That Which Remains
Awareness came back to her slowly, the railroad of memories of the night before slamming into her with enough force to make her groan softly and wish for those days of loneliness and quiet. The days after she had woken in that red room, with its walls which reminded her of the colour of her own blood as she had bled out over an over again. Skin had split and healed, as according to her cursed regeneration, and her skin still did that even to that day.
Fingernails dug into the soft skin of her wrists, and she breathed out sharply as she grounded herself in the present. It did her no good to look back and reminisce of days gone by. A life she would never be returning to, unless she was caught up in some bizarre fever dream.
Footsteps sounded, light and barely audible, and Sakura felt herself stiffen as she was reminded that she had company. She had company who knew the original Aerloth. She paused, intimately aware all of a sudden that she was sleeping inside a wardrobe in either a guest room or one of her brothers’ rooms. Startling out of her stupor, she hurried out of the small space which had been nothing but a balm to her uneasy mind, pushing the doors shut to conceal the bedding, blankets, and pillows she had used to pad the wardrobe out to something resembling a sleeping area.
The clack of those wooden doors evidently echoed somewhat, and Sakura looked up at the sound of a faint tapping at the door to that room.
She stared at those doors, holding her breath at the sound of the latch twisting, and she met that blue-eyed, curious gaze of the ellon she was supposedly childhood friends with. She was no closer to figuring out his name, and idly, she wished her brother had given her his name in one of their many letters. The fact that she had no memory of him was nothing more than a shallowly buried skeleton all but primed and readied to be excavated.
“Aerloth,” her friend greeted, and she threw on the best smile she could manage as he stared at her and the room in confusion. “I checked your room, but you weren’t there… Why are you in Tathrenor’s room?”
Sakura smiled, ignoring the question of who the bloody hell was Tathrenor? Her brow furrowed for the barest of instances. Probably the name of one of her who-knew-how-many brothers she seemed to have there, she figured. The very same brothers she didn’t particularly want to meet. The very same brothers she would eventually meet whether she liked it or not once her exile was over and done with. Oh how she dreaded that day. “How long is left on my… period of exile?” she asked, hoping then that her companion would say a couple of yén or more, if only so she could hide away from her problems for many a years to come. Maybe then she would be less of a nervous wreck when she eventually went to see her brothers for the first time.
“One-hundred sun years is what I’ve heard,” he answered. “But then again, it could change… depending on whether your brothers manage to convince the king – he’d the only one who could shorten or lengthen your time spent in exile. Until such a time as the order to bring you home is passed though, you will be stuck out here in Harlond,” he said as though that were a bad thing. “Undoubtedly, by the time you return to court, much will have changed – and that is if you gain permission to return to court at all. The king may well forbid your return, and I daresay I would not be able to blame him…”
She tilted her head at that, reminding herself of what a firecracker the original Aerloth had seemed to be – and her impression of the original being who had worn that skin only seemed to worsen the more she heard of the stranger who undoubtedly ought to have been there instead of her. Never mind the fact that she didn’t think anything of the original Aerloth would be returning to court, if she could return at all.
“I’m not familiar with the gossip of the high society you used to amuse yourself on endlessly, so I can be of no help there,” he informed her, and Sakura only shrugged, fingers itching to return to the forge and begin trying to learn the art of blacksmithing properly. Only she had a guest, and that undoubtedly severely limited her freedom. Even from the little she knew of who had come before her told her that Aerloth was not one to dirty herself in the forge. With her friend there, she could hardly allow herself to be stranger than she had already been the previous night. Otherwise that would bring up questions she couldn’t dare to answer.
“What do you want to do today?” she asked, having already mentally asked herself that same question and come up devoid of any reasonable answers. So asking around for reasonable suggestions it was, if only to prevent her from seeming any stranger than she already was.
He blinked at her, large blue eyes staring at her uncomprehendingly, and Sakura had the strangest of impressions that she’d just put her foot in her mouth for the thousandth time since his arrival at her home. “You…?” he trailed off, swallowing thickly. “You… want me to decide what we’re going to do today?”
She folded her arms, standing as firmly as she could against the scepticism creeping into his tone. Imperious, she reminded herself, trying to shoehorn herself into a personality she thought was more skin to the original’s. “Yes,” she declared. “That is just what I asked you to do, after all.”
Her friend stopped short for a moment. “I see,” he remarked, recovering from the surprise quickly enough. “Well, the weather is still too haphazard for us to go boating… a pity I did not come in Laer. The weather would have been nicer and less prone to sudden storms.” As if to emphasise his point, the windows rattled as another harsher gust of sea air slammed into the side of the house. “I don’t suppose you would wish to venture outside… I fear the weather would ruin whatever hairstyle—” his words cut off abruptly, blue eyes fixing on her and the messy plait she had thrown her hair into the night before.
It was still strange to her, even after all that time, to see brown hair instead of the pink – or white, as her hair had slowly turned through the years of pain in that place – colouration she was almost expecting to see.
“I wouldn’t be opposed to going outside,” she said, trying to sound braver than she felt. A familiar curl of anxiety wrapped around her stomach and squeezed. The thought of going beyond the walls of that house was terrifying to that part of her which had labelled them as safe. That was her home there, no matter if it had only truly belonged to the original Aerloth. Somehow she didn’t think that strange elleth would have ran out of a bedroom in terror due to the colour she had decided to paint the walls.
“Then shall we visit the market?” her friend asked, and it made part of her wish that she had never said she didn’t mind going outside when the opposite was far truer. “It’s Orbelain, which means the weekly market will be setting up about now,” he explained, and Sakura tried to figure out just what Orbelain was. Was it some sort of festival? Yet nothing rose up from the recesses of her brain to explain just what that word was, and she was left frowning at her friend.
“Orbelain…” she echoed, glancing outside, even as her stomach grumbled.
He laughed. “You really have lost track of time if you cannot remember what day of the week it is,” he said, and Sakura blinked at the knowledge that no, she didn’t know what the days of the week – a six-day week, that was – were called there in that place. Though she had long since remembered that there were only six days to it, thanks to whatever fragments of concepts were left over from Aerloth as she’d originally been. At least that was where she assumed that knowledge came from. “Come. Let us go and have breakfast. Then we can visit the market – your brothers sent me over with an additional allowance for you, so you do not need to worry about your spending limits.”
Sakura tilted her head. “I did not realise I had limits,” she muttered, realising how silly that sounded only after the words had left her mouth.
“Ah, yes,” he murmured, corners of his lips curving up in visible amusement. “Your family has never been one to struggle for finances, though I suppose neither have mine,” he said, sighing softly, even as they ventured down the stairs into the main lobby. “It is a luxury both of us share…”
She shivered at the sight of the doors and windows at the front of the house, part of her wondering just whereabouts her usual guards had gotten to. She didn’t quite understand where they watched her from on a day-to-day basis. Her stomach grumbled loudly once more, distracting her from her surging fears. “Come on,” she said, increasing the pace. “I think a leftover slice of apple pie will do nicely for breakfast.”
“Then I suppose I ought to make us something just a bit healthier to go with that,” he said dryly, side-eyeing her as they strode through the house and towards the kitchen she knew like the back of her hand. “Your sweet tooth never changes.”
“And it never will,” she finished, pushing open the door to the kitchen and wincing as the hinges creaked loudly. “I’ll have to oil those,” she muttered, earning herself another side-eye which was more confused and concerned than the last.
“Since when do you oil hinges?” he asked, one silvery brow rising in question.
“Since now,” she said, shoulders sinking at all the small little details she seemed to be tripping up on when it came to her as she was then and how she was supposed to be to everyone who seemed to know her on those strange shores. “What are you making for us?” she asked, abruptly changing the topic before either of them could elaborate on her strangeness.
“I’ll have to see what is in the cupboards, but I think some oatmeal might be good,” he said. “I’ll have to check the greenhouses to see if we have any fruit a bit later… perhaps after we come back from the market. Then I’ll have a better idea of what to make for tomorrow. Plain oatmeal can get rather boring after a while, and you have never been one for plainness.”
“Greenhouses?” she echoed, clamping her lips together then as she realised what a stupid thing to question that was. Could she be any more obvious about her missing memories? Part of her wondered about that hopelessly, even as her friend turned to her with an almost characteristic frown by that point.
“Yes. The ones your mother had build some several yén ago,” he said, pulling open the cupboards, retrieving the ingredients he needed without any further questions directed her way. Yet that strange glint in his eyes remained whenever he looked at her – even as she bustled about, grabbing yesterday’s apple pie from the cold storage and carving them out two more pieces for their breakfast.
At least her apparent sweet tooth matched Aerloth’s, she mused, tuning the sounds of her friend humming out as she readied the leftover portion of their breakfast.
There was an uncomfortable tightness in her stomach as she stared at the open doorway in front of her – the unseen line which divided outside from inside in the midst of the doorway her friend was standing in. He glanced back at her, concern shining in those bright blue eyes of his, and all Sakura could do was try to ignore the discomfort the idea of going outside brought.
She could almost picture the face of her nameless torturer – one of many who had indulged themselves in their own sense of sadism beneath the veneer of trying to unpick the method of her immortality. Part of her almost wanted to ask her friend of what sort of timescale they lived upon when they measured lengths of time in such great a period as a yén. Yet it wasn’t as if she would be an oddity, if the rest of her kin lived to such lengths… and yet she still had her ability to heal any sort of injury, and there was the dreaded feeling that it was a ability unique to her. It was a holdover, from a life she almost wished she could forget.
“Do you need a warmer cloak?” her friend asked, tilting his head as he looked at her plainly. “You’re shivering,” he stated, worry creeping that much further into his expression.
“I’m fine,” she said, part of her feeling just a bit safer with that cloak there to cover her head and cast her features in shade. Fear were irrational, funny things, she was coming to understand the longer she lingered there as Aerloth. “We won’t be late to the market, will we?” she asked, wondering whether or not she would be able to step out of the door in the first place.
She had shut herself away in that place for weeks by that point, never able to muster the courage to set foot properly outside of the walls of that house.
“We will if you keep dawdling,” he said matter-of-factly, but rather than simply waiting there he held out his hand instead. An offer. There hadn’t been a hand extended to her with the promise of help in quite some time, so she only marvelled at the sight.
Her fingers twitched, part of her urging herself to put her hand in his own and let that strange-friend who might or might not have been hers pull her from the safety of her home. “Right,” she mumbled. “I cannot dawdle…” she murmured, silently wishing that it was as simply as putting a brave face on and taking he proffered hand. Hesitantly, she reached forwards, wanting nothing more than to feel another’s warmth for the briefest of moments. Yet her hand stopped halfway, fingers shaking before she quickly curled them into a fist.
It was pathetic.
There was a lump in her throat which wouldn’t shift, even as she remembered the room she had been held prisoner in for years upon years. Decades upon decades. She had been there long enough to see several generations of a sadistic family who had delighted upon her screams and her pain. Yet she still remembered the times before that – the fateful time she had left her home, only to wind up kidnapped through a simple lapse of judgement.
Would she come back to the safety of her home if she left that place with her friend? Or would she be dragged into another endless abyss of pain and misery?
A thumb gently rubbed away at the tears she hadn’t even realised were falling, blue eyes suddenly far too close. “Why do you cry, Aerloth?” her friend asked, peering into her green eyes as if they might hold all the answers to the many questions he seemed to have.
Gently, she grasped at that hand, pulling it away from her face, fingers curling around his hand tightly and not prepared to let him go. She wanted that contact, she realised dumbly, even as she wiped away her tears with her free hand. “Let’s go to the market,” she declared, holding onto his hand as though her life depended on it and hoping that he thought nothing of her grip.
“Aerloth.”
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to,” she warned, keeping her eyes fixed on the ground ahead of them. A shaky breath escaped her as she set foot outside, immediately feeling as though ants were crawling over her skin as she crossed the boundary she had never dared to when she’d been alone.
Did having a supposed friend there give her courage?
Memories came to her, remembering blonde hair and a sunny smile, dark hair and eyes which had spun red. She remembered greying hair, wrinkles, and ashes interned in graves when they had aged and died without her. They had left her through no fault of their own.
Had that empty, greedy part of her heart already latched onto that friend who looked nothing like the people in the friendships she had once had when her ears had been rounded?
Well, she supposed, a frown creeping onto her face as those blue eyes caught her own for the briefest of seconds. Blue like Naruto’s, though undoubtedly not the exact same shade. Yet those friends of hers had been dead for years upon years by that point – and, more to the point, buried in a completely different place to the one she was in right then and there.
“Very well,” he murmured, and Sakura felt at least half of the tension drain from her shoulders at the assurance he would not pry. “To the market let us venture,” he said, shifting the topic of their conversation away from dangerous territory and into something more mundane. Mundane was safer than questions prying into why she was acting so unlike what was supposed to be herself.
Gravel crunched underfoot, the pathway leading from her household to something of a main street – or at least a more well-travelled area – quite long and winding as it brought them down the hill upon which her house was situated. Breath came out in a cold mist, the stinging of the cold, salty air on her nose almost a relief to her. It meant she was free. There had been no air which had smelt like salt and pine back in that room she had been kept prisoner in. There had been no friend to walk beside her on the pathway which snaked between vast stretches of woodland that fenced the property off from the town she could just about hear bustling about its morning a ways away.
“What goods are sold at the market?” she asked, praying then that her ignorance of the matter could be put down to not having been to that particular market in the last yén.
Her friend looked at her, staring at her for just a few seconds too long. “Harlond is a harbour town – so you will have fresh fish, and if the pearl divers have managed to venture to the cliffside and the bay around there where the oyster beds are… then you might see some pearls, but those are less common, more so in the colder seasons,” he explained. “There are locally grown vegetables and fruits as well, but fish is more common of a produce here. What else is there…?” he mumbled, counting the items he’d already listed off on his fingers of his free hand. “With how often you destroy the forge, I doubt you’ll be interested in any of the metals mined from nearby, nor any of the jewels… There is quite a selection, since some of the blacksmiths also specialise in jewel-craft or otherwise work alongside skilled jewel-smiths in order to make jewellery. Though I suppose you are much like a magpie when it comes to jewellery.”
“I hope you’re not insinuating I steal things,” she said, watching the path ahead, even as it flattened out, trees becoming sparser the closer to the collection of grey-stone buildings they moved. A variety of coloured doors caught her gaze, the similarities and differences between all of those rather small buildings made apparent as they grew closer to where the market was.
“Of course not, Aerloth,” he said. “Do you not remember the many seasons of Laer we spent upon these shores?” he asked, and just like that every single drop of tension returned to stiffening up her shoulders. “We ventured to this market quite a few times when we still had yet to come of age properly…”
“Things change over time,” she answered, skirting around the question of her memories because she had none of those when it came to the matter of Aerloth and her existence. “Come on,” she said, cutting him off before he could demand another answer from her. “I quite fancy fish for dinner all of a sudden. Though I suppose we can have leftovers from yesterday for lunch.”
He looked at her, those blue eyes ever suspicious and searching for someone she didn’t think was there any longer. “I see you already have this all planned out…”
“Indeed,” she murmured, walking beneath the cheery blue and silver banners which seemed indicative of where the market began on the street. “Though I didn’t bring anything with which to carry our future dinner… and our other purchases in,” she mumbled, eyes catching on the crates which held numerous small gems that glittered in the light. Part of her almost wanted to empty those crates of jewels, her mind’s eye already picturing them set into the hilts of the many swords she wanted to craft if only to make them that much more pretty to her eyes. Was it vain of her to want to make weapons that were both beautiful and practical? She tore her eyes away from those jewels, focusing instead on her friend as he held out a canvas bag, waving it pointedly in front of her face.
“You’re lucky that out of the pair of us, I actually have some forethought,” he said matter-of-factly, and Sakura only snorted at that, pulling him forwards then towards the hustle and bustle of vendors selling their wares to eager customers.