Letters From the Sky, 1/3, Kai/Aoi
Title: Letters From The Sky
Author: losseflame
Chapters: 1/3
Genre: Angst, drama, romance
Warnings: severe angst here and there, language, sex [eventually], more to come.
Rating: PG-15
Pairings/Characters: Kai/Aoi
Synopsis: Stranger rises, smiling at Kai one last time before turning and wading through the laughter that pooled on the floor towards the exit.
Comments: Remember when I used to satisfied with 1500 words? It seems those days are gone. Le sigh. This is going to be posted in parts, but this is a oneshot. Just a massive, 20 page oneshot.
***
It starts with tea.
A strange, small thing to start with, but everything needs a beginning, and more often than not they are much less dramatic than the things following it.
So, as naturally as breathing, it starts with tea.
.:.:.:.
The floor screams its protest at the indignity of being stood on as Kai stares, unsure of how to react, as a person he’s sure he’s never met before moves to sit in the chair across from him.
The chipped mug of tea Kai didn’t order for himself yet is still there steams innocently, as if it couldn’t imagine why Kai is currently glaring at it with a passionate dislike he normally reserves for crying children. Kai sighs. The aching, burning exhaustion is being pumped through his veins with each heartbeat, setting itself into his marrow, and interaction with some crazy who’s blessed with the oblivion of sleep is the last thing he needs.
It’ll only remind him of what he’s missing.
After much deliberation (and a couple deep breaths to ensure he doesn’t have a mental breakdown in the middle of a coffeehouse over a cup of tea), while listening to the man who placed the tea in front of him in the first place fold himself into the rickety chair, Kai looks up to face him.
“Who the hell are you, and why the hell do I now have tea in front of me?”
The man has dark hair in need of a cut, skin that begs for the sun’s embrace, a wide nose and lips that seem a little too full for his face, offsetting it slightly.
Kai would have thought it almost beautiful, had it not been the source of such irritation and, not as strongly, suspicion.
The features that Kai’s scrutinizing form a smile.
“I’m the west wind, carrying Sleep on its wings.” The voice is dreamy, and Kai barks out a laugh.
“Don’t bother blowing over me, then.” Kai’s eyes are burning again, and the hand holding his book tightens till the knuckles are white, just for a moment, before they lose even the energy fuelled by self-righteous frustration and go slack. He places the book on the table, the idea of reading defeated by weariness.
The stranger notices this, and his smile tucks itself away into the vast calm of his expression, hiding it away from the world. His skin is devoid of any markers alluding to fatigue, and Kai imagines that maybe this outsider can see Kai’s skin turning green.
The man cocks his head to the side.
“Maybe if you break the pattern, the things you want to get rid of fade more easily.” He laces his fingers together, leaning his chin on his joined hands and his voice glitters in the air between them, his words windows into a mind Kai’s not quite sure what to make of. This statement seems to be in response of Kai’s bitter rebutting of the man’s introduction, and Kai wonders how the words weave together, creating a conversation that makes sense. The pattern of entwinement isn’t one Kai’s familiar with, but then, Kai can’t say he’s had enough conversations to recognize them all.
An introvert tends to prefer silence.
“I don’t quite know what you’re getting at.”
The man, one who Kai will henceforth refer to as ‘Stranger’, smiles again, the lips curling up at the edges until it spreads, curving his mouth, eyes crinkling and nose, if possible, seeming to get wider. Stranger’s entire face seems to lift and his entire body seems to light up with it, spreading though his veins and filling every crevice of his body.
It’s an ugly, stunning thing, and Kai wishes he could replicate it.
Unfortunately, smiling is a long forgotten skill of his.
“You have a pattern. Three times a week, you’ll come here and order one hot chocolate and one sandwich, and you’ll never finish either. Instead you’ll read books in languages you only half-know, because you know that if you understood it would be beautiful. Then you’ll go outside and smoke one cigarette, and all the thoughts you can’t share with anyone will mix up in the smoke you breathe out. It’ll disappear into the air before anyone can read the words caught in between, but not before staining your skin and hair and clothes so you can’t forget them even when you want to.”
Kai is left speechless, because one would think he would notice someone who notices so much about him.
That and the fact that he’s just a bit uneasy, now.
But Stranger isn’t done.
“And there’s sleepless nights settling underneath your eyes, so I figure that the reason Sleep’s abandoned you is because she’s realized you’ve let yourself fall into a pattern. I’m breaking the pattern. You’re with someone now, and that hasn’t happened before. I’m changing things, and Sleep will be much kinder.”
Kai laughs, because if all problems could be fixed with someone sitting with another person than the world would have achieved world peace long before this conversation. But Stranger’s words drift towards him, burying themselves underneath his skin and working their way past the barrier of his logic and into his chest cavity, where they sit heavy and cool, calming the unease that rose beforehand.
Kai folds his hands around the mug, bringing it towards him.
He sips. Its chamomile, sweetened gratuitously, just the way he takes it.
“How do you know so much? I’ve never seen you before.”
Stranger stretches his hands on the table in front of him, palms up, as if offering something.
“I’m here every day.”
“I’d have noticed someone observing me as intently as you so clearly have.” The irritation, previously quelled, is rising again, battling with the fatigue for reign over Kai’s next choice of words.
“I didn’t want to be seen.”
“That’s hardly an answer.”
Stranger smiles again, and laughs. The sound is breathy and soft, and pours over his lips like spring water. Kai can almost see it splashing onto the table, spreading across the surface and tumbling over the edge to reach in all directions.
“The easiest place to hide is in plain sight. You should know that best.”
Stranger rises, smiling at Kai one last time before turning and wading through the laughter that pooled on the floor towards the exit.
Kai continues to sit, until he realizes the tea has gone cold.
He sighs, and it taints the laughter that still lingers around him, darkening it, turning it mocking and harsh.
He picks up his book, puts a couple bills on the table, and walks towards the door.
The walk feels long, and with each step the marrow in Kai’s bones slowly convert to metal, weighing him down.
.:.:.:.
The mother tries unsuccessfully to calm the screaming child, and Kai grits his teeth and curls his hands into tight fists as the screaming rises an octave higher, shattering the air around them, and the nonsense cooing gets louder.
Every day, the elevator ride to the eighth floor somehow includes this screaming child and fussy mother, no matter what time Kai gets back to the apartment.
He is beginning to think the mother plans it out this way.
Their respective apartments are right next to each other, so Kai can’t hope for salvation until he enters his own apartment, closes and locks the door, and spends the next twenty minutes screaming into a pillow and punching a mattress he wishes is humanity in general.
The elevator dings and Kai sighs in relief as he exits and flees to his door, whipping out his key.
The metal grinds against the tumblers, forcing them out of their respective places to let the small wall sluice slide into the lock chamber, allowing Kai to turn the doorknob, yank open the door and enter his living space.
He doesn’t call it home, because he doesn’t have one of those and it would seem cheap to address a place where the nights torture him with lack of nothing as such.
The door closes behind him, and Kai rests his back against it and slides down, closing his eyes and pushing the air out of his nose from the very bottom of his gut, as if he could expel all the weariness from his body with it.
He sits there until the small of his back is screaming for mercy and his stomach is growling its malcontent at being empty.
He opens his eyes and drags himself into the kitchen, where he scours the fridge to find it lacking anything excluding cheese with a few spots of green fuzz, eggs, and lettuce that has started to more resemble the Blob than a vegetable commonly served uncooked and cold with oil based dressing.
He tosses the lettuce, fries the eggs, cuts away the fuzzy spots on the cheese and grates it before tossing it over above mentioned eggs.
And he eats alone, sitting at a table made for two.
.:.:.:.
It is eleven o’clock, and Kai has already sentenced himself to another night of hell.
All the lights are out in his apartment, and he is in bed wearing a pair of sweats and nothing else, lying back against the pillow and listening to the tick of the clock.
His skin is itchy and it feels like worms are moving underneath the seven layers, twining around sinew and driving between muscles to rub against his bones. Kai turns to one side and then the other, forgoing blankets as they feel like they’re trapping the worms inside.
His eyes are burning and he’s sure if he could summon tears, they would skim down his face as acid, burning and twisting and warping his face until it’s something else entirely, some new monster Kai wouldn’t recognize if he saw it staring back at him from the mirror.
He lies on his back again, as if it would make a difference, and arches his back, stretching out to force the worms out from under his skin.
It doesn’t work, but then again, it’s not like that’s surprising.
It is twelve o’clock, and Kai has never realized how loud the hum of his refrigerator is. It is a constant low moan of pain, and Kai wants to add his own harmonization to it. The sound permeates his skull and swirls around, filling his head to the bursting point with the monotonous drone of the temperature regulating machine.
He drags himself out of bed, opens the door of his bedroom and stumbles into the kitchen, stubbing his toe on the table leg and cursing more than the pain really merits.
Sometimes you just need to call an inanimate object every name under the sun.
Kai reaches behind the refrigerator and unplugs it, because it’s empty now anyway so he doesn’t really need it much. The freezer, however, is a different story, but Kai doesn’t feel too horrible about sacrificing a bucket of ice cream for silence.
The bright green numbers on the oven mock him, advancing too quickly for him and yet not nearly quickly enough.
It is one o’clock, and Kai turns on his computer screen and nothing else, letting the bright white of it illuminate his room. He mindlessly surfs, going from news sites to celebrity blogs to cheap American porn and back again, waiting for something that he’s not quite sure of and swearing he can hear his mother’s voice chastising him every time he switches back to long legged girls with spray tan skin and plastic breasts.
He watches this mindlessly, bored and sometimes scornful.
It is two o’clock, and Kai is in the dark again, sitting in the middle of his bed and trying to count how many seconds go by. He never manages to pass three hundred, and he when his lips fumble around the sounds of another number he restarts.
And people wonder why his voice is often husky.
It is three o’clock and Kai is lying down again, forcing his eyes to stay closed and trying to line up his heartbeats to the sound of the clock. His mind is racing in circles and his fingers are scraping against the sheets as he tries to keep his body still -
And Kai is jerking upright at the sound of his alarm, a cold sweat forming a second skin over his body and his heart pumping louder than usual.
It is 7:15, and Kai has just slept more in one night than he has in the past month.
Kai chooses to ignore the tears crawling down his face as he makes his way to the shower.
.:.:.:.
He doesn’t go to work that day, instead making his way over to the coffee shop he was at yesterday.
He is sitting at the same table, and for the first time he can remember, Kai changes his order.
He has a chamomile tea.
Kai is stirring in his fourth spoonful of sugar when the chair across from him is pulled back, and Stranger situates himself in the chair as if he belongs there, sitting with Kai.
“Did you dream?”
Stranger smiles as he asks the question. Kai likes the look of it, likes how it lights up his face.
It is, Kai muses, a face made for smiles such as that, ones that speaks of gentleness and dreams and more than a few unknown truths.
“No. I think its better, though. More rest if you don’t dream.” Kai sips his tea, grimaces, and puts in two more spoons of sugar.
Stranger shakes his head.
“Dreams only happen when your mind is completely separated from your body. That’s why in dreams anything happens. It’s more restful when your body doesn’t have to contend with your mind, isn’t it? Your mind is, after all, the projector of exhaustion.”
Kai likes the pattern of his logic, the ease and flow of it. It has the feel of something well practiced, a road made easier to travel by being well worn. “Did you dream?”
Stranger’s face softens with something like half remembered joy at the question.
“I was in between the clouds and an awakening planet, watching as life started. The solar system - not this one, the one that’s after the next one over - was singing, and the cosmic lullaby woke the planet up softly. The sway of the universe rocked the old planet to sleep as the new one took its place. And then the stars rejoiced.” Stranger’s face was gentle when he spoke, his voice rising and falling as if to an unheard drumbeat. “It was beautiful.”
“It sounds like it.” Kai turned the mug around in his hands, an odd yearning settling itself in his chest. He couldn’t remember the last time he dreamt, and he couldn’t remember what his last dream was.
It must be a nice thing, to dream.
“I was there, you know.” Kai looks up at Stranger, his eyebrows rising. “My dream was just a memory of myself before. I’d seen all that, and probably more.”
Kai makes valiant attempts to keep his expression neutral, but something must show through.
Stranger, mercifully, doesn’t seem to take offence. He smiles then laughs before quieting again, looking at Kai with inky eyes.
“You’ll believe me. You did before.”
Kai doesn’t ask when this ‘before’ was. Instead, he asks something so typically mundane one wouldn’t think that just minutes ago Kai was listening to what was apparently the memory of a planet waking up.
“Who are you?”
Stranger throws back his head and laughs, and the sound catches the sun streaming in through the window, throwing reflected light around the room.
“That’s a difficult question. Do you want to know who I am or what I’m called? Those are two very different things, as one would take too long to tell and the other is what most people prefer to know anyway.”
Kai finishes his tea, sets the mug down, and tries to imagine it full again.
“Just give me something.”
Stranger smiles again - or perhaps continually.
“Today I’m called Aoi, but yesterday I was someone entirely different.”
Kai takes the name and fits it over the man’s face, and decides that it fits quite well, the name complementing the expression and sitting on the tilt of his shoulders.
“Yesterday you seemed the same.” Kai is repeating the name Aoi in his head, trying to tattoo the name into his grey matter.
“That depends entirely on your idea of ‘yesterday’. One person’s yesterday could be another person’s yester-year could be another person’s yester-week. Everyone’s perception of time is different.” Aoi tilts his head to the side, his hands reaching for Kai’s abandoned mug. Aoi picks it ups, runs his thumbs over the sides, and puts it down again; nodding as if he has accomplished something necessary to the task he has at hand.
“What’s your perception?”
“It depends entirely on who I decide to be that day.”
And, oddly enough, it made sense to Kai.
.:.:.:.
Kai is dimly aware that he is dreaming.
But only for a moment, before the dream overwhelms him with the force of a tidal wave, pushing his head under and holding him there.
‘There’ is an open plain, the ground hard underneath the feet (his feet? Are they? He doesn’t have a body, but he’s sure he can feel them…). And he is spinning and not quite there (just on the edge of waking up, he can feel cool sheets on his side) but is facing another person and it’s someone he knows well, although Kai’s never seen him before.
Or is he Kai? He doesn’t feel so, but who else is he?
He ponders it for a moment, and decides that although he may not be Kai, he is still himself.
And, as most things in dreams do, this makes sense.
He is in the sky for a moment, seeing everything as a hawk and feeling nothing before he is on the ground again, the grasses whipping against his ankles cool.
And the person he knows like himself but doesn’t (but does but doesn’t but does and the moon is bright through his window and he turns, rousing before falling back again) turns towards him.
The face is unclear, but there is recognition in his gut and joy stems from the smile he knows must be there but can’t see.
“I’m glad you believe me.”
And Kai (but he isn’t Kai, is he? The refrigerator is humming…) has never heard this language and doesn’t understand what it means but hears every word with a clarity he has never had before. It is harsh and guttural and the words fall off of this person’s lips like stones, and then Kai see small pebbles around their feet and knows where they come from.
The person is speaking again, grabbing his hands and pressing them to their face. Now Kai (who isn’t but is but isn’t) can feel the person’s smile, and the warmth of it flows through Kai’s non-existent body like sunlight.
“In battle, you’ll see my wings.”
And the voice has taken on a feral edge, and the smile goes sharp under Kai’s fingertips.
Kai doesn’t like this, the sharpness, because it shows how unlike the person is to the person they used to be and Kai doesn’t like the idea of his life rubbing off on them (this thought appears from nowhere and makes all the nothing sense in the dream world and Kai’s blanket has just fell to the floor as he turned).
So Kai does what feels natural and leans in, pressing their foreheads together and trapping the smile between them.
“No, you’ll see mine.”
And Kai is awake and so warm and listening to the echo of ‘You don’t have wings, beloved’ that he knows has a place in the dream he just had even as the memory of it slips from his mind like water between fingers.
But he is interrupted from his half-assed search for the memory when he realizes that he was dreaming, and even if he can’t remember what it was, he knows it was beautiful.
.:.:.:.
Aoi is sitting at Kai’s normal table as if it’s normal, routine, and Kai thinks that maybe now it is.
Aoi beams at Kai as he sits down, and there is a strange jolt of familiarity. He is not sure if it is caused by Aoi or if it is a jolt of familiarity in response to the jolt of relief he felt at the sight of Aoi when he first entered.
“Did you dream?”
And all at once memory floods him, wiping away Kai’s dubiousness and speculation of Aoi’s sanity. Although, in the lack of Kai’s disbelief he must begin questioning his own.
“Yes.” For the first time, Kai’s voice is breathless with something that isn’t exhaustion.
Aoi smiles and leans over till their foreheads are touching.
“I still have to show you my wings.”
Kai laughs giddily, because this is unreal and yet it isn’t, and here they are and Kai’s afraid it might be a dream again. But he feels Aoi’s breath against his face and knows it isn’t.
“I still have to show you mine.” And Aoi laughs, and the tumbles from his lips and Kai wants to find a way to somehow capture it and hold it close to him when the nights are long and Sleep finds it fit to scorn him.
“You don’t have your own, beloved.”
Kai smiles and he half expects his muscles to snap from disuse. Instead, they burn. Aoi scrapes his fingers against Kai’s face, and Kai smiles more, because the burn is a beautiful pain.
“You have mine.”
Aoi’s whisper hangs in the air between them like a promise.
***
A/N: Theories, anyone? I had so much fun writing this bit. :)