rainbowfic | and live with them;

Name: Mischa
Story: and as the daylight falls
Colors: bistre (prophecies never know the blood-price they extract), Side B (Turn and face the strange → Changes (Hunky Dory)), vienna orange (My made-up mind was not put here for you to try and change)
Supplies and Styles: canvas
Word Count: 1055
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none really, other then Mika's dad being kind of a dick.
Summary: "All life is a risk. And we need your help, dreamer."
notes: Written for a creative writing class prompt of not supposed to be more than 1000 words. I will probably redo this with the cut pieces of dialogue/world-buildy bits at some point in the future.

The last time Akemi Nakajima had spoken to his father had been shortly before the divorce, when he’d been twelve and sitting next to him on the world’s most awkward ferris wheel ride at the carnival that came through town every year, mice skittering behind the tents to avoid the light and noise. The salty, scorched scent of burned popcorn mixed awkwardly with too-sweet taffy and grease, and his father’s voice, deep and hesitant, words sliding through the strands of his memory, lost and gone. He remembers guilt, the slow measured cadence, but not the shape of what his father had said, it’s slipped away like so much else.

(weeks later, his father walked away without looking back, without another word. his mother’s sad eyes, his sister’s incandescent rage behind her cheerful words. had his father loved them ever at all? he doesn’t use the name his father gave him anymore. his dreams turn black and gray and red.)
***
“Hey, Mika?” Akiko says, laying upside down on the couch and draping her legs over the side, her rainbow-socked heels digging into the worn stucco of the living room wall, freckled spots of fading paint flaking free.

“Mm?” he asks, blinking, watching as she spins threads of light between her fingers. It’s always been their secret, her powers and his dreams, and Akiko’s insisted that they never tell their parents, especially not their father. But it’s not like their father speaks to them, anymore, not since he walked out of their lives without another word: maybe a card at Christmas, a brief phone call on their birthday, and

The words on the page in front of him are blurring together, and he chews on his lower lip. as he tries to concentrate.

“Just remember, no matter what happens.” his sister chirps. “Everything will surely be alright, okay?”

“What are you talking about?” he asks, frustrated, and Akiko swings her legs back over the side of the couch, sitting up and grabs his hand. “You don’t make any sense.”

“Just listen, okay?” she says, spins light like thread between their clasped fingers. “No matter what happens, everything will be alright. I’ve made sure of it. ”

Akemi doesn’t understand why: he doesn’t understand, though he’s the dreamer of the two of them, dreaming of things to come. He doesn’t understand why until it happens, bare months later, in the beginning of the hazy summer. He is fifteen years old, fifteen years old and dreaming (dreams have always been his stock-in-trade), when his life shatters, months he can’t remember sliced from memory. His sister dies, bright laughing Akiko with the light she spins between her hands, his sister dies, (he is screaming and there is blood on the snow, and someone is saying in a voice so calm and peaceful, shh child, shh, dream no more. dream no more. dream no more. dream no more. dream no-). They lay her out in white before they burn her, at her funeral, but he only barely remembers, his mind shredded, sedated into not-quite-comfortable quiescence. Everything is blurry for a while, never-quite-settling sideways. When he wakes up again, he’s the freako kid whose sister died, who dreams of everything all at once (every future-), who dyes his hair odd colors and doesn’t have a place or friends or know what to do.

It doesn’t make sense: it doesn’t make sense until he comes home from school to see the two young women sitting on the porch. Kalika with her bright smile and roses twined through her hair and tall grim Aisling with her almond eyes and white-tipped cane over her knees. And somehow, impossibly, his sister’s friends.

“Friends, coworkers, something-or-another.” Kalika says, leaning back and twining her dusky fingers with Aisling’s pale ones. “How much did she tell you?”

“Nothing.” Akemi shakes his head. Akiko hadn’t told him anything of whatever she’d been involved in.

“We’re sorcerers. Wizards?” Kalika offers helpfully. “Guardians?”

“Meddlers.” Aisling adds sarcastically.

“...maybe we should start from the beginning?” Kalika says as Akemi stares at her, struck utterly speechless for a moment.

“Please.” he says, as Kalika leans forward to begin.

“This world is broken,” the young woman says, cheerfulness fading. “This world is breaking.”

(the world is cracked. the world is broken. the abyss is creeping in. whose wish broke the world?)

Kalika, Aisling, and Akiko had been part of a small faction of sorcerers who had stood between the world and the abyss: self-styled guardians and protectors who disagreed with the others of their kind (including his father) how best to deal with the abyss, how best to protect., and they’d stood in the shadows trying to stitch together tattered fragments of the failing barrier long enough.

“There’s a prophecy,” Kalika says, shrugging. “They think it’s too much risk to put it all on one man, to depend on him to stitch the world back together,”

“But you don’t?” Akemi asks.

“All life is a risk.” Kalika says, shrugging. “Better we try, then let the world slowly unravel. And we need your help, dreamer.”

“Prophet,” Aisling adds, low and rough.

“Will you help us?” Kalika asks.

Akemi curls his hands around his forgotten mug of tea, and knows he has a choice to make, everything coming sharply into focus, everything finally making sense. His dreams of the future, the man who he’ll someday fall in love with (and has died for, in other worlds, other lives.), and -

Everything will surely be okay, right?

Another memory, entirely unbidden, floats up: his father, years ago, when Akemi had been small, when his father was still the center of his world. Make your choices, son, and live with them.

“Yes,” he says. “I will.”
“
***
Akemi meets his father again, years later, on the other side of a prophecy. He is nineteen years old, with his fingers twined small and tight in his boyfriend’s hand, walking by the sea as the sky lightens. He’s still dreaming - he’s always dreaming- but he’s made his choice. He’s made his choice, and will live and die with it.

“Akemi,” his father sighs, as Justin looks between the two of them confusedly. “What have you done?”

“Eh?” Justin asked, dark eyes confused. “Mika, what’s going on?”

Akemi squeezes Justin’s hand, tightly, and glances back at his father, as his voice flattens. “What I must.”