disclaimer: Weiss belongs to Koyasu Takehito, Project Weiss and others
beta'd by Sybil Rowan
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author's note: Nonasuki-chan kindly let me write this as the counterpoint to her Darkness, which even the mildest Schu/Aya fan will enjoy.
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I like bright colours, and passions, and words. I tried to brighten up Rosenkreuz when I was there, finding colours in souls that had been ash coloured for a century. Which is one reason why Crawford found it easy to get a first rank telepath for second rank duties.
I like seeing Aya in daylight. Weiss hunt darkness in darkness, but they are light themselves. None more than that sombre young man. In his black he is Abyssinian. But in his sweater and jeans – and I like that sweater - he is my Aya. And at night with me he is sometimes Ran, and that is even better.
Crawford told me once not to get too attached. I didn't even try to find out what he'd Seen. Long range visions are so sketchy they're at least half guess work, anyway.
So, once in a conjunction of blue moons, when he's alone at the back and no one's likely to walk in, I come out of the shadows and into the flower shop. He looks up from whatever he's doing and sees me with those brilliant eyes.
The first time I joined him at the plant bench he said he'd thought I was a creature of darkness. He was joking, with his faint smile. A tilt of one end of his mouth, a slight narrowing of his eyes, and I was distracted and dazzled as I always am.
If I were a painter I could at least recreate his image. I'd paint him in a hundred paintings – this is mine! See, isn't it marvellous? - and plaster all the galleries I could with them. He doesn't know how I envy Kudoh. Occasionally he looks at Aya, imagines and wants him naked. Not for sex, but to draw his beauty. That is a way he could have him and I cannot. But for Takatori's schemes I worked and remade the mind of the highest paid and most influential painter in Japan. I know I don't have his talent.
If I was a poet, in the old days of Europe I could have spun elaborate metaphors around his hair, which is a red not quite like any other. Around the different violets and greys in his eyes. A modern poet could shape syllables and lines to echo the grace of his movements, and the poem would be the most graceful ever made. A Japanese poet could write seventeen coherent syllables all echoing light. But I am not a poet.
If I was a good man, I could be with him in the daytime. When he feels utterly alone in a crowd, when some small commonplace thing hits him afresh with his grief and loss. That's when I envy Hidaka or Tsukiyono, who can console him. Enough, at least, to keep him going for one more day. But I am not a good man.
But I am a man. It keeps me human to talk with my lover for a little until Hidaka – it always seems to be Hidaka – comes to interrupt with some trifle, and I fade away into the shadows again.