"Finished."
The staff stepped back and Rima eyed herself in the mirror. Today, after a series of individual shots, she and Shiki were participating in the "spring" calendar shoot, adorned in the outfits that Rima had designed earlier in the semester. The calendar was one of those 18 month affairs, starting in July, but as they were taking the photos in early April, the agency still referred to it as the spring calendar. Admiring the blend of trendy and edgy, the blond model nodded in satisfaction. Shiki's suggestions on the sketch had been in good taste, and she was glad she had taken his advice. The final product radiated a sense of alternative, chic fashion. Exactly as she had hoped.
Beside her, Shiki was patiently suffering through a new coat of make-up. Unfortunately, his individual photos had taken longer than expected, so while Rima was able to take advantage of the break, her partner was not. She was pleased with her handiwork, though. His coordinating outfit suited him very well, especially since the colors complemented his hair and contrasted his eyes so well. She might have to try her hand at another matching ensemble in the near future, since this particular effort had turned out so well.
Glancing at her colleague, Rima saw this eyes had unfocused and dimmed, his body still as a doll while the staff worked over it. Lately, she really hated it, how he shut himself away sometimes in the dusty spaces of his mind. She wondered, as she had started to do more and more lately, what he was thinking. Where were his thoughts? Far...they were undoubtedly somewhere impossibly far away. They were an echo of disjointed sentiments fleeing before a fog that pitched everything into ruin. It seemed that although Shiki's body was warm and alive, his heart was infinitely cold. Not dead, perhaps, but lodged under a thick layer of ice. Because of his parents, he had transformed himself into a superficial robot.
And she wondered, as she did sometimes, if the heat of her blood might rouse his sleeping heart... She was uneasy, as well, because she wasn't sure what would happen if he ever looked at her, just once, with everything that was inside him. With the full force of consciousness, with a cloudless, vivid storm of a thousand shades of woken blue... A shiver gasped across her skin. She feared becoming a captive of those eyes.
"I'll be back," Rima told her partner abruptly. She needed to clear her head. "I'm going to walk around for a few minutes."
"Okay," he acknowledged, barely able to move his lips as the staff carefully applied the make-up for the next set of photos.
"Twenty minutes," one of the staff reminded her, and she nodded before shutting the door behind her, grateful to be alone in the hall.
Setting her mind to autopilot, Rima let her feet direct her path. Although she had worked here for a few years now, there was always something new popping up in one of the rooms. Sometimes, it was a new model, sometimes an announcement for a job opportunity plastered on the bulletin boards, sometimes a guest. Whatever was new or wherever her feet led her, though, she didn't mind. As long as it was away from her colleague.
Shiki... Exasperation pursed her lips, hovered in her lungs, the premonition of a sigh. She couldn't shake her thoughts of him, so perhaps it was better to let them run their course. Rima slowed her steps, recollecting the afternoon they had been sent to dispatch the Level E. She recalled the thirsty red of his eyes, the quiver of his lips, the twist of his neck as he mentioned his mother. The blond winced. Hana Shiki...had she bitten her own son? Did he feel disgusted? Trapped? Used? All of the above? But although Shiki had revealed something of himself to Rima, so much was left unsaid and hidden behind the concrete barriers of his eyes.
The mahogany-haired vampire was like a sorrowful word, an arrangement of melancholy syllables that perhaps could be rearranged into another, sweeter sound. Yet that word was one he never uttered, kept detained and silent behind the bars of his lips. Sometimes, she thought she could hear the vague semblance of admissions and revelations exhaled along with his breath, spoken between the gaps of words, but she could not begin to assemble them. A wild thought crept across the expanses of her mind, one she adamantly denied, that perhaps with a single kiss she could tangibly feel the shapes of those unsaid truths against her lips and on her tongue. What would they taste like there? Perhaps they would taste bitter, or perhaps like sweet, melancholic rain.
She shook her head. It was a passing fancy, nothing more. What would kissing Shiki accomplish? Even if she managed to seize his torments from his lips, he might still retreat far away from her. He had opened up to her a very, very little, and she couldn't expect to pry him open further. Besides...in small part, she already understood... Hana Shiki wasn't the same person that had illuminated the screens. Whatever she was now, it was vile and tragic and sunk its teeth directly into her partner's bruised heart. Rima shuddered. She couldn't imagine her own parents abusing her in such a way. Proud as they were, they would undoubtedly seek their own ends before falling to such depths.
Lost in thought, Rima's footsteps led her to the information office, where a large sign was posted for a film audition. She sighed, reading over the flier. It was going to be shot here in town and the surrounding area... Her father's warning words were ringing in her ears, but all the same she wavered uncertainly, unable to shake the desire to try. She knew the timing was terrible and the danger was high and yet...maybe she could finally make her dream a reality...
"Not yet." The two quiet words cracked through the silence like thunder.
Startled, Rima turned, shocked by the decisive tone of his voice. When she hesitated, the mahogany-haired model stepped forward, taking her hand firmly in his and leading her down the corridor, back towards the small room where they waited between photo shoots. She had been so lost in her own thoughts that she hadn't noticed his approach.
"Not yet," he repeated. "After we finish with school, I'll take you to properly audition."
A thousand thoughts clamored for attention in the aftermath of his statement. Shiki planned to help her? To accompany her himself? Moreover...to stay with her for all that time..? A flush spread outward across her heart. "You will?" was all she managed to ask.
"Yes. It's something you have to do, right?"
"Yeah..." she murmured, still stunned by his sudden declaration.
"There's such an intense aura emanating from you when you're thinking about acting... It would be a shame to waste it."
The blush was spreading to her cheeks now. "I won't live by hiding away," she declared. "I'll absolutely enter the world I admire."
He stopped then, turning his head toward her, and she watched in amazement as one corner of his mouth lifted slowly hitched upward into a crooked smile. "It's that passion that you shouldn't lose."
Against her gaze, his own gaze had transformed into mesmerizing blue. She was speechless, captivated by the abrupt emergence of vivacious color.
"I'll go with you," he said. "I think...it would be lonely again, without you." And then he was leading her back down the hall, the spell of his eyes and that lopsided smile gone.
"You're saying...you want to act?"
"With you," he affirmed.
Rima sucked in a small breath, flustered and oddly warmed by his unexpected decision. The urge to steal all of his secrets from his lips was flaring up again. These narrow glimpses of himself he offered were teasing her, inflaming her naturally curious tendencies. Each glimpse tempted her to discover more. This Senri Shiki, the one walking ahead of her now, was entirely different from her first impression.
"From the beginning, I've been thinking how annoying you are, because you never show yourself," she admitted with blunt honesty. "You're always hiding. But...I understand a little better now... If you say you want to go into acting with me, I won't refuse..." She trailed off, wondering if perhaps she had said too much.
His hand tightened around hers, the only response he offered. Staring down at their enjoined palms, Rima thought that going hand-in-hand like this wasn't so bad. Actually, the warmth of his skin and the faint thrum of his pulse against hers was...nice... For some reason, she wasn't letting go of that hand.
In front of the door to their waiting room, he stopped, and after a heavy pause, confessed, "Although...perhaps I'll be following in my father's footsteps that way..."
Rima shook her head decisively. "I'll stop you. I won't permit it, if you start becoming like Rido Kuran." She didn't think he would. Shiki was nothing like a pureblood, nothing like a Kuran. And anyway...hadn't Rido Kuran been driven mad by unrequited love? Her coworker's circumstances weren't at all the same.
The grip on her hand shifted, fingers entwining through hers now. Her blood pressure was quickening, but she forced it back and pinned his elusive eyes with hers, stating, "I promise."
Unbelievably, impossibly, the corners of his eyes subtly crinkled and his lips curved up into a second small, precious smile. A smile just for her. In that moment she was seized by the thought that Shiki was like the night sky, dark and silent and riddled with complexity...and even the smallest smile shone for her like the brightest star.
Without warning, her pulse accelerated, and she felt a strange, nervous pressure squeeze hot and uncomfortable around her heart. For the first time in her life, Rima Toya was entirely and inexplicably flustered.
AN: Someone asked me why I write Rima as a blond. The answer is: I'm not entirely sure. I think because I read the manga first, and it's black and white, I always envisioned her to have more of a golden hair color. I didn't want to write her as a redhead and calling her orange-haired all the time would bother me, so I used my default gold hair that I've always thought of her as. Even though I know she has orange hair I still see her in my head as a blond. I'm really sorry that it disrupts the story for you... I don't want to go back and change the color now, because I'm afraid I'll miss some words and she'll end up blond in one paragraph and orange in another. Can you live with blond Rima? =( If it helps I'm not imagining her as blond-blond but more like a rich gold color...