[ Week 2, Day 3] [video]
[ The video feed displays a giant rhino with Rinnegan eyes and piercings all throughout its body. On its back stands a small, female-looking figure that also has the Rinnegan and wears an Akatsuki cloak.
The Deva Path, Pain's main body, is looking somewhat disheveled. That body stands aside for a moment ( Read more... )
The Deva Path, Pain's main body, is looking somewhat disheveled. That body stands aside for a moment ( Read more... )
Ah, no. Your real body is far away, isn't it?
[She smiles, but it's a miserable smile, because there's no escape from it. The sky is cut cleanly in half - the starless darkness on one side and the outstretched branches of the Saigyou Ayakashi, in full bloom, glowing a pink so rich it's nearly red (the tree has gorged itself, clearly, drinking blood faster than it can even grow) and swaying in a wind that Yukari can't hear.
She can't smile properly, because she's sure of it now - a thousand years of fasting, and now the tree is hungry. It will eat him, surely. It will eat them all.]
Still.
That one is special, right? That body. You should have brought another one.
Well. There's still time.
[She sighs.]
Listen, under here [she prods at a fallen tree's trunk with a stick] is something I need. But the shimenawa [and here she traces along the bark as though something is draped along it] is preventing me from touching it. Those things are made to ward off youkai. This one is very powerful.
Hurry. You shouldn't stay here long. [She glances up and back, anxiously, watching as the branches stretch farther and farther across the sky]
Reply
[ She is in a volatile condition right now. He must approach this with care and caution. Perhaps it will help: talking to her. Grounding her in reality. Humouring her, perhaps. What could be the harm in doing the latter? They have done this often enough. ]
With all of my eyes -- God's eyes, they have told me -- there is much that I can see.
But I have been unable to see what you have pointed out.
I wish I could view the world you look into.
[ If she is so out of her mind, perhaps she will not remember this later.
So he can be honest with her. ]
After all, it was you who taught me to see so many things that I never did before.
Therefore --
Therefore, I will try to open my eyes.
To see with you here.
[ So if the trunk is the problem . . .
. . . he simply tenseis it away. ]
Reply
The sea? Where is she? There's no sea in Gensokyo, so - oh, right. She's not in Gensokyo. She's - well, the Lunar Sea, right? Of course. She has to be ready to fight now. She can't lose, because this is it. Enemy territory - and she unclenches her fists and drops the stick (stick?) to the ground and spreads her hands open wide, so that her power can flow out of them, slipping through her fingers. If you fail, it's for nothing. All of this was for nothing.
She looks over to Nagato, looks into his eyes. Nagato? He has strange eyes. Eyes like ripples. Eyes within eyes within eyes. Insane. Lunatic eyes. Kill it kill it kill it
But he speaks again (After all), and she remembers (it was you who taught me to see so many things that I never did before) that this is Nagato, who is her friend. And anyway, she's just back here, right? At... the Hakurei Shrine. That's what she told Nagato. And she's - right, right. That's right. What had she been thinking?
She looks down, at where the fallen tree had once been. Fallen tree? No, that's right - she isn't really sure why she thought it was a tree. It was a pillar from the shrine. And where is the shintai?]
I don't see it.
[She sounds disappointed. She needs to save the damn thing. It's important.]
Reply
He can see it: the tree of her dreams, rising high, high, high into the air, all endurance and beauty and warning, with blossoms like the many origami flowers Konan has folded through these endless years. Like memories. And the tree is what Pain saw in the dream. That time. That time humanity consumed her, and she dreamt a memory of when she killed in the name of love.
And the tree presses down on his mind: Konan's petals press down like years of gathered memories, because how long has he waited not to feel? Yukari does not feel pain; she does not hurt (or maybe it is only that she has had enough years to burn down the wick that Nagato lights each day of his life). And Pain can see it for the first time. All the things he refused to see for so long. ]
Yukari.
I see it before me now.
This tree.
It --
It is her precious soul, is it not?
[ Because in the place of the tree, he sees a woman with hair like lilac. Flickering through the leaves. And then a woman with hair like cornflower; his own companion, made of petals, disappearing into petals. Women all through time, like a spectrum of lives; cherry blossom tears glowing against this blood moon night. ]
Yes, I do see.
Sometimes things are more than the mere reality of their skin.
Sometimes people are deeper than you expect.
[ A deliberate pause. The night is silent. ]
You said that this body is special.
That is the truth.
This body once belonged to my beloved friend.
I took it for myself . . . because I had to.
No, that is not the entire truth.
It is partly true. But I wished to revive him. I did not say this aloud. Did not acknowledge it. The motive became so submerged in my own mind, beneath more logical reasons, that I have all but forgotten that it is also the truth.
I live my life submerging him.
Drowning him in myself.
It is an effort to tell you this. To speak of him, when I fear he might consume me, as this tree wishes to consume those it touches.
The dead gorge themselves on the living.
Your friend. My friend. What have we done to them, in the name of love?
It is just a tree. But it is the memory of your friend.
It is only a body, but in the mirror I see the face which first taught me to laugh in days gone by. Now, it laughs no longer.
Ah, Yukari.
They go with us, in our memories. All those whom we have loved. Even your length of years will not erase them all, I am certain.
I see what torments you.
For you now, I will be unafraid . . . until you can submerge these sights again.
Reply
A transparent moment of understanding, in which Yukari can see - there is indeed a danger here. It is neither the tree, nor whatever destroyed the shrine, nor even Lunarians. It is her, and the confused panic that grips her. With her power returned, this world, and the lives in it, Nagato's life, is small. So thin that she can see right through it, might shatter it with an unmeasured movement.
She must control herself.
She breathes deeply, to steady herself.]
Yuyuko's life - in the end, she had little more that her regrets.
[It's said bitterly, because it should have been different. She should have made it so.
But Yuyuko's guilt was stronger than anything Yukari had. She had lived a crueler life than anyone. As a young girl with grey eyes until the day she died, she mourned, for every death, for death itself. She wept, and emptied herself out with grief. Grieving over her own existence, as a bringer of death, as a black hole from which no life escaped. The dead gorge themselves on the living. Yuyuko ate lives, pulled them down as surely as gravity - but the dead ate her.]
She was truly a miserable creature. She hated for anything to die. Even people she didn't know. Even people who were cruel to her. Humans, youkai, even animals - she hated death. But she brought it with her everywhere.
[She thinks perhaps Nagato is not so different. He lives, eats, speaks, and fucks through a corpse, the corpse of his friend, whom he surely had wished would have lived - he calls himself "Pain" and never smiles. Yuyuko was the same, a girl who obsessed over death, sought death, was death. They both lived their lives with a sort of vicious irony - embodying their own destruction.]
The dead consumed her.
I had thought that was a human thing. To be troubled by death - not just your own death, but the deaths of others.
[Ah, but -
She snorts, almost amused, and looks upward. Stares at the light, peeking through the branches, the mess of petals - or rather, the light emanating from them.]
I'd thought that I had rid myself of this thing.
[She had sealed the tree, and brought Yuyuko back. And she had moved forward with her life, gone on to become Yukari, the maker of Gensokyo, Yukari, the witch of the border, Yukari the drunk, the sleeping youkai, the keeper of spirited-away souls. She had left that past behind her and taken Yuyuko's ghost with her, and she had gone so far that neither she nor Yuyuko could clearly recall those days.
But through every moment of it, the tree, and the girl, had stood, unwavering, at her back. She might have turned, and embraced it, scoffed at the pointlessness of life and become a thing just like it. Instead of creation, destruction. A thoughtless unraveller of worlds. Blood in the place of warm sake, and an empty void in the place where Gensokyo stands now, full to the brim. She might have killed Nagato here, erased him with a thought.
But Yuyuko stood there as well. Yuyuko with her regrets, with her infinite sadness. Yuyuko as she had been when she lived, with her grey eyes. Yuyuko, who tells her, not this way. And Yukari never could deny her anything.
Yuyuko as she no longer was - because Yuyuko now could only ever smile. But Yuyuko the girl, the human, stands behind her, always. Even now, Yukari can feel her there. Her small hand splayed on Yukari's shoulder. Her hair tickling at Yukari's ear, her voice, hoarse from crying: "Don't forget." Yukari reaches back to touch her hand, to say, "I won't," but when she turns, there's nothing there.
She needs to be strong. Because she is all that stands between the tree, which looms above them now, which is now brushing the opposite end of the horizon, having taken the whole sky as its own - and Yukari stands between it, and everything she has created. Yukari, and frail, human Yuyuko.]
Perhaps it's for the best.
Reply
But he does not think Yukari will destroy him. Trusts that she will not. She can be violent, and capricious, and now she is delusional, but . . . is this how Konan feels? To be in the presence of one who could so obviously crush your life, and to want to come closer, regardless? Pain has never considered that. It has been too long since he has felt small like that (but once, once, he did; he came from smallness, from nothingness); he has not known what it must be like to live with the potential of threat from another person. Not in years. He has forgotten how it feels, even now: to be threatened. Small. The others call them monsters. How little their opinions have always meant to Pain. ]
When I met you, I did not understand.
How one so powerful, so long-lived, could take such pleasure in things which, to me, seemed trifling. I thought meaning occurred only in grand gestures. I thought certainly the powerful would agree with me, with my philosophies.
But. [ He remembers. Yahiko and himself, playing in the wet lands, with the sobbing frogs of the marsh, and dinner; prayers to forgotten gods. Konan folding a crysanthemum. Yahiko stayed him all night, once, when Nagato was ill. Stayed up all night, telling stupid stories about made-up nonsense. About clumsy ninja who got through life with rare bursts of wit, things Jiraiya-sensei had probably imparted to him, and Nagato had laughed and rolled his eyes. But he had laughed.
Konan lifted him the day he fell. Held out her tiny, mud-stained hand. Those hands brought him more comfort than anything in the world. Thin as they were. ] But he never believed that. They never believed that.
Yahiko could laugh at anything. Could enjoy anything. I envied him that. I have always asked myself why it was that I survived and he did not, when he enjoyed his life, and made the most of it, and I -- I --
You reminded me of him. With your carefree ways. That time we talked, that night, when I was preparing to go to war . . . I left you a message afterwards. I did that because. Your story of your friend. I did not say so then, but your words affected me. You said I could be human, alive, and myself, without nurturing only pain and loss.
I rebuked you, I think. But your story, that of your friend . . . that her life could go on . . .
It is taking me a long time, but.
I want to do as you have said. Konan keeps asking me if we can live differently here. I want to.
Even as the tree is your burden, your danger, my own past is mine.
But you gave me clarity. Konan, Yahiko, you, and the others whom I have cared for in this life. And I wish only to do the same for you. So if I cannot, if I cannot have clarity . . . then you might take my existence . . . but I would already be dead.
Reply
Leave a comment