dancing on bones (our souls of iolites and emeralds)

Chapter 23

"For even the very wise cannot see all ends."

― J.R.R. Tolkien,  The Fellowship of the Ring

//

Something strange Kusuo started to notice after a while, long after Felix Potter realised he was also Saiki Kusuo– or rather, when Saiki Kusuo realised he was reborn as a little boy named Felix. After moving to the Dursley household in Little Number Four, Privet Drive, Kusuo began to Dream.

It was difficult to grasp the abstract meanings with the clarity of his adult mind then it would have been if he'd been a child, an age when it had made sense for stones to whisper to him, for rivers to sing, for trees to cradle him and croon welcome and warnings both.

(what little magic he has is potent and cruel and wraps around him like armor. it whispers Secrets in his ears in a voice that's hardly audible and he can't understand. His Magick screams)

Felix found himself spending more time in nature during his waking hours then he ever  did as Kusuo. He'd managed to skip years worth of school and yet was still disappointingly unoccupied by the institution of learning. The pre-teens in his class were obnoxious.

To prevent the boredom from overwhelming him during classes spent with children who preferred to pass notes rather than learn geometry, Kusuo found himself having to read library books he had gotten during a class trip pouring over texts on history and war and botany, of all things. Well– Kusuo supported healthy hobbies.

And the history of England, of Britain– it was fascinating. Either that or he was terribly bored and it was truly incredible that this was the best entertainment he could find.

He wondered how the Magical world would have applied similar practices to the Muggle one, or if they already did. How was it enforced? Who decided anything beyond the Ministry of Magic? How did they hold onto power?

He closed his book.

The local playground that Dudley and Harry ruled was edged by an overgrown wooded area. It was recess, and he was bored.

Kusuo wandered amongst the trees in the woods, searching; most were disappointedly young, their ashen grey-brown trunks thin and peeling, their leaves shades of green and orange and brown, but he did find a cluster of trees he recognized as silver birches. Their leaves were green and their trunks were pale.

Kusuo took care to make note of where the glade of silver birches could be found, and next time he visited the woodland he made sure to 'borrow' Vernon's pocket knife, with the intention of carving a face into the trunk of the largest of them.

And the pocket-knife did its job. Kusuo wasn't a master carver by any stretch of the imagination, but his powers certainly helped and the finished face reminded him of the old shrines he used to visit with his Mama in the Before.

Sitting at the foot of the tree, pressing his back against the trunk, Kusuo closed his eyes, listening to the world around him.

It was quiet in the woods. It was something he noticed, considering how much loud it was. The cars, the people, all packed together, all busy– nowhere was truly quiet.

Here, beneath his Tachigi-bori* it was.

And Kusuo doesn't really put his faith in any gods, but this is feels like comfort. It's cultural for him. A connection to his old life. Not religion.

James once said absentmindedly to him that he found the Old Gods through being around nature. He'd never spoken overmuch of them to Kusuo. But he had told him that he never felt closer to them then when he was kneeling in the wood, surrounded by nothing but the natural world.