Title: Blue
Author:
E-mail: wren13 @ gmail.com
Fandom and pairing: Baiser and Penicillin; Shaisuke x Yukari, Hakuei x Yukari
Keywords: yaoi, romance
Rating: Kids
Words: 1,721
Status:
Complete
Disclaimer: The story is mine, only meant as entertainment, and is completely fictional. I’m not making any profit, or intending to hurt anyone.
Comments: I’ve always wanted to write a story about the memories that haunt every one of us, but this fic lay half-finished and abandoned on my computer for a year. I honestly never thought I’d come back to it until the incentive to write a ghost story landed in my inbox, so I ended up writing this for the Alpha Male Archive Halloween Challenge 2003.
Dedicated to Ingrid. Because I promised.
By
It’s been a year today since the accident. Almost a year since I was last here. And the first time since I’ve started dating Hakuei.
My eyes take in the garden around me: morning frost makes
the ground shimmer mysteriously and the house beside me is at least twice the
size of my apartment in
My gaze returns to the pond before me, the pale reflection of my own face shifting with the ripples. Shaisuke once told me there were ghosts in this pond. As a child he was afraid of them when they came to join him in the garden, until he learned to live with them. They never went away, but their presence stopped bothering him.
A shiver runs down my spine and all at once the memories start coming back. This place is thick with memories, as though the years Shaisuke lived here have seeped into the ground to feed the trees and plants. I pick absently at the ground plucking a tiny blue feather from a tangle of twigs. When we first visited here Shaisuke wouldn’t let go of my hand, even when his mother was around, like he intended to hold onto me forever. The fingers of my left hand close around the feather, pressing it into my palm.
I remember the day the two of us first met Hakuei.
I was walking up some stairs, the kimono catching around my legs with each step, when my shoes tripped me up. I remember falling and the world suddenly spun around me. It all happened too fast to follow. Before I could even realise what was happening I felt someone catch me. It was only when my mind stopped reeling that I realised I had fallen into the arms of a tall, blond man.
Dark eyes sparkled down at me in concern and faint amusement. “You okay?”
Automatically apology took over my speech. “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m so sorry.” Trust me to fall infront of a good-looking man, I thought, trying to pretend blood wasn’t rushing to my face but realising despairingly that he must be able to see the pink staining my cheeks anyway.
“Yukari!” The sudden voice diverted our attention. Shaisuke’s hawk-like eyes latched onto my rescuer, glinting like lit firecrackers. Somehow his stance at the top of the stairs coupled with that unconcealed anger made him tower like an imposing storm over us, but at the same time I wanted to melt under that gaze. His figure displayed that beautiful tension of a wolf in aggressive defence, his shapely legs encased in black vinyl, the muscles beneath his skin-fitting shirt tight on his chest and shoulders.
“What do you think you’re doing?!”
Electricity sparked in Shaisuke’s voice, but the blond man only raised calm eyebrows in confusion. “Excuse me?”
“Get your hands off my boyfriend!” Shaisuke’s voice rose an octave, and suddenly he was moving. Strong fingers latched onto my arm pulling at me roughly, and I stumbled against Shaisuke’s shoulder. He reached around me with one arm to set a firm hand on my hip. That one arm could have been made of iron for the bond it formed around me.
The stranger blinked at Shaisuke. “Your boyfriend, here, lost his balance on his way up. If I hadn’t been walking behind him he would have fallen down the stairs,” he defended himself calmly, a touch of arrogance letting Shaisuke’s fury roll right off his back.
My hand lay flat against Shaisuke’s chest, the warmth of his body radiating out through the fabric of his clothes. I could see the tight tendons protruding from his neck, and the pulse pumping beneath the white skin of his throat. At the same time I could feel my entire body heat up. He smelt good.
“Shaisuke.” He turned to face me when I spoke, his look hard, but I kept going. “It’s true. I tripped and this man caught me,” I said, holding his gaze, letting my eyes convey the truth of my words.
Finally I watched his temper rein itself in, as the deep, dark depths of his eyes wavered. Uncertain, reaching for control.
“Yukari...” his voice was softer when he spoke to me. I stroked his chest lightly, soothing. Then: “Are you alright?”
I nodded, the long hair falling over my shoulders. “I’m okay, thanks to this man.”
He pursed his lips, his arm around me becoming looser, finally falling away completely. The he turned to the other, suddenly remembering his manners. He bowed, his voice oddly rough when he spoke. “I’m sorry for the misunderstanding and I apologise.”
The stranger nodded, graciously accepting the apology.
That was our introduction to Hakuei. Later he became a close friend of ours, even if he did get a kick out of riling Shaisuke by flirting with me at every opportunity. To Shaisuke I was always his Yukari, his treasure, his angel.
But we didn’t hold on forever. Time drives everyone apart, and too soon Shaisuke and I broke up, splitting the band with us. Our dream had ended. But even after he was killed in that car accident something remained behind, a memory, a feeling I have held onto for the past year...
Light glints off the pond and I squint into it. My reflection ripples with the wind. In the shadowed water of the pond my hair looks a darker red... the facial features sharper... the slope of the eyes gazing back at me more definite...
The light on the water is blinding me and I seem to see Shaisuke gazing up at me. I know that face only too well. For a moment the thought is so strong in my head that I reach out to touch his face. His deep onyx eyes continue to hold mine; I can’t look away, almost like I am hypnotised by that reflection.
Ice water chills my fingertips the moment they touch that surface and the light shifts as waves wrinkle the water. Those eyes are the last to fade when my fingers break the mirror.
The wind is still whispering my name and I imagine the breeze on my cheek is Shaisuke’s lips. He seems to be everywhere around me, and my insides knot up with that thought. I can sense him kneeling behind me, his hands on my shoulders, too insubstantial to feel, but I know he’s there.
I shiver. So close, but no touch can reach across what divides us.
Opening my eyes again dispels the ghosts. On the water surface only my own face looks back at me.
I sigh. My breath mists infront of my eyes making the garden hazy and indistinct. Across from me a budgerigar alights in the branches of a pine tree. The young limbs bend even under the weight of that small bird, and the colour of its feathers reminds me of a patch of blue sky amongst the evergreen needles it has managed to perch between.
It must have belonged to someone once because I don’t remember ever seeing a wild budgerigar. I wonder if a bird belonging to someone long enough gets so used to being looked after that it forgets how to be free.
That glorious, awe-inspiring freedom - sailing through the frozen skies this morning, wings freezing in the ice blown winds, in a world where only the wind can hold you back - and in a flurry of wings I watch the bird take off again, like a tiny blue angel in flight.
In Baiser I called myself an angel because the music let me fly like that. But it’s been so long since I felt like I was light enough to fly.
Suddenly something makes me stand, glance away from that ghost-inhabited water, cast my eyes up to the sky. The sunlight feels warm on my face even though my hands are so cold I have to cross my arms and hug them against my chest for warmth. If I were a bird I would never want to come down to earth, that azure expanse so wide I could happily fly out there forever.
Looking at the feather in my hand, so small, it is barely a sensation in my palm. The wind picks it up when I open my fingers, lifting it, swirling into the air.
My eyes follow it across the sky over my head as it is guided ever higher by the wind, growing smaller by distance until it vanishes so high up it must have touched heaven itself.
I’m dizzy and I have to close my eyes.
“Careful!” Steadying hands grab my shoulders. I didn’t even realise I had leaned so far back I was falling.
When I open my eyes I see the same dark gaze that caught me last time. “Hakuei! What are you doing here?” As brainless as that sounds, it is the first thing that comes to my mind.
“I thought you might be here.” There is a smile in his voice, though it doesn’t show on his face, perhaps out of respect for whatever I came here to remember. He releases my shoulders to let me stand for myself again.
I shake my head. “I was just thinking.”
“Saying hello to him?”
Unexpectedly I think of the bird resting on the branches of that pine, a small rest on earth, before it flew off again. How much I want to be like that.
“No. Saying goodbye.”
Hakuei smiles then, that smile that never fails to catch every woman watching him, and I feel a part of me melt inside. “C’mon, let’s go inside before we both freeze to death,” he says, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and I lean automatically into that casual embrace.
The whispering wind has stilled as the two of us walk back to the house in that quiet morning, away from the pond and its ghosts. Perhaps next year those ghosts won’t bother me anymore either.
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Date: 2003.10.28