An Amazon Heart To Heart
By S. Mark Gunther
"You're getting closer,
To pushing me off of life's little edge
Cause I'm a loser,
And sooner or later you know I'll be dead
You're getting closer,
You're holding the rope and I'm taking the fall
Cause I'm a loser,
I'm a loser, yeah..." 3 Doors Down - Loser
--
Mousse sat on the rooftop of the Nekohanten, the soft summer wind blowing through his thin hair. The night breeze swirled around him like an inferno of heat and desire. Mousse could feel none of this, as his whole concern was on his friend in the bottle next to him. He took a sip of the dark green elixer in the ornate bottle with an determined arm stride. Acid-like and burning as it passed his tonsils, the slick liquid carried him further and further into the hell he was living in. The hell he was also trying to claw himself out of. And the alcohol helped him as much as it hindered him.
The day's work had ended and Mousse found himself sitting on the roof for the tenth time in the past two weeks. With the bottle. And his memories. And his pain. It made for some deep soul searching and second guessing, the combonation of melancholy and liquer doing strange things to his psyche. Summer cast it's insufferable heat over all it claimed ownership to, but at night it's hold was loosened and it was here that Mousse emerged from the amazon hell. Mousse was growing older and growing up while still being forced to be the lynchpin for Shampoo's desires. Anger, frustration, depression, and all the other emotions that he normally supressed welled up in him like a fountain. It was on the roof that he had begun to let it all out.
The sake had helped. It always did. Mousse developed a taste for the liquer he now sipped as an accident in the kitchen one day. He dropped a glass filled with it and licked the residue of the splash off his fingers. Liking the taste and it's opiate effect on his exhausted body, he poured himself a drink of his own. One drink was all it took, after that he wasn't the same. Now he found himself buying a quart of sake every night after work and stealing away to the rooftop to drink himself into submission. The rooftop solitary sake parties he had conduted served to show him what he had been surpressing in his heart and his mind for the last two years. For as the saying went, the alcohol that he drank did not change who he was, it merely showed him who he was in the first place. He didn't like what he saw in his emotional mirror.
Mousse, in his rooftop drinking sessions, found out that he was a man. An amazon male, a foriegner in a strange land, a misguided lover of someone, but underneath it all he was still a man. He took another sip of the sake as another on of the dark urges that he had been fighting all summer began to flow in his mental theatre. Deeply disturbed urges. Urges that could destroy his life and everything he had worked for. Which, in effect, was a large load of nothing. This point was not lost on the amazon as he sucked down liter after liter of the tonic, night after night after night. It was finally beginning to go away, the love he had forced himself to have for Shampoo was finally beginning to fade into black. And he was not happy with it. But the alcohol helped him to accept it.
The night lights twinkled as Mousse looked over the city. His dark, mournful eyes shedding a tear or two as the pain of his heart ravaged over him like a black wave. Like rain to a desert, his tears bathed his soul. Sake scented tears, nonetheless, but still tears. No one understood his pain, but that was ok. The alcohol helped him accept it all. Nothing could hurt him now. Nothing...not even...
"Mousse?" A gentle voice called out from across the night sky. "What you doing up here? Work still need to be done in kitchen..."
"Shampoo, my work is done for the night. Everything else is your job. Cologne even said it. So go away. I'm spending time with a friend."
"Mousse have no friends. Mousse just stupid duck. Stupid duck that should do Shampoo's work, cuz Shampoo no kill him every time he make Shampoo mad." The young girl walked across the rooftop toward the unmoving, untwitching young man with aggravation in her eyes.
"Then why are you up here now?" Mousse said softly as he turned his head toward the girl. His dark eyes littered with the tears of his pain. Shampoo drew back, not expecting him to be so soft towards her. His normally fawning, droning, love struck voice was replaced with a quiet anger that she didn't feel particularly happy about. Then she noticed the bottle. "Aren't you supposed to be whoring yourself to Ranma? Or mabye flirting with a customer to spite me? Hmmm?"
"I came up here to see what you were doing." She said softly as she switched over to Mandarin. The amazon male noticed the shift to their native language, the familiarity of the tone allowing him to relax more. She walked closer and sat down next to him on the ledge that he occupied with the bottle, eyeing the booze with a wary gaze. "Now I wanna know why you are up here."
"Does it really matter? You hate me anyway...what does it matter what I do on my time?" Mousse answered back acidly, an unnatural amount of bile rising in his throat as he spoke. "It's the summer, I"m lonely, and I'm tired. This alcohol and I have become good friends over the last few weeks. I'd appreciate it if you left."
"I"m not leaving until you talk to me. Mousse, what has happened to you?" Shampoo gently took the bottle from Mousse's large, spider-webbing hands and placed it behind them. "You don't tell me you love me anymore...you barely do your work at the store anymore. Even Ranma doesn't make you angry anymore. And now you are drinking. What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong. I'm just not going to 'buy the lie' anymore. I'm tired of it, and I'm tired of loving you with no hope of getting any of my love back." Mousse's voice dropped to a new level as he spoke his anger to Shampoo. His former love looked onto his slumped shoulders with a kind of detatched shock at his drunken behavior. "I'm tired of feeling like I've wasted an entire decade of my life chasing after someone who doesn't give a shit about me. I'm tired of being the one who keeps this store together while you go play whore to Ranma Saotome. Ironically, I don't even hate Ranma like I thought I did. He's in worse shape than I, being with all those fiancees and no hope for his own decisions.
"Shampoo, I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few weeks, and I've come to the conclusion that I need to leave. I need to let you go and find out who I am. Not who the amazons think I am, not who Cologne thinks I am, not even whom you think I am. I need to learn about me. But I'm not going to be able to leave until I get enough money to make my own way in this world. So for now, I have to grin and bear living with you when you hate me. Hence the alcohol." He paused as he slid his glasses off his head and handed them to Shampoo. Her porcelain-like hands took the spectacles with a reverant, almost remourseful movement. "I'm drinking because it has helped me to find out who I am, and it has helped me tolerate you for the last few weeks. I drink to forget it all and it's working. Now you know the truth. What do you think about that?"
Silence passed over the pair for a few moments as Mousse let a new set of silent tears flow down his cheeks. Seconds passed slowly between them. Feeling a soft flesh against him, he looked over and saw a purple blur leaning against his arm. Shampoo's eyes also leaked tears of pain onto his sleeve and he instinctively wrapped his arm around her and let her cry along with him. Finally she stopped and looked into his eyes, her own eyes showing a river of dissapointment she had been wading in for the longest time.
"Do you think it has been easy for me Mousse? Really, honestly, do you think I like acting like a 'bimbo' for anyone, let alone Ranma? Mousse, you know I don't love you. But what you don't know is that I don't love anyone right now. Not even myself. I'm too busy being an amazon female to love myself enough to get the things I really want." She touched his hand with a fingetip and shivered as he grasped her hand in his. Her words became deeper, slower, even more detailed as she tried to articulate the feelings she kept inside of her for forever and a day.
"I need a friend. I need someone who can just be there for me, and will let me be there for them. No matter what..." Shampoo whispered as she wiped her eyes with his sleeve.
"You mean you need someone to be your emotional trash can," Mousse replied acidly, hurt lacing his voice. "I could have been there for you. Why didn't you ask me?"
"Because you were trying to make me love you when I wanted to be your friend and let whatever I feel for you develop on it own. The timing wasn't right. I hope now it is." She placed Mousse's glasses back on his eyes and watched as he peered into her's, affection now shining where once only anger was. "Mousse, you think I don't care, and you're wrong. You have saved my life more times than I care to remember. You've been there for me more than I'd like to admit, even when I should have been left by everyone. You are the one person still willing to die for me. I never take it for granted that you care so much for me."
"Then why all this? Why break my heart every day? Why weren't you honest with me?" Mousse said softly, laying his hands against hers in a reverant motion.
"You tell me. Do you think you could have just been my friend 2 months ago? When you were ready to kill Ranma over me? When you were ready to follow me blindly into anything, including your own personal hell?" Shampoo looked into his eyes with a sad, regretful glare. "Do you think you could have put your feelings aside and, for once, look for what I'd like to have in someone?"
"...I...I don't know..." Mousse's voice dropped to a new low as for the first time, he heard the anger and the pain in his love's voice. He had accepted that he needed to figure out exactly how he felt about her, but he'd never saw the need for her to find out exactly what she wanted as a woman, not just an amazon. For the first time, he was seeing her as a person and not just a lust filled desire. It hurt his heart to see her in the pain she was in. His arms wrapped around her waist and they embraced as two souls in pain for the very first time.
"Mousse, I just wanna find out who I am as well as help you find out who you are. We've spent too long trying to be something we're not. Mabye before we could have lied to ourselves about ourselves. But not now. Not after we've been here in Nerima. Not after we've been a part of all these people's lives," Shampoo said softly. The wind tussled her soft purple hair around her eyes like a colorful cloud against the night sky. Mousse felt her warmth ajnd her sorrow against his side and it chilled him to the core to feel the dualism in the air. "I know you love me Mousse, but now I just need someone to love me as a friend. Can you do that?"
"I'm not sure I can..." Mousse answered honestly. The thought that he could finally be honest and true with the one person he loved more than anything floored all conscious thought in his mind. For the first time in a long time, Mousse found himself with absolutely nothing to say. His love was telling him that she wanted him as a friend and he was ok with the concept. "But I'd like to try...if we can do this more often. Just me and you up here. No interruptions, no issues, just us. We rarely get to talk anymore. I figure if we're going to be friends again, we need to talk to one another."
"Yes. That would be nice." Shampoo said, her head burying itself into his chest. Minutes passed and they said not a word to one another. The emotional rivers that were flowing in their hearts were filling up with new feelings of togetherness, and in one fell swoop the dams came down. Words floated from their mouths like petals off a tree, and their mutual lonliness began to subside as they confided in one another. Nothing else mattered at that point to the two amazons sitting on the roof of the Nekohanten. Not their lives as amazons, not their fighting to find love, not their expectations given by others. All that mattered was that their friendship was to be ressurected in the soft light of love.
And it was. Slowly but surely, the walls between them began to come down. As Mousse let go of the lust he had held for shampoo, he began to love her in a totally different way. Like a friend feeling fondness for someone they share a repall with, Mousse felt his heart change and his affections refocus towards his former lover. Shampoo began to see even greater how sensitive and loving Mousse was as she let go of the annoyance and frustration she felt towards him. No longer was he just the love struck boy that meant well, nor was he the crush that just wouldn't go away. He was a man. A man who was a gentleman among boys. A man she could depend on.
Soon they ran out of things to talk about, so they merely sat and let the soft summer breezes lull them into a trance-like state. The relaxation they felt towards one another was refreshing, like a rain after a long emotional drought. They didn't want the moment to end. But sooner rather than later, the bells in the far distance reminded Shampoo that the time for her to keep up appearances in her life was nigh. "Mousse, I have to leave. I don't want to go..."
"But you have somewhere you need to go. I know." Mousse nodded as he seperated his arms from her waist. His didn't feel nearly as trepidious as before in letting Shampoo leave, but these were not the normal state of affairs. He knew that they both just could not get up and leave. They had to keep going. They had to make sure they actually could be in a position to leave when they were ready to. "I'll be down in a few minutes. I wanna stay up here a little longer."
"Alright. I'll see you tomorrow morning." Shampoo stood up and walked part of the way to the door. Then she stopped and looked back at her friend's back with a longling look in her eyes. With not a word, she walked back and enveloped him in the largest, deepest hug she could give him. His hands reached back to grasp at her, pulling her, tugging her closer into his body and soul. For a moment, the two warriors were one. Nothing was ever going to seperate them...nothing could stop the love. even if Cologne at that exact moment had tried to intervene, nothing would have been done. There was just too much love there for both of them to handle.
"I will love you someday, Muu Tsu..." Shampoo whispered as she gave the boy one last squeeze before whisking away. The tears that flowed from Mousse's eyes as she let him go were not tears of anger, but tears of joy. The emotional game they both played was now totally revamped, from the ground up. Things would never be the same again. And for Mousse, it was ok. He was Shampoo's best friend again. For the time being, it pacified him.
By S. Mark Gunther
"You're getting closer,
To pushing me off of life's little edge
Cause I'm a loser,
And sooner or later you know I'll be dead
You're getting closer,
You're holding the rope and I'm taking the fall
Cause I'm a loser,
I'm a loser, yeah..." 3 Doors Down - Loser
--
Mousse sat on the rooftop of the Nekohanten, the soft summer wind blowing through his thin hair. The night breeze swirled around him like an inferno of heat and desire. Mousse could feel none of this, as his whole concern was on his friend in the bottle next to him. He took a sip of the dark green elixer in the ornate bottle with an determined arm stride. Acid-like and burning as it passed his tonsils, the slick liquid carried him further and further into the hell he was living in. The hell he was also trying to claw himself out of. And the alcohol helped him as much as it hindered him.
The day's work had ended and Mousse found himself sitting on the roof for the tenth time in the past two weeks. With the bottle. And his memories. And his pain. It made for some deep soul searching and second guessing, the combonation of melancholy and liquer doing strange things to his psyche. Summer cast it's insufferable heat over all it claimed ownership to, but at night it's hold was loosened and it was here that Mousse emerged from the amazon hell. Mousse was growing older and growing up while still being forced to be the lynchpin for Shampoo's desires. Anger, frustration, depression, and all the other emotions that he normally supressed welled up in him like a fountain. It was on the roof that he had begun to let it all out.
The sake had helped. It always did. Mousse developed a taste for the liquer he now sipped as an accident in the kitchen one day. He dropped a glass filled with it and licked the residue of the splash off his fingers. Liking the taste and it's opiate effect on his exhausted body, he poured himself a drink of his own. One drink was all it took, after that he wasn't the same. Now he found himself buying a quart of sake every night after work and stealing away to the rooftop to drink himself into submission. The rooftop solitary sake parties he had conduted served to show him what he had been surpressing in his heart and his mind for the last two years. For as the saying went, the alcohol that he drank did not change who he was, it merely showed him who he was in the first place. He didn't like what he saw in his emotional mirror.
Mousse, in his rooftop drinking sessions, found out that he was a man. An amazon male, a foriegner in a strange land, a misguided lover of someone, but underneath it all he was still a man. He took another sip of the sake as another on of the dark urges that he had been fighting all summer began to flow in his mental theatre. Deeply disturbed urges. Urges that could destroy his life and everything he had worked for. Which, in effect, was a large load of nothing. This point was not lost on the amazon as he sucked down liter after liter of the tonic, night after night after night. It was finally beginning to go away, the love he had forced himself to have for Shampoo was finally beginning to fade into black. And he was not happy with it. But the alcohol helped him to accept it.
The night lights twinkled as Mousse looked over the city. His dark, mournful eyes shedding a tear or two as the pain of his heart ravaged over him like a black wave. Like rain to a desert, his tears bathed his soul. Sake scented tears, nonetheless, but still tears. No one understood his pain, but that was ok. The alcohol helped him accept it all. Nothing could hurt him now. Nothing...not even...
"Mousse?" A gentle voice called out from across the night sky. "What you doing up here? Work still need to be done in kitchen..."
"Shampoo, my work is done for the night. Everything else is your job. Cologne even said it. So go away. I'm spending time with a friend."
"Mousse have no friends. Mousse just stupid duck. Stupid duck that should do Shampoo's work, cuz Shampoo no kill him every time he make Shampoo mad." The young girl walked across the rooftop toward the unmoving, untwitching young man with aggravation in her eyes.
"Then why are you up here now?" Mousse said softly as he turned his head toward the girl. His dark eyes littered with the tears of his pain. Shampoo drew back, not expecting him to be so soft towards her. His normally fawning, droning, love struck voice was replaced with a quiet anger that she didn't feel particularly happy about. Then she noticed the bottle. "Aren't you supposed to be whoring yourself to Ranma? Or mabye flirting with a customer to spite me? Hmmm?"
"I came up here to see what you were doing." She said softly as she switched over to Mandarin. The amazon male noticed the shift to their native language, the familiarity of the tone allowing him to relax more. She walked closer and sat down next to him on the ledge that he occupied with the bottle, eyeing the booze with a wary gaze. "Now I wanna know why you are up here."
"Does it really matter? You hate me anyway...what does it matter what I do on my time?" Mousse answered back acidly, an unnatural amount of bile rising in his throat as he spoke. "It's the summer, I"m lonely, and I'm tired. This alcohol and I have become good friends over the last few weeks. I'd appreciate it if you left."
"I"m not leaving until you talk to me. Mousse, what has happened to you?" Shampoo gently took the bottle from Mousse's large, spider-webbing hands and placed it behind them. "You don't tell me you love me anymore...you barely do your work at the store anymore. Even Ranma doesn't make you angry anymore. And now you are drinking. What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong. I'm just not going to 'buy the lie' anymore. I'm tired of it, and I'm tired of loving you with no hope of getting any of my love back." Mousse's voice dropped to a new level as he spoke his anger to Shampoo. His former love looked onto his slumped shoulders with a kind of detatched shock at his drunken behavior. "I'm tired of feeling like I've wasted an entire decade of my life chasing after someone who doesn't give a shit about me. I'm tired of being the one who keeps this store together while you go play whore to Ranma Saotome. Ironically, I don't even hate Ranma like I thought I did. He's in worse shape than I, being with all those fiancees and no hope for his own decisions.
"Shampoo, I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few weeks, and I've come to the conclusion that I need to leave. I need to let you go and find out who I am. Not who the amazons think I am, not who Cologne thinks I am, not even whom you think I am. I need to learn about me. But I'm not going to be able to leave until I get enough money to make my own way in this world. So for now, I have to grin and bear living with you when you hate me. Hence the alcohol." He paused as he slid his glasses off his head and handed them to Shampoo. Her porcelain-like hands took the spectacles with a reverant, almost remourseful movement. "I'm drinking because it has helped me to find out who I am, and it has helped me tolerate you for the last few weeks. I drink to forget it all and it's working. Now you know the truth. What do you think about that?"
Silence passed over the pair for a few moments as Mousse let a new set of silent tears flow down his cheeks. Seconds passed slowly between them. Feeling a soft flesh against him, he looked over and saw a purple blur leaning against his arm. Shampoo's eyes also leaked tears of pain onto his sleeve and he instinctively wrapped his arm around her and let her cry along with him. Finally she stopped and looked into his eyes, her own eyes showing a river of dissapointment she had been wading in for the longest time.
"Do you think it has been easy for me Mousse? Really, honestly, do you think I like acting like a 'bimbo' for anyone, let alone Ranma? Mousse, you know I don't love you. But what you don't know is that I don't love anyone right now. Not even myself. I'm too busy being an amazon female to love myself enough to get the things I really want." She touched his hand with a fingetip and shivered as he grasped her hand in his. Her words became deeper, slower, even more detailed as she tried to articulate the feelings she kept inside of her for forever and a day.
"I need a friend. I need someone who can just be there for me, and will let me be there for them. No matter what..." Shampoo whispered as she wiped her eyes with his sleeve.
"You mean you need someone to be your emotional trash can," Mousse replied acidly, hurt lacing his voice. "I could have been there for you. Why didn't you ask me?"
"Because you were trying to make me love you when I wanted to be your friend and let whatever I feel for you develop on it own. The timing wasn't right. I hope now it is." She placed Mousse's glasses back on his eyes and watched as he peered into her's, affection now shining where once only anger was. "Mousse, you think I don't care, and you're wrong. You have saved my life more times than I care to remember. You've been there for me more than I'd like to admit, even when I should have been left by everyone. You are the one person still willing to die for me. I never take it for granted that you care so much for me."
"Then why all this? Why break my heart every day? Why weren't you honest with me?" Mousse said softly, laying his hands against hers in a reverant motion.
"You tell me. Do you think you could have just been my friend 2 months ago? When you were ready to kill Ranma over me? When you were ready to follow me blindly into anything, including your own personal hell?" Shampoo looked into his eyes with a sad, regretful glare. "Do you think you could have put your feelings aside and, for once, look for what I'd like to have in someone?"
"...I...I don't know..." Mousse's voice dropped to a new low as for the first time, he heard the anger and the pain in his love's voice. He had accepted that he needed to figure out exactly how he felt about her, but he'd never saw the need for her to find out exactly what she wanted as a woman, not just an amazon. For the first time, he was seeing her as a person and not just a lust filled desire. It hurt his heart to see her in the pain she was in. His arms wrapped around her waist and they embraced as two souls in pain for the very first time.
"Mousse, I just wanna find out who I am as well as help you find out who you are. We've spent too long trying to be something we're not. Mabye before we could have lied to ourselves about ourselves. But not now. Not after we've been here in Nerima. Not after we've been a part of all these people's lives," Shampoo said softly. The wind tussled her soft purple hair around her eyes like a colorful cloud against the night sky. Mousse felt her warmth ajnd her sorrow against his side and it chilled him to the core to feel the dualism in the air. "I know you love me Mousse, but now I just need someone to love me as a friend. Can you do that?"
"I'm not sure I can..." Mousse answered honestly. The thought that he could finally be honest and true with the one person he loved more than anything floored all conscious thought in his mind. For the first time in a long time, Mousse found himself with absolutely nothing to say. His love was telling him that she wanted him as a friend and he was ok with the concept. "But I'd like to try...if we can do this more often. Just me and you up here. No interruptions, no issues, just us. We rarely get to talk anymore. I figure if we're going to be friends again, we need to talk to one another."
"Yes. That would be nice." Shampoo said, her head burying itself into his chest. Minutes passed and they said not a word to one another. The emotional rivers that were flowing in their hearts were filling up with new feelings of togetherness, and in one fell swoop the dams came down. Words floated from their mouths like petals off a tree, and their mutual lonliness began to subside as they confided in one another. Nothing else mattered at that point to the two amazons sitting on the roof of the Nekohanten. Not their lives as amazons, not their fighting to find love, not their expectations given by others. All that mattered was that their friendship was to be ressurected in the soft light of love.
And it was. Slowly but surely, the walls between them began to come down. As Mousse let go of the lust he had held for shampoo, he began to love her in a totally different way. Like a friend feeling fondness for someone they share a repall with, Mousse felt his heart change and his affections refocus towards his former lover. Shampoo began to see even greater how sensitive and loving Mousse was as she let go of the annoyance and frustration she felt towards him. No longer was he just the love struck boy that meant well, nor was he the crush that just wouldn't go away. He was a man. A man who was a gentleman among boys. A man she could depend on.
Soon they ran out of things to talk about, so they merely sat and let the soft summer breezes lull them into a trance-like state. The relaxation they felt towards one another was refreshing, like a rain after a long emotional drought. They didn't want the moment to end. But sooner rather than later, the bells in the far distance reminded Shampoo that the time for her to keep up appearances in her life was nigh. "Mousse, I have to leave. I don't want to go..."
"But you have somewhere you need to go. I know." Mousse nodded as he seperated his arms from her waist. His didn't feel nearly as trepidious as before in letting Shampoo leave, but these were not the normal state of affairs. He knew that they both just could not get up and leave. They had to keep going. They had to make sure they actually could be in a position to leave when they were ready to. "I'll be down in a few minutes. I wanna stay up here a little longer."
"Alright. I'll see you tomorrow morning." Shampoo stood up and walked part of the way to the door. Then she stopped and looked back at her friend's back with a longling look in her eyes. With not a word, she walked back and enveloped him in the largest, deepest hug she could give him. His hands reached back to grasp at her, pulling her, tugging her closer into his body and soul. For a moment, the two warriors were one. Nothing was ever going to seperate them...nothing could stop the love. even if Cologne at that exact moment had tried to intervene, nothing would have been done. There was just too much love there for both of them to handle.
"I will love you someday, Muu Tsu..." Shampoo whispered as she gave the boy one last squeeze before whisking away. The tears that flowed from Mousse's eyes as she let him go were not tears of anger, but tears of joy. The emotional game they both played was now totally revamped, from the ground up. Things would never be the same again. And for Mousse, it was ok. He was Shampoo's best friend again. For the time being, it pacified him.