To the Future
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Chapter 1: For Each Beginning, An End
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Sinking forevermore beneath the horizon, the sun slips away as the Earth prepares to tuck it to rest under an impending blanket of navy. Red-orange light shifts glimmer on the water, swaying gently on the still waves. The night air is pleasant, still warm from the recently passing sunny day, but already having taken on the cool chill of approaching night.
Calm and peaceful. Serene and perfect. The perfect moment to end a perfect day.
Until I hear her bittersweet cry rising on the wind, resonating in the still of the air.
"This is the end! I'm tired of waiting for you Yuusuke! Half my life I've waited for you to come around! Even when you were here, you weren't really! You weren't here for me! Go on fighting…" her voice, so steeped in the unspoken agony of the foregone years grows softer, "…but it's time I get what I want."
I watch as her once defiant figure draws into itself, her arms falling limply--lifelessly to her sides once more.
Somehow, I'm almost certain that the salty ocean breeze washing up towards me will soon be accompanied by another not-quite-as refreshing salted aroma.
I lower my gaze to the sand and look away from the distressed maiden respectfully. Amidst the sea of crimson spilling before my eyes, I see a cigarette butt drop to the earth, and a black boot coming down resoundingly atop it to put it out. In here own way, Shizuru paid her own sort of silent vigil to her friend.
Although the words themselves hadn't come from her lips directly, we all knew what she really meant. For three years--a long three years--she stood aside placidly, watching with unquestioning compliance as the world went on without her. People grew into their new lives and into their new roles in High School. People grew up and apart, changing their own friends and standards by the day. Falling into love and just as surely falling out of it.
As blunt as the description of coming of age and into your own may sound, it's the nicest way to put it. After all there must always come a time when we realize no good can come of staying in the past.
Expectations change. Circumstances change. People change….
Emotions change…
And she hadn't let it happen as it was naturally supposed to have done. All because of a single promise, that now, after so long, seemed to be unraveling right before her very eyes.
I don't suppose any of us had really expected her to stay true to her word. Not because she was disloyal, no, but because we all knew who had made her the promise.
"You know Kurama, I'm surprised Keiko hasn't gotten fed up with him and left him yet." Kuwabara had told me that earlier this very day, and I must say I see his point.
Yuusuke is a good person; I shan't discredit him by saying less, because he really isn't bad. He just needs to learn to get his priorities straight. And, I don't think he has. For as long as he and Keiko have been friends, which to my knowledge stretches the better part of the last decade and a half, she should be the first and foremost on his list.
But, she isn't.
And perhaps that's why my heart goes out to her on this forsaken eve.
"I don't want you to wait either." The all-at-once familiar and unfamiliar voice draws me from my reprieve and I glance up in the direction of the shore. "See? You don't have to."
The next scene is a blur to me. Keiko looks on disbelieving before running the stretch of shore that separated them and leaping with complete abandon into his arms causing him to overbalance, and sending them both tumbling to the sand. For a moment their eyes lock and in an act of blazing defiance she grabs the scruff of his jacket and kisses him with what I might be mistaking for furious passion.
Then, as if to protest their coming together, a giant, thundering wave sweeps over both of them, draping them in a curtain of seawater. As the tide flows back, both of them are sitting upright, drenched to the skin, baring the most curious expressions on their faces.
I can't help but chuckle slightly in spite of the circumstance, and neither can Shizuru apparently.
From that moment, things took on a flow of normalcy their lives had possessed at a time before the Reikai Tantei had been assembled three years prior. The two of them were able to act freely for the first time in ages, and of course Kuwabara and Botan made no hesitancy in jumping in as well.
As childish and trivial as their little water war was, somehow I couldn't help but envy them as I watched from behind the far shadows that had enveloped the hill where Shizuru and I stood. They were together again, against even the slimmest of odds, and were free to be themselves once more. No stringent school codes to bind them. No quests to undertake to save the world--any of the four of them--on a moment's notice. Nothing standing in the way of them being themselves and returning for a brief glimmer of a moment to the life which they once had, and yet could never fully retrieve from the past.
They could relive the past and commence to the future. Could continue to move within the flow of time. Whereas I could not.
It seems that even though a promise had been kept today, another had been lost to a lie. One that I wasn't even sure of why I had said it in the first place.
Watching my companions act with such carefree abandon in the wake of the new beginnings that awaited them, my heart clenched in pain and unspoken anger.
"Hiei, I value our friendship and all that we've been through, but I'm not interested in you that way."
Even now I'm not sure why I lied. I don't know why I spoke those words to him. Perhaps because I knew given the situation it wouldn't have been appropriate to say the words I truly meant, or perhaps because I felt it was morally and socially frowned upon. There again are those stringent, binding codes to which we must unfairly adhere, even when we must go against what our very hearts know.
Or maybe I was just afraid.
Either way, it didn't matter. The fact remained that I had indeed lied, and nothing could be done to change that.
Why, I wondered, why of all the countless lies I've told in my life… why must this one, of them all, come back to hurt me now?"
I feel a hand close gently on my shoulder and glance around to see Shizuru standing and looking at me with a soft-spoken understanding in her soft hazel eyes. As though she knows what was running through my mind.
"Don't worry Kurama, he'll come back. Maybe he'll come around. Just stay strong, hm?"
I smiled thinly, trying to make it seem genuine, or at least slightly less forced "yes, you're right."
Bet even as I said it my spirits hung low.
For every new beginning after all, there is only another end.
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