(no subject)
Title: When I Get Older (I Will Be Stronger)
Author: powdered_opium
Fandom: NO.6
Pairing: implied Nezumi/Shion
Rating and Warnings: Very introspective angst. Spoilers for most of the series, especially the events of episode 7 onwards.
Summary: When Nezumi is seven, he sings for his first soul.
A/N: First time writing this fandom, so I'll unleashing this on the Internet world and then running away. Written as part of the no6holiday piece. Probably I'll edit this later. The first italicised quotes are references to Macbeth by Shakespeare, the latter one is from Miller's The Crucible.
Disclaimer: Not Atsuko Asano. Sorry to break it to you, guys.
Because death is so full
and man so small.
- After the Storm, Mumford and Sons
When Nezumi is seven, he sings for his first soul. Leafy funeral glade, mulch squeezing between stubby toes. Someone wrapped up peaceful clean, a parcel to be secreted beneath the roots, but Nezumi isn't afraid because this is how life is. You breathe among the trees, climb reckless because you're little and skinny enough, branches barely shifting beneath your weight, you're too clever to fall like others do. Then you'll grow bigger, you'll breed, and then die in painless sleep. Your people will give you back to the earth you came from, and you'll lie beneath the leaves, soft and quiet, nourishing the plants your ancestors clamber through. You don't think about faith because you don't know what it means to be without it. You're seven, remember?
Nezumi doesn't know why he sings, beyond that knowledge of how this is what is done when people leave us, this is how we remember those lost now. Nezumi's not a rat, not then, he's loved; so he has a different name, one his mother gave him; so he stands, hair wild with goodbye flowers, beloved child of a proud untamed nation, and sings about love and hope like these are absolutes, because they are, aren't they? He's seven, remember? And he learns that singing is like resurrection; it digs up the bones of what has been and makes them dance again. Music is entwined irrevocably with human memory. It makes people cry - remembering dead beloveds whispering into their skin late at night - it makes couples smile - their wedding dance, and everything is new and bright. Music calls up the roiling blood, provokes and rescues.
Later, there's cooking flesh and faceless reapers, kowtowing to the end. The trees are black, and everything is screaming. Later, there's a grey metal building that smells like death, that eats you up and crushes you inside; curling up and mouthing the words to a song because his throat is hoarse with all the souls he's had to sing to appease. There's a bullet inside his body, a fragile little genius shrieking his heart out on a classy glass balcony. Later, later, that comes later.
(He doesn't feel like singing after that. A song can't save anyone. He rips the heart from his sleeve and squishes it beneath his heel, scoops out the sensitivity like a cancer. Still, at night, he hears half-echoes, snatches of old songs he used to know. They haunt him, like the sound of wind brushing through leaves, like remnants of a culture he should take care to preserve but -- he's not a curator, and they don't have art here anyway.)
He grows bigger. He hardens, crusting with hatred, sealing over. He gave up on faith long ago, put it back to where it belonged: the days of sunlit forest trust. He doesn't think about it anymore. And now he's sixteen, owes his life on a glossy silver platter to some brunette prodigy, and he's heartless, or so he likes to think -- because it's excruciating enough to be sixteen without the entire world having failed you already. Better to shut down and survive. He only sings for dead dogs now, stands on a stage in an imitation silk dress, material sickly sticky with sweat and repairs.
"I think nothing, my lord," Eve declaims prettily, and wonders whether Ophelia truly meant that; the girl whose madness became her armour. Did she think nothing, or is that too optimistic? Was her mind so clamouring that she resolved to silence it with emptiness, soothing white noise blank? She sang herself to death, didn't she?
Some nights, he sleeps with ghosts who reach for him, silvery, imploring, old ageing pain, stroking his face or snatching at his hands, why didn't you save us.
(I couldn't. I tried. I was so young. You told me to keep running. None of the excuses fit right. Weak, weak. You're so weak.)
Nezumi knows it's all in his head, chokes out bitter laughter. Come, let me clutch thee! I have thee not, and yet see thee still. It doesn't happen so often now, admittedly, but enough to make him wake white-knuckled and run for his books. They're reassuring, he knows how they end; the bedtime story of the hopeless penitent. The definition of vendetta is carved into his skin, he'll never be a selfless prince; he knows it's stupid and futile to pluck your eyes out for sorry beaten match-girls and starving playwrights. Don't waste your eyes on strangers, don't waste your eyes on anyone.
Breathes in longing, breathes out loathing: sorry, but that's how this one goes, babe.
*
How can anyone be so goddamn happy? It's ridiculous awful, the way a boy with hair that grew old before him smiles, creased half-moon grin as Nezumi slouches through the door. Wannabe wife or something, welcome home! Cuckoo-like, Shion’s wormed so thoroughly into Nezumi's life that if he left, gaping holes would riddle the whole structure. He still believes in the third option; reminds Nezumi of a seven-year-old self, and he hates the contrast between them. He paints the world greyscale. Cuffed to an identification bracelet most of his life, manacled to loyalty, he's brainwashed, Nezumi, he must be.
However many times hurt, he plasters it over. He's never asked to die since that time. The dead parasite is still shriveled in its glass jar, decaying testament, study specimen.
"Strength isn't pretending never to be weak," Shion tells him one time, thoughtful philosophical, "Actually, it's overcoming vulnerability in favour of something greater. Right?"
In front of him spill careful notes, diagrams of lancets and syringes. Nezumi doesn't answer, eyes peeling words from Macbeth, squashing dissenting thoughts. Come, let me clutch thee.
Shion's still open enough that he cries without concealment. When this happens, Nezumi walks out, leans back against the rust door and listens to the proof that yes, this little flowery boy, with his scarred naivete, is human too.
*
Dogkeeper talks too much with Shion, but then everyone talks too much with Shion. He makes people want to tell him things; more than once, Nezumi’s had to squash down the urge to blab his entire excuse of a life story to the brattish princeling who’s the same age and yet so much younger - yet so much older, with a brain stuffed with hypotheses -- wailing violins and all.
Scowling through a tangle of hair, she tells him about the singing. Shion glances up eagerly, hands digging into a furry puppy, blatant hunger for information Nezumi's starved him of. Nezumi’s seething. He doesn't want to be seen as someone who sings a girl's dying mother to last sleep, because that claws out a picture of kindness he isn't. He's stronger than that -
Strength isn't pretending you're never weak.
And you, Shion, have never had to be strong in your life.
It's a lie, but it makes him breathe easier.
(Still, one thing he's learnt: people are fragile defiance. Despite everything, humans don't die so easily as it sometimes seems: the human body is adapted to survive as best it can, as long as it can, to fight to continue -- even when the mind struggles to a corner and begs crucify me, already. People don't just lie down quietly to die. They have to be kicked and kicked.)
*
Nezumi tries to ignore the awe reflecting in Shion’s eyes. He doesn’t want it, or he wants it too much. Thriving off admiring indifference is good, but this is a love that goes beyond that, steps over an invisible, tangibly potent line that should have been drawn somewhere, anywhere, back there. But he forgot, wrapped up in illusions. Too late to stamp out now.
He sees it when he’s Eve, declaiming a dead bard’s words with the reverence of one who deifies dusty poetry. He sees it when he fights, instinctive blur of kick and knife. He sees it in an old, old cave, when he sings a song that’s been killing him with a childhood memory of leaves and peace. He sees it when he stumbles in raggedy and heavy-eyed, Macbeth soup and holes in shared blankets, taunting heat and torment of proximity. He sees it in reflecting irises, palm impossible soft against his throat, sin-dipped, teasing; in the wordless apology of a lying goodbye kiss.
He sees it -- all the time, someone make it stop -
(Until one time, he sees pity: he sees the change when Shion hears the tale of the forest people who burnt in their kingdom and realises the nature of old scars. He hates that more.)
Love is the coins on a dead man’s eyes. He knows that.
And he loves anyway.
Stupid little fool of a clever little rat.
*
Still, he sings, turning his face away from Shion in a cattle van, about green water and flowery maidens and things the inhabitants of the West District have never seen and never known, because he knows they’ll die - or part of them will die - and he doesn’t want that inflicted on them too harshly, wants to soften the axe blade somehow. And he’s scared, because this facility corrects you wrong, fixes something human inside of you until your emotions stay on a cold metallic spectrum. They find you, a snivelling little starveling, crouched in rubbish, ashes and leaking wounds, and they take you - and they don’t make you better, they make you empty. Shion shifts closer into his side - warm as a homecoming - and Nezumi fights down the feeling.
(I won’t let them make you like me. I promise.)
*
A rattling gurney, shaking hands on needles, syringes puncturing; a horror movie montage Nezumi drifts in and out of in waves of black unconscious tide. Suddenly, he shivers with laughter, feeble and sickening.
“What is it, Nezumi? Hold on, hold on -“
But he slips away again.
(Who’ll sing for me?)
*
Explosions rack the skeleton of the building. Dogkeeper has fled, self-preservation kicking in with alacrity. Nezumi remembers the feeling - the urge to survive tearing through all else.
But Shion’s dead. Dead dead dead - and Nezumi’s seen people die, oh, he’s seen people die - good, innocent, undeserving people - but this No.6 brat, privileged and principled, took a bullet for nothing, and it’s - it’s so unfair -
It’s always been unfair, all of this; Shion’s never been fair, with his smile and hope and over-fed intelligence. Life plays dirty -- it takes what you want and dangles it on a string, and it makes you jump for it -
He sings, because this is what we do when people leave us, but the words are cracked and lilting, and Nezumi knows they’re going under. Two pretty boys who tried and failed; what a sad story, what a cautionary tale.
They’re going under.
*
And then they live again. A deus ex machina of overblown literary proportions, grand and confusing and terrible, and it comes down to this: them, and tangled sheets, and the dawn sleepily announcing itself. Shion is awake, visible through blinking blurry vision. He's drawing galaxies and alphabets on Nezumi's stomach, fingertips pressed against old cotton. Overwhelming mothering instinct surfaces; Nezumi yawns, a chirpy morning greeting and a lower, nervous, "You okay?"
Nezumi breathes carefully, feels the world turn beneath them. He waits until the need to bolt subsides before nodding, once. Shion pushes curious trails of kisses against his left shoulderblade, because he can. Ah, but I can! And there's your first wonder, that I can.
They built a city on his people's graves, and now it is gone. He has achieved appeasement. The world is a clean slate, thoughts littered at the corner with sore lovebites and maybe, maybe teaching Shion what it means to shiver, the question mark of what might come next, and that might be anything. The clatter of nightmares reverberates still, but time fades things as wounds into scars -- until they only sting lightly with ointment or ache with rememberance, and then rarely so. He'll leave, but he'll come back. He knows this.
"Yes. M'okay," he says, and means it, his voice wondering with sincerity. Hope comes to eat at his table, sneaking a few crumbs; he no longer has the strength to chase her away. And Shion smiles. This is his liberation.
The wall has come down.