Disclaimer: SD and relevant characters belong to Inoue Takehiko.
Warnings: Shounen-ai undertones. Mild angst.
Notes: Someone once told me that the entire journey of love can be described as an attempt to recapture one's first experience of it, that after one falls in love for the first time, one spends the rest of one's life trying to relive that memory of the past. I feel that human beings have an enormous capacity for self-deception, enormous holes of absent self-knowledge, when it comes to matters of the heart. Sometimes we believe that we have fallen in love with a certain person, but in truth, our psyche has only projected onto this person the image of another we once loved before. Such is the strange nature of love.
I have tried, in this fic, to capture this personal view and insight. I hope you like it, and would appreciate any feedback.
TOUCHED WITH FIRE
She was loud, and boisterous, and felt like the wind's harmonies on a summer's day. Her hair fell about her in amber waterfalls of sun fire, auburn crests grazing and caressing his skin when she moved close. When she laughed, her shrill, liberated shrieks of unbridled joy awakened something inside him, like déjà vu, or a shadow of a memory. When it ended, a bittersweet aftertaste always remained.
He had taught her how to play basketball, or so she thought, he had seen the spark of explosive passion in her all along, and knew better. She was phenomenal for a beginner, excellent for a girl. Eventually he forgot that she was one.
She was persistent, shameless, a transparent, open book of childhood simplicity. She had moved into the empty house beside him six months before, watched him with his basketball, observed him shooting hoops at the court nearby. She hounded him, ignored his deliberate silences and non-deliberate lack of manners, forced him to acknowledge her with her spirit of blind and obstinate refusal to accept failure or rejection.
She moved in flashing streaks of red, and shed a delicate mist of sweat on the places where they touched during one-on-one matches, or lessons in defense. Her mannerisms turned his thoughts inwards, like the haunting silhouettes of hypnosis and reminiscence, until her being sometimes dissolved into the tangerine skies which enveloped the tenacious firmness of her frame.
He ignores the warning signs when he prefers her in loose-fitting, plain clothing which dulls the natural curves of her feminine bodice, her hair tied backed and slicked tightly against the now sharpened angles of her forehead. When she runs her calloused fingers over his face, he does not explain why it must happen in the dark, when her features are shrouded and obscured. He imagines that he is in another place, at another time, with another person, and when he opens his eyes after kissing her, he is momentarily startled, silently confused, he finds that he has forgotten it is she.
She leaves on her birthday. She waits for words that never come, a look, a touch, to tell her what she wants and needs to hear. She cries. He remembers the only time he has ever seen such an avalanche of tears, and suddenly, that Face in the sea of his memory collides with this face in the moment before him, so different but so very much the same, two overlapping mirrors of his buried and forbidden yearnings. And for the first time he sees that it is all wrong, oh so very wrong.
"Do you even love me?" she pleads, and instantly she is scared, shaking with her sobs and her sincerity, hazel eyes of gold filled with so much pain and so much love and so much promise.
And he does not answer, he does not know. She weeps with inhuman abandon, engulfed by a silence that carries more answers than all the words in the world could ever explain.
"Damn you, Rukawa Kaede." she chokes, angry and bitter and heartbroken all at once. "Damn you."
He lets her cling to him, cry on his shoulder, hit and strike him with fists that hurt instead of tingle with the painless passion of paradoxical desire, like the interminable bruises and marks on his skin adorned by another, those mementos and secret letters of suppressed longing. He lets her hold him as she rocks back and forth, keening, raging, protesting, accepting. He does not hold her, a symbolic statue of the love he receives but cannot reciprocate.
She leaves, and when she looks back at him, the sun glares the truth, raw, naked, and bare, merciless light exposing her voluptuous figure, her goddess-like locks of feminine tenderness, her thick, matted lashes which curve upwards and parallel the softness of her movements and her face, and it is not His face, he sees for the final time that it is not His face. He sees that he has broken something inside her. He never sees her again.
He sees Him later after school. He is absent during practice, and the gymnasium screams with the empty spaces that are His to fill. He waits for the others to depart, chattering and guffawing, exchanging half-hearted, playful insults or solemn plans. He is left alone in centre of an empty court, with nothing but the faltering fluorescent lights above him and the faithful bounce of the basketball below him as his company. He sweats and pants hard, rugged breathes of desperate claustrophobia, a door bursts open, and there He is, chest rising and falling in loud, boisterous motion, carried on gusts of the wind's harmonies on a summer's day. It is His face.
He wants to hit Him, hurt Him, break Him, so he can make Him cry on his shoulder, so he can hold Him as He does.
"Damn you, baka kitsune." He growls, hazel eyes of gold burning with the fire in the amber blaze of His hair. "Damn you."
The last thing he thinks before they fly at each other is that it is all wrong, oh so very wrong.