Disclaimer: I don't own these people

The Beginning

Five-year-old Sakura Kinomoto ran out into the rain, a tiny hand held over her head, hardly shielding her from the torrent of water. Under a lamp post metres away, a lanky boy stood with his back to her.

Sakura scuttled up to him and planted herself on his right. He wore nothing more than an old T-shirt and faded jeans, both already drenched by the rain. Sakura felt guilty for her brand new slicker and wellingtons that Mama had just bought for her that weekend. She shrugged it off and held it in her hands, but couldn't quite make herself step out of the wellingtons that kept her little toes warm.

"Sakura, you get away from him!" Tomoyo Daidouji, her cousin and best friend, looked warily at her company and stayed a fifty paces away, yelling over the roar of the rain. "Grampa's gonna drive us! Come on! Get away from him!"

Everybody knew that Syaoran Li was dangerous. Only nine and he'd already known how to wield a knife better than any grown man in town, and Sakura was sure he could gut anyone of them had they ever dared to mess with him, too. Syaoran was poor, and his parents were from the wrong side of the tracks. The whoring drunk and the whore were the worst kind of trash there was, according to Mama and Papa when they discussed the lives of Syaoran and his family, always a favorite topic, in the privacy of their bedroom when they thought she wasn't evesdropping.

Sakura had always felt that Syaoran had protected himself as fiercely as he did against pity.

"I'm taking the bus to school, same as anybody! You can go with Grampa." Sakura turned her head and faced forward, waiting until Tomoyo sighed and walked away.

"Go on and get away from me." It was said so quietly Sakura at first couldn't be sure he had spoken, then was ecstatic that he had.

"I'm taking the bus! We're waiting for the bus together." Sakura spoke carefully. He had such a nice voice, really, low and manly, at least to her young ears. "My name's Sakura, and you're Syaoran." It was more a statement than a question.

"I know your name. Go on with your grampa. Get away." He wasn't looking at her.

"I'm taking the bus, and I'm taking it with you! Now that you know my name and I know yours, we're friends now, okay?"

"Go on, you. You'll get me in trouble." He still refused to look at her.

"Why would I? I won't, you'll see!" she swore with the earnestness of innocent youth.

"You don't know anything."

"I do know things!" Sakura thought hard, then said, "But you can teach me if you think I don't!" Sakura was five, and couldn't care less about propriety. The town princess and the son of the resident drunkard and all around loser. There was no hope for any kind of friendship.

Sakura was the only child of the Mayor of Patience, Georgia, and was the closest thing to a princess the town had. She had curly brown hair that her mama would swear was as soft as down feathers, the brightest green eyes anyone had ever seen, and a rosy, round face that everyone fell in love with on sight. She had made it her mission to make friends with Syaoran Li. Afterall, he had no friends, and neither did she, having been cosseted and babied to within an inch of her life. They were two peas in a pod, to her mind, and were meant to be together.

The rain wasn't relenting, and Sakura's small frame began to shiver violently from the cold. Syaoran glanced at her shaking, then said, "Put on the damn jacket. You'll get me in trouble."

Sakura gasped silently. He had said a bad word! It was a bad, bad word. Mama would have skinned her alive had she ever dared to utter such a bad word. She immediately forced herself to stop shivering. "Am not! You won't get into trouble, I promise."

The arrival of the bus prevented him from answering,or perhaps retorting, and Sakura stepped into the warmth with a sigh of relief. Her wellingtons squeaked on the floorboards as she made her way to where Syaoran sat, subbornly staring out the window.

"I'm sitting here, okay?" without waiting for an answer, Sakura plopped herself down beside him.

He felt really warm. She could feel the heat through both layers of clothes, and suddenly felt so much better. She beamed at him, but he stoically focused through the pane of glass, as if the answer to the mystery of the universe lay just beyond it.

Sakura sat quietly throughout the rest of the bus ride. She was thinking. Syaoran seemed to think that being seen with her would get him into some kind of trouble. She made a point on her mental checklist to convince Syaoran that he'd be safe with her, just as safe as she strangely felt with him.

Once she stepped off the bus, she was accosted by Carl Dingham, a cousin of sorts. It seemed the entire town was covered in the roots of her family heritage. You could go nowhere without touching someone related to her. Carl was eleven, big, and mean as they came, and apparently family meant nothing to him. He had a shock of blond hair on his plump head, which always seemed to Sakura to have been screwed too deep into his neck-less tank of a body.

"Where are you doing, you loser?" he reached up a surprisingly quick hand and yanked on her messy ponytail, practically just a stub that Mama had stuffed her riotous short hair into to give a semblance of neatness. Still, it hurt when it was pulled, and Sakura, as if yanked right off her feet, went flying, head-first.

She lay on the ground, trying to catch her breath, waiting resignedly for the cackle of laughter that always meant a Carl Dingham getaway after an attack. It never came. She gasped and wheezed as she sat up.

Syaoran, tall for his age and as tall as any eleven-year-old, had had Carl by his starched lapels and had slammed him to the playground wall. Standing there, he growled menacingly. "Don't you touch her again." He let Carl drop to the ground, crying.

Sakura wobbled over and wound a hand through Carl's blond locks and gave a painful yank of her own. Better late revenge than never. Carl burst into even more violent tears. Syaoran watched her with shuttered eyes.

"Thank you, Syaoran." she grinned all her baby pearly whites at him.

The way Sakura figured it, she'd been put onto the earth to take care of Syaoran, because no one else wanted to. They'd protect each other.

Note: I was advised to put a line here so you guys could separate my story from my notes, but the website doesn't allow me to for some reason. Oh well I'm sorry. I know it says romance/drama, and that's what it is, but I'm a humorous person, and I like humour, so there's bound to be some in here, so no worries! This is the start of a new story. I give you the first chapter. Enjoy!