Title: Photo Album
Rating: PG-13
Pairing/Character/s: Ritsuka, Soubi
Word Count:
Warning/s: Dead from school, probably mucho crap.
Summary: Sometimes Ritsuka hates cataloguing his life in pretty pictures and torn off post-it notes. Because you can't make a life from still moments and silly little words.
A/N: I think the summary catches more of what I wanted to portray than the actual drabble. Sorry I'm so absent, it's doubtful I'll be picking up any of my stories soon.

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The fur on Soubi's coat tickled Ritsuka's nose as he shifted on the bus seat. Soubi's hand tightened reflexively around Ritsuka's as the younger boy moved closer to the warmth and sighed. His eyes were open, and usually he'd be keeping his distance and refusing to show affection to Soubi in case he took it as a reward for his lies - but tonight he was tired.

They'd visited Seimei's grave. It had been cold, but Ritsuka had escaped through the window on the second floor and had forgotten a jacket. He didn't mind - he felt he could sympathise better with Seimei, cold like Seimei had been. He'd read somewhere that when fire reached a certain temperature, the heat starts to feel more cold than hot. He'd knelt on the grass and crushed blades of green between his fingers. They smelled of chlorophyll afterwards, reminded him of summer days when Seimei would mow the lawn and Ritsuka would mess about in the paddling pool, splashing his brother and laughing when his ears twitched.

But Soubi was warm.

It had struck him as he left the graveyard, gravestones so old and neglected that the words were covered in moss or illegible, that humans had an odd habit of cataloguing their lives. Photo albums from the time you're born to the time you die, placed on shelves and rarely flicked through. Birth certificates at the beginning, death certificates at the end. Birthdays for every 365 and a quarter days you spend alive, and then a ceremony when you die as well. Anniversaries. Gravestones. Biographies. Memoirs. His grandma had collected fimbles, had one for every special occasion of her life, and his grandad had collected bottle caps. He'd been a big drinker.

It all seemed rather pointless. They weren't great people - they were rather small, really. In a hundred years time, no one would care who Agatsuma Soubi was, and probably no one would know anyway. Faded photographs and a tombstone don't tell of a person. And sometimes he hated it, the way he had to catalogue his life, the way he had to make still-life memories from pixels and posed moments, in the hopes that the Ritsuka who came before and after him would care enough to learn about the Ritsuka who had been sacrificed and died. He hoped the boy who seemed so opposite to him, would have enough human empathy to care about who he had been in his absence, would know how to recreate lives, personalities, stories to go with the photographs and post-it notes he wrote himself.

He doubted it. He knew it would be impossible to recreate his life through the meagre means he had left. But that was all he had, that was all anybody had to show for their lives, and who was he to think he deserved any better? He'd tried, before. Stayed up all night with pictures in his hands and made up moments that had never existed, personalities to go with faces and pasts to go with the pixellated people. It was easy, to make up a life with the things he had left. It was useless. But...he feared oblivion more than anything else. It was too tempting sometimes, to forget about the Ritsuka-that-was and focus on the Ritsuka-that-is, to live in the moment and not worry about photographing it, to let lights burn brightly and burn out before he caught them.

He sighed, shifted closer, and the coat lifted to tuck around him. His fingers threaded in a belt loop, and he could see Soubi smiling in his reflection on the window. A streetlight burned outside, bright orange against dotted black. The after image burned in his eyelids until he fell asleep.

And sometimes he didn't want anyone else to know these moments.