guard.

GONE WITH THE WIND, LIKE SAND OR A DREAM

ACT I, SCENE II

gone with the wind, like sand or a dream.

Soon after the first, the second is born. Two hours and twenty minutes, exactly. She is pale skinned - but a darker shade than her brother. Only slightly -- dampened snowfall. She does not cry like her elder twin; she stifles, tears fall from her eyes ― she is as soft-spoken as she is always. Even at her birthing, quiet cries that sound more like whimpers - she lets a sea of tears swim in her eyes. They are as blue as her brothers. As blue as her father's. Blue-blue like the sky artificially in television shows and movies. As blue-blue as the ice, she has yet to wield it (as blue-blue as the frost that covers her lungs).

Her name will be lost to the house she will grow to. A woman of flickering fire and smoke on a snowy summer day. The girl is like her mother - and whilst her siblings fight with the dragon that lays waste to their sanity. Woman of White will fall by its hand―boy of frost for flame will turn to dust. She sleeps on thissle-thorns and poison-ivy, she is hollow-boned and carved with nameless greetings and endless lessons. Beloved by the boys she never knew―except the one yet to be born (body of stone, hands of ice).

Fate bemoans a song of the fixer, the meditater. She is the story of a girl that sits in dresses waiting for her knight to save her ― and someday in the future, she'll hope the knight is really a girl under all that armor. (There is no knight in her story, there is just her and the dragon, wrapped around her throat like a noose). 

The Woman of White is crying once more - tear tracts streaming down hollowed out cheek bones and broken ribs, he daughter is bitten by frost in a body of fire. "Hello Fuyumi, welcome to the world." 

She whispers to the child as if it is a secret, one they may not she with the men that lay in waters so close to them. Fuyumi - snowfall and winter and frostbite trampled over by the sun - grabs her mother by the finger. Safety and kindness, chipped teeth and white bandaids. She tells a story in two parts, the protector and the victim, though she may never call herself as such. Fuyumi is a girl of kittens milk teeth and eagle eyes and bad vision, of glasses and broken shards and piecing the wrong things together. Years of hurt and heavy hands and wraping bandages around pink-blue burns and whispering away nightmares from older brothers and wiping away tears of younger ones. Split ends and blurry sights. She is sad girls and desperate girls― and please, can't we just be happy? girls.

Mourning over headstone brother and two-toned baby and summers' child with a heart of ice. One day she may snap as her mother has -- when headstone brother turns to cinders and gets buried and father of ire turns brothers' photos to dust. She will lock herself in a room and close the door, because she cannot stand to see her brothers' face on a man so corrupt. Shares of glass and shattered dreams lay waste on a graveyard.

Fuyumi is a girl of white, dressed in sparks and dynimte. She is of girls who hate their blue-blue eyes and girls who break mirrors. Sad girls, crying girls and quiet girls, she is of heartache and sorrow, of watching her twin burn as she freezes over, her fingertips numb as she watches his skin fall off. Watches as her father stands as though a god amongst men. He's watching as her brother burns and that is what happens. She is of sleepless nights and unearthed sorrow, of crying by a stone, knees pressed on the soft dirt of a grave. 

She is a teacher. Spelling letters and guiding with bruised hands, holding scars and tears close to her chest. Learning and learning , she'll know it all one day (maybe not in this life, or even the next, but she has the dead teaching her). Her heart yearns for the redemption of a man with the colors of the devil. She pleeds mercy upon his blackened soul and he crushes her lungs, you know as well as I how this story ends.

Though―

Not yet.

Not yet, because now she is of wide blue-blue eyes and gurgling. Now she is of giggles and baby-babble; broken hums and quiet crying (she never has to learn).

She sobs softly, cold hands and sheepish gurgles.

(Kanashi wonders if she thought of her youngest sister like this―cute and in need of protection. Just as the boy of flame in frost doth declare. When he is older he will stare at his twin, blue-blue eyes in mirror and as we know he will burn. Fire on molten skin and heavy hearts, bloodshed endless as he claims the opposite of his sister. That the man, the monster―the dragon that keeps her in her prison―ought to burn by the flames he bred. Number one will fall as he was supposed to, by the eldests hand. All she could do is watch and I cannot apologize if she doesn't grieve, because the man is a menace - dipped in greed and honeyed with poison.)

It's a terrible lie it has to be, she will say, in failing to convince herself otherwise. The news is too bad and bitter and her brother must be dead―he was such a sweet boy. One that would hold her when she had nightmares.

But then he will cry out to her, blue-blue eyes from inside a cell, teeth and broken skin. It's terribly true, I'm afraid.

And her world will burn once more (this time the towers walls will turn to ashes and she will run until her legs give out and grieve the tragedy of her elder brother).

Fuyumi laughs quietly. Blue-blue eyes like her brother and father before them. One day she will break, but not today.

Not yet.

END SCENE