Disclaimer: Angel Sanctuary doesn't belong to me. Katou and Kira are creations of Yuki Kaori.
Warnings: Angst. Shounen-ai. Elements of suicide. Amateur AS writer's dayview fic into the fandom - possibly plagued with errors.
Contact: there_is_nothing_else@hotmail.com
Notes: I haven't written for ages!! . So I have a feeling my writing's more than a bit rusty. Anyway, this is my first AS fic, and I hope I've done the fandom justice. Kira and Katou are actually my two favourite characters in AS (amongst others like Katan, Raphael, and Zaphriel), but that's not the reason why I've paired them up. ^^; After attempts of character psychoanalysis, I firmly believe this is the truth behind their relationship… but I feel like it's more of a love triangle, with Kira's feelings for Setsuna. Ah, you just can't win in love, can ya?
LOL… I'll leave you to the fic now then. Hope you enjoy it. ^^
SEE
Restless gusts of wind toss random strands of raven hair over his eyes, touching and rebounding off the contrasting, faded ends of mine. He exhales almost inaudibly, layers of smoke rising in spirals, only to be carried away by the wind's desperate dance. I tap the end of my cigarette, as does he, and watch the ashes tumbling and turning in undetectable inertia towards the ground below. I draw the cigarette to my lips once again, rhythmically, instinctively. We stand motionless, both of us soundlessly acknowledging each other's presence in familiar, somewhat comfortable silence. And as usual, he mentions nothing of my otherwise considered melodramatic and alarming fiasco with the Stanley knife last night.
He doesn't ask, and I don't volunteer the information. And even though the air hangs laden with countless words unspoken, I know that he already knows. He always knows.
At the beginning I hated him for it. All those times I would have succeeded if he hadn't appeared, stared into my eyes with those bottomless, pitch-black orbs of his, compelling me to let go – of the pills in my hand, of the razor above my wrist, of the rope or the gun or whatever I had in store for myself. Without a word, without a flicker of his fingers or fists – simply with his eyes; unfathomable and veiled, but yet possessing all the answers to all the questions I had ever dreamed of. Mere glimpses into them never failed to send me into irreversible realization; self-pity and desolation hitting me with the intensity of multiple blows to the chest, until I was reduced to nothing but a wreck of chokes and sobs and senseless utters of anguish for what might have been and what so blatantly was.
I hated him because I hated living, but he made me want to live. To breakdown, to cry, to have him hold me in his arms as I wept for all the things I wished to be untrue, something which he did into the deep recesses of all the blood-stained nights when everything about existence was so much more than I could take. I hated him because he had saved me when I least wanted to be saved. He had saved me.
But now, using the word 'hatred' to describe my sentiment towards him falls somewhat short of accurate.
I cease to understand what I'm feeling anymore.
At times like these we never look at each other. We gaze into the distance, our vision fixed firmly before us on vague traces of anything in sight, our only movements being the mechanical motion of our arms raising our cigarettes to our lips. At the corner of my eye I watch him stub out the cigarette in his hand to replace it with yet another. Immediately I'm aware that although I've attempted to hide it, he knows I'm watching him, but doesn't mind in the least bit. He moves under my stare without a remote trace of embarrassment or discomfort, and for some inexplicable reason, this captivates me.
I don't know what compels me to speak, but I break the silence.
My words hit me unexpectedly, scraping across my skin like the eerie echoing of a scream, the aching of a hidden wound with an otherwise unknown existence. And suddenly I'm paralyzed by the alien discovery that all along, I never even realized that these words were all I ever wanted to say – and at the same time, all but enough. Never enough.
"What would you do if I told you I'd do anything for you?"
He doesn't flinch like the naïve and inexperienced part of me half-expects him to. The words don't shock him or surprise him, like they would to anyone else.
But then again, nothing seems to shock or surprise him.
I turn towards him, not so much because I'm not afraid of what I might see in his reaction, but because I know that even if I hadn't asked, he would have known my question and answered all the same.
"You're welcome." he says, his voice still, calm, unreadable, his eyes unflinching.
And even though he hasn't directly addressed my question, even though I know that no matter how many times I say thank you, it'll never be enough, I don't persist.
'You're welcome'. For a brief moment, I have the urge to laugh at the irony of it all. Welcome. Am I? Am I ever really…welcome? I bite back a quick scoff of bitter amusement. Welcome. You're welcome. It's just a formality. Just a custom set phrase that means nothing. People use it everyday like it's just another meaningless particle in this screwed over universe of ours. And it is. That's precisely what it is.
But yet, coming from him, the words somehow take on a transformation of their own. And standing here with him, for a moment eternal, I feel like I really am … welcome. The feeling seems surreal, ungraspable – addictively unnerving.
"Why would you do that?"
His question catches me completely off guard, partly because he's never asked me a question like this before, partly because I had assumed he'd left the issue behind. For him, he doesn't need questions to see the truth about me. I stand stunned, at a loss, and unconsciously my grip releases and the cigarette falls from my hand. He watches it twist and turn beneath us, running his slender fingers through his hair, and in my state of stupor I would give anything to be able to read his thoughts for a change.
"Ha. I thought you could read my mind."
I force a smirk, hoping desperately to cover my blatant trance. But instead my voice comes out in chokes, weak, laughable and unconvincing. Often I wonder why I bother to put up any form of pretence with him when I know he sees straight through all the lies, but I do it anyway.
"Read away." I attempt a sarcastic laugh.
He doesn't respond immediately. And as I watch him, his gaze still fixed unwaveringly on something I'll never be able to see, an overwhelming sense of melancholy engulfs me.
The pain reverberates through every fibre of my being, every chord of my consciousness, throbbing and tearing through my muscles in places and ways I've never felt before. I feel it spreading and expanding, not from my wrist, as I would have expected, but from the core of my senses - what appears and feels like an unintelligible place somewhere between my gut and my heart.
He turns towards me and locks his gaze with mine. Suddenly the pain stabs at me, sharper than ever before; the pain of knowing with an apocalyptic type of certainty that while he knows everything that there is to know about me, there will always remain an untouched, shrouded eternity of things within him that I'll never know. His thoughts - so faraway, so distant, so unfathomable to me; of someone else, someplace else, another level that I'll never be able to understand. The essence of Kira Sakuya, forever a mystery to the likes of someone like me.
And all of a sudden, as if on cue, the wounds on my wrist begin to bleed.
Wordlessly he takes my hand in his, holds it against his chest, and gently unwinds the blood-stained bandages, rewrapping them with strands of ripped, black cloth. He doesn't take his eyes off me. I say nothing, once again utterly spellbound.
And as the warmth of his skin grazes mine, I can't help but speculate whether it petrifies me that right from the very first time these queer delusions of mine began to bombard me, he probably already knew. That in all likelihood, all along he's always known how much I've yearned to force myself onto those indescribably beautiful lips of his, throw myself onto the contours of his body, and drown myself inside him.
The wind strokes my face, brushing through my hair and veiling my vision in shades of bronze, obscuring his features from my view, but not for long. His fingers run softly across my palm, and then…
He smiles.
A small smile, small enough to go unnoticed by others, but a rare smile; even more so coming from him. A smile that shines and radiates with feeling, with emotion – and with something else I can't read. Sadness. Sympathy, possibly. Weariness, perhaps. Blending in with tinges of so much more that lies hidden and shadowed by the blackness of his eyes. He smiles a real smile.
And it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.
"I already have." his voice resounds in my ears with the hypnotic clarity of glass.
And the truth strikes me now, stripped bare of all deceit and deception, but this time, I have no desire to run away.
Shaking and unexpectedly weak, I wrap my fingers around his. And for a fleeting instant I think I witness a flicker in his eyes.
Every time I'm lost, I find myself waiting to be found. Not by my sister, who was the only one who ever bothered to pretend for a while that she cared. Not my mother, never my mother. Not even my father, even with all my endless wishes for him to lie and tell me that he loved me. Not by the drugs, or the cuts, or the booze, like I would have people believe. Not by God, or the salvation of Jesus Christ, or whatever else the phonies preach about.
But by him. Only him.
Every time I'm lost, I find myself waiting for him to find me.
He reaches out and slips a cigarette into my mouth, blocking out the existence of time. His vision moves back into the distance, the curls of cigarette smoke from his lips regaining their rhythm. But this time, his fingers remain intertwined with mine.
I'm just waiting for him to save me.
Because every time he reads me…
I let him.
END