Gackt woke up in a dark mood.

This in itself was unusual; generally he woke up in no mood, preferring to let the day begin before he decided how best to tackle it. Moods were creeping things, in his experience, that came upon one after something else had occurred to inspire it.

This mood, however, had decided to flaunt all conventions by coming over him before he’d even fully woken up. Perhaps the lingering clouds of a dream had brought it on? Gackt stared up at the ceiling for a moment, trying to remember, but if there’d been a dream (and he suspected now there had been), it was successfully eluding the feeble grasp of memory.

An annoyance interrupted his thoughts, scattering them like leaves, and it actually took him a few moments to realize it was the phone ringing. He grabbed for it and put it to his ear.

There was a long silence, and then a tentative “Hello?” from the other end, and Gackt belatedly remembered that he was supposed to say something. “I’m here,” he said, wincing at the roughness of his voice.

“It’s Ren,” said the person on the other end. “They put me on call duty—“ Gackt could vaguely hear snickering in the background at that—“and I just wanted to know, did you remember practice today?”

The end of the dream was just out of reach... Something about dark, swirling clouds, and water the color of night... Or was it water? Perhaps glass that only looked like water....

“Gackt?” A prompting, expectant voice. Gackt was startled to realize he was still holding the phone. He suddenly couldn’t remember picking it up.

“What?”

“Uh, practice? Today? The thing you’re currently late for?” Ren’s voice went from amused to concerned in the course of the sentence. “Hey, are you feeling okay?”

Glass that looked like water, and once you went under you were trapped there, frozen there, like an insect in amber, only colder, much colder, all the warmth stolen from your body... “I’m fine. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Alright, if you think you’re okay—“

Gackt set the phone back on the receiver absently, then went to take a shower.

Practice was a blur, a confused jumble of sound and images that Gackt’s memory could no longer sort out by the time he got home, very late. He seemed to recall You giving him worried looks, and Chachamaru offering things—a bottle of water here, a sandwich there—that Gackt wouldn’t accept, and Ren looking upset every time Gackt would forget to answer some question. But it was all distant now, like a dream.

He sat back on the couch, head back so he could stare at the flicker of candlelight on the ceiling. The gentle glow comforted him the way electric lights couldn’t. It reminded him that warmth still existed, even if it couldn’t seem to penetrate him the way it once had.

He felt himself being lulled into half-sleep. A part of him knew that sleep would bring back the dark glass/water, but he found himself unable to muster the energy to care. Perhaps this is how we die, he thought to himself. We just run out of the warmth that keeps the cold dark away.

As he fell asleep, he could almost feel the candles going out.

Darkness surrounded him, and he shivered.