four dreams in a row, a k fanfic

Sometimes, they forget that you're cut from the same cloth. You stop worrying about it while you're young, don't really expect anyone to understand.

It's just that you've always been there, smoke behind his eyes, see what he sees, feel what he feels (only difference is that he's still raw, all molten core; you've just weathered it out, tempered it some).

Just like, he's always been there, smoke behind yours.

You'd thought once that if this was love, you wouldn't want anything to do with it, that you would tell it to children like a horror story, a cautionary tale of Do as I say; not as I did. Don't fall in love with bad ideas, with things that makes you breathless, and there are multiple kinds of breathless and not all of them good. There's the kind that crushes your ribcage, the kind that keeps you up at night, with nothing but your paranoia for company, the kind that makes your heart hiss: Come back safe and alive or I will kill you myself with my own two hands in the next life and every life after that.

You wouldn't tell them that you'd go back and do it all over if you could.

The truth doesn't always make for the best story besides.

Seri is the white picket fence, the unattainable dream that's good to have, often because it is unattainable.

She's the thing you daydream about from afar because it's nice and neat and not real. You think you might be in love with the idea of her, the escapism of the idea of her, even if the idea of it is nowhere near what the two of you could ever be. It's not just that she'll never have you but she'll never have the picket fence either. You two have this in common and even if sometimes, it's a little bit sad, mostly, you find it soothing. You wonder if she does too.

Really though, you adore her too much, respect her too much, to subject her to yourself. In a sense, she is your comrade in arms: different battle, different king, but another chess piece nonetheless, another faction of the same old war.

A king walks into the bar and you smile behind your champagne flute. He's on edge and slept poorly last night and the kids have been louder than ever today. You pour him a shot in response to his scowl. He sighs at you and that's possibly more conversational than he's been all week.

Sometimes, it's as if he's made a pact, sworn himself off verbalizing emotion, and so you do double time.

Sometimes, they say your life has been stolen from you but is it still stealing when you've consented, signed it away, for less than a breath and a look and a corner of his heart? How can it be stealing when you're bleeding and you want nothing more than to bleed right on, through the sheets and the tablecloth and the drapery, even if it leaves no mark on the asphalt, even if no one knows and no one sees.

Maybe, you think, it will seep through the cracks. Maybe, it will make flowers grow. Maybe, it already has, and you just can't see them.

You were never here for the flowers anyway.

There's a day he comes home bleeding and you make him a cup of tea. You put it on the bar and you look into his eyes and you don't say a word.

"Sorry," he says.

"No, you're not."

He shrugs. "But it's what you want to hear." For a second, you can almost see it, the way he's putting up the King's walls, dissociating, and you fight your own body, tell it to relax when you feel your jaw clench tight.

You smile, short of a snarl, say, crisp and even, "Don't you dare. You don't tell me what I want to hear. Not me. Not ever."

"Sorry," he says again, and you're not sure if it's out of spite, but he holds the eye-contact.

You both know you want to hurl something at a wall every time this happens. Once it was him, then you'd graduated to dinnerware. Now, you're just tired, and it was a pain in the ass to paint over the cracks, and he's here and he's all wrong but his hand is warm on top of yours, and you're so tired you barely register it happening.

No, he's not always able to show it, but when he tries, and what he shows instead is worse sometimes.

And no, sometimes, you don't want it. Sometimes, you want to quit. Sometimes, you want to scream, want to run, change your name, change your face, forget that this is your life, wake up washed ashore on the coast of another land.

You have a lot of vivid dreams.

But you wake up, and there are arms around you.

And then, you forget. You forget. You forget everything

You dream in circles, in reds and blacks and whites. Sometimes, you see other colours, the greens of fields, aquamarine skies, your youth spread out before you and relinquished behind you.

Other times, all you see is fire. The bed's on fire, your world's on fire, his mouth's on fire, your whole goddamn life is on fire.

It's a terrible storm but it comes with its own kind of beauty, own kind of splendor, just as the beauty comes with a cost. And, for better or worse, your vantage point has always been from within the eye of the storm.

He comes out of the shower, skin glistening, water beading down his clavicle and towel wrapped around his hips. You touch his hair, slide your hand down to the spot above the cloth, juncture of hip and thigh, go lower, you tug.

You press the pad of your thumb against his lips and they part behind it. He bites down, teeth on fingernail, makes you grin, makes himself grin.

This is a secret that no one knows.

And for now, it's yours, all yours.

You breathe him in the next morning when he's all smoke and sweat and sleep and skin.

This is real, you have to remind yourself. This is yours.

You want to say something but there's nothing that comes to mind, nothing that wouldn't ruin it.

Stay, you think, and in this dream, you've said it out loud. In this dream, you've ruined it after all.

He says your name against your mouth, barely a breath, hardly a word. You think he'll pull away, wince, but he doesn't.

"I never ask for anything," you say.

"And then you do," he sighs, turns his face so it comes out muffled against the pillow. "The one thing I—"

Sometimes, you'll wake up in tears and you'll turn away quick, swipe at your face, hope he'll miss it, but you're not quick enough.

He doesn't move, doesn't ask, but he'll lock an arm around your waist as you sit up, won't let you stand, not quite, not until you laugh and shove at his head. Sometimes, not even then.

Sometimes, he'll drag you back, press his face against yours, put his hands in your hair and hold you like he knows.

Sometimes, you forget he's a king.

Sometimes, you wonder if he knows.

I'm shit at this, he says, even when he's not saying anything at all. You can speak five separate languages but you're most fluent in this. He says it with his frown, with the edge of his frustration, the curl of his fingers into a fist, the burst of flame that's emotion, that's everything.

I'm shit at this and why do you bother and I could never do for you what you do for me and you deserve—

No, you think, and you want to hold him down, tell him, No, no, no. Please rid yourself of this impossible notion that I deserve better.

I am not a good man, you think. You'll bleed and draw blood without rhyme or reason. You've done it before, will do it again, for him, which is, really, for yourself. There is no way in which he is forcing your hand. It's only doing what it's meant to all along.

We are only who we were meant to be all along. Nothing more or less. Just this. Just together.

I am not a good man, you think. You, with all your flaws, might even be better.

You can't help the violence in your blood but I—I do it willingly.

Don't you know? We deserve each other.

It doesn't make sense. Of course it doesn't. It wouldn't be any good if it did.

There are seven wonders of the old world and seven kings of the new world.

There are seven whims flying under his skin, seven ways you could kiss him now.

(There's one; there's one; there's only one.)

You think you must have felt it, for a fleeting moment, so fleeting that you almost missed it, and only at first, when Tatara first came along. The thing was that Tatara fit into your life, into both your lives, so easily that you never gave it another thought. Tatara was good for him. Tatara was a light in your everyday, with his sunny smiles and backbreaking resilience, and, of course, his quiet promise of borrowed time.

Sharing space with Tatara had never been difficult, had always felt natural. Sharing anything and everything with Tatara had always felt natural, and it was effortless to trust him with your home, your heart, with the incarnation of both.

Tatara came, and then Anna came, and they burned and glowed with hearts, with love, that felt so familiar to yours and so, it was easy to trust them with the most important things.

Still, you think about how the numbers grew, think about the way the Blue King looks at him sometimes, try to wonder if you should feel something but nothing really properly emerges and wants to be named. He's got an orbit and it sucks everyone in it and you can't blame him or bring yourself to pick it apart too much.

You wonder if, maybe, it's because you were first. He was yours first. He was yours the longest. It doesn't make up for everything that follows but, sometimes, it comes close.

Outside, the weeds grow through the cracks and you don't look at them.

Spring turns to summer and the dandelions turn to dust and he tastes like strawberries on your tongue (and ash, and ash), feels like the sun on your skin, leaves you breathless, an ocean in your lungs, sharp saltwater and the jagged rocks of the reef and all.

You breathe him in anyway. You'll carry it in your lungs. You'll carry it any day, every day.

And maybe they're wrong about him. Maybe you're the Icarus and too close to the sun. He's burning your wings or whatever's left of them, but you can't move, can't look away.

He presses his face against you, holds you down in place and you can shake him off, even now, even with his king's strength, know that he half wants you to.

It's a mistake you're both making but it doesn't matter, not when it's real and he needs real, needs it right now, like he's never needed it before.

You dream of the same thing after all. Fire and fire. You know how it will end, know that that's all the more reason to take this and keep it in your hands while you still can, while its still real and not some half-baked hope or memory in your head. He kisses you and it's guilty at first—all his motions are always guilty at first, until you pull and pull, insistent, shake him out of it.

Never asked you to follow me is what you know he'll say, and you could call him a thankless piece of shit, but the truth is that, well. He's right.

Sometimes, you resent it. Not him. But this thing that makes him think you're doing him a favour when you'd follow him anywhere and you figure this is it, isn't it? The deepest circle of hell, or your own private version, where he doesn't make it out alive while all you can do is watch and smile and lie through your teeth and love him and love him till you're spent.

You can't take, there isn't much left to take, and no, you don't fault him for that, could never, it's just how it is, and so, you give and you give, and make fire with your hands, his fire, his heart, his love, his fear, all of it, rising redgold from your palms.

Some people are difficult to love.

He's not. Not difficult. That might have made it easier. Maybe. If that had been the difficult part. No, the love comes easy. Might be the easiest thing. It's everything else that's hard.

It's keeping him tethered to the land of the living that's hard when it's like he's had one foot out the door since the slate and the crown.

It's the bit where he didn't want it to be like this either that's hard.

The bit where he looks at you and his eyes tell you to go away, go as far away as possible, but also don't leave, don't ever leave; the bit where he looks at you and his eyes tell you nothing at all; the bit when he's asleep even with his eyes open.

He's got one foot out the door and he's not coming back. Not from this—

—and all of this is while Tatara's still alive.

It's the bit where you've got his face in your hands, in your head, frown lines and dark circles burnt into memory and also the laughter, which must have been a decade ago, you think, and you know you're both running out of time—that's hard.

But the bit where you breathe out when he breathes in?

That's easy.

Seri remarks that you're wasting away, wasting your life, wasting your breath, asks you: Does he even feel the same? Because it's a little bit toxic, if you know what I mean.

You shrug it off with a laugh and pour her a drink.

You'd grown up reading about love, about red roses and dim lighting and the soft sound of violins. You'd been a fool and a half if you'd ever thought that any of it could have prepared you for this.

You think about her words, absently, and no, you don't kid yourself. Of course, it's probably a little bit toxic, but Seri and her king didn't grow up in each other's orbit. They weren't friends before the crown, weren't family, weren't everything. It's almost not worth explaining and you probably couldn't do it justice if you tried.

You know that he feels, how he feels, in every sense of the word, know that he channels emotion differently from the way a lot of people do, even if the conceptualization of it may be the same. What it comes down to is that it doesn't matter. You don't need him to be like everyone else. You surpassed that point long before either of you even realized it.

Sure, it tears you up inside sometimes, sometimes, but the other times, it's fine; it's more than fine.

It might have been nothing that you once wanted but, for better or worse, it's the only thing you want now.

She looks at you, and there's a bit of pity in there, and you try to ignore it, perch your face in your hand, elbow on the bar, and smile at her, easy.

She is beautiful and you're well aware. Sometimes, you wish in a haphazard fit of fantasy that you were in love with her, this paragon of a woman, a cool blue pillar of ice and stone and all things solid and sturdy and not crumbling beneath your feet. You still think you might be, a little bit, something of a nice picture-book, fairy-tale uncomplicated love, a made-up fantasy where the two of you are spies or partners in some far off crime, rendezvous every now and share your secrets and then you part. It's clean, always clean. You love her. You're grateful for her. It's just. Different. It will never be the same.

She'll always be honest. You love that she is honest. She'll tell you that you always had a taste for disaster. You won't bother to correct her because she's right. You always gravitated towards the sun, towards the fire, liked the taste of ash on your tongue.

They all call him the wreck and you the enabler but then, you wonder what it makes you, really. What does it make you to be unable to pull away, unable to stop the fire, bask in it sometimes, even? Never mind that you taste salt in the back of your tongue, salt and bile and fear.

It's not just fear that he's going to die but that, one day, he will leave you, and what then?

What will you be, what will you do, who will you be then?

You think it would be much more toxic if you weren't so aware, but you are, and you've already thought: Hell with it, because you'll love on anyway, till the end, till you're sick, till he's dead, till you're both hollowed out to your bones.

It's a sweet summer, the last one. He's eating strawberries that Anna and Tatara picked out from somewhere. You've carefully gotten rid of the leaves; there's a tea they're supposed to make that you read about once and you're saving them for that. It's also just convenient because Anna will only eat the fruit once it's free of the leaves.

He tosses one up in the air and catches it in his mouth.

Tatara cheers out loud and Yata looks appalled.

You hide a smile behind your hand. It's been a while since that old trick.

It was a sweet summer when you saw it first. You'd laughed then and you hadn't even seen it coming, had no idea then that you'd been heading for disaster, already so far gone, in over your head in love.

He's got his head in your lap now, and you find yourself carding a hand through his hair, unthinking, let your fingers drift to the side of his face.

He catches your wrist, squeezes your fingers, drifts to sleep soon after.

You think if you were to die, right here, in this moment, it would be just fine.

This is your life's work, you think sometimes, more in a moment of overwhelming fondness than arrogance; your magnum opus.

You don't tell him.

You already know what he would say. Something along the lines of an apology, simultaneously wry and sincere and you don't know which part of it would kill you more.

At least it would be open, honest, maybe even good for both of you. After all, sometimes, you both get tired of pretending.

You don't tell him, and it's not just because you know there's no need.

You don't tell him because you know him, and know what saying it would do to him, what knowing it already does to him, and you just want him to feel free, of guilt, of debt, but also just, free.

Instead, what you say is:

"So we built ourselves a kingdom." You do not say: It was a kingdom neither of us wanted until one day, there it was, and we didn't know what else to want.

"You built the kingdom," he counters, almost reproachful. It's as if he's also saying: Sometimes, I wish you hadn't—

built it, or

loved me, or

thrown your life away.

He would never mean it, but you know all too well that there are moments where he wishes he did.

You stand by the door to find him sitting on the edge of his bed. He looks at you and says nothing.

You have no empty reassurances. You never have. That wasn't your job and the one with that job is gone now.

No, you were the one who matched him, look for look, fear for fear.

"I know," you say, close the distance, want to touch his face but you don't know how. "I know."

His forehead hits your hip and then it's unthinking, the way your hand goes to his hair, runs through it like it will change something. It won't.

Tatara was right about a lot of things but he was wrong about this.

Partly, you think, he must have known all along, which is why he could say that everything would work out in the end, because, for him, it was true even if in a sick sort of way.

He went first; he wouldn't have to wait, wouldn't have to watch.

Right now, you almost envy him.

No, it's not going to be okay.

For now, at least, the two of you are going to be not okay together.

But soon, so very soon, he's going to leave you too, leave you to be not okay on your own.

"Sorry. It's not enough," you say, when there's half a dozen new cracks in his sword, in your heart, and Tatara's body is not quite ash just yet but will be soon.

Tatara is dead and Mikoto is dying and you get the honour of watching, waiting, so if your composure fractures for a moment, you can't really be blamed.

You don't say: Sorry, I can't be them. Cant be another king, can't pretend to understand the weight of it, even if I can feel it, the bomb ticking with every second, with every beat of your heart, feel it in my own heart, in perfect time with yours.

You don't say: Sorry, I cant do what he did, can't tame your storm, can't stop the fire. All I have are words and plans and something like prayer, and that's not going to be enough.

"Shut up," says Mikoto, not even trying to misunderstand. "Shut up," voice tighter, terser now.

"You know it's not going to be enough." You smile, sad, on the edge of bitter.

He clamps a palm over your mouth, snarls, frustrated.

"You were always—" but he cuts himself off, feels his words failing, and presses his own mouth to the knuckles covering yours, a kiss to traverse skin and blood and bones.

It makes its way, in spirit, or something.

It silences you, at least.

It's the last time you touch him in the bar.

He doesn't say goodbye. There are no goodbyes. You lie in a continuum; the two of you exist when you don't.

He's here all the time anyway and there's no missing something that's carved on your back, in your lungs, in your blood.

He says your name, once, and you feel your heart, your soul dislodge a little from your chest, get ready to ascend, to follow, because I go where you go.

And then you look at Anna and you try to get your head on straight. This is so much more than you'd ever signed up for but he's looking at you, one part apology and two parts trust and the remaining parts are everything else, all the time and space, everything behind and everything ahead.

There's a split second where you hate him, fiercely, but even now, even here, it doesn't last. It never lasts.

("Why?" he'd asked you once, for the hundred thousandth time even if it was the first time out loud. "I never asked you to. Then why?"

"You held out your hand," you'd said.

"That was stupid. A joke. A dumbass experiment."

"You asked a question and I gave you an answer."

"An answer that made no sense," he'd grumbled.

"Can't help you with your intelligence level or lack thereof."

"Shut up. It wasn't a test."

You'd smiled at him then.

"Maybe. Maybe not. But in that way, you did ask, even if you didn't mean to. But you never needed to. You know that right? Anyway, there isn't a universe where we wouldn't have taken it."

He'd exhaled, almost resigned. "You know, sometimes, I wish—"

"I know," you'd cut him off. He wishes you hadn't, either of you. "But I don't," you'd told him, "and it goes without saying that he would agree with me too.")

You tell him, after everything: "I was happy, you know?"

"When? Before?" He means the slate, the crown, the sword, the point which divided everything into before and after—well, the first of one such points anyway.

"Before. After. With you. Just, always." Sometimes, he rubs off on you and you have trouble saying it too but, sometimes, it feels—important, and you just need him to know. "I was happy."

"Even when you were goddamned miserable?" Mikoto sounds skeptical. Then, "What? Don't lie to me."

You laugh because you may have nearly made a living out of lying but you could never sell it to him if you tried. "Yeah," you laugh, bright, too bright, but not dishonest. "Even then."

"Yeah," he echoes, quiet, glances at you and then away. "Me too."

x x x

Notes: Title from Straw House, Straw Dog by Richard Siken.

This started somewhere in early summer after I wound up rereading his Crush anthology on a plane and nearly every poem—

I had four dreams in a row where you were burned, about to burn, or still on fire. / In the dream I don't tell anyone, you put your head in my lap. / You swallow my heart and flee, but I want it back now, baby. I want it back.

—brought me here.