[dream 15] little one, little one, the sky is falling [week 22, day 1]
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
****
Your eyes flutter open in a back alley of Yomisato, the sky dark gray and hissing with rain high above you. The rain has washed the color out of the world, so you see everything in monotones and chromes.
(Chrome, you remember, you were looking for her. Weren't you?)
Are you looking for someone?
Your hand trails along the wall of the building next to you, the wet wood giving slightly beneath your touch. Probably rotting. You'd know, wouldn't you? About things that rot away inside, invisibly to the outside world until they split open, disgorging their parasites and dross. You'd watched an empire rot that way. (Or are you the parasite?)
It's been a month since you died.
You don't remember waking up since then, in fact. It all runs together in a grayscale blur, smeared across the windows of your memory. Maybe you spoke to someone in the aftermath (did you?); or else you wouldn't be in Yomisato again. There was something you thought you were going to do. (Wasn't there?) Someone you had to see. You'd meant to tell them, there was a whole group of people you'd meant to speak with. (Weren't there?)
It's no use. C.C. was there, and gone, and there, and gone, and there, and now gone again. You'd seen her on the Hitomi calling for revenge - for you? did this happen in the Before, or the After? why can't you put the puzzle pieces of time together properly? - and gone to her, gone to where she'd said she was, and - nothing. An empty room, a cold bed, and no sign of a living thing. You'd run your hands over the mattress, once, and walked out. A man you were familiar with saw you exit the hut and blanched. You are a ghost, now, haunting unfamiliar places and chasing the shadows of people that are gone.
(Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.)
There's nothing for it but to walk out into the rainy street. The people pass around you like images reflected in water, cast between the raindrops. You realize you aren't even wet.
So I am dead, you say aloud, and the sound scatters on your lips.
Don't be so eager, she says beside you. C.C. is there. Or C.C. is not there. Her eyes retain the only color in the world, a deep liquid amber that shines on its own.
You say nothing and keep walking. C.C. isn't there, because she is never there, and even when she is, she will only vanish again. The gods either seem to love your reactions to her comings and goings, or else C.C. is as willful and contradictory as always, and impossible to keep in one place.
I see, she says, you've given up. Her eyes burn with reproach. I never would have thought it of you.
No, you will not say anything.
She turns away, finally. Such disappointing things, from the man who once held the world in the palm of his hand.
There is nothing to hold here, you finally snap. This isn't my world. This isn't my right or responsibility. If the gods here want anything out of us, it's for us to shut up and do as we're told, isn't it? (Because you'd made a contract, but they had broken it. They've taken C.C. away countless times, and finally, when you'd taken a greater step against what you had seen in the back alleys and rotting whorehouses, they'd taken your Geass, too.)
She says nothing, and you realize she is gone. Your words have broken the spell, shattered an illusion made of spider silk and glass.
How predictable, you say aloud, as if the jab might bring her back.
****
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
****
There is, instead, a woman burning brightly with the colors of the sun where C.C. had stood, standing out against the gray like blood on a white gown.
Ame-no-Uzume-sama, you greet her. I'm not sorry, you know.
She says nothing, but smiles, her eyes blazing gold, and Lelouch can guess the sentiment: I don't care whether you're sorry or not; you lost your head for that little outburst already.
You decide to walk on, but as you do, the city streets give way beneath your feet to grass, and the sky clears above you, brightening. Color begins to seep in again.
Ame-no-Uzume is still wearing that perfunctory little smile. There is something she is holding in her hands, wrapped up in many cloths and bandages.
What do you want? you snarl. It almost feels good to feel something like anger or resentment again, after weeks and days of drifting in something not unlike apathy, waiting for yourself to disappear as well. What does she want? Does she want you to convert and begin singing her praises in the streets of a city that has turned their backs on the gods? You, the convenient unkillable martyr, to die and rise and die and rise again, harrow hell on your way down and build a cult of your own on the way back? Thanks but no. You've had enough. You have had a lifetime's worth of enough.
She rolls her eyes and sits on the grass, cocking her head and gazing up at you as if waiting for you to say something, tossing the roundish object between her hands idly.
You should walk away. You want to walk away. But you sit instead, not far from her. Up this close, the goddess is very difficult to look at directly.
She hands you the object.
(Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.)
You are struck, the moment your hands touch it, by an intense feeling of trepidation. She mimes unwrapping, and gestures to you. Slowly, reluctantly, your fingers peel the wrappings apart, and unwind, unwind, unwind.
Ame-no-Uzume has handed you your own head.
You stare for a moment, take it in - the bloodied stump at the base of your neck, your glassy sightless eyes, your expression frozen in a look of something, something seeking, and never finding.
Dully, you feel as though you should be much more horrified; as it is, you can barely feel anything. It is just an object, somehow, a lump of meat and bone.
...That's disgusting, you say, because you feel as though perhaps she'd meant it as some sort of quasi-normal gesture and simply failed to understand how humans felt about holding their own heads.
The goddess points to her lips. You look at her. She points again, more insistently, peels her lips back to show him her teeth.
The head in your hands is a little past rigor mortis, and you are able to pry your own mouth open - this is very weird - to find a scroll within, bizarrely large enough that it shouldn't have fit within. Inscribed upon the seal are two kanji: 更生.
(kousei:
"rebirth.")
That's intriguing.
You look up, but Ame-no-Uzume simply waits. She doesn't encourage you to open it. If anything, she seems to, for once, be waiting on you. Waiting for you to make a choice.
Choose it if you want it, she seems to be saying.
You weigh the objects in your hands, your head in one, the scroll in the other. You can stay. You can drop the scroll and stay and wait for the gray rain to wear you down like a monument until you forget your own face, weathered into rock and soil and left alone. Or you could open the scroll given to you by a goddess you don't particularly even like. It might change you, warp you, twist you. Or it might be nothing, some ridiculous zen koan about watching the sky and contemplating the leaves, whatever. Choose, Lelouch, frying pan or fire.
You drop the head. The scroll's seal breaks quite easily beneath your fingers. You unspool it. There appears to be writing on it, but you cannot - cannot read it - is it shifting? what is? -
****
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
****
The brightly shining woman reaches out and ruffles your hair. Her touch is warm.
You're much more endearing this way, she says aloud.
[ The Hitomi shows an alleyway in Yomisato, the same from the beginning of the dream. A young child, maybe about ten years old, with Lelouch's hair and eyes and maybe a higher-pitched version of his voice is slowly standing, looking around himself with abject confusion and buried fear. His clothes are about seven sizes too large for him, and he doesn't yet notice the Hitomi on the ground at his feet. ]
Where... where is this?