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Kiryu sighs, it's not enough but with Nishiki, it's never enough.
With Nishiki comes a sense heavier than all of heaven and earth entwined. A weight that no light, no silver ribbon of midday sun could mend. It makes fall into his skin but for Nishiki, it's far more.
Nishiki, whose hair falls like a masquerade of coffee-colored cords akin to it curling over his Fuschia-tipped ears. Nishiki, whose skin melts into the light like wax under the sun. With bones intact of glass that shatter like water on his skin and his eyes that stand on every action alone, still requital.
Sheltered behind arms full of sloping blossoms and bowing branches. Crying tears of bliss into the enchanting fog, the echo of a rose ringing throughout the winter fields of his mind.
Kiryu is unable to put it into words—all those rhymes and poems seem to be Nishiki's thing—but Nishiki looks unalike to how he usually is under the newly installed lights of the karaoke bar, as he rips his throat apart singing Judgement all the while Kiryu's hands burn to back him up. There is no stopping because, with Nishiki, it's easy to forget that there is a tomorrow.
Is it real? Nishiki shoves him and bellows out a cry, his eyes glowing like embers in the dark. They both look at each other like it can't possibly be real, shadowing their ignorance. Under the phantoms that plan in the night that flutter through his barren room, Kiryu sees wraith-like points in the scarlet breeze and it drips down in a gliding current. The feeling of Nishiki against him is both familiar and foreign, falling into shapes of geometry he never quite listened to in class.
When he goes to sleep, he dreams a clear image. He catches a flash of red-gold beneath the surface of the water, and realizes that there are koi in the pond, massive, serene, and wonders: are they dreams of fish, or fish who dream? It's enough to wake him up in a cold sweat.
The wind swiftly reforms, calling out from an onyx lake to remind him of memories that are yet to be touched by time. Memories that are forever bending through the gleaming rays of lights, in passages of time like a misplaced prayer from a solitary spirit. He is more than malleable to the threads of fate in the state he's in.
Nishiki wishes to be along with the lilies, among the lotus' that break the surface of the water, glistening a luminous blaze. "To float as one with purpose—a being with tragedy, but a being nonetheless," he says by Kiryu, voice full of sorrow. "Instead of fluttering about soundlessly in the wind like a lost soul, I seek it back bar none. For of all the dynamism I have yielded not a single touch has been rebound. Raindrops that same to quiet cracks become endlessly missed the moment they splash. Dropping fast as if wingless spirits cut loose from the heavens, forever walking endless steps through the concrete woods and into my heart. Forever trapped in the hollow wondering amidst the labyrinth of flora. Just a saint without an altar, an emperor without a shrine."
And just like the wind changing the currents of a stream, he's back. He flows, a koi in the river and one that refuses to be swept away by the tide. He soars brighter than any other of them out there. To be honest, Kiryu just wants to go home and eat noodles with him.
But tonight, black and white with unkempt hair, their drinks aren't enough to wash away the truth.