When Usagi was nothing more than an unpretentious six-year old, she had asked her less naïve and marginally older playmate a simple and straightforward question. At the time, he hadn't thought much of it, too involved with his humble but complex play of cops and robbers, so he had answered upon pure reflex.
No, of course he didn't like her. What sane eight-year old boy would? Girls were mean and girls were cunning, and he learned this from observing his older sisters as they took advantage of him because he was a boy, and because he was the youngest in their family. He didn't like girls, and he probably never would.
Besides, he had thought, turning away to chase down his best friend, girls had cooties. It was the way of the juvenile world, surely written as law in some book somewhere. After all, everyone knew it.
She had burst into tears, wailing on and on until she had driven him away to find someone to make her stop. Her father had come out, overprotective and overbearing with his affection, and cast him disapproving looks. He was too wild for his daughter, he had overhead one day, from the color and length of his hair to the slant of his eyes to the rowdy tenor of his voice. Unfit for a friend of his precious gemstone daughter.
Apathy had claimed him, but the stinging mark of his worthlessness had been left a scar at his impressionable age. If that was what they wanted of him, of what they expected of him, then he would gladly fulfill their flimsy prophecy.
He would show them.
When he grew into the limbo between childhood and adolescence, he had shown them. The local gang wanted him after he had emerged the victor in an afterschool fight. The intimidating initiation process had hardly deterred him, and in the end, he had strove to the top with the respect of a leader that, until then, he had only been able to achieve in his dreams.
But that had ultimately been his mistake. He had let his selfishness, his yearning for recognition drive him blind and insensitive. Usagi's parents had all but dragged her away from him, their deepseated fears of his abominable influence swelling like a great black beast to devour their daughter's floundering autonomy. When she turned eleven, they had sent her away to live with relatives in the country.
The night before her conviction, she had sneaked out of her room and scaled the tree outside his room. He had refused to let her in then, too angry with himself, and the memory of her pale, crestfallen face in the luminous moonlight had seared a home in his mind. Before she had slid down the tree to run back home, she had hurled something through his open window and onto his bed.
It had been hastily wrapped in bright orange paper—an undeniable reminder of his flaming head of hair. And inside the layers of crinkled gift-wrap was a simple picture frame created for two photos. On the left side was a vivid snapshot of Usagi with a death grip in his hair grinning into the camera, and on the right. . .
The right was empty.
A slip of paper that had been trapped in the middle had swayed to the floor.
Happy Birthday, it had said; because Usagi wouldn't see him when he turned fourteen.
Usagi was gone, and his failure to realize how much he would miss her was finally rectified—left him questioning the tiny hollow in his chest. He knew her address because she wrote him often and without reservations. There were letters every week, sometimes five or six at a time. But every time he reached to pen a response, his hand would hesitate.
Hesitate with what?
Maybe with things he had no desire to explore. Things he wasn't ready to touch. Not until he had gained a name for himself. Not until he had cleaned up the past four years of his life that had pulled him so deep, he wasn't sure he would ever break the surface.
The lethal undercurrent in his memories ebbed slowly as Usagi stirred in the bed next to him. The gold-soot lashes fluttered against the ivory of her cheek like extravagant monarch butterflies. Blue, muddled with remnants of slumber, peered at everything in the room and saved him for last. She smiled shyly as their eyes met.
Then she touched the aching bump on her head and remembered why exactly she was in bed and who had scared her into a six foot drop. "Baka!"
He sneered. "I broke yer fall, ya know."
She gave him a sour look. "Only because you made me fall!" She kicked off her covers and stood menacingly over him.
Tasuki blinked. She was still so small. "Yer own fault fer being clumsy in the first place."
"Ooo!" she huffed. "You haven't changed at all, Suki-chan!"
The nickname made his toes curl. All these years and she was still calling him that. It was agonizingly nostalgic, but he wasn't in the mood to rise to the bait. Tasuki climbed out of his seat and tugged at one of her pigtails hard enough to make her squeal.
She scowled, but her voice did not hold the same bitter edge. "You're not hurt, are you? I mean, after I landed on you."
"Nah."
The silence stretched.
"You got bigger, Suki-chan."
He grinned at her, easing a little of his too-long canines into his smile. "You didn't."
"You don't have to point it out like that," she grumbled, cheeks flushed pink, and shuffled around him.
There was lack of direction in her movements, he noticed, like she was doing things just to keep herself occupied. Was she nervous? Around him? It pleased him, made him a little nervous, too. "So, this is where ya live, huh? Not bad."
Usagi paused, glancing at him. Two lines of thought intersected in her head and she blurted it out before she had the chance to stop herself. "Why didn't you ever write me?" He didn't respond, looking uncomfortable and guilty. "You knew where I lived and you never responded to my letters."
"'Sagi. . ." he said foolishly.
"I really missed you."
He didn't have the courage to speak like she did, to speak without hesitation and to wear her heart on her sleeve. It would have left him and his kind vulnerable, because the world he lived in was not perceived through rose-colored glasses.
But he had missed her, and he was determined to convey that through another way. Tasuki ruffled through his coat pocket and plucked out a slim ivory box.
Usagi stared at it suspiciously as he awkwardly held it out to her.
"Will ya just take it? It ain't gonna jump up and bite ya."
"What's it for?"
"Damn nosy women," he muttered to himself, "always gotta know why. It's fer all the birthdays I missed."
A tingling warmth spread from the center of her chest to the tips of her fingers and toes. Usagi reached for it, hesitated, and dodged it to give him a fierce hug. She squeezed his protest away and pressed her moist eyes into his shirt. "I-I thought you hated me! Because you didn't write back!"
"I'm sorry."
"Just promise to write me," she murmured, raising her flushed face, "when you. . ." There was a flash of awkward tension. "When you go back." Usagi sniffled and looked at him imploringly. "You can stay a few days, can't you? I'm sure auntie and uncle wouldn't mind—"
"I can't. I hafta get back by tonight," he said. The disappointment in her eyes was crushing him.
And so he had to wonder, had any other boys felt this way when she looked like that at them? Did she know what kind of power she held, now that she wasn't a completely ungraceful child? Now that she was in the prime of her youth?
The plots of baby fat had evened out, and the round, childish face had lengthened to suit her large sapphire eyes. She had legs now, long, slender legs, and hips, and a waist—all these things that she hadn't before and had made the opposite sex relatively immune to her.
"Suki-chan! They're so pretty!"
In the space of time when he had taken his attention to a tangent, Usagi had opened his gift and adjusted the matching ivory and pearl combs into her hair. She spun away from the mirror in her tiny bedroom and grinned beatifically at him. The setting sun set her golden mane aflame and the porcelain of her skin to a muted bronze. Her sapphire eyes glittered with a light he should have recognized sooner.
The setting sun also reminded him of just how long he had stayed. He made his way to the doorway. Usagi's smile wavered a little along the edges as she followed him.
"Don't get into trouble, Suki-chan," she whispered, gripping the empty box in her two hands.
He smirked and stepped out into dusk. The orange and purple clouds loomed into the horizon. He inhaled the crisp, cool air, and remembered something. "Hey, 'Sagi." Tasuki turned around as he spoke. "That picture frame ya gave me, before ya left—why's there a picture missing?"
She inclined her head to the side, drawing her eyebrows together in thought. "Because it hasn't happened yet."
And that was all he needed to know. He grinned at her one last time before he left, sure that she would know what it meant.
His car roared away. Crows cawed. Wild green grass stirred deliciously in the wind.
Usagi waited until she could no longer see his car on the road before she opened the box again. A slip of paper lay tucked to the side. She opened it slowly, looked it over twice, and folded it neatly back.
It's a promise.
AN: Not much to say, except I had agonized over this for a while. 'Suki' means 'to like' in Japanese, and is oftentimes a woman's name, hence Tasuki's aversion to it. And lastly, I don't really get some parts of this, either (I tend to leave a lot up to the imagination). P I'm in the QuickEdit of right now and it's. . .BIZARRE! I really haven't been in here in a while! Reviews are welcome!