[Author's note: This is a coda to the ending of the Dramatic Precious Final Stage CD, "Dreamless Life." As such, it will probably make no sense at all unless you're familiar with the source material. You can find a translation by the fabulous Jey Kama at his Weiss site, Aya no Weiss Kreuz Corner. (Familiarity with the CD drama "Endless Rain" would probably also be helpful; Kai Ling's Endlessly Clear White has an English translation of that.) Since "Dreamless Life" takes place at the very end of the Weiss story, there are general spoilers for all kinds of things relating to Aya. Please see my disclaimer page for copyright information. Thanks to K-chan and Jey-sama for their comments!]
Purity
A Weiss Kreuz fanficBy Natalie Baan
He could hear waves, quiet thunder and hiss of water against the shore, the steady, ceaseless rhythm of the tide wearing upon the land. The sound was his only real measure of time's passing. The day's first light was breaking into shards on the back of the sea: brilliant, blinding ripples following one another, each an all-consuming brightness that held him within its crescent curve until the next one came to replace it, and then the next one, and the next.... All urgency seemed a thing of the past. Suspended there alone but for the waves' muffled drumming, the sunlight's flash, and the familiar, dreamlike presence of Kikyou, once his friend, once his betrayer, he looked at the way that lay open before him. It seemed as though it should be a simple choice. He'd had his revenge on the man who'd shattered his family and his world. He'd saved his sister and left her to her own life, as far from the darkness he'd come to inhabit as possible. The organization that had claimed him was broken -- he'd served his function there, too, taking lives as was required, becoming a tool for its execution of justice -- and with its fall, the bonds of obligation that it had placed on him were loosed at last. He had no illusions that the sins he'd committed in its name would ever be redeemed. And Shion, the teacher that he'd admired and loved, his guiding star, dead by suicide -- and dead to him even before that, having fallen from that place of esteem, the ideal that the man had embodied for him twisted into nothing but more killing, nothing but a merciless blade. One by one, each desire, each aspiration had been stripped from him. Innocence, salvation, the Way of the sword -- all were lost. He was empty, a translucent shadow drifting in that place between. And yet -- "No, I'm done with that life. I'm done with Weiss. But...." Hesitating, he could hear the sea birds cry, their voices high and wild and lone. It was exactly as Kikyou had said. Why should he go back into that world of death, sorrow, and suffering, when instead he could be free? He could be free of the burdens of being himself: a murderer, a white hunter without a purpose anymore, a man whose own awkwardness was an anguish inside him, whose feelings were an incomprehensible pain. Free in dying, as he had yearned to be in life.... He glanced back. He could see the jagged pieces of his katana strewn in the grass, glinting in the long angle of the sun. He could see himself lying sprawled there, hair tumbled over his face. Ken was hauling him up, pulling him off Shion's corpse one-handed, the other arm dangling, a torrent of bloodstain darkening the side of the younger man's body. Ken was shouting, face screwed up in anger or misery and eyes too bright, too wet -- but he couldn't hear the words. Further off, Youji was pushing himself to his knees, teeth clenched, a hand clamped to the long tear in his coat, his fingers crimsoned. As if for the first time, he looked at those two men, his partners, wounded and distraught -- and he could feel the release that spread through him like ecstasy as he let go of even that one last selfish wish. The waves lapped the boulders, more gently than before, their hollows reflecting the sky, now that the mists had cleared. He thought about Shion's dying words, the sorrows of those left behind -- and smiled then, unfolding at last into true freedom, without dreams, without longings for himself.
"I'm going back," he said.