Post by Colin Arascain on Jun 23, 2014 4:28:35 GMT -5
The two of them met again, in the morning. Shy glances turned into stumbling words that trickled before they flowed and the more they told each other the less they wanted to hold back, the distance between them closing. Her skin felt like fire that never burned; the heat of a flame, that intensity, captured in her touch. She made his heart beat faster. She made time slow down. The slightest movement of her lips, and he felt like he was falling.
Falling towards her.
Because she was a star with her own gravity and he could barely stand it, when he was close. Maintaining that distance, that orbit, was perhaps the hardest thing he'd ever do.
He didn't have to, though, for long.
They took a walk. She wanted to show him something, somewhere. It was bright. There were birds and flowers, out in the sunlight, but he barely saw them. It was, he didn't know, he wasn't listening and couldn't, just couldn't take the sight of her framed against that sunlight. His lips cut hers off, and she didn't mind. Even there, out there in the sunlight, they loved eachother.
They didn't care if anyone could see it.
His hands roamed over her body as she melted into his. Clothes were discarded, that distance between them fading even more. Soon, it didn't exist.
And they were laughing at eachother, because after all of this they were still just human. Their bodies were the same as they'd always been, as everyone's had always been, and that seemed so absurd, like they should be better now. Beyond this. Less awkward. Beings of pure thought, perhaps, evolved beyond such base desires. It wasn't her body he cared for, after all.
But he liked it.
And when they moved against eachother he liked it even more.
And it felt like bliss, it felt like flying--no, he'd done that, what flying should feel like, and there weren't words before long, sensation ate all thought, happiness ate all fear, there was just...
...she was trembling, she was shaking and she gripped him, eyes open in panic, coughing, trying to speak.
Words weren't coming, there was no room for them, they did not fit in the limited space. From the blood pouring from her lips it was clear that not a cubic centimetre remained. It was like a splash of thick, warm water. Matching holes in her chest. A dagger glinting from behind in that same reflected light.
That laugh.
He woke, gasping in darkness, utterly alone. Faint pinpricks of starlight, a narrow corridor of darkest grey and his sense of touch was all that kept him from shouting out, from going mad. Tearing at blankets that made no sense, that had not existed moments ago, his hand finally met the skin of his chest and found it dry. He felt nothing.
There was nothing dry or flaking, nothing running or red. His skin, the way it had always been. Faint markings that might be scars he hadn't noticed, but he didn't look at himself much while he was in the prison and memory had dulled the pain. No blood, though. No blood.
There was a moment of dislocation. It didn't feel like he was anywhere. Everything was strange and if he reached out, he didn't know what his fingers would touch, if he was trapped in another dream, if the darkness went on forever. He reached out and felt empty space.
He was in a bed, he understood that. There was a window, but it was in the wrong place. His room hadn't--the bed was too large, too comfortable for that anyway, and he knew it was ash as more memories came flooding back, his brain reconstructing itself through the passage of time. But he'd woken up like this in that bed so many times.
It was only a natural assumption.
He couldn't see. There was nothing to see by, the line of light only bright enough to make him sure he wasn't blind. He didn't know if there were any lights, but his eyes... this had happened before, hadn't it? Trapped in darkness.
He'd learned something there, the last time. He could use it now.
He spoke. The same words anyone would say in a strange place; quietly, spoken as much to reassure himself that noise existed, that his voice functioned and that he was safe and real, as for anyone to hear them. They were quiet and trembling. He surprised himself with how young he sounded, disrupting that silence.
"H-hello...? Is anyone..."
...any...
...anyone...
He closed his eyes because he wasn't using them. He didn't need them to see.
...nnnnyyyyoooo...
He could see... could hear... just knew when the echoes formed, noise turning in on itself, half dying, half bouncing back. It arrived like a half-finished picture, an impression of vision in greyscale all at once. He knew, roughly, the distance of the walls even though the model didn't shift when he moved and faded quickly, like he'd opened his eyes for a split second in sunlight before closing them again. There was something to his right that could have been a light and haltingly, by touch, he flicked it on.
Would he always need to sleep? Would this kind of thing--blinking in the brightness, closing his eyes only to feel the light invade, burning red beneath closed eyelids, his pupils constricting and reluctantly adjusting to the light--happen for the rest of his life? He rubbed his eyes and they felt bruised, like he'd slept for too long or too little, like he was a groggy passenger in someone else's skin. He knew where the shower was--didn't know where he was, but knew that--and stumbled, one hand on the wall, in that direction.
The spray of it, that pounding heat, could make sense of this.
It touched him--just one, that first drop--and he knew. He remembered.
She was alive.
He was--it rushed over him, scattering droplets, pouring down his body--with her, she was sleeping just a few rooms away and walls were the only thing keeping them apart. It wasn't life, it wasn't time. He could walk over there and see here. There would be more than a handful of minutes of that feeling, of being understood.
He didn't have to be alone, and there was nothing in the world that felt better than that.
Not even a fading dream.
He looked down, and it was like he was seeing himself for the first time. It was surprising that he still looked like himself, that all his imperfections hadn't been washed away along with everything else; a reassuring disappointment, in a way. Not everything had changed.
He found a bar of soap and started running it across his skin, finding places that hurt for reasons he didn't remember, undiscovered aches and pains. The place where...
...he'd been shot, a bullet had passed through him and all that remained was a spreading pale discoloration of new skin, how was that possible?
Other marks, ridges and tender spots he only faintly remembered as places of pain he'd tried to tune out in that mad rush to get away. He tried to remember it all, to overlay the new on the familiar because the rest of him was there; leaner, half-starved, more pathetic-looking than he'd ever been.
He'd always wanted to look strong when he was younger, but he'd never managed it, and now... his skin was tight across his waist. He could feel his bones.
The water turned cold. His eyes had adjusted to the light and he was almost awake, almost, really, even if his eyes slipped closed not once but twice on his way back to his room once he was clean and dry. He looked back at the bed--more comfortable than anything he'd scrounged for himself in the last year--and knew temptation, was almost tempted, but... just now, he didn't want to close his eyes again.
There were things in the darkness of his mind he'd rather not see.
He padded down the hallway, looking for... something, he didn't know what, though the kitchen was a start. Orange juice, coffee, something to make it easier. He'd sit there and listen to the silence until the sun rose, if that's what it took. In the day, after he saw her one more time, then maybe...
What was that?
He thought he heard something for a second, but it was a... like, a... he didn't know how to describe the sound.
Maybe it wasn't real.
In the back of one her cupboards, hiding like it was guilty of something, he found a box of cereal. Not his favorite, but one he liked, and the thought that they--of course it was hers--shared some of his tastes just warmed his hard. He poured it into a bowl and marvelled at the sound it made, individual tiny impacts rising to a chorus. He could see how it all fit together now, and it was just...
Delicious.
Holy crap, it was delicious.
How long? Months? Weeks? Real food? As much food as he wanted? He was halfway done the bowl before he remembered it was someone else's food he was eating, that he was there as a guest and hadn't paid for this.
Halfway through the box before he cared, and only then because he started to regret it. Too much of the same kind of food, too quickly. How many times would he make that mistake?
When he bent down--rubbing his stomach, because it was aching already--to put what left of the box back where he found it, looking around for the sink to dump the bowl, he caught a bowl of fresh fruit out of the corner of his eye.
How many? One more.
A few minutes later he looked up--his mouth stained blue with berry juice, grinning sheepishly--at a thoroughly unimpressed man, suddenly standing in the doorway.
"Do you know what fucking time it is?"
Colin opened his mouth.
"No, of course you don't." His voice was that perfect mixture of quiet and harsh. "Because if you did you would be sleeping. Because that's what people do at this hour. They sleep."
"I was just--"
"There's a clock on the well. You can read it, can't you, now that I've pointed it out?"
"I got--"
"Do you see how the little hand and the big hand are near eachother, close to the top? When the sun is set, it means go the fuck to sleep and don't make any noise because if I hear you again I'll come in here and throttle you. Simple enough?"
Colin's eyes narrowed.
"Not all of us are freeloaders, you know. We're not all sleeping in beds that don't belong to us because she took pity on us. I actually live here. I have responsibilities that require me to be awake and alert and you're just one of her strays so if you'll fucking kindly--"
"How are you doing that?"
Colin was standing in front of him now, a step or two away, and smiling. He'd done it without making a sound.
"How--"
He stamped his feet on the floor. He clapped his hands. Nothing. Even Seiichiro's next words were stolen away. Colin waited until he stopped shouting soundlessly before he allowed noise to exist again, caught the tail end of a spluttering something that trailed off as he started to speak.
"...Sorry," he said before anything else, when he saw the look in the man's eyes. "I shouldn't have done that, it was... cruel? wrong? I should know better than to... take over like that. I won't do it again."
There was something else in his eyes, now, and they studied him with a spark of what might have been fear.
"I couldn't sleep. I lived alone for a while... too long, I guess... and I just didn't think about it." A smile he hoped would be shared. "I'll be quieter now."
It was like it could have gone any number of ways, most of them bad, before Seiichiro let out a long breath and let the reluctant traces of a grin sketch itself across his face.
"I suppose I'm not falling asleep again quickly anyway. I hope you were considerate enough to leave some of the milk for other people to use?" Colin grinned, embarrassment coloring his cheeks, and motioned towards the fridge.
They ate in relative silence, neither knowing what to say or if anything even should be said. They didn't have to know eachother, hadn't even been properly introduced outside of--
"You've got a good swing, you know?"
Seiichiro only grumbled in response.
--a previous altercation best left undiscussed, and were at best strange intrusions into the others' lives. It was right for them to be wary of eachother, because they were from different worlds. Hell, they only spoke the same language because Colin swam rather than sank when tossed into a new city.
"How..."
But it only took one of them to break the ice.
"What you did before, how did you..." There was an uncertainty on the other man's face that seemed completely foreign. Colin had only seen arrogance, rage, resentment from him, but this was something different and altogether more vulnerable. "How did you learn to do what you did with my voice?"
Colin wanted to answer. There should have been some really clever thing to say that would have let him meet Seiichiro's way of reaching out, but there just wasn't. Things just happened, and if there was any logic to them...
"Don't know." He already saw the other man's eyes turning cold. "It just happened, like... everything else that happened." He looked down at his hands. They still looked human. "I can't tell you why I'm like this any more than I can tell you why Karakura was destroyed." Human and not good enough then. They looked the same. "That's where I met her. We were both in the middle of it. I... thought she died, until..." The other man moved his hand fractionally closer to Colin, as if he considered--however briefly--reaching out to comfort him.
"We all thought that, for a while."
"She saved my life." Colin looked up at Seiichiro and met his eyes. "She makes me a better person in so many ways." He'd said too much, and looked away again, wondering how awkward it would be if he just slinked off back to the room he was staying in and tried to sleep again, after opening up to this stranger, but something stopped him.
"Hold on, do you think--" His eyes widened. "Shit, did I--" His awareness expanded, covering most of the building and its nearby rooms, searching for something very specific. He could hear himself, his blood pumping, heart pounding with sudden worry, Seiichiro's breath, but there should be something else.
Further, then? Was he remembering wrong, did she slip into a different door than the one in his memory? "I can't--" No, it just wasn't there. The third set of sounds, of her, the sounds she couldn't help but make just because she was alive, weren't there.
They weren't anywhere.
"She's gone."
"What?"
"She's... she's gone, I can't find her anywhere. I thought, maybe I woke her up? so I... I have good hearing, if I try, right? It comes with the shutty-uppy thing, and if she were anywhere here, I'd hear her breathe... Why are you looking at me like that?"
Seiichiro looked like a man in serious distress.
"Is something about this funny to you? She could be anywhere, and--!"
Seiichiro burst into laughter and didn't care about Colin's murderous expression, taking his sweet damn time slowing down and milking the other man's discomfort for as long as he could before finally speaking.
"She's out in the tree, you absolute moron."
"Wh--"
"Don't ask me why. It's where she sleeps. It doesn't make any more sense to me than it does to you--"
Colin was already halfway across the room.
"Wait!"
He paused in the doorway.
"...Fine, never mind, go, tell her to make herself useful if she's awake, but if you do anything to hurt her--"
Colin left the words hanging in the air.
"If I ever hurt her, I'll kill myself."
The door slammed behind him.
The darkness outside had a different texture. It was humid, thick and alive in the way that the city never was. Things rustled near his feet, crickets chirping, and he suddenly didn't want to walk very far in this strange place without the benefit of sight. He didn't know why was out here, anyway.
He just... wanted to see her, once.
He could sleep then, after he saw with his own eyes that she was alright.
He looked for the tree, he craned up, stumbled forward, tripping over his feet and the dew-covered grass but never quite falling. He hadn't brought a light and that was stupid in retrospect because how would he... He could hear her, at least. Maybe he'd drift off as he listened to her heartbeat.
The tree couldn't be far. He'd come far enough, hadn't he? Walked enough steps in the darkness that he knew it couldn't be far away and he reached out knowing that he'd have to feel something in the next set of stumbling steps unless he was hopelessly lost...
felt a rough surface...
not tree bark, not rough enough so what was... Had he gotten turned around after all? Found brick, another part of the house, or--
no
what was
why was there light, that light wasn't coming from
it moved beneath his fingertips and he shuddered and stepped back, a sound of pure wrongness and fear slipping out from between his lips
it opened its eyes
it was alive
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