Disclaimer: Paradise Kiss belongs to Ai Yazawa.
A/N: Very short story I thought of randomly after finishing the manga. Reviews are much appreciated!
Homecoming
One day, control is lost to him. He is alone when he shouldn't be and that tight knot of jealousy has burst and consumed him, so wholly and intensely that he has no control over his body. Something has snapped: a line crossed, a foothold crumbled; his actions are not truly his own and he is no longer kind, passive Hiro. As his suppressed passions explode and posses his body, his conscience can only calmly berate himself. His mind has risen above his raging body an impartial observer, and its thoughts are thus: it was only a matter of time. His return has stirred a long dormant fire in us both.
Yukari returns late that night to find her freshly bare feet stung. The feeling is peculiar to her in her usually impeccable flat; words such as sterile, colourless are the ones that spring to her mind. She does not associate her living space with any minor extremities of emotion: pain, irritation, joy, lust are all alien to her there, numbed by a slow, slow sensation of sinking (although that is soon to dramatically to change). She wiggles her toes, experimenting. Objects embed them: small, hard and round. She lifts her feet. A few stick to her but most scatter on the floor, disturbed by her movement. She turns on the lights and they are thousands and everywhere. In the creases of their clean white sofa and dotted across the glass coffee table and broadcast over the polished floor like a symptom of disease.
Beads. Beads. Everywhere she looks. She would know them anywhere; one week of her life had been devoted entirely to those little beads: Isabella's precious antiques she had been collecting since childhood, painstakingly stitched onto every inch of that rustling blue fabric. That fabric that, when against her skin, brings Yukari suddenly up from a gradual asphyxiation and she can breathe in the past like a life force, smell the dye of the roses and see the blinding lights behind her eyelids. The fabric that when she looks closer has been torn, torn, torn and its remnants dance across the room with their beads and it is so beautiful, so horrible that Yukari can only weep and hold close all she can gather as her silent accusations thicken the air.
Her husband watches, a voyeur on her pain that is also his own. He does nothing to hide the scissors glinting in his hand.
