Ever After

an X fanfic

by Serenade

Written for the X2009 challenge.

Insert standard disclaimer here.

Ripe persimmons hung from the vines, their taut red skins glistening with dew. Fuuma reached up and cupped one in his hand, twisting it gently free. He placed it into a basket already heavy with peaches and nectarines and other fruit he had never bothered to name.

This clearing was one of his favourite haunts. A dense wall of maples sheltered a mossy hollow, where water trickled over damp earth to collect amid the roots in pools clear as mirrors. Fuuma crouched down next to one, washing his face, when he heard the child crying.

At first he wondered if he were mistaken; he had not heard another human voice, save one, in many years. But the crying continued, thin and pathetic, laden with misery.

He stood, leaning heavily on his cane. The sound came from the north, towards the borders of the forest, past whose edge he was not meant to go.

Fuuma picked up the basket and started limping towards the source.

The girl hunched on a log, scrubbing at her wet face with a sleeve. She looked no older than nine or ten. Her hair was cropped into a pixie cut and she wore a blue dress stitched with yellow stars.

"Hello," Fuuma said, stopping a short distance off, the way he would to avoid startling the white deer that roamed the forest. The girl shrank back like a startled deer herself.

"I won't hurt you. Are you okay?"

The girl gulped. "I want to go home."

"Where's home?"

"I don't know. In town."

The town that lay at the other end of the road beyond the forest. Fuuma glanced up at the sky, barely visible through the thick canopy of leaves. Only a few hours till dark. Kamui would be worried if he was back late. But so would this girl's mother and father.

"Don't worry," Fuuma said, reaching out a hand. "I'll help you find your way home."

The girl hesitated, obviously remembering warnings about going with strangers. But Fuuma waited patiently, trying to project reassurance, and after a few moments she slid forward and took his hand. Together, they started walking north.

"What's your name?" he asked her.

"Akiko."

"I'm Fuuma. How did you get lost in the forest?"

"I was looking for Mina. My canary."

"There aren't many canaries in the forest," Fuuma told her. "I'll keep an eye out for her. In the meantime, your family will be worried about you."

They continued on, Fuuma forcing himself to a faster pace to make decent distance before dark.

"What happened to your leg?"

"A building fell on me. Back in the earthquakes. They had to cut off my leg and give me a new one." He lifted the hem of his trousers to show her the prosthetic.

Akiko stared at it wide-eyed. "Did it hurt?"

He shook his head. "I was in a coma all through it. I didn't feel a thing."

"My daddy died in the earthquakes."

"I'm sorry."

She shrugged. "I don't remember him. It was before I was born."

Fuuma gazed at her in mild disquiet. He had lost count of the seasons, in this timeless place, but the seasons went on turning, enough for a baby to grow into a girl, a girl who didn't know a world before. To her generation, 1999 was as distant as the moon, the cataclysm a tale out of history books, its consequences a fact of life.

He wondered what Kotori would have been like grown up.

"My family was killed by the earthquakes too," he said before he thought to stop himself. Burdening a child with his personal grief.

But Akiko only said, "Are you sad?"

"Yes, sometimes. But it's okay. I'm not alone."

Dusk dimmed the sky by the time Fuuma returned home. As he walked up the path to the shrine, he noticed green shoots poking out between the paving stones. Time to weed again. The forest had swallowed everything around them, but Fuuma could keep this space theirs for a while at least.

Kamui stood under the eaves of the shrine, sweeping dust from the steps, a distant expression on his face. When he saw Fuuma, he dropped the broom and sprang towards him. "Fuuma! I was about to go look for you."

"I'm fine," Fuuma said, turning into the house. Kamui trailed him, taking anxious inventory of his condition.

Fuuma set the basket of fruit down on the table and eased himself onto the mat beside it, stretching out his legs carefully. "I ran into a visitor."

Kamui stiffened. "A visitor?"

"A little girl. She was lost, so I helped her home."

"You left the forest?"

"Not all the way. Just to the start of the road."

Kamui knelt beside Fuuma, so that they were at eye level. "It's not safe out there, Fuuma," he said, intent, urgent. "Please don't go again."

Fuuma regarded Kamui with gentle affection. "If a little girl can manage herself out there, I'm sure I have nothing to fear." But he didn't push. He knew that Kamui's concerns were sincere, if exaggerated; that he carried burdens from the dark days he would not share.

Sometimes Fuuma caught him fingering the scars on his palms, his expression far away and sad, as though he were troubled by an ache that would not go away. It made Fuuma want to seize his hands and ask him, "What is it that hurts you?" But he knew already that Kamui would not answer. Fuuma had asked that question too many times before, and had been met with only silence.

He tried again now, to connect, to get behind that wall. "I don't blame you, you know." For Kotori, he meant. Although Kamui said little about it, Fuuma sensed that lay at the heart of the matter. "Is that why you won't talk to me about her? Because I would blame you? Kamui. Do you honestly imagine I would do that?"

Kamui looked away. "No. I don't imagine you would at all."

Fuuma roused from an uneasy sleep, fragments of nightmares still falling through his brain. He threw off the covers and dragged himself over to the window, where he leaned heavily upon the sill. Moonlight transformed the forest into a landscape of shifting shadows. He wondered if Akiko would return, chasing after lost companions or exploring hidden pathways. I know the way now, she might tell him.

He could visit Kotori's grave. See the world that Akiko had inherited. Find an answer to the shadows that haunted Kamui's eyes.

The two of them had withdrawn here because Kamui had wished it, and Fuuma wasn't even sure why.

But a road could be traversed both ways.