Oneshot: Pictures Of You

[andrew_in_drag]

Title: Pictures Of You   
Author: andrew_in_drag   
Pairing: Kyo/Toshiya   
Rating: PG-13       
Warnings: Somehow the creepiest thing I have ever written. Strangely formatted. Scarily insular.   
Synopsis: I've been looking so long at these pictures of you, I really think that they're all I can feel.   

Pictures of You

I've
been looking so long at these pictures of you, I really think they're
all I can feel.    

Nine by thirteen, ten by fifteen; passport pictures, class pictures,
casual pictures, the ones I love the most. Classic film and digital;
crinkled edges, smudged colours; SLR; reds too blue and pinprick eyes
in the earliest days of polaroid: photographs, photographs,
photographs of you.  

At first   
it was the arranging of them that I liked. Chronological order
was time consuming at first, and then too simple when it was done.
Categories, categories: you at parties and you at work. These are
your memories, and I've got them all, like your first day at school
and your most recent birthday. I can draw a perfect trajectory of
your life and plot all the significant moments along it like
landmarks, the ancient ruins of your own history.  

I
have so many pictures of you.  

The albums became so inefficient, before too much time passed. I had the
kind with the cellophane covered pages, and that slick screen got in
the way, frustrated and pissed me off: I took them out and laid them
out, my pictures of you: like this one, one of my favourites,
you in your blue hair phase – oh, pretty boy. Standing awkward
because you haven't grown into your long limbs yet, teetering around
on coltish legs and tucking your hair behind your ear with a bashful
hand. I can see your face just below those clumsily cut bangs. You're
so young you're barely formed, and it's that absence of everything
that interests me: before it all happened and we were not yet
anything to each other; or rather, I was not anything to you,
not yet, and the sky was so blue that day that it transcended
everything I had ever thought of as blue. It was still blue,
but it just wasn't the blue of our minds; because it wasn't
the sea and it wasn't sadness and it wasn't sapphires:
it was a whole new definition of blue.    

And under this sky
you're standing with your arm around somebody I forgot

as soon as I cut them out; when that happened, they ceased to exist.
Your clothes are black, and so are your eyes. And whose dark bite on
your neck? Pretty, pretty boy.    

So when I got rid of the albums I had to find somewhere else to put
them. I stood staring down at you and your eyes stared up at me a
thousand times over, and I put them on the wall so then, that way,
you could be watching me all the time and I wouldn't have to suffer
any kind of vacancy from you. This time, I cared less about
organising them, because it wasn't about arrangement and
classification and categorising; it was about you and your car crash
eyes. To put it in a metaphor, because you like metaphors and I can
tell that from how you talk, there's me, a slowly spinning galaxy,
and you are the black hole at my centre that forces my edges into
spirals and drags my light away.    

Light, bad lighting, good lighting, flash: another picture of you. There are
stars in your eyes that I know you sucked out of the darkest parts of
me, and so I did the natural thing and I took you down into the
darkness too. I wanted to help you to understand me. I wanted to get
more pictures of you. You saw the mounted tripod and the glowing
lights of the cameras and got the wrong idea, of course; pretty,
stupid boy, and there was nothing I could say to talk you round; not
even offering to untie you did it, you just kept on crying. The sound
drilled into my head. I saved up a scream and roared at you, the
monster in the mine shaft, the beast in the basement, and it shut you
up and turned your eyes cold.

I'll never, I'll never, I'll never do what you want.  

You'll have to kill me.  

I don't want to kill you.  

Just
kill me, please.  

So what if what I am is a collector, and I don't need to organise
because that would interfere with gathering? That's what I was
thinking. I made sure your home had a bed and a bookcase and a radio,
I fed you by hand, spoonful by resentful spoonful that you took from
me, since your wrists were bound or else you'd try to scratch my eyes
out. The radio played rock revival, Roy Orbison, dream,
dream dream dream, whenever I want you all I have to do is dream.    

Dream a little dream all about the basement scene.  

I did everything I could to make you comfortable but you stubbornly
grew pale. Sullen thing, wilful thing: dayblooming flower, you
refused to blossom down there in the dark. But you were still the
ultimate collector's piece. And there were flashes in the dark as I
took pictures, pictures, pictures of you.  

I got excited when I realised that you and I had never taken pictures
together, and that was my next project, pushing our memories together
so you could see all the places where we crossed over, and gradually
the basement was so dark that it wasn't dark anymore. Your eyes
adjusted and your mind adjusted too, and your furious silence abated,
and you asked questions that were not why am I here  

but what is your name and    

where are your parents.  

My name was given to me by people that were inept, stupid people who
would never understand, so I baptised myself Kyo and gave that to
you. Which you accepted. In time you accepted everything. When the
insects swarming my parents in the kitchen began to take over the
whole house, I moved into the basement with you. Food was a problem
and it began to trouble me: how best to keep you alive, to preserve
you in ways that did not involve silver nitrate and celluloid. I
wanted you, my baby doll, breathing and talking like the real thing.
The darkness crowded at the edges of our vision. Have you ever loved
somebody so much, you didn't care what happened to yourself?  

I made a cut and held my sloppy wrist up to your mouth. Funny that a
boy who would at first mash your lips closed against the silver spoon
would then take my blood so willingly. I knew that I was meeting my
goal and you were beginning to understand    

me, probably in a way you have never understood    

anybody before. Pretty thing, foolish thing; you ran away with your
hands still tied and your lips still carnivore-bloody, dragging your
chair behind you through the streets; you betrayed me with your
screaming but you still refused to let go of that chair, even when
they disentangled you from the ropes that connected you to it; they
didn't understand that the ropes were not physical  

but all tied up inside, like the cords between me and you,
irreversible soulblood ties and bonds and cuffs.  

And   
on that day the sky was so blue.    
It wasn't blueberries or blueblood or bluebruises, it was all of
those things together, and my loss of you was a balloon floating up
like a cloud against that blueblueblue sky, with the tether stretched
as far as it could go, and my feet on the ground and my head on the
ceiling. Winterblue. Like you, cold moon, had reflected my light, the
snow on the ground reflected the sky until all I could see
was blue, and even as you flailed blood across the frosted grass it
was still all I could    
see, even when I closed my eyes, blue and blue you and blue pictures
of you, all together, so blue you weren't blue any longer.    

I   
have four walls covered with pictures of you.  

Drawings,   
mostly. A lot of my photographs were taken away and I only managed to
pilfer a few. Your absence is now my memorabilia. I can hear the
silence and age stretching through the corridors, sounds like heavy
feet on old stairs; the reality of you has evacuated,    
or maybe it's just...disappeared.  

I've   
been looking so long at these pictures of you, I really think that    
they're all I can feel.    

I've    
been looking so long at these pictures of you, I really believe that    
they're starting to be    
real.  

Comments

[tcharlatan.livejournal.com]

And you do it sooooooo goooooooooooood <3