The Hollow Man

Disclaim :

Characters and the Trigun series aren't mine.
The repeated lines - this is the way the world ends...ect - are T.S. Eliot's.
So is the title(MAN was MEN).
So there.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

He actually couldn't believe it. That he could love.

That he could love a monster.

Its claws reached out to him in dreams from the soft beds of spidery long fingers, flawless and sharp and cold, like the iron grating in his chest -- not his. Like her blood red lips and heady perfume. Like the foreign things inside her that she couldn't escape.
The bruises on her body when they carried her away.

He sang and he sang and he sang her blue Sylvia song.

He dreamed of a man with hyacinth-colored hair and bright cat's eyes that shone like marbles in his skull. The desert wreath that was the temple of his body, lit, like with a million candles, burning low into the heart of night. His small smile voicing every ghost.

But when the hyacinth-haired man escaped him, and he learned -- no, he remembered how to hate again -- he dreamed of porcelain gods and monsters with beautiful faces. Men that were not men, plunging themselves into the depths of fear, and reaping harvest with a scythe of Death. Feeding the rows with blood that would sprout beautiful red flowers.
Petals falling all around her blackest moonlight hair: the woman with the brown eyes that he didn't know.

The monster had ended her, too.

Sometimes it felt like she wanted to say something to him. About Him. About His brother.

Then he woke up.

Legato had left a book of poems for him, once. Some lost art that the Master had somehow managed to salvage. His volumes of lost knowledge, kept in secret; things that He longed to share with His brother, when they could be together, when they could be together.

This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.

He folded down the page and left to find a seedy nightclub southside of December.

She was there, dancing in the shadows behind him, with long legs bare and red dress shifting against her thighs. Like the silvery shivery dust motes falling from the curtains in a beam of light, she was there: dancing to the Sylvia song that he played, in shadow. But it was never only them.
Monster voices pulled at his strings from behind him; so intimately fucking with his head.

Legato warned him with bright flashing eyes like yellow beacons to be careful, careful, careful where he stepped. There was dark water up ahead.
Quicksand.
Hyacinth-haired man, so jealous, waiting in the dark water.

He played his saxophone song with closed eyes until he couldn't see the warnings anymore.

He thought he was so far beyond fear.

That night he fell asleep inside a woman that he didn't know. His saxophone case was propped up against the hotel bed, and the shutters were closed, the occasional flurry of air stirring the grime along their slanted faces. He could feel the night-heat crawling in, drunk and heavy like he was, and slowly pulling in with it the night sky -- so blue -- and damp breaths fluttering against his face smelling like too much alcohol, his cheek pressed flat into a woman's downy breasts, the night heat crawling all along his back.

Don't dream tonight, he thought. I thought I drank enough to make you go away.

A slimy cool voice drags itself against his mind like sharp nails on a blackboard.

I am always watching you …
Hornfreak.

And he shuddered somewhere deep inside his skin.

This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.