Note: This fic was requested by Mandii – much love! – back in late November, early December, and it is with her go-ahead that I'm posting it here. *hugs*
Disclaimer: All characters involved belong to Takei Hiroyuki and the massive propaganda machines (I kid, I kid) that publish his works globally.
Continuity: Set several (hypothetical) years into the future of the Mankin world, and holds that Ryu and Lyserg are in fact a couple. Minor spoilers for the rudimentary past of Lyserg and references to tankoubon twenty-one.
Feedback: Certainly appreciated in any form.
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Crystal: Part One
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I remember winter, every time it comes whispering in, ice and snow and sharp things to prick tender skin along the breeze, and Mum would weave her fingers into my hair as we watched the snow drifting ever-down. It was easy to fall into dreams, then, with her hand warm and soft against my head, and Father humming something quiet as he watched us, watching the snow coming down, down.
Dreams were pleasant when I was young: simpler, innocent things, such that I didn't fear any shadows at all. I could close my eyes, and slowly drift, not caring in that tentative line between waking and slumbering that my throat was sore again with winter and ill-health; that I was still smaller and ever would be than the other boys. What could it matter, with the cocooning feel of my small family, with winter falling all around?
And then there was fire, strong and hateful, and the dreams became nightmares, that innocence webbed over with cloying shadows, and outside I had no love for snow, or sunlight, or any of the quiet things given by nature. It was being swallowed by all my weaknesses and natural inferiorities: softer, rounder features and feminine hands; petite and slender where the other boys were thick and strong; quick to illness amidst the buoyant health of youth. I knew I was weaker and I despised it, and I hated him most of all for taking what had kept me from living with the knowledge of what I had within me.
I remember winter, and do not love it.
He does, though, and makes it so I can bear the snow and the smiles; I smile, if shy and almost always embarrassed, and he gives me that somehow, though I don't know how. He disarms me easily, all theatrics and noisy, affectionate violence when he shouts at his friends, and all blushing flattery and stark honesty when he talks to me. Ryu is a brutally honest person, and I do not think he is capable of true, successful deception unless it was to protect someone he cares for.
Even then, when he has lied before, to me or his friends, I can see that strange honor in his eyes that makes him more hero than villain, though God knows he's no real, noble hero. He is real, and noble, and something of a hero, but mostly he's just Ryu who makes me feel strange inside, comforted and sheltered, as if those natural weaknesses that fill me with narrow coldness are nothing more than little pieces of crystal that are only part of me.
I don't know how to speak to him. I'd like to make him feel comforted and sheltered as well, I want to give him what reserved smiles I can, and once, when the cold took him and Yoh stayed me from doing what I wanted to do (what I didn't know I could ever want to do, what filled me with hate and anger and a tired, sad knowing), I wanted to be the cold so I could keep him safe.
He does these things to me and I stand in the snow, watching it falling down down like bits of the sky torn savagely apart (now dying, and tumbling sweetly, softly in ruin), wondering if he would watch the snow with me as I did, once, with my first family.
-end part one-
