Work Text:
noun: grief
intense sorrow, especially caused by someone's death.
The winter had been long, and hard, but that day, the snow drift fell gentle, and dusted his shoulders.
Raven ignored the chill. The bite of cold had become a part of him. He observed the stone marker, humbly lain, just north of the clan's entrance. The space beneath it gaped, empty, waiting to take from the world what lay motionless in the halls of the temple.
There had been no spectacle after Yoshimitsu’s death, no grand ascension to the nether world, just a quiet that filled the halls like the morning after a storm. Everything wet, still, the sun a bleary shine on the puddled snow.
The clan moved in silence, groups forming shadows that parted and grew in corners, whispers a low drone on Raven's ears.
Raven had not, in recent memory, experienced grief. He had, he was certain, must have experienced it somewhere, maybe when he was a child, when he sat in bare walls with a teddy bear and a few tin cars and a view of woodland outside, just hidden behind a car park.
He must have felt lonely, it was the run for human experience, must have cried and pounded his fists and demanded answers, as children do. A woman in dark glasses had come to take him away. She signed the papers and with a dry tongue in a cold head had told him to pack his things. He was only six. The sheen of the ice reminded him of his smile, fading, reflected in the glare of her sunglasses.
But this, this was not grief. He had not felt it, even when he’d recounted the story to Yoshimitsu, the first time the memory had fallen from his lips, had been uttered for human ears. Yoshimitsu had looked at him with grief, and Raven had not understood it.
Raven had finally brought himself to view Yoshimitsu laid in his quarters, surrounded by his relics, his masks that hung on the wall in a line of past lives, secret histories locked behind faux mouths and eyes.
Raven had haunted the room long before he'd entered it. That one space which cradled Yoshimitsu’s remains had pulsated like an open sore in the back of his mind, carrying all thoughts towards it like an oppressive magnet. The clan members had since paid their respects, had dropped away, but they were mere shadows to Raven (the rest of the world, at that moment, had that distinction.)
The mask Yoshimitsu wore on his deathbed bore the likeness of a daemon, bone white, forked tusks, a spray of red at its base that smoked out like a stream of dragon fire. The sword, arranged over his chest, was armoured in gold leaf and steel. A stupid combination, but this, this was Yoshimitsu. Grandeur and practicality in equal measure.
Raven knelt.
The dusk of his thumb dragged down the end of the death mask, pausing at the mouth, which was bare, and skin, and no longer alive.
He placed both hands on the façade and drew it away, and stared, blankly, at what was left.
The black hair of Yoshimitsu was mussed, reclined over the face like thin lines of spider web, settled between the creases of his mouth, caught in the eyelashes, untidy in the slope of neck to shoulder.
He rested his forehead on the face below, his hand lifting to place on the cheek, to feel the immobile blood and bones beneath. He'd seen so many dead, before, so many bodies, wrecked and laid fast, open and naked in more than skin.
Raven had not seen the wound that dealt the end. His hand slid down Yoshimitsu's chest, lingering over the smear of dried blood, the rise and crack of the armour, where Bryan's fist had entered in a burst of fury. He peered at Yoshimitsu's face, understanding the madness of attempting to convert it to memory, for Yoshimitsu's true face forever filtered like water from any recollection, a touch of old magic.
Idly, his hand settled over the mantle of Yoshimitsu’s blade.
A warm, comforting thrum spread though Raven's arm, buzzing to the tips of his fingers. Raven exhaled, melting into it, his attentions held on that face, his hand still pressed firmly to the curve of the dead man's cheek.
I am here.
Raven's brow furrowed. The whisper came again, and if by puppeteered by a strange gravity, Raven's hand closed, steadily, around the handle of the sword, slipping it free. A sweet, quiet craving stitched into his chest, trickling down on his doubt, filling with an addictive promise of right.
Here I am.
Raven had never touched the sword, had only ever witnessed its gleam in battle, its sheathed weight hung from Yoshimitsu's hip. He held it up to the light, drawing his hand down its ridge, feeling the power soothe the hairs on his arms.
Raven was not gifted with a single blade. He fought with his twin daggers; proficient, deadly. But this, this came as easy as speech, as easy as thinking, walking, being. He adjusted his stance, and brought it down in a single swipe. The blade lit, shone a mossy emerald, stirred and spat like a firecracker.
Raven smiled.
Smiled, over the body of his dead comrade.
Sickness, no, sense, seized him. That and the awful spectacle of the ivory flesh, the hands loose and hanging from where he had disturbed them.
Guilt ripped through Raven, in a wave that built to a tsunami, which clouded his eyes and choked his throat.
No.
He replaced the sword, sheathed, back in the arms of whom it had once belonged.
Do not be afraid.
But he was, oh so much.
This was not grief, this was fear. Cowardice.
He slid the mask back on, shuddering as bone and metal fixed back in place, hiding the man from sight but keeping the legend intact.
That night, the body was put in the ground, rooted at the foot of the gravestone. The sword, wrapped in silk and tied with string, was left outside Raven’s room in a pine box.
Raven sat in his room (their room) the sword laid over his knees. He lifted it up, spied the sheen of it against the gaslight.
He placed both hands over the handle and inhaled, imagining the warmth of his comrade's palms in the place of his own, the shadow of Yoshimitsu’s determination, stemming from the large heart that had once carried it.
There was a whispering, a soft cascade from the sword, trickling down to his fingers, moving along his knuckles and melting into his blood. It stung his veins, rushing towards up his hands, into his chest, up up up with a thump in his heart.
A cry broke from Raven's throat. He gasped, dragging in breath after breath, stare fixed on the sword that crackled, as if in pleasure, a spike of lightening shivering from blade tip to blunt end.
It took everything Raven had to not drop the damned thing, to resort to hissing about superstition, about demons, tracking the clock back ten years, where everything was a suspicion and his thoughts and mind were shielded by protocol and duty and silence.
He threw it on the bed. The break of his skin with the handle was disturbingly painful; the sword screamed, a low, tortured whine, and the gravity of the sound wracked through Raven and the insuring stab of grief bloomed fresh, agonising, in his chest.
"Shut up!" He didn't recognise the cracked hiss of his voice. It came from another part of him completely. "Enough."
The blade whimpered, spluttering like a candle, before falling silent, and became dull.
The fullness, the electricity, the life that had bloomed in him, fell away into the numbness Raven had accepted without consent nor knowledge. He sat heavily on the bed, and instinctively, went to push his glasses further on his nose, to hide his eyes; but there is nothing to push, nothing to shield, for he has bared his eyes for the last ten years, bared them to the world, to Yoshimitsu.
You have nothing to hide.
The backs of his hands sufficed. He rubbed his thumbs against his temples, his teeth bared in hard brackets.
Here, you are welcome. You are accepted.
The sword laid plain, dead, on the end of his cot.
You are family.
He pressed his palms to the backs of the eye, inhaling, exhaling, and in his mind, he thinned out the shadows of the clan hidden in the corners, appraising him with eyes like dark water.
They were waiting.
They knew.
How had he not seen this? Sensed it, puzzled it out in the powerful machine of his mind, where sense and deduction married in perfect harmony? The Manji Clan veiled themselves in snow and mystique, they were not normal and did not have normal expectations.
A quieter voice murmured in his head.
Grief.
Of course.
He groaned, and then almost laughed, for of course. Yoshimitsu was perplexing and irritating enough in life, what would stop that bastard in death?
The sword whispered.
I am here.
No.
I have always been, and always will be, here.
The sword lay on his hemp covers, the flare of gaslight reflected in the blade. Also, Raven's face, twisted.
A shimmer danced across the metal in a flicker of white fire and in that moment, many faces replaced his, so many, ageless and impossible to place, until finally, a white mask, horned and bequeathed in red hair, with a smiling mouth, a human mouth, before it faded, once more, to Raven with his eyes, too raw and open.
He crossed the room, his footsteps light, barely audible to his ears. Duty, like his grief, burnt inside him, keeping his hand firm as he reached for the handle.
I am here.
His knuckles flexed as he wrapped his strong fingers around the sword, and drew it up, to his chest, and laid his forehead against the flat ride of the blade.
The whispers intensified, heating the inside of his mouth, for his own lips and tongue moved in conjunction with them, in languages long lost, and the sword shone, shone like a radium sun, moulding soft green hands on his face in its wake.
The loose stitching of the connection solidified, melded, clung to him like an errant child.
I'm here.
Ghost hands joined over his, entwining fingers and breath, before it folded away, soft and quiet, in the lure of the sword.
"I know," Raven knew this voice. Even with the odd echo now behind it, filling out his words like the timbre of an orchestra, this was his voice. Their voice. "I know."
When he left the room, the sword of Yoshimitsu elegantly hung from the waist, did the Manji clan kneel, hands bowed, as he passed. Raven's palm remained flat on the base of the sheath, his eyes hard and faced forward.
He passed the gallery of masks. He'd hidden his eyes before. Now, that was all the world was going to see. He wasn't afraid.
The great, white world waited behind the huge oak gates. Snow fell, tender, on his shoulders. The marker stood, idle, in the frost packed earth.
I am not there.
Raven unsheathed his sword. He brought it up, slowly, to his face, resting the hilt against the tip of his nose. He bowed.
I am here.
He began to train, sliding slush and snow beneath his shinobi sandals, the grind of frost falling away in the heat of his steps.
The sword sliced the frozen air, sliced through history, sliced through him and finally, finally, broke him open.
His face was forlorn, his shoulders heavy with his new authority, his stance perfect and his technique without flaw. The damp on his cheeks was caught by the cold.
I am here.
This was how you dealt with grief.