Remedy (Shuhei x Isabella)
@mystifiedgarden
To you, with love
------------------------------------------------------------
"This way," Shuhei murmurs to his wife.
He's leading her down a dusty path, the sandstone homes of the part of Orasan city making a narrow way for them. The two tiptoed under the few lit torches of the alleyway, careful not the make any noise in this quiet part of the slums.
Stray dogs lay cautiously watching, heads on their folded paws. They stirred up dirt with their scraggly tails and panted a hello to the pair as they continue on. The night sky is filled with stars, twinkling like little blazes of fire in a faraway land
"Where are we going?" Isabella asks.
Shuhei tightens his grip on her hand, lacing his fingers through hers. He brushes his index finger on her knuckles. "There's a place I want you to see."
As they crossed an intersection in the road, a few camels cut them short. Isabella marvelled at their swaying hips, and their masters swaddled in dark clothes. They were most likely Vithrat smugglers. Shuhei had known about them in his time on Orasas. They sold other things besides the most tempting drug known to this side of the sea, like gold wares and exotic treasures and pets. They were more common now that the Guard has no means of enforcement. They were friendly enough when provided the right accommodations. and the right price.
Shuhei tightened his grip on his wife as they continued through the streets. His geta and her sandals scuffed the sandy stones underfoot. What he was about to show her... he hadn't shown to anyone else before. He wasn't even sure if it was still there.
"Shuhei, look," she points out. There was a small tattered piece of cloth with an insignia on it, limp in the windless night. It hung in front of a small sandstone abode, toward the end of the narrow side street. Jungle trees had overrun the front stoop, once tamed and well groomed. The shingles on the roof had long since been stripped and the walls were crumbling and cracked. The blood smear beside the rotten wooden door had faded. Not how he remembered the place. He had been afraid of that.
"What does that mean, do you know?"
Shuhei sighed. He had wished this wasn't the case... but what did he expect? Almost 20 years away from this place. What did he expect?
"It doesn't mean anything now."
He shouldered the door in, dust and sand falling from the shifting doorframe. He waited a beat to make sure the structure was stable before he held out his hand. Isabella took it firmly, stepping inside the small home.
There wasn't much left inside it, in the main room at least. There was a fire pit in the middle of the floor and moth-eaten blankets and rugs on the dirt floor. Everything was covered in soil. Shuhei turned his nose up at the foul condition of the place. It made his blood boil, it made his heart ache.
He turned to Isabella. Her hair had grown out again since living in Orasas for a while. It fell down her shoulders in a braid he had done up for her. Her body was covered in a halter made of red silk, a wrap-around skirt to match. She clutched a shawl around her torso with one hand, holding his with the other. Her eyes were wide, curious, taking in the surroundings. She wondered what this place could be... where her husband had brought her this night.
"Shuhei, baby?" She looked at him for reassurance, for clarity. "Where are we?"
Her gentle voice was almost drowned out by the locusts and crickets in the trees outside. Some of them had made their way inside, opening the small space to make it seem like it was just an extension of the untamed island. Like nobody had ever lived here... like this was a ruin that was intended to be forgotten.
He grimaced.
"My mother's house."
Isabella softens, taking a step forward into Shuhei's arms. Her head is pressed to his bare chest, the hems of his robes touching her cheeks softly. She could hear the coarse, yet light fabric scrape against the gold barbells that were pierced through his nipples. He held her close, standing in the middle of a home that never seemed to be.
Isabella knew how hard this must have been for him. She knew that he felt this was a part of him that he was supposed to leave behind. She was honored he had shown it to her.
This part of him seemed to always have been a blemish, a rancid spot that Kyoh had tried punishing him for... then attempted to wash out. Although it had faded and morphed and evolved, he had never let it die. He had never forgotten who he was. Orasas was always going to be ingrained in him... but it seemed the sands of time and war and turmoil had blasted the last of his hieroglyphs from their original place. Now the only copy of his roots left for him was the bastardized transcription written on his chest in blood. She knew that. He had told her, and she knew.
"Oh, Shuhei..." Isabella hugged him tightly, pouring her love into him. His face was hard to read, a stone bulwark over a whirlwind of pain and disappointment and rage. He draped his arm on her shoulder, not able to take his eyes off the vacant space. Isabella hurt for him.
"I'm so sorry, baby."
He shook his head. "So am I... Sorry, I wasted your time... There's nothing here."
Isabella turned his chin to face her. There was so much love in her eyes, the color of rosy hibiscus. It made Shuhei ease, the hardening of his heart slowed down, and it came to a stillness.
"You haven't wasted a bit of time. This place, it's important to you, no?"
Shuhei pets her head, nodding slowly. Her hair was so soft, so silky. The way her slender fingers trace gently upon his back, faintly rubbing back and forth, it lulled the raging seas of his mind.
"Then coming to see it is worth it. Okay?"
Shuhei took a deep collective breath and his anger seemed to subside a bit. This was proof that there wasn't anything his wife's comfort couldn't fix. She brought his face down to her so she could press her pink lips to the corner of Shuhei's mouth. The Head of the Royal Guard savored his wife's intimate reassurance.
"Show me... show me everything," she whispers.
He nods, regaining the courage to shift through the wreckage of his mother's past, one she seemed to have let fall prey to assimilations in Kyoh. Who could blame her? All the stares, all the beatings, all the spit Shuhei had to wipe from his face as the other children looked down upon him... he would be the first one to understand why his mother would let the ripples of her past turn to the cold, still water of his father's land.
Oh, but the water was never still.
He notices something glinting on a shelf nearby. The moonlight had caught it, sparking a shine in his brown eyes full of pain. Without letting go of his love, he reaches with a long arm to grab the trinket.
It had been a piece of stained glass. It was dusty, but with a few swipes from Shuhei's thumb, he could see the red glass more clearly. He marveled at it... could it be?
"It's..." He whispered. He talked as if he'd blow his own hope away. Softly, his words barely a sound leaving his lips.
Isabella looked up at him, at his eyes turned hopeful, nearly black in the dark house. She didn't know what he was holding.. but it seemed so important.
Shuhei took a minute to complete his thought. He didn't want to be wrong. He let the world stand still around him, in case what he thought to be was all just a mirage...
But it was. It was what he had thought! He smiled, hugging Isa close. He held it down so she could see it. She huddled over the piece of glass inventively.
"It's my grandmother's old prayer glass..."
Isabella rose her eyebrows. It was beautiful, engraved with swirls of Orasan ash paint and etched with little words. She wondered what they said. She had a feeling though, that she shouldn't ask.
"It's beautiful," Isabella mentions. It looked expertly crafted and very very old. It was chipped on the edges, the perfect circle resembling a sand dollar.
Shuhei nodded. "Yeah... these are considered artifacts now... They were supposed to shed the Devil's light on your old sins... and pray them away."
He admired it, holding it to the moon's light so that red beams would strike the floor of the home. "My mother also has one..."
He paused before he continued as if he didn't really want to mention what was going through his mind. Isabella waited patiently for him to finish.
"But it's locked away since she no longer practices Elsmaic Worship. She says it's cursed."
The words hung in the air like a plague. The history of this prayer glass was just another thing about them that had gotten washed away. That his mother was wished away.
Isabella looked up at Shuhei. "Do you believe it's cursed?"
Superstition and religion were something that Shuhei had always struggled with. Isabella had her deities, and those made sense to him. His friend Salice was living proof of the Devil and his promises... but even so, he could never find himself believing in anything... not fully.
He shook his head. "No."
It wasn't used for anything anymore. His mother hadn't called on the Devil in decades. How could the devil curse someone if he no longer has power over them? Why would the Devil care so much about a piece of glass? Nobody else did.
Isabella closed her hands around her husband's, encircling the prayer glass in her protective hold. She kissed his knuckles, worn and calloused. How she loved his hands. These hands had built her a home, wielded a sword to protect her, and touched her so tenderly in ways nobody else in the entire world could understand.
"Then we shall keep it."
Shuhei gazed at her soft face. The moon's light cast white rays on the angular shape of her nose, contouring her face into the mural of a goddess. Her sweet lips held the secrets to heaven and the words that will forever guide him when he is lost in the purgatory of his own obscured emotions. He grabbed her chin, leaning down to capture those lips in a sweet kiss.
She held his face, gazing into his eyes for a brief time. The world seemed to stop as they shared this intimate moment. Shuhei could live here forever. His wife's presence turned this shabby grave of his formal life into a grand mausoleum, embracing everything he had ever wished to destroy about himself.
"Shuhei... I want you to know that if this glass is a part of you, I will keep it. If this home is a part of you, then I will honor it. Just as I have received this island into my heart, I will receive any part of you. Good, or bad, blessed or cursed, you are my husband and your life is my life."
Shuhei's tears didn't hesitate to spill over his lids. He cupped Isabella's cheeks and looked into those eyes once more. He knew his heaven would be a place he could forever admire these eyes, and his hell would be any world without them. He pressed his forehead against hers as a quiet sob broke through the confining fortress that was his lips. He couldn't say anything, for she had said it all.
After thirty years, judgment day had finally descended upon him. It had come and gone in these few moments, and, with Isabella as his messiah, he had passed over into a place of peace. His wife accepting this final part of him welcomed Shu into a world of validity, encouragement, and sanction.
Shuhei Kumagai, a bastard of two incommensurable lands, no longer wore the bloody smear of shame. The insurmountable weight he had been carrying both on his shoulders and the pit of his soul had been, at long last, lifted. The four corners of his complicated, fragmented, and equivocal world were now thoroughly explored and were acknowledged with love, by none other than the woman that completed him.
On this day, in the comforting dominion of his wife's light, a man was remedied.
It was this day, with his old sins forgiven, his past curses abolished, his wife had baptized him in love unconditional so that he could bestow it upon himself, today and every day thereafter.