[Team Angst] (Good Intentions) Obsession (2/2)

[bottan]

Prompt: Good Intentions
Title: Obsession
Rating: M
Spoilers: None
Any author's notes: To score the fic, please go over to part one on the kurofai comm - as this fic is officially fic of doom, judging by the length of it, and I have to post it in two parts. Warnings for sexual content, blood, violence. All the pretty parts are thanks to wonderful Uakari, who last minute betaed for me - remaining mistakes are mine alone.

Kurogane dreamt. He dreamt of Fai’s apartment, basked in sharp, white light. And for a moment, he was blinded by the reflecting glass and mirrors of the sculpture, that strange, alien sculpture in the corner. He blinked, and slowly, waveringly Fai’s figure melted out of the white, hair and clothes a wispy halo around his body, skin bleeding into the brightness engulfing him. Smiling hollowly. Burning up from within. Vanishing. Black spots danced before Kurogane’s eyes, like ashes floating up, up, to meet the heaven, and he knew that Fai was dissolving before his eyes. Something small inside him started thrashing, as it became very, very afraid.

You are not fighting for his life, a voice whispered close to his ear. You are fighting for your own.

*

Kurogane woke before dawn, staring blankly at the dark ceiling above him. He could clearly feel the fatigue pulling on his body, but his mind was wide awake. He turned around to check the red letters of the clock on his nightstand. Half past four in the morning. What the hell. With a groan, he heaved himself out of bed, and blinking heavily as he turned on the light, deciding it would be in vain to go back to bed, anyway.

Fifteen minutes later, he was out on the road, running, his trainers padding in a numbing rhythm through the night that was turning into morning, breath slow and steady. Almost unconsciously, he found himself running down along the cliffs towards the fisher’s village, towards the white, ivy covered house that Fai lived in. He watched the ocean brighten with light, gulls crying out as they swarmed over the clashing waves. He would take the bus back up, later, get the motorcycle and drive down once again as soon as Fai was awake. The air was clear and fresh and Kurogane breathed deeply, feeling his heart pounding in the slow, heavy rhythm that told him he wasn’t out of shape. His studies in engineering bound him to his desk far more than he would have liked, and especially in the beginning he had gone stir-crazy and was easily irritated within a week of continuous sitting, learning, writing assignments. Running in the mornings helped ease his temper, helped him keep a clear head.

His thoughts kept going back to the dream, kept circling how Fai had vanished before him. He was nervous, uneasy worry that he couldn’t explain was tugging on his innards. He couldn’t help the feeling that something was about to happen. That Fai’s strange behavior was going to climax in the next days. And he still wouldn’t talk to him, Kurogane thought with irritation, speeding up as adrenaline swirled in his veins. He still didn’t trust him, still wouldn’t let him in. And Kurogane was irritated with himself for wanting to help so badly, for caring so much. Hated that he didn’t even know where to begin helping. Hated that he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was failing. He ran and ran, until he stopped thinking and the frustration was washed away by movement and heat.

His cell phone rang in the silence that the steady sounds of the ocean, his feet, his breath had feigned, ripping him out of this thoughts. He came to a slow stop, walking at the roadside that was still completely empty. Fai, his cell told him and something knotted up in his stomach as he picked up. Fai was never up that early. Only when hadn’t been sleeping, at all.

“Yeah” he asked the speaker, watching the ocean absent-mindedly. The weather was still murky and the wind colder than it had been these last days. Static sound answered him. “Fai? Is that you?” he asked again, worry bleeding into his voice, feet stopping on the gravel. Concentrating.

Static. And then slow, shaky breathing. Nothing else.

“Has something happened?” Kurogane blocked the crashing waves out with his other hand. No answer. He thought he heard a word, a single sound – and the line was cut and Kurogane started cursing. Goddammit, he thought, and he started running towards the houses that were already in sight, far under him. The wind was picking up and pushing him from behind, tousling his hair, urging him on, down, down, down, towards white houses painted brightly in the rising sun. His heart was racing now, cold sweat building on his chest and nauseating fear pounding in his stomach. Fai never called him after nightmares. Never woke him even up if he could help it.

It must have been ten minutes before he reached the house, running as fast as he could. Dread crawled up his back and neck as he stopped in front of the house seemed almost surreal against the picturesque street, the white, friendly houses. The sun was blinking in and out of clouds, washing over the paint like waves, lighting the soft flowers that moved in the wind. Kurogane hit the doorbell with enough force to grind the plastic as though it was about to break.

Nobody answered.

He hit all the five buttons to the different apartments in quick succession, cursing under his breath at the early hour. After a minute, a sleepy, irritated voice answered him.

“Just let me in, I’m here for Fluorite, it’s important,” Kurogane cut the woman off. “Please.” For a moment, silence answered his plea – and then, almost to his surprise, the door buzzed and he pushed it open almost forcefully. As he ran up the stairs, the old woman that lived on the second floor poked her head out of the door – the same who had opened the door.

“He was moving something heavy around the apartment, tonight,” the words rose up the creaking, wooden stairs together with Kurogane’s running feet. “Sounds like he broke something, didn’t look after him because he sometimes does that – such a nice young man, though…”

Kurogane stopped on the highest floor, the fifth floor, blood pounding in his veins, and he reached out to push open the door that was never locked, sweat slickened hand curling around the cold brass handle, and drew a ragged breath.

The door swung open into white, blinding light, leaving him blinking into the sun that had suddenly risen to illuminate the room.

The sculpture was gone.

The wooden door circled lazily on its hinges, banged against the wall, making its creaking way back. The sour tang of blood filled his nostrils, Kurogane lowered his gaze – and he stumbled back against the wooden railing, sucking in a harsh breath.

The floor was littered with bright, glittering shards, leaving him almost unable to see against the light. And amidst it all, amidst an ocean of light, of broken reflections of the sun, sat Fai, curled up in a fetal position on arms and knees, face covered by his hands. And around him, there was a slowly spreading puddle of his own, glistening blood. His phone was lying a meter away from him in the shards, bloody fingerprints covering the screen.

“Idiot,” it was more of a low grunt than a word that tore out of Kurogane’s throat and he stumbled forwards, shards crashing under his feet, and fell down next to Fai, ignoring as what was left of the sculpture as it dug into his knees. His hands hovered over Fai’s back. Blood soaked up in the white-blond hair, crawled up his light clothing, and he was so still, too still. Kurogane almost panicked as it occurred to him that Fai wasn’t breathing, he wasn’t breathing-

“You called me,” his voice was strangely level to his own ears, clinging to sanity as the iron tang of blood flooded his nostrils and he saw Fai’s life crumble and dry on the floor under him. “Can you hear me? Idiot, it’s me, it’s Kurogane… answer me.”

A low shiver ran through hunched shoulders and shards shifted. Kurogane’s hands sank down on them, afraid to stir him into motion, afraid of shards that were still sitting in flesh, afraid of tearing what was left of him into pieces-

“Leave me,” Fai whispered. “You have to leave me. Don’t be close to me. I don’t want you to get pulled into this.”

Hot, irrational anger rose through the confusion, the only reaction that Kurogane seemed to know to this situation. “Like fuck I’m going to leave you. What happened here?”

“Leave me,” Fai shrieked and he curled up further, starting to sob hysterically into his arms. “Why did you get so involved? Why do you care so much? You weren’t supposed to care so much, you were supposed to stay away, you were supposed to make me stronger-“ the words lost coherency and his voice broke under the tears and shaking, and Kurogane cursed under his breath as he realized that new, fresh blood was starting to wet the shards underneath.

“I’ll call the ambulance,” he grit out, reaching for his cell phone, and didn’t realize how hard his hands were shaking until he hit the wrong buttons twice. He shouted the details at them over the noise of Fai’s crying. Hung up. And then he could do nothing but wait, watching Fai’s crying subside, too afraid to even touch him in his upset state, too afraid to scurry him into movement that would open up scabbing wounds.

After a while, Fai fell silent. A shift in the air, a silent beam of pale sunlight reflecting off of mirror shards. Fai sat up, time slowed. In a moment that seemed to separate from reality and drift between them like a dream, Kurogane watched his blood smeared face rising from the shards. And the man lifted his body, up and up, upright, and turned to look at him, eyes hollow and blue. Looking right at him and right through him at the same time. There was blood on his face, crusting under his eyes, on his forehead, his mouth. Streaks of tears were running down his nose and cheeks, digging viscous paths into a landscape of red and black. Kurogane held his breath. The sun came up, flooding the room behind Fai, blinding his vision, making his eyes sting and water, black spots were dancing before Kurogane’s eyes, like ashes floating up, up, to meet the heaven, and he knew that Fai was dissolving before his eyes -

The doorbell rang and Kurogane jumped up to press the button that would open the door with an angry buzz. Steps flooded the hallway. And he never took his eyes off of Fai, beautiful, self-destructive Fai whose wide eyes were blank and unseeing.

People filled the room, pulling Fai up on a stretcher, moving his body like that of a broken puppet. They asked Kurogane questions that he wouldn’t remember answering, later, and carried Fai out, leaving the room empty save for the bloody shards, and the thick silence, and the light dancing across the walls. And then, someone lead Kurogane with them, to get stitches for his legs and hands, which he had cut without even noticing. They drove him to the hospital, all the way up the cliffs, passing the university, entering the city.

He spent the morning in the hospital hallways, waiting for word on Fai, and trying to collect his thoughts in a mind that was filled with white noise and so thick with emptiness that nothing else seemed to fit inside, anymore.

*

The room was dim, stripes of pale light filtered through the blinds and painted walls. Fai’s back was slender and pale against the light as Kurogane slowly closed the door to the hospital room. The other man didn’t move as he crossed the space that was filled with the smell of disinfectant and fresh sheets and a hint of flowers and urine. Hospital smells. Kurogane sat down on a chair next to Fai’s bed.

The man’s arms were bandaged up, his hands wrapped in gauze, light blue shirt falling open at his back and revealing more bandages across his torso.

“How,” Kurogane’s voice died in his throat and he had to clear it. Fai slowly turned, not looking at him but straight ahead. His eyes were half closed, his gaze unfocused. Apathetic. “How are you?” Kurogane asked.

Fai didn’t answer, but he lowered his face to stare at the useless, stiff hands in his lap.

“I need you to talk to me,” Kurogane stated. He had been thinking about it, thinking for hours, circling and circling around all that was wrong with Fai. And over and over again, he was tripping over the same questions. He knew nothing about this man, next to nothing. And for all that he could see through his masks, for all that his pain was so obvious to him – he wouldn’t get anywhere if he didn’t know the names of Fai’s fears.

“I know you think you can’t trust anyone,” he said slowly. Fai still didn’t look at him, still didn’t speak, lips standing slightly open. Lost to the world. Kurogane wasn’t even sure he was hearing him. “But you won’t get anywhere if you don’t even try.”

Fai slowly shook his head no, a gesture so small that it would have been lost had the rest of him not been so quiet.

“I am,” Kurogane swallowed hard before grabbing for words that were unpracticed to him. He had never been great with words. “I’m not going to leave you.”

“You’re too kind for your own good,” Fai’s voice was a small animal in the silence, hushing through the room before hiding under the bed. “I’m sorry, this is my mistake,” he whispered, shoulders hunching further. “I shouldn’t have gotten so close to you. You look so tough on the outside that I didn’t realize…” he broke off. “Is it strange that I don’t even want to ask what you have done all your life?” he whispered into the silence.

“It’s not as though you’d want to think of your own past, as well,” Kurogane answered, silently turning his wristwatch around his arm. “You’re not even seeing this as your real life. You’re living inside a dream world.”

“And if it was that way,” he said, voice dreamy and distant. “Is that a bad thing?”

“You’re hiding,” Kurogane stated. “You’re pretending that you’re hunting something, but you’re hiding from yourself.”

Fai gave a snort that might have been laughter, but there was no humor in it.

“Kurogane, you’re trying too hard to be perceptive,” he said and the man stiffened at being addressed by his full name. “There is something I need to do and I can’t tell you what it is and I can’t let you stop me.”

“Why am I even here, then?” Kurogane growled, starting to get irritated with the way Fai tried to push him away, now that he finally was getting closer to understanding. “What does this relationship even mean to you?”

Fai turned, mouth hanging open, fear dancing through his eyes. I don’t know, his helpless expression said, and strangely enough, this was soothing Kurogane, soothing him more than any kind of explanation could have. It meant he needed him, in some strange twisted way, the same way Kurogane needed Fai.

Don’t run from me, Kurogane’s mind pounded, whatever you do, don’t run from me.

“This relationship wasn’t your decision alone,” Kurogane said aloud. “But I can’t do a fucking thing for you if you keep me at distance. I’m not going to let you go down that road, you’re paving. Because at the moment, it looks a lot like you’re going to run off to kill yourself at the next possible moment.”

Fai looked up at him, eyes wide as if seeing him for the first time, today. His mouth turned into a smile and he laughed, a breaking sound. “Kurogane, what are you even talking about?”

“Don’t fuck with me!” Kurogane suddenly roared, anger answering the passive role that Fai had forced him into for so long. “This morning I pulled you out of a puddle of your own blood, you are not even interested in whether you get hurt or not! You’re not talking to me, excluding me, and it’s not doing a fucking thing but damage, to both of us! Don’t tell me you’re not prone to hurting yourself! Don’t you dare telling me that this is none of my business, because you made it my business when you started calling me your fucking boyfriend! Do you think I don’t hear you asking for help, just because you don’t say the words!?” Kurogane was breathing heavily rage still curling in his veins.

Fai stared at him, opened his mouth, and it snapped shut so hard that his teeth clicked. He turned his head away, forcefully.

“Kurogane, you better go, now,” he said silently, voice tight with restrained emotion.

“Stop lying to yourself,” Kurogane hissed. “Stop the fuck lying! I won’t leave this room before I get answers!”

“You want answers?” Fai said lowly, dangerously, eyes vicious. “Well, is it a sin that I’m not going to tell some guy that I’ve known for barely half a year every detail of my life?”

“It’s not a fucking sin, and I respected your idiocy for long enough – but you are at a point where you are merely hurting yourself. You are too fucking afraid to trust, you desperately want to keep this distance, you want to keep me away where I can’t interfere with you working yourself to death with that insanity of yours-“

“Is that what I am, now, insane?” Fai interrupted him, eyes wild. His hands were clutching into the sheets and Kurogane saw blood seeping through the bandages where the cuts had ripped open. Fuck it, he wasn’t supposed to upset Fai like this, but he wasn’t going to stop either.

“You look fucking insane to me, right now,” Kurogane growled. “You know why? Because you never get around to explaining things. I don’t get what the hell is going on. Why are you so afraid of some woman buying your sculptures?”

“You wouldn’t understand even if I told you!” Fai shouted back, emotion and anger contorting his face. “It’s not as though I’d understand half of this, myself! I make no sense at all! Everything I’ve done since I came here was wrong!” His mouth snapped shut, as his voice started wavering dangerously, heavy breath escaping through his clenched teeth.

“What were you doing wrong?” Kurogane tried to pull out. “What are you so afraid of? What was that sculpture all about?”

Fai stared at him, angry and broken and still unyielding. And he seemed so small, so small in that bed, fighting himself and Kurogane and the rest of the world for a reason that Kurogane didn’t understand; fighting something that was so big that it was going to devour him alive.

“I’m… I have the feeling that something terrible will happen, after the exhibition, Kuro-min. I thought, if I destroyed the sculptures, all of them, then I could stop it,” he rasped out. “But the exhibition is already opening, and it’s too late now. I’m too far down this road. I will disappear,” his eyes were shining with wetness. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry I couldn’t let you go.”

“Why are you going to disappear? Are you… are you ill?” Kurogane had wondered this more and more often recently.

“No… no, no, it’s not… I can’t explain…” Fai bit his lip as tears spilled over his lashes and onto his cheeks. “It’s too complicated…”

“You could try,” Kurogane said levelly. Fai was silent, eyes still pressed shut in a picture of concentration and pain.

“It is the only path that exists for me,” he said after a moment, voice collected and calm. “Please stop asking. I’m tired of this, Kuro-min. Tired of fighting, tired of pretending.”

“You could stop pretending. You could stop running from me. You said yourself that I’m too deep in, already, how about finally including me,” Kurogane tried.

Fai looked at him and, for a moment, hope shone in his eyes, and his lips were already parted, ready to finally spill the words that were weighing him down-

A knock came from the door and Fai’s face shut down. Kurogane closed his eyes in silent frustration.

“Yes, please?” Fai called out and the shuffling of feet suggested that a nurse entered.

“Is everything alright, in here? I heard the shouting,” the nurse’s voice was heavy with disdain. “If you are having an argument, I will have to ask you to leave, Sir.”

“No, it’s quite alright, we weren’t fighting,” Fai smiled at her.

“Well, the visitor hours are over, anyway,” she replied insistently, seemingly keen on getting Kurogane out of the room.

“He’ll leave right away, could you just give us another minute, please?” Fai said sweetly. And she finally seemed to be driven away, unhappily closing the door. Silence fell over them, again, and Kurogane waited for what Fai had to say. Finally, the other man drew a shivering breath and turned towards him.

“I will stop running,” he said eyes shining with cold fever and determination. A shiver ran down Kurogane’s spine. Something in those words was chilling him more than Fai’s former evasiveness. “I will face this. There is something I have to do here, something I have to complete. I will go through with this.”

“Go through with what?” he asked lowly. But Fai didn’t answer, just looked at him with something that was almost pity. And Kurogane was angry enough to pound Fai’s stupid head through the wall behind him. How could a human being be so frustrating? He stood up, leaving the other man alone.

And when looked back at the dark scheme that was Fai’s fallen form, a kind of foreboding flooded him. The door closed and he had nothing to look at but the long, busy hallways of the hospital. He had the sinking feeling that he was making a terrible mistake.

*

Fai vanished, almost as though he had never existed, two days later. The hospital didn’t even know his name, his telephone was out of order, his so-called friends that Kurogane found at the exhibition were so clueless that he wondered if they even knew who he was talking about. When he was brushed off by a snobbish professor, he had finally had enough and swung up on his motorcycle to speed down to the bay, to Fai’s apartment.

In the evening, the weather was still murky and the road wet as he arrived in front of the building. Fai’s car was missing, gone from the place where it had always been a silent presence in front of the house. He rang the bell for half a minute, before trying the old woman that had opened him the day before yesterday.

He ignored her attempts at small talk and gossiping while he kept climbing the stairs, taking two steps at once. He tried the door – not locked, as usual. As though he could push it open and Fai would greet him from the other side, goofy smile on his face, building some kind of terrible construct – deafening silence greeted him from within. Emptiness. Kurogane felt his chest constricting a bit as he stepped inside.

The floor was cleaned of shards and blood, the bed stripped of its covers.  The sketches that usually covered ever inch of the walls were taken down, the desk in the corner was cleaned. Kurogane felt himself growing nervous. He crossed the, room, pulled open a drawer of the wardrobe, just to make sure. Nothing. Nothing at all. The bathroom was cleaned out, as was the small room that contained the kitchen. Everything that Fai had ever owned, everything that had made up his very presence had been taken and cleaned out.

Kurogane stood in the middle of an empty room that he didn’t recognize, that oddly smelt of dust and disuse, when he knew it should be filled with Fai’s stupid laughter. Rain started falling outside, wind pressed against the windows. He felt his breath coming a bit short and forced himself to calm down. There still could be something – anything – left that could give him a hint, Fai didn’t have that much time to clean everything  up, he was injured, it was a possibility that he had overlooked something.

And Kurogane started searching.

After an hour of looking under the bed, lifting the mattress, looking through every drawer and pulling furniture around to look behind, he pulled up a chair to search the top of the kitchen cabinets. His fingertips swirled through dust and grime and finally collided with a sharp edge – a stack of glossed paper fluttered down to the earth and Kurogane blinked and coughed at the cloud of dust settling over his head.

Photographs.

Kurogane kneeled down, picking them up.

Laughter, sunshine, people he didn’t know. Forgotten days, spreading across cold tiles. All of them depicted Fai – Fai with friends that Kurogane had never seen, Fai sitting in the apartment, painting the street scenery he had seen on the canvases that now were missing. Fai, smiling so openly and sweetly that Kurogane didn’t recognize him. The only thing that didn’t seem to have changed were the surroundings, strangely enough he could remember some of the clothes, his soft hair. And as he turned them around, he found dates scribbled on the backside, four years back, five years back… before the change. Kurogane swallowed hard. One picture caught his eye – this time, it wasn’t Fai depicted, just a young, sweet girl with auburn hair, clad in beach wear and caught by surprise by the camera, maybe sixteen years old. He turned it around and on the back, next to the date, a phone number was scrawled.

“Sakura,” he mouthed the name that topped off the number. Sakura. Sakura Fluorite. Unthinkingly, he dug out his cell phone and started dialing.

*

 “You’re calling about… Fai?” the formerly bright voice on the other end of the telephone wavered dangerously and something in Kurogane’s stomach dropped. “You… I mean,” the girl – Sakura – cleared her throat. “Why would you want to know about him?”

“I’m a good friend of his, and I really need to know where he is,” Kurogane said cautiously, soothingly. “I know how this sounds, but he vanished and might be in danger…” There was a beat of silence on the other end.

“He… well, he vanished when was going to that… that university for fine arts, at Honifleur-“

“I know, that’s where I am,” Kurogane interrupted her impatiently. “Do you know where he is, now?”

“He’s dead,” the voice on the other end blurted out without warning. Something inside Kurogane froze. He slowly turned around, facing the storm raging outside his window.

“He,” Kurogane drew a calming breath. “That can’t be. When would he…?” he was grappling for words to voice his confusion, for emotions to fit this frame. Things inside him that he hadn’t known to existed started to drift apart. Kurogane let himself sink back against the kitchen cabinets, hand raking through his hair. He remembered Fai sitting next to him, here, bleeding from that stupid wound he had gotten from working on that sculpture, bleeding and denying that he was hurt, in the least. “He can’t be…” He said he would be dying, a little voice at the back of his head nagged.

“I’m… I mean, I’m sorry… may I again ask who you are?” the girl stuttered along nervously.

“Kurogane Suwa, engineering student at the University of Honifleur… I’ve been Fai’s… I loved…” he couldn’t keep going. He stared at the dimness of his small apartment with his mouth hanging open and his eyes prickling. Something inside him felt like it was breaking. How could it be possible that these things only occurred to you when it was too late?

“…my brother died in a car accident,” she suddenly said into the static silence. Her calm words trickled past his ears, dripping into the murky waters of his mind, mingling there before he could make any sense of them. Kurogane’s head started spinning and as thunder rolled across the sky and he remembered that the car was gone from the front of the house. He slowly bowed his head to look at the photographs scattered over the tiles, looking at that Fai that he didn’t know, unable to interrupt her. “He was… very close to getting a contract with a famous atelier, at this annual exhibition. It was storming, back then, more heavily than he expected it to. As he drove down from the university… you might know the place, there is this steep road, leading along the cliffs… as he drove down the wet path he lost control over the engine and…” There was a swallow.

“And crashed through the wall and plunged right into the sea,” Kurogane quoted Fai, mind reeling.

“Y-yeah…” she said. “I didn’t realize there were friends of his left who… who didn’t know…”

“How the fuck should I’ve known… I talked to him, two days ago,” Kurogane rubbed a hand across his face, staring with wide eyes at nothing. What the hell… what the fuck was going on? How could this have been happening, when had this happened? Who had cleaned the apartment?

“…no,” the voice on the other end cut harshly through his thoughts. “That, that can’t be, you must be mixing things up. You can’t have talked to him, my brother died four years ago.”

Kurogane’s mind turned blank. Suddenly, with absurd clarity, he remembered the paintings in the corner of Fai’s room. Dated four years back. Remembered the notebook filled with his own name, as though he was reminding him of who he was. Remembered the way he almost vanished against the light, remembered the crying when he woke up at night. I don’t want to die. Remembered the ghost stories Fai had told him and all of a sudden, a harsh shiver ran up his spine, pressing his throat closed with coldness. Don’t be ridiculous, he told himself, even as his heart started racing.

An outcry from the other end made him jump and his head crashed painfully against the drawer behind him.

“Don’t tell me you have found Yuui?” she suddenly exclaimed.

“What? Who?” Kurogane bit out in irritation, rubbing at the lump forming at the back of his head. What the fuck was up with that family telling him a story in bits and pieces.

“His twin brother, Fai’s twin brother… he vanished shortly after Fai’s death, and we haven’t had word of him, ever since. He was off worse than any of us, and we had all been afraid… that he had done something stupid,” tears started to make her voice incoherent. “Oh god, it was Yuui, wasn’t it? That’s how you got the number, he must have had it written down, after all… What… what is he doing at Fai’s school? We searched everywhere, everywhere… When he just went in search for his brother… he’s alive… he picked up where Fai left off…” And the sobs swallowed the rest of her words.

Things slowly started to shift around him. No, Kurogane thought, cell phone with stifled sobs drifting from his ear towards his lap. No, he hadn’t picked up where his brother had left off. He stared out into the storm, heavy raindrops pattering against the window panes and swallowing his heavy heartbeat. I don’t want to die, Fai had cried against his chest. Yuui had cried, who impersonated his dead brother, copied him in every way possible. Things slowly moved and clicked into place to form a picture. Yuui hadn’t picked up where Fai had left off, he had been repeating what his brother had been going through. He had taken his name, copied the signature on the paintings. He lived in the same apartment, he wore the same clothes his brother had left behind. And now, things had been arranged exactly as for his brother – he had been offered a great chance to make progress with his art, it was storming outside, it was the last night of the annual exhibition. The car he had been so afraid to drive was missing. Fai – Yuui – had been so afraid he would be dying because it was the only way out of this story. The wind rattled his windows and Kurogane’s throat constricted with fear.

“When exactly did his brother die? What time?” Kurogane glanced at his wristwatch.

“W-what?” she sniffled. “Er, he left the university around 11 pm, I think-”

Kurogane cursed, cut the call, and thundered down the wooden stairs into the heavy weather. His motorcycle howled when he started to force it up the road and towards the cliffs.

11:12, his wristwatch read.

*

Kurogane arrived at the curve maybe ten minutes later, weather making it impossible to see further than 50 meters ahead. His heart skipped a beat and for a moment, he thought he was looking at a gaping hole in the wall. Then the light of his motorcycle broke through the rain and  he realized he was seeing the side of a shut down car against the white stone wall. Kurogane pulled the brakes and stumbled off of his bike even before the wheels stopped turning, ignoring the way it crashed down on the asphalt behind him, and running up the rain-slick asphalt to the driver’s door. The front of the car had folded against the low, white concrete bricks, and as he ripped open the door, a small figure sat there, hands still locked to the steering wheel.

His face was ghostly pale and the blue eyes wide and glassy as he turned to Kurogane. His mouth was standing open slightly, but nothing came out.

“Yuui?” Kurogane’s shout seemed to be barely a whisper over the howling of the storm.

And the other man’s face crumbled up and tears started rolling out of his eyes, running over his cheeks without restraint. His eyes pressed shut as though in pain, and his back hunched as sobs shook his frame. He seemed unhurt save the injuries that he had obtained when destroying the glass sculpture. Thank God, thank God. Kurogane leaned over to peel his clutched, still bandaged and bloodied hands off of the steering wheel and Fai – no, Yuui – transferred them to his shoulders, sobbing into his chest as he held on to him like to a lifeline. Kurogane pulled him out of the car and into the rain, relief pounding in his head so strongly that his knees buckled. They collapsed in the dirt, neither of them caring. Rain was running down Kurogane’s face, soaking him to the skin.

He was alive.

*

 “I couldn’t do it,” Yuui said lowly, clutching at his coffee. Kurogane had dumped as much sugar into it as he could fit without the cup flowing over, but Yuui seemed to need it more to hold onto rather than to drink. Not long ago, he had stood in the rain, shivering, as Kurogane had moved the crushed-up car along the roadside so that it wouldn’t hinder the traffic. The engine was still working, and the doors hadn’t deformed, another sign that the driver hadn’t tried too hard at breaking through the wall. They hadn’t driven to the apartment down in the bay, the one that had belonged to Fai, who indeed had died another time, but to Kurogane’s small room in the dormitories, walking all the way up.

“I needed to find out if I could end things as I had planned,” he whispered. “And I couldn’t… I thought it would be easier to go through that wall…” Kurogane was sitting on the other end of the bed in the cramped room, not saying anything. He felt exhausted. Empty. Incredibly relieved that no one had died, tonight.

“You think they’d use the same, loose stone to rebuild that fucking ancient wall?” he grumbled.

Yuui was smiling, thinly and waveringly, and the expression vanished all too soon.

“Fai and me,” Yuui began in a low voice that knew exactly what story it was telling, “have always been together, ever since we were born. Only when we finished high school, he moved over to the coast to study arts and I moved further to the south to become a journalist. We didn’t see each other that much, anymore, and while we still talked on the phone every other day, we’re… we were not that different. He would work day and night on his paintings, and I worked ridiculous hours, trying to hold my job with the newspaper. And the last year of his life, we almost lost contact.

“I hadn’t talked to him in almost a month, when he called me at the night of the exhibition. I… I was still on site for an interview, it was loud, and I didn’t even understand what he was saying, at first. It took me a minute or so to understand that he was so happy that he had made it, so glad that he had not only people interested in getting his contacts, as usual, but that were so convinced by him that they would ship his pictures out, in a few days, giving him a real chance at making a living with what he was doing… And I told him I was happy for him but had no time and I’d call him back later, when I was done with work. That was the last time I talked to him,” Yuui drew a shivering breath.

“I should have been here,” the words were timid and broken, and a single tear fell out of his lashes, dropping onto his pale wrists. “After his death, I kept thinking that I should have been here. I should have seen more of him. I should have known his life, here, what he did, where he had lunch, who his friends were. And instead, I was a thousand kilometers away in some stupid, cold city, spending my time away writing things that people would throw into the trash the next evening. It would have been so easy to apply here when he did… I wonder why I never didn’t, when I had time. Maybe things would have been different. And I thought that maybe it was not too late to… to understand what I had missed.” He stopped for a second, as tears kept flowing and sobs broke his voice. And Kurogane wondered at how different this kind of crying was, now that the plans had failed, now that he was lost. Kurogane stood up to hand him tissues that Yuui accepted with a small hiccup. Thanks. “I thought… that by coming here, walking the same streets… I thought it would give me the peace that I searched in vain after his death. I had hoped that coming here would make it hurt less… that it was almost as though catching up with him. I didn’t tell my family – I didn’t tell anyone, out of fear that they wouldn’t understand me.

“Only when I arrived here…” Yuui drew a shivering breath, before he continued, eyes glassy, “I couldn’t feel him, at all. I stayed at his apartment, at first, as it was still open after his death, but I had never actually been here… all I could do is go to the university to see his paintings, talk to his friends. I was reconstructing what he had been doing, bit by bit, writing down every little detail… I have logs on what he was eating, on the names of his friends, on what he did in the evenings, most of his habits…” Yuui broke off, shadowing his eyes from view for a moment. “And then I thought that by taking his name… staying in his apartment, living the way he had… Kuro-min, it was almost like bringing him back…”

Kurogane ached and he shivered with the pain that spoke from Yuui’s words.

“It was only that, the longer I lived as Fai, the more I became him, the less I could remember who Yuui had been… until I thought that there was nothing of Yuui left. There were only two things that were different… I could never paint the way Fai could, and the things that I built were the one thing that told me that I was still breathing, still alive. The second thing was you. Fai never had lover, from all I gathered he had never been with someone, in his time here. All I could see was that I was reliving Fai’s life, inevitably experiencing the same things. And while the years were melting, I began to understand that after three years of living here, inevitably, I would die. In whatever way, I would have to die. I couldn’t run from it, even when I wanted to, I didn’t know how to. I didn’t know what was supposed to come after that, because Fai’s life ended at that point,” Yuui shivered like a leaf by now, breath hitching in his throat as though he was cold, and pulled his knees up to his body, rocking back and forth.

“On some days, I truly believed I had become him,” he whispered, and his eyes were wide and lost. “I just didn’t want to let go, yet, but holding on was so hard,” he admitted, and Kurogane remembered the sculptures that were nothing but a thousand of mirrors, out of which, at Yuui, the broken face of his brother must have stared back. He had been surrounded by death, all those years. Build broken forms of his brother, over and over again. He shivered at the thought.

“Holding on was hard,” Yuui continued in a whisper that was shaking his voice, now. “And I almost wanted to give up. And… when I first met you, I thought that you were exactly what I needed. I was losing my strength. As Yuui and Fai melted inside me to become the same person, things started to fall apart. And then you were there, just living, telling me not to run, telling me to keep working for my goals… I felt I could do it, as long as you would be there.” Kurogane broke eye-contact and swallowed a lump in his throat that might have been fury, or guilt, or something else that he wouldn’t want to let out. How could he have been so damn blind? Kurogane shut his eyes for a second, rubbing a hand across them. He hadn’t even realized how seriously caught up Yuui had been in his own head. But what made it worse was to know that he had helped this… this lunacy along. That he had supported this twisted view of the world. That he, with all that he had tried to pull Fai out of his life crisis, he had helped Yuui to pretend, had told him to keep working to reach the one goal that he had had all this time. Becoming a person he wasn’t. Dying.

“I didn’t want that,” Kurogane said. “I didn’t want to make things worse.”

“Maybe it was the only way to break out of this illusion,” Fai said with surprising clarity, smiling at him in a strange, almost disturbing way.

“So, now that it’s over… what are you going to do?” he asked, watching the other man. Yuui was quiet for a moment.

“I don’t know,” he admitted finally. “I never planned this far. I guess I could always go back to being a journalist, I’m not sure. Probably that’s part of the reason I was reluctant to think about it…”

Kurogane snorted at the understatement and Yuui grinned lopsidedly at him.

“You’ll find out. It’s not that bad, living your own life. Bit boring, at times, I guess, but it’s not like you can’t change that.”

“Heh, big Kuro-growly finds university boring?” Yuui grinned at him.

“Shut up, at least I’m not as fucked up as you.”

Yuui’s smile wavered and died. For a moment, they just looked at each other. And then Yuui asked, very quietly, very seriously, “I’m… I’m still pretty fucked up, I guess. Why didn’t you just leave me, before? It must have been… it must have been hard on you…”

Kurogane just looked at him. At Yuui, who possessed such strength, misguided as it might have been, who was so insecure, when it came to other people, who was so kind on the outside, and too afraid to not be sent running once you came close. Yuui, who had such kindness and tried to do everything on his own.

“Idiot,” Kurogane told him with a scowl. “Try to make me leave, now, and I’m going to have to punch your sorry head through the ugly wall behind you.” He was angry at Yuui, no question. He simply didn’t have the energy left to be angry, now, but he would give the idiot hell as soon as he had slept and eaten and the other had somehow stopped ripping open those stupid wounds all over his arms and legs. He could have stomped out of this mess, go back to his life – run in the mornings, work to get some mundane job, eat, sleep, repeat – and he wondered why he should even want to. He had decided to get Fai out of this, and he had been surprised when he pulled Yuui to the light. And whatever the hell Yuui would decide to do, he could bet that Kurogane wouldn’t just leave him alone with it.

“You saved my life,” Yuui said, as though realizing it that very second. “…even when I imitated everything Fai did… Fai never had a lover. You made the difference.”

Fai just watched his expression and Kurogane felt his face growing hot. Yuui started grinning broadly.

“Kuro-min, you are so pretty when you’re blushing!”

“Shut the fuck up,” Kurogane growled, but he didn’t push the other man away as he sidled up and leaned into him, silently sipping at the coffee that must have been cold by now. Yuui was shivering a bit, and his skin was still clammy, even after he had changed into too large clothes from Kurogane. And so, he laid an arm around his waist and pulled him close, sharing warmth.

And as the rain subsided outside the window, he was breathing the scent of Yuui’s skin. Fai had died, tonight, again. And maybe, on some level, it had been worth all the effort, all the pain that they had gone through. He hoped it had. Hoped that they had broken the circle of obsession that Yuui’s life had evolved around.

“Kuro-pin, I think we are not so different,” Yuui breathed softly into the darkness. Kurogane drank in the warmth between them.

“How do you mean that?” he asked, starting to fall asleep, slowly.

“While I had Fai all this time… weren’t you terribly focused on me?” he asked airily, something that was almost laughter dancing in his voice.

“Idiot, that’s different,” Kurogane grunted in irritation as he started to pull the covers back so that both of them could slip into the too-narrow bed.

“Sure, if you say so,” Yuui grinned against his chest. And falling asleep, pressing that breathing, warm body against him, Kurogane the words left a bitter aftertaste. What would he have done had Yuui died, today? Where was his line between love and obsession? And he found that it didn’t matter to him, not as long as Yuui was alive, alive, alive, and he wouldn’t have to think of it.

And yet, in his dreams, Yuui kept disappearing, or maybe it was Fai, he had problems separating them, ring of laughter melting into brightness that made his eyes tear.

~link to part one to score the fic~

Comments

[konnichipuu.livejournal.com]

KYAHAHAHAH! :'D *dies laughing from tickling and huggles*

...see what you did, now? YOU KILLED ME! *clings to you from beyond the grave*

[faren-maddox.livejournal.com]

Didn't you kill me, once? I seem to remember that I'm a ghost for some reason... We can be ghosts TOGETHER! And we can haunt clover's kitchen, BECAUSE.

[konnichipuu.livejournal.com]

OH, you're right! I hugged you to death, a few times! WHOOP! A fellow ghost! :D

I'll haunt the cupboard with the nutella, just so you know. ♥

[fieldofclover.livejournal.com]

HEY STAY OUT OF MY NUTELLA CUPBOARD YOU GORRAM KIDS!

*shakes fist like a crotchety old man*

*continues with the tackle glomping*

[faren-maddox.livejournal.com]

*tucks, rolls, grabs Nutella, sprints away*
....
*sheepishly hands back Nutella so she can get more hugs*

[fieldofclover.livejournal.com]

*gleefully trades Nutella jar for hugs*