Description: Time continues at an unceasing, unchanging pace. Throughout the universe, this is a constant. But to humans, time is subjective -- a minute can feel like a day, a half-second could feel like fifteen minutes. Honoka was able to slow down her perception of time enough to share last words with Reika -- and had thought that would be enough, until she found herself in another place, another time entirely.
The common fiction about death is that, as someone lies dying, they will see their life flash before their eyes. Certainly, that might be what people who've *almost* died have come back to report, and the reasons why could be practically anything. For example, might not someone about to perish suddenly spend their last few seconds dwelling on their regrets, and thus see their life in flashback? Never mind that our perception of time is quite different in these moments. Like dreams, this reverie can take mere moments of 'objective' time yet feel like an eternity in our minds. But what the REAL truth is, we may never know, as none have come back from that undiscovered country beyond the final veil.
Certainly, there probably isn't a lot of precedent for what happens to Honoka as she feels the life fade from her at the Taiyo Dome, surrounded by disbelieving witnesses full of conflicting emotions. She likely didn't expect to die that day, nascent empress of a new nation as she was, though perhaps her use of a body double suggests she knew it MIGHT happen if she wasn't careful. As the performer-turned-ruler's vision begins to fade, and her blinking becomes infrequent and deliberate, however, something entirely unexpected happens, even given our limited understanding of how people die:
She's suddenly standing at the start of a short wooden boat dock, which extends out into a nearby body of water. Looking around shows wherever she's standing now to be a wooded island, small, in the middle of some lake or inland sea. Above the tree line, the tops of a spire -- some strange combination of a Japanese temple and a more western monument or church.
There are no people, but beyond that, the setting is almost... idyllic. The lapping of water against the shore is a soothingly rhythmic backdrop to the sounds of nature: bird calls, the rustling of trees in the wind. The sky overhead and the water below are both their own shades of blue, and the air is warm, but a frequent cooling breeze sweeps over the place. If one was looking for a place to retreat from basically all of creation, this is it... and perhaps like nowhere else in the world right now, trouble and care seem a million miles away.
That's probably the first clue that despite this idyll, something's not quite right.
Standing at the end of the dock is a figure with its back turned to where Honoka stands now, a figure that would be almost entirely unrecognizable if not for the combination of Asian clothing and a messy head of scarlet hair.
~ Reika... listen to me. Share what we know about Mukai. Tell them goodbye... tell them that I wish things could have worked out better... ~
"... and tell..." Honoka's voice scares her into silence -- to say nothing of suddenly being transported to a wooden boat dock. She looks down at her chest, a dark, but beautiful stain of red blossoming outward from her heart, the darkest color of all on her otherwise light-toned imperial robes. But, unlike the last time she looked down, scant moments ago, the handle of a kunai is nowhere to be found.
Mukai. The obsidian terror allowed her dreams to come true -- and ever since then, her dreams have been dominated by the unusual power. The line between dream and reality has been blurred ever since, the young woman drifting further and further from reality each day, and each night.
Clearly, this is his doing. She's dreamed of Sakura, she's dreamed of Frei, she's dreamed of Jira, and Zach, and all those she's cared for... and now he's really crossed the line. "If I die in the dream I die in real life," she assures herself, "... So why am I =here=?"
Her brain foggy, she shakes her head vigorously for a moment. No, she's still... here. In this unknown place. She spots the scarlet hair, and figures... if she's going to get to the bottom of this, maybe the monk knows. She strides purposefully to him, folding her hands beneath her stomach, sleeves marrying perfectly to conceal the skin beneath. Stopping just short of Frei, she quirks an eyebrow at the seer. "... Frei." She'd prefer to use his family name, but she has a feeling this isn't the time to dredge up painful memories. "Where is this place?"
He doesn't seem surprised to see her.
"Technically..." the redhead begins, half-turning to look at Honoka -- and noting, for a moment, the dark red stain on her imperial regalia -- before he continues. "I'm pretty sure this is an island in Lake Biwa. If you look over there, you can see where Hikone should be." He points off in a direction, probably east given the position of what appears to be a mid-morning sun, across the lake. But where the city of Hikone should in fact be, there's just trees, maybe the occasional wooden building or shrine if your eyesight is exceptional.
After giving that response, however, Frei shrugs and shakes his head. "But I don't think that's where we REALLY are. This is... it's more like a MEMORY of Lake Biwa. From a particular point in time and space. Kind of like being in a particularly vivid 3D photograph." He doesn't sound sure, not really, which is strange, because to look at the man, he actually seems... entirely at home here, in a way that he frequently did not in the 'real' world. Like he belongs here.
In total defiance of Japanese traditions of politeness, he puts a hand on Honoka's shoulder and gives her a gentle smile. "How are you feeling?"
"Hikone," repeats Honoka, underwhelmed. The only memory she has of Hikone was that it was on her long list of places to desecrate to shatter the will of the Japanese people... but not the short list. "But it's not there," she states matter-of-factly, squinting as Frei indicates the location.
Recognition dawns on her after a moment, and the Empress grows silent, eyes narrowing ever so slightly. She nods, her head still a bit foggy from all that's happened to her. She's still dreaming, right? None of this is real, it can't be -- otherwise there'd be a city there.
And then she notices that, despite his utter lack of surprise to see her, he seems... confused. Possibly even lost.
And then the halfbreed /sisam/ dares to put his hand on her. Her lips curl back for one brief instant before she can throttle back the anger... at which point she dials back to a merely smoldering gaze.
"How am I feeling," she reiterates. Spending a moment to consider, she then looks down at her chest, pointedly. "Out of sorts. This should have gone away." She looks back up to Frei at this point. Squinting her eyes at him. "Well, what should I be feeling? I don't feel anything."
Frei's smile doesn't waver; does that mean he didn't see the sudden, passing feeling of anger or revulsion when he touched her, or does the redhead simply not care? Either way, he pulls his hand back without too much delay, grasping one hand with the other behind his back. It's a strange gesture, the sort of cute expression of curiosity that a schoolgirl might exhibit. "Well, I'd imagine you should feel very confused, maybe even a little angry? If you're really unlucky, regret, which might be the most useless feeling at this point."
He walks to the edge of the dock and eases himself down to sit on the edge, before swinging his legs up and pulling off his shoes and socks, stuffing the latter into the former and placing them on the dock before slowly lowering his legs toward the water. He idly dips a toe in the water, which has a surprising clarity, like liquid glass with the barest tint of blue-green, and there's a flash of orange-gold as a koi swirls the surface and then swims off.
If Honoka's in the afterlife, it appears to be pretty boring.
"How do YOU think you should be feeling, Honoka?" he asks, continuing to watch the water instead of turning to her for the answer. Even his speech patterns are languid, like he's got all the time in the world to have this conversation (as does Honoka, really). But it's not dismissive or airy, merely... placid. "I would think after all that's happened to you, you'd have a lot of conflicting feelings right now, yes?"
Honoka was... pretty confused, pretty upset, AND full of regret. The last time she talked with the seer she was upset at him for reading her... /better/ than she'd wanted to let on. Never mind the obvious difference in education between the two; fine literature wasn't exactly her circus tutor's forte.
But now... yes. "Regret," she agrees, "... I suppose that was the last thing on my mind before I..." She looks around idly. "... found you."
She looks down at Frei to see him taking his socks and shoes off. She mumbles quietly, "... how can you be so relaxed at..."
... Sigh. There goes a fish. How long has it been since the girl's actually... -played- with a fish? The slightest hint of a smirk crosses the Empress's lips as she slips out of her geta, then peels off her tabi socks, and drops herself alongside Frei. Spreading her toes out in the water, the young woman seems... amused. No koi seem to be nipping at her right away though, so she offers a faint smile over to Frei. "... I suppose you'll tell me that I should be enjoying myself. There's no telling when this will end, and I'll be on to the next..." She looks down for a moment, struggling to find the word. Dream? Day?
Honoka thinks on that for a moment, then shrugs. "I'm... sorry. This isn't a sort of conversation I typically have in a dream. I'm not used to being so... lucid."
That gets a light, entirely sympathetic laugh from Frei, who shakes his head sadly as he places both hands palm-down on the dock. He tilts his head up, looking into a sky full of lazily drifting, puffy white clouds. "I felt the same way, at first," he says, continuing to look up at the sky, perhaps assigning shapes to clouds... an activity he seems eminently suited for. "Like a whole bunch of things that had held me back, had clouded my thinking, were suddenly gone. I was a little shocked at the difference."
Here, he DOES turn to Honoka, and raises an eyebrow for a moment. "Kind of a shame for it to happen I had to basically be entirely incinerated by a ninja ideologue."
He lets that sink in, then continues, turning back to the water and leaning forward far enough just to dip his hand into the water, looking at the ripples moving away from his touch distractedly. "That was... a few days before we met at Kinkaku-ji, actually. Everything since then has been a little hazy, in terms of cold hard 'facts'. I know I don't have what you'd call a 'body', anymore. I don't suppose you've heard of Seishirou Ryouhara?" he suddenly asks, turning to look at Honoka for a moment. "A very dangerous individual. We fought, and... he killed me. Or something. It was strange. The second my body burned away I felt something I can't quite describe."
There's a creak of wood as Frei gets to his feet, stretching, his arms making a curve over his head as he links his fingers together in the process. "Chi is life, you know. Even people who can't use it have it running in their veins. And for most of my adult life I've been an intermediary for it. Not... using it or controlling it, but directing it. Shaping it. For me, it was easy to 'hear' it or 'feel' it. But there was always one remove, you know? There was always this barrier between me and 'it' and then suddenly, right there in France, the barrier was gone. That's what happened. And I finished my fight with Ryouhara, and then... here I was."
Now he turns away again, looking out over the lake. "And I've been moving between here and other places ever since. Sometimes because I want to, sometimes because it just happens. But would you believe me if I told you I don't think this is the 'afterlife', per se?" he asks, turning back to Honoka with an expression of genuine curiosity.
"... So." Honoka looks up at the clouds. She never did see much use in this -- they're just vague shapes. Any shapes you see, you brought to the clouds. It's pretty, the skies are clear...
Skies are clear. Why is that relevant...?
The Empress of Ezo looks back down to Frei, passively listening to him, but confused by his mention of an ideologue. Honoka is used to hearing words she doesn't know, but she generally can pick up enough context to play along... and she's rewarded here as well, when he mentions the cause of his death. "... But you said... -before- we..." ... And with a start, she realizes Frei is suggesting that he was dead the last time she saw him. She springs back to her feet, her heels kicking up a splash suddenly, soaking the lower hem of her robes. Not that she cares too much... "But," she starts, only to hear Frei pontificate about... chi.
She can be polite enough to listen. She may be wearing the Empress' garb, but she still felt a little... bad about her last meeting with Frei -- especially in light of what happened a few short days later.
"... Yes, you were in... tune with it..." she agrees, as he speaks.
She digests some of the words, but not all, as others have given her pause. "So... before, in Hiroshima, you were following the ley lines. I could feel those, but... not so much in Kinkaku-ji. So why were you--"
Honoka catches up. "... Wait. What do you mean, 'not the afterlife /per se?/' Is this--" She looks down, patting down the damp, sticky mess on her robes. "Am... am.... Am /I?/ But..."
... wish that things had gone better ...
Tears rush forth from her eyes. "Reika. I didn't..."
"I might be wrong," is how Frei responds, not without sympathy. If he was going to use up his one time touching Honoka before she flipped out about it, it was probably wasted on a friendly shoulder-pat on her 'arrival'. Right now, the former Empress probably could use a hug. Or... maybe not. He quirks a brow somewhat at the mention of Reika, a name he doesn't know or recognize other than it being a vaguely common-enough Japanese name. "You wanna know how I know?"
He turns and spreads his arms wide, more or less encompassing the vastness of Lake Biwa as it spreads around them. "We both know I grew up around here. But one day my father took me out here, just the two of us," Frei explains, before turning back to Honoka. "Which was unusual. For starters, I have two younger brothers. Second, when I was a kid my mother was adamant about me learning the sword, so she wouldn't have approved. But Dad had that kind of effect on Mom and so we rented a boat and came out here."
THere's a pause, and then Frei takes a breath and continues his story; it's probably the first sign of a crack in the perfectly placid and calm face he's turning to Honoka right now, though it doesn't seem like his being at ease is ENTIRELY a lie or construction. "It was great. I was miserable because I wasn't turning out to be the good little swordsman Mom wanted, but when we sat here and just watched the lake for hours I finally felt like I BELONGED somewhere for once. You know? It's one of my earliest GOOD memories. And so I suspect there's a reason I keep coming back here. But... living in one good memory, forever, doesn't seem like a very fair afterlife, if there is one."
And now he turns to Honoka and tilts his head a little, that curious expression coming back to his face. "But I don't know what that means for you, that you're *here*. I mean... where would YOU be? Because I don't know everything about what happened, but I've been able to keep track, since we parted ways. I feel like you were searching for something, though maybe you didn't KNOW that you were searching for something. You made yourself Empress of a kingdom long gone, after all. So where SHOULD you be?"
Might be wrong, he says. The mystery of this place wasn't that it was a dream that followed a dream, but rather, that it was the transition from reality. Those words echoing... she's peripherally aware that those are happening. Right now. She didn't get to say something.... what was it?
"No... it..." Words never did come that quickly to the girl; each word required a decided, concerted effort. And effort... is something she finds difficult.
She can tell, though... that sympathy is given. And, stepping forward, she wraps her arms about Frei, sobbing softly into his shoulder for one long, long moment. Even here... she can respond to feelings much more intensely than the artificial verbal constructs man made to pretend they were better than nature.
Clutching at the front of Frei's shirt, she looks around as he gestures to the lake. When he spreads his arms wide, she can feel her viewpoint shift, ever so slightly, as if a bird on the wind. She can feel every nuance of what he's saying, nodding slowly. He's not speaking in those damned parables, those words forgotten by the common people -- he's speaking from the heart. And she can hear those words.
She draws back, raising an oversized sleeve to her eyes, dabbing it dry. The little Empress never really -let- herself grow up, nods wholeheartedly along with the impression of Frei's mom. Of her mom.
She listens intently, nodding along... until she's asked, where would she be? Searching for something... empress... "I was searching for Mukai. I never told you... or did I? It was so long ago. He... He gave me, and Sakura... the power to make dreams come true."
She turns her back from Frei, hands pinwheeling out to either side... and the sky is washed gray, like the surf sweeping across a sandy beach in the early morning. She stops... and looks around... and suddenly, she is happy again.
A dense fog covers everything. The water is still water, the dock is still a dock, but everything else has shifted. "This is Lake Mashuu, in Ainu Mos- sorry, in Hokkaido." She tilts her head towards a small boat, beached a fair distance away. "My parents took me here when I was eight. We... we loved to fish. Fish was our breakfast, lunch, and dinner, it was our work and play. I... I..."
She turns back to Frei, tearing up again. "I never thought I wanted to get aboard another boat again, Frei. But I did, I did..."
It will be difficult for her to complete this thought until her chest starts convulsing. She reaches for the front of Frei's shirt, having that it'd provided her solace just a few short moments ago...
It is curious that now, bereft of what one might call a physical body, that Honoka appears to need physical comfort the most. But in truth this sort of thing doesn't make a lot of sense even to Frei, who's been living in this liminal state for a while now. Whether she needs to hug him, or simply have something to hold on to so she knows this is 'real', or even feels the need to do 'damage' to make herself feel better. In the end, she indulges in a couple different options from that list. For his part, Frei's silent once he asks his question. This isn't about him, after all; it's about Honoka.
He turns his head slightly as the landscape shifts, noting with interest that both his memory and Honoka's both involve places near the water, and memories of parents. She corrects herself to 'Hokkaido,' but the slip is not difficult to catch, not after Honoka decided to literally call her new nation the republic of Ezo. Frei might be (partly) ethnic Japanese, but he's not a fool. "You're Ainu," he observes carefully, looking around. "From the land where the gods walk among us, right?" He doesn't know as much about the indigenous people of northern Japan as he'd like, but everyone who lives in the country knows at least a little, and amateur anthropology was a hobby of his, anyways. According to Japanese legend, someone who sees the surface of the lake on a clear, fog-less day will be cursed with bad luck for life.
From the looks of things, for Honoka, even looking at it on a foggy day might have been enough.
He resists the urge to tell her that Frei lost his father when he was young, too; after all, this is really her moment. Instead he looks down into the water, which apparently is legendarily clear, visible down to a surprising depth. "I know about him now," he says, responding to the other question, the EARLIER question, the one he can actually address. "He and the ones working with him. They're trying to turn back the wheel of time, revert everything, undo history. Why, I don't really know. But..."
Surprisingly, Frei reaches down and holds the hem of Honoka's sleeve, pulling it up (and possibly her arm with it) as if he were inspecting its fit on her. "Maybe I do, actually. When the past is painful, the notion of just... starting over seems really attractive, doesn't it? Remaking it all with the wisdom of what we know now." There's a pause, and he glances at Honoka's face, trying to make eye contact. "So... if he gave you the power to make dreams come true, what did you do with it? Or Sakura, for that matter?"
Honoka settles for simply touching his shoulder -- the gesture that, received rather than given, had almost made her opt into violence instead. But now... Frei is comfort for the young woman, the only rock she has, the only one who, this night, is around to listen to her prattle on. For the past eight years Honoka had surrounded herself with people she called 'family,' but they were never family in the trust sense -- they were people, and over time, they became an extension of herself. It was no more possible to share stories with them than to try and tickle oneself -- it just never did any good.
So to the few she's shared stories with, the past few weeks... she's really appreciated the different perspectives. And the helpful hands. Honoka didn't know -how- to be close to anyone. So to have someone not only acknowledge the obvious -- her Ainu nature -- but to speak of the cultural and religious aspects of her culture is heartwarming, to say the least. She straightens up, nodding her head slowly.
When Frei shifts topics, she doesn't realize what he means. She didn't subconsciously conjure images of her father and mother as she had with Mukai, so how can he say he knows about hi-- Oh. Mukai. Right. "... Yes... that... that s-s-s," she stutters, blinking as Frei impulsively reaches out and snares her sleeve. She stares at the garment, listening to him talk. And as he talks, the white feathers burn to cinders, the cerulean blues and the veridian greens -- perfectly natural colors, to be sure, but not -Ainu- colors, like the ones left behind in the wake of the crackling, purifying lines of flame. Through it all, the elm bark fibers remain the same, unchanged, much like the earthy tones of the applique left behind.
The purple highlights seem to have been burned away as well, her hair singed a lighter shade of chestnut brown as if from the light of the sun, as one would see if they lived their life upon a boat. And if Frei is really up on his Ainu history, he'd understand the mustache-like facial tattoo that somehow found itself on Honoka's face -- a tattoo which would elicit nothing but fear and mockery if she were to stride into a high school in Honshu right now.
"This," she says, breaking eye contact with Frei to demonstrate the fishing village the pair now finds itself right in the middle of. "Bringing Ainu Mosir back to its roots. None of this technology that's made life easy. None of the tools and tricks that make it easy to forget our heritage, our people, our past."
Her brow furrows, as she turns back to Frei. "It's too far gone, though. Mukai showed me I could make this. And I denied him, I denied this. Everything I did, Frei, I did it so I could prove this was worth bringing back."
But tears don't come forth this time -- no matter how much her eyes are overflowing with them. "This was my selfish, selfish dream. No one wanted this dream but me, Frei. This... this is why I sacrificed myself. I destroyed Japan... for myself."
"Okay."
Frei will be lucky if Honoka's response to his saying that is not either hysterical laughter or immediate violence. But he listens to her reasons, looks at the visual display in front of him, and takes in what she means, what she REALLY means. She wanted to prove that this thing she was, this thing that made her different, was not a mistake. That the parents she loved and lost were not wrong. That the world as she saw it wasn't an illusion. Like so many people, Honoka fought with every ounce of her strength to prove to herself, more than anything, that all of this was FOR something.
At least, that's how it appears to Frei.
"So in the end," he says, with a gentle smile, "you were a human being to the very last."
There's a pause, and then a deep breath, and then Frei walks away from Honoka, wandering the village, looking around at the setting. The Ainu certainly aren't the only people in that sort of situation. The myriad tribes of America's indigenous people. The tribesmen of the Australian outback, or even the New Zealand maori with whom the Ainu might even share a massively distant relation. All forced from their homes into narrow corridors of existence. Told to adapt, or die, or sometimes not even given the CHOICE to adapt or die. So how did this influence Honoka, the sage wonders to himself for a moment.
Turning back, he shrugs. "The past is funny. It's a prison with the door open that we choose never to leave, you know? Even though we could any time we wanted. But we don't. And that's not necessarily bad. Just like doing something only for yourself isn't necessarily bad, either."
Honoka's response is neither hysterical laughter nor immediate violence. She damned herself, not him, and Frei asked -- and he accepted her admission at face value. Saw her vision, saw the reality she wanted... and simply accepted it, sans judgment.
That's all Honoka ever really wanted. To have to defend her own dream, to be forced to convince others that her life was virtuous, or worth living... that was the cruelest situation Japan as a nation, Japanese as a culture ever forced upon Honoka and those like her. That Frei can understand that, and say, simply, 'okay', is all she'd ever expected.
A human being to the last? "... I suppose so," she says, with just a twinge of remorse.
Honoka looks down at the sleeve for a moment, once Frei lets it fall. It is a dream, now, she realizes. But it's one she was content to walk around in now. Home, she realizes... but not home. It's too empty.
She stares hard at the village houses. Narrows her eyes, furrows her brow. And the villagers return. She'd done it before, for Mukai... and it's no more or less difficult now. She walks amongst them, weaving her way past the growing crowd as she filters her way towards Frei, noticing similar motifs in the attush of those other villagers as they go about their business, trading fish, selling wares at market.
"Maybe I belong in prison, Frei. I've been called lots of bad names. And no one ever calls me those names, here. Home." She laughs mirthlessly. "When the -sisam- weren't around... no offense."
'Sisam.' It's not a word Frei knows -- his understanding of Ainu is probably limited to the word 'kamui,' for the most part -- but there is something about the way Honoka uses it that makes the meaning pretty clear. For a second, he's lost in thoughts of his own past, though these don't manifest visually in the way that Honoka's dream is starting to respond to her mental and emotional state. But he grew up a white redhead in a traditional Japanese household.
"Actually..." he says aloud, not entirely processing that he's transitioned from inner to outer monologue without any warning in the matter, "my brothers both look like my mother. She's a total 'Yamato Nadeshiko,' actually. A willowy porcelain-skinned beauty with long black hair. It was my father that looked like this," he adds, turning to Honoka and pointing at his cheek and the barest hint of freckles on it. "I think part of the reason my mother and I grew apart is that I reminded her of him. And she couldn't bear to look at me because of that." There's another pause, then he sighs. "I guess my point is that you can't always count on 'home' for that sort of thing."
"I'm not going to apologize for the people who hurt you in your life, Honoka. I might even be one of them," he adds, thinking back on the pair's discussion in Kinkaku-ji, how Frei had read the girl's words as derision and she had read his warning against that derision as arrogance. "Honestly, what would the point of judging you *now* be, anyway, even if I was inclined to judge?"
Frei steps a few paces closer to Honoka, watching her intently, his arms at his sides, his carriage loose and unthreatening... a deliberate choice that the words he says that follows should explain the motivation for. "If I'd been alive and known what you planning, I would have tried to stop you. I'm sure you knew that even when we first met. But it wouldn't JUST have been to save lives, you know? Especially if I'd known then what I know now. Nobody 'belongs' in prison, Honoka. There's nothing so good that accomplishing it is worth any price and there's nothing so evil that you can't find a way back from it in the end. Because..."
He shrugs. "Here we are, now, in a place where good and evil are more or less irrelevant. What's important here is what's in your heart. What's important here is that you made decisions you can LIVE with. Because the land remembers. That's what I found out. That's why I started babbling about chi being life. We're ALL connected in life and that connects us in death, even to things that have been alive for uncounted eons and which will be alive still long after we're gone."
"I don't... need judgment here. You're not giving it. It's all okay, so long as you don't start quoting philosphy books at me again," Honoka says, hazarding a brief smile. "And I appreciate that you might -want- to apologize. But how can you... their crime wasn't intentional. Their crime was ignorance, and... it was what I was trying to impress upon them," she adds with a resigned sigh.
The longer she's here, the less she feels the need to act tough, to lash out... to be the Empress. Ever since the previous Emperor -- they would soon dub him Emperor Heisei, due to dogmatic rote -- lost his life to El Gado's knife, she'd felt the need to defend her every judgment, to contextualize it in the background of her own passive persecution at the hands of an ignorant Japanese public. She felt more favor with non-Japanese than with the very people she'd grown up with -- she felt more honest feelings with the people she'd met in Southtown than with the so-called "family" she toured the nation with. And she trusts Frei more now than she ever did, in life.
So it's bittersweet, that he mentions... if she had but opened her mouth. Revealed the plans that he accused her of having, rather than lashing out, aggressively denying those plans. If she had trusted him, maybe... -maybe-... she'd have gotten another chance to make her dream come true. The right way, without killing a few thousand people she'd never meet.
Never meet as a human, anyway.
Nobody belongs in prison? "The Ainu say this too, Frei. No one ever dies. We change state." She steps backwards to let a villager pass in front. "I'll find out for sure, soon enough. Maybe I could wander with you? Maybe... I could fight again? Stop someone else from picking the same suicidal path I did?"
'Can I wander with you?'
Probably what's hidden behind that question is, 'what's going to happen to me now?' And so Frei's answer, when he finally gives one, reflects his sometimes unfortunate tendency to tell the honest and unvarnished truth. "I don't really know. I can't say what's going to happen to you because I don't even REALLY understand what's happening to ME," he says, with the ghost of a somewhat tired smile following after. There's a pause, and then an almost helpless laugh. "Truth be told, you're the first person I've seen 'here' that wasn't... just an illusion of some kind. When you showed up, I felt it. I kind of hoped you'd be able to tell ME what was going on."
Turning away from Honoka, Frei walks to the end of the dock where they arrived and sits back down on its edge, much as he was doing when the Empress arrived in his... whatever this is they're in right now. Through the patchiness of the fog, the redhead seems surprisingly indistinct from a distance. He opens one hand, palm up, and stares down into it for a moment, as if glancing at something very small in an intent way.
"I will say this, though: don't move forward from now trying to 'make things right'. I think that's a mistake people make when they've done wrong; they wonder, 'how can I make up for this?' To be honest, you usually can't. All you can do is look to the future. How can I be better? How can I avoid making the mistakes I made before?"
He turns back to Honoka and smiles, gently. "If you'll permit some more preaching from your elders, anyway."
Frei doesn't know. He's been dead for... weeks? Months now? How long has this madness even been going on, anyway, Honoka finds herself wondering. With a light sigh, and a weak, self-deprecating smirk, she notes, "If figuring this out has fallen onto my shoulders, I think you got the short end of the stick."
She looks down at her bare feet for a moment, never having placed her sandals back on. Frowning lightly, she hazards a look at the fisherman's wares on display as she walks barefoot along behind Frei, stopping to examine a recently-caught fish. Lifting it up with her hands, she examines the texture, the aghast, petrified look on the fish's face, the pale-colored scales, before letting it go and hastening to catch up to Frei.
"Mmm... perhaps it's more that I just don't mind being preached to, now."
Honoka turns to the village behind her with a sweeping gesture. "This village is Akan -- the name, that is." Honoka corrects, as the name of the village is another word for 'bad' in Kansai-ben. "Before it became the embarassing Ainu tourist capital of the world. More accurately, this... here... is how I'd always envisioned it. The real Akan."
She clasps her hands before her, looking down. "I don't know what it will be like when I go, Frei. But I doubt it will be this... comforting. But I'd like to stay here until that time comes, I think."
She looks to Frei -- not far off from her own height, she realizes -- and rests an arm on his shoulder. "I've tried to correct my mistakes for the past week. It only took one knife to the chest to get me to stop." The other arm presses to her heart -- the spot on her chest has grown larger in the past few minutes. "Frei... I'm not going to make you do anything silly like promise me anything. But... I think the end is near, for our world. You have friends on the other side who can still help. I doubt anyone else in the world will ever listen to me again. And maybe I--"
A hitch in her breath, just then. She controls herself, and continues. "I mean, I should say thank you. For believing in me. For talking to me, for even looking at me after all I've done. You are a true friend."
Honoka squeezes Frei's shoulder. For the little woman who hated being touched, this is... probably a good sign.
For a moment, after that physical contact, Frei turns his head, tilts it up, and looks up into Honoka's eyes. 'You are a true friend.' Was he, though? Wouldn't a true friend have tried to STOP this somehow? If he really believed in Honoka, wouldn't Frei have found a way to intercede? It's not as if he's totally powerless to intervene in the real world, and it's not as if his disappearances and reappearances are entirely random, entirely out of the blue.
The part he's not talking about, now, is that when he says 'the land remembers' the implications of that statement are far more wide-reaching than even Honoka might apprehend at this point. If he wants, he can really see anywhere, because this place -- whatever it is -- is connected to everything. But a part of Frei... is actively avoiding doing that. He's content to be here, in his memories, letting time wander by. After all, 'time' is an abstract concept here. This entire conversation has taken at least what must feel like 15 minutes to Frei and Honoka, yet in the 'real world' the Empress still clings to her last seconds of life to experience it at all. It... probably works the other way, too. It may even be that here, there IS no concept of 'time'.
A part of Frei feels like he's earned the rest after all this time. If he were a good friend, the kind of friend Honoka thinks he is, he wouldn't be content to rest. Not yet, anyway.
"There's a few people..." he finally says aloud, turning his head away and staring into the water, unable to meet the Empress's gaze. "I know they'll be out there, doing everything they can. You don't have to worry. And when the time comes, I'll do my part, too." That, at least, he feels like he can say with confidence, and not worry that he's telling a lie of omission. Of course he'll do his part... the question right now is, what IS his part? Why is he here?
Getting up, he dusts himself off briefly, then turns to look at Honoka straight on. He can feel it, too, now that he puts some effort into it... the thing Honoka herself has probably already started to sense: their time together is drawing to a close. There's no real 'evidence' of it; merely an intuition, a feeling. Still, it's compelling. "It goes both ways. Thank you for believing that something I had to say had any value. And if it makes you feel any better... the land remembers, Honoka. No matter what happens, you were here. You were part of... all of this," he says, spreading his arms again. He might mean Akan, but he might also mean literally all of creation. "I don't care what Mukai or the others say: you can't erase that, not entirely. As long as there is life, there will be the memory of you, and of me. Somewhere."
Honoka takes up Frei's offer, wrapping her arms about him. It's a release, knowing that there is a 'sisam' who actually understood what she was trying to do, who actually did more than nod and smile -- who actually knew what it was like here in Akan. It doesn't matter to her if he'd ever seen this place before now, in the way she believes it should have been -- the fact is, he's seeing it now. Her past, her dream future... there's not much of a difference.
She knows her time is short. Off in the distance, a villager from the shore points at the two, calls to others. She starts to draw away from Frei, reluctantly. "I did believe, much as I didn't want to. Had to go look up Oz...Ozy... Ozymandias, after I left." She laughs mirthlessly, looking down at her fingertips lingering on Frei's shirt, caught ever so slightly on the fabric. "Look on my works, ye mighty."
Two diffeent villagers come running up the dock towards Honoka, eyes wide. She doesn't turn to them, simply drawing her fingers back, clasping them in front of her. "Mukai, and his kind... they'll be saying that soon, I'm sure."
The villagers, one male, one female, reach up with Honoka, visibly frustrated that she doesn't appear to notice them. They wrap arms about her in a tight embrace, and she shudders lightly. Tearfully, she nods to Frei. "I'm home, Frei. Thank you for showing me the way."
She wraps her hands over the arms wrapped about her, closing her eyes. "I missed you both so much..."
By the time Honoka has expressed her thanks and turned away, Frei is gone. And somewhere out there, on a solitary island on Lake Biwa, a man with red hair sits on the dock and looks at the sky, and waits.
Mourn not for Honoka, crowned Empress of Ezo in the 26th year of the Heisei era and deposed in the same. At last, after a long search, she has found what she was looking for.
Log created on 18:20:30 09/30/2014 by Honoka, and last modified on 21:57:37 10/01/2014.