And now Kyou? The idea was not unpleasant.

Unable to prevent a secretive smile from her face, the quiet, pretty girl slipped silently inside her home. Inside, the house was, as usual, a mass of chaotic, noisy activity as her younger siblings tried to avoid going to bed and her mother tried fruitlessly to quiet them down. "Saki-chan, it's late," the woman said to her eldest daughter.

"Gomen, Mama. I was with Tohru."

"Did you eat?"

"Hai."

Hana's younger brother came tearing down the stairs at this point, with a sister in hot pursuit, some great event no doubt taking place. The mother was fighting for some kind of order, and Hanajima, who just wanted to get upstairs so she could do some serious thinking about the odd experience she'd just had, fired a warning flare of purple electricity towards the children. Immediately they both fell silent. Affecting her scary voice, she ordered them to go to bed, and they turned and ran back upstairs.

"You shouldn't do that," her mother said wearily.

"It works." She started up the stairs herself.

"You scare them."

Hanajima's face didn't show her internal wincing. What her mother really meant was "You scare me." Of course Hana would never hurt her siblings; she loved them. But her mother would never forgive her for the accidents that happened when she was a child. She wanted so badly to be able to tell her "Mama, I couldn't control it then! I can now. It's ok. You can love me again." But Hana never said anything.

Once in the safety of her room, Hanajima slowly, ritualistically, untied the ribbon in her hair and brushed out the braid, running her fingers through the thick, black tresses and silently remembering the walk home. What exactly had happened?

It was difficult to put into words the flashes and feelings she got from people on a daily basis. In truth, they felt much different from the deliberate use of her abilities to read minds. It was more like reading facial expressions and body language, except that she could tell much more about a person than ordinary people could. She had been certain, when she asked if he was afraid of her, that he felt people were afraid of him. And she had known without a doubt that he wanted her to find out what he feared.

It was so upsetting and lonely, what she had seen inside him. Deliberately she had not pried too deeply, respecting his mysterious secret, and what she had seen was confusing. Only his crushing lonliness, along with jumbled, faded images of his mother. She knew that it wouldn't make sense unless she probed deeper into his mind, and that she was unwilling to do.

But she did understand something, now. She had asked him if he was in love with Tohru, and he hadn't answered. She had believed he was in love with Tohru, because of his actions and the flashes she'd gotten from him. And he believed he was in love with her, too, but Hanajima could see clearly, even if he could not, that his love had less to do with Tohru herself than it did with his fear.

"Why?" she whispered out loud. "Why are you so afraid of being alone?"

And then there was the kiss - she had been trying not to think about that part of it, but there it was, all the same: the kiss.

What did it mean, she wondered. She had absolutely no experience with boys or romance, and for the first time in a long time, she found that she could not predict what another person was going to do. Of course she had watched her classmates in their strange love rituals, and had found that once a boy and a girl had kissed, one or both of them generally seemed to completely lose all sense of reason. Stepping back and looking at herself, she decided that she was still in control of her faculties, and Kyou had never appeared to have a particularly well developed sense of reason in the first place, so what was she to expect?