The Personification of Night

Inspired by A Warden and his Prisoner by Z3R0 K1N6. Go and find it on Fanfiction.net if you want to see where I got the idea for the Minato/Nyx pairing.

Once, I believed that the ideas behind love were manufactured and contrived little things, where the most you would obtain from them was a split second's worth of 'warm and fuzzy' before the 'heartbreak' settled in.

The boy, Minato, stared at the rose in his hand, brighter and more durable than any rose had any right to be. The leaves were cheap fabric, and the petals, dried frog's skin.

Humans procured various oddities from department stores, where smiles were cast from plastic, and every motion, every piece of advice was polished to the point where polishing became more of a problem than the regular wear and tear of time's hand. These oddities were then given to the object of affection in hopes of winning their hearts, as if they were things to be won.

He refused to think of his heart, or any, for that matter, as such. After all, it was becoming jaded by the hour, and it wasn't to mean, in some terrible play of words, that his heart was turning to semiprecious stone on an auctioning pedestal. Minato threatened to tear the rose apart in his hands, pressure homing in on a single point of weakness in its synthetic stem.

A gift from some admirer. He did not care.

This was not what his heart yearned for. Feeding it ersatz garbage only smothered what embers of passion were left inside him; never kindled it.

Not to get the matter confused: He cared for his friends deeply and he would do nothing short of offering his life to protect them.

Fuuka's cooking. Aigis's tears. Akihiko's smirks. Koromaru's barks. These were only four of many friends that he'd met that year, and they were precious artefacts that demanded his protection and loyalty. All of them were strong and admirable people, and if they weren't, he forged them into such—not for power, as much as the social link would benefit him.

Even so, Minato was tired of... this. His lips drew into a thin line, the pressure in his fingers subsiding.

He was missing something; of that, he was almost certain. After all, no matter how much he hit that coveted 'rank ten', it did nothing but fill him with guilt. Minato had never once wished for any of his friends to fall in love with him.

On their part, he supposed it would be genuine love, but for what?

Minato chided himself, fingertips brushing against the artificial thorns of the rose. He had given them his full attention and did everything he could for them. Their lives were precious, and he wanted them to live happily. After all, life (and quite equally, death) was meaningless, but happiness was all they had to make their short existences worthwhile. The sense of accomplishment and relief that blossomed in his chest was real.

So why, then, did he still feel empty?

It was as he'd told Pharos once before: He felt like there was something missing from his journey, and, even though January was fast approaching the end of its thirty-first cycle, Minato still felt this odd absence hidden away, like a small chink in his otherwise fulfilled heart.

As Dark Hour struck, and the greatest of ordeals came to bear upon SEES, his heart was aflutter with anxiousness, as if that chink was slowly being chipped away, pickaxe ever insistent on breaking it open. With a quiet fear, he forged the Universe Arcana and came to face the end of humanity with intrepidity and determination.

He heard his friends' cries chorus from below as his body lifted effortlessly up against the roars of the moon looming above, staring up into the face of what should've been certain death. As his tiny form was swallowed up in the moon's voracious maw, his vision was engulfed with white, on the doorstep to what humans often described as 'the light'. That final light, that is.