Lawyers: The author hereby known as nahui renounces any claim of ownership to Card Captor Sakura, as well as to the characters, original or not, portrayed here-in and the plot which involves them, since they are based on elements not of her property. That's right, you suckers you don't even own your own fanfics. Furthermore, nahui officially apologizes for assaulting and retaining the third parties here involved against their express will.
nahui: *duct tape over mouth*
Lawyers: And we don't care if you feel stupid.
know how it is when something fits
I hear them breathing.
They know what I have done, all that I've been through.
I tell them secrets.
And who's to say it isn't so?
Move, don't move,
stay a little while on my linoleum.
Breathe, don't breathe,
walk a thousand miles on my linoleum.
Tweaker ~ Linoleum
The low rumble of the elevated train car traveled up Sakura's legs and spine, making something inside her tremor slightly. At the imperceptible shiver, Syaoran put an arm around her shoulders from behind her. She barely leaned into him, stopping right at that distance where she could sense the warmth of his body and the hairs on his skin standing— right before touching. She denied herself the contact in favor of a pleasant tingling expectancy, a slight caress of his senses completing the gesture. A warm radiance crept greenly up her back in response, sprouting tender buds from every tiny pore of her bones, his presence and hers shifting into and around each other like Fighting Forms, all wrapped-up in invisible strokes. She could feel him between and beyond her skin, running rain-soaked leaves along every one of her nerve endings. She closed her eyes. The radiance converged along her spine and then diverged again over her arms and legs, ending at her fingertips with the prickling creep of a growing stem. She felt herself gathering like raindrops, pooling at the apex of some jungle plant's cool green blades.
She released her breath.
Syaoran's loose hold on her shoulder tightened slightly, a bare hint of a real embrace. She leaned into him fully now, taking note of his shape behind her. Her head fell back, cradled on his collar. She let her eyes follow the avid love affair between the sun and his skin, pleased with herself that she could touch him just like sunlight did: warm and engulfing. She could feel her presence smiling. Syaoran kept her close.
Her eyes shut.
"I ran into Yukito at school yesterday."
He felt her nod against his neck. "Yeah. I think my brother said something about him applying for spot as a student teacher." She shifted her head. "I never thought about what oxymoron that title is. Student teacher…"
"Not really, if you think about it. They gotta learn too, I guess… I wonder what class he'd teach."
"I've no idea. I don't even know if he is gonna be at Seijou. I'm not too sure I'd want him there, either."
Syaoran's eyebrows furrowed in question. "Why?"
" 'Hello, class. Open your textbooks to page forty, oh, and, Sakura, To-ya said to make sure you have supper ready by nine, because your father is bringing a guest.' "
"That would not happen and you know it."
"I do not know such a thing. Besides, you should be more concerned than me. You'd be hounded by the parafraternal forces."
"Please. Yuki's cool. Besides, it's not like we get any privacy anyway. That entire damned school hangs on to our every action like they were watching a bad soap."
"They probably think it is one. 'Sakura, your boyfriend is, like, so hot. You are so lucky.'" She laughed lightly and her presence twinkled with a rush of colors. How clueless can you be? How out of touch with reality that you can't see past the obvious?
He responded with a tender swish as of leaves rustling moisture off their tips. She shifted her shoulders against his chest. She was exactly where she wanted to be.
Three girls tripped over them on the way to the front of the car, giggling apologies all the way. Ignore them.
Okay, one more station passed. She made a point of noticing the buildings out the window. She'd only come around here once before, so she needed landmarks. She wasn't completely certain how to get to the record store where she'd found her Tiger Trap stuff; she didn't, in fact, remember its name. But she was certain she'd be able to figure out the way if they got off exactly where she had that time. Watching the billboards and neon signs out the window, she moved her hands to hang from her boy's forearm, her grip on him obvious and secure. Well, maybe she couldn't quite ignore them.
Where was she? Right. Two stations left. She closed her eyes and busied herself on nuzzling Syaoran's neck.
Syaoran's absent contemplation of the bright blue spring sky ceased when Sakura pulled out of his embrace, her hand keeping a hold on his arm to guide him out.
Outside the stuffy constraints of the train car, the earth glowed with bright spring sunshine, painful and burning warm, while the wind held on to its wintry needles. Maybe the light was too much, because he felt dizzy all of a sudden. Blinding whiteness seeped into his ears, drowning them in something tight and constraining. He felt his balance choking. At some undefined moment, he lost all notion of exactly where he was and how he was moving. He looked up at the sun; its singe kicked into being a sharp, long pain in his eye, like a worm, thin as a nerve, eating its way over his veins, nibbling painfully with infinitesimal jaws. His vision burned into red as the lines of pain spread over all his head. His skin felt too tight and his head too hindering. His muscles moved as if with taut ropes and pulleys, shuddering with inaccuracy. It overtook his spine and he found himself loosing all sense of his body, as the crippling strings grew capillaries into him.
"Syaoran!"
It took Sakura less than a microsecond to realize Syaoran had let go of her hand, but by the time she turned to him, he was crumpled on the ground shaking violently on his side. Blood dripped from his nose, and from a lower lip he'd bit into, spraying in all directions from the fierce spasms.
Her shrill call startled passers-by miles around.
Fuck.
Sakura rested her forehead on the cold hospital wall.
Fuck!
She let out a sticky, uneasy breath and abandoned the wall in favor of the whole pacing thing. Felt less stagnant.
Tomoyo smiled at her wistfully, offering a silent still plea to sit down next to her and let herself be comforted. Sakura kept walking.
On the set of joined plastic chairs lining the opposite end pf the hallway, A particularly deflated Eriol sat next to a strangely quiet Nakuru. She paced.
A little bit beyond, Yukito and her brother kept a watch on what happened on the other side of a blinded window, both their faces unreadable. She joined them, standing close to the glass, her head against Touya's impassive bicep. She stared at nothing.
On the glass, her reflection and Syaoran's refraction mixed into shapes she did not attempt to figure out, interrupted regularly by opaque gray lines. Her head rushed. Her eyes stayed open. This was not happening. This was just not happening.
The sound of a door opening shook the still life her head was fabricating behind her eyes. A nurse with a clipboard approached her when he saw no-one else move.
"Are you family?"
"Yes."
He eyed her skeptically and held on his clipboard "What are you of his?"
Sakura held back an exasperated sigh. "His girlfriend. He has no blood relatives in the country."
"Okay." He handed her the clipboard. "But he's a minor, so I will need to contact a parent or guardian."
"Yes, I'll make sure I do that."
"I'm also going to ask you to fill these forms, and then you can go in and see him."
"I'll fill them." Eriol's thick voice reverberated over Sakura's and the nurse's low whispers like a foreign sound. "I'm sure I'll know enough to fill them. You should go in." He took the clipboard from Sakura's numb fingers.
She tread hesitant steps towards the door, finally laying her hand over the handle. She pressed her forehead against the imperturbable metal, breathed once, and walked in.
The air was colder than heaven, and she felt the
ghost of mist gathering on her lips. She could feel thin, stringy,
gnarled fibers all breathing out fog, tying intricately at a constrained
center. She could feel something struggling to breathe itself free as
the mangled limbs pierced into its core. She could feel the waterline
around her thighs quivering with her steps.
She shivered.
She could see Syaoran prone and surreally still on the bed.
Gods, she hated this.
He turned to her and met her eyes, just as she took one more hesitant step and she felt her knee barely brush against a single fiber.
In less than an instant, the strings all tightened their knot at the center, digging deeper, so deep that they drew blood, which diffused over the water like a violent sunset cloud. Painful pure sound erupted and rebounded from every wall, as people rushed at sonic speeds around her, fibers ebbing into ether as they passed, forming again and again instantly and constantly. Syaoran convulsed fiercely, back arching unnaturally. The strings were choking something inside him.
She flinched away. And the sea storm died at the mangrove.
Eerie stillness returned to the fog-wrapped roots and the voices and sounds hushed. The fiber she had just brushed seemed to mock her with cruel sarcasm. She receded with deliberate care.
Gods, no. Am I doing this?…
The spring tide had receded from the mangrove. Sakura could feel the waterline below her folded legs as she sat on the hospital floor, mindful that a half-asleep Syaoran did not see her, feel her, or otherwise become aware of her presence. She kept it locked inside, all the wilder from her fearful, angry hold, like a man being held back from a barfight. The mangled exposed roots of the tree extended all around her, twisting and rising away from the trunk behind her, where their sister branches kept a choke hold on Syaoran's very self.
Her breath misted before her eyes.
An occasional word drifted through the gray mist and vanished again, distant, unreal, and false.
"… resemble epileptic attacks…"
All around her, silky-still, black-green leaves staked their claims on spaces between the cold fog and the stark lucidity of cold air. The water was like an obsidian mirror.
She thought.
Nakuru, Yue, and Eriol's auras gleamed through the fog like muted ignes fatui, quiet and sad, but there. The roots ignored them.
It wasn't fair.
"… no evidence of a tumor…"
The rank smell of silt bellow the water rose unheeded, as she closed her eyes and stretched her legs, always mindful that she wouldn't cause anymore pain. She got up and headed for the door.
"..ility would be an embolism, but again— Miss?"
"I need coffee."
As Sakura walked out with a dead expression Eriol caught sight of her lips muttering so low they barely moved. He turned back to look at Syaoran's form, forcing himself not to close his eyes and start weeping.
Outside, Sakura had to contain the urge to have Earthy shatter the hallway apart. That bitch. She couldn't believe she'd done this to them. To him.
Gods, we don't deserve this…
Metatext:
Please don't kill me. I have a family of people who love me (or claim they do) and some people still waiting for me to finish my Rurouni Kenshin and Escaflowne projects. I promise this will work out satisfyingly, if not necessarily happily. And that is still a possibility, since I'm a sucker for a happy ending. Hard to believe, eh? But I don't write one where it won't fit.
Fighting Forms is a borderline-abstract painting by Franz Marc, co-founder of the Der Blaue Reiter group. I love German and Austrian Expressionism. There are plenty of images of it on the 'net. Take a look at it to get an idea of what that first scene would look like. Just, uh, change the colors to fit.
Seen it yet? Yes, I swear it's not abstract. If
you guess what it represents, you get liminal brownies. *wiggles
eyebrows* I like to keep it diverse.
"Parafraternal" was inspired by Mafalda cartoons. It's my brotherly deformation of Quino's motherly deformation of paramilitar into paramaternal, "paramilitary" into "paramaternal". Don't look at me like that. Anyone from Latin America knows what I'm talking about. Right? RIGHT?
Again, a special thank you to Perseph, who,
again, helped me find epigraphic lyrics. And who loves anything with the
word Linoleum in it. XD Rock on, mah sistah.
water_soter and Cherry, worry not. Have you seen the review count on my other stories? If I wrote to get many reviews I'd never write anything. I do post here to get reviews though, good, intelligent, enthusiasm-boosting reviews like yours, Taidora's, and Artic Wolf's. Quality over quantity. I am proud never to have been flamed, even though more than one story of mine would have been an easy target. Like my fifth semester Spanish teacher said, I write for intelligent people. Oh, and Cherry: It's not sad as much as very, very dramatic. Overly so. There's not much time for angst-and-wallow moments here, though it might end tragically.
I am frustrated for the lack of an English phrase to mean fuegos fatuos that doesn't sound silly. Thank the gods for Latin's universality.
The next chapter promises to be a nest of plot development. *sigh* I'll try to have it done on proper time, but don't expect much. I tell my teachers the same and they get mostly no results. With that I leave you to review. A good stroke to the ego is the best way to keep a writer happy.
Not philosophical. Just thinky.