auld lang syne
the vision goes thusly:
twelve corpses are affixed in his mind's eye, twelve fallen bodies, twelve blazing embers that once were stars in the sky. he remembers blood tattooed in snowbanks, artistic fans that might have been abstracts patterned on a screen, the outstretched wing of a cardinal to fly -- but they are not the angels, no, nor will ever be again. broken lights and seals opened, the fallen lie. the day of promise, and what was promised he has seen: twelve lives bled out in snow-streets, paradise lost.
he is breathing snow as he staggers snail-trails on pure white concrete, his footsteps erased behind him like vanishing magic. his lips are frozen dry, flakes following the breath that blazes down his lungs and aches and rattles, some caught in his eyelashes and melted into his gaze to mix with tears. that is, if he's crying; the snow makes everything unsure. his leg throbs with pain, distractingly, but he cannot remember why. the sword up on his shoulder, too big and awkward for his hands alone, is ice-biting through what remains of jacket and shirt, both quickly being tattered by its too-sharp fanged steel grin. it whispers that it is ready, ready, so thirsty it would give none at all to the traitor snow, and he will not trust the way its weight feels like nothing in his grip. he would just as well pry its buzzing metalvoice from between his ears, and throw it into the snow to be covered, as let it out to seek what it tells him to desire; better for such a thing to go unseen than to lead him to whatever follows.
has he gone alone, wrenched it free from its prison of water with his own hands? too late, much too late to remember now, under the reddened sky and the cold that chokes him. surely no one remains to have done it for him; the streets are silent, draped in snow as for the grave. tokyo is empty but for him and one other, if other is other. everyone gone but he and he, he and me, me and me and we. ice in his lungs that fills up to drown him, and forever and ever left to travel on his unsteady legs, through the dead wading cars and buried cracked pavement and streetlights haloed in bits of frozen fallen sky. and up ahead, the tower looms, symbol of disaster.
on the eve of the new year.
and vision spins on its axis like revolving doors, and he is there, an eternity above the city and crushed from overhead by the vermilion clouds, and the ring of sword on sword is colder even than can be the air that freezes tear-tracks to his cheeks, and when slapped together the whispering voices of the two shinken become alien song that is all but unbearable, that wants to tear him apart, in league with the blank mechanical smile that greets him in reflection here and there in a blade like the portents he would never heed until now, now, now --
and now --
it is sudden, and that is what makes it possible, and that is what he will refuse to remember; sudden, too sudden to see and interpret and anticipate before action and remorse. now he is charging, roaring despair, fighting snow, and now the twin of his raised sword is also raised to meet it, and now he is coming in behind the driving force of a strike he never meant to land, except that now nothing remains but this --
and now, the other sword drops. falls like a limp flowerstem to a side that is now defenseless, pointing into the earth. and it is much, much too late to pull back. his sword pulls his arms along, and behind them a shocked and unwilling owner, and it sings in hideous triumphant chorus its long-since-ordained victory --
and Fuuma smiles at him with a gratitude that lines up before the sword every hope he's carried until now, to be cut down in a single stroke.
in those warm eyes, he sees it: the truth, what he has never realized before this moment, but should have in one of the many times it has come to haunt his dreams; the secret he will never be able to tell, no matter who might ask it or who might have, once; the thing he will carry forever, his damnation, his curse, and worst, his release. in the gaze that thanks him, he sees the wish of the wish-giver, and it is the only thing it could be.
an end.
the snow tapers off and stops at the moment they both fall, one on purpose and one on none and neither able to say which is which. behind it, not so far overhead, the clouds part and comb away, receding from the city: a the pettiest sort of miracle. if he had looked up even once before jumping, he could have seen the stars.