Rainbow Stripes

Orange: Deep Sleep Dreaming

He was alone, a child lost in a nightmare realm of his own devising. The walls he had built were closing in around him, a cage for that wildest of wild beasts, humanity. Slow and steady, the bars reverberated with his heartbeat; lub-dub, lub-dub. Through them he could glimpse a tableau, frozen before his eyes and yet alive. A boy, a girl, and the world, turquoise globe suspended in midair so that it might be falling or rising. The boy was smiling, not at the girl who hung in the air, hand on his shoulder, but at him. The gaze would catch him, if he let it, and he would drown before he remembered to breathe. He could not meet those eyes on any terms but his own, and he did not know what those terms might be. The girl looked at him also, smiling kindly but at the same time beseeching him with her eyes and the white hand outstretched toward him. She was asking him to come help them, her and the boy and the world. He wanted to call to her, explain that he couldn't pass through the bars, tell her to find someone else, rather than he who could not be what she wanted. He did call, but still the girl's eyes begged him to come out from his cage and save them all. She begged, and the boy stared, and the world hung in the balance, all waiting for him. But he could not leave the cage where the bars beat like his heart.

He sat on a couch made of rainbows and watched the world go past through a window of cloud. Below him he saw all the years of the earth, one at a time and together. Heat and cold and rain cycled past, from bare rock to boiling sea to sphere of ice, until at last land and sea and sky met and merged in peace. Then the plants came; giant ones like nothing he had imagined, tiny ones that no eye could ever catch, all the plants he never knew. Slowly, slowly animals began, simple things and swirling shapes and tiny shells of perfect crystal, things that grew and grew and grew until they were great and terrible beyond belief, until they ruled the world with teeth like lightning and claws like thunder. Then they too were gone, and in their place came the soft animals, those who had been just that much smarter or quieter or quicker. The soft ones grew, but not as much, and they spread until he could see them everywhere. And then he saw the people. He saw two dark figures bending over a flame, and two more holding knives that had their beginnings beneath the first sea. He saw careful men painting on stone, and a woman with a drooping face pulling clay figures from her fire. He saw blood on the snow, and a yellow sun rising, and the dreams in the heads of the people, dreams of what they believed they had done. He saw death come on silent wings to those who died without warning, and rats scurrying beneath a long-desolate altar. He saw blood pouring into the ground everywhere, until the people who ran over it neither knew nor cared. He saw beauty grow up from the red-stained ground, stories and pictures and perfection, but he saw also that it was still red. He could see as the world began spinning faster and faster, until it must either cease or fling itself to pieces. Another moment, and it would do one or the other--it vanished. He knew that he should make it continue, that so much as lifting his hand would do it, but he couldn't move, couldn't bear to see the ending even as he begged for it. Then he was falling, falling, down through clouds that shaped themselves for a moment into faces no longer remembered, falling into oblivion.

He was back in the cage, staring at the frozen figures. He tried to turn his head from them, but when he did so fire licked at his vision, forcing him to face what he would rather forget. The girl was halfway off the ground, crystal wings forever frozen in the act of beating. The boy--her brother, he suddenly recalled and knew not how--waited for him to do something, anything, but his icicle face could not move to say what it was. Kotori, his mind whispered, Fuuma, but though the names dripped from his tongue like water they meant nothing. Only the statues meant something; pain and longing and a need that he could not understand. The fire, too--Mother, it fell from his lips, but his mind knew only that the fire held loss within its flames. At the same time, it beckoned him to it as the statues did, wanting something of him that he ought to give but could not, because the beating of his heart confined him. The fire, though, promised rest as the statues could not. He wanted that rest, wanted it so much more than he could imagine anyone wanting anything. Kotori and Fuuma, he tried to tell himself, help them, but the words meant nothing and the fire called. Slowly he turned to see the fire burning bright within his cage, within his reach. The first flames tickled as they touched him, then burned, but it was an ease and a pleasure to burn, far easier than turning away. He fell into the fire away from everything, away from pain and longing and crippling terror, into peace and an ending, for better or worse. As he fell, he heard the statues crumble to dust behind him and briefly regretted not letting them rest too. But everything was vanishing into the comfort of the flame.

And back in the world, Shirou Kamui stopped breathing.

Ending: Orange

Notes: This is a quite definite AU of Requiem, a 'what if Kamui died before Subaru could pull him out of himself?' story. It was written for the 'Silence' challenge on Togakushi shrine, my own challenge. It is, I confess, an exercise in metaphor, and mainly imagery and allegory, but I liked writing it. What do you think? More plot? Stay like this?

This story lives! I know, I know, it's been a while, but X has been coming out in drabbles lately. C'est la vie. I have no idea when it will be updated again; challenge pending, whenever I get a really good idea.

So, feedback? Suggestions? Words of wit or wisdom?