[Saiyuki] And If Rain Brings Winds Of Change (Hakkai/Gojyo, PG)
Title: And If Rain Brings Winds Of Change
Pairing: Hakkai/Gojyo
Rating: PG
Notes: For prompt #8 on saiyuki_time: Spring Cleaning. Reincarnation? Bizarre post-apocalyptic AU? Something like that. Chasing the cobwebs away.
His mind is a dusty thing, full of cobweb-thoughts, dried out memories like dead flies that might crumble into dust and forgotten fragments of other days; it has been wanting for a dusting for some years now, but he can't find it in himself to sweep all the debris away. Somewhere in it all there may be something of value, a little gem of living memory, and definitely there are things beneath the dust that are better buried. So he keeps the whole thing, a shrine to once upon a time, and stares at it so much that he cannot see tomorrow.
That's how Two finds him.
Two is called Two because he's the second kid, he says, and his parents always did kinda suck at naming. And at plenty of other stuff too, maybe. The point is, he needs a place to stay, if it's okay. Why's Moon called Moon, anyway?
Moon, baffled at the onslaught -- or maybe just baffled at being talked to willingly -- finds himself sharing his shell of a home for the first time in five years.
Two has his own old memories and cobwebs, Moon suspects, but he keeps them in cupboards, tidied away out of sight, even though he doesn't seem as though he ever tidied anything else in his life. He never manages to tidy Moon's home, anyway. Not that it's much of a home to tidy, and not that Moon would ever dream of asking, because Two does more than enough in other ways. In all the years since the bombardment everything's been weird, and Moon is lucky to even have this place. Luckier still that Two is good at making money, one way or another.
Two seems pretty at home with all the weirdness that is life now, but maybe Two isn't old enough to even remember what normal was. Moon hardly is, but he can remember big cities and green fields, far away and distant.
He had another name then which he doesn't especially deserve any more, which is why he picked Moon. Moon because she was calling herself Sun, before she left him with his cobwebs and his dead flies, and he always felt that she and he were the opposite sides of that coin. Something like life and death, day and night. But the thought process that led him to that conclusion is dead now too, one of the dry, crumbling things in a corner of his mind. He tries to tell Two about it, at least the broad outline, and it doesn't come out right at all. In all honesty, it might make him sound a little insane. He doesn't even say what Sun was to him, really. At least Two takes the whole unprovoked outburst of nostalgia fairly well.
Nothing really seems to throw Two. Or that's what Two wants him to believe, he decides, after watching him for a while. It's possible that it's not so simple.
Is anything ever simple?
Two stays with him all winter. Moon expects that he will leave in the spring, once the snow has gone and it's warm enough to sleep outside without freezing to death. He drifted in from nowhere so the reasonable assumption is that he will drift out to nowhere again, a migratory bird; a temporary splash of colour in Moon's drab, grey little house.
But birds don't fly in for the winter anymore, haven't for years. Winter here is too harsh now. They visit other places. So that comparison doesn't work.
And Two doesn't go away, not even when the spindly trees which call themselves a woodland start trying to put out leaves, little points of pale green here and there, a far cry from the wide leafy canopies which Moon associates with his childhood and everything Before.
Moon doesn't say anything about it in case Two thinks he isn't wanted. Instead he manages to get another set of blankets from Cy over on the other side of the Compound, who only has one eye and who never laughs at anything at all. Moon and Two have been sharing one set all winter, and they're beginning to get worn ragged, tatty cloth coming apart at the corners.
These days little things like that seem to matter.
He finds himself watching for what might happen tomorrow, though he's peering into the future through the dusty windows of his eyes and he can't see it very well. The fact that he's even trying surprises him.
The first time he actually realises what he's doing is when he's walking home from the Compound market and finds himself thinking, I wonder if there will be flowers next week. It's such a startling thought that he stops dead on the cracked tarmac pathway, confused, and has to remind himself that walking means putting one foot in front of the other and that if he doesn't keep on doing it he will never get home.
Two laughs at him for that revelation.
Moon does his best to act offended, and polishes his glasses so hard he has to stop before he breaks them because there'll be no way of replacing them, which means he's actually more pleasantly embarrassed than annoyed.
Some of the cobwebs have been blown away without him doing anything at all, caught and torn from him by Two. Just because he's Two.
There are no flowers the next week. Flowers are rare, after all. But Moon takes to looking on all the patches of earth for signs of life, just in case.
“I am not a good man,” Moon tells Two.
“Who the fuck is?” Two asks in return, sprawled on the road which no vehicles use. He is all wiry limbs and messy hair and in daylight he looks different. All winter Moon has never seen him step outside, but now he's here, under the cloud-clogged sky, pale skin and dark hair, a study in contrasts even in this grey, grainy light.
“Perhaps you are,” Moon says.
Two laughs and laughs.
Moon doesn't know how Two can laugh so much; honestly, truly doesn't understand it. Most people manage from time to time, but Two laughs as though life is good, even though Moon knows Two's life hasn't been good. No-one's has. But Two wants people to think that he thinks it's all a joke, perhaps. That could be it.
I mean it, Moon doesn't say. It isn't a joke.
Instead he says, “I used to have a wife.” It doesn't have anything to do with anything, but for some reason he is remembering a story he only told Two fragments of before, on an icy-cold night around the death of the old year.
“Huh,” Two says.
“She was very beautiful. Her hair was as gold as... as gold as...” he hesitates, “I don't know. As gold as a lot of things that I assume don't exist any more. Cornfields, perhaps, or Summer sunlight.”
Two stretches.
“Poetic.”
“Apologies.”
A shrug.
“Go on. She dead?”
“Gone.”
Two pushes himself up on the palms of his hands and looks at Moon, something disconcerting in his expression. It's not fair of Two to start being disconcerting now; he's usually so straightforward, or does his best to appear so. “That mean dead?”
Moon shakes his head. “Just... gone. She had her reasons. I am, as I said, not a good man.”
“And these ain't good times. Point?”
Moon shakes his head again and wonders what makes Two believe in him. He does seem to believe in him. By now Moon is fairly sure of this. He just can't even begin to tell why.
“I've killed people,” he offers.
“I've killed people. Who gives a shit?”
“I've killed a lot of people.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I've killed a lot of people and I'm not sorry for my actions.” Although, he adds to himself, if I scare you away I may be sorry for admitting to them. Even though that is rather what I'm trying to do here, isn't it? Oh dear.
“How many's a lot?”
“Oh... some. I'm afraid I wasn't keeping count. Do you think I should have made notches on the wall of my house?”
“Can't even fucking tell when you're joking, man,” Two says. “More than five? More than ten? Fifty?”
“Hmm. Keep trying.”
Two looks like he really is gonna keep trying for a moment. Moon regrets opening his mouth. Then Two shrugs. “I get the idea. Why?”
“It seemed,” Moon said, very carefully, “to be the thing to do. At the time.”
They had been people who might of hurt Sun. That they hadn't was entirely beside the point. Preemptive action had only seemed sensible. On several occasions.
Sun had disagreed when she found out, but of course she would. He just hadn't expected the strength of her disagreement; in his mind they had had an argument and then agreed that what was done was done, and had carried on with their lives. In reality she had left.
And he should have been sorrier, presumably. Or sorry at all. He had loved her. Loved her very much, in fact. But she hadn't seemed to appreciate all of his ways of showing it. You can't just do these things. It isn't right.
After she had left, things had become far more peculiar for a time, and after that he'd let the dust build up to hide it all.
He tells all of this to Two.
Then he tells him again that he is not sorry, just in case Two missed that point the first time around.
They sit in silence for a time.
“So,” Two says. “You had a wife, huh.”
“Mm.”
“I guess,” he says, “that means I shouldn't offer you a blowjob, huh?”
And Moon stares, and stares, and stares, until Two can't keep a straight face any more and collapses into laughter.
“Fuck, man, your face.”
A few more cobwebs are dislodged.
It carries on like that, a little change at a time, a few stories at a time, until the week when Two goes quiet.
Moon finds him behind the house, staring at the ever-grey sky.
He tells Moon it's nothing important.
Moon lies inside and worries, restlessly, for the first night, and the second. He should have known that after a certain point it would become too much. He shouldn't be using Two as his confessional.
It's unspeakably selfish of him.
Sun always said he was selfish, though to begin with she used to smile when she said it.
Sun knew him well.
Sun left.
Oh.
There are moments when he almost wishes his memories were still dead, dry, distant things.
The third night he goes out and sits beside Two, although he tells himself he should not.
“I'll be fine,” Two says, and Moon nods helplessly, all too aware that there is no-one he can kill to make Two stay beside him except Two himself. And he will not think about that. Dead, Two would not laugh, and he would be covered in dust and cobwebs instead of driving them away.
He cannot think of anything to say. He's worried that if he opens his mouth he'll say something frightening, or tell Two to run away while the chance is there.
Two might not listen. Or Two might listen. He can't even say which possibility is worse.
“Yanno,” Two says, and then is silent for some time, so that Moon almost thinks he isn't actually going to say anything. “Yanno... I killed my mother. About this time of year.”
“Did she deserve it?”
Two closes his eyes. “Does anyone?”
“Yes.”
“...maybe. I dunno. She was a pretty crap mother, but I loved her alright, all that stuff.”
I think perhaps you could love anyone, Moon doesn't say. “What happened?”
“Shit. Shit happened. Shit always happens. She was sick. It wasn't... it didn't seem...”
Two's eyes are screwed shut tight, as though he's trying to shut them tight enough to keep the memories out. But doing that, in Moon's experience, only ever keeps them in.
Two is good at giving and Moon is only good at taking, and taking, and taking - it's always felt like that, even when it's Two living in Moon's house. But he knows he should try to do something different anyway; to make a change, maybe to find something deep inside himself he never knew was there.
Everything about the kiss he presses to Two's lips is uncertain. Should I, do you, can we, is this what you...
Moon counts the seconds to drown out his mind screaming at him that this is the wrong thing to do, and has reached eight before Two kisses back.
On the fourth day Two seems like Two again, all the cobwebs taken down again and packed carefully away, saved for next year.
On the fifth day Moon finds a little white flower peeking between cracks in paving-slabs not far from the house, and realises it's been so long since he saw anything like it that he can't remember its name.
On the sixth day, the air feels different, as though a change is coming. Something stirs for the first time in years.
On the seventh day, Two peers out of the door and says, “huh, I guess this is what spring is meant to be like. I kinda forgot.”
And Moon smiles in a way that is more sincere than habitual.
And the last of the cobwebs crumble away in the light, cool rain.
Pairing: Hakkai/Gojyo
Rating: PG
Notes: For prompt #8 on saiyuki_time: Spring Cleaning. Reincarnation? Bizarre post-apocalyptic AU? Something like that. Chasing the cobwebs away.
His mind is a dusty thing, full of cobweb-thoughts, dried out memories like dead flies that might crumble into dust and forgotten fragments of other days; it has been wanting for a dusting for some years now, but he can't find it in himself to sweep all the debris away. Somewhere in it all there may be something of value, a little gem of living memory, and definitely there are things beneath the dust that are better buried. So he keeps the whole thing, a shrine to once upon a time, and stares at it so much that he cannot see tomorrow.
That's how Two finds him.
Two is called Two because he's the second kid, he says, and his parents always did kinda suck at naming. And at plenty of other stuff too, maybe. The point is, he needs a place to stay, if it's okay. Why's Moon called Moon, anyway?
Moon, baffled at the onslaught -- or maybe just baffled at being talked to willingly -- finds himself sharing his shell of a home for the first time in five years.
Two has his own old memories and cobwebs, Moon suspects, but he keeps them in cupboards, tidied away out of sight, even though he doesn't seem as though he ever tidied anything else in his life. He never manages to tidy Moon's home, anyway. Not that it's much of a home to tidy, and not that Moon would ever dream of asking, because Two does more than enough in other ways. In all the years since the bombardment everything's been weird, and Moon is lucky to even have this place. Luckier still that Two is good at making money, one way or another.
Two seems pretty at home with all the weirdness that is life now, but maybe Two isn't old enough to even remember what normal was. Moon hardly is, but he can remember big cities and green fields, far away and distant.
He had another name then which he doesn't especially deserve any more, which is why he picked Moon. Moon because she was calling herself Sun, before she left him with his cobwebs and his dead flies, and he always felt that she and he were the opposite sides of that coin. Something like life and death, day and night. But the thought process that led him to that conclusion is dead now too, one of the dry, crumbling things in a corner of his mind. He tries to tell Two about it, at least the broad outline, and it doesn't come out right at all. In all honesty, it might make him sound a little insane. He doesn't even say what Sun was to him, really. At least Two takes the whole unprovoked outburst of nostalgia fairly well.
Nothing really seems to throw Two. Or that's what Two wants him to believe, he decides, after watching him for a while. It's possible that it's not so simple.
Is anything ever simple?
Two stays with him all winter. Moon expects that he will leave in the spring, once the snow has gone and it's warm enough to sleep outside without freezing to death. He drifted in from nowhere so the reasonable assumption is that he will drift out to nowhere again, a migratory bird; a temporary splash of colour in Moon's drab, grey little house.
But birds don't fly in for the winter anymore, haven't for years. Winter here is too harsh now. They visit other places. So that comparison doesn't work.
And Two doesn't go away, not even when the spindly trees which call themselves a woodland start trying to put out leaves, little points of pale green here and there, a far cry from the wide leafy canopies which Moon associates with his childhood and everything Before.
Moon doesn't say anything about it in case Two thinks he isn't wanted. Instead he manages to get another set of blankets from Cy over on the other side of the Compound, who only has one eye and who never laughs at anything at all. Moon and Two have been sharing one set all winter, and they're beginning to get worn ragged, tatty cloth coming apart at the corners.
These days little things like that seem to matter.
He finds himself watching for what might happen tomorrow, though he's peering into the future through the dusty windows of his eyes and he can't see it very well. The fact that he's even trying surprises him.
The first time he actually realises what he's doing is when he's walking home from the Compound market and finds himself thinking, I wonder if there will be flowers next week. It's such a startling thought that he stops dead on the cracked tarmac pathway, confused, and has to remind himself that walking means putting one foot in front of the other and that if he doesn't keep on doing it he will never get home.
Two laughs at him for that revelation.
Moon does his best to act offended, and polishes his glasses so hard he has to stop before he breaks them because there'll be no way of replacing them, which means he's actually more pleasantly embarrassed than annoyed.
Some of the cobwebs have been blown away without him doing anything at all, caught and torn from him by Two. Just because he's Two.
There are no flowers the next week. Flowers are rare, after all. But Moon takes to looking on all the patches of earth for signs of life, just in case.
“I am not a good man,” Moon tells Two.
“Who the fuck is?” Two asks in return, sprawled on the road which no vehicles use. He is all wiry limbs and messy hair and in daylight he looks different. All winter Moon has never seen him step outside, but now he's here, under the cloud-clogged sky, pale skin and dark hair, a study in contrasts even in this grey, grainy light.
“Perhaps you are,” Moon says.
Two laughs and laughs.
Moon doesn't know how Two can laugh so much; honestly, truly doesn't understand it. Most people manage from time to time, but Two laughs as though life is good, even though Moon knows Two's life hasn't been good. No-one's has. But Two wants people to think that he thinks it's all a joke, perhaps. That could be it.
I mean it, Moon doesn't say. It isn't a joke.
Instead he says, “I used to have a wife.” It doesn't have anything to do with anything, but for some reason he is remembering a story he only told Two fragments of before, on an icy-cold night around the death of the old year.
“Huh,” Two says.
“She was very beautiful. Her hair was as gold as... as gold as...” he hesitates, “I don't know. As gold as a lot of things that I assume don't exist any more. Cornfields, perhaps, or Summer sunlight.”
Two stretches.
“Poetic.”
“Apologies.”
A shrug.
“Go on. She dead?”
“Gone.”
Two pushes himself up on the palms of his hands and looks at Moon, something disconcerting in his expression. It's not fair of Two to start being disconcerting now; he's usually so straightforward, or does his best to appear so. “That mean dead?”
Moon shakes his head. “Just... gone. She had her reasons. I am, as I said, not a good man.”
“And these ain't good times. Point?”
Moon shakes his head again and wonders what makes Two believe in him. He does seem to believe in him. By now Moon is fairly sure of this. He just can't even begin to tell why.
“I've killed people,” he offers.
“I've killed people. Who gives a shit?”
“I've killed a lot of people.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I've killed a lot of people and I'm not sorry for my actions.” Although, he adds to himself, if I scare you away I may be sorry for admitting to them. Even though that is rather what I'm trying to do here, isn't it? Oh dear.
“How many's a lot?”
“Oh... some. I'm afraid I wasn't keeping count. Do you think I should have made notches on the wall of my house?”
“Can't even fucking tell when you're joking, man,” Two says. “More than five? More than ten? Fifty?”
“Hmm. Keep trying.”
Two looks like he really is gonna keep trying for a moment. Moon regrets opening his mouth. Then Two shrugs. “I get the idea. Why?”
“It seemed,” Moon said, very carefully, “to be the thing to do. At the time.”
They had been people who might of hurt Sun. That they hadn't was entirely beside the point. Preemptive action had only seemed sensible. On several occasions.
Sun had disagreed when she found out, but of course she would. He just hadn't expected the strength of her disagreement; in his mind they had had an argument and then agreed that what was done was done, and had carried on with their lives. In reality she had left.
And he should have been sorrier, presumably. Or sorry at all. He had loved her. Loved her very much, in fact. But she hadn't seemed to appreciate all of his ways of showing it. You can't just do these things. It isn't right.
After she had left, things had become far more peculiar for a time, and after that he'd let the dust build up to hide it all.
He tells all of this to Two.
Then he tells him again that he is not sorry, just in case Two missed that point the first time around.
They sit in silence for a time.
“So,” Two says. “You had a wife, huh.”
“Mm.”
“I guess,” he says, “that means I shouldn't offer you a blowjob, huh?”
And Moon stares, and stares, and stares, until Two can't keep a straight face any more and collapses into laughter.
“Fuck, man, your face.”
A few more cobwebs are dislodged.
It carries on like that, a little change at a time, a few stories at a time, until the week when Two goes quiet.
Moon finds him behind the house, staring at the ever-grey sky.
He tells Moon it's nothing important.
Moon lies inside and worries, restlessly, for the first night, and the second. He should have known that after a certain point it would become too much. He shouldn't be using Two as his confessional.
It's unspeakably selfish of him.
Sun always said he was selfish, though to begin with she used to smile when she said it.
Sun knew him well.
Sun left.
Oh.
There are moments when he almost wishes his memories were still dead, dry, distant things.
The third night he goes out and sits beside Two, although he tells himself he should not.
“I'll be fine,” Two says, and Moon nods helplessly, all too aware that there is no-one he can kill to make Two stay beside him except Two himself. And he will not think about that. Dead, Two would not laugh, and he would be covered in dust and cobwebs instead of driving them away.
He cannot think of anything to say. He's worried that if he opens his mouth he'll say something frightening, or tell Two to run away while the chance is there.
Two might not listen. Or Two might listen. He can't even say which possibility is worse.
“Yanno,” Two says, and then is silent for some time, so that Moon almost thinks he isn't actually going to say anything. “Yanno... I killed my mother. About this time of year.”
“Did she deserve it?”
Two closes his eyes. “Does anyone?”
“Yes.”
“...maybe. I dunno. She was a pretty crap mother, but I loved her alright, all that stuff.”
I think perhaps you could love anyone, Moon doesn't say. “What happened?”
“Shit. Shit happened. Shit always happens. She was sick. It wasn't... it didn't seem...”
Two's eyes are screwed shut tight, as though he's trying to shut them tight enough to keep the memories out. But doing that, in Moon's experience, only ever keeps them in.
Two is good at giving and Moon is only good at taking, and taking, and taking - it's always felt like that, even when it's Two living in Moon's house. But he knows he should try to do something different anyway; to make a change, maybe to find something deep inside himself he never knew was there.
Everything about the kiss he presses to Two's lips is uncertain. Should I, do you, can we, is this what you...
Moon counts the seconds to drown out his mind screaming at him that this is the wrong thing to do, and has reached eight before Two kisses back.
On the fourth day Two seems like Two again, all the cobwebs taken down again and packed carefully away, saved for next year.
On the fifth day Moon finds a little white flower peeking between cracks in paving-slabs not far from the house, and realises it's been so long since he saw anything like it that he can't remember its name.
On the sixth day, the air feels different, as though a change is coming. Something stirs for the first time in years.
On the seventh day, Two peers out of the door and says, “huh, I guess this is what spring is meant to be like. I kinda forgot.”
And Moon smiles in a way that is more sincere than habitual.
And the last of the cobwebs crumble away in the light, cool rain.