“Light…all away…”
Yuki finds her in the garden. It’s the first place he looks these days. Something about the flowers and the sun seems to draw her here, even if she can’t really see them anymore.
“Where did all the colors go? Pretty colors…”
She twirls around, her white dress swirling after her. There’s a single white rose in her hands, and he thinks for a second that if the sound was muted, this would be his perfect picture of Alia. But the words trickle through, like water out of a broken sieve, like blood out of torn skin. He can smell the blood before he catches sight of it. It’s dripping down her arm. She must have caught herself on a thorn.
“Rain, rain, go away…” she giggles, spins again, the blood-stained petals floating after her as she sings. “All the darkness all around me.”
He reaches out to catch her hand, still her crazy spinning and make the world solid for her, only to barely stop himself in time. She hates him sneaking up on her. He never knows if she’ll let him near her or scream in fear. He wonders sometimes if she sees the demon underneath his skin on the days she screams. His words are soft and gentle, out of habit. “Alia, come inside.”
Today is a good day. She smiles when she sees him, that smile that takes his breath away because just for an instant it’s his Alia standing there, not her fragmented shadow. Then she giggles again and his soul feels a little sick.
“Pretty boy all wrapped in silver…”
He wonders, too, what she sees on days like this, the days she smiles at him. He thinks maybe his soul is like paper wrapped around his demon, like gift wrap around a present no one actually wants to receive. It makes him wonder if she doesn’t understand him better now than she ever did before. Yuki shivers in the sunlight.
“The shadows go away,” she tells him, and she takes his hand and lifts his arm to spin underneath it, dancing like they never did before. “Silver man all shiny. Where are the shadow men?”
He stops her with a hand to her waist, frozen for a second in what could almost be a waltz if one of them wasn’t insane. He looks carefully at her bloodied fingers; the cuts are deep. “Come on, Alia. We should go inside. You need to sleep…”
“No!” she screams, and in a second the moment of near-normalcy is over and she’s wrenching away from him, scrambling backwards, holding her head. “No! Walls around me, closing up my brain!” She huddles into a tiny ball by the rose bushes, smearing blood on her face as her hands clutch at her hair. “All dark…all dark.”
Yuki closes his eyes for a second, trying to find strength he doesn’t think he has anymore. He’s lost count of how often they’ve replayed this scene. It still hurts every time. He reaches out despite himself, wishes he could brush her hair back from her face, hold her hand, embrace her until the big cruel world just went away and left them both alone. “Alia…”
She beats at his hands, frantic, with none of the strength or accuracy he remembers her having. “Get away get away get away! Monster! Monster! Big black monster, all wrapped up!”
He grabs her wrists, looks into eyes that he used to know better than his own to find them filled with terror and confusion. His soul breaks somewhere in the middle of his chest, because he knows what she’s looking at and knows she sees the truth.
“Shadows coming!” She breaks away again, but she only goes a few feet before she crumples to the ground, like the world is so heavy on her shoulders that her bones are breaking. “Shadows coming…”
“Alia…” Very, very carefully, Yuki kneels beside her. “There are no shadows.” He knows somewhere inside him that this is a lie, but it is a lie that calms her almost instantly. He makes a soothing noise and reaches out to once more take her hand. “The shadows are dead. I promise.”
“No shadows?” She looks up at him at last, and he knows she will believe him. He wonders, of all things she can see so clearly now, why this lie is one thing she cannot.
“No,” he whispers, as he helps her to her feet. “Never any shadows.”
She looks at him helplessly, now clinging to the hand that seconds ago seemed to burn her. “Silver man goes away. Big big world…scary…”
He gives a little smile. “The world’s not that big. And we only have to walk a couple steps, alright? Just a little ways.” She doesn’t say anything, and so he takes her hand and tugs her a little, guiding her along the rock path back to the house. This is their life now, his and hers, and it is nothing like how he imagined it, when he let the thought cross his mind back in the days when she was the smarter and the braver and the steadier of the two of them. Yuki now knows that he never thought she would need taking care of, least of all by him.
They move silently into the house, quiet and still and sad and heavy with her madness and his desperation and the love, the history that chains him here, to her.
A vase in the living room is broken, its shards scattered, glittering, across the carpet, the red rose it had been holding laid across the pieces like some kind of sacrifice. She always breaks things.
“Broken world, all shattered…”
Yuki looks at his Alia and thinks that she has never made more sense.
