Thirty Kisses: Meilin Li and Touya Kinomoto

Written by: Ciuline Ihmenjo

Card Captor Sakura does not belong to me. The characters in Card Captor Sakura do not belong to me. CLAMP owns CCS. Besides, even if you do try and sue me, I have no money.

From Start…

I find it rather disturbing that the better of my fictions always seem to come during bouts of procrastination. I should be doing work for… erm… work at the moment, but I decided to take a lunch break. Instead, I blasted through a fiction (Argh, that hour of writing has robbed me of food!). Thankfully I changed the title… "The trouble with hard object in the mouth" just sounded much too dirty! Anywho, I'm quite pleased with this and hope it's somewhat original for the theme. After all, who chokes on a jawbreaker?

o()o Stuck in the Middle o()o

30 Kisses Theme: candy

There was something in your throat; I don't think now that it really matters what it was, even though I knew. If I hadn't been there that day, it would not have happened in the first place. At the same time, if I hadn't stayed, I never could have saved you.

You had been standing there look sullen and depressed. Your gaze was not for me but far in the distance. You looked east. He was east. You had given him your heart only to have him unknowingly break it.

Heartbreak is a horrible thing. I had been thinking just the same as I rounded to corner to see a flash of crimson and hair the color of the darkest midnight.

And you turned to me, a box in one hand and a blank look on the other. The blank look changed first to surprise and then to panic.

I think I startled you, which brings us to the loud coughing and flurry of hands. You make a funny noise and flail wildly again. If only you would put your hands at your throat, my mind would understand what's going on. I'm afraid my senses are a bit dulled in matters of life and death.

Instead, I look in all directions, trying to figure out what exactly had caught your attention. You gasp and suddenly you are fluttering towards me. It's almost like the wind is carrying you. I suppose it is, for you're a ghastly shade of a color humans should not be. And then it hits me about the same time you flop against my body.

"Meilin!" I manage before patting you hard on the back. One arm supports you gently while the other pounds against your spinal cord. You cough once, loudly and resume your journey through the rainbow of anoxia. A slight squeak emerges from your mouth as I smack my hand against your body right below your shoulder blades. Your face turns from a blue-ish tint to a more pleasant red one. Maybe it was purple. I'm too distressed to really care about colors. I suppose, you might be distressed as well, but the fifth… or seventh… or maybe it was the third… pass of my hand yields results. Something brightly colored flies from your mouth and shatters against the pavement.

You wipe a bit of spittle from your mouth against my shirt as you heave breaths into your lungs.

"My hero!" you exclaim over a fit of coughs. Cheeks flush, eyes shining, you give me the stupidest grin you can possibly muster and swoon comically against my body. "You saved me! How can I ever repay you?"

"You can stop publicly embarrassing me?" I offer. You look up at me and then at the small crowd of evening travelers who have gathered to watch this spectacle.

"Thank you," you say, turning away from me. For some reason, I miss your warmth. It's not because of the temperature; the summer heat is slowly disappearing into the dimming light. You begin to bow, low and sweeping your arm back like a street performer. "Thank you very much. We perform weeknights and you can even book us for travel."

I can only bury my face in my hands.

You turn back to me once the crowd has dissipated. "We should take this act on the road."\

"You could have died."

"Yes," you place a finger to my lips, leaning into me with a mischievous grin on your face, "but my knight in shining armor has rescued me from the clutches of an evil oxygen stealing food."

You lean in suddenly, your face inches from my own.

"You're acting strange. Almost like Akizuki."

You purse your lips and grin. "It's probably all the sugar."

"You're another person who can wield a simple food substance as a deadly weapon," I mutter. Memories of the aftermath of Akizuki's chemical experimentations on one poor (and probably mortally traumatized) Spinel Sun float to the front of my mind.

"Did you say something?"

"I… yeah," I figure perhaps catching you off guard might subdue you a little. It seems to work well enough when I need to distract Eriol's guardian. "I thought that you look exceptionally pretty tonight."

You flush, turning as red as your eyes, your face still inches from mine. "Pretty enough for you?" you counter. Some sort of intensity is blazing behind your fire-red eyes. I hope it's not the onrush of another sugar high.

My eyes dart left for a moment and then back to the right. No escape route. Plowing through you would bring the wrath of two magically enhanced teenagers onto my poor self. Besides, I'm not going to knock a girl over. Even Akizuki wouldn't deserve that… no matter what… erm… he is.

"Pretty enough and then some."

I think steam is starting to filter from your ears. "Really?" The mischievous grin has returned and I'm suddenly aware of your palms gently resting against the side of my head. I stand there slightly confused before my brain registers your expression and your actions with a slight pinging noise. "Pretty enough for this?"

You lean into me, pressing gently against my body. I feel the feather-light touch of your lips before you pull away. It's almost as if you were never there, that my brain had somehow imagined the entire incident. I place my fingers to my own lips for a moment and catch sight of your closed eyes. A serene look has come over your face as you open them to observe my reaction.

I don't know what I look like at the moment, but I imagine could be mistaken for a choking victim right now. My heart is hammering away in my chest like it's trying to escape my body.

"Not pretty enough?" you say glumly. "Syaoran wouldn't accept them either."

"The candy or the kiss?" I ask while my heartbeat calms itself down.

You look thoughtfully at me. "Neither, actually." You stoop down and pick up the box, nearly forgotten where you had dropped it. "Do you want one?" you ask shyly, extending the box in my direction.

"Isn't that what nearly killed you?"

"They're harmless," your shy demeanor turns to a fierce grin, "really, I promise they won't hurt you."

"Sure," I say with a shrug, accepting one of the little spheres of compressed sugar. A red ball drops into my hand and I pop it into my mouth. "You know, if you eat another one, perhaps I can get a chance to save you again."

"Fair enough." You tilt your head backwards and dump at least a dozen of the round orbs into your mouth. Seconds later, you begin to sputter wildly, waving your hands in the air.

To finish…

Well, I actually need to get back to work, but I thought I'd just pop this up on the site (and the live journal) to see how the response is for this.

I've got an update for Fallen planned sometime in September and an update for Covered in Rain sometime in the coming weeks. I'll be on vacation in August before college goes into swing again, so I thought I'd post the CiR update when that ends. And please… please… review Fallen Neo… it's suffering from a severe lack of fan attention as of late! Author kneels and clasps hands together. Please?

Also, I'm going to start updating Splinters now that I've done a preliminary thinking-over of the direction and how I want to do things. Be prepared for a few Spinel/Nakuru hijinx to the chagrin of a puzzled Eriol as well as plenty of Tomoyo/Eriol fluff. Finally, I've got a third CCS coupling!

See you next update…

Ciuline Ihmenjo