deconstructed
by Kaoru Camui
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I had always liked it when he smiled at me.
The delicately crafted lips that would lift slightly in a gentle curve, and that spark of muted emotion flaring in those cold sapphire orbs before dying down again as quickly as it had begun – he was beautiful, oh so beautiful.
Exasperatingly beautiful in his obstinate devotion to the Card Master, disturbingly so in his desperate solitude.
Sometimes, sometimes when the waxen moon hung interwoven with a velvet tapestry of deepest ebony flecked with sterling, he would tell me things that he had never before told anyone in his life. Sitting by the mahogany study desk littered with papers and medical textbooks, propping his head up with his right hand, silver locks falling languidly over one shoulder, he embodied an exquisite torment both untouchable and unsurpassable.
Our conversations were always the same.
Tense, yet with the tacit understanding of soul mates bound to each other beyond this earthly realm and the next.
He never once spoke of the Card Master though. Concealing his wounds entirely within himself, even if I could sense his bittersweet obsession in the smudges of claret tainting the pristine white of his doctor's coat, the suffocating scent of his fatal obsession permeating the air. And I, consciously aware that I was a mere replacement for his unrequited affections, trying to salvage his love from its inevitable self-immolation.
There was something strangely fragile about him that drew me in like a moth to a flame, ensnaring me in its devious care. A lavish pearl-gold kimono dappled with auburn maple leaves draped around his slender body, he seemed almost similar to a butterfly emerging prematurely from its chrysalis, too vulnerable and too weak to stand against the harsh pace of the world.
"Cassian, did you ever get the feeling that you couldn't trust anyone in the world?" Coming from him, the cynicism of the question would be veiled by an innocent frustration and quiet hopelessness.
There was never a need for an answer.
I would hold him close to me, losing myself in the blueberry scent of his tousled hair, hoping that he would in some way find a kind of solace in my touch. I embraced him with all the love I could muster although I myself was so afraid, so afraid that he would leave me one day and never return, because I realized that somehow, I had to be stronger if I were to stop him from falling apart.
Now he lies before me, a perfect visage of lovely serenity. The crimson stands in dramatic contrast to his abnormally pale countenance, pooling thick and warm and wet between my fingers and his windswept tresses. A smile, that gentle smile, remains on his mouth, perpetually frozen in time.
Oh, God –
I understood that he would never love me as I did him. But I thought I could be content in the knowledge that I and I alone held the key to his deliverance, that he would find in me his raison d'être, that the confessions of his sins to me would stop him from losing his mind.
I was wrong.
And it kills me inside to know that in the end I could have done nothing at all to save him from himself.
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Author's notes: A drabble first posted on the livejournal community, drabble_me. I think I have an obsession with how the good doctor died. ;_; And the Jezebel/Cassian relationship is one of the most poignant in the whole series, though I very much do prefer Jezebel/Alexis, hehe. ^^
-kaoru c.