A Vague History
Notes: Regular disclaimers apply. Not for profit - and I'm uncertain if it IS for fun even. ^_~
..
When he awakes he is groggy and bleary-eyed. He is whole except for some of his memory, some bruising and cuts - but none of that matters. He will continue. He will carry on with his travels and persevere with the recording. Whatever has happened, is history - o he can appreciate the irony - and cannot now be undone. It is a loss. That is all he will cede to. Anything more and he betrays them all - who they are. It is akin to letting the Enemy have the upper hand. There is no need to pick up the pieces, because there are none to pick up.
He closes his eyes. A voice asks, "Who are you?" From within he replies. I am Bookman.
We are the wind, going everywhere, touching everything (everyone) and feeling nothing. We keep wandering. Eventually we leave no trace.
.~.
When the blast hit, the other man retains enough presence of mind to shut his eyes and let the wind buffet him, trusting in the sturdiness of his body to look after itself. For some moments he loses consciousness. When he comes to there is nothing. He is in a field that is devoid of life, not even weeds. Everything here is dead, but somehow, he is alive and he looks over to a sound some distance away - and so is the old man. He is not sure whose hand he needs to thank for that, or perhaps no one - if his future is accursed he muses.
A young exorcist extraordinaire rising up the ranks and naive in his confidence. He tastes blood as he licks at the corner of his lips. He touches a hand to the right side of his face, cursing at the slow burn and feel of the sting of a wound beginning to throb and ache. Ah he grimaces, he will never be pretty and whole anymore, eventually he manages a painful grin. He has no doubts in the power of his charms and mysterious intrigue. The hand then flicks loose strands of hair off his face. He thinks growing his hair out might be a good idea.
He will need to get his bearings straight if he wants to get a start on his search, his hunt. The Enemy already have the advantage over him as he does not know how long he's been here. Wherever here is of course.
.~.
They concur it best to part ways and take different roads. They need to investigate further, learn and find out to garner other - or harness more - ways to defeat the darkness threatening to swamp the world. Their travels take them everywhere. Their thirst for knowledge, insatiable.
.~.
It is in Egypt when their paths cross. Again. A neutral observer and his recordings. A soldier - with a need to be free from constraints of his superiors, to learn more so he can better fight this war. This never-ending war. This forever war. He is in this mystical land, this mythical place to learn more. There are practitioners here who might impart to him their ancient knowledge. They might be reluctant.
He is hoping (praying - even) and he is never really sure if this does any good. Blasphemous or heretical as that sounds. There is no one here to call him on it, and if he will be judged on his many trespasses, he will cross that bridge when it is burning in front of him. With his sense of urgency and his charms he might be able to glean what little they can give him.
He eyes his short companion next to him. Witnessing, recording, he flicks his red hair over his shoulder - whatever. As long as it does not interfere with his research he will pay the other man no mind. He has urgent business to attend to, because his search is ongoing.
Likewise the short one eyes the taller one, with suspicion. Although to be fair, their credo of neutrality to some eyes is no different to using someone or something for their own ends. They share information but it is always with riddling on the elder's part and impatient frustration on the soldier's front. The elder deems it too dangerous to be meddling with knowledge that of the ancients that should be left buried, while the younger feels it would arm him better in this fight. He is a weapon of war after all.
Hidden histories and forbidden spells. They each have a part to play, they each have to push on with their own paths and answer to their different calling.
.~.
..
Five years on, in front of the Guardian Gate of the Black Order the redhead is saying goodbye to one of his friends and his partner. So chaste. So loving. He once thought of giving chase himself. But has long since discovered that the love they have for each other is the forever kind. He's quite happy to revel in non-attachment. They should already give in to their hearts' desires. Although it isn't (openly) allowed in the Order. Why? He will never understand. Yet they remain faithful to each other, prepared to wait the long war out. He wonders if the war doesn't end before they do, what then?
As they bid each other farewell, that feeling that someone's crossed his grave makes the tiny hairs on the back of his neck stand. He is after all, off on a long mission that will take him halfway across the world and after that into the maw of the beast. The missions that all exorcists go on are dangerous and Akuma always outnumber them. Each time comrades say "Godspeed", the irony of the phrase never fails to tug at him. Perhaps it is because of his predilection for the feeling that this war is just only baring its teeth. It really began some seventy odd years ago if he is to believe his once-upon-a-time acquaintance's reckoning. He is not sure if he is being realistic or pessimistic.
When the redhead eventually hears of their deaths via the grapevine of finders, he is mournful enough to offer up a prayer for them, inasmuch as he can. Their bodies - he is also informed - are irretrievable. He wonders only briefly at that, because normally the Order would have said - cremation. But doesn't give it any more thought. He cannot allow himself to wallow in any kind of melancholic, it is not his way. He will continue on - he does have a job to do, a duty to carry out. Even if he is merely an acquaintance, he is sure that Bookman will be proud of his sentiment.
It is only decades later that it dawns on him to equate some of his 'dead' comrades to the Second Exorcist Program.
.~.
His quarry are on the run now. He diligently follows them. He is never wholly sure in what capacity he does so. For protection, for information, for humanity's sake - for misplaced friendship? Existential questions that plague him all the damn time. He does not have an answer either for himself, the two or humanity for that matter. He puts it down to just doing his duty. It makes life simple that way.
The splits and cracks in all the factions are already showing, the splintering spirals and spiderwebs outward. What this means for humanity he does not know. This is where he comes in. He does a job for the Order, but he is hedging his bets (because he is loathe to be on the losing side) and reckons that not all is cut and dried as it seems on the surface. He really does want to be on humanity's side. Others might judge him on his methods, Any scruples he harbours, he wraps them up and puts them away in a dark recess of the darker shelves in his mind - not too unlike a Bookman. He grins to himself at the thought, because it is an indication that he definitely spent far too much time in the company of that old man and some of his habits and thinking have clearly rubbed off onto him.
.~.
Speaking of whom, that personage is making his way East. Always eastwards for now. He crossed the Urals sometime back. He and his kind are known well enough and thus the hospitality of monasteries provide shelter and what provisions he can barter with. Heading into Asia proper now, he still wanders, constantly recording and journalling witness accounts of notable events, as is his duty. No hagiographies for him even if he looks like one who might, but his subject and matter of interest are the wheels of wars, the why and the wherefores. Only every once in awhile will he cast his mind to his once upon an erstwhile companion. Like himself he can only surmise, continuing with their bounden duty.
It is now more or less twenty-five years since he started this journey on his own. In that time before he had his apprentice, and before him he had his master.
The travelling takes him everywhere and as time passes, he feels that maybe it is time that he takes on another. He manages to avoid the issue within himself for a while now, arguing (with himself) that he has not met anyone suitable as yet. One or two candidates have come close, but at the time he supposes that it is not quite right time, that is. Of course now, even if it might be too late in the day already, he does still have to 'wait' for the right one though. He is not sure how he will know but he trusts his instinct and himself that he WILL know if the right one comes along. Or he happens upon them. Whichever comes first.
The avoidance of this issue of a successor also brings with it other questions, obligations and duties that he must fulfill thus he cannot skirt the task further. He promises himself that the next possible-probable-suitable person he finds that fits fulfills all the requirements - or as close to - he will take them on, shaking aside any doubts and misgiving he might have up his own sleeves to veto the choice. Facing up to this he wonders, as he is wont to do, how the other is faring in his own search.
.~.
Bookman recalls his own choosing. He was already into his teenage years but had not grown beyond the height he is now with his parents worrying for his future. They are not a tall people, still, he is short by their standards. It was fortitude when the broad shouldered, dark man with his face covered in scars and tattoos on his face appeared in the distance. From out of the Tundra onto the steppes walking across the grassland to their ger. From the homestead his eyes followed the stranger from the moment he spied the speck in the distance and observed it till it loomed large, waved a greeting and surprised him off his horse by speaking in their tongue with fluency and not a fleck of inaccuracy.
Customarily he welcomed the stranger to their humble home and invited him to take shelter. He called to his parents as he did so and before he knew it the man was with them a few days and in conference with his father for most of it. His mother shooing him away to chores and such until mealtimes, which he spent openly gawking at the man who stood twice his height, with dark gleaming eyes. On the fourth day his mother shook him awake early. The false dawn still beyond the horizon and the stars were still in the sky.
It was then that he left home. He has only returned once and found that there was none there left to remember him. He feels no pang of regret and that is as it must be. The man who was his mentor, never gave him a name. The only name he knew his master by is the one he has taken up the mantle of. What other names Bookman himself has had over the years is also irrelevant. He is crossing the sea from the mainland to Fort Zeelandia, Formosa. It will be his last stop before he turns back and retraces his steps, back to the beginning. Perhaps going back he will not drag his heels too long, and might only take him half the time.
.~.
Again he wonders, how the red-haired man is doing, whether the search that was begun years earlier is still ongoing. Bookman, in his pansophical wisdom does not doubt at all that their paths will cross again as they must. He can cling onto his tenets and codes in an argument for neutrality as much as he wants to and discount such feeble concepts as fate. But there is no running away from this, his part in the unfolding scenario also has its beginnings when he auditioned for a role on a side that might shed light on several junctural events in the past seven millennia that he might give them more than a passing scrutiny. It seemed too good an opportunity to pass up at the time to learn more. To add more. In truth it had been a deal with the devil, wonders if the price he paid for the knowledge was worth the events set in motion remains to be seen, and he knows the map before him is charted already and he knows where he must go, and this is the last stop.
Not for the first time in his long search, and archival profession does he think, maybe the Bookman codes and laws needed to be changed. Even more so now, because the world was changing. It is not just an evolution of mankind that the world needed to know about, but the changes that evolution brought with it. But he was one man, one Bookman, how to affect change within their own tenets that only saw vicissitude every few hundred years. Perhaps it was time too. He's taken to sighing a lot these days.
It is at the Fort's mission, where Bookman finds HIM. It is as if the fates - if he believes in such things at all, and he does not, not really - are laughing at him. Karma for going against his beliefs and picking a side all those years ago. The Fates, mocking him, throwing him a sign, an omen, "Here is another, see if you can pick another side and see it to the end." Empty, imagined laughter ringing in his ears. Only if he believed in such things of course. There is however no running away from his own word and the boy before him. The boy with the red hair and strange eye. The boy with a look of promise and within that little soul; doubt and - perhaps misplaced - trust all at once - in him, an old, old man.
..
FIN
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Notes: I had an idea and ran with it. I wanted it to be better than this. I apologise.
Add to that, I wanted to include word of the day (on the 1 November) from :
hagiography
hag-ee-OG-ruh-fee, hey-jee-noun
1:the writing and critical study of the lives of the saints; hagiology.
2. biography of the saints
3. any biography that idealizes or idolizes its subject
Derived Forms
hagiographic (ˌhæɡɪəˈɡræfɪk), hagiographical, adjective
Con-crit is most welcome.