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Sonzai (Existence)
Fourteen: Kaika

In his memory, the Kutou palace gardens were a rare thing of beauty, exotic vines weaving their luxurious fringes through contorted tree limbs, delicate flowers strewn almost carelessly across living water that puddled and tinkled into vast, crystal pools. There was none of that now as Kaika carefully closed the door behind him, hearing a small snick as it clicked back into the wall. He jerked his head at the noise, and in that one brief glance he saw the door was no longer there.

Mysterious disappearing doors or ghost-child monks had hardly fazed him, but as he stood there in front of the doorless wall, he realized that he'd half- hoped the gardens at least would still be as he remembered.

No one had looked after this place for some time. The pools were all dry, choked with dirt and weeds. The trees had grown to monstrous heights, black branches stabbing the sky with bare fingers. Unpruned swaths of vine swallowed what could be seen of the lower trunks; higher up, dead leaves fluttered in the gray wind. Kaika bent and touched the cracked stone path under his wolf-stained sandals, and as he did so the wind swirled in eddies between his toes, whipping past him the last remains of flower petals.

He caught one of them between his fingers, but it crumbled to dust.

With an effort he got to his feet, clamping down firmly on the corner of his mind that tried to cry out in anguish, wondering how, who, why. There was only one answer to the question, he knew, and he couldn't afford to think about that answer right now.

His feet took him in a slow daze around the edge of the old flower garden, through a ruined maze of tiered pool beds, to the foot of the old wooden bridge spanning the dried remains of the garden's central lake. Kaika stepped gingerly onto the first plank, testing. It held. There was no evidence of rot anywhere within these walls, he realized as he made his slow way up the bridge to its highest point, grasping the faded rails still bearing traces of its original brilliant red coating. Everything was merely very dry.

He coughed on the dust as he stopped, staring down into what used to be rippling water, now cracked earth. Shun, he thought. I had to go. That's the way it had to be. I'm sorry.

"You did the right thing," his brother said softly from behind him, and Kaika didn't turn around, simply smiled. "I'm glad you went. If you hadn't, maybe we would have all been killed."

Kaika gripped the rail. "Am I alive now?" he wondered. "I'm not so sure."

There was a cool touch against his cheek, the faintest hint of a breeze. "I'll be here if you need me, Aniki," his brother said, and the presence was gone.

The path wound around several tall stands of what most likely used to be ornately pruned shrubs, now reduced to a matted mass of weeds. He skirted them, hearing his shoes crunch against pebbles coming loose from the walkway, turned the next curve to what used to be the back entrance to the palace.

The double golden doors had not only been locked, but he could see wooden beams tacked securely across their width, and the gate leading from the garden to the doors over a pebbled footbridge that once arched gracefully over rushing waters had also been locked and barred. Vines crept through crumbling holes, brown and dusty. Kaika hesitated. He could climb over the wall, but it was high, and he withdrew his hand with a slight yelp as he tried to touch the wall itself; the vines, he saw as he looked closer, were embedded with tiny thorns.

There was something about bridges, he thought to himself absently, sticking one sore finger in his mouth and tasting the tartness of his own blood. Something about bridges, that girl in the red and white gown who had been calling to him. There had been water under him and sky above him, and all he had to do was let go, and he thought of something else then, that he had been grasping his flute as she tried to save him.

His flute, he thought with a sudden jolt and pulled it from his belt, placing the rough mouthpiece to his lips.

He had no particular melody in mind as the first notes wafted into the grey air. He thought instead of water, of a brown-haired girl in red and white ceremonial garb and her tears, of green and growing things. He thought of Shun, his brother's voice and the touch of a small hand, of Sairou and his parents waiting faithfully day after day for him to come home. He didn't know when he had started to cry, only realized it when he felt wetness on his cheeks, his face, a touch of a tendril on his mouth-

It was raining.

His eyes flew open.

He stumbled backward, almost dropping his flute as he dashed one hand across his mouth where the vine had crept up and began to wrap itself around him. But not just one vine â€" there were hundreds of them now, creeping across the courtyard in brilliant lines of growing green, wrapping themselves around the rails of the dry bridge, curling across the shuttered palace doors, rushing through the holes in the wall, through the cracks in the garden gate.

Before he could draw another breath, to ready himself or perhaps to scream, the vines tightened on the already straining wood and stone beams holding the gates upright, held taut for a split second, and then the wall shattered.

Kaika ducked instinctively, one arm flung up over his head. Splinters and sharp pieces of rocks pelted through the air. He dropped to a crouch, bracing against the impact.

There's no time to waste, aniki, the voice whispered, and he did not hesitate, didn't look to see where he was going, simply clenched his flute in his free hand and dashed forward.

His feet hit solid ground and he pounded through the dust cloud, eyes shut tight. He expected at any moment to feel the shock of slamming into something solid, a wall or a door, but there was nothing, just dry air stinging his lungs as he ran staggeringly on. There was echoing around him, above him, through him, and he gasped for breath as his legs gave out under him and he collapsed to the ground, panting.

When he opened his eyes, he found that everything around him was utterly, completely dark.

He fought the bubbling panic. He couldn't have run far, he reasoned to himself, and he was still clutching the flute so hard that his palms hurt. Relaxing his grip, he balanced the instrument on one unseen knee and pushed himself up to a sitting position. The air smelled musty, like the air of a room that had not seen the light in a long, long time. The floor was smooth, tiled...marble?

I'm inside the Kutou palace, he thought with a curious sense of frightened delight, and with that thought his knee jerked slightly and his flute fell to the ground.

He heard it roll just to a short distance away, but his fingers scrabbled blindly at the marbled floor and touched nothing. The panic began bubbling again and he pushed it down ruthlessly. Blinking his eyes rapidly, he wondered if he had truly gone blind, but there was a slightly bluish quality to the air that was not quite light but not quite dark either, and he could almost make out the outlines of his fingers when he put one hand up to his face.

Another memory came creeping back, of him alone in a room waiting for Yui to return, a blue light, and a clam shell-

He breathed out sharply, and was rewarded by a faint bluish glow in the space where his breath had vanished.

Pushing himself to his feet, he swallowed, focusing this time on the immediate space around him. When he blew out the stream of air this time, it was bright, concentrated, and through its glittering sparks, he saw his flute laying no more than an arm's length to the right from where he had been sitting. He bent down and picked it up, noticing absently that the air was lighting up now as he exhaled, a dim but steady glow that took longer to fade than his initial experiments.

"That'll be fine," he whispered to the echoing palace walls, blowing out a long sigh that bloomed like muted fireworks, rolling slowly across the floor and up the pillared walls. Everything was blue. He didn't know if that was because of the odd quality of the light or if this room had always been blue â€" because it was a room, Kaika saw â€" with a door at one end, high ceilings painted with faded, contorted frescoes. He glanced back from where he had come, but the light did not reach, and there was only an endless black tunnel.

He took another deep breath and let it out again, and as he turned his eyes to the door, he noticed that there was a peculiar quality about this light in the space next to him, as if there was almost a tracing of an outline, like a body...

"We'd better get going," his brother said to him, "or we'll be too late."

Kaika closed his eyes and then opened them. The outline was still there.

"What," Shun chided him gently. "You don't believe in me?"

"That's not what I meant," he began, and then stopped as a warm hand found his and squeezed his fingers slightly.

"Yui-sama's in danger," Shun said. "And we're the only ones who can save her now."

He didn't ask how his brother knew this. Instead he grasped the unseen hand tightly, feeling it as warm and solid as any flesh-and-blood, and led his twin across the floor to the single door set unassumingly amid the swirling paintings of Kutou's dragon god.

It swung open at their approach and he crossed through the low arch, exhaling deeply again to illuminate the hallway beyond. It twisted out of sight beyond the light of his breath, but the same grotesque, strangely fascinating paintings that had decorated the walls were hung here within dusty, ornate picture frames.

"What is this place?" he wondered, and his brother replied, "It's the part of Nakago's heart that we never see."

He tightened his grip on his flute in one hand and Shun's warm palm in the other, concentrating on moving forward, one foot in front of the other. The air was musty and he almost sneezed, fighting back the twitching of his nose and glancing downward at the floor to clear his eyes, and stopped.

"Footprints?" he whispered.

His brother didn't answer and he bent down, reaching out with the hand that held his flute, the floor glowing blue at his approaching breath. The prints were small, barely disturbing the layer of dust that coated the marble floor, not small enough to be a child's prints but not large enough for a man's.

"Yui's been here," he said with certainty, and something made him look up, to the left, at the painting hanging on the wall there. As with the room behind them, perhaps it was his breath that made it glow blue, or maybe it had always been blue, a mass of spiral cloud and smoke shapes that made no sense to his questioning eyes - but it caught the attention and held it.

"Shun?" he said.

"Take a step back," his brother said quietly.

A river, he thought as he backed up, but no, the chaos was too ordered to be a river, four limblike shapes stretching from the blue expanse, and he turned his head further to the right, following the mass of blue to where it reached a thorny forehead, bulbous eyes, a gaping maw of a massive dragon.

He stumbled back, and there was a burst of something in front of his eyes, a mental explosion. The world went light, then dark, then light again, and he faintly heard his brother shouting, "Aniki!" and then someone else speaking, perhaps through memory or perhaps words, far away.

The first wish was for the sealing of Suzaku.

There was a scream, perhaps Shun's or perhaps his own, and the ground shook. His only thought was for his flute as he collapsed backward against the throbbing in his brain.

The second wish was for the return of the Suzaku no Miko to her own world.

Get up, aniki.

"I can't," he gasped, and the pressure on his hand tightened, becoming a feeble jerking on his arm.

Aniki, please. Aniki, get up.

He gave a hoarse cry and heaved himself off the ground, toward the faint blue form before him, not realizing that beyond that was the wall and set into the wall were two gold doors. He had no time to stop before his head slammed into one of them, and there was the explosion again, except on a smaller scale because this time it was mostly physical. The doors groaned and he stumbled through on shaky legs, hitting the ground as he realized that someone was screaming.

"Kaika!" someone cried, and he forced his head to move, forced one arm under his body. It was wobbly and the world spun as he focused, on the black boots that turned into a tall man in emperor's robes as he looked up, the yellow-haired girl slumped against one wall, bleeding heavily from the forehead, the red-haired woman standing on the dais as if she was holding court.

"The third wish," Soi said, her eyes fixed on his as he met her gaze through the throbbing pain in his head, "was to have been Nakago's, for power over the world of the miko. But it was never given!"

For one split second, the world stopped, and it was just he and Nakago in the room, with the rush of water cascading across the stones just like that day he had almost died, and the ghost of a blue-eyed memory saying - Amiboshi, you will go to Konan-koku.

"You shouldn't have come back, Amiboshi," Nakago said.

And then he felt something cold pierce through him, a pair of hands that were not his with a weapon that was not his either. The ryuuseisui whistled through the air, and he cried out with someone else's voice, "Leave my brother alone!"

Nakago smiled. The blast from his hands hit the wall behind Kaika, but the ryuuseisui sped away nimbly, whipping back and forth dizzyingly, taunting. Shun, he thought desperately, and then calmer, looking past Nakago to where Yui stood supporting herself against one wall, eyes hard and determined, one hand outstretched. He did not need to look closer to know that she was holding a small clam shell.

He could hear his brother sobbing if he listened too closely, a sound that seemed to come from deep inside him, a tearing of the heart. "Yui," he gasped, and he didn't meant to cry but he was crying anyway, begging her with his eyes to understand. "Yui, I was too late. I'm sorry! Yui, I'm sorry!"

She held out to him the hand that cupped the clam shell, took a step closer, and he suddenly saw that her hands were no long human, but clawed and scaled, silver-blue. Nakago's next energy blast flung him back against the far wall. He felt something wet lap at his toes and looked down, expecting to see blood. But instead he saw that the blast had also broken one of the basin walls, and the pool of water was trickling outward. Nakago held out a hand and he could feel the energy gathering there, felt his brother pull the ryuuseisui to respond, whistling through the air and wrapping around Nakago's wrists, quicker than sight.

Nakago jerked back, pulling Kaika with the motion. The broken pieces of tile sliced into his skin and he saw Yui running, gesturing urgently with one hand. The water lapping around his legs was tinted red now, and he could feel Shun's energy draining through the bond, but the ryuuseisui held. He tried to bring his flute to his lips with arms that felt heavy as lead. "Kaika!" Yui screamed.

She was so near, if he could only reach out one hand to touch her - he could see her panicked eyes, the cut on her forehead, the torn hem of her skirt. If only I hadn't lost you in the rain, he thought fuzzily, if only I'd tried harder, I wouldn't have failed you. His brother tightened his grip on the ryuuseisui as he struggled just to breathe, knowing that if he lost consciousness, it was over.

Amiboshi.

He blinked through his foggy vision, but it was not Nakago and it was not Yui, or Soi. "Help..." he whispered, and whoever it was laughed. He felt warmth creep around him, between his toes, up his chest, a gentle summer breeze kissing his face.

Whatever happens, don't let go.

Yui's hand touched his, scaly and rough, and something small and cold folded into his palm as she intertwined their fingers tightly together, and before he could gasp out another apology, she kissed him.

The room disappeared and he was spinning downwards into an endless abyss of black. The wind whistled past his face, harsh and shrill and freezing like tiny drops of ice, but Yui's body and lips were warm against him, her fingers still holding onto his for more than her life, and that tiny, hard shell sandwiched between them.

"Are we dying?" he whispered against her lips, and she shivered.

"You came back," she said in response. He felt his brother stir at her words, like another part of his consciousness, and wasn't sure which one of them she was speaking to. Perhaps it didn't matter now.

Yui-sama, I promised.

But no, it was daylight, and he could feel the breeze tickling the back of his neck as he pounded down the cobblestoned street. There was the smell of fear in the air, the sound of feet behind him, shouting. He couldn't stop, he knew. He didn't know why he was running, who he was running from, just that he had to keep going because if he did not, they would catch him, and if they caught him, he would never see Shun again.

"Stop! Chiriko! Stop!"

Chiriko?

The sound of rushing water filtered slowly into his hearing and he turned down a side street, feeling his flute slippery with sweat between ice -cold fingers. The bridge reared up in front of him, a few paces between him and freedom, and Kutou.

Something slammed into him from behind. He reeled, tottered unsteadily as sparks flashed before his eyes, stumbled backwards, tried to jam his foot into the ground behind him before he realized there was no ground. The river swirled hungrily beneath him and his desperate, scrabbling fingers found the railing of the bridge.

"Chiriko," said the maiden in the beautiful red dress and the beautiful brown eyes, so beautiful, so sad, and her voice was full of despair and longing and something else he could not name. He could feel his fingers slipping. The rock was too wet, the river too high and hungry after the long rains. "Your music is so lovely...you don't need to use it like this!"

You don't understand, he wanted to tell her, to laugh, to catch hold of her hand and tell her that it was not true, it was all a bad dream and soon they would wake up. The fingers of his left hand crept upward, caught on some bits of loose brick, and even as he tried frantically to regain his hold, he knew it was too late.

The river roared beneath him, so close, so welcoming. He squeezed his eyes shut against the splash of the icy water, but there was a jolt as something - someone - grasped the other end of his flute.

The reed will break, he thought, opening his eyes, but it did not break after all, and even before he saw her he knew it was the maiden in the red gown, and he remembered that the something else in her eyes that he could not name before was called love.

"Don't do this, Chiriko. You don't need to hurt anyone. You don't have to play the flute to hurt anyone."

He smiled at her and heard the voice, that other voice, over her words.

Amiboshi. You will go to Konan-koku.

"I'm sorry, Miaka," he breathed, and this time as he let go, he did not close his eyes as he fell. She was crying. So was he, he found as he hit the water, taking one last breath before the waves closed over his head and the cold shock of the icy river froze his limbs so he could not even have swum to the surface if he had wanted to. I'm drowning, he thought, but the thought seemed very far away. Someone else was crying too, but it was very near, much nearer than the distant thought of death.

I'm sorry! he sobbed. I'm sorry! I wasn't strong enough. I couldn't. I can't. I had to let go, don't you see?

Arms closed around him and he felt the water carrying him away, a rushing of bubbles close to his face washing away the tears. When he closed he eyes he saw the maiden in the red gown, as vivid as if she had been painted onto the insides of his eyelids. Miaka, he thought. Her name is Miaka, and the presence beside him said, I know.

His eyes flew open as Yui kissed him again, the long, shuddering contact jolting through his body, and between their fingers, clutched tightly, he could still feel the ridged clam shell. Water swirled around them, pulsing bright, pure blue, and he realized that he had no need to breathe as Yui drew away at last and they stared at each other in wonder through the blue hazy glow.

"Nakago followed Miaka to her - our - world," Yui said. "I remember the rest now - the rest of the story. I should have stopped him, but I didn't. I was weak."

Kaika said, "But you're stronger now." The clam shell thrummed with power through his fingers. He felt Yui shaking ever so slightly.

"Soi told me," Yui said finally, "that I still have one wish left."

For a moment Kaika allowed himself to feel his hopes crashing down around him, allowed himself to finally confront the fact that she was of another world after all, and in the end, she could not stay. "What will you wish for, then?" he said finally, drawing her to him. She rested her head against his chest.

"For a long time," she said, "I thought I hated Miaka, I thought she hated me as much as I hated her. I thought she'd abandoned me."

You couldn't know the truth, Yui-sama, Shun said quietly. It wasn't your fault.

"I made myself believe she would raise up a kingdom to fight against me because Nakago told me so. I thought she'd call her god to destroy me. So I vowed to destroy her first."

"I don't think Miaka was like that," Kaika said, and Yui shook her head.

"Miaka was too innocent," she said, "and so was I." She paused. "Nakago's killed her, you know? I couldn't save her in the end, so he killed her. Miaka, and all her seishi, and everyone she loved. They're all dead too. I watched them die.""

"Yui-"

She laid a finger on his lips, and he blew out a long, deep, quiet breath. A blue trail of air wisped around them, curling around Yui, caressing her face, her shoulders, wrapping around her waist, and disappeared. "I have to go," she said. "I have to set things right."

Kaika swallowed. "I know."

He held her at arms' length for a moment, and afterwards he could never be sure if she had initiated it or he had, but somehow he found her arms tightly around him and his around her, the beating of her heart quick against his chest, the clam shell still clenched between their intertwined fingers, and the voice of his brother in his ears.

Aniki, it's time.

"I love you," he breathed, or maybe it was Shun's voice, or maybe it was both of them, but he felt her smile once more against his lips as she drew a deep breath, as the word reverberated from her lips through the water and they rose from the depths like the rushing of a wave, in a coil of blue light and foaming water like an ocean storm in the wake of a dragon's roar.

Kai...jin..