Love by 0083

[blackrose]

Title: Love
Author: 0083 shinigami0083@yahoo.com
Warning: Kyo POV, and i am known as the angst queen,
so beware of the angst. it's like a minefield in this
fic. and spoilers, yes. after anime ep 23 or so? not
too sure..
Note: i don't get things betaed. takes too long.
and uhm.. this is an odd, introspective type thing.
tell me if this kind of fic is okay or not on this ML.

--


Love




Love.. it is such a deceptively small word for
something so vast and unfathomable. It represents all
that is good and all that is bad, urging some to great
heights of acts of wonderful kindness, pushing some to
the brink of madness and violence. It is overused,
much like other words of importance, so that the word
won?t seem so intimidating. People tend to say such
trite things as ?I love cake? and ?I love this movie?
without fully understanding the word. Many people are
even in the habit of saying ?I love you? without
realizing what it should mean. A four letter word
used often enough to be nothing more than just an
afterthought to most people.

It has been said that children instinctively know what
love is from the moment of birth. They can tell who
loves them easily and they also love others just as
easily. It is an effortless thing when you are young.
It is as you age that love becomes hard, painful and
maddening.

When I was a child though, I can?t seem to recall a
time when love was not accompanied by a seething sense
of bitterness, fear or hate. I wish I could remember
loving my mother without reservation, but I don?t
think it was meant to be. She tainted that love I had
for her with her fears and doubts, slowly poisoning
the purity of a child?s love for his mother with her
adult and senseless view of the emotion. Her
overbearing nature, the selfish incorporation of my
life into hers, her need to always watch me, fear me,
love me.. in the end, it overwhelmed her and me. She
died by her own hands and in some way, I died with
her.

Life is not easy without love, so they say, but it is
unbearable with it as well. The stifling kind of love
of my mother, the frighteningly violent love that
drove her insane.. that was all I could remember of
love. Everyone else either feared me or hated me..
but with love like that as comparison, just what was
the difference?

Kagura was the next person who claimed to love me.
She told me many things, but the fact that she told me
that she loved me stuck with me the most. She
convinced herself that she loved me despite, or maybe
because of, my dreaded other form and began her quest
of pursuing me. She has dedication, I will say that,
but does she really love me? Maybe. I can?t say
because I cannot read her heart no more than she can
read mine, but I somehow doubt that her love for me is
what she thinks it is.

She hits me an awful lot, overcome by her strong
emotions. Is that what love does? Does it drive
someone to lose their minds and all connection to
anything resembling reality? Does it make relentless
pursuit romantic, ruthless hunting of the other?s
heart acceptable? She gives love to me with a few
punches thrown in for fun, but she does not give it to
me in a form that I can accept. I do not resent her
much, however. She was my first friend, the first
person outside of my mother to love me, the first
person to try to be with me. Whatever her reasons, I
am grateful to her, but I cannot love her the way she
thinks she loves me. Why? Love had become dirty,
painful, and frustrating to me. It caused me nothing
but grief, brought tears unshed to my eyes, made me
shut myself away.

I suppose I decided that I would never love. Because
if I did, the only thing I could hope for was pain. I
could not understand then that love might have had a
shining luster about it, that it could be the source
of something greater than pain, something more eternal
than the damned curse.

Fortunately for me, where the females of my family
failed to show me anything good about love, one man of
the Sohmas did. My master, a man who I wish could
have been my father, gave me the kind of affection and
love that seemed so unreserved and overflowing that I
began to see something positive in that four letter
word. I began to realize that it was a word of many
facets, an emotion that could flow through me in
various, different ways. Because of him, I began
hoping that someday, I might be able to experience it
without the pain, sadness and the regrets.

But that was not to be.

Tohru. Pretty name, pretty girl.. but most of all, a
boundless, limitless heart. She dropped into my life
rather unexpectedly, or rather, I dropped into hers
through a roof. She fell on me, there was a poof and
smoke. And from then on, she was there.

She smiles even when she is sad to cheer others up.
She apologizes a lot, not out of habit but because she
really is sorry. She looks after everyone with
sincere care and she has never done anything mean to
anyone, not even unintentionally. She is the kind of
person that I could not imagine existing, even when I
was face to face with her.

I blush more than I should when she is nice to me,
yell at her more than she deserves, and do many other
things that has the potential to make her upset.
Despite it all, she stays. Maybe not for me, but she
stays by me. By us all, but by me, most of all.

At first, I did not know why my heart lurched when she
was near nor did I understand why my lips would tilt
in a soft smile in response to hers. I did not see
that my eyes lost their edge when looking at her and I
failed to notice that my temper soothed out more and
more as the days passed by. The only thing I knew was
that she was there and that was enough to make me
comfortable, warm and calm. In a short time, I
stopped imagining a life where she was not, thinking
about a time when she was not present.

She became a constant in my life, a lodestone for my
emotions. Then in a moment of clarity, I had an
epiphany.

I loved her. Deeply, painfully, joyfully, without
question.

There is a catch, of course. The love I have for her
won?t be pretty or sweet. There won?t be trilling
birds, dancing cherubs or soaring through the clouds.
The love I have for her is also tainted, but this
time, it is tainted by me.

How did I ever come to imagine that I could love
without pain, fear or anger? No matter what I do, I
am under the curse, to transform, to change. It does
not matter how much I love her or how much I want to
be with her. In the end, there isn?t a way at all for
us. If she loves me back, I can only cause her heart
break and pain when I have to go away. If she didn?t
love me back as I love her, then I would be hurt, I
would feel angry and eventually, I would make her sad
by making her feel at fault for not loving me. After
all, Tohru is that kind of a girl, someone who cannot
bear to cause others pain.

But she can?t help that with me. I just may be
destined to feel pain, no matter what.

Despite all that, I love her still. I will love her
for the rest of my life and beyond it, if there is
something after life. If I tell her, one way or the
other, she will be hurt. If I don?t, if I keep it
inside of me instead of airing it out for her, she
will be safe from the pain of love.

Love.. didn?t I say it was too simple a word for
something so damned devastating and beautiful? As
stained as my love is for her, as frayed at the edges
as it is, it is still the most wondrous thing I have
ever felt for another person. I cannot help the
smiles, the soft looks, the stuttering of my heart. I
cannot stem the tide of warm feelings that batter my
heart nor stop the barrage of dreamy images of our
impossible future together. Then I remember the pain
that will be and I must shut it all away.

I heard something the other day, that the saddest
thing in the world is to be in love with someone who
used to love you. That is not true for me. For me,
the saddest, most heart aching thing of all is to be
in love with someone who could love you if you could
give it a chance. See, it is as if I can grab onto
happiness, make it tangible and solid between my
fingers, but I must refuse, because if it ever becomes
solid.. it will bleed, it will cry.

I don?t want that for her.

I am too afraid to be with her, too scared to be loved
by her. I must close my eyes from the remote
possibility that love could be a radiant, luminescent,
glorious thing that will chase away all my fears and
cowardice. I must be satisfied with the tarnished,
lusterless version that I hold in my heart, because
she deserves better than what I can give her, what she
can have from me.

Because I love her.

[Kaili Charmer]

Whoa...you weren't joking about the angst, eh? heh...however, I have to say this was actually a good piece. I'm always open to something new ~looks at when first posted~ Okay, I'm always open to something I haven't read that's in a different style than what i normally look for to read? haha...but yeah, I can tell you put a lot of effort into this, and it paid off in my opinion. You portrayed Kyo's pov about his feelings for Tohru very well. Good job.
~kai

[miyuchan]

ACK! I'm slowly turning into a Kyoru! *runs for a safe hiding place* I must say that this was a very sweet story and I love that it's told from Kyo's POV. There are so few of them out there and he has a somewhat interesting take on things.

[pilot03]

This was good stuff. I always enjoy your fics. You laid on the angst pretty good. To bad it was very close to the reality that love is. All well, that's life right. Well, I'm going to go listen to Cold Play and go shave now, heheheh.