Current mood:	sleepy
Current music:	You Don't Know My Name--Alicia Keys
Entry tags:	30_kisses, card captor sakura, touya/yukito

Fic: Watching
Title: Watching
Author: fairymage
Rating: PG-13
Community: 30_kisses
Theme: #6-the space between dream and reality
Fandom: Card Captor Sakura
Pairing: Touya/Yukito
Notes: November has started, it's NaNoWriMo time, I have homework, and what am I doing at 3 in the morning? Writing fanfiction. Beware the Yue angst, I didn't mean it.


It was like floating, he’d decided.

It wasn’t full consciousness. Not like when he was in control of the body, not even like when he watched through Yukito’s eyes and heard with his ears and felt with his fingers. But nor was it complete sleep, when he left Yukito to his own devices, and drifted in his own memories and darkness.

No. He could never sleep, not when the false form that had somehow, beyond his predictions, assumed his own personality and unique person, was around that one. The connection between them was too strong, he was too heavily affected by Yukito’s reaction to him. He’d initially created Yukito only to hide behind, but the magic that he’d used was beyond his ability to control, apparently—otherwise, Yukito would continue to mindlessly exist for his sake, not his own.

That was what had brought him to this in-between state of floating the first time. The tremors he felt reverberating through his false form’s consciousness, the chilling and warming threads he was sending out. It was at the time, to say the least, uncomfortable. He wanted it to stop, because it was disturbing him. It was snaking and twisting and clawing through and at him, and all he wanted was to forget—or never know it, depending on what the case may be.

If only he could remember what it was that brought it on, he thought, he could prevent it from happening again. Control Yukito just enough to keep himself safe. But he couldn’t identify it. It wasn’t just one isolated incident—it was one isolated incident that awakened the monster. Now it was everything. A smile, a glance, a touch, a shared musubi, pancakes on Saturday morning, the scent of his sweat, his fingers over his body and his warmth spreading over his lower body and cool air against his skin.

Since it had all become more familiar the force had subsided, but its existence had never ceased.

He would never admit that he was also very curious. He wanted to know what it was like, wanted to reach out and touch it and study it. He grasped at the straws Yukito handed him, blindly seeking something—something thin, elusive, transient. And yet it was so real for Yukito. It was a sensation, a feeling, an emotion that he didn’t understand, wasn’t sure if he’d ever known, but that some small part of him wanted to know.

Curiosity. He supposed that with enough effort he could have gotten used to it. Forgotten about it, ignored it. He wasn’t that foolish, or weak. And yet… he didn’t want to. He wanted it, more of it, wanted to know it for himself, but he couldn’t demand it. Pride was part of the matter. There were many things he would never admit to, and this—this wanting, this fascination—was one of them. It made him feel weak, vulnerable, touchable by people and things he did not want to be touched by.

He’d vowed never to let that happen again. He was powerful, strong enough to control his own destiny, his own life and existence. If he wanted this fake form, then fine. He could create it, maintain it. It could feel, live, hurt, love, all in his place. He wasn’t invulnerable, though, and his downfall was brought about by his own Master cheating him of control. He’d been made without the ability to support himself, and needed someone else’s magic to sustain him.

And then he’d been cheated, denied the right and privilege of choosing his own Master. It didn’t matter whether or not she would make a good Master. He had been played all along. It made him feel weak, small, insignificant—and that his very existence was entirely beyond his control.

But more than pride was the biting, stinging knowledge that he wasn’t supposed to feel this. He was not Yukito, and Yukito was not him. They were one and the same, but they were different. He did not begrudge Yukito anything. What Yukito felt for him was not supposed to be something he was privy to. Just because they shared a body didn’t mean they shared anything else. And what he felt for Yukito did not necessarily extend to him, the other one.

He could never experience it fully, because he was not in control, this was not his place or his business, but he could never ignore it.

They were so different, he and Yukito. They could say it all they wanted, that they were the same, so very much the same it was amusing, but they weren’t, and any attempt to make them the same was folly. They could never be the same, and they could never together make up a single whole, because each was nearly a whole unto himself. It made them separate and inseparable.

Which left him unsure as to how he fit in with the two of them. He’d given up his magic to save Yukito, not him; and yet it was to save him, too.

And so, until he worked out the puzzle, he was left to drift, to float on the tide, the ebb and flow that he could never understand, could never own, could never control. It was the difference between riding the waves and being able to wade in them, in his mind. He could watch, but never take part.

Sunrises and sunsets, moonlight and starlight. Laundry drying on a clothesline and aprons hanging on hooks in the kitchen. American movies and Japanese game shows. Feet propped on the coffee table and chins propped on elbows. Fingers intertwined and arms linked. Tentative, shy kisses and hungry, lustful ones. Bare skin and blushes.

He could watch them as they laughed, hear their laughter, but he never wanted to join in. Watch as they twined fingers shyly in the park and nervously walked home, but could not feel the pressure of fingertips. Watch as they eyed each other over dinner, mirthful over shared secrecy, but could not make eye contact. Watch as they held each other, touched each other, kissed, melded their bodies together, but the form was not his own, it was Yukito’s, could not be his.

All of it he saw, but could never touch. It was just beyond his reach, hovering just beyond his dream bubble, and he could never leave it.