I swore, at the beginning, that I would never regret my decisions.

Easy enough. I never thought to wonder about those decisions that were not mine to make, locked in a silken dynasty cage and sharpened like a living weapon.

I was neither darkness nor light, I was shadow; the hot summer sort of shadow, spiderfine and strong, hiding whispered promises and the neglected dreams of children. Or the forgotten ones. I have lived too long within illusions to exist without them now, but here I stand, with little other choice.

Words of mine-- to shape and weave a world of golden sky and crystal rain. Words to make aged rice wine at an emperor's feast seem thin and tasteless.

There is nothing comparable here in the ningenkai, this fractured place where words are spoken to die.

My eye twitches, muscle reflex that is impossible to quell, even all these years later. Aa. I, too, was once spoken to die.

Once. I woke with Words in my head.

Rare blessing, that. How long since unbidden Words had seeped into my sleeping mind, impatient for release? Trying not to think on it too hard lest I frighten them away, I rose from bed, sliding long legs from the sheets and crossing swiftly to my cherrywood cabinets. Delving in, my hands found ink, and brushes, clean and pure, begging for the stain of indigo. I opened a low drawer, seeking paper--

None.

Oh, there was paper. The sort that was more of furnishing than writing, harsh rice-grained stuff for reports or Arago-sama's decrees. Nothing of the heavy, sweet pages that would call to the Words waiting in my mind, cradle them, define them.

There was nothing of sufficient worth that I could call to hand.

On my low bed, my lover stirred, hand moving blindly for my abandoned cushion. The movement disturbed the sheet clinging precariously to his skin, and it slid off with a near-silent rustle, baring his back.

Sh'ten's fine, smooth, pristine back, gently rising and falling with each deep sleep-breath.

I returned to the bed as quickly as I had left, hands no longer empty.

Sh'ten stirred sleepily, my touch now familiar enough that it no longer brought him immediately to wakefulness. "What are you doing, Rajura?"

"I've had Words given to me, Sh'ten," I heard my voice saying, careful not to disrupt the flow of them from my thought to my hand. "You are my scroll."

He laughed, lazily, a luxurious sound in the still sweet air of my room. "Your palimpsest, you mean, Spider-fingers." A low chuckle in his throat made his skin tremble a bit. "Damn ticklish."

"What?" I asked distractedly, sweeping stray tendrils of his hair back over his shoulder. I was entraced by the liquid indigo staining his shoulderblade, the word ‘anticipation' looking never so chillingly delicious as on his vibrant skin.

"You wrote upon me surely enough last evening, my forgetful one," Sh'ten said huskily, a featherfine tremor shivering across his spine. "With your hands in the stead of a brush, your mouth in stead of inks. Do you seek to overwrite those Words?"

My mouth was dry. He was always surprising me, in those days. All I could see of his face was his profile, resting on his spread hands. "What I seek, red-topped child, is to free the Words that came to me when I was sleeping."

"After I wore you out," he pretended to yawn. "Old man." On his stomach, he moved against the bed, the slightest twist of his hips, and my body sought to prove that it was not so old as he claimed.

I swallowed. "Be still. I'm almost done."

And, obedient, he was still, though surely he could feel the heat of me against his side.

"Poetry, hm?" His tone was not quite conversational, and I could sense the tension building in the small of his back. I drew ‘winter' with its quick snowfall brushstrokes and he supressed a tight laugh. "Surely this is an ancient form of torture."

"Not poetry," I said. "Words." Those which had always been mine, immortal words when I was yet ningen and foolhardy. Or perhaps I am still foolhardy. "Older than poetry. More powerful."

When I painted ‘spring' with its long sweeping curve right at the base of his spine, he hissed through his teeth.

"Must be the beginning of the end, when the old man begins writing poetry." But I could hear the undercurrent in his voice, that he too could feel the lift of spirit from my brush, the veil of power laying across his skin. He sounded almost-- frightened?-- when he asked, "Will you tell me what you're spelling?"

I looked down at the poem, if that were word enough to describe the canvas of living word I-- we-- had created, and shuddered. ~Spelling the end of us.~ But I could not say it, for all that I recognized the truth.

Autumn's anticipation.
Winter's deliverance.
Here, the death of spring.

It was not completed, and yet it had to be-- it had spoken itself as haiku, and there the form ended. My mouth felt raw, as if I'd said the words aloud, a prophecy. But I could not speak.

"You won't read it," Sh'ten said, sounding weary.

I wanted to say that I could not, that to say it was to bring it to be; but it was too far truth for my one small voice to make much of a difference. "I-- it is not the poem I expected it to be," I said at last.

He smiled sharply. I thought it was relief that I had done, that he would sit up and shake the ticklish feeling away. But he met my eyes, and knowingly. "It never is, Rajura." He twisted around on my bed till he lay on his back, Words achingly concealed. "Was I the poem you thought I would be?" And he brought me down against him in one slow redolent movement, hips rolling up to meet mine, bright knowing lips seeking and caressing my every shadow.

There was more than one reason Sh'ten was spring to us, youthful fool that he was. All I could remember was how to touch him, which corners of sensitive flesh would make him gasp, and which murmur my name. There was always the hint of sakura in his sweat, of plumblossoms and clove in the rich fall of his hair.

He could make the purest out of what we had to give, distilling heated blood and tightened passion into something more intense than words-- and he did so relentlessly. There was no defeat or surrender, only the deep intoxicating tautness of his body, both his offering and his demand.

He held me, or I held him, I cannot remember, and the tsunami thundered through us and past us... And we were only men again, as much as we ever were, stuttering heartbeats and upheaval of breath. As if the bittersweet truth written on his back had always been there, his touch burned just the same against my skin.

Too late I realized he was turning his head and I could not stop him.

There, gracing our rumpled sheets in nearly pristine negative, were the Words. They looked perched on the soft fabric, ready to unfold their indigo wings and leap into being.

Sh'ten was silent for a long moment, his eyes unreadable. "Those are the Words you dreamt, Rajura?"

I could only nod. How I had hoped he would never read them, never hear them spoken.

"You've left yourself out," He murmured, catching up my hand and absently rubbing my brush-stained fingers, speaking what I myself had only begun to notice. "Hardly fair, Spider-fingers, to weave yourself out of the web."

"There isn't any more," I said, trying to disguise the grieving. No surcease from my eternal wondering, there were no Words for me.

To my surprise, Sh'ten laughed. He touched a finger to my face, gently tracing the eyelid of my one unseeing eye. I flinched a little, more from the unexpected sound of his laugh than his questing touch. "Of course there is more, Gen Masho. It just wasn't given to you. Your blind spot."

And he picked up my discarded brush and ink, kneeling before my bed. With sure hands he created another line of words-- oh but surely they were Words, the way his eyes caught fire--

beneath my own reverse poem. Looking self-satisfied, he smiled to himself, pointed a drippy brush to the arrogant sweep of his handwriting: self-taught, aesthetically disconcerting, and absolutely perfect.

Summer's dream-spinning.

I had been startled to realize I loved him, brash red-headed child, and still more so to learn thus that I would lose him. One does not expect to know the ending of the poem when one is only beginning to savor the opening bloom of words.

But nothing was so suprising as knowing-- heady, vertiginous knowing, watching the joy in his spring-destiny eyes-- that this selfish fierce soul was capable of pure Words. For me.

Perhaps we were not quite spoken to die, after all.