Work Text:
Shizume city has the brightest lights in the world, that’s what he’ll tell you. But don’t believe a word he says. He’s a liar. He has learned to lie so convincingly that the edges between his lies and truth have blurred to the point that even he can’t tell them apart. He doesn’t know anything of lights and of the gleaming glass-and-steel facets of other cities. But he is made of moonbeams, newborn suns and glittering starlight, it will bewitch you and do everything to convince you that its owner knows of light and happiness. He doesn’t. He is from deepest, farthest recesses of the darkness where even the brightest illumination that spills over from the city cannot penetrate. He is from that place your mother warned you about.
You have heard stories of it. It’s where winners shouldn’t go because they wouldn’t belong in a place meant for those who didn’t make it. There is nothing there but soul-crushing hopelessness and the leaden shackles of poverty that will weigh your ankles down and never let you leave. It’s a place meant for vermin. But his slim wrists are meant to be adorned by gems. His fragile shoulders are meant for silk and velvet. His smile will blind you and remind you of things you’ve never even experienced. Things like hope and life and you’ll be stunned when he calls you King. Believe in him when he says that. He can see things in you that even you can’t.
The world is a black and white sketch to you, the pencil lines fading and bland, one dimensional and the faces around you never change. You are sixteen and there’s a whole life in front of you. But you have already seen everything there is to see. You tired of living existing. Nothing is new. Nothing gets the stagnant, viscous blood in your veins going again.
Look in the mirror. Look at your stern eyebrows and firm jaw.
You are formidable. They fear your volatile rage. The fragile things that have succumbed to your wrath are part an endless list of damages that sit at the bottom of your mother’s purse. Izumo is your only friend and he is older for his years, carrying your weight over his shoulder, picking up after you for as long as you can remember. Your truancy is how people know you now and words and ideas aren’t your forte. But if someone asks you what loyalty means, you know his name is the one you’ll take.
Devotion can never be understood by those who don’t deserve it and it isn’t perhaps a coincidence that Izumo’s undying faith in you will outlast your life itself. Something like that deserves to be recognized and you acknowledge that but the will to just give in to the soaring tidal waves of ennui is too great. Izumo grows older and it gets easier for him to hide his disappointment behind that easy charm and colored glasses. Sometimes, when you see Izumo dealing with yet another mess you’ve made, you can almost feel the phantom ache of guilt twisting in your gut like a rusted knife with a serrated blade. You will never accept that you are, in fact, glad to know that you can still feel.
Your eyes are barely open when a flash of gold floods your eyelids. Totsuka’s face is upside down over yours as you are lying on the grass, skipping classes again.
You open your eyes and he looks so familiar, even when you’ve never seen him before. You don’t realize that you already knew his name before you even heard him speak. It doesn’t sound strange to you at the moment but you open your eyes and look at him even before you know what he’ll become and that is the most anyone has ever gotten from you. Izumo is slack jawed with horror and surprise and Totsuka looks at you like the universe begins and ends right where you stand. It is uncomfortable. This kind of adoration always comes at a price.
He smiles and you, and holds out a small hand, hoping you’ll take it so he can help you get up. No one has ever offered a hand to you. You are sixteen when a golden haired boy decides that you are the centre of his orbit. You will not realise it now, but he is a star, your very own North Star and he will guide you home.
It starts then, and you two are inseparable. He is a pest, firecracker sparks and unwavering faith locked inside the fragile, spun-glass frame of a child and you cannot shake him off no matter what. He has you in his sight and he will never let you go. He calls you king and others laugh. The boy must be out of his mind. There are stories about him too. Izumo tells you one quiet evening while you lose to him in shogi over a bottle of beer both you are too young to be drinking.
‘Totsuka isn’t normal’, he says.
You give a dismissive snort and resume your game. A week later a bully cracks open Totsuka’s skull and shatters the bones in his leg. When he sees you, leaning against the door to the hospital room, exhaustion and boredom settling in the wrinkles on your clothes and the bags under your eyes, he smiles like you are an angel, sent to rescue him from this hell that both of you have been trapped in. You tell him to back off yet again, and this time even you know how futile it is.
Totsuka melts himself into the gap between you and Izumo and it’s like he’s always been there. You are 19 and the world had one last trick up its sleeve when you come face to face with the slate.
You lock yourself inside four walls, you cannot control yourself or the overwhelming, burning red that engulfs everything you touch. You are convinced that you will slip into insanity. You never wanted to be a King.
Totsuka is still reed thin and unsteady on his feet at age 17. He has a fickle heart and Izumo’s little apartment is littered with the mementoes from his many trysts: Half-done paintings, an unfinished sculpture, countless musical instruments. You won’t realize why you’ve been the only constant in the never ending list of things he’s loved till it’s already too late.
He asks you to trust him and the flames flicker around you, lapping at him. They’re hungry and they want to wrap themselves around his small frame and melt off whatever little flesh clings to his bones. You have never cared for the trail of broken limbs you leave in your wake but at that very moment, or the first time in your life, you’re afraid of hurting someone, hurting him.
You want to close your eyes and against the inevitable, his skin is soft and cool to the touch. It feels like a salve and he’s still there, kneeling in front you in reverence, in assurance. The red around you has disappeared. The only thing you feel is warmth, and it’s not from your aura. It’s from inside your heart.
People have perished from lesser misery than what Totsuka has seen and you are intrigued when he tells you his story one rainy afternoon. The bar is usually empty at that time of the day, and it is your time alone with him. Him napping on the couch before you, while you relax into leather and close your eyes, the smoke from your cigarette leaving a numbing warmth in your lungs. He is tipsy, rosy-cheeked and teary eyed. But he never stops smiling.
You wonder how any mother can bear to abandon him, but you make no move to comfort him when he buries his face in his arms. You can picture it in your mind. Those thin fingers, blackened with coal dust, sprinkling salt on the ice in the fish market holding out a tattered hat for the merchants to tip some loose change in it. You can almost taste that triumphant smile his face must have worn when he convinced the butcher to let him have the scraps and bones. You can imagine his little hands plucking mushrooms from the woods, smelling of damp earth and moss. He tells you that his father loved him. Totsuka tells you about the stories he used to tell on rainy afternoons like this while they placed buckets underneath every leak on their roof. He doesn’t tell you about that one time he overheard his father tell his neighbour what a heartless boy he is over cups of cheap sake.
Heartless.
You stare at him in shock and it felt offensive somehow, even back then, when you didn’t know what he would come to mean to you.
He is the beating heart of Homra. You remember how Anna had bloomed under his loving care. You remember how he takes the broken pieces he gets, every last delinquent, every last stray that find their way to them and how he puts them back together again, making them whole. You may be the king, but you know that he is the one who keeps everything the right way up. You’d have burned the whole world down if things were left to you, you don’t understand how anyone can call him cold.
You begin to find out two months later.
It’s a vicious fight, three men perish at your hand and they leave nothing behind.
No ash, no blood and no bone.
Five others are cowering at your feet when you feel his hand on your shoulder.
You expect disappointment. You expect the look of betrayal.
You find nothing but sickening, unwavering love in his amber eyes.
The pavements are slick with the blood of those who have angered you and the setting sun makes his eyes glow like embers when you realise what his father had truly meant.
Totsuka has an empty soul. He has always been that way. But he smiles when he says he has found the holy grail in you when he ran into you in school all those years ago. He says you give him meaning and his smile is just on the other side of too much.
There are stars suspended in the velvet inky blackness of the sky and there a cool breeze that free the strands of dull gold hair that he’ d tucked behind his ear. His earring sparkles in the light and he looks so beautiful that it breaks your heart. Not that you’d know that feels, but this is the starting of something new: subtle touches, secret glances.
Izumo smiles knowingly at you when he notices how soft your eyes grow when you see him with Misaki and Anna. He drags you out to the cave at the beach to look for ghosts and he’s a miracle, clinging on to your shirt. You want to hold him, but you are also a King.
So you clench your fists instead, the fire from your wrists are a tempest on their own. He reaches out, unafraid and takes your hands in his. They’re cold, they always have been and you’ve started to imagine them stroking your face, the tips of his fingers pressing gently against your overheated skin. The fire vanishes when he touches you, your clansmen have grown to trust him to calm you down. They call him the lion-tamer and when he unclenches your fists, a fiery butterfly blooms from where your hands touch.
Totsuka doesn’t believe in ghosts but he believes in freezing time in memories. He will never know of those that you decided to keep inside you, the memories of things that could have happened but didn’t.
Anna grows little by little before your eyes and Totsuka wants to shower her with roses. It’s her birthday and it feels like a beginning for you. Unbeknownst to you, somewhere nearby, a plan has already been set in motion, the universe is breaking and coming together again in little ways and everything will change soon. You feel a change in yourself too. When Totsuka looks down to the city from the roof and talks about people wanting to be rescued you wonder if that’s what he wants as well. You are standing close and his arm is only inches from yours. You want to ask him if he had always wanted to fix you. He hadn’t. He only wanted to fix himself by latching on to the brightest thing he could find. He saw nothing but light in you when you nothing but darkness and you can feel the cooling, healing touch of his aura around you.
Kiss him.
Hold him in your arms and tell him what you feel.
Whatever you do, don’t let him out of your sight. You had never known regret. That is the first thing that will change tonight.
Yata and Izumo’s shouting match from the bar downstairs is a jarring cacophony at the edge of your consciousness but you are so warm, so comfortable where you lay that you barely recognize them anyway. The apartment is dark with the blinds pulled shut but there is brightness and sunshine in your bed, cradled in your arms, his breath tickling your chest. Your mouth is pressed against his forehead, your legs tangled with his under the sheets but it’s still not enough.
You lean in and press gentle kisses against his mouth, and awake him from his slumber.
Tostuka’s smile makes the breath catch in your throat and you for the first time in your life, you are glad you are a king because you want to adorn him with jewels, spread silk underneath his feet, kiss the cold, fragile tips of his fingers. You look at him now like he used to look at you before and you don’t even remember how you found your way back to him.
You kiss him everywhere: against the bar while Yata is arguing with Kamamoto, open mouthed kisses while he melts against you; against the glass window on the landing while he shivers under your hungry fingers; against the railing on that roof where you’d lost so many things.
Your fingers fit in every indent between his ribs, he breathes your name in a broken whisper against your ear as the edges that separate you bleed into each other and become one. He still calls you King, but he saves your name for the nights when he is pliant and eager to be burned by your touch.
‘Mikoto’
Your name has never been this red before.
It’s just the two of you, and you never leave his hand. Izumo is still picking up the broken pieces you’ve left behind and you still feel guilty at times. But none of that matters now.
You are at the roof again. The roof where you’d lost so many things and this time your arms are wrapped around his waist, your lips mouth at his neck in gentle touches that leave him humming.
‘King’
You kiss his ear in response.
‘Anna, Yata-chan. Kusanagi-san, do you think they can see us?’, he asks.
The sword of Damocles has chosen a new red king and it sparks with raw power, suspended against the eastern sky in all its terrifying beauty as you look on.
‘I hope they do’, you tell him.
The universe was built in seven days, and yours ended in just twelve, starting on this very roof.
If you look closely, you’ll find his bloodstains against the dust. The blood that spilled from your heart however was invisible.
Totsuka touches his earring that adorns your ear now.
You love him so much that you can’t bear to look at him at times. He is too bright and it hurts, like looking directly at the sun. So he takes over for you, covering your mouth with his and everything suddenly makes sense. His hand clenches over that scar in your chest that Munakata’s sword had left, and you realize you only ever existed in that world because he had found you all those years ago and called you King.
You both walk back to Homra, hand in hand. You wish they could see you. You wish they knew that their King had found his way back home after all and that he is here, right with them, just out of view.
You are meant to be a king in every universe there is, and in all of them there is always a golden haired boy to place the crown on your head.