prologue: yomiya
Rain pattered down on the roof and the walls of the Imonoyama mansion; moisture made the air thick and hard to breathe. The downpour was the same one that had plagued him all the way back from the hospital, and it drummed steadily on the world as if to say, hmm, you know, Tokyo's nice enough; maybe I'll just stay here a while. Maybe forever.
Kamui was already sick of it; the rattle on the windowpanes made him want to grit his teeth. On a better day, the constant noise might have been relaxing, but today it sounded like a cold accusation, a pointed finger. You. Of course, with the way his thoughts were going, just about anything would have sounded that way to him tonight. And he probably deserved that, didn't he?
Everybody had told him to sleep, it seemed like, and so when he got back he had headed upstairs to do just that -- thinking the whole time how he would have been much happier about getting some rest if he could have done it in Subaru's room at the hospital, curled up in a chair or just on the floor beside the bed. And then how unfair it was to be sent all the way across town from the Sumeragi, when right now it felt too far away to be just across the room. What if something happened?
What if, what if...
But he'd been too tired and too broken down inside to argue much, and so he'd come quietly back to the mansion and to his room. It was only when he reached his door that he had realized, with his stomach lurching up a couple inches higher than it was supposed to be, how much he really, really didn't want to go in there. The strange room -- still strange after three whole months of sleeping there; he'd probably never get used to it -- was especially dark and shadowy and awful in the dim gray cloudlight, and going in there alone right now would just be horrible. It would hurt.
And he was so damned tired of hurting.
So after a few minutes of hovering in the hallway and trying to think, he had looked down the stairs to make sure no one was watching him, and then hurried up the next flight, to the third-floor hallway where most of the other Dragons roomed. He already knew which door was Subaru's; he'd memorized it in the past few months, like so many other things that he'd kept track of for reasons he didn't want to think about. His grades in school were apathetic, but if he were ever tested on Subaru, he'd nail it.
The room, he'd found, was practically untouched, cold and blank as a hotel suite or a guest bedroom... but it wasn't quite empty, and there was a lingering whiff in the air of a familiar, smoky smell that made Kamui's heart wring itself out inside him. The tears in his eyes had surprised him, and for a moment they made him blind; and he told himself he had to lie down on the bed, to keep from falling.
And he'd cried for a while as he lay there, but the rain outside had done it right along with him, and so that was probably all right.
And eventually he had calmed down, and told himself he really would try to sleep; with that warm scent on the pillow, it might be easier. But when he'd closed his eyes, all he could see was an endless loop of Subaru collapsing in his arms, with blood and something horrible, clear and sticky leaking from under an eyelid that looked weirdly flat -- as if there weren't quite as much holding it up as there had been before (oh stop it, will you, just stop it); of Fuuma, shadow-wings painted on the air behind him, rearing back with a hand in the air and a horrible, blank-eyed smile... and how when those fingers had hit like a blunt dagger, there had been a sound, not anything dramatic but just what you'd hear if someone dropped a grape and then stepped on it by accident...
There had been a few dizzy seconds where he was sure he was going to throw up, but finally, it had passed. That was good. It would have been really embarrassing to explain later.
And even with his inner movie theater set on torturing him, at last he managed to fall into an uneasy light sleep; one with too many dreams of a blank staring eye, and the sourceless shadows of wings.
And a couple weeks later, when Subaru had come back in reasonably good health (without commenting, thankfully, on the slightly rumpled state of his bed), Kamui dreamed of him. He dreamed they were in the hospital room, with the rain tapping on the windows; and that they lay together in the bed that was really too big for just the onmyouji, and Subaru held Kamui to his chest and stroked his hair and told him things in a quiet voice that seemed very important at the time, but which were impossible to remember later. And then Subaru bent and kissed him in his dream, surprising him, his tongue slipping between Kamui's lips and teasing inside his mouth, and while Kamui had never been kissed like this, this had to be what it was supposed to be like. It felt too good to be wrong. He did the best he could to answer, and Subaru pulled Kamui down on top of him, touching him and kissing his forehead and his brow, and telling him that it was all right, everything was okay. And they kissed, and the rain fell, and he was warm all over in a way that he couldn't remember ever having been warm before, and he was a little afraid that he would never be again. But Subaru's lips were sweet and soft and felt like home, and for a while, he forgot to worry about it. About anything.
He woke up blushing from his hair straight down to his toes, and with an uncomfortable but not quite unpleasant throbbing in his body below the tugged-down sheets. He stared at the ceiling, and touched his own cool lips; and what was wrong with him, anyway, dreaming about something like that?
And then he lay awake until dawn, staring wide-eyed and feverish out into the darkness, because he couldn't stop wondering how Subaru's mouth would taste.