I lived in only this moment. The shallow waves around me washed away the stench of the past, swallowed the mist of the incense I carried, cleansed me of the moments prior when I had been wishing to return to them. The lake would be my house of god, my salvation when the world of heaven there became devastating. This lake, I thought, looking over my shoulder, the path I had crossed far into the distance of the field, and the Honden farther still from my sight. I wondered how much time had passed between them, where the boundaries were to call forth a different world from across the ocean. The hem of my kimono floated up slightly atop the buoyant water, as I touched my fingers to my lips again to wash away the taste of the blood. Blood was all I could taste. The lake could have granted a much stronger freedom than I had been given in the mountains, and I thought I could so easily slip into it. The weight of my hair would keep my head down, and if it tried to rise, tangle it in fury and confusion. I would let my breath fall away, through whispers to the angels to collect my soul, my nerve, and save me from torment. Save me from love. But love, that was sacred, like my life I had bet against it, and an angel somewhere would shed tears for me. That angel that so little time ago had cared for me, had wanted to let me love, had wanted to hold me and breathe life into me. And love would take my life eventually anyway.
I cupped my hands hovering just under the surface of the water, began to feel the shiver run through me like a current through my veins. The winds began to carry sorrow, and I heard like a dream, that angel's voice as she told me her mercy. I ducked my head and let the ends of my hair fall into the water, and I remembered the weight of her hands around me. I could still feel it linger on me, her passion and hatred for me at once, and I was tangled in her name the way her skin had filled the scars on my soul. I laughed. I laughed though into my hands fell tears I had felt dry, and mixed with the lake to offer to my gods. The gods that looked upon me when I had been in her arms had smiled, and now they asked if I had been kind to that angel they left behind. She didn't belong to me, and for her, I was nothing but a prize when I had begun to think that now I would lead. Demeaning when I had wanted, now heartless because I felt cold.
I had my question for the gods now, for that angel, could I live this way? Could I give up what I had searched for to let there be space in my heart for simplicity? Could I learn what it was to cherish when I had lost, cried, drew blood, and like everything around me, had fallen to pieces?
I knew that what twisted inside me, what ran through me to make my blood boil with regret, would not be so easily washed away like the stains on my kimono in the cold of the lake. I could stand there for hours until the skin of my legs would turn blue and my eyes would become drowsy, I knew, but nothing would save me. I had never known what it was like to be left alone, though I had seen loss, I had seen sorrow, and I had known pain and torture. But I had never been truly alone. Now, as I looked into the surface of the lake at my reflection, I was empty. There was nowhere now for me to belong. There was no heart to endear me, no arms to enslave me. There was me alone to keep myself. I had lost the only one to really steal me, and I had no love for glory, no matter how divine.
No voice in my heart. No song in my heart, either. Nothing to dance to, in the end.
I wore my hair down so he could hold me, like the reins of a stallion that knew open fields and had never been caged. My soul was like a bird, tethered to the body so used and entrapment was familiar. I laid to rest beside him before he stirred, and I wondered only for a moment how he dared comfort himself in my bed, waiting for me to return from the forest, before I dismissed it as I felt the warmth of his skin wash over me. I reached out my fingers so tenderly, slid them down his side, and rested my head against his shoulder.
"You were always weak." Sugai leaned back, rejecting any form of seduction I had left to offer. He was through with my deceitful temptation. "You wouldn't move an inch unless it was me who made you. Even when I had a blade to your throat, you were too afraid to do anything but tremble because you didn't want to hurt me."
I shook my head to his accusations. "Something happened to me, when I came to the mountains. Something that was once steel in me became wax. I felt like I never had before, and when ache had been so familiar to me before, it began to constrict my heart so tightly I couldn't breathe without permission."
He wore a smug smile, and chuckled. "So you learned. You learned to soften your heart the way I did for you." In an instant, his hand shot out and fingers curled in one after the other into the collar of my shirt. He pulled, and I didn't resist. "You learned what it was like to suffer so much for the one thing you want so desperately, grasping at thin air when you're so close you can smell your prize." He ran his tongue the length of the side of my face, in a feral way as though he was whetting his palate.
"It was a hinder to my entire existence." I could say nothing to lie or fool him. "I was always afraid. I was always preyed upon, and I had no desire to retaliate. It was a fate worse than love."
So what had I done? What had I come to feel? Nothing. All that time, everything transparent in me, everything a window to the man I was and would become, and there was nothing to give myself forgiveness for yet nothing to regret. There was just nothing. There were simply voids, holes in my soul where the light of Heaven had burned through unevenly, such a painful way to bathe the sins of me clean. It was the fault of the innocent, I reasoned, so much inexperience that was cast upon me, covered me up so slightly and yet consumed me. It consumed me like the river that would have taken me, had there been no one to feel compassion, and here, I had blamed loneliness when I had never really been alone. Here, I sat shadowed with a longing from a past I didn't remember, and a future that would never conceive me.
I wanted him around me so desperately, so deeply that he melted into me, swam through my blood. How could I ever have understood past the words I swallowed, past the pressure over me, lifting the weight of the world from my soul. The world I had suddenly found myself floating in, slowing down as I reached the bottom, as if I had been falling and had finally broke the surface of the water. I was suspended with it around me, paralyzed from the shock of the impact, heavy inside and out. I felt the frustration of my heart constricting, as if it was connected to my eyes where it ran from them. Crying drop after drop until I filled every crevasse of the earth with them, when I would blow the unfeeling from my heart and create ice to walk across the barriers. It was love, that feeling. That feeling I so longed for and yet hated for its entrapping properties. I wanted to be so consumed, so enraptured, so violently devoured that I would never bring my head to surface again. I wanted to drown in it, in him, with him, bring him with me to the last breath I drew and then steal another from him. I wanted to hold him while I felt the life drain from him, into me, then back again, connected where ever we fit each other. I wanted to rake my fingers through the feathers of his make-believe wings, hurt him, rip them from him, to stop him if he wanted to leave again.
"There is no means of escape."
He whispered to me as he pressed his lips in gentle kisses to the contours of my neck. My breath came deeply through my open mouth as I used every ounce of my strength to keep from crying out. The air was still, but saturated with sounds from the distance, as if they all called us on, like an audience. I was made to perform for an audience, whatever the prop of my dance may be.
"She told you, didn't she? The reason I came back to you."
I had already considered every angle. I had already visited letting the lake end me. I had already dreamt of a life sitting still. I had already decided to be docile, and let the moments pass between us, and if I would be bold enough, enjoy them. "A life here, in the mountains, with you is all I can ask for now. I have received it. Whatever you're here to do, I think the end of my life in your hands is how we were fated to come together."
His eyes bore into mine for long enough that I fought to slow my breath. With some tenderness, he cradled my face with both of his hands, and by the firelight, his eyes shone. "I do love you, Seishin. I taught you cruelty, and you learned to pass it on your own. It was not my intention to mar you as I have. The curse of the Kitsune, I'm afraid."
"What do you owe me then?" I had already considered the conversation as well. The answer was nothing.
"I made you a promise long ago. Do you remember?" I remembered the night my spirit was bound to him, that I let go and was controlled, manipulated, given no choice. If there was a promise whispered between us that night, it was to make a slave of me, and a slave I had become. "I didn't keep it then. But I will now. I promise that you'll know. I alone will decide when the time is right, but I will not take you unaware."
"Good enough."
"For now, I know I am selfish. I know I am undeserving. But I want more time."