   Adi88
2007-06-02 . chapter 1Argh. Insomnia is bad, but fics are good… ah, the quandary… Maybe you just need to be allowed to run on a different schedule than most of the world. The Bomb Shelter will take care of that…
ZOMG DEDICATION! I gets a partial dedication. This goes in my Collection. *wriggle* FEEL THE POWAH, mortals. Minemineminemine. You are so… completely awesome.
Also, joy joy joy, because Buffy shall delivereth the great lines to be used as fuel for the fires! Kikikiki… Seriously, loved that episode. And the quote. And… about weeping because I have been very patient and not read this without reviewing and now I finally get to and I can only imagine how this lovely line, the lovely character dynamics, and your extraordinary writing will combine.
So I’m going to go read it now and THEN review because I am not THAT patient.
…oh.
I… am trying to think of something that’ll cover it and coming up blank. ‘Marry me and have my children’ might work if the latter wasn’t physically impossible. Just… love. Gods, the love.
Ayame and the wearing-of-ones-emotions, first of all. Because nowhere does it actually sound incredibly callous until you stop to think that it IS, and cruel too. And so indescribably lucky, especially in his family. The conflation of it with clothes is so unutterably perfect, and “That was the secret to beauty, to know how to mold it to ones own specifications.” THAT, right there, is a LINE. The kind of line people put on, like, icons and billboards. I am having such a good line-finding week. This takes some kind of prize.
Even more than what he‘s doing to other, though, the “After all, it wouldn’t do for his bright and flaring personality to seem dull and colorless.” I… actually never thought of what turning stuff on and off at will would do to him personally. And then without even saying it you put it all… right there.
“Anyone who knew Ayame knew that he spent at least half the morning, every morning, making sure he was perfect. It would be a sin to embrace the day with less preparation than that.”
- Because… love. Hat. Hat. Hat.
“If he wasn’t sure of something, he clung to it until he was.”
- And in this, he does not differ terribly from the Head and God of the Sohma family, does he. They’re both… so… possessive, in a way, only the word doesn’t fit Ayame as such, does it… or more, it’s just that he’s not always worrying his things will up and run and Akito never thinks of anything else. Still, they do both throw themselves into things and believe so completely that just because they did so they’ll be caught before they hit the bottom… In a way, Akito’s what you get when you take Ayame and add a bunch of suspicion and fear and insecurity to the mix.
“He knew how to wear feeling, but this was uncomfortable, and he didn’t like it at all. He marveled at those people, some of them even in his own family, who could live with this feeling day after day.”
- So gloriously, obliviously Ayame. Kind of want to pinch him and make him wake up, and kind of… want to cuddle him and make him never have to notice that WHO IN YOUR FAMILY DOESN’T live with this feeling…
“He couldn’t quite imagine the battle of their gentle but stubborn wills that must have been.”
- So fun to picture, so fun to think of Ayame picturing, and so beautifully put. “Gently but stubborn wills.” Oh, Yuki and Tohru. Such wonderful people. I am… feeling extremely attached to everyone mentioned here for some reason… like more than usual…
“He was glad she had won out though, because like everything else, Ayame knew how to use an opportunity.
Now if he only knew what to do with it, maybe he wouldn’t feel so sick.”
- Oh, use and sickness. Callous!Ayame in such wonderful, juxtaposed combination with worried!Ayame.
“He reached the porch and, as it seemed to be the day for such, committed another first; he hesitated.”
- M~m~m love. Hesitation, anticipation, other… mm.
“Where was Yuki? Had Shigure lied and the boy had gone to school? What if he was too sick to get up to answer the door? Shigure hadn’t said how sick, and his friend wasn’t home today either. Would Yuki leave him standing out here forever?”
- So Ayame… wild imaginings, and yet, this is the Sohma family. Shigure might well have lied, Yuki might well have actually had some kind of attack and been unable to get up, and Yuki might well have just figured, ‘No. You don’t GET my house. Instead I’m just going to rub it in your face that you’re such an absentee.’
“…because his head continued to spin its creative, and at that moment, unwanted, threads of imagination and ‘what if’ scenarios.”
- Phrasing and topic and yum, oh my…
“They walked in silence to the living room, and then motion stopped.”
- “motion stopped” in particular. You know he’s seriously upset and out-of-body experience-y when he’s not the one performing the actions. Such… ooh, telling little detail. *wiggle* Love for this. Makes everything so much more acute and it’s so small.
“His attention to detail seemed to have taken on a fatal injury and deserted him today.”
- Sn. Sn. Sn.
“Yuki, there’s, well, you see little brother, in all our long years, you know that everything I say to you has been a pearl of wisdom,” Yuki started to look very annoyed again, and Ayame breathed an inner sigh of relief. Now that he had gotten going, not even he could stop himself. He started to smile more, his hands lifting from their sides. “So, as an older brother should, I have come to share something with you, a gift more precious than anything you could ever imagine in your wildest dreams.”
- So many things here… the stuttering start, pure, unadulterated Ayame ending of the first sentence. Yuki looking annoyed AND - just making that a ‘but’ would have changed everything, only that’s not them, is it… moods on a see-saw; one goes up and the other must come down - Aya being happy to sink into autopilot. My mom was talking about that to my aunt recently, when you get going and you know it’s not working, they’re not laughing, but you started and goddamnit you’re going to finish because where else can you go from here?
And finally, just Ayame’s dialogue itself. So very, very him and perfect. And… a gift, when it’s really a return. Only it IS a gift. Oh. Just.. Love.
“That wouldn’t do…he couldn’t spend more than a day feeling like this, it would wreck havoc on his personality.”
- Oh, Ayame Ayame Ayame. This sentence kind of… makes something. The fic. Part of the fic. Because we know he loves Yuki and everything, KNOW that… it’s just that he’s Ayame and loving other people always kind of comes back to himself. This is what we need sometimes.
“I have something I need to talk to you about.”
- Whn. And if that doesn’t get Yuki’s attention, nothing will. I guess panic does serve a purpose when it renders you incapable of most speech.
“He had been certain that with an approach as bland as that he would lessen his credibility, or that his brother would simply shoot him down before he got any farther.”
- ‘He just doesn’t get it…’ God I wanna hug him for that. Lessen his credibility…
“His brother needed to understand things. Everything needed to be clear and explained, it just had to be.
He couldn’t say a word.”
- Just… mnah. The urgency, and the inability, and we’re getting up to the part made me sweat through my shirt for tension, and I… grfln.
“Talk had failed him, he felt lost, panicky. What was he supposed to do?”
- Because I know what it’s like to depend on words, and… if they weren’t THERE… mean for making me not just think about it but feel it in my tummy… Then that sorta terrible-wonderful moment that comes after panic when you realize it’s inevitable and you have to accept it and work with it and it’s just… a relief.
Oh oh oh the book. The Book. So… for approximately the next ten paragraphs I am in torture. Thank you so much. Tension overload… so perfect…
“Yuki hadn’t believed, since a young age, that things could be mended. They could be patched, they could be covered, but they could never be fixed. To fix something you needed two sets of hands, and in the Souma family, no two pairs of hands ever worked towards the same goals.”
- Because it’s beautiful and accurate and overall… mm. Perfect metaphor-thinger.
“Ayame’s hands didn’t know how to do the right things, the things they needed to do to make things right.”
- But they do they do they do! Yun-YUN! …Well, the know the holding-out-the-book part. Oh exquisite. All the things the book symbolizes and…
“It would sit there, floating between them forever.
But there it was.”
- With the floating. Takeittakeittakeit!
“His older brother, who had had a paragraph and then some for every occasion, sat in front of him in complete silence. He looked like he was waiting for the guillotine… Could he do it, could he let the blade of retribution slam down at his brother’s wrist?”
- Because it’s beautifully well-worded and yet another perfect metaphor, and of course brings to mind the Scarlet Pimpernel song. Mad-good metaphor award going to Katia… something about having it on his wrist instead of his head, too… maybe the vague suicide associations? I mean, just because… they’re both so much a part of this…
“He could be merciful, he could relieve that. . .
What was he thinking?
He wondered when he had become so high, so proud. When had he ever been found deserving to hold that much power over someone else.”
- For some weird reason, this is where I started to think, ‘Omigod he’s not gonna take it’ in earnest.
“If he was honest with himself, hadn’t he set Ayame an impossible task? He had wanted his brother to earn his forgiveness, to deserve it; even though anything Ayame could do would never be enough.”
- epiphany!Angel connotations make me happiest girl on earth. Pretty sure you’ve not watched Angel [yet], but they’re still there for me. ‘Our time is never up.’ Yes. Another favorite topic.
“He had watched his brother jump through hoops for years, and had even denied the existence of those hoops. Ayame had come now, giving him a choice, halting their circus of family affections and hatred.”
- More metaphor awards. Cor, you’ve always been that damn good, but where are you pulling these from all of a sudden?
“He was asking Yuki to make one choice now, because he had finally figured out what his little brother had been doing all these years. Yuki knew that Ayame had figured out the game, and come to beg him to end it. Of course he didn’t deserve to be forgiven, nothing could make up for the past…but neither of them could move forward until Yuki had either rejected or accepted the offer. If he did, then maybe they could start to fix some things; maybe things could get better.”
- Mm… because it’s like… Yuki had to set up a game to see if Ayame would play, and when he did it was good [even if it drove him nuts] but then he just got tired of it… but he can’t end it because he started it and there are rules, there are always rules. Aya had to forfeit. Or win. Or something, but make it stop himself. Only when it comes down to it, the game is what they’re both used to now.
“He still didn’t trust Ayame’s hands. Didn’t trust them to help him fix things. They were too different. If it came to it, he wasn’t sure if he could let Ayame be the one to hold him up, or if he could return the favor.”
- Because all of it is so indescribably beautiful and fragile and human.
“But…he could try.”
- And I can breathe again…
“That little book was something; it was the heart of one of the matters. It was the knife that they had unknowingly passed back and forth, always wary that the blade would suddenly open one of them up.”
- Metaphors. You’ve… ah, got them down. Woefully inadequate way to say it, but… wow.
“And he took it.”
- …and overexposure to oxygen. Oh sheer bliss.
His fingers closed around it, and he looked from the cover and up at his older brother. “Thanks,” was all he could manage.
“Ayame didn’t say anything at all, but he did smile, and Yuki found himself, unlike he would have done with one of those empty vows, returning it. It was the first thought they had shared, Yuki was almost certain of that.”
- Yes. Oh yes. Sometimes silence is the answer. Finally sharing… all to the good… oh yes. Love, love, love.
“It was a first for them, and so for now, the results didn’t really matter.”
- Brand new day. Springtime. Because whether they want it or deserve it they just need it. Lends a certain cynicism and paradoxical generosity to the entire thing. LOVE. I don’t know. Oh… just perfect from start to finish. I have to… go cry now… and also show Little Sister this trilogy so that we can cry together… You kind of rule the world. |
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