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Snow drips with crimson at dawn.
Lashes of wind strike and slaughter, their insatiable limbs desperately latching onto my clothing, more alive than any of the corpses plastered across the ice. Warily, scarves and gloves are torn from the dead, wrapped around myself instead.
2 minutes. The affirmation of silence. The stench of demise stains the crispness of oxygen, but in this quartz void, it's at best something to shatter the indifference.
Silence.
Silence reigns across the battlefield, and silence calls for anger, which brews and seethes, compressing my body heat into cremated fireflies. Although the moon’s fragmented pieces no longer show a crescent, the clustering is evident: another month has passed. I am now 18. My steps spark with adrenaline, my touch a delicate dynamite, as if the very fury in my cells could melt away this suffocating ice. It cannot. Nothing ever can. Is this the indignation of adulthood, I wonder?
There is a figure, short and unassuming, fluttering nervously in the midst of this hiemal morgue. His skin is sun-lavished, perfectly youthful; a brilliant flicker of lightning in the midst of a dismal darkness.
He is a child. Yet, he is in a graveyard of childhood, inside a battlefield brimming with the absence of hope.
“What is your name, child?” the words spill out my mouth, tight and constricted in this breathlessly rigid air. The phonetics of the words do not resound in my mind, simply a collection of incomprehensible sounds. It’s been too long since I’ve spoken; the sound of my voice rings like a dust-shrouded toy in an attic, worn and forgotten.
“Izuku.” he whispers back, the only sign of him being a human, and not a doll. “My name is Izuku, and I know yours is too.”
My muscles spasm, involuntarily reaching for the rifle by my waist, but logic restrains me, throttling such a violent thought. Although no living human should know my name, something calls for me to compress my suspicion. His eyes scream of spring, even though he stands in an endless winter. I know this boy- I am doubtless in this thought.
“That, it is.” I confirm, boring into the figure opposing me. “Although that is not something you should know.”
He pauses. His viridian eyes are dauntingly clear, unblemished but coloured with thought. They’re hauntingly familiar.
“Of course I would know. Y- you still go by the name Izuku, don’t you?”
Except, I don’t. Izuku Midoriya. After decades of muffling memories with snowdome, the name sang of another life- one that no longer belonged to me. One that still belonged to this child, who peers at me with genuine confusion that coaxes me to answer.
“I serve the constellations. I am but a soldier.” I urge, kneeling down to face the boy, so young and so vulnerable, so encompassing with the life I had lost. His body is small, but his warmth is an utopia, dripping compassion in a manner only children can; a flame in the depths of glacial hell. “You do not belong here, Izuku-kun. It’s far too cold.”
My reality is no longer a place children should be brought into, is what I don’t say.
“Do you not go by the name Izuku any more?” he repeats, ungloved, tentative fingers reaching towards my face. His fragile, explorative brushing of my skin reignites my cells, like a splatter of shimmering stars across an abysmal universe.
“No.” I answer. Peculiarity oozes from this child like nectar from a flower, as he continues tracing my face with pale hands. In this terrain, his uncovered limbs should shrivel in 150 seconds, as his skin distorts into a gruesome, pitiful purple. By 325 seconds his flesh should meld into a mere mutation of cells, able to be snapped off and grinded into bloodied powder with a simple touch. Yet, he is whole. “I don’t get to go by Izuku anymore. As soldiers, we serve the constellations of the cosmos; they do not allow characterisation, when we are more unified as a whole.”
How is he able to wear that bright yellow t-shirt and those shorts, like it was a hot summer day in Musutafu again? As if summer even existed anymore- as if Japan even existed. The world he once knew has been destroyed for centuries, if not millenniums; so why is this fragment still here?
“But you’re not just a soldier.” he breathes, his chest rising ever so slightly. A small smile dances across his lips, “You’re Izuku. Izuku loves- well, he loves so much.”
My hand tightens around his shoulder, as he seems to become more certain of his words. His recounting of my former self is assured, as he utters a tale of someone who practically died long, long ago.
“You love the glow of the first snow of the year, and the aroma of Ka-san's katsudon. You love heroes, and everything about them! You love playing with Kacchan in the park, and drawing All Might. And- and you don’t like the dark, and neither do I, but Ka-san always says that thing-”
“Hikari no mae no yami.” I finish for him, and the phrase chants of my mother’s warm, steady fingers untangling my locks at dawn, of the repetitive thrum of a soul underneath my ears, of dispelled shadows amidst tenebrosity. “Darkness before light.”
This child isn’t just any child, alive deep within the heart of a massacre. My hands cup his face, pressing insistently against his supple flesh. How do my own calloused and corrupted palms feel, I wonder? How severely do the hands of murderous intent, grate?
“I am a soldier of the constellations; that is all that I am. You and I are no longer the same person. You must not utter of Izuku in this place, for you will nurse this snow with your blood if you do. Is that clear?”
Unbearably, he continues peering at me unabashedly, fists clasped tightly in his trousers in apparent indignation.
“Why can soldiers not be of personalisation? To fight in an army…there’s so much darkness isn’t there? Why do you choose to succumb to such a life; I haven’t ever considered this once. ” he ponders, gnawing on her bottom lip absentmindedly. “Our future sounds scary. I always wanted to be a hero not- what are you?”
“Hikari no mae no yami,” I emphasise,”it’s the reason I can survive. I’ve only managed to live this far because of the darkness. To save myself- that's the only way I can be a hero.”
“Is surviving worth it, though?” With those words, his skin suddenly cracks under my rigid grasp- I flinch backwards. Trails of fragments blossom from his forearm and stretch outwards, hisskin a mosaic of merciless winter and survival. “Izuku-kun, was it worth it?”
Universes are mirrored in his gaze, a solitary shade of wonderment flooding through his very veins. Constellations, suns, asteroids, stars; they’re simply blots of paint in his canvas of perception, his body a vessel for phenomenon. He transcends humanity itself- what little there is of it left, anyways.
His ear snaps off in my hand without a struggle, a frozen pebble, smoothed over by the indomitable ice. My finger glides over it like glass, a simple ceramic piece in the tragic masterpiece of adulthood. There’s no blood, only mine, bubbling out of my lips and eyes and ears, a cacophony of regrets and buried dreams.
“Was it worth it?” he asks again, body shattered and battered from the lashes of bitter wind. “Is surviving worth it, if you’re nothing but a tool? If you're not a hero to anyone- not even to yourself.”
Blinding white surrounds me- endless, encompassing, eternal, inescapable; the snow has long since stopped being a companion. Darkness seeps into my bones, an ethereal ink that replaces my blood; I am made of more terror than tissue.
Clumsy hands desperately grasp for the rifle by my side, as a dainty voice echoes.
“Was it worth it? Oh Izuku-kun, is life worth living without me?”
Was it worth it? Is my dutiful service to the constellations enough to compensate for the snow dripping with crimson? Is it fine for me to survive, even though everyone I've ever loved- Ka-san, Kacchan, Yagi-sensei and the others... when they've been dead for lifetimes? Is it not the duty of an adult to bury the child they once were, with one last promise of playing with them?
Can my bereavement for the child in front of me, ever restore my humanity?
My fingers move from memory alone, as I hear the distant click of pulling back the trigger, and then the familial ring of a bullet. A splattering of crimson, and the boundless silence that follows.
A shattered, doll-like body rests with the others.
He's dead.
The taste of metallic ozone oozes into the air that my lungs greedily inhale. Relief has never felt so nauseating. Without his melodious voice haunting me, survival is fit for me now, is it not? Now, am I free to explore the world beyond that childish mindset of hope?
Tilting my head up to the sky, my breath stutters from the endlessly stunning sea of stars up above; the sight is ethereal (regardless of the blood slick in my palms, so very cold despite how warm she had been a moment before). Navy, cobalt, and azure swirls above like paint in water, and I am tantalised by the infinity of it all.
Indeed, this is the reality: to live on ground, the childish nature to soar must be assassinated.
I turn eighteen today. Surely, the constellations above would care, even for a meer mortal like myself? I- a firefly, desolated in this niveous, decimated land? No longer Izuku, no longer a hero, hardly even human. Don't I also deserve a little taste of reprieve?
Beneath my paralysed feet, snow drops crimson at dusk- this is my mark of maturity.