Juuni Kokki - A Spoonful of Water

[a_hollow_year]

Title: A Spoonful of Water
Fandom: Junni Kokki (Twelve Kingdoms)
Writer: Resmiranda (a_hollow_year  )
Artist: Suriyel (moko_moko  )
Character: Youko
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: Light #2 // "i wanna be free"
Summary: To reign in hell is to serve in heaven. Or is it? [Youko, Shoukou]

"If a man is destined to drown, he will drown even in a spoonful of water."
- Yiddish Proverb

A Spoonful of Water

The plague came.

The rebellion was barely a week gone when Youko first received word of the horrible disease spreading throughout Kei. It had begun on the northern shoreline where the refugees from Tai landed, looking for a safe haven. Someone had undoubtedly brought it with them.

Now it was slithering from village to village, causing misery and death; worse than youma attacks, it struck indiscriminately and without blood. Children cried out from their beds, and in the fields men and women worked through the pain, moving slower and slower until one day they finally slowed to a stop, then gently folded to the ground and died without even a sigh.

In Japan, in her old life, Youko knew pestilence and plague were caused by germs and viruses, little things so small they could not be seen. Poor hygiene and close living quarters exacerbated the problem, but outbreaks had been all but eradicated in her part of the world; quarantine, medicine, and doctors all played a part in controlling them, but here there were no such things. The country hadn't even sufficiently recovered from its last horrible queen to function under the best of conditions. And now this.

Here, they blamed her. She knew they did. If tragedy befalls the kingdom, it is the fault of the emperor, who has transgressed against the will of heaven. There were furtive glances and whispers. Shoukei and Suzu came to her room at night and relayed the rumors in voices so hushed they were almost drowned out by the burning of the lamps, and when the sun shone Enho stayed silent, unable to answer the questions that washed against her lips. She was losing sleep, poring over maps, negotiating the movement of the military with Kantai, and every time she put her head down for only a moment the dreams came back, corpse fingers poking through the soil, snagging her clothes as somewhere in the darkness someone wept.

And all eyes fluttered to Keiki, straining to see the first signs of the Shitsudou illness.

And yet...

"...Three hundred refugees from Hei province arrived in Wa two days ago..."

"...Emergency food stores have been exhausted in Kou province, but the Lord of Baku province has requisitioned half the emergency supply of Baku and has sent it East..."

"...Reports of banditry and thefts are on the rise..."

On her throne, Youko listened to the litany of misery from her advisors and kept her hand on her sword, wishing for a way to slice through this problem as she had carved her way through the last. Her mind touched on orphans, on barren fields and funerals, on starving families and bared blades on lonely roads and the swiftly crumbling law.

Too heavy, her thoughts drifted down to the dungeons.

..o..


"Tell me about the will of the heavens," she said.

Shoukou yawned at her through the bars of his cell. "What is there to say?" he replied.

Youko narrowed her eyes. He looked the same as he had when she last saw him shouldered between two guards as he was dragged into the sunless chambers beneath the ground. Still hard and implacable, still strong and unyielding. His mouth still quirked in that awful little smirk, the one that said: I know. I know what you want to know, and I will tell you, if you beg.

But you won't like it.

Youko hated that smirk. She scowled at him, her chin lifting.

The smirk twitched. "Do not be upset with me, my queen. Getting upset will not banish this plague."

So he knew about it. Youko wondered who had told him, but decided that it did not matter. "Then what will banish it?" she asked.

Shoukou shrugged elegantly. "You must appease the will of the heavens, obviously. I would do it quickly, if I were you, before it spreads any further and angers Tentei even more."


"I don't understand."

"Clearly if you let your failures fester, they will become worse. Problem begets problem, crises compound each other, until you have well and truly strayed from your path, the kirin falls ill, and you both die."

Youko felt her mouth thin down into a hard line. "Yes, I know that. What I meant was, how can I appease them? There's... not enough healers, not enough medicine, not enough food, not enough of anything that will stop it! How can I keep the plague from killing more people? The army is already stretched thin, keeping the infected areas cordoned off, but people are still dying. I can't ignore that, but I can't do anything about it either!"

The smirk on Shoukou's face deepened, just a little. "You are confusing the symptoms with the disease, my queen," he told her. His voice caressed the words 'my queen' in such a way that Youko almost took a step back. They sounded like poison and pride in his mouth, something so bitter he couldn't help but savor it until it trickled all the way down.

"What is the disease, then?"

He smiled. "Me, of course."

..o..

Late that afternoon as the sun was sliding down the sky, Youko found Keiki in the garden he had commissioned for Yo-ou. He went there when he wanted to think by himself. The place had fallen into disrepair in the intervening years that the kingdom had been without a ruler, so it wasn't terribly pleasant to look at any more, but Youko sometimes found that she had to suppress a small flare of jealousy. He'd never done such a thing for her. But, then again, she hadn't needed it.

"He's obsessed with the will of the heavens," she said. "That's his explanation for everything, even when he doesn't believe it exists."

Keiki just blinked at her in the way he usually did when she said something that confused him, and Youko had to remind herself that he certainly believed in it. He was, after all, heaven's will made manifest.

"He thinks it's all about him," she supplied, to help him out. "It's like the world revolves around him, me, and the heavens, and no one else."

"He did commit many crimes, your Highness," Keiki said. "And it is clearly heaven's will that he be punished, otherwise you would have never caught him."

"Heaven had nothing to do with it," Youko snapped, turning away.

Shoukou had said that, too. She wasn't sure why it was so necessary for her to have acted completely on her own, except that she was to blame for the chaos and misery that he had caused. Setting it right was... important, but important to her as well.

She sat on a ruined fountain and stared at the twisting passage of a climbing weed as it clambered up the marble sides and across the edge. She took a deep breath. "And I don't think it has anything to do with this plague, either. Keiki... in Hourai there are medicines and doctors that could take care of this. There's no heaven involved."

"Perhaps," he said.

"But here there's just me. Is there no science here like the science in Hourai, because everyone believes that sickness and natural disasters are the will of the gods? Do people run from youma attacks because there are no weapons sophisticated enough to take them down, and it is the emperor's duty to keep them at bay?"

"I don't know, your Highness."

Youko glanced up, giving him a humorless smile. "I don't know either," she said. "But if heaven's will is so powerful, why do all these terrible things happen that go against the will of the gods? They could just as soon stop it from happening. So many people suffer."

Keiki sighed, but not the sigh that she hated. He sounded tired, and a little sad. "We are the tools heaven gave to the world," he said. "We are both instruments. It is heaven's will that we prevent such things. When we do not, we are punished divinely."

Youko thought of Hou, and its empty throne. Yes, the emperor had been punished, but not soon enough. The people suffered so much. So many dead, so many crippled lives that struggled on and on and on after he had died, dragging their sadness behind them. Was that fate? Was that just?

He would have died eventually. But that wasn't enough.

..o..

"I've petitioned En for help," she said.

She didn't know why she was here. She had nothing to prove to him, even though he obviously thought otherwise.

"And I am certain the king will give it to you," Shoukou replied. He shifted on the hard stone floor before lifting a wooden cup of tea to his lips and taking a long drink. He set it down by his knee.

She could feel him judging her, and just like that she was the meek little girl again, looking for approval from everyone, finding it nowhere. "I don't want to ask him for aid," she snapped, "but food is running low. We'll have to take it on credit. I'll be sending it into the affected provinces when it arrives."

"Will that cure the plague?"

Scowling, Youko turned away from him and stared at the floor as she began to pace. "It will help. Everyone will be required to wear masks so they won't be breathing infected air, and everything and everyone who ventures in is to be scrubbed thoroughly to prevent the spread of the disease. Anyone outside the provinces who shows signs of illness will be quarantined and treated as best we can." She stopped and turned to him.

"This is how I appease the heavens," she told him, though her voice was uncertain, and it sounded as though she were asking him a question.

He shrugged. "You are the tool of the gods, my queen. Whatever you do must be the correct course of action."

Against her better judgement, Youko snorted. "Except for when it isn't," she said. She could hear his ironic little smirk reflected in her own voice.

He heard it too. Youko watched as that horrible smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "Yes," he said. "Except for that."

They stared at one another for a long moment before Shoukou broke the silence.

"Incidentally, my queen, might I ask when will you be beheading me?"

Youko hadn't expected that question. She glared at him through the bars. "When this plague is over," she told him.

He laughed, a short, sharp bark. "I have lived too long already. The gods do not like that. Why else would the plague spread?"

"You were alive for quite a while before I captured you, you know, and there was no plague then."

"One would think I was plague enough," he replied.

"Be quiet!" Youko said. "You and this outbreak are not connected. You have nothing to do with it, so there's no point in executing you before it's over."

In the candlelight he smirked at her again, and his smile cut a deep path across his face, filled it with sharp shadows that threatened to spill over onto his skin, into his lap, across the floor and through the bars, where they would gather at her feet, piling up and over until they swallowed her whole.

"Interesting." He sounded thoughtful. "But my queen, if there is no connection, then why wait?"

Slowly he lifted the cup to his lips again and took a long, slow sip, his eyes never leaving hers, and Youko caught her breath. His gaze sliced through her, down her chest with surgical precision, peeling back layers of skin and bone until he found her naked heart and exposed it to the light.

Youko felt cold.

He placed the cup on the floor again, and smiled.

"What, my queen," he said slowly, "do you want to prove?"

..o..

Healers from Sai and food from En arrived over the next week. Youko sent them into the northeast, then shut herself in her room. She refused to speak to anyone.

She dwelled on her thoughts.

Shoryuu had said that for a kingdom to be won, blood must be shed. Rebellions quashed, criminals executed, and the like. She had taken it politically when he said it, but did it also mean that the heavens willed it to be that way as well? If the kirin were in charge, his mercy would destroy the country, but a king could keep it strong with the right amount of applied violence. Mercy was to be doled out when necessary.

It wasn't necessary in Shoukou's case. She knew that. And yet he was still alive, while innocents died.

Something should be done.

..o..

"How is the plague?" Shoukou asked when she visited him for the last time.

"Contained," she said. "I guess the heavens approve of what I've done."

His mouth quirked. "For now," he said.

Youko was silent, and as she stared at him she thought of all the people he had killed, the money he stole. Everything he burned and raped and murdered, just to know the will of the gods.

Would the plague go on, if he were not executed?

Was it worth the risk?

The heavens approve. For now.

"Let me ask you one question," Youko said finally.

Shoukou folded his hands into his voluminous sleeves. "Anything for you, my queen," he said, and bowed, as though he were truly grateful.

Youko took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a brief moment.

She opened them again.

"Why did the heavens not punish you before it became necessary for me to find you and take you prisoner myself?" she demanded. "Why were you allowed to run free?"

For the first time, he looked almost confused. "Why, so you could become a worthy queen," he said. "Without me, what would you be? Still a puppet, dancing in court, knowing nothing, seeing nothing, doing nothing."

Was that true? She didn't want it to be true. But if not for him, if not for his cruelty and the machinations in place that allowed him to continue his wicked ways, she would never have thought to step from the throne and into the world, looking for the truth in her own country. Or perhaps she would have. If it had not been one thing, it would have been another.

Wouldn't it?

"But... that isn't justice," she said finally. "What about all those people you killed? How can just your death pay for that? Was that necessary? Do I have to become queen of a country with the blood of innocents as well as criminals?"

"If it is the will of heav - "

"Shut up about the will of heaven!" Youko shouted. "That's not right! Maybe I'm the will of heaven on earth, but that doesn't mean I can make everything better! The plague, the flooding of the rivers, crime, prejudice - all of it, I cannot make it all better! I can't keep it better forever!"

But he looked even more puzzled. "But you will become a good queen. You could not be so without adversity," he replied, and Youko thought she heard strain in his voice, as though the foundations of him were cracking beneath the weight of her argument.

She wasn't prone to tears. That was the old Youko. But she could still be so angry her head swam and her nose stung with frustration unshed.

At her side her fists closed so hard her nails almost drew blood. "But people will suffer," she said, hearing her own voice tremble. "And they will die."

She clenched her jaw once, twice.

"And it's not fair."

And then Shoukou seemed to relax. "Ah," he said, the strain suddenly gone.

Then, "Ah."

Youko saw his shoulders tremble, and his eyes were wide and disbelieving, as if he'd just got the joke.

"You think..." he said after a moment, then paused to snicker. The desperate edge to it sent ragged shivers up her spine. "...You think the heavens care?"

Why was he laughing? Why was he laughing? "They care about good, or you would never have fallen, right?" she demanded. "That's the whole reason you did what you did! You defied them with wickedness!"

"Of course, of course, the heavens will punish the wicked, and the good shall prevail - " he was chuckling now, his teeth flashing in the dark, his eyes crinkling at the corners, and for just a moment Youko thought she saw the barest hint of a watery sparkle in the weak candlelight, " - but my dearest queen, that is all in the end. To get there... whoever said they had to be nice?"

Youko stared.

Then Shoukou finally broke, his whole body shaking, and he laughed and laughed and laughed.

..o..

Three days later, as the dawn stretched pale, lazy fingers across the sky, Youko took his head herself.

Within two weeks, the plague had subsided. The casualties were many, but not so great there could be no recovery. Rebuilding started.

In the end, wickedness was punished, as was right and good. In the end, the land was trusted to her care, and she took care of it, as was right and good.

There was much evil, sometimes too much, but in the end, good prevailed. That was a promise. That much was sure. In the end.

Perhaps somewhere above, heaven gazed down.

..o..

But Youko always wondered if that was enough, and gazed back.