The Sacred Blue Water Lily
A/N: First Kuroshitsuji fic – I discovered it last summer and have been trying to concoct a good fic for it ever since. There will be more chapters but this is still in the pipeline so bear with me. Enjoy.
Many times it has been said, that he who remembers the pain that took his death away, shall by it become invincible, or shall crumble into dust.
It's rather ironic when you think about it.
We're not supposed to remember.
All our lives we seek the simple answers that fuel us without our knowledge, we seek them when we know we can never have them, but we sink back behind the facade, turn our backs, always concluding that we are better never knowing. What etched us into Earth like a repugnant scar that will never fade. What changed our paths, what righted our wrongs and wronged our rights. What threw us into deep water and watched us drown.
Who, or what, failed to save us. And pretended we were never there.
But before a Phoenix can rise from the ashes it must succumb to the flames that engulf it. Death wipes the slate clean, burns hopelessness to hate, anguish to anger and pain to power, and with it we burn bright again.
Imagine the surprise when the flame burns white, and the smoke black.
At first, she thinks that she has dreamt the shouting coming from the front door.
Maybe it was the last thing she heard asleep, or the first thing she heard awake, or somewhere in that translucent plain inbetween.
Her eyes open.
A pot shatters, and she feels her fist turn numb and her knuckles turn white as she grasps the blanket that covers her. She wants to let go, but she can't, as if one single movement from her reed mat bed might distract her enough to make her miss the words exchanging between her father and these loud men downstairs.
There is a cry, and then the sound of a thud, closely followed by footsteps surging throughout the house. Shadows dance upon the wall opposite her open bedroom door, as tables are turned, stores ransacked, and the house is turned upside-down. Her father's voice has fallen quiet, and she knows only one thing. That she has to get out.
Standing on her tiptoes, she is just about able to pull herself up towards the ledge of her window. Her blanket slips from her hand as she swings her legs over the sill, and the chilly night air slaps her in the face.
Fed up, she climbed back down from the window-sill, gathering her precious blanket in her tiny hands and squeezing it close to her chest. A sudden increase in the volume of the voices causes her to gasp, and without a second thought, she dives for the window, her tiny arms shaking as she pulls her weight over the sill, and drops to the floor below.
The crop store is dark, dank and smells of mice droppings, but it is the only place she can go without being seen or heard now. She clambers behind several piles of reed baskets, she drops and attempts to obscure herself from sight. Curled up in the miniscule space, with her forehead rested on her knees, her legs cramping painfully at the awkward shape she finds herself in, she closes her eyes, and waits for silence. Silence however, does not come, and she grits her teeth as she hears someone announce that they were going to check the house again.
In the doorway appears a gleaming golden line of candlelight, followed by a dark shadow moving from left to right, and she covers her nose and mouth with her hand.
"No, if there was a child it's long gone. Leave him there; the physicians don't need their precious time wasted."
A gasp escapes her lips before she can prevent it.
Taking all of three huge strides he throws the baskets aside and seizes her by the wrist so hard that it hurts, yanking her out into plain sight. She holds on to her blanket for dear life. She can smell his breath from here. This man is the biggest she has ever seen, twice the size of her father, his shadow looming over hers like a shroud.
"Well well well..." he says, pulling her into the light, "What have we here?"
The pain consumes me like a hot, loud, sickening fire, but it doesn't last long, my death taking my pain away, fading into a horrible ringing in my ears, along with the sounds of shouting of the people around me, my bones breaking, my blood spilling, light and colours swirl, and I am gone.
The best way for me to describe it is that it's like fainting. You don't even realise that you have until you start to come around. I begin to regain a little of my physical sensation, that I have a body, a face, a nose I can wrinkle and eyes I can screw shut. There is light, like a faint sunset cast over me, blazing through my closed eyelids, and with it bringing a flooding warmth of relief. I did it. I did it.
"Not all you think it's going to be, is it?"
My neck turns towards the direction I think her voice is coming from, but it feels like I'm immersed in water, and everything is slowed down.
"Serafina?" I say, trying to concentrate through the stare of the light and the blur of echoes around me, "Are you there?"
"Of course, I am always here."
I open my eyes and she is beside me, bathed in the light like a goddess, a soft and gentle smile on her face. "You lied." I say, avoiding her eye contact as I silently fume, "You lied to me."
"No I didn't." She says calmly, "You lied to yourself."
"You said that there would be a way out, a way to end all this!" I say humbly, "And you lied."
"I never lie to my charges." She says with a small smile, as she turns to stand beside me and observe the glorious light, through which I now realise I can make out the figures of people running towards the road, all to catch a glimpse of my limp and surprisingly unmangled body. I had expected to go underneath the bus, and be torn to pieces, however the impact seems to have knocked me dead. At my side, I see him shaking me roughly, and I feel my skin creep and someone walks over my grave.
"You have a choice set before you." She explains, as time plays out before us like a silent film, "You can choose to end it all now. To die and await your fate in the Afterlife. Or, my offer still stands."
My fingers curl into fists. "In exchange for my soul." I mutter under my breath. I pause for a moment before I ask, "Does that mean I will go to Hell?"
"It means that you will cease to exist. So to answer your question, no." She says, tilting her head as if to observe me for a moment, "Just know, Sara, that if you barter your soul today, the fields of paradise will forever be out of your reach."
She seems to understand what I must be making so readable, and faces the commotion again. "I cannot coerce you Sara. Only you know what your soul is worth."
"What if I accept?" I ask, "What will happen?"
"If you accept," she says, "then I am your humble servant until your revenge is complete, and our contract terminates, and then your soul is forfeit."
"And you can make anything I wish come true?"
She nods. "Yes."
"Anything?"
She smiles. "Anything in the world."
I breathe. It has just occurred to me that I don't know what Serafina is. Or maybe I do, and I just don't want to think about it. As far as I am concerned, I could simply be going insane, or I could be in a hospital on opioids by now and hallucinating. What started out as a dream in my head to take away my pain has somehow warped from its innocent beginnings and become something else entirely.
"I want five years." I say suddenly.
She turns. "What?"
I relax a little. "I want five years." I repeat, "To live. To really live. In the West." I say slyly, "What good is revenge if I cannot enjoy it?"
"In five years you may no longer feel the same way about dying as you do now."
I nod silently.
Serafina appears to consider this for a moment, and then to humour it in her head, before she turns to me again, a bright expression on her face. "Why not?" she says jovially, "Why not indeed?"
The sharp thrash of the water hits her face and runs down the skin of her cheeks, causing her kohl eyeliner to run as it does so, dragging the powder downwards along with the oil and sweat of the day in a cascade of black tears that drips into the bowel before her. Now only one of her eyes is black. She raises a cloth to her red puffy eyes, squeezing them shut for a moment, before wiping the tears and kohl away. She would sob, if she knew it wouldn't hurt her ribs. In fact, she can't remember a time when they didn't hurt. When anything didn't hurt.
The servants have been given instructions not to prepare any meal tonight, so she thinks that she will retire early. Maybe he plans to dine elsewhere, and hopefully, he will either be too drunk when he returns, or he will not bother to wake her. While he is gone, she has taken the opportunity to feed herself well, on three whole loaves of honey bread and two bowls of ale. Neither can she remember the last time she wasn't famished. The large, heavily pregnant swell of her belly is hungry, she is sure, kicking at her for food. She isn't sure if he will notice that she has eaten too much, she isn't really sure how often he checks the larder, but he likes her lithe, and that is how he keeps her.
Just as she is about to fall into bed, she hears the door open and close, and she starts to feel sick in her stomach to the point where she is sure she is going to vomit. As she listens, she observes a female voice as well as his own, but tries to ignore it, and closes her eyes, waiting for sleep.
Her attempt is soon cut short by the sound of his voice roaring her name from the kitchen, and she heaves herself from the bed and slips into her robe. The kitchen is an almost unknown place for her, they have so many servants that she has never had to cook a day here in her life, except on the first day. Before, she used to cook for her father, and had been quite good at it, even enjoyed it. When she thinks about it, that was probably what had sealed her fate, of all other things. If she hadn't passed the test, she probably wouldn't be here now.
She finds him there, and with him a very young girl, no older than eleven, her eyes terrified like those of a rabbit before a snake.
"I have work to do." He says, "Show her where everything is."
Her eyes follow him silently as he leaves the kitchen, and when she knows he is gone, they return to the girl. "I..." she says, her voice no louder than a whisper, "I cannot cook, mistress."
"What is your name?"
The girl swallows. "Merytaten, mistress."
Disgust plasters over her face like mud, and then she wonders why it surprises her. If being heavily pregnant made her repulsive enough to deter him even just a little she is sure she would happily spend the rest of her days pregnant, but, she thinks, there is always a price.
"I'll help you." She whispers, ""But you mustn't tell him."
Silently, she finds out the ingredients, and instructs the tiny girl in how to mix them correctly, taking care not to get too close as to get flour on her robe, for then he would know that she had helped. She sees the girl start to breathe again as the loaves go into the furnace, however she herself cannot bring herself to.
She sees the girl reaching for the furnace door, and she reaches forward and places a hand on her shoulder to stop her.
"Burn it." She whispers, her hand shaking in its clutch, "If you want to ever go home again, burn it."
Slowly, the wide-eyed girl nods, and steps away from the furnace, her eyes falling to the floor, and it only takes a few minutes for the smell of burning bread to waft through the house and summon him.
She has no kind of magical ability, however she has no difficulty in predicting what will happen next.
There was a time in her life, she thinks, when she would have stepped between him and the young girl he is now miserably beating to a pulp. When she was younger, she used to fight back. She used to try and run away. She had tried to get an injunction passed, which indeed is possibly here but nowhere else. Every time, she was brought back. Every time, she was told she was delirious. Every time, he hit her ten times harder than she could ever hit him. And as she watches him knock the life out of this little girl, what is left of her soul starts to flare in anger.
One final smack to the face leaves the girl unconscious and she slips lifelessly to the floor, blood pouring from her nose, mouth and her left ear. He steps back, his nostril flaring, his eyes wide, furious and predatory.
"Clean this up." He snaps as he throws his bloody fist in a gesture to the splattered floor, before straightening the ring on his finger, "And put her to bed."
She thinks she hears him call to the servants for a horse, but the fact that he is gone again barely sinks in for a good two minutes. It is the small cough of the girl on the floor that pulls her out of her trance-like state. The girl is alive, but only just, her eyes half-open as her heads lolls to the one side. Her jaw and nose are both broken, and the blood that is still pouring is horrific, and if it doesn't stop soon, she will not recover. A tidal wave of guilt washes over her and she runs one hand through her hair whilst the other cradles her forehead. It didn't work, she thinks, she had felt sure that it would. If she had thought he might still want her after burning the loaves then she would have helped her escape first and risk a beating herself rather than condemn the child to a life of torture and servitude.
She still isn't moving, and the light in her eyes is muggy and still, and her ability to breathe against the gush of blood is waning. Reaching for one of the iron pokers used to keep the furnace alight, she steps over the blood pool and as the tears begin to run, places the end of the poker against the back of the girl's skull.
"I'm sorry." She whispers, raising the end of the poker as high as she can, "But I'll not let it happen to you too."
When I wake up again, she is still there.
It's like she hasn't moved at all, like she is a statue, barely even noticed by the passers-by. Not only is her long ebony hair uncovered, it falls in orderly waves down her back, soft and smooth and glistening in what I would think was early morning sunlight. I have never given much thought to her skin tone before, she is of colour, yes, but the precise shade I had never actually made a precise decision on. Of course she has one, I simply never notice, or I simply never remember. Or maybe I just fail to describe it, but it is a dark olive shade. She is dressed in an expensive-looking tailored black suit – trousers, not skirt, bootcut, black heeled boots, and a teal blouse.
I am not quite so lucky, I am patched together like a misplaced ragdoll, my legs and one of my arms are in plaster casts, my head is throbbing so much that I can't count how many places I hurt in.
"Serafina..." I say, blinking as I gaze up at her from my pillow, her face lighting up with enthusiasm as I do so, "Am I still dead?"
I never speak to her in Urdu. Never have. It doesn't matter if I never escape Pakistan again, I am English. And I want to speak English.
"No." she says, her voice is of low register, strong, and somewhat resembles the ringing of a bell. "Unfortunately not, mistress."
I try to sit up and rather quickly realise that I can't. I drop back onto the pillow again in defeat, and close my eyes, and open them again. She is still there. I think my surprise and shock are subdued by the fact that I am quiet heavily sedated, I notice her there, I think to myself, this is odd, but I don't actually feel as surprised as I should. I want to, I tell my body to react, gasp, stare, place my hand over my mouth, but it takes one glance at her, and then at its condition, and thinks, nah.
I feel myself start to perspire a little as I struggle against the drugs. "You, you aren't real."
She looks dismayed. "I most certainly am." She says, "Did you think I was a figment of your imagination?"
I sigh defeatedly. "You are a figment of my imagination."
"Not, anymore." She says, and I notice the very striking and unusual teal green colour of her wide eyes, "Not now."
I summon some strength and open my eyes. "Can they see you?" I ask her, looking around.
She chuckles. "I think the doctor should take another look at you."
I stop for a moment, and take in my surroundings. I am in a hospital ward, but it's not the one in Lahore. "Where am I?"
"The Assini Mental Hospital. It's perfectly safe." She reassures me, as my face falls, "The 'safest' place in all Pakistan, I do believe. Come." She says, pulling the intravenous catheter out of my arm, "You are ready to leave."
"But..." I protest, noticing that my legs are broken in at least three places and that I wasn't going anywhere without crutches, and the various security guards that would stop me from leaving, if not because of my state then because of our lack of a male consort, "We can't just walk out of here!"
She turns and rolls her eyes at me into a blank expression. "I certainly don't need a man to find my way home, and neither do you." She says, as she pulls a knife out of her inside jacket pocket and starts to cut the casts on my legs away, "You have a lot to learn young mistress."
"What are you doing?" I hiss at her. I see her about to pull the cast from my leg and I brace myself for the pain, but I don't feel anything. Nothing at all. Not so much as a pang. She repeats the action on my other leg, and I watch in astonishment as both come away cleanly, my legs completely healed without so much as a scar. Frantically, I rip a dressing from my arm and marvel at the lack of anything except healthy skin and nine stitches, apparently there for no reason at all. Serafina begins to cut them and pull them out, the tweaking making my arm flinch.
"How did you do that?" I ask her, my mouth agape.
She replaces the knife into her jacket. "Like I said," she says, "You have a lot to learn." She throws a full plastic bag at me, which on inspection I find to be full of clothes, Western clothes.
"Now hurry up. We have a plane to catch." She says, before a somewhat dubious smirk appears on her beautiful face, "And you and I have some business to attend to before we leave Lahore."
The Foreign Office, and Big Ben strikes twelve on a rather miserable London day as the pile of papers lands on the Secretary's desk.
"The report you requested Sir."
The Secretary peers over his glasses at the pile, and closes the laptop he has been working on. "Thank you." He says, nodding at the assistant to leave. He waits for the door to close before he reaches for the pile and pulls it onto the stack of work before him.
"Issue XVII: Missing Persons Report 2013"
He opens the page, and immediately a 'hm' escapes his lips. Marketing, he thinks, is overrated. He does not need pages of pictures and lists of names to inform him that this situation is dire.
Khadija Adouni
Umaira Chadhar
Farah Naeem
Seema Thathal
Madeeha Derawal
Sonja Ahmed
Laila Siyal
Parveen Kassar
Banafsha Langah
Hajira Bahra
Atiya Jandun
Sara Quaisrani