Atonement

Atonement

Part II

This time of year, the river was unforgivingly cold. This Genma knew to be a fact. He’d never set foot in the river after October, but he didn’t need to feel the water to know. It glistened sharply under the moonlight, small, thin shards of ice floating downstream with the current. It looked the same every year. Genma found an alien comfort in it.

In his right hand, he kept his fingers tightly closed around the neck of the bottle of shochu; in his left, he held a bag of stale senbei in varying flavors. The majority of them were a completely untouched collection of squid-flavored senbei he’d received as a souvenir from one of his elders. Genma couldn’t stand squid-flavored anything, but he couldn’t very well throw them out. They made wonderful duck bait on the one night a year he fed the river all of his demons.

Genma started off standing. He always did. But as the night wore on and the shochu left the bottle, he found it increasingly difficult to get his feet to agree with the ground beneath him. Eventually he was on his ass, the frost on the grass melting underneath him into the seat of his pants. He threw the stale senbei into the river, watching them break up as the icy water soaked into them. One for the information I lied about having failed to retrieve because Tobitake killed one too many civilians. Another one joined the uneven line of soggy senbei sliding and sinking down the river. One for the civilian I couldn’t save from that tag blast. The line kept getting longer and longer as Genma counted his sins, each one accompanied with a fiery swig of shochu. One for each of those ANBU we didn’t get there in time to save.

There was a rustle in the frosted grass behind him, and he jerked suddenly, unevenly – the alcohol hadn’t dulled his senses any, but it had fucked with his ability to move properly in response to his automatic shinobi alerts. He steadied his arm before he’d managed to spill any of the alcohol, twisting his body around to identify the source of the sudden, unexpected disturbance.

He almost couldn’t see her at first. She was so dark and cold-looking herself that she blended in too well with the night, even out of uniform. A biting breeze swept through the air as she approached him, brushing her hair back from her cold white face, but she didn’t seem to flinch. The only warmth that seemed to be left in her was in the color of lips.

Genma was sure there was something to say, but his clumsy, groping mind couldn’t find it. He simply watched, slack-jawed, drunk, and interrupted, as she dropped to one knee beside him – just behind him.

“What are you doing here?” The edges of the words were sharpened by the alcohol; Genma bore Yuugao little ill will, but she had imposed on what was, to him, a private thing. “What, did you come here to drink away all your sins, too?”

Yuugao merely shook her head. Genma couldn’t help but notice that the lack of uniform did nothing to erase the distinctive grace that came with being in ANBU. The way she rested her weight, with one knee on the ground, was so light and delicate that it looked as though the grass might claim her at any moment. He wanted to ask how she’d found him – why – but he couldn’t navigate the words around the thick slush in his mouth. Instead, he just turned back to the river, crushing a senbei in his hand. The crumbs never made it to the water, falling from his palm to blend in with the dirt and grass and sand.

Yuugao, Genma had noticed, had never been one much given to words; she was a woman of silent, swift action. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to him that she didn’t speak, merely eased herself down into a kneeling position at the riverbank beside Genma. Her white hands were clasped neatly in her lap, making no move to reach for the absolution Genma was so desperately feeding upon. Genma had never found himself so discomfited in silence.

Finally, she moved – silently, but not as much as Genma would have thought; he was almost surprised to hear the soft rustle of her clothes and the crinkle of the grass beneath her as she leaned forward. She dipped her bare hand into the river, where some bits of Genma’s senbei still floated tentatively. When she withdrew her hand, a soggy piece of senbei was stuck to one of her fingers. Watching her, Genma was suddenly seized with an irrational fear that she had interrupted this ritual, all but destroyed it, merely by shifting that one small piece out of place. His drink-clouded mind spun in purely internal panic that refused to surface on his face; his eyes were fixed rigidly on her, watching his absolution hang in the balance of one girl.

Yuugao seemed to study the soggy piece of cracker on her finger for a moment before she leaned forward and dipped her hand back into the river. When she drew it out, it came away clean; the missing piece had been restored. Genma was surprised with how much relief that simple action had granted him; letting the feeling flood coldly into his stomach, he settled back and watched as the senbei continued to travel down the river, a little less sluggishly now thanks to Yuugao’s hand. The whole thing, Genma decided, was eerie.

“Does it really help?” she asked, her voice unexpectedly soft and subdued.

“Yeah,” Genma answered, “sometimes.” There were some stains that simple atonement couldn’t erase, but every shinobi had those. They sat in silence for a short while. There was nothing to be said, now.

Moving in eerie silence, Yuugao leaned forward slightly. Her fingers glided over the grass and dirt, where the senbei crumbs lay, brushing them into the water. Genma watched her in sluggish bemusement. His drink-clouded mind could not fathom her actions.

The words bubbled up from his throat, now, slowly and sparsely. “So what do you do?” Despite the lack of verbal context, it seemed his meaning was well-understood. Yuugao’s face turned away from him as her hand drew back, her profile edged in moonlight. In a flash of sobriety, Genma could only think the image was painfully striking.

She shook her head then, slowly, her hair – black under the night sky – shifting and sliding like silk. Genma sat back on his heels, fingering the top of the bottle of shochu in mild vexation. That was no answer.

“Don’t fuck around.” Genma hurled another senbei into the river; there seemed to be a degree of malice in the force of the action. “You don’t go to bounenkai. You don’t do this stupid shit like I do. What do you do to start yourself over? What do you do to rid yourself of all the filth that accumulates?” He couldn’t accept the idea that she would do nothing – just about everyone in this village did something to make themselves clean again. She was ANBU – she had to. She couldn’t have been that cold – not with a face like that. She was only a girl. “What do you do at the end of the year to make it all right again?”

It looked like, for a moment, Yuugao was smiling that tragic smile, but it was just as soon gone, and Genma wanted to believe it was just a trick of the light on his hazy vision. “At the end of the year?” she said, and her voice was like the wind on the grass, “I do nothing.”

Genma took a spiteful drink, resenting her suddenly. “Don’t fuck around,” he said again. His hand dove back into the bag of senbei, but they were all but gone.

“There are too many things to get rid of all at once.” The quality of her voice had changed. She didn’t sound quite like the girl he’d seen in the hospital – less of a girl, now. Still serious, but so much less young for the world. “An ANBU carries too many sins to drop them all into the water at once. We must atone for them as they are committed, one by one.”

The drink went down bitter and burning in Genma’s throat. The bottle was so much lighter, now. Yuugao folded her hands – those deceptively delicate white hands – over her lap. “I envy you, Genma-san. The weight of your sins would never dam up the river.”

Genma felt insulted for a fleeting moment, watching her with lidded eyes as she rose to her feet. She was too young – far too young. But it was still a comfort to know that there was still something on the inside.

The last two senbei dropped into the water with the lightest of sounds. Genma leaned back on his elbows with a grunt, watching them float unevenly down the river together, side by side. The shochu wasn’t all gone, but that just meant he’d save it for later. His eyes rolled lazily up to Yuugao, who was still standing just behind him.

She didn’t carry the weight of a collection with her; that was why she appeared to float so lightly, so tentatively, why she looked like nothing more than a girl. But Genma looked closer, and he could see the stains that had been left – left by each and every one of them. She carried the residual weight, still, but so deeply inside of her.

That white hand came into his blurred vision. His eyes shifted and refocused, to see that Yuugao was holding her hand out to him. She smiled, but it never reached her mouth. “You’ve thrown away all that you needed to, Genma-san. Why don’t I help you home?”

That was what Raidou was usually for, though, and for a moment it seemed to all be horribly out of place – but Genma couldn’t bring himself to refuse her, finding his hand on hers without thinking much of it. He staggered to his feet with the pull of her weight, swaying slightly as the alcohol simply defied gravity and rushed to his head. He felt a steadying arm around his shoulders, thin and cool.

They moved through the village soundlessly, save for the slosh and swish of the alcohol left in Genma’s bottle. It was a blur to his unfocused eyes, nothing that needed paying attention to, and for all that she was so much smaller than him, she never faltered. Genma wasn’t sure when they reached his place, or when he’d even told her where he lived – had he? – but she had brought him to his door just the same, but without the usual muttered chiding that Raidou usually provided. She had done her duty, silently and swiftly – like she did everything.

She slid away from him like liquid grace, and Genma watched her hazily as he fumbled for his keys. “You must be a beautiful sight in action,” he said – he hadn’t meant to say it, but the words had fallen from his mouth loosely, a distant observation. She smiled again, slightly – a real smile, this time? – and stepped back, away from him.

“I’m sure you’d like to see that sometime, Genma-san,” she intoned, and bowed her head to him. “I wish you a good new year, Genma-san. May you live to see the next.”

And then she was gone. Genma had only the time to think that it wasn’t even the new year yet before he was alone on his front step, the keys finally between his fingers. He stared distantly at the place where she’d been for a moment before he scraped the key against the doorknob in a sorry attempt to unlock it.

“May you live to see the next,” Genma echoed as he shuffled into his home, and he found that he meant it.