Title: Prologue - Despair in Three Parts

Author: schyra

Date written: 11/12/09 (3.40am)

Pairings: Lucia/Haru

Summary:

Author's Notes:

There is a chair in front of me.

Where before there was you, in the morning, sitting opposite. With newspaper, with book, with coffee. Two hours or fifteen minutes, then the wooden sound of scraping as you push it back, stand, stretch. Your gaze gradually sharpening, it's a new day.

Work. Breakfast.

Now, there is a chair, and nothing more.

There is a mug. sitting still upon the metal drying rack.

There is a folded paper from two days ago.

A book with purple cover, hardback, on the bookshelf. A bookmark still in it.

Now, there is no sound.

And still, in the morning, the clock ticks too loud. I should get rid of it. The gleam of the metal cutlery when I open their drawer is like it's mocking me. We have too many plates. Still, when I look down at toast and eggs, something hovers at the edge and on top of my gaze, around my eyelashes, where your black shirt could have been.

--------------

They come often, now. When before it was just casual dropping in, bringing a cake, some food, a beer. For chatting and old times' sake. Now they come to check if I am alive. They aren't blind. They notice the dark rings, that I've had no sleep, and that my hand sometimes shakes when I put my hand on the mail.

There are letters still addressed to you.

Elie brings me flowers to put in the vase on our table. She puts them in herself, and fills it with water, because she knows I won't touch them. They're things of beauty, and I know she chose them from a florist somewhere. You'd have looked at the fallen petals, eyes dark with thought.

Musica brings alcohol. And jokes. And reassuring hands. And company. It is not him I ache for, but it's nice anyway. I like to think his gestures mean something. He laughs the same as always, but it sounds a little tighter now, because I don't laugh along. Sometimes he holds me. He has shoulders I could cry on, but I'm empty.

Reina, Sieg, Niebel, Ruby. Everyone comes. They give condolences, tears, hugs. Julia holds my hands, sitting beside me on the sofa, and looks through the air, as if she could see my grief. Deep Snow finally dropped by last week, and said nothing as he went through the house, straightening and cleaning and dusting. He took some of your things with him when he left.

It's alright. He was your brother. Maybe he finds comfort in objects no longer with an owner, maybe he took them to remember whose they used to be.

I don't need them anyway. Your stuff never defined you.

They notice I don't eat, and so they sit with me at meal times. In the afternoon, at night. They invite me out, but more often than not I don't go.

Their eyes look at me with sympathy.

And I know that they don't understand.

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Winter. Snow.

Ice slate on the tarmac.

My fingers are white under my maroon knitted gloves, and despite the three or so layers I'm wearing I'm shivering. Every breath that leaves me condenses into wispy smoke and disappears into the air. It's at least ten degrees below zero, celsius.

Hey.

Do you think freezing hurts? Like maybe the way you put an ice cube down your back, and it pulls on your pain receptors along with your cold ones as it slides over your skin?At what point does cold become numb? When you stop feeling? When your nerves get too much and just shut down, leaving parts of you disconnected? I suppose getting frostbite is painful. All that dead tissue and flesh, that froze because it was too cold. You have to cut them off, you can't feel them anymore.

I'm not a scientist. All I have is high school basics. I know herbal remedies though. And old sayings, about what to do to keep out the chill. I know what to do in case of hypothermia. I know that your extremities freeze off first. I also know there are things they don't tell you.

Because they don't say that 'being numb' hurts. That 'not feeling' can make the strings of one's heart tighten and snap and its walls quiver with strain.

They say sit by a fire, have a cup of something warm, like soup, like tea. Chicken soup for the soul, because you can trek in the cold with you, like the melting snow you leave behind, that snuck in under your boots.

But they don't say that sometimes the cold is inside as well, shivering, coating your core like cool, viscous liquid until you feel like it is you who are wrapped around ice.

I can't feel.

No, that's not right. That's 'numbness'. I can feel. It is the same as feeling an absence, but not. Similar to feeling the lack of something, but not quite. I've been sensing that quite a bit too.

I can feel you 'not being'.

And it hurts more than this knife I hold, gripping, in my palm.

Red seeps over my skin, as though it has always been waiting to burst free, and answers gravity like its an irresistible master and drips onto the table.

After a while, I get up, put my hand under cold running water, splash it with disinfectant alcohol, wince appropriately and wrap it in white. Bandages are rough, brittle-feeling things, and I wonder why they're used to wrap you up. Hardly suitable for keeping what's inside you from spillng out, it seems, from touch.

I go to the window, look out.

Snow is falling again. There must be four or five inches out there by now.

I turn away, head to the bedroom, close the door, and I sleep.

The rest of the season is like a haze, like hibernating. I wake, though not really, make toast, eat a bite, have hot chocolate, water, bathe. I take the phone of the hook for an hour or two, then put it back on, because it would be quite inconsiderate of me if the others had to drive all the way out here to see if I'm alright.

One day, I go to the window again. Even though it means nothing.

Children pass before me, laughing, playing. A dog barks and jumps, reaches to catch a disk. The sky is blue, and the ocean crashes timely upon the shore. An electric guitar thrums with life, and a gull takes to the wind. In the grass, small flowers, sleep survivors of the winter, press into bloom.

What do they know of death?

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I am on the sofa, lying in the dark.

I don't sleep in the bed. It is too cold, too spacious. I wake in the night from thinking I hear something, only to realize it is because I heard nothing at all. In the dark I still wait, still expecting to feel your hands on me. Like before. Back then.

The sofa is bad for my back, sometimes uncomfortable, and sometimes my neck creaks with pain when I wake up in the morning.

But it doesn't hurt my heart, and that is the important thing.

There is a typhoon tonight.

The neighbours talk over the fences, wishing their husbands a safe journey on their flight, for water not to get in, for there not to be terrible winds and that their children would be good while kept inside. They want this storm to pass by without delay, without incident, without any mention of harming.

I just want you to be with me. Is that too much to ask?

--------------

They are growing frustrated now. Angry, worried, tired. I am not responding.

The cold has eaten me. I seem to have ceased to feel.

They all have flashing eyes, knitted brows, tense hands or tight lips. They hold my hand, then get up to pace. They don't like the look of my eyes. My cupboards are empty. They bring take-out food. Dumplings, rice, sardines. Everything might as well taste of ash, they taste of nothing.

Elie brings fresh vegetables, fruit, and meat and packs it away into the fridge.

Sometimes, someone comes over and I cook. Meat is like sand in my mouth, even though I know I've doused it with flavour.

Snap out of it. This isn't like you. I know it's hard.

That isn't the point of it.

You have become 'not'. If there is no Heaven, no Hell, then what else left is there? Do you know? Do you walk among the clouds, shake hands with God? Toil wincing beneath lime and fire, glaring through the heat at the feet of a Great Demon? If anything they say of the afterlife is true, will you tell me?

Have you become dirt?

Nothing but ash, like the taste of it in my mouth, and in time mere molecules, atoms, that drift between the dimensions. That disintegrate and rebuild as nature and chemicals reactions see fit, until you are a part of anything, dispersed in the soil, taken up by plants, eaten, in the stomach of a bird, up in the air.

Can you still speak to me?

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I am writing this from the future.

In case of fire, flood, thunderstrike, cruel twisting of Fate. Because I have had dreams, and in it you were not with me, but those were not the worst of it. They were scary, but not terrifying. What was terrifying was the dreams of dreaming you were with me, but to wake up and find the world shattered, of roses begone and of a sky streaked slate gray and scarlet. In my hands, a skull. On my wrist a bone hand. In my arms a limp skeleton. I would scream for you, and still you would not come.

In some of those dreams, nothing is more cruel than to exist within them.

They say that nothing has ended, I have to move on, I'm still here, you wouldn't want me to be this way.

I think you'd want to be alive.

But you're dead.

I'm still here, but you're still dead.

And what use is breathing? What use is 'being' and 'not being' when no matter which it is, I will never once more be close to you, see the glinting gold of your eyes, hear the smirk on your lips?

What use is even death?

It is a purely selfish wish, to hope that you haven't died. It is an even more selfish thing to only wish that if I were to be together with you. And yet, if this letter ever reaches the past, I would wish even more still that you would not die before me.

This letter is from the future, but you are not. And I am not. No, you are in the past, and I am in the present, and though it feels like I could bring you with me, I could fill the oceans with my wishes and still it would not make your heart beat once again.

I suppose it is true what some say, that happy endings are for things that haven't ended yet. Have we ended?

Lucia?