Send me ‘✂’ and my muse will kill yours.
He didn’t think it would happen this way.
He hadn’t wanted it to happen this way.
Had he even wanted it to happen at all?
It was after one too many days without feeding. Finding potential victims had become harder and harder, something he would never have expected in this rotten world. How could he gather the despair of mankinds to revive his Queen’s legacy when he could barely gather enough to keep himself alive?
That brought up a lot of questions in Close’s mind. Why him, Why now, Was he going to die just like this… And while he didn’t find any answer to those questions, he felt like he already had part of a solution when he remembered those words again and again: It’s all Cure Flora’s fault.
His aimless wandering brought him back to Yumegahama. With his entire body aching, yearning for Despair Energy, the only thing Close could think about was Cure Flora. How everything was her fault. How as the cause of his problems, she might also be the solution. Her despair. Her life. Her.
It was about time they lifted that pathetic “truce”.
It all happened very quickly. Close found her easily enough, walking down the street, chatting excitedly with someone over her phone. He approached her from behind without making a noise. He readied a sphere of dark energy in a hand, like he did so many times before…
And when she was within his reach, he fired the magical projectile at point blank into the back of the young girl’s abdomen. The impact devastated the surroundings, and sent her flying at a distance, where she crashed into a lamppost that bent under the shock.
Close kept his arm in place for a while. He stared silently at the aftermath of this simple gesture before he stepped forward. He had expected her to put up a fight. He thought she would transform, and they would settle this just like they could have settled this back then. So why…?
He bent down in front of the limp body in front of him. Blood was leaking on Haruka’s face. An empty eye that wasn’t hidden by her fringe stared back at him in an uncanny peaceful expression. She was already dead before she touched the pole. Close rose back up, not exactly sure of how he was supposed to feel now.
He killed Cure Flora. He killed the cause of all of his troubles. And yet…
And yet it didn’t feel like a victory at all.
And yet that didn’t fill that gaping void he felt in his chest.
He knew he had something his Queen didn’t have, the ability to be compassionate and to understand the feelings of others. It is because of this feeling Cure Flora managed to drive him away that time. It is because of this feeling he let his anger dictate his action just now.
And it was because of this feeling he felt he just did an enormous mistake. By taking out his enemy like that, he just threw away any chance he had to revive his Queen’s legacy the way she would have wanted him to.
Or maybe what he truly regretted was that he just killed the one person in this world who showed they understood how he felt? That he now had on his hands the blood of the only person on Earth who didn’t see him as just a monster?
What was an avatar of despair supposed to do, when they themselves fell into the deepest despair there was? Close could never tell. He simply burned into his eyes the pitiful sight of his enemy’s lifeless body before preparing to leave this world and maybe every others for good.