.author's notes. Completely useless background information: spawned, rather worryingly, by a single line in a slashified commentary on a couple of screenshots filled with the brothers Wincesters' incestuous!love, from the TV show Supernatural. I know not why, but it makes me afraid.
.disclaimer. CCS belongs to the lovely ladies of CLAMP.
.summary. (EriolTomoyo) (Oneshot) Drinking sessions in Penguin Park seemed like a good idea in the beginning.
.dedication. For the almost criminally wonderful Diana. Because she never screams, no matter what I throw at her.
…
But you're too easy
Tomoyo is a cheap date.
Eriol watches, more amused than a sober Tomoyo probably would have appreciated, as she gets herself drunk on half a bottle of wine and starlight.
"I'm vaguely disappointed in you," he says cheerfully as she wobbles where she sits and pitches forward into his lap.
"Mmfgh," she mumbles around a mouthful of his trousers.
…
They are sixteen and they are impulsive and they are reckless and stupid and they are sixteen going on twenty-two going on forty going on ninety going on four.
Drinking sessions in Penguin Park seemed like a good idea in the beginning.
…
The sake is cheap and acrid and it burns the back of her mouth.
"Couldn't you have conjured up something better?" she asks through a mouth that is puckered and wrinkled like she has tried to eat a lemon.
He swallows an enormous mouthful unflinchingly.
"I though we'd get drunk like teenagers," he says.
"Which means?"
"The fouler the alcohol, the better."
She wants to punch his smile.
…
The first bottle makes her surprisingly lucid.
"I want to rule that world out there," she says, gesturing with a flinging, careless hand out at the world drawn in glittering lights beyond them.
"Do you?" he asks.
She slumps miserably.
"No. But Mother wants me to."
"You could if you wanted," he says thoughtfully. "Queen Tomoyo."
He makes her a daisy chain crown, slowly, carefully. She asks him why he doesn't just magic one up, and he says he sometimes likes to do things for himself.
"There is magic in the mundane," he says and she wrinkles her nose in disgust and says ugh, what a line, you're usually so articulate, Hiiragizawa-kun and he laughs and he agrees.
…
"What do you really want to do, Tomoyo-san?" he asks, some time later.
She pretends not to hear and he pretends not to have asked. He guesses it has something to do with Sakura-san.
He is still working on the daisy chain.
…
"What about you?" she asks, and by this point everything seems to be getting duller, or maybe that is the light fading away. Everything is softer. The very air is kinder. Hiiragizawa-kun looks like a blur of glasses and dark hair. His mouth looks very pink.
He looks at her for a very long time.
"Paris would be nice," he says vaguely.
"For a summer?"
He shakes his head.
"For another life."
She hears the unspoken invitation in his voice and she wants to laugh and she wants to scold him and tell him not to start that.
…
By the end of her second bottle, she is singing.
He'd be amused if they weren't so pathetic.
…
She crashes after bottle number four, snoozing with her face mashed into the grass and her long hair spread everywhere like lace somebody has spilled from their sewing basket.
He has just finished the daisy chain crown. He sets it reverently atop her slumbering head. It looks ridiculous.
What the hell are they doing?
It starts as unstoppable twitching of his lips and grows into a gale of slightly crazy laughter as he rolls around in the grass, laughing and laughing because they are so stupid.
"We could always go to Italy, I suppose," he says fairly to her comatose back, when he has recovered. There are tears of hilarity lurking in his eyes.
"No, Paris would be lovely," she says indistinctly. Eriol jumps. He didn't realise she was awake.
For some reason she feels the need to justify this. She wriggles around on the grass until she is able to look up at him with one eye, which in its slightly unfocused bleariness only looks sharper and more intelligent then ever. She is regarding him much like he imagines a hawk would.
"Well, the wine in Paris would be a hell of a lot better than this stuff," she says, brandishing a bottle of the revolting sake in his general direction.
He is forced to concur.
…
All his plans lately seem to involve running away with Tomoyo.
Which is silly.
Terribly silly.
He tries to reason it away. Dreams about running away with Tomoyo-san - afraid to stay in a country that reminds me of Kaho? Half-seriously making plans to run away - wishing to shed responsibility? Wanting to go to Paris - simply desire to see if it has improved any since the 1830s? (That was an interesting trip) Wanting to go to the supposedly "most romantic city in the world" - SECRET SUBCONSCIOUS DESIRE TO ROMANCE TOMOYO-SAN?
…oh dear God, no. He hopes it isn't that. The idea of trying to romance Tomoyo-san is too horrible to seriously contemplate. The very notion brings him out in horrified goose bumps. Tomoyo-san scares him because she is very beautiful and more intelligent than she has any right to be, really, and more than a little insane, and he is a sensible boy. Who rather values his limbs.
It is after around two hours of "reasoning" (that gradually but steadily deteriorates into vaguely amusing doodles) that he thinks, bugger this, I rather just think that I think Tomoyo-san would make an interesting travelling partner.
Of course, none of this changes the fact that this is a ridiculously, relentlessly silly notion.
…my, but airplane fares were cheap nowadays.
…
When he presents her with two plane tickets a week later over a bottle of slightly better sake, he doesn't know what he was really expecting, but he suspects it wasn't, "oh."
They look at each other. Tomoyo stares down at the tickets. They really do say it, plain there in black and white: Narita, Tokyo - Charles de Gaulle, Paris.
"How long are we going there? For a life?" she asks.
He chokes on his mouthful of cheap alcohol.
"No. A summer. Well. Half a summer."
There is an unspoken sentence behind that, something about having all the time in the world for another life. She smiles a secret, hidden smile into her drink.
…
Eriol booked a midnight flight half because he thought it would be more fun and half because it was, for some reason, cheapest.
That was a stupid idea.
He meets Tomoyo at the front door of the Daidouji mansion. She has already spun a tale to the maids about going away with Sakura-chan for a few weeks, and to tell her mother so if she comes home early. "But I should be back long before she returns," she says.
The maids only allow her to go when she promises that their beloved young mistress is not eloping and leaving them forever. They hug her and blow their noses on lace handkerchiefs and wave her off at the door.
"Have a good flight!" "Good luck!" "Stay safe!" "Enjoy Paris, Tomoyo-sama!" "Do come back to us, won't you?"
Eriol comes up to her, dragging his suitcase behind him as Tomoyo wrestles her own over the threshold of the door. The maids, as soon as they see him, begin to murmur in relieved tones about that nice Hiiragizawa boy. As Eriol tries to help with her suitcase, he manages to step on her foot.
A midnight flight was a stupid idea. It is incredibly dark around them.
One of the younger, ditzier maids says, "I thought you were going with Kinomoto-san!"
The other maids elbow her into silence and roll their eyes hopelessly at each other.
Tomoyo colours prettily and glances at her companion.
"Oh. Hiiragizawa-kun is coming too!"
"I insisted to Sakura-san that I pick Tomoyo-san up, because ladies should not be out unaccompanied at night," Eriol picks up admirably.
The maids murmur fondly about chivalry and gentlemen. Tomoyo grins at him and it is wild and reckless, baring all her pretty white teeth.
…
They walk down the street, trailing their suitcases underneath a full moon. They are strolling at a leisurely pace but each feels like they should break into a run and dodge the probing light of streetlamps. Considering that they are running away, they are doing it very calmly and slowly.
"I feel as though I am kidnapping you," Eriol says frankly and Tomoyo laughs and laughs and laughs.
"I'm fairly certain I could convince any enquiring parties that it is the other way around," she says.
Overhead, the stars are out in force.
Eriol hails a passing cab and they tell the driver they are airport-bound.
….
.author's notes. Just for clarification – this is THE END. There is no more to this tale.