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It was a perfectly fine afternoon when Farma or, well, Yukutani though he hardly seemed to think of himself using that name anymore, realised the gravity of what he had done. Not intentionally of course, his whole being was devoted to irradiating and preventing ills. However, whether intentionally or not, he had stolen, and bastardised the memory of the poor boy’s body in which he inhabited.
It was a sudden realisation that paused him. He was nowhere out of the ordinary to have this realisation, nothing he saw sparked the thought. He was taking a walk through the expansive gardens cutting through the lines of roses and making his way over to the gathering trees on the far side. Of his path he only made it halfway before he was stopped by his thoughts. It would perhaps be strange to look upon him at that moment. He had paused in a wide patch of grass that was nearly trimmed but held no real point of interest. Of interest though was the swirl of thoughts in his mind.
The shame of what he had done clung to him like streaking water after a plunge into startlingly ice cold water. There was no reprieve from the onslaught of emotions that overcame him. Worst of all was that the boiling emotions overflowed and the next moment he, some messed up combination of Farma and Yukutani, started sobbing, falling the short — too short — distance to his knees.
The sun beat down on the exposed skin on the back of his neck, the side of his face and his arms, where they weren’t wrapped around himself. He tipped his head up, towards the sky. He almost wanted to look into the blazing sun as a resigned, pitiful form of self punishment, only a small voice recounting the effects that extended exposure to the sun stopped him from doing so. He kneeled there for a while, tears starting and stopping unpredictably as he tried to contain and control his emotions. To keep himself from crying for what he frankly wasn’t in the right to feel. He couldn’t even mourn the right things.
Kneeling in the dewy grass he mourned how little he ached despite kneeling for so long, he mourned the ease at which his mind seemed to adapt to simply expressing emotions in only the way a child could, and even he mourned the loss of his last life, miserable as it had been. Yet he couldn’t seem to mourn Farma . The child he displaced or the child that had died prior to his placement in this world. He wiped a sleeve under his nose, Yukutani ( Farma? ) knew which series of events that led him to the young body that he would prefer to hear in order to selfishly satisfy the clawing guilt squirming uncomfortably deep in his gut.
Why couldn’t he mourn Farma?
The most plausible reason perhaps was because he had never met the child. He knew the boy only through osmosis, little half comments people left in a conversation about how different he was. But maybe even then it was his selfish desire to have an acceptable reason to feel the way he did that moved him to cling to that explanation. For all he knew it could just be a personal fault, a deep seated failing. After watching the grief of so many others he worked with, all the coworkers that grit their teeth and shouted their grief in every determined action they partook and in those that, like him, shoved the grief of the loss of family and loved ones, inconceivably far down too sure that if allowed out it would drown them, push their head under the waves and leave them gaping endlessly for air waiting for a rip to pull them away from a safe and sandy shore.
It was like that, eyes tightly closed, fists balled in his lap and head tilted almost uselessly back granting the sun to dry a sticky residue on his cheeks, that Ellen found him. He heard her approach and when he clocked her presence she was closer than she should have been with how the sound of footfalls drumming into the trimmed grass beneath her was greatly exaggerated.
He willed himself to open his eyes but his limp body refused to comply. It was only with the hand that dropped to his shoulder, lightly enough at first but then followed with a grounding weight, that he pried his eyes open and turned his eyes to her.
“Farma.” she began softly, calling out a name that both was and wasn’t his, her voice whispered as if any more weight to her words would leave him shattered. Perhaps it would. “What’s wrong?”
He opened his mouth to respond, attempting to make sense of the thoughts that recklessly and relentlessly struggled against the crash of waves that slated over any concrete thought he tried to pin down. He blinked hard and quickly, too afraid that if he kept his eyes shut any longer they would stay that way indefinitely.
“I’m not-” The words stuck to his tongue and clogged his throat, with great effort he swallowed past it. “Not him.”
He shouldn’t have said it, he was already waiting for the day someone cried at him and told him that he wasn’t welcome anymore, that he never had been. His father had almost done so after he healed the Empress and even then he hadn’t told his father the whole truth. Bless her though, Ellen just tilted her head in a confused manner and blatantly looked him up and down taking in his doleful state. “Farma what do you mean? Are you sure you’re okay?”
He wanted to wave off her words to tell her to turn around and go back inside but the crawling, unsatisfied pit of guilt in his stomach demanded to be acknowledged, for someone to see what he’d done. “I’m not Farma,” Ellen looked to protest his words, “I’m not!”
Ellen shot him an accusing, but not sharp, look, “You sure look like Farma.”
“That’s the problem! I’m not him! I’m not!” His cries seemed hysterical even to him but he had to make her understand, had to make her see him and condemn him. “I’m- I’m someone else. Not from here, from- from somewhere else. I’m not him !” He couldn’t even say the name yet it was all that bounded around his head a chorus of ‘ Farma, Farma, Farma..’ looping cruelly, feeding that dark swirling gulf inside him.
“Farma-”
“Not him!”
“Okay, okay, not him!” Ellen raised her hands placatingly, like she was soothing a wild animal who was preparing to strike, “Who are you then?” She asked in a sort of bewildered absent tone like she found the notion was completely absurd.
He hesitated then. Unsure if he even knew who he really was anymore. “Yukutani?” And damnnit that was meant to be a statement, he glared at the ground as water pooled in his eyes and he tried to will it away.
“Yukutani?” Ellen said to confirm. And he couldn’t help but notice that the name didn’t fit anymore. It was the name of someone else, someone bigger, more modern.
He let out a frustrated sigh, “Was Yukutani, used to be.” He wanted to add that he was Farma now but that was wrong - he couldn’t be Farma, that was a young boy, a dead ten year old boy who would never be buried because he had stolen from him, from all his family and friends.
“And now?” The way she said it was with the utmost patience and even the incredulity colouring her voice only served to make Farma feel bad that he wasn’t sure how to respond.
“Neither,” was the only response he could muster, truly neither feeling from here nor there.
Farma could only imagine what Ellen was thinking in that moment other than thinking him completely insane, which was clear.
Desperate to claw back a sense of control or at least the appearance of sanity, Farma explained feebly, “I’m Farma now I suppose? But I wasn’t before. So I’m not really Farma.”
“I’m not sure that makes sense? How can that be?”
“I- uhm, came from somewhere else, another earth, kind of like this one but also very different..”
Ellen nodded. She did not believe him.
“And when Farma, actual Farma got hit by that lightning, I… moved here?” It was crass to liken moving places of residence to hijacking someone's body and potentially misplacing their soul but it was what he was working with. “So I’m him now, have to be, can’t be someone else - it's ‘Farma’s body.”
“You are.. in Farma’s body?” She questioned incredulously.
“Uhm, yes? I am kind of Farma now? So.. Yes?”
“How did this happen!”
He was glad to be able to answer that question “I died and then woke up here. I'm not sure if Farma, old Farma” - Actual Farma - “survived the lightning bolt.” He looked down at his lap and scratched the back of his neck awkwardly. The gnawing guilt returned with a vengeance and Farma wished he could muster up some heartbreak for the lost boy.
Ellen looked stricken, or at least as stricken someone can look when they don’t believe over half of what they’re being told. “He didn’t… make it?” Her voice was somber and cracked at the end. She, at least, was able to feel for the displaced boy.
“I’m sorry.. I didn’t- mean it?” It was weak but Ellen met his eyes with a watery smile.
“You didn’t deserve to die either, you know.” It was a token protest, one she would probably back at a later date but he could see that her heart wasn’t really in it so he just nodded. There was a dull silence that fell between them. The leaves rusted on trees and a few bird cries could be heard in the distance but all in all the day had fallen quiet. Some noise may have been a reprieve but wishing to hear the faint ring of a phone or splutter of a car engine served only to hit a little harder after the transpired conversation.
Later when Ellen arose from her knees he clocked the action as strange as he registered that he hadn’t realised she had moved to them in the first place. She held out a hand to him to direct him up to his feet. His limbs hardly supported his weight and they buckled slightly as he rose.
They moved in stale muteness as they trudged to the manor entrance.
In a small voice, fainter than one he had ever imagined Ellen speaking in, she asked, “What would you like me to call you?”
A dreary smile chaperoned his response, “Farma is fine.” A pause and then, “Thank you.”
The conversation likely wasn’t over forever but Farma had done enough talking for the day. He would keep living with the consequence of what had been done. He could ponder and panic upon the idea of body snatching another day.