OK, another one-shot. I know I have a story pending on here but I've been having a terrible writer's block and writing something I don't necessarily have to commit to usually helps.
If you read my other one-shot "Autumn In Spring", it would really help when reading this, if not, it's OK too (it's only like a sorta-kinda continuation to the other one-shot).
Somewhat of a 'songfic' but not really, the snippets will be italicized. I hope it's not too confusing, especially with the flashbacks (because I will not italicize them).
Disclaimer: I do not own Card Captor Sakura, it belongs to CLAMP. I do not own the song 'Nectarine' either, it belongs to Twin Sister.
"That's it, Syaoran, that's just it..."
Lips trembled in my palms and I couldn't feel them.
The quivers and stitches my becoming life wove without intentions came apart and she pulled and pulled, itching as the sweater around her did not match her sprightly, loving eyes.
"We can work it out...yeah?"
The nectarine in her waves found my answers. Their patterns meant turns and turns.
Our turn was up.
"We worked it out five months ago, and then before that two, before that two weeks..." The ice cream parlor provided sheets of a once dreamed happiness, musical notes embedded in our psyche, smiles carved into our eyes for better days of spring, spring in my cynically molded heart. The happiness melted in my waffle cone.
"So what do you want to do..."
The words that hardly slipped my eyes suffocated the release of sentiments my dear intended to free.
Sakura, say I love you and we can work it out! Something good can work, remember Madrid?
We sang so brightly atop the highest floor of our neighbor's penthouse, perched on their balcony because we had a spare key and they were on vacation.
And what of those trepid years of selfishly adoring those castle eyes? Your castle eyes of unintentionally broken hearts, because dear, you are breaking my heart.
And it was a moment of paroxysm that secluded Sakura Kinomoto from the arms of Brooklyn, a stripped absurdity living in the dementia of the split second my sadness became habitual.
"I'll miss you, Syaoran"
The pin-striped wallpaper paralleled the linear, tedious mixture of feigned laughter and insensitive women. There had been Rose who, if her name deceived, was of pure thorns and vain collections.
For a night I pretended in the lucrative talks of Oksana, a Russian broad far from my interest. But she was company and I was sick of pretending company.
"Not bad, huh?" Eriol, the English gentleman of tiresome mannerisms, stood beside me holding a box of packed necessities.
Eyes of insomniac-like nights plagued him, and I wasn't to blame any of it upon his health.
We stood together in a kindled friendship of loneliness after a year of unspoken shattered glass (beautiful glass, I'll be honest).
"I know, oh hey, about this weekend -"
"Don't even worry about it, man, I got the rooms covered, just worry about delivering one hell of a presentation"
he grinned, dropping his box at the center of our new loft at the center of Brooklyn.
I nodded and searched for the bed I once dreamed and once kicked and resented in. A resentment of the living I would continue, resentment for files and archives, numbers and figures, currency and older men fit for their business suits and stale fingers too cold for lovers. I resented the neglected lips and eyes I missed. Within the whirlwind of the kaleidoscope dimension my fingers found between hers...there appeared a wall of business. It was a bit of an art, this hate of mine, which derived from the existence of my destined association to the Li Corporation.
Oh, fuck it, fuck everything.
You miss her.
You miss her lips.
You miss her eyes.
You miss her hands.
You miss her dresses.
You miss her eyelashes.
You miss her happiness.
Because when her happiness fell from the clouds, it landed with you and you could not let go, you wouldn't let go.
"Syaoran, we're here" a nudge at my sides reminded me of everything washing against the everything I couldn't build without her crafty hands.
Is forgetting this difficult? Should it have to be? And on fateful moments sitting in an airplane, Eriol interrupted a cascade of old wounds.
I grunted and resisted but reached for my phone. 'Sakura Kinomoto', her name remained against the loving picture I discretely captured in her candid moments of laundry nights.
Locks muffled in the chore that pricked at her skin because she hated washing clothes but she loved making me happy.
"Mou, Syaoran, this shirt isn't even dirty!" Grumpy pouts flushed Sakura's lips as she tossed a shirt in my direction.
In her Brooklyn apartment, we capsized every feeling running beneath our soles and caught in the web of our hands.
"Perhaps not, but I was having dirty thoughts while wearing it. All evidence must be washed!" The shirt became a hot potato.
"Ew, infidelity!" Her porcelain hands dropped the shirt into the washing machine, a victorious accomplishment on my end.
"No, it's Fidelity. Regina Spektor said so" there wasn't a speck in our eyes that couldn't warm her living room, not in the midst of the frosty weather and not in the turbulent future of our heart's dismay, and not in between the sheets where her eighteen year-old secrets found their way to my lips.
Those looks have closed me in your palm
Sent me dreaming softly between
The weather in Austin may have suited her better. But if her heart suffocated under a glacier of ice would the weather suffice? No, the summer weather withered within the warmth of our hands. Even if our happiness had fallen apart, I couldn't let go of our tumbling unity, and I held on against the two other ladies in the year, against a blurred knowledge of her well-being in Austin, and with the present spring in my autumn of descending leaves, falling and falling in accordance to my sadness. I reached for my phone and reached for her hands.
But I won't stay where I dream for long
Where are you? - Syaoran
I entered my temporary apartment, dead in the center of Austin's downtown. Meetings in cities, cities in meetings, they all revolved the twenty-one year-old adventures of an obligatory career path I woke into daily. And to dream of cassette tapes and vinyl records with the girl that pixilated into the corners of my heart...the temptation inched closer and closer until I reminded her of everything.
Please reply, Sakura, please.
I'm going to perform. It's at a coffee shop called 'Rabbit's Delight' in downtown, two streets from Tomoyo's old loft. You can't miss it - Sakura
Ba-dum, ba-dum-dum, ba-dum.
A drumming stitched together moments I couldn't miss. Had I forgotten where Tomoyo's old loft was? Yeah. I'm sure Eriol hadn't though. We drove carefully, both our eyes determined against a couple lights of youthful night life. And those lights hit and illuminated a murky doubt polished into oblivion, the thought that perhaps the young girl in my life had grown in a year's span, and perhaps she left the tides of uncertainty and found the hands of a free bird's youth. Perhaps she had forgotten all about the boring pages of Syaoran Li, the becoming business empire, and danced and swayed her delicate hips in the abandoned sounds of fickle guitars and honey vocals, where she belonged.
And not with me.
Not with me?
"Drive faster" Eriol turned to my request, his face alarmed in regulations.
"Syaoran, the speed limit's thirty-five, and besides, there are people everywhere, if I drive any faster, we'll probably miss the place"
I grimaced at his logic and his reasoning because I couldn't.
"If you drive any faster, we'll get there sooner"
And so he sighed and nodded because it's all the English gentleman would mumble about on nostalgic days.
Has she always been delicate? Always frail to the eyes but tempting to the touch? Always sensitive to my lips and warm to my instincts?
Inviting and sensuous, the girl I loved stood on a stage and whispered all her melodious desires, all her melodious quilts keeping her safe from the frost of Brooklyn.
Through your rising in the morning
And when you're sailing 'round the evening
And when you come back home...
When you come back home
Hands caught her recognition, they thundered throughout the comfort of the venue, quaint and small like her Tomoeda dreams.
I rummaged through the crowd and skimmed everyone over like those daily files at the office, because apparently Becky in archives couldn't separate the years.
Blurred images, bokeh images, images clattering in the disposal of my mind, but I found her once more.
She wore the lace dress I struggled to take off her (note: back-zippers of fitted dresses are a bitch, she needs to wear that dress on Sundays only), her waves longer and fuller than the last I remembered, waves deeper and richer in honey, and her eyes...her forbidden eyes, precious to my own and sensitive in their love.
Bodies surrounded her, girls with fake pearl necklaces and red lips, boys with curls and blue, blue eyes, a collection of people brightening her heart figment by figment.
But when the boy who sang and played guitar with her became visible in the outline of her lips, a sudden tinge of guilt and embarrassment tingled my face.
But she looked.
"H-hey, Syaoran!"
Again, her eyelashes whisked away the stench of the bar and the mindless voices, the white in her lace battled the purity in her heart. Purity?
It was pain to be pure at heart once more for her, she expressed her concerns on rainy days because her red boots could not afford the puddles.
And so she sunk, and sunk and sunk on rainy days...
Tears slid against the window, a curtain of pastel intentions attempted to cover the loneliness storming outside and yet, the inevitable sentiments flowed into the streams of Sakura's then eighteen year-old heart. "Neh, Syaoran, would you like me better if I were cool like your friends?" Eyes of absolutely nonsense declared an empty insecurity accumulating significance.
The book in my lap was for show because I was actually peeking into her figure of loveliness resting on my bed.
Besides, I never was one to like the indirect, unintentional, though for that very fact naturalistic, nihilism of Palahniuk.
"My friends aren't cool. They're people without family, they have this impending need to emphasize everything else"
the nonchalance in my response flipped through the unread pages.
"See! Even my terminology is unfit. I'm sorry" and the tears kept slamming harder and thicker against the windows.
Sakura stood up from my bed and before me.
"Sorry for being young and beautiful and the best eighteen year-old any twenty year-old, by God, any healthy man! Could possibly ask for?"
I stood and pulled the small girl, the girl who occasionally plagued the velvet walls of my sleep.
"I'm sorry, I know our age difference is hardly a difference at all, but days like these make me a little insecure"
The nagging image of her upset lips and discomforting eyes closed the distance between us and, in turn, closing the ridiculous distance between the ideals of an eighteen year-old sleeping between the lace of her dresses and the convenience of twenty year-old pressured business suits. And I love you as I loved you on that rainy day.
The figments in the dwelling of my memory ink vanished, leaving me with the traces that stood before me.
Smiling, like a child with loving parents and warm hearts, Sakura awkwardly waited for my reply.
"You look...good"
Did she blush?
"Uh, thank you, it's been a while. Um, how have you been?"
Can we stop pretending? Can you not ask about me but about us? I used to like that much better.
But she insists and I reply, "Oh you know, the usual, working, I'm actually here on a business trip"
Business. The business of break-ups, the business of sentiments barricading logic or the reasoning drenched from relationships.
Business. The word cringed into her lips and reminded her of an 'us' with bitter moments. I'm sorry.
"Oh, that's right...so yeah; um, how long will you be here?" She ignored the cringe.
"Just for the weekend, I need to be back in Brooklyn by Tuesday"
She nodded an 'I see..', and nothing else became a part of our reunion. She may have smiled sweetly, perhaps thought similarities in the potential of my own expectations, but a heavy layer of tension prevented any further happiness. Not to mention the guy who sang with her heading our way.
"Sakura! Hey, Rostam's having a get together at his place, you in or what?" Rough edges. Aggressive tones, poetic undertones. The man by her side reflected the boy she fell in love with three years ago. A dungeon of temporary angst and terrible secrets, things kept together by the natural goodness of some men, less men, these characteristics in the person beside Sakura frightened me.
They stood beside each other, but they stood as an 'us'.
"Well, you see, a friend kind of just dropped by and so - "
she struggled her response but the man's eager reaction smoothened the rocky bits.
"Oh, hey man, Ezra, nice to meet ya'" Ezra? Ezra Pound, he was fucking genius, and if fate decides a foul play in my anticipated needs, blue-eyed, raven-haired Ezra would be just as bright.
"Syaoran" I returned his handshake, not passing the opportunity to redeem any sense of the collected admiration Sakura once found in me.
And he stopped shaking, and he grimaced (hardly notably), and he tried to commence the return of enthusiasm.
It was beyond my understanding.
Sakura melted; her eyes hid hindering honesties, disguised in the chatter of the crowd.
Was I right? Is there an 'us'? Not the us I hoped for.
"Oh well, hey, you know, it's all good, you two catch up, bet it's been a while, huh?"
Ezra, the man I nearly hated, gathered his intentions and grinned carelessly, the carelessly 'I don't give a care' grin that pasted feigned sentiments upon his eyes.
"Yeah, it kind of has, hasn't it?" His enthusiasm was infectious.
"Mhm...Thanks, Ezra, I'll see ya' later, kay?"
Her attention graced the blue-eyed Jewish-American boy once more.
"See ya!" And his farewell ended the building tension.
A moment trailed our fingers and slipped like sand onto the vast nothingness that existed at our feet. I could do this now and never regret it.
"Want to get something to eat?"
If my lips could speak and kiss and cry and sing and leap from cloud to cloud, they would have all together because for the past hour or two, the ginger (or perhaps the rhizome of the zingiber officinal, as medicinal practices taught me) of all tenderness in our night boded magically with the full year of resentment. Her ginger fingers and ginger smell complimented in the vivacity of her tulip-like lips, but perhaps in most hopes, unlike the perennial comparison, they could live much, much longer in some quaint happiness of mine.
"Oh, Syaoran! I can't believe it's been so long. I can't believe all of this has happened to you!"
She wiped at the invisibility at her eyes because tears could not ruin our night, especially not ones of joy.
"I know, right? But not all of my clients are like that, just that one – "
"Crazy from England?" she cut in like she used to.
"He must have been related to Eriol"
"Aren't you related to Eriol?"
I smiled, she grinned.
"Only on the surface and not on Saturday mornings, God no, not Saturday mornings"
I grinned, she smiled.
"Ha-ha! You two are still the same…"
She took a sip from her strawberry milkshake, the ice cream parlor never appeared as empty as tonight. With skies of a frothy pink and miles of tiles of a prominent cream, the fan swung gently, lowly reminding within every turn of all the memories, all the smiles and kisses and lip traveling fragments spent in our current booth, every turn indicated a new cycle.
But Sakura sighed and sunk in her seat, drowned by the nostalgia that coursed inevitably.
And I wouldn't deny anything, because truth be told, I gasped internally every so often. When her fields of azurite malachite (of which she often confused for aragonite malachite), drowned in the simple Nussbaum-Maser wood of my own, the bitterness returned. And we were back in the same ice cream parlor shop where the architecture of my heart came tumbling down, and all the gates protecting me so carefully were unlocked and she, the loveliness that once guarded the frailty, tore and tore maliciously, unintentionally, artistically…because Sakura Kinomoto was a bright girl.
So I had to ask because I would never regret.
"Why, Why did you break up with me?"
The anopsia commenced, the pink of the ceiling caved into dimness, and for a second, my field of view disappeared.
Sakura disappeared but teased me because she would not look at me as she disappeared. Please, look at me.
"Why are you asking me this…everything happened because it did, Syaoran" I felt the visibility appear, but the color had been withdrawn.
The noir of our atmosphere suffocated the prior lucidity, but the truth became our current subject.
"But why did it?" the more I asked, the more she looked, the more she looked, the brighter our booth became.
"You know perfectly well why it did" Sakura fumbled with her purse and intended to stand up, but she looked at me. And the atmosphere within me must have permeated onto the cloud of her thoughts, because her eyes softened, like a single cherry blossom petal, smooth and pure, unaware of past intentions, past misfortunes.
She sat back down, her purse lay helpless once more, her lace dress covered every inch of feelings expecting to burst at the hem, a disintegration of sentiments, one that would build her truth and shape my own. Her lips did not speak and her mind did not break. But her eyes cracked.
"I didn't exist to you, at some point. You were particles of numbers, laws and suits, and I couldn't see into you as much as I tried, Syaoran. You have to understand that"
I didn't understand the formation that created my demise. I didn't understand the man she couldn't peek into, I didn't understand the construction of myself.
But I understood her lips and her rosy cheeks. I understood why she wore lace dresses (they complimented her skin and illustrated a sense of reality that only existed in the flowery trail of her mind), I understood the late night terrors crying in her thoughts because of the natural inclination towards ghostly visitors, I understood her thimble fingers lacing my own, I understood her lips kissing my own. I understood Sakura to be the kite beneath my sun, high above, and the sons in our eyes because sometimes when I stood by her side, I didn't mind the future.
"I don't know if I understand what you want me to understand. But I do know that even through all the paper work...and meetings, well this might sound a little delayed and, honestly, cliched but I always thought about you. I'm sure you know this, but Brooklyn is a terrible place to sleep in. I can't. I don't know if I've forgotten how to, it certainly feels like I have on some days, but on those nights, I remember when sleep wasn't such a difficult thing to do. Because on nights when everything was OK, I always remembered you beside me. I know, this is absolutely...ugh, I don't even know what this is. I don't know what you feel, if everything you felt for me completely vanished or transfered elsewhere, then being here telling you everything...it's probable that I'll return to sleepless nights in a place full of those memories. So, I might be doing this for myself but it could be for you too, maybe. In shorter terms, Sakura, I've always loved you even when I became too busy, and...truthfully, Sakura, I think that's why I'm here with you"
The ceiling fan kept turning, winding closer to the roof of our heads, clattering the messes left in the carelessness of experiences, or close relations.
Sakura's eyes fluttered in the wake of existing tears. Please don't cry, you'll ruin your make-up, and I know how much you hate when that happens (which occurred more than it should have because you were always a little more sensitive that you'd like to be). But she took her purse and proceeded to stand up again. My heart sunk into a cabinet of dusty files and coughed out the miseries of Sakura Kinomoto's allure. Don't leave me, please?
And my vision could only focus on the blurred spots of the booth's polished table.
My eyes had always been a weakness, so you can imagine Sakura's figure standing and waiting before me hardly made an affect.
And so she spoke, "Please come home with me, Syaoran.."
Home?
Where our hands found mirth in each others, where our lips found teeth in each others, where our legs found temptation in each others, and the last place I remembered loving tenderly as intended? I let the rest dance by.
My legs realized of reality, the reality that Sakura Kinomoto selfishly probed into the soil that became my love, an us I missed.
But home could have meant a day.
Whether it was a day or a century
I followed the clicking of her heels
resonating step by step with the anticipation that only ignited with the touch of her hand
and ended with nineteen year-old secrets whispered into the calamity of my lips.
How can I leave when time didn't matter anymore? Time was in her lips and in her secrets and soon, it was in my lips, her body, my own.
Tonight, time became secured in the sentiments of sleep and soft hands.
When you come back home
I won't ever let go, I haven't before
Bah, another pointless one-shot, review if you'd like but it's kind of just here, really.
Thank you for reading though!