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skadventuretime · 25 days ago

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The Tower

What a wonderful experience writing for the @noragamitarotzine! Check out everyone's work there, and my piece below the cut!

It could have gone like this:

Cicadas hum in sunset-soaked trees, the smell of asphalt at odds with the fresh-cut grass. You sit next to a girl on the swingset, puffs of dust erupting each time you skid to a stop. You’re eating a snack that you probably swindled from some poor human, smears of food around the corner of your mouth until you look at your reflection and gasp at the audacity of no one telling you that you had something on your face.

(Once broken, can anything truly be put back together?)

The signal is always three flicks of her light. You knock on the window late at night, your grin wide and full of more stories to tell while you float around a room that must look so mundane compared to Heaven. But no, in this world, it would be interesting—your eye would catch on an award hung on the walls, or on a family photo on the desk, and you would get that hungry little look in your eyes, the one that says you must know in great detail everything there is to know about whatever prompted it. And in this world, you’d get more than an exasperated answer.

(What jokes would you have shared today?)

Or perhaps it went like this:

You pester Yukine on the way to school, buying a plushie and stickers because you know he gets so excited to get a “good job!” when there’s a sticker. You say annoying things and are so pleased when no one leaves, proud that you have friends despite what Father told you.

Maybe you’d get bored and visit the hospital, leaving advertisements all over the bulletin board. You’d grin at all the work you’ll be able to do with your hafuri and all the time you’ll be able to spend outside of bedrooms, looking in.

(Would things be different now, if you never felt the blight-sting from these claws?)

The floors are quiet. Monitors beep and the hum of fluorescent lighting is loud in the one unoccupied room you find. You think about all the trouble you’ll cause later and how you’ll pass it off on Daikoku or Kofuku, and wonder if you can hide a beer long enough to finish it before Yukine notices.

(Do you know how ichor tastes?)

You linger by the window, hips and shoulders that glorious degree of perpendicular, lips in line with the sun. You smile—why? Do you still have faith in tomorrow? Is loss so far away?

Gone is the high school graduation party in Kofuku’s home, flushed from too much to drink and wondering about the heat where our shoulders touch; gone are the mornings you drag us to your favorite restaurant just to have us try everything on the menu and pretend like you don’t care about our opinions; gone are the nights you hover in the tree, both of us pretending you’re not there as you watch another human night hit the bottom of the hourglass.

(Was there ever a world in which your blood didn’t dry, blasphemous, beneath my nails?)

Instead of sunbeams, we get sirens. And that’s the worst of it; we’re trapped in every shard of glass and frantic phone call from loved ones who just want to know their person is safe, and we will never get back to those lazy afternoons or bandaged hands or shining, precious almosts. The ground hasn’t fallen away; it sits heavy and aching with no way out.

I hold the could-have-beens tight to my chest while I leap for your throat. I tuck each and every plan for our future into bed and watch them burn away as my blight eats your flesh. Maybe if you grant this wish, this final, desperate wish, something can be saved. I sink my teeth into your shoulder and ignore the screams and moans from the hospital I’ll no longer grow up to work at.

Your blood coats my tongue and you look at me like it doesn’t matter, like nothing matters except us going home together, so I hand you the weight of tomorrow and wait for Sekki to join me to you forever.

Do you think we’ll be happy, in this unimagined world?

#noragami #noragami tarot zine #hello from the past where i have not yet added this to the ao3 collection #i'll do that when i get a minute

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