Red Ice Which Flows Through One's Veins
After the mission, Hawk finds his way to the memorial. The last stop before his penultimate destination. The point of no return. Past this Rubicon, there would only be conclusions.
He presses a hand against the pole, right arm twinging. An ill omen for things to come. He is not a superstitious creature, especially after entering the Reaper’s Game. But here he was anyway. Not due to any sort of religiosity, but rather because he was… sentimental. Not a great trait for a thing like him. He twists his lips into a wry smile for himself, but drops it quickly enough. He wonders if there will ever be a time when he could dispense with such expressions.
Surely that time was approaching.
“There are no gods but the ones we make ourselves,” he says into the night. “They say we are the ones who pull the threads of our own destinies.”
“But who really has these rights? The ownership of the future, the judgement of worth.
“Fate is a fickle thing, its grasp tight and jealous. Perhaps everything has lead down this road for a very long time.”
He regards the sky, a note of melancholy entering his eyes. Today is quite possibly the last time he would see the stars above Shibuya and admire the soft glow of the street lights against the inky infinity of the heavens.
This probably isn’t the right choice. He knows that better than anyone. The course that he has taken meant abandoning everyone else. And yet, there is a burning, absolute need driving him to continue. He can’t just back out now. It’s not in his nature, and there were too many chains that he could not afford to break.
Maybe things would turn out better if he left those behind too. If he could. But he had known that events would unfold this way from the very beginning. He had been resigned for a long time. There had been a brief period when he could forget these obligations that he was meant to uphold. He wonders if things would have been different if he were not his current self, if he had taken that offer to change.
“Every day we are slowly killing ourselves. The person we once were 10 years ago may not be anything like the person we are now. Where has that child gone? We killed them. They are gone, and cannot be revived. And now… perhaps we are naught but the smiling cicada shells left behind by the spirited souls which once inhabited these bodies.”
Who did he want to be? Which part of himself should he smother, and which should he nourish? He had never known, and the results of the years of letting others decide had chafed on him. He didn’t know. He doesn’t know if he can know.
He rubs his aching arm. The decisions he had made had led him here, and he would walk the narrow path that he had set for himself, the tightrope that was the difference between several different, terrible outcomes. There was no happy ending for him, no light at the end of the tunnel.
For now, all he could do was cling to a stone cold determination. A strength to continue, a stubbornness to put one foot in front of the other, a steel that courses through his body and keeps him upright even though there is nothing left of him.
He turns. Just one more day. Everything would change tomorrow, for better or for worse.
[[Hawk leaves 7000 yen in his wake]]
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