1. Bonamana by Super Junior.
Look at the stars, he says. They all make certain shapes, see?
She looks where his fingers point and sees a bunch of dots that are like lights being swallowed up by the ever-hungry darkness, and the more she stares at them the harder it is to actually notice them.
So no, she doesn't see them like he does. I see, she lies, wanting to emphasize or understand or whatever it is you do when you like a person, because she does like him, she thinks, as much as she can like a person when the person is eight years old and just wants to continue believing in true, eternal love.
He doesn't fall for it and looks at her with red eyes that are the very definition of skeptic. She caves and admits she doesn't see it.
Red's patient; he shows her the charts and points again and this time she thinks, just thinks that maybe, just maybe, she can really see the shapes of a queen and a king and a proud horse.
He moves and she wonders if he ever saw her like she saw him, like he saw those stars of his.
She sees a boy named Green. She thinks that he's an odd one who may or may not be a psychopath – she's not interested in learning the exact definitions a psychologist or whoever decides those kinds of things would use.
His grandfather gives her a starter and he challenges her there and then.
Sheer will and some kind of instant connection has her beating him instantly, setting the standards for their every other encounter there and then in the small building where information and data is processed, in the research center slightly out of place in the small town that's all she's ever really known.
She sees him – the boy with green eyes and a loud mouth and spiky hair and just a snappy attitude, nothing like her star-loving boy who has left and not shown once – as a rival and can't imagine him as anything else until the day she defeats him in the chamber of the champion and he kisses her, abrupt and unpracticed and quick.
And maybe she's always been ready to see something other than vague, twinkling stars.
Or, maybe she hasn't.
She still doesn't know exactly what she sees in the world.
Because soul-madness requested this somewhere in January to help me fill my goal of 100 stories. It's not weird that I'm writing it now for #103.