[POV: Vanitas]
The smell of burning wood intertwined with the rich scent of Gullinbursti fat. The cold here didn't just touch the skin; it sank its fangs into the bones.
The boy sat before the fire, stretching his trembling hands toward the warmth. And I... I watched the meat as it writhed over the embers, exuding golden drops that fell onto the hot flames with a faint hiss, breaking the mountain's silence.
"Have you tried it before?"
The question escaped us, slicing through the heavy stillness settled between the stones.
Mugen didn't blink. Black eyes reflecting the fire's embers like a dead sea that neither swallows light nor reflects passion. A long time passed before he spoke, his voice faint, echoing from the bottom of a bottomless well:
"Only once... a very long time ago."
"How did it taste?"
He didn't turn around. The silent dragon remained staring into the gloom: "You will see for yourself."
Silence piled up once again, like the layers of ice outside the cabin.
A few minutes later, the blade of his wooden sword moved with a lightning-fast flash the eye could barely perceive. A piece of cooked meat landed on the wooden plate stretched between us.
The boy reached out his hand. I took the piece, and sank my teeth into its hot tissue.
The golden crust shattered, and the warm fat flowed to revive stiffened veins.
But...
In that precise moment, something broke for a fraction of a second.
It wasn't the taste of grilled meat. The boy's tongue collided with a cold spark, as if he were sinking his teeth into electrified metal or hard scales dripping with bitter blood.
The boy blinked violently. I clamped my teeth again, and the sickly sting evaporated instantly, and the warm taste returned to fill the mouth... just an illusion and a distortion of the senses from sheer exhaustion.
I raised my eyes to Mugen.
He was holding a piece of meat, motionless. And in the flickering tongues of fire, his fingers seemed to wrap around something that throbbed with a hidden tremor; a pale blue light reflected on his eyelids for the blink of an eye, before everything returned to just silent meat and a man who does not eat.
"What's wrong with you?"
Mugen blinked slowly.
He reached out his hand and began to eat with a mechanical motion, devoid of any ecstasy.
The boy chewed his food, while a strange weight grew in my chest. It wasn't hunger, but an emptiness wrapping around the ribs like a rope. To sit next to an entity that had crushed him to death days ago, a silent entity before whom demons retreat... makes even eating akin to swallowing ashes.
Mugen withdrew into the shadows of the cabin and stretched out on the hard wooden floor.
The boy closed his eyes, trying to stop the burning gears in his head, and I fell into the darkness.
I dreamed.
A desolate space, endless. A vast white emptiness, no trees, no humans, and no roof to cover this absolute nothingness.
Isolation is the natural sanctuary for Vanitas, but the little one in the dream was trembling. He was filled with a strange panic, searching for noise, for any clamor to tear apart this absolute void surrounding him.
And suddenly... from beneath the illusory floor, heavy beats struck the pores: (Doom... Doom). The echo of rough, overlapping, and muffled laughter, coming from afar.
The boy gasped, opening his eyes!
The chest heaved, and the cold mountain air settled in my throat. That wasn't my dream... that terrified ghost in the dream does not belong to my solid consciousness.
The cabin was quiet, reeking of rotten wood and dead ashes.
The boy turned slowly towards the dark corner. Mugen was still lying there, his pale face surrounded by stillness.
But... there are gleaming lines slowly streaming down his cheeks.
The boy stared at them.
They are raindrops... leaking from the cracks of the dilapidated wooden roof.
They must be.
Because to believe they are something else, to believe that this body secretes energy that bleeds like tears, or that the boy sitting in the dark is the one truly crying at the bottom of the collapsing pink space... means I must move my hand and face reality.
And Vanitas has no energy for confrontation.
I turned my face away from those drops, and the boy shrank into his corner, asking for a cigarette to burn away the taste of clotted blood in his mouth... perhaps this poisoned emptiness would calm down, and perhaps one day he could be human.