We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them
He had seen madness before.
There was a young man once, he remembered, only barely older than he was.
He was sitting outside a small teahouse when he and Misao came upon him while
attending to some errands. He had thought the boy was sick -- he had tucked
his head between his clasped knees and he was rocking himself back and forth,
moaning loudly. Alarmed, he had bent down, tried to calm him. As soon as
his hand touched the other's shoulder, the boy turned on him, his eyes
blazing black and red all at once, his mouth drawn back in a snarl, and
he bit him.
He still had scars on his hand. Sometimes at night he looked at them as
he would look at an inkwash painting, and he would wonder that madness
could be so easily immortalized in the dried blood and broken flesh of an
unknown random stranger. He dreamed of the mad boy for months afterward, and
always in his dreams the boy would be kneeling beside him, his eyes bright
like fires dying, and he would be asking him to deliver unto him his insanity,
as if it were an artifact that can be excavated from his body and then
offered as a propitiatory sacrifice.
And perhaps it can.
It is believed that the insane are consumed by evil spirits. There are
rituals designed to counteract this, dating from ancient times, and all of
them of course involve exorcists, for what is madness but possession?
For a time after the young man bit him, he wondered if madness was also
infectious. Surely the living can possess the living as much as the dead,
perhaps even more so. Ghosts exist in a monomaniac landscape where the
past is so integrated with a sense of others' wrongdoings; the madness
they engendered could only be an empty windowless room that existed only
insofar as it was outside of themselves. But the living mad wandered the
ruins of their hearts. The people they contaminated saw the destruction
of their dreams from the desolation of within; it was not so much possession
as a disease, madness is the transmission of a will towards self-murder.
He thought about that for weeks. He would watch the poorer of the insane
driven together in small, dirty, public cells, where they can be watched
and pitied and ridiculed and transformed into a point of morbid detached
curiosity by anyone who cared to do so, and there were many who cared,
himself included. There was something very fascinating about seeing people
die from the inside; he would study them closely, wondering which of them
were mad because they could see themselves only as formless vengeful
wraiths that were otherwise dead were it not for their also amorphous hate,
and which of them were mad because they could see themselves only as they
hated themselves and themselves alone. These people died more quickly, he
observed, but then it was probably an easier task killing one's soul when
one was poor. And it was so much more easier to hate others on the basis
of internalized spectral grudges. Hate could be more elemental to survival
than food; even the poorest of the poor could see that.
After this he would visit the mansions of the rich, or the less ostentatious
middle-class dwellings in the city, where the geography of insanity seemed
to be more elaborate, if only because their convolutions were obvious. The
mad man would be on his bed, surrounded by solemn family members. Sometimes
the mad man would be restrained, sometimes not. Always, he noted, they were
crying. Buddhist priests chanted sutras in the room, while hidden discreetly
from view but close enough to be heard, the child-medium shuddered and screamed
as they imagined themselves eating the mad person's madness. That was how he
thought of it. Eating. He wasn't sure if the hunger was initially voluntary,
but that distinction quickly became irrelevant anyway when the hunger mutated
into an addiction, as it always did. Lusting for more and more narratives of
madness, mediums constructed their devastations as if they were spinning
candy, or preparing stylized opium. Meanwhile, the mad men from whom they
took their madness cry and cry, as only the knowingly victimized could grieve.
And afterwards, they would leap out of bed and shout that they are healed.
Their insanities would then be displayed, like expensive newfangled toys,
which they were, of course. People with money could afford to play with their
sanity; more importantly, they could afford to pay for their madness and flaunt
it. The mediums, on the other hand, these juvenile voluptuaries of insanity,
acquired theirs for free, but it was all the same thing. He wondered what
they saw, these artificially mad people who treated insanity as kicks.
Perhaps they didn't see anything at all. Perhaps their madness was really
just a story, interesting sometimes, but more often boring, like a tired
old fable only listened to in the marketplace because of the sex. But
the tragic rarefied heights to which they aspired were simply laughable;
he looked at their contrived sorrowful nobility in the same way that he
looked at cheap trinkets that fell apart seconds after being bought. Their
madness was beautiful and mad, but also empty of meaning, and that he
disdained.
Now he asked himself if it was possible to survive the realization that one
was mad when one really was, and if so if this was true madness, when
the world one lived in was systematically reduced to a series of incidental
aestheticized externalities that were relevant only insofar as they
constituted one's insanity. It was a complex invention, and he was proud
of it sometimes, but then he would start thinking of how much longer he
could stand it, and he would inevitably despair. This was no sham, no
pretty airy story. He was mad because he had to be and because he knew
he could be and was. But he would not think of that now. There were other,
more immediate variables to consider.
Like Okina, for instance. He stalked the body slowly in a circle, inspecting
the wounds inflicted by his kodachi. The old man was bleeding copiously,
but he would live. He struck out one more time, just a little scratch
on the face to complete the formula he had devised in his mind. His mouth
felt dry, his arms leaden, his throat tight, but that was only to be
expected. He had seen all this, he had calculated all this.
A movement, in the doorway. Also expected, also planned. He saw his
proceeding actions as clearly as he could the next steps in an elementary
dance. He straightened, sheathing his kodachi, with enough flourish of
movement such that she was sure of seeing the blood on the blades. Okina's
blood.
He would then walk towards the door, past her unmoving form, and if she
turned on him, if she attacked him, as he was sure she would, he knew
he would be in position to kill her, as he was sure he would. A simplistic
plan, but eminently infallible.
He had it all worked out.
He was only a few steps away from her now. This close he could see her hair,
so black and seemingly so fine he wondered detachedly how much it would
cost him to touch it. His hand was already reaching out before he knew it.
He forced it back down to his side.
She was just so close.
"Aoshi-sama," she whispered. She was looking at him with wide blue eyes;
were they ever this intense? He couldn't read their expression and he didn't
want to. It was not necessary. He would pass her in a moment. In a moment
she would tell him she hated him, she would be drawing her knives, and it
would be all over.
But then she smiled.
It was only a little smile, and she was really crying, he saw that now. He
knew he should ignore it, and her tears, kill her now nonetheless, but
instead he stood riveted by that smile. And suddenly he was also thinking
of Haanya and the others, and he felt the pain he felt when that little
boy had bitten him on his hand, so long ago. But that madness had not
driven him mad, whereas her smile was possessing him like a sentient
beautiful thing, and when he looked at her, he knew he was seeing the
ruins not of his sanity, which was something he could easily overlook,
but the ruins of his own madness, as she saw it for him, and it was
terrifying, and ridiculous.
Did she really think it was so simple as that?
"Aoshi-sama," she repeated.
He had been prepared for this, theoretically. If he had to rip his soul
out himself, he would have done so long ago, if it would have served his
purpose. But he hadn't seen the necessity. He would think of the mad
young boy, and the boy's teeth on his skin, his madness fossilized in
his blood. And he would laugh at him in his dreams, because he knew
that try as he might, the boy could not touch him. If he wanted to,
he knew he could engineer a conceivable illusion of his madness, on
the inside, but it would only be childish and exaggerated and ugly,
and so he had never tried. How could it be otherwise? He consciously
purged hate in himself, and thus armed with the arrogance of the
consciously pure, he rejected the possibility of ever tampering with
his heart.
Possession, he felt, was a state of mind.
Shishio wanted to change the world; he only wanted to standardize it
to his madness, drive it mad so he could live in a mad world that was
the only choice for living, it was the only way he could...
She was still watching him, she was still smiling her small smile,
through her tears, smiling it with white drawn lips and dark blue
eyes darker with shock.
She reached out then with a slender hand, and very softly touched
his bloody fingers one by one. He froze.
"Oh Aoshi-sama..." she sighed. "What's happened to you?"
And he stared at her, suddenly stricken, for she was looking at him
as if she loved him.
Madness is true, she seemed to be saying with each fluttering childlike
caress, when people you have loved all your life have turned against
you, when the beloved dead have forsaken you, when the only story you
can tell about your insanity is one constructed from broken hearts.
I love you and that is my madness.
He didn't know how long he stood there until he managed to pull
himself away from her grasping fingers, or when he finally truly
turned his back on her. He heard her cry out but he was walking faster
and faster, out into the darkening twilight and thin cold rain, before
she could drive him completely to her madness with her smile.
It was the perfect possession, he thought, shaking.
He looked at his hand, and stared. The scars from the boy were gone.
There were only impressions of her fingertips, indented in blood and
rain, spread across the back of his hand like a flower, like her heart.
And, slowly, his eyes burning, he brought them to his lips and kissed
each one of them, with the same infinite tenderness with which she
had touched him.
That night, he dreamed of her.
END
*Rurouni Kenshin copyright Nobuhiro Watsuki. All other disclaimers apply.
This fic was written by Tin Mandigma ([email protected]). Please do not
archive without permission.
NOTE: Well. This was initially a Misao POV, up until the third paragraph
or so, when I realized I was really writing Aoshi dammit. Also, I wanted
to do this piece for the 60-second Challenge in the KFFDISC, but when I
broke 1000 words and I was only three-quarters through, I said screw it
and modified the scene I'd chosen to describe in my supposed vignette in
ways I never thought possible. Fic's horribly long-winded but Aoshi's brain
is a prolix convoluted fucked-up piece of work and I have never figured
out the technique of writing him in simple sentences and straightforward
imagery. Maybe next time.
A short explanation about what I was trying to do with Aoshi -- I think
I just can't express it very clearly, but I've always seen his supposed
insanity in the series as an aesthetic construction on his part, sort
of like a mathematical equation. Most of the male characters in Rurouni
Kenshin seem to be obsessed with systems and world-building, and with
beauty. Kenshin's belief in non-violence is not so much an ethic as
an abstract logic; of course it has its contexts, but in his mind, Kenshin
thinks of it in the same way that he would think of murder. Something
efficient and precise and dazzling in its perfect form. Saitou has the
same sentiment with regard to his Aku Zoku Zan, and Hiko with the entire
paradigm of Hiten Mitsurugi Ryuu. Aoshi's obsession is not quite so obscure,
but it is even more fanatic than Shishio's. He tries to pervert the
world around him, he is mad inasmuch as his world is mad, and because
his world is mad, he can do mad things. He knows he's a victim of circumstance,
but he can't quite act on that, ironically because he still holds to a moral
code that is outside from him and yet that is the one thing that he can't
bring himself to destroy, because should that happen then he would be
really truly mad. He is aware of this incongruity, which is why he is
so fucking repressed and tense.
Quote from T.S. Eliot "Four Quartets" ^_^
See, they return, and bring us with them
He had seen madness before.
There was a young man once, he remembered, only barely older than he was.
He was sitting outside a small teahouse when he and Misao came upon him while
attending to some errands. He had thought the boy was sick -- he had tucked
his head between his clasped knees and he was rocking himself back and forth,
moaning loudly. Alarmed, he had bent down, tried to calm him. As soon as
his hand touched the other's shoulder, the boy turned on him, his eyes
blazing black and red all at once, his mouth drawn back in a snarl, and
he bit him.
He still had scars on his hand. Sometimes at night he looked at them as
he would look at an inkwash painting, and he would wonder that madness
could be so easily immortalized in the dried blood and broken flesh of an
unknown random stranger. He dreamed of the mad boy for months afterward, and
always in his dreams the boy would be kneeling beside him, his eyes bright
like fires dying, and he would be asking him to deliver unto him his insanity,
as if it were an artifact that can be excavated from his body and then
offered as a propitiatory sacrifice.
And perhaps it can.
It is believed that the insane are consumed by evil spirits. There are
rituals designed to counteract this, dating from ancient times, and all of
them of course involve exorcists, for what is madness but possession?
For a time after the young man bit him, he wondered if madness was also
infectious. Surely the living can possess the living as much as the dead,
perhaps even more so. Ghosts exist in a monomaniac landscape where the
past is so integrated with a sense of others' wrongdoings; the madness
they engendered could only be an empty windowless room that existed only
insofar as it was outside of themselves. But the living mad wandered the
ruins of their hearts. The people they contaminated saw the destruction
of their dreams from the desolation of within; it was not so much possession
as a disease, madness is the transmission of a will towards self-murder.
He thought about that for weeks. He would watch the poorer of the insane
driven together in small, dirty, public cells, where they can be watched
and pitied and ridiculed and transformed into a point of morbid detached
curiosity by anyone who cared to do so, and there were many who cared,
himself included. There was something very fascinating about seeing people
die from the inside; he would study them closely, wondering which of them
were mad because they could see themselves only as formless vengeful
wraiths that were otherwise dead were it not for their also amorphous hate,
and which of them were mad because they could see themselves only as they
hated themselves and themselves alone. These people died more quickly, he
observed, but then it was probably an easier task killing one's soul when
one was poor. And it was so much more easier to hate others on the basis
of internalized spectral grudges. Hate could be more elemental to survival
than food; even the poorest of the poor could see that.
After this he would visit the mansions of the rich, or the less ostentatious
middle-class dwellings in the city, where the geography of insanity seemed
to be more elaborate, if only because their convolutions were obvious. The
mad man would be on his bed, surrounded by solemn family members. Sometimes
the mad man would be restrained, sometimes not. Always, he noted, they were
crying. Buddhist priests chanted sutras in the room, while hidden discreetly
from view but close enough to be heard, the child-medium shuddered and screamed
as they imagined themselves eating the mad person's madness. That was how he
thought of it. Eating. He wasn't sure if the hunger was initially voluntary,
but that distinction quickly became irrelevant anyway when the hunger mutated
into an addiction, as it always did. Lusting for more and more narratives of
madness, mediums constructed their devastations as if they were spinning
candy, or preparing stylized opium. Meanwhile, the mad men from whom they
took their madness cry and cry, as only the knowingly victimized could grieve.
And afterwards, they would leap out of bed and shout that they are healed.
Their insanities would then be displayed, like expensive newfangled toys,
which they were, of course. People with money could afford to play with their
sanity; more importantly, they could afford to pay for their madness and flaunt
it. The mediums, on the other hand, these juvenile voluptuaries of insanity,
acquired theirs for free, but it was all the same thing. He wondered what
they saw, these artificially mad people who treated insanity as kicks.
Perhaps they didn't see anything at all. Perhaps their madness was really
just a story, interesting sometimes, but more often boring, like a tired
old fable only listened to in the marketplace because of the sex. But
the tragic rarefied heights to which they aspired were simply laughable;
he looked at their contrived sorrowful nobility in the same way that he
looked at cheap trinkets that fell apart seconds after being bought. Their
madness was beautiful and mad, but also empty of meaning, and that he
disdained.
Now he asked himself if it was possible to survive the realization that one
was mad when one really was, and if so if this was true madness, when
the world one lived in was systematically reduced to a series of incidental
aestheticized externalities that were relevant only insofar as they
constituted one's insanity. It was a complex invention, and he was proud
of it sometimes, but then he would start thinking of how much longer he
could stand it, and he would inevitably despair. This was no sham, no
pretty airy story. He was mad because he had to be and because he knew
he could be and was. But he would not think of that now. There were other,
more immediate variables to consider.
Like Okina, for instance. He stalked the body slowly in a circle, inspecting
the wounds inflicted by his kodachi. The old man was bleeding copiously,
but he would live. He struck out one more time, just a little scratch
on the face to complete the formula he had devised in his mind. His mouth
felt dry, his arms leaden, his throat tight, but that was only to be
expected. He had seen all this, he had calculated all this.
A movement, in the doorway. Also expected, also planned. He saw his
proceeding actions as clearly as he could the next steps in an elementary
dance. He straightened, sheathing his kodachi, with enough flourish of
movement such that she was sure of seeing the blood on the blades. Okina's
blood.
He would then walk towards the door, past her unmoving form, and if she
turned on him, if she attacked him, as he was sure she would, he knew
he would be in position to kill her, as he was sure he would. A simplistic
plan, but eminently infallible.
He had it all worked out.
He was only a few steps away from her now. This close he could see her hair,
so black and seemingly so fine he wondered detachedly how much it would
cost him to touch it. His hand was already reaching out before he knew it.
He forced it back down to his side.
She was just so close.
"Aoshi-sama," she whispered. She was looking at him with wide blue eyes;
were they ever this intense? He couldn't read their expression and he didn't
want to. It was not necessary. He would pass her in a moment. In a moment
she would tell him she hated him, she would be drawing her knives, and it
would be all over.
But then she smiled.
It was only a little smile, and she was really crying, he saw that now. He
knew he should ignore it, and her tears, kill her now nonetheless, but
instead he stood riveted by that smile. And suddenly he was also thinking
of Haanya and the others, and he felt the pain he felt when that little
boy had bitten him on his hand, so long ago. But that madness had not
driven him mad, whereas her smile was possessing him like a sentient
beautiful thing, and when he looked at her, he knew he was seeing the
ruins not of his sanity, which was something he could easily overlook,
but the ruins of his own madness, as she saw it for him, and it was
terrifying, and ridiculous.
Did she really think it was so simple as that?
"Aoshi-sama," she repeated.
He had been prepared for this, theoretically. If he had to rip his soul
out himself, he would have done so long ago, if it would have served his
purpose. But he hadn't seen the necessity. He would think of the mad
young boy, and the boy's teeth on his skin, his madness fossilized in
his blood. And he would laugh at him in his dreams, because he knew
that try as he might, the boy could not touch him. If he wanted to,
he knew he could engineer a conceivable illusion of his madness, on
the inside, but it would only be childish and exaggerated and ugly,
and so he had never tried. How could it be otherwise? He consciously
purged hate in himself, and thus armed with the arrogance of the
consciously pure, he rejected the possibility of ever tampering with
his heart.
Possession, he felt, was a state of mind.
Shishio wanted to change the world; he only wanted to standardize it
to his madness, drive it mad so he could live in a mad world that was
the only choice for living, it was the only way he could...
She was still watching him, she was still smiling her small smile,
through her tears, smiling it with white drawn lips and dark blue
eyes darker with shock.
She reached out then with a slender hand, and very softly touched
his bloody fingers one by one. He froze.
"Oh Aoshi-sama..." she sighed. "What's happened to you?"
And he stared at her, suddenly stricken, for she was looking at him
as if she loved him.
Madness is true, she seemed to be saying with each fluttering childlike
caress, when people you have loved all your life have turned against
you, when the beloved dead have forsaken you, when the only story you
can tell about your insanity is one constructed from broken hearts.
I love you and that is my madness.
He didn't know how long he stood there until he managed to pull
himself away from her grasping fingers, or when he finally truly
turned his back on her. He heard her cry out but he was walking faster
and faster, out into the darkening twilight and thin cold rain, before
she could drive him completely to her madness with her smile.
It was the perfect possession, he thought, shaking.
He looked at his hand, and stared. The scars from the boy were gone.
There were only impressions of her fingertips, indented in blood and
rain, spread across the back of his hand like a flower, like her heart.
And, slowly, his eyes burning, he brought them to his lips and kissed
each one of them, with the same infinite tenderness with which she
had touched him.
That night, he dreamed of her.
END
*Rurouni Kenshin copyright Nobuhiro Watsuki. All other disclaimers apply.
This fic was written by Tin Mandigma ([email protected]). Please do not
archive without permission.
NOTE: Well. This was initially a Misao POV, up until the third paragraph
or so, when I realized I was really writing Aoshi dammit. Also, I wanted
to do this piece for the 60-second Challenge in the KFFDISC, but when I
broke 1000 words and I was only three-quarters through, I said screw it
and modified the scene I'd chosen to describe in my supposed vignette in
ways I never thought possible. Fic's horribly long-winded but Aoshi's brain
is a prolix convoluted fucked-up piece of work and I have never figured
out the technique of writing him in simple sentences and straightforward
imagery. Maybe next time.
A short explanation about what I was trying to do with Aoshi -- I think
I just can't express it very clearly, but I've always seen his supposed
insanity in the series as an aesthetic construction on his part, sort
of like a mathematical equation. Most of the male characters in Rurouni
Kenshin seem to be obsessed with systems and world-building, and with
beauty. Kenshin's belief in non-violence is not so much an ethic as
an abstract logic; of course it has its contexts, but in his mind, Kenshin
thinks of it in the same way that he would think of murder. Something
efficient and precise and dazzling in its perfect form. Saitou has the
same sentiment with regard to his Aku Zoku Zan, and Hiko with the entire
paradigm of Hiten Mitsurugi Ryuu. Aoshi's obsession is not quite so obscure,
but it is even more fanatic than Shishio's. He tries to pervert the
world around him, he is mad inasmuch as his world is mad, and because
his world is mad, he can do mad things. He knows he's a victim of circumstance,
but he can't quite act on that, ironically because he still holds to a moral
code that is outside from him and yet that is the one thing that he can't
bring himself to destroy, because should that happen then he would be
really truly mad. He is aware of this incongruity, which is why he is
so fucking repressed and tense.
Quote from T.S. Eliot "Four Quartets" ^_^