(KAI) I actually am not particularly sure what's going on.

---

Fading

Natsuo yawned. A moment later, crawling beside him, Yoji yawned. For a moment, they stared at each other. Weeks had gone by. Weeks and months and those many, countless hours of inactivity. Of fading...

"I can hear the rain," Yoji said quietly, tugging on a lock of the other boy's hair, letting it fall from his fingers lazily. Fading from one day to the next, fighting only with Kio, occasionally Soubi... One moment to the next, their name nearly forgotten in the daily cycles of living.

"Me, too," Natsuo replies, his own hand moving and resting on the other boy's neck. Where had the marks gone?

A patter in the wind, like fighting. "Be closer to me."

Natsuo complies, until they are pressed together, forehead to forehead, hip to hip, arms wound so tightly, one could hardly determine where one boy began and the other ended.

Yoji closed his eyes. A moment later, nuzzling the sacrifice's nose, Natsuo's eyes closed. For a moment, they breathed, deeply, in and out. Nagisa had thrown them out. And she... wasn't she supposed to love them? The thoughts had run circles in their minds for each of the faded days. Soubi put them up, Kio put up with them, albeit with something of a smile, and there was Ritsuka, who fell in love with everyone...

They felt love, didn't they? Love wasn't words, wasn't a mark, wasn't Nagisa. Yoji curled his hand around Natsuo's arm, the warmth of it something nearly palpable.

"Can you feel the rain?"

"Yes, with you."

Yoji leaned forward that tiny bit, and kissed Natsuo soundly. There is a slinging of water against high, loft windows, cold and lost in a dark outside, unable to touch the blanket they've wrapped themselves in. There is a soft heat in it, not quite viable, and a certain comfort. "Let's be rain."

"Let's be rain," Yoji agrees, feeling, for the first time, one of Natsuo's tears slide against his cheek.

"Let's not be nothing," Natsuo adds, touching the tears, the slow-tracking, warm-feeling, salt-tasting tears, that track down Yoji's cheeks the way they're tracking down his own.

"It's fighting to get in..." Yoji's eyes open to meet his fighter's.

"It's fighting to get out," Natsuo corrects, this time initiating the kiss, tasting warmth and salt. Tasting.

The other boy shoved himself, all torso, against the fighter, digging his fingers into Natsuo's back, desperate and feeling the softness of a cotton shirt... stolen, most likely, from Kio's overnight bag. There is the kiss.

Somewhere desperate and soft. Somewhere in the salt of tears, fading against marks and the quietude of rebirth, washed away.

Somewhere in the rain.