Are You Now or Have You Ever Been
Kozue sits at the fountain, her gaze veiled under dark eyelashes. Juri sees the blackberry of her eyes, the wild stained color of them. They fade to an innocuous lime when Kozue notices Juri.
Behind Kozue, trickling water sings faithlessly, and Kozue seems to follow the melody. Over her skin is a marine haze. She echoes other Kozues: bruise blue, straw gold, blossom black, sea, sand, and stone. She is shades of fear and day-sky.
The hours of darkness overlap and stutter. Juri watches Kozue fill up the space with haloes and hallucinations until she speaks.
"Aren't you going to tell me off for being out late, Arisugawa-san?" Words reduce Kozue to her simplest form: pert voice, white skin, blue eyes, standard-length skirt and tidy tie. The sound of speech does not fit into this static-blur of colors and shapes. Kozue is everything she's usually not. Something more girlish, something more modest, perhaps something more like her twin.
Juri frowns, with just a touch of her usual distain. This action is both familiar and not. "Why else would I be out here?" The regular dialogue falls into place effortlessly.
The ghost of a black flower tarnishes the white of Kozue's blouse. "Perhaps to make a wish?" She points upward. Her hand is silver and strong, and Juri sees variations of swords blooming from it: a rapier, a bamboo stick, a scalpel.
The sky is a mirror ball of light-scars, dizzying and cold. Juri wonders why anyone ever thought stars could grant wishes: they are spiky and remote, they are not friendly. "I don't believe in wishes." Juri hates the words immediately; they sound like admitting shame. Juri's voice should be a whip laced with diamonds; instead it is a silk scarf fraying in the wind.
"Of course you don't, Arisugawa-san." Kozue's precise uniform is just another costume, a part in a play. She has never been a normal girl, and she knows she doesn't fit the role. "Perhaps you're out tonight because you missed seeing me."
Juri's impassive expression falters as she thinks of the real reason she's out wandering the grounds tonight: her single dorm has distorted into a haunted place, fluttering with tiny wings and a photograph she knows she's thrown away before. The black and white print practically breathes as it transforms into plum-wine and creamy flesh, and though Juri doesn't remember the girl's name, she shudders. Even now, the ghosts of chains she's already broken smudge her collarbone.
Of course Kozue doesn't know everything: she sees Juri's face and sneers. Her hair warps into a mess of ink and indigo, and her skirt ghosts away into sleek, zippered pants. Gold buttons dot her jacket; the top ones are undone and the sharp planes of her neck peek through, moon-colored flesh exposed. The petals of the black rose at her breast brush her dark lapels.
Juri considers how easily her own diaphanous nightgown could rip, how easily a blade might rupture her chest. She is not even vaguely alarmed by the prospect-- why be afraid of a kitten dressed up like a wildcat? Still, Kozue wears arrogance well.
When Juri smirks back at Kozue, she remembers the surge of power that threaded through her veins the first time she saw her own face in a magazine; the first time she bested Touga in a duel; the first time she defeated Ruka. None of these accomplishments mean anything now, but she wonders if Kozue feels that heady blend of conceit and satisfaction just now.
"Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm just waiting around for underclassmen to break the rules. Then again, maybe not."
Juri walks to the fountain, treating the cobbled concrete like a runway under her sleek legs, trampling red rose petals carelessly. Her boudoir slippers are white silk but inexplicably click like heels on the pavement.
Her gossamer robe garbles as she moves, glossing smooth as a snowy jacket and coral trousers. Juri's teenage curves strain and her curls tumble impossibly past her hips. She parts the velvet curtains of darkness, elegantly passing from stage left to stage right.
Juri sits next to Kozue at the fountain, her thighs chilly on the wet marble, and pretends not to notice when Kozue's features register astonishment, then turn calculating.
"The world is just full of possibilities, isn't it, Arisugawa-san?" Kozue's eyes are onyx, glittering and eager.
Juri has forgotten any uncertainty. If the world is to be mercurial and volatile, why shouldn't she follow suit? She is tangerine and pearl, brighter, swifter, and sharper than any sword. She leans closer; discarding imprecise and unessential forms of herself with every movement, revising herself as an apparition, fleeting as a butterfly or a kiss.
She drapes her arm across Kozue's shoulders, and whispers a hot lie in her ear. "Don't you know? The only possibilities left are the ones we create."