4. Love
"We're eight years old and playing in the garden and it's only an accident, only an accident when the wind blows by and spreads about your sheet music, only an accident when I come tumbling down trying to catch them; it's only an accident and you lie there with your eyes open wide in surprise, your face is too close, your panicked breath lingers on my lips, and it's the first time I completely realize just how well your name fits. We can kill a person in five different ways without even using weapons, but this is different, this is new, this is something no one's ever taught us. It's only an accident and we don't even know what we're doing and your mother calls you to come home before we are able to understand anything.
"Now we're fifteen years old and we know full well what we're doing and it's never an accident anymore."
"Occasionally, I think about the life we'll never have; how we'll never own a small house with cherry trees in the garden; how we'll never have a clumsy, yet loving dog that barks when you arrive home, while I'm cooking in the kitchen with children playing around me; how I'll never spend an entire morning polishing my award for winning the Marathon, while you wash our car outside in the sunlight; how our life will never come even close to the one imagined by cereal advertisments.
"And I can't even hold your hand without feeling remorse."
"Eyes-kun steals hearts from people the way a fire steals lives from moths: unknowingly, unconsciously, yet irresistibly; and all the moths burn their wings.
"I know I'm just one more moth about to get burnt, but I don't think I'll ever stop hoping."
"It's lips meeting lips and skin meeting skin, half-closed eyelids flickering like fireflies and hearts trembling as if on the edge of a cliff; it's fast-paced breathing, ribcages and hip bones colliding in the night like a car crash; it's stifled moans and earthquakes sweet, it's Kanone's hands and mouth finding their way down my body, burning flesh and burning bones; this is perfection at its best.
"And then it's waking up in the morning in Kanone's arms all over again; it's the warmth of his chest against my shoulder blades and the caress of his breathing against the back of my neck; it's soft collarbone kisses and fingers running through my hair like rivers, it's his hand in mine and his eyes of liquid gold that look as though all the sunlight in the world has decided to rest for a moment there, and 'perfection' can't even begin to describe it."
"Your eyes always get even bluer when you're sad, the way the sky darkens when it's about to rain. But, as your eyelashes shield you from my gaze again, I know full well that this rain will never come, and how can I even ask for rain, when this drought of blue is the only landscape you've ever shown me? Your eyes look away and I'm left here as an ersatz mourner of things you never talk about, left here with tears that shouldn't be mine scalding my eyes, and the only thing I can do is hold you in my arms so tightly, until I can't distinguish your heartbeats from mine. My tears form an ocean in your hair.
"This will suffice, you say."
"Her lips are soft and quivering, yet her eyes sparkle with anger when I pull away; she looks best when she's angry, this beautiful catastrophe, this wild natural disaster. Then she hits me and runs outside in the pouring october rain, crying, with nothing but a white shirt and her jeans on, and what else can I do but run after her with a jacket in one hand and with bitter feelings of resentment in my heart?"
"Rio gazes with so much ardor, that the air in the room is alit with fire and it hurts to even look. She thinks of moths, then she thinks of butterflies, and then she thinks she likes butterflies. Specifically, the butterflies in her stomach. They flutter about and make her all giddy, and she thinks she likes the feeling.
"Truth be told, Rio is not actually in love, but rather, in love with being in love. She's in love with the butterflies that dance inside her, sickeningly sweet and sticky, looking for affection the way Kanone's cats do. She loves boys the way a sunflower loves the sun, turning towards it all throughout the day, yet staying in the same spot; the way red autumn leaves love the ground, looking from afar while perched up in their trees, then falling down in a twirl only to be blown away by the wind. There's this fine line between admiration, friendship, love and desire, but a Blade Child has to fail somewhere.
"Rutherford and Kousuke both act as if they don't notice, anyway; they don't have eyes for seemingly-little girls, and, at any rate, I'd probably end up hitting Kousuke even more if he did, for reasons much too selfish to admit."
"But by the time we'll be washing the blood off our fingers, Ryouko will be cursing and blaming me for Asazuki's actions, going 'ohGodIhateyouIhateyouIhateyou' again and sending me to hell three times in a row. I wonder if it makes any longer a difference if more sins add up. She still refuses to kill and resorts only to harming those who hunt us, but she can't honestly expect Asazuki to do the same.
"Sometimes, Ryouko wishes she had a frying pan permanently attached to her arm so that she could knock what she calls 'sense' into Kousuke more easily; sometimes, she wishes she could just crack open his head and rearrange what's inside. Most of the times, though, she just wishes she could run away with him and she hates herself for it. She hates and hates and hates, and then she loves again, radiating like a comet."
"I've always liked the way snow tasted; when I was a little kid, I used to take handfuls of snow and roll them into balls, then I'd pretend that they were apricots and I'd bite right into them. Eyes would always grimace and say that I shouldn't do that because snow is dirty, but I would always reply that something so beautiful, so soft and so white could never be dirty.
"I sometimes still eat snow-apricots; they're mostly the same, but the innocence seems to have lost itself somewhere along the way, and the coldness hurts worse than a red hot iron."