Human Kindness
A strange tale of a Nine-Tailed Fox who wishes to become human,
and a demonic hunter who is considered inhumane:
in the end, both would know of human kindness.
A/N: The nine-tailed fox is a popular mythical beast in both Korean and Japanese mythology (it is usually known as a kitsune in the latter, despite there being some cultural/technical differences). Legend has it that when a nine-tailed fox eats a certain number of human livers, it will finally turn into a human being. The concept of the nine-tailed fox within this story is not, I have to admit, academically accurate; it is a mixture of Korean and Japanese mythology, some popular stereotypes, my imagination where my knowledge fails to deliver, and the tales I have heard from my grandmother in my childhood. Most details and any relevant information will be revealed in the unfolding of the story.
There will be gore and cannibalism (or rather, a mythical being eating human beings), as the two subjects are rather inherent to this particular mythology. Chapters containing explicit material will be labeled as such.
1
夢
tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.
He does not remember his parents in his waking hours. He must have had parents, at some point, at some time – a long time ago, now – for while he may be what he is, he knows (despite some stories, human-born, that he hears and waves by with some amusement and some scorn, and perhaps even a baffled kind of love) that he is quite real. He is not born of smoke and phantom lights and the old anguish of the earth. He knows that he is made of flesh and blood – it is a start, he thinks, and a very good start, when considering that half of the creatures he knows to exist in the world are not so tangible – and thus he must have had, by logic, parents. He is not born of an egg cracked upon the jarred edges of a rainbow, like some humans (or what humans think are humans – worship as humans, and thus feed their devotion back to their bloody pride); he is not the remnant of some personal grudge, a baffled evil that loses its direction after some time (ghosts and ghouls are never pleasant, even as – or perhaps because they were – humans, once).
He used to pride himself upon this fact, almost, the fact that he must have had parents. Not because of any real attachment he feels – as they are not real in his mind (they are instead a single word – a single concept – a single similarity with what he wishes to be), so the emotions he feels towards them are not quite authentic; they are detached from his mind, from his heart. They are but a question that he thinks of, sometimes, when he has the time in the midst of his dreams, but never ventures far enough to discover its answer. Upon discovering from quiet observations that the word parents are supposed to mean something more, that the words Father and Mother and all variations in between are said with either respectful love or unforgiveable hatred (both innate, etched into one's blood for that is what we are all born of) – that parents and their children are irrevocably linked, by some red string of fate (or blood), he had thought to himself, that is one thing that I cannot do. That is one thing I do not have, that I have cut away for I wish to be something else.
For it does not matter. They do not matter. Yes, he is born of flesh and blood, like humans and so unlike humans at the same time, for while he may have a warm body with crimson rivulets running through – like his parents, for parents and children are often similar in nature – he does not have a soul, even as he does not know what a soul is (do human beings know what a soul is?) - like his parents, who were also not human, and thus despised. He is of a race that is born not only of earth and blood and dust but of stories too, stories that are born not of a mother's womb but the mouths of old women and wide-eyed children.
But he is born, and that is enough – it is enough for him. Parents may be the ultimate symbols of blood relations, of a past that one cannot change, of a beginning that he has no part in but twists and morphs and conceives himself. Father and Mother, the roots of a tree that he is the fruit of: if this is a story, then they may be considered the beginning.
But they are not the beginning, he thinks. They are not the beginning, flesh and blood and families have no say in this – a tree is a tree, and the ancient bark from which its seed dropped and sprouted is not to be considered. (He remembers seeing a human holiday of celebrating the existence of one's parents – there had been a song sung by children: without you we would have not been born. And so it is true, and he thinks to himself that perhaps he should be thankful. But then an ugly resignation comes over him, for if he had not been born – if he had not been so alike his parents in nature and shape and race, would he have been happier? Would his story have taken place in some other form? Some other time?) It is alright, for over the years he has successfully mastered the art of forgetting, or perhaps it is not so much mastering as stumbling and running away from his past, chasing instead a brighter, a much lovelier thing.
He does not remember his parents, and that is fine, for they have no meaning in his beginning. Any memory from before his changing years has long faded into a confusing oblivion. When he closes his eyes, when he lies down to sleep or rest or mere darkness and ventures to remember a certain smell – a certain sight – a certain being, perhaps, from his former years, there is not much that comes willingly to the scrutiny of his mind.
But a single memory will never fail to come, and this is the beginning of the beginning; the very start of his story, revisited under the darkness of his eyelids: he remembers the damp outlines of a cave, the pungency of a rotting carcass, the darkness and the fear. (This is not a happy story.) There is no warmth; there is no comforting familiarity by his side (he thinks to himself that he must have had siblings, too – siblings that he does not even know the names of: mere beasts without names). It is like one of those stories, one of those great big ones that encompass the world and its births and its deaths, gods and goddesses: in the beginning there was (not lovely light, not comforting darkness) nothing.
Or perhaps not entirely nothing. He had been afraid. He remembers that. It had not been a fear of death, even then, when he – a dumb, poor thing of a beast trembling, starving – had lain waiting in that cave; it had been an animalistic terror of pain, of being abandoned by his pack (his parents, his siblings, he cannot remember them now - only the slightest phantoms of a soft touch, a nuzzle), of being hungry and yet unable to hunt or scavenge or even beg, of being completely alone… Of the deepest hunger that he had ever known. And then he must open his eyes, for then it becomes too much.
In the beginning there was nothing, there was nothing except fear and loneliness but above all there was hunger, there was hunger within a little fox that lay alone in a cave. Do not ask what this hunger may be, for there is always hunger in these beginnings, in these stories that are not quite happy: once upon a time there was a fox (let us ignore his parents, his siblings, all dumb beasts and all slaughtered now, just carcasses, they are dead and they do not matter: rotten dead trees), once upon a time there was hunger and shame and death close by.
Years later he still remembers – even when everything else has merged and faded away into some disappointing secret, he still remembers the dread of a dying beast, pathetic and keening. The memory, in the form of a blurred stain – innocently odious, until it creeps up to him and threatens to revert him back into his past days – always returns; there is nothing he can do about that, even now when he has learned the human language of flowers and herbs (it had been there, when he had been a beast; but the human tongue for their names is much more interesting) and can boil some soporific and calming tea. No matter how much time has passed, it always manages to catch him unaware, when he has settled down onto his bed, grateful and nearly giddy with his progress. (He thinks, deprecatingly, of that saying, how one cannot teach an old dog tricks. How old horses must be shot down. But then he remembers that he is not an animal, not anymore, not really. So it should not matter.) It treads across his mind in his deepest dreams where he cannot simply wake up, light his bedside lantern, and say, but now I am changed, but now I am not – I am not there. I am here.
He is here. He tells himself there. He is here, and not rotting and dying of starvation in the back of a deserted cave. He sits for a moment, and calms his breathing.
A long, long time ago when there had been tigers smoking on their pipes, when there had been wise men in the mountains who knew how to speak with everything for everything has life: this is where our story starts, in all senses of the word, but his story starts far afterwards, when our fox has grown and lies not in a cave, but in a forest, dreaming.
Breathe in, breathe out. In and out, out and in; blood – either that of his parents' or himself (for he too had lain bloody and ill and dying in that cave) – is not the beginning.
It is one of those nights – those nights when he remembers, and he is hapless within the confines of his past. They are not always grim and frightening, and sometimes he thinks it might be even nostalgia that is catching up to him, he who has run so far ahead of the days of his mindless childhood and near death. While he is still young by the standards of his - his race (an ugly word, highlighting the contrasts between him and others), he has seen many winters and parted with many summers. And while he watches the leaves bloom and fall – while with each passing year he thinks to himself that he is succeeding in this near-eternal run, that he has almost outran his faux beginning, the last days bloodied with that of his (he shivers) "family" and "race" – this memory, this earliest shard of memory with all its jagged edges and shadows, prove to him that they lurk behind him still.
He rubs at his eyes and sighs. It is not a good memory – and yet, it is a necessary memory. Even when he wakes – seemingly centuries and centuries later, rendering all his years useless and vain – sweating and clutching at any part of his own body (he has human hands, he has human fingers, he has a human mouth capable of screaming out words encompassing his nightmares) – he is also relieved. He has not forgotten. Sometimes, he thinks to himself that he must be getting soft in his pursuit; it is nights like these that remind him that he is not yet fully human, that he had never been fully human, that even though he may have had parents and may have been born of flesh and blood – he is not quite so. And that he must make his own beginnings.
His beginnings are meaningless. – Or, rather, its beginnings had been meaningless. But now he has what he can call a past (not present), even if it is bloodied and tattered and something that he is almost shameful to face; he has (he looks down at his fingers, long and white and everything that he had wished for a very long time) human hands. He is halfway there, and he can almost see it, he can almost feel it. He will not be deterred, and he has all the time in the world, and then he will go and feel and see.
He clenches his trembling fists and he thinks of another beginning (this is the beginning that truly matters, that has nothing to do with his parents or blood or – or whatever he may be, whatever he wishes not to be): a golden mustache, strong legs that had not faltered, and did not falter until the end. The flicker of a knife, the promise of pain – but a harder set of blue eyes that had somehow barged their way into the fragments of his past. In the beginning there had been nothing, then there had been a man: one who was experienced with knives. There had been the certainty that he would die – his beast's senses crying out to him, in not words but pathetic whimpers, it will hurt, it will burn, it will take and take until you aren't anything but, that is the way of humans, hunters with their knives; for you are prey.
But then – but then there had been hands. A firm and unyielding set of hands – unfamiliar, and in his beast's mind frightening, but surprisingly gentle; he had had not the strength to avoid them, and so there had been a faint spark of surprise in his terror when he had discovered such calmness in their promised violence. They had been the first human hands that he had ever known.
In the beginning there was a pair of hands.
He had thought, in his blind panic, that he – almost dead and soon to be rotting next to whatever had been in the caves with him (even now he feels queasy – but he knows, in his heart) – was being taken to be killed in a more convenient place, like a tiger that calmly drags back to its own lairs the sacrificial deer. But he had been surprised when that same pair of hands had, after a few hours' tread across the forest where he had been born, taken him within, washed him, and set him on a pile of rather old blankets. In his confusion and desperation he had fallen asleep, almost immediately; when he had later woken up there had been milk and meat and the old human sitting on a chair, gazing out the window.
This is the only thing that he is almost grateful for towards his parents: that through their slaughters (a human word – for them it would have been mere necessity), he met this man, and had been born. It had been a shameful birth (for his birth was the result of a death in the old man's life) – but, but.
Some weeks later the old man (his name, Zeff, is forever engraved onto his mind, both human and animal) had given him a name, Sanji; the man had not used it often, instead opting to insult him with a multitude of rather odd nicknames, but he had been the one to give him a name.
Then is this not the beginning that matters? There cannot be a story without a name to call it.
His parents may have given him his flesh and blood but never a soul; his parents had not given him a name, or even if they had he cannot remember, and so this is enough; Zeff had given him a beginning. He sometimes wonders whether his human form comes from this quiet revelation resting within his subconscious: that his golden hair and blue eyes, while not the result of blood and generations, have still been passed down from (from a lack of better words to describe himself and Zeff) father to son. For was it not through Zeff that he first learned how to be human? First learned the value of being human?
He never did call Zeff Father. (Instead there had been a variety of insults, hand-picked by himself, original as little eggplant. What comes around, must go around.) For what meaning does that word have to him? Nothing. There are sometimes things thicker than blood, more important than being born: a name. A human name, called by human tongues. A human name given to him through human kindness, and thus he had been born.
He had smiled – he had liked it, in the secret of his heart.
And in his bed, this present moment, he smiles now, and his mind is slowly eased out of the dark shadows.
In the beginning there had been no warmth – there had been in its place fear of pain and hunger and a solitary demise – but there had also been, in the beginning, a name and a set of human hands; there had been what he thinks might have been human love (he remembers Zeff's hands and looks down at his own); there had been a man; there had been dreams born and reborn; there had been human kindness.
Sanji, for that night – and not for the first time, or the last – decides that sleep is all but impossible, now. He knows from experience that he cannot seek the refuge of sleep, if such dark dreams can be indeed called a refuge. He does not dream much, save for this particular memory; he sometimes wonders if it is caused to his not being human. His sleeping mind does not create – it only remembers, and takes from the past. As he wiggles out of the warm bed and puts on a long robe that he had gotten for himself (a rather flamboyant purchase, perhaps, but he loves the feel of the soft cloth), he wonders if he will acquire dreams if (when, he corrects himself) he becomes fully human. Is there some other element to the human mind that lets it wander in uncharted landscapes? Fly in unrestricted horizons?
He had asked that question, once, in less philosophical terms, to Zeff, when he had been alive. The gruff man had only squinted at him, barking at him to finish cleaning the dishes. Only later that evening he had muttered that he does not prefer dreaming, he would like his dream uncluttered of unnecessary things, thank you very much. Sanji had noticed then the subtle strain of his eyebrows, the tight clench of his fingers over his knee, and had refrained from asking any further. It was only much later that Sanji had realized that Zeff dreamt much like himself: not dreams, perhaps, but memories, dark, looming, unforgiving.
He stretches a little and wonders whether he should make tea. (He has gotten some good herbs from the shopkeeper of the nearby town. He can get his own herbs, yes, but it is not the products he needs – it is the feeling of walking down the streets, and having small talk with those of the market, and feeling alive in the warm sun.) He stands in a dazed stupor for a moment before his awakened mind takes control; he looks out the window, and decides against it. Instead he fastens his robe more snugly against his shoulders – for despite it being a summer night it is still cold before dawn – and, closing the door behind him, walks out of his little cottage. Nights like these – when Sanji dreams of both of his beginnings (of his parents, of Zeff) – he oft finds himself unable to stay within, and he takes a walk, regardless of the time. It is, as some elder villagers might have said, an ungodly hour – but not being fully human as of yet still has its advantages, and sharp vision is one.
It is still dark, before the first rays of dawn have crept over the horizon, darker for Sanji's little abode rests within the edges of the forest. As of the moment the woods are quiet and dampened with the still night – but they are nothing compared to the darkness of the cave, the darkness of his dreams. (He shakes his head once more. This is not a night he wishes to stay up thinking about faux beginnings, about things that lurk behind his thoughts.)
The woods where Sanji has built his little cottage are but a part of an expanse of a great forest that spans over several kingdoms, in a great continent. The capital of the closest one – and any other city of importance – are, of course, located far from the actual forest itself, for the forest is considered either sacred or frightening or cursed (or all three). But the small towns and villages, pushed to the edges of the kingdoms for their lack of nobility, are often located near the forest, lacing the borders with respect and fear. Do not go into the woods, there are monsters and beasts and who knows what shall come thither? This is a lesson that all small children learn in their youths. And, Sanji thinks, it is a wise one, for there are things in the forest that are beyond even his knowledge, terrible and great in their beauty and age. Humans – or those who are sane and sensible – only venture into the shallow edges of the great forest, and only then in fleeting moments. Sanji, being not human, is accepted by the forest, and even he does not often wander into its innermost parts. His cottage too is not completely within the forest; it is only some distance to the nearest village, and the shelter of the woods is only for his privacy when he – when he must do what he does. He enjoys being in the village, being amongst people, and he is often noticed and well loved by some.
It is not merely the result of his appearance, although he has often heard himself being described as fair, sometimes beautiful. (He admits to himself that he is vain, and likes hearing those compliments tumble in ecstasy from the mouths of others. And if he is to be practical, it aids him well in his – it aids him well.) He genuinely loves them, these humans; he has been baffled by them and has loathed some but – but despite their fear, their hatred of his true self, he still loves them, in the end. And he is the happiest when they return his love.
- For he is less hungry, at such times.
The cicadas, as if sensing his presence, still in their melancholic song for a moment, and then they start calling to each other once more. The branches of the trees rustle above him, but all he feels underneath his fingers is the firmness of their bark.
Sometimes he envies them, and sometimes he loves them with his entire being. And as if lured away by some piper, some will-o'-the-wisp that has appeared to a weary stranger (although, he supposes, such strange lights are attributed to himself and his stories), he steps in the direction of the nearby village, closer to his dreams.
This is his seventh village – or eighth, if you count the little camp that he resided at some decades ago; once every one or two decades, he needs to move to escape (quite accurate, if rather vague) suspicions. He ages slowly, and even though it has been several decades since the beginning of his changing years he still retains the look of a young man; there is no white hair on his golden head, no mist clouding his blue eye. For the first few times he had had to make quick getaways: oftentimes it was a body carelessly left strewn here, raising suspicions (if not of some mythical and deadly creature, then a deadly murderer who needed to be locked up), and he had to flee. But he is older now, and wiser; he does not make such mistakes, and – if he is accurate in his calculations, if he can manage to obtain the last ones needed for his final transition – then this shall be the last village for him.
It is nearing dawn; he can see the horizon lightening now, for he is at the edge of the forest and can clearly see the sky Sanji sits at the top of the hill, in a clearing of trees, and watches the villagers wake for their morning routine. He could go down there, he could, he could and nobody would ever know – for how would they suspect that he was what he was? He looks the same as them, when he is fully in human form (long has he gone without changing to his form of a nine-tailed fox); he sounds the same, he has the same hands and fingers and voice and (he hopes) dreams, but it is not enough. In these hours, in these hours before morning when he feels that he is but a shadow – a story, incomplete, unborn – he cannot go down to the villagers who think he is one of them.
A wolf in sheep's clothing – a fox in human's clothing, that is Sanji, and if they were to know, these villagers whom he has dubbed the last ones he will love to his death, he will be heartbroken. (He has been heartbroken before: once, for Zeff, although for a completely different reason; and another, when he had to flee amongst burning torches and flashing knives and hurling stones.) And so he is content with sitting atop this hill, in this peaceful clearing of woods overlooking the village, before the sun rises. Only after the sun rises and reflects his golden hair will he be able to go down, for that is what he feels in his heart. For that is when his golden hair hides his bloodied hands, his bloodied mouth – his shameful secret.
And so Sanji sees (with his human eyes, of his fox's vision):
The guards who protect the gates (for this is a larger village than most) are switching for their shifts; the one who had stood all night yawns widely, says something to the latter and clasps his shoulder (a familiar comradeship, and Sanji wonders for a moment if they might be brothers), and trudges into a nearby cottage;
A pair of lovers who suspiciously looks around the street – no doubt returning from their midnight rendezvous - and murmurs goodbyes in haste and unwillingness; their fingers kiss for one last time, and Sanji lovingly notices that the woman is quite beautiful. Ah – he had met her, a few times, in the marketplace; she had been lovely. And she has a lover to prove that;
A woman who opens the windows of her house, shakes out the dust from a blanket, and then turns – is she calling for a husband? A son? A daughter What kind of things would she say to them, in the morning? Kind words, or stern ones, he sometimes thinks what it would be like to have a Mother;
Merchants and vendors who are up before anyone else, and start taking their places in the streets; they call out to each other in – and despite his distance Sanji can still hear their tones, their voices – joyful greetings. Good morning, have you slept well, I hope we all sell well today.
Sanji sits and sees and wonders, and he is torn. They are all kind people, and in their interactions with one another Sanji sees this, and loves them even more. For none of them are alone, none of them are hungry like he is.
Just a few more, he thinks. Just a few more and I shall be like them. They seem all ordinary – and yet they are so bright, so much brighter than him, so much brighter than his golden hair or anything else that belongs to him.
(Is this what they call a soul?)
He is lonely. He is hungry, he knows why the dreams (or nightmares or memories or his past, whichever word sounded the most foolishly soothing) persist every once in a while when he dares to dream: his hunger, the hunger that had existed from his beginning, prevails. That hunger had been quiet when Zeff had been alive, which had been such a short time for him in his "gift" of a long life – now it is awake, and Sanji is dragged down once more in the depths of its dreams, its echoes.
It is a curse that is born in his blood, in his generations and his lineage and his race (he thinks, rather deprecatingly, so the story does start with my parents, so the story does start in blood - ): a dream, a wish, a fate that dooms all of them, in the end. Why do you wish to become human? He has never met another of his kind, but if he could ask – why do you wish to become something weaker, something that we eat, something that we can kill so easily and satisfy our hunger? Something so fleeting and foolish and fearful? (You are what you eat, he thinks and almost laughs to himself) Why do we all doom ourselves to this dream?
In the beginning there was a fox who wished to become human; such foxes become so desperate in their wish – in their loneliness – in their hunger that they give up what they are in return for something to love. Eat one thousand human livers, and tail by tail – until your nine tails suddenly fade and you find yourself with none – you shall too find that you are capable of this love, this human kindness, this compassion and warmth, this is how the story goes; eat one thousand livers and you gain a soul, this is the trade. Why do we wish to become human? They are weak and foolish but they have one thing we do not, a soul: we kill and eat and weep in order to love. For in the beginning there had been nothing, except for fear and loneliness and pain, and who would wish to return? Rewrite our beginnings with blood, this is the deal.
Sometimes the irony hits him – that the harder he strives, the more he eats, the more he feels that his long life is diminishing to that of human standards and he cannot hear certain sounds and see certain sights any longer – the more bloodied his hands become.
Would Zeff have approved? Would he have forgiven him? (He would have, in the end, for
Little Eggplant, find your own happiness.
And these are his endeavors to become happy. To love.)
But it is alright. It is quite alright for once the trade is done and he becomes what he has long wished to become, he shall find it. And then nothing shall matter.
Why do humans think we are the myths, the legends, the stories? Why do you think we are the ones to be feared? Do you not understand that we envy and fear and love you? That your kindness is to us, the true stories that we wish to hear over and over again, the stories you never tell us but we only overhear?
Sanji looks down at the villagers – and then the horizon, blossoming golden behind the mountains far away. He should return soon – it is time to cook breakfast, is it not? He is hungry, he realizes. But this is not the hunger that matters; this is what he thinks even as he turns a list of possible menus in his mind (he should be expecting visitors today).
In the beginning there was a dream. And there was desire, and a wish, things that would bloom into a story.
He is hungry, he is always hungry for what Zeff had given him so long ago, in that cave, in the beginning; when he changes, when he turns for the last time, when he realizes that stories are not merely stories but real dreams he can catch and swallow - he will find once more what he had had, when he had first received a name and had first known of human kindness and – when he had been so happy, for a time.
A/N: It has been a long time since I've written multi-chapter fanfiction. Such a slow beginning - I need to pick up the pace a little bit, don't I? For anybody who was somewhat confused by this first chapter, it was meant to be – more details shall be revealed in future chapters. I only hope I can manage it.
Title excerpt taken from "The Cloths of Heaven," by W. B. Yeats.