moonlitnights: stories/takesonept1.txt comparison

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author	rlm
date	Fri, 19 Feb 2010 06:24:59 -0500
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+AUTHOR'S NOTES: First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to read
+this. I'm so very glad you bothered! This is my second shoujo ai fic. That
+sounds terribly official, doesn't it? ^_^ I'm hoping to keep this under
+three chapters, considering how many *other* fics I have going. Please send
+feedback if you're so inclined!
+This isn't as dark as 'Conjure Me', and hopefully there's a little humor in
+it as well. I can't resist the temptation to play with Tomoyo's head.
+*angelic*
+I hope you enjoy!
+-Meredith
+Disclaimer: This fic features two women in love. L-O-V-E. ^_~ If you have a
+problem with this, please evolve, or at least get out of this fic. Any and
+all flames will be summarily laughed at and used to line the gerbil cage.
+Remember, bigotry is not a family value.  If you're not allergic to the
+aforementioned topic (even the gerbil ^_~), then welcome!
+Rating is PG-13. Light kissing, ect.
+============================
+It Takes One to Know One 1/?
+by Meredith Bronwen Mallory
+http://www.demando.net/
+mallorys-girl@cinci.rr.com
+============================
+She had never held another girl before; and though she had known what to
+expect, the reality of blood fleeing Tomoyo's lithe form was so terrifying
+she nearly fell to her knees. Gently, she cradled the young school girl
+close to where her heart beat frantically, moving her arm to support
+Tomoyo's knees. Now, stumbling backwards, and she pressed her back against
+the side of the foot bridge, which was chill with soul of winter. Tomoyo's
+eyes were wide and vivid against her pale skin, before they vanished behind
+twin fanned lashes and the heiress' body went completely limp.
+"Two hundred six and still a lady-killer," remarked a deep voice, filled
+with morbid humor. Snow flakes caught in fur the color of the sun, and
+melted as if the locks were what their shade suggested.
+"Kero!" the woman scolded, the flash in her emerald eyes visible even
+through the heavy fall of snow. The white masses moved like waves in the
+wind, lapping even so high as her thighs. She held Tomoyo high over the
+winter ocean, as one protects holy, precious things.
+"I'm sorry," the Seal Beast remarked, the rumble in his throat sincere.
+"It's just, there's so much blood. I never saw her body, so  never really
+hit me that she was dead. Even after all this time."
+Oh, but *she* had seen Tomoyo dead, and white and in the coffin and damn
+it they put her in the ground. Tomoyo's body, just a husk, an empty thing
+that was blasphemy because it dare to look like the beautiful girl without
+actually being her. There had been no blood, then-- the morticians cleaned
+it up-- only the garish, red lines on the corpse's wrists, and the silver
+bracelets placed there to hide them. Nothing could be done about her lips--
+pale blue from hypothermia, even through the pink lp gloss.
+"She's not going to die," his mistress replied firmly, "I won't allow even
+Tomoyo to hurt herself."
+"Do you need help, Sakura-sama?" this from another voice, high and silvery
+like the the moon on an autumn afternoon.  Yue's pale eyes were narrowed
+and focused, he held his wings aloft over his two companions, shielding
+them..
+"Iie, but thank you. We need to get her inside. Let's go,"  within the
+young woman's face, there was a brief flash, like a ghost's photograph, of
+a younger, more carefree Sakura. Then, the snow dove in drifts of suicidal
+faeries, and the bridge was empty as if no one had ever been.
+############################
+To err is human.
+To really screw up is even more human than that.
+She looked about twenty six, this Sakura; her mouth hovered in a coral
+crescent forever between a smile and a frown, and if she let you look
+really close, you could see that there was something written and obscured
+by the jungle in her eyes. She was tall, this Sakura, and she carried
+herself like she knew where she was going, even when she didn't. Her years
+numbered two hundred and six; and so many of those years had been
+wandering, looking, wanting so badly for something that was gone.
+Eden wasn't paradise until we lost it, after all.
+############################
+Tomoyo had planned her suicide. Not the when, but the 'where' and the
+'how' and the 'fate-of-my-body', since the 'why' had been laid down years
+ago by a glorious Sakura-smile and the realization that she could never
+speak what was in her heart. The 'when' was the theta, the renegade
+variable that she teased and prodded herself with; 'when' didn't matter,
+because she was almost always ready to die. In the bottom drawer of her
+dresser, she kept the dress she planned to wear, the ribbons she'd use in
+her long tresses, and expensive, pearl-handled letter-opener that was going
+to do the trick. She was Cinderella, and the ball was waiting on her.
+She stayed because she wanted to be by Sakura's side until someone else
+came to take her place. Then; just fade to black. Maybe she was a little
+scared, and maybe she thought herself a coward for wanting to take that way
+out, but certainty in death allowed her to live.
+Yesterday, at nineteen, When had come to her with wide open arms,
+whispering that her mother was away and Sakura engaged and... and she had
+known it was time.
+She had been sleeping in such a way that, while under the spell of
+Morpheus, she could sense and hear and feel the world around her, but she
+was trapped in her ivory bones. Now the voices seemed to blur and then
+focus. Dark wings fluttered before her eyes until the abstract angles and
+colors of the world came into view. She couldn't even be bothered to wonder
+why she wasn't dead-- there was something inside her so sensitized to the
+other girl that she sensed her beloved's presence almost immediately.
+"Do you..." began a voice that sounded like wind chimes in a summer house
+filled with the scent of one's lover. Under Tomoyo's blue silver gaze, the
+older woman pressed her lips together, and her green eyes said things to
+Tomoyo that were just too good to be true. "You do realize this is the
+first chance I've had to talk to you in one hundred eighty seven years?
+Hoee..." she looked down at her feet, "What I am I supposed to say?"
+"Sakura," Tomoyo breathed; taking in the matured vision of her beautiful
+best friend. Her hair, done up in her habitual style, was a little longer
+and a little darker. Even in the plain cream sweater and black pants that
+graced the older woman's lithe form, Tomoyo could sense the barely
+contained power of the Cardmistress. "Sakura," she began again, some how
+understanding that this woman had been so changed by her experiences that
+she was not quite (and only not quite) her childhood friend, "-sama," she
+decided firmly. The situation may have been strange, but she accepted
+Sakura instantly.
+"You can call me Kinomoto-sensei, if it's easier," Sakura offered.
+"That makes me think of your father," Tomoyo protested weakly. For the
+first time, her eyes moved to the rest f her surroundings. Just her room at
+home, with the curtains drawn partially so she could still see the snow
+drifting down like lazy flower petals. The lights were on, bright and
+somehow tangible; the quilts gathered about her form and Sakura's tender
+gaze made her body momentarily forget the chill of being unrequited.
+"Kinomoto-kun," Tomoyo tried, blushing just a little, "I have always
+thought Sakura-chan would make a cute '-kun'. Li-kun should have addressed
+her as such, in the beginning, since they are both magical people."
+Kinomoto-kun seemed to darken at the mention of the Chinese boy, but she
+laughed, "I'd never thought of that."
+"Of course, That Brat doesn't have an once of respect in his body," pipped
+a familiar, high Osakan voice.
+"Kero-chan!" Tomoyo giggled, taken by surprise as the small, winged
+creature dove into her hair.
+"It's nice to see you again, Tomoyo-san," Kero said cheerfully. He hovered
+near her for a moment, before darting back to the table situated on the
+other side of the room. Tomoyo could see Yue had installed his rather
+elegant form on the couch, and she nodded in greeting. Her eyes, however,
+soon sought the blinding glory of Kinomoto-kun-- she was everything Tomoyo
+had known Sakura would grow up to be and more.
+"Do you think you can eat something?" Kinomoto-kun asked, taking a seat on
+the bed and offering Tomoyo a tray of hot soup and warm bread. "I really
+think you should but, if you're too weak, you might not keep it down."
+"I am a little hungry," the heiress accepted the tray, enchanted by all
+the new details and movements of the Cardmistress' future form. "Arigato,
+Kinomoto-kun!"
+"Tomoyo..." Kinomoto-kun's voice was tender as it moved over the world,
+like silk pressed against Tomoyo's skin.
+"Hai?" Tomoyo let the spoon rest against the side of the bowl, gazing on
+the sorceress with concern, "Is something wrong? I want to help
+Kinomoto-kun, if I can."
+"Damn it!" the Cardmistress said suddenly, taking Tomoyo's hands gently in
+her own and cradling them like baby birds, "You always do this. You do
+everything for me and nothing for yourself."
+"I want Sakura-chan to be happy," the heiress emphasized, as if that
+explained everything. She looked down at her hands, feeling out-of-sorts
+without a camera to see the world through.
+"Well, I'm not," Kinomoto-kun's tone was firm as she ran a dainty finger
+over the bandages on the younger girl's wrist. "I'm not happy, because the
+person I love left me."
+"Li-kun?" Tomoyo was scandalized. There was a sudden guilt inside her,
+swinging like a pendulum, because she had not chosen the correct person for
+her Sakura.
+Kinomoto-kun leaned in close, until their foreheads touched, "No, Tomoyo.
+Watashi wa Tomoyo ga daisuki desu. Aishiteru."
+"Watashi ka?" there was a fluttering of live flowers in Tomoyo's rib cage,
+as if everything she'd ever known had been drained from her body. "But
+Sakura-chan is going to marry Li-kun and live happily in Hong Kong."
+"Correction," Kinomoto-kun said dryly, " 'Sakura-chan'," she referenced
+her younger self with some malice, "was engaged to marry Li-kun, when her
+best friend Tomoyo cut her wrists and, for good measure, drowned herself in
+the middle of winter. Sakura-chan was-- and still is-- in love with
+Tomoyo," Kinomoto-kun's eyes were all emerald fire, and Tomoyo could not
+look away, "but, all her life Sakura-chan had thought that boys went with
+girls and so on. She was too stupid to understand how she felt, and too
+dense to see the truth even when her best friend put it right in front of
+her. So, when Tomoyo died, the world wasn't the same any more, and
+everything she touched was like in the fairy tale-- it seemed to turn to
+glass and cut her."
+"I wasn't trying to hurt you," Tomoyo linked her arms around the
+sorceress, but Kinomoto-kun could only see the time before. She rested her
+cheek against the heiress' soft lavender hair and stared without seeing
+into the snow night beyond the window.
+"So Sakura-chan broke off her engagement," she continued, "She went to
+college and pretended to be a person. She majored in archeology, since it
+made a good excuse, and studied magic in Tibet. She lived so long that
+every day was a nightmare, and she worked ten years to perfect a Card and a
+spell that would help her change her mistakes." Small tears gathered in the
+corners of the sorceress' eyes.
+"It hurts me to see you cry," Tomoyo said honestly, taking up a quilt to
+ease the sadness seeping from Kinomoto-kun's eyes.  Kinomoto-kun's arms
+tighted around her suddenly, and Tomoyo was suffused with a feeling of
+wings folded at her back as the other woman rocked her gently.
+"You're real... It hurts me to think I never... I didn't...," Kinomoto-kun
+took a deep breath, "Why did you give so much to me, when I never gave
+anything back?"
+"Sakura-chan has always given to me!"
+"But not the way you wanted," it was a shrewd point; and for the first
+time, Tomoyo felt the dream-like quality vanish from the situation. No
+dream or vision would have shown her this.
+"No..." she admitted softly, "But I didn't have a right to want those
+things."
+"Of course you do!" for a moment, just a moment, Kinomoto-kun and
+Sakura-chan were the same. "Everyone has a right to love!" Gently, the
+sorceress brushed the twilight locks away from Tomoyo's face. Then, to
+break the growing intensity, "Your food is getting cold."
+"Hai, Kinomoto-kun," Tomoyo obediently took back to sipping her soup, glad
+when Kinomoto-kun didn't get up. Instead, the older woman watched her with
+careful attention, playing absently with the slighly curling ends of the
+younger girl's hair. "Are you sure you couldn't have been happy with
+Li-kun?"
+"You don't believe me, do you?" Kinomoto-kun shook her head roughly, "Did
+you know that I used to sit with him in the darkened movie theater and
+wonder if there was something wrong with me because all I wanted to do was
+go home and call you? That he practically had to bribe me to kiss him? When
+he first said he liked me, I was just excited that *someone* did, since I
+thought I had never felt anything. I always got 'hayaaan' when I was with
+you, but I was with you all the time, so I didn't notice."
+"Sakura...," the sound breezed past Tomoyo's lips, and she so wished she
+could see the same look in her friend's  wide pools of green. Coming from
+this slightly different Sakura, it didn't seem real.
+"It doesn't matter if you still don't believe me," Kinomoto-kun smiled
+sadly, tracing lightly down the slope of Tomoyo's nose, "I'm going to
+change the past. I wonder how many times Clow did the same, trying to get
+things right?"
+"Three, if I remember correctly," Kero put in. He'd managed to pilfer a
+large cake from the Daidouji kitchen and, after lugging his prize upstairs,
+was taking a bath in it as Yue looked on with vague disapproval.
+"Kero-chan!" Kinomoto-kun scolded, "I put servants to sleep! What will
+happen when the cook wakes up and finds her cake gone?"
+"I'm not worried," an icing-coated Kero sang, making a flying nose-dive
+into the cake, "My wonderful Mistress will get me out of this mess, and I
+haven't had a Daidouji cake in almost two bloody centuries!"
+"Of course, your 'wonderful mistress' will save you," Kinomoto-kun rolled
+her eyes with good nature.
+"There's another cake in the back of the freezer, if you want it," Tomoyo
+offered, smiling at the sudden chorus of 'wai!!" that struck up from the
+other side of the room. Kero offered a paw-full of cake to the winged young
+man by his side.
+"I hate food," Yue sniffed, "But thank you all the same, Tomoyo-san."
+"Isn't there some place you two can go? It's big house," Kinomoto-kun
+raised an eyebrow, only half-teasing.
+"Hey," Yue pointed out with trace of his own brand of humor, "Someone has
+to protect Tomoyo's virtue from certain amorous sorceress."
+"Yue, what a thing to say!" Kinomoto-kun turned pink, "HOOOOEEE!"
+Added Kero, from somewhere in the mound of cake, "And keep you from doing
+any permanent damage to your younger form."
+"Chaperones," Kinomoto-kun sighed. The two women blushed and looked at
+their hands.
+Having finished her meal, the young heiress set the tray on her
+nightstand, studying Kinomoto-kun with wise, moon-shine eyes.  "Change the
+past..." she murmured.
+"I really didn't know if I could do it," Kinomoto-kun replied, in answer
+to the question Tomoyo hadn't asked. "But... after I found you on..," her
+profile turned down, locks of auburn hair obscuring her features, "maybe I
+shouldn't talk about this." Tomoyo's soft touch on her shoulder seemed to
+bring the words out; "I looked, to see if you'd been reborn. All my
+research in Hong Kong and Tibet suggested a great chance of failure in
+time-travel, so that was my other hope. When the cards found your new form,
+I was elated. You were thirteen, living on the colony on Europa. That's why
+it took me so long to find you."
+"Europa..." Tomoyo murmured, "It's an ocean moon, ne? Very cold?" Her body
+seemed to tense with the memory of the lake and her attempt to meet death.
+"Hai," Kinomoto-kun tipped her head back, staring at the ceiling, "You
+were in training to dive for the gin-pearls that grow under the icebergs.
+But all accounts, you were happy-- designed clothes for your classmates,
+sang, worked hard in school. I told myself I just wanted to see if you were
+really alright. I was being selfish..."
+Breathless, "What happened?"
+"I happened," Kinomoto-kun laughed bitterly. "I arranged a meeting with
+you easily enough-- I offered to sponsor the school you attended. And there
+you were-- your hair was short, but it was you and... I'm a really selfish
+person, Tomoyo." Gently, Tomoyo eased the older woman's grip on her hands,
+moving so that Kinomoto-kun could rest her head in the heiress' lap.
+"You're not selfish," Tomoyo murmured, fascinated by the play of light in
+the gold-yellow-topaz-all-over-autumn of Kinomoto-kun's hair.
+"I am, because I was so happy to see you, and I promised to help you go to
+a good conservatory, cultivate your voice. I felt betrayed that you didn't
+recognize me, but I didn't let you see that. I just wanted to be near you
+again. Then, when business called me back to Earth-- That is, when I called
+to check on you, you'd done it again!"
+"Death," Tomoyo may or may not have murmured. And, with sudden
+understanding, "She loved you and thought she was... was wrong."
+"All because I was so stupid as to come back into your life again."
+Kinomoto-kun raised her head, eyes filled with the same desperate affection
+Tomoyo hid within herself. "I have to change that. all of this."
+"You have," Tomoyo pointed out.
+"Not enough. I can't just say, 'Don't give into the sadness, Tomoyo' and
+then expect you to wait around for me to figure things out. I thought I
+might just vanish after I rescued you, but obviously I haven't changed all
+that much."
+"I won't leave," it was a breathless promise, "I would never hurt
+Sakura-chan."
+"But, see, you'll only be doing it out of obligation-- you'll still be
+miserable."
+"I don't see how--"
+"Wait." Kinomoto-kun's lips turned up in an almost smile, "listen."
+Downstairs, the clicking of the front-door latch echoed, and Tomoyo heard
+the faint callings of *her*  Sakura. She started to trill out a happy
+reply, but the sorceress at her side raised a single finger, motioning for
+silence. Sakura's calls came closer and rose to a level of fear-- the sound
+of hurried footsteps vibrated down the hall and then.
+A happy, pixie-ish face, and a voice slightly out of breath, "Tomoyo-chan!
+I was worried..."
+With smile of pity and a little self-loathing, Kinomoto-kun said;
+"Okari. I've been waiting for you, Sakura-san."
+======================
+TO BE CONTINUED
+There once was a lady named Mere,
+Who was madder than a March Hare,
+She did love to write,
+deep into the night,
+and feedback made her so happy she walked upon air!

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comparison stories/takesonept1.txt @ 0:ed1308d04df2 moonlitnights