by Seishuku Skuld (skuldhotohori@yahoo.com)

Series: X

Pairings: implied Seishirou x Subaru

Warnings: angst, implied shounen-ai, spoilers

Author’s Notes: Songfic weirdness!Guess which song inspired me to write this.^_^Oh, and more from me in my weird surrealistic moods.^^;;

Forever

“I still remember…”

The silence echoes throughout the desolate city.Cars lie on their sides in pools of shattered glass, their windows smashed, seats abandoned.Torn remnants of newspapers, paper cups, magazines, skid across the empty streets.A stale wind blows through the area, raising clouds of thick brown dust, spreading the odor of decay throughout the piles of debris.

He sits in the moonlight, on a mound of soft brown earth, perhaps the one last scrap of purity that remains in the dead land surrounding his solitary figure.

Sumeragi Subaru taps at the cigarette dangling from his limp fingers.It has been hanging there for several minutes, the glowing embers crawling their way up slowly to burn his flesh.The ash drops from the smoky cylinder like the fall of snow, the plummeting of something so great and yet so inconsequential that the world freezes in silence.Another strong gust of wind picks up, and Subaru coughs as tendrils of dust reach out their wraith-like arms and muffle his lungs, choking his breath.

The coughing goes on until the breeze stops, and everything - papers, bits of debris, the ubiquitous dust beings to settle.Subaru speaks again, his voice tiny, the barest of whispers in a hurricane gale.

“I remember your softly spoken words.”

Subaru tosses his cigarette into the ground beside him, not bothering to stub it out.He lets whatever flame is left inside it remain and consume it.He has forgotten it already.

He closes his eyes, the eyelids slamming shut like opaque storefront doors, blocking out all light and prying, curious eyes.He closes his eyes, shutting out the peeping of toppled concrete gods, the debris of bridges and the encroaching sea.Or perhaps he closes his eyes not because he wants to stop the outside from looking in, but the inside from looking out.

“I remember what it felt like to see your shadow behind me.”

He lifts a black-gloved hand and caresses the silken fabric with reverence.He brings it to his cheek where he can be closest to its softness, and furthest away from the star-shaped mark which he still believes is there.

“Some say I’m crazy,” Subaru murmurs, biting at the ends of his gloves, white teeth from between pink lips snaking out, sinking into smooth ebony cloth interwoven with invisible spells of immense, crackling power.“But I know they’re all wrong.”

The glove comes off smoothly in one swift, liquidly graceful motion.It flutters to the ground, digits outstretched.Subaru screams and rips the other one off, flinging it far, far away from him.The wind picks it up and bears it aloft in a barrage of dust.Subaru watches it disappear, the small thing turning about in the air, whipped and shaken until it dwindles to a small speck and is lost to his vision.

“Nothing can hold me,” Subaru hisses, wide-eyed, looking down at the back of his own bare hands as if seeing them for the first time.“Give me a reason to believe you’re gone.”His fingers etch the path of the stars that once marked him, the stars that were the bonds holding him to the side of the Sakurazukamori.

“They’re still there, aren’t they?”Subaru clasps his hands together, pulls them in towards his chest, as he calls upon his power.He reaches inside himself - the ourobouros loop within - anything to reach the lines of energy that were tied to his hands.He gropes blindly for them, searching vainly in the dark, willing for anything to come within his hold; something to dispel the fears that what he is searching for is no longer there.

Finally, after several moments of falling in and out of trance and grasping at elusive straws, Subaru crumples to the ground.

“They know you can’t leave me,” he whispers, fighting back tears he thought abandoned him long ago.His breath runs ragged, in short panting gasps.His shoulders heave and he begins to feel a dark eruption at the bottom of his stomach, threatening to overtake him with retching.

“They haven’t given me a reason to believe that you’re gone.”

Subaru lurches to his feet, ignoring the lump of dread in the pit of his gut.He sheds his black trenchcoat, tossing the heavy material from him, giving it no more heed.It is too big for him anyway.

“Seishirou-san!”Subaru shouts, flinging his arms wide, lifting his head to the sky.Dark clouds float by overhead, wearing their thunderous masks of displeasure, shaking disapproving heads at the despair of the rotting city.Subaru opens his mouth, waiting for a drop of rain perhaps, a bite of dust, or the intoxicating caress of cherry blossom petals.

“They took you away from me…”

A lone bird soars in the sky, a mere speck against the monstrous fresco of thunderheads descending swiftly upon the city.Off in the distance, in the direction of the now-toppled Tokyo Tower, a forked branch of lighting strikes.

“…but I’ll take you home, Seishirou-san.”

Another bright flash of light, closer this time, and the thunder responds with its war drums.It is an earthshaking rumble, a rolling groan that resounds in the very core of the Earth, answered by the wind and the restless sea.White foam sloshes up angrily against the shore, water rising in towering columns and hammering upon the land, its powerful blow crushing whatever lay beneath it.

Subaru runs, jumping over tumbling structures, leaping from crumbling roofs as he heads towards the water, its uncontainable volume already filling the streets, bearing whatever lies in them in a landslide of liquidated mud.

“They don’t hear you singing to me.”

With the rubble of Odaiba all round him, Subaru stands his ground, his mismatched eyes gazing with defiant wonder at the fury of the gods of the ocean.Already the storm is beginning, the stillness of the air broken by the howling of the wind, its fists beating on him mercilessly, as if to drive him back.But Subaru resists and embraces its attack, laughing as rain is suddenly emptied forth from the heavens in thick, heavy sheets, a veritable downpour that quickly fills the already flooded streets.

“Sing!” Subaru commands, pointing a hand in the direction of the storm, the untamed sea writhing as it tries to engulf the city.“Sing to me!Sing me wild, raving hymns!”

He laughs, the wind whipping at his hair, howling like siren song.The seas moan and the earth shakes with resonance as one by one whatever buildings left standing plummet into great gaping crevices as the Earth screams in its rebirth.

The sky turns dark as the sun is obscured in blackness, and every one of the known elements is hurtled into the air.  Burning magma erupts from deep ravines, abysmal fissures in the Earth’s crust as it is torn asunder.It bubbles forth in little spurts of laughter, throwing itself playfully into the ocean, creating an eerie world of steam, blindness, and the constant booming as the gods reforge their greatest and most dismal creation.

Lost in a world stinking with sulfur and scalding heat, Subaru continues to stare forth to where he knows the sea must be.The sea that must now span the world, swallowing continents whole, meeting with the burning liquid seething beneath the Earth’s crust, casting a white veil of opaque, poisonous smoke about the planet.

“I can’t love you anymore than I already do.”

Subaru smiles as the curtain in front of him parts, and the dragon rears its head, its foreclaws gleaming in the macabre non-light.It looms above him, the length of his sinuous body wrapping itself several times around the world, tightening its inexorable stranglehold.Its scales glow like little suns, each flame-scorched shingle filled with inky blackness, overflowing with the unknown.Its voice blasts forth from its open jaw like the blaring of a thousand trumpet fanfares, a challenge that heralds the end, the beginning, and the promises of a world devoured in fire and smoke.

“Even in death, Seishirou-san...

Subaru stares the dragon in its eye, a bright smile on his face as it charges towards him, the waters surrounding it surging forward with enough force to flatten mountains and shatter continents.Subaru’s mouth opens, his lips forming quiet words that are blown away, lost among the cacophony as the sky crumbles, ablaze in flaming, falling fragments.

“I will stay here forever with you.”

∞the end? ∞

Final Note: This fic was inspired by “Even in Death” by Evanescence.Download it if you can, it’ll be well worth your time. ^_^

Seishuku Skuld Author Pairing Rating Subject