Disclaimer: I don't own Monochrome Factor or any of its characters.

Summary: Understanding cats was difficult work, and Shirogane felt that only he knew exactly how difficult it could be. After all, no matter how much cats hated him, there were times when Akira was just like a cat.

Author's Note: This is for a friend who likes Shirogane/Akira. And cats, which I like too. Though I wonder if this meets your idea of a Shirogane/Akira fic…If you want something ecchi, we would have to trade dares for it, all right?

Cat's Play

Akira snuck out of school before fifth period started. He left the room with a muttered excuse to go to the toilet, and then walked to the back of the gym, where he made a sudden dash for the wall and scaled it. Shirogane watched him as he jumped outside with a lazy ease which seemed to have more to do with years of practice doing such things than with him being a Shin. Hardly smoothing out his uniform first, Akira began to walk away, and Shirogane followed after him, hesitating. He adjusted the brim of his hat. When they turned a corner, he finally asked: "Are you sure you should be doing this, Akira-kun?"

"I'm bored," Akira replied shortly, rubbing the nape of his neck so that some of his hair got caught between his fingers. His hair appeared a bit heavier, sticky with electricity because it had rained for the most part of that morning. They hadn't gone to the rooftop, of course, and Akira had been testy and on edge the whole day. Shirogane wondered if it was because he didn't like the weather, or because he hadn't been able to skip class like he was used to.

"You'll get into trouble," Shirogane scolded, more as a joke than because he meant it. Akira seemed to understand as much from his tone, and merely sighed and stretched his arms above his head, lazily.

"Akira-kun," Shirogane said. "You left your bag in the room."

Akira stopped walking at that. He brought his hands to his pockets and turned to look at Shirogane with a small frown which was somehow both calculating and pleading in his face.

"I can't bring it back," Shirogane said, and smilingly added: "If your classmates see a floating bag, it would be troublesome, wouldn't it? And I don't think Aya-san would appreciate anyone getting it for you."

Akira grunted, turned around and flung his hand over his shoulder in a careless gesture. He started walking again. "Then stop caring about it."

"But don't you have it in your bag? The house key, I mean."

"So? You can just open the door from inside, right?" Abruptly Akira halted, his shoulders tense with a thought Shirogane found easy enough to read: He didn't know if Shirogane would open the door for him. Or to be more precise, he thought Shirogane might refuse to on the grounds that Akira needed to be more responsible, and then might require him to beg before opening the door for him. He wondered if Akira was aware of how much of his thoughts he gave away by his actions alone. But if he was right, Akira had also correctly guessed what his reaction would be.

"Shirogane," Akira said now, his voice flat, and Shirogane smiled, although Akira's back was still to him and he wouldn't have seen.

"I'll open it for you."

…

Shirogane found that being near Akira had made him sensitive to the boy's moods, but there were still things about him that Shirogane felt he didn't know. Like what Akira felt about the situation they were in. Shirogane had not thought to ask Akira about it directly, aware that he had pulled the boy from a normal life, and that whatever he might have said, he had done so for purely selfish reasons. But Akira had agreed to help, and everything was inevitable anyway; Akira had to be able to fight. For all Shirogane cared, Akira could hate him, as long as he was alive to do so. But sometimes, when Akira stared off somewhere, or when he slept, Shirogane wondered if Akira weren't somehow able to briefly open the memory of an earlier impossible wound, one for which Shirogane had probably not been forgiven for yet.

"What's wrong?" Akira's voice, pitched low enough that he might have missed it, except Akira spoke again in a surlier tone: "You've been awfully quiet."

Shirogane blinked, then looked around and saw that he had followed Akira into a blind alley. Presumably Akira had led him there to talk, and he didn't notice. But Shirogane merely smiled. "Do you want me to say something?"

Akira leaned against the wall, his eyes narrowing. Behind him was a spray-painted graffiti of wings, the sharp-angled feathers fading soft as a thought into the cracked stone. Shirogane wanted to comment, but, knowing Akira, he was probably only marginally aware of the wall, never mind what was on it. And it would be seen as a deliberate change in topic, that much he was sure of.

"I thought," Akira said, "you might be planning something."

Shirogane put on a hurt face. "You don't trust me much, do you, Akira-kun?"

Akira snorted, thrust his hands into his pockets and turned his head to one side. "First, give me a…reason to," the boy said, his voice ending surprisingly in a distracted mutter. Shirogane glanced at where Akira was looking and saw nothing more remarkable than a tabby hanging on to the lip of a steel garbage bin. It looked at them shortly with knowing green eyes, and then ignored them and started to paw at whatever was inside the bin.

"Nyanko," Akira said, the affectionate term for cat so out of place in the empty voice Akira spoke with that it surprised Shirogane into considering it seriously.

"Is there something wrong, Akira-kun?"

The cat jumped down from the garbage bin and slunk several feet away from them. It dropped on its hind legs and started licking at its paw. Shirogane almost wanted to say something about proper sanitation, mainly because Akira was still looking at it.

Akira brought his hand out as if he wanted to reach for the cat, but quickly changed the gesture to a scratch on the head. He looked at Shirogane, looked at the cat, looked away. Shirogane kept his eyes on Akira. Akira pretended not to notice his prolonged stare, but after a while Akira sighed in silent defeat and slumped back against the wall, which was the farthest he could go from Shirogane without walking away, and muttered in explanation: "Cats hate me." He sounded hurt or wistful, or maybe just embarrassed.

Shirogane tilted his head to one side, considering. "I don't think I quite follow what you're saying, but…does this mean you actually like cats a lot, Akira-kun?"

"I don't like them that much," Akira said, while Shirogane watched a blush spread across the boy's face and tried hard not to lift an eyebrow in disbelief. He failed. Akira, the blood positively glowing on his cheeks, turned away and brought his hand up belatedly to cover the lower half of his face. He looked more than ready to drop or change the subject, and Shirogane recognized the danger posed by an Akira deciding he wanted to talk about other things. Akira surprised him by continuing the conversation though.

"Cats are very simple, aren't they?" Akira said. Without needing the pretense to have been looking somewhere else, Akira was watching the cat in its cleaning ministrations openly, although his eyes held a defensive look of boredom. "They either like you or they don't. They don't change their minds easily."

"Kind of hard to understand then, don't you think?" Shirogane replied. He leaned on the opposite wall, and after a while he smiled guilelessly and asked: "Do you like me, Akira-kun?"

Akira looked at him. He said, very pointedly: "We were talking about cats."

Shirogane kept smiling. "Do you want to know how you can get close to them?" He walked slowly over to the cat and, two feet away from it, squatted down. The cat glanced up with a swift movement of its head, but otherwise the rest of it froze in place. It waited to see what Shirogane would do. Shirogane let one hand fall softly from his knee and slightly extended the hand out. The movement was small, but even so, the cat moved a few steps backward. Shirogane moistened his lips with his tongue.

"Pish, pish," Shirogane said. Behind him, Akira said incredulously: " 'Pish'?"

"Cats like that sound."

"I know that," came the sullen reply. "But you're worse than me at this, Shirogane."

Despite himself, Shirogane felt offended. He turned slightly and looked over his shoulder with a slightly appraising stare. "Why don't you try it, Akira-kun?"

"It's impossible. For me." Akira fingered the hair hanging over his ear in what seemed like a nervous gesture. "I can't do cute sounds."

Shirogane blinked at him slowly, and then deliberately turned back to the cat, which had remained sitting in front of him. The cat looked at Shirogane with its glass-green eyes, as if it was (wisely) judging if it were more dangerous to stay or to run. "Pish," Shirogane declared to the boy at his back, "is hardly a cute sound."

"Yeah, right."

Shirogane sighed. And then in a relaxed manner so as not to startle the cat away, he reached inside his coat and brought out a packet of cut salmon. He opened it, put it on the ground and eased it forward. The cat looked wary for a moment, and then it went closer and hunched low to sniff on the salmon. It glanced up as if to be sure Shirogane wasn't planning on getting it back, and then started eating. After a while, Shirogane reached out and ran a gloved hand down the cat's back. The cat, grown indifferent with the gift of food, allowed this.

"That's cheating," Akira said.

"More important than that, Akira-kun," Shirogane sighed, "Why don't you try coming nearer now?"

Akira hesitated for probably all of ten seconds. And then he took a few uncertain steps forward and sat down on his heels beside Shirogane. The cat looked up at the new intruder, took a piece of fish in its mouth and moved slightly away. Shirogane looked at Akira and observed: "When you crouch like that, Akira-kun, it looks like you're going to pounce on it."

Akira relaxed his shoulders a bit and said, softly, "Shut up." He looked for a moment more, and then put out his hand to pat the cat on the head. Akira had the same breath-held-in excitement of a child trying to touch fire. The cat only looked on with its big eyes, but when Akira's hand descended on the cat's head and moved slightly forward and down to its nose, the cat moved sharply and dug its slim teeth into Akira's finger. Shirogane let out a surprised gasp, but Akira himself was silent. Taking up a last slice of salmon in its mouth, the cat dashed away like a bobbing orange rug and was gone.

Shirogane lifted Akira's hand to inspect the finger, a little surprised at the lack of resistance from Akira; he had thought Akira would immediately start to pull his hand away from him. The finger had bled only a bit, the blood gathered on the rim of the nail. Shirogane took out a tissue from his pocket, put it around the finger and applied a bit of pressure below the bitten part to force out any leftover blood, then used the tissue to wipe the finger clean. He crumpled it up and threw it over his shoulder, deciding that the garbage bin was near enough that it wouldn't matter even if it didn't go in.

Akira had been quiet for too long for it to be a good sign. "Akira-kun?" Shirogane said. He wondered if the boy was angry.

He had kept Akira's hand, palm up, clasped loosely in his own, and now the fingers of Akira's hand curled upwards, and Akira pulled his hand away. "It happens every time," Akira said, voice numb with incomprehension. Shirogane leaned back to watch him for a moment, then stood up and offered his hand to Akira. Akira ignored the hand and stood on his own, one hand gently stroking his bitten finger.

"Let's go home," Akira said.

…

They were quiet on the way back. Somehow, what had happened with the cat had left them both thoughtful. Shirogane opened the door as he had promised, holding the door open as Akira went in and kicked off his shoes. When they reached Akira's room, Akira merely stepped in front of the bed and allowed himself to fall across it. After a while, he dug his hands into the covers and pulled his feet up, curling up on the bed like a huge pampered cat. Shirogane sat on the floor by the side of the bed, watching Akira. He said tentatively, "Maybe cats really like you, Akira-kun."

Akira's shoulders stiffened visibly, and then he lifted his head over the blanket he was pulling around him and frowned at Shirogane, probably trying to judge if Shirogane was teasing him. He started moving around to find a more comfortable position. "What makes you say that?"

"Because when you get close to them, they try to bite you."

Akira stared at the ceiling of his room, hands laced behind his head and one leg carelessly crossed over the other, his eyes reflecting, chiefly, only the quality of light, stark gray or green or iron that had bled into blue. The soft brown strands of his hair flossed out in a messy mane over the pillow, partly falling over his ears and eyes.

"…That doesn't make any sense," Akira said.

"It does," Shirogane said. "They want to leave a mark after all. A mark of property."

Akira sat up slowly, the blanket pooling around him. When it didn't seem like he was going to say anything, Shirogane started to turn to lean his back on the side of the bed, and was surprised by Akira pulling at his braid. He allowed the back of his head to touch the bed, and Akira let go of the braid and crept closer.

Shirogane looked up for a moment at Akira's upside down face, a question waiting in his throat, and then the other leaned down and touched their lips together. Shirogane, mildly shocked at the soft resistance of the flesh of lips against his own, did not react. Akira opened his mouth, closed his mouth over Shirogane's lower lip, and ended the kiss in a rough nip. Then he straightened up.

"Um, Akira-kun," Shirogane said. "Why did you do that?"

"Shut up," Akira said. "That's for the door," he muttered less sharply when he noticed the look on Shirogane's face. His tone had the carefully adopted carelessness of a lie.

"Right," Shirogane said.

Akira threw himself back on the bed, also pulling the covers up to his chest with one hand. He gazed up at the ceiling, his eyes half closing. "When I died," Akira said, his voice thick with sleepy concentration, "I mean when this Ryuuko guy died, did you cry?"

Shirogane felt a needle prick of suspicion and pain. "Why do you ask?"

"I don't know," Akira said, too sleepy, it seemed, to be irritable. "Because you're making a weird face right now."

He didn't wait for Shirogane's answer. Akira simply closed his eyes.

Shirogane listened to Akira's breathing even out in sleep. He took off his glove and ran a bare finger lightly over his lips, stopping to press against the middle of his lower lip, which stung only slightly. He sighed. Pulled on the glove again. He won't even pretend that he understood.

End.

Author's End Note: