Please C&C to Gerald Tarrant at lordofmerentha@yahoo.com

Sacred Things

When he was very young, before his memory had been fully formed and more than just cotton candy wisps of sight and sound and smell that melted in his hands when he tried to catch hold of them, even before he had met Luka, he had had a father.

It was strange, because Hana told him when he asked that she remembered her mother much more than she remembered her father. But he did not remember his mother at all – just a tall silhouette of a man. His father had big hands, he remembered. Big hands but very gentle, just right for handing a little boy his first baseball glove, or picking him up and brushing away his tears when he tripped and fell in the mud, or feeding him soup when he was sick.

There was something odd about those hands though, something that he only realized the significance of much later, when he was old enough to understand. The little finger on his father's left hand had been missing.

He didn't remember how old he was, and he supposed it didn't matter because that meant he had been young enough that the grief would not be too near, but one day his father did not come back.

Hana was never really sad when she talked about her mother. Just like him, she had not been old enough when Yi-Che had died to really remember much about what she had been like, and her father's grief had been private, a protection of sorts for his daughter, to pretend that life was normal. But Sho had always been like that. He was good at pretending, good at accepting things, good at ignoring things even though they were staring him right in the face. It had been a mixed blessing.

His daughter did not talk about him at all. It was like Sho had never really existed. Yi-Che, to Hana, had been real, flesh and blood, a memory that though faint, was still there – a good memory. In Hana's mind, there was no memory of her father at all.

Sometimes, he wondered if that should make him sad. Sometimes he thought it was for the best, and sometimes he simply wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her and say, don't you realize how much your father loved you? Don't you realize what a great man he was?

But he never did, because that would mean dredging those memories up again, and these memories, unlike his own memories of his father, were still very real and vivid to him.

The moon was visible just above the bare branches of the trees outside the kitchen window of Hana's small two-room apartment, and one thin cloud, like the black wing of a bat, scudded quickly across its speckled surface. The tree branches dipped in the cold December wind, but the inside of the apartment was warm, and he'd turned on all the lights as well as the radio and the TV, and the fan above the stove was humming also. For all that he was cold-blooded and a creature of the night, he hated the dark.

Toshi had teased him sometimes about that, because his habit of turning on all the lights in whatever room he was in had started even back when it was just the four of them, he and Toshi and Shinji and Sho, in whatever ratty hole they happened to have found for the night. Back then they had no electric lights, only cheap wax candles that Shinji would buy off the local candle maker for a few pennies, or would swipe under the tables if pennies weren't available that day. He would wait for them to come home, go for the candles when they weren't looking, light all of them if Sho or Toshi didn't stop him. It had been an obsession.

For a vampire, Toshi told him one day, pulling the candles out of his hands, you sure hate the dark. Are you sure you're a real vampire?

He'd been surprised at how readily Toshi had accepted him, but Toshi was the kind of person who would accept just about anyone unless they'd sworn vengeance against him, and even then, he wouldn't have been surprised if the Toshi managed to bat the vow of revenge aside with some peace offering of food. Shinji wanted nothing to do with him, but if Sho said that the vampire was all right, Toshi would also say he was all right.

Toshi had not been a friend, but he had been as close to one as a vampire could ever have. Without being Sho. Because Sho had been different.

He had thought it was going to snow, and the weather channel had said it might, but there were few clouds and tomorrow was supposed to be a sunny day, so he doubted they'd see any tonight. The curry was almost ready, and he glanced at the clock on the wall above the window as he stirred it thoughtfully. Almost 9 PM. Hana was late again.

Accompanying that thought was the squeak of the front door and the bright girlish voice that was the only thing he lived for nowadays, calling to him from the other room. "Kei? I'm home."

"Dinner's almost done," he said over his shoulder as she emerged into the room. He couldn't see her, but he felt her presence at his back, setting some bags down at the table with her usual chipper, self-sure movements. She had her father's strong mind with the grace of her mother, and sometimes it confused him, especially if he had been dozing or asleep and she would walk into the room, because he would start awake, address her in bewilderment as either Sho or Yi-Che, and she would look at him like he had gone mad.

"Thank you for making dinner," Hana rambled on behind him. He heard her take off her jacket. "Sorry I was late."

"It's not a problem," he said, turning off the range and reaching into the upper cabinet for a bowl to pour the curry into. "How was the art show?"

He felt her grin. "So much fun. I wish you could have gone."

Turning around, he matched her grin a bit ruefully. "I doubt I would have understood most of it. I don't have your passion for the arts."

"Oh come on. I've seen some of your sketches. You're as good as any of them."

"I doodle," he corrected. "I don't draw. Eat before it gets cold."

Obediently, Hana scooped rice into her bowl and ladled the curry over it, and he sat down at the table and watched her eat. The aroma of the food was pleasant to his sense of smell, but only as the smell of a candle or incense was pleasant. After he left her place, he would scout around for a meal.

"I wish I could offer you some of this," she said quietly, and he shook his head slightly, not meeting her eyes. "It's a shame…you're such a good cook, and you can't eat any of it."

"I could, if I had to," he countered. "It would probably make me sick. But I could."

Her lip quirked. "That's not what I meant."

He sighed, folding his hands in front of him and staring at the peeling wallpaper that whimpered pathetically at him from the center of the wall where the corners of the paper were supposed to meet. That would be his next project. This weekend he'd re-paper Hana's kitchen. "Don't go feeling sorry for me, Hana," he said softly. "I don't need your pity."

"It's very cold outside," she said in return. "You should stay the night. You never stay."

He didn't answer, and she finished the meal in silence. The moon outside the window had crept up in the sky while the clock was ticking, and now it was hanging in the far right windowpane, a glass globe of translucent light. When she got up to put the dishes in the sink, he realized he'd forgotten to put the curry saucepan in the sink to soak, and it was probably crusty by now.

"I can do it," she said when he reached over her to turn the tap on. "You go watch television or something, ok?"

"Just because it's on," he said, "doesn't mean I like to watch it."

She watched his face curiously and he couldn't look at her, retreated and left the kitchen to slump on the faded lumpy couch and stare listlessly at the moving pictures on the screen. He heard the tap turn on, then turn off, heard the clink of glass and china and chopsticks hitting the metal of the sink. Heard the plop plop plop of soap bubbles above the mutter of the television.

If he listened hard enough he could hear the wind outside too, the wind in the naked tree branches swirling in tiny air currents around the tiny twigs, could hear the barking of the neighbor's dog two doors down, could hear the roar of cars on the highway just a few minutes' walk away. His ears, more attuned than any human's, would catch the mutter of the land as it creaked and groaned from the weight of the frost that was already beginning to settle, the crackle of dead leaves curling in the winter's chill, the hissing of smoke from industrial chimneys rising up towards the cloudless sky. The moon's strange thin, wailing song, like the cry of a child.

Strange. The moon's song hadn't always been like that. It had been kind once, kind and almost soothing.

"Kei?"

He turned slightly to see her leaning forward slightly in the doorway, hands still damp. Her face was bluish in the light of the TV.

"Kei, are you upset?"

He sighed. "No. Come sit down."

She left the doorway obediently, came and sank into the couch next to him. "I need a new couch," she said.

"I can get one for you."

"I don't have the money." A bright smile. "I was just thinking out loud. I like this one just fine."

He gave her a worried look. "Are you sure?"

She laid a hand on his arm and he let her, relishing the touch of her warm hand. His skin was always so cold. He didn't want to touch her. "Stop worrying about me, Kei. You always take everything I say so seriously. Sometimes I'm just wishing. You do enough for me…more than enough."

"I wish I could do more," he said. "I don't know if…" Fixing his eyes on the television made it easier to talk to her, as if he wasn't really saying the things that were coming out of his mouth.

She waited, obviously expecting his half-finished sentence to finish itself. "What?"

He shook his head. "Hana, are you happy? I mean…really happy? I don't know. I promised someone I'd take care of you, but I don't know if you've turned out the way…"

The hand on his arm patted him. "We've been over this. Whoever you promised…they trusted you enough with me that they knew you'd do a good job. I think you have. You know that."

That was enough to make him smile just a little bit. "Don't you wish sometimes that you had a real family? I know you remember your mother. You used to talk about her."

She was staring at the television, but her gaze was far away. "That's in the past, isn't it?" she asked him softly. When he didn't answer, she sighed. "One of the things you've taught me…and I guess maybe you didn't teach me as much as I just learned from watching you…is that the past is past and that we shouldn't dwell on it. Isn't that right?"

"I'm a vampire," he said. "The past is all I have. But you…as a woman, a living breathing woman…you've so much more. I guess you're right."

She didn't speak for a while, and then he felt the movement of the couch as she shifted, got up. "Can I make a fire? It's rather cold."

He shrugged. "Sure."

He didn't look at her as she put the logs on the fireplace and lit them, but he could see the red-gold flame out of the corner of his eye as it climbed up into the hearth, lighting the bleak screen of the television with a little color. Three people had been killed in some kind of robbery today. It was on the Mandarin news.

"Don't watch that," she said. "It's depressing."

"I want to."

A pause. "There's no need to put yourself in more of a bad mood than you are now."

He felt his hackles rise at that, just a little. "I am not in a bad mood."

Another pause. "I was talking to one of my classmates today, and we were somehow talking about her mother. She said her mother was asking about me."

"Was she now," he said dully, his eyes glued to the screen. He couldn't look at her.

"Kei. Why didn't my mother talk?"

There was a forced note of levity in her voice that made him realize she had wanted to ask him this for a very, very long time and never had. Because she didn't want to think about the past? Because talking about Yi-Che was painful for her? He wondered how long she'd held this inside her, waiting.

"Your mother did talk," he said softly. "At the very end. I never heard her, but I know she did. I suppose you don't remember."

"I don't."

"Your...father…told me, when he saw me again. That before she got sick…"

He felt her look away, turn around, and only then did he unglue his eyes from the television and look up at her. She had gotten a haircut, he realized, because her hair was shorter than it had been last week, but other than that, if he repressed the sharper-than-human instincts that his vampire blood gave him, he could pretend that he was talking to Yi-Che.

He could see that she was trying not to cry.

"I remember it was winter, like this," he said. "We were all friends, you know. Your mother and your father, and your uncle and another boy and me. We had a snowball fight outside when it snowed that first night. Your mother made us hot tea."

Her voice was low and accusing. "Even though you couldn't drink it."

"That wasn't her fault. She didn't know. She made me tea, just the same." Your mother was in love with me. But no, he couldn't say that. She didn't need to know that. That was something that he had kept inside him, would keep inside him till the day he finally met his end, something sacred that Yi-Che had given him and that he would have for his very own.

They had both given him sacred things, Yi-Che and Sho. He didn't think either of them had realized it.

"Did you drink it?" Hana said, and he realized her mind was still on the tea.

"Yes, I drank it. It made me sick for days afterward."

"You shouldn't have," she choked out, and he got up from the couch, wrapped his arms around her and held her as she sobbed into his coat. Her hair smelled like flowers, and he felt the sense of her flow through his body, savored with an exquisite sadness the mix of Yi-Che and Sho's presences that dwelt within her, as well as the uniqueness that was her own.

"I loved your mother," he said, rubbing her back gently. "She and your father…I swore I'd protect them, even though she didn't know what I was. Sho…your father, he knew. But she didn't know. But I loved her all the same."

She gulped a bit and he rocked her back and forth, trying to organize the thoughts jumbled up in his mind, trying to figure out what he could and could not say. "They both grew up, you know. And I couldn’t protect them anymore. But still, I loved them. It's dangerous for someone like me to love someone, because my whole time on this earth, I shied away from feeling that way for anyone. Because they would grow up and grow old and die, and I would still be here. But with them, it was somehow all right. It still frightened me, but that didn't stop me, because I realized that if I didn't learn to let go and love someone, I would be living a life devoid of meaning."

The moon outside the window passed behind a cloud and he closed his ears to its wailing, willing himself to listen only to the crackle of the fire, smelling the curry still lingering in the air, feeling Hana's warm, frail form in his arms. "And that was why I promised your father I'd take care of you. Not only because I loved him, and not only because he loved you, because he did. But because I wanted to know that in this life, I did something right."

She sniffled a bit and he held her until she stirred and back out of the circle of his arms and he lowered them, feeling a little cold again. Her big eyes, a bit puffy from crying, were wells of sadness and something else that he wasn't quite sure of as she looked at him, but she was smiling. "No, Kei," she said. "I think you did fine. I think…you did all right." A deep breath. "I think my father would have thought so too."

He gazed at her, once again feeling the bewildering sense that he was looking not only at one, but three people, and blinked. The feeling vanished. She was looking at him expectantly, and he moved over to her, kissed her gently on the forehead, then reached down and turned off the news.

"It's depressing," he said. "You're right – I don't need to be watching that."

It was later than he had planned when he finally left her apartment, making her promise him that she'd go to bed once he had shut the door and that she'd be up early for class tomorrow morning because she only had three months left of high school and it was important to finish strong. The wind was chill but he had his overcoat and Hana had lent him a scarf, saying she had another one and he would need it tonight.

The moon was out again from behind the clouds.

In that picture they'd taken on the beach, Toshi had made them bring lights, telling them to carry as many as they could hold, tossing a teasing glance in his direction. He'd taken the jibe in stride, amused even that Toshi had remembered that from their childhood days, because after he and Sho and Shinji had grown up, they'd all moved out on their own.

Sho had objected to the picture. He had said it wasn't a good evening to go to the beach. He had said it would rain. But it hadn't rained. Just like it wouldn't snow tonight, even though it was bitter cold and he was going to have to look harder than usual to find food because few people would attempt a robbery in weather like this, and the few bums and drug addicts out on the streets would probably be freezing to death.

He could go without for tonight. Maybe the people that might have become tonight's hapless victims would turn their lives around tomorrow and find themselves a better future. He had to give them that chance.

He clattered down the apartment stairs and stuck his hands in the coat's pockets, making his way down the sidewalk, his breath making hardly a wisp in the icy air because he, like the season, was cold-blooded. It was so cold. And so dark. If he could, he would always carry a thousand candles with him everywhere he went, and the candles would be everlasting, never burning out, so there would never again be darkness.

That was the most sacred thing Sho had given him, really. Sho had been the light, the candle in the darkness, the one thing that had kept the shadows at bay.

Pausing, he glanced up at Hana's window, where the light was still on, and smiled.

29 Sep 2003
for Laurel