Author's Note: I offer a variety of warnings before reading this. First, this is a side fic of "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" as well as a crossover with "Hikaru no Go", if you lack familiarity with this (more with the first so much than the latter), you will be dreadfully confused. Second, obviously, this is NOT CANON.
July, 1985
It started like this:
Eleanor Lily Potter was four going on five, she had yet to fall out of a tree in Mrs. Figg's yard and had yet to meet either the god in the train station or else the man who lived inside of her head.
Instead, in one of those strange coincidental turn of events that should not have happened at all, the bloodstained goban of Honinbou Shuusaku, Kuwabara Torajirou, instead of resting in the shed of Hikaru Shindou's grandfather to be found by the young and unwitting go prodigy years later, was sold to an oblivious westerner who believed neither in spirits nor curses. Slowly the goban traveled west, first through Hong Kong, then onwards to London to sit among collected antiques of the far east in a well to do home on the west side, and finally due to its imperfect bloodstained surface and a need for wealth and space sold to an antique shop in London where it would sit until 1985.
Coincidentally, in that strange unlikely manner that made it seem as if it was not a coincidence at all, in the summer of 1985 Petunia Dursley née Evans got it into her head that the best way to impress the neighbors of Little Whinging was to fill her home with antiques that one would expect from old-wealth and well to do families.
Of course, Petunia did not have it in her head to buy anything exotic or untoward (no need to make their home any less normal and British than the girl already made it) and entering the small shop had no use for a goban or any idea what go was and if it wasn't some variant of chess or Chinese checkers. She also didn't have it in her head to bring the girl, Ellie Potter, in question along.
Unfortunately, it was summer, the girl and Dudley weren't in school yet to begin with, and Mrs. Figg was perhaps for the first time in her life not rotting inside of her house with a thousand cats. Thus, Petunia Dursley had been forced to take not only her son (who, though she loved him dearly, would admit he was not the kind of child one would bring to an antiques collector) but the little freak as well. Even Petunia could not delude herself into thinking that leaving a four-year-old, particularly her sister's daughter, alone in a house for half of a day or even a few hours was a good idea.
So, the three walked in, or in the case of Dudley waddled, to this small innocuous store in the City of London proper. The girl looked silently around, already having learned that freaks who lived in cupboards were to be neither seen nor heard, and her eyes reflected the glittering rainbows of the crystal chandeliers and painted neoclassical faces of the portraits hanging on the walls. Dudley, for his own part, tugged at his mother's hand (who was gripping it perhaps a bit too tightly as she knew exactly what would happen the second Diddykins wandered off) and whined, "Mummy, why do we have to be here? I want to go play with Piers!"
He tugged in vain, making high pitched moaning sounds that came before the tantrum. Ellie (as she was still Ellie rather than Lily before the tree, her death, and a metamorphosis that wasn't a metamorphosis at all), standing just behind him, eyed him warily.
"Mummy! This place is old and smelly and doesn't have any toys! I want to go play with Piers!"
"Hush, Diddykins," Petunia said as she tugged the little boy forward, "You can play with Piers later when we get home."
Her eyes then looked backwards, training in on the girl who had not kept pace with them and was now staring in fascination at the sculpted marble face of a small statuette of a Greek god, "Girl, keep up!"
Ellie looked over, eyes so bright, so green, and so wide, and silently stalked forward so she was only just out of reach of Dudley's grubby fists. Dudley, looking over his shoulder, glared at her as he noted that her hand was not being held.
Dudley did not realize that this was a sign that ultimately, Petunia Dursley was perhaps hoping in her heart of hearts that Eleanor Lily Potter would wander off, out of the store, and be hit by a double decker bus.
Petunia then grinned, a strained too tight thing, at the middle-aged man manning the register and stalked forward, preparing herself to ooh and aah at baroque grandfather clocks and small figurines that looked old enough to impress but were unimportant enough to be inexpensive. Dudley squirmed and as he did so, he focused on his smaller, leaner, cousin.
As Ellie Potter had yet to fall out of a tree Dudley Dursley had yet to learn that as it was unwise to bait sleeping dragons it was unwise to provoke his absurdly powerful cousin.
Piers wasn't in the store, there weren't any toys, Dudley was bored, but there was always Ellie Potter and always Ellie hunting. He leered, as much as a four-year-old was able, and said under his breath as Petunia talked and he continued to try and tug out of her hand, "I'm gonna get you, you little freak. I'm gonna get you and hurt you and put you in the ground with your mummy and daddy."
Ellie, blinking once or twice, did not need to be told a second time. Before Petunia could look back or Dudley could make good on his threat, the girl promptly disappeared into the back of the store to inspect those wares that were not expecting to be sold.
Clearance pop culture artwork from the 1960's and artists whose fifteen minutes of fame were not equal to Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame accompanied a collection of bejeweled Russian eggs and various collections of crystal figurines. Beside all of this, as her eyes wandered over each silently, was a polished goban of excellent quality aside from the blood staining its surface.
She stopped, hovered over it, staring down at the stain and wondering what sort of pattern it made and what sort of a story it was trying to tell. It spoke of illness, desolation, despair, and a great desire for some unseen and unknown purpose. Ellie didn't know the game, didn't recognize the board, but the stain spoke a clearer and more universal language.
Not a desire for meaning or enlightenment, she thought with some fascination, but for completion and reaching out for some divine unseen hand for a thousand years and a thousand more after that.
As if this stain, the blood and the spirit, would be there long after the strange box splintered and fallen apart.
A clinking of crystals, tottering of figures precariously over the edges of tables (though none falling quite yet), she turned and caught sight of Dudley waddling over and searching for her with pent up aggression and desperate boredom. Ellie, glancing at the amount of rather expensive valuables that Dudley would undoubtedly break, blanched.
Still, she slunk further into the corner, closer to the mahogany surface of the goban, and willed herself to be invisible or else Dudley to grow bored of being bored. Her hand, idly, brushed the surface of the wood and the innocuous blood stain.
And that, with little Ellie Potter's desperate cry and falling into unconsciousness, Dudley Dursley kicking her rather hard in the stomach with no response, Petunia Dursley paling and cursing her niece, and the unseen spirit of Fujiwara no Sai escaping the bonds of his wooden prison, was that.
Sai's first thought, when he came to and realized that once again he was not in the goban, not with Torajiro (Torajiro dying of cholera, so young, so terribly young at only thirty-three), was that this girl, whose pale fingers had touched the goban and carried him out of it, was so young.
Torajiro had already been a young man, already a go player and a fine one at that, when he had come across Sai's goban and wandering spirit. The girl though was still a child, not even a child but a small thing that was only a few years out of toddling and clinging to her mother's skirts with small pudgy fingers.
Asleep in the hospital bed, a strange white sterile room full of strange beeping metal boxes that looked nothing like Torajiro's world and even further from his own, she seemed overwhelmed by the room as well as her mass of unruly, curling, red hair. The color, Sai thought with a sense of awed fascination, of bright red flowers, of spider or tiger lilies.
She was so small, so pale and delicate (her skin almost matching the strange sterile white of the bedsheets, themselves the color of the moon or fresh snow), and her features already so thin where he thought there should be some sign of baby fat.
Doctors came in and out, each tall and western and dressed in western clothing similar to the suits worn by the strange foreign men during the end of Torajiro's lifetime. No one else, however, lingered beside the girl besides the invisible spirit.
There was no sign of the thin bird-like woman from the store, the mother he had assumed, or the grotesquely fat child that he had assumed was the girl's brother and the woman's son. Neither was there any sign of a father. Just the girl, her face passive and her eyes closed, head against the back of her pillow and her hair flowing out behind her as if drifting in a current. As if she, too, had drowned as Sai himself had so many years ago.
As always, his hands though intangible, itched to play go, his throat longed to speak of it, and he reached out desperately for the Hand of God, but his eyes stayed on this little western girl who had somehow come to play the role of Torajiro, and how young, how pale, and how alone she looked.
Slowly, as if there was no anticipation and no expectations, the girl's eyes opened. They were a very pretty color, like the emeralds of the emperor's palace, glittering in the sunlight. The strange bright lights of the ceiling sparkled inside them along with the sunlight, giving them a depth that Sai didn't know could exist in human eyes. They combined with her hair, her skin, her dark and thick eyelashes, and her delicate if western features, gave her the appearance of a well-crafted and highly expensive doll that one might give to a princess.
However, he thought as he looked at her, his pensive mood plummeting through his heart like a stone, there was no smile, only resignation and a dull and enduring despair that for Sai had ended in a river.
So naturally, the first thing Sai did when he looked over to her wasn't to introduce himself, the goban, ask what happened to Torajiro, and talk about the Hand of God and go, but promptly burst into tears while the girl, in some alarm and puzzled fascination, blinked over at him and asked some strange, lilting, question in a language he couldn't begin to understand.
Sai, later, would wish he hadn't started crying then, because it kept getting worse and if he had known he would start so early he would have shaken at the thought that he wouldn't be able to stop.
The story of the girl, which he began slowly but surely to put together, was a bleak one that became more tragic with every detail he uncovered. Once awake she was an oddly cheerful thing, undeterred by the lack of a common language between them and had eagerly taken on the task of introducing him to herself and her world through charades.
There was no asked question of why he was here, or how, if he would go away or what he wanted from her but instead an overjoyed and entirely too easy acceptance of her own haunting. As if she had been waiting all her life for something, anything, even a spirit that might devour her soul, to come by and just say hello.
(It had taken him a long time to stop sobbing after that, the girl, kindly, had snuck into the main quarters of the house and brought him back a box of what she called tissues in offering. Unfortunately, his intangible hands could not grip them, which of course only made him cry harder.)
Her name was Eru Lee Riri Potta, though this was not right, she used strange western syllables that did not exist in either Japanese or Chinese, and he knew as he tried desperately to form her name back to her with an encouraging an eager smile that he botched it terribly. She'd just looked strangely awed and touched that anyone had tried to say her name at all.
Her name later became shortened to Eru Lee which then shortened itself to simply Lee and she didn't seem to mind at all that all the other syllables of her name, all their hidden meanings, had scattered to the four winds.
She was… He believed she was an orphan, that the family she lived with were relatives, but not her mother and father. Or else, perhaps, he thought, she was an illegitimate daughter of the mother or else the father, though of the two of them he'd say she took more after the severe looking woman than the overblown walrus of a man. However, even then, she resembled neither them nor the fat boy closely.
They treated her as a servant, but not simply a servant, but the way barbarians would treat a slave.
They locked her in a dark cupboard, barely fit for storage let alone a human being, along with a faded bulky futon and a small glass bulb which cast a faded obnoxious light. She would sit there in the dark, for hours at a time that sometimes seemed to stretch into days, leaning against the wall and impressive drawings created of sticks of brightly colored wax she called crayons, and would unconcernedly babble and gesture and attempt to teach him English, learn Japanese and Chinese from him, and describe this modern western world of hers.
Then, when she was let out, she was hurled into the kitchen to prepare food that she herself was forbidden from eating, clean the house with a horrendous sucking creature powered by lighting which she called a vacuum, pulled weeds from the garden, and would wordlessly and without complaint perform any task given to her.
And they never said her name, not once. He listened for it intently, not only to refine it and pronounce it correctly inside his own mind but also just to hear someone say it. However, it was only sharp, monosyllabic commands accompanied by words he was sure were slurs of the vilest nature, hurled at the stoic little girl who would in turn say nothing at all.
Her eyes, when she looked at them, were flat and dead, devoid of any feeling whatsoever, and he thought once, she had tried to explain to him, that they were little more than puppets to her dangling from strings she couldn't see. Broken, absurd, toys who controlled her life like petty tyrants.
She was unnaturally brilliant, he had been a prodigy himself as a child, quickly rising through the ranks of the go world to be appointed as a candidate to instruct the emperor himself but even though his childhood was so long ago he knew that she surpassed him. Where he stumbled and stuttered over her language, so different from anything he'd known, she seemed to almost fly into his and transform it int other own strange dialect with delight. She didn't have to speak Japanese, didn't have to speak at all, you could tell just by looking in her eyes when she truly looked at you, sometimes he thought he could see a kami staring out of them.
However, she had nothing. She had no true home, no true loving kin, no friend at all in the world except, perhaps, for the foreign ghost who could barely shape his lips around her name. But whenever he said it, whenever he gave up and settled simply on Lee, she would grin so brightly as if he'd just gifted her with the moon and the stars themselves.
And each time he thought his heart broke just a little further, until he wondered, if by the end of this, there would be anything left.
So of course, even before they truly exchanged words and terms, before they exchanged anything at all, he gave her the only true meaningful gift he could think of. The only thing he had to offer, to Torajiro and to her, the gift of go.
He set up an imaginary goban between them, the one his soul had rested inside still in a store inside a great English city called London. They were inside of her small and dingy cupboard the only place she had any true privacy or comfort and were facing the long hours of the night until the woman would shriek at the girl again to prepare breakfast. Lee brought out a thick stack of unnaturally white paper she had stolen from the strange metal box that would write messages for you, crisp and thin at the edges, as well as a box of her colorful wax sticks as she watched him expectantly.
It was not a board, he thought at first with some sadness, not a true goban, but this was a girl who had nothing at all. It would be callous and cruel, he thought, to complain about the mere lack of a goban when go existed far beyond the board and the stones.
He pointed towards it with his fan, motioning both across and vertically, as he instructed in his own native tongue, "Nineteen lines across and nineteen lines vertically."
He watched as she nodded, and, with reverence, drew impeccably straight lines until the grid rested before them. She then looked up, motioning for him to continue, drawing a fond smile out of him even as a strange churning excitement overtook him at the thought of even teaching go.
It had been weeks since he had arrived in this new world, the summer days growing shorter and hotter, and there had been no word of go, no hint of it, no sign of its existence whatsoever. He had been so certain that go was eternal, perhaps even universal, but when he'd brought it up Lee had never seemed to have heard of it at all.
(Some part of him had despaired then, in a way that it had never feared or despaired before, for how could he find the Hand of God if he was the only one that remained. He had had to stifle his overwhelming fear as Lee had found herself ill while vacuuming and had promptly been slapped across the face by her aunt and forced her to clean up her own sick while shaking from the force of Sai's growing overwhelming anger.
Sai had learned then that his emotions had terrible consequences.)
"Good, excellent, Lee, that's a very fine goban," he grinned at her, as if they were sharing a secret between the two of them, and she grinned back because they were. Her family, she had mused when he first told her of the game, would not like go.
"Now, normally, we would have stones, white for one of us and black for the other," he said, and he wished that he could feel the weight of the stones, that Lee could feel the weight of the stones and see them for herself, but there were only crayons and he had to remind himself that go was not made of stones, "We take turns placing the stones at the intersections."
Here, with his fan, he pointed to one of the intersecting points on the grid, "Once you put it on though, the stones cannot be moved, only removed, when captured."
Here he pointed to each of the intersections surrounding the placement of his imaginary stones, "A stone is captured when the stone is surrounded by the other player's stone like so. The game lasts until neither of us wishes to make a move, and the territory of your stones is counted with the winner having the most territory."
He looked up, looking deep into her eyes to see how much of that she had caught, what had to be repeated and restated in some slow and clever way, but her eyes were clear and filled with a firm understanding. Relief, unbidden, trickled through him that at least this one small obstacle between him and go was set aside.
Finally, looking at him, in her strangely accented words she said, "This is nothing like chess."
"Chess?" he asked, and she pressed her hands together, then, with determination, took out another sheet of paper and drew an eight by eight grid, half the squares shaded in and half left blank, and then drew ornate pieces featuring small castles, horses, and crowned figures.
She then drew various patterns for the pieces on the paper, "The knight, that's the horse, can only move in an L-shape. The bishop diagonally in any number of spaces. The queen in any direction in any number of spaces. The pawn only one space. The rook in straight lines. Then the king in only one space just like the pawns. There's two players, one black, one white, you move pieces onto another player's space to capture them, with the goal being to capture and eliminate the king."
Sai stared at the paper for a moment, thinking, then said, "Ah, something like shogi then. Yes, I know a game like this."
He pursed his lips, looking at her sheet, then declared simply, "Go is better."
She laughed, apparently delighted by his firm insistence, causing him to flush and flail as he insisted, "It's true, Lee, go is far more complex, far more elegant, and far worthier of dedication and study than shogi. I've played both and would certainly know."
Lee just grinned, crossing her legs and leaning forward in a rather uncouth manner that he wouldn't normally believe could suit a little girl but suited her just fine, and she said, "Well then, let's get to it."
Then she looked at the stack paper though then at the board with some trepidation, "Although, this is going to take a while and take a hell of a lot of paper."
Sai, even though he privately sulked and despaired and agreed, couldn't help but brightly laugh at that and was glad, that at least, she was laughing too and not thinking that with the long nights in this cupboard of hers, she had more than enough time even for a game or two on paper.
That Fall, in the very early days of autumn when it was still well and truly summer, Lee and her cousin started their schooling with other children of similar ages. When Lee explained this with a shrug that morning as she trailed behind her three masters, talking to him under her breath in accented Japanese, he was delighted.
"Essentially, I'm going to be going to this place until I'm eighteen," she said with a shrug, "Then god only knows the Dursleys aren't going to be paying for any higher education and are likely going to throw me on the street to become a hooker."
Sai flushed, aghast, and flailed dramatically, "Lee, where did you even learn that word?!"
He had certainly never gone around talking to her about prostitutes or even geisha.
"Television," she responded obliviously with a shrug, speaking of the strange metal box with the moving pictures of people, showing western dramas to audiences all over the country, and sometimes, on obscure channels in the middle of the night when she managed to pick the lock to her cupboard, dramas in the strange modern version of Japanese that they must be speaking in this new age.
"Point is, this is going to be the rest of my life," Lee said, not necessarily enthused but not reluctant either, as if this meant nothing to her.
"But there will be other children there, other people?"
Her red eyebrows raised, as they often did, as she was dubious about his enthusiasm and optimism. Finally, she said, "I've met other people before, Sai, it's never gone particularly well."
He was about to respond to that but then they were there, the little leering fat boy making faces at Lee while his parents coddled over him and pressed affectionate and proud kisses to his forehead. Lee they simply shoved into the building without even glancing at twice. Worse, Lee didn't seem to have expected any different.
Sai wondered to himself as he looked after them leaving her behind if he had ever hated a group of human beings more than he had these spineless, slavenly, caricatures of human beings that Lee called her relatives.
Stepping inside it was so different from the rooms in which Sai himself had once been educated in the art of calligraphy, mathematics, and go. There were many children for the single instructor, and instead of a wealthy educated man at the front of the class it was an older woman dressed in strange western clothes that had once been reserved for men, the children all appeared equal in age and were roughly split evenly between boys and girls. Most sported similar western features to Lily and her cousin but a few had darker skin or else looked as if they could have been from China or Korea.
The room was filled with small writing desks, one for each student, great glass windows peering out onto a play yard, and a great white wall where strange and incomprehensible messages in English were written.
Perhaps more exciting, or personally exciting, than this though was the feeling of potential in the air. This, he realized, was probably Lee's first real chance to see and speak with people who weren't her relatives. Her first chance to make real and true friends and branch out into the world.
Perhaps, Sai thought with some guilty excitement, some of them were budding go players themselves or had parents who played or knew of people who played go.
Lee was shoved forward into a desk, knocking into a little girl who gave her a bizarre look, as her bulky cousin snickered behind her, "Watch where you're going, crazy freak."
Lee grimaced, brushed off her shirt, and barely spared a glance for the girl whose desk she had run into before searching for the desk with her name written on it in great, simple, English characters.
The flower of hope inside of Sai's spirit wilted ever so slightly.
Lee, at her desk, tapped on a sheet of paper, a familiar nineteen by nineteen grid drawn on the lined surface and wrote in wobbling, freshly learned, kanji studied in the dark hours of the night, "White or black?"
It didn't take her cousin much time at all. Sai wondered if he'd been waiting for this, preparing for it, because on the first day he was walking around the school yard screaming that his cousin Lee was a crazy freak who spent her time speaking in gibberish to her imaginary friends.
When he'd first put that together, or rather, when he'd asked Lee exactly what it was they were saying one day after the fat boy and his skinny friend had chased her with sticks until she'd climbed up on one of the play structures where they couldn't reach her, he'd felt not only angry but almost irrationally guilty.
He spoke to her so often in broad daylight and she'd answer back and he'd forgotten that he wasn't real, that no one else could see him, and that of course she'd look like she was talking to herself in a language none of them could understand.
Not only was he using her, in some sense, to appease his own overpowering need for go but his very existence was pushing her away from having any kind of meaningful relationship with anyone.
He wondered, if he hadn't been here, if things might have been different.
Lee had just thrown her head back and laughed, long and hard, and with eyes twinkling had said, "Oh, I don't think so, Dudders simply can't help being Dudders. Besides, my life exists in such a way that if I didn't come across a haunted goban then I would have come across a haunted ouija board and I still would be a crazy freak."
She'd looked at him then, assessing him fondly in his clothes from ages upon ages ago, and remarked, "Besides, Sai, you're far realer than the rest of them anyway."
He still wilted with guilt, would look off into the distance and think over the thousands and thousands of paths her life might have taken when she was inside the classroom doing school work and too busy to talk to him, but he couldn't help but feel both lighter and brighter for what she had said.
He had been close with Torajiro, the man had given Sai so many games of go with many truly able players, but he had still only ever been a strange and ancient spirit to the man. To Lee, Fujiwara no Sai was the true man, and the world was otherwise filled with solid ghosts.
The go games continued during the long nights as well as during the school days. Any time not spent running from her cousin, doing school work, or else performing the household chores was spent in the thrall of go.
The girl had more than a little natural talent for it, something that pleased Sai immensely, and slowly but surely their games moved on from the very simple and painful basics to animate teaching games. She would transform during games, from a small and endearing child to a still force of nature, like a great mountain staring down at the earth with endless green eyes.
As the weeks turned into months, and halted fragmented sentences turned into conversations between them, he thought that in her own way she looked more like a kami rather than less.
It almost wasn't surprising when blatant more supernatural acts began to show themselves. Elements would twist to her whim, the wind would catch under her feet and lift her to the rooftops and away from Dudley and his friends, in the middle of go games she would instinctively breath out illusions to turn the teacher's attention away from her and the make-shift boards between the two of them.
Lee did not even seem to notice, and when he noted these instances for him, she didn't seem to care.
She just shrugged, stuffing one of the elderly babysitter Mrs. Figg's cookies into her mouth as cats circled about her feet, and said in Japanese directly looking at Sai (despite Mrs. Figg's clear discomfort at Lee's continued relationships with her imaginary friend), "Well, I'm not sure reality's all that real anyway, Sai."
She counted off on her pale, thin fingers, "I mean, first there's the whole indentured servant thing and then my relatives in general, I don't think people aren't supposed to be that one-dimensional. Second, there was the whole getting possessed by an ancient Japanese Heian era go ghost, that's not supposed to happen either. Plus, tiny surreal things have been happening on almost a daily basis. Clearly, Sai, reality's just some shoddy construction that's slowly but surely falling apart without anything any of us can do about it."
"Ellie, dear, could you say that again in English?" Mrs. Figg asked, blinking behind thick glasses, "I'm afraid I didn't quite catch that."
Lee blinked, once, then twice, at the woman before shortly and clearly saying, "No."
That explanation was not really one that he had expected or liked. However, he'd also learned that it was very difficult to argue with Lee especially when nothing she said was entirely wrong. That didn't mean he hadn't fidgeted awkwardly on the woman's couch, once again stared at by all of the cats who batted at his invisible legs, and tried almost desperately to convince Lee that the world was real and filled with possibilities she just hadn't seen yet.
Still, as always, there was go. And if go and Sai were the only truly real things in her world, well, then even Sai would admit that the game of go was the closest man could ever come to truly touching the divine.
However, that didn't make the world intangible, it didn't make Sai real, and it didn't make little bright-haired Lee truly human.
There was also… A stain on her soul, similar in a strange way to Torajiro's stain of blood on the goban. Sai had barely noticed it at first, didn't notice at all in those first few months, but there was something just underneath the surface of her own overwhelming spiritual aura, just under the skin, that writhed and hissed in barely controlled anger.
Lee didn't seem to notice this at all, even when, one dark night Sai's eyes had been pulled to the lightning bolt scar on her forehead. The one she had said had been given to her in a car accident but Sai wondered if it hadn't been given to her by something else, by a god or else a demon.
She never focused on herself though, her soul, her unnatural talents, but instead would always look to him with wide and curious eyes and would ask in a high, childish, voice, "What is it you're looking for, Sai?"
They walked back from school, slowly after having lost Dudley and Piers along the way, and Sai took in the autumn leaves drifting the ground, at once similar to those from his home country and yet so very different.
"What am I looking for?" he repeated, and she nodded, giving him a moment to tap his fan against his lips and consider the question. The answer, of course, was obvious as it had always been obvious.
"I'm searching for the Hand of God."
"The Hand of God?" Lee asked, shoving her hands into the pockets of her western trousers and Sai's smile turned into a grin.
"The Divine Move," Sai explained, "The perfect game of go in which every move leads one to a perfect victory and a move that cannot be contested. I have lingered in this world for a thousand years for that single game."
This last was said stoically, the weight of those years in the goban weighing down on his spirit, and with the strange scent of non-present wisteria blossoms he wondered if he would be waiting a thousand more still.
Lee however stopped walking, looked at him almost in awe, eyes growing wider still and mouth falling open. Finally, after a moment, she asked, "So, the meaning of life is go? The perfect game of go?"
Sai hesitated, grimaced, and spluttered, "Well, it's the meaning of my life and afterlife."
She however didn't seem to hear, but rather looked past him, out into the world and all its wonders, "I had always thought there wasn't any meaning. That any attempt to find meaning would end in tragedy, that we all just flail about and look for a purpose that isn't there. But… Go, go can be found, be played, be done, in go life can have more than meaning…"
She grinned, then, rushed forward and took his hands in hers, uncaring that they slipped through his transparent fingers, "I'll help, Sai, I'll do everything I can and together we'll find it! I promise we'll find it!"
And Sai, taking in her earnestness, didn't know if he wanted to laugh or cry.
"If we're going to find other, real, go players then it's probably going to be in Chinatown," Lee reasoned as, instead of going to school, Lee left an illusion of her presence and boarded local transit into London.
"Oh," Sai simply said, looking down at her and noting how small she looked amongst all of the other passengers, "Any idea where?"
"Nope," Lee said with a large grin, "But I'm sure we'll find someone eventually. After all, it's your destiny."
They didn't at first, even when then train then the strange underground train took them to an odd section of the modern city with trapping of China amongst the towering silver buildings and painted black streets. Lee wandered, speaking in her hideously antiquated Chinese picked up from Sai to baffled merchants and passersby, searching through streets and restaurants for even a hint of go.
Lee's chess, Sai thought somewhat petulantly, they saw plenty of in the various London parks often played between pairs of elderly western men. There were even flyers for chess competitions for children, he saw one day in despair. Where there was a drought of go there was a clear overabundance of chess.
Lee however, was undeterred. Perhaps it was because nothing in her life had ever come simply or easy, perhaps it was because she had nowhere else to be or anything else to do, or perhaps it was because she had well and truly seen aiding Sai as her divine quest much in the way Torajiro had chosen to aid Sai rather than play go for himself.
The world, he thought to himself, was still so very strange. There were countless plays inside of tiny boxes filled with lightning, voices which spoke in other smaller boxes out of steel netting, great horseless carriages that raced through the streets at speeds far faster than any team of horses could manage.
Three days of wandering alone through the city, of entering every dim sum restaurant and every butcher's shop, they found a small rickety parlor above an Indian restaurant seemingly dedicated to the playing of go filled with aged Chinese men.
It was…
Seeing goban again, seeing black and white stones and hearing them click upon the surface of true wood, tears had filled in his eyes. Go had not vanished from the face of the earth, he'd thought with unbearable relief, it was still here, even a land as far as this go still breathed.
They turned their heads slowly from a game between two men, two amateurs by the look of the board with white poised to win, and turned to look at the small western girl who by all rights should have been in school.
Lee pointed across to them, then to an empty goban, and in the antiquated Chinese of Sai's lifetime, declared, "I would like a game."
They blinked, stared at her harder, one even rubbed his eyes, and then laughed. Sai bristled unconsciously, aware that Lee did not look like a go player, that they couldn't see Sai inside of her soul or her own gift for the game, but bristling all the same at their clear dismissal.
Lee moved forward, parted the mob and sat down at the empty board, then, casting an indomitable green-eyed look at them, she repeated, "I'd like a game, please."
After some tittering and joking among themselves, asking who this little girl was supposed to be and wondering if someone should call her mother, one of the men sat across from her and asked, "Are you sure you know how to play go, little girl?"
"Yes," Lee said simply, "And I am very good."
The man grinned, amused, and asked, "What handicap? And shouldn't you be in school?"
"No handicap," Lee said, looking for all the world like an emperor in the skin of a little girl, ignoring the man's raised eyebrows at her gall, "And I'm right where I should be. Go is frowned upon inside of great learning establishments."
"Is that so?" the man asked before noting, "Your Chinese is very good. Where did you learn?"
"Thank you," she said, rather respectfully for her, and added "I was taught by the go instructor to the emperor of Japan from a thousand years ago."
The man laughed, ignoring Lee's rather petulant frown at having the unbelievable truth dismissed so easily out of hand, "No handicap and taught by and go instructor to the Japanese emperor. Well, I tell you what, you give me a number to call your mother and I'll teach you how to play go."
Lee's eyebrows raised, fingers drumming against the goban, and then she asked, "How about we make a deal?"
She pointed to him, "We play, and if you win, I give you the number to call my mother and I never come back, and if I win, then you ask my most humble forgiveness, pay for my lunch, and never ask about calling my family again."
The men laughed at her presumptuousness even while Sai, invisible, felt himself flush and fluster at Lee's brazen dramatics with this group of strangers. Lee however seemed to feed off it, her smile only growing, staring down her opponent and waiting for him to fall helplessly into her trap.
To Sai, she looked over and grinned, switching to Japanese to ask, "Well, Sai, are you ready to pity some fools?"
Sai looked towards the heavens, wondering how he'd managed to get into this mess when all he'd really wanted was go, but then turned towards the game and decided that there was nothing for it. And that, perhaps, they really should learn how to respect even someone like Lee.
Naturally at the end of the game, they did not end up calling Lily's aunt.
After the first ten games, all in that afternoon by baffled then eager amateur go enthusiasts, they stopped asking question altogether and instead started piling homemade food on her plate and referring to her as a divine prodigy of go, this strange English little girl who spoke antiquated Chinese with a dexterity and fluidity that was a mystery to all.
Sai wondered if there had ever been a place where Lee had looked so natural in her own skin, if only because the setting was so very unnatural.
"I wish my grandson had interest in go like you," one of the men bemoaned after his rather heavy loss at the hands of a girl who did not even know how to place the pieces on the goban, "All he does is play football, he considers go a game of old Chinese men."
Lee just nodded in sympathy, sipping at her tea as if she was a great sage, before saying, "My cousin has no interest in anything besides beating up children smaller and more helpless than himself."
The man laughed, considering this to be a joke or an exaggeration, Sai, unseen, blanched.
Lee, crossing her arms and surveying the board, preparing herself to parrot Sai's explanations and teaching back to the man, asked, "So, is there anywhere else around here to play go?"
The man, as well as those hovered around them, laughed, "At your level? In England? I don't know if you've noticed but go has yet to truly catch on in the west. You'd have to go to China, Kora, or Japan if you want to play go."
"If you were in China I'd tell you to go and become a professional," an elderly man with glasses, inspecting the board in front of them, joked with a laugh, "Hell, I'd buy you the plane tickets to get there myself."
Lee looked stunned, like the wind had been knocked out of her, slowly, her hands shaking she asked, "I could… leave England?"
Sai wondered if she'd ever thought that before, that there was a world outside of her country, that she could go and travel there, travel even to Sai's homeland in Japan and see Kyoto for herself. She was not trapped in this country, not forever.
"With a talent yours kid," one of the man said, in stilted fragmented English as he slapped her on the shoulders, "Though you'll really have to work on not sounding like the venerable Confucius."
Lee grinned, eyes full of wonder and distant kingdoms, and a future with only go and the east inside of it.
Nearly every day Lee would skip lessons to play go with the old men in London. Sai, constantly flickered between excitement over go even go with amateurs and petrifying guilt that he was so very clearly using Lee for his own ends. This wasn't Lee's future, this wasn't her life, and she was throwing everything away just so that she could chase after a shadow of Sai's own ambitions.
Perhaps though, he'd think to himself, she looked happier there. Even allowing Sai to play through her or them in a back corner playing each other against a real goban with Lee's explanation to the men of playing herself she would smile and it would look more real than it ever had before.
There was pride in her, not a bad sort of pride, the good needed pride in one's life and one's work that glittered inside of her. Go, this place, was responsible for that.
Still, winter came and went, then spring with it, and finally it was early summer. School ended and, in the middle of June on Dudley Dursleys birthday, on a day Mrs. Figg was sadly unavailable, the family, Lee, and Piers were taken to something called a zoo.
"The zoo's fine," Lee said in the cramped back seat to Sai who was sitting halfway in the trunk behind her, ignoring as Dudley repeatedly punched her in the ribs, "Plenty of interesting animals from all sorts of places, plus, nobody will want to watch us so I'm sure we can get a solid game of go in."
Sai wondered, for a moment, if he was a bad influence that Lee's first thought on going anywhere was the number of games of go one could fit into that time frame.
"Girl, stop babbling gibberish to yourself!" her uncle barked in English, eyes flashing in the rearview mirror. For a horrible moment, Sai wondered if the man could somehow see him in that thing.
Lee paid no mind, "It'll be fun, we'll run away from Dudley, get lost for a few hours, go back home, and then tomorrow be back in London. Hey, we may even get to see a panda!"
"Girl, what did I say about the gibberish!"
As it was, fleeing into the zoo at the first opportunity with Dudley and the skinny one on their heels they did not end up seeing a panda. Instead they passed exhibits of tigers, bears, lions, and all sorts of animals that Sai had never heard of. Lee, with a grin, sketched out the beginnings of a game of go in her mystically never-ending notebook of go games between them.
Of course, that was, until she started hissing.
"Sorry, Lee, I didn't catch that last move," Sai said, looking down at her, but she was looking, blinking across at a snake and hissed again in surprise.
She closed the notebook, looked up at him in shock, and said, "Sai, I think I can talk to snakes!"
"You can talk to snakes?" Sai asked, now looking across at the python in the glass tank staring back at Lee with undisguised interest.
"I've never talked to snakes before," Lee said with wonder, pressing her face against the glass, "I don't think I've talked to any animal before. I'd always assumed they weren't sentient but oh… Oh… If they are then this is all very very bad."
"What's he saying?" Sai asked, leaning in closer to get a better look, the snakes eyes, somehow, flickered over to him and it could have just been Sai, but he swore it flicked its tongue out at him in amusement.
Sai didn't think he liked snakes, even when he was already safely dead.
Lee hissed delightedly at her latest and greatest friend, before beaming up at Sai, "He says he's from Brazil, that people are mostly boring, his cage is small, but at least he gets fed regularly."
Sai wondered if Lee realized how much of that applied to her own life.
She paused, looked at the snake closer, stared directly into its slitted yellow eyes, then said whispered, "He says he wants to go home."
It was staring into he tank, ceasing movement for a good solid few minutes, that Dudley and Piers finally caught up to them.
"Look, Piers, she's gone and made friends with a snake," Dudley proclaimed entirely too loudly, ignoring the way Lee's fingers stiffened against the glass.
"Is she hissing at it?" Piers asked.
Dudley barged over, tapping on the glass and shouting at a volume that was almost screaming, "Hey, freak, aren't you going to introduce us to your new friend?"
Lee's eyes darkened, her expression fell flat, and her voice was not that of a little girl as she answered a clear and unshakeable, "No, Dudders, I won't."
Dudley shoved Lee against the glass, rattling it and causing the snake to hiss and retreat further into its den, "Why? Does even a snake think you're a freak?"
Lifted higher than Dudley, when pressed on the glass, she stared down at him without a hint of fear, compassion, or mercy in her god's eyes, "No, Dudders, it's because a pitiful creature like you isn't worth even a snake's time."
He punched her in the stomach, and as she wheezed and fell into his fist, she laughed, the glass behind her vanishing and the python lunging out and past her. Dudley shrieked, dropped his cousin as he, Piers, and all the rest scampered away from her.
"Girl, what in god's name happened!" Sai could hear her uncle shouting even as Dudley ran towards them screaming, "Dad, the freak set a snake on me!"
Lee, on the ground now, curled in on herself laughed, fell into utter hysterics even as the snake gave her a nod and a grateful hiss before continuing on his way. Sai tried to put a hand on her shoulder, reach out and help her up, but as always his hands pushed through her skin.
Lee stood on her own, wiping at her lips, and giving him a rather wry and amused look, "It's a long way to Brazil but I hope he makes it."
Even then, from what he knew of her family and her home and his own powerlessness to help her in any meaningful way other than go, he asked, "But Lee, what will happen to you?"
She searched the crowds, eyes landing on her petrified aunt and her red faced furious uncle, and she said distantly, "This, I think, is as good a hill as any to die on."
Lee had said death first, Sai hadn't thought that, but when she got home he wondered if she hadn't seen it more clearly than he ever had. They put her in the cupboard, first for the night, and then longer. In the morning they came out and shoved her into the bathroom to give her just enough time to do her ablutions and use the toilet, and then she was shoved right back in.
Every few hours into the bathroom, but never anywhere else.
A few days in he could almost see her growing thinner, her sentences started to run together in a mix of English, Chinese, and Japanese, and it was as if she was wasting away before his very eyes. As Torajiro had wasted away before his eyes with Sai helpless to stop it.
"Lee," he said, his voice cracking under the desperation and the grief, and even the grief didn't make her sick anymore, just caused her to pale ever so slightly, "Lee, you must get out, get out and eat something."
She stared ahead, not even seeming to acknowledge his presence.
"Lee, please, I know you can do it, I've seen you do so much…"
Finally, her eyes, so unnaturally dull, looked over at him and she simply asked, "Why?"
"What?"
"What's the point?" she asked, and she seemed… so old, too old, in her child's body, "There's no go in England, there's no me in England, not really. I am the cog that doesn't fit, can't fit, and what if Japan is no different? No, I know Japan will be no different."
She tilted her head towards the ceiling of the cupboard, as if she could stare through it and see the stars, "I will wander for eternity, Sai, endlessly as you do searching for something I can't see and can't believe in. And I… I am so tired."
"That's not true, Lee!"
She just looked at him, smiled compassionately and with pity, as if she knew some great truth that he was too afraid and too human to see for himself, and asked, "Was there a place for you in the emperor's courts, Sai? Was there room for you in Torajiro's soul?"
He wished he could touch her, wished he could get out and break her out and shake her, he wished he could take her away from this place and throw her relatives into a pit but all he could do was lean over her and plead, "You're different! You're not me and you're not Torajiro, Lee! You can be different, you can make your own path, you can find it for yourself and for me! I believe you can do it, no, I know you can do it!"
Her eyes fluttered shut, that smile still on her lips, and if she was more awake and not sinking into despair he knew that she would tell him something along the lines of, "That's nice, Sai."
But she would not believe him.
The book of go, beside her, filled with handdrawn games, lay untouched in the darkness.
And the stain, that pit of miasma on her forehead, flared into life.
Sai felt himself falling into darkness, falling forward into Lee's head, pulled there by some magnetic force. There, blinking, finding himself crawling on the floor on hands and knees he looked up to see a tall, dark haired, pale-eyed, western man looking down on him in contempt.
No, not just him, next to him Lee was picking herself off the floor and standing, looking across at him with dark and challenging eyes.
"Eleanor Lily Potter," the man said, a cruel edge to his smile, "How wonderful to finally meet you face to face."
"My friends call me Lee," Lee informed him as she picked Sai up off the floor, and he gaped because she did pick him up, her hands didn't slip through him and for once, in some strange manner, he felt tangible.
The man seemed amused by this, but his amusement, Sai thought, was not something to covet, "I am not your friend."
He paused then, examined her, then glanced over at Sai, finally he asked, "Do you have any idea who I am?"
"Not particularly," Lee said, brushing herself off, before remarking with her usual blasé attitude that was not appreciated in a setting like this, "Someone entirely too overdramatic for one thing."
Lee then nodded towards Sai, "And let me tell you, I have high standards for drama."
Sai couldn't help but gape at that, flush, then flail as he insisted, "Lee, I am not overdramatic!"
"Sai, all you do is overreact to things," Lee said, looking slightly confused by his fussing, "I mean, it's nice to have someone react to anything I say or do, but even you have to admit that you overdo it ninety percent of the time."
"But I…"
"Are you two quite finished?!" the man asked, though Sai couldn't help but think it was a command, the man had such… presence to him. Their ominous surroundings, a dark temple of some kind, only seemed to emphasize this.
Lee however, didn't seem to care in the slightest, "I'm sorry, I had assumed you were quite finished."
And as their surroundings caught fire, transformed into a small western home with a red headed woman looking remarkably like Lee lying with glazed eyes, dead, next to a burning cradle, Sai and Lee made their first acquaintance with the undying spirit of Tom Marvolo Riddle.
A man who wanted anything but go.
Lee was human, the man said, but an exceptional human born with great innate abilities that were lost on the likes of Sai. He explained that her mother and father had been the same, hidden away from the normal populace, but that they had died and Lee had inconceivably been left in her abusive relatives care.
He said, quite plainly, that he had murdered them both and attempted and failed to murder Lee. He said it as if he was proud of this, or else slightly annoyed at the failed nature of his attempt, Lee had said nothing.
He dreamed of revolution, of returning to a material body and pillaging the mortal plane as something more than misplaced miasma. In London he forced their eyes away from small go parlors and aging Chinese men and towards great hidden kingdoms of miracles where humans walked about in broad daylight performing wonders that outmatched even the strange innovations of the modern era.
Lee and Sai both stared out at the crowds in silent wonder, watching as the man directed them confidently towards banks, book shops, and more to learn what had happened to him in the ten years that he had been resting underneath Lee's skin.
It was Lee though, who pointed out plainly and simply, "There's no go."
The man stopped, translucent in the middle of the street, already having walked forward past Lee and Sai into the mob (and Sai didn't know how he stood it, whenever Sai wandered too far from Lee he felt a pang, more, he felt insignificant and imaginary, as if he needed one person at least to be able to see and believe in him or else he'd stop existing at all). He turned back, pale eyes burning, and he asked with a sneer, "What on earth does that have to do with anything?"
"Go is everything," Lee said, hands in pockets, and looking at him with such clear eyes that held no room for doubt, "Go is life's ultimate and highest purpose."
"Go is a game," the man said, rather dully, as if Lee was missing something dreadfully important. Sai opened his mouth to interrupt, to say that go was anything but a simple game, but was in fact the game of all games but Lee beat him to it.
"So is revolution, comrade," Lee then looked him straight in the eye, "We all play games for meaning, mine just happens to take the shape of go."
"And what, exactly, is that supposed to mean?" he asked in irritation, looking as if he wished nothing more than to be tangible so that he could grip her by the throat and attempt to murder her once again.
"It means that I'll help you as best as I can, I'll try to get you a body and leave you to your own devices, but only as long as our goals, our games, aren't mutually exclusive," Lee said, "If there's no go in this wizarding world of yours, then I can't stay here."
"Your go," the man sneered, pointedly looking at Sai now, giving a derisive laugh, "It's hardly your go, is it Ellie? Your go belongs to Fujiwara no Sai, you're just his mortal puppet, a tool to steal his genius and turn it into your fame."
Those words, brutally honest, were a knife in Sai's heart. No, they were the water in his lungs as he sunk further and further into the river. However, Lee, as always, was unmoved, having considered this terrible truth long ago and moved past it as she always did.
"Then I'm just his mortal puppet," Lee said with a smile, "And if that's my destiny then that's my destiny. Destiny, after all, makes no promises to be kind. To you, to Sai, or even to me."
The weeks wore on, the man seethed, Lee endured, and Sai played go.
Inside the world of Lee's dreams the three of them would often meet, and more often than not, it would be with a goban between Lee and himself while the man lurked like a spider yokai in the shadows. His eyes, always, burned like bright little stars as he watched for some sign of weakness.
He goaded her, pleaded with her, and attempted to seduce her into returning to his own world time again, forsaking go and Sai and delivering him a mortal body to wreak havoc on the world. Lee, instead, would begin a game with joseki and bow politely to Sai.
She did not bow before Tom Marvolo Riddle.
The summer passed, life moved on, Lee played go with elderly immigrants in this strange western land, attended school, and waited for the future to arrive in whatever form it chose to take.
Then, one day, with Lee distracted by her own games and the man watching them with stony eyes and that ever present anger, Sai did something that surprised himself. He turned to the man and asked in English, "Would you care for a game?"
He blinked, looked over at Sai, looking a touch amused, insulted, and just a little bit confused, "What?"
"Go, have you ever played?" Sai asked but the man just smiled.
"I have played and am familiar with chess," he answered, "But I can't say I've ever even heard of this go of yours. However, I have no interest in trying."
"Why not?"
"Because that, as your Lee has so helpfully pointed out, is not the game I play," he said with a sneer, "I play with pawns and kings and revolutions, not stones."
"Let's play a game," Sai said instead, motioning towards an empty table and a goban, "You may learn something from it."
The man scoffed but sat down across from him, and for a moment Sai imagined that they both had bodies to themselves, that they could reach into the pouch and withdraw the needed stones, but of course neither could and so they would have to play by memory.
The first time, predictably, Sai slaughtered him and the man seemed entirely unimpressed with the results. His dark eyebrows simply rose, he gave Sai a rather sardonic expression, and silently asked if he had done his duty.
Sai simply asked, "Let's try again, shall we?"
They played again, matching Lee game for game as she talked with her own men, and he thought, at some point, that the man may have seen a flicker of what go truly was resting beneath the stones and the goban. In his eyes, reflected there even dimly, was the soul of go and the shadow of the Hand of God.
"Why exactly do you, a malign spirit, want this revolution so badly as to linger here?" Sai asked halfway through their third game. The man caught on quickly, even without the physical and visible pieces in front of him he was frighteningly clever and tactical minded. He would be a great player, Sai thought to himself, if only he let himself become one.
"Revolution is not why I linger," the man said with a rather amused huff, "The revolution is merely… convenient. What about you, did you really force your own soul into haunting the earth just for a game?"
"Go is not just a game," Sai corrected.
"I hate to insult you, but it is," the man said, "Your Lee may not speak kindly of my revolution but that doesn't make your own ambitions any less ridiculous than mine."
Sai had the feeling, staring at the man, that they would never understand each other. This was not the kind of man to search for enlightenment, through go or anything else, similarly, Sai was never a man who had hungered for power or let his own bitterness control him.
"It's a pity you've corrupted her," the man mused, nodding over towards Lee, "She could have been so very useful."
"What do you mean?" Sai asked, for a moment, the man said nothing.
Finally, still looking at the girl, he said, "She is very special, there is a prophecy that was supposed to be about her, written for someone else instead, that predicts she will have great and terrible power. Enough power, even, to slay a dark lord."
"And here she is, trapped among muggles," the man said with a sneer, "I never would have believed it."
Sai wanted to say so much to ask, to ask about the prophecy, about what the man meant, and maybe where else Lee could go but all he could think to say was that, "She can't stay here."
For a moment the man said nothing and finally, after far too long, turned his attention back to Sai and said with a deflated and almost defeated sigh, "No, she can't stay here."
It was so clear to both of them, that no matter their differences or their agendas, Lee's future did not lie inside of this place.
"Lee," Sai said as soon as they were in the cupboard that night, he tried to take her hands in his, forgetting himself and slipping through as he gently repeated, "Lee, it's time."
"Time for what?" she asked, blinking at him as well as the man behind him who stood in the doorway, looming over them like the hurricane that had yet to hit their shores. A great and unseen magnet that would one day, inevitably, draw them back to this small dark island.
"Time to leave England," Sai said.
"Time to leave?" she asked, eyes wide and confused, but he stopped her before she could ask. Before he could point out that her relatives would undoubtedly destroy her, that she could not belong in this place but perhaps could belong somewhere.
"Take your books, take your drawings, take our games and we'll go to Hokkaido. I'll show you where Torajiro lived, I'll show you everything and we will play go together and play it professionally. We'll find people who will look you in the eye and will not flinch, who will play go with you and with me, and we will shine."
His hands rested on hers, hers pale and visible through his, and he promised, "Together, somehow, someday, we'll find the Hand of God."
Author's Note: Written for the 4200th review of "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" where Vanity Maxwell asked for a fic featuring a crossover of Hikaru no Go and Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus. So we have this and my god Sai is wonderful and has so many feels. Unnaturally obsessed with go, perhaps, but you go man (both in terms of the game and the verb).
Thanks for reading, reviews are much appreciated.
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or Hikaru no Go