Disclaimer: Hikaru no Go belongs to Yumi Hotta and Takeshi Obatta.
A/N: Tabi are the traditional socks worn with a kimono. As far as I could work out, Sai wears them.
"Nobody heard him. the dead man.
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning." - 'Not Waving but Drowning' by Stevie Smith.
Fading was unlike drifting.
It was the whisper of ancient fabric that ghosted across his ancient, faded flesh.
It was when Torajiro's health waned and Sai deteriorated with him.
It was those times that Hikaru forgot his umbrella and, as they ran through the rain, he fancied he could feel the soft caress of the raindrops on his face, only to realise it was his tears. Faded hope.
Sai thought he knew it quite well.
Drifting… this he knew intimately.
It was the vague way he had stumbled through his homeland after the Emperor had severed his only link to Go.
It was when he slept inside a Go board and dreamed of the things he'd left behind.
It was those times that neither Torajiro nor Hikaru could shake him out of the past he was lost in; when his mind brought him back to the things he believed he had forgotten. Drifting thought.
So Sai was surprised that when Hikaru's eyes fluttered almost to a close, the feeling of separation from his host was not what it had been with Torajiro's death.
Sai was not drifting but fading.
Hikaru could not hear his goodbyes and this – this he regretted. Sai knew the boy he had existed for would become stronger and stronger without his help but this – this he still regretted. For he would not be there to witness it.
Sai looked at Hikaru until the boy had faded away completely – though in truth it was he who had faded – before closing his eyes, accepting that he could not change things.
When he opened them, it took him a little while to recognise his surroundings.
There had been no shift, nor sense of movement.
It was a beach that Hikaru had taken him to once. An empty and still land, a wilderness dissimilar to what he had come to associate with modern-day Japan. It held the same tranquillity that he had lost after he drowned.
He never dared to hope that he could find it again.
The tide came in. The tide went out.
The sun retreated below the distant horizon.
A slight breeze blew Sai's long hair across his face.
Water weighed down his tabi, but his heart lightened.
He turned away from the sky and looked back down to the earth. Taking a tentative step, he felt his feet sink into the wet sand, relishing the forgotten pleasure of contact. He took another step, and another, and soon there was a trail of footprints along the shore.
Sai smiled. His journey down the path to the Hand of God may have been over, but that didn't mean there weren't more paths to travel.