XXIX. Choice
Fate had intervened that day – the day when Seishiro first met Subaru.
The sakura leaves blew into the night sky, abandon freeing them into the winds of kismet.
He had just killed a little girl – she couldn't have been a day over nine years. She had been wandering out late at night, all by herself, without anyone to supervise. Seishiro considered that killing one of mercy, saving her from no doubt abusive parents who didn't care where she was at all hours of the night.
It would only be a few moments later when out of the corner of his eye, he could see a young boy – small wiry frame, a mess of black hair, and a withstanding innocence in his green eyes that accompanied his cherubic face. He had a look of shock and confusion on his face, but it didn't last long as he tried to exorcise the illusionary tree that hovered over Seishiro and the dead girl, stopping it from consuming the corpse's body.
This had surprised the hunter – it had also struck a chord of curiosity inside of him as well – something he had not experienced for a long time.
He had taken the boy's hands into his hands. He had looked deeply into the boy's emerald eyes, as if absorbing every last detail of his young soul.
With this, he had told the boy the absolute truth.
"If you and I should ever meet again, let us live together for one year. My heart is the direct inverse of yours... you are kind, pure, and honest. And I'm sure that is how you will continue to grow up. Your heart will remain pure. So, if we should ever meet again, I will try my hardest to learn to love you. Just for one year... and after that year, if I can consider you "special", you will have won and I will not kill you. But if I decide that I cannot consider you special to me - if I cannot distinguish the difference between you and that corpse, then... I will kill you. And so today... I will let you go."
He had kissed the back of the boy's hands, leaving pentagrams, tokens of his affections on them, and had walked away, leaving a baffled child in his wake.
He had come home, or the place that was designed to be his home, feeling an immeasurable, unimaginable ambiance around him, caressing him, taking him and giving him what he had never had.
It was unlike anything he had ever felt – he felt a fascination with this young boy and with this fascination, an eventual desire grew exponentially.
He wanted to do things to the boy.
He wanted the boy to do things to him.
It was if he had been drawn to the boy from the very beginning, that everything he had been through, every moment he had suffered at the hands of others, as well as his own hands, had been all so he could meet this one boy.
They had been fated together.
There was no mistaking that.
But he…
He had chosen Subaru as his own.
"I chose you."
In the distant past, he had admitted this to himself. Afterwards, he had closed himself off again.
If in fact, he had ever opened himself up in the beginning.
Now he was going to say it again.
Proudly.
And he would immortalize the words.
"I chose you."
