Categories > Anime/Manga > Saiyuki
smile
It takes no gift to forge such a tool - it is craft without art, a common brown leaf shed in summer among ten thousand other common brown leaves.
I would hardly say I saw it, or picked it up by conscious design, save that I passed and it was in my hands. Dusty from however long it had lain waiting in forgotten state on the mantel, to be awakened from its ornamental death.
It has been a useless thing for a long time, but it remains sharp enough to be serviceable. See how readily it parts the fine white skin, traced with blue veins, and the soft muscles of hands that never saw work, thrown up against coming doom. It catches and scrapes against bone, but that was never its purpose. It is not a butcher's blade.
To what end? There is no end.
Did I say it was for you? I lied, but you knew that. Once we outgrew the naive ideals of early childhood, we both did. Smile, say please and thank you sir, so sorry our existence is inconvenient for you, so sorry, can we do anything for you? Smile, please.
Do you call it vengeance? No, vengeance is too complicated a word for it, laden with such fine notions as justice and payback and retribution. See, this is the edge of the rule by which I measure them all. Men as selfish as myself, women like you, pregnant with terror and loathing of uncharitable fate, and laughing, innocent children that we never were and will never have - beneath the fat of their surfeit, once the glutted joy has been bled from their bellies, we are all equally clad in rich crimson and ivory, common brown leaves of flesh and bone.
But no. Possibly I only wanted to cut something, and it was easy to just focus on this friction of metal in bloody carcasses, easy to not think of you and our dreamt-of future and your present, easy to drive in the blade again and again until my hands were drenched in blood, as though I had bathed in it, easy to not see your likeness in these screaming, noisy creatures.
Then afterwards... Did I expect to see you? No, not alive, at least. Was I happy? You repaired that readily enough, once I brought the tool to you. Such hopeless courage, my beloved sister. Who else dared measure themselves by its edge? Not I.
Do you think it was destiny? Can you read it in your guts, Kanan? I made you an ocean of blood in place of the tears I could not shed, can you descry our future in its gory depths? I swim in it, am baptised and reborn in it. Here are my hands that you loved - the edge has been broken and reforged tenfold in them. Is it not enough, is it unclear?
The truth is: I am the life you spurned. I am the unborn child you killed. I am Cho Hakkai, who was Cho Gonou, who is no more. In me, you live, he does not. Smile.
end
It takes no gift to forge such a tool - it is craft without art, a common brown leaf shed in summer among ten thousand other common brown leaves.
I would hardly say I saw it, or picked it up by conscious design, save that I passed and it was in my hands. Dusty from however long it had lain waiting in forgotten state on the mantel, to be awakened from its ornamental death.
It has been a useless thing for a long time, but it remains sharp enough to be serviceable. See how readily it parts the fine white skin, traced with blue veins, and the soft muscles of hands that never saw work, thrown up against coming doom. It catches and scrapes against bone, but that was never its purpose. It is not a butcher's blade.
To what end? There is no end.
Did I say it was for you? I lied, but you knew that. Once we outgrew the naive ideals of early childhood, we both did. Smile, say please and thank you sir, so sorry our existence is inconvenient for you, so sorry, can we do anything for you? Smile, please.
Do you call it vengeance? No, vengeance is too complicated a word for it, laden with such fine notions as justice and payback and retribution. See, this is the edge of the rule by which I measure them all. Men as selfish as myself, women like you, pregnant with terror and loathing of uncharitable fate, and laughing, innocent children that we never were and will never have - beneath the fat of their surfeit, once the glutted joy has been bled from their bellies, we are all equally clad in rich crimson and ivory, common brown leaves of flesh and bone.
But no. Possibly I only wanted to cut something, and it was easy to just focus on this friction of metal in bloody carcasses, easy to not think of you and our dreamt-of future and your present, easy to drive in the blade again and again until my hands were drenched in blood, as though I had bathed in it, easy to not see your likeness in these screaming, noisy creatures.
Then afterwards... Did I expect to see you? No, not alive, at least. Was I happy? You repaired that readily enough, once I brought the tool to you. Such hopeless courage, my beloved sister. Who else dared measure themselves by its edge? Not I.
Do you think it was destiny? Can you read it in your guts, Kanan? I made you an ocean of blood in place of the tears I could not shed, can you descry our future in its gory depths? I swim in it, am baptised and reborn in it. Here are my hands that you loved - the edge has been broken and reforged tenfold in them. Is it not enough, is it unclear?
The truth is: I am the life you spurned. I am the unborn child you killed. I am Cho Hakkai, who was Cho Gonou, who is no more. In me, you live, he does not. Smile.
end
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