I'm Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally
Disclaimer: The title is a Nine Inch Nails song that I felt was relevant. X/999 and all its characters belong to CLAMP.
Subaru smelled smoke and it reminded him of Mild Seven cigarettes. The scent of butane. The stink of ash inhaled.
Everything burned.
The Dragons of Earth, with whom he had chosen to side, had won. Kamui was dead. Subaru had felt his kekkai break apart like skin on pavement.
He couldn't bring himself to mourn another death, so instead he waited for his turn. Fuuma—the Other Kamui—would come for him soon.
He sat on top of one of the high, deserted financial buildings, its windows blown out, office furniture collapsed, wires exposed, hanging, technology peeled open and destroyed. People lay on the street below like broken parts of the buildings they worked in, mostly clothes and blood, reduced to less than human from where he surveyed with his and Seishirou's eyes. He was far separated from the worst destruction on the ground.
Still, he could smell the city and its people burning.
He closed his eyes—one of them the only token of the past left to him—and breathed it in.
Seishirou-san.
The past was a piece of junk that people put a high price on. To reexamine it was of no use now.
But.
"Subaru-kun…"
Subaru opened his eyes, and repeated the words that obsessed him, murmuring them like a lover, something he had never had the chance to be, to a dying Tokyo that had been fiercely loved by so many.
"Boku wa…kimi wo…"
In the end, how did you end up being more honest than I was?
The city didn't acknowledge him. Even after he had given his life to it for so many years.
"Subaru-kun."
Subaru turned just as Fuuma squatted beside him, reeking of human viscera, covering his eyes with a gory hand. Someone else's blood dribbled down his cheeks, still warm like Seishirou's had been when Subaru held him in death.
"Your Wish, Subaru-kun."
Nodding slightly, Subaru relaxed his weight against the young man.
When the pain tore through his chest, he only thought of Seishirou, and how they were connected again by this one violent act. He felt himself laid on the roof by accommodating arms, felt his lungs fail as he began to aspirate blood.
Soon, it would be over.
"Seishirou-san… I—"
look forward to joining you.