Collections For The Lost

Day 1: Midnight

Lost Memories rating: teen and up audiences warnings: mcd (because of Xander) relationship: David/Teruko/Xander (all dating each other)

links: SqWA

Day 2: Starling

Never Ignore the Warnings rating: teen and up warnings: nawa relationship: David/Xander/Teruko

links: SqWA

Day 3: Quartz

Gem rating: teen and up warnings: nawa relationship: David/Teruko/Xander (all dating)

links: SqWA

Day 4: Zinnia

Gone But Not Forgotten rating: teen and up warnings: nawa relationship: David/Xander (past), David/Teruko, Teruko vs Xander

links: SqWA

Day 5: Tarot

Spell rating: teen and up warnings: cntuaw relationship: David/Xander, one-sided Teruko/Xander, Teruko vs David

links: SqWA

Day 6: Critters

Reincarnation rating: teen and up warnings: nawa relationship: David/Teruko, past David/Xander, past Teruko vs Xander

links: SqWA

Day 7: Free Choice

You're Like a Gift for Them rating: explicit warnings: nawa relationship: Teruko/David/Xander

Nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing, because David is incapable of feeling anything real at all. That’s what David would say, if he was a more honest man.

He’s not entirely disconnected from reality though. He knows what he’s supposed to say. “That they’re pretty.” It’s not a lie. But it’s not a feeling either. “Maybe that’s a little boring…”

“Maybe a little,” Xander admits. Is Xander disappointed? David’s heart beats in loud anticipation for the day Xander finally rids himself of David. But he never does; he never even seems close to freeing David from his fears by validating them. “But I think it’s interesting too.”

“The sunsets?”

“The mindset of being able to view them as just pretty. Every sunset is a little different.”

“That’s true,” David mindlessly agrees. The wind is whipping around them. Summer sunsets in the city are always like that—pink and blue, softer than Xander, yet running too fast, rushing towards their destiny across the planet. “But perhaps I only view them that way out of necessity.”

Xander tilts his head, curious. “Oh?”

“The sun rises and sets every day. I don’t have a problem appreciating the mundane. The problem is getting myself to stop,” David lies, as if he’s ever fully appreciated anything in his life ever. Even this conversation with Xander is starting to feel like a workplace chore. He looks right at Xander. “If I stop too long and let myself appreciate the colors that I’ll only ever see once in my life, I’ll spend the rest of it waiting for something like it.”

Xander looks on fondly. “Your heart isn’t big enough for all the sunsets, huh?”

“In a sense.” David smirks. “I only have room for one person in my life. No sunsets.”

Xander breaks the romantic mood with a loud laugh. “You sap!” He opens his arms wide, inviting. It pains David. He still can’t believe he has this. “Come here. I’ll make sure all the sunsets in the world know you’re mine.”

David falls into Xander. His back is turned towards the sun. He cannot look at it head on. He cannot accept its warmth. “And Xander, what do sunsets make you feel?”

“Lucky,” Xander answers. “Because every day, good or bad, is different with you. It makes the sunrise worth waiting for.”

“Did you hear? They say that David Chiem is retiring soon.”

“David Chiem? Is that someone important?”

“Just one of those TEDTalkers… but those were going out of style. Nobody has the attention span to listen to those anymore. Anyway, are you going to see that new movie coming out?”

The train is behind schedule. Xander taps his foot against the platform, impatient. The neon yellow strip in front of him, that which represents danger, leaves him feeling rather apathetic.

It smells here. There’s always more to be done. Those incompetent bureaucrats are always sitting on their asses and never getting a damn thing done. It’s the same story every single time—elected on the false promise of improving things.

He sniffs and recoils at the smell of sewage. The plastic bags in his hands rustle from the movement. That reminds him: he’ll have to check in on David and make sure he’s regularly taking baths in addition to these groceries.

The train honks, a deafening noise. Xander looks at the tracks and sees the most interesting sight he’s seen all day—the rats, all scrambling out of the way of the death machine.

Even vermin are afraid to die.

***

Wherever Xander went, whatever he did, David heralded him. It left the strangest impression on Xander—a mixture of strange lust and fear.

Is that surprising? Of course, Xander felt a kinship with David—David wanted things to change. Nobody has all the answers—David can’t be faulted for being afraid, for not knowing how to proceed.

David was enough as he was. Xander has the strangest contradiction of beliefs: self-help books are worthless; David’s motivational speeches are not.

The illusion can truly become a reality. Xander is the flesh proof of this.

And of course, David was simply Xander’s friend too, even if David didn’t believe it. You were never friends with me, David had snapped, back then. You only loved what I showed you.

David had worshipped everything about Xander. Xander didn’t think David would believe it if he’d said that Xander had also cast that same illusion on him.

Alas.

It’s not so bad. In the past, in his halcyon days, Xander wasn’t well liked. To be liked by one person, even if all David does is worship his accomplishments, his persona, what Xander can provide for David…

Xander rings the doorbell of David’s apartment. Good enough.

***

Xander knows how he is perceived by the world: intelligent enough to lead, but not bright enough to see past the facade. Charismatic, but prosaic.

It’s neither here nor there whether or not Xander refutes that anymore, but even then, Xander had been able to pick up that his classmates were… unsteady. David had a tendency to smile wrong in the shadows; a harsh slant that seemed to dig into his skin.

He’d wanted to free David from the shackles in his heart.

David had beaten him to the punch. To say that David had killed his career in a rather catastrophic way would be an understatement.

Like pressure under a fault, Xander had failed to notice the cracks until it was too late. Seated in the crowd, wide-eyed, slack-jawed, as David absolutely exploded at his partner on stage. Worthless was an insult that seemed to be a particular favorite of David’s. They’d had to haul him off stage—it could have easily been taken for a nervous breakdown.

And then someone began to laugh. It wasn’t him. Ripples followed into a sea of laughter. Then, for the tiniest fraction of a moment, Xander understood David’s hatred of the world.

***

“Come,” Xander chides, pulling the covers off of David’s body. The room smells something awful. “It’s still daylight out. The sun’s good for you, chap.”

David groans—Xander is unsure whether it is from the light or the nickname. Regardless, it brings a small smile to Xander’s face. “Would you prefer a vegetable soup or something a bit more hearty, like bacon and eggs?” David doesn’t answer, only making a feeble attempt at swatting Xander away. “Yes, that’s right. I figured you would want vegetable soup.”

It’s not really that endearing. Xander, although he does his best to be, isn’t exactly a patient person. The first day it had delighted a sickened part of him to finally be useful to David.

By the fourth month that part of him started to speak up, Is he even trying?

It’s not easy on Xander’s finances, but more than anything, it was his wish, turned against him. Please, he’d begged the world. Give me a second chance to be a better older brother than I was before.

The monkey’s paw curled. He’d been parentified, and Xander knows that David despises him for not letting him die.

But David is still his friend, regardless.

***

“How’s the search for a job going?”

David glares, and he looks like a pouty child with a spoon in his mouth. “Put in thirty yesterday.”

“It’s tough out there, huh?”

“Can’t say I’m particularly looking forward to working even if I do get one.” David doesn’t look the same as he did in his prime anymore—but he’s certainly not unrecognizable either. At least, not to Xander. “Why don’t you leave?”

“Well, you haven’t hired at least a cook like I told you to…” Xander frowns at the oatmeal boxes. “You can’t eat gruel for the rest of your days. You’re not a horse.”

“You’re such a sanctimonious prick.” He doesn’t say I’m a lost cause, stop. David must know that would be ineffective. “What do you get out of this?”

Xander laughs easily. It’s very simple. “I don’t really get anything. Not really. You must know that all too well.” He runs his hand through David’s hair teasingly and gives David a small smile when the former speaker swats him away. “All I get is the sense of accomplishment that comes from seeing effort be rewarded.”

“Aren’t you tired of being stupid?”

Xander always leaves before David.

Their shared apartment is poorly lit by the sunrise. They’d cheaped out on everything—curtains, counters, the apartment itself. It was, of course, a practical arrangement. There was nothing left for the disgraced rebel with no funds and no family. David had remained pristine from the whole affair for his cowardly part—one which resulted in Mai’s untimely demise. Hope’s Peak hadn’t glossed over him—oh no, but it would look terrible to have a dead student and two disgraced ultimates. Best to let one take the fall.

When Xander slips away he is always quiet, but he breathes life into everything he does—just the scent of the toast Xander dutifully left behind makes David blink the sleep out of his eyes. The former rebel wants to live like a ghost, escaping away from this world, from David—and David can’t say it isn’t what he himself deserves. It is a death for David wholly karmic—a death much like how he lived in life—fading away, rotting in a tepid kind of uselessness.

His career is still pristine. His vehicles have not been tagged. His manager is the only person who regularly texts his phone, like always. Beer cans sit in his fridge, begging to be opened.

David can’t reconcile his role in all of this. He places Xander’s toast in his mouth—it is terribly dry and bland. He has a speech to give at six. He straightens his bow.

He places his signature hair clip on his bangs—his mirror visage has a horrible smile.

***

David found his first and only love at fifteen. He’d had baby crushes before of course, like the spring of youth—ephemeral and blossom-like, all for women. But this love was different, it was religious, something to worship, permanent. In this rotten world that valued only appearances, Xander was special. He stepped out of hell and still managed to keep the shrine of his heart wholly clean.

Nothing like David, worshipped for his tepidness, his vapidness. For acting like a funhouse mirror, only reflecting what one wanted to see.

David is sure of his truth. He is a speaker, a spellcaster, a liar. He can decipher Xander’s beautiful words.

That’s why he cleans this birdcage where Xander licks his wounds. If David’s love for Xander was soul consuming, David’s love for Mai was a tempest. She came into their lives, set Xander on his course, and tore their hearts apart.

It was inevitable that this should happen at some point. Failure, catastrophic. Xander is David’s god, but Xander isn’t a god. That’s exactly what makes him so special.

David just wasn’t expecting it to happen while he was here. But David is being ridiculous. It wasn’t like he was ever capable of changing anything anyway.

***

It isn’t like Hope’s Peak doesn’t let Xander out of his cage sometimes. Of course, David is his minder, a role which fails to please David the way it should. In his lowest moments he’d dreamed of this, of having Xander in the palm of his hand, wrapping his fingers around Xander’s.

Now Xander is tamed. Outside in the gallery, he dresses in his casual clothes—nothing much, but still recognizable outside of his uniform thanks to his trademark rose red bandana—hiding the tracker around his neck. His gaze is contemplative as he looks upon the painting in their view—the handsome young man, naked and bare like freshly fallen snow, arms wrapped around the feathered dark creature with wings.

David takes the approach. “Are you a fan of the classics?”

“Ah, Mr. David.” Xander acknowledges David, but the reversion to honorifics still stings more than if he had simply ignored David entirely. His gaze does not shift from the painting. “A fan might be too strong of a word.” He smiles, as if making a joke David cannot understand. “I saw similar paintings in France when I had the chance to visit—the neoclassical style that is, though I can’t say for certain.”

“From your time as a student in Britain, I take it?”

“Of course. It was part of my course curriculum to study the arts. I remember thinking two things—how could studying this possibly contribute to my future job prospects in a world that disregards the arts—and what terrible taste this is.”

David pulls closer to Xander. Upon looking more intimately, he is still as handsome as ever, even in metaphorical chains, stripped of what had made him so beautiful to David in the first place. David understands the devil in the oil paint. “So you’ve seen the Michaelangelo version of this one in person.”

“I’ve had the honor, yes.” The Trojan youth’s distressed expression continues to remain immortalized thousands of years after the myth began. “I really should consider myself lucky. The majority of art around the world was lost during the tragedy, wasn’t it?”

“Something close to sixty percent, I believe.”

“That’s not as bad as I remember.” David cannot help but smile with Xander, though it is a sort of nervous grin, born of reminiscing on a shared time together—not the one Xander is referring to here. “Do you know the story—the myth of this painting?”

“Of course. I assume it repulsed you?”

“As much as it would repulse a twelve year old boy who shared an adolescence with Ganymede.” His black boots click against the tiled floor as he turns away from the painting on the wall. David follows, looking away from the defilement on the wall, as he always has. “But I was more so confused—I could not understand the appeal of this painting, and perhaps all of art in general, outside of the skill required to make it.”

“Because of the story?”

“I think the story makes the painting more appealing now.” David makes a final glance behind him. Ganymede clings to the eagle like a lover, for he has no choice—he would plummet to his demise otherwise. It burns itself into David’s mind—the allure of it all, how the possessed was still made to appear as lily pure as possible. Xander does not look back at all.

***

Neither of them are much for cooking. This isn’t of any particular significance—Mai wasn’t much of a cook either. Nothing would have changed here regardless of who’d survived the ordeal.

David has learned many things about Xander as his unwitting captor. He has dish pan hands under those gloves of his. Xander occasionally mixes the sugar and salt because he cannot taste them in small quantities at all. And perhaps most importantly, Xander does not treasure the life that has been given to him the way that David does.

Lunch is a greasy garlic shrimp al ajillo, ordered from outside of course. David has learned to substitute the senses for seasoning—something strong smelling will have to do.

Xander does not appreciate it. He wolfs down the meal, not lingering a second longer than he has to. It reminds David of that first video he’d seen of Xander, the first recorded instance of the fire put to pixelated video—sharing a meal with his fellow rebels. He’d looked out of place, a fresh faced and scrawny fourteen year old surrounded by grown men and women. It was oddly charming, to see a real and traumatized human being that words alone couldn’t save.

Xander sucks even the oils off of his fingernails, desperate for everything he can have. It reminds David of many quotes, but here is the most apt one: decorum is only for those that have never truly suffered poverty.

This is what, in my desire to keep you alive, I have reverted you to.

David, in all of his immaculate being, the shirts, the straight bowties, the posture, should find this repulsive. But David licks his lips.

***

Apropos of nothing, on the anniversary of the day Xander’s Ultimate title was stripped from him, David says, “I think about Mai sometimes.”

Jailers aren’t particularly known for treating their prisoners well, but David knows this is a low blow. Xander won’t retaliate, can’t retaliate, not with the collar recording his every action and every word, and so he delivers a punch in the only way that he can. “You must be bored, to bring her up. Given that you’ve disavowed her with everyone else Mr. David, I thought you’d hated Mai.” He leafs to the next page of the book he is reading, though his attempt at feigning disinterest is not going particularly well. Xander is clearly not reading a word. Eden’s mutilation has made what remains easier to track. “As I understand it, you found her disingenuous. It must have been a horrible chore, to have worked with her for a year before you could plunge the knife in her back.”

David reclines back into their creaking couch. The television in front of them plays nothing, acting like a mirror. David, stalled. Xander, in false action. “I’ve worked with people I’ve hated before.”

“What a shocker.”

“No, allow me.” Xander is young, but not getting any younger. “So long as our ideals align close enough, I’m willing to overlook anything to achieve that goal.”

“Anything, you say.”

“Anything.”

“Then why is it that you’d failed when Richard Spurling confronted you?”

They’re devils, David wants to say. The Spurling brothers are evil made manifest. “Because ordinary men like myself simply aren’t capable of standing against people like him. I couldn’t hide anything from him,” he admits lamely.

“I’ll bet you didn’t even try.”

David does not answer that. “That means Mai’s wish is still unfulfilled.”

“I know, David.” Xander puts the book down. He fiddles with his collar. The corners of his lips curl. “I have to admit, even if you’re lacking in a lot of ways—You are very good at your job.”

***

The next morning, David sees the swiss army knife and the masking tape and the screwdrivers and his heart soars. This won’t last any longer. After the dirge comes the rebirth of his god. He knew Xander would never give up.

***

So to see him off, David asks for a game. Each of them has a set of five cards, classic poker.

He places three cards down. Xander’s brow raises. “Bad hand?”

“I’m just lucky. I’m sure of it.”

Xander chuckles. “That you are.” He deals David the cards he’s owed and then folds a card of his own—just one. His expression is unreadable after he deals his card. “Are you ready?”

“I should be asking you that.” David reveals his hand. A straight flush. A full hand of clubs—not a single speck of red to be seen amongst the sea of black. “And you?”

Xander sighs, revealing a pair of doubles. “You’re quite the hustler.”

David grins, wide and unnaturally white. “I wouldn’t have gotten this far if I wasn’t.” The leather chair squeaks as he stands to place his hands atop Xander’s. “I’m guessing that single card failed you?”

“The chance I would have gotten something that could push me to a full house was low. It’s not unexpected.”

That I would lose to you, even in the end.

When David wakes up tomorrow, he knows there won’t be toast and coffee waiting for him. His heart shall be ground to dust, he will never love again, and he is quite pleased by it. His only hope for the world continues to march on forward.

So David bends down and kisses Xander on the top of his head. “Let’s play again tomorrow,” David lies. “And the day after that, until you can beat me.”

“Yes,” Xander says, his eyes glistening with unshed tears. “I would like that very much.”