Title: Light and Shadow
Author: YukariYoukai
Summary: Where is the cat? Where is the mouse? AkitoTohru
Notes: Enjoy? The brillance of the summary goes to a writer on livejournal's "loveless100" drabble community. That is all.
"Have you seen the mouse?"
Tohru is dreaming. Tohru is waking. She is lost and hopeless and bowing before a god. The god glides closer, his movement a whisper against her heart.
"So you haven't seen him?"
Tohru is breathing him in like summer wind and spring rain, and when she tries to answer the words stay in her throat --- sharp needles. He moves closer to her and she can feel the cold and heat he radiates. His hand almost touching her skin and she dies.
"That's alright. You're here after all."
Tohru is choking on her needle words and the floor is red with it. Red, like her mother. Red, like his eyes in the early sunlight. Her mother, beautiful and laughing, would have liked him, she thinks. She curls in on herself and feels him beat against her, light as the snow.
"You'll stay, won't you?"
Tohru is looking into his eyes and she sees Nothing. He smiles and finally, finally, touches her (she doesn't think of her father then and she won't think on him now) and she falls into his shadow. He soothes her wallpaper heart into a slow pace and delicately, gently pulls back her hair. He touches her knees and she twitches.
"Did the cat do this to you?"
Cats are mean, she remembers. They claw and rip and tear when all you wanted to do was help, just show them the way out. And their words, their words are as sharp as their claws and she bled for him but he didn't see her at all.
Her knees are purple and blue and green, like the kimono she had seen Hanajima wear once, in a family picture that had fallen apart in her hands.
"You must have fallen," he croons. He presses on her bruises until they turn black, but she won't cry out, not even when she bites through her tongue. "Did you try to fly?" Her answer is a gurgle and he lets her head fall limply onto his shoulder. Thick trails of her warmth traverse her neck in beautiful swashes of color against a silk kimono.
Red, like her mother.
