What colorful butterfly will fly next?

[waterfell]

Cold fog swirls, and makes the darkness even deeper, shrouding everything in a damp, cloying mist. There's a smell of ash in the air. To the side, a single golden pin impales a blue butterfly with black markings, just above the thorax. It struggles with a vain flurry of its tired wings, but for all the writhing desperation, there is little life left in the spasming body. It rests weakly between fits of frantic activity.

Beneath the butterfly, a picture of a blue-haired girl in a tiara and sailor-style collar has been clearly marked 'Mercury'. Nearby, similar displays bear the names of other planets. In some, the butterfly's wings have been pulled off or its body has been singed and scorched or bent to sickening angles; others are fresh and empty, but labeled in anticipation. They stretch into the distance as far as the eye can see in all directions.

Comments

[waterfell]

"People meet who should never have met." This is not necessarily bad; and it is not necessarily good. It simply is. She knows the ways outside influences, even small ones, can change a world drastically. Sometimes a world needs its fate changed, though. Sometimes that's all a world has come to be about.

[findmyownreason]

"So - we'll meet here again."

He's not good with goodbyes. He never has been. He doesn't want to admit that that's what this is but - it is. And all the things he should or wants to say can't find the words to come out. All he can do is hold her while she goes. It's not enough. It never is.

/sniffle. moving into endish?

[waterfell]

Despite the fatalistic words, and the sense of fatigue, Mercury seems to accept her current fate; and talking with Cloud and others has made her ready to still hold on to the ways she can still stay near the people who've started to make her believe she has people near her.

She doesn't quite smile, but she isn't raging, either. Even the talk of vengeance - she does expect to be avenged, because she knows the ones she left behind are quick to answer any blow dealt them - has faded.

So has she. Her body begins to shimmer and dim.

bwah. yep.

[findmyownreason]

He knows. He's always there when the people he cares about die. Never soon enough to stop it, always just in time to hold them as it happens. It's a pattern he had hoped that he'd broken... but holding Ami as she fades away tells him he hasn't. He doesn't have any words, even though he feels as if he should say one last thing. Instead, he holds her body until there's nothing left to hold. Don't tell him it's a dream. Waking won't change anything.