A/N: I think I’ll stop apologizing for the delays, since they’re starting to become the normal updating pace. I’ll have to pick up again, anyway, if only because I’m leaving in vacation soon and will not leave this unfinished, na-uh. I hope you’ll enjoy this anyway.

Chapter dedicated to butterfly-chan. Who is, finally, back, after scaring the lights outta me. 3

Disclaimer—I’ll let you know when I own MK. Till then, I'll go with this.

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tired

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Prompt:—

We have lingered in the chambers by the sea

By seagirls wreathed in seaweed, red and brown,

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

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(A story can—)

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Memory comes in with water.

It is not-water that fills the petite hotel room, floods it with blue reflects, drowns it with one too many night’s worth of dreams. And a little stranger, then, because Paris is blue and dark in her back, and, despite the streetlamps and windows and buildings, nothing at all like Tokyo. The lights here are not as electric, not as manifold, not as violent. There is something soft in them, something cruelly gentle.

The Eiffel Tower’s revolving ray sweeps by in blinding white across the sky, shadeless as though etherized, and then retracts, and strolls away. It will be back in a minute. So it goes. So it will go.

(The October night is cold.)

Aoko rubs her arms warmer and retreats inside the hotel room. She steps back; and bumped against solid, realistic flesh. Kaito’s hands grabbed hers and swivelled her round; and Kaito’s laughing voice:

“Careful where you’re going—“

And if the words were serious (scolding, one might think), the tone most definitely was not. So he was up to another prank of his. Aoko defiantly smoothed down her uniform skirt. “Where are you going?”

“… to class?”

“In this part of the building?”

“I could ask you the same question, Aoko-chan.”

“Aoko?” Aoko blinked. Kaito was standing a few feet away, hands buried in his jacket pockets, looking puzzled. (Why are you here? he did not ask. What are you doing here? You should—) “You coming, or what?”

It was cold and bright in the garden; cold and bright and a winter afternoon. (Or morning or noon—she did not remember. Much. Or morning or noon.) They walked around and most of the trees were bare; they walked around amongst the ancient statues. There was something unreal about this.

A little wrong, then—

A little too on this side of wrong, and Aoko’s slap across his face seemed to crumple much—beliefs, trusts, and this share of reality she had carefully constructed with glass-like images. They reflected the mirrors and the lights with swift delicacy and stealth, and subtly hid what it was that she did not want to see.

(She drowned herself in words.)

“Aoko—“ his cheek stung.

“Get out!” she yelled (crack, the glass images went. Crack.) “Out!” and when she woke she woke to Kaito’s warm hands on her shoulders and Kaito’s worried eyes, their blue subdued in the predawn (ghosts) greys—and Kaito’s sleepy face and voice.

“Whatsamatter?” he mumbled lazily, lodging his face in the crook of her neck. “Didya have a nightmare of something?”

“… a nightmare. Yes. Oh, yes.” Her hands crept up his back, anchored around his shoulders, steady and strong and there. After realization relief flooded, almost breaking past the dam of tears. “It was all, all a nightmare.”

“Was it, though?” Kaito murmured in her neck.

(You should not be here.)

She woke, and—

“This never happened,” she murmured dazedly. She stared at their uniforms, at their surroundings. There never was such a corridor in their school buildings. (Was there?) “This never happened,” and she lifted her (a thousand’s) eyes to him. “So why—“

Kaito had lost his clownish smile, and (the biggest prank was to come, the fish-bird said.) “Because it is not real. I’m not real? It’s a dream, Aoko.”

She woke, and,

“Come back. —“

She curled on herself, tightly, entwined and crying, whimpering softly like a kicked kitten, trying to hold back the great racking sobs that threatened through her body, hands extended and clawing desperately as what was already gone—

She woke, and,

(You should not be here, Aoko.)

“You coming, or what?” Kaito asked, looking annoyed. He was standing a few feet away, hands buried in his pockets. The garden around them unravelled bright and cold, white to the ancient statues that strayed on the frozen grounds, and not like Tokyo at all.”

Aoko sobbed a little, and forced the words out of her throat. “… I can’t.”

He blinked. “Why not? We said we’d take a walk and have a coffee, and then go home—“

She could feel the taste of taste in the cracks of her smile. “That sounds… wonderful. And there’s nothing I’d love better than to go with you, and so help me, I can’t. Because it’s—it’s just a dream, Kaito. And now I have to—“

—and then she wakes.

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(a story can swell and rise—throb gently in hues of blue and crumple together to the first shivers of morning.

so can dreams.)

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… and after that, the plot will (at last) pick up a little. To be perfectly honest, the delay for this chapter was due more to writerblock than to babysitting. I’ll do better next time. … I hope. *tentatively offers cookies*