"Cogito ergo doleo" - I think, therefore I am depressed.
The room was pleasant enough, except for the smell.
Semi-opaque drapes framed the window, their slightly sun-faded pattern promising the coming of happier times, when the season would finally turn and the window could be opened to admit the Spring. Right now, of course, it was shut; and perhaps that was a good thing, but Kamui honestly felt that the room would have smelled better if they could have opened it wide.
"Anything?"
Sorata looked up from his post by the bed; he'd fallen asleep, and was trying to look like he hadn't. "Naw. He still hasn't said a word." He pushed his cap further back on his head.
Kamui nodded once, and dared to come a step closer. Perhaps it was because every member of his family was dead, or perhaps it was because he himself had been hospitalized too many times to count; whatever the reason, Kamui did not like hospitals. It spoke good things of his character that he was willing to take a turn to come and watch. To watch, yes; but not to interfere. It did not seem that there was much that anybody could do; Aoki sat, physically unharmed but mentally vacant, staring off into space and breathing regularly only because his body remembered not to stop.
"What do the doctors say?"
Sorata shrugged, his hair sleep-ruffled and his eyes fixed stubbornly forward in spite of his nap-daze. "They said he's fine, physically. Not a thing wrong with him that they can see, but you know how THEY are. They just... don't know why he is." Sorata seemed to realize he'd been sleepy enough to leave that sentence unfinished, and he blushed, running his hand through his hair. "Don't know why he's... the way he is. Like that, I mean."
Kamui simply nodded. "And the princess?"
Sorata shrugged. "Her dreams didn't see it coming. She has no idea what's going on. All she gets is vague stuff about darkness and demons and feathers. Lots of feathers."
Kamui merely nodded again, having seen more than enough of Hinoto's dreamscapes for one lifetime. He still did not trust her; but since the dragons of heaven had no other future-seeing help, and he had no direct proof that she was as evil as his instinct said, he did nothing. Of course, it seemed he usually did nothing these days; he was beginning to wonder, bitterly, just what good it was to be a neo-Messiah figure when all one could do was get one's self pinned to a wall so one could watch while one's friends were mutilated. Like, say, having their eyes torn out.
Of course, he had no room to complain; he hadn't even asked Sorata about Arashi, and the girl had disappeared days ago. No one seemed to know why or where, but from what Kamui could gather, apparently she'd slept with Sorata and then - well, freaked out.
It was the stuff jokes were made of. It was also the stuff of tragedy; and due to the intimate nature of the problem, Kamui hadn't been able to bring himself to discuss it. He felt guilty for this, in a way; Subaru would have asked. Subaru was always aware of other people, always hurting for them, always so amazingly selfless in spite of his personal pain - at least in Kamui's opinion, which was one of the reasons why he emulated the onmyouji so.
Well; emulated in theory. "Loved" might be a better word, but he tried to think of it as having a good role model. It was safer that way.
"Thinking about Subaru again?"
Kamui started, his eyes glancing toward Sorata suspiciously. The young monk just smiled back at him.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Kamui insisted.
"Uh huh," Sorata said. "That's your 'oh gods, Subaru, what have I done to you?' look. As opposed to the 'oh gods, Subaru, you're so beautiful' look or the 'oh gods, Subaru, PLEASE stop hurting look' or the - "
"ENOUGH," Kamui growled, hands clenched at his sides, and Sorata stopped; he shrugged again.
"He's not coming back, Kamui," he began, trying perhaps to tell Kamui what everyone had been trying to tell him delicately for weeks, and Kamui reacted exactly how everyone had thought he would upon hearing it so bluntly: his hand was around Sorata's throat before the latter even had time to put down his crumpled hat.
"He WILL come back," Kamui said, eyes blazing amethyst. "YOU don't know him like I do! He will!"
Sorata gargled a reply that was not definitely a yea or a nay, but Kamui accepted it as the former and backed down. And just as suddenly, the anger was gone; Kamui trembled.
"....I'm sorry."
"Yeah. I know. I shouldn'a opened my mouth anyway," Sorata said, not looking sorry, and coughed a little. Then, he grinned. "You haven't gone all tough-ass on me like that for months; that was kinda nostalgic to see, you know? Glad you got some fight left in you!"
Kamui refused to answer; hugging himself, he walked to the other side of the bed and stood with his back toward the door. Sorata stood with a sigh.
"Your turn to watch, I guess," he said, changing the subject, and Kamui asked his question without turning around.
"Do they all think that?" he said. "All of them - about me?"
"About you and... Subaru?" Sorata asked, hazarding a guess.
Kamui nodded.
Sorata shrugged. "I dunno. It's not a topic of conversation that I've been involved in, kid. I'm just going on what I've seen."
Kamui nodded slowly and accepted. "Good enough. And don't call me kid."
Sorata donned his hat with a smile, shifting from foot to foot as if preparing himself for physical exertion. "Sure thing, Kamui. Seeya." Kamui nodded again, not trusting himself to look, and Sorata left without another word.
He really should have asked about Arashi; Kamui knew that, on some level, but he just didn't feel like basking in someone else's pain. No sympathy; yes, there was yet another way that Subaru was a better man than he was. Why Subaru hadn't been chosen to be the savior of the world was anybody's guess - Kamui felt he couldn't even back up his decisions once he'd made them. Some savior.
Feeling inordinately heavy, Kamui sat down and waited.
Aoki did not move; no one interrupted, and Kamui began to see why Sorata had drifted to sleep. Nurses came and went; Aoki never so much as changed the direction of his gaze, although he did blink on a regular basis. The sun crossed the sky and began to peer more directly into the western window of the room, but nothing else changed. Kamui, having considerably more on his mind than Sorata, had no trouble staying awake; but that was not enough to stop the dreamscape.
With the suddenness of a tidal wave darkness hit him, heavy, crushing, and feeling as though he could not breathe, Kamui passed out.
"Who are you?"
Darkness; where was this voice coming from? Whose voice was it? Kamui felt he should know, but for some reason, he could not place it. Afraid - or perhaps just leery - he remained silent.
"Who are you?" The question rang in the darkness again, echoing slightly against unseen walls, and Kamui shuddered and gripped his head; it felt like every decibel was strung through his heart with cold wire.
Before him, darkness suddenly swirled into a vortex of color from nothing, shaping in wavery figures to form people - people Kamui knew, and people he didn't.
He saw Subaru; standing before an individual of debatable gender, who was laid in a hospital bed and whose hair covered his (her?) pillow. He saw them speaking; he saw... some sort of odd power pass between them, an understanding, a mutual pain - and then the images swirled into nothing again, leaving emptiness behind.
Kamui stared, desperate for a postscript. "But... what was that? WHERE was that? WHAT'S GOING ON?"
"Who are you?" the darkness answered placidly, and Kamui rubbed the bridge of his nose.
"You know who I am," he accused softly, "or we wouldn't be having this discussion. Well, since you know who I am, and I know who I am, I'm going to make this simple for you: let me out of here or I will blow whatever maraboshi, illusion, or dreamscape it is you've made here to hell. You got that?"
"You do not know who you are," corrected the voice, and Kamui paused.
"I don't have to deal with this," he said, quietly and carefully controlled; and then suddenly, there was a man.
An older man - at least, from Kamui's own perspective - muscle-bound, wearing a Japanese Self Defense Force jacket and and sickly pale-green skin pallor.
Kamui stared.
The man said, "I am Shiyu Kusanagi. You are Kamui," and then just stared blankly ahead.
Kamui took a step back; no dreamscape he'd experienced had offered something like this before. "What? Are you real?"
Kusanagi continued to stare at nothing, and his coloring grew worse. "It's... wrong," he wrenched. "It's... something is wrong."
"Yeah, I can see that," said Kamui, who took another step back; an unpleasant, distinctly dead smell had begun wafting toward him.
"You've damned him," Kusanagi said, almost dreamily, and for the first time focused his eyes on his audience. Kamui swallowed; one of Kusanagi's eyes was missing."You've damned him and changed it all. The Final Battle is - "
And just as suddenly as he'd appeared, Kusanagi was gone. There was no fanfare, no flash of light; he simply wasn't there anymore, as if someone had turned the projector off. Once again, Kamui was left with another unfinished sentence.
Whispers warmed the air around him, caressing his ears and shivering in his soul, asking over and over again- "Who are you? Who are you?"
Kamui took a third step back, then a fourth; he could see nothing, feel nothing but the ground beneath his feet, and the whispers - overlapping one another now - began to grow louder.
"Stop it," he said, lifting both hands to his head. "Stop it. STOP IT!" Power crackled out from him in a blaze, a reaction to his panic rather than a planned response, slivering the air into pieces as the entire world around him suddenly shattered.
Kamui stood, flinging his chair back and screaming. Both hands on the side of his head as though he were trying to keep his skull from bursting, he wailing, loudly, stopping only when a nurse came running into the room carrying a fire extinguisher. She was followed by two doctors and a security officer, and although Kamui stopped crying out the moment they touched him, he said nothing to indicate what was going on and turned violent when they tried to make him leave the room. In the end, they decided to sedate him.
While this went on, Aoki Seiichirou continued to stare at nothing, react to nothing, hear nothing. When Kamui finally submitted to being put in the bed beside him, Aoki simply breathed and blinked and did no more. Drugged nearly mindless, Kamui did the same thing.
For a long time, there was silence.