Summer, Season 124/2009
In the aged spring after the plum rains have spent themselves and before the long humid days of summer, the country about the village is delightful. The village sits in the midst of flat rice fields but beyond that the country unrolls itself. The fields become patchy, turning into mosaics of rudely green woods and muted grassland before yielding to rolling hills of mulberry, cedar, cypress - then the true wilderness of the mountain. The river wends herself imperial, cutting across the landscape like a sinuous artery, rushing in what direction she wills; all the crisscrossing reservoirs and streams empty to her, but she herself submits only to an unfathomable outside sea.
In the wooded places on the foothills there are many quiet inlets, cloistered nooks where one can look out across the land and watch farmers weed paddies or villagers make their meandering way through the roads. On a clear day like this, Orino Harukawa could even spot the children playing near the village walls, tinny dots of unpredictable motion. She hopes that Tsuru is one of those dots, once again small and happy. The two-ri trip every few days is a bother, but Orino would take walking the fields over her sister playing near the river, every time.
The wind rises, gusting the gentle dry fragrance of leaves and green wood. Trees whisper around her, dancing their quiet dance; unseen insects begin their chorus anew. Mottled sunshine filters through the moving canopy, strong then fading, then strong again. The light and sound calms her: the woods had been her refuge when the Sight had crowded her thoughts, and now they still shelter. Still, Orino gets up, brushing stray leaves and twigs off her gown. She knows she has to savor the woods. In private, she worries that someday she will become too accustomed to them, that their magic would fade. It is a distant worry.
Making her way down the foothills, Orino sees a familiar figure wind its way across the trail through the paddies. Just in time, she thinks. Soon, her youkai guest would arrive.
The house sits familiar and austere in the noonday light: not large, not small. Orino approaches from the side, marveling at the neat thatching that her husband and neighbors had finished only days before. In the quiet stillness of day everything seems in its place. She enters. The kitchen is dark, and so she sets about lighting the wood-stove, bringing some tea to boil, in case. Something is amiss, though; the inside is gloomier than she remembers. There is a brief moment of worry before she remembers: The amado need to be taken down.
The rains had been heavy that spring, torrential and unforgiving. The house had gamely held out against the first storms, but then buckled, sagged, gave out. It sprung leaks from a hundred places while the whole family shivered in misery, scarcely able to keep up with repairs. Everything dampened or turned into damp, even their food.
At last, an outsider had to lead the charge: the amado had been Kyosai's idea, because that was what husbands were apparently for. He returned home one afternoon carrying enormous slats of wood. This was only a month or so into their marriage, so Orino was unsure whether it was polite to ask him his business. She decided that asking would do no harm: she could still return him, anyway.
"I'm making storm shutters for our home. Your father would appreciate it."
His voice was gruff and sure, clipped. Then, Kyosai had felt like any other man she'd met - solid and vaguely mineral, dense. It would be another month before Orino learned to spot his soft manners, his hesitating concern. It would take her slightly longer still to appreciate them.
When the work began, Orino had involved herself, naturally. Ever since the marriage, her father forbade her from working the fields, but the leaky house had given her plenty of practice. Kyosai wasn't a natural craftsman (he had come from a family worse off than them) but he was persistent, and she was a quick take. Their amado set was a sequence of learning: the first blocks were badly-cut and shoddily-fitted, but the latest had improvised monkey-latches and catches that slid them into place. Kyosai had insisted on fitting them all, even the earliest, ugliest sidings.
After everything was done, Kyosai had run up the nearest hill to take stock of their creation. The way he'd gone, boyishly romping and puffing, hair all askew, had made Orino's heart catch in her throat. Once on the hill, he had waved and hollered - joyous. Then he called her name, over and over and over. That was when the marriage took on a texture of realness for her.
Now, however, Orino had to find a way of moving an ungainly, unromantic block of heavy wood. Marriage, she thinks. She'd make it yet.
"Excuse me, Miss Orino. I've come to check the medicine."
Reisen, Reisen would have to do. She hefts the medicine box under her arm and carries the boiling-hot kettle into the reception room. She makes for a harried affect, as if Reisen had caught her in the middle of her chores. Orino slides the door open with her foot.
"Oh, is now a bad time, Miss Orino? Let me handle that box, I'll be quick." Orino feels she has overdone it a little. She surrenders the box to Reisen and sets about placing the kettle in a worry-less place.
Both of them sit in temporary positions, Reisen half-crouching over the table, she in a sort of uncomfortable kneel, hand still on the kettle. For a few moments there is only the sound of clattering pills and medicine packets being shuffled around. Orino moves to cut through the awkward stillness.
"You know, you're free to take off the hat and let those ears catch some air. The season's already turning hot."
"Um, thank you, Miss Orino. I'm almost done." Reisen pauses, and Orino can't see her face for the massive bamboo hat. The next moment, though, she takes it off, her ears bobbing free, her hands smoothing out and reforming her bursting ponytail. Reisen's face is paler than Orino remembers, sallower, and her movements stay tense and snappy. About her floats an air of distracted worry. A bill for the medicine is soon written, and money changes hands.
Before Reisen can escape, Orino pours both of them a cup of tea. She settles, making her position more comfortable and permanent, before pushing Reisen her cup. Whatever burden Reisen was carrying, Orino wanted to help.
"You know, you weren't interrupting anything. I was only thinking of taking down the storm shutters, but that can wait. No need to rush."
Reisen, sensing herself being drawn to a rest, doesn't even try to resist. She flashes a brief, wan smile at Orino before collapsing onto her seat, discreetly stretching her legs under the table. Orino follows suit, testing her tea.
"I could help with that, Miss Orino. But please let me stretch my legs a little, first. Thank you very much for the tea."
Orino nods, and she can feel Reisen's wandering gaze. The youkai had been absent from her rounds for several months: instead, shorter and more nervous girls delivered the medicine, girls who scampered or went mute at the first sign of conversation. Orino had begun to miss their short updates, and had wondered in passing what a youkai like Reisen would have to say about marriage. Did youkai even marry?
Orino feels a dull poking sensation spread from her temple. When she had had Sight, this was the cue for an unsettling invasion of images. Now, without Sight, she knows that Reisen has just taken a brief glance at her mind. It was a rather rude habit, and Reisen often guessed the source of her moods wrongly, but Orino understood better than most the compulsive pull of such an ability.
Reisen perks up, her ears visibly so. A surprised smile spreads across her features. "I didn't know, Miss Orino, I truly didn't. I'm overjoyed. Congratulations on your marriage." She hesitates for a few moments, but her earlier paleness is gone. Dragging her substantial bag towards the table, Reisen rummages before offering Orino a neatly-made bamboo box.
"It's very late and very insubstantial, but please accept my gift. It's some mochi that I made myself."
It is Orino's turn to be surprised, and as she thanks Reisen she thinks of ways to tell Kyosai: This afternoon, a mind-reading rabbit youkai gave us a wedding present—yes, the same one who cured Tsuru. A nice anecdote bubbling in her mind, Orino finds it easier to ask Reisen to accompany her to take down the amado. She would have something to reward her with, after all: tales of her marriage.
They begin with the reception room, with the latest of the shutters. The work here is simple: Kyosai had grooves made in the floor, so that the shutters needed only to be pushed along a single track into its sheath. Still, the damp has swollen the shutters and so they take breaks, talking between pushes.
She tells Reisen of her austere wedding, the joy of a small sort of love blooming, of finding yourself capable of such a love. She finds that talking about her marriage buoys her, sweetens her small trove of memories, and Reisen makes for a curious companion besides: another young woman, but not quite. Reisen asks the usual questions about circumstance, but poses them at a remove ("Would you have picked him again, if he wasn't set in stone? If you could choose three times over?" "What if you didn't have to marry, would you marry?"), as if she struggled to understand that love could bloom from something so arranged and permanent.
"Truth be told, I haven't put serious thought into it. Excuse me for asking, but does it work?" Reisen pauses, unsure about the propriety of the question. She worries next about its naivete, hastening to add, "I've seen it, I've read about it. My teachers were married."
Orino's answer is definite. "Yes, though you need effort and time. Youkai have lots of both."
"There's the problem. I'm fine with both, but that work isn't actual work. It can disappear."
Reisen's expression sours, as if she'd swallowed something bitter. Relationships, Orino thinks. She's in the thick of relationship troubles.
"If you're having trouble with that, you can ask me for advice."
Reisen scurries away, bracing her shoulders back against the shutters instead of giving her an immediate answer. Orino realizes that she's missed. Not that sort. Reisen's evasion, though, tells her that her guess had landed close.
"Oh, it's not that I'm hurrying to get married. Let's push this again, Miss Orino."
They do. The shutter yields, scraping painfully home. Orino makes a note to tell Kyosai about oils, but thinks it'd be faster to drop by the village herself. Kyosai tended to forget about details - he seemed to think that things existed as a natural set, that oil for the shutters would materialize because the shutters themselves existed. It was annoying, but she could handle him.
Next, the living room. Here the shutters here were cruder, home-hewn blocks of wood secured by monkey-latches and other improvised bolts. First, the bolts had to be loosened, taken down, then the blocks themselves had to be lowered. Orino had truthfully objected to them being fitted; she had had fearful flashes of some autumn typhoon or earthquake bringing the heavy shutters down onto Tsuru or her mother, and her going on another mad dash for help. But Kyosai had been insistent, and joked that if it happened then she'd have him for company. She had laughed, only a little convinced.
Now, they were merely difficult to take down. Reisen had taken one look at them before glancing back to her in confusion. "Miss Orino, it'd be impossible for one person to take these down. They look dangerous. Maybe it'd be a good idea to have them remade."
Orino feels a stir of vindication, but then other balances had been on her mind when she'd agreed with Kyosai. What harm could there be in telling that to a youkai?
"Yes, they were my husband's idea. I didn't agree completely, but here we are." She tells Reisen about the making of the amado, in broad strokes.
Reisen's ears twitch and crumple. The wan smile flashes back on her face, and she speaks in a low, collusive tone: "Ah, marriage."
Had she thrown shade over her own marriage, and so soon? No, it's only honesty, Orino tells herself. If the 'work' that Reisen feared doing was compromise, then it was her place to tell her that marriage was made of it, and so she had better arm herself with deep reserves of modesty and patience.
"Leave things to me, Miss Orino. Would you mind closing your eyes a while? It's a formality, since you already know who I am. But still."
Orino readily agrees and closes her eyes. She wonders what youkai magic Reisen is working on the shutters - perhaps telekinesis through the eyes, or teleportation - and imagines how such abilities would help with housework. Her days were now spent in countless small revolutions: the kitchen, the living room, the kitchen, outside for washing, the kitchen… her hours were as long as they'd been in the fields, and more mind-numbing. If she could light the wood-stove with a glance, prepare meals without using her arms, she would.
"Is Miss Tsuru doing fine? I thought I saw her with Miss Keine the other day."
Orino nods, blindly. Tsuru, at least, was unequivocally in a better place. "Miss Kamishirasawa came here herself to ask for Tsuru. She's been at the temple school since, oh, Yayoi or so." Something occurs to her then. "That couldn't have been Lady Yagokoro's doing, could it?"
There is a pause, then a series of snaps as the bolts are loosened. "Actually, that was me. I only told Miss Keine to keep Miss Tsuru in mind. I guess she went above and beyond."
"Thank you, truly, Reisen. She's much happier and out of danger." Orino omits the shouting matches between her and her father about the school fee, because Tsuru is worth so much more than that. "I'd never have guessed that a youkai would go so far to help."
Another silence, this one a little sullen.
"I'm closer to what Miss Keine is, rather than some other youkai. If you please, I'd like you to keep that in mind, especially if you meet those others. I'm only here to do my work. You can open your eyes now, Miss Orino."
The shutters were neatly stacked in a corner, the latches sorted from smallest to largest. Golden afternoon light was now streaming through the high rafters, motes of dust swirling lazily in the air. In the sudden light Reisen appears slight and pale again, her flat smile plastered on.
Orino decides to be direct. Asking would do no harm. "What's wrong? You're pale."
Reisen's eyes flicker, but she fans the air with measured nonchalance. "Learning difficulties, Miss Orino. It'll pass. Is that all of the shutters?"
Orino shrugs, internally. If Reisen was determined to keep her problems close to her chest then she had no say. She'd settle for making her a little more comfortable in the meantime.
"There's a set in the backroom, but they're very heavy. I'd rather wait for my husband, so let's finish our tea."
Reisen gives her a searching look, and she feels her mind being peeked at again. Orino looks up and is stricken by an odd shame, a scarlet warmth spreading its petals inside her. She feels it now: Reisen's taut wariness, as if she were a child freshly daunted by an encounter with a boiling kettle. She thinks I'm lying.
Orino pivots towards the backroom, Reisen closely following from behind. Over their encounters, the map of borders that made Reisen had revealed itself to her, and she didn't care for this new habit of suspicion. Reisen had always been reticent but never mistrustful; that had been Orino's role, the (rightfully) cautious human who was now less so. Hadn't she just talked about her marriage, in confidence? Whatever was clouding Reisen's mind was also planting new jagged brambles along her bounds.
"Well, here's the backroom."
The backroom was where they had kept their clutch of silkworms. The season having ended in spring, the room was now steeped in must. It had been Tsuru's task to clean the room, and though she did the sweeping and washing with painstaking effort, she had missed the order of things: she'd simply left things where her attention gave out. Rearing trays were sloughed about haphazardly; in one corner, the breeding racks had fallen, forgotten, and dried cocoons littered the floor from an upturned rack. Tsuru was getting there, but not there yet. The storm shutters fixed there had been their earliest constructs, unsubtle wedges of ugly wood already rotting from the damp. More barricades than shutters, they spanned the length of the room, lashed to the house's supports by thick coils of rope.
Echoes of Kyosai's bustle marked the room. She sees him hauling the wood, measuring with his elbow, cutting with borrowed tools. She sees herself tying the slabs, dimly happy with the work. The first act of their marriage, undertaken with great tentativeness and budding romance - seeing it now unspooling and bare causes an unfamiliar ache to rise in Orino's chest, on top of that strange guilt. She wonders about her memories of him a year from now, ten years from now: would they also leach, turn mundane with every telling?
She feels suddenly exposed, feels that she has told and shown Reisen too much.
Reisen senses this, she must. She hesitates at the threshold of the room, her ears turning nervous little circles. Her face rumples with embarrassment as she tries to ignore the mess of the room, the secret weakness.
Orino steps inside and she follows, careful. "The hardest part. Let's get to work, Reisen."
Reisen inspects the barricade, gingerly running her fingers over the coils of rope. "Should we cut the ropes, Miss Orino? Would you have a knife, a tool?"
"Yes, and no, my husband took the ax."
"Please turn around, Miss Orino. You might hear loud sounds."
She turns, crouching to inspect a cocoon. Kyosai would have used it to feed the fish in the communal pond, or even eaten it himself. He was charmingly practical at times.
"Bang."
Two loud cracks sound, like stone hitting stone. Orino catches a whiff of something burning, something like spent matches.
"Okay, Miss Orino. I think this will do."
The thick ropes have been reduced to ash, the entire construct now leaning dangerously. Orino moves to support the barricade, to prevent it from falling over them both, before realizing that most of the slabs of wood have completely disappeared. Dusty light falls into the room from the space where the shutters once were. In the far distance, Orino catches the outline of the mountain.
"Should I make some more space?" Reisen, the sleeves on her happi coat rolled up, pointed towards the remains of the shutters. Smoke coils from the tip of her index finger, and before Orino can object, Reisen takes another peek into her mind.
"I need the rest for - firewood, Reisen. Thank you." Orino's lie is blatant: the soggy wood would only smoke and smoke without igniting, but it is all she can say. The ache in her chest curdles into something protective, and she finds herself gently lowering, cradling the remaining shutters. She thinks, inanely, Now I won't have to worry about these crushing anyone anymore.
Reisen is soon beside her, easing the larger blocks down. The remaining lengths of wood are wordlessly arranged, and the rest of the work is completed in similar silence. It is Reisen who breaks it this time, whispering as they return to the reception room.
"I feel like I should apologize. I feel out of sorts today."
Orino sighs. If Reisen hadn't insisted, if she'd just let Kyosai take down the shutters—in fact, her caution had been her mistake: she couldn't decide between wanting to help and being needlessly suspicious. And if she'd just been frank, from the start.
Here Orino stops, forces herself to: hadn't she been the capricious one? Reisen had simply taken down the amado with her. At the end of the day it was she who worried her marriage into all things, saw portents where there were none. And if she had revealed too much already, wouldn't her anger only reveal more, confirm it?
"You've been a great help, and those shutters were due, anyway." That was mostly true. She and Kyosai could make new, less worrisome ones. And with just as much feeling. Reisen looks back at her, unconvinced, and so Orino braces for the dull poke - but it never comes.
The reception room glows golden in the setting light, and both settle to finish their cold tea. Everything seems in its place. Reisen retrieves her hat, and for several minutes Orino admires her intricate method of fitting ears and hair into it. Finally, she rises, drags her pack, shrugs it onto her shoulder. Orino accompanies her to the door.
She is opening it when Reisen asks, "Miss Orino, may I ask a private question?"
"Go on."
"Why would you forgive your husband?" It was a truly odd question, and Orino had to fish around for context. Why wouldn't she, if he asked for forgiveness? But Reisen eventually added, "If he made something dangerous, like the shutters in the backroom, what would it take for you to forgive him?"
Orino reflects a little, before saying, "It would take him promising to do a better job. We'd do it together, so it'd take very little, for me."
Her answer seemed to deflate Reisen. "What if he was lying, if he told you that the shutters were safe but actually, they weren't? Would it take more to forgive him?"
Orino feels Reisen circling around her, too afraid to ask her actual question. "Yes, but not a lot more. I'd leave him alone for some time, because he lied to me, but if he truly apologizes, it's done."
Reisen sighs, clearly unsatisfied by her answers. She takes a different tack, "This sounds stupid, but would there be a formal way of asking forgiveness? A formal time? What gifts would you need?"
You're overthinking it, Reisen. "Why don't you ask the person straight? Did you scorn him? If you did, then he gets to decide."
"I can't. I can't. They're too angry and I've done something they aren't willing to let go." Reisen's voice is sad, but something pettish creeps in. "They won't let themselves get it. I'm glad that not all people are like them. Like you, Miss Orino." At this, Reisen smiles, but it is a peevish smile.
Orino opens the door. A summer wind blows in, dry and heavy.
"I'm not special, Reisen. You did something kind, so I'm kind. You've been inside my mind a few times, you should know."
Reisen steps out into the afternoon, clutching her bamboo hat tight. "Oh, so you know about that too, Miss Orino? I'm glad that people can accept that. So it's the same. You try, so I'll keep trying, as well."
A/N: This is the epilogue to the fic! Hope you've enjoyed it~
If you enjoy my writing, be sure to check out my AO3!: /users/Sunshowersy
Currently writing a sort-of smutty Kaguya/Reisen fic~