Sunshine

By The Queen of Blueberry Toast

As silly as it sounded even echoing in his thoughts and nowhere else, shining 
was a lonely place to be.  The light that poured from him when he scintillated 
on stage left him with a hole in his heart larger than his lover's fist.  
Tohma tried, tried as much as Tohma could.  But Shuiichi faced it that moment 
more than any other time- he was his lover's crutch and not the other way 
around.  Like sunshine, he could only catch the living world, make it blossom 
with color.  

But there was nothing in the world to hold him up.  

Not that he wanted antyhing too.  With or without his heart taken from him 
and blown like glitter over the audience- he was Shuiichi of Bad Luck, and 
emptiness he turned into a kind of joy.

And pictures.

Lots of pictures.

He spent too many days sprawled somewhere or other in Ryuiichi's house, 
surrounded by starbursts of markers and crayons and glowing shards of Crayola 
watercolors torn from their plastic dishes.  The lacquer of the downstairs foyer 
bore a rainbow web of their work- small and intricate designs drifting from the 
jagged tendrils of the larger, more symbolic images that crawled up the walls and 
into the ceiling where there was ceiling.  Mostly it was skylight that caught the
 color, danced with the color and let the color rise from the ground in reflections 
that tinted Shuiichi and his idol thousands of fantastic shades. 

"Do you like my rabbit?" Ryuiichi asked him, and his eyes were green as emeralds, 
rather than the piercing indigo they should have been- he was after all curled up 
underneath the meadow they'd been working on the past few weeks.

"I love your rabbit! He's even better than the one you drew last week!" As he said 
so, Shuuichi leaned back against the enormous puffball that stood ready to catch 
the door if it flew open.  Its pink ears melted into his pink hair and his 
companion began to sing and gurgle at the sight.

Ryuuiuchi threw himself back against the opposite wall, and backwards, with nothing 
but the scratched they had left in the paint to guide him, he drew himself a pair 
of ears.

"We can both be rabbits! Happy, shiny rabbits."

They both kept gold sharpies on them for signed autographs, a flourish passed 
between their two bands.  The caps came off and fell between them on the floor.  
They drew.  

These signs, these wiggles and wobbles and curlicues, they were all the lines of 
rampant souls and mice and tangles of vines growing both roses and cucumbers.  The 
lines of that day, the shine, wouldn't let itself stay confined in the foyer.  
Flitting everywhere and nowhere they chased each other all over the house until 
every imperfection in the walls and the screens between them was swimming with 
golden lace.

It was pure chance they both collapsed in the middle of the master bedroom whose 
ceiling already blew kisses and flying fish uttered in the most minimalist of 
strokes, but when Ryuiichi who rolled on top of his prot‚g‚ and in a hushed voice 
said- "I know you must shine.  You must shine so bright it feels like..." That was 
nothing of fate.

And as Shuiichi started to sob, his companion drew a gaping, golden hole in the 
center of his chest.