The Visitation
(for 31_days prompt, "Slowly Twisting the Lilac Stalks")
All characters belong to Amano Akira and Shounen Jump
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the eyes exploded to a stare that shot
through all of us and still speaks in my dreams:
I know who you are. • B.H. FAIRCHILD, "THE DEPOSITION"
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There was one side of the building that used to be a very impressive skylight, now stained and cracked in many places. That didn't mean it lost its transparency however, and every so often a small city bird would be unfortunate enough to fly into the glass. These survived depending on the velocity before impact––some were simply knocked unconscious for a few minutes, others hobbled away on a broken leg or wing, and then there were others that, perhaps hurrying or fleeing from something and flying at high speeds, fell dead after the crash.
This didn't bother Ken so much (he found it amusing) despite the fact that his favourite perch was directly below the skylight, though Chikusa often picked them up and roughly threw them out the window (he found it annoying).
"Birds wouldn't have appreciated that," Ken would tease him, baring teeth.
"I would have tossed him too," the rejoinder would flare back, in the seething way Chikusa said things.
She didn't understand their banter when they shifted to the crude mishmash of Japanese and Bolognese, and didn't hold it against them that they probably chose to do so to exclude her. One didn't mind the suitcase in the corner of the room for itself but for its contents; and on days when their beloved leader was quiet in his keep, the frail fortress he chose to house his will meant nothing to them.
Without the boss, both agreed silently, all they had was a corpse.
But she had been learning, and while she wasn't like the unexplainably brilliant children her age who could perfectly mimic sounds and words that didn't mean anything to them, the sounds she had been uttering were beginning to find form in a deeper, more profound sense.
One day, she thought, she would be able to understand them when they spoke.
Nobody really knew when Mukuro found it fit to manifest himself, not even the girl. One moment the base would be brimming with the usual awkward silence that settled when Ken and Chikusa were not talking, and then suddenly the girl from her corner would speak up, her voice dropping a few notches deeper, to appropriate the true voice of the one possessing her. It unnerved Ken sometimes (made the hairs on his scruff stand on end) and it left deep disquiet in Chikusa (because it felt disembodied).
So it was indeed a surprise when they came home earlier than usual to find the girl on Ken's couch, crouched and holding something large. Before Ken could bark out a rude remark about how she should keep her stupid, scrawny ass out of places she didn't belong in, the sound of her voice––her voice, the girl's own, soft, wavering––stopped him in his tracks.
"They're taking good care of me. I know I shouldn't be such a burden, so I'll try to be stronger. My Italian's getting better too... come ti chiami? ...Si! Mi chiame Chrome. Chia--chiaman. Chiamir? Chia...mare⓵. Okay. I'll say it that way."
It was a crow this time, sizeable, limp wings sagging from her cupped hands. It probably flew in from the east, dipping low amongst the scaffoldings, and flying towards the setting sun. The dirty glass would have been invisible against such light, and from the eyes of a thing in flight, there would only be the sun falling in between silhouette of the city, its buildings jagged like teeth. Both Ken and Chikusa could see that the bird was dead, struck from a collision with something it couldn't see. The city it was flying to was a lie, and now it would never get there.
It disturbed Chikusa, watching her talk to the bird as if it were alive, as if it was talking back, it disturbed him that she used their leader's name in a conversation they would only hear one side of. Ken caught his breath, not quite fully understanding the powerful symbiosis between girl and god, but knew, the way animals sensed things, that this... this body held a life within her. That whoever went after her in battle thinking she was easy prey would have to contend with the other self that stood invisible to the world.
The inverse was also true.
One eye the colour of falling dusk looked up at them almost suddenly, cutting the monologue (conversation? Chikusa thought warily) short. Dipping her head apologetically, she moved quickly out of the couch, and made for her side of the room. The dead bird she gathered to herself almost reverently, as she scurried away.
"S-sorry," she murmured, unaware that she had said it in Italian. "I'll just go throw this out, he--he hit the glass pretty h-hard and fell as I entered... I kind of...spaced out... "
"No, don't!" they both said said aloud at the same time, as if it were a crime, as if the corpse that she held in her hands would rise at any moment, unpredictably, and would not appreciate what they would have done.
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NOTES:
£U Chiamare • Come ti chiami means, "What is your name?" and she replies, "Yes, my name is Chrome." Chiamare (when Mukuro in her head corrects her) is the verb root which means "to call for" or "to summon"
• I took off mainly from the stanza the line was taken from (Eliot's "Portrait of a Lady"), primarily the ones along
"Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you who hold it in your hands";
(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
"You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
And smiles at situations which it cannot see."
• I still imagine Ken and Chikusa to mix Italian with their Japanese, if they don't speak it entirely and fluently. Being kids kept in the Estraneo dungeon and being around Italian scientists...
• ALSO I played around with Chrome's affiliation these days with birds :D