Eye for an Eye
Fujin looked over the ocean, some days a calm, smooth plain of blue, most days a crashing swirl of blinding white and dark blue.
The waves crashed onto the rocky drop. She could feel the droplets of salty ocean water hit her face. They tasted like tears, as if the ocean had been weeping.
Already the sun was bleeding orange into the pounding surf. It looked like the pit of a volcano down there.
Fujin did not know what had drawn her to the cliff, she just came. Something about the wild abandon of a stormy sunset echoed deep in her soul, something she would let no being come close to.
She sat on the grassless cliff. Absently smoothing the folds in her eyepatch, she remembered...
Fujin stared at her dinner. It was seperated into clear parts, coleslaw on the right, microwaved fries on the left, the burger in the middle. The tomato ketchup didn't dare to slide over the plate, just stayed a gob of bright crimson.
The fork was on one side; the knife on the other. It was like a scene from a cookbook.
The air around the table was stiff. Silence hung like a man swinging from a noose. Every molecule waited for the inevitable.
"So, what's for dessert?" Fujin's father asked. His dinner was untouched.
"Tiramisu," answered her mother. She had stuck a fork into the burger, as if impaling it. The fork quivered in the air.
A tiny little nerve under her father's eye twitched. "Tiramisu? As in the one with wine in it?"
"Of course. This isn't," her mother's voice was laden down with sarcasm. "Chocolate cake."
"Fujin can't eat it. She's underage."
"You should have thought of that before you asked me to make it."
"I didn't," Fujin's father said slowly. "Ask you to make anything."
"You did!" the voice was accusing and sharp. Her mother leaned over the table, glaring at Fujin. "Fujin, dear, did you hear Daddy tell Mommy to make tiramisu cake?"
Fujin looked down. Her eyes were burning; a now-familiar sensation.
"For God's sake, don't bring Fujin into this! She's four years old!"
"I'm her mother! I have every right--"
Both of them sprang up.
"And I'm her father!"
"Here! You want tiramisu cake?" Fujin's mother walked into the kitchen. She opened the fridge and took out a cake, rich and brown with alternating layers of cream, and stalked back, brandishing the glass platter like a weapon.
She flung it onto the floor. The platter broke into shards. Fujin leapt down from the chair, preparing the dash upstairs to her small room, her sanctuary, her tiny citadel.
She looked at the shards of glass on the floor. She could see her face reflected back at her in fragments. One bit helf her eye, another a lock of her silver hair, a piece of her mouth, her small nose...
"There!" her mother screamed. "Now you can have tiramisu! You can just lick it off the floor if you want it!"
"You bitch! What the hell are you trying to do?!" her father grabbed a glass from the table and hurled it. Her mother ducked easily.
"You asshole! That was expensive!"
Fujin was staring at the shards. She could see herself, in hundreds of facets. Every one of them was different. If she half-closed her eyelids, she could almost think that she was the one on the floor, broken and fragmented.
She walked slowly to the staircase. She knew that as a family, they did not work. They were like a machine, once-perfect, but now was falling to pieces. Some parts worked by themselves, but they were still imperfect.
They didn't love her. That she knew. If they loved her they wouldn't spend every night just looking for a tiny mistake in whatever they did, and once they found it, they would begin screaming and hollering at each other, until the words and insults just blurred into senseless noise and destruction. And through it all, Fujin would sit in her room and look at the wall, without blinking. She would pretend that she was like that wall, gray and featureless, flat and smooth. Perfect, instead of broken.
She paused on the first step, and looked back at her parents. She hadn't spoken to them in months, not to anybody. Her parents didn't notice. The students at her kindergarten avoided her; they were children, but they knew that she was different from them. It was not her silver hair, or her strange eyes, it was something deep inside of her, a major flaw in the foundation of her. Her teachers had already accepted that she did not speak. Fujin did all the kindergarten work perfectly, she played with the blocks and clay mechanically, in the playground she sat on the swing without moving. The swing just moved back and forth a tiny amount, driven by the wind. Nobody disturbed her, not even the boys who pulled other girls' hair and teased them.
She just sat and was pushed back and forth by the wind.
Now her parents were hurling things blindly at each other. The cutlery and plates were smashed against the wall, the food mashed together into multi-colored slush. They were grabbing things, gathering more ammunition, anything from ornaments to vases. Their curses had disintegrated to shrieking, gutteral and wordless.
Perhaps, if she hadn't lingered there, looking over the scene, feeling so detached from everything, as if she was watching something from television, she wouldn't have-- but it was already done.
Her father had thrown something; his aim was off, it flew through the air. As it neared her face, Fujin realized what it was. It was a photograph frame.
Fujin's family-- her parents and she-- had their faces creased in a polaroid smile of happier days. As it thudded dully into her wide eye, it was the last thing she saw.
Then there was blood. As the the crimson slid like a curtain over her eye. she thought: so this is what it feels like to be broken.
"Thinking?" a familiar voice asked.
Seifer walked across the rocky ground, his heels scuffing up dirt clouds which were blown away by the wind.
Fujin didn't answer. She felt an odd surge of feeling, like a fist clenching around her heart.
She had been speaking to people in-- what had they called it?-- her dead-fish voice, as expressionless as the eye of a gutted fish, cold and slimy. Most people found it disturbing, and those who met her for the first time never tried to disguise the shock of her voice.
Except Seifer and Raijin. They had already accepted that this was her voice, no matter how "creepy" it sounded. Perhaps once in a while they had conned themselves that she had always spoken in that voice, in leass-than-four-word sentences.
She hadn't. She remembered a time when words had actually meant something to her, that she cherished what she said, and they had slipped out of her mouth easily, instead of the way she talked now; as if she had to line them up, and shoot them out of her mouth like hard bullets. She glanced at the sea again; pounding surf. It was a good day for beginnings.
"Maybe," she said carefully, and was amazed that her voice, the one she hadn't used in over ten years, came so smoothly.
Seifer wasn't fazed at all. He settled down beside her, as if he had expected her to use her real voice.
"Hm," he said, in a non-committal tone. "They say this place has high magical energy. Says this place can do incredible things."'
Fujin knew about high magical energy. It was a field of magical energy spread over a certain area, like the Island Closest to Heaven. That was why there were so many draw points there and monsters that could cast magic congregated there.
Fujin felt the urge to say, "Like making me talk?" but didn't. It was a day for simple things. Seifer was looking over the sea, staring at the huge flaming ball of gas known as the sun, patiently waiting for her.
Fujin knew that there were no gigantic leaps that her relationship with Seifer could take now. There was no chance that Seifer would grab her in a fit of passion and they would start smothering each other with kisses. Perhaps Seifer knew how she felt, but she had no proof. But then again, love wasn't all about evidence, was it? Love hates calculation, the coldness of being analytical. Love was about trust. Something she had never experienced, even as a child.
But now? Perhaps nobody would love her, but she was ready to love.
"Like the sunset?" Fujin asked, finally finding her words.
"Yeah. Even though I've gone through so much... bad stuff," at this, Fujin smiled. Seifer could never stand the phrase "I lost".
"At least there's still the sunset." Seifer said. "I won't be around forever, but the sunset will. I hope. And then..."
"When I look at the sunset, I'll remember you," Fujin finished.
"And when I look at the sunset, I'll remember you," Seifer replied.
The sun was slowly descending into the sea. Fujin half-expected the ocean to steam from the heat. She noticed that the ocean had calmed down, was smooth and shimmering in the light again. Just a coincidence.
But a coincidence that she could pretend wasn't a coincidence.
Fujin smiled.
"What're you smiling about?" Seifer asked, instead of the usual "My god, Fujin smiled!" reply that he usually gave her.
"Nothing," Fujin shook her head.
"Fuj?" Seifer asked, even though Fujin had ordered him not to call her that, and had kicked him twice in the shin to make sure he got the point. Her foot almost spasmed instinctively, but she didn't kick.
"What?"
"How did you get your eyepatch?"
It was a question nobody had dared pose to her before. Not even Raijin. And now here was Seifer, asking her out of the blue as if he was asking her something utterly bland, like "Is asparagus really green?"
She felt the clenching of her heart again, but in a different way.
"My parents... fought a lot," she said. "They were throwing things at each other. I got hit in the eye."
"It hurt, didn't it?"
Fujin would have usually snapped, "Of course it hurt, you twit!" and kicked him, but she just nodded.
"Sometimes I just hurt too, for no reason at all. Just because I screwed up my life so bad, with the entire sorceress thing... It's like a voice telling me I'll never be anything. I'm about as meaningful to someone as a slug," Seifer's voice was hard, he was shooting out the words as if they injured him. "I just... hurt. I never got used to being hurt, but now here I am, hurt, and I have nobody to blame except myself." he gave a bitter laugh. "So what should I do, Fuj? Take a gun to my head? It'll just be the end to a useless life. Nobody would even cry." His fists were in the air, clenched tightly.
Fujin was at first scared. She had never heard Seifer say things like this before. But then the words came to her, and she felt empathy, an emotion she had never allowed herself to use. "I would," she said, softly.
"Really?" his voice was almost pleading, but not quite there.
"Yes. And I would cry, and I would never forget you, and it would hurt so bad, and whenever I saw the sun I would weep." She put her hand over his gloved fist.
Seifer smiled. "Guess now I've got someone to remember me."
"Yeah."
They watched as the sun slid into the horizon, the hues of pink and orange and red slowly fading away with the light of day.
Seifer held her hand, and Fujin held his, and she heard him whisper, "Beautiful. Just beautiful."
She didn't know what--or who-- he was talking about, but she smiled all the same.