Disclaimer: I own nothing involved in this story unless I invented it myself. This is written for fun, not for profit. All forms of feedback eagerly accepted. Concrit is loved the most, but everything is welcome.
Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh GX
Title: In The Quiet Before
Romance: Ryou x Yuusuke
Word Count: 1,722||Status: One-shot
Genre: Friendship, Romance||Rated: G
Challenge: Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, section E55: write a pre-canon fic; Written for One Ship Boot Camp, #17, tissues.
Note: This takes place before Ryou, Yuusuke, & Fubuki's first year at DA. Summary: Anyone can catch a cold. Even the perfect duelist. How convenient that one of his friends is willing to stay with him.

Ryou closed his eyes and wrinkled his nose, trying with all of his might not to sneeze. He wasn't sick. He didn't have a cold. He wasn't going to sneeze at all.

Apparently being the perfect duelist didn't include the ability to lie to himself, since he held the sneeze back barely one more moment. He groaned and leaned his head against the pillows behind him. He hated being sick. It happened so rarely that he tended to forget it happened to him at all.

"Ryou?" Yuusuke's quiet voice and the soft brush of the other's hand against his brought his eyes open. There sat his friend, a worried tilt to his head and quirk to his lips. "Do you need a tissue?"

Ryou didn't even think about it and just nodded. He would've liked some sort of miracle cure, but since that hadn't yet been produced, he would settle for tissues.

"And some orange juice?" he asked, hating how his voice sounded so raw.

"Right." Yuusuke set the tissue in his hand and stepped out of the room, his footsteps fading away in a matter of moments.

Ryou dabbed at his nose a little before closing his eyes again. This cold sapped at his strength, taking away every bit of appetite that he had, and not letting him get out of bed. He didn't get sick often, but when he did, whatever hit him tended to make up for lost time.

Yuusuke and Fubuki took it in turns to take care of him right now. His parents had to work, or they would've been there instead, and he didn't want Shou to catch this. So his little brother was now spending most of his free time during the day over with one of his friends, Satomi Kai.

Frankly, Shou tended to be a worse patient than he was, which was the major reason Ryou didn't want him to catch this cold if he could find a way to avoid it. And Ryou knew quite well that he wasn't any saint at the moment.

He cracked open one eye when he heard Yuusuke's familiar footsteps coming back down the hall. A moment later he had a chilled cup of orange juice in his hands and he took a moment to enjoy the feel of it there before he took a sip.

"Anything else you need right now?" Yuusuke asked before he even looked at the seat he'd been sitting in before. Ryou shook his head; he would have to have lunch sooner or later, but it wasn't something he wanted to deal with at the moment.

Carefully he sipped at the juice, savoring it. He thought he was on the mend; he could at least string a paragraph's worth of sentences together and make something coherent out of them. Focusing enough to do that had been difficult the last couple of days. So it wouldn't be much longer before he'd be back to his full strength.

Yuusuke sat there in companionable silence, the soft shuffle of cards the only noise between the two of them. Every now and then he would glance up to one side, and if Ryou hadn't known better, he would've presumed that there was someone there. But no matter how hard he stared, he couldn't see anything.

This wasn't the first time he'd seen Yuusuke looking at thin air as if there really was something there. Once or twice he'd even caught him talking to it, though never loud enough for him to realize what the other was saying. At fifteen and about to enter high school, most people didn't bother with imaginary friends anymore.

But Ryou was a duelist and he knew quite well there was more to the game than just the cards. Just because he couldn't see them didn't mean he didn't know the spirits weren't there in the first place.

I wonder if I'll ever see them. He knew vaguely that they existed, but that was about it. He wanted to take classes involving them when they all reached Duel Academia and see what he could find out from there.

"Ryou?" Yuusuke once again pulled him from his own thoughts with just his voice. Ryou glanced toward him, finding it a little easier to focus than it had been before. Yuusuke lifted his deck. "Feel up to a duel? Tabletop, no disks."

That was just as well; Ryou couldn't be certain he had it in him to use a disk at the moment. But he pushed himself up a little more and reached for the deck that seldom left his side. He tried to duel at least once a day but since this cold laid him low, he'd lost a few days.

At least that wouldn't affect his getting into Duel Academia. Having graduated from the middle school at the top of his class made that a given.

He pulled as much of his focus on what was going on now as he could manage. Yuusuke wasn't a pushover when it came to dueling and Ryou wanted to give him every ounce of respect, and fight, that he could dredge up from himself.

As duels went, this wasn't one of the more exciting ones that he'd ever had. Yuusuke had refined his deck since the last time they'd fought one another, which gave it an extra bit of thrill since it provided for some new combos that he hadn't already made plans against. He had a few new ones in his own deck, but he somewhat missed not having the holograms there as well. One got rather used to them after long enough.

What made it not quite as exciting was the fact he couldn't raise his voice the way he preferred, not without stressing it more than he wanted to. If he even tried, Yuusuke gave him a large-eyed look that had him back down after only a few seconds.

Yuusuke quite probably was the only person in the world who could've done that and he would do as the other wanted. Not even his parents could back him down if he set himself on a course more often than not. Fubuki never even tried; mostly because he had yet to disapprove of anything either of them did in the first place.

But with or without holograms, with or without being able to declare his moves in the way he'd grown accustomed to, he hadn't been given the name of Kaiser in the last days of middle school for absolutely nothing. Even with Yuusuke's new combos, and even in the grip of a cold that he disliked above everything he could imagine, the duel ended more or less the way that he'd expected it to.

"Cyber End Dragon, attack," he said, imagining the metallic glory of his ace card from memory. That took out not just Honest, but the last of Yuusuke's life points as well.

"That was a good move. I didn't expect you to use Cybernetic Fusion Support like that," Yuusuke said as he gathered up his cards and tucked each of them back into the deck. His hand lingered on Honest, as it did most of the time. Given how much Yuusuke used him, Ryou suspected that if any card in Yuusuke's deck held a spirit, Honest was that card.

"I wasn't expecting that combo with Honest, either," Ryou replied, looking at where they'd kept the tally of life points. Yuusuke had managed to get him down to under a thousand before the cards fell in the favor Ryou needed them to. "You've been getting better."

Yuusuke's cheeks reddened the tiniest bit. Ryou did not hand out compliments very often. At least part of that was because, whether he liked to admit it to himself or not, he liked seeing Yuusuke's reaction when he did. It was so different from Fubuki, who lapped up praise like a cat would cream. Yuusuke never quite seemed to think that anything he did was worth the praise, no matter what.

I hope Duel Academia changes that for him. From everything his old teacher Samejima told him, it was that kind of place.

He wanted to say more to Yuusuke, but almost as soon as he put his deck back in the holder, another sneeze tickled at his nose. He'd managed to hold it off during the duel, but now it returned with a vengeance. He barely had time to grab for the tissue box, which Yuusuke shoved closer the moment he realized what was going on, before the sneeze shook him hard. He sighed deeply.

"You'll be well soon," Yuusuke promised. "Then you won't have to deal with this for another what… five or six years?" A small smile hovered at the corners of his lips. Ryou returned it; Yuusuke could make him smile as few others could.

"Something like that. I just hope that you don't catch this."

Yuusuke's eyebrows lifted for a single moment. "I'd stay with you even if I did. We're friends, aren't we?"

In days to come, Ryou wondered about the way Yuusuke phrased that. It sounded perfectly ordinary, but in light of events that had not yet come, he simply wondered.

For now, however, he reached out to touch the back of Yuusuke's hand with his own fingers. "Of course we are." He counted few people as friends. Yuusuke and Fubuki were two of them, and the two he cared the most about.

"You should probably take a nap," Yuusuke suggested, not taking his eyes off where Ryou's fingers rested. Ryou found his hand very warm. It took a small effort, probably legacy of the cold, to move his hand away.

"You're right," he said, though he kind of wished otherwise. Being sick simply took up too much of his energy to do much else. Perhaps he shouldn't have even had that duel. Being tired made him think strange things, like how warm Yuusuke's skin was and how comfortable he was with the other next to him.

He also blamed the cold for the dream he had of himself and Yuusuke walking into a darkness that wound them both together, closer than anything in the world. It wasn't a bad dream at all, but in the days to come, he thought upon that dream, and he wondered.

The End

Note: Thank you for reading and I hope that you enjoyed the story. Please let me know what you thought of it if at all possible. I also wrote this fic for BridgitKiido, as a birthday gift. She was one of the first Ryou x Yuusuke 'shippers with me, and I wouldn't 'ship it if it wasn't for her lovely Yuusuke RPing.