Yami No Matsuei Fan Fiction / Yu Yu Hakusho Fan Fiction ❯ Uprising ❯ Hazy Night ( Chapter 9 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

(Disclaimer:  I do not own Yami no Matsuei/Descendants of Darkness, nor do I own Yu Yu Hakusho.  Never would I want to own them.  Ever.  I wouldn’t be able to handle the fame very well.  I, however, do own Andrea.)

(AN:  I know I wrote “Obsession” and “Self-Indulgence” first, but I couldn’t help but add a little bit in-between the chapters “Michiko” and “Obsession.”  I wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t for two of my good friends, EggDropSoup and Koritsune Dragonrider, for asking me about that night.  This is for them as well as for you.  Enjoy!)

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After they had gotten home from Kabukicho, Andrea went into the kitchen to plug her cell phone into the charger.  She was free from the bombarding questions of that night, mostly involving Tsuzuki in some way.  What could she really see in that idiot?  Shaking her head and as diligent as always, she checked her phone for any messages to see if she would have to go into work; she was on call for the next day.
And, just as usual, Tsuzuki saw that Andrea didn’t talk much while she did it.  He wasn’t sure why she wouldn’t at least hum or whistle or something.  The silence in the apartment was enough to where Tsuzuki could hear a pin drop... if there was a pin to drop to start with.
Andrea pressed a few buttons before she blinked.  It was just what she suspected.
“Work in the morning?” Tsuzuki asked Andrea as she stood in the kitchen.
“No,” Andrea answered without even looking up from her phone.  “I’m off tomorrow.”
He couldn’t help but hear a sad tone in her voice. Did it sound weird that a teenage girl really could like working that much?  Maybe.  Most teenage girls her age would have been out on the town, partying, anything except working at the rate she was.
It wasn’t a bad thing for a girl to work, sure.  It was just the amount of work Andrea did; working at a restaurant, fighting demons as a Spirit Detective... and then there was the cleaning, cooking, and Andrea checking her phone on a daily basis.  All of that in one day, and Andrea didn’t seem fazed by it.  If Tsuzuki had worked that much in one day, he’d complain after one thing.
Before he could ask her if she was all right, Andrea was already one foot into her bedroom.
“I’m headed to bed,” she said, forcing her voice to sound somewhat normal from the day’s events.
That was the sign that he wouldn’t get anything out of her.
“All right,” he said, resigning himself to not ask Andrea anything for the night.  Kabukicho might have not been such a good idea to let Andrea go to after all.  “Good night.”
“Good night,” Andrea said before walking into her bedroom, her shadow slowly disappearing into the room.
Tsuzuki watched the light go out in Andrea’s bedroom before he changed into a pair of pajamas.  He did not want a repeat of earlier today where he had, albeit accidentally, showed up at Andrea’s bedroom door completely shirtless.  The last thing he needed now was something much heavier than a pillow thrown at him for that again.  After that, he lay down on the couch and looked at the ceiling.  It was one thing that Andrea wasn’t even old enough to walk down the streets of Kabukicho; it was another altogether to wonder why Andrea wouldn’t talk to him about anything.  Was Andrea stubborn?  Was she holding something back?  Maybe.  But then again, it was common knowledge that Tsuzuki was a stubborn man.  He’d find some way to get something out of her.
But for right now, he needed sleep.  It wasn’t a good idea to try to weasel anything out of Andrea if he was half awake himself.  That and waking Andrea up would only serve for her to connect something heavier than the tongs from the hibachi grill tonight at his skull.  Closing his amethyst purple eyes, he pulled the blankets to his shoulders, turned to the side so that his back was against the back of the couch, and fell asleep.
Tomorrow would be another day.
Problem was... he wasn’t alone tonight.

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A few hours had passed, and Tsuzuki was still asleep on the couch.  What he didn’t know was that someone had walked into the kitchen before walking to the living room at the sleeping Guardian on the couch.  He looked so peaceful, so serene lying on the couch under a blanket.  The figure watched as Tsuzuki continued to sleep with a tilt of the head.  A slender finger gently moved Tsuzuki’s hair from his closed eyelids as a face moved closer to his, almost painstakingly slow yet distractedly.
“Why are you so cute, yet so damn stupid?” the figure whispered as the face moved closer, closer still, to his, only a foot apart.
Almost as if he had woken up from a nightmare, his eyes snapped open before he grabbed the figure by the wrist and pulled what seemed to be the voice in the nightmare to the floor.  It wasn’t that Tsuzuki wasn’t a heavy sleeper; in fact he was.  It was just something he couldn’t explain at the moment.  What if this person was going to hurt Andrea?  How could he forgive himself if anything terrible happened to her under his watch?  Was it a burglar?  A murderer?  A Yakuza?
So many things ran through Tsuzuki’s head, and at the moment, the only thing that seemed to matter was keeping this person from getting to Andrea.  Was he overthinking it?  Could he really be overreacting?  Perhaps, but at the moment, it didn’t matter what he was thinking or overthinking.  All he knew was one thing:  this person was not going to get to Andrea without getting through him first.
Tsuzuki pulled the figure’s arms up over the head with one hand as he reached with his other hand for the lamp switch while climbing over and pinning down the figure to keep the person from escaping.  “All right, who are you?” he asked before turning on the lamp.
What he saw under him only made his heart beat even faster in his chest.
There, the figure lying on the floor under the wide-eyed Guardian of Death wearing a short-sleeved nightshirt (from what Tsuzuki could see) with auburn hair fanned out under a head with stunned yet hazy looking sapphire blue eyes... was Andrea.
What was wrong with her?  Why were her eyes looking like that?  And worst of all... why wasn’t she moving?
“Andrea?” Tsuzuki asked, his voice showing shock, fear, and worry all at the same time.  Worry because he didn’t know if Andrea was okay, fear that he might have accidentally hurt her, and shock from the fact that it was his own roommate under him and definitely NOT a burglar.
And right now, not hearing an answer out of her only made his worry skyrocket.  What if he really had hurt her?  What if he... Tsuzuki shook his head.  No, he couldn’t think of that option.  He could NOT think of such a thing right now!
Tsuzuki gently moved his hand off of her wrists and gently shook her in an effort to get Andrea to say something.  Anything!
“Andrea?” he asked her again while he shook her shoulder.
He heard Andrea make a noise and relief washed all over him like a tsunami wave.  He hadn’t hurt her at all; he merely knocked the wind out of her.  But still... he couldn’t believe he did that to her.
“Thank goodness you’re alright,” Tsuzuki said, his voice sounding much more relieved than it was before.  “I thought something happened to you...”
Andrea blinked from her place on the floor before moving her head slowly to look at where she was at.  Something to her didn’t sit right; she wasn’t in her bed.  In fact, she wasn’t even in her bedroom.  She blinked at seeing something dark over her and then looked at a very familiar set of purple eyes.
While he watched Andrea look about her wordlessly, worry slowly started to creep back into Tsuzuki’s mind.  What if he had accidentally hurt her?  Andrea already had a rough night; he shouldn’t have made it worse.  At least her eyes weren’t hazy anymore; that was a good sign.
“Are you all right?” Tsuzuki asked in an effort to calm Andrea down.
Finally, Andrea’s eyes looked down her torso and realized, after seeing her legs clamped together by a leg on either side of her hips, one very awkward fact...
Tsuzuki was on top of her.
And that was all it took to make her scream.
“Get off of me!” she shouted, her leg trying to shoot up from its hold and nearly reached its target of between his legs.
Thankfully, not just for Tsuzuki, but also for his almost injured manhood, he had scrambled off from her and looked at Andrea as she sat up on the floor.  Her leg had missed him by almost half a foot.  Tsuzuki was glad that both of them were unscathed.  That and he was glad that Andrea, despite looking like she had, still had her reflexes.
“What are you doing here?” Andrea asked with her back against the coffee table.
“What I’m doing here?” Tsuzuki asked back, his back against the couch.  “You’re the one who came in the living room, leaning over the couch at me.”
Andrea simply blinked at him, her jaw slacked open.  “What?” she asked.
“I thought you were a burglar or something,” he explained.  “Then after I turned on the lamp...”
“Do I really look like a burglar to you?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.
And as Tsuzuki now noticed that Andrea’s nightshirt also had white leggings under it, he didn’t think so anymore.  No burglar would wear white in the dark; they would stand out much too easily.  “No, but...”
“But what?” Andrea asked.
It was the one question that had been on Tsuzuki’s mind since he saw the hazy look in Andrea’s eyes a while ago.
“Do you know how you got here?” he asked her.
Andrea blinked as she looked to her still-pitch black bedroom, and the fear and anger that she had felt melted from her face and was replaced with a look of total confusion.
“Where was the last place you remember being?” he continued.
Andrea looked down on the floor and found herself completely unable to answer Tsuzuki in any way whatsoever.  She really couldn’t think of an answer to it, and as much as it pissed her off inside, for once, Tsuzuki had a point.
“In my bed,” Andrea answered finally.  “But how did I get here?”
Tsuzuki had always been one to sugarcoat something if it sounded bad.  And right at that moment, he decided to do that.  “Well, maybe you went to check the door to make sure it’s locked,” he wondered.
Andrea’s confused face only deepened.  “But I always lock it,” she answered.  “Before bed, every night.”
“Maybe...” Tsuzuki rubbed his chin to think of something else that might sound more plausible than the truth.  “Maybe... you were just making sure.”
“But I am sure I locked it before I went to bed,” Andrea pressed.  “I might be a teenager, but I’m not that damn stupid.”
And sugarcoating definitely did not work.  So Tsuzuki had only one option to do now:  tell Andrea the truth, and hope that she wouldn’t freak out.
Tsuzuki took a deep breath before he looked at the confused Andrea at the coffee table.   “You were sleepwalking,” he finally said.
Andrea blinked and looked at him, shaking her head.  No, this couldn’t be her.  “No way,” she refused.  “That wasn’t me.”
“Then how do you explain leaving your bedroom light off and coming in here?”
Tsuzuki watched as Andrea stood to her feet and covered her head in her hands.  Now he had gone and done it; now he upset her and made things even more awkward than they ever could have been.  Andrea had gone through enough already; she didn’t need to be told something was wrong with her.
“I’m sorry,” he continued, trying to keep Andrea centered.  “But think about it.  There’s not a lot of ways, short of teleporting yourself, to get from a dark bedroom to a living room and have no memory of it.”
He watched Andrea make her way to the loveseat, her hands over her face still.  She still didn’t answer him, and Tsuzuki wondered if telling her the truth was such a great idea after all.  He mentally kicked himself for even suggesting something like that to her face, but he couldn’t take the words back, even if he wanted to.  He just didn’t know what else to think; Andrea had gone from a pitch-black bedroom into the living room and had no memory of how she got there.  All of that was a sign that Andrea was sleepwalking.
But if that was true... why was Andrea full-blown denying that was the case?
Andrea finally lowered her hands from her face.  She didn’t look like she had been crying or even the least bit upset.  She just looked to have the strongest poker face one could manage at the moment.  What could he be talking about:  her sleepwalking?  She certainly didn’t look like the type of person to just walk from one place to another.
Sleepwalking’s for kids, Andrea thought.  I’m not a kid anymore.  So what in the hell could Tsuzuki be blabbing on about?  He really should stop watching TV while there’s a case to solve.
The silence between them was just as awkward as before, so strong that one could hear a pin drop onto the floor.
“It’s late,” Andrea said finally, her voice gaining an interesting amount of strength.
Tsuzuki looked at her and realized that he was likely not going to like dealing with Andrea later on in the morning.  “All right,” he answered.  “It’s still kind of late.”
Wordlessly, Andrea stood up from the loveseat and headed to her bedroom again, but she stopped when she heard Tsuzuki from the couch.
“I didn’t hurt you, did I?” he asked her retreating figure as he stood up to sit down on the couch.  “If I did, I’m really sorry.  I just thought...”
“I’m fine,” Andrea answered without even turning her head to look at him.
Andrea’s trademark phrase.
But still, Tsuzuki didn’t want to question that again.  It was much too late in the night for that.
“All right, Andrea,” he said, inwardly relieved that she wasn’t injured.  “Good night.”
“Night,” she said before walking into her bedroom again.
Tsuzuki took a deep breath before leaning his head on the back of the couch.  Tonight was more awkward than anything this case had done up until now.  He looked at the clock at the microwave and saw that it was only 02:30.  With that, he decided to lie back down to go back to sleep.
“I really hope she’s okay,” he said quietly as he laid his head on the pillow.
A few minutes of complete silence passed before Tsuzuki found himself getting drowsy.  Maybe he should help Andrea take it easy for a while.  Maybe he should do more to help her out, to make sure that she didn’t have a lot to do when she got off work.  Maybe he could try to make it up to her somehow...
Maybe...
Maybe he should get some sleep first.
Yes, sleep would be best.  It’d be smarter for Tsuzuki to think after some sleep instead of a groggy thought stream.
Tsuzuki felt his eyes close and it only took a few moments to fall completely asleep, hoping the next morning wouldn’t be as awkward as tonight had been.

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The next morning, Tsuzuki noticed two things when he woke up and after he had gotten dressed.  The first was that there wasn’t a second time that Andrea had been sleepwalking.  The second, however, was more of a surprise to him than anything; Andrea was much calmer than she was last night, which was a welcome sight considering the night before.
He had walked to her bedroom door just to peek in at her sleeping form under her covers.  Part of him wanted to move up closer, just to see how calm she looked, but he realized that Andrea had had a rough night, and Tsuzuki knew that he didn’t want to make things more awkward than they were last night.  Still, seeing the sleeping Andrea made him wonder if there was more to her than everything that happened so far.  Maybe there was more to that sleeping girl than he first thought; maybe there was something that he couldn’t see before.
Then, an idea struck him just as his stomach grumbled.  He could buy breakfast for her.  Mostly for him, but at the moment, he didn’t know much about Andrea and what she would eat.  The girl never talked about herself, except to say that her parents had died.  Maybe if he took a guess on what she would like and if she liked it, then maybe the hatchet from last night could be buried.
It was a chance that Tsuzuki would have to take, though.  But at least if someone looked out for her, even though Tatsumi had told him to not be involved in Andrea’s personal affairs, maybe he would be able to know the real Andrea, the girl behind the attitude.
If it worked for Hisoka, then it just might work for her.
With that thought in mind, he quietly headed back into the living room, took a deep breath, wrote a quick note and headed out of the apartment.

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Half an hour passed before Andrea stirred herself awake.  Rubbing her eyes, she sat up in the bed and heard... nothing.  Maybe Tsuzuki’s still asleep, she thought as she climbed out of bed.  She walked into the kitchen and peered into the living room from there and saw nothing.
No, Tsuzuki wasn’t there.
Taking a deep breath, Andrea headed back into her room and put on a pair of dark-washed jeans and a three-quarter sleeved teal peasant shirt.  After she got dressed, Andrea went into the kitchen to grab a bottle of green tea before heading into the living room again.  This time, her mind was focused on one thing:
Finding out about Michiko Fujiwara and figuring out anything that could help the case at all.
Sitting on the couch and setting the bottle on a coaster, she started to work.  That was the Andrea she knew she was; a hard worker who took her job seriously.  Part of her, however, wondered where Tsuzuki went.
Oh, I’m sure he can take care of himself, she thought as she typed in a search box.  Her eyes shifted to a small note on the couch next to her:
“‘Andrea, I left to get breakfast’,” the note read.  “’Once again, I’m sorry about last night.  If I had known it was you leaning over me, I never would have done it.  I’m just glad that you’re all right.  See you in a little bit, Tsuzuki.’”
Andrea simply shook her head and took a deep breath.  “I don’t know what he’s more... stupid or stubborn,” she said to herself before she leaned up to take a sip of her green tea.
It was time to get to work, one of the things Andrea liked best.

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alf

(AN:  Okay, just so you know, I do NOT think Tsuzuki is a violent kind of guy.  The reason he did what he did was more of a reflex.  He never would have done that if he had known it was Andrea to start off with.  I should write more, but with my new job and new major, the chapters might take longer than normal.  See you guys with “Uprising.”)