Incandescence

By: Anja



[ Drabble – 400 Words ]



Notes: Dedicated to Usagi. :3 Because there needs to be more Mnemoshipping, damnit!



One

Our first kiss was on his sister’s coffee table.

The room dark and void of all motion save our own, I had looked up at him, eyes half lidded in pleasure and arms curled around the crook of his neck in a lovers’ embrace. Before I spoke, he knew what I wanted. It was an odd request coming from me, we both knew, but he complied nonetheless. It was a kiss, after all; nothing as intimate as the hand he often crept beneath the barriers of clothing. It held no emotional significance, no promise of love encased in bronze and gold wrappings.

But it was the first of many.

In a sense, it was like sex. Comfort. Reassurance. An addiction. Obsession was nothing new to us because we knew its ways well. We knew the cold hand that callously clutched and grasped at our lives like it were our own. It was how we had met, after all, under the cool shade of anonymity, and it was how the bonds of intimacy had grown. It wasn’t until the façade of memories fell away that we were truly revealed for what we had become.

Friends.



I lied when I said I couldn’t remember.

Every moment, every emotion, every willing infliction upon my person, I remember. I arrived on his doorstep, a quarter to two in the morning, battered, broken, drunk, and drugged. The words I spoke were in haste, child-like fear gripping at what remained of my consciousness.

“The cat is going to eat me,” I uttered, horrified and clutching at his bare arms.

“You’re drunk,” he observed, gruff voice tempered with tentative worry. His words reached me like the cadence of rain – soft and gentle. Soothed, I fell pliant into his already waiting arms.

In that position, we could have been lovers. He and I are alike in many aspects. We like, we love, we screw, we fuck; we could define the very term itself.

But we aren’t in love.

In my naïveté, I thought I could forget. The moment his fingers twined with my own, though, I realized that remembrance wasn’t necessarily painful.

Liquor may dull the pain of departure. Drugs may sculpt false illusions of security. Sex may afford an incomplete sense of human comfort.

But I learned a certainty that night, one that had been there all along.

Malik Ishtar.

“...Malik will love Yami forever and ever...”