(no subject)
Fandom: Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town
Pairing: Kai/Rick
Theme Set: Epsilon
Rating: Towards the light end of PG-13
Disclaimer: I don't own 'em, and the people who do would probably be horrified. ^_^;;
Notes: This is the first time I've ever attempted yaoi that wasn't blatantly, blatantly canon, so please be kind. ^_^
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#01 - Motion
Kai can never stay in the same place for more than a season at a time before restlessness drives him on; Rick can never decide if it’s envy or pity or grudging admiration or disgust that he has for the guy.
#02 - Cool
Rick might be a jerk, but part of Kai wishes he had someone watching out for him like that.
#03 - Young
When Popuri bemoans to her mother that her brother and her good friend are always at each other’s throats, Lillia only laughs; they’re boys yet, sweetie, they’ll fight it out of their systems eventually and be fast friends forever afterwards - although, when is anybody’s guess.
#04 - Last
Rick has tried, again and again, to warn his sister that it won’t last, because it never lasts with a guy like that, because he likes women too much to commit to one woman; Popuri has never thought to try to explain to Rick that she doesn’t care if it lasts, because for now, it’s lots of fun to spend time with Kai, and that’s what summer should be about.
#05 - Wrong
Logically, Kai knows that they’re both to blame for this ongoing feud, but Rick just gets his back up and he always finds himself saying things to make it worse; Rick knows no such thing, because he has no use for slackers who waste their time and everyone else’s by flirting with anything wearing a dress.
#06 - Gentle
Even though he’s the one who caused it, shoving Kai sharply back to stumble and hit his head on the edge of the bench, Rick panics, kneeling first to make sure the other boy is still breathing before racing off for Zack’s help; Kai, who is not unconscious, only dazed, is surprised by the gentleness in the trembling fingers searching out a pulse.
#07 - One
Kai is the only person that Rick has ever hated; he’s also the only person that Rick thinks about every day, outside of his family.
#08 - Thousand
Trust Kai, Rick once said scornfully, to be obsessively fond of the most expensive crop you can grow - you only get two for a thousand; Yeah, Kai snorted when he got word of it, because he could buy two thirds of a chicken for that price!
#09 - King
When Rick angrily orders Kai, who has just slid onto the barstool next to his, to go away, Kai only smirks and asks, who died and made YOU King of Mineral Town?
#10 - Learn
Whenever Karen tells Rick bluntly that he should learn to get along with Kai because he’s upsetting his sister, Rick groans and asks Karen why she couldn’t just tell him to learn to breathe underwater - it would be easier.
#11 - Blur
This time, when Rick comes to the beach to yell at him, Kai grabs the other boy’s glasses in a swift and completely unexpected motion, and Rick can’t figure out why he doesn’t hate this laughing darkpurple blur the way he hates Kai.
#12 - Wait
When Kai came around the Poultry Farm to say good-bye to Popuri and Lillia before he left this year, he said it to Rick, too, and now Rick will have to wait until next summer to find out why.
#13 - Change
But a year of worrying and wondering when he has time doesn’t stop Rick’s skin from crawling with annoyance when Kai shows up again, flirting with every woman in sight, even Stu and Elli’s grandma, because sometimes things change, but most of the time they don’t.
#14 - Command
Still, he’s learned something from watching that irresponsible idiot put the moves on every girl in town, so this year, when he finds Popuri hanging around the beach when she’s got work to do, he asks nicely if she’ll come back home and help him; for his trouble, he gets Popuri fretting that he’s sick, and Kai anxiously advising him to go sleep it off.
#15 - Hold
Somewhere between lunging furiously at Kai and sprawling together to the sand, Rick’s glasses get knocked away, and when his lifelong enemy turns into that darkpurple blur again, he feels his anger evaporating, a death-grapple turns into rough-housing, and he finds himself laughing as Kai catches him in a surprisingly skilful wrestling hold.
#16 - Need
“The fact is,” Karen tells him after her third drink of the evening, swaying unsteadily on her barstool, “you need each other, because having a rival makes you want to improve yourself.”
#17 - Vision
Rick used to have a daydream, in which Kai would hastily leave Mineral Town amid the cheers of the townsfolk after promising never to come back; for some reason, he doesn’t think about it anymore.
#18 - Attention
“Geez, Rick,” Kai snorts when he catches the other boy hanging about the Beach Café, watching him, “if you paid half as much attention to Karen as you do to me, she’d be the luckiest girl in the world.”
#19 - Soul
One night, Kai overhears Rick declare no more loudly than someone with four beers in him has any right to be, that there’s no such thing as an afterlife, that when we’re dead, that’s the end of us; and he starts to understand why Rick can’t accept his father’s decision to spend his life looking for Lillia’s cure - if they’re both going to die someday anyway, they should spend all the time they have with the people they love.
#20 - Picture
Rick can’t understand why Kai still has that photo of the two of them and Popuri and Karen two summers ago, when Lillia and Sasha took at least a half dozen that day with only the girls, and only him and Karen, and only Kai and Popuri; Kai can’t understand why Rick thinks it’s strange.
#21 - Fool
Kai is nearly ready to admit that he’s been a bigger jerk by spurring this conflict on every summer just for fun, than Rick is by trying, genuinely if misguidedly, to look out for his baby sister.
#22 - Mad
But just because he’s been the bigger jerk doesn’t mean that Rick hasn’t acted like a nutcase.
#23 - Child
“You know, you’re not kids anymore,” Doug tells Kai disapprovingly one night after Rick has left in a huff - and taken his generous tips with him - because the dark-haired boy wouldn’t quit goading him.
#24 - Now
Rick doesn’t quite know why, when Kai showed up at the Poultry Farm one Sunday afternoon to see Popuri, he took a quick glance and then went about ignoring the intruder, but he thinks it might be the same reason that he just left instead of starting a fight at Doug’s Place last night.
#25 - Shadow
Tonight, it’s Kai’s turn to get drunk, and Rick listens, terribly uncomfortable and touched with sympathy, to the story of a young man leaving home to get out of his big brother’s shadow because no one ever took the time to notice him under there.
#26 - Goodbye
“Have fun with your aimless wandering this year, you lazy troublemaker,” Rick grumbles good-naturedly when Kai stops in at the Poultry Farm to say another goodbye.
#27 - Hide
“Sure thing; you have fun beating the guys away from Popuri with a nail-bat,” Kai rejoins before ducking quickly under a table, and it’s just another reflection of how things have changed this summer when Rick’s half-grudging chuckle joins Popuri’s trilling giggle and Lillia’s soft, gentle laugh.
#28 - Fortune
Really, it’s just the way the world works, that Rick watches enviously as Kai leaves town without a second thought to anyone or anything, while Kai peeks over his shoulder at Rick and Popuri supporting Lillia as they all wave goodbye from the farm gate, the closeness and warm easy love between them clear to any onlooker - each boy thinking, that lucky bastard.
#29 - Safe
Maybe that’s part of why Kai comes back to Mineral Town every summer - there are things like that, that never change no matter what else in his life might, and there’s something nice about that that.
#30 - Ghost
One night, Kai learns the hard way that Rick believes in ghosts when he’s drunk, and walks the trembling shaggy-haired boy back to the Poultry farm, trying not to turn bright red at the way he’s clinging.
#31 - Book
A few days later, Rick learns by accident that Kai doesn’t just read romance novels for research, when he finds the boy too engrossed in Heart of Ice, Eyes of Flame to hear his approach, and it’s really kind of lucky, because now they both have dirt on each other.
#32 - Eye
Rick’s gotten to the point that he can mumble an apology while looking at a spot on the horizon behind Kai’s head, and part of Kai wonders how long it’ll be before Rick can look him in the eye when he says it.
#33 - Never
“I don’t get it; Kai never comes to see me anymore,” Popuri wails, distressed, one day, and Rick thinks it’s kind of weird, because Kai was here just the other day, wasn’t he?
#34 - Sing
Even though he’s not as good as his girlfriend, Kai still stops in astonishment and listens avidly when he finds Rick humming an old, familiar hymn as he goes about his work - although, that might just be the novelty of hearing the guy make a noise that isn’t yelling.
#35 - Sudden
Rick wishes he could say it happened out of nowhere, Kai’s hands finding the sides of his face and Kai’s lips finding his for a brief second in the middle of a bout of rough-housing on the beach, but when he sees Karen and Popuri watching in thinly-veiled amused delight and Zack rolling his eyes in completely unsurprised disgust, he knows it’s been coming for a while.
#36 - Stop
Neither of them knows if it would be better to take one step backwards to friends now, or if it has to be several steps backwards into enemies, so they just don’t talk anymore at all.
#37 - Time
When Kai finds a carefully, clumsily wrapped little box on the bench next to his café, and opens it to find an old watch given to an adoring son by a father who couldn’t live up to such adoration forever, he takes it as a sign and makes up his mind to wait for Rick by the bar tonight.
#38 - Wash
“You know, if you’d wash your hair once in a while, you wouldn’t always have to wear that bandana,” Rick told Kai one day when he saw him about to collapse from the heat; to which Kai replied plaintively, “But if I didn’t wear the bandana, I’d have to wash my hair!”
#39 - Torn
For the first time, Kai has to think really hard about whether he wants to leave Mineral Town come autumn or not.
#40 - History
When Karen asks bluntly and for his own good what’s going on with him and Kai now, Rick just shrugs sulkily and replies that they’re friends who kissed once - hell, that’s what Mary and Elli are; and now Karen looks like she’s trying to decide whether to hit the Library of the Clinic for the full story, or whether she’s happier not knowing.
#41 - Power
It’s weird, Rick thinks through a cloud of dull misery at the baffled hurt in Kai’s expression when an attempt at a goodbye-hug was brusquely pushed off, that just as soon as he gained the power to hurt the guy, he stopped wanting it.
#42 - Bother
Kai isn’t completely aware of the grin spreading over his face as he rereads the gruff, awkward lines, and then pulls out a fresh sheet of paper to scribble his reply: Hey, Rick; sure, I’ll come for Starry Night Festival, if you’re sure it’s not too much trouble for you three.
#43 - God
The Festival is something special that year, because Rick is too busy exchanging good-natured barbs with Kai to pick on his sister, and Popuri’s laugh mingles with her mother’s just as beautiful, and Rick wonders if this is what people mean when they can feel God’s presence - this feeling that you could just stay in this moment forever because you can’t imagine any other one being half as good.
#44 - Wall
Just as the four of them are about to go to sleep the next evening, Popuri scurries away and returns with a grey wool stocking, and explains very gravely to Kai that Rick went over a few days ago and asked Ellen to make this because he didn’t want their guest to be left out, even if they can’t hang it up on the wall because there are only three hooks.
#45 - Naked
When he accidentally catches Rick stepping out of the shower, Kai forgets for several moments that he shouldn’t be embarrassed and fascinated and nervous and excited, that he should be as unconcerned as Rick, who’s asking him to toss a guy a towel, since you’re here anyway, because they’re both guys, after all.
#46 - Drive
With a tiny little smile that ages her instantly to her age and older, partly wistful and partly glad that they’re happy, Popuri slips quietly out of the room to leave her big brother and her good friend alone to watch their silly racing show.
#47 - Harm
Rick gravely agrees with Karen’s candid warning and Lillia’s gentle one, that he and Kai ought to be a little less blatant about it, because not everyone will be so happy for them; Kai simply scoffs and asks, who’s it hurting?
#48 - Precious
After a summer that has come and gone far faster than he wanted it to, Kai begins the packing he’s put off for as long as possible and wonders with a chuckle why he feels like he’s leaving something very precious unguarded - who’d have thought he’d be the protective one?
#49 - Hunger
He knows he’s got to be up to leave early, so Kai purposely avoids any plans that evening, until Rick asks him with something new and a little scary in those eyes that are so nice when they’re not glaring, if he wants to go for a walk.
#50 - Believe
When Rick finally tells Kai what he’s wanted to for ages now, Kai just scoffs and orders Rick to stop playing around, or he’s going home; so with a tiny grin that’s partly playful and partly terrified, Rick decides to convince him the only way he knows how.
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Pairing: Kai/Rick
Theme Set: Epsilon
Rating: Towards the light end of PG-13
Disclaimer: I don't own 'em, and the people who do would probably be horrified. ^_^;;
Notes: This is the first time I've ever attempted yaoi that wasn't blatantly, blatantly canon, so please be kind. ^_^
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#01 - Motion
Kai can never stay in the same place for more than a season at a time before restlessness drives him on; Rick can never decide if it’s envy or pity or grudging admiration or disgust that he has for the guy.
#02 - Cool
Rick might be a jerk, but part of Kai wishes he had someone watching out for him like that.
#03 - Young
When Popuri bemoans to her mother that her brother and her good friend are always at each other’s throats, Lillia only laughs; they’re boys yet, sweetie, they’ll fight it out of their systems eventually and be fast friends forever afterwards - although, when is anybody’s guess.
#04 - Last
Rick has tried, again and again, to warn his sister that it won’t last, because it never lasts with a guy like that, because he likes women too much to commit to one woman; Popuri has never thought to try to explain to Rick that she doesn’t care if it lasts, because for now, it’s lots of fun to spend time with Kai, and that’s what summer should be about.
#05 - Wrong
Logically, Kai knows that they’re both to blame for this ongoing feud, but Rick just gets his back up and he always finds himself saying things to make it worse; Rick knows no such thing, because he has no use for slackers who waste their time and everyone else’s by flirting with anything wearing a dress.
#06 - Gentle
Even though he’s the one who caused it, shoving Kai sharply back to stumble and hit his head on the edge of the bench, Rick panics, kneeling first to make sure the other boy is still breathing before racing off for Zack’s help; Kai, who is not unconscious, only dazed, is surprised by the gentleness in the trembling fingers searching out a pulse.
#07 - One
Kai is the only person that Rick has ever hated; he’s also the only person that Rick thinks about every day, outside of his family.
#08 - Thousand
Trust Kai, Rick once said scornfully, to be obsessively fond of the most expensive crop you can grow - you only get two for a thousand; Yeah, Kai snorted when he got word of it, because he could buy two thirds of a chicken for that price!
#09 - King
When Rick angrily orders Kai, who has just slid onto the barstool next to his, to go away, Kai only smirks and asks, who died and made YOU King of Mineral Town?
#10 - Learn
Whenever Karen tells Rick bluntly that he should learn to get along with Kai because he’s upsetting his sister, Rick groans and asks Karen why she couldn’t just tell him to learn to breathe underwater - it would be easier.
#11 - Blur
This time, when Rick comes to the beach to yell at him, Kai grabs the other boy’s glasses in a swift and completely unexpected motion, and Rick can’t figure out why he doesn’t hate this laughing darkpurple blur the way he hates Kai.
#12 - Wait
When Kai came around the Poultry Farm to say good-bye to Popuri and Lillia before he left this year, he said it to Rick, too, and now Rick will have to wait until next summer to find out why.
#13 - Change
But a year of worrying and wondering when he has time doesn’t stop Rick’s skin from crawling with annoyance when Kai shows up again, flirting with every woman in sight, even Stu and Elli’s grandma, because sometimes things change, but most of the time they don’t.
#14 - Command
Still, he’s learned something from watching that irresponsible idiot put the moves on every girl in town, so this year, when he finds Popuri hanging around the beach when she’s got work to do, he asks nicely if she’ll come back home and help him; for his trouble, he gets Popuri fretting that he’s sick, and Kai anxiously advising him to go sleep it off.
#15 - Hold
Somewhere between lunging furiously at Kai and sprawling together to the sand, Rick’s glasses get knocked away, and when his lifelong enemy turns into that darkpurple blur again, he feels his anger evaporating, a death-grapple turns into rough-housing, and he finds himself laughing as Kai catches him in a surprisingly skilful wrestling hold.
#16 - Need
“The fact is,” Karen tells him after her third drink of the evening, swaying unsteadily on her barstool, “you need each other, because having a rival makes you want to improve yourself.”
#17 - Vision
Rick used to have a daydream, in which Kai would hastily leave Mineral Town amid the cheers of the townsfolk after promising never to come back; for some reason, he doesn’t think about it anymore.
#18 - Attention
“Geez, Rick,” Kai snorts when he catches the other boy hanging about the Beach Café, watching him, “if you paid half as much attention to Karen as you do to me, she’d be the luckiest girl in the world.”
#19 - Soul
One night, Kai overhears Rick declare no more loudly than someone with four beers in him has any right to be, that there’s no such thing as an afterlife, that when we’re dead, that’s the end of us; and he starts to understand why Rick can’t accept his father’s decision to spend his life looking for Lillia’s cure - if they’re both going to die someday anyway, they should spend all the time they have with the people they love.
#20 - Picture
Rick can’t understand why Kai still has that photo of the two of them and Popuri and Karen two summers ago, when Lillia and Sasha took at least a half dozen that day with only the girls, and only him and Karen, and only Kai and Popuri; Kai can’t understand why Rick thinks it’s strange.
#21 - Fool
Kai is nearly ready to admit that he’s been a bigger jerk by spurring this conflict on every summer just for fun, than Rick is by trying, genuinely if misguidedly, to look out for his baby sister.
#22 - Mad
But just because he’s been the bigger jerk doesn’t mean that Rick hasn’t acted like a nutcase.
#23 - Child
“You know, you’re not kids anymore,” Doug tells Kai disapprovingly one night after Rick has left in a huff - and taken his generous tips with him - because the dark-haired boy wouldn’t quit goading him.
#24 - Now
Rick doesn’t quite know why, when Kai showed up at the Poultry Farm one Sunday afternoon to see Popuri, he took a quick glance and then went about ignoring the intruder, but he thinks it might be the same reason that he just left instead of starting a fight at Doug’s Place last night.
#25 - Shadow
Tonight, it’s Kai’s turn to get drunk, and Rick listens, terribly uncomfortable and touched with sympathy, to the story of a young man leaving home to get out of his big brother’s shadow because no one ever took the time to notice him under there.
#26 - Goodbye
“Have fun with your aimless wandering this year, you lazy troublemaker,” Rick grumbles good-naturedly when Kai stops in at the Poultry Farm to say another goodbye.
#27 - Hide
“Sure thing; you have fun beating the guys away from Popuri with a nail-bat,” Kai rejoins before ducking quickly under a table, and it’s just another reflection of how things have changed this summer when Rick’s half-grudging chuckle joins Popuri’s trilling giggle and Lillia’s soft, gentle laugh.
#28 - Fortune
Really, it’s just the way the world works, that Rick watches enviously as Kai leaves town without a second thought to anyone or anything, while Kai peeks over his shoulder at Rick and Popuri supporting Lillia as they all wave goodbye from the farm gate, the closeness and warm easy love between them clear to any onlooker - each boy thinking, that lucky bastard.
#29 - Safe
Maybe that’s part of why Kai comes back to Mineral Town every summer - there are things like that, that never change no matter what else in his life might, and there’s something nice about that that.
#30 - Ghost
One night, Kai learns the hard way that Rick believes in ghosts when he’s drunk, and walks the trembling shaggy-haired boy back to the Poultry farm, trying not to turn bright red at the way he’s clinging.
#31 - Book
A few days later, Rick learns by accident that Kai doesn’t just read romance novels for research, when he finds the boy too engrossed in Heart of Ice, Eyes of Flame to hear his approach, and it’s really kind of lucky, because now they both have dirt on each other.
#32 - Eye
Rick’s gotten to the point that he can mumble an apology while looking at a spot on the horizon behind Kai’s head, and part of Kai wonders how long it’ll be before Rick can look him in the eye when he says it.
#33 - Never
“I don’t get it; Kai never comes to see me anymore,” Popuri wails, distressed, one day, and Rick thinks it’s kind of weird, because Kai was here just the other day, wasn’t he?
#34 - Sing
Even though he’s not as good as his girlfriend, Kai still stops in astonishment and listens avidly when he finds Rick humming an old, familiar hymn as he goes about his work - although, that might just be the novelty of hearing the guy make a noise that isn’t yelling.
#35 - Sudden
Rick wishes he could say it happened out of nowhere, Kai’s hands finding the sides of his face and Kai’s lips finding his for a brief second in the middle of a bout of rough-housing on the beach, but when he sees Karen and Popuri watching in thinly-veiled amused delight and Zack rolling his eyes in completely unsurprised disgust, he knows it’s been coming for a while.
#36 - Stop
Neither of them knows if it would be better to take one step backwards to friends now, or if it has to be several steps backwards into enemies, so they just don’t talk anymore at all.
#37 - Time
When Kai finds a carefully, clumsily wrapped little box on the bench next to his café, and opens it to find an old watch given to an adoring son by a father who couldn’t live up to such adoration forever, he takes it as a sign and makes up his mind to wait for Rick by the bar tonight.
#38 - Wash
“You know, if you’d wash your hair once in a while, you wouldn’t always have to wear that bandana,” Rick told Kai one day when he saw him about to collapse from the heat; to which Kai replied plaintively, “But if I didn’t wear the bandana, I’d have to wash my hair!”
#39 - Torn
For the first time, Kai has to think really hard about whether he wants to leave Mineral Town come autumn or not.
#40 - History
When Karen asks bluntly and for his own good what’s going on with him and Kai now, Rick just shrugs sulkily and replies that they’re friends who kissed once - hell, that’s what Mary and Elli are; and now Karen looks like she’s trying to decide whether to hit the Library of the Clinic for the full story, or whether she’s happier not knowing.
#41 - Power
It’s weird, Rick thinks through a cloud of dull misery at the baffled hurt in Kai’s expression when an attempt at a goodbye-hug was brusquely pushed off, that just as soon as he gained the power to hurt the guy, he stopped wanting it.
#42 - Bother
Kai isn’t completely aware of the grin spreading over his face as he rereads the gruff, awkward lines, and then pulls out a fresh sheet of paper to scribble his reply: Hey, Rick; sure, I’ll come for Starry Night Festival, if you’re sure it’s not too much trouble for you three.
#43 - God
The Festival is something special that year, because Rick is too busy exchanging good-natured barbs with Kai to pick on his sister, and Popuri’s laugh mingles with her mother’s just as beautiful, and Rick wonders if this is what people mean when they can feel God’s presence - this feeling that you could just stay in this moment forever because you can’t imagine any other one being half as good.
#44 - Wall
Just as the four of them are about to go to sleep the next evening, Popuri scurries away and returns with a grey wool stocking, and explains very gravely to Kai that Rick went over a few days ago and asked Ellen to make this because he didn’t want their guest to be left out, even if they can’t hang it up on the wall because there are only three hooks.
#45 - Naked
When he accidentally catches Rick stepping out of the shower, Kai forgets for several moments that he shouldn’t be embarrassed and fascinated and nervous and excited, that he should be as unconcerned as Rick, who’s asking him to toss a guy a towel, since you’re here anyway, because they’re both guys, after all.
#46 - Drive
With a tiny little smile that ages her instantly to her age and older, partly wistful and partly glad that they’re happy, Popuri slips quietly out of the room to leave her big brother and her good friend alone to watch their silly racing show.
#47 - Harm
Rick gravely agrees with Karen’s candid warning and Lillia’s gentle one, that he and Kai ought to be a little less blatant about it, because not everyone will be so happy for them; Kai simply scoffs and asks, who’s it hurting?
#48 - Precious
After a summer that has come and gone far faster than he wanted it to, Kai begins the packing he’s put off for as long as possible and wonders with a chuckle why he feels like he’s leaving something very precious unguarded - who’d have thought he’d be the protective one?
#49 - Hunger
He knows he’s got to be up to leave early, so Kai purposely avoids any plans that evening, until Rick asks him with something new and a little scary in those eyes that are so nice when they’re not glaring, if he wants to go for a walk.
#50 - Believe
When Rick finally tells Kai what he’s wanted to for ages now, Kai just scoffs and orders Rick to stop playing around, or he’s going home; so with a tiny grin that’s partly playful and partly terrified, Rick decides to convince him the only way he knows how.
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