Hotaru
i'm still here but all is lost
There is a tenuous grasp of consciousness, like colorful smoke between her fingers, that she can do little more than stir with faint twitches of energy far past spent by the time they land. Every nerve cries in agonized harmony as Remi stumbles and jerks around her, a cage of man and flesh. Something rises into her throat as he lurches toward the pool - bile, objections, her heart perhaps - but it never makes it past her tongue, and then. And then there is water. Everything goes quiet, the waters rushing through and around her, blocking out everything. Pristine, utter silence. Not even the air that otherwise would have been circling in her lungs can distract her now.
Ba-bump. Ba-bump.
Only her own heartbeat.
The energy seems out of reach, but she has to see - she has to. Slowly her eyes open, the swirl of bubbles a haze that clears the longer she remains cradled motionless beneath the surface. Gold spills out beyond. Gold, gold, gold. It fills her vision like ink in the water, illuminated by the shine of her own soul that will never dim even through exhaustion. Everything shines in this moment; her heart a singular companion of sound, her golden hair and unyielding luminescence a cocoon instead of a cage. A place to be reborn from. A moment in time, suspended alongside the slow burn of her lungs, where she is finally herself. Defined by nothing and nobody else. Hotaru Kaito the Valkyrie - singular.
Ba-ba-ump-bump. B—bump.
Remi’s heart.
Ru closes her eyes and slowly straightens in his arms, head rising from the pool. It goes no further than what is required to reach his chest. Her cheek falls somewhere over his heart to hear it beating in counterpoint to her own. Never meant to be a vessel whose rhythm matches her own, but one that fills some of the empty spaces between - a harmony that supports instead of mirrors. Lifting an arm is an impossible task, but has he not just achieved the same impossible task by carrying her all this way? Her limp fingers come to splay somewhere between his jaw and the edges of his damp hair curling near his nape. Is it from sweat, steam, or snow?
I see, her heart whispers when her tired lips cannot. Just as you promised I would. The guilt doesn’t come - not yet - but she can feel it stirring somewhere beneath the rattle of her slow breaths. I see you. Her tears slip lax and silent, strangely cool upon her spring-warmed cheeks, like they aren’t really her own tears. The strained but unbroken foundation of their connection hums like plucked chords in her chest. Threads that had looked like string revealed instead to be woven steel when tested against a blade. I see you. Spoken even as her eyes close again, exhausted. Sight isn’t what she means.
His arms are no longer a cage. Now they feel like the weight of his wing across her hip with Flora cradled between them, or the callouses of his fingers when they had wrapped around her own kneeling in front of Frey’s shrine. There is no impurity to the amorphous symphony of her emotions as they sing faint and fuzzy through the areas their bare skin comes to meet. Yet it is not the same arrangement of sounds and sentiments that arise when Deimos’ voice - as unmistakable as her own, a voice that has harkened to her across time, space, and realities - breaks the silence. No, that is something purely familial. What then does that make the two of them, to feel so similar and yet be so different?
Her head can do little more than shift, energy so depleted that the healing benefits of the waters are slow to rejuvenate her. Eyelids shift and attempt to open but cannot find the Sword, only catching hazy glimpses of Remi’s skin and the jagged edges upon it where her lightning had kissed him. She searches nevertheless - he’s always been her guiding star.
Dei, she calls, voice cast like a line into the dark, uncertain and small. Young. But there is no lilt to the end that would imply questioning. She would know her brother anywhere, even here, blind and bled dry.
And then, sweet like the smoke of burning nightingale flowers and hemlock blooms, Hotaru’s voice rises from her lips properly to encompass all of them. Or perhaps to announce a declaration to a world that is listening - always listening.
“I am going to kill them all.”
Suffice to say her mind is her own again.
