Disclaimer: Nakamura sensei owns Skip Beat!, but I do own this story, and I wish Ren to belong to all of us.
English is not my first language, so sorry for that.
This is a translation of a fic of my own: Náufragos.
The Spanish version is available at /s/12624591/1/
Warning: OoC or not OoC, that is the question... ;)
CASTAWAYS
Kyoko had been awake awhile, memorizing this moment, learning it thoroughly... She let herself be clad in the firmness of his arms around her body, the soft and rhythmic beat of his heart under her hands and his warm breath on her skin.
She fears the moment when this dream that it's not a dream eventually ends and he wakes up. And at the same time, she wants it to finish as soon as possible, so she can fix the broken pieces of her heart and start living without him.
Kyoko inhales and closes her eyes, making longer her happiness and her agony, and she tries to figure out the fragrance that it's already engraved on her soul and her skin. Wood, grass and sun, with a bit of cinnamon —his cologne, no doubt— and something clean and transparent that reminds her of the roar of the raging sea.
He lets out a sigh that reverberates into his chest and his breathing changes. With a pang of panic, Kyoko forces herself to slow down her own breathing and she prays (to the god that may listen to) for he doesn't realize that she's awake.
He disentangles carefully, very slowly, from her body and she pretends to be still asleep. With the cold of his absence, shame will eventually come, but in the meanwhile...
She hears his soft steps toward the kitchen, and she dares to open her eyes in the darkness of the living room. The dull sound of the refrigerator being closed, and then, his black on black silhouette, on his way to the bedroom.
Believing herself safe, she sighs then, and she lets the walls that held her up fall down. She feels herself abandoned, dirty and used. But she doesn't care; she doesn't really care, because she has used him as well. She has allowed herself a single night to love him, to feel loved, and just then to leave him behind. She has allowed herself to jump to the abyss and to make a memory to cherish on the winter nights of the soul. She has used him. She has used Ren... She took advantage of his wound, his pain, and she wanted to believe that his love was true. She felt it real...
It had been a dinner like so many others: kind words, looks that made her doubt about the impossible, and the pleasure of each other's company. Until the phone call that brought the misfortune with it.
She saw the colour leave his face and the panic set in his eyes. And then, the hand, limp, weak, and the phone that slides to fall on the floor.
"Tsuruga-san!?" Kyoko exclaims shocked.
"My father," he says, after a horrible silence, the words mumbled, barely spoken. "An accident."
"Is he well?" she asks hurriedly. "Is he going to recover?"
He nods, distant, absent, as if her voice hardly touched him...
"But?" And the uneasiness stabs her breast like a dagger.
"I can't go to him," he says, his voice wavering in the end. "I can't be with him."
And he breaks down.
It falls on him, the weight of the years, the absence and the broken dreams, turned into endless chimeras. He is burdened with the past, full of dark hours, the future he stole to his parents and the present, away from those who always loved him. Time, remorse, fear and loneliness fall on him, taking the air away from his lungs.
He's drowning.
And once again, she rescues him unknowingly. She opens her arms, and holds him as best as she can in a sincere embrace, a mirror of that one he gave to her that night. And he feels his lungs can breath again.
She feels him shaking in her arms, and she holds tighter, trying to make him understand with that gesture that she is right there for him as long as he wants to. And then, he breathes on her skin, which it's more like filling himself with that scent of hers that always is the safe harbour of his soul. Ren can't help it, he doesn't want to: he holds her and he wraps his arms around her, breathing again on the virgin alabaster, his nose teasing her skin and spreading butterfly caresses. And then a kiss. A kiss on the curve of her neck, the taste of living porcelain and beating beneath his lips, and more kisses... Soft kisses, slow, curious, drawing a way in flames until reaching her mouth.
And then everything changes...
This is not how she imagined it. Or the way she would have imagined, if she had deemed herself deserving of such a dream...
His kisses are now voracious, rough, full of sorrows and grief. They are desperate, hungry kisses. They are kisses of a shipwrecked man.
She feels the vertigo of his mouth, the impetuous whirlpool that drags her into the abyss of his hands, the maddening swaying of his taste and his smell and the sinking of her will. Ren, all of Ren, over her, around her, inside her... And Kyoko, the Kyoko who loves and wants to be loved, closes her eyes cherishing the stormy yearning that lies in his kisses and she just lets herself be sunk with him...
In the darkness of the room, Kyoko is waiting for him to switch off the bedroom lamp. She's letting time pass, to make sure he falls asleep. And when the silence and the darkness return, and when he finally sleeps in his own bed, only then, she will get dressed, grab her things and leave without looking back.
She's despicable... A fake, a hypocrite... She feels the nausea creeping up into her throat, so she closes her eyes and swallows hard to repress it. What about her moral code? What about her boasted maidenhood? What about the due respect to her senpai? If at the first opportunity, just when he is shattered, broken, when he wasn't in control of himself any longer, she jumps from her safe place to the sea of his arms... It never should have been that way... It never should have happened... Despicable... That's what you are…
The light in the bedroom is finally turned off and Kyoko knows that her dream is about to end. She closes her eyes again, preparing herself to leave his life. But the soft noise of his footsteps on the carpet draws her attention.
He is back, and she senses him laying beside her, as the breeze of a blanket falls on her. He gently entangles himself again in her body, shaping himself back to her and pulling her closer to him, holding her tightly. She feels his hand caressing her cheek with such tenderness that tears gather behind her closed eyes.
And then, the kiss on her hair, subtle, delicate, as if it was carrying promises of impossible dreams. The whisper of an I love you, a Kyoko flooded with tenderness. A forgive me painted with torment...
A tear that slips away and a sigh drowned in tears.
And he kisses her. He kisses her again, softly, slowly, repeating those three words embroidered with more kisses. And Kyoko feels her heart exploding into a thousand white butterflies that take flight filling everything. Because he loves her. He loves her.
And between kisses, a story of shipwrecks and souls adrift. The story of two castaways who only found their salvation between the arms and the heart of each other.
And at dawn, when the growing light slips through the curtains of the living room, she will open her eyes, to meet the pure green gaze of Hizuri Kuon's eyes.