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merryfortune · 1 year

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Lip Balm for Your Soul

Written for the 100ships Challenge on Dreamwidth

Prompt #64 Lipstick

Title: Lip Balm for Your Soul

Ship: Manatsu/Minori

Fandom: Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure

Word Count: 2,057

Rating: T

Tags: Crushes, Pining, Practice Kissing, LGBTQ Themes

Minori isn't the kind of person to wear her heart on her sleeve. Or her cheek, not in her hair nor the beds of her nails, and perhaps not even in the shine of her eyes hidden behind her glasses in a perpetual glare. But she especially does not show her heart upon her lips.

And yet…

Lately, she had been thinking about her lips. Or more specifically about lipstick.

Minori isn't the type of girl to like or worry about make-up. She's a humble nerd. To try and dress her up would be a futile effort, like putting pearls before swine, surely. She wasn’t exactly the most attractive girl going, she liked her frumpy outfits and her blunt personality just the way she was so there was no point in dolling her up. It would be a waste of resource, only to wipe it away at the end of the day, unsuccessful and likely bitter. She simply would not feel like herself.

And yet…

Manatsu succeeded.

It was just a small thing. Just a smear and a share of lipstick but it was enough to transform not only Minori but Minori’s long held feelings of apathy and even outright disdain towards makeup and conventional beauty standards. She liked it. She liked the feeling of Manatsu’s hand on her cheek as her other hand was steady. A tube of somewhat sparkly but still a somewhat nude pink lipstick pinched between her fingers as she did Minori’s lips.

Mwah.

That was the noise that Manatsu had made when she finished, instructing Minori to rub her lips together. Like a kiss. And the tube of lipstick, it belonged to Manatsu, she had used it previously and she would use it again after with no care despite Minori having used it so… It was like an indirect kiss too.

That one little onomatopoeia. It was enough to make Minori’s heart flutter even though her long held opinions ought to have instructed her to feel repulsed. But she didn’t. She rubbed her lips together and held onto that not a real or actual kiss, indirect kiss.

This little incident, on the precipice of becoming Cure Papaya, really stuck in Minori’s mind.

It was chaotic and random and impossible and it was just the first rainfall before the actual downpour. The deluge of whimsy and magic that followed was grander and more bombastic than the last. Mermaids were real. They were stronger than the foes that they vanquished. They became the best of friends and biggest supporters of one another.

Minori wanted to write her story again. Even though she hated it.

It was that moment in which Manatsu had used her tube of lipstick on Minori which was the moment that she had changed. Physically, literally, and even emotionally. That was the moment that Minori replayed over and over in her head, picking apart the recollections and how it felt again in the present and more. As if she was editing a manuscript.

So now, from zero to one hundred, Minori was not only thinking about things that she used to dislike, like lipstick or the flaws in her writing, but about Manatsu, too.

Manatsu was her junior. Manatsu was very active and loud and over the top. Manatsu was also a girl. And in all her totality, the extremes and whims that she was so capricious with, that included being Minori’s crush. Not that she knew it - or so Minori hoped, she seemed very oblivious regarding that sort of thing.

Totally unlike Minori who was closeted but comfortable with her lesbianism, just not ready to come out and especially not confess to the object of her admiration, either. It appeared in her own writing, like a reflection of her own psyche, the mermaid making for the perfect symbol for what was othered and unattainable. She had always known on some level that she had zero interest in the opposite sex and that she preferred her own. She had always been that way, even when she was small. Minori couldn’t begin to predict what Manatsu’s orientation was, however, and would also find it a teensy bit rude to speculate but she didn’t hope.

Why would she?

They were so externally incompatible and yet. The very essence of Manatsu, the sunshine within her that made her her which captivated Minori. She adored how Manatsu pursued every dimension within herself. How she contained multitudes and cared not for if they were contradictory or later uninteresting to her. She tried everything, she unabashedly was everything she could be at once.

So unlike Minori who, for so long, was certain she could only be one thing. A frumpy girl. A hard faced girl. All the cliche opinions that should come with it, like being against makeup or finding no use in trying otherwise, not even for a moment of pampering.

Not even, as her Mother suggested, “Oh, Minori, dear,” her Mother piped up over Minori’s reveries as she wrote them down in her diary, “your lips look so chapped. You should get some lip balm.”

Minori looked up from her diary entry that she was so dutifully filling out. A record of her daily life, no frills, no fancy. Hence why she could write so out in the open, even when she was having redolent thoughts about her crush, and she blinked owlishly upon this disruption. She paused to consider what her mother had said to her. She licked her own lips. They felt dry, they even tasted chapped somehow. She hummed to herself.

“You're right.” she agreed and then hummed again. “I think I’ll buy some then when I’m in the store next.”

Her Mother laughed, yeah, right but she didn’t say it, “If you remember, I know you don’t like that sort of thing.”

“Yeah…” Minori mumbled.

However, she did remember. Of course she did. Her Mother may not yet be aware of the internal changes that Minori had encountered in her private life as a Pretty Cure but she was. They were important to her. Important to her as a reflection of her crush on Manatsu, especially.

And so, the following day, Minori picked out a tube of lip balm for herself.

Papaya flavoured, no less.

Though artificially flavoured so it likely bore no resemblance to the actual fruit which did diminish some of Minori’s excitement for it and yet.

She simply could not help herself when her eyes noticed that particular flavour.

She had gone into the aisle expecting herself to choose something flavourless as a bare minimum. Maybe honey or melon flavoured but as soon as Minori saw the tropically coloured packaging, she felt herself smile and a very peculiar tug on her heartstrings. It was undoubtedly the flavour that Manatsu would have picked out for her, she thought.

So she bought it and could not have been more excited for it.

At least in the realm of her heart, anyway. Her face, meanwhile, was stony as she went through the self serve check out and her walk home, too. Yet all the while, her heart was quaking within her chest as her inner dialogue spieled with hopelessly romantic purple prose narrating her the journey of her purchase and walk back from the store. But when she arrived at her house, she had to temper herself so as to not just race through her house to get to the bathroom.

And Minori discovered a new faucet in which she and Manatsu were so dissimilar.

She recalled the smooth application of Manatsu’s hand, so steady, as she moved the scrolled up tube of lipstick across Minori’s lips and though that action was so simple. Minori found herself unable to replicate it. Her hand trembled as she got too close to the mirror, trying to apply the lip balm to herself.

Was it nerves? Was it inexperience? Minori was unsure but as she burdened herself with all these calculations of it, the tremble worsened but still. She completed the task. Left to right and then.

Mwah.

Minori felt her heart skip a beat as she completed the final step of smushing her lips together and rubbing in the lip balm onto her skin. She wanted a kiss. A real kiss. Not an indirect one, not the implications of a kiss, and she wanted to kiss Manatsu most of all.

Minori met her own eyes in the reflection of the mirror. She had been so zoomed in, so focused, that she hadn’t seen herself until this very moment in which she, quite literally, took a step back. She flattened her foot against the bathroom tiles as she held onto the sink.

Her eyes were her charm point.

With or without glasses, the blue of them was beautiful and oceanic. Her eyelashes were long, long enough to touch the lenses of her glasses which could be problematic from time to time but she didn’t mind. She batted them at herself, wishing she could be batting them at Manatsu.

The rest of her was not her charm point.

A blunt fringe which kept everyone away but not out of her eyes. An expression which was often hard to read at the best of times. Dimples and other abrasions of the skin, stray hairs and the like in her eyebrows or on her chin. The normal things of a normal adolescent girl. A pimple which was just going down on the side of her cheek.

A girl who did not like nor wanted to wear makeup. A girl who pined to wear lipstick prettily. A girl who was all one thing and too stuck in her way to be anything else.

So entirely unlike Manatsu.

She wanted to do everything. There was nothing that she actually wanted to do. She laughed, she cried. She was loud and gawky and never said anything of import until she did in which her wisdom was clunky but so earnest. It was even inspiring. That was Manatsu’s victory.

Minori trembled in her hand again as she tasted the sunken in flavour of her papaya lip balm. She leaned in. She wanted a kiss. She thought about Manatsu and how she wanted a kiss from Manatsu most of all.

This, still, was not a real kiss.

It was pathetic, if anything. To practise kissing in the mirror, dreaming of a crush who was neither this way nor that way, changing like the wind at sea perpetually. And yet Minori did it.

She embraced it. It was another expression of her own inauthenticity. Her writing which drew upon no real expression and was self censored at the best of times, too, whenever she touched too close on her personal themes. The mermaid and the sailor could only ever be friends. Minori wasn’t ready to write them otherwise, just yet. Just like she had never actually tasted the flesh of a papaya yet either, for now, kissing the mirror and writing bad writing was all she could do.

But pulling away from the mirror, it's cold touch and even moving away from her reflection, emptying it, Minori was happy with the taste of artificially flavoured papaya lip balm and the way it became a smudged halo on the glass. The orange-yellow stamp of her lips going mwah with only the white walls reflected as a background.

It made Minori smile a very tiny smile. She was content with this, for now, as fake and amateur as it was as it came with the hope that the next story might be better written.

More real. The actual taste of papayas. The actual sensation of an actual kiss, what it did to her internal narration and to her endocrine system. With Manatsu maybe, too.

She wanted to wear lipstick.

Whether it was papaya flavoured or not. Whether it was applied by herself or not, by Manatsu or not.

At the end of her story, Minori wanted to be able to wear her heart on her cheek, or on her sleeve or in her hair, in her nail beds or most important of all, in her eyes. She wanted them to be bright and in love and shining with precious memories all encapsulated. She wanted to contain multitudes the way that Manatsu did, that she didn’t need to be just one thing and never the other.

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