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Left Eye of the World; [Kyo Charinko - Single Post]
Topic Started: Feb 2 2014, 03:45 PM (132 Views)
The One True Nobody
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"...does this clockwork hand follow you... or guide you?"
This post takes place at two thirty in the morning after The Devil and the Hanged Man.

---

Wake up, little butterfly... wake up, Kyo-chan... I have something to show you...

Kyo had fallen asleep next to Hiroko Tachibana that night, in her own bed, in her own apartment, for the first time in over two months. When she awoke, she felt warm, content, and oh so sleepy. She could feel the smile on her face, and the delicious sound of sleep calling her back into the depths of her own bed. But some part of her mind was conscious enough to think dimly, Did someone call my name...?

And indeed, someone had called out to her. She didn't want to awaken, but the voice called out again:

I have something to show you... wake up, little one...

Kyo's eyes slowly opened, glinting faint yellow in the darkness of the room. The clouds had cleared from the sky; moonlight peeked through the bedroom window, a faint sliver on one side of the small window's curtain, coincidentally aimed directly at Kyo's face. She couldn't help a groggy roll of her eyes, and she closed them, wanting nothing more than to get back to her pleasant dreamland.

Little one! I have something to show you. It can't wait, so get that perky bum of yours out of bed! Quietly. This view is for you and you alone.

Kyo's eyes sprang open, her brain kicked into gear, and she realized that this was the voice of Cereza, or Bayonetta, or whatever her Persona was best called--same difference, although the name Cereza reminded Kyo more of the little bespectacled girl than of the buxom angel-slaying beauty she eventually grew up to be. Kyo almost sat up--but then she realized Hiroko's arm was draped over her. No wonder she was so warm in spite of the shitty heating.

It took a bit for her to place the voice speaking inside her head, but really should have known. The voice spoke in English, with a distinctly British accent, at once playful and serious. It was a perfect impersonation of Hellena Taylor's delivery in the game itself, though the tone and speech patterns weren't true to the source material. Bayonetta rarely sounded as serious as this.

Without her Persona saying so, Kyo got the immediate sense that she needed to leave the apartment. It was cold and windy out, though--she could hear the breeze softly battering the window. It took a bit to extract herself from bed without waking Hiroko, but just to aid herself in this task, she placed her hand softly on her boyfriend's cheek and injected him with a mild Dormina spell. That would keep him under long enough for her get out from under his arm and into her clothes drawer, in search of something suitably warm for winter rooftops.

When she was fully-dressed, in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, her jacket and black wool gloves visibly complimented the outfit, but she'd slipped on some thermal underwear beneath for good measure. Silently she padded out of the bedroom, shut the door, and crept to the apartment door, where her boots waited for her feet to fill them. As she laced them up, she could here her new Persona whispering:

Stand at the highest point in the darkest part of the city, and I will show you your witch's guiding light, your most precious of treasures.

The highest point in the darkest part of the city. The tallest building in the worst sector of Nagashima...

---

And so she found her way. She was still sore from the night's events, but a little parkour wasn't so taxing that she was incapable of getting from the apartments to the midst of the backstreets. She did know better than to rush it, though--in spite of the cold and the lateness of the hour (or earliness, as one might prefer to say), she climbed and jumped and climbed back down and climbed back up as she usually did, taking advantage of dark alleys, fire escapes, and sometimes lampposts to return to ground level wherever the rooftops failed to provide the path she needed to get where she was going.

Where she was going turned out to be the tallest--and paradoxically the shittiest--apartment tower outside of the main cluster of mid-range residential places she herself lived in. Kyo had never taken note of which building in the backstreets was tallest before, only which buildings could be traversed for quick passage and which couldn't. But this apartment building almost dwarfed the others in the area, and that made it the perfect candidate for this "view" that Cereza was talking about.

From here, Kyo could see almost everything: the apartment buildings, the lights of moving cars in the area around Matechi Street, all those avenues and byways that no one ever seemed to remember because they weren't Matechi Street, Tanjiro Shopping Center, or the backstreets, the three places in this city where everything worth thinking about ever happened.

"Phew... hoo-boy, that shouldn'ta been as hard as it was..." Kyo panted aloud as she hauled herself up over the top-edge of the roof, only to find a fence bordering the rooftop. Typical. Sturdy, too. A token effort to keep impoverished residents from jumping off the roof, she supposed. Grunting in annoyance, Kyo pulled herself up onto the fence and climbed up and over, vaulting over the iron bar at the top and landing in a roll on the other side. "Oof!"

...The oof had been something she wouldn't normally have let out after a short jump, but the slash across her chest was still sore, and the fresh scar her Shadow had left there hadn't enjoyed the constant upper body movement that climbing required. The green-haired girl let herself collapse on the rooftop in a splay-legged sitting position, holding herself up with her left arm, rubbing at her chest through her shirt with the other. Her forehead was coated in a thin sheen of sweat, and the air felt bitingly cold against it.

After taking a good minute to catch her breath and dry her face off on her jacket sleeve, Kyo pushed herself into an Indian-style position and her yellow eyes went completely. "Okay, so," she said breathily. "What've ya gone and dragged me all the way up here for, then, ya stupid bi... I mean, witch."

Cereza's tone conveyed reluctant amusement: That wasn't any funnier when Team Little Angels said it. In any case, I told you I wanted to show you a view. So, stand up, and turn around...

Kyo tilted her head back, glowering at the sky--and then she noticed that the moon was out. It was a full moon...

"Does this have anythin' t' do with that other power ya wouldn't tell me what t' do with?" Kyo asked dubiously. "Left Eye o' the World? What is that, anyway? Seriously, after Dream Catcher, I'd really feel better about this ascension if I knew there weren't some stupid hook to it."

Stand up and look, little one, Cereza insisted. And of course there isn't any "hook." You have broken the chains of the Devil and become an avatar of the Lovers Arcana. You are only as bound by your inner self as you believe yourself to be. You understand that; that's why I emerged from the sea of souls, your new mask and "other self," remember?

Kyo nodded dully and pushed herself to her feet, roughly brushing off the seat of her pants--this wasn't a particular clean roof for sitting on. "Yeah, yeah," she said. "But all the same, I ain't changed any o' the shit I hate about myself yet. You're just the 'me' that won't be trapped by it. Got a long way t' go..."

Indeed. But turn Cheshire's most recent advice on its head for a moment--you've looked at yourself, now look back out at the world...

Kyo blinked. "...Cheshire?"

Nana does have a kind of scary smile, doesn't she?

The girl rubbed at the back of her neck. "Of all the nicknames y'could give her," she said in an exasperated voice, "why the one that refers t' your stuffed cat-doll and the idiot guy y' flirt with? Couldn'tcha call her somethin' more appropriate? 'Acid Crotch,' maybe?"

Technically, every woman secretes a certain amount of acid when--

"AAAAAAAAH, shutupshutupshutup!" Kyo yelled, flailing her arms in wild warding motions and quickly turning back toward the fence. "Shit, just--tell me what this is all about, already, never mind... vagina stuff."

Cereza's response almost seemed to contain an audibly quirked eyebrow. Why so shy about the topic all of a sudden? You never seem to have any problems with--

"Why ask questions ya already know the answer to," Kyo said flatly, stepping up to the fence and putting her hand on it, hanging the fingers in the links of the fence.

Maybe I think it'd be healthy for you if you said it out loud, Cereza responded in a teasing voice.

"D'ya hafta make that sound so perverted...?" Kyo asked, her voice taking on an exasperated tone again. "Look, I just--I throw around sex talk and all that 'cause I feel like I oughta look open and confident about myself, is all. And it pisses me off that people talk about that shit like it's indecent. It don't mean I wanna think about the mechanics of it at any odd moment o' the day, yeah? Now get t' the point, it's cold up here."

You're not looking.

"I'm lookin', stupid," Kyo snapped. "See? This here? This is me, looking." And for emphasis, she moved her face closer to the fence, widening her eyes a bit at the darkened cityscape beyond. The only thing she accomplished was to emphasize that she couldn't see the buildings in the distance as clearly as she was used to... Probably gonna need to see an eye doctor...

Cereza made an impatient huffing noise in Kyo's mind. You need to open your Eye, little butterfly, said the Umbran Witch. Open your Eye and look.

Kyo frowned, but then she caught on. Her Eye... with a capital "E." Her Left Eye. The Left Eye of the World. Her mind raced through everything she knew about the Left Eye from her Persona's source material... in the Bayonetta mythos, there were two powers, Eyes of the World, that the Umbran Witches and Lumen Sages used to oversee history. The Right Eye, Overseer of the Light, and the Left Eye, Overseer of the Darkness. In the story of Bayonetta, it transpired that Bayonetta herself was the Left Eye of the World, and the only point this served in the story was to enable Father Balder to summon the Creator--basically God--in a bid to reboot and recreate all of reality.

The green-haired teenager didn't know what that would translate to as a Persona power, but the quickest way was to "look," she supposed. And so she took a breath, closed her eyes, swept her hair out of her face with one hand...

...and opened the left one.

What she saw took her breath away. It was so dazzling that she didn't even know what her eye was sending to her brain. Through the links of the chain-link fence, she could see lines, glowing lines, thin and distant, somehow greater in clarity than any of buildings, vehicles, or streetlights she could see below. It was like the city was enmeshed in a great, glowing webwork of blues, reds, greens, and mixtures of the three--all the colors under the rainbow, for those were the primary colors of light, and they were free to mingle and mix but she was sure somehow that those three were the main colors in all of the lines, because those three were the most prominent.

They curved, they weaved, they passed in and out of buildings, there was no making sense of any of it. The lines--strands, they looked like strands--were everywhere. Some were dimmer than others, some were brighter than others, some looked ghostly and others looked solid...

Kyo opened her mouth to ask what she was looking at. That was when the bottom edge of her eye alerted her to something else. She looked down, and saw that some of the lines--some of the strands she could see... quite a lot of them, in fact... were passing directly through her.

"What the hell..." she breathed, moving her right hand to pass her fingers through the ghostly strings. There was a lot of blue in these strands, though some of them contained mixtures of green. One of them was purple, and on of them was flat red. A few of them were frayed. Two of them... two of them were cut off entirely, and for some reason Kyo couldn't help feeling melancholy at the sight of those... they were both green. Was that significant...?

Turn around, and you'll understand what you're looking at, Cereza said at last, in a low, surprisingly serious voice.

"Turn around?" Kyo laughed, looking up from the strands that all let through her chest, through her metaphorical heart. "How can I look away from a lightshow like that? What am I even lookin' at here?" The threads passing through her were odd, though, she thought. Almost all of what she could see out there was at a lower elevation, either at ground level or passing through apartment windows higher up. These threads, these--how many were there? She looked down, and quickly counted with her eyes. There were at least forty strands, all snarled around her, hovering loosely and every last one oriented downward, though they splayed off in different directions.

She turned around, more to try and track where all of the strands went, vaguely thinking that the way they were arranged, it was as though they were coming from her body, but--

But then she saw them there, and she felt her knees wobble. Two floating figures, hovering in the air behind her, semitransparent but unmistakably clear. One, a blonde, foreign man in his early twenties, lanky, wearing a fur-lined longcoat. Edward Keller. The other...

...Dark skin, athletic build. Reddish-brown eyes, red hair. Worn jeans, biker's boots, even his favorite jacket. Exactly as she remembered him best. Kenshin Nakadachi...

An inarticulate moan of longing escaped her throat, and she took a step forward, reaching out tentatively toward the second phantasm, but as she moved, so did it--she didn't draw one inch nearer. "What is this?" she blurted out. "What is this, Cereza?! Tell me what this is! Ken, is that you?! Edward, c'mon, say somethin', both o' ya--"

They can't speak, Cereza said, cutting across Kyo's confused pleading. Kyo froze, her hand still holding her hair out of her eye and her right eye still shut tight. They are the echoes of your heart's bonds. The old saying about how those we love never truly leave us... now you see proof, with your very own Eye.

"You think I wanna be able to see this?!" Kyo growled, snapping her left eye shut. "It's bad enough I dream of 'im all the time, dammit... it's bad enough I can't stop myself wantin' t' pester Kazue about gettin' one last chance t' talk to 'im. I don't wanna be haunted by his ghost, damn you! Why? Tell me why!"

This is merely a visualization of what you've been able to see all along, Cereza replied softly. This is the source of your strength, the power that holds you up and lets you keep walking. But it isn't only your own strength. Don't look away--and I can feel your eyes starting to burn, don't you dare. Don't you dare cry! If there are two things I hate in this world, it's cockroaches and crying babies!

"The ruins could prolly make ya a nice big crying baby cockroach, y'know," Kyo muttered, before reluctantly opening her left eye again. As she'd expected, both strands connected to her... ghosts... were fairly solid. One, blue-tinted green, connected to Edward's heart. The other, a second flat-red that she hadn't noticed before, connected to Kenshin. "So I can see people I've made bonds with even after they die."

And those dearly departed that others hold close to their hearts. You are the one who can see the true tonic of the human heart, little butterfly. This is the force that keeps the darkness in check.

Other ghosts belonging to other people. Kyo's eye widened, and she felt a chill run down her spine that had nothing to do with the temperature. For the first time, she thought she could feel a bit of what made Kazue so uncomfortable about her ability to communicate with the dead. If Kyo were to use this power near Isoroku, would she see Isoroku's dead parents? If she were to use it near Nana, would she see Kanon Watanabe, or the other former gang-mates whose lives had ended at Nana's own hand? If she were to use it when Naoya was there, would she see Toru Watanabe's ghost hovering behind him like a silent prison guard...?

Once again, you're looking at me backwards, she heard Cereza hiss, the Persona's voice conveying unbridled annoyance. This is not a curse. It is clarity. A heart without these connections is a sad, diminished thing. There are those among your fellows who can't see this web of power, who go about their day, unappreciative of where true strength comes from--or who believe it a hindrance to their own ends. Those who push others away, trying in vain to free themselves of these bonds, unaware that once woven, the web cannot be undone without causing their own hearts grievous injury.

"So, what?" Kyo said in an uncertain voice, turning to look back out at the city and the distant spirit-strands woven throughout. "I can see magical strings in the air now. What am I supposedta do? What's the point?"

Cereza remained silent for a long moment, leaving Kyo's question hanging on the air. Just when Kyo's face twitched with anger, as she thought her Persona was going to be a cryptic, mysterious bitch about this, the Umbran Witch answered:

There's no grand design, no greater plan, no special task you need to complete, Cereza said dismissively. Or, if there is, I don't know about it. What you choose to do with this power or the knowledge it brings with it is on you. You can even close your eyes to it, if you like. But I have to say, little one...

And suddenly, without any warning or fanfare, Kyo's view of the city was obstructed by something--a pair of angry, narrowed, glowing yellow eyes, familiar eyes, belonging to a green-haired girl who was in every aspect identical to Kyo herself, who stood close, intimately close, nose nearly touching Kyo's own.

"I would be really disappointed in you if you did that."

Kyo yelped and stumbled back, right eye opening and her focus on maintaining the Left Eye power broken, but as quickly as her Shadow had appeared, it was gone again. Kyo was alone on the roof, alone with herself and her other self and the cold night air and all the confusing, incoherent wonderings the revelation of this new power had brought to the table with it.
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