Disclaimer: Noir does not belong to me. Please do not sue.
Originally written for Yuletide's New Year's Resolutions Challenge 2005, but rewritten for this site. Comments and feedback, positive or negative, are very welcome.
CHAPTER THREE
Shades
Mireille is barely conscious of the road she traverses next.
It is familiar underfoot. The light is vanishing, and a vague sense of hunger gnaws in her.
Yet the apartment whose door yields to the turnings of her key is quiet.
Mireille looks up at last, searches the darkness with blinking eyes. The shadows are empty. "I'm home," she exhales. Loathe to raise her voice, she adds softly, "Kirika?" Then it occurs to her that Kirika may not be home. She usually stays till late at night cleaning up, and since Mireille did not go to work today, their lone shop assistant probably needed the help...
"I'm sorry," she murmurs. The sound of her own voice inches her closer to reality; Mireille's dulled senses inform her that she is not as alone as she thought. She swaps her handbag for a penknife off a side table, then scans the living area rapidly.
Finding no one, she advances into the nearest room. A study of sorts, they also use it for storage purposes. The previous tenant left glass cabinets in. Kirika liked their twinkling glints, their jagged reflections, so they simply built around the original furnishings.
The door lies open. Kirika stands silhouetted before a cabinet in front of the room's only window. Her hands are raised. There is something in her spread palms.
Mireille can barely see the white T-shirt she has on, the black shorts. Her imagination shades in other details automatically: abundant black hair, unruly despite Mireille's best hairdressing efforts; extra tufts over the ears she insists on keeping and Mireille secretly likes; eyes, lowered thoughtfully; the old pensive look she's been wearing more often lately. She passes inside, stopping a metre away from Kirika's position. The Japanese girl doesn't react to her presence. For an assassin, such neglect was certain death; for them, nothing, not anymore. Mireille holds back, maintains her silence despite the sudden constriction in her chest.
Kirika.
Mireille hid a gun in this cabinet back when she thought they would stop killing altogether. She told herself it might be useful someday.
Her vision dims. The penknife falls to the floor with a clatter.
Kirika's bleary outline stirs. Although she can't see them very well, the bright, yearning eyes she raises stab through Mireille's gut. Then Kirika lowers her gaze, and the pools disappear, bringing on a strange emptiness. Even Kirika's speech emerges strangely, weaving words through the curtain. "We did the wrong thing. It should have been this," she says.
Mireille moistens her lips just as a reluctant tear rolls down her cheek. "No," she whispers, husky-voiced. More loudly, she repeats herself. "No. Not yet."
Drawing in a breath of sorely needed air, she approaches Kirika. Her feet are heavy, her heels creaking as she moves through the oppressive silence. She stops a handspan away and puts up her hands, inching them closer to the cold glint of metal. Fingers hovering above the barrel, she sidles her gaze to meet her partner's. What she sees closes her throat so that she has to swallow to clear the lump.
For once, the assurance of speech fails her.
The simplest movement seems difficult. Abandoning her original idea of taking the gun, she barely manages to grip, circling thumb and forefinger about, two cold fingers welded to the even colder firearm. They feel frail and thin.
She lets go, then finally bows her head, breaks the unflinching eye contact. "Isn't it better like this?" she says slowly.
Outside the window, dimly present streetlamps dot the landscape, competing vainly with the simplicity of moonshine.
What are we going to do now? Kirika said, a lifetime ago.
We'll talk about it later, she replied. But there was the tea, and then they weren't in the mood for talk. Neither of them are very good at that kind of thing.
The weight of unspoken sorrow stirs a dull ache in the pit of her stomach. Kirika isn't saying anything.
"I really was thinking of not coming back." Without needing to look up, Mireille senses Kirika's eyes on her. "I wanted to know what brought us to this place. It seemed life would be simpler after we quit the business." She chuckles. "But I was wrong."
She knows Kirika will not speak. She waits anyway, before continuing. "Still, I came back. I thought of you, and I had to come home and see."
Kirika watches her steadily, unblinkingly. Her question comes quiet, slipping into the silence of the room: "Why?"
"Who knows. I was going to the teahouse, and then somehow I walked away."
"You weren't at home when I got back. I found this."
"How did you know?"
"I was looking at our things. I was trying to remember. I looked for a long time."
"Remember."
"Yes." Kirika looks down at the weapon. Momentarily, Mireille thinks of drawing away, but decides not to.
Kirika continues in a faraway voice. "We found out about our past. We were being controlled by the Soldats. We didn't want that, and that is why... that is why our hands are empty."
The loaded silence resumes as if it had never left. Mireille gropes for words in it, comes up with nothing.
"I saw that you were sad. However, I could not do anything to help."
"You knew. Is that why...?" She opens, closes her mouth. "I..."
"And then I saw that there had to be another way. But I still don't know if it is the right way."
The question is unnecessary, but it has to be asked. Regarding her from beneath lowered lashes, Mireille asks. "Are you thinking of ... going back?"
Kirika doesn't move, doesn't reply.
Going back. The resonance of her question floats in the air like a palpable presence. The implications: back where, back to what, bite into her calculations. Mireille pushes the excess meaning away, tries to forget what the gun really signifies, what Kirika meant when she said they should--
She curls her hand into a fist. "I will not take that risk. Not if ... it means our lives. The price is too great. No. Kirika, we weren't wrong."
She believes this. Perhaps Kirika can hear that in her tone; her profile shifts.
"I have been thinking, and I know it now. This is what I chose. If we had to do it all over again, I'd choose the same. Did you think I would really leave? You know, I like this place. I told you, I want to make the customers like the teahouse as much as we do." Mireille smiles faintly, bolstered by the confidence in her voice. A handspan away, Kirika lowers her hands and the object of her contemplation.
"Yes," Mireille nods. "It is true. We are not their Noir."
She looks away. "But..."
A pause.
"...You and I."
Unable to continue, she prays for her meaning to penetrate the distance somehow. "You and I..." What could she say?
Kirika steps nearer, padding just close enough for Mireille to see the glint of unshed tears. Without a word, she turns, deposits the gun on the corner table. It stands out vividly on the glazed surface.
"Mireiyu."
She sounds firmer than usual. Startled, Mireille scrutinizes Kirika's expression, but comes up with nothing of note.
"If you want to leave, I won't stop you. But because of me don't... don't do this because of me."
Mireille stiffens.
"Not because of me."
The memory of red almond eyes, narrowed into slits, glides across the forefront of her thoughts. Mireille slides her own eyes closed, hard enough that the light splinters behind the lids.
"For me," she finally says. "I'm doing this ... for me. I'm sorry. I was being selfish. It was never your fault." She reaches out without looking, captures the pale fingers whose location she will always know even without the benefit of sight.
Kirika makes a small, surprised noise.
Kirika! Please...
"No," she says again, for both their sakes. "We weren't wrong. This, I'm sure of."
Moisture trickling through tightly-shut eyes, Mireille slips her fingers along the insides of gun-calloused digits, clasping.
Their hands entangle.
In the next moment, Mireille relives the sensation of having the ground pulled out from under her feet. She falls silent. Perhaps her head droops. Movement flickers in her peripheral vision, colours shifting from one shade of grey to another. Something touches her hair. She lets herself fall, tumbling blithely with something very small in her grasp. Or is it more than that? The warmth is unexpected.
When she straightens, bewildered, Kirika is inches away, smiling a smile wiser and sadder than her years. There's a damp spot on Kirika's sweater where, she realizes, her head lay. She quirks her lips in response.
Kirika's mouth moves.
In the silence, Mireille begins to understand.
I'm glad you came back.
Me too, Kirika.
Slowly, she raises their entwined hands. She waits.
Kirika dips her head. Looking back up, she nods.
------
They first touched each other in the new apartment. It was two weeks after Kirika's convalescence. They had been lying side by side, not looking at each other until Kirika called her name, sounding inexplicably nervous. Mireille eyed her for a moment.
Her expression gentled. She reached out, curving her palm against the slope of Kirika's face. Kirika covered her knuckles with her own. They looked at each other.
Confronted with those deep pools of burgundy, Mireille could not but bend and brush her lips over Kirika's. She lingered. They paused again, inches apart, simply breathing the new air of closeness.
"I don't know what to do," the smaller girl admitted in a whisper.
"Well, we'll have to learn, won't we?" she joked. "We won't be the Noir maidens anymore."
There was a sharp intake of breath from Kirika; Mireille was caressing the slight peaks of her collarbone. She gave way to louder, more tortured sounds as Mireille went on to touch her as thoroughly as she knew how, and then she needed no further encouragement to teach the pleasure she had been taught.
For them, the process of exploration was slow, slower than either could wish. The layers they peeled away lay around them, shattered fragments of the past, and they, struggling, terribly young, would hold on together, joined by the same inexplicable longing.
---
fignae's note: This was brought to you by the year 2004-05, pre-exam impatience, and the acknowledgement of the emptiness of language. Since the semantics of the ending scene have been changed between NYR 2005 and now, even though what I meant to convey essentially remained the same, I'll add that I prefer this second version. That one was more sappy; this more practical and true to the themes of the story. Where they go is up to them, to our sweet girls of Noir-that-once-was.
