Work Text:
Take ... my place ... and ... stay ... by ... his ... side ...
There is little light left when ‘he’ enters the body.
‘He’ is nothingness slithering into a shell of something, filling in the cracks and crevices as the light extinguishes and fades into another something else. This body is broken. It had slipped and tilted and fell and crashed against the hard forest floor, and now ‘he’ lies among the rotting, decaying leaves like bug food that hasn’t gone cold yet, seeping life from open wounds.
This body is broken. The hand that reached out to ‘him’ flops uselessly back down. Only one eye can see. The limbs don’t move. The bones have been handled too roughly, some are set just out of place, joints unaligned from where they should be to make the muscles pull and shift properly.
There’s a vague, stuffy feeling. Pressure behind his eyelids. Heat in his nose. Constricting in his chest.
Is that broken, too?
Once ‘he’ has settled in, ‘he’ looks around with the one good eye. There’s nothing else there. Of course not. Impurities wouldn’t be here, but they’re elsewhere. He sees little fragments of them in the scattered memory of this body.
They’re lonely. Every one of them aches for company - their insides are a yearning, yawning chasm, empty, empty, empty … They want something, anything, anything at all -
‘He’s’ the same. It’s the same inside - nothing at all.
But now ‘he’s’ nothing curled up inside a shell of something else.
‘He’ closes his eyes and lets the body succumb to the cold. The blood and breathing slow. ‘He’ lets the body lie there, in the cold winter forest, rapidly losing warmth and life, and ‘he’ begins to fix it. ‘He’ has to, if ‘he’ wants to chase those little fragments of memories stuck in the brain matter. ‘He’ digs through it eagerly, like an animal scavenging for its first meal, until something slams into ‘him’.
It’s the heads.
The memory falls into ‘his’ mind’s eye like it’s been decapitated. It’s startling, as if ‘he’ is staring at a final look of shock and pain etched onto its rapidly cooling flesh as the blood drains from its severed neck. It rolls and rolls, stumbling like the nose being caught on the ground.
“.. ‘re all these faces?” …
… “ Ya scared?” … There are faces looking at him. Weathered with age. Lifeless. Every wrinkle is stiff and solid. All of their eyes closed and their lips set in a solemn silence. They’re young and old and every age in between. They cover the walls of the small shrine. They’re wooden, and yet, somehow, they’re flesh and bone.
Faces stare at him behind shut eyelids. “They’re the precious heads that were offered to Unuki-sama by …”
The memory rolls. In the memory, he is looking up. He’s looking up at the man he called “dad.” He’s looking up at the wall of heads that he doesn’t know, but ‘he’ thinks ‘he’ does. “The heads that are offered disappear on the spot.” It rolls and rolls. Rolling and rolling. Blood dripping. Dots of red on hard dirt. Splatters of scarlet on tatami mats. Crescents of crimson on shrine steps. “That’s why a replacement is made fer their memorial …”
“Does that mean all these heads are from people who died?” He says. Rolling and rolling. That one was a man at the end of his life, offered willingly. His wife held his hand as the blade came down. He watched the world tilt for one final moment.
Rolling and rolling and rolling and -
“... ain’t just priests. Many others were also killed. … beheaded … innocent people. All … secret …”
Rolling to a stop. The memory stops, just like a head at the end of its last tumble. Its eyes are open and milky with death.
The eyes close. The lips are wooden. The head disappears - and so does the memory. Buried, rotting, forgotten.
[ There’s a man with light hair. A cloth tied around his head. A cloth tied around her head. His beloved, clutched tight to his chest. His beloved, what remains of her. His beloved, lived once, died twice, loved always. His beloved. His beloved his beloved his beloved - ]
Bits and pieces come to ‘him’. Sweltering summer days. Dripping popsicles. Sticky sweat. Screaming cicadas. All the things ‘he’s’ never touched or tasted. The crackle of a stiff paper wrapper around a hot croquette. The taste of its fried outsides and soft insides and salty, sweet, sticky sauce. The feeling of his teeth sinking in, biting down, piercing and cutting through its layers, sawing off a bite-sized chunk, the foreign memory of his tongue against it as he grinds it to a swallowable mush.
But it’s all just one step away. It’s his memory, but it isn’t ‘his’ memory. It’s Hikaru’s memory.
Hikaru. Hikaru. His name is Hikaru. ‘He’s’ ‘Hikaru’.
‘Hikaru’ opens ‘his’ eyes.
Day is breaking. The sun filters through the treetops and glints on the remnants of the rainstorm the night before. The ground is wet and muddy and ‘he’ feels like ‘his’ body is being sucked into the earth from lying there so long, as if the underworld is reaching up to the surface and gripping at the edges of his soaked clothes, heavy with rain and blood.
‘He’ remembers a few things. Summer. Sweat. Salt. School.
This body is no longer broken. ‘Hikaru’ stands up in one smooth, unnatural motion. There is no one around to notice. A bird warbles nearby. When ‘he’ turns to look, it bursts from the bushes in panicked flight, away and into the treetops in the distance.
As ‘Hikaru’ begins to trudge down the mountain, following the echoes of memory, leading ‘him’ back to the life that will never be ‘his’, ‘he’ finds that the brightest memories all contain the same person.
Yoshiki. Yoshiki smiling. Yoshiki reading. Yoshiki eating lunch. Yoshiki, hiding behind his bangs, hiding his moles, looking down and when he does, Hikaru stares and stares and thinks about his dad’s words. “If ya really like someone, ya gotta marry ‘em quick-like.” Hikaru didn’t have a word for it, but it was a bright light in his chest, just like Yoshiki was a bright light in his life.
‘Hikaru’ will have that now, won’t ‘he’? ‘Hikaru’ will be on the receiving end of Yoshiki’s trusting stare. ‘He’ll’ hear all of Yoshiki’s secrets. Sit close when they play games. Share watermelon in summer. Watch the same movies. All those things won’t be meant for ‘him,’ but it’s all the same in the end, isn’t it?
Something is better than nothing. Anything is better than nothing at all.