Seasons in the Sun
By Gabi-hime
Part Three of Five
By Gabi (pinkfluffynet@yahoo.com)
Spoilers: The end of Angelic Layer TV, what can I say, at least I'm consistent.
Pairings: Misaki/Oujirou
Rating: PG-13 – This is a kissing book.
Synopsis: Four years after the third National Angelic Layer tournament, the grand circuit deuses of Angelic Layer finally leave their fields of gold.
Chapter 3
The Sound of Her Wings
Oujirou tossed uncomfortably on the narrow cot and squirmed, trying to find the one marginally comfortable spot he knew was hidden somewhere on this roll-away bed like some sort of pitiful buried treasure. Not here, not there, it was too hard, like he was nesting in a pile of two-by-fours. Truth be told, the small bed in the spare room of the Angelic Layer Company's Tokyo test facility was not meant to provide a comfortable night's rest. It had been originally installed so that Shuuko could lie down whenever she became too exhausted from practice and had remained a fixture because his brother had found it useful for grabbing a few hours of sleep when he pulled all-nighters at the lab. Oujirou had become quickly familiar with the rock-hard consistency of the little cot upon his graduation and initiation into the Angelic Layer Company. What with the secret project, if Ichirou was not himself pulling an all-nighter at the company, then he expected Oujirou to be doing so. Oujirou snuggled sleepily back under the thin blanket. Oujirou had been so tied up in Ichirou's new marvel that he'd almost not had time for Misaki, although Ichirou still seemed to have plenty of time for . . .
Wait a second. There was something that Oujirou was forgetting. Something about Misaki. Well, maybe it could wait until morning. He was so tired and he knew that he'd have to be up earlier than he wanted, no matter who rang the bell that woke him up.
Ahh, sleep. Sleep . . . bed . . . Misaki.
MISAKI!
Oujirou only barely managed to keep himself from sitting bolt upright and possibly falling off the edge of the bed and onto the linoleum floor. Misaki, that was the reason he had been relegated to the extremely uncomfortably outside edge of the cot. Misaki was asleep between his back and the wall, taking up the only slightly comfortably place that the bed provided. When he had blurted out his unintended request in the stairwell of the hospital and Misaki had unexpectedly agreed, he had been unable to think of any other place where he could take her where they'd be alone. He wasn't about to drag her back to Kobe with him, and although Shuuko would likely not be home until well into the morning, you simply don't ask a woman to spend the night with you and then spirit her off to her own boudoir. The cot at the Angelic Layer Company wasn't the height of comfort, but it was private, and Oujirou knew he wouldn't have to deal with any scandalized queries at odd hours of the morning when parental figures arrived to check up on them.
So he'd brought her here, to the dim room where he'd sat vigil by Shuuko too many times. She worked herself to exhaustion only when Ichirou was not there, so it had always fallen to Oujirou to sit and watch her sleep. It was also the bed where later he knew his older brother had spent many nights dreaming of the woman who'd once slept there peacefully, cursing his own inaction and mourning her indecision.
With Ichirou at the hospital and Shuuko with him, Oujirou knew that the test room would not open today. There was no one to test, after all, and no one to test them. Almost all of the Grand Circuit deuses were sitting awkwardly in the lobby of Tokyo's Second General Hospital or were sleeping fitfully in their beds after being sent home by Ichirou. The research and development team would spend the day curled up at home, waiting for a call that might devastate them all, and clinging closely to their own families.
They were safe, he and Misaki. Safe here because it was cool and dim and quiet and he could sleep next to her without reproach. That had been all he wanted, really. He had needed some comfort, and sleeping with Misaki close at hand where she could be present to dispel any nightmares he might have, where she could smooth his hair and tell him that it was just a dream, where she could hold his hand until he fell asleep again – that was the greatest comfort he could imagine.
He rolled towards her to gather her in his arms, tucking her head under his chin where it fit so easily, gently, so as not to wake her, but perhaps not quite as gently as needs be, so she would sleepily open her blue eyes and smile at him. Or blush and be scandalized. Anything really, just a beating pulse, the thrum of her heartbeat and lifesblood to assure him that she was real and flesh and bone and not some dream he had conceived of half a decade ago that he would sharply wake up from, finding that Suzuhara Misaki was just a figment that he had invented for himself to console his heart over the loss of her mother.
He rolled to her with all this spilling through his mind at once, as chaotic and unorganized as only a sleepy grief-stricken man may be.
And she was not there.
He almost choked, and his had darted out before he could stop it to search under the thin blanket, as if she might be hidden, although the space provided could have only concealed a being of two dimensions. But there, the bed on her side had a little warm hollow where she had been. Misaki had been there. She was no figment and he had asked her to marry him. That was reassuring. It would mean he had far less explaining to do to his parents.
The bed, with its lack of comfort, had driven her out of it, likely and, she hadn't wanted to wake him. He slipped out of bed, feet bare against the chill floor and banged his shin against the bicycle which leaned against the near wall. Since no one was around to hear him, he cursed quietly under his breath. Gentlemen do not use strong language, but at two in the morning and looking for his wisp of a girlfriend, Oujirou did not feel much like a gentleman.
He knew where she would be, had known before he'd even gotten out of bed. The door to the main room was standing slightly open, and the dim blue light that bathed the room came from there. He widened the door only enough to slip through it and padded out to where the test arena stood.
Misaki was sitting like a child, legs tucked under her, bare feet against her bottom to keep them warm. She was leaning forward, one hand draped carelessly over the control keys, the other propping her chin up. She had wrapped herself up in his lab coat to cut the chill of the room, and it hung around her shoulders and draped almost to the floor. Her hair was down, caramel shag hanging loose and half over the half-size headset she was wearing. He sighed gently, and she took no notice of him and he knew why.
Hikaru had turned to regard him the moment he'd stepped in the room, her crimson eyes noncommittal. He didn't need to circle around to the other side of the layer to know that Misaki's eyes were wide and unfocused, to know that she wouldn't answer even if he spoke to her directly. Misaki tranced into Hikaru deeply, deeper than any of the other deuses when she let herself go fully. She tranced so completely and with so little effort that Ichirou had invented a new scale just to measure her sync on. Oujirou glanced at the readout on the main monitor – Sync Ratio 99.9999872%. He was not surprised. Oujirou knew that Misaki had a habit of trancing into Hikaru when she was upset and felt she needed guidance. Hikaru seemed so confident and in control that it was understandable. When Misaki was like this, there was no talking to her.
But perhaps it wasn't Misaki he needed to talk to right now. He settled down in the other chair, his chair, and produced Wizard. Hikaru watched him without comment and then turned back to doing what she'd been doing before he'd come into the room – that is, staring at the ceiling.
His hands played lightly over the keypad and as he settled the headset on gently he murmured, “I've always loved you on that bed of roses.”
Wizard went in with a flick of his wrist just as the mist cleared and revealed the field of roses that required a special clearance code to unlock even here in the test room. Ichirou's codes were fortunately not all that difficult to decipher, since his master code seemed to be 'nyororo.'
As Wizard landed, Oujirou deliberately lost himself in the feel of the breeze on his face, on the tight, controlled shift of his muscles, on the casual grace of his step and almost at once he had tranced into Wizard. It was always so easy with Misaki there. You didn't have to struggled with it, it just came.
She was standing ahead of him, eyes intent on something far above her. He almost wondered whether or not she'd noticed him, so he closed the distance between them and prepared to gently lay a hand on her shoulder.
She spoke before he could move, as if she'd been waiting for him, “Have you ever wondered how high the sky goes?”
He raised an eyebrow impassively and then looked up, “Well, this particular sky goes about twenty feet into the air and then hits reinforced steel.”
Misaki-Hikaru looked at him and it took only one word of reproach, “Wizard.”
He shrugged and crossed his arms absently, “Even the sky doesn't go on forever. The troposphere goes about ten miles up, the stratosphere another twenty, the mesosphere another twenty, and then you're in the thermosphere. It goes on for another three hundred miles, and then you hit the exosphere, which eventually merges with the planetary gases of space. You'd know that if you paid closer attention in class.”
She shook her head and spread her arms wide, back curved into a smooth arc so she could better regard the heavens, “I didn't ask you how far the atmosphere went. I asked you how high the sky went. You can tell me how deep the Pacific Ocean is, but you can't plumb the dept of the sea. It's different. It's the core of the thing, the idea, you know? Not the thing you can find on the map.”
“Well, you're feeling remarkably philosophical tonight. If you had already decided on the answer, then why did you ask me in the first place?” he asked dryly. Oujirou quirked a smile. Wizard was always so serious.
A bare smile played over Hikaru's face and then Misaki-Hikaru said, “To see what you'd say, of course.”
She hopped lightly away from him and began to play an imaginary game of hopscotch on the ground, going first forward and then backwards, skipping different numbers as she ran through the sequence quickly, like it was an old friend.
“And what did I say?”
“What I expected you to say,” she laughed softly as she continued to skip, “You can't measure heaven, because if you could then you'd know how far you'd have to go to get there. And you can't know that.”
Trust Hikaru to come up with her own uncertainty theory.“Then you can't get to heaven?” he baited and she knew it and he knew that she knew it.
She laughed again, “Of course you can. Anyone can touch heaven, if they believe. If you believe, then you can do anything,” she skipped backwards, and as she did he felt himself sigh inwardly as the soft snow wings burst from her back and in the same movement she took to the air, where he could not follow.
“Your problem is that you don't believe, Wizard,” she chided gently, “I've explained it to you in as many ways as I know how, but you have to believe, and you don't.”
She was so beautiful in the air, even more beautiful than she was on the ground, like a warm star in the sky.
“I believe in you.”
“How can you believe in me if you don't even believe in yourself?” she asked quietly, folding her arms over her chest and hugging herself as she spun, propelled by the wings of her faith.
Here on the layer, she was unknowable, so many steps above all of them. She was an angel, silver-soft and warm sun-red, the queen of heaven, a strange title for a girl who could fit in the crook of his arm. She was gentle, warm, and comfortable, but she held the mysteries of the universe comfortably in the palms of her hands and attempted to guide him like a shepherd with a particularly stubborn sheep. She was Beatrice and Virgil and perhaps Charon all at once, a guide to the living and the dead and she was spun of moonshine and grace and laughter, and god, he loved her more than he loved his own life, more than he loved the world.
She banked in the air and then came down, diving like a swallow, wings folded close as she spiraled down and he wanted her, wanted that grace, wanted her secrets, wanted her spark, ached for her to find some fascinating mystery in him the way he longed to unravel the mysteries of her soul, unravel them or get tangled in them, safe forever in her gentle embrace.
She slipped by him easy as a whisper, and his hand shot and claimed her wrist and she dragged him with her into the air. She was surprised by his move and shimmied and shook, trying to break his hold.
“Not that way,” she grunted from the exertion of keeping the both of them in the air at the same time, “You can't cheat.”
“You don't have faith enough for the both of us?” he asked, clinging gamely to her hand even as she squirmed against him in the air.
“I do, but that wouldn't be fair,” she explained gently, prying his fingers loose, “to you.”
He let her loosen his fingers and leaned backwards into the fall. Her eyes were beautiful, crimson, expectant, even though he'd fallen heels skyward countless times before, pondering her secrets as he counted the seconds until he left a scar in the field of roses.
But then suddenly he was only half, there, only half falling, and he was staring back up into sad crimson eyes, but he was also staring across the layer into a pair of cobalt blue eyes that were locked with his own. She was crying.
And he suddenly knew that she was crying for him. That they were crying for the both of him, he who could not believe because he played by the rules and knew them so well that he could not think of contradicting them, of breaking them, and the one that sat curled in the deus chair, tight and so in control of his emotions that he dared not let the slightest breath escape him, grace and elegance but so little life behind it that he seemed like a prince from a story – all pomp and circumstance but no feeling. In the end he would marry the princess because that's simply the way things were done in a happily-ever-after.
And as he fell backwards and felt the wind sing in his ears and saw her eyes, crimson and blue like the endless sky, he felt the wings burst from his back a moment before he plowed a furrow in the field of roses.
He sat up slowly and rubbed his head, wondering if he had any broken bo – oh, that was silly.
She alighted close to him and then sighed a little breath that turned into a laugh, “Of course they'd be black.”
“Why of course?” he demanded, rolling forward on his knees as he shed rose petals. He stretched them and looked behind himself and verified that they were in fact black.
“Even when you're touching heaven, your image is too important to you not to have some effect,” she rolled her eyes as she giggled and flipped backwards, catching herself on her wings.
It was his turn to offer a one word remonstration, “Hikaru.”
But she didn't listen, simply kicked off into the air again, “I'm sure they'll appreciate it,” she called back over her shoulder.
“Who's 'they'?” he asked coolly, folding his arms over his chest again.
“Why, all the other women, of course. Who else is your image for?”
And then he was after her, a shower of soot black feathers left to mark his passing. He caught her, arms tight around her waist even as she squirmed against him again. As they spiraled forward, spinning from the counter-momentum, he murmured into her hair.
“Maybe you should tell them that I'm going to be a married man.”
And he kissed her with the pent up frustration of five years of watching her sport about, unable to catch her, unable to know those wings, to feel them. He kissed her the way he wanted to kiss Misaki, but was too shy, too afraid he'd startle her with his passion, with his devotion. He kissed her like a man possessed, and she bent gently back into his arms and didn't squirm, didn't fight him, but let herself be held, small and fragile as a doll.
He was so lost in it, in that being himself and yet someone else, his other self, that he almost didn't feel her hand on his arm. And she was there, headset still on, his lab coat still hanging lopsided from her thin shoulders. She crept into his lap and curled up, knees against her chest and nestled her head against his neck.
“Misaki,” he murmured gently, and there were no honorifics between them, no sweet little -chan and no distant adult -san. It was the way he'd always wanted to be with her, private, close so he could feel her little bird bones and hear her little heart which he knew was beating perhaps even more rapidly than his. Gently, he pulled the headset from her head and laid it back on the control panel and then did the same with his own. He stood, arms loosely cradling her against his chest and they watched Hikaru and Wizard fall back to the layer like stars and land in the thick cushion of the rose petals.
His steps were silent, bare feet on the linoleum, and he was sure that it would end quietly, until a little Hikaru shone through in Misaki and she kicked her feet lightly and squirmed a little.
“Next time, Oujirou, next time you have to promise that it'll be a better bed.”
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