Dragon Raja

51 - The Sun Will Still Rise, And I'll Be Thinking Of You All The While

Only in her downfall would the world be brought to peace. Fate mocked and ridiculed the very life she had intended to live—putting her on a pedestal and then pointing and laughing at her for attempting to find a way out. Even in the hands of people who wished to protect her, the world was determined to find a way to end her life, to cut all her ties and deliver her corpse to the gods as an offering of peace—that dragons would no longer terrorize the Earth.

But there was an unspoken promise made that evening as rain began washing away all the blood spilled on the Earth's sands. As the last drop of the last vial of blood rage antidote filled her veins—Y/N would be protected, no matter what.

Now, lying in a warm bed, Y/N could only dream about her eventual death or the life she'd have if she were to be saved.

Johann rested in a separate room, recovering from his injuries while completely exhausted out of his mind. In the room right next to his, Caesar lay with bandages across his chest—Y/N had thankfully missed a vital spot.

"We have another thing to thank Chisei Gen for," Luminous muttered under his breath, "if it weren't for him, we wouldn't have made it to a hospital in time,"

Finger grunted beside him, a cast wrapped around his calf and ankle. "Good thing I was able to disable our location services for the time being, EVA won't be able to track us here with Y/N and report back to the Principal,"

Luminous sighed and slumped down in his seat in the hallway. Chisei Gen had accommodated them into a private house on the outskirts of Tokyo, guarded by Hydra soldiers keeping them away from any outside threats.

He remembered how Johann, despite his weakened state, insisted on carrying Y/N to the house while Luminous and Finger slowly carried Caesar in pursuit. How bad Y/N's injuries were in comparison to everyone else's—and he wondered how she was able to push past that pain and keep fighting.

Luminous sighed, he was still the weakest link, even with being at Cassell College longer than Y/N. But, he figured it must've been the fact that Y/N was cursed with power and eventual demise that she had been so strong.

He thought about her cruelty of the curse, how unfair it had seemed. How crushing it must have felt to find out her friends had kept that secret from her from the beginning. A wave of guilt washed over him.

"You know, I'm glad everything turned out okay," he began, "but what about now? Can things really go back to how they were?"

Finger quietly picked at the edges of his cast, "That's all we can hope for right now," he answered, "In the end, all we can do is hope things can go back to the way they were,"

Of course, that was what they had said before they noticed the ECG machine beside Y/N's bed flatline.

-

Home.

What was home to her?

Home had been the bright afternoon sun on the blinding white snow. The sound of laughter and the crunching of boots and the scraping of ice against skates. Where the food was warm and she was just a child who could barely hold a sword.

Y/N followed a lone arctic fox through the snowy forest, a familiar path that led to the plaza of her old home. From a distance and through the opening of the trees, she could see before the setting orange sun a giant Christmas tree.

A place of gathering, somewhere her heart felt warm. It was a mirage of times when she believed she was truly happy. Faint echoes of voices and laughter breezed through the air, but it sent a shiver down her spine—like the haunting call of ghosts.