PLOT Muse A and Muse B have been childhood friends since birth. The two have dreamed of nothing more than becoming mages together and joining the infamous Fairy Tail. But during a fateful night when a Dark Guild wreaks havoc on Magnolia Town, Muse A goes MIA in the turmoil of destruction and chaos. They were only twelve at the time of their separation, and Muse B has been struggling to continue on since then. Years have passed since then, and slowly those who went missing during the battle have come back bearing grave news: the Dark Guild took hostages during the confusion of battle, prisoners they planned to turn into their own. With rekindled hopes, Muse B joins Fairy Tail, hoping to help retrieve those who have tried to return home, including Muse A. What Muse B didn't expect, though, was for Muse A to come back on his own - and not as a friend.
You are Muse B; currently the Dark Guild is launching another attack on Fairy Tail's home after six years, and where we begin is where she sees Muse A among the enemy.
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| "What I chose up until this point cannot be undone - But if I could make it right, I think this is how." |
| Kogi Hiroomi. |
| It must have been a thousand times. Waking up in that bed to the sound of helpless cries and his captors' muffled voice behind the iron door.
A thousand times.
Putting on a jacket that he would never grow out of – the shirt and pants and shoes, too.
A thousand times.
Walking down the bleak halls on a morning that smelled of a somber musk of skunk and a sky tinged lavender.
A thousand times.
Meeting her. The charm should have worn off by now - magic is only magic when you haven’t figured out the trick. He’s far from solving the mystery (if there is anything to be solved), but at least by now he has a vague idea of what is going on. But he finds himself breathless each time. It plays out like a scene from a movie, each frame painfully slow and every detail of her magnified with almost overwhelming clarity: the fluttering of her lashes; the strand of hair that’s made its way out from her usual tidy arrangement; her mouth opening, then closing, opening again; the quiet confusion in her eyes. Her eyes. At first her question had been, "Why don’t you recognize me?" Eventually, it became, "How will you recognize me?" Because he could hardly recognize himself anymore. The face in the mirror was familiar, but Time was relentless, and even in surrendering to its flow, he could feel the inside of him being gradually worn down, smoothed into nothing. If a person was the sum of their choices, then who was he - a person who had made every possible choice or plainly incapable? He’d exhausted all the options, and now he was left wondering which choices had really been his own. He’d tried everything, after all: refusing outright, ignoring orders casually, coaxing desperately. At one point he’d even tried completely ignoring himself, to see what might come of it. But it never lasts long. Because one look at her face and whatever remains of that disintegrating self in him trembles, and when he opens his mouth to speak it always turns out to be the things he never intended to say, that she never wanted to hear, that never, ever seem to work. It all ends the same. (Or, should he say, begins the same?) Waking up in the bed to the sound of helpless cries and his captors' muffled voice behind the iron door, wearing the jacket and shirt and pants and shoes that he’ll never grow out of, walking down the bleak hall that smells like the somber musk of skunk and a sky tinged lavender, a thousand times - meeting her. And the scene - put on pause, rewound- begins to play again: her lashes long and lips soft and the strand of hair departed from the rest, and when he catches the color of her eyes, he knows – he will never breathe again. The Dark Regulus spell's flames swirl around his hand slowly lapping away at his skin, hesitating and frozen in time. She's on the other end, point blank at the mercy of his fist, and he can almost hear her childish voice calling his name. That name, which he abandoned so long ago, that name he was forced to abandon long ago. He hardly believes himself; this has to be a dream, he tells himself, this is just another one of their tests. But the pit in his stomach, the twisting sense of grief and fear and hesitation, tells him otherwise. She's here, now, standing in the Guild Hall of the infamous Fairy Tail, looking no different than she did nearly six years ago. And slowly the blood in his veins run cold, his spell subsides and vanishes, and he's left standing and staring. |
