A/N: More fun in our Diluted Seasons verse! We're alternating ficlets this time, so guess who has odd and who has even. XD Written for the the Sinnoh League: general challenge, Twinleaf Town Part 2: write a fic that contains shoes and include the colour red, and for the Diversity Writing Challenge, f9 - ficlet collection with ficlets 501-1000 words
1. the macbeth river
Sneakers squelch in blood and mud. They dry and are caked again: icing on their soles and the icing calls ants and maggots while the cake rots -
But no matter how rotten her soul is, she'll still press forward. She'll still walk, even if those little phagocytes that swim in blood eat through her soles and start to feast on her toes. She'll walk without her toes if she has to. She'll walk on her hands or drag her torso in a squelching orchestra but she'll move, move forward, because she's lost and left behind too much and done too much to go back now.
She can stop for a shower to wash the blood and mud off her legs, to wash the perfume she's sprayed on so strongly so Kazuki won't stop and stare for all the wrong reasons - but he stops and stares anyway and she's glad, when those worries aren't of her, because of her - except they are because of her, in a way. Because she exists. Because she loves him so and he loves her back, and it's only society's rules for the world that make it impossible to realise.
She'll realise it anyway. They'll love each other to hell and sometimes she wonders where the mud from under his shoes comes from because there's mud there too. There's always been mud for the both of them because they're going to hell together, even if she only knows what's kissed the skin of her own form.
But she can guess. Some stains are buried in a magician's craft and even if he's not like her and hasn't sprouted sudden powers she can play with willy-nilly, he's got talent and smarts and he can pull that tucked away inner self out and splay it like Aoi Akira can cut through anything with that cruelly razor sharp tongue of hers.
She's far too fond of doing that but someone's put her in her place and it's just a shame that scar on her face isn't a burn instead. She can do it, of course, but there's a difference between fighting out of necessity and fighting out of wishes and fighting willy-nilly and she's not quite in the final category yet and she doesn't want to be either, because that's an even deeper layer of hell and she doesn't want to be so deep there's no light and she can't see Kazuki somewhere nearby…
And the deeper she goes, the deeper he has to go as well and it's bad enough they've voided their passes to heaven's door with blood on their hands and soles and blood under their nails and neither of them want to drown.
If she does drown, she'll never see the light again: not Kazuki who's the bullseye of her world, not Hitoe and Ruko who are the gold circle though it's only Ruko now. Hitoe's there and gone: she's white and black and grey and a blood clot but Ruko's still a beating heart even if, the way Tama and Ulith Urazoe Iona are going, she won't be for long.
She will be, she will be, because she can bear being with Kazuki forever but, after Hitoe, she'll keep Ruko far away in heaven and white and safe.
She walks forward and the ashes in her wake mix with the blood and mud.