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Chapter 19
Looking up at that blade falling down, down, down, I thought for the first time that I had never felt so scared, so utterly off-kilter with the rest of the world. But then, I mused, that wasn't exactly true. As a child, I had felt scared most days. Especially in the later days. The days before-
My mind recoiled, fighting against me.
Stop, stop, it begged and I could almost see the younger me, hair long and tangled, crouched beside that campfire. You don't need to remember. Why would you need to remember? Don't make us.
But I was so tired. That's all it really comes down to really. How tired are you? How much has the world beaten you down? How many people get to tread on you until you're just a worn husk with all the darkness bared to the world?
"Stop," I breathed, feeling the dewy warmth of the net against my back as that blade sliced through the clumpy floor just where I had been standing a moment before.
"What?" Ichihiro hummed from above. "Oh drat. It missed."
...he most certainly is not a living thing, Hisoka had murmured in parting and my eyes burned, my head throbbing as I tried desperately to pull myself together. I couldn't think about this now. Now wasn't the time-
It's time. It needs to happen tonight.
"Panda." I can hear her now, her voice soft and sure. She was always like that - even when things started to crumble. "Panda, oh, my panda~" She always sang that last part, her voice bubbling up into laughter so contagious that it pulled me out of the deepest sleep and into the waking world.
"Ma," I yawned, rolling over, blinking blurrily up at the flash of teeth, her lips full and tucked back like a curtain being drawn back to let in the morning sun.
Those days are the ones I barely remember. The good ones where we would go out and pick the vegetables growing in our tediously tended garden out back. Where she would force me to do the small chores like sweeping and I would complain and she would start to sing, her voice drowning mine out until I dissolved into obedience. Isn't that odd? I know that those memories are there - perfect day after perfect day but… they went right along with the bad. I locked them up and now… now I can only remember the miserable.
It started with a letter.
A single morning where she didn't wake me. I can taste the cotton in my mouth, the sweaty mess of tangled sheets that comes when you've been lying down too long.
"Ma?" My body feels stiff, unused and yet worn like a stiff wash rag that got left in the wash so long that it dried. Morning light has turned into an afternoon blaze, pressing against the drawn curtains like an impatient caller. "Ma?"
That letter. I can see the edges, small and wrinkled like it had been discarded and then mailed before reaching us. It was pressed beneath her palm, her eyes wide and unseeing even though they were focused so intently on that one scrap of paper. She wasn't reading it, her back straight, face smoothed into a blank that made the whites of her eyes seem glinting in the morning light.
For the first time, I felt a well of tension zing through my blood. I was scared. My breath stuttered, my feet going clammy against the scratchy wood of our floors. I whispered, "Ma?"
Her head snapped to the side, her eyes still wide, face still stuck in that blank mask like a marionette that had just had it's strings jerked. I recoiled, skittering back a step.
"Panda." My stomach rolls, my nerves spiking again at the stiff way that her shoulders are bent forward. Bent towards me. Her eyes run over me, down to my toes and then right back up to the very tip of my scalp.
My breath hitched, something alien itching at the back of my nape. Run, it seemed to say. Run because this place isn't safe.
But then she blinked and a light seemed to click on behind those staring, dark eyes. My mother blinked and then smiled, her body relaxing one joint at a time. I remember the moment of fleeting confusion, the doubt I had that turned into vague denial. My mind was playing tricks on me. Her smile was soft. "Panda. What would you like for breakfast?"
There was nothing more for a day or two - no letter, no late starts to the day. My mother was warm, welcoming - everything that I had ever wanted. I loved the way she combed my damp hair as I drifted to sleep. I loved the way that she tied my shoes when we went on walks. And even when she sang over me, I loved her. Even the odder things - the newer things like the candle that burned through the night just on the other side of the house where she slept. Even the sudden lessons that seemed to be whimsical - almost ludicrous like meditation and speed tests.
Even the times when I would wake up in the middle of the night and feel her fingers still tangled in my hair, the moon casting a sickly white glaze to her open eyes as she stared down at me.
But I was a child and children are vivacious creators. Children can explain away anything. And so I explained away my mother's odd behaviour. I let her have her staring and lessons and odd midnight whispers. I gave her these things with an air of superiority. Being in on these secrets made me feel older, wiser, more a part of my mother's life.
The package came two weeks after the letter - wrapped simply with twine, the box made of cardboard. There was no note, no return address.
I begged to see what was inside of it. I sat outside with my mother as she stared at it, her back straight, her nails pick, pick, picking at the knuckle of her other hand. I dropped hints, saying that my birthday was going to be here before we knew it even though it had just passed a month ago. I lamented, bargained, raged. She returned my emotions with the lack of her own, her face never flinching, her words distant, evasive.
Our lessons picked up.
"Breathe." My mother's breath was warm and steady against my cheek, centering me. Beneath my lids, I saw blackness mixed with the flickers of candlelight that dotted the living room. "What do you see?"
Odd. We never had classes at night. Night time was for sleeping and nothing more. I could hear the soft clicks of my mother's shoes as she circled me and then stopped, lean forward to… I resisted the urge to recoil, open my eyes and stop this game. In my mind's eyes she was willowy, rigid in much the same way as an unused doll, her pupils thin and beady inside the alabaster cast of her sclera.
I stayed quiet.
"You have to see something, peanut," she would whisper and in those words I heard an edge of irritation and I would stay quite still. Because there was nothing that I could tell her. "The edge. That's what you see. That darkness is the very edge of what you are. If you know your boundaries then no one will be able to defeat you."
Then there was the lavender scent of her breath across my cheeks. A chill and she was pulling away.
I stared into the darkness within. It seemed safer than whatever darkness was growing in her.
I found the box beneath our porch, covered in dirt, piles of mud patted around it like a rodent had tried to keep it tucked away. But the only thing that could have done this… A floorboard above my head creaked and I scrambled away, crawling under our raised house and sprinting to the woods beyond our backyard.
"PANDA!" I heard my mother calling but I didn't stop. Running away would become a safety net.
Mother stopped combing my hair at night. She stopped singing me awake. She stopped making me do chores. Instead I would wake up in the afternoon. The smell of rotting food was becoming more and more pungent, filtering to me from our sink and table along with the softer scent of unwashed skin.
I stilled, resisting the urge to curl farther into the blankets. Even before my eyes opened, I could feel her. I could feel her eyes, wide like an organ that had had all the skin pulled away from it. Her breath didn't smell like lavender any longer and it hit my skin in moist bursts, her chair creaking as she drifted a bit closer to me, leaning over me… closer… closer…
Most days I would lay like that for hours - however long it took for her to take a deep, ragged breath and then level herself up from that chair and drag herself out of the room.
I don't know when I took the bear from its hiding space within the box beneath the porch. I don't even know how long I had it.
"Why do you have that?"
My muscles locked, cramping, my fingers turning white around the small blue bear in my fingers. It looked just like a bear from my study books, all soft fur and patched belly.
"I said...why do you have that, Panda?"
"I-I haven't given him a name-name yet," I stammered, yanked off-balance as her hand closed along my bicep. Her eyes were bottomless.
Odd how the mind can play tricks on you - how it wraps itself in bubble wrap and makes you believe one thing is inside when it's really another. In my dreams, things were softer. In my dreams, my mother was still the same woman who had raised me for the better part of my life. She was soft, warm, scented like fresh lavender.
But that's exactly what it was - a trick.
It takes me ten days to figure out that my mother is never coming back. It takes me six days to stop flinching when she enters a room. It takes me 24 hours to understand that a bruise from where someone hits you won't be cured with band aids and neosporin.
The woman that's taken my mother's skin doesn't apologize. After she hits me, she takes the bear and the box and I don't see them again for nearly two months. I don't lament. I don't bargain. I don't rage. I go along with her lessons. I try my best in her speed tests. And above everything else, I don't leave my bed after she tells me to go to bed. I don't leave my bed when I hear the whispers. I don't leave my bed when I hear her crying. And I don't leave my bed when I hear her creep into my room and fold herself into the chair beside my head.
"Tonight," she breathes and I resist the urge to pull away as her moist, acrid breath hits my cheeks. Her spidery fingers curl in my hair, yanking at the roots in some tortuous form of brushing. "Is going to be special. Fun."
I don't answer. Lately she hasn't needed me to answer. Lately she's only needed me to do. The candles in our house flicker, wavering in the inky darkness that the night casts from just outside our window.
My feet stumble on the steps of our house as she drags me along, her grip surprisingly strong even though I can't remember the last time I saw her eat.
"Come on, Panda," she breathes, her eyes fixed on the roar of the fire just in front of our house. I can just make out the outline of… I stumble again, my stomach tightening. The bear - the one from the box - sits just beside the flames, it's body somehow grotesque against the glowing light.
My fingers shake, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up as I see the sharp glint of metal just beside it's crumpled body. Futility, I pull against her grip, my shins splattering in dirt as my heels dig into the soft ground. "Ma - ma-"
"Ssshhhh," she soothes me, her knees hitting the dirt with a soft thud as she reaches the area just before the fire. Just within reach of the dagger. My eyes flick nervously from one item to the next, my mind spinning dizzily.
"I don't like this," I whisper, my heart rabbiting, unsure if I'm overreacting or if I need to run or if I need to claw my way out of her grip or-
"Panda." Something in her voice makes me pause, my breath evening for a moment as I see a wan smile curl her lips. She's there. Not fully. She looked tired and thin and dirty but I can see her just beyond. "You love me don't you?"
I hesitate. And then berate myself because why do I need to hesitate? "Of course. Yes."
Her eyes soften. "And I love you." Her fingers comb through my hair, gently. My blood sings. Everything will be fine. The eyes that I'm staring into are my mothers. Everything will be fine. Her gaze searches mine. "You have so much potential, panda." She scoffs. "So much more than I ever had. I can see it growing in you every lesson." Her voice teeters off, darkness creeping into her irises. "That's why tonight you need to do everything that I tell you to do. Do you understand?"
"I-" Flighty nerves jump through me, confusing me. "Yes? But-"
"Good." Her fingers reach back, gripping the dagger with a swiftness that makes me jerk back. But she still has a hand on my bicep.
I yelp, scared, unsure. "Ma, I don't want to. Don't make me. Please."
Cold hands clasped around my jaw, jerking my eyes up. "This is the way of things. You are strong. Stronger than me. It-"
"I DON'T WANT IT!" My throat is raw. Raw from the smoke. Raw from the overwhelming fear that's pumping through me. I felt a scream building in my throat, my eyes ticking to the side, dragged by the crushing darkness that was emanating from that bear, it's eyes beady, pricking with the light from the fire. I had wanted it so bad but - "PLEASE! I DON'T WANT IT! I DON'T WANT IT-"
"Don't be afraid of it, panda. Fear will get you nowhere." But I am afraid. I can feel it clawing up my throat, threatening to spill out as the flash of jagged teeth glint in the firelight. Her teeth. "It will be as much a part of you as your own nen. It will make you stronger-"
"Then why don't you take it?" I sob, clawing uselessly at the hand she has wrapped around my bicep. I can feel blood and skin collecting under my nails but she doesn't even flinch.
There's a flash of surprise that stills her features for a moment. She wasn't expecting me to ask such a question. And for a moment, I think she'll let me go. I think she won't complete the ceremony.
"Because I don't have enough nen to sustain it," she finally whispers and that scream breaks lose as she grabs a knife and slits my hand open.
Pain. Pain. Pain. So much pain. I gasp through it, wailing through it. My hearing pops as I watch my mother slit her own palm open and then press both of our hands to the hilt of the dagger. She's whispering, whispering something that sounds too quick, too silky to be anything but nonsense.
Her eyes meet mine once more, feverish. "I love you," she whispers, a moment before she forces the dagger cupped in both of our hands into her stomach and then drags it to the side. Blood burst warm and jarring across my arm, splattering onto my shirt and neck and face.
Am I screaming? Or am I quiet? How long does it take for her gurgled gasps to sliver into silence? I don't know. I'll never know, I suppose. All I know is that I stay there through the night, the dagger still held in my slippery grip. All I know is that when I finally force my eyes to the side, away from whatever hell I was staring into, my mind blinks once, stuttering on and off like a faulty electrical line.
Because the bear is glowing, swirls slashing through it's fur with a reddish, glittering light. Because there's another hell that's opening up before me, fueled by blood and decay. And it's staring right at me.
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