Hyacinth

Disclaimer: I do not own these characters or concepts, which I too often explain and explore.

Hyacinth

"Swing through the sadness, tears of joy,
Curse the sunlight
Arsenic for the girls and boys
Drink the madness, smoke so coy,
Smile injection
Serum of a will destroyed..."
-AFI, ‘The Nephilim’

Chalk fell forgotten from gloved fingers.
A dusty streak scuffed the well-polished floor.
The young man cocked his head to the side.

Something was... wrong.

"Oh."

He realized his error, and wiped one dusty sleeve over half of the board. The boy behind him shifted from hip to hip. He retrieved the chalk and began again.

"Don’t you ever get angry?" He asked, toying with his ring.

He glanced at him as he pressed his glasses back up with one hand.

The sound of water dripping was deafening.

"Why?" He asked.

"You have to start all over!"

"The error was my own. It serves no purpose to agonize over it. It has been corrected."

"Has it?" The boy whispered.

Chalk dust flew into his face as he wiped the board again. He looked then for the boy, but he was alone in the room.

Nemuro sneezed.

~*~

"I don’t believe that he understands it." He murmured, sighing a little, as he tilted his head back.

"Understands what?" The deep voice rumbled through him, sturdy and strong. Dark fingers combed through pale hair.

"The end of his world...?" He asked.

The man laughed. "No one truly understands the End of the World."

"The Shadow knows..." The image of the girl against the wall noted. The man dismissed the shadow with a careless wave of his hand.

Across the room, Nemuro knelt beside the bed, scribbling furiously on a tablet. The space around him was showered in neat sheets of yellow papers, all covered with equations and notes. "It never moves..." He murmured.

"It’s stale in here." The boy noted. He winced a little as the hand stilled, tangling in the soft pink strands.

"This is a holy land." He reminded sharply.

"Is he a holy man?"

Nemuro threw the legal pad across the room with an inarticulate cry. It slipped gently off of the wall and lay still. "It never changes."

The boy uncurled himself from the floor beside the chair.

Somewhere, a stopwatch clicked.

Nemuro froze, a bleak look upon his face. Kneeling beside him, the boy closed his left hand over the young man’s, and traced a few faint symbols across the page. He murmured, "Your face is an open book, where men may read strange matters..."

The stopwatch clicked as he withdrew.

"Unless..." Nemuro breathed, excited. He attacked the tablet again, retracing the ghost-like symbols the other boy had left behind.

~*~

"Is he correct?"

"Matter cannot be created, nor destroyed..." He responded.

"...It merely changes form..."

"All that you are will rot and fade away. However, all that you do... That butterfly might change the world..."

"Is that revolution?"

"No."

~*~

"What is life?" He asked.

"I am a physics professor." He replied, frowning at the warped reflection. Having covered both sides of the blackboard, along with the smooth surfaces of the brick walls, he had started on the windows.

"I was once like you." The boy noted shyly.

"And then what happened?" He uncapped a fresh marker, and began again.

The dead marker rolled to a stop in front of one dusty black shoe. "Then... I grew... pale..."

"And yet, you never fade..." Nemuro noted.

"Do you change?” The boy interrupted.

"Everything adapts."

"Not everything."

"Then it would not live - It would die."

"Is there a difference?"

"I am a physics pro-" When he looked around, the boy had gone again.

~*~

"What are you working on?"

"It is a map."

"To what?"

He licked his lips, forever flavored with heavy powder. "Everything."

"Can you change everything...? ...Or merely... Chart its course?"

"What do you mean?"

"Could you change?"

"I have."

"That isn’t what I asked you."

He didn’t respond.

~*~

Nemuro Souji was a linear man.

A linear man reads.
Absorbency of a language leads to a cultural modification - an information revolution-, which shapes the way a nation thinks.

The analysis of an environment leads to its subsequent editing, which shapes the method of the change of others.

"Is that revolution?"

"A revolution... of sorts."

"Could he change?"

"All matter changes."

"Could he change... matters...?"

"Yes."

He felt naked and vulnerable again, as he managed to pry the small band from his finger.

"Then give him this."

That dark hand opened, and he placed his own upon it for only a moment, before shivering it away quickly.

"Where is the life that he has lost in the living?" Mikage asked.

"Where is the knowledge that he has lost in information?" The Chairman replied.

"It evolves."

Akio laughed as his hand closed over the small, white ring.

~*~

Nemuro Souji was a linear man.
But the man himself was quite dry.

"Dry bones can harm no one." The boy whispered.

Nemuro could not hear him. The signet upon his finger gleamed in the half-light.

"And God said, shall these bones live...?" Mikage said sadly.

Water splashed.

Mikage made a soft, quiet sound.

Revolving, but never moving forward. Turning and turning in the widening gyre...

"That’s revolution." He said firmly, staring at his promise ring.

The flashbulb exploded.

[cut: fade to black]

"The seasons change without me.
I remain in shadows growing wings.
The spirit song still surrounds me, in refrain, in shadows
Like a devil, meant for better things..."
-AFI, 'The Nephilim'

The title comes from this excerpt:

"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
"They called me the hyacinth girl."
---Yet when we came back late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

--T.S. Eliot, ‘The Wasteland’, I: The Burial of the Dead

...This story was written for the Doppelganger Challenge on the Live Journal Community utenadrabble.