There's something about winter that makes it uneasy to stand still for too long. The cold is bitter and it chaps his lips, which don't seem to moisten no matter how many times he licks them. The snow melts under his fingertips, blackened earth exposing the deep scars of its history to him while he traces the same path over and over. This is what it must be like to be stuck in limbo between two extraordinary states of being. Rather, this is how it must feel to be Haruto, so broken beneath a soft surface that so easily melts away.
Fire stirs in the torches. Kaito relaxes his hand.
It's time for the new year to begin and nothing had changed since the year before or the one before that. There's no pause to the endless monotone of his life and yet somewhere in the lessons and the nights spent at Haruto's bedside there's a brief period of time in which he feels wild and free from the golden rings on his fingers and it's in that time there is something more than this.
Tall ships skim the horizon and a violet sky breaks into red to touch the false ships and turn them to trees with the first light of dawn.
His future stares back at him though he doesn't see it. He feels it - sense the way the wind moves and wonders how much longer he can keep up his mask before the courts.
Dawn has broken.
Yet there is no joy at a new day.