tragedia: second half
the rest of this monster (no, seriously, i think this thing ate my muse):
Tragedia
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III. Pathos
Inside, the music deafens; outside, it’s no more than a murky throb in his ears. Beyond the sticky railing, Aoyama opens neon eyes to the night. Junin leans on his elbows as the dreaming, teeming city presses in all around him. It carries a whiff of Minako’s perfume with it, and he blinks once, twice, unhurried. No spastic blonde; instead, leggy brunette with a penchant for Paco Rabanne. Nice. He was never much of a modelizer, but Minako’s got the right idea as usual, dragging him out of his hole.
After all, watching the women massage Usagi’s pregnant cankles and reminisce isn’t really Junin’s idea of a Friday evening. He’d rather hit the dive bars with Nobu, veg out on the Playstation with Izaya and Mamoru and a six-pack…or would he?
Nothing like a night with his boys, but since the accident…he hasn’t felt up to it, and they haven’t pushed it. Maybe Junin doesn’t want to depress them, not when they’re obviously so content. He knows Nobu’s started sleeping at Makoto’s five nights out of seven, that Izaya’s invited Ami to his gallery show this weekend. Mamoru…well, obviously. He doesn’t want their solicitous suggestions, their sidelong glances. Maybe he needs to be hanging out with someone as emotionally fucktarded as he is, and Minako - yeah, you’d never guess it just to look at the girl - fits the bill perfectly.
“Christ,” Junin mumbles. Now he can’t handle happy people. That’s wallowing.
But he can’t help it. On good days, the self-pity ebbs and flows with the hour, and on bad days it doesn’t ebb at all. Junin’s tried talking to her, tried leaving her alone. What hasn’t he tried? They used to squabble before the accident, sure. Slammed doors, mouthfuls of the unsaid. But now, it’s like those tubes sucked out all of Rei’s filters; every weapon in her arsenal is slung at him in anger. Even before she came back from the hospital, he’d played with the idea of counseling, then abandoned it. Between their past, present, and future, they’d probably end up giving the shrink issues.
Tonight, when Junin’s alone in his room (the one he rents, not the one they share), he’ll imagine her curled up in their futon, a few feet away. He’ll wait for the pain in his chest, quick and sharp. The phantom ache of legs twined with his, of sleepy hands reaching across the sheets. Of lost limbs. But the pain won’t come at his urging. It can’t be conjured or constructed. And so he’ll steal into their room to catch the moon trailing pale fingers through her hair. He’ll wonder if she still dreams of how they met, or if her night wanderings now lead her away from him. He’ll slip in beside her like a thief, blankets cold against his back. Only then, the pain will come.
“Hi. Hello?” Minako snaps her fingers in his face. “Drink for you,” he takes the highball balanced precariously between her thumbs. “And drinks for me,” she finishes, a martini in each hand, both dirty as hell.
The blonde’s smile is bright, if brittle, and in the year since he’s returned it’s only gotten brittler. Junin finds himself pondering whether he masks his dissatisfaction as poorly as she does. It’s hard to miss how she looks at him sometimes, places a harder face over his. Less often now, but he still catches that faraway look, turns expecting Kunzite - or whatever the hell his name is now - to stride in. Sure, he’d like to know where the fucker’s gone, too. He can’t cherish the same cuddly memories of his commander she can, and yet he can’t begrudge the blonde her singular weakness.
Junin knows what it’s like to chase a ghost. To fall hopelessly behind.
“You okay? Horny Boss keeps checking you out and you haven’t even noticed. Quit playing hard to get,” she nudges him, and he realizes he hasn’t replied.
“Lot on my mind,” a muscle works in his jaw almost unconsciously. He’s already making up glib explanations before Minako laughs, like Christmas bells in his ears.
“Well, you don’t want to tell me about it, and I don’t want to hear about it.” She links her elbow in his, and her charm bracelet - all gold hearts, all pointy - digs deep into the skin of his upper arm. It’s bizarrely pleasant. “So let’s get shitfaced, shall we?”
They shall.
It could be the laughter thundering through his blood, erupting around them as they move from group to group, raucous and so easy to come by. Everything with her is so easy. No history to drown or buoy them; it’s the curling thrill of looking up at a skyscraper he’s designed for the first time in the making. Examining its gleaming metal skeleton, feeling its infinite possibilities thrumming under his fingertips.
It could be the shots with aforesaid horny boss. His limbs loosening and lengthening as the hours pick up pace. His world shrinking to isolated pinpoints of recollection. Fine hair at the base of her neck, a flaring nimbus in strobe lights. Lips at his ear - no, she’s just telling him she hates this song and her feet hurt, can they go?
It could be his skull spinning as they slump in the taxi, so much that his head settles over hers. She tucks into his Adam’s apple with a sigh, and he brushes silver glitter off her cheek. His knuckles come away wet, and he stares at the captured tear, befuddled until he hears the drowsy name escaping her lips.
It could be anything. Or nothing at all. And yet, the pain in his chest, unbidden.
…
Rei’s already holding out a cup of English Breakfast when the blonde staggers into the kitchen the next morning; two teabags, cream, Splenda. “Oh, God, thank you. Just how I like it,” she manages, wrapping her fingers around its warmth like a lifeline.
“I think I’d know that by now,” the priestess returns, closing the refrigerator door, and Minako’s surprised by the faintly amused light in her shadowed eyes.
Funny, because there used to be nothing Rei could do to surprise her in the least.
Looking at her, it’s painfully obvious she’s lost a tremendous amount of weight. Her simple sheath shows the ridges of her sternum, the jut of her hipbones. Still, she’s beautiful; hair coiled high, a slick of black laid over her lashes. And oh, dressed to kill.
Minako’s hair, by contrast, stinks of cigarettes and she’s pretty sure her lipstick’s feathered to Joker-like proportions. We’re all friends here, right? she reasons.
Though Rei’s tone is playful, she doesn’t quite meet Minako’s eyes, fidgeting with something in her hand. “By the looks of you, last night’s big party was a success.”
“If you call puking in the cab a success,” Junin enters the kitchen, showered and dressed as well. Okay. Now she’s regretting her Tanqueray-soaked smelliness.
“Speaking of you, drunkard,” she nods toward Minako. “Have you seen the baby shower pictures? There are some really good ones; I stuck them on the fridge.”
The priestess moves out of the way, and they both lean in to investigate. “Nice eye, I don’t even remember some of this stuff,” Junin remarks. “Who shot these?”
“Yours truly,” Rei hums, the sound smug. “Help me, Jun, I’m running late.”
He laughs, her hand in his, and now the blonde sees the creamy strand of pearls clustered in Rei’s palm. She inclines her head as he fastens the clasp at her nape, fingers brushing the delicate wisps loosened there. “Where are you going, looking so pretty?” Junin murmurs teasingly behind Rei’s ear, and her lips curve upward, soft.
Minako forces herself to look away.
“I’m going to Izaya’s gallery show thing with Ami,” her friend explains after a moment. “You two want to come? It’s until midnight, I heard there’s free food - ”
“You go have fun. Not my thing,” he shrugs. “So, about that thing at eight - ”
“Oh - God, I completely forgot.”
“Okay.” He takes a sip of his tea, measured. “Now you’ve remembered.”
“Okay,” Rei repeats, taking the bait. The blonde stares into her cup as her friend’s voice turns to ice. “Did you want me to clear the rest of my weekend, too?”
“Why, got too many graves on your schedule?”
The priestess puts down her tea; the porcelain makes no sound against the wood. Nor do her footfalls from the kitchen to the foyer. They don’t hear the front door close but feel her absence nonetheless, and Minako lets out a suppressed breath.
“What’s wrong with you? You - she - ” she breaks off. “She looked so happy.”
Junin doesn’t say anything and she presses ahead, too irritated to stop. She hasn’t seen him go after Rei like that, ever; not even when she’s probably deserved it. “Don’t even pretend like that just slipped out. Jadeite was never cruel by mistake. You know what someone said about you once? A silver tongue’s a sweeter name for a knife.”
His smile is scathing. “Of course he did. My commander always had a way with words, even if he didn’t use many of them. Any other gems of his wisdom, Venus?”
The unspoken name pounds beneath her ribcage, drowning out her retort. She’s sure he hears it too, sure that’s why neither of them can speak for a few seconds.
“Uh, I shouldn’t’ve…” at her frozen expression, Junin backtracks. “You know, Nobu and I were talking about him a few days ago. We think Kun - ”
“You’re apologizing to me and not Rei?” she cuts him off. “I know she’s sensitive nowadays. No - she’s impossible. But aren’t you glad she’s finally going out, having fun? God, Jun, wasn’t the accident bad enough without you guilting her about - ”
“We were fighting like this before the accident.” His fingers curl. “Today’s our anniversary. You really think I’m all butthurt because she’s ditching me for dinner?”
“It’s just a date on the calendar,” Minako offers gently, but he seems to not hear, bracing both forearms against the door frame like he means to break it. She always senses his awkwardness with Hikawa Jinja’s small spaces, and it’s got nothing to do with his average height. “Man up. It’s your job to forget anniversaries, not hers.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit. I’m glad she’s going out, doing stuff. But it’s like…” he rubs his temples. “Ami wasn’t sleeping next to her stretcher. Ami wasn’t taking her to the hospital bathroom. I was. Maybe it’s petty and fucked up, but I just keep thinking. What about us?” The bewilderment in his voice hurts. “What about me?”
“You have so much together,” she tries, and hears the end of the conversation.
“Do we?” He laughs; she winces. “Sometimes I think all we have are memories.”
Which ones? she’s tempted to ask. What wouldn’t Minako give for memories with him in this life, instead of dried-up, dessicated dreams of another existence? But those are her problems, not Junin’s. She waits until he’s mumbled something about the gym and left, and moves to examine the photographs on the refrigerator.
Her and Junin tangoing across Usagi’s parents’ backyard. They’re laughing too hard to really dance; she has this tiny problem with letting anyone lead her, and he talks like he’s Fred Astaire but ends up just dipping her a lot to look like he’s doing something.
Still, she likes the grass between her toes, the ominous sound in his voice when he tells her to shut up and let him do the work. The warmth of his palm on the small of her back, the freezing water in her dress when he tosses her into Shingo’s old kiddie pool.
She touches a yellow curl haloed in sunlight. Maybe we don’t need soulmates, she muses. What good has love eternal done her? Maybe we just need to be happy.
And the enormity of it strikes her, and Minako snatches her guilty hand back.
“Maybe,” she repeats to the mute photograph; there it hangs, edged and shining.
…
Late that night, Junin’s hunting around for his last clean pair of briefs when he notices the bathroom lamp’s switched on. Weird. He hadn’t heard her come in. Following the trail, he catches Rei’s reflection before she catches him, soft as pearl under dim lightbulbs. Her face is thoughtful as she absently pulls at her chignon.
“Let me,” he steps up, and her hands fall to her sides as he searches the lustrous mass for pins. Junin loves the heaviness of her hair in his hands, the slip through his fingers; this has been their ritual since Rei first asked him to come in for a drink, (sorry, no coffee or beer; small smile playing at her lips), and maybe before that, too.
It’s been a long time.
He takes the steps three at a time and crushes her laughing to the rusty screens, looses her buttons and her hooks and finally her hair, a dark cloak spread beneath them. What exhilaration, to rediscover every inch of her, to marvel at what’s the same and what’s different.
He hasn’t understood yet that nostalgia’s the pain of homecoming, not the pleasure. When he’s realized the truth, already his carelessness has made him promise her something and his conscience has made him keep it. They go on this way because they got a chance to, because they can - but in the accident’s angry wake, he’s starting to think maybe they just can’t.
The idea coils and burns inside him.
Contrary to what she says when she can’t not say…betrayal isn’t his second nature.
Or Junin hopes it isn’t.
“Sorry,” he whispers fiercely into the crown of her head. He is, but not for what he said. It’s just easier to apologize than analyze. His eyes search hers in the mirror. They’re the swirling dark of a vintage port his dad used to keep high out of his reach when he was a kid, and sometimes he feels just the same looking at them, despairing of ever understanding. “Honestly, I’m just…” everything sounds thorned. “A cretin.”
“No.” Rei looks down at the sink. “I haven’t…things haven’t been easy for you.”
He’s emboldened by the warm glow of reconciliation. “Rei, just talk to me - ”
“The police finally released his name,” she says, almost to herself. “It’s Arai - ”
Junin squeezes his eyes shut and tries to sound reasonable. “Stop it.”
“If I'd just taken out my earphones at that crossing...”
“This isn’t healthy. There's nothing you can do for him. What's past is past.”
“Easy for you to say,” Rei spits, suddenly a live coal in his arms. “I might as well've killed someone. What's past is past? You’d love to believe that, wouldn't you?”
What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Junin wants to ask. But the question lodges and smolders under his lungs like shrapnel. “Don’t,” he says weakly. “Please.”
“How does this play out?” she rages. “How do I just smile and move on - I’m a Senshi, I’m supposed to save people, not the other way around! Oh, if you knew, Jun - ”
“It was an accident.”
“It was my fault,” she chokes out before he covers her mouth with his.
Rei yanks almost angrily at his shirt collar; she hasn't let him touch her like this since even before the accident. Her mouth tastes of the spicy candies she can't resist a handful of before bed; in haste their teeth knock together, and ginger blossoms painfully on his lower lip before her tongue swirls over it. Suddenly there's not enough air in the humid bathroom. Junin picks her up and carries her to their futon.
She drags her fingertips over his forehead and cheekbones and chin, irises black as the pupils. Junin tries to settle his weight over her gently; she's gotten so thin she almost seems crushable. His practiced fingers find the slope of her breast, and though Rei moves the right way, murmurs and arches to his touch...instinct draws him back.
“What's wrong?” he hates the sour sound of it.
She averts her gaze. “Nothing. Keep going.”
Junin stares at her a moment before he rises to his feet, redoes the fly of his jeans. Disappointment slogs through his veins, a sludge that wearies him more than anger.
“Nothing, she says.”
She sits up, covering her breasts with the sheet. “Jun, don’t...” at his look she falters, then firms. “I’m sorry. I can’t…I can't. It has nothing to do with you. I swear.”
“Yeah.”
He stalks into the bathroom again, palm already dipping past the elastic of his underwear. His knuckles clench around his hard length, his eyes fall closed, and his thoughts drift to a place of their choosing. As his hand moves faster and faster, he hunches into himself; shoulderblades straining, chest rising and falling quickly.
Release comes far too soon to satisfy him, but it’ll do. As it sticks to his fingertips, Junin sags against the door, too drained to question why all in his mind’s eye is gold.
What’s in his heart isn’t a betrayal, so long as it stays and seethes there.
…
The overcast sun feels heavy on her shoulders; its pale light bounces off glittering concrete and back up again. By the time Minako reaches Hikawa Jinja, sweat layers her spine, the bends of her elbows and knees. She hardly notices, lost in reflection.
Today, she and Junin had enjoyed a liquid lunch and decided to call it an early weekend. Meandered out of the building at three o’clock, casting exaggerated looks of suspicion in every direction until they reached the metro, then doubled over and cracked up until their stomachs ached. Oh, she’s feeling guilty, but for all the wrong reasons. Today, she recalls with a twinge, they hadn’t talked about Rei at all.
Someone else they didn’t talk about…but then, those conversations are for Junin and the guys, and even then, only in the lazy melancholy that falls over an empty sea of beers. Of course, they all stopped broaching that topic with her a long, long time ago.
Minako’s got an anniversary to celebrate, too. A year since she started looking for him. A year she’s swung between drinking away his inconvenient memory, and despising the piece of shit he’s clearly become, because he’s got to be playing with them at this point. Playing with her…no, she doesn’t remember him as callous. She remembers him as kinder than she was, in fact, even in unkind circumstances. So today is a drinking sort of day.
Deep down, where love fortunes and lost liaisons are concealed, she’s no optimist. But isn’t there a dragonfly possibility, fine, fragile - that with his brothers’ return to this world, he’ll follow, someday, and her hopes with him? He’ll come. He won’t. He will. A refrain, like picking apart daisies, and Minako instantly feels like she’s in the seventh grade all over again, letting fate and flower petals decide. She always hated that crap.
“Already planning your Friday afternoon?” it filters through, and she tries on a grin.
“God, how old are we? Thirteen? Ditching work?”
“You were saving the world at thirteen,” but then Junin’s expression darkens. Irrationally, she wants to poke a finger between his knit eyebrows. “Not everything has to be so fucking serious, you know.”
“Two months since you-know-what and your girlfriend and my best friend is still depressed as shit,” Minako retorts as he hauls her up from the dingy metro bench.
His hand closes around her wrist, his thumb circles over her suddenly rapid pulse.
“You don’t have to do that,” he says, abruptly. “Hold her out. Like - like armor - ”
“Armor against what, Jun?” she interrupts rashly, and then, faced with his eyes gathering heat like gas flame, she jumps on the next train without looking back.
Minako realizes with a jolt that she’s already at the shrine; Rei’s sitting out on the steps, eyes trained on her laptop, a melting bowl of mochi beside her. The sight of her fills the blonde with a squirming sense of something she doesn’t wish to identify; ignoring it, she tiptoes up behind the other woman. “Gotcha!” she crows.
True to form, Rei doesn’t jump or shriek, but she can’t minimize the browser window fast enough for Minako to miss the opened tab. “Who’s Arai Kazu-what - ?”
“You can’t sneak up on me like that,” she replies coolly.
“No way to talk to your fearless leader,” Minako plops down beside her. The sweet sake loosens her tongue, makes her reckless. Tell me how to help you, she wants to say, but it emerges as something else altogether. “So when are you going to quit obsessing over this guy? I know what happened to him is awful, Rei, but you’ve - ”
“Been talking to Jun, I see.”
“So?” she rests her elbows on the steps, lifts her face to the clouding sky. Her head’s hurting, honing the edge of her voice. “Maybe he’s right. Maybe you should move on. Grieving is one thing, this is another. You can’t keep lashing out at him - ”
“You don’t know anything about it,” the other woman rises smoothly, dusts off her robes. “Death deserves respect. I know what my responsibilities are. I know - ”
“How to punish yourself,” Minako overrides. “How to live in the past.”
“Who are you to talk? Living in the past? You can’t even say his name out loud.”
Rei’s shadow falls such that the blonde can’t make out her expression, but she flinches to imagine it. There’s one other person in the world who can hurt her like this - like an equal - and Minako’s the dumbass trying her damnedest to find him.
“I can’t even say his name to myself,” she confesses quietly, and the dark-haired woman’s shoulders slump. Unlike Junin, she knows how to take the heat out of her friend’s rage. Like Junin, she also knows from experience that Rei’s arrows almost always find their beating target first. “I won’t act like I know how you feel. But don’t take it out on Jun. For my sake, Rei. Not everyone gets a second stab at the apple.”
A shudder goes through Rei; she tenses her slim hand on one of the cherry blossom tree trunks. Now Minako wishes she could see her face. “Whose side are you on, exactly?”
“No one’s side. I just want things to be good between you two. Jun and you have everything going for you, this time around. Don’t waste it. You love each other.”
“Love isn’t always enough.”
“That’s one I don’t think I’ll ever learn.” She’s grateful it emerges weightless.
They watch beribboned branches shake in air that smells of rain. She licks salt from her upper lip, presently feeling the need to press the obvious. “They’re all back, except him.” She hates the pathetic possibility she hears there, the hope bubbling up despite herself. “Do you think I’ll ever meet him again, Rei? What does the fire say?”
“Don’t ask me that, Minako,” the dark-haired woman says in her lowest voice. If Minako didn’t know the proud priestess better, she’d almost say she was begging.
“It’s bite at the apple, isn’t it?” she comments idly, after a few minutes pass, and thunder rumbles over the hills. “Not stab. Ugh. Why do I always screw these up?”
“You mixed it up with another one,” Rei observes distantly. A strong wind carries her friend’s voice to her, smelling of melted tar and mirages. “Stab in the back.”
…
“Hey, tell Nobu I’m bailing on you guys tonight,” he purposely waits until Mamoru's head is almost submerged to say it. He finishes his lap, strokes cutting swift and precise, and Junin can hardly believe he prefers running to swimming. But the Prince was a quick study when it came to just about any skill. Mamoru just talks about it - or anything else that might be considered personal - much less. Which is unfortunate, because Junin’s usual response to reticence is to talk. Much more.
On cue, Mamoru surfaces and fixes him with a look. “Sure. Something happen?”
“Yeah, forgot I made plans to catch a movie.”
He scrubs the chlorinated sting from his eyes. “You’re seeing a lot of her lately.”
“Spit it out,” he adjusts his goggles, hiding his eyes from view. “It’s too painful to watch you try and tiptoe around it. You’re about as subtle as a shit ton of bricks.”
“It,” the other man echoes, one thick black eyebrow raised ever so slightly. “You mean Minako, I’m guessing? Didn’t realize there was an...'it' to try and tiptoe around.”
Junin curses under his breath. A quick study, indeed. He casts about for a way to make Mamoru understand; it comes out of absolutely nowhere: “Can I tell you something?”
Mamoru nods briefly, and he continues without much idea of where he’s headed. “I think I told you my dad got transferred from Okinawa to San Diego when I was ten. It sucked. I didn’t know any English, and everyone kept saying ‘what a nice, quiet kid’ to my parents. Except I wasn’t a nice, quiet kid; I was a holy fucking terror. Here, I was funny, and popular, and probably kind of a bully, and there, I was a total douchebag because I didn’t have the words to be. You know. Myself.” He leans on the dank wall, not wanting to look over at Mamoru. “That’s how it’s been with Rei, lately. Like we don’t speak the same language. Like we don’t even know how to be friends - ”
He shuts his mouth immediately, stunned.
The other man nods again, slicking dark hair from his face, and Junin sees his carefully neutral expression through the fogged lens. It's a look he considers himself past master of, a look he taught the Prince in lessons of statecraft an age ago, a look that will serve the King well in years to come. It's a look he absolutely fucking loathes.
“Just be careful,” Mamoru says softly, before Junin's ears fill with watery noise.
…
“I thought we were going to the theater - ”
“We are. I left something at a friend’s place, it’ll just be a minute.”
They’re walking briskly along the water’s edge; behind them a stretch of high-rises Minako would have to sell the whole of her shoe collection (ah, one of the few real financial perks of fashion blogging) to afford a few months’ rent. Before them, a sunset setting fire to the waveless bay. Her Tokyo’s so unusually peaceful this evening, it’s hard to believe there’s a flash flood warning in effect around here before midnight.
Finally, the city seems to sigh.
As they ride up the elevator, she studies his aquiline profile in the glass. It’s sad. His are eyes lined from laughter, a mobile mouth accustomed to the same. Who knows? Maybe her features have started to settle like his. Unfulfilled. Or filled with regret.
“Your friend gave you his key?” she’s pulled from her reverie as he unlocks the door. They’re at the very top, Minako realizes as she surveys the studio, bare except for the scattered DVDs, a Wii, and a table that’s all edges. “Nice digs. Is he single?”
Junin chuckles. “He wishes.”
She’s too distracted by the floor-to-ceiling window to pay him attention. “Holy shit, Jun, come here! I’ve never seen this view before, it looks incredible, it looks like…”
Across the harbor, in the final flash of sunset, the highest buildings stab the lowest clouds, colorless and cold as diamond. Or crystal. The sweeping panorama suddenly looks familiar.
“It looks like the future,” Minako breathes out. “Those buildings are yours,” she turns, and belatedly notices the abused blue Chucks by the door. Junin rarely wears them now, but she recalls once trying to get pictures of him lacing them up for her blog, mostly because everything else he wore was so boring. Lacoste and Levis, SoCal prepster to the core. It’s like a slice of the sky, she’d exclaimed, and he’d rolled his eyes. That’s what my dealer in high school said too, Minako. Junin likes to do that, play up that lazy, laid-back posture. But underneath? All forty-five-degree angles. The first thing she’d thought when she walked into this apartment was that it couldn’t be further from Hikawa Jinja’s crumbling columns and rounded roofs.
“And - and this place is yours. You’re moving out of the shrine.”
He joins her at the window, handing her a beer as he does. “You know what’s funny?” he muses, seemingly apropos of nothing. “I have exactly one memory of you with Kunzite,” he ignores her twitch at the name. “It’s nothing special. Actually, it’s pretty retarded. The pair of you, riding into the palace courtyard from the desert. It was your first time, and you didn’t want to wear all the robes and hoods and things. I could tell because you two weren’t talking, and every visible inch of you - a lot of inches, by the way - was burned red. But that didn’t stop you: you charged right in on the fastest, whitest mare we had in the royal stables, and it definitely wasn’t any coincidence that what little you were wearing was white, too. So that’s all I saw at first. This whirl of white and gold pounding into the gate. You were trying not to smile, I think now, because everyone was gaping at you and your nudie entrance and you’d just fucking owned Kunzite. And you knew it. So you just looked around, very impressive, very tough shit with your sword and your chain, and you noticed me, for some reason. And you gave me the juiciest wink I’d seen outside the brothels in the caves.”
Minako opens her mouth at that, but Junin keeps talking, even faster, like the words are escaping him. “I’d never seen you do something like that before. Something funny. Playful. It was probably just to piss him off, but it made me think there was more to Venus than I thought - which, I’ll be honest, was nothing fit for your ears.”
“Venus could be kind of a bitch, sometimes,” the blonde concedes cautiously. She sees how it’s careening, signs whizzing past, but she doesn’t know how to stop it.
“It made me think…why couldn’t we be friends, back then?” He grips the windowsill as the first raindrops slap against it. “You know, the drama, the highs, the lows. The back and forth and the challenge. Yeah, exciting, I admit. But didn’t you get tired of it? Didn’t you want someone you could just make an asshole of yourself with?”
“You’re about to make an asshole of yourself right now,” she points out.
“Exactly. Wouldn’t have cost either of us anything, because we were…” Junin waves abstractedly at the ether. “With them. But we would’ve been happier. I know it.”
“Junin - ”
“You want Rei and I to work. More than we do. You want us to be the same. I want that, too. And I used to feel it - ” he takes her hand and puts it over his chest; she feels it tattoo into her palm. “Right here. That ache whenever I looked at her. My memory of it is intact. Indestructible. But I don’t feel it anymore. And I don’t know how to be with her anymore, either.” By necessity they’re closer now, and her quickening breath lifts curls from his face. “So tell me. Am I doing the right thing? Leaving?”
“I thought you went too fast,” Minako takes a fortifying sip and deliberately turns her gaze back out the window. It’s useless, though, because there’s nothing but blinding sheets of water pouring down. She doesn’t want to step backward because she knows he’ll step forward, and how many kinds of tricky would that be? “You fell into it because it was easy. Maybe you do need to think things through…take a break.”
“A break,” he says, and her fingers are brushing his chin now, stubbled and hard. How the hell did that happen? She lets her head rest against the glass and watches it blur. When she tries to think of Rei, her face refuses to materialize, and she has the childish urge to write her name in the condensation. He’s saying something, and she hears the shift in his tone, the strength gaining like a flood. “A break with the past.”
“Stop doing that - ” Minako doesn’t know if she’s referring to his twist on her words - Jadeite’s silver tongue again - or his mouth on the tender inside of her wrist, searing. That’s all Junin. But in the end, his kiss isn’t what collapses her inward like a house of cards. Instead, it’s his tears on her fingertips, as hot against her skin as the window is cold. The last thing she wonders is if he’s even conscious of producing them.
Is it really possible for someone to need her this much? the sheer power of it astonishes her as they sink together to the unsparing floorboards.
As they kiss each other in this place that smells of drywall, not dust.
As they burn the before without thought for the after.
…
IV. Catharsis
The slant of light across his eyes awakens him; he squints at the sunrise. This is not an hour he’s terribly acquainted with, nor is he familiar with the shooting pains up and down the muscles of his back when he tries sitting up. Junin stops trying, and instead stretches an arm across the rosy patch of floor, eyes falling closed. Minako is already gone, as he knew she would be. So is the storm. The white sky’s as pale as her skin, the sun’s as red as…Junin draws the blinds with a rough yank of the cord.
He’s not ready for recriminations yet. There’ll be time for that later. Plenty of it.
Instead, Junin winds the wheel of his memory. To hours earlier, when he’d traced the tan mark on her wrist where her charm bracelet circled it. When she’d opened her clear blue eyes and didn’t smile to see him, for once. Do you love me? she’d murmured, and he could tell it was the yes she feared, not the no. No, he’d answered, honestly. Strange to touch her, all of a sudden: even the simplicity of her hand seemed inaccessible to him. He was almost asleep when it emerged. No, but I could.
Even if he wanted to ask her the same, her absence is her answer. She’s like that. He once thought Minako was chasing ghosts; he now realizes it’s her ghosts chasing her. But if she were here, Junin isn’t sure how he’d look at her sleeping form, sprawled out in a pile of honeyed hair and legs. It might be with envy. Or it might be with pity.
…
Across town, Minako slides open the screen door of Rei’s room, slides her bare feet across the floor like a shadow, slides herself into the cozy futon with the other woman. She sighs noisily into the back of her neck, their skin clammy where it meets. They haven’t lain like this since they were teenagers, nestled tight against the shrine’s innumerable cracks and leaks that allowed winter inside. Just the familiar smell of her friend’s no-nonsense shampoo mixed with camellia oil is enough to make her throat heave and hurt. When did everything change? God, how the hell did she get here?
“Rei, Rei,” she chants feverishly into her ear. “Rei, I have something to - ”
“How long have you known?” the priestess asks, almost guttural. The blonde blinks back her own tears as best she can when she finds Rei also weeping. Her slender body racks with sobs, and Minako wraps her arms around her, startled. Some alarmed part of her wonders if his scent still clings to her skin. But no, there’s a piece of paper, crumpled and soaked from the other woman’s fist, and pressed into her palm.
“I’ve tried to tell you for so long,” she croaks. The ugly sound of it is jarring in the tranquil early hours. “Sometimes…the things you said. I thought you knew. Other times I wasn’t sure. But you had to know, you found the rest of them so easily. The way you looked at me sometimes. I know I - I pushed you away. And Jun. But I felt so guilty, having him here while you…”
Minako unfolds the thing carefully - she has to, it’s too fragile to decipher otherwise. When it opens, and a shaft of morning hits it just so, she can’t speak.
“I looked for more pictures, but it was impossible. He worked in intelligence. Something with security clearance. All I had to go on was…what I remembered.”
When the blonde remains silent, Rei continues, shaky. “I was crossing the street. I had my earphones in and I dropped my keys. I thought the light was red, but…someone shouted - he knew my name. I turned around at the brakes squealing, and he was already grabbing me. A suit, big shoulders, the tallest man I’ve ever seen. A briefcase falling into a rainbow. An oil puddle. But it was the eyes,” and she closes her own, lashes trembling. “From before. He remembered mine, too. I could tell he did.”
Minako strokes the flash of silver hair in the photograph with her fingertip, smears the cheap ink as the priestess whispers into the hush. “At the hospital, I hoped my mind was playing tricks on me. The drugs, I…it couldn’t be…it was just too ordinary. An auto accident. None of us were supposed to go like that. Especially not - not. Not someone like him. But here - ” She takes Minako’s limp hand and puts it to her breast, like Junin did. The blonde wants to cry at the sick parody, but the uncomplicated tears that flowed before are dried up.
“Here,” Rei’s voice breaks. “Here, I knew.”
The face of Arai Kazuhiko was a noble, handsome one, that she can tell from the grainy thumbnail: she can tell nothing about him was changed in the slightest.
All she wants is to rub at the lines until it’s just smudge and fog on paper. To erase him and her out of existence, back up the blameless channels of birth and rebirth.
“Can you forgive me?”
The dark-haired woman’s words are stolen from her own repentant mouth. She feels how they float around the both of them, disembodied. Wraiths. Minako dumbly watches them drift out the ajar window. And she keeps watching them, like a kid scanning the sky for balloons, as they pass the cherry blossom trees, skirt the empty street. Jump the park and skip the water. There, gradually, they fade from view.
Across the harbor, a tall skyscraper - the tallest - gleams like a spear.
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The quote “The bold are helpless without cleverness” is taken from Euripides. Also, peripeteia, anagnorisis, pathos, and catharsis are all stages/terms used in classical Greek tragedy, which I don't profess to know a single thing about, for reals :P
Tragedia
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III. Pathos
Inside, the music deafens; outside, it’s no more than a murky throb in his ears. Beyond the sticky railing, Aoyama opens neon eyes to the night. Junin leans on his elbows as the dreaming, teeming city presses in all around him. It carries a whiff of Minako’s perfume with it, and he blinks once, twice, unhurried. No spastic blonde; instead, leggy brunette with a penchant for Paco Rabanne. Nice. He was never much of a modelizer, but Minako’s got the right idea as usual, dragging him out of his hole.
After all, watching the women massage Usagi’s pregnant cankles and reminisce isn’t really Junin’s idea of a Friday evening. He’d rather hit the dive bars with Nobu, veg out on the Playstation with Izaya and Mamoru and a six-pack…or would he?
Nothing like a night with his boys, but since the accident…he hasn’t felt up to it, and they haven’t pushed it. Maybe Junin doesn’t want to depress them, not when they’re obviously so content. He knows Nobu’s started sleeping at Makoto’s five nights out of seven, that Izaya’s invited Ami to his gallery show this weekend. Mamoru…well, obviously. He doesn’t want their solicitous suggestions, their sidelong glances. Maybe he needs to be hanging out with someone as emotionally fucktarded as he is, and Minako - yeah, you’d never guess it just to look at the girl - fits the bill perfectly.
“Christ,” Junin mumbles. Now he can’t handle happy people. That’s wallowing.
But he can’t help it. On good days, the self-pity ebbs and flows with the hour, and on bad days it doesn’t ebb at all. Junin’s tried talking to her, tried leaving her alone. What hasn’t he tried? They used to squabble before the accident, sure. Slammed doors, mouthfuls of the unsaid. But now, it’s like those tubes sucked out all of Rei’s filters; every weapon in her arsenal is slung at him in anger. Even before she came back from the hospital, he’d played with the idea of counseling, then abandoned it. Between their past, present, and future, they’d probably end up giving the shrink issues.
Tonight, when Junin’s alone in his room (the one he rents, not the one they share), he’ll imagine her curled up in their futon, a few feet away. He’ll wait for the pain in his chest, quick and sharp. The phantom ache of legs twined with his, of sleepy hands reaching across the sheets. Of lost limbs. But the pain won’t come at his urging. It can’t be conjured or constructed. And so he’ll steal into their room to catch the moon trailing pale fingers through her hair. He’ll wonder if she still dreams of how they met, or if her night wanderings now lead her away from him. He’ll slip in beside her like a thief, blankets cold against his back. Only then, the pain will come.
“Hi. Hello?” Minako snaps her fingers in his face. “Drink for you,” he takes the highball balanced precariously between her thumbs. “And drinks for me,” she finishes, a martini in each hand, both dirty as hell.
The blonde’s smile is bright, if brittle, and in the year since he’s returned it’s only gotten brittler. Junin finds himself pondering whether he masks his dissatisfaction as poorly as she does. It’s hard to miss how she looks at him sometimes, places a harder face over his. Less often now, but he still catches that faraway look, turns expecting Kunzite - or whatever the hell his name is now - to stride in. Sure, he’d like to know where the fucker’s gone, too. He can’t cherish the same cuddly memories of his commander she can, and yet he can’t begrudge the blonde her singular weakness.
Junin knows what it’s like to chase a ghost. To fall hopelessly behind.
“You okay? Horny Boss keeps checking you out and you haven’t even noticed. Quit playing hard to get,” she nudges him, and he realizes he hasn’t replied.
“Lot on my mind,” a muscle works in his jaw almost unconsciously. He’s already making up glib explanations before Minako laughs, like Christmas bells in his ears.
“Well, you don’t want to tell me about it, and I don’t want to hear about it.” She links her elbow in his, and her charm bracelet - all gold hearts, all pointy - digs deep into the skin of his upper arm. It’s bizarrely pleasant. “So let’s get shitfaced, shall we?”
They shall.
It could be the laughter thundering through his blood, erupting around them as they move from group to group, raucous and so easy to come by. Everything with her is so easy. No history to drown or buoy them; it’s the curling thrill of looking up at a skyscraper he’s designed for the first time in the making. Examining its gleaming metal skeleton, feeling its infinite possibilities thrumming under his fingertips.
It could be the shots with aforesaid horny boss. His limbs loosening and lengthening as the hours pick up pace. His world shrinking to isolated pinpoints of recollection. Fine hair at the base of her neck, a flaring nimbus in strobe lights. Lips at his ear - no, she’s just telling him she hates this song and her feet hurt, can they go?
It could be his skull spinning as they slump in the taxi, so much that his head settles over hers. She tucks into his Adam’s apple with a sigh, and he brushes silver glitter off her cheek. His knuckles come away wet, and he stares at the captured tear, befuddled until he hears the drowsy name escaping her lips.
It could be anything. Or nothing at all. And yet, the pain in his chest, unbidden.
…
Rei’s already holding out a cup of English Breakfast when the blonde staggers into the kitchen the next morning; two teabags, cream, Splenda. “Oh, God, thank you. Just how I like it,” she manages, wrapping her fingers around its warmth like a lifeline.
“I think I’d know that by now,” the priestess returns, closing the refrigerator door, and Minako’s surprised by the faintly amused light in her shadowed eyes.
Funny, because there used to be nothing Rei could do to surprise her in the least.
Looking at her, it’s painfully obvious she’s lost a tremendous amount of weight. Her simple sheath shows the ridges of her sternum, the jut of her hipbones. Still, she’s beautiful; hair coiled high, a slick of black laid over her lashes. And oh, dressed to kill.
Minako’s hair, by contrast, stinks of cigarettes and she’s pretty sure her lipstick’s feathered to Joker-like proportions. We’re all friends here, right? she reasons.
Though Rei’s tone is playful, she doesn’t quite meet Minako’s eyes, fidgeting with something in her hand. “By the looks of you, last night’s big party was a success.”
“If you call puking in the cab a success,” Junin enters the kitchen, showered and dressed as well. Okay. Now she’s regretting her Tanqueray-soaked smelliness.
“Speaking of you, drunkard,” she nods toward Minako. “Have you seen the baby shower pictures? There are some really good ones; I stuck them on the fridge.”
The priestess moves out of the way, and they both lean in to investigate. “Nice eye, I don’t even remember some of this stuff,” Junin remarks. “Who shot these?”
“Yours truly,” Rei hums, the sound smug. “Help me, Jun, I’m running late.”
He laughs, her hand in his, and now the blonde sees the creamy strand of pearls clustered in Rei’s palm. She inclines her head as he fastens the clasp at her nape, fingers brushing the delicate wisps loosened there. “Where are you going, looking so pretty?” Junin murmurs teasingly behind Rei’s ear, and her lips curve upward, soft.
Minako forces herself to look away.
“I’m going to Izaya’s gallery show thing with Ami,” her friend explains after a moment. “You two want to come? It’s until midnight, I heard there’s free food - ”
“You go have fun. Not my thing,” he shrugs. “So, about that thing at eight - ”
“Oh - God, I completely forgot.”
“Okay.” He takes a sip of his tea, measured. “Now you’ve remembered.”
“Okay,” Rei repeats, taking the bait. The blonde stares into her cup as her friend’s voice turns to ice. “Did you want me to clear the rest of my weekend, too?”
“Why, got too many graves on your schedule?”
The priestess puts down her tea; the porcelain makes no sound against the wood. Nor do her footfalls from the kitchen to the foyer. They don’t hear the front door close but feel her absence nonetheless, and Minako lets out a suppressed breath.
“What’s wrong with you? You - she - ” she breaks off. “She looked so happy.”
Junin doesn’t say anything and she presses ahead, too irritated to stop. She hasn’t seen him go after Rei like that, ever; not even when she’s probably deserved it. “Don’t even pretend like that just slipped out. Jadeite was never cruel by mistake. You know what someone said about you once? A silver tongue’s a sweeter name for a knife.”
His smile is scathing. “Of course he did. My commander always had a way with words, even if he didn’t use many of them. Any other gems of his wisdom, Venus?”
The unspoken name pounds beneath her ribcage, drowning out her retort. She’s sure he hears it too, sure that’s why neither of them can speak for a few seconds.
“Uh, I shouldn’t’ve…” at her frozen expression, Junin backtracks. “You know, Nobu and I were talking about him a few days ago. We think Kun - ”
“You’re apologizing to me and not Rei?” she cuts him off. “I know she’s sensitive nowadays. No - she’s impossible. But aren’t you glad she’s finally going out, having fun? God, Jun, wasn’t the accident bad enough without you guilting her about - ”
“We were fighting like this before the accident.” His fingers curl. “Today’s our anniversary. You really think I’m all butthurt because she’s ditching me for dinner?”
“It’s just a date on the calendar,” Minako offers gently, but he seems to not hear, bracing both forearms against the door frame like he means to break it. She always senses his awkwardness with Hikawa Jinja’s small spaces, and it’s got nothing to do with his average height. “Man up. It’s your job to forget anniversaries, not hers.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit. I’m glad she’s going out, doing stuff. But it’s like…” he rubs his temples. “Ami wasn’t sleeping next to her stretcher. Ami wasn’t taking her to the hospital bathroom. I was. Maybe it’s petty and fucked up, but I just keep thinking. What about us?” The bewilderment in his voice hurts. “What about me?”
“You have so much together,” she tries, and hears the end of the conversation.
“Do we?” He laughs; she winces. “Sometimes I think all we have are memories.”
Which ones? she’s tempted to ask. What wouldn’t Minako give for memories with him in this life, instead of dried-up, dessicated dreams of another existence? But those are her problems, not Junin’s. She waits until he’s mumbled something about the gym and left, and moves to examine the photographs on the refrigerator.
Her and Junin tangoing across Usagi’s parents’ backyard. They’re laughing too hard to really dance; she has this tiny problem with letting anyone lead her, and he talks like he’s Fred Astaire but ends up just dipping her a lot to look like he’s doing something.
Still, she likes the grass between her toes, the ominous sound in his voice when he tells her to shut up and let him do the work. The warmth of his palm on the small of her back, the freezing water in her dress when he tosses her into Shingo’s old kiddie pool.
She touches a yellow curl haloed in sunlight. Maybe we don’t need soulmates, she muses. What good has love eternal done her? Maybe we just need to be happy.
And the enormity of it strikes her, and Minako snatches her guilty hand back.
“Maybe,” she repeats to the mute photograph; there it hangs, edged and shining.
…
Late that night, Junin’s hunting around for his last clean pair of briefs when he notices the bathroom lamp’s switched on. Weird. He hadn’t heard her come in. Following the trail, he catches Rei’s reflection before she catches him, soft as pearl under dim lightbulbs. Her face is thoughtful as she absently pulls at her chignon.
“Let me,” he steps up, and her hands fall to her sides as he searches the lustrous mass for pins. Junin loves the heaviness of her hair in his hands, the slip through his fingers; this has been their ritual since Rei first asked him to come in for a drink, (sorry, no coffee or beer; small smile playing at her lips), and maybe before that, too.
It’s been a long time.
He takes the steps three at a time and crushes her laughing to the rusty screens, looses her buttons and her hooks and finally her hair, a dark cloak spread beneath them. What exhilaration, to rediscover every inch of her, to marvel at what’s the same and what’s different.
He hasn’t understood yet that nostalgia’s the pain of homecoming, not the pleasure. When he’s realized the truth, already his carelessness has made him promise her something and his conscience has made him keep it. They go on this way because they got a chance to, because they can - but in the accident’s angry wake, he’s starting to think maybe they just can’t.
The idea coils and burns inside him.
Contrary to what she says when she can’t not say…betrayal isn’t his second nature.
Or Junin hopes it isn’t.
“Sorry,” he whispers fiercely into the crown of her head. He is, but not for what he said. It’s just easier to apologize than analyze. His eyes search hers in the mirror. They’re the swirling dark of a vintage port his dad used to keep high out of his reach when he was a kid, and sometimes he feels just the same looking at them, despairing of ever understanding. “Honestly, I’m just…” everything sounds thorned. “A cretin.”
“No.” Rei looks down at the sink. “I haven’t…things haven’t been easy for you.”
He’s emboldened by the warm glow of reconciliation. “Rei, just talk to me - ”
“The police finally released his name,” she says, almost to herself. “It’s Arai - ”
Junin squeezes his eyes shut and tries to sound reasonable. “Stop it.”
“If I'd just taken out my earphones at that crossing...”
“This isn’t healthy. There's nothing you can do for him. What's past is past.”
“Easy for you to say,” Rei spits, suddenly a live coal in his arms. “I might as well've killed someone. What's past is past? You’d love to believe that, wouldn't you?”
What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Junin wants to ask. But the question lodges and smolders under his lungs like shrapnel. “Don’t,” he says weakly. “Please.”
“How does this play out?” she rages. “How do I just smile and move on - I’m a Senshi, I’m supposed to save people, not the other way around! Oh, if you knew, Jun - ”
“It was an accident.”
“It was my fault,” she chokes out before he covers her mouth with his.
Rei yanks almost angrily at his shirt collar; she hasn't let him touch her like this since even before the accident. Her mouth tastes of the spicy candies she can't resist a handful of before bed; in haste their teeth knock together, and ginger blossoms painfully on his lower lip before her tongue swirls over it. Suddenly there's not enough air in the humid bathroom. Junin picks her up and carries her to their futon.
She drags her fingertips over his forehead and cheekbones and chin, irises black as the pupils. Junin tries to settle his weight over her gently; she's gotten so thin she almost seems crushable. His practiced fingers find the slope of her breast, and though Rei moves the right way, murmurs and arches to his touch...instinct draws him back.
“What's wrong?” he hates the sour sound of it.
She averts her gaze. “Nothing. Keep going.”
Junin stares at her a moment before he rises to his feet, redoes the fly of his jeans. Disappointment slogs through his veins, a sludge that wearies him more than anger.
“Nothing, she says.”
She sits up, covering her breasts with the sheet. “Jun, don’t...” at his look she falters, then firms. “I’m sorry. I can’t…I can't. It has nothing to do with you. I swear.”
“Yeah.”
He stalks into the bathroom again, palm already dipping past the elastic of his underwear. His knuckles clench around his hard length, his eyes fall closed, and his thoughts drift to a place of their choosing. As his hand moves faster and faster, he hunches into himself; shoulderblades straining, chest rising and falling quickly.
Release comes far too soon to satisfy him, but it’ll do. As it sticks to his fingertips, Junin sags against the door, too drained to question why all in his mind’s eye is gold.
What’s in his heart isn’t a betrayal, so long as it stays and seethes there.
…
The overcast sun feels heavy on her shoulders; its pale light bounces off glittering concrete and back up again. By the time Minako reaches Hikawa Jinja, sweat layers her spine, the bends of her elbows and knees. She hardly notices, lost in reflection.
Today, she and Junin had enjoyed a liquid lunch and decided to call it an early weekend. Meandered out of the building at three o’clock, casting exaggerated looks of suspicion in every direction until they reached the metro, then doubled over and cracked up until their stomachs ached. Oh, she’s feeling guilty, but for all the wrong reasons. Today, she recalls with a twinge, they hadn’t talked about Rei at all.
Someone else they didn’t talk about…but then, those conversations are for Junin and the guys, and even then, only in the lazy melancholy that falls over an empty sea of beers. Of course, they all stopped broaching that topic with her a long, long time ago.
Minako’s got an anniversary to celebrate, too. A year since she started looking for him. A year she’s swung between drinking away his inconvenient memory, and despising the piece of shit he’s clearly become, because he’s got to be playing with them at this point. Playing with her…no, she doesn’t remember him as callous. She remembers him as kinder than she was, in fact, even in unkind circumstances. So today is a drinking sort of day.
Deep down, where love fortunes and lost liaisons are concealed, she’s no optimist. But isn’t there a dragonfly possibility, fine, fragile - that with his brothers’ return to this world, he’ll follow, someday, and her hopes with him? He’ll come. He won’t. He will. A refrain, like picking apart daisies, and Minako instantly feels like she’s in the seventh grade all over again, letting fate and flower petals decide. She always hated that crap.
“Already planning your Friday afternoon?” it filters through, and she tries on a grin.
“God, how old are we? Thirteen? Ditching work?”
“You were saving the world at thirteen,” but then Junin’s expression darkens. Irrationally, she wants to poke a finger between his knit eyebrows. “Not everything has to be so fucking serious, you know.”
“Two months since you-know-what and your girlfriend and my best friend is still depressed as shit,” Minako retorts as he hauls her up from the dingy metro bench.
His hand closes around her wrist, his thumb circles over her suddenly rapid pulse.
“You don’t have to do that,” he says, abruptly. “Hold her out. Like - like armor - ”
“Armor against what, Jun?” she interrupts rashly, and then, faced with his eyes gathering heat like gas flame, she jumps on the next train without looking back.
Minako realizes with a jolt that she’s already at the shrine; Rei’s sitting out on the steps, eyes trained on her laptop, a melting bowl of mochi beside her. The sight of her fills the blonde with a squirming sense of something she doesn’t wish to identify; ignoring it, she tiptoes up behind the other woman. “Gotcha!” she crows.
True to form, Rei doesn’t jump or shriek, but she can’t minimize the browser window fast enough for Minako to miss the opened tab. “Who’s Arai Kazu-what - ?”
“You can’t sneak up on me like that,” she replies coolly.
“No way to talk to your fearless leader,” Minako plops down beside her. The sweet sake loosens her tongue, makes her reckless. Tell me how to help you, she wants to say, but it emerges as something else altogether. “So when are you going to quit obsessing over this guy? I know what happened to him is awful, Rei, but you’ve - ”
“Been talking to Jun, I see.”
“So?” she rests her elbows on the steps, lifts her face to the clouding sky. Her head’s hurting, honing the edge of her voice. “Maybe he’s right. Maybe you should move on. Grieving is one thing, this is another. You can’t keep lashing out at him - ”
“You don’t know anything about it,” the other woman rises smoothly, dusts off her robes. “Death deserves respect. I know what my responsibilities are. I know - ”
“How to punish yourself,” Minako overrides. “How to live in the past.”
“Who are you to talk? Living in the past? You can’t even say his name out loud.”
Rei’s shadow falls such that the blonde can’t make out her expression, but she flinches to imagine it. There’s one other person in the world who can hurt her like this - like an equal - and Minako’s the dumbass trying her damnedest to find him.
“I can’t even say his name to myself,” she confesses quietly, and the dark-haired woman’s shoulders slump. Unlike Junin, she knows how to take the heat out of her friend’s rage. Like Junin, she also knows from experience that Rei’s arrows almost always find their beating target first. “I won’t act like I know how you feel. But don’t take it out on Jun. For my sake, Rei. Not everyone gets a second stab at the apple.”
A shudder goes through Rei; she tenses her slim hand on one of the cherry blossom tree trunks. Now Minako wishes she could see her face. “Whose side are you on, exactly?”
“No one’s side. I just want things to be good between you two. Jun and you have everything going for you, this time around. Don’t waste it. You love each other.”
“Love isn’t always enough.”
“That’s one I don’t think I’ll ever learn.” She’s grateful it emerges weightless.
They watch beribboned branches shake in air that smells of rain. She licks salt from her upper lip, presently feeling the need to press the obvious. “They’re all back, except him.” She hates the pathetic possibility she hears there, the hope bubbling up despite herself. “Do you think I’ll ever meet him again, Rei? What does the fire say?”
“Don’t ask me that, Minako,” the dark-haired woman says in her lowest voice. If Minako didn’t know the proud priestess better, she’d almost say she was begging.
“It’s bite at the apple, isn’t it?” she comments idly, after a few minutes pass, and thunder rumbles over the hills. “Not stab. Ugh. Why do I always screw these up?”
“You mixed it up with another one,” Rei observes distantly. A strong wind carries her friend’s voice to her, smelling of melted tar and mirages. “Stab in the back.”
…
“Hey, tell Nobu I’m bailing on you guys tonight,” he purposely waits until Mamoru's head is almost submerged to say it. He finishes his lap, strokes cutting swift and precise, and Junin can hardly believe he prefers running to swimming. But the Prince was a quick study when it came to just about any skill. Mamoru just talks about it - or anything else that might be considered personal - much less. Which is unfortunate, because Junin’s usual response to reticence is to talk. Much more.
On cue, Mamoru surfaces and fixes him with a look. “Sure. Something happen?”
“Yeah, forgot I made plans to catch a movie.”
He scrubs the chlorinated sting from his eyes. “You’re seeing a lot of her lately.”
“Spit it out,” he adjusts his goggles, hiding his eyes from view. “It’s too painful to watch you try and tiptoe around it. You’re about as subtle as a shit ton of bricks.”
“It,” the other man echoes, one thick black eyebrow raised ever so slightly. “You mean Minako, I’m guessing? Didn’t realize there was an...'it' to try and tiptoe around.”
Junin curses under his breath. A quick study, indeed. He casts about for a way to make Mamoru understand; it comes out of absolutely nowhere: “Can I tell you something?”
Mamoru nods briefly, and he continues without much idea of where he’s headed. “I think I told you my dad got transferred from Okinawa to San Diego when I was ten. It sucked. I didn’t know any English, and everyone kept saying ‘what a nice, quiet kid’ to my parents. Except I wasn’t a nice, quiet kid; I was a holy fucking terror. Here, I was funny, and popular, and probably kind of a bully, and there, I was a total douchebag because I didn’t have the words to be. You know. Myself.” He leans on the dank wall, not wanting to look over at Mamoru. “That’s how it’s been with Rei, lately. Like we don’t speak the same language. Like we don’t even know how to be friends - ”
He shuts his mouth immediately, stunned.
The other man nods again, slicking dark hair from his face, and Junin sees his carefully neutral expression through the fogged lens. It's a look he considers himself past master of, a look he taught the Prince in lessons of statecraft an age ago, a look that will serve the King well in years to come. It's a look he absolutely fucking loathes.
“Just be careful,” Mamoru says softly, before Junin's ears fill with watery noise.
…
“I thought we were going to the theater - ”
“We are. I left something at a friend’s place, it’ll just be a minute.”
They’re walking briskly along the water’s edge; behind them a stretch of high-rises Minako would have to sell the whole of her shoe collection (ah, one of the few real financial perks of fashion blogging) to afford a few months’ rent. Before them, a sunset setting fire to the waveless bay. Her Tokyo’s so unusually peaceful this evening, it’s hard to believe there’s a flash flood warning in effect around here before midnight.
Finally, the city seems to sigh.
As they ride up the elevator, she studies his aquiline profile in the glass. It’s sad. His are eyes lined from laughter, a mobile mouth accustomed to the same. Who knows? Maybe her features have started to settle like his. Unfulfilled. Or filled with regret.
“Your friend gave you his key?” she’s pulled from her reverie as he unlocks the door. They’re at the very top, Minako realizes as she surveys the studio, bare except for the scattered DVDs, a Wii, and a table that’s all edges. “Nice digs. Is he single?”
Junin chuckles. “He wishes.”
She’s too distracted by the floor-to-ceiling window to pay him attention. “Holy shit, Jun, come here! I’ve never seen this view before, it looks incredible, it looks like…”
Across the harbor, in the final flash of sunset, the highest buildings stab the lowest clouds, colorless and cold as diamond. Or crystal. The sweeping panorama suddenly looks familiar.
“It looks like the future,” Minako breathes out. “Those buildings are yours,” she turns, and belatedly notices the abused blue Chucks by the door. Junin rarely wears them now, but she recalls once trying to get pictures of him lacing them up for her blog, mostly because everything else he wore was so boring. Lacoste and Levis, SoCal prepster to the core. It’s like a slice of the sky, she’d exclaimed, and he’d rolled his eyes. That’s what my dealer in high school said too, Minako. Junin likes to do that, play up that lazy, laid-back posture. But underneath? All forty-five-degree angles. The first thing she’d thought when she walked into this apartment was that it couldn’t be further from Hikawa Jinja’s crumbling columns and rounded roofs.
“And - and this place is yours. You’re moving out of the shrine.”
He joins her at the window, handing her a beer as he does. “You know what’s funny?” he muses, seemingly apropos of nothing. “I have exactly one memory of you with Kunzite,” he ignores her twitch at the name. “It’s nothing special. Actually, it’s pretty retarded. The pair of you, riding into the palace courtyard from the desert. It was your first time, and you didn’t want to wear all the robes and hoods and things. I could tell because you two weren’t talking, and every visible inch of you - a lot of inches, by the way - was burned red. But that didn’t stop you: you charged right in on the fastest, whitest mare we had in the royal stables, and it definitely wasn’t any coincidence that what little you were wearing was white, too. So that’s all I saw at first. This whirl of white and gold pounding into the gate. You were trying not to smile, I think now, because everyone was gaping at you and your nudie entrance and you’d just fucking owned Kunzite. And you knew it. So you just looked around, very impressive, very tough shit with your sword and your chain, and you noticed me, for some reason. And you gave me the juiciest wink I’d seen outside the brothels in the caves.”
Minako opens her mouth at that, but Junin keeps talking, even faster, like the words are escaping him. “I’d never seen you do something like that before. Something funny. Playful. It was probably just to piss him off, but it made me think there was more to Venus than I thought - which, I’ll be honest, was nothing fit for your ears.”
“Venus could be kind of a bitch, sometimes,” the blonde concedes cautiously. She sees how it’s careening, signs whizzing past, but she doesn’t know how to stop it.
“It made me think…why couldn’t we be friends, back then?” He grips the windowsill as the first raindrops slap against it. “You know, the drama, the highs, the lows. The back and forth and the challenge. Yeah, exciting, I admit. But didn’t you get tired of it? Didn’t you want someone you could just make an asshole of yourself with?”
“You’re about to make an asshole of yourself right now,” she points out.
“Exactly. Wouldn’t have cost either of us anything, because we were…” Junin waves abstractedly at the ether. “With them. But we would’ve been happier. I know it.”
“Junin - ”
“You want Rei and I to work. More than we do. You want us to be the same. I want that, too. And I used to feel it - ” he takes her hand and puts it over his chest; she feels it tattoo into her palm. “Right here. That ache whenever I looked at her. My memory of it is intact. Indestructible. But I don’t feel it anymore. And I don’t know how to be with her anymore, either.” By necessity they’re closer now, and her quickening breath lifts curls from his face. “So tell me. Am I doing the right thing? Leaving?”
“I thought you went too fast,” Minako takes a fortifying sip and deliberately turns her gaze back out the window. It’s useless, though, because there’s nothing but blinding sheets of water pouring down. She doesn’t want to step backward because she knows he’ll step forward, and how many kinds of tricky would that be? “You fell into it because it was easy. Maybe you do need to think things through…take a break.”
“A break,” he says, and her fingers are brushing his chin now, stubbled and hard. How the hell did that happen? She lets her head rest against the glass and watches it blur. When she tries to think of Rei, her face refuses to materialize, and she has the childish urge to write her name in the condensation. He’s saying something, and she hears the shift in his tone, the strength gaining like a flood. “A break with the past.”
“Stop doing that - ” Minako doesn’t know if she’s referring to his twist on her words - Jadeite’s silver tongue again - or his mouth on the tender inside of her wrist, searing. That’s all Junin. But in the end, his kiss isn’t what collapses her inward like a house of cards. Instead, it’s his tears on her fingertips, as hot against her skin as the window is cold. The last thing she wonders is if he’s even conscious of producing them.
Is it really possible for someone to need her this much? the sheer power of it astonishes her as they sink together to the unsparing floorboards.
As they kiss each other in this place that smells of drywall, not dust.
As they burn the before without thought for the after.
…
IV. Catharsis
The slant of light across his eyes awakens him; he squints at the sunrise. This is not an hour he’s terribly acquainted with, nor is he familiar with the shooting pains up and down the muscles of his back when he tries sitting up. Junin stops trying, and instead stretches an arm across the rosy patch of floor, eyes falling closed. Minako is already gone, as he knew she would be. So is the storm. The white sky’s as pale as her skin, the sun’s as red as…Junin draws the blinds with a rough yank of the cord.
He’s not ready for recriminations yet. There’ll be time for that later. Plenty of it.
Instead, Junin winds the wheel of his memory. To hours earlier, when he’d traced the tan mark on her wrist where her charm bracelet circled it. When she’d opened her clear blue eyes and didn’t smile to see him, for once. Do you love me? she’d murmured, and he could tell it was the yes she feared, not the no. No, he’d answered, honestly. Strange to touch her, all of a sudden: even the simplicity of her hand seemed inaccessible to him. He was almost asleep when it emerged. No, but I could.
Even if he wanted to ask her the same, her absence is her answer. She’s like that. He once thought Minako was chasing ghosts; he now realizes it’s her ghosts chasing her. But if she were here, Junin isn’t sure how he’d look at her sleeping form, sprawled out in a pile of honeyed hair and legs. It might be with envy. Or it might be with pity.
…
Across town, Minako slides open the screen door of Rei’s room, slides her bare feet across the floor like a shadow, slides herself into the cozy futon with the other woman. She sighs noisily into the back of her neck, their skin clammy where it meets. They haven’t lain like this since they were teenagers, nestled tight against the shrine’s innumerable cracks and leaks that allowed winter inside. Just the familiar smell of her friend’s no-nonsense shampoo mixed with camellia oil is enough to make her throat heave and hurt. When did everything change? God, how the hell did she get here?
“Rei, Rei,” she chants feverishly into her ear. “Rei, I have something to - ”
“How long have you known?” the priestess asks, almost guttural. The blonde blinks back her own tears as best she can when she finds Rei also weeping. Her slender body racks with sobs, and Minako wraps her arms around her, startled. Some alarmed part of her wonders if his scent still clings to her skin. But no, there’s a piece of paper, crumpled and soaked from the other woman’s fist, and pressed into her palm.
“I’ve tried to tell you for so long,” she croaks. The ugly sound of it is jarring in the tranquil early hours. “Sometimes…the things you said. I thought you knew. Other times I wasn’t sure. But you had to know, you found the rest of them so easily. The way you looked at me sometimes. I know I - I pushed you away. And Jun. But I felt so guilty, having him here while you…”
Minako unfolds the thing carefully - she has to, it’s too fragile to decipher otherwise. When it opens, and a shaft of morning hits it just so, she can’t speak.
“I looked for more pictures, but it was impossible. He worked in intelligence. Something with security clearance. All I had to go on was…what I remembered.”
When the blonde remains silent, Rei continues, shaky. “I was crossing the street. I had my earphones in and I dropped my keys. I thought the light was red, but…someone shouted - he knew my name. I turned around at the brakes squealing, and he was already grabbing me. A suit, big shoulders, the tallest man I’ve ever seen. A briefcase falling into a rainbow. An oil puddle. But it was the eyes,” and she closes her own, lashes trembling. “From before. He remembered mine, too. I could tell he did.”
Minako strokes the flash of silver hair in the photograph with her fingertip, smears the cheap ink as the priestess whispers into the hush. “At the hospital, I hoped my mind was playing tricks on me. The drugs, I…it couldn’t be…it was just too ordinary. An auto accident. None of us were supposed to go like that. Especially not - not. Not someone like him. But here - ” She takes Minako’s limp hand and puts it to her breast, like Junin did. The blonde wants to cry at the sick parody, but the uncomplicated tears that flowed before are dried up.
“Here,” Rei’s voice breaks. “Here, I knew.”
The face of Arai Kazuhiko was a noble, handsome one, that she can tell from the grainy thumbnail: she can tell nothing about him was changed in the slightest.
All she wants is to rub at the lines until it’s just smudge and fog on paper. To erase him and her out of existence, back up the blameless channels of birth and rebirth.
“Can you forgive me?”
The dark-haired woman’s words are stolen from her own repentant mouth. She feels how they float around the both of them, disembodied. Wraiths. Minako dumbly watches them drift out the ajar window. And she keeps watching them, like a kid scanning the sky for balloons, as they pass the cherry blossom trees, skirt the empty street. Jump the park and skip the water. There, gradually, they fade from view.
Across the harbor, a tall skyscraper - the tallest - gleams like a spear.
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The quote “The bold are helpless without cleverness” is taken from Euripides. Also, peripeteia, anagnorisis, pathos, and catharsis are all stages/terms used in classical Greek tragedy, which I don't profess to know a single thing about, for reals :P