Gemstone Eyes

A/N- Yay for 500 hits!! Tell your friends! Keep \'em coming people!! :) Hope everyone liked the double update, and domo arigatou to my darling reviewers. You know who you are... ;) I PROMISE the lemon is coming...normally my stories have it much faster...but this story has **gasp** plot! Read and enjoy!
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Yohji took a deep breath, feeling Aya’s body against his. Their faces were so close now, their noses touching barely. Yohji blinked and softly whispered, “Aya…” He was about to lean forward the last few centimeters and claim the redhead’s full, pale lips, when the door to the Koneko burst open.

The two men practically jumped to opposite sides of the room. Ken walked in grumpily, slamming a list down on the counter and wincing.

“Alright, Aya. I finished the…” he trailed off as he looked up. Yohji and Aya were both looking at him, eyes wide. They were as far apart as they could be, and at first glance Ken thought he had walked in on an argument. But as he took in the situation again, his opinion changed. Both assassins had a faint pinkish tinge to their cheeks and he could practically hear hearts pounding. They were carefully not looking at each other. The most damning evidence was that Yohji’s favorite coffee mug was sitting on the counter by Aya’s elbow. There’s no way it would have been there without Yohji. Ken looked at the two men again.

“I finished the deliveries, and I gotta take a piss. I’ll be back.” He ran to the bathroom and muffled his laughter in a towel. ‘I can’t wait until Omi gets back so I can tell him! I wish I knew exactly what I’d walked in on!’ He finished laughing and ran the water in the sink, scrubbing his face. He looked at himself in the mirror. ‘Well, it couldn’t have gotten very far, they’re both still fully dressed. Yohji wasn’t grinning like an idiot either. Maybe they were kissing, and I walked in and interrupted.’ Ken began to curse himself for his horrible sense of timing when he heard a knock on the bathroom door. Drying his face, he passed Aya on the way out.

Yohji was still in shock, sitting on the counter, when Ken walked back into the shop. The younger assassin hopped up beside him and propped a bandaged wrist on his shoulder.

“So, what happened?” Yohji looked at him and raised his eyebrows. Ken smirked. “Don’t even try it, Kudou.” He lowered his voice. “I figured it out already you know…that you’re in love with Aya.” Yohji winced at the word ‘love’, but didn’t break Ken’s gaze. The younger man continued. “I’d also had my suspicions that he felt more for you than he was admitting, even to himself. So what did I walk in on?”

Yohji looked down at his coffee mug. “I was teasing him, like I always do. ‘Sleep with me, Aya’ and all that stuff.” The brown haired man nodded. “He turned and made some comment I ignored.” Ken inwardly rolled his eyes. Yohji looked confused for a minute. “Then something changed…I was angry, then I wasn’t. Instead, I wanted to kiss him so bad, and he was so close…” The blonde locked eyes with Ken again. “He changed too…something in his eyes. They showed..hope. And a yearning I had only seen flashes of twice before. He let me get close, in fact it seemed like he wanted it just as much as I did. I almost…and then you walked in.” Ken sighed and beat himself in the head with a fist.

“Sorry Yohji…I had no clue.” The older man looked down at him and clapped him on the shoulder.

“Don’t worry about it. I’m gonna go get another cup of coffee. You want?” Ken shook his head and Yohji hopped off the counter and left. Soon after that, the object of their conversation entered. Ken looked at the redhead. Aya was going to be harder to break, but he hoped that by making the team leader talk, it would also make him think, and not allow him to push the incident out of his mind. He wanted his teammates happy.

“Oi, Aya.” He started. The assassin looked over at him, gemstone eyes carefully neutral. Ken constructed his method of attack. “Sorry I walked in on you and Yohji earlier. I didn’t know—“

“There was nothing to walk in on.” Ken raised his eyebrows, desperately wishing for the ability to arch only one. He hopped off the counter and came to stand by Aya, who had started on another arrangement.

“Really? Because I mean, the way you two acted when I came in, I thought you had been making out or something.” Aya shot him a glare and he heaved a sigh. “Alright then, set me straight. What happened?” Aya looked at him crossly.

“Nothing.” He hissed. “Now if you aren’t going to make yourself useful, at least leave me to work in peace.” At that point, Yohji entered with coffee, and upon seeing Aya, quickly averted his eyes. The blonde grabbed the list Aya had made for him, and began to go about the business of gathering materials for his first arrangement. Ken sighed unhappily and left. Fine then, he’d fight ice with fire. Omi ought to be able to get to Aya.



Aya looked over at Yohji. The other man was working diligently, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. Something deep inside of him smiled at the familiar image. He was surprised at the fondness for the blonde that welled up from somewhere inside himself. He scowled down at the lilies he was working with, his slender fingers adapting easily to the task. Having Yohji that close had made him lightheaded. His mind still reeled with emerald eyes and honey-blonde hair and the lips that had almost captured his. He suddenly wished it would happen again, and in his surprise almost bruised the stem of a lily. He tried to block the feeling out, but it would not be denied. Aya was disappointed that Ken had walked in and interrupted them when they had been so close…since when had Yohji begun to mean so much to him?


Yohji snapped the stem of a particularly delicate yellow rose he had been trying to fit into a nest of its brothers. “Kuso.” The soft curse sounded in the deathly quiet room. He couldn’t work like this. Normally he was just as good as Omi at these arrangements, even if nobody could beat Aya, but too much was on his mind right now, and too much tension was in his hands.

“I need a smoke,” he grumbled to the general area, and headed out the door, lighter already in hand. Aya watched him go before walking over and picking up the rose Yohji had discarded.



He sucked in the sweet, sweet nicotine and could already feel himself relaxing. The tall assassin leaned against the wall, taking another long drag on his cigarette before stumping it out in the ashtray and pulling another from the pack in his back pocket. What was he going to do about this? It had been so much easier before. Aya would never be interested in anything or anyone except Weiss and killing, so Yohji was living with unrequited love. That was fine. As long as there had been no chance, it had been fine. But now, everything was thrown into disarray. That look in Aya’s eyes haunted his memory. Those eyes had definitely been more than interested in the situation their owner was in. Yohji sighed and started in on his third cigarette. He always chain-smoked when Aya was concerned. Trying to think all of this through was going to cause a marathon, he could feel it.

Aya had wanted it. He knew Aya had wanted it. In that moment, even Aya had known he wanted it. But now, there was no way the frigid redhead would admit it. In fact, Yohji was pretty sure that if he tried to talk to the other man at the moment, he’d be answered with ice. The moment was gone, and Aya had probably blocked it by now, locked it tightly in some strongbox deep inside his mind that said ‘moments when Aya was human’, or something like that. It really hurt him to think that this had been his one and only chance. Because now that he knew that somewhere inside the ice, there was a man trapped and desperate for release, desperate for love, maybe even for the love of Yohji Kudou, there was no way he could ever go back to his relatively painless way of living before. He had to have what he had seen.


Omi arrived home from school with the fangirl rush. The first thing he noticed was the overflowing ashtray outside the shop. He arched an eyebrow at it and continued inside. Throwing his book bag on the couch in the kitchen-living room, he trotted through to the shop.

“Ohayo Aya-kun, Yohji-kun!” He was greeted by a nod and a smirk, respectively. Yohji was busy attending to a squirming mass of swooning fangirls.

“Oi Omi, did you have to bring so many beautiful friends of yours back with you? I don’t think I can choose just one!” He turned a dazzling smile on the girls, who squealed. Omi looked over at Aya just in time to see one fiery eyebrow twitch in irritation. Aya was scowling something fierce. He was about to ask him what was wrong when a brunette figure dashed in front of him, grabbed him by the arm, and dragged him away. Yohji turned to look at the two younger florists.

“Oi! Ken! Omi! Get back in here and help out, would you?!”

TBC.....

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~Tareacel