Gensomaden Saiyuki Fan Fiction ❯ Stay ❯ Chapter 1

DISCLAIMERS: All things Saiyuki belong to Kazuya Minekura/Epix, Saiyuki Project, TV Tokyo, and A.D. Vision, Inc. No infringement intended.

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"Stay"
By Viridian5
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"Home again," I called out cheerfully.

"Hi," Green Eyes said, smiling a little. "There are leftovers.... You're back early."

"They were boring me." They'd always bored me. I just never had anything better waiting at home before. "You don't have to--"

"I'm closest. It's no trouble to heat this up for you."

Everything was "no trouble" for Green Eyes. Maybe he felt like he had to pay me back for the doctoring and the place to stay. My place had never been so clean in its life, and it turned out that the counter wasn't actually brown. All right, so it hadn't been cleaning so much as excavating.... Green Eyes would probably make dinner so it would be waiting hot for me when I got home if I'd ever told him when exactly I'd be home. No trouble for somebody who wasn't supposed to leave the house or do anything strenuous for fear that his healing guts might pop out. "What else do I have to do?" he answers, though I leave him books.

He was good company, though a little quiet. Smart, but not too aggressive and off-putting about it like some educated guys were. I felt comfortable around him.

It was almost like having a wife. No sex, though. If he were a woman, he'd be perfect.

If he were a woman, I would have fucked him already, and he'd be gone now.

The guys at my hangouts made comments about how they'd always known I was a sucker for a pretty face, but they hadn't known it could be on a guy too. I didn't bother protesting much, since protesting much was like a goad to them, and the girls had been making an extra effort to "win me back" lately, which I didn't fight at all. Except for those times when the girls made an extra-special effort to win me back--heh--I preferred to be home lately anyway.

I couldn't tell them that I'd decided to take a stranger into my home for a month because he'd looked at me and smiled before passing out into a coma. They'd think I was nuts. I think I'm nuts. I couldn't explain it to myself, and I didn't want to bother explaining it to them.

If I didn't have to play cards to support myself, I might not go out at all.

Green Eyes whipped me at cards almost every single time. I had no idea how he did it.

I had no idea what his name was either, or why he'd been lying in my path with his guts hanging out that night. I hadn't asked, and he hadn't volunteered. I had to start calling him something while he was lying in my bed getting better, and I'd started with "That Guy." Once he opened his one, unbandaged eye, he became "Green Eye." Lately, with both pretty eyes uncovered, he'd become "Green Eyes."

I was so glad that I'd never slipped up by calling him any of these things to his face. Though it might amuse him to hear them.

Things had become a bit tense between us lately. Not like we fought--Green Eyes never even raised his voice--but I felt a kind of charge. He was waiting. Waiting to be well. Waiting to leave. Probably waiting for me to ask him who and what he was and where he'd come from. It must be hell to live waiting like that all the time.

I didn't think he was a serial killer. He had plenty of opportunities to kill me over the last few weeks.

It felt tense right now as I ate the food he'd cooked and warmed up for me, so I said, "I won't ask." I sounded brain dead. Just out of nowhere, right?

But he seemed to get it, because he smiled. He had a great smile that brightened his whole face.

To diffuse the moment a bit, I asked, "After I eat, you wanna whip me at cards again?"

Something a little dark showed up in his smile. Green Eyes had something dark inside eating him, not that he ever gave me more than a glimpse of it. "Would you like to play for money?" he asked, obviously kidding me.

"Do I look suicidal?"

I wouldn't ask him anything about himself that he didn't want to give me himself. Because I knew that if I asked, he'd leave sooner.