Surfacing
Let me preface this by saying that my muse is a giant fucking bitch.
I skipped my last class to work on this essay, which I HAVEN'T LOOKED AT ONCE because this story sank its teeth into my throat and wouldn't let go. I wrote this against my will, and it never hurt so good.
And dammit, I see you all with your tantalizing ficchat thread, and I'm not giving in, because I've got 6 more pages of psych paper to write between now and 8:30 a.m. tomorrow.
I just checked, and that's basically how many pages of fic I wrote today. Fuck you, muse. Fuck you.
Call this Monstersocks with PLOT. And that's all I'm gonna say, because I want to see how well I explained things in-story.
Surfacing
It hurt more every time. Dreaming was meant to be effortless, weightless, as natural as breathing or as falling onto your pillow at night. It had been that way for him, once, this not-dreaming, back when his consciousness had had no physical body to return to. He had hovered in limbo, slipping between recurring memories and shadows of his past, sometimes imagining himself in the home of his childhood, sometimes imagining himself in the home of another life's childhood. Sometimes he was with the others, and they dreamed together, or they reminded each other that they were not dreaming, that this was their reality now, this hovering on the edge of death that felt only like tortured sleep. But it was easy, then, for their dreams to turn to him. For him to summon them out of the shadows, to shake off the dust of their nightmares and hold them in his company for a few precious moments. It felt natural to be in his presence, even if this, too, felt like a dream, and the details of the long hours spent in conversation seemed to flutter from their memories when they returned to the worlds of their own making.
But that was before his mind remembered what it was like to live in the conscious world, and answering those summons, grasping onto the thin golden thread that was his prince's call, and clawing his way to its source, now felt the same as ripping his own soul out through his throat, and it hurt more every time.
He knew him, as he always did, by the blinding golden aura, rays of light streaking from inside him like a star. It obscured the room around him, bent it in odd ways and stripped it of light or color. And though he knew his prince intrinsically by the power he exuded, not once had Kunzite been able to detect the details of his face. It was lost behind the glistening light, and behind the foggy, dreamlike state that held him captive.
"My Prince?" He asked, and the language felt alien on his tongue. He was starting to lose it, he realized, never finding occasion to use it in his waking life.
"You're here," his prince whispered, and though Kunzite could not see his face, he could hear the ache underlying those two words. "I've been trying for weeks to call you. I thought..."
"I'm sorry," he said, and he was. If he could, if it were up to him, he would endure the pain to be by Endymion's side every moment of the day. "It has been... difficult to come to you."
"The others haven't appeared before me for months. I can barely sense their presence in the stones anymore, or yours. I'm... I'm starting to think that they'll never appear again."
"They still try," Kunzite offered, knowing what a hollow consolation that was. He was not entirely certain why the other three had lost the ability completely, while he still managed to cling to it. Maybe his power was greater, or his connection to Endymion was stronger. Or maybe, it was because his spirit was more content to remain in this state of limbo, living for his dreaming life instead of his waking one. Some days, he wanted nothing to do with living. "Their thoughts are always with you, Endymion. They do everything to try and be with you."
"What about you?" His aura was dim, uncertain. "Will you cease to visit me soon too?"
"I cannot say," he replied elusively, because he could not bear to state the truth outright. "But I will always be here, my prince, even when I cannot speak to you."
"And then what?" Endymion hesitated, took a long breath. "Are they... are they really just asleep, Kunzite?"
He knew what he was asking. For him, he knew only that the spirits that had once appeared freely from the stones of their namesake were slipping away. For him, there was nothing to cling to except the placating promises of a ghost, whose own ties to his stone were growing more tenuous by the minute. Kunzite chose his wording carefully. "They are waiting. Waiting to truly return to you. Which they will do, my prince. That is one promise I can make."
His voice still sounded hesitant, but the glow of his aura seemed to flush a warmer color, tinting with the barest hope. "It's hard to be certain of that, sometimes."
"I know. Now why don't you tell me why you've called. Is something else bothering you?"
The aura shifted, ripples of uncertainty running through it as a golden hand ran through what must have been his hair. "I told you before that I was applying to universities?"
Kunzite remembered repeating that information in his head, to keep the details from slipping away when he woke. "I remember. You wanted to study medicine."
"I got my top choice. And the scholarship I wanted."
He studied the blur where his prince's face would have been, wishing he could read it. Sometimes he saw the symbol of Earth glinting on his forehead, gold emblazoned on gold, but he could never make out his eyes. "You don't sound happy about that."
"I am. It's everything I hoped for, but... as far as I know, the future isn't so far off. Someday, I'm going to be asked to step up as king. I'm expected to lead these people, and I don't even know how I'm going to do that. Maybe I should be spending my time preparing for what's to come instead of chasing my own dreams. I feel like I'm being selfish, pursuing medicine."
"How long have you wanted to become a doctor?"
"Since I was young. Almost as long as I could remember."
"Then I think you've already made your decision. I regret many things about the past, Endymion, but one of my worst transgressions was in pressuring you to constantly think of your future instead of living in the present. If I had known what little time we had..." he shook his head, and could see wisps of semi-transparent white hair shifting in his vision, though he could not feel it brushing his face. "The future will take care of itself. You will know what to do when the time comes. For now, you should do what means most to you, while you have the opportunity. No matter how our world will change, what you do now will never be a waste. I can think of worse people to be my king than a doctor."
His aura glowed truly golden now, stronger with Kunzite's words. "Thank you. It... it means a lot to me that you approve."
Something was tugging at Kunzite, closing its fist around his chest and making it harder and harder to focus on Endymion. "More than that, I'm proud of you. You have far exceeded my expectations, my prince. Tell me, where are you studying?"
"I'm going to Harvard." A small, relieved laugh escaped him. "They accepted me again, even though I couldn't make it last year. I guess now that the decision's made, I have so much to do. September is only a few months away."
The world was fading before him, but Kunzite knew that he was the ghost in this place, and it was he who was fading. He desperately pushed himself to form the words that he needed to say, even as he felt his voice leaving him. "I'm proud of you, Endymion. We all are. Please, you need to know..." Endymion, the dark room, all of it was slipping away, faster than he could grasp onto it. "You need to know that you won't be alone. We will be with you. I promise."
The golden light dimmed as it fell away from him, and for one impossible moment, when the light had almost grown weak enough to see past, he thought he saw the shadow of two dark eyes. They burned into his memory even as they vanished into darkness, and he clung to that vision desperately, the only piece of his prince that he could bring back with him.
"Kain!"
He woke gasping, clinging to something so hard that he thought it would break beneath his fingers. That thing was Jaden's shoulder, and the blond had drawn back, wide-eyed. "Are you okay? You were barely breathing."
He relinquished his friend's shoulder, drawing in air like he had been drowning. His bedroom did sickening flipflops over his head, and he pushed himself up, ignoring the weakness in his limbs and the pain that seared like hot knives through his temples. Vertigo made him stumble and nearly crush Jaden beneath his own weight, but the blond seemed prepared for that, and bore him up despite his size. "Whoa, let's try this standing thing, huh? We'll start by you putting your arm around my shoulders."
Kain gritted his teeth. The floor wasn't staying where it was supposed to. "Jaden..."
"I know, buddy, just try not to aim for me when you puke. I like this shirt."
He managed to hold out until the bathroom, but the toilet was too far away. He went for the sink, instead. Jaden waited beside him. Kain was not entirely sure when he had learned patience.
He managed to stay leaning heavily against the counter long enough to vaguely rinse his mouth out, but his knees felt ready to buckle at any moment. Jaden put the toilet lid down, a rare occasion in an all-male household. "Sit down. Do you want something? Gatorade?"
"Anything but red."
He sat with his head in his hands, waiting for every part of him to stop shaking. It hurt more every time, and it was only a matter of time before his body could not take this anymore.
Jaden returned, and pushed an open bottle of orange Gatorade into his hands. "Drink it slowly. Gatorade puke is nasty."
It was such a rare occasion for Jaden to be the one giving him the orders that Kain did not argue. He sipped at the bottle's wide rim, his stomach feeling like lead. The blond watched him, rolling the bottle cap between his fingers. "You know, as your friend, I should really tell you to stop doing this. This is starting to get scary, what it's doing to you."
He swallowed the neon orange drink. "But as a guardian, you don't want to lose the only connection to him you have left. I know."
Jaden fidgeted beside him, evidence that perhaps his newfound patience only extended so far. Finally, he blurted the words that were building up inside him. "So how was he?"
Kain stared at a crack in the wall, willing it to stop shifting. "He seemed okay."
"Okay? It's been months since I've seen him and weeks since you have, and all you can give me is okay? How is he really?"
He gave up on the crack in the wall, squeezing his eyes shut. He would worry about making it stay still later. "Jaden, I need you to stop talking for a minute. I need to go over everything in my head before I forget it, and then I'll tell you what I know."
The deep sigh of annoyance was usually only heard out of his teenage students, but Kain heard him shuffle into the hall soon after, allowing him to think without an audience. There was something important that he needed to tell them, and he needed to make sure he had not imagined it.
The world had almost righted itself, when he heard the front door close, and muffled voices in the kitchen. It was not long before light footsteps sounded beside him, and fingers slid through his hair, pulling it away from the cold sweat that clung to his face. Sasha had just recently gotten a thin silver hoop pierced through the center of his lower lip, just like the one he used to have. Kain almost managed to get the lip ring to stay still when he looked at it.
"You can't keep doing this. You know that, right? I want to watch over him as much as you do, but it's not helping him, not the way you want to."
Jaden hovered in the doorway, looking like he wanted to say something. Kain knew that he did not want to be the one asking his commander to continue killing himself just to catch glimpses of their prince's life. He could not fault Jaden for thinking it, not when he was such a willing participant himself.
Sasha's sharp green eyes narrowed at him. "Kain, I'm serious. What you're doing is literally splitting your soul in half. Those stones weren't made to do what you're using them for. They're not communication devices, certainly not over long distances, and definitely not to be used when your soul is perfectly rooted in a physical body."
Kain took a sip of orange. "He thought we were gone." Sasha froze. "He thought that he'd lost us, and that we might never come back. That's what it looks like from where he is. If we stop talking, he thinks we're dead for good. And I can't tell him otherwise, because if he knows that we're here, alive for real, then he'll come looking for us."
"Why is that so bad?" Jaden grumbled. He was twisting the plastic bottle cap out of shape in his hand. "We've been waiting forever. We followed all the rules and stayed away. Even when he was sick. Even when we stopped feeling his starseed. We did everything right, and now we can't even talk to him."
"Do you really think we deserve better?" Sasha hissed, and Kain did not need to be seeing straight to notice how Jaden's hackles raised.
"It's been years. No punishment needs to go this long."
"It might not be much longer," Kain said softly, stopping Sasha before he could march over to Jaden and pick a fight. He spun the half-empty bottle in his hands. "He says he got accepted to college." He could almost feel them holding their breaths. He looked up at them both. "He got accepted to Harvard."
In the stunned silence, the transformation was remarkable, like rain falling on a desert. Suddenly hope was flooding faces that had grown too accustomed to resignation. "He's coming here?" Sasha whispered.
Though he felt miserable, and he had not done it in so long that he almost did not remember how to, Kain let the corners of his mouth turn up ever so faintly, that he could be the one to give them this news. "Yeah. He's coming here."
Suddenly Jaden let out a ground-shaking whoop, and he was jumping up and down in the hall like a maniac. Sasha wordlessly dropped to the floor beside him, and Kain pulled his arm around him, letting the blond bury his face in his shoulder. "I still want to yell at you, you know!" Sasha twisted the edge of Kain's t-shirt in his fist.
"Yeah, you can do it later. After we celebrate."
I skipped my last class to work on this essay, which I HAVEN'T LOOKED AT ONCE because this story sank its teeth into my throat and wouldn't let go. I wrote this against my will, and it never hurt so good.
And dammit, I see you all with your tantalizing ficchat thread, and I'm not giving in, because I've got 6 more pages of psych paper to write between now and 8:30 a.m. tomorrow.
I just checked, and that's basically how many pages of fic I wrote today. Fuck you, muse. Fuck you.
Call this Monstersocks with PLOT. And that's all I'm gonna say, because I want to see how well I explained things in-story.
Surfacing
It hurt more every time. Dreaming was meant to be effortless, weightless, as natural as breathing or as falling onto your pillow at night. It had been that way for him, once, this not-dreaming, back when his consciousness had had no physical body to return to. He had hovered in limbo, slipping between recurring memories and shadows of his past, sometimes imagining himself in the home of his childhood, sometimes imagining himself in the home of another life's childhood. Sometimes he was with the others, and they dreamed together, or they reminded each other that they were not dreaming, that this was their reality now, this hovering on the edge of death that felt only like tortured sleep. But it was easy, then, for their dreams to turn to him. For him to summon them out of the shadows, to shake off the dust of their nightmares and hold them in his company for a few precious moments. It felt natural to be in his presence, even if this, too, felt like a dream, and the details of the long hours spent in conversation seemed to flutter from their memories when they returned to the worlds of their own making.
But that was before his mind remembered what it was like to live in the conscious world, and answering those summons, grasping onto the thin golden thread that was his prince's call, and clawing his way to its source, now felt the same as ripping his own soul out through his throat, and it hurt more every time.
He knew him, as he always did, by the blinding golden aura, rays of light streaking from inside him like a star. It obscured the room around him, bent it in odd ways and stripped it of light or color. And though he knew his prince intrinsically by the power he exuded, not once had Kunzite been able to detect the details of his face. It was lost behind the glistening light, and behind the foggy, dreamlike state that held him captive.
"My Prince?" He asked, and the language felt alien on his tongue. He was starting to lose it, he realized, never finding occasion to use it in his waking life.
"You're here," his prince whispered, and though Kunzite could not see his face, he could hear the ache underlying those two words. "I've been trying for weeks to call you. I thought..."
"I'm sorry," he said, and he was. If he could, if it were up to him, he would endure the pain to be by Endymion's side every moment of the day. "It has been... difficult to come to you."
"The others haven't appeared before me for months. I can barely sense their presence in the stones anymore, or yours. I'm... I'm starting to think that they'll never appear again."
"They still try," Kunzite offered, knowing what a hollow consolation that was. He was not entirely certain why the other three had lost the ability completely, while he still managed to cling to it. Maybe his power was greater, or his connection to Endymion was stronger. Or maybe, it was because his spirit was more content to remain in this state of limbo, living for his dreaming life instead of his waking one. Some days, he wanted nothing to do with living. "Their thoughts are always with you, Endymion. They do everything to try and be with you."
"What about you?" His aura was dim, uncertain. "Will you cease to visit me soon too?"
"I cannot say," he replied elusively, because he could not bear to state the truth outright. "But I will always be here, my prince, even when I cannot speak to you."
"And then what?" Endymion hesitated, took a long breath. "Are they... are they really just asleep, Kunzite?"
He knew what he was asking. For him, he knew only that the spirits that had once appeared freely from the stones of their namesake were slipping away. For him, there was nothing to cling to except the placating promises of a ghost, whose own ties to his stone were growing more tenuous by the minute. Kunzite chose his wording carefully. "They are waiting. Waiting to truly return to you. Which they will do, my prince. That is one promise I can make."
His voice still sounded hesitant, but the glow of his aura seemed to flush a warmer color, tinting with the barest hope. "It's hard to be certain of that, sometimes."
"I know. Now why don't you tell me why you've called. Is something else bothering you?"
The aura shifted, ripples of uncertainty running through it as a golden hand ran through what must have been his hair. "I told you before that I was applying to universities?"
Kunzite remembered repeating that information in his head, to keep the details from slipping away when he woke. "I remember. You wanted to study medicine."
"I got my top choice. And the scholarship I wanted."
He studied the blur where his prince's face would have been, wishing he could read it. Sometimes he saw the symbol of Earth glinting on his forehead, gold emblazoned on gold, but he could never make out his eyes. "You don't sound happy about that."
"I am. It's everything I hoped for, but... as far as I know, the future isn't so far off. Someday, I'm going to be asked to step up as king. I'm expected to lead these people, and I don't even know how I'm going to do that. Maybe I should be spending my time preparing for what's to come instead of chasing my own dreams. I feel like I'm being selfish, pursuing medicine."
"How long have you wanted to become a doctor?"
"Since I was young. Almost as long as I could remember."
"Then I think you've already made your decision. I regret many things about the past, Endymion, but one of my worst transgressions was in pressuring you to constantly think of your future instead of living in the present. If I had known what little time we had..." he shook his head, and could see wisps of semi-transparent white hair shifting in his vision, though he could not feel it brushing his face. "The future will take care of itself. You will know what to do when the time comes. For now, you should do what means most to you, while you have the opportunity. No matter how our world will change, what you do now will never be a waste. I can think of worse people to be my king than a doctor."
His aura glowed truly golden now, stronger with Kunzite's words. "Thank you. It... it means a lot to me that you approve."
Something was tugging at Kunzite, closing its fist around his chest and making it harder and harder to focus on Endymion. "More than that, I'm proud of you. You have far exceeded my expectations, my prince. Tell me, where are you studying?"
"I'm going to Harvard." A small, relieved laugh escaped him. "They accepted me again, even though I couldn't make it last year. I guess now that the decision's made, I have so much to do. September is only a few months away."
The world was fading before him, but Kunzite knew that he was the ghost in this place, and it was he who was fading. He desperately pushed himself to form the words that he needed to say, even as he felt his voice leaving him. "I'm proud of you, Endymion. We all are. Please, you need to know..." Endymion, the dark room, all of it was slipping away, faster than he could grasp onto it. "You need to know that you won't be alone. We will be with you. I promise."
The golden light dimmed as it fell away from him, and for one impossible moment, when the light had almost grown weak enough to see past, he thought he saw the shadow of two dark eyes. They burned into his memory even as they vanished into darkness, and he clung to that vision desperately, the only piece of his prince that he could bring back with him.
"Kain!"
He woke gasping, clinging to something so hard that he thought it would break beneath his fingers. That thing was Jaden's shoulder, and the blond had drawn back, wide-eyed. "Are you okay? You were barely breathing."
He relinquished his friend's shoulder, drawing in air like he had been drowning. His bedroom did sickening flipflops over his head, and he pushed himself up, ignoring the weakness in his limbs and the pain that seared like hot knives through his temples. Vertigo made him stumble and nearly crush Jaden beneath his own weight, but the blond seemed prepared for that, and bore him up despite his size. "Whoa, let's try this standing thing, huh? We'll start by you putting your arm around my shoulders."
Kain gritted his teeth. The floor wasn't staying where it was supposed to. "Jaden..."
"I know, buddy, just try not to aim for me when you puke. I like this shirt."
He managed to hold out until the bathroom, but the toilet was too far away. He went for the sink, instead. Jaden waited beside him. Kain was not entirely sure when he had learned patience.
He managed to stay leaning heavily against the counter long enough to vaguely rinse his mouth out, but his knees felt ready to buckle at any moment. Jaden put the toilet lid down, a rare occasion in an all-male household. "Sit down. Do you want something? Gatorade?"
"Anything but red."
He sat with his head in his hands, waiting for every part of him to stop shaking. It hurt more every time, and it was only a matter of time before his body could not take this anymore.
Jaden returned, and pushed an open bottle of orange Gatorade into his hands. "Drink it slowly. Gatorade puke is nasty."
It was such a rare occasion for Jaden to be the one giving him the orders that Kain did not argue. He sipped at the bottle's wide rim, his stomach feeling like lead. The blond watched him, rolling the bottle cap between his fingers. "You know, as your friend, I should really tell you to stop doing this. This is starting to get scary, what it's doing to you."
He swallowed the neon orange drink. "But as a guardian, you don't want to lose the only connection to him you have left. I know."
Jaden fidgeted beside him, evidence that perhaps his newfound patience only extended so far. Finally, he blurted the words that were building up inside him. "So how was he?"
Kain stared at a crack in the wall, willing it to stop shifting. "He seemed okay."
"Okay? It's been months since I've seen him and weeks since you have, and all you can give me is okay? How is he really?"
He gave up on the crack in the wall, squeezing his eyes shut. He would worry about making it stay still later. "Jaden, I need you to stop talking for a minute. I need to go over everything in my head before I forget it, and then I'll tell you what I know."
The deep sigh of annoyance was usually only heard out of his teenage students, but Kain heard him shuffle into the hall soon after, allowing him to think without an audience. There was something important that he needed to tell them, and he needed to make sure he had not imagined it.
The world had almost righted itself, when he heard the front door close, and muffled voices in the kitchen. It was not long before light footsteps sounded beside him, and fingers slid through his hair, pulling it away from the cold sweat that clung to his face. Sasha had just recently gotten a thin silver hoop pierced through the center of his lower lip, just like the one he used to have. Kain almost managed to get the lip ring to stay still when he looked at it.
"You can't keep doing this. You know that, right? I want to watch over him as much as you do, but it's not helping him, not the way you want to."
Jaden hovered in the doorway, looking like he wanted to say something. Kain knew that he did not want to be the one asking his commander to continue killing himself just to catch glimpses of their prince's life. He could not fault Jaden for thinking it, not when he was such a willing participant himself.
Sasha's sharp green eyes narrowed at him. "Kain, I'm serious. What you're doing is literally splitting your soul in half. Those stones weren't made to do what you're using them for. They're not communication devices, certainly not over long distances, and definitely not to be used when your soul is perfectly rooted in a physical body."
Kain took a sip of orange. "He thought we were gone." Sasha froze. "He thought that he'd lost us, and that we might never come back. That's what it looks like from where he is. If we stop talking, he thinks we're dead for good. And I can't tell him otherwise, because if he knows that we're here, alive for real, then he'll come looking for us."
"Why is that so bad?" Jaden grumbled. He was twisting the plastic bottle cap out of shape in his hand. "We've been waiting forever. We followed all the rules and stayed away. Even when he was sick. Even when we stopped feeling his starseed. We did everything right, and now we can't even talk to him."
"Do you really think we deserve better?" Sasha hissed, and Kain did not need to be seeing straight to notice how Jaden's hackles raised.
"It's been years. No punishment needs to go this long."
"It might not be much longer," Kain said softly, stopping Sasha before he could march over to Jaden and pick a fight. He spun the half-empty bottle in his hands. "He says he got accepted to college." He could almost feel them holding their breaths. He looked up at them both. "He got accepted to Harvard."
In the stunned silence, the transformation was remarkable, like rain falling on a desert. Suddenly hope was flooding faces that had grown too accustomed to resignation. "He's coming here?" Sasha whispered.
Though he felt miserable, and he had not done it in so long that he almost did not remember how to, Kain let the corners of his mouth turn up ever so faintly, that he could be the one to give them this news. "Yeah. He's coming here."
Suddenly Jaden let out a ground-shaking whoop, and he was jumping up and down in the hall like a maniac. Sasha wordlessly dropped to the floor beside him, and Kain pulled his arm around him, letting the blond bury his face in his shoulder. "I still want to yell at you, you know!" Sasha twisted the edge of Kain's t-shirt in his fist.
"Yeah, you can do it later. After we celebrate."