Aneko: So here we go again. A Princess Tutu fanfiction. You know, I should really be working on that Vocaloid multi-chapter…but I'm not…Maybe when I get home later.

Disclaimer: I didn't make the Princess Tutu anime. Wish I did. Wish I could draw that well too…


Fleeting

"Thank you." Her words are a cold breath against his neck where her head rests. The feathers that gather her hair are soft against his cheek. There isn't really a need for his hand to be around her waist. But she fits so perfectly in the junction of his shoulder. Where does she end and he begin? Pages fly around him and he doesn't know.

The unity of their being is disrupted only when she slithers to the ground, transformation unraveling as her braid unfurls down her back. He is brought back down to the dark reality of the night. Frogs cry, and the wind whispers to itself.

It's hard to remember sometimes—that she is only a young girl, only a duck. Small, frail.

He remembers once, when he was younger, he had owned a yellow canary. He had wanted to show it to Mytho, but he didn't want it to fly away, so he held the bird in both hands, pressing down too tight, so it's wings couldn't flap.

With dead eyes on the bird, Mytho pulled Fakir's hands away. Warbling, it set off into the blue sky. Fakir yelled at Mytho until childish tears gathered in his eyes.

Mytho looked at him with the same dead eyes. "You were crushing her."

Picking her up takes almost no strength and it scares him. He hasn't held anything living in so long. The last thing he had held in his hands was a sword, and no matter how hard he gripped it, he didn't have to worry about crushing it.

In his other hand he holds the story. Her story. Not Mytho's. He asks himself why, but when he thinks about it, he doesn't want to know the answer.

He leans over the bed to lay her down, slowly, carefully, his hand getting caught in a tangle of braid. He freezes, thoughts cascading through his mind like water.

It was softer than he thought it would be.

Mytho's dead eyes.

Like bird's down.

A yellow canary that he never saw again.

The story he couldn't write.

The story he could.

She sighs and shifts slightly in her sleep, and he lets the hair slide through his fingers and onto the pillow beside her.

He looks at the story. Words he dares not say aloud. She curls onto her side, and pins poke into his heart.

A story he could.

He shakes his head, a choking feeling filling his throat.

He goes to the kitchen. Stokes the fire. Just enough time for the pages to go in, the whole stack, white curling black and camouflaging black ink before—

"Fakir."

He shut the fire door.


Aneko: I will specify since my test audience was confused. She is NOT a duck at the beginning. She is Princess Tutu. It's the beginning of Akt 24, when she gets out of Drosselmeyer's trap/weird clock place. Whatever you call it. Yeah.

Anyways, see you again soon, hopefully. Ja ne. ;)