Title: When Everything Feels Like the Movies
Author: Dorku no Renkinjutsushi
Rating: T for thought-provoking
Warnings: Angst, thought provoking.
Disclaimer:Not mine.
Summary:
'I don't want the world to see me.'

'Everything was made to be broken.'

'When everything feels like the movies, you just bleed to know you're alive. Understand?'

'Why do you do that?'

'Do what?'

'Hurt yourself.'

'I don't hurt myself.'

'Yeah, you do.' He rolls over underneath the sheet, turning to face the man. Tenderly, he lifts one pale, strong arm. As the moonlight washes over it, deep pockmarks are revealed, craters in otherwise soft skin. In the pale blue glow of the moon, they seem like explosions on the surface of an alien planet, not scars in the soft skin of a lover.

Dark eyes look up and down the arm as it is held above his head. Finally, he sighs and rolls onto his side, looking into his lover's dark eyes.

'Doesn't hurt,' he murmurs silkily.

The boy blinks. Jabbing at a still-red pockmark, he grimaces, expression tugging and twisting his tribal tattoos. 'You cannot tell me that that didn't hurt.'

The man, pale and skinny, shrugs. 'Didn't,' he murmurs. 'If letting the kikaichuu out did, I'd have gone crazy years ago.'

But he's not so sure he didn't go crazy years ago. It certainly seems that way. After all, he would have to be truly fucked in the head to let the little things feeding on his soul eat more of him than necessary, right? And isn't it supposed to be the first sign you're going crazy, hearing things? And seeing them?

A hysterical half-laugh nearly escapes him, and he clamps down on it in the last second.

'Why do you do that?' the boy demanded, tan hand dropping the man's arm. He hunched over him in the small bed, skin glowing under the pale light of the midnight sun.

Again, the man shrugged. 'Why don't you ever talk to anyone anymore?'

'This isn't about me, it's about you,' the boy answers. 'I'm not the one going crazy, here.' He blinked seriously, straddling the man. 'Am I?'

'I…I don't think you are,' the man whispers, suddenly afraid.

Who is the one going crazy here? He's the one hiding under the sheets in the middle of May, a bottle of sake on the bedside table. He's the one voluntarily feeding himself to kikaichuu. Surely he's the one who is mental here. Surely he's the one with the cracked head.

But…

Is he really? After all, the boy won't show himself anymore. He hides in the shadows, teases the man endlessly, but refuses to speak to anyone else. His dog, his once precious friend, now cowers and hides whenever he's near. Maybe it's the boy who's going crazy, not him.

'Why don't you talk to anyone?' the boy asks suddenly. 'You just lurk there, hiding in your jacket. Trying to hide in your creepy-crawlies.'

'I don't want the world to see me,' the man answered simply.

'Why not?'

'I don't think they'd understand. I mean, there was you and then…there's me. And there was then, and then there's now. Even you have to admit something's wrong.'

'Everything's made to be broken,' he says, and a philosophical shrug ends his thought. He smiles brightly, suddenly. 'And I only talk to you 'cause I just want to be sure you know who I am.'

The man smiles, his smile somewhat fake, somewhat broken. He reaches up to caress a soft cheek, memories of the gentle feel of skin like butterfly wings rising in his mind, like a tide ready to drown him and sweep him away.

'Like I'd be able to forget you,' he murmurs, voice thick.

And it is thick because he is afraid to admit that he did forget. Somewhere, somehow, somewhen, he forgot. He really wishes that he hadn't. Remembering may hurt, but he's pretty sure that forgetting hurt more.

But he's not sure. He cannot remember forgetting.

The boy sighs and cuddles against him. The man feels a gentle almost-weight on his breastbone, and he almost smiles. His fingers ache to drift through that thick, unruly hair, but he fists them under the sheets. The boy sighs again, twisting like a puppy sunning himself. The man gives in to the urge. He tries hard not to tremble at the feeling of the boy's hair, so soft it's almost like petting clouds, so not-there it's almost there.

'Why?' the boy whispers. 'Why do you do that?'

Tears start to form in the man's eyes as he watches his lover fade. The boy smiles as his thin body starts to dissolve into nothingness, lips still caressing words as his voice drifts back to the wind that brought it. His hands reach out, a butterfly's kiss on the man's tear-streaked face, before he is fully gone.

The man sits up in the bed, trembling slightly as he rocks back and forth. The kikaichuu swarm out from beneath his skin, and a new mark begins to form on his skin. A few seconds later, with a spray of blood and flesh, a new hole is created. The small bugs stream out from it, covering it in their saliva so that it will scar faster, form a better exit.

'Why?'

A voice drifts into the room, and the man looks around. Surely a wind could not have brought the voice on its own!

There! The boy stands in the doorway, smiling gently.

'Sometimes,' the man begins to say. Then he shakes his head, changes his mind. 'No.' He raises his face to the boy.

'When everything feels like the movies,' he explains, kikaichuu starting their exodus from his skin, 'you bleed just to know you're alive.'

Standing by the doorway, a woman puts a hand to her mouth, crying softly. Her dark hair falls around her pale face, hiding her white eyes from the world. As a man with equally white eyes places a hand on her back, another woman pulls her into an impulsive hug. Tears stream from the woman's red eyes.

Near them, a very-pregnant pink-haired woman leans against the shoulder of a man wearing green, preparing a syringe. If tears leak from her eyes, no one says anything. The man squeezes her hand gently, though, and she squeezes back. They both watch the blonde man talking to the blind one, the simple one, telling him something—they don't know what and they don't really care.

The blind one looks up as the door opens. A blonde woman who looks to be about twenty stands framed in the pale light. She enters the room swiftly. The blind man looks towards where he hears her, a simple smile on his face. The woman smiles painfully at his blonde protector and hands the blind one a lolly, telling him not to eat it too fast. He nods and puts it in his mouth, the motion revealing, for a moment, the earth-shattering inky black that stole the last of his tenuous grip on sanity.

The blonde woman takes the syringe from the pink-haired one. She leans over and whispers something comforting in her ear before moving towards the door. There, she squeezes the shoulders of both sobbing women, reminding them that it's ok, he's happier now.

She enters the room slowly, watching the look of hope on the man inside's face fall, only to shatter on the ground. Tenderly, she gets out the first aid kit and binds his wounds. Task done, she gently places the needle against his carotid artery. Squeezing tears out of her eyes, she thrusts it in, depresses the plunger, and removes it, slapping a bit of gauze on with a sticking plaster. She throws away the syringe and leaves the room, doing her best not to cry.

'Kiba?' the man calls into the darkness, wishing someone would answer.

But no one ever will. He's sure of this, now. Every once in a while, that woman—her name is Tsunade, he remembers—comes in and gives him things that make him feel funny. And when he feels better, suddenly the world has changed again, like it's back from its midnight-sun glow.

Much as he calls for Kiba, he'll never answer. He can't answer, he knows. He's been dead for nine years. Died on a mission to Hidden Grass.

Still, he keeps his eyes wide, watching the darkness.

'Kiba?' he calls again.

In the shadows, the boy smiles.