The Witch and the Dragon
Hana-chan was accustomed to watching.
As long as she stood silently, still as stone, still as night, they often forgot she was there. She was a shadow. No one hides their expression from a shadow.
Hana-chan noticed things.
She noticed the way Yuki looked at Tohru, and she noticed the way that Kyo didn't. She watched the orange-haired boy watching as the Prince smiled at the Princess, and she smiled back. There was something innocent in their exchanges. Something pure. The air practically sparkled with their joy in each other's presence. The air grew sweeter when they were together. He reflected Tohru's light. Hana felt her insides twist with envy but smashed down on it with suffocating force. She would untwist it later. Yes, Hana had no doubt that the Prince was falling more in love with her sweet Tohru, just as she was with him. Whether that love was romantic she could not yet define. Tohru was still too oblivious. Hana's gaze flashed to the other Sohma. Speaking of oblivious…
Kyo's posture had averted from the two, a scowl marking his face. He stood a little apart. A self-inflicted outside like herself, and she saw a little of her own feelings splashed across his expression, even as he tired to hide them. If Yuki was the Prince and Tohru was the Princess, then Kyo was the Dragon. All fire and anger and misunderstood intentions. Unable to express what he felt. Unable to really understand it because, and she suddenly knew this with such certainty that the revelation cut her, he had never been treated with that level of kindness or hope. Nobody ever fell in love with the Dragon. Hana twisted her fingers into the edges of her cape. No one fell in love with the Witch either, and yet…
Tohru's eyes alighted on her friend, standing in the shadow, the stone in the dark, and grinned widely. The light of her smile blazing a trail that lit up the psychic.
"You coming, Hana-chan?"
Hana felt a gentle smile tug the corners of her lips, stone becoming flesh again.
"Yes," she lilted, her voice a thread of smoke, "I'm coming."
Later her cape would brush the skin of the Dragon and he would hiss, hackles raised, snarl at her not to sneak up on people. There would be fire in his words and anger, and she would see it because the same fire burned in her heart.
"The Princess doesn't fall in love with the Dragon."
His lips twisted in a furious scowl.
"What the hell you talking about?"
Hana tilted her head.
"In the stories. The Princess doesn't fall in love with the Dragon."
He recoiled slightly in a hiss of breath, pain in his expression. Betrayed by the forced acknowledgment of something he already knew.
"Yeah, well, so what?"
Hana sighed, a very small smile on the edge of her mouth, her voice the whisper of a river in the dark.
"No one is supposed to love the Witch either."
The frown burned between his eyes, a defensive sneer gathering at the corners of his lips.
"Thought you were supposed to be a physic not a witch."
She hummed low in her throat, turning her face away to watch Tohru from a distance.
"True." A breeze blew at her cape and she held the edges tighter. "But you see…" Kyo's head jerked up as she looked at him again, not expecting her to continue, buried in a labyrinth of his own thoughts, "Tohru isn't really a princess either."
She let this sink in for a beat, violet eyes locked on amber and he tilted his head in a challenge.
"Oh, and what? Guess I'm not really a dragon?"
That swept her thoughts into a whirlwind and she gave them a moment to settle, to become clearer.
"Something like a dragon," she murmured, eyes narrowed. "Something like a cat."
She didn't stay to see the frozen expression, the flash in burning eyes or the fingers curling compulsively, protectively, over the bracelet he never removed.
Instead she walked away, cape sweeping out behind her, marveling in her own heart at the Princess who had enough love for both a witch and a dragon.