Temps Mort challenge: beverages. Completed in 35 minutes.
Rating: PG-13 Pairing: Muraki/Oriya The characters and situations do not belong to me
The bitter taste of tea
by Beth
Autumn, Oriya thinks, is a season unfairly shadowed by the overrated spring. There is a richness and decadent, dying beauty to the multicolored leaves that cannot be compared to the time when the leaves are all uniformly green, freshly born. The autumn collage changes as he watches: leaves turn from red to brown, and float gently to the ground. He smiles. He knows now how one can see beauty in this process, beauty beyond the one made precious by its fleeting.
Beauty of an elegant ending.
He realizes that autumn also brings with it a pronounced chill. His skin is cold. When he turns and goes back inside his inn, the warm air (and wasn't central heating a surprise for his friend a few years ago, true astonishment covered with teasing about finally leaving the Meiji era) is almost painful. He looks at the green tea brought in by a maid, but decides he is in the mood for a different kind. A harsher and less refined taste, but he blames the infrequent indulgence in black tea on his friend.
The Western tea set is not where he left it, and it takes him a moment to remember his friend borrowing it the last time he stayed over. Oriya shakes his head; Muraki only left this morning, and apparently the maids did not clean the room yet. Once he enters his friend's room, he is glad of the fact. The slight lived-in disarray of the furniture makes the room feel even warmer than it truly is. Oriya's fingers brush the covers of an English book before he picks it up and puts it on the shelf, right next to Shelley's collected works. This one is of course by the other Shelley, the wife: one of Muraki's favorites.
The tea set and assorted supplies are not hard to find, and turn out not to have been used, except for one missing cup. The motions of brewing the tea come to him easily. They lack the elegance of the tea ceremony, but that in turn makes his thoughts lighter. The mundane ritual lets him think freely of the beauty outside, and how he should buy the girls at the inn kimonos in a patter like autumn leaves, and how the inn seems to be picking up customers - not that it ever lacked for them even during the recession, unlike common soaplands - and when will Muraki be coming back...
He hesitates for a moment, then puts a substantial amount of sugar in his cup. He may as well indulge and break tradition all the way. Even his tea and food are so often purely Japanese, that he sometimes forgets just how many Western influences there are in his country. He wonders if this means he is hiding from those influences, or from all sorts of change. He decides it is not so. Tradition is his founding stone; he could have done many things with his life, but this is worthwhile. After all, he pursues all his interests, and does not lack for friends.
He smiles, and thinks of Muraki again.
He gets up and walks around the room, touching the small signs of his friend's presence. He sips his tea, sweet and warm. Behind the sweetness, the sharp tang of bitterness clears his head.
He sees the door to the bathroom has been left slightly ajar. Inside, the cup from the tea set rests in the sink. There is something half-crusted on the bottom, a brown liquid that looks like very thick tea.
He picks it up, and then he smells the scent. Metallic, sickly-sweet. And he knows it.
Both cups fall from his hands and shatter in the sink. Tea and blood run together, amber and copper-brown.
He thinks of Muraki. He thinks of his friend.
He wonders whose blood it was.
{FINIS}
Note: First-ever improv, though I've done non-themed hourfics before :) Like? Not like?