asymmetry
They meet as a result of a serendipitious gap between their worlds left unattended. He sees her in the sky, a broken-glass spot of bruise-black, and one eye afire in brilliant blue flames, coattails fluttering like wings as the wind blows. She is plane geometry, onyx hair and salt skin and the cleverest fingers manipulating, with mechanized finesse, a gatling gun of massive, sweeping proportions. She is all lines and angles; he could graph her like he did in those math classes, draw the shape of her like a summoning pentagram. Izumo and Shiemi would love her, the orderliness of her composition, he thinks, observing the scarecrow stature of the girl as she stares right back.
He waves, breaking into a grin. His hands splay, and he thinks he can see the impression of a smile on her gossamer lips as she salutes him briefly but truly, bootheels clacking against stormclouds.
She doesn't speak (not directly, anyway), but he's able to understand her, nonetheless. She baffles him sometimes, in her nondescript silence, her lips pressed into thin gates or holding back warm laughter; he is not easily able to sew his mouth shut like she does. But he finds her interesting her own, peculiar way, and so he holds her hands in the quiet, the both of them sitting on park benches, feeling the hardwood and the peeling paint underneath their legs.
Her hands are always gentle, whether cradling the spent shells of her gun barrel or pressed against his or tossing birdseed to the school's pigeons. Her clothes are always thin, always transparent, and he asks her, through a blush, if she is cold.
Would that make me more normal if I was? her mute answer demands. Her eyes search his face curiously, seeking traces of indecision. He doesn't reply. He just looks, at the white star on her trenchcoat, her arms folded across her lap, and he realizes he doesn't care, nor does he need to. He doesn't need to ponder this girl and her otherverse; he just needs to be with her, to know that she is there. Her shadow is comforting, like a blanket.
He kisses her awkwardly, highschool pubescent boy that he is, and when he comes away, he is trembling with the intensity of it. Her pupils sear into his, asking for the truth.
"I love you," he is finally able to say, and then she kisses him back, hands reaching up to grasp at his hair. They stand, bound by their tongues and their mouths and greedy, grasping fingers exploring all over, and they drink in each other like the sea.
His reality is Shinto shrines, red arches, Latin verses and Hindu mantras, the heat and fury of his father's power unleashed from its demonic blade. Hers is chessboard landscapes and cold, proud women with metal claws, horizons gray as wintry slush, dripping chains raining from greenlit skulls sneering as they whirl around a macabre queen. The worlds do not overlap, but parts spill over occasionally; namely, in him and the nameless girl. The gunner.
They fold together like paper, like creases and cuts, and that is their overlap; their glorious asymmetry.