Perfect Enemy

...Fifth Part: Krad...

Dark and I met every night, just to be together under the stars. We had found our first obsession: kissing. And the Niwa and Hikari never suspected a thing – or at least if they did, they didn't say anything.

And then one night, Dark didn't show up. I didn't know where Niwa lived, so I didn't go looking for him, but all the while I waited, there was a knot in my chest that wouldn't go away, and the feeling only caused more anxiety.

Finally concluding that he wouldn't be coming at all, I slumped against a wall, crossing my arms poutily and propping them on top of my knees, which I pulled in closer to my chest. I felt cold and mildly depressed. I figured that Niwa was probably out late and Dark wasn't able to sneak away to see me, in that case, but there was a more unreasonable piece of me that thought, for some reason, he just didn't want to anymore.

I glanced over to the studio part of the room, staring for a while at a disarray of several papers across the top of a table. I wondered suddenly if any of them were blank.

I wanted to try my hand at drawing.

Getting up and wandering over there, I shuffled carefully through the thin white sheets until I found on completely void of Hikari's many planning sketches. Next, I located a pencil and sat back down on the floor where I had been before, using a book as a surface to put the paper on so it would be easier to draw.

I knew instantly what I wanted to sketch.

It wouldn't be too hard, I thought, to draw something you knew so completely. Every dimension, proportion, every soft curve and hard feature. My hands had their own kind of memory, creating in a flat image what they knew to be in real life.

I drew Dark.

. . .

The next night, Dark appeared again, making my heart leap when I heard the familiar tap on the window.

"Dark!" I exclaimed, hastily flinging the window open. "I almost thought you weren't going to come see me anymore. What happened to you?"

Grinning in that crooked way that was known as a smirk, he pulled me outside, not giving me the chance to get my wings out, and carrying me up to the nearest rooftop to give me his excitement-filled explanation.

"I was out thieving last night," he told me. "It was awesome! Niwa does this sort of thing all the time, apparently."

"Really?" I wondered. "Don't you think... you shouldn't be stealing things, though? Isn't that what got us stuck the way we are?"

Dark shrugged. "But it's so fun!" he insisted. "There's just this... adrenaline rush... that you get from it; the feeling that you could get caught at any given second, and then the thrill of getting away with it right under their noses. And besides..." he added, grabbing me around the waist, pulling me against him, and looking into my eyes with that heart-stopping, deep violet gaze. "...I like you the way you are."

"You... you know that's not what I mean," I spluttered, feeling my face heat up considerably. "I meant how we're stuck in the Niwa's and Hikari's bodies."

Dark touched his forehead against mine and the tips of our noses. "Don't worry about them," he told me flippantly. "We can work around that issue."

I kissed his cheek briefly before pulling away from him and looking out at the sleeping town around us. "Sometimes I wonder about them," I worried, crossing my arms over my chest. "Hikari's been awfully quiet lately. He hasn't ever asked me why I've suddenly stopped begging to see you –"

"Maybe he's just glad he – supposedly – doesn't have to worry about it anymore," Dark suggested. "Niwa's been the same way."

I shook my head, thinking. "I don't think that's it, though. Hikari isn't that type of person..."

"Or you thought he wasn't," Dark said, trying to end the subject. He came up behind me and wrapped his arm around my shoulder, resting his hand on my chest. "You could be wrong."

Leaning back against Dark, I closed my eyes. "Perhaps..."