Notes: Moment is set shortly after Yoh promises to drop out of the Shaman Fight in exchange for Ren's life. Written for LiveJournal's 31 Days - the first in a series of Shaman King drabbles.

Space for Regret

Where now are kings and where
are the men who passed this way before you?

- August 27th

Reflecting, the old kings are lined in rows longer than her prayer beads, half-shapes against a color that blind eyes might see. As she looks, her mind's eye shatters the power that holds the world into fragments of old lives, memories and people that she has never trusted. They have only been men; now, only voices barely full in the dark. But then, they have never promised justice or kindness, only strength to build to their cause.

She trained him, and trusted him, and never thought that it would be the other kind of strength that he would need at the end. And all of the gentleness she has loved in him (but hardly valued) has broken the only dream he created for her that she has ever understood. She thinks of the life bought back with the blankness of unpracticed emotion, knowing, words sharper than thought, that it was the only path he saw through the dark. But she recognises by the tautness between his shoulder blades that he regrets the price. (Yoh is the only language she knows - clearer than Japanese or the spells she learned as a child: to bind and conjure, to break and shape.)

And though Anna has taught herself, too, of the dangers of weakness, she feels a fraction of ease that at least he won't fall by the wayside of the dangers that confront the Shaman Kings.

end