disclaimer: I do not own Shaman King -- and while we're on the subject: Marco in short-shorts, Takei? -- and the breakdown of elements in the human body was taken from Fullmetal Alchemist. Sadly, the fic is mine, although the fulcrum of the fic has been used in various other fic-incarnations.
author's note: Written while I should have been taken notes on my essay for good and evil. I will not be blamed for the pretentiousness of this fic, or for the fact that it appears to be preparing for multi-chapter. It was (a really pretentious way) to deal with and an overabundance of a certain device in HaoYoh fics. Splits from canon some time before Marco appears in short-shorts.
It's more of a teaser than a prologue, in that it probably makes no sense whatsoever.
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prologue
"Give us the body of Asakura Yoh."
Yoh dreams. - - -
What he remembers about ghosts is that all the words in the world cannot hold them; they come when called and depart when not. Between, there are blank and airless spaces of which no one speaks. Mystery - but he has known mystery (electricity underneath the smoke), and the difference that splits this (are you lost? where have you come from? why do you stay, here? what are you looking for?) and that (I can feel his heartbeat -- who was it-- get out of my way!--no--he lives still;iwillnotleavehim) is clear under nightfall.
The thoughts of ghosts are smoke, and familiar with the strangeness of a homeland long unvisited. They prickle his skin, peculiar and weighted, when he recalls them. He thinks that it may be discomfort, awkwardness, and tries to stop drawing up faces that are not his own. Eventually, he may learn to connect ghosts to things other than things that should not feel commonplace: patterned scars, umbrellas lost with broken spokes, a bright-haired girl with monstrous a shadow. For now he leaves the pieces unconnected, and looks elsewhere, to what he knows.
He remembers little, but this is his kingdom: the endless rolling green hills; cities all facets of dust and glass, whole and broken; glimpses of half-shaped people framed in brightness on the horizon. Like an idle princeling, a god, he does not rule but allows the land to go on around him and it does.
He never asks why.
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Days rise; days fall.
Yoh wanders.
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An idle morning, he recollects fragments of something else, an image beyond this world for which he has no name. A breath forms on his tongue, holding fast.
That day he travels in circles, looking at the fresh brightness of cherry trees in spring as he tries to recall something that may have never been. He cannot remember why, but it is no matter. By night's return he has already forgotten its importance, why it clung so to his bones, like the memory of bruises.
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Later he thinks that it - that half-breath (ah, an, An--) - might have been a name he knew once. He cannot be sure.
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Pieces drift back to him, in brightness, in dark - the mazy corridors of a trembling house, a girl's knifing voice, an edged kiss like a branding. He does not touch them for fear of breaking them, or perhaps only himself against them.
The girl does bother him though, for reasons both implacable and unplaceable, like a promise broken. It is one of the things he neither knows nor remembers that he cannot forget.
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"Ah!"
Later it comes to him: in all the passages, the distant figures that he never catches, the impossible glittering brightness of his world, there is no voice but his own.
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He cannot sleep for speaking - not his words but hers, that girl he cannot recognise. Fitfully, he sprawls out. (She says: this is not real. This is a tangle of the last memories you have left to yourself meshing together - madness, and there are no doors out of madness but to draw your borders. To divide knowledge into memories, to force more of what is yours from the dark.)
His foot kicks out. (What do you have here that is not ash? Ask yourself for voices, for song, for the taste of burnt fish because you forgot to turn off the stove, for the ache of running in your veins. These are not strangers with odd and tangible likenesses; they are yours, and have always been. Take them back. Do it.) One knee bangs another. (Ten hours of the electric chair!) He yelps and sits up.
There should be someone there (a blurry silhouette through the paper screen, all angles and efficiency that does not extend to affection), faceless and nameless because he remembers none of it. The girl, he thinks, and something slides in with a click: one piece out of many. (Jagged bits of a puzzle heavy with dust, unfinished; the glittering of streetlights on a cliff far from the city; the brittle sting of a leaf's sentient bite; his own voice, saying let's go togeth--)
He closes his eyes to search.
The callused heaviness of hard eyes on the nape of his neck; a wrist snapped out of reach; a rigid mouth and thin sharp hands; the marks that knuckles leave against his cheek; an unspoken prayer that goes heard and unappreciated--
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He is dreaming the hiss of fading ash, the snapping expulsion of water from the branches in the fire, the hard press of bone to bone as he leans too hard into a shoulder not his own. It is night, moon sloping in slanting scatters through the branches; in his dream, his eyes are half-open, and he is at a shore that he has never visited.
Water gives his luminous reflection when he looks, and Yoh sees himself four times over: himself, first, in limbs dark and scarred by ghosts over a series of distant years; then another - a small callused foot, a flip of dark hair, an outflung hand sifting the water at the shore; and traceries of horror and a terrible wonder in the lake.
Ripples stir shimmers through. His face vanishes into the indistinct details of a ghost.
"By logic," says that clear voice like his own, "in a balance, nothing can ever be lost."
Scars like half-moons inked down their arms, and places where their veins mirror each other. Heat flares through his skin to his, and when he swallows he feels the fire course into the pulse at his throat.
"Balance," says that other Yoh as he turns, lifting a hand to cup the slope of his cheek. Hair veils the lines of his face as Yoh watches, long and unfamiliar, and he is no longer Yoh but someone else - other, separate (but the same).
His brother.
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(And a nonsense of splinters emerge that make no sense even when put together: palms rough against his elbows, nails hard on his arms. A breath sinks in his lungs. Skin slides hard on skin, and heat surges through.
He cries out.)
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Elsewhere in the dream there is a school, which does not live as much as exist. Strings of recitations drift through the halls: the scientific breakdown of the body (human) as examined in old textbooks where the ink has worn from page to page and the pictures have been scarred with scratches: water carbon ammonia lime phosphorus salt sulfur fluorine iron silicon and fifteen other elements in minor quantities. None of it explains the ghosts in the courtyard, the ghosts lounging at every window, in every seat, the hazy outlines of ghosts as far as the graveyard.
Every person is (he knows) flesh, bones, a mind, a soul. To break them down further would make the pieces something other than human, that might be stone as readily as skin.
To break them down further...
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It is evening again, and he knows this dream in a way that he had not known the others. The tang floods his bones with certainty - he is Asakura Yoh, of Team Funbari Onsen in the Shaman Fight, and he is outside when he shouldn't be.
The unexpected cold of night has dried his throat, spidering through his veins. He hugs himself, shivering absently. Waits, shifts on his feet, hearing the grit and earth crackle as if breaking.
Remembrance winds lazily across his skin, and he straightens. He is waiting for himself.
"Come," Hao says. He tips him a broken mirror's smile over his shoulder, lucent in jagged edges and splinters of hooded light. "Didn't you want to save me?"
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Then, darkness.
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- to be continued -
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feedback: always adored, occasionally framed and put on walls. Makes it easier to use as a dartboard -- not that I've ever done that.