid,” Aya spoke in a small voice Yohji hardly placed as his. He stood still, facing the opposite wall, shoulders pulled up in haughty anger that the voice couldn’t match.

Yohji wanted to hug him, but he knew such a rash action would make the situation worse, perhaps through the intentional amputation of one of his own limbs. He could leave, though it meant dismissing all the progress he had made; and even though he had been mentally bitching about the insufficient nature of their current relationship-that-wasn’t, Yohji’s stomach tightened unpleasantly at the possibility of letting it slip back into distant friendship. He couldn’t meet Aya’s silence, a few words spoken over obligatory tasks could never live up to the few traded conversations they had shared over the kitten.

It wasn’t much, but it was his. Aya had tried to let him in, just a little, and though Yohji had managed to screw it royally, he wasn’t letting Aya take it back. In fact, he was going to demand more.

Plopping down on Aya’s bed, Yohji made himself comfortable. He scooted back against the headboard, reclining against it as he crossed his ankles and let his head droop to the right so that he could see Aya’s profile and his slow, soothing touches to Meli’s head.

“Mom let me have a dog when I was eight,” he offered.

Aya might have glared or gathered his eyebrows at the sudden shift of mood and subject, but he simply paused in his petting, tilting his head in that barely perceptible way that Yohji had recently realized meant he was actually listening.

“It was the ugliest thing you ever saw, big and kind of dirt-colored. His tongue stuck out all the time, made him look a little slow. We picked him up at the pound, and the day we brought him home he ate my sister’s lipstick and took a dump in the middle of the hall.”

There were no questions about his family, just quiet attention, so Yohji went on. His gaze shifted slowly to the cream comforter as he recalled his best friend for one childhood summer.

“Cass always hated him, but Zoe–she’s four years older than me, Cassidy’s seven–Zoe thought he was kind of cute, in a mutt kind of way.”

Yohji missed the slight tug at Aya’s lips, but he shifted over to give the man room when he settled on the edge of the bed. He looked at Yohji just long enough to place Meli gently beside the blonde’s thigh before turning back to the far wall as he rested his hands next to him on the bed. Meli gave a little mew of protest, staggering away from Yohji towards Aya’s back. Yohji let her go with a single tap of her head, watching amusedly as she scratched twice at Aya’s jeans before curling up against his bottom. The redhead tried to look back at her, ‘hn’ed quietly, and returned to his staring at the wall as Yohji proceeded.

“I loved the damned thing, even after he tore up every single pair of socks I owned. I spent the whole summer wearing chewed tennis shoes with no socks. That fall Mom decided to move again. We hadn’t been in the country or anything, but Kibou had been able to stay in the back yard. The minute Mom said Tokyo, I knew he was gone.

“I told her it was okay, that I was tired of him . . . I’m not sure she believed me. We took him back to the pound. I knew no one else was going to give that ugly fucker a chance, but I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Cass took the leash outta my and gave it to the woman. Kibou . . . just stood there, dumb as a rock, tongue hanging out the side of his mouth, just looking at me.

“Shit.” Yohji pushed his shades onto his head and pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes, annoyed at the tears that almost escaped. This wasn’t supposed to be a moment of personal catharsis. Aya was supposed to open up, maybe cry on his shoulder, not the other fucking way around. He felt beyond lame, not to mention embarrassed as he had to take another swipe at his eyes.

Shifting forward, he was about to make an escape when Aya’s hand landed across his thigh. It wasn’t an advance; there was nothing sexual in the firm touch. It was a move of comfort Yohji hadn’t thought Aya capable of, and surprised followed on surprise when he looked up from those long fingers to find violet eyes regarding him with a calm approaching kindness.

“Aya . . .” He stopped coughed to clear away the teary hitch in his throat that remained despite his mind’s quick flight away from the painful memories. Yohji didn’t like to linger with his pain; he had no angsty desire to poke or prod at the bundle of sensitivities that was his past. He would much rather kiss Aya.

So he did.

Leaning forward, he rested his left hand on the other’s shoulder and laid his lips softly over Aya’s. He stilled there, with the warm, dry lips beneath his own. For a second, neither man moved. Then Yohji felt Aya’s quick intake of breath against his lips, and the blonde drew away.

“Sorry.”

Aya’s hand was jerked from his thigh.

“Oh.”

~tbc~



Author& #8217;s Notes: Well, that was not what I set out to write this chapter (and the kiss was not supposed to happen for quite a while–impatient boys!) but when I went to write an Aya-talks-about-his-past moment, Yohji offered something a little more original. Still, I kinda want to get the Aya-story I have in there, so perhaps next chapter. If you like it so far, please pet the kitten using the review button below.

^-.-^

Or you could pet one of the boys instead…