Skycolour
France & UK
"My wings were clipped long ago, Arthur," were the last words he remembered from that day that not only the sky turned an ominous red.
They had been neighbours for as long as they could remember. Arthur Kirkland, the stuffy Briton, and Francis Bonnefoi, who had taken the step from 'cute' to 'handsome' over the summer he'd spent in France. They had changed from being 'friends' to 'enemies' and back so many times now that Arthur's brothers couldn't be bothered to ask which it was at any given moment anymore - it would change soon anyway.
Francis had been bragging about his trip to France the entire evening, and would probably have still been talking if it weren't for Arthur, who had snapped and told him to shut it before storming out of the convenience store. Francis had merely grinned as Arthur ran, he loved teasing the Brit.
Arthur hated it. Not the teasing, it was a game they both played, but rather what Francis didn't say. There was something in the way he behaved; Arthur could tell there was something wrong, just not what.
As it turned out, he did know what. Arthur and Francis would, for the first time since Kindergarten, be in different schools, and Francis worried that he might not be able to make new friends.
Francis Bonnefoi worried about making friends.
It was so ridiculous that Arthur burst out laughing.
A few weeks later though, he wasn't laughing anymore. Surprisingly, Arthur was the one to have made lots of friends, while Francis was lonely. It wasn't that he was shunned by everyone, the girls adored him, but that just resulted in the guys hating him. He had gotten himself a girlfriend to try to fend them off and get some male friends (it didn't work), a pretty, tanned girl from Seychelles that even Arthur approved of. But she couldn't completely fill the Frenchman's need for socializing, and Francis didn't want a hoard of fangirls, he wanted friends. The sky was still as blue as ever.
Arthur heard the rumours before Francis told him anything. The two were sitting on the roofs of their respective schoolhouses. The buildings stood next to each other and used to be a single school until someone decided otherwise. There were fences around the edges, and if only the fence around Arthur's hadn't been so bloody tall he would have climbed over them to go comfort his friend. As it was, Arthur could only silently convey his support by listening to the painfully honest (and true) accounts of what Francis had done together with Gilbert and Antonio.
"So stop it," Arthur said.
"If I don't hurt myself I'll end up hurting someone else," Francis whispered remorsefully under a cloud-gray sky.
"I'm not allowed to play," Francis blurted out one day.
"Pardon?" Arthur asked stupidly before he processed the statement. "Why not? You're the best pianist I've ever heard!"
"You haven't heard Roderich play," Francis said, with no emotion behind his pale blue eyes. It was ridiculous that a mere fence should keep Arthur away from his friend when he so needed someone next to him.
"But she said you were her 'Ange de Musique'!"
Francis climbed up to sit on 'his' fence.
"Angel, huh?" Francis chuckled hollowly. "My wings were clipped long ago, Arthur." Thoughtfully he let a shoe drop down through the red evening light, landing with a soft thud four floors below. His eyes glazed over. "How I would have liked to fly once."
"Francis -!"
He regretted throwing himself to the void like that. I could see the panic and the plea for help in his eyes when he finally looked at me that last time. He was always such a coward.
But I was never allowed to save him.
Fences are installed for 'safety reasons', huh.
Hmm. This turned out pretty darn gloomy.
Inspired by 'Skyblue!' (literally: Skycolour) by Kagamine Len, though it was supposed to be happier at first.