Disclaimer: I do not own Magic Kaito.
Oneshot Seventeen
Phoenix
In the red light of Pandora, his old life had been burned away.
Black feathers, passed down to him from his father, were shed and replaced by living flames.
The world had come to pass as a single flowing movement.
He didn't care.
Because he does not remember it, save for streaks of bright colors. Riotous flashing tinsel. The chime of a clock and a bell. Fragrant smoke tickling his nostrils.
Instead he sleeps for a long, long time.
He can never be sure whenever he awakes, and he doesn't think he ever quite does.
He recalls a river of stars, and wonders if he can cross over it to a field of perfumed flowers. He sees figures standing among their ranks, always waiting for him.
Some stand so close to the bank, he feels that he would just have to reach out to take hold of their vying hands.
Just stretch a little more . . .
And then the world turns black, and strange colors and shapes spiral slowly overhead.
He watches as the wheel turns, and everything cycles many times.
The cosmogyral skyward displays seem so vast, that they could last forever.
But then even they drop from the wheel.
And new ones come to take their place.
And eventually they too take their leave.
Forevermore he endures.
Always sitting, or curled fetal.
Nestled in jagged ice, flowers only a remembrance.
A mimicry of potential life.
He tries to recapture it.
The warmth so denied.
And in his dreams,
In the stirring of his soul,
Those frozen sands whisper to him, the way that his life piled up, shaped by mother-hands and father-hands and child-hands that may have belonged to a girl.
Voices that slip through one ear and echo in his head before gliding out the other, ghost-like they cannot be caught.
A blur where a face should be, sometimes among the muted colors and vague outlines he can catch a glimpse of history.
He does not recall these things, but his soul does, and every fleeting repetition of what might have once been repeats the impressions, emanations of something that existed only in his mind if that.
And sometimes, he almost rouses from the indistinct, blearily, as if rising from sleep if he ever does.
And he almost ponders his existence, if he does and ever did have one. He knows that he was born.
He wonders why they should remain with him,
When they mean nothing now,
For as there is no one to recognize him,
He Does Not Exist.
But he is sure that he was born, nevertheless,
And if he ever is allowed to cross those stars,
Will he recognize those who wait on him forevermore?
Will he step onto the wheel and fly off it aloft wings of black?
How can he continue burning?
It is simple: because fire does not live, only mocks.
And he does not live.
A/N: I only uploaded this because people told me to. This isn't the original formatting of this installment either.