Disclaimer: The characters presented here are not mine and I am making no profit off of this whatsoever.
Title: Someone Who Understands
Romance: Asuka x Ryou
Timeline: This happens a few hours after episode fifteen of season one: the 'tennis episode'.
Notes: I wrote this for the 15pairings challenge on Livejournal. I will be writing fourteen other fanfics, each a different romance, for that challenge.

Asuka watched as the pebble drifted out of sight in the depths of the pool, leaving behind only several concentric rings that soon faded away just as the pebble itself had. Something like that would make a very pretty image for a Duel Monsters card. It probably had. Pegasus was an artist, and there was no doubt that he would have picked up on such beautiful imagery.

Ripples. Everything changing. She'd had to listen to lectures like that in school before. It hadn't made much of a difference to her when she had. She'd only marked time in all of her classes until she could get to the lessons that mattered: the ones about dueling.

Why couldn't anyone else actually seem to grasp that she meant it when she said she wasn't interested in someone? Did she have to come out and tell them that she was, as far as she was concerned, married to her dueling deck? She hadn't wanted to tell them all that so soon, if at all, but after all that Ayanokouji had done, she wondered if it might be necessary. Just so she could get a little peace, and not wonder and worry about people trying to intrude themselves into her life that way.

Dating was something other people did. It wasn't something that had ever caught her attention, not for as far back as she could remember. When other girls in her classes had been giggling over the cute boys, she'd been busy going through cards and dueling strategies. Even when she'd started puberty, none of that dating mess had ever appealed to her. It all seemed so juvenile.

The fact that Fubuki was in it up to his eyebrows hadn't really helped her opinion of it, either. As much as she loved him, anything that he liked that much tended to send her screaming in the opposite direction.

She dropped another pebble, wishing that there were someone or something around here that she could hit, just to vent all of her frustrations. It was all Ayanokouji's fault! If he'd just stayed away, she wouldn't have had to put up with this. No one had even thought about dating her around here, and she'd liked that just fine.

With a growl she slammed her fist into the dirt beside her. "Damn it!" Asuka seldom swore, but right now, those were the only words that were effective enough to convey what she was thinking. She would've used stronger ones, if they'd existed and had actually gotten the message across.

At least it was over now. Was it going to happen again? That, she didn't know. But at least for now, she'd made it clear that she wasn't interested.

"Would you mind some company?" Those words would have been grounds for a furious retort, if she hadn't recognized the voice they were spoken in almost at once.

"Sure, it's all right." She nodded a little towards Kaiser Ryou as he came towards her through the trees. There was a convenient boulder perched beside the small pool, where she usually sat herself, watching the clouds and the stars skitter overhead, and that was where he sat. Today she had taken up a position across from it, just staring down into the murky waters. "I didn't know you knew about this place."

As far as she knew, no one knew about it. It wasn't much; just a small clearing with that boulder and the pool, grass and trees and flowers. But she'd enjoyed it here so many times on her own.

"I used to come here myself, last year." Ryou's voice was, as always, quiet and firm, and she wondered if he'd meant after Fubuki's disappearance. Her fingers clenched briefly at the grass at the thought of her older brother. Were they ever going to find out what had happened to him?

Before she thought much about it, the words were out of her mouth. "Was it with my brother?"

"Sometimes. Not often. He preferred the ocean." Ryou replied. If he were upset about being asked, he showed no sign of it. "This place is quiet and out of the way of some of the more annoying aspects of the school."

She sighed a deep sigh. "People who can't take no for an answer."

"Yes." Ryou nodded briefly. Asuka hesitated for a moment, then pushed herself to her feet and came over to his side of the pool. He inched over, making way for her on the boulder, which was big enough for two if they were reasonably good friends.

He is my friend. My best friend, these days. He was the only one at the school that she knew of who knew about Fubuki. That didn't count the teachers, of course. But of the students, the ones who were in her year, no one knew. She hadn't told them, and there was no need to. This was her problem to deal with, and Ryou was the only one she could talk to about it. If he hadn't been Fubuki's friend…well, she didn't know what she would have done about his disappearance.

"You're thinking about him again." Ryou said. She only nodded; what else could she do? "He was looking forward to you coming here this year. He would be proud of you."

Asuka wasn't certain exactly why her heart shook a little at that statement. Fubuki would have…she didn't know how he would have handled this whole mess that had happened earlier. She might have even wanted to smack him for whatever he did. But at least he would have been there for her, and once he got it through his thick skull that she wasn't interested, he would've defended her right to be so.

In an effort to get herself under some kind of control, she focused her thoughts around Ryou. It was easier to think about him than about Fubuki. Fubuki roused up anything from grief to loneliness to anger to frustration. Ryou was different. Ryou, as cool and distant as he always was, meant only contentment when she was around him. She could talk to him about virtually anything, and he would simply listen and she knew that he understood.

Though Asuka wasn't interested in dating, she was a living human female, which meant she was fully aware of the fact that her friend was extraordinarily attractive. Fubuki had mentioned it to her after his first year at the Academy, when he had first met Ryou and had come home telling her all about this new 'smoking hot' guy that he'd met there. Sometimes she wondered about Fubuki. She wondered about him quite a bit.

But Ryou was no more interested in dating than she was. She all but laughed out loud at the very concept. The two of them, dating? It was absurd.

It wasn't all that bad just to sit here with him, both of them being more or less quiet, just watching the windborn waves as they rippled across the surface of the pool. Being together with him here or at the ocean or watching some of the duels, sometimes doing their homework together, when he would murmur a quiet word or two that made something in a lecture suddenly crystallize in her mind…that was better than dating. It was being friends.

You couldn't buy friends like him. She wouldn't have even if she could. Ryou was something special, something that glowed above everything else in the world. She knew without having to think about it that he would be magnificent, whatever it was he wound up doing with his life. She could only hope to achieve the heights that he would, that he already had. He was the Kaiser of the school, the unquestioned and unrivaled champion.

She shifted around a little, bracing herself on the boulder with one hand, the other resting on her lap as she lifted her head, staring now more across the clearing than into the pool. "We should probably go back sometime soon." There would be curfew to think about, and while Obelisk Blue students didn't have to worry about it as much as the Ra Yellow or Osiris Reds might, she still preferred to play by the rules.

"Yes." Ryou made no more move to get up than she did. He appeared to be as comfortable there with her as she was being with him. "Have you done your homework for the day?"

The faintest hint of a smile touched her lips. "Most of it. But there's still a few more things I could use some help with." He would never outright give her the answers, though he'd been through the same lectures and classes himself two years prior. Sometimes it was hard to believe that they weren't the same age. Was she too old mentally, or was there even a scrap of a chance that he could seem almost young? Was it another of those things that didn't matter? Some friendships surpassed ages.

"I'll help you, then," Ryou replied. Still, neither of them moved so much as an inch. At a slight sensation of warmth, she looked down to see his fingers ever so slowly touching hers. Their eyes met briefly, and she found herself smiling. Ryou's lips moved a touch, though she wouldn't go so far as to say it was a smile for him. But it was the ghost of one, and that was enough at the moment.

She turned away, looking back down into the pool, and picked up another stray pebble before dropping it into the water. "I wonder how deep that is," she mused, thinking in the back of her mind just how good his fingers felt on her hand, and wondering if he would take them off any time soon. This was so much different from anything that most people referred to as 'dating' that she didn't even put it in the same category. This was just her and Ryou, and what else could it be?

"I don't know. Fubuki kept talking about how we could find out one day." She sensed more words that he didn't say, but he didn't need to. With Fubuki gone, there had been no special trip to find out where it came from. It could have gone unvisited until she'd found it again.

I think he'd like that we were here. Deep down, she knew her brother had only wanted her to be happy, and if that meant dating or dueling, he would be behind her all the way. It would entail having to convince him of which one she really wanted, but that wouldn't take much more than a few hits to the head, and possibly a duel if she wanted to put it in the baldest terms she could think of.

Time crept by, as time had a habit of doing. Asuka was so used to the feeling of Ryou's fingers on hers that she almost didn't notice when he moved them away. "It's almost dinner time," he said, and her stomach rumbled almost on command at the thought. She pushed herself off of the boulder, brushing the dirt and grass from herself, and turned back towards the Academy. She suspected that some of the more dating obsessed girls were still going to tease her about what had happened. If she had to, she'd duel them to convince them to leave her alone. It was sometimes the only language they understood, though there were times when she doubted that much.

At least Ryou understood.

"Thanks, Ryou," she said. He hadn't said hardly a word about everything that had happened, but she felt better about it all just by the fact he'd come to talk with her, just to be with her. Of course, their day wasn't really over yet, and there was still plenty of time they could spend together. "I still have that homework to do," she reminded him with a faint smile. He only nodded, and they started back to the school, side by side.