A/N: Written in a random flash on a rainy June night. There are like… facets, to Charden and Kyoko, which I've kinda always been compelled by, and I had Eagle Eye Cherry stuck in my head (ironically enough, the title is actually a David Bowie song). Hey presto.
I'm not going to pretend it's particularly finished or polished or whatever (yay dodging study whoooo!), but… read and review, if you like.
Keep in mind a lot of artistic license is at play here, also.
Summary: Ooh baby, baby it's a futile world… the best sweepers are those with an innate sense of isolation. Short, (bitter)sweet, KyokoxCharden.
Disclaimer: If I had the rights to Black Cat or anything remotely pertaining to it, I wouldn't be so scared of my uni exams. The cat would, to not put too lame a pun on it, be in the bag already.
Soul Love
Lyon
There should be laws against being this way.
It's the first thing she's said in the last two hours, and the words hang in the city-night gloom, tinged by bitterness and longing and fatigue, making him ache. Her pale skin gleams where the streetlamp light hits it, from beyond the window where she sits, her head resting against the glass, with an unshakeable sadness written across the curved faces of her pearlescent eyes.
She sits nowhere else when she comes to his apartment, not on the one-of-a-kind designer Italian leather couch, nor at the chrome bar counter which separates the kitchen from the wide expanse of dark hardwood floor which constitutes the majority of his nearly-a-million-dollars-per-square-metre space. Just on a window sill, which, by all rights, she shouldn't be able to fit on in the first place, staring out at some world nobody else can reach.
The best sweepers are those with an innate quality of isolation, and at her core Kyoko is pure light and heat.
Untouchable.
Her head rolls forward so that her short, witchy black hair hides her face as she pulls her handbag up into her lap and unscrews the cap from a silver flask.
"I've got scotch here," he objects as she brings it to her lips and tilts her head back, and from the corners of her eyes she sees him stir, then push a rope of silver yellow hair over his shoulder.
"I'm on something a little stronger tonight…" she says, grimacing at the after-tang (because she is never sure how far between a taste and discomfort it is, but tang is a better way to describe the sensation the moonshine gives her, slipping down into her insides, tempering the fire there) and he raises an eyebrow sardonically, remembering the girl who sucked on icy sweets constantly. Drinking a brew she'd pawned off a homeless man.
"As you were then."
She smirks around the lip of the flask, but there's a desolation which will not shake itself from where it dances across her irises, and he gets up to pour himself a glass of the liquid gold. A distraction from the need he feels to gather her in his arms and hold her there, safe.
She is twenty years old now, and sometimes when he thinks about the fire that burns inside of her he worries about how much of her it eats up in the process.
No fire can exist without fuel, after all.
Sometimes she hates the way Charden looks at her, because she knows he is the only person who ever sees her for her, and she has vested much time into trying to be somebody else. Not this person, this girl she is tonight, wanting the half-dark limbo of the night-time city to swallow her whole.
The liquor splashes around the crystal cut tumbler (the set an heirloom from his grandparents, and one of the few things he bothered to keep when his family crumbled into dust) and by the time it's full his hands have ceased shaking. From his peripheries he sees her tilt her head back and yawn. The tendons in her neck are beautiful, and although he doesn't often think of Kyoko this way, they lend her a vulnerable delicacy, one he can't properly comprehend. Huddled in her bomber jacket, she looks up when he comes back, sits on the arm of the couch, closer to her side.
She holds out a hand and he gives her his glass. Gravity pulls her bag to the ground, the handles free of her hands as she sips, revealing textbooks, a pistol, and a plushie key ring.
Old habits don't die if you're life is dedicated to saving people. Even now she is going to be a lawyer. Ditch the sweeper get-rich-or-die-trying mode of thought. Save the world through the courts instead of on the streets. Or so she says.
She had come over this night to celebrate, at first. That she has won a full scholarship to one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Somehow, though, the ache of existence got in the way.
"There's nothing wrong with you being as you are, Kyoko." The words spill out of him, tongue loosened by the alcohol, and she turns, forcing one of her long legs down off the window sill in the process.
"What."
"You… you are…"
"From a strictly Taoist point of view, actually, there is. There's a lot wrong." And he can hear the hurt in her voice, although he doesn't understand it, brain dulled by booze. (And she can drink anyone under the table, he knows, but is still surprised she is so sharp even now)
"Don't, Kyoko."
"No I'm damn well going to. Who am I?"
"You are yourself."
"Don't spin any of your cryptic bullshit Charden. You're only 5 years older than me."
"What's cryptic about that?" he demands, sobering up, stung. And afraid, as well. Not for the first time. Worried that she resents him for finding her, all those years ago. Guilty accomplice in her own perceived undoing.
"Define me. I dare you. What am I in relation to the universe?"
You are light and fire and hope he wants to say. But then he realises what she means.
"I'm sorry," she says, after a pause – the space where his answer should have gone. "I didn't come here to fight with you… I'm… not sleeping at the moment, and so… sometimes I get… tired."
You're only human.
"I'm not," she says, smiling at him, and she reaches down to run her fingers through his hair. "But thanks for thinking so."
The tumbler is one glass too many, tipping him over the edge, and he knows this, because he is catching her hand as it plays with his hair, is lacing her fingers with his own, is standing up and cupping her face in his hands, kissing her soft lips before he realises what he is doing. Stunned, he steps away from her, forcing himself to meet her eyes.
"Forgive me," he gabbles, glad for the night that hides his shame and dismay, makes it easier to look at her. "I didn't mean to. I don't know… I've just… the scotch… I…" but then her mouth is on his again, her body pressed up against the length of his, her fingers running through his hair, the heat of her nearly too much to bear but impossible to pull away from, and he wonders if he has been living in the cold his entire life. When they surface for air he finds himself unable to let her go, his arms around her waist, holding her against his chest.
"I'll blame that on the brew I traded Tarzan a blanket for, then," she murmurs, referring to her kiss, the one that throbs through his mouth even now. "And because you're so drunk I'll say that I love you, and that it kills me that I'll never be good enough for you. That I wish I was strong enough to accept this but I can't, so I'm leaving… and you won't remember in the morning."
"And because I'm drunk and won't remember," he replies, "I'm going to say that I have been wanting to do this since you were 17, and that I know I can't keep you. But goddamn I want to." And he kisses her again, in control now, or kind of, anyway, her hands running up under his shirt, leaving tingling trails of lightning across his skin.
And Charden forgets that she is untouchable. Forgets that she doesn't think she is human. Tastes the molten heat of her body, feels the seismic rock of the universe in her, and the words you are my entire world hang unspoken between them. Suspended somewhere between Light and Darkest night. Heat and cold blood. Witchy girl and Shaman boy, desperate to confirm their impact upon the universe, each other.
Lifelines come in many guises, and they do not need to question the validity of a shared despair. An inherited loss. Soul recognition consummated in their bodies, to delay the inexorable collapse of their reality.
Ooh baby, baby it's a futile world.
Her tears sting his skin, the way he has always known they would.
fin