Yasunori Mitsuda - October Mermaid
The Lost Years, Part Three
...
…Invited to be lodge in a guest room, Kain had to watch over Gizamaluke, lying upstairs on the same bed with the disease spread on the red blanket, and carefully give each day his dosage of Ether, so he could bear with the illness until his body got rid of it on his own.
No matter how long, when the effect were meant to be saw by the eye, Kain hoped that boy's strength would endure, as much as his will to live, alike a seed from a foreign land raised on a dry soil; so, he would be no more a motive of such a worry, regret carried over like a stone on his back. But Gizamaluke couldn't die so easily, because he and Kain already tied their tails on each other.
If Kain believed Gizamaluke could recover, then Gizamaluke, just for another day, could, after all he passed through, to once again prove he is willing to not be back down so sudden, by using anything left on his own to one day stand on his feet, with the eyes wide open to the world he live. That spirit of his, Kain knew for sure, certainly would find a way to go up in the ladder and burgeon into the sparkling sunlight. The same Frigg seemed to believe, in her own way. After all, she was just experiencing new things, almost never felt by the Vastitas she belonged to.
With the days spent at Pathos, not only Kain had attention over Gizamaluke, but also took care of Frigg's house when she was away. Always there to clean the dust hiding below the carpet, wash the dishes made of clay, to prune the growing vines of kudzu from the walls of the house and garden... Another daily quiet life, spent when she went away to buy at the market.
With or without the armor, as he noted with the days, Frigg had changed. She looked like a common Vastita housewife, wearing that single lime cloth, always carrying a knife in the pocket, just in case someone tried to beset her. Beautiful as the sight and scent of a rose, although covered by spikes that allows no one to hold her in the arms, Frigg owned the same independence from before, or pretended she could.
From the dinners accompanied of Kain to the soups given to Gizamaluk before he could withstand the bitter taste of the Ether; on a starry night, rare to be seen for the people living at the Mist, lying on the roof to gaze at the sky, when asked by Kain about why she was cooperating with him, one word came from her lips: Selfish.
Frigg admitted all she had done was for the sake of herself, like the many stars that shine for themselves. By giving Gizamaluke a shelter to rest, and allow the one he calls by 'father' to stay with him, Frigg felt better when satisfied with the pain of the others, because it was better to do something than do nothing.
To live for the sake of the other, besides themselves, is a kind of feeling long lost by the Vastitas. From that day onwards, the image of a Frigg who once Kain thought to be refractory towards people... shattered like a mirror as a whole since that short moment.
Later that night, from the deepest layers of his memories, immersed in a dream, Kain saw a faint glimpse of the light belonging to a distant fire merged into the void of darkness. He had forgotten his purpose left on the way, and no news from his comrade, Siegfried. Nothing about Klaire and Kilde, or his home at hills, where Lucrecia was raising Nate.
For all these days, Kain had not been secluded at Pathos not because of the burden he felt towards Gizamaluk. It was the burden of someone else that interrupted his way to bring his people the choice of Bahamut. The child found at Kilde, who felt better as the days had passed and the symptoms disappeared, was no longer a reason for Kain to stay there.
17 days, and Gizamaluk was already fully healthy, seemingly immune to the pox, could walk once again, even talk and look at his father, but still Kain and him stood at Frigg's house, with some invisible force pulling him to stay. On that fateful morning, while he took care of the flowers from the outside, as Frigg opened the door to go somewhere else, Kain stood in front of her, decided to ask her why secluding them from the world. Frigg said nothing, and as lies spread like lices, rats like her couldn't bear to escape forever from an earthquake with such strength, who persisted until the reminiscence of someone long lost were seen through her eyes.
When Kain spoke about Gizamaluke, who had something to do for the reason of her burden and why she left the armor of a Red Mask commander she was, Frigg ended up the conversation that didn't even start and that suspicion of his only had upsetted her.
With both lost for words, Kain accidentally, without no purpose, stepped over Frigg's shadow; as he was about to tell his apologies, a straight cut was delivered to his right arm by that knife. Shocked, Frigg had no chance to help stop the bleeding of Kain or speak to him, remaining quiet instead.
Next to Gizamaluke's window, flowers were raised. Yellow on the right, as the happiness and the good wave of expectations felt by his father, and Blue on the left, as the calm and restless ocean of stability between reliability and anxiety; thus were born the first hyacinths.
But, from the repressed pain Kain felt by the tip of the sharp blade of Frigg , a day later was born of his dripping blood from his arm to the flowers of the left, the first purple hyacinths. Purple of the same shade that grew on such flowers filled into Frigg's once grey eyes like the Mist, because for the Vastita, it hurted to cry, enough for the red of the veins spill over her vision as blue like the tears shed...
...
— ...Mother. Did the mother cried when she gave birth to her son, or was it just me alone, Sig?
— Your mother... to 'cry' is a mere single word, an easy way to describe such unmeasurable pain. everyone feels pain, my Prince. Some feel it on different ways, as Frigg once, and still felt, as your brother...
...
…It all became clear on that dim night, when the shadow had its own story to be told by the owner of his. As if Frigg so feared that thing like a kid, had no self control over it whatsoever... How do you create your own 'self', your 'beliefs', she asked.
You create your 'self' from what people taught you, mainly. You're born empty, but ready to learn. The family is the diminished part of the State, created in order so 'you', since a baby, could learn of what the State taught you, from the words of your father, or mother, or sister, or brother, someone older than you, that learned from the same way you'll learn.
With no exception, any Vastita was said to be born under punches. Violence is the basis of the Vastita 'teaching' with their children, verbal and not, defined as basis of their 'society' in a whole. In order to become a Vastita, you had to retaliate. Through lies, deception, mutilation, corruption, death...
No Vastita, from the day they were born, lived; instead, they survived. No sly doubt about it. But each one is born with a sense, the innocence part of our good nature, belittled by the ones over you. The beliefs are instituted by the same ones who are one; the family, at the command of the State, was in charge to develop a trust to their young ones, in order to share their beliefs to the new generation.
You are told a shadow stands below the body, it's natural it remains below, but what if it stood above you, like the darkness across the night sky, where you can't see anything else? The shadow of your father's arm stands next to the unseen shadow of the comfort given by your mother's womb, both lying within yourself', while the shadow of the ignorance given by and to both lies above yourself'.
Everything you see is a star, because you had been told it is a star; everyone besides the Vastitas you see is a foe, because you had been told it is a foe; everybody believes what they are told, because they got no sense to refute the family on your own. They are what is your 'own'. To become a Vastita, you needed to be emptied of those stupid ideals of 'self' and abandon the 'Frater' as you reach maturity, they say, or else you will never reach the truth told and be punished by them. By them, she referred to the 6 major Demiurges, members of State, founders of the Jugend of Pathos who once reunited on the reigns to a test.
They each had in their possession a Midgardsormr, giant snakes who seemed to measure 2 meters of height and 30 cm of a width body – counted by today's measurement system. Possessing of sharp black scales, birth from the offspring of Uroborus, the snake said to had fallen from heaven, kept at Grignard, the Midgardsormr swims on the Stige, the river near the outskirts of Pathos, as the children were thrown in there by force.
While some of them ended up with a choke on their lungs, drowning in blood, the remaining ones were attacked by the snakes. As they wrap around the child's body, breaking the bones, the weak ones shed their last tears without even being able to scream, because of how tied the constriction of those snakes, and the more they struggled against it, the stronger the grip fastened as the sudden stroke felt on head. Whoever survived, a few ones like Frigg, had passed the test.
How cruel wasn't enough to describe the rawness of those stark words, and the mark of a painful constriction left below the scarf who once covered the same neck. The flow of pain felt at the moment, pumping through a wounded heart, was nothing compared to the weight left to a wound carved so deep to be carried for a lifetime.
As Kain looked further keenly at Frigg's soul, stripped down to the bone, he saw visions a child, being hurt plenty by the whip hitting on her back, tied on the altar dedicated to the goddess of Persistence, arms and legs scratching of the prurience emanating from the pinkish bubbles of pox, the skin burnt by the cold nights on the harshest of the winters, while lying on a bed of twigs without a piece of cloth to cover the naked body... all done to raise new soldiers, with no particular 'self' and secluded of their 'Frater' into ashes belonging to a burning bridge, to be stepped over in order to trigger the inner Vastita to rise earlier from its refuge, the shadow beneath them all.
For Frigg, the world had all his sides immutable and no meaning to exist besides through the minds of few, like a said to be perfect triangle. Frigg was about to end the conversation, bury it at once, but then, she had perceived no reason to keep it away on the wings from Kain, because she saw Gareth through him, listening carefully to her words.
Those eyes forced her to confess that, besides her mentor, Gareth was like a father figure to Frigg. A father born from a stranger family that gave her a shelter, Gareth even listened to Frigg's personal problems and understood them clearly, never showing a sign of distaste for each one of her problems, always there to give his advice.
Frigg needed someone, unlike that shadow over the years, to tell about the woe attached to a secret kept locked, meant to be told only for Gareth. One slip of tongue, and everything would fall like a landslide into her.
Without Gareth, Frigg became a compass without a north to be pointed. She knew Gareth fought for his country, but why he had to leave, wondered the lonely one. The strength of her alone may have sufficed enough the demand of Grignard on her own, as it seemed by the others. To regress, not develop your 'self', but instead share of a 'self' without developing your own; call it something contrary to the brave and fierce image of a Red Mask that slowly vanished from Frigg's 'self' or whatever, but Frigg was finally showing off her 'true' colors, inside the pitch black world of her.
To copy the moral behavior of a family meant to raise you, to create you... how could Frigg discover the 'you', the 'self' without them? The 'own' carried by the 'other'? A façade that deceived everyone of 'his' weakness, the co-dependency of being 'they' hiding underneath that shadow; Frigg died once with her innocent and Gareth's demise, and became a man instead of a woman, because of the pressure given since when 'they' are born.
By 'they', Frigg meant all women belonging to the Vastitas families. Mother, aunt, sister... and all the pressure suffered by the weight of the State and Clergy, one and same structure, during war times. With the majority of the Vastita army composed by proud male soldiers, and as the high amount of them meet the end of their lives at the warfield or in the civil disorder outbreaks, grated for being able to protect their homeland and wifes left at home, it was common the decrease of the male population.
The solution was for the Clergy/State to initiate a policy to incentivize the union act during those times. The more the sons, the more prospere life would become, believe the men of Bulu; for the Vastitas, the more the men, the more prospere the war. Many children were born from those periods of policy, including Frigg, and her sisters, her mother, the sisters of her mother...
With such destiny reserved to her, Frigg turned into a man, engrossing her voice, erect posture, javelin, heavy armor, pointy spear... she wasn't the only female disguised as a male, but was an example to all. Selfish of her 'self', Frigg wore red not because 'he' was a Red Mask, but the red of the armor and clothes, underneath and beneath the armor, were used to not hide the red poured off of her enemies, but the 'red' of herself.
But against the mirror, Frigg couldn't confront what the bends, parts of a body told to 'him' is truly 'her'. Women had the tendency, from the eyes of a man, to be beautiful in any way, no matter how they saw themselves. It was nature, pulling one of its tricks to attrack opposite sexs to the junction of a being. Frigg couldn't stop insisting to herself that Gareth, the one whom she shared of the inner intimacies, left her to lead a life on her own.
Until then, when the 'red' of Frigg disappeared, and someone that reminded Frigg about the 'his' awoke inside the 'her' ... Someone that told Frigg to trust in her own strength and have faith in her own destiny... Someone like Gareth, a son of his, raised from the frivolous yet painful labor pains. His name...
That's when Gizamaluke came to the room. With eyes stained in purple, a color that engulfed her once pale iris, Frigg stopped the conversation to stare at him. He was healthy, able to walk freely once again.
A soul no longer tied to the bed where they are born and die someday; It was Gizamaluke, Kain was certain of it, as much as Gizamaluk was. Instead of dozens of them as demanded, Frigg only had a long lost son, the same found on her arms once again. When that baby was born, as Frigg told, she wasn't able to bear with the education methods that the boy was supposed to be taught, because 'he' was a part of 'her', and 'her' was a part of 'he'.
Raised to be another fragile soul, without discovering her 'self'; those scars on the back of Frigg reflected upon years of torture persisting like the flame of the nation, trespassing the skin and later habitating the boy's heart. Was she as mother like her mother, or as fatherly like her father?... to give the child another world to live seemed to be the only choice, so before Gizamaluk could open his eyes, Frigg secluded him from the world she lived, because she feared her child, the same child of the 'father' whom she missed and wanted to stay, to be taken with the shadow she grew onto.
It was all done to alleviate her own personal sake, then and now, as Frigg once thought. The things Frigg felt for Gizamaluke when she left him on his own... Things that couldn't be easily explained. Those things felt as a whole were something more than selfish. Frigg knew how excruciating was the process of a child to become a Vastita.
For all these years, she blindly followed the path of others, because she had no other option, besides what the 'other' demanded. The Vastitas, for centuries, never progressed to freed themselves, simply they preferred to had fallen apart into methods of superiority and dominance.
Frigg and Gizamaluk were both raised on different corners, sharing the same sky with two colors, yet they shared the same blood and principle of existence. A son whose reflection once was his only companion, and a mother still afraid of her own shadow; the act of reflecting upon objects demonstrated both had a bond hidden by the fact of 'him' and 'her' being lost into different worlds and themselves.
Abandoned by the parents, raised by the pain, although the shadow grew with Frigg, it was of her own inner choice that the same Gizamaluk she found once again had the opportunity as a kid to counter the effect of years of desolation, to shift the Vastita paradigm since Frigg moved him to Kilde and years later Kain met with him, as a bond tied like a missed ribbon grew on them…
...
— …Frigg... she was just like mom, wasn't she? The reason why her life was taken away...
— It's natural for each living creature to fight against other creatures and each other, like the Vastitas once had done. But what makes us more than mere rats is that we fight for the others. In order to protect her own offspring, a mother like yours would even take of her own life to protect you. Frigg, as a mother, secured of Gizamaluk's life as the same way Racquel secured the other, you, to live. Edgar may be right about you being the reason Racquel is gone. But your mother... she cared for the others above herself. That's the relevance meant to be told. Sacrifices taken for an only being the sake of other beings; and for this same purpose, your mother stood there, agonizing into the pain, afraid of what would happen, as something already predicted by a dream, but... That's part of our nature, the human side of ours, that separates us from mere animals. Mere Vastitas.
— Mother...