Because of You
Everyone has a pain.
A light pain. A pain that cannot be forgotten. A pain that only grates. And a pain one wishes could be erased.
"Were you sorry you couldn't bring your dead daughter back to life?"
The thing before his eyes was not a human. It was a monkey.
Once there was a monkey that chased a shining stone, simply because the stone was beautiful. Foolishly, the monkey clutched that stone and howled.
The stone lay in the phantom thief's hand. The very same stone the monkey held. And then it multiplied. As if a dam had burst, stones overflowed from the phantom thief's hand, piling and piling until they made a mountain. There were so many that they could no longer merely pile; they spilled from the summit and rolled. Before anyone noticed, the place had become a sea of stones.
"You wanted to see your daughter's face again, didn't you."
A sea of shining stones. A sea more brilliant than the light of any true ocean.
Clack. Clack. Clack.
Stone struck stone and rolled. Again, and again. Repetition became a current, and the current was like the waves of the sea.
"I cannot understand that heart. Forgive me. I was someone's child, but I have never been a father, so in all sincerity I find it difficult to understand."
A wave rose. A wave of stones, large enough to bury a man. It was not enough to bury the monkey.
The monkey went berserk. One swing of the stick in its grip split the earth, set the sky shuddering, and dealt destruction without distinction. Cleaving the waves, it rushed the phantom thief, and still the stone was clenched in its hand.
"——————!!!!!!!"
"They say a parent's heart knows no limit."
The sea shattered. Green dust scattered in every direction. But a sea is a sea. Break it, and it becomes itself again.
"For a beloved child, even if one's own body breaks, cracks, and wears away, one never lets that child see a trace of it."
This was a true sea. A sea that holds whatever comes to it, that gives each day's bread and opens a road toward anywhere at all.
"And you... well. Were you a parent?"
"——————!!!!!!!!!"
The monkey was no sea. He could not hold her. He could not remain beside her. Like a rough wave, he only showed his face for a moment, and then another.
What had the child who saw that thought? Watching a monkey that merely imitated the sea, false as a sea of green light, what had she felt? Hatred? Understanding? Or resignation?
He did not know. The dead do not speak.
"I know! You must have tried! You must have wanted even one second more! Even if you couldn't show it, you must have tried to give her your love, if nothing else!"
A life lived as a mercenary could hardly have been an honorable one, yet the fruit of his love for the person he cherished would have set a light in that barren heart, and each day would have been happy. He must have sworn to strive for the future, and for a family.
"And yet... you failed, didn't you."
The wife he loved left him to illness, and he had to earn money for a child who had only just learned to walk. All he knew how to do was kill. He threw himself into danger and made sums beyond imagining. But he was gone from the house so often that he drifted ever farther from the child.
"Mr. Sword. How many times did you tell your daughter you loved her? When was the last?"
He stopped dead.
The rampaging monkey halted at those words. A faint light filmed his eyes, dyed red with blood, and that light turned toward the past—a past already faint, even as memory.
The phantom thief held a single card before the monkey's eyes. A heart was drawn upon it.
"Love has no form. Giving it a shape the eye can see is a person's work."
The picture inside the card began to change. A box tied with ribbon. A kiss between two people. A teddy bear, a robot, money, a building, land... it became one thing and then another, without end.
"But to a child, what matters is not this paltry excuse for love."
Into the monkey's eyes came the image of parents holding a child. An ideal the monkey could not reach, and would never be able to reach, not in all the years to come.
"A parent's very presence is an enormous love to a child. It is everything. Nothing can be traded for it."
Whether want of money made life poor, or she envied others the things she could not have, none of it mattered to a child, so long as the parents she loved were there.
"Did you give her that? Were you beside her?"
"I... I..."
He had not.
There had been more hours outside the house than in it. He had seen his enemies' blood more often than his child's smile. He had driven himself on with the child in his thoughts—but what of the child?
"And now you would undo it? After your mistakes have heaped themselves into a sea?"
"Is your own sea not greater than the sea of any parent?"
"I—I didn't want it to be that way!"
He was sorry. He was so sorry. Sorry he had not stayed beside her. Sorry he had not held her hand. But to let go of a trade so unsteady required money and power beyond all imagining. All of it had been for the child.
"You of all people should know what comes of not wanting it."
The green sea caught and burned red. A sea of fire that would swallow anything.
"No... this isn't it!!!"
The fire danced. The fire drew a picture. In the picture was a little girl, laughing brightly, bouncing this way and that. Toys crowded around her, and food without number. Anyone who saw it would have thought the child happy.
"Toys. Food. Very good. Shall we go on?"
The phantom thief flicked his hand, and the picture changed.
The girl had set a teddy bear beside her and was drawing. On the page were a large person, a small person, and one smaller still. She was drawing her family. Then the door opened, and someone came into the house: a big man with a sword across his back. At the sight of him, his whole body steeped in a fire thicker than fire, the child broke into a radiant smile. She ran to him and held up the picture she had drawn. He took it, gazed at it for a long while, and stroked her hair. Her laughter was brighter than the sun.
"How harmonious."
"Don't... don't..."
The man stayed with her. They ate. They played with dolls. He eased, if only a little, the guilt of all the time he had not been there. But the scene could not last. A call came, and he left in haste. Just before he opened the door and went, he waved to the child, and she saw him off. Until the door closed, she was smiling.
"A pity."
"No... no..."
Before the shut door, the child climbed onto the bed and clutched the teddy bear. Her shoulders shook. Her breath came rough. Only when the moon had gone and sunlight spilled in could she finally stop.
The sun set, and the moon rose, over and over. The child grew, and nothing else changed. The hours the man and the child had together were no more than a handful. Little by little her head sank. She no longer looked at him.
"It would have been better if it had ended here."
"Don't show me this! Don't show me thiiiiiis!!!!!!!"
The one who had been a father threw himself into the flames. Blood burst. Skin boiled. He did not stop. The picture wiped away and the fire weakened, but it did not go out.
"No... anything but that!!!"
He thrashed, and it was ugly. Ugly, so he would not have to see again what he had tried to forget.
"Do you think a thing is forgotten simply because you decide to forget it?"
"I forgot! I said I forgot!"
He seized his own head and drove it into the ground. He did not want to hear any more. He did not want to see.
"That day was a night like this, wasn't it? I imagine."
A cake in one hand, on his way home for the first time in so long. A leave he had won by effort. This time, unlike every time before, he could stay for a long while. At the thought that he might even take his daughter somewhere—on a trip—the smile would not leave him.
But alas.
That house, where his precious daughter was.
"Aaaaaaaaah!!!!"
The flames roared up.
They roared.
Hehehe!!!
"So this is that bastard's house!"
"His daughter's in there? Then kill her!"
"This still isn't enough!"
The phantom thief hauled up the man who was fleeing reality. A horrific truth crashed into eyes that had become a sight no one could bear to look upon.
"The karma of the blood you spilled drove your own daughter to her death."
Because of you.
By that half-finished work of being a father, you killed the daughter you held dear.
"No... that isn't my daughter..."
He denied it. Staring at the pendant at his throat, he drilled the lie into himself.
"Do you truly think so? That she is a fake, and all of this an illusion?"
"Yes... this is an illusion..."
"Hah... If that is what you wish to believe, then it cannot be helped."
The phantom thief drew away from him. The roaring fire swallowed the phantom thief whole.
"Let us see whether your daughter thinks the same."
"What are you saying..."
He sneered at the phantom thief. His daughter was dead. How could she possibly be here...
"Papa."
"Anastasia...?"
He—no. Alexei Ivanovich Yan turned his head.
His daughter was there, wearing the fire.
"You're not... my daughter..."
"Why did you...?"
No.
His daughter was dead.
They hadn't found so much as a single body in the burned house.
"Why didn't you save me?"
Please. Don't say it with that face.
"Why were you never home?"
It was the work. It was all for you!
"Did Papa..."
Anastasia. Papa did. Papa—you—
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!!"
Alexei Ivanovich Yan was a father who had never managed to become one.
The shining green stone was still in his hand.
"A tragedy."
The sort of thing anyone might hear of, once.
That sort of thing.
A perfectly common tragedy.
The phantom thief watched the tragedy.
Without end.
He simply watched, without end.