Into the Hands that I Lift
Summary: Sometimes conversations start with words, and sometimes they don't need words at all.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I don't own Darker than Black, and I sure as hell ain't making a profit off this work. Title from a Pablo Neruda poem. (Whether DTB Season 2 happened or not is up to you.)
1.
Yin has tried very hard to learn how to smile, and now she thinks she's figured it out.
It takes a bit more than she's used to – is this called effort? – as feeling something is warm and alien and leaves her with a funny feeling in her stomach.
She cannot see herself in a mirror, cannot see at all without her specters, but she can reach up and feel the muscles in her face twitch and shift. She feels along her skin, smooth under her fingers (and isn't it strange she notices this), moves the tips until she touches the very corner of her lips.
"You know, someone might think you're about to give your kiss away," a voice interrupts, and she turns and looks through the darkness, fingers lingering. She ponders this. A kiss? The word echoes in her, bringing back a memory of listening to her mother's voice, sweet with love, bringing to life late into the night fantastic tales of wild boy-princes and pirates and fairies.
The silence starts to ring, and Yin realizes her partner is expecting a reply. She starts to map the contours of her upper lip with her index finger. She pauses. Thinks. "My mouth is not an Eastern puzzle box."
This earns her a sharp bark of a laugh, and she can hear surprise in it. Hei is not a man of much humor, she knows well, but for some reason she can amuse him at times just by speaking her mind.
She thinks she'd like to learn how to laugh, too.
The Contractor is still chuckling, and from the light rustling of clothes she imagines he's shaking his head. "You've read Peter Pan?" he asks, moving to where she knows the little kitchenette is located. She tracks his footsteps. He stops by the sink, and the sound of running water fills the apartment.
Yin likes water. Likes the paradox of its constant inconstancy. If she struggles to come up with the words to describe it, she will almost say it feels like coming home.
Then there is the seeing. It's changed since the incident at the Gate; she no longer has to be in physical contact with a body of water to be able to see, only be in the same area. She doesn't know how to explain it, never having seen before, but now it's almost as if she were a part of the water, peering out at the world.
Every body of water is different, and she finds she likes it: a stream of rainwater from a gutter is swift and plunging, while a pool of canal water is calm and still. Each gives a different feel to the seeing, sometimes bringing sharp staccato flashes of images, sometimes clear pictures, colors painful to her mind's eye.
When she is with them, she thinks she can almost feel again.
"Yin?" Hei sounds calm. Lightly chiding. She sees, suddenly, the hand he's thrust under the faucet, the red and black of charred skin. She refocuses, and his profile stands in sharp contrast against the foreground of trickling water. He's looking at her over his shoulder.
She straightens, lowers her hand from her mouth. He's frowning now; she sees the crease between his brows deepening. "You know, your hair is falling down," he says. She dully wonders if that was an indirect order.
"You should fix it." Within the water, she looks in her direction while taking a few steps into her line of sight. She cannot see herself – it's as if there is no one there.
"…I am blind to myself," she states softly, and she hears him stifle a snort at the non sequitur. Aren't we all?" he mutters, and for some reason she doesn't like his tone She steps closer. It reminds her too much of the before time, when they weren't hiding together.
"I can see you," she tells him. Hei straightens and faces her. She can only see his back now, and the line of it is straight and stiff, and she is inexplicably reminded of Mao. She moves past him and reaches for the water faucet, turning the knob.
Silence settles in the room, and Yin thinks she might have figured this out too. She waits a few heartbeats. Then she begins.
"In the time before, my mother read Peter Pan to me every night before I went to sleep," she's staring right through him, she knows, because she hears him shift uncomfortably, "She made me believe he was real. I wanted to be a Lost Boy. I felt sorry for Captain Hook." And she did, too. She remembers crying for him (tears are lost to her now, but there's nothing she can do about it).
"I wanted to learn what thimbles were," she finishes, and she can feel him staring. She knows this is more than she's said to him in weeks, but…something seems to be happening to her. As if she's waking up from a deep, dark sleep. She thinks she likes it, but isn't sure yet.
Time passes. The little watch Hei keeps with his backpack beeps, telling them it was half past the hour. Yin can feel sunlight creeping over her from the small window behind her. It was nearly time for dinner.
Finally, he speaks. "I wanted to be a Lost Boy, too," he tells her, and he's moving past her, and the back of his hand brushes against her arm and she shivers. Something is very much happening, and she thinks she likes it.
She surprises herself when the right-hand corner of her lips quirks upwards.
2.
"Hei."
"Yes?"
"What is color?"
Silence.
"…a part of life that gives things depth and meaning, I suppose."
"…I do not understand."
"Hm. Well, if everything were black and white, or shades of gray, keeping track of things would be a lot less complicated, right?"
"…Possibly."
"But at the same time, if people weren't able to tell the difference between colors, life would be boring. I guess colors make things interesting."
"But…if I cannot see it for its color, is it still that color?"
A laugh. "I'm not a philosopher, Yin, but I do think that you've got it easy."
"Oh?"
"Absolutely. You can know things without having to rely on the most inaccurate sense humans have. Our eyes deceive us."
"…Oh."
3.
Hei is pulling her through the afternoon crowd, and his hand is warm over her own. The people pushing past her come close, and the feel of foreign shoulders against her makes her tense and shrink into herself.
They are hiding in the chaos of Ginza's streets. Hei gets the odd paranoid urge to do this occasionally – to 'throw the trackers off their scent', as he puts it. She herself doesn't think they smell that bad, and when she voices this thought, he just shakes his head.
One particularly aggressive shopper bumps into her and makes her stumble. Her partner squeezes her hand, and they continue. Yin trusts him to keep her safe, even if he can't keep strangers from moving into her personal space.
He changes direction suddenly, and cold air rushes over them. They must be in a department store now. The smell of fresh leather and perfumes rushes up to meet her, and she struggles not to breathe through her nose.
He squeezes her hand again, twice, asking if she's okay. She nods. She can't quite explain why she needs to not worry him, but she does all the same. They're still moving through the cracks in the crowd, and he deftly navigates them to the large fountain in the center of the building.
He leads her to the edge, and she takes a seat. She reaches up to adjust the dark wig Hei bought for her; it itches, but she cannot scratch without disturbing it. He sits beside her, and sighs.
Except for the sounds of civilization around them, she would think they were alone.
She bumps her shoulder against his, curious about the sighing. She dips a finger into the fountain, revels in the sight just sitting by it brings. She sees nameless and faceless people walking past, never giving the couple a second glance. She sees colorful advertisements and people dressed in ridiculous outfits.
She sees how Hei has positioned them just behind a large potted plant, far from the danger of security cameras.
He shifts, and she turns her head towards him to signal her attention. He sighs again, then: "I suppose I'm just tired."
She nods after a breath, but doesn't understand. To be tired, in her limited experience, is to fall behind. And to fall behind means capture, and at worst, death. She's reasonably sure she doesn't want to die, but now she's not so sure about her partner. She stares at the back of his head in mild confusion.
"It's just…" he continues, "I don't like running. I'm not used to it." He crosses his arms, and she sees it then, the tension in his frame. She wonders when he started to talk to her, to share his thoughts and worries.
She looks down to her hand in the water, and thinks.
Yin blinks slowly, trying to take in all the details. Trying to feel something. They're sitting closer now, and his breath brushes against her cheeks every few seconds. A child veers in their direction, laughing loudly, before his mother pulls him back into the steady stream of people flowing beside them. Hei's eyelashes look very long from this angle, but his mouth is making a tense little moue of unhappiness.
She finds she doesn't like this look on him, so she says the only thing she's never told him before: "It's going to be okay."
Hei looks at her and nods sharply, relaxing a bit. He reaches for her hand and they stand together, disappearing into the crowd in a matter of moments.
4.
They switch cities every month like clockwork, moving from continent to continent when there's a definitive sign the Syndicate is on their trail. Yin grows well-versed in reading Hei's mood by merely stepping into a room. If he's tense, the air seems to vibrate; if he's calm, the air is quiet and still.
It's not a perfect system. They're not the well-oiled team they used to be, ever since they went on the run; the absence of Huang and Mao resonates in the empty spaces between them, in the words they don't say. They're both quiet, usually, and at times it grows strained and awkward. Hei goes out when that happens.
Yin never asks him where he goes.
This time, though, in the silence that stretches between them (they've just finished settling into their new apartment in Montreal), Yin speaks before Hei can move towards the door.
"When it rains," she says, then stops. Waits to see if Hei is still leaving. When he shows no sign of moving, she continues.
"When it rains," she says again, "it's like watching the world through falling stars."
"Ah," Hei says, breathes, and doesn't move. If he were any other person, Yin thinks absently, he would be shifting his weight from side to side. But he's too well-trained for that.
"…When it thunders, what do you hear?" she asks, curious in her distant way. She'd always pictured dragons, twining their way through the storm clouds, calling out their victories to the world.
Yin doesn't know if that's her memory or a memory-from-before.
Her partner is silent, but this time it's contemplative. Yin waits and breathes and waits longer, because waiting has always been an easy thing for her to do.
"I hear freedom," Hei says softly, and somehow, without needing a specter, Yin can see the gentle smile on her partner's face.
She nods and kneels, folding her hands in her lap, and when Hei goes to make dinner instead of wandering off, their silence is mutually companionable.
5.
If ever Yin were to learn what this feeling is, this mountain of warmth spreading from her chest to the tops of her ears and her fingers and toes, tingling in her throat and bringing color to her cheeks, making her curiously, oddly, confusingly light—
Yin would mouth its name to herself, shaping the vowels and consonants, and make it her own.
She wonders if Hei might know.
+1
Hei knows.