A/N: So apparently, after weeks of writing this bit after bloody bit, I've finally come around to finishing it. This pairing is like a rollercoaster—you never quite know which way it's going to reel next.
Warnings: Mentions of sex, but nothing too graphic, unless you have a vivid enough imagination.
Disclaimer: I don't own either the cast or the in-between bouts of poetry, all of which were inspirations to writing this. Copyright goes, in order, to Aoyama Gosho, T. S. Eliot, Heinrich Heine, Leonard Cohen, John Keats, Louis Aragon, E. E. Cummings, and Charles le Quintrec.
..
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
..
i shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
i have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
(...)
(i do not think that they will sing to me.)
(...)
i have seen them riding seaward on the waves,
combing the white hair of the waves blown back
when the wind blows the water white and black.
..
He remembers there was a sea behind the church; remembers taking a stroll on the beach while the wedding-pictures session took place out front. He remembers, best and above all, the wind, and how it'd bring him face-full whiffs of deep blues and seaweed, and seagull whines.
The sea is wide and green and white and Koizumi is standing waist-deep in it. The long, pearl-and-jade formal dress is almost exclusively soaked, and clings to every single inch of her pale, dripping skin, slithering on her like a snakeskin. Her hair is wet, too, the long hair Saguru has always refused to see as anything but auburn, now almost dark-red around her shoulders and arms as she hugs them to herself, shivering, her back turned to shore and face turned to the tiding waves.
For the first time since he was a boy of eight, Saguru thinks back to childhood-woven tales, English and Japanese both, twined together; tales of kelpies and kappas and mermen coming in from the sea, their wet skin, slick and cold, and their crackling magic between thin-finned fingers. He remembers their petty, childish cruelty, their mindless laughter, and their voices so sweet and luring in luxurious chanting. Beautiful, beautiful faces sneering up at him, mouth red as coral, long lashes lowered and screening water-drenched green eyes; these he can see, and can feel the wet slap of the swell against his flannel trousers.
He thinks that poets did once see a mermaid, and that he might just have as well.
Belatedly he realizes he has waded right into the sea. "Koizumi," he says, and puts his hand on her shoulder.
The next second he finds himself sprawled back in the cold, cold water, catching sight of blue, and then white, and then green, and long, fine hands are coiled about his neck and squeezing. Koizumi is drenched all over, and she stands above him with her hair and her arms and her eyes; he is pulled underwater by a thousand fingers and he hears, he hears in his ears ringing the sweet, sweetly deathly chanting of absinthe sirens luring him in, luring him down.
After, he builds a fire on the beach and watches the sturdy flames play off over the sea, dark and inky and stealthy as it moves, ripples, wanes out in the sealed circle of the shores. When Koizumi breathes, still close enough to drown, he thinks he can still feel the throbbing against his eardrums, the slow, luring trap of the closing waters. Incidentally, he wonders whether she can hear it as well, or if the dull, measured sound echoes that of the blood in her veins, deep and steady and ultimately natural.
..
Den Schiffer in kleinen Schiffe
Ergreift es mit wildem Weh;
Er schaut nicht die Felsenriffe,
Er schaut nur hinauf in die Höh.
-
Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen
Am Ende Schiffer und Kahn;
Und das hat mit ihrem Singen
die Lorelei getan.
..
Some places they meet in. One of those is Venice, and Koizumi's dress is in the same feathery grey as the pigeons' crowding square Saint-Marc. Tea—brown and gold, thin slices of red like slices of lemon and sun—and cakes, Akako pulling a slightly disgusted face at the pastry's ill-disguised sweetness. The clank of a fork against the china plate.
Saguru stirs his tea and watches the children—a group of four or five perhaps, with jackets and hair so bright he cannot exactly make out boy from girl at this distance—that run about the fountain; the water is a thin sprinkle, barely shimmering in the Italian sun, and peppered with the gold of passing tourists. The children sing. From afar it is nothing more than soft, diffused crooning, an easy stream of rolling consonants and bursting vowels.
"Hakuba-kun. Cigarette?"
"Thank you, no." He declines the offer quietly, cautiously, and watches her light hers, the supple, pliant hands making quick work of the lighter and the first draw, slow and strenuous, before at last the long, slender body unfurls and unwinds against the café chair.
"Pleased with Italy so far?" she asks then, making it sound exactly as though they have met under sheer coincidental circumstances. They make small talk as others would make sweet love, each quietly pleased with how their thoughts and words echo and bounce, curling within each other under the Mediterranean sun. There is something quite painless in the way Koizumi draws her teacup to her lips, in the way the tea wrinkles and slides velvet-y over Saguru's tongue.
There is more to this place than pigeons and tourist gold and unstable cobbles, he thinks, looking around, homesickness a feeling he is not quite used to. Koizumi's high heel bumps slightly against his ill-angled ankle.
The children sing and run, scattering.
..
i swept the marble chambers,
but you sent be down below.
you kept me from believing
until you let me know:
-
that i am not the one who loves—
it's love that chooses me.
when hatred with his package comes,
you forbid delivery.
-
And when the hunger for your touch
rises from the hunger;
you whisper: 'you have loved enough,
now let me be the lover.'
..
"… what." Koizumi says, once in England in Saguru's birthhouse. (Well, not quite, because he was born in a hospital about two miles away from here, but.)
He pauses. Swallows. "You should understand that I am perfecting my position upon extremely reasonable bases—"
"… what." Koizumi says again, and there is a carefully crafted, poised edge to her voice, one that makes Saguru pause. Swallow, and, oh, he thinks. Oh.
(He thinks of England and longs moors and villages by the sea, where the green of the earth and the green of the water revolve as but one. They are close to Dover here, not quite far into land yet, but close to the edge, close to the margin between land and sea enough to make the earth thrum with old magic.)
"Akako-san, you cannot honestly believe—"
Koizumi laughs and Old England laughs with her, everything that Saguru keeps, religious and secret, within his flesh and his blood and his pounding heart, rolling and spinning itself inside out until Koizumi sneers at him, perched on the arm of his generations-old leather armchair.
"You—bastard," Koizumi wheezes out, "you—fucking—how dare—bastard," she snarls, and her hands seal about his neck again and squeeze, oh, and again, and Saguru blanks out for a good couple of seconds before he finds himself on his back, sprawled right out on the comforter, and Akako's eyes running and crazed and hot and Akako's fingers are
everywhere and
searing fire scorches through him, and all that he can think about is drowning
..
i met a lady in the meads,
full beautiful—a faery's child,
her hair was long, her foot was light,
and her eyes were wild
…
(…i saw pale kings and princes too,
pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
they cried—'La Belle Dame Sans Merci
thee hath in her thrall!'…)
..
and the bright that is within your eyes my darling is the light that shines over the sunrise of another once saying you have loved enough and now is the time to render that love my friend my very my own
saying
you have not yet loved enough i
do not think i cannot look at you much longer because this is what you and i taste like: .
and the light that is within your eyes and your hands and your face and
the one only thing that makes that petty lacking black magic of yours making the one and only truth that keeps me going these days oh my darling what can i say but fuck oh fuck i can't i just can't let go let go i can't can't don't you understand don't you oh god you don't you don't
and the bright that is within your eyes my darling
it makes the bright revolve into and the darkness is one with the brightness and it is you, it is your laughter and your waking and your coffee in the morning that make the bright, that make the bright and the dark as one.
myfriendmyfriendmyfriend
oh my darling.
..
tes yeux sont si profonds qu'en me penchant pour boire
j'ai vu tous les soleils y venir se mirer
s'y jeter à mourir tous les désespérés
tes yeux sont si profonds que j'en perds la mémoire
(…)
il advint qu'un beau soir l'univers se brisa
sur des récifs que les naufrageurs enflammèrent
moi je voyais briller au dessus de la mer
les yeux d'elsa les yeux d'elsa les yeux d'elsa
..
And then, sometime in the wake of summer, Hakuba Saguru has an epiphany.
He wakes as a drowning man should, whose limp body has been brought back to shore, and who, in the rolling, reeling clouds of the storm, thinks he still can hear the sweet chanting ringing of coral voices. It is quiet enough in the room for him to have slept through several hours, but his bones are weary and his body is tense, wrists and thighs and ass aching and sore with the mere strain of moving. A migraine is bursting behind the eyelids which he has not yet lifted; booming, cracking claps of thunder that make him wince with each slow, cautious twitch.
The bedsheets are just slightly so scratchy and he thinks that they will have to change them later. If he keeps his eyes slid shut, maybe he will believe that he is back underwater, long sweet hair coiled about his neck: but the mattress dips and moves, and as a hand he knows is long and pale and cool to the touch settles over his face his flinch smoothes out into something softer and more tired; a sigh.
They sit on the bed, Saguru's head laid across Akako's lap, Akako's fingers streaming through Saguru's sweat-dark hair; sitting on the bed; still, and yet churched together as though lost out at sea, where they hear the waves tiding to shore, slow and steady, a very deep green, and roaring in their ears. Akako's fingers linger. They breathe on.
..
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colours of its countries
rendering death and forever with each breathing
-
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
..
They really do not meet all that often, and as the years unravel Saguru takes to watching her sleep. There have been evenings of burning wine, and should he let his eyes slide shut, he would still taste the tangy-sweet of berries on his lips. Akako's hair streams about her face, streams about her hands, like a mermaid, like a siren. When she smiles it is like she is singing.
It reminds Saguru of the long flat moors of his native land, how they would crest and ripple under the leaden sky and the fast-whipping wind of lavender and heather—and the grey moving forests and the white cliffs of Dover, which the great waves, white and green, would rush up to and collapse against; he thinks that Koizumi would fit there, at the junction of land and sky, where the magic thrums and crackles, green and white, under nimble fingertips. Elves and unicorns and prancing in witching-hour clearings, and Koizumi would be beautiful and terrible amongst them, laughing her siren chant over the brimming trees.
He thinks that he has clearly drunk too much if he is coming to imagining such things.
He does not think he cares.
(Much, anyway.)
Here, in the witching-hour bedroom, wrapped up together in Akako's arms and Akako's hair and Akako's skin, Saguru closes his eyes and maybe dreams. He can feel the deathly-sweet, tangy taste of wine-berries on his tongue.
..
bouche contre bouche au galop
par les seigles et les forêts
folle, tous les mots que je te tais
mes lèvres mouillées de tes mots
tes mots rouges comme des plaies
ton rire en moi comme un sanglot
..
A little less than ten years after the end, they return to England. They are close to Dover, close to the margin between land and sea, and watching Akako smoke thoughtfully on the balcony, one elbow propped on the stone, reminds Saguru of white cliffs and green-grey seas. He is standing at the French doors, eyes half-lidded as he leans against the frame with his arms crossed: gold within, blue without; gold behind him and the smoke of Akako's cigarette in the tumbling blues of evening. She turns and looks at him, quizzically, on her lips a half-smirk.
"Cigarette?"
"Thank you."
She passes him hers, and it is not her lips and the old magic running through her veins he tastes, but nicotine and something of his family house's stones and dust. They are close to Dover here, and the smell of deep blues and seaweed reaches them, strong and wistful as it was over ten years ago, boy-Saguru meeting mermaids on unknown shores.
Akako chuckles once more, lifts the cigarette to her lips again. "It is a nice place here."
"We are glad you approve."
"What luck."
"Indeed."
She smiles, looking wistful (meaning not), and looks out at the sea, fast and far over the circle of the shores. This is not a place either of them believes they can stay in long, and the negligence in Akako's tapping off the cigarette's ashes is as much a reminder of this as it is one of familiarity. A reminder of home that-is-not-quite-home, because England hasn't been home for years now. Neither, really, has Japan.
"Supper?" he suggests, leaning forward over the railing.
She raises an eyebrow at him. "Surely you are not meaning room service supper."
"My dear, I am fairly certain your precious stomach will bear the strain." The look he graces her with then would have made both Holmes and Fogg proud, probably, in all its English-(oh)-ness.
"I should hex you all the way to Calais and back for even suggesting such a thing."
"You should," Saguru agrees complacently, rather unmoved; and then he wonders why. Perhaps it is due to the combined smells of England and Akako's cigarette, moving together like seaweed; perhaps to the overall sated feeling that lingers, purring low in his chest, underneath the many layers of sweater-vest and starched shirt and skin. And perhaps it is just the way Akako's hands tangles with his on their way back in their hotel room; the way they move now, ten years after the end, as easy and smooth together as in water.
..
i have seen them riding seaward on the waves,
combing the white hair of the waves blown back
when the wind blows the water white and black.
-
we have lingered in the chambers by the sea,
by seagirls wreathed in seaweed, red and brown,
till human voices wake up, and we drown.
..
End Notes: This was a rather complicated fic to write. The first part I wrote was the first, and the last the last, but in-between everything was rather confused. Likewise, while some bits wrote themselves inside and out with the most bewildering easiness, others took me ages to scrape off. Still, I've kicked Writerblock in the butt. Deserved it, the fiend.
In other news, after much prodding, poking, whining, and overall drama between gemmie and I, I've finally gotten a LiveJournal. (Something like, er, a month ago already? I've been gone too long.) Link is over on my profile, if anyone's interested.