Chains
There is a missing link. There has always been a missing link.
Unlike his two brothers, Nigredo has no anchor. They are tempered fury contained by accident into two separate bodies; hanshin of rage that periodically flare with the unison they need sometimes, even if it is only in the language of fists. His lips purse whenever he considers the two of them, like the core of a world. Rubedo is pure blood-crimson heat, the one who destroys yet unites others, as metals are fused in the forge; Albedo the white heart-fire burning so intensely at the center that it has grown cold. They belong to each other. They belong. Not so, him.
666. 667. 669. Like a missing star in a familiar constellation; a skipped heartbeat in a human's life. He had thought for the longest time that the missing one had been a mistake, and anomaly perhaps - termination? No. He should have remembered that here, the mistakes are kept and urged to grow, if only for more data to add to the successes.
The girl - he will not think of her as sister - is alien to him, wrong, the contours of her mind too strange for his. She is lightningspark to his night-cat thoughts, like the breath of something hot and alien and utterly deadly just brushing, enough for him to know she is there...and that is already too much. He will not know her as he might have known the one who should be her; the nameless child of the bright golden hair who could have been more than a dream long before Nigredo himself was born/made.
That one would have been as close to him as he is to himself, yet somehow endangered them all with his brilliance, he knows without asking why. Even if that is truer that anything Nigredo still regrets when he sees the not-quite-true 668, different and distant with her hair like a dying sun. Not fair. No other possible way, but. But.
Because "might" will never "be," he is as shadows to the bright fire of his brothers instead, and it is almost enough.
A/N: 350 words. Hanshin "other half." You have no idea how unnerving it was to find out that 668 was female...
