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No other world than this.
When I close my eyes, cities
burn. The men I cannot touch
I name. When strangers knock,
death gathers at the door
And flies out of our mouths,
that swan song in our throats
a falling cloud of ash.
-Sodom and Gomorrah, Timothy Liu (about the AIDS crisis.)
His hands have gone numb, on the hilt of his black blade, and the sky is unlike any Shibuya has ever seen.
It is dark, though clouds wreathe the sky. No star has been seen in Shinjuku since the advent of electricity, and their sudden reappearance has shone only on ruin. On cloudy nights, Guren might have looked out his apartment to see that sickly grey lavender reflected back upon the city; on clear nights, the grey might only be a little darker. It was isolating, missing home, the quiet and starry countryside. But eventually, it became a sort of comfort- the protection of community, of light, a sign of teeming human life. Growing saturated with the city, the people, the closeness- he got used to wanting it. Seeking it. Needing it.
We live on the cutting edge of history, he heard some man say broadcasted on the side of a Shinjuku skyscraper, we live in a world filled with possibility.
What a fool.
The sky is choked just as deeply with humanity tonight. But the pollution is not of light.
Guren looks up at the sky, and the wind brings in the unmistakable scent of mass death, undefeated by the makeshift scraps of cloth tied over their faces. There has been no adaptation they can assume fast enough to outpace the ever-mounting volume of tragedy. Guren’s eyes water at the chemical cloud; he is adamant this does not count as weeping. It cannot be grief. It can only be consequence. He is not allowed to feel grief.
It is beginning to snow, for the first time since the fall. A few flakes at first, and… the snow is grey with ash. The sky is green, with methane. Shinjuku is dead dark, and if Shinya were to light the match his hands so idly stroked, it would be lucky if the light did not fall on a single corpse. They have not had the luxury to even think yet of what they might do with all the dead.
It has been-
A week.
Guren cannot feel his hands. He has not said a word to Shinya in hours. What could he say? Good lord, what could he say?
It is surreal, and it is so very quiet, as in this new hell can only mean the very eye of the storm. They have been put on watch. Again, though they have not slept in so very long. But how can they complain, when the rest of the watch rotation has dwindled to half its size, when all that remain are children and the defenseless? When near all those he saves will most likely not survive the coming sunless day?
The catastrophe, the end of the world- the way it always felt in Mahiru’s mouth was as if it were to be a single event, a sudden destruction as edgeless and complete as black and white. The catastrophe is not a point in time. It is a ceaseless descent, it happens and keeps happening. It takes a long time to fall from the top of the world, crashing into everything all the way down.
Shinya sets down his gun, silently, leaning forward and holding out a hand to catch the first cold flakes, in the pale and sickly moonlight.
“The snow on Christmas was beautiful, in comparison to this,” he mutters, voice badly stripped of banter, hoarse and peeling. Held out, his hand is pale and fragile, veins a pale blue at the wrist, removed from its glove. His nails were always perfectly filed, but now several are broken at odd angles, the palm scraped raw healing in scabs. Of course Guren notices this. Guren aches to throw himself upon his blade. “How much worse do you think it’s going to get? Before it dies off?”
He is referring to the smell- the smell, and the endless waves of horror, the children festering and mute under beds, the smog and pollution, the desolate sky, the insectile behemoths descending still ever more upon the world.
“I remember reading the prediction in a newspaper, a few days before. Everyone was so excited for the Christmas snow, even though it would only melt by morning.” Shinya smiles, that odd smile of his Guren has grown horribly attached to, the kind meaning nothing but peace within pain. “I watched it start, while you were asleep on me, outside the hotel window. It felt like the beginning of the end.” He looks down. “I know I should have tried harder to rest. Maybe I could have done something, then. If I’d gotten my beauty sleep- Maybe things could have been different.” His silken white hair slips from behind his ear, hanging limp in front of his face, as they face the wind atop the ash-covered roof, amidst the rubble. The smile returns. “But I wanted to watch the snow. You know. In case I wasn’t around the next day.”
Guren’s mouth opens, and closes, and opens again, like a dying fish.
“It’s- uh. The ash is polluting it. The snow. Don’t get any ideas about catching it on your tongue.” (Something to say that will not kill them all.)
Shinya stares out into nothing, setting down his hand staring limply upwards, washed-out eyes underlined with shadow. “Right. I’ve never had a silly idea like that in my life, have I, Guren, and neither have you, hmm? We’re respectable big kids. We make good choices with our lives.”
Guren would smile, if only to perform the social cue as not to seem out of place. But he simply cannot. What it has taken of him to sit next to Shinya- to bear it, to hold it, to silence it when dead Shinjuku could hear even the smallest snapping of a twig-
He wants to-
Shinya must take his blade from him and run it through his chest before he might speak. But he can’t, he can’t, he can’t .
Oh, how easy it would be if only he’d never so briefly tasted the will to live!
A week ago, in that little hotel, on that stained couch pressed against the boy- for a moment in sleep deprivation and clinging familiarity, his most pressing concern had been Shinya’s pale pink lips. The curve of his hip, his crystal eyes, the crinkle of his ever-smooth face breaking finally through that facade. That if the world was going to end, perhaps he could bring himself to ask, just once. That Shinya was halfway to it, in their brief hour of respite, like two girls at a sleepover, desperate for a warm body. He never did. He never did. He certainly never would now.
Their bodies are cold, in the flurries, the wind, the howl of something faraway and unnatural. But inside- inside of Shinya, it is still warm. He assumes it must be, from the visions of Lord Ferid’s manicured talons digging into the soft tissue of the heart.
What if he injured it? What if it is festering, contaminated with whatever horrible things lay underneath the noble’s fingernails?
Guren grows paranoid his friend might start rotting if he looks away for too long.
Not even Shinya has seen his own heart. But Guren has. He feels sick at the thought, his mere presence violating. Shinya has had no power in his own resurrection. He knows not of all the hands which have been laid upon him. He knows not of Guren’s sick dream, that last fitful night.
(They were alone- in Mahiru’s apartment. There, where Guren lost everything. In the afternoon light, the stuffed animals, the pale pink sheets- it was Shinya , in her place. Less soft, and far more real, Shinya reached out a hand, held his gaze as Mahiru could not. Tear-stained and red, Shinya, Shinya’s skin to his, Shinya’s back to the sheets, hand in his hair, lips to his lips. And-
The taste of blood, and pulling away the string of saliva- a great, gaping hole in Shinya’s chest, blue eyes wide and dead- and Guren screaming, half naked and mouth smeared in blood, stumbling backwards until he awoke in a deep, drowning horror.)
Shinya would never have wanted Guren to do this to him.
Shinya is shivering, but his face is blank. Guren thinks perhaps Shinya is unhappy with him. He is terrified it might be for the right reason.
Another crash, and another plume of smoke in the corner of his eye, in the bleak urban distance.
Guren stands up, more than restless, attempting to shake the slightest bit of heat into his fingers, sense into his gored mind. He cannot let this get to him. He cannot think of it. He must be nothing now but a soldier. “Kureto said to delegate any horsemen in the east to his team tonight. Just radio it in.”
Shinya remains seated, stiff. “Got it.” He picks up the device, clunky and old fashioned. It’s the only line they’ve yet gotten working. For a moment, he stares at it, not meeting Guren’s eyes. “You seem almost disappointed. Would you prefer we bust our asses again? I can’t stand looking at those things during the daytime. Now it feels like we’re in a horror game. Not even a good one.”
He is trying to be funny again. It doesn’t land, and Guren just looks miserable.
“Right, sorry. Yeah. I’ll do it.”
The snow grows heavier with the wind, and as Guren stares, Shinya becomes almost a silhouette in the grey air, struggling to work his fingers enough to press the buttons. “Hey. Shinya here. Yep, hi, big bro. Got some horsemen up to the east. Go handle it.” A pause. “I don’t know, by that big building with the sign on it. I can’t exactly pull up google maps anymore.” A muffled string of cold insults, through the receiver. “Love you too, god. Thankfully it looks like they die down at dawn.”
Shinya lets the receiver fall in his lap, hanging limp. There is snow caught in his eyes, and the chemicals in the flakes will cause him to start crying, whether he likes it or not, within a few minutes.
Something sticks in his mouth. Trying to escape. Failing. Until he cannot stare upwards anymore and he must cover himself, a small noise of pain, wiping his eyes, nose red and running. This is a new kind of winter, Christmas has come and gone, and it will only get colder.
“I-”
Hovering, over-hovering, an angel above, outweighing even the cling of the demon on the shoulders. Guren feels it hovering, the unspoken. The massive unfurling wings, too unwieldy to fly without a massive expense of fossil fuel. Shinya, snow white and made of ash, Shinya, in the dead snow.
Guren does not want to seem more uncaring than he must. He is terrified. He sits back down, a little unsteady, uncomfortably as the concrete he sat upon has already dusted with snow.
“What is it?” he asks, numb, limbs and head filling with sharp static, pins and needles, then a painful numbing. It is muffled, his own voice.
Shinya clings to himself, and with a little hesitation takes his hands out of his gloves, shoving them into the arms of his uniform. “Hey, yeah, it’s just- I’m just cold. It’s fucking cold.”
He says nothing for a little- but then, in second thought-
“You’re acting like- really weird .” Shinya vomits the words upon him. And Guren is struck with the worst pit of fear, the first feeling of the sword in the slot once again-
sudden,
total,
utter unavoidable mechanism.
Shinya reaches out. He draws his fingers back into the palm, remembering the cold. Out, Shinya is stretched, and wants to touch. But he does not want to offend.
Those violet eyes do not look the same as they did. When the boy with the footprints on his back looked up from his desk with eyes near black, there was yet that midnight gleam, that- could it be- resistance? Hope, growing brighter even as the cover of darkness fell, this, this was his savior.
It is dark now, isn’t it? But they do not reflect back.
(The image of Mahiru, smiling, giving her speech upon the podium- before she went missing. She stares at him. He stares at her. Their faces are glued on. Their eyes are plastic, their voices prerecorded. Degrees of separation. This is diplomacy.)
This isn’t diplomacy, is it?
Shinya is so god awful tired of diplomacy. Within Guren he found the only solace. It was almost embarrassing for Mahiru’s love to catch him too, for her to be right about anything. But he was, he was , like a light in the dark, Shinya only a dusty moth in washed out colors. He never knew how soft it was to see one’s unpainted face- of Guren’s, and his own. It was as if meeting himself for the first time. Just the warm touch of an ordinary hand.
But Guren is giving him that face now, that poker face, the face one has to peel off at the end of the day with seven different products.
Something has gone wrong in him, deeply so. All the world has gone wrong, how could he expect anything else? But this is, this is. Worse. Somehow. Worse.
Shinya recovers himself. Smiles.
“I can’t take this,” he admits, “I’m so scared. I don’t mean to push you into a corner, I’m just so- I’m worried I’ve done something wrong- or…”
Guren frantically shakes his head, reaching out, on his knees. He is mute, pushing against glass, barely moving.
“Or- something wrong has happened to you, and I’m not enough to help.”
Haven’t you done enough, Shinya wants to say, haven’t you suffered enough? Why can’t we just rest? Why can’t we just sleep?
But then it will seem as if he is asking for death. Guren doesn’t deserve to carry that as well. He doesn’t really want death, maybe, he wants to live- so recently, despite everything he wanted to live. He just needs- something else.
Something else.
He needs to be back in Guren’s apartment, back in time. Playing dumb games, laughing and stuffing their faces, succumbing to sleep as the sun came up. He would like to forget any of this ever could have happened.
It is immature to mourn something as unnecessary as an 8-bit fighter game. But if he names what it is he really mourns he may realize he never had it to begin with.
(Childhood.)
No, the thing that he wants back the most, right now, is the warmth. That is it, it is only the cold. Bloody and raw and sweat soaked, let him have one last summer back. But his joints are red and aching, and he bares himself before Guren, and Guren does not bare himself back. Guren is a brick wall, jet-black and beautiful and suddenly withholding. Something has gone wrong. Guren is looking at him like a dead sack of meat, one of those bodies now, leaking pandemic putrefaction into the streets. He feels like one, and he is scared. He wants to go back. He wants to make it his fault. He would do anything to make it his fault. Maybe it is after all.
The snow catches in his hair, the snow catches on his face, and he is cold and wet, and it is soaking past the uniform fabric. “...Don’t you feel it?” He laughs. “I thought we were over this, this- barrier. I thought maybe we could actually make it. I thought-” He stops himself before he becomes too loud, before the angels hear them, but the sound seems to barrel over, too much momentum- splattering undignified over Guren, like blood. Shinya trembles- and retreats, snow crunching under his feet.
“Course, everything is different now. Forgive me for saying anything. Easier to pretend. I know. I know that.”
Guren is staring as a deer in the headlights, clutching the hilt of his sword again.
He clings to it so often now, a bad habit, black addiction. Shinya is guilty of it too. They no longer have the luxury to wash themselves of the black soot. All the world is smothered in it.
“Yeah.” Guren responds, but he is looking down, face now devoid of emotion. “I fucked it all up, didn’t I. I’m so, so-” He stops- cannot say the word. And he shakes it away from himself, sweet black curls wet and slick in the snow, teasing now a little past the back of his neck. He does not elaborate.
Guren’s response is not illuminating. It only stays dark, the sky choked with ash, a dull and muddy color. On the first day of the end, it was as dark and ugly as a fresh bruise. Now it blooms like a corpse.
Shinya sits upon the top of the broken world with him. He opens his mouth again, lips tinted a dusty blue.
“I really admired you. For- trying. For believing it could happen, that we could save the world.”
It was an amazing, fleeting thing, really- the moon, watching the light of the sun, lighting his path. Watching the light of the sun burn itself out. Shinya was the one to ask for revolution, but without Guren nothing could have started.
Yet, even with Guren, everything still ended.
“If we failed, I didn’t- I didn’t really think about it. Mahiru only wanted to prepare for life after the end.” Shinya speaks, quietly. “I thought she was crazy. It was like you were the only one in the world who dared think we might save ourselves. I lived on that. It had to work. What was the point in planning for the worst if it had to be like that? ” A breathy laugh, single, unechoed.
(But look where they are now.)
Nothing matters anyway , Shinya would have comforted himself, before he met Guren. Pale-faced and smooth, Shinya hates the boy he was before then, devoid of any line of resistance but a smile. But Guren showed him something which did, something which mattered a lot, a lot, a lot.
What they should have had. What they could have had. What he dared to hope for the first time they might fucking get.
Damn-
Goddamn it all, damn it all , he is only now so far from numb.
The cold is not sweet as the Christmas they should have had, that would fall ever short of empty hands, robbed of their softness. No, the air stings, the concrete is littered with human remains, it is past midnight and his eyes are watery. Shinya feels faint, and unknowing, like something has left him while he looked away.
Guren is in there somewhere, in those dark doe eyes, clutching his katana, he must be in there somewhere. If Shinya must follow him to the ends of the earth, follow blindly behind. Orpheus could not look back. But he could follow. All could not be lost. (He pleads.)
In the reality of it- they have known each other for less than a year. Yet this year, this- this could never be undone.
The abstraction before him, the resolution made flesh, these cherry lips bitten and bleeding hover close to him, close as a statue, slightly trembling. They have been kissed before. But only by poison. Shinya-
(Guren keeps breaking their gaze, as if fighting habit though every glance cries like an open wound.)
Shinya does not think now that his kiss would change that.
A tear,
chemical and snow-wet
streaks across a parched and cold-flushed face.
Shinya is crying.
It is a relief only in name to watch his best friend’s scrutiny fail, to break gaze and leave him secretly in a cold and safe coffin.
He wants, almost, to beg, to spill, to pull Shinya into his arms and break everything . Oh, how he wants to, oh how only now confession is death. Confession is death; Guren was hidden from the world all his life. Now he knows why. Now he knows what he could do if they ever let him free, if they ever let him near a precious Hiiragi, as all Ichinoses knew. All would bruise and rot, all that was good would die and the world would come to an end.
Never in all his life has he been this tender. Never, ever so truly, truly alone, and this past year minced and gored in anguish is but a drop to his endless sea of blood.
But Guren is secure, for now, in his deceiving, and Shinya weeps. Of the acrid air or pure despair, he cannot tell which would be worse.
“Don’t cry,” is the only thing he can say, and immediately he regrets it. “I’m sorry. I am not a comfort. That is not a comfort.”
What comfort could a perpetrator ever provide?
Shinya is broken, patched together in a botched job. He sets his hands in his lap, kneeling, and is composed again, his face yet raw and red. “It’s the furthest thing from your fault. Our shift ends and we crawl back to cots, we lie awake, blood swimming with adrenaline and demonic steroids until we phase into nightmare, and then we wake up and put on our faces for the Hiiragis, and it’s… just- same old, same old.” He takes a breath, shakes his head and waves it away.
Shinya hangs his head.
“I’m just cold is all. I don’t know if the sun is coming back.”
Guren hangs next to him, limp and heavy as if from a noose. “It has to, doesn’t it? Eventually, the smog, it’ll- clear out, right?”
It is just as much for himself as for Shinya.
The look in his eyes shares the overwhelming sentiment. It will get far worse before it will ever get better. The death, the rot, the corrosion and confusion and deathly scramble to hold the slightest scrap of light, of water, of refuge. All that exists comes in the form of grief- homeless, formeless, directionless grief. All that is gained, they are reminded every second, is easily lost. There is no fixing. There is no going back. It takes a very long time to fall from the top of the world.
The worst thing, perhaps- is the simplicity, the transparency of it all.
All Shinya wants is to be close. He does not take much to be content, after all, he raised himself happy with air, and armageddon is of no consequence, in the end. Life will go on, and he will smile even in the face of this writhing mass of horror. Guren knows Shinya; there is very little he demands.
All Shinya wants is the one thing Guren cannot give him.
Good lord.
It hits him, as the full force of the divine upon his head.
He will have to let Shinya down slowly. In very many ways.
He should have let himself down the second he made his decision, he should have recognized the immensity of the task, of the act, of revelation, the ultimate sin. He should have realized- these were no shoes for a child, no human being. If he was to do this it was as simple as that.
To become that final pin in the grand machine, he gave up all claim to personhood. Guren is as good as scripture now. He is a mechanism, fighting with every second against the very god-sized gear he set in motion. What did he think it would feel like, when he set himself on the cross?
He could either have Shinya in his arms, dead, or alive, far, far away from this dangerous machine. Guren made his choice.
But he has not yet miraculously transformed into such an emotionless thing.
.
Shinya, at the funeral, in a sleek black suit.
He brought flowers. White, only, and blue. Guren held them, with a loose and empty grip. Sorry my dad executed your dad. Can I still come over to play video games?
Shinya’s presence was diplomatic suicide. Guren would be punished more than Shinya for his presence. And yet that night he did not sleep alone, no, he was not left alone. He could be held up, the grief of one by six at once- he walked on. Emotionless machine.
He fails to disguise himself as one, a role gifted to him at the age of five by a father who gave only what he had received, a mother dead the second she gave life to him. Guren is no good at being a man, and yet ever more it is necessary he act as one.
(There was a time when the sect put on a spectacle, a play, far before he was born, yet burned into the memories of all. Cutting and scarring, a historical reenactment with all the trappings of Kabuki. They had an Ichinose man play her - she who was the root of all their suffering, who bore the burden of all tears.)
An inherited burden, from parent to child. An inherited tragedy, from Hiiragi to Ichinose. That day, they placed the weight in his hands. A side table, a figurehead, to replace his father’s neck on the chopping block- he should have known, he had no personhood to begin. But Shinya, that night, Shinya held his hand, as they looked out at the moon. It meant nothing, to him. It meant everything in the world.
.
“...Do you want my coat?” Guren asks, after a million years.
Shinya stares up at him from below, mouth slightly open, eyes underlined as a deep bleeding wound. “Why would I take your coat?” he smiles, concealing again his pale and frozen hands. “You’d only be colder.”
It is said so sweetly, and so cutting- how the angels descended, how softly they held Shinya in his sleep, how brutally they mutilated him in awakening, how mercilessly they took their payment. Guren held him, when he was colder than any human being ought to be. It was the least he could do.
He cannot hold Shinya again.
“I don’t mind,” he whispers, so tense, the high tenor of the voice that suggests one may barely hold back a wail. Snow gathers on Shinya’s lips, and they lean in to each other-
So very-
But he can’t, he can’t , he-
Shinya mutters, so close to him, sharp and brushing him, just slightly gracing the skin- half a laugh, half a cry. That same, high sort of voice, fragile and cracked, hands nearly bundling into a fist. “But I don’t- I don’t want you to.”
What he wants-
He will never say it, not with Guren like this. Never again. Guren has forgone his chance.
What can he do but look away, look away and pretend he does not know?
He chokes himself before he can speak, and Shinya draws himself back again, shaking his head. Ever composed. But not really. “I’m so sorry about- all of this. I know it- I can’t know how- hard- it must be for you, with…” He breathes in. “...Mahiru, and everything. It must be about her. What you can’t talk about.” He stumbles up. The snow is gathering now. And he takes Byakkomaru again in his hand, in a faint and brief spark of blue, walking towards the edge and staring out at the dark, dark city. “I can shut up. I know I can’t- speak on what you feel about her.”
Guren-
Wide eyed, and screaming.
He is smothered in blood, he is five years old, he is ten, he is fifteen and sixteen and sixteen and sixteen , he is sixteen goddammit and Mahiru stands in front of Shinya, superimposed, in her school uniform, hair blowing in a nonexistent breeze. Obscuring, bleeding into, standing between. Skirt and lace and steel blade. Her hands are red. Guren’s hands are red. Shinya is all, all red. He looks, dead, alive, for an answer, only an answer.
On his tongue,
Red and blue, violet made of the midnight and the day
Guren lies.
“Yeah- it’s about. Her.”
In the air, there is only silence. Shinya cannot find anything to rest his eyes upon which has been unvisited by devastation. Guren’s eyes are the worst of all the ruin. From the look of them, Shinya has said something wrong again.
His tongue has been butchered, eyes flat dark and dissociative. He has left, though he is still there. So it is about Mahiru.
“Oh, don’t worry about trying to explain it, I know I, an unloved virgin, could never understand,” Shinya laughs, exhaling all hope, in a sort of comforting way.
Joking, Shinya is good at joking, at patronizing himself. He has given up the attempt at being candid, but- that only ever worked so few times, this is what he is used to anyway.
The words in the air taste so sugary, so heavy. He has had nothing all day to eat except cake, and he is so hungry for anything else. But here’s more cake, I guess. It is all they have.
It is a good inoculation to the horror of it all. It has always worked on Guren.
Guren, crouched on the ground, takes his hand off the hilt, and does smile- a little, under his breath, barely looking up. Shinya lets out a breath of frozen air, limbs going numb to the night. It is- maybe it is better this way. The heartburn warms the joints. His heart has been doing that a lot lately.
But Guren responds, then, an offhanded thing, after- a little too long of a pause. “Oh, you know, like I said with Mito…” He gives a sardonic smile, though does not move, still looking slightly past him. “I am just a lowly Ichinose after all. I wouldn’t mind, if you wanted me to- I live to serve. I could always have sex with you, if it would make you feel better.”
Shinya-
Stands in the gale of the wind, and the light of the moon just barely draws a dim glow to the toxic clouds above.
Silence, as a sinking, plummeting feeling.
His face draws into a deep grimace, hand drawing back into a clutched fist. “Don’t- Don’t joke about things like that, Guren.”
It.
It isn’t even the unfortunate nail on the head, it isn’t Shinya and his little infatuation still caught under the tongue. It isn’t even the generality of it- as if it were nothing but a platonic gesture, that he would be the third person to receive this offer.
It is that Guren would offer this only as an apology. That he would offer this, instead of answering the simplest of questions.
This is worse, far worse than nothing at all.
Shinya got the idea in his head recently- only recently that there might be more than a wild chance Guren felt it too. He couldn’t just be a straight boy, after all, he didn’t carry himself like one- this Shinya had always suspected, even watching from afar. Shinya never tried to hide it, not like Guren. But- he thought, he- caught something, in the hotel that last day before the end. He was nearly sure of it, in his academic study of Guren Ichinose. Guren loved him too.
.
Shinya is not exactly sure what he believes anymore. Maybe Guren does love him.
But maybe, after all, he was mistaken.
Guren tenses at Shinya’s discomfort, and retreats, collecting himself again on the rooftop, face red. There is a face of immediate regret. “Yeah- sorry. Just trying to lighten the mood.” The weapon clatters to the ground, glowing red and black in the snowy grey night, and stays away from him, for a moment, away. He hunches over, clutching himself.
Fuck, he’s ruined it. He’s ruined everything, Shinya has ruined it all, yet again.
Into Shinya, Guren is staring directly. He is trembling too. He is just as freezing, yet their silhouettes remain firmly apart.
How many more minutes left in their shift? Hours? And how it batters them, the wailing wind, the acid snow, the fragility of life, the insecurity of the very concrete they stand on. Shinya has been silently crying through much of this. It is from the chemicals. It is not. All has come to an end. It is still ending. Shinya can feel it slipping away, all dignity, yet what can he do but smile?
Byakkomaru slips from his cold hand and disappears as blue flame, abandoned in a wavering moment. Shinya collapses to the ground and falls upon Guren, closing his eyes and wrapping his arms around Guren’s neck, pressed limp and pathetic against the chest. Shinya says nothing. Guren is frozen, frozen in place for a moment. Waiting, it seems, for the end.
And after a moment, in the silence, he slowly wraps his arms around Shinya as well.
It feels like he is saying goodbye.
(Beat.)
(Beat.)
(Beat.)
(His heart feels frailer than it was.)
The howl of the wind. The silence of the snow. Buildings are still in the midst of collapse, falling as dominoes in delayed reaction. About once every hour, something crashes horribly to the ground. One takes the other. The continued price of a beating heart.
The body, as clawed and held and used. The Ichinose body, bent to the knees. The hands provide themselves, Lord Bathory’s fangs in his neck, Mahiru’s blood on his hips, Kureto’s hands around his neck, Noya’s breath drugging the muscle, the bitter taste of another pill on his lips. He is marked, in ash and bruise and scar tissue. He is a body of use. He will offer himself again. No clean patch of skin nor drop of blood remains.
Shinya, pressed to his chest. Shaking.
Guren cannot keep from it. Guren is drinking in the warmth as the very last breath of air, and with it is a deep, silent, unabiding panic.
What if he cannot do it?
His nails dig into Shinya’s back, his muscles tense, wracked by silent tremors. And Shinya leans into it, as deep as he can, neck wrapped over his shoulder, heart- against heart- beating. Beating still.
He is on the verge of tears, eyes wide in horror, for he is struck with it, felt as deep and useless as a sword in the chest.
Guren is in love.
What if he cannot do it? It is causing such a physical, chemical reaction in him, as a match to sandpaper, he is catching fire.
What if he cannot make himself? What if his act is not convincing enough? What if Shinya knows him too well? He is so close to doing it, he wants to do it, he is going to- he does not know if he can stop himself from crying, though he vowed he could not- Surely, he could not do this forever. He is going to have to do this . Until the end of time.
For the fucking farce of angels above, how very close they were- to- Guren does not know, does not know if he could call it happiness, call it freedom, call it anything but love. But-
-Blood. Wet. Hot. Unrelenting.
”Shut up, shut up, you’re not gonna die!”
“Guren- p- please, just let me t-”
Trembling fingers, grasping at your sleeve, slipping off in failure, hitting the floor.
“No, no, use your energy to heal-”
But there is no healing that. There is nothing in the world that could stop this from ending. And all so, so quickly, Shinya is smiling. Smiling, tears blossoming and falling away.
“Please, Guren. It’s- okay. I’m happy. I got to… spend Christmas with you, ‘right? I finally…”
Shinya stares into nothing. Unfocused. Trying. Failing.
“Just- stay the same, right? Stay like this forever. We’ll win. As long as we’re together. Don’t do anything… bad, okay? It’s ok.”
NO, NO IT ISN’T, NO, NO-
“Please don’t go,” you whimper, like a child, at his very last.
“I’m- sorry. If it… counts for anything…” Shinya meets your eyes. “I loved you.”
HE LOVES YOU?
You cannot respond- you cannot- think of-
Silence, and- breath, losing its…
A cough. Trying to be a laugh. It isn’t.
“...What, I don’t get a goodbye kiss?”
“I- I- Shinya-”
You are failing. You can feel his blood soaking your uniform. He is there one minute. And he is gone the next. And he dies, soft, cold, in your arms.
He loved you, Guren.
Past tense.
It was love, it was . Now it cannot be.
How utterly cruel of God, to tell him only at the moment it died.
What salvation, because Guren could not bear to kiss the cold thing goodbye. He has been saved, for Guren kissed another. Shinya has been saved- For what, sinbearer, for what?
Does he want to be alive, like this? He was happy, at the end, thinking still that they won.
He is going to cry. He cannot tear, he cannot weep, and he must end this embrace, he must cut it short but he cannot. He cannot he-
Must. Let someone else do it.
He does not call her out loud. He only- heartbroken. Mouths her- three syllables, staring wide at the ground far below. Ma. Hi. Ru.
It is the most uncathartic surrender of them all.
All I ever wanted was you , she croons, in his head, a weight, a weight emotional now physical, now demonic, now clinging as soot to the skin and digging into his very heart.
All I ever wanted was you , Guren cries, in her voice, in his head. Desperate, agonized, clutching his shoulders. To Shinya, her pale and thin hand against his lips. It jumbles, it meets with interference, it scatters unintelligible, and reaches him not.
Guren is Mahiru, lilac and cherry blossoms and dirty, dirty rot.
All I ever wanted
(The taste of Mahiru’s lips, salty and metallic, blood and sorrow, a lip gloss so chemical it stuck to him long after the deed was done)
(And Shinya’s blood on the tongue, on the tongue, in the hair, him above, her below, his katana deep inside)
(The hole in Shinya’s chest, the gore on his lips. Dying, unrequited, for another.)
All I ever wanted
Guren, remember
How the old story goes-
[A Hiiragi man meets an Ichinose woman,]
Desire kills.
ALL I EVER WANTED WAS YOU.
Cold, crimson, cherry blossom and ash. Calm, she exhales. Her limbs cease their trembling, her tears do not fall. He falls away, and in the silent snow, She releases Shinya, into the cold.
Shinya is silent to it, white hair, porcelain face catching little light to reflect. He stares for a moment, but finds something in the eyes he cannot bear to look upon. So he looks away. Stands up. It is a mercy they must wear masks, and the second breaking of Shinya’s heart is unseen on his face.
They cannot see the moon tonight.
They have not had the time to take it in, really. A hundred years would not let them take it in. Watery eyes, teenage death, dual isolation. A product of their environment, a cutout of it, in silhouette against the broken world.
There is a flag, battered and beaten by the gale, atop a building near to them. It falters, fighting tears and wear to the thread, hanging by one frayed fixture- and fails, borne away by the wind, fluttering after some time to blanket someone who will never be buried. The ash falls through the sky, unceasing, the grey mass of steel skeletons blanketed slowly in white. There will be no fireworks on the new year, save for those that kill. So this is the show.
Is Shinya glad he stayed awake to see this?
Even he cannot know.