Kingdom Hearts Fan Fiction ❯ Alkalinity ❯ Silicate ( Chapter 10 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

 

 

“And the emperor does not wish for the child to be lost.”

 

 

Roxas' thoughts swirled and raged and attempted desperately to fit themselves into a logical pattern. They began to spill out of him.

 

 

“I'm not a doctor! I don't know anything about babies or bodiesor delivering-"

 

 

The hand tightened again, silencing him.

 

 

“The emperor does not wish for the health of his wife and child to be threatened on his account,” the man murmured gently. His eyes were earnest, though Roxas could not remember looking up to meet them.

 

 

“At such times alternatives are offered. Concubines still offer the possibility of pregnancy, and one child at a time is more than enough.” His voice grew careful.

 

 

“And it is known by some that the emperor has certain preferences.”

 

 

Roxas' denial struggled with the statement, tried to twist and reshape it. But his mind was quick, and arrived at the appropriate conclusion before he could blind himself.

 

 

He was suddenly wary of the man beside him; of the implication that this courtier was one of the few close enough to the emperor to know such things. He wondered if this was a test, if there was something he was expected to do or say.

 

 

“Who are you to the emperor? Why are you telling me this?!”

 

 

The man stood and pulled him up as well, looping a supportive arm around his waist when Roxas' knees failed him. They moved forward, and Roxas felt bile rise at the back of his throat.

 

 

“I am telling you this because we've been sitting in the foyer of an empty wing for quite some time now. I'm telling you because someone should have told you, and I had hoped that in the telling the fear might leave your eyes. I'm telling you because I had hoped you would be willing if you only had a chance to decide for yourself.”

 

 

They passed through sitting rooms, a library, and other chambers that blurred together. When the man stopped and slid the final screen behind them, he released Roxas and allowed him to sink to his knees.

 

 

All he could see was the massive bed within its frame of intricately carved wood. Then the man resumed his speech, and he wished again to be struck deaf. Worst of all was the pity in his voice, the cautious gentleness.

 

 

“I am telling you this because in the very near future we are going to lay in that bed, and we will not sleep. But I do not wish to force you.”

 

 

Roxas thought, then, that it would be years before he could even comfortably consider what was proposed.

 

 

But a matter of weeks found him in the bed for more than sleep.

 

 

A matter of months taught him not to suppress the moans that were so enjoyed by his partner, that Fen Hui preferred his name to his title during Roxas' desperate moments. He had learned to set aside his initial embarrassment, to forget the tradition that had caused him shame the first time he felt wanton.

 

 

He had learned that Fen Hui, at least, thought of him as no less of a man, no less strong. That his intelligence and pride were never overlooked.

 

 

He remembered clearly the night that feeling wanted became feeling cherished.

 

 

As he began to drift off into contented sleep, now clean but still sated and slick with sweat, Fen Hui's voice roused him.

 

 

“Rù Xué… did you learn of destiny in all your studies?” The emperor rolled onto his side then, pressing a light kiss to Roxas' forehead before murmuring against the skin.

 

 

“Did they ever teach you that some things are meant to be?”

 

 

It took him many months after that to admit to himself that he loved the emperor, and many more after that to say it. His indecisive struggle was worth the desperate, devouring kiss it instigated.

 

 

Years after his arrival, his wrist was still scarred. Never again had Fen Hui's touch burnt him, but Roxas did not regret the mark, or desire an apology. The emperor did not have to explain to him the claim in the seared skin.

 

 

It was popular court gossip; that with his son old enough to walk, the emperor had still not returned to his wife's bed. The calculating glances of the courtiers coupled with the hissed slurs that followed behind him kept Roxas from court. Eventually he could not bring himself to leave his sanctuary. Fen Hui had created for him a haven of whispers against flesh and silk sheets. Returning to reality was too painful an experience.

 

 

But he was forced to the night Dài Tì Zhe gave him rice wine. He had come to fear the woman who hid her hatred beneath impeccable manners and small smiles just warm enough to dissipate Fen Hui's suspicions.

 

 

It was too well-timed, when the guards rushed into the room. The emperor had started choking almost immediately, leaving Roxas to wonder if Dài Tì had bothered mixing any wine into the poison. Swords were raised even as the emperor tried to speak over his own erratic gasping.

 

 

So Roxas ran light fingers over the last face he wanted to see.

 

 

And emptied the bottle down his own throat.

 

 

x(X)x

 

 

“Are you one of the servants?”

 

 

The responding grin flashed in the brilliant moonlight.

 

 

“Something like that.”

 

 

The man standing across the courtyard from Roxas was impossibly tall, the effect of which was only strengthened by his stature. His spine was ramrod straight; his shoulders thrust backward, his head held high. Another man would have resembled nothing so much as a preening chicken, but Roxas thought privately that the emperor would appear a fool beside this peasant who looked every inch the king even though his feet were bare and his garb ragged.

 

 

Roxas had left his wife and young children in the capital, expecting a solitary season at his long-neglected country manor to clear his head. A season without intrigue or politics, to sleep, meditate, and read poetry without the magnifying lens of court following his every gesture. A season to be human rather than the idea of what a human should be.

 

 

His tranquility was almost immediately disrupted, however, by Akuseru - the servant who never worked. The giant who towered over him, and would never admit to his heritage: he offered only secretive grins when Roxas asked. Akuseru's height was, at times, the least striking of his attributes. His eyes and skin were unnaturally pale, his teeth straight, white, and sharp, and in direct sunlight his seemingly black hair revealed itself to be deep, bloody crimson.

 

 

Roxas had spent so many years organizing every aspect of his life around beauty and perfection that Akuseru was like meeting with clean air when one had finally learned how to breathe underwater.

 

 

The man was loud and disorderly. His movements, though oddly elegant, were too fast and too free. He was indelicate in all things, blunt, oft sarcastic when speaking, and happy to throw off the intricate dance of precision.

 

 

Roxas had hated it, at first, until suddenly it was natural again. Everything with Akuseru became natural: walking with steps unmeasured, laughing loudly, speaking of anything and everything without fearing offended sensibilities.

 

 

Natural to touch lightly, to take his companion in the water after hours spent hiking to the hot spring.

 

 

He wondered how anyone could be sustainedby pleasantries and polite sentimentality when the man writhed and mewledbeneath him, hissed and cursed in pleasure as he hooked a long leg over Roxas' shoulder.

 

 

His sharp nails cut bloody tracks over Roxas' shoulder blades, and Roxas wondered, as pain and pleasure mixed, if any of those trapped fools remembered what it meant to live.

 

 

Weeks passed after the hungry copulation, with many revivals of the act to follow.

 

 

And Roxas reflected that though most court customs were ludicrous, there were those chosen few he could not bring himself to overlook. After such nights the man (or in this case, “man,” he could hear Akuseru dryly observe) was expected to leave a gift, a sign of his regard and respect. With no one's expectations to meet but his own, Roxas found that he still wished to do so.

 

 

But he had hardly planned for such an occurrence in his packing, and he had yet to think of anything appropriate. Because while something simple and ornamental (a comb, a fan, a lacquered box) might have suited another, he wanted an item that held some kind of true significance.

 

 

As luck would have it, it was only days later that he found the perfect gift while hunting. He had left prepared to catch rabbit - Akuseru claimed to have a craving, and the man's desires were inevitably contagious - and found instead a fox. It would not have concerned him, but that fur…

 

 

The fox's markings were nearly insubstantial against a brilliant scarlet coat. It did nothing to hide the animal, and everything to remind him of Akuseru: Akuseru, who cared nothing for his clothes and would be terribly cold in the coming winter; Akuseru, who would look more appropriate than any being he knew in fur so luxurious. His lingering sense of aesthetic whispered that it was a match, pleasing to the eye.

 

 

And so he carefully aimed, and shot the fox as it darted after one of the rabbits he had chased to this hillock.

 

 

He allowed another servant to remove the pelt as he bathed, but insisted upon cleaning and preparing the fur himself. His arrow had been lucky; by catching the animal through the throat, it had left the fur he would be using undamaged.

 

 

For months he waited with his present, eager anticipation bleeding into frustration, worry, panic, despair.

 

 

He never saw Akuseru again.

 

 

x(X)x

 

 

The villagers had apparently held the trialwithout him, deciding that an inquisitor was not necessary to determine what was obvious to them all.

 

 

Roxas heard the ruckus before he saw it, observed the plume of smoke rising over the village's central square.

 

 

He handed his horse's reins to Thomas, pushing through the gathered throng until he gained a clear view of the pyre.

 

 

The witch saw him in that moment, saw him and stared without comprehension. Then the red-haired man smiled past his swollen jaw, and without taking his eyes from Roxas began to laugh in a manner that bordered on hysteria.

 

 

Then the flames caught his clothing, and the screaming began.

 

 

x(X)x

 

 

As in all times of desperation, Roxas found himself relying more and more on coolly precise logic to make it through his days. Strange dreams could be chalked up to stress, over-imagination, and an intensive history course. The nature of the dreams was the nature of any other, of course: his subconscious mind was refracting data back to him in an order made puzzling only by its lack of rhyme or reason.

 

 

These were calming thoughts, and they became the murmuring undercurrent to every moment. When trying to find the bathroom in a certain corridor, or plowing through columns of equations, the mantra was unceasing. He had not yet assigned words to it, and feared doing so.

 

 

In contrast to his vivid unconscious hours, those spent in the waking were made increasingly notable by their blinding normalcy. Life went on around him; indeed, it had not ceased its churning advancement for even a moment. Classes began and ended at set hours, meals were consumed, gossip and idle conversation exchanged. And every day, reciting his logical reassurances to himself like a cold rosary, Roxas felt a little older, a little more tired. It was not age in the sensation of maturity but in fragile, papery skin stretched too thin over bone. It was in his inability to summon even passing interest in his surroundings while they moved around him, the unmoving boulder around which the stream parts.

 

 

He had grown so distant that his eventual return to reality was sudden, even painful. And vaguely humiliating, of course, because why wouldn't it be?

 

 

Medea was a strange play, though its strangeness definitely qualified it for Saix's class (in which no body of literature was complete without violent death). Saix reduced to tears the few girls brave enough to attempt reading the title role aloud for the class, before moving to the male denomination.

 

 

And so, unwilling and lethargic, Roxas became a woman. A furious woman of Asian descent, in fact. Medea, after killing her brother, betraying her father, leaving her homeland, bearing sons, and performing numerous other errands for Jason, sought revenge that Roxas couldn't help but view as righteous when Jason left her for the young princess of Corinth and the power his new marriage could bring.

 

 

The woman had given all and lost everything, and was willing to destroy herself if only to achieve her vengeance upon Jason. And though he began flat and disinterested, Roxas found himself caring, attached to this woman and occasionally defending her to his classmates. Her words tasted of bitter regret and hopelessness, desperation and despair. And no matter how many times Roxas repeated his silent mantra, he recognized the flavor all too well.

 

 

“I loved you once: And I am ashamed of it: but there are some things that ought to be remembered by you and me.

 

 

“…shall I fly home - to put my neck in the coil of a knotted rope, for the crimes I served you with?

 

 

“This is it. I did not surely know it: loathing is all. This flesh he has touched and fouled. These hands that wrought for him, these knees that ran his errands. This body that took his… what they call love, and made children of it. If I could peel off the flesh, the children, the memory… Poor misused hand: poor defiled arm: your bones are not unshapely. If I could tear off the flesh and be bones, naked bones; salt-scoured bones on the shore at home…”

 

 

Roxas kept his voice from shaking, at least. His eyes burned, but remained dry. He read until she immolated

 

 

He quietly envied her courage.

 

 

x(X)x

 

 

A/N: I had another segment planned for this chapter, but it's taken me so long to sneak the necessary writing time that I've lost chunks of it from my mental storehouse, and I don't want to serve anything of truly abysmal quality if it can be helped.

 

 

Say… do we have any Sandman fans in here? Because I have a treat coming up for you. ^^

 

 

Finally, remember that reviews are amazing and truly the only reason I check my email daily. Also, I was just rejected from my state's Governor's School for the Arts (the creative writing program.) And while an esteemed educator assures me that their selection process is far from fair, I've still been feeling really low since I got the letter. So while you don't have to review, maybe some sense of empathy will drive you to it?

 

 

Leijhana tu'sai to all readers and reviewers!