One Last
By Clorinda
Rated: PG
Category: General
Summary: Yamato glimpses the world one last time to see that everything's changed. One-shot.
Author's Note: A very belated New Year's piece of sorts. I know I had a fantastic wrap-up to the celebrations this year— I watched "The Last Supper," the black humour tragi-comedy, with Cameron Diaz (who actually did a good acting job) and a non-celebrity cast.
PS. The dates may be off. My only excuse is that I never knew when Yamato died.
He is the alpha and the omega, cigarette smoke trailing from his lips, one hand in his pockets, as he leans slouched against the car. Yamato Kudo's lips flickered into a smile. Ban had faithfully mimicked him in death. Picture perfect.
A blond head was sticking out of the car, and Yamato had to look again. Yes, he'd seen that face. The ragged teenage boy with the face of a man. Yamato had been to Maze City. Seen the Thunder Emperor. The king of hell revered as its god.
But now he thought the face in the car bore a striking resemblance to the Emperor. Chocolate-coloured eyes when the Emperor's had been cocoa. They couldn't be the same person. Besides, Ban called this one "Ginji."
Yamato smiled at his own little joke.
He wanted to smoke, his long, bony fingers straying to the cellophane-wrapped cigarette pack in his jacket. But Ban had his lighter now. Pure silver with an engraved Y. He felt like an ass for giving that one away.
The moonlight was dim that night, and he hated it, watching it pool around his ankles as he leaned against the chipped brick alley. Then dawn would come. He glanced at his watch.
Not even with the passage of time, had he forgotten the old house. The street was not deserted, littered with the impoverished and the homeless, and Yamato picked his way through them, ignored, with the occasional lingering glance. He found the apartment building, older, poorer, and rattier than what he had remembered, but the years of unkemptness does things to people, and to things.
Pushing open the frosted-glass outer door, he found the stairs, making his way into a place he'd abandoned years ago.
Their letter-box was still there, and gingerly pulling an envelope that was trapped in the broken door of it, he saw it was addressed to himself. The date was two years ago.
Had no one ever lived in that flat again? Haunted?
Yamato smiled again. In the dark dimness of the ground floor of the building, his teeth flashed and the simple smile looked eerie. Maybe it finally needs someone to haunt it?
He had to pause outside the door of the flat on the fourth floor to measure if he wanted to go in. Really.
Now, he regretted that slip of nostalgia. This flat was just plain depressing.
Like a museum to those last days of grief and rage. A rather morbid one that Yamato disliked the sight of, as he slowly moved through the carcass of his life.
There was the bloodstain on the wall, a whole cabinet of prize crockery smashed, the plates peeking pitifully from under the splintered wood, and the dust on the window, even after so many years, still bore his name, traced by a forlorn, young girl's finger.
He walked through it all, to her bedroom. The cast iron bed was rumpled with mouldy bedsheets that had been here all these years, and something big and dark poking out from under the blankets. Yamato crossed the floor, extracting it. It was a stuffed bear, one sewed-on button-eye close to falling off.
The teddy grinned up at him, and he grinned back. She had stopped playing with this one a long time back. "So, why don't you just chuck it out the window?" he's reasoned. "Or give it away. You don't want it."
"Who said so?" she'd cried, leaping up from the bed, fiercely snatching it away from his callous hands and crushing it to her chest. "I still like him!"
He'd laughed, arching an eyebrow. "Him?"
And, Yamato thought, he was still here. Maybe it was too painful to take the bear to her new life. The past has its place in everyone's heart— the sock drawer.
He moved through her things, opening the cupboard, sliding back a hidden panel that was cluttered with broken vials, bottles, a mortar and pestle, now flaked and rusting. He fingered them, thinking of the hours she'd spent with the doors and windows locked, crouching on the floor, to get her perfumes right. The air would stink with odoured fumes for a day.
Still holding the stuffed bear, he left quietly for Ban's quarters.
It was a shock to walk in there now, because in real time, in living history, he'd been there just yesterday. Everything was in its place.
"Yesterday" the place had been a stable. Now, the bed was made, the books arranged neatly on the shelf, thick, ancient volumes of alchemy and folklore, interspersed with an atlas and the updated dictionary. The chair was behind the desk, and all the curious paperweights and table lamps stacked against the wall.
It was like Ban had known he could never come back. There was no point in making the room look familiar anymore. Perching himself on the desk, Yamato leaned over and picked up one of the paperweights. It looked like Medusa with its snaky hair. It was Tisiphone, of the trio: Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera.
His own voice sounded in his ears: "Oh God, Mido, what is this? Not even Hannya is supposed to look like this freak."
Ban, droll and supercilious, "It's from Greek mythology. It's one of the Furies, three female spirits who're supposed to punish perps of unavenged crimes. Basically, they run around cackling and thus, scaring the pants off people."
"Mercy! Mido, this is female? This is a woman?"
At the end of the day, Tisiphone was really not so different from Hannya. The demon seeking retribution, burning with jealousy and envy. Except, perhaps Hannya looked much more like a girl, but Yamato hadn't met any of them yet.
One arm holding the bear to his side, monopolising his corner of the table, Yamato knew he didn't want to see his old room again. What was the point? He'd lived in it for what had been centuries of his life. He'd memorised it, and he didn't want to memorise it again. There was always a ceiling to boredom.
So he just sat there. Time swirled around him like he was Moses and the Red Sea was slowly closing after him.
It was a time capsule. This house. Untouched. No wonder she had never come back here. He didn't want to, himself. The memories were all meshed together, the good times and the dire straits. An ancient bill poking out from the closed drawer reminded him of the harried weeks when they didn't have a job to do, and the electricity company had cut their power because they hadn't paid.
Ban had arrived one night with two candles, after a day of darkness. Their only source of light, begged, borrowed, or stolen, had to be lit by the only lighter in the house.
They were down to the second candle when they finally had found a job, being paid the preliminary fee. Himiko had jump-started into economy drive, refusing to let them count the money by candle-light.
This flat was like a time capsule indeed. A photograph unfading in its frame. It was impossible to untangle the bad memories from the good, because the walls could whisper.
Clutching the stuffed bear, Yamato let himself drift away on the wings of the moonlight falling over his feet.
When he finally walked out of the house, there were ghostly footprints in the dust left behind him.
She was watching the television, some sort of think-deeper movie splaying over the screen. She looked avidly engrossed, until she lifted the remote and switched to some slapstick sitcom.
Yamato stood at the window of her house, watching her through the glass pane like it were the window of her soul. His headstrong, proud sister. His little girl. Oh, Himiko, he thought, his cheek pressing against the glass, not daring to come any closer. She was nestled into the couch, a big lumpy thing, but he daren't reach out to her.
Her face had never been lined, and the lips were not meant to stop smiling. His heart hammered warmly in his chest, as he thought of how she'd pulled through the years. She hadn't needed him, and she hadn't cried.
For a minute he considered leaving the bear on the window-sill, and quietly slipping into the shadows that would take him away. But she would recognise it. She would know where it had come from. And he couldn't do something like that to her.
He couldn't break her heart. Or repair it.
The next morning, just as the hour hand on the old-fashioned carriage clock eased over the ninth mark, the doorbell rang. Going down the stairs, Himiko knew it had to be Ban. It was New Year's day. She'd always celebrated it with him, ever since the two of them had been able to reach out to grasp each other's hand across the unbridgeable chasm of their old lives.
He said nothing, no wise-ass crack, as she swung open the door, merely handing her an enormous bouquet of jonquils he'd procured from somewhere. She stared at them, her eyes going wide. "Ban! This is ... this is..."
"Sweeping you off your feet?" Anything faintly wise-ass had to come.
Through the flowers, she punched him.
He doubled over instantly on her doorstep, making a show of being mortally wounded so that passers-by stopped to stare.
When Himiko finally let him in, he followed her into the dining room where she put the flowers into a vase, and he stood back with her to admire its effect. The dark bold colour stood up against the cream-coloured tablecloth, and over the arrangement, there was the shelf, strewn with personal photographs of Himiko with her friends, her colleagues and her life. There was one of Yamato, in his dark, rumpled, fading corduroy suit, and beside it, was a picture of Ban.
With his hair plastered down over his head.
"Long time, eh?" he muttered, unable to take his eyes off that one.
Himiko followed his gaze, and shrugged. "I guess it seems like day-before-yesterday now."
"I'm touched, you know. By that one."
She grinned. "That's because you're a sentimental softie."
"What!" The wistfulness had been knocked out his voice. "Just because I admire your ratty photos doesn't mean I have to get insulted for it! I bet I'm the only guy who's even told those aren't half-bad, and is this how you re-pay me?"
She laughed. "Well, I was talking about the jonquils, too."
He squirmed, deflating a little. The heel of his shoe drew circles in the carpet. "You ... ah..."
"I think you're a bloody fool." She smiled at him, without the trace of a grin. She leaned over, and pulled him into a tight, quick hug.
Leaning against the doorframe, his ankles crossed, Yamato finally allowed himself to smoke. He ripped the cellophane, opened the pack, and knocked out a cigarette. He struck alight a matchstick, and carefully lit it. He took a long drag, the exhaled smoke spilling like incense through his lips, the taste of good tobacco in his mouth.
One last, he thought.
Yamato Kudo let himself smile. Now, there wasn't a reason left for him to stay anymore. He'd found what he'd wanted to find.
One last glimpse of what it was to be alive.
—- End -—
Author's Note: I also read somewhere that jonquils signify a desire for requited love. On this website itself, I read once in a story, they kind of say (to quote), "Don't hate me anymore." And if you've ever noticed, I don't think Ban ever exhaled cigarette smoke from his nostrils, like smokers are prone to do.