How to Have a Heartbeat? (Book Two)

Chapter 30 : Decay

 Sena

      "Oh my, just how are you even standing?"

      I felt my body slightly stiffen at the man's comment, his eyes darkening over my frame, sitting half naked on a wooden chair. The cracks in my porcelain skin had begun to spread up to my face, the most dominant crack lingering just under my eye. Weak and fragile were words I knew very well, but I had never thought that I would now be the recipient of them. To be so fragile that I could literally shatter apart never had been so apparent.

      "Can you do it or not, Hakudoshi?" I asked, and the elderly man glanced towards me, his lips curling into a frown. His staff stayed planted in his hand before the point of it suddenly drove just over the gashing crack near my barely existing heart.

      "Would it really do you any good to still linger in this world, Sana Kumiko?" He slowly asked, his eyes rising to meet my own.

      I felt composure suddenly slip away from for an instant, and felt the hatred suddenly rage beneath my eyes before I forced it back down. My lips moved mechanically. "Have you grown soft over old age? Can you do it...or can you not?"

      "I see that no matter how long you live...soft is just out of your reach, isn't it?" The older man let out a calm sigh, his wrinkled eyelids suddenly closed in what appeared to be genuine exhaustion. "I am nearing my 70s Sana, and I am already too tired to go on...aren't you exhausted?"

      I went silent at his words, and allowed them to barely even phase me, but something about them lingered in my chest. "Are you going back on your word?"

      "And what of you? When I agreed, it was because I was agreeing to your death sentence. But if I help you, I am helping you to live." The man slowly sat down on the wooden bench, his eyes lingering by the tiny fire that kept the house warm. Things were only managing to make everything all the more cold in the Mist village as of late, and the rain hadn't seemed to settle, as if it were mourning the dead. "I think it's fine if you die in that body of yours...after all, isn't it the first thing in this world that has ever been fully yours?"

      My eyes narrowed and my fingers gripped around the middle of the man's neck, but quickly let go when his smile didn't disappear.

      "Nonetheless, you offered your word, Hakudoshi."

      "I was barely 18 at that time, and a beautiful woman offered herself to me," the old man reminisced, his eyes glancing over to me for a moment, as if in nostalgia. "Has any man refused you fully before? ...But I know better now. Letting someone like you go on is dangerous."

      I found myself scoffing before I could help it, my robes tight against my skin, the long, skin tight cloth suddenly covering all the weakening chips on my skin. There was a time when I wouldn't allow someone to talk to me like this. There was a time when I had no need for any puny human life. Between then and now, I believe I took it for granted.

       "The moments for talk are fleeting and I am running out of time, as you can see." I slowly lifted myself off the wooden chair, my eyes burning as I felt the chips of my skin on my lower back start to twitch.