Fate. A predetermined supernatural power. The will of the universe. Fate is order. It writes, and rewrites, gives and takes. It spins vibrant red strings that flow into the world and connect people who are destined to meet, to love, to share a story...
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I tightly clutch the support overhead as the train clatters to the side and the passengers crammed into the car lightly press against each other. I can barely keep my eyes open. My surroundings are a blur of red, fine strings streaming into the distance, coiling and creeping and flowing inside and out, reaching for the partners that fate has chosen for the people they come from.
Only I can see them—these threads of fate clinging to the fifty or so passengers travelling with me, swarming my vision with a fiery red. Some stretch and glow and pulse with life, as if to say your soulmate is only a heartbeat away, while others fall loosely around the bodies of those around me, limp and dull, but still leading somewhere, someplace far away, where their soulmates wait for them.
The brightest of them all is the person standing beside me, squeezing my palm and bobbing her head along to the music pouring from the speakers. She's like the heart of this train, and the threads branching away from her, into the rest of the world, like the veins connecting her to the rest of her parts.
"Rubi! Are you with me? You look kinda out of it," she observes, the permanent smile in her warm honey-brown eyes flickering. Kurumi Kai, my once-high school senior and very important friend
I pull my hand away from hers and silently stretch my palm. It looks so empty. So plain. The absence of red around my fingers painfully stands out. "I'm just thinking about some stuff," I mutter, smiling up at her, but she's not convinced.
She brings our hands together again, and the strings curled around her fingers spill onto my hand. I fool myself into thinking that some of that red is mine. That fate hasn't cut all my strings and left me with nothing but these eyes These eyes that let me see into people's hearts, that show me red wherever I go. These eyes, that I'm not sure I want,
"Rubi is not good with crowds," Irina says, peeling her inky black eyes from the window. "She always gets like this around too many people." Irina. My more-than-classmate-less-than-friend. She went to middle school with me, and we sort of took the same train nearly every day for almost three years. I say less-than-friend because we haven't vocally established a friendship yet. I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that she sees me as a real friend until she says so herself.
Irina doesn't particularly dislike me; I know this because if she did, she would say it straight to my face. She's painfully honest that way. We're always stuck together, be it on the train or as the last remaining unpaired girls for a group project. At some point, having her by my side became the norm.
"Really?" Kurumi-senpai muses, tugging at Irina's dark, Rapunzel-like twin braids. Irina curtly swats her hand away. "Why do you know more about Rubi than I do?" Senpai demands jokingly, getting in her face on purpose. Irina cuts an annoyed glance at me.
