A/N : I bet you thought I was dead :)
Sorry about the exceptionally long delay. I'm not in the mode to go on a tangent about my reasons. I'll try to be better about updates in the future.
Chapter Two - Words
His addiction to the words started simply enough. The catalyst was when he saw the beauty. It filled the world to the brim and flooded over the sides. It was the scent of lavender, and it was meadowlark song. White air and whispering trees. All he saw filled his heart, and then the words came. The words to describe his feeling. Words that could take him higher than morphine. He doesn't understand how he lived without them before.
At first, his work was just three line prose, innocent and unassuming like the first buds of spring emerging from a barren tree. Inspiration was fragile, and it brushed against him softly in times of silence. Just a gentle lapping like soft waves on sand.
He can't pinpoint the exact time it began to grow and blossom. His mind was ever turning out of itself, bursting into a mad whirl of color scent and sound. It was almost frightening to feel such life pulsing inside him. Poems became ballades, became stories, became novels and still, his mind was never quiet. Never satisfied that he'd thoroughly expressed the blooming brilliance lacing through his every nerve.
To feel so inspired was pain most exquisite. Every moment the intensity of the world was almost too much for him to hold himself together. The light was in his eyes, and eternity rested on his palms. There was no time to hold his breath before the storm. The words were pounding away in his skull. A restless, churning surf against the rocks.
But all of this exhilaration was trapped in his mind, and so he wrote. Pencils. Pens. Keyboards. As long as he could write until his fingers bleed with emotion.
Living outside his mind, he seemed a very reserved person. The world was only ordinary, and on the outside he too was an ordinary man. He was friendly and well liked by his friends, but he would always be the reticent one. The one who thought too much about good and evil. Life and death. Nobody expected him to turn out this way when they were twelve.
After all, his brother was the artist. Seeing as this role was already filled, he was expected to occupy a different niche. Perhaps, they said, he could play basketball, or become an English teacher. But he had come to know the words quite well, and they moved him in ways he never knew.
Out of his body. Into the wind.
Hikari was always the one who brought him back. She, with her straight faced assessments of the world. She who lived for others, contact, ground, truth. He would never have been there at all if she hadn't held his feet to the ground. She was the one who pinned him down to the cork board, and he didn't mind at all.
Their companionship started out as one of necessity. The two youngest children caught up in a battle they never signed up for. They kept each other sane with make-believe and stories. They whispered soft words of comfort to each other on scary nights with no mothers around to chase away the demons. It made peril a game and the darkness more bearable. Even when the world was falling apart, Hikari would still play tag with him.
They remained closer than friends normally are after their experiences, but their relationship didn't become physical in any way until after she married Yamato. He thinks it began to change after her twins were born. Something about his perception of her changed. She was always an eight year old girl to him, until then. But when he saw Hikari the wife and Hikari the mother, he also began to see Hikari the beautiful woman. How had he missed it before?
But until that night six months ago, it was only a mildly interesting observance. She was married to his brother after all. He thought at the time that he would do anything for his brother.
And then there had been that night. From the instant their mouths touched, there was only fire. First kiss became first time in a matter of minutes. No romantic words or finesse. Only an irrepressible need to be closer. As close as one can possibly be to another person.
It had become a wild new turn in their friendship. He didn't think about Yamato until much later.
It was only after he woke up in the morning and she was gone.
At first he was filled with dread. Where? Why? How? And then the truth stung him in the back of the neck. She had returned to her family. Her husband. Her children. His beloved little niece and nephew. His stomach turned. Everything that had been so wonderful the night before was making him feel ill.
He vowed that it wouldn't happen again. He was more than willing to sweep their indiscretion under the rug. Nobody would get hurt that way. He never wanted to hurt anyone. But he did, and he has been for six months now. He cannot give her up.
She is in his mind now. The place where his passion comes to play with his heartstrings. She is still on his fingertips, and he can smell her on his sheets. He didn't mean for it to happen, but she has become like the words. An obsession.
Hikari. Hikari. Hikari.
She is everything his turbulent mind had been waiting for. His poetry about life has become poetry about love. All the wild untamed emotions he feels, she will take them all. He is starting to enjoying the rich, earthly fragrances of a life outside his mind. The taste of her breath. The sound of her sighs. He doesn't need words to enjoy this physical world. He is a slave to his new fixation. His Hikari. His Light.
He didn't expect her to appear at his door that morning. She always appeared to him at night, like one of his many conscious dreams wrapped in silky words. Her tangible presence now solidified reality. Ugly reality dancing shamelessly on the tip of her blotchy nose. He couldn't understand how people could live their whole lives caught up in reality. Reality wasn't beautiful. He never gave it much status in his mind.
"You've been crying," He held open the door, and she stepped inside with rigid purpose.
She chose not to reply to that statement. He knew it. She knew it. It didn't matter. She had come to tell him what needed to be said. That was all they ever said to each other anymore. Only what needed to be said. Sometimes he wondered if that was enough.
"Yamato and I are getting a divorce," She stared past him and spoke to the painting on his wall. The one of the angel with hair the color of mahogany wood. An angel that spoke of a past so forgotten that it seemed to be someone else's memory in his head.
"I see," He steepled his hands behind his back and let the words fall short on his lips. What else could he say to that?
He could apologize for ruining her life, but he doesn't feel completely responsible, and he isn't sorry for loving her. The only one who deserved an apology was Yamato, but he wasn't there, and Takeru doubted an apology would fix the damage. Especially if he didn't feel sorry. Guilty, yes. But never sorry.
"Where do we go from here?" She was looking at him strangely. Pleadingly. He was supposed to say something that would make her life livable. Something that would take away all the guilt and the pain. He was always supposed to save her, and he never failed her. Why should now be any different?
But it was. He had nothing to offer her this time.
"Hikari," He placed his hands on her tiny shoulders and looked at her, but he couldn't think of anything but her name. So he said it again. Whispered it. Drew small circles with his thumbs on her pale arms.
Her bottom lip quivered. The first sign that she was starting to fall apart. She'd come to Takeru because he could make every injury better. Him and his words. He always knew what to say. But not now. She was far beyond crying at this point. And if she did cry she didn't know who it would be for. Yamato? Her children? Mostly herself.
"Takeru," He was startled when he felt fingernails on his chest, "I need . . ." The sentence was hollow. What did she need? Too many unnameable things.
"I need something with alcohol."
That would work for now. She'd deal with the rest later.
He sighed. He knew better than to argue with her, "I have that."
That was the way things were to work from then on. Strong liquor. Unspoken words. Fast. Hard. Hazy. He helps her forget the details. Takeru won't believe in reality. She's catching his religion. It's easier than she thought.
The world is prettier through the bottom of a shot glass.
Sorry that this chapter is so short, but I want the next part to have its own chapter.