Disclaimer: Everything you recognize belongs to CLAMP. This fic was written permission and profit free.

Dedication: For Circe, in celebration of Touya's birthday. He's what…five, now? Six, maybe? Something like that.

Notes: Takes place roughly a year before the first episode of CCS, not long after Yukito first arrives on the scene. Written as part of Sakura-san's non-issued challenge.

Different

Chigau.

Different.

Touya understood that word, not just intellectually, but on a cellular level. Beyond the dictionary definition of the word, he had experienced it the way other people experienced passion or religion. The word had connected to feelings, physical and emotional, and it was forever scarred into the landscape of Touya's very soul, so that he would never in all his life forget what different was.

He had been born that way.

The day of his birth was not a normal day, did not appear on every calendar, and was a curious mix of human construction and cosmic insistence. It came only once every four years, so that even as an old man, he would be a child.

And even as a child, he'd seen things. Spirits, fae and wild, had crowded the streets of his world in numbers that rivaled those of the living he saw. His mother had explained to him what they were, and he'd known that she saw them, too. His father had been so accepting of this that it had been years before Touya realized that his father couldn't see or sense the people he was walking through.

When Sakura had been born Touya had known that she was different again, different from him and their mother, but not 'normal' like their father, that there was something about her that was going to be involved in great things, and he'd worried. But he'd also loved, as he'd been taught, without fear or reservation or boundary, and trusted that it would be enough to keep her safe.

Then Mom had died, but she hadn't left, and Touya didn't cry because he still saw her and spoke with her and took care of Sakura and helped Dad, and life hadn't really changed that much. Except for Dad's grief, and Sakura's, but he did what he could to ease that. Which meant relaying some of what she said to Dad, but not Sakura because she was afraid of ghosts, even if it was their mother and she was different.

Then Dad had gotten a better job at a bigger university, and they'd moved to this town, Tomoeda, and it was odd. Not in that it was smaller than Tokyo, or cleaner, or nicer, but in that it had a huge well of magic and that was different from anything he'd ever felt in any other town, but strangely familiar. Like him. Like he and Sakura had come from here, instead of come to here. So he'd gone to the largest source of the feeling, a cherry tree, and met a woman who also felt familiar. She, too, had magic. Wrong and right, Kaho had been his teacher, his friend, and his lover. And he loved her, and she'd loved him, and then it was over and she was gone and now he sat here, being different, chigau, again. Because he was not wondering where she was in England, or what she was doing, if she missed him the way he missed her, he wasn't even thinking about her. He was staring at the new boy, Tsukishiro Yukito, and understanding the word different all over again.

It was not that the face of the boy everyone saw was so different. But from the corner of his eye, or when his glance slid past the slight, pale kid, or when his eyes were staring beyond Tsukishiro and he was unfocused, that was when Touya saw what was different about him. Another face, someone taller, moon-pale and long hair, blue cat's eyes and wings. They weren't the wings of an angel, he knew somehow that these pushed air instead of ether, and there was something too restless about the creature that seemed to sleep inside the handsome boy who sat next to him for this to be a spirit gone to heaven and returned.

Touya didn't know yet if Tsukishiro was aware of the fact that he wasn't human. He hadn't decided if he should tell him if he didn't know, or keep it to himself.

But what was really different about Tsukishiro was that Touya liked him. He understood him, to an extent, and even at that, he liked the boy. He was friendly and open and generous, and something else Touya couldn't define, but was important. He was also going to be connected to Sakura, and that meant that he would have to do something about the boy. Something, but he didn't know what. And he still liked the other boy.

Touya pulled his attention away from that face and the memory of the morning when the boy had smiled at him, said "You're my first friend here, you know. You can call me Yukito, okay?" and turned back to the paper in front of him. He'd written the kanji for 'different' in the middle of the paper. A complicated collection of lines, but it looked beautiful.