This story is set within the year after the Mew Mews defeated Deep Blue and the aliens left. Since the anime established Ichigo's age as 13, she and Lettuce and Mint are 14 years old at the time of this story. Zakuro is about 5 years older, and Pudding is about 5 years younger. The "a la Mode" story has not occurred, and so Mew Berry does not exist in the universe of this story.
The story begins rather slowly. I'm sorry if you get bored with it before it gets interesting.
The Tokyo Mew Mews . . . . .
in
Fall from Grace
Chapter 1
Grace
Midorikawa Lettuce looked around for a second for help, but no help was coming. She was in the library again, she had an armful of books again, and she had stumbled and dropped them again. And she was alone, again. Being alone was like being clumsy; it was part of being Lettuce. She really would have liked it if one of the boys there in the library would have helped her pick everything up – that was what boys were supposed to do, after all, when a girl needed help. But no one ever seemed to help Lettuce. Maybe she wasn't a girl, in their minds. She wasn't one of the guys, either, of course. She was just Lettuce.
She managed to get all of the books back into her arms after dropping two of them a second time, and stood up. She needed a table to spread them all out, but all of the tables in sight were occupied. She headed farther toward the back of the library, nearly dropping the books again once. There was a table at the very back, behind the stacks to the right. She could use that table, she thought.
But when she got there, it was not empty. A tall, dark-haired young man sat there alone with his own stack of books. His brow was furrowed as he read; clearly something deeply concerned him. And Lettuce knew him: Aoyama Masaya, the boyfriend of her friend Ichigo; a magical character, to be sure, whose alter-ego was the Blue Knight. And something was troubling him.
And Lettuce was Lettuce, kind and concerned to a fault. And so she quietly walked over and placed her stack of books on that same table, across from him. He looked up, his dark eyes taking in the one who stood there.
"Ah. Midorikawa-san!" he said in a low voice. "Yes, have a seat here, please! There's room for both of us." Actually, there wasn't, with all of the books the both of them had. But Masaya took his own large stack of books and placed them on the floor, making room for Lettuce's. She managed to place hers on the table, spilling only one to the floor. And before she could begin to bend down and pick it up, the boy had left his chair and scooped it up for her, placing it carefully on top of the stack.
Lettuce sat in her chair and looked at him. He smiled, placing her at ease, and for some reason she did not feel an attack of her usual shyness. And so she said softly and with more than a little trepidation, "Aoyama-san, I couldn't help but notice something has you worried."
Lettuce knew that she had crossed far over a line into his private affairs when she asked that; but she was Lettuce, always ready to help.
He looked into the huge blue eyes that stared softly at him from behind the big round glasses. He could read the real concern there, and so he said, "I just wish it was all so easy as it seemed to be when I was younger."
"Easy?" the girl asked. "What was easy?"
"Everything," the boy responded. "Everything. Like this book, here. You know I've always wanted to protect the environment. I've dedicated my life to that, you know. But it seemed so easy. There were bad guys who polluted, and good guys who stopped the pollution, and I was going to be one of the good guys. So easy! But it isn't that simple. Protecting the environment has a lot of economic costs. If you protect too much, you hurt the economy. That means you hurt real people. And really, as it says here, environmental protection is really a conceit of a rich economy. If you hurt the economy, you make it harder to protect the environment."
"How so?" Lettuce asked, quite enthralled with his little dissertation.
He shrugged, and said, "To give a simple example, you don't have much interest in protecting an endangered species – like, say, the finless porpoise – when your kids are starving, and you can feed them porpoise."
The finless porpoise, of course, was the endangered animal whose DNA gave Lettuce her magical powers. Yet she understood, totally, for she loved children. So she said, "I think I'm starting to understand, now. We want to leave our kids with an unpolluted world, but to do that, we'd destroy the economy and leave them in poverty. But if we let the economy run wild, we'd destroy the environment and leave our kids a polluted mess."
Aoyama nodded, and said, "So you see, it's not easy. You have to have a strong economy, and you have to have a clean environment, and you want to leave both to your kids, but the two seem to work against each other. And so it's not easy."
Lettuce nodded. Masaya was so deep, so intelligent, so wise for someone so young. It was so interesting to talk to him! For a second she felt a twinge of jealousy toward Ichigo, who had this man as her boyfriend. And when she felt this, her eyes fell, and the boy said softly, "Oh, I'm boring you with all this heavy stuff. I'm sorry, I'll let you alone."
Lettuce shook her head vigorously. "No! Not at all! It's just – it's just that I'm not used to this kind of talk, so deep and all." She smiled, and went on, "It isn't normal for a guy your age to be thinking about the world we'll be leaving for our kids."
"Yes, it's rather odd," Aoyama said, smiling in return. "Not too many guys our age think much of having kids. I think girls do, more." He was quiet for a second, and then changed the subject. "And you, Midorikawa-san – what are you working on, with all of those thick old books?"
"Literature assignment," the green-haired girl replied. "The legend of Tokoyo. I have to write a report, and my opinions about the story. It's due next Monday."
"Yes, the legend of Tokoyo," the boy replied. "You know, it's interesting. We Japanese, we can be so odd in the stories we love. Our history has made women subservient; if you dream of a career beyond nursing, Midorikawa-san, it's because we've picked up those values from the Westerners. But our stories are filled with girl heroes. Rather like, I would say, the Mew Mews. Only you girls aren't a fairy tale or a legend, are you?" He smiled shyly.
"You know, that's just the way I'll theme the report," Lettuce said. "About how while Japanese history suppressed women, Japanese myth and legend made them heroes." She smiled broadly. "Aoyama-kun, you help me so much!"
He smiled in return, and their conversation went on, turning from one academic subject to the other, even touching on that most dreaded subject of them all, algebra. Lettuce was fascinated to find a boy who cared about the things she cared about, and though she really needed to get working on her report, she kept allowing herself to indulge in just another few minutes of conversation, and the boy seemed most happy to oblige her. In fact, she thought that they must have wasted nearly half an hour, and it must have been close to supper time, when they were interrupted.
It was the librarian, who told them they had to leave. It was closing time! Lettuce blushed – it could not be that late, could it? She checked her cell phone for the time – 9:00 PM! And she blurted out, "Oh, Aoyama-kun, I'm so sorry! I wasted your whole evening! I'm sorry, I'm sorry…"
But the boy just smiled and shook his head. "Midorikawa-san, this was one of the best-spent evenings in my life. I haven't enjoyed a conversation this much in ages. Really! So no more apologies to me. Though you might want to call your parents on that cell phone and tell them why you're so late. I think an apology might be needed there."
Lettuce blushed deeply and thanked him profusely as she punched up her parents' number. It was not like her to be late, ever; and she was sure they would be worried. She made the call, and the apologies; and Aoyama waited for her, to help her carry that huge pile of books that she had not used. He was such a gentleman, she thought. That Ichigo was so lucky to have him!
Author's note: The legend of Tokoyo is a Japanese folk-tale. In it the emperor goes rather bonkers and banishes a famous warrior to the distant Oki Islands, in the Sea of Japan off of northern Honshu. Tokoyo his daughter goes to rescue him, knowing full well that the Oki Islands are a dangerous abode of dragons. After some adventures she reaches the islands, where she finds that the locals are in the act of offering a maiden to a sea-dragon keep it at bay. She takes a dagger and plunges into the sea in place of the maiden. She is a pearl-diver so she can swim underwater a long time, and she finds the dragon, slays it, and also finds a magical statue which bears a curse that made the emperor go bonkers. So she breaks the curse and saves her father, as well as saving the maiden and the people of the Oki Islands from the dragon. The tale is very much like a "King Arthur" heroic romance - slay the dragon, save the girl and incidentally the kingdom - but the hero isn't a Knight of the Round Table, but a young woman.