Not once in the past two, almost three years, since she met him had she ever been so afraid of what lurked behind his deep, earthy orbs. Sure, there had been fear and even a hate so strong, she had nearly suffocated in it multiple times! Darkness twisted in the brown of his eyes, streaking them almost black, and all at once, three hate antenna popped from her head at the heavy waves lapping over to her. She was the shore to his waves of hate that slammed coldly into her but this time it wasn't fear she felt looking into those dark, empty brown eyes.
This time the hatred wasn't drowning or suffocating her and it didn't light a fire in her blood or stroke the antenna from her head.
Even her hate antenna, summoned by the Demon King's icy presence, huddled atop her head with wide eyes, wondering why in the hell they had even bothered to pop up in their trembling hold. There was one antenna, though, that was caught by the Demon King and unfazed by the roiling anger beneath the surface. It didn't tremble in fear of the freezing angry blizzard that had descended upon the grudges, no, instead this tiny little anomaly sunk into itself. It wrapped it's arms around it's ghostly middle, a deep frown etched across it's face.
Everything had shifted the moment she met those turbulent waves, tossing and turning in the recesses of his brown pools. Her world was spinning uncontrollably and the more she looked into his gaze, the deeper the black tendrils dragged her under the dark waves and the more she lost herself to the harsh iciness hanging between their heavy stare. The air froze the blood in her veins, hair standing on end as she was doused in the coldness in Tsuruga-san's usually warm gaze, like the soil in summer when you dug your feet beneath the Earth in the light of the Sun.
Caught and ensnared, she didn't notice when the car pulled to a slow stop and she didn't notice the way Yashiro peeked fearfully at them in the rearview mirror.
All she could see was the darkness crashing through Tsuruga-san's eyes. Through the confusion and the fear, through the Demon King's cold, narrow glare, Kyoko noticed something else through his angry brown orbs. It swam through the icy waves and the black streaks, breaking the surface being pulled back under the harsh, frothy waves shoving it down.
But Kyoko saw it and, with a blink, recognized it.
That one single emotion, buried beneath his anger and the icy disappointment rolling off of him, nearly tore her apart.
Brown glinted harshly in the sunlight falling in from the back window of the car, the light falling through the tangled, twisted mess of emotion.
Dark brown hair swept back over both sides of his face drew out his wide, narrow eyes. Long, thin eyebrows curved downwards above the long bridge of his nose, angled over his murky depths in a straight line, inking out his faint frown. Resting his lower jaw on his curled fingers, Tsuruga-san glowered intensely, and Kyoko's heart stuttered.
What could she say to fix this? All the memories of Sho, the good ones, the ones she thought about sometimes – the ones she would die before ever admitting, to anyone but especially the devil himself, that made her heart ache for the boy that had made her laugh – in the deepest recesses of her broken heart, were swept away by an icy wind and carried by rushing waves. Her memory and her heart flooded, filling to the brim before overflowing, with different memories, ones of the man sitting across from her.
Eyebrows creased and twisted, her lips pulled downward in a tight grimace from the effort of inwardly biting her lip, a hot warmth bloomed in her chest where the memories burst and overflowed like a spraying fountain. Each drop was a memory, a moment, and the more that burst from her, the more that built up until she felt like she was drowning. All she could see was that harsh, painful twist over his sharp, angled features.
His expression, the smothered hurt in his dark eyes, shot straight through her and Kyoko physically ached. She would have done anything to take back that night, to have changed it and fought against Sho, to have walked away but the moment she thought that, another memory shot upwards and burst apart like a pierced drop of water.
If she hadn't run out that night, she never would have met Tsuruga-san that night, either. Sho had stolen a kiss from her when she was at her weakest, unable to defend her honor, and though she hated the thought of that idiot kissing her again – she was upset with herself for doing the one thing she had promised, to this very man, not to do.
Why was she such an idiot and making these kinds of mistakes!? Inwardly, she wanted to scream that it was all a misunderstanding, that she could explain, and then grovel for the Demon King's forgiveness.
But a new, deeper part of her said, quietly, no.
She would not grovel and beg. Kyoko, despite wishing it the kiss hadn't happened and having been more in control of not only her emotions but her own awareness, was not in the wrong. Once again, Sho had stolen something precious from her and at a time when she couldn't even say no but that was not her fault. She hadn't asked him to come and, the memory flooding her, she also hadn't felt anything towards him. At the time, she had been numb to everything around her, including Sho and his heroic but entirely unwanted act.
But, she thought with a dazed awareness creeping in, there was one time she felt something that night.
And it wasn't over a lost prince.
His deep words rung in her ears, drowning her in the echo: "No one would be surprised….If you fell in love with him again."
She wanted to deny it because there was just no way she could have ever fallen back in love with Shotaro, no way in Hell.
Except that she did still love him.
It wasn't that she had stopped loving him, it was that her love had changed for him. What had once been beautiful and gentle had been shattered into a million tiny pieces and when Kyoko had, finally, pieced it back together, it didn't look the same. She didn't feel the same because even though, yes, she did love Sho, she didn't love him. A part of her would always love the boy in her memories, the boy she still saw in him sometimes, the childhood friend she deeply missed, but her heart no longer belonged to him no matter how much she cared about him.
She loved him, how could she not when they had grown up together for so many years and he knew her best?
But her love for Sho could be nothing more than a tiny fragment of her heart.
How could the tiny piece of her heart that had loved Sho ever be compared to the rest of her heart that had fallen, deeply and rather irrevocably, in love with the man sitting next to her?
She had always believed that the next time would be different but it always came back to love in the end. The truth was that love still hurt and she still pricked her finger on the thorns, unable to touch the soft, silk petals right out of her reach.
A stinging warmth built behind her eyes as she realized where the pain was coming from. What left her heart bleeding in her golden eyes wasn't that Tsuruga-san knew about the kiss or Sho's impromptu morning visit….Her heart was breaking because the man she loved thought she had fallen back in love with someone else, someone that wasn't him no matter how hard the musician tried to be, and that all this time she had hoped only to be told how she felt.
That same quietly, gentle voice spoke again, quieting everything roaring through her.
He didn't know how she felt, it said. If she had seen Tsuruga-san kiss someone else, how would she feel?
Sharp pain ripped through her and the hot, warm tears hardened into a ball that hurt whenever she swallowed. Agony blossomed in her chest at the thought which was immediately followed by a blistering surge of jealousy that had her grudges clawing to get away from their own mistress. The new antenna stood still in the flood of green, acidic jealousy and simply blinked at the Demon King, cocking it's head slowly to the side, face drowning further in sorrow.
Her hands clenched into fists on her knees. She hadn't expected to ever tell him how she felt but in the instant of looking into dark depths of cold, empty brown, the words she wanted to say sprung up from her tight, painfully beating heart.
She wanted to say them and wanted to deny that it was Sho she was in love with and in that one single moment, no one would ever know how much Kyoko wanted to love and tell him that it was him. Trembling hands on the deep, red curtains Kyoko wanted to throw the heavy drapes aside and tell him the truth weighing heavily down on her. The warm wet tears in the back of her throat and the tight, hot pain in her chest screamed at her to tell him, to give in to the love begging to burst free from her, to throw open the curtains and let in the light.
She wanted to.
But she didn't.
Tsuruga, Ren deserved more than her and no matter how many walls she broke down or mountains she climbed, he would always be on the other side where her cries couldn't be heard and her fingers could never touch. He was a Prince – not a fairytale one but a real prince who would love and cherish the woman he chose – and never more than that day did Kyoko wish she was a Princess, someone who could stand beside this shining man and make him glow, a woman, not a girl with a heart as broken as her glass slippers.
But something stopped her from looking away.
Everything in her screamed to leave that car, to walk away and never look back before she got hurt again. The grudges, seeing their chance to sway their Master, rushed back with poisonously soothing whispers, reminding her what it felt like to love. Bitterness welled up brought to life by the acidic whispers of her past, of a love broken and lost. Buried in her heart and in memories long past, was a girl who had loved with all her heart only for it to shatter into sharp, tiny pieces by the hands of a Devil in disguise of a Prince.
Once upon a time, Kyoko had believed in fairy tales and princes and magick. Until that world she loved and believed in was broken, twisted and torn apart, by the only person she had never imagined being the evil King. He left her broken but not empty, and instead of a beautiful princess with glass slippers and a gown of silk, Kyoko had risen up with a crown made from the glass shards of her broken heart and the flame of vengeance where love had bloomed. Where love had brightly lit up her world long ago lie ashy ruin, razed by the fire that had burned her.
She drew on that fire, on the ash of burnt fairytales and long ago sweet magick, and pulled on the heavy curtains. She tugged and jerked and cried until, deep within her, they were thrown open with such a force that the deep red curtains burst into red tatters that fell around like the petals of the rose she couldn't touch.
A wall was knocked down and when the light the curtains had been blocking flooded her, tears blossomed at the corners of her eyes and ice between them cracked.
He tensed and she could feel the heat of him sparking against her skin, heart cascading into a jerky erratic rhythm. A tiny prick of unease wriggled at the thought of what she was going to say but it was overshadowed by the sparks and tense electricity. Dark shadows fell from his eyes, erasing and easing the harsh expression, melting and softening it and when, at last, it dawned on her, a faded, cobwebbed light bulb flickered on.
His brown eyes softened, lightened by the edges of his lips turning upward. He didn't smile but he wasn't frowning and it was the gleam of pain in his deep orbs that powered on the lightbulb through the webs of obliviousness.
Heat rose to her cheeks and a smile rose to her lips in the warmth tickling her chest like butterflies wings bathed in the rays of the Sun. This man had the power to break her, more than Sho, but she had never considered he was also the one who could sprout growth in the barren, ashy wasteland of her burnt and hopeless dreams of fairytales and happily ever afters.
The curtains were finally open in falling, tattered shards, a gentle light falling down on a wide, dusty stage where a girl sat and glanced up at the bright, warm light. She remembered it from a time long ago when a Princess had dared to hope and love. A small piece of her clicked back into place, a piece of her glass crown chipping off and falling back into place inside her heart.
It didn't matter Yashiro-san was up front and probably holding back squeals like a teenage girl or that the car was stopped outside the studio where, if she didn't hurry, she would be late for the filming of 'The Lotus in the Mire', and it mostly certainly didn't matter that Tsuruga-san was staring at her in some sort of mix of wary confusion and surprise.
All that mattered in that moment was that Kyoko still believed in fairytales and hope and happily ever afters, in princes and magick, and most of all: Mogami, Kyoko still believed in love.
One small hand reached, settling light and gentle atop Tsuruga-san's jacket sleeve as she said, magick burning in her golden eyes, "You're right. I loved Sho, once, and a part of me still remembers."
Her words rung in the dead silence of the car as she dropped her gaze from his for a moment to her other hand still fisted on her knee with a wince, fingers twitching in the smooth jacket at the dull, painful stab of memories she knew she would never be able to forget.
When she raised her eyes, the words tumbled out of her from open curtains and bright light, from a wind that blew burnt, bitter ashes into sparks of hope and magick. "But I forgive him. I won't forget and it still hurts but I won't….I won't hate him any more because I'm tired of losing myself and I don't want to darken the good of the memories that are left. I don't want to lose to my past any more."
Standing on a stage and dancing, petals of red curtains billowing all around her and heart skipping a beat, Kyoko urged the wide-eyed man to understand. "I forgive him and I still care about him but I don't love him, not any more. It's…."
This was the moment, her moment, and she wore her heart on her sleeves with pride. "It's not Sho I'm in love with."
Thick with implications but bright with hope, the sentence hung in the air. Grabbing the strap of her blue and white bag, Kyoko scooted – careful of striped skirt, even with the attached shorts! – to the car door and threw it open wide before stepping out into the Sun. She lifted the bag and settled it on her shoulder, waving to a couple of cast members by the studio doorway when they saw her, before she turned and leaned on the car door to peek inside at the men she'd left blown away in her wake.
"I'll see you later, Tsuruga-san. Thank you for accompanying Yashiro-san to come and pick me up this morning."
She gave him a quick bow before she looked at her manager – she didn't dare say 'their' manager for fear of imploding at the implications of sharing a manager – with a bright and happy smile. "Arigato, Yashiro-san! I'm off by 7 tonight so I will see you then. Jaa ne!"
The door clicked shut behind her and for the first time since coming to Tokyo and having her heart broken, Kyoko believed that maybe, just maybe, fairytales were real after all.
All that was left was for Tsuruga, Ren to throw open his own curtains and join her solitaire dance on the stage she had laid bare for him.
She couldn't wait.