There were lights on his face, once.

Hide had seen it, Yoshimura had, then Touka, Hinami, Nishiki, Amon, Tsukiyama, Banjou.

And they were orange lights, small tiny fracture beams that marked his cheeks, his eyes. They marked Kaneki's fingertips when he held the corner of page to turn it to the next, followed his feet when he tapped them on the ground in his own symphony of words and sentences, strung together delicately and tied together like woven silk.

Kaneki had looked at himself in the mirror many times before, but he never really had looked, either. He doesn't see the lights as fireflies. He only sees scars, ugly and hideous, marked and raw from the times he thinks, "Fuck, I'm a terrible person."

He had long since cast aside those lights, the remnants of those thoughts that linger like the shadows on the wall of a house.

And he would jump off a cliff, then, step right off and let himself fall and the wind blow him back. He doesn't have wings. No limbs upon his back, no feathers.

So he falls, falls and falls until the ocean licked at his face and swallowed him up with its tongue. Kaneki holds his breath, but he never tries to swim up. Drowning, deafness, silence.

But that's okay. Kaneki had always liked to delude himself in his own fantasies, thinking that he always took a chance at the world with feet spread and hands clenched. He liked to think. Amuse himself that he did struggle in his shackles.

In the end, he never really tried at all. The wind tells him to fall and he falls, the ocean tells him to drown and he drowns.

Because that's what Kaneki knows how to do best to erase those memories.

Those laterns, those candles and those fireflies.

Those moons and those stars.

a/n: please let me know what you think. if its anything, i wanna know what people see when they read my writing. do they imagine the universe, raw and red? or is it a constant changing shade of blue, black, purple?

do they think of the wolves that chase the sun and moon? or the birds that glide, the deer that stroll or the patrol of cats?

i dont know. but you do.