Disclaimer: (folds arms angrily) Nooo…I don't own X or TB. And I never will because of CLAMP's 'cease and desist' order…
More Disclaimers That Will Probably Save Me Time Later:
Hey everyone! I'm Kyou-chan2 (formerly known as Kakyou-chan and Kakyouluverx) and I like the X/1999 and TB fandom. I've been wanting to write this story badly. Really, really badly. And now that the voices telling me to do this have driven me to a breaking point (and I caught a break from college) I'm doing just that.
This story is SeishirouxSubaru and may possibly have male on male bonking. If that offends, go away and play with the tolerance sock puppet. This is a post-TB story BUT there will eventually be themes from X/1999 so that's why it's here in the X/1999 section. Lastly, I love this fandom and its readers which is why I can never seem to go away for good.
So thank you and enjoy my story!
The Hall of Broken Mirrors
I. Renewal
Shadows masked the glow of golden light as they flickered under the brisk footsteps of their master. The street lights were dim and sparse in the deteriorated neighborhood, the darkness creeping into its bowels. This was the underworld of Tokyo, mused the man as he swaggered down a ruined, snow-covered sidewalk. Yet it was the desolate darkness that was ideal for business.
The man's secret meeting had concluded a good half hour ago, and he would have already been home to his extravagant house and a shot of bourbon if it were not for the distinct feeling that he was being watched. It began only minutes after his colleagues had vanished back into the night. He had almost disappeared himself when, deep in his chest, he felt a tickle of paranoia. He felt eyes focus on him with great intensity.
At first, he was quick to dismiss the feeling or, at most, speculate that he had caught the curious gaze of the homeless riffraff. He assured himself that whoever was watching—if there was in fact anyone there in the darkness and cold—would lose interest in him.
But the feeling only deepened in the pit of the man's stomach, and panic burst through him as he considered that he was being spied upon. If this were so, he would be subject to endless blackmail, or even worse, total ruin of his career, his reputation—everything that he had.
He had to salvage whatever he could from this situation, and so the man turned up the collar of his expensive tweed jacket, and abandoned the slippery sidewalk for a fresh blanket of snow that led into a labyrinth of alleys. He hurried through the empty narrows as fast as he could so that even he became disoriented by his movements. He was sure that his escape into the snowy alleys of a treacherous neighborhood would deter any man who was set to destroy him, but his pursuer was more persistent and clever than any enemy he had publicly encountered.
It was not long before the man could only force himself forward in exhausted bursts of speed. Between his labored breaths, the man heard a sudden crash of junk metal nearby, which was enough to cause him to trip under his own feet. That instant of fear brought to light the true nature of what the horrid feeling in his gut was, and with it came a new wave terror.
He was being hunted.
His pursuer's aim was not to ruin his career but to take his life. The man scrambled to his feet, and winced at the twisted ankle he had just suffered from the fall. He ignored the pain and limped forward like an injured animal. His breathing turned into frantic gasps and cries of pain and exhaustion, and although his mind refused to acknowledge it, his body would not go on.
Just when it seemed hopeless for the man, who was close to collapsing in the snow, the presence of his pursuer vanished. His feeling of being hunted abruptly dissipated. The man opened his mouth to let out a withered laugh, and his eyes teared up with relief.
It was too late for him when he noticed a shadow eclipsing him.
"Good evening, Minister," a smooth, empty and disturbingly indifferent voice rang behind him.
The greeting was followed by the sickening lurch of his vitals being torn and his chest cavity ripped open to the cold. Air escaped his throat in a perforated groan and with horror, he looked down to see white fingertips emerge from his front like a knife's tip. The man went blind with pain and his mouth overflowed with blood laced with the bitter taste of sakura. He was suffocated by that sweet, horrid taste of death.
Sakurazuka Seishirou held the corpse tightly until he felt the last pulse of life fade between his fingers. He then pulled out his hand from the man's punctured heart and watched the limp body crumple into the snow. The Minister of Japan's interior lied dead at his feet. Yet such a high profile kill gave him neither a feeling of self-satisfied power nor any thoughts of remorse, only a faint twitch of irritation.
The Minister had been selling government secrets to crime lords for the better part of a year, and his indiscretions, once a normal part of any country's dirty politics, had progressed to threatening Japan's national security. He had been caught, tried and found guilty by a jury of the highest government officials, all of this business of course kept secret from the perpetrator. Whether or not the Minister's fate was justice did not matter to Seishirou—as Sakurazukamori, his part in this dance of government secrecy was the executioner, and as such, his efforts were a form of art.
The Minister's death was poorly executed, although it was not entirely his fault. He could have never guessed that his victim was exceptionally sensitive to his power. A victim never realized that he was hunting them until they had his hand in their chest and blood on their lips. Nevertheless, he should have adapted at the first sign that the Minister had sensed him. Mistake number one, he mused to himself.
The second of his errors was less forgivable. When the Minister fled, he had little choice but to follow after. Yet when turning a sharp corner, he collided directly into a stack of garbage cans. He hated to admit it, but the loss of his right eye greatly reduced his judgment of distances and depth perception.
He thought that he had evolved past the point of clumsily stumbling into things, but his lack of focus tonight was inexcusable to him. It had been a year and a half since his accident, and it frustrated him that he could not adjust from such a meaningless loss over that long amount of time.
Overhead, the air sung with the melody of nearby church bells. It was fifteen 'till midnight on December 31st, and although the New Year meant nothing to Seishirou, he found it somewhat fitting that the Minister did not live to see midnight. In the morning, his body would be found half frozen in the snow with bundles of dirty money in his pockets. He would be exposed by the government as a dirty politician and offered to the people as a sacrifice. Within days his murder, no matter how messily rendered, would be forgotten and the government would be renewed in the eyes of the people as a just institution.
Renewal was the meaning of ritualistic holidays such as the New Year. It was a chance for people to wash away their previous shortcomings with silly resolutions that rarely came to pass. The death of a corrupt politician, the death of an old year—it was all interconnected in Seishirou's eyes. And while he remained irked at how the man's death came to pass, he was also amused at how no other night could have done justice to his passing.
A smirk twisted at the thin edges of his lips, and Seishirou flicked his crimson-stained wrist over the corpse, shaking free the thickening drops of blood from his skin. He bent to his knees to scoop a ball of snow into his bloodied palm. As it did around the stiffening body, the snow turned pink as it drank away the mess from his fingers. It was astounding how something so white could be so easily disfigured by the worst of sins.
Seishirou's smile spread over his face as the cold sphere in his hand darkened into a deeper shade of pink while his hand was subsequently cleansed. When the snowball deepened into a mortal red and was melting between his fingers, he straightened back over the body with a craving for a cigarette to warm his lungs on the long walk home.
As he reached into his coat pocket he froze, and his eye focused directly ahead at a silhouette on the other side of the alley. The figure was not much taller than a child, gaunt and covered in rags that flew about in the wind like wisps. The bedraggled creature was a street tramp that had the terrible misfortune of trespassing at the wrong moment.
Seishirou cursed as the shadow-child eyed the corpse at his feet with what must have been unrestrained terror. He had just committed mistake number three, the gravest of all errors he could have made: he let someone catch him in the act. There was nothing now to do but amend the mistake the only way he knew how.
Before Seishirou could take his second victim for the night, another wintry gust swept through the alley, causing both of them to shudder. Strands of dark, unkempt hair flew back from the intruder's frightened face, exposing the eyes for only a brief second. Something jumped inside of Seishirou as they glowed like an alley cat's in an unforgettable shade of green.
Entranced by the momentary glint of those two large orbs, he took a curious step over the Minister's body toward the other end of the alley. At once, the shadow darted around the corner in a dead sprint. A half-second later, Seishirou regained his senses and swore a second time before running after.
No matter what he would see in that strange shadow, no matter how familiar to him those eyes were in that fleeting moment, Seishirou would not be making anymore mistakes tonight.
Once he rounded the corner, he found a pathway of light footprints laid out before him in the snow. Icy wind cut against his face as he thundered through the back-roads after them. He liked to think of himself as agile despite his tall stature, yet each time he turned the next corner of the endless twists of alleys, the footprints remained with no other sign of the fleeing shadow.
The tail of his black trench coat whipped behind him in midair as he sprinted at full speed. Seishirou could not remember a chase so irritatingly challenging. He found himself running past faceless alleys littered with rusted dumpsters and fluorescent graffiti lining chipped brick walls. It was not long until he lost focus of the narrows winding around him and concentrated only on the skipping footprints that had no end.
As a final confounding element to his hopeless chase, Seishirou suddenly recognized his own larger footprints beside the ones he had been pursuing. He abruptly halted. He was running in circles after the shadow of an intruder that had all but vanished. He frowned; this night was testing his worthiness of being Sakurazukamori and he was not doing well at all.
He was further annoyed when he felt the cold touch of a snowflake resting on the tip of his nose. Seishirou looked down at himself to find his black coat dappled with specks of white. In minutes the fresh snow would fill the footprints and conceal them. His shoulders slumped, and he crossed his arms. Seishirou desperately wanted that cigarette now.
He reached into his pocket for the half empty pack of Mild Sevens when one of the steel garbage cans sneezed. The sound was pathetically weak, and if circumstances were not as desperate as they had become, Seishirou would not have heard it. He forgot about the cigarette and treaded over to a trio of garbage cans. The steel was frosted over in a lifeless shade of gray, but behind it he could hear the faintest sounds of uneven breathing.
In one swift movement, Seishirou lifted the foremost of the cans and tossed it off to the side. He found the elusive creature curled between the two remaining cans, partially submerged in the snow. The clothes that he wore—Seishirou concluded uncertainly that this pathetic thing was a boy—were hanging loosely from his emaciated figure and consisted only of frayed jeans, layers of rags, and a large, torn jacket. Beneath them, the boy was shivering violently, and the thin slivers of skin Seishirou caught exposed were pale enough to be mistaken for snow.
It was at that moment that Seishirou came to recognize a remnant of an old spell he had cast ten years ago. He gazed at the street tramp with his eyes fixed in shock as he realized that there was only one person alive that carried his mark. Reluctantly, the sorry creature raised his head from his chest, and Seishirou blanked.
He was looking directly at Sumeragi Subaru.
The boy's face was more drawn and exhausted than he would have thought possible, but nevertheless, it belonged to Subaru. Despite his sickly appearance, his eyes wildly gleamed back at Seishirou with terror.
Even Subaru's lips were growing pale when he parted them. A few breaths of air escaped his mouth in puffs of white before he managed to speak. "Are…are you going to murder me?" he whimpered in a voice that could have been shattered by the wind.
Seishirou did not expect those words from him. As he crouched down into the snow to examine Subaru, the same church bells from before sounded with greater clarity. The melody rang crisply in the remaining seconds before the New Year. Seishirou realized that the boy was genuinely afraid, and he knew at once that something was amiss. Fear was the unlikeliest emotion he ever expected to see in Subaru.
He stared into those scared green gems. "Is that what you want, Subaru-kun?"
The melody reached its conclusion and the bells clanged together, counting the hours in an outpouring of sound. One…two…three…
Tears crept to the edges of Subaru's enlarging eyelids. Seishirou watched closely—this was the reaction that he was expecting moments before, and he did not understand what he could have said to provoke those tears so suddenly.
Four…five…
"You…know who I am!" Subaru cried.
Seven…eight…nine…ten…
Before Seishirou could answer, before he could even make sense of what had already been said, Subaru collapsed into the snow. A tear shook loose of his dark eyelashes.
Eleven…twelve.
The final bell echoed into the New Year. As its sound thinned, Seishirou kept his attention on the unconscious boy in front of him. Snow relentlessly clung to Subaru, slowly entombing him. This place would become his grave if he remained there dying of exposure.
None of that meant anything to Seishirou. His thoughts rested only on those cryptic last words. After a short time, however, Seishirou concluded that Subaru was not going to wake and say anything more.
Sighing admonishingly at him, Seishirou wrapped his arms over Subaru and lifted him from the snow. With no more thought toward the person in his arms, he began to navigate himself out of the alleys and back to the endless light of the city.
Not far away there was a horrified shriek over a fresh body surrounded by a patch of burgundy snow, but few could hear it over the bursts of fireworks ringing in the New Year.