Stranded - Writers Forum

Kitaeru · 03-04-2008, 11:52 AM

Rating: T/PG-13
Warnings: shounen-ai/slash/boyxboy
Summary: A stand-alone one-shot related to my story 'Vanished'- you do NOT have to read that first to understand this. Unit five's Tenshou and Natsuki find themselves stranded in a cave when an unexpected storm comes up. shounen-ai, TenshouxNatsuki (If you want to check out my other work - including 'Vanished' - I have it all posted on FictionPress under the username Kitaeru.)

Author’s note: I decided to try my hand at a one-shot. A shounen-ai one-shot. It’s 1am...Yeah, and I’m on a sugar-high, so cue the insanity…

Stranded

“You have got to be kidding me,” I hear the leader of my unit growl as he flips his cell phone shut with a loud ‘snap’.

I look up at him from my position on the hard ground where I’ve been drawing in the dust with a twig I found near the entrance of the cave. Tenshou looks like he wants to rip something to shreds – and that something could very possibly end up being me – but I pipe up, “What? They don’t want to send anybody to come get us?”

“They said they can’t because of the storm,” He grinds out, refusing to look at me. “We’re to stay where we are until the storm passes and they can safely send a jeep or rover to get us.”

“Hm. Is that all?” I question nonchalantly.

Tenshou turns cold grey eyes on me and snaps, “’Is that all?’ ‘IS THAT ALL?!’ That means I’m going to be stuck in this cave in the middle of nowhere with YOU until this storm passes! That could be a couple of days!”

I grin, ignoring the murderous glare, “Aw, come on. It won’t be that bad. Think of it as some team bonding!” I give him the most serious look I can muster under the circumstances. “And we aren’t in the middle of nowhere, Tenshou. We’re out on the designated training grounds.”

“Which are in the middle of nowhere,” He growls, turning and stalking to the entrance of the cave, no doubt to check the severity of the storm that drove us to take shelter a couple of hours ago. Considering the fact that this is about the time of the year that storms usually last a couple of days before dwindling off, I don’t see how he can expect it to have decreased in severity already. Well, whatever floats his boat, I guess. I go back to drawing stick figures in the dirt with the twig. Already, I have Tenshou looking grumpy, just like always. Next to him I’ve drawn Ichirou, one of my teammates, who happens to be out sick with the flu and so didn’t come with us for the training exercise. Stick-figure Ichirou is holding stick-figure Kazuki’s hand. I only met Kazuki once, but I’ve seen him and Ichirou together a lot and it just doesn’t seem right to draw stick-figure Ichirou without his little stick-figure boyfriend. I start to draw stick-figure Tsuneki – my other teammate; God only knows why he didn’t come along today – as Tenshou comes back, brushing his still-damp blonde hair off his face. I know for a fact that once his hair dries, it’ll spike itself back up and he won’t look like a half-drowned puppy anymore, but it’s still a hilarious sight – adorable, too – and I snicker.

He shoots another murderous glare my way and I grin and wave. He huffs and goes over to sit against the back wall of the cave, as far from me as he can get and still be near the fire we built to warm us. I love pissing the guy off; it’s almost too easy sometimes. Granted, one of these days he’s probably going to snap and try to strangle me or something, but I figure I’ll just deal with it when it comes to that. My right leg feels like it’s falling asleep, so I shift my position to get the blood flowing again. I feel something blunt jab me in the leg and reach into my pocket to pull whatever it is out. It’s my music player.

Another grin creeps onto my lips and I quickly unwind the headphones from around the player and put them in my ears, turning the little device on. I thought I’d left it in the jeep when Tenshou and I had gotten out to train after the damn vehicle broke down – again – but apparently not.

I take a deep breath and open my mouth to sing along to the music, “Hey there! Guess what? It’s time to stop being down; time to move on, push through, get over your problems-“

I feel the searing glare my blonde teammate sends my way, but I don’t stop singing, even when he snaps at me to shut up. In fact, I sing even louder. “Hi ho! Guess what? It’s time to move on, push through. Hey there! It’s a new day; smile!”

“Shut up! I mean it, Hasekura! I don’t know what the hell it is that you’re singing along to, but I don’t want to hear it!”
I stop singing and stare at him in mock horror. “You… you don’t know them?! My god, man, you haven’t lived! No! Wait! We must fix this! What if a bolt of lightning strikes you the moment we step out of the cave? Or worse! A tank runs you over! Your life just isn’t complete!”

I bolt up and run over to him; much to his horror, I’m sure, I jump on him, pinning him to the ground. He struggles to try to get away, all the while cursing me, my parents, and the doctor that brought me safely into the world, but even though we’re about the same size, I have far more experience wrestling with and pinning people, so he’s pretty much screwed. Somehow, in all of this, I manage to get the volume turned up on the player and shove one of the earphones in Tenshou’s ear.

“See?! Aren’t they good?” I add as an after-thought, “The vocalist and the lead guitarist are really cute, too.”

I ignore his angry demands to get off of him and sigh, “It’s sad, though...they’re both engaged. Not fair, I tell ya. Everyone else is getting all of the really nice, cute, funny girls and leaving the air-headed bimbos for the rest of us poor saps. ‘Course, that Kiyomi girl from unit four is kinda cute and I don’t think she’s got a boyfriend. Maybe I should ask her out next time I see her...”

“GETOFF!!!”

“But I never really did have that much luck with girls, so maybe that's not such a good idea and, anyway, there are lots of cute guys, too, so-“

“I don’t care! Just get off me!!” I decide to do as he says this time, since if I drive him completely insane now, I won’t have anything to do later. I let him up and scurry over to the other side of the fire, patting down my
now-messier-than-normal black hair as I go. I don’t think I have to worry about him trying to shoot me, what with there being a slight chance of the bullets ricocheting off the stone around us if he were to miss me. He has really good aim, but I have even better luck, so he probably would miss. At least, I hope he would. I don’t want them finding me as a bullet-riddled corpse when someone finally gets out here to get us un-stranded. Of course, I’d rather them not find me as a corpse at all. That wouldn’t be much fun.

I go back to drawing stick figures in the dirt, occasionally singing along softly to the music. Every time I glance at my teammate, he’s just sitting there, scowling at the wall, like he’s trying to burn a hole through it with his eyes. Finally, I pipe up, “Ya know, Tenshou. If you stare just a little bit harder, you might be able to get that wall to, like, spontaneously combust or something. That’d be awesome!”

He turns his steel-blue glare on me and I’m surprised that I don’t spontaneously combust or shrivel up and die. He’s pretty upset, I think. We sit in silence for another hour and I begin growing bored with my stick-figure-in-the-dirt comics, even though itis fun drawing me and Tenshou kissing and going on dates and stuff. I crawl over to Tenshou and plop down next to him, with enough space between us to draw something. I make two horizontal lines over two vertical lines and draw an ‘x’ in the middle square. “Your turn.”

He ignores me.

“Hey, come on! I can’t play tic-tac-toe by myself. It’s no fun. I always lose when I play myself,” I pout.

The look he gives me is priceless, “How can you lose when you’re playing yourself?”

I roll my eyes and state, “Because I know my strategy. If I didn’t know my strategy, I couldn’t win, therefore, I wouldn’t lose.”

The older man gapes at me, probably trying to make sense of what I just said. Finally, sounding mystified, he says, “That made no sense whatsoever.”

“It made plenty of sense,” I inform him.

“What are you high on?”

“Life. You should try it sometime. It’s great,” I grin at him.

“I have a better idea.”

“And that would be?”

“Strangling you with your own intestines.”

“Hmmm… no, that wouldn’t be much fun.”

“I’d enjoy it.”

“You’re sadistic, aren’t you?” I ask pleasantly.

“Only with you, Hasekura.”

“You can call me Natsuki, you know. It doesn’t bother me when people use my given name.” I wish he would use my given my name. If nobody else did, I’d be happy if he called me ‘Natsuki’, even just once. I’ve wanted to hear him say my name for a long time, even before I realized I had actually fallen in love with him.

Tenshou’s only response is another glare, which I grin at. I wonder if he realizes just how sexy he looks when he glares like that…If he'd just stop glaring at me every time I piss him off, I wouldn't try to piss him off just to see that glare.

I hold up the twig, “So, you gonna play?”

“No.”

“Aw, come on!” I whine.

“Get away from me, Hasekura.”

“No,” I pout and cross my arms over my chest. “And call me Natsuki.”

This time, he doesn’t favor me with a response, so I glumly go about playing tic-tac-toe by myself, occasionally sighing as forlornly as I can manage, but if he notices, he doesn’t show it. We’ve been teammates since the second week of training, so he should know by now – almost a year later – that letting me get bored is a very, very bad idea. And I’m really bored now.

Tenshou has been glaring at the same spot on the wall for the past hour or so and I’m beginning to wonder if he didn’t fall asleep with his eyes open. I mean, who can possibly keep staring at one spot for that long without going crazy?
I edge closer to the blond, eyeing him cautiously before poking him in the neck with the twig. Before I can even blink, he snatches the twig from me and tosses it into the fire.

“Hey! You took my twig! Now how I am supposed to draw?” I give him the most offended look I can muster, but it holds no power when he doesn’t spare me even the tiniest glance. Damn it all, he’s supposed to look at me! I want him to look!

“I don’t care. Now get away from me before I throw you into the fire.”

“You wouldn’t do that,” I state confidently.

“Wouldn’t I?”

“Nope. You love me too much.”

He levels me with another cold stare and I decide that I now have a mission: thaw the man out. The first step in my new mission is to risk my life and hug him, which I’m pretty sure no one’s ever tried before. If they did, we probably never heard about it because he either tortured them, killed them, or threatened to do one of those things.

I leave him be for now, hoping he’ll let his guard down and make my mission a little easier. It’s getting late now, I’m sure, but Tenshou isn’t showing any sign that he’s going to go to sleep any time soon. Well, that’s just fine. I can wait him out. There’s no way in hell he can stay awake all night and then all day tomorrow. I, on the other hand, have managed to do so on a couple different occasions. Granted, I had large amounts of caffeine and sugar to help…

The next thing I know, I’m blinking blearily up at the ceiling of the cave. Okay, so I wasn’t able to wait him out. Big deal. I’ll probably get another chance, what with how long storms usually last around here. I sit up, stretching my arms over my head and wincing as I feel every muscle in my body – including muscles I forgot even exist – pop. When I turn to Tenshou with the intent to piss him off some more, I see him slouched against the opposite wall, arms crossed over his chest. And he’s sleeping.

I know an opportunity when I see one and this is definitely the chance of a lifetime. Employing every ounce of stealth I have, I edge closer to my sleeping teammate. Less than a foot away from him, I stop and get ready to pounce on him. This may or may not get me killed – I’m quite hoping the latter, but I don’t know how Tenshou will respond to being woken up like this; the former is more likely.

Even as I’m pouncing, he’s becoming aware of my presence and waking up. The little, logical portion of my brain is screaming for me to abort, abort, abort, but I mentally bash it with a large frying pan and continue on with what I was doing. I tackle Tenshou to the ground in a hug before he can react too much.

The thing was, I wasn’t counting on him waking up and moving, and I’m
not exactly skilled at changing course once I’ve charged something – or someone – so close. I was also a little too worried about getting him into a hug before he could shoot me or something to worry about just where I was actually aimed. I can make up a lot of excuses for my current predicament. And I need to pick one – a really convincing one – as quickly as I can, because if I don’t pull away soon, Tenshou will definitely kill me.

I wasn’t intending to kiss him – really, I wasn’t. He just kind of moved right where I was able to accidentally kiss him when we toppled to the ground. Not, mind you, that I have any complaints about kissing him. If this even counts as a kiss. I just don't want him to kill me.

I sit back on his legs, smiling sheepishly down at him, while he lays there, staring at me in shock. I need to come up with something really fast, “Um…I can totally explain. That absolutely was not wh-“

I’m cut off by him roughly yanking me down by the front of my shirt and kissing me senseless. Well, if before didn’t count as a kiss, this sure does. I pull back, breathless, when he finally lets up on my shirt a bit. It takes a second for my brain to start functioning again, and then I manage a cocky grin, “Not complaining about being stranded with me anymore, are ya?”

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Author’s note: This is a story I never intended to post. I had started writing it for my Creative Writing class, but I got stuck and tossed it aside in favor of one that I actually knew how I wanted to end…which ended up sucking horribly, unfortunately. This definitely deviated from my original intentions, though. It did not start out as a shounen-ai at all. But it’s the middle of the night. And I found this. And saw the ‘sadistic’ comment I had written, right where I left off about five months ago. You can see where that went… I think…I may write more of these two. Great…two more muses fighting for my attention…

Oh, and that song Natsuki was singing - lyrics I wrote on a sugar-high for the purpose of pissing off some poor character in one of my stories.

Tiamat10 · 03-05-2008, 02:58 PM

Lol... I have to congratulate you. When I started reading this, it just annoyed the hell out of me. By the end, however, I actually liked it. I don't really know what else to say. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around how I changed my mind.