No happy endings
To a connoisseur of literature like himself, endings should preferably be beautifully organised, led up to with precision, executed with smooth control.
There are, Hakkai knows, no happy endings. Not to true stories. Endings, by definition, are not happy. He expected this ending (although he should have known that he would not be permitted such a mercifully poetic end), because all lives are stories. His was almost formulaic. The orphan child who finds love briefly, only to have it stripped from him. The quest, the battle, the need for vengeance, the fair lady-love and the evil villain. The hope of joy, dashed at the last moment. The loss of self in fury and hate. The climax, the lover's death, everything gone, everything, haunting and pleading for justice withheld. That was sheer poetry.
And it was supposed to end with a suitably dramatic or pathos-filled death. And bleeding to death in a most anonymous fashion was in keeping with the literary style; to die alone and unknown after killing so many.
That was supposed to be the end.
Life is not supposed to inexplicably continue; there is no room for sequels, but here he is in one, thanks to a stubborn half-breed who just didn't know when to keep walking.
Journeys such as these cannot be traced from a single point. It is wrong to say: there they were static, and then they were moving. Now they have triumphed, and here they are back home. They tell their story as if it is a segment, neatly boxed in by two strongly inked points, Beginning and Ending, and the only story is the one in between.
How wrong they are, who say that their journey began when they began to go west. It began when each of them drew first breath, maybe even before that. It is ruled by karma, and consequence, and choice, woven so tight that it all seems coincidence when truly there is nothing but the inevitable.
A butterfly flaps its wings, and a man goes home in the rain.
But really, there are no happy endings. He would have been happy to find his end that night; he was smiling at the thought. But he wasn't allowed to die, and he remembers how carefully he didn't hate Gojyo for denying him that. How very carefully, and how very long.
A sequel? Or just a continuation? After all, even death does not really end anything. They are haunted, all four of them, by events and names that have followed them through death, rebirth and centuries of isolation.
He wonders sometimes what would have happened if something had changed that night. If he had died. He would have been a memory in a stranger's mind, and a curse on the lips of those he knew. Remnants of a broken soul.
But here he is instead. And the stories have it wrong. There are no endings, really. There are no straight lines of cause and effect. Everything twists and tangles, forever. There are changes of pace and character, but the story goes on whether or not the characters wish it to, past the point where the pages run out and the reader's eyes close. And every event that he thought of as an ending proved only to be another beginning.
He has always been wary of being happy, knowing the consequences of that ultimate complacence as intimately as he does. But a thin red thread of it weaves through the fabric of his existence, and he accepts. Because after all, what tale would be complete without death and love?
A/N: I'm planning a tentative sequel called 'Epilogue', which will be more of a story than this. Dialogue and all. Keep looking.