Dreamless Love Story Chapter 4: Trust, a tsubasa chronicle fanfic

Dreamless Love Story

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chapter 4: Trust

Dreamed I was a dream – I stole you away, away in your sleep
Saved you from a fire, a gun for hire, I introduced you to a vampire
Wave crashes on the beach, we roll around in its foamy grasp
Kissing in the chaos of a kelpy sea - seems I couldn't save you from me…

"Fireman" - Jawbreaker

Disclaimer: I own nothing. Nothing. Is this really necessary?

No thinking. Just bodies, skin pressed against salty skin, his fingers tangled in her long, wet hair... Just instinct, this much he understands. Like the familiar scent of human fear, that extra sense, innate knowledge of motion and sensation... This is his special skill - he has always trusted his own body. The ocean roars in his ears, through his fingers, underneath him. Salt water foams and swells. He can hardly stand it. Her murmuring lips are too pink, too pure, like plum blossoms... It's unbearable, he can't consume enough, move fast or hard enough. Sinking his teeth into her pale flesh, sinking himself into her... gasp. Shift back. He trusts his body, tangled in the chaos of this kelpy sea...

Kurogane's eyes snap open, fading into focus on a stained ceiling, twilight bathed. His chest heaves, sheets soaking with cold sweat against his bare skin. That same dream... only...

A sweet, female sigh drifts gently up from the rumpled sheets, a small body shifting in her sleep - this delicate and fragrant girl curled beside him. He feels something catch in his throat, as conscious awareness sets in. What has he done? She's still here, in his futon. Dark hair spilling around her angelic sleeping face like a halo. He closes his eyes in a confused pang of guilt and selfish contentment, inhaling... her. She smells of the rain, and of him... He grits his sharp teeth, ruefully. So, he couldn't protect her, after all... from himself...

He looks indulgently at her sleeping form - one delicate hand is curled peacefully beside her cheek. Those pale fingers half closed like a small flower, unfurling. He will never forget her cool touch - it has been burnt indelibly onto his skin since the first time she touched him, in her bedroom. Last winter...

"It's... beautiful..."

Kurogane freezes at the sensation - her fingers brushing the damp skin of his back. Sitting on the edge of her bed, his sopping wet t-shirt in his hands, his shoulders are tensed and hard. The stupid girl wanted him to take off his rain-soaked clothing, did she? Worried about her fucking carpet. Well then, whatever her royal goddamned highness desires... He'd turned away gruffly, steeling himself against the expected reaction. Not this.

She traces her fingers across his inked skin, fascinated. "So beautiful..."

Taken aback, Kurogane is unsure how to respond. He coughs. "I wouldn't know."

"What do you mean?" She cocks her head to one side, kneeling behind him on the bed.

He just grunts. "I don't know... wasn't really my choice." In his mind's eye, he is ten years old again and standing in the doorway of his father's study. His father is there... With his back to his young son, the older man unbuttons his crisp collared shirt, slipping it down off his broad shoulders. He reaches for the sheathed katana displayed above the enormous mahogany desk, the muscles of his back rippling underneath tattooed flesh. The shirt falls to the floor, and the young boy's red eyes widen. His entire back is one glisteningly huge and ferocious black dragon.

Tomoyo's gentle voice brings him back to the present. "Not... your choice?" Her hands are still on his back. He feels his shoulders relaxing under her soft touch. That's right, it's her. This is how she makes him feel. This is why he comes to her... He doesn't have to hide anything.

"I..." He breathes in deeply, inhaling her scent, her room. "...I was seventeen. When they did this." He clears his throat. "Took almost twenty hours, and bled like hell. But I was damn proud, didn't even flinch. Guess I was thinking about that person... my father..."

Tomoyo continues to gaze at the terrific, dark dragon coiled in his inky flesh. Is it possible for her to understand? She knows that his mother and father were murdered, in their own home - shot dead in cold blood - when he was only fifteen. She also knows, from the news reports, that it was rumoured to have been a gang-related killing - that his father's company had been somehow involved with organized crime, Chinese trade cartels. She knows too - because he told her himself, once - that he had been the first one to find them, riddled with bullets in the blood-soaked living room of their family home. Closing her eyes, she rests her cheek on the tattooed skin of his shoulder. It is the first time they have been this close. She murmurs softly - "Was that... when you were in Kyushu?"

He nods. "You're not scared?"

She shakes her head, still pressed against his back so that he can feel her warm breath on his skin.

"Even though I'm..." His low voice trails off.

She whispers the word. "Yakuza..."

Under her soft, cool hands, his muscles begin to tighten. "It's a fucking joke anyway." He growls, eyes still lowered to her bedroom floor. "Marked like this... when I had no idea..." About the lies. A jaded, teenaged orphan taken in by his father's business associate, his father's closest colleague - that man, Fei Wang. Taken out of school, taken up north, bitter and traumatized, with wild, rebellious eyes. Raised to manhood as a criminal and a killer, bitter, and traumatized, but loyal. Always loyal.

When they'd tattooed this dragon into his back as proof of that loyalty, on the floor of a Kyushu hotel room, he had no idea that the man who'd rescued him from that blood-stained family living room was the same one responsible for the slaughter. His father's business associate, his father's closest enemy, who betrayed him in an underhanded double-cross. Against all the codes of honour and swordsmanship that his father had believed in... a foolish and naive man he had been, to believe in honour in this day. Kurogane grinds his molars deep in his jaw - that was a mistake he himself had never made.

Born with a gift of violence, able to sense movement with eyes closed. Able to read, on the faces of others, the most subtle markers of emotion - fear, arrogance, distraction - almost like different colours or smells. Able to move with an unnatural speed and power - an aptitude, a raw talent... a gift, some might have called it. But only in another world, another age... For now there are no more ninja, no more samurai – only ignoble, brutal and abhorrent killers of men. Maybe he wasn't meant for this world. Maybe that's all there is to it. But there are no more samurai, and Kurogane knows this in his very bones.

He snorts. "That's why..." Throwing his head back. "...I don't care much for it."

Tomoyo continues to trace the dragon with her delicate fingers. Could she ever truly understand?

She starts to speak, tentatively, in her eerily polite manner - "I still think that it's very beautiful..." Her voice is clear and melodic, like a ringing bell. "Even if it means… yakuza…" She pauses on the word, "…to other people… You shouldn't hate your own skin."

He turns his body, coming face to face with her for the first time since they have been speaking. Her violet eyes gaze right into his, determined. "Because, that's who you are... nobody can mark you or decide for you..." She lowers her eyes suddenly, as if she has surprised herself in her boldness. "I just think," she almost whispers, "that you can make it yours. I believe that you can own it..."

Her eyes widen as he grabs her and draws her face to his own, kissing her lips roughly, and meaningfully. The room is dark, and her mouth is sweet. The rest of the world is asleep, so he holds tighter still, and in his arms he feels her trembling body melt.

She's still here. She's still in his futon. And he feels an overwhelming guilt, black and viscous in his bones, deep in the very marrow. The one person he'd felt compelled to keep safe, and pure, since the first time he'd laid eyes on her as a child. Looking down at her sleeping face, he winces. She was never as innocent as he made her out to be, but he... he was a selfish, weak... bastard.

I just think... that you can make it yours. I believe that you can own it...

Yeah? Those words she'd said to him... She had faith in him then. She really believed he could escape the cycle he was in, but she had no idea... He shakes his head. How the fuck could he expect a sixteen year old girl to understand the kind of shit he was involved in? Still, he'd liked the sound of that, at the time. You can own it...

He had broken her trust, then, by going back to Wang, by taking that first job. As if it had been his choice to make, but that wasn't the point. She'd pushed him away immediately and he felt like he was the one who got burned. It was her doubt that burned the most… But she had been right to get the hell away from him. Now it's his turn... because, he thinks, scratching his head, he still likes the sound of those words...

I just think... that you can make it yours.

But he hadn't, at least, not yet. As long as Wang knows where he is... hell, as long as that bastard lives and breathes, he is not his own man. A new thought is growing and surging in his bloodstream. Adrenaline pounding in his ears. He turns away from her sleeping serenity with a throbbing in his veins and a tearing sensation in his stomach, or is it his chest? Very quiet. He pulls on clothes, grabs his helmet, drops a key on the table... and pauses. He can still hear her breathing. There's a black marker by the phone but no paper. He hesitates, then quickly, scrawls a few marks in squeaky pen on the peeling paint of the doorframe. Have to do something. He cringes, shuffles his feet, then – I will definitely come back.

Turned to the wall, Tomoyo holds the sheets close around her naked body. What had she been expecting? At the sound of the scrawling pen and the muffled click of the door closing behind him, her cheeks are wet with tears.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The red Mazda pulls sharp around the corner and into view, shiny and powerful and black-tinted in the washed-out, weak grey day. Tomoyo breathes a sigh, inaudible over the roar and clattering of rain on the awning. Pulling the oversized, heavy leather jacket closer around her shivering shoulders, she makes a short dash through the rain to the passenger side door. Sinks in to the reclining seat and slams it behind her.

"Tomoyo-chan…" the driver frowns, with earnest eyes under heavy brows. "Uh, Sakura called me the second she got off the phone with you… I got here as fast as I could…" He is looking her up and down with concern, taking in her tear-stained face, bare legs… the red crescent-shaped marks on her neck. "Are you… okay?"

"Mhm." Tomoyo nods, looking down at her lap. "Thank you… Syaoran-kun."

There is nothing but the loud wooshing sound of windshield wipers as the car careens through the downpour.

The driver clears his throat to speak. "I'm taking you to Sakura's place, okay?"

"Yes, thank you." Sakura had been the only person she could think of calling, after crying her eyes dry into the rumpled sheets of an unfamiliar futon. Have to do something. The black scrawl feels burned into the surface of her eyes, she can see it ghosting on the windows, the dashboard, her pale hands clenched in her lap. She sinks down further into the stiff leather jacket, much too large for her tiny frame. His jacket, his smell.

"Listen…" says the boy behind the wheel awkwardly, scratching his head. "I don't really know what's happened, but I just wanted to say… that you shouldn't worry too much."

Tomoyo looks up at him, her childhood friend, wincing embarrassedly as he flicks on a turn signal. "I just mean…" he continues, forcing his mouth into a lop-sided smile, "that you've always been a pretty good judge of character."

She blinks, her eyes still red-rimmed and throat still hoarse from sobbing. "Remember…" Syaoran is looking at her now, "when we were just kids?" He shrugs his shoulders, turning back to the road. "You were the only one who ever noticed how I felt about Sakura. Even before I knew it myself… you could always do that. Not me. And not Sakura, that's for sure…" He laughs lightly, and Tomoyo can't help but let out a small giggle in response. Sakura really wasn't very perceptive, was she…

"But that's what we both love about her…" smiles Tomoyo, for the first time since getting into his car.

"Yeah, but…" Syaoran's face is serious again. "There's something to be said for your insight, too… You've always been good at reading people. I trust that about you…" He sniffs, eyes on the wet road. "That's why, even though I don't know this guy…" he pauses for a moment, his voice trailing off. Then, suddenly – "Tomoyo-chan, do you love this person?"

She gasps a shallow breath, surprised at the pointed question. "Um… I…" There's a roaring in her blood, and an aching in her bones. Thinking about that empty futon, his terrible handwriting on the doorframe… Her cheek against the damp, tattooed skin of his back… The tall, snarling teenaged boy with his school bag and a shinai over his broad shoulder… Standing in the dark and the rain outside the 24-hour café, letting her body answer all of her questions. "I…I think I might…" Her voice is shaky, and uncertain.

"Then he'll come back." Syaoran says with confidence, running a hand through his shaggy hair.

Have to do something… I will definitely come back. Burned in her heart.

"'You have to trust your own judgment." He is pulling the car gently in to the familiar carport of Sakura's home. Looking at her awkwardly again, he shrugs his shoulders. "And if you love somebody, you've gotta trust them too."

Tomoyo's eyes are in her lap again, feeling strangely guilty. Feeling, strangely, better?

I will definitely come back.

Kurogane… why is she always fighting against it? Why is she always doubting him, doubting herself? She believes in him. No matter how long it takes him to do what he has to do… she will definitely see him again.

Lunging suddenly, Tomoyo throws her arms around his lanky, stiff torso in the driver's seat, a wide smile on her face and shimmering tears in her eyes… The boy's face glows red as he stutters, "T...T..Tomoyo-chan!"

"Syaoran-kun… thank you so very much."

A/N: sheepish grin... I know, I can't angst it up without trying to cheer up Tomoyo afterward, sigh... But you know, she is a pretty strong girl after all, can't expect her to mope the whole time he's away... Thanks for the encouragement, you guys! (espec. mysticdawn, don't worry, I will finish this story for sure. Yeah, I'm with you on 121, I thought it was actually a pretty awesome chapter. Sometimes it's hard to support this pairing as canon though with so many multitudes cheering for the other team! We minority shippers must keep the KxT love alive amongst ourselves, hee hee, ne?)