• --- He still feels the heat of her breath against his cheek, as she leans closer to allow petals and furnaced warmth to curl around these shells called ears in the form of sweet nothings and innocence; like the crashing of waves against the soft white sand -- she's there and merrily roaring with all of the wind's fury and grace behind her, and then she's ---

    gone. Receeding back into an endless ocean of sharp, faded nothings. Waiting to resurface as a ghost that whispers death beneath his eyelids as he drowns at night in pools of memories, his lungs filling with all the tears he ever cried.

    Suddenly, her perfect lips are brushing, rubbing, loving against his dry ones -- her spindly arms made of bone and nothing else, as she hugged him close -- as he watched his last puff of air escape from his exposed ribcage, from between his lips and get caught in her closed lashes. With a smile made of acrid ink and blood, she falls apart in his arms, a jumble of skin and bones and blood and love and he briefly wonders if it was he who was dead -- if he was dead and happy in hell.

    He smells a burst of gunpowder and tastes the tang of blood and hears the clanging bells and feels the cool silk of metal before his eyes come back into focus ---

    just as she receeds back, dipping and falling into an abyss, a single skeletal hand peering from the thick velvet -- and he grasps for his lover's hand and holds on ---

            ( his fingers run through her midnight sky --
            endless, empty blue orbs that bleed in -----
            reds and purples and then she's gone again
            in a solitary blink of love and hate and kohl. )


    ❝memento mori, touji❞


    And with a start he awakens; ghastly in appearance, eyes wide and he covers his face with trembling hands and lets out a small sob; he could still feel the heat of her breath against his cheek --- he can still feel her weep against his shoulder in droplets of ice and snow.

    He can still see his sanctuary sealed behind kohl lashes, as they bleed in reds and purples and within those broken glass shards he finds that they only reflect the fact that he will only ever dream of her.



            ( and he suddenly feels as though she's clawing at his
            mouth and heart and legs and back, trying to tear
            him apart limb by limb. youkilledme! youkilledme!
            echoing in his ears as the tears come faster --- )




    ❝memento mori, touji❞ ----

    Repeated infintely in his mind, as if one day he might forget that he was the one who caused her skeleton state; as if one day he was going to join her in the faded and ever ebbing ocean of memory. That one day, maybe, he was going to return to his sanctuary of kohl -- all that was standing in his way of opening those eyes once again was a pesky little thing called death.