Submission 2 - Recessional
Title: Recessional
Author: TBA
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairing: Kakyou/Hokuto
Summary: For once, Kakyou can’t think of anything else other than now.
Recessional
The dreamscape was a plain place, before she came, a dim existence with no colour or sense of space. Then she came, and filled it with the beautiful sea.
-
White splits through the dreamscape. It is not of Kakyou’s causing, and its blinding brightness makes him unable to see what is. Something does not feel right, he feels a vague foreboding, as if in the distance, a star has fallen and inevitability has been set into motion.
Through that white break in his protective illusions, a human figure coalesces. A real person, not a watched dream or vision of the future.
There is a girl in his dreams and he doesn’t know what to do.
-
“Where am I? This doesn’t look like one of my dreams.”
She looks at him, direct and unafraid.
“So this must mean, this is your dream.”
Kakyou cannot manage a word, cannot think, can only stare in dazed wonder. Something is still not quite right.
“I’m Hokuto, Hokuto Sumeragi. What’s your name?”
He manages to remember his name. “Kazuki. Kakyou Kazuki”
“Calling you Kazuki-san is a bit…formal. Is it ok just to call you Kakyou?”
Wide eyed, he nods.
“You’re a dream seer? I’ve heard of that…”
Hokuto grins at him, and it chases away that vague feeling of disquiet.
He is a dream seer, but he forgets this too. This is something he doesn’t want to remember, not with this smiling girl visiting his dreams.
For once, Kakyou can’t think of anything else other than now.
-
She comes to his dreams often, and gradually they learn who the other is.
She talks about herself, and the immanent threads of her fate start to uneasily manifest, likelihoods of blood and white hanging about her. Now becomes clouded by what will happen, and he knows each moment is precious.
-
If you could go anywhere, where would you go?
Anywhere, if it was with you.
That just won’t do! This will be our first date in the real world after all!
The sea then…
-
“Let’s get you out of here!” She offers her hand, and he reaches. This is a dream, and he is not certain if they would even be able to touch. Kakyou has never had another person in his dreams before. Their hands meet and she firmly holds tight, she pulls, moves against the fabric between dreaming and waking, but then she disappears. Kakyou assumes that she must have inadvertently woken herself up.
He wonders if she wonders what would happen if she had succeeded.
-
Hokuto talks about her brother often. Lately, she has been worried about him. However, tonight she is relieved. “I bet today, my little brother will finally confess!”
“Confess what?”
“That he’s in love!”
Kakyou has been told a great deal about her brother, and her brother’s friend. It’s obvious Hokuto loves them both.
Ever mercurial, Hokuto leaves the matter of her brother’s love affairs aside. This is her sea, and she lightly twirls and tiptoes through what’s left of the waves once they reach the shore. She reaches they stony outcrop on which Kakyou is sitting, and pulls herself up to sit beside him.
“How is it that I am able to come into your dreams?”
Kakyou is downcast, his eyes do not meet Hokuto’s as he shyly admits, “Because I was always by myself, I wanted to meet someone…anyone”
“Just anyone…” Hokuto flatly repeats, but there is just hint of a mischievous grin at the corners of her mouth. Kakyou is not looking, and only hears her words. She puts her hand under his chin, forces him to look upwards, at her. She brings her face very close to his.
“Are you saying anyone was fine?”
Hokuto pulls a comically exaggerated expression of disappointment. “How can you say that, when you have a cute girl like me standing on front of you?!”
Kakyou really doesn’t know what to do now.
-
“Aren’t you happy you met me?”
This will be the last time they meet. Prescience has caught up to Kakyou, its final form still uncertain, but this moment now is too precious and tenuous.
“Yes. I’m happy” Hokuto is silent, intent hearing his answer. His words are quiet and gentle, as if spoken in the rarefied spaces of a sacred place. A simple sentence, that contains all of his feeling for her. Hokuto’s hands clutch the kimono silk of his clothing, and Kakyou wonders if she somehow senses his fatalism.
For once, she doesn’t talk, and instead draws closer.
They sit, two human beings together in a dream. Hokuto’s eyes are closed and she smiles as she leans against him, her head resting on Kakyou’s shoulder. He wonders if he could kiss her, but even now, but he is afraid to move, to disturb her in any way. He is afraid of the consequences, the implications of memory on eternity. The future fills his head, echoing shadows, wrong, possibility, certainty, loss. Pain. Kakyou feels the threads of fate pulling tighter and tighter, once Hokuto moves, they will break, and she will be gone forever.
Hokuto does not know any of this, and Kakyou does not say anything, because he does not yet know that the future cannot be changed.
Inestimable and timeless is this moment. She moves, the world shifts, and the chance is lost forever.
-
Feathers. Kakyou is surrounded by feathers, blinding him and choking him. This is a dream he can’t control, one of those nightmares of the future he has no power over.
He can’t see Hokuto at all, and he knows something is wrong, that what was going to happen is happening. He can’t see but incoherently the sense of it comes to him and he babbles “…her brother…something”
Feathers blown by troubled, turbulent dreams become cherry blossoms and now he can see her, far away, Hokuto is about to die, dressed in stolen ceremonial robes of white.
Horrified, he wakes.
-
He doesn’t know where she is, doesn’t even know where he is, doesn’t know anything at all in the waking world past the four walls of his prison room.
Kakyou runs down stairs, out a door, almost makes it to a gate…
A gunshot forces him back into the inert dream watching he has done all his life. Kakyou can only see fate, he cannot change it. It will take the end of the world, and the dying words of another girl, years later, to regain any kind of hope.
-
From his passive position he sees her death, and the greater part of him dies as well. And yet, complete death is denied to him, no matter how much he will ever wish for it,
-
Aren’t you happy you met me?
Her words and her sea are remembered forever, preserved in the dream.
-
“I…guess I have to go now”, Hokuto announces as she stands up and stretches. The beautiful, peaceful mood, is, for Kakyou now, irrevocably broken.
Hokuto does what Kakyou was unable to do. She stoops, and quickly kisses him. To her it is a beginning; to him it is the end, it hurts. It will hurt forever, the future inexorably moving forward.
Kakyou knows they will not meet again, but exact knowledge of the circumstances still eludes him. He is only able to say a single word.
“Goodbye.”
She smiles, happy, unaware of the future, of what she will wake up to.
“Well then, I’ll see you later.”
Author: TBA
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairing: Kakyou/Hokuto
Summary: For once, Kakyou can’t think of anything else other than now.
Recessional
The dreamscape was a plain place, before she came, a dim existence with no colour or sense of space. Then she came, and filled it with the beautiful sea.
-
White splits through the dreamscape. It is not of Kakyou’s causing, and its blinding brightness makes him unable to see what is. Something does not feel right, he feels a vague foreboding, as if in the distance, a star has fallen and inevitability has been set into motion.
Through that white break in his protective illusions, a human figure coalesces. A real person, not a watched dream or vision of the future.
There is a girl in his dreams and he doesn’t know what to do.
-
“Where am I? This doesn’t look like one of my dreams.”
She looks at him, direct and unafraid.
“So this must mean, this is your dream.”
Kakyou cannot manage a word, cannot think, can only stare in dazed wonder. Something is still not quite right.
“I’m Hokuto, Hokuto Sumeragi. What’s your name?”
He manages to remember his name. “Kazuki. Kakyou Kazuki”
“Calling you Kazuki-san is a bit…formal. Is it ok just to call you Kakyou?”
Wide eyed, he nods.
“You’re a dream seer? I’ve heard of that…”
Hokuto grins at him, and it chases away that vague feeling of disquiet.
He is a dream seer, but he forgets this too. This is something he doesn’t want to remember, not with this smiling girl visiting his dreams.
For once, Kakyou can’t think of anything else other than now.
-
She comes to his dreams often, and gradually they learn who the other is.
She talks about herself, and the immanent threads of her fate start to uneasily manifest, likelihoods of blood and white hanging about her. Now becomes clouded by what will happen, and he knows each moment is precious.
-
If you could go anywhere, where would you go?
Anywhere, if it was with you.
That just won’t do! This will be our first date in the real world after all!
The sea then…
-
“Let’s get you out of here!” She offers her hand, and he reaches. This is a dream, and he is not certain if they would even be able to touch. Kakyou has never had another person in his dreams before. Their hands meet and she firmly holds tight, she pulls, moves against the fabric between dreaming and waking, but then she disappears. Kakyou assumes that she must have inadvertently woken herself up.
He wonders if she wonders what would happen if she had succeeded.
-
Hokuto talks about her brother often. Lately, she has been worried about him. However, tonight she is relieved. “I bet today, my little brother will finally confess!”
“Confess what?”
“That he’s in love!”
Kakyou has been told a great deal about her brother, and her brother’s friend. It’s obvious Hokuto loves them both.
Ever mercurial, Hokuto leaves the matter of her brother’s love affairs aside. This is her sea, and she lightly twirls and tiptoes through what’s left of the waves once they reach the shore. She reaches they stony outcrop on which Kakyou is sitting, and pulls herself up to sit beside him.
“How is it that I am able to come into your dreams?”
Kakyou is downcast, his eyes do not meet Hokuto’s as he shyly admits, “Because I was always by myself, I wanted to meet someone…anyone”
“Just anyone…” Hokuto flatly repeats, but there is just hint of a mischievous grin at the corners of her mouth. Kakyou is not looking, and only hears her words. She puts her hand under his chin, forces him to look upwards, at her. She brings her face very close to his.
“Are you saying anyone was fine?”
Hokuto pulls a comically exaggerated expression of disappointment. “How can you say that, when you have a cute girl like me standing on front of you?!”
Kakyou really doesn’t know what to do now.
-
“Aren’t you happy you met me?”
This will be the last time they meet. Prescience has caught up to Kakyou, its final form still uncertain, but this moment now is too precious and tenuous.
“Yes. I’m happy” Hokuto is silent, intent hearing his answer. His words are quiet and gentle, as if spoken in the rarefied spaces of a sacred place. A simple sentence, that contains all of his feeling for her. Hokuto’s hands clutch the kimono silk of his clothing, and Kakyou wonders if she somehow senses his fatalism.
For once, she doesn’t talk, and instead draws closer.
They sit, two human beings together in a dream. Hokuto’s eyes are closed and she smiles as she leans against him, her head resting on Kakyou’s shoulder. He wonders if he could kiss her, but even now, but he is afraid to move, to disturb her in any way. He is afraid of the consequences, the implications of memory on eternity. The future fills his head, echoing shadows, wrong, possibility, certainty, loss. Pain. Kakyou feels the threads of fate pulling tighter and tighter, once Hokuto moves, they will break, and she will be gone forever.
Hokuto does not know any of this, and Kakyou does not say anything, because he does not yet know that the future cannot be changed.
Inestimable and timeless is this moment. She moves, the world shifts, and the chance is lost forever.
-
Feathers. Kakyou is surrounded by feathers, blinding him and choking him. This is a dream he can’t control, one of those nightmares of the future he has no power over.
He can’t see Hokuto at all, and he knows something is wrong, that what was going to happen is happening. He can’t see but incoherently the sense of it comes to him and he babbles “…her brother…something”
Feathers blown by troubled, turbulent dreams become cherry blossoms and now he can see her, far away, Hokuto is about to die, dressed in stolen ceremonial robes of white.
Horrified, he wakes.
-
He doesn’t know where she is, doesn’t even know where he is, doesn’t know anything at all in the waking world past the four walls of his prison room.
Kakyou runs down stairs, out a door, almost makes it to a gate…
A gunshot forces him back into the inert dream watching he has done all his life. Kakyou can only see fate, he cannot change it. It will take the end of the world, and the dying words of another girl, years later, to regain any kind of hope.
-
From his passive position he sees her death, and the greater part of him dies as well. And yet, complete death is denied to him, no matter how much he will ever wish for it,
-
Aren’t you happy you met me?
Her words and her sea are remembered forever, preserved in the dream.
-
“I…guess I have to go now”, Hokuto announces as she stands up and stretches. The beautiful, peaceful mood, is, for Kakyou now, irrevocably broken.
Hokuto does what Kakyou was unable to do. She stoops, and quickly kisses him. To her it is a beginning; to him it is the end, it hurts. It will hurt forever, the future inexorably moving forward.
Kakyou knows they will not meet again, but exact knowledge of the circumstances still eludes him. He is only able to say a single word.
“Goodbye.”
She smiles, happy, unaware of the future, of what she will wake up to.
“Well then, I’ll see you later.”