Sebastian

There was blood on the mirror and it was broken.

            A glacial spider web of fractions told of a hundred impermanent realities, and each splintering  thread was a static portrait of desolation; a unknowable nightmare prince, tortured and caged beyond a snowflake palace of crystal and glass.

            Touching the mirror is not touching yourself. It is pale distortion. It is an invitation to dance held out to you by your own ghost. It is ice in the veins.

Movement. A mist, warmth from the dead, forms around cold, manicured fingernails, purpled with ink. The hand pressed to the looking glass, pressed into the palm of a beautified, cadaverous lover, seems to radiate cracks that frantically root outward. A rivulet of steaming red is creeping along the fractures. It stains some pieces scarlet, the rosy hue of dusted church glass. A little drips thickly to the floor and a humourless smile, a smile you would expect to see only in the concluding moments of your life, spreads across the cruelly handsome face of Vincent Valentine, the face that the mirror did not dare tell.

            "I am a coward, Sebastian." Vincent's tone, rich and empty, dripping with silver. "I am already dead. Dead to you. And I am a ghost to myself. The firing squad awaits." A crawling whisper. "Don't cry. Maybe you send me to heaven." His laughter unfurled like a ribbon, lone, luxuriant and mirthless.

            Behind him sat a man folded into a broken chair. A man who, slim and gilded, cried into the formless comfort of a worsted grey trench coat, his irregular, wrenching breaths dragging out from his lungs, the only sound in the  blasted, greying room.

            Vincent smiled distantly at the mirrored trooper, who in return could only stare with jealously green eyes that craved the young man, craved the pain he caused and the falling dream of his meaningless kisses. His fingertips were hungry for Vincent, ravening for him, raw severed nerves that pulsed with the starving want of him.

            Sebastian was frightened. His voice was torn.  "I'm sorry. I just couldn't bring myself to see you. It's late and you must be…tired. But you left us Vincent. You left us to die, and we – most of us did. You are our captain. No, you're a deserter, now. We needed you.  I – need you Vincent."

A pause. "It isn't that late."

"What?"

            Languidly, breathlessly, Vincent drawled in his honeyed upper class tones.  "I'm not tired. It isn't that late."

            And, when his fingers parted from his reflection, and moved to linger in the air away from the mirror, it seemed to freeze before falling and smashing on the wet floor, rearranging itself into dust and jagged knifes. Then, the silence ripped over the room and neither one of them were breathing.

            "Do you think that I'm too pretty to die?"

            Sebastian stood. His dark blond hair, muddied, was stuck to his high cheekbones. "You're something else Vincent. Yes. I do think you're beautiful. But yours is the beauty of some lurid insect; a painted, venomous insect. Look at you. Your ugliness is on the inside, all locked away inside, rotting outward. And look at you. You know it."

             "At least I'm not some shirt-lifting faggot like you." Vincent's laughter was hysterical and immediate.

            Chords of agony tightened around Sebastian's throat. "You're so ridiculous. Do you know that? It must be agony to look at yourself in the mirror sometimes and think, oh my god, that's all there is. Just a pretty skin. Nothing underneath."

            With his gently mocking voice, he had struck some vein of misery and anger within Vincent, some scar over his heart, because his head fell and quivering, he stared into shackled and bleeding palms that were cold and detached and belonged to somebody else; a forgotten pianist, a nervous, sickly boy. But, the cold clotting blood was his own and his hands were his own and both were unclean.

            "I hate you Sebastian."

            Vincent's hands were thin; his skeletal structure stood out in places, like long, mechanised pistons with a layer of ineffectual, fleshy architecture knotted around.

            Sebastian's breath on the neck of his prisoner. "I don't believe you."

He felt Vincent shiver. "You're a dead man, Des Grieux."

"Not so giggly now are you?"
            "Well obviously no, you stupid queer."

Sebastian backhanded him fully across the face. The slap was rough, male. It bowed Vincent, a syrup of blood like a finger tracing the line of his lips, his frown. His shaking hands moved to cup his face.
            The young captain was gripped by his own adrenaline. "Don't speak to me like that. I'm in command now. It might be nice to finally have a little respect from you, you yuppie scum. Oh, getting angry now aren't you?" He laughed absurdly. "Aren't you, you cad? Do you want to feel the back of my hand, too?"
 
            "Sebastian?" Vincent stared at him emptily, as if there was some black void in his core where a soul had been ripped away. He was sickly, his face pale with sorrow, his lips fat and glossed with blood.
            "What?"
            "Do I look… alright?" He wiped his lacquered hair, his face, and then his hair again.  "Sebastian? You're looking at me... strange." There was a rich overtone of pain, of untouched misery, in his fragile tones, as he said, "It's my hair, isn't it?"

Suddenly aware of a weight of claustrophobia pressing down on him, the fair soldier quietly said, "You've snapped."

And all the time Vincent was smiling his cruel promise of a smile, teeth pink and bloody, eyes ringed in red. A haunting, enthralling vision, with a face beautifully tuned to perfect hate.  "You're going to die here. Did you know?" In the dismal twilight, the cry of the cannon sounded, a blasted scream of metal tearing followed, rippling over the land, over cold, muddied mortar scars. They did not seem to notice or care. "I never wanted to be in the Shinra army. I wasn't ready. It's just me; never ready. Not quite…there. But the meat-grinder looks at me, listens to my voice, and puts me in charge but it's a joke, Sebastian, it's a joke and I think… I feel so desperate, sometimes." An expression of panic crossed his hollowed features, damp with fever-sweat. "I'm so frightened." He buckled slowly, a plastic mannequin folding under heat.
            He was on his hands and knees, his breath tearing out of him, before Sebastian spoke. "Are you alright?" The blond soldier knelt awkwardly beside his prisoner. His uniform was an odd patchwork of mud, rosy stains and worsted grey, blasted on one sleeve. There was a jolting reek of damp gunpowder about him, over a cocktail of sweat and cologne, and his taste was heavy on the still air. "You seem a little bit insane, that's all."
            "Oh." All of his practiced concentration pressed onto the other man, the unfilled, analytical stare of a sniper, aiming. "The psychiatrist said that too. The psychiatrist said I shouldn't put myself in stressful situations. He said… He said I wasn't ready…I had a breakdown, Sebastian. I had a mental breakdown."
           Sebastian knelt fully, the fear of his former captain an instinct gripping him, his hands on the wet floor and on Vincent, fingernails sharp and needing, his breath stalling in his throat. Then, his dark red lips touched Vincent's cautiously, kissing him in silence, and reality was displaced; a world that lay shattered in a mirror.

His lips were cold, and sensuous, like a false silk woven from the fronds of a spider's web. The taste of this one kiss would always persist, mutely, in the throat, smothering.

A fat tear sliced down Vincent's cheek, finding Sebastian's lips like a bitter ribbon. The kiss was a ghost. He turned away, away from Vincent's raw, human emotion. "I shouldn't have – but I had to - Just once." He knew the measure of salt in Vincent's tears, lingering with the taste of his kiss. "You know what they say about the brilliant ones, Vincent? They say it's the brilliant ones that crack." His voice was softly mourning. "I hope kissing me wasn't too awful for you. Will you hate me if I tell that I had dreams about kissing you like that for years, Vincent? Years.In the dark I would stand over you, kneel over you while you were sleeping, and just think about doing it. But you would have known. You would have felt it. You would have felt it burn you. And I knew what you'd do if you ever kissed you when you were awake…"
            "What did you think I would do?" There was a hollow note of desperation in his voice. Vincent's eyes were the red of young blood, at once angry and despairing. 
            Hs gripped his wrist hard, and Sebastian turned. His smile was tender venom. "You're always so creative with this…Oh, I don't know. Shot me in the elbows, maybe? Cut the word 'fag' into every inch of my skin? Kneecapped me? Who knows!"
            "No, Sebastian. I would have kissed you back."
            He tore away from Vincent's touch, standing. Sudden anger painted a cold sweat on his flesh, and he whipped around, eyes frenzied. "You're a liar!!! You lie about everything!" Vincent stared up at him vaguely, his face a mask of expressionless analysis.
            "But - it's true."
            He clenched his fists. His heart beat out a rapid tattoo. "Don't lie to me Vincent. Don't try and save yourself like this, coward. Say something else, beg, I don't care. Plead with me. Say sorry to me. Scream at me. Just don't say that, because I will hit you."
            Vincent watched his own hot tears fall to the slate. "Then I suppose you had better hit me."
            "I bloody will as well! You'd better not be serious, Vincent. I can't have gone through all this for you to tell me now on the eve of your fucking death you stupid, stupid idiot. You're not serious," He forced his nervous fingertips through greasy blond hair, smiling bitterly and without mirth. "You little liar. You're just stringing me along, aren't you? Aren't you!"
            Vincent looked into his green eyes and saw hatred, dark and hot, lingering there in shaded hollows. "No," When Vincent finally spoke, his voice was the whisper of silk being knotted. "I like you. I think… I think I might…love you. I feel almost sick when I look at you; Almost frantic. It's like a hunger. When I look at you, I feel the adrenaline fill my blood. I feel heavy, and desperate, and my heart is like… like a wild bird in a cage. I can't look at you without feeling death in my veins and my breath being squeezed out of me… I can't look at you at all."
            And tenderly, Sebastian blindfolded him, pulling down a curtain of oblivion, a close, dreamless dark.

           
            And I; skin over muscle and bone, bleeding as I was, gave my heart to you still beating, tore it all out to give to you, ripped every sinew, every cord. And you; you who possessed the hearts of many, dissected it idly, as one examines the innards of a daisy to be picked apart and discarded.
            And in return, you gave me a fistful of sand, a broken hourglass I have stitched into the void of me, with echoes of yourself. You touched me with feathers from the tattered wings of the angel of death.
            False heart of sand, of molten glass, of the broken machinery of promises,
            I am so far from you know, with so much sorrow…
            Masquerading as anger…
            Your loveless Valentine.

           
            Dawn comes. There is no birdsong. It filters over the east, pressing its pink body and its blood onto the shadows, the dark dragging its palpable, inky bulk westward. Shadows snag on machines that burn on the roadside and on the twisted bodies of infantrymen. The stagnant air is thick with the heavy, metallic stink of cold meat.
            This is proud Wutai. This is where legends are manufactured. The water colour sky was writhing overhead, moving quickly and hungering, in an unfelt tide of wind, the day melting inward, brushstrokes of dullish colour inking a blue page.
            Sebastian led him out, clamping hands on both pallid, thin shoulders, his grip strong and on Vincent, like a puppeteer, with Vincent the broken puppet, strings snapped, a boneless toy. The air was a memory of freshly spilled blood blending into the soft, thirsty ground, of crippled machinery and its syrupy, oily innards.
            Vincent's voice, an eternity of emptiness, whispering, "Believe me. Please believe me."
            "Believe you, you say? When hell freezes over, Vincent. Stop here. You won't run, I hope. It'd be very un-ceremonial of you; if you did. I'd have you in a second, anyway. No point trying, is there?"
            The greasy blond released him, and the absence of his warm, clasping hands was an ache that made Vincent sway drunkenly for a moment, in his sightlessness. There was a current of breath like a ripple of silk over his blueing lips, painted as they were in blood.
            "Any last requests, then?"
            "A bullet proof-vest."
            "Fuck off. I have a present for you anyway, Vinny." Sebastian's voice was a cracked note, throttled by bitterness and envy. "Here you are." He thrust a gun into against Vincent's hands and locked them around it, tightly and spitefully gripping his skin with short, hard fingernails. There was a silence in which the report of cannon staccato resonated like a failing heartbeat through the ground and he quietened, the wind carved into them and distorted the whirred answer to the falling of mortar upon flesh and iron.
            There was a hitch in Vincent's lustreless tones. "It's my gun."
            "I know how you love it. Stupid antique thing. It's useless, of course - not loaded. I thought you might like to feel it as you die. And maybe you could think about the love you lavished on it when you should have been with me. Heart-breaker."
            Vincent flinched and a small expression of pain cracked the mask of his white indifference. The pretty little red crescents where Sebastian's fingers had held him so cruelly marked his long, elegant pianist fingers as they slid over the familiar pistol.
            Sebastian stared miserably into the shallows of the black fold where he knew Vincent's eyes would be. "Haven't you got something to say to me?" He whispered, desperation in his voice a thick, sweet undertone.
            The dark, deathly captain pressed his gun to his lips, then cheek. A new, terrible jealousy flared in the dreadful, fair soldier and his heart jerked against the cage of his ribs.
            "Sorry, but I can't really think of anything." Vincent smiled savagely, in tangled pleasure, knowing his words had stung the blond through his veil of arrogance.
            When Sebastian finally spoke, his voice was but the tearing of a dead rose's curling petal, the crushing of butterflies in the fist. "Do you know what you are, Vincent? You're just a scared and lonely little boy."
            Carefully Sebastian kissed him on the hard line of his cheekbone, his eyes the green of jealousy. His boots scuffed on the wet concrete as he turned, his long grey coat slapping at the smoky air, and Vincent could see them together, faraway, young lovers that walk together, Sebastian's blond hair like sand, clean to the touch, caressed by the reach of the wind, his laughter rough and thickening.
            "We can run together Sebastian. Why be stupid? Why be loyal? Don't you feel anything for me? Please, Sebastian. We're alone. There's no-one left. It's just, it's not like we're in court is it? There's no one out there." He was begging. "You're the coward! You're frightened of me, aren't you?"
            "You're a traitor and a deserter. You know the penalty."  His face was expressionless. "I can't imagine why it is that I love you. Why you make me feel so…heart broken. But it is the attraction of a moth to a flame… You're like an addiction to laudanum. I will aim for your heart, Vincent. For your twisted little heart." He smiled viperously, pulling his lips away from his glinting teeth, and began to walk away. His last vicious words to his dark prisoner, "I never asked to fall in love with you."
            He stood paralysed. Every heartbeat now was a summons to desolation. His breath was not his own, being still laced with his cold darling. His blood seemed viscous in the blue lattice of his veins, already syrupy in slow death, chilling his system, moving into his breaking heart as sand moves into an hour glass.
            Love for Sebastian left him breathless. But love and hate are twined together, and he hated Sebastian for not believing his dying confession. Vincent was a talented and practiced liar, wearing a mask of his own fashioning, his outward personality clay shaped in the lines of cruelty and weakness. Truth and deceit were threaded together in the glassy sinews of his mind; but his only definite emotions were of quick, strangling hatred, intense melancholy and sleazy, vengeful lust. His smiles were willed. His despair was clawing outward. Everything in between was vague and impalpable; grey, learned and copied, intangible in a dripping fog. 
            And love to Vincent was surrender. It was the final sedation. It was a dismantlement of himself, of his armour and his mask of pale tragedy. To Love was to know exquisite horror, original agony. It was a sickness, inescapable and consuming; the burrowing knowledge that your love will be your undoing.
            A monstrous possessiveness seized him. He wanted Sebastian's life, however wantonly. A notion of the romantic, fragile and ornamental in a mind of bleak psychosis, burned within Vincent, and he wanted his lover to die with him, enchained together in their own bespoken hell.
            So he lifted his gun, with manacled palms, kissing it. And he smiled his wicked smile. Sebastian turned to look at Vincent, and felt a drunken terror curdle within his body, seeing the dark soldier's sickly promise of a grin. Yet Vincent was blindfolded and his gun was not loaded. His perverse smile was mirthless and inhuman.
His pistol tracked the deluded soldier with a surgical accuracy; Vincent leering behind it, and there was a subtle demonism in his grin and then Sebastian knew. He could see where the shadow lingered in the pits of Vincent's skull, the sockets of his eyes, the hard lines of his cheek and jaw, on his sculpted brow, and it was a face loved by Death's own hand. He was the shifting darkness glimpsed in the corner of the eye; he was the tangible dread moving over his body, he was a form roiling in the black reaches of a shattered mirror, grinning, and the vision of Death as a miserable gothic prince with the eyes of hell.

            And he knew the horror that Vincent had seen in the looking-glass.
            Fingers of fear gripped him. Dread was a tightening collar on his white neck. He folded with panic, sending the rifle clattering to the concrete. Like the moves to a dance never forgotten, an instinct never quite scrubbed from the brain, Vincent swivelled his high shoulders, muscles weaving and locking in frightful mechanism as he took aim. His shackled hands were as still as cold metal, his thin form poised in fatal insect motionlessness, a mantis. His body seemed paralysed there, standing lifeless, but this was a perfection of marksmanship. His mind was empty aside from a sense of terrible, mutilated joy.
            Sensing the beckoning of Death, Sebastian gave a ghastly, bloodless laugh, bliss torn from the inhuman sound. There was a hollow, clicking report from Vincent's silenced pistol; semi-automatic, it had chambered a single bullet, giving the illusion of being empty. Sebastian staggered back a pace, gasping sharply, and began to drown, wetness gushing ceaselessly down his throat and chest. His life was spilling quickly from his gullet, draining the coral hues from his pretty face. He mustered a scream but found no vocal cords to carry it, instead a horrific gargling issued from his gaping throat, choking as he was upon the syrup of his own inky blood. He slumped to the wet ground, frame heavy and muscles fluttering in bloodless weakness. There were lines of gore on his palling cheek, whitening and denied of life. His hair was soaked in red and clots of chilling meat, all gilt beauty stripped away, death paling his handsome face as it kissed him with its cold, decaying lips. His eyes, a dream of a rich green ocean, were carefully regarding his own blood as it mingled with the waters of the rain, and softly, still resisting the weight of death pressing on his frame he began to cry fiery tears of pure, distilled regret. He let death push his fragile body onto the hard ground, weeping and still as he watched the pendulous clouds draw the carriage of the day across a sky of pink and deepening orange. And midnight spread outward in his failing sight, white static sparkling on the edges of his consciousness, a flurry of black and white feathers easing their palpable lightness over his skin.

Then he knew Vincent loved him, had loved him always, had cried over feelings he had not been taught to have, and had agonised and twisted and wrenched out what little emotion he had. He understood Vincent had learned only how to hurt, and how to lie, and that he was the son of a monster. He knew he would never be going back home, where things were wrong anyway. He knew suddenly and with crushing finality he had steel in his eyes and what he had become was a shapeless semblance of himself, an imitation of the golden boy that he recalled uncertainly. With a single-minded resolve he raised his leaden hand, and plucked the medals from his bloodied jacket, and threw them aside, with a watery, heaving laugh, blood and spittle lathering. He wanted to strip off his uniform. The silence around him was roaring, echoing, a deafening and divine soundlessness.
            He saw Vincent run to him; the blindfold ripped from his eyes and the tears a ceaseless stream that coursed between his pale lips. And Vincent was holding him so tightly, wordlessly, that his fingertips seemed like thorns, his muscles like the pistons of a machine. He screamed into the bony cage of Sebastian's chest, and understood that this, this moment, was unending. It would be the haunting, lingering insanity of his own love, screaming its truth into the breast of a murdered soldier that stayed with him forever, his own exquisite, perpetual death; A slow, enduring torture. He lay on Sebastian's chest, crying with exhaustion and anger and all terrors, hypnotised by the irregular rhythm of his Love's failing heart.
            His tears were hot and pink with blood. Vincent whispered, in his spoilt, clipped tones, "Now do you see? You couldn't have lived, no; you couldn't have, not without me. We'll be alright now. I couldn't have died without taking you, it isn't selfish... I just wanted you. Do you believe me now, I ask? I'll kill myself to be with you, Sebastian." Lifting his half bloodied face from his lover's heaving chest, with the hideous, warped smile of a broken man, he repeated again, quietly, as if to himself, "I'll kill myself for you."
            "Oh, no, no, no. Shinra wouldn't thank you for that. Excellent shot, wasn't it? And blindfolded too!"
            Vincent seemed dizzy with shock for a moment, crushed by a grey horror, a sense of nameless and awesome dread that was a pressure on his shoulders. He turned quietly, adrenaline threading through his veins, heartbeat deep in his throat.
            "...You're going to look magnificent in a suit." And before the rifle's lacquered muzzle was swung against the side of his head, Vincent knew he stood before the devil; pale as sin, stitched into a three piece indigo dinner jacket.