Title: Lose Your Fantasy
Characters/Pairing: Kakyou/Hokuto
Genre: Angst
Rating: G
Warnings: n/a
Word Count: 703
Summary: Four stages of Kakyou's relative life.
I.
Kakyou's dreamscape shifts, sometimes, but mostly it's blank, translucent darkness that pools around his ankles and in the folds of his robes. Sometimes it's a traditional japanese bedroom with tatami mats and shoji doors, the only place he remembers seeing before the anonymous men with dark glasses and guns stole him from his home.
In both places, the air is wafer-thin and bleeds against his elbows, his knees. The Dream feels like it could crease and tear if he dares to move, and waking up means facing Them again--today, everyday, he just doesn't have the energy to lie about the future he sometimes see. He's lost the will to talk back long ago, to tell them he wasn't a fucking weather forecast, that the nature of dreams and destiny is too far above their petty political heads to grasp.
Instead, he counts the fibers in the screen doors, watches silhouettes moving beyond them. Not moving means not opening the doors, and while a fraction of him thinks--hopes--that if he did, he'd see a world beyond this square of straw matting, the other half, the larger one, is hoping that the sedative-hypnotics will add up, until the number is large enough to subtract the narrow heartbeat in his chest and equal out to zero.
II.
He dreams of her, but he waits for her to wander in for the first time, a slice of poignant color that drops into the waiting dark. After that, he grasps at her consciousness when she sleeps at night and draws her into his dream. He is already in love.
Hokuto takes him to the beach. Their imagined sun is so bright that he gasps aloud, and the smell of sea-water and wind stings all his senses. He perches on rocks at the edge of water, still not moving, but only because he's breathless, watching Hokuto dance with seagulls overhead.
When she wakes, the seascape goes with her, and Kakyou doesn't try to call it back yet. Somehow, it'll feel wrong without her there.
She's half the sun to him, and while he loves the way organic heat feels, sinking into his skin, it is Hokuto's presence that arrows into his mind, as if the touch of his consciousness to hers is her tracing the curve of every dead axon in his body, sparking his nerves alive, gloriously alive. Now, he feels the empty spaces all around him a thousand times more sharply, at least until she's there to fill them up again.
III.
When she dies, Kakyou jolts awake and tears from the bed They keep him. Disoriented, he crashes into the machines that keep him alive during his long periods of sleep, scrambles frantically for the door knob. But it's been too long and his muscles have forgotten how to function. Distantly, he hears a gunshot and his body goes on fire. Shouting. His legs won't work right, and he collapses to his knees, wills his arms to drag his body across blank tiles.
His breath comes heavy: all he hears is the whisper of Hokuto's shikifuku, her last spell, the feel of blood-slicked rosary beads rolling across his arms and chest.
And the cut-out of a hole, yawning in his chest, where Hokuto's heart used to be.
IV.
In grief, he puts himself to sleep forever, rustles around the walls of the bedroom, throwing open doors to different worlds and searching for signs of a miracle, that she isn't dead, that for once, he's dreamt falsely. Like everything else, hope suffocates under the heavy weight of time.
He takes himself back to the Oceanside because he has nothing else of her., but there is no joy in being there anymore. The saline air he thought crisp and scalding clean before tastes only of tears now. If he's lucky, maybe, his captors will realize he's useless to them and kill him.
If he isn't, well… it's only a matter of time before the Kamui arrives, and every else's worlds crashes around their shoulders too.