I bound the lawyers and left them gagged on chapter 01. Go look for them there. Meanwhile, I must figure out how to get them off my ass. *schemes*
02
hope blinds reason, thankfully
…Creating a radio played just for two
In the parlor with a moon across her face
And through the music he sweetly displays
Silver speakers that sparkle all day
Made for his lover who's floating and choking with her hands across her face
And in the dark we will take off our clothes
And they'll be placing fingers through the notches in your spine.
Neutral Milk Hotel ~ Two-headed Boy
The afternoon sun, barely touching twilight, bathed
the room with a painful pink glow. The entire space had a feeling of
vague unreality; mirror-polished hardwood floors and a minimalist
platform bed completely out of place in the industrial-chic walls of the
reconditioned factory, their colors off under the tinted light. She
shied away from the glare and buried her face in her arm. Syaoran
shifted in his sleep, turning away from the light. His shoulder caught
the sun, gleaming tersely under the creamy natural light. She moved so
that his body's shadow guarded her eyes.
A shrill ring obliterated her plans to go back to sleep. She scavenged for her shirt and jeans, and rushed to the entrance. At the push of a small white button, a fuzzy distorted voice asked to be buzzed in. Delivery for Li Syaoran. It took a minute or two for the freight elevator that was the main entrance to start rising with ominous rumbles. Through the cage she could see the box approaching, from what could be the depths of hell, nearing her feet, until, with a sigh, it finally stopped level with her head. Inside were two men standing guard by several large boxes, piled atop each other, covered in customs seals and held together with printed masking tape.
She pulled the cage upwards and open. One man held out a clipboard. "Li Syaoran?"
"He's out. I'll sign."
"Afternoon, miss," the other man loaded in the first box.
She held the clipboard against a wall, just out of habit, and signed, as the men moved box after box out the elevator and into the big hybrid room she had no name for as of yet. Was it even a room, or was it an area?
The men finished up with a weariness she knew had to be fake. She gave the clipboard to one as they exchanged detached professional pleasantries, and sent them on their way to ground floor. Done with this, at least.
A quick glance at the blue, curve-surfaced kitchen called her attention to the phone. After brief deliberation she sat on a stainless-steel-and-blue stool and dialed by heart.
"Tomoyo? Yeah, it's me… No, we're here. We're fine. No, it's just that his stuff just arrived and there's boxes all over the place. Uh-huh. Could you please tell everyone to get here an hour later? Yeah. Nine. Thanks, it really helps me out. Great. See you at nine."
She hung up and set the wireless back down on the stand. It was bright leaf green.
How much had all this cost? Knowing Nakuru, all this funky, post-modern ItaliaDesign shit was not cheap. Lucky, those with trust funds. Then again, Syaoran did not really need all these things. He'd probably be perfectly happy with a mattress and a good napping couch. And a kitchen. Maybe even just a fridge to keep yesterday's take-out. She could not really picture Syaoran cooking anymore. Much less in this wavy-edged blue counter. She couldn't, in fact, picture him doing much at all in this apartment. Maybe once he got it more lived in…
She walked back to the bedroom, stepping lightly. She carefully slid the screen panels that served as doors and walls to a silent effect. They were plain beige. They needed something, her mind diagnosed, something Syaoran. She made a point of closing the blinds while she was up. She discarded her clothes and got back in bed.
Four hours. They had four hours. How pleasant. This had to have been the best morning of her life. Things would fall into place now, she was certain. They'd finish the semester, go to college. She'd move here, they'd get married, maybe. She'd help him out like she'd promised and after he'd found him, it would all be okay. She would set things right. He deserved it. He deserved everything.
She indulged in his image, faint under the thin stripes of dying sunlight creeping through the blinds. He was beautiful. His build was lean and sinewy, terse skin scarcely scattered with faint scars, thickened with work at the hands. His chin was poised just so, his head tilted, his lashes casting long shadows over his cheeks. The sheets tangled on his legs and his chest rose and collapsed with his inherent rhythm. So beautiful. So unreal in his own strange physical perfection. Like a sugary-sweet machine, cadenced and powerful, balmy, fluent and fragrant. It was amazing to watch him move. She snuggled closer and he placed his hand on her hip. She loved the contact. She loved the feel of his weight on her, held tight and secure. She loved the satisfying blunt pain on her cheekbone as she pressed his collarbone against it, tighter and closer until she could feel his breathing this side of her skin; his heartbeat pulsing deliciously up her spine like low vibration with each of his strokes.
She could live like this.
She did not notice when the blind-striped sunlight waned into tiny speckles of city lights. Things simply slipped away; right now nothing was of real concern. She had dozed into uncertain half-sleep and would take something big to jolt her up. The bed was warm and the room was slowly beginning to take on his smell.
By seven thirty, Syaoran had been watching her sleep for half an hour. With a sigh and a kiss he decided it was now unavoidable. He got up to shower.
"Msyran…"
"Hm?"
"Msyran, yr stuff 'rrived. Signed fr it. Hope you dnt' mind." She rubbed some sleep from her eyes.
"I don't. Thanks. Where is it?"
"Main space area living volume… thing."
He blinked a little, but decided to let it go, since Sakura was beginning to fall asleep. "Thanks. I'm taking a shower."
With a grin, she sighed something about nice imagery, and turned around to get some more sleep. He suppressed an embarrassed chuckle.
Now that the sun's glare had passed, he tugged at the blinds to let in the man-made starlight that dotted city blocks. A quick trek to his unfamiliar linen closet procured him a grayish sage green towel. He'd find soap and shampoo in the bathroom; he and Sakura had gotten such necessities just this morning, along with groceries and supplies for his own welcome-back party. He wondered how their get-togethers would go now that they were all most probably drank…
"I would have bought it all before, but I wasn't sure what stuff you liked," and she had smiled. "I guess there's no reason to mention your favorite shampoo in your letters." It turned out the store didn't carry his favorite shampoo. The two of them had wound up sitting in the middle of the aisle, opening bottle after bottle of each brand they could find, deciding based on the smell and the back-of-the-bottle text. All the while a stock boy frowned at their hysterical laughter.
"This one smells alright."
"Does it say 'rinse thoroughly and repeat'?"
"Uh," he would scan the back of the bottle, "no."
She would shake her head. "Never trust a shampoo that doesn't ask you to repeat."
And with that he found himself in his new industrial bathroom. There was something about cold concrete walls in a bathroom that was just unappealing. And where in all hell was the shower head among all these pipes and tubing? A careful inspection revealed the knobs and once the water had started, all was easier.
In the bedroom, the sounds of water falling in thick heavy streams with loud smacks dispersed sleep from Sakura's head. After a quick orientating thought process, she stretched the unusually aware muscles of her body. Time to get up, she guessed. Her friends, their friends, would arrive in a short while. Boxes had to be moved, emptied into closets, into shelves. A few personal objects here and there would help the feel of the place. A life had to be unpacked from cardboard and poured out like concrete into this new steel frame. And she was the one to do it. She walked a beeline across the room, picking up her clothes and his. She'd enjoy the mental image of her boy, wet and naked, later.
Or now, why not?
Small lacquer boxes and round black river stones, bronze figures of what Kero would call "Magicky protector thingamajigs", everything emerged from boxes wound in sheets of bubblewrap and crumpled balls of newspaper. Work methodically. Leave the magic books and scrolls for last, they can wait. A box on the nightstand. Three stones by the platform bed. A charm over the elevator doors. That looked... kooky. Three dog figures on the shelf by the funky lamp with the red leather shade. A print of what could be either an abstract green thing or a tropical leaf, over the couch. Mental note: get candles for the coffee table.
Syaoran came back into the room, his hips cloaked in a towel. He scanned the space and headed for a large box by the window, scribbled hugely with the word "clothing."
"You should frame these. We could hang them on the bedroom screens," she held up the rolled up posters from the bottom of the box. First, Clash. Mission of Burma. Nick Cave. Soulside. Fugazi. One last poster, a rolled up, crumbly-feeling Angel Hair, revealed a strange old friend, almost forgotten because of its permanent presence before: The Liasin board. It remained in her hands like an old document in a historian's. And she was one, for those instants, gathering sources, testimonials and memories, rebuilding the time when Syaoran appeared in her life, guns blazing and frown in place. Just a shell, she knew even then.
She looked up to find him rummaging through the clothing in the box, all the while blushing and clutching at the towel, which was comically close to falling. What in all hell had he to be shy about, she wondered, as the night-illuminated Tokyo Tower cast a vague yellow glow through the window, alien on his skin.
She loved the view.
"…ixty decibels. If ten violins play simultaneously,
what would the combined volume be?"
The teacher had dictated problems for the last twenty minutes. Painful problems. A classroom full of teenagers and casios and TIs worked away between the spurts of confusing numbers and unclear wording.
Sakura sighed. "I don't get it."
Syaoran kept quiet, waiting for the thoughts germinating behind her frown to refute her own statement.
"Okay. I think —Okay. Decibels are logarithms, right? So you can't add them."
"Exactly…"
"So then, you add…" she bit on her pencil, "Intensities. Reference intensity times ten to the β over ten."
Syaoran smiled. "Exactly."
"Play this."
"Okay," he set down his beer, and extracted with great care the generic white CD-RW branded with Sakura's bubbly handwriting. Magic Marker Singles. The disc went in to his new stereo, one of those Norwegian floating disc things that still felt like an interesting stranger next to his old friend of a Discman. Syaoran watched as a translucent blue plastic lid closed over Singles and it began to spin. This he sorta liked. But he was getting rid of the fiberglass salt and pepper shakers, no matter what Nakuru said.
Sakura watched his face with rapt attention, tense, like an ensnaring cat. He grabbed his bottle again and took a sip. Any second now. She ignored Nakuru's incessant chasing of Kero, who was ruining her masterpiece with that hyperactive flying and the cookie crumbs and he'd better stop it if he didn't want to wake up one morning to find his wigs clipped, did he hear her? She ignored his brother's uncomfortable cross-armed glare, and Yukito's superior amusement next to him. (Having Yue around inside him really gave him an unusual edge...) She ignored Eriol's absent gaze, that followed her own eyes, and she ignored the red light blinking in her peripheral vision, fighting the urge to snatch the digital camera away from her friend's hands. All this concentration so she wouldn't miss the instant Syaoran's face would scrunch satisfyingly with deep spiritual disgust.
"Oh, no." He shook his head. "No. No way. There is just no way—" He reached to stop the song, but Sakura's gaze deterred him.
"C'mon, it's a great song!"
"Tullycraft," he stressed the word with a grimace. "It's twee."
"It's tweepunk. Still punk." She emphasized with a nod of her beer bottle.
"That is highly debatable."
"Only by annoying purists such as yourself. Would you just enjoy it?"
He grumbled a reply she did not feel compelled to decipher. It was only a few minutes before his lips were barely moving along to Sean Tollefson, muttering softer than his breath, "… one thing I know, you'll find more Posies at the used bin than there're people at the show..." He was certain Sakura couldn't hear him. He was wrong.
"See? I told you it was a great song… "
"It's catchy," he spewed out the word. "It doesn't mean it's good. Oh, wipe that smirk of your face. I'm playing Antioch Arrow next."
"Your house," she shrugged, and took a sip from her own beer.
"Yeah well, it doesn't feel much like it when certain people play music I don't like on my own stereo."
"Oh, fuck off. Admit it! You like it."
"I do not."
"You do."
"No."
"Yes."
"No."
"Enough with the slapstick comedy." An exasperated voice erupted from the small ball of black fur erstwhile napping on the green lounge. "Some of us want to spend a quiet evening getting some rest."
"Aaaww! Suppi!" Nakuru relented on her pursuit of Kero to scold the other Sun Guardian "This is a party! You can't nap through it! C'mon, get up and dance, you wallflower!" That said, she grabbed Spinel by the front paws and proceeded to spin and tug him like an eight-year-old trying to make a rag doll move. Spinel did not look pleased.
Syaoran felt the chaos called for some sort of justification. "Why are you people at my house, again?"
"To celebrate, of course," Eriol smiled with fake innocence and condescension. It made the other boy very uneasy.
"Didn't you do that here just last week?"
"But that was your Welcome Back Party, Li." Tomoyo giggled. "This is your One Week In Tomoeda Party."
Syaoran pondered whether he should hide his vynils.
"They just wanna get wasted, and you're the only one with an unsupervised home," explained Nakuru with a knowing wink.
Definitely hide the vynils. "What about Yukito?"
"I don't want drunk teenagers in my house."
"Oh, and I do. And Hiragizawa?" He pointed at said sorcerer with an almost accusing finger.
"Mizuki," was the unanimous flat response from both the boy's guardians.
"You are so whipped."
"Shut up and give us beer."
Sakura laughed. The first few notes of Kissing Book started playing. Syaoran was arguing with Eriol. Well, this looked to be another interesting night. Maybe she should hide the vynils. She sipped her beer.
Yukito found him lounging on the top of the
bleachers, school blazer and tie discarded carelessly, shirtsleeves
rolled up, and the top buttons undone poignantly. Yukito could almost
see him deconstruct his uniform with all the intent and purpose of
making a statement, even if only to himself. Those were the
statements that counted, after all.
He had headphones on.
Yuki approached him, Yue feeding him aural readings somewhere between consciously and not. Though he might have seemed to be, the defiant schoolboy was not at ease; every sprawled limb, every unkempt hair, every wrinkle on his uniform was carefully planned to give a certain effect. Not fake, as much as overly purposeful.
Yuki approached Syaoran Li from behind, sending out signals of his presence that the other boy must have been too absorbed to sense. He finally resorted to touching his shoulder.
Syaoran jumped a little, but recovered fast enough to pretend it hadn't happened. He slipped the earphones to his neck and pressed stop on a rather unidentifiable object, presumably his Discman. It was a bright blue iridescent thing covered with stickers, the paint chipping on the most battered corners, revealing a bland gray-white plastic. On the lid, "Ĉerenkov" was written with flaking White Out pen. The cd player had been worn down lovingly and with great care. Another significant detail.
"What are you doing here, all by yourself?"
Syaoran turned to him, and the sun's glare, by directional association. The boy squinted. "Hiding," he smiled wryly.
Yukito surveyed the scene before him on the school's sport grounds. There was weight in this place: memories are heavy. In the court, boys' soccer was starting to gather for a warm-up run. Cheerleaders clotted on the east side of the fields, and the track team set up the high-jump. "Weren't you supposed to be great at soccer? The sports captains must have been hounding you."
"Yeah… well, yeah. Though that's not why I'm hiding."
"Then why?"
The boy made a face. "I'm supposed to be in Japanese class, in the special after-school course with the rest of the foreign students."
Yukito blinked, trying to decide whether "concerned parent" was a good tone to take with him. "Don't you need to be there?"
"Not really. The final test is worth like seventy percent. And I'm sure I can ace it."
Wasn't he being overconfident? No, Vague Presence Of Yue assured inside his head, he was being just confident enough. "But then why are you here, in the sun, all alone, when school's out?"
Syaoran simply pointed. To the north, on the cinder diamond the older boy remembered so well, Sakura stood on the mound warming up her pitcher's arm, mitt already in place, while the rest of the girls geared up for softball practice. The two boys watched in silence while she threw the ball a couple times, watching her laugh even though they couldn't hear her. Her aura shifted warmly in their direction, absent and vague, probably moving unconsciously. Syaoran put the earphones back on.
"What're you hearing?"
"Tom Waits."
Yukito nodded. Syaoran pushed play.
They resumed their silence.
He has changed
True. Though not nearly as much as you think, and not nearly as little as Sakura does.
Is that good?
My guess is that it just is. You have to understand he's been living his entire life hindered by duty and weighted down under expectations. This is the first time he's had the chance to try out his own skin. I think that's the reason he came here early. He got fed up.
Early?
Yes. The Li Clan had planned for him to come here for college, then go back to Hong Kong, hopefully with Sakura. He came months early. And in mid-semester, with all the trouble that entails... Something must have happened.
And?
Sakura won't tell me anything. Kero's baffled
too.
Yuki considered a single thought for a moment.
… Is this the real Syaoran? Is this who he should be?
I don't know. I can't tell if this is the Li he wants to be. But it is not the Li the Clan wants him to be. Right now, that is enough for him.
A shuffle beside him roused him from his inner dialogue. Syaoran had packed Ĉerenkov away in his messenger bag, and was in the process of shrugging on his blazer. His tie hung limply around his neck.
"Leaving?"
"Yup. Japanese is just about over. I have Physics Lab."
"And you can't ace that?"
"Nope. S'why I like it." He smirked. "See ya."
Metatext:
I work better with brevity. This three thousand world ramble was supposed to give some sense of time between the last and the next, important for reasons you shall see. As it is, it just sounds rather random.
Special thanks go to Persephone of Abydos, my beta, who was nice enough to help me pick out epigraphic lyrics. Get used to them, they'll be everywhere.
The Twee scene came about from a discussion between Perseph and me, on what kind of underground music our favorite characters might listen to. And by underground I don't mean more than "not commercial". Sakura likes twee, because Sakura is twee, overly sweet but with an underside of something else, something potentially off. Syaoran likes punk simply cause that's one of the scant few genres that allow someone to be an extremely purist grouch.
"I'm sickened by what passes for punk these days."
"I'm sickened by what passes for music these days."
Yes, I've had such conversations.
In case you were wondering, Tomoyo likes the
Elephant Six collective, and Eriol likes Aphex Twin type IDM. Kero likes
house. So does Nakuru. The rest of the characters I either forgot, or
the discussion did not settle anywhere.
Special thanks to the nice people who reviewed. The
questions you voiced, starquestor and Nunichan, are precisely the doubts
you should have as of this point of the plot. You both get liminal
cookies. Dragon's Daughter gets a liminal cake cause she used the word
"liminal". Don't you all feel special?
Next chapter is the big one. It will probably take a while to write, mainly because many details there are crucial. I hope this chapter clarified some things. If not, feel free to ask. There's a drop down right there that says submit review. Be nice responsible readers, won't you? No?
I'm gonna Throw Aggie from the Bridge. Have fun figuring that one out.