Schism ~ an adventure in shounen ai with the occasional flock of strangeness by ShiniJekka
Necessary Disclaimer o'Goodness – I don't own this stuff. If I did I wouldn't be using such a cronk computer. I'd be flying high with some alienware, gigahertz processor.. ooh, the possibilities..
Author's Ramble – This took me forever, and I'm sorry. It took a very long time to be able to write in Ken's POV without it turning out to be pages and pages of nothing. For some reason he rambles in my head… if you doubt that, I have four pages of pure dribble lying around. I might post them some distant day. Kensuke ahoy!!
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Chapter 1 – An Ache on Eternity
"So.. whatcha thinkin'?"
"Nothing in particular.. just.. thinking."
"You think too much."
I raised an eyebrow and glanced to the side as Daisuke made a peculiar grunting noise, rolling onto his side. The grass beneath him flattened, and where he used to be was a curious mix of still-flat and struggling to rise again. There was a Daisuke imprint.
"I think too much?"
"You heard me," my boyfriend groused, poking my side with a callused finger. Both eyebrows were now elevated to a lofty expression of incredulity.
"Is this a matter of thinking too much in general," I asked, reaching down to take hold of his tanned finger with my own smooth, pale hand, "or just in comparison to you?"
He snickered softly, shaking his hand lightly in a slight attempt to release my grip, then grasped it with his other hand.
My gaze strayed, down to where he held me, holding him.
"So what I should I do, then?"
"Duuuh," Daisuke replied in all his eloquence. "Think less."
"How much is too much?"
"This much," he murmured, releasing my hand to tap my forehead. I blinked in surprise, eyes following his hand right up until the point of cross-eyed.
"What?"
"You've got lines."
"That's ridiculous," I splutter, rubbing my forehead. "I'm too young for wrinkles."
"Wrinkles ON wrinkles! You worry too much."
"I'm not worrying," I mutter indignantly, sitting up abruptly. Daisuke continues to look at me from the grass… I can feel clearly the weight of his russet gaze.
"You're always worrying," he sighs. "And always thinking."
"That's how I am, then."
"I'll worry for you," he offers, tugging at my hand. I look down at him, and then slowly around ourselves.
The park isn't all that crowded, which is a surprise. If you're lucky enough to find any spot in Odaiba that hasn't yet reached its humanity saturation point, be sure to grab it. To find a spot as lovely as a hillside in a little grassy park borders on miracle. There are, total, maybe ten other people here, all spread about, walking dogs or reading on benches. There's one other couple, under the shade of a tree with a picnic basket.
"We ought to be in the shade, too," I declare suddenly.
It must have been a mistake, because my Dai suddenly has something suspiciously akin to a triumphant smile.
"Whyyyy?" he draws out lazily.
"Because it's far too sunny out, and in case you hadn't noticed, it's getting hotter."
"Why, Ken!" He bats his eyelashes at me charmingly. "Are you… worrying?"
"I'm the one with fair skin here. Unless you want to spend the entire night rubbing aloe onto a second degree sunburn…"
His eyes practically light up. "Now THERE'S an idea," he cries, sitting up. "But I don't want you to hurt while I do it, so let's just change the aloe into whipped cream…"
From the sudden heat in my cheeks, I'm sure I looked like the victim of sunburn already.
"Whipped cream doesn't help a sunburn," I say carefully, knowing I have a tendency to stutter when he takes this sudden shift into flirtatiously kinky.
"Then we'll have to try it out soon… say… now?"
I can't help but laugh, leaning against him and savoring the sheer Daisukeness of it all. He smells of cinnamon and clove and a peculiar musk that I associate with that bomber jacket of his, though it's far too tepid a day for it.
"You're impossible, Dai," I murmur in his ear. He snickers back and slips an arm around my waist, and with a slight tug pulls us both back down to the grass.
"You only say that cos you think too much."
"Ne… Ken…"
"Mmmn?" The heat was making me drowsy. It may have been the close proximity of the love of my life, but I'm still shy now and then, so even to myself I say it's the heat.
"I had a real funny dream last night," he says.
One blink, and I suppress a shiver as my own nightmare rushes back to center stage of my mind.
"Really?" I would rather hear about his than think about mine. I had nearly given Wormmon a heart attack this morning with all of my thrashing and groaning. He'd finally woken me up by jumping up and down on my face.
"Yeah." He's looking at me again, and I can't help but meet the gaze, as though his eyes hold gravity over mine. "I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours, though."
"I thought it was, 'I'll show you mine...'"
He grins. "Well, that too, but we're in public."
"This inhibition is a first, for you," I mutter. "Why are you asking?"
"Because when you're real silent and weird like this that means something's upsetting you. It's Sunday so it wasn't school, which is normally it, and I don't think it was your folks, and I'm hoping beyond hell it wasn't me, so I figured maybe it was a dream. And when I said I had one, you went real still and stuff, so I figured maybe I was right. So what was it?"
Sometimes I need to remember that my Daisuke is a genius in his own right. He has such a knack for reading people that occasionally I'm stuck between opening up to him and falling into his arms, or trying to draw the shutters closed a little tighter. It's hard not to shrink away from someone so open…
Someone so vividly alive that it's like looking straight into the sun.
"You… really want to know?" I ask, under my breath as though I don't want him to hear. When he hears, he'll assure me yes he does, and then I'll tell him merely for the reason that he is Daisuke.
There's a rustle, and suddenly he is all I can see, dominating my entire field of vision, propped over me with hands in the grass, straddling my hips. I can feel blood rushing straight into my face, a flush setting over my cheeks and rising to the tips of my ears.
"Maybe we should have moved into the shade," he whispers, eyes sliding over my face so slowly they must leave tracks. "You're so red…"
Yet I feel so frozen. My limbs have gone stiff, my heart beating desperately against my ribcage like a panicking bird looking for escape. With lips gone mysteriously numb, I manage somehow to tell him that it isn't sunburn.
He nods, chestnut hair bobbing about in its place, brushing over those ridiculous goggles given to him by Taichi.
"I do really want to know."
A long pause, as I stare upwards at him. He gazes back, infinitely patient, but steadfast and determined. I could no sooner escape him than my own phantoms.
Ironic, considering that as of late he was my escape.
"Alright, Dai. Alright."
As I tell him, I find myself fascinated by the disinterested and distant tone of my own voice. It's as though I'm lecturing on something that doesn't apply or affect me at all, when in reality I was speaking of that which had terrified me nearly every night this week. Things I haven't even told Wormmon about, yet. Dreams that I had been careful not to look full in the face, afraid of what I might remember about them.
"It's dark outside… it's dark everywhere… but it isn't nighttime. It's just … dark. I don't know where I am, at first, except it's the city and the sidewalk and it's cold… it's very cold. I'm wondering where I am, where Wormmon is… my parents, or the other Children… where you are, too, Daisuke. But no one's around at all; it's just all quiet and faded.
"And then there's a bit of movement to my left, I spin around to see someone dart around the corner of a building… I have to catch him… I have to stop him, before it's too late. If I can just catch him, none of what I know will happen, and it won't have been my fault. I run the corner and suddenly it's not just dark, it's BLACK, Daisuke… black and thick and shifting all around me, like an ocean. And he's in front of me. I can see light from somewhere glinting off the rim of his glasses, and the outline of his hair, and he grips me by the shoulders, shaking me until I can't see straight.
"He's got something to say… something I need to hear. He's so insistent about it, so violently commanding, but before he can tell me what it is, there's a loud noise, and it isn't dark anymore… it's a sandstorm, and I'm lost in it, and I can't find him again… I'll never find him again."
My voice trails off, and I'm trying so hard to not think about how terrible it was, that it's the only thing on my mind. Tell yourself not to think of elephants and you'll get pachyderms on the brain, relentlessly. It hurts, to be thinking of this. There's a gnawing emptiness settled into the very marrow of my bones, down into my heart, and it's been there for so long that I only seem to notice it when it hurts more than usual. For all I know it'll be there until the end of my days. I have an ache on eternity.
Daisuke lays a hand on my shoulder, and I'm jolted back to the present by the sheer heat radiating from within him. He, too, seems surprised, glancing at the point of contact, eyebrows raising.
"You're freezing."
"… I'm disturbed," I reply slowly, pulling the words out carefully.
"A dream like that, no wonder," he muses. "Any idea what it meant?"
"What it meant?"
"Who the person was? Where you were? What he was trying to say?"
I stared at the grass… rather, through it… letting my thoughts attempt to organize themselves. It had been in the city, at first, just the normal stretch of street outside my apartment.
"I don't think where is important," I say, eyes listlessly watching the waver and bend of the grass stalks as I think harder. "It was just a street. What bothered me most is that I have no idea what he wants to tell me… and it seems so dreadfully important, Daisuke. I need to hear it."
"And there's another thing," my boyfriend huffs. "Who is he? You said you couldn't see but you seem to know anyway."
"I… it was dark, yeah… but… I could almost see, and at the very least it felt like…"
"Like…?" He nudges me slightly, so that I look up at him. His deep eyes have blended into a sort of cherry chocolate color, offset by tiny sparks of light color. Fire opals.
"Osamu," I whisper, letting it slip out, so caught up in his eyes that I barely notice something I'd meant to keep hidden escape straight into the wind, into his ears, for him to mull over and decide upon.
I don't want him to think me unstable, which is an outright laugh. Daisuke knows me more than anyone, save for Wormmon, who's known me longer. But Dai… he's known me closer.
I suppose I'm thinking too hard again, because he's staring at me with a peculiar mix of worry and exasperation.
"Your brother?" he finally says with a blink. "The, um… gone one?"
"I think so."
"Well, then he's telling you to lighten up!" Daisuke pokes me in the chest, almost sending me off-balance.
"It seems more than that," I mutter dryly.
"C'mon, Ken, relax. Your bro would never keep you up all night just to haunt you. He isn't the type to haunt."
"The type?"
Daisuke nods emphatically. "Right. But I am."
Which takes me off-guard.
"You are, what?"
"The type to haunt, of course! And at this rate I'm gonna have to, cos we have all this free time, just you an' me, and you're just moping around. In face, I can see it now… way down the road, you'll be lyin' in bed with your old man knickers on, thinking 'If only I'd paid more attention to Daisuke back when I was young and energetic. We could have had so much more whoopie…' And then there'll be a cool gust of wind and-"
"Wait, wait," I interrupt, laughing. "Whoopie?!"
"Yeah, whoopie! Now lemme finish. There'll be a cool gust of wind at the window and you'll look up and there's me, floating around like the sexy ghost I am."
He stood up at this point, waving his arms in the air and sucking in his cheeks to try to look gaunt and frightening. He looked like a shriveled squirrel.
"Daisuke, is there some sort of medication you should be on?"
"Quiet, I'm a ghost. Kee~eeeen… Whyyyyyy did you mope so much? Aaaaaall those wasted afternooooons… we could be kissing right nooooow…"
"Except that by 'now' you mean when you're a ghost."
"No," he says with a grin. "I mean NOW!"
I barely have time to blink as he leaps at me, a nice clean tackle. His fingers are searching up my sides for the tickle zones he discovered lately, but I'll have none of that. He's not impervious either.
Giggling like normal boys, we roll down the entire hill, covered in grass stains and breathless, and by the bottom I'm happy again.
Though it may just have been my imagination that someone else was giggling.
It must have been.
There was no one else there.
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The author walks to the roadside and carefully drives a sign into her lawn
Muses wanted.
More on the way.