逆さまの溺死
When Shiori recovers from spluttering and coughing out water, still feeling like her lungs are drowning in the lake of her stomach, and from the shock of landing painfully on stone cold ground, she can only stare dazedly around herself.
All around her are clouds. The ground looks like it's made from them, but it can't be because she feels that she's sitting on something solid. They're just covering it, and it sets her teeth on edge with fright that she can't see what it is she's sitting on. The cloud-ground, no matter what direction she turns to, stretches far beyond what she can see. The same goes for what is above her; it's just a ceiling of heavy, dark smog that looks impenetrable.
She can hear the roar of powerful waves crashing against each other as they pound relentlessly towards a distant shore Shiori has a strange feeling might not be there. Her hair is plastered to her back and face as she pushes it out of her eyes and leans to the side, trying to peer around her.
There, right next to her hand, is a hole in the cloud-ground.
Shiori snatches her hand away from it with a startled gasp and wiggles backwards. She could have fallen through it if she'd made only the slightest movement in the wrong direction. She freezes when she realizes there could be any number of holes, just there for her to plunge through if she moves one more inch. Her heart pounds in her chest, the rush of blood to her head almost unbearably loud in the silence that surrounds her.
Shiori hesitantly kneels and leans forward, blowing hard to clear some of the mist and looking past her dripping nose down below. There is a black, angry sea broiling beneath her, with white foam running over the scaly ridged backs of serpentine creatures that swim close to the surface of the water. She spies the end of a barbed tail lashing angrily as one of the creatures dives down deeper into the stormy water.
A shaky gasp works its way out of her as she stares down below. If she's not careful with where she steps, she could fall through and land as one of those creatures' dinner.
She wipes off the water dripping from the tip of her nose and sits back on her heels as she looks around her and wonders what to do. She keeps her arms wrapped tight around her knees, afraid to move. She knows she needs to stand and walk around, to look, but what if she falls through one of those holes?
More importantly...why is Pai's subconscious like this? That's all this place can be, because where else could she have landed? But why does it look like this? Shiori feels like this place looks better suited to being what the world probably once looked like, in the beginning, before any gods created anything. There;s too much chaos, too much...something, in this place.
It's the polar opposite to what Pai is. She's neat, she likes being neat, she's polite, she's kind, though she does tend to put other's before herself which Shiori is always worried Pai will take too far to her own detriment.
Shiori shakes her head, putting her hands down on either side of her legs and getting to her knees on the stone cold ground, peering over the cloudy edge to the angry sea below. It doesn't matter. What this place looks like, what it means, none of that matters.
She needs to find Pai. That's what matters.
It's only when Shiori looks behind herself that she realizes that there is someone else here with her, in this place – and it's not the Kitsune man from before.
It's a girl, with long black hair that flows down her naked back. She sits utterly still, like Pai tends to when she's so caught up in her own thoughts that it's like she temporarily ceases being part of the world outside of herself. Like Pai in those moments, this woman is unmoving as she stares at something in front of her, even though all there is to see is the large expanse of cloud-ground that seems to stretch endlessly.
Shiori scrambles to her feet, her heart pounding in her chest, and she's about to start running toward the girl when she remembers that if she makes a wrong move, she could fall down to that black ocean. She glances down at the grey-brown mist swirling around her ankles, pursing her lips in frustration, and looks back up at the girl. The mist practically hides her from view, rising up to clothe her as she stares unseeingly at something Shiori can't make out, if indeed there is anything there to see.
Maybe...maybe she's looking at something only she can see.
"Pai!" she calls out, desperation tingeing her voice high and scared. "Pai!"
Pai doesn't move.
"Pai, turn around! Look at me, I'm here!" she tries again, to the same result. It's like Pai can't hear her, isn't aware that Shiori is right behind her. "Look behind you! Turn around, Pai!"
A woman's chuckle rings out behind her, and Shiori whirls aruond, making sure not to move too much. Years and years of playing basketball and twirling on her feet to pass the ball have perfected her balance enough that she doesn't stumble as she moves. Shiori gasps when she sees who is behind her.
"Ma – mama?"
It's – it's her mother, but at the same time, it isn't. Not really. Her skin is paler, fine-grained to where there had been faint lines starting to appear on her mother's face. Her lips are full and a pale white-pink shade as they curl up in a becoming smile Shiori has never seen her mother wear. Luxurious thick curls of red-brown hair tumble down her bare shoulder, framing a heart-shaped face that is supposed to be kind, yet appears cruel and harsh. Her eyes are darker than midnight, glinting as the woman who is not her mother smiles.
"Mama," she echoes. "Is that who we are to you? Your mother? How sweet." she tilts her head to the side. "We don't have one. How is it? What's it like?"
Her eyes are black holes that suck Shiori in, drawing her into their immeasurable depths until she feels like she could forget herself just by looking at them. A void opens up in Shiori's chest, so abruptly and out of nowhere that her stomach twinges painfully. The void is filled to the brim with sadness and an intense longing to leave, to abandon everything and just get back to her own body and look at Kouta's face again, because she's – she's so sad, and she misses him, and she wants to go back home, she wants to go home.
But – but she can't. She can't leave, not yet. Pai is here. She needs to get Pai to wake up. If she leaves now, Pai might die.
The woman is staring at her with an unreadable expression on her face, but something about the way her eyebrows twitch and her plush lips purse makes Shiori think she's – annoyed, about something.
Then she smiles, and it sends trickles of icy water down Shiori's spine.
"She can't hear you," the woman informs her, smiling like she's asking Shiori to sit down for a cup of tea. "She can't hear anyone."
Shiori shivers at the voice, with that same strange quality of two voices speaking through the throat of one person, the voice tone Shiori has come to associate with Ayakashi. But this, this is different, somehow. It's colder, sweet. It sounds...older.
This woman...she's not human. At least, Shiori doesn't think she's human, but neither can she tell what the woman is. The characteristic hot and cold flashes that she gets from the Ayakashi is absent with this woman.
She blinks, slowly, like she's coming out of a dream. "Wha...who – who are you?" why do you look like my mother?
"We birthed the many, and we are the one." She answers gently. "She can't hear you, even if you scream."
Shiori gulps as she remembers the Kitsune man's warning.
"There is a woman in there with her. If you see her, do try to exercise more caution with her than you are with me. Don't trust anything she says."
This must be her. Who else could it be?
"Why?" Shiori asks quietly, in the softest voice possible. She doesn't know why she feels like she needs to, but she's almost scared to talk any louder, as if the woman is a sleeping child who'll throw a tantrum if woken. "Why can't she hear me?"
The woman cocks her head curiously, as if she's genuinely confused as to why Shiori would ask such a question. "Because she's remembering."
"What is she remembering?"
A sour look crosses the woman's face, and Shiori holds her breath. Her brows tug lower over her dark, sad eyes, and her lips twist in a sneer. "She is remembering what they did to us."
Why is she talking like that? This woman makes it out to seem like whatever Pai is seeing, she knows what it is because she's seen the same thing, been through the same thing. She's talking like she and Pai are one and the same. But that's not possible.
Shiori opens her mouth to ask another question, to find a safe way to get to Pai without falling to her death, when the woman speaks again.
"Where is he?" she asks. She looks around behind Shiori, and Shiori is half-tempted to look back as well, but she doesn't. "He didn't come with you?"
Shiori shakes her head. "Who?" does she mean Kouta?
"Our his. Where are they?" she smiles, a simpering thing that has a cold sweat breaking out over Shiori's skin. "Or does he not care enough to bother?"
Shiori can only stare at her owlishly. She has absolutely no clue who this woman is talking about. Our his? Who is that supposed to be?
Her attention snaps back to the woman when she takes a step closer and leans towards Shiori, turning her head sightly and looking back at Pai.
"You are here to save her," she whispers conspiratorially. It's not a question. Shiori keeps her eyes focused solely on the woman's lips instead of those deep, fathomless eyes that threaten to pull her in and never let her go. "You are her. Manami. Touka died for you. You ruined Kagetora because she died for you. The Sakura-hime, Manami. Hiyori. Konohana. You are her, come to save Pai where you failed before."
Shiori's breath catches in her throat. Kagetora – that's the Kitsune King. What the hell is this woman talking about? Shiori has never even met him.
And Manami? Touka? Who are they? Is Manami a previous reincarnation of Hiyori, of...of Shiori? But how? Extensive records are kept on all incarnations of the Sakura-hime (which Shiori finds simultaneously convenient and helpful but incredibly unsettling), and though Shiori's only browsed through them, she's made a point to memorize all their names.
She doesn't remember a Manami, or a Touka.
The woman leans back and regards Shiori with a small smile coyly playing about her lips. "We have always been close to the Sakura-hime. She gave her life for yours many times over. Are you here to repay that debt?"
The woman steps forward and Shiori can't help flinching, eyes shooting down to look at the mist curling around her ankles as the woman's hand comes up. She feels it cradle the side of her face, her touch soft yet so, so cold. It's nothing like the gentle caress of her mother.
The woman coaxes Shiori to look up at her again, and when Shiori's eyes unwillingly find hers, she can't look away. It's like everything suddenly fades away into darkness around the edge of what she can see, and nothing seems to matter anymore. Her bones turn to jelly. She struggles with all her might not to fall to her knees before this woman.
Her lips curve up, beguiling Shiori to give up. "Are you here to to do same? Offer your blood to us the way she has had to for yours?"
"I..." No, Shiori thinks dizzily. No, I'm...I'm here for Pai. "...Pai. I'm here for Pai."
The woman grins, like she's leading Shiori into a trap that Shiori doesn't know she's walking into. "Why?"
"To – to bring her back. To bring her home."
The woman stills at that. Abruptly, she moves away, not seeming bothered in the least that she could fall through the cloud-ground as she takes quick steps back from Shiori. She stares at her, and as Shiori watches, the distance between them breaks whatever spell Shiori had unwittingly fallen into. Shiori blinks, trying to shake off the web of dizziness from her mind.
She looks at the woman again, and jolts in surprise when she sees glistening tracks of tears running down her cheeks, quavering over her wobbling chin before dropping down and disappearing in the fog below.
Her tears are red. Shiori's stomach twists uncomfortably at the sight of her mother's face crying tears of blood, even as she knows that this woman is not her mother.
Her voice trembles on a whisper as she says, "Home?"
She sounds broken. Like a record that's been ripped apart and is still playing as the woman repeats the word again, a fragment of a sentence only she knows lost to the quiet around them.
"...home...home...home...home..."
Shiori shifts uncomfortably. Her eyes slide over to the still silent figure of Pai. It doesn't look like she's made a single move since Shiori had first seen her. For a moment, Shiori stares at Pai's hair, now the natural black it had once been. She's grown so used to seeing it white that looking at it now as it used to be is jarring.
There's a movement to the left. She looks again to the crying (bleeding) woman in front of her, keening as she sinks to her knees on the cloud-ground, lifting her dainty hands to her face as she rocks back and forth, crying.
"We gave him everything," she weeps. "We listened, we obeyed when we didn't need to, and yet he broke his promise and everything is ruined. Now we can't go home."
"Why?" the question is out of Shiori's mouth before she realizes it.
The woman looks up to her, fingers at her cheeks, stained red with her own blood. "Why? We don't know. He killed us. He killed us and wouldn't even tell us why." The woman suddenly grins, a smile that has Shiori's stomach bottoming out. The woman's eyes wander away from Shiori, and she's not sure the woman is entirely...here. "He betrayed us, and when he comes for us, we will wake up and burn them all. We will take from him more than a thousand, more than he could ever replace in the millennia he will not survive to see."
This...Shiori doesn't know how to react to this. She doesn't know what's going on, who this woman is and who she's talking about. All she knows is that she's scared of trying to get past this woman to reach Pai, and this woman is clearly unhinged enough to hurt either one of them if Shiori does something to set her off. Shiori can't risk that – she doesn't know what effect it will have on their bodies in the real world if something happens to her, and she's more worried for Pai than she is for herself; Pai is already in a precarious situation in the real world, her body failing after everything that's happened.
If something happens to Pai in this world, her body in the real world might not survive it.
Shiori has to be very careful here, now.
"But...Pai has nothing to do with that." Shiori says slowly. The woman brings her forlorn eyes back to Shiori. "Please, let me take her home. Pai has nothing to do with your – your revenge. Please give her back."
"Nothing...?" the woman frowns. "You do not remember. What happened two hundred years ago...you do not...remember?" an ugly look, a snarl, twists her lips. "She has everything to do with it."
"What?" Shiori asked, mind completely blanketed in confusion and torn in two. Time is wasting, she needs to get to Pai, but she's sure that if she makes the wrong move, this deranged woman could end her life just as easily as she seems to switch between whatever she's feeling.
She pauses. Wait, two hundred? Again? The Kitsune man mentioned something about that too, didn't he?
The woman stands gracefully from kneeling on the ground and slowly walks over to her. She keeps her eyes trained on Shiori's the whole time, a small frown puckering her brows as she looks into Shiori's eyes, searching for something she's not finding. She comes to a stop right in front of her. Shiori realizes the woman is a good two or three inches shorter than her. It's strange, to notice such a thing, especially considering how completely terrified and anxious Shiori can't help being of her.
She's so close Shiori can feel her own breath blowing back at her...but she can't hear the other woman breathing. She doesn't even look like she is breathing.
As Shiori watches her warily, ready to spring away at the slightest hint of some sort of attack, the woman tilts her head to the side. She's no longer crying blood-tears, but her cheeks are still lined with red. Shiori's gut twists to knots at the sight of her mother's face warped into such beautiful cruelty.
"You truly do not remember," the woman murmurs gently. "You do not remember, and you do not know what was done to her to make her want to stay here with us than wake up to you. You know nothing."
"That – that's why I'm here," Shiori answers. "I'm here to find out and bring her back."
"And what will you do if saving her means leaving her behind?" she asks with an eyebrow arched questioningly. "What would you do if you knew of all the pain that waits for her if she leaves?"
"What pain?" Shiori asks, blinking in confusion. "There's no pain. There are people waiting for her, people who care about her and don't want her to die. There's – there's no pain for her." She doesn't realize that she's crying until she feels the first tear drop to touch her upper lip, inching down to the corner of her mouth. "Please, please just let me take her home."
The woman spends an aeon watching her, staring at her with a blank look on her face. It's impossible to tell what she's thinking. But, Shiori can see something there, something strange like...is it disappointment?
"You..." her pink tongue flicks out and runs along the seam of her lips as she looks at Shiori with that impalpable look in her eyes. The corner of her lips tick up in a faint sneer. "You are selfish."
Shiori stares at her. "What?"
The woman's eyes flicker with something that scares Shiori. "You are not selfish for wanting to take her back to that world of pain waiting for her. You don't know what's coming. You can't be held at fault for the sins of others. But you are selfish."
"Why?" Shiori exclaims defensively. "Why am I selfish for wanting her to come back home?"
"Because you want her back for you. You don't want to lose her. You don't want to be alone." She makes a faintly disgusted sound at the back of her throat. "All you humans are selfish, even in the grips of indomitable grief ,in the moments of darkest despair. When one of you dies, you are sad because you will not see them again, yet you can't bring yourself to be happy knowing they have shed the weight of your heavy, mortal bodies." The woman looks back at Pai with a tender softness that astounds Shiori. That look disappears in the blink of an eye as she turns back to Shiori with a narrowed gaze. "It's disgusting."
Shiori shakes her head, opening and closing her mouth, wanting to argue, to refuse what the woman is saying, but no words make it out of her. She doesn't know what to even say to something like that. It's – it's true, she doesn't want to be alone, but she doesn't want Pai to die. Those are two completely different things! She – what is she even supposed to say to that?
The woman takes a step closer to Shiori. "Do what you will to bring her back. If you fail, you will stay here. If you succeed, she will go to your home. But remember this," here, she leans in with a glint in her eye, a bright look that Shiori doesn't like one bit. Shiori has to force herself not to recoil from the proximity. "When the world calls for a hero and she is changed to a monster instead, you will be hard-pressed to remind her of your friendship. When she is in that pain we promise, when they keep coming and coming for her and do not stop, when she is hurting and looking for someone to blame, you will bear that burden." She tips back on her feet, laughing cruelly in the Shiori's shocked, pallid face. "You, and you alone."
Between one startled blink and the next, she vanishes in a swirling cloud of grey mist.