Disclaimer: I own nothing involved in this story unless I invented it myself. This is written for fun, not for profit. All forms of feedback eagerly accepted. Concrit is loved the most, but everything is welcome.
Fandom: Digimon Adventure 02
Title: During The Date
Romance: Jun x Yamato
Word Count: 2,196||Status: One-shot
Genre: Romance||Rated: G
Challenge: Written for Pairing Diversity, prompt #7, regrets; Written for 28 Days of Love, Day #4 (write about a pairing you're not terribly fond of), Written for Diversity Writing, section D, #17, write using the alliteration device.
Summary: [one-shot, Jun x Yamato/Yamato x Jun, Pairing Diversity; 28 Days of Love, & Diversity Writing] Jun insisted that Yamato take her on a date. It's taken a while, but now it's happening.
Yamato wasn't having a good time. Jun didn't need to be able to guess when someone was telling the truth or not to know that. For one thing, he was actually paying attention to the movie instead of to her. He probably could've told her more about what was going on across the screen than what perfume she'd worn or what color her eyes were.
She knew the color of his, a rich blue that glowed like the skies above, like living sapphires. She wanted him to ask, wanted to have a chance to say something to him about it. But all he did was keep his attention on the movie and take occasional bites of popcorn and sips of soda.
Jun shifted in her chair. She wasn't going to pout about this. She really kind of wanted to, but she wasn't going to. She was seventeen; seventeen year olds didn't pout. That was for kids like Daisuke.
This was all his fault anyway. He'd done something earlier. She didn't know what he'd done, only that it involved him being late, and so Yamato had come over to tell them about it. As if he couldn't have sent them a message on his own. But for whatever reason, he hadn't, and that gave her the chance to get Yamato to take her on this date.
She wasn't sure if it counted, since he really wasn't that enthusiastic about it, and he looked more like he would dodge for the nearest exit if he had the chance. But it was kind of a date, at least. A date until she knew what else to call it? That sounded about right.
"Are you all right?" he murmured, glancing over at her. Jun's heartbeat sped up a fraction. He at least noticed something was off! Maybe she just needed to give him a chance.
He was kind of young, after all. Not as young as Daisuke by any means - she would never have wanted to date him if he was that young - but sort of youngish. Fourteen or fifteen. She found his music a lot more interesting than his age was.
Maybe she could finally talk Momoe or Chizuru into letting her sit in on a rehearsal session with the Teenage Wolves, now that she'd dated the lead singer. Chizuru did her best to help their music, but she knew Momoe better, and Momoe had sat in on a few before, mostly because Chizuru wanted her there for some reason or another.
Before she could trail off into a mental ramble, she smiled brightly at Yamato. "I'm fine! What about you?" This was his chance to confess that he wasn't having a good time, if he wanted to do it.
He smiled at her, though, a soft kind of expression that made her insides wiggle in the happiest of ways. "I'm really enjoying the movie."
Oh. She didn't know what else to say, only nodded a little, taking a long drink of her soda and staring up at the screen. She had paid too much attention to him and not enough to it, so if there was a plot, she had no idea of what it might be.
She didn't want to ask Yamato about it, either. Not because he couldn't tell her, but because she didn't want him to know that she didn't know it. She slumped a tiny bit more down in her seat, hoping that he didn't see her. If he did, he said nothing about it, his eyes focused firmly on the screen.
If he's going to be like this during the movie, what about dinner? It wasn't the most exotic first date or trial date or whatever, but she supposed right now it at least gave Yamato something to focus on that wasn't her. So he wasn't entirely bored.
And she'd thought this would be a good idea if she got bored, if it turned out that pretty looks and a good voice were all there were to him and being on a date with him would be something she'd regret.
She kind of did, but not the way she'd thought she would. She'd hoped that they would click in a magnificent kind of way and she would spend the whole movie staring into his eyes, with him staring into hers, and going on about how wonderful he was, and he'd say the same thing about her.
How am I going to explain this to Momoe? Her best friend had squealed nearly as much as she had when Jun explained that she had a date with Ishida Yamato.
Well, there was an easy way to get around it. Momoe would only know what Jun told her, and if Jun happened to play up how fascinated Yamato was with her, then who would know the difference?
It wouldn't be the first time Jun sort of bent the truth when it came to some of her dates. She'd told Momoe once that she and the guy in question hadn't really hit it off and so she'd never tried to see him again. That was true only if one accepted 'he tried to put his hand where Jun didn't want it and so she put hers where he didn't want it, hard enough to knock him out of his seat'.
Jun knew what her grandmother, and to a degree her mother, would've said about that. But she'd never really gone out of her way to be a very traditional person anyway.
At least Yamato wasn't that kind of a guy. She almost wished he'd at least notice that she had a body at all, instead of just a mouth and a pair of eyes that looked at him instead of the movie screen.
Is he interested in someone else? That was probably a possibility. But who? She didn't know everyone that he knew. Maybe she'd talk to Daisuke about this. They kind of knew each other. If Daisuke didn't know, then he could probably ask Yamato's brother. He'd know.
The thought actually cheered her up. If Yamato wasn't interested in her, then it might not be her fault. It also didn't completely write her out of the picture. If Yamato liked someone else, but clearly wasn't dating them, because if he was, she'd know about it, and he would've told her when she wanted to go out with him, then he wasn't in love with them, and that meant she really did still have a chance!
All it would require would be something that all Motomiyas came equipped with: determination. There hadn't been a Motomiya born in the last fifty or sixty years who didn't decide they wanted something and gave up on it before throwing every bit of their heart into going after it. They might not always get it in the end, but it was never because they didn't try for it in the first place.
Which meant that even with Yamato not being interested now, it didn't mean that he wouldn't be in the future. She just had to let him know that she would always be interested, at least until she met someone who was more interesting than he was, or until he met someone that did return how he felt about whoever they were.
Tonight wasn't even ruined! Tonight she could show him how much she liked him and it would stick in his mind, like a little burr under the skin. He probably wouldn't think anything of it for the longest time. Then one day when she least expected it, he would call her up, and...
Ohh, better not get ahead of herself. She wanted him to pay attention to her, but she didn't want him asking questions about why she was suddenly a brilliant flaming red and perhaps had a bit of drool going down the side of her face.
She slipped a quick look toward him, relaxing to see his attention hadn't wavered from the movie. You'd think he was going to be graded on it by how much he kept watching it. But perhaps that wasn't so bad. She could make her plans without having to worry about him noticing her doing so.
And make them she did indeed. They weren't all that complicated. She would get his e-mail and send him things now and then. Just little ones, ones that would make sure he didn't forget about her. Maybe this even was how he acted on a movie with a girl he liked. Maybe some of her plans wouldn't even be necessary, and he'd tell her that he wanted to see her again when it was over?
Jun liked that idea. She played with it quite a bit as the movie's finale unrolled before them. As soon as the first credits began to roll, Yamato pulled himself to his feet.
"You said something about dinner?" he asked, sounding a little more enthused about that than he had anything else. She'd always heard the way to a man's heart was through his stomach. Even if she wasn't cooking now, she at least knew some good restaurants.
"Yeah, there's this really good place right around the corner. Let's check it out!" She didn't hesitate to wrap one arm around his. She had to show him where it was, right?
Jun wasn't stupid. She saw how he looked away. But she kept a grip on him anyway. If she let him get away now, she'd regret it for the rest of her life, and she would much rather regret what she did do than things that she didn't.
Getting to the restaurant didn't take too long. They weren't the only movie-goers headed there, which did make it more than a little difficult to find a table. Yamato looked this way and that, trying to fidget without making it too obvious, while Jun stared at the menu and wondered if he had a favorite she could sneakily order for him. She was bound and determined that everything she did tonight would stick into his mind on such a level that even if he wanted to he wouldn't forget her.
Once they had a table and their order was set, Jun stared directly at him. "So, what was it that my brother really did the other day? You can tell me." He had to trust her.
Yamato fidgeted again, and didn't put as much effort into pretending he wasn't this time. "It wasn't anything all that important. Just...something he had to do at school."
She poked her fingertips at him. "We're on this date because I knew you were lying that day." She didn't need to go into details on the fact he was doing it again. She didn't really care that much what her brother was doing, but she couldn't think of anything else that would encourage Yamato to talk to her.
Several silent, solemn, slow minutes passed, during which their food arrived at the table. Yamato spent them all staring anywhere but at her. When he finally spoke, she didn't fully expect what she heard. "I can't tell you. It's not my secret to tell and if he wants to tell you that's up to him."
He stirred his food around a little before eating it, while Jun plowed right into hers, thinking over what he'd said. She'd known that since the beginning of the school year, Daisuke was up to something. His last soccer game hadn't gone that well, either. She hadn't been surprised by that, though; he'd crowed for days before it that he was going to be going up against Tamachi, which boasted Ichijouji Ken. There wasn't any way he was good enough to beat Ken.
She wondered if there was more to it than that, though. She didn't know what or how, but Yamato clearly did, and that gave her yet another reason to want to keep hanging out with him. He might not tell her now but once they got to know each other better, how many secrets could he really keep from her?
So, her goals were set. She liked Yamato and she wanted him to like her too. But he had someone else on his mind, someone that she didn't know and who could end up not interested. That offered hope. There was also intrigue, since her brother was up to something that Yamato knew about and couldn't tell her, so she had to get closer to one of them to find out what it was, and Yamato was a lot more interesting than her brother by every possible scale.
It might take some conniving to get his e-mail, and maybe even his phone number, but she would do it. One way or another, she'd unravel all of these secrets, and if they weren't a couple by the end of the school year, it wouldn't be because she didn't try.
Jun leaned back, satisfied. Really, it was better to regret the things that one did, rather than what one didn't do. And she had a lot to do and she wouldn't know if she regretted any of it unless she tried.
The End