[013 ☿] Even if the two of us are ever torn apart, I swear that I will change the world.

[waterfell]

The forest is quiet, and green. A cloaked man heads towards an altar in a clearing, already laid out with candles and, crosswise, his sword in its sheath. He takes a deep, cleansing breath, and picks it up

Comments

[findmyownreason]

He feels like he's late, though he can't understand why he feels that way. He's missed something - or almost missed something - very important yet again. He's in his regular day wear, black, silver wolf, but his arm's in a sling on one side, bandaged to the shoulder and there's a dark wing of leather that tucks inward on that side. He doesn't seem aware of either deviation however. Instead all he's paying attention to is the woman in front of the memorial stone.

He understands that.

Not her specific pain but he's close enough to his own to understand a little at least. So the tread of his boots is slow but steady as he approaches, careful not to disturb the flowers of ice and light and they don't stop until he's directly behind her. Close enough that a step back, a step forward, would bring them into contact. It's too close, too personal an invasion of her space but he can't seem to help it. He doesn't touch though, doesn't speak. Unsure of his welcome or even if he has a right to be here.

It's just that he can't not be here. She might - she might need him.

[waterfell]

At first, she doesn't even move. She might as well be a statue herself, carved from ice or maybe from the marble in that place where she first met the man resting here. She stays where she is, looking elsewhere so she doesn't have to see the disapproval, the turning away she assumes will come.

There is a question she needs the answer to, more desperately than she could ever say even if she ever would. It's such a telling question, and that's why she can only ask it to him, a safe person who only exists in dreams and a person she would like to convince herself might just tell her the truth. Might tell her why, even with Kunzite, it ended in her not being enough to stay for. It ended in being left.

Her voice is quiet, but steady. "Do you think I'm just the sort of person no one could want to be with?"

[findmyownreason]

His eyes come up at her question and fix on the back of her head, even as his pale brows slowly sink over his eyes in confusion. He doesn't answer right away though. Not because he doesn't know the answer but because blurting something out wouldn't be treating her question with the seriousness that it deserves. Against his back, the wing shifts a little, a whisper of leather.

"I think," his voice is soft, very low, and he pauses, terrible with words and aware of his failing, trying to collect his words so they'll make sense. "I don't think he wanted to leave you. You're not an easy person to leave."

[waterfell]

The trouble with trying to believe that is that he did leave. And despite her efforts, she is still too emotional to notice one thing: If he had no thought for her, why not leave immediately once the circumstances leading to it had arisen in his world?

He'd stayed, those months at least, for her. She had been enough to live for. But just as she's never known there was a chance she could have grasped for freedom and a peaceful future, she's never known it.

As for it not being easy to leave her... well. Kunzite is far from the only person to have done it, starting with her own father, who left the family. "It seems easy enough," she says evenly.

[findmyownreason]

Cloud thinks he's probably the worse person in the world to be having this conversation with. Considering he's dying and they both know it now. That's pretty much 'leaving' her too, even if it's not his choice. Anything he says is going to sound hypocritical. So his head lifts and he looks over her shoulder, still standing at her back. Looking at that stone slab.

"Why did he do it? Kill himself like that?"

[waterfell]

"To understand that..." She'd asked Kunzite to make her understand it. She'd been left to understand it for herself. So her answer now has to come from her.

It's a fuller, more honest answer than she's given others, because Cloud just might understand that pride and that single-minded pursuit of one's beliefs; but she waits for what she tells him right away to sink in before saying more.

"First of all," Mercury says, "Kunzite was already dead."

[findmyownreason]

He's not in any hurry. He's got all the time in the world for Ami right now. Or... as much time as is left to him, he's willing to let her have it. Because he wants to understand.

He wants to help... even if he doesn't know how.

So the wing at his side spread and curls, almost as if it would curl protectively forward over her even though it doesn't touch and he makes a low, soft noise. He's listening. He wants to know.

[waterfell]

"Like me, he died in the war in our past," Mercury says. That much is perhaps not hard to imagine. "However, he and the other shitennou weren't sent into new incarnations like I was. Instead, the one to revive them was Beryl."

He'd never asked for that life. He'd treated it as a chance to seize his vengeance, but he'd never asked for it and, she thinks from his eyes when she saved his life in Econtra, perhaps he never wanted it.

"She was the one who set herself up as queen. However, she was nothing." And no pride could suffer being under Beryl's thumb. "In the end, he took her life, when she would have taken Nephrite's."

[findmyownreason]

She's talked about past lives and being reborn before so he understands that part. The rest - it's vague. He can understand that something went wrong with the man's rebirth, that it sounds like servitude and he wonders, in passing, if it was anything like being a puppet the way he had been. If so, he can understand the way it felt to be trapped that way.

"He killed the fake queen," he can offer his understanding of that much, at least what he thinks he's pieced together so far. It still doesn't tell him why the man killed himself. So he waits for the rest of her story.

[waterfell]

"Of course," Mercury says, as if this is self-evident. No one who'd been there, who'd seen it firsthand, could forgive Beryl. She herself had met the truly sharp edge of Beryl's anger only once; but it had been enough to stir an anger in her in turn that made her wholly understand Kunzite's grudge.

"We, together, were able to overpower her - Kunzite, Zoisite, Nephrite, and me," she explains. "And then, she died on Kunzite's sword." A grim satisfaction for the man she'd pulled into this life so unwilling.

[findmyownreason]

Cloud absorbs the tone of her voice as much as what she says, hearing the fierce hatred behind it, understanding that maybe better than she'd expect him to. He'd been a pawn, a puppet himself, controlled by a creature he'd hated with every fiber in his being. Or so he'd thought...

He can understand the satisfaction of killing your puppet master too and so he makes his own grunt of satisfaction. It's obviously not where the story ends though because they're here and Kunzite isn't. So his voice is soft as he prompts:

"Go on."

[waterfell]

In the way she has, she's mixed the two together: the Kunzite who lies here, and the Kunzite of her own world. She comes back to the man who is here.

"This Kunzite, probably had no intention of accepting a life given to him by her, once his vengeance was complete."

[findmyownreason]

That part Cloud can't understand. Even when he thought he was a clone, a nothing, a borrowed memory of someone else... he still hadn't wanted to die. Give up? Yes. And he'd accepted what he'd thought was his end. But taking his own life because of it...? The opportunity hadn't been presented and yet even if it had, he couldn't see himself...

"So he killed her and then killed himself?"

[waterfell]

"It was almost like that." Except there was more time there, and... "He also took his vengeance on the prince."

More than that, she doesn't know much of herself. He'd never been forthcoming in telling her his plans that didn't involve her directly, and being from different worlds, they hadn't seen each other often.

[findmyownreason]

She's being so factual. He can understand the safety in that. He's lost the ones he loved, the ones closer to his heart than most. Trying to talk about it... he just usually won't. But she's trusting him enough with this and it's obvious the other man was someone very precious to her. Maybe he shouldn't but he raising his hand, hesitates, before resting it gently, easy to pull away from, on her shoulder. He remembers last time. She may not want his touch and he's ready to withdraw if she does. But it's hard to know she's hurting and trying so hard not to show it.

He's not really interested in the prince or vengeance. Because that's not what's wound around Ami's heart when it comes to this grave.

"How did you know him?"

[waterfell]

She lets it stay there. For all the times she says she isn't looking for comfort or kindness, she is. But to explain Kunzite is something that's still difficult to do, a mix of confusion and how do you explain someone who dominated your life for a year - four years if she thinks of her own world and not just the man laying here?

The answer may not be positive. "He was the one who brought me to the Dark Kingdom in my world."

"And this man, from Econtra, I also fought at his side."