The second chapter of the day! This is one of my favourites, and I've been looking forward to writing it ever since I sorted out the list of words and realised I'd given Yuu miracle.
Yuu
There they were, at the bottom of the decorations box. Seven long, thin, gold candles in a box once meant for twelve, three of them already half-burned.
Yuu took them out of the box carefully, feeling the heavy beeswax warm slightly in his hands. He'd always been so sparing with them, but he couldn't deny that one day they were going to be burned down completely.
The first time he had tried to explain to Gingka why he sat in a room on his own and lit two gold candles on the twenty-first night of December, Gingka had asked him why he didn't buy more candles if he was so worried about them burning out. But that was the point. They were from Dark Nebula. He would never be able to get these candles again.
Yuu dug around in the box until he pulled out the two candlesticks and the matches. With a bit of effort he managed to get two of the half-burned candles into their holders once more, and placed them on the table.
For the next hour or so he ignored them, preoccupied with sorting out the rest of the decorations so that they were all in neat piles for putting up the next morning. Outside, the evening fell fast. On this, the shortest day of the year, clouds came in early and reduced the amount of sunlight even further; Yuu turned the lights on at just after half past three so that he could see. But eventually he found himself with no further jobs to do, and picked up the matches.
The candles lit quickly, their sweet scent filling the air almost immediately. Yuu leaned around the low sofa and turned the lights off before dropping down to sit almost eye-level with the flames. He had done this every year since the Nemesis Crisis. When the day became so short that the night seemed endless, he lit two candles at dusk and waited, lost in memories and praying for a miracle.
"Yuu?"
Yuu didn't turn around when the door opened and let a slit of light fall across him. He knew who it was anyway. "Hey, Kenta." His voice cracked a bit on the second word.
A hand brushed against his shoulder. "Are you okay? Can I join you?"
Yuu nodded, not trusting his voice any more, and shifted up so that Kenta could sit down on the sofa next to him.
"It still hurts." he said after a long silence. "I can still hear the way his breathing sounded right at the end. Sometimes it's like the years in between never happened and I just expect him to come striding back in to our fights like he used to and… and he never does."
Kenta looked at him sadly. "I miss him too. More than I ever thought I would."
"I just… I thought he would always be here." Yuu wasn't certain where the words were coming from, but they were raw in their trueness and he suddenly found himself trying not to cry. "I wouldn't have met any of you without him. I owe him so much and he taught me so much and I just… I wish I could have said thank you. For all the times he helped us even when he didn't really want to. For all the times he helped Tsubasa, or Gingka, or you… or me."
Kenta leaned into him slightly, shoulder pressing to shoulder in solidarity. "There'll never be anyone else like him. That's for sure."
"I'm glad you got to know him," Yuu said. "Even if I wish it could have been me." Kenta said nothing, but Yuu knew there was no animosity between them, just the weight of loss.
Again there was silence between them. Yuu let his mind wander back to the past, recalling memories of a fallen friend as he did every year on the anniversary. For one evening of the year, for one hour as the candle burned, he would sit on his own in the dark with nothing but the candle flames for light, and remember everything he could about the man once known as the Dragon Emperor.
It had started as his own private mourning, morphing to remembrance as the years dulled the grief, but some of the others knew about it. Kenta, of course, who had known Ryuga so well in the end. Tsubasa, who knew Yuu. And Gingka, who always understood. But most of the time they just came for a brief time, to stay with Yuu in the darkness and the stillness, and then they left him alone to pray for the impossible.
The Western traditions that Tsubasa and Masamune had told him about insisted that Christmas was a time for miracles. Yuu had only seen two things he might have considered miracles in his life, neither of them anywhere near Christmas time and both of them on some of the worst days of his life. So, really, he was overdue for a proper Christmas miracle. At least, that was his theory. It hadn't worked so far.
After about half an hour, as expected Kenta straightened and stood up. "I- I'm going to go and help with dinner," he said. "I'll come and get you when it's ready, okay?"
Yuu just nodded, deep in thought. He barely noticed when the door clicked shut behind Kenta.
Left alone, the light from the candles seemed to expand to fill the whole room. The golden wax was dripping down the side of the candlestick and heading dangerously close to the table, but it would be fine – Yuu was only going to be a few more minutes and then he'd blow them out. Best to save as much of the wax as possible.
He didn't know why he'd had the candles with him on the day that he left the Dark Nebula. All he knew was that he had found them undamaged in his pocket after the fall of Battle Tower, and had immediately shoved them as far under his bed as possible so he didn't have to think about everything that had happened to him in that place.
But when the first anniversary of the Nemesis Crisis rolled around, he had been trying to displace the memories of his lost friend by tidying, and had found them again – this last link he still had to Dark Nebula, but also to Ryuga, who had liked to have fire nearby at all times. The candles had been his, usually found on the Dark Nebula dinner table.
Perhaps Yuu had been taking another set of them to the dining room when he had been ordered to fight Reiji, and that was why he had them in his pocket when he escaped? So many memories had been lost. Some of them had been terrible, that was true, but Yuu was all too aware that as time went on he was losing the clarity of the memories he wanted to keep – watching Ryuga fight and grow stronger every day; witnessing L-Drago's true power for the first time, before it had turned possessive; seeing a young man with white hair step out of a helicopter onto yellow rock and proceed to answer Yuu's attack-greeting with one of his own, treating Yuu as an equal.
Even when he closed his eyes, he could still see the two flames flickering in the darkness like a pair of deep gold eyes.
.
Yuu opened his eyes into near-darkness. Beside him on the table, the candles were flickering low, barely an inch of wax left. He should blow them out before he used up more wax...
"Yuu."
The voice froze him into stillness. Not because he wasn't expecting someone to be there (there were far too many people in his house for that), but because he recognised it. And that voice wasn't possible.
Yuu raised his eyes to look over the top of the candle flames and across to the other side of the table, where a young man with white hair and fierce, dragon-ish eyes sat with his elbows propped on the table and his chin in one hand.
"Ryuga..." Yuu breathed, and the erstwhile Dragon Emperor smiled so that his eyes flashed in the candlelight.
"You've been asleep for some time. I'm glad to see you awake at last." His voice was as soft as his smile, and Yuu felt his heart sink.
"Is… is this a dream?" he asked.
"Do I look like a dream to you?"
Yuu shook his head. It was true. Ryuga was sharp and clear and solid, almost more so than Yuu himself. "But you sound like one. You'd never say you were happy to see me. It's me who wanted you to say that."
"So if you're not going to believe I'm here, why did you ask for a miracle?"
.
"Yuu? Hey, Yuu. Wake up."
Yuu opened his eyes – actually opened them this time – to see that the lights had been turned on in the room and another so-familiar face was smiling down at him. Tsubasa had one hand on his shoulder and was shaking him gently.
"Hey," he said softly as soon as he realised he had Yuu's attention. "I came in here and the candles were burned out and you were fast asleep. Dinner's ready."
The candles had burned out? Yuu sat up with a jolt and looked up at the table, only to find that Tsubasa was right. As he had slept, the candles had completely burned down, and there was nothing left of either of them. Now he only had five left.
"I'm sorry," Tsubasa said. "I should have come in earlier, I know how important those candles are to you, how they help you remember." Then he paused. "That's strange," he said suddenly. "Yuu, look at the wax."
Where the two candles had burned all the way down, a cascade of dripping wax had fallen over the edge of the stand and bled across the table. But that wasn't what had caught Tsubasa's attention.
The wax wasn't smooth. Instead, it was covered in tiny indentations like half-moons, or scales. And, at the end furthest from the candle, the wax stream had split to form a side-view of the open mouth of –
"L-Drago," Yuu whispered, reaching out to touch the impossible object. The wax cracked away from the candlesticks when he touched it, leaving him with what could only be described as a perfect wax model of a dragon curled up in his hands. Tsubasa was staring at it too, eyes wide. Finally, he cleared his throat.
"I think you can safely call that a Christmas miracle, Yuu," he said. He knew all too well what Yuu hoped for at this time of year. "I don't know how it happened, but that's not something normal."
Yuu made no reply, but ran one finger along the cool wax scales, only half-imagining the feel of real, warm scales brushing past his cheek. Yes, this was a miracle and no mistake.
Perhaps it wasn't the miracle he had asked for. But it was enough for him.
