Drabble: répondez s'il vous plait (YnM, Hisoka/Muraki)

[b_hallward]

AN: Written for p_zeitgeist. Part of the Winter Collection.

répondez s'il vous plaitThis is merely a dream, except for all the ways it's real. The world is too bright, lit with the harsh clarity of winter. The sun repeats itself across the sky, soft dawn on his right, noon above and in the distance a faint purple twilight. His breath clouds the air.

Comments

and on that same tangent

[p_zeitgeist]

It may not surprise you to hear that we're doing it again. This is self-indulgent of me, but I tell myself that perhaps talking about it will give me some impetus toward finishing the story in some foreseeable future: In fragments from nearly four years ago -- which is to say, shortly after I finished that very first Hisoka story -- I have a bit where Muraki is arguing with Tsuzuki about Hisoka, and that whole pesky murdering-my-partner thing. Muraki makes the obvious Muraki-ish point: I made him young and beautiful forever, what's the problem? To which Tsuzuki, easily distracted as always by the by-ways of the argument, says in essence, You couldn't be sure that would happen. And Muraki tells him, Of course not. To be sure would have required a full clinical trial with a significant sample size, and your likely objections aside, I don't see how we could have managed a double-blind study design.

And Tsuzuki understands at once that this is a joke, and his first thought is that Muraki has fixated on the wrong shinigami, because Hisoka would probably both get it and laugh at it. In which understanding he is, of course, perfectly right. The only difference is the usual one of key: in my version, Tsuzuki perceives this as a kind of cosmic joke on all three of them. Because his mode of coping in this universe is, I think, a permanent stance of This isn't really happening and if it were it would be funny, in a horrible kind of way.

Anyway, yes. The sadness of that moment in the Three of Swords arc is one of the things I hope to, um, fix. Or at least, to make a little less cosmically awful. I think, though, that your insight that Muraki cannot be dead in this timeline helps tremendously even before I begin my interference. It helps, that is, that Muraki's delicate references are ironic in a way he does not quite intend, and that he will not be able to appreciate until much later. It's Muraki himself who will take the role of Persephone in the myth, after all: Hell's Prince Consort, neither a subject of the lord of the dead nor a permanent resident of his kingdom. Tsuzuki doesn't get the exquisitely-laid symbolism, then; but it strikes me as less tragic when you set it next to the fact that the beautiful set-up will turn out to be wrong.