Work Text:
They prayed a lot back then. The adults said it was so the crops would grow strong, and so the rain would fall more. So it would stop falling so much. So the winter would be short and the summer mild.
So children like him and his brother would grow up strong.
Ginro never understood the meaning of it. When there wasn’t enough water, they all went out to find more. When there wasn’t enough food, they starved together. When someone was sick, it wasn’t a prayer that saved them, but the entire village banding together to nurse them back to health. He couldn’t see the point in begging for the help of someone nobody had ever met or even seen. Not when every problem that the village ever had, the village had solved, all on their own.
Kinro held a similar opinion: he thought it was a waste of time to pray about a problem when they could be spending it working towards a solution. As such, the two of them would often team together to avoid praying whenever they could help it, inventing chores and faking sore throats, pretending to have lost track of time as they crouched outside under a window to listen for their parents’ voices to quiet.
The other kids in the village agreed. Chrome prayed, but he preferred to be outside exploring the fields. Kohaku and Ruri didn’t have much of a choice because of their family. Magma liked to brag that he’d never said a prayer in his life.
Ruri’s illness changed things.
Growing up in the village, it was hard not to be acquainted with death. Adults died of disease or injury. Brothers and sisters died before they were ever named, living just long enough to be mourned but not quite enough to be missed. Sometimes a lion would wander too close to the village and someone would have to go out to fight it off. That was how Magma’s dad went. That was how a lot of people went.
But Ruri was different. She was their age, with a name and face that they recognized. She had dreams, just like them. She had a future. There wasn’t a kid in the village who prayed more, or was more prayed-after, than her.
If the future priestess wasn’t safe from an early death, then who among them was?
The fear of death hung over Kinro and Ginro like a thick fog, through which they stumbled in opposite directions, arriving at entirely different conclusions. Ginro learned that it didn’t matter how much they prayed. No one was going to come down from a cloud to save him on account of how good and pious he’d been. Survival was something you had to fight for, no matter the cost, no matter what anyone else said or thought.
On the other hand, Kinro decided the whole thing was his fault. That it was all of their faults. “It’s because we weren’t following the rules,” he’d say. He’d repeat it at night while Ginro was trying to sleep, or while they were down by the river, collecting small fish that their parents would fry for dinner.
It’s because they were lazy. Because they didn’t do what they were supposed to, people could die. People would die.
During the long hours he spends standing in front of the village gates, Ginro thinks about it often. He wonders how things might have been different if Ruri had never caught her illness. If things might have been different if she’d died while they were still young instead of serving as a living testament to their own mortality.
He can tell that she’s been getting worse lately. Her condition has always been cyclical, but this time seems more serious than before. Kohaku hauls water to the village with alarming ferocity, even for her.
Ginro wonders how Kinro will change if she dies.
“Do you still think it’s your fault?” he asks one day, out of nowhere.
Kinro gives him that squint—the one that means he doesn’t understand and is trying to see Ginro’s face.
“About Ruri,” Ginro adds.
“What about her?”
“Her getting sick. Do you still think it’s because you didn’t pray enough?”
Kinro’s squint flattens as the corners of his mouth sink, expression turning sour. “Maybe not mine. I don’t think that god’s that cruel.”
Ginro looks up at the sky. He watches a cloud pass as he lets the silence sit for a moment.
“Then, what do you think now?”
The stillness comes back. From the corner of his eye, he sees Kinro glance up at the sky, just for a second before he resumes gazing out at the trees. The clouds are small today, little more than dandelion fluff drifting across a sheet of blue. Kinro probably can’t even see them.
“I think that god was punishing all of us. Not just me, not just you. It was the whole village at fault.”
Ginro looks down, tilting his head at his brother. “What did we do to deserve punishment, though? I don’t think that we’re so bad. Most of us, anyway. Anyone really bad gets banished.” Or so they say. He’s still never seen it happen, himself. It could be that it’s just an idle threat used by adults to keep kids from misbehaving. He hopes he’ll never have to find out.
“Well...” Kinro’s voice goes strained as he searches for an answer. “What else does it mean when a priestess dies young? When the next priestess after her is illness-stricken even younger?”
Ginro hums, considering it.
The day is long. He has a lot of time to mull it over.
No matter how long he ponders at it, he never comes up with an answer, though. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all.
Becoming guards hadn’t been a choice. It was what their father did, so it’s what they do now that he can’t. When he hurt his back and they had to take over, Ginro hardly even complained. There was no point. He’d spent his entire life whining about it, so by the time his father handed him the spear, there wasn’t a grievance left to voice.
“Shouldn’t the chief be the one guarding the village?” he’d asked in the past. “He’s the strongest one here, isn’t he? It only makes sense that he’s the one out there.”
It all disappeared when he held the spear in his hand for the first time. The feeling was different than he remembered. Heavier.
“Sorry,” Kinro apologized afterward. “If my eyes were better, I could guard alone. You wouldn’t have to do this.”
It was something he said a lot when it was just the two of them. Despite the griping, Ginro didn’t actually mind, though. Not really. When he thought seriously about all the jobs in the village, about becoming a hunter or a craftsman, it was difficult to picture himself as anything but a guard. He wasn’t particularly strong, and he wasn’t all that good with his hands, either. Being a farmer seemed like too much work. Being a fisherman might not have been so bad, if not for the risk of drowning. It wasn’t like he’d ever be able to rise to the position of chief.
“What do you mean?” Ginro nudged his brother. “You’ve got a perfectly good pair of eyes right here.”
Kinro’s face folded in guilt. “I meant—”
“I know. But it’s okay. I’ll see for you, and to make it up to me you can protect me if something happens. Deal?”
Kinro’s jaw clenched. He’d never liked like showing his emotion if he can help it, and by then he’d gotten good at holding in the worst of it, but there was little he could do to hide the thickness of his voice.
“Yeah.” He swallowed. “Deal.”
“I’m counting on you, big bro.” Ginro patted Kinro’s shoulder, teasing, and was surprised when Kinro responded by swallowing him in his arms. They hadn’t hugged since they were little, so it shocked him, making him stand there stunned and awkward as Kinro pulled away.
“Thank you,” Kinro said, looking better than he had in weeks. Guilt still painted the tension in his brow, but his shoulders were set, resolved.
He’d always been the decisive one.
And all the guilt that Kinro shed in that moment, Ginro gathered for himself, shutting it up in the deepest trenches of his heart, where no one could ever hope to dig it back up. Because he realized as he stared up at his brother: his place in the village was completely reliant on Kinro’s inability to see. If Kinro’s eyes weren’t sick, Ginro might not have been able to find a job at all.
He wondered who should be thanking who but answered, “Don’t mention it.”
Standing there at the gates all day, every day, can be hard. It’s boring. It’s hard in the summer when it gets too hot, and again in the winter, when it gets so cold he has to tie a cloth around his hand just to keep the spear from falling from it. It’s downright miserable when it rains and storms and Kinro still refuses to shirk his duties. All said, it’s not so bad, though. Because he has company. He has purpose.
They fall sick as a pair. They get better together. The seasons pass one after another, turning into years, and no one ever comes to the village. Ginro was thirteen when he was handed his spear. He’s sixteen now.
“Do you really think there’s anyone out there?” Ginro asks some days, just to fill up the time. He doesn’t know why he does it, because Kinro’s answer never changes.
“There has to be.”
Ginro thinks it’s amazing how he can always be so sure of everything he says. Even when he isn’t, he has a decisive way of speaking which Ginro’s never figured out how to emulate.
“But don’t you think the lions would’ve gotten them by now?” he asks.
“Kohaku says the lions aren’t so dangerous if you know how to avoid them.”
“Kohaku is Kohaku. I don’t think I’d be able to avoid lions for my entire life if I had to.”
“I imagine it’s something you learn fast.”
Or you don’t learn it at all. But there’s no point arguing with Kinro when his mind’s made up about something. Ginro doesn’t really want to keep imagining lions anyway, so he changes the subject.
“What do you think you’d do if someone ever did come?” he asks.
Kinro answers, “My duty.” It’s simple for him.
“So, you’d drive them away?”
Kinro doesn’t say anything. He rolls the tension from his shoulders instead, staring fixedly into the shifting underbrush. He doesn’t like it when Ginro starts asking for specifics. Most likely, he doesn’t like thinking about it. Maybe he doesn’t like the idea of facing off against someone who managed to survive outside for years without a village to support them. Kinro’s strong, but he’s not invincible. He’s never had to point his spear at anyone before.
“Even if it was a really cute girl?” Ginro presses, trying to redirect the conversation.
“Even then.”
“Even if it was someone who said they could help the village?”
“People don’t always mean what they say. Rules are rules.”
“Even if it was a little kid?”
This makes Kinro hesitate. “Rules… are rules,” he says again, although Ginro can tell he doesn’t like the sound of it. “I’d have to talk to the village chief about it.”
“Well, it’s not like anyone’s ever going to come anyway,” Ginro sighs, enduring his brother’s dirty look as he sticks the end of his spear into the ground and rests his chin on the butt of it.
“You’ll dull the blade.”
“Oh, no.” He closes his eyes to roll them, a content smile on his face. “I guess you’re just gonna have to protect me if someone comes, then.”
If it were anyone else, they might’ve kicked the spear out from under him. But Kinro fills his lungs like he’s come up for air, standing taller.
“Of course I will.”