Question Sleep?
part two: destruct
He slept on for many weeks in relative peace, when he chose to have peace. There were days when he ached so badly but had a little while ago forgotten why.
He'd welcomed Nothing, and it had taken him like a comfortable blanket from a world he used to know.
Subaru remembered that maybe there had once been other things like him. Things that could talk, things that could move and look. Sometimes he wretched inside to think that he couldn't remember what another human voice sounded like, or even the warm, pliant fingers of someone who could have been his attachment. A lover -- a sanctuary, a should have been that would never again BE..
Water rolled down his face and obscured the violence of the unforgiving sun as Subaru tried to remember.
Some days ago he'd found in the piles of things -- his empire of beautiful, silent companions -- a CD of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Unscratched in it's battered plastic case, he'd stared at it quizzically for a long time before slipping it into his coat, for the first time in weeks having found and remembered.. music.
There were thousands of broken CDs and cassettes. He had seen them while wandering one day about in the main hall where thousands of voices used to be heard. Sometimes, after finding more CDs to listen to, he would go down there and starting singing and imagine what it would sound like to hear so many voices again, filling the hall, rioting off the cobwebbing, sunlit pillars in joyous abandon. He cherished it all, Subaru, spinning in the emptiness and falling down in the middle of the marble floor that stretched for miles to him, laughing and becoming truly happy and full of it to spilling over, reveling in the sunlight until it retired for the night..
Sitting down in the middle of the trash, licking thoughtfully and carefully around his mouth on a sweet tangerine he'd found in the cupboard, trying to ignore the sounds of singing birds outside as he set about to righting a small, dented stereo. As he switched it on, a slight glimmer of satisfaction came over him when he heard the familiar static speak to him from every corner of the outside world. This was all he needed to know about what went on outside; from the window he knew when it was night, when it rained, when it was piercingly bright and the sun was shining as it had since he was born.
He wondered idly again about what Tchaikovsky was for a moment, and slipped the precious CD in, stomach fluttering slightly, eyes widening, savoring the sugar on his tongue more acutely than life itself.
Subaru listened to the low, foreboding strings and immediately fell in love again. Over the last weeks he would lay upon his favorite bedroom's floor, which, while invaded and.. grown over, somewhat, with electronics and now creeping vines.. was bare and sparse and had a wooden floor that was warm in Winter and cooling to his bare skin in Summer. He listened, and remembered. He listened, and forgot.
He'd forgotten what day it was, too, but it was..
..that particular time.
Spring. He'd first smelled it while listening to Tchaikovsky again, in the mid afternoon when Subaru usually dozed. The air was hazy and his eyes would not open more than was necessary to dream while awake. He liked to remember dreams. Silky clouds above his head in the window seemed wider and more gentle, and Subaru smiled at them, closing his eyes several times and nestling into the creaminess of his long coat, spreading his arms and legs out as far as he could take them, trapping the heat inside that cocoon so that he felt a human embrace for the first time in centuries.
Spring bloomed and furnished the new world with beauty uninterrupted for the first time by anything that spoke. Light came into the world again, and he observed it through his now open window, letting the whistle and caress of breezes from the ocean allow him to breathe freely and deeply.
When the first cherry tree petal fell into his room, Subaru picked it up where it had fallen beside him.
And screamed.