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All This, And Love Too
The river was forgetfulness, always moving in a rough deluge with only brief moments of relative stillness in its flow. All things forgotten had to go somewhere, though, or at least that was what he told himself when he would look down into the water and glimpse a reflection. A flash of eyes, sometimes thin and yellow and amorphous, sometimes steady and a deep enough blue to show up against the midnight haze of the river bottom; the pale impression of a round face with incongruous strong cheekbones or a shock of blue-white hair reflected out of reach beneath the surface, like a drop of ink caught just before it disperses.
A nervous cough of announcement brings the Ferryman’s attention up from the water. He turns to see who has arrived. At a glance he knows they won’t stay long; living souls seldom do. They often came to him requesting passage to see the King and beg mercy for someone lost and he would take them if they had the fare; it was his function to take across those who asked it of him and could pay. Just as often, however, he would collect a double fare from those same passengers as they returned to their own world after being refused by the King. The two standing on the dock now are younger than his usual passengers, middle teenagers at the oldest. Loss came at all ages, he supposed, along with the instinct to rebel against it. They put him in mind of the sun and moon as he looks them over. The one on the left glows goldish with a kind of hazy heat-shimmer around the edges, while the one on the right gives off a silver-grey light like a midwinter twilight. Even without being able to see beyond the flamelike haze that blocked out the faces of the living, the Ferryman can sense them tentatively sizing him up as well. The three of them wait in silence for someone else to make the first move.
“We, uh. We’re here to see the King,” the Sun says finally, his voice steady but overloud with nerves.
The Ferryman nods. “Your fare, please,” he says, extending a hand to them. The two of them remove thin chains from around their necks on which hang two five-yen coins, the kind of thing children might make as good luck charms. The Ferryman shivers involuntarily as he takes them, the warmth from their skin an unexpected shock. He holds the boat steady for them to climb in, the Moon first then the Sun. They sit next to one another on the small seat in the center of the boat, close but with an unspoken space left between them. The Moon sits very upright, back tight and shoulders rolled slightly forward in a self-protective hunch. The Sun, on the other hand, slings one leg onto the seat to sprawl sideways with his back against the side of the boat and his head turned to look at the Ferryman. He clears his throat several times as they set off onto the water, words failing each time.
“So, um. What’s your story, dude?” the Sun asks finally. His voice is light but in a thin, clipped way like someone telling a joke to keep from crying.
The Ferryman considers him a moment before replying. He isn’t used to passengers trying to rouse him into conversation. By now the dead have usually taken their drink from the river and are silently processing through their fading memories and the living are usually more like the Moon, too stiff with anticipation to fake familiarity. The Sun genuinely seems to expect an answer from him, though, so after a moment the Ferryman replies. “I am the Ferryman. I take care of departed souls as they cross to the other side. And occasionally the living who hope to work against the natural law.”
The Sun gives a nervous laugh at that, fingers tapping a restless beat on the side of the boat. “D’you get a lot of not-dead folks down here?” he asks.
“Some.”
“Do any of them ever...get what they’re looking for?” Again the conversational brittleness comes into the Sun’s voice. The Moon shifts irritably in his seat and shoots a razor-sharp glance at the Sun.
“Only if they change their mind on what it is they’re looking for,” the Ferryman replies.
“At least we’ve got that going for us, huh?” the Sun says with a thin laugh, nudging the Moon’s leg with the toe of his shoe. “It’ll be a breeze to hit the top of the leaderboard if it’s blank, right?” His nudging grows more insistent as the Moon refuses to acknowledge it. Finally the Moon shoots out a whip-fast hand and seizes him by the ankle, jerking the Sun around by the leg to sit properly beside him.
“Can you please take this seriously?” the Moon snaps.
The Sun begins to retort but cuts himself off with a sigh. “Yeah, sorry. We’re in full-on important stuff territory, I get it. Promise,” he says, one hand coming up to rest bracingly on the nape of the Moon’s neck.
“We don’t even know if we have a last chance yet, but we can’t waste it if we do,” the Moon says, his voice low and terse. His head turns to glance over his shoulder as if he’s looking to the Ferryman for confirmation, but he looks away before it can be given. Instead he sits up straight again and asks, “How long does it usually take to cross? The river didn’t look this wide from the shore.”
“It depends on the desire to reach the other side,” the Ferryman replies. “It could take minutes, or hours. Sometimes days, if the one I am taking feels unsure about their crossing.”
The Sun is the one to shift uncomfortably this time, clearing his throat and avoiding the Moon’s eye. The Moon reaches over his shoulder and lifts the Sun’s hand from his back, bringing it forward and giving it a bracing squeeze with both of his own. The Sun lets out a slow breath as he squeezes back. Soon the far shore ceases its retreat and comes up to meet them.
The sight of the King’s capitol necropolis takes his passengers aback as it comes into view. The ashy, hollow houses stretch out in neat quadrant rows, ruled over by the looming black stone edifice of the King’s tower in the far distance. The two of them stand on the dock as the Ferryman ties up the boat, indistinct faces turned up towards their goal.
“Well. We’re here,” the Moon murmurs under his breath.
“Yeah,” the Sun breathes back, swallowing thickly. “Only way out is through, right?”
“Right.”
Their determination is admirable but ultimately misguided, the Ferryman thinks as he motions them toward the tower road. Often this is where the living begin to falter, pushed forward by clawing desperation alone. Not so with these two; the closer they come to the black spire of the King’s tower the more resolute they become, backs straight and heads high with purpose. It was honestly a shame that it would all come to nothing. Another involuntary shiver runs through the Ferryman on the heels of that thought. It was not the first time he had felt a kind of pity for a living soul on their way to be torn down by the King, but it was usually a brief, clinical reflection on their state in general rather than a wish for a better outcome. Feeling something strong enough that he could put a word to it knocks everything inside him uncomfortably off-kilter. The Ferryman mentally shakes himself as he reaches a hand towards the iron-bound oak doors of the tower. Admiration, pity, encouragement; none of these were of consequence to him. His only purpose was to escort.
Shadows lurk in the corners of the antechamber that precedes the King’s audience hall despite torches with blue-white flames that line the walls. As the Ferryman and his passengers walk down the oxblood carpet that leads to the audience hall, one cluster of shadows begins to buzz and chitter with unintelligible conversation. The hum travels around the room, spreading out through the clumps and clusters like an audible virus.
“What the hell--?” the Sun whispers. He crams in close to the Moon, dragging them both up to walk at the Ferryman’s side as one of the shadows approaches and begins to keep pace with them.
“The restless dead,” the Ferryman answers. “The ones who refuse to accept their final judgements and those who expect to be given a second chance. The King sees them as a nuisance, so he entertains almost none of them. They consider living souls competition for his time.” He deftly swats the shade with his staff as it extends a grasping hand towards them. It glowers balefully and lets out a scolding death rattle from the back of its unseen throat. The Ferryman ignores it, and leads the way through the archway into the audience chamber.
The King lounges in his high black throne at the far end of the room, holding court in his usual careless way. The helmet-like machine that fills his lungs with air gives off a rhythmic thrumming that hovers constantly on the edge of skin-crawling. His courtier demi-fiends are scattered in his periphery, perched on free areas of the back and arms of the throne or standing nearby. The Knife and the Flame are bickering at one another as the Ferryman and his passengers approach; the Multiplicity scrambles to take each of their sides in turn while the Magician and the Drake watch the spectacle with amusement, exchanging coins as one or the other of the feuding pair makes a winning point. The Child, the most favored of them, sits on the plinth at the King’s feet and stares down at the newcomers with impersonal disdain from under his pale hair.
“Ooh! The Ferryman brought us toys!” the Knife cheers, her already too-wide grin stretching to accommodate even more teeth. She hops down from the back of the King’s throne and appears before them a split second later. Her expression sours as she looks the Sun and Moon over. “ Ugh . They’re not even a little bit my type,” she grouses to the Ferryman. “Bor- ring .”
“Thank god for that ,” the Sun mutters under his breath.
A small reflexive noise bursts out of the Ferryman, not quite a laugh but close enough to one that it draws all attention to him. Jitters of the unfocused right-wrongness dance up the Ferryman’s spine as he pretends to have not noticed his own outburst and waits to be addressed by the King.
“So, Ferryman, who have you brought?” the King asks, his voice low and unhurried.
“We’re here for…” The Ferryman had expected it to be the Sun who spoke first, but it’s the Moon who steps forward and makes the declaration of their purpose. The name he says blurs in the Ferryman’s ears before he can make sense of it and sends a disorienting static through his mind.
“Yeah!” the Sun agrees, drawing even with the Moon. “You can’t keep him here. You don’t have any right to!”
The King lets out a cold noise that’s not quite a laugh. “I think you’re mistaken,” he says with mirthless amusement. “If he is here, he’s mine. My domain gives me the right.”
“… should never have been here in the first place!” the Sun replies. The heat in his voice makes the incomprehensible name crackle through the Ferryman’s head even more strongly.
The King considers this like a cat considering a small, injured animal. He stands, pulling away from the Child’s loose grip, and moves to step down. A moment later he’s looming above them, posture unconcerned as he folds his hands behind his back. “The living really do feel entitled to the things they think they love, don’t they?” he asks affably. “If he is here, he is no longer your concern. You have no power to demand otherwise.”
The Sun sucks in a hard breath, shoulders tightening to brace for what he’s about to say. The King is on him before he can utter a single sound. “Would you rather it had gone the other way instead? It would make things easier for you, surely,” the King says. “All that responsibility off your shoulders, never having to bear the weight of someone else’s unspoken emotions ever again?”
The Sun shrinks back reflexively, only managing to stutter out a few disconnected contrary sounds as a rebuttal. Point made, the King rounds on the Moon, who flinches but refuses to give ground.
“Do you really think your guilt gives you the right to steal what you lost?” the King asks him. “Does …’s voice ringing in your head every time you try to sleep at night give you justification for your pointless defiance?”
“You don’t know anything about me,” the Moon says through gritted teeth, but the Ferryman can hear an injured wavering in his tone.
“He’s the ghost you’ll waste your whole life chasing,” the King goes on with a feral serenity in his tone. “Not that it’s worth much otherwise. Just day after day of pushing forward, pretending one day you’ll wake up in a world where you’re more than a failure with delusions of grandeur and a guilty conscience.”
The Moon takes a long moment to steady himself. “You don’t know anything,” he says again, not bothering to mask the choke in his voice. “Say whatever you want, it doesn’t change why we’re here, and it’s not going to make us go away.”
“Y-Yeah!” the Sun chimes in, finding his voice again. “We made a promise, and we’re going to keep it whatever it takes. We’re going to be heroes, all three of us!”
“Ah, yes, a promise . Surely, the only thing stronger than death itself,” the King says with a snort and a “how could I have forgotten” spreading of his hands. “If you’re so certain, then why did you need to speak to me at all? Surely … will follow you of his own accord if your hallowed promise is so binding and eternal.”
The poisoned arrow hits its mark, and the two of them falter. The right-wrongness is awash in the Ferryman again, opening a looming pit in his chest. The King usually treats the requests of even the most persistent and disrespectful living souls as so beneath him as to barely warrant acknowledgement. There’s something different with these two, something that has the King so riled up that he feels the need to humiliate them before he sends them away. All in a moment the Ferryman is scared, deeply and blindingly afraid for them.
The Moon starts slightly, both his and the Sun’s heads turning around to face the Ferryman. It takes the Moon looking down at his own arm for the Ferryman to realize that he instinctively reached out to the Moon, hand closing bracingly around his wrist. Time narrows down to a single unmoving point as for the first time the Ferryman sees their faces. The Sun is all angles and freckles with a flop of blond hair and wide green eyes behind thick glasses. The Moon is more rounded despite his hard edges, his red-rimmed eyes just visible behind a curtain of unbrushed black hair. Both are so familiar he would have known them in a crowd of a thousand people; both are frighteningly unknown to him.
“Don’t--don’t give up!” The words bubble up unbidden in a hoarse blurt, his hand tightening around the Moon’s wrist. “Just keep fighting. Please don’t give up.”
“You--” The Moon tries to speak, a film of tears forming in his eyes. The Sun chokes out the name, but the word is still too garbled for the Ferryman to hear it over the feedback it sends through his mind.
A cold cough of laughter from the King shatters the moment into needle-like shards. The Ferryman pulls his hand away and the faces of the Sun and Moon fall into hazy indistinct blurs once more. He can feel the King’s hidden gaze on him and it feels like the point of a blade resting against his spine.
“That’s enough dramatics for one day, I think,” the King says. He turns away and is lounging in his throne once more, cheek resting nonchalantly on his fist. “Leave,” he adds, waving his free hand in a vague shoo-ing motion.
The Ferryman nods, his throat too dry and tight for words. When he turns to go he sees the Sun and Moon have gone ahead, walking in a stiff huddle together. As they walk back through the antechamber past the rustling shades and down the tower road to the dock the Ferryman works to regain control of his mind.
The Sun and Moon board the boat without comment and sit with their backs to him, apparently no longer eager for his company. The Sun rests a hand loosely against the nape of the Moon’s neck again, occasionally drifting down to rub between his tense shoulder blades. Neither of them say anything on the crossing, not even to one another. The Ferryman poles the boat through the water, the steadiness of the sound soothing his mind. He doesn’t need to wonder about why the King seemed so specifically agitated by these two. There is no reason for him to pay any mind to the discomfiting right-wrongness that makes everything around him seem suddenly strange and suffocating, or for his mind to hold so stubbornly tightly to the thought that not only had he known them, but in that moment they had known him . It isn’t his place to wonder what was hiding behind the feedback whine in his brain. His name is his purpose, he is the Ferryman. That’s all he needs to know.
That thought needles him in its own way, however, as he realizes in the confusion he didn’t charge the two for their return trip. The Ferryman supposes it’s a moot point now as they draw level with the dock; even their original fare ended up being a bit of a scam. The King had been so wrapped up in his bizarre vendetta he hadn’t even given them the chance to face their deceased loved one. They’d come all this way to get even more of an empty nothing than they’d bargained for.
The Ferryman reaches into the bag at his waist and pulls out the coins on their chains. It was absurd to even consider the idea of returning a fare; the living souls who came here knew the risks and paid the price accordingly. Then again, neither the Sun nor the Moon struck him as the type who would give up after one failed approach. Did it really matter if the same fare ended up in his bag twice or three times or even ten times over as long as it stayed there in the end? Fist closing around the coins, the Ferryman steps off the dock and hurries to follow as they make their way up the road that leads to the cavern’s entrance.
Their determined energy is visibly flagging as the Ferryman finally catches up to them. Their steps have fallen out of sync with one another, the Moon lagging behind the Sun. Their hands, once clenched together in white-knuckle solidarity, have loosened to barely-interlocked fingertips. The Ferryman’s chest tightens with the inexplicable feeling that an unnamed something terrible will happen if they get separated. He presses forward, beginning to pant with the effort of keeping pace.
“You two!” the Ferryman says, trying to catch their attention. “Wait a moment!” The two of them either don’t hear or ignore him. They keep their heads turned away, the endless crunch of their shoes on gravel the only sound in the tunnel. The Ferryman grits his teeth and picks up his pace, but the farther they go upward the harder it is to follow. “Hey! Wait! I need to return this to you!”
Again, no reaction from either of them. The Moon stumbles over an unsteady place in the floor and his hand finally slips away from the Sun’s. The Moon is less than three steps behind the Sun, easily still within arm’s reach, but the unresponsive blankness that obscures their expressions turns it into an eternity of space. The Ferryman sucks in a hard breath that feels like a knife driven into his chest. Each step forward seems to make his feet grow heavier, but he forces himself up the slope in an ungainly hurry to close the distance. The Ferryman’s hand shakes with the effort of movement as he reaches out to grasp the Moon’s wrist once again, pulling it up to reunite it with the Sun’s hand.
As he reaches for the Sun’s wrist, however, the tables are turned on him so swiftly he can barely make sense of it. The Moon animates with a renewed energy, pulling out of the Ferryman’s grip and seizing him by the hand instead; at the same moment the Sun’s hand snaps up from his side and grabs tightly onto the Ferryman’s other hand. On some silent signal the Sun and Moon both begin to run towards the cave entrance, dragging the Ferryman along behind them. The Ferryman cries out in shock, his leaden legs protesting the sudden speed and threatening to trip him. Every time it feels as though he’s going to pull them all down, though, the two of them pull him hard upright with a strength they seemed to be completely bereft of a few moments ago.
The closer they come to the surface the more they have to carry him, his feet clumsy and his breath coming in thin wheezes. Fear blooms hard in his chest. He’s afraid to leave this place, his place, his purpose; afraid he’ll be the reason that none of them make it out of here. The ones pulling him along, however, don’t have any such fears. The Sun (Hizashi, bright and loud and always laughing, always thinking, always right there when his mind and his heart are desperately needed) and the Moon (Shouta, of course it’s Shouta, who else would dig in his heels so hard he’d talk back to the God of Death himself, who else would ever dare) both keep their eyes forward and their legs pumping, hands locked on his to make sure he doesn’t fall behind. And he wants to go with them. With every part of his heart and soul and every scrap of him that is still him , still Oboro Shirakumo, still their friend, he wants to never be parted from them again. Gathering what strength he has left he pushes forward toward daylight even as his body numbs and his vision goes white.
Looking down into the water below him, all he can see is brief flashes of color or shape, never anything solid enough to grab onto. Even here where the current isn’t quite as strong and even if he bends down far past the limit of personal safety the river only even seems to tease him with a vague impression of something deeper before it washes away again.
“Hey, you okay?”
Oboro startles in spite of himself, the sound of Hizashi’s voice reminding him that he isn’t alone. When he glances to his left Hizashi is smirking a little, one eyebrow raised.
“You were staring off into the void again,” Hizashi teases. He makes his face go slack and emotionless, eyes wide but unfocused into the middle distance. Oboro snorts and shoots a halfhearted elbow at his friend’s ribs. Hizashi snickers, dodging. “Seriously, you good, dude?”
Oboro hesitates on the question for a long moment, eyes wandering back to the water below the pedestrian overpass. The slow, burbling flow of it reminds him of somewhere else, dark and half-forgotten in a way he’s not sure he cares for much. “Yeah,” he says finally, the word coming out as a short, sharp breath. “Just...thinking. About stuff, y’know?”
Hizashi sobers slightly as he nods. “Yeah, I getcha,” he says quietly.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Shouta asks from his other side. The patch over his still-healing right eye blocks most of Shouta’s face, but Oboro appreciates the sliver of supportive concern he can catch in his peripheral vision. He nods.
“It’s time, I think,” Oboro says with more surety in his voice than in the rest of him.
He reaches into his jeans pocket and pulls out the contents: a small leather drawstring pouch and two thin silver chains that were each looped through the holes in two five-yen coins. They were the kind of homemade charms kids put together to get a little extra luck on a test they weren’t prepared for, Oboro thinks as he looks down at them. He drops the charms into the leather pouch and cinches it tightly shut. Moving before he has a chance to think, Oboro reels his arm back and throws the pouch as far as he can. It hits the water with an unceremonious splash; Oboro lets out a slow breath as he watches it sink below the surface and vanish downstream. His friends’ hands find his own and give a tight squeeze of solidarity almost in unison. Oboro squeezes back, a small thick laugh brushing away the feeling of tears that had been building in the back of his throat.
“C’mon,” he says, pushing away from the overpass rail. “Let’s hit up the arcade before it closes. I’ve been cooped up in that hospital room too long, I’m dying to have some fun!”
His friends’ admonishing boo’s and shouts of “too soon, dude!” mingle with Oboro’s own cackling laughter. Despite their half-joking protests he throws an arm around each of their shoulders and the three of them walk back towards town together.