Mentor Demented

A/N: My goodness, how long has it been! So sorry I haven't updated in...ages. But I've had problems that needed to be solved, and I hope I've solved them all now, so I can dedicate myself to you all again! And this chapter might seem just a tad-bit rushed.

Disclaimer: The ownership has not changed, and none of this still belongs to me. Except for the title. The title's mines!

There was a monster that lived deep within him, a creature that he incessantly fed, allowing his loneliness to grow. After the first few centuries, she had become his mistress, whom he loved and cherished, her cold eyes and frigid lips always his first demand.

He used to cry, and she would cradle him, envelop him in her indifference and disgust towards mankind. She had ensnared his once bright soul, diminishing the little rays of hope that had flickered like fireflies and had slowly burned out. She was his Misery, and just like the fireflies, she was diminishing as well.

And it scared him.

5th Night- Rude Awakenings

His pale and gentle face was vivid with something indescribable. His eyes seemed feral, his smile near predatorial. Needless to say, he was scared of him. Slowly, the unbecoming feeling of being trapped grew inside his chest, surrounded and caught him, as though threatening to squeeze and crush his bones.

As the boy started to move his thin lips, he already knew he would dread the words that silky voice would wrap around, turn into a haunting melody.

"My request is but a simple one," he began, gliding closer on an unseen mattress, "in return for sparing you, I wish for nothing more but a year of your life." His stone-cold hand found the right side of his cheek, which he slowly caressed in a hypnotizing rhythm.

This plea was all but unexpected, and he seemed obligated to accept. As he slowly nodded his agreement, the boy's smile hardened and the world he knew moved out of his reach for eternity. But how was he to know that a year of his life would continue as an existence in hell on earth?

The pain that had accompanied the touch of the boy's lips to his throat slowly ebbed away, and carefully, like a loving mother, the black of unconsciousness took over. The feel of his velvet tongue ran across his eyelids as they slowly closed and shut out what was to become his future.

Yuki woke up, perspiration coating his forehead lightly.

'Nothing but a dream', he chastised himself, his smile unsure as he attempted to reassure himself that it really was nothing more but a dream. A dream he thought he had shut in the very recesses of his mind.

He shifted his weight towards the side of the bed, pulling the covers with him as they lifted off the floor on the left side, pooling into a dark puddle at the foot of the bed as he shed them off of his unclad body. He stood in the shadows, the morning still a painstaking four hours away.

'Wonder if the brat's awake'. Yuki looked out the window from the shadows, not moving closer as the sky began to lose its midnight touch and stars began to twinkle into a soft unsteady glow. He couldn't explain it even to himself, but there was something about the window that made him uneasy. Normally when he had the dream these days, he was able to and would disregard them as nothing, but not this time. It clung to him like white on rice, as if afraid of being forgotten once again. But it was true that he had forgotten many of the facial features on the strange face that always reappeared-except one.

His eyes…

An unfamiliar awareness emerged from nowhere and everywhere at once, focusing onto one point.

…a familiar crimson.

Sleeping like the dead was just a phrase that was used to emphasize how horrible a morning-person a person was. But actually sleepinglike the dead was a new experience that Shuichi had just discovered.

"Who left the damn windows open?" he cried out in frustration as he tried to bury his face deep into his pillow, his whole body trembling with the early morning chill. He grumbled some more as he tried to reach for his blankets and draw them tighter around himself, but all he could feel was a cushioned surface, almost velvety and not giving him much space to move around in.

He glared out into the darkness that surrounded him as he began to be more aware of his surroundings. "What the-?" He tried to stretch his arms out towards the roof of his curtained bed, though he never did draw them around him. He preferred to awaken with the sun flooding through and smacking him in the face. Needless to say he was one of those types of morning people, but this morning he awoke with a slight suffocating sensation.

Shuichi had barely lifted his arms that they had already made contact with another hard surface. He tried to spread his legs some to kick of what he thought would be some remaining cover-there was no cover and there was certainly no space. "Hey! Yuki-hey!" Shuichi continued to try to twist and turn in any and every direction, but succeeding in only moving the…confinement. It was slowly dawning on him that maybe he wasn't in his room-at least he remembered that he didn't live at home anymore- and that maybe this wasn't even a bed.

Inhaling deeply, so as to avoid a throat-wrenching scream, he began assessing the situation, making sure he included the words 'suppose', 'maybe' and 'perhaps'.

Suppose this wasn't a dream, that this was reality. Suppose that just maybe he had somehow relocated his body during the evening into this …we'll just stick with place for the time being. And just perhaps, this place was actually a coffin and he had just woken up in it. Now for the final assumption; hypothetically speaking, and only hypothetically, suppose that once he lifted the… lid… he would look up and see the evening sky. Then what?

Shuichi just loved living in Denial- it was a lovely little moorish place in the very back of his brain, where he had built a mansion in sixth grade and could hide out and disguise reality to be what he wanted it to be.

Closing his eyes, and taking another deep breath for luck, though he immediately coughed it out because it was so rancid, he counted to three and pushed. That, at least, had been his plan, until he started to count down from fifty-two and calmly waited until he reached his goal. Twiddling his thumbs and assuming that he had been by himself all the while, it really shouldn't have been much of a surprise that in that precise moment a ghostly voice decided to breathe into his ear.

"Hey."

He forgot what number he had been at, as well as that once he bolted up, he would hit his head against the lid of the coffin.

Luckily, there was no lid. His heart still trying to remember its rhythm, he slowly, but in uneasy and jerky motions, began to feel the space around him, searching for the confinements of a box for the dead that he had been in just a few moments before. Shuichi suddenly was filled with a great desire to be back in that casket, where he had been guaranteed solitude. Refusing to look in the direction of his left hand, he carefully allowed his fingers to explore the soft yet icy surface. Muscle, bone, knuckles, and, regretfully, nails.

In no kinder way to put it, Shuichi was fondling the hand of what he guessed to be a dead man.

"HOLY CRAPPOLY- I'M GONNA DIE!" he shrieked, jumping out of the bed and bolting out of the room, hitting the floor running with such speed that even Jesse Owens would have been proud.

Shuichi didn't dare look back, afraid of what he might find, what he might see pursuing him. But his speed couldn't match that of the one pursuing him, and instantly ran into what he at first thought was a carpeted wall, but strong, muscled arms wrapped around him, pinning him against the chest of-

"PLEASE DON'T EAT ME! I SWEAR I TASTE LIKE A BEAN BURRITO! BEAN BURRITOS CAN MESS UP YOUR INDIGESTION!"

Yuki was at a loss. "Brat, calm down. It's just me. Hey!" He had gone into Shuichi's room to ask if he wanted some sort of breakfast as he also had lack of sleep, but hadn't expected this spastic, hyperventilating paranoia to overtake Shuichi. Being a man of few tactics, Yuki put a gentle pressure against Shuichi's frenzied mind to try and calm him-the way it was running in circles was driving him crazy.

Too bad for Yuki, this just riled him up more. Yuki should have learned by now that the slight idiotic at heart can't be tamed by mere command- you have to put a force behind it.

The attempt at calming Shuichi had changed his entire attitude, though. Even though he had stopped struggling, his mental alpha waves had suddenly changed to an annoyed fury that was unexplainable to both of them.

Letting him go, Shuichi immediately stepped back and raised his fists towards his unseen foe. The moon was overshadowed by thick storm clouds and casting the hallway in complete darkness. Only his sixth sense gave him any orientation as to where his 'enemy' stood. "So, you want a piece of me?"

Yuki chose not to reply. He was sure that if he moved his lips now, they might just curl into a smile. His face muscles weren't prepared for such a feat just yet.

"I asked, do you want a piece of me? Well, do you? Because I can give you a piece of meand my mind! Right here- right now!"

This was getting tiresome. Ignorant of what the consequences might be if he did it, Yuki reached out his hand and, with just enough pressure so Shuichi couldn't shake his hand away, pulled him forward and placed his warm lips against his of winter.

It was a strange sensation, as well as a strange feeling that filled Shuichi at that moment. The functioning part of his brain seemed to have gone on stand-by, and wouldn't be in touch for a while-please leave a message after the 'beep'.

Unaware of what his own body was doing, Yuki slowly guided him backward against a wall, his back towards the window, not noticing the faint purple that was beginning to tint the sky. Shuichi seemed helpless and resistant at the same time, his mind now divided into seventeen different sections. But the first section, also being the one with the quickest solution, took over the other sixteen and they all agreed to go on a trip to Lala-land.

Without being able to object, he fell asleep against Yuki's lips and was falling forward, falling forward onto his lap and continued to doze without a second thought on reality. Denial sometimes was such a beautiful thing.

Yuki was panting at the unfamiliar sensation of fire coursing through his veins. It wasn't an unfamiliar feeling, just one that he hadn't expected to feel ever again. His own eyes had turned a seducing ebony, the gold around his pupil almost swallowed whole in the black of the moment.

Gazing down, he watched for a while as Shuichi's breathing lifted his chest, his whole torso moving with that vital action. His eyes softened; humans were truly fragile things. Cut off the air, and their minds would slowly collapse on them, their eyes bursting and their voice vanishing.

He finally noticed the dawn, his body feeling sluggish and near boneless. He picked Shuichi's sleeping form off the carpet, which seemed to weigh more than the appearance figured as Yuki swayed with his steps to try and keep his balance. Heading towards Shuichi's room, it seemed the morning was very much against him like it normally was, the sun rising faster than usual.

Laying him back into his bed and pulling the covers around his shoulders, Yuki knew he wouldn't be able to make back into his own chambers and began to draw the curtains closed in his room and around his bed, crawling onto the mattress next to the sleeping adolescent. Exhaustion and fatigue overtook him, and he drifted into a dreamless slumber.

He never noticed the muddy footprints on the sheets where Shuichi had his feet above the covers.

A/N: I figure if I write shorter chapters, then maybe I can get more accomplished. But I thought I'd posted this chapter so long ago and Iam sorry that it's so rushed. I will try to write more next time. Now push that purple button and tell me how much you want to strangle me-go on! See if I care!

Jesse Owens was a famous Olympic racer in the time of WWii; why I chose him is beyond me…

Peace,

C.S.