Yato sits in the library and drums his fingers across the blonde wood of the desk. He looks off, stares, turns back to his project, huffs and taps the pen to his lips. He knows what he would write, if he could–he'd write all the swirling monsters in his head, the nightmares, all that shit that came before. He'd write all of his days in neat penmanship, letters aligned beautifully, meticulously, almost obsessively, in dark purple ink. He'd write them so well people would buy all of his memoirs, his voluminous anthologies of collected wisdom, even his scribbles; they'd pay great funds to meet him, and he'd sign each volume, or, maybe, never show up to the bookstore at all, but what would it matter, it was written by him and him alone and it would be so great they'd invite him back, anyway. He'd write until he was dizzy, until someone built a golden shrine, and all his words would be etched in the archways, on the ceilings and on the floor; he'd stack the manuscripts up, until they reached the ceiling, words over words, scribbles over scribbles, layers upon layers of crisp white paper brimming with the stories in his head.
And he thinks on this as he glides the pen over paper; not in violet ink, as in his mind, but black– the only color of pen that still worked from the assortment he filched from the librarian's desk. The paper is not weighted, it is not embossed with golden borders, it is plain, college-ruled looseleaf smudged with someone's old math on the first half of the page. Beneath this desk is a century's worth of half-chewed gum, his reason for showing up in the first place; but it'll still be here in an hour, anyway, and he's got the scraper in his pocket. And so he writes. Or tries too, but it starts and stops on the phantoms, on the clean slice of his blade, on the tales of his greatness. All the words worthy of a halfway-decent god sputter out into nothing and he's left with nonsense, no grand phrases arching into eloquent sentences, no surges of literary genius and no refined wise poignancy, or fuck it all, not even any punch.
He looks off again, looks back, nearly throws his pen across the room.
Why oh why does it all look like her?