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Tokyo buzzes with faint noises, Alfred lays on freshly cut grass of Kiku's lawn. The sirens of the ambulance filing up the gaps.The silence between them never feels like a crashing apocalypse, instead it feels like a morning after a snow storm. Things seem better than the last time they'd met. Alfred remembers crying in his arms.
When he became the superpower, they looked at him like an atheist looking at stained glass in a church. Grand and glorious yet nothing. They'd pay to see you shatter. Alfred doesn't know if Japan does too but he knows Kiku didn't.
"It's Halloween soon."; he absent-mindedly wonders. "We could be anything."
The birds perched on the poles flit & swift past the promenades where the sequoia leaves lay strewn.
"Human for a day then?"
"What would you do?" Alfred chirps in.
"Fall in love maybe"; Kiku laughs.
To kiss you, to hold you under the pouring like the ones Hollywood makes. Hold onto you the way Van Gogh held to his art or the way Dostoyevsky didn't give up on writing even when he was in jail. The way these things kept these people alive is t he way I'd breathe to see another day with you. To be human is a rare and beautiful thing.
The latter remains unsaid as usual.
"It's rather bold to assume love exists in this time and age. Can absence of hatred maybe called love?"; Alfred wonders if he said that aloud.
"I think love is more than an antonym of disgust."
Love is a bruised monarch, fluttering like cigarette smoke, slowly ellipsing around those aquamarine blues.
"It's like hemlock."; Alfred says.
"Hemlock is venom"; he whispers. Even though he knows that's exactly what Alfred means. His iris collapses into Alfred's, like impaling grass fronds, queued side by side. Trust is a forgien concept. Guns blazing, bloody knuckles smelling of iron, it was his way.
"Love slips under your skin, invades your blood and seizes your heart. There's nothing you can do about it”; Alfred says. There's a hint of sorrow in his eyes. Kiku doesn't question it.
Alfred wonders if Kiku knows that he looks at him like he's the Helios to his Solar System. He wants to kiss him but he doesn't.
After all there's a comfortable silence between them. Who would want to poison that?