Chapter Text
Ingo always had questions. It was never quiet in his mind. He constantly thought about the questions he feared he would never have the answers to. Where did he come from? Who was he before he came to Hisui? How did he end up in Hisui in the first place? Would he ever go back home?
The biggest one that was always at the front of his mind, however, had the most mystery of all.
“Why was I found with a severed hand?” he asked quietly.
The little mound he knelt before didn’t answer. The trees didn’t answer. The sky didn’t answer. As usual, he was left with a question and no one to answer him.
He didn’t remember how he came to Hisui, only waking up covered in bandages and to the faces of Pearl Clan healers leaning curiously over him. Irida had been there, just as confused and shocked as everybody else. It had been jarring, to just suddenly wake up to so many faces, so much pain, and just black emptiness when he tried to recall anything to tell them about himself.
They told him they found him clutching a hand. Or, one young healer had tried to lightly joke, it had been clutching him. No one had laughed. Calaba had scolded that one with harsh words, saying something of angering spirits and disrespecting the limb.
It was human, they said, but it wasn’t attached to its owner. They brought it in with him, kept it in a box of snow and ice. He didn’t know why, their answers always varying between wanting to discover the answer behind the mystery or just because, but they did.
Ingo got to see it. He actually demanded to see it, wheezing it out between the pain of his injured ribs. It was encased in a white glove, just like the one he had on his right hand, blood having soaked through the base of the fabric hem. The fingers had curled from rigor mortis; apparently they had to wriggle it off over the course of an hour, no one daring to disrespect the limb.
He had passed out in the midst of a panic attack after seeing it, but it wasn’t because it was a limb. Understandable, they all had told him after he had reawoken. It was so graphic and bizarre, anybody would faint at the sight of a dismembered hand and the news that it had been clinging to them.
It hadn’t been that. Ingo never told them it hadn’t been for those reasons, he had just quietly laid in bed while they comforted him and tended to his wounds. No, not for any of those reasons, it was because he was sure he knew whose hand it was.
But he didn’t.
Ingo had gone through the possibilities of how it ended up like that. Being bedridden for so long would have let anyone’s imagination on the mystery run wild, but his didn’t. It couldn’t have been a pokemon attack, the cut was too clean. It was a bloody stump at the wrist. It was like someone had just sat still while something cut through it with one slice of an expertly sharpened blade, but it was obvious that it wasn’t the case. There was just no possible explanation for why it was the way it was. He couldn’t even think of whose it was. There was no one to possibly remember for any candidates.
It was a miracle he didn’t go mad with the thought while he recovered.
When they asked him to dispose of the hand, he refused.
“Please, I need it!”
Embarrassing when he looked back on it, but he was so desperate and afraid and he hadn’t known why .
They let him keep the hand. He didn’t care about the looks and questions he got, he just knew he had to keep it with him. He had to do something with it, something to keep it close but also to respect whose body it had belonged to in the first place.
Calaba had been the most understanding about it, surprisingly. She hadn’t been a fan of the choice for Ingo staying, but she wouldn’t deny an injured person in need of medical attention or the fact that there was a severed hand needing to be taken care of. She hadn’t been at all phased by the hand in the box of ice in the tent, she was far too old and too mature in her profession to be, she just gave what advice she had.
“Give it a proper burial,” Calaba said simply. She snipped the excess bandaging off of Ingo’s calf. “You don’t want to anger the spirit attached to it.”
“They could be dead,” Ingo responded, more of a question than a statement. He wondered, he wondered so much but he just didn’t know.
“Perhaps. However, even if whoever it was attached to is still alive, you don’t want to be causing the rest of their body grief.”
“Ah, I see. Thank you, Lady Calaba.”
He buried the hand. He cleaned it, made sure it was wrapped in clean cloth, and placed in a small wooden box. It was all by himself; for some reason he couldn’t bear the thought of even an experienced person like Calaba handling it. Ingo knew he should have felt disgust at cleaning a dead limb, one starting to fall apart especially, but all he felt was such a horrible despair that made him sob in the privacy of his quarters. The cloth smelled of flowers and salt by the time he closed the lid on the box.
Who was he mourning? He didn’t know. Was he even mourning at all, or was he yearning for the answers that the hand held between its bony fingers?
Lady Sneasler had helped with finding rocks to put around the grave; she knew how much it meant to him, how it was something so important and held the secrets to his lost memories. The dirt mound was soon surrounded with round stones, but Ingo still found no peace despite how much care he had put into making sure the hand was properly buried.
He didn’t bury it completely. Ingo kept the glove it came with. He knew it wasn’t a very kind thing to do, but he couldn’t part with it once he took it off of the disembodied limb. Every touch brought a sense of horrible longing, faint sounds and smells just out of his reach. He had spent a long time afterwards just feeling the fabric.
It took lots of cleaning under icy water, but he finally managed to get most of the blood out of it.
Irida came to visit him long, long after it had been buried with small stones of her own.
“I thought…” Her head had been down, like she was ashamed. Maybe she was, for how she first judged Ingo even at her decree to the rest of the clan that he would stay. “I thought you could maybe use these. For your… Your memorial.”
They were all so beautiful. All of them were red. Red, and all of them separately mixed with speckles of black or white. Irida said that Lian had helped her, an olive branch of his own apologies as well, and that they were carefully picked. She had been listing names like jasper and bloodstone, how they would help ward bad energy from tainting the holy spot Ingo had chosen for the burial.
Red and white. Red and black. It was all Ingo could see and hear.
Ingo still felt the embarrassment of shedding tears in front of the clan leader, even if she kept reassuring him that it was alright. She apologized so many times Ingo thought her tongue would be numb to the spiciest snow radish in the Icelands.
“Thank you,” was all he could whisper through the tears.
He had wanted to apologize for his behavior, for such a display in front of the clan leader, but all he could do was thank her. Thank her and Lian for their wishful thoughts, for their care in choosing the stones, for the colors, for helping him find one little fragment in his shattered mind.
She left after that, with a quick bow and teary eyes. Ingo hadn’t wasted any time going behind his tent to get to work.
The mixed stones only made him feel more lost. He didn’t understand even as he decorated the grave with them, red rocks dappled with black and white, but he just felt so lost looking at them tumbled together. Something inside somewhat settled whenever he finished putting them around the stone ring and mound, like a little piece of him was reconnected seeing them together, but he never stopped crying.
A part of him knew something was crooked inside of him for treating the limb of a stranger notastrangernotastrangerIknowIknowIknow with more care than a living human being, but the judgment was kept behind closed doors and out of his assumed earshot.
Irida did her best to comfort him whenever she visited the grave with him. It was an accident the first time she disturbed him, but her company was something Ingo didn’t realize he needed. It helped, having someone there with him to keep him from being sucked into hours of staring into space. He began letting her come sit with him, letting her pray over the hand, and he began letting Sneasler sit with him, too.
It filled some little lonely part of him, at least.
The questions he had gotten had become slightly more kind with their wording, more from the older people of the clan, but there was never any good way for anyone to ask about the hand.
“Warden Ingo, have you had any luck remembering whose hand was found with you?”
“I’m sorry if I’m being upfront, but have you remembered anything about the…limb found with you?”
Ingo would keep his brave face and give the same answer he always had.
“Unfortunately, I do not.”
Now he sat on his in front of a little grave dedicated to a severed hand, the glove he never returned to it in his hands. No one was here with him today, it was just him and the hand with the faint cries of the wild in the distance.
Silvery eyes shined with tears as he stared at the mound. He slowly rubbed his roughened fingers against the worn fabric of the glove that came from it. The longing he felt was always so much worse when he visited the grave. He could feel a name on the tip of his tongue, he swore he could, but he didn’t even know what letter to start pronouncing.
“I know who had you,” he rasped. “I know. I know. I know I know I know…”
He just couldn’t remember.