Chapter 0:
The Flowers Are No Longer in Bloom - Part One
My Fantasy is Just a Mirror
『It’s cold, Bismuth. Let’s go home.』
Falling through space, its mind played like a broken record. The static from that record shook it to its core, but wordlessly it didn’t wobble, nor make a sound. Instead, giving up on the color it couldn’t stop from fading, it let the disappearing world take the reins.
The Abyss it stared into seemed to harrowingly welcome its submission, taking control and playing on repeat the endless loops of wasted opportunities that burned in far too deep.
Once a certain pain cuts so many times, the mind would become desensitized to it. Throwing itself away, it almost seemed to finally understand that. Being forgotten time and time again… Now the act of forgetting didn’t phase it.
It felt as though it had found its purpose situated in the eye of the storm it created—long past the event horizon of a melancholic greyness. Alone, beyond the knowledge or cognition of those harsh winds, the scars they caused bleeding quietly, unnoticed.
Within that darkness, it was hard not to find the faint gust the Abyss replicated chilling, seeing it as the only thing separating deafening noise from its very absence. The wind blew against its disconnected and disheartened face, but as the breeze took a heavier sensation, it started to sound less like the wind and more like a breath. A familiar light breath whose nostalgic wisps brought the words, again, to the surface of its mind.
『It’s cold, Bismuth. Let’s go home.』
Even here—even in a place like this—it simply couldn't escape those words.
Replacing its failures with one that could never be erased, a few splitting, unsettling images rose up in defiance. It fought against it but the overwhelming emotion that those images brought to it were cripplingly tempestuous.
A field. Beaten, suppressed, and driven to darkness.
The waving of grass. Beaten, suppressed, and replaced.
A flowing sundress. Beaten, suppressed, and replaced.
Falling through nothingness, having thrown away its one opportunity at life, those images violently flashed in its mind without consent, settling on a face that it was simply unable to suppress. Being confined into a monochromatic Abyss, it was only natural those colors had wished to break free.
But those hues, those blurry wisps of life… No matter where it went, why did they have to follow?
Almost as if there were no other colors to exist in that former world, any attempt to bury them down was fruitless. Those fruits instead burst at the seams like splatters of hostile and vivid paint, and as the blowing lustrous spectrum of hair came into view, its mind could only utter one static message finally seeing the face it hoped to bury under its capitulation.
『It’s cold, Bismuth. Let’s go home.』
That voice… It felt painfully familiar.
The paints on cracked canvas splashed more, as her face came into view. She was beautiful.
Descending down in two parallel spectrums of hues which mirrored each other brilliantly, her pigtails blew softly against the wind. Those colors morphed themselves from a cyan, to sapphire, to violet and orchid, before humbly fading into a bright pink and ending with gold.
These colors, which gradiented themselves on her hair, beamed with every color in the rainbow. Nested above her vibrant curls, a white sunhat sat over her, one hand holding it steady while the other held the ivory sundress against the artificial breeze.
These colors were meant to be soft and loving, but what was left could only be called petrifying.
Despite her colors, which now turned their luster from bright and exuberant to oversoaked and hostile, the rosy lips plastered kindly over that girl’s porcelain skin wore a genuine smile.
That girl…
All it could do was reject the answer. The bright colors in turn burst away in the form of sparks and dying embers. Such lit the once vivid images of her visage like short-lived fireworks, before those hues, too, disappeared from the artificial Abyss.
At this point, it was clear… that even here, running away from those memories would never be possible, no matter how hard it tried.
This decision had been its nepenthe, a final escape from the world that had thrown it away.
But the cruel truth was—nothing could save it from those memories. Not even an eternity of silence…
The cost to receive that cruel answer—it was everything. Everything it had left. Every breath. Every ounce of its dying hope.
But that word… Hope…
“…”
Overwhelmed, it had nothing left to give.
Not a single tear, not a frown, not a splash of color left to envision for her.
It could be content throwing away the world. It didn’t need it.
But what cut so much deeper than that…
I threw you away… I forced you to suffer alone, for so, so long…
The flowers had wilted months ago.
Her colors had faded months ago.
Her smile, as well…
And that’s why…
Why it couldn’t accept this fate.
Why it could never be satisfied.
Why, no matter how much it will suffer, and how much it could have won in the end…
It will never have meant a single thing.
Forcing himself to open his eyes, enveloped in the blackness of his fading consciousness, he stated the truth so blankly, and so candidly, as if he had already abandoned the self that would have to hear it…
『You’ll always hate me. You’ll hate me long, long after I die…』
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