(no subject)
WHO: Kristoph Gavin [myscarsmiles]
WHAT: Kristoph deals with the death of his beloved consort - or should we say, he doesn't deal with it.
WHERE: Kristoph's house
WHEN: A couple days ago / a couple of days after Mazikeen's death.
He arranges a quiet, private funeral for Mazikeen and tells no one about it. He does not invite Dean, Franky or Gin (even if he could find him). He does not talk to Rhode, Nagi or Hokuto. He would hate for them to see him frowning.
This was harder than it should have been. As much as he was fond of Mazikeen, she was his pawn, and just that- a fellow masked conversationalist, a bodyguard, another body to share his bed, and not much more. Yet her death haunted him in a sense that he could not quite grasp. Her presence by his side, once utterly invisible, suddenly felt like there was a constant cliff edge at his feet. Even when they were not together, when she was off doing whatever she liked and he what he preferred, he still felt a sick hole somewhere under his heart, around his stomach. It was a wholly unpleasant feeling, and he spent a long time contemplating on how to rid himself of it and had come up empty. Though Mazikeen annoyed him on multiple levels - her fascinating with his unmasked self, her almost obnoxiously devout loyalty, and more - he realized that even the small nuisances Mazikeen caused him somehow made him felt good.
She’d been dead and laid to rest a couple of days when he finally realized what the sourness in his body was.
He was grieving.
The concept was laughable. Kristoph Gavin, grieving. Kristoph had been murdering people since he was fifteen, and destroying their names since before that - and in it was a sort of amused pleasure in his own power and his own capabilities. He hadn’t cared when his mother had divorced his father, when all of them had left him, when his own brother Klavier had spat at his face and called him a monster. Sure, he had felt a pang of regret, that he hadn’t been able to move the situation more to his advantage, that he had lost something so valuable to him, something so easy to meld had slipped away. But he had never grieved for Klavier, perhaps every so often wondered if things could have been different, yes… but not this. Klavier had never caused him to break out in sweat during the night, or snap at people he was normally incredibly pleasant too.
For the first time in as long as he could remember, he could feel his mask slip.
At first, he’d attributed his odd sensations to the loss of Ichimaru Gin, his amusing little partner in this dance they did. But losing an amusing enemy was just like losing his brother - could have been better, but most certainly nothing to lose sleep over. But Mazikeen did not let him move on. He slept poorly and brooded, and found even his journal pages going empty. He listlessly paced around his own house, not going out, not drinking tea or medicating or doing his morning crunches. He lay in bed and wondered if perhaps he could have saved her. Perhaps if he could have taken one of those bullets, they could have both survived, and she could have screamed and pulled her hair out at him for being such an idiot and trying to protect her. This was her job, she would say, her life. To get in the way was an embarrassment and a humiliation to both of them. He would smile and shake his head and speak honey, and she would tell him to shut up, and he would laugh.
Instead he stood alone and crumbling.
Grief was foreign to him. This sort of power behind his heart - even that was a stranger. He’d always dealt with most emotions distantly, wondering precisely how to recreate the correct facial expression, the tone of voice, the body language. Yet his grief was invasive, invasive in the way that it did not allow him to think of how to deal with it. He would get up and stalk around his house in his boxers, breaking pots simply for being there. He’d thrown a thousand-dollar vase to the floor for no reason, and he didn’t care. He kicked the pieces all over his hardwood floor with his bare feet and stomped off and left the shards.
That was yesterday. They still lingered on the floor, and just seeing them nearly threw them into this sadness-powered rage that made him want to spend weeks torturing some poor soul. That would get rid of all these unnecessary feelings for a tool he’d apparently cared for too much.
How dare Mazikeen wrest herself into him like this. How dare she possess his thoughts, ruin his concentration, make a puzzle difficult and finances impossible. What gave her the right? No one. If she was here, he’d strip her bare with words, reduce her to a crumbled mass of tears and muscle, selecting every word for the most effect, that she was worthless, and she was against him, that she would dare step into his heart.
He stared at the vase pieces and stomped off yet again. Mazikeen’s emptiness lingers behind him, her amused voice wondering why he would let all this dirt and crumbs go uncleaned. Because of you, he would say, his lip curled into a sneer. Because I know it keeps you wondering and I like that.
Because you won’t fucking leave me alone, is the answer. I feel like I can hardly be myself without you at my side.
The realization makes him fall to his knees laughing in the middle of the hallway, near the vase pieces. To think that he needs Mazikeen to be himself is hysterical. He needs no one except himself. Mazikeen was a wonderful accessory, an incredible pawn and tool and dare he say a friend, but not a necessity. He always knew this day would come and he imagined stepping away from her and carrying on. But so many years went by and he imagined that day would never come, and now here it is and he is a wreck. A blubbering, ridiculous mass of emotions, laid bare.
He is so vulnerable it makes him sick. His mask has melted into a pile of her words and his thoughts. He feels worthless and god, the sort of self-hatred that lingers in him makes his stomach turn.
He vomits into the toilet and lets the last drips of bile dribble down his chin and onto his tile floor. He knows he is a wreck; he can feel himself shattering from the inside out, until he’s resting his head on the cool porcelain of the seat and he vomits again, all bile and no food.
This is unacceptable. Unacceptable in as many senses as there are: that he would let someone get to him like this, that something as insignificant as death would affect him so, that he would break and shatter into this, clinging to his toilet seat till his hands - his soft hands that she loved so dearly, and how did she do that, appear in his mind even now? - were white in his grip. He retched and gagged and felt faint, and wondered that perhaps when he woke up from this he would receive the worst ribbing of his life from her.
Her harassment meant she existed, and as such, he could tolerate it.
He did not pass out, as much as he would have liked too. He gasped for air and concentrated the pain in his throat, so more ridiculous pains faded out. Pains that couldn’t exist because the thought of being so attached to another person was foolish. Pains like the wad of confused anger and grief in his throat, pains like the way half his face aches, the way she would touch it, probing him for the slightest signs of his sincerity. Touching his mask, trying to slip through it, to see the real him, as much as it may have pissed him off. She did it, over and over again, until somehow she was not only behind his mask, but under his skin and threaded in to his tendons and pumping in his blood.
Fuck her.
He tried to stand up but his strong legs were as if he was twelve again, and left nearly unconscious by his stepmother as she trained him to be a mafia soldier. Instead he just lays prone on the bathroom floor, staring up at the white ceiling, and seeing her half-white face. He hurls his glasses across the room and does not feel the satisfaction he know she should have when he hears them shatter. The white is a blur now, and he can’t see her anymore, thank god. He can’t see her, but he knows where she would be - leaning in the bathroom doorway, two buttons of her vest closed, her dark hair loose and wild, making her face seem small and delicate. He liked her delicate, his deadly porcelain doll, and he loved watching her move in that slinky red dress of hers, as they attended so many different balls with her on his arm, gotten so many looks at her mask, and they didn’t know that her mask wasn’t the one you should have been staring at. No, her mask was beautiful. But they couldn’t see the hideousness of his, and so they stared at her, and she stared back, and they laughed and drank and spoke of murder and sex.
Anger burned in him. It was not his usual anger, the sort that lent itself to a good plan, a nice blackmail scheme or a well-thought-out assassination by garotte. No, this anger did not simmer quietly as his always has. This was a pyre.
This was her bonfire inside of him.
It was that anger that compelled him to his feet. Compelled him towards her room, where her things were so neat and organized, as he demanded of her. Her computer sat open. There was a note to speak to Sakuya. Her collection of masks.
Slowly he brought his fingers over each one of them, and a bitter laugh escaped him when he realized that he was a person with no mask, and here it was, a mask with no person. Slowly he took the one he liked the most - the plain porcelain with the red lips - and set it to his face, and it didn’t fit but it didn’t matter.
He regretted it instantly. The mask smelled of her and him, and for a moment he felt his lower body struggle with the weight of his emotions and nearly crumbled. But he grabbed her dresser and held himself up, and tossed the mask across the room and watched it hit the wall and fall to the ground in pieces.
The rest of the masks joined the first, and he had a pile of ceramic bits. He kept one, similar to the first, and with more care than perhaps he knew he had, took it off its stand and placed it outside the room.
Kristoph knew it was barely the evening - six or seven, maybe - but his entire body was giving way. His mind, organized, calm, and structured, was gone and in its space was this raging torrent of so many things Kristoph could not explain. Grief and anger, and there were things that he dared not name because he did not do those things. His throat burned, and his stomach growled hungrily. His feet hurt and he imagined he may have cut himself on the vase pieces and tracked blood across his house; his hands fell at his sides. His blonde hair was loose and limp, and instead of making him seem aristocratic, it gave him a sad, young expression. He could feel his face red and his eyes puffy.
For the first and last time, he slept in Mazikeen’s bed.
He dreamed of dark hair and white porcelain and slim daggers. He dreamed of being chastised and not caring. He dreamed of being told to shut up and of successful schemes. He dreamed of meeting a woman with half her face burnt off, who told him she wanted back in the house, and swore herself to him till the day one or both of them died, and beyond. He dreamed of naked, seared flesh.
He awoke to realize that his pillow was wet, that his face was crusted with the remains of dried salt-water. He was quite sure he had never had a less restless sleep, and he was quite sure that he simply could not move his arms and legs. He was trapped by the weight of his mind, by a lingering spirit he’d dare call further out to him.
When he was sure he could stand up without falling down, he did so, and slipped from her bed. It smelled strongly of her, still, of linen and porcelain and murder and he wondered if there was a way to press the smell into the sheets in the long-term. It made his throat close and his stomach twist, but he refused to vomit anymore, and he meticulously made her bed, as he would have her done. When he was finished, he slipped a small knife from the sheath hidden under it, in case of emergencies, and the blade felt comfortable in his hand.
Even more comforting was the sound of tearing fabric as he slammed the blade into the bed, mattress, duvet cover and all. It made a relieving sound, an endless rriiiiiip, and he looked at the long gash as best as he could. He remembered he’d shattered his glasses in the bathroom. Then he made another gash, and another, and another, till he was panting for breath, till sweat mixed with the dried water on his face, still the bed was unrecognizable save a couple of seams and springs. He slammed the blade into a bed a final time and left it there.
With a wide, sweeping gesture, he threw all her things off her bedside table - her notes, alarm clock, pda and more went clattering to the ground. With a strength born by fury he heaved the table across the room and watched it bounce off the dresses and come to rest in the middle; he tossed her workdesk over onto it’s side, the drawers emptying their pens, papers, clips and a gun. He tore the closet doors off and wrenched everything to the ground, the shelves included. He punched her mirror, and the spider-web shatter did nothing to hide his beet-red face, his panting expression, the way his hair fell, suddenly stringy and dead around his head. He felt possibly more exhausted than he had when he’d gone to sleep now, and now he had a destroyed room to speak for him as well.
“How dare you,” he whispered, his voice pulsating with hatred as he surveyed his destruction. “how dare you go and get yourself killed and refuse to leave me. You’re dead, Mazikeen! You’re dead and I don’t care!” He clenched his fists, pushing at the dresser again, and the mirror fell in front of him with a loud shatter. “You’re dead and that’s what was supposed to happen, because I am still alive. Yet, how dare you prepare this, prepare to refuse to leave me, prepare to stay with me, to turn me into this sniveling rat that sleeps in another’s bed and retches over something so insignificant as emotion. Do you think you’ve gotten some sort of privilege to do this to me, Mazikeen? Do you think your faithful service should be rewarded with you infesting my thoughts? You’re even more worthless than I always thought you were.”
He spat on the mirror and nearly slammed the door off its hinges on his exit.
He was back in his room when he realized that he was still exhausted, but had no desire for more sleep that involved porcelain faces and wet pillows in the morning. He couldn’t stomach tea, and just this once, wished he had coffee. He showered and dressed and returned to his room, hair twisted nicely, blue suit pressed.
She would be coming in now, he reminded himself. Coming in with whatever errands she’d finished in the morning and giving him her morning report on how things were going, what they should do, perhaps dinner together? Then they would discuss politics and torture, and enjoy each other that night.
No, she would not, he though to himself. She would not be coming in, not now, not in fifteen minutes (sometimes she did oversleep), not tomorrow, not ever.
He hid his eyes behind his hands, cancelled all his appointments, turned off all his electronics, and did not allow a single tear to escape.
WHAT: Kristoph deals with the death of his beloved consort - or should we say, he doesn't deal with it.
WHERE: Kristoph's house
WHEN: A couple days ago / a couple of days after Mazikeen's death.
He arranges a quiet, private funeral for Mazikeen and tells no one about it. He does not invite Dean, Franky or Gin (even if he could find him). He does not talk to Rhode, Nagi or Hokuto. He would hate for them to see him frowning.
This was harder than it should have been. As much as he was fond of Mazikeen, she was his pawn, and just that- a fellow masked conversationalist, a bodyguard, another body to share his bed, and not much more. Yet her death haunted him in a sense that he could not quite grasp. Her presence by his side, once utterly invisible, suddenly felt like there was a constant cliff edge at his feet. Even when they were not together, when she was off doing whatever she liked and he what he preferred, he still felt a sick hole somewhere under his heart, around his stomach. It was a wholly unpleasant feeling, and he spent a long time contemplating on how to rid himself of it and had come up empty. Though Mazikeen annoyed him on multiple levels - her fascinating with his unmasked self, her almost obnoxiously devout loyalty, and more - he realized that even the small nuisances Mazikeen caused him somehow made him felt good.
She’d been dead and laid to rest a couple of days when he finally realized what the sourness in his body was.
He was grieving.
The concept was laughable. Kristoph Gavin, grieving. Kristoph had been murdering people since he was fifteen, and destroying their names since before that - and in it was a sort of amused pleasure in his own power and his own capabilities. He hadn’t cared when his mother had divorced his father, when all of them had left him, when his own brother Klavier had spat at his face and called him a monster. Sure, he had felt a pang of regret, that he hadn’t been able to move the situation more to his advantage, that he had lost something so valuable to him, something so easy to meld had slipped away. But he had never grieved for Klavier, perhaps every so often wondered if things could have been different, yes… but not this. Klavier had never caused him to break out in sweat during the night, or snap at people he was normally incredibly pleasant too.
For the first time in as long as he could remember, he could feel his mask slip.
At first, he’d attributed his odd sensations to the loss of Ichimaru Gin, his amusing little partner in this dance they did. But losing an amusing enemy was just like losing his brother - could have been better, but most certainly nothing to lose sleep over. But Mazikeen did not let him move on. He slept poorly and brooded, and found even his journal pages going empty. He listlessly paced around his own house, not going out, not drinking tea or medicating or doing his morning crunches. He lay in bed and wondered if perhaps he could have saved her. Perhaps if he could have taken one of those bullets, they could have both survived, and she could have screamed and pulled her hair out at him for being such an idiot and trying to protect her. This was her job, she would say, her life. To get in the way was an embarrassment and a humiliation to both of them. He would smile and shake his head and speak honey, and she would tell him to shut up, and he would laugh.
Instead he stood alone and crumbling.
Grief was foreign to him. This sort of power behind his heart - even that was a stranger. He’d always dealt with most emotions distantly, wondering precisely how to recreate the correct facial expression, the tone of voice, the body language. Yet his grief was invasive, invasive in the way that it did not allow him to think of how to deal with it. He would get up and stalk around his house in his boxers, breaking pots simply for being there. He’d thrown a thousand-dollar vase to the floor for no reason, and he didn’t care. He kicked the pieces all over his hardwood floor with his bare feet and stomped off and left the shards.
That was yesterday. They still lingered on the floor, and just seeing them nearly threw them into this sadness-powered rage that made him want to spend weeks torturing some poor soul. That would get rid of all these unnecessary feelings for a tool he’d apparently cared for too much.
How dare Mazikeen wrest herself into him like this. How dare she possess his thoughts, ruin his concentration, make a puzzle difficult and finances impossible. What gave her the right? No one. If she was here, he’d strip her bare with words, reduce her to a crumbled mass of tears and muscle, selecting every word for the most effect, that she was worthless, and she was against him, that she would dare step into his heart.
He stared at the vase pieces and stomped off yet again. Mazikeen’s emptiness lingers behind him, her amused voice wondering why he would let all this dirt and crumbs go uncleaned. Because of you, he would say, his lip curled into a sneer. Because I know it keeps you wondering and I like that.
Because you won’t fucking leave me alone, is the answer. I feel like I can hardly be myself without you at my side.
The realization makes him fall to his knees laughing in the middle of the hallway, near the vase pieces. To think that he needs Mazikeen to be himself is hysterical. He needs no one except himself. Mazikeen was a wonderful accessory, an incredible pawn and tool and dare he say a friend, but not a necessity. He always knew this day would come and he imagined stepping away from her and carrying on. But so many years went by and he imagined that day would never come, and now here it is and he is a wreck. A blubbering, ridiculous mass of emotions, laid bare.
He is so vulnerable it makes him sick. His mask has melted into a pile of her words and his thoughts. He feels worthless and god, the sort of self-hatred that lingers in him makes his stomach turn.
He vomits into the toilet and lets the last drips of bile dribble down his chin and onto his tile floor. He knows he is a wreck; he can feel himself shattering from the inside out, until he’s resting his head on the cool porcelain of the seat and he vomits again, all bile and no food.
This is unacceptable. Unacceptable in as many senses as there are: that he would let someone get to him like this, that something as insignificant as death would affect him so, that he would break and shatter into this, clinging to his toilet seat till his hands - his soft hands that she loved so dearly, and how did she do that, appear in his mind even now? - were white in his grip. He retched and gagged and felt faint, and wondered that perhaps when he woke up from this he would receive the worst ribbing of his life from her.
Her harassment meant she existed, and as such, he could tolerate it.
He did not pass out, as much as he would have liked too. He gasped for air and concentrated the pain in his throat, so more ridiculous pains faded out. Pains that couldn’t exist because the thought of being so attached to another person was foolish. Pains like the wad of confused anger and grief in his throat, pains like the way half his face aches, the way she would touch it, probing him for the slightest signs of his sincerity. Touching his mask, trying to slip through it, to see the real him, as much as it may have pissed him off. She did it, over and over again, until somehow she was not only behind his mask, but under his skin and threaded in to his tendons and pumping in his blood.
Fuck her.
He tried to stand up but his strong legs were as if he was twelve again, and left nearly unconscious by his stepmother as she trained him to be a mafia soldier. Instead he just lays prone on the bathroom floor, staring up at the white ceiling, and seeing her half-white face. He hurls his glasses across the room and does not feel the satisfaction he know she should have when he hears them shatter. The white is a blur now, and he can’t see her anymore, thank god. He can’t see her, but he knows where she would be - leaning in the bathroom doorway, two buttons of her vest closed, her dark hair loose and wild, making her face seem small and delicate. He liked her delicate, his deadly porcelain doll, and he loved watching her move in that slinky red dress of hers, as they attended so many different balls with her on his arm, gotten so many looks at her mask, and they didn’t know that her mask wasn’t the one you should have been staring at. No, her mask was beautiful. But they couldn’t see the hideousness of his, and so they stared at her, and she stared back, and they laughed and drank and spoke of murder and sex.
Anger burned in him. It was not his usual anger, the sort that lent itself to a good plan, a nice blackmail scheme or a well-thought-out assassination by garotte. No, this anger did not simmer quietly as his always has. This was a pyre.
This was her bonfire inside of him.
It was that anger that compelled him to his feet. Compelled him towards her room, where her things were so neat and organized, as he demanded of her. Her computer sat open. There was a note to speak to Sakuya. Her collection of masks.
Slowly he brought his fingers over each one of them, and a bitter laugh escaped him when he realized that he was a person with no mask, and here it was, a mask with no person. Slowly he took the one he liked the most - the plain porcelain with the red lips - and set it to his face, and it didn’t fit but it didn’t matter.
He regretted it instantly. The mask smelled of her and him, and for a moment he felt his lower body struggle with the weight of his emotions and nearly crumbled. But he grabbed her dresser and held himself up, and tossed the mask across the room and watched it hit the wall and fall to the ground in pieces.
The rest of the masks joined the first, and he had a pile of ceramic bits. He kept one, similar to the first, and with more care than perhaps he knew he had, took it off its stand and placed it outside the room.
Kristoph knew it was barely the evening - six or seven, maybe - but his entire body was giving way. His mind, organized, calm, and structured, was gone and in its space was this raging torrent of so many things Kristoph could not explain. Grief and anger, and there were things that he dared not name because he did not do those things. His throat burned, and his stomach growled hungrily. His feet hurt and he imagined he may have cut himself on the vase pieces and tracked blood across his house; his hands fell at his sides. His blonde hair was loose and limp, and instead of making him seem aristocratic, it gave him a sad, young expression. He could feel his face red and his eyes puffy.
For the first and last time, he slept in Mazikeen’s bed.
He dreamed of dark hair and white porcelain and slim daggers. He dreamed of being chastised and not caring. He dreamed of being told to shut up and of successful schemes. He dreamed of meeting a woman with half her face burnt off, who told him she wanted back in the house, and swore herself to him till the day one or both of them died, and beyond. He dreamed of naked, seared flesh.
He awoke to realize that his pillow was wet, that his face was crusted with the remains of dried salt-water. He was quite sure he had never had a less restless sleep, and he was quite sure that he simply could not move his arms and legs. He was trapped by the weight of his mind, by a lingering spirit he’d dare call further out to him.
When he was sure he could stand up without falling down, he did so, and slipped from her bed. It smelled strongly of her, still, of linen and porcelain and murder and he wondered if there was a way to press the smell into the sheets in the long-term. It made his throat close and his stomach twist, but he refused to vomit anymore, and he meticulously made her bed, as he would have her done. When he was finished, he slipped a small knife from the sheath hidden under it, in case of emergencies, and the blade felt comfortable in his hand.
Even more comforting was the sound of tearing fabric as he slammed the blade into the bed, mattress, duvet cover and all. It made a relieving sound, an endless rriiiiiip, and he looked at the long gash as best as he could. He remembered he’d shattered his glasses in the bathroom. Then he made another gash, and another, and another, till he was panting for breath, till sweat mixed with the dried water on his face, still the bed was unrecognizable save a couple of seams and springs. He slammed the blade into a bed a final time and left it there.
With a wide, sweeping gesture, he threw all her things off her bedside table - her notes, alarm clock, pda and more went clattering to the ground. With a strength born by fury he heaved the table across the room and watched it bounce off the dresses and come to rest in the middle; he tossed her workdesk over onto it’s side, the drawers emptying their pens, papers, clips and a gun. He tore the closet doors off and wrenched everything to the ground, the shelves included. He punched her mirror, and the spider-web shatter did nothing to hide his beet-red face, his panting expression, the way his hair fell, suddenly stringy and dead around his head. He felt possibly more exhausted than he had when he’d gone to sleep now, and now he had a destroyed room to speak for him as well.
“How dare you,” he whispered, his voice pulsating with hatred as he surveyed his destruction. “how dare you go and get yourself killed and refuse to leave me. You’re dead, Mazikeen! You’re dead and I don’t care!” He clenched his fists, pushing at the dresser again, and the mirror fell in front of him with a loud shatter. “You’re dead and that’s what was supposed to happen, because I am still alive. Yet, how dare you prepare this, prepare to refuse to leave me, prepare to stay with me, to turn me into this sniveling rat that sleeps in another’s bed and retches over something so insignificant as emotion. Do you think you’ve gotten some sort of privilege to do this to me, Mazikeen? Do you think your faithful service should be rewarded with you infesting my thoughts? You’re even more worthless than I always thought you were.”
He spat on the mirror and nearly slammed the door off its hinges on his exit.
He was back in his room when he realized that he was still exhausted, but had no desire for more sleep that involved porcelain faces and wet pillows in the morning. He couldn’t stomach tea, and just this once, wished he had coffee. He showered and dressed and returned to his room, hair twisted nicely, blue suit pressed.
She would be coming in now, he reminded himself. Coming in with whatever errands she’d finished in the morning and giving him her morning report on how things were going, what they should do, perhaps dinner together? Then they would discuss politics and torture, and enjoy each other that night.
No, she would not, he though to himself. She would not be coming in, not now, not in fifteen minutes (sometimes she did oversleep), not tomorrow, not ever.
He hid his eyes behind his hands, cancelled all his appointments, turned off all his electronics, and did not allow a single tear to escape.