Spoilers, I'm sure. I do not take credit for the characters of Xenosaga, or the story, or the game itself. I merely play around with what someone else has already made.
While chaos doesn't strike me as the type to restrict his affection for Ôjust about everything' to a single individual, this was a shameless excuse to eavesdrop on a private moment in which a normally untouchable, dignified Gaignun Kukai is more himself.
Gaignun Kukai ballroom dancing alone was a friend's idea; chaos' appreciation of melon flavored candy was a spontaneous characterization idea spawned by discussion over coffee.
Suggested questions of companionship vs. true loneliness in the world.
Suggested shounen ai, too, I guess.
Dignity
The straight line aesthetic of a body long, black suit framed against the backdrop of the Foundation. I have seen visitors catch their breath at the juxtaposition of a man standing sure by a window where the world faces the wrong way. I've seen them gasp, astonished, at the beauty of a false world, in the same way I have.
At the obfuscation of space when Gaignun has stood by that same window, the darkness of his suit vanishing into the star dusted beyond.
Dignity is a word that tastes good when the tongue makes utterances of it. The word reminds me of melon candy, of traces caught between my teeth in bland sweetness, hours after I've had stolen the last from a solitary dish on the man's desk. Dignity is the way shoulders, arms, legs are straight lines of unshakeable confidence. The curve of a spine his only flexibility.
Gaignun Kukai smiles suggestions. He is his mouth, the way it shapes insinuations and wins the hearts of competitors over like the promise of wine and whispers. He is smooth, bland, eyes impossibly green when he works, and careful in his confidence with his own body not to move without necessity. This locks focus on his words, marks motion with more importance than they deserve, and this is part of the illusion he shapes entire.
After my initiation into the Foundation, it wasn't long by any standards before I decided 'Gaignun Kukai' was an entry for which there was no true definition, that I would find what would define a man that he would wear such masks.
-==-
I am visiting the Foundation under unfortunate circumstances when I define at last what Nigredo stands for.
Admittedly, I do not remember when we arrived, only that the Elsa had an unfortunate mishap in hyperspace when a less than merely careless pilot had let their ship drift into our trajectory, and clipped the side of the tunnel. Of the Crux, there were no survivors. Of the Elsa, all hands accounted for. Projected reparations period: two weeks. Two weeks docked at the Foundation, and more added to the Captain's debt.
I had been below in the docking bay, but can only guess at what happened by the state I'm in when I wake. Something must have landed hard against my side, because to breathe deep leaves my ribs creaking and whistles down my throat in a wheeze loud to my ears.
Waking to shapes dark against white, and the Captain's explaining the situation in fits and starts between grunts of pain to a stern-voiced man with clipped questions and a black suit.
And realize it's Gaignun, speaking down to Matthews in a transport stretcher. I find myself in one of the same, but when I try to turn my head to seek out the others, shadows creep quick into the edges of my vision.
I do not dream. I never have.
My mind is an ocean, and that is enough.
The Foundation's medical facilities are among the best in the Federation; if it is one thing the Foundation is known for, it is that it keeps its own well tended to. Nanomedication has made me whole again when I wake, and I would have been none the wiser of my injuries if one side of my ribcage didn't feel vaguely uncomfortable.
As well as efficient medical care, they have been thoughtful enough to provide with pants for the hospital gown. The floor is cold, and I don't think anyone would mind my borrowing cloth slippers. Twice on my way out I am referred to as 'miss'.
Briefly, I consider tucking in my shirt so that it doesn't look quite so androgynous.
The effort would be wasted when the late hour has so many of the halls empty in the docked Durandal. These halls begin to look all alike unless you've been here long enough to know that vending machine indicates we're near the common room by the medical bay, and that door there means further down to the left is the shuttle.
Only a few glance twice at a figure stepping onto the shuttle wearing a hospital gown and slippers, but none look twice.
This is the Foundation.
People have seen stranger.
-==-
I am stepping off the lift leading to the Director's chambers when I notice where my meanderings have carried me, and for a time I'm watching the latch of his door read 'locked' on its digital panel and count off my minutes for each repetitive blink of green lettering.
It's faint, but this close, I can hear the faintest strains of old music.
-==-
Gaignun Kukai is Nigredo most when his office is empty, when shades are drawn tight over the outside world. He locks his doors within and without with the same assured ease. He seals his office away from the world made by his hands and with those same bids music to fill the silence. No one thinks to disturb him.
In private, the man sheds his shoes and sheds his world and becomes his solitude, embraces it like he takes the hand of a partner invisible and dances sweeping in an empty chamber.
Seeing him this way is seeing him at his most candid. Seeing him this way is a thing he protects himself against, and this is why I bid this world forget me for as long as it takes to slip intangible through all these locks and stand like a spirit by the wall, clad still in the slippers and white gown and pants of the Foundation's medical bay.
I go unnoticed. I would have it no other way, not when I'm voyeur to Nigredo's facades shed like so much skin.
He is a swan black and singing his last invisible, soundless; like the universe's endless expanding has been its death throes for ages, it's the way he's sliding steps across the floor, tilting his head to cradle empty air where loneliness is his best dance partner.
This is the heartbeat of his pain and I wouldn't be surprised if light painted the path of tears on his upturned face when eyes go closed to the privacy vanishing ghostlike the longer I am standing here. In the absence of them, his dance is an ache physical, loneliness' portrayal in fingers folding in the grasp of nothing, the lean of his body making way for a partner who is little more than air and shadow.
It is his own, like his partner.
Watching, silent as I have been struck breathless with how he possesses the exquisite grace of ages dying.
-==-
I give Gaignun the courtesy of knowledge by lifting one hand to my mouth and coughing quietly into the cage of my fingers. His response is quick enough to suggest he's always kept an ear sharp past the music filling this room for intrusion on those scant moments of privacy, and like a man caught red-handed, he stares wide-eyed to the door first, and then finds me further down the wall than he'd expected of a visitor.
Incriminating evidence of his one-man scandal is still cloying the air with its music.
To see Gaignun dancing is to see the man at his most candid. To intrude is to see him momentarily mad with surprise, but even betrayal of his face to his own startled state is a thing he is quick to regain control over. The mask of dignity has been assumed by the time I've lowered my hand, brushed the front of the hospital gown with fingers searching for wrinkles.
I can tell he's trying to find out how long I've been standing there, by how green eyes return again and again to the door; I can tell he's trying to determine how I managed to bypass locked doors, and this by how that same stare flies to me, silent repetitions.
Both of us favor tact, so both of us decide to speak at once in our own well-meaning attempts to break the silence on the other's behalf.
"I--" begins Gaignun.
"Wh--" say I, until I exhale smiling and feel my own brows arch in an expression sheepish. Go ahead, my fingers insist.
Gaignun's composure is immaculate; he exudes unruffled professionalism like a pheromone.
"Shouldn't you be in bed?" It must have been only hours since he'd seen most of the crew of the Elsa depart their ship in stretchers.
My laugh is brief, "Shouldn't you?"
The man snorts softly. "Yes. However," as he points out directly, in spite of standing here in socks, "I'm not the one injured."
"Aren't you?"
It is exceedingly rare to see him nonplussed, unheard of to see it twice in so little time. I find myself fascinated, captivated by the way surprise is a slow thing to blossom behind the veil of his eyes while he's realizing the assured purpose with which words had marked him.
I've never quite understood why humans find silence so uncomfortable, but my patience through the next few wordless seconds seems a challenge Gaignun is rising to meet in the way that he's straightening slow with shoulders at a lax angle. He's starting to look self-assuredly confident, and by this I know I'm losing my opportunity to find what defines the man. I wonder, briefly, if my disappointment is at all visible.
Gaignun shows little sign of relenting.
"You could always join me," purrs he in a dry, disbelieving humor that has me considering twice whether I had heard him correctly at all. He does not expect anything more than a polite decline, and he is only wrong this once because surprise seems a weakness. This once, I will infringe upon another's chink in their armor, and hope to be unexpected enough to wrest from him another mask.
I unfold my arms from behind my head and step away from the wall, soundless where it's just a layer of cloth between my feet and the floor.
It's been a while, and I admit as much aloud while I am coordinating where I stand. This is as close to a confession I have ever uttered in Gaignun's presence, and by how his eyes narrow but a fraction I observe that he's trying to draw a conclusion about how one such as I could ever pick up the singularly rare habit of dancing, let alone carry a familiarity with the waltz.
Distraction on my part is but a weave of fingers with his, a hand on a shoulder, and an inquisitive cant of my head to one side. When I look up, Gaignun's expression is muted and strange. His silence is loud when music has faded in the space between tracks of the recording he had acquired, likely through the same venues he has gained his other antiquities.
Predictably, Gaignun has a taste for ancient classics; his office smells strong of nostalgia, hanging like shrine incense on the air. How much regret for the past is spoken in this, I have yet to determine by experience.
For the moment, I wonder if he is insecure in all this silence, his feet an inch or less from mine.
Time suspended.
(Touch.)
(Go.)
It starts.
-==-
A single trill of some stringed instrument, the name of which I no longer remember, playing delicately through the act of shattering silence with the same gentle simplicity that is another's fingers closing on the back of my knuckles. His body is long; it's natural that he leads with a step first and a tug of a hand captured in his, second. It's an easy slope of step-back-turn to a choir of violins pretending they can be docile, incapable of frantic shrieking of strings.
Dispassionate creatures doomed to the graceful repetition of history.
This is the world rotating on an axis of a bar of nothing between dancer and dancer, mere air warmed by breath wordless, soundless but for the weave of singing strings. A turn of the waist mirrored in another's to the plaintive longing of a flute's thrilling loss, ghost echoes when I find I've tipped my head away from the next turn.
The lines of shoulders and waists orbit parallel, and the world would be but two in it for all that the room's little more than shapes and colors to spin a crescendo.
I am breathless and still breathing and alive, it seems, for as long as violins hold their breath. Beyond that, for as long as notes string together. Beyond that, as long as there is motion immaculate mirrored. Beyond that is like watching Gaignun vanish into eternity by the black of his suit and his hair into space dusted by stars.
This is something akin to joy, so it is no surprise that I find myself dizzy enough to laugh soft into a green slash at his throat that is his tie.
This world spins. I am lost, completely, and music can build 'forever' in three-step patterns, and this is why something as simple as song has lasted through the ages. Build an eternity out of a kaleidoscope of a world turning on an axis of two and silver scattering in my eyes, closed to half-mast.
The world could spin forever, strings screaming crescendos.
What I do not expect is a crash as I back solidly into a surface I have forgotten exists, and find myself half tumbling back into the chamber's lone desk.
A dish, cut crystal, tumbles from the corner where my hip had dislodged it, and it only escapes shattering by bouncing on the carpeting beneath the desk and rolling away. It has left a trail of its contents, like so many scattered, colored beads, all colors but green present and accounted for.
Gaignun's mouth is silent where he breathes by my ear, motion halted by the unexpected interruption of the man's own desk at the back of my legs. A minute passes with the back of my hand pinned to wood, fingers caught. I wonder how much longer I will remain here, watching a world that consists of the ceiling past a frame that is black hair and the straight line of a shoulder, until he raises his head and does not look at me.
The dance is over.