Devoted Sinners
A Weiss Kreuz fanfiction
by Mayflower

---

Night, like a shroud, steals over the already darkening landscape with a subtlety not limited to the lack of light in the air. Night is not shadow, night is despair. Night is not respite, night is wakening. A black slip, worn leather sliding into creaseless motion against pale skin, and night. Night is personified. Night is covered in raven-black and wields a sword with a whistle like the wind, a glimmer of fate and death. Night is.

---

Your hands are bare. Covered in nothing but the air around them and my fingertips when I should so choose. Devoid of gloves. Devoid of blood. These are the hands that keep my tears at bay, the hands that create artwork out of nature's blossom, the hands that hold me as close as your eyes push me away. Everything paradoxical, no thought simple enough to pass without my every effort going into resolving it. As if staring at a computer screen could solve a problem like yourself, as if a book could hold some kind of answer to the lock that is everything it takes to get inside of you, because it couldn't. I can't understand...

My fingers slide upward, well past pale fingers, and over inch by inch until I arrive somewhere, pretending there had been a journey to begin with. It isn't the destination, is it? We hardly search for who we are, we simply seek to survive. As if there could be any other explanation for the devotion we have to what it is we strive to achieve. Fingertips brush old scars and I know you are looking at me, making some kind of effort to reveal all my inner thoughts with a simple gaze. You know it doesn't take much more than that, nothing beyond the very stare that occupies my every thought, every moment I am with you and the very look that drives me to distraction when I am not. I am simple. I cannot understand you and so I ask, it's predictable.

"Why?" I ask, and you're prepared, even if I haven't met your gaze once. Even if the icelike arrow that is your pursed lips and narrowed eyes never pierced my heart. You pull my hands away from your skin, watching me watching you.

"You know the answer to that question," is your reply, calculated and pre-determined, so much so that I could hear it even before you opened your mouth. Not because I've heard it before, which I have, but because I know, instinctually it would seem, I know you. You have been forever frightened of the idea, as much as anything frightens you. I've taken everything away and that's all I look at any more. Whatever is left. The cool skin and reluctant embrace, the angled glare and strangled sigh, the restraint and the giving in. The kiss I coax you into, the embrace you have to accept in order to enjoy.

You seem to think, and wrongly so, that there is something about you that I can't handle. Some part of you that's just too much for me to comprehend. A dark corner in your past that you can't hold back. You wrongly assume that there is no such demon, no such skeleton, beneath the depths of the honeyed smile I send in your direction every day. And I wonder how.

I wonder how it escaped your glance. The way I push against you, the little gasps that don't sound half as repressed as your own, those things you must have seen. Those motions that we go through, you must have felt. And so, I have to humor you. "No, I don't. I don't remember the answer. I've... forgotten," I say, tilting my head to one side, pulling myself upward to lean over you, looking down through messy, dark locks. "It's so easy to forget these days."

You frown, your forehead wrinkles rather adorably, and I'm tempted to grin. You make a noise in the back of your throat, the sort of noise that serves as a warning to me: you've gone too far, step back, let me breathe. "You..."

"I know," I interupt. "I know. I'm teasing you, right?" Am I fighting with you? For you? You really are a lot of effort. Everything you've ever meant to my life has been death and sorrow. Everything you've ever meant to me, on the other hand, has been struggle and success. I don't mind the struggle so much and once we're beyond the struggle... well, you know. You're there every time.

Every time I'm here, looking down at you, always begging for something. For you to speak, for you to stop, for more. Always asking for something, asking when I know you won't give me what I want. Asking when I know you derive pleasure from provoking me. You want to watch me become flustered. You used to always light up, grinning and laughing at me, I think, when I was embarrassed. Whenever I was shy. Whenever it was your hands touching some place new or forbidden. And you aren't so used to that feeling being turned back on you. You couldn't have imagined that I wouldn't be innocent forever? When it was you soiling all of that supposed 'innocence' away, whatever part you think is safe from the murder, safe from the killing and the leaving and the hurting. Because there was always something you could take, because there was always something I could give.

And I can give you something now, you, the mystery. But I doubt you'll accept. As always, you push away the more you draw me close, wanting something you think is impossible, if only for the sake of torturing yourself. Your breath hitches, a more than blatant encouragement. You think this is torture? I will show you torture.

Somehow we've stopped talking, simplifying our encounter to each one of those gasps, every little touch and caress, some reluctant. Some bold. We don't need to talk if you don't want to. I know it will simply make you angry with yourself and ultimately with me. Why should we bother? We've gotten to a point where nothing we say to one another changes. And the best I can do is try to understand you, to try and fulfill any desire you might have. I suppose that's love. Learning that there will never be everything. Nobody is everything.

Everyone is something, however, and all of the little things that make up the something that is you, at least in my eyes, never come up lacking. It's something beyond the hands I held so carefully, beyond a perfect little dip right below your ribs, something besides the arch of your neck or the curve of your spine. It isn't quite the shine in your eyes, cloudy and filled to the brim with old sins and crushed violets. Not your whole body, searching for somewhere to move when I have you trapped exactly where I would always like you to be.

It's more like the way you growl, more like the way you don't really ever say that you love me. It's everything you don't do that I ought to expect of you. Because I know you don't want to and you don't think you have to humor me. Just as I don't think that I have to stop asking just because you may not answer. Because you might answer me with something other than words, your lips demanding something from me nonetheless. I don't mind.

I'm not complaining. You taste familiar, you feel familiar, and...

"I love you."

You never say the words I expect to hear from you.

 

| return