Where Rainbows End

Final Shot

We dance inside this tragedy.

~X~

Future?

It stands, that nothing is constant in this world.

It must have struck Haru's mind, once she and Gokudera set foot in the outskirts of the shopping mall she had bidden promise to return to three years ago. She stares at it in wonder. Her thoughts though, betrayed the notion once she sees a person with a tattered brown coat enveloping his or her body. The eyes were hidden in red goggles that lit up in different colors. The dark blue hair was mangled and seemed to be cut in haste. The look signified how much this world had changed since she remembered.

"From where have you come from?" there was a certain briskness in the husky yet womanly voice of the stranger who greeted them. Her tone bade them no welcome.

"The Crimson Castle," said Gokudera breezily, almost arrogantly that Haru had to elbow him sharply. This was bad.

"We came to see Timoteo-san," she adds, but the woman cuts aside and has her sights only at Gokudera.

"So you won then. Like Timoteo-sama," she says, the next sentence almost sounding like an epithet. She then takes off the goggles. Haru was aghast. The skin to her left almost looked like rotting flesh. Her eye was almost reduced to a crackly bulge.

"Where is Timoteo-san?" Haru asks again. But she didn't seem to be listening as she walks up to her partner.

"Your name," she says.

"Gokudera Hayato," he replies.

"Lal Mirch," said the girl, looking at him from head to foot. "I suppose then that you have met them?"

"The rulers of the castle? I have," says Gokudera. Haru was looking at them fumingly. Why the hell weren't any of them even paying attention to her?

"Where is Timoteo-san?" she tries to sound polite again. Lal Mirch didn't even twitch.

"Hmph. Judging from your appearance, you must be immune. Timoteo-sama, the clan leader here, didn't last in the end. He died two years ago. He was one of the people I met who was released, aside from you."

"Any others?"

"There's four here," said Lal Mirch, still wearing a frown. "Get inside. It's amazing how you managed to journey here. How did you find this place?"

Gokudera just looks at Haru.

"I told him, dammit!" Haru now tries to holler at her. "Hel-lo?! You shouldn't be deaf!"

"She told me," Gokudera says, thumbing at her.

Lal just looks at Gokudera's direction, and for the first time there was a look of surprise in her face.

"I thought you were an uptight kind of man. Turned out you have a funny side in you too," she moves her lips sideways, as if to smile.

Haru looks at her rather irritably, not getting the joke.

And then she understood.

~X~

-Past.

It wasn't funny.

He didn't understand why Yamamoto had to try joking about her sister's death. Of all people, why did this idiot have to fucking say she was meant to burn into his arms? Why the fuck did he say because of the fires of love? It didn't make any sense. It made no sense and yet he sat and did nothing about it.