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solongsun Rating: teen
Bands: Dir en grey
Pairing: Kaoru/Die
'When all this is over, we'll be together - when this is over we'll be a proper couple.'
They didn't all come home, you know.
No, not by a long shot.
I wake up first; the light wakes me up, always. Even in the heart of the city, when the night is brighter than the middle of the day, we sleep with the curtains wide open.
Ever since the war, neither of us like the dark very much.
So I wake up to the sun on your face. Your skinny body has been thrown around while you've slept; your hair is twisted around your neck, tangled up in your dog tags. Your cane lies abandoned on the floor next to you. I could put on my glasses, but I don't; instead, I worm my way closer to you, clinging to your feeble warmth.
Your arms are long and white. Your hair is red, fading to brown. Your body is as well-known to me as my own, and infinitely more beautiful.
Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. Twenty-five today.
The city in December is a wasteland. The sky is grey. The buildings are black with smoke. Our little apartment, our perch, is hostile too: the floors are bare and the wallpaper is peeling and the windows are bleary. The fridge is empty. You sleep with a quarter-full bottle of bourbon next to you, two glasses smeary with fingerprints completing the scene; you sigh in your sleep and twist away from me, onto your side.
As for me – I dream of the war, and of you, and of the kind of landscapes I long for; red clay mud, silver birch, the old shambling neighbourhood where we grew up. Birds and insects.
Dragonflies.
Fantasize.
This is the golden country; this is ago, this is before.
In my dreams I jump off the edge and land back there with you, sixteen again.
In my real life I sit up in bed and feel the aches in my body kick themselves into life, the fissure in my shoulder grinding along its fault line, the smothering feeling of crowds buzzing around my head. The smells, the smells of the war, my war; smoke and ash, blood, antiseptic, the dull sterile smell of gauze.
The smells of your war: smoke and blood. Cold earth. Metal, and exhaust.
There was a last time I saw you, back before I thought I would ever see you again. This is the dream I save for the daytime. I remember when you and I had not seen or heard news of each other for five years, and then I saw you – my soldier in uniform, khaki fatigues, killing time on a park bench with a can of beer; marking your minutes, all of them, before they sent you back out to the front.
The bench was at the far end of a large square where enormous television screens were blaring the war news, the death toll for the day, the charred mass of bodies they had tried and fail to save in the mountains up North; and it was too cold to be sitting out without a jacket – it was March and a vile, biting wind was sweeping litter and debris across the ground. People were everywhere, the mill of bodies in drab ration clothing, and as they crossed back and forth they hid and revealed you, hid and revealed you. By then I was an officer, non-combatant, a medic.
I saw you and all the blood rushed back into my veins.
The part of my heart I had closed off ripped open and began to leap, aching as it went; I remember shoving bodies desperately aside, ducking under arms and carried baskets and bundles and tripping over bicycles and children; I ran furiously against the current to touch your arm.
That thing they say, you know, about the thousand-yard stare; it's true. Even with my hand on your shoulder, you took a while to find me.
I saw your face cave in with frantic relief. Your beer fell to the ground and glugged its contents uselessly onto the pavement as we tried to push ourselves back together; we were trying to match ourselves up again at the old lines; the places where we had originally been torn apart.
I remember the drone of distant planes and the sirens starting, and the sudden, flown-apart look of panic on your face.
The only thing you said at the time was my name. Kaoru. You said it once, and you didn't say anything else. Your chest heaved against mine; my tears dampened the shoulder of your uniform.
The sirens turned the churn of people frenetic, and like two rival tides, they started to rip at us both. Our desperate eyes locked over a sudden frothing sea of bowed heads; the last of our body parts to touch was our fingers, sliding desperately apart.
Over the din of the sirens I said as fast as I could to you:
'When all this is over, we'll be together – when this is over we'll be a proper couple.'
I don't think you heard me. You were struggling, so hard, to get back to me.
These are the words I live with; this is what I keep in the front of my mind.
Everything else is history.
So I wake up to the sun on your face. Your skinny body has been thrown around while you've slept; your hair is twisted around your neck, tangled up in your dog tags. Your cane lies abandoned on the floor next to you. I could put on my glasses, but I don't; instead, I worm my way closer to you, clinging to your feeble warmth.
So the city in December is a wasteland.
So our apartment is a cold and hostile space.
History, repeating itself as I reach out for you and try to pull you back into my world.
Your arms are long and white. Your hair is red, fading to brown. Your body is as well-known to me as my own, and infinitely more beautiful.
'Happy birthday,' I say quietly. When it doesn't wake you, I'm glad; it was a stupid thing to say.
So you dream your troubled dreams; so I save my dreams for the daytime.
I remember the first time I kissed you.
Laugh in my face, Die; tell me I'm being stupid. Since the war, you don't laugh.
Since the war, car alarms and fireworks make you sick and tear you up into sharp and shaking pieces.
But this was back when we were too young to fight, me sixteen and you fifteen, spending an afternoon lazing around in the skinny silver birch trees that grew around the lake, dragonflies skipping between their trunks; the rippling patterns of bamboo; soft mud, clay-like and red, and a hazy blue sky broken up by the roar and white tails of war planes. They were buzzing like angry insects off to other, more important places, but we hid. We did it instinctively, as if they could have seen us and decided to waste a few of their firebombs on our little village – on these two teenage boys clutching each other in the trees. I was afraid, Die. Not just of the planes, the bombs, the war – all of that – but I was scared to be so close to you.
The sky was so pale, and we clutched at each others' sweaty palms. I could feel your body, warm and alert next to mine; we coiled together, shielding each other's faces from the conflict, and I had to do it. I had to kiss you.
Finally, you looked as frightened as I was. I scared us both stiff. You licked your lips nervously, swallowed and put your hands behind your back like you were trying to prove that your intentions, always, had been pure.
All the while the planes roared above our heads, and at last you ducked your head and said in a voice so low that I could hear your high, frightened breathing above it, 'Have you done this before?'
'No, I haven't.'
'I don't think I know how.'
'Me neither.'
Two wide-eyed kids. The ground shook. The trees rustled but they kept their secrets, and you and I, we moved back together. You placed your hand uncertainly at the small of my back, and I rested my fingertips against your hips. Nothing had ever been more terrifying than that moment – reading the shock in your eyes as you moved your body against mine, and as you carefully touched my shoulder. My eyes and ears and nose were full of you, and I couldn't help it – with your body close to mine, my cock stiffened beneath my jeans. We tumbled to the ground, and I knew you felt it, pressing insistently against your thigh.
'Sorry—'
You pressed your mouth against mine; helpless, we kissed over and over again. The planes had passed on and it was just spring again, our beautiful April, light birds and insects wheeling through the trees. Dragonflies.
Fantasize.
Jump off the edge and land back there with you, sixteen again.
I listened to your breathing, faster and lighter than usual; your long fingers shook but slid under the hem of my T-shirt and jerked it upwards; I unbuckled your belt, pushed your pants out of the way.
You looked so anxious and so perfect. I could have screamed your name for hours. The white skin of your neck and the tanned line of your forearm; a pale flash of belly and the warm flush of your dick; I ran my fingers along them all and chased them with my lips, my tongue. Your face changed – an expression I had never seen upon it before – not a bad one.
'Die—'
'Please don't stop.'
I rolled us over, put you onto your back and myself between your legs, my face flushed and scared and hovering uncertainly over your dick. I took the head of it between my lips and tasted you for the first time. Let the smell of your skin get up in my head as you grasped at me, the long line of your throat exposed, your hair picking up bits of leaf and twig. With your cock in my mouth I slid a hand inside my jeans, my eyes open so I would always remember this moment and never, ever forget it; my mind chattered at you nervously and said what are we doing and why are you letting me do this and how long until you push me away and won't let me do it any more?
I breathed hot against your skin; sucked you like I'd dreamed of. I heard you say my name.
Kaoru.
And history repeats itself.
And history repeats itself.
Jump off the edge and try—
—to claw your way back into the dream. Try to stop the cracks from appearing in its swirling, soap-bubble surface. Try to stop hearing the cold voice in your head and the scream of train whistles, air raid sirens: where do you think you are, Kaoru?
Believe. Run back through the years and watch history repeat itself.
Believe they all came home.
Where—
Believe in miracles. Believe that spring will come again and the clock can run backwards; believe that the dead can walk and talk and think and feel; believe they watch us; believe they reach out for us; believe that you will wake and turn over and smile at me and talk to me; believe that you will never again come screaming and fighting out of sleep.
—do you think you are, Kaoru?
Believe in second chances. Believe in life; in what I said to you.
When all this is over, we'll be together – when this is over we'll be a proper couple.
'Where—
—do you think you are, Die?'
I say this to you softly as I brush the hair back from your face, checking your forehead for cold sweat.
Your eyelids flutter; that thousand-yard stare. It takes a while.
But you find me. Smile tiredly.
'Home, of course.' Sit up, rub at your eyes. Your dog tags tangle; you hesitate a moment and then pull them off over your head. You put them into a gentle pile at the side of the bed.
Your arms are long and white. Your hair is red, fading to brown. Your body is as well-known to me as my own, and infinitely more beautiful.
'It's my birthday,' you say, and your hand reaches for mine across the sheets.
They didn't all come home, you know.
No, not by a long shot.
But you did. You came back to me.
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This was written a few years ago, and I think it's the only oneshot I actually liked enough to move over to dreamwidth. It was a songfic of sorts written listening to the Radiohead song Codex.
Anyway, enough from me. Thank you so much as ever for your wonderful support! Your generousness completely floors me. Thank you!