Fic: Smile
Title: Smile
Author: fairymage
Rating: PG
Community: 30_kisses
Theme: #12-in a good mood
Fandom: Card Captor Sakura
Pairing: Touya/Yukito
Notes: Written for duowolf's request. Happy holidays!
As long as anyone had known Touya Kinomoto, he’d had a scowl on his face. They could hardly remember when he’d smiled at played like a normal little boy. No, they only remembered his dark eyes, fierce and veiled, protecting his family and himself from the world. The hard lines around his eyes and mouth seemed permanent; only his father and sister saw him at home, in his natural, comfortable habitat.
In elementary school he learned to play alone. He was smart enough to know that he was different from the other boys, in a way that he could never describe to them. It meant that their simple games were not so simple, their way of seeing the world was inherently incompatible with what he knew. He couldn’t focus only on picking teams during the break periods or chasing the girls around the play area. So when they invited him to play (and he was too good to not invite to play) he did, but he never made friends with the boys most often picked as team captains, and did not want to.
And when they didn’t play games that he was good at, or games that he would condescend to play with them, he learned to amuse himself alone in a corner of the playground. He would watch the bugs crawling in the dirt or on a tree. Sometimes he would sit and watch the sky and wonder where the birds were going. Other times he would talk to the ghosts he saw, though those were rare. Mostly he tried not to bother the ghosts, so that they would not bother him.
His teachers thought maybe he was just shy. And maybe, just maybe, they were right. Underneath it all, maybe he was just a shy little boy who didn’t understand why he was different, or what to do about it, and was trying to figure it out all on his own. But he could never explain that to them, and so shyness became anti-social at the worst, a simple disliking for games that were “too easy” for his advanced mind at best.
By the time he’d reached middle school the shyness was entirely gone, and the sharp silence and serious face were a product of maturity. He didn’t have time for frivolities, and no one seemed to understand that. He had no time for girls and silly get-togethers and weekends out when he could be working. At first it was impossible to get people to hire him. He was tall, angular and muscular for his age, but he simply was too young.
So while his classmates were visiting and playing and learning to become social animals, he was wandering his neighborhood, looking for odd jobs. He went to the university where his father was teaching, offering to carry or deliver things. They wouldn’t let him do much, but as the soon of a professor he was exempted from much of their usual scrutiny. He learned to cook, learned to clean, learned to do basic fixes on machines and appliances.
His father never said anything, and he never volunteered any information. He knew that times weren’t hard, his family was going to be fine, but he’d grown up independent, and it seemed time that he learned what that really meant. At the beginning, he’d tried to intervene, suggest that his son join some sports clubs or study groups, but Touya stubbornly refused. Instead, he got good at sports by practicing alone in the backyard and then after school in casual games, and proved that he didn’t need a study group to do well in class. His father ran out of excuses, and that was how he preferred it.
He got his first real job when he was fourteen, restocking shelves in a drugstore. Eventually he was “promoted” and allowed to work at the register; he was studious, serious, and professional, and rarely made mistakes. He knew he’d finally won when some of his classmates walked into the store to buy soda and snacks. They tried to joke and be familiar, and he treated them no differently. They caught the hint, and from then on, everyone knew how to treat him.
The scowl on his face in high school was, as far as anyone knew, an indication of his displeasure and impatience with high school life. High school was like middle school, only worse. There were more parties, more hanging out, more cram school, more of the mundane day-to-day activities that he grew so tired of. They were tedious, the same day after day, and he hoped that somehow the future would be different. And yet no day seemed particularly blessed, sent on its way with a kiss from Destiny, and so he remained restless.
And then there were the other changes. His height, weight, strength, amazing physical build made him the object of everyone’s attention. He stood out among his classmates in a classroom, just in terms of size, and teachers called on him regularly. Coaches and the male students wanted him on every sports team he was eligible to play on. Girls wanted him… well, just wanted him, period.
It was irritating, mostly, and he didn’t have time for it. Class he could deal with because he was smart, and he didn’t mind making that clear over and over again. Sports were a welcome outlet of energy and self, someplace that he was able to focus on something and release the weight that constantly seemed to be hanging on his shoulders. Girls… those were another issue entirely.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like them. All right, he didn’t like them. They were loud, made a ruckus of everything, and didn’t seem to get it. He was sure there were those quiet, understanding ones that he would like somewhere in the sea of hormones, but they were too shy to talk to them, and he was too disinterested to seek them out. Part of the scowl had to do with a girl-no, woman-that no one knew about, after all. In some ways, he was jaded there, and in other ways, completely innocent.
The trademark scowl was part of his appeal, part of his attitude, part of his mystery, and when one day at the beginning of lunch period it was strangely absent, every girl knew about it.
“Ne, To-ya, why are they staring?” the shorter, slimmer boy asked curiously, looking around with wide eyes at the people stealing furtive glances over hushed whispers.
The scowl returned, deeper if anything, as he answered, “Ignore them.”
“But why?” he persisted, hurrying to keep up with his taller friend as he quickened his pace towards the stairs that would take them to the roof. “What did you do to make them so curious about you?”
Touya ignored the question, lowering his head. He was going to kill something, someone, really-probably himself. “I’m hungry, that’s why.”
They took the stairs two at a time, Yukito chattering away the whole time, the incident of the staring girls in the hallway seemingly forgotten. Once on the roof, they sat down against the fence and pulled out their food, Touya once again marveling at the size of Yukito’s stomach. As Yukito stopped talking in favor of digging into one of his three bento boxes, Touya snuck a furtive glance of his own.
He probably shouldn’t have smiled when Yukito said that he’d love to have lunch with him, but really, was there any way he couldn’t? Yukito was so unassuming, so carefully oblivious that Touya had no desire to make him submit the way he had his classmates. He knew that Yukito was different, not at all mundane or day-to-day or tiresome, and it wasn’t just because of the magic presence lurking deep inside him.
“Ne, To-ya, you’re in a good mood today. You were smiling earlier,” Yukito commented, smiling himself.
Touya felt his face flush a little, and to hide it he reached over and stole the umeboshi off Yukito’s rice. As Yukito stared, wide-eyed and open-mouthed at his now unadorned rice, Touya shrugged.
“Maybe I am.”
He couldn’t help smiling as he said it.
Author: fairymage
Rating: PG
Community: 30_kisses
Theme: #12-in a good mood
Fandom: Card Captor Sakura
Pairing: Touya/Yukito
Notes: Written for duowolf's request. Happy holidays!
As long as anyone had known Touya Kinomoto, he’d had a scowl on his face. They could hardly remember when he’d smiled at played like a normal little boy. No, they only remembered his dark eyes, fierce and veiled, protecting his family and himself from the world. The hard lines around his eyes and mouth seemed permanent; only his father and sister saw him at home, in his natural, comfortable habitat.
In elementary school he learned to play alone. He was smart enough to know that he was different from the other boys, in a way that he could never describe to them. It meant that their simple games were not so simple, their way of seeing the world was inherently incompatible with what he knew. He couldn’t focus only on picking teams during the break periods or chasing the girls around the play area. So when they invited him to play (and he was too good to not invite to play) he did, but he never made friends with the boys most often picked as team captains, and did not want to.
And when they didn’t play games that he was good at, or games that he would condescend to play with them, he learned to amuse himself alone in a corner of the playground. He would watch the bugs crawling in the dirt or on a tree. Sometimes he would sit and watch the sky and wonder where the birds were going. Other times he would talk to the ghosts he saw, though those were rare. Mostly he tried not to bother the ghosts, so that they would not bother him.
His teachers thought maybe he was just shy. And maybe, just maybe, they were right. Underneath it all, maybe he was just a shy little boy who didn’t understand why he was different, or what to do about it, and was trying to figure it out all on his own. But he could never explain that to them, and so shyness became anti-social at the worst, a simple disliking for games that were “too easy” for his advanced mind at best.
By the time he’d reached middle school the shyness was entirely gone, and the sharp silence and serious face were a product of maturity. He didn’t have time for frivolities, and no one seemed to understand that. He had no time for girls and silly get-togethers and weekends out when he could be working. At first it was impossible to get people to hire him. He was tall, angular and muscular for his age, but he simply was too young.
So while his classmates were visiting and playing and learning to become social animals, he was wandering his neighborhood, looking for odd jobs. He went to the university where his father was teaching, offering to carry or deliver things. They wouldn’t let him do much, but as the soon of a professor he was exempted from much of their usual scrutiny. He learned to cook, learned to clean, learned to do basic fixes on machines and appliances.
His father never said anything, and he never volunteered any information. He knew that times weren’t hard, his family was going to be fine, but he’d grown up independent, and it seemed time that he learned what that really meant. At the beginning, he’d tried to intervene, suggest that his son join some sports clubs or study groups, but Touya stubbornly refused. Instead, he got good at sports by practicing alone in the backyard and then after school in casual games, and proved that he didn’t need a study group to do well in class. His father ran out of excuses, and that was how he preferred it.
He got his first real job when he was fourteen, restocking shelves in a drugstore. Eventually he was “promoted” and allowed to work at the register; he was studious, serious, and professional, and rarely made mistakes. He knew he’d finally won when some of his classmates walked into the store to buy soda and snacks. They tried to joke and be familiar, and he treated them no differently. They caught the hint, and from then on, everyone knew how to treat him.
The scowl on his face in high school was, as far as anyone knew, an indication of his displeasure and impatience with high school life. High school was like middle school, only worse. There were more parties, more hanging out, more cram school, more of the mundane day-to-day activities that he grew so tired of. They were tedious, the same day after day, and he hoped that somehow the future would be different. And yet no day seemed particularly blessed, sent on its way with a kiss from Destiny, and so he remained restless.
And then there were the other changes. His height, weight, strength, amazing physical build made him the object of everyone’s attention. He stood out among his classmates in a classroom, just in terms of size, and teachers called on him regularly. Coaches and the male students wanted him on every sports team he was eligible to play on. Girls wanted him… well, just wanted him, period.
It was irritating, mostly, and he didn’t have time for it. Class he could deal with because he was smart, and he didn’t mind making that clear over and over again. Sports were a welcome outlet of energy and self, someplace that he was able to focus on something and release the weight that constantly seemed to be hanging on his shoulders. Girls… those were another issue entirely.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like them. All right, he didn’t like them. They were loud, made a ruckus of everything, and didn’t seem to get it. He was sure there were those quiet, understanding ones that he would like somewhere in the sea of hormones, but they were too shy to talk to them, and he was too disinterested to seek them out. Part of the scowl had to do with a girl-no, woman-that no one knew about, after all. In some ways, he was jaded there, and in other ways, completely innocent.
The trademark scowl was part of his appeal, part of his attitude, part of his mystery, and when one day at the beginning of lunch period it was strangely absent, every girl knew about it.
“Ne, To-ya, why are they staring?” the shorter, slimmer boy asked curiously, looking around with wide eyes at the people stealing furtive glances over hushed whispers.
The scowl returned, deeper if anything, as he answered, “Ignore them.”
“But why?” he persisted, hurrying to keep up with his taller friend as he quickened his pace towards the stairs that would take them to the roof. “What did you do to make them so curious about you?”
Touya ignored the question, lowering his head. He was going to kill something, someone, really-probably himself. “I’m hungry, that’s why.”
They took the stairs two at a time, Yukito chattering away the whole time, the incident of the staring girls in the hallway seemingly forgotten. Once on the roof, they sat down against the fence and pulled out their food, Touya once again marveling at the size of Yukito’s stomach. As Yukito stopped talking in favor of digging into one of his three bento boxes, Touya snuck a furtive glance of his own.
He probably shouldn’t have smiled when Yukito said that he’d love to have lunch with him, but really, was there any way he couldn’t? Yukito was so unassuming, so carefully oblivious that Touya had no desire to make him submit the way he had his classmates. He knew that Yukito was different, not at all mundane or day-to-day or tiresome, and it wasn’t just because of the magic presence lurking deep inside him.
“Ne, To-ya, you’re in a good mood today. You were smiling earlier,” Yukito commented, smiling himself.
Touya felt his face flush a little, and to hide it he reached over and stole the umeboshi off Yukito’s rice. As Yukito stared, wide-eyed and open-mouthed at his now unadorned rice, Touya shrugged.
“Maybe I am.”
He couldn’t help smiling as he said it.