paradise (a history)

What happens when you die?

*

His name was Shirou Kamui, and he was not all that much different from anybody else.

He was brought up by a single mother, who was a former member of one of Japan's oldest magical families, and he had no father he ever knew, but that was about the extent of his abnormality. Unless you counted the fact that he was unusually sexually active. Or that he had wings.

His best friends in the world -- so he would tell you if you were to ask -- were Segawa Keiichi and Sumeragi Subaru. They were all the same age. Subaru was an onmyouji (thirteenth head of the Sumeragi clan, which was apparently something very important that Kamui didn't entirely understand), and he had a twin sister with a somewhat alarming tendency to dress up like Valentine cards. They'd been raised by their grandmother after their parents had died in a car accident when they were small. All of this led Kamui to the comfortable belief that, if nothing else, Subaru was much weirder than he was. Keiichi, however, was so normal that he should have come with a warning label. Or at least a volume control.

It was Subaru who had first identified his wings as such; Kamui's mother pointed them out one day when the boys were sixteen, actually, curious as to what the young onmyouji's opinion on the matter might be. Subaru had frowned, studying the two shimmering ethereal protrusions from Kamui's aura with great care, and at last pronounced that from their shape and position, they seemed -- seemed -- to be wings.

"But it's hard to tell," he'd said hurriedly, even as Shirou Touru's eyes widened at the news. "They're... not completely here, I don't think. It makes them harder to see."

Kamui's mother had frowned, leaning forward on the sofa in their small living room. "What do you mean, not completely here?" she'd asked.

"I mean..." Subaru had thought, and then sighed. "They're old. No, that isn't quite it... They're from, well, before. Not necessarily the past, but ... They're here now, but they're not from now, and they aren't part of now. They're over."

"Huh?" Kamui had inquired brightly. In all honesty, he hadn't been all that interested in the conversation. This magic stuff was beyond him; he was mostly interested in lunch, and the making out that was likely to take place in his room later that afternoon.

"They're like the stars." This statement had seemed like a revelation to Subaru, and he'd pressed on with it earnestly, despite two confused looks. "When you look at the stars, you see them not as they look now, but as they looked millions of years ago, because it takes the light that long to reach the earth. We're not really looking at the past itself, but seeing how a piece of it looked, like it's frozen in time. That's what those wings are like -- I mean, if they're wings at all. They're fragments of something else, and even though we can see them, they aren't really here. Or anywhere else. Just echoes."

"Do you mean a previous life?" Touru had asked, and he'd shrugged slightly.

"Something like that, possibly." He'd looked at Kamui then, and smiled; a less shy smile, already, and the other boy had been glad. "Whatever they are, they're very pretty. But I think that's all they are."

So Kamui didn't think of himself as unusual in the slightest, really. It wasn't as if anyone else could see them, after all; and he certainly wasn't about to bring it up.

And anyway, he had bigger problems than some astral projections from his aura (whatever that was supposed to mean). Like when his mother wanted him to go to college. She'd wanted desperately to go away to school, but had been too tied up in obligations to her family at the time... and now that Kamui had the option she hadn't, Touru was firmly determined that Kamui was going to receive higher education for the whole family. Kamui, however, didn't like this idea at all. He didn't want to go to college; he wanted to hang around Tokyo, go out with his friends, get drunk, get laid, and maybe get a job that he'd actually like, instead of one that would pay reasonably well for sucking the living soul right out of him (or so he described this possibility to his mother). It was the reigning issue when Kamui was eighteen, and they fought bitterly over it for what must have been months. And on top of that, another disaster struck, just as Keiichi and Subaru began to date (an affair that would end badly around the middle of Keiichi's college career, not that any of them knew that then). That was when Kamui was made casually aware that Keiichi -- his best friend since they were both 11, a friend when no one else would have even so much as talked to him -- was in love with him, and had been for a while. And while Kamui loved Keiichi like a best friend and like a brother, well... that was more than he knew how to deal with.

It could have been worse than it was, though, he supposed. But they both managed to be mature about it, and things got smoothed over, and Keiichi started going with Subaru. If only all problems ended so well. But nonetheless, after that, going away to college didn't seem like such a horrible thought anymore. Rather practical, really, all things considered. He would have hated to be in the way.

And besides that... that time was when Kamui first became really, truly aware of The Absence: when he first turned around and faced the beast walking behind him in his footsteps, walked right up to look into its beady eyes and smell its sulfurous breath. He didn't talk about The Absence then, of course (and, save one bad night when too much to drink pried his mouth open for just a little too long, never would), but he first began to realize it was there -- that it had perhaps been there all along -- and identify what it was. It was just what he thought of it as: a void; an emptiness; a space left open that should be filled. It was a vague sensation of something missing, as though some small but vital piece had simply been left out when he was being constructed in his mother's womb, and now there was something he was supposed to be, something he was supposed to do, that he couldn't and would never be able to. Something that would make everything else make sense. Something... more.

Mostly, he tried not to think of it. But it was still there, one day to the next, hovering over his shoulder and breathing down his neck. It followed him to college, followed him home again when it was done. It was relentless, but at least it was quiet.

He had weird dreams, too, though that probably wasn't much of a problem to speak of. Horrible, lurid dreams, sometimes, full of death and destruction and ominous portents, red skies and silver blades. Nightmares, he supposed, though he could barely ever remember them when he woke up -- and though he had sometimes woken up from them crying when he was younger, they were somehow more sad than frightening. Like going through the journal of someone who had died in a terrible war. And as he got older, it began to occur to him that they were like his wings: like memories, echoes, not things of the present time. They were old; they were over. He thought of telling Subaru about them once or twice, but always forgot. Probably just as well.

One night, he dreamed that he was standing on some sort of glass disc, talking to a pale, small woman in traditional dress, whose hair was white even though she was young. The only thing she told him that he remembered was that none of them -- not Subaru, not Keiichi, especially not him -- knew how happy they all were. It was one of the weirdest by far; left him feeling strangely guilty for days. A couple years later, though -- even weirder -- he could have sworn he passed the same woman on the street, though she was dressed normally, and in a wheelchair that was being pushed by a tall, attractive dark-haired woman in whom he could nonetheless see a certain familial resemblance. The woman in the wheelchair smiled as they passed, and so he smiled back, at a loss for what else to do. Later, he convinced himself that it had been his imagination, or at least just a coincidence.

No; maybe he didn't know how happy he was. But sometimes, in those years, he had to wonder how much worse it could really be.

*

Maybe that's the end, then. Maybe it's just fade to black and then curtain, nothing more. You go into the ground and your body becomes part of the earth, and for a while people remember you, and then they don't.

It'd probably be kindest that way. Perpetuity is exhausting; oblivion is rest.

*

Kamui came home at last from college to find that Subaru was having a crisis. This was not an entirely unheard-of event, but this time seemed a lot more serious than any before. Not only had he and Keiichi broken up, but Keiichi had a girlfriend, and was getting married, and therein was the real crux of the problem: Keiichi wanted a family, and Subaru's sister was already married and quite pregnant (Kamui had met her husband, Kakyou, once or twice; he seemed very nice, if a little skittish), and Subaru was beginning to feel like something was wrong with him for not wanting those things for himself. So Kamui went to see him, bearing a quart of the best ice cream Tokyo had to offer, and he spent the night patiently explaining to Subaru that being in his early twenties, very attractive, and possessed of the beginnings of a thriving veterinary practice made it physically impossible for his life to be over, all of which was followed by a lengthy blowjob on the couch later on in the evening. Let it never be said that Shirou Kamui was not a good friend. Just not exactly boyfriend material.

Still, he did prove to be prophetic (or at least he claimed so after the fact): within a year Subaru had met the love of his life, at, of all places, a veterinary convention. Sakurazuka-san seemed nice enough, but nonetheless Kamui and Hokuto both put the gentleman through a grueling interrogation period before mutually deeming him worthy. Fortunately, Subaru and Seishirou both seemed amused. Kamui was, naturally, very glad for Subaru. He couldn't imagine they'd be anything but happy.

Of course, what this meant was that just about all of the old friends he hadn't wanted to leave behind in Tokyo were otherwise occupied now, and he found himself with increasingly little to do with himself. He had a job, working in a local greenhouse and at the florist's it supplied -- he loved plants -- and a fairly nice apartment of his own, but no other real ties. He found himself gravitating back toward his (fortunately understanding) mother, going with her to visit an old high school friend of hers, and her two children. He had known them growing up, actually; the Monou children had been much younger than him, but he'd done some babysitting once or twice, and taken them out for treats every now and then. Good kids: sweet, charming Kotori, and her very quiet, presumably shy older brother, Fuuma. He'd always liked them, especially Fuuma -- the poor kid didn't even have any friends, from what Kamui could tell, and he'd made an extra effort to reach out to him, to pull him out of his shell. With minimal success, really, but was that the point?

Well... maybe.

But kids grow up. Kotori was already becoming a lovely young woman, as pretty as her mother... and Fuuma was just as quiet as ever, except that the little boy -- who'd always averted his wide, uncurious eyes from Kamui as from the sun -- had grown into an uncomfortably attractive teenager. And one who, Kamui found, had problems of his own.

It was Kotori who first pulled him aside to talk about it, though Kamui could tell from the worried, sideways glances Fuuma's parents cast at him from time to time that the boy was on his whole family's minds. "It's just like he's dead inside," she'd confided to him, as they sat on the front steps of the Monou household, looking out at the small, largely unimportant shrine their father maintained. "He doesn't do anything, he doesn't like anything, nothing makes him happy or sad or anything. Mother and Father try to pretend that he's just quiet, but he's not. I know. I love him, but... he just isn't."

Kamui had frowned. "What isn't he?"

"Anything!" She'd sighed, shaking out her wedding-band hair. "We've played together ever since I was little, and when he's left to himself, he just... isn't anything at all. He doesn't think for himself. He doesn't do anything but what other people tell him to do. It's like...

"It's like something's left out of him. Like there was something that was supposed to be put in when he was born, but it's missing. It's like... he's empty."

And Kamui had sat there staring at her, open-mouthed, as the spring sunlight played across their skin and over the grass of the backyard. Because while he had never considered himself a particularly spiritual person, he believed that sometimes there were signs, omens, in life that one shouldn't ignore...

And there were signs, and then there were signs.

Kamui was 25 years old, a gardener with a college degree, living alone and bound to remain that way, and he had no future ahead of him that he could possibly imagine; he was a disappointment to his mother, to his lovers, to his friends, and most of all, to himself. His decision was made even before he knew there was a decision to make, and it was probably better that way.

He decided he wanted to help Fuuma. And, perhaps, in so doing, to help himself as well.

And then, well, Fuuma...

Fuuma was afraid of everything. No -- it wasn't that. There wasn't even enough of him to be afraid. But everything was new to him. When he felt something -- really felt something, as he never had before -- it knocked him flat, completely paralyzed with the incomprehensible consequences of emotion. When Kamui touched him, he shook, completely at a loss as to how to respond to too much sensation, too much unknown. They spent more than a few long, hard nights, just trying to work through the walls of uncertainty, where Fuuma clung to Kamui and shuddered and leaked tears of simple overstimulation and asked, begged to be told who to be. To be given somewhere he could put all the feelings that unsteadied him, this pain that was like being born all over again. And what could Kamui say, to a request like that?

And in time, as he tried to crack his way into the strange, smooth shell that was this unfathomable young man, he began to admit to himself that to help wasn't all he wanted from Fuuma. In this boy he believed he had found something beautiful: fragile and twisted, yes, but still beautiful, still compelling, still something he first wanted and then craved and then needed. A kind of mutual magnetism, a kind of mutual dependence, an emotional more than physical desire (though there was certainly no shortage of that either, and often he almost regretted his decision not to push Fuuma on the matter).

A need.

He couldn't help but feel extraordinarily stupid when he finally got around to figuring out he was in love.

He wasn't exactly sure when Fuuma moved in; only that it happened, and it seemed so right as to preclude any real discussion. One day it was just as if he'd always been there. Kamui's cat (a fat white Persian by the extremely fitting name of Hime-sama) loved him, he looked perfect stretched out and napping on Kamui's couch, and before long the Sakurazuka and Sumeragi joint veterinary office had taken on a quiet, diffident new assistant. And day by day, little by little, it seemed like Fuuma wasn't so empty, after all; and day by day, little by little, The Absence seemed smaller. The footsteps of the beast behind Kamui faded, retreated, until he could barely hear them at all.

And somehow, miraculously, everything was all right.

And one night -- not long after they had finally first made love -- Kamui had a dream; one that was more vivid than any of them had ever been before. More present, more real. More now. In it, he was in deep, deep water, swimming down to the bottom as if to fetch up some treasure from the sand. It was the clearest water he had ever seen, and light shone down through it, gloriously, illuminating the world in iridescent color like being inside some glittering precious stone... but it was still water that could still suffocate you, if you stayed down there too long. And as he neared the bottom, it was with no real surprise that he saw the treasure he had been sent to retrieve: there Fuuma stood, buried to his knees in the rocky bottom, and his eyes were bleak as eternity until the sight of Kamui lit them with surprise.

Kamui, what are you doing here? Fuuma asked, and he looked alarmed as well as surprised.

And Kamui, not even pausing, replied, I've come to take you back.

And he wrapped his arms around Fuuma's shoulders, shoving his hands securely under arms that were much larger than his own; and once his grip was secure, he began to pull, pulling Fuuma up, breaking away the sand and rocks and tugging him loose. And in Fuuma's voice now was not just alarm, but panic.

No, he said; no, you can't, you shouldn't. This is where I belong. This is what I deserve.

It isn't, Kamui said, and kept pulling. Fuuma was almost free now. He wasn't struggling, but nor was he helping, either. It isn't and you know it. You're coming back with me. That's where you belong.

Holding Fuuma, holding him close like he would never let go, Kamui began to swim. Back up through the water. Back toward the sun.

No, Kamui... Fuuma sounded as though he were almost begging. His weight was the weight of a corpse. No, you're wrong, please... just let me drown, it'll be so much easier...

Kamui wouldn't listen; Kamui only continued swimming toward the light. It was coming closer, but slowly, so terribly, terribly slowly. His breath felt like it would burst out of his lungs.

Stop! I can't go back there! He was afraid, Kamui knew -- afraid it would hurt? It always hurts, doesn't it; being born. Please, Kamui -- let me go!

No, Kamui answered him, and was surprised by the strength in his own voice. He ached, like nothing he had ever imagined before, but the pain did not seem like any reason to stop. I won't do that. I promised you. Closer, closer and closer with every joined beat of their hearts. I love you, Fuuma. It'll be all right. Just trust me.

His muscles burned; his limbs were leaden. But they were almost there.

Kamui, please.

I won't. Not now; not ever again.

And with that, finally -- gloriously -- they reached the surface. And his last confused impression was of pulling Fuuma up to break the water's ceiling, the sun caught in a million sparkling water-droplets that sprayed off of Fuuma's rising form like comets; of the sound of Fuuma's first shuddering, painful gulp of air, as Kamui's arms around him brought him up and into the light.

When he woke up, tears were running down his face, as though something had broken loose inside him. He wrapped himself around Fuuma, ignoring the boy's half-awake murmur of confusion, and just obeyed without questioning the intense need to tell Fuuma that he loved him, whispering it over and over again like the chant of an ancient spell: that he loved Fuuma, that he would never leave him, that he would always always love him, and everything would be all right.

By the next morning, The Absence had gone for good... and though they both lived a long, long time, Kamui never dreamed again.

*

Or maybe -- just maybe -- what it is is a second chance. You know what I mean? Somebody hits the big cosmic RESET button, and you start it all over from the beginning... only maybe a little different, this time. Some of the props are gone, and the scales aren't weighed quite so heavily against you. This time, it's manageable. You have a fighting chance, and that's just what you have to do with it -- fight. Fight, and keep fighting, until your last breath.

Or maybe not. What do I know?

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