http://clampfix.fanworks.net/x-fix/angels04.txt </head><body><pre>NOTES: Not much happens, except for PostCoital!FxKyou, Fuuma Character Development, a Yuuto cameo, and an tiny little flashback at the end that /I/ think is rather yummy. 'thoughts' /flashbacks/ /"flashback dialogue"/ A little note on characterization: I /am/ aware that people will find some of the interpretations of the characters to be somewhat unusual. Kakyou's in particular. Let's just say, in Kakyou's case, I think it's a /possible/ Kakyou and it /is/ explained. As for Fuuma, I basically hate the "possesion" theory (in other words, I do NOT think that Dork!Fuuma is still in there somewhere). My interpretation of Fuuma is also in here, partly at least. This is all to say, I appreciate comments, but do take into account that these interpretations of the characters aren't exactly the ones lots of people are used to. I /would/ like to know if I'm pulling the characterization off credibly. ^^ ANGEL'S FALL Chapter 4 Fuuma sank back at Kakyou's side, among the tangle of the yumemi's robes and his own haphazardly strewn clothing. "When did you dream up the bedding?" he asked after a minute or so, his voice still a little breathless. Kakyou let out a dry laugh. "Contrary to what you might think, laying on my back on cold floors is not something I find particularly amusing." "Could've fooled me..." Fuuma purred, reaching out to tangle his hand in Kakyou's long hair. He sighed in temporary contentment, his eyes slowly drifting shut. He always needed a few minutes to recover after sex. 'Just for a little while... I can stay here for a little while...' He knew Kakyou was watching him, he could feel the catlike eyes on him. It didn't matter for the moment. For just a moment, he could lie back with his eyes closed and catch his breath. /"You /can/ stay, you know. Just to catch your breath, of course."/ /too tired to leave anyway just this once nothing's going to happen if I stay./ Fuuma frowned slightly, his hand still tangled in Kakyou's hair. /And when his eyes drifted open he found an arm draped over his waist, and a warm body pressed against his back. Words were being whispered in his ear./ Fuuma sat up, his movements brisker than was usual for him. He grabbed his pants and pulled them on, for once not bothering to do it as if he were the star of his own personal porn film. "You're leaving then." It was a statement, not a question, and Kakyou's voice was flat as he delivered it. "I want a smoke." Fuuma replied with a hint of a smirk. Kakyou glanced at him unconcernedly. "You don't smoke." "I don't?" "A drag or two to get under the skin of whoever happens to be sakurazukamori doesn't qualify you as a nicotine addict. It just makes you annoying." Nevertheless, a box of cigarettes materialized in Kakyou's hands. "/Real/ cigarettes." Fuuma protested as Kakyou made as if to hand them to him. The yumemi merely shrugged gracefully. "I don't see the difference." "I wouldn't expect you to." Fuuma replied as he got to his feet. "They're no less real than what we just did, and you seemed to enjoy that just fine." Kakyou continued in a bored tone of voice. "Why don't you just say you can't stand the thought of actually /staying/ with someone you just fucked?" Fuuma didn't reply. The air crackled around him as he collected the energy necessary to rip a hole through the wall of Kakyou's paper prison. "Sweet dreams, Kakyou." He said in his usual slow drawl, his hand lazily tracing the contour of Kakyou's jaw. With that, he left the dreamscape, emerging at the side of Kakyou's bed, right where he'd entered. The silence was interrupted only by the blipping monitors and Kakyou's light, even breathing. Fuuma looked down at the comatose yumemi for a long time before walking out of the room. * * * * * * * * * * * * * The void that the Dark Kamui had ripped in the dreamscape's fabric didn't simply banish after he left. It seemed to harden around the edges and then contract, closing quickly but gradually. Much the way a bloody scar might harden and then close, except much faster. Kakyou wondered briefly what it must be like, to know you left scars in your wake the way the Kamui of the Dragons of Earth did. Perhaps that wasn't entirely fair. The seventeen year old had as much potential to heal as to scar. And some types of healing left horrible scars. Kakyou glanced down at the pack of cigarettes in his hand. Thoughtfully, he tapped one out of the box. A lighter appeared in his hand, and he lit the cigarette. He held it delicately between his slender fingers, studying the way the edge burned as the smoke rose up. "/Real/ cigarettes? Do I even know what they smell like?" Not first hand, of course. His knowledge of that, as of so much else, came from second hand experience. In this case, it came from nine years of spying in on Sumeragi Subaru's dreams in the hope of catching fleeting glimpses of the onmyouji's dead sister. The smell of nicotine had come at first from Subaru's memories of Seishirou. Eventually, as the onmyouji became more and more a pale shadow of the boy he had been, the smell had ceased to be a memory of another. And over the past few months, Kakyou had gotten a still sharper knowledge of it, from a source much more immediate. Fuuma's breath never smelled of cigarettes - the real reason Kakyou knew he didn't smoke except as a sometime affectation - but his clothes often did, a silent testimony of the company he kept. He closed his eyes for a moment and brought the cigarette to his lips, poised to inhale. Instead he wrinkled his nose in distaste. He flicked the cigarette away, and both it and the lingering smell disappeared in the shadows of the dreamscape. "You were right. It really is a disgusting habit." Kakyou stood and picked up the discarded robe and slid it around his shoulders, shrugging into it with an unconscious grace. He frowned at the hastily conjured bedding, and the last evidence of what had happened between him and the Dark Kamui vanished. The seventeen year old Kamui was not the company Kakyou would have chosen. But any company was better than none, and Fuuma's occasional, odd tenderness had proved to be a surprising comfort in Kakyou's otherwise dreary existence. The yumemi had come to almost enjoy the visits, despite Fuuma's often caustic moods and the frequent and spontaneous bursts of desire that just /had/ to be satisfied. But not this time. The power to know the future through dreams is a funny, erratic thing. It's always too late when a yumemi sees a vision of the future, but these visions can come minutes or years before the fact. Sometimes they come in bits and pieces, spread out over time. And there's no guarantee that a yumemi will know the reasons for what is seen. Long before ever laying eyes on the dark, handsome teenager, Kakyou had known that he would meet someone who could make Wishes come. He had also known that this person would promise to grant his. Recently, however, Kakyou had learned that he would break that promise. Tonight, Kakyou had been sure that for the first time, Fuuma had meant to stay. The teenager had seemed altogether too content and relaxed laying beside him in the aftermath of sex. And Kakyou was thankful for whatever it was that had darkened the young man's expression and made him change his mind. The Dark Kamui was the last person he wanted to be spending time with at the moment. * * * * * * * * * * * * * The wind whipped Subaru's coat around him as he paused to light a cigarette. He leaned against the wall of one the buildings adjoining the alley, thinking the night was almost disturbingly quiet. The fact that it was almost 2 in the morning didn't matter in his estimation, and the thought that perhaps what disturbed him was the absence of an amused, taunting drawl breaking the silence of his life never occurred to him. He smoked in silence for a couple of minutes, finally snubbing out the half-smoked cigarette on the wall he was leaning against. He took off his bloody glove and placed it in the pocket of the red trench coat before pushing himself off the wall and leaving the alley. It had been almost five nights since the sleeping city seemed quieter and empty. Five nights since nothing and no one had cracked the cold shell of his detachment. He was beginning to see the truth in Seishirou's long gone words, about there being little difference between a rock and a human being to the Sakurazukamori. * * * * * * * * * * * * * It was mid-afternoon the next day when Subaru stepped out for a walk. He very seldom left Seishirou's house before noon. It wasn't that got home late and therefore slept late, in truth, he hardly slept at all. Mornings simply didn't agree with him anymore. Afternoons, however, appealed to him. There was something about the way shadows began to lengthen and the light began to fade in a crimson, almost bloody way that called out to something deep within the onmyouji. One might almost have said that it moved him. He didn't get much farther than his front door that afternoon. Waiting in the shadows across the street stood a tall man, dressed in impeccable suit and coat, blonde hair tousled by the breeze. As Subaru stepped from the house, the man crossed the street and came to meet to him. "Sumeragi Subaru, I presume?" he asked in a light, courteous voice. He held out his hand, and Subaru shook it somewhat bemusedly "My name is Kigai Yuuto. I've been looking for you."Ê "And why would that be, if I may ask?" "An associate of mine requests your presence at City Hall. I am here to convey the invitation." "And just who is waiting at City Hall that is so eager for my company?" The man called Yuuto smiled in what could have been either amusement or common courtesy. "Why, the other Dragons of Earth, sakurazukamori." * * * * * * * * * * * * * Waiting, Fuuma decided irritably, was the single most excruciatingly mind-numbing experience a human being could be subjected to, either by choice or by force. It wasn't that he had nothing /to do/ while he waited... it was simply that one can never fully be distracted from it. No matter /what/ you do to pass the time, in the back of your mind you always know you're waiting. It was the uncertainty implicit in waiting that irritated him. Fate and personal history had made Fuuma somewhat obsessive about control. He knew that, in the end, his own destiny was largely out of his hands... which was all the more reason to keep as tight a rein as possible over the details of his life as it approached it's inexorable conclusion. If he was going to be asked to give his life in a cosmic, apocalyptic struggle, he'd be damned if that life wasn't going to be /exactly/ what he wanted it to be. One could argue (and Kanoe often did, intrusive bitch that she was) that this made him rash, impulsive and extremely fallible. It was true of course. Over the past few months, Fuuma had become what might be best described as addicted to instant gratification. This would have been seemed very unlikely to anyone that had known the young man a mere year ago, but in truth, it wasn't so very strange. Fuuma, was, after all, a teenage boy... and a teenage boy that had spent most of his life putting /his/ need for self-gratification in the back seat while he concentrated on trying to meet unrealistic expectations. It didn't really matter whether this expectations came from an outside source, like his father, his teachers or the memory of a dead mother, or whether he set them himself while trying to fit into molds which he had always felt were too restrictive. No matter how much he repressed himself, he always fell short, he always had this vast sense of insatisfaction, of never being truly sated. For a long time, Fuuma had known that the walls he'd built around his true self were cracking. He'd known the level of self-denial he imposed on himself would break, and that possibly he would break with it. This had indeed happened. After all, what boy Fuuma's age, when suddenly finding himself the vessel of incontainable power, wouldn't react precisely as he had, throwing aside rules and conventions and even morality? What seventeen-year-old boy, upon discovering he was virtually an unstoppable force wouldn't automatically assume that he was entitled to satisfy his desires when and where they struck? There was no longer anyone he had to answer to, and as for the one person that might have stopped him... well, Kamui didn't really seem to be trying very hard. /"I wouldn't expect you to understand it. Seeing as how you subscribe to the 'I see, I want, I take' mentality."/ As always, Kakyou's words from five days ago had been scathingly on the mark. But however impulsive he might be, Fuuma was far from an idiot. He was also uncannily perseptive, and the years of repressing himself had taught him an iron self-control, which he could exercize if the situation required. If the possible rewards were tempting enough. Fuuma was well aware that this particular game called for patience and a machiavellian scheming of the sort he didn't usually bother with. Which left only /one/ real question... Was Subaru worth the wait? /"Was it worth it? Waiting six years to play your little game with a teenage boy?" he'd asked, no more than mildly curious./ /Seishirou had laughed softly, his fingers trailing across the skin of Fuuma's bare back./ /"Of course. Beautiful young men are always worth it, whether they're the Thirteenth Head of the Sumeragi Clan, or overconfident sluts at the mercy of their hormones."/ /And Fuuma had closed his eyes as the older man's lips grazed the back of his neck and the hands moving over his body became more aggresive; not caring if Seishirou was laughing at him, or using him just as much as he'd used the Sumeragi nine years before./</pre><p><a href="./">Back</a></p><p><a href=http://www.dreamhost.com/donate.cgi?id=216><img border=0 alt="Donate towards our web hosting bill!" src=https://secure.newdream.net/donate1.gif></a></p></body></html>