Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Pain,
Agony, even.
Suffering, if you will.

Surrounded by blue roses, the girl clad in black had descended. Not from grace, not from anything that was strictly metaphorical in nature. But it...

Have you ever had your whole world fall onto you, slashing you with each infinitesimal movement?
It hurts so much. She presses her eyes closed, savouring the feeling of simultaneous pain and pride. Pride, was that what it was?

She did it. She actually... she feels...

Contentment. (And agony.) She ripped it apart with her bare hands, torn the cataclysmic labyrinth into shreds like a hurricane. The fractured, fallen tower. The ringing blooms of the aftermath.

If this is not beautiful, what could be...?

But it would not cease.

The universe was laughing at the girl, she figured. The structure, singing, shaking, snickering at her.
Why were the glass fragments ringing?

Her head trembles suddenly, as if brushing the sound off.

It doesn't disappear.

She swears the tower is quivering.
The maze is shivering.

It glows with a sort of beautiful uncanniness. Dark, glistening reds, purples, blacks, blues, discordant and dissonant, like the louder and louder ringing that it keeps on emanating.

The girl clad in black stays low. Still. Frozen.

Perhaps she should have been more attentive, as her heart was in pain. And beating to the rhythm of the glass.

She is ready for the maze to explode. For it, and the world, to be shattered like broken glass. For it was broken glass.

Destroy her. Wreck her. The butterflies reflected in the fractured labyrinth.
Encase her in black shards, a rose trapped in airtight glass. Fight or flight?
She’s frozen.

But it doesn’t.

A laugh escapes her mouth, unconsciously.
And then she runs.

She flees the destroyed tower, and the conflict follows her. Her breath is shallow and her heart hurts and she doesn’t stop until she finds silence.

There must be more of this eternal, painful, memory archive...
The girl clad in black, with new resolve, makes a silent promise to herself.

Then, she aims toward the luminous sky in the distance. Well, it was not an exceptional distance. (Perhaps she was just dreading ascending stairs…)

Perhaps she would find deliverance there— or maybe, just maybe, she could destroy it, fracture it, like she had triumphed over the scenery here.

She doesn't wait for an answer.

Chapter Text

The translation of Light into ひかり.

Was there any hint of anything apart from this infinite brightness?

Perhaps her story ends here.
It would only be too simplistic to say it had just commenced…

when her heartrate will only cease too soon.

The girl clad in white gazes at the false sky...clad in white. Glass cuts her knees and bare feet (wow how kinky)  like ceramic knives.

What is time? She doesn't seem to have concept of it anymore.
She was here, in the moment, for the bliss of the glass, the luminous heaven.

It could have been so simple.

This luminous sky could stretch out to her perceived eternity, the light trapping her sense of "self". Happiness, joy, infinity, it means nothing.

And she'll just stay here a little more.

There's only so much time one can remain sitting frozen in zazen before pin needles begin invading your legs. The memory-induced papercuts only seemed to exacerbate the pain.

Pain?

She struggles to stand, movement being foreign to her. It's an awareness of an outside sensation, the girl clad in white notices. She has no words to describe it, perhaps because she had initially focused her attention on the whole of the glass, rather than the memories archived. 

Should anything else have happened, it truly would have been an unceremonious farewell for her.

Still.

She's...

Alive?

She has legs, and she has a heartbeat, at least for now.

She can perceive the light she's trapped by, the prison of heaven, the cage of Eden.

She...

The paradise broke her. And yet, she feels nothing. Bliss, perhaps. Empty, empty paradise. It tears, it corrupts, it ruins as deftly as conflict, if not more. Joy poisons the mind in the same way hopelessness does. In this case, they are merely synonyms.

Won't something free her? Someone? Liberate her from this meaningless eden. A lone shard. Anything.
She can wait. It won't happen, but, an anomaly, it's certain to come... Shatter the false sky!

But it doesn't.

So she screams. Or, rather, an involuntary call forces itself out of her mouth, ringing, ringing, ringing.

It echoes and the fragmented sky rings at the same frequency.

If only the sky could quiver, the light waver, yet the confinement of white is suspended in an eternal, meaningless utopia.
It is hell, truly. Nothing more, nothing less.

Hopelessly, helplessly, eternally. For the first time, she has a will of stone, a determination to escape. "Hikari", she perceives, as is her name. Ephemeral determination. Temporary hope.

A fleeting prelude, a motif never to materialise again.

And the girl clad in white, once again falls to her knees, with a blank stare on her face, and a solitary tear fades away with her dream.

Chapter Text

Tairitsu blinks. Someone...someone is screaming.

The girl clad in back turns her head towards the cerulean sky, dappled with black glass.

Well.
If this is truly what it seems...

Perhaps she could find some answers. Useless answers, considering her determination to wreak destruction on all of the glass, this entire multiverse. Nonetheless, answers, regardless. That would suffice for the minute, infinitesimal part of her brain that longs—yearns, even, to know.

If the girl clad in black chooses to devote her life to said answers, and not for the annihilation of the memories, this tale would end quite differently.

But, alas. This is the closest the girl fated for conflict comes to any hope of discovering a whisper of salvation. As for the girl bound to light...well.

She ascends. One step, one step. Higher, infinitely higher, amidst the spire of convergence. 

The memories continue their assault on the girl clad in black. But her resolve only hardens, to find...whoever else was left in this desolate world. Was trapped in this world. And to destroy, destroy, destroy, as of someone fated, if not sempiternally bound to conflict by an unwritten contract.

Freedom...what is it?
The girl can no longer care for concepts like these. Death is certain, she knows, from the memories, and that is it. The labyrinth is far behind her, far below her, but the truths she was exposed to after her awakening would never fall from her memory.

Slowly, the dark memories clear, and she feels out of place, the tiled stairs with their restrictions, and her limited stamina hindering her. But there is nowhere else to go, and descending these steps would take more time than continuing to climb.

The girl, bound to darkness, dappled with flowers, curls her hand into a fist and sighs.

She reaches the summit. The sky— simply light. The girl clad in black thinks for a second, allows herself to ponder what would have happened to her if she was awoken here, instead. But she has her answer in front of her.

And on the terrace of this...church? she sees her. "Her" being flowers, at first, before her vision clears.

What...is....

The girl clad in white...her eyes are glazed over. Her feet are cut, presumably from melodical shards. She's beautiful, if not fragile, if not broken encaged by the light. For her, everything is agony. For her, the girl clad in black is a harbinger of light (how ironic), of liberation from infinite, but empty bliss. Conflict, after all—
Freedom...what is it?

Hikari. Tairitsu. A false sky, obscuring the night.

They have no one else. Now, their fates intertwine.

Chapter Text

Quiet.

The glass does not ring, the sky need not echo. The ruin simply stands there, still, waiting.

Above them, the sky waits bright white... not the real sky, but an artificial construct, waiting to shatter. Arcaea moves, slowly, like a cloud watching them, but nothing significant occurs. The scenery shifts, ever so slowly but surely, and light pulses faintly, intermittently, to the beat of a human heart.

"So," says the girl clad in black, finally, "what are you here for?"

The other girl does not respond, but only blinks, slowly, recovering from the shock of, well. Serendipity, perhaps, of being saved.

It's funny, isn't it? How the girl clad in white—Hikari—barely even knows her own name, yet both of them, the awareness of the world around them is there, and there's just the two of them, only the—

What now?

The silence is long, and unforgiving.
There's shared gazes, a near-theatrical tension, a star-bejeweled archive of light and conflict. And they wait, for nothing.

Finally, the girl bound to light speaks. "Can we walk?"

Tairitsu closes her eyes. One, two. What a strange request.

The skylight is different here, no longer a blinding miasma of bliss, yet still brighter than what she was used to. There is no knowing. There is no foresight of what is to come, for the world itself appears to not perceive their combined existence.

"Yes, I suppose we can."

They don't speak until the false sky clears, but once it has, they recount their stories. Mainly Tairitsu.

"It's funny," says Tairitsu. "How I survived. I swear, I have memories of the entire labyrinth exploding, a world ending battle, and another version of you—and then darkness. In this realm the glass just feels dead, somehow."

The girl clad in black has had her own suspicions, but she needs to confirm them. It's a miracle she's sane.

"I," starts Hikari. "What."

No, Arcaea is not dead. She knows. Not yet.

She knows. But how?

And then her own personal hell begins.

Not a epiphany, but just her first taste of sorrow. It's enough that her façade of blankness shatters and she falls to her knees in the middle of this archived wasteland, hands clenched.

The mind break of bliss is gone, replaced with one of omnipotence.

It is now that the girl clad in white awakens, too, like the girl clad in black had prior to her escape. Now, Tairitsu is looking at her, eyebrow raised. What a strange response, she wonders. 

The knowledge Hikari is imparted, it isn't enough, and yet...

"She", "Hikari", created this, no? That is all she knows with a strange conviction, in her heart. (Vaguely, in a memory of an alternative, she feels cold shard and warm blood pressing against her breast.)

Why does she remember? Is this itself an anomaly? The first in its timeline.

The world holds its breath, and every fragment stills in a bizarre equilibrium...and then the colour starts fading from them all, one by one.

Ah.

So the world has taken notice.

And they will be disposed of.

"Tairitsu," she says, and immediately the conflict-bound girl responds despite never having heard it before. "Can I just, hold your hand?"

Hikari knows that her own are cold.

Like a creator, maybe.

Like a corpse, more likely.

Like a sinner.

And Tairitsu doesn't even know it's the end of the world, yet she takes her hand anyway.

Hikari smiles. "Let's just stay here awhile, no? Until the end."

"No. I refuse."