Chapter 1: What!? You can't just end it like that!
"What!? You can't just end it like that!"
There are many reasons I have my job, but if I had to select the most important one? I'd choose my limitless patience. Every time.
"I mean, come on!"
My patience is more than just limitless. Some of my peers have an idea of 'patience' that amounts to little more than zoning out when things start to irritate them.
Not me.
"Sure, in the end we mighta saved the world, stopped the baddies, and cracked the heavens..."
My patience is attentive. In the face of otherwise interminable boredom it never ignores you. It never belittles you. My patience makes you feel like the center of the universe. Like an implacable glacier, it weathers your resolve with little more than time and pressure, until it grinds you down to whatever I require.
At least... in theory.
"But it can't just end there! He didn't save the girl!"
"You heard him yourself," I replied, forcing a word in edgewise in my charge's endless tide of raving. At times, his blathering seemed to rival the scale of the galactic titans we had observed not so long ago.
"Yeah, yeah," he cut right back in, not missing a beat. "The dead should stay dead. I'm not deaf, y'know! Even if I'm not sure how my ears are supposed to work when I'm like this..."
"You don't have ears or anything else like that," I said for what very possibly could have been the millionth time. "It's just you making a mental projection to make sense of your current-"
"You don't think I know that!?" my charge interrupted yet again. Speaking of imaginary organs, had I a tongue I'd probably have been biting it non-stop. If only in pursuit of some salve that might assist in tolerating this level of impudence.
"I was merely-"
"Put a sock in it, Shinigami. Just so ya know? You won't get me to go against my blood brother, either. If he says the dead should stay dead? That's the way it should be - no ifs, ands, or buts about it."
For once, I was willing to brush off his brutish - and incorrect - labeling of me as 'Shinigami', his idea of a death god bogeyman. I knew an opportunity when I saw one.
"But, Kamina," I said, modulating what he was sure to interpret as a 'voice' to achieve maximum emotional response, "if that is the case... why are you still here?"
On an emotional level, I knew that had shaken his resolve. With vanishingly few exceptions, those individuals who have died and continue to linger are possessed with egos timid and frightened. That they vainly cling to lives that no longer exist, indeed, is a testament to the purity of their overwhelming terror. And Kamina, I long grown to understand, was more terrified than most, not less. But his words continued to betray no fear, despite their transparency.
"Hah! As if that would matter in the slightest, Shini. After all, I'm the great Kamina! And more importantly, I'm not dead!"
Fantastic. This again.
"The beating of a man's soul pumps in time with the rhythm of his destiny! It's the pulse of that soul - not blood or flesh, but the singular burning spirit of the lone wolf - that's how I know I'm alive!"
He tried to strike a dramatic pose, disregarding the reality of him having no body with which he could make a pose with in the first place. "You've done pretty good to pull the wool over everyone's eyes, Shinigami. But sooner or later you had to know the spirit of the wolf would grow to burn too brightly for you to escape. It shines through the power of our manly souls, and now we see your cheap, sheepish tricks for what they are!"
I had long learned to stop marveling at his impromptu, often incoherent monologues, yes. But there was a kernel of truth in this. Or, at least, something that I did not understand.
Kamina had crossed time and space (and in truth, much more than that) to save his friends when they had been brought to their lowest point of despair. Honestly, I was still at a loss at how he was able to perceive what was required to accomplish a feat like that in the first place. For years it had just been him, alone... if you didn't count me, the sap with the thankless job of trying to get him to accept his fate and move on from his long expired mortal coil.
But now? Now it seemed like Kamina was perceiving EVERYTHING.
"Shini, listen. The things we couldn't do, the people we couldn't save, the trying to fool me into thinking I'm dead... I could almost forgive all that and just let it go. The great Kamina is nothing if not magnanimous in victories both large and small."
Well, isn't that charitable of him.
"But, this new thing that's coming," Kamina said, pausing in hesitation. For the first time I could sense true discord lurking between his words. "They're not gonna be able to stop it-"
Now it was my turn to interrupt. "Is that the great Kamina I hear, doubting his blood brother?"
"Hey, screw you! This is different and you know it!"
I couldn't really argue with that. But I also couldn't resist taking that cheap shot. Was there a limit to my patience, after all? I couldn't discount the possibility; I had never had to test it to this extent until now. Most things that die aren't even dealt with by me or my peers. The instinctive understanding of death propels them without any interference on my part.
My role, to put it very crudely, is to encourage those who lack understanding. Or, more rarely, the obstinate. Normally the process is done in a handful of mere moments, if that. Sometimes it can take longer. On rare exceptions there are those who may hold out for entire days, if the deceased is particularly reticent. But not seven years. I couldn't understand how he hadn't gone crazy by now.
Assuming the remote possibility that he hadn't already been crazy when he got here.
"So you can do your worst, Shinigami! I'm not going to budge one inch until I can get out of here, no matter how long it takes! A real man doesn't just give up because someone tells him he's dead. He cuts through the barriers of existence with his sword, the sword of his very life. And the blood that sword spills will make a path-"
"Okay."
"-to your destiny, a destiny that wait what."
This wasn't the ideal solution. I didn't know any of my peers personally that had ever resorted to it, and briefly contemplated the approximation of embarrassment in my employing it. But Kamina was correct, for once. Perhaps more importantly, I was beginning to realize this might be the only option that he was willing to go along with. And I really didn't want to stay here forever, either.
"I'll let you go back. You win."
"I... I..."
My goodness. Had I known this suggestion would have actually rendered him speechless, I might have acquiesced a lot sooner.
"Hey, what's the big idea!?" Kamina said, regaining his composure with infinitely more alacrity than I had hoped for. "After all this time, you just give up? No grand realization? No villainous breakdown? What kind of trick are you trying to pull!?"
"Not a trick," I replied, trying not to take too much pleasure in finally having my charge on the defensive. "This is not my preferred option. But given the situation, I am prepared to agree to it."
"And what is 'it', exactly, Shini?"
"Reincarnation," I said haltingly. "Of a sort. On the condition you give me your word that once you die, you come with me once and for all."
"Yeah, yeah, that's fine, whatever." Even if it was not evident in his words themselves, in the moment I could feel the effervescent self-satisfaction oozing from every facet of his emotional state. "You just drop me off in Kamina City - man, that sounds good to say out loud - and I'll get to warning Simon, and then-"
"That won't work."
"What!?" The burning of Kamina's emotions re-erupted tenfold as my words shut his plan down. "Give me one good reason why the hell not!"
I took the time and effort to approximate the vocalization of a sigh before speaking again:
"You're dead."
"...oh. Then... huh?"
"If I bring your soul back through space-time to live once again, it has to inhabit the proper receptacle. Your life. Your body."
"So... what? Something ridiculous, like, time travel, then?"
After watching his friends seize the power of a colossus bigger than galaxies, now he wants to complain about something being ridiculous. "Probably not as you would think of it. All the memories, the things you'd want to do all over again... it won't work like that. The soul of your past is just as much Kamina as you are Kamina, right now. One soul cannot supplant its twin. Rather, in such a situation, the two would combine."
"Manly combining, yeah! The graceful beauty of soaring through the air with your fighting spirit-"
"Yes, combining," I said, cutting him off brusquely. "Far from bringing all your knowledge of the future back to change things, if you focused with all your might you could possibly change... two or three decisions that you made, tops."
"Two or three?" Kamina asked. I could feel he was nearly balking. "That's it?"
"Yes," I confirmed. "And I can guarantee you this, Kamina. No matter what else changes..."
"Hmm?"
"You will still die."
In an instant, it felt like the embers of Kamina's burning passion had been smothered with a totality that the brutal isolation of seven years had never been able to accomplish.
"On the same hour, of the same day, on the same battlefield of your previous death," I continued. "You will fight, and you will die. Nothing you or I can do can change that."
Kamina fell silent, and an eternity seemed to pass in the wake of my declaration.
I was keenly aware of how much of a gamble I was taking by making this suggestion. The eternal grind of our present situation did have the advantage of being eternity. To resist forever was an impossibility that sooner or later any soul would submit under. I was trading it for a risk; a wager that was as blunt as it was selfish, as fearsome as it was tantalizing.
And yet I had to wonder... perhaps I had come on too strong?
"Well, then... what the hell are we waiting for!?"
And just like that, the dying embers of indecisive emotion were now giving way to a raging conflagration of determination. If only I were able to intentionally encourage him like this, I realized, I would have been done years ago.
"Remember," I admonished, hoping to rein my charge in before he got too pumped up. "Once you die again, you finally give up this fight and come with me. On your honor-"
"Idiot!"
Well. That didn't work.
"You think the great Kamina would go back on his word? Just who the hell do you think I am!?"
"Clearly not someone who tires of his catchphrases even after their nonstop repetition in total isolation..." Okay, maybe my patience was fraying a little more than I had letting on.
"Don't get me wrong, Shini," Kamina continued, his voice growing grave and as serious as I could reasonably hope to expect. "The great Kamina would never dream of stealing the spotlight from his blood brother. I'm just going back to give him a little push in the right direction."
"If you say so," I said skeptically. "Then we have an accord, Kamina. Your fate is your own, for the little time you have it."
The decision made, I broke the endless nothingness with a nearly countless series of images. Kamina in his infancy, Kamina with his father, Kamina fighting, Kamina embracing... Kamina dying. It was all there, in the dizzying fractal imagery. "Would you like to start at the beginning of your life, the end, or...?"
"Oh, no, Shini. I have just the place to start..."
Normally I would have just been relieved at the prospect of this coming to a close, but as much as I had come to appreciate my charge's lack of sanity, I was still fairly confident that he wasn't stupid. The fact that I was having more reservations about doing this than him now was just so quintessentially... Kamina.
Well, I mused as I initiated a process that, for the first time in my existence, I didn't know the outcome of. At least we won't run the risk of getting bored now.
