Author: Ai no Kitsune Rating: G
Finding the Heart Stone Chapter-4
PRAYER
James let his footsteps pull him along. He wasn’t particularly concerned about where he was going, he knew no matter how long he walked or how far from camp he wandered, he would always find his way back. That fact had nothing to do with him-it was a property of the world.
There were no birds where he was. The birds weren’t real anyway, and it took tremendous energy to maintain them-he certainly wasn’t going to bother with such tricks for his own amusement. The forest was full of dead leaves that crunched under his boots and turned to dust.
He came to a small open area, where great dark trees speared upward toward the sky like ancient black pillars. He sat on a convenient log, lowering himself with great care and taking care not o scratch his flesh even slightly on the edges of the bark. He closed his eyes and rested his arms on his knees, and breathed carefully.
The whole world was falling to pieces. The others couldn’t tell, of course, no matter where they went it was all the same. But the wind was dying down, and the birds were becoming less plentiful, and all the other small animals whose existence was a point of personal pride for James had simply begun to disappear from the branches and the burrows and the clearings. He simply didn’t have the strength anymore.
He let his lips part and felt a new breeze waft down out of the sky and stir his hair, chase playfully around the dark trunks of the trees, and fade away. And then he felt a new breeze, colder than before, that ripped the leaves from the trees and blasted James’ hair back and nearly sent him toppling from his seat. He opened his eyes in panic.
She smiled at him
“Hello, James,” she said, and cocked her head in her annoying little-girl mannerism that showed off her curly blond locks. She had her hands behind her back and her little feet together and her knees showed just beneath the hem of her frilly pink dress. James scowled.
“So this is the test, isn’t it?” She said, rocking back and forth from heel to toe. She fixed her brilliant blue eyes on his face.
James had always heard that the eyes were the mirror to the soul, that no matter what the appearance of the individual, a person’s eyes would reveal her true nature. As though two orbs of pigmented cells were somehow able to reflect the complicated firing of neurons that went on in the average human’s brain.
No, eyes told nothing, they were just instruments of sight. This being that stood before him certainly betrayed nothing in her gaze that indicated her nature, or character.
“What are you going to do, James?”
He turned away and stared between the tree trunks.
“About what?”
“Don’t be a fool.” Suddenly she was beside him, her head level with his, her little feet perched precariously on the log beside him. He lips so close to his check he could feel her breath. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
“So what if it is? I threw it away. I can’t change that.”
“It doesn’t bother you? Not even a little?”
He looked at the girl, into her cool blue eyes that could devour whole nations, swallow universes, and destroy him utterly.
“What’s done can never be undone,” he said softly, “I understand that.”
The little girl leaned back and stared at him for a long moment.
And she smiled.
****
By the time Jessie finally fought Ash and misty into bed and climbed into her own sleeping bag, Brock was already snoring loudly on the other side of the fire. James had finally wandered back to camp some time after the dishes were already finished, but Jessie had simply been to tired to berate him for it. She promised herself sleepily that she would harangue him thoroughly tomorrow.
Jessie watched as James began his nightly preparations for bed. He was very fastidious, and always went about his activities in the exact same way. First, he washed his face in a pan with water from the stream, then he flossed and brushed his teeth (he always flossed, something even Jessie had never been able to force herself to do) and finally he ran a comb through his heavy, shining hair.
And then he said his prayers. Jessie knew he didn’t think anyone else had ever heard him, and certainly Ash, Misty and Brock were totally oblivious to his little nightly ritual. Jessie, however, had lain awake many nights listening to him rattle off his list of blessings, and though she doubted that he was a particularly religious individual, he certainly seemed sincere when he spoke to whatever God he’d been raise on.
“…and bless Ash, even though he’s an idiot, and Brock, and Misty, and Jessie…”
Jessie closed her eyes.
“And Mom and Dad, and Meowth….”
Meowth? Who was that?
“…and the Boss, because no-one else will, and Mondo and Meowzy and Arbok and Victreebell and Weezing and Lickatung and…”
And the list went on, full of people she’d never heard of. The mantra was soothing, though, and James voice was soft and gradually lured her into sleep.
He always finished up with a recitation of some childhood prayer. He seemed to have an endless supply of them, a new one every night. Tonight he began:
“There are four corners at my bed
There are four angels at my head
Mathew, Mark, Luke and John,
Bless this bed that I lie on.”
Jessie wasn’t particularly religious, but she guessed the names were those of angels, or saints. James continued:
“Now I lay me down to sleep,” he said. Jessie smiled with her eyes closed; this was a prayer even she knew. She mouthed the along to the words as he said them.
“Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the lord my soul to keep.
And if I die-“
He stopped. Jessie’s eyes flew open, staring wide into the blind darkness.
“And if I die-“ he tried again, and again after that. He simply didn’t seem to be able to finish the verse. “and if I die-“
A long silence fell in the clearing, and all she could hear was the crackle of the fire. Finally, after many minutes, she heard James rise to his feet and leaves crackle underfoot as he walked alone into the forest.
She closed her eyes. “And if I die before I wake," she finished sadly, "I pray the lord my soul to take."
***
This time James made a wider circuit, walking until his legs were utterly exhausted and he sank to the ground. He waited for a long time, until the moon rose. He couldn’t see it beneath the heavy forest canopy, but he felt it in his heart.
Carefully he made his way back to the camp. Anyone watching him would have been stunned by the way he walked unerringly back to where he’d come from, without glancing around or looking at the sky, in total pitch blackness.
The fire was burning low, and James carefully made his way to Jessie’s side. He squatted on his haunches beside her and listened to her slow steady breathing, watched her eyelids flicker in REM patterns no conscious person could duplicate. Still he waited, though logic told him she was asleep. He waited until his thighs and ankles ached from the unnatural position. Then slowly, cautiously, he reached out a hand towards her bag.
She didn’t stir and she didn’t move, but every inch was an agony of slowness. Finally he grasped her bag and lifted it carefully from its nest of leaves. He sat it on his lap, reached inside of it and drew out the stone.
Its brilliant light shone for a minute in his grasp, valiantly straining like a candle before a gale-force wind, then flickered, and went out.
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