-1Disclaimer: Rurouni Kenshin is not mine.
AN: Bit of a random drabble. AU.
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The cave is huge. It stretches back like a cathedral of rock, it climbs high in sweeping crags of dripping stone, it reaches down, stretching clawed tunnels into the earth. The walls are black and grey, damp and cold to touch. Smooth walls arch to stalactites, rough floors into stalagmites and every surface glows with the reflection of a billion candle points. The light flickers and dances, somehow separate from the surroundings, somehow cold through its golden amber glow. The light of life,
The wind whistles on the plane beyond but within the cave there is only the soft sound of a candle's flicker, amplified forever until it roars and whispers and speaks the stories of every soul that was and is and will ever be. They call it the Cathedral of Life and within it hangs a billion candles, suspended in the air, rocking on the breeze from the plane, waiting to flicker out.
He watches them through half lidded eyes, dreaming of sleep though knowing it to be an impossibility. As each slight chill sweeps in from the entrance, taking with it the light of however many lives, he wonders if this time it is the one. But it never is and he'll shift to his feet, pluck the smoking, darkened candles from the air and line them up to be relit, line them up to be thrown back into life while his own candle sits deep within the earth without even a wick to burn.
He's been here countless days and months and years, infinite measures of time that doesn't quite exist. Countless lives have passed, flames swept out by the chill breeze from the planes or the cold water dripping from the shadowed roof of the cavern. His place is here, his punishment. Keeper of the Candles, priest to that great cathedral of rock. His curse is to tend them until his crime is matched and beaten by another in life, only then will he be free.
Battousai. That is what they used to call him. Increasingly life is like a distant memory, like a childhood he struggles to hold on to. He remembers his sword and he remembers his death and then all he remembers is the cold glow of life, taunting him from every angle, and the sight of his own candle, soulless, wickless, unfit to burn.
He watches the wars come and go, gusts of wind sweeping out families, cities and nations. He watches cancer drip from the ceiling in water to douse out flames; natural deaths, soundless. He watches candles that seem to burn forever, lives so long he envies them greatly, and then he watches with small, morbid satisfaction when they too flicker out and die.
He collects the candles, every now and then. A certain number every month or day or twisted unit of time that he likes to think is regular. He collects them and places them in a line in a cool, dark chamber deep in the earth. Lined up they sit on the floor and sometimes he wonders at stealing the wick from one, at placing it within his own candle in the hopes that he might live again. But it wouldn't work. He knows this as he's always known it. Even if he found a soul to take him there'd be no one to light the candle, not until another master of death sweeps out more lives than he did, only then will he find his freedom. So he lines up the candles, bitter and regretful, placing them one after the other and kneeling down to blow the flame of life into them. As each one lights it rises, floating to join the others in their sweeping dance across the rocky landscape of the ceiling, each moving that bit closer to death.
He watches and sometimes thinks he'll watch forever. He closes his eyes to dream of sleep and sometimes sees another life, over that whisper flicker that tries to tell him so many others. Sometimes he sees his other life. The one he'll lead when a new keeper is born. He sees him saving lives, stopping killers from killing, stopping death, helping people. He sees it and it makes him chuckle. When they give him back his soul, when he steps off that dark cliff to the planes below, when he walks again, a human, he'll make sure that keeper suffers as he does, he'll make sure that in his new lifetime no man or woman or child surpasses that death count, he'll make sure that keeper keeps these souls, guards these candles, until life itself feels like a plague of locusts, crawling and flitting and blocking out the sun. Until that cold, bright glow makes them dream of earth, makes them wish and long for the colours blue and green.
In his world of black and grey and orange he sits in the entrance and waits for the chill to rise.
Maybe this time, he wonders.
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