Thanks for all the answers ^_^ The award: a new update! 'glows with pride' :D :D
In the quiet, he listened to her secrets.
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Dokugamine Riruka is loud, brash and obnoxious. When she loves something, she loves it with all her heart and senses and voice range. When she loves something, she proclaims it on the top of her voice, lets everybody know of her newest obsession. There is never a quiet moment around her, be it because she has found something so unbearably cute or something so ugly and disgusting she simply has to inform everybody of it (namely, Yukio).
Truth is she hates silence.
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While being obnoxious, Yukio is nowhere near loud or brash. He is a quiet calculating beast that always waits for his opponent and strikes as viciously and silently as possible. That's why his company is one of the most successful in Japan. After all, what they say is true: the calmest waters are the most dangerous.
He hates the silence around him though.
Thanks to it, he hides so many things from the others, and after so much time spent hiding in the shadows like some kind of a beast, he wants to share his secrets, all that bad things he has done and to be forgiven. But he knows that no such thing can happen and simply sits in the corner of their common room.
The quiet continues to shadow him.
Needless to say, that means a lot of awkward silences around him. The only one he loosened up immediately to was Riruka and simply because she wouldn't stop talking and fangirling. He liked that: he got to be a child again, be as shallow as possible, insult her any given moment and make childish remarks about her everything that make her throw tantrums.
In the wake of their arguments, he got to be himself more than when he was making a business decision, more than when he was with his saviour Ginjo, or Jackie, or Tsukishima (whose silences were as terrifying as the calm before the end of the world).
He loved that (not her, though).
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One of the first times she and Yukio shared a moment where both of them weren't sprouting insults to each other, was definitely awkward.
Not the normal awkward, but the awkward awkward. The I-know-that-you-know-but-I'm-too-shy-and-I-know-you-are-too-so-there's-no-point-in-doing-this-but-the-universe-just-keeps-on-getting-us-together-along kind.
She had caught him unawares, in the common room, 7 o'clock in the morning, when no one else was up. She had had nightmares and he had stayed up all night under the pretext of playing games when he had actually made plans for another business negotiation.
She plopped down next to him, not even bothering to peek at what he was playing, too exhausted to even think. Her thick hair hung in tired ringlets she hadn't straightened yet, her eyes were obscured by shadows that resembled a panda's markings but weren't cute at all, and it was obvious to everyone that she was deprived of her beauty sleep (and what wasn't obvious for everyone except Yukio was that for once she didn't want to let the world know of that).
"Nightmares?"
She jumped and glanced at his small frame; he hadn't lifted his eyes from the game, but his body was half-turned to her, indicating some sort of concern and show of attention. Her left eyebrow rose.
A warmth rose in her half-asleep chest, but she ushered it away as soon as it was born.
Pfft. As if white-haired weird boy could show as stupid a thing as concern. Ha. What's the lack of sleep done to her?
"Mhmm."
"Try some milk - helps sometimes."
Quickly she stood up to do as he said; looked around in Giriko's countless cupboards, but all she could find was various bottles of alcohol. Curse those adults! Do they think only of alcohol?
She wandered about some more until finally finding some milk and a packet of chocolate chip cookies.
The seat next to Yukio was taken again as Riruka sat there, more carefully this time, with a steaming white mug and a dish full of cookie heaven in her hands. Without even asking, the tiny boy reached over, took one cookie and downed it in a second. She didn't bother to yell at him, just sipped at the soothing white liquid and nibbled at the cookies until she felt a weird kind of calm descend over her body. The clicking of his PSP only added to it, oddly lulling her but still keeping her sharp awake.
They spent the rest of the time not saying a word, she chewing her cookies carefully, him pressing buttons with various force, until, at 10 o'clock in the morning, they heard some weird sounds, coming from the other side of the room. They had glanced at it, then at each other and decided to erase the last few seconds from their minds.
Neither of them talked about that incident.
But Yukio wondered why he had cared enough to give her an advice. Riruka wondered why she had listened to him.
Both attributed it to the lack of sleep.
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She is manageable when she isn't rambling, he realises. Not only her voice doesn't annoy him, but also he feels he gets to know her more than when she talks (not that it's a good thing but it feels nice to be sure somebody isn't lying). Before now, she has been a riddle for him but now he feels she is a comfortable kind of transparent to him.
(She isn't like his parents who not only hid the truth from him but sucked at lying too. At least she doesn't bother to conceal anything from him.)
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After a few accidents like that (she doesn't call them 'incidents' anymore; they are accidents and accidents only), she realises something: she doesn't hate the silence. She is terrified of it. Terrified of all the things she lets slip when her mouth is shut, of the memory of all broken promises and of the quick beats of a young man's heart whose eyes had once shone with laughter but had darkened around her (she still saw him in her nightmares).
"The quiet scares me cause it speaks the truth."
Oh yeah, and she hates Yukio so much.
He already knows so many things without her confessing them.
Damn brat.
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The first time she isn't afraid of silences is when he kisses her. Because in that silence, they exchanged vows which, though frightening with their depth, were comforting in all their scariness.
(It isn't anything passionate, just a press of their lips, followed by their biggest argument ever. But the pink dusts her cheeks all day long and she giggles more often than usual.)
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I don't have to be the girl who has to fill the silence.