@pegoryuweek #pegoryuweek2020 day1: “Soulmates” A poltergeist, reincarnation, and a demon working penance.
Akira's feet landed gently onto the creaky floorboards, as he folded back his red and black wings. He glanced around the deck, wandered past splintered sail masts, and peered through the musty night and cobwebs hanging from rotted wood. The ship beneath his feet swayed slightly.
"Hello?" He called out gently into the empty hull.
The darkness creaked in reply.
He began exploring the floating wreckage. From a distance, he had sensed an entity haunting the old ship. It explained why the humans stayed away, not even clearing the wreck from the bay's rocks. Akira turned over another piece of broken furniture. Everything seemed shattered or cut by blades, more than decay.
The sound behind him was more than a creak.
Akira fell back, evading the swish of a cutlass.
The disembodied sword suspended in midair. As Akira watched from his fallen position, he could see an apparition slowly fade between view and invisibility. He stretched his senses and could hear him now.
"Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhgh!"
Akira propelled himself backward with a pump of his wings and continued to dodge the sword.
The ghost came more clearly into view, with each graze of his blade. He was a sailor. No, the Captain. He wore the distinctive hat of decades ago. Sharp, blond hair. His swipes were a succession of blind furies. His voice was angry, but tinged with desperation. He grit his teeth. He had tears.
Akira slipped past one of the Captain's more reckless swings, and grabbed the sword, before knocking the entity off balance.
"What the hell?!" The ghost was too flabbergasted to pick himself off the ground. He watched the living being who had somehow managed to touch him, toss the sword away.
Akira crouched down to his level, folding his wings back again. "What are you doing here?" He asked gently.
The ghost Captain lunged forward, screaming and clawing his hands towards Akira's neck. His wrists were easy to grab, but his strength was something to contend with.
"What are you doing?" Akira asked again, struggling to keep his calm tone through their arm wrestling.
The Captain kept screaming, kept forcing his hands, in vain, to clamp around the intruder's throat.
It was to be expected. They were always like this. They always screamed and tried to harm, haunted and threatened. Sometimes they killed and cursed. But Akira had been trained to see past that.
"I'm not here to hurt you."
Maybe there was hesitation in the Captain's attack.
The second the Captain's strength wavered, Akira threw his arms open and grabbed onto him.
Unable to move, the ghost still wailed and struggled.
But as Akira unrelented with his calm presence, he reclaimed the psychic space. "Shhh..."
The ghost Captain began to calm, assimilating into Akira's serene psychic dominance.
"It's okay..."
"I-It's not okay." A cracking murmur came from the Captain. "They all turned against me..."
"Was it a mutiny?"
The Captain nodded into his shoulder. "Then they killed me."
Akira could feel dangerous memories arising in the Captain again. Anger could revive his rampage. He remembered those tears. He took the Captain's face in his hands, and wiped at the wet trails with his thumbs. "They're not here anymore. Everyone who hurt you is already dead and moved on. You don't have to stay here."
The Captain failed several times to mouth words. "I don't have to stay here?"
Akira shook his head. "No, you don't have to stay here. You don't need to keep feeling this way. You can go anywhere you want. Once you move on, you can do anything."
The Captain looked at the strange winged being's gray eyes and gentle smile. "I don't have to stay feeling this way anymore?" His tone finally began to veer off from his previous mono-directional speech patterns. The ghost began to solidify. There was an amorphous succession of new expressions passing behind his eyes. And more emotions than just rage. But he seemed incapable of comprehending this new ability to choose any of these new thoughts.
"Is there something you wish for? I can grant you a wish."
The Captain's brown eyes snapped back to the present. "I want to be far away from here. I want to be on land. And run far away from here."
As soon as he spoke those thoughts, they were both lifted out of the night wreckage, and suddenly into bright clouds.
The Captain glimpsed the shrinking ship below his feet, a lock-box of his bad memories, crumbling into the bay. And suddenly, there were only bright clouds.
The Captain could feel a tug on his arm, as he stood.
Akira guided him to stand behind a human figure. Behind another human figure, in an endless line. All of them half-faded or glowing, like apparitions.
Akira's hand on his arm, slipped away.
"Wait!" The Captain reached out into the bright light.
The blurry silhouette paused. Akira stepped back towards the Captain, his form and features becoming more clear. "Just stand in this line, and you'll be okay."
"Wai---Wha? What is this?"
"This is where you'll move on. When you get to the front," Akira pointed towards the presumed beginning of the line, "you'll be reincarnated and have a second chance at another life. Then you can have your wish." Akira reassured with a smile.
The Captain bounced up on his feet, trying to see ahead of the line. "It's all blurry clouds! Is this line forever?!?"
Akira's eyes went wide, watching the formerly-haunted ghost Captain hop up and down like a child. He shook his head into focus and tapped the shoulder of the spirit ahead of them. "Excuse me. How long have you been waiting here?"
"Hm..." The spirit seemed hazy as they turned. "Hard to say...But seems like a very short eon."
"A VERY SHORT EON?! AN EON?!" The Captain whipped back towards Akira. "WHAT DOES A *SHORT* EON EVEN MEAN?!
All the spirits in line audibly shuffled to peak over at the Captain's outburst.
He quickly clasped both hands over his own mouth.
Akira chuckled. Maybe for the first time in a century. His wings flitted. "Time isn't something you'll be able to really measure here. So if a spirit describes the time here as 'short', then that's probably what it will feel like, more than anything else."
"Short, huh?" The Captain seemed to calm, though glancing around curiously.
"Good luck then." Akira turned away.
"Hey!"
Akira felt a hand on his arm.
"You're going to leave? Just like that?"
"I have to purify more spirits."
"So that's what happened to me, huh?" The Captain murmured to himself. "So are you an angel?" He eyed Akira's bat wings, a mix of blood red and pitch black.
Akira dropped his guard enough to grimace. "Maybe after a few centuries."
The Captain craned down to catch his aside.
"I'm a demon doing penance." Akira stated more clearly. "If I can purify enough souls, help out the angels with their jobs, they might let me ascend or reincarnate."
"What'll you do once that happens?"
Akira went blank for a moment. "I don't know. But at least they'd stop making fun of me for these." He pointed backwards at his flapping wings.
Their stark bloody red and endless midnight blacks frankly left Ryuji awestruck. "I think they're great." The Captain unthinkingly said aloud, while continuing to admire Akira's wings.
The compliment caught Akira off guard.
"Then why don't you come see me?" The Captain grinned.
"What?"
"You said you don't know what you'll do after your penance is done. I'm getting reincarnated, right?" The Captain pointed a thumb to his own chest. "I'm guessing I might get a lot more reincarnations, even after this, but it'll all be on Earth, right?"
Akira nodded.
"So when you finish your penance---however long that takes---come to Earth and see me!"
Akira blinked. But he couldn't hide the unconscious excited flutter of his wings.
Maybe that was the reason the Captain's face beamed. "So come see me! I'll show you what I did with my wish!"
Something inside Akira's chest welled up. If he could see that smile again at the end of his penance, he'd get through it, no matter how many centuries. "Here." He pulled an invisible thread out from between his fingers. After it glowed red, he tied part of it to the Captain's own finger. "No matter where we are, we'll meet again."
The Captain stared at the glowing thread suddenly connected to his finger. "What's your name?"
"Akira." .
.
.
There it was again. Ryuji glanced out the corner of his eye. A flickering hint of red came in and out of view as he jogged. No solid objects to explain it. And if there were, then it must have been following him all around the school's track. Maybe it had something to do with the flickering red he sometimes imagined on his finger.
He slowed to a walk and eventually came to a bleacher where he had left his sports bottle. But soon after shaking it, he cursed to himself, with visibly frenzied irritation.
A gentle laughing distracted him.
"Here." The team's student manager handed him a fresh water bottle.
Ryuji's tensions immediately melted way. "Akira, you're an angel!"
"Thanks, I worked hard at it."
They laughed, an invisible red thread between them.
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.
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(Author notes: Sorry it’s a day late. It's been a long time since I've written a narrative; please go easy on me. ~_~;;;;;; )
