the other side of a decade {kirito & arianna}

You were made to make it hurt,
Disappear into the dirt,
Carry me to heaven's arms,
Light the way and let me go.

A siren screams.

Kirito awakens in a fit with sweat sticking to his skin, staining the winter white cloth of his sheets. Night's single eye sits among the stars overhead watching the shadowy world below. The broken body of a lost boy turned man sits shivering by his bedroom window. Eleven years ago he ventured across the River Styx with twenty three others only to return alone with his mind still somewhere behind him. He is now former mayor, mentor, and father but still can't sever the title tribute. His lives in the present but exists in the past. 

The screen of his television shines again with the same scene only seconds long. The loop reiterates over and over a constant stream of calamity. Eye contact, blood, eye contact, blood, eye contact, blood. The boy's knife buries into her skull time and time again. Her body falls endlessly to death. The story never changes as history cannot be rewritten. Just as Kirito sits as a scarred shadow, Annora Taylor lays dead within the ground.

The repetition ends at the flick of Kirito's fingers, but Annora's face refuses to fade with the dimming screen. Her presence seems so clear as she is stepping forth from the confines of the technological box. Her eyes hold no flecks of death and her body shows no signs of decay. In this instance she is like those of the recent quell, a phoenix reborn from the ashes of devastation. Kirito can feel his heart quickening in a race with fear but he is unable to move away from his visitor. A single sentence, a sole request keeps gradually gaining volume with every step she sets towards him. The words of a young Harbinger as painfully sharp as one of Wyatt's flaming knives.

"Save her."

"Save her."

"Save her."

Success for the District had been achieved in Harbinger's victory, but failure in the request of which one should have been wearing the blood-born crown of killers. The room begins crumbling, cracks crippling the walls as the shouting grows severely. Annora begins to open her mouth only to share a siren's scream. Kirito's body convulses, bends, and falls. The world is winding further into disarray as his head meets the side of his bed staining black across his reality. He finds no comfort in unconscious slumber, only ice and guilt. 

Pain personifies the first moments of Kirito's renewal of consciousness. The cold caress of tile holds his fallen frame as a red river runs from its lake at the top of Kirito's forehead. In stunned silence he lays for a moment helplessly a slave to his fear. Medical memories and the pages he's read ramble across his mind but bring no comfort. All the signs seem to point towards a dangerous outcome when a soul is dipped into such a state of delirium. Something wrong is living inside his mind other than the victorious burden of accepted murder. 

Applying pressure with the palm of his hand, Kirito carefully stands. Beneath his bare feet the disturbingly familiar feeling of scarlet stickiness wraps around his toes. The room no longer distorted spins in subtle bodily confusion before barely stabilizing enough for Kirito to walk to the bathroom, a trail of red footprints being left behind him. It is scene from a horror movie, but to him only a minor sight. 

Cold water seeps into the exposed wound of Kirito's forehead as one of his hands holds a wet white towel. Before the exposure of a mirror's cruel gaze, Kirito's warm brown eyes seem glazed in haze. The figure staring back at him is frightening, his frame frail from a lost desire to eat wrapped in a sweat stained shirt ruined by the stains of his blood. He looks like a boy pulled out of an arena just yesterday, not a twenty six year old victor who has been learning to live again for over a decade. But the time healed scars littering his now revealed chest at the removal of his soiled top tell the truth. The battle within a storm that purged a factory as a clock tower cried ended long before this moment in time. 

Dizzy spells and a dry river bed for a tongue draw Kirito to the train's kitchen. Medical experience and fatherhood guide his hands as a kettle settles atop the stove and a homemade mixture for tea forms. A gentle kiss of lilac aroma brings Kirito's mind back to the sweltering summers of his childhood. He can hear Ma's voice calling through the fields to Kirito as he gathered herbs and to Ikaia as he plowed the dusty dirt. He can already taste her sweet tea dancing on the tip of his tongue. 

A low hoot from Imp, now clearly an elder owl, responds to the opening of the nearby car door. For a second, embarrassment flusters the cheeks of the victor as he stands shirtless with a now half red towel pressed to his head. The awkwardness quickly disappears as Kirito opts to use tea as a hopeful escape route. He takes two mugs out from a nearby cabinet. 

"Well, I can say I've looked worse." Kirito says softly with a subtle humor. "I'm just finishing some of my Ma's old lilac sweet tea. Want to join me?"

Dear Agony,
Just let go of me,
Suffer slowly,
Is this the way its got to be?

Lyrics : Dear Agony by Breaking Benjamin