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Every time he drives his ancient car up here he thinks the engine will fail, but it doesn’t. It goes on. Like life. Apparently.
It’s always cold in Kurain village.
He feels the cold now. He didn’t much before prison. Even after the coma. But now he’s always freezing and most freezing when he’s here. The only place he’s warm now is in her arms. When he told his physio he felt cold now, she said that could be a good sign. Nerve damage healing. But it’s not a good sign. There’s too much damage. His joints ache all the time. Sometimes he can’t taste. He walks with a stick. He’s coughing. He’s dying. He’s ash inside.
There are some poisons that work real slow.
But he has survived. Until now. A living man in the shadows of dead women.
This cold might kill him. Any moment. Or perhaps Kurain will.
Kurain is almost callously beautiful, with the frost glittering on the broken stone paths and the blossom on the wind.
He walks into the village and frost crunches under his shoes and he’s so cold. It might help if he gained some weight. Why can’t he gain weight? He eats as much as he can stand and yet here he is, a skeleton in this town of ghosts. Why is he alive? Why does he stand here. A survivor. Why did he live?
Why won’t anyone tell him?
He never came here with Mia. The first time he came to this fucking place it set him on course for the mess that was Hazakura Temple. This fucking place, he should have known it was cursed. It took one look at him, insane with grief, and snared him deeper into it’s web of beautiful death.
Why didn’t you just tell the police, Godot?
Why didn’t you just take that letter to the police?
Just?
Because she hated the fucking police. “Fucking police took her mother away.” He mutters this under his breath and the frost squeaks under foot and he nearly slips. He catches himself with hi stick but his bad leg screams. He’ll be limping for days now.
Fucking police took her mother.
Then he took her mother.
God this is so fucked up. Why is he alive?
“Godot!” There’s Maya, coming out to greet him.
He looks up. Pearl, with her. He grins and waves.
Maya doesn’t look like Mia. But sometimes she reminds him of her. Even though Mia is dead and Maya is the most alive person he has ever known. He’s brought her some strawberry mochi. It’s fun how excited she gets over food, over being alive. She is blooming now, he can see it. Roses in her cheeks.
The first time he’d ever come here Maya hadn’t looked at him like this, she’d looked suspicious, as well she might. Mouth tight as she asked him what he wanted. He’d said penance and she’d given it to him. Or, she’d taken him on a trek around the freezing hills to a dilapidated temple full of stray cats. That walk had left him in bed for a week afterwards.
Be careful what you wish for.
Even then, that first visit, and with his body aching and freezing, he’d asked for it. He’d come all this way. A dying man. He had to see her.
Maya had agreed to do it and in the dark of the channelling chamber, a single candle, a warm white light, overwhelming. The scent of incense thick and pungent as the air in prison.
Even then, breathing in the smoke and barely able to see more than shadows, he’d thought, it’s probably a hoax. She can’t be here.
“Diego.”
She can’t be here.
“Diego”
Even after everything he’d seen in court, he thinks, she cant be here.
No one calls him Diego any more.
Smoke.
Smoke and mirrors.
When he was in prison a lawyer had come to see him. A defence attorney called Kristoph Gavin.
Godot didn’t have his visor in prison. Blind without it, he had no idea what Kristoph Gavin looked like. But his voice told Godot that Kristoph Gavin was exactly the kind of man he wanted nothing to do with.
“I’ve read about your case. I’d like to help you mount an appeal.”
Godot can taste a bitter taste in his mouth when Gavin speaks, like her poison inside him is a rising tide. “What? Why?”
“The things that happened in that court room need to be challenged. Do you realise that for part of the trial the defence attorney was being impersonated? We can prove it. There are medical records. Phoenix Wright was in hospital. And did you know that’s not even the first time he’s be impersonated in court? Your conviction is unsafe.”
“I know about that. That didn’t happen during my trial. That was Iris Fey’s trial. My trial was… I pled guilty. I am guilty.”
Kristoph Gavin ignores this. “Fucking shenanigans. Magic tricks in the court. Phoenix Wright lost his badge at his very next trial. Did you know he and Iris Fey were lovers? I assure you, you have a case.”
Fingers touch Godot’s hand. Smooth and cold. A stroke on his middle knuckle. He yanks it back. “Dude, what is this?”
“Ah, forgive me. You’re an attractive man.”
“I used to be. Is that why you want me out of prison? You could have just arranged a conjugal visit.”
“I know people Mr Armando. There is a cell. Number 13. For VIPs. I could get you in there. Get your visor back. And then, get you out.”
“Why would I want my fucking visor in here? What should I be looking at?”
“Diego, it’s me.”
If he ever doubted Kurain’s magic was real, he doesn’t when he smells her. No one smells like her.
That scent, filling up his senses. Wiping away his doubt. And his dick is hard, who else could do that? Just like that.
“Diego,” she’s behind him, touching him. He turns. He breaks. He falls into her arms and sobs like a baby.
He whispers, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” It’s all he can say.
“It’s okay, Diego. It’s okay.” She kisses him. Her lips are sweet. Warm. Her mouth tastes like her mouth tastes. She kisses him until he isn’t crying.
His hands are in her robes, opening them, finding his way. Her breasts in his hands. He hadn’t meant to make love to her. He had just wanted to touch her. But why else do people come to Kurain. Maya had assumed he wanted this as soon as he mentioned it.
He’s on his knees before her. He kisses her pussy, tongue between her legs. Her pussy tastes like her pussy tastes. It makes him ache. This is wrong. He slides his tongue over her clit. He licks her and he never meant to put his dick in her. He feels, like he did years ago, that he could never earn such a right, never, to touch something as beautiful. To put his filthy worthless dick in the sacred cunt of Mia Fey.
He would rather writhe at her feet, a supplicant.
But, as ever, Mia has other ideas. Her fingers had touched his cheek, lifted his face from between her legs and she had said, “Please, Diego, make love to me.”
“I want to make you come, kitten, please. Let me eat you until you come.”
A voice like a memory of music. “I want to come with you inside me. Please Diego. I’ve missed you so much.”
“Death has changed you,” he laughs, but he wants to cry all over again. He doesn’t. She is on the ground and he gets on top of her. He moves his body and slips a hand between her legs where she is wet from his mouth, wetter than just from his mouth. He slips a finger in, deep. Into the slippery beauty of her cunt, opening in his hand like a blooming flower. Open and greedy like an anemone. Eager and… she bucks in his arms, “Please, Diego. It’s been so long. Fuck me. Come on.”
Her fingers curl around his dick and jerk it. He gasps. “Mia, please.”
What is he begging her for?
He fucks into her and she cries out. Pleasure. She arches under him, nipples drag over his bare chest. Life pounds through him and it is so good.
His head moves down to her tits. Her nipples in his mouth. God, he wants her. He has her. Here she is.
This is wrong.
He’s tries to fuck her slow, but her cunt holds him, sucks life out of his dick. He wants to crawl inside her body. Stay with her. He thrusts into her like he can. Like he could fuck her with his entire self. And he comes inside her, too fast, stars falling from the sky.
As he comes he knows why he didn’t want to fuck her. Because fucking her, coming inside her, would be the end. Is the end.
“Diego, she says again but her voice is so soft, too soft.
“No,” he cries out, his orgasm crumbling to dust. “No,” he sounds like a dying animal. “NO.”
No.
He howls. “No, take me with you. Take me. Please. Mia.”
Not yet.
When she goes. Every time she goes. When the candle goes out and he can’t catch her scent and another voice says, “Godot?” its like his heart is being eaten by wolves, it’s like she dies all over again.
How, how can she not be real? How can she be gone?
He comes back to Kurain, back and back. Every month. He’s an addict. He lives only for those moments in that dark scented room with Mia’s flesh ghost.
Maya always greets him. Maya. She is so bright and sweet. Is he raping her? Is he doing something wrong? It’s her body. But she knows what he does. He says lots of Kurain’s clients do it. There’s even a special teas she drinks so she can’t get pregnant from it.
Maya is beautiful in her way. Her loves of food is infectious, he should eat like she does. Sometimes he wonders if he could love her. His dead loves kid sister. It’s a filthy thought. But she has Mia inside her. She is the closest he could ever get now. If he loved Maya, making love wouldn’t end like his soul being ripped apart.
When Godot isn’t in Kurain, he jerks off in the morning thinking about making love to Mia in the scented channelling chamber. He’s managed to find an incense that smells the same. He lights it in a saucer and wraps his hand around is dick, lying naked in his bed in his tiny one-room place above a dry cleaners. He strokes his dick and imagines she is there, above him, smiling down on him like a goddess, naked, lady bounty. The most living woman he ever saw.
It’s always the same. She, him, his dick. An orgasmic that sends him crashing down so hard it isn’t worth it and yet…
But he can’t say no to those moments with her, no matter the cost. Just like he can’t say no to being with her every month in Kurain.
She is dead, he tells himself from time to time, often in the morning, looking in the mirror. “She is dead. You have to let go.”
When Maya texts he blinks at it. He’s always surprised to remember Maya has a phone. The signal in Kurain is patchy. But it turns out she’s on her way into the city. “Meet 4 lunch?”
She means, “Buy me lunch.” He scrolls on his phone out to find the cheapest place to eat near the train station. He thinks, this is his chance. He’ll tell her, he’ll tell her he won’t be visiting Kurain again. He has to stop.
She looks different in the noodle bar. She glances at his bowl of spicy pork and her nostrils flare. She’s pale. She takes a long drink of Sprite and says, “I came to the city to see you.”
He can’t think why. He can’t think of any reason any of the Feys would want anything to do with him. Would come to him. The Feys were the women he had always been chasing. Never quite reaching in the dark.
“I’m pregnant,” Maya says.
Mia is having his baby.
He has survived.
He stops on the path, leaning on his stick. Maya runs down the steps of Fey Manor to greet him. He kisses her mouth. She tastes like her sister.