Copper and Candlelight

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Ink Burns

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

This is a work of fanfiction, produced according to the principles of transformative fair use as put forward in US copyright law, and abiding by the custom and practice of fan-produced work in Japan, where the source texts were created. No author is in any way affiliated with any of the creators of the source texts, nor with the companies who distribute their products, nor any other rights holder, and these stories were not authorized by either the creators or the producers. Ink Burns is a fan site and the material here is freely provided for the enjoyment of fellow fan-community members; there is no commercial infringement.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 US license at the Ink Burns fanfiction archive (http://alltrees.org/archive/).

Published on 2007-01-15 14:07:11.

Attributions can be made by author's name and a link to the archive.

This ebook edition was published on May 16, 2012 by the Ink Burns fanfiction archive.

Copper and Candlelight

Yui tries to process what happened to her. Tetsuya is an exceedingly nice guy. Drama, I-2

Yui lay with her arms folded behind her head on the rumpled cotton of their quilt, staring up at the high, clear blue of the sky. "I wonder if he was just going crazy."

Tetsuya pushed himself up on his elbows and slid his shades down to look at her with wide eyes. "What?"

"Seiryuu." She wriggled her stockinged toes in the cool air. "He really shouldn't have been able to do what he did, you know. I think that's why all of us were so... deranged." She flicked her fingers over the smooth, green paper cover of the book she'd brought to read today. "At least that's what all the stories about gods say. When someone tries to do something at the wrong place or time it just twists."

She looked over to see what Tetsuya thought of this theory. He was silent for a long moment, eyes dark and steady on her. Finally he reached up to move their picnic basket out of the way and slid an arm under her shoulders. She smiled and cuddled into the solid warmth of his chest. Tetsu was always warm; it was nice.

"It sure looked like everyone on his side was pretty messed up, yeah," he murmured. "Tell me about what you've been reading?"

"Well, a lot of the stories themselves are in really old language, but I've tracked down some very good annotations." A fact which pleased her. At a time when most of her tests, even in a middle range high school, didn't make sense to her anymore, it was good to feel that familiar, sure grasp on words and thoughts.

"Who'd have ever thought you'd go into folklore," Tetsuya chuckled. "So? What do they say?"

"Well, from the very start, with Izanami inviting at the wrong time..."

Tetsuya listened and nodded and twined a long, soft strand of her hair around his fingers. He worried about Yui. Keisuke's little sister had lived her story and found an ending for it, and now she was walking on into her life. Yui hadn't been so lucky. He wondered, sometimes, whether this story would ever end, for her.

So he held her close in the spring sunshine and listened to her retelling her story's beginning and stroked his thumb absently over the smooth, blue stone in her ear.

End