Notes: Okay! The following likely won't make much sense unless you're somewhat familiar with Anna's background as revealed in the side-novels. Long spoilers short: Kushina Anna was once the crowning prodigy of an experiment to force a Strain to ascend to the position of blue king. In canon, they failed and HOMRA destroyed them.
Here, she changed her mind.
Standard disclaimers apply! I don't own K (Project), nor am I affiliated with it, and the bulk of this was written from the hours of three to seven in the morning. No ships to declare except the usual levels of Yata and Fushimi being staggeringly embarrassing about each other to ye old canon effect, and isn't that bad enough? Sorry about not being the author you need or the one you deserve, K Project. Rest assured, on the day your metaphorical Batman gets here, I'll be first out to hold the door open and polish their wheels.
fevers for the lost
Somewhere lies a desert, pale as drought and cool as steel, where a girl can wander under the ash-heavy sky to watch flowers grow, red, out of the dust.
She no longer rests except to dream, no longer dreams but for this: brushing off her skirts, weaving between the dunes in her bright-ribboned slippers. Breathing thin. Scattering petals round as marbles. Grains sliding beneath her toes. There are traditions for girls such as these: children who have lost an eye, a voice, a heart, set loose on the world to reclaim them.
She remembers, still, the stories.
She isn't there.
Not in the offices, plain and hollowed, not the cool rooms shrouded in lights and drapery. Not even outside, in the courtyard where the officers scrape through drills. The sky darkens; the clansmen mumble and scramble and wander. They search; that is their right and duty.
He finds her because that is his.
In the corridor his footfalls ring like knocked bells; his sword clinks like a held chime in the sheath. Rumpled hair, knuckles bare, sharp in his stride and stiff through his spine. A child under wave, drawn to her doorway to fill it with his cut-clean clothes. A boy at once distant and drowning. She invents the images because she cannot see past them; her eyes are nerve and water and irises stripped down. They tell her how ill he fits his clothes, how his boots scuff the cafeteria floor when he crosses. How his mouth never used to firm like that, with a soldier's exactitude. Too many truths and no mercies among them.
His hair had been red to her once. She remembers that.
"Oi, An—" He stops; she hears the echo bitten down. "Captain. You wanna be left alone or anything?"
"Misaki," she says, "can come in."
There's a catch of breath, the bit of an old protest between his teeth (it's Yata, che, Yatagarasu and it's gonna be a legend!), but he lets it by; Misaki, after all, has never been anything other than kind. "You'd have a pretty good view of the drills from up here—" He works through the logic in a flash; she hears his mind's gears grinding all their teeth. "Hey, captain! Were you watching us?"
A dance of needles, steel twisting like snakes, lights coiling together. Deft hands, firm hands, hands caught and chained. She nods. "It was good today."
"We really were, huh! I think the unit's getting better at the stuff I'm running 'em through—I'm working on my part, but I'll definitely get there!" She lets the talk reel off his tongue; it coils the air, jolts and rustles and crackles, sharp enough to stretch out her arms to it and be remade in ash and warmth. "Oh, yeah," Misaki adds eventually. "Er—you wanna go down to 'em? N-not that you've gotta do anything! But everybody's looking for you, you know...?"
"Misaki."
"Uh—! Yeah?"
She extends her arm. Her sleeve droops down her arm, a silken scald of light; her finger marks a distant point. "What color is it?"
"What?" His brow twitches and furrows and clears in the same heartbeat that his foot taps the floor. He goes to her at once, braces a hand against the sill to stick his neck past the frame and swing his glower high. "What color's what?"
"Ah. That."
"The sky?"
She nods.
He follows it down to her eyes; the weight of it holds. His knuckles creak the windowframe.
"Red," Misaki tells her, at last. "It's red."
Of course he remembers the old days, too.
It dogs him all the time through lunch in the cafeteria, thoughts like those—back when she'd worn frills and scarlets and gazed up at every clansman, gazed harder when they blushed (and sometimes the blushing one wasn't even him, okay?). And maybe that's good and maybe it isn't, 'cause it's not like he's got much to do, then, past keeping an eye on the rest of the clan. Most of the time, their spaces don't intersect more than they have to. Sure, they take the same drills, get the same missions, and Yata gets to figure out which of 'em gets delegated to what job, but that's all mission-talk and nothing more. The arrangement's better that way—Yata likes it better that way, the stuffy bastards who actually think that yammering out their names when they draw their swords makes them sound cool and organised somehow, as if some well-organised and forward-thinking thug couldn't possibly have the time to jump on a skateboard, flip up and slam across their heads wheel-first before they reached the end of the line.
It's Anna they belong to anyway—her mark plated, invisible, at the backs of their eyes. A lens to refract the world.
Yata Misaki especially, with her ribbon black around his wrist. The mark of her chosen lieutenant.
So he digs into his pudding cup with every lunch, sucks on his spoon and carefully doesn't kick up his boots onto the table. It's not that kind of place, which is exactly why his heels itch with it. Not like any of them'd ever sat near him enough to care.
"Misaki," a shadow says, stretching across what he could've sworn was an empty table. Yata nearly falls off the edge of his bench. "Isn't it?"
He slams a fist against the table, ignores the swing of heads towards them from the stretch down. "Watch it!" he says. "Just 'cause you hear her—hear the captain saying it doesn't mean you get to use it too!"
By all appearances, the man's been sitting there for sometime; his chopsticks have rolled off the top of his noodle bowl, and there's a little pot along with a porcelain cup resting between them. Yata barely remembers his name—half the Blues wear spectacles, and look like they've got some kind of radar installed behind their lenses besides. Hell, it's probably 'cause of those that they sense the wannabe insubordination pouring off his skin.
In his head, he dubs them all Glasses Bastard #1 - 10. Sometimes he has trouble remembering their actual names.
"Is that so," Glasses Bastard #3 says, and Yata realises he's staring. He jerks his eyes back to his own scraped pudding cup, only to remember his rank and glare back again.
"It's Yata," he says. "Yata!"
"Yata-san, then." In his pearled mouth the inflection's nothing the way Kamamoto used to say it. "Your milk will warm rather quickly if you leave it to sit."
Yata's brows snap together. He doesn't look at his carton—which isn't fear, he tells himself, but animal instinct. Common sense declares that the carton sitting at the edge of his tray is radiating an air of something not meant to be digested. Damn all cow juice, anyhow. He doesn't even know why they bother putting it up with his sides. "Shut up," he says, nonsensically. "Drink your goddamn tea."
"Is something the matter?"
"Like how you won't quit talking? That'd be more'n enough for anybody."
"I thought it might be more than that. It's hard to find a Clan that will accept too much strangeness, you see." He stops, lets a breath unravel, wraps his long fingers around his cup. "I assume you know who I am."
Strangeness, Yata thinks, and a guy who doesn't have friends enough to talk to about the lieutenant who can barely draw his own sword without calling on the wrong powers. Contrary to popular belief, he isn't a total dumbass: he can do the math. "Aaah?" he says, and he makes his voice belligerent just to see the guy wince from lack of elegance. "Aren't you the Strain?"
But Glasses Bastard #3 does no such thing. "The only one in the unit, it seems," he says instead. He stirs his tea. Steam eddies and twists, pale above the rim. "Isn't it comforting."
It's a weird kind of conversation to have—the kind the Blues have all the time, words underneath words, all the layers to figure out and nobody ever admitting that they damn well want something the way normal people do. He doesn't get why the Strain'd bother—everybody in Scepter 4 knows doubletalk isn't Yata Misaki's kind of good time, and he isn't close enough to any of 'em for that to do the Strain any good anyway. His spoon's empty, too; Yata thinks about ditching.
But if he's right, then this is his to do.
He crumples the cup, drops it onto his tray and says, "They'll get used to you."
"As they adjusted to you?"
The tremors of the earlier slam apparently haven't shaken their way out yet. All around the room, he can feel ten pairs of ex-bureaucrat eyes boring into him, into shoulderblades and jaw and coat. "Nobody said I was here to make friends," Yata says. He cracks a grin, laughs—the sound curves meanly around the edges. "As long as we're doing the captain's work, the rest's not gonna matter!"
"Oh?" the Strain says, dainty. "What end, I wonder, could be so vital...?"
Yata bristles; it's automatic. "Got something to say, you better spit it the hell out."
His officer gazes back at him, mild and steady-eyed behind the lenses. There they have it, the bastard's real interest, and this is too close a question to ask. After a moment, he too pushes his cup away. "It's simple and very plain that your temperament isn't suited to the Blue Clan," the Strain says. "You direct the raids as if you're running a gang. You won't learn the sword, no matter how long you're given to master it. But you pledged your loyalties to her regardless—leaving your friends in the Red Clan to do it. Can you blame anyone for investigating the discrepancy?"
Glasses Bastard #3. A sharp-jawed man, kind of old but not that much, with a sweep of dark hair hanging just above his glasses and his thin fingers laced mildly before him. He smiles in barest crooks of the mouth, hardly shifts, doesn't flinch, and pinches his spoon with the idle precision of a seamstress holding a needle. He draws sixth in the line, Yata remembers, and when the hilt opens to his hand, his motion's fit to cut the sky apart.
"Mind your own business," he says, louder than he needs to—but if he's warning one, he may as well warn them all. At the end of the day, half-blinded or not, Anna still belongs to HOMRA, and this shabby-stitched, formal police force isn't much more than just another gang in colors to look out for. "If you're gonna stand with us, you're loyal to the captain, and that's all you need to know!"
"Is it." The bastard's mouth stretches, thin. "But it's my clan as well."
Power rolls on his caught breath like poison. "Oi," Yata says, and makes the insolence of it mean something, a lieutenant to his officer. He slides his hands across the table as he rises and braces against it, leaning down. "Bastard," he says. "I said this wasn't a clansman's business. And what kinda insubordinate face's that to make at a superior officer? Eh, Munakata?"
All Strains were human once. Yata sees no sign of it in that head tilt, or the blank slackness of his shoulders. "I wonder," Munakata says, cool and unstartled. "My apologies."
Between them, the last thread of steam unravels from its cup and vanishes.
(The mark of her favor had fallen to him on an early mission. She'd turned from the field, then, knotted warmly into the folds of her blue coat. Snow ground underfoot under the cloud-dulled sky, but nobody shivered; the officers were moving, and the king did not grow cold. At her side, Misaki barked out orders to every passing officer as they dashed along, scattering them across the stretch of blocks where the Strain lay waiting, cornered in one of the building junctions.
"Misaki," she said, grave-eyed.
"Bastard, you better run faster than that before I come after—aaah?" He turned. "Yeah—yeah, I'm still here! What's happening?"
She held out her hands. The ribbon dangled like a dead serpent. "It came loose."
His mouth gaped, then needled thin before it stretched open again, helpless. "Obviously," he started. "Right. So I oughta retie it for y—wait, you want me to. Uh." He stopped again. "Seriously?"
His captain nodded.
"I," said Misaki, and no thought of scrambling away crossed his mind; his heels took him backwards of independent accord. "I can do it later, right, Anna? Right now we've still gotta catch that dam—thaaaat Strain!" He brandished it, a proud banner drooping over his knuckles. "I'll tie it to my hand so's I don't lose it! For later!"
The knot he lashed over his wrist as he ran off, she noted, was very neat.)
"Tsk... Fancy seeing you here."
It's the click of the tongue he hears first, disdain boiling between his teeth, and all of it familiar enough to ache.
He remembers, is remembering, has remembered by the time his fingers tighten on the swing's chains. Yata twists his weight against the momentum of his arc. He jumps off as it swings down, drops to a puff of gravel on his knees and rises in the same motion. Here, he thinks, is the thing he forgets sometimes—or maybe he just never wanted to think about it to start with. That the world is no more than water and dust arranged into an infinite series of little distances. That a couple strides could cover it here, footsteps through the scattered pebbles to mark the line that would take him from the rocking swings to the intruder, marked and barred for old familiarity.
That there is more than one danger in crossing over to old haunts, lost territory. The parks where they used to go after school before they saved up enough for games, to kick rocks around and yell about the world.
Saruhiko hasn't spoken. Yata figures maybe that's a good start. "You didn't see me, all right?" he says, as he starts out of the pit. The coat rolls down around his wrists, colors stark as shouting. "Better that way."
"And why would that be?"
"'Cause I'm telling you, that's why!" Old temper sputters in his throat. He scratches it out. Says, "Just leave it. I'll," but the nerves of his throat have burned out, a twist of dead candlewicks, and he can't finish his opening. Saruhiko's still staring, and Yata fights down the weird urge to flush. It isn't that he's screwing this up—the cool detachment, the professionalism of Scepter 4—so much as Saruhiko doesn't even seem to get that's what it's meant to be. He looks like he's been confronted with a tap-dancing duck.
"Sorry," Yata mutters instead. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and keeps walking.
He's nearly off the grounds when Saruhiko calls after him. "Is that all you can think of?" he says, and it sounds wrong, it's nearly a yawn. "This is about something stupid, isn't it...?"
His shoulders stiffen up. "It's important. I'm telling you, forget it!"
"Misaki..."
Saruhiko pronounces it without rancor, and that's the last straw somehow—the easy indifference of the inflection, like this whole thing is just a temper tantrum Saruhiko can crush with a thumb and a sneer. Yata rounds on him.
"Don't," he says, sharp and wild, "Don't you call me that—" and it tears from his teeth like the punch he wants to crush into Saruhiko's goddamn mouth. Suoh Mikoto could come after him here and Yata'd feel his reasons more than ever, he'd run into Scepter 4's main office and cling to the desks and pound his way through every last report for the sake of the king who opened a door from the streets and pressed fire and wonder into his hands—but this is gonna wreck him, he thinks, and he knows it will.
A dark-eyed boy, gaunt beneath his glasses, gazing back at him, a hand reaching up, outstretched, as if to hold onto him. Loss and contempt and grim resignation—those, maybe, he'd expected. But this—Saruhiko watching him with all the shuddering hollowness of like a compass's splintered needle—
This, he was not made to endure.
"Tch." The pebbles kick up, rattling off his boots as he advances on Saruhiko suddenly—Saruhiko, whose red flame barely ever ran past his fingernails, who carries himself like he'd hate the world for touching him. Saruhiko, who isn't fair damage, and still— "It's fine," Yata bites out, to Saruhiko's lightless eyes and his slack, slouching distance, "when you were the one with the plans, right? But I go off for something and suddenly everything's gotta get run past you!"
"Because you're an idiot," Saruhiko mutters right back, brows taut and mouth in a fixed line. He says, "Maybe I'll leave him after all."
Yata stops.
He says, "What?"
"This sort of playing's getting boring. Clans, and squabbling," and the words spin on while the breath threads through Yata's lungs, each thin as if slashed open, all air sliding out. "... stupid little territory quarrels while we're in the dust scratching for crumbs of their power..." Saruhiko says. His features sharpen, sheer with scorn, a skull's empty sneer. "As if he really needs another fool joining the crowd around him for that."
"I don't care!" Yata bursts out, like it's the first time he's been able to break a thing in edgewise—and it's true, he's sick of the words, goddamn sick of Saruhiko posing like it doesn't matter, like it's all just a game somehow. "You can't leave him! Somebody's gotta look out while we—I'll come back for you," he blurts, and means it; there's nothing else on his tongue. "I'll come back—but you've gotta trust me."
"Who do you think you're telling that to?" Saruhiko says. The question cuts through the noise, slices it into nothing. "Haven't you forgotten him already? In the end, you can't serve more than one king."
Yata swallows the words hard enough that they stick in his throat like teeth. Holds down the bite of those too. Stays silent.
"See," Saruhiko tells the silence between them, gentle as a touch. He's nearly smiling—teeth catching against his lip and his eyes brimming pale. "Isn't this the real problem, Misaki? You don't mind change. But if anyone tries to make you grow up, if you have to face reality for more than a moment—anything like that, and you'd rather just cut out and run instead."
"Shut up!"
"Didn't you only leave because HOMRA got to be too much...? Just another petty little gang that won't take you anywhere. Aaa, but it'd be losing to admit that, wouldn't it? Knowing that your precious Mikoto-san didn't save anyone—he just took your hand once because you were standing in front of him."
It was never like that, he wants to say, and more—he wants to take the plan and fling it in Saruhiko's face. Wants to force him down and get him to see it, for once in his bespectacled life, something real that Yata knows and needs. There is no better king than Suoh Mikoto—isn't their record proof of that? The kind of man who could take a city big as Shizume and rock it to the foundations with the sound of his name in six years—who else could do something like that?
Who else could understand, but a girl standing at a window with ribbons in her hair and her rain-thin hands raised to the glass?
Blood in his teeth, in his arms, blood veining tight to his knuckles—and the crack of them across Saruhiko's silenced mouth would be sweet. Yata digs his hands into his thighs. "Shut up."
Another little muted pause. They haven't touched, not yet, and that's new too—that was never meant to be the way things stood between them. Bruises and insults and grudges and uncertainties, sure. But the earth could crack as long as they were standing on the same side of the crevice.
"Prove me wrong, then, Misaki," Saruhiko says—and it's like he can't look away somehow. Neither of them can. He extends a hand, thin as a skeleton's upturned welcome, and Yata can't do anything but stare. "Come back with me. You're the one who wanted to join in on these stupid games."
And that much is true. But if Yata has learned anything in the past three years, it's that truth matters only as much as the dirt it takes to cover it.
"I can't." and he's tired, he thinks, he's so damned tired, but he conjures the words anyway, ash and sparks dulling on his tongue. Feels the weight of the coat flatten out his shoulders, the press of it sinking against his spine. "Like I oughta bother, even. Talking that kinda shit... about Mikoto-san, about the clans. Nobody who really knew me'd start with that junk!"
There's something in it this time—Saruhiko goes silent at last. Yata thinks that maybe this time he can almost hear the world splintering, jagged, between them. He pulls himself up, straightens, dusts the grey from his blue coat and pulls the sleeves right, too. "Nothing to say to that, huh?" he says—tries to sound proud, because if he isn't, if he doesn't mean the words, then—
"Monkey," he adds, and parries the thought. "Not like you've left Mikoto-san yet either, right? 'Cause you know it too! That's the only place in the world that'd really take us." He turns. "Keh, I'm done. I've got drills."
Saruhiko's mumbling, saying something to his back—oddly colorless, voice drained. But Yata's already four steps ahead, eight and sixteen and running.
It's fact, seen and felt and known through the division, that no one can take the blue king's hand but Yata Misaki.
Mornings, however, are a world away from known things.
Old enough to take her crown is old enough to dress herself, but hair-tying is difficult at any age. Once upon a time, she'd liked the ribbon's weight when it hung, the velvet of it curving through her hair—but they hadn't been her habits to form and so she never pieced them together. In the end, as with everything else, prediction offered only a horizon: all the steps to its edge take her own heels and arches and toes.
Here she is, standing on the edge, and still she isn't alone.
Every morning he knocks at eight, to find her sitting at her chair before the window with two ribbons and a bow hung along the back. There is in this a ritual: the consecration of everyday objects. His steps noiseless across the floor, his coat crisp and dustless, his bow at a neat angle (undiscussed, if not unacknowledged), his fingers coming to curl into the curtain of her hair, good morning in a stretched whisper and the ribbons drawn like ink between them. She rests before his stand, head bowed and nape open to the daylight, and long practice gentles his touch as he tugs her pale hair back.
Later she will remember it as the day he answers; but it begins much more easily than that. His voice carries through the brush, bristles soft into the curve of her skull.
"You'll forgive me, I hope," says her favorite hairdresser, "if I have a question."
An answer is more convenient than tilting her head, which would waste his efforts. Anna says, "Yes."
Steadily the Strain works one sleep-knot from the ends of her hair, then another; it was a dreamless night. She lays her hands along the arms of the chair, and waits.
"Is he so worth saving?" he says.
She startles—feels it pull through her skin like a magnet drawing sparks and reels with questions. "How—"
"A simple deduction," he says. She tastes the lie on her tongue, then swallows it. Like a child offered rice. If he gathers gossip—well, the presence of a Strain in a clan which hunts them is an anomaly. Adults must look for advantages where they can. "Certain questions are often raised of a military division whose special forces are led by a girl so young. There was an incident a year ago where the gang known as HOMRA raided and wrecked a gold clansman's experiments with a promising young clairvoyant Strain." He stops—for her to give some sign, perhaps. That he's right; that he ought to discontinue. She doesn't. "But he didn't fail completely."
In the heart of her Strain, there lives the ugliest kind of faith: a sheer and terrible belief in all that they do. Our cause is pure—his heart runs to steel with the truth of it; the closest, she thinks, that he might ever come to love for anything.
She says, "I didn't want him to."
"So I see. But in exchange for your kingship, you've lost the ability to foresee."
"I don't need it. There's only one thing to do now."
"Staving off the future revealed in your final vision. And on the premise of saving a single man you took the bones of a Clan and turned them to your purpose..." The brush he lays aside at last, to furl a ribbon through where the bristles ran. Efficient and precise in gestures, and his voice unbetraying. "I can't say it wasn't neatly done."
The light sinks past her heels; she can nearly see the cast of his shadow, his reflection wavering in the bright glass. Seated, she can barely see the scrape of the horizon beneath the sky's blue stretch—the line of it gleams greenly unreal. "There was another world," she tells the lying distance. "I didn't have to be king."
"Oh?"
"The Strains," she says. "If the Slate connects to someone else when there are already seven kings, it rebounds. It changes them."
This is, perhaps, the first crack the blue king has ever felt in him: a brittleness in the turn of his hands, the bow pulled up too sharply. Her clansmen rarely take to great displays; like the worst of them, he only gives way to frost. (She imagines the cold riming his fingers, knuckle to nail, brutal as glass in shards.) He finishes the tying in silence, and Anna turns up her head—but his face is still, and set, reflecting no more than ice. Years ago, she might have seen through him.
Years ago, he would have never allowed them to touch.
Aloud he says, "Am I to take it that..."
But the words coil in the air and wither without end. He stands with his hands slack at his sides, straight in the presence of the girl-king, his commanding officer.
"Do you hate your power?" Anna asks.
Time passes in heartbeats; the silence rises, and she lets the count slip by. "In this," her Strain says at last, "I have to admit some good luck. I'm not certain what I would have done if it had come to me earlier. From what I gather, younger Strains don't always fare well. As for the other matter..." His mouth crooks up, slips in its wry line, then firms again. "It's long past the point of relevance, isn't it? I won't deny that there are things I want which may yet contradict the lesser aims of the division."
He looks at her, then. The light glances off the lenses, shields his eyes like ghosts clustering behind a wall. "Nevertheless," he says, softly, "it seems that my loyalties have already settled."
A hand reaches out, adjusts the bow before he allows his wrists to fall; she grips the back of the chair and kneels on the seat to follow his step turning away. "Reishi," says the blue king to his shadow. "Thank you."
At the door, he stops. "There was never," her clansman says, "any need for that."
Lunge. Feint. Parry. Riposte.
Each stride comes in sharp relief, carved by the raised lights strung along the courtyard. Step and step and point, the swing of the sword scything through the dark. Scepter 4 holds a strict curfew—nobody'd think of taking the courtyard after midnight.
Well, nobody else.
Yata lunges, sees his shadow follow the stroke and chases it, lashing across the ground in vicious flurries and invisible casts of raised fire. Anna's chosen her clansmen well—none of them are gonna draw on their own for anything less than an emergency, and so there's no record kept of their movements. Nobody ever has to know about Scepter 4's lieutenant practicing to hold up against his own troops but him.
It's a relief in some ways—the one point in the day where all goes still and sharp, all bright lights and clean edges the way the world had been once, back when he could ream fire through his fingertips and go into battle swinging, his skateboard wheels roaring with the sound of stone steps and scratched railings. And maybe—maybe, in truth, this much doesn't have to change: the part where he can fall away to a still part of the world, where nobody's going to ask him to think about the way his unit still slant their eyes at him around corners, or the weight of the ribbon streaming from his wrist, all of it trailing back to the day he'd found her behind the bar, sputtering prophecy and blue light. The downpour crashing on them in waves, and saltwater on his fingertips as he caught her cheek, or the flash of a king's blood seeping, red through the white—
He stops, panting, the warp of the air pressed through the net of his lungs, all heat, all stillness—thinks, almost crazily, about his phone. Just one more invisible lump buried at the bottom of the satchel he'd tossed to the fence when he'd stepped inside. There'd never been anybody much to call before—and even then. Not like there's much of a damn reason for it to buzz, to ring after, not after he opened the bar's belled door and stepped out in chimes, not after he'd knelt to a girl in a night-dark dress and asked for her mark.
Not after the first time he'd drawn the sword, and the broken slant of an old friend's mouth.
Here he stands, and that's all they need. A boy and his captain against the dark. Maybe they'll understand and maybe they won't. But it'll be enough, when it's done.
(Colorless and faint, an echo saying, it was never a place in the world that I needed.)
His heel marks a spin—Yata pushes forward and brings the sword down.
Riposte.
Elsewhere, the dunes at night: ash-heavy skies and poppies from dust.
She does not sleep but to dream, does not dream except of this. Her bleached sight, her strangled voice, the space sitting under her ribs. All her lost things.
And a palm's touch along her hair, and a low sigh.
"Enough." A man's exhale, steeled on smoke. "Rest already. Anna."
Ah, the blue king thinks.
Here they are.
end