After a long, long while, another Baiken and Anji drabble! Yay!
And it’s angsty! Yay!
Title: Graves and Names.
Word count: 927
Baiken remembers very little of her parents.
She remembers their names (Kimura and Ryuko), and what they did for a
living (her dad was a construction worker, her mom was a homemaker), but
besides that only vague impressions of the people who raised her remained.
(The smell of fresh rice as she woke up, the sound of her mother humming
in the kitchen.)
The years had been a blur of blood and hate, she could barely afford
time to find a place to rest her head, much less reminisce about people she
would never meet again. She can’t say for sure if they were good parents, or if
they were harsh. She hardly remembers their faces.
(The feeling of her father gently shaking her shoulder, the sound of his
laugh when she only buried herself deeper in the covers of the futon.)
Anji, in contrast, never had any parents to forget about in the first
place. Barely 11 months old and found on the steps of an orphanage. Being raised
by someone who wasn’t paid to do it was a novel concept for him, so he tended
to ask about hers when he thought she was in a good mood.
(A large, calloused hand on her shoulder gently guiding her to the smell
of rice, her mother started to sing.)
She indulged him eventually, if only to shut him up. He asked her some
ordinary things and she answered from what she could remember. His joy and
wonder over the tiny, bleary details of her parents was just this side of
absurd. The most interesting thing she had to say about them was that her mom
was, supposedly, an Enka singer for a few years before she married.
Boy did he love that tidbit.
(A warm bowl in her hands, the rice slowly rousing her as she ate it,
her father swaying off tune to the song with a smile.)
Eventually she ran out of answers for him, and he stopped asking. She
doesn’t miss them, she can’t. How can she miss people she barely knows, that
she barely had the chance to know before it all got taken away.
(The sound of something exploding outside the house. The feeling of
being knocked off her feet and the roof collapsing on top of her.
Pain. So much pain.)
She still visits their graves every year, more for tradition than
anything else. Not that there’s anything beneath the makeshift tombstones, no
time to carry such useless things as dead bodies in the middle of the chaos,
but it has their names. That should be enough. It needs to be. It’s all she can
give them.
(The smell of fire, the sounds of screaming, the sounds of everyone
screaming. She can’t hear her mother singing beyond all the screaming, can’t
see her father dancing from behind the flames.
A monster in the sky in gleaming armor.
Hate. So much hate, building up in her chest to the point where she is
sure it will burst out and split her in half.
Nothing, absolutely nothing. She can do nothing.
Not yet.)
“How can so much dirt build up in one year?” Anji
grumbles as he cleans soot from around her father’s name on the stone, breaking
her out of her reverie as she glances at him from the corner of her eye,
“Doesn’t this place have a groundskeeper?”
“Not for twenty years.” She says lightly, glancing down at the
base of her mother’s gravestone before reaching out to brush a few stray leaves
away. “No one left in the colonies that wants to deal with the corpses
here, that generation is long dead.”
“Except for us.”
“…Except for us.”
He traces a finger on the last name on her father’s stone, carefully
moving along the groves of each character.
(The first thing she threw away, she didn’t need it, didn’t deserve it.
Kimura and Ryuko’s daughter died along with them, burnt to ashes until
there was nothing left and then sank to the bottom of the ocean with the rest
of their home.
She is Baiken. That is all she
will ever be.)
Anji sighs and pats the stone gently, “I always wanted to meet you,
sorry we never got the chance.”
“The stones can’t hear you Anij.”
He looks at her from the corner of his eye, hand still on her father’s
marker, “the stones are all that I have to speak to.” He frowns.
“Soon not even that, at the state their in.”
She clenches her jaw. “Stones wither away.” He faces her fully
now, an unspoken challenge in his gaze as she keeps her gaze on her mother’s
name. “Everything withers away, eventually.”
For a long while, he says nothing, turning away to stare at the
gravestone again. A gust blows through, clearing away what was left of the dead
leaves.
Eventually he sighs, and groans as he gets up on his feet. “Yes,
eventually.” He offers her a hand with a soft smile. “But not for a
long while yet.”
She looks at her mother’s name for a moment more, lifting her hand to
trace it on the stone, before reaching for Anji.
She doesn’t look back as they walk away, her hand holding his until the
horizon swallows up the stones.
(The first anniversary of their death, she stopped for a moment to
wonder if they would be proud of her if they saw what she amounted to.
The day after, as she slit a man’s throat open, she decided that it
really didn’t matter.)
Rex's place 