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Let Her Paint an Inch Thick, To This Favour She Must Come
Her eyes follow you, and you do not know what emotion is in them. Oh you know what she's thinking, and she knows what you're thinking, and knows that you know what she's thinking and you know she knows you know her thoughts. And it loops and loops and curls in on itself until there's a strange stillness and a knot of paradoxical uncertainty. You are not open books for each other, but instead something rather like the moon and its reflection in the water and a million fun-house mirrors all alongside.
You should find this easier to bear than the open books that do populate the house, full of awe and pity, gratitude and something like fear. Still you avoid her even more than the rest, and her eyes follow you, and you think she must be calculating something.
There is a thought you know as your own. Anna, oh Anna: you deserved so much more than this. I wanted to give you much more than this.
It was your own, wasn't it?
Her beads rustle as she approaches, and she puts a hand to your face. And you close your eyes as she snatches the rosary and casts it out all around you.
"Do you ever think," you once ask a face that looks just like yours, "That there might have been another way? Some way we could have figured this out where she would have forgiven me? That, if only..."
You feel the expression on your face, the muscles tensing and features screwing tight, but in the man who was your reflection just looks back serene and shrugs with a half-smile "No," he says.
There should be something more you can say, but the words stick in your craw, and you just lean forward over the sink and rest your head against the mirror. Your eyes close. Your head buzzes. Why is he so damn accepting, you wonder. Wasn't he you? Didn't he want to win, to live, didn't he have things to fight for too?
"Oh, here," the man you killed says fondly. "Look at it this way. You got the happy ending, right? What you were fighting for, and everything you'd wanted. And so what if there were some unpleasant things in the meantime? It's not like you or her or everyone's dead."
Yet, you want to say, yet, and you feel her enter the room, your feedback loop. The buzzing in your head deafens you and puts you to rest as you feel another oni being born.
If the man you killed was alive, you wonder: would he tell you to take care of her?
Does it matter if you're him?
And you wonder, distantly, ah, so is this guilt, then?
They meet in corridors with her when you cannot notice, little rebels and their princess. "Something went wrong," Tao Ren says flatly.
Kino snorts, and who knew that old woman would still be around. "That implies that we knew what the results would be in the first place."
It's a rehashed conversation, becoming old ground. Take a soul and split it in halves--let one develop with its original intentions and ambitions and insanity and obscure powers to make any man tremble, and let the other take and develop into a high perfection the other's sympathetic and good nature. When recombined, what shall the result be?
What shall the poor rebels do? They conspire further, spinning out plots.
Manta, poor Manta, worn smoother under the weight of his distress and a life hiding around the corners of power; and yet he still takes time to worry about those other than himself. He reaches up and tugs on the princess' sleeve. "Anna, you look tired. Are you alright?"
Kino snorts derisively again.
For extra, let the pathetic soul in question, and the women he thinks as his wife, both have reishi. What fun!
Tao Ren frowns. "No strategy yet?"
Anna opens her eyes, solemn. "Nothing's been revealed to me. Not yet. I have been spending most of my time in the realm of No-Mind--"
"Careful you don't lose yourself there, girl. Another Bodhisattva's all well and good, but won't help us deal with your husband at all."
"I can summon forth spirits, be it from paradise or the next life," Anna says. "No one knows the ways of the Six Realms as well as I, and how to balance them. I will be fine."
A day of many oni, and you're exhausted, depleted, and she looks back at you when you open your eyes.
A damp wet cloth rests on your forehead, but you smell the steam of boiling water. She shifts, you hear the rustle of her legs in her skirts, and you see the lattice patterns on the traditional doors. A sickroom, you think, and then there's a memory: a birthing room. You were once born in a room like this.
A birthing room. How appropriate.
She catches a thought of yours before you do, and frowns. "Don't do that. I've done plenty worse than you, and I still can if you cross me."
"Oh? Have you?" you ask.
She wrings out another cloth and replaces it on your head. Ah, this will be how she kills you, watching you drain your energy with oni.
She hasn't always been, but for a long time she's been ridiculously strong.
"You've done horrible things, then? As bad as kill a King and marry his brother?"
You are all teeth and smiles. Before she can reflect you back, her face shutters, and she slips away again.
When you had proposed to her, and then taken it back--then it was that she had accepted. There is a reason, she had said. So I am doing it for myself. Not for you.
Remember that.
There is a path nearby your house, lined with statues of Jizo. People used to come, but since you moved in, no one has, and the bibs on the stone have faded already from red to white.
For a while, there were plenty, and you just assigned one each to each oni that you two together created. Like children. That then were dispatched.
Your children.
You know now that there must have been some you never got to meet, that appeared and were destroyed while you knowing. You think you might resent Anna a little for not telling you. Still, it is for only those monstrous children that you have looked in the face, met their rage and recognized, that you dedicate statues.
The path has run out of Jizo, so you call upon a earth spirit and make some more.
The oni were as much your children as the embryo that your wife is right now carrying, for all that you were the one to create them, give form to them. But Anna is their parent too, their father, for it is her fault too, you think.
You walk along the path, glowing spirits lighting your way, and you plan how you'll introduce your son to his siblings someday. Walk him down, stopping at each statue one by one, making him bow to greet his older siblings. Tell them happy things, about his days in school and friends and playthings you don't want to rend and devour.
On the path, following your thoughts, then Anna finds you.
"He doesn't even need to hear other people's bad thoughts to create oni anymore," Manta had explained, laying out his research and psychology books. "There's enough conflict and turmoil inside him to fuel it by himself.
"It's guilt," Manta looks down at his hands, adds softly. "After all this time. He's being consumed by it."
The old woman frowns around her pipe. "It's compassion. Too much of that damn fool boy's compassion. And it could kill us all."
Anna puts her hand on your cheek, draws near. You clutch it, close your eyes, and try not to think.
But: Ah, I love you, I love you. And then you wonder, Do you love me?
She promised she'd forgive you anything, so long as you made her Queen. But right now she's distant, a blank.
You both stand in the garden of your dead children. But that is all right: you'll have more. She'll be mother to a son, and you'll be mother to monsters. And the monster you are yourself, watch them die.
I love you, I love you, you gasp into her mind, but you already know it's no good. Continuing like this, you two, and you'll destroy everyone else on earth.
An oni large enough to devour the world. It will come.
And Anna slaps you.
She grabs your jaw, and wrenches your head violently around to face her. Her mind is back behind her eyes, and she thinks fiercely, No. Stop that. I will save you.
You want to believe her, but you can't. She can't. Not someone who killed and absorbed his own brother. And his brother was himself: you can't escape what either of you have done.
You crumple and cry. Her arms are gentle and soothing around you.
"Oh Yoh," she says. Calling your name, "Yoh."