I wrote Yami
het. Muraki/Ukyou Yami het,
to be specific. No, I don't
understand it either. But the title is a
line from Oscar Wilde's lovely poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and the fic is very
short.
Disclaimer: Muraki and the
concept that is Ukyou aren't mine.
* * *
Because the Dead so Soon Grow Cold
The
problem with life stories is that they always overstay their welcome. Stories
that go on too long have no alternative but to end in tragedy.
The facts can't be disputed. This late in the game, the hypothesis has been
tested too many times to be disproved. The body dies, decays; nothing remains
but an afterimage, an atomic shadow of memory burned onto the wall.
It'll be two years this winter. At the end of every month I visit his grave and
leave red roses, though I know, if he were here, he would only laugh at me for
it.
I won't need flowers where I'm going, he would say. And then smile; that same
sad, sweet, poisonous smile as always.
For all his sleight of hand and all he had kept from me, I know that much is
the truth. Though sometimes I think it won't do any more good than a single
drop of water in a parched riverbed, I offer a prayer as well.
It's always the same words, over and over, until they come to me so easily I
wonder if they mean anything anymore: Wherever you are, I hope it's peaceful.
Wherever you are, I hope you've forgotten... everything.
I've always imagined death as just another synonym for amnesia. It hurts less
that way.
If that's true, then life is really nothing more than a long trek toward
forgetfulness. I can't remember anymore what it felt like to kiss him. His
mouth, or the fall of his hair against my face.
It's the little things that sometimes seem the most profound. The details no
one else wants to care about are the most important to preserve. Every time I
realize I can't recall the color of his eyes so clearly, it's like watching
something precious he entrusted to me go up in a column of flame.
I used to think that what was wrong was what he was. Now I think it was what he
wasn't. What he could never be.
Somewhere along the line he lost track of all the masks he wore as faces, and
all the faces he wore as masks. And it felt like every word he ever spoke only
carried us further from salvation. Further from each other.
There are hollow places between the events of every life, soft and
insignificant moments like the space after one wave breaks and before the next
crests. When ours happened to align was the time we spent together.
Like a stray cat, I'd lose track of him for days and weeks and months at a
time. When I saw him again, it was always with flowers and jewelry, and never
with explanations.
Funny, the things you can learn to live with. The things that can give you
peace.
In the evenings, he used to read to me from Kafka and Milton and Mishima. We
were younger then, and I was thrilled by the way his glasses slipped a little
down his nose when he was deep in thought. He always turned the last blank
page, as though he expected more words to shimmer, like a mirage, and appear.
Endings were never final enough for him, never as certain as he wanted them to
be.
He never quite understood that sometimes people walk out of your destiny and
into their own.
For what it's worth, I did try. There were times I wanted to hold him so close
he'd never think to slip away again. And there were times I wanted to forget I
had ever loved him at all. And there were times when all I wanted was to tear
him to pieces to see if there were any strands of truth left in him.
But I can see now that it wouldn't have mattered. Not really. Because, in the
end, he's still killed as many people as he's killed.
In the end, that was never the reason I was too afraid to hate him.
In the end, dreams and lusts and madness and love really weren't so different.
One didn't burn any more brightly than the others. One wasn't more slowly
reduced to ash.
In the end... there was only one way things could have turned out, and so what
I feel isn't regret. It's something too new, too unfamiliar to be regret.
I used to be afraid that I'd never stop missing him. Now, I'm certain I won't
and I'm relieved. Maybe it's too much to ask that he be forgiven, but I don't
want him to have gone without just once knowing what mercy is.