Wow, it's been ... a few years. Anyone still out there? Life has been busy & inspiration sorely lacking; however, there's nothing quite like two weeks of constant fireworks at all hours (thanks, Chinese New Year!) to send one searching for a way to while away sleepless hours. So, it seemed appropriate to come back to another New Year or two. If this feels a bit stop-and-go (as it does to me) and not quite on point as far as past characterization (as it also does to me), it's probably because it's been written in fits of stop and go over the past few years.
(Thanks to Kuu-sama for a blindingly fast review (I'm glad someone's out there reading and enjoying!) & catching a typo! That's what haste to get something out for the first time in a few years will do ...)
Usual disclaimers of non-ownership still apply.
The Year of the Horse
Ne/zǐ. The first Earthly Branch. Eleventh Lunar Month. Ruling hours: 11 pm to 1 am.
… Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness ….
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
James Wright, "A Blessing"
Mimori shivered as she sat in a bank of fresh straw, exhaustion sunk in every bone of her body. She'd spent most of the day in bed, a rare day off to spend an inordinate amount of time catching up on sleep, only to be called out at five to set a broken arm, then off to deal with a foaling mare who was having problems.
She felt disgusting. Sweaty, covered in straw, horse sweat, her own sweat, and fluids – she had days when she thought she should simply concede defeat and return to the Mainland to a cushy research job that wouldn't involve standing shoulder-deep in a straining, sweaty horse in the dead of winter. Today was one of those days.
"What idiot bred for a foal this early?" she had cried to Tanazaki, the young farmer who owned the big grey mare.
"My father, Kiryu-sama," he'd replied sheepishly.
"It's December, for the love of all things – they usually arrive in spring for a reason, you know!"
Everything had ended well, which was something – a healthy, big colt had slithered into her waiting arms after a few minutes of gentle traction, though Mimori had nearly gone down under the weight. Where's Kazuma when you need him? But it was a strong foal, already up and tottering around on impossibly long and unsteady legs. Mimori had never found human newborns particularly endearing – scrunched faces, mottled skin, and spidery fingers added up to alien little things as far as she was concerned – but foals and calves and lambs, well, she was still delighted by them. Human infants didn't get bouncy for a few months. The colt was already feeling steadier on his feet, and testing out his little soft hooves. He swished his tail and gave a squeal before collapsing in a heap of limbs, only to shakily get back up once again to give it another try.
"Kiryu-sama, are you all right?" Tanazaki's pleasantly chubby wife leaned over her, a maternal look in her eyes.
"I'm … fine. Just tired." She took a deep breath and heaved herself up onto unsteady feet. "I think we're about done here. Keep them inside tomorrow, and keep the blanket on the foal. They can't regulate body temperature very well for a few days."
Tanazaki's wife nodded. "Yes, of course. We're sorry Kiryu-sama, I know you finally had a day off – but we were just worried …."
"Better to be called early than too late." She hated getting called out of bed on chilly winter nights; she hated getting called out to some miserable emergency she could have done something about if someone had called earlier even more. "Call if there are any problems."
The wind had died down, but the air was still frigid. She wondered if Kazuma had eaten all of Kanami's stew from that evening's dinner; her stomach clenched painfully in hunger. She'd forgotten her coat in her haste to get out of the door and the cold cut straight through her sweater and ratty old pants. The 15-minute walk back was starting to seem like an eternity.
Her foot caught on a root that had grown across the little path, and she went down in a blur of dirty wool, rubber boots, and the last remnants of any grace she could've possessed under the circumstances. She couldn't help crying out as she landed in a heap, skinning her palms and twisting her left ankle painfully.
Mimori sat up after catching her breath, thinking that the house was looking very far away. She pulled off her boot as gently as she could, wincing as she had to maneuver her already tender ankle through a boot neck that suddenly seemed ridiculously narrow. She flopped backwards, face to the sky, deciding on how to proceed.
"What a miserable evening," she said to the silence. No answer, of course. She wondered if anyone would notice that she wasn't home yet. Probably not; she hadn't been gone that long. Of all the nights to stagger out of the house without her phone, she had to pick this one. Naturally. She looked at her ankle, which was throbbing in time to her heartbeat, wondering whether she'd be able to hobble up to the house on her own. If only the hill weren't so steep. She could only imagine what sort of picture she cut – dirty, disheveled, and unladylike tears beginning to well up.
It was a cold and clear evening, and the stars were scattered in their winter formation with the barest sliver of a moon still visible. Mimori rolled onto her side, the earth feeling wonderfully cool against a too-hot cheek.
Not the most ideal place to rest, but she'd seen worse. Maybe someone would come to help before she had to heave herself up from the cold earth. Or maybe she'd just lie there all night, the impromptu star watching session to end all star watching sessions. She blinked, trying to sort the stars into their proper formations. Asuka was good at that, pointing out the constellations as they circled the sky.
She could almost hear Cougar, starting his favorite story for little kids: 'Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived among the stars ….'
Kanami picked her way up the gentle slope, deftly avoiding the ruts and muddy patches. The half-finished pavilion – a place for reflection, they had called it, but really it was a memorial – rose in front of her, the bare frame of thick beams standing in relief against the sky. It would be beautiful someday, but for now it reminded her of the dead it was raised in honor of. Skeletons, crumbling into darkness.
Kazuma had passed out on a full belly after ranting and raving about the hordes of people traipsing through the town. 'Fucking assholes, staring at us like we're god damned animals in a zoo,' he'd bellowed over dinner. She'd calmly ladled him another bowl of stew, and his face fell a bit. 'Maybe if they were all like Mimori, it'd be OK.'
But they weren't like Mimori; they were unattached third parties who simply wanted to experience something out of the ordinary. She knew the curiosity wasn't malicious, especially not wrapped in the stories of 'once upon a time' – the veneer that the participants in the stories weren't actually walking around, going about their daily business while tourists on holiday oohed and aahed at the lovely scenery and quaint lifestyle. The people – tourists, wealthy ones – paid good money for stories and cows and stars and chickens ('They're chabos,' Cammy had pointedly noted to a group of woman admiring the pretty plumage on 'those cute birds' earlier in the day), not broken alter users and the mundane reality of the great heroes – or villains, depending on one's perspective – of the story.
She clambered up to the platform, which had yet to acquire steps. Ryuho was leaned against one of the massive support posts, arms crossed over his chest, an impassive look pasted on his face. He flicked his eyes over as she stood up and brushed sawdust from her knees.
"You felt like you needed company," she said simply. At some point, she'd learned to shut out the thoughts and feelings of random passers by and residents unless she felt like it; it had taken a while, but she no longer had to concentrate on not feeling. It was like cutting out background noise to hear some quiet conversation, she'd explained to Cammy. It just made it easier to concentrate on the important things, like the fact that Kazuma was tossing and turning in a dreamless sleep, Asuka was glad to be coming home after a week away on business, and Ryuho was lurking around in shadows, in need of company.
He made some non-descript noise – if it were Kazuma standing before her, it would've been a half-feral grunt, but Ryuho had managed to maintain some aristocratic sensibilities, and half-feral grunts were rather clearly beneath him in the day-to-day.
"It wasn't supposed to go like this," he said finally, his voice as flat and even as if he were merely commenting on the weather.
"Wasn't it?"
"They were supposed to stay away forever," he said, voice still curiously flat, but gaining a slight edge that belied the raw hurt that he kept so well hidden from most people.
"No one manages to stay away forever, Ryuho-san, not even you."
He sighed, and rubbed his temples. Kanami looked out over the town and the small group of tourists who chattered and laughed as they made their way to the path leading down to the seaside. So it was all for nothing. He didn't need to say it – she felt the uncertainty winding around him.
"No, not nothing." Kanami sat down on one of the broad beams making up the handrail of the little pavilion. "Just something different. I think …" She paused and looked up to the ridgepoles that seemed to cut the sky into perfect slices. " … they'd understand."
Ryuho remained motionless, save quirking an eyebrow. "They?"
"Ryuho-san," she started slowly. "If you had given up everything for someone, would you really want them to never really live again?" She felt him falter.
"I … I honestly don't know."
Cougar sat on the floor of Mimori's study, books spread around him – all sorts of delights, modern and ancient, sent in a large crate by her mother. He was fascinated with the ornately illustrated children's books – 'A nice break from your stodgy list of classics, I guess,' Mimori had noted with a laugh – and was currently absorbed in an old book whose pages had faded to a golden hue. Classic Tales From Around the World. An odd time capsule of some life – he found himself idly brushing crumbs from some cookie older than him off most of the pages, and scratching half-heartedly at the remnants of jam on corners.
While it was hard to envision their Kiryu-sama poring over the pages of a glorified picture book (even twice as difficult to imagine her leaving behind cookie crumbs and jam stains), he liked the idea of handling some little part of the Mimori-that-had-been-once-upon-a-time.
A shriek brought him out of his contemplation. He creakily rose from the floor, his bones protesting at the movement, and peered out the wide window that looked out on the hills below. He couldn't see anything, but he had heard something; though his body had been giving up on him for years, his mind wasn't suffering the vagaries of accelerated aging.
He started down the little path, worn smooth from comings and goings, pulling the collar of his coat up against the chill of the night air. His heart skipped a beat when he saw her lying on her side in the winter grass. "Miss Mino-" he started to call out, and her tired laugh came to him, the correction he so adored and would never tire of hearing. "Mimori, Cougar."
She struggled up as he hurried towards her, fast as his painful joints would allow. "Oh, Cougar, you shouldn't be out – it's cold, and you really need to be –"
"Ah, my lovely Kiryu-sama, have I ever been one to ignore the cries of a damsel in distress?" That at least garnered a wan smile from her. "What in the world happened?"
"Tripped on my way home from the Tanazaki farm. I just thought I'd lay here and watch the stars for a while, since I was stuck here for a bit anyways." She touched her ankle gingerly and winced.
"Well, it's your lucky evening – I've arrived to rescue you. Shall we return home? You must be half frozen – I think those pants were ready for the trash bin several years ago, my dear."
She hesitated for a moment, eyeing him carefully. "I … think I'd like to stay here and look at the stars a while longer, if you wouldn't mind. And if you promise you're not too cold." Of course I wouldn't mind; have I ever turned down an opportunity to just feel your presence? He didn't say it though; he knew he didn't need to.
So many things passed unsaid between them, and he liked it that way. She and Ryuho had their private game of painfully stiff and formal language, remembered from their childhood, among other things. Cougar wasn't entirely sure he'd trade the game they played – the knowing what you feel without you having to say a word game, which was sometimes painfully serious – for everything Ryu enjoyed. There was something to be said for such a friendship, intimate in its own ways.
He settled next to her, and she leaned against him, murmuring an apology for the stench of sweat (equine and human), and the sharp bits of straw that worked their way from her sweater to his coat. They looked out together at the expanse of dark ocean rolling up to the shore.
"Do you think the stars here will ever not look close?"
He gazed up, the winter belt of the Milky Way winding its way lazily across the black. She continued, apparently not expecting an answer. "I … it's selfish of me, but I hope it never changes. I worry sometimes that all this –" she waved her hand down to a group of Mainlanders making their way to the beach. "I worry that it's just a prelude to something else."
Cougar considered that for a moment; oh, he supposed it was possible that someday the hillside they sat on would be paved over, and a high rise would stand in place of their rambling house, and one wouldn't be able to watch the stars for all the lights at night. It just seemed unlikely. Maybe long after anyone who remembered the past few decades had passed on – maybe then, but the distrust and suspicion ran deep.
"I think sometimes it's all my fault," she said weakly. "And then I think that's giving myself a little too much credit, but Mama can be so … insistent." Cougar smiled to himself, thinking if her mother was half as persistent as she was, it was little wonder the government had acquiesced from their former policy of 'If we pretend the Lost Ground doesn't exist, it simply doesn't.'
"Ah, my Lady Doctor-Veterinarian, no one could blame her for wanting to see you again. Besides, where else can people go to see stars as close as ours?"
"I suppose you're right, Straight Cougar."
"My dear, we'd be a pretty miserable tourist trap without the night sky, wouldn't we? As delightful as Cammy's chabos are, they're hardly the draw that pureunadulteratedNATURE is." He could feel her smile into his arm, and he was glad he hadn't lost that particular skill yet – and hoped he never would. "And for that reason alone, I suspect you'll have your stars for a long time to come."
"Maybe so, Cougar-san." She reached down and started pulling on her rubber boot. "Shall we head back?" His creaky bones moved faster than her tender ankle, and he offered her a hand to help her up.
"Straight Cougar?"
"Kiryu-sama?"
"Would you read to me tonight? It's been a while since we've done that and I think … I think I'd like it."
"But of course. We can relive your childhood, or your mother's – I can never quite tell which book belonged to whom. Someone had a fondness for cookies while reading, is all I can say."
"Yes, yes," she laughed. "That would be me and my mother. We can look at whatever you feel like, as long as there are happy endings. I'm not in the mood for authentic fairytales tonight."
They slowly returned home in comfortable silence, leaning on each other for support. Cougar pondered exactly what it was that made an authentic fairytale – surely they didn't have to have a miserable ending, culminating in limbs being amputated or people getting eaten – or star watching being lost for want of a profit. No, even stories that ought to have a gruesome ending could turn out fine in the end – weren't they all proof of that?
The house was quiet, save the bubbling of the coffee pot. He was relieved that there wasn't a pack of people over; his head hurt, he was tired, and feeling vaguely unsettled after his conversation with Kanami. Memories and thoughts he usually kept desperately under wraps threatened to overwhelm him. A scalding shower and a swift collapse into bed was all he wanted.
Mimori was seated on the wide windowsill in her study, looking out towards the sea. She smiled sleepily at him, and he thought she cut a very pretty picture – one that belonged on the pages of one of Cougar's antique books. He idly wondered if she had been this pretty in the years they had been apart.
His recollection of Mimori-the-teenager was fuzzy around the edges, clouded by time and years of exhausted idealization of someone he would never see again, exacerbated by a lack of photographs – though that was probably a blessing, the idea of coming face to face with his teenage self made him uncomfortable. He remembered her as rounder, softer around the edges. Others had plumped in intervening years, but her constant schedule of running here and there kept her lean. He'd spent many a happy hour tracing every inch of the Mimori-that-was-now, but occasionally he mourned the loss of a body he'd never really known.
"You're home late." She smiled and held out a hand to him, which he took somewhat gratefully – after a day spent with nothing other than sawdust, planks of wood, and gawking tourists, it was nice to simply touch her.
"Long day. Kanami came up to see me." She just kissed his hand and held it to her cheek in response. "What in the world did you do to your foot?"
She looked down at her bandaged ankle morosely. "Wasn't paying attention walking home and tripped on a root. I think it will be fine with a few days of rest, it's just sort of uncomfortable at the moment. However," she continued, "a side benefit of being a temporary invalid is that Cougar has promised to entertain me tonight with childish fairytales."
He wished he could just stand here and hold her hand forever.
She leaned against the glass. "Do you still wish I'd left when you asked me to?"
"I -" he hesitated, caught off guard by the suddenness of the question. No point in lying, not like you've ever been any good at hiding the truth from her. "Yes. Sometimes." He brushed her bangs out of her eyes. "For selfish reasons. You weren't raised for this."
She smiled a little sadly. "Nor were you."
No, but there wasn't anything left for me. It went unsaid – he didn't need to say it, it was something they both knew.
"I was the selfish one." Her voice was low and quiet, and it wasn't clear if she was talking for his benefit or her own. "You know, at the time, I thought I was doing something so wonderfully grown up and useful. Can you imagine? I realized at some point it was really selfish of me … all of it. Coming back, staying, still staying, staying longer." She paused to wipe condensation from the windowpane. "Funny, isn't it. I guess at some point it just hurt too much to leave, and I could at least justify being selfish by flinging myself into altruistic things."
He tried to say something, refute her portrayal of herself – 'selfish' was the last way anyone else would describe her – but the words stuck in his throat. He often wished he was like Cougar and could so eloquently voice his feelings and soothe her in her panicky moments, but he wasn't. He could only stand here holding her hand, looking at her with what he was sure was an idiotic expression.
She looked down at his hand and suddenly appeared a little horrified, as if she hadn't realized she was talking to him. She laughed too brightly, covering up her misstep. They had once promised to simply live in the now, and not dwell on the past, nor ruminate on the future. "See? There I am, doing it again – you've had a long day and I'm keeping you up rambling about … nonsense. You look exhausted. Why don't you go take a shower and go to bed?" Her suggestion, as always, was solid, but he was loathe to let go of her hand; he wished he could set her at ease with a word, elegantly explain all that she meant to him, everything she embodied, what she meant to everyone. But he couldn't, so he held her hand instead.
He finally convinced himself to let go when he heard a door slam and the sound of Cougar's boots on the floor. A painfully hot shower quickly followed by what he hoped would be a dreamless sleep – just as she had suggested – sounded like an excellent idea. As he crawled into a hot curtain of water, he could hear Mimori's genuinely bright laugh and Cougar's deep, mellow reading aloud voice. He'd heard Cougar tell stories enough to know precisely how he was beginning, even though only the contours of his voice carried between the walls and over the sound of the shower. 'Now, Kiryu-sama, how do these always start again? Oh yes – once upon a time ….'
Once upon a time. Cammy had said one night – after a little too much wine and in a fit of the teenage romanticism that still caught her from time to time – that Mimori 'is a bit like a fairy tale princess, isn't she? Beautiful and kind and wise and loving and patient.' He had thought at the time she had another thing, a once upon a time, the golden age before everything went to hell. He supposed they all had something like that, but the faded photographs pasted in Mimori's childhood albums testified to a life that really had been fit for a storybook princess.
He sighed and leaned his head against the cool tile of the shower as water that felt like stinging needles beat down on his shoulders. "Once upon a time, before life fell apart bit by bit and then disintegrated all at once in a rush, a life that subsequently went limping along with a veneer of normalcy after kind of recovering from a few years that qualified as hell on earth." Hardly the romantic fluff Cammy would delight in. He and Mimori would make a pretty awful fairytale, come to think of it. Almost as gruesome as the old German ones Cougar delighted in scaring the older children with. How would it go? He closed his eyes, trying not to remember the sound of his mother's voice as she read him to sleep.
Once upon a time, in a land that seemed far away but really wasn't, there lived a princess, and she was beautiful and smart and kind. She traveled to a land that seemed far away (but really wasn't) to see how the people there lived. There she met a boy, and broke his heart (unintentionally), because she had to leave ('But,' she had declared with a firmness beyond her years, 'I'll be back, I promise'). Years later, she did indeed keep her promise, and she was still beautiful and smart and kind.
But this time, the boy left, preemptively breaking her heart (on purpose), lest she be able to wield her power again ('Because,' he had justified to himself with an iciness beyond his years, 'it is for her own good.'). But the princess waited for him to return - though she didn't have to - for princesses are raised to have a sense of honor and duty, and she was good and faithful and patient (also beyond her years), And the boy come back and she still loved him, which he found difficult to believe, and he often laid next to her while she slept, simply watching, fearing that she would take back her gift of forgiveness and break his heart once again. For in a just world, bad deeds never go unpunished.
Mimori stood brushing her hair out in long, even strokes – she did find repetition soothing at times - and peered from behind the heavy curtains that shut out most of the light. The first and only time she had come face to face with a curious tourist staring into her bedroom at 3 AM, she had screamed loud enough to wake most of the town. A bleary-eyed Cougar had managed to restrain Kazuma from committing a capital offense, and Ryuho had simply fumed silently with a murderous look in his eyes. They'd hastily installed curtains after that.
She'd always liked falling asleep in a room half-bathed in moonlight; the Lost Ground was still so blissfully dark at night, and the moon so comparatively bright. No wonder the tourists like it, she mused as she watched a couple head down the little path to the sea, a bottle of wine tucked under the woman's arm. The moon was barely a sliver, but the sky was bright with stars. It pained her a little to shut out all that lovely soft light with … curtains. She sighed, and hoped Cougar was right - that little changes like strangers coming through at regular intervals weren't the beginnings of wholesale change. Curtains were bad enough; she didn't know what she'd do if the stars were no longer close.
She turned away from the window and felt her way to bed. The covers were cold and smooth, and she settled herself gratefully against Ryuho (who was not cold in the least, which still surprised her) as he curled around her and slipped his arm around her waist.
She idly stroked his arm, a snippet of a poem Cougar had read to her once coming back to her suddenly. Not knowing when we will meet again, let's write letters. Letters – they should've written letters when they'd parted as children. She wondered why she hadn't. Not that it made much difference now, she thought wryly. She thought of asking him if he'd ever considered it, but he was so tired today.
She smiled when he kissed the nape of her neck, sending a little shiver down her spine. "Mimori?"
"Hm?"
"You're not selfish."
"Oh, Ryuho, you don't have to – I mean, I'm sorry for -"
"Stop." His hand found hers, which was twisting the cord of her (their?) pendant a little anxiously. She stopped her half-anxious twisting. "Just because I sometimes wish you'd gone back when I asked doesn't mean … doesn't mean I know what I'd do without you," he mumbled into her neck finally.
She couldn't help but smile at that, the closest thing to a declaration of love she was likely to ever get from Ryuho Ryu. Years later, he still jealously guarded his innermost feelings, even when they were obvious to everyone. She supposed they all did, at least a little – she marveled at the visitors who were able to so blithely wander here and there, soaking up the pastoral views without a thought to those who had made it so. Some were scarred physically; those who weren't were frequently scarred emotionally; and all of them seemed to be waiting for the other shoe to drop, as Asuka had once said to her.
As if letting go of the tight rein they kept on their memories could spell disaster. And maybe it would, causing the carefully constructed life they had built up bit by bit, safely shielded from the past, to collapse in a heap of raw anger and grief. Even so, it hurt to feel the wide gulf that separated them sometimes. All the conversations waiting to be had, memories waiting to be released. She and Ryuho lay together some nights and she wanted nothing so badly as to simply shake him and insist he spit it all out – every last terrible, miserable, heartbreaking thought. Instead, she always felt at once wonderfully close and terribly far away from him, as if there was always going to be some unbridgeable chasm between them.
She wondered how it was that fairytales always had neat endings, or at least their modern reincarnations did. What lay beneath them? What did authors leave unsaid? Did the heroes and heroines calmly hash out their trials and travails over a pot of coffee and some cake? Did the lovers patch things up with a week's vacation to some tropical place? Did the Cowherd and Weaver Girl ever spend their solitary annual night together twined around each other but separated by lives lived apart, yet so very interconnected?
She held his hand a little tighter.
Once upon a time, she began in her head, silently mimicking Cougar's solemn voice, the one he always started stories with. Once upon a time there was a girl, and though some called her a princess, she was merely a member of an ancient aristocracy - although if her mother was to be believed, there were some imperial relatives buried in the genetic woodpile somewhere. And when she was young, she met an aloof boy, equally as aristocratic, but twists of fate and geopolitics had shuffled his family to the margins. And, in a burst of youthful naïveté, she resolved to win him over, and she did. For a while. And then …. And then ….
… and then in after years, people were wont to sigh in admiration for their long-standing love and mention romance and fate, though the 'princess'-cum-doctor-veterinarian wondered if they had any idea of the heartbreak that lurked right below the surface, ever ready to burst forth with renewed vigor.
Well, she thought, that wouldn't do. Sleep was washing over her, but she resolved to try again.
Once upon a time …
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton," from Four Quartets