AN: This shouldn't have taken me four months to finish.
Title from "Three Birds" by The Dead Weather. Otherwise inspired by Radar Bros. ("The Fish"), Failure ("Solaris"), and Tortoise (the entire album TNT).
As Shinsuke awoke, the smell of the place still clung to his nostrils, even now – a muddy, earthy smell, but with a sparkling brightness, almost herbal.
His eyes opened, and the dull sunlight filling his room poured into his eyes. He thrashed onto his side and pulled the covers over his head. They felt damp and hot.
It was suffocating.
He heard cars outside his window, and the din of people bustling about – blocks away, but sounding like they were yelling outside his window.
He threw the covers off.
He was starting to smell himself everywhere, overwhelming everything else, familiar and dirty and alien. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to remember the dream again, get the smell of the place back. Already, it all started to blur – the green and brown and babbling water becoming a smudge of refuge that never was.
He had to get it back.
He sat up at the edge of his bed and shook his head around, like he was trying to displace the cobwebs he felt in his head. The fog in his head felt like it was starting to lift, but as it did, he noticed that the pit of his stomach ached with a clinging emptiness.
This was not where he was supposed to be.
He sat at his kitchen table now, holding a cup of coffee with both hands. He inhaled deeply, taking in the smell of it and feeling the warmth of it against his face before taking a sip. For a moment, things felt right. But between sips, his mind started to drift, and that feeling drifted in again.
He doodled trees on a stray piece of paper with a black marker, and flowers with eyes and long eyelashes, and swords. Maybe they had teeth.
This was down south somewhere. There was a stream. The breeze sounded like whispers.
He laughed to himself. This wasn't a place. Maybe this was a story he'd read when he was a child. Maybe it was some weird movie - some old thing that had worked its way into his dream.
But if he could find it, maybe he'd feel right again.
Shinsuke hissed a little when the hot water from the shower first hit his skin, but the initial shock of the heat dissipated into something pleasantly sensitizing. The water roared in his ears like waves as he rinsed his hair.
The stream flowed south, away from the trees. He smelled the sea on the breeze.
His scalp tingled nicely as he scrubbed it roughly with shampoo – it smelled of mint and tea tree oil and rosemary, comforting and clean. It took a while to rinse it out, but he didn't mind.
The breeze whispered that it was safe here. The breeze whispered that he should wait for them. He lay on the grass.
The water was hot enough to turn his skin pink. He didn't mind. It felt almost torturous to pull away long enough to soap himself up.
He should take the train into the mountains. They'd show him the way from there.
He scrubbed himself roughly, hard enough to make his nerves sing. When he rinsed, the water was hot enough to make his skin sting softly. He breathed in the heavy steam, infused with mint. His forehead fell against the shower well.
He was clean enough now. He was ready for them.
The train car was nearly empty. Shinsuke stretched his legs over the seat beside him and rested the side of his face against the window. The train's movement rattled through his whole body, making him feel blurred and somehow closer to the landscape zooming past outside. Sunlight streamed through the window and warmed his face. He closed his eyes and wrapped his jacket tighter around himself, like a blanket.
Slowly, he felt himself drift, and for a moment he was back there, in that smudge of lush green valley, three chirping birds and the flowing water, the sparkling inside. He was getting closer. He was almost there with them. But, seemingly as quickly as he drifted off, he jolted awake. He shivered and his stomach growled loudly. It was much too bright inside this train. He blinked until he could stand it, then looked at his watch. Nearly an hour had passed since he'd fallen asleep. His stomach growled again, more urgently.
For a moment, he sat, groggily dissatisfied and hungry. Then, he felt a soft smile cross his face. He opened his backpack. There it was – the lunch he'd bought at the station, a little box of beef domannaka. He opened it up and his mouth immediately watered at the smell of it. It was so simple – just stewed beef on rice, but he'd eaten this enough to know what to expect. He picked some beef and rice up with his chopsticks and put it in his mouth. It was even better than he remembered – savory and rich and immeasurably satisfying, a taste that seemed ideally calibrated to the most comforting places in his mind. Even lukewarm, the beef was so tender he barely needed to chew it, and whatever type of rice this was soaked up the sauce perfectly.
Part of him wanted to gobble up all of it as quickly as he could – it was too good to wait. But he knew he had time to spare, so he chewed each bite carefully and waited until he could barely taste it again before he took another. When he finally finished it, leaving not even one grain of rice remaining, he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes again, feeling as if he glowed with satisfaction. He drifted off again into a cozy, dreamless sleep, waking only when he reached his destination.
He heard the taxi speed away as he walked toward the gate. The gate was a tall, simple metal gate, tarnished from apparent years of neglect. A rusted chain wrapped through it, secured by a large padlock. Shinsuke ran his fingers along the gritty surface of the chain. He needed to go through this gate, but how?
As Shinsuke touched the chain, it started crumbling, leaving sandy grains on his hand. He gave one of the links a soft tug. It snapped. The broken piece turned to dust and blew away on an errant breeze. Shinsuke slipped the padlock down to the broken link and pulled it off, unraveled what remained of the disintegrating chain, then walked through the gate, brushing dust off himself.
On the other side of the gate, yellowed grass poked through rocky, graying dirt. Fine leafy trees lined a narrow trail, though the leaves were sparse and brown in spots. Shinsuke strained to look ahead, but he couldn't see what might await him on the trail. Still, he began to walk along the trail, with purpose, the dirt and fallen leaves crunching under his sneakers.
The trail was quite hilly, and the hills grew steeper and steeper as Shinsuke hiked along the long trail, until the hills felt like small mountains. The sun beat down hot against his skin – the spotty cover of the trees did little to shield him. In the distance, he heard the faint sound of flowing water. Sweat began to drip into his eyes. Birds chirped, a mocking call.
"I know," he said. "I know."
He chuckled. This was nothing like the place he'd seen in his dream. Maybe it was foolish to travel so far on such a strange whim. But he'd gone too far to stop now. He took another step up the steep hill. His foot slid a bit before gripping the ground again. The air was so heavy here that each movement felt like swimming. The muscles in his thighs burned with every step. With each step, his foot felt less steady – he slid more before finally gripping the ground again.
As he reached the top of the hill, he took one more step – a longer, more ambitious step – and his foot landed on a jagged rock. He struggled to steady himself, but it was no use. His feet slipped out from under him, and he tumbled face first, sliding down the hill into a big, pointed rock.
He staggered to his feet, his skin stinging with small scrapes, his tongue drawn to a bit of blood on his slightly-swelling lip. He looked around to get his bearings. When he looked down below the hill on which he stood, he could barely believe his eyes. There was a small valley, much lusher than the surrounding land, full of dewy green grass with a stream babbling through the center. On the breeze, he could smell it – it was exactly how he'd dreamed. His heart jumped. He wanted to run down that hill straight into the stream. Instead, he scaled carefully down the hill to the valley below, the tantalizing sound of flowing water growing louder in his ears, the smell of wet grass and earth drawing closer.
Finally, he reached the edge of the stream and looked down into the water, clear as flowing glass. He felt his parched mouth struggling to water, begging for a drink. His hot, stinging skin craved the relief it knew the water could bring. He pulled off his dusty, sweaty clothes and stepped into the shallow stream – it was ice cold, like it had been fed by a far away arctic spring. He slowly sat down until he was neck deep in the water, sighing happily as each new body part entered the soothing water. The burning in his muscles dissolved. The stinging pain of his scrapes felt cleansed and drawn out.
Once he was settled, he dipped his mouth below the water's surface and lapped up some of the water. It tasted impossibly pure and refreshing, like nothing he'd ever had before. He lay back and floated as best he could, his hair flowing around him like a halo. He felt the water holding him up, like hundreds of small sturdy hands. Their fingers rubbed down, following the direction his blood flowed, pulling the tension from him. He felt light. Unobstructed. Safe.
He felt the hands around him. He felt them inside him. They enveloped him. They divided into thousands, into a swarm of vibrating electricity. The stream's babble became a roar in his ears. He heard women laughing. He moaned. His toes curled against the bed of the stream. His mouth felt desperately empty. He plunged his head below the surface of the water for several slow, silent, ice-cold seconds, flashing dark and sparkling until his heart raced and he sat up and gasped. He crawled out of the water and lay down on the soft grass. He smiled.
He rested his face in the grass, and as he breathed, his lungs filled with the smell of grass. He tried to catch his breath. The sun's heat poured down on him, wrapping around and pressing him down into the earth, pushing down his back, down his legs to the soles of his feet, warming his muscles like a perfect massage. As he relaxed, his legs opened wider. A gentle breeze blew over him, kissing each drop of water on his skin.
With every slight movement he made, the softness of the grass tickled against his belly just a bit – the tiniest bit of sparkle in his nerves. Warmth radiated from the earth below him and pulled him close. Between the sun above him and the earth below him, he felt exquisitely sandwiched. Above him, the birds chirped, an oddly reassuring thing, letting him know that this was where he needed to be.
All at once, the light above and the sound of the water overcame his nerves. The earth roughly pushed him inside. The glittering light inside him vibrated at a fever pitch. He was the light that gave life to the earth. The breeze carried his seed across the land. The water fed everything inside. With a burst, he collapsed ecstatically into the ground. Behind his eyes he saw flowers and women holding swords. He was exhausted. He was consumed. He returned, reborn, to the world.