Broken Worlds
Part 1
By Natalie Baan
The red light of fires flickered on the towering buildings, flashed bright reflections on the broken-out remnants of glass in their windows. When the movement of the flames allowed for it, those fractured windows reflected as well the darkness of the sky, the occasional distant brilliance of lightning--and then, too, for one brief moment, a solitary blur of whiteness hurtling past.
Subaru sprang down and hit the street hard. He whirled to face his enemy, the white cloth of his robes sweeping around him. That whiteness was ragged in places, torn and marked with dirt and with the crimson of blood from earlier fighting. Some of that blood was his own.
He didn't care. That he hurt, that he felt pain--it was only something else to be put aside, as he had put aside so many things in his long waiting for the end. Nine years of waiting, and every day of those nine years another obstacle, another barrier, another eternity to "get through"...when the only thing he wanted was to get to /this/.
This time, and this place.
This person.
It would end now, on the final day of the world--would end here, among the ruined, faltering high rises of the Shinjuku district that trembled, slightly, with the force of an earthquake somewhere else in the city. It was the place that he had chosen.
A place where he had once been happy....
Then, from out of the darkness and the roiling clouds of smoke, a familiar figure walked slowly toward him. Familiar height and familiar wide shoulders, familiar dark hair stirred by the wind that billowed the black coat out around that person, and also, still unchanged, that familiar smile...
...and those eyes.
Subaru watched that person, who continued to stroll toward him in a leisurely way, appearing entirely unconcerned by the destruction that surrounded them. Just as he began drawing /too/ near, and Subaru put a hand into his sleeve to take hold of his ofuda, the man stopped. He regarded Subaru steadily, seeming as usual to be mildly amused. The disparity between the warm aliveness of humor in one eye and the cold, dead white of the other was shocking, even now.
"Hello, Subaru-kun," the Sakurazukamori said.
A piece of shadow and smoke detached itself from the darkness around them and drifted to his shoulder. It shifted fluidly, and extended trailing, transparent streamers of itself that might be wings. It lifted up its "head," and gave a short, silent cry.
The eagle shikigami. Subaru watched it alertly. That was the killing blow, right there, and if the Sakurazukamori released it he would probably get in only one strike before he died. That he would die in such a way didn't concern him at all...it was no more than he expected, really. But he had to be ready to move in the single moment that he had, to make his own blow count in return.
"Have you been waiting long for me?" the Sakurazukamori asked, in his usual pretense of "polite conversation." Glaring at him, Subaru bit back the answer...that he had been waiting for nine endless, bitter years. His heart was racing; he wished that he had not gotten swept up earlier in protecting the other Dragons of Heaven. He wished that he was fresher for this one particular battle.
"Well," the man said, "I did tell you that I'd see you again." He smiled, seeming relaxed and perfectly unaffected by Subaru's anger. "Do you intend to kill me now?" he asked, still with that quiet amusement.
"Yes!" Subaru hurled the word back at him like a challenge--a first shot. The Sakurazukamori's only response was a widening grin, and rage flared up in Subaru, a rage that was savage and as familiar to him as his enemy's face: rage at the Sakurazukamori, at his awful impenetrability, and rage at the rage itself, which had no place in what the head of the Sumeragi was supposed to be. He sent that fury out like a lash into his words, so that it would not go into his magic instead, and cloud his workings.
"I'll kill you.... You deserve to die, for what you've done." And there was a time when he would never have thought that...a time when he would have believed in the possibility of redemption. His voice shook. "A person like you...a person like you should never have been born at all!"
And the Sakurazukamori laughed.
His laugh rang out, echoing back from the buildings around them, and Subaru's heart leapt into his throat suddenly as memory overwhelmed him, remembering other times, other places: the antiseptic whiteness of the veterinary clinic, the soaring spaces of the Tokyo Tower observation deck, but still, still that same laugh, everywhere....
Subaru forced his mind back to the here and now, clenched his teeth on the sudden pain that mingled with his rage. He drove the memories from him. The shiki made a harsh sound, as if it, too, were laughing, and took to the air abruptly. Subaru stepped back, trying to follow its flight and still keep his eye on the Sakurazukamori himself.
"Be careful, Subaru-kun," the Sakurazukamori said, his voice still filled with laughter. "To wish something like that...you could end up destroying yourself."
/I could,/ Subaru thought, /but you've already destroyed me. You've already destroyed the person I was./
The Sakurazukamori took another very slight step forward, and Subaru tensed. But the man only asked him, gently, "Subaru-kun.... Do you know anything about your parents?"
The question...it had nothing to do with anything, and Subaru did not allow himself to be distracted by it. He craned his neck, trying to track the moving darkness that was the eagle. It had come to rest on a nearby streetlamp, where it folded its wings and stared back at him soullessly. "My father died before I was born," he responded curtly. "My mother died not long afterward. I don't remember her. /You/ know these things." If the Sakurazukamori had not forgotten.... Subaru had told him all of this long, long ago.
"Indeed," the man said. He lowered his head for a moment, the smile becoming enigmatic. "Indeed...." Then, he looked up, and the firelight gleamed for a moment in his eyes. "Subaru-kun, the people who told you about your father...they lied to you.
"You're my son."
/No/.
Whenever that person snatched the world out from under him like this...it was as if there was no air left to breathe where he was.
But this time it was a lie.... It was a stupid lie.
"That's not so!" Subaru said. He was no longer the boy who was gullible enough to believe in everything that was told to him. "I was nine years old when I first met you, and you were only a high school student. You're not old enough to be my father!"
"A high school student..." the Sakurazukamori mused.
"...like this?"
And Subaru could not stop himself from backing away, from raising his hands to his mouth in horror, because the person who was standing before him could not be more than eighteen. /An illusion...the Sakurazukamori was a master of illusion..../ He retreated until he ran into the wall of a building, and then he froze there.
The boy raised his head, and looked at Subaru with eyes that did not match, one a luminous gold, the other deathly white.
/No/.
"My mother, too," the boy said, coming toward him, drifting slowly closer, step by step. His voice was soft, and lighter than that of the man. "When I first met her, I thought she looked like a girl. She seemed to be so young...she was very beautiful." He smiled at Subaru, a strangely mature, knowing smile, and all Subaru could see was the silvery column of the cherry tree, and the pale pink petals falling....
<"Do you like cherry trees?">
"It was hard to think of her as someone who could have given birth to me," the boy continued, "but when she told me, I knew that it was true." He was very near now. They were about the same height, though the boy was younger...he was tall. His eyes met Subaru's evenly. "You also know."
"No...."
"Subaru-kun...you've never known how old I am." The voice was deeper, the figure taller...Subaru could not tear his eyes away, even when the strong, gentle hand reached out to caress his cheek. Seishirou-san...he had claimed to be twenty-five then, and if so they would be the same age...but Subaru was a boy now and his heart was breaking all over again as he looked into those eyes, one gold and one scarred with the white that was the mark of his own sin...his own failure to move out of the way in time.
He had never been able to move....
Seishirou put a hand on the wall beside him. The other he cupped gently under Subaru's chin, and Subaru could not find it in himself to break free of that touch. "I always used to joke about it...do you remember? Pretending that I was older than I said I was.... Hokuto-chan would never let me get away with such things." He was the more mature man now, the Sakurazukamori that Subaru had fought, but still no different in any of the things one might expect to have changed--still the pleasant voice, still the tenderness of his gestures, still the smile.
Still the eyes.
/What is the real person?/ Subaru thought frantically. /What is the lie?/
"I didn't realize it myself, until I killed her," Seishirou admitted quietly to him, and the unthinking callousness of that admission only made everything that had come before it sound more like a terrible truth...he didn't care enough to lie, now that there was no "bet" which required it. "Her blood was familiar to me.... I looked into her soul and then I recognized what she was. There is always that connection, between family." He held his closed hand between them, and then opened it gradually. Two cherry blossom petals trembled on his palm for an instant before the wind took them away.
"Sakurazuka...." he whispered. "I put her soul where such things belong. Do you want to see her?" Subaru closed his eyes. He turned his face away, but he could not make himself stop listening, could not stop feeling....
"She's with the Cherry," Seishirou said softly. "That's where we go when we die.... You can see her, if you like."
Lies. It all had to be lies.
"Subaru-kun...the same blood that flows in my veins also flows in yours. This Sakurazuka family...you're part of the same thing."
"No."
Subaru's voice broke on the whisper--oh, why did denying those words hurt so much, even now?
Even if it was /him/ that Subaru was denying?
"I think I understand now why I always found you so fascinating," Seishirou went on, serenely and without mercy. "You have always belonged to me."
/Lies..../
"When I clouded your mind as a child, you took me for your friend...when you met me as a boy, I was your would-be suitor. Then I betrayed you, and I might have been your killer. And now, as it happens, I seem to be your father.
"What have I /not/ been to you, Subaru-kun?"
Deep inside Subaru, there was something that cried out silently:
/Never..../
/Never the person who loved me./
Only a truth could hurt this much....
The lies had always been kind to him.
Seishirou took a half-step back from Subaru then, and looked at him consideringly.
"So, Subaru-kun," he mused, "now that you know, I wonder--
"What are you going do?"
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