Title: Salt Water
Author: Brigdh
Content/Rating: PG-13. Thoughts of suicide and Muraki memories.
Summary: Kyoto. Fire. Death. Salt water. Love.
Archive: Phantom Moon can have it. It's also going up on the TsuxHi ML and my LJ. Others ask.
Author's Note: Four drabbles. (A drabble is a story that's exactly one hundred words long.) The thoughts of the characters during the big climax at the end of the Kyoto arc. Spoilers for all the anime, and the manga up to the equivalent point. Feedback is a good thing, maybe the best of things. Brigdh@yahoo.com
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Salt Water
"The cure for everything is salt water: sweat, blood, tears, or the sea."
**********
The sweat is pouring off Tatsumi. He's never minded sweat; to him, it's always been a sign of hard work and honest labor, the undeniable proof of the worth in every yen. But no one earned this. Shinigamis would burn in such a fire, would flare briefly like discarded receipts.
Black flames flicker like shadows, echo in an ever-alert part of Tatsumi's mind. He knows how easy it would be to call it to bear, to take control of the chaos that engulfs this building. He makes no move, though. Lives are far more difficult to balance than budgets.
**********
Muraki can taste blood in the back of his mouth.
His hands are red, and he can't remember whose blood covers them. He lost count somehow. Oriya warned him.
One short. He was always one short.
Muraki's tasted blood before, of course: offered freely by foolish, besotted girls, licked from skin more beautiful and more unwilling than bouya's, sprayed across his face in surgery gone suddenly, unpredictably wrong. He's quite familiar with the taste, salty and copper-bright as life itself, bitter as a newly minted penny.
He smells sakura, or maybe it's gunpowder.
Muraki wonders if he's gone mad. Perhaps.
**********
Tsuzuki is tired of tears.
He is tired of salt left in the corners of his eyes, tired of scratchy trails across his cheeks. He is tired of how his head aches, his throat goes sore and harsh with sobs. Tired of their taste on his lips, dead and barren.
He has not tired of life. He never will. But the price is too high. Every day he ever lived was bought with the death of an innocent. Tsuzuki wishes he was still innocent.
He would like to see the sun once more, but the tears are blurring his view.
**********
Stay with me, Tsuzuki. Idiot. Listen. You think you can drown yourself in this sea, and that'll make it all better? You think your death will improve things for the rest of us? Do you think I can't understand about pain, pain so intense you want to let go and slip under the waves? Damn you.
Not even a sea can wash away scars. I should know.
Listen. Yes, there are dark depths under us, and yes, we never learned to swim. But please. Just a little longer.
Stay with me. If you drown, so do I. Stay with me.
Author: Brigdh
Content/Rating: PG-13. Thoughts of suicide and Muraki memories.
Summary: Kyoto. Fire. Death. Salt water. Love.
Archive: Phantom Moon can have it. It's also going up on the TsuxHi ML and my LJ. Others ask.
Author's Note: Four drabbles. (A drabble is a story that's exactly one hundred words long.) The thoughts of the characters during the big climax at the end of the Kyoto arc. Spoilers for all the anime, and the manga up to the equivalent point. Feedback is a good thing, maybe the best of things. Brigdh@yahoo.com
**********
Salt Water
"The cure for everything is salt water: sweat, blood, tears, or the sea."
**********
The sweat is pouring off Tatsumi. He's never minded sweat; to him, it's always been a sign of hard work and honest labor, the undeniable proof of the worth in every yen. But no one earned this. Shinigamis would burn in such a fire, would flare briefly like discarded receipts.
Black flames flicker like shadows, echo in an ever-alert part of Tatsumi's mind. He knows how easy it would be to call it to bear, to take control of the chaos that engulfs this building. He makes no move, though. Lives are far more difficult to balance than budgets.
**********
Muraki can taste blood in the back of his mouth.
His hands are red, and he can't remember whose blood covers them. He lost count somehow. Oriya warned him.
One short. He was always one short.
Muraki's tasted blood before, of course: offered freely by foolish, besotted girls, licked from skin more beautiful and more unwilling than bouya's, sprayed across his face in surgery gone suddenly, unpredictably wrong. He's quite familiar with the taste, salty and copper-bright as life itself, bitter as a newly minted penny.
He smells sakura, or maybe it's gunpowder.
Muraki wonders if he's gone mad. Perhaps.
**********
Tsuzuki is tired of tears.
He is tired of salt left in the corners of his eyes, tired of scratchy trails across his cheeks. He is tired of how his head aches, his throat goes sore and harsh with sobs. Tired of their taste on his lips, dead and barren.
He has not tired of life. He never will. But the price is too high. Every day he ever lived was bought with the death of an innocent. Tsuzuki wishes he was still innocent.
He would like to see the sun once more, but the tears are blurring his view.
**********
Stay with me, Tsuzuki. Idiot. Listen. You think you can drown yourself in this sea, and that'll make it all better? You think your death will improve things for the rest of us? Do you think I can't understand about pain, pain so intense you want to let go and slip under the waves? Damn you.
Not even a sea can wash away scars. I should know.
Listen. Yes, there are dark depths under us, and yes, we never learned to swim. But please. Just a little longer.
Stay with me. If you drown, so do I. Stay with me.