I'm back, baby. Thought I'd give the fanfiction a rest and focus on what I'm doing with my life. Turns out I wasn't doing much anyway, so here I am. Anyone up for some more Yukiru? I promise I'll be nice. Here we go…

I happen to not own Fruits Basket.

Running Water

It had been horrendously, ridiculously, painfully early in the morning when Tohru surfaced from her bed and stumbled to shower. Shigure-san, Kyo-kun, and Sohma-kun assumed that Tohru was a morning person because of the sheer energy she exerted coaxing them from their beds. It was quite the opposite. The brunette was similar to Yuki when she woke up. Of course, this was about two hours before anyone else in the house had stirred. Tohru had soon realized that if she was going to get everything done that she needed to before going to school, she would have to wake up earlier than anyone was really meant to. By the time any of the Sohmas were lucid enough to judge her character, she was as bright and relentless as the sun.

And what was her secret? The longest hot shower known to humanity and a bracing cup of tea drank unorthodoxly at boiling temperature. So it was quite to her dismay when she twisted the taps and was supplied with the far-off groan of a dead pipe. Don't panic, she thought, They must be frozen. In August. Calmly, she tested the sink and reached the same result. Twist, clunk, groan, silence. Alright, maybe Sohma-kun kicked Kyo-kun through the piping last night and the upstairs is cut off. After confirming that the downstairs wasn't working either, the brunette sank to the floor, leaning against a wall. At least the ground still worked. That was a start. And gravity, too. Now, where is the water?

A sick feeling like a rotten orange was sitting in her stomach as the teenager slipped into Shigure's office and began rifling through the detritus around his desk. After a couple of minutes of fruitless hunting, Tohru found a rumpled letter jammed inside of a porn magazine as a bookmark. She glared at the address, then ripped it open to read the bill inside. She dropped the porn magazine and stood, nodding to herself. Yep. He'd forgotten to pay the utilities bill again. She fingered a clump of her mussed brown hair, gauging its cleanliness and sighed. Ah, well. Alright, move on. Start breakfast going. As if by instinct, the brown-eyed girl swung into the kitchen, skipping over the stack of newspapers to be recycled, and flicked the light switch. Nothing. She paused in the dark, sucking in her breath to keep from screaming.

Five more minutes of searching in Shigure's office revealed the unpaid electricity bill.

Okay, no shower. No tea. No light.

She gave up and went to rouse Sohma-kun. If she got started now, he might be mobile in the next hour. But that was when the lights were on and it wasn't winter. The brunette scaled the stairs in the gloom, brushing her fingertips along the wall to keep her bearing. A long time ago, when she was really little, she would be scared of the stairs at night. She didn't like the sounds they made—the ones outside of their old home were metal and creaked in the wind—and would tell her mother with a straight face that the world was so hungry that at night its stomach growled, threatening to swallow her and her mother whole. Tohru smiled at the darkness, feeling the ghost of her mother's hands on her shoulders. Sometimes, the darkness was more forgiving than the daylight.

The brunette paused outside of Sohma-kun's door, tracing the wood grain down to the doorknob. It was comforting in the dark, where she could be by herself and her thoughts. When she was alone, her mother was just close enough to touch. She shook her head at the darkness, the door, the silliness of turning to it for balance, and quietly slipped into the rat's room.

He was an awkward sleeper. It was a funny thing to think about, especially since Yuki was such a graceful person when he was awake. But there was no doubt that he slept like he was trying to settle down on a bed of jagged glass. His arms were lifted to cushion his face, his legs splayed apart to access as much cool sheet as possible. He slept with his neck bent forward so that he seemed to be praying while running. And his countenance shifted as his mind shifted through dreams, sometimes placid and sometimes distressed. It was a little unfair that a boy who was plagued by demons had to sleep in their company.

Tohru shook his shoulder, trying to muster a bright voice for Yuki at least, "Sohma-kun! It's time to wake up!"

He tensed, burying his face in his arms further away from the impending Switching On of the Lights. What woke him up was the lack of Switching On. The silver-haired teenager sat up, rubbing away the face his dreams had left him to wear, and glared at the darkness. A hand suddenly came into sight on his knee, seeming to catch the blurry, pearly light and reflect it. Tohru's voice said in a lackluster voice, "Sorry that it's so dark, Sohma-kun. Shigure-san's forgotten the electricity again."

Yuki groaned, his eyes trying to outline the shape of the girl he knew so well. His mind screamed, cogs going too fast too quickly. He meant for a wry comment to pop out about Shigure forgetting where he buried his bones, but instead he barely managed a shaky, "…Shower."

The hand seemed to tighten around his knee. Her voice again, this time even less luminous, "He's forgotten the water bill too."

This was grounds for public execution. No one, no one, could have possibly broke worse news on Sohma Yuki. If Kyo had tried it, he would have been up against the wall with his shoulder and elbow being dislocated simultaneously within nanoseconds. Shigure was going to die. To soften the blow, the brunette hastily added, "But it was really my fault! I should have checked that the bills were being paid."

"Mrgh, no….shower?"

"I'm so, so sorry."

There was a dangerous silence as the concept continued to sink into Yuki's conscience, passing through sleepy dura mater. It didn't seem to quite puncture through before the rat dragged his limbs off of his bed one by one and shuffled past Tohru with his head nodding forward languidly. Afraid to touch him, the brunette waited with bated breath as he padded down the hallway, occasionally bumping into the wall as he attempted to enter a theoretical door that he had assumed would be there. His seventh try he ended up in the bathroom. Tohru winced as she heard it: twist, groan, clunk, silence.

It was good five minutes before Yuki finally understood. It was another two seconds for him to attempt to kill Shigiure in his sleep. He would have succeeded too if it weren't for the fact that the place where Shigure's door was supposed to be was exactly five feet to the left of Shigure's door. Yuki stormed with frigid, murderous rage into a wall.

Some time later, he and Tohru stood shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen, contemplating what could be done. There was always the option of sending Shigure to the utilities offices with a black eye - Yuki's suggestion – and the proper amount of money to pay the bill pinned to his hakama like lunch money attached to a kindergartener. Then Tohru pointed out how unlikely it was that Shigure would make it to the utilities office without stopping and spending the money on the way. There was the pond farther back in the forest. They could lug water in from there and heat it for a bath. Yuki eyed the brunette and hastily tried to think of a different idea. The last thing he wanted Tohru to do was put forty pounds of water on her back. Tohru had a similar objection – who knew how much heavy-lifting Yuki could do without invoking the Bronchial Tube Wrath of Doom. The solution was unavoidable. They would have to bathe in the pond. With the sun coming up, it would have to be soon, or else they might be seen by some freak accident (which seemed to happen more often than normal accidents to the Sohma family and Honda Tohru). And maybe, with the darkness, they might not even see each other.

It was a sad substitute for the – Blessed be its name – Hot Morning Shower, but it would have to do.

I will post the second half within the week. For y'all who favourited or alerted this for the chapter that was originally here from Straight Lines:

I will repost Straight Lines later. Looking over it after I posted it, I realized that a) it was too short, b) it wasn't really fitting the song, c) it was really, really angsty. So there's some editing to be done on that monster.

Until then, ja ne.