Gravitation Fan Fiction ❯ Langer Schlaf: The Long Sleep ❯ Zippers ( Chapter 2 )

Langer Schlaf 3/?

By Nix Winter

Disclaimer… I don't own Gravitation.

Spoilers… um.. not really any so far.. though it is set after the series and OAV's… and who knows.. it might be AU to the manga.. cuz I didn't read those.

Warnings… there will be violence and probably a lemon. If you're reading this on a site that doesn't permit such things, the uncensored version can be found at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/YukiandShuichi/

Tokala.rulestheweb.com Shonen-ai books are good!

Uesugi Eiri left the plane, the airport with a determination that turned his cab driver into a quiet person, but didn't make the miles any shorter. Miles. Not kilometers like a civilized country, there were miles and miles of empty nothing, just the occasional building after they left the city. Mika sat between Tohma and him, constantly trying to get his hand, as if he were her big brother again and somehow meant to comfort, provide some kind of security. It took all his effort not to smack her searching fingers away. He did not need comfort for himself. Shuichi was alive.

The horizon became the outline of the rubble of a building so suddenly. The horizon might have continued out to each side, followed the line of the over pass farther up the highway, but for Eiri, it was simply a huge pile of broken concrete and glass, like a pile of sushi dropped from the table, no more real than black ruined California rolls and paper walls. His palm pressed to the glass of the window, glass hot from the California air, unreal to him. Shuichi was inside that pile.

He didn't feel Mika's grip on his other hand until her nails began to cut into his palm. Golden eyes glared at her and she pulled back even as Tohma's arm went around her protectively. They pulled into the parking lot and the driver barely got the taxi stopped before Yuki had the door open, the sole of his designer shoe sticking lightly to the new asphalt. Cold inside, furiously icy, he couldn't be Eiri as he walked towards the ruin of glass and modern architecture. Mika called to him, a distant voice, fragile like his hold himself, as unreal as their Tokyo apartment was to the grasshoppers making little clicking sounds in the grass surrounding the parking lot.

His dream, of Shuichi crying out for him, of Shuichi's terror, he didn't know if that was real now or not, if it had just been the passive of Shuichi's spirit over him on his way to the, the whatever awaited the dead. Tohma met the police officer who had been approaching Eiri, and Yuki walked right by them both, around the perimeter. His eyes felt dry, dry enough to be unusual, odd. He counted the body bags, black thick plastic, plastic coated canvas, maybe. Yuki didn't know what Americans used for such things, but there were forty-three of them. Hiro and K were at the hospital. Other's must have survived. It was simple odds.

He closed his eyes and Shuichi appeared, right before him, grinning, pink hair all wild, that same bruise on his knee, dress shirt covering him. "Eiri," Shuichi purred, "Why are you upset? It's just a shirt, you know? I'll buy you another one!"

Yuki let his eyes stay closed, watched the smiling Shuichi sitting on some wall. No. It was a counter, no, a bar, a mini bar. "Where are you," he mouthed. "Where are you, shitty brat?"

"I don't know, Eiri. Am I lost?"

"Sir?" A voice intruded and Yuki gave up a solid death glare.

The person, a young woman with dark hair and EMS on her cap, glared right back. "Describe the person you're searching for."

"Male, early twenties, pink hair." He stopped when she flinched at the pink hair. "You have that person," he asked coldly.

"We have one that you can make a possible id on." It wasn't standard. Yuki Eiri was the only family member, of any kind allowed on site. That was mostly Tohma's doing.

It was Tohma's voice that interrupted next. "I will look," he said in stilted English. "I can make an identification as well as you can, Eiri."

Yuki reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out his cigarettes, just holding the box in his hand. "I will do it." Threat, just statement, sometimes it was hard to tell with Yuki.

Tohma didn't follow as Yuki walked into the garden of black mounds. Mika didn't either. Yuki hated being in America. It did not matter which coast he was on, always there was death.

A voice, fragile and lost sounding whispered in his ear, so clear that he could hear it, feel the coco scent breath move his hair. "I'm not there, Eiri! I'm not there! Don't look for me there!"

He put the cigarette box back inside his jacket and squatted down by the black garment bag the woman had stopped by. She held out a pair of gloves to him, but he didn't look up, didn't want to see her face, and he didn't want the gloves. It was a big zipper, black plastic. He'd thought they ought to be brass, at least brass zippers for the dead. It wasn't fair to fly plastic class, he thought, fingering the pull. The mount under the plastic wasn't in the right order either, not like Shuichi under a blanket, one arm over the back of the couch, knee drawn up, all sprawled out. No, it was laid out straight, one long line. Shuichi couldn't sleep like that. Yuki knew that for a fact, the singer never held still for more than a few minutes. So that meant that this couldn't be Shuichi, didn't it.

"I'm scared," Shuichi's voice said in his ear.

Yuki pulled the zipper quick and hard, opening the bag as if it were nothing more than a suit bag, just one more task to do before he did an interview or pitched a book. Pink popped up out of the opening, neon and brassy, and nylon. Only then did he realize he'd been holding his breath. "It's a wig." He pulled it up, just a little, fingering the cheap nylon Barbie doll hair wig. "It's not Shindo Shuichi."

He paused there though, fingers trembling against the zipper pull. The face between the zipper opening, it was slashed, almost as if an animal had gnawed it, a large animal, ripped right through to the teeth. He pulled the zipper down just a bit more, morbid curiosity perhaps, perhaps the warrior in him looking at the tracks of his enemy. The throat too was ripped away, exposing red muscle and shiny silver connective tissue. Bile burned up his throat and he turned away, holding it in until he'd cleared the black mount forest, at least.

"Eiri, I knew it wasn't going to be me," Shuichi whispered against his ear. "I'm not dead."

Yuki Eiri splattered blood of his own over the pavement, up from a stomach that might never fully heal.