Description: Death and sand. Wind and night. He runs through the city on bloodied feet, not knowing why. She lies amidst the fallen, her life a single gleaming thread. What is the role of the new generation? Will they succeed where the previous failed? Do they share the same dreams? Blood and smoke. The dawning sun. Children grow up so fast.
It's nearing dawn in Southtown. A few scant hours ago, the sky was a star-studded velvet darkness punctuated by the lights and sounds of a city that never seems to sleep. Now, however, it's a rapidly-spreading field of palest blue as the sun starts to crest the horizon, and the 'city that never sleeps' does indeed seem to have its quiet hours even now. In garages and kitchens and bedrooms, the 'day shift' is waking up, preparing to leave, looking to greet a new day, while those who haunt and revel in the night are just now finding places to rest and wait. Yet here on Sound Beach two of those night owls will never see another dawn, and a third, well...
Under the moonlight the sand was bone-white. Under the burgeoning day, it's a pale blue, like the powder running through some vial or clock in a wizard's room. The truck that Brihan appropriated is right where she left it: parked on the sand, the tarp on the back undone. Two figures slump against it, one on one side, the other in the sand just behind it, unmoving. A third figure, however, lies on the sand a good distance away, amid whorls and patterns in the sand that suggest a lot of quick, decisive movements were made in it not that long ago. Her black hair runs down her back, splayed out and mussed, and the coarse sand is a layer of grit for a pillow. However, unlike the men next to her, the breathing she's doing proves that while she's injured and out like a light, Farah Tenjou has the benefit of being at least *alive*.
Only one hand is visible, the other tucked beneath her, and the one that can be seen curls into and out of a fist in erratic ways. After her encounter, the Egyptian's dreams are tense, dark, and violent. Nightmare visions fill her unconscious mind, borrowed from her own memories and those of a certain African orphan turned violent killer...
Denji can't remember how long he's been running.
At first, it was out of enthusiasm; given a tip-off from Rust -- and failing to ask how long ago it was acquired -- that Farah-chan could be found in Southtown, Denji raced to the park, still determined to express his unreflective affection and determination to be a champion worthy of her ideals (having somehow blended Farah's heartfelt sentiments and Sakura's more-or-less shallow ambition into the same vague heroic concept). He obviously did not find her. For some reason, he continued to run; as he did, he began to thrill in it.
Denji has no reason to run, no reason to rush. What urgency is there in a life such as Denji's? When a man can live as a drifter, when he so easily latches on to an interesting experience and lets it carry him wherever it will go, supplying only his own latent energy, what use a guiding ideal? The ideals of others, the dreams of his compatriots -- and even his own burgeoning feelings for Farah -- they are just disconnected motes of light, delighting him as the stars might mesmerize a child newly gifted with a telescope. Who knows how long these feelings will endure? So why rush, why strive to see them through? Denji never runs, he never runs anywhere.
But those simple feelings changed as he ran, and fascinated by the change itself, intrigued by the unfamiliar pain in his sandaled feet and robed legs, Denji dashed throughout the city, his hair whipping wildly behind. Confusion coalesced into fear. Where is she? What are these feelings? Who are these people he's surrounded himself with, really? An unsettling feeling has shrouded this city, and only that, it seems, allows Denji himself to, for the first time, feel truly unsettled.
It is only the beginning.
He ran all night.
Sweating profusely, his mind a daze, his body a blaze of pain, at last he stumbles onto the beach, having moved directionless throughout the city, somehow, finally, drawn here. He limps toward the vehicle, blinking sweat out of his eyes, shallow chest heaving intensely, spitting frequently. These feelings within him-- he doesn't like them anymore. He's not interested in this sensation. This is beyond his capacity to appreciate, this being shaken to his core. He's not used to this. But somehow, somehow, he can't turn away. The wreckage fills him with a dire sense he has never before experienced. Nevertheless, he approaches, as though he has no choice.
For the first time, Denji sees a corpse.
"Ah..."
He croaks, though no noise will emerge. As though viewing the scene from a distance, he finds himself intrigued at how that unsettled feeling fades away. Perhaps he made the right decision? It is beyond Denji's power to comprehend that it is beyond his emotional limits to understand. He does not know that his own unexamined emotions have shut down. He only knows that the pain has stopped. Blinking, he begins to shuffle through the sand, ignoring the fallen for now to--
No.
No, no, no.
"F..."
What was to be her name becomes a hoarse and helpless cry as Denji throws himself upon the sand, half at will and half as his body simply collapses beneath him. He drags himself over to the collapsed girl. His arms trembling, he reaches out with a quivering hand, unable to tear his gaze from her face.
"F... Farah..."
The darkness that pursued her. He didn't know what it was. He was ignorant, and slow, and stupid, he was stupid, and it got her, it got her while he wasn't watching, while he was off in the clouds, got her while he wasn't looking, and he never had the chance to figure out what was important, what was so cool about all this, all these feelings in the first place, and now he'll never know, because she's dead.
"Farah!"
Confused, helpless, letting out only that single wail, Denji rests his hand upon her chest and begins to sob, his exhausted body trembling, tears alighting upon his long hair like dew upon the grass.
So tangled in these feelings is he, he does not detect that she is breathing.
It's not a bed of roses, or a glass coffin. She has not been asleep for a thousand years nor is there any prophecy that her true love will ride to her on a steed of purest white. Still and all, given that this is a cold lonely beach with corpses nearby...
"Ngh..."
...there are worse places indeed for a storybook miracle. However, in the Disney version, Denji probably isn't groping Princess Farah for proof of life in his tear-stained grief. But perhaps because his intent is pure, even if his subconscious motions are not, he really is rewarded with something joyous: stirred by a combination of physical contact and the oncoming day, the heart beneath Denji's outstretched hand starts to quicken, and the body on the sand which he had thought a grim remnant of a friend he had abandoned starts to stir. The motions are small and halting at first, but eventually, Farah regains some sort of control on her unruly person, banishing dark dreams to the corners of her mind where they may lie in wait for their next opportunity but which, for now, trouble her not. Her eyelashes bat, her eyelids flutter open, and the first thing that unfocused violet gaze takes in is the face of Denji, hair dangling in his face.
But more than that, perhaps what called her back from the brink was genuine concern, filtering into her consciousness through her powers. It's a genuine desire to see nothing bad happen to her, and genuine regret that nothing could have been done for her. It's a metaphorical ray of sun to complement the literal ones now filtering over the waves, one against which the darkness in which she was trapped struggled in vain. They are a rope she climbs out of the pit.
"D... Denji..."
She looks around, confused and groggy, through the detritus of the evening prior, and seems to be more distracting than problematic... until the truck, and the men, and the terrible memory of what happened to her.
"She... I..."
And then her arms are around the mountain-bred youth's neck, and her sobs are loud, and ragged, and without shame.
For a few blessed moments, amidst the fallen and the filtered rays of the emergent sun, they weep together, young friends. There was a time when Denji might have given up -- well, he doesn't have anything to give up, but if he /had/ something to give up, he'd have given it up -- for Farah to put her arms around him. There was a time when that image warmed his dreams, and he'd awake with a smile, not thinking much of it, appreciating it simply for what it was. That dream is forgotten.
Perhaps Denji's focus upon the immediate is a kind of fickleness. Perhaps it is a sign of weak moral fiber. Perhaps it will cause him future trouble, as this tide of darkness rises. But in his unthinking commitment to what lies before him, despite his lack of true urgency, in this moment Denji is impressively stalwart and straight-forward. Not a single virtueless thought is able to enter his head. He is consumed utterly by his emotion, his hope, his relief.
When the tears cease to choke him, though do not cease to fall, snuffling shamelessly, he speaks. "Farah," he manages, voice thickened, "I thought you were dead. Oh... oh, man... I thought you were dead." He pulls away slightly, swallowing, just to get a look at her. "When I heard you were in trouble, I was trying, you know? I was training hard, with our friends. We wanted to... I wanted to... I mean..."
Denji has few strengths here. Valiantly, he perserveres.
"I want to support you," he manages, swallowing noisily again. "I... I feel like you've got big dreams, and I want to help. Because, I mean, I guess I don't, or I guess I've never had them before... or..."
He's done. He's finished. He doesn't know what else to offer. The nature and source of his own motivations are completely beyond him, and he's in even less of a state than usual to express himself. Finally, he smiles through his tears.
"...I'm... glad you're okay."
That it's not too late to talk, even if he can say nothing.
It's only after a few moments pass, his hands still protectively at her sides, that he is able to turn his gaze away, that he is reminded of the wreckage that surrounds them, that it occurs to him that while he has not yet lost his opportunity -- his ignorance remains.
"Farah, what... what happened here...?"
Now that the two are separated, it is clear that whatever happened here, at least a good portion of it happened to Farah. A small trickle of dried blood stains one dusky-skinned cheek, and the white sleeves of her shirt are torn and, perhaps even more terrifyingly, burned straight through in some places. What can be seen of her arms and neckline betrays bruising of a really nasty stripe. Yet even as Farah herself -- and possibly Denji -- takes a mental inventory of her physical state, she inevitably finds herself drawn to the truck, and the bodies, and their persistent reminder of the reality of what's transpired. She is about to say something, when the whole of Denji's outpouring of his thoughts seems to hit her on time delay, as if her ears had perceived the sounds but only just now does her brain put it together.
When they first met, there was something compelling about the placid, unruffled serenity that Denji seemed to radiate. It was a counterpoint to her own energy and the contrast seemed to sharpen and heighten both. In her heart, Farah knows that her seeking of Denji, all this time, has been in some respects an attempt to capture a bit of that for herself. She has really needed it, after all, and persistently Denji was the only person she desperately wanted to find that she never could, while dark thoughts haunted her steps so. And yet he is apologizing to her for letting her down. Telling her he wants to help her.
To save herself, she had to find the serenity to not overthink things. To save her, Denji embraced the need to take a stand on something.
Although it doesn't seem to match her words, she is smiling once she finds the power to speak. "If you'll forgive me for being a selfish and ignorant woman, in the end," Farah says quietly, glancing at Denji carefully, "then I'd be happy to walk alongside you on the path to becoming something better."
They'll do it together.
No reunion can put aside the terrible reality of the setting, however, and Farah's face turns grim, the terror she feels below the surface visible in her eyes. "Some woman tricked me into coming here," she says quietly. "She wanted... to kill me. And she killed those men."
Denji, of course, has no idea what she's talking about.
But he sees her smile, and he blinks through the remnants of his tears, and though he doesn't grasp what underlies her words -- and, typically, just as had been the cause of his previous mistakes, doesn't think to plumb any deeper into her meaning -- he nods dumbly, looking past shaggy bangs into her eyes, as though transfixed. Well, he may not get it, really, and in that he may still be deeply lacking as a friend. But what she believes is nevertheless true.
He'll be by her side.
Farah may be remembering the bodies near her, but Denji is only now noticing the body before him, its injuries, the blood and bruising. His hands start to tremble slightly as he lifts them from her sides and, in a fruitless and unthinking gesture, smooths the fabric of her torn clothing over her wounds, as though that alone would serve as a kind of impromptu bandage. "Umm," he manages, struggling to make sense of it all as he turns again to regard their setting, now following her gaze, "why?"
It sounds stupid, but it's all he can say.
What is going on these days?
What is this feeling...?
Why?
Good question.
It's been haunting Farah herself, from the second it happened in the middle of her battle with Brihan up until now, whether she be asleep or awake. What purpose was there in taking any of these lives? One man, she can tell, was dead even before Farah got here... perhaps even part of the trap, a realization that causes fingers of true, cold dread to close around her heart in a tight grip, the idea that someone would kill an innocent to get to her. The other was just... in the way. 'Worthless,' was what Brihan had said. About them, and...
Farah shivers. Was it only her ability to fight back that kept her from a similar fate?
"I don't... know," Farah says at last, still not quite having the strength to get back up. Her skin is cold even through her clothes, a consequence of sleeping on sand during a cold winter evening, though it's warming up now that the sun is rising and she is awake. "She said they were... worthless. That they didn't contribute anything to the world by being here. Said the same thing about... me, actually."
A hand comes up to Farah's chest and presses down, palm in, her eyes hooded. "There was a... profound darkness in her heart, Denji," Farah says quietly. It's the first time she's ever mentioned anything even remotely hinting to this facet of her powers before, really, but this is important information. This woman's going to come back, Farah feels it in her marrow. This confrontation isn't over, merely delayed. "I couldn't understand it all. But the things I saw were awful. Something has made her this way. Something took away her hope for living."
Hope, huh?
Denji furrows his brow as he gazes at the fallen. He's grown accustomed to the profound sense of emptiness he experiences when he looks at what used to be living people. Of course, he had been taught about Buddhist corpse meditation, its purpose and design, but for him it was more trivia, no more relevant than any other information, nothing he imagined he'd have the opportunity -- whether he liked it or not -- to attempt. He tries to imagine the bodies as himself. Instinctively, he reaches up to place his palm over his own breast, feeling the pulse of his own heartbeat. He can't do it, he realizes, becoming aware at last of his own limitations, of his own lack of perspective. He has no idea what that'd be like, what it is for a body to really be just a hunk of meat. His body, he's so comfortable with it. And Farah's body, Farah's beautiful body, how could it be just--
At last, Denji's eyes soften.
Farah's body, laying dead amongst them.. Farah's body, just like theirs.
"That's so sad," he whispers.
Perhaps in this moment, his unquestioning acceptance of her words, that it doesn't even occur to him to wonder about from whence her awareness arises, is to his benefit. In this case, the point that leaps into the forefront of his mind is, perhaps, once of the most important.
"To live hopelessly..."
Denji doesn't often consider his own virtues. Arguably, even his best qualities are a bit accidental, though to be fair, everything about Denji is arguably accidental in some way or another. But if there is a virtue that describes a man who doesn't seem to need a reason to live, who has no inkling of the nature of despair, and who makes no effort to unify his experience and force it to conform to any particular narrative--
"I can't even imagine what that'd be like."
Hope might be a good word for it.
In his own way, Denji is a beacon of hope--
"I don't think... that could possibly be right."
If only because he doesn't know any better.
"Hope..."
The car that Rose gave her in Italy so long ago was 'The Star', and when a young Farah had asked what it meant in the language of the tarot, the fortuneteller's response was 'Hope'. In her own mind, it's the belief that no matter how bad things are now, no matter how dark the world can become, there is a chance that in the next moment -- the next minute, hour, day, year, lifetime -- it could improve. That things as they are NOW are not the way things have to be. 'You will be the star upon wish people hang their wishes,' she had said. 'The star of hope.' She's spent the remainder of her life so far trying to live up to that ideal, to be the spark that brings people hope, suggests they could live a better life.
Living without it... she could never in a million years imagine it.
"But people do it everyday," she says quietly, unable to keep that truth from being realized. People without advantages, people with destiny on their side, people born in the wrong place at the wrong time. "They feel like the world is collapsing in on them and it could never get better. She..."
There's no words for it.
Slowly, Farah gets to her feet, body protesting the entire way, but she feels the need to be the first to do it. To tell the forces that tried to eradicate her that she won't be denied and she won't give up. She will shine. She will burn.
She reaches a hand out to Denji to rise with her.
"Let's do our best to convince them otherwise."
Log created on 20:30:37 02/06/2011 by Denji, and last modified on 02:10:14 02/07/2011.