Title: The Fox, The Monk And The Mikado Of All Nights Dreaming 3/9
Author: Seraphim Grace
Feedback: Always appreciated and replied to.
Series: Gundam Wing
Rating: R
Pairings: 1x2, suggested 13x6
The old lady sits in the gazebo with a pink shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She is wearing heavy boots and has a second thermos sat beside her on the wooden bench. Her heavy braid hangs over her shoulder like a silver rope and at the end is a violet ribbon. It is a vivid splash of colour against the black and pink. She looks tired, and in her hands is another piece of knitting, although this one is a dark rich purple and looks to be the makings of a scarf.
When she sees him, and he is wearing the sweater she has made, she smiles, and then mocks a frown. "You're late." She says, "I was beginning to wonder if you were going to show up."
"I had something to do," the boy says.
She just smiles at him again and offers him one of the sandwiches out of her bag and then hands him the second thermos. "The way you wolf down the food I give you," she says, "I'd think it was the only decent food you got."
For a moment the boy looks panicked, as if she has learned some terrible secret from him but then he realises she might just be teasing, although it's hard to tell with her, and smiles. "You make good sandwiches," he says and offers her a shaky smile. "And you tell the best stories."
Relena just laughs, her hands making quick work of the scarf in her hands as it grows, the needles clacking. "Do you know I never understood why old ladies knit? I do now, it gives my hands something to do whilst I can listen or talk. It's a good hobby to have, although everyone I know now has more knitted things than they know what to do with. Do you think you could find a use for a knitted doily?"
He laughs and she laughs with him, "but you are not here for my sandwiches and soup, or to hear me talk about knitting, you want to know what happened between the fox and monk." He at least has the decency to look abashed. "I thought for a moment," she continues, "that another child would show and I would be stuck telling Cinderella, I must admit that I am enjoying myself telling the story of the fox and the monk, more than I thought that I would." She takes a deep breath, her hands never slowing, "now where was I?"
Over the following months the fox brought what treasures he found in the forest to the monk, until he began to break the stricture of only calling on the monk when the moon was new. At first the monk ranted and raved and hned and did his best to ignore the fox.
The fox did not care. He would show up in his human form, his hair bound back by golden wire he had found beside the road one day. He would bring the tales he heard from the men's road that he sometimes visited in his fox form, and sometimes stole from and brought the treasures to the monk.
The monk pretended not to listen.
The fox bathed with the monk and laughed with the monk, they shared food and sometimes they talked, they never mentioned their pasts, for those things had already been and gone, but sometimes they talked of the future. They talked of girls with the dread fascination of someone who has never seen one. And sometimes they laughed.
Through the fox's perseverance against the monks determination to ignore him the two of them came to share an easy camaraderie that was only possible by the fact that for as much time as they spent together they spent an equal time apart.
One day the fox did not come when the monk expected him. He did not know what he intended when he walked into the forest. He trekked through the wood he did not know listening to what he knew of the fox's den, of how it was beside a thin waterfall where the water laughed. So he followed the thin stream he had diverted, climbing over rocks and up the slope until he found the small laughing waterfall, and in the shadow of a large rock he found the small fox.
The fox's nose was dry and his breath was sweet so the monk picked him up in his arms and carried him back to the temple. He laid the small fox down on a pile of rugs next to the fire which he brought up, he gave the fox water from the stream and bowls of miso, he gave him sweet potato and baked fish.
He gave him tea that he had dried himself from a wild camellia and he laid his futon next to the mountain of rugs that the fox slept on. He wasn't sure how to treat a fox but he gave him the same consideration that the monks at the last temple ha had been at had given him when he was sick and he prayed.
When he awoke the fox was still asleep and lying in his futon in his human form. He had curled against the monk in the night, drawn to his body heat and the soft sound of his heart beating. The monk lay on his futon and looked at the fox. His skin was like fresh milk and his hair the colour of burnished oak, and his lips were the pale pink of a new rose. He could see the soft crinkles of the fox's lips and before he knew what he was doing he sought to recapture the feeling that the fox had given him when he had kissed him on the mouth. He pressed his own mouth against the fox's.
The fox awoke to the kiss and pressed himself into it, he opened his mouth, slipping and sliding it over the monk's. And when a tongue slipped out to better taste the faint taste of the fox he brought his own to meet it. He was surprised at the feel of hands that cupped the back of his head to bring him closer.
Then when he opened his eyes he found himself staring into striations of blue and grey, framed with thick dark long lashes and the monk rolled them so that the fox lay on the monk's stomach pushing the monk so that he lay between his thighs. As their tongues pushed against each other one of the monk's hands found its way to the curve of the fox's ass and began to push down so that his own hips ground against the monks and he groaned into the kiss.
That broke the spell between them, the monk jerked back pushing the fox away from him and gathering one of the rugs about his shoulders he fled. The fox sat for a moment blinking in shock, his penis was a heavy weight between his legs, rubbed hard by the monk's hands and mouth. When he saw the horror that they had inadvertently wrought on the monk, he slipped into his fox form, ignoring the salt water that formed in his eyes and the burning lump in the back of his throat. He ran and ran and ran back to his den beside the waterfall that seemed to laugh at him.
He made a point of avoiding the monk and the places he was likely to go. He ate little and only stayed in the dark places of the forest, keeping mostly to his den and let the dirt cake his fur.
He was surprised when he heard voices in the places that he was haunting. "Are you sure that that is the one?" the voice said. The fox crept closer.
It was two great oni; their edges were gathered tattered shadows.
The fox hid under a bush and could tell that perhaps he had deluded himself for they could easily see the temple and the monk bent over scrubbing the small veranda of his temple. The oni were watching him. They were creatures of shadow and teeth and claws so the fox squatted down and did his best to pretend to be dead so that they would not notice him for they were the type of oni who would rend apart any living creature that the y found.
"That is the monk," the oni said. "Our master has marked him since before he was born, he laid his hand upon the child whilst he still wriggled in his mother's belly and now that we have found him it is time to lay upon him our master's curse."
"Is any one around to hear us talk?"
The oni twirled around with the stench of rotten meat and carcasses left too long in the sun. "There is just a dead fox," the oni said, "and it does not matter any way for our master has laid a compulsion upon us that any that over hears our plans that their heart will explode in their chests if they try to tell anyone, and their brains in their heads if they try to tell the young monk. We have spent twenty years searching for him and now that we have found him our master would be displeased if his plans were foiled by so simple a thing." He laughed then, it was a terrible sound of steel on stone, "and who is to tell him, this dead fox?"
The fox did its best not to move as a fly descended and crawled along his face despite that it tickled almost unbearably.
"How will our master kill the boy?" the smaller of the oni asked.
"To ensure his own immortality," the larger of the oni explained, "he can use no violence or poison to kill the boy, so he has devised a terrible spell to do it in their stead. The boy will have three dreams.
"In the first he will dream of a box," the oni said.
"In the second he will dream of a key."
"and in the third he will use the key to open the box and his soul will be taken into the realm of the Emperor of dreams apart from his body, and without his soul his body will wither and die because he cannot take food and he cannot take water and deep in his enforced sleep he will die without ever seeing again the sun."
The fox did his best to ignore the fly as it dipped its forelegs into the openings of his nose and rubbed together its thin legs though he wanted to sneeze.
"And that will make our master immortal?" the small oni asked.
"Certain lives are tangled in the great skein and whilst this boy lives so does the master, but if the boy should die then the master's life force will betaken from the skein and he shall live without death, so say the three witches who serve him."
"Well," the small oni said measuring the sky and how far the moon had journeyed across it. "We must return to Kyoto before the dawn and tell our master that we have given the monk the dream."
And the two oni vanished into the shadows of the trees and once they had gone the fox took a shaky breath and began to fear for the monk who had been kind to him when he had no cause to and whose kiss still burned like liquid fire though he had done his best to push the thought of him from his mind.
Unsure what else to do, knowing he could not tell another of the terrible dilemma he had he returned to his den and prepared to mourn the monk and upon his death to utterly destroy the small temple he had built.
As he moved within the confines of his den his feet found the small jade dragon that was his treasure. He looked into it's tiny red eyes and remembered his brother who was almost forgotten, a faint scent that he sometimes recalled, and how his brother had said that it had been their father's. He didn't remember his parents at all. Neither did the monk.
It was all he had.
It was all he had to offer.
Taking the jade dragon into his mouth the fox began a journey. He travelled across the forests as fast as he could, and over mountains and through rivers until he came to a forgotten grove in the very heart of Japan. Around it the trees hid great precipice that looked over a small lake with a smaller island inside. With a prayer in his heart that this was all that he had to offer the fox through the dragon into the water and then returned to his den.
This is the dream that the fox dreamed.
He was in a great plain where he was neither fox nor man. Around the great plain were mountains that reached higher than the sky. The clouds were made of fire. In the centre of the plain, atop a grassy knoll, upon which there was a great spur of stone, sat a great fox with eyes the colour of amber and fur the colour of fire, around his neck was a great ruby and he wore a cloak of raven feathers, and he was many things but he had chosen to be a fox for this dream. Flittering around his head was a bird that was sometimes a nightingale, and sometimes a canary and sometimes a man with golden hair in a military uniform. This all made sense with the perfect clarity of dreams.
Seeing the great fox with the feather cloak the little fox was silent.
"You have given your one treasure to talk to me, and although it was not mine it belonged to someone I knew who will be given heart when the tides return it to him. You have given all you had to talk to me but yet you remain silent."
The fox apologised and pushed itself down on its belly, like a dog that has displeased its master.
"You do not need to abase yourself to me, little one," the great fox said, "you have come to ask me a question, will you not ask it of me?"
"I," the fox said and as he looked at the great fox and how he was simultaneously a great dragon, a mighty lion, a proud man in a military uniform.
"He is afraid." The Nightingale said in a deep rich voice.
"yes, my lord," the fox said, "I am afraid. I live apart from the lands of man because man was cruel to me, but a man came to my forest, a monk. He is a kind man and I owe him many things, but a great onmyoji has set a terrible curse upon him. He will have three dreams, in the first he will dream of a box, in the second he will dream of a key, and in the third he will use the key to open the box and he will be trapped in dreams until he dies."
The great fox swished his fiery tale and bared his teeth in anger. "Lies," he said, and the nightingale sang a sad song about his head.
"No, my lord, I wish to save him for what he has done for me." The fox protested.
"You lie to him because you lie to yourself," the nightingale said.
The fox thought long and hard as he watched the multifaceted diamond moons of this great plain. "I would save him," he said, "because I love him."
"Was that hard to say?" the great fox asked, "but I warn you that the love of a fox and a man can not be achieved except in dreams, and you are doubly damned because he is a monk and sworn to Buddha even unto death. He may dream of being with you but it can be no more than a dream."
"I know," the little fox told him, "and I have naught to win his heart anyway, I am just a small fox, but I heard the demons as they wove the dream into his world and I would save him. I have no worth in this life, I am just a small fox, but I would save the monk because he is a good man, and also it would destroy the onmyoji that cast the spell on him and I would spite him."
The great fox cast back his heads, each of them, as if in slow motion, and laughed and the nightingale laughed with him. "There is only one way to save him," the nightingale said, "you must take his place in the dream and dream the dream in his stead."
"but I do not know how," the fox told him.
He stood up and with a flourish of his black cloak of raven feathers they were in another dream, another place in the emperor's great domain. There were great beasts there, the size of lions and proud with dragon's scales and peacock feathers depending on how one looked at them. "These," the great fox said, "are the Baku, the dream eaters, my gift to mankind. When a person has a bad or odd dream it lingers for a moment about their head and they wish for a Baku to come and eat it. This is the place where the Baku wait, if you are lucky you might be able to beat them to the dream and eat it in their place and the dream will be your own. But," he stopped, "you alone must dream the last dream if you are to save the monk, and the Baku may be large but they are cunning and quick."
The fox, for the first time in his dream, smiled, "ah," he said, "but I am a fox and foxes are nothing if we are not cunning and quick. Thank you," he told the great fox. "I will be in your debt."
The great fox said nothing as he and his entourage of the single golden nightingale vanished into the darkness under his cloak of raven feathers.
Relena looks up at how the sky around the gazebo darkens with winter setting in, "I'll finish this part tomorrow, it's getting rather late and your parents will be worried."
"They won't notice," the boy protests.
She looks at the finished sweater in her hands, and how the boy has his hands wrapped around his chest. "Here," she says, passing it to him. "You take this, it's thick wool, it will keep you warm."
"But," the boy protests her kindness, "you made it for your friend. You said that when I asked you."
"I did," Relena tells him with a smile, "but he has no need for another sweater and he will not notice its lack where you will appreciate its presence." Her smile is winning. "The rain is cold, are you sure you won't let me drive you home? My driver won't mind."
The boy shrugs off the question, holding the thick blue sweater to his chest like she might change her mind and take it back. "I'll be fine." He says. He pulls the sweater over his head and she smiles. He does not know about the tracker she had her security plant on it, she has her suspicions about the boy and wants them desperately to be disproven.