Broken (Cardcaptor Sakura, Sakura/Syaoran, challenge #3)
Title: Broken
Author/Artist: rhap_chan
Pairing: Li Syaoran/ Kinomoto Sakura, Li Syaoran/Li Meiling
Fandom: Cardcaptor Sakura
Theme: 03. the final plunge; commitment
Disclaimer: Cardcaptor Sakura belongs to CLAMP.
Summary: Syaoran may have married Meiling, but he still wonders, and he weeps.
He lay away at night and wondered what would have happened, had he returned. Meiling slept peacefully and deeply, always did. Syaoran was the insomniac of the family. He lay awake and waited for the baby to cry, tense.
He hadn't the courage to send her a wedding invitation, not after the way he left Japan last. He had ripped up her heart in a way that no girl deserved.
"I broke your heart by breaking my own," he said into the darkness, reaching out with his arm and clutching at nothing.
The baby cried and he got up without shifting the bed, a small thing that his lengthy training had been good for, and he took care of the child. His first son had his mother's eyes and his father's stern face. Looking down at the babe, he wished the boy had Sakura's smile. But that might have been too much to bear.
She hadn't been acceptable to the clan: a foreigner, an usurper who had stolen the Cards, despite Syaoran's careful explanation to the contrary. Meiling, on the other hand, was Chinese. Magic ran in her family; it had simply chosen not to manifest itself in her. There would be continuation of the bloodline if he kept his rash childhood promise.
Do as you like.
If you could even call it a promise.
He fed the baby and hummed to him in an absent-minded way, very much at home with the action but not focused. It was how he'd acted since his return from Japan, almost a new, dreamy personality, that Meiling did not much like. Sure, she loved him, but she resented the fact that he had to be forced to marry her. That wasn't like Meiling. She would have given things up if she had been able to, but they all seemed to fall into place and now she was stuck with this dreamer. A man always dreaming of another woman.
Li Syaoran was a Li, first and foremost, and that was why he had obeyed. But you can't control a man's dreams, and she would always be in his heart.
Some mornings, Syaoran, Meiling, and Sakura woke with tears on their pillows. And they simply got up and faced the day. After time, heartbreak becomes less paralyzing and more of a dull ache. That was how they lived.
It's simple. Just love me and I'll be happy, Sakura said to him in desperation before he left, and they both wished that was true.