[Beta version posted 7/5/01]
She pulled on her new middle school uniform, waved to her dad and ran off to school. She couldn't be late today, not on the first day of school! So many things could happen today! It was the start of a new part of her life!
A glimpse of wings. A soft furry body. A tall figure she half recognized, half didn't.
"Shaoran!"
He was back. And he had the teddy bear she had so lovingly made for him, the one she had sewed all night to finish before he left for Hong Kong.
He was back in Japan.
And she was back in his arms.
And everything was as it should be.
A whirl of flower petals.
"Sakura-san?"
She looked up at him. They were sitting together on a secluded bench behind the gym, away from prying eyes (and Tomoyo's video camera.) Only a few low sounds of laughter that drifted in the cool air reminded them of the festival that was also occurring. It was getting dark but she knew his face by heart.
"There's something I want to tell you."
His voice was low, almost too soft to hear, so she leaned a little closer to him. She could hear his heartbeat as he leaned closer to her as well.
His face looked into hers. She was so close she could smell the light but distinct scent of incense around him.
"Sakura ..."
Startled, she looked back up into his eyes.
And felt his warm lips on hers.
For an instant she was too startled to even move as he kissed her softly. Then she relaxed, and let the scent of incense and flower blossoms carry her.
He moved back after a little while, looking back into her eyes. "I love you Sakura. I'll do anything to stay with you."
"Shaoran-kun..." She took his hand and held it gently. "I love you too..."
She leaned on his shoulder as they both looked up at the beautiful sunset.
A brush of cold wind made the hairs on the back of her neck rise. She stood up suddenly, and Shaoran would have jumped if he hadn't already stood up as well.
"This energy..."
"Magic! Sakura, you're not..."
But she already had taken out her key and was chanting the words.
A gust of wind sent dry, red leaves scattering.
"I have to go back to Hong Kong."
"Again?" She was used to this. He had gone back on a number of occasions, but he always returned as soon as he could.
"Mother is very insistent, and you don't want to cross her."
"When will you be back?"
"I... Sakura, I'll come back as soon as I can."
That wasn't enough. "When?"
"I... I don't know. I'm almost eighteen, and Mother wants me to start staying in Hong Kong and begin taking over the family. It's my duty, after all. She's even been trying to set up some engagement proposals with other families."
"Engagement?" she whispered.
"Sakura, come with me to Hong Kong. It's a wonderful place and I'm sure you'll love it there, with the variety of people who live there. You could meet my family like I've met yours. If you came back with me to Hong Kong, I'm sure Mother won't mind. We can get married there."
"But I... We're not even done with high school yet! And what about college?"
"You can come back here for college, or go somewhere else like the United States. But if we're at least engaged then Mother will get off my back about family responsibility and we can be together."
'I'll do anything to stay with you.' The words echoed back in her mind.
"Sakura... I have to decide. You have to decide. If not this trip then very soon. There will come a point where Mother won't allow me to come back. It's duty."
And what of their love?
"I... I need some time to think about it," she stammered.
"Then time you have. But you can't take forever to choose."
She was silent.
"I have to get going."
She looked up as he turned and started walking away.
Away.
She reached out to grab his hand, to tell him she was willing to go to any lengths to stay with him, to stop him and convince him to stay here in Japan, but her voice didn't work and her arm wasn't long enough to catch him. His tall figure dwindled down to nothing in the distance.
A rush of movement. The Sakura Cards had escaped from her pack and encircled her in a protecting manner.
Protecting from what?
They glowed faintly with power, trying to comfort her. Her desperate eyes searched the familiar faces and names, looking for a card her heart knew did not exist.
There was no 'Stay' card.
"Shaoran-kun!"
Sakura woke up with a start, her hand reaching out to grab something but grasping only air. She sat up in bed trying to clear her head from her dream. Looking around her room proved to be a bad idea, for it only made her more confused.
This wasn't her dorm room at all!
Her desk was in the wrong corner and the door shouldn't be next to it! Where were all the things that personalized her space? What were all these boxes doing, stacked neatly on the other side of the desk?
Why was she sleeping in her school uniform?
What was that rose on the desk?
Where was Kero-chan?
"Kero-chan," she asked softly, "Where are you?" When no reply came, she got out of bed and starting looking around. "Kero-chan? Kero-chan! Where are you, Kero-chan?!"
Sakura ran out of the room into an unfamiliar hallway, calling his name, when she came upon yet another shock.
"Just because my hair is green doesn't mean you can call me a frog," said Saionji in a slightly stuffy tone of voice. His eyes never wandered from the sociology book he was reading, lounging on a sofa in the common room and twirling a highlighter in his free hand.
"Sai...Saionji-san! What... what are you doing here?"
"I live here," he said succinctly.
"..."
"And so do you," he added, answering her question before it was asked.
"...What?"
"It is a rule of the dueling game that the Rose Bride live with her Champion to whom she is engaged."
"...WHAT?"
He turned the page, still not looking up, and remarked, "You really don't know anything about this school, do you?"
Sakura eyed him warily, wondering whether she should start running now or wait to see if he had any better explanations to offer to her.
"Sit down and I'll explain it to you. You have a right to know, mixed up in this as you are. Didn't listen to me, did you? But it's too late. You're too involved."
She sat down in the chair farthest away from him and eyed him warily as he folded a corner of the page and set the book down on the table. "Where should I begin," he mused to himself.
"From the beginning?" she suggested with a hint of acid.
He shrugged it off. "Very well. This school, Ohtori Academy, operates just like any other school does. You've seen that. But behind the scenes...
"When I and most of the other Student Council members were starting high school, we received letters from an entity who was known as 'Ends of the Earth.' We also received rose signets," and he showed her his, which was smooth and white and had the school's logo embossed in silver on it. "These gave us the, well, permission is the word I suppose I'm looking for, to duel. For the hand of the Rose Bride, who was also a high school student named Himemiya Anthy. She was also the younger sister of the then-acting director, Ohtori Akio. During the duel, she would summon the Sword of Dios that would rise from her heart and be given to her champion, who would fight a challenger. The winner of the duel became her new champion and also became engaged to her.
"We dueled... for many reasons. The Sword of Dios is a key component to the World Revolution," and Sakura could hear the capitalization of the phrase, "and only whoever was engaged to the Rose Bride could bring the Revolution about. It's said that he who is engaged to the Rose Bride can enter the Castle of Eternity which appears overhead when there is a duel, and sometimes Dios himself comes out of the castle to watch. What's in that Castle... I don't know. But it's powerful. They say miracles can happen if you enter." He shook his head again, saying, "But that's just what they say.
"One day a girl named Tenjou Utena transferred to the school. She, too, had a rose signet and immediately began dueling us to win the hand of the Rose Bride. But she wasn't a Student Council member and she'd never gotten letters from Ends of the Earth. It was a very strange occurrence.
"We felt it happening, we Student Council members, but we couldn't stop her. Even when Touga managed to defeat her, she turned around and beat him in the very next duel. And then...
"One day we felt it happen. Or we should have felt it happen. But nothing did. There was a build-up that... didn't doing anything at all. Except that Utena suddenly left the school with no explanation as to what happened up there on the dueling platform, if she entered the Castle of Eternity, or anything. She just disappeared, and everyone forgot about her except for the Student Council. And then the next day, Anthy left as well, saying only that she was 'going to meet her Prince.' Utena.
"And so the duels were over because there was no Rose Bride to duel for. Until... you arrived.
"Kinomoto Sakura. The new Rose Bride."
The new Rose Bride was not very convinced. "Why me?"
Saionji shrugged. "We received a letter from Ends of the Earth not a month ago saying to prepare for the duels. And then the roses on the platform bloomed again."
"I just felt sorry for them. I love all kinds of flowers, not just roses. I got it from my mother who loved flowers so much she named me and my brother after them."
"It's said that the roses will bloom only for the Rose Bride. Anthy took care of them as if they were her best friends." Her only friends, he thought, until Utena came along, not counting that ugly little monkey mouse beast she kept as a pet. "Will you?"
She was silent at that remark, remembering how the Flower Card had revived the roses. But she was the one who used the card. No, it couldn't be. "Then why are we here?" she wondered, changing the subject.
"The Rose Bride and her engaged, her champion, live together. Most of your stuff has already been moved and is just sitting in the storage room. It's another of the rules. And since the Eastern Dormitory has been unoccupied since Utena left, the Student Council felt it was the perfect place. Unless you're scared of ghosts; this place has a reputation for being haunted." His tone of voice suggested that it would be very silly indeed for a college student to be afraid of the supernatural.
She was scared of ghosts, but she wasn't about to admit it. Besides, growing up had allowed her to get over most of it. Shaoran had helped her get over most of her fear.
Shaoran...
Who was probably now engaged to a Chinese girl with a good family in Hong Kong while she was suddenly living with a young man she barely knew.
Sakura turned and ran back to her room, which really wasn't even hers. Saionji watched her disappear, sighed, and picked up his textbook again.
She entered her room at the verge of tears and closed the door behind her, hands searching for a lock but finding none. A tapping on the window distracted her and she ran to open the curtain.
Kero-chan was floating outside her window, looking excessively harried and rather upset. She opened the window to let him in and he fell into her arms, wings drooping, complaining (quietly, for he was a cautious guardian) about how long he'd been waiting outside her window without anything nice to eat.
"Kero-chan..." whined the young woman, tears starting to trickle down her face.
"Sakura-chan..." Suddenly his petty problems disappeared under the weight of her real ones. His wings shimmered and grew to an impossible size, wrapping around his diminutive body. Sakura took a step back as the wings unfurled again to reveal Keberus, the winged feline guardian of the Clow Cards and of Sakura.
She clung to him and wept into his fur, and he was reduced to soft murmurings of "There, there," and "It'll be all right." He gently wrapped his wings around her slim body and let her cry herself out.
"Kero-chan," she bawled. "What am I supposed to do?"
What indeed? He had no clue. All he could do now was to shelter her until she could gather herself together. So he stood as firm as a soft, furry, warm and comforting rock to which the Card Mistress could cling to. He could figure something out later.
"It'll be all right," he repeated over and over, hoping it would.
"Hey, where's Kinomoto-san?"
"She's not sick, is she? I didn't see her in our History lecture either."
"It's so weird. You'd think with all that vitality she'd never catch even a cold!"
"And she doesn't skip lectures to do other things either!"
"How strange!"
"Where do yo think she is?"
"Wakaba, you're her dormmate, aren't you?"
"Not... not anymore."
"What? You didn't have... a fight, did you?"
"No... some people just suddenly came up and said the Student Council had sent them to take all of Sakura-chan's belongings to the Eastern Dorm, and they did."
"The Eastern Dorm?"
"No one's lived there in decades!"
"Isn't it haunted?"
"Why would they do something like that?"
"How strange!"
"Guess what!"
"What?"
"Hurry up and tell us!"
"I heard Saionji-sama also moved into the Eastern Dormitory the other day!"
"What?"
"No way!"
"Why would he do something like that?"
"Well, the Student Council did summon Kinomoto-san to talk with her."
"How strange!"
"Will you stop with that?"
"But it is strange! You don't think..."
"Think what?"
"Maybe they're in love!"
"Oh, don't be silly!"
"Maybe they're engaged!"
"Wakaba, you had a crush on Saionji-sama before, didn't you?"
"I did. But... I don't think he'd fall in love with someone so quickly. I mean, he's been here since before I arrived and Sakura-chan's been here less than a month! I don't think he's the kind of guy who'd fall in love at first sight."
"See? Stop being so romantic. There's probably a good explanation for it."
"But why would they be living together if they're not engaged?"
"Oh, please. You've been reading too many romance novels. They are not engaged."
"And he said that we were engaged. ENGAGED, Kero-chan! What am I supposed to do? All because the roses bloomed for me."
He turned his eyes to Sakura's desk, where a red rose lay in perfect condition.
"We'll think of something, Sakura. Just hang in there."
Somehow, that rose was making the fur on the back of his neck rise.
Could he really blame a rose?
...to be continued...
AUTHOR NOTES:
"Kero" is the sound a frog makes in Japanese onomatopoeia. In volume 1 of the manga, Sakura starts calling Kerberus 'Kero-chan' and he protests, saying it makes him sound like a frog. Hence Saionji's comment of "Just because my hair is green doesn't mean you can call me a frog."
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Card Captor Sakura was created by CLAMP and is (c) their respective companies. Shoujo Kakumei Utena was created by Chiho Saitou/Be-Papas and is (c) their respective companies. Please address all inquiries to me at ming_ling@hotmail.com. Please do not repost this fanfic without my prior written permission.