Fic: "Ghosts With A Negative Age"

Title: Ghosts With A Negative Age
Author: redbrunja
Fandom: Saiyuki
Rating: R, for mature themes
Characters: Yaone.
Author’s Note: Written for 14valentines, raising awareness of women’s issues for the 14 days leading up to the 14th of February.
Summary: Yaone possesses the skills to heal or kill, and sometimes the line between the two is very thin.
 

( Ghosts With A Negative Age )

Yaone’s mouth tasted like irony.

I love you.... I just want you so much....

It was pathetic to realize that she was just as foolish as all those women who came to her with desperate eyes and slim figures.

He’d told her what she wanted to hear, and she’d believed him.

It was a simple as that.

She hadn’t been smart, she hadn’t been clever. She’d fallen in love.

Her hands worked automatically, scraping, mixing, distilling.

It was nice to know that the fall out of love was quicker than a flash of lightning (the look in his eyes, staring at her, a prize just won, and now, worthless). It was like reaching enlightenment; the world flashed white and suddenly everything made horrific, implacable sense.

She may have made every stupid mistake a seventeen-year-old youkai could make, but luckily for her, she had resources that the typical, frantic, adolescent female didn’t have.

Footsteps across the floor and she didn’t look up from her work.

“What are you doing?” her father asked.

“Tincture for a patron.” Her voice was guileless.

“Is that true, Yaone?”

Yaone raised her head. “Of course.” She put just the right amount of ‘what else could it be?’ in her words. She never used to be able to lie like this.

“Ah. Carry on.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, obedient and flawless.

Her father left.

She swallowed the tincture down.

It tasted like salvation.

~3~

Yaone turned the key, heard the lock of her room click open, and the back of her neck prickled. She paused and, due to recent experiences, bombs were between her fingers before she turned her head.
 
She caught a flash of bright beryl-colored hair darting back behind the corner and returned her explosives to their normal positions.

Yaone fiddled needlessly with her lock and waited.

After a few minutes, she heard footsteps approaching.

“Lady Jiang,” Yaone said politely to the youkai girl walking towards her and terribly faking nonchalance. “How good to see you. Would you care for some tea?” she asked and Jiang darted inside the room so fast the edges of her outline blurred.

Yaone followed at a more controlled pace, carefully locking the door behind her.

Jaing was pacing back and forth, wrenching her fingers and twisting thin rings bearing precious stones that could have feed a family for a month.

“You won’t tell my father, will you?” Jiang asked, and Yaone’s estimation of her intelligence rose; most of the girls who came to her were too rattled to ask that question until after they’d told her everything.

“Of course not,” Yaone said. “Will you join me in the kitchen?”

Jiang nodded, her neck too-loose and eyes too-bright.

“You are an apothecary, right?” she asked as she followed Yaone, who guided the girl to the window seat.

Her kitchen was too small for a table. When Yaone had the desire to actually cook something she simply used her lab. However, her kitchen did contain miscellaneous snacks, teas, and a spice cabinet stocked to her standards, which meant rather more aconite and belladonna than one normally found in a room where food was prepared.

Yaone started water for tea. She sat down next to the girl and waited, staring out at the mountains, jagged peaks cutting into the crisp blue sky like hungry teeth.

“I was stupid. He said–” Jiang cut herself off. “I was stupid,” she continued tightly, “and now I’m pregnant and unless I get rid of it, they’ll kill me.”

Yaone nodded. “I know what you need,” she said quietly, and went to pour scalding water over an abortifacient.

“I was so stupid,” Jiang repeated between gulps, eagerly swallowing down the hot liquid, and it was only when she finished that she started to cry.

Yaone put her arms around the girl.

“I love him,” Jiang sobbed into her shoulder, “I love him so much but I can’t, I can’t...”

“I know,” Yaone whispered into her hair.

“My parents would have killed me, they would have disowned me, I would be...” Jiang’s voice was cracking, and she pulled away, scrubbing at her cheeks and trying to get herself under control.

Yaone looked away, giving her as much privacy as she could, staring at the familiar lines of her counter, the chill sunlight illuminating the tiles on the floor and the knife block with startling clarity.

“If they find out I’m not a virgin I’ll be worthless,” Jiang said in a dead voice.

Not necessarily, Yaone thought automatically. But Jiang was most likely correct. She had an arranged marriage and wasn’t going to be sacrificed to a demon known for his perversion; virginity was going to be much more important than it had been in Yaone’s case.

“That won’t be a problem,” Yaone told her, soothingly brushing strands of blue-green hair away from the girl’s temples. “I can teach you how to stain the bedsheets convincingly.”

~finial~

Yaone pressed her hands flat on her worktable, pushing down so hard that the tips of her fingers were flushed and her joints were white. Between her hands, a perfectly prepared cordial sat, ready for her to consume. She could taste panic and she could. not. move.

Yaone focused on steadying her breathing, which didn’t seem to want to do anything but flutter frantically in her throat.

She didn’t know why her body was reacting this way. She had been in this situation before (well, not exactly, because when he was finished, she was sated and replete and he brushed damp hair off her forehead and the look in his eyes was of finding something holy instead of defiling it and–) and it had been easy to fix.

Easy. It was easy. Why wouldn’t her hands move?

It wasn’t like there were any other reasonable options. They were enemies and–

She had a sudden flash of future-memory; a little sweet-faced girl with Hakkai’s coloring and Yaone’s tentative smile, asking, “but why did you have to explode him, Mommy?”

She wasn’t sure precisely what about that thought felled her, but she jerked one of her stools from under the counter and sat down abruptly, pressing her head to her knees.

....maybe he could kill her. That would solve so many problems in one stroke. She wouldn’t have to tell Dokugakuji or Lord Kougaiji or Merciful Goddess, Hakkai himself. Yaone inhaled the familiar scent of gunpowder and chemicals and tried to imagine telling Hakkai about this.

Her mind went utterly blank.

Think, she told herself, turning her head to stare at the cup of dong quai steaming innocuously on her table.

Hydrogen, atomic weight 1.007, her mind supplied, Lithium, atomic weight 6.941.

Yaone’s hands were shaking. She was an apothecary and her hands were shaking. Her hands were shaking. She’d walked forward to be sacrificed to a horror and her fingers had been steady. What was wrong with her? She made explosives, her hands couldn’t ever tremble.

But they were. That’s how accidents happen, she told herself as she picked up the cup, walked across the room, and flung the liquid down the drain with an uncharacteristic lack of respect.

It wasn’t an accident and she knew it but her breathing inexplicably calmed and she went to the window, opening it wide and letting the cold, high- altitude air slip around her and ruffle her hair, cooling her flushed cheeks.

Please let me die before I start to show, Yaone prayed, but that thought lacked force, and her hand didn’t reach for the dagger sheathed at the small of her back.

~~

A woman’s body belongs to her and her alone, and the choice should always be hers. Planned Parenthood.