Leaves by the Candle Light

Chapter VII

By Hachi Mitsu

Hiddencache.com

            This was wrong, how could this be?

            / A single Tree /

            No. No. No.

            / Two figures. /

            He walked into a room that draped heavy with the smell of disinfectant and despair.

            / A single shadow. /

            It was like stepping into a symphony that had already begun.

            It was a three-part symphony; a perpetually spinning wheel where the beginning lies far after the end had long passed by in a whirling rage.

            / Where am I? /

            Subaru blinked into the ghost of two mismatching eyes.

            A smile...

            A strike...

A lie...

            / Subaru-chan, I'm so sorry... /

            A death.

            / Subaru-chan... /

            A faint voice called out to him from the past like the delicate tendril reaching forward from the past. A voice no longer with an origin.

            "...Sumeragi-san!"

            A voice from far away. A voice not like before. Subaru blinked again and saw only a large bed swathed with blankets and gauze. No cold eyes. No fake smile. It was like being woken from an endless dream by a shower of ice. Like reaching through layers of water at the moment of death; reaching, reaching, touching nothing.

            "Sumeragi-san! Are you alright?"

            Arisugawa. Arisugawa Sorata, the gregarious young priest from Kouyasan that had found Subaru after... Subaru closed his eyes in denial of what had happened only hours before at the fallen Nakano Sun Plaza. He blocked the world, but only saw those bottomless eyes against the starless backdrop of his personal hell.

            So he opened his eyes. The cheerful priest wasn't smiling anymore. Concern laced his eyes, which were trained on the unmoving figure in bed.

            Kamui.

            Without answering Subaru walked over to the boy.

            The irony that the being who had only hours before possessed the power to choose between the powers of God was now just a motionless masquerade of a helpless boy.

            How ironic that only hours before Subaru had believed he was happy.

            Subaru looked at Kamui but saw another boy, sitting under the tears of his sister. Another soul torn apart by destiny. Subaru placed his hands on either side of the dark haired boy's face, and looked into those lifeless violet eyes.

            How could anything so beautiful be so dead?

            Subaru leaned closer as he begun to chant. This was inevitable. The wound on his chest burned with searing pain as the fresh gash protested, but Subaru hovered motionless over Kamui.

            So it begins again.

            The chanting faded as blackness replaced the mantra of hope. As the rest of the Dragons of Heaven watched on with sickened apprehension, Subaru dived into the whirlpool of frazzled emotions that was once Kamui's mind...

            And destiny, prepared to screw them over one last time.

***

            There is a contemporary poem by a peculiar man whose name escaped him. The poem had a simple title: "Tunnel". In the nightmarish setting of the poem, a boy watched, for days, a stranger who stood motionless before his house. In his fear and despair, the boy shouted, threatened suicide and destroyed his own life in attempted to rid himself of that frozen statue that stood in his yard.

At last in one final act of desperation, the boy dug a tunnel into the yard of a neighboring house. Upon immerging from his self imposed hell, no longer a boy, he stood before the house, too tired to move, too weak to call for help, too faded to hear the shouts of anger and fright. He only stood there for days, waiting for the help that will come.

            In his attempt to escape that which he could not understand and feared, he became what he loathed.

            Perhaps the greatest injustice brought onto Subaru was his lost of self.

***

            Coming to Nakano had been a bad idea. He knew it, he knew it, he knew it. But he came anyway, because the thought of so many people dying for of his personal duel with destiny made him cringe with guilt.

            So Subaru threw caution to the wind and followed the line of destruction to the towering building. As he stepped tentatively across the trembling grounds part of him wondered if he should be surprised, despite all that had transpired, all that he had learned about that particular Dragon of the Earth, that the said Dragon was currently leaning casually against a twisted beam of steel coolly analyzing his approach.

            Suddenly, Subaru felt like he had stepped into a story in medias res, not knowing what has happened, not knowing what will happen. How, he wondered in half daze, could someone smile in such a situation when thousands are dying in agony?

            A conversation ensued, of that he was certain, but of what, he could no longer say. It was the bitter disappointment that he remembered. Subaru remembered the burning pain of the harsh magic that grazed his chest, leaving a long slash of crimson. Yet, some how, that physical pain never came close to the pain he felt beneath the wound, somewhere in heart that he never really did bury.

The last thing he could remember was the flurry of pale pink against the sickly glow of his fading keikkai. Everything in life holds a meaning, a reason for being, and the cherry blossoms that brushed softly against his lips were the faded blood of past wounds. Wilted, he thought as the realization that in the end Seishirou would always choose his job as the bringer of death over Subaru, wilted... like a stain that doesn't wash out. Unwanted and thrown away.

// People never do change. //

Never.

Somewhere out there, Subaru felt the sharp pain of a boy he never met slice through his misery. There were others worse off than he was, but for now, the thought did nothing to appease him.

***

            When Subaru finally returned home, he entered an apartment devoid of all the essences one would relate with home.

            But in the grayscale of the apartment at dusk was a simple unornamented glass in which perched a single white rose with flaring petals whose edges were laced in red. The water that half filled the cup caught the last breath of light from a far away window and cast a glowing shadow of a brilliant white square on the black tabletop.

            // Even the darkness will fade in the light. //

            Subaru smiled a little barely perceivable turn of lips, and reached to turn on the lights. As artificial light flooded the room into color, the single patch of white disappeared.

---

End of Chapter VII

Note: the middle part was a flashback of Nakano. Ok. Don't kill me if you didn't like that _ I'll make things better in the next chapter =D which will be out very very soon because it's killing me too ~_~