>>163100 For a given value of 'soon'.
Goddamn. Turns out it's really hard to write if I hadn't done it for a while and I feel hella rusty so my writing should be even worse than normal. But now at least with the scourge of Christmas behind us we should be getting much more regular updates.
New Year's Resolution: Finish this story without anymore kerfuffle.
With any luck, this will be first resolution that I've actually kept.
[X] Tell her about Daiyousei. Let’s not forget our original purpose here.
- [X] Then tell her everything else. Everything.
You get up slowly, wincing and rubbing your cheek. It’s been a very long time since anyone had been able to successfully raise their hand against you. You’d like to say something cool and overdramatic such as thinking of how you had almost forgotten what pain had felt like but that wasn’t really true. Partially because pain is not something easily forgotten but mostly because you had just been impaled on a scythe a few seconds ago.
“My apologies for the distress. I did die but only an alternate version of myself. I broke my hearthstone and sundered the timeline for a little bit. Please don’t hit me again!”
Komachi looks sorely tempted but ultimately holds fire. You don’t need your eyes to see the turmoil she is in. She opens her mouth to say something but stops for a second. She tries again, her tone cold.
“What do you want? I don’t assume that you
ordered me here just to toy with me.”
“About that favour…I was in a little bit of a panic. I should have worded that a lot better. I’d apologise again but I’ve already said sorry just about a million times right now and at least one of them must have been for me being a jerk.”
Despite herself, she smiles slightly.
“If the punishment properly fitted the crime for that last one, you’d have to keep apologising for the next seventy years. But that’s not my decision to make. You can explain all you want in front of the Yama.”
Looks like you weren’t getting away with this scot-free. Not that you thought you would. Letting Eiki read the Crane was never asking for anything but trouble and bitter misunderstandings. If only there hadn’t been so much other important bullshit festering that needed dealing with.
“Oh good, I was just thinking of how I wanted to see her again. I won’t resist. But first, there’s a problem with Daiyousei.”
She glances over to the side, in the direction of the unconscious fairy. You don’t even remember her collapsing. Had she done it when you died? Likely another symptom of her…condition.
“Yuuka’s put something in her soul. I don’t know how long it’s been there but I have my suspicions. I need Eiki to fix this.”
“She has been very busy trying to clean up the various messes you’ve caused everywhere. Why would Shikieiki suspend those efforts to try and heal something as irrelevant and unimportant as a single fairy on
your word?”
“Only some of those messes were directly caused by me. And to tell the truth, because she is an irrelevant and unimportant fairy. If I can’t help something so small, what
can I help? And…”
You mutter something indistinctly. It’s nothing.
“Yes?”
This piques her interest, draws her in further. Excellent.
“And because it’s all my fault! If it hadn’t been for me, she’d still be off gallivanting around and spraying blasts at random travellers and whatever else fairies do. She might not have been the most helpful of the people I’ve met but she’s certainly been the most constant and well-meaning…and she’s received no reward for it but additional misfortune. I didn’t even tell her that Yuuka was loose! She got to her before I did. With my own blade, too. This is all my responsibility.”
To say that saying this is difficult would be a rather large understatement. To sway someone’s will with nothing but the raw truth is usually nigh impossible for you. You can feel your words dying on your tongue, your curse making them sound insincere and twisted. But you’ve managed to do it before. You just have to truly
mean it.
++Willpower reduced from 6/10 to 5/10++
You meet her eyes.
“If Eiki refuses to do just this one thing, then I’ll find another who can. And I’ll be damned if I’ll come willingly to my judgement after that.”
“You can’t resist me now, Nash. You’re spent and powerless. You don’t have a choice about facing the Yama.”
“
Try me.”
She looks away first.
“Very well. Grab the fairy.”
You scoop Daiyousei up as Komachi tries to pull the scythe out of your corpse. Various squelching noises result. She curses as the blood down the handle of the weapon blisters her hands.
“Why the hell do you have so much blood everywhere anyway? You split open like a fucking piñata.”
Well at least she’s recovering back to her old self.
“Defensive mechanism. All of my veins are highly pressurised so that any injury results in loads of blood flying everywhere and burning people. I can’t turn it off. I’d recommend washing those hands very thoroughly before you eat again, by the way.”
“Did anyone ever tell you that making acid poisonous is overcompensating?”
“You know, it’s never come up.”
You walk over to inspect your corpse, getting a grip on it.
“I hope you don’t mind me taking a little memento? If nothing else, it proves my otherwise absurd story of splitting timelines true. Not to mention that he makes for a more agreeable companion than most. Never talks, keeps his opinions to himself and easy on the eyes. No downsides!”
You let your hand linger on that beautiful face, frozen in a mask of exquisite pain. No. Not now. There’ll be time for that later. You heft your corpse over your left shoulder, carrying Daiyousei on your right.
Komachi doesn’t react. You suppose one in her line of work doesn’t get put off by a few corpses. She grabs you, one arm braced around your side.
“I thought we had a good thing going,” she breathes. “Why did it have to end up like this? Why?”
There’s no time to answer as the world changes around you, distance stretching and contracting like rubber. You find yourself standing in a barren empty field as far as the eye can see. There are no stars in the sky.
“This place used to be a lot prettier,” Komachi says. “She’s ripped up all of the flowers. No sense in taking chances. Well come on, get inside.”
She pulls open the doors to a sprawling colourful building that you are quite sure was not there a moment ago.
“I would not recommend trying to deceive the Yama in here.”
“Whole truth and nothing but the truth. I promise. I’ll tell you all everything. And hopefully we can bring it to a beautiful conclusion, despite what I might say. This melancholy ill-suits either of us.”
You follow her through the corridors, taking a straight path straight to its heart. Surprisingly, there was nothing remarkable about the place itself. It all seems disappointingly
ordinary for the ultimate judge of what lies beyond death. You’re not sure what you were expecting.
The last set of doors swing open to reveal a spacious office. The room is divided by a black desk, Shikieiki wedged behind it. She’s leafing through a ledger of some sort. You don’t know what it is but neither do you need to, it is transparently an act of feigned indifference to your arrival.
“Hello, Eiki! I haven’t seen you since you abandoned me on that island. If only we could have had our second meeting in better circumstances.”
“The best circumstances may have been never meeting you for a second time at all.”
Yeah, she’s pissed. She roughly shoves the ledger off her desk, pulling out a more familiar tome as she does.
“If it wasn’t for you, I would never have had to read this disgusting book. And it, combined with your own actions, paint you in an exceedingly unflattering light! And secondly, while you stand on judgement, you will refer to me as
why the hell do you have your own corpse with you!?” You drop the corpse on the ground, where it starts to immediately burn a hole in the expensive-looking carpeting.
“That’s a bit of a mouthful. I’m sure just Eiki will be fine with all of us. I bring the corpse along as proof of my good character!”
You hastily relate the recent encounter between you and Komachi, the shinigami herself interrupting often to add her version of events. All the Yama can do is sigh and rub her forehead.
“Sacrifices are a virtue, yes. Many a noble hero has passed through my gates so that they may remain barred to others. The willingness to throw yourself in harm’s way just so you do not raise your hand against Komachi would be a stunning proof of your character…
if you did not immediately resurrect and show that you were never in any significant danger. Then it’s just showmanship and empty blather.”
“May I speak?”, Komachi asks.
“Why not? This judgement became a farce the moment he stepped into the room.”
“Even though he did not face true death, he still refused to fight back. Doing so even at the cost of draining his own reserves and becoming harmless and unable to protect himself significantly. With, as you can see from the corpse, no small amount of pain and mutilation inflicted too.”
“I doubt the harmless part. Who knows what kind of reserves he truly has?”
“Barely any, really.” You try to look as small and miserable as possible. “I could fire off a few more small Charms but that’s it. I had already spent a reasonable amount on a previous matter and Komachi took nearly all that was left. You can check, if you have some way to.”
She harrumphs but does not challenge your claim. Perhaps she does have some way to see your strength. That would only be mildly terrifying.
“You are correct in one way though. I never had any intention of sacrificing my actual life. I’m not some kind of noble hero who eagerly rushes to get himself killed for any cause he can think of. I’m quite attached to my life, to be honest. And that is no crime! Why would I suffer all that pain and helplessness if I were evil?”
“To trick us.”
“If we go down that path, let me say that I am not
that depleted. I could not last in any significant confrontation but I still could have done significant damage to Komachi’s mind. Or yours. Isn’t the fact that you still have the capacity to mistrust me at all a sign that I can be trusted?”
Komachi steps back slightly, clearly not comfortable with being reminded of the possibility.
“No. Circuitous and based on bad logic. And the walls around my mind are absolute. Yuuka could find no purchase there and neither could you.”
“Pray that we never have to find out. It ultimately comes down to just trusting Komachi’s and my words. And I have no idea why the two of you disregard mine in order to trust that of a book as foul as that. Anything it says about me is almost certainly a twisted lie.”
Shikieiki glances down at the Crane on her desk, unwilling to look at it for longer.
“This book is unpleasant, yes. Filled with taint. After this is all over, I imagine I will have all copies burnt and their ashes buried. But if it is even remotely true, it cannot be ignored. As unsavoury as the prospect is, I’m going to move to interrogation.”
“I’ll answer everything you ask truthfully. Everything. But first, you have to promise me that you’ll help Daiyousei out.”
You dump the fairy on the desk. Shikieiki recoils immediately, her chair grating as she pushes it back.
“What is this? It’s foul!”
“I figure that this is in both of our common interests to help. I don’t really know how the metaphysics of this work but to put it shortly, Yuuka broke her. Fix it.”
She gets over her revulsion enough to peer at Daiyousei closely. “I don’t know if I can. With those others of Yuuka’s, they were supposed to be dead. Firmly within my domain and mine to take. But I’ll try. No matter how your judgement turns out, she didn’t deserve this.”
She takes Daiyousei tenderly and the fairy disappears, leaving only a few scattered flower petals behind. Shikieiki immediately burns them.
“We’ll see how she turns out. But I’ll take care of her.”
Eiki cares a lot more about fairies than Komachi does. You suppose it’s a requirement for her position. A shinigami can think all the bad or neglectful things they can about people as long as they do their job. Perhaps a Yama must show compassion towards all living things before she could judge them all equally. You know that Eiki hates to see souls go towards the worse end of the afterlife, hence her attempts to get them to improve while in life.
But when she turns back to you, you can find no trace of mercy in her eyes. Her gaze has picked up that uncanny quality to them as they did back when you first met her, the kind that makes your skin crawl and your Coadjutor scream. In the periphery of your vision, you can see Komachi edging out of the way in order to escape the Yama’s field of vision.
“Begin the interrogation.”
She stands up, placing her mirror on the desk. It goes blank, no longer reflecting anything in the room.
“There shall be no questions asked. In light of all the confusion, I will rip the truth from your past directly. It only showed tiny glimpses of you before but I have since then calibrated it to allow creatures beyond Gensokyo’s laws. Your life shall face a full judgement!”
The mirror shimmers, the blankness receding to show a luscious green landscape of immense trees, each one a giant. And a small house nestled away within the roots of one tree in particular. It was in far better condition than what one might assume from being in such a place, like a cottage in a storybook. Smoke curled slowly out of the chimney, being the only sign of activity beyond the two-legged riding lizard sleeping in the shade, its jaws still red from the meat that had been thrown to it.
You feel an immediate sickness through you that it almost pains you to look at it. Nostalgia perhaps for a time long gone, seven decades hence. But mostly, you just feel violated. This is what mental defences are for! So that you never need feel vulnerable or open to anything or anyone. And yet she just casually shows you that forest, that house?
“Nope!”
You try to push the mirror over, Eiki pulling it out of the way just in time. She scowls.
“What are you doing? I can hardly imagine a more obvious sign of guilt.”
“I’m willing to truthfully answer any question you asked. There is no need to work your way through my life.”
The Yama raises an eyebrow.
“Oh? And if you are truly intending to answer any question I ask, what pray tell is the functional difference between the two methods? This one is far more impartial.”
“I’ll be honest. A lot of my life is pretty pointless bullshit. And none of it is pleasant. Quite unsavoury, in fact. We would all be a lot better off not seeing the large majority of it.”
“The words of a guilty man.”
“I agree with him,” Komachi says. Eiki gives her a death glare but she doesn’t back off. “Surely only his actions while within Gensokyo matter. Anything else is outside our jurisdiction.”
She knows how violating the feeling of your secret past being revealed is, you can tell. And you can see very clearly that she really doesn’t want to know. She’d much rather stick with the version of you that she’s known. So would you.
“There must be an alternative.”
[ ] Oh screw it. You said you would tell them
everything. Even if it’s a terrible violation of privacy.
[ ] You just said that melancholy isn’t meant for the likes of you or her. And yet, at the price of being overdramatic, that is all that lies down that path. Force a different method.
[ ] NOPE NOPE NOPE. Run now. Do it do it do it. Fuck everything.
