FIC: The White Snow of Miracles Fell [Prétear, Hayate & Sasame]

[omnicat]

Title: The White Snow of Miracles Fell
Author: Omnicat
Rating: PG / K
Genre: General. Though I wished ‘Hope’ was a genre, because I don’t like to stick ‘Angst’ labels on stuff like this.
Spoilers: All 13 episodes of the Prétear anime.
Warnings: No more than the ones for Prétear itself.
Pairings: None featured. Hinted at Sasame x Takako.
Soundtrack: Disney’s The Lion King II; Simba’s Pride has this great song, ‘Not One of Us’. That song (and the AMV that came with it) was a great source of inspiration for this fic, especially Sasame’s feelings. It’s not necessary to know the song, but it could add to the feeling when you read.
Disclaimer: Neither Prétear nor The Lion King are my copyrighted property, and I do not make any profit by using them as my source of inspiration for this fic.
Summary: Evil has been defeated, but there’s no happily ever after yet. Hayate and Sasame were best friends. They thought they knew each other. But they aren’t so sure anymore... So they have a talk to right the last wrongs.
Author’s Note: The first piece of Prétear fanfiction I have ever written, but not by far the last. I hope you’ll enjoy!

 The White Snow of Miracles Fell

The Great Tree of Fenrir had been destroyed, but so had great parts of Awayuki Town. The damages took months to clear up and restore. Now that Takako had finally turned back to her normal self, she felt the least she could do was to help rebuild what she had wiped away in her frenzy. Though she no longer had the ability to be a true Prétear, to give Leafe to the world around her, she could still use her power to manipulate Leafe. So she helped out as much as she could, either as the Leafe Sorceress Takako (1) or as the Sound Prétear, with Sasame always by her side. Hayate and Himeno were doing the same thing, along with the other Knights and a veritable army of workers hired by Natsue.

Semi-unsconciously, Sasame and Hayate made sure to keep as far away from each other as they could. It hurt every time they caught sight of the other, a painful twisting of their hearts in their chests. Compared to the gaping hole left between them by everything that had happened, their want - no, their need - to grab each other’s hand, to reconcile, to be friends again and support each other like they used to do, seemed like a futile attempt to bridge the gap, a tiny, fragile bond holding them together. It looked so hopeless... With reality back into the picture, the snow of white Leafe seemed such a fleeting, powerless miracle.

But as such things go, they couldn’t run forever. The day came when al that could be done, had been done, and it brought everyone together to go over everything one last time. And when all had been gone over, checked and double-checked, Hayate and Sasame were left alone together by the wind chimes on the Awayuki grounds, the place where they usually opened the portal between Leafenia and Earth. (2)

For a while they merely stood there, looking at the rippling, sparkling water of the fountain. Both refused to turn back at this stage, but were still afraid to take that final step. In the end, it was Sasame who made the first move, falling down on one knee and bowing his head.

“I have failed as a Knight of Leafe,” he said, a haggard edge to his quiet voice. “I turned on my brothers and sought to destroy that which I had vowed to protect.”

“So you have.” Hayate murmured, unable to look at his (former?) friend and looking at the wind chimes instead. Silence stretched out between the Knights of Sound and Wind, laden with hurt feelings and regret. The fresh memories cut deeply into Hayate’s heart, causing old ones to well up from the hazy forgetfulness of the years. Misinterpreted looks, words he hadn’t been entirely sure he’d heard, dismissed gestures... now that his mind found their rightful places, Hayate realised the amounts were staggering. All that time he had thought he knew Sasame and had been able to support his friend in the dark times they’d been through together. But by his feet knelt a stranger. The Sasame he’d fought and laughed with for sixteen years had been a... a deception. A lie? No. There was one thing Hayate had never doubted; Sasame may not always tell the truth, but he did not lie.

The rift of silence between Hayate and Sasame felt like it broke his very heart in two, and made Hayate painfully aware of how alone Sasame must have felt though all those years. But the steady breeze that made the wind chimes sing reminded Hayate that despite everything that stood between him and Sasame, wind and sound still made a great match.

“So you have,” Hayate repeated as he too sunk to his knees. “And you did it with a grace and dignity that would put the likes of Judas and Brutus to shame. (3) But you are not the only one who failed, and whatever your reasons were, I am sure they were better than ours - than mine. I failed you as a friend. I failed to notice your struggle and pain, I even failed to ask!”

Because he’d held his head bowed while Hayate spoke, Sasame’s expression upon hearing those words was hidden behind his bangs. But when he looked up, the same smooth, mild expression that had fooled Hayate into thinking it hid nothing, not from him, for over sixteen years, was on Sasame’s face.

“You underestimated me.” he said calmly. “That’s not a crime. After all this time, I feel I’ve underestimated myself as well.”

“I was supposed to be your friend!” Hayate ground out, silently cursing himself over and over again. “We’ve known each other for our entire lives, we grew up together. I should have noticed something. But I was too preoccupied with my own problems and self-pity to pay real attention to yours.” He wondered for one absurd moment if Sasame would interpret that as meaning that Hayate thought he’d turned to evil because of self-pity, but shook it off quickly. “With that, I betrayed our friendship. Our duty to the world as Leafe Knights is important, but our duty toward each other as friends...” Hayate didn’t finish his sentence, unsure of what to say. It was their difference in opinion about this that had caused the mess they were in, after all.

Sasame smiled slightly, that bashfully sincere, melancholy smile Hayate was only just beginning to understand. “Ah... what is more important to a Knight; his armour, or his heart?” He closed his eyes, for which Hayate was secretly glad, because he felt that the tormented look in them was entirely his fault. “I’ve asked myself that many times... so many times... but I could never find the answer. I had to lie to myself that I did know the answer. So no matter what I did, I was always a traitor. First I betrayed myself by putting my duties as a Knight before my feelings for Takako. Then I betrayed Takako - twice - by sealing her away while I stayed free, and then trying to forget her. And when I finally chose for Takako and my own feelings, I betrayed the Knights.”

Fear struck Hayate’s heart at the tone of those last words. “You make it sound like you’ve left us forever.”

Sasame looked away.

“You can’t be serious!” Hayate burst out, grabbing the silver-haired Knight by the forearms. “Sasame, you were born to be a Knight. You died as one and were resurrected as one. Doesn’t that mean anything? The Leafe Knights is where you belong.”

“What if I just don’t want to go back?” Sasame cut in, a small but unprecedented amount of aggression in his voice and opaque eyes. At least, that was what Hayate thought, until he remembered the way Sasame had lashed out at him and Himeno on the day he proclaimed his love for Takako in front of them all. Despite the shock this caused him, Hayate tightened his grip on his friend’s arms.

“We need you. Without you... there are no Leafe Knights.”

Sasame shook his head, slowly and sadly. Though Hayate was almost sitting in his lap, he seemed incredibly alone. “Even if I return, things will never be like they were before. When you or the others look around you, it will always be ‘us and him’. Though in a way, it always was, for me... Deep down, my loyalties have always lain with a different Prétear than yours.”

Hayate’s hands seemed to lose their strength faster than a Demon Larva could have sucked out Leafe. He sought desperately for anything that could keep his friend from completely fading away. The boy he’d learned to swim with under the watchful eye of the old former Knight of Water; the boy he’d hold all kinds of small contests with, ranging from ‘who-can-stuff-their-face-with-the-most-rice-balls’ to ‘who-can-get-Kei’s-personal-care-products-‘accidentally’-contaminated-with-the-most-ridiculous-and-varied-colours-of-dye’; the boy he’d chased and caught Tipi’s with under the pretence of practicing their powers; the boy he had practiced his power, his sword fighting and his flying techniques with; the boy he could hold the most varied conversations and keep the most comfortable silences with... the young man whose lovesick looks he’d failed to feel pass him on their way to their Prétear, the young man whose broken heart he’d failed to see, whose silent pleas for a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on he’d failed to hear. He couldn’t just let it end like this, without any chance to correct his mistakes. But what could he do?

“Have you talked to Himeno?” Hayate asked quietly. It was the only thing he could come up with.

Sasame nodded, without looking at him. “She said she’d be glad if I came back, but that she’d understand if I preferred to leave.”

“So what are you going to do, if you’re not coming back? Do you want to stay alone with Takako for the rest of your life without ever seeing your friends again? Have you even thought about what she wants? Takako and Himeno can hardly be separated anymore; do you want to break their young friendship apart?” The words came out harsher than Hayate had wanted, and he instantly regretted uttering them at all.

Sasame didn’t answer immediately. He stood up from his kneeling position in front of the dark-haired Knight of Wind and walked over to one of the stone benches surrounding the wind chimes, to sit down there. Hayate followed suit, fearful of distance of any kind forming between them.

“To be honest...” Sasame spoke hesitantly. “I... I don’t know what I want. Both situations hold too many bad memories. I - don’t think I could stand it anymore.” He seemed to shrink away in his robes. When Hayate touched his shoulder worriedly, there were suddenly tears in his eyes. Hayate was shocked beyond words. Sasame never cried!

“S - Sasame...”

The sound of his voice only seemed to push Sasame further away, so Hayate acted in the only way he could think of. (After all, if it worked with Himeno, why wouldn’t it work with Sasame?) Though Sasame usually did not have any qualms about physical proximity, Hayate, who did, had to literally pull his friend into a hug. But once there, Sasame gave in entirely. To Hayate, it seemed like the inner strength that had kept him upright and sane throughout the years, had been rooted in loneliness and trestled by the distance he kept between his true heart and those around him. Now the pillars were melting, and Sasame clung desperately to the warmth Hayate offered, like a drowning man would cling to a piece of driftwood.

He cried: reluctantly at first, like years of holding back the tears had made him incapable of shedding them, but soon Sasame wouldn’t have been able to stop if he’d wanted to. Tears began to stream down Hayate’s own cheeks. He kept rocking the two of them and rubbing Sasame’s shaking back, feeling helpless because he had no idea how to truly comfort his best friend.

“Why did you never tell us? Tell me?” he whispered into Sasame’s ear.

“Shame... fear...” Sasame managed to say between gasps, his voice muffled by Hayate’s shoulder. “I was a Leafe Knight, I wasn’t supposed to have fallen in love with the enemy. I couldn’t risk losing the thing I’d given up everything else for.”

“Didn’t you trust your friends!” Hayate cried out, tightening his hold on Sasame’s body.

“That’s exactly why!” Sasame said, lifting his face off of Hayate’s shoulder to look at him though a mist of tears. “We’d already suffered so many losses, I couldn’t burden you, Goh and Kei with the knowledge that inside, I was just as cold and dead as Yuki, Mikio and Kawarō (4), and my heart resided in the darkness with Takako.”

Hayate suddenly let out a short, strangled laugh and said, as he rested his forehead against Sasame’s: “Next time you decide to act all selfless, warn me beforehand, would you?”

Sasame stared - or rather, squinted - at him for a moment before an absurd grin began to form on his face. In their emotional state, this small bit of fun quickly had them both hunched over with laughter. The sound of their joined merriment cut through the cramped tension that had persisted in the backs of their minds and the pits of their stomachs, allowing every uncontrolled exhalation to carry more and more of it away. When they’d calmed down again, Sasame heaved a sigh that was interrupted by a hiccup, and wiped his face with this sleeve.

“I’m sorry... that must have been weird.” he said sheepishly. “It was weird. I think I haven’t cried like that since we found Takako and became true Knights.” (5)

“No, you have...” Hayate said absently, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand. He had to close his eyes and take a deep breath before he could look back up at Sasame’s deep, dark purple gaze. It was not something he had taken lightly himself, and he didn’t know how Sasame would feel about it. “The night after... we sealed Fenrir away. I woke up in the middle of the night from your screaming. I went to your room and found you sitting up in bed, sweating and shaking. You didn’t seem to notice me, but you kept saying the same thing over and over again, and you were crying...” ‘Takako, I’m sorry! It’s all my fault, I’m so sorry. Oh, Takako...’ It had been the first and, until now, only time Hayate had seen his friend cry since they were five or six years old and Sasame had accidentally gotten his fingers frozen solid by their Knight of Ice. “I sat by your bed for the rest of the night.” Hayate finished quietly.

“I don’t remember.” Sasame said, equeally timid. He smiled crookedly. “How ironic. The one time I let my distress show, and I don’t notice your support.”

“Yeah.”

“Hm-hm.”

“Hm.”

A new silence fell, one different from the ones before. It wasn’t what Hayate would call companionable yet, but he could sense that his and Sasame’s thoughts were going in the same direction again. He’d missed that feeling, he realised. He’d lost sight of his best friend, making it possible for Sasame to appear right in front of him, heading in the opposite direction and prepared to go right through him. All without Hayate noticing his approach. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, listening to the wind rustling in the trees and rippling the grass, the birds that sang all around them or soared high up in the sky. It was a beautiful day in early autumn, bright and sunny, but not too warm.

From a distance, the wind carried voices to the two silent Knights’ ears. Himeno’s and Mawata’s, having fun under the bower behind the mansion with Hajime and Shin. Goh and Mannen, arguing as usual. Takako, trying to convince Mayune that her name was not Mikage and that she wouldn’t be cleaning up after her failed pranks anymore. Tanaka working himself into a fit because he didn’t know how to get all the lard off the driveway before it would leave stains. Kaoru cooing over his wife while she told him all about her latest sculpture and Kei going completely unnoticed as he complained that it looked nothing like him.

Hayate looked across at Sasame, knowing that he had heard it too. He suspected his friend had been listening to it all along. It took a while, but Sasame eventually met his gaze.

“We miss you.” Hayate said simply. “Things may be awkward for a while, but don’t you think it’s worth it to try again?”

“Will you ever be able to forgive me for what I’ve done? Will the others?”

“The White Prétear forgave you.” Hayate said, a smile forming on his lips. “The snow of miracles did not fall without purpose. To ignore that would be the greatest betrayal of all.”

Slowly, hesitantly, Sasame smiled back. He stood up from the bench and with a swish of his cloak, knelt before Hayate’s feet.

“My brother, my friend, I will gladly take up my rightful place as the Leafe Knight of Sound. I will take up arms once again and renew my vows of loyalty to the Leafe, to Leafenia and Mother Earth, to the Knights of Leafe, my brothers in arms and in heart, if not in blood, and to our Princess Prétear - both Prétears. Unless,” he looked up with gleaming eyes. “someone has already taken over my place as the poet of the group, during my absence.”

Hayate smirked as he too stood up. He drew his sword from the winds and touched both of Sasame’s shoulders with it before resheathing it in the air.

“Rise, Sasame of the Sound Leafe, and reclaim your rightful position in the ranks of the Knights of Leafe. Your prerogative to poetry will be returned to you, as I have no intention to start fancy rituals. And please don’t ever treat me as your superior again. Goh would have a fit if he heard you, and it only gets my hopes up for nothing; you guys never remember that I’m the oldest when I want you to remember.” (6)

Sasame bowed extra deeply before standing up and being enveloped in a bear hug.

“I missed you, my friend. I’ve done you great wrong and I’d like to make it up to you somehow. Will you ever forgive me?”

Sasame smiled and produced an echo of Hayate’s earlier words as he returned the embrace.

‘The snow of miracles did not fall without purpose. To ignore that would be the greatest betrayal of all.’

“I missed you too, Hayate.”
 

 PSAN: I hope you liked it. Please Read and Review!

Additional Notes

(1) “Leafe Sorceress Takako” – A purely fanon term. I was thinking; even though Takako as Prétear can no longer give Leafe, she can still manipulate it, according to Hayate. So what does this make her? It sounds like she’d actually be much like a Leafe Knight, to me. So I thought, why the Hell not, let’s give her a nice and shiny title. Admit it, it sounds cool, doesn’t it?
(2) “Hayate and Sasame were left alone together by the wind chimes on the Awayuki grounds, the place where they usually opened the portal between Leafenia and Earth.” – Credit for this idea goes to The Cleric 007. If I hadn’t read her/his/its story ‘Bonds Not Broken, Only Bent’, the location for their meeting would have been very dull, and not nearly as symbolic.
(3) “the likes of Judas and Brutus” – For those without my knowledge of Western history and myth; Judas and Brutus have been branded traitors by the passing of time. Judas is said to have sold out Jesus Christ to the Romans, and Brutus played a key role in the murder of Julius Caesar. They’re two of my favourite mythological and historical figures, actually.
(4) “Yuki, Mikio and Kawarō” – He means the three Knights that used up their Leafe to seal Fenrir, and faded away. I made the names up myself, though I realise that other fanfiction writers right here on ff . net have used (some of) the same ones; the fallen Knight of Ice - yuki, which means ‘snow’; the fallen Knight of Plants - mikio, which means ‘tree trunk man’; and the fallen Knight of Water - kawarō, in which kawa means ‘river’ and -rō is a common suffix in male Japanese names, meaning ‘son’. I have no idea if any of these names are actually considered appropriate in Japan.
(5) “since we found Takako and became true Knights.” – ‘True knights’ in the sense of ‘Knights with a Prétear’. Because it isn’t of much use to have the title of Knight if you don’t have a princess, now is it? Again, purely fanon interpretation.
(6) “I’m the oldest” – And yet another AN! Okay, this one is up for debate. The official Japanese Prétear site states that Kei, Hayate, Goh and Sasame are all presumed to be sixteen years old (this is the case in the manga, but I have my doubts about the anime). Following from their given birthdays, their age compared to each other would be as listed above, with Kei being the oldest, Sasame the youngest. (Yes, I’m the kind of person to take a Japanese site and an online dictionary and make them do conspicious things together...) However, the English site (the ‘AVD Official Site’ for Prétear) has their ages listed differenlty: Hayate is eighteen, Sasame seventeen, and Kei and Goh are both sixteen, while their birthdays are the same. I used the latter as my source of information, as you may have guessed, simply because that’s the one I could read properly. Besides, I’m not sure how clearly the Japanese one differentiates between the anime and the manga... they have pictures from the anime all over the place, but that site had Shin and Hajime both listed as being 7 years old; it may fit the manga, but it’s nonsense for the anime.