Description: It was after the moment in which he almost died defending Shiraha from Rugal Bernstein prior to the Taizhou incident. The moment in which he almost sacrificed everything that he was.. but couldn't. A small moment of cowardice, shameful. It saved him from himself in Marise's twisted space. He lived on, and every breath he took thereafter was a blessing. He only had one person to thank for that. But sacrifices..must still be made.
He almost thought to laugh.
What did he expect to find?
Once he had recovered enough to realize the true depth of what exactly Marise had done to him, what exactly had occurred inside of that nightmare world, Ryouhara found himself--if only briefly--with an odd feeling of peace.
He was a genius, they said. The strongest shinobi Ryouhara's known since Ikou. Understanding came easily to the black-haired boy in all respects but the ones closest to himself.
- - -
It was as if the young boy, a boy he'd almost lost to the darkness, had elected to show him a brief smile. Even more, it seemed to mirror the smile Arinori had shown him.
A new ideology seemed to arise.
But.. "Perhaps.. I'm much weaker than I thought."
= = =
It had taken some time to recover, a brutal affair of stripped clothing and repetitive rinsing in the brackish improvised water systems in one of his organization's dingy and poorly maintained safehouses in China. Though his efforts would do little to wash the salt from his hair the fever from his body, it was more a ritual to rinse the acrid scent of the Koga kunoichi from himself. A sublimninal thing more than anything else, that particular smell seemed as if it would never wash away.
A fair upset, he scrubbed until his skin was tender. The plying scent seemed now inextricably associated with a profound enmity he'd never knew he continued to harbor after he'd sent his brother's murderer away.
That enmity, that darkness. Such things were dangeroued, he had always reminded himself. A loss of focus and control would harm his goals immeasurably. But when he'd had Tippin sent away to a dark place for the rest of conceivable time, a part of him was not sated. It was supposed to be simply honor--that one of his clansmen could not be killed without justice being handed out. But in the end, someone had taken something from him.
The last something he had.
That was the beginning of the enmity that threatened to eclipse him. And everything else.
- - -
An intuition, an understanding that he could do anything.
That was the great guilt of the judgment he'd initated during the first Jinchuu.
But.. the figurative knife at the base of his skull wasn't caused by limitless potential. It was the very idea that there was a part of him that truly did not care if Katsuten had achieved a catastrophic release. He had told himself that the people would decide their own fate. That he could have faith in humanity, and that would be enough. But there was always that part of him..
That understood that some people were worthless.
He was on a path to self-destruction. It was his sacrifice--to give up everything meaningful about himself to become what he needed to be to achieve his goals. In so doing, he had climbed further away from anything that ever made him feel at all. It was only until he'd reached that twisted space that he realized that there was nothing left for him to sacrifice.
Except one thing.
= = =
He went to her.
A spartan upscale apartment in Southtown in a nondescript building in an even more nondescript neighborhood. An aetheral dwelling, one of ghosts. Like the woman he had come to see, it might not have ever existed at all had circumstances been only slightly different.
It would have seen Ryouhara quite the different person, if so.
Not much had been disturbed from when he last entered the apartment. Though no bar to him, the door was locked. Everything was exactly where he had remembered it. But it took only a moment or two for the oppressive silence of the apartment to settle onto his shoulders. A sense of abandonment that made every angle stand out as thuroughly empty. He needn't be told much more.
= = =
Most, of course, would never be able to tell the difference. The desolation of the moment seemed only a reflection of thousands more. But Ryouhara could sense the change. She'd had an emptiness to match his own. That was the way of ghosts. He moved through the kitchen, lightly brushing fingertips through the fine layer of dust covering the countertop, as if to remember a cooling touch.
With ghosts, you are always watched.
There was no witness here.
= = =
He had wronged her immeasurably, he remembered.
He was bitter to her request. How could she think to ask of him the one thing he had left? Dying on his own terms was going to be his final answer to the miserable black curse gripping his skull. To allow the Hirano to decide his family's last moments was the greatest insult he could have conceived.
But when the spite, the enmity he'd held for the Hirano was fully spent, he was left only with guilt.
She had lived for him.
He had sensed it before, her devotion. He'd disregarded it as a reasonless connection. Only now did he realize what it meant to him, and how he should have responded.
= = =
Her washroom still bore the faintest traces of her scent as he ventured inside. Her preferred fragrance, the warmth of lavender, was now the only evidence she ever truly lived there. The only physical reminder that she was ever truly there.
It reminded him of the battles they'd fought together, of chance encounters and a closeness that abjectly terrified him before. Only now did that all make sense.
She was an infuriatingly complicated individual, her words never quite the same as her actions.
The mirror was cracked, a shard missing in the center, a large fragment laying in the sink. The person in the mirror was not the sublime lost woman for which he'd come. Instead, a golden-eyed youth, alive with misery.
But alive.
= = =
To be a human wasn't something Ryouhara had ever considered before. His family had tried that. In his mind, they'd failed. He aspired to be more. But ... a cost that he couldn't pay stood in his path. The harpy showed him that. Taught it to him, in that twisted space. If he paid such a cost... his family would truly be dead.
And she would be gone.
But he would always be alone. To know that she is still in this world would have to be enough. That is the sacrifice--the sacrifice that must always be made for idealism.
He cracked a particular rueful grin, a chance expression in the mirror. That expression always reminded him of his own father, a rough but ..happy man.
= = =
For all of the indignities, perhaps he was missing the point.
His family was still proud, still strong in him.
To keep them alive was, in many ways, his duty.
The warm lavender scent was, by now, settling into the fabric of his clothes. Those times that that fragrance was upon him were seemed to truly be at peace.
Perhaps now he understood the meaning of this life. She was someone who was important to him. For that reason alone he returned from the twisted place as he was. There was much he wanted to say. But succor will never be his. Even to the silence, he could only say one thing.
He picked up the broken fragment of glass from the sink, setting it into the mirror and completing the relfection therein. He could only live by his word. His lips parted.
"Nakatani-san," he whispered to the mirror, using only formalized language for her.
"I feel like I exist again."
She had asked him to live for her sake, to see the change they would bring to the world.
. . .
RYOUHARA'S THIRD JOURNAL, DAY TWO
It seems there are always costs to be paid.
This body of mine is no longer mine to give as I see fit. It belongs to those most important to me, not the Hirano, not to the idealisms for which I toil. If I am to be pried off of this mortal coil, it will not be swift, nor will I surrender willingly. Ever again.
...was she a dream? Just a figment of my imagination? Nothing has ever felt as real. This is to be my penance... my sacrifice. Something greater than my life. For once in this life, I want for something else. But it cannot be. This is the only appropriate beginning.
Peace is not something I believe I'll taste again.
Never rest. Never idle. Never surrender.
- sei
Log created on 18:54:58 01/14/2011 by Seishirou, and last modified on 02:41:11 02/06/2011.