onepassingnight | 002nd Promotion ♛ Shall we dance?

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002nd Promotion ♛ Shall we dance?

[In the Great Hall of a palace made of crystal, gold and white marble, there's a party, a big one with many guests who mingle with each other, dance, talk, laugh and eat, enjoying themselves. Everyone is in their best suits and dresses, even you, unexpected guest, will find yourself perfectly dressed for the occasion, the only difference between you and them is that them all wear masks covering their faces completely or partially. Even the musicians, at a corner of the gigantic room, cover their faces as they play music without rest or pause. The music is delicious and keeps tempting you to dance. The delicate food spread all over the tables at each side of the room also invite you to take a bite or take a drink, it doesn't matter how much you eat or drink, the food never runs out neither do the drinks.

The ceiling raises high over your head, higher and higher than your eyesight can reach, point at which it melts into a nocturne sky full of sparkling stars that shimmer and dance on their own private dance floor. No matter where you look the large windows, that show to a garden full of bright crimson and silver flowers, are all closed. Yet there must be a door or a window open as to explain the natural present of those golden butterflies and brightly red cicadas that circle around in the air, flying everywhere but not bothering anyone. Then again, they aren't exactly normal insects, are they? There are no butterflies or cicadas made of golden or red light that burst into small harmless sparkles the moment you poke at them. But it doesn't matter, why should it?

Come and relax uninvited guest. No one care where you're from or why you're here so don't worry yourself with those things either. Just relax and enjoy yourself in this dreamlike party. Who knows how long will it last?]

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[She remembers the fragments; she remembers standing at the edge of everything with him while both of them held worlds in their hands. She's done amazing things in dreams.

Now, Ami holds out her hand. Shall they dance while talking?]

The butterflies especially are unreal. [She chooses the word deliberately, both praise of their beauty and acknowledgment that they seem magic somehow.]

That's certainly something I can't help to agree with.

[They are magical after all and unlike other witches he doesn't carve to be acknowledged as a real wizard or something. He knows what he is and that won't change. He bows politely before taking her hand to guide her back to where most of the dancers are in other to dance with her.]

I do feel a bit hurt, though. No word about the cicadas? They are specially mine.

[He smiles a bit, clearly nothing more than a polite joke, at his own expense even.]

Then I should praise them.

[She doesn't. She has to tease him, now, withholding it. She moves in the turns and steps of the dance as if she'd always known them; she has a certain grace to her movements, like the flow of water. It allows her to seem coy, stepping close one minute and turning away the next.]

What is their nature? I don't believe they're simple cicadas, if they're from you. [Besides that, she's seen some of the butterflies fade by now.]

[Oh, yes, she has to tease and withhold it. It wouldn't be fun if she didn't after all and Primo does look more pleased than if she had praised the cicadas immediately. He also clearly enjoys the dance, she's probably, with difference, the most graceful dancer in the party.]

I think energy would be the simplest solution. They serve as a kind of optical representation of my magic, which is nothing but energy shaped in ways normal humans are incapable of. They tend to appear whenever I use my magic, or in this place, my home, as it was built with my magic as well.

Then the butterflies are...? [She considers her own question, eyes slightly narrowed in thought.]

A different magic? [Who would be here to shape it with him? The person who comes to her own mind is Ichihara Yuuko, whose symbol had been a butterfly. This does not seem right; this does not seem to be from the world Yuuko had existed in.]

That's quite right.

[He nods, tilting his head slightly and looking at one side of the room, a polite and subtle way to point her attention in one direction. If she looks she will be able to spot a woman with long silver hair and a purple gown, sitting and enjoying some tea in the company of another woman, blonde and dressed in a red dress which probably should be considered shameless no matter how open minded one was.]

Some of my guests belong to the court of the Golden Witch, the golden butterflies are theirs. I suppose they thought that just the red cicadas were boring.

[Her eyes narrow in suspicion, alert by his words at once.]

You were against the witches you spoke of before. [Has he changed his mind? Made an exception? It bothers her; not for any reason really relating to him or them; she doesn't know them well enough to judge. But the simple idea of a change of viewpoint tugs at her mind.]

[He nods.]

The Golden Witch isn't one of the witches I fight against. She has done no evil, on the contrary, she has tried to carry over her shoulders the sins of others in order to avoid the one she loved reality's pain.

[He sighs a bit.]

I can't say I agree with her, and her methods are probably cruel from a human's point of view. But she remains within her own boundaries. The witches I want to destroy are witches that aim for nothing but pain, who play with worlds and people as if they were toys. Those witches can't enter here, they wouldn't even try to, though, it's dangerous for them as those are my domains.

[So there are different kinds of witches. She thinks of Beryl, a vindictive and selfish one, chaining those around her like pawns to be used for her goals with nothing in return but the chance of her favor - and less pain. She's had Beryl's power cut into her body before, for her defiance when she worked with Kunzite and Zoisite to thwart Beryl's plans.

She thinks of the ones Primo described before, who are similar. They cause pain and suffering for their own ends. She cannot pretend that she has not acted capriciously and selfishly, too; but never on that level. And she's changed, some, since back then and those early days in the Dark Kingdom.]

Your Golden Witch sounds like a savior.

Don't you have something believable instead?

A savior? Her?

[He laughs outloud at that, clearly amused by the thought.]

No, she's not a savior. If she really was there would be no problems. She started them all, unintentionally, but they happened because of her fault, because she was selfish and stupid. She has done no evil but that doesn't mean she wasn't the spark that started the fire that burned everything. Besides that her way to get the sins from others consisted in basically making her loved one accept she was the culprit of the tragedies... By making a game out of the tragedy that happened.

The major difference between her and the others is that even if she may have started the tragedy she had no intention of doing so. She tried to stop it, failed and then tried to keep at least one person from suffering from it by hiding the truth from them. The other witches? They produced the tragedies with their own hands and for their own whims.

No, Beatrice isn't a savior. She's just a witch. In all the meanings of the word.

[Ami finds that much easier to believe. As they dance, she moves by instinct and her body's memory while her mind remains occupied with the cicadas, the butterflies, and the witches.]

Does something like a 'savior' even exist anywhere?

[The question is mostly rhetorical; she's decided the answer is no.]

[It's a rhetorical question, he knows it, yet he leans in slightly as they dance to answer.]

No.

[And he has seen countless of worlds to have that conclusion as a fact.]

But there are people that, while not exempt of flaws and mistakes, are willing to sacrifice themselves for others or a world. Yet many could argue that what they are doing is really saving people, some could say that they are instead forcing people to keep suffering based on their own selfish wishes. So I wouldn't call them saviors in the least. Just humans willing to fight and do anything for what they want.

Something that I find far more respectable and admirable, to be honest.

[It's roughly her. She, like the shitennou, has given up a lot to be able to fight to make sure the planet is still there. Of course, this is less noble and more born of the fact that none of them want to give up what they call theirs. They have won it, and they will keep it.]

It's more honest.

[This, she values more than the lies of love and justice.]

[Primo can't help but agree. It's more honest and real, yet it doesn't take away the value of the sacrifices those people made, because there's no such a thing as a completely pure being.

He smiles and nods as they keep dancing with ease.]

[As if his silence prompts her, she keeps talking, almost as if to herself.]

That's right. The ones who pretend to be the light while doing the worst things are the ones I won't forgive.

[Chiefly because others do forgive them.]

Pretending to be the light is nothing but a sign of foolishness anyway. What's so wrong with a clouded light even? The sun is one of the brightest lights on e can find in the universe and even he has his dark spots.

[There's no sense in a world of light without shadows, it's just as blinding and deceiving as one made of darkness. Claiming to be all pure and made of light is something only fools would do.]

Not to mention that there's no one living there. Just as there's no one living inside a black hole. Too much light is just as bad as too much darkness in my opinion.

Is this going to become a lecture about balance? [She doesn't particularly care about balance, either. She doesn't mind a world that was won by darkness, a world where light was snuffed out as vengeance for its crimes.]

I hope not. Lectures always bored me unless it was a specially interesting subject. And it would be too hypocrite even for me to preach about something in which I don't believe either.

[He said nothing against worlds of mostly light or mostly darkness after all.]

Sounds good to me.

I don't have any trust in sweet words. I want to wait to see what's done first. If it's a so-called hero, I want to see... what they really do, and, what they treat as precious to them.

[By what, she really means who.]

Seeing then believing, huh? That's not a bad way to go around things and it suits you. After all, words are just words, it takes little effort to claim that one loves everyone or that they will sacrifice themselves for the world. But it takes the real deal to actually take action in accordance to those words.

Yes. The one who says the prettiest words in my world, destroyed it completely.

[For once, the words come with no heat of anger, not before a man uninvolved.]

How can those words be true if it means that little to her?

Would it make more sense if you thought of them as "candy bullets"?

As what? [She turns to face him; no, that is not helpful, Primo, that is more confusing.]

What do you mean by that? [Her voice is a bit terse with the confusion.]

Ever heard about the case of a man who made bullets out of hardened sea salt? He gathered the sea salt himself and prepared it to create a bullet which he used to kill someone at their own home besides the fireplace. Because the body was besides the fireplace for a long time before it was found, even as the body's temperature fell, the sea salt melted until there was no trace left of the bullet. By the time anyone found the body, the sea salt bullet was long since gone.

[He talks with ease and knowledge, as if he has seen it happen himself, he probably has.]

A candy bullet is similar. An imaginary ammunition, powerless and without a physical form, something apparently harmless that slips into your body and slowly dissolves into it. Rotting your soul and mind from the inside with its sweetness if you're not careful.

Maybe those pretty and sweet words of hers were never meant to be anything other than candy bullets destined to destroy you. In that sense, wouldn't that make sense? It's not that she lied, it's just that no one realized than what she was doing was firing candy bullets to destroy things at a slower pace.

It's a good metaphor.

[She says so thinking of the way Usagi had seemed to infiltrate her way into their lives, with that meaningless smile and those shallow embraces. For once, she lets the image of the smiling girl stay in her head. She puts it next to the image of the destroyer. The result is something much like her old, old hallucination of Usagi carrying a gun...]

However, the end result is the same.

wow, self. what is formatting? /sob

something we don't need to understand each other /hugs

/hugs

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