fic: Blue Star
Title: Blue Star
Author: prologuesized
Pairing: Akame
Rating: R
Genre: AU, Angst, Tragedy, Romance
Beta by: -
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: Pi's gone and Ryo and Jin are desperately looking for a replacement, ending up kidnapping a certain Kamenashi Kazuya to force him to adapt the role. Jin wakes up to see he's in too deep to escape his wrong star colour.
Author Note: I've already mentioned I got the line He's number 26 and counting down stuck in my head and needed to write a fic for it. After ages of trying to figure out who the hell they were in this fic, this happened. Oh. What a depressing Word explosion...
But I do quite love it. ...I swear I've been at work too much. I mean, the whole star thing XD Sorry but the space movies in the planetarium are too captivating.
And I really have to warn about the angst level. Let's just say psycho came from Criminal Minds and supersad angst Of Mice and Men. Finished reading that at school today and almost cried at the end. Fuck dammit. I don't cry...
Wordcount: 3,800
Blue Star
The atmosphere is low, and the evening sky is the colour of an eerie, pale and cold blue. He exhales a long spiral of smoke from his lungs and feels the autumn in his cool fingers, a reminder of an eternity of gravity in his swollen brains.
“Anxiety?” Ryo heaves and two numb pupils meet each other, one pair shying away. He sniffs and rubs his goose-bumped arm, drops his faintly lit cigarette to the ground and stomps it.
It’s been forever since remorse. Remorse belongs to the days of bleached blond hair and exhilarating childhood giggles, days with no scraping fingernails and unnerving, prevailing silence.
He pushes the small button of his lighter (click) and places one of his fingers in the flickering flame. It burns and hurts and he leans against the small balcony’s fence, arching his neck back. Ryo follows him with curious eyes, watches his violently shaking hand before taking the small object away and flicking it away as far as he can throw. He’s no pitcher and as Jin follows the barely visible dark silhouette he hears his old belonging giving out a metallic sound that cuts the silence as it collides with a parked car.
Lights flare on and the alarm in the car goes off. Ryo stomps his own cigarette and pulls him from the fabric covering his shoulder briefly, heading in.
He watches the starry night sky and wonders why the stars aren’t all white anymore. The pale blue and crimson insist on staring down on him.
Thermal differences, he thinks as he turns around, lost in his thoughts. He’s not the only star out there. He’s not the only one with a changing atmosphere.
He’s a special star, raging from cold blue to yellow gold, snow white and crimson red. He’ll never be seen and categorized like those alike him are.
“Jin,” Ryo appears on the doorframe again, pulling at his fingers. He hears a ripping sound and fears of shattering stars as he turns his eyes back at his friend, back at the deceivingly soft dark brown eyes.
“Inside,” Ryo continues and turns away to walk back in and Jin can feel the thermal change in his hand as Ryo’s fingers slowly slip away. His hand, not much extended in the first place, falls back to his side limply and he lowers his eyes, stepping back inside the hollowness of the house, closing the door behind him with a silent click.
It’s always a click. Such a snappy sound.
He studies the stars glowing in the darkness of his room, the ones he has glued to his ceiling with the help of his lonely metal chair, and wonders why they are green.
Illusions can be distorted easily.
--
He’s a quivering mass of bones and sharp edges strapped to a chair, dark hair gently caressing his shoulders. He’s long ago stopped crying but the spark of resistance is there thus he isn’t qualified. He’s just a broken piece of living organisms.
Jin sits in the room quietly, listening to the two young male’s separately timed breaths. He’s not capable of guilt yet - it comes before remorse but with the burning red marks drawn to his back he hardly feels anything.
“He wants to throw you away,” Jin tells him with a quiet voice. “Like a dirty old rag.”
He hears the boy sniff, his head limply falling just a bit forward, lips pressed together to stop the trembling. He’s an ugly decoration to the ugly room with dust gathering around. It tastes as a thick layer on his tongue whenever he steps in, a bitter reminder of the awful flashes his brains try to force in his still-remembering eyes. Or maybe it’s the other way around. He isn’t quite so sure anymore.
“Can you sing me a song?” he requests. “Can you sing like him so he can let you stay?”
The boy remains silent, only sniffing again. The corner of Jin’s lips twitches and he looks down at his hands, studying his burned fingertips. One is strapped with a bandage, one Ryo insisted he put on. It’s in excruciating pain, the tip of his left pinky. Raw and frail.
He knows the boy’s name. It’s Kame. Kamenashi something. He always wore brilliantly shining smiles and moved with an enviable confidence. But that image of him only seems like a mere phantom of the past anymore.
Jin appreciates phantom pain. It’s often there somewhere around his heart. His heart owns no stars, only toxic gases. Lately it feels like so anyway.
Because he’s number 26 and counting down.
The shakily laughing figure from back row seat 3 is forever gone now.
The door bangs open and he pulls himself into a tight ball, taking cover. Ryo grabs his hair and forces him on his feet, giving him a harsh blow on his left cheek. He flinches but doesn’t struggle away. Kame doesn’t dare raising his gaze anymore.
It’s not so unusual.
“Don’t come here alone, Bakanishi,” Ryo growls through his strained jaw and Jin looks down with his shoulders raised high, shying away. Then the man sighs and blinks tears from his eyes, pulling him into a soft embrace and rubbing his back and neck, combing fingers through his dark, dry curls. Jin wraps his arms around the shorter boy’s figure as well, forgiving him. He understands.
It wasn’t always so.
“Don’t cry,” Ryo tells him with a softer voice, still caressing his locks and burying his face in his hair.
“I’m not crying,” he answers and withdraws to prove his point, two pairs of anguish eyes glowing in the dark.
“Don’t get attached,” Ryo pleads him, caressing the back of his hand. “He’s not… him. He’s not going to stay. He’ll never be him.”
Pi, he means. He’ll never be Pi. Something they both already know.
A shaky voice tries to sing. A voice breaking and hoarse, raw with despair. As Jin looks at him his whole body shakes violently, bits and pieces of his own self painfully being ripped away as he tries to take over the voice that isn’t his own.
Jin closes his eyes and listens.
It’s not him. But it could be. He could remember wrong. Memories faded and fell apart. Eventually faces were lost.
He could’ve been him.
He watches the breaking boy singing even more frantically as Ryo kneels before him, wrapping his arms around his skinny, tiny form and embracing his midriff. Jin can hear the quiet clinking sound as numbers and numbers are being added to the boy’s remaining time.
He sits back on the ground and leans against the wall.
He knows something in his hazy, corrupted state of brain. The one that has been taught and trained to treat lies as truths.
It is never going to be Pi, and he is never going to come back. Searches are futile.
He is number 26 and counting down after all.
--
Lights play an awfully important part in Jin’s history and present, his self and what-not. It’s always the lights and it’s always going to be - the first time he had decided so had been when he had been a mere fourteen year old boy holding a red penlight his uncle had brought to him as a present. It was then he first learned to see them properly. The glow of their depths and their futile attempts to reach so much more before they faded and disappeared. And in the end he couldn’t see where the light ended anymore.
It had been the street-lights that had enfolded him when Pi had been gone. It was among them he felt at place, and somehow then people just disappeared, dropped out on a different frequency. Since then, for a while, it was just him.
Without Ryo he wouldn’t be there anymore, not with the people. Without Ryo he’d still be forever-nothing among the out-dying neon lights and street-light spotlights. Maybe a victim of a too fast car-light.
Ryo doesn’t have the lights. He’s just a chained prisoner of the arctic reality. It had turned him into an iceberg as well.
His snowing was silent and gentle. But the cracking of the ice was not.
“Do you think he will..?” Jin voices out from the other side of the room, voice fading towards the end. Ryo looks at him, a small bottle of cheap beer barely in the hold of his hand anymore.
Ryo shrugs and puts the bottle down, staring at the plain ceiling Jin finds uninteresting. Who knows.
Ryo needs him so. Otherwise he’s uninteresting and only a hindrance.
Jin misses the days he was able to smile.
Lights had taken their Pi away. Lights faster than speeding cars, faster than the falling ice-cold raindrops that feel like slashes on numbing skin.
He remembers the sad look on his friend’s eyes for quite a while before the lights had come to collect the previous supernova away from him.
He’s just a little star, cool and red. He wants to be the previous delightful yellow or the raging blue, the raging blue Ryo sometimes carries.
His temperature is so low it isn’t heating up again. It’s like watching a candle burn out. Scary when he thinks of it as a comparison.
Red stars are bound to be out cold soon.
--
He sits down in-between the bound boy’s legs and the boy tries to smile, tries to force himself to take the role demanded from him.
“Jin,” he tries to laugh with a shrilly voice, a pitchy hitch to the frail sound. “Don’t be sad. There’s no reason to be sad, I’m here. You can tell me what’s wrong.”
Hardly. He has learned to be silent, something that wasn’t an original characteristic of his. He wraps his arms around the boy’s thin shins. For a while it feels as if he would’ve been sitting in a swing in a park, but the illusion only lasts for a short while. They’re often fast gone.
“You’re no one anymore,” he tells the boy and feels him flinch, fearful of the following events, the words that are dancing on Jin’s thickened tongue. Jin holds his fragile future in his hands and he knows it. He acknowledges his situation.
“…Or are you him?” he wonders aloud and slowly rises on his feet, taking a hold of Kame’s face and forcing him to look at him. And no matter how blurry his memory of his friend is becoming, he isn’t able to fool himself into ignoring the dissimilarity. The thin eyes and the crooked nose.
He wants to believe the work they’re doing to fit him into his new frame.
It angers him. And for once, he flares up.
Like a blue star he burns and boils, fingers twitching and entire body shaking in agony as he stares at him, disgust taking over his mind.
It’s only so little for him to snap after all.
“YOU FUCKING LIAR!” he roars at him in fury and grabs a pair of scissors from the table. Kame shrieks and cries out in panic as he forcefully grabs his hair, his dirty, wrong hair, and then he laughs, a hysteric and frail little child’s laughter. He doesn’t know what innocence is anymore.
“I know how much you love a straight line,” he tells him with an adoring little child’s voice, he tells him lovingly as he cuts cuts and cuts his hair and then the fury takes over him and he cuts more, ripping some of his hair off with his bare hands. It’s not him, the way he’s shaking and fearing him. Tired of the fear of the place, the closing-in walls.
“Why don’t you love it, why don’t you love me anymore?” he sobs as the scissors fall from his hand and hit the ground, the voice echoing in the room. Kame’s still shaking and hyperventilating, limbs cold.
He embraces him, the never-Pi, and Kame tries to sing with his breaking voice that sends chills down Jin’s spine.
“Don’t,” he whispers to him and presses his head next to his, holding him gently. “You don’t have to lie to me anymore. I know.”
He covers the younger boy’s lips as he tries to insist. And then exhaustion takes over him and he can feel the drop in the temperature. In his space-separate atmosphere.
“…I liked you better back then,” he tells him and smoothes his hair with shaking hands. “I liked you better as yourself. Before he saw you and we ruined you. Before he made me ruin you too.”
Kame gulps and Jin walks to kneel down before him. He finally manages to better lock their gazes and the turmoil he sees is enough to clench his weak stomach.
“Are you crazy now?” he asks quietly, crossing his arms and shaking, tearing his gaze to look away. “Did we… are you..?”
And then Kame’s all silent again. His life depends on his performance and he’s deadly afraid of the fatal mistakes he withholds within. Jin fidgets as he stands up better.
“If you’re not I-I’d like to talk to you every now and then,” he tells him, still unable to face the mess before him. “I don’t feel quite sane anymore.”
For a while it’s quiet in the room and he remembers the space silence he hates, the one he’s come to know since Pi’s passing. Nothing speaks to cut the thick air anymore.
“Me either,” the boy finally whispers back and he raises his gaze. And then they’re both exhausted again.
Kame has stardust in his eyes. Jin is afraid he’s out cold already.
--
He washes Kame’s now shorter hair, fingers gently scrubbing his scalp. Kame doesn’t sing around him anymore, he doesn’t smile and talk with a fake-happy voice. He’s mostly quiet.
It’s a silent agreement, the thing between them. Just a little bit of support and well-kept secrets was what they shared, what the two of them had between them. Things not reserved for Ryo’s sick-fallen malicious ears.
His burned finger burns so badly his hand shakes and every now and then convulses. Kame doesn’t say a word. He’s seen the bandage.
“Will I eventually die?” Kame asks him with a defeated voice, one that doesn’t withhold much fear anymore, the message being voiced out like a mere statement rather than a question. Jin bites his lip.
The correct answer would most likely be a cruel yes, but he doesn’t want to say it. It doesn’t suit his lips anymore.
“…I’m lost in frequencies,” he tells the boy instead, sharing his own mind. Opening it for the other one. “Do you believe in parallel universes?”
Kame shrugs as he rinses his hair. Jin massages Kame’s painfully tense shoulders with uncertainty. He sniffs and wipes his nose with his water-dripping wrist.
“I feel like I’m not here,” Jin tells Kame. “Distant. Like I’m watching a movie but I’m not in the picture.”
“Mm,” Kame nods slowly. “…I get it.”
“I want to get away,” Jin continues, even more quiet and hesitant, eyes unfocused as his rubbing ceases. “I want to disappear.”
“There’s no place in the world for me anymore,” Kame speaks his mind, true to himself as he is. “I don’t feel the way I used to feel.”
“I don’t have anything out there for me anymore,” Jin says even more quietly, voice quivering. “It’s useless, I’m gone already.”
Their fingers meet and brush against each other.
“I want to go underwater,” Kame whispers, expression tired and long gone.
Jin pulls him out of the bath and wraps him in a towel, patting him dry.
They hug. Quietly, gently. Tiredly.
It’s almost underwater.
Stars weren’t supposed to go underwater.
--
Ryo’s getting more anxious day by day. Jin sits by his side and has his arm wrapped around his head, holding him gently against his shoulder. For Ryo it’s only him in the world anymore. Everything else has eventually fallen out.
“I love your personal star sky,” Ryo tells him with an exhausted whisper as they lay side by side, jammed into Jin’s small one-sized bed. The luminous wonder stars don’t twinkle, they don’t budge high above them.
“Me too,” he answers him, shifting a little to see them better. “But they’re green.”
“Only a bit,” Ryo notes. “Why does it matter so much?”
“…It feels as if the stars are sick,” Jin whispers with a gentle voice, hand reaching out towards the stars, never quite reaching. “There’s nothing I can do to help them.”
“…I get that,” Ryo murmurs gently, turning his gaze to look at him. “…Sometimes you’re the same.”
“Mm?” Jin mumbles concernedly, sitting up on the bed. Ryo stays lying where he is, only extending his arm to press his hand on his arm, trying to be there for him.
“A green star,” he continues with a grieving voice. “Something that fell sick and I can’t help it. There’s nothing I can do to make you glow right again.”
Jin looks into his hands, hair tickling his shoulders weakly. And suddenly he hates his own glow.
“They’re toxic,” he grunts quietly, voice barely audible. “I’m infected. The lights infected me. It’s always the lights.”
Ryo doesn’t hush him. They stay where they are until after some time Ryo’s fast asleep.
Jin’s one with his sad, green stars.
--
Kame’s not bound anymore. Hasn’t been for a while.
First he kept walking around the room endlessly, hour after hour in-between the short breaks he was sleeping on the futon they had gotten for him. Now, after some time, the excessive behaviour has calmed down but Jin can tell he feels solitary. He only knows it becomes dark after a red star has burned out.
They are sitting side by side on the futon, just the two of them. When they can be Kame and Jin. When they can be their hopeless selves.
“I want to burn again”, he tells Kame softly, fingers brushing against each other. Kame studies him with his radiating gaze. The same gaze which had felt so much colder before. “I want to burn a delightful yellow.”
“I remember,” Kame whispers. “You and yellow. I remember seeing you and yellow. Like the sun.”
“The sun is a star,” Jin agrees. “A yellow star.”
Kame caresses his hair and their faces are close. As they breathe they can feel the tingle of the gentle heaves against their faces. Jin doesn’t know what life is anymore.
But he knows he glows just a bit more yellow when only Kame is around.
“I can make you a yellow star,” Kame whispers to him, hands slowly and gently wrapping around his nape. He licks his upper lip, almost as if as a nervous gesture. Jin nods, sucking his own ones.
“This is Stockholm Syndrome,” Kame whispers against his face. “Nothing more.”
“…I love you,” Jin answers. “Nothing less.”
And it isn’t anything less anymore.
The kiss is like tumbling on an unfamiliar ground. It’s slow, hesitant and far from perfect with two rough, ragged lips and not yet quite clicking teamwork.
It’s the way Kame tilts his head and pulls him closer that flares up his tired flames. That awakens the hidden heat wrapped somewhere within.
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” Kame says with a broken and shrilly voice, teardrops drawing lines on his cheeks. For Jin it feels as if his arms were shattering, starting slowly from his fingertips and moving up.
Jin doesn’t want Kame to get cold like all the previous ones. Cold and stiff like a disgusting puppet.
“I’ll take you away,” he promises. “Somewhere.”
They don’t have a place in the world, no. It’s a scary place, like being on a field with open fire.
It’s just so hard to live the life of an infected green star anymore.
--
Jin holds one of the green stars from his ceiling in his hand as they run. He carries a piece of the part of him he struggles so hard to leave behind.
Kame holds his other hand. They run until they’re out of breath and then they continue stumbling and Kame’s weak knees give in for a few times. After hours of trying to pull out their disappearing act they sit on the rooftop of a random city building and shiver in the cold wind under the beautiful, starry sky.
“S-so where do we go from now?” Jin breathes out the question they don’t know the answer to, the question only time is able to tell them. Kame sits by his side and buries his face in his shoulder, grasping the fabric of his sleeve exhaustedly. His eyes burn.
“…Look forward,” he asks him and Jin turns to look at him, eyes wondering, just a little spark more life in them. Kame kisses him on the lips with quivering lips and turns his head forward as he sneaks to his back, one hand on his shoulder. The hand shakes and presses tightly.
“Just look forward,” he tells with a shaky yet gentle voice and Jin feels overpowered by the love as he does as he’s told, eyes gazing in the mass of rooftops, city-lights and a night sky all right before his eyes.
“That’s where we’re going,” Kame continues and kisses his nape, pressing his head in the crook weakly. “To the stars.”
“…Are you going to start burning again?” Jin wonders aloud. Kame laughs a teary laugh.
“I already am, Jin,” he tells the older man gently and removes his hand from his shoulder, moving it to brush his hair. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“Kame?” Jin voices out worriedly, trying to turn his head but Kame forces it back the way he had previously positioned it. Jin’s heart starts beating just a bit faster.
“…Just look at the stars, Jin,” he tells him and keeps combing his hair with loving touches. “We’ll become stars on the night sky too. Just remember that. Because you’re going to be a yellow star, one very much like our lovely sun, and I’m going to be right beside you. A frail red light.”
“And one day we’ll collide,” Jin carries on with a sweet and hypnotized voice, eyes glossed. “And then we’ll burn as one. Burn so hot we’re going to become blue.”
“Just remember that,” Kame whispers and a few teardrops graze his nape.
“I will,” he answers hoarsely. “…I will, Kame.”
Kame strikes a knife through Jin’s ribs, coordinated enough to hit the heart. He plucks the knife away and holds the gasping Jin, shivering Jin. The decaying Jin.
The limp body falls to the ground, almost as if he’s sleeping.
Never has he shone so bright before.
Kame positions the knife on his own chest and closes his eyes.
There isn’t a place in this world for them.
Author: prologuesized
Pairing: Akame
Rating: R
Genre: AU, Angst, Tragedy, Romance
Beta by: -
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: Pi's gone and Ryo and Jin are desperately looking for a replacement, ending up kidnapping a certain Kamenashi Kazuya to force him to adapt the role. Jin wakes up to see he's in too deep to escape his wrong star colour.
Author Note: I've already mentioned I got the line He's number 26 and counting down stuck in my head and needed to write a fic for it. After ages of trying to figure out who the hell they were in this fic, this happened. Oh. What a depressing Word explosion...
But I do quite love it. ...I swear I've been at work too much. I mean, the whole star thing XD Sorry but the space movies in the planetarium are too captivating.
And I really have to warn about the angst level. Let's just say psycho came from Criminal Minds and supersad angst Of Mice and Men. Finished reading that at school today and almost cried at the end. Fuck dammit. I don't cry...
Wordcount: 3,800
Blue Star
The atmosphere is low, and the evening sky is the colour of an eerie, pale and cold blue. He exhales a long spiral of smoke from his lungs and feels the autumn in his cool fingers, a reminder of an eternity of gravity in his swollen brains.
“Anxiety?” Ryo heaves and two numb pupils meet each other, one pair shying away. He sniffs and rubs his goose-bumped arm, drops his faintly lit cigarette to the ground and stomps it.
It’s been forever since remorse. Remorse belongs to the days of bleached blond hair and exhilarating childhood giggles, days with no scraping fingernails and unnerving, prevailing silence.
He pushes the small button of his lighter (click) and places one of his fingers in the flickering flame. It burns and hurts and he leans against the small balcony’s fence, arching his neck back. Ryo follows him with curious eyes, watches his violently shaking hand before taking the small object away and flicking it away as far as he can throw. He’s no pitcher and as Jin follows the barely visible dark silhouette he hears his old belonging giving out a metallic sound that cuts the silence as it collides with a parked car.
Lights flare on and the alarm in the car goes off. Ryo stomps his own cigarette and pulls him from the fabric covering his shoulder briefly, heading in.
He watches the starry night sky and wonders why the stars aren’t all white anymore. The pale blue and crimson insist on staring down on him.
Thermal differences, he thinks as he turns around, lost in his thoughts. He’s not the only star out there. He’s not the only one with a changing atmosphere.
He’s a special star, raging from cold blue to yellow gold, snow white and crimson red. He’ll never be seen and categorized like those alike him are.
“Jin,” Ryo appears on the doorframe again, pulling at his fingers. He hears a ripping sound and fears of shattering stars as he turns his eyes back at his friend, back at the deceivingly soft dark brown eyes.
“Inside,” Ryo continues and turns away to walk back in and Jin can feel the thermal change in his hand as Ryo’s fingers slowly slip away. His hand, not much extended in the first place, falls back to his side limply and he lowers his eyes, stepping back inside the hollowness of the house, closing the door behind him with a silent click.
It’s always a click. Such a snappy sound.
He studies the stars glowing in the darkness of his room, the ones he has glued to his ceiling with the help of his lonely metal chair, and wonders why they are green.
Illusions can be distorted easily.
--
He’s a quivering mass of bones and sharp edges strapped to a chair, dark hair gently caressing his shoulders. He’s long ago stopped crying but the spark of resistance is there thus he isn’t qualified. He’s just a broken piece of living organisms.
Jin sits in the room quietly, listening to the two young male’s separately timed breaths. He’s not capable of guilt yet - it comes before remorse but with the burning red marks drawn to his back he hardly feels anything.
“He wants to throw you away,” Jin tells him with a quiet voice. “Like a dirty old rag.”
He hears the boy sniff, his head limply falling just a bit forward, lips pressed together to stop the trembling. He’s an ugly decoration to the ugly room with dust gathering around. It tastes as a thick layer on his tongue whenever he steps in, a bitter reminder of the awful flashes his brains try to force in his still-remembering eyes. Or maybe it’s the other way around. He isn’t quite so sure anymore.
“Can you sing me a song?” he requests. “Can you sing like him so he can let you stay?”
The boy remains silent, only sniffing again. The corner of Jin’s lips twitches and he looks down at his hands, studying his burned fingertips. One is strapped with a bandage, one Ryo insisted he put on. It’s in excruciating pain, the tip of his left pinky. Raw and frail.
He knows the boy’s name. It’s Kame. Kamenashi something. He always wore brilliantly shining smiles and moved with an enviable confidence. But that image of him only seems like a mere phantom of the past anymore.
Jin appreciates phantom pain. It’s often there somewhere around his heart. His heart owns no stars, only toxic gases. Lately it feels like so anyway.
Because he’s number 26 and counting down.
The shakily laughing figure from back row seat 3 is forever gone now.
The door bangs open and he pulls himself into a tight ball, taking cover. Ryo grabs his hair and forces him on his feet, giving him a harsh blow on his left cheek. He flinches but doesn’t struggle away. Kame doesn’t dare raising his gaze anymore.
It’s not so unusual.
“Don’t come here alone, Bakanishi,” Ryo growls through his strained jaw and Jin looks down with his shoulders raised high, shying away. Then the man sighs and blinks tears from his eyes, pulling him into a soft embrace and rubbing his back and neck, combing fingers through his dark, dry curls. Jin wraps his arms around the shorter boy’s figure as well, forgiving him. He understands.
It wasn’t always so.
“Don’t cry,” Ryo tells him with a softer voice, still caressing his locks and burying his face in his hair.
“I’m not crying,” he answers and withdraws to prove his point, two pairs of anguish eyes glowing in the dark.
“Don’t get attached,” Ryo pleads him, caressing the back of his hand. “He’s not… him. He’s not going to stay. He’ll never be him.”
Pi, he means. He’ll never be Pi. Something they both already know.
A shaky voice tries to sing. A voice breaking and hoarse, raw with despair. As Jin looks at him his whole body shakes violently, bits and pieces of his own self painfully being ripped away as he tries to take over the voice that isn’t his own.
Jin closes his eyes and listens.
It’s not him. But it could be. He could remember wrong. Memories faded and fell apart. Eventually faces were lost.
He could’ve been him.
He watches the breaking boy singing even more frantically as Ryo kneels before him, wrapping his arms around his skinny, tiny form and embracing his midriff. Jin can hear the quiet clinking sound as numbers and numbers are being added to the boy’s remaining time.
He sits back on the ground and leans against the wall.
He knows something in his hazy, corrupted state of brain. The one that has been taught and trained to treat lies as truths.
It is never going to be Pi, and he is never going to come back. Searches are futile.
He is number 26 and counting down after all.
--
Lights play an awfully important part in Jin’s history and present, his self and what-not. It’s always the lights and it’s always going to be - the first time he had decided so had been when he had been a mere fourteen year old boy holding a red penlight his uncle had brought to him as a present. It was then he first learned to see them properly. The glow of their depths and their futile attempts to reach so much more before they faded and disappeared. And in the end he couldn’t see where the light ended anymore.
It had been the street-lights that had enfolded him when Pi had been gone. It was among them he felt at place, and somehow then people just disappeared, dropped out on a different frequency. Since then, for a while, it was just him.
Without Ryo he wouldn’t be there anymore, not with the people. Without Ryo he’d still be forever-nothing among the out-dying neon lights and street-light spotlights. Maybe a victim of a too fast car-light.
Ryo doesn’t have the lights. He’s just a chained prisoner of the arctic reality. It had turned him into an iceberg as well.
His snowing was silent and gentle. But the cracking of the ice was not.
“Do you think he will..?” Jin voices out from the other side of the room, voice fading towards the end. Ryo looks at him, a small bottle of cheap beer barely in the hold of his hand anymore.
Ryo shrugs and puts the bottle down, staring at the plain ceiling Jin finds uninteresting. Who knows.
Ryo needs him so. Otherwise he’s uninteresting and only a hindrance.
Jin misses the days he was able to smile.
Lights had taken their Pi away. Lights faster than speeding cars, faster than the falling ice-cold raindrops that feel like slashes on numbing skin.
He remembers the sad look on his friend’s eyes for quite a while before the lights had come to collect the previous supernova away from him.
He’s just a little star, cool and red. He wants to be the previous delightful yellow or the raging blue, the raging blue Ryo sometimes carries.
His temperature is so low it isn’t heating up again. It’s like watching a candle burn out. Scary when he thinks of it as a comparison.
Red stars are bound to be out cold soon.
--
He sits down in-between the bound boy’s legs and the boy tries to smile, tries to force himself to take the role demanded from him.
“Jin,” he tries to laugh with a shrilly voice, a pitchy hitch to the frail sound. “Don’t be sad. There’s no reason to be sad, I’m here. You can tell me what’s wrong.”
Hardly. He has learned to be silent, something that wasn’t an original characteristic of his. He wraps his arms around the boy’s thin shins. For a while it feels as if he would’ve been sitting in a swing in a park, but the illusion only lasts for a short while. They’re often fast gone.
“You’re no one anymore,” he tells the boy and feels him flinch, fearful of the following events, the words that are dancing on Jin’s thickened tongue. Jin holds his fragile future in his hands and he knows it. He acknowledges his situation.
“…Or are you him?” he wonders aloud and slowly rises on his feet, taking a hold of Kame’s face and forcing him to look at him. And no matter how blurry his memory of his friend is becoming, he isn’t able to fool himself into ignoring the dissimilarity. The thin eyes and the crooked nose.
He wants to believe the work they’re doing to fit him into his new frame.
It angers him. And for once, he flares up.
Like a blue star he burns and boils, fingers twitching and entire body shaking in agony as he stares at him, disgust taking over his mind.
It’s only so little for him to snap after all.
“YOU FUCKING LIAR!” he roars at him in fury and grabs a pair of scissors from the table. Kame shrieks and cries out in panic as he forcefully grabs his hair, his dirty, wrong hair, and then he laughs, a hysteric and frail little child’s laughter. He doesn’t know what innocence is anymore.
“I know how much you love a straight line,” he tells him with an adoring little child’s voice, he tells him lovingly as he cuts cuts and cuts his hair and then the fury takes over him and he cuts more, ripping some of his hair off with his bare hands. It’s not him, the way he’s shaking and fearing him. Tired of the fear of the place, the closing-in walls.
“Why don’t you love it, why don’t you love me anymore?” he sobs as the scissors fall from his hand and hit the ground, the voice echoing in the room. Kame’s still shaking and hyperventilating, limbs cold.
He embraces him, the never-Pi, and Kame tries to sing with his breaking voice that sends chills down Jin’s spine.
“Don’t,” he whispers to him and presses his head next to his, holding him gently. “You don’t have to lie to me anymore. I know.”
He covers the younger boy’s lips as he tries to insist. And then exhaustion takes over him and he can feel the drop in the temperature. In his space-separate atmosphere.
“…I liked you better back then,” he tells him and smoothes his hair with shaking hands. “I liked you better as yourself. Before he saw you and we ruined you. Before he made me ruin you too.”
Kame gulps and Jin walks to kneel down before him. He finally manages to better lock their gazes and the turmoil he sees is enough to clench his weak stomach.
“Are you crazy now?” he asks quietly, crossing his arms and shaking, tearing his gaze to look away. “Did we… are you..?”
And then Kame’s all silent again. His life depends on his performance and he’s deadly afraid of the fatal mistakes he withholds within. Jin fidgets as he stands up better.
“If you’re not I-I’d like to talk to you every now and then,” he tells him, still unable to face the mess before him. “I don’t feel quite sane anymore.”
For a while it’s quiet in the room and he remembers the space silence he hates, the one he’s come to know since Pi’s passing. Nothing speaks to cut the thick air anymore.
“Me either,” the boy finally whispers back and he raises his gaze. And then they’re both exhausted again.
Kame has stardust in his eyes. Jin is afraid he’s out cold already.
--
He washes Kame’s now shorter hair, fingers gently scrubbing his scalp. Kame doesn’t sing around him anymore, he doesn’t smile and talk with a fake-happy voice. He’s mostly quiet.
It’s a silent agreement, the thing between them. Just a little bit of support and well-kept secrets was what they shared, what the two of them had between them. Things not reserved for Ryo’s sick-fallen malicious ears.
His burned finger burns so badly his hand shakes and every now and then convulses. Kame doesn’t say a word. He’s seen the bandage.
“Will I eventually die?” Kame asks him with a defeated voice, one that doesn’t withhold much fear anymore, the message being voiced out like a mere statement rather than a question. Jin bites his lip.
The correct answer would most likely be a cruel yes, but he doesn’t want to say it. It doesn’t suit his lips anymore.
“…I’m lost in frequencies,” he tells the boy instead, sharing his own mind. Opening it for the other one. “Do you believe in parallel universes?”
Kame shrugs as he rinses his hair. Jin massages Kame’s painfully tense shoulders with uncertainty. He sniffs and wipes his nose with his water-dripping wrist.
“I feel like I’m not here,” Jin tells Kame. “Distant. Like I’m watching a movie but I’m not in the picture.”
“Mm,” Kame nods slowly. “…I get it.”
“I want to get away,” Jin continues, even more quiet and hesitant, eyes unfocused as his rubbing ceases. “I want to disappear.”
“There’s no place in the world for me anymore,” Kame speaks his mind, true to himself as he is. “I don’t feel the way I used to feel.”
“I don’t have anything out there for me anymore,” Jin says even more quietly, voice quivering. “It’s useless, I’m gone already.”
Their fingers meet and brush against each other.
“I want to go underwater,” Kame whispers, expression tired and long gone.
Jin pulls him out of the bath and wraps him in a towel, patting him dry.
They hug. Quietly, gently. Tiredly.
It’s almost underwater.
Stars weren’t supposed to go underwater.
--
Ryo’s getting more anxious day by day. Jin sits by his side and has his arm wrapped around his head, holding him gently against his shoulder. For Ryo it’s only him in the world anymore. Everything else has eventually fallen out.
“I love your personal star sky,” Ryo tells him with an exhausted whisper as they lay side by side, jammed into Jin’s small one-sized bed. The luminous wonder stars don’t twinkle, they don’t budge high above them.
“Me too,” he answers him, shifting a little to see them better. “But they’re green.”
“Only a bit,” Ryo notes. “Why does it matter so much?”
“…It feels as if the stars are sick,” Jin whispers with a gentle voice, hand reaching out towards the stars, never quite reaching. “There’s nothing I can do to help them.”
“…I get that,” Ryo murmurs gently, turning his gaze to look at him. “…Sometimes you’re the same.”
“Mm?” Jin mumbles concernedly, sitting up on the bed. Ryo stays lying where he is, only extending his arm to press his hand on his arm, trying to be there for him.
“A green star,” he continues with a grieving voice. “Something that fell sick and I can’t help it. There’s nothing I can do to make you glow right again.”
Jin looks into his hands, hair tickling his shoulders weakly. And suddenly he hates his own glow.
“They’re toxic,” he grunts quietly, voice barely audible. “I’m infected. The lights infected me. It’s always the lights.”
Ryo doesn’t hush him. They stay where they are until after some time Ryo’s fast asleep.
Jin’s one with his sad, green stars.
--
Kame’s not bound anymore. Hasn’t been for a while.
First he kept walking around the room endlessly, hour after hour in-between the short breaks he was sleeping on the futon they had gotten for him. Now, after some time, the excessive behaviour has calmed down but Jin can tell he feels solitary. He only knows it becomes dark after a red star has burned out.
They are sitting side by side on the futon, just the two of them. When they can be Kame and Jin. When they can be their hopeless selves.
“I want to burn again”, he tells Kame softly, fingers brushing against each other. Kame studies him with his radiating gaze. The same gaze which had felt so much colder before. “I want to burn a delightful yellow.”
“I remember,” Kame whispers. “You and yellow. I remember seeing you and yellow. Like the sun.”
“The sun is a star,” Jin agrees. “A yellow star.”
Kame caresses his hair and their faces are close. As they breathe they can feel the tingle of the gentle heaves against their faces. Jin doesn’t know what life is anymore.
But he knows he glows just a bit more yellow when only Kame is around.
“I can make you a yellow star,” Kame whispers to him, hands slowly and gently wrapping around his nape. He licks his upper lip, almost as if as a nervous gesture. Jin nods, sucking his own ones.
“This is Stockholm Syndrome,” Kame whispers against his face. “Nothing more.”
“…I love you,” Jin answers. “Nothing less.”
And it isn’t anything less anymore.
The kiss is like tumbling on an unfamiliar ground. It’s slow, hesitant and far from perfect with two rough, ragged lips and not yet quite clicking teamwork.
It’s the way Kame tilts his head and pulls him closer that flares up his tired flames. That awakens the hidden heat wrapped somewhere within.
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” Kame says with a broken and shrilly voice, teardrops drawing lines on his cheeks. For Jin it feels as if his arms were shattering, starting slowly from his fingertips and moving up.
Jin doesn’t want Kame to get cold like all the previous ones. Cold and stiff like a disgusting puppet.
“I’ll take you away,” he promises. “Somewhere.”
They don’t have a place in the world, no. It’s a scary place, like being on a field with open fire.
It’s just so hard to live the life of an infected green star anymore.
--
Jin holds one of the green stars from his ceiling in his hand as they run. He carries a piece of the part of him he struggles so hard to leave behind.
Kame holds his other hand. They run until they’re out of breath and then they continue stumbling and Kame’s weak knees give in for a few times. After hours of trying to pull out their disappearing act they sit on the rooftop of a random city building and shiver in the cold wind under the beautiful, starry sky.
“S-so where do we go from now?” Jin breathes out the question they don’t know the answer to, the question only time is able to tell them. Kame sits by his side and buries his face in his shoulder, grasping the fabric of his sleeve exhaustedly. His eyes burn.
“…Look forward,” he asks him and Jin turns to look at him, eyes wondering, just a little spark more life in them. Kame kisses him on the lips with quivering lips and turns his head forward as he sneaks to his back, one hand on his shoulder. The hand shakes and presses tightly.
“Just look forward,” he tells with a shaky yet gentle voice and Jin feels overpowered by the love as he does as he’s told, eyes gazing in the mass of rooftops, city-lights and a night sky all right before his eyes.
“That’s where we’re going,” Kame continues and kisses his nape, pressing his head in the crook weakly. “To the stars.”
“…Are you going to start burning again?” Jin wonders aloud. Kame laughs a teary laugh.
“I already am, Jin,” he tells the older man gently and removes his hand from his shoulder, moving it to brush his hair. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“Kame?” Jin voices out worriedly, trying to turn his head but Kame forces it back the way he had previously positioned it. Jin’s heart starts beating just a bit faster.
“…Just look at the stars, Jin,” he tells him and keeps combing his hair with loving touches. “We’ll become stars on the night sky too. Just remember that. Because you’re going to be a yellow star, one very much like our lovely sun, and I’m going to be right beside you. A frail red light.”
“And one day we’ll collide,” Jin carries on with a sweet and hypnotized voice, eyes glossed. “And then we’ll burn as one. Burn so hot we’re going to become blue.”
“Just remember that,” Kame whispers and a few teardrops graze his nape.
“I will,” he answers hoarsely. “…I will, Kame.”
Kame strikes a knife through Jin’s ribs, coordinated enough to hit the heart. He plucks the knife away and holds the gasping Jin, shivering Jin. The decaying Jin.
The limp body falls to the ground, almost as if he’s sleeping.
Never has he shone so bright before.
Kame positions the knife on his own chest and closes his eyes.
There isn’t a place in this world for them.