My chickens:

Life can be a bitch, no? I'm pretty fed up with it, as it is, but that's okay. Sorry I haven't written, but I've been occupied with schoolwork and some issues I have to deal with, which is what my good buddy Hakkai is for! So that I can live vicariously through him. Ergo, Hakkai gets to work out 'his' feelings of abandonment, sadness, cynicism, bitterness, and overall angst. :long pause: Well.

-SNORKY

DISCLAIMER: Don't own it.

WARNINGS: Wow. Like, none. Mentions (barely) of sex, I guess. I suppose that my summary is pretty misleading (as you will find out), and the 53 part is really, REALLY brief. So… sorry.

SPOILERS: Nope.

ITAI

Mourning.

Ah. No. Morning.

Sun lifts, color shifts, the world awakens to a fresh likeness of itself. It is right, all of it, right in that the sun rose on time and intends to set on time as well.

And it is so hard. To look up one day and say, Yes, it is okay to smile without irony, without guile; to pull back from oneself and nod thoughtfully because everything is, for once, as it should be. And it hurts to agree with once trite sayings about roses and sunshine and happiness. It pulls at something from the time before Jeeps and harisens and red hair. You cradle your reservations close to your chest, you look over your shoulder once, twice, three times, feel the chi illuminate the tips of your fingers. This is the product of distrust, of misuse; you find your lips curling on their own; you find your fists clenched.

But then his hands descend on yours and you know, know, that everything can go terribly, terribly wrong. That everything can end in a moment.

But it won't this time. It can't.

You came to it slowly: the realization that someone meant something to you. More than that, you meant something to someone. Really, something. Not teacher or doctor or chauffeur; something. Which struck you as odd, since the last time it happened it ended in the sudden shock of crimson, in the static flood of blood over trembling lips in a place far, far from home. You held out your hands, received nothing but emptiness, crawled deep down inside of yourself.

Odder, still, that this time, this time (how novel; a second chance), the feeling, the realization began with all of these things. Began with blood and dark and being in a place far, far from home. In the rain. In the pain. Odd, really, how life twists things, pulls things out of shape and original dimension for humor that is not so much catching as corrosive, burning holes in what you had once considered everything. Little things, of course. Like love, life, happiness. Little things only.

You lift your head to the moon, swear you feel the glow filling you, glinting off your monocle, wonder briefly if moon bathing is a negative of sun bathing (skin grows paler, body thinner, quieter) and decide you don't care. His cigarette burns like a star you'd follow anywhere, confident, always, that it will lead you home. Home. How bizarre. That things can be moved like that; altered. Home was once a quaint cottage, filled with domesticities and flowers and a gentle, chiming laughter that buried itself in the once-hollow caverns of your heart. And it skips, your heart, to think of it again, after all these years, blowing dust from the artifacts of a life you have no right to remember.

No matter.

Home, now, is that place wrapped in two strong arms, smelling of cigarettes and alcohol and sweat. Home is the driver's seat of a bumpy Jeep. Home is that battlefield between a Smith and Wesson and a relentless stream of:

Harahetta!

And you like it like that. Never knowing.

And sometimes you can even tell yourself that you don't mind when he turns his exotic eyes on someone else, even if it is that pretty waitress or the innkeeper's lovely daughter. And, really, you expect it every now and then, and hardly mind when he mentions them, curled around you in bed, breathing gently against your cheek, lips trailing over the shell of your ear; it is only a mention, you reason, no matter what twists inside of you, what it paralyzes in you.

Long legs. And that dress is tight in all the right places… don't ya think?

Ah.

Smile for him.

It breaks your heart but, honestly, what ever did you expect?

You think, instead, ahead to the time lingering over the horizon: the journey home and, more importantly, reaching home where everything will be different, yet the same. A vegetable garden is in order, of course, because you have always wanted one but, unfortunately, dying (being born) tends to take priority over gardens, cleaning, and the like. And the house will be a mess; the dust will be terrible, so you will sleep outside unless you would prefer to asphyxiate on all that has collected, accumulated.

Your breath catches.

Under the stars. You will wrap yourself in him, feel his breath on your collar, pull him forward for a chaste kiss, tilt your head back to see the stars, how they are made clearer for their distance, how his eyes are made clearer for their proximity. Another kiss, perhaps. He makes you so happy, and this is strange to someone who has been happy before, but never expected good fortune ever, ever again. Sometimes you can only watch him, watch his subtlety, understand everything that you had assumed lost. The feeling lingers.

His cheek on yours. Hands around your waist. You feel the breath on your neck, and look past the crimson halo to something or other beyond that. Stars, most likely.

And you can pretend, for a moment or two, that he is not doing the same. You can pretend that he is not looking over your shoulder, past the limiters—one, two, three—at some tight shirt or short skirt or holy white robes and golden hair.

You press yourself nearer, nearer…

Ah. To what, again?

The journey is hard. You sleep seldom, eat little, lie somewhere deep down inside the dark chambers of your once-filled heart, where the distant pulsing is like a thunderous tattoo surrounding you as you shake, tremble for it. For the heartbeat you don't want, but gather close, clutch anyway.

You watch the stars shift in the sky, lazy and ethereal in their divinity, and you envy them, wish they would come closer or take you with them. You hate their coldness and their austerity. Hate them and love them for lighting the way.

At night you forgive everything he has done to you. The stars are remote. You find mercy somewhere around the soles of your feet, press it with your short life-line firmly into the rough wooden wall that stands between you both, and you smile as the splinters dig deep burrows into your long fingers, as reckless snores serenade you, intermittently strewn with a few, soft:

Harahetta!

Inhaling the stale, stagnant air, you press your forehead into the back of your hand. The air, there, smells metallic, muted like red. Beyond there, beyond your hand and your blood and the wall now stained, there are no words spoken. Softly, carefully, they begin: moaning, creaking, sighing, straining. The sutra is laid aside. At the finish, they smoke together, silently.

And you know it is over without ever having begun. What you had (didn't have) together.

The stars are remote.

You drive everyday, notice everything, as you should, as a driver should, as a doctor, teacher, mediator, cook, friend (just friends) should.

And think, sometimes, that it hurts more the second time around, when the old wound is still present, still painful to the touch, yet healed enough to be truly reopened. Perhaps it hurts more for the oddity of a second chance; perhaps you got your hopes up; perhaps a vegetable garden is not in order. You lay awake at night, thinking of it while you stare, eyes like fresh bruises, at your swollen palms, thinking:

Ah. A vegetable garden would be quite useless.

You don't blame him. For anything. Not for holding you, not for kissing you, not for smiling at you, not for leaving you without having ever, really, arrived. Not for picking you up off the ground, though you wonder if he regrets it; of course he does. Of course.

And you want so much; for everyone to have what you thought you had. You want everything there is to want—happiness, peace, love—for everyone and everything. You hold your hand to the sky, imagine the stars sticking to your skin, crawling inside, lighting you from within. They twinkle in the hollows of your eyes, in the hallowed flesh, and you think:

So lovely. To die, illuminated.

Now and then your mind flickers over what you could have done, what you could have possibly done to deserve this abandonment, not once, but twice. Your pulse races, and, for a moment, you are suspended in blamelessness, and your eyes are like disks on which the words scrawl, beetle-like--

This isn't my fault. I have done nothing.

--before your head ducks down again; you fold into your old smile, you bury yourself in the darkness of your chest cavity, you look at stars.

The journey is hard. The entire journey. Both of them. All of them.

Perhaps, you muse, it is harder for the happiness. The pain is deeper for remembering gentle, feminine laughter, for smelling cigarette smoke in your shirt. For letting it happen again, for opening yourself, for thinking it would be okay.

And it hurts, thinking you could have stopped it. Should have stopped it. Shouldn't have crawled closer, held tighter, swallowed against the bile; shouldn't have relaxed into it, let the words about roses and sunshine and happiness roll over you, and you, like the fool you are, nodded along, smiled along. Because, for some reason, you honestly thought it would last.

In the dark, you laugh about it, quietly, as if you are hearing a joke for the second time. In a way, you are. You are.

And it hurts more for the second go around. Cuts deeper for imagining a vegetable garden when, really, they are quite useless.

You look up. The stars are remote.