Approaching Metamorphosis (or Not Enough)
He walks through the grounds of the shrine; the pavement is firm beneath his feet, even as the dark red maple leaf drifts down and obscures the tip of his boot, shifting the foliage mosaic into a new form. The pathway is barred on two sides by trees, which in the autumn season, are living, bleeding entities of crimson, ochre, and coffee. During this season, they shed their summer growth, reworked from a conformist green into something each of their own choosing before they denude. Every year the dress has been different and unique, evolving.
Subaru Sumeragi breathes in the fall musk and believes he is different, too.
He stands in the stiff chill of the outside, letting the frosty air trace the high ridge-bones and soft hollows of his cheeks until they go numb and he can no longer feel the wind's wandering fingers. It is cold, and will get colder, so he moves to generate warmth and to hold it gently as great a time as he is able to, like the hand of a long time lover who promises they will return but whom the well-wisher knows will not. A few early withered leaves, sere, and mapped with veins, crunch under his left heel and he moves swiftly away, thinking that when winter comes, he will not need to tread as carefully. Even though it is autumn yet, his thoughts are of powdered snow, of intricate snowflakes melting and binding their lattices together for a transient time before they melt away, bonds lost, then forgotten and never to be made again.
Such is the nature of people.
The shrine is empty in the early morning, and quiet, except for the half-whispered murmurs of a wind still in half-sleep and not wholly conscious. Subaru thinks of this slumbering breeze, he thinks of the coming snow, but those things fade and pass, marks in the sand erased by the surging surf of an ocean that too, eventually rolls away. But there is one thought that will not go away, and at the recollection, something newly born burns within the Sumeragi.
He shuffles, down the road quickly, not caring as the muddy soles of his shoes leave damp prints on the leaves, which flatten and begin to break under his weight. It is autumn, the wind blows stronger and more fiercely, awakening under the weakening feeble rays of a cloud-obscured sun, but Subaru is cold no longer. He walks faster and faster, his legs blur, and suddenly he is not walking at all. The gravel flies under his feet, and he feels as weightless as a bird soaring over a distant rocky shoreline. His heart hammers, a machine possessed, and Subaru finds himself struggling to breathe. His lungs work like bellows until they ache, but the fire in him does not ashen, instead it flares.
Subaru grits his teeth, and allows himself to hate.
He thinks of Hokuto, but he does not think of her for long. It is said to count the years since a person has died will bind the deceased to the living, and bring a burden on them. Subaru does not count the years, but he is afraid that his loneliness and grief is so great that their gravity might snare her anyway, so he tries not to think of her at all. In his dreams where Subaru's subconscious can indulge, he hears her voice, replays their days together, but when he wakes to an empty hotel room, dark in the hours before day, he experiences a still darker hollowness in his chest. It frightens him a bit, that he feels so little, but then Subaru remembers about the years, and he is glad. He is glad that he no longer has anything for Hokuto to bind to.
The pathway circles around until it ends abruptly at the first step of the temple. Subaru looks for a moment, ponders whether to climb up the stairs, but the pavement is smooth beneath his feet. The trees are littering their leaves. Tokyo spreads itself before him; in the beyond he can see its feast of lights and people between the shelter of green. He takes one step up, but then retreats, and lets the dream drift again, lets the hate return.
He turns on his heel and strides back the way he has come. The feeling still rolls in him, sure and present, but he no longer feels weightless, but anchored, like the roots of the crying trees that shed their colorful tears before him. He hates. He hates and he wants to hate. He lets the hate turn into disgust, revulsion, and then anger. Subaru wants to roar. For a moment he is not an onmyouji, or the spiritual head of the respected Sumeragis, but a man who has lost too much to an unfair world, an ordinary man who wishes to rally against a fate that has been unjust, unkind to him. He sees the crimes before him, and nothing else. He does not hear ghost-Hokuto's plea, or concern himself with the pedestrians down the block. He does not feel the wind that tries to placate him, smoothing over his hair, reaching between the worn white fabric of his coat as if to embrace him.
He walks with shaking legs, out of the shrine grounds, and there is madness in his eyes.
Someone stands, waiting at the entrance.
Subaru stops in his rage, and something in him, the thing that has hammered so hard, hammers one more time, then cracks and begins to bleed. The red spreads itself until it drowns him. The intruder is dressed in black, and even the man's piercing gaze is hidden behind shaded sunglasses, but still, it is as if something too bright has struck Subaru's eyes and they begin to sting. Subaru tries to breathe. The wind runs caressing fingers through Seishirou's hair and the cosmic scale that resides in Subaru tips. Hate is shed, something else takes its place, and under the falling rain of maple leaves, under the impassive gaze of the man he can not escape but can never touch, Subaru's racing mind is still again, sane again, and he weeps.
During the metamorphosis time of autumn, he has walked into the grounds of a shrine, and walked out...still not enough changed.
Owari.