Fic: Like a Heart Needs a Beat [Tekkon Kinkreet; PG-13; Kuro/Shiro]
Fandom: Tekkon Kinkreet
Title: Like a Heart Needs a Beat
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Kuro/Shiro-ish.
Warnings: Some violence, purple prose & mental illness, I guess.
Summary: In which Shiro asks about women and Kuro learns some things about himself.
A/N: Title taken from "Apologize" by OneRepublic.
Shiro is sixteen when he asks Kuro about women.
"Women are trouble," Kuro says, voice as careful and firm as his gaze. He knows Shiro about as well as he knows himself, which sometimes isn't very well at all.
Shiro scratches his floppy-eared rabbit hat lopsided. "All women?" he wonders aloud. "There's gotta be some nice ones." He nods to himself, sure. "There's gotta be."
Kuro jams his hands into his pockets. Clenches. Relaxes. Shiro worries at a scabbed-over pimple on his chin in the silence. Then, Kuro smiles softly, without teeth, and suggests, "Why don't we go to the sea today?"
Shiro's face lights up like a firework, delight blossoming out of his eyes, captivating and brilliant. He laughs in a lower voice than Kuro expects. "Really, Kuro? Really?"
"Really," promises Kuro, and Shiro can hear the sadness in his voice.
Once they are away from the bustle and stale air of the city, Shiro pulls down the smudged glass of all the windows in the train car, and invisible spirals of wind whip his hair over and off and over and off his eyes. He's everywhere, poking his head out of all the windows to see as much as he can, talking with rich, wide gestures about swimming to China and back, about battling a rabid dolphin into submission and equipping it with gigantic lasers, about building a castle out of shells so high that he'll be able to pick stars out of the sky like cherries. "I'll put 'em in my pockets, and all those stars will be for Kuro. Every single one."
The faint lines on Kuro's forehead smoothen. He doesn't look outside as they roll past people and the places and things they changed. He looks at Shiro.
Together, they run down to the frothy shoreline, shedding clothes like dandelion fluff. Their bare feet hardly skim the hot sand below before kicking off, legs stretching forward. Kuro wonders when it was that Shiro became a little bit taller than him, a little bit faster. Shiro's back seems gold and focused. Kuro reaches a hand out, to brush against it, maybe, but Shiro is too quick. He dives into the surf, and Kuro dives in too, as though afraid he will lose him.
As the sun slips past the curve of the distant ocean, Kuro and Shiro grill fish on a driftwood fire. They pick white, juicy flakes off the bone with salty fingers, and drink cheap, local beer from brown glass bottles. There is a bit of sand mixed in with each bite of fish, but Shiro declares it, "Delicious -- the most delicious fish of all time."
Shiro wipes his greasy mouth with the back of his hand. Kuro stares at his pink, shiny lips.
"I love the sea. I love the fish and the seagulls and the crabs and the sand. But I like the water best of all. Hey, Kuro," Shiro pauses thoughtfully, "what is your favorite thing about the sea?"
Kuro thinks of Shiro's back as he ran through the shallows, of Shiro's crooked, squinty-eyed smile as he burst from the water, of Shiro's lips. He says, just louder than the lapping of the waves and the crackle of the fire, "I like --"
Two days after they return from the beach, Kuro sees Shiro talking to her again. They're sitting on a bench in the park on the outskirts of Treasure Town, her polyester pantsuit-clad legs crossed at the ankles, Shiro's wide and long and bare. Her hair is pulled back into a low bun, and her glasses keep slipping down her nose to be automatically pushed back up with small, white hands.
When she says goodbye to Shiro, she touches his hand and smiles like it's a secret between the two of them. What Kuro can't see from where he's perched is the color of her eyes: sharp, sea-green and extraordinarily beautiful in an otherwise plain face.
Kuro follows her for the rest of the week. He shadows her on the way to the grocery store, to her office in a brick building squashed between ugly, crooked apartments, to her own somewhat nicer apartment with a doorman outside and large windows with white curtains. She buys flowers every other day from a little shop run by a toothless old woman, which mystifies Kuro. He doesn't understand why someone would pay for something that doesn't feed or clothe you, something that will rot and be thrown away. It seems like such a waste.
Because everyone knows Kuro, he learns that her name is Midori, that she is a social worker from Tokyo. She'd had a younger brother who ran away at fourteen and died Treasure Town in a pointless sort of way two years later at the hands of yakuza he'd wanted to become. She is twenty-five years old and wears loneliness like a delicate shawl.
Midori stays home on Friday night, alone with a bottle of brandy she'd bought after work, clutching it in its paper bag blanket to her chest like a child. When she goes to draw the curtains shut, tears are streaked down her cheeks in a way that causes Kuro to look away uncomfortably. Kuro stubs a cigarette out on the concrete roof he's perched on, considering her as he flies down. He decides to leave her alone.
On Saturday evening, Shiro brings a sticky handful of white chrysanthemums back to the dingy room they've rented and puts them in a liquor bottle that's neck has been broken off. They don't have windows in the room, but the walls are covered with crayon and marker and paint, worked until the room was like stepping into Shiro's world. Next to the arch of an tree bearing both apples and oranges, whose purple and brown branches fan across the ceiling, Shiro had drawn a circular window outlined in blue, looking out onto a turquoise ocean and a perpetually sunny day. This is the part of the wall that Shiro's plastic desk is against, and it is here that he sets the flowers.
"Hey, Kuro. Aren't they pretty?" Shiro murmurs. "They smell really nice."
Kuro looks up from the book he's been pretending to read and shrugs, the bed beneath him creaking. "She gave them to you," he comments, not wanting and wanting to talk.
"Oh, do you know Midori, Kuro? Isn't she nice?"
Kuro grunts, rummaging through the junk on the box between their twin beds. He taps a cigarette out of a crumpled pack and lights it.
"She doesn't like this city very much though. I asked, 'Why are you staying in a place you don't like?' and Midori said that it is very hard to do things that make you happy. I wish I could make her happy."
At once, Kuro ignites with anger, sickening fear riding shotgun. The ash on his cigarette grows longer, like something both alive and dead. He isn't entirely sure why, but he wants Midori to never talk to Shiro again.
"I didn't really understand about it being hard." Shiro stretches, yawning so deeply that his back cracks. A thick sliver of stomach peeks out for a moment. "Do you, Kuro?"
The ash falls off onto Kuro's lap, but it feels like it doesn't weigh a thing. Kuro's mouth feels very dry. "She sounds stupid to me," says Kuro coldly, and they don't talk any more after that. Kuro tries to read his book again, but he's stuck on one sentence:
Every lit candle casts a shadow.
The days go by, and the stench of dead vegetation seeps throughout the room, but neither of them throw the flowers away. The distance between them that has been looming for a long time now is apparent through things unsaid, through looking away. Life seems a study in refusing to give up or give in.
On the night when Shiro receives his first kiss, he comes home late. Kuro returns even later, smelling like alcohol and blood and sweat. They have the inevitable conversation.
"I'm sorry," Shiro whispers, trying to catch Kuro's eyes.
Every muscle in Kuro's body is tensed, ready to snap. His eyes are dark and opaque. "Why?"
"I don't know."
Kuro laughs. "You've done nothing wrong."
"Then why do you hate me?" Shiro's hand reaches for Kuro's -- Kuro slaps it away viciously. "What did I do?"
"Where are you happiest, Shiro? It's easy: not in this stinking city." Kuro isn't crying. "Did you really think things wouldn't change? I can't take care of you forever. You've got to grow up."
"You're wrong!" Shiro shouts, and he punches Kuro in the mouth. "You're wrong. You're wrong wrong wrong." He punches again and again, and Kuro doesn't move at all, and Shiro's hand grows redder and wetter.
Drunken revelations had as Shiro's fist slams into him: the place Kuro is simultaneously happiest and unhappiest is next to Shiro. He is torn by wanting what is best for Shiro and what he really wants for himself. The two things he wants to say are, "Go, go and live in a white house filled with flowers by the sea, create beautiful things every day, go become happy by teaching someone else to be happy, go and never stop smiling, go and forget all about me," and, "Touch me, and let me touch you, and never leave, and never let anything change. Just the two of us, undying until the end of time."
Instead, Kuro, not bothering to wipe the blood dribbling onto his shirt, says, "Get out," but he's the one who gets out before Shiro can say anything else.
As far as he knows, Kuro has killed seven men during the eighteen years he's been alive. He's never killed a woman, never thought there would be a reason to bother with something so fragile. Lately, he's been waking up on benches and on train seats from grotesque, crawling nightmares of worlds where Shiro disappears, where Shiro can't come back no matter how hard Kuro tries, where Shiro doesn't even exist, where Shiro is undoing the black, plastic buttons of Midori's jacket with a smile just for her. Lately, he's been missing time, blankness striking out hours of memory a day. His right hand burns constantly, as though it's been rammed with a white-hot needle too thin to pull out.
But he can't go home, won't go home, won't go anywhere near there. He will wait until Shiro couldn't possibly still be there, until there's no one to hurt or be hurt by. Growing up is becoming a whole person, and Shiro deserves that, no matter how much pain it causes, and maybe Kuro will be able to convince himself that he needs the same.
Kuro is determined to make sure everything he's ever been afraid of true. He doesn't know how to be any other way. He's thinks that if he looked into a mirror, he'd see horns.
During winter, the sand on the beach looks like dust and the ocean water hostile. Kuro hugs his knees to his chest and watches a strange sun bob below the horizon over and over. Each morning is a new story, but Kuro hates them all. When he drifts through the city, the snow looks like sand, but it smells like nothing.
He expects something to happen -- something horrible, something wonderful -- but it's only rewind, repeat of always tomorrow and never yesterday, not darker, not lighter. He might be grown up now.
"I don't know," he says.
"But that's okay," Shiro reminds him. Yes, that is how it goes. Shiro is there to forgive the same mistakes, to understand the same problems without solutions, live up to each hope and promise so soundly, to pull him back from the edge, to take his hand when they both don't know the way. "It's okay to not know a thing. Be happy, be happy. I found you. I am here."
Except when Kuro trudges forward, there's only one pair of footsteps in the snow.
Title: Like a Heart Needs a Beat
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Kuro/Shiro-ish.
Warnings: Some violence, purple prose & mental illness, I guess.
Summary: In which Shiro asks about women and Kuro learns some things about himself.
A/N: Title taken from "Apologize" by OneRepublic.
Shiro is sixteen when he asks Kuro about women.
"Women are trouble," Kuro says, voice as careful and firm as his gaze. He knows Shiro about as well as he knows himself, which sometimes isn't very well at all.
Shiro scratches his floppy-eared rabbit hat lopsided. "All women?" he wonders aloud. "There's gotta be some nice ones." He nods to himself, sure. "There's gotta be."
Kuro jams his hands into his pockets. Clenches. Relaxes. Shiro worries at a scabbed-over pimple on his chin in the silence. Then, Kuro smiles softly, without teeth, and suggests, "Why don't we go to the sea today?"
Shiro's face lights up like a firework, delight blossoming out of his eyes, captivating and brilliant. He laughs in a lower voice than Kuro expects. "Really, Kuro? Really?"
"Really," promises Kuro, and Shiro can hear the sadness in his voice.
Once they are away from the bustle and stale air of the city, Shiro pulls down the smudged glass of all the windows in the train car, and invisible spirals of wind whip his hair over and off and over and off his eyes. He's everywhere, poking his head out of all the windows to see as much as he can, talking with rich, wide gestures about swimming to China and back, about battling a rabid dolphin into submission and equipping it with gigantic lasers, about building a castle out of shells so high that he'll be able to pick stars out of the sky like cherries. "I'll put 'em in my pockets, and all those stars will be for Kuro. Every single one."
The faint lines on Kuro's forehead smoothen. He doesn't look outside as they roll past people and the places and things they changed. He looks at Shiro.
Together, they run down to the frothy shoreline, shedding clothes like dandelion fluff. Their bare feet hardly skim the hot sand below before kicking off, legs stretching forward. Kuro wonders when it was that Shiro became a little bit taller than him, a little bit faster. Shiro's back seems gold and focused. Kuro reaches a hand out, to brush against it, maybe, but Shiro is too quick. He dives into the surf, and Kuro dives in too, as though afraid he will lose him.
As the sun slips past the curve of the distant ocean, Kuro and Shiro grill fish on a driftwood fire. They pick white, juicy flakes off the bone with salty fingers, and drink cheap, local beer from brown glass bottles. There is a bit of sand mixed in with each bite of fish, but Shiro declares it, "Delicious -- the most delicious fish of all time."
Shiro wipes his greasy mouth with the back of his hand. Kuro stares at his pink, shiny lips.
"I love the sea. I love the fish and the seagulls and the crabs and the sand. But I like the water best of all. Hey, Kuro," Shiro pauses thoughtfully, "what is your favorite thing about the sea?"
Kuro thinks of Shiro's back as he ran through the shallows, of Shiro's crooked, squinty-eyed smile as he burst from the water, of Shiro's lips. He says, just louder than the lapping of the waves and the crackle of the fire, "I like --"
Two days after they return from the beach, Kuro sees Shiro talking to her again. They're sitting on a bench in the park on the outskirts of Treasure Town, her polyester pantsuit-clad legs crossed at the ankles, Shiro's wide and long and bare. Her hair is pulled back into a low bun, and her glasses keep slipping down her nose to be automatically pushed back up with small, white hands.
When she says goodbye to Shiro, she touches his hand and smiles like it's a secret between the two of them. What Kuro can't see from where he's perched is the color of her eyes: sharp, sea-green and extraordinarily beautiful in an otherwise plain face.
Kuro follows her for the rest of the week. He shadows her on the way to the grocery store, to her office in a brick building squashed between ugly, crooked apartments, to her own somewhat nicer apartment with a doorman outside and large windows with white curtains. She buys flowers every other day from a little shop run by a toothless old woman, which mystifies Kuro. He doesn't understand why someone would pay for something that doesn't feed or clothe you, something that will rot and be thrown away. It seems like such a waste.
Because everyone knows Kuro, he learns that her name is Midori, that she is a social worker from Tokyo. She'd had a younger brother who ran away at fourteen and died Treasure Town in a pointless sort of way two years later at the hands of yakuza he'd wanted to become. She is twenty-five years old and wears loneliness like a delicate shawl.
Midori stays home on Friday night, alone with a bottle of brandy she'd bought after work, clutching it in its paper bag blanket to her chest like a child. When she goes to draw the curtains shut, tears are streaked down her cheeks in a way that causes Kuro to look away uncomfortably. Kuro stubs a cigarette out on the concrete roof he's perched on, considering her as he flies down. He decides to leave her alone.
On Saturday evening, Shiro brings a sticky handful of white chrysanthemums back to the dingy room they've rented and puts them in a liquor bottle that's neck has been broken off. They don't have windows in the room, but the walls are covered with crayon and marker and paint, worked until the room was like stepping into Shiro's world. Next to the arch of an tree bearing both apples and oranges, whose purple and brown branches fan across the ceiling, Shiro had drawn a circular window outlined in blue, looking out onto a turquoise ocean and a perpetually sunny day. This is the part of the wall that Shiro's plastic desk is against, and it is here that he sets the flowers.
"Hey, Kuro. Aren't they pretty?" Shiro murmurs. "They smell really nice."
Kuro looks up from the book he's been pretending to read and shrugs, the bed beneath him creaking. "She gave them to you," he comments, not wanting and wanting to talk.
"Oh, do you know Midori, Kuro? Isn't she nice?"
Kuro grunts, rummaging through the junk on the box between their twin beds. He taps a cigarette out of a crumpled pack and lights it.
"She doesn't like this city very much though. I asked, 'Why are you staying in a place you don't like?' and Midori said that it is very hard to do things that make you happy. I wish I could make her happy."
At once, Kuro ignites with anger, sickening fear riding shotgun. The ash on his cigarette grows longer, like something both alive and dead. He isn't entirely sure why, but he wants Midori to never talk to Shiro again.
"I didn't really understand about it being hard." Shiro stretches, yawning so deeply that his back cracks. A thick sliver of stomach peeks out for a moment. "Do you, Kuro?"
The ash falls off onto Kuro's lap, but it feels like it doesn't weigh a thing. Kuro's mouth feels very dry. "She sounds stupid to me," says Kuro coldly, and they don't talk any more after that. Kuro tries to read his book again, but he's stuck on one sentence:
Every lit candle casts a shadow.
The days go by, and the stench of dead vegetation seeps throughout the room, but neither of them throw the flowers away. The distance between them that has been looming for a long time now is apparent through things unsaid, through looking away. Life seems a study in refusing to give up or give in.
On the night when Shiro receives his first kiss, he comes home late. Kuro returns even later, smelling like alcohol and blood and sweat. They have the inevitable conversation.
"I'm sorry," Shiro whispers, trying to catch Kuro's eyes.
Every muscle in Kuro's body is tensed, ready to snap. His eyes are dark and opaque. "Why?"
"I don't know."
Kuro laughs. "You've done nothing wrong."
"Then why do you hate me?" Shiro's hand reaches for Kuro's -- Kuro slaps it away viciously. "What did I do?"
"Where are you happiest, Shiro? It's easy: not in this stinking city." Kuro isn't crying. "Did you really think things wouldn't change? I can't take care of you forever. You've got to grow up."
"You're wrong!" Shiro shouts, and he punches Kuro in the mouth. "You're wrong. You're wrong wrong wrong." He punches again and again, and Kuro doesn't move at all, and Shiro's hand grows redder and wetter.
Drunken revelations had as Shiro's fist slams into him: the place Kuro is simultaneously happiest and unhappiest is next to Shiro. He is torn by wanting what is best for Shiro and what he really wants for himself. The two things he wants to say are, "Go, go and live in a white house filled with flowers by the sea, create beautiful things every day, go become happy by teaching someone else to be happy, go and never stop smiling, go and forget all about me," and, "Touch me, and let me touch you, and never leave, and never let anything change. Just the two of us, undying until the end of time."
Instead, Kuro, not bothering to wipe the blood dribbling onto his shirt, says, "Get out," but he's the one who gets out before Shiro can say anything else.
As far as he knows, Kuro has killed seven men during the eighteen years he's been alive. He's never killed a woman, never thought there would be a reason to bother with something so fragile. Lately, he's been waking up on benches and on train seats from grotesque, crawling nightmares of worlds where Shiro disappears, where Shiro can't come back no matter how hard Kuro tries, where Shiro doesn't even exist, where Shiro is undoing the black, plastic buttons of Midori's jacket with a smile just for her. Lately, he's been missing time, blankness striking out hours of memory a day. His right hand burns constantly, as though it's been rammed with a white-hot needle too thin to pull out.
But he can't go home, won't go home, won't go anywhere near there. He will wait until Shiro couldn't possibly still be there, until there's no one to hurt or be hurt by. Growing up is becoming a whole person, and Shiro deserves that, no matter how much pain it causes, and maybe Kuro will be able to convince himself that he needs the same.
Kuro is determined to make sure everything he's ever been afraid of true. He doesn't know how to be any other way. He's thinks that if he looked into a mirror, he'd see horns.
During winter, the sand on the beach looks like dust and the ocean water hostile. Kuro hugs his knees to his chest and watches a strange sun bob below the horizon over and over. Each morning is a new story, but Kuro hates them all. When he drifts through the city, the snow looks like sand, but it smells like nothing.
He expects something to happen -- something horrible, something wonderful -- but it's only rewind, repeat of always tomorrow and never yesterday, not darker, not lighter. He might be grown up now.
"I don't know," he says.
"But that's okay," Shiro reminds him. Yes, that is how it goes. Shiro is there to forgive the same mistakes, to understand the same problems without solutions, live up to each hope and promise so soundly, to pull him back from the edge, to take his hand when they both don't know the way. "It's okay to not know a thing. Be happy, be happy. I found you. I am here."
Except when Kuro trudges forward, there's only one pair of footsteps in the snow.