Title: Turn Around
Author: Sorchafyre
Rating: PG
Pairing: Naoe Takaya/Kagetora, mention of Takaya x Yuzuru
Summary: Naoe watches a storm and thinks about relationships.
Acknowledgements and Disclaimers: I do not own Mirage of Blaze, it belongs to Kowabara Mizuna and probably Anime Works. I'm just sneaking onto their playground to smoke in the dark. No money was harmed, or changed hands, during the making of this fic. Special thanks to Thirteenth Nightengale for the beta.
There were few things that managed not to pale after hundreds of years of existence. Watching the gathering storm was one of them.
I stood just inside the doorway of the Narita clinic, my eyes locked onto the roiling clouds above me. The world was turning dark, and I knew that if I slid my eyes to the left a little, I could see them reflected in the glass of the window. Takaya and Yuzuru.
The atmosphere outside perfectly matched the one within. Outside, the air thickened with the edge of electric potential contained within the storm while inside...inside it was difficult to breathe through the sexual tension. Involuntarily, my eyes slid that fraction to watch the hazy images behind me.
I do not know if they had ever acted on their desires, these two who had a relationship long before I entered their world, claiming Takaya as the reincarnation of my Lord Kagetora. Their touches, glances and low murmuring words spoke to me of lust and desire as obvious as the deep echoing of thunder reverberating through the shadows of the storm.
Then Takaya laughed, and his laughter was the thrust of a knife into memory, slicing through the intervening years to lay my psyche bare. Pain spilled over, igniting something dark within my soul.
I was angry then, filled with rage as suddenly and violently as the flashes of lightning without. I choked on the irony that it was I who had protected Yuzuru, before the spirit of Lord Takeda possessed him completely. Telling Takaya that his only chance to save his friend was to regain his powers, I had shamelessly played on his desire in my attempt to awaken my Lord Kagetora. Had it worked, Yuzuru would have never seen the Takaya he knew again, and I would have my Lord back.
Instead I was left with blurred images on a window, and an edged passion filling the room at my back.
The anger drained out of me as suddenly as it had come, leaving me empty and waiting. Cold wind, smelling of latent rain, wafted in through the open door. Numbly I wished for a cigarette. Never underestimate the comfort of the familiar.
The storm began then. Without as much as a gentle sprinkling in preparation, water sheeted from the sky, abruptly engulfing the world outside my refuge. Staring into the violent cleansing I realized that I had changed, just a little. Being forced to protect the soul residing in Yuzuru's body once again drove home the price of our existence. It was shortly after that when I had begun noticing Takaya as a person and not just as a vessel.
There was still no price I would not pay to have Lord Kagetora. I would whore away every scrap of pride and honor I still maintained, or let the world be damned and every soul in it lost just to dominate and be possessed by him. Takaya, however, was intriguing in his own right. If his soul was lost, he deserved to be remembered, this man-child struggling to define his own life.
The rain ended as suddenly as it had begun, leaving me with an aching sadness. There was never any refuge for me in the storm's aftermath; it left only a softly scented world filled with pastels and absolution. It is beyond my imagination that I will ever know peace again.
I turned around into the light of the room. To where I would watch, silently, as the spirit I burned for moved in the timeless dance of seduction with someone else.