call out my name // i'll be on my way. steel.

You arrive as quickly as you left.

But you don't know you're gone. In your eyes you walk through the tunnels you awoke in for eons and eons, following the light that calls your name.

("Steel. My name is Steel."
"Goodbye, Steel," a boy calls through the eons.)

"Goodbye," you whisper back, but you never look behind you. You keep going, step by step, for you know there is something you must do. That part of you stays - the knowing that you must finish what you started. Everything else falls away until you are all but a girl with your name and your sense of duty. Until you have no feet, no hands, no body - until you're just a girl on the wind, until you're nothing but the wind. 

On and on and on you go, carried through the tunnels toward the light.

The light, it turns out, also has a name. 

You want to say it, fire in the back of your throat that fizzles out as it reaches your lips. But you can't quite, and you stay in the dark with your name and your departing conversation. "Goodbye, Steel," the voice is fragmented - almost a memory. But it's not the voice you're looking for. It doesn't belong to the name you need.

("- but I don't know what's going on. And it scares me."

You remember the wind,

"I’m not scared, I’m not scared, I’m not scared."

and the petals,

"Breathe."

and-

"I have to go find-")

"Kenji."

The door opens.

You pass through the end of the tunnel, carried by his name, carried by the wind - or perhaps you have become the wind, fleeting, a whisper across the sand and the sea. Through the forests and the flower beds, carrying the robins and the crows to the top of the mountain, following gentle snowflakes back to the shore underneath a sky of sunshine and stars and the moon, all intertwined like the lightning frozen above you. 

And you know he's okay, and that you may never say his name again, because the wind places you on the shore and doesn't leave you. You feel it, somehow, more than the light brush against your skin or the way it dances in your strands of hair, how it ebbs and flows like the waves on the shore. When you open your eyes the wind pulls you upwards and you see stars, two glowing brighter than the rest, and you know who they're for without needing their names. 

Finally, finally, you let yourself look over your shoulder and find eleven sets of eyes staring back at you.

"Hello Steel," says Aria.

"Hello," you reply with a smile.

And the wind breathes a sigh of relief.