I might be crazy for this one but would you say Kayo is canonically super pretty? Or am I looking in to it to much men were stumbling to impress her imo?
Title: All My Forevers
Fandom: Mononoke
Pairing: Kusuriuri/Kayo, eventually
Warnings for this part: Canon-typical violence and horror imagery. AU as far as movie lore goes (much of it was written before there was movie lore!). Also, it’s super self-indulgent. :)
Epigraph from "A Mouthful of Forevers" by Clementine von Radics.
I will love you when you are a still day.
I will love you when you are a hurricane.
Kayo knew seeing Kusuriuri again would mean dealing with another mononoke—when two, she was quite sure, was more than enough for any human lifetime—but she still hoped it would happen. Not that she went looking for trouble. Trouble just had a way of finding her. And when she heard people in the marketplace talking about a terrifying figure haunting the newly abandoned Watanabe Manor--no one seemed to be able to talk about anything else--she knew what it had to be.
It's none of my business, she reminded herself, bowing to the vegetable merchant and accepting the basket of taro.
If he does come, he’ll handle it just fine on his own, she told herself as she haggled over the price of hamachi--the fish was good, but the price the man was asking was absurd!
It’s not like you even care that much, she lied to herself, securing all her packages for the walk to her new home.
She made it all the way back there before she admitted to herself that she was going to the manor to have a look.
***
Kayo tucked some salt into the sagemono at her obi before she set out. Not that she was going to charge into anything. It was just in case.
The stories weren’t exaggerations: the manor already looked like a ruin, even though Kayo knew people had lived here only a few days ago. The yard was full of dead, dried vines and other plants, as if they’d suddenly overtaken everything and just as suddenly died. Torn paper rattled in the screens, stirred by a wind she couldn’t feel. She hesitated to step into the courtyard; it had the feeling of a threshold she wouldn’t be able to un-cross.
“Kayo-san.”
She was expecting to hear Kusuriuri’s voice any moment, but he was so close to her so suddenly that she still jumped.
“I knew you’d be here,” she said, trying to match his calm, which was as unruffled as usual.
“Yet you were surprised.”
Of course he hadn’t missed the jump. He didn’t seem remotely surprised to see her, but then, she hadn’t expected him to.
“That’s because you snuck up on me!”
He coolly ignored that, and stepped easily across the line where she had hesitated. “What do you know about the family that lived here?”
She stood up straighter and followed him. The air was noticeably chillier in the courtyard, and now Kayo could feel the icy wind’s bite on her skin. Dead leaves skittered across the ground, though autumn was still weeks away, and all the trees were gnarled and dead, too. Even as they passed by one of them, it crumbled and fell as ashes behind them. Kayo scurried to get closer to Kusuriuri, the sleeves of their kimonos almost touching.
“I know the lord’s eldest son got married, not long ago. I heard his bride was called a great beauty in her village, but I’ve never seen her. No one here has.”
“Hm.”
The great double doors of the main entrance stood ajar, and Kusuriuri used the hilt of his sword to push one open. Wind gusted out, even colder than the air outside, almost knocking Kayo off her feet. Kusuriuri steadied her with a hand on her arm. Kayo didn’t see him fling the ofuda this time, but she heard the papery rustle as they hit the wall behind them, and she glanced back. None of them turned red.
“A great beauty no one had caught a glimpse of,” Kusuriuri mused, lifting the sword to look into its gruesome little face. He gave another considering hum when it failed to react.
“Oh! That wasn’t all. Akiko-san next door told me the lord’s son already wanted a divorce.”
Kusuriuri turned a sharp glance on her. “Divorce? On what grounds?”
“That she was greedy, can you believe it? But they did say in the marketplace that not too long they married, the servants here started having to buy almost twice as much rice as before!”
“Ah.” The metallic clink sounded that meant a piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. “The form is kuwazu nyobo,” Kusuriuri murmured.
“We have to deal with a lady with two mouths?” Kayo squeaked. She knew this ghost story.
“You need not.”
That didn’t deserve an answer; she just gave him a look.
“So she seemed like the picture of a perfect wife,” she said, thinking aloud to figure out the mononoke’s story. “The Watanabes are very traditional and serious. No fun at all! Even when the sons were kids, they never played or laughed. That poor girl must’ve been miserable.”
I might have ended up miserable like that.
Might have?
She wasn’t sure when, but she’d stopped taking it for granted that she’d marry someone someday.
Kusuriuri paused and looked back at her. Shafts of light from holes in the roof pierced the dimness, one falling on him so that his pale skin seemed almost to glow and the markings on his face stood out even more vividly than usual.
Well, maybe she had some idea when she’d stopped thinking that.
She could’ve tried to pretend she wanted a normal life with a husband and children and all the rest, but that was a lie she told herself, or maybe a lie she’d been told that she’d never thought to question. But she’d been questioning it ever since the umi bozu showed her what her true fear was.
This: puzzling out the mystery of a mononoke with Kusuriuri, working together, talking together, and yes, sharing more than that. This was what she wanted to do.
“Mononoke can seldom resist suffering of that kind.” He flicked another flurry of seals onto the walls ahead, and these flared bright red.
“The kitchen,” Kayo said.
The room was in ruins, shattered pots and dishes everywhere. Every container had been opened and emptied. Kayo didn’t see a single scrap of food, not even a stray grain of rice. She edged into the room to take a closer look, curious to see if everything really was gone.
“What was it?” Kusuriuri asked the ruins. “What, in the end, could you not endure?”
Kayo spotted a single piece of bright paper among the broken shards of pottery. “Kusuriuri-san.”
He swept across the wreckage and plucked it up. “Chocolate. I see now.”
“What?”
“They denied her even an indulgence as small as this.” He lifted the sword as if to let it see the mess on the floor, and maybe it really could.
“And that was too much for her to take."
“Yes. Trapped behind a mask of perfection, with no one to understand her and no respite or whimsy.”
“Whimsy?” Kayo asked, surprised.
He gave her an unreadable look; she thought he might have been silently chiding her for having imagined him so dour that he wouldn’t know that. “No one can live without small joys. The Watanabes tried to force her to, and when she could not find it in herself to rebel, the mononoke stepped in. That is its truth.”
Kayo didn’t hear the sword’s confirming clack over the huge crash that echoed the moment the words were spoken.
Faster than thought, Kusuriuri seized her hand and pulled her out the kitchen door. She stumbled into him and caught at his sleeve.
The ceiling in the kitchen had fallen, crushed by another desiccated, dead tree.
“Now the regret.”
“How are you always so calm?”
He gave her a look much like the one she’d given him at the suggestion she might turn back.
Impossible man!
The wind picked up again, as if the mononoke knew its end was approaching and was trying any trick it could to throw them off. It whipped a whirlwind of skeletal leaves about them and drove Kayo’s hair into her face, blinding her.
“There’s nothing alive out here, either!” She could feel Kusuriuri right beside her, but she didn’t know if she’d heard her cry over the roaring wind. He wrapped his free arm around her and pulled her in tight against his side.
A sickening crunch sounded from the roof of the kitchen.
The kuwazu nyobo was wrapped around the roof, monstrously huge and two-headed. It gripped the ōmune in great yellow talons like a falcon’s, the wood splintering further even as Kayo watched in frozen, horrified fascination. One of its necks snaked out toward them, wearing a face that was nothing but bloody fangs.
The creature shrieked, a razor-sharp cry between a woman’s wail and a bird of prey, and the second head swung around to stare at them. The face had once been beautiful, but now it was distorted, the skin blackened, the eyes red, the teeth so elongated that the mouth couldn’t close. The fangs cut into the creature’s lips when she screamed again, sending black blood pouring down her chin that smoked where it hit the roof and the stones of the courtyard.
Kusuriuri pulled Kayo even closer and held up his sword. “Once you had devoured the family who had mistreated you, you turned to the growing things left alive here for sustenance. Even after you became a mononoke, you could not conceive of escape. For you, the world was a place where you would never be allowed to ask for what you wanted.”
Does he feel sorry for her? Kayo wondered suddenly. It wasn’t a new thought, but it was one she didn’t have time for, because the sword rang for the final time.
“The regret is revealed.”
Everything spun away into blankness, swirling and surreal.
The mononoke slammed its faceless head down onto the ground, and Kayo was driven to her knees. She was dimly aware of Kusuriuri’s otherself advancing on the kuwazu nyobo, the fiery sword at the ready. He spun and struck with deadly grace, but the mononoke attacked with its second head, and he had to dodge, what surely would’ve been a killing blow going wide.
Kayo looked desperately for something she could use to help, but they were in an in-between world, the shapes of the manor and landscape as sketchy as brushstrokes.
The golden one brought the sword around in a huge arc, grunting with the effort, and lopped off the kuwazu nyobo’s faceless head. He reached without looking, and the mirror Kusuriuri wore appeared in his hand, just in time for him to use it to deflect the spray of blood that fountained from the monster’s neck.
The mononoke’s scream of pain shook the whole world. It writhed and struck out with its claws, catching the mirror and sending it tumbling to the ground.
“No!” Kayo launched herself toward the battle.
She was too far away.
The kuwazu nyobo caught up the mirror, raised it to her bloody mouth, and bit down. The glass shivered between the great teeth, one crack snaking across it, then two, then too many to count.
Kayo met the golden one’s eyes and saw the fear in them, which frightened her almost more than anything else that had yet happened, but he visibly steeled himself and, with a wordless battle cry, brought the sword down on the mononoke’s remaining head.
Kayo knew the blow had come too late.
The very air shivered and fractured, as if the whole world were breaking. In a falling shard of it, Kayo saw two arms, one pale, one dark and gold, reaching toward each other, straining. Not meeting.
Everything exploded.
***
Some time later, she came to, aching all over. She pushed herself up to a sitting position with shaky arms. The air was thick with choking dust, and it reeked of blood and ashes. “Kusuriuri!”
She got no answer.
Gritting her teeth against the pain--it felt as if something huge had kicked her in the chest--she struggled to her feet and called him again.
“Who is there?”
His voice. She made her way toward the sound, carefully. The air began to clear. “It’s only me. Are you--”
The question died on her lips. He was looking up at her blankly from where the blast had flung him. The markings on his face were gone, but Kayo had glimpsed him without them before, and there was something else not right about the way he looked, something she couldn’t put her finger on--
His ears weren’t pointed anymore.
“What happened to you?” she blurted out.
He got to his feet, clearly in as much pain as she was, which was unsettling enough, but it got worse. He bowed neatly. “I am sorry, but I don’t know who you are.” He thought for a moment and frowned. “And I’m not sure who I am, either.”
Kayo could only stare in dismay. She felt her mouth trying to form words and failing. “It’s going to be all right,” she said finally, even though he could probably still tell she was lying. If he doesn’t know what to do, how on earth am I supposed to figure it out? “My name’s Kayo.”
“I-- What did you call me?”
“Kusuriuri-san.”
“That is no name.”
“I don’t know yours. I’m sorry.”
The play of emotions across his face was perfectly easy to read--disturbingly so, when she was so used to his cool poise that gave nothing away. Confusion was the strongest, but there was sadness in his eyes, too. She could tell when he made a conscious decision to put both aside for later. “I certainly don’t know it now,” he said. “I don’t mind ‘Kusuriuri’.”
“You don’t remember where you’re from, do you?”
He shook his head.
She couldn’t leave him alone, that much was certain. If another mononoke were drawn to him like this, he was in no shape to fight it.
That sparked a sudden thought, and a fear, and Kayo looked around on the ground for the sword. To her vast relief, she found it. It looked just the same as ever, to all appearances as tightly sheathed as usual. “Here. You hold onto this.”
“It’s mine?”
She nodded.
“Strange.” But he tucked it into his obi.
The swirls on his kimono were gone, too.
Finding the medicine box took longer--some rubble had landed on it, but it was, somehow, undamaged. Kayo hoped there was something inside that would help them. She hefted it onto her own shoulders. “I’ll explain what’s going on... as much as I can, anyway. But it’s not safe to stay here.”
“Mm, I guessed as much from our injuries.”
He followed her back to the street, clearly wary but just as clearly having decided to trust her. He was subtle about it, but she could tell he was feeling out the extent of his own hurts just as she had tested hers when she first stood up.
It hadn’t gotten any less alarming that he was hurt enough to have to do that.
The town beyond the collapsed manor house looked completely normal. No one was even stopping to gawk. It was hard to believe no one had seen or, more to the point, heard anything, but then Kayo remembered leaving the Sakai estate to discover that outside, it had still been the same day she’d all unknowingly let a stranger selling medicine into the kitchen.
I’d do it again. Even now.
Taking him to her employer’s house was out of the question, but this wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have out in the open, either. “Would it be too weird to get a room at an inn?”
“Would it?” he countered with a straight face, and Kayo felt her own face heat up.
“Maybe. But it’ll be safe. And private.”
OK. What would Kusuriuri-san do?
Kayo pretended that wasn’t a crazy thing to wonder when he was right next to her, only... not. All too conscious of how she would stare if she weren’t careful not to, she snuck glances at him as they walked.
She’d never been able to get used to his beauty--it had always struck her anew nearly every time she looked at him. He still took her breath away. Maybe even more now, with the inhuman grace and strangeness stripped away.
“How old are you, anyway?” She hadn’t meant to ask so rudely, but he seemed very young, despite nothing actually being different except the missing markings.
He had to think for a moment. “I’m not sure of that, either, but ‘twenty-two’ is the answer that comes to mind.”
“Twenty-two?” It came out in a mortifying squeak. “That’s younger than I am!” Somehow that felt like the most unfair and wrong part of any of this.
“It cannot be much younger.”
“I’m twenty-five,” she said, grinning in spite of herself.
If Kusuriuri were really here, he’d think of something really smart and fix this!
Well, I can’t do that, so I’ll just have to do the best I can.
Suspicious-musing-Kayo is such a treat. I love her I love her
They know each other from the bakeneko situation and she *knows* what he's done and likely saw him as his spiritual self yet is undaunted by it, takes it in stride (back then she even stepped up to help when he was struggling). As another post previously mentioned here, she's the only one who seems to be able to relate to this particularly unusual (to society) individual, and even displays a natural affinity towards them
When they first meet and she's working for the Sakai family, she admits the medicine seller into the household immediately. She's a young, inquisitive maidservant and look who just showed up. Curious appearance? Tipped ears and canines? No problem (me, thinking: we actually don't even know if the other characters in the show see this or whether there's some sort of glamor at work which makes them 'miss it'.)
Anyway the two hit it off like a house on fire.
Kusuriuri may have that catatonic stare and grounding presence but can be rather playful when he wants ( kitsune be like that.) I mean he *was* going to show Kayo some of that shunga collection kdsjdhaj before Death happened. He *can* definitely charm people in the literal sense, when an annoyed Sato arrived to scold Kayo, our peddler essentially turned around and the woman was SHOOK. He didn't do that with Kayo. Partly because he didn't have to, she gave him intel (the lowdown on the family's issues) almost instantly; and possibly didn't want to either, she was honest in her excitement and the medicine seller reads people well.
WHICH BRINGS ME HERE I CAN'T let go of this scene because she's adorable and he's obviously pulling her leg with precisely that which would get a rise out of her (since she expresses her wish later on, for a happy married life etc). As a fun turn around, she gives kusuriuri the same treatment later re: 'popularity'.
LOOK at them LOOK. Look at them being dorks, the supernatural warrior being medicine seller and the human girl.
Cooper isn't Joel because he wasn't willing to burn the whole world down for his little girl. Barb is the one who had the grit to do that. And people despise her for it and love Joel and only compare Cooper to Joel lololol
I'm not faulting him for it. But his answer to the question of destroy everyone for my child or not was no. That's a different person (for better or worse) at core.
They made a Black woman the Joel and everyone thinks she's evil when she does the same damn thing. And credits her husband, who made the exact opposite choice of Joel, with being the Joel.
ellievsbear
discoholicmusic
jbbartram-illu
dailybridgerton
tangentwithtanner
titsay
dededos
romaincrisis
