Disclaimer: I don't own Loveless. I'm not sure I'd want to, because then even the few cute and fluffy moments would be gone.
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Ritsuka feels his eyes burning with tears that he's too afraid to shed. His brother has left him, and Soubi is broken, following him around like a puppet pulled by a string. It's a string he's sorry that he can now see, for it's frayed and torn, stretching from Soubi's chest to the empty air.
Ritsuka tries to touch it, but it feels like cobwebs tickling his palm and as soon as he moves his hand, an imaginary breeze plucks it from his skin. It falls back to lay in the air, curled towards nothing, giving no hint that any bond had ever existed.
His own thread leads somewhere in the opposite direction, and he's not exactly sure he wants to know who waits at the other end.
There was nothing he could do as Soubi bowed his head and gave Seimei his every wish, a final touch of proof that Ritsuka will never matter enough. Not enough to be Soubi's everything. Not enough to be like Ai and Midori, nor Natsuo and Yoji, both sets of which have been in and out of the room he's sharing with Soubi multiple times. Not enough to be connected by that thread.
Soubi doesn't love him, he loves the idea of him, he loves the orders he has been given. Whatever Soubi says, he himself has admitted to being a liar, and however happy Ritsuka feels when he's with the man, it's an unfortunate side-effect of the sheer wrongness of Soubi.
He's like a fallen angel, beautiful and terrible, and Ritsuka knows that an angel and a human can never be a part of the same being, not like the others are. Not like he would be if he followed his bond to the end of the world.
No, theirs is a bond of chains and pretty, meaningless words. It's the satisfaction of not being alone, and the pressing self-destruction of followed orders that go against the very nature of a Sentoki. It's nothing, neither in name nor in feeling.
Ritsuka wishes that he didn't know this. He doesn't want to believe it, and he feels that if he says any of it out loud, his own belief might make a lie sound more self-assured. But he won't lie, not when it can do no good for anyone.
He's lied for years now, with soft smiles and comforting words and acts to soothe a screaming mother. He's lied, and it's doing nothing, but it's working better than this somehow. It's that realization that hurts the most, because he doesn't think him being the wrong Ritsuka will help anymore, and he wants to sleep and wake and find that it's all been a bad dream, and Seimei is at his side bandaging his wounds, but he knows it won't be true.
Ritsuka's chest hurts. It's an acidic, burning sensation, and it makes him cry, not from pain but from sheer fury. He thinks that this must be what it feels like to have your heart break. There's no way for him to be sure. This is the first he's felt of it in this lifetime of two meager years.
Ritsuka's chest won't stop, and he wants to open his mouth to scream for the pain of it, but his heart is pushing the air out of his lungs. He gasps uselessly, blunt nails tearing at the spot where his heartbeat thuds against his skin in a frantic, timeless rhythm, but still nothing happens. Finally, after seconds that seem like hours, the pain recedes, leaving him with a startling sensation of desolate emptiness and a cold that invades his every vein. But he claws at it still, fingernails tearing at his own flesh until his chest becomes a mass of angry red. All the while, Soubi tries to stop him and Ritsuka finally lashes out, sobbing an angry order for him to get away.
The upper left of his torso is broken, torn and bleeding. It bleeds from his very heart, but the pattern is so utterly different. His flesh is a gnarled mesh of sharp, straight lines and sudden petals of blood bursting from his skin like a flower reluctantly blooming at a funeral. But he can't see it anymore, so it's better. At least for the moment.
Because the imprint will be inescapable soon, and he knows that it's finally true. Loveless. Sans Amour. One without love.
It's because his "love" is a lie.
And maybe, no, probably, he once had it too, but he gave it all away and received nothing in return but the wisps of self-satisfaction that came from Seimei, and the lies from Soubi, and the pseudo-affection of those who don't even know him. So, now he is empty and he lives without, dealing with hollow echoes of his soul.
He wants his heart to hurt again, but it's just there, just an existance, just a reminder of what might have been. It is icy and vacant and lethargic as it tolls out a beat that haunts him, repeating words in his head, like the lyrics of a mournful love song. It's just there, a dim presence, like a sickness lingering at the back of his mind. He lets the infection overwhelm him.
He orders Soubi to stay and turns to see his thread stitched into the air. He lets it fall onto his palm and realizes that it feels soft and metallic, like nothing he's ever seen or felt before. For some reason, he's afraid of the realization that it will not break, but he follows it anyways, because a broken angel and an empty human will still never complete each other.
Especially not when Ritsuka counts the knowledge of the scars on his heart, not those of metaphor or simile, but those made up of the word Loveless and a cracked line that splits his heart in two.