Bad Hands » Places

         

Osaka, and irony tastes nothing like metal.

Shirayuki did not have a bird’s eyes, but she had all the empathy of the truest still-bleeding heart, and she learned more from watching him watch the mikoshi than the mobile shrine’s fluttering drapes could ever teach her. Perhaps she could not understand the tense line of his jaw, could not comprehend the reasons for such intense focus in one she’d thought as flighty as an August breeze between skyscrapers, but observation was not the same thing as comprehension.

“Stay near.” The words reverberated, sending a thrumming trill up her arm from the place they touched, rocketing through her limbs and up into her throat, down into the ground as though the command itself were growing her the roots she needed to do just that. Upon further consideration, it was not so much a physical thing, but a visceral one: the mandate, for it was no simple entreaty, rippled across the surface of her soul, if indeed she had such a thing in the first place.

Before she could scarcely register the impact of whatever it was that he’d just done (for surely, it had been something; she was meek, but not subservient by nature), time seemed to pick back up at its normal pace and he was speaking again, the words lighting a kind of mirthless amusement in her eyes, for oh, if only he knew.

Her understanding of such things was not grand. She would not pretend to be a power-player in a game where she barely registered as a piece on the board, the lowliest of pawns, if that- no, half a pawn, and half the unwitting victim of so much chess. Still, it was a reality that she knew, that she had come to know always through violence. When had she discovered it? Was it the first time she was elbow-deep in the blood of a dying tanuki, trying to sew him together enough that he might survive to fight another day? Was it even earlier, when some assailant she could not remember had torn out her throat with his or her teeth, leaving her forever bereft of whatever small gifts had been afforded her in the grand scheme of things?

Or, perhaps, was it simply when her mother had left, unable to live in a human’s world with a human’s rules, but unwilling to subject herself to ‘baser’ yokai? Sometime between then and her father’s desperate, lovestruck (after so much time!) pursuit, when at last the faces of his children had mocked him long enough?

But, though perhaps a few of these thoughts might have flickered in troubled frowns and downcast eyes across her face, she would not answer so, for it would require a rudeness not in her nature, to so thoroughly shut down the presumption that she still wore the whitewash of the innocent. And perhaps, perhaps she did not quite want him to know this of her, not just yet.

Shirayuki fixed Sahen with a look, furrowed of brow and gentle in reproach, lifting her chin stubbornly and stepping forward a few strides to draw even with him once more. If I am to endure this once more, let it be of my choosing, and for better reasons than before.