Writing Meme
Stole this meme gleefully away from miawinner, considering that I have been sort of hit like mad upside the head with writing-urges and practice is good. Practice with an audience is better.
The first five people to comment in this post get to request that I write a drabble of any pairing/character of their choosing (of course this means I must know the ( Read more... )
The first five people to comment in this post get to request that I write a drabble of any pairing/character of their choosing (of course this means I must know the ( Read more... )
Sometimes, apparently, they were supernatural tunnels that liked to whisper.
Dampness had begun to slicken the sides and floor of the tunnel, making them gleam with an organic wetness as she descended. It made little sense in a tunnel going into a mountain, but Yuki just tried to note the sort of smell it had while her mind rifled through her training as princess, esoteric priest, and yoriki of the Department of Shrines and Temples for what the hell this was. She felt little fear; as Princess, most supernatural things could not much hurt her, but this just got weirder and weirder.
Suddenly her torch turned off and all she could see was pitch blackness.
Yuki strangled a scream, freezing in place.
Calm. Observe. Think. The mantra of her station ran over and over again in her head to try to stem the rising well of panic in her chest. Her mind jibbered, but slowly she started to make out distant forms in the black ahead of her. It made no sense. There should be no light down here for her eyes to adjust to, not even the barest gleam of star, moon, or distant city lights.
Three heads turned to look at her, and three pairs of eyes gleamed like wet mirrors as they focused on her.
Maybe the thought of snakes had not been too far off after all. Yuki stared, still frozen, as three ….bodies? languidly shifted out of what seemed to be a dark knot of winding flesh. She tried to fit them together into something recognizable, but all she could see was the slope of women’s shoulders and the long, thick bodies of snakes mixed together. Darkness kept all details firmly filed away. Part of her was obscenely glad.
Her manners finally reasserted themselves and Yuki dropped down into a respectful kowtow more quickly then she could ever recall before in her life, and her knees screamed at the punishment.
“Forgive this one her trespass, kami-sama,” she breathed in as formal a Japanese as she could dreg up out of her memory. “This one wishes to bring no harm nor ill will into thine sacred place, and wishes with deep sincerity to suffer upon thine good will.”
Close to her nose, the wet rock smelt like must and rot.
A dry, rustling sound and great movement echoed before and around her as the three whats-its moved. Yuki remained where she was, cursing with all the skill inherited from listening to Kinu’s ranting within her thoughts. Stupid, stupid, stupid!
Cold hands ran over her shoulders and gripped her upper arms. Some instinct kept Yuki from flinching, her body tight against the urge to run. Even if she did, it would do little good-the tunnel was straight, and surely the kami could do with her as they wanted now.
“What is it?” whispered a sibilant voice above her head, the Japanese thick and old. Yuki strained to parse it. All she could tell was that is was terribly informal. Which made it harder to follow.
“A child, one of his,” added a second, slightly deeper and tinged with disgust.
“But alive,” came the third, close to Yuki’s hair. She fought a shiver, her torch still gripped in her right hand so tightly the ridges of plastic bit into her palm. “They do not come down here alive. The way must be open. A way. She will want to know.”
Pleased hisses echoed above her head and Yuki’s heart froze.
Fuck.
She struggled, panicking, but it did no good. As cold, strong hands pulled her to her feet Yuki whispered a prayer to Amaterasu-oomikami, firm in her heart, that she would live to see the end of her own foolishness and Kinu’s face again.
Reply
Light, soft and green, began to turn the tunnel walls to mirrors. Yuki barely registered when it happened, the occurrence had been so slow. One minute she struggled to see, the next she could make out the face of one of her captors and was being forced to her knees, head shoved down to the floor by iron hands.
It had been a beautiful woman’s face, once, her startled mind registered briefly, if not for the network of scars that ran in parallel lines destroying the proud visage.
Yuki stared at her knees, her hand aching from gripping the torch, and realized the oddly comforting whisper of movement sounded like the swish of kimono fabric.
Around her the snake-women bowed their bodies-she could see their long and matted hair hanging down in the corner of her eyes, bones, rocks, and other things woven into the tangled locks.
“We found this child,” said the closest snake-voice, tone twisting with disgust, “coming down our tunnel. We wished to bring it to you, Milady, for we thought she could be of use to you.”
The air paused, trembling under the weight of some great regard. It seemed to her there was a great conversation being held completely through silence.
“Cover her eyes.” Yuki’s breath crystallized in her lungs, the voice was so cold. It was female, expressionless, and the Japanese barely understandable and it was right in front of her.
Dry, cold hands pressed over her face and Yuki resisted the urge to struggle against them.
Freezing points of pressure pushed upward under her chin, forcing Yuki to lift her face. Despite the hands over her eyes, she could sense that she was being measured-like a feather brushing against the pure center of her soul. The freezing-fingertips?-turned her face from one side, to the other, and back again in utter silence.
“What are you named, girl?” said the freezing voice.
“I am Setsuko, Princess Yuki, the daughter of Lord Tayasu, the Middle Councilor,” Yuki managed in her most gracious of voices, her court training coming to her slowly. Calm had settled in her, for her terror had wrung out every other reaction from her and left only emptiness behind.
The pressure on her chin turned into a firm, painful grip. “The princess royal of the house of the Great Sun…..her get, his child,” came a furious hiss.
What?
Reply
“Get this thing out of my sight! Kill it, and leave it for the oni to eat!” The cold grip wrenched Yuki’s neck with a shove and vanished, the angry swish of kimono and pat pat of bare feet retreating away.
The snake bodies rustled and hissed, uneasy. What? What? Yuki’s calm mind ran as fast as it could but nothing made sense yet. All she could think was that the woman’s voice had somehow seemed….
Pained.
“Milady,” came the hesitant voice from Yuki’s right, “She is alive. She came from somewhere.”
The pat pat of feet stopped. Cold hands over Yuki’s eyes pressed against her head with a sharp tension that made her head ache.
“…..How did you get here without dying first, miserable get of that man?” The question had been thrown from the woman with the casual edge of a tossed knife.
Yuki ran her tongue over the inside of her teeth, trying to sift through everything that had been happening. “Within the mountain that this humble servant calls Mt. Haku, a mysterious crack opened in the earth. This humble servant was called upon to see what might have caused such a thing, and to enact the proper rites if so called upon, or call in those who have the ability if not.”
She could feel impatience pressing in, and rushed onwards, almost tripping over the complicated polite phrasing.
“During investigation, the tunnel collapsed behind me, leaving me without my guard or any way to leave by myself.”
Silence.
“Useless!” The woman screamed. Her voice raked across Yuki’s ears like nails, and Yuki gasped and twisted with the pain.
But so did the snake-women who had her gripped so tightly, and their hands slipped. Before Yuki could shut her eyes, green light burned the image before her into her mind.
Reply
It all coalesced at once in Yuki’s mind, and instead of horror, she suddenly felt a great painful sympathy. Perhaps it had been all the terror wearing her out, but she could not bring herself to be disgusted. She also could not look away. More then the horror, more then anger, she heard a deep pain in the goddess’s voice that filled her with some great, trembling emotion.
Izanami twisted bone fingers into her once long and luscious hair, still screaming. “Useless! Useless! All of you, useless!”
“Izanami-no-kami,” Yuki dared to say, suddenly brave. The snake women-shikome of some kind, Yuki finally understood, cringed away from the fury of their mistress. It was not with fear, she understood in a sudden flash of intuition tinged with an odd warmth similar to what she felt in prayer to Amaterasu. They cringed with sorrow and guilt. “Please forgive this one for bringing you such sorrow.”
Izanami froze in her twisting, gaze alighting on Yuki. Yuki focused purely on the Goddess’s eyes, feeling strangely no need to avert her gaze. Something in her whispered that it would do her no good to show such mortal-born deference here.
The eyes she met with her own were still lovely, a rich and liquid brown. If she focused on them, the sheer horror of the rest of her faded some.
“Do not look at me!” Izanami ordered, voice reaching new heights, and cut her hand through the air as if to rip out Yuki’s eyes from a distance. Yet Yuki’s calm seemed able to deal with this, too.
“Only as her radiance wishes,” Yuki replied, holding Izanami’s eyes for a long moment with a confidence that felt strange, yet right, in her bones. She sunk down to her knees in the most graceful bow her tired limbs could manage, showing deference. “Oh great mother, please forgive the intrusion of this one into your sacred realm. This one does not belong here, but instead throws herself onto your graces of forgiveness.”
Reply
Yuki could hear the plap of bare feet approach her slowly.
“Daughter of Amaterasu. You do not cringe from me. Why? Do you find me pitiful? Do you feel that you, a mortal child of her get, have the right to look down on me?” The voice had returned to deep cold, but Yuki understood now.
“Far from it. Death,” and here she paused, thinking about Kinu waking up in cold sweats after her stint in Africa, about the way the trees went bare in the winter, about the dead becoming again a part of the earth, until she could put her thoughts into a proper order. “-is merely a part of living. Even here, Izanami-no-kami only brings existence full circle. If Izanagi-no-kami could not see that, he was foolish.”
She cringed at criticizing a god, but it was all she could think of when she’d been told the story as a child. For a moment Yuki knelt with the full certainty she was about to die. I’m sorry, Kinu, I tried.
“…..I cannot leave.” Cold hands cupped Yuki’s face, and she realized with a start she stared at the lush folds of a woman’s kimono pulled taught over bent knees just in front of her face. The kimono had faded until the patterns dyed into the silk could barely be made out, but once it had been fine, and Yuki imagined, brightly colored. Yuki lifted her gaze slowly as Izanami lifted her face until the two woman stared eye-to-eye, and Yuki caught her breath.
No more a rotten Goddess, Yuki looked into a smooth face that seemed meant for smiling. She gasped softly with wonder.
Izanami touched Yuki’s forehead gently, brow wrinkling. “You have a strong, pure spirit. Even I can see that in you, Setsuko, Princess Yuki. You see beyond the surface, but you are still young, and foolish, and prone to anger and grudges. You are like me, child.” The Goddess’s eyes held only sadness now. “Go home, while I am still in this moment the Izanami that loved instead of hated, and remember well my lesson.”
Yuki barely remembered to breath.
“Thank you, Izanami-no-kami.”
Then there was nothing, just the after image of Izanami slowly gathering herself up to her feet with a quietly lost expression making her face painfully beautiful pressed into her mind.
Reply
“Yuki! Yuki, dammit, wake up!”
Yelling pounded at her thoughts, setting off a sudden chain reaction of pain bursting inside her head. Yuki groaned, lifting arms that felt like lead to push the yelling away. Ow. Ow. Oooooow moving sucked, bad idea. Instead she clutched her head. Something weird was over her mouth, and the air tasted like plastic.
Hands pried the press of Yuki’s palms away from Yuki’s temples. Familiar hands, calloused in a very specific way, and Yuki’s eyes snapped open.
Kinu looked down at her. Dust coated her hair and shoulders, and in the darkness of where they were, only a pale beam of light picked out the utterly frantic look on her face.
Guilt wrenched through Yuki’s heart and she struggled to sit up, and realized the thing on her face was an oxygen mask.
Kinu gave her that mom knows better glare and pushed her back down, holding the mask in place. Even though she struggled against it, Yuki slumped back with all the strength of a kitten. All her body felt like over-cooking udon noodles.
“Like hell you’re going walking around-I should tie a rope around your neck and attach it to my belt! Don’t you ever go into a giant hole in the ground without any support again, do you hear me?!” Kinu yelled. It was the worst yelling voice Kinu owned, taught and scratchy with trying not to rise in tone, but all the more furious and crazed with worry for it.
Yuki winced, trying to shrink into the ground.
“Do you hear me?” Kinu repeated, flushed and staring Yuki through the eyes, into the soul. Only then did she shift the mask so Yuki could speak.
“I hear you-oh gods, Kinu,” breathed Yuki, and she felt tears from all the stress of the past several hours scratching her throat, “I am so glad to see you, I thought I would be trapped there forever, oh gods-“
Shocked, Kinu stared at her, and suddenly Yuki found herself enveloped in the arms she so loved. Best she could, Yuki clung to the dirty back of Kinu’s uniform, her face pressed into the other woman’s smooth neck. She breathed in deep; under the smell of dirt, Kinu smelled purely of living, and Yuki could not get enough of it.
“I told you, you fool child,” Kinu said, into Yuki’s hair, her arms tight around Yuki’s shoulder, “I will never, ever leave you. Never.”
Reply
In the debriefing and on the cart-ride back to town, Kinu explained what had happened after Yuki had walked into the hole in the ground. One minute, Kinu had been speaking with one of the priests about procedures-the next, Yuki had been gone, and the mountainside had started trembling with a distant aftershock. They suspected after contacting the meteorological and geology agencies a shift in the dormant volcano Mt. Haku had made the ground shift, causing the cave in.
Kinu had, as Yuki would put it, ‘freaked the fuck out.’
After yelling at progressively higher and higher level points in the priestly chaing that made up the attendant priests of the Mt. Haku Shrine, they had flown in a rescue team and started excavating. The fear had been that Yuki would run out of air before they could break through, which had leant a frantic air to all the proceedings. At the same time, no one wanted to cause more rocks to fall and potentially bury her more then she already had been.
“It was the oddest thing,” Kinu said, leaning back against the leather seats and trying to wipe the dirt from the cave off her face with a rag. Yuki made a noise and attempted to do it herself, but to no avail; her limbs hated her and were in full rebellion. The best Yuki could do was lean upright inside the car. “I just knew that you were okay. They were digging through, and once when I looked away, I thought I saw a man standing off to the side with a weird look on his face. He looked at me, smiled, and pointed at the hole, but damn if he didn’t disappear when I looked away.”
“Huh.” Yuki titled her head to the side, quiet. Kinu gave her a queer look, but kept talking.
Apparently Yuki had been lucky. The cave in had missed her, but by the time they had broken through, the oxygen levels had lowered to a point that Yuki had fallen unconscious. Emergency oxygen had been supplied to her, and Kinu had forced her way in front of the paramedics. A full five hours after the cave in, that was when Yuki had woken up.
The cave in had, miraculously, also destroyed the rest of the tunnel, leaving Yuki in a perfect empty space. No one could explain it.
“I met her,” Yuki said, finally, after they had left the inner shrine room to hear the profuse apologies of the priests about the accident despite Yuki’s insistence that nothing could have been done. It was all her fault, after all.
“What?” Kinu asked, supporting Yuki’s walk with a warm, solid arm around the waist. Yuki did not mind in the least, despite how she protested every ten minutes she was fine and event the doctors had cleared her for just bed-rest at home.
“I saw her. Izanami-no-mikoto. Izanami-no-kami.”
Kinu’s face went blank with alarm.
“Yuki, she’s a goddess of the dead.”
Yuki felt an odd, prickly need to protect the Goddess that she still saw so clearly in her mind. “I know, but she’s still part of the divine couple who created Japan. … I think she kept me from dying.”
They walked out of the inner halls of the main Shirayume-hime Shrine in silence. Kinu’s grip around Yuki’s waist had tightened.
“A vision?”
“It must have been. There’s no way I could have actually walked under the mountain….” At Kinu’s look, Yuki shook her head, delaying the conversation. “….I’ll explain later. But I think she saw…something of herself in me. She kept me alive. …I think Amaterasu-oomikami helped me. Guided me. ….She was so sad, Kinu.”
The stepped carefully together over the threshold that separated the sacred inner spaces of the shrine from the world outside. Birds sung brightly in the trees. People thronged the inner spaces of the courtyard, their voices mixing into a bright calvacade of sound. High above, the sun shone brightly, the broad reach of Amaterasu’s arms enveloping them in a comforting warmth.
Yuki smiled, drinking in the sheer sound of life all around them.
“You always did like her,” Kinu commented, silent at Yuki’s side. Yuki looked up at her guardian, and felt a warm wriggle of pleasure at the fond, reflective expression on the older woman’s face.
They looked at each other, somehow both a part of the great noise of life around them and purely by themselves at once.
You are like me, child. Learn my lesson.
Reply
Kino laughed, and obligingly walked them down the stairs toward the wafting smells of the small food booths that always appeared in heavy clusters at the foot of famous shrines. “How could I ever think that you would ever change?”
I’m not like you, not entirely, Yuki thought as they wove through the crowd. I have Kinu, not Izanagi-no-mikoto. Kinu will never leave me behind, not even if I ate the fruit of the underworld!
Reply
Leave a comment