Author's Note: Not, you will notice, the most original of titles. This started out as a few unconnected scenelets. Obviously it didn't evolve much beyond that. ;;
the art of leaving
I.
It is like that spring two years ago all over again. The first few days pass in white walls and pale light filtered through windows, though now there are just the two of them, and it is Ken who is confined to the hospital this time.
Ken has always been brittle since they left the first Koneko, but now there is something worse than the bloodlust that had shone behind his bitter laugh - only a wounded silence, in the way his sentences trail off and the way he keeps staring at nothing in particular. Aya is almost glad, guiltily so, when visiting hours are up and he has to leave - solitude is better than having to see that empty gaze.
Aya's last visit is on a perfect summer morning, because Ken mentions awkwardly that he'll be able to leave tomorrow. They both know, by experience, that that is the cue for the last loose ends to be tied up.
Kritiker gives them the option of clearing up the belongings of the others. Aya doesn't allow himself to, because the less he has to hold on to the easier it'll be, however little difference it makes. But things have a way of turning up, and when he is surveying the mission room one last time, he sees something glint under the table. He sets down the cardboard box of his few books, crouches down by the sofa -
- it is a cigarette lighter, slightly scuffed, and cold to Aya's almost hesitant touch.
The metal reminds Aya of too many things; he picks it up and slips it into one pocket, and wonders if he will ever really forgive Youji for dying.
Ken returns to the Koneko the next day to half-empty rooms, but only enters his own. Still, Aya catches him at Sena's door that evening, one hand resting against the panelled wood, the other half-clenched at his side.
Aya leaves quietly and unseen, and refuses to think about the photographs lying unclaimed in the empty room.
The call comes a day later, startling them both. Aya hurries up from the basement, reaching the living room in time to see Ken laughing softly as he hangs up the phone. Laughter breaking off with a wince of pain, Ken looks up at Aya, and Aya feels a splinter of what he would have once called hope work its way deep into his chest.
Ken's eyes are more alive than they have been since that night, and in a way it is worse than the bitter grin he usually wears. As Aya walks closer, Ken slumps down onto the couch, one hand pressed gently against the still-healing wound. When he speaks his voice is sharp with laughter, shaky with wonder.
"He's alive," Ken says, staring at the carpet, lips curled in what might be a grin. "He's still alive."
"Where is he?" Aya asks before the surprise has time to catch up with him. Despite himself, his mind races through a host of catches; he's alive but crippled, he's still unconscious, he's in a coma - gods, not that, anything but that -
Ken laughs again, a harsh bark of amusement. "That was Rex. 'Persia knows nothing about this call'. We're not supposed to know."
"Ken, what -"
"He doesn't remember."
Aya stops somewhere in the middle of running through a list of possible life-threatening injuries, and just stares. When Ken turns to look at Aya the laughter in his eyes is fading and his voice is laced with a bitter wonder. "He doesn't remember. Everything we've been through, who we are...he's got a new life. Lucky bastard."
Aya just stares. Ken shakes his head slightly and wonders if relief can taste so much like disappointment. "He doesn't remember and Omi doesn't want to. They're both dead, you know? They're both dead. Aya - Aya, there's no one left. Can't you see? It's only us, now. No one else remembers."
Aya stares and then lowers his gaze and sits down in the armchair, not trusting himself to look at Ken.
"There's only the two of us left," Ken says again, and there is a desperation in his voice that neither of them acknowledges.
It is like that spring two years ago all over again, where the silences stretch uneasily and everything chafes. One would have thought escaping death would bring people closer; still, they have met near-certain death at least three times together, and each time the distance between them aches a little more.
Aya's last conversation is on a drowsy summer night four days later, because he booked the flight ticket since the day Ken was discharged and there is nothing left in Japan for him. He tells Ken that his flight leaves the next evening, and so their last night is spent in the mission room, where Aya goes through the computer and Ken talks to the air while finishing off the beer in the fridge. Neither of them comments on what the other is doing, but the faint rhythm of keyboard keys and clicking does pause when Ken speaks, or at least so Ken imagines.
Ken falls asleep on the couch, and when he wakes in his bed the next morning he is alone.
II.
Ken speeds to the airport with the wind in his hair, cursing Aya and fuelled by a desperation he had not known he could still feel. The road is long and clear under his motorcycle's wheels, and there would be something like a thrill in his blood if not for the despair.
Ken has lost everyone he has ever believed in, and he does not want it to happen again.
Aya feels something not quite relief and not quite gladness when he hears his name carried by a familiar voice - he pauses, and turns, and when he sees Ken it is almost enough to make him reconsider. Aya waits until Ken, panting and fiercely bewildered, catches up. He offers nothing. There are too many things that they can say to each other, and thus nothing that can be said.
Ken stops and catches his breath and wants to tell Aya to stay. He can't.
Aya wants to tell Ken about dying and patterns and what might be a jinx or what might be sheer coincidence; he wants to tell Ken about wounds that will never heal because the both of them will always remember, can't Ken see, because the both of them will never be able to move on and they'll always see ghosts in each other, echoes that would haunt them anyway but that would haunt them worse if they were together.
He wants to tell Ken about second chances, and about living, and about dying. He doesn't have the words, and even if he did he couldn't have spoken them anyway.
Ken's eyes are confused and desperate and pleading; Ken doesn't have words either, and even if he did Aya doesn't think they would make much of a difference. Ken looks away, frustrated, and when he looks up again Aya is leaving.
Ken is alone even before Aya disappears fully into the crowd, and he still does not understand.
III.
America doesn't hold any ghosts for him, but it doesn't matter because they follow him anyway. It's always his dreams; if it's not Kikyou and Shion then it's Kyou, or Sena, or Asami. Sometimes he dreams of Ken too, of that day at the airport and the darkness in his eyes, and he wonders if Ken ever found his peace.
Sometimes he lets himself wonder, too, if he should have stayed.
But such wondering is useless because Japan is dead to him now - the whole of Japan is gone, something to be kept in locked drawers along with an abandoned cigarette lighter and old photographs and memories still as sharp as broken glass. The only thing alive in Japan for him is a small flowershop somewhere where a girl lives and works and laughs, and it is the only thing he does not trust himself to think about anymore.
But he does so anyway, guiltily, as he does for the only thing he does not want himself to think about - Omi, and a promise he made two years ago, and how he has to break it like every other promise, like every other sacred thing he's already broken.
In this city everyone is faceless or less than faceless, like the glass-walled buildings in which you only see your reflection; distorted, glazed on the cool smoothness of the panes, like a memory caught for an instant in water. This suits Aya just fine. He does not recall the last time he has spoken to anyone outside the orphanage, besides the brief less-than-conversations he grants his quarry before the kill.
This is something to be grateful for, really, and in any case he has learnt that words can change nothing. But silence only lets his memories speak louder, and all the empty conversations of the past echo in his head as he walks unseeing down the cold streets of New York. There are times, when he is alone in his small apartment at night, that he recalls Sena's optimistic voice, and the feeling he refuses to acknowledge as grief is an almost tangible thing; settling heavy in his veins and at the back of his throat.
Sometimes, on those nights, he lets himself wonder if what haunts him is something that can even be lost.
It is like those days two years ago all over again; America, and foreign voices, and the streets lined with strangers. The days pass in quiet coffee breaks and the nights in silence or death, though now there are more voices with him, and it is sorrow that refuses to leave.