Lights Dance up and down the Penrose Steps
Disclaimer: I own nothing, certainly not VK.
A/N: Meet my new obsession: Inception and what it had inspired.
Yuki doesn't remember exactly how she got to this place. They now exists in a vague limbo, neither here nor there, just like what she was for sixteen years, neither human nor vampire.
From across the room, Kaname shuffles in his own small twin bed rather uncomfortably because his tall lean frame overwhelmed the small bed. But it was the only hotel room available with two beds, so he puts up with it.
Lights glimmer from the slit between the curtains, and from the corner of her eyes, Kaname sits up abruptly. He had always been a sharp riser, wasting no time and always awake on time quite unlike her.
Attempting to get more sleep, perhaps, Yuki squeezes her eyes shut and pulls the comforter closer to her.
Lights dance in the room against her shut lids as the sun rises higher in the sky.
He moves around the room, changing and putting their stuff away (thin jackets, her dresses), not much things anyways. They travel light.
She thinks about the red ribbons hidden deep into her coat pockets and squeezes her eyes even closer together.
It is easy to predict that he was going to say to her before he speaks. After all, the words are spoken every morning, with the same tone, and exact inflection (gentle, flat). His voice is silk threads unraveling over clear water, soft and uncertain, falling apart.
"I know," she hears herself say before he finishes his sentence and climbs out of her bed.
"I know."
The cold water splashes against her face and awakens her senses. Yuki pulled her long hair into a tall ponytail. Fingering the strands and brushing it away from her face, she misses her unobtrusive short hair.
A curt knock on the door and she answers, "I'm done."
Shrugging on the once pristine frilly trench coat, covered in several layers of grim from months of traveling, Yuki opens the door.
Kaname had already packed up the luggage (two small, gray rolling suitcases) and bought it down to the car, a small dusty number that he brought with a fistful of cash and eyeful of suspicion by the seller, whom she was sure examined the money more carefully than he otherwise would had. It smells like old mold and dirt, bird droppings dried and peeled off the mottled yellow paintjob. However, it works reliably and efficiently, and that is all that Kaname was looking for. It isn't as if he doesn't try to keep it clean and presentable (frequent scrubbing, deep set brows), but he didn't realize that some filth are rotten into the core and melted too deeply to remove.
"Yvette," he appears at the door, calling her pseudonym. His dark eyes catch hers and diverts quickly. They never reveal their real name to anyone, signing into hotels under the assumed name of Yvette and Cain Windsor, brother and sister, on their merry way to visit an ailing relative. Kaname has the story with all its frivolous details planned out seamlessly. No one had yet to question their cover.
She stuffs several personal items in her worn satchel and follows him wordlessly, shutting the door behind her.
While Kaname, or rather Cain, pays their bill with crumbled dollars, Yvette sneaks out to the front of the small, family ran hotel, and digs her hand deep into her pocket until she fingers a smooth red ribbon amongst the many. She ties it around the street post, then glances at the figure inside, still with his back towards her.
Yvette walks toward the ugly car with the peeling paintjob.
Yuki lays awake in the middle of the night, unable to sleep because it was in her nature to be conscious. Kaname decided it was better to travel during the day, weaving through dry landscape, zigzagging across the land, unknown roads and forgotten paths, and whizzing by the lovely nature around them in a tiny, stuffy car. Just spreads out endlessly before them.
Flimsy maps and pages of tour guides scatter the backseat. Sometimes, he stops the car and leafs through them, only to turn and go in a completely different direction. They have visited hundreds of quaint villages, thousands of homely hotels, and millions of beautiful beaches. Yet it does not satisfy. The more they've seen, the emptier and duller each sight becomes.
She suspects Kaname knows that, but keeps quiet. He mostly keeps to himself nowadays, speaking only when he must and often deep in thought.
Yuki turns to watch his still form, amid crumple bed sheets.
She walks over to him and tugs at his cuff.
Kaname turns to face her. His shirt crumples at the collar, slightly parted and wrinkled.
"What's wrong?" he asks. Eyes brim with concern.
She touches his neck and leans toward him.
His face turns barely and her lips brush by his cold cheek. His hand finds the back of her head, stroking gently.
"Are you hungry, hmm?" Kaname pulls back once again placing distance between them, and all at once his warmth and scent leave her, suddenly cold and unsure of herself.
Assuming her silence as consent, he offers his bare wrist toward her with all its pale green capillaries running in webs floating closely near the surface of his pale thin skin.
He doesn't kiss her anymore.
She remembers the days when he used to capture her lips with hunger and desire. Hot, powerful, obsessive; his taste usually lingered for hours between her teeth. Not even gulps of water would rinse the feel of his lips over hers out. His fingers craved her flesh, and explored her skin like folding waves, washing over her until it coated her whole body.
Those used to be the days when Kaname was a king.
Now he drags his fingers across the surface of the cheap car, drawing creases within dusts, frowning at the state of its dirtiness. He rarely touches her, if ever. Just a light pat on the head or a tap on the shoulder (smiles, faintly).
He used to ask for kisses. But when she looks up at him expectedly, Kaname just presses his lips against her forehead. And that is it. The soft touch leaves as soon as it arrives, just a summer breeze. Then he pats her head paternally, not even fondling on the silkiness of her hair, a habit he picked up and dropped one day.
Maybe anger, maybe resentment, Yuki takes his hand rudely and snarls harshly into the flawless white skin, now mangled between her teeth.
Kaname does not make a sound of discomfort at all, and simply watches her draining his blood.
Colors bleed out from his face, yet his expression never changes, indifferent and calm. He watches her guzzling his blood like water.
Kaname understands very well at that moment, his blood is not enough for her.
He grips the steering wheel as they shift between lanes (Fingers: long and precise, used to slide across her stomach lazily). Dimmed sunshine slips through the tinted window and burns her skin.
She thinks about the red ribbon she ties around the street signs when Kaname wasn't looking. Her fingers fiddle with a stray thread unraveling on her coat absent mindedly.
She only asked Kaname once where they were going at the beginning of the journey.
His hairs were falling over his eyes and his breathes ragged, but he answered honestly, the most honest answer he had ever given her between his webs of deceit.
"I'm looking for a place that I saw in a long forgotten dream."
"You don't have to come with me if you don't want to," he told her when they escaped the searching army and his wounds had mostly healed. He had stumbled a bit over a thick root.
She reached out to steady him. His palm were wet with his own blood and her hands were immediately soaked with it.
He smiled and apologized, holding onto a tree to stable his balance. Red blood dripped from his hand, down the tree. He fell onto the ground, breathing heavily, still attempting to recover the damages he received from that gun.
"Brother!"
He smiled kindly at her. "Go back to him Yuki. They will not hurt you. I need to leave here."
She shook her head; her face, a deathly pale.
"I am coming with you."
They travel under fake names and avoid highways or cities.
People are looking for them, vampires and hunters alike.
But sometimes, under the bright sun and the endless roads, it is hard to remember the conflicts and bloodshed.
He often says that it is a miracle that they haven't been caught yet.
She wakes up to an empty car from a half-remembered dream. The sunlight paints the dashboard a faint orange. Golden dusts float in the air, startled by her movement.
Cries of sea gulls brush by her senses and she pushes the door open.
Her boots sink into the white soft sands and the wind whipped her face.
Strands of her hair fly into her sight and she tucks them back impatiently. Sand filters into her overwhelmed senses, everywhere, between her teeth and nooks of her fingers. Heaving up by strong autumn wind to be deposit someplace miles away, the sand is everywhere.
Before her, stretches a never ending beach that fades into a watery grayness of the sea. Uncertain sleeves of white foam divide the line between land and ocean, pushing and pulling, a paradox within itself.
A place filled with a sense of abandonment and loss.
Her feet disturb the perfect smoothness of the damp sand. It crumples underneath her weight only to be sooth by the sea water. It is as if she had never touched the sand and it remains pristine and perfect, washes away her every steps.
"It's a deal," she had told him, "I will go with you for a year, but you have to come back and face your charges."
He smiled and promised.
A smidge of blackness against the white sand appears after a few minutes of walking.
Partially submerged into the sea, when the tides come in, strands of his hair glean wetly on the surface and water soaks into his three piece suit, carrying with it seaweeds and sand. Then the waves fall back and the sensation of floating disappears as he lands back onto the white beach.
He sits up when she approaches and turns to look at her. Water drips from strands of his hair and down the white column of his throat.
"Is it here?"
He shakes his head. "No, but it is close."
The autumn wind blows and his face grows paler. His hands feel like ice when she touches it. She yelps and jerks her hand away.
Kaname breaks into an empty beach house a few miles away to rest for the night.
His foot cracks the rusted lock on the door without hesitation in an explosion of dusts and splinters.
According to the grim that had accumulated in the corners, nobody has lived here for a couple of years at least. Kaname frowns, but mutters, "It will do," under his breath.
A thick white sheets drape over the furniture and shiver with filth as Kaname pulls it off and leaves it at the corner neatly folded.
He checks the perimeter and turns on the old, rusty generator he discovered in the back. Hot water and electric stove tonight it seems.
Water runs behind the locked door of the bathroom and stream rises. Kaname turns to the kitchen and starts making a simple dinner. Neither of them are great cooks. She isn't one by nature and he became spoiled by privilege. However, he still retains some culinary knowledge and spaghetti and canned marinara sauce he bought from the previous town is effortless enough.
A white towel wonted tightly around the hair she piled up on her head and soft stream radiates off her skin. Yuki pounces out of the bathroom in light silk nightdress.
"God I am starving!"
Kaname glances at her and finishes washing his plate. He pours himself a glass of red wine he rummaged from a cupboard somewhere, and offers her.
She shakes her head and starts on her cooled off dinner.
He sips his cheap wine on and off quietly, watching her eat out of the corner of his eyes. He had changed out of the wet suit and now wore a simple shirt and slack, professionally tailored to his tall frame.
He showers quickly, allowing the strangely bland water to rinse off the crystallized salt and sand from between the strands of his hair and hidden corners behind his ears. Sand lingers around the drainage and Kaname cleans it up, perfect and pristine.
When he comes out, with the towel hanging lazily around his neck, the light is off and the plate washed, neatly put away. She has most likely gone to bed already.
He pours himself another glass of the wine with the badly fermented grapes, and consumes two other glasses in the darkness.
She wakes up in cold sweat in the middle of the night. The nightmares that had subsided recently haunt her tonight. Her lavender silk gown sticks to her skin uncomfortably, soaked in sticky sweat. She shifts in the foreign bed with unrecognizable scent that smelled vague like dusts and stale wood, like every night she had spend in numerous unfamiliar sheets for the last ten months.
Yuki throws her cover off, fanning air to skins behind her neck, stomach, and legs. Until the chilly night air cools her limbs and she starts to shiver.
She jumps when the old beach house groans against the ocean wind, and her feet lands on the dirty floor. Wrapping the comforter around her body, Yuki calls out cautiously, "Brother?"
He doesn't answer her.
After a few minutes, the house echoes emptily back to her, devoid of his presence or anything really. Only her steps and the sound of her comforter dragging against the wooden floor return to her.
She opens the door, and the strong ocean wind almost propels her back, whipping her hair back into her face. The livid and eternal howl of the sea, which sounded beautiful and gentle before, roars horribly and terrifyingly, like the sea is alive and furious. Yuki wonders how she could have fallen asleep to the lure of the waves before.
Forces push her back, but she steps forward, abandoning the heavy comforter and shuddering at the cold, ruthless wind.
She finds him sitting leisurely on the soft sandy beach, amongst the deserted crumpled castles, away from the touch of the ocean, but near enough to still taste the bitter flavor of the sea.
Leaning back and allowing the wind to pull his hair toward whichever direction it blows, Kaname takes a gulp of the bottle of red wine, had effectively discarded the wine glass, which he had lost within the dunes of sand that broaden for miles and miles.
He turns slightly when she yells for him. Her voice could barely be carried across the blasted wind and hollering waves.
He takes another swing of the wine, tasting its stale sweetness and overt bitterness on his palette. Hardly fine wine, barely decent.
"What are you doing?" she asks him, her voice rises above its usual octave and even then, she doubts he had heard her quite clearly.
"Enjoying the view," he shrugs and drinks sloppily and very uncharacteristic. A trail of redness runs down the side of his mouth, reminds her of blood, and he wipes it away.
"It is freezing," she yells. Her throat burns with the gulp of salted sea air she swallowed.
"It's manageable," he pulls off his jacket and hands it to her when he notices her quivering.
Slipping the jacket, still emitting warm from him, around her, she plops down next to him in the cold soft sand.
"Go back to bed Yuki."
She reaches for the bottle and feels its weight. "You shouldn't drink this much."
He finishes the remaining wine and throws the bottle into the ocean.
She kisses him first, and his lips are like ice and remind her of bitter almonds and rubbing alcohol. He is surprised by her action and pulls back. His fingers curl against her forearm, so cold that it feels like a burn. His whole body feels like it was dipped in icy water, clammy and frozen.
But the places where their skins touch are smoldering hot and she can't help but trace her fingers down the imprints of elegant bones beneath his skin.
She kisses him even more, pressing herself against him despite the chilly, chilly wind, and the sand pouring into everything. He falls against the beach softly by her force. Dark hairs intertwine with pieces of shells and white grains.
When the wind sweeps sand onto their tangled figure for the fifth time, Kaname pushes her back and murmurs gutturally against her ears, "We should go inside."
He picks her up easily and carries her into the beach house. Locking her arms around his neck, Yuki breathes in relief when he shuts the door behind her, successfully stopping the cold air and the breeze that streams through the beach house, up heaving sheets and blowing up curtains like silent ghosts.
He returns her to her bed. The mattress bounces under her weight, but he doesn't stay like she thought he would.
A chaste kiss on the forehead (kind, platonic), he brings her cast off comforter back to her and closes the door behind him after bidding her good night.
In retrospective, Yuki realizes that it was the last time they've ever kissed.
Kaname glides into a parking stop right after they drove into the next town. He takes her to a barber shop where old middle-aged women eye him like a piece of meat.
Silver scissors sway dangerously around her neck, chopping off long strands with no particular pattern. The lady is distracted by her handsome brother, waiting on the couch, flipping through some gossip magazine with mild interest.
Maybe he noticed the direction of the lady's gaze and smiles. Chop! A particular patch of hair drifts down her front. He comes over and the silver blades hover close to her throat. He says that he is going to the nearby shop and he will be back by the time she is done.
After the lady finishes demolishing her poor hair, Yuki stands up and shakes the stray strands. It feels strangely lighter, but when she runs her hand through it, there exists a sense of bizarre emptiness, like something is missing.
And he is paying at the counter and turns around and smiles harmlessly at her. His handsome face lights up quite extraordinarily.
He hands her a slick shopping bag inscribed with the name with a nearby department store.
It is clothes, shorts, jeans, and plain T-shirts. Just things that she used to wear as human.
They abandon her elegant dresses and pretty shoes in the back of the trunk and she changes into shorts.
When she looks into the mirror later that night at another motel, she doesn't recognize herself anymore.
He orders a glass of fine wine with his entrée and wears his creaseless three-piece suit. An illusion of grandeur recreated.
It amazes her that they haven't run into any vampires yet, maybe because they are traveling during the day and avoiding the highways and big cities where most vampires gathered.
She ties a ribbon around the street lamp as he inspects the car. He claims that he heard some strange clanking sound (frowning and frowning, turning the coins in his hand over and over).
He drives about a hundred miles more and they stop at another village for the night.
The weather becomes harsher and Kaname fixes the heater in the car. Her breathes become fogged against the tinted windows. Her fingers leaves messy prints and she reads her books, trying to keep up with her studies. The radio starts to play Christmas music when it isn't crackling noisily between regions and stretches of empty lands with only lonely, crumpling signposts and the endless freeway.
They must have covered thousands of acres this year. She doesn't recognize the road signs or even anything anymore. It blurs and blends into one another and everything seems foreign yet familiar at the same time.
The branches on the trees are bare and gray. He buys chains for the tires from a vendor at the side of the road when dirty slush splatters the side of the roads.
They see even more white and gray beaches; snow began to accumulate on the sad, cold and slippery shores. Sometimes, mists and fogs roll from the ocean and she can't see even five inches before her.
In her plain shirt and slouchy jeans, she orders burger with soda from the waiter with the foreign accent, and feels rather foolish and out of place.
She wakes up one morning and realizes that they have exactly two weeks for Kaname to turn himself in at the Hunter's headquarter.
Yuki mentions it over breakfast (greasy bacon and tasteless biscuit).
His fork and knife pauses of a piece of pancake and he looks up at her with a perfectly measure smile on his face.
In a very matter-of-fact tone, he says, eyes twinkling with amusement, "Yuki I never had any intention of going back."
Yuki calls him from a telephone booth when she sneaks out in the middle of the night, a number she memorized and didn't want to use.
He answers immediately in a cold clinical tone as if he is expecting her.
Yuki hesitates for a moment, briefly wondering if she should, but he prompts her impatiently.
Her voice trembles as she informs him of the conversation over breakfast.
A growl startles her and he grunts that he knew this would happen and he should have never agreed to her ludicrous plan and arrested him then and there.
Apologizing, she asks that they would only come if he isn't at headquarter at the deadline.
He agrees reluctantly, and she promises.
"I miss you," she says at the end.
There is a silence and he admits, "I miss you too."
He hangs up, and she listens to the dial tone.
When Yuki crawls back to bed, she fingers the red ribbon and ignores the guilt collecting at the bottom of her stomach.
She begs, but he smiles. She pleads, but he kisses her forehead chastely. She threatens, but he ignores it.
She leaves the room when he smiles, and pushes him away when he tries to kiss her. She tells him that she hates him and she wishes to never have met him. The poisonous words leave her lips and into the air. She can never take those words back.
Kaname drives. They cover more roads, gray seams of the broken parts of the white land, threading into winter. Leaves of maps and guidebooks in the backseat mingle with stale bread and broken ribbons. She traces the pattern on the windows and writes hateful words.
Dusts turn into gold in the sun, but clouds shadow them everywhere.
He smiles, easy and kind, but his eyes are dark. His voice is velvet (she runs her fingers on its silkiness and disrupts it with her mean rebukes).
When his foot steps on the crumbling sand, Yuki wonders if he thinks about the death of others at his hands. She almost asks, like always, but bites her lips and doesn't speak a word to him. The silent treatment.
His pants drip with sea water. He walks into the ocean, knee-deep in the icy water.
She stays ashore, unwilling to damp her climbing boots and trousers.
The sun peeks through for a moment, and the lights dances on the beach, up and down.
The waves crash into the shores and leaving it smooth, devoid of disturbance.
It is as if they were never there.
She runs out of red ribbons to tie around street signs, but it doesn't matter. They are here now, and Kaname has run out of time.
He laughs and talks politely to the woman at the gas station, buying bottles of water. She wonders if he knows that everything is about to end.
The world is collapsing.
He hands her a water bottle, and she tears it open angrily and drinks from it.
Kaname heaves the whole box into the truck. Her silk dresses are frail and wrinkle under it, creases of dirt and smudges, relics of her old life.
She wears old jeans and comforting sweaters, curling up at her side of the car as he pulls into a rocky coast. Hard, sharp black rocks clutter the shoreline. Waves collide into the rocks, pulling out loosened crumbs from underneath and fling white foams into the air.
There is no sand, just hard, hard black rocks everywhere. Critters crawl into its eroded holes and breathe and peek with their dark spikes and tough shells.
Unpleasant, harsh, white mists rolls in from the ocean and the cold salt air sticks to her face by the blasting wind, it tastes like bitter tears and almost knocks her off balance. She stumbles onto the uneven rocks, jagged irate angles, clinging onto a disappearing strength. The toothed tips of the shore cut into her sneakers, damp with the squirted water, icy and horrid.
He stands at the end of the cliff, overlooking the unfriendly sea from twenty, maybe thirty feet up perhaps. Water drips from his hair and down his white neck. His coat glimmers of crystallized salt and wetness. She can't see his face, but he stands there, at the edge, just gazing down at the crashing waves and torn sea weeds for an unsettling long time as if he was mesmerized by the pulling and receding paradox of the sea (gentle but angry, dangerous but calm, coming together but falling apart).
Gray angry clouds overcast, but it doesn't rain or snow, just lingers like an unraveling idea.
Then he traces the riding waves up to the horizon where the ocean blends into the sky, both colored with a stiff grayness. It is difficult to tell where land and sea separate and where they touch.
They appear out of nowhere, as if they had already known where they would be. Yuki tries to not let the guilt swell at her throat. She exhales and steps forward.
His voice, a voice she had not heard in a year, startles her. It is cold and cruel and almost at once sometime frighteningly similar to regret engorged her chest.
"Kaname Kuran, the former King of Vampire Alliance, you are hereby under arrest for obstruction of justice, resisting arrest, attempted murder, first degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, high treason, and various high misdemeanors."
Behind him are several vampire hunters with their weapons in display, ready to jump in at any motion of resistance.
"Zero…" she starts, but he silent her with a slide of an eye. His fingers grapple something at his sides. Tension rises between his brows as Kaname turns with calm curiosity.
"So you found me?" he says with an amused expression.
"We've been tracking you for a whole year," Zero hisses. His eyes are cold and hard and he pulls out his trusted gun. "Now come with us and face your crimes."
Yuki's eyes widen at the sight of the gun and she cries, "Zero, our deal! You must not hurt him."
Kaname glances at her. She knows he is looking at her, waiting for her to turn to him, but she can't, just can't meet his gentle eyes with her own without wanting to die. He knows, she panics, he knows.
Kaname sighs. Water drops strands of his hair, splatters on the ground.
"I am afraid I can't do that."
"Brother!" Yuki grips onto her brother's sleeves, silently begging him. "Please."
He stares at her momentarily and she wills him to say no, no that he is coming with Zero. Then he looks away, back at the gray-haired hunter before him with a smile.
"Are you resisting arrest then?" Zero raises a hand to stop the hunters from attacking him.
"I guess so," Kaname drawls, but he pulls Yuki behind him, standing in front of her.
He shoots after Kaname and Yuki screams. He misses, but the bullet grazes Kaname's shoulder. She hangs onto him, and begs with him to just go with Zero.
Other hunters launch themselves at him with sharp blades and dangerous guns. He dodges effortlessly; a blade precariously grazes his throat.
"You have nowhere to run," Zero aims and pulls the trigger.
"I wouldn't say so," he banters playfully, still covering Yuki with his own body, shielding her from harm.
A stray shot hits his arm and bright red blood immediately soaks through his trench coat and trickles down.
"Kaname!" she shrieks his name and jumps in front of him, protecting him with her own flesh.
But that is it.
A simple distraction, a fuming gun, a shot too late, she doesn't realize it when it hits, her ears are still ringing and her eyes searches for him, but he stands in front of her swaying lightly. Smokes rise from Zero's gun, and the scent of blood in the air thickens.
Her heart drops to her stomach and she couldn't breathe.
Others stops attacking and just watches quietly with their steel, hateful eyes.
He turns and smiles at her, relieved that she isn't hurt.
Blood dribbles down his chest. Her quivering fingers touch the torn, burned flesh with blood oozing from the white shirt beneath his vest. Her hands are instantly wet with his warm blood.
"You said my name," he whispers, swaying on his feet.
She would say it a thousand times more.
Kaname stumbles past her toward the edge and she is powerless to stop him. His blood soaks through her hand, dripping and sliding down her arm, and she can't stop it from happening. Scarlet roses blossom on the ground with his every unsteady step.
He is coming apart at the seam, breaking threads and falling, tattooed by spider webs drawn on from fastidious hands.
"I've found the place in my dreams, Yuki," he breathes her name and she wants to cry. The strong wind waves him and he staggers at the end, perilously above the hard gray sea.
"The place I was born," he murmurs, eyes glazing. "It used to be a city, but now there is nothing."
A traveler coming home to ruins, there is naught but rocks and ghosts.
Fallen and crumpled, sand is everywhere, washed clean, smooth by the sea.
"I've always wants to come back home, but I couldn't remember the way," he sighs and coughs blood, dribbling down his chin in a steady stream. Cracks runs up his throat and pale face like ridges of a complex design.
Kaname's lips quiver into a bright smile, so brilliant that she can't really see it at all through the veil of tears (blurs, blurs, spots of colors).
"Yuki, I told you," he says gently, kindly softly, with a voice like silk running over water, unraveling, "I never had any intention of going back."
He falls, and the gray water overtakes him.
Fin
Penrose Steps: an impossible object created by Lionel Penrose and his son Roger Penrose