Let's Try Left, a kino's journey fanfic

Where are you going, Kino?

Right now you're swerving slowly around a long bend, darting down a dusty orange path cut through a thick copse of trees. Light and shadow rush over your visor, air blasting unnoticed around your head as you twist the accelerator handle, being supported by...and in turn supporting...your motorrad and your friend. The copse is coming to an end, and you abruptly burst into the late spring day. You blink, not out of surprise, only because you need to adjust your eyes to the light. The road is rather bumpy here. Rather well-used, you ponder. Must be a notable junction ahead. They're always pretty ground up, you surmise.

That answered 'what are you doing', but the question was 'where are you going', Kino.

Ahead you see the junction. The sky above isn't that cloudy, but the clouds are large and well-defined, looming over the landscape like battleships covered in fur. The landscape is flatter here, slightly hilly but very open, snaked in various shades of green with the occasional grey punctuation or ellipses of rock. You can see far into the distance, a wide river's edge...maybe even a sea...pokes out of the very bottom-right of your vision on the far horizon. In front of you, you notice a fork in the road. One goes left and one goes right. Going straight ahead only offers bare rock and a cliff edge. Looks like you have to choose.

Yes, that's 'what's in front of you', but where are you going, Kino?

You pull back on the accelerator and rumble gradually to a halt, sticking your boot out to plant your foot on the ground. Your friend rumbles impatiently beneath you, sputtering and fuming as if trying to persuade you to hurry up. You push your goggles up your face and rest them on your hat, looking at the turning quizzically. It looks familiar to you, and gives you the strange impression that it's asking you a question, a question you have never ceased asking yourself.

No, that's 'what are you thinking'! Where are you going, Kino!?

A smile gently flickers across your lips. You're never going to give a straight answer, are you?

"Oh! Kino! Kino!" Hermes piped excitedly to his friend, "I remember this place!"

"Now that you mention it..." Kino rested one of her arms on her companion's handlebars and brought her hand to her chin, expressionless in thought, "why is it so familiar?"

"Don't you remember?" Hermes jumped in, holding a perfect memory of every road he'd been ridden down, "we were here just after visiting that country where everyone used dancing instead of medicine to make people better. We went right and headed south down that river there that led to the sea to the south and then headed west."

"You're right," Kino realised, resting both her arms on Hermes' handlebars, "we must have gone in a huge circle..."

Her thoughts meandered...of course her thoughts hardly ever proceeded in a straight line at the best of times, so 'meandering' was probably not the best way to describe her state of mind. Her thoughts just did whatever her thoughts always did...went off in completely unrelated tangents. She was thinking about why she didn't remember this split in the path. She had a great deal of maps with her, and knew even before travelling south that it was a massive peninsula that would double back on itself eventually. In other words, she should have seen this crossroad coming the moment she turned right. But she couldn't honestly remember that realisation ever crossing her mind. She knew, and at the same time consciously decided not to know.

"Kino?" the motorrad asked in the manner of an inquisitive child.

"Hm?" the traveller acknowledged, still slumped contemplatively over the front of Hermes, staring at the split in the road as if studying an interesting flower specimen.

"Why did we turn right?" Hermes asked.

The tangent in her mind ceased. That wasn't a question she could acknowledge. Her brain refused it wholesale. Instead, she looked south at the winding river flowing through the wide, segregated fields, and north at the rolling hills and grasslands.

"Let's see..." Kino rubbed the back of her neck as she recalled the moment she made the choice, "it was November...really cold...and I didn't fancy trawling north in freezing ice and snow. So we went south instead."

"For all the good that did us," Hermes whinged, recalling the blizzard they got stuck in that winter, "I guess there's winter wherever you go."

"That doesn't very likely, Hermes," Kino considered. There were parts of the world where winter and summer held no meaning, and instead were subjected to alternating periods of dryness and wetness. They should know, they've been there. Still, that was another tangent Kino's thoughts took her down...how she and Hermes remembered things. Hermes' memory was very literal. Whatever he saw, he remembered, and will probably remember until he rusts away into non-existence many centuries from now. Kino's memory, by contrast, had more holes in it than was comfortable. She had difficulty remembering what even happened yesterday, and her whole life up to the age of 12 was no more than a jumble of disconnected images in no set order. But while Hermes could only draw on what he's seen in front of him to guide him, Kino's mind was constantly drawing links, making inferences, filling in blanks with her imagination, and generally never once shutting up. She might've been grateful for anyone to come along and make it shut up so she could get some peace for once, but there was nothing to be done about it. She was cursed with a nomad mind.

"Well?" Hermes asked.

Kino blinked and looked down at the slightly turned headlight, wondering "well what?"

"Do we go right or do we go left!?" the motorrad grew irritated, wondering what was taking his friend so long to decide.

Kino considered. There was no real reason why they couldn't turn right again. There was a bridge across the river not far along the road that they had previously ridden past. But then...

"Let's try left."

Kino turned the handlebars left towards the rolling grasslands, and paused as if inviting the question Hermes asked next, "why left?"

"It's May now, so north should be alright in this time of year," Kino justified, getting ready to push off.

"Kino?" Hermes asked one more time.

"What is it?" Kino spoke back, using the time to look over the landscape and gauge how well it could be transversed. She'd need to stop and get better maps, she considered.

"What happens if we come to a turning like this...and we've already been both directions before?" the motorrad sounded worried.

"Then we go down one until we find a direction we haven't been before," Kino gave her pat answer.

"Yeah, but...what happens when we run out of places we haven't been before?" Hermes pressed the issue.

Kino smiled and patted her friend, slightly condescendingly, "it'll be a long while before that happens, Hermes."

"I know, but what happens when it does!?" Hermes was exasperated at this point. In truth, Kino knew what Hermes was pushing at from the first question, but he had the unerring tendency to ask bluntly a question she'd been grappling with for months. The motorrad was so much like a child in that regard. The kind that would point out that the emperor was wearing no clothes. Kino wasn't much like anything by comparison. She was just...Kino. She stretched her arms back and leant on the back of the motorrad, staring up at the slightly clouded sky.

"That's easy," the traveller decided, "we go back to the beginning and start all over again."

"Even in places we've been before?" Hermes wondered aloud with surprise.

"The world changes all the time, Hermes," Kino considered, "by the time we have to return to countries we've already been to, they won't be the same countries anymore. They won't be the same people anymore. We'll be starting all over again in more ways than one."

"So..." Hermes wondered in idle curiosity, "...will the journey ever end?"

Kino snapped back into practical concentration, her gaze shifting to the left road, goggles being pulled over her eyes and hand returning to the throttle. The gloved hand twisted and Hermes' rumble became a low roar, dust and mud ejected from under the back wheel as the motorrad surged ahead, turning to the left before straightening out. Kino's boot left the ground and tucked into Hermes' left foot-rest, the gentle wind becoming her own private gale. She gave no thought to anything except moving. She always had to keep moving.

"I suppose that was the wrong thing to ask," Hermes guess.

'A nomad mind?' That was the best you could come up with Kino? You can't blame Hermes for pointing out the emperor has no clothes.

You rumble downhill along the path, passing under a cloud's shadow as it drifts across the muddy road. Your knowledge of the north is scant, at best, compared to the networks you used to find destinations in the south. Yet you still turned left, and don't give the road behind you a second glance, staring at the rise ahead and not knowing what's beyond it.

A long while before you run out of destinations, you say? Will you still be travelling when you're old and wrinkled? Even your master gave up eventually. You give no thought to what's in front of you, and you've long given up trying to justify your travels with some waffling, inconsistent philosophical drivel. So the question remains...

Where are you going, Kino?

You pull back on the accelerator, and ride over the horizon.

BREAK

Author's Note: I was grinding my way through work, self-sustenance, a long-running Avatar fan-fic serial, and diluting my brain with internet instead of working when this little slice of heaven called 'Kino's Journey' fell into my lap. So far I've only seen the anime, but still felt compelled to show my love for Keiichi Sigsawa's creation the only way I knew how. It's a series that brings tears to the eyes. Where most anime outstay their welcome, one feels compelled to follow Kino on her next adventure up to the very end. Where a series gets bogged down in filler, Kino thrives on it. It might just be a side-effect of being produced from a literary source rather than the latest teen fad, but the sheer beauty, terror, wistfulness and cruelty that exists in the world Kino travels through...in essence our world too...compels you to travel with her. Which funnily enough is exactly what I've done.

This isn't a 'break' from my other fan fictions, per se. I'm writing those too, it's just a side thing I needed to get across. As of right now this is nothing more than a placeholder, a reminder to contribute to Kino's travels at some point in the future. It might turn into a prologue for a series of one-shots, as I have at least one idea I'd like to write. I was thinking of experimenting with my style a bit more than Avatar allows. The 'BREAK' I put at the end is essentially something to indicate 'this is the point this tale stops' instead of 'THE END' or 'TO BE CONTINUED'. It can be interpreted more than one way. It can merely be a 'break' in the story until the next part, or it can be a 'break' in Kino's voyage in general. After all, it never 'ends', and saying 'to be continued' implies it can be put on hold. Even if I write a final chapter, I'll still end it with 'BREAK'.

So it's BREAK for now, I guess.