Summary: Poirot SS Competition #1: He has to destroy her, but to do that, he has to say her name. He doesn't know what it is, until he realizes that he has all along.

GA: I wrote this...rather quickly. I'm not quite sure why I decided to go this route myself, but I thought that the personification of Hope would be an interesting topic to dabble in.

Anyways, enjoy!


SAY MY NAME


She lived inside Pandora. She was the one that gave it life, that gave it the ability to give life. She was red hair and porcelain skin and beauty, all wrapped into one, and yet she wasn't at the same time.

She gave him nine guesses in three nights - "How very Rumpelstiltskin of you." - to tell her the name that was given to her. Three days to figure out her identity and kill her with her name on his lips. He thought it wasn't fair, seeing as how there were millions of names in the world and that he didn't have the time or the resources to discover the one especially picked out for her, that it would take a miracle for that to happen.

She then laughed in his face and reminded him that it was he himself who claimed that he could make miracles happen.

The first night, she began to shapeshift, and he wasted his first guess on Kaa-san as Kuroba Chikage replaced the figure of the woman living inside Pandora. She counted it against him, and he fumed but refused to be too ruffled by it. He needed to focus, to find something, anything that could possibly be useful in knowing who she was. His next two guesses were slightly more valiant, but Ruby and Pandora were both still incorrect.

The second night, she took the form of Nakamori Aoko. He wasn't fazed by her display, however, and took a steady breath to calm himself. He had done more research, had a few more names to tell her, but the way she flickered between her form and that of his best friend - prospective girlfriend - unnerved him, made him think, somewhere in the base of his mind, that it was obvious. That he was missing so much. His first guess that night was Eve, a simple name of Christian descent. Again, he was incorrect. Soatsaki was his second, a lesser known tale that ran along the same vein as that of Pandora. She laughed at him, said he was complicating the matter, and let him take his final chance of that night. Alice was proven wrong, as well.

And yet, despite the futility of the hunt for her name, he knew that he would find it. Because he could feel close to the answer. He just needed a little bit of...

That third night, he came in with a bright smirk, dazzling in the moonlight. She took her final form, one that he suspected she would. Because if there was anybody in his life who could make him feel as insignificant as he did, it was his own father. With Kuroba Toichi staring down at him, he delivered his verdict.

"You lied," He spoke calmly, clearly, "when you said that your name wasn't kaa-san. Because to me, that's who you are. You are my mother, you are my best friend, you are my father." And when she looked at him, there was none of the usual arrogance in her expression, just a mischevious smile. And he knew, and she knew that he knew, that her time was up.

Even before he felt her name on his tongue, she had disintegrated into red dust, no longer the immortal gem that she had once been. In his hand laid a red stone with no more luster, no more shine or gleam, and yet it was the most beautiful thing in the world to him, because it had housed the woman named after the only thing that had kept him from giving up.

"Hope."


Not much to say this time. Hope you enjoyed it. 'Til next time!

~G. Annihilator