Transparent

Kuro awoke in a world that was not the same.

All things had shifted around him, and yet the change was his. His dewy eyes watched the air move over him, combing the flower field. He failed to stand up.

Whatever his senses encountered was airy, almost vanishing. But the metamorphosis lay in his dubious heartbeat – never had he imagined, even in his dreams, how frail his skin could become.

The other way around, his mind whispered. The flowing perpetuity of his being now spread out in the world, him frail and broken.

He felt his immortality flow out to the currents of existence, like open hands spreading seeds in the wind. He was alone now – lost in the silvergrass, his reformed body clinging to life.

Only then, shaken by its own words, his mind awoke again. He shivered violently.

He was never supposed to be alive.

Kuro opened his eyes, and the world fell apart.

Wolf met the ground without any resistance.

His fate was a well-oiled mechanism. He only knew himself to be a fragment of it; even the shape of his fall, the tearing pain in his chest, had to be planned in the flow of all things.

It was just how it had always worked, he told himself, weighed down by the haze of blood loss.

His skin was immune to the flames of dishonor – nothing was to be felt, in a life of acceptance. If the blade in his back had to come, even in the wake of success, so had been decreed.

No reason to hold in the warmth of his body, now harder, heavier, by the second.

It was the way he had always done things, after all. Never complete, never enough.

It was his last thought. Drifting into the darkness, he welcomed it.

The worn clothes were still warm with blood.

Against their pungent smell, Kuro felt the stains of his own tears pool deeper, as if scorching his eyelids. In a delirious instant, he believed he could steal the heat back from the horizon on fire.

It was wrong, he screamed in silence, clutching what remained of the bleeding corpse tighter. His wish for humanity had never implied this.

And yet, it was part of the change. His whole body, now aching – for one emptied of breath, uselessly tight in his arms.

He was not dead yet.

Wolf thought it was strange. It was all his mind could muster, in the shaky remains of his essence. He imagined motionlessness, with his chest perfectly still in a chamber lost to fire. The thought escaped him without a word.

He lay at the heart of a strange shift – as if all of existence had poured in his veins, purging his chance to die from within him.

He did not understand. He just remembered. All that was left of him existed within a young voice, and the small hand clinging to his own for life.

Wolf heard it once more, reminded by the feather-light object on his chest.

Please, live again, it had asked. In sleep and soft breath, he obeyed.

There would be no answer this time.

Kuro was aware of it, and yet he tried. No matter how suffocating the stillness got – he traced the lining of his clothes, full of care and regret in equal measure.

Whether it truly was pointless, he could not say. He pondered on it in the midst of tears, as he poured medicinal water on a mouth closed to its drops.

It was beyond a matter of life and death – it was about their chance to exist, to adapt. He could not stop trying, or his soul would shatter like glass.

So he continued, caught in a spell of eternity, until the timid sunrise broke the night in half.

Kuro held his chest in the last, desperate grip.

Please, live again, he begged without words. Nothing happened.

So it was that, in the light of the new tomorrow, Kuro accepted his fate. He raised his head to the indifferent heavens, offering them his teardrops as they warmed, and tenderly cradled the body in his arms.

The exchange had been made – his wish was granted.

It was his time to live.

Spur-of-the-moment fic inspired by Kokia's song Transparent, which is about an ethereal, inhuman being wishing to live on. This song resonates a lot with me right now, and always made me think of Sekiro in several ways. Being unable to draw the comic it inspired, I decided to just get on with it.
The song has more or less two sections, and I thought to associate them with the two parallel plot events I wrote about.