June 28th, 2020
Keiichi's shows of strength, his willpower, his ability to twist fate, it's all like a firework. Bright, explosive, impressive, spanning farther than anyone who saw the unprepossessing shell could've thought, a thousand colors and sparks raining down to ignite more fires in the unwary, able to turn night to day and inspire even the dullest of souls.
But like a firework, Keiichi's inspiration, his ability to strike fires and ignite miracles, was brief and tenuous. It was fragile. It those flames were not fed, they would be extinguished and leave nothing of themselves. That was why they had failed in one of the most unspeakable cycles –not just unspeakable because it dealt with Satoko suffering under her uncle, but because it had seen them defeat that cruel man, imprison him and free Satoko of the mentality Rika had spent decades trying to fix, tear down her fate, discover the identity of her tormentor, and be well on the way to success and safety before they…failed.
Failure was a better way of saying it. A kinder way, a less grief-stricken way.
They were massacred, would be the correct way. The blunt way. The accurate way.
They had almost made it, and there was no crueler fate, no crueler words for Rika in her hundred years of reincarnating, than almost. So close, but not close enough. They could see their goal, they could see it and almost touch it, but it slipped from their fingers the moment their fingertips brushed it.
Perhaps one might say Rena's unyielding fire was more potent, for it slumbered but did not die, and awoke from smoldering blue to incandescent white-hot at moments of true peril, fires that burned away Rena's ordinarily calm and placid personality and forged her in adamantine will, turning her into a powerhouse, a berserker that would not stop, would not pause, would not even falter the moment she tasted blood, cutting and probing until she hit right down to the bone, whether in words or deeds.
Rika might have been more appreciative of that will if it hadn't, in so many worlds, left her a blackened, charcoaled husk in the corner of what once had been a school, but was now a few fragile posts in an ashen crater, with unknown chunks of metal and glass fused and melted into new shapes, dirty with more ash and soot, and scattered with the small, twisted skeletons of her and the other children.
And although Rika loved her friends dearly, and had counted on their fire and passion more times than she liked to think of, there was always a part of her that would remember how their brightness and passion had failed her or turned against her.
Fire was not always beneficial, after all.
12.01 PM, USA Central Time