Haku bowed his head slightly to the old sorceress in greetings. "I've brought her along this time."
Zeniba's eyes lit up in excitement, "Oh? Bring her in."
The dragon had frequently visited the sorceress with concerns about the possible dragon spirit within Ryumiko, during the time she stayed in the confines of Rin's home. Zeniba was positively brimming with curiousity about the girl and whether or not she was a spirit, seeing as such things rarely occured in the Spirit Realm.
Haku could've groaned at the sight he saw when he went to get Ryumiko. She was dancing around No-Face, like a child who had received some long awaited gift on their birthday. He cleared his throat to get her attention, and she froze, her excited expression quickly turning tense and wide-eyed. Whipping her head around to face Haku, panic welled up and clouded her thoughts. This was it.
When she didn't move from where she stood, Yukaoi, who was nearest to her, put a reassuring hand on her back. At the dragon's touch, she could feel her muscles loosen, and Ryumiko swallowed, as if to keep her fear restrained. She slowly took steps forward. Haku went to follow her into Zeniba's cottage but Ryumiko stopped him with a raised hand.
"Please, can I do this alone?" she asked, not looking at him. Haku took a step back, acknowledging her wishes and watched as she hastily shut the door behind her.
She took a deep breath, leaning against the door. Ryumiko sighed. She couldn't keep doing this, shutting people out. Chihiro had always told her that she shouldn't take everything on alone. When her parents were still alive, they always left her home, leaving Ryumiko to look after herself. It wasn't like she wanted to be so independant. It was just that independance was something she had to rely on her almost all of her childhood, and it was something that that was hard to get out of habit.
"You must be the girl Haku spoke of, cousin of Chihiro. You two indeed look astonishingly alike, but you both are very different," she heard a voice. She turned to see Zeniba smiling at her from a rocking chair across the room.
"Different how?"
Zeniba laughed gently, "Chihiro was very level-headed and determined when I met her. Already I can see you're always full of energy and have an imagination that sometimes gets the better of you. What can I do for you?"
Ryumiko smiled a little, "That's very close to the truth. I guess I'm looking for answers. Whether or not I'm a spirit. Can you tell me that?"
The old sorceress nodded and beckoned the girl closer. She hurriedly walked over, and stood before the older spirit.
"This is your last chance to turn around child. If you do not wish to know if you are born of spirit or man, you must say so right now," Zeniba said, looking up at her with a stern gaze. The girl swallowed a little before nodding. She may not be ready to hear it, but she knew she would forever regret it if she wasted this chance.
With her agreement, Zeniba stood and placed a hand on top of Ryumiko's head. She heard Zeniba mutter something and then all that filled her ears was a noise that sounded like a wind rushing around her, blocking all other sounds. The blue-eyed girl could feel something clinging to her skin. It was cool and hard, like a layer of steel skin. Then it suddenly stopped, the sounds, and the steel feeling over her skin, like it was never there to begin with.
Zeniba looked into her eyes curiously.
Ryumiko took in a shaky breath, preparing herself for the sorceress' answer.
"I delved into your deepest memories, and what I saw child, was this;
"Sixteen years ago, a couple, your human parents, were weeping the loss of their stillborn. Then a dragon spirit, came to your human mother, promising her the renewed life of their child. Your human mother beleived the dragon spirit to be a hallucination formed by her own grief, and agreed, thinking it to be a dream.
"On that same night, their newborn breathed life. But your mother could tell it was not her child that lived in that body," Zeniba said, sitting back down in the rocking chair while Ryumiko slumped to the ground.
The sorceress continued, "It seems that with your human mother's agreement to surrender her dead child's body, the dragon spirit was able to place your own spirit into the empty baby's body. Though why the dragon spirit wished to place you in a human body, I do not know."
The girl looked up at the old woman's face, "But - How can I be a spirit? Wouldn't I have known if I wasn't human?"
"Indeed you were not originally born of human, but you were raised as one in a living body, so naturally, you are essentially a human in everything besides spirit."
Though these words were of little comfort to Ryumiko as she became even more persistent in proving that she was not a spirit.
"But I grew up normally! Doesn't a spirit choose how fast they age? How could I have chosen how I aged as a baby?"
Zeniba sighed, "Being a spirit bound to a human body may have made you age the same as humans."
Ryumiko was lost for other reasons to prove the sorceress wrong. In fact everything made sense. If her human mother could tell that her baby's soul wasn't in its proper body from the beginning, then it explained why her parents were always out of the house. They never really connected with her as parents and she had never connected with them as their daughter. It explained why she felt like a stranger living in a couple's home and why she had almost a near indifferent reaction to their deaths.
But it felt like someone had told her that her entire life up to this point had been a lie. A damn good one at that.
Zeniba's voice broke her line of thought, "Now that you know what you are child, what will you do with this knowledge?"
Ryumiko took one glance at Zeniba's brown eyes that made her think of Chihiro, before she turned and fled, bursting out of the cottage in a blur of teal green. Retsu went to go after her, but Yukaoi stopped him, saying she needed time by herself. Ryumiko ran around the back of the cottage and straight into the middle of a field before her legs gave way, and she fell to her knees in tears.
She crouched down in the long grasses like she used to as a child, and wept as her thoughts clouded her mind. Because she was a spirit in another human's body, she probably didn't even look like herself. By any chance, she could look completely different with purple eyes and green hair. Was her name even Ryumiko? Why was she left in the Living World in the first place? She cried not in sadness, but in frusrated confusion of who she was, wishing for Chihiro to appear, to tell her that it was alright, that she was still Ryumiko.
Haku looked through Zeniba's window out to where Ryumiko was in the field. With his dragon hearing, he could hear her sobs from even inside the cottage.
"She did not take the news well," Zeniba said with a sad sigh.
Haku turned his gaze onto the old woman. "Well I didn't expect her to rejoice either."
"Give her time Haku, she needs to come to terms with this on her own. In the meantime, you can help prepare dinner."
It was sunset when Yukaoi went to go check on Ryumiko. The girl had stopped crying, but she lay on the ground staring at the sky without expression on her features. Yukaoi crouched down near the girl's head, her white hair covering the girl's black locks, and the midnight coloured fabric of her dress pooled around her body like liquid.
A short silence passed before Yukaoi spoke in her bell-like voice, "Is it that you are against the idea of being a dragon spirit, or that you are against knowing something you didn't want to know?"
Ryumiko took a deep breath. "What I'm against is, only finding out about this now. When I should have been told this from the very beginning. Because maybe I wouldn't have felt so damn abandoned all the time!" she yelled sitting up. "Maybe I would have liked to have been told from my own parents, if that's what you can even call them, that I wasn't their child! It would've cleared a lot between us! Also maybe my real parents could've have kept me a spirit! That would've been a much better idea. If dragon spirits even have kids... but I wouldn't know would I? Because all I've known all my life has been nothing but the biggest bloody lie anyone has ever told!"
Yukaoi blinked, not expecting the outburst or being the target of the girl's anger.
Ryumiko stood when the dragon spirit said nothing in response and paced back and forth in a short line.
"What am I supposed to do now? I obviously can't go back to the world of the Living because of the barrier Yubaba set up, but I don't know a single thing about the Spirit World beyond what Chihiro has told me, let alone anything about being a spirit. I can't have Haku take care of me forever!"
At this, the white haired woman stood and wrapped her arms around the smaller girl. She knew humans did this action of embracing to comfort or show affection, though spirits did not and especially not dragons. But it seemed appropriate in Yukaoi's eyes, to comfort the girl in a familiar way, though she was quite unsure of what she was doing.
To cover her uncertainty, Yukaoi spoke, "That's what Retsu and I are here for."
Ryumiko blinked, "I thought you were here for Chihiro? From the Dragon Clan to help us?"
Yukaoi moved back a little, her arms still around the newly discovered spirit in human form, but a gap now between them, "Who told you that?"
"H-Haku said that you were here to help fulfill the prophecy," she mumbled.
"Indeed we are here to search for a prophesised one but we and Kohaku are looking for two different people. Did Kohaku not tell you of the two separate prophecies?" she asked.
When Ryumiko shook her head, the white-haired dragoness hissed. She couldn't believe that he hadn't told her.
"We've been looking for you, not your cousin. And now that we know that you're technically one of us, we will take you into our family ourselves if you so wish," Yukaoi said, leaving out the small little detail that being a Noble could mean that she would automatically become the ruler of all dragon spirits.
Once the 'hug' became much too awkward for Yukaoi, she let go of Ryumiko and wiped away the girl's tears, "Now enough of these tears. All will be well in time. For now, just focus on what you want to do. I'd say, start by slaughtering Kohaku for me."
Ryumiko laughed a little and started to head back to the cottage. She felt significantly better, but still couldn't shake off the emptiness that was beginning to form inside her. Today, she'd lost a piece of her identity, and that was going to be difficult to fill in again. She was being cowardly, and she knew it, but at the same time she wanted to stay on the sidelines and do nothing about it. Unfortunately, life just wasn't that nice to her.
As Haku was stirring soup and Retsu forced to learn how to knit, Zeniba eyed the river-dragon spirit.
"There's another thing you should know Haku. When I searched her mind, I discovered something interesting," she said.
Haku gave her a sidelong glance to indicate he was listening.
"What you should know Haku, and you as well Retsu, is that Ryumiko is not a full blooded Noble spirit but only half."
And another chapter complete... This one was really hard to write D:, mostly because I had to work out how Ryumiko would react, but this is what came up! So yeah, that's my awesome and totally interesting story!
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Laugh. While. Crying (Don't worry, I didn't think of No-Face either when I started writing the last chapter, and then at the end I was like, 'Wait! Zeniba's not alooone!' and then frantically crammed No-Face in there! Thank you for reviewing! :3)
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