Archive of Our Own ^beta

It had been a week since Ei had left.

Empty sake bottles lined the insides of the deep cypress flooring of Yae Miko’s quarters in the Grand Narukami Shrine. She had not left, not risen from her bedchambers, where Ei had lied with her last; where the ephemeral transience had abandoned her at last. All that remained of her once singular eternity, a gnosis, nestled in her palm in lieu of a goodbye.

A piece of a dormant heart she could never gaze upon once more, A piece of a dormant heart she will never release. A heart she swore to as her own flesh, a heart that will always, always, no matter how she denied, be removed far from her own.

Her jaw ached, yet she did not unclench muscle.

Fog of her own making clouded her vision, seeped into her already deteriorated consciousness. Surroundings once her own overwhelmed in their foreignness. Had her rage truly overcome the unity between the conceptual and the tangible? Her body felt disjointed, as if floating in a sea above a ground far too close, holding, waiting, waiting for the fall.

Thinly protected bone dug into hardwood flooring, a dull, persistent pain ebbing into the side of her face, not quite piercing past the surface. The floor, now, seemed wonderfully solid below the dirt that had set under her nails. When had she fallen? She did not know. Yet, as she lay there, her forehead now pressed against the same perfectly varnished hardwood her nails were lifting, surrounded by a sea of empty bottles, drowning in the lingering stench, there was a certain comfort in knowing there was nowhere farther to fall.

When had her cheeks become wet?

When had tears replaced the varnish protecting flesh from raw wood?

Perhaps it was the sake, elongating misery towards an infinity that can only briefly be grazed. The product of an endless drowning in the physical that no longer gripped her form, having long been abandoned, overshadowed by a pain that had settled on bone, ingrained in flesh.

—

Ei had always said she drank too much.

Ei was always correct.

—

Vision finally focused, ghosts of a place once well loved cleared into view. This place was not her own. Before her, a monument in memory for the one who came before. Now a reminder of a looming shadow, her fate forever darkened by its cast, her failures illuminated in its contrast.

Disgust filled her bowls, pooling into her throat, yet every muscle, every tendon felt utterly paralysed, only her heart remaining so, beating rhythmically, suffocating all else. All urge to purge the scene before her, purge the memory of her, purge the drowning indulgences of the nights before, completing what she had begun, dissipated as quickly as the fleeting thought had entered. This place will never be her own, the memories of past souls and past loves forever ingrained to overshadow those that enter in their wake.

Perhaps she had always been a stranger, extrinsic in a place utterly disconnected from her disposition, masquerading the role of a domesticated fool. Perhaps that is her doomed eternity.

Forever doomed to an aching jaw, forever doomed.

—

It had been a week since Ei had left. One week, one single week, one. Or, perhaps, it had been longer.

Yae Miko’s jaw ached.

Yae Miko, head priestess of the Grand Narukami Shrine, protector of Inazuman faith, bridge between the realms of the human and youkai. Yae Miko, daughter of the great kitsune saiguu, destined to carry the legacy of the matriarch hakushin as the final of her ancient lineage. Yae Miko, familiar to the Raiden Shogun, friend of the one within, servant of eternity. Yae Miko, patience incarnate, never a rash decision without thought, never a step without calculation, ever in waiting for her presumed ‘correct moment’, to free her from the intoxicating clutches of inaction, to return to her a flawless reality that had so seamlessly been ripped away from her embrace before its true value had been revealed.

Yae Miko, jaw still clenched, jaw still aching, ever in waiting for the moment of convergence. A moment, a reality, only delusion would deign to construct.

A reality that seemed ever more unattainable, slipping further as her comprehension of events past unravelled along with her deteriorating perception of the physical, as the tangible disconnected from perfectly constructed pores she had worshipped so beyond prying eyes, beyond immortality. All to collapse into an ever tortured, ever maimed metaphysical, teetering on the precipice of the utter decay of an esoteric egoism contrived under the weight of a reverence that had once bore bottomless confessions conceived in embers of a scorched utopia.

To bear a collapsed soul, to tolerate dried blood, to face ashes of a blaze that encompassed all in an excess that would never sustain two.

—

Soft warmth from beyond the confines of a sheltered eternity flitted through cracks that had not yet been sealed over, flickering across her features, disturbing a massacre of self infliction. Eyes screwed shut, in avoidance of the corporeal she inhabited, for submerging in the transcendental was far less troublesome.

Alas, reality remains ever so perplexing, entangling disparate threads into knots that could never be undone.

Mind lingering on past souls and past threads, as two heartbeats resounded through her flesh, only one was a part of a heart that was once whole. A heart ripped from the desperate clench of another's love, doomed to consume her own before the blood had yet to still.

—

Ei had always said her eyes glowed in the early light.

She doubted they did so now.

—

To acknowledge reality is to acknowledge the role of the self in constructing one's own prison of the present, made of all the abhorrence of the misdeeds of one's own hands past. Yet to escape is to convince oneself that in absence all will resolve, as rot continues to fester, stripping the foundations of the self from within.

When had her present filled with the evidence of abortive attempts to annihilate a mosaic of memories past, to outrun the person once occupying this body, forever encased in memories of her, forever lost to memories of her.

For a brief moment of singularity her senses returned, the electricity that had once engulfed her existence when she herself was consumed by the obsession of her perfection coursed through her neurons once more. Blinded by the light of new dawn, blinded by the decisions of the past, eyes finally focused through the haze onto an outstretched arm, onto the palm of the cruelest of hands, onto a singular, burning, heart nestled in the centre.

In place of where another's touch once belonged, burnt flesh enveloped the foreign heart once more, it was never intended for these hands, she knew she could never occupy her soul as she had done hers, and yet, and yet, and yet, all that remained was a hollow shell to clutch onto where a heart that was never her own once resided.

—
Ei had always said she drank too much.

Ei had promised she would never leave.

—

Ei was a liar.