Hellebore [writer's craft]
Hellebore
She sees the shogi game pieces first, scattered in the snow. She can see it in the back of her mind: Junta seated on the windowsill, legs folded awkwardly under him with the shogi board between him and no one, the look on his face as he swept the enemy king from the board, sending him and his army flying outside. And then she sees the blood in the snow, and she can see how that happened too: tiny pieces of splintered glass and wood and a broken window and a hundred miniscule scrapes from which a hundred miniscule rivulets flow; can see the arch of Junta’s back and his eyes squeezed shut and his mouth open in a soundless scream; can see shreds of red-stained cloth fluttering down as feather and bone pushes through clothes and skin, shaking crimson spray as a dog might shake itself dry, the droplets falling like rain and landing as a thousand cherry blossoms.
The image comes to her with a jolt, - Junta watching the clearing warily, his back pressed to the tree - a vice grip at her temples probing straight in to the back - one hand tucking his bangs behind his ear to stop them from falling over his face - leaving her panting - his breath slowing back to its usual pace, no longer quick and panicked - gloved hands pressed hard into the snowy ground, her left curled in a facsimile of a fist. He’s still here. In the neck of the woods, but still here.
She stands, brushing away the snow packed in the creases in her pants, watching the tiny pellets drop and indent the untouched crisp white crust where they fall. She tilts her face sharply towards the distance, as if scenting the air as a.
She hadn’t taken him seriously a week ago, when he’d told her his secret. And it was a hell of a secret. “As if,” she had scoffed at him, handing him the fruit knife and freshly washed apples. “Stop being a twit and cut these, JunJun.” She’d seen the look that had crossed his face afterwards, but hadn’t thought of it more than just Junta being Junta. That look carries a lot more weight now, and there’s not much she wouldn’t trade right now to have had the foresight to have taken him more seriously last week, the week before the last, and all the weeks before that. At this point, she’d give him her soul if he asked for it. “Wait for me, stupid,” she says to no one, except maybe to the sky with its grey and silver clouds. “Idiot,” she adds for good measure.
She scoops up the king from where it protrudes from a pink tinged depression, and hits the ground running, awkward winter boots and all. Her jacket flaps behind her; she’d left the house late this morning, sprinting down the street to where she was supposed to meet with Junta so that he could cream her in shogi all over again. He’d managed to whup her pathetic army anyways, she thinks wryly. Just without her there. She’ll have to demand a rematch for that particular game.
For as long as she can remember, Junta has always had the shogi board with him, with its nine by nine grid and slanted pentagonal pieces of all different heights and sizes. He hasn’t been here so long; he only moved to this town six years ago, so she can still remember clearly the solemn eyed boy with a battered wooden board and an equally battered wooden box in one hand and a shiny new duffel bag in the other. She sees him though, not as the ten year old she knows she met him as, but as a toddler with a pawn clutched in one pudgy fist pushing a promoted knight up a square. “It’s all I remember,” he’d replied wistfully, when she had teased him once about being married to the board.
A passing thought, she gives thanks for the small blessings. Winter means that she can follow his footsteps, steady at first, and then sparingly here and there where he’s deigned to leave them. It’s better than nothing though, even if the cold cuts into her unprotected face because she was dumb enough to leave her scarf at home. “Stupid,” she says for her own benefit. Then “stupid,” she says for his. And then again, “idiot,” this time for the both of them.
“I want…to leave.” Junta snatches the bishop she’s offered up to trade before she can reconsider the idea of giving him yet another tool to help send her poor, beleaguered king to wherever it is that defeated and captured shogi pieces go. It’s almost mumbled to only himself, but he says it as if at the last possible moment he intends for both of them to hear it.
“Eh? What?” She’s not really paying attention to him, because she’s dedicated most of her brain’s resources to coming up with another elaborate scheme that will probably end in failure. Again.
He makes a sound in his throat that may or may not be something dangerously close to a piteous whine. “Oh never mind,” he replies, exasperated. “Checkmate.”
There are, she thinks, limits that can, and cannot be crossed. Growing wings and flitting off somewhere is one that should never, ever, ever in a hundred thousand millennia fall in the former category. The problem is of course, that it seems to have happened no matter what she thinks.
-- no one there in the old house, abandoned long ago by its masters. Uncomfortably, unusually empty, as if driven out by some unknown, universally feared force. A crouching figure - Junta, both hands clutching his head as if to reach inside and rip something out like the roots of a particularly obstinate weed.
“Give me some warning next time,” she mutters as she imitates Junta’s fetal position after the images fade out slowly in contrast to their sudden and forceful implantation into her conscious. Power has a nasty habit of being a blessing with a hidden curse - but she can take it if it means she’ll get irregular updates on Junta’s present condition. He’s still here. He hasn’t left yet. Which is all that matters, really.
She reaches the clearing, short of breath and with no signs of regaining it any time soon. Easily, she finds the tree, peeling off her mittens and running tender hands used to long hours indoors along the roughened bark. That way, the tree whispers to her, the boy with the strange eyes went that way. Thank you, she whispers back, tapping into strength she has used but once in all her sixteen years. Why didn’t you come earlier? the tree asks her, oddly petulant for a tree. You’ve so much power for your kind. It’s always been Da’s, not mine, she tells the tree. Never mine.
“I don’t really like Shogi,” he confesses to her one evening. “It’s always just sort of here, you know?”
They’re on the sofa in his living room, because her parents are out of town working, and it’s his dad’s night to take his girlfriend out, so they have the house to themselves. It’s winter, so she’d told him that she didn’t want to sit on the windowsill like they usually do.
“Can’t you leave it?” It’s a valid question.
He shrugs, hugs his knees to his chest and wriggles bare toes against the white upholstery. “I can’t. That’s why I said it’s just always there. With me. Sort of like…your Dad, right?”
“What about Da?” Absentminded, she’s more interested by the pecans on the candy tray than the conversation. It’s easy for Junta to steer it away with a quick “never mind.”
“These are really good,” she tells him around a crunchy mouthful. “I can’t understand why you don’t like nuts.” Junta promptly chokes on his melon soda. “Not that way, pervert,” she quickly amends when she (finally) gets it and flushes bright red, muttering darkly about boys and their one track minds.
After a moment, Junta begins to set up the pieces again, wood clicking against wood hollowly. “Well, up for another game?” Tips of her ears still pink, she thinks that he sounds oddly resigned - and then decides it’s probably just her hearing.
It sets her on edge; everything that can feel wrong about it feels wrong. Which in this situation is oddly comforting, because that means something must be going right. But when she warily avoids the missing steps on the stairs and hesitantly peers around the peeling door, it’s hard to remember that this is exactly what she’d been hoping for from the moment she’d seen Junta’s open, empty window this morning.
It’s JunJun for certain, with his too long bangs that always fall over his left eye and his hunching posture that’s meant to make him seem smaller than he really is. It’s just JunJun with eyes of brittle blue instead of nut brown and JunJun with a bared chest and oversized wings that remind her of the night when the wind creaked in the cracks of the walls and the snow piled up relentlessly against the houses.
“You’re a moron for coming here, you know,” is the first thing he says, and his voice is deeper than she remembers.
“Put on a shirt, pervert,” she retorts - at least she thinks she does, it feels too heavy to know properly - before she slumps to the floor. Her last thought is of Junta and wings and the unfinished - unstarted, she amends - shogi game and the king that’s still clutched tightly in her hand, the corners of the piece jabbing skin even through the woolen glove, leaving its mark on her palm.
~~~
His breath catches in his chest, every exhalation a desperate fight against the intake of much needed air. Sweat freezes on bare skin and rolls down his neck, his arms, his chest in the form of tiny glass beads. His arms flap wildly at his side in a poor imitation of a runner’s gestures, resembling instead a child just learning to swim. Socks long drenched and discarded, ice crystals melt under his bare feet and freeze in the imprints his toes leave behind. The arches of his feet disappear beneath the snow each step, soaking the ends of his pants, his ankles uncomfortable and clammy. His eyes flutter close as he stumbles forward, catching himself in the next step, every tiny flap of newly grown wings sending a biting ache down his spine.
It had been so sudden; like an asymptote, he thought, or maybe a jump discontinuity. There’d been that heart-stopping second of warning before he had gone from dreading it happening, to holding every bit of himself in check to keep from screaming as it did. It had all flooded back, going from 1/x to x10 in an attosecond; memories, power, emotion, knowledge, and most painfully yet least importantly, the wings.
She’ll come looking for him. She’ll run to his bedroom window calling out a breathless apology for being late followed by an admonishment for an unperceivable error on his part, finishing with either “idiot” or “stupid” or maybe “moron” if she’s feeling particularly inspired this morning. And then she’ll see the mess he’d left behind, and she’ll put together the puzzle and be after him as fast as her legs can carry her.
He oughtn’t to leave tracks. The thought occurs to him, and he immediately takes off, managing a full distance of ten steps before he touches down heavily, gasping with the exertion of the movement and the shaking of his body. And he leaps again and goes a little further, and again, and a little further. He grits his teeth and flies.
“Really JunJun, why do you always make it so difficult?” Emphasizing the last word, she tugs a little hard on the bandage, and Junta winces at the rough treatment.
“Dunno,” he offers by way of explanation, eyeing her warily in case she decides that his response is somewhat unsatisfactory. She does, and this time she yanks at the ends of the bandage on purpose, glowering all the while. Junta hurriedly snatches his arm back from her and does his best to tie it off left handed.
She calls him a shit faced stubborn dumbass - and Junta knows by the triple insult that he’s in really big trouble in her books - but leaves it at that.
He makes it as far as to the woods, and he’s either getting used to the wings or he’s getting used to the pain. He lands lightly, folding the great, black appendages against his back, tucking them in as tight as he can so as to not get them caught in the branches.
He pauses at the first open space he comes to and spares a second to cast a net, just in case someone - not Elena please not her - inadvertently catches him unawares, heading his way. Whichever way is his way.
Junta tenses for a moment, and the feathers on his back shiver with the slight twitch as he suddenly feels the familiarity of this place. I was born here, he thinks with a touch of bewilderment. His true birth into this world, not the one sixteen years ago that brought him into humanity. It was strange that fate seemed to wind back here to its beginning; it was her too - this place was her beginning as well.
The house, however, is easy to find. It calls to him, a whirling ball of kindred energy in this county of unfriendly light and fence-sitting neutrality, and he responds eagerly in short airborne bursts.
Run-down and ramshackle, the unfamiliarity of the place rankles him as much as the familiarity comforts him. It’s devoid of life - these whole woods feel devoid of life - as if life has recognized the predator in him that he hasn’t yet found and has run far, far away.
She falls asleep an hour before midnight, a lump under his blanket on his bed. The moon is a waning quarter - enough to lighten his room a shade but not enough to illuminate her face. Even without the light, he remembers that she’s pretty; angular chin and sharp cheekbones offset soft eyes and soft cheeks and soft lips. He knows the last because she’d once fallen asleep on his shoulder, and when he’d turned his face, her lips had brushed lightly against his cheek.
He drives the memory from his mind with a vicious shake of his head. It had ridden too closely on the tail-wind of the other thought to not be disturbing. That wasn’t how he thought about her, it just wasn’t. Monster, he comments softly to himself. I’m a monster, aren’t I?
From somewhere within his consciousness, a voice that’s only recently begun to bother him pipes up. Don’t flatter yourself, it snipes. If you’re a monster, I might as well be more frightened of a fledgling chicken.
The resulting cacophony of swirling thought may’ve been with his best interests in mind, but it does little other than drive Junta to his knees, fingernails digging sharply into his scalp as if it will somehow make it better, as if he could somehow claw it all out.
It passes as time passes, and he gingerly stands, one hand rubbing unconscious small circles at his temple. His eyes roam about, and he notes the table in the corner and the stairs that lead up to the second floor, and he wonders if he should go upstairs. Too much effort, he eventually deems. And it might be dangerous.
He feels her first - because she’s always felt different to him though he’d never known why, a sort of different that rubbed him the wrong way and called to him the same time - and then he hears her footsteps quick and hurried and then slow and measured and hesitant.
Idiot, idiot, idiot, he chants as a silent mantra, and curses him for his own mistake, for forgetting that she doesn’t need his footprints to find him here. Forgetting that she has powers of her own tucked safely in her blood. Hope, glee, anger, frustration all take their turn when he sees her poke her head in, bright pink ears hidden barely in dark brown hair an absolute mess, and then her bulky purple winter jacket, and finally the whole of her stepping in and pushing the door shut. You’re a moron for coming here, you know. It’s all he can say right now. He wants to shut his eyes to stop his urges to either run to her and squeeze her in the only hug he’s ever given, or to gleefully twist her heart and mind around his finger and claim it as his first soul taken. He does neither, and he doesn’t shut his eyes either, because it somehow doesn’t seem like the right thing to do. Not yet, at least, not yet.
It hurts terribly; the place on his back where the wings he’s been holding in his entire life have finally torn through. I can’t hold it back anymore, he’d finally told her after weeks of indecision, but she hadn’t believed him, just like he hadn’t believed himself when the memories had first begun to trickle back. How nice it would have been if her belief could have held. Then she wouldn’t be here, facing a force she can’t truly know the greatness of, overwhelmed by it because she’s opposite and opposing in every way, and he wouldn’t be gliding the meter or two to her side, dropping to his knees, afraid to touch her and afraid to let her alone.
Junta bends towards the girl, hands playing out over her eyes, her hair, her lips. There are things we can’t fight, his father had said all those years ago, and he’d naively dashed off to join this girl who he’d thought he’d loved. Or what he had thought was love. A human, despicable term. He’d tied his soul to the shogi board, to the king and his generals, and the endless repetition of battle after battle. It made him human, made him forget. It had, he amended. At one point, it had.
Elena, he whispers, fingers brushing aside a cooling sweaty tendril of hair stuck to her neck. Why didn’t you believe me? Why didn’t you say anything? You could have - but he keeps this to himself, even if she’s out cold. You could have believed, could have stopped me, could have known. Even before I had known. Could have done something. Your parents…they’re both…why didn’t they? It’s been bothering him ever since.
He has to go, leave, forget this girl and their endless games of shogi with the slanted wooden pieces with painted black characters and everlasting battles of slowly advancing pawns.
There are things we can’t fight, he hears his father say again, the echo of his words still lingering in this house. He pulls her into his lap, and slides the hand that was on her neck downwards - she’d call him a pervert and a molester if she were awake - and reaches into her heart. It’s ridiculously simple - it’s as if she’s giving it to him.
He casts a trace from his heart to elsewhere and it takes him effortlessly, and Junta glances back one more time before he slips into the dimension he can call home. Maybe it’s because now he numbers her soul as one of his own, but in place of her lifeless body he sees her smiling and offering him her king held in her open palm, in a way that says she sort of knew all along.