Samurai Champloo
Genre: Angst
Type: Complete
Pairing: MugenxFuu
Title: Victus (living)
Summary: Because something between them, always, is changing. MugenxFuu
(Heavy, obscure, weird and nonsensical; big angst before the onslaught of smut/humour fics -grin-)
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His lungs are burning, legs aching, but he runs and he runs and he runs and he runs, because she's been taken again. It's funny and it's annoying and it makes him wonder, not for the first time, why there is always a sudden stitch in his heart at the sight of her absence.
When he finally gets there, it's the same scene. Men with smirking faces and arrogant threats, who want power, who want money, who want something (anything) to call their own. The fights never last long—clashing swords, metal on metal, then silence. And then—
It's the saving, the rescue, their reaction to one another, that never stays the same.
Because something between them, always, is changing.
So when he sees her—hunched over, bound, shaking—the first thing he does is curse, loudly, because she is so goddamn stupid and vulnerable and young, it hurts.
But he laughs low, darkly, hiding it with a smirk that tugs on his lips.
"What the hell makes you so fucking special?" Caustic, bitter, serious, he walks toward her with weighed footsteps and scowls at the rope marks on her wrists.
Kneeling down, face to face, he stares forward and she stares back. No tears, strong features, and he feels like smiling a little. Then the binds are cut and the moment is broken and he walks away with rolling eyes and a mind full of unanswered questions.
And she lags, standing quietly and dusting off worn fabric. Her eyes are downard, trained on the grass stain that will never come out (another memory), but she sees him walking away, up the path, toward the darkness of the upcoming forest.
She waits until he's almost there before saying it.
"It's you." Half-yelled, and he stops where he's standing.
A deafening moment, where he breathes slowly and concentrates of the rhythm of his heartbeat, before he turns, looks, sees her staring back intently and smirking small.
"It's you." There is so much space between them but her words travel the distance and cut right through him.
"How the—" but her voice cuts in, heated and accusing, and suddenly she is walking fast and talking fast and he does not to move.
"You show up—" She's closer now.
"—every. single. time—" Closer still.
"That's why I'm so fucking special." And then, when they're finally standing at arm's length:
"Because you can save me, but you can't stay with me."
Narrowed eyes and clenched teeth, a jaw twitching from repressed emotion. He stares at her, hard, trying to figure out how to handle this sudden situation.
In truth, he just wants to say everything. He wants her to know that she suffocates him with her careless laugh and vivid expressions. Pure and vibrant and young and untouched. That, like a vice, she twists him tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter until he can't breath and it terrifies him because he doesn't know what this feeling is, what it means, if it's normal, if it will go away.
So he grabs her gently amidst the darkness, while the crickets chirp and the moon shines bright, and contemplates words like "love" and "living" while drowning in her eyes and the sound of his own heartbeat.
And quietly she waits, staring up and staring back, feeling the silence and pressure of his fingertips, while wondering why it's so easy to love the man she swore she hated.
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