That Good Night

A/N: Please let me apologize in advance for the lengthy author's note. That was much faster, I think. Now for the important stuff. As I plan it, there should be two more chapters, followed by an afterword by the narrator (not me, the narrator; there's a difference). So, if you've got any questions about the story, any at all, please ask them in your review, and he'll answer them there, along with some other stuff. I'll be trying to finish this story in the next week or so, or else I'm liable to stop caring, and that would be bad. So review, please.

Burn and Rave

I remember to this day how they looked clearly as the day I saw them: The first, like some bird and a human, intertwined and intermingled till there was no telling the one from the other; and the second, his neck longer by far than his body, and his tongue a disfigured black.

When I woke, I was not alone. Beside me sat Ishida; he was sleeping, but he still carried the remnants of worry on his brow.

It didn't occur to me where we were until I heard the beep: his father's hospital. Only, weren't they not on speaking terms? And I thought he hated his father. Maybe I'd ask him about it once—

He opened an eye.

—or maybe not.

He sat there a moment longer before he rose and came closer.

He said, “You're awake. Good.”

I almost said something sarcastic; instead, I said something closer to “How long was I out?”

“About twelve hours.” He looked at his watch. “It's two am.”

“Hmm,” I said.

Actually, no. He'd never gotten up to begin with, was still sitting in his chair. I flinched at the realization.

“What?” he said.

“I—” The words stopped half-formed at the back of my throat. “—I don't—“

I stood up, and everything was perfectly clear.

—the echo of birds' wings outside the window, the unrelenting croak of the frogs, the incessant—

“—think I'm—”

I jumped off the bed and scanned my surroundings.

My mind had split to operating on two levels, and I cannot hope to adequately describe it. There was the first, the lower, layer, which operated instinctually and had complete control of my body. And then there was the second, my regular mind, and all it could do aside from think was to force the occasional word from my mouth.

What I saw, I saw on two levels. There were a door and a window—exits. There was the machine by my bed—unknown. And there was Ishida—mate?

My instinct-driven body kissed the body it had deemed “mate,” which seemed to take Ishida by surprise, because he just stood there.

Until I smelled something, a foul stench at the edge of the city. A hollow. The same as before. It had to die if I was to get better. I don't know how I knew this, but I did. I was in a hospital gown, but my zanpakuto was by the bed. I grabbed it, then jumped out the window.

Shards of glass dug into my feet on the pavement. They twisted and turned with each step, and left behind bloody footprints. I ran the whole way there.

The bird-hollow sat upon a tree, and he had been watching for my arrival. But he was not one for wasting time, for words; he moved immediately for the kill.

But I dodged it.

His long-necked brother stood in the background; this was not his fight.

He moved again, this time with his beak, and it grazed my shoulder. A second sooner would have been my heart.

I swung without thinking and without aiming, but it only just missed. It hit the ground and raised up a cloud of dust. The fight had just begun.

Each movement flowed to the next in a fight of reflexes, of instincts. His skin was hard, his feathers doubly so. His ceros were many, and they were inaccurate. But they hurt. I clipped his wing; he stabbed my thigh.

We growled at each other, let loose wild cries suitable only for the field of battle. His a sharp caw, mine a rumbling scream. I almost cut off his arm, his wing.

When he knocked away my zanpakuto, the only thing I saw fit to do was go at him with my bare hands. I grabbed him by the hand, and by the shoulder, and I pulled even as he screamed out until it came off. He tried to fire a cero, but I knocked him over, smashed my foot through his mask before he could.

My foot didn't go all the way through, though. He writhed from the pain as he could while I pressed harder and harder. It went on and on like that until there was this crunch, and he dissolved away.

Then there was the matter of his friend.

—I was in the room with Ishida, and we were making out even as the people milled passed the window into the hallway. I sat naked in his lap, writhing from the feel of his hands. But still I was thinking doubly, and something seemed off—

The pain in my back brought me back to the fight. The sneaky bastard—

Another blow, to the front this time. But my body moved even as my mind reeled. It would not stop for mere pain; only death could stay it.

My zanpakuto was still too far away to be of any use; I'd only need my hands, anyway.

Flash step, flash step, punch—miss. But only just.

I moved around behind him and tried a kick—but my gown restricted my movement. How had it even survived the last fight? It served no purpose other than to hinder; I took it off.

There were still bandages from the hospital, but I was otherwise naked.

The hollow's body was nimbler than it looked; his neck stretched and bent this way and that to dodge my punches. His mouth was the dangerous part, though. His tongue slithered in and out of his mouth rapidly, and for each he fired a cero. One of them hit my knee.

But pain was a petty thing. I flash stepped above him and kicked him into the ground. Even before the dust could settle I was upon him. His neck in my hands, I rammed my head into his, and his mask cracked.

My hands fell limp, and I stumbled backwards a few steps, then fell tom my knees. I clutched my head in my hands, and I screamed. It hurt—I hurt—I couldn't stand even a second of it—my eyes shut tight and ears full of my own screaming. Why did it hurt? Why couldn't I stand it?

The two levels of thought began to merge back together, slowly and painfully. Different parts of my body responded to different masters, and all of them hurt. My head smacked itself into the ground to dull the pain.

—footsteps, slow and careful, quiet; and a sinister aura, sneaky and filled with glee; then a swift—

Next I saw was Ishida, bow drawn, standing between me and the hollow. His hair blew, swayed in the breeze, and for some reason everything moved so very slowly. . .

He wasn't quite beaten, but close to it. There was no contest at this point, except maybe for how long he could last.

But it was all I could do to focus on my merging minds. Primal instinct met higher consciousness in an explosion of conceptualization. Like two planes twisting and contorting themselves into one, no matter the disparities. Dips and gaps remained, maybe, but it was once again whole, or as close as it could be.

I still couldn't move by the time Ishida was finished.

He came up—not quite running—and asked how I was doing.

“Just fine,” I managed, before almost collapsing again.

He held me up again, and looked me in the face. “Of course. Is there a reason you're naked?”

In what I can only describe as a remaining—perhaps newborn, perhaps not—gap in my consciousness, I answered him with a kiss.

—the moon above so pale and full, and not a thing to stand against it. It swelled like a sea or an ocean deep within, always unrelenting, always unforgiving. Nothing stood against it. Moon and sea, each tugging at the other, pushing and pulling back and forth. But there was no overcoming the moon, no going against the tide. Only a struggle, vain in the undertaking, and that only for a moment.

A man stood by a shore in the darkness lit only by the moon, and he watched. He could almost laugh at it, but refrained. There was no decorum in that. Smoke wafted upwards from his cigarette into the sky, where it joined, became the cloud. When he looked up, this man, into the starless sky, he saw miles away and away, past the dunes and the trees and the mountain, deep back into where—

I was in the hospital. I'd blacked out again. But it was still dark, at least. Ishida had returned to his seat, eyes open this time. He moved when he noticed mine.

“I-What happened?” I said.

“That was my question,” he said.

“That hollow. . . I think he did something to me,” I said.

“You, well. . .” He seemed more than a little reticent to talk about what I'd done. “Your head, you hit it pretty hard.” Then he got the cutest little blush on his cheeks. “And you kissed me.”

“I—Well, it was weird. Since I woke up—the first time, I mean—it was like my mind was split in two. There was the part that was in control, and there was the part where I could think. And, well, I couldn't really control what I did. It was all. . . instinctual.”

“So it was your instinct to make out with me?”

“Apparently.”

“And then there's what you did to that hollow.”

“You saw that?”

“I didn't think it wise to get in your way.”

“You did save my life, though.”

“You looked like you were in some serious pain.”

“Right when I cracked that second guy's mask I got this headache, and that's when that two-mind thing started to end. It kinda hurt, but I'm not sure everything got put back right.”

“I don't think Izuru's good enough for you.”

“But I don't think I want to—What was that?”

He looked away. “I don't think Izuru's right, good enough, for you.”

“Where's this coming from?”

“I like you, asshole,” he said with an edge of irritation.

Remember when I said I learned later he had a crush on me? That would be now.

“Well, I know that.”

“You do?”

“Of course. You haven't exactly been subtle about it.”

He straightened himself. “I-I suppose I haven't. I apologize for the outburst. It was inappropriate of me.”

As I lay there, watching him speak, I thought. I thought of what all he'd gone through, what all he'd done, what all he'd felt. I thought about how I'd acted, knowing what I knew, and I thought about what he'd likely have thought about it. And, at last, and with some reluctance, I thought about what I felt.

Love. . . what is there to say about it that hasn't been said a dozen times before, and better. There are so many schools of thought as to the nature of love, or of its antithesis, that any prolonged debate quickly devolves into parroting ideas argued for ages and ages. But I must here make some attempt, at least. That is the nature of my story, after all.

Many people tend to over-think when comes to the heart, so that they miss what is right in front of them. They—myself included, by the way—fantasize about what they can't have to the point that the realistic, the real is lost to them. They stalk; they obsess. There is no reasoning with them. But, as with so many other things, that is usually a phase.

They go on over-thinking, though. They deny their instinct for attraction, and that is a sad thing, for in that instinct lies the truth.

That right there is what I realized when Ishida made to leave. That right there is why a grabbed his arm to stop him. That right there is why I kissed him with more fervor, with more passion than I ever had before.

He kissed me back, for a while, until I could stand the pain no longer—because, really, it still hurt. It was only a flesh wound, though.

He said, “What about—“

“I'll tell him tomorrow—late today, I mean.”

“Because I refuse to be the other man.”

“Don't worry.”

“You don't think he'll take it badly?”

“No, I don't,” I lied.

He left, then, had other business needed attending or something.

Left me alone with my thoughts, and with my dreams.

—stood by a shore, and the man thought. He thought how youth was so wasted on the young, and he thought how he'd like it back all the same.

The waves swished in the background, pooled and swirled against the dark sand. He puffed his cigarette till only the stub remained, and he thought all the while. Soon as it went out, he was no longer alone.

But they did not speak, no—how cliché a thought. They stood, each by the other, and that alone was enough. By his being there, the boy knew what was and what wasn't, what had and what hadn't been.

All was silence till the man spoke at last what always and only he had reason to say: Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.

The words proved enough, and nothing else mattered till moon had set and sun had risen, and by then he'd wake.