Disclaimer: I don't own Samurai Champloo, which is owned by Manglobe/Shimoigusa Champloos.
A/N: Sort of a pretentious companion piece for The Student of No. Spoilers for ep # 14. One shot. Kohza? Good candidate for psychotherapy. 3Jane? Needs to stop reading mid-twentieth century French playwrights.
Exit Wounds
I. She knows the wolf at the door.
She has never liked mirrors. They show too much of what she already knows, that the person staring back at her never ishasbeenwillbe a person.
She learns this the first time that she is not enough, when her mother, poor poor shadow, goes into the ground, and she has to try again. She is emptiness replete with hunger, filled with the footsteps at night and the suffocation of corpse that creeps into her bed of bones. She does not mind; his hunger can be hers. Nothing can be something. For a while, death is as content with her as he can be, but it cannot last. She understands when the mirror shows her nothing wrapped in skin, and she gets on with it.
She starts over.
The second time she is not enough, she tries again. She fills herself with stars and sand, and words of a boy, who; she watches as death comes for the boy in sweetness, and the boy pinwheels against the sky. He is gone and she is hollow, so hollow, death is not ready to leave her just yet. Death stops her mouth when the boy, a murder of crows, goes into the water, and she has to try again.
She starts over.
II. She knows the wolf is the door.
The third time she is not enough, she tries again. This time, death brings the man to her, and for a short time she thinks she can see the arc of ascent; death lets slip the boy, and hope blooms in her chest. Death will let her go, and he is enough, at least for a little while. She tries to tell the boy, she tries — but he will not listen, and goes into the water again. The man's eyes know, and he sees the shape of where she is not, but he understands when she tells him never to leave her. He holds her close and they are almost there, the arc of ascent — but death is dead, and now his face is that of the pinwheel boy, and he comes for the man. Now the man is the shape of nothing too, and now he is as hollow as she is.
The last time she is not enough, she tries again, but death will not have her. He has had enough, it seems, and walks on though she shrieks after him —
"Please, kill me —"
So. Time to get on with it.