Two drabble things.
Dec. 21st, 2007 12:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
midnightdiddleReborn! and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. :D
He kills himself in May, holds a gun to his head and fires.
Hibari fic. Shameless angst, teenage suicide, and, uh, that's about it. Oh, wait. A kid who's totally stuck on his parents. Right.
May's Child
He kills himself in May, holds a gun to his head and fires.
His mother's nine days dead, his father's eleven, and the house is empty, quiet kitchen and lonely table. He sets the places at the table, one two three, and sits in his chair, between one end and the other, and says, "hello?"
No one answers.
The bathroom's empty, too, a leaky faucet his father never had time to fix, towels his mother picked out three months ago. He washes his hands, dries them on the old towels, the drying towels, and picks up the new towels, the pretty pink-and-rose towels his mother got for company. He rumbles them up, throws them on the floor, then shakes them out and folds them again.
Does it once more, then again, and tosses them into the tub, where they bleed, faint dye too rich for the cotton, into the shallow water.
Their bedroom is a mess, bed unmade, a dress hanging over a chair. Ties are lined up on the bed, where his mother had been trying to match tie to shirt for his father, and there's a suit jacket hanging from a hook over the back of the door. He flicks on the light, sits on the bed, and lifts the ties. Ties one on, then takes it off. Ties another, looks in the mirror. The green and beige clashes with his school uniform, and he fingers the silk, straightens the knot.
Tries to choke himself, blinks back tears when he lets go and breathes.
Someone knocks on the door that night, when he's sitting in the living room. The TV's muted, kanji scrolling across the screen, and he leans back, closes his eyes. Waits, listens to the person knock again, and turns on the sound.
The TV's sound doesn't get high enough, doesn't rattle the windowpanes, and so he kicks in the TV, glass shattering on the floor. And there, that's it, that's what he wants. He wants to break everything, until his mother catches him and holds him and asks, "Kyouya, Kyouya, what's wrong?"
He wants to piss his dad off, make him cuff his head. He wants to make his mom cry, and he wants his dad to complain about teenagers, temperamental and blind, and he wants to sit down to dinner, awkward silences before his mom starts laughing and his dad makes faces and he can smile at his plate, pick at pieces of rice one by one.
He wants to cry.
He wants, he thinks, to die.
He digs through his parents' drawers, where their socks are mixed together, his father's plain black and gray and white, his mother's bright yellow and red and green. He digs lower, past his father's badge, and lower, and his father's gun slides into his hand like his mother's hand used to. Smooth, and warm, and it feels like home.
There are bullets in a cabinet downstairs, and the key was in his father's pocket when car wrapped around streetlight, and it's in his hand now, when he wraps himself around the doorway, spins himself down the hall. He fumbles with the lock once, twice, but he opens it on the third time, and it doesn't take long to figure out how to load bullets. He's always been a smart boy.
He aims at the mirror, lifts his hand like they do in movies, backlash of the gun, or something like that. Smiles, makes a face, and puts the gun to his head.
Kyouya kills himself on May 16, puts the gun to his head and fires. His mother's nine days dead, and his father's eleven, and his birthday cake is still in the fridge.
They never got home to light the candles.
Butch is gone one morning, when Sundance wakes up in the cold, shoulder aching. He doesn't think it at first, waiting to hear Butch whoop from outside, riding around on that stupid bicycle, or baiting Ethel's steer, or just dancing with Ethel, bootsteps on the front porch.
Post-movie. 'cause I believe they made it, damnit. Butch, Sundance, and Australia: things that break the world.
The Australian Sky
He limps through Australia, a hand pressed against his side. Sundance watches him go, the way Butch fades into the sky and the ground, the edges of his body shimmering in the heat. Butch turns back, smiles as he lifts his head to look at the sky.
"Good plan," Butch says, congratulating himself like they're not two cripples clinging to Australia's dirt. Sundance nods.
"Good plan," he agrees. "Not even a garden."
Butch laughs until his breath hitches, and then he leans against his horse, hands wrapped the stirrup, holding himself upright. Sundance looks away, looks up at the blue sky and the twisted rocks, and nods again.
"Good place."
x
Sundance writes a letter to Ethel while Butch is sleeping. Australia, the letter says, is hot. Feels a lot like home. Good summer.
When Butch wakes up, jerking awake with a cough and groan, muttering something about coffee, Sundance shoves the letter across the table, pushes the pen with it.
"Sign it," he says, and Butch looks at the letter, looks at Sundance. He signs James Ryan, then below it, with smaller, tighter flourishes, Butch Cassidy.
Sundance burns the letter that night, while Butch watches, and writes a new one in the morning.
Darling, it says, I've made it to Australia. Jack is doing well; he aches from the war. How are the children?
He mails the letter on the last day of summer, and rides back home, shoulder dragging too low, hand still numb on the saddle. He stumbles when he swings off the horse, and Butch laughs, loud and hoarse. Sundance shrugs, pulls at the saddlebags, and sits on the dirt of Australia.
x
Ethel's letter comes before winter. Dear, her clean writing says, I had feared the worst. Armies are cruel, and I'm glad you suffered only what you did.
The children, it says, are gone. Give my brother my love.
Butch reads it over Sundance's shoulder, and says, "all dead, then?"
"Sounds like," Sundance agrees, and folds the letter small as he can, sets it in the heel of his boot. He steps on Ethel's words, always so smart, and wishes she could carry him again.
x
Butch is gone one morning, when Sundance wakes up in the cold, shoulder aching. He doesn't think it at first, waiting to hear Butch whoop from outside, riding around on that stupid bicycle, or baiting Ethel's steer, or just dancing with Ethel, bootsteps on the front porch.
It's Australia, though, Australia's shade of blue that stares him in the face, and Australia's air that sits heavy in his throat. He digs through Butch's things, mostly still there, and then goes out to the ragged stable. Butch's horse is gone, saddle and bridle, and Sundance curses as he throws down hay.
He's sitting in front of the house, coat hanging too loose, when Butch rides up, looking ridiculously pleased with himself. Sundance lifts his chin, tugs his hat further down, and waits.
"Hey, Sundance," Butch says, nearly falling off the horse, and his pain looks nearly like a smile from where Sundance is slouching. Sundance flicks a hand against the butt of his pistol, wishes he had a shotgun.
"Where you been?"
Butch looks sharp, and catches on quick, like always. He steps to the side, not back or front, and shoves his hands into his pockets, smooth like talking. "Nowhere much," he says, like Sundance isn't running his thumb over the butt of his pistol, over and again.
"Where you been, Butch?" Sundance asks again, and he wants to kick something, send it flying. Butch takes another step, forward this time, and he's lifting his chin, rolling his shoulders, like he always did when the boys got too rowdy and the girls too fast.
"Nowhere much, Sundance," Butch says, smooth smooth, like the silk dresses Ethel had mooned over in New York. "Just lookin' 'round."
The accent's smooth, too, like a taste of home, and Sundance knows he's being played, just like all of Butch's boys. He waits until Butch is closer, then swings out, his fist catching the edge of Butch's shoulder. Enough to knock Butch off-balance, but not enough to hurt either of them.
Everything, though, hurts now. Ethel's letter, folded in his shoe, and Butch taking off in the middle of the night, nothing gone but him and his horse. Everything hurts now, and Sundance feels lame in the saddle.
"A bank," Butch says appeasingly, stepping back faster than Sundance has seen in months. "Was lookin' at a bank."
"No," Sundance says, and he goes inside the house, sits at the table, and drinks the coffee grown cold.
x
"There's a good bank nearby. Wouldn't be hard," Butch says, clanging his way through the dishes. There's not much, just a few cracked, misshapen bowls, and Butch drops them onto the table, pushes one across towards Sundance. The porridge looks lumpy, too brown in some parts, too white in others. Sundance runs a finger through the porridge, watches it gloop.
"We've gone clean," Sundance says, scraping his finger against the edge of the bowl. There's still porridge, and so he licks his finger, grimaces. "God, Butch, this shit--"
"Shut up," Butch says, and he sounds angry. Sundance shuts up, momentarily startled, and watches Butch sit with a wince, grab his own bowl of porridge.
"The bank," Butch says again, hours later, when he's leaning back against the wall, blinking sleepy-eyed in the firelight. Sundance grunts, turns his pistol over, checking it again.
"No job, Butch," he says, and rubs a finger across the barrel, metal cold and smooth.
"Right," Butch says. "Gone clean."
x
Butch always limps the most in the morning, when the air's cold and snapping in the room. He's angriest then, too, angry at Australia and Bolivia and the world, and even Sundance. Sundance stays out of his way, skirting around until the lines on Butch's face ease, and Butch starts making the strange half-hum he makes when he's thinking.
"Hell," Butch says cheerfully, like he's just had a woman or too much to drink or a train to talk down, shake loose of bills and coins. Sundance grins, shrugs, and goes back out to the shaky stable to throw down hay for the horses.
Butch catches him in the dirt, grinning wide and drunk on spring. "Should teach you to swim," he says, like it's some bright idea of his, and Sundance nods, because Butch never looks this happy anymore.
"Right," he says, and Butch pushes past him, grabbing bridle and saddle and horse.
The waterhole is cold, shoots up and down Sundance's limbs like hot metal, burning in its cold. He gasps, drags back his hair, and thinks this might be one of Butch's stupider ideas, right up there with chasing off their own horses and leaping into rivers from cliffs.
Butch is laughing, though, the scars across his side and stomach stretching with his movements. Sundance watches the pull of muscle and skin, still too pink and new, and lets Butch push him deeper into the water, until Sundance feels like he's drowning.
"Stupid idea," Sundance spits out with water, but without any heart, and Butch nods, looking up at the sky.
"Not a good place," Butch says. "Next one will be better."
Sundance doesn't know if he's talking about Australia or the waterhole or Bolivia, and doesn't want to know. He drags himself out of the water, dirt caking onto him as mud, and throws himself on the ground, tired and cold.
"Next one," he agrees. "Next one will be good."
He kills himself in May, holds a gun to his head and fires.
Hibari fic. Shameless angst, teenage suicide, and, uh, that's about it. Oh, wait. A kid who's totally stuck on his parents. Right.
May's Child
He kills himself in May, holds a gun to his head and fires.
His mother's nine days dead, his father's eleven, and the house is empty, quiet kitchen and lonely table. He sets the places at the table, one two three, and sits in his chair, between one end and the other, and says, "hello?"
No one answers.
The bathroom's empty, too, a leaky faucet his father never had time to fix, towels his mother picked out three months ago. He washes his hands, dries them on the old towels, the drying towels, and picks up the new towels, the pretty pink-and-rose towels his mother got for company. He rumbles them up, throws them on the floor, then shakes them out and folds them again.
Does it once more, then again, and tosses them into the tub, where they bleed, faint dye too rich for the cotton, into the shallow water.
Their bedroom is a mess, bed unmade, a dress hanging over a chair. Ties are lined up on the bed, where his mother had been trying to match tie to shirt for his father, and there's a suit jacket hanging from a hook over the back of the door. He flicks on the light, sits on the bed, and lifts the ties. Ties one on, then takes it off. Ties another, looks in the mirror. The green and beige clashes with his school uniform, and he fingers the silk, straightens the knot.
Tries to choke himself, blinks back tears when he lets go and breathes.
Someone knocks on the door that night, when he's sitting in the living room. The TV's muted, kanji scrolling across the screen, and he leans back, closes his eyes. Waits, listens to the person knock again, and turns on the sound.
The TV's sound doesn't get high enough, doesn't rattle the windowpanes, and so he kicks in the TV, glass shattering on the floor. And there, that's it, that's what he wants. He wants to break everything, until his mother catches him and holds him and asks, "Kyouya, Kyouya, what's wrong?"
He wants to piss his dad off, make him cuff his head. He wants to make his mom cry, and he wants his dad to complain about teenagers, temperamental and blind, and he wants to sit down to dinner, awkward silences before his mom starts laughing and his dad makes faces and he can smile at his plate, pick at pieces of rice one by one.
He wants to cry.
He wants, he thinks, to die.
He digs through his parents' drawers, where their socks are mixed together, his father's plain black and gray and white, his mother's bright yellow and red and green. He digs lower, past his father's badge, and lower, and his father's gun slides into his hand like his mother's hand used to. Smooth, and warm, and it feels like home.
There are bullets in a cabinet downstairs, and the key was in his father's pocket when car wrapped around streetlight, and it's in his hand now, when he wraps himself around the doorway, spins himself down the hall. He fumbles with the lock once, twice, but he opens it on the third time, and it doesn't take long to figure out how to load bullets. He's always been a smart boy.
He aims at the mirror, lifts his hand like they do in movies, backlash of the gun, or something like that. Smiles, makes a face, and puts the gun to his head.
Kyouya kills himself on May 16, puts the gun to his head and fires. His mother's nine days dead, and his father's eleven, and his birthday cake is still in the fridge.
They never got home to light the candles.
Butch is gone one morning, when Sundance wakes up in the cold, shoulder aching. He doesn't think it at first, waiting to hear Butch whoop from outside, riding around on that stupid bicycle, or baiting Ethel's steer, or just dancing with Ethel, bootsteps on the front porch.
Post-movie. 'cause I believe they made it, damnit. Butch, Sundance, and Australia: things that break the world.
The Australian Sky
He limps through Australia, a hand pressed against his side. Sundance watches him go, the way Butch fades into the sky and the ground, the edges of his body shimmering in the heat. Butch turns back, smiles as he lifts his head to look at the sky.
"Good plan," Butch says, congratulating himself like they're not two cripples clinging to Australia's dirt. Sundance nods.
"Good plan," he agrees. "Not even a garden."
Butch laughs until his breath hitches, and then he leans against his horse, hands wrapped the stirrup, holding himself upright. Sundance looks away, looks up at the blue sky and the twisted rocks, and nods again.
"Good place."
x
Sundance writes a letter to Ethel while Butch is sleeping. Australia, the letter says, is hot. Feels a lot like home. Good summer.
When Butch wakes up, jerking awake with a cough and groan, muttering something about coffee, Sundance shoves the letter across the table, pushes the pen with it.
"Sign it," he says, and Butch looks at the letter, looks at Sundance. He signs James Ryan, then below it, with smaller, tighter flourishes, Butch Cassidy.
Sundance burns the letter that night, while Butch watches, and writes a new one in the morning.
Darling, it says, I've made it to Australia. Jack is doing well; he aches from the war. How are the children?
He mails the letter on the last day of summer, and rides back home, shoulder dragging too low, hand still numb on the saddle. He stumbles when he swings off the horse, and Butch laughs, loud and hoarse. Sundance shrugs, pulls at the saddlebags, and sits on the dirt of Australia.
x
Ethel's letter comes before winter. Dear, her clean writing says, I had feared the worst. Armies are cruel, and I'm glad you suffered only what you did.
The children, it says, are gone. Give my brother my love.
Butch reads it over Sundance's shoulder, and says, "all dead, then?"
"Sounds like," Sundance agrees, and folds the letter small as he can, sets it in the heel of his boot. He steps on Ethel's words, always so smart, and wishes she could carry him again.
x
Butch is gone one morning, when Sundance wakes up in the cold, shoulder aching. He doesn't think it at first, waiting to hear Butch whoop from outside, riding around on that stupid bicycle, or baiting Ethel's steer, or just dancing with Ethel, bootsteps on the front porch.
It's Australia, though, Australia's shade of blue that stares him in the face, and Australia's air that sits heavy in his throat. He digs through Butch's things, mostly still there, and then goes out to the ragged stable. Butch's horse is gone, saddle and bridle, and Sundance curses as he throws down hay.
He's sitting in front of the house, coat hanging too loose, when Butch rides up, looking ridiculously pleased with himself. Sundance lifts his chin, tugs his hat further down, and waits.
"Hey, Sundance," Butch says, nearly falling off the horse, and his pain looks nearly like a smile from where Sundance is slouching. Sundance flicks a hand against the butt of his pistol, wishes he had a shotgun.
"Where you been?"
Butch looks sharp, and catches on quick, like always. He steps to the side, not back or front, and shoves his hands into his pockets, smooth like talking. "Nowhere much," he says, like Sundance isn't running his thumb over the butt of his pistol, over and again.
"Where you been, Butch?" Sundance asks again, and he wants to kick something, send it flying. Butch takes another step, forward this time, and he's lifting his chin, rolling his shoulders, like he always did when the boys got too rowdy and the girls too fast.
"Nowhere much, Sundance," Butch says, smooth smooth, like the silk dresses Ethel had mooned over in New York. "Just lookin' 'round."
The accent's smooth, too, like a taste of home, and Sundance knows he's being played, just like all of Butch's boys. He waits until Butch is closer, then swings out, his fist catching the edge of Butch's shoulder. Enough to knock Butch off-balance, but not enough to hurt either of them.
Everything, though, hurts now. Ethel's letter, folded in his shoe, and Butch taking off in the middle of the night, nothing gone but him and his horse. Everything hurts now, and Sundance feels lame in the saddle.
"A bank," Butch says appeasingly, stepping back faster than Sundance has seen in months. "Was lookin' at a bank."
"No," Sundance says, and he goes inside the house, sits at the table, and drinks the coffee grown cold.
x
"There's a good bank nearby. Wouldn't be hard," Butch says, clanging his way through the dishes. There's not much, just a few cracked, misshapen bowls, and Butch drops them onto the table, pushes one across towards Sundance. The porridge looks lumpy, too brown in some parts, too white in others. Sundance runs a finger through the porridge, watches it gloop.
"We've gone clean," Sundance says, scraping his finger against the edge of the bowl. There's still porridge, and so he licks his finger, grimaces. "God, Butch, this shit--"
"Shut up," Butch says, and he sounds angry. Sundance shuts up, momentarily startled, and watches Butch sit with a wince, grab his own bowl of porridge.
"The bank," Butch says again, hours later, when he's leaning back against the wall, blinking sleepy-eyed in the firelight. Sundance grunts, turns his pistol over, checking it again.
"No job, Butch," he says, and rubs a finger across the barrel, metal cold and smooth.
"Right," Butch says. "Gone clean."
x
Butch always limps the most in the morning, when the air's cold and snapping in the room. He's angriest then, too, angry at Australia and Bolivia and the world, and even Sundance. Sundance stays out of his way, skirting around until the lines on Butch's face ease, and Butch starts making the strange half-hum he makes when he's thinking.
"Hell," Butch says cheerfully, like he's just had a woman or too much to drink or a train to talk down, shake loose of bills and coins. Sundance grins, shrugs, and goes back out to the shaky stable to throw down hay for the horses.
Butch catches him in the dirt, grinning wide and drunk on spring. "Should teach you to swim," he says, like it's some bright idea of his, and Sundance nods, because Butch never looks this happy anymore.
"Right," he says, and Butch pushes past him, grabbing bridle and saddle and horse.
The waterhole is cold, shoots up and down Sundance's limbs like hot metal, burning in its cold. He gasps, drags back his hair, and thinks this might be one of Butch's stupider ideas, right up there with chasing off their own horses and leaping into rivers from cliffs.
Butch is laughing, though, the scars across his side and stomach stretching with his movements. Sundance watches the pull of muscle and skin, still too pink and new, and lets Butch push him deeper into the water, until Sundance feels like he's drowning.
"Stupid idea," Sundance spits out with water, but without any heart, and Butch nods, looking up at the sky.
"Not a good place," Butch says. "Next one will be better."
Sundance doesn't know if he's talking about Australia or the waterhole or Bolivia, and doesn't want to know. He drags himself out of the water, dirt caking onto him as mud, and throws himself on the ground, tired and cold.
"Next one," he agrees. "Next one will be good."
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Date: 2007-12-22 09:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-23 09:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-23 11:13 pm (UTC)NONO! THANK you FOR BEING SO AWESOME.
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Date: 2007-12-23 08:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-23 09:10 am (UTC)