11. Shaky Steps (1/2)
title: of the darkness||chapter: shaky stepscharacters: ryou, shou, camulachapters: 11-25||words: 1,110||total: 12,617genre: family, supernatural||rated: pg-13challenge: diversity writing challenge, ygo gx, j6, multi-chapter with 15-25 chaptersnotes: it's an au. it involves vampires.summary: shou invites his
other in after ryou returns from a long trip away. that is his first mistake. it only gets worse from there.
shou had no idea of how long he lay where he was and stared at the ceiling above him before he realized it was a ceiling at all, much less that he was looking at it. he'd passed from asleep to awake with only the barest awareness that such a change happened at all.
"shou?" confusion curled within him at the sound of that voice. he shouldn't be hearing it, should he? he wasn't certain. he couldn't think all that well right now. nothing seemed to fit into its proper place. "shou, are you awake?"
his fingers twitched a fraction. yes, he was awake. he knew that much. he wasn't very together, but he wasn't asleep. he didn't think he was, anyway.
fingers
ushed alongside his wrist and a shadow of some kind moved nearer. shou tried to flinch, vague memories of such a darkness being far too near, but he couldn't get his body to do what he wanted it to do.
"shou, i'm sorry. i didn't want to hurt you." that voice. he knew that voice and he wanted to remember who it was. he thought he made a noise, or thought that he tried to. but he couldn't hear himself at all. "but you're going to be all right. you won't be like me."
like… whoever? shou still couldn't put the pieces together. he tried, but they didn't seem to all be there. there was one huge one right in the middle missing, he thought. he'd never been good at jigsaw puzzles anyway.
no matter how much he wanted to know what was going on, without being able to put those shards of memory together, shou remained baffled by the whole situation. he had no idea of how long he lay there, occasionally hearing that odd and familiar voice speak to him. sometimes he thought he could answer but he never heard anything come from his throat at all.
other times, when the presence wasn't there, he thought a different one was, one that he didn't like half as much as he did the first one, the one that mourned whatever had been done to him. this one did not speak. but if he could've spoken, he would've said that he felt watched all the same. watched by unfriendly eyes that wished for nothing more than him to be gone forever.
but no matter how hard they wished, if that was truth and not the results of whatever put him where he was, shou slowly began to heal. he realized somewhere along the line that his neck hurt, and that was part of why he couldn't speak. he didn't think that was all of it, but he'd never received any training in how to heal someone, much less himself. so all he could do was wait for the pain to subside and his voice to work again.
the shadow person seldom left his side, even as he mended moment by moment. they didn't always speak, but shou knew they were there anyway. he liked it when they were there; he rested much more comfortably than when that other presence hovered.
time wasn't a thing that existed for him now. he knew it passed. he knew it had been… a while? he thought? since he'd first opened his eyes in this bed, and much longer since whatever had happened happened in the first place.