InsaneJournal

Wingless
Title: Wingless
Summary: There is a cost for freedom, and a beast is always a beast.
Rating: PG
Warnings: sliiiight language
Update: one-shot
Original Post Date: 04/30/07
Other: For Perfect-sama <3 Promt was 'Kaito and Akira; "legends"'


Akira had grown up with a lot of bedtime stories.
His dad had always had a passion for myths and fables, as a little boy Akira spent his nights just as much with Norse gods and brownies as the tales every kid heard. It didn't change as he got older, if he was three or thirteen. His dad would read out loud for them, pulling out one of their many dog-eared, barley clinging to spine books whenever they were both free, never bothering with getting a TV in all those years.

Akito loved the house as soon as he saw it, books scattered around the place in both Japanese and English. Agito only liked the comic collection unsurprisingly. More than anything he remembered when there had been story time while they had been there. Akira would be in the kitchen cooking dinner, while either Agito sat on the floor tuning his AT or Akito would sit close to Akira's dad on the couch, curled up and looking even younger then he was. His best friend may have claimed to like movies way better than "any of that stupid crap", but he was the dominant one almost as much as Akito for it.

Most of the time his dad was just Akito's teacher, covering what Kaito couldn't- and trying to teach Agito a bit too even if his friend seemed to resent it most of the time. It was a nice time in Akira's life, not perfect but something.

-------

Akira would look at any books when they made a stop at a convenience store, buying something if it was good enough. He almost got himself shot a few times by his habit of reading out loud, but Kaito seemed to tolerate it now. Akira even- just a few times, the other would catch on if he played the game too much - pretended to read while he made up a story.

He'd done it once while they were drunk, pacing around the beach they were parked at while he told about a prince- no, a *king* who stole the Pied Piper's instrument and went around with his knights dealing with the dumb punks in the kingdom. They would lead them to waterfalls, or flames, or any of a million nasty deaths. The punks would fight back, but almost all of them failed. One day a witch came along and offered one of the knights what they all really wanted- freedom. All it would cost was the knights wings being ripped out. He screamed in pain for days and days from the pain, until on the seventh day he finally lost his voice as well. Next was his hearing from all the screams, but at the end of it he was finally free.

Akira was quiet at this point, staring out at the ocean for ten long minutes before he continued. There was one thing the knight was told he must never do, and that was fall in love. Though he may look human now, the knight was still what he was born as at heart, a flying beast. So any romance was destined to fail. So of course the foolish knight fell in love with the witch. With her, he made a new kingdom and surrounded himself with four trusted ones. Their kingdom was weak in individual strength of all all but the knight and his four trusted ones, but they grew greatly in size until all would tremble before the behemoth. The knight became known as a land beast and time passed with just more joining them or crushed before their strength.

Their kingdom was almost all punks so one day the king came with his knights and when the king called to the knight after he and his four trusted ones were defeated, he came. For the instrument was still strong and the king even stronger. He became his knight again, even as the deaf, mute, wingless creature that he was. Through this all, the knight never lost his sanity or himself, despite all else that he lost. But on the day that he lost two of his four trusted ones to a great beast...

Akira didn't continue, he just dropped down next to Kaito, staring up at the sky.

"Gonna finish your story or not, dumbass?" Kaito looked down at the teenager with a raised eyebrow.

"Everybody dies from falling rocks. The End." The reply was deadpan, Akira still staring at the sky.

The white haired man snorted. "Crappy ending."

"Life isn't any better. People just expect more with legends." Akira thought for a moment. "In a brief minute of insanity he kissed the king, and either got kissed back or killed. Or knowing the king, both. But hopefully if he got killed the king was nice enough to fuck him first since it kinda sucks to die a virgin, and since there was this thing about witches not being able to have sex with knights so all he'd had was a bit of oral."


It wasn't perfect, in fact it kinda sucked at times when you got down to it. But it was Akira's life, and those rocks still had yet to fall.