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IV. morning promontory.
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If you had a seed, where would you plant it?
I would plant it on the cliff, where it would grow flowers red and wild, and the ships would see them from afar, and know that they are coming home.
He startles awake, and it's strange. That happens only so rarely to him, but never after almost-dying, not that he recalls. It takes some effort to bring a blue-ringed wrist to scrub his eyes (he can't move the fingers in his pierced hand yet).
What was that dream, anyway?
He asks himself that in hopes of dismissing it answerless, but he's faking it, 'cause he knows- that's his mother's deep voice and his own puny bratty voice, and one of either spewing some shit about 'home'.
It's dark around, so it must be night. He lies on a futon, so he must be inside, and there's other people with him, so it must be Jin and Fuu. Who knows when it is, though. Who cares, too.
If he doesn't move, nothing hurts, but he feels like shit anyway, like someone placed a heavy stone on his chest in hopes that he sinks and drowns- but he won't, 'cause he's on land now, and on land the Crow Men guard him.
What…?
And so, he goes back to sleep, and dreams dreams filled with dense undergrowth and tanagers, and the chapped, melancholy songs of the village elder.
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What is the duty of the dying?
Would it not be to come to the aid of the living?
Lying awake, Seizō muses. For a man with such unwavering faith in the kingdom of heaven, he is surprisingly reluctant to die.
To tell the truth, he never minded until now: he had abandoned all he loved, and left destruction in his wake, so it'd not been hard to abandon himself too; and as a shell wait for the moment of deliverance.
But it is all coming back to him now, slowly. It came back first with his little girl's careful whispers to Nakamura-san, his faithful retainer, and her careful, discreet fussing over the agonizing man she returned with, when she returned. He realizes it's not him she wants to avoid disturbing, but that spindly, foreign youth.
Seizō is well at peace with that. Nakamura-san fills him in on what the man, or boy, rather, looks like, one day that Fuu is not around, and he puts together in his mind the picture of a kid who's done terrible things and paid for them, who didn't learnt from that and did it all over again, and again, who was probably too young for the long time he must have spent in prison (Nakamura-san mentions but cannot understand the tattooing). A kid who was never loved and found redemption anyway- Seizō knows it through his little girl's devotion to making the kid well again.
In the world of darkness he lives in, there are many things Seizō sees without his eyes, and much he can experience without moving, like the hitch in his daughter's breath when the boy coughs, (though he ignores how she now and then looks at him, with eyes full of reluctant compassion) or the methodical check-up she does on the kid every day, the satisfied sigh she heaves before heading out very silently, as if she left in search of something- or someone?
(But Seizō also never sees how the last look she takes before leaving is a long, pensive gaze, directed at her father.)
In the world of darkness Seizō lives in, he also has plenty of time to think. And he thinks he might be proud of that boy that lies there, scarcely out of his reach, for most probably breaking out of the clutches of evil. In a way, perhaps, he could be the embodiment of the Christian meaning of redemption.
But then he hears his little girl's sigh of exhaustion, as she gets ready to sleep the night away, and he somehow feels he's even prouder of her.
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Mugen drowsily comes to to chirpy morning light, and the sound of quietened labored breathing, and a faint, but strange smell hanging in the air, like… his brow creases as he half-awarely scrounges to place that smell somewhere. It kind of brings the image of a brothel to mind, though he does not know it's wilting flowers he's smelling, and he loses interest immediately.
He can crane his neck enough to confirm his suspicions that the dude lying on the risen part of the floor is not Jin. Doesn't breathe like Jin, doesn't quite lie on his deathbed like Jin, and plain just doesn't look like Jin.
So that bastard got ahead of me this time, huh.
He just isn't exactly sure what he means by ahead.
Although he knows he's better now, he still feels heavy as shit. Back in Ryuukyuu, some village broad taking pity on his pre-adolescent self would be tsk-ing, saying he's got kijimuna sitting on his chest again, a whole family probably, because surely one couldn't keep him down.
Mugen frowns silently. He never thinks about the past –he'd like to know what he did now that opened the fucking memory floodgate. Maybe it's the nearly-dying business.
Yeah, that's gotta be it.
He tries to get up, but he cannot, and he could crawl, maybe, but he's not doing that today. Not with a random dude lying there, probably sizing him up despite neither being much of a threat. He feels caged.
'Fuck this, this sucks,' he swears under his breath, 'Ain't there no-one here can give a guy some water?' His voice is raspy, rusted, feels like it belongs to someone else. And breaking that holy-weird kind of silence makes him cringe, unlike him.
'Everybody is out,' a quiet, worn voice replies.
Right. The dude. He'd almost forgotten. He grunts a response and thinks that's that, but then he asks, on impulse:
'The hell are you, buddy?'
The boy's way of talking does not even register with Seizō, who's been always among the poor, among whores, and beggars.
Criminals, too.
'Kasumi Seizō. And you?'
'You shittin' me?' he asks, uncommonly stoically, stealing a glance at the man, who is little more than a silhouette from his point of view.
Silence answers him, but what kind of answer had he expected, anyway?
'Figures I'd end up dyin' next to a guy like you,' Mugen says, eventually, even though he knows he won't really die this time, not if he's not gone yet, but wishing he could see the look on the face of Fate as it dealt him that one. And who knows. Maybe Fate had Fuu's face all along.
'Mugen, that's the name,' he breathes. 'Your brat travelled 'cross the whole damned country to find ya. An' guess she found ya, after all.'
'Yes...' says Seizō, slowly. 'And I am sorry she did. I'm a sad sight to behold.'
Aren't we all, Mugen's mind supplies. He groans, inwardly. 'Shut up, buddy. Make our pains feel at least a bit worthwhile.'
Seizō's lips part in a small, chapped smile.
'You're in danger just by knowing who I am, boy, and Fuu the most.'
Yeah, well, Mugen thinks, I don't give jackshit about that. And that little bitch's a magnet for trouble without your help, anyway.
That's not what he says, though. What he says is,
'Yeah, whatever. What's-a sunflower smell of, anyway?'
'Nothing. Sunflowers have no scent.'
'The fuck, then...?'
'It's because they turn, towards the sun. They're flowers that follow the light, just like we follow God. Or, used to. All that, it's gone now.'
'Pretty shitty reason to leave your folks behind,' Mugen says, and he's honest. But the passing thought occurs to him, that he's saying something kind of like what Jin would say, and on Fuu's behalf. But it doesn't occur to him how much that means he's been changing. His mind brings up the recollection of Okuru's eyes, and how they'd died through the death of his family.
He briefly wonders what this man's eyes look like.
'No day goes by in which I don't regret so much... I would have brought them with me, my beloved child and wife... (he coughs) But I made peace with myself, that I would rather have them live hating me, than dead because of my selfishness.'
'Girly's gonna love to hear this shit. Ya'll talked, already?'
Silence.
Then, 'Not yet.'
'Huh,' Mugen grunts, cranes his neck to take another look at the samurai with the scent of sunflowers, and closes his eyes. He's done damn enough talking about corny shit for the rest of the season, he hopes. The man's labored breathing quietly becomes part of the silence again, and Mugen remembers what he looks like: a wisp of a person lying there, half-bathed in a halo of light filtering through the poor thatching of the roof. Alive, dying, and dead, all at the same time.
No, his eyes won't look like Okuru's.
Mugen can tell that if the Crow-Men took their masks off, they would all look like him.
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kijimuna: mischievous little creatures in the Okinawan mythology. One of their most well known tricks is to lie upon a person's chest, making them unable to move or breathe
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morning promontory: title taken from the album Utabautayun, by Asazaki Ikue, who sings Obokuri Eeumi.
to be continued