Notes:Written for LiveJournal's 31 Days.

My heart is capable of every form:
Pasture for deer, a monastery for monks,
Temple for idols.

-- August 18th

Shapeless

He wakes, smiling. It's a moment before he remembers his surroundings: Ritsuka's covers, Ritsuka's bed, Ritsuka's sun slanting thinly through the blinds over the glass.

And he is not Ritsuka.

Later, in the mirror, he tries to see himself as Soubi sees him. Not Ritsuka before some madness swept all trace of him away: Ritsuka as he is, every moment renewed into an unwanted stranger. His features sharpen, clear in the glass. Then, in a space between moments as he glances elsewhere, another face flickers. Startled, he says something (a chaos of nothing).

Unfamiliarity pulses through his veins: old promises, despair, tastes and secrets that aren't his. Blindly, he lifts a hand to the fading light but finds them gone, having coiled through his mind into nothingness.

The other Ritsuka, he guesses - and sees, then, the sudden tautening of his mouth, the drawing of brows fine and dark against his skin. His tail makes prowling lashes around him, taut with the certainty of expecting something unknown, and the scene is all very familiar, though not his own when last he saw it. Startled, he remembers – memory that is not his, a careless laughing Ritsuka with the coy simplicity of the indulged – a strange animal at the zoo: liquid eyes, small bared teeth.

(His eyes, his teeth against the intruder in a body already taken.)

Will these three years vanish? He's asked her before, the doctor. (Will they take him with them?) The question seems to rob her tongue of answer, words, thought, so he remembers, now, not to ask anymore.

It doesn't matter, he answers relentlessly, whether the Ritsuka of these few years flickers like a mote between launch and ascension – doesn't matter so long as his mother finds, somewhere in all her grief and fury, a smile again. But that he asks the question proves an unasked point: that, counting down the days until he vanishes, he would rather live than turn to dust, a half-seen memory.

Beyond all the desires for his mother's happiness, the resurrection of the Ritsuka split from his memories, the (false changeling) child wants to be.

-

For the afternoon, they go out to the park. Beneath a tangle of trees, the table's edge blunt against his back, he touches an insect's bite knotted at his ankle, where the bone juts. As his head tips up, he is acutely aware of the precise loveliness of the scene around them: butterflies drifting, windblown, long wings beating the strokes of a disconnected heart against the world, wisps of Soubi's hair at the edge of his eyes as wind and light catch hold to coax them into movement.

His eyes close; the wind murmurs at his ear, low. "Soubi," he says, idly sudden, "what do you want?"

Movement unfurls in sound: a painted smile shapes itself out of the air, slim and precise in its lines. (Surely the gift for art doesn't emerge randomly from the half-air in which Soubi grew; he wonders if Soubi learned all of his expressions from images that do not move.) "Whatever Ritsuka wants," he answers, in cultured grace.

"Soubi," exasperation flattens his ears as he turns - back, against his skull - but his Fighter only watches him, eyes like glass.

His head tilts, fingers tracing thoughts and images without tongue over the table. "If I weren't here," he pursues.

"I would die," Soubi says simply, words learned into a graceful rote.

"You don't have to die! You didn't when—" he falters; this is familiar territory, where the memories that are his own say: here there be danger, here lies tragedy.

Soubi's eyes are half-lidded, and even the afternoon sunlight breaks against the colors, darkening into hypnotic opacity. "I love you," he says. "Ritsuka."

This is the only certainty he knows – even Soubi doesn't know the question, the flaw that reaches deeper than a scarred name at his throat and the way he smiles, suggesting useless things whose purpose Ritsuka can't see. It's love. Even with all that he does not understand, he can recognise it when it shows itself so obviously. But it's the offering of a shattered thing: a beggar-child laying his only knife on the altar.

Sightlessly he makes a high, sharp noise. Not knowing what to ask, not knowing why the question still lies waiting in his mind like a snake, a guardian.

(What Ritsuka wants: questions that don't go answered by questions, an untraversable demand.

What he desires: desire.)

. end