Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. The authors claim no ownership of the characters within, nor received any compensation for this work.
Nothing was real, and Aya couldn't be happier about it. He was floating in a haze of nothingness, holding on to nothing, supported by nothing, content that he was not empty any longer. Let the rest of the world fade away. All that mattered was that he felt whole again. The lack of love had been the ache inside of him that duty, responsibility, and revenge could not soothe.
All he could feel was his own body, really. He felt pleasantly heavy and weighted, like the sluggishness that comes from a long, restful sleep. His body was warm and loose, a relaxation he hardly ever allowed himself except in sleep.
Something was tickling his nose, he noticed. A moment later he realized that something was pinching the inside of his elbow. Bother. The annoyances were too real, and he wanted nothing more than to ignore them and drift back into that calm, comfortable space of nothingness. However, the tickle and the pinch were insistent, pulling him up through a grey fog from the happy blackness beneath.
There was something he had forgotten. It flirted with the edges of his consciousness, teasing him. All Aya knew was the absence of something, but not what that something had been. Cye would know, because Cye always remembered things. He would just roll over, wake up and ask Cye.
Except... he couldn't roll over. He tried to turn and his body wouldn't respond. At first he thought perhaps it was like that first morning together, when he was unable to move because of Cye's gentle weight on him... but this was not like that time. This was a paralysis, pinning him down, a restraint on his body that wouldn't let go. He tried to call out for Cye to come and help him, but his mouth wouldn't open, his voice wouldn't work.
Where was Cye? Where was Aya, for that matter? Why was he being held down, where was...
The tearing loss inside made itself suddenly known. Gone was the blue-green thread of welcome that he had only recently discovered. It was gone, and Cye was gone, and Aya was alone. He struggled to open his eyes, hoping against hope that it wouldn't be true, begging deep in his heart to be in that soft bed on a warm morning with a sleepy lover beside him.
When he opened his eyes, it was all white.
White walls. White ceiling. White window. White floor. White white white and the smell of disinfectant and...
And the thing tickling his nose was a breathing tube, and the pinch on the inside of his arm was another clear tube that ran up to something outside of his vision. And there were little pads stuck to his chest, he could feel them now, and his wrists and ankles were restrained by something he couldn't quite see because there was a white blanket in the way and he was trapped trapped trapped...
"Not dead! I am not dead! This isn't what I want anymore! This isn't my dream anymore! I don't want to be dead, Cye... Cye, tell them! Tell them I don't want to die, I want to be happy in that house with you forever and ever..."
Aya tried to scream. His voice failed, coming out as only a soft choke. He tried to thrash. That yielded better results, and the hospital bed - God, no, not a hospital bed, a prison for dead people, no no no no - rattled beneath him. Someone had to hear him. Cye had to come! He had to come and tell whoever had put him here that Aya wanted to be alive now, that he didn't want to be the one in the bed, in the eternal sleep, that he wanted so much more now! Where was he? Where was Cye and why didn't he come?
"Aya! Aya, calm down, it's all right, you shouldn't toss around so much. Calm down."
The voice was one he knew, but for a second Aya couldn't place it. It seemed so far distant, but welcome, like an old friend. When large hands rested on his shoulders, and an elegant, concerned face bent over him, Aya realized that an old friend was exactly what it was. He stared up at Yohji in shock, calming into stillness for a few moments. Yohji was here. Aya wasn't in that world any more. He was back. But how?
Yohji relaxed when Aya calmed down and removed his hands. "How many times are you going to make me wait around for you to wake up?" he sighed, shifting his weight to lean against the railed hospital bed. "This is getting to be a habit, you know, and not one that I'm particularly fond of, since it keeps me out of my bed when I'd rather be sleeping." Yohji must be nervous. He only chattered like that when he was nervous. But what would Yohji have to be nervous about?
"Cye," Aya managed to hiss out, with great effort from a terribly dry, scratchy throat. If he was back, then Cye must be too, and Yohji had to know where to find him.
Green eyes just blinked down at him, blank. "Cye? Don't tell me that's what you want to be called now. I already gave you 'Aya,' I'm not giving you another one. Lay still, would you?" As Aya started to struggle again and try to sit up, Yohji rested his hands on Aya's shoulders again, holding him down.
"Listen to me," the older man insisted, leaning down so he was almost nose-to-nose with Aya. "You almost got killed, okay? You were shot in that alley. The doctors said your heart stopped at some point but it must've got started again. Are you listening to me?" Those long fingers were digging in to Aya's shoulders, but he could barely register the words. That alley? The one from all those months ago? His heart stopped? But hadn't he been floating with Cye just a few hours ago?
"H... how... long?" Aya managed, relaxing again. Thankfully, Yohji found a glass of water from somewhere outside Aya's vision, and put the straw to his lips. He took tiny sips of it, wetting his dry throat.
"That was three, four nights ago," Yohji said grimly. "They've had you on some heavy drugs since then. That bullet went clean through you, and you're fucking lucky it didn't hit any organs on the way. But you lost a lot of blood, I guess, and they said that your heart stopped.
"Shit," Yohji sighed, taking the water away when Aya, in shock, refused any more. "Only you, Aya. Only you could come back from the dead again like that. I don't know how the hell you did it."
Too many questions filled Aya's head, and he knew his flagging strength could only hold out for a couple. How had he gotten back to the alley? How had they known to come for him? And most importantly, where was Cye?
"How long... since... Midnight mission?" he whispered, feeling his energy draining. Midnight had been the code name for the mission they were on when he'd first seen Cye, the name of the club where they had been.
Yohji looked impatient. "I told you: four nights ago. When you got shot. You've been drugged up and asleep ever since."
Four nights? Only four? That wasn't possible! He'd been with Cye for ages, he knew there were at least twenty separate days that he could recall clearly...
Not so clearly. Aya frowned. The house and the beach and the garden were all becoming muddy in his mind. A fog had settled over his memories, brought on by the drugs in his system and the great fatigue weighing his body down. He remembered Cye, but then, he'd met Cye in the bar before the mission began, hadn't he?
"Cye?" His voice came out terribly small, surprising and embarrassing him.
"Maybe you better sleep some more," Yohji sighed. "I think you're still delirious. You don't know anybody named Cye, Aya."
"There was... a garden," Aya insisted, shutting his eyes and trying to remember. It all slipped away so quickly, but weren't there roses and sweet grass? "And... the sun. It was always so bright..."
A surprisingly gentle voice met his ears, as the caustic Yohji that Aya was familiar with softened somewhat. "And there were people there that you loved?" he asked, very quiet.
Aya opened his eyes suddenly, looking up at Yohji. "Yes!" he whispered, knowing his eyes were wide and vulnerable and not caring. Maybe his teammate really did know about the house and garden, and about Cye, and maybe he would tell him now! "Someone... someone I..." His voice left him in a quiet choke, dry throat closing up again from too much effort.
"Hey," Yohji soothed, patting his shoulder again in that casual way that Aya had always hated. Now, though, it was a comfort. He'd gotten so used to being touched when Cye was around. "It's all right, Aya. That happens a lot to people who go through what you went through, don't you know? They see a bright light, and a beautiful place, and people they care about there to greet them. They call it a near-death experience."
Heavy, crushing weight pressed down on Aya's chest. He could barely draw breath to tell Yohji that it wasn't true. He knew he had been in that place, it wasn't his imagination! Aya knew better, it had been real! Hadn't it?
Aya turned his face away. He didn't want Yohji to see the tear that trickled down his cheek and was soaked up in the pillow.
~*~*~*~
"Isn't Aya-san here?" The girl was clutching a small pot of violets in a death grip. She refused to let Omi ring it up, insisting on seeing her favorite Kitty in the House florist. "I haven't seen him for two whole weeks! Where is he? When is he coming back? Is he sick? He didn't..." The girl's eyes got huge for a moment in pure horror at the very thought. "... quit??"
"Oh no!" Omi reassured her quickly. "He just has the flu and can't come back to work yet." He gave the young girl his sweetest 'come back soon' smile, wishing privately that he could pull off Aya's 'buy something or get out.' "You don't want to catch the flu from him, do you?"
Omi decided he really did not want to get the answer he got from the obsessed teenager and tried to put the thought of Aya tongue-swapping his made-up virus out of his mind. Ken patted him warmly on the shoulder. "Nice cover. I wonder how much longer they'll believe that?"
With a sigh, Omi shook his head and shut the register again. "Hopefully as long as it takes Aya-kun to get back to full strength. Who knows how long that will be?" He cast a glance over his shoulder, at the back door that led to the greenhouse. "We shouldn't have let him get back to work even today. He still isn't very strong, and he's been so..."
Ken nodded in quiet agreement, sympathetic to Omi's worries. "I know. It's weird, isn't it? He was never friendly before, but now he's..."
"Almost talkative," Omi agreed, serious. "We had a whole conversation this morning. He actually said to me, 'I like to do the pruning.' I didn't think there was anything in the world that Aya-kun liked!"
Ken lowered his voice to confide, "He hasn't glared at me once since that mission. What do you think almost dying did to him?"
"I'm not sure," Omi whispered back. "But those boys in the alley..." He looked down. "I didn't put them in my report. I didn't want anyone after them, not after that one helped Aya-kun. They weren't the targets. And that other boy got hurt, because of us."
"The one that looked at Aya all funny, yeah," Ken agreed grimly. "That guy didn't know what he was getting into. Too bad he had to get caught in the middle of it like that. I hope he lived."
Omi sighed, with another look back at the greenhouse door. "I hope so, too, but we'll never know."
~*~*~*~
Aya knew the difference between a friend and a babysitter. A friend helped you out, talked with you about interesting things, and most importantly, did not smoke around your very delicate orchids. A babysitter, on the other hand, sat around and did very little but look at you while you went about your business. It was very clear to Aya that Yohji was babysitting him this afternoon.
With him out of commission for two weeks, the greenhouse had become a terrible mess. Omi couldn't do all the work alone and prepare for missions minus one team member, and the other two were completely hopeless when it came to plants unless it involved transporting said plants from the back to the front of the store. And Yohji wasn't even very good at that. Consequently, Aya had a great deal of work to do in the greenhouse this afternoon, and not only was Yohji not helping, he was actually hindering Aya's progress.
"Don't lift heavy things," Yohji yawned when Aya bent down to pick up a pot that had been left in the wrong area and was suffering from lack of sunlight.
"You've been standing up for too long," Yohji told him when he was only halfway through untangling the ivy that was sneaking up and choking his roses.
"Blood pressure," Yohji reminded him when he muttered about the azaleas not having been watered enough.
"Hey..." Yohji blinked when Aya sat down, stayed quiet, and took a few minutes' rest. "Aren't you going to snap at me or narrow your eyes at me or anything? Ch'. What'd I come down here for, then?"
Aya didn't answer him, sitting on the folding chair with his elbows on his knees. He rested as the doctors had told him to and as Yohji had pestered him to repeatedly. He rested and looked down at the floor and tried not to think of anything.
These moments when he wasn't occupied were the worst. If he wasn't doing anything with his hands, or reading something, or distracting himself in some way, he started to think. Invariably his thoughts turned wistful. He missed the quiet security of the house by the sea and the loving boy he'd imagined into being. He wished for the warmth of that world and the understanding of one person who wouldn't give up on him, no matter what.
His teammates weren't exactly family, and their apartments over the shop weren't exactly a home. This was as much as any of them had, and they were friends of a sort, but they still lived separate lives. The others never talked much about themselves or their other lives. Not like Cye's daily details about his home and his friends. They didn't inquire about his life; they didn't dare try after months of rejection. Not like Cye, who hadn't cared about his glares and silences and who had drawn truths out of him that he hadn't admitted to anyone.
Aya must have sighed, though he didn't hear it as caught up as he was in the mist of not-memories his mind had created. He saw Yohji's hand slip into his field of view and hesitate before touching his own. Golden on pale, he thought wistfully. How beautiful.
"Aya," the older man began hesitantly. "You know... did you know that everything that you feel and experience sticks to you like lint? I can see it all over you but I can't tell what it is that's getting to you. It's not like we haven't come close to dying before."
For a few long moments, Aya stayed silent. The scenes of that house by the sea lingered in his memory, blurred by too much brightness but still strong. But he wasn't there any more, and that house had never been real. Yohji was his friend, and they had stuck by each other in their grim business for a long time. How could he tell his friend, now, that he longed to flee the only home they had and run away to a dreamland place where he had been happy? How could he say that, knowing that Yohji's own dream world was tainted by death and the bitter taste of failure?
"It was so bright," he whispered before he could control the words. Immediately he heard Yohji shift and sigh, and before he knew it, there were gentle hands on his shoulders. Aya let the older man touch him. His hands were strong and his fingers were long and slender, and it seemed like ages since Aya had been touched.
"It was just a dream. You can't live there forever, Aya. If you want to live in the past, I can't stop you and I really can't blame you. But you can't live in a world that doesn't exist. You had a near-death experience, and whatever it was that you saw there, it wasn't real." Yohji's hands tightened on his shoulders. Aya leaned back in the folding chair and quite suddenly Yohji's arms were folded across his collarbone.
Relief washed through him for a moment, glad for once to be touched. However, ache soon followed in its wake. Yohji was his friend, but his were not the arms that Aya longed to feel around him... even if he had imagined that boy. Cye had to be a figment of his imagination, because no one in the world could possibly be so perfect for Aya. Such a faultless match just couldn't be possible.
"I know," Aya finally admitted. He gently pried Yohji's arms from around his shoulders and slipped out of the man's grasp. "It was a dream. I am trying to shake it, Yohji. I promise."
He rose to look his friend in the eyes so that Yohji would know the truth of his words. What he saw in those green eyes almost made him take a step back. The ache and longing that Aya had felt in his heart a moment ago was reflected in Yohji's eyes, focused on Aya himself.
Had it been there all this time? Did he really see what he thought he saw? Aya blinked, frowning in his surprise.
Yohji looked at him hard, the expression in his eyes fading from want to denial. Yet Aya had seen, and Yohji knew he had seen. It could not be taken back, but neither of them were the sort to wax poetic about their feelings. The moment of silence stretched on, neither of them putting voice to what might have just occurred. All they could really do was stare at each other. Yohji could not articulate what he was thinking, and Aya could not call him on it, because what if he were wrong?
Aya found himself thinking that Cye would not have let a moment like this pass.
Finally, Yohji turned away with a wave of his hand. "Maa, I believe you. Better quit frowning, you don't want your face to stick like that." The careless playboy exterior was firmly in place now. Yohji sauntered past him. "Ah, wait, it already has. Come on, let's go see if the bishounen want any dinner."
Aya followed, because there was nothing else for him to do. It hurt his heart to know that Yohji was right, and that the world that flourished in his mind had only ever existed there. It hurt a little bit more to know that Yohji wanted something from Aya that he didn't think he could give. Hurt and ache was a familiar thing in Aya's life, though. The house and garden by the sea was just one more idyllic memory to be put away in the back of his mind.
[ on to chapter 18 ]