[Suikoden III] Mirror Mirror
Mar. 26th, 2011 07:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
runicloreMirror Mirror
Author: Myaru
Fandom: Suikoden III
Characters: Sasarai
Words: 682
Rating: K
Notes: for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seta_suzume in response to her request for fic at the Help Japan post.
....................................................................................................................
When Sasarai was a child - a relative term - he thought everyone wore the shape of the True Earth Rune on the back of their right hand. All of his caretakers wore uniforms, gloves, so he didn't know for some time that he was different. Never once did the thought occur to him that his perspective of the places he knew, like the temple, the back gardens with their wisteria arbors, had never looked bigger or smaller, but always the same. This was the Circle Temple, he always told himself; status quo was the whole idea. His caretakers wouldn't dare to mark a doorway tracing his growth, as Dios did with his children; of course there was nothing to look back on and reminisce, no remnant of his more innocent days.
Instead, when he returned home after the war in Zexen, everything looked exactly the same, and Sasarai rode down the causeway at the head of a parade thinking he himself must have changed. The shop fronts and their pink awnings stood stilted and stiff-shouldered in a long line up the hill, exactly ten steps wide; the trees shading them stood at intervals of twenty, trimmed and neat. His countrymen came out dressed in all shades of blue, light, dark, vibrant, greenish like seawater, and they waved red flags and scarves for victory. For a lie. The tread of the fifty-first division pounded like a heart, stretched down the lifeline of the street behind him, every boot hitting the cobblestone street at exactly the same moment. The sound beat in his ears long after he left them in the courtyard and returned to his apartment in the temple. Dios stayed behind to manage them, and Sasarai thought about the report he would have to give to the council of bishops. He could hear the questions now:
The chief bishop has never made a mistake before. Why now?
How did he forge his identity? Our record keeping is flawless.
So flawless, he imagined Elsa saying, a curl to the corner of her lip, that to this day we do not even know his name. She was the wit of the group, taller than most, her family name more powerful. Scowls would meet her quip, and silence.
Nobody knew Luc's name. Only Sasarai - only a hundred people who would not care to remember it.
His cuff links gave him trouble for the first time he could remember; his fingers slipped from clasps as if he'd forgotten how to use them while Sasarai stood before the mirror in his dressing room, trying not to look at his reflection - only at the deep cornflower blue of his uniform, the white trim, the golden chains and insignia of rank. The uniform hadn't changed. His gloves felt tight, yet when he measured them against the pairs in his drawers, they were also the same. His hair had grown longer while in Grassland, and he thought about having it cut - today, even, before supper, before the meeting.
Sasarai could walk into the meeting with his hair shorn above his ears, and nobody would know who had entered: Luc, or his brother.
Brother. More like--
Like--
Sasarai tried to see himself when he gazed at the mirror. Luc looked back - the Luc he met twenty years ago during the Highland war, whose face puzzled him by reflecting his own so accurately, down to that spot on the chin and the fold of his eyelids. Cold hollowness swirled in Sasarai's stomach. What made him who he was-- the uniform? The rune? If he removed them, what was left? Material? Clay waiting to be shaped into something else?
If Sasarai died, would he be another forged identity? Perhaps he would be struck from the books and disappear just like his counterpart.
The earth rune pulsed, as if to confirm his suspicion. Sasarai was never able to say how or why that mirror shattered into such fine particles of dust.
Author: Myaru
Fandom: Suikoden III
Characters: Sasarai
Words: 682
Rating: K
Notes: for
seta_suzume in response to her request for fic at the Help Japan post.....................................................................................................................
When Sasarai was a child - a relative term - he thought everyone wore the shape of the True Earth Rune on the back of their right hand. All of his caretakers wore uniforms, gloves, so he didn't know for some time that he was different. Never once did the thought occur to him that his perspective of the places he knew, like the temple, the back gardens with their wisteria arbors, had never looked bigger or smaller, but always the same. This was the Circle Temple, he always told himself; status quo was the whole idea. His caretakers wouldn't dare to mark a doorway tracing his growth, as Dios did with his children; of course there was nothing to look back on and reminisce, no remnant of his more innocent days.
Instead, when he returned home after the war in Zexen, everything looked exactly the same, and Sasarai rode down the causeway at the head of a parade thinking he himself must have changed. The shop fronts and their pink awnings stood stilted and stiff-shouldered in a long line up the hill, exactly ten steps wide; the trees shading them stood at intervals of twenty, trimmed and neat. His countrymen came out dressed in all shades of blue, light, dark, vibrant, greenish like seawater, and they waved red flags and scarves for victory. For a lie. The tread of the fifty-first division pounded like a heart, stretched down the lifeline of the street behind him, every boot hitting the cobblestone street at exactly the same moment. The sound beat in his ears long after he left them in the courtyard and returned to his apartment in the temple. Dios stayed behind to manage them, and Sasarai thought about the report he would have to give to the council of bishops. He could hear the questions now:
The chief bishop has never made a mistake before. Why now?
How did he forge his identity? Our record keeping is flawless.
So flawless, he imagined Elsa saying, a curl to the corner of her lip, that to this day we do not even know his name. She was the wit of the group, taller than most, her family name more powerful. Scowls would meet her quip, and silence.
Nobody knew Luc's name. Only Sasarai - only a hundred people who would not care to remember it.
His cuff links gave him trouble for the first time he could remember; his fingers slipped from clasps as if he'd forgotten how to use them while Sasarai stood before the mirror in his dressing room, trying not to look at his reflection - only at the deep cornflower blue of his uniform, the white trim, the golden chains and insignia of rank. The uniform hadn't changed. His gloves felt tight, yet when he measured them against the pairs in his drawers, they were also the same. His hair had grown longer while in Grassland, and he thought about having it cut - today, even, before supper, before the meeting.
Sasarai could walk into the meeting with his hair shorn above his ears, and nobody would know who had entered: Luc, or his brother.
Brother. More like--
Like--
Sasarai tried to see himself when he gazed at the mirror. Luc looked back - the Luc he met twenty years ago during the Highland war, whose face puzzled him by reflecting his own so accurately, down to that spot on the chin and the fold of his eyelids. Cold hollowness swirled in Sasarai's stomach. What made him who he was-- the uniform? The rune? If he removed them, what was left? Material? Clay waiting to be shaped into something else?
If Sasarai died, would he be another forged identity? Perhaps he would be struck from the books and disappear just like his counterpart.
The earth rune pulsed, as if to confirm his suspicion. Sasarai was never able to say how or why that mirror shattered into such fine particles of dust.