Notes: This is yet another Tsukimineshrine challenge ficlet. It actually ran pretty long, for something with no discernable plot. The challenge ran as follows:

'Blue'

Canon, 500-1000 words.

Name at least six blue things, or write about a character feeling blue. Do not use the word 'blue'.

I kind of…got inspired, and extended it a bit. This story contains references to everything mentioned in the poem, 'What is Blue?' from Hailstones and Halibut Bones. I plan on making a series of ficlets referring to that poem, but this is not it. Gah. My muses hate me. The full text of the poem is at the end of the story. Thank you.

Disclaimer: Still not CLAMP. Still do not rule world. Still not mine.

Warnings: Implied shounen-ai, Clow/Yue and Yue/Touya. Your issues and my problem are unrelated.

Blather: Blue fuzzies!

Hailstones and Halibut Bones

            The sky was clear and endless, so pale as to be almost white. No sun was visible, but still it was bright, so beautiful as to be painful. Even the occasional bird winging its way across the  vast expanse served only to accentuate its distant, absolute unreachability to anyone confined by flesh and bone. And the sky was proud, in the way anything so fair is proud, to be the target of such admiration without hope. No emotion could awaken a response from such an ever-cool entity.

            Yue seemed no more than a downward extension of that sky as he sat on a rocky promontory and gazed out over the quiet sea. So he seemed, but he was no such thing. Rather, his chill was the chill of the sea, still for but a brief time as secret sorrows rippled through the depths. Yue was remembering.

            There had been someone, once, with whom he used to watch the sea, someone whose eyes had reflected each of its moods so perfectly in dazzling cerulean depths. That someone had said, once, that if you could see Spring as she came into the world, over her shoulder would be wound a scarf the color of that sea. Yue had thought it the color of his eyes.

            That same person had been with Yue when twilight left navy shadows on everything, even over Yue's paleness, and had said that it was beautiful. Yue had thought twilight was most beautiful on him. There had always been some of those shadows near him. Even on the snow, drifting through short winter days, the same shade had lurked over the whiteness. It had been winter, then, just as it was winter now.

            Yue let a single tear slip over his fingers to mingle in the sea. Clow was dead, had been dead…only he wasn't. And Yue didn't know what hurt more, thinking him dead or knowing him alive, knowing that the memories he could not forget no longer mattered to anyone else. It still pained him, on those days when he felt so low that he could not bear the company of the present, and sought the past instead.

            He remembered seeing a heron, one day, comparing its ungainly sort of longlegged grace to Clow's, and loving it just for that. He remembered the pride with which he had slipped his sapphire earring on for the first time, Clow's promise, so he said, to always care for Yue as for a priceless, living jewel. He remembered a long afternoon in the garden, how he had given Clow a bouquet of flowers, gentian and lovely larkspur and most of all forget-me-not; he remembered the care Clow had taken to preserve a single azure blossom of remembrance, and wondered if the flower was with Clow's replacement, if that replacement ever looked at it and remembered. He might not remember, but Yue could not forget.

            The wind blowing in from the sea besieged Yue with the whispered sound of a thousand long-gone conversations. He had heard the same sound with Clow when the flax was in bloom, and he marveled how much lonelier it was now. He knew that sound well, when evening crept through the empty rooms of a house forlorn because never lived in, and there was only Yue to hear.

            Silently winging his way home in the cold, Yue's eye was caught by a welder at work. His torch blazed with a flame the same color, not as Clow's eyes, but as another pair of cobalt eyes he knew just as well, perhaps better now. Clow's eyes had been cool, calm, ocean eyes even when he was at his most passionate, but that same hue could be hot as well, so hot as to blister. Those eyes, those screaming wild eyes, were waiting for him now as Clow no longer waited. Yue sighed and let go of the past.

            At dawn, glancing from Touya's window to the pale, sunless light that sent indigo tracks across the snow, Yue was no longer sad. The shadows had belonged to Clow, but this new winter dawn belonged to Touya.

The End…Or The Beginning?

What is Blue?

Blue is the color of the sky

Without a cloud

Cool, distant, beautiful

And proud.

Blue is the quiet sea

And the eyes of some people,

And many agree

As they grow older and older

Blue is the scarf

Spring wears on her shoulder.

Blue is twilight,

Shadows on snow,

Blue is feeling

Way down low.

Blue is a heron,

A sapphire ring,

You can smell blue

In many a thing:

Gentian and larkspur

Forget-me-nots, too.

And if you listen

You can hear blue

In wind over water

And wherever flax blooms

And when evening steps into

Lonely rooms.

Cold is blue:

Flame shot from a welding torch

Is, too:

Hot, wild, screaming, blistering Blue—

And on winter mornings

The dawns are blue….

Okay, I'm actually quite fond of this. Plus, I managed to reference all the blue things in the poem in order. *is proud* I think that's six, oh yes I do.

   I would love a bit of advice: Should I use this in a color series, or should I write another piece to go with that, focusing more on Yue as an individual? I'm inclined to the latter, but not quite sure. What do you think? Is one Yue and blue piece one too many? Or should I take another angle?

P.S. L-chan, I love you for setting this challenge and make me actually use some of the ideas I've had cooking up for the last year. *hugs* My new Muse!