Work Text:
Rintarou was ten when a girl named Elise moved to the apartment next door. Wavy blonde hair like spun gold, eyes blue like the clear Yokohama sky on a summer day. She moved with the grace of a dancer while talking a mile a minute at him in broken Japanese. She dressed in well-worn Western designer clothes, all frills and bold hues, so starkly different from Rintarou’s muted color palette.
His parents were businessmen. Hers were dancers. The two couples hated each other on sight, but their children took to each other like moth to the flame.
Elise was whimsical and spoiled; the way children often were when their parents compensated for the lack of affection with more money than they could afford. Rintarou was quiet and submissive, silence beaten into his body by his father’s hands, sometimes quite literally. Elise liked the way he listened to her attentively like nothing else mattered in the world, how he catered to her every whim. Rintarou liked the way she glared at his bruises, as though she would love to pummel whoever was behind them into the ground, and then dragged him to play doctor with her the next minute.
When she died two years later, his Ability manifested for the first time. Vita Sexualis looked at him with Elise’s eyes, childlike fierceness shining like molten flame, hands steep in the blood of his father. He laughed, long and hard into the cold night, and it – she – laughed with him, terrifyingly insane and absolutely perfect.
Rintarou fled the house that had never been his home right after. Elise ran alongside him, a living ghost, a reminder of a childhood that should have been.
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Even though he was capable of changing Vita Sexualis’s appearance, Rintarou never once thought of letting his Elise age. She would forever remain twelve, while he grew older and older, until the child who had once followed her around like an obedient puppet became nothing but a distant memory. Until she became the only one who ever called him by his real name anymore.
He could change her clothes in a blink of an eye if he so wished, but he still spent his money on frilly dresses (red suited her the best), expensive sweets and drawing supplies, dolls and toys that he knew would bore her within a day or two. He could make her less demanding, less impulsive, less quick-tempered, but then he might as well be talking to a complete stranger and not his childhood friend. Elise was his goddess, and he worshipped her like a loyal servant. Next to her, he could be a young boy again, living out his stolen childhood as though it had never been lost at all.
Most of the time, Rintarou could even pretend she was truly Elise, and not just an extension of his imagination. He could pretend she was immortal, and not rotting six feet under the ground at some nameless cemetery.
No one else would ever understand.
With her, he was invincible.