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In Every Life I've Lived: (6) The Sea For Green Fields / Part Two.
Title: (6) The Sea For Green Fields PART TWO
Pairing: Yamapi/Jin, Koyama/Shige
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: AU. Sex, supernatural, disturbing content.
Summary: This fic was written over the course of 24 hours for the JE Valentine's Day challenge. It is meant to follow on from my AU fic 'In Every Life I've Lived', which is here. It can be read on its own, but it'll make a lot more sense if you're familiar with the original fic. Part one of this installment is here.
Please read the other fics in the challenge, too! They are: acchikocchi | agirlcalledkil | anamuan | devetir | honooko | imwahyou | iverin | jackoweskla | jadedfrenzy | jnessap | ky_rin | mousapelli | pearljemz | peroxidepest17 | procreational | shatteredinu | soucieux | thawrecka | tinyangl
Jun finds himself pacing. He's in the room where he sometimes deigns to sleep, when he wants to be fenced in from the rest of the world. It happens rarely, usually when trouble isn't far away. There's an odd wind stirring, or so it feels to him.
It rains, all day, impossibly heavy and thick. The sky is murky and the sea is restless, and nobody leaves their houses, not even those who like a drink or seven on a Monday evening. There's nobody about. Everything is eerily quiet.
When Jun finishes pacing, he leans out of the window and gathers the rain on his face, in the hope of clearing his head. After five minutes, he only feels cold, so he closes the shutters and slumps down in a chair. It's then that he sees the dagger, water-logged on his desk.
“What's the point in rain,” he mutters to himself, picking it up and fondling it dry. It's in that moment that he's fooled: it's a different dagger. Not the one Jin gave him. He turns it over, and over. Yes, it is: there are no blue stones. The one Jin gave him had blue stones.
He looks down at the paper on the desk, and there's piles of water, puddles and streams of it. It's not the rain. It's the dagger.
As soon as Jin takes out the bottle, there's a faint sound. A clinking sound, like ice knocking against your boots. Yamapi turns, sharply, but sees nothing. He's almost certain that somebody is tapping against the ice, but there's nothing around them but water. When he turns back to Jin, Jin's face is pale. He's staring up at the ice on his side, where a small crack has begun, where a small crack is travelling down the centre of the room they're standing in.
“We're going to drown,” he's saying. “Oh, fuck, Yamapi – what do we do? What do we, I can't-”
Yamapi does the only thing that's logical: he leans over and grabs the belt from Jin's waist, drops it to the floor, starts out saying, “Take it, take it! We have what you requested!”, only it becomes a shout, and the shout does no more than anything else. The crack widens, more cracks begin, until the whole structure is riddled with them. Thin veins become wide valleys and the sound of rushing can be heard, and there's nothing, absolutely nothing. The tunnel is too high for them to jump, and they wouldn't be able to scramble fast enough, and-
“Yamapi,” Jin says, only it's small against the water, small against the world. He says it again and again until Yamapi locks his gaze, and then Jin picks up the belt and holds it in his hand.
“We have to get the stone out, we have to-- I can't. You have to help me.”
“It's your stone-”
“No, what if it isn't. What if it's not, Yamapi, I haven't got a soul, I haven't got – I lost them, I lost them before, and you said. You said that I could have your heart, Yamapi, hold the bottle with me. Touch the bottle. We have to do it together. That's what we need to do.”
“Jin, I don't-” Yamapi begins, because there's not a lot of truth in any of that, but there's no other option. The walls are beginning to flood, there's puddles underneath their feet. Water washes the walls clean, freezing cold and so, so loud. There's nothing else to do. Nothing else but to trust, for the last time, that Jin is right. Jin is almost never right, but maybe this time, maybe this time-
Yamapi reaches out, and hopes that when he opens his eyes again, there'll still be the two of them. That after all this, there'll still be Jin. Whatever else he loses, he can't lose this. His fingers touch the bottle, clasping Jin's fingertips, and there's an almighty sound.
“Dig,” Shige is saying, over and over. “I can hear water, they'll be drowned, we have to dig-”
Koyama is on his hands and knees besides, trying uselessly to scrape away the ice.
Ryo watches, gaunt, from the crow's nest. He's unable to move. Unable to speak. What if he caused this? What if he had a bad soul? What has he carried with him from a previous life, a future one? What spirits are inside him, and what has he passed on to this crew?
“Ryo!” Shige shouts up. “You have to help us. Get down here and help us!”
Ryo can't. Ryo feels frozen. He cannot move, even if he wanted to.
The stones on Jin's belt are changing colour. Yamapi's eyes are open and the world is collapsing, the world is flooding, and he and Jin are soaking wet and being thrashed from all sides. They're choking out water and bracing the cold, but Jin's eyes are open and they're surrounded by a white light. They look at each other because there's nothing else: this is it, this is the only thing that matters. The stones turn white, one by one, as if a light is turning on inside each one.
The purple is first, the blue next. Each glints and with each one, the water seems a little less loud, the world a little less cold. The white throws around them, makes it easier to see. Yamapi's hands are tight and wet and cold, and Jin's mouth is open with the force of it all, but they're here and they're alive, and that is all that matters.
The red stone won't change. It falters. The colour tries and tries, but it can't envelop. It can't illuminate. It cannot switch on. Yamapi stares at it and then at Jin, and somehow he knows that they must have picked the wrong person. Ryo's soul is dark, is treacherous. He had other things on his mind when he bonded himself to the stone: things like blood, death, betrayal. Jin sees it, too. The light is fading from his eyes and Yamapi doesn't know how to stop it, not until Jin reaches out and grabs the stone, hissing out curses, full of absolute rage.
Above ground, Ryo begins to move. He climbs down from the top of the ship, he races across the deck. He throws his upper body over the side of the ship, looking down upon the chaos below. And he holds on, and he holds on, and he closes his eyes, and he hopes with all of his might.
There's a huge flash of light, then, and Yamapi closes his eyes. All he can feel as the world drops away in the warmth of Jin's hands, clutching his.
Neither of them see the green stone change or the veins turn inwards. Neither of them see anything. All they can feel is one another.
“Fuck,” Jin exclaims, for what feels like the thousandth time. He opens his eyes to freezing cold water and a dark sky. Paddling, he gets his bearing, and then he turns sharply, looking for Yamapi. Yamapi, who surfaces beside him, he's never been so glad to see him in his life, and-
Shige and Koyama, too, some way off. They swim closer, grabbing onto each other with fear in their eyes. And Jin looks at Yamapi, and Yamapi looks back, and neither of them know what to say.
Ryo leans over the edge of the ship, and he lets down the rope.
When Jin emerges with no belt, only a bottle, Yamapi feels his heart sink. As they lie on the deck, sodden and confused, he feels for the bottle in Jin's hand. Bringing it before his face, he strains his eyes to see inside it. Not a stone any longer – lying flat at the bottom of the glass is a small, green shoot.
Yamapi stays ashore long enough to help his sister plant the shoot, to watch it grow where the crops refuse to. He stays long enough to see it flourish, to see it provide her with anything she asks of it: first rice, then grains, maybe flowers, she thinks, next. It grows and grows as if it never tires of it, a constant chameleon. He stays no longer than a few months, enough to see the town beginning to grow again, to feed again, to bloom again.
The fields are beautiful as the world changes itself to summer, but Yamapi realises that he has no time for green fields, no time for the changing seasons, no time even for watching his sister working in the hot, lazy sun. This world has no sway over him. The one that does is the one that changes, that tosses and turns, that isn't always kind but is always a world in which he feels he belongs.
“I don't want to come back again,” he says to Jin, as they prepare to leave. Summer a good time for sailing: plenty of crew, plenty of wine and food. “I just want to stay on the sea.”
“Jun always said that you couldn't take a pirate ashore for too long,” Jin says. “Not without him getting seasick.”
“I thought after everything that happened with us, I wanted a break. Some time away, to enjoy you. But it got worse, when I took that time away. Isn't that funny?”
“Not really,” Jin says. “We don't belong here. We never have. We belong out there.”
“How can I let it go of it all?” Yamapi says, suddenly, looking at the mast and the flag and the deck and trying to force the horrible images out of his mind: Jin choking on the deck, his body full of salt water, halfway between this world and the next. The awful circle on his chest, the empty place where a beat should be.
“You just keep going forwards,” Jin says, after a moment. “And you stop looking back. And you think about the moment in the bottom of that bottle, the moment when you took my hands and you trusted me. That's what you do.”
Yamapi studies Jin, for a long time, and the words he speaks then are soft and slow, because he doesn't want to have to repeat them. And slowly, and surely, Jin's face becomes open and soft and there's a nod in his eyes that spreads over the rest of his face.
“From here on,” Yamapi says, “you should be the captain.”
Pairing: Yamapi/Jin, Koyama/Shige
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: AU. Sex, supernatural, disturbing content.
Summary: This fic was written over the course of 24 hours for the JE Valentine's Day challenge. It is meant to follow on from my AU fic 'In Every Life I've Lived', which is here. It can be read on its own, but it'll make a lot more sense if you're familiar with the original fic. Part one of this installment is here.
Please read the other fics in the challenge, too! They are: acchikocchi | agirlcalledkil | anamuan | devetir | honooko | imwahyou | iverin | jackoweskla | jadedfrenzy | jnessap | ky_rin | mousapelli | pearljemz | peroxidepest17 | procreational | shatteredinu | soucieux | thawrecka | tinyangl
Jun finds himself pacing. He's in the room where he sometimes deigns to sleep, when he wants to be fenced in from the rest of the world. It happens rarely, usually when trouble isn't far away. There's an odd wind stirring, or so it feels to him.
It rains, all day, impossibly heavy and thick. The sky is murky and the sea is restless, and nobody leaves their houses, not even those who like a drink or seven on a Monday evening. There's nobody about. Everything is eerily quiet.
When Jun finishes pacing, he leans out of the window and gathers the rain on his face, in the hope of clearing his head. After five minutes, he only feels cold, so he closes the shutters and slumps down in a chair. It's then that he sees the dagger, water-logged on his desk.
“What's the point in rain,” he mutters to himself, picking it up and fondling it dry. It's in that moment that he's fooled: it's a different dagger. Not the one Jin gave him. He turns it over, and over. Yes, it is: there are no blue stones. The one Jin gave him had blue stones.
He looks down at the paper on the desk, and there's piles of water, puddles and streams of it. It's not the rain. It's the dagger.
As soon as Jin takes out the bottle, there's a faint sound. A clinking sound, like ice knocking against your boots. Yamapi turns, sharply, but sees nothing. He's almost certain that somebody is tapping against the ice, but there's nothing around them but water. When he turns back to Jin, Jin's face is pale. He's staring up at the ice on his side, where a small crack has begun, where a small crack is travelling down the centre of the room they're standing in.
“We're going to drown,” he's saying. “Oh, fuck, Yamapi – what do we do? What do we, I can't-”
Yamapi does the only thing that's logical: he leans over and grabs the belt from Jin's waist, drops it to the floor, starts out saying, “Take it, take it! We have what you requested!”, only it becomes a shout, and the shout does no more than anything else. The crack widens, more cracks begin, until the whole structure is riddled with them. Thin veins become wide valleys and the sound of rushing can be heard, and there's nothing, absolutely nothing. The tunnel is too high for them to jump, and they wouldn't be able to scramble fast enough, and-
“Yamapi,” Jin says, only it's small against the water, small against the world. He says it again and again until Yamapi locks his gaze, and then Jin picks up the belt and holds it in his hand.
“We have to get the stone out, we have to-- I can't. You have to help me.”
“It's your stone-”
“No, what if it isn't. What if it's not, Yamapi, I haven't got a soul, I haven't got – I lost them, I lost them before, and you said. You said that I could have your heart, Yamapi, hold the bottle with me. Touch the bottle. We have to do it together. That's what we need to do.”
“Jin, I don't-” Yamapi begins, because there's not a lot of truth in any of that, but there's no other option. The walls are beginning to flood, there's puddles underneath their feet. Water washes the walls clean, freezing cold and so, so loud. There's nothing else to do. Nothing else but to trust, for the last time, that Jin is right. Jin is almost never right, but maybe this time, maybe this time-
Yamapi reaches out, and hopes that when he opens his eyes again, there'll still be the two of them. That after all this, there'll still be Jin. Whatever else he loses, he can't lose this. His fingers touch the bottle, clasping Jin's fingertips, and there's an almighty sound.
“Dig,” Shige is saying, over and over. “I can hear water, they'll be drowned, we have to dig-”
Koyama is on his hands and knees besides, trying uselessly to scrape away the ice.
Ryo watches, gaunt, from the crow's nest. He's unable to move. Unable to speak. What if he caused this? What if he had a bad soul? What has he carried with him from a previous life, a future one? What spirits are inside him, and what has he passed on to this crew?
“Ryo!” Shige shouts up. “You have to help us. Get down here and help us!”
Ryo can't. Ryo feels frozen. He cannot move, even if he wanted to.
The stones on Jin's belt are changing colour. Yamapi's eyes are open and the world is collapsing, the world is flooding, and he and Jin are soaking wet and being thrashed from all sides. They're choking out water and bracing the cold, but Jin's eyes are open and they're surrounded by a white light. They look at each other because there's nothing else: this is it, this is the only thing that matters. The stones turn white, one by one, as if a light is turning on inside each one.
The purple is first, the blue next. Each glints and with each one, the water seems a little less loud, the world a little less cold. The white throws around them, makes it easier to see. Yamapi's hands are tight and wet and cold, and Jin's mouth is open with the force of it all, but they're here and they're alive, and that is all that matters.
The red stone won't change. It falters. The colour tries and tries, but it can't envelop. It can't illuminate. It cannot switch on. Yamapi stares at it and then at Jin, and somehow he knows that they must have picked the wrong person. Ryo's soul is dark, is treacherous. He had other things on his mind when he bonded himself to the stone: things like blood, death, betrayal. Jin sees it, too. The light is fading from his eyes and Yamapi doesn't know how to stop it, not until Jin reaches out and grabs the stone, hissing out curses, full of absolute rage.
Above ground, Ryo begins to move. He climbs down from the top of the ship, he races across the deck. He throws his upper body over the side of the ship, looking down upon the chaos below. And he holds on, and he holds on, and he closes his eyes, and he hopes with all of his might.
There's a huge flash of light, then, and Yamapi closes his eyes. All he can feel as the world drops away in the warmth of Jin's hands, clutching his.
Neither of them see the green stone change or the veins turn inwards. Neither of them see anything. All they can feel is one another.
“Fuck,” Jin exclaims, for what feels like the thousandth time. He opens his eyes to freezing cold water and a dark sky. Paddling, he gets his bearing, and then he turns sharply, looking for Yamapi. Yamapi, who surfaces beside him, he's never been so glad to see him in his life, and-
Shige and Koyama, too, some way off. They swim closer, grabbing onto each other with fear in their eyes. And Jin looks at Yamapi, and Yamapi looks back, and neither of them know what to say.
Ryo leans over the edge of the ship, and he lets down the rope.
When Jin emerges with no belt, only a bottle, Yamapi feels his heart sink. As they lie on the deck, sodden and confused, he feels for the bottle in Jin's hand. Bringing it before his face, he strains his eyes to see inside it. Not a stone any longer – lying flat at the bottom of the glass is a small, green shoot.
Yamapi stays ashore long enough to help his sister plant the shoot, to watch it grow where the crops refuse to. He stays long enough to see it flourish, to see it provide her with anything she asks of it: first rice, then grains, maybe flowers, she thinks, next. It grows and grows as if it never tires of it, a constant chameleon. He stays no longer than a few months, enough to see the town beginning to grow again, to feed again, to bloom again.
The fields are beautiful as the world changes itself to summer, but Yamapi realises that he has no time for green fields, no time for the changing seasons, no time even for watching his sister working in the hot, lazy sun. This world has no sway over him. The one that does is the one that changes, that tosses and turns, that isn't always kind but is always a world in which he feels he belongs.
“I don't want to come back again,” he says to Jin, as they prepare to leave. Summer a good time for sailing: plenty of crew, plenty of wine and food. “I just want to stay on the sea.”
“Jun always said that you couldn't take a pirate ashore for too long,” Jin says. “Not without him getting seasick.”
“I thought after everything that happened with us, I wanted a break. Some time away, to enjoy you. But it got worse, when I took that time away. Isn't that funny?”
“Not really,” Jin says. “We don't belong here. We never have. We belong out there.”
“How can I let it go of it all?” Yamapi says, suddenly, looking at the mast and the flag and the deck and trying to force the horrible images out of his mind: Jin choking on the deck, his body full of salt water, halfway between this world and the next. The awful circle on his chest, the empty place where a beat should be.
“You just keep going forwards,” Jin says, after a moment. “And you stop looking back. And you think about the moment in the bottom of that bottle, the moment when you took my hands and you trusted me. That's what you do.”
Yamapi studies Jin, for a long time, and the words he speaks then are soft and slow, because he doesn't want to have to repeat them. And slowly, and surely, Jin's face becomes open and soft and there's a nod in his eyes that spreads over the rest of his face.
“From here on,” Yamapi says, “you should be the captain.”