Title: salt and sulfur
Authors: keelhaul lizzie
Pairings: Fuuma/Kamui, very brief mention of Seishirou/Subaru.
Rating: R
Genres: Drama
Summary: To the flesh and bones of you.
Wordcount: 2105
Warnings: slash, violence, spoilers for the Acid Tokyo arc.
Date: August 3, 2007; finished August 6, 2007.
notes: I would like to take this opportunity to point out the obvious: ffnet's formatting sucks balls.
Lines of poetry and/or song are from Wallace Stevens, Coheed and Cambria, and Islands, in that order.
----
good eye, sniper, i'll shoot, you run;
here across the grass between the glass.
&
i remember the flavour, but i made a choice to stay here,
laying low in a tropical hideout;
if anyone finds out i'll turn their lights out.
1.
Across the chloride wasteland of sand and calcium comes a man from the Tower, ensconced in a cloying shroud of dust; Kamui watches as he tumbles from his bike—his heavy broadcloth jacket makes him seem as another rain-eaten boulder, casting shadows like those of distant giants, stolid and inexorable.
Kamui is not concerned with his fate overmuch, but nevertheless he finds him amongst the rubble and brings him back to the Government Building, his body draped over the back of his own red hovercraft. He comes to on the concrete floor—once high-polished marble, now laid deep beneath a patina of dust and rock—and through a mouthful of blood says, "Well, I've never seen you before."
Kamui kicks him in the ribs.
The man smiles, his teeth coral-pink and blood-slick like fragments of fresh-rent bone, and reaches for the semi-automatic at his hip. With trembling fingers he holds it aloft; it looks foreign to Kamui's eyes, some blue-steeled relic of a distant age on a distant world. Kamui extends a hand and deftly crushes the barrel between cruel fingers.
"Good thing I've got a back-up gun, huh?" the man says, still smiling beatifically, bloodily. His smile matches his red-tinged lenses; they give the impression of twin sunsets limned in some golden metal.
"What are you doing here?" Kamui digs his nails into the man's face. "If—"
"What're you doing here?" His smile does not change around Kamui's fingers. He repeats, "I've never seen you before. You're not from this world."
Kamui does not deign to answer; instead, he returns to the man's now-broken-down bike, disease-spotted with rust and age, and retrieves a burlap bag hanging from the handle. He empties it onto the floor, countenance studiously blank, and begins to sift through his belongings. He says, "Neither are you."
"True."
He finds a crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes, yellowed with age, two cigarettes left. A scratched Zippo lighter, the hinged lid long lost. Pulpy sci-fi and western novels, dog-eared and grit-worn, and some porno mags, falling apart at the bindings. A dented pillbox, full of powder and tablets. Rations. A Desert Eagle—he gives the magazine a cursory examination, then tosses it aside. A box of loose coffee beans.
Kamui reads the logo on the cardboard lid; apparently it once held rock candy crystals.
"Where did you get these?" Kamui rattles the box in his face.
"Now why would I answer that? You're being awfully inhospitable." He catches Kamui's hand as it comes flying at him, arrow-sharp, and squeezes his wrist. His fingers are raw from acid and wind, and his palms are oil-slick. "I found them in the sand."
His lies are as easy and as transparent as his smiles.
Kamui withdraws his hand and gives him a perfect frown, the hallmark of the sullen teenager.
"What happened to you?" he says, making a point of appearing deeply unconcerned.
"I got in a little accident."
"Are your ribs broken?" Kamui watches the way he clutches his chest with a sort of chilly disdain.
"Funny you should ask."
"We don't have enough medicine for you."
"I've got some. It's a little outdated, but it oughta do." He spreads his fingers in a gesture of surrender, extending the olive branch in the form of his blistered hand. "Hand me that pillbox, would you?"
Kamui does.
2.
His name is Fuuma, apparently. Kamui thinks he remembers him from somewhere, but he can't quite place it—perhaps it was in the form of some fictional cowboy, immortalized in celluloid or paper, a kind of Lucky Luke.
Faster than his own shadow.
Fuuma's box of medicine and rolls of dirt-smeared, once-used bandages seem to be doing the trick, because after a day of lying on Kamui's floor (he refuses to give up his bed, mostly on principle) wrapped in industrial-grade curtains, he seems to be in high spirits. He tries to read Kamui some of his paperbacks, highlighting passages detailing starships and aliens and cow-tipping and boots with spurs, but Kamui never listens.
Once, however, he tells Fuuma how inaccurate it all is, and Fuuma laughs until he spits blood.
On these nights Kamui sleeps with his back to him, so Fuuma spends his time disassembling his Desert Eagle and reassembling it, carefully counting the parts and examining the screws, the bolt assembly, the rounds. He keeps the twisted remains of his Tokarev TT-33 hidden in his bag, wrapped in a filthy square of cheesecloth from god knows where; his brother has one just like it, and some day he will show Seishirou the crumpled barrel. He can only imagine what he'll say, those vampires and their disregard for antiques.
Kamui does not know this, of course, so he keeps the gun stowed away.
3.
Fuuma has lingered well into the next month, and it is with growing ire that Kamui allows him to sleep in his room. He has seen Fuuma watching the nearby shadows of people shift past the curtain pinned to the door, and wonders when he will leave. He's healed well enough, and now wanders about the labyrinthine halls of the Government Building with a detached sort of interest, drinking what Kamui assumes is moonshine from a wear-worn canteen and sifting through dirt as though he is trying to find something, like he's expecting to find broken bits of pottery and glass threaded with flax; the remains of some ancient civilization.
If not that, he's sure to find ancient pieces of Mitsukoshi signs or polished-chrome vending machine parts.
Fuuma says it's because he lacks something better to do, and somehow Kamui believes him.
The others are not so trusting, but they say nothing; Fuuma drinks only his own concoctions, eats his own food (synthetic meat and freeze-dried peas, tiny pieces of brittle chocolate and granulate sugar tablets) and works with his own tools from inside his bag, wrapped in grease-supple suede. Now he is spending his time fixing his bike, carefully toying with a galaxy of wrenches and screwdrivers with their colour-coded handles.
Kamui watches him from a toppled column of granite that presumably once held a glittering and vaulted ceiling aloft. A neon sign lies at his feet, inert and air-corroded—he imagines it once extolled the virtues of a pachinko parlour in Shinjuku, maybe Ginza. He doesn't bother contemplating what it's doing in this building now, under dust.
"When are you leaving?" He makes sure he sounds forceful.
"Why, Kamui, it almost sounds like you don't want me here."
There is something of Seishirou in him, in the way he speaks and moves, in the ingratiating smiles and lingering glances, hidden behind red polaroid lenses though they may be. Kamui flexes his fingers and wills himself not to connect the two. Fuuma wipes his filthy brow on his shirtsleeve, and with a practiced hand lights one of his last cigarettes—with a match from an old matchbook he finds in a pocket of his sun-worn jeans, and not his Zippo. It doesn't work so well anymore without the lid.
"Want one?" he asks, already knowing the answer.
Surely enough, like organic clockwork, Kamui shakes his head. Fuuma unscrews his canteen and takes a long drink; Kamui notices that its metal siding is engraved with his name, though he can't make it all out. Somehow, it disappoints him.
More optimistic this time, Fuuma says, "You want some?"
The canteen's glass bottom winks like Akihabara signs, Electric Town at night, as Fuuma waves it at him. Kamui doesn't say yes, but he climbs down from his throne of fallen rock nevertheless, and approaches like a veteran predator.
"Did you make that?" The sentence seems unfinished; Fuuma knows Kamui wants to ask if it was with the Tower's water supply.
He doesn't, but Fuuma answers the question anyway.
"Do you think I'd waste precious water on making booze?"
"Yes."
"I didn't make it."
"Where did you get it?"
"A friend of mine gave it to me. Single malt whiskey." He asks again, "You want some?"
Kamui doesn't say no, and Fuuma extends the canteen toward him, holding it aloft like a clumsily-constructed chalice.
The taste is foreign and sour on Kamui's tongue, but he does not complain.
4.
Another week passes, and Fuuma's canteen is dry. Kamui expects him to dip into the water supply, perhaps brew coffee with those loose beans and some contraption he hides in his bag, but Fuuma remains silent and his canteen remains miraculously empty, though he spends more and more time at the edge of the reservoir; the surface remains glittering and still.
"I think I got my bike to work today," Fuuma says to Kamui's back, ever keeping vigil at the edge of the water.
"Good."
It feels like Fuuma is invading his space, almost as if he knows what sleeps under the industrial-sterile water, but Kamui never keeps him away; somehow he knows he couldn't. Fuuma just comes and goes, with his playing cards and broken telescopes, and he plays solitaire on the concrete ledge while Kamui wonders if he could see Jupiter, glimmering somewhere behind the pollution.
"You're leaving soon then, aren't you?"
Fuuma glances at him above the suspiciously-creased edges of his Bicycle cards, behind his lenses; they play canasta underground for want of anything better to do. With an easy smile, he says, "If you want me to."
He sounds like such a pariah, and Kamui frowns. "Everyone at the Tower must wonder what happened to you."
"I'm sure."
"Besides," he continues, laying his hand down in a semi-circle, perfect-folded like a paper fan, "you must want to go back, right?"
"Of course."
"Give me a proper answer."
Fuuma too lays his hand down, and Kamui can see he has several cards hidden within in the heart of his palm, concealed within his shirtsleeves like throwing knives. "Was that an improper answer?"
"You cheated."
"Oh, I guess I did."
"What else do you cheat at?"
Fuuma reaches for his bag, for the last Lucky Strike resting in its cardboard ruin of a box, and lights it in his mouth; he throws the box aside, where it continues to proclaim "it's toasted" under dirt and darkness.
He says, "Everything. Is that a good answer?"
5.
It's now around ten-oh-nine PM. Keeping track of time is difficult in the Government Building; sundials are rendered useless, water clocks are inexcusably wasteful, the transmission towers already fallen into the earth. Fuuma has a tarnished, sand-choked pocketwatch, however, and its face says ten-oh-nine, the second hand accelerating like the noisy flight of mechanical birds.
Kamui can hear the gears grinding, an ugly sound, as he allows Fuuma to kiss him, lower him onto the bed. Fuuma slides on top of him; Kamui makes a surprised little noise as their hips fit together through their jeans, their bones and their skin. Fuuma fumbles around his bag, trying to keep contact, trying to squirm out of his clothes, and as Fuuma reaches for some equivalent of lube in his ever-useful bag Kamui reaches for his glasses; in one fluid motion he pulls them off, and Fuuma squints in the new light, the world no longer rose-tinted, blood-tinted.
Fuuma recalls those few nights he happened to see Seishirou and Kamui's brother together, and he realizes that the twins are not so similar—Subaru was all sad smiles, the archetype of the lovelorn teenager personified; Kamui grabs at him like he intends to break his arms, his fingers.
Fuuma can only imagine what Kamui would say; he doesn't mention it, and fucks him in silence.
He'll mention it to Seishirou, though, the crumpled barrel and Kamui in his hot, dirty little room of sandstone and canvas, maybe even the fierce and bestial way he fucks, so unlike his brother.
Thinking of Subaru, under all that water, all that weight, makes it harder to come—but he does, quickly, in a rush of little words. Kamui gasps, maybe swears, and his nails extend like blackened branches into the flesh and muscle of Fuuma's back, scraping some stretch of bone. He opens his eyes, cat-slit feral, and does not apologize.
The clock now reads ten-thirty-three, and after Kamui drinks the blood from his back, languid, deliberate, Fuuma sleeps on the floor.
6.
Fuuma leaves the next day, eight-thirty in the morning exactly, and Kamui watches him as he speeds away into the rain on the rusting remains of some beast, and says nothing.
When Fuuma arrives he moves to change his clothes; Yuzuriha asks where he got the new scar, five perfect imprints of scab-red, and Fuuma just smiles behind his glasses.