"Okay," Yuki Eiri said to himself as he loomed threateningly over his laptop, "I am going to write a chapter. Starting right now."

The apartment was blissfully quiet, since the brat was on tour in Kyoto. Shuichi had been his usual whiny mess when the tour was announced, but Yuki had pointed out firmly that it was a deadline week for him anyway, and he would need the peace and quiet. He had managed to take care of himself for nearly three decades before Shuichi came along, thank you very much.

The apartment was also spotlessly clean, since Yuki had spent the whole morning tidying up rather than writing. But now it was getting dark, and Yuki really needed to get serious, because the rest of this novel was due by Friday, and he was stalled on page 197 with a half-dressed main character who was showing no interest in the completely naked other main character inhabiting his bed.

"Right now," Yuki repeated. "Any time now..."

He glared at his fingers, but they refused to finish his novel. Or really, do anything but idly rub at that weird slick spot on the space bar where his right thumb always rested.

Sighing, Yuki reached for his mug of tea, and nearly spilled it all over himself when his phone began to shrill 'Predilection'. Setting down his tea with a thump, Yuki fished the phone out of his shirt pocket and jabbed the button.

"YUKI!"

"Dammit, brat!" Yuki slumped back in his chair and put a hand over his forehead. "What did I tell you about changing my ring tone?"

"No more shite pop," Shuichi answered dutifully. "But Yuki..."

"Save it," Yuki cut him off, sitting back up. "What do you want?"

"I miss you, Yuki!"

"Keh." Yuki figured it was safe to let the corner of his mouth curve up just a little, since the brat was miles away.

"Yuki, are you smiling? You are, aren't you? Yuuuki!"

Son of a bitch. "Tell me about your concert. Did they kick you out for being a zero talent hack?"

"Oi, don't be mean." Shuichi pouted audibly for about a tenth of a second. "We played in this huge garden, it was so beautiful, all reds and purples and we thought it was going to rain at first..."

"Uh-huh." Yuki sat up a little more and tapped a few keys on his keyboard idly.

"...and there was nearly a riot, but then Hiro took off his shirt..."

"Hunh." Shifting the phone over so that he was holding it between his ear and shoulder, Yuki put both hands on the keyboard and wrote a sentence or two.

"...and then K said 'It's a good thing I brought my big game rifle, ha HA' and Sakano..."

"Nuh." Suddenly the plot hole didn't seem as gaping, and there just might be a way to get these idiots to do what he wanted, and the big problem in chapter ten could definitely be fixed by adding in a long-lost brother...sister? Cross-dressing sibling...

"Oh, Sakano's starting to cry, that means I have to go!"

"Eh?" Yuki snapped out of his reverie, fingers stilling on the keys.

"I love you, Yuki! Bye bye!"

Reaching up to take the phone from his ear, Yuki winced as he tried to roll his neck, then paused as he saw the call duration blinking on the cell's screen. How in the hell had that idiot managed to blather on about absolutely nothing for forty-seven minutes?

Yuki set the phone aside and turned back to the laptop, squinting at the screen to reread the last few sentences. He tried to go back to writing, but his flow had been completely interrupted, and why the hell did he have a cross-dressing sibling in here?

"Ten pages is good enough for one sitting," he announced, then got up to make more tea.

********

By ten o'clock the next night, Yuki had written exactly seventeen more words, although the last one wasn't really a word so much as a long string of J's from when the key had gotten stuck.

They looked kind of nice, all in a row like that, and Yuki was thinking about keeping them there.

'Predilection' began chirping in his pocket again, and Yuki knew that he should really ignore it because he had to write goddammit, but then again, if he didn't answer Shuichi would just keep calling and calling and calling and calling...

"Yeah?" he said into the phone.

"Yuki! Yuki Yuki Yuki!"

"Shouldn't you be at some post-concert orgy or something instead of bothering me?" Yuki demanded. Oh, he definitely shouldn't have said that, because he could just imagine Shuichi in that tight, shiny getup he wore on-stage, or rather half out of it, sweaty and flushed and voice hoarse...

"Are you trying to talk me into cheating on you?" Shuichi wailed into the phone.

"If only," Yuki snorted, trying very hard not to imagine the way Shuichi's lower lip stuck out when he pouted. "If you had a lot of practice, you might come back a half-decent lover."

"Yuuuuuki!" There was some rustling in the background that was clearly clothing being shuffled off, and Yuki swallowed hard. "You're so mean! And you'd better not be even thinking about cheating on me!"

"Relax," Yuki balanced the phone between his shoulder and ear and drummed his fingers on his keyboard. "I've told you you're the only one I'll come inside of."

"Couldn't you try to be just a little romantic instead of saying it like that?" Shuichi sighed, but his tone was affectionate. "But guess what? Our concert tonight got pushed back to tomorrow because of the rain so I can talk to you for hours! And besides, they lost our opening act."

"What do you mean, lost?" Yuki asked absently, suddenly remembering something he had wanted to put into this scene. He started typing it in so he wouldn't forget what he was doing again like yesterday.

"Well, it's kind of a long story, but K said he just stopped by to see how their practice was going…"

Yuki rolled his eyes but didn't stop typing. It was a good thing the brat never blathered on about anything actually important, because Yuki could feel the story building up behind his fingertips again, finally, and he saw a glimmer of hope that this novel might get finished on time.

He had completely lost track of time by the time Shuichi had run through several other long and winding stories besides the tale of K and the vanful of abducted boyband members. Shuichi's voice had become a background hum as his novel poured out onto his laptop keyboard, plot holes sealing themselves and characters doing his bidding.

He paused when another small snag popped up, only to have it dawn on him that the other end of the phone was silent.

"Brat?" There was only silence for another few seconds, then a huge yawn.

"Yuki?" Shuichi's voice sounded rough and sleepy. "Sorry, Yuki, I must have fallen asleep. M'gonna go, okay?"

"Yeah, sure sure." Yuki reached up to put a hand on the phone and winced when his neck cracked loudly. "I'll be working all day tomorrow, so don't bother calling."

"I love you too, Yuki." Shuichi yawned again, and then the connection dropped with a beep.

Setting down the phone, Yuki rolled his shoulders a few times and put his hands back on the keyboard, but absolutely nothing happened. He forced out another couple pages, but they were nowhere near as good as what he'd been typing before the end of the phone call, and Yuki knew it.

At exactly 4:37 AM, Yuki Eiri realized that he was royally fucked.

********

"Just another few days," Yuki said into the phone, as close to begging as he was ever going to get. In three more days Shuichi would be home, blathering on about his tour like a runaway train, and then Yuki would be able to write all the smut Kanna wanted.

"Absolutely not, Eiri," Kanna replied. "You do this every time. If I give you a few more days, then you'll want a week, then two weeks, then you'll be in violation of your contract, again, and then we'll both get fired."

"This is different!" Yuki protested. The afternoon sunlight streaming in his bedroom window through the crack in his curtains was giving him a pounding headache, and Yuki threw an arm over his eyes.

"Isn't it always?" Kanna's voice held a definite edge of amusement, and Yuki ground his teeth. "That manuscript is going to be in my hands tomorrow morning, or your neck is."

"Kanna, you don't understand!" Yuki barked.

"And don't you even think about skipping town again, you bastard," Kanna said sweetly before hanging up on him.

"Fuck," Yuki moaned, sitting up on the edge of his bed and rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.

He had twenty hours to write three more chapters, and only one possible solution.

He was going to need a lot of coffee for this.

A half-hour later, Yuki sat down in his office chair, woke up his laptop, and slid his cell phone out of his pocket. In his other hand he held the headset that had come with his cell but he had never learned to use.

No time like the present.

Clipping the headset to his ear and adjusting the microphone against his cheek, Yuki plugged the headset into his phone and said a little prayer that Tatsuha often used on such occasions.

"Holy fucking god, I can't believe I'm doing this."

Two rings into the phone call, Yuki nearly hung up, but due to the curse of modern technology, Shuichi's phone would have recorded his number anyway.

"Yuki?" Shuichi picked up after the third ring. "What's wrong? Are you dying?!"

"No." Yuki sat the phone down on the desk and twiddled with the earpiece a little.

"Is the apartment on fire? Has there been a tsunami?!" Yuki heard some noise in the background, and then the low murmur of Hiro's voice, followed by Shuichi's slightly muffled, "I think Tokyo is being invaded by aliens!"

"Shut up!" Yuki barked into the phone. "Nothing is wrong! The apartment is fine! Tokyo is fine! I am fine! Everything is absolutely fine!"

"Oh, okay," Shuichi said after a stunned moment. "But…why are you calling, then?"

This is the worst idea ever, said a voice in Yuki's head, which sounded disturbingly like Tohma. You're only giving in to the insanity! You managed to write novel after novel on your own before him!

"That was before," Yuki grunted, only realized he'd spoken out loud when Shuichi asked again if he was feeling okay. "I need you to talk."

"Talk?" Shuichi ratcheted up the concern a few notches. "Yuki, you're scaring me! I'm sure I can get home on the next flight if Hiro draws K's fire…"

"No, stay there!" Yuki pressed a hand to his forehead. "I'm fine, I told you. I just need you to talk on the phone for a while. And to not ask any questions."

"Okay." There were another few murmurs from Hiro, to which Shuichi answered in the worst whisper ever, "I think Yuki's having a breakdown!"

"I'm not having a breakdown!" Yuki roared, then took several deep breaths and tried not to think about irony. "Just…you just need to talk. Please. Shuichi?"

"You said my name, Yuuuuki." Yuki didn't need to see the melting to know it was happening. "What do you want me to talk about?"

"Anything." Yuki cracked his knuckles, tilted his laptop screen back just a touch more, and laid his fingers on the keys. He cast about mentally for something suitably pointless. "What did you have for breakfast?"

"Pancakes!" Shuichi answered immediately. "But they only had these little tiny syrups at the hotel and Hiro had to keep asking the waitress for more of them and they were really hard to open, but K had his switchblade so we would just like puncture them and then squeeze them but it would kind of shoot all over…"

Silently vowing to dedicate a whole stack of pancakes at the family shrine, or at least to have the main character eating them in the final chapter, Yuki began to write.

He didn't edit and he didn't look back; he simply typed with the mindless fury of a man who knows that if he does not get the last chapter of his novel finished by the time his idiot boyfriend has to be onstage, his editor will be at his doorstep the next morning in spike heels and she will be aiming low.

From time to time bits of the constant babble managed to penetrate Yuki's concentration as Shuichi went about his pre-show business, tracking down costume bits and warming up a little, slipping Sakano a mild sedative and letting Hiro deal with Suguru.

Several hours ticked by, and suddenly Yuki realized that Shuichi was saying his name.

"Eh?"

"I said," Shuichi repeated, "I hope you aren't going to need me for much longer because it's only forty-five minutes until showtime. I'm hiding in the dressing room as it is!"

Yuki took quick stock of the situation and thought that it was just barely possible that he might finish if nothing disruptive happened.

"Then you'd better keep talking, hadn't you."

Shuichi kept on talking, and Yuki kept on typing, and it began to look as though the end to this nightmare was finally in sight as Yuki finished up the penultimate chapter.

"Shuichi, I want you to listen to me very carefully," Yuki purred as he cracked his knuckles and tried to stretch his cramped fingers in preparation for the final sprint. "You have to swear that you aren't going to stop talking, no matter what happens, until I say."

"You're using the scary voice, Yuki," Shuichi complained. "And there's only twenty minutes left!"

"Then shut up and start talking."

Fortunately, Shuichi did not seem to register the sheer idiocy of that request before he started up again.

"Almost there," Yuki murmured to himself as he tied off a few of the subplots. "Almost…"

The pounding on the door was audible over the phone, as well as the muffled shouts of Shuichi's name.

"Yuki?" Shuichi asked nervously. "Yuki, they're going to break it down, or maybe blow it up, I can't tell which."

"I need at least ten minutes," Yuki calculated. "Hide."

"What?! I'm in a dressing room, where am I supposed to hide?"

"Figure it out!"

There was some grumbling from Shuichi's end, and the sound of things being shifted around, and then the thunk of a door closing.

"Well, I hope you're happy," Shuichi groused. "Now I'm back in the closet."

Yuki made a mental note to laugh at Shuichi's expense later. At the other end of the line, he heard the crack of a door being forced off his hinges, and was that a dog barking?

"If I get shot, you aren't getting any for a month," Shuichi threatened in a whisper.

"That means you won't be getting any either," Yuki pointed out, killing off a character with great satisfaction that he had hated for the last five chapters. All he needed now was a snappy tagline and he could polish off the rest of this bastard on his own.

"I hope K does kill me," Shuichi hissed, "that way I can haunt you for the rest of your life, Yuki!"

"Clichéd, but somehow perfect," Yuki reflected. "Your specialty."

The end was within the reach of Yuki's nicotine-stained fingers when a flurry of automatic gunfire ripped over the line, and Yuki very plainly heard K shout, "You cannot escape your manager ha ha!"

"Yuki! Hey, let go! Hiro, you traitor! I said LET GO, you perverts! Yuuuuu—"

The line went dead just as Yuki finished typing and hit 'save' with a flourish. Yanking off the headset and tossing it aside, Yuki clicked off the blinking 'disconnected' screen on his cell and scrolled down to Kanna's number.

And this time he would get to hang up on her.

*******

Three days later, Shuichi threw open the door to the apartment, a duffle bag in one hand and a lime green wrist brace on the other.

Yuki, who had even put on pants for the occasion, looked Shuichi over from the couch, where he was smoking a cigarette.

"You didn't actually get shot, did you?" he asked.

"No," Shuichi snapped, letting the duffle bag crash to the floor and slamming the door behind him. "I wrenched my wrist getting yanked out of the closet by armed men!"

"Teenage girls across the country appreciate your sacrifice," Yuki shrugged, leaning forward to stub out his cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table. Shuichi stomped across the room to loom over Yuki.

"You really are a son of a bitch, you know that?"

"Uh-huh." Yuki reached up to hook fingers in Shuichi's belt loops and pulled Shuichi down into his lap. Shuichi wrapped arms around his neck and nestled close, the edge of the brace scratching the back of Yuki's neck.

After a few minutes, Shuichi straightened up to see Yuki's face.

"Are you going to tell me what that was all about?"

"Not really." Yuki drew the injured arm off his shoulder and kissed the underside of Shuichi's braced wrist. "Are you going to withhold sex for a month?"

"Weeeell," Shuichi's voice hitched a little when Yuki brushed lips over the skin right above the brace, "I didn't exactly get shot…"

"Good choice." Yuki made to stand up, but Shuichi slid his weight further forward into Yuki's lap, pinning him down to the couch. He leaned in to give Yuki a deep kiss.

"I did, however," he murmured against Yuki's lips, "get shot at."

"Meaning what?" Yuki gave a muffled groan when Shuichi rolled his hips.

"It means we'll be doing things my way," Shuichi promised, sliding his lips over Yuki's cheekbone and flicking his tongue against Yuki's earlobe. Yuki made a strangled noise. "How about," Shuichi whispered, grinning, "you talk for a while, hmm?"