Bombarding you guys with prompted fics, wheeee~

So far this is the longest fic I've ever written, actually ^^;; about 44,000 words at the moment, and counting~

In the evening gloom, it is easy to mistake an array of irreproachable shapes for something that it is not.

Shizuo had thought he was past this. The last time he had put a group of shadows together to form — purely by accident — sinister faces like halloween masks was when he was a kid and still sleeping in the same room as his brother. On occasion he'd sit up with a yelp and stare at it in the dark until he realized it was only a pile of clothes on the desk chair, or a series of silhouettes produced by the faint glow of the adjoining kitchen's light. Kasuka would wake up to point out the happier shapes in the room until Shizuo's head met the pillow for good.

Suddenly he was standing, but could not remember the action between this and sitting at the roof's edge with a cigarette between his fingers. The city below him created a rush of air that made the building seem taller than life yet as unstable as a paperclip trying to balance upright atop a surface. Individual lights further down to earth gave off golds and blues and reds, millions of dazzling, crystalline points to mirror the collection of those above.

He remembered shouting.

The cigarette dropped to the verge of the roof.

He'd seen a pair of eyes, studying him, widening with alarm, coming just a little closer.

But they weren't real. They were there, and then gone. Nothing eerie, nothing cordial, but nevertheless entirely a nightmare, for to Shizuo it was clearly better to notice something bad that was there than not to notice something good that existed only behind his line of sight.

The sound of his shoe sole scraping against the corner of cement did not reach his ears as weightlessness consumed him and sank in the deadening sensation that spread through his chest like a cancer. As an intake of air stopped in his throat, Shizuo wondered faintly if it might be his last.

A flash of scarlet that slowed his plummet just enough.

"Shizuo!"

He tapped the side of the blond's carmine-washed face, blood smudging across his fingertips as he pulled his hand away. He was careful to move the body so that his arms no longer twisted over one another — so grotesquely that a burn rising in his throat was swallowed down with difficulty. He called him again, and the faint flicker of a reaction was the only way he could tell that Shizuo was still hanging on to the thinnest threads of life.

A pair of eyes to greet Shizuo face to face, a hazy visage of someone he vaguely remembered. Vision clouded with a blur tinted a brilliant crimson, these eyes darkened to claret. They were not aligned correctly — one above the other, rather than side by side, but after a moment of contemplating the pressure in his arm it was apparent that he lay limply on his side. Glazed chestnut and gold fluttered closed. Sensations flooded back one at a time. Shouting again, a sound he recognized in an instant. There were several voices going on at once, all panicked and distressed. Breathing was swiftly proving to be an arduous task, chest falling and heart palpitating against an invisible weight. There was little pain in itself, but such an irony was the worst pain of all.

His lungs throbbed and fought for air — dirty, rusty city air that made him choke and effected a dry wheeze along the trachea. As Shizuo tried to open his eyes again, the red faded away, and a clear image of Kadota's concern appeared before them. A call of his name was merely taken into calm regard as they slid closed again. With great care, tension against the numbness, a number of hands found his shoulders and legs, and the lightweight feeling returned once more.