Warning: This story implies the eventual involvement of two women together. Don't like? Don't read.
Commentary: I owe my gratitude yet again to lostinhersong, who read bits of this for me and gave me invaluable advice and encouragement. Because she hasn't seen this in its entirety, though, blame any mistakes you see on me! ;)
This is the beginning of a story involving Haruka, Michiru, and their relationship as it evolved during the Silver Millennium. They are between six and eight years old here—you decide the specifics!
I originally didn't intend this story to be even this long, so its eventual breadth is unknown. If you like it enough to see it persist, the best way to have that happen is to let me know!
To all of you who read, review, message, question, critique, and encourage me: thank you so much. Please continue to do so.
As always, I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Disclaimer: I do not own the BSSM franchise. It belongs to the goddess Takeuchi Naoko.
Oh empty my heart
I've got to make room for this feeling
So much bigger than me
—Imogen Heap, "Can't Take It In"
SKY DOWN
CHAPTER ONE: Kero-Kero
The reeds rustled. A child peered through their slats, her gaze predatory, her fingers buried in the brookbed's muck. It gooshed up over her knuckles and painted them brown. When her hair fell into her eyes, she brushed it away and gave her sharp cheek a thoughtless sienna warstripe. A dragonfly buzzed the shell of her ear; a cloud of midges passed by her nose, and sweat misted in her lashes and ran down the runnel of her shoulderblades. Heedless of it all, her world the width of a pencil and her eyes fixed upon her target, the child tensed. Her thighs trembled. She licked her lips.
She sprang!
Her fingers closed about the unsuspecting frog. With a strangled gweep and a slippery writhe, it squirted from the cage of her hands, landed in the sodden rushes, and made haste away in a flex of long legs and a flurry of swirled streambed silt. The croaking cacophony of its brethren filled the reeds with ribbety reprimand, and the young princess in their midst threw back her head and laughed.
"Fine!" she shrieked, cupping her muddy hands about her mouth to form a rudimentary bullhorn. She sucked in a sure breath. Her cheeks puffed. She insisted finally in a giggle-gasp wail: "I won't kiss any of you!"
"Who are you talking to?"
The princess spun on a surprised heel. The mire beneath her feet squelched, slipped, gave way. She managed a single pinwheel of flailing arms before she ended on her rump in the middle of the stream. The trailing ends of her dress fluttered on the faint currents; slimemuck specked her slender legs and spurted up the back of her ceremonial vest. The frog chorus fell in volume to what seemed a shared sinister laugh.
"Ugh," she muttered, cheeks flushed, and turned her eyes to the stream's low bank.
Another child in a linen shirt and breeches crouched there, watching her. Elbows propped on thighs, hands dangling between knees, said child flicked her fingers and repeated, curious, "Who are you talking to?"
"I was talking to the frogs," the princess sighed. She noted a sliver of gooey green at the edge of her vision and, wincing, reached up to pull a clump of sodden moss from her hair.
"Why?" her visitor pursued. She smirked and tacked on, "You missed some." She twiddled her fingertips above her own sandy temple. "Just here."
Squelching to her feet, the princess slogged over to the bank and plunked herself down mere inches from the newcomer, who wrinkled her nose. "I," she told the girl imperiously as she made to wring out her soaked curls, "was looking for a prince in them." She paused, shifted her legs under the drenched dress. She offered next, morose, "I think I have mud in my—"
"What have frogs got to do with princes?" her unexpected companion interrupted. She shifted over a little to avoid the streamwater spatter and sat down. Smirk still hovering about her mouth, she pointed out, "You've still got that stuff in your hair."
The princess blinked, then ladled the sopping mass of her mane into her companion's lap and insisted, "Get it out for me, then."
"…you just dripped slime," the stranger observed, her tone a mix of horrified and awed, "all over me."
The princess flapped a pale hand. "You won't get in trouble," she assured the girl. "I'll just tell them I pushed you in."
"But—"
"It's your fault, too." Looking up, the princess narrowed seabrine eyes and threatened, "I fell because you surprised me. If you don't get it out, I'll tell them you pushed me in."
"That's not fair!" the stranger protested.
"Neither is holding my head like this," the princess groaned. "My neck hurts. Hurry up! You already know what will happen if you don't."
"And if I do?" the other child muttered. She eyed the goop in the young royal's hair—and on her breeches—with disgusted apprehension. "You have to give me a better deal than not tattling."
The princess sat up a little. Her wet-welch locks whispered over the stranger's wrists, traced her arms. She looked resolutely through the snared snarl of her bangs and whispered to the girl, voice hushed with promise, "I'll tell you what frogs and princes have in common."
The newcomer frowned, dubious. Doubt fogged her gaze and made it gray, but there was green in there too, the sprig-hope of mountain meadows. She huffed and asked, "Is it good?"
"Oh," said the princess, smug, "it's good."
The stranger debated, jiggling her knees beneath the royal's turquoise head. Around the pair the frogs kept up their churring chitter. One gave a particularly disgruntled werk! from the safety of the ring-rushes. A small, curious smile stole over the stranger's lips at that, and she plunged her fingers into the soggy blue mound, searching diligently for lingering algae strands. She demanded then, eager in the subdued way of one who is more accustomed to being quiet than lending a voice to light, "Tell me."
The princess held up a pruny, muck-muddled finger. "First things first!"
"What now?" moaned the stranger. She nevertheless stuck to her task, not that she was given much choice in the matter: the princess had hair like enthusiastic ivy, and it clung with special surety when wet.
"Your name," the noble asserted. "What is it?"
The stranger hesitated, netted by the noose of hair in her lap. "Haruka," she offered at last. She worried a careful palm over a final cerulean curl, tossed a glop of residual stream-gunk back into the nearby reeds, and surmised, "Finished."
The princess rocked upright. She ran studious, suspicious fingers over her skull, then smiled and thrust an arm into the space between them. She did her best to curtsy sitting down. "Michiru," she permitted. She lowered her lashes and looked at her cohort through them, feigning shyness. "Sorry for getting your hands dirty."
"And my lap too?"
"No," Michiru admitted in a brazen giggle. "White breeches? You were asking for it!"
"They aren't white anymore," Haruka muttered. She picked a crumpled dragonfly wing from amidst a coil of unidentifiable gloop near the hinge of her knee, flicked it away, and turned burnished stormcloud eyes to the princess at her hip. "You owe me!" she insisted suddenly. "The princes, the frogs—pay up!"
Michiru made a face, but agreed, "All right, all right." Tucking her chin into the cradle of her hands, she asked the other girl, "Do you know what a prince is?"
"What my father wishes I was," replied the wearer of stained breeches. She blew a sandspire forelock from her eyes and shrugged.
The young royal's face pinched in revulsion. "Gross," she opined, and continued sagely, "a prince is a man."
"Uh-huh."
"He wants you to—to be a man?"
Haruka hesitated. She rubbed smudged knuckles over her jaw and hedged, "I think it's something different." At Michiru's squally glance, she held up her hands in a peace-slay-me gesture and grinned. "Okay, fine! So a prince is a man."
"A man," the princess echoed grumpily. She eyed her companion, daring the advent of any new definitions. When none came, she persisted, "A man who will do anything you want."
Haruka chewed the inside of a cheek, listening to both her company and the nyeep-nyeep of the rushbed's inhabitants. She narrowed her eyes against the glare from the stream's sunlight-spangled surface. "Ah-huh…"
"And frogs," Michiru conferred, "turn into princes when princesses kiss them."
Together they considered this. The royal dangled her feet in the stream and dug her toes into the soft silt, relishing the squish of the mud beneath her heels. The newcomer, for her part, watched the rill-rustle of the reeds and squinted one eye shut for the speckle of sweat above it. She heaved a knowing, suspecting sigh.
"You want one, don't you?" she asked. "A prince."
"Absolutely," Michiru affirmed. She kicked a leg and sent a ring of water skyward, expression righteous at the height it achieved. Nibbling her lip, she stated, "They're really hard to catch, though."
"…I could help you catch one," Haruka proposed. She steepled her fingers above a grubby knee and smirked at the noble. "But I will not," she declared, "kiss one for you."
"Who said I needed you to kiss one for me?" Michiru demanded archly.
"You did. You said—you said frogs turn into princes when princesses kiss them." Haruka jerked a thumb at herself, the pad of the digit tucked between the dimple of her collarbones. She smiled. With her other hand, she indicated her entire person in a grand, sweeping flourish. "I happen to be a princess."
"You happen to be a liar!" Michiru snickered at her.
Haruka bristled. "I am not! I'm a princess! Really!"
"Of what?" Michiru indulged. She kicked both feet this time. The resounding splash scared off a small school of fish, and beneath the new ripples they flicked and shone like silver darts. Michiru laughed.
"Of a whole planet," Haruka boasted. She plucked a blade of grass, stuck it between her lips, and nipped at it. It tasted terrible but, in an effort to exude poise, she kept up the act. "Of Uranus," she maintained. "I'm here to meet another princess, actually. Maybe if I could find her, she'd kiss a frog for you."
Michiru's feet stilled. Waterbugs skated placidly between the canyons of her ankles. "Which princess?" she asked, suddenly cautious.
"Are there really so many?" Haruka replied. Puzzlement laced her voice in lieu of her companion's reaction, drew it down soft again.
"No… no. I guess not. But—" she floundered, and found, "which one?"
"The princess of Neptune," Haruka murmured. She spat out her blade of grass at last, unable to bear the taste any longer. "The two of us—we're supposed to—"
"Form a team," Michiru permitted. She drew one foot from the stream, then the other, and dried them on the grass. She looked away from Haruka into the reeds. Somewhere in their hidden heart, a frog gave a weeble-wick croak.
"Yeah," Haruka concurred. She rocked onto her knees, brows blown aloft. "You're her, huh?"
Michiru looked back at her, stuck out her tongue: nodded.
They surveyed each other. Haruka spied a pondscum urchin. Michiru noted a blonde, blade-bent child possessed of strict eyes and a surreptitiously softer smile beneath them. They both secretly liked what they saw.
The latter hid a grin behind a grimy hand and observed, "You don't think I'm a liar?"
Haruka rolled her shoulders. One cracked. "No. I think you'd be bad at it anyway." She prodded the other royal's hip. "You didn't show up earlier at the welcome ceremony. Why not? We all waited a long time."
Michiru stared hard at her fellow noble a moment, face unreadable. She scratched an insect bite on her thigh and ultimately confessed, "I was afraid I wouldn't like you."
"Uh?" Haruka coaxed.
"We're supposed to form a team. Us two. I mean, there are others, right—other princesses we'll work with someday." Michiru looked to the other girl for confirmation.
Haruka dipped her head in easy assent. "Yeah, that's what my father says. We might have to fight, too. With those girls." She added, "But only if it gets really bad."
"Otherwise it will just be us," Michiru confirmed. She scratched the bite again, harder this time. The frogs set up an orchestral number fit to rival the Triton citadel's best performance, and minnows zoomed in the shadows cast by the aqua-haired noble's toes. She took a breath and grouched, "Wouldn't it be terrible if I didn't like you?"
"Well—"
"It would be!" interrupted the princess. She scowled, not so much at Haruka as through her. The other girl had to bite her lips on the inside to keep from laughing. "Together forever and hating each other! Geez!"
"Mm…" Abandoning all pretense of caring whether she was clean, Haruka dropped herself onto an elbow along the streambank. She stretched her legs over the moss-covered verge. Crinkled leaves collected in the cuffs of her breeches. "So you ran away," she discerned.
Michiru picked up a rush seedpod and worked her fingernails into its crevices. She attempted to break it apart, failed, and chucked it resolutely across the currents instead. "I ran," she said, and amended, "but not away."
"I'm trying to understand you," Haruka responded, "but it's not working. You're being weird."
Michiru, whose absent wandering fingers had found another seedpod, pursed her lips and chucked her prize at the other princess. It bonked between blazing cowlicks.
"Hey!"
"I am not being weird," Michiru sniffed. She folded her arms. Rivulets of muddy water dripped from her wrists.
"Weee-eeeeird," Haruka insisted, sing-song. She was treated to the sight of Michiru's pink-petal tongue for the second time in mere minutes.
"I ran," the smaller princess repeated after a patient pause.
"Uh-huuuh…"
"I can find something heavier to throw! I have great aim."
"Fine, fine! You ran! And?"
"And it wasn't away," huffed Michiru, "because I—I guess I sort of knew you'd find me no matter what, or where I went. Not just because we have to do this, either." She trailed off to study the minnows in the stream, head bobbing to the wind-crackle of the circling cattails. Privately she sought words to explain a feeling she scarcely understood but implicitly trusted, ignorant still of such broad concepts as fate and destiny and starcrossed streams in which were spun greater things than slippery frogs.
Haruka sensed the necessity of quiet, so she kept it. Resting her cheek in her palm, she put in a simple, "I'm listening," and waited.
Michiru smiled. Thus assured, she volunteered matter-of-factly, "The sun comes up in the morning because it—because it does. Nothing anyone says makes it do it. And that's how I felt when they told me about you coming here, to be, uhm. To be with me. Our team. I just... ergh!" Her fingers twisted together in her lap and she spluttered, "I knew you would find me because—because that's you. Like the sun comes up, you'd come to me." She made a cutting motion with her hand. "That's all," she finished, and fell silent.
Haruka mulled this over. A beetle made to lumber across her knuckles: she flexed them and let it pass unmolested. "Fair enough," she allowed when it was gone.
The other princess laughed. "Just like that?"
"Hm?"
"You agree with what I said? Just like that?"
"Why not?" The blonde child grunted, sat up. Both her breeches and her tunic bristled with bits of fen detritus. "I'm here, aren't I?"
Michiru's smile fanned into a sugar-shy grin. "Mmhm. You are."
"I still don't understand why I'm here, though. Exactly." Haruka motioned to the stream: its reeds, rushes, cattails, croaking creatures.
Roses wore across Michiru's cheeks. "I like it here," she defended. "I—I wanted to be in a place I liked. In case I didn't like you."
"Huh," observed the newcomer. And then, "Do you? Like me?"
They surveyed each other again, thoughtful and certain at once. Michiru bit her lip, sighed, hedged: "That depends."
"Ah?"
"…will you really help me catch a frog?"
Haruka's thin ribs jumped in a blustery sigh, but she swung to her feet and offered her arm to Michiru. Pleased, the princess pulled herself up. Her companion told her with a wiggle of yellow brows, "I'll show you my skills."
"My hero," Michiru lauded the girl, though the praise was half a giggle. She fluttered her eyelashes and tightened her fingers in the available elbow.
They set off along the streambank's narrow skirt, leaving behind them a stippled line of seeping footprints. The encompassing hum of insects lent their progress a warbly soundtrack. Heat-rills simmered over stiller pockets of water, and both princesses were sweating profusely by the time Haruka spotted a satisfactory clump of undisturbed rushes. She drew up short and pointed at it, indicating it to Michiru. When the smaller girl made to pounce from the bank into the stagnant mire, Haruka captured her hand and insisted, "No! We need a plan first."
"Plan?" Michiru asked impatiently.
"A strategy." Haruka tugged the noble's fingers. "If just chasing them around worked, I think you'd have gotten one by now." She frowned suddenly. "Hey—why do you even want a prince, anyway?"
Michiru gave her friend a surprised look. "Didn't you hear what I said earlier? About how princes are men who will do anything you want?"
"I heard you just fine. You're kind of loud."
Ignoring the jibe, Michiru queried, "Don't you have some chores you absolutely, positively hate?"
"Sure, I gue—"
"Chores you wish someone else would do for you?"
A dragonfly landed on Haruka's forefront cowlick, buzzed its wings, and took off again. Eyes wide in abrupt understanding, she jiggled Michiru's hand in hers and hissed, "We need a plan now. And two frogs."
"Well, you're the one with skills, right?" Beaming, Michiru jabbed a thumb at the waiting rushes. "What do you suggest?"
The blonde princess took a moment to seriously study the situation. Her lips moved soundlessly; her fingers drummed against Michiru's palm, idle, a low backbeat to a burgeoning friendship. She soon recommended, "Since you're good at scaring them, you do that. On the other side. I'll wait over here and surprise them when they come out."
"They're really slimy," Michiru cautioned her, doubtful. "Do you think you can catch one and keep it?" She hesitated, then chewed her lip and admitted, "I lost one right before you got here. Splut!" She wiggled her fingertips, miming the scurry of a scared streamslicker.
Smiling because really, who could help it around the spritely girl, Haruka unhooked their joined fingers only to press them together again, flat this time. "Look," she said, and Michiru did. "I thought of that already, see? My hands are bigger than yours. So I think it'll work."
Her eyes fixed on the press of their palms, the azure-locked child managed in a tone that bordered on worshipping, "You really do have skills, don't you?"
Haruka blinked. Blood boiled into her face and she put in, voice both firm and faint, "Let's try it and find out." She took her hand away from Michiru's and sat down on the bank, gaze hidden, fingers working at the laces of her boots.
Michiru hopped from foot to foot as the other girl carefully took off her socks and rolled up her breeches too. "I'm going over!" she announced once Haruka was ready.
"Ssh!"
"Sorry, sorry! I'm going over," she repeated in a strident stage whisper, "now." She turned, slipped, nearly fell face first into the stream, and shot a shamed look back at Haruka. The other princess, lips stapled smartly shut, aimed her eyes skyward and pretended to have seen nothing.
Arms spread for balance, Michiru waded across the stream and crept to the back of the rushbed. Haruka followed her partway and crouched before the still reeds, letting her fingertips trace the surface of the water, each digit flared in ready anticipation. The weight of the humid air fell over the girls in a leaden sheet—sweat dipped from the tip of Haruka's nose and Michiru's vest stuck to her in all the wrong places, but neither of them really minded. Hunting frog-princes was, after all, incredibly serious business.
"I'm in position," Michiru eventually informed her. Her words came in a low, rare rasp.
"Me too," Haruka called quietly back. Her eyes narrowed, focused, intent. "Do it."
A shriek shook the calm of the glen as Michiru threw herself into the rushes. Cattails crackled, crumbled; reeds exploded in a rapidfire popgun salute. Loose sludge flew to the heavens and Haruka, half-snarling and half-laughing, launched her slender body like an arrow into the mire after the first frog she saw. She grasped—
Her fingers closed over it—
"HAH!" Michiru cried seconds later. She came out of the ruined reeds with fresh algae in her hair, mud stuffed up a nostril, and a stunned minnow wedged behind an ear, but she noticed none of these things. Her attention in its entirety fell instead on the struggling creature clutched in Haruka's hands. "You got one!" she exulted. Giddy in the surge of endorphins that came with such a triumph, she sat down in the shallows next to her friend.
"I did!" Haruka wheezed. She pulled her face from a mound of muck, spat, and made to sit up. Michiru helped her. With the fringe of her dress, she wiped away the ooze on the other girl's face, and when Haruka could see again, they both bent over their prize to examine it.
Bowed front legs paddling uselessly at the air above Haruka's thumbs, the anxious amphibian squirmed in its prison of palms. Its tremendous jowls quivered. Its squinty eyes strained; its throat bulged. It kicked a webbed foot that made a wet thwuck against its captor's wrist.
"It's huge," Michiru breathed.
"It's ugly," Haruka decided. "It's gonna make a really unfortunate prince." She thrust it at Michiru, who giggled and leaned away. "Go on, then," she encouraged the smaller princess. "A nice big smack. Right on his chops! C'mon!"
Puckering her lips obediently, the child dropped her head to bestow her embrace upon the frog. With her mouth millimeters from its snout, however, she stopped. She frowned.
"What's wrong?" Haruka asked. She gave the frog a ginger joggle. "You shouldn't keep him waiting. It's rude, see."
"How… how do you know it's a him?" Michiru queried.
Haruka opened her mouth, paused—closed it again. "I don't," she confessed.
"I don't know how to tell either," Michiru worried. She leaned in close and Haruka followed suit, and their temples brushed, a muddled wave to a dirty dune, as they set about inspecting their captive from top to trembling toe.
"Do you know if it works on girl frogs?" Haruka murmured.
"Hmm-mm." The princess lifted her eyes to her friend, expression severe. "This is a problem."
"A real problem." Haruka nodded. The frog renewed its struggles and she strengthened her grip. After gazing at it thoughtfully, she put forth, "You could just kiss it anyway. I guess, worst case scenario, it turns into another princess. No one said we couldn't just make her do whatever we wanted, right?"
Michiru brightened. "That makes sense," she acknowledged. Her spine stiffened, resolute. "Lift him up."
Haruka complied.
Without fanfare, hesitation, or ceremony, Michiru squinched her eyes shut and kissed the frog.
A breeze rattled the rushes. The minnow behind Michiru's ear revived and wiggled free; it fell back to the stream with a small plunk. A glob of mud unglued itself from Haruka's hair and followed the fish.
The frog, though, stayed a frog.
Michiru opened an eye and made a sound of dismay upon discovering this. Haruka shook her head sadly. For a moment neither princess said anything, too disappointed to really vocalize their conjoined woe. When one did deign to speak, it was by far the more optimistic part of the pair.
"Maybe the princess doing the kissing has to be from a strange land," said Michiru. She shifted her gaze to Haruka, a devilish intent gleaming within its marine depths. "Stuff like that's really popular in stories."
Haruka blanched. "You can't be serious."
"Dead serious," the Neptunian princess corrected.
Haruka looked down at the frog in her hands. Perhaps sensing her deliberation, it puffed out its pendulous pouch of a throat and gweeped piteously.
"No."
"Yes!"
"Forget it."
"You're afraid," Michiru accused the other girl loftily. She studied her dirt-encrusted nails, faking shocked disappointment. "What happened to your skills?"
Haruka flushed a dull crimson beneath the lingering remnants of her mud mask. "I'll show you afraid," she growled. She spun the frog in sure fingers, lifted it, studied it grimly. "Pucker up, pal," she muttered, and brought the creature in a crush to her lips.
Several seconds later, Michiru touched her elbow. "Haruka."
"Mmmffh?"
"You can stop now."
Haruka looked through her lashes. The unaffected frog stared back at her. Face erupting into a pugnacious scowl, the blonde princess whipped the creature away from her mouth and hissed, "Strange land, huh?"
"It was just a thought."
"It was a terrible thought."
Michiru hung her head. Haruka sulked. The frog failure between them gave up the ghost of getaway and dangled. It supplied the occasional cross croak.
"I'm sorry," Michiru whispered finally.
Wiping her mouth on a sleeve, Haruka grimaced and shrugged. "Princes must be hard to find," she surmised. "It's not your fault."
Michiru made a subdued whimpering sound in response. Surprised, Haruka glanced over at the other princess and was horrified to find her close to tears. "It is my fault," Michiru denied. "I went and got us dirty—"
"I like getting dirty!" Haruka interjected. She didn't think it wise to point out that their mutual filth-mongering had actually happened before the frog's capture.
"I got us slimy—"
Haruka opened her mouth to say she didn't mind slime, really, honestly, the breeches were scratchy and uncomfortable anyway and the slime was probably an improvement, but Michiru screwed up her face and moaned:
"And I said I'd tell on you and I made you kiss a frog and I know you didn't want to and there wasn't even a prince and… and… you don't like me, do you? I was so worried about not liking you that I didn't stop to think that you might not like me, and you don't, right? How could you possibly? How could you like me at all?"
Tears, two of them, spilled down the smaller noble's cheeks and made smeared trails in the dirt there. They winked like jewels before Michiru tucked her face into her fingers to hide her shame, her shoulders quivering beneath her saturated vest, her hair a straggling, sopping seaweed net.
Haruka reached for the other princess. Thus freed, the frog bounded euphorically into the stream's deeper currents, and its captor's hands cupped Michiru's jaw, tipped it upright again. "Hey," the blonde child managed, gruff. "Hey now. Stop that." And then, because it was true, "We're wet enough, aren't we?"
Michiru giggled through her tears and cast cautious eyes to Haruka, who smiled at her and gave each cheek in her possession a gentle pinch. "Yeah," Michiru agreed, hoarse. She reached up to take her friend's hands. She squeezed them and pronounced, "We're pretty wet."
"Mm!" Haruka chuckled. Her muffled laughter melted into muteness, however, as she studied their joined fingers, and she said suddenly, "You asked if I liked you?"
Michiru instantly straightened, serious. "Yes."
"Well," Haruka teased the girl, "as I recall, that depends."
A delighted, near-disbelieving grin bloomed on Michiru's lips, but she concurred sagaciously, "Uh-huh?"
"I caught and kissed a frog for you. Will you do something for me?"
"What?" Eager, the princess leaned forward.
"Someone I know needs a prince," Haruka sighed. She rolled her eyes. "Troublesome kid, really. I thought I'd try to give her one. But I found out recently that the whole thing with the frogs and the kissing—yeah. That doesn't work."
Embarrassed, Michiru muttered, "It really doesn't."
"Mmhm. But, see—frogs are stupid. That's got to be the problem." Haruka put on a staid, sober face. "I, on the other hand, happen to have skills. It's been proven. You can ask anyone."
"Right," Michiru approved.
"So-oooo," Haruka proposed, "while I might not be a frog, I bet I'd make a pretty good prince anyway. What with my skills and everything." She finished, "All I need's a kiss from a princess. Want to help me with that?"
Michiru stared at her. She drew her hands from Haruka's and tucked them back into her lap. She frowned. She tensed. Discomfited, Haruka flicked her eyes away and began to say, You don't have to if you don't want—I liked you the minute I saw you, honest, but then Michiru's fingers were in her hair, twisting there at her temples, and the other princess apologized as their noses bumped and their cheeks collided and their lips met,
"I had to make sure you wouldn't get away—sorry! Princes are really hard to catch!"
They kissed.
When it was over, Haruka climbed to her feet and pulled Michiru with her. They clung to one another to keep from slipping on their way back to the bank. Once there, Michiru tugged Haruka's tunic and demanded, "Well?" She eyed the girl and admitted, grudging, "You don't look any different. How do you feel?"
Haruka contemplated. She flexed her slender arms, stretched them skyward, dropped them to her sides again. Curling her hands into fists, she jabbed them at an unseen foe and determined, "Princely."
"Oh really?" Michiru was unable to suppress a giggle.
"Really." Haruka nodded. She gave the other royal a superior glance. "What? You don't think I'm lying again, do you?"
Beaming, Michiru shook her head and declined, "No. I was thinking… you know…"
"Mm?"
"I was thinking," said the princess shamelessly, "we're going to make a pretty good team, my prince."
They smiled at each other, the two children, and Haruka made a short bow and responded, "I think so too." She provided her arm to Michiru. "Shall I escort you home, my princess?"
Michiru took it. Haruka picked up her boots in her free hand. Together they went back down the streambank, and amid the chorale of the frogs and the rustle of the reeds mingled the special sound of their twined laughter.