A/N: Longer chapter. Thanks to rai17 for the heartwarming review. This chapter is dedicated with much gratefulness to you.
………………………….
"So what do I have to do?" asked Eriol as Tomoyo began to load a fresh tape inside her recorder. "Should I display my ballerina skills? Maybe I should sing my ABCs backwards. Or how about a penguin courtship dance?"
"Adorable," she said simply. "But simplicity is the best way to go. Just be yourself, and I'll have a video fit to seed more terror in Li-san's mind than the one he experienced when he watched Sadako creep out of her well."
"You seem to think so highly of me," he remarked, his mouth twitching in amusement. "You're the only person I know who would talk to me this way. I like that.
She briefly glanced at him over her shoulder. "I respect you in various little ways. One of them is my deference to your innate ability to terrorize souls like that of your descendant's. But I also respect you for guiding Sakura-chan the way a father would. I guess, you're also the only person I know whom I would feel this way for. Ambivalently."
"Ah," he uttered, his eyes softening.
Gracefully, she straightened and aimed her lenses at him. "Ohayo, Hiiragizawa-kun! You're now filling up magnetic tapes, so don't waste my gadget's resources."
He nodded, chuckling. "My cute little descendant would be watching this, yes?"
"He should be when he receives this," she said from behind the camera. "So anyway, Hiiragizawa-kun, what's your birthday message for Li-san?"
"Swiss?"
"Message, Hiiragizawa-kun, message, not massage."
"Oh, must be my ears." The smile on his face belied that though. "Don't count your eggs before they hatch. Sakura-chan doesn't."
"That's foul." Tomoyo meant, she relished green jokes about Syaoran as much as the next person, as long as it didn't involve her beloved best friend.
"Erase that," he said cheerfully. "How about, don't do unto others what you don't want them to do to you, especially in the middle of the night?" He received a blank look from her. "Oh, too cryptic. OK, how about, say no to drugs? You don't like that? How about, save the dolphins?"
She sighed exasperatedly. "Hai, hai, moving on…"
…………………………….
Keroberos watched in infuriation as Yue burned the tiles of Tomoyo's bedroom with his endless back-and-forth pacing.
"You sure know how to ruin a sun guardian's appetite, don't you?" Kero gestured to the chocolate cookies it wasn't able to touch for the last fifteen minutes.
"If you call three batches of cookies a ruined appetite, it's not my problem anymore," retorted the lunar sentinel, and then resumed his soldier march.
"I average five, Yue. But that's not the point." It decided to get up and talk business with its counterpart. "Tomoyo-chan said she'll be fine. She also said that she won't do anything intolerable towards our former master. So why are you still acting like a laboring hen?"
"I'm…" At last, the winged man ceased his motion and faced Kero. "Worried."
"So what else is new?"
"About Mistress Daidouji."
The yellow animal blinked. "Eh?" It wasn't everyday news that Yue admits anxiety over anything, least of all Daidouji Tomoyo.
In the early days of their fulfillment of their obligatory guardianship of the girl, the lunar protector was not very enthusiastic about his duty—a direct contrast of the yellow guardian that was overjoyed to care for a girl after its own heart.
Nah, it wasn't as if Yue was ever enthusiastic about anything, but he was quite vocal of his dismay at his latest job.
After all, he used to judge the worthiness of a card captor. He was also the former secondary master of the cards that were under his sign. Now he was reduced to a job of looking after a rich brat with a camera trigger-happy trait.
But as time passed and they both got to know Tomoyo more, they realized the folly of both the Clow master and the Card Mistress: Daidouji Tomoyo did NOT need a babysitter; she needed a friend.
A friend whose attention span lasted longer than four o'clock PM because she has 'a date with Syaoran-kun at six and needs to freshen up'.
"Why? It's not like Master Clow Reed would do something not nice to her," said Keroberos, treading with words carefully. The sun protector wasn't sure whether Yue's loyalty still lies with its former master or its current mistress.
"He isn't Master Clow Reed. And that's what I'm worried about." He crossed his arms in front of his chest, pondering on the situation at hand. "That person… that person has Master Clow Reed's memories, and yet… he doesn't live what he remembers. He has his own way of breathing his existence."
"Um… so?" Kero, still confused.
"He might do something ludicrous… something Master Clow Reed has already gone beyond." Yue.
"Ludi… is that bad?"
"No. Just worse."
"Matte, matte!" Kero's wings fluttered frantically. "You seem to know something I don't."
"After hundreds of years, you only admitted that now."
"NO! I mean, about Tomoyo-chaaaan!" The yellow creature scratched its chin. "The way you speak… it's like Tomoyo-chan made a very bad move in going to that guy's house."
His eyes focused outside the window, unspeaking despite Kero's shrill, insistent cry demanding to let it in his secret knowledge too.
………………………………….
That afternoon, Yue had surfaced in Tsukishiro Yukito's body again. Kinomoto Touya warily reprimanded him for wearing out Yukito too much, but they both knew that his purpose was too important.
Months ago, Daidouji Tomoyo was slowly isolating herself. That was strange, considering that she used to be one of the most cheerful and kindest person in the town. Sure, she became more of a homebody ever since she realized that tagging along in her best friend's dates and being a third wheel wasn't worth the Sakura footages and causing Li's discomfort. That was understandable.
But in burying herself for days straight inside her house and immersing herself in making Sakura costumes that her best friend would never really wear, the people around her started to worry. She may not speak much about it, but all those who knew her saw that she was affected by the relationship that was depriving her slowly but surely of a childhood best friend.
So Kinomoto Sakura and Li Syaoran had decided to confide to Hiiragizawa Eriol, who then just arrived from London to live in Tomoeda for good.
Sakura and Eriol then decided to send Kero and Yue as Tomoyo's own guardians. Li, on the other hand, didn't like the idea. He somehow sensed that this was not the answer to her real problem. But seeing that there was no other solution, he finally agreed, upon the condition that they would think of other ways to solve this.
This was forgotten in the course of weeks and months, when even Syaoran had to accept that it was working: Tomoyo was starting to become more cheerful and less possessive of her best friend and second cousin.
So Yue had now started to accept his fate. In fact, he was starting to look forward to seeing his ward, who would entertain him and Keroberos with her stories, nuggets of wisdom, and generally, poking fun at the people who would otherwise never think of her as capable of humor.
Talking with her was different from talking with Sakura, who, though may have little moments of a grown-up attitude, was generally a naïve child—the kind of person who believed in princesses getting rescued from towers by a prince and living happily ever after with him.
Daidouji Tomoyo, on the other hand, believed in romance like every little girl does. But her ideals and dreams were reined back by her pragmatic attitude she learned from her early experiences of rejection and yielding. She was the type of person who believed that not all princesses locked up in towers were miserable: some of them deemed that as their prerogative, and had learned to love the tower and the things that surrounded it. Just like her.
And in the end, though he clandestinely loved both girls as much as he loved Clow Reed, he surmised that intellectually-wise, Tomoyo was as mature as the sorcerer. However, she had yet to acquire Sakura's innate wisdom with emotions—that though Tomoyo was perceptive and the cherry blossom was… not, the latter handled her feelings better than the former.
Yue was just outside Tomoyo's bedroom door when he heard footsteps inside. Activating his powers, he tried to sense the kind of aura inside the room.
Realizing it belonged to someone familiar, he let out a sigh of relief and entered the room.
Li Syaoran was too engrossed with what he was reading to notice his presence. A peek at the notebook's cover told him that it was the mistress' journal. That made him frown in concern.
"You should not be touching private documents like the mistress' memoirs."
Syaoran turned to him, alarmed. When recognition dawned on the little wolf, he closed the diary, bookmarking his current page with his finger. He then turned to face him.
"Not when her emotional security is concerned," Li replied calmly. "Now if you may excuse me—"
"You are not taking the mistress' property with you," he said firmly.
"On the authority of my ancestors' great name, I order you to stay out of this."
"It is the Card Mistress and the Clow Master's reincarnation that gives me orders, and I shall not acknowledge any other authority other than the one that emanates from them," he replied with the same decisiveness.
Li looked at him intently, assessing his steadfastness. In the end, he let out an audible sigh of resignation and collapsed on the bed. "You do not understand anything, Yue."
"As far as I am aware of, my intellectual capacity is far from feeble, Clow descendant," he snapped coolly.
"She can't do this… not with him…"
"Pardon?" Li's strange words stirred confusion within him, as well as an urgent need to know whatever trouble was brewing in his ward's life.
"I saw something… and I came here to verify my assumptions." His fists clenched. "I could kill that bastard for allowing her to do this. She's so vulnerable… and he took advantage of it, that son of a--"
"Elaborate."
"Daidouji has just fallen in love..." Syaoran's eyes hardened dangerously. "With Hiiragizawa Eriol, no less. They had been in a relationship for two weeks."
……………………………………………………..
"… and this is the bathroom cap I wear when I take a bath." Eriol pointed to the neon green material lying neatly on the sides of the pale green bathtub. "It doubles as Suppi's boat when Nakuru takes a bath with me."
"The three of you take a bath together?" she exclaimed, wide-eyed.
"There's always a room for four," said Eriol slyly to the camera, as if talking to an imaginary Syaoran who would be watching the video.
She laughed from behind the lenses, but it abruptly stopped when he started to undress. Losing focus for some seconds, her head appeared from behind the camera. "H-Hiirgizawa-kun? W-What on earth are you doing?"
"Disrobing." He discarded his robe and started to unbuckle his belt.
"T-This is not a porno flick!"
"I know. If you informed me that the video would be sold online and I'll get plenty of sums for royalty, I may just decide to do that." He got out of his trousers slowly, as if giving her time to turn her back on him and scream.
But she didn't; she was too damn fascinated at how this scene seemed so familiar… as if it happened just yesterday.
"There is something I remember… the times I took a bath not alone. Someone who rubbed shampoo on my hair and soaped the part of my back that I couldn't reach. I want to try and live that moment again."
"If you're hallucinating that I am Mizuki-sensei then you ought to have your eyes checked for better eyeglasses prescription."
He smiled sadly, a smile that made her heart skip a beat.
He stepped cleanly out of his pants, revealing no minuscule fabric covering his manly flesh. She should have known that he was the kind of person to shun undergarments just for his amusement.
There was no modesty and haste in his movement toward and into the bathtub. And to her consternation, even her highest moral was not disturbed by what he just did.
In fact, everything seemed so natural to her, as if she was not watching a live person but a Greek god depicted in moving poetry. Malice and lust were absent on his face; just serenity and pleasure in feeling the contact of water with his nakedness.
"Daidouji-san?"
"Y-Yes?"
"Do you believe in eternity?"
"I… I can't really say." She placed her camera on the sink and sat on the cover of the bathroom seat, unable to tear her eyes off him. "But… under normal circumstances, nothing lasts forever. Diamonds may last a long, long time, but they defy perpetual ownership. Just as love, which claims to be endless, cannot go beyond a lifetime."
"I am a reincarnation of Clow Reed, and if this present existence ceases to be, I can come back again in another time. Wouldn't that be proof of eternity?"
She frowned thoughtfully. "True. You have that person's memories, but you can't live an exact life as his. For one, your environment is very different from his. And two, in the process of living your own life, you add more memories to those that are saved in your consciousness.
"Maybe eternity without change is the only impossible scenario I can think of," she concluded. "Why did you suddenly ask that?"
He smiled feebly. "I just remembered a conversation with another friend about that."
"You have friends?"
"My social circle is not limited to my imagination, Daidouji-san," he replied good-naturedly as he stretched his arm towards his back. "Oh my, I can't reach that part again!"
Her eyebrow arched.
"Daidouji-san, would you be a sweetheart and help me soap that part?"
…………………….
"She went WHERE!"
Kero-chan held the receiver away from its ears as Li Syaoran exploded with every crisp profanity known to mankind, literate or not.
"You committed a grave mistake by making that phone call," said Yue, shaking his head.
"It's your fault! You won't tell me ANYTHING about Tomoyo-chan so I had to call Sakura-chan, but it was the BRAT who ANSWERED MY CALL AND NOW HE'S ALL FREAKED OUT!"
"Are you finished?" he asked calmly when Kero slammed the receiver down heatedly.
"Won't you still tell me anything?"
"…"
"Go talk to your daddy!" Steaming, the yellow animal plopped down by the window and muttered beneath its breath.
……………………………………
to be continued