Fic: Starlight Now (5)
Title: Starlight Now
Characters/Pairings: FaiYuui, some KuroFai, some YuuiSubaru to come, mild KuroYuui, mentions of other characters
Rating: T
Summary: Yuui writes for a living to convince people of his dreams, but cannot convince himself to stop loving his apparently oblivious twin.
A/N: part 5 of the secret santa gift for Jo. Now very not so secret, not so Santa, and so late it’s been overtaken. Twice. Still no kissing, and blatant Fail on the part of the author.
*****
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
- Sylvia Plath, The Rival
Envy is a sick slick thing, alive and digging more firmly and deeper. Yuui dreams, sheets twisted around his legs and his hands turned to claw his mattress, raking down a body that isn’t there. Something like a lost creature he wakes almost nightly, his mirror’s image still writhing in his mind’s eye, seething and tumbling and turning his thoughts by calling bastardisations of another man’s name.
(Kuro-sama.)
Hot sweat dries cool in November and Yuui buries himself beneath his covers again, chilled.
We made whole worlds, you and I, and without consultation we each took it upon ourselves to break them.
The thing is - the thing is, it exists and lives and breathes quick damp breaths in the darkness I’m here, I’m here, I’m here - it’s not a competition, not between them, Kurogane and Yuui. A non-starter, stillborn, behind the spark behind the thought behind the hand putting pen to paper, it’s not even that.
Fai loves Yuui more (most), always has. Probably always will, Yuui knows well, just the same, something easy-bright about the companion that walks with you through life, closer than the heartbeat in your head and the shadow attached to the earth, to your skin. They’ve always filled the spaces they left thoughtlessly for each other, not quite half-and-half but a comfortable overlap, and that’s -
The opposite of right is left, and the opposite of right is wrong. It’s quite possible for one thing to have two opposites, and that doesn’t damage that thing at all, no, not until someone brings the fact up to attention and makes a conflict out of it. Calls for clarification make a carnage; if Yuui asks, sincerely, devoutly, he’s never feared before that Fai will fail to deliver, but -
Love me. Just me.
Fai would be the one left bleeding, and that’s worse.
But how does one measure up heart-aches against each other? Love, they love differently; they’d been teenagers when Yuui had learned he and his brother dreamed of different things. Yuui watched the clouds and Fai stretched his fingertips to the sky. It should’ve been more obvious before then, Yuui should have seen it - he and Fai had always liked the same things, but in different ways.
And now there’s Kurogane, and Yuui dislikes the man in precise pieces because he can’t truly dislike him. Kurogane’s a good person. He’s good for Fai. Isn’t that wonderful. It is. (It isn’t.)
Oh dear.
[There’s a train at - oh, late, late o’ clock, because it’s past evening outside the windows and amber lighting inside the carriage makes the world outside the windows seem very black. There’s Fai and there’s Yuui and the light on their blond hair as they pass through a station, and it’s a little like being wrapped up in a secret jewellery box, Yuui thinks, this, their travelling home. Fai’s curled himself up into a set of empty seats and fallen sound asleep to the sound of the wheels on the train-tracks, ch-chk, ch-chk, his head hanging at an angle that will surely have him complaining about his sore neck later (won’t that be fun). For now though he’s silent, unaware, a forgotten doll made of china and gold. Someone at the front of the carriage is on the phone - quiet murmurs, an Edinburgh lilt -, but other than that, Yuui could be the only soul left conscious in the world.
Yuui writes songs on the windowpanes in his own condensation, words that come, come again, easy as breathing. He can read the city lights through them, mile after mile, all the pinprick glitters beside the reflection of his face.]
“Kuro-chan, if I asked you to come to a party with me - would you come?”
They’re at work, Kurogane being his usual sulky self in the corner whilst Fai does his job and points the lost and confused to where they want to be in the museum - but when the people are gone it’s Fai’s expression that changes, cheerful smile dripping off all his corners to leave something unsure wobbling behind.
Kurogane just looks over at him, arms folded, eyebrow raised -
So Fai laughs, and turns away. “Nevermind.”
But Kurogane, you know, is not the sort of man to just let things slip by.
“Explain,” he says, and takes Fai’s arm before Fai can slide away. “What party?”
Fai licks his lips, shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “It’s a thing to do with Yuui’s work. Lots of writers and publishers and their friends together, but it’s…” he looks up at Kurogane, “Kuro-rin, it’s probably not really your thing…”
“But you still want to ask me to go.”
“No, I said if I asked you -” Fai falters again at the look Kurogane gives him. “Would you come?”
“Won’t your brother be there with you?”
“Well. Yes. But Yuui is…” Fai trails off, shrugs a little in the way that on anyone else would be affable. On him, it’s helpless.
Inwardly, Kurogane sighs. Idiots. “…Fine.” Fai looks up at him inquiringly, stupid hair flopping into his eyes. “Fine,” Kurogane clarifies, “I’ll go with you.”
Fai smiles like the full moon - like the sun has touched his face and left him silver-bright.
Look outside your tower window; there’s a kingdom falling down. Will you sleep? Will you sleep, and not see how the kingdom shall be given to the summer and the roses, and the thorns that dig into the cracks in the stone? Summer is for sleeping, summer is for dreaming, but if all you do is sleep and dream, what will you wake up to when winter rolls around again?
Dust cannot keep you warm.
Yuui is unhappy. The unhappiness is coiled like a snake about his bones, supple and silent, invisible until he moves and its scales catch the light. Yuui is unhappy and Fai is unhappy to see him so, but the days are long over where he could simply toddle over to his twin, bump noses with his brother and kiss him to make all the nasty hurt go away.
“Yuui looks very handsome,” Fai says quietly, watches his brother pause in dressing for the evening, hands hanging near the still-undone buttons at his throat. (Yuui’s eyes look like stained-glass windows when they’re so wide, Fai thinks, bright blue outlined in lead. Fai wishes he could shine a little light in through them, leave sunbeams over the cathedral of Yuui’s soul.) “Will you wear your black waistcoat tonight too?”
“You think I should?” Fai’s already dressed, always ready to drop an opinion.
“Of course!” He smiles, and watches a ghost of the expression echo on Yuui’s lips. Why can’t adult hurts just be shooed away? “Yuui always looks sexy in his waistcoat.”
Depending on one person for all your happiness is a terrible thing to do.
[Come on, Sleeping Beauty, Yuui says, rubs his brother’s arm to stir Fai from his long nap on the train. We’ll be arriving at our stop shortly; it’s time for us to move.
Fai just grumbles, eyes fluttering part-open so he can regard Yuui with a grumpy pout. Sleeping Beauty got woken up with a kiss.
Yuui shakes his head. Not in the original story.
I like the kissing story better. Fai regards his brother stubbornly, flops further back into his seat with the determination of a child. I want my kiss.
I could just leave you on the train -
Kiss, Fai says obdurately, and doesn’t shift until Yuui sighs and leans in, kissing his twin gently on the forehead, smoothing down the tufts sleeping has left in Fai’s mussed-up hair. Fai smiles for him. I dreamed of you, my prince. You made me banana bread.
Alas, Yuui says, and smiles back at the expectancy his brother so visibly wears, I am not the prince of your dreams, dear princess. Make your own damn banana bread.
Fai pouts at him, but gets up.]
They look like dolls. Pale, with gold hair gleaming, Yuui and Fai look like dolls that evening, Fai in cream and blue, Yuui in red and black. Kurogane tucks himself into a corner of the party as soon as he’s made the obligatory circuit of the room with one of the twins on either side of him to make introductions, nurses a tumbler of surprisingly good scotch like a pet and frowns after both of the Fluorites.
Perhaps he’s not as subtle about it as he always thought he was, because Yuui looks over at Kurogane’s corner in a trembling instant, raises one eyebrow at Kurogane’s frown. Comes over.
“How are you holding up, Mr. Kurogane?” Yuui smiles politely and doesn’t much mean it, for reasons entirely different to his idiot brother. Being a terrible liar must be genetic.
“Fine,” says Kurogane shortly, taking another large gulp of his drink and summoning slow ponderous words up from its swirling depths, the rise of the kraken. Stupid social conventions. “Thank you for inviting me.”
Yuui just looks at him. “Thank Fai. He invited you.”
“No,” Kurogane corrects, “the idiot dragged me here.”
“…You never struck me as the sort of man who could be made to do something against his own will, Mr. Kurogane,” Yuui says, shifts his weight speculatively. Foxes are smart. “So if you really didn’t want to be here, why did you come?”
“The idiot dragged me here,” Kurogane repeats. “And if you want to know why he did that, go and ask your damn brother.”
Yuui doesn’t ask Fai anything. He already knows the answers to his questions - the questions relating to Kurogane, anyway -, and to ask them of Fai -
“Is there something wrong with wanting my two most favourite people to get along with each other?”
Fai seems so tired when he comes to where Yuui’s secluded himself on the balcony later, a book full of old fairytales with the pages worn thin by love. If Yuui held him up to the light, he would probably see right through him, soft amber like the terrible wine Yuui’s downing by the litre.
Strange, passing strange - Fai usually always glitters so brightly at parties.
(Look what you’ve done.)
“Yuui,” Fai says, because Yuui hasn’t answered him, and the silence hanging between them feels like the pause before someone jumps off a roof. (The street is very far below.) “Yuui, did Kuro-sama do something to offend you? Do something or say something or -”
“No.” Although to say he had would be the blessedly easy answer.
Fai tentatively touches his - Yuui’s - elbow, curls in his fingers as warmth against the night air. So gentle and loving a touch - Yuui is grateful for it, turns his head to meet the bewildered blue of his brother’s gaze. Tonight, Fai is the braver one. “…So what is it about him that rubs you up the wrong way so much?”
“I’m glad he makes you happy,” Yuui tells him, quite sincerely. Swallows past a lump in his throat. “And if he ever does anything to make you unhappy, I’ll kill him for you.”
Fai smiles, a little, at that. “Do you think he’ll make me unhappy?”
Yuui shakes his head. “You’ll make each other happy, or drive each other mad. Probably both.”
“So why-?”
“I just -” Yuui puts down his glass of wine on the balcony ledge, hears it chink. “I’m glad for you; you should have every happiness. I just would rather that - that he, your Kurogane, not rub me up at all.”
Fai leaves quietly, returns to the party, to Kurogane’s side, and Yuui stays on the balcony, bends so he can press his hands to the railing and his head to his hands and feel the ache of cold through all of him. What do I do, what do I do, why does this world make me have to do anything -
Laughter, sour with wine, bubbles up at the back of his throat. “For a twin,” he says, to himself and the stars because it hurts, it’s funny, it hurts, “for a twin, I’m getting to be quite bad at sharing.”
“Is that so?” asks the shadows, and Yuui whirls. Around, around -
There’s the click of a lighter to light up the sharp cut of a face - another man leaning against the house’s wall, slim, unfamiliar, Asian, beside the door back inside. Black hair, black clothes, a cigarette in his hand - he looks passably contrite when Yuui just stares at him, deer in the headlights.
“My apologies,” says the man, pauses lifting the cigarette to his mouth to keep the smoke from his eyes. “I thought you heard me come out. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“No, I -” Yuui’s heart is still beating like a startled swallow in his chest.
In some other world all the stories are true.
“Subaru,” the man offers eventually, extends his hand. His fingers are long and cool, his handshake sure. He still bows his head a little with the greeting - cultural acclimatisation -, and the movement makes his dark black hair sweep down around his cheeks. “Subaru Sumeragi.”
“A pleasure,” Yuui replies, formal but honest. Honest despite himself - there’s something fascinating in the slight curve of Subaru’s faint answering smile. “Yuui Fluorite.”