#amberxkai

Kai followed Tala through the labyrinth of corridors in the lower bowels of Preston. He’d never had reason to venture down there before, and considering the strong smell of paint and strange clanking from the metal pipes running along the ceiling and through walls, he hoped to never have reason to again.

“You sure they’re down here?” he asked as they turned down another narrow hall, their feet squeaking off the dirty, blue, tile.

“It’s a Friday night after a game and they’re nowhere else to be found. They’re down here,” Tala muttered, jaw tense as he clipped out the words and paused at a junction. He tilted his head and Kai strained his ears hoping to hear something that would mean their journey was nearly at an end. As long as they ended the party before Nicolai arrived, he could get back to his dorm to watch the highlight reel from the Sentinels vs Centurions match.

A faint strain of music and a rhythmic thudding drifted up from the left corridor and Kai nudged Tala, motioning him towards the sound. Nodding, Tala began to creep down the hall, keeping his feet light to avoid detection from any lookouts. Clonmel hadn’t been much for parties but getting drunk in the attic was a fairly common occurrence and they always paid off lower classmen to act as lookouts and decoys to avoid getting caught. It wasn’t the detentions or possible letters home to their parents that worried them, it was Balkof’s wrath they all feared. For Kai, even the few moments of buzzed incoherence wasn’t worth the verbal lashings edged with the physical menace that Balkof exuded when angry. Though he knew his father spared him from the worst of that temper.

Preston, however, didn’t have those fears, he realised, as they turned down another path and the music increased in volume. The area was empty as far as the eye could see, except for one lone figure sitting on the floor, head lolling forward, hair a dark curtain around her face. Kai stifled a sigh just as Tala stiffened and, exhaling a curse, darted forward.

“Benz!” He dropped to a crouch and pressed his fingers to her throat. “Hey, wake up!”

“Mm?” Amber lifted her head and studied Tala’s face with glazed eyes. “Oh. What are you doing here?”

“Trying to stop this party before Nicolai comes down. How much have you had to drink? Can you stand? What are you doing out here on your own?”

“I haven’t drunk anything. The music was too loud. I came out here to sit. My lips are numb.” She patted her fingers against her mouth and pressed a few times.

“Benson,” Kai drawled, with burgeoning delight, “you’re drunk.”

“M’not.”

Except her words were slurred and she was clearly taking her time to enunciate each syllable in the hopes of coming across sober. A cute wrinkle formed between her brows as she studied them both with a small moue of annoyance. Kai smothered a smirk and hunkered down in front of her, picking up the can at her side. “So you were only drinking coke?”

“Yes, that,” she said, gesturing wildly from Tala to the can so that both boys had to lean back out of the way. “Coke.”

“With rum,” Kai finished, and he knew he sounded smug but this was just too rich.

“What? No. It’s just a gener-generic brand coke. Ian gave it to me.”

Tala exhaled a long stream of air and caught her chin between his thumb and index finger, forcing her to look at him. “How many did you drink?”

“I dunno, two?” She held up two fingers and then got distracted by them, twisting them in front of her nose this way and that before slowly closing her hand. “Two.”

Kai snorted. “You’re a lightweight, Benson.”

Again she sent him that slightly superior look, one brow arched as she peeked up at him from under her lashes. “I am not drunk. I might be a little buzzed. Like a teeny-weeny-weeny-tiny bit.”

“Uh-huh.” Oh, he was going to milk this tomorrow. When she showed up to practice hungover, he would make sure she remembered all of this. It would be the perfect payback for all the small irritations she caused him.

Brushing his hands down his thighs, Tala rose to his feet. “Take her back to her dorm before your dad comes and I’ll go get the rest of the idiots.”

“Wait.” Kai stood up, mild alarm seizing his chest. “Why don’t I get the others?”

“Because they won’t listen to you."

“I’m their captain, they have to listen to me.” Anything was better than dealing one on one with a drunk Benson.  

“Oh dick-dictates-dictatoes? No.” Then Amber’s eyes narrowed. “Asshole Kai strikes again. Just ruining all our fun. Probabably told your daddy where to find us.”

“Get over yourself, Benson, I don’t care what you idiots do for fun but we have practice tomorrow morning.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“We never have practice in the morning after a game.”

“New coach, new rules.” He wouldn’t admit the sincere satisfaction in watching her smugness drain away to mild horror.

Turning, he slumped as he watched Tala disappear around the corner, clearly having decided his plan was better. With a growl, Kai faced his nemesis and propped his hands on his hips. He could leave her there, get her suspended from the team for a bit, enjoy some snark free practice. Except, no, he couldn’t do that. It would hurt the team; he was a dick, but he wasn’t that much of a dick.

He crouched down again and studied her face. Glazed eyes, flushed cheeks, bruised lips—had she kissed someone recently, he wondered, feeling a disturbing clench in his stomach but it eased when she nibbled and tugged viciously on her lower lip as she glowered at her clenched hands. 

“You’re definitely drunk.”

Those glazed ochre eyes lifted to his again, sparked with annoyance and frustration. “Why do you care?”

“Honestly, I don’t. However, you’re the best sharp shooter we have, which isn’t saying much but if we want to have any chance of defeating the Sharks, and that is the end goal, we’ll need some of that supposed talent you possess in your pinkie.”

She looked down at her pinkie and wiggled it. “It is talented,” she finally agreed.

With a grumble, she slapped her hand, talented pinkie and all, on the floor and tried to unsuccessfully push her body up. Gravity didn’t comply and with a grumbled curse she dropped. Kai raised his eyes to the ceiling, filled with pipes running vertically and horizontally without much of a pattern. Somewhere a cistern hummed cheerfully and a light fitzed.

“You sure you only had two?”

“Yes. I’m just... tired. I’m not drunk. Because I’m Irish. I have lots...” She gestured with her hands and became distracted by them again.

With a chuff of startled amusement, Kai reached forward and caught her wrists. “Yes, those are your hands. Now come on, stand up.”

“Hey, Hiwatari? If I can’t—” She broke off, once again distracted by the index finger she pointed at him but before he could say anything, she growled and clenched her fists. He pulled her to her feet and steadied her.

“I don’t like this,” she complained. “Don’t let me do this again. This is Ian’s fault but don’t—-you can let go of my hands now.”

He shifted his grip on her wrists to keep her close as he looked around and tried to figure out the quickest way back out of the basement. “I don’t suppose you know the way out of here?”

She swayed as she looked around, relying on his grip to hold her up. Planting her feet, she loosened one of her hands from his and touched her index finger to her lips as she thought. “Hmm, we go that way and turn right.”

He frowned. “That’s not how we cammph—” Soft fingers pressed into his mouth and he tried not to think that those fingers had been against her own lips not two seconds ago. He jerked his head back out of her reach. “Benson, don’t touch me.”

“Don’t talk then. You’re pol-lu-ting the air. We’re going this way.”

She shuffled off and he prayed for patience. As she stumbled and bumped into the wall, patting it companionably with a muttered apology, Kai realised there was no god and he was doomed to deal with this menace on his own. Cursing himself a fool, he scooped her up off the ground and strode down the corridor, easily covering more ground now that she was no longer going at her own pace.

“You are a pain in the ass,” he muttered against her hair, grinding his teeth when the strands caught on his lips.  

“Pot. Kettle. Blank.” Clearly happy enough that she no longer had to drunkenly stagger around, Amber looped her arms around his neck and—began to play with the hair at the nape of his neck. He clenched his jaw. Shivers raced over his skin and his shoulders tightened in defensive reflex to the unfamiliar but strangely scintillating touch. “Benson, hands.”

“Left here.”

He hitched her higher and inadvertently loosened her grip on his hair but it was only a momentary diversion before her fingers slipped right back into the strands, twisting and tugging gently. Great, Benson was a tactile drunk who didn’t seem to realise that she was caressing her mortal enemy—her words, not his.

They travelled in uneasy silence for a few more corridors until he finally spied the exit door. Shifting her again, he jerked the handle and used his hip to push the door open. The night outside was cold, carrying hints of decay and the creeping fingers of winter. The cool white moon peeked out from behind a thin cloud and a small dervish of crisp brown leaves skittered along the tarmac in front of him. He paused for a moment to listen for any sign of life. At this hour of the night, there would be no security but he didn’t want to run into one of the patrolling prefects either.

After a tense minute, he began to make his way along the flagstone path to the dormitories.  

“When we get to your dorm you’re going to drink coffee—”

She turned her face up to him with a curl of her lip. “Ugh, no coffee. Tea.”

“Coffee,” he repeated, “and a pint of water and aspirin. You might be in good enough state for practice tomorrow.”

“Captain Kai strikes again.”

“You keep saying that, Benson. Some people might think you have a problem with my captaincy.”

“Meh,” she mumbled into his throat as she rested her head against his shoulder and his eyes widened at the intimacy of the position. He wasn’t used to this. This wasn’t something he’d ever faced with the Sharks and Benson didn’t even like him most of the time. Yet here she was, cuddling into him and burying her face into his neck. “S’cold.”

“Stop rubbing your nose on me.”

“It’s cold.” She set her cheek against his shoulder and curled further into his heat. “You have a scar on your jaw. Did you know that?”

He rolled his eyes and tightened his grip on her as he stepped into the shadow of a large shrub in order to check their surroundings once more. The paths remained quiet and he hoped Tala had had some semblance of success with removing the rest of the team from the party. He supposed he’d gotten the better half of the bargain; all he had to do was cart Benson back to her dorm and at least while drunk, she was a lot easier to deal with. No bitchiness, no pettiness, just disgruntled and weirdly adorable. It was disconcerting but definitely the better option.

“Hiwatari?”

“What?”

She shifted and he clutched her closer, the last thing he needed was to drop her on the pavement. Her hands came up to cup his face, smooshing his cheeks as she very seriously looked into his eyes. “You have pretty eyes. How is that?”

Stunned, he gaped at her for a moment, then yanked his head back as much as her hands would allow him. “Don’t even think about touching them.”

Again she sent him that mildly aggrieved look as if she were the one dealing with an idiot. “I wouldn’t steal them. They’re your best feature. Really the only thing that makes you tolerateable.”

“Tolerable. The word is tolerable.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Kai? Amber?”

Internally muttering every curse word on the planet, Kai steeled himself and then turned to face the girl on the path behind them.

“Mariam!” With a delighted cry, Amber lunged towards Mariam and Kai clamped his arms around her to hold her to him. Idiot girl was going to injure herself. She had zero self-preservation instincts. 

“Hi, Mariam!”

“Benson, shut up," he ground out, sending another quick look around campus.

“Hi, Amber. Have you been drinking?”

“No, but yes. Tech-ni-cally I have but I didn’t know. It’s Ian’s fault.”

“Rum and coke in a can,” Kai explained, stifling a sigh as Mariam’s eyes travelled to where Amber’s hand had settled against his neck again.

“Wow,” she said with a barely concealed grin, “okay, do you need help getting her back to her dorm?”

“Please. Can you make sure the coast is clear so I can get this handful to her bed.”

“Oh trust me,” Amber said, flopping back in his arms, “I am not a handful.”

When her gaze dropped down meaningfully, Kai swore under his breath and avoided Mariam’s coughed laughter as he felt the tips of his ears burn. Drunk Benson did not have a filter. Drunk Benson was also incredibly deluded.  

As Mariam walked off, Amber hummed under her breath, her attention fixating on the laces at his collar. “You have a crush on Mariam.”

Kai hissed out a breath and followed Mariam along the path, keeping at a distance so that she wouldn’t accidentally overhear Amber’s words. “No, I don’t.”

“Everyone’s talking about it.”

Who the hell was everyone? He just wanted to play hockey. And he wasn’t blind. Mariam was stunning and she was fun to talk to. That didn’t mean he wanted anything more. God knows he didn’t have the time for distractions.

“You should date her,” Amber stated, with a determined nod of her head.

He moved so she wouldn’t accidentally—deliberately—head butt him. “No, I shouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” he ground out the word as Mariam reached the double doors to the girl’s dormitory and held up a hand for him to wait while she checked inside. The courtyard outside felt eerily exposed as he tried to stay in the shadows from the columns that circled the decorative fountain.

“Because is a stupid answer.”  

“I’m not taking dating advice from you of all people.”

She reared back to send him an insulted look. “What does that mean?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t have a boyfriend. In fact, you’ve never had one, so why would I take advice from you?”

She opened her mouth to argue that, then closed it with a defeated sigh. “Fine. She probably wouldn’t date you anyway.”

“Why?” The word popped out against his instincts and he immediately wished he could pull it back.

“Well, Mariam’s a fifteen.”

“A fifteen?” Oh, he was going to regret this but like nearly all of his conversations with Benson, he couldn’t seem to prevent himself from getting dragged into her lunacy. “Out of what?”

“Ten.”

He pressed his lips together and then followed up with, “If she’s a fifteen, what am I?”

“An eight-point-five.” She only thought of him as an eight-point-five? He didn’t even know why that bothered him but it did.

“An eight-point-five? And Mariam’s a fifteen. What the hell are you then?”

“A five, maybe a six on a good day. Obviously.”

No, not obviously. “None of your math makes sense.”

“Your mouth doesn’t make sense.” And her mouth was disturbingly close to his, he could even see the thin jagged ring of darker amber around her pupil.

He squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated on his breathing. He was being stupid allowing her to get under his skin. She was drunk, she wasn’t in her right mind and she thought she was a five - a six on a good day. None of it made sense. She was clearly bordering on insane.

Luckily at that point, Mariam poked her head out the door and gestured him inside. Carting Amber up the stairs, with her cheek once again pressed to his shoulder, he considered gagging her. He didn't want her saying anything to Mariam but considering her penchant for being perverse, he knew that would only make her worse. He just needed to put her to bed and get away from her.

"I'm going to remind you about all of this in the morning," he muttered the threat into the vanilla softness of her hair.

“Got rid of the dead-eyed waif look you were going for, didn’t it?” She dropped into the chair and crossed her legs, sullenly watching him. Draped in an oversized denim jacket, she looked smaller and grimmer than usual. “Seriously? You need to look after yourself. Keeling over after a beyblade battle is not normal.”

He grunted but refrained from saying anything. She couldn’t understand. She didn’t blade, she didn’t know how it felt to link with your bitbeast so that the world melted away and each battle was a waged war. He experienced his bitbeasts pain, absorbed each slash and parry.

Which was why he couldn’t shake that strange feeling.  

He picked up his beyblade and studied the empty bitchip. Dranzer was gone but why hadn’t he felt her death? He should have realised how close she was to feeling but he hadn’t. Why?

“I have a thought about that.”

He lifted his lashes just enough to look at Amber without giving her any indication that he wanted her to elaborate. He’d learned with Benson that if you gave her an inch, she’d take a mile. And weirdly, he found that he appreciated that. He wasn’t the most amiable of people, friendships took more work than he was willing to put in and only the very rare or very determined stuck around enough to matter. Which suited him fine, he didn’t want to invest himself with people who’d just up and leave. If he had to have friends he wanted them to be worthy of it.

She shifted to curl her feet up under her body, making herself comfortable and freeing up her hands to gesture as she spoke. “Here’s the thing, you say that Dranzer left but I don’t buy that. I mean Dranzer’s put up with your emo bullshit for three years and she calls it quits now? I don’t think so. Especially since you won your stupid ass battle and didn’t actually die. Colour me surprised.”

“Is this supposed to be comforting because you’re failing, miserably.”

“No, listen. And stop being you for five minutes until I explain this stuff.” She took a breath and huffed it out, expression sobering. “Look, Dranzer isn’t going to bail on you.”

“She didn’t have a choice.”

“She’s already a spirit, Hiwatari, how can she die? And like everyone’s said, you’d have felt it.” She made a sound of frustration and shifted in her seat as if finding her calm. “Here’s the thing, bitbeasts thrive on belief. You believe in Dranzer more than you believe in yourself, so she didn’t die and she can’t fade away. So the only other option is that she left, which makes zero sense for all the reasons I already listed involving your emo attitude and the fact that you tagged her out for Black Dranzer.”

That stung. He studied his empty bitchip, alien and wrong, and wondered how he could explain things in simple words.

“I mean, what if she’s just waiting to rise from the ashes?”

He snapped his head up, felt his brain rattle in his skull, and frowned at her. “What?”

“She’s a phoenix, right? They do this whole Fawkes thing—” At his blank look, she dropped her head back to stare at the ceiling, spreading her hands, before meeting his gaze. “Harry Potter, Fawkes, never mind. I’m wasted on you. The point I’m making is phoenixes rise from the ashes. That’s their thing.”

Her words circled in his head, the myth of the phoenix slowly unfurling in front of him. “Dranzer isn’t a phoenix. She’s the vermillion bird. She gets confused for a phoenix but she’s not technically a phoenix.”

Amber pursed her lips. “Okay, yeah, that’s what Indiana said.” At Kai’s blank look, she squeezed her eyes shut and blew out a breath. “Ah, Tyson’s brother, the one with the hat? He said that as well but then we talked to his dad—”

Why the hell was she talking to these people about his bitbeast?

With an exasperated sound, she folded her arms tightly and made a face. “Newsflash, people actually care about you. Which actually is a newsflash because you’re a huge dick. But you were so freaked out about Dranzer, and the others were here making sure you pulled through, so I started asking questions. It’s what I do. Anyway, Tyson’s dad said that maybe Dranzer has become a phoenix. A proper one. That’s how belief and mythology work. People embellish tales, and then others share those embellishments. Before you know it, what a creature once was, is not what a creature, or bitbeast, is now. If enough people believe something, it becomes truth.”

Kai turned his attention to the blade in his bandaged hand and rubbed his thumb over the bitchip. Could they be right? Could Dranzer have evolved? Everyone thought of Dranzer as a phoenix, it was easier to let people think that than try to correct them. But now his heart trembled in his chest and a pulse of warmth echoed from the blade. He froze. The bitchip remained empty. Was that a figment of his imagination? Was he letting himself hope in vain?

He slid another look at Amber as she sat at his bedside, ochre eyes warm and earnest. “What if you’re wrong?” he asked, voice tight around the foolish lump of hope swelling in his throat.

“What if I’m right? And you’re just sitting here looking three skipped meals away from skeletal? If I were a phoenix coming back stronger than ever, I don’t know if I would want to hitch myself to Skeletor.”

Kai felt a fierce rush of something unnamed—something he didn’t want to define—and glowered at her. “Has anyone ever told you you’re a pain in the ass?”

Eyes wide, she splayed her hand over her chest in mock surprise. “Me? Never.”

He looked down at his Beyblade and tamped down on the warm glow of feeling, the size of an ember all but burning in his chest. Heartburn. Probably because of the stress, he told himself.

He felt her eyes on him, studying him with an intensity that drew his attention and he arched a brow over his unbandaged eye. “What?”

“This isn’t the only reason I came. Tyson’s about to go battle Brooklyn, I figured you’d want to be there, moral support and all that jazz. The others are at the stadium already and since you’re awake and somewhat human-looking, we should probably go. I’m sure there’s a high spot for you to perch yourself on.”

He growled, clasping his beyblade tight in his hand and kicking off his blankets. “Why didn’t you say so earlier? Tyson, that idiot. He’s going to get himself killed. Brooklyn’s not going to go down easily. Not after our battle.”

He stalked (hobbled) to the door and gestured Amber out the door in front of him. His teeth all but ground into dust as they emerged from the hospital lobby and into the bright daylight, marred by growing clouds in the distance—right where the arena sat— and Mr Dickinson waved them towards a black town car.

“Miss Benson, why are you not away yet? Kai! My boy! It’s good to see you up.”

Amber stood and spread her hands. “I’m sorry but I had to reanimate dead boy there. It took a while.”