yoru no uta

You\'ll come apart and you\'ll go black

Some kind of night into your darkness

Colors your eyes with what\'s not there.



You put your hands into your head

And then smiles cover your heart




Fade into you

Strange you never knew

Fade into you

I think it\'s strange you never knew


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Saturday morning was perfect. Sakura was gone and she said she wouldn’t be back until maybe dinner. She left for school with a plastic bag filled with scraps of fabric and what looked like white paper streamers. Decorations and costumes, she said.


Her little yellow tagalong of a guardian would be busy with the final level of whatever racing game he kept cursing at for the rest of the day. The peace and quiet made the occasional muffled hoot of disappointment through his sister’s door bearable.


He and Yuki started the day late in the morning, and now the sink was full of dishes, half-empty mugs of tea on the kitchen table. Down in the livingroom, the TV was on, the sound was off. Awkward rhythms of constantly-changing light flickered upon an empty couch. Tangled blanket, a throw-pillow on the floor. They’d crept upstairs like mischievous children.


Touya lay in bed, and through the window blinds he saw snow. The sky was gray as graphite, the dust of charcoal that always stuck to his hands after an art class he’d taken once in his freshmen year of college. Something about Yuki enlightened him. He didn’t mind trying new things anymore, things he sucked horribly at and knew it too.


His sister said they were good, but she was tilting her head at the canvas and turning it at all sorts of awkward angles. He didn’t know why he showed her anything. She was encouraging but she didn’t understand. In so many senses she was still what she had been when she was born. It was easy to change the subject, which is what he had done after snatching back the canvas. Thirty seconds later she was asking him whose turn it was to make dinner.


But the thing with his sister was that she wasn’t the same as she had been all those years ago. He was no longer the only one with things unsaid. He wasn’t the only one who looked for quiet mornings like this—she would never tell him, and he hated to think about it, but he knew it was so.


It was her pretty smile and her bright spirit that made her what she was. It was those things that made her so important to him—and she was important, though he wouldn’t admit it to anyone but maybe Yuki (because he already knew.)


But it was also those things that led her to understand mornings like this. Wrapped in the gray lull of a silent world, where everyone but the two in bed were off at school, or work. This—this was the most beautiful thing in the world. It was the only beautiful thing he wished she would never know.


She would never tell him, just as he never told her. He wasn’t sure how he knew her so well, past the predictability of her mannerisms. It made his stomach hurt to think about it, the late summer evening when she slipped through the front door with rashes on her cheeks and clouds in her eyes.


He wanted to say that she was too young, because she was always late for school and she still tripped sometimes when she was putting on her shoes. But he would have seethed at anyone saying the same for himself at her age. His first encounter with love, burning red under that woman and her magic touch. Just like that she was gone.


Yuki wouldn’t leave, he knew. There was no England to run to. There were no riddles, and he wasn’t as condescending on his worst day. His glasses were on the night table, and he stirred in his sleep. Touya closed his eyes. This was their world, and nothing could ruin it.




Except, maybe, knowing that his sister’s damned boyfriend wouldn’t be leaving her either.





______________________________________________________________________________________


Syaoran sneezed, and quickly recovered by straightening his spine. From beside him, Sakura blinked confusion. It had been happening to both of them for a good portion of the morning. And maybe she was coming down with something; it was cold enough for a virus to be spreading and Rika hadn’t been in school for a couple of days.


Her head was hazy; she’d woken up nauseous and her knees sometimes trembled. Syaoran kept taking her forehead in his palm and pressing in to look for a fever. He must not have found one, because he hadn’t been insisting for her to go home and rest.


Classes were over anyway; she didn’t need her concentration except maybe to decorate the stage. Tomoyo showed her how to tie the gold and white streamers into braids without ripping them. She said they would look like satin braids for the throne, which was really just an old armchair re-upholstered by the remnants of last year’s Santa suit.


Sakura kept managing to rip the streamers anyway, despite her attempts, and now she was sitting on the wooden stage and applying a similar tactic to the wires of Christmas lights. Red and green. Syaoran was testing the white bulbs to be sure they all worked. They were going to string all of them around the stage together, and the backstage crew was going to operate them one-at-a-time so that the red and green lights only played for the choir.


Chiharu, in a pinned-up and half-finished dress, was arguing with Yamazaki about something too faraway to overhear. But it was probably about the way the lights kept shorting out.


“Sakura?” Syaoran’s voice cut her daze, and she flinched. “…what are you doing?”
She looked down at her lap. The wires were all tangled around her hands; she slumped and whined a moan of disappointment.


“Sorry,” she said.


He knelt in front of her to help free her from the festive chains, and his eyes were dark with concern. He’d been waiting for a chance to get this close; she could tell.


“Are you feeling alright?” His voice was soft. The wires fell to her lap, detangled and very much un-braided.
She stared at them and they blurred like headlights on a rainy road at night. Then, it was night. She could hear the cold December wind pushing against her ears, and her hands were cold. She needed her gloves.


“They’re in my pocket,” she said.


“…What?”


“Huh?” She raised her head, blinking. “Um.” And then shot him a nervous and apologetic smile. “Sorry, I wasn’t listening.”


He didn’t say anything, just took the wires and stood. She followed, and then stared straight ahead for a long time. He was talking to her now, but she couldn’t make out the words. Her hands were cold, and she wanted to ask him to get her gloves from her coat pocket, but he would say no because it wasn’t snowing. Silly, it can’t snow indoors. But he wouldn’t put it like that, no. He never called her silly; it sounded like something she would say. It sounded like a conversation she was only having in her mind.


Her stomach twisted and she thought that she might throw up right there until she realized she wasn’t nauseous anymore. She wasn’t anything. She heard her name being spoken, or thought she did, and thought—for a moment—that there might be something to be concerned about. But then everything became dark and she could see the floor coming towards her, gaining rapid speed.


She never hit the ground. When she didn’t answer to her name, Syaoran noticed her eyelids dropping and he’d reached out just in time to catch her with one arm. He tried to wake her, but she was suddenly so heavy. He slid to the ground with her. Maybe he’d been saying her name, but all the sound in the world stopped abruptly when he got a better look at her.


Her face was white and drawn, her lips colorless, eye-whites in thin strips between the lashes, eyes rolled back into her head. He couldn’t hear her breathe, but he could see the aspirated rhythm in her chest.


Tomoyo was trying too, he realized. She must have rushed over. But Sakura couldn’t be woken.



______________________________________________________________________________________






First thing, there was the light, sharp and stinging. Her head hurt and her pupils shrunk like airlocks on a plane. “Kero,” she murmured; her voice was hoarse and her throat felt like a damp passageway that was filmy from lack of use. She was confused by the pain in her throat. It’s wrong, never mind it. “Kero, shut the blinds.”


“Sakura?” There was an operatic note of hope that made her blink. More conscious thoughts attacked her now. The mattress was too hard. The blanket pulled over her was nothing like her warm comforter. There was no window, but a flickering overhead light. The light. She cringed and tried to shield her eyes. That was when she realized his touch, warm and wonderful on her icy skin; his presence flowed through her like the blood in her veins, and she found herself purring with satisfaction when another of his hands stroked her from forehead to chin. She clapped her free hand over his to keep it there.


“Sakura.” He said, in a voice that was much different than the first. She focused, and his eyes blurred a little less for each second to pass after that.


Tomoyo was standing behind him, hands clasped at chest-level, bright-eyed and worried.


“You’re awake now?” She looked quickly back at Syaoran when he spoke. His voice was soft, but it wasn’t the kind of sweet concern she liked, the senseless but warming worry that made her feel safe and loved. It was a fear this time, and she decided that she hated it on him. And maybe it wasn’t senseless this time, because her head was throbbing and the muscles in her legs felt like lank jelly. She cleared her throat, and it hurt, she cringed.


“What happened?” She whispered, to neither in particular.


“You blacked out,” Tomoyo was brimming with sympathy, but the helplessness in her eyes was painful to watch. “You’re in the nurse’s office.”


A warm rush fluttered through Sakura’s cheeks and she shrunk in the blankets. “At school?” she murmured.


“Yes.”


She squeaked, breaking her hand from Syaoran’s to pull the thin blanket to her face. “You mean…” Her eyes barely poked over the edge. “It happened in front of everyone?”


The silence answered her and she pulled the white sheet over her eyes with a whoosh of finality and a whimper of embarrassment.


Syaoran lowered his eyebrows in slight disbelief, or maybe confusion. Tomoyo bit back a smirk, albeit a grateful one. “Looks like she’s back.”




______________________________________________________________________________________





The downstairs door opening and the rush of audible wind was what woke him. He squinted warily over Yuki’s bare arm to see the bedside clock beyond the pair of glasses. It was barely one, which meant one of two things: One, Sakura was home earlier than she’d expected to be, or Two, someone was breaking into the house.


He opted for the latter.


And as he crept out of bed, hastily into his clothes, and down the hall, his mind was filled with scenarios of a quick fight implored by his much unused martial abilities.


Everything changed when he reached the stairs, and saw his sister. She was pale and small, leaning on the kid’s shoulder. He was just then putting her backpack and an empty plastic bag by the door.


“Sakura?”


She barely raised her eyes at him, dim and glossy. There was snow clinging to her hair and melting in the thick weave of her black coat. She smiled brokenly. “I’m okay.” And then she stumbled, to be caught snugly at the waist. By the kid. Again.


Her forehead was cold and powdery when he checked for a fever. Her knees were shaking, too rapid to be controlled. “Really, Oniichan.” She yawned. “I’m okay.” She could taste something like copper on her tongue. She’d thrown up in the bathroom in the nurse’s office, and then she sat on the edge of the mattress with a paper cup of water while Syaoran sat next to her, too thoughtful to speak. She wanted to wait a while, because she was afraid that she’d get sick in the car. The thought made her sick again, and they were there longer than she’d intended. Finally he just suggested a plastic bag.


And then he helped her with her coat, and even her gloves because she kept forgetting where the finger holes were.


There was nothing to worry about because she fell asleep on the way home. See a doctor, he said when the car had stopped, and she told him that she would.


Outside, the snow was getting worse. Touya could see the kid’s car through the window, the windshield of it already forming a fresh layer of opaque white.


“You should go before it gets bad,” he told him, but Syaoran wasn’t really paying attention. Sakura rubbed at one of her eyes with her fist. “Before it gets really bad,” she added, “offer Tomoyo a ride, too.”


Tomoyo. Who was nowhere in sight. She’d be calling one of them before the day was through, he was sure. She stayed with them in the nurse’s office, offering what limited resources she had, until Chiharu—apologetic for interrupting—said that nobody else knew what the hell they were doing with the costumes, and Sakura somehow convinced her to go. There had been something strange about the way they grabbed hands and looked at each other’s faces before she left. When Tomoyo was gone, Sakura put her head on his shoulder. I love you, she said.


What’s this all of a sudden?


I just wanted to let you know. And she squeezed her arm around his. I just wanted to let you know I love you.


“Get some rest,” was Syaoran’s answer. They didn’t kiss—Touya knew they wouldn’t—but the tangle of black and red gloves around their fingers squeezed together, and she smiled at him, which was worse.