“Whole thing’s shitty,” Rui said after a time. “It’s all right.”
She kept saying it, but it wasn’t true.
“I can’t undo it,” he said. “But I can tell you I’m not gonna let them get me like that again. I’ll be better. They won’t break us, all right?”
There was so much fear, Rui thought, fear of others, of the war, the unknown. The general, pervading fear of being lost, of feeling, in some deep way, that there was nothing you could do about it. That you had to let it happen.
It was a fear of change, and at the same time, fear that nothing would.
It came and went in waves. It showed itself in times she’d least expect.This, too, Rui thought,this is how we survive.
“They put me on the field,” he murmured, repeating himself. “Tokuon. We’ll be a day behind you. But you – the Jibashiri – you can get there first. This is our chance.”
He smiled now, vague and distant, and, yes, afraid.He’s worried, Rui thought.He’s trying to believe it all, himself.
“Then let’s take it.”
It was an act of bravery, she knew, finding a way to believe when nothing told you that you should. When you had to find it in yourself, because it was nowhere else. “Let’s do it,” she said again. “Let’s do this thing.”
We have each other, she wanted to say. And it meant: things will start looking up.We can do what we want to do. We can do anything.
“Oh, this place.” Sen sighed. “This fucking wild land…”
“What’s that?”
“It’s just like us.”
There’s an ocean inside you, she thought, just as wide, and real, and vast as any other. Just as huge as the river I could see from home. She knew because she had those memories in her, those little hardships and those joys.They carry everything, they remind me who I am. Who I can be.It brought the past with it, and sometimes she wanted it to come, wanted it to drown her out. She felt she might be washed away, but tonight, she wanted to be washed away. Tonight, it felt good.
They went outside, and even the night seemed warmer now, warm enough to be free. The dry, chill cold and the patchy clouds and the whispers of a breeze, and somewhere up there, the gods were watching. She felt the twinge of pain again and remembered the Hososhi.Sen, too, was cursed, they’d said.
But tonight, her god was silent. Tonight, there was just the two of them, who’d been found together by chance, and who, by chance, had found each other once again. Who’d saved each other, in different ways.
Sen was the closest thing to family she’d ever had. Closer than Koroku, closer than the crow monks themselves.
“You and me,” he’d told her, once, at Kannagara, his young face bright and shining, as they stole off with a jar of rice-wine and got drunk under a harvest moon.
You and me.It’syou and me against the world.
We’ve got to look out for each other.
I’ll always know you’re there.
Now, she felt those words again. She saw them in his eyes, his glance. She felt, for this instant, somehow closer than family, closer than love. In it, she felt wild. This was someone who would always be there, who would say,We can do anything.Who said,We don’t have to be what they make us.Who said,We can run.Who said,We can sing, we are drunk with it, the power of knowing that you, Rui, you out of everyone in this fragile life, you have my back.
“It’s us,” he said again, now, quietly. “It’s all of us.”
Here, under the heavy clouds and the wind and smell of frost, Rui felt a shard of hope. Hope that, as long as they could find a way back to one another, they would make it through. “It’s us,” she echoed.Us.
No one can tell us what to be.
The wind blew clear and cold around them. The clouds began to brighten with a glow.
“Rui,” he whispered. “Look. The moon.”
She smiles at us, Rui thought.
She fell asleep with the world still spinning beneath her, feeling the earth on her back and the air on her skin. She fell asleep with Sen in his embroidered cloak clutching her left hand, and whispering into her right.
