Shugo Chara Fan Fiction ❯ Return of the Cat Boy ❯ Ikuto's Return ( Chapter 2 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

A/N: Chapter two, enjoy! Now it's Ikuto POV.

The next day, Tsukiyomi Ikuto followed the swarm of students entering Seiya Academy High School with his eyes. He’d only returned to the city the day before, having finally felt it was safe enough.
Even after Easter’s fall, he had had to keep running. Goons still loyal to Easter even after it’s end had continued to search for him and finally, after four years, the running was over. The chasing had stopped. He was truly free.
So, why was he here, at Seiya, on his first day back after moving into his new place?
Hinamori Amu.
From the moment he’d left, the pink haired girl had filled his thoughts. He missed teasing her. He missed sneaking in through her balcony. He’d missed watching her blush, and how sometimes she could say the wisest things he’d ever heard, and yet trip all over herself the next minute.
It had taken him about a year of this torture-like reminiscence to figure out the meaning behind it.
He missed her, not for the reasons he might have thought, either.
But because he loved her.
He didn’t quite understand why himself, but he did. And four years of absence had merely served to strengthen it.
Which explained why he was here. He was going to watch her for now. See how she had changed over the years, so that he would be ready to see her later. Because he knew if he went up to her now, he might do something stupid-like kiss her and never stop. He doubted that would be welcome. Especially since he was pretty sure his pink-haired, golden-eyed beauty didn’t feel the same way.
Ikuto’s ears perked up when a familiar voice reached his ears.
“That’s her, nya!” Yoru, his alley cat Chara, exclaimed, pointing to where Amu was walking through the school gates.
Ikuto’s eyes locked onto her as she moved. She looked pretty much the same. Her chest hadn’t grown much in four years, but she was a bit taller. Her skin was still the peach shade from his memories, and her hair was the same strawberry pink he remembered. And the uniform she wore was almost the same as the one she’d worn in Elementary School, pink leggings, red skirt and all. She even had the red X hair accessories from back then.
Ikuto watched as she opened the case slung over her shoulder, releasing the four Charas from within. Pink, green, yellow, and blue Charas all came flying out to circle around Amu’s head.
“It’s her Charas,” Yoru said, his eyes fixing on the floating figures. “I wonder what they’ve been up to since we’ve been gone, nya?”
Ikuto hid his amusement at the Chara. He knew perfectly well which of the four Yoru’s eyes would settle on. Yoru hadn’t done a good job at keeping his ‘secret’ crush on Miki, Amu’s blue Chara, from him.
“Oh, what’s this?”
Ikuto turned his attention back to Amu at Yoru’s question, just in time to see the other Guardians all crowd around Amu in a semi-circle.
“Well, what do you know,” he whispered to himself. So the other Guardians all went here as well. He’d sort of been hoping that they’d all moved away in the time he’d been gone.
Or at least the Kiddy King, he decided, as he watched Tadase smile at Amu and she blushed exponentially. He calmed the part of him that was currently shouting that it should be him making Amu blush, not Tadase.
But then, as he watched, he began to think something was off. That didn’t look like the blushes he remembered. It seemed…different. Almost fake. And it didn’t come close to reaching her eyes. Not to mention that from the little bits and pieces he could hear of her voice, she wasn’t stuttering at all. That wasn’t normal. The Amu he remembered had always stuttered when she blushed. Not this one.
The group began to move forward, and as Ikuto watched from his tree perch, Amu fell behind the others; who were laughing and talking animatedly. And for a moment, he could have sworn that a sad smile crossed her face and entered her eyes.


A while later, after following Amu around all day, he began to think that what he’d seen earlier had been a trick of his eyes. She seemed just as happy as ever. She talked, she laughed, she smiled. She was completely normal, down to the last detail. She acted just as she expected her to. Even when it came to her blushes.
He was now in the tree outside her house, pondering whether or not now would be a good time to visit her. Looking at his watch, he decided against it. It was almost two in the morning. No doubt she would be asleep.
Sighing, Ikuto started to jump from the tree…
…but stopped when he saw a small light come on in Amu’s room.
So she was awake. Why wasn’t she in bed? Especially this late at night?
Ikuto moved to the balcony and peered in through the glass, careful to make sure he stuck to the shadows so as not to alert her to his presence just yet. He could see her sitting at her desk, a small light turned on, and a notebook open in front of her. Miki, the blue Chara, was floating near her, drawing pad open as she moved her hand across the page.
Ikuto looked at Amu, his eyes widening slightly at the sight she presented. Her face was serious and concentrated. Her hand wrote with a swift accuracy that not many people had, and she paused only once or twice to think. She never scribbled something out, always going back and fixing a mess up, or rewriting a sentence. In that moment, Ikuto wanted nothing more than to read the words she was writing with such care. To see exactly what she was writing that could give her that small half-smile and such bittersweet eyes.
Looking at that expression didn’t make him doubt what he’d seen that morning. In fact, it made it all the more likely that what he’d seen was true. Never before had he seen Amu with bittersweet eyes or a half-smile before, and in his opinion, it made her look beautiful. Made him want to take a picture to look at whenever he wished to, and at the same time, made him want to hold her against him until that look left her eyes forever.
Ikuto sighed silently. Only Amu. Only she could make him feel things, desire things, that he shouldn’t. That he’d never wanted before. He’d never thought he’d feel this way about anything, especially not Amu, the person he’d once had to consider an enemy.
Ikuto watched for a while, until Amu finally closed the notebook and turned off the light, crawling into bed moments later. Miki followed suit, floating to her egg and settling down.
When he was sure she was asleep, he opened the door and silently moved in, not making a single noise. He moved over to the desk, and opened the notebook. Cat-like himself, he wasn’t surprised he had little trouble making out the words on the page. It was what he read there that surprised, shocked, and delighted him.
It was him. Short stories about him. He read through one, then flipped to the one she’d just written. The Blue Haired Boy was scrawled across the top of the page in her writing. His eyes widened as he read a recollection of what she remembered the day they’d first met more than five years ago. When he’d tried to take her eggs from her, and made her blush for the first time.
He looked through more, until he found one that made him pause. This one was written in first person, and was about what she imagined to happen when they next saw each other after his long absence. His eyes widened at the kissing scene she’d inserted, more so at the words her character said at the end.
“I love you. I want you. I missed you.”
Ikuto felt the notebook slip from his fingers, but by the time he came out of his daze and noticed it, it was already too late for him to catch it. The notebook toppled to the floor, and Ikuto bent to pick it up, thinking that surely the sound had been too soft to wake her up.
That is, until he heard her voice whisper through the darkness.
“Ikuto?”



Yoru waited outside while Ikuto went through the balcony doors. He’d been excited just seeing Miki through the glass, and barely managed not to rush inside and blow their cover. Alley cat he may be, but that didn’t mean he was swift or as capable of blending into shadows as Ikuto was. Na, he was more of an in-your-face kind of kitty. And he thought Miki liked that about him.
Yoru couldn’t contain himself anymore and moved into the room, heading towards Miki’s egg. She’d been drawing something, and he wanted to see what it was.
As he closed the distance between himself and the egg, he noticed Ikuto flipping through the pages of a notebook-the one Amu’d been writing in.
Yoru smiled slightly. Ikuto hadn’t been himself in the time they’d been running. He’d been sadder. Even less talkative than before, and since he’d never talked much, it made it nearly impossible to speak with him. Today, though, as they’d followed Amu around, he’d been talking more, and a smile had been present almost every time Yoru’d looked at him.
Yoru reached the egg, and slowly lifted the lid.
“Hee, kawaii,” he said when he first glimpsed the sleeping Miki. She looked cute, her face smooth and peaceful in sleep.
Yoru closed the egg behind him, careful not to nudge her while he moved. The egg was small, but with her curled up at the bottom asleep, there was just enough space for him to hover above her at the top. He reached for the drawing pad, and opened it carefully.
With a cat’s eyes, he could easily see the drawings inside. A wide grin covered his face as he looked at pages covered completely with pictures of him.
“So she does like me, nya,” he said out loud, then clasped his hand over his mouth when he realized he’d spoken aloud.
Miki stirred beneath him, and suddenly light was pouring in the egg as she lifted off the top.
Miki looked up at him, wide-eyed. He grinned in response. Then, slowly, quietly, she whispered, “Yoru?”