I thought I learned my lesson after writing At the Oceanside Hotel; that getting kidnapped by monster ideas was NOT ALLOWED in all caps.
No, clearly I haven't, although this isn't quite as bad.
So here is my first foray into the world of Clover, I hope that it is an acceptable beginning.
The lyrics contained throughout the story are Unistall, by Chiaki Ishikawa, where the idea contained within, I felt at least, fit with what the Clovers of the tale must choose, just because they are Clovers. The little thing at the beginning is just as much mine as the words of the story itself.
One leaf begins the threads of fate, spinning on unspoken fears
Two leaf catches them, each thread spiraling throughout the years
The weaving spreads out because of desire
Three leaf tangles the future in fingers that lengthen in the span of a breath
Four leaf takes them all with her, a second chance in the promise of more after death
Left behind in a dying fire.
All leaving behind the one without a leaf; the one to remember.
When the stars spread over her, Oruha wonders why her fate is so maligned in the tangled sprawl of lights, burned out by the downward reaching of streetlights, futilely trying to mimic those tiny pricks of life in the deep azure sprawl.
When she stands on that stage, the music only a heartbeat away from beginning, the threads of song spiraling out into a thousand meanings, a thousand stories never heard, she feels alive for the first time.
Although only the one-leaf marks her as what she is, and her power is nothing more than a ticking bomb, there is still something lost.
She finds it again in that brief second before sound begins, the harmony of anticipation and silence.
The weaving spreads beneath her fingers, the music the warp threads of a loom, and her voice the shuttle that funnels fate through, over and under until the picture is born.
She grasps the sliding birth of threads in her hands as the first words fall from her mouth like autumn leaves.
There is much that unravels beyond what Gingetsu's visor perceives, and beyond what even sight can see. But with blinded eyes, the threads of fate cling to all he knows, lurking in the shadows of the day.
He stands at the edge of a street corner, that is like any other but for lacking his current presence. To those flowing unconcernedly past him, he is nothing more than someone lost in the crowds, and not worthy of notice.
But those who see past the shields see a man watching the threads of time ignore him entirely, leaving him untouched for all of his flaws.
His power is more than a one-leafs, and the beginnings of power seep through everything he feels. The world for him, is born and dies in touch.
There is a thrill, an insatiable rush of emotion in the moment just before the hunt begins, that moment frozen between the ending and restart of a breath, something so quick and intangible he has to let it pass.
The sounds of his visor, whirring to a hunter's life, pull him away from that brief thread, and it snaps in his hands.
The floor before him is still covered in blood, his brother utterly unconcerned with wanting to clean the mess from the tiles where he had spilled the blood of the other most powerful of them.
C knows what he is beginning to want, to chase the threads that flow away from him, barred by white cages meant to freeze a moment into a thousand years.
He's beginning to fear that it really will be so long that he is locked away from that sensation of finding a life that doesn't end in nothing.
Even a life that ends in death had a life at one point. But a life that never was, locked up like a bird in a cage ends as it was.
As nothing.
A's arms slide around his body, a childish brother's hands leave bloody prints sliding down the matching white-purple of his clothes.
Somehow, it fits.
"I am going to leave." he says, and the words are a foul crack in displaced air.
The wires of fate tangle and snap to his fingers, threads that were removed from sensing him wrap around him, strangling him in their depths.
Even if C never does leave, the ability to let time continue to pass him by is gone.
Suu sees the beginnings of the tapestry forming, the picture still uncertain, but four colors mixing together into a picture. And yet they were all the threads that crossed over, the ones that were the ornamental outside.
So who made up the warp threads, the part of the tapestry unseen, yet perhaps more important than all else?
She feels the sensation of one of the two Three Leafs remaining, a coil of dangerous power, of the blood that lay at the end of corrupting innocence. There is a trickle of fate leaking into the unstained white of his pallet, leaking in bright shades of indigo, flying from the palest beginnings of fibers to a deep color that was almost black, yet holds the sensation of blue within still.
And the tapestry spins into color beneath her feet, even as she just stands there, the ribbons at the back of her dress fluttering up like butterfly wings, incandescent and incredibly fragile.
She can not see the whole picture yet, spinning in evanescent illusions about her feet, but indigo sets the stage, all the thousands of varying tints leaving an impression of what the ending will be.
The threads snap apart in her hands, and the colors fall to bits, back into the quiet tiles of the floor.
"Are you alright?" the fine clicking computerized voice of the rabbit asks, unruffled entirely by the working she had ended so abruptly.
The words are a lie on her tongue, she wants to say the real ones, what the truth was, but all that comes out is; "Yes, I'm fine."
Suu can still feel the fragmented endings of the weave, broken before their time. She collects them in her hands, a protector and executioner in the same heart.
Back then, the ultimate reality
that came to see us from the beyond was
That it had come to laugh at how our
existences are as simple as all this I'm perplexed by the reality that, even
if I press them on my ears, slips through my hands Where in my thin body
should I find myself taking in strength
Oruha finds an unexpected strength lining her legs when there is a gasp of fate, that trembling uncertainty caught and twined into one route, leading to the same ultimate ending.
Even worlds must die eventually, though they are always the last, folding in on themselves with a quiet whisper and shudder of peace.
There is always death lining the threads of fate, reaching out endlessly across the stars.
And yet, there is also always birth, the second flare of life after the dying comet's trail shivers to pieces and even memory of that bright rush is well and truly forgotten.
She finds rebirth in the moments as she leaves the stage, like a phoenix rising bright and clear from its own ashes.
Usually, that time after the final notes end, their strangling melody still floating through the air in waves of invisible smoke, still as permanent and effervescent as always, are her own,
Yet tonight, there is someone else standing on the route to her dressing room, tall and unimposingly attractive. A long tail of dark hair snakes down around his shoulders, unassuming in its unusualness. He smiles at her, and there's something within her that smiles back, a bright flare of hope and trust and who knows what else could be?
But that insistently chiming bell of time running out runs over all the sudden thoughts that spring to her mind, and cools her outward smile.
He is unfazed, and yet lets her walk past with not a word.
Oruha is struck by the idea that he is not searching for anything that someone is not willing to give, but is there to offer up strong arms when all else fails.
For some imperceptible reason, she is reminded of the warp threads in a loom, lost beneath bright colors, but still shaping the pattern all the same.
Gingetsu ignores the trails of smoke curling about the ceiling with cat-like ease, and only adds another thread to the evanescent collection. Gloved fingers curl about a cigarette with careless care, ash drops diligently from the end to land in the tray with an edge of finality.
There is a tremor in the air, and it is that of a Clover, but one more stronger than him, and testing out unused wings.
He expects a call very soon from the General, requesting his presence at this location or another.
And yet the minutes tick by and nothing is said, and soon the strains of power fade, lost in intangible moments, falling back to earth suddenly.
Kazuhiko leans back in his chair, his own cigarette adding another wisp of smoke to the soggy air. "I saw the singer today," he opens a conversation that is new, and wholly uninteresting in changing. "Not on stage."
Gingetsu knows of who he speaks, vaguely. He has sensed her power before, something dimmer than what remained of the moonlight, yet somehow incredibly bright all the same.
She has not ever interested him, and is unlikely to do so, not in the way that Kazuhiko has taken an eye to her.
But he wonders, as the threads of fate that seem still steadfastly determined to ignore him tremble in his grasp, if she does not hold an interest for him at all?
She is not confined as he is, within the frames of glasses and power that leeches at sensation till he is left with only touch as a certainty in an ever changing world.
C does not care about the now faintly ugly smell of old blood wafting up from the floor, where faint lines in the tiles just won't scrub out.
At least nothing remains of B's body, mutilated and shredded as it was. There had been a duo of soldiers, stone-faced and locked away behind their masks, to clean up the pieces that had been left collapsed on the floor.
And A had done nothing to help, nothing to hinder. Yet the vaguely bloody smirk that he wore broke the stone of their faces with all the venom of vines biting through trees.
So he lies on the floor, drawing lines of green in the tiling that vanish with only a blink, and leaves him wondering if he'd left it there at all.
For some reason, the fading lines of green leave him thinking of smoke, like that which drifts from A's creations sometimes, when his dissatisfaction overwhelms everything else and he shatters them piece by infernal piece till there is nothing but ruins and smoke.
The green fades to a softer gray beneath his fingertips, and they are slightly longer than yesterday, almost imperceptibly.
But he is running out of time to delay, to find a way that both of them can live together in the cage, despite how unhappy he may be.
He feels the snapping of threads of fate, unraveling the certainties again, and he wonders which path leads to the future where there is life.
C isn't sure, but the temptation to see the sky just once more, to feel sunlight that isn't faked and watered down, is overwhelmingly filling his every cell with desire.
Suu can feel the four of them all somehow breathing in harmony, late in the night.
The one-leaf sleeps uneasily, watching her life count ever away, each moment somehow both infinitely precious and yet discarded without a thought, because time is swallowed up in gulps and heaves and only realized how little it is when the last seconds are slipping through the bulbs of an hourglass to smash upon the floor.
The two leaf is not sleeping, but is somewhere between true waking and half sleeping, a state where each breath unfurls like butterfly wings. He sees without remembering, except that his eyes are blank and light brown and stare at nothing.
Even as she watches, he rises to his feet, and his hands slide to the wall, knowing instinctively where he is in space, and following an unseen road to a different place.
She lets him go, and the three-leaf, the one closest to her, catches her attention.
He does sleep, curled up in the possessive embrace of his twin. She feels that he of all is the one perhaps most lost in the threads that weave out now. She knows without knowing that he will be swallowed up by time, each jump shoved through his body until he withers away, life lost in an infinitesimal amount of chances.
He stirs, and for a moment, he may or may not see her, indigo eyes flickering beneath blackened lashes.
And at last she turns to herself, sitting in the window. The room is turned to the darkness of night, and she knows that people sleep during this time. Yet she cannot find the desire, and instead the window that leads nowhere is her vantage point.
Uninstall, uninstall
As I am now, I
can't comprehend how I'm one of countless specks of dust on this world
Uninstall, uninstall
I've got no choice but to act like
A soldier who knows no fear:
uninstall
The next time she sees him, he is watching her sing, and yet not ogling her, not staring at the parts of her body uncovered or covered. Instead, his soft gaze is focused on her hands, where the microphone rests so that she can move from one spot to another.
She is glad that she knows this song so well, because there is a second in time where she cannot consciously think of the next lyric and habit alone carries her through that second where their gazes lock.
Then it passes and Oruha continues to sing along as usual, and the suddenly rapid pounding of her heart and the insistent rhythm of a clock that ticks only within her mind war for dominance.
After the ending of her showing, a success even for her usual hopes of those who listen, he walks up to her, a soft smile on his face, either too forgiving of any slights she may have given him, or just not remembering their first encounter. "You have a lovely voice." he says, and once again, he is not staring at the parts of her body covered or uncovered, the dress cut in such a way that it draws the eye, but this time he meets her gaze, brown eyes utterly calm.
There is again, a split second in all the time she has left, a tiny fraying in the thread, where she cannot find her voice. There is something in her that wants to go to him and never let go. "Thank you." is all she says when she remembers that he has just complemented her.
A younger woman slips through the crowd, a look of awe lining unrealistic blue eyes that shimmer under the lights, and Oruha turns her attention to her, a pleasant smile playing about her lips.
When she turns back to her unexpected fan, he isn't there, the space filled by someone else who's face she'll never be able to remember.
She should have been able to find him, he wasn't short enough to slip away, but somehow he is gone.
Oruha feels a strange sense of loss at that realization, and the threads of fate waver and change color in front of her.
Kazuhiko has been in one of his flying states, where the sheer overload of happiness and other enthusiastic feelings sweep him up into a barely repressed bundle of energy.
Gingetsu finds him only barely tolerable in these times, and he resists the urge to remove the visor, let the world sweep into darkness and rub at the throbbing parts of his temples.
Again, there was a pulse of power from a more powerful Clover, and there was then, and is now, a part of him that wants to recognize and bind that pulse to him, learn every fragment and thread of it until all the mysteries are solved, and still never understand.
It is the first time he has ever understood the very thrill of a mystery and it slightly frightens him, leading him to lock his lips tighter than usual and look twice behind him for every once in front of him.
It also leads him to have trouble focusing on his only friend's babbling about the singer, the words slipping away into a well of lost thoughts and memories until it is too late for him to scrabble at the base for them.
"Is everything okay Gingetsu?" Kazuhiko has apparently noticed that he is not in the most composed of states and there is a look of concern leaking into his own seeing eyes.
Gingetsu has long since given up jealousy at the fact that his friend is not tied to electronics to be gifted with a sense. He is locked away from the world, and sometimes only what he can feel beneath his finger makes any sense in a space of sound and smell and vibration.
"It's nothing." his answer is somewhere between dodging the question and lying. He exhales a thread of smoke, and it leaks up to the ceiling and out of sight. "It's just been a long day." he finds himself attempting to explain.
The twisting of Kazuhiko's lips tells Gingetsu that he is unconvinced, but the ringing of a call to the both of them distracts him from any possible interrogation.
He finds himself thankful for that small mercy, even as a pair of cigarettes are abandoned in an ash tray, sending up spiraling threads of smoke into the clearing air.
They weave through the air, like the spinning of thread and though they never touch, they are close together.
As they leave on a call of theft, Gingetsu notices absentmindedly that his goes out first, where Kazuhiko's impacts the ceiling with nary a fraying of the cloud of gray.
A is in one of his darker moods, and even C's touch does nothing to sooth the fraying strands of his sanity, but instead leaves him with a bite mark lining the heel of his hand and blood dripping to the floor dispassionately.
He thinks maybe two months have passed since B's death, and he still feels nothing. But feeling nothing is better than feeling guilty, or angry at either of them.
The fact of the matter is, is that they cannot continue to live together, and his clock is ticking in leaps and bounds.
Already, though thankfully his body does not change beyond A's right now, he is beginning to understand that which he couldn't before, there is a level of thought process where he can leap further now.
And the threads of green and gray he weaves on the tiled floor where he kneels, hiding from his twin, last far longer than before.
A loop, and a second, a third, the last spiraling down to a tapered point and back up to the first. In silver and emerald, he draws the symbol of a four leaf Clover, watching the colors shimmer and waver, a long breath and two before they vanish into the air.
When C lays his cheek on the floor, and stares until the world bends to shape his vision, sloping sideways, he thinks that he feels wires slipping through his fingers, leaving burns behind from how fast they run.
And he thinks he hears the voice of a young girl. "You can leave, and there will be time to find your threads before the spindle falls back." she says, her voice an echo of everything that he'd wanted to hear before.
Black and indigo stain his vision as C shuts his eyes. For a moment, he sees the flash of one, two, three, four leaves, each one a different name. But when he blinks, and sits up to greet his brother, who has stormed in, ponytail swaying in vibrant agitation, they all vanish and he cannot remember the names.
But there is an irrevocable sensation that his time to hide is up. And it lies in the pits of his mind till well after the night leaks into his dreams, A's hands trying to earn a sense of playing out of him, of their sickening little game.
He understands how A was able to kill B, and finds that there is a part of him that wants to add his twin's blood to the faint little brown-orange stains on the floor.
He wants to live, and he's understanding now that his brother is the reason he cannot now.
The tangling of his own threads of fate leave red marks that only he can see in the darkness, glowing like arteries lit by a science display.
Again, Suu is watching the four of them in the depths of night. This time, the one leaf does not sleep, but lies in the throes of insomnia, thoughts and incompatible wishes throbbing in her mind so brightly that they might as well be written in the stars, flashing on those bright signs introducing singers and other novelties.
She wants to go to the side of the beautiful singer, to curl up against her and never let her go. And the clock within her ticks to a closing, the years fading quickly. But Suu cannot force herself to leave, even though the doors would open for her easily, let her go through and never be found again.
So she turns her gaze to the two leaf. His sightless brown eyes are shut, and she finds herself saddened to not see those paradoxes of life. He breaths with the sleep of the uneasy, and faint beads of sweat well up on his chest.
He dreams of a moment that rapidly approaches without memory or comprehension. And she knows what the catalyst is, and how the time is about to snap again, fate gulping up that which was corrupted so that its chosen path plays out its own way.
So she turns to the three-leaf, extracted from his brother's fingers, and returning to drawing in strands of color.
The one-leaf's black mingles with the silver of the two-leaf and her own green in the loops he draws out over and over, his only line of sanity in the sudden muddle of the world for him.
It takes her a moment to realize that the black and silver are split by his own indigo, a thin line running up the curling of each strand he leaves behind.
His fingers are finer than they were, the bones reshaping as he continues to see that which is barely there.
For a moment, he turns, and Suu thinks he might have seen her. But the moment passes, and instead he lets the pretty little threads sink back into the darkness, before he lies down next to his twin, and joins him in tangled inhalation of life, taken from the third by way of blood, hatred and indifference.
Her own period of introspection is interrupted by the bunny pushing open the door, a tray of milked tea and something stained with an imitation of chocolate arrayed neatly on a plate. "If you aren't sleeping so well, you may want to try this." it says, a mechanical clicking disturbing the patterns of its voice until it is impossible to pretend there is any humanity in it. "Good night mistress."
The door shuts hard again, and she does not move to touch either of the things displayed, instead curling up tighter in the cream of her dress.
The ends of the tapestry fall into her hands and she collects it close to her heart, holding onto all that she can hold dear, three people that she will most likely never even meet.
"A four-leaf is always destined to be alone." Suu reminds herself and the words are a little more hollow than they were before, growing more and more lonely through each repetition.
She stays up with the one-leaf through the night, listening to each heartbeat in the back of her mind until the day begins again.
It seems our unconsciousness is getting
itself honed of its own accord
If, the moment my eyes open to
The shapeless presence under my bed, it is such that
Only the heartless violence that
will destroy anything and everything
Cannot choose a season to quietly fade away
If there is no replacement for me,
then those days I spent living normally
Oruha is falling in love with her sweet, but noticeably persistent follower, who still does not stare at her with the sole purpose of undressing her, physically revealing her to the world, but instead with the care of a protector. He is Kazuhiko Fay Ryuu, he said with a grin the third time they met, brown eyes twinkling merrily.
And once again, he is perched in a precariously lazy way that somehow leaves him in a position to move at a moment's thought, watching her as she waits in that frame of seconds between the ending of one song and the beginning of another. There is no lust in his eyes, only care.
And it is that which draws her eyes back to him so often.
The thrumming of knowing how soon her time must end is drowned out by the hope that he leaves within her, that maybe even if the day comes, there will be something that she leaves behind, more than the memory of her voice, sterilized and tied into recordings that never match what she feels when she stands on that stage, again ready to find her flight in the tremors of sound.
She is beginning to be aware of the fact that it is not just Kazuhiko who watches her, but another presence, late in the nights, powerful enough to rival the shattered gods of failing beliefs, and young enough to trust in the innocence of power as strong as that.
She is not threatened by it, for it feels lonely above all else, and if she is falling in love with Kazuhiko, then there is also a part of her that wants to sweep up that lonely child and teach it that it has to be alone no longer.
Oruha smiles over the crowd that watches her, and last at Kazuhiko, as the strings of her last song for the night begin.
There is a thrill and rush of sensation as he smiles back at her, but then she must turn her eyes away, avert them to sing, the liquid emotion of sound flowing out through her throat. She loses herself in the melody, each word a ripple of a growing sense that she has once again surpassed the boundaries of her own flesh, and is born again and again in each tangle of sound that flows forth from her.
She believes that she sang better than ever before, and that now the threads of fate that she can feel beginning in her hands are a road to the future where she isn't alone, where none of the Clovers are left alone, caught up in stories and uncomfortable truths that resemble lies in their blackest form.
Oruha looks over again at Kazuhiko, watching her with his enigmatically open smile, and there is something in her that takes flight.
She lets it go, and chooses.
The bar that Gingetsu has ended up in at the request of his only friend, is much cleaner than the ones they usually end up in at the conclusion of work, waiting for something that isn't there yet.
There is a certain anxious energy wafting about Kazuhiko's limbs, leaving him to clench the glass in his hands slightly harder than is really safe for the material blown from earth and fire, grown in the branches of lightning in the rare moments that anyone can find one of those unexpected clumps upon the sand after a storm.
There must be a lightning bolt in Kazuhiko as well, for when the singer of the bar steps up, he almost loses his balance, the chair wavering dangerously beneath him for a moment, swaying as he turned his attention to the woman.
Gingetsu finds himself actually intrigued in what could have drawn his friend's undivided attention so quickly, and looks at her as well, the visor adjusting without a command to zoom in on her and fix the colors so she is not just a collection of pixels bound in varying shades of gray.
She is attractive in an unusual sort of way, not conforming to the usual shapes of beauty valued in their current society, but her form, voluptas though it is, holds no appeal towards him.
Not that he is surprised by this fact.
She glances out over the crowd, and there is something in her eyes that lights up and flares into being when she meets Kazuhiko's eyes, something that is reciprocated in his, a smile that barely touches his lips and yet fills the whole room.
He is not jealous of this, but maybe the slightly hurt warmness within is that of happiness? There is no way that he can fit between them.
Despite all the distance in the room, and even between the two of them, Gingetsu could feel that there was no crack to slip through, no room to wedge them apart.
Not that he wanted to anyway, and the threads of fate slid through the room, invisibly red threads that tied his friend and that singer to whatever end they raced towards.
The only thing that leaves him slightly uncertain of whatever intentions she may have, is the marking lying right above her breasts, green and flawless but for the letters he knows lurk in the depths of the shadows.
She is a Clover too, and the sense of an overwhelming fate settles over him like a blanket in the coldest nights.
It is a comfort, but never enough.
There is a strangely satisfying thrill to being the one to create the catalyst of A's anger, knowing that his twin will never strike out at him. Despite his hatred of the world, A matches the heavy weight of fury with the same amount of love, need and obsession on C alone.
It is a heavy, heavy burden to bear, and he wants to shed that cage ever more.
Sometimes he thinks he hears B walking through the halls, about to ask one of his enigmatic questions, and he's turning to say something when he realizes that no one's there.
A will never hurt him, but he is certain that his death will be by his twin's hand, whether through violence or desire.
It is harder and harder to conceal the fact that time is about to snap, and his age will shift drastically.
Already, he cut the ponytail so that the trailing lengths were the same as A's, and he did that the day before, the same four inches tumbling to the floor in a blackened silent wail.
It is perhaps the most repetitive change, and the most immediately visible.
He knows now that part of the cage is his own choice to remain behind.
When he is ready to leave, the door is already open.
Almost as if by instinct, the colors of smoke spell their way to his fingers, the four colors he does not yet understand, and the one he does.
It is the work of a split second to draw the Clover of four parts, and the stem.
Four Clovers and five people.
He doesn't yet understand how or why they are all important to each other. But fate has different ways of explaining things, and it is not yet time to ask.
The last loops fade as A walks in from the other room, eyes reddened from his fit of anger and face turned down so his own ponytail, the measurement exactly the same, hangs dully about his chest. "Are you still mad?" he asks, and the words are somewhere between scared and lonely.
C is not used to hearing those sounds in his brother's voice, and it is the work of a second to walk over and hug him, a protective position, a lie. "I'm not mad anymore."
His arms loop a little longer around A's body than they used to, but his twin doesn't notice, shuddering in his embrace with childish tears of relief.
C's heart breaks a little to know that he is lying about his feelings, and lying about wanting to stay there.
But as much as A makes up half of him, he cannot bear to remain a bird locked up in a cage. The door is already open, and the breath of time that it takes to leave is rapidly approaching.
Of the five threads of life, two are already twined about each other, and where three run straight, alone, the mark where two of them tie together is within sight.
This time as she watches, it is day and the day is rain. Although she cannot see beyond the borders of her cage, she can see that the water pools into the crumbling earth, a desperate attempt to return to the soft grasses and plants of a thousand years ago, where one can run on the skin of Gaia without glass or rocks or metal stabbing into the bottoms of feet born to run.
The one leaf she is beginning to love, just from knowing everything about her, is smiling, something in her heart thrumming with the tales and lives that she's already had, will never finish, and have yet to begin again. She is an old soul, reaching out from the depths of age to try again and again to end without regrets.
But Suu is beginning to believe that there is no end without a regret of some kind, even if it's just not saying goodbye fast enough.
To live is to die, and to die is to live, a backwards circle that loops in uneven rhythms until the threads of fate snap shut forever and end everything in the abrupt closing of doors.
The one leaf hums to herself, a hair brush sliding through glistening hair like a memory through water, and although Suu can not see, she knows the feeling echoing in her blood.
She turns to the two leaf, the one with the longest strand of fate still clasped in her hands. He is visored and locked into sight. She wonders what the world is like for him, not knowing whether the vibrant colors he sees are right or not, if they match up with what everyone else sees.
But clealy he cannot be concerned about that now, his blankened eyes are far away, and there is a voice, a voice telling him of an instance where fate and destiny work in tandem.
For the three leaf has left the cage, and stands in the rain, eldest of them all and most lost of them all. Blankened violet eyes that stare with disinterest at those who surround him, and the air snaps and threads spring into her hands at the end as with a glance of indigo eyes, the wires of the streets sink down and string up his followers like victims of the Joro-Gumo, blood drained and limp with shock.
Also limp with death, but that is the inevitable end for both of them.
Indigo and gray twine together in her eyes, wrapped up so tight in the threads of the loom that she cannot say that they are not one.
Rain pours around them, and she is watching, not with her eyes, but with her ears. The splashing of booted footsteps, that stop without judgement. The tumbling of the three leaf to the unforgiving ground.
And as if by the prayer of a melody, he is gently lifted from the pools on the ground to be curled up in the arms of the two leaf.
Fate and Destiny sing their songs of fate and Suu watches as the ending approaches faster than a bad dream.
Even as the three leaf wakes and begins again, not as C, but as someone yet to be, the two leaf chooses a path that did not match with his broken vision before, and the one leaf finally accepts her fate with no malice, no resentment, no anger, but only forgiveness, another chance for a life that was stolen all too soon looming in the wake.
Suu holds the ends of the threads of life in her hands, and for a short while, she can guard those who will pass after her.
She holds the knowledge of what must be, but the why is yet to be known.
Love rules and changes all fate, for destiny plays a different game.
Uninstall, uninstall
I want to bring them all to an end by my own hands
There's nothing at all that's wicked: uninstall
Uninstall, uninstall
As I am now, I can't comprehend how I'm one of countless
specks of dust on this world
Uninstall, uninstall
I've got no choice but to act like
A soldier who knows no fear:
uninstall
Uninstall, Uninstall
Suu's voice is echoing in the special little microphone in her hair, her soft childlike voice that is unheard by anyone but her for now.
It is a grand stage, and Oruha is glad that she can be here, even on the last day of her life. There are so many things that she keeps thinking of, of places she wanted to go, words she wanted to say, memories she wanted to make and leave behind.
But the time for all of that is past now, and the minutes are ebbing away in the flow of the oceans of time.
She can see in the eyes of her mind the last hour thrumming away, the numbers ticking in insistent digital red, each second swallowed forever.
But she is on a stage, a real stage.
It is the first time she;ll be here, it is also the last.
Suu's words, her song are one of the things she thinks of even in that little gasp of time between when the curtains go up and the spotlights focus on her. The second is that she'll only be able to sing this song, and it's her farewell more than anything.
The last is that she is so happy that she spent even this little fragment of her life with Kazuhiko, and that her last days have been the whole reason she's lived.
"This song is for my two favorite people." is all she says before the music begins, innocent with a touch of destiny.
And she sings, and although the words are simple, they are all she has been, all she will ever be.
All she is now.
"I want happiness
"I seek happiness
"To cause your happiness
"To be your happiness"
Suu's voice harmonizes with her, leading, following, dipping like the metallic swallows in mimicked flight, calling to mind an ancient blood memory of when the real birds did that, over green streams through cool air filled with the cry of insects.
They sing together, and the minutes tick away.
"So take me
"Someplace far away
"To a true elsewhere
"Please take me there."
Oruha can see her lover standing in the crowd, proud and tall.
She never told him that their days were numbered, that the strand of her life was slipping away even as the others were born from her fingertips.
She sings on, the last minutes devoted to her melody.
"Magic that lasts
"Never-ending kiss
"Revery without break
"Imperishable bliss."
Her entire audience is silent, and the only thing she hears besides the music and her own voice is Suu's, a little bird singing to not be alone, for one fragile day of her life.
"Take me
I long for happiness."
There is a short pause in the strings of her voice, she breathes as the melody plays along, richer and richer with every passing line.
She opens her mouth again, and the sounds roll off her tongue like liquid gold.
"Birds sing
"Songs of unknown tongues
"Though winged, they
"Still fail to reach the sky."
How strange is it, that though she's always known when the time was, that everything is so much more infinitely vibrant in the last few minutes?
Life is something that is probably always unrecognized for what it is until that last moment, the flash of everything together.
"A place
"Not to be treaded alone."
Oruha is all she's ever been and all she'll ever be. She is the song itself, losing the boundaries between everything else as the words are born and born again from her voice.
"So take me to a true Elsewhere."
Suu's voice climbs while hers descends, an archaic harmony that is like that of a phoenix's cry.
The ashes are swept up in tomorrow.
"Wet feathers
"Locked fingers
"Melting flesh,
"Fusing minds."
Even though the lyrics of song are ended now, the last words are still ringing in her heart.
"Take me
"I want happiness."
"Not your past,
"But your present is what I seek."
She feels the clock within ticking out the last moments.
00:02:32
"Carefully winding back its fragile thread."
There is a deafening silence as the last notes spiral into all the years to come.
00:01:09
"Please take me there"
She hears the click of a gun, far up above, and her eyes flash to Kazuhiko's, even while everyone in the hall is still too stunned to applaud.
Everything she's ever meant to tell him flashes in the air before her eyes. "I'm sorry, I love you, I wish I had more time, I wish
it wasn't going to end this way."
00:00:00
The bullet punches straight through the tattoo on her breast, and she falls to the floor, the shock of pain rushing to her face as her body fights for that instant of life.
And fails.
"I want happiness."
The One Leaf is gone.
She is dead and swept up in the sound of wings instantly.
Uninstall, Uninstall
It is very lonely, to be the last known Clover alive, and he bears the burden as well as any who is the last one does. With dignity, loneliness and a sense of foreboding.
His skills never ran towards seeing or sensing the future, but he knows that his own ending is very near to come, that with his death, the last pages of the book close, a failed truth of the government.
Gingetsu waits in the darkness of his hallway, and he hears the shadow of a shade of footsteps, knowing full well that it is his own mind offering up a lonely illusion to his mind.
The click of his door opening is much more real, and he jumps at the sound, until he hears the uneven pattern of Kazuhiko's feet and forces himself to relax.
He does not wear the visor any more, brown eyes turned to study the world without sight, and the doorways that everyone never saw.
"Hey." Kazuhiko's voice has lost much of the life that permeated it when he and Oruha were together, more when Suu vanished into death after here, and still more when Ran joined them, in the earth for the first time in his life. Except he was dead, and far from where Gingetsu could reach him. "You're not wearing them today."
It isn't hard at all to figure out what he means, but Gingetsu still brushes a hand over the space where he is used to finding metal shaping light and color and life into something that he'd never known with his own body. "I didn't want to see today."
There is a soft rush of air as Kazuhiko sinks against the wall next to him, fabric creating a rustling sound wholly unique to him. "I can't blame you." he says and there is a level of unexpected bitterness in his voice, except Gingetsu does expect it. "Sometimes I wish I could turn off my ears or my eyes and ignore all the stupid people not turning to look at what they have till it's gone."
Gingetsu shakes his head at this naivety that is wholly Kazuhiko, and the strands of white hair that has been hanging longer and longer on his face in the weeks since he laid Ran beneath the world, brush against his cheeks in the only caress he seeks to feel anymore. "It doesn't change anything. You still know it's there." he says, and it could be an answer to many things, both said and unsaid.
There is a soft beep, and Kazuhiko curses as he fumbles at his pocket, accidentally slamming his arm into Gingetsu's. "Yes, I said I wasn't going to do anything work-related today!" he barks at the summoner even as he flips it on, and the voice appears.
To any regular person, the sounds emanating would have been for his friend and his friend alone, but he is blind and his ears do more for him than for most people. Gingetsu can hear every word that the wizard on the other end is saying.
"A has left the cage. Hunt him down, and either return him or bring him down. But he should not be let free."
he hears, and the answering thrum of power that is a more powerful Clover calling to all of the same or lesser strength sets his blood on wary fire.
The visor is leaping to his hand in a moment's breath, and he doesn't even think of leaving it off as the screws bore in, the wires taking but a moment to attach and give him back something he never had.
The last of the Three leafs is calling for him, and him alone, and he knows why.
Kazuhiko ends his call just in time to grab at his arm, and stops Gingetsu, confusion running up over his face. "Why are you going?" the question is layered with a tiny tremor of desperation. "It's my call, not yours."
Gingetsu sighs even as the tattoo on his wrist is revealed for a moment, the deep color flickering in the still uncertain lighting of his visor. "A and I are the last ones left." is all he says, and all he'll ever need to say.
Kazuhiko's eyes widen, the pupils shrinking in on themselves. But he breathes hard, a look of frustration replacing shock. "And you're not going to continue to even try?" The words are bitter, bitter as gall, and Gingetsu is almost tempted to flinch under the weight.
But he does not falter. "We've both known all along that this day would come." he intones, the words flatter than the floor they stand on. "You were not a Clover, and..." he trails off, because what he was about to say has only been said before to Ran, in the shadows where no one and nothing could see, know the truths.
He exhales and the words come out anyway. A rapidly approaching death seems to bring out an ability to say many things that were locked away before. "And by being human and still there even when we all fell apart, all began to die, it is more magic than we can ever do. But there was a time for us to be, and that time has passed."
Kazuhiko's fingers loosen from his wrist, leaving white trails of bloodless flesh behind. Gingetsu shows none of the fainter traces of emotion that are unexpectedly filling him. "Thank you." he says and there is no more room for words, not on his part.
His friend lets go, and there is a terrifying moment of falling through shadows and dusk before he catches himself back within his body. "Someone has to remember that you existed, that you all were as human as the rest of us." Kazuhiko says, and the words are more than anything else could have been.
He smiles, and with that flash of farewell, is through the door and leaving behind all the ghosts that have walked there.
The air crackles with power, and a face that he recognizes dimly, as if seen through a filthy screen, is in the reflection of the window he looks at from the corner of his eye, swirling into solidness behind him.
"I do hate you." A says, and his voice is cold, clipped. "I never got to be there with my brother because you took my place."
Gingetsu isn't surprised by the words, just turns to face the Three leaf hovering in the air, power far surpassing his in leaps, bounds and everything else bound up by those words. "I wouldn't have stopped you." he says, and lets the meaning hang in the air like loops of smoke.
Not surprisingly, A's face twists in anger, and a tiny part of Gingetsu aches to see Ran's old face that vicious. "But you would have!" he yells back, fists clenched tightly next to him. "You didn't want me to see C anymore."
He's not sure if he's trying to console or bait the boy in front of him, but maybe they are the same thing now. "It was Ran's choice." he says and watches the twists of anger about A's mouth.
The power in the air cracks and shoots down, controlled fury only disconnecting the visor from its power source, and his sight is lost forever. "Is it really me that you want to kill?" he asks the boy he knows hasn't moved. "Is it really me who took what you wanted from you?"
He hears the grinding of teeth as A forces back a snarl. "Yes. But not just you."
There is no more explanation needed, and Gingetsu doesn't blame him for that blackest hatred.
Often a much muted version cultivated by himself is held in check when he is given a job by the Five Wizards. "Their power is already fading." he answers, and he hears the quiet sudden gasp of a startled child. "Much of what they still control is a reputation, enforced by the Clovers they placed in their army. But there is only one left."
There is a wash of power over him, electrical and psychic that leaves him wanting to shiver. "You're already marked for death." A says, and hot anger is replaced by cold. "And you're the last. It's why they haven't blown up the bomb already."
Gingetsu already suspected as much. "I don't have the same qualms." the three leaf adds, and the last thread of his life falls from his hands, to lie among the ashes with Oruha's, with Suu's, with Ran's.
He expects that A will take his life and then advance on the Council, but instead the slap of bare skin on cobblestone comes closer to him, and thin hands push him to kneel on the ground. "Even though he said he wouldn't love anyone more than me, C loved you the most." A's voice is nothing short of heartbroken and lost. "Even when he died, he was thinking of you and not me."
Gingetsu says nothing, but tries to figure out why A does such a thing, frozen into the moment. "But he's gone somewhere farther than most of the Clovers can reach, and I don't think you can find it on your own. So I'm going with you."
Tiny fingers brush against the skin right behind and around the hooks of the visor, and it falls off of his face and smashes on the ground, wrecked beyond repair. "And when we get there, we'll see if C is happy or not."
His head throbs as A's fingers slide along a little further back, to the scars of where the bomb is implanted, and there is a heartbeat of a moment where nothing happens.
"So take me with you!"
The cry reverberates through his body and his mind as A tightens his grip and the sudden threads of destiny wrap around them both, a strangling rope that cannot harm him more.
His eyes are open when the bomb goes off, painting the street red in both of their remains, shattered bone and blood.
There is a sensation of wings and a feeling of relief.
The Two Leaf is gone.
Everything is done.
Uninstall, Uninstall
Ran does not find himself regretting much, even as his breath shortens and breaks apart in the silence of the night, each string of air and life harder to pull in then before.
He is dying, and he knows it. What time he had is out, for good.
Yet, even as his breath stutters in his throat, catching on shards of glass that aren't there, he is not angry, not resentful.
After all, he has been happy these last five years. If what normal people call happiness is the warmth of Gingetsu's touch, the flowers that bloom within when something he finds beautiful notices him back, whether it is Gingetsu, or the bird in a cage, or the breeze that toys with the dirt in the window box, whether happiness is found in late nights with cups of tea cooling in hand, or that moment when the curtains are swept away from his hands by the motions of something more than he can be.
If happiness is not regretting life in those last moments, when everything grows fainter and fainter, than he is happy, and has been happy.
The thin strands of his hair stick to his face, grayed beyond their deep color, and withered away. Ran draws in another halting breath, and it is more shallow than the one before.
Dying is an interesting experience, that slow sensation of everything within slowly and thoroughly giving out.
Gingetsu is holding him, and nothing more. There are no pleas to stay, no tears, no last conversations.
Just warm encompassing arms that swallow him through those five years away from the cage, of being Ran.
He smiles, a curling of the lips that is an aged representation of youthful joy, and there is still some of that within. Despite the age of his body, he is still young, although the exact years don't matter.
His heart skips, and falters in the steady pulsating rhythm. Gingetsu's arms hold him a bit tighter, cheek tucked in against the faded strands of Ran's hair.
There is a sound of wings, slow and majestic, the strength of thousands of dreams and wishes and beliefs.
He coughs a little in the back of his throat, and the breath rattles like beads in a jar. It is somewhere between painful and releasing.
The world before his eyes flickers, everything is lost to a void before rushing back in fading colors.
Ran sighs, and his voice is cracked with physical age, with mental wisdom.
There are thousands, millions, an infinite number of things he could have said, but he doesn't need to, or want to. His truths are his after all, and no one but himself can understand their own importance.
So what he says, on those reedy threads of breath, to the one person who has guided him through life, death, rebirth, life and death again, and has never asked for anything in return, is "Thank you."
Ran can hear the wings beating louder, one angelic, one metallic. He knows the sound of her wings, the sound of their wings.
Gingetsu might have said something, he might have heard it. But there is no space where he can record it.
His breath cracks and runs out, an eternal descent followed by the silence of his heart, that powerful organ ceasing to pound out every proof of his life.
Ran rushes into the void with only a sorrow for Gingetsu's being left behind, and knowing that as he is a Clover, his time is close to up too.
The Three Leaf is gone.
The last thing he remembers is the solid warmth of his partner, the only thing he could know was always there in those last moments.
Uninstall, Uninstall
She stands on the precipice, and while below lies the inevitable, towards the sky is everything she'll never have this time.
Suu wishes, even as she sees Kazuhiko pulled from the immediate dangers of the wreckage, and she can see that he'll be alright, that this never had to happen.
But the fate of a Clover is always death, always to be alone. And even if she fought, that would still be the ultimate ending.
Her boots make an odd sound as she stands up on the ruined neck of the fairy for Oruha, and pieces of bright rock tumble to the dilapidated ground far below. It is far enough that she does not hear the impact.
There is a voice on the wind, sweet and rich, like all the stories of the world before, impossibly brilliant.
She wanted to see real birds winging through the skies, their warring cries a melody far more beautiful than all of the toneless, tuneless things repeated endlessly yesterday and today and tomorrow and all the days after.
Where is the beauty of the world when all it does is stay the same? The very fact that it changes constantly and irrevocably, leaving every second evanescent and infinitely precious. The weaving of the future is not set until it becomes the past.
Maybe Suu hasn't been in the 'real world' long enough, maybe she's too much a Clover to understand what everyone else looks for, but even she can see that without that unconscious knowledge that nothing is going to stay, everything loses the colors and fires of life.
There is a rumbling beneath her feet, and she knows that the fragile ground is breaking apart.
Her death approaches on the wings of destiny.
There is a moment where the air shivers, and she can see. A woman, voluptuous and smiling, dark curly hair tumbling around her bare shoulders and eyes bright with the joy for life she has only seen in those who know that the next minute could be their last.
There is a Clover mark in the space between her breasts, and Suu knows who has come to her in her very last seconds.
"Oruha." she says to the image hovering there, arms stretched out wide, and the woman smiles, making her world that much more lovely. For a moment anyway.
The wires behind her snap, and the ground shudders again, a waking beast climbing to its feet after a very long rest.
Oruha's lips move, but Suu cannot hear what she is saying. It takes until the statue is hanging by a thread, and her life is bound to the spider's fragility of that wire, to understand that it is not speaking that she is doing, but singing.
"Take me
I long for happiness."
"I think I found it." she says to the woman again, and Oruha smiles again, every fiber of her illusion filled up and swallowed by love.
Suu closes her eyes and falls into the embrace of her ghost as the last wire gives way, and she tumbles to the earth, not afraid of impact, or death.
There is a loud scream of rock and metal and something else in the air as she is crushed into the earth.
Somehow, she is not immediately dead, but there is rock crushing everything below her ribs, and a piece of metal through her shoulder. Blood bubbles in her mouth and spills through her lips.
It hurts without pain, she is too far gone to feel pain. But there is numbness that starts in the pieces of her body that are nothing more than blood and bone and ash.
Suu blinks once, and coughs, the sound long and wailing in a way that she does not feel inside.
Again, Oruha comes to her, in the shadows of the ruined angel, looking fairer than all the fairies that populated the world after her death.
"Are you alright Suu?" She isn't certain if it's Oruha speaking to her, or only her mind asking her as the person she loves.
She coughs again, much shorter and more bloody. "I'm dying." the words are choked and don't sound like her voice at all.
"Why did you choose death?" It's such an un-Oruha like question, that Suu is certain now that it is her own mind wanting to know why she chose this way.
It is harder and harder to breath, and there is nothing left for her to live with. "Because from death comes life...and...there is always...another chance..."
Another chance to try again. But there is too much blood in her mouth, and her throat, and not enough air to say it.
There is a glitter of light above her, and she isn't sure whether it's in the real world, or if she's passed. But the numbing pain still encompasses her body, leaving her in doubt of that idea.
"I will protect you Suu, guide you to that next time." Oruha's ghost says, and Suu is filled with joy, that overwhelming bright light within, even as something in her chest stutters and stops.
Her breath trickles and fades out like the blood on her lips.
Once...she tries to breath, a shrill heartbeat that ends too soon.
Twice...she cannot find that air, that life anymore. The world before her is blurring out, everything is black, a void deeper than black.
Thrice...her fingers uncurl from the fist she didn't realize she had and her head slackens.
She is floating away, like something that has been deleted from all memory.
Deep wings wrap around her and carry her away to that fantasy world that she's dreamed of forever.
The Four Leaf is gone.
It isn't that bad to want to
Uninstall...