I hope you’re proud of yourself, anon
Clapotis
It takes four centuries for the stars to align: the right man, the right time, the right place. But it happens, finally -- it happens.
The man dips the Samehada into a stream to clean it, as he has a thousand times before, but this time, she who has been trapped in this sword for hundreds of years tastes the waters of her birthplace.
She feels the enchantment break. She flows out of the sword and into the freedom of the water and doesn’t look back: she will never let herself be caught again.
The man on the bank looks after her in astonishment, this shape of a woman that emerged from his sword and fled into the stream and vanished like so many bubbles.
He lingers long on the bank among mud and river-grass but she does not come back.
So Kisame’s sword is just a sword now -- still the same in many ways, rough-skinned and chakra-thirsty -- but it has lost that spark of intelligence that made it something else.
It feels lighter now.
This story would’ve ended there, perhaps, if happenstance and curiosity hadn’t led Kisame’s steps back to the same stream many months later.
There he finds that the stream is no longer a stream: now it is a river swollen with spring melt. He takes a few steps down the banks, looks around, sees nothing.
He dips the Samehada into the water because, hey, it’s what caused the weirdness last time...
She almost kills him. It is strange to drown: this element, water, has been Kisame’s ally through many battles, for many years. Now, as his water jutsus fail him and he is dragged down towards the riverbed with only a half a breath of air to sustain himself, he understands that he has never been its master. There are others more powerful than he that can claim this title -- others like this spirit that was in his sword and is now killing him.
“What do you want?” comes a blue hiss in his ear. “Why are you here?”
The world is fading and he can’t really talk with a windpipe full of water. He chokes out some words with the last of his breath, “Just to see you -- not going to hurt--”
At this rate he’ll be dead in about five seconds. Those are going to be his last words. At least they’re honest.
He’s lucky; the ring of truth makes her relent. The water that had filled his lungs is pulled out -- strange sensation, and not one he wants to relive ever again.
He finds himself roughly tugged by hands or by waves to the edge of the river and dumped among the reeds, where he coughs up a grotesque amount of water, pints of it, and collapses onto shaking hands and knees.
“See me, then.” (The voice: if a stream could talk, this is what it would sound like.)
He looks up and thinks there must still be water in his eyes, because, how else…
She stands before him on the surface of the water in the way that a geyser could be said to stand, or the column of a waterfall -- wavering, multifaceted, effervescent.
He doesn’t know what she is. A river spirit, a nymph, a faerie -- something Other, and far beyond his ken.
And she takes his breath away -- the magic in her, the old power, the beauty. Her hair cascades -- literally cascades -- from her head to her feet in frothy curls. Her pale skin catches the light with the white-blue translucence of river rock seen through a glassy brook early in the year. Her eyes are changeful -- now stormy sky, now blue lagoon, now green pond murk, now a clear stream dazzling him with reflected sunshine.
He stands and asks her, “What are you?”
And she says, “The river. What are you?”
And he says, “A shinobi. Missing-nin from the Hidden Mist.”
And they look at each other and neither understands what the other is.
“I see now that you are not the one who trapped me,” she says after studying him with those variegated eyes that make his head spin with their impossibility. “It is hard to tell sometimes...”
“It is...?”
She shrugs her shoulders with the slow grace of water flowing over a mossy ledge: “Mortals are all the same to me.”
“I -- I didn’t know you were in the sword,” says Kisame, because it seems important to point out to this river deity that he isn’t intentionally at fault, lest she curse him forever. “I really didn’t…”
“It doesn’t matter any more.”
(Water under the bridge, you know; she’s already half-forgotten he’s there, this mere mortal man, and is thinking of going for a swim in the shallows over there where the wavelets are dancing under the sun...)
He doesn’t want her to go: he is fascinated, if not already enchanted. “Who trapped you?”
Her attention drifts back to him. She ripples out a sigh. “A man. Four hundred summers ago...”
She tugs at a strand (a rivulet?) of her hair, contemplates the river weeds laced therein. “I shall kill him if I see him again.”
It seems strange to have to point this out but Kisame feels he ought to inform her: “Uh. If he did this to you four hundred years ago… then he’s dead now.”
“Dead?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you know?” (The voice: have you ever heard a brook ask a question?)
It’s so weird that he has to explain this, but. “Because… most people don’t even make a hundred.”
“Strange creatures,” says the strange creature before him. “So brief, with your little firefly sparks of life...”
She walks -- drifts -- floats -- away a ways. “I never want to see that thing again.”
Kisame is confused until he sees her gesture to where she flung the Samehada upon a distant bank, that hated former cage of her former life. (He’d lost track of the sword, as one tends to do, while he was drowning.)
The movement of her arm hurts his head to look at, as does the rush of the cascade that is her hair -- the shimmer of water bending in ways that are beautiful and not actually possible.
“I’ll never bring it here again,” he says. (Please don’t destroy it, it’s a really good sword.)
She fades as he speaks, down into the water, and does not answer.
Many fruitless visits later, she deigns to show herself again. Perhaps because she is bored, perhaps because she is lonely, Kisame doesn’t know -- she is changeful as the river and so far beyond his understanding that he doesn’t even try because he’ll only hurt himself.
So she comes out one afternoon -- one afternoon when he has all but given up, when he morosely calls out, “I just want to talk to you,” and the only answer is the wind rustling through willow-boughs in a green whisper.
She materializes a little ways off just as he turns away.
“What is it?”
At first all he can do is stare at her because he has already convinced himself that he dreamt her up.
He asks her her name. She is coy about it, or so he thinks; she shakes her head, her fluid hair gurgles.
He asks again, please, he has to know.
She studies him with her eyes-of-every-colour. And then she says her name. It sounds exactly like white-gold dawn glinting off wavelets, the morning of the summer solstice.
Needless to say, he doesn’t try to repeat it; he recognizes an exercise in futility when he hears one. (He does carry the memory of the sound with him for the rest of his life.)
Then she asks him his name, and he says, “Kisame.”
She scoffs (water splashing against rock) and says she’s never seen anything less like a shark; mortals choose the most peculiar names, don’t they? Odd creatures…
He asks her what she would’ve called him. She looks at him, tilts her head so that her hair showers down one shoulder, and says something like the sound of a footstep down a way-worn path through sand dunes to the sea.
“And seagulls, maybe,” she adds dreamily, completing some unvoiced half-thought. “Their cries are so wild to me, you know…”
She sighs (wind in rushes) and turns westward, where her river flows for thousands of miles before pouring itself into the sea.
“You miss the sea,” he says, because he feels her longing as though it was his own.
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you go…?”
She makes a sad sound: the echo of a single drop of water falling in a still subterranean lake. “It is too much for me.”
“Too much…?”
“I lose myself to every beautiful wave. Every splash of sea-foam...” She holds out a pale white hand, almost translucent in the sun. “The rare times I have been there -- already they have diminished me.”
Kisame thinks he understands, though he can’t put it into mere words, this -- this wanting something beautiful, knowing that it will tear you apart.
“I will return there when I am ready to find eternity,” she says with another long sorrowing look downstream.
Sadness is unfamiliar to him. It becomes familiar now.
Meanwhile, she, with her moods as changeful as currents, has cheered up, and comes closer to him.
“You know the sea?”
“Yeah,” says Kisame. “You were there with me...”
“In the sword?”
“Yes.”
“I was not really there,” she says.
“Oh…”
“There was only darkness and silence,” she says. Her voice thickens with bubbles of reproach. “I do not wish to speak of those days.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t--”
She’s gone.
Summer comes and goes (once) and Kisame comes and goes (many times). He wonders, as he wanders the riverbank over weeks and months, if she’ll ever show herself to him again, and if she does, whether he can keep his big dumb mouth shut and avoid pissing her off again.
It is past midnight. The moon sets and leaves him alone with the stars.
The river surges at his feet, prattling its strange old stories to rushes that listen with many sighs and whispers.
“Must be a sad story,” he says to the rushes.
At first his only answer is silence. His interruption -- his uncouth mortal voice -- has even hushed the papery murmurs of the reeds.
Then the breeze picks up like a breath around him.
“Sad and sweet,” comes her voice from somewhere -- everywhere -- at once.
He has never felt such a thrill of joy: she is here and she has deigned to speak to him again. In what new, spectacular way will he mess it up this time? He almost doesn’t dare talk.
But he must, or she will lose interest, and fade away...
“I like sad and sweet stories…”
The breeze turns towards his face, a huff of amusement. “You do not understand my stories.”
“Will you -- will you let me listen anyway?”
She sighs and coalesces into being in front of him. “Strange creature.”
The stars glint in her hair, silvery pearls a’tumbling down a perpetual waterfall.
It hurts to look at her.
“It is a song,” she says, brushing her hand along the dancing tips of the rushes at her waist. “An old song that I have sung since I was the barest trickle of a spring…”
“What’s it about?”
“Perhaps if you had more than a hundred years, I could explain in your little words,“ she says, then adds, carelessly, “but you will die soon, and so there is no purpose...”
“Ouch,” says Kisame. He stares at his feet. Yes: he is a mere firefly to her eternities.
She follows his line of sight, unused to the ungainly body-language of mortals, and curious about what has drawn his attention.
“What are those?”
She is pointing at his sandals.
“Shoes…?” says Kisame, confused.
“Shooz,” she repeats. Then she laughs (the splash of a spring in alpine meadows). “Sounds like a fat bumblebee drunk on nectar...”
“Yeah. Uh. I guess you don’t wear shoes...”
“Shooz,” she repeats, delighted. “No, I do not wear shooz.”
Again that merry laughter breaks out. She is infinitely older than he is, but, in that moment, she is somehow younger too.
For the first time since he has met her, she steps out of the river. It is a heart-stopping moment; the water is alive, where is the gravity, how does any of this work...
She comes to stand beside him, noiseless feet on damp river grass. “You see: no shooz.”
Her presence is vast but, physically, standing beside him now, she seems tiny.
She looks up at him (and her hair shimmers bluely down) and appears to make a similar finding. “Such a big bumbling mortal. Small wonder I can hear you crashing your way to my river from leagues away…”
“Oh,” says Kisame, wrong-footed and embarrassed. “Sorry...”
“Why sorry?” comes a questioning tinkle. “You can’t help bumbling, just as bees can’t help bumbling…”
Now he feels awkward and self-aware; now he knows that he is a large oafish uncoordinated idiot. It is especially evident because he is standing so close to this exquisite nymph-creature who embodies pure grace…
He looks away towards the dark horizon, pained by the discovery of his mortal man’s ineptitudes.
She notices his pain and it makes her curious. She climbs upon a rock next to him and peers into his face with eyes the colour of moss growing thoughtfully along a weeping wall.
“I have made you shy, poor thing,” she says, a droplet of ruefulness colouring her voice. “Your kind is so easy to vex.”
His kind is easy to vex?
“... Speak for yourself,” says Kisame peevishly.
“Psh.” (The sound is that last splish that a stone makes when you’re skipping it, just before it sinks.)
“It’s true,” says Kisame, knowing that he is dangerously close to vexing her again.
“Perhaps you oughtn’t say stupid things.”
“Sorry. I’m just a bumbling mortal…”
“Yes,” she says, gentle wavelets against the river’s edge. “You are...”
She raises her hand to his face. At her wrist is a bracelet made of one or two of the night’s constellations entwined. It dances as she reaches and taps his nose with a cool fingertip. “...Bumbling and cheeky. An unwise combination.”
“Yeah, well…” (His wit has evaporated in the face of the tap: she touched him. She’s tangible…)
She does not notice his wonder; her attention has drifted to a cattail nudging her hip in the breeze. She runs her fingers along the brown autumnal velvet, like one might stroke a favourite pet.
“Perhaps I ought to be more patient with your inadequacies.”
“I’d -- really appreciate that.”
The cattail comes apart into puffs of fluffy seeds in her hand. She lets them go and watches them swirl in the capricious breeze, eyes intent, like there is meaning in every movement and it is important.
The last of the white seeds float upwards and lose themselves among the stars. Again this seems significant; she stares after them, a frown trickling down her brow.
She folds herself into a seated position on her rock. “Sit, then, and I shall try out this newfound patience.”
He sits on the long wet grass that borders her perch and she glistens above him like a woman-shaped fountain.
Her eyes darken to the blue-black of northern lakes edged with pines. “So, I shall try to tell you some of the song you heard.”
Her voice grows hushed and she leans forward and places her hand on the surface of the water. “It is a lullaby. For my river. To fall asleep beneath these lanes of great still stars and dream…”
She trails off and he, mesmerised, prompts her to continue in a half-whisper: “Dream about what?”
“The world when it was young.”
“Oh…”
“We could hear the stars, then,” she says with a melancholy sigh that pulls painfully at his heart. “They sang strange tales in voices so sparkling and deep…”
Her eyes are filled with the night sky. “It was such a comfort, you know -- this great presence that made our sorrows seem so small...”
Kisame doesn’t even notice that she is leaving, so gradually does she ebb away, and he is left full of thoughts sad and sweet.
Kisame looks for her with increasing desperation as autumn fades and she doesn’t show herself again.
He chases after things that may or not be her: gold glinting along a bend in the river, shadows in shallows, ripples with no cause…
Then one day he hears her laughter upstream and pursues it, knowing that she can hear his every bumbling footstep and splash. She lets him catch up, eventually, shining ahead of him in late autumn sunlight, flinging sparks of sun-diamonds with every movement, blowing kisses to waterlilies as she jets away.
He’s supposed to be a fast guy but apparently he’s not, not compared to this twinkling thing in front of him that laughs merrily at his breathless failure to keep up.
Onwards she leads him, up a golden faerie stream, until he throws himself at her, and catches her, and they roll about, and lie tangled in the rushes.
He is annoyed and exhausted; she teems with amusement.
And she’s just too beautiful for words, like those stars from that younger world she so misses, sparkling and deep.
There is a question he must ask her. He thinks he knows the answer. It’s already killing him.
She is cool in his hands; corporeal, and yet not.
He asks the question. “Why did he put you in the sword?”
She stills and studies him with eyes of purest source-water. “You already know why.”
“He loved you.”
“Yes.”
“He wanted to keep you.”
“Yes.”
“I understand him now.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Will you try to catch me too?”
It takes him too long to answer. The truth is, he doesn’t know.
She kisses him once, rain against his lips, and then she is gone.
He never sees her again.
Clapotis: my fellow francophones know this word that so perfectly describes the soft sound of water lapping against something, for which English has no equivalent.
