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A Castle of Silence and Bones
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003.
falling slowly to the earth
(we break and destroy ourselves more frequently than we do others.)
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Yao has not been to Japan in a long time, but when the gauze is finally removed from his eyes, he instantly recognizes the wall and the floor and the ceiling and the bed to be from one of the inner chambers of the Akasaka Palace.
He remembers the height of the ceiling; the westernized inventions (made in Germany, he knows--he was your ally first--because only the best quality can suit the palace of 'guests') that click and clack in the early hours of the morning. It's a mutation, not the seamless hybrid he thought it first to be.
The world, and the people of the world, they are like that.
He went, once, to this very room.
Kiku comes again, today, and an unpleasant shiver runs through Yao's spine (that face, those eyes, that horrid, horrid touch; those feelings) at prior events. He wants to convince himself that he knows the person clad in white and gold and blood-red-splatters before him. He wants to convince himself that last night was only a nightmare, did not really happen.
The captor--his captor--approaches, comes closer. There is a curve of lips; cool silence as always.
'Stop, stop,' he begs in a tongue that is not his own when Kiku advances.
This is not a dream.
You are not going to wake up.
There is no hope for anything anymore.
He would say that the other is too close for comfort, but even being in the same room, in the same grande stretch of a palace, is too much. He's known hatred and pain and betrayal through the course of lifetimes and lifetimes. He's kneeled and bowed and been forced to submit and submit and still submit more because there is nothing more he can give.
Shallow breaths, a flutter of lids; Kiku has not even raised a hand yet.
And just like that, the other leaves.
He clutches tightly to the silk-spun sheets about him.
(There is no escape.)
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