Arashi ("Storm"): A NOIR fic (3 of ?)
Title: Arashi ("Storm"): A NOIR fic
Author: Wye (w.y.back)
Fandom: NOIR (the anime)
Pairing: Mireille / Kirika
Rating: R, may be higher later
Disclaimer: "NOIR" and its characters are the property of Bee Train and its creators. I'm just taking them for a strictly non-profit spin. The only thing that's mine is the story below.
Spoilers: Just to be safe, everything NOIR (the anime).
Author's Note: This was supposed to come out sooner. I’ve learned my lesson though. From now on I’m going to stop saying that any of my updates will be out soon because every time I do, something comes up. :P Thanks to xxmadlaxx for being an incredibly stubborn beta, and thanks to sav8801 for the lesson in French. The verse Kirika quotes is from an English translation of “Sonnet XVII” by Pablo Neruda.
Previous chapters: 1, 2
3: KIRIKA
Kirika was being tested. Or at least that’s how it felt.
The day was warm and Mireille, still flushed from her errands, decided to take a shower while Kirika prepared their tea. When she finished, she returned to the table in house clothes, which for Mireille meant a half-buttoned, white long-sleeved man’s shirt that barely covered her thighs, and not much else.
The girl glanced covertly at Mireille. Roughly half of her was hidden behind the day’s newspaper. A lone drop of water slid from her damp hair, making its way down the hollow of the slim, white throat. When it slipped beneath the vee of the thin shirt, Kirika swallowed.
Still preoccupied with the paper, the older assassin didn’t notice how the girl’s right hand balled into a fist over her tea fork. She was fighting the urge to reach over, and trace the path of that droplet of water...
“Do you want to go for a walk?”
“Sorry?” Kirika looked up, blushing a little at being caught unawares. She felt herself being appraised by frank blue eyes.
The paper rustled as Mireille put it down. “It’s Sunday, which means the Left Bank is closed to traffic,” she clarified. “It seems to be cooling down. It might be nice, and we haven’t gone in awhile.”
Kirika couldn’t say “yes” fast enough, and her obvious enthusiasm made Mireille grin.
***
Mireille lifted her face to the cool breeze that blew along the Seine. The river smelled good today. She laughed as the wind messed with her long blonde hair. She ran a hand through her tousled locks and tried unsuccessfully to put them back in some order.
Along with many residents, she loved the fact that the normally busy Left Bank was closed on Sundays, leaving pedestrians, cyclists and joggers to reclaim the riverbank.
She hadn’t been down here in awhile. It had been different before. When they weren’t on a job or running for their lives, Kirika and she had taken many walks around the city. They had wandered down the cobbled streets of Montmarte, leaned on the thick, pale-stoned balustrades of the bridges crossing the Seine, and made their way to the stately edifice of the Musee d’Orsay.
During their first time at the museum, Mireille had taken Kirika to the café on the top floor, and grinned at the way the normally taciturn assassin’s eyes turned wide at the sight of the huge metal clock built into a transparent section of the wall. They took the table next to it, and for the first time Kirika willingly sat with her back to a door as her avid gaze took in the view of the river below, and Montmarte and Sacre Coeur beyond.
The walks began as a way to help Kirika become familiar with the city. It continued because it gave the two of them some semblance of normalcy, even if they never really dropped their guard.
In the end, Mireille had grown to look forward to the long, quiet walks. Sometimes they shopped. When the weather was kind, they would find a place to sit along the riverbank. While she reclined to enjoy the sun or watch the water, Kirika would bring out her sketchpad.
It wasn’t that Kirika had been eager to resume drawing, not after she’d tossed her first sketchpad in the Seine. But one day Mireille had simply bought her another pad as well as colors, and several mornings later Kirika had slipped them quietly into her bag.
Who was he, the man who had inspired Kirika to draw? Mireille had never asked, had only warned the girl in freezing tones that she should stop seeing him. And Kirika, not understanding, had refused to accede to her for the first time.
If she could’ve only explained. Part of it was concern, because Mireille had already learned the hard way the pitfalls of drawing people, who had no idea of the shadowy underworld that permeated the city, into her life. She had wanted to spare the girl that. As to what other reasons there might be for her anger at the sudden emergence of a new relationship in Kirika’s life, Mireille had deliberately tried not to look into that too deeply.
She started as fingers brushed tentatively against her hand.
“T'as l'air songeuse.“ Kirika wondered what kind of thoughts could produce such a pensive expression on Mireille’s face.
Mireille shook her head and gave her a little smile. Though they still mostly spoke together in English, Kirika was much more at ease with French after her time in Lyon. “No, there’s nothing on my mind. I guess I just missed this.”
The girl nodded in agreement. “They did this in Lyon too, closed the section next to the river. Only there it’s closed all the time, not just on Sundays. I wanted to show it to you, and the old city,” she said quietly.
Mireille heard the unspoken words. But you never came. Even the trip to fetch Kirika had been quick, just a matter of getting to her school on time and returning to Paris right after. Lightly, she took the hand that was placed a careful half-inch away from her own. “Maybe you still can. I haven’t visited Lyon in years. I’d like to see more of it. And now I’ve got a proper guide,” she found herself teasing, though she wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do. There were reasons why she’d stayed away. Good reasons.
But for now the bright, pleased expression on Kirika’s face was more than worth it.
***
Was it possible for an assassin to be blissfully happy? Over something as simple as an ordinary afternoon?
Because that’s how Kirika felt. After their brief exchange, Mireille had made to pull her hand away. But Kirika had resisted, and with a rare, indulgent smile, she had allowed it.
They'd spent the rest of their walk mostly hand in hand or with arms twined loosely together. They stayed out till near-dusk without a specific destination, except to buy supper at a small brasserie where the owners greeted Mireille by name.
Then Mireille had gone to take a nap, leaving Kirika to tidy their purchases and her things, which were still half-unpacked from yesterday. When she’d finished, she found herself gazing reflectively at the city outside, and the purple and deep blues of a deepening sky.
I didn’t imagine it. If Kirika had had any doubts about her feelings, this glorious day had put them to rest. She was in love. Had probably been in love, for years, with Mireille.
That it had taken her so long to put a name to these feelings…
The Soldats must’ve taken her when she was very young, because Kirika didn’t remember anything about a family at all. There were only scattered memories of the manor where she and Chloe had been trained by Altena and her “sisters.” In all that time, Altena had spoken of love in only one way.
If love can kill people, then surely hatred can save them.
Kirika wanted to be able to hate her, wanted to blame everything that she’d become on Altena. But Altena too had been shaped by the pitiless ways of the world. Altena was a child when war enveloped her city, a weary child with sunken eyes who was frightened by the smoking ruins of her neighborhood and the loss of her parents. A soldier had noticed the lost-looking girl and taken her by the hand. Then he took her to a broken-down room, closed the door, propped his gun against the wall, and used her to pleasure his body for hours. By the time he stopped and left, something in her was as dead as the bodies scattered outside.
Mireille’s fate was different. Like Kirika and Chloe, she too had been chosen. The third sapling was the eldest and only daughter of the family who had ruled Corsica in alliance with the Soldats. But in the end the Bouquets had loved their daughter enough to refuse to surrender her for training. They had paid the price for it. And as much as Mireille had suffered in the lonely, cautious exile that followed, still that sacrifice had left her free to live her life and find her own way.
Unlike Kirika, who often felt as if she were only a player in her own life. There was an empty space inside of her, a dead void where nothing could reach or touch her. There was no harm, hurt or regret there, but there was also nothing else. She couldn’t pinpoint when that began to change, when she began to realize that Mireille made her happy in ways she couldn’t explain.
Then Chloe appeared and gave her back part of her memory…and Kirika found out that she was the one Mireille had been hunting for all these years. She was the assassin who’d executed the Bouquets for defying the Soldats. She had executed the father first, the mother last.
It was those moments with Mireille’s mother that haunted Kirika most. Mireille looked so much like her mother. In the blur of Kirika’s nightmares, sometimes the face under the dark bullet hole wasn’t so much Odette’s as her daughter’s, and it was Mireille’s face that would stare at her in hatred and accusation as a horrified Kirika watched her die.
So when Mireille had turned and kissed her one night, each measured touch signaling forgiveness and something more infinitely tender, it was too much. Kirika had burst into tears. What she felt for Mireille was something she couldn’t explain to herself back then, much less to the woman whose lips were so soft on hers. Before that night, she hadn’t even known that her feelings for Mireille included desire. Kirika had never wanted anyone so badly in her life, had not realized that her body could ache for someone this way.
But she was not, and would never be, worthy of Mireille.
Only months later, in Lyon, did Kirika come to understand that there were words for these confusing feelings. To any other girl, it would’ve been an easy assumption. To Kirika it was practically a blinding revelation.
It was, of all things, a class discussion on poetry that sparked insight. Kirika wasn’t exactly impressed with literature as a whole, though she tried to pay attention because Mireille liked these things. Still, she didn’t see the point. Factual accounts were one thing; information was always useful. But Kirika saw no use for fanciful stories, much less for poetry. When she’d first been made to understand what poems were, she could hardly believe that people indulged in something so…impractical.
On that early morning, the teacher had made them read a sonnet by a man named Neruda, and Kirika found herself wandering the halls afterwards. Lost in thought, she quietly repeated the words to herself.
I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
Like a spell, the words carried her away, and in that moment she was no longer in a corridor surrounded by noisy teenage girls, but back in Paris, watching Mireille place a new potted plant next to the window.
“I found it,” Mireille had said, in a voice that was strangely calm and tense at the same time.
Kirika had raised her head inquiringly.
“Your letter,” the blonde added. She was fussing over the plant, and her back was to the girl.
“Oh.” Nervously, Kirika cast around for something to say. Give her a gun or a knife or even a fork and it was like a natural extension of her hand. Words though, writing that letter to Mireille had been one of the hardest things Kirika could remember doing. “I meant it.”
Only she wasn’t exactly sure, back then, what she’d meant.
With Neruda’s sonnet running through her head, suddenly she understood. It wasn’t that Kirika hadn’t heard of love. She knew the word, had read about it and watched some of the shows on TV. It’s just that the concept had never been a part of her personal equation. There was survival, death, duty and purpose, and brief moments of fulfillment. But love? It didn’t apply to her or her life.
Until someone had shown her. Until one night in the pouring rain, when the one woman in the world who had every right to kill her, refused to. Till then, Kirika had not known that she could be forgiven, or that there were emotions more powerful than duty or vengeance. Or that death would be preferable, easier in a way, than living with a forgiveness one did not deserve.
That stormy night had led to Kirika’s first taste of regret so deep, it would last the rest of her life. Because nothing she did now or later could possibly make up for what she had taken from Mireille. From this moment on, she would have to live with who she was, and the sins she had committed against the person she cared for above all others.
Armed with her new revelation, Kirika had barely resisted the powerful urge to leave on the next train to Paris. She had wanted to run to Mireille, to tell her, “I have the words now. I know what I meant in the letter, and what I felt that night.”
But of course she hadn’t, though the knowledge of her feelings burned in her heart. She could only wait, and excel at the task Mireille had set for her.
And now? Now that she was home again and with Mireille, she was tongue-tied. Worse, it seemed there were plans to send her away again!
Kirika stared with unseeing eyes at the world outside. “I love you,” she whispered, “as certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul…”
In Lyon, there was an instance when Mireille’s cool composure had slipped. It was in the moment when they’d first laid eyes on each other. Kirika, dressed in her uniform of white blouse, dark skirt, blazer and tie, had been quietly waiting to take her into the school. She’d barely caught the startled flash on Mireille’s face before she was swallowed up by the sensation of her own heart racing.
Because Mireille had changed too in the years they’d been apart. She was firmly in her twenties now, and there was an aura of self-assurance about her that showed in everything from the relaxed sophistication of her clothes to the way she stood and squarely met Kirika’s gaze. She looked like a woman who was ready to take on the world, and why not? After all, she had pulled off a feat no one else had thought possible. The sapling once considered the weakest among the Noir candidates had stood up to the Soldats, turned Altena’s plans to ashes, and reclaimed Kirika. Together they had survived the ultimate test.
So how could Mireille even think that they were best apart? How could she doubt that they stood strongest back to back?
In frustration, Kirika walked away from the window and to the full-length mirror in another corner of the room. She stared at her reflection. The first time she’d looked into this mirror, she’d been a thin, rather unremarkable Japanese girl of fifteen or sixteen who barely knew anything outside the science of killing, and felt almost nothing. A perfect sapling, Altena had called her. The perfect future half of Noir.
And now? Maybe not so perfect in that way. Kirika hadn’t killed in years, though she’d kept her skills honed to perfection. But the biggest changes weren’t physical. Something inside her was coming alive, and it showed in her eyes. They were attentive, engaged. The intense focus that had been with her all her life was shifting - from killing to having, from an existence steeped in death to something passionately alive.
Since that night when Mireille had kissed her...
“Mireille.” The name slipped from Kirika as softly as a wish. If she woke and came to me right now, and looked at me with that knowing smile, if she reached for me… Kirika was startled by how her reflection in the mirror came alive in an instant, how her eyes brightened and her mouth curved. A flush suffused her cheeks, and her stance shifted as if already anticipating the arc of Mireille’s body against her own.
I won’t go quietly this time. Mireille was part of her darkness and her salvation and worthy or not, Kirika would not lose her again, not without a fight. She had fought for many things before and she had been a proficient weapon, but it had always been for others. This time it would be different. This was for herself and what she wanted.
And what she wanted was to put that startled, almost helplessly exposed look on Mireille’s face again. For those piercing blue eyes to focus and see only her, even for just a little while.
Kirika planned her next steps as thoroughly as if she were dealing death.