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31_days2007-05-01 10:49 am
tongari.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2007-05-01 10:49 am
[May 1] [Mushishi] everything is made from a dream
Title: everything is made from a dream
Day/Theme: May 1: between the click of the light and the start of the dream
Series: Mushishi
Character/Pairing: Ginko, Nui
Rating: G
Sometimes he remembers a woman’s voice, cracked with either age or grief, speaking through the pitch-black darkness of childhood memories he cannot recall. When he’s tired, he’s read too much and has to rest his eyes, he’ll shut out the candlelight, daylight, starlight – watching his eyelids – and repeat to himself what he’s learnt from the text, but it’s always her voice that speaks the words again. Facts, advice, sometimes poetry – he has no idea who she is, who she’s supposed to be. If it was only an old woman’s voice, calm and severe as the tolling of a bell, he’d dismiss it as an archetype lurking in his subconscious, a personification of all the information he needs to keep in his head--
(It’s not.)
Each lilt and break of her soft voice pulls at his heart, vacant but stirring, a sound with a sense of loss in it. As if she was once a real person but had fallen through the dark hole in his head, together with his earliest memories: the memory of where he had come from, the memory of his real name, the memory of those who had loved him. “Mother?” he whispered, once, upon waking; spilled candle wax across the floorboards and burnt his hand. He was glad for the reason to cry.
*
Sometimes he remembers the ones he couldn’t save. Falling asleep to wake in another place; he gets slowly to his feet, in a stone lane gold and green with sunlight through trees. A woman with a child trailing at her side puts out a hand to steady him, smiles without concern. Grey walls furry with moss loom high and close to either shoulder; he presses himself against one to let her through, feels the dew soak into his shirt. The little girl steps on his foot as they walk past; he draws it back, hissing, but the pain isn’t there, it’s his chest he presses his hand to, his heart. In the sword-smith’s workshop a man is reaching for a sword, pulling it from its sheath, smiling at the gleam on the blade. It’s a place and time he’s been, before. He reaches for the packets of medicine that by now are no longer in his pocket; mouth dry, shoulders heavy. If he ever had the chance to go back, what difference would he have made, what else could he have done?
Day/Theme: May 1: between the click of the light and the start of the dream
Series: Mushishi
Character/Pairing: Ginko, Nui
Rating: G
Sometimes he remembers a woman’s voice, cracked with either age or grief, speaking through the pitch-black darkness of childhood memories he cannot recall. When he’s tired, he’s read too much and has to rest his eyes, he’ll shut out the candlelight, daylight, starlight – watching his eyelids – and repeat to himself what he’s learnt from the text, but it’s always her voice that speaks the words again. Facts, advice, sometimes poetry – he has no idea who she is, who she’s supposed to be. If it was only an old woman’s voice, calm and severe as the tolling of a bell, he’d dismiss it as an archetype lurking in his subconscious, a personification of all the information he needs to keep in his head--
(It’s not.)
Each lilt and break of her soft voice pulls at his heart, vacant but stirring, a sound with a sense of loss in it. As if she was once a real person but had fallen through the dark hole in his head, together with his earliest memories: the memory of where he had come from, the memory of his real name, the memory of those who had loved him. “Mother?” he whispered, once, upon waking; spilled candle wax across the floorboards and burnt his hand. He was glad for the reason to cry.
*
Sometimes he remembers the ones he couldn’t save. Falling asleep to wake in another place; he gets slowly to his feet, in a stone lane gold and green with sunlight through trees. A woman with a child trailing at her side puts out a hand to steady him, smiles without concern. Grey walls furry with moss loom high and close to either shoulder; he presses himself against one to let her through, feels the dew soak into his shirt. The little girl steps on his foot as they walk past; he draws it back, hissing, but the pain isn’t there, it’s his chest he presses his hand to, his heart. In the sword-smith’s workshop a man is reaching for a sword, pulling it from its sheath, smiling at the gleam on the blade. It’s a place and time he’s been, before. He reaches for the packets of medicine that by now are no longer in his pocket; mouth dry, shoulders heavy. If he ever had the chance to go back, what difference would he have made, what else could he have done?