Prologue
"Want some?" She brandished the ruby red bottle at him, the dark liquid inside it gleaming near-black. The sunset before them cast rippling red light across the sky, bathing them in the scarlet glow. They were old photographs under a safelight.
"No," he answered definitely, his eyes not wavering from their fixed destination: the skyline.
"Mm," she acknowledged passively. Her own eyes flickered back and forth between her glass and her companion, watching slow ripples skim along the surface of her wine as she tilted it. Watching its surface shift uncomfortably in the silence.
"Thank you."
He remembers the way her eyes burned against the sunset, so in contrast with his own, as he reluctantly brought his gaze to hers.
"For keeping me company." She broke eye contact and brought her gleaming glass to her lips, taking a small sip. "I know you have a heart under all that ice, Captain."
She spoke as if it were a fact of which she was the exclusive keeper; as if no one else in the world knew… including Toshiro. He suddenly felt very interested in the abrasive rooftop where they were sitting, the shingles rough underneath his hands. He could barely hear her chuckle, near-silent, as a lonely butterfly landed in his line of view.
"Where did you get that wine in the first place?" he asks the wind, his words spiraling lonely circles around him for lack of a recipient. "You delinquent…"
Toshiro looks at the sky, the setting sun; it's not as it was that evening so long ago. The sun casts a discontented dark glow in the clouds and they scatter along the skyline, indignant and somnolent, rumbling threats of an impending storm. A breath escapes his lips with a note of weariness as his hand tightens on the neck of the bottle. He isn't going to drink the wine inside. It's left over from her last stay here; he knows she had touched it at some point before they left... before the accident.
Maybe it's pitiful to want to hold onto it, he thinks, and the un-entertained notion of throwing it off the rooftop tugs at his consciousness. The thought wants to destroy anything left of her, shatter it into pieces so small Toshiro can't put them back together again, can't think of her anymore. He feels his hand make a surreptitious move with the thought, but it doesn't go far, weak as it is.
The buildings around him are taller than he remembers, and the grass is grayer, but the house has stayed the same, he notes with undue bitterness. He stands, feeling the roof shift barely under his weight, and wonders how many times she had lazed around up here instead of working. It's probably leaking somewhere or another from her abuse, old as it is. He shakes his head and climbs down the creaky ladder, weather-worn from years left unprotected.
As he sets foot onto the concrete, a lonely butterfly's torn wings struggle to find purchase in the pre-storm winds. It's thrown helplessly into a nearby spider's web.