Question Sleep?
part three: violets
In the overrun green city, there was rain in Spring like no other time.
He was quite sure that several months had passed since he'd wiped out all of humanity. A week after he was standing on a hill of bodies, impervious to the smell of the decaying mass corpse. A day after he was watching the sunrise, barely aware of himself through screaming, trying to make the sound carry long enough so he wouldn't be subjected to it's mocking echo. And a minute after, a great boom had taken the sky and he could not hear. He'd been holding Kamui in his arms at that time, watching violet eyes close and dull with death, so quietly acquiescent in their passing. His suffering was gone.
His heartbreaking smiles, too.
Along with his many broken promises.For all Kamui's vexatious beauty.. the intense life in his violet mirrors slowly just faded away.
The rain had come down in torrents, wetting Kamui's pale skin. Still glowing, still supple and soft to the touch.. he didn't want this rain to ruin it so instantly, and he clutched his counterpart close, close to him and didn't feel him shudder or shy away from his touch for the first time in many years.
Everyone is all gone, Gemini.. the only person here is me. I did that for you so you wouldn't have to worry about everyone else for a change..
"Though it's not like you appreciate anything I do." He says smiling, fingering the darkest locks of Kamui's chocolate colored hair, likening it to wet little bodies and smiling little boys playing in the corners of a long forgotten shrine.
Then he threw Kamui into the water, watching beauty sink into a graceful pile of rapturous silence, washed away because it was so fragile against the wave of change.
During those weeks he had wandered from apartment to apartment, in search of something he has lost from a very long time ago. When he wanted to know the time, there was a clock shop undone with springs and gears spreading into the street, black and twisted open as if it's insides were once living and the heartbeat could still be heard faintly – from clocks still breathing inside. He inspected one of these ruined things with a certain dispassion in passing, wondering if, indeed, time did not stop that day for a reason.
He was without a solid reflection to give the shadow form.
Thus he came to the present, walking through miles of the gray new world he had created with his own hands. Tokyo was a great, beautiful junkyard now, as he saw when he looked out into the world below from the high rise apartment of a person he had not known in life. Without this person there he studied what their life had been like, and the lives of many others; some were doctors, some had children and high paying executive jobs. Some were simple people who lived in rented houses in the suburbs, who in another life altogether could have been his own. He had read their books and listened to their music well into the silence, sitting in a child's room and petting a beloved stuffed animal or two, silently taking in the responsibility for the loss of it's owner.
It was raining and he dragged on past the shrine where his former self had once lived. He, his sister, and Kamui had spent evenings curled up in one futon together, being read stories by his mother. He remembered the warmth as if it were yesterday, though in his heart he knew the image wasn't perfect.
A fondness for a race that had vanished altogether was of no consequence, he supposed.
Now he felt tired and worn out, and somehow that antiquity of the moments he remembered made it seem even more far away, as if he were a man of seventy.
As for his beloved Twin Star…
No, Kamui would always be fifteen. He couldn't imagine those violet eyes getting older, being anything less than childishly beautiful as they had been that day, and all the days before that; couldn't imagine Kamui growing up and not be entranced by storybooks and soap bubbles, driving a car and having a job. Couldn't imagine him getting taller and learning not to cry, and finally seeing the common sense in carrying an umbrella in the rain.
He'd always imagine him without those things.
There were no more violets in the world..
Because he'd killed them all.
It was morning again and he was wandering from house to house, from one more empty palace to the next. Hearing the creak of the steps in that always silent space, he placed his fingerprint on the wall where dust was, knowing that human flesh was part of it and wondering why there was so much here.
It was bright and the blue mirror of the world flew down upon him, sole in the world to see it. A breeze floating invitingly through all the open windows and he allowed himself to stretch his arms wide, walking down the hallway with his eyes closed and his empty heart open for all the cracks in this building to see, have that wind wash through him like holy metal through his chest.
There he stopped at a sound.
Sound?
….the sound of a violin.
There was a void and a substance behind that sound, as if it had played for a long time and no one had been there to shut it off. As if when all the world had died as it had long ago, and the sweet and commanding pleading of the strings had forced it to play on. No matter how desperate and sad it sounded, despairing long into the months and still crying through the speaker of a small stereo that ran and ran and ran..
..until there was nothing left, and it didn't know how to stop moving.
And so it continued, in an everlasting loop that lived on despairingly and beautiful forever.
These sounds stopped the breeze and reversed the tide, and he was standing above it, above the stereo that had kept playing when all the world had gone dark. He was standing
Above..
Him.
No breath.
White fingers and black eyelashes cradled in sunlight. The flesh was lustrous in the blue glare of the glorious day, and he saw blue mirror the sky, living, breathing, behind it's translucent finish. A mess of white cloth on a floor covered in dust, immortal and small and precious and humbling. Long limbs stretched out into the curves of the floor, and he remembered how young he was. Small mouth, open pale colored lips curved in graceful innocence.
Immortal beloved, it was called.
"Subaru."
He spoke, voice cracking and crumbling into a whisper.
Subaru still dreamed.
One dreamer left in the purposeless, void world who's only inhabitant was Death. Kamui and his warm violets laughed inside him, and Fuuma crouched down, touching the charming coat with his palm, touching warm Subaru with his fingers, down the curved cheek, over those lips and the shock of his senses when breath escaped.
Green eyes shimmered open slowly as the CD looped again, heavy with sleep. Heavy with dreaming things he could never dream.
"You were.."
You are, and everything I know is now real.
He seized those small shoulders in anguish, crying out in horror and hearing a voice – that soft voice – cry out with him. He hated that bell-like sound, hated Subaru for making him so relieved and happy again. Hated him for reminding him of sleep, hated him for letting him touch white skin, hating beautiful Subaru for making him stay here on an empty earth where he could think and, thinking madness, rot away.
Hated him for all that he was and all that he could have been.
"…Monou."
Eyes the color of impossible flora stared at him for a long time, awake and still asleep because they looked wrong somehow, and drops of water spilled onto his fist around Subaru's fragile human wrists.
Subaru was broken but broken possessions all loved the same thing.
"Monou-san.. there you are."
Those long, translucent fingers curled let go suddenly, as if by holding the wrists capture he'd caused the life in them to give out. Spread out now over his sunlit warmed jeans, crushed by Subaru's hands, were a hundred tiny violets.
A smile to stab him and make him whole. Kamui was fifteen and laughed again in his ear.
"They are only for you, now."
Only for him.
They waited a long time as the violets wilted in the sun.