Slight content warnings for Grimm fairytale violence and metaphors. By the way, did you know? it's Friday the 13th... c':
Thanks to emm [emmelinamarch at tumblr] for beta'ing!
Also, AO3/tumblr crosspost versions don't have paragraphs of italics. The link to the Rarepair Valentines masterpost can be found on my profile, if you'd rather not read them.
Rarepair Valentines 2015
[ Friday, February 13th ; Fic 4 of 5 ]
Once upon a time, there was a little girl with a heart of stone, veins made of glass and flesh made of sand. "Terrible!", her parents called her, because a child with no beating heart could not be called a child, nor could they live amongst the ranks of those with flushed-pink cheeks and blood in their bodies. And then they made plans to rid of her post-haste in secret, for none could know they'd created such a creature. So they went to the rushing river at the edge of town, bound her in fabric, and threw her in.
The girl was carried by the rapids for days on end. Sunrise turned to sunset and then to sunrise again. But then it happened that a knight in armour coal-black was riding by the river, and saw the little girl carried down the stream. The knight was aghast with desperate shock and ice-cold dismay, swept down in pursuit, and it was in the misty twilit-day before the night that he managed to pull her ashore.
"Who are you?" the knight asked her, seeking her name, but she shook her head and refused to reply.
It was then that the knight realised how imposing his armour would have hulked, so he undid the straps one by one, cast it to the ground, and pulled off his helm to reveal the most startling blue gaze beneath rough-tousled hair.
Instantly the two fell in love; she, her handsome saviour, and he, the light refracted off amethyst-glass eyes.
"Hajime's going to be here in three minutes," comments Honey, from her seat at the café's counter. "Nice, you're not going to be done with that match until two minutes after she gets here."
Birthday grins. "You heard her, Nice. So, do you resign?"
"Never," grits Nice, and picks his target.
Birthday's rather painful Mr. Lemon dance moves and attempts to draw him into conversation aren't particularly distracting. But for some reason, thoughts about Hajime are distracting enough that his wrist shivers as he pulls out the Jenga block, and the entire tower almost comes crashing down.
The moment of weakness isn't missed. In fact, ever since Art's release, because Nice's competence is continuously betrayed by his thoughts of Hajime, the morning games with Birthday have all but become tradition.
Birthday leers and wiggles his eyebrows.
"Oooh, so close. But now, it's Birthday's turn," he says. "Honey, keep up the updates about Hajime's position!"
"I'm not doing this for you," Honey shoots back. "I just happen to like watching them together. Oho—get you! As expected, Hajime went and spilled the jam on her toast onto her fingers. She's really in a hurry."
And then Hajime would switch the toast to her other hand in order to lick off the jam, rather than finishing the toast and licking it off then, which means she'd end up dripping jam onto her other hand...
When Honey comments on his expression, Nice curses his hormones and buries his face in his arms.
Thank god it's still Birthday's turn.
And so the girl grew under the knight's ardent care. She found him charming, compassionate, chivalrous and always eager to serve. Not once did he turn sour over her strangeness, and not once did he ever demand her speak whenever the sand in her mouth began to melt and she could not speak any more until dawn. Together they painted colours in the sky, great streaks of bright vibrant happiness after the rain, and the girl never again thought of those wretched people who called themselves her parents nor of that rushing river.
Until one day, when the knight had to depart so that he may meet his liege. That day, the girl heard the whispering water. Bidden by its magic spell, she stumbled through thick trees and brambly bushes, but when she arrived she was not alone.
In the middle of the river sat a young boy atop a large rock, surrounded by waves of white crescent-foam licking at his feet. He heard the girl's footsteps and looked to her, and the girl became entranced by the stars dancing off fingertips most skillful. Her stone-heart beat – his gold-heart glowed; one most worthless and one most worthful greeting one another, recognising their kin.
The boy extended a hand and invited her to join him, and the girl did. She slightly stumbled while making her way to the large rock in the centre of the river, and the tips of her toes almost washed away, but with willpower the girl managed to succeed. And the boy congratulated her with the most dazzling of smiles before telling her stories about the universe and distant cities called galaxies, while weaving between his hands a mystically magnificent star-tipped daisy crown.
"For you," he said, gaze earnest and gold.
When the girl put on the crown, a surge of stars rained. Empty glass veins filled with fine stardust tears. A cut on the girl's foot began to bleed shimmering starlight until she touched a finger to the sandy skin – and the cut was closed and everything was healed. The girl turned around, wanting to thank the boy for letting her see life, but only one person was on that rock.
The skillful boy was gone.
After the girl blinked, she forgot everything except for his stars.
Hajime's taken to sleeping on Nice's chest, ear resting atop his heart, when Nice doesn't have any jobs and Hajime doesn't have anything to do. They often occupy one of the café's padded chairs, so Nice can slouch downwards and Hajime can curl up on his side.
"So cute," mumbles Koneko between her fingers as she passes by.
Hajime stirs. As if she were responsible, Nice sends Koneko his best death glare. But instead of flinching, Koneko's admiration only intensifies, and Nice's intuition points him toward the conclusion that he's being adorably overprotective.
He sighs.
Of course, that's when Birthday decides to slide up to him. Nice isn't sure when he'd become the newest target for Birthday's and Honey's teasing. But Birthday's chosen his timing well, because Nice can't sock him or use his Minimum for fear of disturbing Hajime.
"You two slept together yet?" asks Birthday.
Nice twitches.
"Want me to tell Ratio about the time you were in his 'sexy-sexy' car, put your feet up behind his steering wheel, and then—"
"Whoa, whoa!" Birthday glances around for anybody within earshot. "That's low, Nice! That's really low!"
"Then don't ask me about my sex life, you fuck."
"Duly noted. I'll never talk to PIs ever again. Wait, how did you find about that anyway?"
Day after day the girl returned to the river, wanting to see the star-boy again. "Who am I?" she thought endlessly. "Who are you?" Why did she have no memories beyond his existence, and why did she melt if the sun was too hot or if she came into contact with too much water? The girl desired to know.
But one day she was not careful, slipped against rocks, and fell into the river.
To her surprise, she did not wash away. Rather, she was surrounded by a world of black and white squares. They hovered like hundreds of little doors, and above them further still was a throne of vines and red roses. And inside the throne sat a queen in a dress made of blood.
"Who..." began the girl.
In response, the red queen laughed twinklingly and hummed, "Me? I am nobody. It is you which you should be asking."
The red queen rose to her feet. She took a step forward, then a square materialised beneath her sharp red stilettos, again and again to form a path until she stood before the little girl. And the red queen wrapped her long, poisonous fingers around the little girl's jaw before lifting her head so far that it nearly popped away.
The red queen's eyes were rubies. In those rubies the girl saw her amethyst-truth crystal-eyes – and then they became the very same rubies the red queen owned.
"You, girl, you think you are most-innocent?" sung the red queen. "Know well this: that you are a witch. You are the greatest witch of them all!"
Koneko turns up one day dressed in black. It's the same day that Nice drops a case for the first time and runs to Café Nowhere, after being unable to reach Hajime's phone.
"Hajime broke all our mirrors," Koneko tells him, before explaining. Glass had rained on Koneko's normal clothes, and they're in the process of being cleaned completely. Ratio wants x-rays done on Hajime's hands to make sure there are no shards left. "It's not surprising you can't call her. She broke her phone last night, too."
Nice blinks. "That's so unlucky." A mourning black cat and broken mirrors all in the same day? "I wonder what reason she had."
The pieces click together. Nice frowns. There's no way that Hajime, stubborn Hajime, can be scared of reflections and imagination.
The little girl screamed and pushed the red queen. "Go away, go away!"
To her bidding, the stars in her veins hummed. Then the air around her became water, and the water formed a rushing whirlpool which uprooted the red queen's throne. The red queen was picked up, her eyes became green, then she turned smaller and smaller before being flushed away.
After casting all these commands, the girl fell unconscious. When she woke up, she found she'd been washed into a town unfamiliar, and set about to explore.
That town was the town of Memory.
She passed strange houses – squatted and round and tall and those that looked like they were going to fall. She passed strange shops, and strange people; a man in purple instructing a child to pick one, only one. The child looked at the display and said, "but sir, I like apples and oranges and chestnuts and watermelons. If I can't have all of them, I would rather take this blade to my neck and go away with none."
"No, no," insisted the man. "There will be no blades here. You must pick one."
Then the little girl grew lonely and wanted to go home.
But home? Where was this 'home'?
The little girl remembered painting colours with a knight and a loving gaze.
The little girl dreamt of stars, the universe, and distant galaxies.
How could she have two homes, so far away from each other? The purple man was right. She had to pick one.
"Thank you very much!"
Nice looks up. There's a brown-haired kid in the store, bowing to Murasaki, and it's not a kid he recognises immediately.
But Murasaki does.
An eyebrow is raised behind his coffee. "They've forgiven you for leading them on?"
The kid nods eagerly. A sparkle appears in his eye, and that's when Nice finally places him: Hikaru, bearer of the Light Minimum. The case Murasaki and Hajime had taken when Nice revealed his existence in the Toranker gear.
"Yes! But Mio still teases me about it sometimes, good grief." His grin is the opposite of any irritation his words convey. "I realise now... I really do owe you a lot, so I wanted to make sure I thanked you properly. Thank you!"
Mio would be his girlfriend then, thinks Nice. For a moment, he wonders about the yare~yare; is it a verbal tic that Hikaru possessed all along? Or is it an invention by Hikaru's former producer as Nice had assumed, and Hikaru still can't let go of that image after all?
Nice decides he doesn't care. He never really grows interested in the same clients that Murasaki or Hajime do.
Hajime'd gone out earlier.
Nice stops paying attention to what is Murasaki's life and goes back to waiting for Hajime's return.
When the little girl ran to the riverbank, what greeted her was not its rushing rapids but a still, ugly, swampy green decay. It smelt of pungent rot, and death, and stepping into it delivered slime oozing between her toes.
She'd walked into the dying water because the rock that the star-boy had sat on was gone.
Hajime says the wrong name.
It's the first time that Nice has wanted to rip out his intuition and feed it to the flames.
The rock was gone, whittled away by once-rushing waters to join the pebble-encrusted floor. The little girl cried in wretched despair, and turned every pebble over one by one in search of the stone that she and the star-boy had shared. So swept up was she, she didn't notice the knight had been waiting by the river until he woke from his sleep and called her.
Briefly, the little girl paused, and then she hitched up her long shirt and began gathering pebbles into that cloth nest.
"I must collect all these stones!" she shrieked.
The knight was confused. "But why? You had so much fun painting colours with me. I have left my liege. We can go to the mountains together, explore the world, leave this place behind. Why are you so interested in these pebbles where I found you?"
"There is a star in the river here," said the little girl. "There is a star that can make my cold heart shine."
After Nice goes out to clear his thoughts, his feet lead him to Art's old apartment. He stares at the worn building for so long that chilly air cuts through his skin and seeps deep within his bones. At one point, he stumbles, and would have fallen to the ground if there hadn't been an echo of his name behind him.
"Nice!"
Who is it? he thinks.
Art is there, says his senses.
His intuition adds: Judging by the angle at which he is carrying you, Art is injured.
Nice blinks, returns to the world, and finds himself being slid over Art's shoulders. Art is limping.
"Art!" he says. "Stop, you're—"
Art looks to Nice softly. "Finally awake, are we?"
"I can walk."
To prove it, Nice pulls himself out of Art's grip and does, if slightly shakily. His legs scream at him; he'd been standing for too long. How long? Too long.
"What happened? Why are you here?" says Nice.
"Myself? I was just on a walk." Art glances down to his own leg and gives half a shrug. "And this... merely a small bicycle accident."
Whose bicycle? says Nice's intuition, pinpointing what Art is hiding with terrifying accuracy.
Shut up.
His intuition doesn't recognise the command. Press him.
Nice ignores it and gestures to the building. "A walk? Here?"
Art turns and stares at the window of his old apartment. Nice has no doubt that he's seeing bullet holes and bloodstains. His blood. Freemum, nearly killing Murasaki, the Revival Minimum.
"They are memories I have to accept," says Art, simply. "There is a lot to be discovered about oneself in solitary. It will be a long path before I am truly able to make amends."
Nice thinks: You shouldn't have to.
"How are you, Nice?" And the topic shifts. "How is Hajime?"
"Hajime is... happy."
"And you?" says Art, eerily perceptive. He's changed.
Nice suppresses a tremor.
They've both changed.
One less emotional and one more.
"Same as usual," is the reply.
Art glances at him and knows he's lying. A silence falls between them, and where Art is cool, calm, serene, Nice can't stop fidgeting. Fuck. Nice has been around Birthday for so long that he's turning into him. He's never going to interact with Birthday again.
Nice isn't sure when he says it, but he knows he says it anyway: "Hajime's in love with Skill."
Art blinks once.
"I see," he says, then turns to Nice in that infuriatingly calm manner. "Want to get pancakes?"
Nice expects it, somehow. Sugar. No matter how much Art changes, it's always sugar.
A laugh bubbles into a hiccuping sob, and that's when Nice knows he's more than fallen.
What happened to the stone-cold stare that put Murasaki's best to shame?
How pathetic.
"Pancakes sounds good."
Pancakes are several blocks down. They never make it that far. Nice has to sit down, and the first seat they pass belongs to a local playground. By the time Art takes a seat next to him, Nice has already tuned out the sounds of children laughing around them. Ignoring his intuition proves harder, but even his intuition cannot operate if he begins shutting his senses away.
Nice exhales.
"How did you do it?" he asks.
"I'm afraid you'll need to be more specific."
"How did you cope?" Nice slams a hand into his chest to clear the buildup in his throat. "After all your work, Skill just appearing and taking everything away..."
"I killed myself."
Nice actually manages a laugh this time. It's faintly hysterical.
"I'm not stupid enough to think Hajime will survive if I take away both people she cares for," he says.
"I did."
"Yeah, you were a selfish prick. But Skill saved you anyway."
Art's wistful smile can barely be seen from the corner of Nice's eye. "I still don't know if I'm thankful for such intervention."
Another silence introduces itself: Hello, I am everything you hate about the world, but I'm really everything you hate about yourself. Hell is other people? Don't make me laugh. Hell is your own misery.
Nice looks up to the sky, and sees nothing.
"I hate it," he comments.
Art tilts his head back and joins him. "Watching you like this, she would be amused."
Nice's intuition cycles through infinite possibilities without being asked.
"You know who I'm talking about, don't you?" continues Art.
"Yeah." Momoka. "I wondered if you ever cared about her."
"She influenced me more than I like to admit," says Art. "Her, and her way of thinking. She had very few confidants yet found me interesting enough to become one. Are you going to let her win?"
"Who cares?"
"The Nice I know would."
When Art turns back to Nice, there's a blankness in his gaze. It's one which Nice often finds him trying to hide, and Nice wonders if Art has ever truly been released from prison.
"Even in this state," says Art, "the Nice I know would have realised what's keeping me going by now."
It's an invitation. But there's something dirty about being invited to read him. Nice can't quite place it (you're scared), and he hesitates. In this moment, Art is entirely open. It's not a Nice trying to figure out the Superintendent's private mindset with the scraps of clues, but a Nice bade to study a friend that's exposed and making no attempts to hide the secrets within.
You're scared you're going to see something you don't want to see, says Nice's intuition. Without scorn, without emotion, simply nothing but the most divine of machines too advanced for human comprehension. Like with Hajime.
Shut the fuck up.
Open your senses, is the reply. Take a closer look at him.
Shame it's harder to make quiet a part of him than it is to make Birthday.
But Nice looks. Art says nothing, simply meets his eyes without shame. Art's grown used to such naked scrutiny. Speaks of everything that's happened to him since his fall.
Yet there's still a trust, there. Nice chooses to believe in it. He takes a deep breath, and then releases his hold.
All the tiny little fragments of the universe line themselves up.
An eternity passes in an instant.
"You..." says Nice.
Art closes his eyes. "Tell me."
"...You believe in him. In Skill. Because you can't believe in yourself."
Art's breathing briefly hitches. Nice is right.
Nice's intuition gives no surprise.
"Exactly," says Art. "What else is there to believe beyond Skill's happiness and the hope that, someday, I can reach that happiness on my own?"
His words are rhetorical and expect no answer.
In the little girl's grief, she never noticed the knight rolling up his leggings before emptying one of his packs, and didn't notice when the knight joined her side. The two collected the pebbles until the little girl collapsed from all their weight, and the knight was so concerned for her that he did not think twice about throwing the pebbles away so that he may carry her back to shore.
When the little girl woke, and found all the pebbles gone, she cried so loudly to the skies that all the birds fled from the nearby trees. The knight was by her side in an instant, and the little girl asked him again and again where the pebbles had fallen, but he could not help her.
And then the little girl remembered that the star-boy had given her the gift of stardust which filled her glass veins. So she asked the knight, "Would you have a box?"
"A box?" echoed the knight.
"A box with which I can put my precious thing in."
The knight had been given his helm and a chest by his former liege, and so he hurried over to where he'd put the chest, unlocked the lid, and emptied its contents of gold and coins by the side of the river. And he offered it to the girl with the key, saying, "Here is a chest," wondering if it would suffice, for he needed no money nor gold nor jewels so long as she would have him.
Nice returns to Café Nowhere, gaze distant and emotions asunder.
She's there at the counter, but she isn't eating. When he enters, her eyes fill with the light of planets reflected from the sun that is his heart. The sun that's Skill's heart. She's been waiting for Nice to return.
Hajime's been waiting for Skill to return.
But she doesn't run to him, not like she used to. Hajime's eyes hover nervously over Nice's features, and Nice's intuition knows why. She remembers the mistake she'd made calling Skill's name.
For a brief instant, Nice wonders what life would be like without his intuition. So many things would change. Dozens of people he wouldn't have met had he been boring and normal. Moral wouldn't have been interested in him.
Then he wouldn't have Skill's heart – and without Skill, he would be dead.
Slowly, Nice extends his arms. When Hajime brightens and jumps into them, he can almost pretend that everything is the same as it used to be.
"Did you have a fight?" asks Koneko, wiping a glass down behind the counter. She continues, giving no time for a reply. "I'm so glad you made up with each other—hey, Nice, you're crying! Do you want a tea-towel?"
Nice looks down at Hajime, her ear rested against his chest, her upturned lips and her closed-smiling eyes.
"No," he answers, tasting salt in his mouth. "I'm happy for them."
If Skill taught him anything in his near-death experience, it would be the negotiation of Ego. Whatever link Hajime has with Skill would be confined to both their Ego alone.
And that is all.
The little girl took the chest and the key and then asked for a knife.
"A knife?" echoed the knight.
"A knife with which I can take my precious thing out."
And the knight unbuckled the knife on his belt before handing it to her, for he didn't think she was ill enough to be untrustworthy. Hardly did she hold it within her hands when she cut open her wrists – one, two – and began emptying the star-boy's stars from her body and into that chest, thinking, "it will be alright. It will be alright. I lived without these stars until I met the star-boy."
But it was not alright, because her body had grown so used to having stardust in those glass veins. So the little girl was surprised when she began to melt, melt into sand, with no more magic left to sustain her little-girl form.
She closed her eyes, resigning herself to her fate, since she was so happy enough to once again see the stars that anything else did not matter.
Then her veins filled up with colour.
The knight gave the little girl his colour, all the same colours that he and she had painted together. He gave the little girl his colour, and she reformed, but he had given her so much that he no longer had any left. His body turned white, his skin, his hair. Then the colourless knight put on his helm so that nobody would see his colourless face ever again.
A click, the chest was locked, and the girl held it close to her cold stone-heart.
The little girl dreamt of stars, the universe, and distant galaxies.
"I will build a ship to Andromeda," thought the girl. "I will find the star-boy, and we will explore the star-seas together."
The colourless knight, sensing her resolve, knelt down and pledged his eternal fealty.
/FIN/
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