This time it's an Akito/Shigure fic. Contains MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR spoilers for volume 17. If you're following the English release of the manga and don't want a major spoiler to be revealed, thus ruining the series for you, stop reading NOW. Anyway... other than that, please read! And review! Yes, review! sweatdrop
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Chapter 1: My Darkness
I always hated the darkness. It reminded me of how alone I really was.
She leaned out of the window, feeling the brush of the crisp autumn air against her face. It was a beautiful feeling,
the cold. It made her feel alive.
She heard the faint sounds of laughter from somewhere in the gardens. Suddenly angered, she whirled around, spying Haru and Momiji taking a walk in the gardens, talking and laughing. She gripped the windowsill angrily and scowled in the direction of the two juunishi. How dare they? How dare they laugh... how dare they be so happy, when she was stuck here,
trapped in this miserable existence, in this room... She hated this room. But she loved it all the same. It was her prison and her sanctuary. Her room. Her life...
"Akito-san?"
She whirled around, rage blazing in her eyes. How dare this insolent persion interrupt her--?
She opened her mouth to shout at the intruder, but found herself mysteriously robbed of her voice when she saw who had so ungraciously entered her room.
What was that look in his eyes? Was that pity? Or was it something else...?
Something about it made it even angrier.
Recovering her voice, she advanced on him. "How dare you?" she shouted. He made a sound that vagely resembled the squeak of a dying mouse. "Get out!" she screamed. "Get out!" He backed away slowly, the emotion in his eyes growing stronger, joined by another one. Fear? Was he afraid of her? She hoped so. All the juunishi should be afraid of her. After all, she was God. They were merely mortal. Worthless.
He stopped at the door, pleading with her silently with those pathetic eyes of his. What was wrong with him? It made her sick, all of a sudden.
"Get out," she hissed, venom in her voice and on her face. He sighed.
In a fit of rage, she grabbed a vase from a small table near the door and flung it at him. He fled, and the vase crashed against the wall, sending water, glass, and rose petals flying about the room.
She collapsed, the anger leaving her in a flood as violent as the one it had come in. As she sat there, shaking, on the floor, she noticed the vivid petals littering the previously immaculate tatami mats in the room. They looked like blood.
An evil light creeping into her eyes, she reached for one of the shards of glass and pressed it into her hand, watching with detached interest as her blood dripped onto the floor, the glass, the petals, staining it, ruining it, marking it as hers. The pain felt good, crisp, like the autumn air. It didn't hurt. Why should it? In her short life she had known more than her share of physical pain. It made it all the more easy to inflict it on others, on those arrogant mortals who dared defy the power of God.
"I am God," she murmured in a frenzied whisper, as she traced the cut in her right hand with the fingers of her left. "I am God... I am supreme..." she dug her finger deeper into the wound, smothering it in blood. "No mortals dare defy me..." she ran the bloody finger down the tatami, making a straight line. "The ones who dare will feel my wrath..."
Another line.
"I will always rule above them."
And another.
"I..."
Another line.
"...am..."
Another.
"...God."
Another line.
She admired her bloody masterpiece.
"Death," she whispered. "That is the punishment for defying God..."
Standing in the hall outside of Akito's room, Shigure looked down at the small box in his hands. What had he been thinking? What had he been feeling? Why had he thought that...
He had only wanted her to listen.
He sighed, then turned away.