If you knew you were in a war, would you ever make friends knowing that they would soon die? For an immortal guardian spirit, it was a certainty that it needed to live with. You lived only as the shield to protect others from harm, a tool. Others that might not even care to be saved, who may even hate you for it. But it was the only purpose that she had, the only reason for her existence in the first place.
Yet there would be that one person who was different. The one who would see not a shield, not a tool, not a demon. The one who would see you for you, see the soul inside the spirit. The ones that could touch your heart and asked to be let in.
You'd let them in all right. Loneliness is a potent poison, that weakens and turns cold leaves fragile. That would bring you to tears to realize that there was someone that would not recoil from who you are. That would force you to seek that one something that would one day turn around to devour you. It was a curse, the curse of eternal memory to bear that poison through eternity. For the one person who'd reach out to you... you could yell and rail all you want but the effort was already done and the one person would be in your memory forever. One more person who would one day be terminated by the forces of fate. One more person hanging on the doorstep of your conscience.
Have you lived forever? You will have known many who have touched your heart and departed. You try to tell yourself that they've only caused you centuries of pain for five seconds of laughter, that they are the chains that pull you down. But deep inside, you can't help it; despite being immortal, a part of you is mortal yet. For you regret.
For whom does the crane dance? They huddle amongst themselves, creatures that search for a community, exalted shades of color across a midnight plain of ice. They can never stand loneliness. One day, one will find another who is different and rejoice. Traversing the ice, dancing on the white mirror of the snow, they would fly into the gray sky together and would be truly together forever.
You know you can never find that other, that you envy those with such short spans who could. You are a construct, a facsimile, a golem created to protect. Immortal. To see two others together brings little more than jealousy to your grief-afflicted persona. That bond was something unbreakable even by the sharpest of swords and the distances of separation. Strained, maybe, but it would never fracture. For you feel envy of not the drive of the flesh, but for the beauty of that lifelong bond. For the intricate weaving of the paths of such fragile ordinary creatures to find another with whom they were willing to sacrifice all they were and all they would ever be for.
And there they were. Two humans who could touch your heart. Who had felt it beat. Two different, forever remembered, times you let them in. They were close to you, they were already embedded into your eternal memory. You had watched them as they first met, as they drew closer, until their paths were inseparable. You could only watch the beauty, knowing that though you could never feel that way, at least they did. And for the first time you did not feel the jealousy. They were already in your memory, already friends.
Tides of time are deafening. We cannot hear our own deaths approaching come high tide. As part of them was in you, you could not see the tide swell and feel the wind roaring against your ears. Not until the undertow had dragged you down. Not until you looked around and realized with an afraid encroaching silence that you're all alone.
You ran down once you heard the terrible news. You ran to see if they could be still alive, to hear their words again. To hear his silly voice joking around, asking why you were so upset. To hear her voice sternly reprimanding him, and flatly telling you that everything's alright.
But nothing was alright. Your eyes widen. You've seen blood before. So many corpses, lying side by side, unburied and desecrated, some twitching and moaning. Your foot lands in a pile of blood as you recognize a face. A woman's face, line with dark black hair, a broken spine barely supporting the body's weight against the wall. You can barely hold back that cough of shock. You hold a hand against her neck, searching for a pulse only to find none.
"Wake up," you slowly ask. "Why won't you wake up?" You know the answer, but a part of you refuses and denies, repeating one single thought: it can't be real.
A part of you wildly looks around, searching for his face. To see the cranes together. All that you can see is solidifying black and red. You look at your friend's corpse and walk away.
You wandered through the innumerable bodies lined up beside each other. Some new, some old, some who were in their prime. It felt like hours before you finally saw that face amid the crimson-colored pools of the lab. A man's face. You see the rest of his body, stained with the detestable red, a large jagged wound across his abdomen. You can't help but know it must've been the worst death imaginable, long and torturous. "At least it's over now," you whisper as you lift the cold lifeless body into your hands, amongst other words that you can't keep track of.
Step through the dark, all the artificial lighting broken, the gushing of wounds still flowing as the human bodies leaked like water through a sieve. Finally you can see her face again, her words echoing in your mind again: "No matter what happens, don't protect us."
You lay his body against hers, muttering something you can't fully understand. You steps back from the two, them looking almost as if they died embracing each other.
"Asking a Guardian Deity not to protect you... you idiots."
Your tears were unrelenting, but you had fulfilled your duty. The two bloodstained lovers now lay with each other. If the dancing crane in the heavens could take these now flightless birds into her frail wings, at least let them be taken together.
A/N: Okay, so I disappeared for a long time. Fear not, I am back for you, my lovely reviewers! Will be publishing some of my left-overs. Sadly, I got bored with DGM. But chapter 193.5 gave me a brief bit of hope, and I wrote this. The inspiration is Ludovico Einaudi's "The Crane Dance", a beautiful short and minimalist classical piece.