Pearls That Were Her Eyes, part two; ophelietta; T/PG-13

[nebulia]

part one


~

“Yao-dono, Yao-dono.” Saki peered down at her, anxious and
breathless. “Jorougumo-dono is saying that she’ll leave you soon if
you don’t tumble out of bed in the next two seconds, those were her
exact words.”

“Eh?” Yao said, lost and muddled in her blankets.

“The beach, Yao-dono. You were so excited about it yesterday…?”

The beach. The ocean. Jorougumo…

“I thought,” Yao said in a small voice, “I thought that
Jorougumo-dono was still entertaining her guest this morning…”

Saki blinked. “No, Yao-dono, didn’t you hear? Jorougumo-dono’s guest
left last night, not long after he arrived, actually.“

Yao did in fact tumble out of bed, which caused Saki to squeak. She
not only tumbled, she ran all the way through the hallways, almost
knocking over a servant trying to repair a broken screen, and
barrelled her way into Jorougumo’s room.

Jorougumo was dressed not in a yukata, but for a day at the beach -
her idea of a day at the beach anyway, in a black mini dress with a
wide white belt, a large, white, wide-brimmed hat tied off with a black
ribbon worn over her gleaming hair. Large, dark sunglasses perched on
her face, but she slid them down so that she good give Yao a proper
stare down. She was dark and cool in the summer heart, effortless and
confident with just a touch of exasperation at Yao’s sleep-tousled
hair and obvious lack of readiness.

No matter what happened last night with that priest that Dosha
muttered about, Jorougumo was still her Jorougumo.

“Good morning!” Yao managed to squeak, before she launched herself at
Jorougumo and hug-attacked her.

“Good… morning?” Jorougumo said, sounding slightly frazzled, both her
sunglasses and hat knocked askew. “Dosha, did you put something weird
in her tea again?”

“Not even remotely,” Dosha said, rolling his eyes. “The weirdness is
100% Yao-dono.”

“I’m - just - happy!” Yao could barely keep herself from
laughing; she had to tilt her head up to meet the gaze of Jorougumo,
who was much taller than her.

“Call the healer, will you, Dosha,” Jorougumo said, mock-serious. “I
think Yao must’ve hit her head somewhere…” Yao only laughed and hugged
her harder, and Jorougumo placed her fingers on Yao’s face, spreading
apart her eyelids and peering into her eyes. “Her pupils don’t seem
dilated, but…”

“I’m just really happy!” Yao said, knowing she felt crazy and looked
crazy and that her hair was standing up all over head like dandelion
fluff and that she was still dressed in her pink shortie octopus
pajamas and not caring at all.

A smile curled around Jorougumo’s lips, and Yao felt her breath come
short. That smile, at far range, was known to take down armies. At
close range, it was enough to make Yao’s heart stop almost completely
and when it started up again, it seemed to forget how to keep proper
time. She felt Jorougumo’s fingers lift away, so her eyelids returned
to their proper place; and then both of Jorougumo’s hands drifted up
to settle on either side of her face, gently as cobwebs and much
warmer. Jorougumo was close enough - near enough - to -

Smush her cheeks together. “Heh,” Jorougumo said. “Fish lips.”

“Web head,” she mumbled, feeling oddly disappointed.

“What has Dosha been teaching you?”

“I didn’t get that from Dosha,” Yao said primly, or at least as primly
as she could with her lips squished apart like that. “He calls you
other things. Like old, wrinkly, used up, drooping…”

With every adjective, Dosha seemed to wilt more and more, and
Jorougumo’s pleasant smile became more and more blinding.

“Haha, you know what’s funny, Yao-dono?” Dosha said, nervously
edging towards the door. “How we sometimes say things that we don’t
actually mean, in absolute jest, and then repeat the
things said in jest at the most inopportune times…”

“Dosha,” Jorougumo said, in those beautiful, throaty, honeyed tones
that meant he was going to be facing incredible pain in the next few
moments, “have you ever heard of this funny past time that human
children call ‘pulling the legs off a spider’?”

~

“So, milady,” Dosha said, quietly, after Jorougumo got her revenge by
giving him a particularly vicious noogie and an elated Yao went back
to her room to change into her beachwear, “what happened to the nasty
baby eating priest, after all?”

Jorougumo snorted. “Do you know what that disgusting creature wanted
in exchange for the elixir? A taste of yaobikuni flesh. Just a little
nibble, he said.” She smiled widely, her fangs slipping out
just a little, gleaming in the morning light. “I gave him a little
nibble, all right.”

“Terrifying,” Dosha remarked, “but oddly comforting, at the same time.”
~

More time passed, and there were other days that were not so happy.
There were sweet things and scary things, sad, stressful things and
downright funny things. There was one day at the beach - after a few
years, Jorougumo had a summer home built by the ocean, “so that I
won’t have to teleport there every damn sunny day,” she grumbled -
when they were visited by a very rude karasu-tengu who said some
rather improper things to an unimpressed Jorougumo. What the tengu
didn’t count on was for the pale little waif in the white sundress
hovering quietly behind Jorougumo to suddenly call up a handful of
waves to pluck him out of the sky and drag him down into the ocean,
her eyes flashing a terrifying, stormy shade of silver. He squawked
and flapped around and eventually the waves released him - the girl’s
mouth had fallen open in a surprised little O - but when he went back
to the mountain he swore to the boss tengu that nothing and no
one was gonna make him ever try to shake down the Binding Lady and her
freaky mermaid-eating pet, ever again. Things were peaceful for a
little while after that.

It was around that time that she took Yao and Dosha to the Witch’s
shop (it would always be the Witch’s shop, even if wasn’t) for a
moon-viewing party, which meant, of course, drinking. The twins liked
for Yao to transform so they could play with her hair - braid it and
pull it up and part it and twist it around and put all sorts of
ribbons and clips and gewgaws in it, some of them nicked from the
storehouse - and Dosha liked to get drunk and trade tales of cruel
mistresses with the cute little shopkeeper, who had his fair share of
horror stories about the Witch, and she and Mokona broke out all the
dirty drinking songs they knew - she had picked up quite a number of
them, in her travels, and Mokona had a great stash that he said the
Witch had taught him as part of her and the Mage’s legacy, bless the
bespectacled fruit bat’s heart - and the pipe fox bristled and
whistled shrilly whenever she got within two inches of “his beloved
Watanuki” as Mokona squeakily called the shopkeeper. Sometimes the
shopkeeper’s errand boy - errand man? - was there too, with a
pseudo-stoic but actually irritated expression that could rival the
pipe fox’s or, as she liked to cooingly call it, the pipe cleaner fox.

It was getting to be that late hour of the night - or early morning,
really - when nearly everyone was passed out. The twins were cuddling
on either side of Yao, buried in the blanket of her hair, and Mokona
was happily wheezing under the table. The pipe fox was curled around
the shopkeeper’s throat as usual, and the shopkeeper himself wasn’t
asleep, but already cleaning up, washing the dishes in the kitchen and
rinsing out empty sake bottles. He had shooed Jorougumo and his errand
man onto the porch, with a pot of jasmine tea - “because you don’t
need anymore liquor, and you should know several dozen times over that
that Look doesn’t work on me,” he said severely, when she tried to
pout her way into another bottle - and a last plate of mochi. Even
though she had been allowed out of the cramped little sitting room
made “especially for her” and allowed out on the porch, she was still
seated on “her” cushion - the one stuffed with pipe fox fur, which,
she could admit now, was actually rather comfortable. That and the
honourary lamp filled with pipe fox fire were now more of a joke and a
tradition than anything; the clear, steady light of the moon was more
than enough to see by.

The years had treated the errand man well, she noted. She forgot how
quickly humans aged; one moment he was a thin, gangling adolescent,
and the next he had filled out, broad shouldered and well-muscled. He
was perceptive for a human, with an unusually mature look on his face
that he had grown into, just like his body, over the years. In the
moonlight, she could see the ring made of peach wood that the little
shopkeeper had tricked out of her many years ago, resting on the ring
finger of his left hand. It was her fault for being greedy enough to
want a taste of his blood, she admitted now; it had been richer,
smoother, than even the best Bordeaux, with a bit of a kick. And she
had been pissed off with him - with that sympathetic,
understanding look that tinted his face when she said yes, she knew
that Yao was being abused. Knew that Yao was being hurt all those
years, and refusing to heal her own wounds.

“You, errand boy,” she said. He slanted a glance at her. “You don’t
like me much, do you.” You eat one seer’s eyesight and the whole world
gets grumpy… not that it hadn’t been delicious and completely worth
it.

He rolled his shoulders in the slightest of shrugs. “You don’t like me.”

“You’re right,” she said, with the kind of directness that Dosha
lectured her on as being ‘rude’, but which Dosha himself employed all
the time. “I don’t. I think you’re stupid.”

He took a sip of his fragrant jasmine tea, completely unconcerned.

“You,” she said. You’re so stupid. Loving that little
shopkeeper to despair, grabbing at what you can, when it’ll all turn
to ashes.” She was drunk, she reasoned with herself. Everything seemed
like a good idea when you were drunk and right now, lecturing the
shopkeeper’s errand man on the proper relations between supernatural
beings and humans seemed not only like a good idea, but like a goddamn
public service. She should be awarded for this. “You’ll
leave him, or leave you, or you’ll leave each other. That’s just the
way things go. It’s useless and greedy and stupid and short-sighted to
hang onto things that aren’t yours to keep - “

“My grandfather was a priest,” the errand man said with what
indeed struck her as a kind of monkish mildness. “He did teach
me a thing or two about letting go of earthly desires.”

“Obviously he didn’t teach you any manners,” she said
severely. “Not that the man had any.”

Something that might have almost been called a smile twitched at the
corner of errand man’s face, before it was smoothed out. “You knew my
grandfather?”

“Knew him? Couldn’t get rid of him! He was always after me to quit
gambling or drinking or doing anything fun, and then he went around
stinking of those cheap clove cigarettes. Filthy chain-smoking
hypocrite. Rummaged around in my dreams sometimes, too.” She blinked,
suddenly suspicious. “I’m not dreaming, right? I’m not actually
talking to that bastard Haruka right now?”

The errand man let out a quiet huff of breath which she supposed, for
him, passed as a laugh. “Not to my knowledge, no.”

“Let us be grateful for small mercies,” she said darkly. “You know, I
can’t believe I didn’t see the family resemblance before. You’re just
as…” She worried her lip, trying to find the right word. Delicious?
“…Infuriating.”

The errand man snorted softly. “You remind me of someone, too.” It did
not sound like he was making a flattering comparison.

She called him something rude and he raised his teacup in ironic
acknowledgement. Jorougumo stopped talking to him after that, and
instead found herself becoming fascinated with the way that he
moonlight caught the edges of Yao’s hair, and the silver gleamed into
white. Yao always curled up on her side when she was sleeping, as if
she could tuck herself inside of an abalone shell and drift away into
oblivion.

For one tired moment, Jorougumo wished she could lose herself in that
ocean of hair, just like the twins, and let herself be rocked to sleep
by the sound of Yao breathing through the night.

~

That night, Jorougumo dreamed of something that might have been a beginning.

In a little farming village, a very long time ago, after many years of
wandering and searching for a place where they could be free to live
and prosper, a lady spider and her many sons and daughters moved into
the second home of a bushi, one of the warrior class. This warrior’s
nerves were in pieces, dealing with both the resentful peasantry below
him and the fearful daimyo above him. So he built this second home in
order to rest and to recover, to reclaim the peace he had lost to the
times.

At the melancholy hour of the evening, the spiders would gather
quietly in the ceiling above the man and listen to him as he summoned
a maid servant, and spoke in short, soft refrains that made the heart
go still and the night turn a deeper blue. The maid servant, in her
soft voice, would repeat them back to him, sometimes faltering, but
pressing on, memorizing them. The bushi and the maid spoke of bees
staggering out of peonies and the perfume of butterfly wings and empty
cicada shells that sang themselves away; but no matter how closely the
lady spider and her children listened, the warrior and the maid did
not speak of their kind.

One evening, the lady spider decided to favour this quiet warrior with
her presence. Perhaps when he saw her, he would find the words to
properly honour her. She descended with perfect grace, her body
shining in the dying light with speckles of black, red, and yellow,
the proud markings of her clan.

Though the warrior was skilled in reciting poetry, he could not
recognise the honour that was being done to him. Instead, he raised
his long kiseru pipe in violence against the spider; in the air, it
whistled past her, almost crushing her. She had to steal hastily and
clumsily away.

The lady spider was stoic. “What can we expect,” she said. “The humans
never change. Ignorant and short-lived, they would spit on the robes
of a god.”

Her eldest daughter, however, was furious. The next night, she walked
in the dreams of the warrior, appearing to him in the guise of a human
woman, arrayed in many layers of robes that sparked and flashed:
black, red, and yellow. At first she pleaded with him to be her
husband, swearing that she had heard his poetry and pined away for
love of him; he seemed to waver at first, drawn to the curves promised
beneath her robes, to the silken streams of her hair, to her
heavy-lidded eyes, to the lush rose of her mouth - but he held firm.

She could feel the fragile costume of her human flesh beginning to
fall away. Beneath the edges of her robes, the wicked sharp edges of
her legs tapped impatiently against the tatami floor of his home.

And she told him, “You have raised your hand in violence against my
mother, and for this, you will not be forgiven.”

Perhaps it was those words, or the gleaming of her thin, red fangs,
that frightened the warrior into waking.

In the morning, though, she knew she had been careless. The warrior
woke and the first thing he saw, lying belly up on his futon, was the
ceiling where the lady spider and her many sons and daughter had
nested for so long, living quietly and listening to him recite poetry.
He ordered the maidservant to clear the ceiling of all the cobwebs and
spiders, and to dump them in a distant field.

The lady spider again, bore this with grace and indignity, though some
of her children wept at being forced from yet another home: the tiny,
dry sound of a spider weeping is like husks of grain falling to the
ground. The maid servant carried the spider clan out very tenderly,
wrapped in a covering of violet watered silk, covered with a pattern
like the sea stirring before a storm.

It was the lady spider’s eldest daughter, sparkling brilliantly in her
fury, who noticed that the maid servant was closer to them in spirit
than to the master she served.

“How can you do this to your own kind?” the spider’s daughter asked,
as the maid servant set them down in a field. “Have you been chased
out of your home, as we have been? Were you ensnared by their nets
and their traps and their spears, and forced into slavery?”

“No,” the maid servant said, gently. The silken thread of the spider
clan gleamed yellow and gold, but the maid servant’s hair rippled
silver as waves. “I serve my master willingly, for he has been kind to
me. You see, I was human once. Even knowing what I am, my master has
given me a home and a place in this world.”

The spider’s daughter, hot-tempered as she was, was no fool. She could
see the love shining quietly in the maidservant’s eyes, as she had
heard it in her soft little voice drifting and touching her master
through the darkness with poetry, the way she could not touch him in
real life.

“It will not last,” was all that the spider’s daughter could say. She
wanted to chitter angrily at the girl for her stupidity, her naiveté,
but her anger was gone. She could only think of the poetry that
captured such fragile images, the words that were finished almost
before they even began. “It will not last for long.”

And the maid servant whispered, “But it’s so beautiful, when it does.”

~

That night, Yao dreamed of the beginning, too. If it had been a story,
it might have gone like this:

There was once the daughter of a noble house who was very beautiful
but very sickly. For much of her life, she was kept in her bedroom,
attended by servants, screened from sight, and told that the world
outside was dangerous: it brought evil and disease and pain and
corruption and death. So this noble daughter learned to be content
with her small view of the outside world, the window outside her
bedroom that looked down the road and that gave just the briefest,
most tantalizing glimpse of the sea. She could feel the faintest
flavour of the sea in her mouth when she woke up, and dreamed of
singing her way through silver-blue waters. But of course that would
never happen. So instead she contented herself with her favourite
wakame seaweed salad and platefuls of the pinkest, most succulent cuts
of raw fish.

Since this noble house bought so much seafood, especially to suit the
noble daughter’s needs, the fisherman and his son came frequently to
the house. From her window, she could see the servant’s entrance, and
more importantly, she could see the fisherman’s son. He was
dark-haired and sun-browned and broad-shouldered and smiling, healthy
and strong and unafraid to walk in the world, and he smelled of the
sea.

Somehow - she would never remember how - he began to look up when he
and his father came to deliver the fish, and she remained brave enough
to not dart away from the window. Their eyes connected; a nod, a wave.
And he was gone, but he was there again, and again, and again. Soon
there were smiles, and silly faces, and suppressed laughter, and after
the fisherman and his son departed from their home, she would find
things pressed into her hands by silent servants: a delicate branch of
coral, a cunning little amulet carved out of pale driftwood, sand
dollars bleached by the sun, shells that gleamed pink and pearly by
the light of her lamp, tiny bits of glazed pottery smoothed by the
waves. She kept them all in a jewellery box made of bird’s eye maple,
and on the rare times when she was alone, she took them out and
admired them, and conjured an entire sea out of a few trinkets.

When the rains came that year, she fell sick once more, as she had so
many times before, but this time worse than ever. The fevers ate her
up with her cruel, licking flames, one right after another. In her
delirium, she saw strange things: masses of billowing, poisonous smoke
anchored by a single monstrous eye, a dancing cat with its tail forked
in two manipulating its claws like a puppeteer, cruel-taloned birds
with the mocking long-nosed faces of men, spiders that turned into
women that turned into spiders. She screamed at the sight of the
priest that they summoned to exorcise her room: could no one else see
the blue-green gleam of his skin, the single eye where there should
have been two, the faint wraiths of dead children reproachfully
clinging to his knees and his robes?

Every night, she could see death coming closer, like a dark ocean
gradually and quietly spreading over the land. And eventually, she
welcomed it.

But one night, someone crept into her room who was not a servant or a
monster, but who smelled like the sea.

“For you, milady,” the fisherman’s son said. The salt in the sea
smell grew stronger, but with bitter overtones of copper. He held up a
bowl to her, and said, “It will make you better, I swear it. You’ll
never fall sick again.”

She trusted him, because he was kind and strong and he made her laugh
even though before this they had never spoken a word, and because he
brought her gifts from the sea. She let him part her lips, and put in
the first carefully sliced piece of flesh that tasted like and unlike
every other piece of fish she had ever had before: sharp and cruel and
rich and wild. She opened her mouth for more.

And then she realised, as the slippery chunks went sliding down her
throat in waves, that the fisherman’s son smelled much less like the
sea and more, far more, like blood.

~

Early the next morning, when the first fingers of dawn were just
creeping over the garden, Jorougumo said to the yawning Dosha, “Take
her home, will you? And make sure she gets a proper sleep.”

“You’re not coming with us, Jorougumo-dono?” Dosha said, pausing
halfway through his stretch.

“No,” she said. “No, I need have to a chat with the little
shopkeeper. I’ll be along later.”

Dosha watched her through lidded, canny eyes, and said merely, “As you
wish,” easily heaving the sleeping Yao over his shoulders and stepping
through the web that he drew up.

“Invited yourself over for breakfast, have you?” The shopkeeper’s
voice was dryly amused. She clutched at the blanket that she’d found
around her shoulders that morning and smiled her very best predator’s
smile, slow and sensuous and full.

“If you’ll have me,” she purred.

The shopkeeper swept aside her come-on as easily as cobwebs. “Gluttons
all,” he said simply.

She pouted - but the shopkeeper’s breakfasts were delicious.

Once he had sent the twins and Mokona scurrying off to clean up the
breakfast table, he poured more tea for them - lemongrass, this time -
and settled onto the porch where she had sat with his errand man only
the night before. Or was it this morning?

The shopkeeper, she had to grumble herself, was good. He had gotten
good, somewhere along the way. He’d adopted the mannerisms and the
dress and the languor of a dead woman in order to keep her alive, and
somehow made them his own. He’d adopted her endless patience, too;
instead of talking, he simply sipped his tea, and waited for her to
speak. Her long nails tapped against the polished wood of the porch,
keeping time with her thoughts.

“You never asked me,” she said, finally. “That time. You never asked
me why I couldn’t just get the pearl myself.”

One of his shoulders dipped low in a half-shrug. “Finding and seeking…
not everyone’s talents lie that way - “

“Don’t be stupid.” She had always enjoyed toying with the shopkeeper
- Mother had lectured her, before she passed on her rule, about
playing with her food - but she was in no mood to see the shopkeeper
equivocate to spare her tender feelings. “You used my silk as a focus
to find her. You knew that I was already bound to her.”

“Perhaps,” the shopkeeper said quietly, “you already knew what you
would find, and didn’t like it. I wouldn’t be surprised. I didn’t much
like it myself.”

“That girl raised a barrier against me.” She went on speaking as if
she hadn’t heard him. To her own ears, her voice sounded flat,
disinterested, as if it hadn’t taken years for her to pry this out of
her own heart and drag it out into the light. “Before, just before. I
threatened to kill her lover. They call me the Lady of a Thousand
Eyes, but I have more than that. I have eyes wherever my people make
her home, and one of them saw her… saw what that man she was living
with was doing to her. I visited her. She made me leave. And after
that, she raised the barrier against me, the exact kind of barrier
that I had taught her to make - and out of the silk that I gave her
myself, no less. What a perfect ruse, to nullify my own power against
me. She made it so that the only person who couldn’t find her… was
me.”

“Even if you’re the one she raised a barrier against,” he was saying,
“you are also the one she chose to live with, after all.”

Jorougumo snorted. “Because I fairly begged her, you mean.”

“No. She chose on her own.”

“I don’t know why… I don’t know why. That girl has an infinite gift
for stupidity, for choosing to love the people who will hurt her the
most - “

“Is that how you think of yourself? As someone who will hurt her?”

And she thought of the men captured in her webs, who even as she
devoured them, looked at her with eyes of love.

“It’s what I am,” she said. “It’s not something I can change.”

“No,” he said, sounding so confident and assured that she felt like
throwing her full, steaming cup of lemongrass tea right into his face.
“No, you are already changed.”

A corner of her mouth turned down. “Hardly for the better.”

“Your self-pity is annoying, and probably not good for your skin.
It’s all very simple. Yao-san loves you. Why won’t you let yourself
love her back?”

“It’s not that easy!” she finally roared, almost relieved at
losing her temper instead of just simmering with resentment. “You
don’t understand. You haven’t lived long enough to understand.
I remember Yao. I remember her as the maidservant to a blind
samurai, reciting poetry to a ceiling full of a spiders. I remember
her as a Buddhist nun, being attacked in the forest. I remember her as
a pearl diver in that fishing village that sold her. I remember her as
a karayuki in that hellhole in Singapore. I remember her as a farm
wife to a kamikaze pilot during the human war, always watching the
sky. I remember her as a school girl on the streets of Tokyo, picking
up salarymen in the park and looking for one who would keep her, who
would stay with her ‘forever’. I remember. She has always been too
good for this world, too loving - even when loving destroyed her, she
kept loving, again and again. Don’t you see? No one deserves her - no
one is good enough - “

The shopkeeper was shaking his head, as if he was dealing with a very
stubborn child. “You don’t get to decide that.”

“Oh? And who does?”

“Why, Yao herself,” he said, sounding as calm and unruffled as his
errand man had the night before.

She forced herself to breathe.

“It’s a good thing I don’t listen to your advice,” she said,
presently. “Because you have obviously been hitting the kiseru a
little too hard to be making any proper sense.”

He rolled his eyes. “One day, you’ll thank me.” He began to load up
the tea tray again. “No charge this time. I can’t take payment from
someone who already has what they want, even if they are too foolish
to realise it.”

~

When she came home, still seriously pissed off at the little
shopkeeper and his stupid cryptic remarks, she melt her anger melting
away at the sight of Yao waiting for her on the porch of the garden,
once more feeding the fish. Bits of bread went arcing through the air,
before the koi snapped it up eagerly, their scales flashing gold and
white in the sun.

“Jorougumo-dono!”

And Yao’s face… lit up… when she saw her, and she ran through
the garden in her yukata, not caring if she fell along the way. And in
Yao’s face, something (perhaps the same something that had been shaken
loose by the shopkeeper’s taunts) clicked into place, she saw that
thing - that elusive thing that the shopkeeper had talked about in
such a matter of fact voice, that thing that turned the world into
something rich and strange.

It was love.

Yao… had been waiting for her.

She shouldn’t keep her any longer.

She found herself kneeling before Yao, who stopped about a foot before
her, and said, uncertainly, “Jorougumo-dono…?”

“Yao,” she said, “I made you a promise, when I first asked you to
live with me. Do you remember?”

Yao came forward, and knelt in front of her. One of her small,
coral-white hands gave Jorougumo a shock as she pressed it against
Jorougumo’s throat, in the place where she wore a small silver locket
on a black choker.

She knew, Jorougumo thought, feeling a little dizzy. She must’ve known
the whole time….

“You promised me,” Yao said softly, staring at the silver locket as
if she could see precisely what was held inside of it, “that that
would be the last crimson pearl.”

“It will be.” Jorougumo was ashamed of how unsteady her voice had
become. “I promise to you again, truer than ever. It will be the
last.”

Without quite understanding how, her arms were around Yao, her hands
stroking the girl’s hair. This was Yao, she reminded herself. She
woke up with pillow creases on her cheeks and she loved sashimi and to
string empty shells together in necklaces and she gathered armfuls of
flowers early in the morning and strewed them about the Manor
willy-nilly, to Dosha’s eternal despair. She was stubborn and
wonderful and warm, and brave enough to keep her heart open and
hopeful far throughout so much pain and loss and betrayal and grief.
She could count off decades like beads on a string and call ocean
storms to heel and weep crimson pearls and break someone’s heart just
by smiling. She was Yao.

None of this was easy, she thought, brushing Yao’s hair away from her
cheeks, and holding her face with both of her hands, drinking deep of
the young girl’s dark gaze, deeper than oceans, and far easier to
drown in.

When she kissed Yao, she thought she must’ve broken her promise
already, for she could smell the sea salt scent that meant tears. But
the pearls that spilled from Yao now weren’t a bloody crimson, but a
pure, pure white, shading into gold.

“For you,” Yao whispered brokenly, smiling through the pearls of her
tears. They scattered into the grass below, gleaming and newly made.
“For you, for you, for you,” as she kissed her again and again.

She thought she could hear, from far away, something like laughter,
and a little voice in her mind that sounded suspiciously like the
shopkeeper’s saying, all gleeful and haughty, I told you so.

Shut up, she told the voice.

Thankfully, it did.

finis.