ANI: MAJOR spoilers for Okami-den ahead, you have been warned. How I sorted out my feelings after finishing Okami-den; it was a very emotional time for me.
i.
They've saved the world, but something still isn't right.
The celestial plain is still ravaged from the fight 200 years ago, deep furrows gouged in the ground and trees bleeding bright red sap. The grass is withered and brown and the flowers are wilting still.
No one has been here for a long time.
At first, it seems as though Amaterasu's return is enough to rejuvenate the area. Where ever she steps, here as on the mortal plain, flowers bloom and grass grows, in bright colours and with bubbling, effervescent life. She heals the ground, remakes the trees, fills the dead rivers and streams with cold water. But when she steps away, when her concentration wavers, the light recedes from the areas she's healed, and they return to how they'd always been.
He wants it to be over, wants it to be done. He's spent a long time fighting, and a longer time waiting, and now that she's back he just wants them both to stay here, safe and happy. He wants it almost enough to override what he knows is right, what he knows they both must do.
Surrounded by a world that will not mend and air that somehow smells sour, he looks into golden eyes and knows with a heavy heart that their work is not yet done.
ii.
The secret of prophecy is not that it comes and goes: it is that it never leaves, clamours at the walls of his mind for his constant attention. It pounds at the cracks in his focus, and when he's at his most tired they come rushing in, a series of images and sounds that are painful to behold and even more so when he knows of what they speak.
Three days after their arrival in the Celestial Plain, when the grass is starting to grow again, his exhaustion wins out over his mind and the images come rushing in.
He sees:
A bright red sun and its partner in the sky,
A young wolf racing across the fields with flowers at his feet and the sun on his back,
Five children gathered in one place and a dark, looming shadow,
A gaping mouth of darkness swallowing the land,
Gold hair and tears.
He barely registers her nuzzling his face, licking away the tears that had begun to stream down his face. He's shaking, staring into the bright sun above them and wishing it would burn him away in that instant, turn him into nothing so that he doesn't have to do what he's seen.
She whines softly, fur soft against his throat, and he leans into her touch and tells her everything.
iii.
Sometimes he wonders if his prophecies would be fulfilled if he never saw them in the first place. He realizes it's a moot point, of course, because he does see them, but when he goes about making them happen he still wonders.
There will be a child of the sun, he saw, and Amaterasu always believes him fully. So she goes about making one.
The creation of life by a god is almost a simple thing: when she made the brush gods, she crafted them out of their elements: Gekigami was born from a single bolt of lightning, Nuregami from the water Amaterasu brought forth from the world first. It was a simple thing to create these gods, but she is having more difficulty creating a child of her own, one that will be hers.
In the end, she crafts him out of stone. It was how she was born and reborn, and so she molds him painstakingly out of the rock, polishing and carving until at last he is ready, and she breathes her breath of life upon him.
A warm glow spreads over the statue's body, and rock gives way to fur and flesh until a young version of Amaterasu herself stands before them.
He looks at the doll he's created himself, at the perfect approximation of flesh and life that he fashioned with his own hands from his own flesh. He looks at the child, looking so much like him, and aches at the lack of light in its eyes, the coldness of circuitry and wires inside the child.
Amaterasu knows it almost before he does, and breathes life into his own doll, his own child. He can see the metal turn to flesh, the oil to blood, the cold wires to neurons and thought. The small figure opens its eyes, bleary and blue, and looks up at him with perfect confusion. When he wraps his arms around the child, and feels the embrace returned, he weeps for joy and sadness from the child's slow, fluttering heartbeat.
iv.
He names the child Kurow, for the darkness he will someday stop.
He thinks he names the child that to remind himself not to get too close. But he can't help himself, so he leaves Amaterasu and her son on the Celestial Plain for weeks at a time to teach and play with and be with his child, even if under a different name.
He teaches his son – for that's what he is – how to fight, how to read. Kurow picks up his strange speech patterns and makes them his own, and when all on his own Kurow takes down a group of imps threatening a small girl he could swear his heart almost burst in pride.
He's tried to teach the child everything; honour, duty, happiness, pride, compassion, friendship. He's tried, even though he's seen how it ends, how his child will fail in the end but not when it matters most.
He realizes it doesn't matter, that he loves Kurow through and through, and hopes that it will be enough to sustain him when he finds out the truth of his existence.
Nine months pass slowly and quickly all at once.
v.
Kurow doesn't really understand why he has to leave, but he does so anyways, with a smile full of mischief and a promise to come back as soon as his mission is over.
When he climbs into the capsule, it feels as though part of his heart has been ripped out. Only holding on to Amaterasu's fur beside him, knuckles turning white, gives him any degree of comfort, and when he wakes the next morning his face is wet with tears.
vi.
He watches over his son through the amulet, and laughs and cries and worries alongside Amaterasu, who's been following her own son's journey with baited breath. They're awed at the teamwork between the two, their two children, so similar to each of them and yet so different.
In a rare moment where she abandons her fur and claws, her hand slips into his and he feel the worry and regret that has been gnawing at his gut dissipate for a few seconds as he focuses on the feel of her hand in his.
vii.
Kurow ventures off on his own only once on the journey, and that's immediately after the moment he sends the message his son has been waiting for his whole time on earth – his mission.
He no longer deems it necessary to hide his true face, and so the first time his son looks on him in his true form he's angry – furious – and deeply betrayed behind it all.
They exchange harsh words and harsher truths, and he says exactly what he foretold he would and Kurow reacts exactly the way he'd have expected.
When the communication ends, he sinks to the floor on shaking legs, but despite the heart-wrenching despair he feels he cannot cry.
viii.
He still doesn't cry when Kurow defects, when he leaves Chibiterasu and the rest of his companions behind in a desperate attempt to fight his fate. He knows what Kurow's thinking as well as he knows his own thoughts, because for a time he'd considered giving in too.
He had had the hope of Ameterasu's return to sustain him, but Kurow had nothing.
Kurow only knew he had been created for a cruel, unfair purpose, and that he was destined to die or die fighting his destiny.
The first time Kurow and Chibiterasu clash, he grips Amaterasu's fur so tightly that she begins to whine in pain, but he can't hear her over the blood pounding through his head and the thoughts:
Failure, you were supposed to protect him, how could you let him fall so far, how could you hide this from him?
His mind gives him no answer.
ix.
Amaterasu and he finally cry into each other's shoulders when their children meet in battle and Kurow falls. All of the things he wanted to tell his son that last time they had spoken are echoed in the words of all of Chibiterasu's partners, things he wished he could've made known at that time.
Watching his son die is the hardest thing he's ever done, and he's seen so much death it's almost rote for him. But watching Kurow close his eyes, bleary and blue, brings him back to a time just under a year earlier.
The hardest part of being a prophet is knowing what happens next.
x.
Within a week, Chibi is back on the Celestial Plain, running around with his mother and bathing in the sunlight, much warmer here than on earth. Flowers sprout at his feet, and he play fights as well as he always has, but there is something missing in his gaze, something a little bit lacking.
And Chibi refuses to speak to him.
xi.
It takes time for the wound to heal.
The Celestial Plain is gloriously beautiful again, the mortal world is fresh and bright, and Chibi no longer avoids him like the plague. By all accounts, the world is a happy, marvelous place, and he's never been so miserable to be so happy.
When he sleeps, he sees Kurow die millions of time, sees the wound on his chest gape as cleanly as if he himself had dealt the blow. He sees the blue eyes that he passed on to him, sometimes clear and mirthful, sometimes angry, but usually sad or bleary as they close for the last time.
He sleeps poorly, even with Amaterasu by his side, and he never goes back to the Moon Tribe, never again.
xii.
The Celestial Plain is not large, but rumours travel slowly and the truth at a glacial pace, and he has not ventured outside of the palace for a long time.
So the knock on the door is entirely unexpected, and when he opens it to gaze into a familiar, if younger, face, his heart leaps into his throat. The boy's blue eyes meet his solemnly, but he can read the emotions dancing behind them easily enough.
He falls to his knees before his son, bowing his head, and feels as though the apologies he's spouting will never be enough. There's a brief, horrible moment of silence, where he thinks that Kurow has turned and left, than he's lost him forever. As it turns out, it's sufficient - he feels small, shaking arms wrap around him and tears begin to soak through his shirt. He buries his head in Kurow's hair and cries, for happiness and for sorrow.
He asks him in a small voice, after all the tears have left them, if he hates him. Kurow merely looks at him and smiles shakily.
"Yeah, dude, a little." His son says, and his heart plummets. "But I think I love you more."
ANII: It's because Waka was always my favourite and I could not reconcile his character in Okami with his character in Okami-den without writing this. Review? Please?