Throwing Stones, Nothing Breaks
by Viridian Magpie
Sai is like a butterfly. The world will never be the same.
Rating: PG
Length: 380 words
Warnings: none
AN: written for blind_go round 10.
Sai...Sai may have felt that he had no effect on the world or that he couldn't exert any influence because he couldn't touch the stones, couldn't move them. Such a curse, wanting to interact with the world, yet locked outside, an unsurmountable barrier keeping him isolated; a wall of glass, and Sai's face pressing against it, harder the lonelier he got, trying to feel, to touch, to smell, to live.
Sai felt this. Felt the pain of it, felt the anger and the frustration, let it bleed inside Hikaru's mind - too strong to hold back, Hikaru knew. Not done on purpose, or with malice, simply too much of it there to control at times. Not always, no, but sometimes.
It made Hikaru hurt too.
It hurt more, though, when that vast presence that could so overwhelm him was gone, and there was a Sai-shaped hole in his life and inside his heart, and all these feelings that weren't his never returned. The lack of them frightened him when he thought too hard about it, when he lay awake at night thinking about Sai, when he saw someone cheat at go or treat a goban like a footstool. This made Hikaru angry, and fury coursed through him, and he'd feel it, the strength of that emotion, but then would come the realisation that there was no echoing anger from another source, that it was all him, and Hikaru would feel the loss of Sai once again and get even angrier. So Hikaru would do something - dress down the guy who was cheating, rant at the man treating a goban that way - and in doing this he would change something, affect the world.
And that wasn't even counting Hikaru's go, and how Hikaru's go, shaped by Sai, affected the next generation, and the generation after that.
So it wasn't really that Sai had no influence, he did have it on Hikaru, and through Hikaru on the world. Like a butterfly beating his wings once and calling up a storm in China. Yet the butterfly on the other side of the ocean would never know his power, and, by the time the storm broke out in China, by the time it changed the life of the people there, the butterfly - so fragile, so shortlived - would be gone.