Juncture
The
heart will break, but broken live on.
-Lord
Byron
---
juncture (n.) - a place where things join, a junction; a criticalmoment in time
---
It rains for a whole month after her father dies.
He comes to see her for the first time in years. They all do. It doesn't feel the same when they shake hands and echo their salutations, mostly because this is a funeral, and it would be disrespectful to the dead in his grave to act out.
Something tells him, though, that it is not just the situation that prompts them all to act uneasily around each other, more so around him. They've always known the he was a very mysterious and conniving man, and, because time has changed them and their friendship has wavered, they think that it is too dangerous to get too close. Even Tamaki has his reservations, but he has managed to improve his acting skills, and Kyouya has to rely on his intuition to believe that Tamaki isn't his closest friend anymore.
People pay their respects. They come and go, and she is alone in the cemetery with him, after they have left. He considers asking if she is alright, or if she would like to leave, but he knows what the answers are, and she will say, with her brutally blunt honesty, NO.
It surprises him when she begins to talk, and he moves closer to her to hear, close enough to see the slight crease between her furrowed eyebrows and the slight twitch on the corner of her thin lips.
"I miss him," she tells him, and, because he is Kyouya, he does not offer her any comfort aside from his presence beside her. "I try to pretend that he will be gone for just a few days, and I'll see him again, soon, but I can still see him. And I should be happy that he's finally with her, but I remember that I'm alone now, and there's nothing I could do."
The sunlight makes her eyes shine like dull rocks washed repeatedly, and he remembers a time when he did not think that she would be capable of bitterness. He realizes that it affects them all, at one point in time, and they were only children then, after all. Too young to be called adults, and too old to become ignorant of everything that really mattered.
"Where is he now?" He asks, his voice tight and hollow at the same time. Translation: where do you see him?
It takes her a moment to respond, and even then, he's not entirely sure if she believes it herself, because she has always been logical. Her mind or her heart, her heart or her mind. The words shift themselves in his brain, and she weighs them carefully in her hands.
But she is still a woman, and more human than he could ever be, so, he supposes, she has the right to believe in her heart.
"Right here," she whispers, and she touches the space below her collarbone and above the slight swell of her breasts, her fingers curling slightly, as smooth as a falling leaf caught in a branch with an uneven edge.
Kyouya wants to tell her that her father is six feet under the ground, in his grave, and that is not where her heart is, but, when he opens his mouth, the words don't come out.
He doesn't have the heart to tell her.
He probably never would.
So instead he allows himself to nod, and let her say goodbye to the first man that she has ever loved.
---
Perhaps, he thinks, she will let him love her now.