fic: lithium ch.2 (kh)
Nov. 16th, 2007 08:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Lithium
This has been sitting around for a few months, so I finally got around to finishing it; at eighteen pages in Word, I think it's the longest single chapter I've ever written. *head-desk* I want it to go away now so it doesn't keep taunting me with the guilty knowledge that I have something else to finish.
___
I was crying when I first met Sora.
It wasn’t for some huge traumatic event, like being beaten or deciding I couldn’t live on any longer, or some other properly angst-ridden cause. I was only six at the time, Sora was five, and I had just fallen off a low brick wall I liked balancing on. I would walk on it with my arms held out to either side, pretending I was one of those explorers on the adventure channel that crossed huge chasms and braved the mystery of wild rainforests in the search to satisfy their own curiosity about the world, only limited by the extent of their courage.
That one day, though, I hadn’t been paying full attention to where I put my feet, and I slipped off the g
“You ‘kay?” a tiny, high-pitched voice had asked. Surprised, my head jerked up, and through the blurriness of my tears I saw a tousle-headed boy with the biggest damn blue eyes I had ever seen, one I vaguely recognized seeing at the elementary school playground. He shifted from foot to foot, uncomfortable in the way that boys are when they see other boys crying.
“’M fine,” I muttered angrily, embarrassed. “Go away!”
“Well, fine!” he huffed, and stuck out his tongue. When we saw each other at the school playground the next day, we promptly got into a fight that I would have won had we not ended up in the principal’s office, nursing bruises. Those plastic chairs in the office were damn uncomfortable, and we shared secret grins when the quietly intimidating Mr. Auron (his last name was something strange and foreign, and nearly impossible for such young minds to wrap around) just looked at us over the top of his jazzy glasses and said that if our stories called for beating each other up, do so off school grounds so he didn’t have to face any lawsuits.
That afternoon, once school let out, we played pirates fighting bravely through hordes of flesh-eating zombies summoned by ancient curses on that low stone wall, brandishing swords made of sticks and laughing as we dreamt of other worlds.
xxx
This time, when Sora showed up in his daily ritual of dragging me down to the dining hall for dinner, he stood in the doorway and glared at the three of us. I was lying on my bed with a book on cultural funerary ritual in my hand, while
“How can you guys do that?” Sora cried suddenly, throwing his hands in the air with exasperation. The two older men started, while I just raised a brow. “Don’t you guys, like, do anything?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it when I realized he was shooting blue glares at my roommates and not me. Fear the cute one’s wrath.
“We are,”
“I mean, don’t you ever leave this room for more than classes and to take a piss?” he clarified, and I nearly choked at his words.
“Yes,”
“Really.” Sora crossed his arms and turned to Cloud. “What about you?”
“I don’t need friends,” he snapped icily. The three of us looked at him with some surprise at the sudden emotion.
“Too bad, too late,” Sora grinned, unperturbed. He had dealt with worse tempers, after all. “You two are coming with Riku and me to the dining hall.”
Cloud’s shoulders had tensed, however, and his blue eyes were sharp, and I felt my body prepare to slide into a defensive crouch when I recognized the challenge he presented. Then all the fight seemed to leave him, and he grabbed an oversized, wine-red sweatshirt that nearly covered the bottom half of his face, without bothering to turn off his laptop.
I slipped on my large black coat and closely followed Sora out of the dorm, consciously keeping myself between him and the other two. I didn’t really think that they would do anything to him, not while it was still daylight and there were plenty of witnesses around, but I had learned not to take chances. While startled that the two men had given in, Sora shrugged it off with a large smile and led the way, the chains on his long blue shorts jingling cheerily as he shared a somewhat dirty joke he learned that day in Theatre.
“I thought the performing arts were about acting, not sex education backstage,” I said with a smirk.
“Shows how much you know,” he retorted. “What else are we supposed to do when we’re all waiting for our own turn to present those stupid monologues? I’ll have you know that I’m the reigning arm wrestling champion in that class.”
“And this is the reason for going several thousand gil into student debt,” I muttered dryly. Behind me,
“It’s a learning experience, and you can’t put a price on the value of the lessons of life,” he pronounced grandly, and I couldn’t help laughing as I pointed out how much he sounded like his mother.
We presented our student ID cards at the door, where the school-employed student gave the four of us a strange look but waved us in anyway. Sora immediately headed for the pizza counter, while Leon and I both settled for the salad bar. Cloud had disappeared.
“You love him.”
“…So?” I replied warily, mind racing to figure out what his intent was. I nonchalantly drizzled some kind of dressing over my bowl as I glanced up at him. He wasn’t looking at me, but at the salad bar, though there was a distance to his gaze that made me think he was seeing more than just wilted lettuce. His fingers briefly touched the scar that ran over his nose. Then he blinked and shook his head slightly, once, and murmured, “Nothing.”
Sora was the last to join us at the table in the farthest corner, tray overflowing with an assortment of foods. He plopped down next to me with a diabolical grin at his meal and attacked it with relish. Leon and I ate more sedately while Cloud picked listlessly at his tray, slouched in his seat and looking like he was trying to curl into his baggy red sweatshirt. Sora was more observant than most people gave him credit for, and between bites he said with perfect friendly neutrality, “So, Cloud, what are you majoring in?”
“…Biology,” he answered after a moment. It was like pulling teeth.
Sora made a face. “Science, huh? What made you choose that?”
If possible, Cloud tensed even further.
“I want to know why the body does the things it does,” he said finally. I was surprised he didn’t just shrug off the question. “Why pain and pleasure elicit almost exactly the same physiological reactions. What kinds of extremes it can adapt to. How far it can be changed and mutated before it isn’t recognizable as the original anymore.”
Gee, that was rather more morbid than the terse explanation he’d given me, and something about the way he said it gave me the impression that he might not have been talking about his major anymore.
Why is the image of darkness…?
“Well, have you?” Sora asked with calm curiosity. When Cloud looked at him in confusion, he added, “Learned why?”
“…No.”
There was always a pause before he spoke, as though he were carefully weighing his words before giving them form, adding the pros and cons of answering and whether it was even worth bothering with. A tone of shyness always lay under those words, like he was expecting to be met with mockery or violence and wasn’t sure what to do when it never came.
“What about you, Leon?”
The brunet gave Sora a suspicious glance.
“Hey, I just want to know what kind of people my boyfriend’s living with,” he said with a rakish grin, raising his hands in benevolence. I flushed slightly.
“Computer-science. I was a tech in military school,” he replied succinctly, and Sora and I both looked at him with open astonishment.
“You were in the military?” I asked dumbly.
“Yes.”
Well, that explained some things.
“Whoa,” Sora breathed. “Did you get to fly planes and stuff?”
“No.”
“Techs don’t fly planes, Sora, pilots do,” I pointed out.
“So what did you do?” Sora demanded.
“Security.”
He rolled his eyes. “Gee, that’s helpful. Like, government intelligence kind of security? Were you a spy? Did you have membership cards and decoder rings and mad ninja skills?”
“If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”
“Pfft, fine,” Sora sniffed, and tackled his pizza with wounded aloofness.
(Cloud’s attention was focused with narrowed eyes on
“And you, Sora?”
“Drama geek,” came the laughed admittance. “Mum and Riku figured that since I talk so much, I might as well do something useful with it.”
“You’re good at math and chemistry,” I reminded him. Sora, despite all appearances, was actually rather practical, and had been one of the best chemistry students in high school. He’d come up with some of the most fascinating compounds when the teacher had his back turned, and last I heard the principal was still trying to find a solvent that would get rid of all the sequins glued to classroom doors and teachers’ desks.
His nose scrunched up. “I don’t want to be a chemist. Or an accountant.” He said it the way someone would comment on bird shit dropped on one’s shoulder. “It’s boring. You can’t see the world trapped behind a desk.”
“You also can’t speak foreign languages for crap, so tayn,” I teased with a flawless accent, and he poked my ribs in revenge. “What’re you going to do when you can’t pronounce the Al Bhed word for ‘toilet’?”
“Take a shit in the alley behind some boxes and hope no one more important than a dog notices,” he quipped. “Then I’ll call you from a cramped little telephone booth and demand to know why you aren’t there with me to make things like that unnecessary.”
I didn’t have a smart reply to that. Under cover of the table, I reached for his hand and squeezed it tightly, silently telling him that I wouldn’t let him use any alley for anything.
xxx
Cloud had been poring over the same document on his laptop for so long that when he finally left the dorm, I chanced a look, leaving my book lying open on my bed.
“The Biological Process of Human Decomposition…”
My curiosity bloomed and I skimmed through it, pausing over the words, The bacterial activity, producing methane and carbon dioxide, as well as the breakdown of the cells into fluid causes swelling in the abdominal cavity and in the limbs and face…
I reached for the keyboard, absently noticing that a smooth spot had been worn onto the space-bar and mouse pad. The eventual dehydration, I typed, also gives the illusion of growth in the nails, hair, and teeth, as the skin begins to tighten and retreat back over the bone. This phenomenon was once thought to be a symptom of vampirism, but in reality the nails and hair were already there from life; it is the loss of liquid in the body that—
“What are you doing?”
I tensed, but forced myself to turn around casually. “Adding some details you forgot.”
Cloud stood behind me with his arms crossed and a stormy expression darkening his baby blues. I waited for him to say something, not sure what to expect of him when his attention, for once, wasn’t in a drugged haze or another world completely.
“I don’t need your help.” The phrase sounded like it was rote memorization.
I shrugged and held up my hands in placation. “I wasn’t offering it.” It had been curiosity, not kindness, but the suspicion in his eyes never faded.
“Don’t touch my stuff.”
For a moment I thought he was referring to my snooping activities the other night, but I thought if that had been the case, he would’ve been a hell of a lot more pissed off than he was. “Hyne, afraid I’ll find your kiddie porn? As if I’d care enough to go through your shit.” I raised a sardonic brow at him from under my long hair, not sure if I was daring him to contradict me or not.
He pushed past me and took his seat, scanning over the document as though looking for the bits of literary pornography I must have no doubt slipped in. I snorted and sprawled back over my bed with my book (The Shadow Archetype of Consciousness, by someone with far too many doctorate degrees to be healthy) in both hands and my feet propped carelessly on the headboard. Silence held for a few minutes, during which I vaguely wondered where
“…Thank you.”
I almost didn’t hear him, and he didn’t repeat himself. I grunted and continued reading as his typing began again.
xxx
It was near the end of October. The days had been lengthening and growing colder, just starting to lose the tropical warmth that tended to linger even after summer had officially ended, and I took it upon myself to celebrate those last vestiges with Sora.
My roommates had both been asleep for some time before I gave up the battle with insomnia and slipped out of bed. I sat on the edge of the frame for a moment, tired but sleepless and annoyed at nothing in particular. I didn’t feel like reading anything or listening to my headphones, and fate didn’t even have the courtesy to grant me the amusement of watching Sora snuffle and mutter in his sleep like the overgrown puppy I knew he was.
Of course, I’d never been one to simply leave things to fate.
The cheap carpet silenced my footsteps as I pulled on a shirt and my jacket and carefully put my keys in a pocket, and I was halfway across the room before I felt something small and hard beneath my boot crunch. Leaning down, I picked up the object, and when it rolled about in my palm I realized it was a pill. One guess where it came from.
It was eerie walking the trail that led behind my dormitory towards Sora’s when there were no other students around, talking or smoking or studying, only the sound of twigs cracking beneath my feet and the rustling of bushes when I startled a deer. The night was a little warmer than I’d expected, and a moon approaching fullness cast strange shadows through the trees. The stress that tended to gather between a student’s shoulder blades from balancing classes with a personal life slowly eased the longer I walked in the comforting darkness, until I could take a breath that didn’t feel like it would break my ribs with tension.
The doors on the outside of all dormitory buildings on campus were kept locked at night, after an incident about a decade ago when someone from the city about a mile from the university managed to sneak in and kill several students. Unfortunately for the school, they’d never given me a key for Sora’s dorm.
It took a few wiggles of a penknife and a plastic card before the lock clicked open, and I slipped inside soundlessly. I met no one in the halls, and Sora’s door was even easier than the first. (This pissed me off. If a two-bit former criminal like myself could get in so easily, who the fuck’s to say that another serial killer couldn’t? Where Sora lived, no less? I made a mental note to get
Agonizingly loud snoring was the first thing to assail my ears, making me wince after having gotten used to the quiet. I avoided one side of the dorm and crept to Sora’s corner, wondering how the hell he could sleep with Donald or Ronald or whatever hacking up his own respiratory system.
He was lying on his back with one hand curled near his head, face turned towards me and his expression relaxed in the dim light of the star-shaped nightlight near the headboard. Something in my chest tightened painfully at the sight. I kneeled on the floor by the bed and crossed my arms over the mattress’ edge so I could rest my chin, and watched the way his eyes shifted under their lids as he dreamed. From the way he’d kicked the comforter down to his waist, I could see that he was wearing the old white shirt, worn to a thin softness, with the giant golden chocobo printed on it that had once been mine. He’d borrowed it when we were still in middle school and conveniently always forgot to return it. I conveniently always forgot to call him on it.
Slowly, I reached out and brushed the hair that fallen over his face and stuck to his mouth. His nose wrinkled as he huffed softly, and when I let my hand rest on his cheek, he opened his eyes fuzzily and slowly blinked.
“…R’ku?” he muttered. It took a moment for his tongue and lips to wake up with the rest of him, his voice as heavy with sleep as his eyelids. Then he stretched, the movements boneless and languid, and it was all I could do not to throw my arms around him.
(I don’t care what Sora says—I do not cuddle.)
“Hey, Sora,” I whispered, and almost laughed at the way his foggy smile turned into a confused frown once he realized I was in his dorm in the middle of the night, and I certainly had no key.
“How—“ Then Sora stopped and laughed quietly, swallowing a few times to lessen the sleep-roughness of his voice that sounded just like a warm blanket would, if blankets could talk. “No, I don’t really care,” he sighed, and opened his arms. Obligingly, I shrugged out of my coat, kicked off my untied boots, and crawled into bed with him, burrowing my face into the soft space where his shoulder met his neck. His arms wrapped themselves loosely around my back, holding me down against him, and he wriggled a bit with a drowsy, contented sigh.
There would likely be a few questions come morning, but I was glad he would wait. There was nothing I had to hide from him except perhaps a few sore points in my pride, but that wasn’t the point. Knowing that I could wake him up and steal part of his bed, cold feet and restlessness included, without him demanding explanations or treating me like a scared kid—well, there’s nothing quite like that. Of course, it was probably just as much because of his exhaustion and his own need for cuddling (which I didn’t do, anyway) as anything else, but that didn’t stop the little smile I couldn’t keep off my face if I tried.
The worn shirt against my cheek was like a kid’s security toy, all soft and threadbare and comfortingly familiar. Sora smelled like fresh soap and sleepiness, with an artsy undertone that brought to mind images of acrylic paint and wood that came from helping with the theater sets. Which reminded me, in a few months’ time at the end of the quarter, his class would be expected to put on a performance. It wasn’t a big deal, since it was just the final exam for a freshman acting class, but I knew that secretly it meant a lot to Sora.
I shifted a little, earning an irritated murmur from below me, and felt the last bits of tension slide away like a heavy cloak. Donald’s (or Ronald’s) snores didn’t stop, but Sora’s warmth soothed the homicidal urges telling me that a pillow over the face would shut him up quite effectively. His second roommate, whose name was something ridiculous I could never remember at all, made the occasional dog-like whimper and smacked his lips.
I never appreciated living with
But I managed to push the circus-sounds to the back of my mind and be unabashedly selfish in stealing my boyfriend’s bed-space. It didn’t take long before I was dozing, half-formed images of naughtiness forming in my head, but for once I was too content to seriously consider giving them a practical application.
Part 2
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Date: 2011-03-08 10:52 am (UTC)Plz continue it! I'm hooked!
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Date: 2011-03-08 11:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-12 04:52 am (UTC)