Fandom: Tokyo Babylon / X
Title: A bubble.
Pairing: Seishirou + Subaru
Rating: PG
Description: Subaru thinks about what he says to Seishirou when Sei-chan asks what does he want to protect. Subaru answers nothing, but in his heart, it is otherwise...
Disclaimer: Tokyo Babylon and X aren't mine, but that of Clamp.
So, at that moment, when Seishirou asked me what I wanted to protect as he smoked his cigarette, I sneered in slight anger. "I don't want to protect anything."
For the first time, I had lied.
If I didn't, I wouldn't be here. And her life would have been a whole lie...
When Kamui had later asked me the same question, I said the same thing to him. I wasn't interested in anything to do with the end of the world...
But that wasn't true at all.
Like before, I had things to do and obligations to fulfill...
Hokuto-chan would be upset with me if I didn't do my best...she would never forgive me...
I never told any of them this, not even Hokuto-chan...
But then again, there are things about a person you'll never penetrate.
Like the heart...you'll never be able to decipher something that...
A bubble.
by Miyamoto Yui
When I turned thirteen years old, I left Hokuto-chan for a while and had to go somewhere to train my powers.
There was no one with me. Not even bodyguards. For now, it was now or never. If I couldn't handle the impact of anything now, then how was I supposed to be a worthy heir to the Sumeragi clan?
As I walked through the forest, I thought about this. It was this responsibility that kept me working hard all these years. And yet, it burdened my mind and heart relentlessly.
There was nothing I could do. Even now, even as I walked through this place alone appearing as if I were taking a short vacation, that could never be.
It was all an illusion.
Invisibly, I was chained like a hanged man on a tree facing towards the earth and crying with my eyes closed.
I had stopped on the edge of a lake and peered at it with a calm face. How many times I had wanted to throw myself into that rushing river I had passed and to have no one find me for days?
But I wasn't selfish. I couldn't do something like that.
Too many people depended on me.
Both the living and dead would cry for me. I was the bridge that connected these two worlds together...
...and yet I wanted to throw it all away.
Kneeling to the ground, I saw the ripples of the tranquil water become utterly chaotic with my tears falling like a little rain cloud upon it.
No one understood how I felt.
Not even Hokuto.
As I looked at my gloved hands, I again wanted to rip them off.
Can't you breathe? Don't you want to look at sunlight?
I want to live...
I felt like a person looking outside of myself. I was inside a pool of water looking at the light on the surface of the complacency of the lake. Reaching for that light, I was drowning even further with my wants and my desires.
Could you really ask me not to feel anything? Is that how you all want me to live? To live like some doll that performed his duties and yet couldn't live the way he wanted?
That was a paradox to what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to help people live...
...and yet I couldn't help myself.
It was then that I set up camp there and meditated quietly as the moon shone around me.
"Hello," a voice had said.
I opened my eyes to look at the beautiful woman in front of me. "Hello," I replied. "What are you doing here?"
"I came also to meditate," she said in response. Then, she tilted her head and smiled wistfully. "It..it is you..."
Looking around, I pointed confusedly at myself. "Me?"
"N-nothing," she said as she got up. "I'm sorry to have disturbed you."
Again, I saw her the next day and we began to talk after our separate 'training' exercises...
Three days later, while we were before the fire warming ourselves near the lake, she put her hands on my cheeks and looked deeply into my eyes. "Thank you, Subaru-kun."
"What did I do?" I asked.
"Thank you for helping me. You have made me very happy." She let me go and looked out into the lake. "There was a great miko who had lived here for a long time. She had fallen in love with her killer, which happened to be a Sakurazuka. On the day of her death, she was smiling...for she had died not as a miko, but as a woman."
I looked at her curiously.
"That woman's offspring said that one of her heirs would become even greater than that of the Sakurazuka or a Sumeragi." Yu then looked at me not knowing that I was a Sumeragi for we had just each other's nicknames strangely. "And that that heir would die graciously for preserving the life of someone who would help in saving the Earth."
She then took my face and kissed me. "Subaru, don't be so sad. Someday...you will be free."
She nodded her head at me and cried as I began to cry too. "I am very fortunate to have known you, short a time as it was."
I shook my head saying, "What do you mean?"
"I love you, Subaru," she said to me. "In my twenty-one years of life, I did not understand what my grandmother had told me, but now I do. Subaru...Tokyo, kirai desu ka?"
"What do you mean?!" I grabbed her shirt and shook her. "I don't understand anything!"
"Megami," she whispered to my ear as she pushed herself from me and fell peacefully into the lake.
Then, my hand reached out towards her as I cried with the blurry image of her body being engulfed by the dark waters of the lake.
Sacrificial Double...
"I want to breathe...I want to breathe..." I struggled to say as I felt like something strangling my throat. But then, I shouted in an inhuman cry, "Why DOES IT ALWAYS COME BACK TO FATE?!"
All the tears I couldn't cry, I cried for hours that day.
For years, that was why whenever I forgot my reasons for living, I disappeared and I came back to that lake to remember that promise of long ago...
With the air bubbles coming to the surface...
As if Yu were just sleeping and waiting for me to wake her from her dreaming state...
...as she had done with me.
But now, I don't have to.
Whenever I stare at you, Kamui, I just touch your cheek softly...
Because the promise is embedded in you...
For you look like Yu...
Owari.
-
Author's note: I don't know where this came from. I just thought of naming a fic 'A bubble' and wrote whatever came into my head...
Posing a thought from me to you: Heh heh, was it stronger for me to make Kamui look like Yu or make Yu Kamui's aunt? Either way, that's what I intended...
And I love the name Yu...it's a homonym for 'You' and just a pun I put to represent humanity; and how they (Kamui and Subaru) both must struggle to fight for their humanity as well as for those around them.
May 2001