TITLE: Blazing For It
AUTHOR: Tiamat's Child
FANDOM: X/1999

PAIRING: Yuzuriha/Kusanagi, Yuzuriha/Satsuki, Yuzuriha/OFC
RATING: PG-13
SUMMARY: Yuzuriha knows what she wants.
AUTHOR NOTES: Written for the 'white' challenge at Contrelamontre: 45-minute limit, written in 45 minutes. And I do mean 45, the clock changed as I looked at it after typing the last letter.

Blazing For It

Yuzuriha's hand is a bright white when it tangles in Inuki's warm grey fur. Sometimes she thinks her flesh is glowing when it meets the solid strength of Inuki's back. In a strange way that makes sense to her. She and Inuki are two pieces of a whole, after all, and power runs in a massive circuit between them. Perhaps when they touch that circuit is completed and the pathways open, power flowing in an unstoppable arc between the two of them. Perhaps Inuki's skin glows as well, and it is only that she cannot see it under his thick fur. It's not a bright glow, after all.

Yuzuriha feels distant and cold and oddly luminescent when she thinks that way. She feels as if she could get lost in herself, bound into questions that ultimately don't matter. So when she feels the smooth curves of unfamiliar thought starting she goes and does something simple and unthreatening. Sometimes she'll bake cookies.

She likes baking cookies. She's always liked making things, fostering things, nurturing them, even if they are only dough and intended to be eaten in a matter of hours (or, knowing her housemates, in minutes). And there's a wonderful rhythm to baking as well. It doesn't really change, no matter how old you get or what wars you fall into. Baking is eternal, something much older and larger than her that nevertheless doesn't hold much in the way of consequences.

Sex is eternal too, and Yuzuriha thinks about that a great deal, but she's a little nervous about that. Just a little, she's had two years to get used to the idea that she will one day enter into that great collective preoccupation of the universe, but she wouldn't be human if the notion didn't make her a little afraid. Whatever else she may be, Yuzuriha is still *very* human. Sex has consequences and so does too much of the stuff that destiny has seen fit to tangle her up in, not really by her choice, and she's not about to be easy in her mind about calling down yet more consequences into her life.

She was, in her grandmother's words, 'an early bloomer'. Which is to say that there was a girl, and a crush, and a great deal of emotional mix up, and that somewhere in all of that Yuzuriha had become aware of things about her body that most people didn't really become aware of for another three years at least. But Yuzuriha has never been normal, and being connected as she is to a wolfspirit has certainly done a few other odd things to her body and her way of seeing the world, so perhaps it's not as surprising as it might be.

It has made things difficult though. She *knows* what the vague things that her body tells her mean. She knows what she wants. Pure and white as air, clear and strong and that rich full color of the cream she pours into the coffee she makes for the Chairman every morning. She's never thought of it as red, not even dark red, like blood spilled on uniform cloth. She knows what she wants and she knows she can't have it.

Shouldn't have it.

Certainly she shouldn't have what she wants from those she wants it from. Kusanagi, for all he's dealing with her feelings for him very well, isn't anywhere near ready to deal with knowing *this*. To know that Yuzuriha wants him, that while she loves him and enjoys his friendship and kindness something in her tightens at the sight of him and that she wakes from dreams of him aching from what she can't have- That would be a bit much for him to handle.

The blinding whiteness that hangs under the warm yellows and greens of what Yuzuriha feels for him would disturb him immensely. He wouldn't know how to respond, how to tell her no without hurting. And he would have to tell her no, because what she wants isn't what is right for where the two of them need to be right now.

And the other is simply blazing. Pure white, dangerous, pulling at Yuzuriha in ways that thrill and scare her. The girl who nearly killed her, and whose name she does not know, haunts her. There was something about her that seemed sterile, almost innocent. Yuzuriha finds that she wants to peel that sterility away, feel the girl's hands in her hair, see if those cables leave scars in places no scars should be.

But she can't have that, and she shouldn't.

When she rests her hand in Inuki's fur and the back of her hand seems to glow that pale white it isn't what she wants so much, but it's something. And it's a good something. A thing she can have. A thing she should have.

She's grateful for it.