Card Captor Sakura - - Set Beta - - Hiiragizawa Eriol/Daidouji Tomoyo
[Fandom] Card Captor Sakura
[Pairing] Hiiragizawa Eriol/Daidouji Tomoyo
[Theme set] Beta
[Rating] The majority of these are PG, one or two might just cross the line into weak PG-13.
[Spoilers] Absolutely none.
[Disclaimer] Card Captor Sakura and all its characters are the property of CLAMP. I claim absolutely no ownership of them. Used without permission.
[Notes] These took me a lot longer than they probably should have, for which I apologise. I've had a blast writing these, and I think I'd like to do another pairing with another theme set in the future. I abused punctuation HORRIBLY as these are probably far too long. And I apologise for #39. I just couldn't help myself. These are not in any order whatsoever, and do not link together at all.
Leave feedback and I will love you forever.
01. Walking
Tomoyo walks like a panther, all lithe and long-limbed and suggestion of power behind the grace and elegance, and his eyes are drawn to her helplessly, hopelessly.
02. Waltz
When he was young, he was forced to take dancing lessons with a stuffy old dance instructor who smelled of mothballs, and he never appreciated it until he felt the small of her back beneath his hand as they waltzed around one of the Daidouji mansion’s many ballrooms.
03. Wishes
He sees a star shoot across the sky, so he turns to her and says make a wish, dear Daidouji-san, yet she says no, Hiiragizawa-san, I don’t believe in wishing on stars anymore and he asks her why, she says because I’m not three years old anymore, but really he knows it’s because once upon a time she wished on all the stars in the sky and still Sakura chose Li.
04. Wonder
Tomoyo knows like the back of her hand the look he gets when he is wondering about something, and she knows better than anyone how to nip it neatly in the bud, especially when, like now, he is regarding her with a cheerily lascivious look.
05. Worry
Hiiragizawa-kun walks, grins, flirts cheerily with Sakura-chan and teases Li-kun like he hasn’t a care, a worry, in the world, and once upon a time Tomoyo almost envied him for that - until she saw for the first time the way his eyes cloud, the way the grin falls away from his face, when he thinks nobody is looking.
06. Whimsy
Hiiragizawa-kun is one prone to flights of fancy - sometimes he tells Tomoyo late at night about how he’d like to take her flying amongst the stars someday, and she laughs and tells him not to be silly - she has no idea he has the means to do exactly that.
07. Waste/Wasteland
His favourite poem is “The Wasteland” by T.S. Eliot, and he write the lines that make him think of her on pieces of paper, feeds them into her locker and never leaves his name.
08. Whiskey and Rum
On the TV screen, Captain Jack Sparrow is shouting about the rum being gone, and Eriol thinks to himself that he wouldn’t be caught dead watching this kind of Hollywood rubbish if Tomoyo wasn’t giggling happily, and he didn’t get his reward in having an excuse to be close to her, so close her long hair tickles his nose.
09. War
Eriol believes in the old adage ‘all is fair in love and war’ (though he never really plays by the rules anyway) and so his massive campaign to win over Daidouji Tomoyo is at times dirty and underhanded - she’ll never admit it, but she admires his nerve, even as she gives away the two dozen roses he sends her.
10. Weddings
Tomoyo’s been to weddings before, but this one’s the hardest, this one’s the worst - she watches Sakura and Syaoran revolve slowly on the dancefloor with unfathomable eyes and he comes and sits silently beside her, ready for when she wants to talk.
11. Birthday
It figures that Hiiragizawa-kun wouldn’t the sort to give her a *normal* birthday present - no, he has to get down on one knee, clasp her hand to his heart, and sing a song he wrote for her himself (his attempt at soprano is both horrifying and somewhat endearing).
12. Blessing
Hiiragizawa Eriol doesn’t get scared easily, but waiting for his meeting with Daidouji Sonomi to ask for her blessing to wed her daughter is easily the scariest thing he’s ever done.
13. Bias
Eriol slowly gets used to the fact that when it comes to Sakura, Tomoyo will always be biased in her favour - he supposes that when you fall in love with someone you learn to accept their faults (after all, she accepts the fact that Kaho still holds a special place in his heart, and always will).
14. Burning
As her voice sounds softly in his ears like a childhood lullaby over the phone from an ocean away, he looks out at the night sky and the stars, burning so brightly and so far away, look like her eyes.
15. Breathing
“I hope you know, Tomoyo-san, that for as long as I am breathing, I shall love you madly, and cover your willing skin with honeyed kisses every morning, and rejoice in being allowed to wash your dirty clothes, and cook you gourmet meals as your personal kitchen slave, and cherish every handkerchief upon which you blow your delightful nose -“
16. Breaking
Tomoyo catches Sakura and Syaoran kissing for the first time, and despite her incessant matchmaking, he thinks she wasn’t really properly prepared for this moment - he can hear her young heart breaking audibly.
17. Belief
He holds a hopeless belief that if he hangs on long enough, if he waits long enough, she will stop looking at Sakura with that ardent, helpless gaze, and turn her eyes to him instead.
18. Balloon
“I’m all fat and swollen-looking - I look like a balloon,” she wails, but he looks at her and to him she looks pregnant and blooming and glowing and gorgeous.
19. Balcony
Their English teacher has assigned Romeo and Juliet to their class, and she makes Tomoyo and Eriol stand up and act out the famous balcony scene - Tomoyo blushes to the roots of her hair but Eriol takes it all in his stride, earning them a standing ovation at the end.
20. Bane
Eriol didn’t exactly set out to make himself the bane of Daidouji-san’s life - things just worked out that way; a cup of coffee spilled over a half-finished design, a slightly too flirtatious smile in Sakura-san’s direction, and an accidental treading-on of one of Daidouji-san’s tapes later.
21. Quiet
They both like the quiet best - they could sit for hours, she knitting and he reading, their silence broken only by the steady ticking of the clock, the click of her knitting needles, the soft sweep as he turns the page.
22. Quirks
Daidouji Tomoyo could recite, in backwards chronological order, every single quirk that Kinomoto Sakura has displayed from the moment the two of them met, but Eriol has to wonder if anyone has ever told her that she frowns when she paints, that she chews her lip when she is lying, and that she wears a white ribbon in her hair, without fail, every Tuesday.
23. Question
There are questions they skirt around out of pure necessity - do you miss Mizuki-sensei, how do you really feel about Sakura-san and Li-kun’s wedding - these are conversations nobody wants to have over dinner, and Eriol reasons that they are fine - more than fine - leaving them unanswered (excuses, excuses, he knows, but not worth the look on her face, and so he will not speak a word).
24. Quarrel
Once, he said something that really hurt her feelings - she wouldn’t speak to him for three weeks, and it took a charm offensive the likes of which Seijuu had never before seen and never would again (and he wasn’t being egotistical in saying so, truth is truth) to bring her around; and so every time Sakura-san asks to hear the “real story behind that time, Eriol-kun,”; Eriol changes the subject, laughs it away, under the weight of Tomoyo’s perfectly honed death glare.
25. Quitting
She’s thought about quitting him before, more than once, more than a few times, but it’s impossible - he burrowed in under her skin while she was looking the other way, and now she doesn’t know how she would live without his face, sleepy and unfocused but cheery, over a bowl of cereal at the kitchen table in the morning and the way he says this funny English greeting, muffled, “good morning!” (how could she leave him now that she is just beginning to be able to wrap her tongue around it in response?)
26. Jump
Syaoran can’t help but think it’s funny that Eriol - the boy who once teased Syaoran mercilessly about being so head over heels for Sakura - now, when Daidouji-san says jump, asks how high? while in midair.
27. Jester
Sometimes, Eriol can’t help but feel a little like his (Clow’s) memories of court jesters of olden days - brought out to entertain the Queen, make her smile, only to be sent away again when the Queen grows tired, wants for something else (he is trying to fill a void for her that he is not big enough to fill; she is unable to give him what he wants, and the strain is evident in both their faces).
28. Jousting
Sakura watches with an odd kind of rapture every time, pupils flying like she is watching a particularly energetic tennis bout, flitting between them - jousting she says to them cheerfully once at lunch, when Eriol-kun and Tomoyo-chan argue, it is like jousting and Tomoyo flushes and looks down at her lunch while Eriol beams, catches Yamazaki’s eye, and the two of them begin to spin an elaborate lie about medieval times for Sakura’s gullible ears.
29. Jewel
Eriol could magic her up fantastic riches, dress her in gowns dripping sapphires and diamonds and rubies, amethysts the shade of her eyes; but he knows instinctively that he could never buy her love, and evenings like these, curled together in front of a fire, are worth so much more.
30. Just
Sometimes life is unfair, she says to him once when he gets her half-drunk on wine and starlight - or rather, he watches her get herself half-drunk with more amusement than a sober Tomoyo would have appreciated - but you just have to roll with it and trust that… everything will be okay (she sways towards him with something like misplaced purpose and - heaven help the both of them, if things have come to this - lust; in her eyes, but falls fast asleep before she has quite finished her sentence, snoring in his lap).
31. Smirk
Someone once told Tomoyo that a smile showing less than five teeth is a smirk, and so in turn it leads her to wonder what on earth one calls a smile in which all the teeth are carefully bared, and Hiiragizawa-kun, the wearer of said smile, suggests cheerfully, “threatening, crocodile-like, scary… - take your pick, dear Tomoyo-san.”
32. Sorrow
She has plucked the petals off a thousand daisies and each result tells her the same thing (Sakura will never be hers); Eriol scoops up all the bald corpses and makes her a daisy-chain where the centers shine like suns, sets it reverently atop her hair like a crown - “from the ashes of things thought to be dead sometimes comes beauty more splendid than the original,” he tells her, and holds her while she cries.
33. Stupidity
Tomoyo cannot believe she trusted him with the grocery shopping - abnormal people do not cope well with shopping, and apparently wizards buy nothing but obscure brands of German dishwasher tablets (when they don’t even have a dishwasher), ridiculous amounts of marmalade and onions.
34. Serenade
Tomoyo is - rudely, in her opinion - woken one night by the sounds of someone strumming a guitar - badly - and singing like a bad Italian musician in a cheesy Italian restaurant; so she gets up grudgingly and goes to the window, throws open the shutters on to the balcony and yells at Eriol to shut up - he protests that she hasn’t a romantic bone in her body, and her response is to throw a pillow down at him.
35. Sarcasm
Neither of them know how to say what they mean - she is bad at sincerity, being so practiced at lying; and he slips so easily into sarcasm - because they are so afraid, they are so guarded, and this is new and dizzying and wonderful, and maybe a wrong word would bring it crashing down around their ears.
36. Sordid
Tomoyo is familiar with that lascivious grin, that wicked glint in Eriol’s eye, and so before he can open his mouth to regale Sakura with some fabricated, sordid account of the - entirely innocent - dinner she had at his house last night; she steps neatly in and changes the subject.
37. Soliloquy
He listens to her sing to herself in the music room when she thinks everyone else is gone away home; someday he will get up the courage to approach her, offer to her a piano accompaniment, for now he listens, sad.
38. Sojourn
- and at journey’s end, the hero and the heroine will ride off into the sunset, inevitably; this story is no different and Eriol wonders what becomes of the faithful best friend left behind (fairytales don’t normally tell you that part, he thinks grimly).
39. Share
“You know - hic - Tomoyo-shan - hic -, I was thinkin’, mibbe we could - hic - share him -“ Tomoyo blinks at Mizuki-sensei and Eriol laughs lightly and tells Kaho not to be so inappropriate, she blinks slowly and says come on, Eriol, it - hic - would shertainly be intereshting…
40. Solitary
Spinel loves it when Daidouji-san comes over - she usually brings a good book for him and sympathizes when he says he feels like the solitary sane one in a house full of maniacs; she says she understands, especially when Eriol walks in trailing thread in an eye-searing shade of pink as he sews Nakuru a particularly flouncy dress, and Nakuru herself has had approximately her own body weight in sugar.
41. Nowhere
She writes letters to the father she has never known - one a week, every week - and stores them in a shoebox under her bed; she addresses them nowhere, everywhere, anywhere (Eriol could tell her in a second where exactly ‘nowhere’ is, but she doesn’t think she wants to know.)
42. Neutral
When it comes to the usual disputes between Spinel and Nakuru, Tomoyo is always the neutral voice of reason, and she solves every single one (practicing for our children, darling? he teases lightly, Tomoyo gives a biting reply).
43. Nuance
Syaoran is more perceptive than he lets on - he can see, for example, the subtle differences in the way Daidouji looks at that That Hiiragizawa and Sakura, and he doesn’t like them one bit - he thinks it might be time to have a little Chat with Daidouji about Hiiragizawa, perhaps likening him to something poisonous.
44. Near
The skin of her thigh is deliciously soft and smooth and white under his hand, she smells like fruity shampoo and roses and the tang of sweat; the grass is slick with the moisture of a balmy summer’s evening underneath them and dragonflies hum in a nearby bush, the pound of his blood has slowed to a lazy, sensuous thump; they kiss and it is sweet and hard and slow.
45. Natural
When he is having a problem, the last person he’d usually think of going to is Nakuru, but she is his last hope, and so he tells her about the strange - urges, for want of a better word - he’s been having around Tomoyo lately, and the dreams these seem to result in; when he has described every little detail for her as she requested and feels as though he may combust as his body feels so warm with the force of his embarrassment; she says cheerily that it’s Natural to feel this way, and he doesn’t feel any better at all.
46. Horizon
You can never catch up with the horizon, Tomoyo thinks, it will always be five steps ahead of you, taunting; just like you can never reach out and grab your own shadow - these phenomena remind her of him, Mr. Untouchable.
47. Valiant
Tomoyo isn’t sure if it is bravery or pure stupidity that makes Eriol attempt a conversation with Touya-kun and Li-kun at the Daidouji Christmas party; later she thinks that he may have had a far more ulterior motive as she bandages up his wound (which Li-kun inflicted upon him after he said something suggestive concerning his relationship with Sakura) and he takes the opportunity to bend his head towards hers for a kiss.
48. Virtuous
Even as she catches him so plainly in the act, he pulls on such a virtuous, how-on-earth-could-this-face-have-done-such-a-thing-when-butter-so-clearly-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth expression that she finds herself smiling reluctantly as she tells him to hand over the bad Chinese love poetry he was about to fill Li-kun’s locker with.
49. Victory
Eriol watches Tomoyo’s face as she gazes, long and pining, at Sakura-san with Syaoran-kun, her dark eyes as far away from this boy with her arm around her waist as it is possible to be - if this is victory, Eriol thinks, it is a hollow one indeed.
50. Defeat
She is always completely gracious in defeat, even when her forfeit is as degrading as this - “how long am I going to have to wear this maid’s outfit, Hiiragizawa?”
[Pairing] Hiiragizawa Eriol/Daidouji Tomoyo
[Theme set] Beta
[Rating] The majority of these are PG, one or two might just cross the line into weak PG-13.
[Spoilers] Absolutely none.
[Disclaimer] Card Captor Sakura and all its characters are the property of CLAMP. I claim absolutely no ownership of them. Used without permission.
[Notes] These took me a lot longer than they probably should have, for which I apologise. I've had a blast writing these, and I think I'd like to do another pairing with another theme set in the future. I abused punctuation HORRIBLY as these are probably far too long. And I apologise for #39. I just couldn't help myself. These are not in any order whatsoever, and do not link together at all.
Leave feedback and I will love you forever.
01. Walking
Tomoyo walks like a panther, all lithe and long-limbed and suggestion of power behind the grace and elegance, and his eyes are drawn to her helplessly, hopelessly.
02. Waltz
When he was young, he was forced to take dancing lessons with a stuffy old dance instructor who smelled of mothballs, and he never appreciated it until he felt the small of her back beneath his hand as they waltzed around one of the Daidouji mansion’s many ballrooms.
03. Wishes
He sees a star shoot across the sky, so he turns to her and says make a wish, dear Daidouji-san, yet she says no, Hiiragizawa-san, I don’t believe in wishing on stars anymore and he asks her why, she says because I’m not three years old anymore, but really he knows it’s because once upon a time she wished on all the stars in the sky and still Sakura chose Li.
04. Wonder
Tomoyo knows like the back of her hand the look he gets when he is wondering about something, and she knows better than anyone how to nip it neatly in the bud, especially when, like now, he is regarding her with a cheerily lascivious look.
05. Worry
Hiiragizawa-kun walks, grins, flirts cheerily with Sakura-chan and teases Li-kun like he hasn’t a care, a worry, in the world, and once upon a time Tomoyo almost envied him for that - until she saw for the first time the way his eyes cloud, the way the grin falls away from his face, when he thinks nobody is looking.
06. Whimsy
Hiiragizawa-kun is one prone to flights of fancy - sometimes he tells Tomoyo late at night about how he’d like to take her flying amongst the stars someday, and she laughs and tells him not to be silly - she has no idea he has the means to do exactly that.
07. Waste/Wasteland
His favourite poem is “The Wasteland” by T.S. Eliot, and he write the lines that make him think of her on pieces of paper, feeds them into her locker and never leaves his name.
08. Whiskey and Rum
On the TV screen, Captain Jack Sparrow is shouting about the rum being gone, and Eriol thinks to himself that he wouldn’t be caught dead watching this kind of Hollywood rubbish if Tomoyo wasn’t giggling happily, and he didn’t get his reward in having an excuse to be close to her, so close her long hair tickles his nose.
09. War
Eriol believes in the old adage ‘all is fair in love and war’ (though he never really plays by the rules anyway) and so his massive campaign to win over Daidouji Tomoyo is at times dirty and underhanded - she’ll never admit it, but she admires his nerve, even as she gives away the two dozen roses he sends her.
10. Weddings
Tomoyo’s been to weddings before, but this one’s the hardest, this one’s the worst - she watches Sakura and Syaoran revolve slowly on the dancefloor with unfathomable eyes and he comes and sits silently beside her, ready for when she wants to talk.
11. Birthday
It figures that Hiiragizawa-kun wouldn’t the sort to give her a *normal* birthday present - no, he has to get down on one knee, clasp her hand to his heart, and sing a song he wrote for her himself (his attempt at soprano is both horrifying and somewhat endearing).
12. Blessing
Hiiragizawa Eriol doesn’t get scared easily, but waiting for his meeting with Daidouji Sonomi to ask for her blessing to wed her daughter is easily the scariest thing he’s ever done.
13. Bias
Eriol slowly gets used to the fact that when it comes to Sakura, Tomoyo will always be biased in her favour - he supposes that when you fall in love with someone you learn to accept their faults (after all, she accepts the fact that Kaho still holds a special place in his heart, and always will).
14. Burning
As her voice sounds softly in his ears like a childhood lullaby over the phone from an ocean away, he looks out at the night sky and the stars, burning so brightly and so far away, look like her eyes.
15. Breathing
“I hope you know, Tomoyo-san, that for as long as I am breathing, I shall love you madly, and cover your willing skin with honeyed kisses every morning, and rejoice in being allowed to wash your dirty clothes, and cook you gourmet meals as your personal kitchen slave, and cherish every handkerchief upon which you blow your delightful nose -“
16. Breaking
Tomoyo catches Sakura and Syaoran kissing for the first time, and despite her incessant matchmaking, he thinks she wasn’t really properly prepared for this moment - he can hear her young heart breaking audibly.
17. Belief
He holds a hopeless belief that if he hangs on long enough, if he waits long enough, she will stop looking at Sakura with that ardent, helpless gaze, and turn her eyes to him instead.
18. Balloon
“I’m all fat and swollen-looking - I look like a balloon,” she wails, but he looks at her and to him she looks pregnant and blooming and glowing and gorgeous.
19. Balcony
Their English teacher has assigned Romeo and Juliet to their class, and she makes Tomoyo and Eriol stand up and act out the famous balcony scene - Tomoyo blushes to the roots of her hair but Eriol takes it all in his stride, earning them a standing ovation at the end.
20. Bane
Eriol didn’t exactly set out to make himself the bane of Daidouji-san’s life - things just worked out that way; a cup of coffee spilled over a half-finished design, a slightly too flirtatious smile in Sakura-san’s direction, and an accidental treading-on of one of Daidouji-san’s tapes later.
21. Quiet
They both like the quiet best - they could sit for hours, she knitting and he reading, their silence broken only by the steady ticking of the clock, the click of her knitting needles, the soft sweep as he turns the page.
22. Quirks
Daidouji Tomoyo could recite, in backwards chronological order, every single quirk that Kinomoto Sakura has displayed from the moment the two of them met, but Eriol has to wonder if anyone has ever told her that she frowns when she paints, that she chews her lip when she is lying, and that she wears a white ribbon in her hair, without fail, every Tuesday.
23. Question
There are questions they skirt around out of pure necessity - do you miss Mizuki-sensei, how do you really feel about Sakura-san and Li-kun’s wedding - these are conversations nobody wants to have over dinner, and Eriol reasons that they are fine - more than fine - leaving them unanswered (excuses, excuses, he knows, but not worth the look on her face, and so he will not speak a word).
24. Quarrel
Once, he said something that really hurt her feelings - she wouldn’t speak to him for three weeks, and it took a charm offensive the likes of which Seijuu had never before seen and never would again (and he wasn’t being egotistical in saying so, truth is truth) to bring her around; and so every time Sakura-san asks to hear the “real story behind that time, Eriol-kun,”; Eriol changes the subject, laughs it away, under the weight of Tomoyo’s perfectly honed death glare.
25. Quitting
She’s thought about quitting him before, more than once, more than a few times, but it’s impossible - he burrowed in under her skin while she was looking the other way, and now she doesn’t know how she would live without his face, sleepy and unfocused but cheery, over a bowl of cereal at the kitchen table in the morning and the way he says this funny English greeting, muffled, “good morning!” (how could she leave him now that she is just beginning to be able to wrap her tongue around it in response?)
26. Jump
Syaoran can’t help but think it’s funny that Eriol - the boy who once teased Syaoran mercilessly about being so head over heels for Sakura - now, when Daidouji-san says jump, asks how high? while in midair.
27. Jester
Sometimes, Eriol can’t help but feel a little like his (Clow’s) memories of court jesters of olden days - brought out to entertain the Queen, make her smile, only to be sent away again when the Queen grows tired, wants for something else (he is trying to fill a void for her that he is not big enough to fill; she is unable to give him what he wants, and the strain is evident in both their faces).
28. Jousting
Sakura watches with an odd kind of rapture every time, pupils flying like she is watching a particularly energetic tennis bout, flitting between them - jousting she says to them cheerfully once at lunch, when Eriol-kun and Tomoyo-chan argue, it is like jousting and Tomoyo flushes and looks down at her lunch while Eriol beams, catches Yamazaki’s eye, and the two of them begin to spin an elaborate lie about medieval times for Sakura’s gullible ears.
29. Jewel
Eriol could magic her up fantastic riches, dress her in gowns dripping sapphires and diamonds and rubies, amethysts the shade of her eyes; but he knows instinctively that he could never buy her love, and evenings like these, curled together in front of a fire, are worth so much more.
30. Just
Sometimes life is unfair, she says to him once when he gets her half-drunk on wine and starlight - or rather, he watches her get herself half-drunk with more amusement than a sober Tomoyo would have appreciated - but you just have to roll with it and trust that… everything will be okay (she sways towards him with something like misplaced purpose and - heaven help the both of them, if things have come to this - lust; in her eyes, but falls fast asleep before she has quite finished her sentence, snoring in his lap).
31. Smirk
Someone once told Tomoyo that a smile showing less than five teeth is a smirk, and so in turn it leads her to wonder what on earth one calls a smile in which all the teeth are carefully bared, and Hiiragizawa-kun, the wearer of said smile, suggests cheerfully, “threatening, crocodile-like, scary… - take your pick, dear Tomoyo-san.”
32. Sorrow
She has plucked the petals off a thousand daisies and each result tells her the same thing (Sakura will never be hers); Eriol scoops up all the bald corpses and makes her a daisy-chain where the centers shine like suns, sets it reverently atop her hair like a crown - “from the ashes of things thought to be dead sometimes comes beauty more splendid than the original,” he tells her, and holds her while she cries.
33. Stupidity
Tomoyo cannot believe she trusted him with the grocery shopping - abnormal people do not cope well with shopping, and apparently wizards buy nothing but obscure brands of German dishwasher tablets (when they don’t even have a dishwasher), ridiculous amounts of marmalade and onions.
34. Serenade
Tomoyo is - rudely, in her opinion - woken one night by the sounds of someone strumming a guitar - badly - and singing like a bad Italian musician in a cheesy Italian restaurant; so she gets up grudgingly and goes to the window, throws open the shutters on to the balcony and yells at Eriol to shut up - he protests that she hasn’t a romantic bone in her body, and her response is to throw a pillow down at him.
35. Sarcasm
Neither of them know how to say what they mean - she is bad at sincerity, being so practiced at lying; and he slips so easily into sarcasm - because they are so afraid, they are so guarded, and this is new and dizzying and wonderful, and maybe a wrong word would bring it crashing down around their ears.
36. Sordid
Tomoyo is familiar with that lascivious grin, that wicked glint in Eriol’s eye, and so before he can open his mouth to regale Sakura with some fabricated, sordid account of the - entirely innocent - dinner she had at his house last night; she steps neatly in and changes the subject.
37. Soliloquy
He listens to her sing to herself in the music room when she thinks everyone else is gone away home; someday he will get up the courage to approach her, offer to her a piano accompaniment, for now he listens, sad.
38. Sojourn
- and at journey’s end, the hero and the heroine will ride off into the sunset, inevitably; this story is no different and Eriol wonders what becomes of the faithful best friend left behind (fairytales don’t normally tell you that part, he thinks grimly).
39. Share
“You know - hic - Tomoyo-shan - hic -, I was thinkin’, mibbe we could - hic - share him -“ Tomoyo blinks at Mizuki-sensei and Eriol laughs lightly and tells Kaho not to be so inappropriate, she blinks slowly and says come on, Eriol, it - hic - would shertainly be intereshting…
40. Solitary
Spinel loves it when Daidouji-san comes over - she usually brings a good book for him and sympathizes when he says he feels like the solitary sane one in a house full of maniacs; she says she understands, especially when Eriol walks in trailing thread in an eye-searing shade of pink as he sews Nakuru a particularly flouncy dress, and Nakuru herself has had approximately her own body weight in sugar.
41. Nowhere
She writes letters to the father she has never known - one a week, every week - and stores them in a shoebox under her bed; she addresses them nowhere, everywhere, anywhere (Eriol could tell her in a second where exactly ‘nowhere’ is, but she doesn’t think she wants to know.)
42. Neutral
When it comes to the usual disputes between Spinel and Nakuru, Tomoyo is always the neutral voice of reason, and she solves every single one (practicing for our children, darling? he teases lightly, Tomoyo gives a biting reply).
43. Nuance
Syaoran is more perceptive than he lets on - he can see, for example, the subtle differences in the way Daidouji looks at that That Hiiragizawa and Sakura, and he doesn’t like them one bit - he thinks it might be time to have a little Chat with Daidouji about Hiiragizawa, perhaps likening him to something poisonous.
44. Near
The skin of her thigh is deliciously soft and smooth and white under his hand, she smells like fruity shampoo and roses and the tang of sweat; the grass is slick with the moisture of a balmy summer’s evening underneath them and dragonflies hum in a nearby bush, the pound of his blood has slowed to a lazy, sensuous thump; they kiss and it is sweet and hard and slow.
45. Natural
When he is having a problem, the last person he’d usually think of going to is Nakuru, but she is his last hope, and so he tells her about the strange - urges, for want of a better word - he’s been having around Tomoyo lately, and the dreams these seem to result in; when he has described every little detail for her as she requested and feels as though he may combust as his body feels so warm with the force of his embarrassment; she says cheerily that it’s Natural to feel this way, and he doesn’t feel any better at all.
46. Horizon
You can never catch up with the horizon, Tomoyo thinks, it will always be five steps ahead of you, taunting; just like you can never reach out and grab your own shadow - these phenomena remind her of him, Mr. Untouchable.
47. Valiant
Tomoyo isn’t sure if it is bravery or pure stupidity that makes Eriol attempt a conversation with Touya-kun and Li-kun at the Daidouji Christmas party; later she thinks that he may have had a far more ulterior motive as she bandages up his wound (which Li-kun inflicted upon him after he said something suggestive concerning his relationship with Sakura) and he takes the opportunity to bend his head towards hers for a kiss.
48. Virtuous
Even as she catches him so plainly in the act, he pulls on such a virtuous, how-on-earth-could-this-face-have-done-such-a-thing-when-butter-so-clearly-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth expression that she finds herself smiling reluctantly as she tells him to hand over the bad Chinese love poetry he was about to fill Li-kun’s locker with.
49. Victory
Eriol watches Tomoyo’s face as she gazes, long and pining, at Sakura-san with Syaoran-kun, her dark eyes as far away from this boy with her arm around her waist as it is possible to be - if this is victory, Eriol thinks, it is a hollow one indeed.
50. Defeat
She is always completely gracious in defeat, even when her forfeit is as degrading as this - “how long am I going to have to wear this maid’s outfit, Hiiragizawa?”