Beast Gacha System: All Mine

"Kill that bitch Cecilia Araceli too."

CRAAASHHH!!

The door exploded outward in a hail of splintered wood and torn rags. A massive black wolf burst through the wreckage, his fur bristling like a storm cloud given form, his jaws open in a roar—

GROAAAAAAAAAR—

His claws gouged deep furrows into the floor where he landed, but the floor was no longer tile.

It was snow.

White, endless, stretching in every direction.

The wolf skidded to a halt, his breath pluming in great clouds of steam, his black eyes wild and rolling as he took in the landscape before him.

The northern wilderness, the place he had dreamed of escaping to a thousand times. It surrounded him now, more vivid than anything he had ever known.

The cold was no longer the cold of a bathtub. It was the cold of a world that had never known warmth, a dry, biting, crystalline cold that seized the moisture in his breath and turned it to diamond dust.

The sky above was a deep, endless indigo, scattered with stars so bright and so close they seemed to be watching him. The pristine white snow beneath his paws was not soft. It was hard-packed and old, a crust of ice that had formed over centuries and would endure for centuries more.

The lilting voice was gone. The growling was gone. The door he had burst through was gone. There was only the wilderness and the wolf.

She was here somewhere. Somewhere. Somewhere.

He knew where to find her. He had always known. She had never moved an inch from that place in his heart—

The wolf tore through the white wilderness. His massive body was a black slash against the endless white, a festering wound with massive legs, moving, closer and closer.

The frozen spikes of trees whipped past him, pines, their branches so heavy with ice that they drooped like the arms of mourners at a funeral.

The wind screamed in his ears, but he was faster than the wind. The snow sprayed up around him in great white wings with every stride. He ran, and the landscape blurred, and time itself seemed to stretch and warp around him.

He charged. He knew where to go.

Why did he want to go to the northern wilderness?

Was it to run?

To freeze himself?

Was that truly the reason?

Was the north just an escape? A grave, a place where the cold would kill the part of him that responded to her?

But his paws, his legs, brought him exactly where he wanted to go—and it was not a grave.

He ran and ran and ran.

The cold burned his lungs. The ice cut his paws. He didn’t stop. The wilderness blurred past him, ravines and ridges, frozen lakes and glaciers, and still he ran, following a map that had been etched into his heart long before he had learned to hate himself.

And then, he arrived. Exactly there. The place they first met.

The landscape opened before him into a small, sheltered hollow beneath the trunk of a fallen tree. The great pine had toppled long ago, and the massive roots were torn from the earth, frozen mid-reach like the grasping fingers of a buried giant.

Beneath its arched trunk, the snow was softer, windblown into gentle drifts that curved like the walls of a cradle.

The fallen boughs above formed a natural roof, their ice-laden needles catching the starlight and scattering it into a thousand tiny prisms.

And in the center of that hollow, illuminated by the cold, distant stars, were two figures. A boy. And a girl.

The towering black beast stopped at the edge of the memory. His massive chest heaved. His breath came in great, shuddering gasps that fogged the air. And he watched.

The boy was young. His face was the face Arkai had long since forgotten how to see in the mirror.

How innocent. Unburdened.

The boy had found the girl curled alone in the snowy darkness, afraid and freezing.

She was even younger, small and shivering, her dark hair matted with snow, her eyes wide with a terror that had no name.

The boy had wrapped his own cloak around her. He had pulled her against his chest and shared his warmth. He had waited with her, hour after hour, until the grey pigeon he had sent flew away into the sky, carrying the message of where they were.

So why had he wanted to go to the wilderness?

Did he want to kill himself?

Freeze himself to death?

No.

That had never been the truth, was it?

Standing here now, watching the boy he used to be cradle the girl she used to be was the proof.

He just wanted to come back.

Back to this moment. To the hollow.

The boy spoke. His voice was young and clear and full of a love that had not yet been poisoned. "I will never be able to hate you, Sienna..."

The towering beast watched. His black eyes, so wild with rage moments before, were still now. Still and wet.

"I love you," the boy said, pulling the little girl closer. "I love you, my sister."

The little girl looked up at him. Her eyes reflected the starlight. She was so small. So fragile. So dependent on the boy who had saved her life.

"But why did you ruin it?" The boy’s voice cracked. The beast’s heart cracked with it.

"Why—"

"You are my family, so why?"

"You are my sister, my beloved, beautiful sister—"

"So why? Why? Why?! WHY?!"

The boy’s voice shattered on the final word. His small body shook with sobs he had been holding back for years. The little girl in his arms didn’t answer. She just stared up at him with those eyes.

The towering black beast watched.

He had never wanted to kill himself in the northern wilderness, didn’t he?

He had never wanted to freeze the part of himself that responded to her.

He had just wanted to come back. Back to the beginning.

Back to when the only thing he felt for his sister was the simple, uncomplicated love of a brother to his sister.

He just wanted to be her big brother.

"You took my sister away from me."