It was sunny, the day that Tohma took him home. Sunny like the day that (he killed) Yuki-sensei had died. Sunny like the day they had visited the grave, like it could provide Eiri any closure at all. Sunny like that most terrible day of all.
Don't think about it.
Eiri closed his eyes wearily, then opened them straight away. He didn't want to close his eyes ever again - what played out on the back of his eyelids were things he never wanted to see again. Concentrate instead on the sunlight filtering through the tiny windows of the plane - of the distance shrunk people outside waving their arms and loading luggage - of the people inside, chattering, laughing, living blessedly content lives that never felt the taint of hatred or - no. Concentrate on-
Tohma was taking him home. After everything - a blur of officials, of soberly sympathetic men and women interviewing him, of his 'innocence' being proven, hah! - he could finally go home. He could go home.
Strange, how he ached to return to the place he had always fled from. But now he just wanted to go home, and seal the outside world away. Forever.
Bookworm
By Aishiteru
Vignette: Muse of Mine
He tried to seal the world away, but his memories taunted him mercilessly.
"Eiri, language is the most important thing. Without language we wouldn't be able to communicate anything. So, even if you'll always speak English with a Japanese accent - which I doubt - you need to know how to express yourself. And in Japanese as well."
Shut up. Shut up.
"I'm not mad at all."
Liar!
"Eiri, isn't this what you've always wanted? Weren't you attracted to me?"
No! Not like this...
"You're a good boy..."
Never like this.
Language, language, the language was constantly racing through his fevered mind. Everything they had said and did repeated mindlessly, endlessly. He had no rest. There was no rest for him.
"No rest for the wicked, Eiri-kun!"
Cheerful, scolding, affectionate. That was the worst.
"After you."
Or maybe not. He could never decide which was the worst.
"I'm not mad at all."
In the end, the actions had spoken louder then anything Yuki had said. Yuki. Yuki, Yuki. Kitazawa Yuki.
And Eiri would huddle in on himself, tighter and tighter, his breaths coming hard and fast, and the conversations of sunny days would reel wildly through his mind, and he replied as best as he could.
"One day, Eiri, I'm going to write a book. A great book. You'll see."
"A book, sensei. What kind."
"A romance novel. People think they're such trash, but in the end, the only stories worth telling are love stories. The interactions between people is what makes the world go around."
"I though gravity did that sensei." His mouth was dry from the endless repetition.
"You're so funny, Eiri-kun. Hahaha."
Cue the delighted giggle. It wouldn't come. "I'm sorry sensei. I truly believe in you. You'll write a classic, I know it."
"And you'll be the first one to read it, right Eiri-kun?"
"Of course."
He didn't realize what he was doing - the pen was in his hands, and Yuki's voice was in his head, dictating in his measured teasing way. It was all so natural for him to write it down - they had worked that way for so long, Yuki concentrating only on his inspiration, while Eiri patiently wrote everything down, and was in prime position to be the first to read it. They had spent infinite days doing this - in the park in summer, bathed in sunshine, in Yuki or Tohma's apartment in winter, enveloped in the warmth of companionship during those still cold days. It was good practice for Eiri's English after all.
So he snatched up a pen and wrote, on anything and everything, working feverishly. He had to get the words down; who knew when Sensei would have inspiration again?
"My muse has deserted me, Eiri-kun."
Such weary words, and they always ended the spell of delicate scribbled words. And then, as always, Eiri was finally free to properly appreciate what Yuki (they) had written. He choked.
Long chains of words, scrawled in black, red, blue pen, bruising the clean white walls of his bedroom, on the desk, on the drawers, everywhere. There was the acid taste of bile mingled with the sharp metallic bite of blood in his mouth, and he was screaming his rage, pounding wildly at the walls, tearing at the table, and bashing at it helplessly with whatever came at hand, anything, anything to erase those words. Everywhere was the ruin of his life, of Yuki's life, of-
Their story. Yuki's story.
Eventually he was overcome with dizziness and the exhaustion of not eating or sleeping for several days. Eiri slumped brokenly in the wreckage, suffocating on his own blood.
And that was how Tohma and Mika found him when they finally managed to break the door down.
After that, it was like a fire had been lit in him. He stayed in his repaired room, and wrote in a fury. It was always Yuki's voice in his head - that kind gentle lying voice. Endless scenarios. He stripped what had happened in New York (our story) down to the bare minimals. He took away the question of gender. He took away their ages.
He took everything away except their own true selves.
You took everything away.
And Eiri wrote, and he wrote, and their story played out a million, billion, trillion times before he understood.
It was his fault. All along he had driven Yuki to it.
I was responsible for all of this, and then I killed him.
And Eiri cried.
Eventually, it seemed that he had come to - well not a peace, but a precarious balance in himself. He didn't stop crying, but at least the tears weren't constantly blinding him, and what had seemed endless was really finite. He was sixteen years old, but he felt ancient, and he had written a book. Several books really, but it was all the same old song, echoing in variation. Da capo al fine. Sometimes on particularly bad days he would take out all that they had written, and read. It was Sensei's voice, Sensei's romantic overtones that pervaded the scribbled script. Sometimes it was Eiri's only comfort.
More often, it was his penance.
And one day - one not particularly special day - he could read the whole manuscript without tears clouding his eyes, or blood clogging his throat.
He was sixteen. He slowly - well, not healed, that would not happen for real, not until the bitterness and jaded sense of the world had really set in, at all of twenty-two years of age, ready for a pink haired idiot to shatter his realizations. But. He began to live with his new self. He sealed the manuscript, the photos, and the memories away, as best as he could, releasing them only in his worst moments. And then he would write.
Surely they noticed it too - the caustic remarks, the cold comments, the hours spent alone. But no one said a word, and he was growing up, wasn't he? They weren't responsible for him much longer. Or so he told himself.
His voice broke. He grew taller. He graduated, went to college, was antisocial and didn't make any friends despite the fact that people flocked to him for his beauty. They were soon turned off by his personality. He was ice. Snow. Yuki.
Ah, god, it made him laugh.
And one day he considered what he was going to do. Such a bright and shining future Uesugi-kun has. Everyone said so. If only he would open up more, share more of himself.....
Two years worth of counseling, paid through the nose by Tohma hadn't done a thing.
Well, what could he really do? He hated talking to idiots, which included most of the human population, although Eiri could be charming when he felt like it. In fact, it amused him, to charm others, then slam the rude door of his reality in their faces. It was a game that broke up the pointlessness of his life some what. A pointless life that was soon going to end in poverty if he didn't do something.
So he ended up doing what Eiri always, however grudgingly does in difficulty. He talked to Tohma.
His brother-in-law smiled that deceivingly benign smile of his. "What do you do best, Eiri-san? What do you do with your time ordinarily anyway?"
Unspoken was the promise between them - that Tohma would always take care of him anyway. He didn't have to do anything really.
So he sat in his room, stewed in his resentment that the older man would always be there, his resentment and mingled relief. He really hated Tohma sometimes.
What did he do best, anyway?
Cause trouble, his father's voice barked in his head.
Besides that.
Nothing. Nothing at all. He didn't want to think about it.
He went and got drunk for a couple of days, and slept around. Plenty of people to do that with, when you had Uesugi Eiri's good looks and unusual coloring.
And when he came back home, head throbbing, and irritable as usual, he found Tohma. And a manuscript, neatly typed up, sitting on the table.
Strange, he could still remember the precise details of that morning - the way the morning sunlight stabbed in dazzling bursts into his grainy eyes, off the glass table, the polished wooden flooring. Dazzling reflected off the crisp folds of Tohma's immaculate clothing - dark hued and green, brilliant blue shirt, all designed to bring out the colour of his eyes. Long slender fingers clasped together, sheathed in dark leather, resting by the letter slashed papers.
"What's this? Going into the publishing business now, Tohma?" he had quipped.
Tohma had smiled. The perfect opening, and Eiri had offered it without thinking. "Not me, Eiri-san. You."
"Me?" A growl, but there was no real surprise. He had known what that manuscript was already, in his heart.
"I've contacted a friend of mine. They'd be delighted to publish, but." A short pause, and a quiet flick of pale blonde hair out of his eyes. "But I suggest you take a pen name. Because of your youth. And especially with that sort of subject. Or for you to change the names of your characters a little, perhaps."
Eiri snorted, and retreated into his room.
Damn Tohma.
He thought about it for a while.
He hauled his copy of their story out of storage. From the bottom of the cupboard, in a dust covered shoe box actually. It didn't look particularly disturbed, but he didn't bother wondering how Tohma had managed to copy it.
He read through the whole lot dispassionately, selected the most generic version, and made the occasional change, tweaked the odd incoherent phrase here and there back into coherency, dissecting the language. And when it was finished, when everything was neat and ordered, and he had typed it out himself, and printed off multiple copies, he stacked them into different boxes, and addressed them to various publishers. If he was going to do this, he wasn't going to be beholden to Tohma. Again.
Stubborn, aren't you, Eiri-kun. Husky whisper, lurking presence in the back of his mind. Still with him even after all the years.
All that was left was a name. In reality, he had known what it would be all the time, during the preparation.
With a bitter laugh, he picked up his pen, and scrawled the kana down - a merging of names that was far more appropriate then his birth christening.
He looked down at the words. Yuki Eiri. Black etched on white.
"After all." he said, leaning back in his seat, and staring at the ceiling. It was as good a place to stare as any. "We wrote this together. Didn't we."
"Sensei."
Author's Note:...........Ooookay, that was crappy. It was originally supposed to be in one of the two chapters of bookworm, but all that WAFF simply crowded it out. This was the angst component. But it's crappy. It's beyond crappy, but it's a part of Bookworm, and I though you'd all like to know what's been stopping me from writing that promises Nittle Grasper's beginnings fic. Apart from Tohma's OOC'ness anyways. *grumps*. Tohma's a lump to write about for the whole story. And Ryuuichi is as well. Maybe I'll give it a go from Noriko's POV....Argh. Scrap that. They're all hard!
Anyway, it has a title now. "Dragon's Fame." Should be a couple of one shot wonders, of how they meet, the rise to fame, what they do once they're famous, the writing of Sleepless Beauty, and the break up. Possibly the return. Who knows? I'll see if I can get cracking on it. I wrote some crap about Tohma's childhood, but blech. Into the recycling you go, first draft.
Anyway, flames will be duly accepted. This vignette was definitely substandard, but at least it's out of my head now, and I can actually try to write well for Ryuuichi and Tohma. Urgh, and did you catch the Moulin Rouge phrases? That's what happens when I watch DVDs.....Actually when I was writing 'their story' I was more thinking of Tidus...I'm so unoriginal. Oh well. That's why I'm writing fanfiction - I don't have to check myself so much. In original work, I have to be careful. Blech.
Review replies:
Thanks everyone, for your reviews! Apologies to everyone who reviewed on the gurabiteshiyon.net site; I didn't reply to the first chapter on that. I'll reply to you all now, k?
Thanks for all your compliments, you silver tongued reviewers! And all your critiques are muchly appreciated.
FF.net reviews:
novasenshi: Thanks, glad to hear that you liked Yuki's stories. I don't know about sexy though...o.O And really, I did write about what Yuki said about Shuichi in the last book! I did!
Megamie: Yup, I'll leave it to the Gravi fans imaginations. ^__^.
Leifang: ^_________^. YAY! I like it when I manage to characters in character. They're so icky when they're not.
Little Kaori: Well, here's sort of more....even though it's icky.
Shenya: Thanks. I thought the pacing was a bit abrupt at the end too, but I just couldn't think of any other way to end it.
Natascha: Heh. considering I pretty much just borrowed the storylines of Gravi....But that's what everyone wanted I think. I tried doing something different with the second chapter with Yuki's novels in the first version, and my beta reader said, "ICK." So, I went back to rewriting Gravi.
Blueraingirl: ^______^! Well, this isn't really a continuation, as much as it is an expansion.
Kiora: YOU HENTAI!!! XD. These innocent eyes have only seen the Gravi anime, and not the manga. I hear that is much more explicit though.....o.O Heh, I'll see what I can do about Y/S fluff, though the first two chapters were fluffy enough. Maybe a one shot wonder...no. I have to work on the Nittle Grasper fic....*chants*. Heh. I hope I can get Ryuuichi IC again. It's hard to make him just hyper enough, but not too hyper....
panatlantic, Angel Tomoe Hotaru, kazuki: Hee, you should hopefully get some more of Ryuuichi soon. Sorry for the triple reply. T_T.
Kamikakushi: *blush* Thank you. And yes, I adore Ryuuichi. Almost as much as Yuki. Well, maybe the same, in a different way...*the fangirl has reappeared* Well, I never go away really...
Windsong: ^___________^. Thanks for putting me on your favourites! It makes me so happy when people do that. I hope you're better now.
LB: O.O *i.e horrified wide eyes death looks of Aishiteru* NOT SEEN GRAVI!!!!!!!!????? ARRRGH!!!!!!!!!!
Katsumi: ^__________________^. (jeez, the Totoro smiled just seem to get larger and larger as I reply, don't they?) Thank you. And originally, they weren't supposed to be in McDonalds, they were supposed to be in the Japanese version, Lotteria as I seem to remember it's called. But, too much confusion, not enough people would know what that is, I think. Even though they make the best teriyaki chicken burger....*mouth waters*. So hence, McDonalds! ..........I know, I know, it doesn't really matter. XD. My mind works in strange ways. Anyway, I'm really looking forward to the next chapter of Hitori. It really sucks when schoolwork gets in the way of writing, doesn't it?
Ayako: XD. I couldn't believe I finished, and looks like Yuki wasn't finished with me. I TRIED to get cracking on the NG fic, I really did. Too bad everything I tried to write, Yuki kept getting in the way, and it turned to absolute bollocks. Hee hee, English slang! I'm so immature, I know...
Leina: Yup, there should be more from me in the Gravi section, it's such an addictive genre, and there's so much you can do. Yay for Ryu-chan!
apsik: The WAFF....Oh no....I can't believe it's WAFF! The next ones should be a little sadder, as they're about NG.
Celeste, Tinki-chan, Lynne: Cute, Cute, Sweet. Awwww. Thanks guys. Glad to see I could get the WAFF inspired in you. ^____________________^. Sorry for the group reply...
Gurabiteshiyon.net readers:
TeeDee: Thanks. *blush* Adorable, huh? I should hope there's no spelling errors - I know my spelling has deteriorated since Year 6, but I'm still okay most of the time. And I did use spell check. *beams*.
Hiei: This site is pretty cool too, isn't it? For all Gravi fic addicts.
Anahita: All things must come to an end....XD.
Andrea: 3 times!? Wow...That makes me feel special.
Desperado Surgoi: I tried my best to make the IC. And yes, K's Engrish amuses me endlessly.
nik: Oh? I don't think you're stupid....You're reading aren't you? Maybe it is a little confusing...Shuuichi's upset because Yuki wrote all those books, and he feels bad because he hasn't read any of them, whereas Yuki goes to all his concerts...Or he does in my version of the Gravi world. Or, if the bit earlier, it's because Yuki says that only the annoying aspects of his character are based on Shuuichi.
Anomay: Heh, more in depth with how he copes. But it's icky. T_T. Oh well, crazy Yuki served. Thank you for all the compliments *gets pin to pop head back down to normal size* Anyway, I make mistakes on my reviews all the time, and it's so embarrassing, isn't it?