...I'm back, kind of. This is the one-shot I feel that I've written in a while, and I can only blame real life of work and university. Also, youtube, which I'm getting more and more traction with every day. Hopefully I can get some more free time to start writing like this again. I feel like I'm still rusty.

Quote of the day:

Arm in arm we laughed like kids
At all the silly things we did
You can't finish what you start
If this is love, it breaks my heart!
— Naked Eyes, "Promises, Promises"

He had been smiling more recently.

Hikari hadn't noticed it at first, but she spent enough time with Takeru for it to become evident soon enough after it had started. Nobody else had been able to tell the difference between Takeru's old smiles and his brightly shining new ones, but Hikari had been able to, because no one knew him better than she did. Daisuke didn't know him better, Iori didn't know him better, and Miyako didn't know him better. Especially not Miyako.

"What's up?" Takeru broke her thoughts, her old friend having a bored expression on his face as he quirked an eyebrow in her direction.

He was handsome.

"Hmmm?" She responded in her light, oh so very Hikari, voice, as if she hadn't heard him.

His eyes were as blue as the sky above them.

Takeru gave her an unconvinced look as his free hand fiddled with an apple, the fruit remaining uneaten as they waited for Daisuke and Miyako to join them for lunch. "You keep looking at me like if there's something on my face."

His hair was golden in the sun.

"I'm just spacing out."

He nodded as he accepted her answer, and both remained silent, Takeru still fiddling with his shiny red apple, and Hikari content to simply continue to stare at Takeru's face. Most people assumed that Takeru and herself were an item already, or if not that, than they at least believed that it was only a matter of time before the childhood friends of Takaishi Takeru and Yagami Hikari pledged their undying and destined love for one another. The two of them had always had at least some semblance of affection for each other ever since the two of them met at the ripe old age of eight years old, and as she continued to stare at the middle school boy beside her, she wondered if 'only a matter of time' was actually true.

As Hikari watched Takeru though, she could only find herself frowning at him. The boy had indeed been smiling more recently, but at the moment he seemed to be more content to stare plainly at the apple in his hand than to do anything that would make his face break into a grin, showing Hikari those happy dimples that she found herself loving more and more the more she saw them. Her frown slowly disappeared however when she decided to scoot just the tiniest bit closer to Takeru on the bench of the table where they were waiting for Miyako and Daisuke to show up. Part of it returned however when she saw that Takeru hadn't noticed.

"I heard that apple skins have toxins in them."

She didn't know why she blurted out what she did, but when she said it, Takeru paused in place and looked at her, before taking the next moment to regard his apple suspiciously. It was a bright red, shiny and glorious thing, and it did indeed look tasty, but she hadn't been lying when she said that she had heard that from somewhere, although at the moment she couldn't exactly remember from where. Whatever the origin of her train of thought, Hikari found herself a little annoyed when she saw that Takeru simply shrugged after some consideration of her words.

"I've survived your mother's cooking. I think I can survive an apple."

She gave him a well-deserved slap on the arm while he only laughed, Hikari then whacking him even harder for good measure. "My mother is a wonderful cook!"

"She gave your brother stomach ulcers."

"That's beside the point."

"She mixes garlic in with her cake batter."

"Sounds tasty to me!"

"Your father has weekly stomach pumps."

"Can't be too careful with your health."

"I almost died once from eating one of her cookies. I was with Iori at the time and all he did was the same thing he always does."

"He stood in the corner and did nothing?"

"While I choked to death."

She laughed at his near death experience, and Takeru tried to frown before he too ended up in stitches. Neither had any idea what had sparked on their random little argument, but soon enough the two of them were almost out of breath from laughter. They were content, and Hikari broke into a grin when she saw that Takeru was smiling again. He was absolutely gorgeous.

I love you.

She had almost said it from being caught up in the moment, but thankfully, Hikari had been able to stop herself before she had gone too far. There would be a time and place for that someday, even if she wasn't sure that she exactly believed it herself. Takeru was her oldest friend, and there was nothing that she held in her eyes for him other than affection.

"Hikari! Takeru!"

Hikari's frown returned when she saw who it was, because although she placed her friends in a very special place in her heart, she knew that the same and more could also be said of Takeru's opinion of them. Daisuke ran up to them ahead of Miyako and sat across from her, and although he mentioned something or other about something or somewhere, Hikari didn't hear a word of it, the girl instead being too focused on Takeru's face, and on just what exactly Takeru himself was staring at. For a moment of time, he was all that she could see. His laughter had disappeared, and instead it was replaced with a look of quiet wonder. He was smiling again, but he was smiling in a way that he never did with her.

There was an unfamiliar glint in his eyes, a shine that Hikari had only seldom seen in them, and as she continued to watch Takeru as his face lit up like a dwarf star collapsing into itself in one last incandescent show of brilliance, the boy smiling a beautifully wonderful amazingly painful smile, Hikari felt her heart breaking at the sight.

He only smiled like that when he saw Miyako.

I'll be back. Have a good one.