It Takes Two (Eriol/Tomoyo)

[storypaint]

Title: It Takes Two
Day/Theme: 28 // whisper your secret to the hole you made
Series: Cardcaptor Sakura
Character/Pairing: Hiiragizawa Eriol/Daidouji Tomoyo
Rating: PG for implied sex
Disclaimer: Cardcaptor Sakura belongs to CLAMP.

Synopsis: On a long trip to a hot springs vacation, Tomoyo and Eriol learn some things about each other. Tomoyo loves to tango, but it takes two, doesn't it?

She wasn't sure what it was that made her offer to give him a ride to the hot springs. She was just in the moment, excited to be going on a vacation with her dearest friends, even if the one she loved the most would be soaking along with her beloved boyfriend.

But Eriol had only been back in town for a month or so, and hadn't a vehicle, and she did. It was only polite that she offered him a ride, since Sakura had invited him. She didn't expect him to accept the offer, but he did. Since Tomoyo's car and Sakura's both only had two seats, she would have to drive five hours in only the company of the enigmatic magician.

He saw too much and spoke too little these days since his return. The question of Kaho was on everyone's lips, but he didn't say a thing, and it would be impolite to ask.

No one would think to ask how well Tomoyo was dealing with the fact that her number one love was firmly ensconced in the arms of another. No one except for Eriol, who saw too much. He wouldn't ask; he valued her kindness too much for that.

So it was that they were going to drive five hours in a car avoiding questions which sat as heavily as people in their laps. It would be silent, Tomoyo thought.

She could tell he was impressed with the car, a cherry-red number with speed in its lines. It was a very unTomoyo-like car, she knew he was thinking, but he'd been gone for too long to know who she was anymore. The quiet desperation had begun to rise in her and manifest itself in impulsivity. She bought the car, she spent some evenings in bars trying to escape her sorrows, though she never drank enough to get drunk, much less stop hurting.

The car was unbearably quiet as an hour wore on and the two ran out of polite things to say to each other. He had told her about his studies in England, and how the weather was dreary all of the time. He didn't tell her that he had been lonely and that the dreary weather had brought depression and that Kaho had slipped away from him without any effort, dull as the clouds hanging low in the sky, and that one day he had woken up beside her and not cared who she was. He had left that afternoon.

He thought about telling her, to break the silence, and to share the pain that grew in him when he came back to Tomoeda and saw that there was nothing more here for him than there had been in England, but he couldn't stand to meet Kaho's eyes anymore, so he stayed. He wondered how she managed day to day.

She told him what he'd missed in his absence-- Yamazaki, the fact that he'd insisted on making his own toast at his wedding, and that the bride had beaten him with her bouquet to get him to stop lying about wedding traditions. That had been when Syaoran came back, almost a year past, and he didn't leave. She didn't tell him that when Syaoran didn't leave she watched her hopes and dreams slip away one by one and how she had taken Sakura's eraser from her special box and thrown it away, because she couldn't stand to look at it anymore, and that she still pretended to be the Tomoyo that they thought she was, because it was too late to be anything more. Still, she stood by Sakura, doing whatever it could to make her happy, and Tomoyo's presence at their hot springs vacation would make Sakura happy, and so she went.

She thought about telling him, because she thought he might understand, but Tomoyo was too good at hiding to give into impulse now, and too attached to Sakura to leave Tomoeda. She saw an echo of her pain in his eyes, but could not understand it. It wasn't that she left him, she realized after long glances in her mirrors at his face. He had fallen out of love, and that idea was foreign to Tomoyo.

To fight the silence she turned the CD player on and tango music began to flow from the speakers. His eyes widened a little, but he said nothing. She smiled and tapped the foot that wasn't driving, little red-painted toes in matching strappy wedges. They were dancing shoes. She wore them to feel good about herself.

One of her impulses had led her to a tango class, and she had let someone hold her and teach her to dance. She had done it by herself, without a word to Sakura, a few weekends last October when she started thinking about killing herself to relieve the relentless monotony of grief. Instead she bought the shoes and learned to dance.

"Do you like to dance?" Eriol said. It was a rational question, but it irritated her a little. She should lie, or switch the CD. Dancing was her thing alone. It was still a young thing and she hadn't quite made it hers yet. Everything she was good at had to do with Sakura-- filming, costume-making... She wanted dancing for herself.

For a girl whose happiness was always attached to someone else, it wasn't very selfish to want one thing of her own.

"I do," she said, not able to lie at the boy who could look through her so easily. He smiled.

"I do too," he said. She pictured them together, cheek to cheek, she in a bright red Latina dress and those strappy wedges, he in a suit so black that the red seemed to reflect dully on it. She saw them dancing and the thought worried her, as in her head Eriol produced a long black feather to thread into her hair, and the softness brushed her cheek.

"Are you okay?" he asked, and she came up from her daydream with her hand on her skin. She nodded and kept driving, though the urge rose in her to pull the car to the side of the road and turn the radio up and show this boy what she could do, just to do it. Somehow she couldn't make herself do it, though she caught the admiring glance he threw her when she admitted to the dancing. It wasn't something she was sure she was ready yet for.

Four hours left to go. Tomoyo tapped her foot to the music and they drove off into the dark.

*

When he woke up, her arm gently resting on his stomach, he freed himself quietly and stood looking down at her sleeping form. One red wedge stuck out of the futon and carefully he relieved her of the shoes she had fallen asleep in. He took the shoes outside with him and set them on the porch railing, and rested his elbows next to them. The wind had grown chilly and he shivered a little in his yukata, but he didn't go back inside.

One night, one hour, one dance could change everything. The four of them had karaoked until about midnight when Syaoran and Sakura begged off, claiming they were tired, though they walked away hand in hand, giggling a little. Tomoyo looking after them was so forlorn that he couldn't stand it and he had taken her hand and pulled her to her feet.

They had tangoed, and the passion in her dancing was intoxicating. They had danced well, even though they were both pretty drunk, cheek to cheek, and when he pulled a feather out of thin air and placed it in her hair she had laughed and kissed him.

They were drunk and not thinking, and his fingers on her skin burned like fire down her arm and she had kissed him.

And now she slept in his room, the same arm that he had touched and kissed thrown out of the bedcovers and gleaming in the moonlight. She had slept in her heels.

He regretted it now, the indulgence of his body's youth. A man as old as he should know better. He was surprised that she hadn't thought a little more. She seemed to be more impulsive than he remembered.

He looked at her shoes, and smiled a little, his first real smile since long ago, before England. He felt guilty, but still he smiled. Her small body in the darkness was a flashbulb memory, her breath on his neck still tingling.

It had never been like that with Kaho. They'd never consummated their desires. He wondered sometimes when he held her hand if the rest of her was as cold. He knew that once he was like her, cloaked in a comfortable mysteriousness, rejoicing in the sweet secret of magic, and that he had liked it too, but he wanted to live in the world now. Was it so wrong to want to worry about groceries or the cost of petrol or the thousand other things Tomoyo worried about, as a normal person?

Normal. What was normal anyway?

He turned around and looked back into the room and the moon sliding into it interrupted his vision of a little dark-haired angel. He left the shoes on the porch railing and went back inside. He carefully placed himself as far away from her as he could, knowing she would be angry when she woke, and regretful.

He woke again around four-thirty with an arm resting on his stomach and her head pressed into his neck. She shifted her weight and he kept his eyes shut, pretending he was still asleep, as she carefully got up. Something soft floated down and brushed his arm, but he didn't open his eyes again until he heard the door open and shut.

She left before the dawn, not wanting to explain things to Sakura, and unsure of how to explain or what to say. There was a small marble rolling around in her that didn't regret her impulsivity last night, but she wasn't sure she was ready for this. She pulled the feather from her hair and dropped it onto his sleeping form, and wondered if he harbored regrets as well. She wouldn't ask him. She slipped into her room and pressed her head into the pillow, and wished it smelled like him instead of loneliness.

At breakfast the next morning Sakura lifted an eyebrow when Eriol returned a pair of red wedges to Tomoyo. Her best friend didn't blush; she simply nodded and thanked Eriol politely, and took them to her room. Sakura didn't ask, but she saw the way Eriol looked after Tomoyo, for just a moment, and she smiled.