Disclaimer: I hate repeating myself, but no, the game's not mine. In other words, nothing's changed in the past two weeks, since the day I posted my last Xenosaga story.
Author's Notes: This time, I'm poking fun at the ever-serious Nigredo. It's an absolutely fascinating thing to do. So fascinating, in fact, that instead of creating a tiny drabble, I ended up writing a regular one-shot. I know I have the tendency to overdo everything.
If the fic's not humorous, then at least I hope it's cute.
Btw, I realize it's a bit too late to be asking, but I'm looking for a beta-reader who'd help me with any stories I may still write for this fandom. English's not my first language and I feel quite uneasy submitting fics that haven't been proofread by a native speaker. So please, if you have some spare time on your hands, a good grasp of your mother tongue, and finally, if you love Yuriev's kids as much as do, send me a PM, ok? I'd be really grateful. :)
Otherwise, just read, enjoy and maybe even review the story below. :)
The Small Offences of Life
by Lucrecia LeVrai
Nigredo wouldn't really describe himself as a loner, but he didn't have anything against being left alone from time to time. Naturally, he enjoyed hanging around with his two older brothers very much, and he wouldn't trade the moments they spent together for anything else in the world, but when the twins were absent for one reason or another—like today, when they had to stay behind in the lab for a few extra tests—he had no trouble taking care of himself. If anything, the boy was glad for the short break he was given, a rare opportunity to relax and gather his thoughts. He found himself a nice bench in the southern section of the Institute's biggest park, and sat there in silence, feeling neither bored, like he knew Rubedo would have, nor uneasy, the way Albedo always felt in similar situations.
He wasn't all alone, though. Every now and then, various members of the facility's staff passed him by, technicians, scientists and the like, though they were mostly too busy to even notice him, let alone stop in front of the bench to exchange a few words. His fellow U.R.T.V.s, a couple of whom were wandering nearby, also ignored him, albeit for a completely different reason. Nigredo didn't mind this lack of attention from both the adults and the children. He had a black and white cat to keep him company.
The cat, Gaignun, sat a bit to the boy's left, carefully licking one of his front paws. Without having anything better to do for the time being, Nigredo watched the animal's movements with mild interest. He thought he understood Gaignun's penchant for cleanliness perfectly well. He, himself, liked to take a shower even trice a day, and he often lingered under the water for longer than necessary—again, much unlike his brothers. Rubedo treated showering like an irritating duty imposed on him by their caretakers (since he had so much more interesting things to do in his free time, he said), and Albedo never found pleasure in equally trivial things.
Well, at least Gaignun shared his appreciation for personal hygiene. It seemed that the cat liked to lick his smooth fur at every possible opportunity; once he was done with the toilet, he would often start it anew. Did it perhaps mean, Nigredo absently wondered, that Gaignun never felt fully clean? Perhaps his tongue wasn't enough? After all, he couldn't use soap like humans and Realians did… Did he even use water? It never rained within the artificial 'outdoor' areas of the Institute, so…
The dark-haired boy was pulled out of his musings by the sound of approaching footsteps. He raised his head to see that one of the passing scientists had stopped to look at him. Nigredo couldn't recognize the man's face at first sight; he was probably a relatively new member of the staff, still unaccustomed to the unwritten rules of the facility. Still treating the U.R.T.V.s like children, not living subjects of his work—otherwise he wouldn't have bothered to exchange a few casual lines with the boy. Even if it did sound more like he was talking to himself.
"You seem to be mesmerized by this cat," the scientist noted with a slight smile. "I like them, too. This one's real, eh? I'd say, even though artificial pets are easier to keep, real ones are still the best." The man's facial expression was met with the boy's complete indifference, and so, quite predictably, he went on in a more somber tone, "You aren't skipping your duties by sitting here, are you?"
Nigredo calmly shook his head. "No, the afternoon drill won't start in another two hours." He paused. "And I was just thinking about something."
"About what?" the adult prompted in a friendly manner, though he was already turning to leave, as if he had suddenly remembered his own tasks.
"About the way Gaignun keeps cleaning his fur, over and over again. Doesn't he ever feel he's clean enough?"
"Gaignun, huh? Nice name for a cat." The man leant forward and patted the animal on the head. "Well, I'd say it couldn't be any cleaner than it already is, unless you gave it a bath." He straightened himself up with a small chuckle, and then finally hurried off.
Just how was Nigredo, a twelve-year-old boy raised within the walls of an isolated military facility, supposed to realize that the scientist had only been joking?
Woefully ignorant of the fact that had just started digging himself a grave, Nigredo set to his task without any special preparations. He merely took Gaignun into his arms—the cat let himself be lifted off the bench without any protests—and carried him into the nearest washroom. It was a large, meticulously clean area assigned to some of the standard U.R.T.V.s. Two rows of showers ran along the opposite walls, each equipped with its own controlling device and bearing a number from one to thirty. Everything looked highly functional and almost unpleasantly impersonal at the same time, though it made no impression whatsoever on Nigredo, who was already more than used to such sights.
The dark-haired boy simply placed the cat under one of the showers and took a step back, since he didn't want to get wet as well. Gaignun raised his black tail into the air and looked up almost expectantly. Having decided that two minutes should be enough, the boy entered the time into the control panel, set the temperature to a reasonable value, and then pushed the start button.
He had never seen the animal move so fast in his entire life! The cat bolted for the exit with the speed of light, probably before the first droplets of water could even touch him. Nigredo blinked and stared at the door, which had already closed with a soft hiss. Unfortunately for him, he was still unable to draw a proper conclusion from the entire event.
Slightly confused and unsure of what had gone wrong, the youngest U.R.T.V. set out to look for the cat.
It took him almost an hour to discover Gaignun's whereabouts, because in the meantime he had to convince some pushy, unnerved mechanic that he had really no idea why one of the newest crafts broke all of a sudden in the middle of yesterday's training. (It was Rubedo who had tampered with that craft's electrical circuits, but the mechanic didn't necessarily have to know that.) After the irritating delay, however, he found the cat back in the park, perched on one of the highest branches of a soaring tree. The animal stared at him mistrustfully. It took a lot of murmuring and coaxing on the boy's part to get him back down.
Nigredo knew that his second attempt at giving his pet a shower would have to involve a different strategy: he would have to hold Gaignun down, to keep him from escaping. Perhaps he had just been scared of the bathroom, the boy decided, an unfamiliar room he had never seen before. So once again, he took the cat into his arms—this time, the animal kept squirming uncomfortably as the boy carried him towards the western wing of the main building, where the U.R.T.V.s' living quarters were located. Gaignun's whimsical attempts to break free gathered intensity as soon as his young master overstepped the doorway leading to the shower room. In response, Nigredo just held him more firmly.
The true pandemonium was yet to come.
The boy carried the animal to the nearest shower. Pressing a very desperate Gaignun with just one hand to his chest, he turned on the water.
Sixteen minutes later he reported himself at the infirmary, cradling not his cat, but both his injured arms to his chest, having successfully stanched the bleeding a short while ago. The doctors on duty gave him looks of mild consternation, but fortunately, they swallowed his made up story about a tall tree and a barbed wire. What he had been doing up the tree before he had fallen down, Nigredo couldn't explain at once, but in the end the men brushed it off as some childish game—with the reservation that Dr. Yuriev would of course be informed about this pitiful incident.
The boy wasn't too happy about the prospect of facing his father, but he just nodded blankly at these words. He had more urgent worries. The doctors poured a large doze of antiseptic and nanocoagulant over his scratches. It stung terribly. Nigredo had to clench his teeth and blink some involuntary tears away.
After the treatment was finished and the cuts healed, he was given a new uniform. The doctors ordered him to change and generally stay the hell away from trees.
Nigredo left the infirmary thinking about what he should do next. He might have been a naïve child when it came to many things other than fighting U-DO and killing people, but he was definitely not an idiot. He knew by now that something was going terribly wrong here. Still, it wasn't in his nature to give up so easily. He lacked his oldest brother's loud-mouthed obstinacy, and yet he possessed the sort of quiet stubbornness that was able to crush mountains. It was a force to be reckoned with.
He would bathe the cat, simply because he had made such a decision earlier and he was going to stick to it. Moreover, he would see it done before the afternoon drill started. It meant that he didn't have much more time left, but it didn't make his task impossible.
What he didn't realize yet was that, within this short period of time, he would also have to reorganize his views on stubbornness, impossible tasks and the issue of never giving up.
Learning quickly (but not quickly enough) from his mistakes, this time he took a small break to rethink the whole matter more thoroughly. For starters, he found a pair of thick gloves, normally used by the Realians' cleaning crew, who often worked with hot objects and caustic chemicals. The gloves were a bit too large for his hands, but he figured they would do. Then, after a great deal of searching, he carried—more like dragged—a hissing Gaignun to his and the twins' own bathroom, where instead of a long row of showers, there were lockable cabins made of see-through glass. Gaignun would have little room for maneuver inside a one-point-two-one square meter space. Or so Nigredo hoped.
The plan itself was brilliant in its simplicity. The boy decided he would place Gaignun inside a locked cabin, and then switch on the water.
Half an hour later he was standing at attention right in front of his father, explaining just what, for the love of all things holy, had possessed, and then possibly enabled him to a) try to take a shower fully dressed and even wearing a pair of stolen gloves, b) slip on an anti-skidding floor, c) break headfirst through the seemingly unbreakable glass wall of the cabin, d) consequently flood half of the bathroom and get himself a concussion, and finally e) fall from a tree and lacerate his forearms earlier that afternoon. All in the span of barely two hours. It might have sounded like an impressive accomplishment, the way his father had put it, but of course it was more than painfully obvious that the man had been nothing but sarcastic when he had summed everything up and demanded an explanation.
With Dr. Yuriev's gray eyes drilling into him, the boy couldn't think up any suitable story, and besides, Father wasn't the kind of person it would be wise to lie to. Especially not right now, when the man looked so irritated with the fact that someone had had the nerve to pull him away from his important work. Like it or not, Nigredo had to tell him the truth.
Had Dimitri Yuriev been anyone else, namely, had he been more human, he would have most probably stared in mute surprise at his youngest child, and then maybe even laughed. However, being the strict, goal-oriented scientist he was, he merely readjusted his glasses and gave Nigredo an extremely brief lecture on common sense and responsibility. Next, he instructed the nearest female Realian to take the boy to a U.M.N. terminal tomorrow, and find him some publications about domestic pets—the U.M.N. was always censored by the Institute staff, so Nigredo couldn't have done it on his own. The man also threatened to put the animal to sleep if any similar incidents happened again, and casually proceeded to tell the child that he would have to remain under medical observation for the next two hours, which of course meant skipping the afternoon drill. Finally, after a brief exchange of 'Understood?' and 'Yes, sir,' he was done with his youngest son.
He hadn't asked about Gaignun's health, not that the boy had expected it.
Unbeknownst to Nigredo, the traumatized cat was currently hiding in one of the darkish, unused storage rooms of the Institute, seven floors under the ground, where the boy would never dare to look for him. And he was carefully trying to clean his wet fur.
Sure enough, Nigredo found Gaignun only three days later, curled into a ball in Albedo's lap. The cat, stroked by the white-haired boy, had been purring in content until Nigredo decided to come closer. Gaignun flattened his ears and hissed warningly, and when the boy, intent on making amends, didn't keep his distance, he just broke free from Albedo's arms and scurried for shelter, disappearing within the nearest building.
"Hey!" Albedo shouted after the running cat, confusion written all over his face. Rubedo lifted his gaze from a broken holocam he had been unsuccessfully trying to fix.
"It almost seems like Gaignun's afraid of you," the younger of the twins said after a small pause, turning his violet eyes to Nigredo. "What have you done to him?"
The culprit tried to appear as calm and convincing as possible. "Nothing."
"It sure looks like something," the U.R.T.V. leader spoke, scratching his messy red hair.
"I said it's nothing," the youngest boy repeated, having finally stopped in front of his siblings. "What are you doing, Rubedo?"
Two heads turned simultaneously, and the twins looked at each other in mute agreement.
"He's trying to change the subject," Albedo, always the clever one, pointed out.
"Yeah. He's hiding something, it's too obvious."
"Keeping secrets from us. How rude."
Nigredo had had enough life experience with these two to know that the rare moments when they actually agreed to something so easily were the most dangerous moments ever. Under these circumstances, it was best to take to your heels. So he did just that. He turned around and ran. Unfortunately, the twins were faster. They caught him, knocked him to the ground and tickled him until he was forced to start talking.
Needless to say, his confession was an extremely embarrassing one. The older boys were merciless and once again frighteningly unanimous in their actions. They kept making fun of him for days to come.
Life went on, at least for those few U.R.T.V.s who hadn't died in the Miltian Conflict. Nigredo, currently known as Gaignun Kukai, a man well into his twenties, still enjoyed taking a shower a few times a day, because it made him feel clean and refreshed. However, he had never learnt to like water enough to consider swimming one of his favorite pastimes.
Gaignun's sole reason to arrive at his private pool today was to talk to Shelley about work, namely, about some report for the government that needed to be rewritten as soon as possible. He certainly didn't intend to join Jr. and Mary, who were currently getting ready for a lazy Friday afternoon filled with diving, splashing around and lots of sunbathing. Even the ever-dutiful Shelley had already taken her blouse off, but judging from a neat pile of documents and an open terminal on a table in front of her, getting an unhealthy tan wasn't her only priority at the moment.
Unfortunately, in order to reach his trusted friend and assistant, Gaignun needed to get past his brother first. It wasn't as easy as one could have expected, simply because Jr. wouldn't take 'no' for an answer, as he persistently tried to convince his younger sibling to ditch work, shed his clothes and jump into the water.
"Not today," Gaignun repeated for the nth time, trying to walk past the boy who stood by the pool's edge, where he was able to effectively block the man's path, regardless of his own diminutive size. "I've already told you, I'm busy."
"You're always busy! Don't you think you deserve a break once in a while?"
"Someone has to work around here, so that you can play all the time." That was meant as a joke—miracle of miracles, Jr. understood it as such and didn't bristle. "Seriously, though, I can't. Maybe some other time."
"But Gaignun!" the redhead insisted. "Now's the perfect time! It's Friday afternoon, for hell's sake!"
"Friday afternoon or not, I still have my duties."
"An hour of swimming won't make any difference in your schedule."
"I've already said no. Besides, I don't like swimming that much."
"You just don't know what's good for you!"
"Perhaps. Now move and let me pass." Fed up with the whole ridiculous discussion, Gaignun finally brushed the boy aside. He managed to walk a total of two steps before his brother caught the sleeve of his white shirt, forcing him to turn around.
"You know," Jr. pressed in a authoritative tone, which didn't match too well with his bratty face, "workaholism is a serious mental disorder, and you should really try to… loosen up… a bit…" The boy's voice broke and trailed off all of a sudden; he just stood there like an idiot, with his mouth still hanging open. He stared at something behind Gaignun's back, looking as if he had just seen a ghost. The dark-haired businessman merely raised an eyebrow.
"What is it?" he asked in mock concern. "A heat stroke? Has too much of our artificial sun harmed you?"
"Oh shit, I can't believe my eyes," the boy sputtered, turning a deaf ear to Gaignun's nasty remark. "I would've never thought I'd see Shelley sunbathe topless…"
"What…? Where?" A pair of black eyebrows rose even higher. Skeptical as he felt, the man had already begun to turn around. "It's not like her to–"
"Gotcha!" Jr. howled in triumph, and something in Gaignun's brain clicked, though it was a bit too late.
Jr. weighted only about half as much as Gaignun did, but his unimpressive strength, combined with the momentum and Gaignun's complete lack of resistance, was enough to push the taller man back—straight into the emerald pool.
In one moment of illusory inertia, Gaignun knew perfectly well what was happening, but there was absolutely nothing he could do to stop the fall. And so he neither flailed his arms, nor let out an undignified yelp. He merely swore under his breath.
There was a loud splash.
Mary stopped rubbing suntan lotion into her thighs, twisting her neck to see what the commotion was all about. Shelley lifted her gaze from a holofile she had been trying to read. Needless to say, the violet-haired woman was dressed in a one-piece swimming suit and a thin white sarong, which made her look unbelievably good, but perfectly modest at the same time.
As for Jr., he just stood on the edge of the pool with both hands on his hips, grinning stupidly, as if he were the greatest general in all history who had just won a hard battle that would earn him yet another medal. He began to laugh out loud the moment Gaignun's head broke the surface. Flattened black hair, a floating tie, the man's expensive suit bloated with water, green eyes narrowed into slits—it was all too much.
Gaignun didn't look exactly like a drenched, furious cat, but the resemblance was there. Still laughing his head off, Jr. turned on his heel and fled. Smart boy. He had every reason to dread the consequences.