Dirge of the Sea, a black cat fanfic

Summary: A story of Life, Love, Loss and Heaven, and how grief can blur these things together. TrainxEve. First Black Cat fic

Disclaimer: I don't own the rights to Black Cat, the particular Hone Tuwhare poem quoted in this, or, seeing as I'm not God or Shakespeare, anything by that lot. Not the rights to a book about Afghanistan in the 1980s, or… umm… any coco pops. I had yoghurt and strawberries for breakfast this morning (muahaha aren't you jealous :P)

Warnings: Swearing. Character Death. A lot of artistic licence. Cultural disparities that might freak some people out, for which I am sorry.

Dirge of the Sea

By Gare de Lyon

-.-.-

For Marrita

-.-.-

"I'm…going now." She says, running her fingers through her golden hair.

He wants to ask her why this should concern him, why he should care that she's leaving him, too, why his heart is hammering in his chest and why it hurts the way that (he imagines) it hurt Sven. But he doesn't do any of those things.

Just watches her, only her, quietly close the door and disappear into the grey-green afternoon.

-.-.-

It's a beautiful day, Sven notices idly. The curve of the long golden beach, empty and wild where they are, is bare and harsh, but in the distance, at the curve of land where the sun is sinking, the city is discernible above the water. Blue, for the distance in between.

This is the vision that flashes to mind when Eve recites poetry, talks of eyes of heaven. It is testimony to his life that he sees a city in the sky, filled with life and people.

Sven has no use for wilderness, for wild places devoid of humanity. Where there are no humans there's no chance for him to survive, and this is why, during those chaotic years when they were perpetually running from organisations that wanted Eve, that they didn't even properly know about at the time, that they always flocked to urban landscapes.

He takes a long drag on his cigarette and lets it issue forth from his nostrils in grand, sooty curlicues. He's meant to be picking up Eve, away on a school trip to measure the gradient of the beach (her fascination with geography is something he doesn't understand, though perhaps, he wonders, it is to do with the fact that she once was nearly responsible for it's loss.) and the bus should be pulling into the car bay at any second.

The sun is warm and he leans against the side of the car and feels oddly content. He has saved a coupla kids and given them, he hopes, something more than what they've given him. If that's at all possible. Love squeezes at his heart, the way it does, and he considers his life. He's not old, yet, but he's not young anymore, either. He thinks about settling down, and remembers that they've got a bounty to track tonight, and that age is going to have to take a backseat.

Life he muses, Is pretty damned good.

Sven takes another drag on his cigarette and watches the glorious city fade into the night, watches the bracelet of light the highway has become that stretches down the coast towards him, inconsistent, interrupted by dark trees and darker water, but there, glitter.

Life is a beautiful band of light, stretching across the water.

When Eve's bus turns up she is the only kid that jumps off at this carpark, the others opting to go home the slow way. But in her bag she has her black dress and her boots, because there isn't the time for her to ride the bus back into town and then go out a hunting. She opens the passenger door and slides into the vehicle.

"Ready?" she asks, and then sees that he is not.

-.-.-

Black. Everyone is wearing black, and he hates that he's wearing it too. It seems…wrong, to be wearing that colour for such a colourful person, wrong to be subdued for someone who was so loud. Wrong to be dressing up for a gentleman who had hated people to go out of their way for him, but had gone far out of the way (even to the edge of death) for everyone else. The motley congregation are stirring downstairs, and Rinslet knocks on the open door.

"They're…waiting for you."

Grimly he ties a bell around his neck, and leaves the house. Hopes she will understand, or, at the very least, leave this farce herself.

-.-.-

Hospitals, she decides, have to be imposing. Have to have hard chairs and large waiting rooms. The nubbly platic of the chair feels like its imprinting itself onto her body, through her clothes, and she wonders if she'll go home covered in scales. She is still in her beach gear, bikini and shorts and a school sweatshirt that says, proudly, St Bernards in bold, white letters. She didn't have time to change, but it is getting colder now.

She decides that hospitals have to be hard and imposing, like a prison (or the house where she was born) because they're too concentrated, filled with such quantities of Life and Death and Joy and Loss and Pain and Anger that they've no choice but to be hard, and leave nubbly plastic marks on the backs of her bare legs, or else they'll fold under the weight of so many human things, like so many human things.

She understands, from afar, that she is in shock.

She doesn't count the hours she's been here, and hopes to God that Train will show up soon, guns blazing and make everything better. As it is, she knows that he's gone after the target himself, because he's Train and there's a 13 tattooed over his heart and he was the most feared assassin in the world once (Excepting herself. And he held the title longer, anyway).

It will take time, not for him to know that they aren't coming, but to care that they aren't. She factors this in and looks up at the clock. A kindly orderly comes up to her and asks if there's anyone he can call. She shakes her head, and her blonde hair whispers around her head. Eyes still fixed on the clock.

Come on, she wills. Come on.

She doesn't know who exactly she is calling. Perhaps the ambiguity of the prayer will draw them both.

A whirl of cold air and a melodious curse. "I said he's my brother, so fuck off." Eve hears a familiar voice snap, and hears, too, the familiar sound of someone falling to the ground unconscious. She rises fluidly to her feet and turns to the newcomer.

Rinslet looks beautiful, in her rehearsal dinner gown, a veritable angel of justice coming down upon the beaurecracy of the hospital to be with the people she loves. She steps over the man who asked Eve who to call and comes up to her, her hair in beautiful disarray, still holding her bouquet. She takes the younger girl in her arms and holds her and Eve breathes in the comforting scent of her perfume. Stella.

"He's strong, he'll get through this. He will." The words are, like her prayer, addressed uncertainly to no one, in the hope that more will hear them. Eve can't speak for the water in her though and so she just holds Rinslet back.

Jenos emerges into the waiting room, goes over to the desk and talks to the receptionist there in a low persuasive voice. He comes over to them, and his fiancee and surrogate niece open their arms to include him. "No news is good news." He tries, in reply to the questions in theur eyes.

Rinslet doesn't tell him that that's the sort of attitude that gets sweepers killed.

-.-.-

Eve sits at the wharf and stares into the water. She's here again, alone, breaking up bread to feed to ducks who have other, better places to be. But she doesn't stop in their absence, doesn't do anything but continue to break up bread that won't get eaten by ducks that aren't there. Soggily it floats on the surface, until it absorbs enough water and begins the slow sink into the depths of the harbour.

The person she loved best in the world is dead. The man who gave her life, who gave her things worth fighting for, living for, is gone, and she has nothing. She repeats this to herself, so that it will stop hurting, so that the impact won't cut her so sharply each time, so that she can accept it and…and…but there's nothing beyond Sven. She's seventeen and the world has been drained of everything it once held for her.

Bitter saline runs down her cheeks and drips into the water. She'd been so sure, so certain that he'd come through. That he'd make it. He wasn't old, after all. Wasn't hurt, hadn't been acting any differently…weren't there supposed to be signs for health things? She knew that battle was different, that not countering an attack in an eyeblink could change everything, but he had had nothing to counter – they had had nothing to counter (because whatever he fought, she did too) his sudden fall into darknesss.

Dreamily she wonders what it would feel like to lie on the harbour bottom, until the end came. Wonders how deep the greasy grey water goes, and what is on the bottom.

If she were to find out, she'd put rocks into her pockets, wear baggy clothes, will herself down. She'd sink, like a feather through the air sped up, like a soggy bit of bread, and the currents of the sea would tug at her green (underwater) hair. And when she hit the bottom a little ghostly cloud of sand would puff up around her feet. There might be sunken boat shapes, seaweed and a few munted fish. The bony piles of the wharf, stretching back towards the shore like great big tunnels, covered in prickly mussel shells would be the last thing she'd see, an errant shopping trolley perhaps, and a lot of beer cans (They do sink, even when there's nothing left inside).

She stands, considers diving into the harbour. Remembers a car bay on the coast off the highway. Wonders what the last thing he saw was.

"You alright love?" She remembers that there's a café behind her now, that the wharf has been developed, in the years they've been here, and a waiter has come over to her, concern in his eyes. She turns and sees the gaze of the customers on her, and says "Yes." Because it's not a question, and then she walks away.

-.-.-

Train skips the service, and the wake. It's left to her to be the bereaved, to quietly thank people for coming. Hollow and horror-eyed. Lamely reiterating, over and over, the words that don't mean a thing. Even Creed has sent flowers. Orchids.

In the de-sanctified church (because they didn't think a proper church was really his thing. Even though he wouldn't have cared) the casket is open, and he is lying there, cold. The days and nights she's spent by him in the funeral parlour have accustomed her to his coldness, the sunken look of his eyes (never to flicker with bright intuition again) beneath the closed lids and the hardness of him. Turned to stone. His teeth gritted audibly beneath his lips. Five o clock shadow on his cheeks. His hair is still beautifully bright though. The colour of marsh lights and the aurora.

The skin of his hands is still soft, gentle and soft, and she knows because she has spent so long holding his hands, talking to him softly. She has dropped out of school unofficially (She worked hard there for him, her grades are perfect, and she'll file for compassionate consideration before exams, and keep her grades that way. Because he would have wanted her to. Wanted her to have something more than him (everything).. There are only a few weeks of school left for her anyway.)

And now she is used to the phantom rise and fall of his chest in her peripheral vision, and has stopped scanning, desperately, with her mechanical eyes for his no-longer-there vital signs when she sees him not breathe. The pain only sharpens when she does that (if that is at all possible) as it is.

-.-.-

She doesn't speak in the service, leaves it to Rinslet and to Anette. Ignores them, for the most part. Sitting in the pew, looking through his coffin to where he lies.

Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted, says the priest.

"Eve are you alright?" Jenos whispers to her and she wonders why people are staring. She nods, and then sees him glance down at her hands. The palm of her left hand on the curved carved edge of the pew. She lifts it up and a stream of fine dust trickles away between her fingers. A hand shaped mark disturbs the symmetry of the old wood.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

She resents him his absence. He has disappeared on her, right when she needs him most. Rinslet and Jenos are wonderful to her, gently taking care of her, reminding her to eat, keeping away busybodies, quietly dealing with (she later learns) her school. He isn't there. They are missing out on their honeymoon, but, they tell her, it's not like they need to waste that much money on a trip to Tahiti.

Train has been nowhere since she called him on the payphone in the waiting room (the next day,) telling him what had happened, where they were, and of the borderland where Sven floated between death and life. Begging him to come. Never at the house, in the day or the night. Only in the border-time, when he thinks that they are all (Rinslet, Jenos, herself) asleep. But she isn't, and even stray cats leave prints. The quickly silenced chime of a bell, a fridge door opening and closing.

She sits up in bed in the light streaming in from the open window and tries to force herself down the stairs. Neverminding the strangeness of their relationship the past year, even when Sven was still there, or the fact that she misses their sometimes nighttime bottles of milk. But the anger coiled up inside of her makes her feel too ill to move, when she hears him, and it only, temporarily, subsides (because it never properly goes away) when the graying pre-dawn light lightens to gold, and all traces of his being there are gone (but for the missing milk and food).

She tells herself that it has nothing to do with what happened, when they took Sven off life support, in a hospital corridor.

The problem with sweeping though, is that you never miss a falsehood when you see or hear (or think) one.

-.-.-

Sven is gone. Everything that made him Sven is already free, and this is just the left-behind, the nurse had said. Watching him with her weapon eyes, the rise and fall of his chest (a machine is breathing for him) and the blood around his body being pumped by something else. No smile on his lips, because even though Sven always smiles in his sleep, he – this – isn't Sven anymore.

Train, curled up in a chair in the dim corner of the room, blue jacketed, blood spattered and broody eyed. In a liquid, too-fast motion, he is standing over the man. Staring at him, drinking him in. Eve watches Train's deep brown eyes flickering faster than should be possible over Sven, knowing that he is using his photographic mind to commit him to memory. The dark, olive-nearly-brown lashes against his cheekbones (both cheekbones, eyepatch lost) the hair like witchfire, fanned out like a halo on the lumpy hospital pillow. The skin tanned, still, but ashy. The uniform offwhite hospital shift he wears a shockingly similar shade to his suit. Train swiftly traces over his features, eyebrows, eyes, nose, cheekbones, lips and chin, and then he vanishes out of the room, locking eyes with her for a nano-second before he is gone.

The nurse is startled by how quickly he moved, and her voice is shaky when she next speaks. "Your…your decision dear?"

She leans down, but she doesn't memorise like Train did. She recollects. She has stored every moment away in her heart, and that Sven and this one are so unbearably different, so far apart, that she can't stand the idea of memorising him this way.

So she holds his hand, and remembers when he held hers and put her on his shoulders at a fireworks display. Remembers feeling like she was on the shoulders of a giant, and that the sky had been lit aflame by him. She leans down, carefully, hair sliding over her shoulders and sand trickles down onto the thin hospital blankets. She kisses him, on the cheek, lingering,

And Train can't hear what she whispers to him.

"Can you…let me get…them." She tells the nurse. "To say goodbye?"

She is dry-eyed. She is still in shock. She shouldn't have to be making these decisions. But he can't, either.

Holy fuck Saya. What the hell else can I do?

-.-.-

In her dreams, she dreams that they are standing in the car bay, the three of them. Sven smiles at her, tenderly, and whispers into her ear that blue is the colour of heaven and then he dissolves into a curl of cigarette smoke, and Train is trapped in a bottle of milk, but it is see through because she can see through to the blurry old beachfront houses behind it and swimming through it like a fish. Naked, but for the bell around his neck. She goes over to him when Sven turns into smoke, taps on the glass and asks him why, twisting her hands, flipping them palm up at him Now what. He stares through her and aims his gun through the glass at her and then she wakes up.

She doesn't understand what it means, has no one to ask, and feels utterly moorless. When Train reappears, in the daytime, for the first time, the pain and anger he brings with him are different and she clings to it like a lifeline. There is no small talk, she just launches into him, until mostly everything downstairs is broken and they are both panting hard and the tears in her eyes feel hard as ice.

"You're a bastard." She says, harshly, and then she runs up into Sven's room and locks the door.

And she hates that the look in his eyes when he first saw her coming shouldn't have made the storm abate a little.

-.-.-

Word has spread, in the day since it happened, like electricity through power lines, and the whole of the underworld and most of the highest (because the two are so intertwined) of what has occurred, and a crowd has gathered outside the hospital. The sweeper alliance in the corridor are oddly subdued, unnervingly still, and hospital workers quail when they have to pass past Sven's room.

Train sits on the roof of the hospital and does his hardest to try to convince himself that goodbyes provide closure, and that this is a good thing to have had, this time. He takes a sip of milk and then he hears the door open behind him, and unsteady footfalls.

He turns and sees Eve running for him, and he knows what she's done and their despair makes them hold each other tight and not dare to let go, when that distance is nulled. Because the world has vanished and there's nothing to separate them from the darkness but the feel of their hearts beating, pressed together but for skin and bone and cloth, and the coldness of their tears on their skin.

She doesn't say what she has done, doesn't need to.

Her hair is still long, and she still smells cold and metallic (like blood) and he feels something like a hook plunge deep into his heart and pull it down and she is sobbing, brokenly, into his shoulder, and it occurs to him that it is the first time that he's ever heard her cry, and that it is the most tortorous sound he's ever heard.

"I – I…" she tries to speak, to wipe away the tears and he holds her tighter, surprised when he sees a raindrop land in her hair and then he realises. He groans and the streetlights come on, all at once, just about. The roof is cold and the sun is gone and Sven is dead.

But then he feels her hands wrap around his chest and strives to ignore the feelings that her doing that evokes inside him, even through the cloud of fuzzy grief.

Saya help me! Give me strength…

And she does. He manages to hold her back, tightly and gently and is terrified the whole fucking time that he's going to screw up Eve's mind even more than it probably already is, but he doesn't.

At least, until she is momentarily dry eyed and still despairing, and she goes still in his arms, shaking, shuddery sobs gone. "Train, I'm – " she gasps, and desperately he tries to brush away the tears streaming afresh down her cheeks. "I'm – s – " and because he can't bear to hear that from her, he does the only thing he can think of, the only thing that he knows, instinctively, that he can. He kisses her.

Not the chaste, mouth to mouth kiss of a child, of lifelong friends, but one that makes heat roar through his body and leaves him sick and dizzy and wanting more. And she gives it. Suddenly they are holding each other differently, and she can't sob, not like that, and her tears, wet and cold on his own warm skin makes him shiver and pull her closer and force her mouth open, until she is short of breath in another, more whole, and wholly new way.

"Get away from her," comes the snarl and they break apart, startled. Leon is there, and he is all lean young man and impossibly long black hair and strength and anger, and Train realises what he's just done. And so he runs. As he leaves, he hears Eve hold Leon there, and prays that this hellish day will end soon.

He has never believed in god.

Saya what the hell have I done?

-.-.-

The point comes, when she stops forgetting, for a delicious moment as she wakes up, that he's dead. The despair that comes with this realisation makes her gasp and sink to the ground on her hands and knees. Makes her treble her efforts to trap time in a bubble in their house. Knows how futile this is, how impossible. Goes to the only haven she has left.

Everything in this room is Svenly. The fake 'old world' world globe on the window sill, the cigarette butts in the café black ashtray by his old school reading lamp. The untidyness of the clothes and (once) wet towels on the floor, and the dirty sheets of his bed. The open mirrored wardrobe door, with all the clothes he has but never wears on view, and the bottles of scotch and eau de cologne on a tray on the floor with old, chipped coffee mugs within arm's reach. The two windows are plainly curtained in starchy white, and as she opens the door the dust she startles up is captured in a flickering shaft of sunlight, turning to golden glitter that falls again to the thick, moss green carpet.

The mattress is hard because he never liked soft beds.

She sits, for a long time, on the corner of it. Staring into the shaft of light, watching the dust swirl and settle and glitter and fade, as her thoughts swirl and fade and are lost in moss green pools of hurt in her heart.

She sits like that until the sun has shifted out onto the other side of the world and the dust is no longer there. She opens the curtains then, and looks out at the night-time city, all lit up like a shawl with diamonds sewn in scattered over the lumpy shape of the city.

That's the first night that she sleeps in his room. Breathes in the fading smell of him, cigarettes and burnt coffee and the mysteriously chemical smell of his briefcase. They burned that, though, with him. Alone in the house now though (because she cajoled Rinslet and Jenos to Tahiti, and Train is only there sometimes) the ghost of Sven rises up out of the ashtray and the carpet and rocks her to sleep in smoky arms.

Disoriented in the morning, she forgets again, for a second, that he is gone.

-.-.-

It is only when he sees the postcard, magneted down to the fridge door in the small hours, that he realises that they're gone. Realises that she's been alone, for…(judging by the date on the other side of the island) at least three weeks. Quietly he steals through the house, guest bedroom empty and spotless, his room, open and empty, bathroom, lounge, hall, her room – empty? And just what that means.

He's never felt so sick with self-disgust in his life.

So when she wakes up (because he doesn't know that she's awake, that she hasn't slept properly for close on a month now) he makes sure that there are dishes in the sink from his meal, and that he is asleep, behind his closed door. He stirs when he hears her vacuum, and gets up, rubbing his eyes.

"You're back," she says, concentrating on the vacuum and the dust when he steps out into the hall. But he can't think of a reply so he goes down into the kitchen. The dishes are gone, the place is spotless again. The ashtrays (a novelty collection attained over the years) are all lined up, gleaming, on the window sill. He grabs a box of cereal, pulls the bottle of milk from the fridge and unscrews the cap, draining it. Munches ruminatively on a handful of coco pops and pretends not to observe her, back to him, wiping away at the red tiles of the hearth in the lounge through the open door.

"Why the cleaning?" he eventually says, when she comes through to get to the laundry, blackened rag in hand. She doesn't reply straight away, putting on a load of laundry.

"Because I'm leaving, and you can't clean." The throw-away comment leaves him staggered and gutted, all at once.

No.

"You can't." His voice comes out as a croak.

"I'm going to go and stay with Leon" bastard black haired punk-assed kid "And the kids for a while. Wander for a bit." Unconcerned voice belying the anticipation inside. Waiting for his reaction, to gauge his feelings (gouge them away). To make her decision. He grabs another handful of cereal and forces it down.

"Okay."

-.-.-

The house is brutally clean, her bag is packed, and she's ready. What else is there to do? thinks Eve, doing a quick check over of all the rooms, making sure that she has what she needs with her. She does. Clothes, cash, the things she's filched from their rooms to keep her… keep her better. Leaving only one last thing to plead for…

He's rebelled against her cleaning scourge, and the kitchen, whenever her back is turned, turns into a tip of precariously stacked dishes and buzzing flies. He sits at the table with a bounty sheet in front of him, dangerously close to a puddle of spilt black coffee. The reward is huge. Bigger than many they've seen in the past few years, and she tears herself away, because it will hurt more later if she doesn't.

Standing, poised in the doorway, he pretends to be oblivious to her presence. The soft (almost) silence of her breath, the silky rustle of her hair.

"…Train?" he turns.

Oh god. Saya. Sven – whoever's there.

She is the most beautiful creature he's ever seen. Black clad in leggings and a grey jersey dress. Black, the cropped hooded cardigan over this. Eyes glacial cold. A redly dead. Shadows under her eyes, and, he notices, the clothes hang a little loosely, a little too-bigly on her frame. She has none of the gentle curves of other girls her age, (she's seventeen goddamnyou) not like Kyoko had had, not enticingly curved like Rinslet, or healthy and strong and tall like Saya. Her mouth though, her beautiful sweet lipped mouth is round and soft (he knows, he remembers) and it makes him want to gather all of (strong and broken) her up into his arms and bring that mouth to his again. But he kills it, because he has to. Because she is all he has left and he'll be damned if he ever doesn't do as she asks again. She runs a hand through her (growing longer) golden hair and the tresses make a whisper noise like leaves falling as with the other hand she stoops to pick up the sports bag that contains everything she needs.

Help me.

"I'm…leaving now." She says, misery pooling into her again.

He aches with wanting to hold her, to tell her it will be okay, to not go because he loves her. But his love is poisonous and he can't let it touch this woman. So he says nothing while his heart bursts in his chest and she dissolves from his sight into the hallway and out the front door.

-.-.-

It comes in waves.

Today the sea is glassy. Green like nephrite and the water ripples catch the light, reflecting it back up into the grey white world. The harbour dances. The old brick warehouses (in the part of the port today yet to be touched by the gentrified brush) are so isolated from one another, right next to each other, but…not there. The industry that once held them together has disappeared, and the port has fallen apart. Still, the tall gothic brick buildings are, in their own way, beautiful.

Just nothing like they once were. And this is the problem.

Nothing left to tie them together, now that their holdall man is gone.

Tears, bitter and salty, run down her cheeks. She'd been so sure, so certain that he would stop her. That the night she let Sven go she hadn't done the same to Train. That his (their, if she is honest with herself) kiss had jarred him just as deeply as it had her. That he had understood.

The ducks are here today, bobbing on the choppy harbour water, but she has no bread to give them.

"I'm sorry." She says, palms held out, empty. "I've nothing."

And this is where he finds her.

"Princess," he says, as though he is going to say more – but he doesn't. She thinks about drowning and remembers her dreams, turning to face him, surreal.

His hair is windswept, because he has run there, all the way from the other side of the city, and the goddamned hope that this stirs inside of her makes her scramble to her feet.

"Train." His name sounds alien on her tongue, and new and different; and it kills her a bit more inside. "Train…" she says again, though, because she can't help herself. "Train, I – I'm – "

He is facing her, panting, angry and panting and all of a sudden she is afraid. Never, in her life, has he fixed her with a look like that. The sea surges against the wharf, slapping up a big white spray of salt over the pair of them, because a gale is blowing in from the sea and the boats by the next wharf rock and groan. It begins to rain.

-.-.-

The bright bright starbursts of pain in his chest, electrical impulses of his ticking heart going haywire and the blood getting stuck inside are what he feels.

He gasps and tries to reach for his phone inside the open car, right in his view, right there on her seat. He grabs it and it falls down below the seat and vainly he scrabbles for the heart medication that he's hidden in the glove compartment that the doctors have been prescribing him the past two years. But his head is feeling woozy and it still hurts, hasn't stopped hurting, just like the time that Eve's pincer went through him when he was saving her, exactly like that, except from the inside out this time, and with no quick withdrawal, and the vital organs all affected. He gasps, forcing breath into his lungs, still trying desperately to live, opening his suitcase, searching vainly for the 10cc shot of adrenaline he needs to stay alive. Hands grabbing the plastic wrapped syringe and the little vial of liquid, Eyepatch coming down, body collapsing inside. Eyepatch and hat brushed off in his frantic search.

And then Sven Sees what will happen next.

He looks, through one eye, into the future he won't see, instead of the life he'd had, and with the other into the indigo blue sky. Sees what Life will hold for the kids he loves with every fibre of his being. And he stops fighting.

The pain is ebbing, fading, as his senses begin to switch off and Sven smiles, content.

Because life is a beautiful fading band of light across the water

But blue is the colour of heaven,

He closes his eyes, and his heart squeezes in his chest again. But in a different, better way.

Breathes out, one last time.

-.-.-

Your head tilts; your eyes open to the world

-.-.-

He's facing her, molten eyes angry and bitter and fierce and it's raining and she has no idea what will happen next, how this will end. And then he's…he's charging at her, and she is too petrified to move or speak or anything as he barrels into her, the weight of him sending them both smacking to the concrete, holding her, pinned, beneath him. His tousled head, just for a moment, is nestled against her breast and then he turns up to look at her.

Tears in his eyes.

"You can't…you can't go." He says, and she feels hope swell in her heart.

"I – " she begins, and, fearing what might spill from her soft pink mouth, Train kisses her again.

It's different this time, softer. There is no grief, but still a lingering sadness that leaves her dizzy and breathless and makes her wrap her arms around him, tightly, while the rain drums them into the ground. They don't stir for a long time.

He holds her, tightly, as though he'd rather her break than be lost, and she feels him breathe in the scent of her. No perfume, not like Rinslet. Not milk and honeyed Saya, or Kyoko who smelt of fire. Eve is… sesame and sandalwood. Rosemary and old roses. It's the most soothing fragrance he's ever encountered, and, slowly, he relaxes his hold on her.

"I – " she tries, again, and again he kisses her. But the urgency is painful, and she can taste his fear. So, when she next has her breath back, she phrases it differently.

She knows that words, the right words, the magic words (just like in the Scheherazade Tales) can seal this up, set it free. Train has always responded when people speak with their hearts, despite the thirteen over his own. Despite the blockades he has put up around his own. "You…" She takes his face in his hands, feels the coarse sandpaper feel of his cheeks and studies his face, her heart beating faster. Holding him like that, holding his face in her hands, makes her hands feel, for the first time, bloodless. As though she is being cleansed. As though she doesn't have to hate herself, for ending Sven's unlife. "You…" but her heart is too trembly, jumping erratically in her chest. He feels it, through the skin and bone and cloth, and frowns, worried. "Train, I… If it wasn't for you…"

Her hair has turned grey from the rain, he notices, and she has never looked more beautiful. But then he feels her heart, pressed up against his, watches, aghast, as tears fill her eyes. "If it wasn't for you I wouldn't breathe." She whispers, shamefaced by how inadequate her words are. "If you weren't…there, I think I'd go into a coma or something." Her breath hitches in her throat and the tears threaten to overflow. He closes his eyes, and then he presses his forehead to hers, guiding her breathing as they share the same breath. Her heartbeat slows, and so does his, and they are joined by the rhythm, as much as they have simultaneously always been, since she turned 16 and he saw her in the kitchen and the gears of their hearts clicked into the same beat when she met his eyes. This is why it works, dizzily and gloriously. Why it works and makes him smile, and kiss her again and breathe for her. He brushes the greying hair off her forehead gently and kisses the fair skin revealed in the action.

"You're never going to not breathe again." He promises her.

Love is every shade of grey.

-.-.-

Te Whakamutunga