Catharsis
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A/N: An idea that came to me while listening to Poe's "Angry Johnny" on Valentine's Day (First line of the stanza, "I wanna kill you, I wanna blow you - away." Right. Don't ask. :D ). A series of Himiko-centric one-shots revolving around the generally-accepted, but now contested "Five Stages of Grief" by psychologist Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. A better writer than I could probably condense this whole idea into just one one-shot, so I apologize for writing another rambling fic. Oh well, hope it works out just the same. Enjoy. : )
"Be careful how you touch her,
for she'll awaken
and sleep's the only freedom that she knows
and when you walk into her eyes, you won't believe
the way she's always paying
for a debt she never owes
and a silent wind still blows that only she can hear
and so she goes…"
from "Wildflower" by Skylark
-o-
"Happy Birthday to you… Happy Birthday to you…"
Kudo Himiko sang in a cracked, high-pitched trill that, nonetheless, pealed with the confidence and clarity of one in the bloom of puberty. But little did the thirteen-year-old know that such a banal, ubiquitous melody would never pass through her lips again.
Not when, ironically, the celebratory ditty had unwittingly become a funerary dirge.
The seconds ticked down for every step Himiko made towards the strangely quiet living room – precious seconds left before innocence, her life, was prematurely snatched away; in – some would claim – karmic justice for having been a snatcher herself.
Himiko walked deliberately, balancing a cake in her hands with the care of a nurse presenting a mother with her newborn child. In the orange flicker of twenty-eight burning birthday candles, her face beamed with a last glow of youth, not realizing such child-like happiness would grace her features nevermore.
Two, three steps… Soon, Himiko was to enter a dimension where time stopped, to be sucked in and captured forever in a cell of her memory that had been set aside for just this moment, reserved long before she was even born; a space-time sealed within four walls now haunted by the doom of her brother, Kudo Yamato…
… and the sin of one Mido Ban.
She crossed, and freeze … the only movement being that of the cake dropping and breaking apart on the wood plank floor. In one slow blink, Himiko's view fogged over with gray; blurry and smudged like charcoal paintings of raving madmen pervaded by splotches of the most vivid red - and two striking pin-pricks of blue.
It was a blue that belonged to a stranger; glazed in tears, dull with confusion, and full of guilty fright. They were not the proud, brilliant oceans the girl had drowned herself in with admiration (too young to realize she drowned because of something else), but fathomless pits empty of mercy, devoid of soul.
Himiko had never seen so shocking a paradox, of eyes that pitiful gazing at her in immeasurable sadness together with a hand so brutal it was gloved thick with blood.
Eyes and hands possessed by a boy she thought she could love…
as much as her brother…
who he just murdered….
for a reason she would kill to know…
Or rather, to know would kill her.
Either way, on that day of Kudo Yamato's portentous birth, Kudo Himiko died as well.
Then came the awful screams, screams like those of mythical creatures; as grievous as the wailing of banshees heralding Yamato's passing; as terrible as a siren's song calling for Mido Ban's death.
Wordlessly, the killer ran, not once meeting Himiko's shell-shocked stare; blowing past her like a typhoon too swift to leave a fleeting apology and too slow to be an unexplained remembrance. As a final insult, the gust of his flight extinguished the last defiant candle flames still burning on Yamato's ruined cake.
And with that, Mido Ban – former friend, brother, and partner – vanished out the door and into the snowy night.
-o-
Denial
"Aniki!" Himiko somehow managed to form a coherent word between the incessant shrieks. She staggered as far as her collapsing knees could take her; finally falling on all fours into a puddle of blood so deep it made a sickening splashing noise when she landed. The teenager crawled, slip-sliding the rest of the way to the limp form slouched against the living room wall; jeans soaking up her brother's fading warmth, hands coated in the remains of his drained life.
"Aniki… Stop playing… It's… not funny…" Himiko hoarsely whispered in the brokenly scared small voice she used in dire straits – and only with Yamato. She straddled his corpse and nudged his slumped shoulders. Surely, this was just some cruel, insensitive birthday trick they were playing on her. Yes. A gross joke, she thought over and over again like a mantra, desperately wanting to believe her cool, calculating, and mature brother was capable of such juvenile pranks. Twenty-eight or not, boys will be boys, right? Right?
But the jagged, gaping hole in Yamato's chest was all too real, as was the congealing sea of red around him; and soon, Himiko's disbelief gave way to defense. She frantically searched his bandolier of vials and her own pockets for their tools of survival. Flame, Retrogression, Corrosion, Acceleration… The girl's eyes gawked hopelessly at the poisons in her blood-slicked hands, at last letting them slide into the sticky spill below upon learning the ironic truth. To her abject horror, out of the two hundred odd potions and palliatives the Kudo siblings had concocted through their art of alchemy…
Not one was an elixir of life.
Himiko held Yamato's ghostly face in her palms, smearing his cold cheeks in rouge. "Why? I don't understand. Tell me what to do…" she demanded, voice straining against the heaviness that was building in her diaphragm like an expanding balloon inside her that refused to pop. It began crushing her internally, yet she allowed herself no release; a case of pragmatism winning over emotion as Himiko scanned her brother's death mask for an explanation.
But she saw no peace in his passing; only pain and resignation; and oddly, a grim twist of his lips that could only be construed as relief.
Relief. It would be years before she found out what that meant.
Himiko floated her fingers above Yamato's closed eyes, considered searching into them for answers. Belief still held of images in the last second of life being imprinted into the retinas like a snapshot at the moment of death. But Himiko balked instantly. Not at the absurdity of such old wives' tales, but at the fact she knew exactly what she would see – that of the traitorous face of a demon reflecting back at her.
It was all the answer she would get.
And all the reason she needed.
"I won't let it end here," Himiko swore as she planted a final kiss on her aniki's forehead. "I promise."
Two promises made to Yamato by two people whom he loved more than himself - one to kill, the other to protect. Somewhere, Yamato's spirit cried forgiveness from his little sister.
As far as promises were concerned, he was going to side with his killer on this.
-o-
The deep woods fell silent as if in sad lament for the young girl dragging the heavy blanket-covered body through its labyrinth. Himiko's exerted breaths created miniature fog clouds that dissipated and re-formed in a continuous cycle, making it difficult for her to spot a burial place in the heart of the forest, in the dead of night, with only the moon for company.
In a way, she was grateful for the struggle; kept her from breaking down, curling up and bawling in the middle of nowhere. Himiko paused for a brief rest by leaning on the long-handled shovel she used as a walking stick. Turning to look back at the path she cut through the woods, the girl discovered Yamato's blood had seeped through the shroud and stained the pristine powder of the snow.
Himiko trudged further into the thicket feeling as though she and her brother had been magically, dreadfully transported into a tragic re-telling of 'Hansel and Gretel', with grisly specks of bright crimson marking their forest trail instead of breadcrumbs; where the witch had gotten away, and where Himiko would have to make the trek back home (what home?) alone.
However, the moon was sympathetic to the plight of one of her daughters as she lit the young girl's way and cast a broad, luminous beam that filtered through the naked, frost-covered boughs. Amidst the copse of winter-hibernating trees, the scattering of white light converged on the snowy bark of a single aspen tree – gloriously pure, proud and shining in the bleakness of Yamato's hidden cemetery.
A solitary tear streaked down Himiko's cheek as she gasped at the vast symbolism of this, her brother's temporary resting place. The youngster was well-versed in the language of plants and trees, knew their curative and poisonous properties as well as their lore. She knew the aspen would protect Yamato's spirit from further attacks of dark forces, but at the same time, when spring came and his withering body began to feed it with life, the tree's leaves would tremble violently over the man's grave with anguish and guilt.
Himiko silently cursed Mido Ban. Wherever he would run, wherever he thought he could hide; she hoped the son of a bitch would feel exactly the same way.
The tears trickled steadily now as Himiko cleared a rectangular patch of snow beneath the tree. When brown earth was revealed, she burrowed the shovel in and broke only a fistful of dirt. With an involuntary despondent whimper, she heaved and dug and prodded, scooping merely clump after clump of soil each time.
With a blood-curdling scream, Himiko sank to her knees and clawed at the hard, frozen ground with her tiny fingers until the sharp grains started slicing under her nails.
"For God's sake! Let me bury him at least! Please!" she shrieked to the heavens, whence her fragile body quaked and finally burst open with the most desolate of sobs; sobs that belonged to old men and women grieving over a lifetime of waste and regret, not thirteen-year-olds brimming with a lifetime of promise.
Himiko cried the whole night as she painfully excavated the shallow grave where Yamato would lie, her wailing muffled by the grayish-blue hued white womb of the forest. Never did she realize someone else could hear her sorrow – running to neverwhere, coatless, shivering and wracked with sobs just as she was.
But how was she to know? Know his misery? The truth?
-o-
At the break of sunrise, with tears all spent, Himiko leveled her brother's tomb with a last dusting of earth. That done, she wearily tossed the shovel away and stared at her splintered, bloodied hands. Slumping to the ground, the girl pressed her palms into the snow to cool the sting of her wounds.
No matter, she thought. Her hands would heal soon, but her soul would not. Himiko looked up at the red dawn that peeked above the tops of the trees and shone brilliantly against the dusk of her salt-crusted, grime-stained face. She closed her eyes to the light and breathed in the clean, crisp air, spiked, she swore, with the coppery tang of an unforgivable sin.
Because unlike hers, Mido Ban's hands would be soaked in blood forever, never to be washed or scrubbed away; Yamato's blood that had bathed his skin, seeped into his pores and coursed straight into his soul.
Blood that was his blood, too.
And Himiko could smell it, wafting towards her like the scent of injured prey tempting a predator to the hunt. She turned her head, towards the biting Siberian wind-chill coming from the west. No.
She then shifted back to where the heat warmed her cheeks. She sniffed. Himiko froze. She inhaled again. Yes. South. South-east. Into the city…
In the direction of the rising sun.
Think a damned, accursed bastard such as yourself can find hope and salvation there? She sneered to herself.
When Himiko opened her eyes, a raging fire blazed in their dark, indigo depths and a seething vengeance rushed in her throbbing veins. Ironically, in her brother's death, she never felt so alive. With feverish determination and resolve, the girl crawled over to Yamato's grave and lay prostrate over it as if in final embrace.
"You're still alive, aniki," Himiko murmured eerily, her ear to the ground. "As long as he lives, you still live to haunt him, and I, to chase him…"
She smiled, her face briefly reflecting pure evil. "I promise you, Mido Ban's death will be our bestest birthday present ever."
-o-
Next installment: Anger
-o-
A/N2: "Wildflower" by Skylark. Lyrics are the property of their respective authors, artists, and labels. All lyrics provided are for entertainment purposes and personal use only.
The aspen tree is also known as the 'quaking aspen' for its leaves' propensity to shake at the slightest breeze. Its symbolism is rooted heavily in both Christian and Celtic lore. Legend has it that Jesus' cross was made from aspen and Judas was supposed to have hanged himself from this tree. Having been used this way, the aspen was doomed to constant trembling from guilt and sorrow.