天つ 風 @ Mateus

More directly, Amatsu has had a lot of time to kill -- and a lot of anxiety to pour into his writing -- because his partner YT had one day up and decided to go out and get a Real Job. After a short period in which Amatsu's expression had been transfixed, flabbergasted at the very notion, he'd offered to go help the boy apply for jobs. This offer, to Ama's further surprise, was roundly rejected by the scrappy young lad, who'd found a flier for an apothecarium that was seeking a clerk/assistant ahead of its grand opening, and, what'd'you know, the shop was opening right up the street from their house. Amatsu, puzzled but pleased, had assented, and the boy had started work the very next day. While his heart swelled with pride at how grown-up his little man had become, to be sure, this series of developments had left rather fewer hours in the day for fighting and fucking -- thus, again, the memoir.

Because he is the type who enters a sort of fugue state and loses track of the outside world completely when creating, his joints are stiff, especially his neck and shoulders. His throat is parched; he'd really only stopped because his writing hand was starting to cramp up. He looks up at his wall chronometer. It reads 9:17. He's been down here, seated at his floor desk writing, for seven bells. According to the hours he'd been given originally, YT was supposed to be home more than three and a half bells ago.

He instantly knows that something has happened.

He wills himself not to panic. He rolls forward onto one knee, rises slowly to his feet, forcing himself to breathe slow even though his heart has begun to pound. He's already blaming himself. Something has been off with this apothecarium job from the very beginning. Amatsu had visited the shop several times while YT was at work, and the storefront was nearly always dead, though the boy always had stories of customers he'd helped find just the right salve or variety of makeup. He seemed to be learning quite a bit about alchemy on the job, though Amatsu had never seen the apothecary, who apparently was always floating in and out on this or that errand. Amatsu had known a lot of criminals, though, and he had a sixth sense about when a business was a front. This quaint little apothecary storefront, with its handwritten Hingan/Eorzean signage, reeked like death to this intuition. This instinct would normally cause a man like Amatsu to start knocking on doors and calling in favors, but this thing with the memoir had become such an occupation that all he'd done thus far was worry. He'd received many assurancces from YT that his worries were unfounded and on one night Amatsu had met him on the front lawn, the boy brandishing an apology note from the apothecary, chicken-scratched in endearingly broken Hingan, to the effect that he's terribly sorry for keeping the boy and he'd like to take Amatsu out to lunch one of these days.

Bounding up the stairs, Amatsu curses himself for having believed any of it. He grabs a shirt, a pair of sandals, messily ties up his hair. He grabs a sword, just in case.. He's, frankly, a wreck -- barechested, his button-up shirt hanging open, his hair a tangled mess, bleary-eyed, trousers rolled up past his ankles. But, manic with worry for the boy's safety, he's fine with looking crazy if his fears are unfounded. Time to get to the bottom of this.

I’m in the Garlean-“Doman” kangaroo court with a bunch of suspected seditionists, revolutionaries, homosexuals, et cetera, except the court’s presided over by my father. This time, though, rather than being wracked by fever-chills and a malarial cough, there’s a gag over my mouth as I’m called before the judge, my father, perversely done up in Garlean frippery. He regards me dispassionately, and he speaks to me in Eorzean:

“What is it you’re calling yourself now?” he spits, as if this is the third time I’ve been in his court this week. “‘Amatsu?’ How perverse. You are brought before this bench today on suspicion of terroristic threatening, sedition, conspiracy to commit…”

This goes on for awhile. Flanking the judge’s bench and the podium are two pairs of hoplomachi, their black gloved hands on their swords, the lenses of their grotesque, buglike breather-helmets fogging with anticipation. Possessed of my faculties in this version of this dream, I regard them all with the requisite disgust. The list of my crimes and offenses drones and drones and drones.

“How do you plea?” the judge intones.

I am unable to answer. I think very, very, very, very hard about killing my father. I bend every inch of my will toward this aim. I offer up my body and soul to all the kami of the rocks and trees and water, then I appeal to any oni, yokai, or evil spirit who happens to be wandering by: 'Crush my heart, evil spirits,’ I think again and again 'til I have a migraine. 'Burn my body and forget my name. I don’t care, as long as you destroy him first.’ My heart is pounding in the dream. My heart is pounding in real life, which I then notice in the dream.

I look down in the dream, and notice that my handcuffs have been replaced by a knife.

The soldiers are already drawing their swords. I hear the other prisoners cheering me on. Everyone knows what’s about to happen. Everyone has always known it would, and finally now they get to see it.

I leap ten feet straight up in the air. The gag is gone, too, and a piercing kiai issues from my mouth. I raise the knife. I hear a shot go off from behind me as I crest the top of the bench, and there are tears of joy in my father’s eyes.

He jumps from his seat, catching me in his arms, and I plunge the knife into his back. I taste blood as my father’s embrace tightens, then weakens.

I feel my dream-legs grow woozy, then fall out from under me.

I jolt straight up out of a dead sleep, gasping and drenched in sweat. I smell fire. I blearily scrabble for my sword, only to realize – I’m still under the outcropping in Yama’s makeshift camp. My heart continues to pound as I put my sword back down, practicing the breathing technique that the old swordmaster had taught me. The fire smell, I realize, is our campfire, and the Great Master himself has set a little camp stove over the embers, poking at a couple of eggs as they pop and sizzle lazily. He barely glances in my direction.

“Good. You won,” he says. “Well done. You beat the last of the fever. I watched it break a bell ago. Decided you’d earned a hero’s breakfast.” I’m still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes as he pulls the pan off the coals, sprinkling in some herbs and tossing the eggs with chopsticks.

“Master, there’s no need. You’ve done far too m–, I start, but he tut-tuts me.

"We will be having none of that! You need to restore your strength! Doubly so,” says Master Yama, grinning, “After all, today is a momentous occasion: I have at last made up my mind. Today, young Amatsu, is your first official day as my student!”

I’m floored. Flabbergasted. Rendered utterly silent, bowled over by the generousness of this offer. There is absolutely no reason for this man to have taken an interest in making me into a fighter. I feel, in this moment, that no one had ever been as kind or as generous to me, in my entire young life, as this man had been during the last sennight.

"Did you hear me, Tenma? What are you going to tell your father?"

"Nothing." I think at the time that my voice sounds resolute -- determined -- manly. I realize later that I am shaking like a leaf at this moment and that this resolute feeling to which I'd attributed myself was wishful thinking on the order that can only be accomplished by very small children and idealistic fifteen-year-olds.

"Nothing? You're just... leaving? How can you just walk away from your family? Everyone you've ever known is down here."

She looks tiny, shriveled, defeated. She's a small girl, anyway, eighty ponze soaking wet, but her spirit usually burned bright. Not tonight. She's already lost and she knows it. I avert my eyes. The sight of her like this is killing me.

"That's the problem. I was always gonna let the old man down. One way or another. Wouldn't run his business right. I could keep the books, but I'm not mean enough. His clients won't respect me without the Stare of Death."

She says nothing.

"I don't really have any friends," I say. I still can't look at her full-on, but I can see out of my peripherals that her head is bowed, her silvery bangs fallen down over her eyes, and her cheeks are wet with tears. I realize in that moment that I've never seen her cry before.

"... what about me?"

"Other than you, of course. That goes without saying." I'm mumbling and I know it. There's a lump of bile sitting at the bottom of my throat. I clear my throat. It doesn't do anything about the lump.

"Does it?" This one feels like a dagger in my heart. A long moment passes. I glance sidelong at her; her cheeks have dried up. Her hands are folded primly in the lap of her kimono, the way ladies are supposed to.

"I can't--" I start, but the words die in my throat. "You know I can't--" I try again, but this, too, feels insufficient. I lift myself to my feet in one smooth motion, and now she's sitting in my shadow. My arms are crossed, defensively, over my chest. I open my mouth to try again: "Zu. You--"

The words crumble to ash on the way up once again, this time because she raises a hand to stop me, and then she looks up at me again, transfixing me with her stare. She looks resolute in all the ways that I wish I did.

Her voice is like ice: "Tenma. You are the way you are. I know you can't help it. I know you'd never be happy with me as your wife. But you always tell me you 'can't' -- whatever. You can't be around your dad, you can't stand the other boys in your class. You can't --" her voice hitches, threatens to waver, then continues "-- you can't marry me. Not and be happy, anyway. But it doesn't have to--" her determined eyes soften, and, having nailed me to the wall, she attempts a coup-de-gras:

"It doesn't have to be for love. You can stay, and we can pretend for appearances, b-b-but I've known you all my life, Tenma. You know I won't make you do anything! It'll be fine! We--"

I shut my eyes tight and look away. This is going where I was afraid it was going to go.

"You're not the only one who's under pressure, okay?!" she interrupts herself, as if trying to preempt some counterpoint of mine. "You're not the only one who has to do things you don't want to! We all do it! Every day! Why is marrying me any different?!" I'm turning away, now, and she tries again, heaving ragged sobs: "It could be an adventure! The adventure we always talked about having..."

"It'd be a lie," I say. My throat hurts like I've been crying even though I haven't. I sound dry and croaky, my hands balled up into tight fists. "It's not about 'can't' anymore, Mizu. I won't live my whole life as a lie. Whatever I do, it has to be on my terms."

I'm still not looking at her, but I can feel her look away again. She sniffs. "... Yeah. I know. I never thought I could talk you out of it, really. I can't go for the same reasons you can't stay. So. Do what you have to." She sniffs again. Wipes her nose on the sleeve of her kimono. "I get it. I really do. But I had to try."

"Yeah," I say.

I sit back down, and I hold her hand as we watch the last dying rays of sunset filtering down through the infinite refracting prism that is the Ruby Sea. Perhaps a bell goes by without another word between us, and we never look each other in the face again.

One of the books on one of those shelves - a slim, nondescript, black leatherbound thing with no text or characters on it whatsoever - was written by the owner of that house, a taut, lanky, taciturn sort in the neighborhood of his twenty-fifth summer. He didn't write in it often, but once or twice a moon he would rise, zombielike, from a dead sleep, trudge to the study, pull the slim black book down off the shelf, sit at his desk, and write furiously until the sun came up.

The first page reads, in part:

"In this book, I'm going to try and set my mind at ease. These times seem to be dangerous ones (though a lot of the danger I'm in has less to do with The Times than my own life choices, bring they weal or woe) and growing more so. I hate the idea that something should happen to me and I never have writ my life's story to paper. The major obstacle to my doing so is that many of the things I intend to write about have writ large over my life, and some of those times I can only think about in vivid detail for a little while before I am reduced to an unbecomingly quivering mess of emotions. ... At any rate, I certify that all the events described here in are true and actually happened to me, Amatsu Kaze.

I was born... ..."