Title: Breath of Life
Series: Saiyuki
Rating: T
Pairing: 58
AN: for NekoMegami_chan.
Song: Meatloaf: I'd do anything for love.
His eyes were begging me to kill him. Cliché I know, but it was utterly true. Looking up at me through that fringe of rain soaked deep chestnut, the red of his own soul oozing out into the world and mud, he wanted to die…and bastard that I am I wouldn't let him. When my hands were literally shoving everything back inside him, my own insides twisted up with his as my fingers sunk into the warm, sticky confines of his stomach, as they pulled the needle through the almost rubbery jagged edges of his skin and I felt like heaving up whatever was left of my beer and cigarette dinner, I could have let him. But I didn't.
I'd shrug it off and say that it was because for as much as he wanted to die, that croaking laugh when he saw me made some dark and perverse side of me keep him alive just to spite him, but it'd be a lie. I'd never met someone more messed up than me before and in that single instant when his lips twisted up into that ironic self-deprecating smile of his I knew that he was worse off than I was. Way worse. It had nothing to do with how pretty he was, even half bled out around my feet in pieces. No, that really had nothing to do with it at all. Well…maybe a bit, I'm a sucker for a pretty face after all. But that wasn't the reason I picked him up and took him home.
It was the tears.
If you think I've got a problem with a pretty face try adding tears and you've got my kryptonite. I just can't look away. Beyond the smiles and laughter and exasperated sighs it's always the tears that make my heart crumble and my resolve fall into ruin. That's probably why I stuck around so long. If you asked anyone who knows us there are two things they'd tell you; one, I'm a good-for-nothing lecher and two, he's a pillar of strength for all who know him. Man do they have it wrong.
Yeah, he's strong, but in a fatalistic kind of way. In the beginning, when I didn't know any better, I use to joke that I needed to watch him with the sharp and pointies in the kitchen. It was just an excuse to stay close to him for me; I didn't know how right I was. It must have been after he came back. Maybe a few months during a really bad storm that I found him in the kitchen staring in morbid fascination at a smear of blood across the stark white surface of the counter top. The paring knife lay a bit to his right, his finger was splayed open like a bug on the dissection table, the rain was pouring outside the window. Lightening licked across the sky in wide pink swaths and I saw him shaking, the knuckles on his left hand going white as they held on to the edge. He was crying again.
I'm not sure when it happened. Maybe it was the sight of rain and blood or his tears or the slightly crazed way his eyes lit up as he turned and watched me walk towards him across the living room, like he was asking me whywhywhy? Or maybe it was the way he pushed back into my hold as I wrapped my arms around him in utter silence, held the torn finger to my lips and lapped at the sin staining it until it was clean and void of such heart wrenching debasement. Or it could have been the way he clung to me through out the night, refusing to let go, refusing to let me go, whispering my name like a prayer, a silent litany that we both hoped would make everything better.
It could have been everything…or nothing.
We're like that. I'm not really sure what the hell we are. We're friends and lovers and maybe even soul mates, everything seems to point that way. But I know one thing we're not. We're not capable of living apart anymore. It's been too long. We could probably be considered codependent at this point. I can't even think of how I survived before he moved in and I know that yeah, even though he had her, he wasn't satisfied. He'd never be satisfied with perfection, even if it was illusionary. He's mostly fixed now. We've spent a lot of time working on it. But there will always be that little section that refuses to stay together and I get that, I do. He feels like he's betrayed her when he smiles, when he laughs and when we touch, but he also knows she'd never want him to live this half life shit he's done for so long.
He knows she'd want him to move on.
So he smiles and goes about his life and I try my damnedest to make them reach his eyes and his heart and I know if it took me throwing my life away to make him really live I'd do that too. There's probably only one thing I wouldn't do for him and yeah I'm a selfish bastard for even thinking it, but I wouldn't give him up and I won't let him play with knives again. The rain is just water and my hair does not mean blood and sin, he's the one that taught me that and I'll beat the crap out of anyone that says differently. It's taken so long…so terribly long to finally understand it that I can't see any other way to live anymore. See? We need each other more than is probably healthy, but I don't care.
As long as he's with me, I really just don't care.
Fin.