Part Three
[ How I'm feeling|
Refreshed]
[ What I'm listening to| http://8tracks.com/_1162171375/finish-what-you-started ~*~*~*~*~playlist~*~*~*~*~
Title: Tin Heart (3/3)
Pairings: Aoi/Uruha, Aoi/Kazuki
Warnings: Sex, drugs, and rock and roll
Rating: NC-17
Summary: He lets Uruha rest his head against his shoulder, feels the tin walls of Uruha's chest beating against him in a rhythm not at all foreign. And he counts the breaths against the skin of his neck as if he'll never feel them again, though he knows that its all he'll ever feel....all he'll ever remember when someone else touches him.
XXIV.
There are shifting scenes against Uruha's face, a naked woman falling back against satin sheets, a car winding along a road, people waving their arms from the windows laughing, a woman's hair blowing in the breeze. Uruha closes his eyes and tilts his head back and the images from the projector shift. A man's arm reaches across the naked skin of Uruha's chest and grabs the woman on the satin sheets. When Aoi shuts the film off, Uruha is thrown into shadow.
His face is oddly colored from the streetlight outside and Aoi wants to kiss it. Uruha remains standing against the white screen until Aoi tells him to come back to bed. When he sits on the end of the bed, Aoi notices the sheen to his skin that he'd thought was sweat.
"I don't like myself," Uruha tells him softly and when Aoi brushes the hair away from his forehead, Uruha closes his eyes again and tilts his head into Aoi's hand. He brushes his cheek against the palm of Aoi's hand, lets his lips brush Aoi's thumb when it tries to wipe away the mess from his cheeks.
He wonders at the way Uruha can say those words with any ounce of belief. There was a reason Aoi couldn't stay away, why he tortured himself this way, spent these nights waiting for the sky to fall. Every time he had tried to walk away, he had found his feet making circles. He always ended up back here in these sheets with this man in his arms.
He had stopped waiting for Uruha to promise him the world a long time ago, but it didn't mean he had stopped putting his hand into the fire. He wondered when he would finally turn to ashes.
"You don't owe anyone anything," Aoi says to him, feeling for the first time an honesty that hadn't been there before.
"Aoi...." Uruha looks up at him, and for a moment he holds his breath, but then Uruha frowns and shakes his head.
"You should leave," Uruha says, though he knows that Uruha would rather him stay. Playing the hero had never suited Uruha. There would always be a part of him that wanted Aoi despite how bad they were for one another. They were only human and humans were selfish and they both knew that Aoi would never leave willingly.
Aoi sits back against the headboard and turns the old projector back on. The images on the screen jump back to life but instead of watching the film, he watches Uruha's face, the way his eyes shift with the changing scenes and the breath comes from between his parted lips in a sigh.
When the woman on the screen shouts to her lover, "I love you", Uruha mouths the words and Aoi's eyes stay there, memorize how they form the words so carefully. Uruha had seen this film a hundred times or more and could recite every line, but for a moment, Aoi imagines Uruha whispering those words for him. For a moment, he is the fool he had been years ago when they'd started this war, eager for sweet lies.
XXV.
Uruha presses his mouth to Aoi's navel and then smiles up at him cheekily. Aoi threads his fingers through Uruha's hair and then lets his thumb slip into Uruha's mouth. Teeth scrape against his skin and Aoi feels himself getting hard again. Uruha smiles wider as he notices.
"Again?" Uruha asks, raising an eyebrow and then letting his tongue trace circles around his navel.
"I love sucking you off, but I'm not a machine." Uruha laughs and rolls over onto his side with a heavy sigh and Aoi is forced to let his hair slip from his fingers. Uruha is always pretty when he has Aoi in his mouth, even covered in sweat and come and a little bit of shame. He'd always liked Uruha that way.
The room smells like sex and the heady incense Aoi had been burning all night to balance out the mingling scents. The room is also stifling hot even with the fan going on high speed. It only serves in blowing warm air on the sweat beading on their skin.
When Uruha bends down to kiss him, Aoi feels Uruha's tongue pushing something into his mouth. He smiles and takes it, swirls it around his mouth, and then swallows it down. He knows Uruha got it from Ruki, ever the designer queen in need of a quick thrill or a pick-me-up. Uruha smiles down at him and then traces his lips with his tongue slowly.
Aoi lies there staring up at the halos forming around the light above the bed and after a while, his body relaxes and then begins to thrum. Uruha settles down beside him, feeling the room curving around them, feeling the nerve endings in their body firing each time one of them touches the other. Aoi's finger drifts against Uruha's thigh and Uruha pulls the ends of Aoi's hair gently, playfully, setting off chills down Aoi's spine. Time passes in slow spurts and finally Uruha moves against him, biting his shoulder with a little laugh.
"You know, even if nothing at all works out, you still have the best years of my life. After this, it's all downhill. That's something at least, don't you think?" Uruha muses, looking up at Aoi and biting him playfully again, their legs sliding against one another, Uruha's fingers tracing the bones of his chest and ribs slowly.
That seems to make all the sense in the world, moves Aoi a little even, and he's not sure if it's from the substance sliding through his veins, or if he truly believes that he had had Uruha in the best of times. Somehow he's not sure if that will make up for all the grief they had given one another throughout their youth.
"I need to get out of here," Uruha says suddenly as he sits up and begins to search for his clothes amongst the scattered artillery around the room.
Aoi's pants hang from the end of the bed and he's sure that Uruha's boxers had somehow made it on top of his dresser. Uruha chuckles as he finds them there and pulls them on, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He looks like beauty queen trash with his blond hair ruffled from Aoi's fingers and his mouth red and swollen from unspeakable acts.
Aoi watches him with a mild fascination as he fingers the bracelet around his wrist idly.
Uruha had shoved a box at him during the birthday celebration the band had thrown him last night and Aoi had stared at the box in his hands with the same fascinated expression he wore now. Uruha was always full of surprises and tricks but this one had been something else entirely.
Uruha sometimes showed up at Aoi's house with alcohol as compensation for gifts or came empty handed most times, just ready to fuck. And Aoi was usually happy with that. He'd only ever asked Uruha for one thing and now that he knew he would never get that, he didn't expect or care for anything else from Uruha. That was....until Uruha had shoved the engraved bracelet into his hands. His name had been carved delicately onto the inside. It was simple and yet it had stopped Aoi's heart for just a second.
"What's this?"
"Just a gift. Don't fucking look at me like that. It's nothing big."
A pair of pants hits him in the chest and he looks up to find Uruha combing through his hair and staring at him imploringly. Aoi shrugs and pushes the pants away and his hair brush hits him in the arm next.
"You're coming with me," Uruha says, throwing himself onto the end of the bed and Aoi bounces with the movement for a moment before he takes the pants and begins slipping them on slowly, all the while eying Uruha suspiciously. He knows that Uruha is always up for an adventure but not when they had planned to spend the entire weekend fucking out their frustrations.
"Where are we going?" His body still feels light and he feels like running.
His eyes try to focus on Uruha, lounging there on the bed and he isn't sure if it's the drug or just Uruha, but he's never looked more beautiful, lying there with tousled hair and sleep still in his eyes and his skin still flushed from sex.
"Out," Uruha says enigmatically, kissing him on the lips and then tugging on the ends of his hair again, playfully.
He follows Uruha out into the hot summer night, his fingers holding onto the ends of Uruha's shirt so that he won't be left behind. He knows where they're going the moment Uruha crosses the street and heads towards a neighborhood playground.
It reminds him of the beginning of this, the way Uruha would wake him up in the middle of the night just to go wandering somewhere where they could talk and share a cigarette. Back then things had seemed less complicated, less about finding a place to fuck and more about keeping their friendship solid. That was before Uruha had went down to his knees in front of Aoi in a storeroom of course.
Uruha sits on one of the swings in the park and Aoi takes the one next to him. He remembers sitting here a few months ago with their breath hanging in the air. Uruha's lips had been cold, his hands even colder as he pressed them into Aoi's jacket for warmth.
"It's cooler out here than it was in your room," Uruha says, bumping his swing against Aoi's and smiling.
Aoi leans over to kiss him and Uruha laughs into his mouth, fingers squeezing Aoi's knee in the process. He still tastes like cigarettes and something tart and fruity, familiar and only a little mind-numbing. He doesn't want to come down from this high. Sometimes things were calm and still between them, but only those rare periods when Aoi had given up the fight out of exhaustion.
He knows he's given up for good when he pulls away from Uruha and finds himself wondering when they can get back to doing what they do best with one another. He wonders why Uruha liked to draw these moments out, to string him along, giving him crumbs in the hope that he'd stay around for more.....and yet more never came....never would.
XXVI.
He decides to take Kazuki's open-ended offer up again to chase away any lingering cravings while Uruha is out one night. He meets him after hours and he fucks him in his bed with Uruha's wristwatch keeping time on the nightstand next to them. He buries his face in the pillow next to Kazuki's head as he comes against Kazuki's stomach and he convinces himself then that he's killed the last bit of emotion he'd had for Uruha.
"Always so careful." Kazuki grins, wiping the mess from his skin with playful fingers.
"You didn't have to pull out."
And yet still he thought of Uruha when he did something like this. He could fuck around on Uruha while Uruha was out playing God to whomever he decided to pick up, but Aoi was always careful about how and with whom he slept with. Kazuki was the only one who had passed the test and still he always jumped in the shower immediately after to wash all traces of Kazuki from his skin.
Kazuki watches Aoi with a disgruntled curl of the lip as he lights a cigarette for Kazuki and then slips into the bathroom. He can see Kazuki through the slit in the door and watches him lean his head back and blow a stream of smoke into the air. When Kazuki turns his head and catches him looking at him, he doesn't turn away, and Kazuki grins back at him.
"You should invite me over more often. I have a lot of fun with you." Kazuki's voice bounces from the vaulted ceiling and is too loud in this space.
Kazuki turns over onto his stomach and reaches for the wristwatch he must think is Aoi's so that he can check the time. Aoi feels a spark of irritation in his chest as Kazuki sighs and tosses the watch back onto the nightstand carelessly. Aoi turns back to the sink and continues wetting and soaping the washcloth for a quick rubdown. He pushes down the asshole in him and grits his teeth against any regrets that try to spill from his mouth.
"Are you cleaning up for the next one?" Kazuki's voice next to ear makes him jump and he curses as he turns on Kazuki's upturned, grinning face.
"There is no next one," He mutters, accepting the kiss Kazuki presses to the corner of his mouth. Kazuki's hands are chilly as they press against his cheeks.
"I don't care. It isn't any of my business. You're just a curious guy." Kazuki smiles as he pushes Aoi out of the way by the shoulder and takes over the sink.
Aoi watches Kazuki as he washes his hands and then splashes cool water on his flushed face. There was something familiar in the cold, clinical way that Kazuki always washed Aoi from his skin after every night together. But it was fleeting, and he always made sure to send Aoi away satisfied. That was initially why he had chosen Kazuki. He understood what they were doing here. He'd never been as stupid as Aoi to think that anything would come of fucking around once in a while.
XXVII.
Another word gone wrong, another fight waiting in the wings and when Aoi tries to grab Uruha back from running away again, he gets a slap in the face, a forceful push against his shoulder that sends him stumbling back against the door. He's only grateful that it hadn't been a fist and he tries to grab for Uruha again because he never knows when to give up.
"Don't." He growls, tasting blood in the corner of his mouth. Uruha looks at him steadily, hand poised for the doorknob behind Aoi's shoulder.
"Was he worth it?" Uruha raises an eyebrow and then shoves him again, this time Aoi lets him throw open the door and he leans against the wall, watching him through red-tinted vision.
"You know, I fucked him too, before you even got to him," Uruha growls and Aoi's shallow breath catches.
"Did you know that? Did he ever tell you that? I've known him for years, Aoi. I've had him for years."
Aoi tries to focus on something other than Uruha's red face, so intent on being the last thing Aoi will ever covet. Didn't he know that he'd already won? And yet still Uruha threw words at him, waiting for the right one to hit home.
"I've even fucked him in the same place I sucked you off for the first time."
There's a wild glint in Uruha's eyes, and beneath that, something that makes Aoi think of a wounded animal, as if at any moment, he's going to strike out at Aoi again in a panic or disappear again like he had done all those months ago, leaving footprints on the wet sidewalk and somehow on Aoi's chest.
Aoi was never sure if Uruha was just stabbing blindly, eager to hit anything vital enough to hurt, or if he was telling him the truth. But he knew that Uruha was telling the truth here. He'd known Uruha had cornered Kazuki is some dark room somewhere, counterfeit meeting that it was to his own experience. It was why he had let Kazuki trail him, why he had pushed Kazuki down to his knees and ruined him all over again.
He had wanted to dig out the pieces of Uruha left behind beneath Kazuki's skin and keep them for his own. In some deprived way, he thought it would bring him closer to Uruha, but the only thing it had managed to do was leave his chest open and bleeding once again.
Kazuki had smiled at him through the crack in his door every night as Aoi left, beer bottle pressed to kiss bitten lips and he'd wondered if Kazuki was some lesser form of evil than Uruha. They both enjoyed taking and never really gave anything in return except a gnawing need for more poison. But in Kazuki's case, he was only in it for the fun and Aoi had never been his main target. Uruha had singled Aoi out from the beginning for whatever reason and left a permanent mark on his heart, used, flimsy thing that it was.
But in the end, they both knew Uruha had no real stable ground to argue on here. Uruha was flinging words like he flung beer bottles into the garbage can every weekend. He'd always loved tossing things around and watching them shatter. He was using Kazuki as a weapon, not knowing that Aoi didn't care as much as Uruha wanted him to.
Uruha was a regular in someone else's bed when he wasn't with Aoi and Aoi had always taken it quietly, flaying skin and probing his own veins for reasons why he let Uruha get away with so damn much. In the end, it was because he was an idiot and he'd been past feeling anything real for a while. He didn't even feel guilt for what he'd been doing the past few months while Uruha was out doing whatever it was he did on cold nights, and no amount of bringing up someone they'd both used was going to change anything.
This was only two people going through the old familiar motions they were too afraid to give up just yet. Aoi wanted to shout into Uruha's face that yes, in some way, Kazuki had been worth the little flinch of pain he saw in Uruha's face as he stood poised, ready to leave Aoi's life again, perhaps for good this time. The bruises were almost worth it.
Almost.
Uruha shakes his head, his eyes roving over Aoi, calculatingly, before he starts down the stairwell. They both know he'll be back, but first he wants Aoi to suffer a little. But Aoi had been suffering for years and he was used to his heart dropping, his vision going from red to hazy for just a second as the anger made its way through him and then out. He was used to Uruha's back and the dismissal and he hated himself for not being stronger.
XXVIII.
"Pop it open," Kazuki urges, grinning as he holds the neck of the beer bottle out to Aoi. He takes it and brings the end of it down on the side of the table and the top flies off and goes rolling under the table beneath their feet.
"This place always smells like piss," Kazuki offers charmingly, taking the beer and tipping it back. Aoi watches him drink it down, follows the way his adam's apple bobs, the way Kazuki's eyes never leave his own. He remembers what Uruha had told him before he'd left in a blind rage.
He tries to picture Uruha holding Kazuki down in the same sheets he had held Aoi down time and again. He imagines Kazuki laughing beneath Uruha's hand, loving the rough treatment in a way that Aoi never had. His stomach does a slow turn and Kazuki frowns, boot nudging his shin beneath the table.
"Wanna get out of here?"
Aoi doesn't even have to answer before Kazuki has him by the arm and they're back out onto the brightly lit streets. The sounds of drunken salary men and the loud laughter of their paramours for the night are loud and Kazuki's laughter is even louder.
"I could fuck you here," Kazuki tells him, fingers digging into his arm as Aoi stops and leans against one of the buildings.
"I'm not a cheap whore. At least get me a room." Aoi laughs as Kazuki's hand undoes his belt and then slips into his pants.
He groans, presses his head back into the wall and closes his eyes against the lights and the people walking by that would only have to crane their necks into the darkness to see them. But no one would, too intent on their own business, their own messy excuses for lives.
He hates the smell of his own breath, full of alcohol, of Kazuki's cologne against his neck as Kazuki kisses him hard. All he can see is Uruha and Kazuki, Uruha with everyone but him, and the anger is real when he pushes Kazuki away from him. Kazuki lets him, even tilts his head and smiles a little too knowingly.
"We're not going anywhere are we?"
Kazuki slips his hand down Aoi's wrist, lets his fingers play with Aoi's hand as he looks at Aoi and Aoi watches the passing suits and heels and wishes for one small moment he'd taken the road that had been carefully laid out for him by selfish parents. It would have saved him a lot of grief at least. He does his pants back up as Kazuki waits patiently, always the perfect picture of silent understanding.
He could almost see himself married with children, slipping out after work with someone who wasn't his wife on his arm. That sort of empty lie he could have taken. But this....this was a slow death. He hated loving someone so much he kissed the ground they walked on. He hated having to go elsewhere to fill the lonely nights. And he hated lying himself down for someone who enjoyed stepping on what he would have given willingly at a moment's notice. That was another life, a walking dream he'd never be a part of. Uruha was unassailable.
"I don't think I could do it," Kazuki tells him as if he'd been listening to Aoi think and nodding all along, the only one privy to Aoi's inner dealings.
He wonders if Kazuki knows that Uruha had told Aoi everything, that he'd known anyway without being told. He wonders if Kazuki had ever looked up at Uruha and saw something bright and deadly, something dangerous. But that was the difference between the two of them, Kazuki knew better than to kneel at anyone's feet. That was a sure way to get yourself ground into the dirt. Kazuki was must have been something dangerous to someone at one time. He knows the rules too well.
"I like to fuck. I like to fuck you." Kazuki punctuates his statement with a little prod in Aoi's side with their joined hands.
"But it ends there and I guess I end here too." Such a simple way to say goodbye and Aoi finds himself admiring Kazuki more than anything.
"At least buy me one more drink. I'm not a cheap whore either." Kazuki is laughing, pulling on Aoi's hand again and Aoi follows him back out into the lights and the crowd of people heading home. Home to him was a place he wasn't sure where to find anymore.
XXIX.
A foot pushes against Aoi's back, testily, playfully and Aoi groans, drawing the covers up over his head to block out the sunlight. Someone had opened his curtains and the air was full of the smell of coffee and affection and apologies. It hadn't even been a full week yet and they were back to the same routine. The covers are yanked away and lips press against his neck and he knows that he's allowed to forgive himself and in some small way, Uruha is asking for his own sort of forgiveness.
"It's too early," Aoi groans, pushing away the cold hands that try to sneak themselves around his waist.
"I have something for you."
"If it's not a blowjob, I don't want it."
"Pancakes," Uruha whispers into his ear.
He looks at Uruha sitting there, lips pouting, face the perfect picture of innocence. He wants to be forgiven, but Aoi didn't care at this point what happened between them. He'd been through this all before, like a home movie he'd been forced to watch over and over again for the amusement of others.
He searches Uruha's face and there's a bitter taste in his mouth. His phone had gone off a few times during the night and in his half-sleep he'd known who it was. It was a Saturday night and Kazuki had probably been at a downtown bar, wondering where his muse was. He'd stopped calling around one in the morning, giving up on the idea, knowing that Aoi was with his chosen method of suicide.
Again he sees Kazuki's face, streaked with black at the corners of his pretty eyes, but still laughing as he pulled Aoi along the sidewalk on their last night together. They'd both known what it meant and Aoi was just a little surprised that Kazuki had wanted more, even if it were for an hour , just drinking their thoughts away.
Uruha had broken away to wander back into the kitchen and when he comes back, Aoi sees that he's holding a plate stacked precariously high with wilted pancakes in one hand, and in the other, a folded map that had seen better days. He can see the worn lines leading to destinations he'd probably been to time and again. Uruha sets the plate on the nightstand and then slips back into bed, beneath the sheets and warms his body against Aoi.
Something in Aoi breaks then, and as so many times before, the strings of his heart pull, straining to meet Uruha and usually meeting nothing. Uruha wraps his hands around Aoi's hands, curling his fingers inward, chasing the chill away and then he pulls the sheet over there heads and grins. Trapped in this muted, shifting light with Uruha's face so close to his own, the scent of Uruha all around him, he feels like this is the true end. It hadn't ended on that rainy day in Tokyo after all. It's only the two of them left in a chaotic world and they've found their paradise for a little while at least.
Uruha spreads the map open above them, pressing the thin paper to the sheet. Chipped fingernails splayed against mountains and wide oceans. Uruha hums low in his throat as he allows his fingers to trace roads and then circles an island out in the middle of a vast blue.
"We could go here and be alone. We could disappear where no one could ever bother us again." And then they wouldn't need to fight about who Uruha had given himself to tonight, or why he couldn't choose between safe and chaotic. When it was just the two of them, Aoi was the only choice.
"I've always wanted to disappear but it never happens the way I want it to."
Uruha's voice is soft and low, almost conspiratory, a sound that penetrates the air and leaves vibrations around them. Aoi's fingers are still curled against his palm where Uruha had left them and his nails dig a little deeper into skin, searching for something familiar because this is a place that Uruha had never brought him to.
"Show me where you want to go," Uruha whispers against the shell of his ear and Aoi finds his fingers tracing the veins on the back of Uruha's hands, slipping over the chipped nails he'd always loved even when they were around his neck.
He finally decides on a destination. It's in the middle of a grid of busy crossing roads and he can imagine the cars lined up now beneath the buildings, the shrieking of stoplights and feet making their way with orderly chaos across the streets.
Uruha looks at him then. He can feel his measured, steady breath against his cheek and yet he doesn't return the look, just continues to bring himself back to a time that was a little less complicated, a little more wild. If he listens hard enough there's the sound of muted music behind granite walls and his heart beats as it had that night, fast and erratic, a song for sweaty palms and dreams just on the horizon.
"Why would you want to go back there?" Uruha asks, eyes flitting in that confused way when he didn't want to understand the feelings behind Aoi's words.
Because you were beautiful. Because I still had a chance.
Instead Aoi just lets out a soft breath and turns his head to kiss Uruha, breathes him in a little more. The map drifts down to settle over their chests and long, awkward limbs that crisscross around one another. He knew that Uruha thought it a joke, that he'd go back to where they had began, struggles and all, but he'd never told Uruha about the night that he'd slipped into that old building, watched an amateur band as he drank a beer in the very back of the room. It had been one of the best nights he'd had in a while, because he'd been seeing ghosts as he watched the faulty stage lights blinking and heard the screech of guitars too close to the amplifiers.
It was as if nothing else had happened after that night. He and Uruha had slipped from the stage sometime after midnight years ago and once that door had closed, back there in the dim and dusty hallway, they'd just become a part of the building. History in those walls. He couldn't explain that to Uruha because he knew that Uruha would just laugh, poke fun at him for living in an era long gone...in a relationship long dead.
"I'll never understand you," Uruha murmurs against his mouth, smiling, fingers threading their way through the hair at his temples, bringing him back to a dangerous present.
XXX.
Uruha's face is damp with sweat, or at least that's what Aoi tells himself as Uruha rubs his cheek against his shoulder. They hold on to each other because they know that this could be the last time. No more lies. No more painted smiles for them.
"I want you to love me," Uruha whispers. But Aoi isn't sure that he knows how to love anymore. He knows too much of the bitter side of passion to taste the sweetness Uruha offers him in these moments. He only offers when he feels Aoi slipping through his fingers.
"Please," Uruha begs and his fingers dig into Aoi's arm hard enough to hurt.
"I couldn't stay away."
"I'm tired of doing this," Aoi tells him.
A record drones on in the background and Aoi remembers a night just like this one with Uruha's head in his lap and the same record looping lazily. Uruha had been painting henna on his back in delicate arches and swirls. He remembers the smoke drifting lazily around the room, the way Uruha had pressed a glass of wine to his lips and then bent over his back, his brow knitted in concentration on the design he was creating against Aoi's skin.
Aoi had been practicing smoke rings in the air and the record playing had always been one of Uruha's favorites, something slow and just a little morbid, like something straight out of someone's old black clad high school garage band. He'd told Aoi that it always brought him back to a better place, some dust covered memory of a past that Aoi hadn't been a part of.
He had never been any good with sharing Uruha with memories.
Aoi feels the sting just as heavily as he had on that night with his fingers drifting through blond hair and nursing an ache in his chest that had never fully gone away. He would always want Uruha to return these emotions he couldn't control. Uruha's thighs had been warm against his hips that long ago night and the words they had loosed into the heavy air around them had been soft and lulling and perfect. He hadn't wanted that night to end.
"Beautiful," Uruha had whispered against the shell of his ear and when he had turned to look into the mirror, he found a flock of dusky birds taking flight against the back of his shoulders.
It had been one of those moments that his heart had taken flight as well. It was one of those moments that left Aoi feeling helpless, knowing that he would never be able to turn away from Uruha, and no amount of liquor flavored kisses, distant points on wrinkled maps, and apologies in dark back rooms was going to change that. They were what they were- broken relics from a time long gone, and they would remain that as long as they loved one another.
"I've always loved you," He whispers into Uruha's hair now, giving him what he wants, feeling all the emotions he'd felt for Uruha over the years come washing over him in a rush. It had been a long time since he could admit to this weakness.
He feels Uruha's shoulders shaking. He feels the fear and uncertainty of giving up everything for a person that could take it all and leave him empty handed. Humans were funny creatures that way. They gave their all and then expected to come out without bruises, without scars. But those scars were what made them human...what ultimately made Uruha human.
"I don't like myself,"
"I'm ugly inside,"
The words come back to him as a flood against his skin. The look on Uruha's face had been like something lost and defeated. Uruha had been fighting himself for so long now that everyone else around him had become the enemy. The hands that held him down to the bed, the lips that kissed him in dark corners while his boyfriend lay sleeping in bed, the eyes that followed him down the street and wanted...just a bit more, the pretty boys and girls, and friends, and lovers...Aoi.
He remembers a time where they had sat on a roof together, watching a storm move toward them in the distance, the scent of rain heavy in the air, suffocating. Uruha's fingers had been draped over his own, and each thunder clap had been like the clicking of a hundred camera shutters while they played their roles and looked at each other warily from across a sea of people. It had always been that way with them. He remembers the calm of that day, the feeling of watching a storm from a distance and knowing that sooner or later it would catch up to them.
Aoi had become the biggest threat of all because he had always wanted even more from Uruha than all those people. He had asked for more than anyone ever had. He had wanted inside but Uruha had become so good at crossing his arms over his chest and denying everything but the one thing alone. Sex? Anyone could have that, but love? That was unheard of.
He tilts Uruha's face up to his own and he presses his lips to damp cheeks and familiar lips, messy with salt and regret. He knows that it would be better to say their quiet goodbyes and let this moment turn into just another dusty memory shoved into the corner. And yet he'd never been able to walk away, especially when Uruha needed him.
"You can have it all." Aoi tells him, "And I won't take anything for myself." He sees ghosts in Uruha's eyes when he looks at Aoi.
"No." Uruha shakes his head and Aoi can see a small vein in his neck pulsing, pumping blood to that hidden space, fast and strong.
"Maybe I don't want you to do that for me." Uruha's words are wisps, trembling things that try to catch themselves in his throat.
"You're a fucking walking contradiction," He breathes, pulling Uruha to him, leaving fingerprints against the inside of that paper-thin wrist. Uruha's body is warm and familiar against him. The smell of him, autumn smoke and rainy days, is something ingrained into Aoi as if he'd been waking up to that smell every day of his life, and he had for six long years now.
He remembers Uruha's back to him on many of those days...sleepless nights, or the nights left alone drinking coffee at the corner shop to kill the thoughts in his mind. But he always ended up dwelling on everything as he watched the night crawlers outside of the shop window.
Uruha is a seesaw of contradictions and he never knows when Uruha will be up or when he'll be six feet in the ground. He tries to tie everything together into a prettily wrapped gift, something that would make sense in the end. But he knows there will never be an answer to any of this and that he's chasing shadows in the dark for all Uruha will ever give him.
And yet still he lets Uruha rest his head against his shoulder, feels the tin walls of Uruha's chest beating against him in a rhythm not at all foreign. And he counts the breaths against the skin of his neck as if he'll never feel them again, though he knows that it's all he'll ever feel....all he'll ever remember when someone else touches him.
Uruha had made him into a record on repeat, kept the needle poised right where he wanted it and Aoi would always be there, running in circles, amnesia, the highest form of limbo, waiting for nothing and everything.
They were infinite.
End.
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A/N: And that's all. I really enjoyed working on this one. The darker, the better taha