The continuous echoes of ringing bells left a deafening silence that lingered in his ears, settling themselves deep inside his bones like cries of the dead. Sheer black and endless darkness greeted his eyes, embracing him with its opaque intensity that held no match to the depth of his eyes. He couldn't tell if he had gone blind or there really was only nothingness?

'I was beginning to worry that you wouldn't wake up.'

Jerking his head in the direction of that oh so familiar voice, he found her, planted on a chair and away from reach. She smiled, curling her legs close to her chest, protecting and shielding her heart from view. Shadows clung to her figure, draping over her porcelain skin like velvet blankets. Only then did he become all too aware of the suffocating bleakness to held onto him in death's grip. His lips cracked, accumulating the fissures that he left with every move, and a soundless voice spoke up with the weakness and fragility of a solemn child.

"Where are we?"

Her smile rose wider, fair skin stretching over the delicate planes of her face. Pink hair rustled with quiet whispers of carefree smiles and bubbling laughter. That was how she always was, an icon that inspired dreams and hopes that belonged in long forgotten fairytales. Something to be protected, to be craved and hidden away inside an abysmal void.

'Does it matter?'

He snorted, the sound laced with veiled aristocratic grace of a fallen monarch and the smothered pieces of a boy.

The dead weight cradled delicately between his hands reminded him of what had been brutally snatched away from him and the overwhelming hollow hole it left, scarring him deeper than flesh and the bone that lay beneath.

'Even after all this time, you couldn't let go, could you?'

Her delicate fingers dragged across the glass wall that he hasn't seen before, a physical manifestation of the distance and space he had put between them. A barrier that divided them so, that even he, even if he tried, couldn't mend what was so wrongly torn apart. Guilty weight dug into his freezing hands, chilling him in such depth he didn't know he possessed.

'Even though

.

.

.

you chose to kill me?'

note: for sasusaku_month on LJ
prompt: "What are you so desperate for?" AU