June 21st, 2023
"The gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again."
–Troy (2004)
Hanyuu has always been… tangled up in the odd corners of the world. She has spent so long as this –this existence that is and is not Oyashiro-sama– that she no longer quite… entirely… understands what it means to live as a human. This is not as grand or ominous a pronouncement as people –as Rika– seems to think it should be: it simply is a statement of fact, a summation of her being.
There is a beautiful and dreadful finality in letting go of one's mortality. Hanyuu will never again be the woman who stood barefoot in the swamp and let the tines of a sacred sword pierce her body. Even if she reincarnates herself –even if she builds physicality around her form and forces her way into being, forces herself to become that which others can perceive– that still will not make her mortal again.
The baby-soft hands are as hers as the cards she holds in them, and if she worries and frets at the others' teasing, it is because she lets herself do so. The form she wears now is something she wears, a mask she can don and strip at will.
She can still feel bruises, can still laugh and play and live with the others, but there is an edge to Hanyuu that none of them have.
So much of what it means to be human comes down to survival. She doesn't mean it in a cruel way: to say that humans are but animals after all, only selfishly interested in prolonging their lives long enough to breed and raise their young. She doesn't mean that at all.
In fact, she means rather the opposite.
From the very cradle, humans rely on love to live. They cannot survive without it. A person is something that is unfathomably complex and yet each human being she has met craves to be understood, to be accepted and loved by others.
For them, that makes everything a risk –a beautiful, soaring, incandescent risk. Every extension of trust, every moment of friendship, is an exposure of all the vulnerabilities and little cracks that make up a human being. All of those numinous moments –and how ironic it is, for a god to use that word in reference to humans– as she watched their feelings and their trust and their belief shatter Rika's fate…
That is love.
Her friends' love for each other is born of their flawed human condition –and Hanyuu uses the word flawed with a fierce affection of her own. Her friends are all flawed, and their flaws are like the glimmering facets of a highly-polished diamond, throwing off brilliant sparks of light and wonder. Their flaws, their pasts, their pain, it drives them to love harder and fiercer as they burn bright as incandescent torches.
Hanyuu cannot be that.
Hanyuu cannot have that.
Love and survival in humans are inextricably linked, and yet Hanyuu is no longer a creature that needs to concern herself with something as mundane as survival. She will endure. Always and forever, she will endure as Hinamizawa's guardian deity. There is no fear of loss, no fear of pain, in an existence dulled by countless centuries.
She still grieves, when Rika fails. She still mourns and fears the time when Rika will finally exit this loop, grow up, and leave her behind. Hanyuu is not made of unfeeling stone, nor is she the merciless god her people seem to have named her for.
But Hanyuu has known that Rika will grow up, die, and leave her behind from the very moment Rika was born. When those blurry infant eyes opened and blinked at her, directly at her for the first time in Hanyuu didn't even know how long, her shocked joy swelled right alongside the knowledge that eventually, she would lose this. Even as she rejoiced, she was already despairing.
It is what happens, she thinks, when you take someone's existence and stretch and stretch and stretch it out, like a band of chewing gum about to snap. She has already long become used to everything –everything– around her being ephemeral, temporary, far shorter than herself. Perhaps she was far more human at the beginning, but now –now, after so long– her humanity has left her, withering away slowly over the centuries rather than a sharp, cleaving moment of separation.
Hanyuu does not have the desperation that tinges every moment of a human life, the knowledge that their life is finite and their survival cannot be taken for granted. Human love is about survival, and Hanyuu cannot love in their way –cannot fuel a brilliant, burning spark the way that they do– because she no longer lives the way they do.
Perhaps that is why she finds their lives so beautiful.
12.19 AM, USA Central Time
