Title: “Equinox”

Author: Shaitanah

Rating: uhm… PGish

Summary: Between the end of the old and the start of the new he plays a game of cards with Eternity. Please R&R!

A/N: Song lyrics from ‘Rosa Decidua’ by Coil.

Dedication: There is this person who is really indispensable in my life. Alex, we’re gonna listen to Creed’s ‘Don’t Stop Dancing’ until it makes us sick, laugh at every word each of us says, discuss 100 ways for Madara to poke out his otoutou’s eyes and use them afterwards and keep going crazy till we’re actually the craziest people on the planet. Deal?

EQUINOX

He was sitting on the rooftop looking down at the pool of people in the streets. They had been dashing about since nightfall and he didn’t even wonder about their destination. Church bells were ringing. The sound floated in the damp air that smelt heavily of the upcoming thunderstorm, serene, uncaring and ignorant of whatever was going on below the clouds.

He liked the mood of that sound.

“Fancy a game of cards?” Eternity asked.

He started like he always did when Eternity showed up. Eternity never said hello and never indicated its presence until it was already too late to avoid conversation.

It peered at him with its impenetrable black eyes (or rather he would have liked to think they were black because no one would ever know their true colour; somehow he doubted they even had one) and smiled crookedly. He glanced down on the crowds which now seemed to move even faster and shrugged.

“Whatever.”

I've put away the poisoned chalice, for now,

And lie down amongst the flowerbeds…

He took the flight and landed gently on the last remaining field of flowers on the outskirt of the city. He stretched himself, basking in the sweet sensation that scorched his numb limbs. Eternity dealt the cards round with the deftness of a regular gambler. He could only admire its grace and confidence. Every move was a miniature strategy all on its own.

“Is this your first time?” Eternity prodded.

He examined his cards carefully, trying to hide it from his mystic opponent, yet reveal his suspicions at the same time. Playing with Eternity seemed both dangerous and entertaining. No one could call it a cheat, yet it rarely played fair. He supposed such ambiguity flattered it.

“You know bloody well this is,” he muttered finally. “Frankly speaking, I was hoping for more. Where are they running? Why waste their final hours on Earth to panic?”

Eternity laughed. It was an odd sound that could only be identified as laughter after it died down. He liked it because it showed Eternity’s fickle nature. He used to try and make Eternity laugh; however, he realized soon enough that whenever Eternity seemed cheerful something ill was bound to happen. Besides, it wouldn’t laugh at common jokes or pranks. Its logic was far beyond human understanding.

This time the sound was that of a windfall in a pine-tree grove mixed with a multitude of quiet sighs and the splashing of waves in the Southern sea.

“Were you any different not so long ago?” Eternity chided. “I’m sure you remember.”

He frowned and made a move. Of course he did. He used to be a regular representative of his time, not the best of its men and certainly not the worst. Always running somewhere, coming late, oversleeping, staying up till dawn, chatting, laughing, crying, asking questions…

Eternity had come when he had least expected it. At the same time he knew he couldn’t have been more prepared. He had neither been surprised, nor scared. Eternity had nothing to do with those romantic strangers of the Mephistopheles kind that came uninvited and always wreaked a lot of havoc. They had greeted each other as though they had been the best of friends.

“To think I had to pluck you from your poorly written reality!” Eternity sighed pretentiously.

He allowed a small smile to flash on his lips. “I’ve always wanted to ask you,” he said, looking at his partner over the fan of cards in his hands, “why me?”

“Books will remain when all the worlds are gone,” Eternity said nonchalantly. “Those who sleep between the pages are the last true gods. Humans give birth to you and forget you but you linger on. Imagination is what gives life to a new world. Why shouldn’t you be fitting to witness the borderline between the old and the new?”

He had to admit he had never considered it from that point of view.

We both seek out the darkest red,

The wine was turned to blood again,

Without this blood we'd both be dead…

He raised his head and saw a young couple flying over the clouds. They must have planned to commit a double suicide by jumping off the skyscraper, but the distorted gravity carried them along with the wind instead of throwing them hard into the ground. He snorted. How silly, and how romantic, and how utterly pointless! These people couldn’t appreciate the chance they had got: to see the ending of the old world. Who would want to die an hour before the world itself?

Eternity shifted, and it snapped him back to reality. His partner was probably trying to take a peek at his cards. He smirked teasingly and told it to hurry up the move. He noticed that Eternity began acting more cautiously around him. He wondered if that signaled the dawn of the new world: the world where he would start winning against all odds.

“How about a draw?” Eternity asked when the last remnants of red bled out of the darkening sky.

He rose gracefully, brushed a few old shriveled twigs off his jacket and looked around. ‘It is about to start,’ he said quietly to himself.

He hadn’t been instructed what to do, so he simply walked forth, a dozen hasty questions bombarding his mind: Will I survive? Will I remember? Will I be part of that new world or simply an observer the way I am now? No doubt Eternity found it all very amusing. He looked back and saw nothing. His path was laid out with sighs and whispers, crammed flower petals and pieces of newspaper pages.

He thought a train and some psychedelic music in the background would be fitting, and a second later he found himself seated cozily on a soft seat, looking at the End out of the window of a flitting steam-engine. It reminded him of a toy locomotive he had when he was a kid.

“Wow…” he breathed almost inaudibly.

“Dreams do come true before the End,” Eternity whispered somewhere very close to him. He resisted the urge to turn around. “Be careful what you wish for, will you?”

He leaned against the wall. It was warm to touch, almost hot. He closed his eyes and smiled. He needed no eyes to see what was going on and had no words to describe it.

He recalled his father: something he had never done (never even tried doing) before. His father was a middle-aged man with thick grey whiskers and a hearty, cunning smile that made him look like a cat hunting for an extra bowl of cream. He had no major faults albeit some of his sluggishness. Eternity had been too harsh in its evaluation as always: the book he’d been taken from was certainly not poorly written, otherwise, he wouldn’t have been so typical in his behaviour, so becoming to his time and yet so easily stolen from it.

Father wrote him shortly before the End. He didn’t know what became of the writer after Eternity had taken him. He hoped that with imagination like that the man would live on, even if only as part of his older books. It relieved him of his worries.

Let's see which way the winter wind blows.

The new world was pristine and blissfully empty of the running hordes. The music died down the second the End was over and the Beginning started. The silence, deafening at first, melted into a sweet cocktail of small natural sounds: the quiet rustling of the grass in the wind, the distant murmur of rain, the buzzing of cicadas.

He was standing knee-deep in the fresh grass, the sun shimmering all around him. The new world was gentle and soothing, easy to breathe, easy to feel, easy to be in.

“I trust that you like it,” Eternity stated. He flashed it a grin.

Eternity took a deck of cards and placed it carefully in the palm of his hand. It was the same one they’d used to play: small neat cards with the slightly faded blue starry back. He wondered why Eternity would want him to keep them, but didn’t protest. Eternity winked at him in a friendly way that looked almost alarming.

“I don’t suppose you’d like being called Adam,” it teased. He shook his head slowly. Indeed, he supposed not.

They parted ways and he walked forth, musing on Eternity’s motives. Trust Eternity to do anything without a formidable reason. He wondered what its final gift meant. He knew that to be consumed by Eternity would mean to live on, and on, and on until life was a mere memory, a silver bell ringing so far away that you couldn’t tell if it was mirage or the actual sound.

Something told him he would see Eternity at the end of this world. His life would now be so long that one day he knew he would be sick of it.

Eternity peeked at him through the slit in the thickening bushes. He was a funny human. He thought he knew everything, but that was never his fault. The writer who made him thought he knew everything, too. But that’s just how the writers are, after all.

“You are my shadow,” Eternity whispered with a touch of cool humour to its expressionless voice.

approx. February 15 – March 5, 2008