Digimon Fan Fiction ❯ The Walls Between ❯ Epilogue ( Epilogue )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

As a bright wind blew across Tokyo, a welcome relief from the heat of summer, and a small bird warbled notification of its presence from her open window, the unthinkable happened in Yagami Hikari's living room.

"You're breaking up with me?" she asked incredulously.

Takeru's voice was thin and reedy through the hiss of a bad phone connection. "I didn't say that. I just think it would be a good idea for us to see other people too ..."

Hikari interrupted. "So you want to play both sides, see other people and still have me. Are you crazy?"

"Hikari-chan ..."

"No," she said, and she didn't mind at all that a half-sob cut off the end of the word and bled into her next. She hoped the sound cut Takeru's heart out. "Don't even start. If you don't love me, then you just don't!"

"It's not that. I really do like you, a lot. It's just ..."

"Just what? Is this because I won't sleep with you? Is that it?"

Takeru paused, and when he spoke again he sounded less wheedling, more annoyed. "I didn't want to bring that up, but yes!"

"I knew it." Disappointment flooded her, almost edging out the shock and grief.

"I'm not superhuman, Hikari. I can't live my life celibate, and you can't expect me to. I don't care if you think that sounds shallow and, and un-pure or whatever it is you think sex is. I can't do it anymore."

Then ask me to marry you! Hikari wanted to shout. I would say yes! But she remained silent.

"I wanted to make it work," Takeru continued. "I tried, I really did. But I can't love you when you keep yourself walled up and won't let me in just a little bit. It's not just about the sex, it's a lot of things, and I just can't take it anymore. I'm sorry, I really am."

Steeling herself, Hikari forced herself to say sternly, "Goodbye, Takeru." Her voice only quavered a little.

"Okay. All right. I tried." He hung up, without any further ceremony. Very gently, she set the phone handset back down onto the base.

She stared out at the wall opposite her for awhile, while the bird in the window chirruped and reality failed to reassert itself by making Takeru call back and say that he was just kidding. Eventually, she got up and moved to the window, and the bird flew away.

"I just have no luck with men," she murmured, resting her forehead against the jamb.

The wind ran its fingers through the chimes on the balcony, bringing forth a wild music, pure and sweet and liquid. Daisuke, with his eyes closed, could imagine that the sounds came from the wind itself, and it was easy to block out the other noise from the street below and lose himself in the pealing notes.

A part of him wanted to weep. He refused to give in to it.

"I'm leaving now," said Miyako from inside the apartment. Daisuke could hear her keys rattle as she tucked them into her purse. He didn't reply, and after a moment the screen door slid open with a rough sound. "Did you hear me?"

"Yeah," he said, not opening his eyes.

She paused, and then he heard her come out onto the balcony, her heels making hard little clicks on the concrete. "Are you okay?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said again.

Her hand moved over his shoulder, and then she crouched beside his chair and put her arms around him. Her head rested against him.

"I'm glad you're back," she said.

Daisuke didn't bother to say anything. Miyako smelled like lavender perfume, not at all like him, although the gesture was not unlike something he might do. Miyako kissed him on the cheek after a moment, then straightened up and walked back into the apartment. After a little clattering around, he heard the front door slam, and lock from without as Miyako left on her errand.

For a long time, it was just him and the wind, and the faerie music that rode it. Finally, though, he forced himself to sit up and open his eyes, and look down at the source of his current mood.

His bonsai tree.

Daisuke had sort of forgotten about it all spring. Now that he'd moved away from him, he'd remembered it. He had come out here the day before fully intending to prune it, fertilize it, wire the branches, and basically do everything that he should have done two months earlier.

And he'd found that he had done all of that already.

The tree was in perfect health. Copper wire, slowly turning brown in the weather, wound sinuously around every large and most small branches, and held them bent into craggy curves. All of the new-growth candles but four had been snipped off, and the tree was starting to throw out short, bushy needles in their place. The sprouts that had been left uncut grew out of the sides of branches that had been pruned very short, and would produce interesting, jagged branches in the future. He even found a bud grafted to the trunk where the sickly branch had died the year before.

Ken had done it all for him, and although the tree was not the masterpiece of miniaturization that Daisuke wanted ... he could see in what he had done that it would be in a couple of years if he just continued to nurture it. His vague mental picture of the Ideal Tree, toward which he had been groping with his bonsai for years, suddenly seemed sharper, and more in reach.

How had Ken known?

Curse it to every hell, how had he known?

How had he been able to divine what Daisuke wanted? Did Ken know him so well?

Yes.

Miyako had been a miracle of generosity. Daisuke had expected harsh words, accusations, questions he could not answer ... there had been none of that. She told Daisuke a few days after he moved back in that she'd made her peace with herself about the whole business, and that she didn't mind that he loved him more than he loved her.

Daisuke had half-heartedly tried to protest that, but she hadn't let him. He was a little afraid of her now.

For all her devotion, though ... Miyako did not really understand Daisuke very well. Daisuke wasn't sure he understood himself all that well. But it seemed that he did.

Ken-chan ...

The ache that had been chewing him apart for two weeks now returned, clawing thoughtfully at his insides. Daisuke wrapped his arms around himself and closed his eyes again.

All of the windows in the white apartment were closed against the beautiful weather, all of the shades pulled. The rooms within were clothed in shadow, and the chancy light made a maze of the hallway and kitchen. No lamp shone, but blue artificial light did blanket the front room, streaming out of the computer monitor.

It was in front of the computer that Ken sat, and it was in front of the computer that Ken had wept.

All his tears were gone now, and he felt strangely calm, almost empty of feeling. As if the salt that pulled on his cheek had contained more than his grief, and he had shed it all, including the anger and hatred ... how he had hated himself since Daisuke's departure! But no more. He felt clean, pure, as if he had conquered something very important.

While the sunlight peeking around the shades grew dimmer and more slanted, Ken sat at his computer, paging through all the photographs he'd taken of his lover and feeling this curious calm. Daisuke sitting at the kitchen table, eating breakfast while looking disheveled and half-awake. Daisuke posing with a jaunty grin between a pair of sumo wrestlers three times his size during a morning practice that he and Ken had decided to visit. Daisuke sitting on the couch and holding up a picture of a Ferrari in a magazine; he'd said once that he'd love to have a car someday, and of course had homed in on one of the flashiest and most expensive cars available.

If Daisuke had asked, Ken would have bought him that Ferrari, even if it broke him.

As he paged through the pictures, of Christmas and New Year's and Daisuke looking exceptionally winsome in a shocking red kimono, presently Ken found himself with no more snapshots other than the ones that he'd taken when Daisuke had agreed to be photographed naked. Ken had been avoiding these, because he feared it would upset his delicate, balancing calm, but once he'd run out of other pictures he began to look through these as well.

The snapshots had come out quite well, especially considering that they'd been taking with a digital camera. Ken could see the flush of heat beneath Daisuke's skin, the faint glisten of sweat, the softness of his lashes against his cheek. That he had once actually touched this precious, perfect creature ... that he had gone to sleep with something this beautiful in his arms ...

A small sound broke the silence of the room, and Ken realized that it had come from him.

What have I done?

Daisuke was not here anymore. His voice and motions no longer brightened the apartment. And Ken knew that to be his own fault. No matter how good his intentions, he'd done it again. Reverted. Relapsed.

This time, Daisuke had been the one to leave him, instead of the other way around, although Ken knew their reasons to be very similar.

Sometimes he wanted to die. Daisuke wouldn't want that, though, so he knew that he would not die. He would just suffer through the endless days of a life with only his memories of Daisuke to sustain him. Daisuke would have laughed if Ken had said something like that aloud ... laughed and insisted that Ken not be such a melodramatic idiot. Ken felt his lip twitch a little, but he felt entitled to engage in a little melodrama within the silence of his apartment and the privacy of his mind.

Slowly, he began to click again through the series of images, each more explicit than the last. Feeling returned then, filling the clean emptiness inside him with hopeless desire. He found himself touching the screen and drew back his hand before he smeared the glass, but still he wanted so badly to taste Daisuke's dark skin just one more time. His desire was viscous and tainting, and something inside him howled.

He would have settled for anything, really. Hearing Daisuke's voice, seeing Daisuke nearby, going to a movie with Daisuke and buying him candy at outrageous prices. Smelling the sunlight in his hair, the sweat on his skin, the musk of his arousal.

Every day, Ken went to work, went through the motions of a living, productive member of society, while inside he felt like dying and he ached for his beloved Daisuke. He ate regularly, slept whenever he could, and yearned during every waking hour and often in his dreams. Had it been this bad last time? When he had been the one to walk out on Daisuke? Or had the feeling of grand sacrifice dulled the pain? Ken did not recall.

He wanted to drink himself asleep again, as he had for three days straight now, but the sake remained in the cabinet and Ken refused to touch it tonight. As the sun dipped lower in the unimportant sky and the room darkened further outside the light of the computer screen, he looked through the pictures yet again. Through them, he sought some connection, some link with his Daisuke.

He paused again on the first of the pictures he'd taken that night, the one of Daisuke glancing coyly up at him with his shirt off and his wrists tied, that began the series. His skin was so smooth, so velvety ... Ken closed his eyes a moment until the screaming agony died down.

He couldn't breathe for a moment, but once that passed he sat up a little. There wasn't anything he could do about Daisuke being gone short of going over to Miyako's place and begging him to come back. Ken would not do that - could not do that. There was, however, one final thing that he could do with Daisuke ... one act which would make him feel, however ephemerally, as if Daisuke were still a part of his life in more than obsession alone.

"I love you," he whispered, and didn't realize that he'd whispered it aloud until the echo began to pain his ears. He typed a little, and mouse-clicked a little, and once his computer was connected to the Internet he began to upload files.

Outside Ken's apartment building, near nine-thirty in the evening, a lone figure stared up at the window with the wind's caress in his hair and clothes. He knew he was still awake, although there was no hint of light that escaped around the curtains. He didn't know how he knew, but he did.

He could go up there. He would let him in, or he could let himself in since he still had a key. And he wanted to, oh how he wanted to feel those hot, dangerous kisses and listen to those sincere lies.

But this time, Daisuke didn't approach the building.

"I love you, Ken-chan," he whispered, and then turned and walked away.

~fin~