Title: Ziggurat
Author: Tiamat's Child
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: X-1999
Pairing: Kotori/Kamui
Summary: It all comes back to the garden.
Disclaimers: Not mine. Nope. They're Clamp's, but they won't get out of my head, so I might as well have a little fun.
Ziggurat
Kotori sometimes thinks that it's her garden that lets her live. It's so steady, the earth under her hands, and the bright, sharp scent of bruised leaves hanging about her, holding her close. When she's here, wrapped up in her garden, she isn't afraid anymore.
Sometimes she thinks that she's afraid of everything these days. Nothing seems solid anymore. Sometimes she thinks that the rest of the world has faded off, just enough that she can sink through it as if it were jelly, and there's nothing she can cling to to pull herself back up again.
It doesn't even help that Kamui's back, because she finds herself afraid even of him. He's so very changed. It's not his anger that she fears, though that shocks her, but his distance, his pain. She feels that she has to take care of him now, and while she vowed that she would, years upon years ago, she never truly thought that it would come to that. He always seemed so strong and brave, when he was a boy. And now he is older, and that strength is still there, but it is brittle now. She thinks that she could crack it like a discarded cricket skin if she isn't very, very gentle. She could press too hard and it would break under her fingertips.
He would break. Not it. He.
Kotori's fairly sure she's going a little mad. Not certain, since she's never gone mad before, or if she has she doesn't remember it, but fairly sure. It's not a nice feeling, but for some reason it almost makes her want to laugh, to let out the sound that it breaks open in her. She knows that if she did it wouldn't be her normal laugh, bubbling and bright, it would be a different sort of laugh together, full of shattered lightning.
Still, there's the garden, and that she can't hurt. Or she could, if she tried, but she'd have to try, and she doesn't want to try. She doesn't want to hurt anything. She's just afraid that she will. On accident. While she's trying to help, it wouldn't be hard. Except with the garden. She'd have to try to hurt the garden. She's been gardening too long to hurt accidentally.
It used to be that she knew Kamui too well to hurt him, but not anymore. Not anymore. He's changed, and she's changed, – she hadn't even known that before she saw him again, she had thought that she was the same as she'd always been, that sweet little girl she once was, but she knows better now – and the love that lay between them has changed, grown in strange ways, overflowing the banks that had been laid for it, joining itself to things that hadn't even existed when they say each other last. She could hurt him now. He's vulnerable to her. It would be so easy, she wouldn't even have to mean it.
If she were one of her classmates, the ones who like to think that they have Kamui's wild spirit, the thought would probably lead her hip deep into liquor.
But she isn't like that. She's herself, and she doesn't want to hurt anyone. She doesn't want anyone to hurt at all, whether the hurt is her fault or not. She hates it when people hurt. She would hurt so many people so very badly if she went and did that. It's not worth it. Not worth it at all.
He can hurt her too. He can hurt her with a glance, with the way he turns away, with the times when he steps back from holding her as a friend and she's not sure if she's still herself to him, or if she's become something else. Something she can't be. Something she doesn't want to be at all. She doesn't want to be his trophy, prize possession, any of the things she sees in other boys' eyes when they look at the girl they have their arm around. She wants to be his friend.
Yes, she wants to kiss him. Yes, she wants him to want to kiss her. But she has no desire to belong to him, to be claimed by him. And she doesn't want him to belong to her. She doesn't want to claim him. He doesn't belong to her, she doesn't belong to him. They just love each other. There's no possession in it, and she doesn't want there to be. It doesn't belong there. There's no room for anything of the sort between them.
She just needs to be friends. She needs him to feel safe with her. She needs to feel safe with him. But she never feels safe anymore, except in the garden.
She knows that isn't her fault. Nor is it his fault. It is simply the way things have become, and she must be careful not to show it.
She mustn't show it because Kamui and Fumma need to be able to believe that she can rely on them, that they are enough to keep her safe and hidden from fear. It isn't true, of course, and she suspects that they understand this, deep under all of their protective instincts, their need to take care of her and keep her from harm. But it is a fiction that they need, the two of them and her. So she pretends, because there is nothing else to do and it is true enough, sometimes.
It's not a bad thing. She has her garden, and she has Kamui and Fumma, and if she's afraid of the future and herself and what could happen to all of them, how they could hurt each other, well then, she can tamp it down and tuck it away and keep it from showing in the day. It's all right. She'll be all right, even if she is going a little mad.