Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction ❯ Glowing ❯ White ( Chapter 11 )
[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]
By: hermit risin 
Preparations for the final moment.
Anime/Manga: Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Angst / Hentai / Drama | Type: Yaoi | Uploaded On: 09.12.2008 | Pages: 4 | Words: 5.5K | Visits: 212 | Status: Work In Progress
Preparations for the final moment.
Anime/Manga: Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Angst / Hentai / Drama | Type: Yaoi | Uploaded On: 09.12.2008 | Pages: 4 | Words: 5.5K | Visits: 212 | Status: Work In Progress
I can’t see anything to indicate what is rising up to us, nothing is written in the faces of passersby, in the pale sky, or even the hazy profile of the school that hints at any culmination, any end. No façade displays the furious preparation that is surely going on.
For once, this will be a structured confrontation. No ambush, no surprise in adversary or strength, probably not even in outcome.
And at this last- the thought of us dying, sinking into that black we resisted against so long, comes no less horrifying, no less disgusting than before. Shouldn’t there be at least something to indicate it?
It seems as if the earth itself should be screaming.
Gripped with a violent resistance, a strange protest against that- not that we should die, but fall for nothing, I stand from the bed, darting my gaze around the emptied mission room for some answer, some speculation of meaning. It is a reaction that pretends our victory would be a victory at all, final in some way.
And if we don’t- what does the world have left for us, us who have been so intended to destroy it and its natural product. Men like Takatori, Tsujii, Shimojima abound, a series of faces and ambitions to replace the rank and file before them.
Why every revolution has failed- there has been no shift in inherent inclination, in the drive that fueled the ideals or propaganda, no matter how sublimated. No matter who we save now, there will be another score of this tomorrow.
Guilt bites back at me from the words- this world could not offer forgiveness, nor could I accept it from such a source.
Puzzled, reamed with doubt, I settle back on the bed.
What does the world have left for us?
The thought breaks off. I stiffen as I hear footsteps outside the door, angry voices rushing up to charge the air. Transfixed, without anything else to do, I listen, tilting my head towards their source.
“I am doing what is best for the-”
“Damn it, I heard your speech! But fuck, Omi, what about you?”
The voice that comes through the door wavers around its coolness.
“That is why I am here.”
The wall creaks as someone, Ken undoubtedly, slams their fist into it.
“Not the deaths? Not the chance to finally finish what we started, to finally rid the world of Esset? Does that matter a damn bit, Omi?”
Ridding the world of Esset would only create a vacuum to be quickly filled again. Maybe by Kritiker. It’s a pointless statement. When were any of us fighting for that to begin with?
Ken continues on, his naïve argument strange to me- that so much could possibly be rectified. We have so much power in that thought, we redeemers pulling the world from filth and darkness. And still we’ve changed nothing, routed nothing.
My shoulders ache at the thought.
“Ken-”
Omi’s voice is helpless, weighted with the same knowledge that Ken is lacking, that lack which constitutes his faith.
“As long as you remember, Omi, it will be impossible to drive all of that from you.”
Ken’s voice is quiet, trembling with a deeper anger.
“As long as I remember-”
Omi’s voice cracks, echoing.
“As long as I remember, I will be able to mourn.”A pause. It drills heavy between the three of us. Omi’s voice breaches it with a whisper, laughter edging around the words.“Why kill anything if that death is not going to stand for something?”
His breath pours out ragged. I imagine his face, drawn and cold, beseeching something impossible of Ken, the same look thrown at me when I’d go to see him. The same look I painted on every silhouette of his, sending us out to kill.
“Why forget- it doesn’t undo the deed, only makes it impossible to repeat?”
And necessary to. Redemption- assuming any is possible- would be violated by forgetting.
“Being able to recall your actions without suffering them again.”
For a moment, Omi’s and Sena’s voices twist together in my mind, distorting my recollections, continually returned phrases massed in my consciousness- could I even think without all these voices?-, smoothing out again when Omi’s voice tightens into something recognizable as a child, so similar to Sena’s that I can’t help but differentiate.
“I’m not asking you to understand.”
Ken begins to sputter, a far cry from the cool sarcastic tone he’s cultivated in the time since Omi’s defection. A reminder of a more awkward, more innocent person.
“That doesn’t- why can’t you just- I don’t understa-”
His voice escalates with each broken argument. Omi’s interruption is nearly inaudible by comparison.
“Ken.”
Silence. I wait for either of them to speak, becoming increasingly aware of my intrusion.
It doesn’t matter.
“Have we ever really helped anyone?”Ken’s voice is quiet, hoarse with the uncharacteristic question.
“I don’t know.”
I wonder suddenly why its such an important question. No matter anything we said, any credos we put ourselves behind at Persia’s and then Mamoru’s conjecture, any honor we ascribed to the innocent, to the weak. Fighting for them in the end places us as a final target. Clearing the strong for the innocence and goodness of the weak, when we are among the strong. Clearing the guilty to protect those innocent, when we are ourselves models of that guilt we say we erase.
And even if we have helped anyone, unlike Ken I can believe that we have, I know that we have, is it really worth the sacrifice of everything that we are?
The innocent, people like Aya-chan and Sakura and Asami, are gifted and made innocent only in the belief that their actions have any significance. Even Tsujii is innocent in that regard, no matter her crimes.
We are set apart by our doubt, a debt that we no longer owe, a guilt that wears everything away until we can no longer even hack at ourselves.
White is the color of bleach, of bandaging, of every new gap we tear around ourselves.
I realize suddenly that Ken and Omi are gone, their voices trailing away down the hall.
Almost mindlessly, the action overtaking me without reason, I get up again and take Asami’s book off the floor, flipping the cover open to a random page.
It is lined with a list of preparations to be completed for the cultural festival. Perversely, I want to rip it out, finish it even.
A celebration that will never happen.
Shaking, I flip through the pages, glancing here and there at the random notations.
“Watanabe likes history”
“Don’t forget to order new copies of CAP!”
“Meet Fujimiya-sensei at five”
I close the book carefully at the last one. After it, all of the pages are blank, without her cramped handwriting or odd acronyms.
What insight was I expecting from something meant to hold only impersonal observations? It’s no diary.
Even so my hand rests on it expectantly, as if demanding that the book bring up some realization.
“As long as I remember- I will be able to mourn”
My lips twist up into a strange expression, neither a grimace nor a smile, as I turn back towards the window, striking in their reflection superimposed over the sky, the buildings, the masses of people.
And still, there is nothing to indicate what is coming.
________________________________________
The wine, spilled, looks black on the floor, a stain rolled out and soaking into a pile of shirts I’ve tossed in front of the dresser.
Black.
Involuntarily, I laugh at the sight. It’s too perfect, my laughter, the darkness of the hue, the basic emptiness of any connection gleaned in the random image. No matter how fitting.
Still laughing, I raise my fingers to my lips, licking off the sticky liquid and the blood from where the glass cut me as I dropped the bottle. After hours and hours and hours, it does not seem possible that the sun will go down and we will leave and act upon the agreement we made earlier. It seems impossible that we will return to Koua, finally, to destroy it, just as it seems impossible that I could have made any decision at all.
Still, it hardens inside me, rearing up cold- an answer to that damning impulse.
Just as impossible that I can return to anything.
Is it a betrayal to free yourself?
He would say it’s not really freedom. I smirk at him, at no one, as I break open another bottle.
Cheers, Aya. I’m not going anywhere.
The thought makes me sick, I drop the bottle to the floor, unable to swallow it, kneeling in the lukewarm fluid as it spreads, picking up glass. My hands clamp down over the broken pieces as my stomach empties itself, shuddering through me in a burning release between my lips, the color of the vomit the same black as that on the floor, foaming up over my hands with glass.
And all black together. How trite, this visual condemnation of an answer I don’t have.
Squinting, I try to call her face, any face, up from the mess on the floor, shape features in glass. Its too spread out.
Show yourself. I glance out the window, taking in the brilliant colors of the sunset, the streaks of red and gold that somehow glance over the room, glazing over the window without entering, brilliance that locks me in.
Memories well up behind my eyes, images half forming from the glare at the window. I stare back down at the floor, crush my fists around pieces of slippery sharp glass to break their noise and their hold.
As long as I remember- I’ll never be able to see but for their features.
“You have to, otherwise, you’ll only continue to suffer.”
My head jerks from side to side, eyes boring into every corner of the room, looking for that face again.
A trail of acid leaks from my mouth as I exhale, her name carrying itself along my breath quietly.
“Asuka.”
The colors outside the window fade, fiery hues collapsing into a merciless black that lends its reflection to the floor. Wine seeps up cold through my clothes. My hands seal into a collection of cuts, the trails of congealed blood spelling no answer as I finally rise and pull my gloves on, rip off the soaked clothes in favor of leather ones that send a dull thrill of anticipation through me, insoluble, an unanswered excitement.
She does not come.
And will I forget this waiting?_________________________________
The clothes slide over my skin, slipping into place. Not one wrinkle in the fabric is unexpected, unanticipated.
In the mirror, the white coat is luminescent, surrounded by the blackness running out from the window- a night unbroken by neon, by stars or celestial tidings, just a black smear of sky that screams of absence.
As if any of their faces could strip the night away altogether.
My face is smooth, taut, the mouth pulled into a tight grimace, the eyes hollowed out by shadow. Even through the dark, the violet manages to latch upon some sourceless strain of light and gleam with all the ire and misery that I have come to associate with my face, inseparable from my features.
My hair sinks back along the sleeve of the coat, a strain of the night detached. Asami’s planner gleams blue from the bed, a memorial of sorts. There is nothing I can do to avoid this, my stomach churning with a strange calm. Serene, numb, I examine every curve of the coat as it falls, all the imagined lines in my face. I take in the numerous crosses on my body, the red searing out from the white.
Crosses were at first only symbols of execution, the shape of the body condemning itself.
I do not paint them fresh with an easy scent of salvation.
If Christ died on the cross, it did not save him.
Silently, I pull my sword out from the sheath at my belt. Another cross, forming with the hilt over my hand.
Glancing at it, I cannot remember where it came from, or that I was ever without it.
This sword has only mattered because it has come to carry everything I have become, without any lingering traces of what I’ve been forced to leave behind.
I raise it up, curiously, a morbid silence echoing in the room, bleeding back from the window. The blade slashes up, arm stretching back of its own accord; a cut through the night itself as it slices down.
The braid slips off my back, revealing my neck to the night. A strange cool air brushes along the newly revealed skin with a sense of inevitability.
My bangs slip heavy over my eyes, spreading out over my forehead as I shove the sword back into its sheath. From the mirror, I look pieced together, younger, but inexplicably wiser. What did I know then in the heat of my rage that revenge stripped me off?
My gaze shifts over to the dull metal stud in my earlobe, a strange subtraction from this older image. I wonder again if she has ever worn them.
Dully, I look up, taking in how uneasy the white seems on me, how strange. It shows too much.
It meant something.
My stomach weighs heavy in me as I turn away from the mirror to glare out the window at the night.
The thought of revenge only works once doesn’t it? My eyes narrow, blaming the night for this loss- this hollowness that it reflects in its depths able to hold so much without relief, without meaning.
My hair coils on the ground by my feet, bleeding up at me all the memories I can not lose with such a severance.
Headlights curve along the narrow road that leads to the school, two pinpricks of light breaking through the night.
I cannot help but imagine her silhouette, crumpled as the pile of hair on the floor.
What freedom can one expect to attain? Freedom from thought? From action?
An oppressive sense of ending descends around me, of finality.
Is this to be the last whiteness? The last sacrifice into that bleary light?
Silently, I lift Asami’s planner off the bed, slipping it into my coat.
Another cross, regardless of its shape.
As we have learned to break ourselves more deeply, we have gained the capability to break ourselves anywhere. For anything.
Unable to look at the room any longer, the idea of the mirror glaring behind me, I leave, slamming the door after me, a jarring noise echoing through the hall.
____________________________________
The apartment is silent, the only light bleeding out from under doorways, lighted rooms subject to whatever preparations my teammates feel they need.
His door is dark, rising up in front of me.
And what does he mean to any of this?
“As long as I remember- I will be able to mourn”Hissing through my teeth I curse Omi for saying those words. Words that my mind, with its proclivity for suffering, swallows whole.
I don’t want to remember him- I don’t want to have to remember him.
The idea settles itself over my skin, uneasy, baring itself up in one possibility.
I knock on the door, rapping loudly enough to stir him from whatever state of drunkenness he has gotten himself into.
The door creaks open, he stands in the doorway. Glaring, he pushes it back, trying to slam it closed. Instinctively I jam my arm through the door, pressing my shoulder against it until it snaps open and I’m inside.
He lets go of the door, not saying anything as I close it behind me, taking a step towards him.
His face is haggard, drawn pale around swollen eyes, rimmed red as if he has been crying.
The room is sickening, thick with a reek of stale wine and vomit. My boots crunch over shards of broken glass.
“Aya, what do you want?”
His voice is hoarse, he grimaces as he speaks. An unknown resolve rises in me, silently, towards nothing.
I want nothing. My lips twist into a vague smirk.
When I don’t answer, he turns away, cracking open a jar of body paint that he draws along himself. Red. A cross vivisecting his torso.
A mark- is it to proclaim him executioner, or label him as one to be broken?
“Have you ever wanted to erase your past?”
The last question he asked me- the symbol only serves to define him further, separating his shape out from the night.
“No.”
He turns around at the word, raising one eyebrow in confusion.
“No?”
I shrug, lost for words, not really sure of what I was protesting with that word.
“If you don’t have anything else to say, could you just go?”
He looks at the floor as he speaks. I turn, picking my way partway through the glass to the door before I am gripped with a strange horror, that ominous thread rearing before me again.
And what if this too ends here?
I am struck suddenly with how contradictory, how irreconcilable this is to everything I want. Why tie yourself down to anyone? It’s only more to shake off, more to be confined within.
Somehow- it doesn’t seem like that, looking at his wan, miserable face, the anxiety written in his body and the desire for me to leave.
“Don’t- don’t die tonight Yohji.”
The words are weak when I say them, hollow, a strange demand that echoes through the room, an exhortation that belongs to neither to us, and both of us right now, now that that distinction has come to nothing.
“Why, do you still expect me to keep my promise?”
His words try too hard to be mocking, twisted with an anger that is faintly obscene and stretches away from him.
I don’t respond.
“Do you really need that reassurance Aya? Do you need me to affirm that I’m nothing without you?”
The words are bitter, thick with disgust, he spits them out at me and they fall to mingle in the mess on the floor.
“You want me to repent everything I’ve broken tonight?”
He laughs.
“We don’t have room for repentance here, do we Aya? Regret, certainly, but you know all about that, don’t you? I‘m curious, what new pearls of wisdom do you have for us on the subject Fujimiya-sensei-”
The last word is hardly out of his mouth before I realize I’ve slapped him, the retort of it ringing through the room, a harsh echoing sound.
He stares at me, the bitter smirk dropped from his lips, stunned.
My eyes narrow, examining his details, his features as they lie under the pink mark spreading over his cheek.
I didn’t hit him very hard.
His cheeks are sallow, brushed over with a pale stubble, his lips swollen and stained dark with wine, his eyes darkened by circles that lend him an age he has not earned, will never earn for all I know. His eyes burn at me through a glaze of drunkenness, somehow lucid through the haze of intoxication.
Anger courses through me at the sight, at the waste of him, at the weakness of him giving in to his guilt.
Giving in to his guilt. The idea forces me to pause.
Maybe the one right I have to my pride. I carry my guilt so I do not have to drown in it.
I do not believe in another option.
My fingers tighten around his chin, digging into skin paled by alcoholism.
“I hate you.”
My voice thickened, tremulous with venom, I whisper, the words falling against his eyes.
Closing my eyes against my rage as it courses through me, I smash our lips together, not caring when my lip gets caught in his teeth, tearing open, the kiss bruising as he begins to move with me, reaching his hands up to dig into my shoulders, a movement that is half pulling me closer, and half shoving me away. As if he cannot decide whether to throw me out or not.
Roughly, I jerk his jacket off him, throwing it on the floor, and pull away, wrinkling my nose as I remember the pool of alcohol. Holding his gaze, I carefully, unbutton my shirt, dropping it in a careful pile along with my katana onto the dresser, far out of the reach of the wine.
Staring at me, a sullen confused look on his face, Yohji follows suit, stripping his pants and gloves off and dropping them on the floor outside the reach of the liquid.
He keeps his watch on.
He watches as I finish settling my clothes on the dresser, eyes boring into my back, waiting for me to turn around. Once I do, he grabs me by the wrist, pulling me with him over to the bed.
Slipping in the wine, I crash onto his chest, the still wet paint smearing over my skin in sticky red lines.
Hot from the heat of his body, it reminds me of Asami’s blood. I drop a hand to it, tracing it down my stomach as Yohji watches me curiously, his brow furrowing with something unreadable.
I don’t want to read it, my eyes skirting his as I look back at him.
I reach my hand up to his cheek, spreading the red over his face, hiding some of the bruising from my palm. He reaches up behind my neck, feeling the freshly exposed skin, taking in the hair drifting over my eyes. I wonder if he’s seeing the same ghost I did earlier.
“Your hair-”
His voice is flat, a quiet acknowledgement, betraying no reaction.
I bat his hand away, twisting it behind him as I press our mouths together again, biting down on his lips, smiling against them as he gasps and pulls away, bending my head back so he can bite along my neck, drawing up thick bruises, making me reel.
I don’t want to think anything, feel anything but this immediate sensation. I just want to do this without trying to discern its meaning.
It means nothing at all that I push him down on his back, toppling him from his elbows. Nothing as I dig my fingers into his arm, leaving brutal red marks along the pale skin. Nothing that I compare it to the radiant tan he used to have, the golden flush that rode his cheeks no matter that he spent most of his time out at night. Nothing as he fists my hair, runs nails down my stomach, twists his teeth around my nipple. Nothing as I gasp and arch back, blood flooding down into my cock, precum dripping in clear trails to distort the cross on his skin.
His eyes burn with a sort of challenge.
“Do you still expect me to keep my promise?”
“Yes!”
I push the word out in a frantic hiss, rushing out between my teeth.
He smirks, wrapping his fingers around my cock, bucking his hips up as I lap my tongue around a nipple, trailing fingers down his spine.
Rage baring itself again, I quicken my movements, moving with a sort of frenzy as I shove one knee between his legs, spreading his thighs wide before me. Rising to a crouch, I kneel between them, taking the sight of him in.
His skin is flushed back to its rightful color, hued dark with paint and sweat and anticipation, his tongue darting out over his lips, his ribcage rising as he pants, breath coming thick and fast as he considers me with those wounds for eyes, green tombs boring into me, riveted on my face.
A moment pf silence passes between us before I jerk my gaze away, reaching over him to grab the lubricant off the nightstand.
I do not know what to make of it. It is again nothing as I rip the cover off the tube, squeezing the cool liquid over my fingers.
I swear he smiles as I lean in again, circling his hole with light movements before the moment breaks and I shove them in, smirking as he winces, clenching around me in pain.
I scissor them about, relishing the pained expression on his face, stretching him quickly, suddenly aware of everything rising before us, of the time draining away from us as we do this.
I glance out the window. A tide of black smirks back at me, as if the night carried all the same rage as I do, all the despair in Yohji’s flickering eyes as I pull my fingers away. He hisses, hands grasping towards me as I pull away, pouring more lube into my hands and running it over my cock. He bites his lip watching.
It was always rare that we did this.
He reaches out, as if to pull me to him.
“No.”
My voice is hoarse. I reach up, grabbing his wrists and holding them to the bed.
I stare into his eyes as I guide myself in, thrusting into him almost painfully.
Fully seated, I pause, almost dizzy with the feel of it.
“Aya-”His voice is a sob, pitched close into my ear.
As I begin to move he lifts his legs, wrapping them tight around my hips as I slam into him, each thrust eliciting a cry, his breath coming hard from his mouth, hot against my shoulder. His fingers brush against the top of my head, twitching with the rhythm of our fucking.
The slapping of my flesh on his fills the room, echoing through the corners, rising up in the reek of stale wine, in the restless gleam of the endless night.
It feels as if this existence here, inside him, is eternal.
I move faster, harder with the thought, strange, frenzied with the unwanted thought.
His hands strain against mine as I move faster, pounding into him with enough force to bruise both of our hips.
It does not last long. He twists his hips around me as he comes, creating an agonizing and painful pressure around me. Gasping, digging my nails deep into his wrists, drawing half moon circles of blood, I come, white leaking over both of us, diluting the stains of red on our chests; and collapse, our two breaths mingling indistinguishable in the night.
_______________________________________
Lying on my chest, his hair falling into his eyes, he looks younger, as if suddenly we’ve- or just I have perhaps, or he has- been returned to something easier than this.
He sighs, shuddering in the cool air, not looking at me. Lingering.
“I hate you.”
Do you Aya?
I lift one hand to my temple. This is not the answer I was waiting for.
Silently, he lifts himself up to a sitting position, his legs sprawled to either side of my stomach. Without thinking, I reach up and jerk his chin down, catching his lips in a soft kiss, our lips sliding over each other with all the tenderness- is that the word? It seems impossible- that was lacking in the previous ones.
When he pulls back, he glances into my eyes for one moment. Violet swirls around me in devastating dark hues, something piercing through them that I can’t quite grasp. Is it grief? Longing? Anger?
Somehow it seems to be all of these, and nothing at all. It seems important, strangely, to grasp what is there, somehow discern what he is feeling.
Fluidly, in a single movement, he moves off me, cautiously resting his feet on the floor. From the bed I watch as he picks his way through the mess on the floor. I’m sure he’s disgusted by it.
When light flashes across his back from the window I am struck again at the sudden absence of hair. Rueful, I imagine it back again, stunned by this sudden lack of it.
My hands find their way into my own hair, tangling about in the short strands.
I wanted to move away from everything, cut away everything with the loss, look at myself and see someone other than that man who had watched Asuka die.
Now I see the one who watched Michelle die. I can’t convince myself there’s that great a difference.
It seems as if in one change, one drastic shift in appearance, he has reverted back to that.
Her face bleeds through his skin, I can’t help but paint him back with that intent, with that murderous and desperate misery we found him in.
I still say found, but it’d be more honest to say that he showed it to us.
He dresses slowly, considering each item of clothing carefully, as he slides his pants over his hips, laces his boots on, straps his belt and the weapon dangling from it to his body.
He stares at the shirt for a long time, glancing from his chest to the dark fabric. I’m waiting for him to go and wash the paint off.
Without a word he pulls it on, slipping the coat on over it.
The red is almost visible through the shirt, it screams back at me, a faint shadow amplified by his movement. The sword swings as he walks back towards the bed, a calm, empty look on his face as he crushes my hand in his, pressing tightly, holding on as if there is no other recourse for him but this.
I still cannot read the look in his eyes.
“I hate you.”
The words send a chill down my spine, no matter that he does not repeat them himself, and I shake, trying to reconcile them with the serene set of his features, the confusion twisting him his eyes and in my stomach, with the cold night air and damp sheets pressing against my skin.
It is all interrupted by an insistent knock at the door, hanging broken around the sound of that summons.
He whispers, murmuring to himself.
“We have to go.”
Pulling himself away, he drops my hand thoughtlessly, closing the door swiftly behind him as it drops down to the bed.
“Hurry.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, I stand up, pulling my clothes on hurriedly and streaking a fresh coat of paint across my chest.
It is uneven.
Staring in the mirror, I wonder, is this my answer?
Another knock comes at the door, Omi’s voice splintering through the wood.
“Come on Yohji! We have to leave now!”
Strangely settled, the answer forms itself over the doubt in my veins, strange and seemingly inevitable- as if it had been staring at me through everything before, as if all things stemmed from it.
It bears all the solemnity of his face when he left, closing the door behind him.
For once, this will be a structured confrontation. No ambush, no surprise in adversary or strength, probably not even in outcome.
And at this last- the thought of us dying, sinking into that black we resisted against so long, comes no less horrifying, no less disgusting than before. Shouldn’t there be at least something to indicate it?
It seems as if the earth itself should be screaming.
Gripped with a violent resistance, a strange protest against that- not that we should die, but fall for nothing, I stand from the bed, darting my gaze around the emptied mission room for some answer, some speculation of meaning. It is a reaction that pretends our victory would be a victory at all, final in some way.
And if we don’t- what does the world have left for us, us who have been so intended to destroy it and its natural product. Men like Takatori, Tsujii, Shimojima abound, a series of faces and ambitions to replace the rank and file before them.
Why every revolution has failed- there has been no shift in inherent inclination, in the drive that fueled the ideals or propaganda, no matter how sublimated. No matter who we save now, there will be another score of this tomorrow.
Guilt bites back at me from the words- this world could not offer forgiveness, nor could I accept it from such a source.
Puzzled, reamed with doubt, I settle back on the bed.
What does the world have left for us?
The thought breaks off. I stiffen as I hear footsteps outside the door, angry voices rushing up to charge the air. Transfixed, without anything else to do, I listen, tilting my head towards their source.
“I am doing what is best for the-”
“Damn it, I heard your speech! But fuck, Omi, what about you?”
The voice that comes through the door wavers around its coolness.
“That is why I am here.”
The wall creaks as someone, Ken undoubtedly, slams their fist into it.
“Not the deaths? Not the chance to finally finish what we started, to finally rid the world of Esset? Does that matter a damn bit, Omi?”
Ridding the world of Esset would only create a vacuum to be quickly filled again. Maybe by Kritiker. It’s a pointless statement. When were any of us fighting for that to begin with?
Ken continues on, his naïve argument strange to me- that so much could possibly be rectified. We have so much power in that thought, we redeemers pulling the world from filth and darkness. And still we’ve changed nothing, routed nothing.
My shoulders ache at the thought.
“Ken-”
Omi’s voice is helpless, weighted with the same knowledge that Ken is lacking, that lack which constitutes his faith.
“As long as you remember, Omi, it will be impossible to drive all of that from you.”
Ken’s voice is quiet, trembling with a deeper anger.
“As long as I remember-”
Omi’s voice cracks, echoing.
“As long as I remember, I will be able to mourn.”A pause. It drills heavy between the three of us. Omi’s voice breaches it with a whisper, laughter edging around the words.“Why kill anything if that death is not going to stand for something?”
His breath pours out ragged. I imagine his face, drawn and cold, beseeching something impossible of Ken, the same look thrown at me when I’d go to see him. The same look I painted on every silhouette of his, sending us out to kill.
“Why forget- it doesn’t undo the deed, only makes it impossible to repeat?”
And necessary to. Redemption- assuming any is possible- would be violated by forgetting.
“Being able to recall your actions without suffering them again.”
For a moment, Omi’s and Sena’s voices twist together in my mind, distorting my recollections, continually returned phrases massed in my consciousness- could I even think without all these voices?-, smoothing out again when Omi’s voice tightens into something recognizable as a child, so similar to Sena’s that I can’t help but differentiate.
“I’m not asking you to understand.”
Ken begins to sputter, a far cry from the cool sarcastic tone he’s cultivated in the time since Omi’s defection. A reminder of a more awkward, more innocent person.
“That doesn’t- why can’t you just- I don’t understa-”
His voice escalates with each broken argument. Omi’s interruption is nearly inaudible by comparison.
“Ken.”
Silence. I wait for either of them to speak, becoming increasingly aware of my intrusion.
It doesn’t matter.
“Have we ever really helped anyone?”Ken’s voice is quiet, hoarse with the uncharacteristic question.
“I don’t know.”
I wonder suddenly why its such an important question. No matter anything we said, any credos we put ourselves behind at Persia’s and then Mamoru’s conjecture, any honor we ascribed to the innocent, to the weak. Fighting for them in the end places us as a final target. Clearing the strong for the innocence and goodness of the weak, when we are among the strong. Clearing the guilty to protect those innocent, when we are ourselves models of that guilt we say we erase.
And even if we have helped anyone, unlike Ken I can believe that we have, I know that we have, is it really worth the sacrifice of everything that we are?
The innocent, people like Aya-chan and Sakura and Asami, are gifted and made innocent only in the belief that their actions have any significance. Even Tsujii is innocent in that regard, no matter her crimes.
We are set apart by our doubt, a debt that we no longer owe, a guilt that wears everything away until we can no longer even hack at ourselves.
White is the color of bleach, of bandaging, of every new gap we tear around ourselves.
I realize suddenly that Ken and Omi are gone, their voices trailing away down the hall.
Almost mindlessly, the action overtaking me without reason, I get up again and take Asami’s book off the floor, flipping the cover open to a random page.
It is lined with a list of preparations to be completed for the cultural festival. Perversely, I want to rip it out, finish it even.
A celebration that will never happen.
Shaking, I flip through the pages, glancing here and there at the random notations.
“Watanabe likes history”
“Don’t forget to order new copies of CAP!”
“Meet Fujimiya-sensei at five”
I close the book carefully at the last one. After it, all of the pages are blank, without her cramped handwriting or odd acronyms.
What insight was I expecting from something meant to hold only impersonal observations? It’s no diary.
Even so my hand rests on it expectantly, as if demanding that the book bring up some realization.
“As long as I remember- I will be able to mourn”
My lips twist up into a strange expression, neither a grimace nor a smile, as I turn back towards the window, striking in their reflection superimposed over the sky, the buildings, the masses of people.
And still, there is nothing to indicate what is coming.
________________________________________
The wine, spilled, looks black on the floor, a stain rolled out and soaking into a pile of shirts I’ve tossed in front of the dresser.
Black.
Involuntarily, I laugh at the sight. It’s too perfect, my laughter, the darkness of the hue, the basic emptiness of any connection gleaned in the random image. No matter how fitting.
Still laughing, I raise my fingers to my lips, licking off the sticky liquid and the blood from where the glass cut me as I dropped the bottle. After hours and hours and hours, it does not seem possible that the sun will go down and we will leave and act upon the agreement we made earlier. It seems impossible that we will return to Koua, finally, to destroy it, just as it seems impossible that I could have made any decision at all.
Still, it hardens inside me, rearing up cold- an answer to that damning impulse.
Just as impossible that I can return to anything.
Is it a betrayal to free yourself?
He would say it’s not really freedom. I smirk at him, at no one, as I break open another bottle.
Cheers, Aya. I’m not going anywhere.
The thought makes me sick, I drop the bottle to the floor, unable to swallow it, kneeling in the lukewarm fluid as it spreads, picking up glass. My hands clamp down over the broken pieces as my stomach empties itself, shuddering through me in a burning release between my lips, the color of the vomit the same black as that on the floor, foaming up over my hands with glass.
And all black together. How trite, this visual condemnation of an answer I don’t have.
Squinting, I try to call her face, any face, up from the mess on the floor, shape features in glass. Its too spread out.
Show yourself. I glance out the window, taking in the brilliant colors of the sunset, the streaks of red and gold that somehow glance over the room, glazing over the window without entering, brilliance that locks me in.
Memories well up behind my eyes, images half forming from the glare at the window. I stare back down at the floor, crush my fists around pieces of slippery sharp glass to break their noise and their hold.
As long as I remember- I’ll never be able to see but for their features.
“You have to, otherwise, you’ll only continue to suffer.”
My head jerks from side to side, eyes boring into every corner of the room, looking for that face again.
A trail of acid leaks from my mouth as I exhale, her name carrying itself along my breath quietly.
“Asuka.”
The colors outside the window fade, fiery hues collapsing into a merciless black that lends its reflection to the floor. Wine seeps up cold through my clothes. My hands seal into a collection of cuts, the trails of congealed blood spelling no answer as I finally rise and pull my gloves on, rip off the soaked clothes in favor of leather ones that send a dull thrill of anticipation through me, insoluble, an unanswered excitement.
She does not come.
And will I forget this waiting?_________________________________
The clothes slide over my skin, slipping into place. Not one wrinkle in the fabric is unexpected, unanticipated.
In the mirror, the white coat is luminescent, surrounded by the blackness running out from the window- a night unbroken by neon, by stars or celestial tidings, just a black smear of sky that screams of absence.
As if any of their faces could strip the night away altogether.
My face is smooth, taut, the mouth pulled into a tight grimace, the eyes hollowed out by shadow. Even through the dark, the violet manages to latch upon some sourceless strain of light and gleam with all the ire and misery that I have come to associate with my face, inseparable from my features.
My hair sinks back along the sleeve of the coat, a strain of the night detached. Asami’s planner gleams blue from the bed, a memorial of sorts. There is nothing I can do to avoid this, my stomach churning with a strange calm. Serene, numb, I examine every curve of the coat as it falls, all the imagined lines in my face. I take in the numerous crosses on my body, the red searing out from the white.
Crosses were at first only symbols of execution, the shape of the body condemning itself.
I do not paint them fresh with an easy scent of salvation.
If Christ died on the cross, it did not save him.
Silently, I pull my sword out from the sheath at my belt. Another cross, forming with the hilt over my hand.
Glancing at it, I cannot remember where it came from, or that I was ever without it.
This sword has only mattered because it has come to carry everything I have become, without any lingering traces of what I’ve been forced to leave behind.
I raise it up, curiously, a morbid silence echoing in the room, bleeding back from the window. The blade slashes up, arm stretching back of its own accord; a cut through the night itself as it slices down.
The braid slips off my back, revealing my neck to the night. A strange cool air brushes along the newly revealed skin with a sense of inevitability.
My bangs slip heavy over my eyes, spreading out over my forehead as I shove the sword back into its sheath. From the mirror, I look pieced together, younger, but inexplicably wiser. What did I know then in the heat of my rage that revenge stripped me off?
My gaze shifts over to the dull metal stud in my earlobe, a strange subtraction from this older image. I wonder again if she has ever worn them.
Dully, I look up, taking in how uneasy the white seems on me, how strange. It shows too much.
It meant something.
My stomach weighs heavy in me as I turn away from the mirror to glare out the window at the night.
The thought of revenge only works once doesn’t it? My eyes narrow, blaming the night for this loss- this hollowness that it reflects in its depths able to hold so much without relief, without meaning.
My hair coils on the ground by my feet, bleeding up at me all the memories I can not lose with such a severance.
Headlights curve along the narrow road that leads to the school, two pinpricks of light breaking through the night.
I cannot help but imagine her silhouette, crumpled as the pile of hair on the floor.
What freedom can one expect to attain? Freedom from thought? From action?
An oppressive sense of ending descends around me, of finality.
Is this to be the last whiteness? The last sacrifice into that bleary light?
Silently, I lift Asami’s planner off the bed, slipping it into my coat.
Another cross, regardless of its shape.
As we have learned to break ourselves more deeply, we have gained the capability to break ourselves anywhere. For anything.
Unable to look at the room any longer, the idea of the mirror glaring behind me, I leave, slamming the door after me, a jarring noise echoing through the hall.
____________________________________
The apartment is silent, the only light bleeding out from under doorways, lighted rooms subject to whatever preparations my teammates feel they need.
His door is dark, rising up in front of me.
And what does he mean to any of this?
“As long as I remember- I will be able to mourn”Hissing through my teeth I curse Omi for saying those words. Words that my mind, with its proclivity for suffering, swallows whole.
I don’t want to remember him- I don’t want to have to remember him.
The idea settles itself over my skin, uneasy, baring itself up in one possibility.
I knock on the door, rapping loudly enough to stir him from whatever state of drunkenness he has gotten himself into.
The door creaks open, he stands in the doorway. Glaring, he pushes it back, trying to slam it closed. Instinctively I jam my arm through the door, pressing my shoulder against it until it snaps open and I’m inside.
He lets go of the door, not saying anything as I close it behind me, taking a step towards him.
His face is haggard, drawn pale around swollen eyes, rimmed red as if he has been crying.
The room is sickening, thick with a reek of stale wine and vomit. My boots crunch over shards of broken glass.
“Aya, what do you want?”
His voice is hoarse, he grimaces as he speaks. An unknown resolve rises in me, silently, towards nothing.
I want nothing. My lips twist into a vague smirk.
When I don’t answer, he turns away, cracking open a jar of body paint that he draws along himself. Red. A cross vivisecting his torso.
A mark- is it to proclaim him executioner, or label him as one to be broken?
“Have you ever wanted to erase your past?”
The last question he asked me- the symbol only serves to define him further, separating his shape out from the night.
“No.”
He turns around at the word, raising one eyebrow in confusion.
“No?”
I shrug, lost for words, not really sure of what I was protesting with that word.
“If you don’t have anything else to say, could you just go?”
He looks at the floor as he speaks. I turn, picking my way partway through the glass to the door before I am gripped with a strange horror, that ominous thread rearing before me again.
And what if this too ends here?
I am struck suddenly with how contradictory, how irreconcilable this is to everything I want. Why tie yourself down to anyone? It’s only more to shake off, more to be confined within.
Somehow- it doesn’t seem like that, looking at his wan, miserable face, the anxiety written in his body and the desire for me to leave.
“Don’t- don’t die tonight Yohji.”
The words are weak when I say them, hollow, a strange demand that echoes through the room, an exhortation that belongs to neither to us, and both of us right now, now that that distinction has come to nothing.
“Why, do you still expect me to keep my promise?”
His words try too hard to be mocking, twisted with an anger that is faintly obscene and stretches away from him.
I don’t respond.
“Do you really need that reassurance Aya? Do you need me to affirm that I’m nothing without you?”
The words are bitter, thick with disgust, he spits them out at me and they fall to mingle in the mess on the floor.
“You want me to repent everything I’ve broken tonight?”
He laughs.
“We don’t have room for repentance here, do we Aya? Regret, certainly, but you know all about that, don’t you? I‘m curious, what new pearls of wisdom do you have for us on the subject Fujimiya-sensei-”
The last word is hardly out of his mouth before I realize I’ve slapped him, the retort of it ringing through the room, a harsh echoing sound.
He stares at me, the bitter smirk dropped from his lips, stunned.
My eyes narrow, examining his details, his features as they lie under the pink mark spreading over his cheek.
I didn’t hit him very hard.
His cheeks are sallow, brushed over with a pale stubble, his lips swollen and stained dark with wine, his eyes darkened by circles that lend him an age he has not earned, will never earn for all I know. His eyes burn at me through a glaze of drunkenness, somehow lucid through the haze of intoxication.
Anger courses through me at the sight, at the waste of him, at the weakness of him giving in to his guilt.
Giving in to his guilt. The idea forces me to pause.
Maybe the one right I have to my pride. I carry my guilt so I do not have to drown in it.
I do not believe in another option.
My fingers tighten around his chin, digging into skin paled by alcoholism.
“I hate you.”
My voice thickened, tremulous with venom, I whisper, the words falling against his eyes.
Closing my eyes against my rage as it courses through me, I smash our lips together, not caring when my lip gets caught in his teeth, tearing open, the kiss bruising as he begins to move with me, reaching his hands up to dig into my shoulders, a movement that is half pulling me closer, and half shoving me away. As if he cannot decide whether to throw me out or not.
Roughly, I jerk his jacket off him, throwing it on the floor, and pull away, wrinkling my nose as I remember the pool of alcohol. Holding his gaze, I carefully, unbutton my shirt, dropping it in a careful pile along with my katana onto the dresser, far out of the reach of the wine.
Staring at me, a sullen confused look on his face, Yohji follows suit, stripping his pants and gloves off and dropping them on the floor outside the reach of the liquid.
He keeps his watch on.
He watches as I finish settling my clothes on the dresser, eyes boring into my back, waiting for me to turn around. Once I do, he grabs me by the wrist, pulling me with him over to the bed.
Slipping in the wine, I crash onto his chest, the still wet paint smearing over my skin in sticky red lines.
Hot from the heat of his body, it reminds me of Asami’s blood. I drop a hand to it, tracing it down my stomach as Yohji watches me curiously, his brow furrowing with something unreadable.
I don’t want to read it, my eyes skirting his as I look back at him.
I reach my hand up to his cheek, spreading the red over his face, hiding some of the bruising from my palm. He reaches up behind my neck, feeling the freshly exposed skin, taking in the hair drifting over my eyes. I wonder if he’s seeing the same ghost I did earlier.
“Your hair-”
His voice is flat, a quiet acknowledgement, betraying no reaction.
I bat his hand away, twisting it behind him as I press our mouths together again, biting down on his lips, smiling against them as he gasps and pulls away, bending my head back so he can bite along my neck, drawing up thick bruises, making me reel.
I don’t want to think anything, feel anything but this immediate sensation. I just want to do this without trying to discern its meaning.
It means nothing at all that I push him down on his back, toppling him from his elbows. Nothing as I dig my fingers into his arm, leaving brutal red marks along the pale skin. Nothing that I compare it to the radiant tan he used to have, the golden flush that rode his cheeks no matter that he spent most of his time out at night. Nothing as he fists my hair, runs nails down my stomach, twists his teeth around my nipple. Nothing as I gasp and arch back, blood flooding down into my cock, precum dripping in clear trails to distort the cross on his skin.
His eyes burn with a sort of challenge.
“Do you still expect me to keep my promise?”
“Yes!”
I push the word out in a frantic hiss, rushing out between my teeth.
He smirks, wrapping his fingers around my cock, bucking his hips up as I lap my tongue around a nipple, trailing fingers down his spine.
Rage baring itself again, I quicken my movements, moving with a sort of frenzy as I shove one knee between his legs, spreading his thighs wide before me. Rising to a crouch, I kneel between them, taking the sight of him in.
His skin is flushed back to its rightful color, hued dark with paint and sweat and anticipation, his tongue darting out over his lips, his ribcage rising as he pants, breath coming thick and fast as he considers me with those wounds for eyes, green tombs boring into me, riveted on my face.
A moment pf silence passes between us before I jerk my gaze away, reaching over him to grab the lubricant off the nightstand.
I do not know what to make of it. It is again nothing as I rip the cover off the tube, squeezing the cool liquid over my fingers.
I swear he smiles as I lean in again, circling his hole with light movements before the moment breaks and I shove them in, smirking as he winces, clenching around me in pain.
I scissor them about, relishing the pained expression on his face, stretching him quickly, suddenly aware of everything rising before us, of the time draining away from us as we do this.
I glance out the window. A tide of black smirks back at me, as if the night carried all the same rage as I do, all the despair in Yohji’s flickering eyes as I pull my fingers away. He hisses, hands grasping towards me as I pull away, pouring more lube into my hands and running it over my cock. He bites his lip watching.
It was always rare that we did this.
He reaches out, as if to pull me to him.
“No.”
My voice is hoarse. I reach up, grabbing his wrists and holding them to the bed.
I stare into his eyes as I guide myself in, thrusting into him almost painfully.
Fully seated, I pause, almost dizzy with the feel of it.
“Aya-”His voice is a sob, pitched close into my ear.
As I begin to move he lifts his legs, wrapping them tight around my hips as I slam into him, each thrust eliciting a cry, his breath coming hard from his mouth, hot against my shoulder. His fingers brush against the top of my head, twitching with the rhythm of our fucking.
The slapping of my flesh on his fills the room, echoing through the corners, rising up in the reek of stale wine, in the restless gleam of the endless night.
It feels as if this existence here, inside him, is eternal.
I move faster, harder with the thought, strange, frenzied with the unwanted thought.
His hands strain against mine as I move faster, pounding into him with enough force to bruise both of our hips.
It does not last long. He twists his hips around me as he comes, creating an agonizing and painful pressure around me. Gasping, digging my nails deep into his wrists, drawing half moon circles of blood, I come, white leaking over both of us, diluting the stains of red on our chests; and collapse, our two breaths mingling indistinguishable in the night.
_______________________________________
Lying on my chest, his hair falling into his eyes, he looks younger, as if suddenly we’ve- or just I have perhaps, or he has- been returned to something easier than this.
He sighs, shuddering in the cool air, not looking at me. Lingering.
“I hate you.”
Do you Aya?
I lift one hand to my temple. This is not the answer I was waiting for.
Silently, he lifts himself up to a sitting position, his legs sprawled to either side of my stomach. Without thinking, I reach up and jerk his chin down, catching his lips in a soft kiss, our lips sliding over each other with all the tenderness- is that the word? It seems impossible- that was lacking in the previous ones.
When he pulls back, he glances into my eyes for one moment. Violet swirls around me in devastating dark hues, something piercing through them that I can’t quite grasp. Is it grief? Longing? Anger?
Somehow it seems to be all of these, and nothing at all. It seems important, strangely, to grasp what is there, somehow discern what he is feeling.
Fluidly, in a single movement, he moves off me, cautiously resting his feet on the floor. From the bed I watch as he picks his way through the mess on the floor. I’m sure he’s disgusted by it.
When light flashes across his back from the window I am struck again at the sudden absence of hair. Rueful, I imagine it back again, stunned by this sudden lack of it.
My hands find their way into my own hair, tangling about in the short strands.
I wanted to move away from everything, cut away everything with the loss, look at myself and see someone other than that man who had watched Asuka die.
Now I see the one who watched Michelle die. I can’t convince myself there’s that great a difference.
It seems as if in one change, one drastic shift in appearance, he has reverted back to that.
Her face bleeds through his skin, I can’t help but paint him back with that intent, with that murderous and desperate misery we found him in.
I still say found, but it’d be more honest to say that he showed it to us.
He dresses slowly, considering each item of clothing carefully, as he slides his pants over his hips, laces his boots on, straps his belt and the weapon dangling from it to his body.
He stares at the shirt for a long time, glancing from his chest to the dark fabric. I’m waiting for him to go and wash the paint off.
Without a word he pulls it on, slipping the coat on over it.
The red is almost visible through the shirt, it screams back at me, a faint shadow amplified by his movement. The sword swings as he walks back towards the bed, a calm, empty look on his face as he crushes my hand in his, pressing tightly, holding on as if there is no other recourse for him but this.
I still cannot read the look in his eyes.
“I hate you.”
The words send a chill down my spine, no matter that he does not repeat them himself, and I shake, trying to reconcile them with the serene set of his features, the confusion twisting him his eyes and in my stomach, with the cold night air and damp sheets pressing against my skin.
It is all interrupted by an insistent knock at the door, hanging broken around the sound of that summons.
He whispers, murmuring to himself.
“We have to go.”
Pulling himself away, he drops my hand thoughtlessly, closing the door swiftly behind him as it drops down to the bed.
“Hurry.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, I stand up, pulling my clothes on hurriedly and streaking a fresh coat of paint across my chest.
It is uneven.
Staring in the mirror, I wonder, is this my answer?
Another knock comes at the door, Omi’s voice splintering through the wood.
“Come on Yohji! We have to leave now!”
Strangely settled, the answer forms itself over the doubt in my veins, strange and seemingly inevitable- as if it had been staring at me through everything before, as if all things stemmed from it.
It bears all the solemnity of his face when he left, closing the door behind him.