Lately, I've been looking into other stories in the Kantai category. One of them was the One-Shot Collection by Chinorwegia.
I want to make this clear that collection of short stories is a blatant copy of the concept behind One-Shot Collection. While the content itself will not be the same, I've decided that I want to try my hand at short and fast one-shots, because I have some experimental story-telling styles that I want to try out.
Please don't take this as a display of one-up-manship over anything else. This is just my own little attempt at a story style that is also currently being done by another member of the Kantai FF community. The credit for the inspiration of this story goes to Chinorwegia and his/her original collection of stories in One-Shot Collection.
As stated, this will be a bit of an experimental story collection, so this story may not be updated as frequently as my other stories are. In addition, if mood whiplashes aren't your thing, don't read these short stories. But feel free to leave requests. The more specific, the better. I want to be able to expand my writing and become more of a flexible writer.
One final note: while A:PM4 and A:AFS seem to be related in some way, this is a standalone story with no relation to my own renditions of the Kantai universe. In this, I will attempt to keep as true to vanilla Kantai and history as possible.
Enjoy,
-Hieda no Akyuu
Like black snow, the ashes fall.
The ripped thread and string of red and white stockings rub against the glass of the earth, soaking in its blue warmth, a warmth that, by this point, is greater than the warmth she feels inside.
The dances of the denizens. She'd never seen them dance so brightly, so happily, so joyfully. Did they always dance this way? Were they always so bright and cheerful? And if so, why is it only now that she notices?
Blinding, devastating - the colors of autumn ruthlessly carry on their ritualistic dances.
It's annoying.
Make it stop.
Make it stop.
Stop...
Her long, pale, straw-blonde hair, the color of young hay, ready to be reaped and harvested for the start of the new season. But what good is young hay when it's marred by the blemishes of the field? The black snowflakes, descending like angels, settle on her - her hair, her shoulders, her legs. They turn her into an eerie palette of colors - straw-mat yellow, micro-dot black, pale peach, stocking red, stocking white, linen blue.
The black angels embrace her with their remorseless love, a love so heavy and thick that she finds herself beginning to choke.
No, this is not love. This is the opposite of love.
But tell that to the black ashes, and they won't understand.
The denizens of the field dance are dancing even more furiously now. The fact that the star in the sky that is called the sun is being blocked out by the unrelenting sheets of gray now no longer matters, for the denizens of the field are fulfilling its role. They throw about their flourishes and joy like paint, and nothing escapes their sight.
She, who is in the middle of the field of denizens, is painted most of all.
She feels a tap against her left thigh. A hunk of twisted scrap metal, with two pipes incongruously jutting out from the top. She wants to feel sorry for it, apologize to it, but in the end, it's just another scrap of metal lying in the field of glass with her.
In fact, there's not really much difference between them. It's not like either of them had the same kind of energy that the denizens of the field have.
The glass is being tainted. Not just by the energetic paint of the dancing denizens, not just by the angels of black ash, but by the red life pouring from her, pouring down from openings in her body, openings that were forced open with conflict, exacerbated by hate, and left to rot by resentment and forlorn. She'd never seen her own life flood out from herself in this way.
It's so alarming that it's almost...
...breathtaking.
It's absurd. She knows she should feel afraid, she should feel scared, she should feel like she needs to do something to stop this.
But for some reason, she can't. In fact, it's more that she knows that she can't. So she doesn't even bother.
As she watches her own life seep into the glass to coat it forever from sky-blue to rose-red, she finally realizes what this red truly is. It's not just her life.
It's her hope.
No wonder she can't feel anything in particular right now.
If you have no hope, you have no reason to feel anything, because you don't have anything to look forward to.
Ah, now she understands.
Now she gets it...
...what it means to be...
..."hopeless"...
...that was what it was called, wasn't it?
This..."mission".
Whatever that means now.
Words have lost meaning.
Like cells being destroyed by having their membranes popped, words are being removed from her mind like a genocide. They're just a mass of useless, dead information floating around in the deep, dark abyss that she is letting her mind slowly develop into...no different than the slowly enlarging field of bright, cheerful, and ultimately useless denizens. Everything inside will rot like a pile of dead corpses, rot until there is nothing left but the bones.
The dogs will be here soon to collect the bones, too.
She looks down. Instead of gazing at herself in the mirror of the field of glass, she instead beholds another girl.
This girl was...this girl was...
...who was she again?
She's almost forgotten. But she knows she can't forget. She absolutely must not forget. It's okay to forget everything else, because nothing else matters. Only this one thing in front of her matters now.
She can't remember this girl's name. She can barely remember her own by now, after all. But names don't matter either.
She puts her trembling hands on the girl's shoulders and drags her up against her. The life that she's lost makes it tough, but it doesn't matter how much of it she's lost, she knows she'll still have it in her to do this much for this girl whose name she has forgotten.
This girl was someone she lived with.
Someone she played with.
Someone she had races with.
And won every time.
Someone she ate with.
Someone she took baths with.
Someone she fought with.
Both against, and with.
Someone she laughed with.
Someone she cried with.
Someone she slept with.
In both senses of the word.
Someone she was sisters with.
Someone she was friends with.
And someone who meant something more to her than anything else in the world.
So why is it only now that she wants to tell her all of this?
Why is it only now that she finally has the courage to admit everything?
Why now?
When she knows it's far too late?
No, no.
That shouldn't even be a question.
She knows why. She knows why she feels this way only now.
She's trying to make herself ignorant so that she has an excuse to feel sad and not have to feel regret.
She knows why. There's no reason to pretend like she doesn't know.
She clings onto the girl as tightly as she can. It's not much, but it'll keep the girl from slipping and breaking through the field of glass and shattering her world forever.
Then, the world changes on its own.
The field of glass is bombarded by trillions of falling boulders.
These boulders, while not exactly large by any means, have more than one way to exert their force.
They pound the field of glass, threatening to break it altogether. The denizens, however, don't care - they just continue to dance as frantically as ever.
These boulders also pelt her and the girl. It's a good thing that the girl can't feel the boulders, because they hurt.
Both as they hit her, and as they roll down her face and down her eyes onto the girl.
She feels the lapping jaws of the glass on which she sits biting at her waist. She hadn't noticed that the glass has already reached that high.
It's about that time, huh.
She pulls up the girl as high as she can, embracing her lips with the girl's.
But it's...just not the same.
It's just not the same.
It'll never be the same.
So all she can do is hold the girl, hug her for dear life, and wait for the field of glass to open up and swallow them.
If anything, she can take comfort in the fact that the two of them will go to sleep together, one final time, to a more peaceful, less complicated place.
In a place where hopefully, no one will ever wake them up again.