3. Grey
dull. storm. smokes.
Kai has seen Hillary tear up many times over the years since they were kids.
She cried in worry for her friends just a little when they took their beybattles too far. She's cried in happiness at her graduation, at Ray's wedding, when she held Lin for the first time, at the news of Max's engagement.
He's seen her angry tears while she stomped around her house over something her professor had said about her project. And he's almost amusingly brushed away her the water from her eyes when she's hunched over because of a stomach ache.
In the entire decade that he's known her, from the age of 13 to 23, he's seen her anger, her apprehension, her confusion, her happiness, her pain, her elation.
But he's never seen her grief.
He's never seen her fucking grieve anything and he has no idea what to do because her grief is angry and violent and out of control and a tsunami of misdirected emotions and its consuming her and she's drowning in it and he doesn't know what to do to save her.
"They're gone…both of them…My parents…they're gone."
He calls Tyson and Max and Ray and Kenny as he holds Hillary off the hospital floor where she's falling apart after being told her parents are dead. He pins her thrashing arms behind her back, arms that were scratching ruthlessly at her skin as if trying to peel off layers and layers of agony. He sits on the floor with her in his lap, her small body forcefully pressed against his chest as her loud sobs echo down the empty hallways.
This can't be happening. Her tears soak his shirt and he feels like he's drowning with her. This isn't real. Tell me I'm fucking dreaming. He buries his face in her head, holding her close to his chest, keeping her hands from clawing her own skin apart. They were supposed to have more fucking time than this -
By the time Max and Ray arrive, she's stopped thrashing in his arms. By the time Tyson and Kenny pull her out of his nearly-panicky grasp, her angry questions have run out and it's just her loud sobs now.
That night passes by in a blur of tears and worry and grief and dingy hospital floors and coughing onlookers and stale coffee.
Kai lets go of her arm to hold her hand when she cries onto Tyson. He's gripping her knees when Max kneels in front of her. He's still holding on to her at the first ray of dawn and the chirping of morning birds.
He holds on to her, as if anchoring her. As if she'll sink if he lets go – but he wonders if he's just anchoring his own self because he feels so fucking lost.
Her sobs have quieted down and her eyes are half-closed and faraway and so fucking dead and she's unmoving.
It's there at the crack of dawn in the dingy hospital waiting room and stale coffee and a mess of tears and over the shoulders of a barely-conscious Hillary that everyone splits up their tasks for the upcoming weeks.
Kenny and Ray decide to handle the funeral arrangements. Kai was to get a hold of her parents will and get their finances in order. Max and Tyson were going to get her home and make her some tea and love her and offer their shoulders and comfort her –
She complies and there's no fight, no let me take care of the funeral, I know what they would have wanted or I want to see them or I don't want to go home, you can't take me home my parents are fucking dead.
There's only resignation and compliance and defeat and it terrifies and confuses him to no end.
It's there at the crack of dawn in the dingy hospital waiting room and stale coffee that he sees the last of her tears for months to come.
He hasn't heard her voice for weeks because she doesn't talk anymore.
She is quiet at the funeral in her pitch black kimono and her face free of makeup. She says nothing when her empty once-bright-crimson-now-dull-maroon eyes glance down at her parents' open coffins for the last time. She wordlessly carries the ashes after the cremation ceremony on her lap in the car with him. She places the grey urn on the kitchen windowsill next to the only plant in her house; a nearly-black ficus.
When he comes home from work the first day after the funeral, he asks her how she is. She puts a cup of coffee in front of him and smiles and it is not as bright or colorful or genuine as the ones he's used to – he doesn't expect it to be – but it still startles him.
He has never seen this side of her.
He feels as if he doesn't know her. He feels as if instead of the bright, bubbly, fiery brunette that he's known for a decade now, standing in front of him is a stranger that he has never met.
The weeks after the funeral are quiet.
Tyson, Mariah and Mariam take turns spending the night at Hillary's because she is too restless to sleep through some nights and others she spends blankly staring at the TV. Ray always brings over breakfast after dropping Lin off to school and Kenny and Tyson and Max take turns visiting her during the day with a set of DVD's they claim she's always loved watching.
There's always food in her kitchen, on her table, by her bed, in her fridge; food she never eats unless Tyson force feeds it to her. Food half of which she retches out within thirty minutes of consuming it. He knows because her cheeks have sunk in and her eyes are darker and there's a graceless sway in her stride and the dinner she helps him make almost always finds its way in a piece of tupper-wear back in the fridge by the end of the night.
He's seen the fifty four shades of blues on the canvases littered across her house; paintings of peacocks, sapphires and lapis and turquoise scattered on an empty beach in front of a cerulean ocean and underneath a bright sunny sky. He's seen every hue of red in her project plans; amber red fireplace, cinnamon apple kitchens, raspberry red couches, coral red bathroom tiles, scarlet red curtains, burgundy wall paints.
He's seen her reds and her blues but never the never the darker edges of her spectrum.
Suddenly, the empty canvases across her room are the same shades as hard stones and a rainy sky andrusted pairs of old jeans and wine-stained bed sheets and blood. Suddenly, the brush strokes are angry and scratchy and jagged and dark. He feels as if he's in the center of a town annihilated in its entirety by an earthquake; abandoned and broken and so fucking silent.
And he knows she's grieving and it selfish of him but he is so fucking unfamiliar with this side of her that he feels utterly and absolutely at loss without their routine and her spark and her fire and her love and her childish mindless musings filling up his day.
He knows how to handle everything else about her.
He can handle her rage and her stomping and her neurotic obsessions and her annoying ramblings. He can handle her stealing glances from him and brushing up against him clumsily and her being all up in his space.
But this quiet, self-destructive, violent blizzard that's raging inside of her and destroying everything that he's ever seen of her – he isn't sure what to do about it.
So he grows quiet too.
He tries to learn how to hold her without actually holding her. And he tries to look after her without her asking for it.
He cooks what is easily digestible. He reduces her serving size so that when she looks down it feels like she can eat. He silently offers her food from his own plate with his own hands when she's playing with hers too much and eating too little, because she never says no to him.
He sorts out her parents' finances with her family's lawyer; their will, her inheritance, their assets, their properties in East and West Bakuten. He pays off the most pressing of her parents debts and Hillary's utilities from the rent he collects from her parent's East Bakuten property. He rounds their house in West Bakuten every few days for suspicious activities or burglary or theft.
The days he senses she's just a tiny bit more restless, he wordlessly abandons his own bed at his own house to sleep on the spare futon in her bedroom. And when he does, he reaches out to hold her hand or touch her fingers, or brush her arms or rub his thumb on her shoulders.
He is searching for an anchor or reassurance or life but he isn't sure if it's for her or for himself.
He wants to assuage her grief but he knows of grief enough to know that he cannot stop the storm – he can hold her in his arms and wrap a blanket around her and shield her while it passes.
He would give anything to stop the storm. But there is nothing he can do.
So he watches helplessly from the sidelines as she lets it swallow her whole without any protests.
It's in the weeks of silence and an utter lack of the routine that he has had with Hillary over the years that Kai realizes the truth of his relationship with her.
The truth is that all the spaces she's shared with her since he's known her have been a tug of war that he's been winning without knowing it. That she's adjusted and moved so that he fits into her life in exchange of one-sided conversations with a barely-present company over the occasional breakfast and dinner.
The truth is that everything that happens in between them is tilted so that it gravitates towards him. That she's the burning, scorching heat in every space he shares with her. That her warmth tugs at him from all sides, sinks into him, and it reaches every single corner of the space and he takes it and relishes it and basks in it.
But his own warmth is nowhere in sight.
Kai realizes how much her silence has affected his own; she's the only person he talks to every single day. And now, she doesn't talk or smile or obsess or get livid or does anything that is the Hillary Tatibana that he knows.
He realizes just how fucking skewed their dynamic has been now that the lights are out and her warmth has stretched thin and she's coiled up on her own self and everything has gone dark, and cold and lifeless – and he doesn't know how he could ever forgive himself for never noticing it until a tragedy struck
His heart constricts when he looks at the stranger in front of him and it's so fucking selfish of him to even be thinking this way but he misses her.
He hadn't realized how much her bright laugh lights up his day until it's gone.
He hadn't realized how her fingers in his hair and on his shoulders and down his back and on his knees had been painting him with a new hue every minute until all the colors in his world are draining because her touch isn't there anymore.
He hadn't realized that she'd so heavily intermingled her filled-with-color-and-textures world with his own and he'd been utterly drenched in it until she'd run out of colors.
He hadn't realized that she'd been drowning both of them in color until they're draining from her world and then effectively his own.
He misses her. So much. So, so much that it has become a dull ache that he wakes up to every single day, an ache that he carries it on his shoulder to work and then back, an ache that becomes more painful when he sees her at the end of the night because she's right there and she's not.
He knows this ache will only leave when she heals but he isn't sure if there's any healing from this at all.
A/N: I legit cannot believe there's a gap of 7 fucking years between chapters 1 and 2 of this story. no words. Thank you so much for the reviews? I legit wasn't expecting ANY response so that's overwhelming and i'm glad that people are reading what I'm writing at least - i was writing for fun but its encouraging when someone is reading.
She's Not Dating Johnny: Just to clarify, she's just fucking Johnny. best way to get over someone is to get under someone else. Kai also knows this. I don't know why i went with Johnny McGregor. Perhaps because of the Hot n Cold story. He's kind of stuck in my head as the person in between Kai and Hils. And I'm familiar enough with his character to write him into that dynamic now.
Colors: The overall theme is colors but, also I'm going with the flow. So chapter 2 and 3 weren't about specific colors exactly. and I had to change the chapter title from 'Loving her Was Red' to 'Infrared' aka the very ends of the spectrum. i'm toying with colors overall i guess and not specifically any one theme per chapter.
Song Lyrics: I've been watching you walk, I've been learning the way that you talk, The back of your head is at the front of my mind, Soon I'll crack it open just to see what's inside your mind. Marry me, I will wait until you're fast asleep. Dreaming things I have the right to see. Lately you are dreaming you're in love with me. The only option left, is look and see inside your mind. I can show you the photographs of you getting on with life. I've had dreams where there's blood on you. All of those dreams where you're my wife Inside your mind.
