Raison de n'Etre pas
Study in Black and White
Soubi does not love Seimei. Love is not sufficiently grand nor complex a term with which to describe the emotional investment he harbours for his Sacrifice, and Soubi is well aware of the power found in expressions, knows how easy and devastating it is to employ the wrong one.
And Soubi does not dream, because he knows the power and despairing beauty of hope and the safety of hopelessness, its beautiful despair.
Looking at Seimei, Soubi sees a contrast study in black and white, expression sharp as line-art, colors blurring together like those of fading sketches.
There was an ink drawing once a little like this, a butterfly of blood on his floor. Seimei had painted it, thin brush sharply brittle and alien in the grasp of his large hand. The blood coloring it, of course, was Soubi's, his willing, eager, smiling sacrifice to his Sacrifice.
Only he wasn't supposed to smile around Seimei when Seimei was being serious, and it cost him a bit more warm redness, the fluid draining out through his lips where Seimei regularly hit him.
Only Soubi had known this, and would not have said he minded: he lies for Seimei, not to him.
Drunk and horny, tears and snot and drool in his flushed face, Kio barfed on it one night. Embarrassed and lecturing Soubi about not taking care of himself and on how he shouldn't keep so much alcohol around, it wasn't healthy, really, Kio had scrubbed the floor clean the day after, killing the butterfly with soap and mop. Soubi was never certain whether it had been deliberate.
Kio's actions are not the ones defining his world.
Soubi has an artist's eyes to go with his Fighter's hands and empty heart: Seimei's hair is black, curling around black ears and sticking to his white neck, occasionally sliding against the black material of his polo. His lashes are black, like his eyebrows, like the swollen shadows beneath his black eyes. His features, the flat planes and the arrogant angles, even the small thick mouth, are white. It's a duller contrast than it ought to be, would have made for ugly on anyone else: Seimei is not good-looking, it is only the smug tint to his too-sharp chin that saves him from unattractive.
Soubi knows Seimei finds it funny how this means Kio has seen Seimei many times and still does not understand who Soubi's special someone is.
Soubi's heart is empty, and sensei formed him, to be able to believe with all his might, to the point where the that mad blind wanton faith is the core of him, the substitute for his heart, and so he lives for Seimei, and he has never known how to laugh, or how to find things funny.
Soubi is grey beneath all the layers of golden hair and red flesh, his nuance composed of leftovers from Seimei's black-and-white self.
Black and white he is, and white is the color of death and black the hue of darkness, and they are blurring, dragging him under, and perhaps this was not what he was meant to believe in, but
He does not mind. Kisses sanity final goodbye on dead lips in a dark face.
xxxxx
