And, since this does deal with post-Gluhen, it's spoileriffic. Or maybe not. Maybe I should move on to the disclaimer.
Disclaimer: If I did own Weiss Kreuz, then none of this would have ever happened and Aya and Youji would be somewhere in Europe on vacation, and Brad Crawford would have never gotten a monocle.
Thanks to JERRY for beta'ing.
Red
He stirred, and slowly opened his eyes.
He'd been dreaming again.
Beside him, his wife slept peacefully. She turned out to be a very
sound sleeper, which he was glad for. It meant his nightly activities
went, for the most part, unnoticed. He carefully slid out of the
blankets, then reached for a sweater. Even with the onset of spring,
it still felt frigid. Or perhaps it was, as Asuka suggested, all
in his head.
He walked into the kitchen and looked through the shelves for the ingredients,
then began to boil the water. His nerves were still on end, whether
it was from the dreams or the cold tonight, he wasn't sure.
Some people dreamed in black and white.
Others dreamed in color.
He dreamed in red.
To anyone else, that sounded odd, but it was the only way he could
explain it. Somehow, in his former life, he'd formed a strange attachment
to that color.
Vivid, bright red. This was a good shade. It was fragrant
somehow. Sometimes strong, sometimes faint enough that it only entered
your mind if you really concentrated, but there was a definite fragrance
to it. It meant love, but in a cheesy romance-sort of way.
It wasn't the deep, mature affection one person felt for another, but instead
something young and naïve. A crush; that was it. Bright red
was the color of a teenage crush that reminded him of light, girlish laughter
and blushes and, strangely enough, flowers.
He blinked and poured the hot water into the mug, followed by a bag
of tea leaves. That was a good color.
Deep, passionate red. The color of burgundy lipstick, the color
of silk sheets, or a cigarette suffocating on the ground. Flesh against
flesh, shared warmth, both wanting something that they know in the end,
is denied them. A vicious, tormenting cycle that never ended, though
perhaps it should have. The eyes, which were filled with lust, but
no love, weren't the right color, and the hair was a bit too long, and
the skin a bit different from what it should be, but still, for one moment,
it was enough. Sometimes this color just left him feeling hollow;
but other times, it left him chilled. There was something wrong with
it, something that made him feel ill. The passion would contort into
anger, and then pain, and then stillness, and then into guilt.
No, no, that wasn't right at all. Guilt wasn't a deep red.
It was nearly an orange in its intensity. A red the color of flames,
and just as dangerous. This red was opposition, to what, he didn't
know. This red, just like fire, could melt something, twist it around,
manipulate it into something else.
This red left him with anger.
The tea cooled down, and he picked it up and carried it into the living
room. The apartment they lived in was small, but comfortable. A perfect
place to start their lives together. He curled up on the couch, quietly
sipping the drink and staring vacantly forward at the wall. On small
hooks rested the one thing they'd found with him. He knew it wasn't
his, it couldn't be, but all the same, he refused to let it go out of his
sight. Asuka hated it, but allowed it because she knew how important
it was to him. It was indeed a mystery, one that he'd spent hours
mulling over. Asuka had even joked one day that he should have been
a private investigator and he'd agreed.
He continued to stare at it, and thought of another red.
Crimson red. The color of pain and sorrow and misery all tangled
into one. In his dreams, crimson red would start small, then spread
like spilled wine upon a white tablecloth, covering everything in sight.
Sometimes there was a feeling of justice attached to it, but the feeling
didn't last long before it was replaced once again with the hollow feeling
in his chest. Crimson red covered him, and no matter how hard he
struggled, it would never come off. Sometimes Asuka would find him
standing in the bathroom, washing his hands over and over again, and he
had no answer to it beyond a faint mumbled excuse. This color was
responsible for the strange behavior,* for the sting that came to the scars
all over his skin that the doctors and nurses couldn't explain, no matter
how hard they tried. The same crimson that painted his chest when
he woke up, the same crimson he saw when he accidentally sliced his finger
on a sheet of paper at work.
But that wasn't the worst color.
The worst red he'd found was one he couldn't even put a name to.
The red that was sometimes as cold as ice, but at other moments could be
warm, comforting. the red that would remain distant from the others,
but would meld into the larger group if and when the time was needed.
It was sad, but was not depressive. Somehow he knew that this red
would eventually turn into a warmer shade, one that wouldn't rival the
vivid red by any stretch of the imagination, but it wouldn't change into
the crimson red that was the stuff of nightmares.
He watched the steam coil upwards from the tea, letting the warmth
spread from his fingers to the rest of his body.
That red was loyalty, trust, and strength. It wasn't a friendly
color, he was sure of that, but it was something that you couldn't help
but be close to. No matter how bad the circumstance, it would survive.
Survive? Where did that come from?
But it was right. It had to be. This red was something
to be admired, because unlike the other colors, it grew and blossomed,
instead of withering into deeper, more dangerous shades.
Out of all the shades, that red was the hardest to dream about.
It left him feeling lonely and trying to place faces and names he knew
wouldn't come. That red that he thought about when he looked in the
mirror, and a man he knew absolutely nothing about stared back.
The mug started to shake, along with his hands. He spent months
trying to find any link to his past. And every time, every damned
time, it had lead to a dead end and headaches. Eventually, he had
given up completely. There was never going to be a stranger that
would recognize him, there would never be a real name, he could attach
to himself, there was never going to be anything to give him an identity
beyond the one he'd built for himself.
And he'd learned to accept that. He'd learned to be thankful
for the small things, the good things that he could remember. Perhaps
his past, whatever it had been, should remain buried in a mass of rubble
and glass.
But still, the dreams persisted.
He set the empty mug down on the small living room table and made his
way back to the bedroom. His wife stirred, but did not wake.
He brushed a finger carefully through her hair before slipping deep beneath
the sheets.
He stared out the window, noticing a small patch of red flowers that
were struggling against the lingering winter chill.
He didn't want to close his eyes.
End
*Granted, he's completely amnesiac, but even more fic-fodder is created when you consider that some part of Youji probably does remember his former life. ^.^;; Made it through that entire fic with pronouns! Go me!