A/N: This is a series of vignettes centered around couples that are...let's say, rather unconventional. Really, it was an idea from my friend, Jessica, for me to write one-shots about couples that I detest and try to make them sound good. So here is my attempt. It's very fun actually.
It Was An Accident, Dearest
It is wrong, Rin thinks, for children like themselves to know death. Death is not meant to be known. It is supposed to be a mystery, the next great journey. Rin closes her eyes and shakes her head. It is no journey. No journey at all.
Death is the end; it is the destination where all things must go. Death is inevitable, irreplaceable, and eternal. Death is where she is supposed to be. Where Kohaku is supposed to be.
She glances over at him, the empty boy, his eyes scattering light like the broken pieces of a stained glass window, every piece, shimmering like the moon. She and Kohaku cheated death. And there is a price to pay for that.
The sky is swirling gray and mist and gray, the gray of drabness, the gray of this world. She awoke to this gray. Twice. Rin laughs. Gray is the most beautiful color of them all. She wishes that she could see in black and white. Colors do not suit her. Colors make her miss this life. She does not want to remember when she is gone.
The empty boy comes to sit next to her. He is silent. Rin hates it. The silence threatens to overwhelm her; it is trying to drown her with its thick blanket of suffocation. Rin begins to talk.
"Why don't you ever say anything to me, Kohaku? You're so quiet."
Kohaku swivels his head around slowly, and his eyes pierce into the depths of her soul. For a minute, they gleam red, but then it is gone.
"Words are not trustworthy. They mean nothing. Surely you know that, Rin," he answers.
She loves his eyes. They have all the splendor of a lost soul, all the color of nothing. He turns away, and she loves his head, noble and stoic. Characteristics that count for nothing. He clasps his hand and she loves his fingers, long and thin like kindle wood clacking together senselessly with the sound of nothing.
Rin laughs with glee. She hates things that are full of hope and promise; things that will eventually melt away. Death allows nothing. She hates things that are plentiful. They will last for a day at most. And then the sun will set, and the snow will fall, and everything, everything will be gone. She loves nothing. She loves absolutely nothing.
She loves the empty boy, for he is nothing at all.
Rin stands up. "Let's go, Kohaku."
It is snowing. Rin smiles a secret smile. Death is waiting to take away everything. So she cups all her treasures of nothing against her chest and looks forward. Death may take all it likes.
She holds Kohaku's hand tightly, and they walk into the forest. She loves a nothing-boy, and she kisses him on the cheek.
He kisses her back, a sweet kiss of longing and lost dreams, a bitter kiss of death.
Rin laughs and laughs into his warm mouth. She cries and cries into his smooth neck. Nothing, she thinks lightly.
The two children hold hands and walk off into tomorrow, where death is forever, and children are no longer that. They clasp hands and face the gray.
xXx
"Gray was always my favorite color. Did you know that, Kohaku?" Rin remarks conversationally. She is an old woman now, her hair, the gray of her dreams.
He is silent.
Rin looks over at the grave where Kohaku's name is carved neatly onto a stone plaque.
Just like many years before, she laughs again, only harder. She laughs and laughs into the warm air. And she cries and cries into the cold ground. She misses her empty boy.
The starlings lift into the sky, startled by her sudden weeping.
Only nothing is forever, she thinks.
Both he and she, they are nothing. No ones, nothings, nobodies, just emptiness and emptiness and emptiness…
And so we are forever. How very funny. I could hardly tell.
She laughs and laughs, into nothing in particular.
Nothing at all.