will you rain down
"Oh the mothers of heroes! Sources of raging rivers!
Ravines into which, from the high cliff of the heart,
weeping, you've already cast your girlhood,
to exist from now on for the sons!
For whenever the hero was interrupted by love,
he would storm free, propelled forward
by every heartbeat that claimed him--
until, already turning to go, he'd stand
at the end of the smiles, a stranger."
--Rainer Maria Rilke
You begin with simple concepts. Elegant statements. Easily summarized bullet points. Beginning from the outside edge, far from the axis around which this all turns, and slowly curving your way in. My child is no one's son, for example. Then, my child is very special, and my child will outlive me. I will not see my child grow up, or marry, or age past his middle teens. I will not meet the first person my son loves. I will not be a grandmother. I will not be.
In this fashion, you may progress to, for instance, if I pick up the telephone receiver now, I will never put it down.
These are the methods by which you may begin to prepare yourself for death. Even, it could be said, if you are one of a blessed few who have been preparing for death since birth.
She is surprised to find that burning to death does not hurt at all. Of course, it is likely that that's only her. But it still seems like it should hurt; that there should be gory, visceral and grisly details that she should be painfully aware of up until the last burning, bleeding, smoke-choked and lacerated breath. That she should feel to the last exquisite drop of agony her skin melting, her bones charring, the composite and delicately crafted whole that has walked and breathed and spoken and claimed to be her for thirty-five years being gradually reduced, by nature's most angry weapon, to only ash and foul air and the fragments of teeth that will be the only key to her name in the end.
She does not. It does not even hurt; it is barely so much as uncomfortable. It is only, she notes, rather hot. Whoever would have thought that one could stand in the burning timber of one's erstwhile home and declare one's own approaching demise "rather hot"?
She also finds that she, absurdity upon absurdity, is thirsty. That could almost make her laugh, were it not for her son's struggles to push his way through the flaming debris, coughing pitifully and screaming raggedly for her. It is not the kind of situation where one laughs. And she needs her voice, anyhow.
Her relief seems unfair, in the face of his pain.
She looks up, her head craned back and arms out, a well-dressed female crucifix on the verge of rapture. And above her, before her, inside her, somehow everywhere around this patch of inferno where she stands, she sees it; she wonders idly if he can, too.
A hand, reaching out...
And the drifting feathers of wings...
The study was quiet except for the wall clock's ponderous tick, and the infrequent buzzing of cicadas. It should have been a surprise to hear them awake so early in the year, but it was unseasonably warm out anyhow; winter still only dreamed of being spring, but Kamui had gone out on the hour-long walk to and from the small food store in town dressed only in t-shirt and jeans, with no qualms from either of them. He had been restless for weeks: it did feel like spring, and the time of year made him want to move around and get out of the house, burst out into the world again like a dormant flower suddenly blooming. Or at least, she was fairly sure that was all that drove him. It had always seemed to be before, after all, every year they'd lived by the ocean: spring fever in extreme, or maybe cabin fever. Unwise to venture outside a seaside house in winter. It had been so frightening when he was younger, she remembered. She'd been terrified he would wake up one morning feeling rebellious and run off to play without telling her, and that it would somehow coincide with the day a dozen suited men who weren't men at all would finally drive into the sleepy coastal town, eyeless under gunmetal sunglasses...
Touru sighed, and sat down resolutely on the edge of the sturdy desk; she discovered she was twisting her hands together, aimlessly, and stopped. Recalling the fear was not the difficult part, not in the slightest. The difficult part was accepting that it was, for all practical purposes, over now. It would be over before the day was out. Kamui knew the dangers, now -- well, as best he could without ever having faced them, as that was exactly what she'd been so careful to avoid and now wondered if she should have -- and he could face them on his own. He would have to. She'd always known he would someday.
Maybe not so soon...
But there was no choice in that. If she had needed time, there had been time, and now it was done. She was well aware of that, had been only too willing to take advantage of Kamui's restlessness and send him out in search of a few purchases that would serve little purpose aside from distraction. She couldn't even remember what she'd asked for now. Too much time taken, too little felt; life is so short, and so easily forgotten. News to no one, perhaps, but the only complaint she couldn't make of the situation was unfairness... or, if she could, it wasn't against her that the odds had been weighted. She'd wanted time, prayed for it, and received it; and lived to regret her prayers. But it had been enough. It had to have been. Kamui was ready, as ready as he ever would be.
Except that held the bitter savour of a lie.
She didn't know what she'd expected of him by the time he'd have to go on alone, but it hadn't been this. Kamui was such a strange boy, well-loved but never understood, not right somehow. And not to say that he'd ever really been ordinary -- neither of them had, in all unaffected honesty -- but as he grew older, he only because odder, further removed from the physical realities of the world most people inhabited. He was too much, was how she thought of it these days: too much of everything. Too young for his age and too old, too aggressive, too shy, too bold, too afraid, too confident, too insecure. Too real and too ethereal; like an angel thrust into a body afflicted with adolescent gawkiness and maddened with a desire to touch, to see, to do -- everything. Before, she supposed, the inevitable return to heaven. She had never questioned the clear and somehow heartbreaking fact that her son was not meant for this world.
Kamui.
Touru supposed, she was forced to admit, that she had been partly responsible for making him that way. She had, after all, been the one who'd pulled him here from the city and his only friends -- though that could not have been avoided -- and kept him out of school, relying on tutors and what she could offer from her own incomplete formal education, rather than letting him out among strangers -- though that really could not have been avoided either. It had taken all of her faith in Kamui's instincts, and in her own vague but constant awareness of his general location and mental state, to even let him out of the house for any reason. There were too many uncertain possibilities, too many shadowy third parties who might want to throw aside honor and ritual and begin the game before its time. That was the principal fear that she had lived with for so long, for what seemed like all her life.
A memory: Kamui somewhere on the unsteady ground of preadolescence, eleven, perhaps twelve, preparing to walk down to the beach. She stops him halfway to the door, catching him in a towel around his shoulders that is a wordless reminder, answering his guileless loving smile with one that only halfway covers her own fear.
"Before you go out..." she begins, and seeing him begin to glaze in defense against maternal orders, takes him by the shoulders and crouches down before him. His eyes widen, curiously. "Kamui, before you go out, will you promise me something?"
"Okay." He is ready, trusting. She resists the urge to place her arms between his fragility and the world.
"If anyone you don't know ever bothers you, and won't leave you alone..." She falters, looking in his eyes, uncertain in the face of his innocence. "If something ever happens that frightens you, or you find yourself in a situation where you're scared, or uncomfortable, or things are happening that you don't understand... I want you to call me. Call me, and I'll come."
Kamui frowns, tilting his head to one side. "But what if you can't hear me?" he asks.
She smiles, an almost painful stretch of the mouth. "I'll come," she repeats, and it is settled.
She had wondered, from time to time, if anyone in the world had ever before made so many promises, so full of the knowledge that they would one day be broken.
But yes, Kamui's loneliness had always been a fact of which she was painfully aware. Fatherlessness had isolated the boy from a far-too-early age, so cruelly that her heart had burned with the injustice of it. Unfair, it had seemed to her, that her own failure to satisfy convention should hurt him so deeply. She had been much more concerned with fairness in those younger days, barely past twenty herself; trying desperately to protect Kamui as they drifted between cheap apartments (where they could be had) in the darker places of Tokyo, doing temporary work as a secretary or a low-level medium depending on what was paying that month. In between she was busy as well: reknitting unraveling spells of deflection, renewing connections to her oldest employer. Companionship had been one of many areas in which what she could provide for Kamui had fallen short. She remembered so keenly his excitement when he had finally made a friend...
And of course, when the boy who had offered shelter to Kamui and a foundling puppy had turned out to be Saya's son, it had become obvious that Touru's time in hiding was done. She could not have taken Kamui away from his two new companions, and there was really no need to evade the notice of the Monou family... and, she had become forced to admit over the following years, she had no desire to abandon her old friend's company. Saya; sweet, foolish, lovely, doomed Saya. How horribly she'd misjudged Saya, even up to the very end. And how completely, when all was said and done, her oldest friend had taken her by surprise.
They had met in middle school, although within a few months it had felt as though they'd known each other for years; by the time they reached the end of high school, when Saya had married, it felt as though they'd known each other forever. Saya had always been so curiously innocent, so gentle, and possessed of some undefinable but soothing aspect: a placidity, or perhaps a resignation... but most likely that was just Touru's current memory coloring past sensations. But Saya had been warm, and so real, and ordinary, an island to escape to from the abstract mysteries and formalities of the Magami clan. She had been Touru's key into the world other people lived in; and for that alone, Touru could have loved her.
Touru had been in bondage to the earth for as long as she could remember, perhaps since she was born, or even before then. It was not something she thought of as remarkable. She barely thought of it at all. Sometimes the bursting of old land mines, where they rested under the dust of Mozambique, would strike her down with headaches, and the cutting away of trees in the rainforests would parch her skin, and after Exxon-Valdez spilled oil into the sea she suffered for nearly a week from vomiting, at last forcing the family to send her to the hospital, dehydrated and delirious; and in the night sometimes she heard the planet's voice, a low groan of age and torment that seemed meant for her alone... but she had not found this worth remarking. It was simply the way things had always been. As she had grown older, she had been taught the proper rituals to divert the negative energy she took upon herself, as kage-nie, into neutral metaphysical space, protecting both the earth and herself. No one had ever adequately explained to her why the rest of the family protected humans, and she protected an entire planet; she had been upset and irked by it for a brief time, and then finally forced herself to simply accept it as fact and move on. Studied acceptance had always been one of Touru's sharpest skills, the result of the constant wars between her own keen sense of injustice and the deep, unwavering pragmatism cultivated in the Magami. A serious, troubled child, she had learned brutally early that, while it might not be fair, sometimes that was just the way things were. It was a lesson that was to serve her well time and again throughout her life.
As a member of her clan, she had spent her entire life with the knowledge that she would die, she would probably die young, and she would almost certainly die badly. Death did not frighten her, no matter what else might; it was the one certainty for which she had always been prepared. What she had never properly been prepared for had been to live. Only Saya had been able to heal that rift, to make her believe that to survive was sometimes a nobler feat than to die... and only Saya had given her reason to try. Saya, her anchor, her salvation; her island.
And then high school had ended, and Touru had been forced to give up that island. Not to mention everything else.
Pregnancy, when it comes as a surprise, is rarely a pleasant one; and when it came to a high school senior and, to the best of her knowledge, a virgin, it was even less so. She had known enough to determine to her satisfaction that she was, indeed, carrying a child, and from there the question had simply been one of where precisely it had come from. There were, of course, several perfectly mundane possibilities; there were all kinds of drugs floating around the world today, and while she didn't remember a rape, that didn't necessarily mean one couldn't have occurred. And then, of course, her unique family life, and what training and unusual work she had already been involved in, had brought her into traffic with certain entities that could also have caused her condition. Contact with demons, spirits, and the other less definite things that swam outside the boundaries of the physical plane had its liabilities, and this was a possibility she had accepted with the same calm consideration as she had taken the more earthly one of rape and repressed memory. But of course, if it were a demon, the child would have to be taken care of...
These were the thoughts that led her to the other side of town one afternoon after school, to a 12th-story apartment in a crumbling building that she knew only from rumor, incense-hazed and littered with cheap statuettes and the bones of foreign animals. The old, sour-faced woman who was its sole occupant accepted her money, waved a string of inscribed beads over her belly while muttering ancient incantations, and then handed her a plastic hospital urine-sample cup and sent her into the tiny bathroom to use it. She had been told to wait in the hallway for "analysis", and almost two hours later the old woman had emerged, stone-faced, with something uneasy roiling behind her eyes.
"What is it?" Touru had asked, bluntly. Eager to have this done with, one way or the other. The old woman had looked at her with a mix of superstition and brute sympathy.
"It's a boy," she'd said, stolidly. "Beyond that, girl, better not to ask."
Frowning as politely as she could, Touru had stood up from the tattered linoleum floor, one hand unconsciously cradling her still-flat belly. Apprehension gnawed her gut. "What do you mean?"
The old woman had thawed then, a little, recognizing her poise even in the face of obvious fear and uncertainty; a little, but not much. "I mean it's no demon," she'd said, a bit more kindly. "But nor is it an ordinary child. If you know enough to come here, I expect you'll sort out what needs to be done soon enough; I surely can't tell you. It's nowhere near my tale. But this much I can say: care for that child well, girl. He'll be needed before long."
It wasn't much of an answer, nor, clearly, was it meant to be. The old woman's faint tone of apology but unwavering crypticism had said that much. But that meant she was out of choices; the Magami were accustomed to a great deal of the spiritual and otherworldly, but she doubted that, in a situation like this, her parents were likely to accept claims of a virgin birth at face value. Perhaps five weeks later, barely a graduate of high school, she had fled the family grounds forever, abandoning her place and responsibilities there for a new life on the run.
The clan was well taken care of by its elite circle of employers, and the entire extended family lived together in a sprawling mansion complex near Tokyo's main center of government. This did not, however, make them a close-knit group of relations; quite the opposite, really, and logically so, foolish as it would be to develop strong bonds between people whose inevitable responsibility it would be to die in place of someone more important. Nevertheless, Touru had been fond of her younger sister, and she had made a point of going to visit and explain to Tokiko that night, before literally climbing out a window and escaping into the dark. She wondered even now if Tokiko had realized, and would remember, what she was being told. It had been predicted before that the Kamui and, of necessity, the shinken would be born of a Magami, but the family had managed to dismiss it as only rumor, or perhaps a rather vicious joke. Now Touru found herself hoping, despite all odds, that Tokiko would remember, and maybe even make some sense of the recollection. Any ally in what was to come would be an unexpected but invaluable gift.
Kamui had been born within that same year, just like the birth of any other infant, and on sight Touru had loved him more than she had ever suspected she could love. Their life alone but for each other, in those years before Saya came back into her life, had pressed them closer together than mother and son ordinarily might be, and after their return to each other's sole company, even adolescence could not shake Kamui's bonds with his mother. She was not sure, even now, whether she should regret that fact. But for her own selfish part, she was not sorry; she was glad for him, glad to have mothered him, glad to have raised him, would have been glad to die for him had that been the way things had fallen. She wondered if Kamui would ever know. Somehow, it seemed unlikely.
Eventually, they had found the Togakushi shrine -- or it had found them, in the form of little Fuuma pausing to offer shelter to a strange child. She had seen echoes of their mother in both the Monou children, and learned to recognize the fragments of their good-hearted father. It was with a pang Touru thought of Kyougo, even now. She had barely met him before leaving home, but she had grown to know him those later years, and she had always felt his kindness had deserved more than it received... but she had no say in those matters, and never had. And, more to the point, the time when anything could have changed was long gone now.
Still, those had been good years, the ones that she and Kamui had spent in hiding from everyone but the Monou family; no one had spoken anything better left unsaid, no one betrayed anyone else's betrayals with an ill-placed word, and they had all gotten along very well in a sort of mutual, comfortable silence. Good, safe years, and happy... even in the face of Touru's knowledge that she would not enjoy them much longer. The final, least pleasant reason Touru had chosen to remain in contact with Saya's family was her knowledge that, eventually, she would have to return to the shrine anyway: to give birth a second and final time. She had known that since her studies and wanderings had alerted her to what, precisely, Kamui was; and really, she wold have known anyway. The shinken seemed to have soul and voice of its own, and in those days she had often carried in her mind a metallic, buzzing whisper that she would just as soon never have known. But Kamui had still been so young, and alone, and the planet had continued to call her in its unceasing, moaning whalesong... and as the end had rocketed toward her, despite her acceptance of its inevitability, she had found herself praying for more time, just a little more time...
Hell's own irony, that in the end she had been given plenty of what she prayed for -- and mostly used it to repent the prayer.
She remembered the high winds on her last night in Tokyo, and the leaves that had skirled and skirmished through the courtyard, falling warriors from another time. Saya had excused them both from dinner, laughingly citing a need for a mothers-only conversation; despite what actually was said, there had been something comforting about standing alone together out on the cobblestones, bathed in the warm gold glow from inside the house where Kyougo looked peacefully after the three children. A sense, even if an illusory one, of home, of life, of a normalcy awaiting their return.
Even now, Touru didn't know why Saya's offer -- or, rather, demand -- hadn't surprised her. Certainly it had come all at once, seemingly from nowhere: first Saya's knowledge, then her talk of destiny, then her quiet but unwavering assertion that she would take Touru's place and had always meant to do so. But the thorny, naive tangle of her love and her conviction had been too familiar to be startling -- and, truth be told, too much of an answered prayer to be resisted. Every reason Saya cited, save the most important one, was a problem Touru herself had already gone over in painstaking detail; it was as if Saya had reached into the abyss of Touru's fears and drawn them out to plead her case.
And yet the most important -- Saya's simple, sweet and candid love -- was the one against which she had lacked the will to argue.
Sitting in her study now, which felt warmer than it should have, Touru closed her eyes, hands clenching thoughtlessly on the thick edge of the desk. Remembering the paneled door sliding closed, and Saya's delicate and guileless blue eyes fixing her, voice low and clear: You think I'll let you die tomorrow, but you're wrong...
No. If it was what Saya wanted, Touru could never have denied her.
The children remained with Kyougo; Kamui was only too delighted by the prospect of staying the night, and already that simple joy began to hurt Touru's heart. The two women walked the few blocks back to the Shirou residence in the kind of silence that falls where very little remains to be discussed. They drank coffee together on the narrow couch for a while, and then for some unnamed stretch of time Touru wept silently into the shoulder of Saya's blouse while the fairer woman whispered comfort into her hair, and later, at some undefined point when the moon towered hazily over the city, they moved into Touru's bedroom and made sweet, awkward love with the windowshades open and the breeze coiling its breath into the dim room. No questions were asked, and none needed. It simply was, as if it had always been.
She could not have said how long they were there; all the memories past that point faded into a gauzy dream eternity of blonde hair tumbling into a veiling curtain, of soft lips and another woman's taste, skin like velvet. When her eyes fell on the clock, as she slid out of the bed, it had been nearly three in the morning, and that remained her only reference. She had dressed, rapidly packed two suitcases, and dragged them down to the little loan-bought car that had barely been used since its purchase, leaving the house behind forever. She had known Saya was awake when she left, and Saya had known she knew. They did not speak to each other. There was nothing left to say.
Kyougo had helped her quietly roust out Kamui and retrieve him to the car. The two adults did not speak more than absolutely necessary, and Kyougo did not meet her eyes.
They drove.
To say it was a bad trip was an understatement. It was worse than she could possibly have imagined. Immediately she had been reminded of why she had barely used the car in this city; traffic was bad, almost gridlocked, even at that hour and heading out of town. Dodging through snarls and hold-ups, trying to absently reassure a ten-year-old who was swiftly shifting from whiny sleepiness to stark and very real fear, all the while that buzzing in her head crescendoing and being joined by a growing pain in her abdomen that said she was moving too slowly, too slowly, and it was all a simple matter of place and time... all told, it was a little like a drive through hell. Twice the stabbing pains in her womb had become so great she had almost pulled over to the side of the road until they passed, but each time remembered at the last moment that if she stopped, it would most likely only be worse. At one point, held to a standstill in a construction zone for too many minutes, she had briefly grayed out over the steering wheel, brought back only by Kamui's increasingly agitated cries:
Mother? ...Mother! Are you okay? Please --
...I... I'm fine, Kamui. Be a good boy for me. We'll be fine.
Fine.
By the time they passed the city limits, the pain was almost entirely gone, and the sun had begun to crawl up over the edge of the sky; and little though she meant to, she found herself thinking of Saya. Kamui, too, had eased down from terrified panic into simple worry, and he began to ask again the questions she hadn't answered before, his violet eyes wide and unhappy. She wished he would sleep, both for his sake and her own, but the boy had never seemed more awake in his young life.
Where are we going?
We have to go away for a while, Kamui. It isn't safe for us to stay in Tokyo right now.
...Why not? Why did we have to leave now?
We're... we're in a little trouble, Kamui. Your Aunt Saya... is... she's helping us get away. But it could only be tonight.
Trouble? How? Is Aunt Saya --
I'm sorry, but it's very hard to explain...
She's not hurt, is she? Mother, I don't --
Kamui, please! Don't ask me right now. Just don't... I can't... Kamui, I can't...
I'm sorry! I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make you cry, don't cry... Mom, you're scaring me, please --
Kamui. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Saya... oh, angel, I'm sorry.
She had managed to pull off the road before the tears hit, and just hugged her son to her and wept, clinging to him as her last hope on earth. After a while Kamui began to cry too, out of simple confusion and fear, and they held each other across the front seats of the tiny car as it sat by the side of the highway, under the rose light of the rising sun.
An hour later, Kamui was asleep in his seat, and Touru was driving toward the Pacific Ocean with one hand raised to keep the dawn out of her eyes.
It was over, and yet it had barely begun.
And here they had stayed, mother and son. As safe from the rest of the world as they could be, as isolated as any two ever were, and still, somehow, not unhappy. And the following spring, Touru had begun to have inexplicable fevers, rushes of heat that would wake her up soaked and alarmed in the middle of the night. So far, she believed that Kamui knew nothing of them; but then, he had always had a certain sense of her, just as she had of him, and there was no way of knowing for sure. And really, that didn't matter anymore either.
Touru looked at the clock. Kamui would be back soon. Maybe she had misjudged the time; the thought was horrifying, but not impossible. She tried not to think of how he would react.
He would know where to go, at least, she was certain. It was the one thing that could be relied upon. One way or another, Tokyo would call him; Tokyo... and the sword. That terrible, beautiful, much-resented creature. Neither would ever let him go.
Bitter desperation flooded into her throat, thick and choking and curiously unfamiliar. When it was her own fate in question, she had always been willing to accept, but Kamui... Kamui... Too soon. Too soon. Please, he's only sixteen, sixteen... please, you can't make him take this burden up alone. Give him a chance, won't you? Let him go.
Let him live...
The telephone rang, sudden and sharp in the quiet room.
Touru jumped, and whirled to look at it; eyes wide and lips parted, as if it were no ordinary appliance but a growling tiger that had prowled its way into their house, coming for her with glinting slitted eyes. But it was only a telephone in the end, nothing more, clamoring its message into a near-empty room: Someone is reaching out to you. You are needed.
You are needed.
Staring fixedly at the receiver, in the space of one second, she found herself struck with a sudden, powerful urge: to flee again, run from this room and its ringing summons, find Kamui on the way and just drive, drive somewhere, escape again and never look back and never say or do any of what needed to be said and done. To take Kamui and go, and keep him safe, even if it cost her everything that made her who she was.
The only trouble was that it wasn't really what she wanted. Not at all. And there were telephones all over the planet, she supposed; and some conversations, some conclusions, were inevitable.
The phone clamored insistently. not to be ignored.
Kamui would be back any minute. Would it be late enough to spare him? No way of knowing now, and no way to change it even if she had.
Resignation was bitter; bitter.
Kamui.
Kamui, she would have liked to have told him, would have told him if there had been time and she had known how, no one can save the world. Not even you. The world doesn't want salvation, not really; it doesn't care about the paltry, feeble efforts of one single foolish person, even if they're efforts for its own benefit. It is too large, and too proud. No matter what anyone tells you, Kamui, don't believe it: you can't save the world. Never mistake the power you have for that one. You can save either the planet or the people, but not both, and neither of those alone comprises the world. The world is something different, something other, and its destiny is not salvation any more than yours is. It can't save you, and you can't save it; the most you can ever do is doom yourself.
But Kamui, there is some comfort in that...
The phone rang again. This time, she answered it.
So cruel, so unfair, that it doesn't hurt.