Night time sharpens, heightens each sensation,
Darkness stirs and
Wakes imagination…
She feels the voice hypnotize her eyes open, and with a jolt, sees that she is lying on a bed of black lace. Horrible, scratchy stuff that surrounds her like a minor sea, waving around her. Grimacing, she detangles herself from the blankets and surveys the immediate area.
The bed itself is made from one piece of marble, carved into a stone swan….
She laughs. It's the sort of bed that looks as though it was made for some strange fetish, a sort of gilded "paradise", the sort of bed Jiraiya would probably write epic poetry about.
"Well, this is lovely…and just a little wrong…"
She hears a chuckle, breaking the spell of the voice for a moment of clarity before the melody returns again. It is sung in the same tenor, low and soothing, that brought her here….
You alone can make my song take flight…
Help me make…the Music of the Night….
She listens, spellbound but something in her soul struggling to the forefront. What? I alone? My voice? At first she is flattered, flattered that someone with a voice as beautiful as that of her benefactor would even consider her, whose voice had once been that of a tin whistle, empty and pitchless, his muse. However, something in the tone of the words seems to ring wrong in her ears, horribly wrong, as if off-key. That's not it though, his notes are always pitch-perfect…
Shaking her head to clear thoughts, she opens the curtain (more black lace tickling her fingertips as she recoils) and sees scene before her.
She is on a sort of rocky island in the middle of a lake, where a wooden boat is tethered to the granite shore. Eyes traveling upwards, she sees the green luminescence of the island fall onto a small, ornate piano, the space around it strung with velvet curtains and mirrors reflecting the orange masked man sitting at the piano, along with his cape of embroidered red clouds.
Sitting at that piano, her benefactor plays a complex melody build of interwoven notes so unlike that fluidly fit together, unlikely pieces matching in a puzzle. The song is hopeful, but tentative, almost like a schoolgirl's first flirtation, first kiss and first love.
Suddenly, she is overcome with a deep desire that seems to burn in her very core, to rip off that mask. It is quick and inexplicable, an urge to see her benefactor, to gaze at the true glory of her angel. But, most importantly, to know.
Father, you said you would send me the Angel when you were gone…
Did you really mean that you would come back?
Are you my Angel, Father?
Surprising herself, she edges nearer to the man and begins singing a neat little melody, feeling a new deceptive nature bursting to life.
I remember there was mist,
Swirling mist upon a cold, glossy lake,
And in the boat there was a….man.
Turning his head, the man behind that orange-swirled mask seems to stare at her from some unseen eye-hole. She continues towards him until they touch, her arms caressing him, at first hesitant, but, as his head inclines, more passionately, her arms like slithering snakes over his neck and the mask.
Who was that voice in the shadows,
Who is the face in the mask?
His head attempts to jerk away from her upon the last line, but not before she holds in her hands the orange vortex, held the only protection from that face.
Stifling a scream, she stares at the grim visage.
It is bruised, one side hideously malformed, permanently stuck in a grimace of agony, eye rolled and bloodshot, a monster's pupil and iris. All the skin is bunched up on that side in folds, in wrinkles. The eye, blind and cloud gray around the redness, stares into her rather than at her, recoiling at her horror.
In an instant, she feels a hit at her knees and collaspes. Above her, she sees…..her angel turned demonic, kicking around himself in a fury, smashing a mirror in his frenzy.
Damn you!
You little lying Delilah!
And then, the fury of the ghost (somehow she cannot reconcile this visage with her angel, and yet she will not attach him to a demon either) subsides, as he too, falls, a painting of cruel fate, his face hidden behind pale, bony hands.
Damn you…
Curse you…
But she is not looking at him, but remembering. As his foot had connected to the mirror, shattering glass, she had seen the side of his face that was smooth, the side of his face…
"Obito?" Her voice is a squeak.
"Call me what you like." His voice is hoarse from the screams of anger he emitted only a minute ago. "It doesn't matter what my name is or was, Rin-chan."
"It does to me!" She suddenly finds anger, and it surprises her in its intensity. "You were dead! Crushed by a boulder while we traveled as children…."
"As you can see," Half of Obito's face smiled, a tragic recollection of the smiling, cheerful boy who had followed her as a girl, "It didn't do the job well enough."
She tries to protest, tries to say that he shouldn't speak this way about his accident, how his face changes nothing, how she will lead him out of here and be his inspiration. She will save him from the world, and she will be his friend once more.
But she cannot tell so many lies, and they stop her tongue.
He sings, throat choked by sobs, a soft melody as he clutches the hideous side of himself:
Stranger than you dreamt it,
Can you even bear to look,
This loathsome gargoyle who seems a beast but secretly,
Secretly, yearns for Heaven,
Yes secretly , secretly, dreams of beauty.
Rin-chan…
Rin-chan…
His voice aches with devotion and love, crestfallen. He's sorry I've seen him like this, Rin thinks as she wonders what to say, what words to comfort him with, how to soothe wounds. And he loves me? How? Why?
I can't love this.
The revelation is cruel as it sinks in, but she knows it is true. Despite everything, his kindness, their past, she cannot bring herself to caress, to ever wake up beside him. But his inspiration…He made me great, a voice protests in her mind. He helped me where even Father failed, he made me feel as though I had purpose….
But she is more superficial than she apparently knew, and is repulsed by him, even as she hates herself, even as she pities him. Pity. Such a cruel fate to be left to.
She simply stares at him, forces herself to see that horrible, hideous side until she cannot stand it a moment longer and pushes the mask back into his hands.
Somehow, as he grimly ties it back onto that face, she has a sudden feeling of failure overcome her.
There was a boy who traveled with Kakashi and father and I….another student.
He wasn't anything special, just a boy with jet black hair and eyes, a pianist with little to no talent….
He helped me release birds when I saw them trapped and cried in one of the cities. I must have been six years old, him a few months older than me.
Smiling. He was always smiling, and he held open the doors with a finger over that grin as the birds were let out. He let me open the next door, and in silence we found a bond.
When we walked, the three of us, into the mountains when I was twelve, near that time Kakashi left.
And then the first rocks fell, getting larger and larger until, finally, Obito was underneath them, and Kakashi was pulling me aside but I was gripping Obito's hand and it…
Was all over, I thought.
But maybe not.
"Come." Obito, already inside the boat, paddle in hand, gestures over to her. "Those two fools who run my theatre will be missing you, those jerks."
And despite herself, despite her intolerance, despite her self-hatred, the childishness in that last statement wrings a small smile out of her.