Author's Note: I have updated nothing in an exceedingly long time. Still working on chapter eleven of YM as well as a trilogy of original fiction and such. But since I've established that no one cares about my personal life, let us move on to the fic. Am exceedingly proud of it, so please feel free to point out every flaw in the narrative. :)
Judgment
There is a grave at which she stands, solemn-eyed, white-faced, and with a clarity of vision as dark as the shadows that loom behind. There is no priest, only people, and their faces as they turn to her and past her are as blank as the low susurration of thoughts at the back of her mind.
Overhead, twilight is catching up to the day.
Fingers on her shoulder, whisper-soft so that she thinks of ghosts until she feels the bones beneath the flesh and turns to see his smile, sharp enough to cut and polished to a sheen.
"Done yet?" He says conversationally, smiling the boy's smile that she knows he cannot be. (Her eyes, his. Black against black and the electricity before the storm between.) She turns back, shrugs her shoulders so that his hands fall away, to the grave as the first threads of the evening catch at the remaining sunlit tendrils and watches them fade away in its grasp.
-
Her legs bang (awkward, gawky) into the table, the extra assurance(limb) that held them back missing, gone, taken. She closes her eyes, sees his face like sunlight (diffusing, confusing, gone) before the mad distortion of his smile coalesces into a closer memory.
There is no sound in the room as her skin shifts across the futon, only a slight change in the texture of the air. The sharp raggedness of her breathing (unsteady silence), the rusty strangeness of her heartbeat – her only accompaniment to the evening as the spilled salt in the room evaporates into the dark.
-
Ghosts – strange, dissolute creatures in the air, souls released from the constraints of form and shape, given unique imperfections that are all their own. Her voice sounds through the room, a whipcrack to startle the (bored) child. You have seen them.
Yes.
What have you learned today, Anna?
She tips her head to the side (with nary a strand to fall forward; the spun gold hangs finely to frame her sparing, hard-drawn countenance, but never to interrupt, cut off the white profile), legs placed stiffly forward and utterly still. (Kino thinks that she has never seen such a controlled child, each movement so perfectly regulated that it could not be said to be true.) That ghosts always show themselves to be who they are.
And?
That ghosts cannot lie well enough to fool an itako, who can see what they are as well as who they were and so knows the whole of the truth, even that which they cannot know for themselves.
Ghosts can lie. Her eyes, sharp like the glint off of the reflection of a tack, staring narrow and cruel and old. (Was she ever like this? Can she see a fragment of herself in that gleaming, unbreakable stare?)
Her lean, unchildish fingers drum careless shapes across the surface of the polished ebony desk, and the eyes she lifts are cool and impersonal. Only if they believe it. And ghosts were once human beings, who are not all fools if they understand that they have left things unfinished.
-
Unfinished.
Where have you gone, Yoh?
-
He is waiting for her in the living room, amusingly out of place upon the (ugly, she thinks dispassionately) seat at the table, in the midst of all the objects that that which he loathes has created. Tilts towards her attentively, shoulders leaning forward, fingers splayed with careless poise, gripping the seat, his lips curled into a careless smile.
"I have been waiting for you."
"Have you?" how did he find this place why is he here what goes on in that mind. She paces past him sedately, determined not to change her routine to show that he has any effect at all. (Aware at all times, his coal-black eyes fixed upon the back of her neck.) "How fascinating a change it must have been from your usual routine. Go wait outside – this is my house."
"Actually," he says indifferently (smile in his voice, maliciously razored, ground glass in a honeyed sip that slides down her throat), though he is looking at her still (carefully, narrowly), "it's mine."
She freezes, turn-whirls in a graceless spin that flings her limbs about like a rag-doll's. Colorless still, but the red rages high in her cheeks, flushed with the beginnings of a clinically acknowledged annoyance.
"You are trying to annoy me." She says coldly. "It's not working. Go."
"Are you so sure that it's not?" He leans against the chair. (Break. She says to it without speaking, but the carpenter was lamentably thorough with his work.) He raises his hands in a careless flip and suddenly she sees the tiny, folded document nestled in his palm. Casually (long, spidrine fingers of an artist's hands) he unravels the page into a scrawled rectangle. "Isn't this, then, the deed to this house?"
"The old woman who rents it to us would have never been convinced to part with it. She is sentimental enough to want to keep it." And pragmatic enough to want money from it.
He smiles at her – wide and dazzling. "Isn't it amazing," he says blandly, "what humans will do for only a little green paper and round metal that isn't even what they had first made it to be any longer?"
"Shut up." She says, and her voice is no longer quite so blank. The ice crackles from her words, bright (the furious glint of sunlight through crystals), snapping like tree branches in winter. The edge in her words sharpens to a point.
She repeats, furiously, "Go." And this time he obeys.
-
Is there ever a possibility that a ghost will drift forever, never to be sent on to the afterlife?
Impossible. Her eyes flash fury, sparking with the beauty of what she must have been. That's what the itakos, the shaman are for – to intervene with nature, and to give peace. That's what itakos are for.
To serve the uselessly aimless all your life? (Slipshod, deliberate, eyes not sly but testing what will you do if I say this if I do that why have you taken me in taken me here what use are you to me what use am I to you?)
A sting like broken glass. (She has noticed the impersonal your.) To serve. To bring peace. But I see that you do not understand, that you will not (though neither will you admit it), so let me ask you a question. What of the peace of others?
What of the peace of others?
What if there comes a time when there is someone who looks to the ghost for all happiness, all joys, and is too tangled up in them to let them go?
Her eyes narrow, flash cold, frost crystallizing around her stare. That bears the assumption that I have no judgment.
Do you?
-
She does not look for him for three days, but sits in the room with the television, watching vapid women flash across the screen like quickfire (their men no better; all thickly-mustached with small heads atop their brawny shoulders), wondering if this is what he sees, what he glimpses when he looks at humanity and what they have created.
During those three days, she leaves the room only to step across the hall to the bathroom – neither eating nor drinking until even the scenes of the television dissolve into incoherent sparks.
-
To bring peace. To use judgment.
An itako is different from a shaman in that they must judge their rights and wrongs. The shaman merely guard nature as a generality – they may find niches and specific places to go, to be, but the majority merely endeavor to do good.
We must do more than that. We are the ones who draw the lines between the black and the white so that the rest might see.
-
At the end of the third day, when the moon sails gently through the sky, she rises wanly to her feet (wavering - the slow, indecisive movements of a pendulum), tastes the sourness of her mouth and of the mortality that lingers in her bones.
Her footsteps are whispers in the corridors as her bare feet wander down the (empty - pillaged; emptied) hallway, and into the room where the moonlight pools softly across the floor.
He turns to look at her, intrusive and smiling.
"How interesting," he says comfortably, legs splaying across her futon in a propped position, "that you chose the best room to see the stars."
"I am not blind." She retorts, not stingingly waspish, but matter-of-fact as she has always been. And under the protective fingers of moonlight, the shadows under her eyes are invisible. (He sees them all the same.) "I might as well have something to see."
"You do not ask what I am doing here." He notes (eyes shining – malice and the twist of old-wry humor).
"I know." She replies. Her voice is tightly wound, a spring coiled to its breaking point, and seeing this, he does not ask any longer, but opens his arms in a careless gesture as he rises to his feet.
"I have kept your sleeping place warm for you, these three days." He remarks airily, gently, to the walls.
"For me. Don't expect to share in it."
His lip curls, a mellifluous movement. "Of course not. I would not ask it of you."
"How very perceptive of you." Her voice – dead with a curl of amusement. "Now go."
"Go where?"
"To get a second futon; you want to see the stars too, don't you?"
If she had not been certain of him, of who he is and was and will ever be, she thought that the spark in his level gaze might have been something akin to surprise.
"If you don't want to see the stars," she says coolly, "you don't have to. It's all the same to me."
Is it really. But he does not say it aloud – there are places where the mortal break (and he has learned them, with a lamentable quickness in one so apparently young), and she is nearing hers.
So he goes away to get the futon, and returns moments later to see her lying down, blank-eyed, gaze narrowed to untrusting slits and some alien, peculiar otherness that amuses him to see it. (He, of all people, knows best the deceptions to be played in darkness, and sees what she sees; a boy whose hair vanishes into the shadows around his shoulders and who, beneath the thin sheets that he sleeps with in the summer, appears to wear only a thin white shirt that would be painfully familiar if she would trouble herself to remember it.)
Anna has learned quickly, he muses, and his lips lilt into a smile.
But not quickly enough.
(And overhead, the night fades away as the sun scorches it into a crumbling black dust.)
- end -
Author's Notes: -has none- I wrote this in a hurry and surprisingly, it turned out decently. Feedback, as always, is beloved. I wrote a short rant on that lately, but I won't burden you with the reading of it.
Review Replies:
Keigojin: Unfortunately, I think that a long hiatus from the SK fandom has killed all of my characterization ability. I'm off to re-read and hopefully regain some sense of who they are. This is one of my longer ones – hopefully you'll enjoy it. And as for a multi-chapter… -waves vaguely towards YM, which has its HxA moments-
Kawaii Koneko92: Shwaa… you think it's cute:) Thanks.
Inulover4eva: -laughs- I do. Which doesn't explain why I'm writing a hundred of them. (Feeling slightly insane.)
Gladiel: Ehe. –cough- Updating exceedingly slowly; my apologies. I've been… I've had strange things happening. I'll attempt to update faster.
asn water: You sure? The forced thing could get tiresome after a while… ;) Not that I mind, mind you, or that I'll stop – it'll be interesting to see how long I can go without repeating the general moods and themes.
Ails: -mild bewilderment- What puns?
Raven Solitude: …Which are very slow in the coming… -cough- Sorry.