Author's Notes: This is an Enzai fanfiction. Writing it, I realize that most likely, no one will have any idea what it's from, but... it had to be written. It's been niggling at me to get it started for some time, and wouldn't let me stop until I'd finished.
Takes place after the good ending with Lusca, for anyone who's actually played. Yaoi implications.
Enjoy!
Voices
Sometimes, the voices still woke him at night.
It had been nearly a year. Ten and a half months already, and he thought that they'd have been forgotten by now- or relegated, at least, to the parts of his mind that he only dared revisit in the safety of sleep's embrace.
They had, of course, become less frequent, and there were nights now when he didn't hear them at all. Blessed stretches filled with undisturbed silence, days when he could wake in the morning with his cheeks dry and heart not pounding with the remnants of some half-remembered nightmare.
But they did still come.
It didn't matter whether Lusca was there, though the nights that he came straight to bed were easiest to handle.
Then, there weren't hours wasted in envisioning the man hunched over a stack of paperwork and fingers stained with ink; he didn't need to picture in his mind the way the candle on the desk guttered as the wick crept nearer the melted wax. Then, he didn't have to remind himself that he wasn't alone, that but for the demands of his newest trial, the lawyer would be sharing the bed with him. He could feel the man instead, reach out and touch the smooth, warm skin of his back and be drawn into the peaceful rhythm of his breathing.
When they could lie together as he began to drift away in those first few moments before sleep claimed him, it was easier. But still they came.
The first time, he'd thought that he hadn't yet woken.
It had begun in much the same fashion as his dreams, after all; with the shade drawn, the darkness in the room easily approached the eerie black that the cell had reached at night, and the cold amusement in the tone was certainly reminiscent of his worst nightmares.
It had taken him almost two full minutes, heart trying to tear its way through his throat, before he'd realized that they were all words he'd heard before. Terrifying though it had been, everything was from memory- promises, threats, and commands, each more chilling than the last, stripping him slowly of the sense of security he'd so painstakingly rebuilt.
Lusca had taken the stairs two at a time when at last he'd cried out in meaningless terror, been at his side mere heartbeats later, wanting to know what was wrong, whether he'd had another nightmare.
Guys hadn't been able to tell him anything. Hadn't wanted to admit that he'd allowed his mind to get carried away, that he'd frightened himself in the dark like a child steadily working up the fear of a monster that, in all actuality, wasn't in the closet.
That night, the man had stayed with him, ignored the work that waited downstairs. Had lay beside him, smoothing his hair, whispering reassurances that he'd heard many times before and since. And when the boy had slept at last, it was a deep sleep, bottomless and vast.
The first time, it had been Durer. But the others had joined him, the sound of their voices echoing with deafening force in the silence of the room.
"I wanted a kitten to play with," Guildias told him occasionally, and the flood of emotions that came with that simple statement were nearly overwhelming. The words were impossible to forget, impossible to deny, and always they had the same smooth, carelessly cruel tone of memory.
"Are you disobeying me?" Jose demanded on some nights, to the despairing whisper of Io's "I'm sorry." And Evan's careless tone came from time to time as well, dismissing him as a kid despite the pain that he'd been through,with Vallewida's voice not long after, all the concern the mandisplayed in his lucid moments put into the gentle query as to whether he was all right.
Sometimes, it was a question that Guys wasn't certain he could answer.
It had been nearly a year, after all, and still they woke him. Nearly a year, and he hadn't quite managed to forget the terror that set his heart to racing even in the safety of his lover's bed.
Maybe, Guys supposed, there would never be a time when he didn't hear their voices in his memory or wake from nightmares that left him shaking and unnerved.
But then, he'd known enough of Vallewida to understand that the man's definition of 'all right' was far beyond the daily standards of wellness to which Guys had become so accustomed. And with time, the boy had grown to recognize that in asking that particular question, he'd actually had something much simpler in mind.
'Can you make it through this?' the man had probed more often than once, without needing to use the words. It was a gauge of sorts, a test to see how well he'd held together- and whether he would be able to do the same in days to come.
And by those standards, Guys supposed that he was indeed all right.
He was holding together, after all, no longer having to scrape the bottom of his reserves just to face the following day. The bruises and abrasions had healed long ago, and he was gaining weight. He had Lusca to... well, he had Lusca.
And wasn't that enough?
Their voices haunted him less often, after all, and when he reminded himself inadvertently that a good many of them were living still in the hell that he'd escaped, it was easier now to push the thought away.
Eventually, perhaps, they wouldn't come at all. And then he could begin again to judge his life by his own standards of 'all right'.
Until then, the boy decided, he'd have to settle for simply making it through- and hoping that Lusca's voice would be enough to drown out those of memory.
-owari-