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"You're sick."With a start, Sapphire whirled around, hugging his schoolbooks tight to his chest in protection. "No," he said, disdainfully, trying to recover his dignity. "I am not.""Yes," the harpy insisted, with large, and - dare he think it? - worried eyes, "You are. I've never seen you jump quite so high before, despite years of trying to scare you pantless."Sapphire sniffed, in what he hoped passed as a haughty manner, but what was really just the consequence of having a runny nose, and brooded over his bad luck. "Really, is that why?" he said, scathingly. "And here I always thought it was a life long determination to get me back for cutting off your doll's hair when we were six. Either that, or it's the fact that I'm Fate's favorite whipping boy."Minako grinned mischievously, and Sapphire contemplated backing away, slowly so as not to call too much undue attention from the loud, obnoxious girl. He knew it wouldn't work, however, so he stood still, shivering from fever in his school uniform. Its dark color made the pallor of his skin and the bags beneath his eyes more pronounced, sadly."Or, it could just be that I want to get you out of your pants."For a moment, Sapphire thought he would die right there, and then he glared at the sinfully smirking blonde with all of his fierce ire and mortification and outrage, and stomped off.Minako laughed delightedly and waved after him, calling out, "Tell Diamond to make you some soup, or I'll tell Usagi he's being mean to you!"Sapphire scoffed, but took the advice to heart, and trudged his way home.*Later, when Sapphire was doped on meds and bundled in every blanket Diamond could find, and had soup simmering hot before him, he decided to say something he had, slowly, come to believe."Brother," he called, and watched blearily as Diamond made his way speedily over to his side."Yes? Are you ill? Are you about to vomit? Is it too hot?" Sapphire pushed his brother's hand off his forehead in annoyance."I'm fine, I'm fine. Just. Well."Diamond waited, only in semi-patience now that he knew his brother wasn't going to drop dead. His pale eyes glanced at the clock; no doubt noting that it was almost time for his favorite shows to come on."You'll think it's stupid."Now eyeing him in irritation, Diamond said, "Probably. Tell me anyway," and settled in an immaculate state of crisp white shirt and pressed trousers beside him.Sapphire wondered, vaguely, if he'd ever be as snazzy as his big brother. "I think Minako has the hots for me."At that, Diamond had a coughing fit, which very badly veiled his laughter. "You think?" he finally gasped, eyeing his brother as though he were the world's biggest idiot.Huffily, Sapphire cuddled the blankets closer to him. "I knew you'd laugh at me.""Well," Diamond drawled, gently cuffing Sapphire on the back of his head. "That can hardly be helped, little brother, when you're such an absolute idiot all the damn time." He sighed in exasperation. "What finally brought you to this no doubt startling conclusion?"Sapphire pursed his lips, pessimistically concluded that no matter what he said he would be laughed at again, and explained. "She said she wanted me out of my pants today."Diamond laughed so hard that, if he had been anyone else, he would have fallen to the floor in an ungainly heap. After, he brushed his artistically tousled hair from his face with an elegant hand. "Well," he said."Quite," Sapphire grumbled."And do you," Diamond clearly choked back an unseemly giggle. "And do you like her?"There was another of those moments where Sapphire thought he might die in mortification and outrage. "Of course not!" he wheezed. "She's insane, for one. She never thinks before she speaks, and she always tries to make me do crazy things - and usually ends up succeeding, damn her! -, and she's always smiling, and talking, and it's incessant, and she's so sickeningly happy all the time, and-""Yes, yes," Diamond interrupted drolly. "I see how all of that is quite simply dreadful."Sapphire nodded his head sharply, and then had to pause for a second as it felt like his brain sloshed messily up the sides of his skull. Ugh, headache. "Undoubtedly."Diamond hummed, and patted Sapphire on the head, ignoring his brother's winces and attempts to bat him away. "Well, I'm afraid I can do nothing to save you from the dreaded clutches of Minako Aino. But," he called, as he wandered out of Sapphire's room towards his own. "You might mention to Usagi my selfish sacrifices in caring for my poor, delusional - I mean, sick - and miserable brother."Sapphire rolled his eyes, and stared broodily into the depths of his soup bowl. It bubbled back at him, happily.*The next day was Saturday, and Sapphire’s first thought was: This is not going to be a good day.To his utter surprise, a bright voice answered him. “You are such a pessimist, how do you stand it?”Shouting, Sapphire accidentally tumbled himself off his bed, caught and entangled with messy blankets. He landed with an oof and blinked his sleep-bleary eyes open to see that the Devil was staring down at him.“How did you get into my brain?” he demanded.He watched as the Devil quirked a blonde eyebrow at him, upside down, and found that he wanted, desperately, to hide. Maybe in the closet. Or a cave. Or on the other side of the globe. Somewhere.“I didn’t,” she chirped.“Then how did you hear me!?” Finally, he won the battle with the bed sheets and scrambled free of them, only to feel his face flush in mortification at the fact that he was wearing a pair of old, somewhat undersized, but silk boxers and an equally old, but comfortable shirt and nothing else. Save his customary morning erection, that is. “Gah!”He had known that the day would be beastly, but he hadn’t known that it would be flat out sadistic, too.Minako watched him scramble back into bed and behind his pillows sedately, a predatory look in her bright blue eyes. Devil woman! He thought, wildly. “You said it aloud, silly,” she explained, before perching quite comfortably on his unmade bed. He twitched, and pushed further into the wall at his back. “You look in distress,” Minako cooed, smiling prettily. “Could I…give you a helping hand, maybe?”Sapphire’s brain imploded.“And you’re quite flushed,” she continued, fluttering her cool, slender fingers across his forehead and down his cheek. “Are you too hot? Do you have a fever? Perhaps we should get you out of those stuffy clothes, to cool you down.”Sapphire hissed at her, his face burning brilliantly and heart thudding in his chest like a racehorse. “She-Devil!”“Quite,” said a voice from his door. Both Sapphire and Minako looked over to see Diamond, fresh and shiny for the day, watching them with amusement. Minako grinned at him, and Sapphire scowled. The girl smiled too much.“Stop that,” he snapped, scowling. “Your face will get stuck that way.”Minako blinked at him, and then sent him a smile that was like the watching the sunrise come up from on top of a mountain cliff. Sapphire shifted, uncomfortably warm. “And then we’ll have to take you to the doctor,” he rambled, “and they’ll have to put you into surgery, and under the knife, and you could die, so stop that.”“You don’t want me to die, Sapphire?” Minako asked, coyly.“Of course not,” he snapped, not certain why he was getting so damned flustered.“And you don’t want me to smile at your brother?”“No!” And his voice was surprisingly like a growl at that one, and he faltered for a moment, confused. “Er, I mean-”“Oh, do shut up, little brother,” Diamond said, sounding amused. “You’re making an ass of yourself.”“He’s quite right,” Minako said, still smiling sunnily. Her hair was all caught up in a high tail, Sapphire realized, and flowed down her back like a stream of molten gold. “Maybe you should take a vow of silence, and then we can learn sign language, and talk across the class room without getting caught by the sensei!”Sapphire glared at her, threateningly. “Not on your life, woman.”“In any case,” Diamond interrupted, “I’ll just be going now. Don’t worry, I’ll lock the door behind me; I’ll probably be back sometime tonight. I’m sure Minako will make a delightful nurse and take exquisite care of you, brother!”Sapphire squawked. “You mean you’re actually letting her stay here with me? In my room? Unsupervised? All day?”Raising an eyebrow, Diamond responded, “I already told you that I couldn't save you from the dreaded grasp of Minako Aino. And besides, I trust you’ve had the talk before, brother dear. I’m sure I can trust you not to do anything too stupid, like getting her knocked up. And besides, why do you think I let the harpy in, in the first place?”“Hey!” Minako protested, and Sapphire smirked at her offended pride, steadfastly ignoring the vast majority of that sentence. “I got you a date with Usagi, and I can get her to cancel it, just as easily!”Sapphire had always thought it was rather amusing just how well his brother could suck up when he wanted to, and right then was no exception.*By the sixth time Minako laughed at something the television said – what, he didn’t know, as he was too busy watching her warily out of the corner of his eye – he couldn’t stand it anymore. He broke.“So,” he said. “You bribed my brother.”She didn’t take her eyes off the television. “Ridiculously easy, of course. I can never tell if it’s by the heart or the balls that Usagi has a hold on him.”“Possibly both,” Sapphire snorted wryly, unable to help relaxing into Minako’s warm, friendly aura. “But how’d you talk Usagi into it?”Minako grinned impishly. “I just convinced Usagi that she owed me a favor, and that it would be a wonderful way of getting back at Mamoru for being such a jerk.”“Oh?” He asked. “What’d he do now?”“He intimated that Usagi and Kou are having devious, kinky carnal relations in secret.”Sapphire raised an eyebrow, “Are they?”“Sapphire!” Amused at her scandalized tone, Sapphire shrugged.“It’s a perfectly reasonable question. We both know that Kou is wild about her, and that Usagi has a soft spot for romance – which Kou is quite proficient at. Though I’m sure I don’t have to remind you,” he added, grumpily, remembering their first year at junior high and Kou’s determination to woo the blonde preteen before he was utterly distracted by the other blonde student who transferred over later that year.“Why, Sapphire,” Minako said, in her sneakiest tone. “Are you jealous?”Now scandalized himself, Sapphire tightened his grip on his blankets. “Of course not! I was merely making an observation.” He scowled at her then, cursing her feminine wiles and curious ability to sidetrack his thoughts. “And in any case, I’m trying to discover what devious plots you’re up to now.”Minako looked at him, shocked and hurt, and Sapphire was again reminded why she played the lead in all of their school plays. “Devious plots? Why, Sapphire! We’ve been best friends since we were four, how could you even imagine that I would have any devious plots about you!”Sapphire, of course, would not be moved. “I wouldn’t call us best friends,” he grumbled miserably, “more like victim and predator.”Minako snickered and bared her teeth at him, growling playfully.Unimpressed, he gave an example of her dastardly deeds, voice both dry and all suffering. “You bleached my hair when we were eleven.”“That doesn’t count as a devious plot!” Getting into it, Minako swung her legs up and turned around to face him on the bed, and Sapphire found that he had already subconsciously mimicked her movements, until they were leaning forward and bickering animatedly, the blankets soft beneath them.“Does too.”“It does not. You wanted white hair!”“You should have known better than to let me though, damn it! But no, that’s right, you don’t know anything, do you?” Sapphire declared, scathingly, watching as Minako’s eyes sparked with anger.“Hey! Why am I the one getting chewed out for you having a brother complex! You're the one who doesn't know anything!" Calculated cruelty flashed briefly through her eyes. "It’s not my fault you’re an idiot with self-esteem issues.”“Shut up,” he snapped, feeling far more frustrated than the argument had any right to make him.“Make me,” she growled, unaccountably and uncommonly antagonistic, wisps of blonde hair falling across her passionate face.“Fine,” Sapphire spat out, and lunged; and suddenly everything went too far, and Sapphire didn’t know the first thing to do to stop it, and found he didn’t really want to.Minako’s lips were like silk against his, and the inside of her mouth was like liquid fire, and tasted of strawberry pocky. He groaned, and pushed her down against his bed, hands gripping her shoulders tightly. Pulling him down onto her, arching up against his pajama clad body, she moaned.With a gasp, he pulled away. Shakily, he panted, “I thought I told you to shut up.”Minako laughed at him, and ran greedy fingers through his dark hair, tugging on it to bring his mouth down closer. “And I’d think that after twelve years of friendship, you’d know that I’ve never followed orders very well.”“Well, you could always indulge me,” he pouted subconsciously at her.She laughed, and licked the tip of his nose. “And you could always indulge me in some of deviously, kinky carnal relations of our own. What do you say?” Pausing in her dialogue, she mouthed along his jaw for a moment, and he swallowed tightly. She continued, slightly breathless, “We have the entire day to ourselves, after all, and your marvelously soft bed is already unmade.”Sapphire scowled, and let her trace the curve of his eyebrow with her mouth with only the slightest shiver. “This is stupid. What are we doing?” he rambled. “We shouldn’t be doing this, it’s preposterous. It’ll ruin our friendship.”Minako roller her eyes, before parting her thighs and letting him slide more fully onto her, and Sapphire lost his train of thought as his hard erection, tenting his flimsy boxers, pressed hard against her. She whimpered, and her hands clenched convulsively in his hair.“Stupid,” he panted, rapturous and yearning.She attacked his neck with her mouth, saying between kisses and licks and bites, “Now you’re the one who needs to shut up. Just go with it, you pessimist.”And maybe it was years and years of following the blonde’s lead; of somehow letting her draw him from his stubborn, sulking reticence; of years and years of trust and friendship and memories and love; of a golden haired girl who always chose him, the little brooding boy in the back, pale with his dark hair and dark eyes and dark glares.But Sapphire, like always, let himself surrender to Minako’s logic, her idealism, and just went with it, despite his chronic pessimism taunting him at the back of his mind that this would end badly.When Minako broke away, just enough to murmur, “If you sneeze on me during our first time together, I’ll make dying your pretty locks white look like child’s play,” and he found himself laughing and helping her unbutton her blouse and unsnap her bra, until she was arrayed like a wanton, beautiful goddess beneath him, he decided that it would be worth it, even if it did end badly, hours, days, or years down the road.And then, he stopped thinking at all, and did what Minako had been trying to teach him from the beginning: he just felt, instead.