To Hold
Title: To Hold
Series: xxxHOLiC
Characters: Himawari
Pairing: Doumeki/Watanuki/Himawari
Rating: G
Summary: She'd forgotten how to smile.
Notes: Vagueness ahoy!




Himawari smiled.

That in itself is not remarkable, hardly noteworthy. She smiles a lot, all the time. But this time, she smiled and it didn’t feel as strained.

It’d been a long time since she’d laughed and smiled properly. She laughed and smiled every day, but the laughter was sounded like broken bells, the smile as distant and icy as the sun reflecting off a frozen river. Ice. Cold. Distance. Nothing.

She would smile.

She would laugh.

If she were honest with herself—and so rarely was she honest to anyone—she would say with shameful confidence, swear up and down, that she had forgotten how to smile, how to laugh, how to be herself—what else could it be but “being”? Smiling and laughing and living, she couldn’t show who she really was, that she wasn’t what she should be, that this is how it was always supposed to be, how—

How she had changed.

She’d forgotten it all, how it felt to be honest, to be unrestrained. She’d forgotten the feel of lips drawing back over teeth, lips curling in delight, her lungs pressing fruitlessly against her chest as she gasps for air. Short, uninhabited breaths were as rare as a sundrop in her desolate, frozen landscape.

Her icy river smile couldn’t melt a thing. Distance. Ice cold. Scattered across a morbid landscape, stretching for miles in blinding white, unmoved by wind or weather or humans. No dancing, no laughing, no smiling. Nothing. Silence. She would trace the intricate designs she’d created in the snow with her padded fingertips and feel nothing. Her hands were too numb. She would capture things, and they would melt.

She’d forgotten what it felt like to actually laugh and to actually smile.

She’d forgotten what it felt like to have company in that snow. To have hands to hold hers and warm her up, rubbing them together to usher in some warmth into the cheerless atmosphere. In the freeze, there’s always the dopey smile printed on one face, showing no remorse or desperation after traveling from the brink of frostbite. The other smile is softer, rounder, subtler, as if it weren’t actually there. It ushered in the protection from the cold, banished everything that was.

She agonized over the questions, searching for answers and finding the same end of the road, the same sign pointing her towards those two boys. She would marvel at it. How one boy would grin sheepishly, grasp her hand in his, delicate and gentle. How the other boy would say nothing, betray nothing except honesty in those eyes, and his hands would grasp hers gently as well, and she would marvel over how he they could be so delicate and gentle while looking the exact opposite. Capable, callused. But never distant.

It doesn’t matter to them.

The cold. The distance. They pulled her back every time. They kept her hands warm.

Somehow they made it seem okay. Made it seem okay to exist, that she was okay. That they were okay. They slipped in the snow, but they got up again. They rubbed each other’s hands for warmth. Their noses and cheeks pink, they would run to shelter. But they were together.

It was in moments that she remembered how to smile and laugh that she remembered that she was wanted.