Elizabeth Culmer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
edenfalling) wrote2007-05-03 12:40 pm
edenfalling) wrote2007-05-03 12:40 pm
Entry tags:
[Fic] "Samsara" -- Saiyuki
I'd like to say, by way of preface, that I haven't taken up writing Saiyuki fanfiction as a regular thing. This is basically a character study, or a relationship study, as well as an attempt to explain something that's been puzzling me. It's pretty dark, but given the fandom and characters, that's kind of par for the course.
So. Kanan and Gonou: two become nothing. A non-chronological portrait of obsession and death. Contains incest, rape, torture, madness, murder, and suicide. (This is Gonou and Kanan. Did you think it was going to be pretty?)
(The final version is now up at ff.net)
---------------------------------------------
Samsara
---------------------------------------------
They take her away as afternoon bleeds into evening.
She fights, of course. Kanan doesn't have Gonou's deceptive strength, but he's taught her about leverage and joint locks, and she manages to slice open two of her attackers with a long kitchen knife before they overpower her and bind her arms to her sides with strips of her own dress.
"Hyakugan Maoh's gonna fucking love you, bitch," one of them snarls as they drag her toward their waiting dragon. She stumbles through the deserted streets, past eerily silent houses with their curtains closed tight at midday. "You're gonna regret making trouble."
All she can think of is Gonou -- her lover, her brother -- coming home to an empty, ransacked house. He's the center of her world, the source of gravity that defines her... and she's the center of his, the sun that lifts his darkness. Family is everything. Separation is death. If she's not there, who will protect him?
Hyakugan Maoh lives far away, in unmapped forests on the other side of Chang-An. No human has seen his castle and lived.
Kanan wonders how long it will take Gonou to find her.
---------------------------------------------
They only talk once about the years apart.
"Nothing mattered; nothing was real," Gonou says, his lips pressed against the back of her shoulder as they lie in bed. "I learned everything I could, but none of it meant anything. I got in fights, but pain is an illusion the body imposes on the soul, and other people's pain is an even more paper-thin façade. The nuns tried to make me care about people, tried to make me feel love or guilt or hatred -- to feel something, anything -- but I can't get out of myself without you. It's just me and my thoughts, spiraling in forever."
"I lost myself," Kanan says, weaving her fingers through his as their hand rested on her belly. "The world was so much, and I was so small. I didn't matter; 'Kanan' was just a sound the air makes, not a name. I stopped talking, stopped thinking -- I don't remember more than a few days of that last year before you found me. The teachers told me that I spent all my time in the gardens, that I'd listen when someone gave me an order, but that I'd get distracted and spend hours staring at a blade of grass or a slug inching along a leaf."
"I won't ever let anyone take you away again," Gonou says.
"I know. But if -- only if -- something does happen, I promise I'll wait for you," Kanan says, twisting within Gonou's embrace to meet his eyes, as poison green as her own. "Promise you'll wait for me, too."
"I'll always find you. You're my other half."
"Forever, right?"
"Yeah."
In the darkness, pressed so close together that their hearts synchronize through the veils of flesh and bone, this is their only truth.
---------------------------------------------
Hyakugan Maoh is fascinated by her eyes. "So brilliant, like living emeralds," he says, tracing a talon along her cheekbone, up the side of her nose, and back through her eyebrow. "I wonder if you have divine blood in your family, diluted enough that only the coloring remains."
Kanan spits in his face.
Hyakugan Maoh laughs. He throws her onto his bed and dives after her in a swirl of silk sheets. His taloned hands pin her in place like a butterfly caught in a collector's trophy case. His knee spreads her legs. He drives into her.
Power beats against her skin like lightning, freezing her body. She isn't strong enough to stop him. She can't protect herself.
She wants to let go, to wisp away into the air, to stop being 'Kanan' -- then she wouldn't hurt, then Hyakugan Maoh would have nothing left to arouse his interest -- but she promised Gonou to wait for him. Gonou will come. He'll rescue her, and they'll find a new home, a new place without any tainted memories.
When Hyakugan Maoh bends his head, Kanan lunges for his neck, teeth bared.
He backhands her, casually, and she fades into the little respite of unconsciousness.
---------------------------------------------
Their parents tell Kanan and Gonou to protect and cherish each other, always and forever. Family is the foundation of all things.
When the nuns lead Gonou in one direction and Kanan in another, Kanan screams herself breathless until she faints. Her last clear memory is of Gonou's hands flailing toward her, clawing the air, trying to reach across the gap. The days afterward are misty at best; she has no anchor to mark her personal experiences out from the immensity of life.
Years later, she hears a voice, ragged and soft, saying "Kanan, Kanan, is that you?" and it occurs to her that 'Kanan' is her name. She looks up, lifts her hands from the damp garden soil, and sees a skinny boy with black hair, backlit and haloed by the setting sun. He kneels down beside her, one hand, trembling, stretched toward her face.
His eyes are green as poison.
"Gonou?" she whispers as the tips of his fingers kiss her cheek.
The boy is crying. Her brother is crying. Gonou is crying.
For the first time in years, Kanan finds the boundaries that hold her self separate from the universe, finds protection from the storm of life. Clinging to her brother, she swears over and over never to lose him again.
Gonou defines her.
---------------------------------------------
It takes less than a month for Hyakugan Maoh to grow tired of her and send his guards out to fetch a new woman.
Two servants lead Kanan down from her tower prison, toward the central courtyard. By now she's seen what happens to Hyakugan Maoh's past favorites, seen the bloody executions he uses to test to nerve of his chosen guards. She knows how impossible it is to dream of rescue; not even Gonou can fight a thousand youkai. "I'm sorry, Gonou," she whispers to herself. "I couldn't wait long enough." She feels the cool weight of chains on her wrists, the light touch of linen against her skin, the warmth of flickering torchlight on her hair, and prepares to melt into those sensations, unraveling herself into the world.
"Oh, you won't be dying. Not yet," a cool voice says.
Kanan whirls as best she can in her chains, and stares at the pale youkai with long hair and fine silk robes. This is Hyakugan Maoh's son, Chin Yisou; what does he want with her? Isn't one tormentor enough? Hasn't she paid enough for freedom?
"My father is done with you, but I'm not," Chin Yisou says, waving one clawed hand to dismiss the servants. "You talk in your sleep, Cho Kanan. You call for one man, but sometimes you call him 'brother,' and sometimes you call him 'husband.' You think he'll come for you, yes? I'm curious to see how far he'll get, and it will be much more entertaining to have a tragic reunion scene before I step in and kill him. Don't you agree, Cho Kanan?"
She can feel power hovering around him, even stronger than his father's aura. His power whispers of despair.
She throws a porcelain vase at his head and sprints down the corridor, toward the window.
He catches her within ten steps. His breath is chill on her neck.
Kanan prays for Gonou to forget her.
---------------------------------------------
"Hey, Gonou. Wouldn't it be nice to get married? Family's the most important thing; if we have children, wouldn't it be good for them to have a stable family?"
Gonou looks up from marking essays and smiles. "We're not stable now?"
"You know what I mean," Kanan says as she slices an orange into sections. "I want to do things properly. I want to tell the world how much you mean to me."
"Mmm." Gonou steals a slice from her bowl and bites into it, savoring the juice. "Kanan, are you pregnant?"
She drops the knife. "No! You know we've been careful, and we'll go on being careful. I know we're not ready for a change like that. I'm just bringing it up now so we won't be unprepared if."
"They won't let us," Gonou says, serious now. "Enough people in town suspect we're siblings; we'll never be able to marry officially. But I promise that if we could, I'd marry you right now. I don't know how to live without you."
Kanan looks thoughtfully at the knife on the table, and then stands to fetch a clean blade from the drawer. "Then let's get married. We're already joined by blood, but we'll bind ourselves by choice as well as chance -- me to you and you to me, so we'll never be separated again, never go back to being half people." The knife is razor-sharp; it parts the skin on the back of her wrist with barely any pressure.
Gonou takes the blade from her hand and turns it on himself. "Forever," he says.
"Yeah."
Their fingers twine, sticky with blood, and they pledge their souls to each other.
---------------------------------------------
It's far too early to be sure, but Kanan has always been sensitive to the movement of life. She can feel the spark in her womb, feel the faint stirrings of potential. In a way, she thinks she should have expected this.
Hyakugan Maoh has no reason to be careful with his women, after all.
"So we're family now, yes?" Chin Yisou says one day. "If you bear my half-sibling, that makes you my stepmother of sorts. I've never had a mother; I wonder if you'll teach me what I've been missing all these years, Cho Kanan." His smile is cold and sharp, like steel in winter, and Kanan knows that he doesn't mean a word he says, that he's only prodding open wounds to see if she'll flinch.
Family.
Kanan has never wanted so badly to fray into nothingness, but she can't. She can't. She's waiting for Gonou, like she promised, even though she hopes he'll never come -- hopes he'll forget her, hopes he'll find someone else to light his darkness and prove to him that the world exists. She's waiting for Gonou, and there's a baby growing in her belly.
She's going to be a mother.
She thinks she may go insane.
Kanan needs Gonou; she can't think without him, can't exist without him. The world rushes in like a storm and overwhelms her until all she can cling to is his name, his face, and the surety that he'll find her. They're two halves of a whole, two broken shards of a puzzle that fit together into a shape beautiful despite their flaws. Forever.
But what if two shards become three? Or if solving the puzzle destroys the pieces? He can't come here. She couldn't bear to see him die because of her; he has to live. They have to separate. Gonou has always been stronger than she is. Without him, she vanishes, but he can learn to live without her. He has to. He has to.
Deep inside, so deep she can't see to stitch the wound, her heart cracks. She starts to unravel.
"This is quite fascinating, Cho Kanan," the long-haired youkai says with a toothy smile. His face is blurred by mist, cut loose from any association with meaning.
Who is Kanan?
---------------------------------------------
"Hey, Kanan." Gonou leans against the door of their rented room, his reading glasses held loosely between his fingers. "You know the children's school outside town, the one we passed on our way in? I was talking to the principal, and he offered me a job. This town doesn't have any other school, so that place takes everyone, even orphans like us. The pay isn't very good, but we can live off it. Shall we get a place together?" Late afternoon sunlight slants over the floor at his feet and reflects off his glasses.
Kanan sets down the suitcase and sits on the bed, her knees suddenly unwilling to hold her up. "A home?"
"Yes," Gonou says, walking in and closing the door behind him, casting the room in shadow. "People will guess that we're family -- even if I wear my glasses all the time, and you act shy and look down, it's hard to hide our eyes -- but if we keep quiet, they won't have any proof. We could stay here. We could make a real life. You could have a garden again."
Kanan pictures it, weaving the idea in her mind. In the morning, they wake together, and he cooks breakfast while she washes her hair. Gonou spends the day teaching children, making use of his knowledge and learning to deal with people he can't ignore or rebel against. She gardens, or shops, or maybe gets a job cleaning houses. In the evening, Gonou comes home to the dinner she's made, and at night they sleep together, unafraid of nuns or teachers breaking down their door and condemning them or tearing them apart.
"Yes," she says. "Yes. Let's stay here. Let's make a home."
"Just the two of us, alone together," Gonou says with a smile hidden in the corner of his mouth.
Kanan kisses it until his happiness spreads over his whole face. "Gonou, thank you. And you know, we're not really alone anymore. We have each other."
"Forever, right?" Gonou says.
"Yeah."
---------------------------------------------
It's raining; she can feel the pounding water even here in the heart of the castle, like a thrumming heartbeat through the stones. For a time she hears screams and scattered crashes, but those die, bleeding into the silent rain, the way she's bleeding her soul into the air.
"I believe this is the climax of our little story," a voice says, troubling the surface of her thoughts. "I wouldn't want to spoil things, so I'll take my leave of you for now, Cho Kanan. Please give my regards to your brother."
She hardly notices the voice depart. She wonders briefly at the silence, but it suits the mist that wraps her mind and vision, and she lets it soothe her as she kneels and touches her belly, touches the little spark that traps her a bare handful of threads from true self-negation.
"Kanan?" A new voice, ragged and soft, breaks the silence and echoes from the stones. "Kanan? Are you here?"
She looks up into one poison-green eye; the man's other eye is drenched in scarlet-black, as if he were crying blood. As if her lover were crying blood. As if Gonou were crying blood.
She is Kanan.
"Gonou?" She stares at her brother, his slender body drenched in flickering torch-flame shadows. Surely Gonou can't be the one who laid this expectant hush on the castle. Surely he can't have come for her. There's so little left of her, so little to inspire this kind of madness.
But Gonou doesn't know that. Separated, they're blind. They never felt each other's pain when the nuns tore them apart. They only felt their own loss of balance.
"You're alive! You're really alive!" Gonou says, reaching through the bars of her cell to grasp her arm.
"Your right eye..." she begins, and loses the thread of her thought. She tries again. "Why did you come here?" All he can take from this place is death. He can't die. He has to live.
"I'm so sorry, Kanan, for everything," Gonou says, leaning his face against the bars. "Let's go home, okay? I promise I'll protect you."
Blind. He's blind. Just like she's been blind. They can't go home; they have no home. He can't protect her; nobody can protect anyone else. If they can't live without each other, then even when they're together, are they really living?
"It's too late. All right?"
"What?" Gonou says. She pulls the knife from his side and steps back. Gonou's eye goes wide in shock, open at last. "What are you--"
Kanan smiles, to cover the cracks inside. "I'm carrying his child. The spawn of that beast is resting in my belly. That's why."
Family is everything. Everything Hyakugan Maoh touches is tainted. She won't force Gonou to make that choice.
There are so many things she wants to say. Open your eyes, Gonou. The world is all around you. Life is just waiting for you to reach out. I can't hold your hand any longer; I can't protect you. I give you back your other half. Take my light to fill your darkness, and learn to live for real.
Live for me.
But words mean nothing, and people can't live for anyone but themselves. She can see that now. She can see everything now. She can even, finally, see herself. Maybe next time around she'll understand sooner.
"Goodbye, Gonou." I love you, but nothing is forever. Live for yourself.
She cuts the last threads.
---------------------------------------------
"Hey, Gonou." He's absorbed in his book, shutting out the world. That's no good, so she plucks a blade of grass, almost as green as his eyes, and traces it down over his brow and cheekbone. "Are you listening to me? Listen carefully: I love you."
"Same to you. What brought that on?" he asks, reaching across the picnic blanket to pull her close.
Kanan settles into his embrace, warm and peaceful in the summer evening. They have each other; she has no fear of the future. "Nothing, really; I just want you to know. So don't ever forget, okay? I love you, and we'll always be together now. We have each other, and that's enough."
Gonou kisses the top of her head. "You and me, forever."
"Yeah."
Behind them, the sun sinks into darkness.
---------------------------------------------
End of Story
---------------------------------------------
Notes: I played a little fast and loose with the canon text incorporated from vol. 4, mostly because Hakkai's flashbacks are structured more like a vivid nightmare than a logical chain of events. (That's not a criticism, by the way; the 'flash in the darkness' effect heightens the emotional impact!) Also, the lines where he tells Kanan about his new job are sort of a weird cross between free-floating narration and remembered dialogue -- they don't quite work as part of an actual conversation. I think I kept the sense of the text, though, and all I did to their conversation in Hyakugan Maoh's castle was fiddle a couple punctuation marks and add Kanan's name once before Gonou's canonical first line.
On a related topic, I have three questions for people who've read past Saiyuki Reload vol. 7, or who've seen the anime series:
1) Do we ever get canon information on what happened to Gonou and Kanan's parents? How and when did they die?
2) Kanan is older than Gonou, but how much older? Could they be twins? Could she be old enough to remember caring for him as a baby?
3) I'm assuming Kanan has green eyes as well; is this contradicted anywhere?
Also, I'm not thrilled about the title of this story, but I couldn't think of anything better. Does anyone have suggestions?
So. Kanan and Gonou: two become nothing. A non-chronological portrait of obsession and death. Contains incest, rape, torture, madness, murder, and suicide. (This is Gonou and Kanan. Did you think it was going to be pretty?)
(The final version is now up at ff.net)
---------------------------------------------
Samsara
---------------------------------------------
They take her away as afternoon bleeds into evening.
She fights, of course. Kanan doesn't have Gonou's deceptive strength, but he's taught her about leverage and joint locks, and she manages to slice open two of her attackers with a long kitchen knife before they overpower her and bind her arms to her sides with strips of her own dress.
"Hyakugan Maoh's gonna fucking love you, bitch," one of them snarls as they drag her toward their waiting dragon. She stumbles through the deserted streets, past eerily silent houses with their curtains closed tight at midday. "You're gonna regret making trouble."
All she can think of is Gonou -- her lover, her brother -- coming home to an empty, ransacked house. He's the center of her world, the source of gravity that defines her... and she's the center of his, the sun that lifts his darkness. Family is everything. Separation is death. If she's not there, who will protect him?
Hyakugan Maoh lives far away, in unmapped forests on the other side of Chang-An. No human has seen his castle and lived.
Kanan wonders how long it will take Gonou to find her.
---------------------------------------------
They only talk once about the years apart.
"Nothing mattered; nothing was real," Gonou says, his lips pressed against the back of her shoulder as they lie in bed. "I learned everything I could, but none of it meant anything. I got in fights, but pain is an illusion the body imposes on the soul, and other people's pain is an even more paper-thin façade. The nuns tried to make me care about people, tried to make me feel love or guilt or hatred -- to feel something, anything -- but I can't get out of myself without you. It's just me and my thoughts, spiraling in forever."
"I lost myself," Kanan says, weaving her fingers through his as their hand rested on her belly. "The world was so much, and I was so small. I didn't matter; 'Kanan' was just a sound the air makes, not a name. I stopped talking, stopped thinking -- I don't remember more than a few days of that last year before you found me. The teachers told me that I spent all my time in the gardens, that I'd listen when someone gave me an order, but that I'd get distracted and spend hours staring at a blade of grass or a slug inching along a leaf."
"I won't ever let anyone take you away again," Gonou says.
"I know. But if -- only if -- something does happen, I promise I'll wait for you," Kanan says, twisting within Gonou's embrace to meet his eyes, as poison green as her own. "Promise you'll wait for me, too."
"I'll always find you. You're my other half."
"Forever, right?"
"Yeah."
In the darkness, pressed so close together that their hearts synchronize through the veils of flesh and bone, this is their only truth.
---------------------------------------------
Hyakugan Maoh is fascinated by her eyes. "So brilliant, like living emeralds," he says, tracing a talon along her cheekbone, up the side of her nose, and back through her eyebrow. "I wonder if you have divine blood in your family, diluted enough that only the coloring remains."
Kanan spits in his face.
Hyakugan Maoh laughs. He throws her onto his bed and dives after her in a swirl of silk sheets. His taloned hands pin her in place like a butterfly caught in a collector's trophy case. His knee spreads her legs. He drives into her.
Power beats against her skin like lightning, freezing her body. She isn't strong enough to stop him. She can't protect herself.
She wants to let go, to wisp away into the air, to stop being 'Kanan' -- then she wouldn't hurt, then Hyakugan Maoh would have nothing left to arouse his interest -- but she promised Gonou to wait for him. Gonou will come. He'll rescue her, and they'll find a new home, a new place without any tainted memories.
When Hyakugan Maoh bends his head, Kanan lunges for his neck, teeth bared.
He backhands her, casually, and she fades into the little respite of unconsciousness.
---------------------------------------------
Their parents tell Kanan and Gonou to protect and cherish each other, always and forever. Family is the foundation of all things.
When the nuns lead Gonou in one direction and Kanan in another, Kanan screams herself breathless until she faints. Her last clear memory is of Gonou's hands flailing toward her, clawing the air, trying to reach across the gap. The days afterward are misty at best; she has no anchor to mark her personal experiences out from the immensity of life.
Years later, she hears a voice, ragged and soft, saying "Kanan, Kanan, is that you?" and it occurs to her that 'Kanan' is her name. She looks up, lifts her hands from the damp garden soil, and sees a skinny boy with black hair, backlit and haloed by the setting sun. He kneels down beside her, one hand, trembling, stretched toward her face.
His eyes are green as poison.
"Gonou?" she whispers as the tips of his fingers kiss her cheek.
The boy is crying. Her brother is crying. Gonou is crying.
For the first time in years, Kanan finds the boundaries that hold her self separate from the universe, finds protection from the storm of life. Clinging to her brother, she swears over and over never to lose him again.
Gonou defines her.
---------------------------------------------
It takes less than a month for Hyakugan Maoh to grow tired of her and send his guards out to fetch a new woman.
Two servants lead Kanan down from her tower prison, toward the central courtyard. By now she's seen what happens to Hyakugan Maoh's past favorites, seen the bloody executions he uses to test to nerve of his chosen guards. She knows how impossible it is to dream of rescue; not even Gonou can fight a thousand youkai. "I'm sorry, Gonou," she whispers to herself. "I couldn't wait long enough." She feels the cool weight of chains on her wrists, the light touch of linen against her skin, the warmth of flickering torchlight on her hair, and prepares to melt into those sensations, unraveling herself into the world.
"Oh, you won't be dying. Not yet," a cool voice says.
Kanan whirls as best she can in her chains, and stares at the pale youkai with long hair and fine silk robes. This is Hyakugan Maoh's son, Chin Yisou; what does he want with her? Isn't one tormentor enough? Hasn't she paid enough for freedom?
"My father is done with you, but I'm not," Chin Yisou says, waving one clawed hand to dismiss the servants. "You talk in your sleep, Cho Kanan. You call for one man, but sometimes you call him 'brother,' and sometimes you call him 'husband.' You think he'll come for you, yes? I'm curious to see how far he'll get, and it will be much more entertaining to have a tragic reunion scene before I step in and kill him. Don't you agree, Cho Kanan?"
She can feel power hovering around him, even stronger than his father's aura. His power whispers of despair.
She throws a porcelain vase at his head and sprints down the corridor, toward the window.
He catches her within ten steps. His breath is chill on her neck.
Kanan prays for Gonou to forget her.
---------------------------------------------
"Hey, Gonou. Wouldn't it be nice to get married? Family's the most important thing; if we have children, wouldn't it be good for them to have a stable family?"
Gonou looks up from marking essays and smiles. "We're not stable now?"
"You know what I mean," Kanan says as she slices an orange into sections. "I want to do things properly. I want to tell the world how much you mean to me."
"Mmm." Gonou steals a slice from her bowl and bites into it, savoring the juice. "Kanan, are you pregnant?"
She drops the knife. "No! You know we've been careful, and we'll go on being careful. I know we're not ready for a change like that. I'm just bringing it up now so we won't be unprepared if."
"They won't let us," Gonou says, serious now. "Enough people in town suspect we're siblings; we'll never be able to marry officially. But I promise that if we could, I'd marry you right now. I don't know how to live without you."
Kanan looks thoughtfully at the knife on the table, and then stands to fetch a clean blade from the drawer. "Then let's get married. We're already joined by blood, but we'll bind ourselves by choice as well as chance -- me to you and you to me, so we'll never be separated again, never go back to being half people." The knife is razor-sharp; it parts the skin on the back of her wrist with barely any pressure.
Gonou takes the blade from her hand and turns it on himself. "Forever," he says.
"Yeah."
Their fingers twine, sticky with blood, and they pledge their souls to each other.
---------------------------------------------
It's far too early to be sure, but Kanan has always been sensitive to the movement of life. She can feel the spark in her womb, feel the faint stirrings of potential. In a way, she thinks she should have expected this.
Hyakugan Maoh has no reason to be careful with his women, after all.
"So we're family now, yes?" Chin Yisou says one day. "If you bear my half-sibling, that makes you my stepmother of sorts. I've never had a mother; I wonder if you'll teach me what I've been missing all these years, Cho Kanan." His smile is cold and sharp, like steel in winter, and Kanan knows that he doesn't mean a word he says, that he's only prodding open wounds to see if she'll flinch.
Family.
Kanan has never wanted so badly to fray into nothingness, but she can't. She can't. She's waiting for Gonou, like she promised, even though she hopes he'll never come -- hopes he'll forget her, hopes he'll find someone else to light his darkness and prove to him that the world exists. She's waiting for Gonou, and there's a baby growing in her belly.
She's going to be a mother.
She thinks she may go insane.
Kanan needs Gonou; she can't think without him, can't exist without him. The world rushes in like a storm and overwhelms her until all she can cling to is his name, his face, and the surety that he'll find her. They're two halves of a whole, two broken shards of a puzzle that fit together into a shape beautiful despite their flaws. Forever.
But what if two shards become three? Or if solving the puzzle destroys the pieces? He can't come here. She couldn't bear to see him die because of her; he has to live. They have to separate. Gonou has always been stronger than she is. Without him, she vanishes, but he can learn to live without her. He has to. He has to.
Deep inside, so deep she can't see to stitch the wound, her heart cracks. She starts to unravel.
"This is quite fascinating, Cho Kanan," the long-haired youkai says with a toothy smile. His face is blurred by mist, cut loose from any association with meaning.
Who is Kanan?
---------------------------------------------
"Hey, Kanan." Gonou leans against the door of their rented room, his reading glasses held loosely between his fingers. "You know the children's school outside town, the one we passed on our way in? I was talking to the principal, and he offered me a job. This town doesn't have any other school, so that place takes everyone, even orphans like us. The pay isn't very good, but we can live off it. Shall we get a place together?" Late afternoon sunlight slants over the floor at his feet and reflects off his glasses.
Kanan sets down the suitcase and sits on the bed, her knees suddenly unwilling to hold her up. "A home?"
"Yes," Gonou says, walking in and closing the door behind him, casting the room in shadow. "People will guess that we're family -- even if I wear my glasses all the time, and you act shy and look down, it's hard to hide our eyes -- but if we keep quiet, they won't have any proof. We could stay here. We could make a real life. You could have a garden again."
Kanan pictures it, weaving the idea in her mind. In the morning, they wake together, and he cooks breakfast while she washes her hair. Gonou spends the day teaching children, making use of his knowledge and learning to deal with people he can't ignore or rebel against. She gardens, or shops, or maybe gets a job cleaning houses. In the evening, Gonou comes home to the dinner she's made, and at night they sleep together, unafraid of nuns or teachers breaking down their door and condemning them or tearing them apart.
"Yes," she says. "Yes. Let's stay here. Let's make a home."
"Just the two of us, alone together," Gonou says with a smile hidden in the corner of his mouth.
Kanan kisses it until his happiness spreads over his whole face. "Gonou, thank you. And you know, we're not really alone anymore. We have each other."
"Forever, right?" Gonou says.
"Yeah."
---------------------------------------------
It's raining; she can feel the pounding water even here in the heart of the castle, like a thrumming heartbeat through the stones. For a time she hears screams and scattered crashes, but those die, bleeding into the silent rain, the way she's bleeding her soul into the air.
"I believe this is the climax of our little story," a voice says, troubling the surface of her thoughts. "I wouldn't want to spoil things, so I'll take my leave of you for now, Cho Kanan. Please give my regards to your brother."
She hardly notices the voice depart. She wonders briefly at the silence, but it suits the mist that wraps her mind and vision, and she lets it soothe her as she kneels and touches her belly, touches the little spark that traps her a bare handful of threads from true self-negation.
"Kanan?" A new voice, ragged and soft, breaks the silence and echoes from the stones. "Kanan? Are you here?"
She looks up into one poison-green eye; the man's other eye is drenched in scarlet-black, as if he were crying blood. As if her lover were crying blood. As if Gonou were crying blood.
She is Kanan.
"Gonou?" She stares at her brother, his slender body drenched in flickering torch-flame shadows. Surely Gonou can't be the one who laid this expectant hush on the castle. Surely he can't have come for her. There's so little left of her, so little to inspire this kind of madness.
But Gonou doesn't know that. Separated, they're blind. They never felt each other's pain when the nuns tore them apart. They only felt their own loss of balance.
"You're alive! You're really alive!" Gonou says, reaching through the bars of her cell to grasp her arm.
"Your right eye..." she begins, and loses the thread of her thought. She tries again. "Why did you come here?" All he can take from this place is death. He can't die. He has to live.
"I'm so sorry, Kanan, for everything," Gonou says, leaning his face against the bars. "Let's go home, okay? I promise I'll protect you."
Blind. He's blind. Just like she's been blind. They can't go home; they have no home. He can't protect her; nobody can protect anyone else. If they can't live without each other, then even when they're together, are they really living?
"It's too late. All right?"
"What?" Gonou says. She pulls the knife from his side and steps back. Gonou's eye goes wide in shock, open at last. "What are you--"
Kanan smiles, to cover the cracks inside. "I'm carrying his child. The spawn of that beast is resting in my belly. That's why."
Family is everything. Everything Hyakugan Maoh touches is tainted. She won't force Gonou to make that choice.
There are so many things she wants to say. Open your eyes, Gonou. The world is all around you. Life is just waiting for you to reach out. I can't hold your hand any longer; I can't protect you. I give you back your other half. Take my light to fill your darkness, and learn to live for real.
Live for me.
But words mean nothing, and people can't live for anyone but themselves. She can see that now. She can see everything now. She can even, finally, see herself. Maybe next time around she'll understand sooner.
"Goodbye, Gonou." I love you, but nothing is forever. Live for yourself.
She cuts the last threads.
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"Hey, Gonou." He's absorbed in his book, shutting out the world. That's no good, so she plucks a blade of grass, almost as green as his eyes, and traces it down over his brow and cheekbone. "Are you listening to me? Listen carefully: I love you."
"Same to you. What brought that on?" he asks, reaching across the picnic blanket to pull her close.
Kanan settles into his embrace, warm and peaceful in the summer evening. They have each other; she has no fear of the future. "Nothing, really; I just want you to know. So don't ever forget, okay? I love you, and we'll always be together now. We have each other, and that's enough."
Gonou kisses the top of her head. "You and me, forever."
"Yeah."
Behind them, the sun sinks into darkness.
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End of Story
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Notes: I played a little fast and loose with the canon text incorporated from vol. 4, mostly because Hakkai's flashbacks are structured more like a vivid nightmare than a logical chain of events. (That's not a criticism, by the way; the 'flash in the darkness' effect heightens the emotional impact!) Also, the lines where he tells Kanan about his new job are sort of a weird cross between free-floating narration and remembered dialogue -- they don't quite work as part of an actual conversation. I think I kept the sense of the text, though, and all I did to their conversation in Hyakugan Maoh's castle was fiddle a couple punctuation marks and add Kanan's name once before Gonou's canonical first line.
On a related topic, I have three questions for people who've read past Saiyuki Reload vol. 7, or who've seen the anime series:
1) Do we ever get canon information on what happened to Gonou and Kanan's parents? How and when did they die?
2) Kanan is older than Gonou, but how much older? Could they be twins? Could she be old enough to remember caring for him as a baby?
3) I'm assuming Kanan has green eyes as well; is this contradicted anywhere?
Also, I'm not thrilled about the title of this story, but I couldn't think of anything better. Does anyone have suggestions?