Summer Boy
Title: Summer Boy
Author: teafortwelve (Tara)
Rating: G
Verse: Gen V, Gameverse.
Characters: Black/White
Summary: His summer ends when she leaves. It's as simple as that.
Author's Note: Comments and crits are loved. <3 This will probably be completely OOC for them when the games are released, but for now, just take their characterizations as my personal interpretations. xD
It all starts at the end.
The sun is setting, but the twosome remains. He’s fishing out the last few dregs of melted ice cream from the bottom of a paper cup while she stares off into the distance, her eyes focusing on something beyond the endless ocean. The calm silence between them is filled with the slapping of waves on sand and the harsh cries of the Wingull that circle above.
“I’m leaving,” she says. Her blue eyes do not waver.
His eyes, however, glance up to meet her profile. “When?” he says, and the uncertainty in his voice is clear. He is tense against the sandbank, his muscles taut with a nameless emotion.
She reaches down to her ankle and strokes Tsutaja’s head. The creature is wrapped around her leg like a living bracelet. His amber eyes are closed in sleep, and he does not feel his master’s restless touch.
“Tomorrow,” she says, after decades have passed. Her blue eyes refuse to meet anything but the darkening ocean.
“But tomorrow-”
“Is three weeks too early, I know,” she says, cutting him off. “Hiun City can’t wait until the summer is over, apparently.” She shrugs, and he knows now why she isn’t looking at him. The last rays of sunlight dance across her eyes, and they catch more light than they should.
“I’ll miss you,” he says, and that’s all. She does not look at him. It would hurt her too much to see the sorrow in his hazel eyes.
He’s up on his feet an instant later, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. He calls for Mijumaru, and she comes, her fur wet with salty ocean spray. He bends down, and she scrambles onto his shoulder. She murmurs secrets of the ocean into his ear in a language he can only hope to understand one day. He whispers back to her as he walks away, leaving strands of summer lying in his wake. It’s over much too soon.
She calls to him, but he does not look back. The summer is behind him now.
* * *
He refuses to say goodbye.
The phone rings, again and again, and his mother begs for him to answer it. But he knows who it is, and he will not speak to her. She betrayed him by keeping her planned date of departure from him until the day before, and he cannot forgive her.
He stays locked up in his room and gazes longingly at the frozen moments of summers long past, his slender fingers dancing across the yellowing pages of the scrapbook. He is six, and she is there, smiling through missing teeth and squinted eyes as he does the same. He is ten, and she is there, her hands ruffling his hair as they wrestle over the last popsicle. He is thirteen, and she is there, winking at the camera and tossing kisses to him as he takes the picture in blinding sunlight.
He is fifteen, and she is not there. His summer ended the moment she boarded the train for Hiun City.
* * *
Mijumaru doesn’t understand.
She doesn’t understand the long walks down an empty beach. She doesn’t understand her master’s refusal to train with her. She doesn’t understand why Tsutaja is gone, because something tells her he should be here, as he was in years before.
And she certainly doesn’t understand the sadness in her master’s eyes as he looks over happy memories from the past, when things were much, much simpler.
* * *
He tries to forget her, as he does every year.
His summer girl is just that; his summer girl. She is born at the start of the summer and dies at the end of it, but sometimes her death is premature. Like this year. It is those summers that he hates, the summers that see less of her, because he already sees less of her than he would like. But there is little he can do about it.
Instead, he seeks companionship in friends; friends with glasses and cold understanding, friends with outrageous hair and consoling babble. They tell him she will be back next year, like always, smiling her bright smile and tossing her dark hair into the rising sun.
They are wrong.
* * *
His summer girl does not return.
He waits through the prologue of autumn, the chilling chapter of winter, the new novel of spring and the old pages of summer, but she never arrives. His only consolation is a postcard featuring tall skyscrapers and bright lights, things only dreamt about in the town of Kanokota. On the back, her scrawled writing promises a hasty return. That is all. No words telling him she misses her old friend, no words confessing what he wishes she would. Just an empty promise written in blue pen.
Mijumaru watches as her master’s shaking hands tear the postcard into nothing as salty summer tears stream down his face. She doesn’t understand, but she feels his pain nonetheless. She squeaks consoling words in her secret language and hops down from her perch to curl up beside him. She nuzzles him with her large nose and waits patiently for him to respond.
He does, in good time. He pulls her close and tells her things he has yet to tell anyone else. Mijumaru is content in his arms, but she doesn’t understand what it means to love someone who is never there.
* * *
He waits in silence and in solitude.
He waits because he wants to remain the same for her. He cannot go off and grow up, not yet, because he needs to be perfect for her. He needs to be the boy she knew as a child, the boy who trailed after her like a lost Skitty in a large crowd. He wants to be the same. He must be the same.
He needs to be himself, not someone the world has forced him to be.
* * *
The summer comes, and so does she, but she is not his summer girl anymore.
Their embrace is rushed and uncertain, and their eyes are distant. Tsutaja is no longer Tsutaja, and Mijumaru hides behind her master, wondering where her old friend went. Her master’s thoughts are similar.
She talks. A lot. They are on the beach again, and she tells him of deserts and skyscrapers and fairytale worlds filled with sparkling lights. She talks of forests of old and theme parks of new, her eyes bright with excitement, her smile illuminating the beach. She asks him of his year alone, what he did, who he saw, how Mijumaru fared. He tells her little in words but a lot in gesture. She laughs at appropriate intervals and smiles at others, but he knows that his yearly endeavours were nothing compared to hers.
Finally, she runs out of steam. Her eyes wander to the setting sun, and he is inexplicably reminded of something that faded into memory long ago. But it is not the same. She has changed while he has not. There are miles between them now. He does not understand; she has never changed before, despite her time spent elsewhere. He does not understand that she is no longer the girl he knew, but a young woman who has experienced the world with Tsutaja at her side.
“I’m leaving again,” she says, and his heart skips a beat.
“When?” he asks, albeit hesitantly. He reaches down to stroke Mijumaru’s unchanged form, a form now huddled in the crook of his leg.
“Next week,” she says, and this time, her eyes meet his.
He blinks and remains silent.
“...I want you to come with me,” she continues, a shy smile creeping onto her face. Her fingers reach out to brush against his.
He pulls his hand away, bringing grains of sand with it. “Why?” he asks, staring intently into her blue eyes.
When she speaks, her voice is a whisper, and he has to strain to hear it.
“Because I don’t want you to be my summer boy anymore. I want you to be my everyday boy.”
* * *
Mijumaru doesn’t understand why they have to leave the old village.
She doesn’t understand her master’s newfound energy or his newfound smile. She doesn’t understand the girl’s constant presence, or why Tsutaja is no longer Tsutaja but is still himself. Mijumaru doesn’t understand that her master is now ready to grow up, to change, and to join his summer girl on her travels.
But what she does understand is her master’s happiness with having the summer girl curled up in his arms, no matter what the season is.