WARNING: This fanfic contains SEXUAL CONTENT. Nothing _very_ explicit but this is a considered LEMON. Please read at your own discretion. Rated R.
This is a MikagamixFuuko fic. For everyone who wanted more of "Beside Me" and was disappointed by the laziness of its author. ^^;

Do I see you? So clear tonight,
slowly but sure, shadows crossing the wall

She removed her shirt with a fluid graceful movement that almost seemed to transcend the reality of what she was doing, so that he could distinctly see both the slow unraveling and revelation of the voluptuous pulse of smooth skin that formed a soft triangle between her breasts, and the tormenting delicate motions of her thin white fingers as they undid button after button. Movement apart from movement, like two hands of a clock that could never quite coincide, until her shirt fell to the floor and her fingers trailed across endless naked skin, and the clock's hands finally overlapped, announcing midnight and the coming together of his own desire.

Her violet eyes gleamed.

She stood apart from him for a moment, as if measuring the distance between them, and then she walked towards the bed where he sat with firm even steps, stopping in front of him with the same military-like precision, her breasts within an inch of his mouth. He slowly reached out to touch; he felt her hand clasp his and, intertwined, both of them settled on the luminous skin of her stomach, felt it warm and soft and pulsing beneath their fingers, and then moved languidly up to the underside of her breasts. Underneath her touch, his hand splayed outwards to span and trace each curve and contour, until his fingers curled over her nipple and she drew her hand away and lifted her arms to release her hair from its habitual clasp. As she did so, she raised her chest slightly, and he slowly brought his lips closer, until he felt the warmth of those beautiful, soft, bare breasts.

The world was removed, a confused tide beating weakly on the shore of a desert island, the sound dimmed by distance. There was nothing, only a vast bright plain, a complete absence of reality, of remorse, even of sensation... An absence even of passion, for there was none. The only note, monotonous and continuous, was that moan of abandonment, a lonely murmur long held in, that the contact with her skin brought to his lips.

He felt her caress his neck, fingers running through his own loosened hair, as she pulled him closer to her. He circled her nipple with his tongue, encircled as it was still by his own crouching fingers. He had a memory of flowers amidst the bleak brightening landscape of a thunderstorm's aftermath--rain-soaked petals tender and fragrant with the musky mingled scent of fallen water and humid earth and secret nectar as they waited for the sun. She had that same elusiveness, that same stalwart delicacy; he drank in it, from her, reveling in the almost forgotten sensation.

She whispered his name. She was remembering it too.

Where is my heart?
Last time, this time, someone set it on fire
I'd forgotten it all

The affair, if one could call it that, did not start with a sudden recognition of lust, as in most of his other relationships, but a gradual awareness of it, until he could no longer distinguish just where it began and how it would end and whether it was lust at all or something less or more than that. There was only a sensation of infinitesimal feeling that increased and intensified as days passed, the more she went near him, the more he went near her, the more familiar every scent, gesture and word became to each and both of them. The congruency of all those things was implosive and unquantifiable and almost inexpressible. Tonight was just such an attempt--though it was undeliberate and accidental, as usual--to see it for what it was, to place it within the parameters of meaning and comprehensibility.

They were talking about shared aesthetics and different kinds of betrayal. She was sitting on the floor, lighting the first cigarette from her second pack of the day. He lay stretched out on her bed, hands lying stiffly at his sides, as if he were a corpse. She teased him about if for a while. When he wouldn't respond, she threw him her lit cigarette. It landed on the bed spread, right beside his arm.

"Maybe if we hadn't started talking, we wouldn't be here now," she said. "Sometimes, I wonder if we really do understand each other. I know we do, but I wonder."

He continued to stare up at the dirty slightly molding ceiling, ignoring the acrid fumes of the cigarette, the small but perceptible heat on his skin. "You were the one who talked to me."

"Well, you understood me."

"You were guilty about Domon."

"Precisely. I wanted your distance. How you do it, that goddamn cheerful serenity of yours."

"Cheerful?" His lips twisted. "Don't be stupid. A lot of people wouldn't call me cheerful. I wouldn't call myself cheerful. I thought you knew that. And as for serenity... I don't have it. In fact, I'm not." His laugh was deliberately short, bitter. "Are you fooling yourself? Or are you just trying your hand at creating revolting metaphors?"

"Cheerful," she affirmed calmly. "And serene."

"What you see in me is a sham of your imagination," he said coldly. He sat up, swinging his legs down the side of the bed. "I should leave. This is getting us nowhere."

"You will stay, my love," she murmured the words like a song, "my dear devotee of sadness. And you will listen to me."

He finally turned to look at her. She was smiling up at him, her jeans-clad legs sprawled out untidily on the floor, an unlit cigarette dangling between the fingers of her right hand. Unconsciously, he picked up the cigarette she had thrown at him, placed it in his mouth. He inhaled, held the nicotine in for a long moment, and then exhaled. She disappeared in a wreath of smoke and filterless tobacco. He spoke into that space.

"All I know is darkness. All I have is darkness." He paused and then mockingly, hesitantly, "My love."

"You affirm my reality through your suffering."

The haze began to clear. When he saw her again, the smile was gone but her clarity of expression, the profound certainty in her mysterious fragile violet eyes, were doubly hard to bear.

"You give me light."

Through the haze, ashes I have traced
Uncover me now, I'll come clear as we chase

His hair was molten silver in her hands, a seductive source of illumination in the barely-lit darkness. She lowered her head and kissed it, following the lovely current and pattern of its strands, basking in its impression of warmth, and then the comforting coldness of its reality. His hair didn't have the tangy confusing scent of hers, with her addiction to oils and herbs and strange shampoos--it smelled clean and straightforward, unbearably exquisite. Fatal, she thought dazedly. Like him.

As if sensing her thoughts, he lifted his head from her breast and looked up at her, his blue eyes glittering beneath half-closed lids. She felt a droplet of moisture trickle down from her temple to her neck to her collarbone to her breast, a path of chilling fire through the heat. She trembled. His eyes closed with a langorous downward movement of thick dark lashes and he reached for her again, taking that fire into his mouth, licking it dry, re-tracing its course perfectly.

His lips were on her ear, nipping it gently with his teeth. She thought he might have stood up but then he held her face to his shoulder as he explored the nape of her neck and she realized she was sitting on his lap, her legs locked around his waist. She tightened her hold hungrily, felt him harden against her thighs.

"Aren't you going to kiss me properly now?" he whispered against her skin.

His hair was molten silver in her hands.

She grabbed it and tugged his head away from her throat as she leaned back in his embrace so that they were suddenly, solemnly, face to face. They were breathing hard; as they watched each other, their gasps subsided, settled into a quiet rhythm that was at once deceptive and comforting, like the calm before a storm. She put up her hand to his face, tracing the elegantly-defined cheekbones, the curve of his brow, the thin firmness of his lips, the contours of his eyes.

He smiled.

And then she brought his mouth down to hers, and the tempest broke loose all over again.

Am I lucky? Merging, emerging, was so lonely sometimes,
completely inside

"In Indian mythology, the world begins divinely, blissfully, radiantly. And then it sickens and degenerates, its beauty becomes ripe for annihilation." Absently, she reached under her bra strap for her plastic lighter, where she always kept it. He watched her, his cigarette--also hers, he remembered--burning in his hand, wondering from whom and why she adopted that particular eccentricity. He had never asked her about it, and she had never told him.

"Therefore it is trampled underfoot by a laughing dancing Shiva." Deftly, she flicked the lighter open, cupping the flame with a practiced hand. The cigarette touched base at first go; she inhaled loosely, satisfied, and then expelled smoke with a generous expansive motion. So different from the way he smoked. He would take in the nicotine for as long as he could, into every part of his body if possible, loathe to release it, if ever. She, on the other hand, would be in a continuous process of inhalation and exhalation, barely tasting the cigarette at all. He had commented once that it was a shallow way of smoking, a mockery of the real thing. What real thing? she had asked mockingly. Did he mean the extended deliberate and deeply-felt self-poisoning he indulged in? For her, smoking was an act of passion and faith, knowing she was taking in a bit of death with every little puff but that she also had the power to take it all back, live with it, get it out. Unlike him. The way he wallowed in nicotine was positively morbid. He treated his cigarettes like they were miniature Death heads. Well, they were, he had reasoned coolly. She only laughed and blew smoke--and a kiss--into his face.

Now she tapped her cigarette on the floor after a half-hearted effort to find her ashtray. It was probably in the bathroom or buried underneath the piles of laundry in the hallway. In any case, it was forever missing. The floor was her perennial makeshift ashtray. "So... where was I?" She frowned, massaging her leg absently. "Oh yes. Shivu dancing the completed world into ruins." Another shallow puff. "But it doesn't end there."

"Because everything begins anew with the smile of dreaming Vishnu whose hands playfully fashion a young, new, beautiful, shining world. It's sort of like--whatshisname--Heine said in his 'Travel Pictures' book-- life and the world are a drunk god's happy dream. Funny huh?" She chuckled. "But anyway, I love all these glorious parables for the beauty and tragedy of creation. How, through them, you can see diabolism and purity as equal symbols of a cult of beauty, parts of a lovely line of progression."

"And you think I have the potential to be a Vishnu?" he asked wryly. "That I can somehow dream my life back into a perfect paradise? But then Shiva will ultimately come, won't he, and he'll destroy everything else again. You still haven't answered the essential question: What's the use?"

She made an impatient gesture, brushing her hair away from her face. In the process, pieces of ash fell on her cheeks. When she turned her head in the red light of the late afternoon sun coming in through the narrow window just above her, they emitted a strangely metallic glitter. 'Smoke gets in your eyes,' he thought inanely.

"You're missing my point," she said, pointedly. "Without Shiva, Vishu cannot dream his golden dreams. You need to live through the suffering to take part in creation. And I never said you have the potential to be Vishnu. I think I rather see you as a cyborg Shiva." She laughed again. "A pretty Shiva, but a prig."

He inhaled just at that moment. He would have choked, he knew, if the cigarette had been lit. As it was, he discovered to his annoyance and mortification that the tip had burned out.

He stood up.

"Hey, where are you going?"

"To find an ashtray."

"You can just throw it on the floor, Shiva."

"No, thanks."

"As your host, I insist. Here, have another one."

"I don't think," he said expressionlessly, "that my cheerful serenity, as you put it, can stand up to more of your metaphors and fables."

She grinned up at him and tossed him the entire pack. He caught it automatically. "Oh yes. Your cheerful serenity. The thing I desire most about you, what you refuse to see in your also cheerful obstinacy."

He shrugged with deliberate affectation, tapped the pack against his palm. "Maybe it's escapism," he said, avoiding her gaze. "Haven't you thought of that?"

"Sure. But I prefer to think of it as courage," she said, looking grave and amused. Loving. "A serene striding forward and dancing through the terrors and flames of the world, the anguished festive offering of a sacrifice."

"You do that."

"I'm only a minion, not the high priest. Besides, it's one thing to jump knowingly into an abyss, without any sense of expectation or dread, because it's just cool; quite another to climb out of it and then jump over and over again, casting yourself into the rocks, smoking yourself into nicotine oblivion, because it's the only way to live."

A cigarette slid out of the pack and onto his hand. He took it between his fingers, pressing it with a vicious desperate movement so that it nearly snapped.

"Don't invent illusions about me, Kiirisawa," he said. "I'm a mere coward."

"Only a coward would be so brave," she said softly.

Been spending my nights dreaming every move
All those
Blue nights without your love
 
 

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Flame of Recca copyright Nobuyuki Anzai and other related enterprises. This fanfic was written for entertainment purposes only. "Sensual Mind" copyright Anggun.