Promises to Keep, Chapter 7
"Girls' Night Out"

(Butterfly: thanks for the review! I promise this isn't a permanent tone shift, it's just that there's something I've got to set up, and it's taking me more pages than I thought to get everyone worked into place. I try to keep the chapters 6 to 7 pages in Word, and when I hit a scene break around that point I stop the chapter, even though probably chapters 5-8 would make what I'd normally call a "chapter" worth of plot material... anyway, chapter 8 soon I hope! I might get it done in the next couple days, who knows...)

Touya was pacing a small tight circle around the table where Tomoyo was demurely seated and sipping a cup of green tea.

"What the hell are they shopping for that would take an hour and a half?"

Tomoyo actually giggled. "Kinomoto-san, you don't understand women at all, do you."

He bit back the first two obvious retorts. Unfortunately, the third one made it past his sanity-check filter: "What could anyone sane possibly understand about them? It's times like this I thank God I'm gay."

"And so does the female population of the country, I'm sure," Tomoyo replied without batting an eyelash.

Touya's jaw dropped open. After a moment's fuming outrage, he burst out laughing, and dragged a seat over to the table to sit down too. Sakura just seethes at me; Yuki's all sugar and roses with his comebacks. It's been a while since I got into a duel of wits with someone who sharpens their wits...

"Touche," he said. "Still. What on earth are they looking for? Your cell phone is turned on, right?"

"Yes," Tomoyo said, and went back to her tea.

Touya shot her a half-lidded glower. "So can I use it or not?"

"No."

"...Why not?"

Tomoyo sighed, and nodded towards a point behind him. "Turn around," she suggested.

Yukito was holding a bag in one arm and Sakura in the other; she had her head bent, and he had an arm around her waist, very carefully matching his strides to hers. Touya's eyes narrowed, and he stood up and crossed the distance between them in about five seconds. Not running; he wasn't such a sap he'd go running, of course. He was just... moving with reasonable haste.

"Yuki? --Monster? --Yuki, what's going on?"

"Sakura-chan's a little tired, I think," he said, smiling as ever, but somehow it didn't quite reach all the way to his eyes this time. "I've taken the liberty of planning out our evenings, by the way, and no, To-ya, you don't get to debate it. Not tonight. Come on, Sakura-chan, let's sit down for a minute..."

Yukito helped Sakura into the chair Touya had just vacated, as gently and carefully as though she were made of spun glass. Gallantry was nothing unusual from him, of course, but there was a certain pitch to his concern which wasn't quite normal. Touya gulped back a completely irrational burst of terror that burned hot enough to scald.

"Yuki? You're scaring the hell out of me and I can't even figure out why."

"Don't be frightened," Yukito replied immediately, and reached over to twine his fingers through Touya's. "It'll be all right. It'll all be fine. You'll both see."

Touya took a careful breath, and tried to let that make some kind of sense. "I don't suppose you might divulge some actual information right about now, would you."

"I would, but it's not my information to share," Yukito replied. "To-ya, you and Sakura-chan are having a sibling bonding night. Just the two of you. Tomoyo-chan, I'm taking you out to dinner, and afterwards, we're going to a movie or something public, or else sitting in your house with people who know nothing at all about Yue. And you're not to let either of us out of your sight until Sakura-chan or To-ya calls."

"Yuki?" Touya asked huskily.

"Hmm?"

"What the hell is going on here?"

Yukito sighed a little, and stretched up on tiptoe to kiss Touya's cheek, and said, "It'll be all right, really."

"Yuki...!"

"Sakura-chan worries too much," Yukito murmured. "But there's something she needs to do, and I'm doing everything I can to help. Which in my case means keeping both of me out of the way this evening. Tomoyo-chan, I'd be most grateful if we could hurry a bit. Sooner or later, Yue's going to get suspicious about why I haven't told him that the shopping is over. If we can generally stay surrounded by magic-ignorant potential witnesses, it would be... a wise and hopefully unnecessary precaution. Just in case."

Tomoyo had already gathered up her bags and boxes and was standing up to join Yukito; her brows were faintly furrowed with concern. "Tsukishiro-san, can you explain a little once we're alone...?"

Yukito shook his head a little. "I'm going to be thinking quite hard about ice cream all evening. And cheesecake and cream puffs and whatever utterly girly movie you'd most like to see. And anything else that's likely to bore Yue to sleep. I'm sure Sakura-chan can explain later. Let's go, though, or we won't get through dinner before the eight o'clock showings!"

He took some of Tomoyo's packages from her, and said to Touya with unusual seriousness, "Call me later." And then he turned his most cotton-candy sweet-and-fluffy smile on Tomoyo: "So what would you like to see? I've heard there's a rerun of 'Pretty Woman' playing at the Metro Retro this week; that's always been my personal definition of the quintessential chick flick!"

"For pure cinematography I think 'The Piano' is the most beautifully-filmed selection they've shown recently. --But I like 'The English Patient' too. Or 'Titanic' maybe."

"Too depressing," Yukito said, waving a hand in the air. "What kind of a girls'-night-out ends up with everyone crying all over each other?"

"More of them than you'd like to imagine, Tsukishiro-san," Tomoyo replied with great composure, "particularly if one of the girls has just had some sort of life trauma that compels her to eat half a gallon of chocolate ice cream in one sitting."

"There's something unusual about that?"

"For most people, yes..."

The automatic doors closed behind them; Touya turned his attention back to the completely immobile and silent figure of his little sister, sitting with both hands cradled protectively against the great mound of her pregnancy.

...She's gotten huge. When did she get so huge? She's my baby sister. I changed her diapers. She's not supposed to be sitting here big enough to burst with a baby of her own...

With a sigh, Touya dropped to his knees in front of Sakura's chair, angling to see her eyes without having to disturb her if she was actually crying. It didn't look like it, but it didn't look like she was far from it either.

Very tentatively, he touched her knee and said, "Sakura?"

To his dismay, the tears spilled down her cheeks then; she streaked a hand across her face with a strained half-giggle. "Oniichan, I... I know something's gone wrong... when you don't call me 'monster'...!"

"Tell me," he said, more roughly than he meant. "What the hell is going on? Why does Yuki think Yue's going to try to do something that he needs witnesses around to try to stop? --Why are you crying...?"

"I don't know," she said, miserable, and it seemed to trigger more tears. "I don't know... I don't know anything... I'm just... I'm exhausted, and everything hurts, and I've got too many lives I'm holding right now, too many lives that depend on mine, and... I... I just... I want to go home..."

Hormones? Touya thought, with an almost crazed giddy hope. Pregnant women are all about hormones. And Yuki was... worried, but it seemed like he was more worried about keeping Yue out of the way... yeah, 'mister hyper-rational Yue the Judge plus neurotic emotional hormonal-rollercoaster tired-out pregnant woman' is not a happy cocktail mix. Let's hope it's all just those wild and crazy hormones.

God, talk about things I never thought I'd hear myself think...

Touya had learned a thing or two about carrying people after months spent picking up Yukito after his fainting spells. However, Yukito was as slender as a wraith; Sakura's weight per se wouldn't be a bother for him, but as a general rule, hugely pregnant women didn't bend in the middle very well.

He considered his sister's figure, sitting slouched in the overstuffed chair twisting a kleenex pointlessly through her fingers, and decided on an approach. One hand went behind her knees, the other around what remained of her waist; she yelped a little in surprise as he struggled a bit to lift her out of the chair.

"Oniichan...?"

"The monster's been out on a leash all day," he grunted, leaning a little precariously to one side to grope for her purse with two free fingers. "Enough rampaging around Tokyo cutting swathes of destruction and shopping carnage. Time to get you home and settled down again. You can devastate the rest of the malls tomorrow."

It always worried him a little bit when she didn't howl protests of being called a monster; instead, she twisted a little awkwardly in his arms and flung her arms around his neck and hugged him tightly, burying her face in the curve between his throat and his shoulder. Her tears were hot against his skin, and Touya fought off another wave of scalding panic.

"Monster?" he said huskily. "Tell me there's nothing to worry about. Tell me Yuki's right."

"I think he's right," she mumbled against his shoulder. "I'm just tired and scared, and it's harder to be cheerful... and I... um..." She hesitated a moment, then gulped hard and looked up at him. "Oniichan, there's a very large favor that I need to ask of you. While Yukito-san's keeping busy with Tomoyo-chan. I just don't quite know how to ask..."

"You don't need to," Touya said, carrying her carefully toward the doors, heedless of the stares that were following them.

"Yes, I do..."

"No, you don't," he said again. "Whatever you need, I'll do it."

Somehow, that seemed to be the wrong thing to say too, because a fresh wave of tears spilled down her reddened cheeks; Touya stopped in his tracks.

"Oh, hell, was that wrong too? Why? --Monster, I'm sorry, I don't want to keep making you cry, I just... I meant..."

Sakura shook her head fiercely, and scrubbed the back of her hand across her cheeks in a rather futile attempt to disguise the signs of her tears.

"...I love you, oniichan..."

Touya meant to say, I love you too, monster, except that his throat had just choked shut with the pressure of his own unshed tears. It was hard to breathe around the knot in his throat, let alone speak, and he had to keep his eyes clear for driving; he simply stood by the door holding her for a long, quiet moment, and then bent his head to brush a kiss against the tears on her cheek.

Hormones. Got to be the pregnant-woman lunacy hormones. Damn -- got to be contagious lunacy hormones or something...

Whatever else was going on, Sakura was clearly telling nothing but the unadulterated truth when she said she was exhausted. She was half asleep in his arms by the time he got them back to the van, and he felt guilty about having to wake her enough to ask her to unlock the door for him.

Touya was ridiculously careful about settling her into the front seat and fastening her seatbelt -- Yukito had told him the rules for pregnant women and seatbelts: the shoulder strap went over the bulge, the waist strap went under it, across the hips, so that the baby wouldn't get pressed against restraints if the seat belt lock kicked in. Sakura smiled at him with a softly sleep-hazed tenderness, and smoothed his hair a little, then settled her hands against the great distended mound of her belly.

She was entirely asleep by the time they pulled out of the parking lot; Touya swore quietly to himself, because he didn't want to be left alone with the inside of his own head right then, but he wasn't going to turn on the radio and disturb her.

There was something about the way pregnant women touched their bellies that always unnerved him. It must have been genetic, because they all did it; no one taught them, but they all did it. A pregnant woman touched her belly the way some people touched their lovers; it was something intimate and terrifying about the way their hands curved so carefully and lovingly over the roundness, something that said louder than words, you're more precious to me than my own life.

Yukito touched him that way sometimes, and it always scared the hell out of Touya whenever he did it. It was so nakedly, unashamedly emotional.

Yue understood why Touya was always terrified by that voiceless, overwhelming love; Yukito didn't understand, but then Yukito had never lost anyone who was that precious to him. Both Touya and Yue silently agreed to keep it that way as long as they could possibly manage.

Sakura had learned that touch too, somewhere deeper than instinct; even asleep, her hands cradled her belly with tender, reverent adoration. Touya stared fixedly out at the road, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

I should've ripped that Chinese punk's head off years ago...

He could hear Yukito's voice in his mind, with that barely-suppressed ripple of laughter warming his words: Sister complex--

Oh, shut up, he told the Yuki in his mind, and concentrated on the road.