Sorry this is so late, but I really wanted to this prompt to be used as inspiration but also hopefully manage to surprise you! Either way, I hope you enjoy it and happy holidays for all!: I'd like to see... A family. At least one of the main/submain characters as parent(s), preferably some participation from the grandparents and maybe a pet.
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Cold brought my hands together, as cold had done before, and I look past the tips of frost that crack the window into the glowing warmth.
The room breathes heat into the sofa, the tree, and even the dog I don’t remember getting that lightly snores in front of the dissipating remnants of a roaring fire. It’s ashes settling over the room and playing puppets with the shadow beaten back. Where those shadows fail to reach, I’m buried into the arms of Hisao on the couch, my knees tucked to my chest and my head feeling the ebb and flow of breath from his midriff.
I thought of the times I’d heard that rise and fall, where Hisao’s hand had found its way down the back of my hair to my back and held me tight. The first had been the festival when we’d met, though with a lack of confidence his hand hovered around the small of my back in a photo Lelouch had encouraged we’d take to celebrate the introduction of another friend.
We’d been wondering the grounds of Yamaku under the festival lights, when a boy looking like his mind was beyond him, stumbled into Taro and almost fell over. It had turned out we’d intercepted Hisao on his way to the library, and we convinced him to join our party.
Of course, it was nothing then. He was an attractive new student, Naomi had mentioned he was hot but I hadn’t even caught his eyes, until the fireworks lit up mine, and scorched the image of him into them.
Now I reach for that silhouette, but its lost to the shadows surrounding us on the couch.
A light turns on from the bottom of the staircase.
I’m back at our first date, where the lights from the sleepy town below the hill Yamaku rested on sunk into our skin as we descended into it. His fingers were gentle but firm as they locked as far as they could between my fingers and the splint affixed to my wrist, he playfully waggled his index against mine and met my eyes when I told him how I liked him. How he liked me.
A cold wind is hitting my cheek.
That cradle of lights below us, how it felt when his lips lowered and met mine and the warmth spread over us, seeped into us. It melts in my memories, like a match behind a polaroid.
We’d sat across one another in the Shanghai, his coffee made him taste bitter in our subsequent kisses. He told me about his old friends from home, how they’d wilted around him in a hospital bed. I took of my wrists coverings, showed him the battered veins and bruises under them, the scars from operations and mishaps. We were sat by the window.
I delicately
placed my hand on the pink jagged line beneath his shirt, and I remember the murmur
Of the dog I don’t remember getting, in front of the fire. The heat doesn’t touch me. The stairs creak as someone descends.
Car lights blind me through the window and
scorched our shadows into the pavement. The snow fell from cracks in the skyline, and melted on my tongue. Hisao laughed as he pulled me through the blizzard and into the warmth of a party we were attending. Taro had slimmed out, and passed us prosecco at the door with a welcoming bow in his neat Tuxedo. He’d ended up married, and this was the one-year anniversary. Naomi and Lelouch stumbled in behind us. We were all together again. Nothing could ever separate us –
The light in the living room flicks on. Hisao gets up with a warm smile.
A young girl with dark hair enters the room, she rubs the sleep out of her eyes and is picked up in a hug by Hisao. He kisses her forehead as the dog yawns before the fire. I’m no longer on the sofa.
I never was.
I’d dipped my hand in something ethereal. When we actually met in the city, there was no snow. There was no longer any us to lose. Our hearts had gone in separate directions, both into racing lights. It was never a fairy-tale.
But we both beat on, a woman with that same dark hair enters from the kitchen. My phone vibrates in my pocket.
The woman is half-cast in shadows and her hair obscures the other half, Yet I recognise her from Yamaku. I’d thought her a delinquent, I’d pitied her. Now she’s on the right side of the window.
The cold begins to burn my face and fingers. Something stings my eyes.
I withdraw from the window. The new light behind me now. But the night carries on, the streets still wind into the blizzard, beyond them, future, beyond them, unknown.
I fade, a cold heart into the ceaseless dark, all the light behind me whilst tomorrow unfolds into a snow storm.
We burn the night before with the past, as the sounds of fireworks mark the start of another year.
Baptised in colour and cold, I move on to the next.
