Author's Note: Remix of my twoshot series "v o i c e s". I was rereading Tsubasa and checking out their TVTropes page and I found out that I sorta left out an important part of Ashura's insanity. Thus, I raged at myself, set to work, and wrote and rewrote my arse off. At one in the morning. This is the result of my deranged Ashura-rampage: mAelSTROM.
Please review and tell me what you thought. Flames accepted. :)
Warning: I was confusing myself while writing this. So, if I tend to repeat things, deviate from YOUR deconstruction of Ashura's mindset, or have screwed up altogether, I'm terribly sorry.
Ashura-ou and Fai(Yui) D. Fluorite are the property of CLAMP and possibly multiple fangirls. :)
-[One]-
His first words to the mirror every morning are I am truly a despicable monster.
Ashura-ou smoothes black tresses into the odd diadem he wears, adjusts his face into a calm and gentle smile, and fixes his robes just so. It's an almost-religious ritual; he must be at his very best whenever he goes to meet what will soon become his greatest sin.
Sometimes the trust he sees in that child's blue eyes breaks him, even farther down than he has already gone. The benevolent wizardking tries to make up for this and puts the child on a crystal throne next to his. Together they oversee a frozen wonderland of magic and bloodshed.
The wizardking cannot blindfold the child, but it's not for lack of trying.
The child is swathed in a heavy shroud of black-blue curses and shimmering with bright violet power, unsurpassable, perhaps the greatest wizard this realm has never known. He carries a world in small white hands and too many years in clouded blue eyes. The child hasn't smiled yet, but unlike many other things, Ashura hasn't given up on that.
The day begins with a simple greeting, a forced politeness on the king's part and a scared, wild silence on the child's. There is an unneeded array of the land's culinary finest, and Ashura fills his senses with illusions of rotting bread that some of the peasants force down. He glances at the child picking at his food uneasily and tries not to imagine an identical corpse.
"Well then, let's practice our glyphs, shall we?"
The child sits with a gray slab of concrete that almost seems to flicker in and out of sight balanced in front of him, painstakingly copying the etched lines on stone onto parchment. Ashura shifts his gaze from the adorable image presented to him to the bloodstained castles burning and crumbling into dust painted inside his eyelids. The voices that scream Save the child! Your demons will kill him! have been trying to give him incentive lately.
Incentive. How cruel they are.
The time for the enchantment hiding behind his fingertips to emerge tiptoes closer, loud, echoing footsteps that only he can hear. Carefully timed, a precise measure: one, two, three, four, five seconds to the deconstruction of his world and his country. He can hear his heartbeat falling within its rhythm, he can hear Fai(Yui)'s steps following in its path.
He presses his fingers into sharp fists, drawing blood. Better his blood than the blood of some innocent. It's a consolation that he knows his blood will be on good hands.