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III. a castle on the waves.
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'Mugen!'
'Mugen!'
'Mugen!'
He feels pain.
Now he is waking up, waking up for real to the calling of his name. It sounds kinda sweet, his name, in how it's clearing the waters of death, chasing away the Hell that loomed so close before him.
Oh yes, because he knows well now, what the Hell will be like that awaits him, because past the screaming of the crows, he remembered the rains of Hachijō-jima.
'Mugen! You're alive!'
He is, he can tell because of the way the voice (Fuu's voice, something within recognizes), quivers. Fear is, after all, something he's only discovered being around her, and there's no way they'll meet there where he's going when he dies.
'Aw, shit, it's only you…' he manipulates his cracked voice to be a mask, 'I thought you were death for a minute there.'
Fuu's pained eyes meet his, and it's de-stabilizing the idea of how the one at whom they're looking is him.
Salvation-less, redemption-less him.
From above he would look not apart from a corpse. He becomes aware of the pebbles of the beach biting into his skin with polar-like edges, and of the sway of the waves, and he can pick apart all of the scents that compose the breeze: misty droplets and rotting seaweed, tideline debris and liminal sealife scampering into narrow crevices, waiting for the rising of the tide.
But the tide, it's ebbing now. He feels it in his bones.
'What about the sunflower samurai….?' (his eyes are open, but he can barely see her) 'D'ya meet him?'
She hiccups and nods, and he thinks her wimpy until he catches sight of the clotting blood that soaks the hem of her clothes.
Is that mine? His unfocused mind wonders. Might as damned well be fucking mine…
He is familiar with being angry, but not at his own wretchedness. But the feeling does not settle, rather dissolves with Fuu's broken trace of a voice.
'Lately all I seem to do is cry'.
Not many people can pick death from the tide, but, at least to Mugen, Fuu is proving to be one. For the second time, too.
If the gulls hadn't been crying aloft, maybe he wouldn't have even believed it. Because his gut told him, when he boarded that flimsy skiff to cross the island channel, that that would be his final journey. He was always mistrustful of islands and third-time's-charm: if the first one (his birthplace) had not killed him, and the second one (fucking prison-island south of Edo) hadn't either, surely his luck would run out on Ikitsuki island.
He sits up, tries to steady his vision. Slowly, the horizon becomes a straight line, as it should be.
'You think you can walk?' Fuu asks quietly, not flinching when dribs of that thick, dark blood of his splatter on the pebbles.
He uses his sheathed sword to support his weight. For a moment, he has the feeling that it's not gonna hold him, that it's gonna break- but it doesn't, maybe because it's a tool of fate, and he grunts.
'The fuck. Maybe I can, girly. But gimme a hand, 'ere'.
Fuu quietly lets him pass an arm over her shoulders. In that strange equilibrium, the beach is left behind with its bloodied pebbles and charred ruins, and sea-creatures that softly crawl out of the tidal pools, sniffing out the two corpses.
Not precisely sure why, Mugen takes a last look at the placid sunset clouds, at the familiar intersection of sky and sea: the only things proven to be permanent in his life. And, if it's not gonna become his hell, Mugen thinks, then maybe this wretched place could become a fucking palace on the waves for them all- the dead and the living alike..
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It came to mind how, if Mugen knew about the legend of King Arthur, he would maybe liken Ikitsuki Island to Avalon.
to be continued