“Have you ever wanted to bring someone back from the dead?”
the question stops her cold, her fingers frozen midway on their journey, the teacup paused in the still air between the sauser and her lips, as every muscle in her body tenses and flares like lightning snapping through her veins and even her breath is caught, not in a gasp, but in a suddenly shut off space. her throat closes, her lungs tremble, her heart skips a beat and then thrashes about wildly in her chest, an angry, untamable bird locked in a cage made from ribs, the lines and tendons in her neck and shoulders working to retain her facade of calm. her hands shake minutely and she attempts to hide that by sipping her drink quickly and setting everything down before she breaks them.
there is plenty of information floating about in the world around takeda kana’s atmosphere, plenty of rumors and speculation, plenty of wash-worn facts, skewed from reality, hauntingly bare and raw and unfinished, multiple accounts of her history that are all true and all false at the same time. perhaps her familiar has done research on kana, perhaps momo has read tabloids or obituaries, perhaps the young fox has seen the faces of kana’s old coven members, her late husband, her dead child… but she doesn’t know the truth. no one does. it’s a mantra kana repeats over and over and over in her head until she believes it again, like the mortar to a wall she constantly has to build and rebuild and rebuild.
the cries of her toddler son as he reaches for her, his body solidifying into stone. the grotesque anguish on the faces of her coven as they curse her in japanese, even as their bones fold in and crush against the grassy earth. her husband’s body twitching as the authorities reel him away on an ambulance stretcher.
no one knows. momo can’t possibly know the truth, hidden in the darkest pieces of kana’s shadow, chained so tightly to her ankles it cuts the circulation sometimes.
a long, drawn moment drags between them as the high priestess inhales deeply and forces herself to meet her familiar’s eyes, dark gaze deeper than the floor of the ocean, holding her secrets like barbed, electric treasure. “i would never wish that on anyone, my kitsune. to live is painful, to die is waking up. could you imagine being dragged back into the world, like being pulled underwater once more, after having reached the surface?” she shakes her head slowly. “death is something we must understand, as daughters of the craft, and there is nothing blacker than that sort of necromancy.”
at least, that’s the official answer she knows she must give. in her heart though, she remembers bleeding and screaming into the stone for hours on into the night, until she was haggard and crazed, begging the powers that be to bring her son back from its muted chambers.