(Yohji)
With the shop finished and the takings delivered to Omi who will bank them, I go to check on Aya, just to make sure he is there. "Leave me alone, Kudoh," he growls at me from his place just by the door, where he sits crosslegged on the tatami and reads. He shoots me a glare that means this is definitely not a night for sex because he wants to bruise me, cut me, hurt me. He can be creative; I've seen him at work, and I'm not keen at all to have his patterns all over my hide. So I decide it is better to let him steam off for a while. He lets me go without lifting his head, but as soon as I turn my back, I can feel daggers jabbing at me. I'm glad to leave.
So why do I love him?
Sometimes, I find this difficult to answer, but then I remember:
The night I caught him in my wire, like a broken butterfly. The evening I first saw him wash the garish dye out of his hair and take out the purple contacts.1 Raging Aya turning into Ran the cultured, gentle youth, well-bred, educated, and mild-mannered. The only thing to link the two is his damn pride.
Pride. It brought us close and it pulled us apart, for I know I will never be able to match him – his upbrining, his past. The golden future that may still lay in waiting for him if he only cared to look. It left me reeling to realise that I could never hope for more than I have now, but I desperately wanted all of him, even if it hurt, even if it would get too much. I could see that, and still wanted.
For then, stripped of his mission gear and his colours, with his shiny dark hair neat and fragrant, his eyes dusky blue, his bony body wrapped into a plain grey yukata, he was innocent again. He was Ran, the young boy who tried to hang on to the fading memories of former happiness, and to a dying girl on a hospital bed. Ran who would sit for hours staring at the silk-bound haiku 2 collection in his lap, and I could see the tears pressing against his eyes.
All those tears seeped back into his soul, for he was unable to cry.
He is full of unshed tears, and he has frozen them into hate because they have nowhere to go. He stores them, hoards them, they are his ammunition, his fuel, the stuff that keeps him going. Just like Schuldig who is full of spite and hatred, desperate for warmth, and broken beyond redemption. I don't want Aya to become like this.
In all the time I've known him, he only wept once: when he had decided to sleep with me. It was an unhappy, defeated kind of crying, tearless, with sparse, harsh sobs. It chilled me for I knew he resented what he had done. He had surrendered to love, he blamed me for it and hated himself. He cried because his pride was bruised, because he had allowed a bloke to do this to him, and perhaps because he realised that making love is different from having a fuck...
Maybe he was grieving for what would never be.
Sometimes I wish he would cry like a woman, just once, but he refuses to let himself go.
Perhaps that's why he cannot be Asuka for me.
xxx
Next chapter: Open Books
Notes:
1 See 'Winding Down – Transformation'
2 Haiku – a form of Japanese poetry