Title: Palimpsest

Author: Miss Selah

Summary: If I could bottle up all this bitterness inside my soul, the bitterness that still lingers, well, it would probably taste like her.

Universe: The King of Eden

A/N: no excuses. Eden of the East moved me in its elegance.

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Palimpsest

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I am in love with the vision before me.

Decadent in her simplicity, she stands no higher than five foot three in a peach skirt and green sweater.

As if I was asleep, in some kind of a waking dream, I can feel her lips on my neck.

Soft, but when I taste them, that mouth is not sweet. She – the girl with the red hair and doe eyes – she tasted almost bitter, like dango. Like if resentment had a taste. A texture.

If I could bottle up all this bitterness inside my soul, the bitterness that still lingers, well, it would probably taste like her.

She is a lighthouse – a seamark in an unpredictable world which I view through cinematic eyes. She is the tempest, creating tides inside of my stomach that pull me down into a black silver ocean, somewhere between a colliding heaven and current, and though my head is above water, I am drowning. I am drowning in her eyes.

She is just a girl; just a girl that just so happens to look just like her but can't be – can't be, because she was only ever a dream – and she is looking at me with those doe eyes and I am frozen: a thousand maybes are running through my head and I meet her eyes with mine.

She is a brick and my body is being unpredictable, being lead by the current that she has risen up inside of me; she is a solid stage and I am inexplicably afraid that if I don't grab a hold of her that I am going to stray.

And what am I looking at? Her hand, extended and pale, the same color as the moon. Behind her burnt red bangs, burnished cooper in the afternoon light, I can only make out one plain, clear brown eyes, slightly downcast, lashes framing at the edge where she stares. Her soft cheek is feathered by the rays of sunlight and I stare in awe, unashamed, as she raises one finger and brushes it against the indentation below her full lips.

My gaze stops and sticks, staring at that mouth, those lips that I have never tasted, but still make my mouth begin to water. The tiniest edge of her tongue flickers out to moisten her lips. Was she nervous? Why would she be, standing there, a Goddess of the East. Her lips close again, and she swallows.

I try to remain impassive, to still my breathing, but I am ashamed when I only half succeed in slowing the ragged, shallow breaths that suddenly came from my mouth.

My ears are blocked by the sound of my blood rushing through my veins.

My eyes trail down the curvature of her neck and I feel as though – insanely – I am staring at the curve of the world. My fingers ache suddenly to trace the hollow at its base and see if I can feel the seed of life there, growing still beneath the expanse of her skin. Was her skin cool or warm? Would she startle at my touch?

Would she welcome it?

She is a navigator that either doesn't know how to lead or that I cannot understand, and she has led me out until I am lost in a silver sea, and I am just a ship that is too proud to sink.

I feel as though I am standing on the edge of a cliff, staring out past the point of no return, and – God help me – I want to take that final leap.

I don't know her; I don't.

But still, the urge to claim this creature of fierce loveliness before me is overwhelming.

I am captivated by everything that she is and isn't. Everything that she could and could never be.

In this second, though I have never seen her before, she is the entire world.

Everything else had evaporated into nothingness; even the busy sounds of the city that never sleeps faded away the instant that her gaze lifted, her face turning fully towards mine with an agonizing slowness.

I draw in a terrified breath.

Her lips part.

"Takizawa."

Sometimes it feels to me like life is rarely for the living; the world is only a place for you to beat your body down until it is broken and battered, and you slide finally – finally – on your hands and knees for that home plate, and you sit, either triumphant or destitute, in the dugouts.

Or like a merry go round, seeing the same things over and over without fail and without change until someone else calls out that it is time to stop and everything ceases, and you are either happy with what you had or you aren't.

And there are hardly ever any gold rings to reach for.

Takizawa?

Her voice echoes inside of my head, the word rattling around, meaningless. An image of the Air King briefly flashes before my mind's eye before it slips like the breath from my lungs.

Takizawa.

It is just a name, just an unfamiliar name, but it is an echo of a person I don't know and of places I have never been. Of stories I have never been told, but that I know all the same.

And her?

She stares at me with such longing, such hope – it is evident to me from her eyes alone that she trusts me with her life. She stares at me like she expects something of me.

As for me?

I want to be whoever she wants me to be.

But the name means nothing to me.

"I'm not him."

The disappointment is absent from my voice, but not from my heart, because – though I don't know who I am – I know that I am not him.

I am not Takizawa.

But when I look at her, I want to be.

God help me.

I want to be.