STATION 72 ; mental link
KALI She Who is the Great Destroyer ; She Who wears a Garland of Skulls | LAKSHMI She Who Believes in Truth ; She Who is the Mother |
DRAUPADI She who was Born of Fire Sacrafice; | DURGA She Who is perpetually endeavouring to protect the weak and the poor and remove their misery. |
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( Like I said, it doesn't matter. Are you really going "love conquers all" at me? After what you said? )
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( Love has never conquered all. Because love is an act, not a force. No one is made less or more able to love. Like no one is made truly good or truly evil. Like loyalty, duty, we feel it's pull and we make our choices. We drive ourselves to act. It is terrifying, yes, it weighs in ways that cannot be imagined. But if you make such choices otherwise, to be brave and true, why not those again?
And I have seen you make those choices, Misato, I am sure you did it long before I came to bear witness to it. Should the same not apply? )
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The long silence she allows to stretch since the admonition says more than whatever reply she deigns to give. ]
( If you've ever tried and failed to fix a broken mirror, Lakshmi, then you'll know what I mean. )
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He is kind to me when I least deserve it, and he tells me the truth that I need to hear. That's enough. )
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( Have you ever heard of the palace of mirrors, Misato? )
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( No. You're going to tell me. )
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It is, to her child's observation, a overwhelming feeling. ]
( Even shards create beauty, Misato. Even the pieces that slice us deepest. )
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( No. No, stop it. It's nothing like that. I know who I am and how I've had to put myself together, and I know there's no beauty in it. But I'm here and I will go on. )
[ Then she thinks of how it must be so insulting, to have shown her such magnificence only to have it rejected. And she is so hungry still for approval. ]
( Let's just talk about something else. Like, I don't know, your husband. )
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( Is there no beauty in that? If there is not, then it is no measure of beauty I wish to partake in. )
[ But she does leave it alone. Her point made, she settles back. Thick coat in long grass, she draws it up around herself, warm and settled. ]
( Very well. What would you like to know of him? )
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[ Beauty is purity. This is the word she uses: Kirei. Innocence lost can never be regained. Mirrors can't be pieced together. The Japanese piece together their broken plates with gold, but they remain broken. ]
( Tell me about the time you knew you loved him. )
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But an argument for another day, as she settles herself to old memories, old thoughts. A moment stolen and perhaps it is only the moment in retrospect as if love could be something so instantly defined. But, at least, for Misato's ]
( The day I realized the choices he had given me, that are not shared amongst most women. Not that either required love - duty would have sustained us. )
[ Because of course, it would have, and that it would is why perhaps they had found love. Not in looking at each other - but in looking out. ]
( He gave me time to know myself, and to then learn him as that person, to show him who I was in return. In that moment, when we did, good and bad, for ill and our own betterment, knew each other wholly? )
[ It is honey in her mouth, in her thoughts, the softness, a memory that is not Misato's, not the nests, it is a woman and a man's. It is the softness of dirt under her knees, the warmth settled between her legs as she perched, steady. It is the fingers the press one, to her collarbone, two to her beat of her heart, three against her breast. His hair was gold in the dappled sunlight through the trees, and his smile was rich where it pressed against her throat.
The warm of his voice, an older man, that rumbled through her. It is Lakshmi who is part of you, Manikarnika. I do not think it, I just see it.
She shudders with that warm breath still, even these years later. ]
( Then. Then I knew. )
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Misato grasps these fragments greedily, eyes and ears wide open, but she maintains distance still. She holds to the edges of these photographs, listens to the voices from the room next door, reminds herself that it isn't her skin but Lakshmi's and those hands belong to another man's, so take care. These boundaries are important. Her self would be too porous otherwise.
Even so, she returns the favor. It is summer, the sky velvet black, the relentless clack clack clack of the fan doing nothing for the heat or the humidity, but it punctuates her whispered words against his neck, her rage against their enemies and her hopes for the future turning into vapor to form the slick layer of sweat on his and her skins. And he doesn't stop her, and he listens, and he says, You have everything you need. Go forward, don't hesitate. He is the one to witness her first flight, the one to fold away her wings for the next morning. It should've been enough. ]
( What was his name? ) [ And on the heels of that. ] ( What happened to him? )
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[ That part - that part is easy. He is a man proud, strong. Too proud perhaps, sometimes, arrogant as a King always wound be. But one that had given her leave to her own strength.
If only that had been enough. ]
( Our son... he did not... ) [ Stiff, harsh, the stick of something in her throat. ] ( A ruler only has a future in our children, and when he did not... it broke his heart. He did not last a year more. )
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When she swallows back all these words, it is for Lakshmi's sake. ]
( You lost a son and a husband in just one year. )
[ She can't resent her for this. ]
( Were you angry at him for leaving you too? )
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Perhaps, for a day - I suppose I was at angry at it all. But being angry over a broken heart is like being angry for the rain falling or the seas rising. It changes nothing and the waters keeping coming.
We are royalty, our people look to us - he knew that too. So we adopted our second son and a few hours later, it was only then he allowed himself to pass. We knew our roles. We only know the end of our duty when we die. So he saw to the end of his. )
[ She shakes her head - and then - realises, in a half step between the memories and herself and this all caught up in her skin - she cannot separate it out of herself. Remember the past or the present or that her own failure - her son, so small in her arms gone in a moment and - with him - everything.
She asked her ladies why they wept, with her, when she sat staring at the crib now a empty basket, in a grief that poured out and out and out. She had stopped being conscious of her tears. Or of anything else in those haze of days laughter. 'He is but one boy, why do you share my grief?' 'He is your son, Maharani, but he is our future. Now we will fall.' ]
( But - I know who my anger belonged too. Three months later, despite everything he had done in those last hours, the vampires and the lycans wearing British Laws and British diplomacy, took it all. My Jhansi was taken from me - and I was forced to watch as they stripped her down like jackals feasting on a corpse.
So, truly, what time did I have to be angry? )