A/N: It seems I can't even write this pairing without breaking my own heart. Damn you, CLAMP.
Fandoms: Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles
Prompt: Fye/Sakura, 'goldfish'
xxxxx
III: kingyo
xxxxx
In her room, she has a goldfish.
She's named it Syaoran, after her first love. It took him weeks and months of patient companionship to learn even that much. Sakura keeps her secrets close to her heart. She loves easily and trusts slowly, though to those not paying attention it seems the opposite. He knows she would die for almost anyone, but will tell her truth to almost no one. He feels privileged to know even that much.
Her name is Sakura. He asked her on the very first day, with a sweeping bow and a rogueish wink, but had to wait a month after that to recover from the bittersweetness of her smile when she answered him before speaking to her again.
Fye is a teacher. He knows it is terribly improper of him to favour her as he does, but he simply can't help it.
She is in his art and art history classes. Though she always stares out the windows at the changing clouds and seems not to be listening, she always knows the answer when he asks her a question. Moreover, unlike her bored and uninspired classmates, the art she creates is heartbreaking in its purity and sorrow. Fye has caught himself many times staring at her paintings and sketches for long minutes on end when he ought to be marking piles of works. They depict empty landscapes, sometimes but rarely occupied by one very small, partially-transparent girl. He knows she is capable of much more creative diversity than this, and half-heartedly encourages her to expand her repertoire, but this is what is in her heart and really all he wishes for is to see more.
One week when she went away to visit her family, it was him she asked to care for Syaoran. Fye felt obscurely honoured by that, and wishes now every day that she would trust him with more than her pet goldfish.
Sometimes, very rarely, he sees glimpses of the girl she used to be before the nameless tragedy she trusts no one with. She smiles and the entire class smiles with her without realizing what they are doing. She helps a pimply, awkward boy pick up the books he has dropped and everyone in the hallway feels ashamed for not having gotten there first. She praises the least talented member of the class, and suddenly he sees a genius in their work that he had ignorantly dismissed before. Sakura sees things, knows things, and says them out loud whenever she has the opportunity.
Even so, he knows she has changed. The edges of her now are too awkward to be familiar. She is uncomfortable within herself, but unwilling to burden anyone else with her fear and pain.
Fye tries very hard not to think of her as some kind of saint, but mostly fails.
This is partially but not entirely due to the first day of classes. He arrived to find her already there, fingers trailing down the frame of one of his sample works. She turned to him with those eyes, those eyes nothing in him had ever really managed to hide from, and asked him why he was so lonely.
Taken aback, he had asked her why she thought he was lonely, and she told him that the painting had told her so.
In all his time as a teacher, he has never met a student or a teacher or any person at all who had seen through the colourful chaos of his paintings to the truth beneath, and so he does not know what to do with her. He fears her. He is drawn to her. He is both, and everything in between, and he has absolutely no idea what to do.
So he teaches his classes, teaches her, and learns from her at the same time. She had lived for barely half the time he has, but she has a wisdom he has never even approached.
When he is afraid and cautious, she afraid and tries anyway.
When he is suspicious and withdrawn, she is suspicious and chooses to trust anyway.
When he is hurt, he smiles, false and bitter. When she is hurt, she smiles and weeps, genuine and loving.
He has never met anyone in his life he wishes so hard he could love. He can't, he knows. She is his student, she is too young, she is innocent while he is old and jaded. He would hurt her. He would ruin her. And yet, and yet, he still wishes he could give in.
She does not help. After class she comes up to hand in her assignments in person, smiling and explaining the meaning behind her work to him. When he has had a bad day, she always knows and lays a hand on his arm to remind him to listen to her words of comfort. When she sees him in the hallways, she bows and beams at him as though she is thrilled beyond words to see him. It makes it even worse that he knows she means it.
One day he knows he will break and ask her out to dinner. He will see the shadow of Syaoran in her eyes the moment before she thinks of a diplomatic way to refuse, and his heart will shatter beyond repair. Later, days or weeks or months later, he will lose his strength and ask again, and once again she will dash the hopes he should not have in the first place.
It is a conflict he hasn't the heart to resolve. He shouldn't love her, he can't, but he does. He loves her. He has loved her for two years, and he will love her for years and years to come.
Perhaps one day Syaoran will fade enough in her mind for there to be room for him. Until then he will have to subsist on the love she gives everyone, the all-encompassing altruism that is her base and incontrovertible truth. It isn't enough. It will never be enough. However, it is all he has, at least for now. Therefore, it has to be enough.
He lives his life now in the hopes that when he eventually falls apart around her, she will put him back together instead of stepping on the pieces. Futile, perhaps, but it keeps him going when there is nothing else.
Once he lived for the twin he stole his name from. Now he lives for her, and he has no friends left to call him derisive names for it.
Surrender is his fondest fantasy.
XxxxxxX
A/N: bawwww
