Butterfly's Sleep copyright 1999 to L'Arc~en~Ciel.
Fushigi Yuugi and all characters are property of Watase Yuu.
III. Strength
We're here and now, but will we ever be again
Cause I have found
All that shimmers in this world is sure to fade
Away again
It's too far away for me to hold
It's too far away
Guess I'll let it go |
--Fuel, Shimmer
After a week, Yui felt comfortable enough around the neighborhood and her host family to go out in the yard to help the Grants with some yardwork.
Will Grant loved growing things. It was evident in the way he handled leaves and stems with reverence, the way he carefully arranged flower petals with gentle hands, the way he clipped weeds as if even they were sacred princes of unseen kingdoms. Yui had never met anyone with so much passion for gardening. The only real gardens she had seen were on trips to Shinto shrines, and there was a certain air about them that made her afraid to touch anything.
In the Grants' garden, every plant and every green thing was a child to touch and to hold and to love.
At first she just pulled weeds and growths, but after a few days, Will gave her the clippers and showed her how to trim bushes. Someday when it was the right season, he said, they could plant flowers. Yui had never planted flowers before.
Will Grant reminded her a bit of Tatara, odd though the comparison was. The reverence in his eyes for the growing things he tended was exactly as she remembered in the Byakko seishi's own as he had held that seed in his hand.
When Yui had betrayed his trust.
The weather was cool, but warm enough that they would work up a sweat in the yard outside, and then Barbara would have lemonade waiting for them when they reentered the house, tired and happy. She'd never had lemonade before, but Yui fell instantly in love with the sweet, yet tangy flavor of sugar and lemons. If everything American were like this, she could grow to love the country. Though the language was a bit strange.
"You know," Will said the first Sunday night, after dinner. "After a few more days of this, you'd be more than qualified enough to be able to help in a gardening store or something."
She'd almost forgotten that she was supposed to get a job here, and the words startled her for a moment. She had become comfortable with the Grants after the first day, helping around the house and learning what made them smile. Yui had always been good with making people smile.
She had finally called Tetsuya that second night, but the conversation had been short. She had heard what sounded like crying in the background, and when she had asked about it, Tetsuya had just sighed.
"Yeah," he said. "They've got a kid."
He had gotten a job almost immediately at the local bookstore, which he said would definitely help him with his English. They hadn't talked about that. Especially for a new employee there, work was strenuous and he didn't have time to talk. He had sounded apologetic when he said that, but Yui detected an almost pleading note in his voice, as if he didn't really want to talk to her. She supposed her voice had the same note when she agreed.
Two years, going down the drain.
She had seen Mrs. Rushette a few more times after that. The other woman seemed to like gardening as well, though with a sick daughter she was probably not out as often as Yui and Will Grant. Yui had asked her if she needed any help with her yard, and Mrs. Rushette had smiled.
"Sweet girl. Not right now, but if I do in the future, I'll give you a call."
She used the free time in the evenings to write letters to Miaka and Taka, Keisuke, and the Suzaku seishi, addressed to Andy in Hong Kong. She felt almost obliged to write Andy, since he had given her extra spending money on the trip ("How the hell can you take a trip around the world with the meager amount they give out?"), and Chiriko ("I was not biased when I selected you. You're imagining things."). She wished she had internet access, but since the Grants' children were all gone, they had no computers in their house. Of course, old-fashioned hand written letters were nice, too, and not that she was a internet junkie, but email would have been more efficient and quick.
The Grants talked a lot about their children. Beautiful Mary, who was married with a child on the way in November, a successful screenwriter in Hollywood. Their oldest son Tom, a captain in the Army. ("He's in Saudi Arabia right now," said Barbara.) And of course Steven, the engineer/doctor, who they couldn't seem to stop gushing about. He was away right now, having secured an internship in Michigan somewhere. Yui had seen pictures of all three. Mary and Tom dark-haired like Barbara, with intelligent, serious faces, and Steven, blond like Will must have been in his younger days, bright and sparkling with a personality that seemed to leap off the photograph at Yui. She wondered how someone like that could stand to sit at a computer and do calculations all day.
Mrs. Rushette finally asked Yui to step in and do the yardwork soon after. It wasn't much, and Yui enjoyed the extra time being outdoors in the New England sunshine. According to the information she had looked up on the internet before she left Japan, it was supposed to be a rainy summer up north here, but so far they had had nothing but sun except for the day she arrived in Philadelphia. Mrs. Rushette's garden was certainly profiting from the weather, and Yui had a fair share of weeds to pull every time she made the trip over.
The Rushette house was a squat one-story with shady trees over the front porch, a bird feeder hanging from one branch, and sparkling windchimes by the front door. At least one window was always open, and Yui could sometimes hear soft music coming from the one by the garage as she worked in the yard. But Mrs. Rushette seldom came outside anymore that she was not doing yardwork, and Yui wondered if her daughter had gotten worse.
I'm so alone, and I feel just like somebody else
Man, I ain't changed, but I know I ain't the same
But somewhere here in between
The city walls of dying dreams
I think of death it must be killing me |
--The Wallflowers, One Headlight
She had gotten a job at a greenhouse/nursery just a few streets down from the subdivision where the Grants lived, and when she finally had free time to go help Mrs. Rushette in the yard, the weeds had grown tall and she had a hard time digging out the roots.
She was deep in the middle of a particularly stubborn plant when the roar of a car sounded behind her, and Mrs. Rushette pulled up in the driveway, stopping the car and getting out, keys in hand.
"Yui! I haven't seen you around for a while."
Yui stood up, stretching slightly. Despite the other woman's light tones, she thought Mrs. Rushette's face looked tired and drawn behind the sunglasses. "I found a job, ma'am, but I had some free time today."
"I see. Well, I hate to interrupt you. I just got back from the grocery store."
"Do you need help carrying bags?" Yui inquired. "I'm almost done in the yard."
Mrs. Rushette's face seemed to light up. "Would you? That would be so helpful of you."
"Of course," Yui said, going around to the back and waiting for Mrs. Rushette to unlock the trunk. There were quite a few grocery bags. Obviously, she hadn't shopped in a while.
Carrying the milk, she went around to the back door and opened it with one hand, steadying the cartons with the other, and stepped inside the house. The window was open in the kitchen and a cool breeze flooded in. The floor was of slick, worn linoleum, and the curtains around the window were yellowed with age. It was a small kitchen, barely enough to hold a stove and refrigerator and countertop and a small kitchen table with three chairs.
Yui guessed the milk went in the refrigerator, and opened the door. The inside was almost bare. Had Mrs. Rushette not even had time to go shopping?
She deposited the milk carefully on the shelf and shut the door, preparing to go back outside when a picture caught her eye. It was hanging on the wall next to the window, the only decoration on the otherwise bare brown wallpaper. She stepped closer, frowning.
It was a teenage girl, in the photograph perhaps a little younger than Yui, holding a spring of roses. Her body was petite and slim, and she was wearing a simple white dress with a high neckline and long sleeves, elegant like a ballgown. She was smiling, but it seemed to Yui that her eyes were looking off into the distance, gazing at something beyond her reach. Her hair was coppery, falling around her shoulders in waves.
Yui didn't know why she reached up a hand to the picture, didn't know why she felt the sudden need, the urge to touch the girl's cheek, forever frozen in time, and whisper that it would be all right, that she would someday find what she was looking for.
But before her fingers touched the glass, there was a rustle from the next room, and she froze.
"Mother? Mother, is that you?"
Mrs. Rushette's daughter. She had forgotten all about her. Was that her in the picture? Yui glanced around guiltily, quickly lowering her hand like a child caught pickpocketing a candy bar in the grocery aisle. Mrs. Rushette was outside; Yui could see her through the window leaning into the car to pick up something unseen. Would it be-
She was naturally curious, and her curiosity overcame her caution. Just a quick look into the next room, to see who this mysterious daughter was. It couldn't hurt, could it? Mrs. Rushette would be grateful that she had looked to see how her daughter was.
Of course she would be.
Steeling herself, Yui crossed the kitchen and the narrow hallway where the door to another room lay slightly ajar. She knocked.
"Mother?"
"No," Yui said softly, then pushed the door open.
The curtains were drawn but there was a light burning on the bedstand by the wide bed in which the too bony figure lay, covers pulled up to her chest. One arm rested slightly outside the bedspread, and huge gray eyes frowned at her as she entered the room, the intruder who was not her mother.
The coppery hair spread across the pillow like ocean waves, long brilliant strands of it, spilling over the coverlet and over the side of the bed, onto the white nightgown like a shroud. Red lips parted but did not speak.
The words which Yui had prepared never came.
For a long moment they stared at each other, the blond Japanese girl in work overalls and clumsy gardening boots, with mud on her knees and dirt on her cheek, and the red-haired woman in the bed, frail in the yellow light that streamed from the bedside lamp, and the room whirled around them and time stood still.
"Soi?" Yui said.
She's got a gun, she's got a gun
She got a gun she calls the lucky one
She left a note right by the phone
Don't leave a message cause this ain't no home
And she cried and she cried and she cried
She cried so long her tears ran dry
Then she laughed and she laughed, she laughed
Cause she knew she was never coming back |
--Beth Hart, L.A. Song
"I knew you would come."
Her Japanese accent was flawless. The temperature in the room seemed to have gone up to sweltering. Yui swallowed, clenching her hands.
"It was you in that picture, wasn't it? In the kitchen."
"You saw that?" There was no particular emotion in that voice. Just a quiet, resigned tone.
"I saw it."
The silence was awkward, hanging like a metal curtain between the two strangers who had once known each other and were yet still strangers.
"I-" Yui said.
But the other held up her hand. "Don't."
Yui closed her eyes. "I'm sorry. Soi, I'm so sorry."
"I don't hate you, you know."
Yui didn't move from her position by the doorway, not looking at the bed but not anywhere else either, the gray walls of the room floating in her vision. "What am I supposed to say? Why, hello, Soi. It's nice to see you in this world, in this life." She heard the bitterness in her own voice, all the festering hurt she had never known she still possessed rising to the surface. "It's nice to know that I haven't escaped from the nightmare that I thought ended with Nakago's death."
"I don't hate you."
Yui moved out of the doorway then, into the dim room, standing by the bed of the woman who, in another life, she had called Soi. For a long moment, there was another awkward silence, and then she expelled a deep breath.
"Hello, Soi."
There was a wan smile on that white face. "Hello, Yui."
"I didn't think I'd find you here."
"Were you looking for me?"
She shook her head.
"I see."
"I-" Yui said, then stopped. "I wanted to look for you, to see if you were in this world. And I didn't. I wanted it all to end. Everything. The nightmare."
"Was it so bad?"
"I suppose I was stupid," Yui said, not answering the other's question. "Miaka found all her seishi, so why shouldn't mine be in this world as well? I was stupid. I'm not usually that stupid. I just didn't want to admit it, that's all."
"I don't hate you, Yui-sama."
Yui shook her head. "Don't. Don't call me that."
"You're still my miko."
"NO!" The woman in the bed flinched, but there were tears in Yui's vision suddenly and everything was a yellow blur. "I'm not! It's over! I'm NOT Seiryuu no Miko anymore! Do you understand?"
Another silence, more awkward than before, as her shout seemed to echo in her ears.
"Come sit on the bed, Yui."
She didn't argue, just blinked tears from her eyes, mechanically moved to the spot on the mattress where the skeletal hand patted, let herself sit.
"I don't know when I first remembered," the soft voice said, slowly piercing through the fog of her brain like a searchlight. "I didn't have dreams or anything like I thought I would, but somewhere during my childhood I think I remembered everything. But it was a blur, images and bits and pieces, being able to speak a language I had never heard, and I thought I was going crazy. I told my parents, and they thought so too. They made me see a psychiatrist, but he attributed it to stress and told me to stay in the hospital for a few weeks. Then they brought me home."
Yui said nothing.
"I went to junior high and high school and in high school I got involved in drugs and the wrong crowd. I drank, I smoked. I slept around. I don't know why I did that. The old Soi-the old me, I wouldn't have done anything like that. But I guess each life is different. By the time that picture you saw in the kitchen was taken, I had already gotten pregnant twice, but I had abortions. I didn't want the responsibility. Even though it killed me inside to take the baby."
"And then what did you do?" Yui whispered.
"I finally ran away." The tone was matter-of-fact, telling a documentary of someone else's life. "I ran away and found a job in the city. I was a prostitute, a street-corner girl, hanging out at the bars and clubs in the big city, hoping to pick up someone so I could eat. For six years, I was miserable and lonely and homesick, but if I came home I knew my parents would never want me back."
"Soi," Yui said, frowning. "Soi."
A shake of red tresses, so slight it was almost non-existent. "When I found out I had AIDS, it was already too late. I should have known something was wrong when I started getting sick so easily, but it-I was stupid. So I did the only thing I could do-I came home. I found out my dad had died the year I left home, and my mother had been struggling to make money to pay for the house herself. She couldn't afford hospital bills for me, and I was too proud to go for help. So I suffered. I was stupid."
Yui took one of the frail hands, meeting the gray eyes looking out from under fringed lashes. She was still as beautiful as Yui remembered, when she had given her final sacrifice to a weapon who had been meant for the one she loved.
"I'm dying, Yui. You know? I'm dying again, and this time again it's for something stupid."
"It's not stupid," Yui whispered. "It's not stupid."
"At least in that other life I tried. In this one, I didn't even try. Not at all." There was self-punishment in the voice now. "So you're not stupid. Compared to me."
"We all make mistakes," Yui said.
The tired smile had a hint of wryness to it in the drawn face. "So we do."
"Damn it, Soi, you're always right. As usual. I'm sorry."
"For what?"
Yui tried to smile. "Feeling sorry for myself."
A shake of the head. "Don't be. You were used. I used you, Nakago used you-we all did, and nothing you did should be yours to blame."
"I used to have nightmares, but they stopped. Now I just cry, and I don't know why."
"Yui-sama. If it's anyone's fault, it should be ours, your seishi. Not yours."
"I know," Yui said. "But I should have been stronger. Like you. I always admired you, you know. Because you were so strong. You loved someone who never could have loved you back, and yet you kept on loving. Suboshi loved me, and I pushed him away. Because I was scared." She looked into the gray eyes. "How do you know?"
"Know what?"
"If it's real or not. When to love and when to let go and how to be strong enough."
"I don't," she said. "You guess and you hope. And when it's hopeless, you keep on hoping because you have nowhere else to go. Like me."
"I dream about him sometimes-Suboshi."
"I dream about Nakago. I saw him, you know."
"Here?" Yui sat up. "Where? How?"
"I didn't imagine you'd be so excited."
"I just want to know…"
"It was at a bar. He was dressed like a businessman, with a big briefcase and expensive suit, with that earring still in his ear. I suppose he has a lot of money now. Maybe he wanted a bit of fun that night. I don't know." Her voice was quiet, and the self-loathing was back. "I took him back with me…we made love. Or, at least I made love to him. I don't think he ever recognized me. To him it was nothing." She laughed. "As always."
"I think he loved you."
"It's too late for that now, Yui-sama. I'm dying, and it's too late. Yui, listen to me."
Frail hands gripped hers with an intensity Yui hadn't even known the bony flesh could produce, gripped her hands until they hurt. "Don't let life pass you by, Yui. We make mistakes-but you can correct them. Even know. It's too late for me, but not too late for you. Don't give up."
Yui closed her eyes. "I'm just a child in this world, Soi. I'm not-"
"You're going to let that defeat you?" The voice was angry now. "You aren't the Yui I knew. The Yui I knew was intelligent, strong, decisive. That's why you were the Miko. Seiryuu chose you."
"I was a mistake."
"Gods," the gray eyes said, "do not make mistakes."
"Soi-"
"Nakago is out there. And if he is, then the others are there too. We're not the same people you knew, Yui. We never really knew you, and now I'll never have the chance to. Don't let second chances pass you by."
"I need to go," Yui said, her words sounding banal in the wake of the other woman's.
"I know."
"I can't-I can't believe I found you. And I don't even have enough time to-"
"That doesn't matter anymore. We all have second chances, Yui. I wasted mine. Don't waste yours."
"I-"
"I will always be your seishi. And you will always be my miko."
Go to bed
Priests are dead
Finally you've found him
And you're allowed
Who could ever say you're not simply wonderful
Who could ever harm you
Sleep now
You're my little girl |
--Tori Amos, Merman
Yui didn't have time to go the Rushette house again, and the weeds began to grow outside. She passed by every day on her way to work, but time was pressing. She had begun to take some English classes as well, and that took up most of her evenings. She had talked to Tetsuya a few times and had gone shopping with him once, but it was awkward and she had given up any hope of rekindling their relationship. It was all a matter of who would broach the subject first. She hoped it wasn't her.
Soi had been right, as always. A second chance…and she was wasting it.
The windows were still open when she passed the house, the windchimes tinkling in the breeze and the birdfeeder hanging from one treebranch, but all she could think of was a small room where the yellow light seemed to seep into the dark corners and a woman lay on the bed, long red hair like fine strands of copper.
"The Rushette girl went to the hospital today," Will commented one night after dinner, when Yui was helping Barbara with the dishes. She almost dropped the mug she was washing.
"She did?" she said, hoping to sound nonchalant.
"Yup. Knew they couldn't keep her here long. Took her away in the ambulance this morning."
"You knew about her?"
Will snorted. "Everyone knows about her. Wasn't such a good girl. You should stay away from people like that, Yui. They'll do you no good."
"Yes," Yui murmured, rinsing the mug and placing it into the drip tray with shaking hands.
She went to work in the Rushette's lawn that weekend, pulling weeds and planting flowers. There was a creak of the back screen door and when Yui looked up, Mrs. Rushette was crossing the lawn with a soft drink in her hand.
"You must be thirsty," she said when she reached Yui. Yui pushed away sweaty hair from her cheek, taking the drink gratefully.
"Thank you, ma'am."
Mrs. Rushette smiled, but her eyes were shadowed. "Don't worry, you won't have to do this much longer. I'm moving at the end of the month."
Yui looked up at her, shocked, and for the first time the red and white For Sale sign in the yard caught her eye. "Moving?"
"I think it's time for a change of scenery. A smaller house, maybe."
Yui nodded. "What about your daughter, then?"
Mrs. Rushette stood still for a moment, then she turned away. "Didn't you hear? She died yesterday."
Time stopped again, and there was the sound of metal sliding into flesh and the fluttering of red hair in the wind, flower petals drifting and a haunted pair of shocked blue eyes and a small voice whispering.
My last gift to you, Nakago…aishiteru.
Furuete kudasai
Hitotsubu no teardrop
Garasu no mune o toosetara
Sore dake de ii
Watashi no koeta kurushimi wa
Iyasareru, ima |
Please shiver
Let one small teardrop
Pass through your glass heart
Only then will I
Overcome my pain
Heal me, now |
--Fushigi Yuugi, Fururete Kudasai (Soi)
|
