His bones are porcelain, as delicate and as finely-made. They are not his own but made from the ground bones of his enemies, his brothers, his mother and his father, his loves and his hopes and his dreams. They are hollow as bird bones, but his wings are flightless.
Master Shuu puts flowers in the vases of his bones, in the flutes of his skeleton. But the blossoms drown in blood and the ivy that climbs the rack of his ribs strangles his spine. He is a sleeping princess in a high, bramble-choked tower, but he has cut the length of his own gleaming gold hair. How, now, does he ask the prince for help? He has no silken skeins to make into a ladder to throw down to the ground. He is an inviolable, voiceless songbird. He must face the witch and the dragon and the curse by himself, and save the family that died so he could live.
And then what? And then what? He wants a happily ever after, but the prince will have left the tower by then. The prince will have found another princess by then, one with her own solid bones and rosebuds on her breasts and wide, clear eyes with no lies in them whatsoever.
He will sit in a new glass tower and pull the porcelain bones from his body, some to throw and some to break, if only to have a window in the frosted glass. If only to view the world outside as shadows in a mirror, where lilies and roses grow together in muddy trenches. And then when he perishes, maybe they will put him in a boat with the flowers on the outside of his bones, and if he floats down the river past the prince's castle, Master Shuu will say,
'She has a lovely face.'
A/N: wrote this on a whim, and because Kanae is beautiful. this might become a collection of ficlets who knows