White
By Aislinn Cailin
He saw her in a swirl of white, her face as blithe as if it was she who had summoned the snow. It was hard to resist the compulsion, the desire to squander every inch of her brightness.
He wasn't attracted to her because of her benevolence, her sunshine, her luck. No, it was none of those things. He was attracted to her because of her masochism, her insistence to wear her heart on her sleeve, her determination to feel every cut, every bruise, every stab that anyone, he himself included, sent her way. He was fascinated. He wanted to learn that from her, that act of self-inflicted cruelty. Because after years of feeling nothing at all, any pain was better than the numbness in his heart.
"Do you know why the snow falls, Usagi?"
Startled, she stopped spinning. She stumbled slightly on the sidewalk, her breath came out in small little puffs. At last, she looked up at him. Her eyes narrowed.
"How stupid do you think I am, jerk? Of course I know why the snow falls."
He waited, his hands stuffed inside his jacket pocket, his brows drawn down in two diagonal lines, his eyes glimmering under the streetlamps. She shuffled her feet and huffed, unnerved by his expression. "The snow falls because the con—condensation in the clouds freezes. And it comes down as tiny ice pellets." She put her hands on her hips and glared at him. "So there."
He smiled, a quick twist of the mouth, mostly rueful, a little amused. "Wrong again."
"What? I—"
"The snow falls," he said, smoothly cutting her off, "because the Earth wants us to freeze to death."
She blinked at him. "You're insane."
"No, I'm not." His grin was malicious. "Haven't you ever heard of 'natural selection'? We're not supposed to survive up here, with our feeble skin and small bodies. If it wasn't for our technology, and our buildings, we would be dead by now."
He stepped a little closer to her, willing her to reach that breaking point, that precipice, where she would fall again, and again. And then maybe he could learn a little bit from her pain, absorb a morsel of that human foolishness that he lacked. "It's a way to purge life. Not everybody gets to live, nor should they. That includes us."
"You—" It worked. He saw the way the tears rushed to her eyes, as if some internal pipe had begun to leak. Or maybe had burst open. "It's the first snowfall of the year."
He watched the rest of her, the way her shoulders shook, the way her hands clenched into fists, the way her face slowly turned purple. His task finished, he waited for it, as he always did. A sliver of pain. That's all he wanted.
"Why do you have to ruin everything?"
Nothing.
He couldn't avoid the way his lips curled in disgust. He couldn't even feel the remorse anymore. She had to hog it all to herself.
His task was done for the day, and he had failed. Again. He didn't even bother giving her a final insult. He walked past her, eyes on the snow, his heart as numb with unfeeling as the rest of his body was with the cold.
"We're not finished!" Usagi grabbed onto him, and with surprising strength, she whirled him around and yanked on his lapels with two curled fists. Her face, two inches away from his own, was red from the cold. Or from the tears.
"What is wrong with you?"
Maybe it was the whisper, the way she hissed it, that made it all the more powerful. Her eyes ran across his face as if the secret to life was printed on it, as if she was reading him open like a toddler's storybook. When her eyes caught up with his again, she gave him a glance so piercing that he wanted to shrink, to disappear, to melt, to go to a place where she couldn't decipher him so fully.
He curled his own hands around her wrists, pulling her hands away from his jacket, trying to free himself of her hold, trying to salvage some dignity. It was like she had physically punched him in the gut, as if she saw everything, everything about him in that one glance.
And out of all the things he though she would do—yell at him, kick him, glare at him with revulsion, glare at him with hatred—she did the most startling and the most obvious. She began to cry. Again. She wrapped her arms around him and shook against his chest.
The pain that exploded in him was so strong, so vivid, so blinding white it rivaled the snow. He staggered to catch her.
And he wondered if he had been the masochist all along.