{epilogue: eulogy}

“Hm. Seeds. That’s very interesting considering I’ve uprooted more than I care to plant, in my day! Or do I care – caring, uncaring, it hardly matters - better yet left to context - context, which is tricky dicky and moreover something I hate bothering with regardless.”

“My context is less so one of placement or thematics- ohhh, I’d argue I’m more like some sort of…hideous sentinel. One here unaccounted for in singular goals and more just like a constant - just as war and genocide seem to be constants regardless of what personal inclinations lie behind them, am I right - am I right?

It doesn’t matter. Do you want some coffee?”

She tips her head aside, hair spooling down onto the desk, curling and falling off the edge in loops. Swung off of her shoulder like that it drags whirlpools down the perfect marbling of her scars, blends into the soft black of her dress, vanishes. Her eyes are darker than any flame could hope to fix.

"Why, why. Maybe I was closer than I knew. Makes sense. It's him or the Greek, every time, though they didn't play their words in the round for any less than catharsis. You're not the type, though, no. You're a cannon in the roof. A scrap of paper in a hand in a cave. They read Shakespeare in the old west, you know? Recited Hamlet in the dark without ever knowing a letter of him."

Akazome swings her legs around in a clean move, a thousand classical dance classes moving gilt in the ball joints of her, until she's cross legged and upright again -- the mauling on her cheeks covered again by blackness.

A raise of the brow, a cock of it - your word - ridiculously contrived thought it may have sounded and as incoherent as a layman might argue. They understood nothing but just as much understood very much - this girl…

Special. It would be a waste to simply try and maim the poor beast, to put it down while the iron is hot enough for one killing blow. Show her around, show her some things.

Crick, crick. Crack.

“Mouths do not oft follow where I go, unfortunately as many a mouth that feeds doesn’t ever reach for a bite! Whenever they do, it’s frequently a bad idea - they go out of order, unchecked, buried for forty years or perhaps even a hundred before they even remember laying foot on my rug.

But oh. Oh, I’m glad you asked! I’ve no idea, who I should tell you I am, because I’m much more interested in that little glimmer in your eye - the one that tells you the things you see - far more than you should, that’s for darn sure!

My ilk runs among shadows and way way more often than not forgets its own name - its own kind. I’m born from the rubble I make and I don’t take kindly to some claim of origin.”

"Palms up like a reading and you won't even touch to them, oh, oh, I see -- they left me in my library in between every dance and stretch and promise and I see the way it was, the way it was and the way it is again. Call it prophecy because they're animals and fools, call me Cassandra when I'm the ones they burned all and all of them, see the way it lays out on me, a generation of fires clawing their way back out and licking at me."

She can't lean closer without crawling over the desk so that's what she does, flipping her hands over and dragging her body full across the gap, feet hanging in midair. Eye to ribeye with this tour guide figure, this pamphlet to a shallow grave.

"You dream like the speech before the ball and I remember it well because I dusted it with my eyeshadow. Good brand. The pot would have sent rich men hungry, eye of a needle. I see what was, I see what was and I'm not fucking blind, I see everything that they ever wrote down and everything that ever giggled in the spaces left behind and I watch people drag those legacies across the world unknowing unseeing truly fooled that the thoughts they think are ones they made themselves.” 

The softest of rattles as the door comes quietly to a close. Something was different about the way the building felt today (something was always different but the familiarity of unfamiliarity did not carry familiarly over to this situation in particular). The vibe, the hunger - it did remain but it felt restrained by something coming - much more difficult. A struggler? But whosoever struggled was just a fun little time waster - this seemed…not insurmountable but definitively more taxing.

A heartier “Welcome!” than usual emerges from thinly pursed lips - their nails dragging ever so slightly on the counter at the front. The managing position, the tip of the pyramid here at the Unresting Place. They could see with eyes like the finest of chimeras - built not by nature but by method - ready to strike with everything they were ever built for.

The girl seemed unusual, but perhaps passable for society’s wandering eyes. People had places to go, things to see, and most importantly could not stop dead center to look at every stranger they met. Cel had no such obligations - everyone who graced their door was a unique and special case.

It was with this observance that they detected how unhinged this was already shaping up to be.

“Where have you hidden it?” They followed up almost immediately in the cold silence. “Whatever it is you’re going to try and frighten me with, that is? You don’t seem like very amicable company, is my bet! So you have to have brought something along. Empty hands and I’ll be very disappointed.”

The walls run careful, lines measured and put together as built as any set she drew out. There's cardboard behind the joints, inside the stones, something she could hollow out. Something she can taste when she rolls her tongue over it. Every house whispers to her like this now and though she knows the difference between promise and marrow there's a bit to this certain to bear teeth.

" -- shh!"

Click of her tongue. Snap of her fingers. She edges closer to the west in her sunrise leaning and leaves the desk north unattended.

Akazome presses her teeth together and closes her eyes. There's no gravity in her to sense or to guess at but the colours cut through and she can see almost the shape of the question being asked. Still. Pattern isn't enough.

"I don't work outside of silk," she begins, eyes still closed, the lashes on one a disjointed sweep longer than the falsehoods she trimmed in feather and glued down. "Used to. No more. They brought me wicker cages for hoops and I turned christenings into weddings, showed them how to pitch feathers into the joints of their needle, dreamed in royal blues. Silk catches. It's a coward. Empty hands but for that, all my hidden things buried down by the waters now. I ran them ophelia and they did me the mercy of freezing in the bathtub."

Eyes open. Desk and a secret and a pair of eyes like lanterns in the last gloom, so tight the noose on her already that it’s a mercy to stop air and race the distance left, slam her hands down upwards at the wrists empty and smarting from the contact.

“Doesn’t just about everyone know they could do just about anything? I’d at least like to think that’s the case.” He walks up the set of stairs, missing a hand. It’s a bit weird, how parts of his arm keep disappearing, but it’s clear to him it can’t be helped. Koyomi doesn’t really mind, but the spark’s fading already. A sudden grab of the wrist is stimulating; a sudden grab of the hand is the slightest bit droll. Now even the appeal of dying is lost on him. Still, it’s not like he minds – maybe she’ll manage to get his hopes up again later, and that’ll be fun.

“I smoke, yeah. I started a year or two ago, I think, I’m not the best at keeping track of time. I’m not sure what the date is, actually, only that it’s probably not Sunday, because I’d be really embarrassed if it was.

On a different note, Akazome-san, did you know the sound for ‘red’ is the same as the sound for ‘filthy’? Speaking of, not following it up with a honorific would make me feel rude and maybe dirty, so I can’t really go through with that. It’s not that I don’t foresee us becoming as close as conjoined twins, but that that sort of politeness is something I’d have to actively work towards correcting. I’ll try to if you bug me about it again, but I can’t make very many promises.”

"Knowing hasn't been knowing since we first ate apples down, you know as well as I do that the case of this particular little engine is to prove that if they lift the pins on all our cages we'll still pace the bars and roar uselessly - this is the zoo they built to test us, and I'm content to play at feeding time for as long as the freshest meat pours through, same as it ever was, same as they know it to be."

Unsurprising that the clutch isn't one he keeps his eyes on, unshocking that his anhedonia spreads down into that. She can see it dripping from him in every polite word, every admittance, the line of him. She's never been the talent she pretended but in the last slice of the staircase like this she can see everything she'd be meant to intuit if she had been blessed, if her spinning had come from higher than god and not pure spiderwicked vanity.

Hello? Hello? Hello?

“I get tired of being bored, bored of being tired, and the cycle begins anew. It’s not a very complicated process…” He manages to keep himself from punctuating the end of that depressing dialogue bubble with a sigh.

Tiredly, boredly, his gaze shifts from the insipid, half-torn lamp post that once lit one of the campus’ pathways down towards his own hand, and the girl’s hand, and the surprising degree of autonomy it must have had to grab a hold of him all its own.

It’s not that he fears it, but he does have a suspicion in the back of his mind telling him he might be killed. It feels unlikely, but you never know with people whose very beings are unlikely.

Truthfully, he wouldn’t mind. Being killed by a cute girl isn’t the worst way to go. In fact, it’d be one of his preferred ones. In fact, since he can’t think of any others, currently, it’d be his most preferred one. He can’t prefer things he doesn’t know, and his inability to think about anything other than the potential end of his life and the pretty girl touching him doesn’t let him know very any things. One can’t know without thinking, and his thinking has been outsourced to an astral projection of himself standing elsewhere without even having the decency to watch this unfold.

Well, if on a whim he wants to prevent it, he’ll just punch her in the face if he sees her pull out something dangerous.

“I can’t say I’ve never skipped,” he starts, raising he hand that has yet to be usurped by her, and pressing his pointer finger against the very middle of her forehead, “but it’s usually always been with good reason, you know? Life circumstances, like being caught up doing something else, or having an emergency back at home, or working overtime. I think it’s perfectly reasonable. Are you a frequent skipper, Akazome-san? Or, was it Nomura-san…”

He watches her eyes up and down the way she watched tigers in the zoo - or, close enough. There's the stillness that doesn't come from fear, the soft roll of air that moves almost in time with her own, but none of the jealousy. He isn't digging his fingers into her mouth and prying it back until her teeth could fit in his palm, not dreaming jealously of biting her back with a jaw strong enough to turn those flints into something fearful. He's just. Watching. Waiting, almost.

"Two last names is confusing, isn't it?" She giggles, pulling in on her tiptoes only to tug them both away. "It's a family tradition, you know, giving your kids archaic names! We're going to the roof, by the way, it's the best spot for smoking. Anyway! I'm named after one of the literary greats, but my mother hated his first name. So, Akazome it is. You don’t have to bother with honorifics. I can tell we’re going to be the kind of friends that don’t need them!"

It means, she thinks, not saying it, "red-dyed". He doesn't need to know that, though - or he does, already, studied ancient poetry with none of the feverish intensity she did. Names and their meanings pull her too close to the edge of what she's ignoring, etymology a well half-covered in the woods that it does nobody any kind of good to peer down into. Red-dyed. Like the hills they came from.

The sun ripples over both of them and she thinks of tigers again, tigers into forests into shadows, just so. The inky inky marks that dapple leopards, the inky inky hands that dealt them, jaguars cut from blue velvet. It's always something like that with her. Cats, and stories, and fires. A thousand metaphors chasing after her. El-Ahrairah.

"Anyway! No, I don't skip often, but I know how to. It's more fun that way, I think, to know that you could do just about anything."

Holding his wrist is awkward as they turn the stairs, clumsy. Easier to hold his hand.

He feels a small amount of relief course through his body once that annoying bell finishes ringing, and he glances at the girl he quickly accepts is playing pretend with his usual inexpressive, barely if at all interested expression.

Ueda didn’t figure a first meeting with a social media acquaintance would start off like this, yet he doesn’t feel any surprise at all. In a way, it does seem pretty natural. Fleeting as this act may be, he might as well play along. He doesn’t have too many better things to do.

“I don’t care either way, is what you’re expecting to hear, but I think it’s better if I keep my grades up.” He turns his head to the side just slightly, averting his gaze and redirecting it to an unlit lamp pole as if that had suddenly caught his interest, as well as shoving a hand down his pants’ right pocket. “I didn’t remember to bring my school bag, though. What’s more, I don’t even have a pen, for a change… So this is sure to be a farce. Morigawa-sensei won’t let me hear the end of it now that it’s his period.”

"Do you ever," she scoffs, stepping closer, "get tired of being bored?"

It's hard to keep her old face on, her old mannerisms dust-rusted and shedding like so much suede - like carrion. If he touches her she thinks she will slough down to the bones, pop and fizz like a firework gone wrong. He won't, though. He stands at the very edge of her fingertips and she could no more close the distance that matters than push her palms though bulletproof glass.

"Like, I get it! This place is a dump even by... public school standards, and the teachers are all incompetents who got hired entirely on the strength of their talent being useless. Something something brand unity, like a royal family that keeps intermarrying until their babies are born with their half-eaten twin where their face should be. This place has, like, one lung and a really bad life support. I get it. I do, we all do, it sucks."

Something almost-forgotten and nasty kicks into gear before she's even realized she still has it, and her one-two tidy-feet ballet steps are lost in a whirl of cateyed contempt. Now she could touch him. For whole moments, it doesn't occur to her that she can't, and she loops her fingers around his wrist as though her nails were still kept in perfect french tips. 

She debates calling to him, telling him what she thinks, spooling horoscopes out until something cuts him. The warning ring echoes again, shivers the glass in the windows still here, and a better idea appeals.