[Orific] Maybe Tomorrow

Title: Maybe Tomorrow

Author: Vianna Orchidia

Rating: K+

Genre: Romance/Humor

Word Count: 861

Warning: short, no real plot, weird and maybe doesn't make sense. Misstypo and vocab and grammar. Title taken from the song 'maybe tomorrow' by Kajiura Yuki.

A/N: Wrote this in a whim. I just needed to write something to make my head lighter. Heh. And meet my two OCs from my unwritten story, Dreamweaver. The girl is pure Japanese whose mother remarried with an Indonesian man, so she now lives in Indonesia. The man is Indonesian, teaches Nihongo at girl's school. Stuff happens and, bam, they're going out. So if a student-teacher relationship disturbs you, feel free to leave this post.

-story start-

It was easy to know she had stuff in her head. Maybe a lot. It made her unconsciously frown from time to time, with those thin lips pursed just a tiny bit. The way she showed it was subtle, but more than enough for him to recognize and sigh.

At first he wanted to leave her alone; she's already grown-up enough to solve her own problems, he reasoned. But as the frown continued to appear—it's the third day, for God's sake!—he couldn't help but feeling uneasy either. Especially when he's looking at her, intently, but she didn't even budge.

The usual Hikaru would, at least, glance back.

“Hikaru?” the tall man cautiously approached. As the younger girl raised her head from the papers, he almost sighed at the foreign solemnity clouding her eyes. Fortunately the sigh didn't escape his lips, because she would definitely dislike it, saying that a sigh always made him seem older.

“Yeah, sensei?”

Febrian clicked his tongue in dismay. “Drop it, will you? I know we're at school and all, but it's just the two of us.”

A slight grin played at her lips—a not so bright grin, he grimly noticed—before she shook her head. “Just playing it safe,” she said.

“All right, whatever,” Febrian raised his hands in a gesture of defeat. “Anyway, Hikaru,” he leaned closer to her eye level, “something hapened?”

As a girl who had done many teatrical play, though not in the serious sense as she did it in her cosplay competitions, Hikaru sure developed a nice expressive face. Shock smeared her eyes at first, then her features scrunched into a deviant defensive expression. It was just too hard to let it slip—he had learned how to read her like an open book.

“No,” she muttered as she shot her head back to the papers she had to score, but her fingers seemed to clutch them a little too strongly. “Why ask?”

“Well, for starters, you suck at lying,” his lips curved into a huge grin, and his index finger moved to poke her at the nose, earning a whine of protest from her. His obsidian orbs softened at the sight of her slightly flushed cheeks. “And, you need more practice if you want to hide your troubled feelings. Especially from me.”

Hikaru batted her teacher-slash-boyfriend's hand away before placing the papers back down. Looked like she'd be going for nothing with those if she didn't finish this conversation first. “Thanks for the advice, sensei.” She put an emphasis at the last word, and her mood escalated slightly at the playful frown Febrian pulled. She always liked teasing him about this.

“Don't call me sensei,” he said, almost pouting.

“Don't poke your nose into my problems,” she cleverly replied.

Febrian shook his head then crossed his arms in front of his chest. “Am not. You just looked a bit too gloomy for my liking so I wanted to cheer you up.”

The Japanese girl smiled at the flutters of butterfly wings in her belly as a reaction of Febrian's honest statement of his caring. “Well, I'm flattered,” she paused to giggle, because this much is literally true, “but haven't you heard about something called women's period and PMS?”

The male went into a trance as his internal gears processed this newly told information. Two seconds, and he widened his eyes. “You mean, you're just—”

“Positive,” Hikaru cackled while holding up her index and middle finger, forming a 'peace' sign. “But... huh, maybe you did well in your attempt to cheer me. I do feel a lot better now.” She flashed him a big grin, before bursting into laughter again.

However, Febrian was mostly not happy about this—okay, he was relieved that Hikaru was fine, but— “So I got worried over nothing...,” he massaged his temple, and it made her laugh even more uncontrolled.

“Sorry, Ian,” the bronze-haired teen patted his thigh. “And thanks.” Her smile was warm and sincere, and suddenly Febrian didn't feel any regret at all. This Hikaru with her dashing smile—as long as he could make her this way again, he would go to the end of the world. Literally and figuratively.

“Now, let me score these papers, will you? Or, maybe you'd rather do it yourself?” she teased, knowing well that the only thing Febrian hated about being a teacher was the students' papers.

“No thanks,” as Hikaru expected, he quickly rejected her offer. “I'll go get some drink, okay?” he stood up and placed his hand on her shoulder. “What do you want?”

“Hmm, strawberry juice, from counter number 2, please?”

“You always request that, don't you get bored?” he chuckled then took off.

After Febrian left, Hikaru sighed once, long. Her face dimmed again as her shoulders slumped a bit. “Sorry, Ian, can't tell you anything about this...” she whispered.

If he said she sucked at lying, then he's definitely wrong. He didn't even realize she was lying about her stress being the result of PMS. No, it was not. It was of something much darker, and she couldn't afford anyone to know...

-fin-