Death Comes Another Day
Log Info
- Title: Death Comes Another Day
- Emitter: Karasu
- Place: Corey and Karasu's rented room
Content warning: expression of suicidal ideation. Please read with care.
It is not difficult to tell where Karasu will be; eventually. In fact, he goes to the room that they share right away; all the quicker to find him. He is packing when Cor'ethil finds him, what few belongings that Karasu has are being folded carefully away. Mostly he is tearing apart the room, locating the hidden weapons that are almost everywhere. Even Cor'ethil who has shared this space with him this whole time had no idea that there were no less than five hidden daggers in the floorboards alone. Karasu is carefully replacing the floorboards now, the banging of the small hammer surprisingly quiet. It sounds like a heartbeat.
Beat, beat, beat.
When Cor'ethil gets to the door, he's wracked with fear. With worry. With a sense of dread that he's too late and Karasu has already done something horrible to himself. The sound of the beat on the floorboards makes Corey's vivid imagination run wild. "Please," he murmurs, before knocking desperately at the door.
Pleading is all he has.
"Karasu, please," Corey says. "Let me in? Please let me in." His voice is gentle yet no less strained for the yearning that's in it.
The sound of the beating stops and then after a moment continues. "Go away Cor'ethil. I will be gone soon enough." He doesn't tell the other man that the door isn't locked. He simply hurries his process a little bit and finishes with the floorboards. Karasu fishes a knife out of the bedside table and puts it with the others.
He will be gone soon enough.
The refusal is a thing that hurts. It hurts Corey to be pushed away. It hurts Corey that he's the cause of this. It hurts all over. And maybe that's why he simply tries the door and...
It's unlocked. Thank all the small mercies and the deities for that. He steps inside, and it's all but a brief survey of the room to see what's going on.
"Karasu." There's tears in Corey's eyes. "Please. Stop and just... talk to me. Listen to me. Please." Again with the pleading.
Karasu starts to fold his daggers up into their wrap, placing it into his backpack. His fingers never hesitate, but his dark eyes turn on Cor'ethil and they're hard as diamonds. Empty and shining like dark gems. "What will you say to me Cor'ethil?" His weapons make a harsh noise and he withdraws his hand from the backpack. "You deceived me. You and Wu..."
The name of his familiar is not even his familiar's name. His lips close and he opens the dresser to start pulling out his clothes.
It will not be long now.
Indeed, what does Corey have to say to Karasu? What does he have to say to make this all better? Is there anything at all, any words he could possibly express that might help here? Anything at all? Had he simply just ruined his relationship with Karasu forever?
"No." The word is said first as an answer to Corey's own question, but he realizes it's an answer for... this. Karasu leaving. Mother was right. That thought comes again like a clawing little thing in Corey's head. It won't be the last time and it most certainly isn't the first.
"I love you, Karasu." Corey closes the distance to put his hand on Karasu's shoulder. "Raiden and I both love you. Neither of us could bear the idea of you hurting--and he was sworn to silence. I want you to listen to me, please. I know I've hurt you, and I want to make up for it. I want to make amends."
The tears are pouring down Corey's face. "Please let me make amends. The last thing I want is for you to seek death and play into that horrendous man's hands by doing so."
For Karasu to flinch away from Corey's touch is a painful thing in of itself, and he does. He moves away from that hand like instinct guides him to safer shores and finally he looks at Corey himself for more than a few moments. He opens his mouth and it seems as though he means to say something and yet it is not what comes out of him. "Love does not lie Cor'ethil. Did your silence hurt me less than the truth? In the end I have learned what you would not have had me know and now I must learn it alone."
Karasu has that stricken look again, as if something deep inside him hurts and it shows only in his eyes. Eyes which have always offered the truth from the very beginning. Even when Karasu had offered only death they had found a way to life and to one another... Until now.
"If you had told me that Raiden was dead, I would have still had you..." He hold up an empty hand. "Now I have nothing. Sori has played his hand well... I have no counter for this attack, no knowledge of what amend you could possibly make to ease the loss."
Karasu's hand reaches toward Corey's cheek for an instant but stops shy and falls empty. "You are the only one aside from Wuya whom I have ever trusted with all of me."
"Karasu." Corey instinctively reaches for the other man's cheek, but seeing that flinch earlier makes him stop. The man clearly doesn't want to be touched right now. "I am yours. I am yours to do with as you want. You do not have to face your feelings alone, and I know that you want to go it alone, but..."
Corey's eyes flicker down to the floor. "We are better in concert than apart," he says. "Your voice is beautiful but few ever hear it and understand. I used to prize being the only one to hear your voice for days, back in Llyranost. But when we got here... I found that I wanted to sing with you, in a way. To be together with you publicly. To have people look at the both of us and feel odd when we were apart. And..."
He bites his lip. The words in all of the languages he knows are difficult things. "There is something we can do together. We are better together. We sing beautifully together. We are better in concert than apart. And your brother isn't dead... He's alive. He's been with you all this time. And..."
He looks at Karasu again. "I don't know how to begin to fix this, but I know this isn't how. It can't be."
Karasu only has a few items of clothing, and he shoves them roughly into the bag, closing it with an air of finality. All of this has an air of finality about it. "If it could be fixed, then I can only imagine that you would know how Cor'ethil." His voice is soft again, and he lifts the bag.
There's a box on the table that holds a thousand cranes. A wish for a future that seems so hard to reach right now. Impossible maybe.
"Perhaps that is your answer." Karasu looks at the man who has been his heart for so long. "Perhaps there is no amend to make. Only one last goodbye."
Mother was right. There's a monster lurking in Corey's heart. He knows what it is. His mother said it was her fault, for spending as many years as she did among people whose hearts and emotions are high-strung places. She had (and still does) covet her husband almost like a prize. It's Corey's one failing as a paladin, as a person. It's that he can't imagine a life without Karasu.
"You know you're not the only one dying, right?" The words fall out of Corey's mouth as his eyes, his hands, are shaking. "By their own hand, right?"
Corey's chuckling, but it's not a genuinely funny laugh. It's the laugh of someone being pushed rapidly to the brink. "I can't live without you, Karasu. If I can't protect you, if I can't fix this, if you're gone, then what's the point? What's the point in living anymore? I just--I..."
Karasu looks at the other man with a trace of incredulousness. "Why would you say this? Why would you threaten your life?" He clearly genuinely does not understand, he drops the bag on the bed and steps toward Corey. "You have always known-"
His words fail then as pain lances through his left arm and loses his breath. He's on his knees without even realizing that he is there, his body aching with a pain that is not his own. Wuya? No Raiden. Karasu's eyes close and he can feel the pain in his familiar as though it were an echo of his own pain, but this is one that he is not trained to ignore. The pain of his brother given to him fresh and unfiltered. "Raiden..."
"Raiden?" Corey blinks, the despair still hanging onto him but clinging hard for its efforts. The will to live and the loss of confidence is a hard thing to reconcile, and the tears are streaming down his cheeks. "What's wrong with him--"
He knows as soon as he says the question. Wuya went with Mother. "Mother took him to go hunt down Sori," he says, horrified. "He might have done something to them both. We need to find them!" The panic melts away that despair-monster clinging onto him in his heart, at least for the moment.
Karasu holds out a hand then, to forestall Corey rushing off to find his mother and Raiden. "No. He is... Hurt but safe. Comfortable... Happy." He shakes his own head and staggers to his feet. Now that it is not a surprise the pain is easier for him to bear. Like so many other pains in life he merely pushes it out of his thoughts. "You must answer me Cor'ethil... Why would you threaten yourself? All this time you have known that mine is limited. I have never hidden this from you. Why threaten your own life now?"
The question puts a sense of shame into Cor'ethil. Yet another private failing of his as a paladin to count against him. "Because..." It's hard to articulate it. How does one tell another person that they have been damned to this sort of thing?
No. It's not that.
"Because it's my fault. Because I failed you. Because I hurt you. Because I should be able to protect you from the things that hurt you, and I can't, and I don't, and I'm..." Corey is miserable-looking again, tears in his eyes. "I don't deal well with the idea of failure. I never have. Ever since my mother made me what I am, I always strove to be the best, and..."
There's a darkness in Cor'ethil Cari'thana. It's the shame of failure. It's the shame of letting people down. Because he promised to be his mother's best son, her only son, for the incredible act of love she gave to him as a child. She never asked such a thing. She'd probably be heartbroken if she ever learned of this aspect of him. Yet... "I love you. And I've let you down. It's not so different as loving someone and..."
Corey looks at Karasu then. "... Leaving them, because you believe that they're better off without you. Even if that's so far from the truth. Even if you leaving leaves a hole the shape of you that's forever in their heart." He understands now. Or, he's beginning to understand.
"How can we continue like this?" Karasu asks, his words almost rhetorical. He does not know the answer to his own words. "I am never going to live as long as you Cor'ethil. Even if I do not die in violence or at my own hand there are a thousand years between us. Will your life end when mine does?"
He finally chases the tears from Corey's face, rubbing them away with both hands. "You were supposed to live. You were the better part of me. All of these emotions which I could never feel were given life in you, and it was meant to carry on; not die with me."
At last Karasu sounds lost. "I was never leaving you better Cor'ethil, I was leaving so that you would not have to watch me die."
There's yearning in Corey's face then. Leagues and leagues of yearning for Corey's touch. "I..." For a long moment he doesn't know how to answer, but he steals Karasu's hand on top of his. "I think, more than anything... I would want to be with you until the very end. That I could at least give you the comfort of dying next to someone who loved you. That I could hold you and tell you that I loved you. Turning away and leaving me is no kindness. It will provide me no closure. It will put a hole in my heart that's knowing that you died without me there to hold you."
He closes those tear-filled silver eyes, just keeping Karasu's touch on his cheek. "And there is the part of me that is most certainly my mother's son that wonders if we have it all wrong. Prophecy, fate, your foretold death... People come back from death, sometimes. They're resurrected, their lives returned when someone speaks the words, when someone casts the spell and brings them back. I'm not capable of it, not unless it's the recently slain..."
Then Corey blinks. And he looks at Karasu. And he laughs gently again.
"It's not a permanent death that was foretold, was it?" he asks. "Maybe I was meant to bring you back."
"I do not know." Karasu murmurs. "I know little of fate."
He lets the other man steal his hand and do with it as he will. "Raiden was the one who was supposed to live. He was going to do such things; driven forward by the thought that I was his foe. I was going to die a glorious death; I was going to give my life for him to be a hero. In his own eyes, and in the eyes of so many others and now... He is dead and I have..."
He has nothing worth dying for. Karasu closes his eyes, pained in his heart by the lie he does not know how to rectify. "If I died, could I trust you in the next life as I trusted you in this one? I do not know Cor'ethil. I have never trusted before and I do not know if I can make myself do so again." His eyes open. "Tell me what to do my kokoro."
"He still lives, Karasu," Cor'ethil says gently, leaning in and quietly embracing his beloved. "He is alive. Not in the form of the boy he once was, but he still lives. I don't know enough of fate either. But that means... We should talk to someone who may be able to help us glean direction. Someone who may be able to help guide us."
He leans in and kisses Karasu on the tip of the nose and nothing more. "I could never demand your trust. I could never demand your love. I am not so cruel; I know I must earn those treasures again. But... I think we start by reconsidering if the noose that has been dangling down is a true one."
Corey smiles, finally. It's just a little smile. But it's the first he's managed since he came back into the room. "I think I know who," he says. "The Archmage Lupecyll-Atlon, Telamon. He is a devout follower of Ni'essa, who knows fate and prophecy."
Karasu doesn't question the words, but merely nods. He has no choice now but to blindly move forward. Speaking to this Archmage is as good a beginning as is any other. "Very well. We will wait for... Raiden and your mother to return and then... we will speak to the mage."
In the end, they must begin somewhere.
In the interim, Corey presses another kiss to Karasu's nose, and he simply holds the other man--although as time wears, the tighter his grasp gets.
"I'm sorry," Corey says softly. "For threatening myself. I shouldn't have done that."
More 'sorries' are murmured, for everything Corey can think of. He just wants to apologize. He just wants to hold Karasu. Because he almost didn't get the chance to do either ever again.
Death comes another day.