All standard disclaimers apply.
Contrary to what everyone believed, Kaho had not been love at first sight. Not quite.
That moment in junior high, when he'd stood there, watching her departing figure, he had been entranced by the falling blossoms caught in her long hair. She had left him not with some emotional burst of longing within him, but with an odd lightweight feeling. Touya made his way home very slowly, and again and again caught himself looking down to check whether his feet were still planted on the ground.
She was not his substitute teacher for very long, and Touya generally preferred science over math, but each day he would listen dumbly to her mouth spouting algebraic theorems and stare at her white hand scribbling equations on the board. He earned the highest grades he'd ever had in any math subject. Earned them, he thought firmly to himself, although she had the most secretive of smiles reserved for him when she put his perfect exam paper on his desk.
He often walked her home many times after school as well, and the entire time that lightweight feeling never left him. There was something fragile about her, like a butterfly. He wanted to cup her in his hands and never let anything blow her away.
Touya didn't tell anyone once they started dating, and didn't want to. Kaho squeezed his hand and said "It's okay. Most people don't understand these things." She then shrugged her lithe shoulders, and he knew she was right. None of his soccer teammates or friends from choir would see past age and status, and a good many of them might even be jealous. It didn't matter that her student teaching stint was done and he was no longer "some boy from her class".
"But it's fun, isn't it?" Kaho asked with her disarming smile, a smile that could melt snow on the coldest day of the year.
"What?"
"Our 'secret affair'!" She giggled. "Okay, so it won't be secret for much longer," There was an emphasis on those last words that he didn't miss, "but isn't it fun right now? Isn't it a little exciting?"
When he came home, his father was sitting in the kitchen table waiting for him. Touya almost wasn't surprised. "Hi." He muttered as greeting, and put down his book bag. He noticed two glasses of iced tea on the table, and an empty seat already pulled out to invite him to sit down. He did.
Fujitaka cleared his throat. "Touya..." he began.
"You have a girlfriend now, don't you?" He asked in a rush.
"You're going to ask if I'm dating Ms. Mitsuki, aren't you?" Touya said simultaneously.
They paused and stared. Fujitaka laughed out loud. "So that's a yes. I saw the two of you as I was going home the other day. 'Ms. Mitsuki?'"
"What of it?" Touya could hear himself getting a little petulant.
"So she's your teacher?"
"Before. Substitute." His cheeks began to get a little red. "That didn't stop Mom, did it?"
Fujitaka became noticeably quiet. Touya wondered to himself if he'd sounded too snappy and was about to launch into an "I didn't mean that" line of apologies when his father folded his hands and placed them firmly on the table. His eyes looked straight at him.
"It'd be hypocritical for me to say I disapprove of this." He smiled. "And we truly never regretted getting married so fast and having you and Sakura." He nodded to the framed picture on the counter. "Isn't that right dear?" Touya sweatdropped. "But it was very hard for us. And well, we'd always hoped you'd get into a normal relationship once the time came.
"A 'normal relationship'." Touya echoed in disbelief.
"You know. With a teenage girl in your class that you'll court for a few months, then take to dinner and movies and concerts, and break up with before leaving for high school or university, but emptily promise to stay friends with." He said this all very quickly and nonchalantly. "You're 14. Fourteen year olds get into healthy, non-serious, heterosexual, normal relationships."
Well, whatever it was he had with Kaho, it wasn't "normal", as he would find out, even if he didn't have anything to compare it to. They'd spent the first months after that still sneaking around, not because she was worried about getting found out, but because she found it entertaining. She could get flighty and absent-minded and sometimes disappeared on mysterious 'shrine business'. She could cancel dates at the last minute because she had a feeling it would rain (it always did) or suddenly drag him along shopping because she had a hunch that there would be a special on exactly what he needed (there always was).
And she never stopped patting him affectionately on the head and saying "good boy", even when it was in bed after they'd made love.
It was not love at first sight, and it was not "normal". He loved her nevertheless, and all her otherworldly ways, for after all, she understood all of his. Yet too often he wondered if she loved him as much as she found him amusing, or if she even needed him at all. He somehow knew that he would never be an essential part of her life.
"You need to be needed." Yuki would tell him years later.
"What?"
"I've found the root of your sister complex!"
"I don't have a 'sister complex', damnit. Stop saying that."
"You always want to protect people", He continued on with a cheery nod, as if he were deaf. "So you prefer the people you love to need taking care of, to need you like Sakura's needed you. You need to be needed, To-ya, that's what it is."
Perhaps it was. He was holding her kimono-clad figure in his arms that one festival night and when she told him "Let's break up", he was shocked more by the fact that he hadn't seen it coming. He did not expect her to leave, even though he had foreseen many things, his mother's death included, and all of his sister's childhood accidents. His power of magical intuition had failed him when he needed more than anything. She was leaving for England, leaving him. She didn't want to write or be written to, because she didn't want him to go on loving her. He asked for one last kiss when he came to see her off at the airport. She had shaken her auburn head, tousling her long, magnificent hair. She took his hand instead, and held it long and hard.
"I'll see you again when you're a high school junior, but you'll move on." She pressed his hand firmly between both of hers. "When I come back, you'll have someone else whom you love, much more than you love me today." Touya drew away sharply, as if he was in pain. "And so will I." She added, and a touch of melancholy had been added to her smiling eyes.
It wasn't until much later that he realized that he had known all along, that he had only stubbornly refused to believe his own senses.
By then, she was far, far away, and there was a commotion at school about the new boy who'd suddenly transferred into their campus. Touya felt it almost immediately once he stepped into the room; the strange energy that the new arrival's presence made on the atmosphere. He walked towards the freshly occupied desk by the window that all his classmates were crowding around, and found himself thinking of forces between molecules, of gravitation pulling heavenly bodies together. He found himself checking whether his feet were still touching the ground and smiled to himself.
"Hello.", the new boy said, his sparkling brown eyes singling him out of all their excitable classmates. Touya's pulse quickened. Perhaps he would never be in a "normal" relationship, he mused. Those probably weren't all that they were cracked up to be anyway. He held out his hand in greeting, and the new boy took it.
"I'm Yukito." He said cheerfully. He had a smile that disarmed; so warm it could melt snow on the coldest day of the year.