Fandom: Yami no Matsuei
Title: kotoba. (words.)
Pairing: Tsuzuki + Hisoka
Rating: G
Description: Hisoka talks to a girl who is painting, but not the scene that is before her.

Disclaimer: Yami no Matsuei isn't mine, but Yukie and the "song" is.

The waves of the ocean are coming back and forth, back and forth. In its ecstasy and desperate state, its fingers helplessly cling onto the sand that offers no comfort or anything firm to hold onto. Back and forth, it crashes with all its cries silenced suddenly with no one taking the time to hear its plea. It lives and yet it doesn't. For can something so cold be able to live? It moves but it doesn't feel anything because it is nothing but water?

Just because I stand here silently waiting for an answer doesn't mean that time stands still. No, time goes by and I patiently wait with a hope that I know may never come true.

The ocean is livelier than me. And yet, I am still counted, with this inflicted soul, as among "the living".

Even when my blood flows away as fast and as temperamental as the crashing of the sea with my heart becoming numb to everything around me?

kotoba. (words.)
By miyamoto yui

Even though I knew he would worry and become frantic by the time he realized that I had gone out by myself, all I could think was that I didn't want to be at that office. I was suffocated by its walls and the thought of staying there for a moment longer somehow sickened me to no end. I wanted to throw up from the queasiness I felt about everything around me.

I was overworked, both inside and out. I would go to work and then I would sleep. Actually, I would lie awake at night and my thoughts would lead to things that weren't so good to think about. Then I would cover my eyes with my palms to force myself to see the darkness. But even my mind's eye wouldn't let me sleep. The image haunted me. These images that would flash into my head and lead from one thing to another. I tried to distract myself, but it never helped at all.

Whenever you got stuck on a single subject, no matter what you did, your heart would react in some way and your perplexed thoughts would connect everything together until you couldn't get through the intricate net that never seemed to loosen as time passed by. Actually, the more you tried to get away, the tighter it would become and you couldn't help but feel that you just wanted to die instead of fighting to live.

For what did living mean really? It is ironic of me to think of these things more as a shinigami than when I was alive, my time having been stuck at sixteen for several years now.

My worn-out sneakers brought me to the park, but as I looked to the sky, why was everything in this world so bright? I was blinded by the sun even though I could also see the moon shining overhead with the clear blue sky painted with no clouds for the day. To see the sun and the moon at the same time, that is a sight that is interesting and mysterious in itself.

And yet, it reminds me of his eyes. Those amethyst eyes that I know belong to someone who has lived through many kinds of tortures and happiness, the former more than the latter unfortunately. Amethyst eyes as dark and bright as shining purple. Who really carries this beauty about them? It is not supposed to exist and yet he is there before me to prove that things are true.

He reaches out to me and I can do nothing but push him away.

I can't touch you. I can't touch you…

Our clashing emotions make me dizzy.
You want to understand and keep on fighting yourself. I'm trying to keep to myself to stay alive and yet I struggle to keep you alive.

For my sake, for my sake, I said with all of my heart, not really, truly comprehending the depth of the words that came from my mouth. Maybe it was out of childishness because when you find someone that finally cares, do you want to really let them go? No. But do you know how to deal with your conflicting thoughts and emotions? No, you're not accustomed to deal with such hardships. It was always easier to shut them out so that you wouldn't have to feel anything at all. That's how you've survived and damn to anything that would make you change that.

And yet, those eyes kept on pushing thoroughly into me.

I bought a bottle of water and walked over to a woman who had seated herself in front of a railing, overlooking a large lake. She is sitting on the bench, but she is singing as she holds her brush to paint on a canvas that started out as all white. As people overlook her and pass by her with no notice at all, they are unmoved and untouched by her existence. I find myself touched by this calm, yet painful scene.

I stop a few feet away from her. As her back is facing towards me and the sun shines with no mercy upon whom it touches, the shade the woman is under offers no consolation to the heat or apathetic glances headed towards her direction.
I watch her as she lifts her brush to paint a scene that isn't on the lake at all. She is looking at the other side of the park. The light blue that she softly brushes over the canvas is careless in technique, but contrastingly careful in manner.

I am intrigued by her and the melody she hums to herself. Only once in a while does she mumble something resembling words.

/Why were words born if they're not heard?
Why do we swim through this life so full of the effort
That makes me die even faster?/

I want to sit beside her, but I decide not to. I am plastered to my place and even though my sweat is falling to the ground, I only pat it with the sleeve of my jean jacket. I watch her painting so earnestly.
It looks like the ocean and yet it doesn't at the same time.

She puts on some red over it and they look like buildings of the city. The skyscrapers are bleeding with people in between them and no one seems to notice that she is painting about us, not a scene in the park. The scene filled with pulsating, lively death is as quiet as a painting can be, but it tells a story of the everyday people.

The dark green trees with their shadows of mixed red and blue have bright, crimson apples in between their hidden crevices. With a dip of her brush, she puts on white waves on the bottom, where the only trace of light blue is left.
Waves, fingers…they try to touch the buildings. I don't understand, but the reflection on the water is distorted like a broken mirror. The city looks so brilliant from this reflection.

I want to reach out to her, but as I reach out my hand, I pull it back. She continues to sing her haunting melody and bursts out loudly:

/Silence speaks louder than
these futile things we call words.
Can I live in a painting
Where my violent feelings show more
Than my expressions
When I talk to other beings that
Are supposed to resemble some of myself
Even though they reject me?
Saying it is in the name of "oneness",
We are hypocrites.
Hurting everyone with our own selfishness,
Yes, this is our fate,
You and me./

She stops painting and she puts down her brush and paints on the grass. She steps over to her masterpiece and she hunches over it. Crying, the tears mix in with the buildings, the waves, and the trees.

She stops singing, but she talks to the painting, wanting to hug it even if it'll be ruined by her strong embrace.

"They tell you the world is beautiful. Yes, that's true, but where is the person that made it beautiful for you? I am so lost…" The woman steps away from the painting, touching it with her index finger. Pressing it to make her imprint.

When she turns around, I step back a bit because I'm shocked to see this familiar face, even though it is hazy in my memory. I don't really know who she is, but I recognize her. I've seen her in my dreams or somewhere in reality before.

I can't tell where I am at this moment…

She is not a woman at all, but a girl no older than twenty-five. She takes off her hood and her cape drapes on her shoulders. She isn't sweating from the heat.
As if she doesn't know what season it is…

As if she can't feel it at all.

"You are a stupid boy, Hisoka," she says while shaking her head and a smile on her lips even though she looks at me as if she wants to scream and cry out to the world about its injustices.

I cannot speak because I don't know what to say to her.

"Go back to where you belong. You don't belong here," she says to me softly and tenderly and I can feel the kindness that she cannot show me. She holds out her arms to show me something; they are bandaged.

They are bleeding.

She is continuing to bleed with no end. Maybe for eternity.

It is then that I realize that there is no red on her palette. She has painted this reality on canvas with her own blood…

"There is someone waiting for you, Hisoka. You have a purpose, even though you don't know what it is or can't understand it right now."
"What are you doing here, Yukie?" I blurt out. It's funny that people whom you don't really know are the names that you unconsciously remember when the time arises.

Yet, I cannot recall where I've met her before.

"I'm waiting for someone who will never come."
Sorrowfully, she smiles at me while folding her bandages over her hand, one over the other, stained more and more by the crimson that becomes her. It bleeds onto her white dress.

"You don't belong here. Go, darling."
Like a mother's gentleness that I've never heard and seen before in my lifetime, she nods her head for me to leave.

And when I open my eyes, flashes come to head. Images of that girl come back. Someone whose voice I used to hear from that prison of a basement. And her words comforted me, as disturbing as her songs were. I heard she was a singer who drank herself to death and committed suicide by falling off a bridge.

"Hisoka~!" Tsuzuki says as he hugs me as tightly as he can. He deeply sighs in relief as he shakes his head while rubbing his cheek on my mine so intimately. "You've been sleeping with a fever for three days. Since we ended that last job…I was so worried."

Even though our overwhelming thoughts and feelings are too much for me to take, I raise up my hands to hold him. I drink him in and I hold onto him with all the life and hope that's left inside my body.

And I wonder why that beautiful girl is there.
Is it because she has lost her way? Or was that her own form of happiness even though others cannot understand that?

But in my heart, the only thing I know is why she pushed me back to continue "living" this life with memories that stab me persistently and a soul that sometimes I don't really care for. I can change. I have the power to change the world around me. I can help the people who need me.

That is the gift I've been given as an angel of death.

But most of all, I am privileged to live the way I want, if I take it into my own hands. I don't have to be bound by the past for there is always a future to make as my own.

I hold onto him tighter.

And with this person. No matter where I'll go, he'll always be with me.

Yukie, twisted as it may sound, didn't want to go further. She liked where she was, even though others cannot comprehend why. It is the life she wanted to lead.

As for me, even though at times I want to give up, I can't. I won't allow myself to. Because if I did, what that doctor and my relatives did would be justified. No, I'm not beautiful because of my eyes. No, I'm not strange because of my powers.

I am myself because I chose to live and fight through everything, rather than to die not trying to understand what the world is.

Closing your mind is the same as suicide.

And as numb as I feel at times, I can see why I was given this power now. Looking at Yukie's eyes, I saw how clearly they reflected me within them.

Quietly, I gently sang some of the song into Tsuzuki's ear:

/I want to become mute
because my words turn into silence.
They are worthless
In telling how I feel.
How much I hate reality
And how much I love you
In all my thoughts./

Yes, I am lucky to feel so much. Because I can feel everything to the extreme, I am able to search for the meaning to anything to the fullest extent.

It is a gift that I should not take for granted.

Owari. / The End.

Author's note: Today, I was aiming for an image, or making an unreal thought come into existence. Yes, this possibly makes no sense at all, but my sadness and confused thoughts inclined me to write this moody piece.

Saturday, July 24, 2004