A/N: Normally I'm canon when it comes to origin stories. However, you might have noticed I'm a stickler for detail. I can write about Dead Wet Girls going splash, people who deal with their issues by dressing up as bats and scarecrows and really tacky evil clowns, no problem. But I can't write Crane's great-grandmother trained crows to attack him by squeezing dead rat juices (eeew) on the old scarecrow and also on his best Sunday suit (doubly eeew) when I know it's stupid.
Crows are smart. Crows make tools. Crows can learn how to use a coin-operated peanut dispenser. Crows can recognize individual humans' faces. Crows can count. All scientifically proven. And they're not going to be fooled by just a little dead rat stink. If she hung dead rats around the scarecrow's neck and around Crane's neck, then yes, they'd go for the dead rats. But if all there is on him is the reek, they'd soon figure out there was no reason to dive-bomb this guy. The person who wrote that origin deserves a little dead rat juice on his clothes.
Which is my way of saying I'm taking liberties with his back story. End of rant.
Added another link to my profile page--a drawing of Suzume by AnotherMaddHatter. Thanks so much!
Also, I promised some explanations about that guy with the scars--you know the one--and they didn't make it into this chapter. Sorry. I'll put it in the next one.
This winter morning
Crows against the snowy landscape;
all that's lacking is the artist's stamp.
---Lady Suzume Murasaki, 1766-1790.
When I was at leisure, I might theorize about the physiology (or lack thereof) of ghosts, but my most urgent problem at the moment was finding my sample specimen.
Following her rapidly drying footprints down the street, I noted the general decrepitude of the neighborhood. I could not see a single piece of living vegetation, not even a blade of grass, which is always a bad sign. The fewer trees there are in an area, the worse the area. When the only earth is as bare and hard as baked clay, it is a sure sign that one way or another, the general environs are not healthy for living things. A few of the front stoops I passed had small clusters of people loitering on them; the further I got from the police station, the more groups there were, and they grew larger. As I went by, they watched me with cold, reptilian eyes.
I felt the seismic thoom-thoom of a car's audio system before I heard it—was it my imagination, or did it slow as it passed me, as though those in it wanted to have a good look at me? Half the street lights were out, but I could see the next intersection up ahead, and Suzume's footprints glistened in what light there was. Waiting at the corner was—
--something impossible. It was someone wearing a scarecrow costume, no, the scarecrow costume I had made all those years ago. I had burned it after I got away, that same night. I had watched it twist as the sparks darted over it like gnats rising from the wet grass, watched it blacken and shrivel. Yet here it was, on this unknown person's slightly built, not-too-tall frame. I knew it was the same one, I remembered every crude stitch, every rip, every patch and stain. This was not possible.
It—he stirred as I got nearer, and spoke, "Remember the pumpkins."
"What?" I knew that voice. Thick with a Georgian accent, young, and male, it was my own, unmodified as I had spoken when at home. Not my voice as one would hear it coming from a recording device, but my voice as I heard it when I spoke.
"You heard me. Remember the pumpkins." And then he was gone.
The preponderance of evidence had forced me to believe there was a Suzume, but nothing would convince me that the scarecrow had been real. No, not even a handful of the straw.
I did, however, remember the pumpkins. In the last couple of years I lived with Great-Grandmother, there was a slow but inevitable, inexorable shift in power, as she grew physically and mentally frailer and weaker and I grew stronger and more confident. The blows she rained down upon my shoulders no longer had that same forceful sting, and it was difficult for her to maintain the same psychological stranglehold she had upon my mind when she sometimes confused me for her late brother-in-law. One day when she raised her cane to belabor me with it yet again, I simply turned around and wrested it from her hand.
It's hard to say which of us was the more surprised, she or I. I sprang to my feet, turned, raised the cane above my head, and she cowered, yes, she finally cowered from me. I paused, because that moment burned sweet in my heart as a drop of peach brandy on the tongue, and I wanted to savor it. I paused, and she waited for the blow to fall. I could hurt her, break her bones, beat her to death, even—and she could do nothing to stop me.
Yet I didn't strike. Not because I believed hitting a defenseless old woman was wrong; after all, this was the woman who had scarred me and starved me my entire life. Nor was it because I believed hitting people in general was wrong. I had been hit so often and by so many different people that even now I can only intellectually comprehend that using physical violence is wrong. Emotionally I am entirely indifferent to it.
I did not refrain from hitting her because it was wrong. Alive and intact, she was useful as the only person in the house who could write and sign checks, useful as a cook, useful as my legal guardian. Dead or severely injured, even hospitalized, she would be a great deal of trouble, one way or another. So I merely threw her cane to the ground and walked away. From then on, I asserted myself more, taking another piece of cornbread at dinner, demanding the key to the mansion's mildewing library, and she did not like it.
That year I decided to grow something new. I planted a cash crop. Pumpkins. I chose a variety which would be ideal for Jack-o'Lanterns, because they only had to look good, not taste good, and because I could sell them myself at the farmer's market in a nearby town, thereby eliminating the middle man and making a larger profit. I had hauled water all summer to grow them, weeding and hoeing and all the other things one must do to grow pumpkins, and by fall I had a fine crop. A neighbor with a truck promised me transportation for both me and my vegetables, and late one Friday night I picked several dozen, crated them up, and went to sleep so I could be up bright and early. I didn't want to keep the neighbor waiting, after all.
Except the neighbor kept me waiting. I waited and waited, while the sun grew higher in the sky, until at last I went in to call him and ask him if something was wrong.
"Oh, your grandmother called and said I shouldn't bother to come." His voice was distinctly cooler than when I had last spoken to him.
"But I—she was wrong. I need a ride, I was counting on you, not just this weekend but through till Halloween."
"Well you can count on somebody else." He hung up. I looked at the receiver for a long moment before I hung up, listening to the dial tone. She had said something to him, I didn't know what, but something that was bad enough to make him despise me and not even listen to my side of the story.
What was I going to do now? I couldn't rent a truck, because I didn't have my driver's license yet, and even if I could afford to hire someone in advance, there went my profits…
I had long ago stopped wondering why my great-grandmother and grandmother hated me so much. Instead, I went out and looked at all my pumpkins, round and orange and perfect as a harvest moon. They were no good for baking or stewing, just for carving into funny faces. Squirrels might eat them, but little else would. All that work, for nothing.
The fury I felt threatened to overwhelm me. I could not go anywhere near my great-grandmother at that moment, because I did not trust myself. I had to find some release for this—and I did. I smashed the pumpkins, a dozen or so at a time over the next few weeks. But why would a long-buried part of my psyche want to remind me of that at this particular moment?
I crossed the street, and stopped, because that was where the line of footprints ended. "Murasaki-Sama?" I called out. This neighborhood wasn't quite as bad as the one I had just walked through; there was a sickly maple sapling planted by the curb.
No-one answered.
"Murasaki O-Suzume-Sama?" I tried again. Seeing a flutter of white by a paling, I went over to have a look at what might be there. It was only a plastic bag from the chain drugstore down the street. I began to feel quite perturbed. Although Suzume might be essentially immortal and invulnerable, she was still all alone in Gotham City, in an era she had no knowledge of, and in a country whose dominant languages she did not speak. Perhaps she was already back at my house, through some connection to either the chest or her bones, but I doubted it. I had broken the charm which bound her to both when I broke the paper seals on the box which held her skeleton, and although that might mean she was free, it also meant she could get lost. I…felt bad about that.
More than bad. She was the same person who had suffered five years in exile, married to a lout, friendless and lonely, only to die a slow and hideous death by poison, and I had betrayed her yet again. Perhaps I was only sentimentalizing, but she was the only person I could say I felt a sort of emotional connection to, and now—could she, would she trust me? Would I never see her again—or would she decide I deserved to share her husband's fate?
A third time I tried, "O-Suzume-sama?"
And then she was there, her bare feet pathetic against the dirty pavement, her hair hanging loose around her face, so long it reached below her waist and headed for her knees. She spoke, and while I did not understand the words, I knew what she meant without need for a translator and without benefit of telepathy. It was all there in the expression on her face, the tone of her voice, her body language.
"Why?" she asked. "Why are you looking for me now when you were going to abandon me there? Among those filth? I was so frightened… What did I do that I deserved such treatment? I mended your shirts for you," she grabbed the collar of her own garment, tugging at it and pointing to me, "and this is the way you show your appreciation?"
The Japanese put much stock in bowing to show politeness, I recalled, so I did, saying, "I'm sorry. I was wrong. Please forgive me," hoping she would understand me as I did her.
She slapped me across the face, hard enough to knock my glasses askew, and it stung like blazes. "I'm sorry—" she said, timidly, horrified at what she had done, but then she recovered. "Why should I be sorry! You deserved that! What do you want from me now? Why should I trust you?" she raged, the tears streaming down her face.
I straightened my glasses. "I am sorry, O-Suzume-sama, and I hope you will let me prove it. Come home with me. Come home, and we'll put this behind us. Please." I held my hand out to her.
She stood there a moment, simply looking at me, and her face twisted up in anguish. Then she looked around at the houses, at this city which was as alien to her, or more, than the surface of another world. "All right," she decided, "I don't have any other choice."
"Crane, Jonathan," I said, pointing to myself. "Murasaki O-Suzume-sama," I pointed at her, and then at myself again. "Crane, Jonathan."
"Ka-ra-ne," she said, sounding out more syllables than were really there. "Jun-a-san—Jun-san!" Her face lit up, and she smiled at me for the first time.
Evidently 'Jun' was a Japanese name, and the 'th-' sound is one of the hardest for non-English speakers to master. So she had interpreted my name as 'Jun-san'.
"Close enough," I agreed, nodding and smiling in return.
She still calls me that to this day, even though she can pronounce my name perfectly. When we're in private, however, it's 'Jun-san'.
This making friends was all well and good, but there was still a large problem ahead of us. We had to make it back to my house alive—or I had to make it back alive, at least.
