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Posted by Meimi at 08:50:06 10/12/2002.
First posting here ever...hi, everybody. ^^
Towards the Ground
by Meimi (meimi @ strawberrymoon.net)
12/10/02
Spoilers: for TB/X anything involving Hokuto.
Summary: Because she deserves the spotlight in fic once in a while.
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"It just doesn't seem like the kind of world I want to wake up to," he told her.
"Well," she remarked. "Life is incredibly unfair."
"I thought you were an optimist," he said lightly.
"I am, silly. But anyone who thinks that life is fair is a total idiot. And I'm not quite that stupid. Pessimists whine about life being unfair, you know. The optimists just accept it and make the best of what they have."
And she did a little pirouette in the air, her feet never touching the blue waters that lapped at the sand.
_______________________
"I'll kill him."
The phone rang, and she had answered, and Obaachama had told her. And she said, "I'll kill him." And at that very moment, she really wanted nothing more than to seperate that man's head from his neck with her bare hands, and leave his body as a sign to the whole world. So nobody would dare hurt her little brother ever again.
She left the phone off the hook, and its droning beep echoed through the apartment. But she didn't spare the moment to turn around and set the reciever back neatly in its cradle.
It had begun to rain that day. She was out the door without an umbrella, tugging on the first shoes she'd grabbed on her way out the door. They didn't match her outfit. For possibly the first time in her life, she didn't care.
The hospital was first. She ran all the way down the slippery white halls, with nurses' calls to slow down falling on deaf ears. She skidded to a stop in front of the door, her shoes leaving the streaky marks of dirty city puddles across the tiled floor. The door swung open open and rattled against the wall, and she ripped away his room's curtain with a metallic ring.
But he wasn't there.
Of course he wasn't there.
Because that, she thought, would just be too easy. He seems in the mood to make life difficult this week.
But she ran (to the clinic, his apartment, a restaraunt or two that he frequented), as the raindrops kept stinging at her cheeks. And she kept on thinking, he broke his promise, he took my brother away, and I'll kill him for it. I fix everything for my brother, and I'll fix this. I'll make sure that man can never hurt him again, and then we'll go back to it being just the two of us. I'll make sure he's happy because I love him more than anyone, and just wait, I'll fix it...
She slowed at the corner for the red light, and then finally really /stopped/ for the first time since the call; standing still in the misty rain and allowing herself to think.
She couldn't even hurt him.
Right now, she was just angry, hurt, and soaking wet. And all she had was what was in her pockets: some loose change, a hair tie, and a little makeup bag. Just a silly little girl, soaked without an umbrella, off to take on the most powerful onmyouji in Japan with - what? A lipstick spell?
What a laugh.
She turned on her heel and walked through the puddles towards home.
But she said again, out to the pouring rain and the shiny streets and the misty sky; so softly that the people rushing around her did not hear: "I'll kill him for this."
Because she wasn't giving up. Just going home for the day.
_______________________
"I can't forgive anyone who hurts him."
She'd been playing badminton when it had happened. And how she was kicking herself for it now. "You should have told me you were going," she had protested. "I would have gone with you." But there had been her badminton date. It was one of those ridiculous might-have-beens that haunted her. "Something just came up," she could picture herself saying apologetically into the phone. "My little brother's boyfriend was landed in the hospital. And anyway, I don't even own a badminton racket. Could we reschedule, maybe for your next day off?" And even though it probably would have made little difference in the end...
She tried to shrug the idea off. But she couldn't stop the little flashes that came to her unwilling. The day as she would have directed it in hindsight. She would have tagged along to the hospital, made tea, and brought pudding for all three of them to eat.
For days beforehand there had been the softest voice whispering at the back of her mind. It had warned her, but she hadn't heard the words. She only had that soft sense of dread creeping through her mind. She wished her sixth sense about her brother had been kind enough to just be specific for once, and tell her straight-out, "Don't go play badminton today. You'll have a happier life overall."
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She was the one who had to explain to Obaachama over the phone.
All she could say was, we didn't know, we didn't know.
She tried to imagine the right words. Well, of course, we knew his name was Sakurazuka. And of course I used to joke about it - about him being the Sakurazukamori. And even when I teased him, he never said he wasn't. And I thought he smelled like blood, I thought his smile would disappear as soon as I turned my back, I thought, I thought, I thought...
And as she was trying to think of words to explain why they'd just never known, the more idiotic she felt, and the more she felt the pressure of the silence on the other end.
"I'll kill anyone who hurts him."
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She was also the one who went to the hospital to bring him home.
At first, they had just figured he was in some kind of shock. But the doctors said he was perfectly well enough to go home. How idiotic. Not speaking or eating or following anything with his eyes. Broken arm in a sling. Why don't they make slings for broken hearts? She wondered.
A nurse wheeled him out to the taxi, and they'd had quite the time getting him inside when he just went limp. They'd passed the ride in silence, and he never looked at her or turned his head. Didn't look out the window. Just stared straight ahead at absolutely nothing, and when the car screeched to a stop in front of their apartment complex, he didn't move.
It was like he was a ghost. Not belonging in this world anymore.
And then she felt sick, just for thinking like that. My brother is alive, and if I have anything to say about it, he's going to damn well live, too.
But she wasn't helping in Tokyo. And it was just too hard to spend the day sitting with him when he looked at her and saw nothing. Glass eyes, she thought, like a doll; they don't see anything. She couldn't watch him like that, couldn't sit around without doing a thing. She had to find something to do to help.
So she left Obaachama to watch Subaru with his empty eyes and trays of uneaten food, and she caught the first train to Kyoto in the morning. She left for the station when the sky was still colored with a tinge of gold from the sunrise. By the time she was settled into her seat and the train began to pick up speed, the rushing scenery outside her window had reverted to the normal, duller colors of ordinary daytime.
She tilted her head against the cold windowpane that trembled with the train's motion. Her eyes closed, and soon she was fast asleep.
_______________________
Her first thought had been, "Maybe he just didn't know." But there he was, leaning up against that familiar rock by the shore, just as he always did. He looked at her, and his eyes were the same as they always had been. She felt like relaxing for a moment.
Until she realized the real cause of his haunting, unblinking gaze. He had been apologizing in advance for this moment since the first day she had stumbled into his dream. He had known from the first moment, known what would happen, known what she would go through. He had done nothing.
"You're angry with me," he said, even more quietly than usual.
"A little." And then she fell silent. Issuing her challenge without words. Talk, damn it, and whatever you're going to say...it had better be good.
They were quiet for a few minutes. The waves kept crashing, one after the other. Splashing into foam, tiny bubbles that would sometimes spray her feet above.
"It wouldn't have made any difference," he said finally.
She whirled to face him, and she was suddenly ablaze with perfect fury. "I don't see, Kakyou, how you could possibly know that. You just lock yourself away in your own little world so you can seperate yourself from the world. People with power like yours - they work, and they fix things, and they help. My brother has power, and he's never used it selfishly a day in his life. Only for other people. Do you have any clue, Kakyou, what you could do if you got out of bed for once and tried to change things? If you stopped being so damn selfish? If you said something like, here's a hint, that guy you're always hanging around? You know, he uses human blood as fertilizer for the most evil sakura tree in the Japan, and he wants to feed your brother to it next?"
She was almost crying now. The waves, she realized distantly, had stopped crashing. When she looked up, the ocean was gone. There was just sand stretching from one end of the sky to the other, a little blurred at the edges from her tears.
He just stared at the ground listlessly, as though he hadn't even heard.
She waited a beat, and said very firmly, "That's it. I'm waking up."
And she did.
_______________________
She hated the clan house.
She disliked the entire atmosphere. It was so drab, so dull, and nothing ever changed. The gate opened and she was greeted with the usual bow. "Welcome home, Hokuto-sama."
"Hokuto," she said automatically. They always called her Hokuto-sama, and she would always correct them, and they would just nod and say Hokuto-sama again the next time. It was an old, unchanging arguement that had gone on for years, and it would never change. She privately thought that staying at the clan home would be infinitely more enjoyable if the household staff would stop treating her so formally.
She walked briskly across the front courtyard towards the main building. The front gardens were as elegant as usual - tastefully understated. Lots of white and pale colors. Simple. She'd suggested replacing the entire garden with sunflowers when she had been about eight. Oddly enough, the idea had never caught on with Obaachama.
She shook her head and ran up the front steps. The door creaked open - she left her coat and shoes at the entrance, corrected another servant about formalities, and padded down the halls towards the library.
She shivered a little when she tugged open the library door.
It wasn't as though she was scared of the towers of dusty books with the secrets they kept, or all the power contained in their neatly written pages. Least of all was the cold atmosphere that often hung over the entire grounds, as though there were some spirit watching in a shadowed corner, watching and waiting...
Visitors to the clan house were always nervous about the family business, as though a ghost would spring out of a cupboard at any given moment. Silly. The grounds were the last place that would ever happen. She had never bothered to be scared of those things. Ghosts, Obaachama had told her when she was little, were nothing to really be scared of.
"Obaachama, I think there's a ghost hiding under my bed."
"Oh - I don't see one, Hokuto-san. But if one pops up, just tell me."
"It wouldn't hurt me?"
"I doubt it. Ghosts, Hokuto-san, aren't much different from normal people. They just got a little lost."
Ghosts were not scary. They were sometimes sad or troubled, but she was never scared of them. Not when the real world was much scarier. Spirits could be exorcised in a day, but cruel betrayals by seemingly kind vets were not so easily fixed.
And she still didn't really like the clan library, and she never had.
She chewed on her lip as she read; the rustling of the old dried pages was the only sound in the room. The library, like every place on the grounds, was just too calm, too quiet, too drattedly traditional. At the first suggestion of the move to Tokyo, she had sworn to herself in that same instant that she would wallpaper her room with some outrageous flower print. Bright red and pink dasies, she had thought firmly, to make up for all this time in the clan house that has dull white walls.
She ran her fingers across a shelf, her fingers dancing across the spines.
She didn't like being on the clan grounds because she didn't fit in. It wasn't that she resented the fact; but the clan grounds were for whispers and kimono and tradition. She liked to laugh so the whole world could hear her and wear hot pink skirts and outrageous hats. She was the square peg, and she didn't care to be crammed into the round hole. She could just be herself, and that was really enough.
Except when it wasn't.
She wasn't herself without Subaru.
She tried for a brief moment to imagine what she would be like without him, but couldn't wrap her mind around the idea.
She tugged a book loose from its place, and sneezed at the cloud of dust that resulted when she dropped the book down at the small reading table.
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She shut her book with a rather satisfying slam.
"I'm not getting anywhere." She said it very loudly to make up for the library's quiet.
Servants would come and go. She would smile and say that she didn't want anything, but the tea came anyway. It went cold quickly in the library.
The door slid open again. "Your room is ready, Hokuto-sama."
"Hokuto." She didn't look up. "And I don't plan to really leave the library, actually - I think I'll be here most of the night. I'm looking for something particular and I'm going back to Tokyo as soon as I find it. I'll sleep on the train."
"Of course, Hokuto-sama." The door slid shut again. She resisted the urge to heave one of the lighter volumes (only weighing half a ton) towards the door, and settled for yelling "Hokuto!" at the closed screen.
It was late, though. There were mountains of books stacked around the tables. She had been fighting to stay awake for the past hour; tracing each faded page with her finger, forcing herself to read each word from cover to cover. She would slam each book in turn, toss it at a pile by her feet, and then pick up another. And another. And another.
It'll be in the next one, she told herself as she heaved another text to the table. The next one.
Sei-chan was more powerful than Subaru. Sei-chan was more powerful than Obaachama. The man had been running a damned animal clinic. It boggled the mind. Subaru, too. How do onmyouji end up with that kind of side job? She chewed her lip and wondered. Then she realized she was thinking of him as Sei-chan. Using an affectionate nickname for a murderer seemed vaguely inappropriate.
Another book landed by her chair with a slam.
She didn't envy Subaru for the power he had. It didn't take a genius to know that she had the better part of the deal - being Hokuto was better than being a prestiged onmyouji of the Sumeragi clan any day. She had all the fun of picking out the stylish wardrobe of the clan head, and none of the responsiblity.
But today, she was in one of her rare moods. She wished just a tiny bit that she was massively powerful.
The sheltered life and dull responsibility would have all been worth it now; if she could just have the full assurance that she could walk up to Sakurazuka Seishirou and smack him upside the head. Without being turned into food for his damned tree, first.
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Her eyelids were heavy. Her hand was tired from propping her head up.
Normally, she probably would have surrendered to sleep when the words started getting blurry. She would have very reasonably told herself that there was no use doing this while exhausted. That she might pass right over the very thing she was looking for.
But she didn't want to speak to him yet.
So she stayed awake, occasionally taking sips of the tea she forgot was cold.
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She found it a little before dawn, at the time before light really begins creeping up across the horizon. The sky was stained an almost blindingly deep blue. Almost morning.
Her finger traced the page. Once. Twice. Three times.
"This is it," she whispered. No matter what she had to say about the clan house and its silent library, it did come through in a pinch.
She'd realized after the first ten books on protection spells that she didn't have the power to manage anything that he couldn't undo just as easily. He would probably be expecting that sort of action, anyway - Obaachan was staying at the Tokyo apartment, trying to keep Subaru safe. But that kind of thing wouldn't keep him away. Not forever. Probably not at all.
He was just waiting. He already knew that Obaachan couldn't stop him, so he was lurking in the shadows. But he wouldn't wait forever. He would pounce. The moment everyone stopped expecting him to.
She was very careful to always expect it.
"But I have a spell. A spell only I can use."
So she had known that she needed to find a spell that was smart. Something he wouldn't see coming. Something outrageous, stylish, something wild that only she would do. Something he wouldn't see coming in a million years. And preferably something that wouldn't require the caster to have much magical ability, so she could actually pull it off.
Understandably, the clan's books on spells were generally meant for the family members who had plenty of power. Not much for girls like her who could occasionally work a little magic with cosmetics. But the library was extensive enough that she was able to hit paydirt after countless wasted hours of spells she knew at a glance would be completely unmanagable.
She smiled. It was risky, insane, and something that Obaachama would never approve of. Right up her alley.
Her smile tightened a little.
Blood. Spilt with love.
The spell called for blood given freely - life given to fuel the spell to protect. Her life for their lives, if she played it right. It could always go the other way, of course. But she doubted it.
At least she didn't have to worry about them. They'd be stuck together, bonded even more closely than they already were...she was technically strengthening their connection, which was why the idea was perfect - she could never break the link that Seishirou had set between them years ago.
But by adding in her little twist to the spell, Subaru would be safer then he ever was before. He'd be protected from everyone. Except himself, technically. But since Subaru felt miserably guilty if he accidentally stepped on a garden slug, she wasn't too worried about him going after the Sakurazukamori's blood.
She wondered if Obaachama would be able to figure out what she had done, after the fact. If she'd be angry, or upset, or if she'd wish that she'd been the one to cast it. She shook her head. Obaachama would no doubt think her insane for protecting the Sakurazukamori equally with Subaru. That, of course, was the reason that nobody else could do it: nobody else wanted to give those two another stab at working things out.
She very carefully copied out the chant, checking it five times to be sure she hadn't made a mistake. Her hand did not shake when she held the pen.
"A spell only I can use."
_______________________
"I'm still a little mad at you, but I decided to get over it," she said simply.
He didn't look at her. The ocean was back, and he was staring at the waves rolling in, one after the other. "I'm suprised you're speaking to me at all."
She chose her words carefully. "Life's too short to spend being mad."
He looked at her, and again she had another sense of the reasons behind those haunted eyes. Maybe, she guessed, this was why he looked at her that way. He'd seen her as a walking corpse from the moment he'd first met her. Why bother to save someone that you saw die long ago?
"Subaru," she told him. "He cares too much. He cares to the point of it being unhealthy. And Seishirou obviously doesn't care enough. If at all."
He looked at her. "So you're going to bind them together, and hope they learn something from each other to arrive at a happy medium."
She laughed and managed not to sound forced at all. "That's the plan. Bind them together even more strongly - and with luck, they'll rub off on each other. Subaru could care a little less, and Seishirou-" The name felt foreign on her tongue. "-will care a little more."
He went silent, and then finally, "It doesn't have to be now." His eyes were imploring her, don't go, stay with me, don't leave me alone.
"Yes, it does. I'll lose my nerve. You don't understand. I love him so much that I'd do anything for him. I want him to be happy."
"You don't know. If he'll be happy." He didn't say it like it was an "if", but she pushed that thought away. Dreamgazing wasn't a proper excuse for acting like such a know-it-all. Or maybe it was. He was still looking at her with those eyes. His eyes were pretty, but almost..scary. Eyes that had seen too much. They looked like cat eyes sometimes. A lost kitten.
And then she turned with the smallest of smiles. "You have to get up and out, Kakyou. I mean it. Life is all about taking chances, about sometimes making mistakes - so you can change what you can. Don't you believe that loving someone that much can make a change in itself?"
Something in his eyes changed. They hardened just a bit, as though he'd made a decision. And though she did not realize it, he had made his choice.
"I believe."
She was trying to understand how his eyes were different. And then it dawned on her: he was looking at her as though she was living for the first time.
And then she jerked awake as the train screeched to a stop at the Tokyo station.
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'If anyone hurts Subaru, I'll kill them.'
And as she tried to slip out the door without Obaachan noticing - no small feat in shikifuku, the beads kept clicking together - those words kept flashing through her mind.
She'd thought for a long time.
It wasn't the Sakurazukamori's fault that Subaru got hurt. Sei-chan was a murderer, and he didn't really smile, and he had /hurt her little brother/, but none of that was really his fault.
It was hers.
'I'm sorry. You might be angry at me...but...'
She shouldn't have let it start when she knew there was something wrong with Sakurazuka Seishirou. She should have stopped it a long time ago, should have always kept closer watch on those two, should have listened to her intuition. The man had lit up warning signs inside her head, but she'd always scolded herself for it. Thought that it was just a matter of an older sister being convinced that nobody in the world was good enough for her baby brother. So she would just settle down and let those two boys play it out, because really, they were absolutely perfect for each other, right?
'But it's my fault.'
She had been such a fool. But no more.
She'd fix it. She could fix anything, if it was Subaru. Her little brother was turning into skin and bones? Well, she'd just wake up at ridiculous hours of the morning to cook breakfast before he ran out the door for work, to make him eat. He was too shy and liked to fade into the background? Dress him up in blinding shades of red and blue and make people notice him, so he could learn to get along with the rest of the world.
His first love broke his heart?
Well, then she'd just have to do her best, to make those two be happy.
She could fix it.
And anyway, she'd always said that anyone who hurt Subaru deserved to die, hadn't she?
_______________________
She had toyed with the idea of writing a letter. She was an avid collector of stationary - she had stacks of cute sets decorated with strawberries and pandas and little laughing crescent moons. Selecting a sheet, a colored pen to match its color scheme, and neatly securing it with a sticker for Subaru to find on the refrigerator door: she did it whenever she went out.
Leaving a letter for him was tempting, now.
But what color stationary do you use to jot down a quick note when walking to your death? It wasn't quite the same thing as see you at five, I ran out to buy more milk, dinner's in the oven.
No. Everything had already been said, really. It wasn't like some wild suicide note. There wasn't a "why" that needed to be answered. The "why" was very matter-of-fact: I love you, I'll miss you, but I'm not sorry and even though it hasn't happened yet, I would do it twice if I had to. She would still be gone tomorrow whether she wrote a letter or not, and the idea of him clinging to some last wisp of her was utterly depressing. If she left a letter, he would no doubt carry it everywhere. In his wallet, maybe, and it would be folded and unfolded until it was memorized. And even then it would remain, dirty from fingerprints and bent at the edges.
Living would be easier without that kind of dull reminder. He knew that she loved him, he knew.
She wondered she was being horribly selfish. She was doing this because she couldn't live without him. And here she was, planning on sacrificing herself for his benefit, giving him a rough shove towards the world and telling him to live in it.
Live it it alone? Perhaps.
But not if she had anything to say about it.
"Sei-chan," she said out loud. It was still the name of a murderer, but saying it no longer felt awkward. "Sei-chan, you'd better make him happy. Because I will be /very/ upset if you two don't make this affair worth my while."
_______________________
It was easy to find him because he wanted to be found.
She knew that he must have been watching her. And he must have known that she was ready to meet him today - she'd been spending her time lying in wait for him before she went to Kyoto. Without a clue as to what she'd say if she found him, of course.
She'd snagged the spare key to his apartment - taped up above the doorjamb. He'd laughed one day, you both should know where I keep it, just to be safe...and oh, how she'd cackled. Sei-chan, you flirt, that's the farthest thing from safe in the world, you're just hoping to lure my little brother into the lion's den - no. She silenced her mind firmly.
She had stood on tiptoe to grab the key, and she'd hopped up on the kitchen counter and waited for him to come home. But the minutes had ticked by, and the light seeping in from the apartment windows had turned from a cloudy grey to the cold blue of twilight. All the while she had wondered to herself, what will I say if he ever comes in that door? What a time for me to be at loss for words.
So she had walked out when it became apparent he would not return. She'd left the key underneath his doormat, not caring if he knew she'd been inside.
She had returned the next day. She still wouldn't have known what to say, but figured he might get the hint about how she felt when he found his plates in pieces on the kitchen floor. Smashing them had made her feel better for almost a whole second.
And she had spent an afternoon leaning against the door of the clinic. Not a sign of him the entire time.
But today, she was really ready to face him, and he was ready to be found.
She walked down the same path the three of them had wandered nearly a year ago. When they had their picnic underneath the only sakura in bloom in Ueno. She had given the slightest tug on the picnic blanket so that Subaru would fall into Sei-chan's arms. She'd laughed, Sei-chan had laughed, and Subaru had blushed crimson.
All that seemed like it had happened only yesterday, and it was odd to imagine that it would never happen again. Ever.
She shut that thought down in a hurry and kept walking. She could see the blossoms creeping up into her range of vision.
It was the only one in bloom.
_______________________
She wondered to herself what it took to really hate someone. Whatever it was, she didn't have it at all. If someone had asked her a few weeks ago what she would do to anyone who hurt her brother, she would have launched into a very graphic description of how she would personally rip them limb from limb and how she'd hate that person forever.
"No matter how bad a person you are, no matter if you're a murderer - I can't help still liking you."
This was the man who had stepped between her brother and a knife. This was the man who broke her brother's arm. This was the man who she had swatted away from fresh-baked cookies on the cooling rack. This was the man who was covered in her blood.
"There's no such thing as a person who shouldn't love," she said softly.
She felt the power gathering from her hands, felt it with the blood dripping from her fingertips. She saw Sei-chan smiling and felt as though it was a smile that would endure even if she had shut her eyes or turned her back. She smiled back.
She was drifting towards the ground. She saw red, then the brilliant light of the spell being cast, and then she saw cherry blossom petals dance before her eyes.
They were raining all around her like a pink snow. And then they weren't.
Because she was growing lighter, and she felt as though she was being swept away on the wind...
And then all that remained was her and the petals, and she didn't know where she ended and the petals began.
And then, there was no difference between the two at all.
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