Flashes of yellow, orange and blue, rushing in on her, swirling rapidly around her mind, creating shadows, pictures, illusions that flared up in vivid color only to be swept away by a large wave of green.

The world ended in green for a moment. At least, that's how Lea perceived it as.

After it, she stood alone in an almost-collapsing building. With a whispered 'torri' she was out of there. The explosion hadn't affected her. An explosion, as the word implies, focused its power outwards. And Lea hadn't been in any harm.

The epicenter.

And now she was alone, a nine-year-old who had created an explosion out of rage and who couldn't find her brother. She couldnt see him anywhere -not in the building, not in the water below, not among the green-tinted flames.

For a second, a little blink of a second, she thought he was just- gone. Then she remembered, remembered she was still breathing, her heart beating, (and that meant so was he) and she felt relief.

The world faded to black soon after.


Seeing an explosion is entire worlds apart from experiencing one.

For one, there was the pain. Which was a strange mixture of excruciating—breathing ash and fire, burning the lungs, tissue damage, pain, agony like fireworks every time he closed his eyes, every movement like ice shards stabbing at his heart—and numbing. He couldn't feel a lot of his body, disorientation clouding his mind. Water covered his eyes and he felt like he was drowning.

—he was drowning though, not just an illusion—

There was something rather familiar about the pressure and the warmth that blanketed his body. It was very warm, his heart, thrumming under his ribs as he fought—for breath, movement, and life—to see the stars again.

The odd fact about the astonishing peculiarity known as death; it was silent as it stole his life away. The desperation for life was what was loud; the thrashing arms, the screaming lungs, the burning desire to feel another spark of pain—all of those basic carnal desires begging the mind to keep fighting for life.

But death itself is quiet. Like water, it floods the body until nothing but an empty shell remains.

In the water, he felt himself drifting. It was funny how, the further down he went into the murky depths, the more his lungs feel like what fire must feel to other people. It set alight to everything; his common sense, his mind, the very nature of his humanity—until all he could feel was the water burning flesh to a crisp and the fire scalding over the scars.

He was drifting.

How delightfully ironic. How incredibly derisive. One of his most peaceful moments was when he dared to kiss Death and tell the tale. And now, a repeated performance. There was no gravity under him, but he was (still) not able to fly. He was just adapting to the environment, like Kaiju are known to do. Could he swim amongst the stars?

He couldn't open his eyes.

It was . . . like he was falling asleep.

It was so peaceful.

So silent.

.

.

.

(It's so... lonely.)

.

.

.

( Once upon a time, a dying star fell into the dark basement of time.

Some eyes become fixated on the lights stuck on the Earth's glass ceilings. Others try to combine the rays of sunshine with the rest of the solar system. Either way, they are always drawn to the stars. Perhaps for the illusion of permanence that they give off? People's gazes—of all kinds—gravitate upwards and drift into a mental oblivion, captivated by the fantasy that, for one moment, everything can be bigger than our small souls and minds, that the words we say and the lights we follow can last forever.

Of course, stars are not immortal beings–it is funny to think of them as "alive", for they are technically nothing but burning gas stuck in an airless void. And yet, do you not find it wonderful that they can indeed live forever, depending on what angle you look at them from in this ever-expanding universe of inverted expectations?

As with everything, the definitions of both life and death is completely dependent on personal, conscious perspective.

You are but a falling, dying star, whose light is dimmed as your lungs become suffocated by temporal waters. Petrified by who you are and who you have become…

So it is time for you to wake up. )


I know you want to leave but, friend, please, don't take your life away from me.

("But…")

.

.

.

You need to wake up now, Vale.

("...I don't know…")

.

.

.

YOU NEED TO WAKE UP VALENTINE.

.

.

.

("THEN STOP WITH THE STORIES AND TELL ME HOW TO LIVE!")

His arms moved like a marionette caught on its own strings, be them controlled by fate's design or his own making, the one thing they couldn't stop him from doing is moving.

His body thrashed, water clogging his ears and murmuring his movements into one incoherent underwater splash—

Oh, God, where is the air?

Stop and be quiet, your fingers cannot claw water but dear stars do they try—

No, no, little prince, water is not glass, it does not need to be shattered, only breached—

A cool voice breached his thoughts, and he felt himself being carried, and the voice's body, his hands were not spears, they were cups, and Vale watched as those palms cupped instead of clawed and caressed the water, not fought against it—

Vale's legs and arms synchronized with the boy's—he carried on, they danced within the waters, and something something in this world must feel sorry enough for him to give him mercy

.

.

.

(Just a child, you learned that nobody cares what you have to say
"Tell me a story, little prince.")

His hand reached upwards—

.

(Just a child, you learned to never expect kindness
"You're about to regret ever threatening to harm my brother.")

He felt the cold air settle on his skin—

Lifting his head out of the water, he gasped—

(Just barely a teenager, you learned that all is lost
"You need to wake up.")

Gulping the freezing air and feeling it freeze over his windpipe into his lungs—

.

And he BREATHED.

.

Something solid, finally- he felt, dimly, the solidness of the ground beneath his fingers and knees as they arrived to shore. He felt everything at once and felt numb, not exactly aware of what was happening.

Warmth disappeared and a chill overtook his body. The stars were absolutely beautiful, but oh, they were falling.

—parts of the building collapsing, frayed wires shooting off sparks and broken glass everywhere—

Fires burned everywhere—around him, inside him—and they threw an eclectic lighting over the scene. Chaos and destruction and falling stars.

"The end of the world," he mumbled, voice faint and tired.

"Not quite, Valentine," a voice rasped next to him—statement or a promise?—but he was long gone by then.


Before he opened his eyes, he flew in a sky of blood and flame. When he opened his eyes, sight eluded him.

In his mind, he was still drowning and the waters had turned blood red.

—Lea's blood—

Was it any surprise that when he woke up beside his savior, he was screaming?

A hand over his mouth quickly fixed that problem, a frantic 'Shh!" from behind.

"You recover quickly, don't you?" the one behind him asked as Vale attempted to pry the hand over his mouth away. One second. He knew that voice.

Turning his head around, his suspicions were confirmed. Brown hair, steel for eyes. the hand was removed from his mouth.

"How did you find me?"

Darren Wakeman smiled thinly. His eyes were soft. "Only a blind man could've missed the damage your sister caused, little prince. The others are gone, I think they thought you dead. Lea is okay, she just passed out." he bulldozed over Vale's next statement. "She used a bit too much magic at once. She'll be fine." he looked around yet again, at the still-fading green-tinted everything. "We should get moving."

His heart was pounding, pounding, just like his head. "Why?"

Darren rolled his eyes, and there's one for normalcy. "There were some corpses hidden there. People are bound to get suspicious when they find third-degree rotting bodies, you know."

"The heck is "third-degree rotting"? Did you mix your decomposition up with burns?" a smirk found its way across his face. It was a special talent of Vale's that he could still make himself sound knowledgeable when he was feeling like absolute crap. Darren made a face, and for a second they've got a little piece of normality, and Vale had to use it up, had to scorch it like a fresh candlewick.


They were fine. They had gone back to their temporary residence. Lea was still passed out on the couch, and Vale had found himself alone with Darren. He had a million questions he wanted answered, but they withered and died before the first wisps of smoke left his mouth. For now, anyway.

"I'll sit here," Darren proffered stolidly, sitting on the floor with determination. "And you can talk if you want."

Vale found himself crashing. He wasn't going to let his guard down around Lea, wasn't going to show the rough and raw edges.

Wasn't going to sit down and count the scars he could see and the ones he couldn't.

He jerked his foot reflexively—his own healing couldn't take away phantom pain, irrational hurts—and his hands were shaking.

"The world is crashing down, me and my sister don't have a home anymore... I don't want to die, just yet." Valentine answered, shifting on the floor as to get more comfortable. He seemed quite eager to get that bit of information in the open. "I'm nearly fourteen years old, I haven't had a decent snog in my life, I haven't shagged anyone in my life, hell I haven't even gotten drunk. Not even once," he looked up. "I haven't visited other countries, and I'd really like to see a tropical beach even if just once. I haven't learned another language – our language doesn't count. The only instrument I know how to play was the old piano at home…"

"Okay, okay, I get your point," Darren said, a bit irritated.

"If it were up to me, if I could make sure he will never attack me, I would let the war keep going. Wouldn't interfere. It's not my business. They will get over it." But Vale wouldn't get over it. He'd just tuck it away into the box that keeps all those violations, the times when his body wasn't his and his mind wasn't his and sometimes the pain was all he knew.

Darren raised his eyebrow in return. "You really think you could?" he asked, scathingly. "Could you, really? Heroics are the base code of your whole being, little prince. If your father would stop actively hunting you down - which I very much doubt he will - you'd do the same, and just go on with your life, while he conquers the Americas, a great part of Europe and possibly Australia and Africa? You could really sit back, and do nothing?" He snorted. "I rather doubt it."

"Actually, I probably could," Vale answered, sounding a little offended. "Heroics are not the base code of my being. That's cowardice and witty humor and possessiveness," he said, now defensive. "And there's nothing wrong with being a coward," he added, when the older teen opened his mouth. "Being a coward keeps you alive."

"Does it, now?"

"Yes!" the prince growled, shuddering.

Darren would have argued, but at that moment Vale let out a slightly demented laugh. He shuddered again, and looked around the house. He began speaking, in hushed tones, as if the shadows on the walls could hear them.

"I can feel him next to me, sometimes. Crouching over me, waiting. And he can't get at me, doesn't want to get at me yet. He has humiliated me, but I humiliated him twice over, with me escaping. There were months of my life, Darren, that my throat never stopped burning… And my position. I'm not so stupid to think that no one will want to come after me, to have the second most-wanted position in the Kaiju hierarchy.

I'm scared of going back; but more of the fact he has threatened to take the ones I love, over and over again, because I cannot die yet. But I never minded dying, not really. I would have traded my life for any one of theirs. I thought I was being clever by hiding, never seeking him out. But here I am, with you and Lea, none the wiser to this- this thing that follows me..."

His hushed rambling came to a halt, as the hybrid put his hands over his face in an utterly defeated gesture. Darren, his brain working overtime, understood the boy's dilemma.

He didn't want to leave, but he was terrified that somehow his mere presence was going to bring about a premature end to both. An insane notion, but something in the back of Darren's mind hummed in sympathy. Out of the corner of his eye he perceived the imagined dark tunnels underneath his mind, and the horrible presence that followed him.

"That's no way to go about things," Darren said, trying to hide his uncertainty with a confident tone. "You never know, maybe he's finally decided to let you off the hook. Given you up as a bad job? Or wait till the war is more advanced."

Valentine chuckled humorlessly. Darren noted that the younger one's hands were shaking. He must have really believed this theory, that death was quite literally crouching over his shoulder, willing to strike at any and all that came too close to the boy.

"Maybe," Vale finally conceded, "you're still alive, I guess. My family too… Lord, I'm truly, dreadfully selfish. I've gotten out of bed and thought of leaving here a dozen times," the prince said, and Darren's heart caught in his throat, "and every time I set out to go, I just couldn't do it."

Right. That, wasn't good.

He wanted to talk Vale out of these notions, and reaffirm that selfishness was, in his case, an admirable trait that he ought to cultivate. However, he really felt that Lea had already covered all the major points in the months they were alone.

"You should listen to your sister more. She had a far more accurate assessment of your situation, and whether people dying has any correlation to your existence." Darren said.

The silence hung heavily between them, punctuated between Lea's soft breathing.

"So...what would you kill for?" Vale couldn't resist asking, changing the subject. "Hypothetically speaking, I mean."

Darren's head tilted to one side, and regarded Valentine with an impenetrable look in his dark eyes. "If someone tortured or murdered my lover, or my children, or one of my family. And I do speak of murder, not simply killing – if a Kaiju falls in battle...no vendettas spring from that. We can often be philosophical about our kind's deaths, simply because most of us live so long in any case. But in my case, the mortals I love? No."

"I will get so few years with those I care about as it is," Darren went on. "That if your already short lives are made shorter by sheer malice…"

"You will become angry; become jealous of the time you didn't have...you will become vengeful." Vale finished for him, eyes zeroed on a faraway spot.

The brunet sighed as Vale stretched his other wing. "If you were struck down, little prince, if you were murdered on the streets of this city you call your passing home...I would take up the vendetta for you."

"What?" Vale snapped, practically bristling and growling with alarm. "No! No one is going on a quest for vengeance for me – I'm not messing up anyone's life like that."

"Why not?" Darren asked, and he sounded genuinely curious. "If someone murders you, they're clearly someone who needs to be removed from society, wouldn't you agree?"

"No. I wouldn't want you to become that."

He sighed and let his head fall back on the floor. There are always people who suffer more. Valentine White hasn't had a great couple of years, but he has a great family. That's more than most.

It makes things better, even if it cannot make them good.


Fūtako: Older sister

Fūtago: Younger sister

Mūtako: Older brother

tago: Little brother