fandom: loveless
title: sketch lines.
pairing: soubi + ritsuka
rating: pg
Description - "I want to be a painting…Your painting, Ritsuka-kun. Repaint me," Soubi asked.

Disclaimer - Kouga Yun-sama owns Loveless.

sketch lines.
By miyamoto yui

Red.
Green.
Blue.
Mix and more…

All the colors are dripping on the floor…

"What's wrong? Didn't you say that you could take anything?" I asked with a slightly irate tone as I gestured with my palm pointing towards the horrible, running painting. "What _are_ these dripping colors? You call this art? What have I been teaching you all this time?"

Your blank face stares back at mine with thin lips making a straight line.
The only movement you make is an unconscious one, when you blink. You don't make a single sound as I scold you in a calm manner, boiling in my anger.

It is a voice that even I'm not used to.

"You asked me to teach you how to draw and yet you still don't understand the basics…" I sighed as my eyes regarded the painting with disgust.

It was created by those hands that I held a billion times. The ones that pierced deeper into me than anything in the world…

But by this time, there are tears in your frustrated eyes. Your hands are in fists and this is the master that I've come to recognize. You are confused as you look at me with protest with eyes holding such loneliness.
"I only learned that I had any talent in anything because of you, Soubi!"

Time has stopped.

Blue.

Drip…drip…drip.
We hold our breath as we wait for the other to move, but we are silent.

I look at you and glance at the painting. Your eyes are also stealing quick glimpses at the colors dropping like rain on the wooden floor.

I turn my eyes away from you and I look at the photograph-like painting. That's what I taught you about Japanese art: it's meshing the real, the unknown, and the unreality.
If we have a picture, we only paint with what we know. We only take it from the perspective that we want to perceive it in.

Green.

Just like all memories.
They're all biased, don't you know that?

I blink my eyes and I begin to understand. It isn't you at all…

These are your feelings…

Red.

…bleeding for me.

Your voice echoes in the wooden art room. "Your expressionless face never told me anything. It was always your paintings. The ones I fell in love with."

Then, we both look at the small simple sketch encased in a black-rimmed, rectangular frame. It's you with a chain on your neck while you're hugging your knees. Your big eyes are small here because they're smiling. And your lips are in an 'o' shape because you were trying to call my name.

A picture I captured inside of my mind. There is an apparent, yet bright contrast between the darkness of night in your eyes and the light in your brilliant smile.

This is another piece of pain from you to me.

I watch you as you're watching me.
"What happened to me? Why's it come to this?" My fingertips touch the wet paint.

I glimpse at you as you're anticipating my next move.

My fingers spread out and I touch your painting, pressing my palm against the canvas as if absorbing the energy of the once reverberant colors.

It is then that I take off my hand and wipe it all over my immaculately white shirt.

"What are you-" you begin to say with the puzzled expression that always encompasses your face whenever you're with me.

I can't ever utter a word of the most important things that need to be said to my precious person. This is the person I fell in love with so deeply that I didn't know what else to do but tell him with my straight face trying not lose control of myself. My frigid, facial expressions wouldn't show the truth that flowed through my warm fingertips whenever I touched you.

This painting…
This is me.

And to think that I would make you feel so much pain and make you cry when I'm always next to you…

I press my fingers on my chest as I stand in front of you like a madman with a calm face.

"I want to be a painting…

Your painting, Ritsuka-kun.
Repaint me."

The boy that used to fight me is sighing. His hands are still in fists, but more than anything, he's fighting himself.

I know…
I know you're very tired…
Just like me.

There are tears in your eyes, as your words come out like a poem with the rain's rhythm:

I painted and painted your face in my mind
onto the blank canvas that I held
in both of my arms.
The paint is dripping and you look at me
and say that it's the worse thing
I've ever made.

And then I tell you with my eyes, "You're mad because you know."

I stand here with no expression.
You know I don't know how to smile, cry, or laugh.
My face can't do such things.
I made myself this way because it hurt too much to care
and so I can't come out anymore.

You paste your hands onto the dripping colors
and wipe them on your clothes.
But you don't seem to fully understand even though you do that.

My silence pleads, "I only painted for you."

Then, you look at me and ask me, "Repaint me"?
I shake my head.

"Haven't you always known, Soubi?"

He goes over to the sink and fills a yellow bucket full of water. He walks up in front of me.
You're so mad that the hot tears are falling down with pride going down with each drop.

"I want to splash it on you
because I'm so upset.
I'm crying deep inside.

I smile at you,
with all the colors and brilliance lost."

He positions the bucket. I am ready for my punishment. Maybe that's one of the things I always look forward to. If you show me what I've done wrong, then I can start to feel something.
It shows me that I'm existing…

But…
...you splash it on yourself.

You've disappeared.

Your voice is in the air and my mouth is open and I'm too shocked to cry.

"I'm splattered all over the floor.
You can't recognize me.

I was the first thing you ever painted,
with the heart that wanted me to come to life.
But the person who wished for me

isn't here anymore.

And therefore,
I no longer have

a purpose
to exist."

I get up abruptly from my bed and I cover my tired eyes with my hands. Upset by the nightmare, I rub my eyes because I don't want to see the tears that are there. I feel them on my palms, but I won't acknowledge them.

"I didn't know I'd fall in love with you.
And because of that, you're changing into someone you can't even recognize."

Ritsuka, I…

…

I immediately get up and rush over to his school.
Kio calls me with an irritated tone. "With the Aoyagi boy again, aren't you?"
"I need to do something important," I say while smoking a cigarette.
With an insipid, sarcastic tone, he answers, "Certainly."

Before I call him, my phone is already ringing. I answer it with the harsh, yet wonderful voice telling me, "Let's do something."

In some way, you knew I needed you today, didn't you?
After all, I want to believe we're connected.

When we're walking to the park, you see my small sketchbook.
"Soubi, I want to see your work."
I blink at him and stop walking with the cold wind blowing between us.

Was this true? Were you interested in knowing more about me?
Were you falling in love with me?

But surely, not as fast as me for you…
You're young, after all.

They say that older people know better. Like hell they do.
They just know how to deny things better because they're so much deeper.

This is a time when wisdom doesn't benefit with experience.
It embeds the feelings even further, on the brink of being hurt more than the last time…

"Then, model for me, Ritsuka-kun."

He looks away. Then, he looks at the sky for an answer.
Anywhere but at my face.

His eyes land on the sketchbook again.
"Just don't ask me to do anything weird."

Pleased, I smile as we head over to the park. I stand in front of a tree. I lean my back on it as he watches me with curiosity. "Aren't you going to ask me what to do?"
"Just do as you always have."

Confused, he takes out his camera and takes pictures. He wonders why I'm not doing anything. I've not even opened my sketchbook.

When he's tired, he sits on a stone table out in the middle of nowhere. It's the one where I first kissed him, lying that I wouldn't do anything.

There was that 'more' implied, but, of course, he didn't understand that part.
Yet.

"I'm getting bored."

Under the nearly setting sun, I find the inspiration to draw him. I open the sketchbook as he sits at the edge of the table while swinging his legs like a little kid.

No, he _is_ a little kid.
Nope, he's not at the same time.

He puts his camera down to one side and holds onto the ledge while looking up at the sky again. Then, his eyes wander. They are now staring directly at me.

It is a look of firmness.
It is an air of confidence.

It looks out of place on that cute face that I've adored thus far.
This face's structure and expression bother me.

Skritch, skritch, skritch, skritch, skritch…
Line by line, I'm composing lines that connect and disconnect.

The eyes…the face…
Those lips…
That body…

I look up and blink at him for a full half-minute.
I catch my breath.

I didn't like his eyes looking at me so eccentrically.

And it is then that I recognize it…
It is Seimei's almighty expression.

And my heart stops beating. For a moment, it cringes even though I'm vigorously sketching as he looks at me with those eyes that won't look stop looking at me.

With a pained smile, I announce, "I'm finished."

Finished, indeed…

I come over to him and sit beside him as he puts his camera back into his bag. "You sure took a long time."
"These things don't come instantaneously, you know," I tell him as I give him the sketchbook.

Silently, he goes over the pages. He's flipping over the pages and tilts his head from side to side.

"Hey, this is my room. You've gotten it exactly. You've only been there about a couple of times."
"I remember everything you've touched."

Deeper than anything you would like to know, Ritsuka-kun…

His facial expressions change from sketch to sketch.
I laugh slightly and am glad because his innocence has returned. That face touched by sorrow is temporarily gone.
That is the face that tells me I'm not lonely also…

But it all vanishes as he goes onto the last page.

"It looks like Seimei…" he mumbles before he can catch and take back his own words.

"This is you," I say.
"But without my cat ears."
"That's where you and Seimei differ."
"We were different in a lot of ways. I want…to be like him…"

I don't want you to grow up…

Suddenly, my arms wrap around him and the drawings fall onto the grass.
"Soubi?"

No, you aren't like him. Not at all.
I know that now.

When I became lost in yesterday, I wanted to hopelessly understand what that power was. What was that thing that connected the both of us?
If I could call you by name, wouldn't I just make the wound more and more deep? Couldn't I go on without knowing?

Yet, wherever I go, you're sure to watch.
You are always with me.

At times when I want you there and at times when I wish you were gone, doesn't it all mean the same thing? What do you want from me?

Why do I want you so much?

It doesn't make sense.

Take me into your hands and reshape me. Break me and then kill me even more. Hurt me until I become beautiful in your eyes.

I hold onto your hands. Your fingers are so cold.

I bring them to my lips and suck on them, but they don't warm up.
Your cheeks are growing redder though.

I don't even know your true name,
but I know we've been here before.

This place where we've been alone all our lives.

I don't want to lose you, but the more I am with you, you will change. I will change too.
And we don't know if we'll be recognizable to one another.

So, I love it when I tease you and you still protest back. It shows that you're still independent in some way, but you see, I've become a child dependant on you.
I need you.

I can't live without you now.

You close your eyes and snuggle against me.

But I know, one day, you'll grow to hate me for confusing you so much.

And being the way I am, I'll be satisfied with that.
After all, it'll become a memory from you to me and me to you.

Red -
blood and lips.
Yellow -
sun.
Green -
hope.
Blue -
tears.

From the moment we met,
the one thing we were both scared of from the start
is beginning towards the bitter end.

One painful color into another…
…until it's all gray sketch lines,

fading into white,
erased of everything.

Our memories,
consciously,
forgotten on purpose.

Owari.
-
Author's note: Yeah, I know it's weird. Soubi's a strange character to do. ;_; I didn't think he would be super hard, but he's as difficult as Yuki Eiri, Sakurazuka Seishirou, and Mustang Roy.

It was also challenging because Soubi's and Ritsuka's characters are so elusive and they're not clearly defined. They reflect their confusion on each other.
But the idea for this fic came out of a story and poem I had made a few days ago. And I thought it would be interesting to try it here.

I hope you enjoyed the fic. It was really hard to make. It's easier for me to relate to Ritsuka, so it flows better with him. And I tried to make Soubi both childish and grown up at the same time.

Thanks always for your support.

Love always,
Yui

April 23, 2005, 5:08 AM