Northern Light
by Kelsey
Disclaimer: X belongs to CLAMP, but I'm tormenting their characters anyway.
Warnings: This makes me cry, and I wrote the thing. An unhappy little Rainbow Bridge ficlet, written under the influence of "Northern Lad" by Tori Amos, hence part of the title.
----
There was a moment when time stopped and everything went still and cold. Smoke curled around his face and liquid dripped from his hand, a soft tapping sound on concrete, absurdly like rain on a rooftop. In this chill second, he looked down at the figure crumpled in his arms and thought, Oh.
The ice cracked -- and he could hear the dull crunch of it in his ears, a million hearts breaking -- and time flowed on and the liquid on his hand was warm. He pulled the hand away automatically, the motions familiar, some small part of him still detached. He looked down, noted the blood staining his trenchcoat. Beautiful shade of red, a crimson found nowhere else in nature. The ground was soaked with it.
His hands shook.
Fathomless green eyes looked up at him, eyes that caught the weak light from the sky and held it. A small, serene smile on his face, Subaru murmured, "Seishirou-san... thank you..."
This wasn't supposed to happen. Numb with disbelief, Seishirou stared down at his prey's broken form. This total absence of feeling, this paralysis -- why did it feel different from his normal apathy? He felt so cold, colder than he'd ever been in his life. Why?
He touched Subaru's peaceful face with one bloodstained finger, felt each gasping struggle for breath, while all the while those eyes looked at him, glazed with pain yet bright with... something...
"Subaru-kun," he found himself saying, "I didn't want this to happen."
Confusion crept across the lovely face, then drifted away on the wind. Placing a hand on Seishirou's shoulder, he pulled himself up, all pale skin and green eyes alight and burning, burning, somehow, despite everything done to him, all the things that should have quenched him. "Seishirou-san," he said slowly, every syllable dragged from his lips by sheer force of will, "I... wanted this... It means that... I mean something... to you..."
"You've always meant something to me." The whisper was ragged, tinged with feeling, a realization in a voice that didn't seem to belong to him.
Subaru smiled again, the light in his expression still there, but growing distant. "I'm glad, because I..." His eyelashes fluttered, but through the pain, he lifted them for one final time, one last glimpse of green eyes illuminated with that strange light Seishirou had never understood. "Because I... love you..."
His hands tightened on the white material of the trenchcoat as Subaru went limp, the words finally said, breaking the most important rule of the little game they'd been playing for so long. Hatred met with indifference, white magic to black. There was no room for love in the safe little patterns they moved in. The game had ended, and not at all in the way he'd planned it. Subaru was supposed to be alive, it should be him clutching his still form in a vain effort to keep him where he belonged, here, alive, with that look of beautiful melancholy, not this terrible, final bliss.
What a fool, to trust in a dying girl's spell.
He was cold again, shivering, and he pressed his face against Subaru's hair, trying to rid himself of the feeling that he would never be warm again. Soft hair, sweet-smelling, but tainted with the faint scent of blood. And in his arms, Subaru was growing cold as well...
The bridge began to crumble, and he did not move.
by Kelsey
Disclaimer: X belongs to CLAMP, but I'm tormenting their characters anyway.
Warnings: This makes me cry, and I wrote the thing. An unhappy little Rainbow Bridge ficlet, written under the influence of "Northern Lad" by Tori Amos, hence part of the title.
----
There was a moment when time stopped and everything went still and cold. Smoke curled around his face and liquid dripped from his hand, a soft tapping sound on concrete, absurdly like rain on a rooftop. In this chill second, he looked down at the figure crumpled in his arms and thought, Oh.
The ice cracked -- and he could hear the dull crunch of it in his ears, a million hearts breaking -- and time flowed on and the liquid on his hand was warm. He pulled the hand away automatically, the motions familiar, some small part of him still detached. He looked down, noted the blood staining his trenchcoat. Beautiful shade of red, a crimson found nowhere else in nature. The ground was soaked with it.
His hands shook.
Fathomless green eyes looked up at him, eyes that caught the weak light from the sky and held it. A small, serene smile on his face, Subaru murmured, "Seishirou-san... thank you..."
This wasn't supposed to happen. Numb with disbelief, Seishirou stared down at his prey's broken form. This total absence of feeling, this paralysis -- why did it feel different from his normal apathy? He felt so cold, colder than he'd ever been in his life. Why?
He touched Subaru's peaceful face with one bloodstained finger, felt each gasping struggle for breath, while all the while those eyes looked at him, glazed with pain yet bright with... something...
"Subaru-kun," he found himself saying, "I didn't want this to happen."
Confusion crept across the lovely face, then drifted away on the wind. Placing a hand on Seishirou's shoulder, he pulled himself up, all pale skin and green eyes alight and burning, burning, somehow, despite everything done to him, all the things that should have quenched him. "Seishirou-san," he said slowly, every syllable dragged from his lips by sheer force of will, "I... wanted this... It means that... I mean something... to you..."
"You've always meant something to me." The whisper was ragged, tinged with feeling, a realization in a voice that didn't seem to belong to him.
Subaru smiled again, the light in his expression still there, but growing distant. "I'm glad, because I..." His eyelashes fluttered, but through the pain, he lifted them for one final time, one last glimpse of green eyes illuminated with that strange light Seishirou had never understood. "Because I... love you..."
His hands tightened on the white material of the trenchcoat as Subaru went limp, the words finally said, breaking the most important rule of the little game they'd been playing for so long. Hatred met with indifference, white magic to black. There was no room for love in the safe little patterns they moved in. The game had ended, and not at all in the way he'd planned it. Subaru was supposed to be alive, it should be him clutching his still form in a vain effort to keep him where he belonged, here, alive, with that look of beautiful melancholy, not this terrible, final bliss.
What a fool, to trust in a dying girl's spell.
He was cold again, shivering, and he pressed his face against Subaru's hair, trying to rid himself of the feeling that he would never be warm again. Soft hair, sweet-smelling, but tainted with the faint scent of blood. And in his arms, Subaru was growing cold as well...
The bridge began to crumble, and he did not move.