Author: Isis
Fandom: Ai no Kusabi
Type: yaoi
Pairing: Iason/Riki
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Written for a tempsmort challenge on LJ.
Summary: Fate, choices, and the immortality of youth. Riki POV ficlet.
Disclaimer: Ai no Kusabi and all its associated characters belong to Yoshihara Rieko.
He had never believed in fate.
Early on in life, he had learnt that in a place like Ceres, you took what you could get, and you gave as good as you got. To hesitate was to show weakness, and with weakness, you would fall. Fate had no place in this society, in his society.
He lived fast and wild and without care, and at times he could almost believe that if he reached out his hands towards the stars, he could catch the threads of twilight in his fingers and they would belong only to him, always to him. The invulnerability that oftentimes came with youth cloaked him like a second skin; he could feel it, silvery and strong, threading through his veins, taste it, tangy and salty-sweet, on the tip of his tongue.
Then, in the single space of one afternoon – a group of petty thugs, a careless gesture, and a too-perfect man of gold and alabaster and ice; and everything changed.
Unused to restriction of any sort, he resented these new threads fettering him, binding him to someone so different from him on the surface, and yet so similiar under the gilded exterior. And yet he could not free himself, as much because he did not want to, as because he could not.
As a wild bird would rebel against captivity, so did he feel trapped, stifled, in the gilded cage that was called Eos. Even as he threaded his hands, rough and callused, through the finest strands of flaxen silk, and clutched at pale, smooth skin and cried out in an agony of passion and hunger and lust and a feeling he refused to identify but could never – would never call love, it was not enough, would not ever be enough. But the more he tried to escape, the more the threads wound tighter and tighter, drawing him inexorably back towards a fate he had shaped – in the choice he had made that one afternoon – himself; a fate that, in his youthful immortality, he gave up everything to deny.
And as the brilliant flames of Dana Bhan lick hungrily up against a black, unforgiving sky, he watches his world fall in smouldering ruins about him, glances at the pale, elegant hand clasped in his, dirty and bloodied just like his own. A thin line of blood, startlingly crimson against the dust and mud on his skin, snakes its way down from a cut on his arm, mingles with the blood of his blond god, threading its way between their clasped fingers.
He smiles, but, for the first time, without bitterness; thinks "red threads", and takes a last breath of his cigarette before closing his eyes.