Question Sleep?
part five: wake
The beginning of the play was a broken shard of glass. It danced on the horizon in front of him, glittering and toothy like the enigma of a blurred afternoon -- all afternoons -- and Fuuma watched it glide over skin and thread, fascinated by the way they curled around his arm, Subaru's fingers cold and tied to each one, a single string.
Music filtered down to them from their pile of electronic devices long since become beaten, sharp edges rounded and softened by the stains of time that reached in and grabbed out the memory of dance and crowds. There were no crowds and no true dancing. Not anymore.
There is only you and I... we can't fill any space, and you've forgotten how to dance..
It was still raining, and he grasped the threads of the spiderweb beside his arm, which for some reason shined red, in the right light.
"What are you playing?"
"Chopin."
They looked together at Subaru's work; horrible wirings and knots of string, pieces of multi-colored glass and mirror and lamps captured together on this web, this charming trap he'd devised and called beautiful.
"I can see light through the glass." He comments, looking upside down to see the sparkle in the jagged edges, brighter and dangerous to the eye and touch.
"Me too."
It was alien and had no meaning, only understood in the air and sunlight. He built it there, while Fuuma rested on the far shore, letting the water creep over him as the ocean darkened closer, crumbled and disapperated into a fluid, tender corpse.
Subaru lead him on with those unassuming eyes, the promise of silence deafening him to the waves for a moment; he heard now the ringing in his ears he was familiar with, lying in bed one night without breath, crushed by the negligible weight of his warm, violet-eyed lover. He couldn't breathe in that world, a fish lying on the bottom of some boat trapped in the middle of the sea, no hope of ever returning to perfect the corpse and devour it.. and yet, still,
one by one..
"Hnn…Fuuma, wake up."
"Stop, Kamui.."
"Wake up, before I do, please?"
Everyone wakes up.
But the dreaming young man above him holding a shard of glass stood still, dark hair flat and expression grim, the glow of his face chilling and causing the fever inside of him to grow stale and old. He tilted that curious face full of nothing, the wind that spiraled upwards lifting those strands that could still float above and into heaven, where supposedly everyone was living happily and where there was nothing broken.
Death was beautiful as always, he thought with a sinister but ridiculous affection, his chest shivering against all his will as he said,
"We're drowning in it, Subaru."
But the music had stopped for them both when..
He looked, ill smile landing on the smaller man's precious music box, keeping him sleeping.
"Monou-san.. don't.." The quietness of his voice is vexing.
Keeping Subaru from waking up..
"Throw it."
No beat up radios, no classical music floating out of it, no bone-thin fingers part of pale and gentle hands.. and no shards of glass that reflected dimly the light that he'd seen somewhere in Subaru's smile, that wasn't actually there. Hell is static, and he watched out of the corner of his eye as the radio -- choked, wavering and full of lies, fell.. washing out with the ocean and shells and other broken things. Subaru wheezed, the gray of the world hiding his tears.
And he felt Nothing reach out from beyond the sea, and watched Fuuma's eyes sail into the end of flight with it, guileless and full of youthful rage. Rain used to be wishes, and when they tried to catch them in their mouths, there it was again, empty and warmed to keep them dead.
Just bitterness, and he couldn't hear that anymore. It kept ringing, church bells he heard until class had started when he passed them in the morning to school, on his old bike that he couldn't remember where it'd gone.
Days passed and the young man did not go out again. Fuuma brought meals to him; small things that they could always find around – trees were growing in Tokyo at the speed they had in the times of the gods, flowering and bearing fruit like an everlasting Eden. Fuuma smiled at the trees, thanking them for providing them both with enough to survive. Humanity had already taken so much from this place, this consciousness of kindness and gentle will, that the continued generosity of this planet made him forget the grimness of the world they lived in.
Subaru's company wasn't a burden. Most days they sat and observed the new sunrise together, silently taking in the smell of Spring and one day, he'd been wandering down a street filled with the blossoms and old strings of green that willows and plum trees had dropped. And he'd found some remnants of the past lying there, covered in this faithless blanket of leaves, quiet and undisturbed for the centuries that had seemed to pass since the last true human being walked the previous incarnation of his earth.
It wasn't very old, but it wasn't quite new, either. It couldn't have been, for what it was, and he found himself dizzy with some chilling desire when he saw what lie under the dying trees, which had also seen the fall of mankind and it's creations.
A car.
"When you're twenty, Kamui?"
"..yeah. Let's go someplace where they won't find us."
They traveled, and when Subaru sometimes looked over at his companion, there a smile on that normally controlled face that came only from true fulfillment; not an imagined or false one. Whether it had been born from some childish indulgence to be free or simply power, Subaru saw this and felt the light outside saturate deeper into color, brushing fingers over the billowing edges of the other's t-shirt as a sign of contentment.
Fuuma looked over just as Subaru's pale countenance floated away from him, in the regal manner that came from airy surroundings and the clean breath of everything around them that sang, open and wracked with life. Subaru was radiant in his separateness from that; he was beautiful in the slick way his back curved over the downed window, smooth shoulders rolling into the sprawl, that expression of a wilting gray flower adding haziness to the view. Spread fingers wide open to the suction sound of the wind, and he saw the mouths of tiny children float past those unkind, thin fingertips, Subaru's cloudy eyes watching them as the spirits who'd died in that sea below them on the highway drifted back into unconsciousness when they left, encouragement by the sight of them gone and away.
They'd trespassed in that sea, he remembered, drowning themselves that day and letting death feel his body clean, Subaru's eyes watching him through the light in the clover colored glass, the murky cloud cover obscuring his vision and letting all the tree's branches burn like scratches on the retina. It'd been days ago.
"We're drowning, Monou-san? That's such a philosophical thing to say." He says unsmiling, struggling to be heard through the wind, white fingers flying through air as if slicing silk or skin. "It's a sad thing.. that we've already drowned in a sense."
His eyes followed the curve of some tightly wound pin in the narrow back, Subaru's empty voice holding the quality of all the butterflies opera's in the world; spoiled, trapped, and sweet. The green eyes have gone dark with that spilled ink, and he doesn't speak again.
He sits in the window contemplating those words, and the older man sits in the sunlight that escaped his shadow, staring at his broken violin. He wants to play it, Fuuma thought. Why not let him?
Somewhere there is a place filled with dust, and invisible hands play the piano and through them come the most beautiful prose. Somewhere in this place full of dead memories of women, walls keeping them from entering the other side of that shallow storm – a thin sheet of rain that became death and unbreakable steel.
And the hands playing the piano are so fragile, but they manage to build a wall that keeps everyone on the other side; silk scratches it, and when he opens the window to stare down at Tokyo, all the guard rails have gone, all the people waiting to catch him have left.
And they don't catch him when he jumps, that wall of empty, liquid comfort robbing him of freedom as he's sucked under.
"Can you hear me now?" he says to Subaru, whose hands are empty.
The bells in the church are ringing, but he can't hear them because Kamui is sitting on the back of his bicycle, telling him of things that will never be, and never happened --- and he quiets into blissful awakening when he feels those thin arms wrap around his waist, and they ride someplace where no one can find them.
"Yes, I can hear you now."