taijiya | Adstringendum | We're All Mad Here

It's a place full of people she doesn't know and memories she doesn't have.

Feudal Japan isn't exactly known for its asylums--or any progressiveness regarding mental illness--in fact, most illnesses, probably mental ones included, are usually attributed to evil spirits, to demon possession. Sango knows this. She has helped to exorcise her fair share of possessive demons from humans and animals alike. She knows this.

And she knows with the same conviction that she was never under the power of one of these evil spirits, these demons. Hosted (imprisoned) in the mansion of a kind feudal lord who remembered her as participating in a mission to save his estate from a demon infestation, she is restless, and she roams the rooms without purpose. There are maids and servants, and there are priestesses and monks and shamans and doctors who visit her, who never tell her what she wants to hear. She protests, she fights their ministrations, and she is every bit the stubborn, bewildered, and cornered girl she's expected to be.

They tell her she's been possessed for a long time--whether with grief or those famous evil spirits, they don't know--that ever since the brutal murder of her family and her village, she hasn't been the same. And it's understandable, they say. You poor thing. A little over a year since that day, they say. And they're so happy to see her in some semblance of normal. The demon is gone--she can live again, can't she?

And then she tells them that that can't be true, because she can remember the feel and smell of damp, cloying dark earth around her, and blood, and crawling out of her own shallow grave, and being taken in by Naraku, the deceptive monster--

But then their smiles grow strained and she can feel their hope dimming. No, they must think, another false start.

And they remind her that it was the guards of this castle who found her, who brought her back, who let her be nursed back to health--and they hoped, back to sanity. And when Sango hears that, her bare feet thump against the tatami mats and the long bamboo floors, all the way to the master's room, and she throws open the door, chest heaving, eyes heavy and dark with wild conviction, until she looks on the lord of the castle--a small, round man with beady fearful eyes--and she knows that it is not Naraku.

She tells wild tales of betrayal and darkness and blood and adventure--of learning to smile again and watching the stars--of a brother and a miko resurrected from the dead, a reincarnated teenager from the future, a rough-around-the-edges half-demon, a Buddhist monk with perverted tendencies. And their smiles vanish and they wrestle her back into her bed and pour food down her throat and tell her soothingly that it will be okay, they will bring another monk tomorrow, and he will exorcise this demon that possesses her and drives her into madness.

And she tries to tell them--tries desperately to make them see--about an apocalyptic city where people come and go like changes of season--about a girl with long curly hair and the sweetest disposition, about a boy with the greenest eyes she's ever seen who broke her heart only a few days ago, about another half-demon with cropped purple hair and mystery hidden in her smile, about a son of Satan whose blue flames have burned her before, about everyone in that place she's ever loved; about the Animus, about events every other week, about delusions just like what she knows this place is, about scars she doesn't seem to have on examination, about things she's learned that she can't prove. About being reunited with the brother that Naraku took away.

They tell her that her brother is buried in the garden as he has been for the past year or so, and that she has not left the estate since she came here then, obviously gripped by evil spirits. They tell her that the things she's seen don't exist, and that she should rest, because her frantic arguments only give the demon who possesses her more fuel. She shakes her head--it's alarming to think they're disputing the existence of everything that's ever mattered, but mattering most is her brother. He's been dead, they repeat as she grows more insistent, because he's the thing she holds on to now. But she remembers, the blood of innocents on his hands, the empty gaze of his body possessed, the glow of a Jewel shard in his neck.

When they ask her what the Shikon no Tama is, the Jewel of Four Souls--that's when she knows that something is terribly wrong.

She curls in on herself, slumps, barely keeps the sobs of frustration and denial at bay. And they hold onto her and comfort her and say that it's alright; anyone would be vulnerable after what she went through; they'll call a priestess tomorrow and she'll be able to exterminate the spirit for sure.

(But she can't. When there is no evil spirit to exterminate, no madness to drive out, when she is insane for being sane, how can she be cured?)

There is only so much stubbornness one woman can contain, and as she looks out over the garden every day at the grave of her brother and her father and the rest of the troupe, and thinks of the death in her village, her home (because there is no motley group of heroes with a heart kind enough to bury someone else's dead--they're just a part of her madness as well), she begins to believe them. She walks the grounds and the scent of the graveyard soil seems to follow her. Kohaku.

She does not want to believe that everything she's been through was wrong--was nonexistent--because she can still feel the echoes of pain and laughter alike, and it is nearly impossible to imagine that those were, well, imaginary. And when she sees people around the grounds with the faces of the people she remembers loving--or hating--it sends her reeling--and then she sees that they are not the faces she seeks, the personas she wants so badly to see again. They are not what she wants.

But what she wants is what everything around her points to being... unreal. Imaginary.

And she begins to wonder if it's possible--if she's lost her grip on reality (because even she knows that there's no evil spirit to speak of save herself). It wouldn't be the first time she remembered coming close to it.

It wouldn't be the first time she's lost herself with a reckless abandon, overcome by emotion for people so far gone.

And just as she's starting to lose her grip on that reality, to descend into an insanity within an insanity--or a result of insanity--she can't quite tell--just as the brink looms and she begins to believe, that the people she remembers loving are simply projections of faces she's seen around her in a reality that isn't real, an adventure born of the desire for revenge against something, born from a need to see and touch and love the things that are lost to her--just as it's all about to come crashing down, she wakes up in a cold sweat and before she can even think, she runs down the hall, bare feet pounding the floor, throws open the door to the room where her brother sleeps, and sags against the doorframe at seeing his figure there.

Just a dream, she thinks, and the chilly air freezes the sweat down her back. He's alright. He's real. They're all here--they're all real--

And then there is a painful constriction in her chest and she knows, without doubt, that there is doubt--and that it is not going away--and that that was not just a dream.

She knows how to deny. She knows how to lie to herself.

(It wouldn't be the first time.)