Yet still : we strive
An ode and love letter to a series that taught me how to live again. Thank you for everything, Ishida-sensei, and may you strive on too.
Also! See words that aren't English? Don't go Google searching yet because they will not be nearly as pretty as the translations at the end. Trust me.
Last note: A lot of my formatting was destroyed by FFN, so if you'd like to check out the "truer" version of this fic please see the AO3 crosspost!
-1 : eris
There is nothing she is certain of, except that she is alone.
Living in a city with record population density, it makes for irony of fantastic proportions. Or perhaps tragedy. She is content with either, knowing they are the turnstiles upon which the world unwinds slowly.
She stands and watches as the crowds sweep by:
Alone
alone
alone.
And these days
these endless endless days
of tangled mouths
and tethered legs —
and how she wishes
she could take the
world instead
and chain
it to
her
She takes words from all over; anywhere she can find them. Living in a city makes this far easier than she had anticipated — at all moments she is assaulted by strokes and letters and dark on light, clamoring for her attention.
In a public bathroom she finds splashed over the stall door: I will clamber through the clouds and exist.
In a library shelf she finds stowed in a dusty corner: There is a cage that I refuse; the key will be mine by dusk.
In a train station she finds carved into the stucco brick: Ars gratia artis.
And suddenly, she is no longer
so
alone.
And these days
these endless endless days
of tangled mouths
and tethered legs —
she watches as the world turns
day by day
around
its cage
(hers,
one day
soon)
She is fascinated — not necessarily by the city itself, with its jeweled lights and rivers of traffic, but rather by those within it. How the people stream away as crowds, how the people seem to endlessly know where they are going and how to get there, how the people carry on with their tiny intricate lives.
Even as she wanders, aimless, collecting her words. Waiting, watching. Here she will stay, she knows.
Perhaps, she thinks, perhaps one day — the world might turn upon these words.
Yes —
No —
Her words.
And these days
these endless endless days
of tangled mouths
and tethered legs —
while she waits
night after night
biding
her
time
She sits back from the screen and stares, lost in the realm of her own words. Her realm. The one so wrong, and so wronged.
Is this world ready? Can it face the truth?
Thoughtlessly she reaches up, touches her unfit eye.
Not yet. Not yet. ...Something must happen first.
She stands, moves towards the window that she almost never closes. It is her gateway to the world, the world she knows one day will be hers — and so she must keep her eye upon it.
The night skies are soft, glowing with reflected light from the city. She wonders what stars might look like, shrouded behind the city's unjust brightness.
First, secure the throne.
She steps forward, balancing her elbows on her windowsill, and looks down, down at those ribbons of light she knew were thousands upon thousands upon thousands of lives winding raucously down the city streets. Those lives of both humans, and... those not.
Neither knowing their place in this gilded birdcage world.
The truth needs to wait — just a little longer.
Yoshimura Eto draws back from the window and watches as Tokyo trundles onward, her dragon asleep still.
0 : righted
For whoever said
Happy endings were all lies?
We walk alongside —
if only we strive
and reach out just a little
higher, further, now
1 : phoenix
There are so, so many lines.
They cross the sky, the roads, between rising towers of steel and lives attempting to once again take root. Ties upon ropes upon wires: all seeking to somehow build up this city so painfully ravaged.
And to think that, somehow, it all began with a misstep, a misfortune.
(Not a mistake — he knows that now. Not exactly, not completely. Not when it has taken him so far, changed him so much. Changed the city, the world so much. To call it solely a mistake would be a mistake in and of itself.)
The wind picks up again and the lines swing gently, a soft conclusion to the cries that once filled the city streets as hatred rose upon hatred.
He treads down that familiar path of thought, wondering distantly if only he hadn't lost himself, found himself, lost himself, over and over and over in the feverish fugue that had been his life here.
I'm here, he reminds himself, the old brag of his heart against his own self-pity. I'm here, I'm alive. And I am better for what has happened.
The wind stills, and he watches as the ropes settle back into their sweeping loops. They are the only true mirrors of what the city really is: crossroads and happenstance, events and times and lives all crashing into one another, overlapping, intersecting.
And you are king. A voice, memory from lives past. This is yours.
No, he thinks, not mine. Not "his" — he knows that now. Not exactly, not completely. But something I have had a hand in. My side effect.
Somewhere within the city there is a ringing, weighted sound: the clarion echo of a metal heap as it is unloaded, dumped onto the concrete ground without ceremony. Beams. Steel beams, perhaps.
(He smiles.)
It is only day three of the reconstruction effort, but he already knows that something has ended, and another has begun. Something backlit by the beauty of life, rather than death: a struggle of a different breed. Perhaps kinder, more hopeful, but no less painful — maybe even more so.
But I am more than willing.
Kaneki Ken watches as Tokyo rises from its ashes, the phoenix to his dragon, finally slain.
2 : nor can i live without you
And there are no words, really
when it comes to this:
because is weightless,
cruel,
(ita vero)
when it comes to him.
I am not a plaything of yours,
strung upon beck and call
slave to your fingers,
however
masterfully
they may weave my whims and woes
he wants to shout at him.
Because
this
is not yours to take.
Not when it was something so new
something he thought had been
lost forever
to the unforgiving caverns of
[his own:
he realizes this now]
.
(for hope is not something kept
as a prisoner of war —
scorched earth is all that is permitted
to be left still standing
in its bone-stark absence)
But instead what he says is:
"Haven't you had enough of this? Because I have.
And now is the time for you to realize that the game is
just
that. A game."
Pointless.
(But then —
Everything
to him
was, after all)
He looks back,
unmoving and unwilling.
"So a game is what keeps me alive,"
he says plainly.
"So it has always been. I haven't changed; but
you
have."
(the truth they both know)
"This achieves nothing,"
he grits out,
gravel pressed through iron bars.
If only these skies would bend
down, to seep through their gaps,
and achieve the impossible
for him.
"Absolutely nothing. We're not teenagers anymore, Uta."
(the truth only he seems to know)
"So we aren't.
But that is besides the point, wouldn't you agree?"
And there are no words, really
when it comes to this:
a chasm
bottomless enough to make them both
cowards,
neither willing to lay the first plank —
(ex nihilo nihil fit
after all)
ever widening,
roaring the echoes of their own silent grief.
"Why do you keep doing this?"
even though you know
I have finally found tomorrows
worth fighting for
worth living for
"Why do you keep forcing us so near the line of no return?"
"Don't talk in circles."
"Then:
Why are you so entranced by having us both
on death's doorstep?"
He doesn't add:
We longed for it once,
because it was all that was left;
but how blind must you be
to miss
the way the city breathes now?
the way the masks are falling,
petals in a new wind?
the way something struggles here anew,
fighting its way to clear the skies
so that we can once again wait for sunrise without fear?
He does add:
"I want to live now.
With, or without you —
and that is up to whether or not I feel you are a
hindrance to that."
forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit,
(olim, olim
forsan olim) —
that mantra he now clings to.
"A hindrance?"
There are no words, really,
when it comes to this:
Disbelief is but a haze
next to the eruption that tears
blindingly open on his features,
a peer into the roiling storm beneath.
(yet still a deliberate farce,
even now)
"Is that what I am now? A hindrance?
What do you want me to be, then?"
And again
he wonders
where he really is,
buried underneath all those masks he's made
both for himself
and for the world
(terrible things both
with crying, prying eyes
neither of them things he was willing to face wholly)
Instead, what he says
is this,
the words lurching themselves
along railings of their own volition:
"What you are now?
Nobody knows that,
least of all me.
What do I want you to be?
I want you to be
alive.
Truly alive.
Living — not just breathing."
Finally,
the mask falls.
And under the bridge,
(a city's veins)
under crossed lines that join life to life to life to life
(a world's blood)
under a patchwork sky seeping with sunset painted sunrise once more
(a universe's heart, finally,
finally breathing)
for
in aeternum te amabo
a single blood lily spirals into bloom.
3 : as many times as it takes
He is found sometime in the third week of the city's recovery.
Something in him wishes he could have had a warning, but something else far louder is grateful that this is so out of the blue.
(Do I still deserve this? something else in between clamors lowly, an undercurrent beneath his gratitude. After everything? Everything I've done?)
"We should — talk," Urie says quietly, over the hesitant roar of the city traffic. The noise is growing louder still every day, a pool mirroring the skyscrapers rising taller still every day. Rebuilding.
"We should," Mutsuki replies, fighting the familiar ruts of habit to meet Urie's gaze. "I... Well, I think we've known we should. For a while."
We just... didn't.
They're sitting at a bench in the park again — again — and all it does is relight the paths once so shadowed by memory and overgrown by time. The wind rushes through the leaves overhead like impatience, and Mutsuki's line of sight can't help but trace the sweep of Urie's eyelids as he looks down towards his hands, linked between his knees.
Finally, Urie lifts his eyes back to Mutsuki's. "Will you be okay?"
Maybe. Soon. Not yet. I don't know. Sometime. Not yet. Maybe. Not yet not yet not yet I just don't know —
"I'm not sure," Mutsuki says carefully. "I — I want to think that I will be. But —"
But everything's still so much, but I still hurt and I don't know if I even should be after everything I've done, I shouldn't even be here, I shouldn't I don't I can't —
"So, you don't know."
He knows that's supposed to be a statement; but is it? Or is it another reminder of his own weakness, his own inability, all these failures chasing each other through the air in circles like headless crows over and over and over.
"That's fine," Urie is saying, and there's something new in his voice that Mutsuki can't quite place his finger on.
(But for the first time in what feels like eons, what he hears aren't knives and whisper-sharpened stares. Instead all he can think of is this: a clear blue sky, mottled and bright through the telephone lines cutting it into stained-glass panes.)
"Is it?" comes out instead.
"I think so," Urie replies. "I don't think it'd be fair to say you're supposed to know, so."
Mutsuki lets out a quiet breath and looks up through the leaves, squinting against the dappled sun. "I think you're right."
Silence seeps into the space between them, eases into the gaps between Mutsuki's fingers. But it's kind, and rounded at the edges: a bridging kind of silence, where the thing coming after glows with its own light and throws soft shadows into the side yet uncrossed.
Mutsuki wrings his knuckles together, looks down. The way they cross, slot into each other — not so long ago there had always been knife handles, sleek and cold, neatly fitted into these very slots. And he can't help but remember.
"Urie?" he asks, and folds his hands carefully on top of each other. "I... I don't think I told you that I'm sorry, about — well. Everything. And I really am, I just — I —"
I don't know if I can still say I'm right about anything anymore —
He expects this: half-hearted assurances, empty promises that everything will get better. He expects this: being pushed aside with that icy, breeze-brisk kindness he knows so well.
He expects everything but: "That doesn't matter."
Mutsuki's eyes jolt to stare at Urie, whose own stare is trained on the sidewalk.
And Urie's eyes — they are burning.
"That doesn't matter," Urie repeats firmly, louder, and it brings Mutsuki's thoughts up short. "What matters is that you're still here, and anyone who isn't absolutely fucking blind can see that you're trying. You're still trying, after all that, and you..." Urie breathes in, closes his eyes.
"You haven't left us."
It might be the most Mutsuki has ever heard Urie say in one go, and he can't help but keep staring. There's something tight in Urie's jaw and the rigidness of his throat, but it strikes Mutsuki as inexplicably open and bizarrely endearing.
And it makes him wonder: How do I strike him? Still a raging, insane killer?
And: Is that all I'll ever strike anyone as?
"...Don't make me regret saying all that."
And of course it's Urie that brings him back to earth, and he lets out the first laugh he has in eternity. "I won't. Thank you, for — for telling me that."
"Mutsuki."
He starts, a little helplessly. "Hm?"
"You..." A cough, shifting. "You deserve to hear it."
And when Urie reaches out and lifts Mutsuki's fingers to his lips (Is... are you okay with this? ...Now I am), it's with only a little trepidation that Mutsuki says, "I wish you'd tell me things more."
Urie laughs quietly, and the warmth of his breath ghosts across Mutsuki's hand. Somehow, that gentle not-touch stills him. Somehow, that careful measured gaze grounds him. He stares wordlessly at Urie, and it feels like everything is hovering, somehow, ever so slightly above the ground — surreal, unreal, yet still unmistakably real.
Somehow, he is here, seen. Still.
"As many times as it takes, don't you remember?" Urie asks, and there's a faint shadow of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "It's... it's about time we talked. And — well, kept talking. Both of us."
Something settles deep in Mutsuki's chest, and it feels as though shards of himself that he'd cast away long ago are finally, finally arcing back to him. Not all of them: but this, this is the first. A start.
He grips Urie's hand and slots their fingers together, and not a single thought of how these same fingers had held blades and hands alike crosses his mind. Urie blinks up at him, startled, and for the first time in so long, too long, Mutsuki lets a real smile slip across his lips.
"As many times as it takes, right?"
(He can only keep smiling when the tears come, because finally, finally, he has found, and been found.)
A/N: The title for eris is taken from Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos and disorder. (If you recall the myth of the golden apple and "give the apple to whoever is fairest" and the whole, um, entire freaking Trojan War — yeah. The root cause of all that? That was her. Pretty fitting for Eto, huh?)
I threw Latin into this thing like confetti sprinkles, dear lord... Here are the translations as promised:
(and yeah they'll probs differ from whatever Google dredges up, but don't worry I took Latin for three years okay I got you guys, got a 4 on the AP exam and everything, plus these will sound way more lovely and poetic and evocative, so please! do not google! before reading these! thank!)
Ars gratia artis (eris): "art for the sake of art"
Ita vero (nor can i live without you): "and so in truth"
Ex nihilo nihil fit (nor can i live without you): "nothing comes from nothing"
Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit (nor can i live without you): "perhaps one day it will be pleasing for us to remember these things" — this is actually a line from Vergil's/Virgil's (? will we ever know the true spelling? the debate rages on and my magister always told me it didn't matter anyway so there) famous work, the Aeneid. And bonus points, it's a pretty famous one that's very dear to my heart (shoutout to the Raven Cycle for making me cry over these six words every time), I weep every time, okay?
In aeternum te amabo (nor can i live without you): "I am loved by you for all eternity"
Thank you for reading! Kudos and comments would make my day :D