Beginning Notes: The story takes place after, and is inspired by, the anime (curriculums 10 and 11). There's a teeny bit of manga influence, too. A warning (for this, as well as upcoming chapters) would be…weirdness.

Nobody gets too much heaven no more
It's much harder to come by
I'm waiting in line
--the BeeGees' Too Much Heaven

Kitto Itsuka Issho ni Kagayaku

(Surely, Someday We'll Shine Together)

Prologue: Vertigo

Pieces of a sky highlighted her hair and curled thin at the ends into the crisp blackness. Light and shadow spun in concession around her body, and whenever she lifted a hand to reach out, the borders of her silver-blue halos expanded, loose and malleable under her watery movements. She moved like a dance—like a dream—frosted breath coming out in coils from her parted lips, pale eyes slowly opening to invite the darkness.

There was nothing he could do except watch her. He had tried, many times, to run away, but her seemingly sentient glow had only thickened around him – a tease, a taunt, a turquoise trap blurring all meanings of liberation. Every inch away from her felt heavy, every breath taken constricted.

But he knew that if he pretended hard enough, he could almost believe that this was what he wanted.

Hiead…

She drifted nearer, her ethereal hand now floating above his chest.

Inside each and every one of us there is the desire to fall

A prayer dropped from motionless lips and a single tear, from unblinking eyes. Each caught the other in a journey toward the ubiquitous midnight and the resulting collision, loud and tragic, like the voices of dying stars, spiraled him on his knees. He felt cold, he felt in need, and he was surprised that he felt at all when, with slightly trembling fingers, he latched his hand onto hers in a lapse of hungry desperation. Their contact triggered a soundless explosion of light, which swallowed them and separated all union. From black grew blue, and the world around him turned unholy in its brightness.

She tossed a gentle laugh, which was momentarily caught in the limp web of emptiness, before both girl and giggle faded into the decaying background. Lying on the ground, consciousness pricked, he saw two silhouetted figures abruptly spring up from the endless blue and the scenery halted—broke—for several seconds before shifting to a rundown building paved in dulled reds and dusty greys. Explosions littered the foundations; the stained walls around him crumbled like statues of sand being blown by unnatural, unforgiving winds – everything was falling.

So, she had brought him here only to see all of this…

Again.

With a lifted chin, he coolly watched amidst the chaos, the two inchoate forms materialize into opaque flesh. Their creation cued a crash, and a chilled cloud of black dust filtered the air. One of the few remaining walls toppled and an artificial entranceway to the outside was created; three gigantic creatures, plated with glinting scales and armor that pulsed, stepped in and now stood amongst the rubble. Their presence could be measured by smell: trailing wafts, sharp and pungent, like blood boiled with honey, teetering between beauty and repulsion, marked the death-path of their grotesque glory. Their metallic green tentacles snatched the air, offshoots and extensions of ways transcending the physical, crackling with something even more alive than each other.

Something wet slid down the side of his cheek just then, but when his hand rose to wipe the slickness away, a sliver of realization stayed it. Premonition prompted him to turn around: screams pierced silence, as several vine-like tentacles similarly pierced the two newly fleshed bodies, ripping them apart, tearing at them, pinning them—torsos, limbs, faces—to the gritty ground. Their eyes rolled up underneath their sagging, folded lids until only a glossy white, thicker than even the coats that clothed the corpses and denser than the stench that hung on their shoulders, replaced all eyeball. Red death spilled out from the insides of their opened mouths, cave-like entrances to a promised oblivion, and the surrounding pools of blood fanned out like a rippled cloak of crimson. It was gruesome, but he had seen this so many times that there was no longer any emotional effect; he knew the ending. After all, she told him this story every night.

He knew the Ending.

Hiead…

A pixie laugh melted as quickly as it was expelled. From the corner of his vision, he spied a small boy, covered and bandaged in ragged yellow, shivering as he slipped quickly between the cracks of a collapsed wall, looking to flatten and hide.

He scoffed at the sight, whirling his body around to make sure the girl could note his incredulity. This was not how it had happened. Not that he wholly understood any of this, but there couldn't have been a boy.

There was never a boy.

Few things stand true beyond death, but nevertheless, he couldn't keep himself from watching what he knew to be hauntingly familiar—the kind of familiar that was sick and dizzying, the kind of familiar that made one's insides feel claustrophobic—and when the boy crawled closer to his mind, he saw the silver hair, the light bronze skin, and he finally knew.

Yes…

His throat went dry.

All except the charcoaled orange light and smoke from the outside could be seen from the boy's vantage point in that half-hidden crack in the wall. Both of them knew that neither could cry out nor scream, but nothing stopped the boy from staring—just like nothing stopped him—out of the hole in which he hid, his large eyes absorbing the bloody scene until they, too, filled and reflected a color just as red – the red of a maliciousness that would indelibly remain. Tentacles, like corpulent snakes hugging the cold earth with their bellies, slithered out of the holes that were bored into the rotten flesh. He felt movement redirect, and the sound of more broken shards, more broken lives. Crunching echoed within the confines of the silence, and the boy's stomach reeled, just as an animal would when whipped and the sweat stings the resulting wounds, the intense, sickening feeling intruding into his own consciousness.

The shadow of the boy's nausea clung to him almost as instantly as it was cast, saliva distilling and lining his mouth, but just as he was about to keel over and vomit, the colors of everything around him blended, becoming one hazy image, a single arched sweep of a distorted rainbow, like chalk pictures smeared together on the sidewalk after a storm. Gone were the boy with red eyes and the bodies without flesh and the monsters with their joy, but in spite of that distinct flash of illness passing, he couldn't feel any relief.

Can you hear me?

For she had returned.

Oh Hiead, Hiead, Hiead

Up and down, up and down – her voice was a seesaw, slippery and singsong. Was she calling to touch or to tantalize him? The rocking uncertainty almost scared him.

Her arms opened into an embrace, the one that always met him right before he was released into a different morning and its accompanying lifetime. He wondered if that was necessarily better, if it even mattered where his legs stood in relation to reality, and how it must feel to be in an eternity that looped around like this; but as he looked up into her shining face, wild and angelic with a blue radiance, he soon understood that here was where all answers fled to bleed, and that in those eyes, there was no, nor would there ever be, escape.

She came down, and he let her hold him.

Ending Notes: The title of this fic comes from the title of the ending episode of Shoujo Kakumei Utena. Shrug. I really wanted something with "Kagayaku" in it as tribute to the "Kagayaki" song. Heh.