Pandora's Box
by Thalia
Rating: PG-13
Eyes like blue flames and fists like cinderblocks. He's slow to anger,
usually. A smirk and an insouciant comment-- that's him. He can be
intimidating when he wants to, of course. He's a warrior... but that is
when it is necessary.
She's crying. Sobbing, shoulders shaking, dark fall of hair obscuring
the sides of her face as she hid her face in her hands. He feels the
slow burn of anger trickling upward like the blood-red of a thermometer.
He could hate her for being like this if he didn't love her, and he
can't help loving her-- he hadn't been able to, since the first time
he'd seen her. She had been smiling then.
He doesn't think about loving her. He doesn't wax eloquent over it.
There are no sonnets in her name and no roses wilting in a vase
somewhere. One does not think about breathing.
He's seen her fight before-- the thug who'd accosted her in the alleyway
had barely time to make a lecherous comment about how he liked them
delicate and dark-haired before she'd sent the heel of her palm into his
nose, leg swinging in a graceful arc to fell the guy. She moves like the
flickering of living flames. Bright and elusive and beautifully
dangerous. A warrior princess with secrets that he'd never been able to
ferret out of her.
It was like some damned romance novel that his little sister Minako
always left lying around.
It had started very typically. She visited him like she did every
Saturday. The usual pleasantries, and it was when he'd asked her a few
questions about the aspects of her that he didn't know that she'd
stiffened.
No answer. No answer.
A visible tightening around those big, dark eyes, and a shake of her
head. She said that she was fine, nothing was the matter, and looked
away.
She's still avoiding his eyes and now he's angry-- he could heal her if
she'd only let him. She knows that he loves her. She even returns it
once in a while. There are holes, though, and she hides them from him
and everyone else. He tells her that she doesn't have to... not from
him.
He's not the one who took the light out of her eyes and replaced it with
obsidian glass. He can't remember ever hurting her, losing her trust.
It's not that simple, and it angers him that he doesn't know if this is
personal-- just for him, or is she simply too broken to let him heal
her?
Today he refused to give up and continues, even now, to ask her. It was
an hour of questioning... patient, determinedly gentle interrogation,
really... that made her turn her face away from him, and it was when he
moved in front of her that he saw her tears.
That was three hours ago, and now it's dark outside. She still doesn't
give him any answers besides the monosyllabic half-truths that frustrate
more than anything.
The slow-burning anger reaches a boiling point, and he grips her
shoulders. He still loves her too much to bruise, but his eyes burn into
her face. "What are you hiding from? What's a brave girl like you got to
run from? Dammit, Rei, I'm trying to FIX you, I'm trying to help, and
you shouldn't hold that weight on your shoulders. Even YOU are going to
break if you don't let go, don't open up, and what do you have to risk?"
He punctuates each exclamation with a little shake, shifting her hair
about her face, flowing down like ink and dried blood against his hands.
Her shoulders shake with his movements and her sobs, and still she
doesn't crack. She's a diamond and only she has cut herself.
So he thinks. If there is something else, it is too complex for him to
understand.
She looks up bleakly into his eyes and gives him a dreary smile. Tears
continue to slide down her cheeks and salt her lips as she finally opens
her mouth to speak. But what she says is just another one of those
things that he can't understand.
"Have you ever heard the story of Pandora's box?" she whispers, a hitch
in her breath. "How the evils of the world were all released and no
amount of regret could recall it once it was unleashed?"
"What's that got to do with anything?" he all but snarls.
"I know the story," she whispers. "And I'm not opening the box."
He can take it-- he can take whatever she has hidden inside of her. He
tells her that and she shakes her head and he wants to MAKE her... But
maybe she doesn't even know, herself, and that is a darker thought than
anything else.
He sighs and gives up for this time and takes her in his arms. He'll be
here for her, and hold her until she finishes crying, and talk of other
things as he kisses her tearstains away, while his heart continues to
secretly wonder about who in her past must have betrayed her.
He won't rest and she won't give and they'll have this conversation
again next week.
~fin
(
geocities.com/wyse_k)