A/N: I’ve just come back from holiday, and weirdly, I’ve been doing more writing than I do when I’m at home. Maybe Vitamin D influences me to write, haha. Anyway, I have a couple of new ficlets, but the other one is in desperate need of editing, so it’ll be up later. This one should be ok though, hopefully! Prompt word is number 42: annoy. It’s set sometime after chapter 11 of Monochrome, but you don’t need to read it for this to make sense, I don’t think. I hope you all enjoy reading it. And thank you so much for the reviews for the last ficlet, I was so happy that you guys thought the characters were written in character, I consider that such a huge compliment!

Sugar

If you asked, he could probably tell you anything you might want to know about Ling Xiaoyu. Favourite colour? Yellow, of course (like her it’s cheery and bright and lifts your mood and reminds you of sunshine).

Favourite food? She says Chinese steamed buns are her favourite, but she also has a huge weakness for the overpriced praline chocolate bars from the school vending machines, if the fact that she always flashes him the death glare if he forgets or comes back with something else is anything to go by. Said death glare isn’t exactly intimidating, but the way her face lights up when he hands her chocolate over is kinda cute, so he tries not to disappoint her if he can help it. (Sometimes he has to go to a few different vending machines before he finds it, but when she asks what took so long he shrugs and tells her he needed a smoke.)

Favourite season? Summer, stupid. Especially when school’s over and she can drag him and Miharu to whatever amusement park she can afford and beg him to win her plush toys when she’s had enough of the rollercoasters. Miharu buys them both candyfloss, and she offers to share it with him even though he’s explained repeatedly that he hates sickly, sugary crap like that. She ignores him every time, telling him it’s yummy and waving it in front of his face until he rolls his eyes and says “I think I’d prefer a beer, somehow.” Then it’s her turn to roll her eyes, hugging whatever plush toy he’s managed to win from the crane games (he rocks at those, but the bastards are rigged and he usually spends more trying to win them than he would have if he were to just buy her one from the gift shop) to her chest.

“And you say candyfloss is gross?”

Her favourite animal? Panda. Her favourite subject at school? Any free period. Celebrity crush? That girly looking Jaejoong guy from DBSK. Best friends? Him and Miharu.

Sometimes that fact irritates him. Sometimes he wishes they weren’t friends at all. No, that’s not it. He’d miss her smiles and (annoyingly) sunny disposition, and her irritating way of insisting on trying to cheer him up when he wants nothing more than to sit and sulk. (But if they weren’t so close, maybe she’d see him differently, and that might be worth not being friends.)

See him differently? So how does she see her best friends, exactly?

Well, Miharu’s the one she can get excited about pointless stuff like clothes and shoes and her favourite band’s new PV with. Miharu’s the one she can talk to about girly stuff like whatever guy she’s crushing on.

Him? He’s the one she can count on to make her laugh, to be the bad influence who tempts her to skip out on class and jump on the back of his bike and tear off to who knows where while all her classmates listen to English drone on about the metatheatrical elements of Hamlet. He’s also the one she runs to whenever she’s upset, and it’s stupid, but whenever she does, he can’t rest until he knows he’s managed to cheer her up in some small way. Seeing Xiaoyu upset puts him in a mood too, and that fact irritates the hell out of him. He doesn’t know why it’s happening, she’s hardly the type of girl he usually goes for, all sunshine and lollipops (and he’s supposed to hate anything sugary) but his feelings for Ling Xiaoyu are deepening, and he really wishes they weren’t.

Especially since the last time she ran to him, upset, it turned out to be because of her deepening feelings for Jin Kazama.