Title: Investigating Stillness 3/3
Fandom: Card Captor Sakura
Series: Faces of the Moon
Summary: Lions and liquor and larceny, oh my!
Characters: Yue (Xue Fang), Keroberous, Meihua (OC), Tou (OC), the Shipcaptain, Li Daran
Warnings: Original characters. Skew-eyed quasi-mystical maundering. Overly picky cultural references, probably wrong. Oh, and you weren't expecting a happy ending to this arc, were you?
Investigating Stillness (3/3)
Day 14
Because Li was small and plump and as bouncy as a rubber ball the back half of their lion twitched and wagged its tail in double time as they trotted across the night-struck courtyard. Tou fumbled with the levers that blinked the lion's long-lashed eyes and cursed the tiny vision slits in the mask. Mostly, in the dark courtyard they practiced in, he remembered where the walls were and danced as if he were blind, guessing where the other beast was on instinct. He jumped and stamped his feet, cursed again when the back-end went the wrong way, and then rubbed up against Wang and Chen's beast in what he hoped was a flirtatious manner. At least he and Li weren't playing the girl lion.
Enough courtship! Tou bounced away and led the other lion into a game of lion-tag that only looked playful and improvised – they had been working on this routine for months, for the new year's street festival. They practiced 'picking the cabbage' that dangled twenty feet up and nipping the little envelope of money hidden inside, and rolling on big starry balls – Wang and Chen with grim concentration, Tou and Li's lion with a waggle to the tail that looked like they were constantly about to fall off. Sometimes they did. No doubt Li thought it was hilarious, but after the fourth painful tumble Tou was just glad that it was the middle of the night and all of the people in Li's family compound were asleep right now. They never laughed, was the problem: a vision of Old Man Li grimly correcting Tou's slapstick technique floated before his eyes and he shuddered briefly.
After hours of work, when sweat slicked their bodies even in the chill of the winter night, Tou and Chen shucked off their lion-skin and, leaving the other two to practice, disappeared through the back door of a tile-roofed warehouse next to their practice courtyard. Wang and Chen ignored them: it was business as usual.
Day 17
"I'm home!" Tou looked suspiciously around the golden-lit room. It was missing a pair of sullen, obsessive eyes watching his sister. "Where's the cat?"
His sister continued grinding resin, sometimes putting more ice around her mortar to keep it cool in the brazier fueled warmth of their room. "Xue Fang is visiting the neighbours."
Tou's eyes widened and he was across the room in an instant. "You didn't let it out? You didn't open the window while I was away?"
"No," she answered serenely, and gestured gently upwards to the matting that was their ceiling. "Xue Fang is visiting the People That Live Upabove."
Tou peered upwards. In the shadows of one corner, there might be a trailing edge of matting leaving a hole that an agile beast could get up to. He noted with growing horror the hanging bulge in the matting, moving ever faster as the upabove squeaks and rustles that Tou never listened to anymore grew quietly more frantic. He noted the frayed patch in the centre of the ceiling. He saw the bulge divide into four that moved with savage speed over the frayed patch, which gave way, and he dived frantically to catch a fanged, clawed, and bloodied ferocious thrice-damned devil before it landed on something breakable, like his sister. It was at that point that Tou tripped on an edge of carpet.
When his head stopped ringing, Tou found himself spread-eagled on the floor, with a wild-eyed eyed scrawny beast digging into his chest with a lot very sharp and bloody claws. He looked at the cat; the cat looked back at him. It chewed experimentally at the half-alive black rat twitching feebling in its jaws. "It's looking at me!" said Tou. A mouse fell on his head and the cat grabbed for it with a razor-clawed paw.
"Ah, you two are becoming such good friends!"
The cat leaped hysterically off Tou's chest and disappeared under the bed, where it divided its time between growling, purring, crunching at living things, and staring out into the world. "I hate you," said Tou, but very quietly, because his sister was laughing, truly laughing, with a soft husky chuckle that he had almost forgotten.
Day 20
Li shinned up to the next tier of shelves in the warehouse, set up a spirit burner, and began going through the boxes, taking off the wax seals of each one with a knife heated in the flame and sorting the contents methodically before resealing it. Tou, in a rough seaman's jersey over his fluffy lion trousers, was keeping watch, clutching the lantern in one hand and a red-tasselled spear in the other. In this warehouse were... things which he did not like, shadows which skittered at the corners of his eyes and whispering voices, and boxes he hated to touch hidden among the bolts of embroidered cloth, badger-formed tea-kettles, the racks of books and scrolls.
"Why do you steal from your family?"
"Eh?" Li poked his head over the shelf. "You're asking me this now?"
"You're an elder son," Tou clarified. "They'd give it to you if you asked."
Li sighed, and resettled his little round glasses on his nose. "If it has to be given, how can it ever truly be mine?"
Tou's thick eyebrows furrowed together.
"To put it another way, I prefer to show initiative to prove that I am worthy of my position of seniority in the family. I want to know what's actually in here. (And if Clow Reed really did put a cataclysm in a box)," he muttered.
"Eh?"
"I said, I'm looking for where they put Clow Reed's personal effects in a box," Li called down, smiling. "Some of the more personal letters might be better off sent to their writers. But I cannot find anything with the right chop on the box, and I know that no crates have left here. It's all very frustrating. You're frowning again."
"But... you gave me a crate three weeks ago."
"I'm fairly certain I'd remember doing something like that," Li said. He tumbled a mass of scarlet silk on Tou's head. "Here, for that girly you're saving up for."
Tou sputtered and fumbled to get his head free from the material trying to drown him. When he did, there was a scratch on his face from a hitherto unnoticed pin, slowly oozing droplets of blood.
"Oh, hey," said Li, reaching down and very gently brushing away the blood with a scrap of cloth. He pressed the bloodied cloth against the golden lock of a rough wooden box and it rang like a bell and sprang open. "Waste not, want not." But there were only jewels inside.
Day 21
Firecrackers were exploding outside. Meihua got up from their platter of sweet nian gao cakes and trotted to the shutters. She felt with her fingers for the crack between them, where the icy wild air seeped in, and leant her forehead against it. She quoted softly,
Before my bed, the moon is shining bright,
I think that it is frost upon the ground.
I raise my head and look at the bright moon,
I lower my head and think of home.
There was a soft sound behind her. She put out a hand and felt her brother's face: the harsh stubble on his broad cheek was wet. She caught the tears from his eyes with an ivory spoon. "Thank you, Older Brother."
He flinched.
That night Meihua dreamed of fire again, and falling white feathers. She dreamed a small growly voice was talking at her, endlessly coaxing her to open a book, any book, and she had tell it, over and over, that she couldn't read any more. She dreamed that a lion took off his mask and became her brother, tired and anxious and bewilderedly kind. She dreamed she was flying over the brightly-lit city. And when she woke up she was still in the dark, and the Xue Fang was sniffing at her forehead.
Day 22
Tou trotted along the wharves, exhausted in every muscle of his body, a lion head wrapped in linen in his arms. Beside him trotted his friend Li, and a little behind were Wang and Chen, drooping yet very happy. Li was planning out what their lion-dance troupe would do for the next festival.
"Say two weeks rest, and then we'll be back practicing at the usual place." He whacked Tou lightly on the shoulder. "It'll be fine. Don't I look after you – as much as you'll let me? Stick with me, and it will all be alright."
Day 68
The European found him on the docks, looking up at the big ocean-going ships and clapped him on the shoulder. "I'd never lived 'til I trod the ocean, my friend."
Tou looked at the man, smiling behind his sandy beard. Tou shrugged.
"If you want to go, just go," said the European. "Don't worry about buying a ticket, I can find a berth for another stoker any day. Or forget about that funny incense, I've got fetching and carrying work about town that needs a reliable fetcher and carrier, if you take my meaning. Under the table but good wages, all right and tight."
Day 77
Meihua is working at her table, sprinkling another layer of ground spice into her mix. Her brother is not here, but he had carefully explained that he would be away for three days, three days exactly, so she does not worry. Instead, she explains what she is doing to the cat, who is lurking on her worktable, just out of touching range. Xue Fang has a knack for being close without interfering with her work, which she appreciates.
"I need to balance all the influences, but not," she says quietly. "Mama said, 'It is not standing still. It is not waiting to breathe. It is being with one foot raised, about to step forward.' That is what Mama said." She hears footsteps in the hall outside, and smiles as she scatters drops from a small silver flask into the mix.
"He does not know what I wish for, my brother," she says. And, "We are buried in the earth of Maya, putting out flower-heads with the seasons. But the Wheel turns; Heaven walks. In this life or the next, Xue Fang, everything will definitely be alright.
Day 100
In a quiet room in a noisy house, a little girl is sitting, still as the hub of a wheel. There is a stack of books beside her which she has never read. She fingers the cover of the top one – when she traces the lion embossed on it the metal makes her fingers tingle. In the brooding summer heat she waits, for the rich dark incense she has bound with resin to cure, for the cat that snores fitfully by her feet to wake, for her brother to return.
The fire-stained clock chimes six o'clock. He never comes.
Day 108
There is a small pile of animal corpses in front of her now. Most of them are dead, though two still clench and unclench their feet in a last flicker of vitality. The cat pushes them forward with his nose so that they twitch against the blind girl's hand. She ignores them. On the table beside her is an iron bowl filled with dark sticky pellets set over cold charcoal bricks. In her hands is a small metal lighter, and she twitches at it, striking sparks from the flint which scatter across her lap and then die.
The cat starts to yowl, a low, eerie sound more felt than heard: someone is pounding on the door.
The clock strikes six.
Day 109
Yue, where are we now? It's dark; we're moving. Our people are gone. Yue, are you there?
Yue?
NOTES:
I have a Salvage Cat of my own; he is nothing like Xue Fang, except that he also can intimidate flatmates and is a little obsessive. Oh, and he crunches down small furry things, but he always kills them first. Just if people were wondering.
He is visiting the People That Live Upabove So you put tightly woven straw mats over the rafters to keep the drafts out, and then the rats move in and rustle. So long as the mats don't give way, everybody's happy. The flowery name comes from The Dragons Backbone: Portraits of Chengdu people in the 1920s (Yu Zidan, annotated by William Sewell). Also mentioned in a Kipling story. (There was a corpse, too.) My, these notes are getting long.
...a cataclysm in a box Li Syaoran, soon after he appeared, quoted Li family lore that a 'great evil' could befall the world when the seal on the Cards was broken with no further details. I'm not surprised that they wanted to keep the Cards in the family.
I'm fairly certain I'd remember... In case that tediously expository conversation didn't make it clear, Yue-the-cat blanked out Li's memories of handling the box because he wanted out of the warehouse and that was the simplest way to do it. And I don't think he liked Li too much either. Go figure.
Before my bed... One of the classics, "Thoughts on a Still Night" by Li Po/Li Bai, 8th century. I don't know the translator. The person who first taught it to me stressed that in Chinese poetry the full moon is indicative of family.
caught the tears from his eyes... Totally ripped from Barbara Hambly's Dragonshadow.
Maya "the deluding or illusive power of the world; illusion by which the world is seen as separate from the ultimate singular Reality" (from http:// www . yogajournal. com/lifestyle/ 159?print=1)
everything will definitely be alright. In Japanese, that would be zettai daijoubu da yo!, if anyone's interested. :-) (I think I just earned myself another ticket to CCS!fandom hell.)