~ni.de - i
It
took Touya a while to realize what had just happened. He still felt disoriented;
out-of-sorts and weak, but the disorientation at least was fading as the
world once again began to take on a feeling of solidity and of...and of
something intangible and ineffable and yet quantifiable in a way that
was beyond words, that had seemed to vanish when Yue attacked him.
And
it was slowly beginning to sink in that that was what had happened; that
Yue had attacked him. But before that had a chance to begin to make an
impact at all, he saw Yue as he was now--eyes wide and unseeing, hands
digging into his hair, that discomforting look of confusion back on his
face, looking almost as if he was trying to tear his own head apart.
"Yue...Oi...oi, Yue...you OK?" Touya said, sitting up and grabbing Yue's shoulder.
No answer. Yue only dug his hands tighter against his head, making strange, thin noises in the back of his throat.
"Yue,
stop it! You're gonna hurt--!" Touya began, pulling Yue's wrists.
The second his hands closed around Yue's strangely delicate wrists, the
being stilled--*froze*--and his entire body stiffened.
"Go
ahead." he said, looking up with Touya with eyes that had suddenly
gone flat.
Touya
frowned. "Huh? Yue, *what* are you talking about?"
Yue frowned, then shut his eyes, his entire body beginning to shake. "Just stop it, Clow! Just--just get it over with! Stop this!"
Touya dropped Yue's wrists. "*What* are you talking about?! And I'm not Clow Read! What is going on?"
"Just do it, Clow!"
Touya grabbed Yue's shoulders, pulling Yue into a sitting position and then shaking him roughly. "Snap out of it!"
Yue's hair flowed around them slowly, like feathers floating in the wind. Yue blinked at the harshness of both the movements jerking him and Touya's voice, then shook his head, frowning. Touya let go of his shoulders, still scowling.
"You OK?" Touya finally said gruffly.
Yue stared at him, as if seeing him for the first time. "To-Touya?"
"Yeah?"
Yue's eyes widened and he looked around, startled. "I...where? And why are you...?" he began, taking in Touya's disheveled and undressed state.
Touya gave him a wry smile and gestured around the room. "Stop looking like you're expecting me to jump you or something. It's the middle of the night. You're in my bedroom. Yuki was asleep and I was almost asleep. He started shaking, I went to wake him up, and out you came. And you went *nuts*. You OK now? What the hell happened?" he asked, deciding by the look on Yue's face that now was not the time to tell Yue everything that had happened--Yue looked as though he was going into some kind of shock, if he wasn't there already. The last thing he needed to know was that he had attacked Touya with magic. He'd deal with that later, when things were saner. First he needed to get that god-awful look off of Yue's face, then to find out what had happened *without* sending Yue further off the deep end. Yue looked terrified as it was, and while that look of confused terror was bad, it was far better than the...the...the dead-person look he'd had earlier; that look Touya had only seen on the faces of ghosts.
"I don't...everything's very..." Yue said disjointedly, rising to his feet shakily. "But I..."
Touya stood up and put his hands on Yue's shoulders, pushing Yue gently back to a sitting position on the bed. "Sit. Breathe. Get yourself together, then tell me what happened.
"And while you get it together, I'm going to get some pants." he said dryly.
Yue
watched Touya moving around the room, eyes wide. It wasn't until Touya
was dressed that Yue spoke. "I...I don't think...I think I have...but...I
wasn't aware of... So I don't know."
"Uhh...Yue...you
*do* know that that made no sense whatsoever, right?"
Yue looked up at him, eyes wide; cracking glacial ice. "I...not making...?"
"Fuck, you're more messed up than I thought." Touya muttered under his breath, sitting down on the bed heavily. "Calm down. Whatever happened, it's over. It's all right."
"No," Yue said, surprising himself with the sharpness of it. "It's not all right. I don't know what's wrong...I don't know what's happening," he said, wrapping his arms around himself. "I don't know what's...why am I shaking like this?"
"Yue?" Touya whispered, then tentatively reached out to Yue. "Are you...are you all right?"
"No," Yue whispered, leaning into the tentatively offered embrace. When Yue responded--as skittishly and tentatively as the embrace had been offered--Touya wrapped his arms around Yue, feeling him tremble.
When Touya's arms wrapped around him, Yue tensed for a moment then suddenly relaxed, his shoulders slumping as the tension in him faded, and he let his head rest against Touya's chest, letting out a breath he hadn't even realized he was holding. He closed his eyes and, for a moment, simply let himself be content, for a brief moment, with nothing more than existing as he was at this moment, within the safety of arms larger and stronger than his own. Embraced by a trace of--
It could not last, he knew that it could not. He did not ask for it to; he did not ask for more than to feel Touya's arms, so much like Clow's, around him, even as he despaired that it would end.
Yue's
thoughts ran before him, uncertain and jagged; splintered and in shards.
He didn't know what had happened and that frightened him. He tried to
make sense of the uncertain images, tried to place the shards and fragments
into an order, only to find that they *hurt* ; that touching them drew
blood. He panicked; the arms around him that had seemed so comforting
a moment before now became confining, a cage, imbued with something that
had been--that was so much like--
He felt
his body tremor; he felt the strange, cold sweat he could not remember
having felt before. He tried to pull himself away from what moments before
had been so familiar and comforting but where now only familiar and terrifying;
now he wanted to escape.
Yue
panicked, and with a strangled cry, he escaped back into Yukito.
End Part One