Coming to Terms

[finch]

Eden didn’t feel like Salome had. She reminded me of someone else altogether, and it took me weeks to figure out it was Ka’ana herself. I naturally fell into orbit around her, just as I had to Ka’ana and to my muse before that.

I felt the need to check on her, just to make sure she was okay. Nine times out of ten, when I called out to her, she turned and smiled and announced that she’d just been thinking she needed me.

Today was that last time, when she scowled, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave. She folded the letter she’d been reading and stuffed it back into its envelope. It was as if there was a cord fastened tight inside my chest, and she held it tightly. Unlike Ka’ana, unlike my muse, she seemed to hold it unknowingly.

“What are you?” I asked her. She was already in a bad mood; surely I couldn’t upset her much more.

“Don’t.”

“You pull on me.”

“Jin, please, don’t ruin this.” Her eyes were black as coal and shiny with tears.

I shook my head. “I don’t want to ruin anything. But I don’t understand why this happens. I can’t find the common thread.”

“Common… wait, what are you talking about?”

“You’re the third woman I’ve known in my life who had this kind of pull on me. It’s not- I’m not in love with you. I mean, I think I could be. But it’s not love, this pull. It’s something else.”

“Who were the other two? Your wife and…?”

“Not her. The goddess she spoke for. And before that, when I was a boy in Japan, there was a guardian spirit who lived in the temple.”

Her voice was measured. “What do you think I am?”

I looked for a scientific explanation. It was hard, to fight through the irrational response to her, though it was easier with her than the others. Something I owed thanks to Ka’ana for, I supposed.

“Not a goddess yourself, or you’d know you were doing it. A bloodline, then?”

“My grandmother had a word for it, and my teacher had another, but it doesn’t really matter, Jin. What matters is what you do about it.”

“What I do?” It didn’t occur to me that I could do anything about this. I never had before.

Eden looked me in the eye. “We’re both going to be here for years, Jin. I don’t want to spend the next ten or fifteen years with someone who’s going to be comparing me to his first wife, or some goddess.”

“That’s not-”

“Once we’ve sorted out our pasts, then we can discuss a future.” She forgot the letter when she walked away. I let myself drift close to it… close enough to see the return address in Mexico, and the name of the sender. I came to my senses before I picked it up, though, and went back to my lab.

It didn’t matter in the long run. The pull of her gravity was irresistible, and she seemed to mind it less as we spent more time together. She didn’t really remind me much of Salome, or of Ka’ana, once I got used to the feeling of being around her.

Instead I learned to appreciate her for herself – she smiled when I baked fresh rolls as the sun rose, when I hadn’t slept, and she made coffee and chatted with me and sent me to bed after. She seemed to know when I needed her as well as I knew when she needed me – something Ka’ana had never done.

When the first of my projects was stillborn, Eden took it and held it like any other child while I cleaned up it’s mother.

“Comfort her,” Eden whispered. She disappeared with the body of the infant.

I held the girl while she cried, not sure if it was comforting but doing it anyway. I knew how it felt to lose a child, and how alone I’d been. I didn’t want her to be alone. And somehow in that, I found a purpose in running the school beyond what the government wanted.

These girls, young and unwed and shunned, they needed someone to give a damn about them. If that someone had to be me, well… it was a shame there wasn’t anyone better, but I was better than noone.

In some ways that night was a dam breaking. I’d held everyone at arm’s length since arriving in Applegate, even Kether, but that wasn’t a solution.

In the next few weeks, I felt younger than I had since the kids were born. I was jogging, just for the hell of it, and I started teaching Kether the martial arts I’d learned in Japan to give myself something else to do with the energy. I’d have to teach our little projects eventually too, so I told myself it was good practice.

I felt more alive next to Eden than I ever had next to Ka’ana. Maybe it was as simple as her having her own body. Maybe it was the fact that she spoke to me as an equal.

One day I spotted her watching us as we finished sparring. I told Kether to go inside and start on lunch.

“Can you teach Kether?” I asked her. It was a risk, but I’d seen her with her new charges. They were true orphans and not related to my work, but they seemed like good kids and I saw plenty of them. And I liked to think I still knew magic when I saw it.

“I can, if he has the aptitude.”

“I certainly hope he does.”

“I shouldn’t have to tell you, Jin, that bloodlines matter in this work.”

“Oh, he has more than enough of it in his line.”

“You don’t-”

“I did, once. I had it burned out of me. But they can’t change my genes.”

“You can tell me that story sometime when we’ve both had too much wine over dinner,” she nodded slowly. “I want something in exchange.”

“What’s that?”

“Teach my children to fight as well. I’ve had… some training, but you’d be a better teacher, I think.” It seemed a reasonable enough request, and I thought it would suit Kether to have sparring partners closer to his height.

After that, they all got up early to meet me on the lawn, and Kether went obediently to Eden’s cabin for lessons with the orphans. He seemed to enjoy having a real peer group for a change; he never seemed comfortable with the handful of local children.

Eden taught him well, very well indeed. He picked it up quickly – but then, he came to it from both sides of his heritage. I let Eden teach him the basics, because you had to see and feel those to pick them up.

Once he understood it, I pulled him aside.

“Kether, show me what Eden’s been teaching you.”

I already knew what the show would be; she’d been keeping me updated the entire time. But I watched him go through the motions, and I thought maybe he was ready.

“I want to teach you something else. Another style of magic.”

He looked at me with wide eyes. “You do magic?”

“No, of course not,” I heard myself say, and his face fell at the bitterness in my tone. How could I explain it, though? Later. When he was older.

“Give me your hands.” He offered them up. I took his left hand in my right, brushed my fingers along the tendons in his wrists. I tried to remember what that had felt like when my teacher did it to me, the way you pulled on the energy.

I felt nothing, of course, but Kether’s arm stiffened and I knew he did.

“Eden’s style is very good, no doubt, she burns like the sun when she pulls the threads. What I would teach you is much quieter, more subtle. The calm act of weaving, one thread after another, rather than her macramé. What do you think?”

“I want to learn all of it.”

“Good boy.” I smiled at him. “This comes from inside you rather than around you. Practice pulling it out like thin strands of taffy. You must use it sparingly.”

“Why?”

“It comes from inside you. That means there’s only so much to pull out.” That was not a lesson Eden could teach him. As best I could tell, she radiated magic like the sun gave off light, naturally and without effort. Even when I’d had the talent for it, it had been work. Pleasant work, like baking or working out equations – work that had something to show for it at the end – but work nonetheless.

Blind as I was, I saw the light in her. It was a wonder to me that no one else did.

She caught me, finally, on a night when the children were in bed and I had been too busy with the birth of my second project to make it to dinner. I was tired but satisfied that both would survive, and the infant was showing all the right signs, and Eden had dinner for the two of us waiting when I came downstairs.

“Is Kether…” She didn’t finish the question, but I knew what she meant.

“Not to quite the same degree as the children here. But the ideas for the… modifications came from Ka’ana originally. And Kether is her son.”

“Was that before you lost your magic?”

I laughed a little, and I was surprised how brittle the noise sounded in the late-night quiet. “Long after, I’m afraid. I was in college when it was burned out of me.”

“Why?”

“I betrayed my family and my government. It wasn’t unexpected, though I thought my handlers might protect me. They didn’t realize what they were dealing with. Not until it almost killed me.”

She nodded.

“It should have killed me,” I continued, dropping the volume. “You don’t just survive that.”

“But you did survive it.”

I emptied the wine glass, thinking how little I’d let myself drink since the weeks after my wife’s death. “I did.”

“Do you know why?”

I shrugged.

“My teacher told me, years ago… he said there were larger forces at work in the world, and the best we could hope to do was keep them from affecting us and the people we care about.”

“Do you think that’s true?”

“I think there’s more to it than that. There has to be.” She refilled our glasses and continued. “You’ve seen surfers, haven’t you? In the movies? They don’t hide from the waves. They ride them.”

“You think we’re meant to ride these forces?”

“I think we are. The work you do is dangerous; it seems perilously close to letting your goddess loose in the world. You’ve been tossed around on the waves, probably your entire life. You’re neck-deep in these forces and drowning.”

“And what do you propose I do about it?”

“You’re trying so hard to put Kether in control of his own life – I know you’re teaching him too, Jin, I can see it. But it’s not too late for you to take control of your own as well. You don’t have to build these soldiers for your goddess or your government.”

“Of course I do. I’m under contract.”

She laughed. “This is so much bigger than contracts. This is the fate of the world.”

“If I had a fate, I lost it with the rest of my birthright.”

“Keep telling yourself that, then, and I hope you see the truth before you drown.”

Eden surprised me by kissing me, gently, on the corner of my mouth. I hadn’t expected her lips to be so soft; I hadn’t expected that I missed touch so much. She left me with the bottle of wine.

If anyone noticed in the morning that I was late, they must have chalked it up to the work the night before.

Mirrored from Jack-a-dreams.

Comments

[whitemage]

I love Eden. XD

[finch]

I do too. XD