A/N: Written for the LJ community 31_days based on the prompt "I believe in walls. That we need them." Fic 2 of 3 of my mini xpost!spam. I think I had been going for fluff, but even cotton candy would taste a little bitter in Kyoko's childhood, so this is what came out. Not exactly not fluff, just, well, still a little sad. IMO. What do you think?
Fairy Castles
It was early in the evening when six-year-old Kyoko dragged six-year-old Sho down a wood-floored hallway lining the back of his parents' ryoukan.
"Sho-chan, Sho-chan, this way!" Her voice was high pitched with enthusiasm and Sho tried to cover his ears with only partial success – she had taken one of his hands hostage.
"This better not be something stupid," he grumbled at her.
"No, not stupid at all! It's really pretty! And we can play in it!"
"I don't wanna play house again, Kyoko-chan. Playing house is boring."
"It's better than playing house!" They arrived at her destination and she hastily (unmannerly – eternal politeness was not yet completely habitual for her) slid open the door to a never-used guest room. She pulled Sho in behind her, then stood glowing at him, waiting for his approval (remembering her manners, closing the door)
"What… is this?" he asked.
"It's a fairy castle!" Kyoko exclaimed. During moments stolen from homework and chores, she had decorated a torn, stained futon cover with all manner of pressed flowers, stickers and leftover glitter from school projects. This she had then strung between a wall, an out-of-place looking western-style dresser, and a high stack of distinctly smelly pillows. The pull string of one corner was tied to a nail protruding from high up the wall (how her little limbs had stretched, how nimble her small fingers had fiddled, none would ever know) while the near corner was secured between the topmost pillow on the stack and a most precariously balanced book of ukio-e prints. The distant corners were tied much lower, to the knobs on the dresser. The whole affair looked more like a flimsy canopy than any kind of castle, fairy or otherwise, and Sho's face clearly expressed his doubts.
"This ain't no castle, it's just a lousy blanket fort. I'm gettin' outta here." He turned to go but Kyoko stopped him with both hands on his arm and teary eyes.
"Noooo, Sho-chan, stay and play with me! You can be the fairy prince and I'll be the princess!"
"Geh," said Sho, but he stayed. He hated it when she cried because he had no idea what he was supposed to do about it, and a small, practical part of his brain realized that probably the best solution was never to make her cry. "Is this really what fairy castles look like? I could blow this over if I farted too hard!"
"Sho-chan," she sang, "fairies live in a different world than normal human beings. They're tall and beautiful and they can fly and their castles are the most amazing things ever."
"Bah. What do you know about fairies? It's not like you've ever met one."
Kyoko looked like she really wanted to say something, but she kept her mouth shut. Finally she said, "Don't speak rudely of the castle, Sho-chan. You're the prince so you'll inherit it one day. You have to be respectful."
"Don't wanna," Sho said, walking around under the canopy, poking at is pinnings. "This is a really lousy fort, you know. How come it doesn't have any walls?"
"It's not a fort, it's a fairy castle!" Hadn't she explained this already? Sho-chan was her prince, but sometimes Kyoko found him just so exasperating. "Fairy castles fly just like fairies do. They float around in the clouds," she started twirling happily around Sho, "and they don't need walls because they're magic!"
Sho disliked being danced around like a maypole and tried to back out of her orbit. "Hah! Magic stuff's just for kids," he scoffed, right as he backed into the pillow buttress. It was a soft thing to bump into, and as it crumpled around him he had the strange thought that maybe this was what clouds felt like. But then the book, which was decidedly not soft or cloudlike despite its floating-world content, also came tumbling down, and it made sudden, sharp contact with his little head.
"Owwwww!" he yelled, and in a thoroughly misguided attempt to get revenge at the universe for allowing such a travesty to occur, he reached up at the floundering corner of the castle and tugged at it angrily.
Which caused the childish knot at the near corner to come suddenly undone, which brought the heavy futon cover down over both their heads, which effectively shut out Sho's source of light, which made him tug at the covers more insistently (and which much shouting), which in turn excited the sturdy natures of both the western dresser and little Kyoko.
"Sho-chan, stop moving around so much!" She tried to find him in the decorated mess, but she hadn't turned the lights on and the only natural light was coming from the window on the wall whither the futon cover had recently fallen, meaning that all was very dark indeed down at six-year-old-head level.
Sho kept shouting and wrestling with the fabric and Kyoko kept calling "Sho-chan" until finally he pulled the pinioning drawer completely out of the dresser. It landed with a loud clack on the floor and Sho, having all of a sudden lost hold of anything with enough tension to fight back, tumbled backwards onto his bottom. He thrashed around some more until he was able to free his head from the futon cover.
Kyoko was still standing, already divested of the castle – it honestly wasn't that hard to just pull it off.
Sho glared at her. "I don't care what kind it is," he shouted, "all forts need walls!"