date posted: 2022-10-09
summary: Futures and presents, the past and its means to an end. Moriyama and Izumo, somewhere in between time.
word count: 1,077 words
notes: set at the tail end of the illuminati arc
this is pretty thick and dense with all the descriptions. i meant to add dialogue but then i thought it suited the mood better without dialogue and then purple prose kinda happened. oh well, good writing exercise at least? sort of? not really. anyway i think about izushie too much and too little
She’s spent the last several weeks trying to imagine her life after she stood before that grave, bandages as a semblance of privacy for her nastiest parts and her words of forgiveness as sincere as she’ll ever manage. She’s tried to imagine a future that’s become the present. Reconciling that is less of a priority to Izumo than it is trying to put together a life in the aftermath.
The bench is cold under her thighs, in this autumn weather. The temperature hasn’t reflected the month yet, but everything to her touch has reflected it well enough.
Ice: cubes, blocks, then a precise sculpture of the person she used to be before she found herself in that Illuminati facility again, accepting the inevitable, until the inevitable became another past consideration. She is static, atrophied ice in a future she never allowed herself to consider.
Izumo forgave her mother’s grave with her classmates behind her and did not falter with grief. Izumo grieved for a sister she’ll never know again as she stood before the girl that was her drive for so long. She chooses her battles and imagines it was the shield of gauze on her cheek that gave her the strength for those instances, the strength to bare herself in front of her family, all of her past and present crimes a bright, flashing sign at the forefront, Izumo Kamiki eclipsed by it.
Izumo stares at the rotting sticks on the ground before her feet, the leaves around them rustling with every sudden shift of the wind. She spots the smallest insects, obvious in their movement from the light concrete, and wonders their impact on every leaf they cross. She pulled her hair into a ponytail as soon as she woke up, and she remembers it only by its messiness and how it feels so heavy and listless on her back. She’s either being dramatic or pragmatic about this, but at least one of those lines of thinking might get her somewhere.
She sits in the biting autumn air, overgrown bangs blown forward and sharpened by the wind, and wonders the furthest extent of her mourning, if the wind can sharpen it just as it’s sharpened the rest of her this afternoon. If her mourning made sharp would push her to move forward to the future.
Her hands are folded and keen in her lap, eyesight locked on them, and then Moriyama’s standing before her, words blurred by the thick wind and maybe by Izumo’s own soundless haze. And then Moriyama’s sitting beside her, on top of those torn leaves that’ve littered the bench for the past hour and driven Izumo crazy with their rustling, and doesn’t think about how Moriyama knew to find her in the furthest corner of True Cross territory.
Izumo finally glances to the side, and sees Moriyama fidgeting with her own hands, with all the confidence of a bandage after the adhesive has worn off, but with the steeled certainty of a stone skipping across water, in the way she pours her certainty into her gaze and words to make her point. Moriyama was always annoying with her obliviousness, but Izumo knew she never was the type to lose sight of her point. Perhaps that’s been Izumo’s biggest mistake in these past weeks – searching and imagining herself in a time that slipped away from her the moment she awoke in that hospital bed.
Moriyama is made of contradictions, like Izumo herself, but she’s always thought that’s where they’re most similar and different. Moriyama is contradictory in her mysteries and self-assuredness alike – Izumo’s found her own contradictions to be blisteringly obvious in the light and only slightly duller in the dark.
Moriyama, with her light, organized hair, disorganized only when she allows nature to disorganize it, and Izumo, with her dark, split and sharp hair, organized by force with every elastic in her reach, until she’s all out of energy and effort or hair ties.
Moriyama has always reached for Izumo, since they first met in that classroom, persevered until Izumo finally let herself consider Moriyama a friend. She wonders how someone can have such endless drive for a person who’s spent a lifetime chasing and running from the inevitable. Maybe Moriyama recognized it at first sight, and decided that Izumo was someone to be saved. It’s a trait she might share with Okumura-kun, perhaps. Or maybe she’s misread Moriyama entirely. She can’t be sure.
The air bites with every new gust of wind, but it’s also lightened its impact with Moriyama beside her to share the brunt of it. Moriyama has her hand on Izumo’s shoulder, and Izumo sees her eyes glance towards her again, some undecipherable bundle of emotions. Moriyama has been silent in these minutes, she thinks, unless the wind has again obscured the words. Izumo wonders if it’s another thing for her spiralling staircase of guilt, that she can’t even listen to the girl who’s reached out for her despite every unbitten word of nastiness from Izumo.
If Izumo’s wondering the furthest extent of her mourning on an autumn afternoon, she thinks Moriyama could be wondering the furthest extent of her compassion. Moriyama, with all of her assured compassion and understanding for those who seal themselves in their brooding. Moriyama and her plants in the winter, Moriyama and the Okumura brothers. Moriyama and Izumo.
Izumo unfolds her hands, sharp air encroaching, but not enough to wreck the start she’s made with finding some warmth in the ice. She’s leaned her head on Moriyama’s shoulder, and she knows Moriyama has her eyes closed, hand still to her shoulder and gentle in its touch but firm in its support.
Futures and presents, the past and its means to an end. Moriyama and Izumo, somewhere in between time. Izumo closes her eyes and feels her thoughts slow for even a moment, in the warmth of Moriyama, how the ice is duller now.
Moriyama with all of her unending compassion and warmth, Izumo with all of her jagged, shattered edges. Moriyama and Izumo, diametrically opposed, but maybe Izumo can allow herself this moment. Sharp and frozen, but always vulnerable with Moriyama, with Shiemi. She lets her hand slip from her lap to Shiemi’s lap, some semblance of an embrace.
The air is gentler now, and Izumo knows that Shiemi is probably smiling. Izumo decides that she can too smile in this moment, future and past forgotten, the present on her mind again.