gAuthor's Note:
Phew! And I sincerely mean that. From the very bottom of my heart. ^_~
A thousand thanks to D for the loan of her Satsuki, and to TK for her Yuuto.
Warnings this chapter for homoerotic tension and a single solitary act of gruesome violence.
*`-,--
"Yuuto, could you please pass down that extra cup?"
"Certainly. Would anyone like a daifuku?"
Sumeragi would never have guessed that the foreordained destroyers of humanity could act so civilised.
Everything about this little event seemed almost ridiculously tasteful. The room they sat in now was well-lit, tidily furnished, perfectly untouched and isolated from the destruction outside. The tea service was porcelain, white with elegantly scripted proverbs running around the rim of each cup and saucer; the tea itself was green and fragrant, and feathery curls of steam sweetened the quiet air. Politeness seemed to pervade the room's atmosphere like lingering perfume--even the girl Satsuki, who had seemed almost sullen in the basement, met his eyes without hostility.
It was slightly surreal.
"Why, Yuuto, you didn't tell us you brought daifuku." Kanoe's voice carried a note of mock-reproach, and the watercaster chuckled.
"Well, they were going to be a surprise, but now that we have a guest..." Yuuto's even blue gaze swept over his companions briefly; his smile didn't falter. "It seemed a little rude not to share."
Sumeragi looked down into his teacup. It took him a moment to focus on the writing: i no naka no kawazu taikai wo shirazu. A frog in a well doesn't know the ocean.
Reading with one eye, however, still made him a little dizzy, and he had to struggle not to slump over the edge of the table.
"Sumeragi-san, are you all right?"
The voice was Yuuto's; Satsuki gave them both an amused look over the black rims of her glasses.
"Ah--fine." He tried for a professional, emotionless tone; it was easier to manage than he had thought. "Just... my eye."
"Perhaps you should get a pair of reading glasses?"
Sumeragi fidgeted. Why should a stranger--a former enemy--be so solicitous right now? Did he want something? Or was he merely teasing for the sake of stirring a blush, the way Seishirou-san--
"Hn... Nakitsura ni hachi," Satsuki murmured, turning her teacup against the saucer with a little scraping sound. A bee to a crying face, Sumeragi thought with a slight chill.
"Now, Satsuki-chan, I won't have anything like a bad omen at my table." Kanoe's lipsticked mouth curved into a wide dark smile.
"The saucer's a little better," Yuuto pointed out. "Yabu hebi." Let sleeping snakes lie. "No serpents here, are there, Kanoe-san?"
"I should hope not."
"Better not to question it. Sometimes questions just muddy the natural flow of life."
"You were born to be a poet, Yuuto."
"Oh, not at all, Kanoe-san!" The blond man gave her a slightly rakish grin. "I'm just a simple government worker."
"With a streak of poetry in you."
"Character quirk," Satsuki put in.
"As our dear system administrator here might put it, 'it's not a bug, it's a feature'," Yuuto said gleefully.
Sumeragi's eye found a focus on the proverb curving across the rim of Kanoe's saucer. Baka mo ichigei; even a fool has one talent.
"Pass the mochi," he murmured.
The girl held out the plate to him--but before he could take it, a strong, baritone laugh sounded from the doorway.
"This is quite a cheerful little party."
"Kamui-san?"
Sumeragi felt the muscles in his chest tighten painfully; he turned as slowly as he dared.
The Dark Kamui was leaning casually in the doorway, playing with a cigarette lighter; with little hissing noises it clicked into life and died again, sounding very much like a grandfather clock having a seizure.
"Sorry to interrupt. I need to borrow Sumeragi-san for a minute."
The temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees.
The Sakurazukamori unfolded his long legs and stood, slowly, feeling the muscles in his calves shiver and stretch after a long half-hour of being sat-on.
"Do hurry back, Sumeragi-kun," Kanoe smirked. "We'll keep the kettle on for you."
He wondered, with a sinking feeling of dread, if he was going to need something stronger than tea when the Dark Kamui was finished with him.
* * *
"So Kanoe's told you everything?"
Fuuma's voice, little more than a purr, came on a current of warmth against Sumeragi's ear. They were so close together, nearly chest to chest, that the wide curved walls of the darkened hallway couldn't pick up the soft breath of the younger man's voice and throw it into echoes.
Sumeragi did not look at him, and he did not let himself get lost in the terrified crashing of his own heartbeat.
"Yes," he murmured.
"She's saved me some trouble, then."
The Dark Kamui leaned in a little further, his cheek just barely brushing Sumeragi's temple. He had to struggle to keep a horrified shiver from spiking through his body; the invasion of his personal space was clawing at his mind, and he wondered if that was the very reason the young man had decided to back him against the wall into what could almost have been a loose embrace.
He wanted to scream. He wanted to pray. He wanted to summon up the strength to reach out and shove, or even just to make his hands crackle with newfound power, a sign that he was someone to be feared.
Fuuma smelled like blood. And he remembered the same smell on a black trenchcoat, mingled with smoke, and it made him feel so weak and so afraid that he was absolutely sure his rattling pulse was echoing across half of Tokyo.
"You're trembling, Sakurazukamori."
"It's cold in here."
A dry chuckle sounded against his ear, and then Fuuma pulled back completely.
"There's something I need you to do."
This time the walls did cast echoes, as the Dark Kamui's boots thumped against the floor; Sumeragi took another moment to clear his senses of that blood smell, and followed.
The corridors were long and empty, partially darkened; as he followed Fuuma, he began to notice that the air was taking on an antiseptic smell, sharp and flowery to the point of cloying.
A hospital smell.
"Where are we going?" he managed to ask, as Fuuma stopped in front of a narrow grey door.
The reply was delivered on a wicked little smile.
"To meet the future."
The door swung open, and the quiet within was nearly deafening; Sumeragi could hear the soft blips of medical equipment before his eye actually adjusted to the white sterility of the room.
Dozens of wires--slenderer than the great nest of silver snakes in the basement--ran towards a single source, a very pale figure on a very pale bed. Fuuma said nothing but gestured for him to approach; the few steps from the doorway to the bed were a long and breathless journey.
Hair so blond as to be nearly white fanned messily across the pillow; an oxygen mask was fitted neatly over the stranger's delicate features. Every now and then, one of his thin hands would twitch, and his eyelids would flicker.
Sumeragi knelt by his side.
"I know this man," he said softly.
"Kazuki Kakyou, another of our yumemi." The shape of Fuuma's body heat towered beside him. "He loved someone close to you."
The thought of Hokuto lanced through Sumeragi like hot iron pushing into his skin--and then a worse thought followed, ice after fire.
What does he want me to do to him?
"His wish is to join his beloved." Fuuma's voice was soft and completely emotionless. "You will enter his dreamscape; you're more than qualified to help him to what he wants."
I can't, he wanted to scream, I don't kill, that was an accident, I'm not a murderer.
He looked down at the pale bed and let his eye unfocus. Kakyou's hand moved slightly, an ivory blur on clean white.
"It is his wish, and there will be no better time to grant it. The most peaceful death is a death of the mind--after that, the body just stops."
Sumeragi wondered, with a nauseated shiver, how he knew that.
"You'll do this for me, won't you, Sakurazukamori?"
He closed his eyes. His younger self was silent, probably asleep--there was nothing to guide him, to help him say no. And, really... he pitied Kakyou for loving someone dead, for living without hope as he did now. He pitied him for being the same kind of fool as he had been, with the same kind of wish and the same naive stupidity that had kept them both alive for so long.
"Of course," he said.
* * *
The dreamscape was wide and windy and empty.
Kakyou sat alone, draped in a soft off-white kimono, staring out into the void. Occasionally a maple leaf would drift by, or he would whisper a haiku to himself; aside from that, all was perfect stillness and perfect silence.
A single sakura petal fluttered across the dreamscape, pink on black.
"Kakyou?"
The voice that cut the darkness was feminine, the perfect echo of one that had not sounded for nine years. It made the yumemi jump slightly; visitors to such darkness were few and far between, especially by those not intimately acquainted with the future.
"Kakyou, are you here?"
The illusion was perfect, a labour of love and memory: the face full of life and sweetness, the figure slender and graceful, and growing, displaying more than hints of full-fledged beauty. It had taken only one vivid memory to create--it seemed that thought alone, combined with the darkening threads of his power, was enough to weave a pitch-perfect creation.
The Sakurazukamori, cloaked in this illusion, gave every word her voice, and painted over each smile with one of hers; he wore his dead sister like a coat.
And the yumemi, eyes wide in wonder, approached him with an expression free from suspicion.
"Hokuto?" he whispered. "Hokuto, why..."
"I've come to take you away with me." Sumeragi held out his arms, slowly, feeling the fabric of the illusion stretch just a little.
"It's time?" Kakyou's pale face lit with the beginning of a smile. "But... the other Angels... and your brother..."
Sumeragi cut him off with a laugh; Hokuto's voice made it sweet, as it did for the lies that rolled off his tongue with startling ease. "Everything will be fine. After all, if things worked out for us, then there's hope for everyone--isn't there?"
Kakyou looked at him curiously; for a moment he was afraid the illusion would fall through and the dreamgazer would ask him that terrible question why, why are you doing this, why did you take this form, why do you torment me and yourself with this memory?
Sumeragi watched the dreamgazer's eyes--and it occurred to him that this illusion was probably no more than a transparent mask to Kakyou. The man knew he was not his sister, his dreamscape was merciless in what it revealed, future and present alike--and yet he was willing to accept this illusion as a gesture.
Because he'd loved her that damn much, the fool.
And then the smile broke out wide and relieved across Kakyou's face, a smile of perfect love and deep relief. He stumbled the few steps left between them, and slowly folded the impostor into his embrace; Sumeragi was a little surprised at how warm he was, how thin the long line of his body seemed.
"Thank you," Kakyou whispered.
He struck.
Muscle and bone gave way beneath his hands with a sickening sound; his fingers closed around a great hard knot of life, and grabbed it, and thrust it out on a tide of blood. The yumemi clutched at his shoulder with weak fingers; a wet little sound escaped his throat, and the darkness began to fall in on itself as the mind that had created it shut down.
Sumeragi let the illusion drop altogether, and visualised his physical body, slumped on the cot next to the frail man; like a diver kicking towards the surface of the sea he set his sight on the edge of the darkness and simply went.
Overpowering vertigo swept over him for a moment, and then he opened his eyes.
There was blood everywhere.
The white sheets were red, almost black in places; the soft hum and whine of the medical equipment was counterpointed by a steady inexorable drip-drip-drip.
Something slick and wet and warm pressed against his hand.
He looked down and saw his hand shoved through the yumemi's heart, his forearm immersed in muscle and blood and chips of bone almost up to the elbow; a terrible little shudder passed through Kakyou once before the stuff around his hand went completely still.
Fuuma was holding his wrist as he would the hilt of a knife.
The smell of blood filled his lungs.
Trembling, too shocked to register the tidal wave of emotion roaring down at him, he jerked his hand back; the torn heart fell from his nerveless fingers. As he staggered to his feet the Dark Kamui only offered him a small smile, and his voice, when he spoke, was almost kind:
"Get some fresh air."
Sumeragi stumbled past wires and monitors and pure white walls to the pale grey door, and nearly tore it off its hinges trying to get out to the hallway; his knees gave out before he made it as far as the opposite wall, and he was violently ill right there. He retched hard, his forehead pressed into the slick dark floor, unable to breathe or force any sound out of his throat while his body emptied itself in response to his crime.
And even before he could muster the strength to take that first breath, the adrenaline hit, so strongly that he had no opportunity to hate himself.
Phew! And I sincerely mean that. From the very bottom of my heart. ^_~
A thousand thanks to D for the loan of her Satsuki, and to TK for her Yuuto.
Warnings this chapter for homoerotic tension and a single solitary act of gruesome violence.
*`-,--
"Yuuto, could you please pass down that extra cup?"
"Certainly. Would anyone like a daifuku?"
Sumeragi would never have guessed that the foreordained destroyers of humanity could act so civilised.
Everything about this little event seemed almost ridiculously tasteful. The room they sat in now was well-lit, tidily furnished, perfectly untouched and isolated from the destruction outside. The tea service was porcelain, white with elegantly scripted proverbs running around the rim of each cup and saucer; the tea itself was green and fragrant, and feathery curls of steam sweetened the quiet air. Politeness seemed to pervade the room's atmosphere like lingering perfume--even the girl Satsuki, who had seemed almost sullen in the basement, met his eyes without hostility.
It was slightly surreal.
"Why, Yuuto, you didn't tell us you brought daifuku." Kanoe's voice carried a note of mock-reproach, and the watercaster chuckled.
"Well, they were going to be a surprise, but now that we have a guest..." Yuuto's even blue gaze swept over his companions briefly; his smile didn't falter. "It seemed a little rude not to share."
Sumeragi looked down into his teacup. It took him a moment to focus on the writing: i no naka no kawazu taikai wo shirazu. A frog in a well doesn't know the ocean.
Reading with one eye, however, still made him a little dizzy, and he had to struggle not to slump over the edge of the table.
"Sumeragi-san, are you all right?"
The voice was Yuuto's; Satsuki gave them both an amused look over the black rims of her glasses.
"Ah--fine." He tried for a professional, emotionless tone; it was easier to manage than he had thought. "Just... my eye."
"Perhaps you should get a pair of reading glasses?"
Sumeragi fidgeted. Why should a stranger--a former enemy--be so solicitous right now? Did he want something? Or was he merely teasing for the sake of stirring a blush, the way Seishirou-san--
"Hn... Nakitsura ni hachi," Satsuki murmured, turning her teacup against the saucer with a little scraping sound. A bee to a crying face, Sumeragi thought with a slight chill.
"Now, Satsuki-chan, I won't have anything like a bad omen at my table." Kanoe's lipsticked mouth curved into a wide dark smile.
"The saucer's a little better," Yuuto pointed out. "Yabu hebi." Let sleeping snakes lie. "No serpents here, are there, Kanoe-san?"
"I should hope not."
"Better not to question it. Sometimes questions just muddy the natural flow of life."
"You were born to be a poet, Yuuto."
"Oh, not at all, Kanoe-san!" The blond man gave her a slightly rakish grin. "I'm just a simple government worker."
"With a streak of poetry in you."
"Character quirk," Satsuki put in.
"As our dear system administrator here might put it, 'it's not a bug, it's a feature'," Yuuto said gleefully.
Sumeragi's eye found a focus on the proverb curving across the rim of Kanoe's saucer. Baka mo ichigei; even a fool has one talent.
"Pass the mochi," he murmured.
The girl held out the plate to him--but before he could take it, a strong, baritone laugh sounded from the doorway.
"This is quite a cheerful little party."
"Kamui-san?"
Sumeragi felt the muscles in his chest tighten painfully; he turned as slowly as he dared.
The Dark Kamui was leaning casually in the doorway, playing with a cigarette lighter; with little hissing noises it clicked into life and died again, sounding very much like a grandfather clock having a seizure.
"Sorry to interrupt. I need to borrow Sumeragi-san for a minute."
The temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees.
The Sakurazukamori unfolded his long legs and stood, slowly, feeling the muscles in his calves shiver and stretch after a long half-hour of being sat-on.
"Do hurry back, Sumeragi-kun," Kanoe smirked. "We'll keep the kettle on for you."
He wondered, with a sinking feeling of dread, if he was going to need something stronger than tea when the Dark Kamui was finished with him.
* * *
"So Kanoe's told you everything?"
Fuuma's voice, little more than a purr, came on a current of warmth against Sumeragi's ear. They were so close together, nearly chest to chest, that the wide curved walls of the darkened hallway couldn't pick up the soft breath of the younger man's voice and throw it into echoes.
Sumeragi did not look at him, and he did not let himself get lost in the terrified crashing of his own heartbeat.
"Yes," he murmured.
"She's saved me some trouble, then."
The Dark Kamui leaned in a little further, his cheek just barely brushing Sumeragi's temple. He had to struggle to keep a horrified shiver from spiking through his body; the invasion of his personal space was clawing at his mind, and he wondered if that was the very reason the young man had decided to back him against the wall into what could almost have been a loose embrace.
He wanted to scream. He wanted to pray. He wanted to summon up the strength to reach out and shove, or even just to make his hands crackle with newfound power, a sign that he was someone to be feared.
Fuuma smelled like blood. And he remembered the same smell on a black trenchcoat, mingled with smoke, and it made him feel so weak and so afraid that he was absolutely sure his rattling pulse was echoing across half of Tokyo.
"You're trembling, Sakurazukamori."
"It's cold in here."
A dry chuckle sounded against his ear, and then Fuuma pulled back completely.
"There's something I need you to do."
This time the walls did cast echoes, as the Dark Kamui's boots thumped against the floor; Sumeragi took another moment to clear his senses of that blood smell, and followed.
The corridors were long and empty, partially darkened; as he followed Fuuma, he began to notice that the air was taking on an antiseptic smell, sharp and flowery to the point of cloying.
A hospital smell.
"Where are we going?" he managed to ask, as Fuuma stopped in front of a narrow grey door.
The reply was delivered on a wicked little smile.
"To meet the future."
The door swung open, and the quiet within was nearly deafening; Sumeragi could hear the soft blips of medical equipment before his eye actually adjusted to the white sterility of the room.
Dozens of wires--slenderer than the great nest of silver snakes in the basement--ran towards a single source, a very pale figure on a very pale bed. Fuuma said nothing but gestured for him to approach; the few steps from the doorway to the bed were a long and breathless journey.
Hair so blond as to be nearly white fanned messily across the pillow; an oxygen mask was fitted neatly over the stranger's delicate features. Every now and then, one of his thin hands would twitch, and his eyelids would flicker.
Sumeragi knelt by his side.
"I know this man," he said softly.
"Kazuki Kakyou, another of our yumemi." The shape of Fuuma's body heat towered beside him. "He loved someone close to you."
The thought of Hokuto lanced through Sumeragi like hot iron pushing into his skin--and then a worse thought followed, ice after fire.
What does he want me to do to him?
"His wish is to join his beloved." Fuuma's voice was soft and completely emotionless. "You will enter his dreamscape; you're more than qualified to help him to what he wants."
I can't, he wanted to scream, I don't kill, that was an accident, I'm not a murderer.
He looked down at the pale bed and let his eye unfocus. Kakyou's hand moved slightly, an ivory blur on clean white.
"It is his wish, and there will be no better time to grant it. The most peaceful death is a death of the mind--after that, the body just stops."
Sumeragi wondered, with a nauseated shiver, how he knew that.
"You'll do this for me, won't you, Sakurazukamori?"
He closed his eyes. His younger self was silent, probably asleep--there was nothing to guide him, to help him say no. And, really... he pitied Kakyou for loving someone dead, for living without hope as he did now. He pitied him for being the same kind of fool as he had been, with the same kind of wish and the same naive stupidity that had kept them both alive for so long.
"Of course," he said.
* * *
The dreamscape was wide and windy and empty.
Kakyou sat alone, draped in a soft off-white kimono, staring out into the void. Occasionally a maple leaf would drift by, or he would whisper a haiku to himself; aside from that, all was perfect stillness and perfect silence.
A single sakura petal fluttered across the dreamscape, pink on black.
"Kakyou?"
The voice that cut the darkness was feminine, the perfect echo of one that had not sounded for nine years. It made the yumemi jump slightly; visitors to such darkness were few and far between, especially by those not intimately acquainted with the future.
"Kakyou, are you here?"
The illusion was perfect, a labour of love and memory: the face full of life and sweetness, the figure slender and graceful, and growing, displaying more than hints of full-fledged beauty. It had taken only one vivid memory to create--it seemed that thought alone, combined with the darkening threads of his power, was enough to weave a pitch-perfect creation.
The Sakurazukamori, cloaked in this illusion, gave every word her voice, and painted over each smile with one of hers; he wore his dead sister like a coat.
And the yumemi, eyes wide in wonder, approached him with an expression free from suspicion.
"Hokuto?" he whispered. "Hokuto, why..."
"I've come to take you away with me." Sumeragi held out his arms, slowly, feeling the fabric of the illusion stretch just a little.
"It's time?" Kakyou's pale face lit with the beginning of a smile. "But... the other Angels... and your brother..."
Sumeragi cut him off with a laugh; Hokuto's voice made it sweet, as it did for the lies that rolled off his tongue with startling ease. "Everything will be fine. After all, if things worked out for us, then there's hope for everyone--isn't there?"
Kakyou looked at him curiously; for a moment he was afraid the illusion would fall through and the dreamgazer would ask him that terrible question why, why are you doing this, why did you take this form, why do you torment me and yourself with this memory?
Sumeragi watched the dreamgazer's eyes--and it occurred to him that this illusion was probably no more than a transparent mask to Kakyou. The man knew he was not his sister, his dreamscape was merciless in what it revealed, future and present alike--and yet he was willing to accept this illusion as a gesture.
Because he'd loved her that damn much, the fool.
And then the smile broke out wide and relieved across Kakyou's face, a smile of perfect love and deep relief. He stumbled the few steps left between them, and slowly folded the impostor into his embrace; Sumeragi was a little surprised at how warm he was, how thin the long line of his body seemed.
"Thank you," Kakyou whispered.
He struck.
Muscle and bone gave way beneath his hands with a sickening sound; his fingers closed around a great hard knot of life, and grabbed it, and thrust it out on a tide of blood. The yumemi clutched at his shoulder with weak fingers; a wet little sound escaped his throat, and the darkness began to fall in on itself as the mind that had created it shut down.
Sumeragi let the illusion drop altogether, and visualised his physical body, slumped on the cot next to the frail man; like a diver kicking towards the surface of the sea he set his sight on the edge of the darkness and simply went.
Overpowering vertigo swept over him for a moment, and then he opened his eyes.
There was blood everywhere.
The white sheets were red, almost black in places; the soft hum and whine of the medical equipment was counterpointed by a steady inexorable drip-drip-drip.
Something slick and wet and warm pressed against his hand.
He looked down and saw his hand shoved through the yumemi's heart, his forearm immersed in muscle and blood and chips of bone almost up to the elbow; a terrible little shudder passed through Kakyou once before the stuff around his hand went completely still.
Fuuma was holding his wrist as he would the hilt of a knife.
The smell of blood filled his lungs.
Trembling, too shocked to register the tidal wave of emotion roaring down at him, he jerked his hand back; the torn heart fell from his nerveless fingers. As he staggered to his feet the Dark Kamui only offered him a small smile, and his voice, when he spoke, was almost kind:
"Get some fresh air."
Sumeragi stumbled past wires and monitors and pure white walls to the pale grey door, and nearly tore it off its hinges trying to get out to the hallway; his knees gave out before he made it as far as the opposite wall, and he was violently ill right there. He retched hard, his forehead pressed into the slick dark floor, unable to breathe or force any sound out of his throat while his body emptied itself in response to his crime.
And even before he could muster the strength to take that first breath, the adrenaline hit, so strongly that he had no opportunity to hate himself.