fic: Cigarette Fires
Cold (navy) nights strangle you with their shadow fingers.
You die on the bed. Okay, maybe you aren’t dying in there, dying is a fatal once-and-for-all word that hardly fits the situation at hand. The moment, the recurring moment, the break moment behind closed doors and shadow fingers.
(Twirling smoke and a struggling firelight readying for its fade-away.)
Ten times you have felt flaming needles pressing through your ankles to keep you where you are and two times the heavy veil of end has come down to steal you of your precious breaths. You’re supposed to stay where you are, Jin, you aren’t supposed to move. You aren’t supposed to go for him.
Kame heaves a long trail of smoke from his lips and leans against the barrier. You wish you could tell his expression but you can’t, the curtains, the veils are on the way, the see-through white no-no’s, the blockages. The dividers. Or so you tell yourself anyway, maybe it’s easier not being able to tell than seeing something you don’t want to see, what you’re afraid of seeing.
You two have been ripped apart and it was by your hands, it was by your trembling and numb runaway-fingers and you can never take your missteps back.
(He’s decided on not waiting for you.)
The room is silent. You wonder if you look like a dead body now - if Kame will walk back in and call out your name with a soft and worrying voice, if he’ll let his lips word out hesitant whispers of “Jin, are you awake?” that you used to hear so much more. That you used to groan as an answer to.
Groans between the two of you have ceased to almost nothing now even though the nights used to be all groan groan groan after groan in so unimaginably many ways more than one.
Fingers dance on your neck, violent bruise-shadow-fingers, pressing pressure-fingers. You stare at him through your half-lidded eyes, through your forever-nothing eyes. He’s now forever-nothing too, you have made him so. He’s a pale and frail shadow of what he used to be, and your fingers only meeting air anymore are a trembling proof of that, of his nonexistence in levels he should’ve existed on.
It was your mistake and now you both carry the weights you created out of thin air.
So you lie on the double bed (for two) with nothing but duvet and a pillow by your side to accompany you and Kame stands high above the streets, city lights and god-awful traffic on the hotel balcony with his third cigarette between his fingers.
Fingers dance on your throat. And you know why he’s quickly heading for a packet a night.
He can’t bear facing you during the shadow-nights and soft sheets anymore. Those days are long gone.
You feign sleep. You deceive him but you follow him with your child-like eyes, with your never-moving body. Deceiver, the shadow man, the forever nothing but e and x put together, forever nothing but “before he left”. Before He Left Man.
Before You Left Man.
What you have between you now is the edge of Kame’s lightened cigarette, a dying firelight struggling beneath the ashes, the toxic he inhales and you follow with your tired stare. Another struggling firelight (starlight) that yearns to die out, that dies out and makes you die once again with it as you follow.
Kame lights another cigarette with his lighter, yearning more for the toxic. And forever through the nights you follow him, follow how cigarette after cigarette he keeps burning the two of you away only to light you up again for a miserable struggle.
He probably never thinks of it the same way you do, he probably never sees how he kills the two of you over and over again with his inhales, how he speeds up the unavoidable end.
But still, he lights another cigarette to revive you, he holds on to his cigarettes every night. And you’re warmly reincarnated over and over again.
You know why. You’ve always known why. You know it when he quietly heads inside again, careful not to wake you up (you false sleeper, you) and looses his robe before sitting beside you on the bed.
When he lies down beside you and you sense-feel him on the other side of the bed you make a wish to become an eternal flame, for the two of you to become an eternal flame to burn forever and ever after.
Or at least until you die out anyway.
(Next night he smokes again.)
He’s a chain smoker, and it’s your creation.