LOG: [Thread] [Gamma and Uni] [Closed]

[cueitup]

WHO:Gamma and Uni Giglionero
WHAT: Celebrating the ghost hanging between these two.
WHERE: The old Giglionero Mansion on the outskirts of Namimori City.
WHEN: December 7 (backlogged)
RATING: G bordering on PG? orz
WARNING(s): All the slowness and flailing that comes when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.

Comments

...am I supposed to be the unstoppable force? XDDD *fails at being forceful*

[onlyluminous]

Europe had been beautiful, Italy more than beautiful -- it had been painful. Her trip began as little more than an impulse brought on by the kind of fear that knows only escape, a sorrow that only grew with the passage of time, and the subtle suggestion in Byakuran-sama's words. Yet as she walked through the vineyards and hills of her childhood it became something more: a pilgrimage, perhaps, to where it had all begun. A journey through the grief she usually kept separate from herself, a tangible thing shelved somewhere behind her books and her sketches, as far away from the daily task of living as possible.

She had not planned her stay abroad; she only knew that she had to get away -- from her office, from Namimori, from the empty tasks that formed her days, from... him. Of all the futures Uni feared, losing him was at the forefront; she had not, however, even imagined the possibility that it would be him who would choose to leave her. And so rather than stay and wait to be abandoned, she herself left

I'm... really not sure who's who. Maybe we're interchangeable! \o/

[cueitup]

He heard the footsteps long before they actually ever stepped on the grass, but he did not turn around, did not dare break the moment. Now that he was sitting in front of the memorial, everything else - his life at the moment, the problems he faced, his nearly extinguished anger, his failings - seemed so pathetically small. Gamma waited until she had stopped, counting the seconds between her gaze and her realization that the person she had probably run away from was really present, and then chose to speak.

"I'm sorry I didn't bring something for you to sit on."

The angels carved unto the memorial seemed like they were all looking at him. Gamma passed it off as a momentary fantasy. He had not really drunk himself into a stupor lately, after all.

W-well, being an immovable object is much more comfortable~

[onlyluminous]

Her heart felt like it had been caught in her throat; Uni knew that if she tried to speak she would choke on it. Instead she moved past him, to the memorial, and kneeling at its foot, placed the lily at its base. She brushed at the memorial's carvings with one pale hand, momentarily regretting that she had not worn gloves. Her fingers were very cold.

But what girl touches her mother with gloved hands? She looked down at the grass, fingered the petals of the flower she had brought, thinking.

"It's all right," she said. She imagined she could see the words dropping to the ground, like snowflakes or rain, to dissolve on the grass. "I was away."

Really? XD

[cueitup]

"I know."

Gamma watched Uni in movement, Uni in perfect stillness, and brought his cigarette back to his lips. Slow drag meant slow poison meant that his body was some sort of time bomb for cancer, waiting to go off right when he least expected it to. Morbid thoughts, but one had the tendency to think in that direction whenever they were faced with a memento of someone who had left them behind.

He did not ask Uni where she went. He felt that he no longer had the right to do so.

...Yes? (What a suspicious XD smiley!)

[onlyluminous]

She withdrew her hand from the flower and settled herself on the grass, resisting the urge to lean her head against the memorial stone. Studying her fingers, the lines on her palm, the light and shadow cast by sunlight and trees, it was all too easy to lapse into silence, pretend that he was not there.

A noncommital, emotionless reply in tones of white and gray, one she might as easily have given to a stranger. "I suppose."

HOW IS IT SUSPICIOUS.

[cueitup]

It would have been easy - so remarkably easy - to reach out and break her. He was always thinking stupid things like that, and occasionally throwing it around as an excuse to act tough and push himself to the limit and say or think things like It's for her or Just a little more, and then she'll be--

Gamma pushed all of that aside. There was a ghost between them, the trace of something or someone who had left them both behind. They could lay their own problems to rest for the moment. They were mature that way.

It... it just is! ANYTHING FROM YOU IS.

[onlyluminous]

The rustle of paper against cloth sounded unnaturally loud in the morning stillness as Uni rummaged in the bag she'd brought. Her fingers were clumsy, stiff with cold (she was not afraid, she told herself), but she forced the trembling in them to stop before she took out a photograph she'd taken a little more than a day ago.

White on black: a grave beneath a weeping willow, the morning sun a pale smear partly veiled by the tree's branches. Still not turning, she reached behind her and laid the photo on the grass before him.

Softly, "I meant to stay."

...What. Why? :0

[cueitup]

One look at the photograph, and that constricting feeling in his throat and chest came back with a vengeance; it was almost as if it had never exactly faded away, and he had only chosen to pretend that it wasn't there.

"Ah."

A moment's pause, and he picked up the photograph, fingering it carefully as though it were a thing alive and so unmeasurably precious.

"...Ah."

It was the only thing that he could bring himself to say.

It just is! (SO INARTICULATE, GAMMA. WTF.)

[onlyluminous]

She had been listening for it, that indrawn breath, the note of something that sounded like pain or grief or death in his voice. Had been listening for it, had been expecting it-- but when she heard the actual sound, it still hurt. Uni winced, bit her lip.

What a lie it would have been to say she was not on the verge of tears. She tilted her head up to keep the tears (that were not there, were not) from spilling over her lashes and gazed at the branches crisscrossing above her.

Maybe she could go, now that she had done what she had meant to do. Or... or not. There was still that other thing--

Later. She couldn't bring herself to speak just yet.

8D (...And again: HE IS A MAN. What do you expect?)

[cueitup]

Gamma stared at the photograph a little more, noting each line and the reality it froze in blacks and whites and grays - it was a portal to the past, laid out against the green grass of the moment. The blond man has a little more difficulty taking his eyes away from it than he ought to.

"Why?"

It was out now, and there was no taking it back. Somehow, Gamma was not as worried as thought he ought to have been.

W-WHAT A DIFFICULT QUESTION TO ANSWER.

[onlyluminous]

"I needed to see it again. To say goodbye," she said, her voice just above a whisper.

Uni sighed, reached out to the memorial, traced the swirls and patterns carved into the stone. The raised motifs, lilies and leaves, angel wings. Her hands were cold; everything was cold. She had not thought it would be this difficult and yet at the same time this effortless; falling away, fading. Detaching herself from another life.

For holding on comes easily, Rilke had said. We do not need to learn it.

She had held on, and so had he, but...

This was really why she had come, wasn't it? To let him go.

"I should apologize for everything," she added, "Before I go. I'm sorry, Gamma."

NUUUUU-- *pop!*

[cueitup]

Her words and what most probably lay beneath them were enough to knock him out of his funk, to ignore everything that had led them to the point they were at now because now that he was this close to losing it, his feelings were no longer so important.

"...You're talking like you're going to leave, and never look back."

He could feel it spinning out of his hands, adding more and more bleeding splinters for him to study and pull out, ripping his skin out along with them.

*noms*

[onlyluminous]

"...Am I?" Her hands brushed at the grass, rolling the dry blades between her fingers. "I'm sorry," again that apology, hollow and empty even as she said it, "but I don't know what I could do to make things better. Not... anymore. I wanted to--"

She broke off. If she thought about everything she had wanted, everything she had hoped for, she would lose what little control she had left.

MY BRAIN, IT IS NOT READY FOR THIS.

[cueitup]

"You wanted to what?"

Gamma moved to sit beside Uni before he could stop himself. The blond man felt the need to see her face, to hear her words close to her ear - it was almost as though bringing himself in closer might give him a better chance at winning her back, at returning to... whatever it was that they were supposed to have.

*KICKS UNI* STOP BEING SUCH AN IDIOT, YOU!

[onlyluminous]

Another sigh. A painful one this time, coming from a throat that all of a sudden felt too parched. She felt his movement, the presence that settled beside her, and it took all of the restraint she had built up through the silences during those nights after they had fought to keep herself from turning to him and letting herself cry.

Uni did not move away. Neither did she turn to him; she kept her eyes on where her fingers had been opening a little hole in the dry grass for her, a grave for an entirely different kind of flower.

"I wanted to believe you," she said at last.

YES, PLEASE DO, UNI. YOU MIGHT BE THE SMARTER ONE BETWEEN YOU AND GAMMA.

[cueitup]

At another time, he might have had to ask her, once again, what she meant, but recent circumstances and all of the conversations they had had prior to the mess they were in at present told Gamma everything that he needed to know:

She was stepping away, she was cutting him off. Everything they had had could have had in the future was on the brink of fading away.

It took every ounce of willpower in him not to lash out, to hate the fact that she was falling back into that old routine of simply crumbling rather than stepping forward. It had cost them dearly, and now she was about to do it again.

"And what made you decide," he said at last, in a deathly calm voice, "that you can no longer believe in me now?"