Story: The Baptism in the Blood (chapter 2)

Authors: bleeding.blade

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Chapter 2

Don't want your hand

This time I'll save myself

Maybe I'll wake up for once

(Wake up for once)

Not tormented, daily defeated by you...

From the song Going Under (the Fallen album), by Evanescence

It had all begun five years ago. I had sauntered into a garden - and had walked in on a darkly brooding and utterly captivating child.

How can I explain why I fell in love with her?  How can I explain the strange magic of her midnight blue hair, her stormy green eyes and her milky white skin? How can I explain how thoroughly she bewitched me?

I can try by invoking the qualities that make her desirable: her beauty, her passion, her fierceness, her determination - the simple, undemanding straightforwardness of her soul. But these traits exist in others, perhaps in even better degrees.

I can try invoking by invoking the quirks that make her endearing: her easy tendency towards embarrassment, her impatience with superficial civilities - the sheer mercurial nature of her moods. But these foibles can be found in others too, perhaps in even more enchanting ways. 

In the end, I don't really know why I fell in love with her. In a way, I've never really cared. I fell in love with her the day I met her, and the rest of it, as they say, is merely details. Comic details at times to be sure. But mostly, and especially towards the end, tragic.

~~~~~

That things turned out the way they did should perhaps not be so terribly surprising. It's true that it would have shocked the vast majority of those who knew me to discover that heartbreak had led to my brief yet devastating spell of insanity. They would have questioned the insanity, yes. But they would have questioned the heartbreak even more. After all, who could possibly resist Shizuru Fujino?

The only one who had ever perceived my fragility had been my father. For years he had watched me glide blissfully and effortlessly through life. He told me that I combined what was best in both himself and my deceased mother: his intelligence, authority and efficiency; her beauty, poise and grace. He also told me that because of these traits, the world wouldn't hesitate to give me most everything I desired. He had placed special emphasis on the word "most".

"Someday, Shizuru," he had told me gravely, "you will know for the first time what it feels like to have your desires thwarted. And I fear for you then, not because you are weak, but because not having the universe conform to your will is simply and utterly outside the realm of your experience."

That day came when I looked at the face of my beloved, and found only disgust and shame.

How could I tell her then what it had cost me to not have attempted more? How could I tell her then that the feel of bare flesh and the brush of parted lips were infinitely more chaste than the sweet violence I had so badly wanted to inflict with teeth and fingers and tongue? How could I tell her any of these, when even I knew that I had transgressed, and that my greatest error lay in not merely wishing to be forgiven, but in hoping that she would actually revel in my sin?

In the end, my father made one subtle mistake. He shouldn't have feared for me when the universe finally decided to laugh in my face. He should have feared for the universe instead. He should have feared for its fate in the face of my retaliation.

~~~~~

And after all that destruction, without even hearing a single explanation, Natsuki forgave me. But forgiving is easy. It's the forgetting that's the devil.

And Natsuki...she couldn't forget, and I couldn't blame her. In the aftermath of the Carnival, I truly had nothing left to give her. She no longer had a crusade I could support. Worse than being useless, the sins I'd committed meant that I didn't even deserve to be her friend. All I could be to her was a reminder of the burden and pain that was her past. That was how things had been between us after all: our relationship had been born from pain, molded by it, ended with it.

So I left. All I had told my father was: "You were right to warn me, Otousama." He had looked at me, had seen right through my calm exterior to the anguish inside, and nodded with understanding. "What do you intend to do?"

"I would like to go to the Eihei-ji Temple in Fukui and stay for as long as you will permit me to."

He looked at me for a long time. "I will allow you to go, on one condition: The day I call for you, you will have to come instantly and without question."

I nodded. It had always been the way between us: a favor given was a favor owed.

The day I left, he had come to see me off. His parting words to me were: "Repent because you must, but do not atone for more than is necessary. To do too little or too much is an indulgence not worthy of a Fujino."

I would have followed his advice if I could. But how was I to know when the need for atonement had passed, when I had no previous experience of either sinning or repenting?

[End notes: Eihei-ji Temple is an actual temple located about 10 kilometers east of Fukui City in Fukui Prefecture. It's actually the head temple of the Soto Sect of Zen Buddhism and is still an active monastery with around 150 practicing Zen monks. It allows lay people to stay and practice the monks' daily routine, though the standard length of stay would typically just be three days and four nights.]

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