A/N: I wrote this with the intent of writing a truly Victorian-inspired fanfic. The setting of DGM offers so many opportunities that it's a shame more fanfic writers don't take advantage of it.
Nevertheless, my knowledge of Victorian England is sadly limited. I'm very thankful for the help of my sister, history major and expert on gay Victorian men, but any historical errors here are entirely my own fault.
I don't own D. Gray-Man.
Piccadilly offered very little respite for an unquiet mind. The cacophony of whores and drug dealers and street vendors would normally be the last place Kanda could ever find peace from the many memories that daily assaulted his brain. Except for one thing Piccadilly had to offer that few other places in London had in as much abundance.
The turn was onto a narrow, dirty alleyway with unremarkable buildings. In fact, the first few times, Kanda had missed the house completely and wandered through Piccadilly Circus aimlessly, too embarrassed to retrace his steps and locate the right entryway.
This time, however, he opened the unlabeled door and marched up dirty stairs, his heart consistently in his mouth, regretting his desire to give into temptation once more.
Until he saw the boys and remembered exactly why he was here.
The first was a lean, slender blond, whose slightly open shirt revealed bare, hairless chest. The typical Hellenic ideal. Not at all Kanda's type.
Next to him was another small and slim boy, this time with darker skin and hair.
And then the redhead. Right build, right tone of skin, right absinthe eyes. Worth however many coins he asked, even if it were a month of Kanda's entire income. A quick question, and then a few pounds retrieved from his pocket and handed to an older gentleman, before answering the boy's subtle finger-curl and following him into a barren room, just to forget for one painful, fleeting moment.
A bottle of wine rested on a side table next to the bed. Cheap, but still more than Kanda could afford on a regular basis. Not many jobs available for a man whose only qualification was Former Exorcist. The boy expertly corked it and poured two glasses. Their rims were peppered with little cracks.
As Kanda slowly approached the bed where the boy now sat, the scent of the wine wafted towards him, forcing a lotus of a memory to bloom before his eyes, carrying with it a night of drunkenness on a roof, drunkenness from alcohol and lust and love. Only then it wasn't wine in the glasses but absinthe, pilfered from the kitchen along with sugar cubes and slotted spoons and carafes of water to dilute the spirit with.
The boy handed Kanda the wine, reaching the glass up so that the image of the boy and the lotus split in the cracks like a sheet of paper tearing. A few glasses would make the images split further, blur together until lotus and boy were almost inseparable and Kanda could very nearly convince himself that they were one and the same, love and lust intertwined in each touch.
But perhaps only absinthe could completely achieve that effect.
A few sips of wine was a proper start, though, and with a few sips came the entire glass, and with the entire glass came at least the comfort to sit down as another lotus bloomed, blood-red against the light of a sun that had set a year ago, tingeing the green hue of two uncracked glasses of absinthe. That color was in the boy's eyes, in the eyes of that lotus of a memory as Kanda's hand worked its way up through neat bangs and messy bangs, watched by two green eyes and one eye of pure licorice-flavored liqueur.
The glass wasn't cracked enough. More wine was needed.
Kanda downed the second cup faster than necessary to appreciate it, and for once he was thankful for his low tolerance for the stuff. The lotuses were enveloping his vision, and the taste of licorice was on his tongue. Deft fingers worked their way up his shirt, undoing buttons, and the rough wind at the roof of the building blew his hair out of its tie.
The green fairy had loosened his lips and tongue, prompting a shy kiss and then another, hesitant fingers removing clothes and roaming over each newly-exposed inch of bare, shivering skin.
Kanda could barely see past the lotuses now, not that sight was necessary when touch and taste were so vital now. The wine glass slipped from fingers which needed to touch mouths and ribs and nipples and hips. It shattered on the floor into endless pieces, blood-staining the carpet.
Hips ground together in the awkwardness and naïveté of first love and first lust and first drunken bacchanalia. Lips and fingers everywhere pleasure would yield. It took hours and seconds, time split into as many pieces as the glass on the floor, reality possessing as many holes as the perforations of the absinthe spoon.
Afterwards, the boy lit a cigarette, and as the flame caught the end of it in a chaste embrace, the momentary light threw his face into sharp reality.
It was impossible to lose oneself now, when cheap tobacco overwhelmed the delicate scent of alcohol, and eyes once lost to the green fairy were instead hazel, like the nuts sold by the vendors on the streets outside. Kanda stumbled out of the dream, pulling on his clothes as he dodged the shards of broken glass at his feet.
He would have to find another whorehouse now, another place where he could save his money for a day when the unreachable was tangible again, and could be woven through his fingers like so many strands of bright red hair.
The final lotusmemory bloomed and wilted before his eyes, the petals falling away to expose lips well kissed, tasting of that exquisite escape only absinthe seemed to offer. Kanda had seen this one lotus born and dead so many times over, had seen the lips part slowly and enunciate with aching clarity so many times over. "Goodbye, Yu," the lips had whispered.
And the glass of absinthe had shattered too.