I'm not dead! Though probably it'll be a long time before I'm really posting consistently again, due to real life. But I'm trying to write things that I can post at all.
And with that, a little Kamui interlude, set a couple days or so before the gang show up in Acid Tokyo.
Three years.
He sat on the ruined stones just outside of Tōchō, watching the thick, boiling clouds overhead. They sang of acidic rain, threatening to fall down like a weight of toxic feathers, burning away the rest of this godforsaken world. Far off, farther than humans could see, a giant snake with crest feathered around the head dove into the earth, searching for a temporary sanctuary from the rain.
"It must be about to rain," he said to no one in particular, returning his eyes to the seething heavens. "Even the dragon snakes are running off."
The cracks lining his rock grew a little as he stood up. Too many years of wind that ate away the world and rain that burned the rest had ruined it beyond repair. Its voice had been silenced entirely.
If he had been less attuned to always listening to the world speaking around him, the general silence of the sandy wasteland wouldn't have disturbed him so much. But three years wasn't enough time to replace the lifetime he had lived in a world where the very sun always greeted him when he woke up. The silence seemed deafening at times.
Only the rain still sang to him. Of death, of course, and ruin, and pain. But it was a song all the same, with a rhythm and melody all its own. Right now, it sung of beginnings, but not the good kind. Days that dawned red and spoke of innocent blood spilled. Forgings started that should not have been. Tyrants rising. Death.
He could probably sing along with it if he wanted to.
It was funny, his family's gift was the one least predisposed to pain. The voices of all living things whether they could speak or not had been a lullaby he'd heard since before birth. And yet always he heard the pain behind the songs.
Subaru couldn't hear them.
Sometimes he wondered what it was like to grow up with that silence, of being the only one who couldn't hear the cries of things that needed him. It must have hurt him so much.
He'd left him alone too long, and the rain was starting. He could hear its triumphant dirge as it dropped from the skies to pummel the ruined earth.
The people from the Tower probably wouldn't invade today.
Kamui looked away from the barren world and returned to the shadows of life inside.
