AUTHOR'S NOTES: Alright. The newest chapter. I'm very, very, very sorry for not putting this up sooner. Finding myself in college removed me from my anime/fanfiction phase, although that's not about to stop me from finishing this story. Yes, I do hereby promise to finish this story and will not leave it hanging in the archives like a blotted jigsaw (although I cannot promise swift updates. I do promise I won't leave the story for 2 years this time though).

This chapter might be a bit shocking so I really, really advise that you get back into the feel of the story before reading this. By "getting back into the feel" I mean, reading back a bit, rediscovering what this story is about, reliving the progress, and re-imagining what has been happening to the way that our two characters have been seeing each other. This is crucial, because this chapter would be lost on you as a disappointing and sudden plunge in pacing if you don't. (HINT: rapid developments up ahead).

Personally, even if it's in danger of being too fast or too sudden, I love this chapter and I loved writing it. So, please give it the best chance it has of getting this story back into pace and getting back into your hearts. Read and review. Thank you!

XIX – Surrender

She was beautiful.

She was beautiful in the rain. She was beautiful when she smiled. She was beautiful beside his locker every morning. She was beautiful across the table in the cafeteria. She was beautiful in the pale afternoon light. She was beautiful, popping out from behind the stern scrutiny of her older brother when Syaoran came to their doorstep beneath the Friday twilight. She was beautiful when she blinked in surprise as he walked with her to the entrance of the carnival.

"Because you need a break," he had said, simply, to her tacit question. "I thought you seemed the type to like this. I saw a flyer, advertising it…"

Her eyes had welled with excitement, and she was beautiful when she squealed and pulled him in.

Her delight was a child's in every ride, every horror house, and every gamble in every carnival game. Syaoran never bothered to catch his thoughts anymore, never tried to assess them. He watched her with a quiet indifference that bordered on fatigue, not thinking of what he looked like, what he said, or whatever his actions betrayed. He didn't wonder, didn't ask, didn't contradict himself. When she bought him a hotdog on a stick and asked if he wanted his with ketchup or mayonnaise, he even let go of Tomoyo's voice in his head, saying, "Li-kun…it's true…"

It's true.

Syaoran had sighed then, and sighed all throughout the week in his head—sighed when he watched her dance through life beside him and he found himself following her lead despite the constant worry in Tomoyo's eyes when she looked at him. Everyday, he came home exhausted, suffering the truth of her laughter and the truth of its reason for chiming along with his, suffering the question of why one did not cancel out the other.

Tomoyo had confirmed it. Hayli's smirk each time she passed him confirmed it. Only Sakura hadn't—Sakura, who was so beautiful, not because of the radiance of her face, but because of the reality that her child's spirit had become to him. He had dissected it with all the power of his logic, butchering his own emotions so he could hold them under the light and extract their significance. He ended up cursing himself to sleep every night for believing everything that he had heard and everything that he had seen for himself, even if they were the worst of contradictions: that she was a fraud, that she was real.

He had asked why so often, he was sick of it.

He had hated her and stayed with her all this time, wondering, and he was sick of it.

When he found himself sitting beside her on a bench that Friday evening, with her balloon animal bouncing idly in her hands, he thought, in exhausted surrender, I'm sorry, Mom.

And he stood up.

She was beautiful when she blinked in surprise. "Li-kun?"

He faced her.

Tomoyo's voice whispered in his mind. "It's true."

Sakura stood up too, and he thought, she was a fraud. She was faking it. She was a joke. She wanted his heart just to shatter it. She did not deserve to be his downfall. "Is everything okay?" she asked.

She was beautiful.

And in the few seconds it took for him to find his voice, the dam of all his feelings shattered in his head and flooded him again, violent and real—the shock of his broken defenses, the astonishment of his pride suddenly in pieces on the ground, the hatred towards Hayli, Sakura, Tomoyo…and towards himself, the emotional carnage behind his seeming indifference the week after he knew the joke that all their afternoons and study sessions had been, the reality of his defeat, the beauty of her spirit alive in her eyes.

All this time, he never asked her for her version of the story, never told her he knew. He wondered why he couldn't bring himself to, and now the lone, standing, humiliating theory was that he feared to do it because it might extinguish that light in her smile and make her stay away from him.

She was his endless question. She always had been. And when the strands of honey hair blew gently across her face in the evening breeze, with the sparkles in her eyes as his guiding star, he knew she was his answer.

He was ready.

"Sakura…"

She blinked. The way he said her name told her she should have grasped something significant simply by hearing it. She felt embarrassed that none of it got through her. She ventured, "Li-kun?"

His eyes raised to hers, and she blinked in surprise.

There was pain. There, in his depths. A raw, indescribable pain.

"S...Syaoran, what's—?"

He heard her gasp before his lips took it away from hers.

I'm sorry, Mom.

It was not deep. It was not long. It was not violent. It was the briefest, lightest, yet surest press, like an affectionate gesture of gratitude—not an impulse but a meaningful kiss that he hardly felt because the significance of it was not a confession to him but a fact.

The shock in her eyes lasted until he withdrew his hand that had gone up to lift her chin before he even realized it. Looking at the questions burning in her gaze, he felt nothing again—nothing but a dull ache he had carried since his conversation with Tomoyo, now amplified into a solid emotion that, as he observed Sakura's every move and every spoken word this past week, he had learned to name as a broken heart.

He lowered his head when his emotions again began to flutter dangerously to the surface, spelling out a solid, almost tangible pain. Exhaustion flooded him. The astonishment on her face could find no voice. The answers in his head surrendered their screaming to silence.

"Syaoran-k…"

He took the name away from her when he faced her again. Even she didn't seem to have heard herself.

His eyes were clear when he locked them with hers, when he whispered in a tone that was heartbreaking in its quiet, resilient, enduring control, "Sakura. You have won your bet."

(CUT)

She felt no triumph.

She found herself in the familiar circle of walking face powder and lipstick brands, and she felt nothing when she told Hayli, "Well, there you are. Had him and lost him." Dropped him, a voice in her head corrected her. She ignored it.

Hayli's eyebrow rose to her hairline. "You're bluffing," she said.

"No."

Tomoyo's expression was uncharacteristically, unpleasantly sour. "He said it already." The line bordered on a snap.

"Well, who asked you?" Hayli shot back. Her face had distorted into a tight look of suppressed outrage that denied defeat. Her vicious brown eyes snapped back to Sakura. "Since when were you planning to pop out with this lie? Did you think I'd believe it if you've wasted several months on him already?"

"Sakura isn't lying—"

"Shut up, Tomoyo."

The air all around the table tensed. The other girls shifted uneasily, glancing from Hayli to Tomoyo to Sakura and back again to Hayli, every one of them afraid to say anything. Sakura felt nothing. She stared at Hayli, her eyes blank. Hayli would have looked perfectly composed staring back, if the tense press of her fingers against the table hadn't betrayed her.

"Don't lie to me, Sakura," she ventured, her voice very carefully moderated, determined to sound, if not to stay, in control. "I know he hates your guts."

He kissed me.

"He indulged you for a time but now he doesn't even look at you. I saw him earlier. He wasn't looking for you. Believe me. I asked."

Sakura didn't hear her. There was nothing to hear. Nothing to feel. For some reason that escaped her and that she didn't try to search for, nothing meant anything to her anymore, not around this table. There was no bet, no pressure—no illusions of power. Her circle searched her face for reactions, but she gave away nothing. She felt nothing. In this table, she was with nothing and she was nothing. Stripped of all delusions, there was absolutely nothing.

Her only solid image was Syaoran, a picture in her head that one else saw.

…It was not because he felt strong enough to do it. I know so. I know, because for the first time…for the first time…I…felt him.

"You really shouldn't be so desperate, Sakura. I mean, it's just a bet." Hayli sounded far away. And stupid. "Although I do find it funny that you weren't able to bend the pushover. I mean, it's just Li Syaoran. I would have thought several months would have given you developments, but, hey, it was my fault for thinking too highly of you…"

Hayli was nothing.

Syaoran-kun...

"You have won…your bet."

Hayli looked more relaxed now, probably fueled by the lack of reply. "You really shouldn't have been so cocky in the beginning anyway. You gave me ideas that you were spunkier than you are. Don't look like such a loser. Really now, Sakura, don't be ashamed."

At his weakest, his eyes were his traitors.

"That's enough, Hayli," Tomoyo said.

"So you're going to back her story up, Daidouji? You staged his confession in a video?"

Syaoran…

Sakura didn't know what was happening. She did not know why she wanted to cry.

"You weren't here when that Li made Sakura look ridiculous in front of everybody, Daidouji. You weren't here when he doused her with soda. So tell me that the said person is in love with her and bring me along when you catch them making out."

Syaoran…

"You really don't know anything, so stay out of this."

…I'm sorry.

(CUT)

Tomoyo looked at Hayli, struggling with her own temper as she took in the gall of the brown-eyed doll. Privately, she tore off Hayli's brown hair and slammed her squealing for mercy against a wall, marking every single one of her curses with the hit of a bokken on her rotten ass. You bitch. You airhead. You deluded moron.

Everyone had resumed eating in silence after Hayli's speech. Sakura still hadn't spoken.

She looked so blank—so scarily blank.

Tomoyo wondered what really happened. All Sakura told her was that Syaoran had said she had won her bet. Tomoyo tried to ask for details, but her best friend had been less than responsive. She thought it her best gesture of friendship and support not to press for more information—at least, not from Sakura. She tried to engage Syaoran in conversation a few times, but none of them ended too well.

Their last one told her she couldn't get anything from him either:

"Li-kun…how have you been doing?"

An unfathomable silence.

"Li-kun, can I ask you something?"

A glance.

"Who told you there was a bet?"

He turned away. Never mind. His voice was ice. "Thank you for telling me the truth."

The phone call with him several days back had been torture for her. She felt like the line was turning to ice. It confused her that he had still stayed with them throughout the week even knowing what he knew. She almost wondered if he thought she was lying, or if he had deleted the phone conversation from memory, but there was nothing in his manner toward her that suggested it. He did not cast her accusatory glances or give her the cold shoulder. Neither did he act like nothing was wrong, because he made no effort to disguise his silences—which had started to come more often—and pensive moods. Yet he never said a word about the issue. This made it more terrifying for her to bring it up with him, so she never did. She partially hoped and partially expected him to ask twice about it, but he didn't.

In any event, the burning question of how he knew there had been a bet in the first place haunted her. She loathed the fact that he knew because she was sure that during the last few months, the bet had become completely irrelevant to their relationship. She thought everything would have worked out just fine if he hadn't known, even if his questions on why Sakura had decided to make peace so suddenly remained unanswered. It wouldn't have mattered anymore. But now, there was no way out of it. The past loomed above all of them, a usurper of the present, sabotage, blackmail—the undeniable truth.

She wanted to grab him in the halls and shake him by the shoulders, shouting, "Yes, Syaoran! She fooled you! But only at first—only at first! Remember how good everything was before you had known? You were good for each other!" And then he would see that they had healed each other, that she had healed him of his loneliness, that he had healed her of her delusions. He would realize that they were the best kind of people they could be with each other, and he would go and seek Sakura. And Sakura…

Tomoyo's eyes went to Sakura, who sat across the table still drenched in her silence.

She didn't know how Sakura would react. She didn't know what to do or what to say because she couldn't predict what Sakura would do. It was true. She didn't know anything.

In some miniscule, unbelievable way, Hayli was right.

The things in her head were all just ideals. She didn't know Syaoran enough. She didn't know Sakura enough. She had no license to act on anything on their behalf. Their sentiments were not for her to touch, because she had learned during the past few months that only their sincerity towards each other could move the other's emotions. She, witness, sympathizer, and ultimate supporter, knew only the faintest throbs of their pulse, but the footage she treasured were plenty to assure her that they were happier left alone, away from these cosmetics-caked bitches.

Tomoyo looked at Hayli, with her haughty confidence and disgusting claim of victory.

Five seconds of certain footage would prove to her that Syaoran really did learn to love Sakura, but she thought it demeaning to share such things with dirt like Hayli. Really, to be thought of as one of them by the student body, even though it did grant such frivolities as swifter passage through the crowds, demoralized her, and the only reason why she stayed around that table was Sakura, in whom she believed with all her heart, that she would someday break free and reclaim her beautiful spirit.

Syaoran, definitely, had been on his way to making her grasp that spirit, but someone, someone had ruined everything by letting him know of the bet—someone who had deliberately wanted to destroy everything, someone who had told him in such a way that it slashed their relationship to pieces.

Watching the smug smile on Hayli's face, more I knew it, it's done than I'm glad it didn't work out, Tomoyo knew for sure that she had found her answer.

(CUT)

Syaoran thought the truth was a catalyst of sorts. He thought would have fallen for Sakura, even if he wasn't told about the bet. The fact that he still found himself next to her in class and teaching her polynomials in a whisper after he knew confirmed it. He found no reason to fool himself into a raging confrontation with her. All he felt was that dull, dull ache, aching in his head, aching in his chest, dull and aching and impossible to ignore. He didn't care anymore. He let it ache.

He did not find her beside his locker the next Monday. He did not sit next to her in class. Tomoyo made few attempts to engage him in conversation, but they only ended in civil nothingness. He never gave her space to talk about anything. Sakura returned to her crowd and he never dared to explore whether or not she glanced his way when he passed them by.

He did not think about embarrassment at all, although he felt eyelined, blush-onned stares burn into his back at times. He knew what he had found in Sakura. He knew he had experienced the best that she was, and the girl who made the mess of students part in the hallways was a ghost of the past he did not care to share anything with. It didn't matter what people thought, if they saw him as stupid or duped. They were all idiots.

Still, it felt empty without her.

It felt new.

But, at the very least, he thought, for that radiant girl he had kissed in a Friday evening breeze, he should be strong enough to live through it.

(CUT)

"It's over, Eriol-kun…" Sakura's voice was a desolate whisper in the wind that blew gently across the soccer field that afternoon. On the bleachers beside her, Eriol turned his glance from the intensity of her sorrow to the group of players in the center of the field training under the sinking sun.

It was a sentimental, red-and-orange-sunset afternoon, and Eriol was beside Sakura on the bleachers just after school. But their eyes were far from appreciating the glow of the skies and the racing clouds. Sakura kept her eyes away from anything that triggered thoughts of how certain afternoons had looked a certain way just the week before, when she walked under it with a quiet rhythm of footsteps accompanying hers as she walked home. That was only last week, a past from which an eternity seemed to separate her.

Eriol did not attempt to cheer her up or throw her riddles. He stayed beside her, quiet, knowing it was his best form of support. He did not know anything about what had happened yet. All he knew was that the new girl, Daidouji, had approached him that afternoon and requested him to help Sakura, because she did not know if she was adequate for any real aid. Moved by the sincerity of the amethyst eyes, he did not fail to oblige her request, and after class, he brought it upon himself to wait until Tomoyo was picked up from school by a limousine. Then he took his cue and took Sakura by the hand.

Her low, cheerless whisper continued beside him, ethereal in the wind, though intense in their honesty. "He knows, Eriol-kun. He knows. I don't know how he did. I didn't tell him… I didn't even know he was already…his feelings… Eriol-kun, I should be happy. I won the bet. He said it himself… But I'm not. I'm not happy. I felt him when he—"She broke off. "I don't know what I've done…"

Eriol thought it best not to betray his surprise. Of course, he wasn't at all shocked that the boy fell in love with Sakura, but— "He knew about the bet…before he told you he was in love with you?" he asked, managing to sound composed.

Sakura nodded.

"I see…" Amazing.

He looked back on the dark-eyed guy he had provoked out of silence in the library a long time back, and he marveled at the resilience that silence had hidden. Of course, the fact that he had stayed his own course and never bended to the popular crowd's opinion of him what seemed to be eons ago was already a testament to his strength, but the beauty of his loyalty to his own feelings was beyond Eriol's verbal prowess.

How the hell did he manage to concretize his loss in his own head by admitting the love he had developed for what had started out as a lie? Why wasn't he outraged? Why did he still push through?

"Eriol-kun…" Sakura's head pressed against his shoulder. Her arms were limp, her hands defeated and slack. "Eriol-kun, I think…"

"Ssh. You're tired…"

Sakura pressed her head further, and he took her hand. Her grip on his fingers automatically tightened, shook, white at the knuckles. It was anger, frustration. It was regret. The intensity of her feelings defeated his grasp. He felt her struggle, felt her crack. "Eriol-kun…I didn't want to…" she whispered. "I didn't want to…"

"Sakura. Don't do this to yourself."

She pulled her hand from his and pushed herself into his embrace. Her face was buried into his chest now. Her body was tense. Her voice grew thinner. "I was weak…wasn't I…? Eriol-kun…"

"Sakura."

"Not like him…" Her grip tightened. "I deserve it… I…deserve—"

Her instability began to unnerve him. "Sakura, don't do this…" he murmured. "Believe me. Believe me, you didn't lose him. He's there. He won't leave." Her body grew even tenser, emotional pain becoming physical. "Sakura, listen to me. You might think he'll go, but, now that I know what he's capable of, I'm confident he won't. Sakura…he loves you—"

She slammed a clenched fist against him.

Eriol quieted.

"Eriol-kun, I…I lost—"

Then her shoulders began to shake.

And Eriol held her for the longest time.

(CUT)

TBC

AUTHOR'S NOTES: Well, I hope I didn't disappoint. Personally, I think a bomb like Hayli's assault (see Chapter XVIII) would have prompted a definite decision from Syaoran. It had to. But before I persist with defenses, let me cut myself off and say I hope I've made it convincing somehow. Shall be writing again soon. Inspire me.