Happy New Year!
Hey, guys! I hope you all have an awesome New Year! Behind the cut is my gift for the Nabari comm secret santa, so feel free to ignore it. ^^; I'll be making a more official New Year's post tomorrow, but until then I hope you all have lots of fun etc etc! I know I've been pretty quiet lately, but I ♥ you all! <3
Title: Delusions
Characters/Couples: Implied Miharu/Yoite
Rating: PG
Warnings: None really…There aren't any spoilers, either, but I'd recommend reading at least until Chapter 47. The fic is set in the middle of that chapter, I guess somewhere around the time Miharu and Yoite go bird-feeding. ^^;
Disclaimer: I don’t own “Nabari no Ou” or “The Tempest"
Notes: This was written for xiphe, for the Nabari comm Secret Santa. I hope you enjoy! I'm sorry that it's a lot less adorable and a lot more angsty. While writing, I was hit by a sudden plot bunny that led into this...less than cutesy fic. I'm so sorry! But I do hope you enjoy it anyway, and a very happy New Year to you! <3
“Delusions”
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” Miharu declares softly to the blade of grass intertwined between his fingers. Everything around him is as calming as a dream. The trees are tranquil and inaudible in their quest to empty their branches, and the lake is so still it is hard to imagine its water flowing at all. The serene feel in the atmosphere is indeed so overpowering that even a few brief disturbances - the swishes and rustles of a nosy stray cat rifling through thickets looking for even the slightest morsel of food, the cracks and snaps of a young duckling as it investigates abandoned twigs, or even the distant quacks of the four other members of its family as they swim towards an adventure on the other side of the lake - cannot detract from the overall sense of peace, of slumber, dominating the halcyon park.
His companion, Yoite, is himself half-caught in a dream, his almost perpetual as the hours pass by and the minute ki still contained in his body rebels against his organs in its own powerful demand for freedom. He can’t keep his eyes open for long and his predilection for sleep has become so overpowering he often falls into a light doze even with his eyes open.
Even now, as he and Miharu lounge in this spacious park, somewhat contemplating their next move and mostly secretly enjoying what is surely to be one of the last few days of “them,” Yoite is fighting the pressing urge to lower his eyelids, appealing silently to the sandman to go away and harass someone plagued by insomnia or utter boredom instead. It is a losing battle, to be certain; his kira powers cannot tear a mere idea - persuasive though it may be - to shreds, and Miharu cannot employ the five elements to wipe away all the sand from his eyes. Yet Miharu can provide a bony but adequate shoulder as a headrest, and as Yoite comes closer to losing the endless battle against slumber, he instinctively puts the shoulder to good use. However, his will is also strong, and at Miharu’s words he musters up enough strength to raise his head and stare inquisitively at the younger boy.
Miharu, as he so often does, senses Yoite’s gaze and meets it briefly, before turning to idly survey the lake before them. His eyes absently follow the frenetic trail the sole duckling is making as it blazes through the water, searching for the family it finally realizes has vanished. Yet his mind is elsewhere; not in water, or even in a park at all. His thoughts are trapped in a distant, dark place that both terrifies and ensnares him; similar, he supposes, to the hysterical state the duckling’s mind must be in. He isn’t as alone as the anxious animal - not when a certain omniscient being is likely listening to his every thought. He also isn’t feeling the strange chill of fear he imagines the animal is experiencing, as the person most often by his side is blocking out most of the cold, biting wind…But his confusion is surely equal to the duckling’s. Probably more so, in fact; this duckling knows only that, if it can find its family all will be well. It doesn’t know that uniting with someone is only the first step. It doesn’t know the one it depends on can vanish again, and again, and again…One day forever.
It doesn’t know, but Miharu does. In his apathy, he doesn’t feel much when he dwells on these revelations. But he dwells on them, nonetheless, and they race, and race, and race through his mind, so rushed that maybe the fairy can’t catch his thoughts after all.
Miharu is not a “feeler”, he’s a thinker. He’s quite skilled at it, too - able to control himself from delving too deeply into uncomfortable thoughts, and prevent would-be outside intruders from catching anything he wouldn’t want them to hear. He can shut off his thoughts altogether. Usually. But this time he can’t turn the thinking off, even for a moment. Even when he tries his hardest, grasps and utilizes all the skills in apathy he has acquired for use at his disposal, just the slightest reminder of the warmth radiating from the immobile body beside him brings it all back in a rush. His mind then overloads to the point that even his normally emotionless, pale face gains some color, and so some emotion - and it is all the fault of the one person who can’t, won’t leave his side.
Yoite…
Just those three syllables mean so much…But he cannot say them; cannot, really, say anything that is on his mind.
He is simultaneously wondering what the duckling would say, if it possessed the power of speech, when he finally grants the bemused Yoite a response:
“We are such stuff…as dreams are made on.”
Yoite blinks, still appearing every bit as trapped in the dream as he had moments earlier. He blinks again, disposing sand waste from his eyes, determined to fight a battle against the inevitable - all for Miharu’s sake. Miharu contemplates the notion of the mother duck also doing anything and everything, choosing to fight even when she was destined to fail, for her duckling’s sake. Then he remembers it was this same mother duck who had so obliviously abandoned her duckling in the first place - and with a smirk at his sleepy but as of yet un-lost companion, he fondly explains:
“It’s from a Shakespeare play…Hey, do you dream, Yoite?”
Yoite’s face transforms into a collage so exquisite and unique, that if Miharu were an artist he would immediately set out to secure the images for all of time on his canvas; from the extreme surprise, to the forced indifference, to the slight fondness, to the unbridled pain, to, again, the strengthened indifference…Yoite’s face redefines art. But Miharu was never gifted in the arts, and thus will never be able to view upon this beauty once it has vanished forever. Not in a picture or a painting. Not even in his own fickle memories.
And the master of apathy only becomes further unworthy of the title as his flat lips curve downward into an undeniable frown.
No, don’t frown.
You know Yoite has dreamt before; lately, in fact, he dreams more than he “lives” - and soon he will live no longer. Most of his dreams must surely be horrible, some are likely to be confusing, and a very few must be pleasurable. Yoite has a fondness, an instinctual partiality for dreams, that much is clear. He can’t escape the bad ones, and he welcomes the good ones.
Quickly, continue, continue!, before you lose him in the lake of dreams,
“What am I saying? Of course you do! And I do, too. And I know the impossible always happens in dreams. Not the kind of ‘impossible’ so often seen in the world of Nabari - but true impossibility. Different species getting along, even accepting each other as the same overall being: something alive and breathing the same air. Or the impossibility of there being some higher being out there, a god or a devil or a demon.
“…Or even…two complete opposites, rivals in every sense of the word…Coming together, at long last, and conversing as equals.”
Yoite smiles at long last, tiredly but not without wonderment, clearly truly considering the weight of Miharu’s words. He doesn’t want to interrupt Miharu’s explanation and break his concentration, Miharu can tell - but when the younger boy fails to continue, he comments, almost breathlessly, “…That’s profound, Miharu. And…and we are like a dream, then, because we’ve becomes…comrades?”
Such hesitation and fear! Yoite cannot abide with kindness and thus will not dare utter the phrase “friends”. But he can tolerate the idea of “comrades;” teammates working together on a mission as long as it takes to achieve a common goal…and no longer.
However, as his only other constant “comrade” has been Yukimi (and even then, only in Yoite’s, and- he hopes-Yukimi’s mind, too, for neither has let the phrase slip from his lips), calling Miharu it is both phenomenal and tremendously scary. His eyes wander, as Miharu’s constantly do, to that lone duckling. He does not specifically note the duckling has lost its family; sleep prevented him from ever witnessing the duckling’s first true realization that its family had vanished. Yet he perceives that something is wrong with the frantic animal anyway. He commits it to memory absently, presuming it means little and consequently giving it little conscious attention. The one who does matter at present has not responded to him. Apprehensively, Yoite’s eyes seek out Miharu’s gaze - and in doing so, sees that the teenager is smiling.
“Exactly, Yoite,” Miharu murmurs at last. Yoite stares with mystification at the splendor in the gaze before him, wondering how something once so perfectly…empty, meaningless, even - dead! - could now look so…normal. No, so human. So full of life. He knows Miharu has been reborn from his hell of apathy. Before he could not have looked so ethereal; corpses rarely do. But…
What is it, that brought Miharu back to the living in such an extreme manner, and is it the same thing that is making him look as flawless as he looks now? Yoite has seen enough of the boy’s visage to have it imprinted in his brain, so he closes his eyes and conducts a closer inspection of the rosy, healthy human face he has just witnessed…
But he cannot, for the life of him, understand how Miharu could have changed so drastically.
“H-hey, Miharu…” he starts, opening his eyes, but Miharu merely reaches over and gently shuts them again, before guiding Yoite’s head back to his shoulder.
“Shh, you’re tired, aren’t you? Sleep some more…”
Yoite means to argue that no, he isn’t tired at all - he merely was trying to inspect the strange boy a little closer! - but then he realizes he is exhausted. His self-defenses against sleep temporarily disabled due to Miharu’s own insistence he rest, he quickly and easily drifts away to the dream world all so familiar to him.
Miharu waits a moment, whispers Yoite’s name; acknowledges he is out. He then wraps the untidy scarf snugger around Yoite’s neck, silently berating himself for never finishing his point, for letting Yoite develop his own interpretation. His life isn’t an open-ended novel to be interpreted at the reader’s will; he has only one thing in mind - and Yoite’s interpretation was incorrect.
He looks up to see the family of ducks swimming by, excitedly; only the frantic duckling he had studied for so long is missing from the group. The family has not noticed. Looking down again, he ensures his absence in Yoite’s dream has also gone unnoticed.
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” Miharu reiterates one final time. In his dreams, this time Yoite will hear! In his dreams, Yoite will care.
As though he himself is trapped in a meaningless dream, he lets his feelings spill forth:
“Because these times we spend together - are like a dream. A painful dream, a confusing dream, the most pleasurable dream I could ever have. And I…don’t want to wake up from this dream and realize that it’s over and you’re - gone.”
He starts at the hiss of the stray cat nearby, tells himself that he will not cry and, either because this is his dream or because it is not, his eyes remain dry.
But his voice breaks as he finishes, “…At least, that’s what Grandma said.”
Miharu smirks instinctively and looks down, expecting for Yoite to comment on his typical method of ruining the mood -
But Yoite sleeps on.
Miharu smiles then, again, for what feels like eternity this time, before the smile breaks and curves upside down. He has sacrificed his indifference in a dream that cannot last forever - but Yoite, sleeping on, cannot understand why.
“Someday,” Miharu mumbles, idly staring at a cat in the distance as it burrows its face into something limp and yellow and red, “you will end up locked in an everlasting dream, as I wake from mine…
“And you’ll never notice my absence at all.”
Yoite’s eyebrows furrow and then smoothen; Miharu’s arm grows numb.
And in the lake, four energetic ducks continue to splash about without a care in the world.
*****************
Again, I hope you enjoyed the fic. I'm sorry it turned out so differently than you requested! To make up for the distinct lack of cutesy Miharu x Yoite scenes, here's a short fic that I wrote. I actually intended for this to be your fic, but I got major writer's block and was never able to write the beginning scene, which I had originally intended to tie it all together. Anyway, here it is! http://chibisah.livejournal.com/10508.html#cutid