To: plaidslytherin From: prismatic-bell
Happy Christmas, plaidslytherin! Have some schmoop on me! :D
Not Long At All
Boy.
Adam’s apple, large and clumsy feet, plain brown wallet.
Girl.
Long curly hair pulled back with a colorful tie, full lips, long lashes, and a crocheted bag to put the wallet in.
Fucked if I know.
He watches the … person sit on the bench in the window and adds another mark to girl: it’s not so much the primness of how they sit as it is the way their knees never come apart and their feet turn to the side, like the sneakers on them are an anomaly and their owner more accustomed to high heels.
Then they pull out a sketchpad, and he adds another mark to boy: their shirt pulls tight across their chest when they lean over, and there are definitely no breasts under it. He frowns.
Both?
Not out of the question, he thinks. There are people like that. And none of that is what really bothers him; male, female, some mix of the two or something else altogether, he has very little preference in the way of sex.
What bothers him is the name.
He remembers the door. And the garden.
But he doesn’t remember the name.
“You work at the palace.”
The person sitting in the window jumps—knees still together, he notes—and … folds up, he thinks. Arms across the stomach and chest, shoulders hunched. Then they look up.
“Why do you care?”
No clues in the voice, either—there’s a soft and musical timbre to it, but it’s pitched just so, neatly between ranges. He puts up his hands.
“I’ve seen you on the bridge,” he says. “I simply assumed.”
The little sprite in the window relaxes, but the eyes—the same color, he thinks, of twisting vines or some other half-thought memory—stay watchful. “How do you know it was me?”
“I don’t think there could be two of you,” he comments. “May I sit?”
“If you have a name.”
“Kurosawa Daichi.”
“The chief of police.”
“Yes. And you are?”
No answer. He sits anyway, sips at his coffee. On his companion’s sketchpad, a shape appears: an ornate door, standing in an equally-ornate gate with nothing to either side. In front of it, the shape of a woman with long hair, carrying a tall staff or stick. The drawing is barely past the lightest of sketchlines before its creator slams down the pencil and lets down a loud sigh of frustration.
“I know that gate.”
“Oh?” Green eyes flick up, and he’s reminded vaguely of jade or malachite or—some other dark stone, one he’s seen in the museum surrounding a cluster of rubies like liquid fire, but can’t think of the name any better than he could. “I don’t draw with references.”
“No.” He frowns again, this time at the woman-shape in front of the gate. “You don’t remember her face either.”
The perfect rosebud mouth falls open in an equally-perfect O. Then it snaps shut, its lovely owner biting at the lips that make it up before swinging the notebook abruptly shut and shoving it back into the crocheted bag, scrambling off the bench to dart away.
His hand encloses the single thin wrist so easily he thinks he might leave bruises—the hand with those long and tapered fingers is covered in calluses, but the wrist itself is delicate and puts him in mind of both young bamboo shoots and old artist stereotypes. If there’s any resistance at all, he’ll have to let go, or it may well snap.
But its owner stops, immobile as stone, and looks back at him. The brilliant green eyes are full of fear, an expression that breaks something farther down in his heart than he knew existed until this precise moment.
That’s a new one, he thinks, and then: what?
“I thought I just saw you on television,” that deceptive voice whispers, and he stands up. There’s nothing he can do about the difference in their height—the top of that curly head barely reaches his shoulder—but he’s had ample practice talking to lost children to know how to lean on the wall, turn his shoulders, bend his knees to take off twenty centimeters or so without it looking on purpose. “That wasn’t it, was it?”
“I don’t believe so.”
There’s a moment whose length can’t, he thinks, be adequately measured by any stopwatch, when they simply stand and stare at each other. Then those long, fine fingers turn against his hand, twist the detaining gesture into a clasp. There’s a sudden cloud of unruly coppery curls in his face, all of them trying to spring free of their elastic, and then a head against his shoulder. He puts an arm around the tiny waist.
“Suzuki Aoi.”
Damn it. Even the name gives nothing away.
“You were right,” the voice says, still in that whispery voice that sounds a little too nervous to jell with the vague remembrance in his head. “I work in the gardens.”
“What time are you done tonight?”
“Noon. There’s some kind of event going on.”
A tea with the princess of Kazakhstan. He remembers it from the roster, now. Extra security so the Queen’s ladies can participate.
He lets his arm drop, feels his companion step away—but not yet out of his space.“Are you occupied this evening?”
The watchful face finally breaks into a little smile. The front teeth are crooked, a thing he can’t say he remembers, exactly, but it feels right. “I could be?”
“Are you occupied at six o’clock?”
The smile turns into a grin. Then the head ducks down and shakes, side to side.
“May I take you for coffee?”
The answering nod ends up accompanied by a peek upward. He would think girl, but he’s not so sure anymore. It really doesn’t matter.
“Yes.”
“You’re here,” he says, and reaches out to encompass one of Kunzite’s single large hands in both of his own. “She said we have to decide if we stay or we go.”
Next to the carved stone gate is a woman nearly as tall and dark as he, carrying a staff taller still and wearing an all-too-familiar uniform. He turns to face her.
“What trickery is this?”
She shakes her head. “Those of Silver Millennium have a story far different than the millions who come and go every day. I cannot interfere. I can only tell you that you may enter the Galaxy Cauldron, whose workings no one may know, or you may choose the door, and a return to earth.”
“As ourselves?” Zoisite squeezes Kunzite’s hand. His fingers are cold, and when Kunzite looks down they’re tinged with blue. He doesn’t have a body anymore, to speak of, but Kunzite gets the impression that a spirit remaining long in this place is no healthier than a human being trying to breathe water. “We go back as ourselves? Together?”
“I cannot tell you.”
They share a single look; after untold millennia, even that one is unnecessary. Kunzite raises the cold fingers to his lips.
“If we’re beetles, I’m blaming you,” Zoisite says, and Kunzite feels a thin smile cross what he can’t properly call his face anymore. He turns his hand in Zoisite’s grip to twine their fingers together. It occurs to him, briefly, that it’d be a fine farce if they came through the other side of this door as brothers.
And then Zoisite squeezes close to him, so they can step through side by side.
