Random Ficcery #5
Mar. 4th, 2003 01:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaWhy is it that when I actually do post fic, I get accused of being evil? ...Well, never mind. XD Here's tonight's snippet. It's actually the ending of a fic (whereupon I learnt never to write endings first, because then the beginning tends not to get written). First person to ID the characters featured gets... er, I'm not sure what. Brownie points? XD
(I've gotta say - this music suits the tenor of the ficlet to a T. o_O; Once again HikaGo catches me off-guard - I was expecting the OST to lean toward synthesized and simple and genki, and instead there's all this shakuhachi and romantic piano and ominous snare fills. I mean, this is the Friendship Theme? Hikaru and Sai, like? With the Korngoldesque upswellings of the string section? Ai yai yai.)
pieces of you, pieces of me
I didn't take him with me; it wouldn't have done any good. I spent three days recuperating, and before I left I paid a visit to the village fields to make sure there would be at least a harvest. That and the spring were all I left him. I have no idea if they were enough to save his life, or if someone else did.
What did he give me?
At this point in time, I'm tempted to say "everything." It would be a simplistic answer. Functional immortality offers no guarantees, and I have forgotten more than this. But at the very least, he saved me -- twice. For in that moment of union he taught me all I ever was to know about humans: their foolish desires and unreasonable kindnesses, the pain born with their first breath and the hope that dies with their last. Their need for others, and their unbreakable solitude. The beauty fleeting even to their existence, but that they insist on loving nevertheless.
Their simple refusal to give in.
That refusal was all that guided me the second time, in the nightmare dark after my sight had gone; ebbed from my eyes like the blood I recognized only by its slickness on my skin, since pain itself had died away. As the hunter approached and I slipped away from a world I had no cause to regret, that small scrap of the human heart he'd hidden in me was the only part that still reached out for life.
It was that call I followed.
And in the darkness of the womb, I fashioned myself after his memory.
In a very real way, I am him. And, as humans live more in their brief span than immortal demons are given cause to understand, I am him perhaps better than I am myself.
What did I give him?
Few children are born to a merciful world. I was not. In his the weak were trampled by the powerful, the poor by the rich -- and death, by cruelty of illness or sword, would always be as present as in that empty village. Perhaps he had the necessary harshness in him. Perhaps they -- perhaps we all do.
After all, how could one defend against such a world, armed only with purity and a desire for peace?
But when I think of it, I do not know what use he could have found for me. When I think of what I was -- that gold-eyed creature cold and ancient, to whom life was a fancy and death a farce --
-- who had place in his heart for nothing in the world, least of all himself --
I do not know.
Did he think me a taint?
Did he forget?
I wish it were so.
I wish --
I wish I did not always get the best of my bargains.
(I've gotta say - this music suits the tenor of the ficlet to a T. o_O; Once again HikaGo catches me off-guard - I was expecting the OST to lean toward synthesized and simple and genki, and instead there's all this shakuhachi and romantic piano and ominous snare fills. I mean, this is the Friendship Theme? Hikaru and Sai, like? With the Korngoldesque upswellings of the string section? Ai yai yai.)
pieces of you, pieces of me
I didn't take him with me; it wouldn't have done any good. I spent three days recuperating, and before I left I paid a visit to the village fields to make sure there would be at least a harvest. That and the spring were all I left him. I have no idea if they were enough to save his life, or if someone else did.
What did he give me?
At this point in time, I'm tempted to say "everything." It would be a simplistic answer. Functional immortality offers no guarantees, and I have forgotten more than this. But at the very least, he saved me -- twice. For in that moment of union he taught me all I ever was to know about humans: their foolish desires and unreasonable kindnesses, the pain born with their first breath and the hope that dies with their last. Their need for others, and their unbreakable solitude. The beauty fleeting even to their existence, but that they insist on loving nevertheless.
Their simple refusal to give in.
That refusal was all that guided me the second time, in the nightmare dark after my sight had gone; ebbed from my eyes like the blood I recognized only by its slickness on my skin, since pain itself had died away. As the hunter approached and I slipped away from a world I had no cause to regret, that small scrap of the human heart he'd hidden in me was the only part that still reached out for life.
It was that call I followed.
And in the darkness of the womb, I fashioned myself after his memory.
In a very real way, I am him. And, as humans live more in their brief span than immortal demons are given cause to understand, I am him perhaps better than I am myself.
What did I give him?
Few children are born to a merciful world. I was not. In his the weak were trampled by the powerful, the poor by the rich -- and death, by cruelty of illness or sword, would always be as present as in that empty village. Perhaps he had the necessary harshness in him. Perhaps they -- perhaps we all do.
After all, how could one defend against such a world, armed only with purity and a desire for peace?
But when I think of it, I do not know what use he could have found for me. When I think of what I was -- that gold-eyed creature cold and ancient, to whom life was a fancy and death a farce --
-- who had place in his heart for nothing in the world, least of all himself --
I do not know.
Did he think me a taint?
Did he forget?
I wish it were so.
I wish --
I wish I did not always get the best of my bargains.
