The Terrible News 1
Kyo and Nodoka Law were twins, but you wouldn't know it if you saw them together. Kyo has blonde hair, eyes the color of amethyst, and he is a foot taller than his sister. Nodoka has silver hair, startling green eyes the color of emeralds, and she is a foot smarter than her brother.
The Law twins were at the Omega Opportunity Preparatory School in Switzerland when they received the worst news of their lives.
Kyo was illustrating a comic book with his best friend and roommate, Soul Evans, when his art instructor, Mr. Umber, tapped him on the shoulder and said, "You are wanted in the headmaster's office. Again."
Kyo shrugged. He was sent to Dr. Bartholomew Beasel's office at least once a week (sometimes two or three times) for various infractions of the rules (of which there were many). The only thing that surprised him was that this time Soul wasn't being summoned as well. (They were usually punished together, which saved the headmaster a great deal of time and effort.)
"Give my regards to Dr. Weasel," Soul said.
"I will" Kyo assured him.
As always, Kyo took his time getting to the office. He chatted with friends, went to the restroom to muss his hair and pull his shirttail out (this drove the headmaster wild), and stopped in the kitchen to tell the chef he would be by later to help her roll out the dough for the cheese biscuits. When he finally arrived at the office, he was shocked to see his sister, Nodoka, sitting on one of the uncomfortable chairs outside the headmaster's door.
"What are you doing here?" Little Nodoka never broke the rules.
Nodoka stared at him mutely with an expression he hadn't seen on her face in a very long time. It worried him. "When we get inside," he said, "you'd better let me do the talking."
Nodoka started to respond, but was interrupted by the massive door swinging open, and the tall, skeletal Dr. Bartholomew Beasel beckoning them into his inner sanctum. Seated around his long conference table were the school nurse, counselor, chaplain, their two dormitory supervisors, and three teachers who had known the twins since they began attending the school seven years before.
Kyo looked at the staff's grim, solemn expressions and knew that something had gone very, very wrong. "I didn't do it!" he insisted.
Dr. Beasel ignored Kyo's shirttail, his wild hair, and his all too familiar disclaimer. "There has been a terrible accident," he said. "I'm afraid your parents are…"
Nodoka fainted before Dr. Beasel was able to finish. The nurse jumped up from her chair, and together with the chaplain and counselor's help, laid her out on the sofa.
"I'll get my smelling salts," the nurse said, and ran out of the office.
Kyo, who had seen Nodoka's emotions overwhelm her like this before, was not overly concerned. He glared around the room in angry frustration at the fussing adults until he could stand it no longer, then shouted, "Our parents are what?"
Everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at him helplessly. Dr. Beasel slithered over and put his long slender arm around his least favorite student's shoulders. "I'm afraid your parents are…missing," he said.
Kyo sank into the nearest chair. "Both of them?" Dr. Beasel gave him a sad nod. "A helicopter crash in the Amazon. The pilot was found…dead…a conflagration…"
Kyo blinked. "A what?" He didn't know what the word meant, but it sounded bad.
Nodoka, who had recovered without smelling salts and was now sobbing uncontrollably, said, "A fire, Kyo. A terrible fire." Kyo joined his sister in her bewildered despair.
The next morning the news was all over the local papers and on the lips of every student and teacher in the school. The twins retreated to Nodoka's private table in the back of the school library to escape all the sympathetic murmurs and curious stares. Nodoka spent more time at this table than she did in the dormitory room she shared with her best friend, Maka Albarn. No one was allowed to use Nodoka's table.
"I have something to tell you," she said, holding her stuffed kitty. At least it was thought to be a kitty. The fabric was covered with patches and stitches that looked like scars; its left arm, mouth and ears were long gone. She'd had it since she was a baby and called it "Kitty." It was never far away from her. Kyo referred to it as the "Frankenstein kitty."
He was seated across from her. Scattered over the table were several newspapers, open books, crumpled tissues, Nodoka's Moleskine journal, and scraps of paper filled with mathematical equations, which looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics to Kyo, and made just about as much sense.
"But before I tell you," Nodoka continued, "you have to promise not to say a word about it to anyone else." A promise between the twins was a sacred pact that could not be broken unless the one who had promised was released from the promise by the one who had asked for the promise. A promise was sealed by giving Kitty's remaining arm a squeeze.
Kyo squeezed Kitty's arm.
Nodoka nodded and took a deep breath. "Remember those nightmares I used to have when I was little?"
"How could I forget?" Kyo answered. "They nearly drove you crazy. Don't tell me they're back."
"They're back."
Kyo shuddered. No wonder she'd looked so tense outside the Weasel's door. The nightmares had bothered her from the time she was two and a half years old until she was six. When Nodoka was a little girl, two or three times a week she would wake up screaming. And when she had calmed down enough to speak, she had virtually no recollection of what the dream was about.
"I thought you'd outgrown all that," Kyo said. The nightmares had stopped after the twins arrived at the boarding school.
"I did too." Nodoka shook her head. "But they're back."
"Do you remember anything?" Kyo asked.
"No, but there's something very familiar about all this. Déjà vu, as if I've been through all this before."
"Well, I haven't," Kyo said, feeling as if ants were crawling on his neck. Nodoka sometimes had this effect on him.
She opened one of the newspapers and spread it out on the desk. "Have you seen this article?"
He looked down at the newspaper. Accompanying the long article describing the accident was a dramatic color photograph of the twins' father, Justin Law. The photo had been taken by their mother and the caption below it read: EMILY LAW'S FINAL PHOTOGRAPH.
"Mother's last kiss," he whispered, staring at his father's handsome face, trying to hold back tears.
Their mother believed that taking a photograph was like giving someone a kiss. She had told them if there was no affection as the shutter released, the photograph was not worth taking.
"She must have taken this on Mount Everest," Kyo commented. Their parents had reached the summit just before they flew off to South America to write an article about the rain forest.
In the photo their father was smiling at their mother with mild amusement. His oxygen mask and goggles were pulled down around his neck. His face was windburned and slightly paler around his purple eyes where the goggles had been. It was a bright day the kind of day their mother loved because it gave her photos something she called "depth of field," meaning the background was as sharply focused as the foreground. Their mother was standing next to him, which had meant she had put the camera on a tripod and set the shutter to release on its own. Her curly blond hair spilled over the collar of her down parka. Her right hand was bare. (You can't manipulate a camera with mittens.) A light meter hung around her neck.
Kyo stared at the photograph so he didn't have to watch Nodoka cry. A lump the size of a chicken egg lodged in his throat.
"Do you think Mom got our Mother's Day card?"
The twins had sent the handmade card to her two weeks early, hoping it would get to her in time.
"I hope so," Nodoka said, reaching over and taking his hand.
With his free hand Kyo picked up a used tissue from the table.
Emily and Justin Law were one of the most famous photojournalist teams in the world. Together they had climbed the highest mountains, probed the deepest caves, and rafted the wildest rivers.
After Kyo and Nodoka were born, Emily hung her cameras up and moved into a house in Missoula Montana, while Justin continued traveling and writing to support their new family. He was gone more than he was home, and he missed many of the twins' early accomplishments.
At age three, Kyo could run faster than his athletic mother. At the same age, Nodoka had a vocabulary larger than most sixth graders. At four, Kyo could unlock the back door and start the car. (Fortunately, his legs were too short to reach the accelerator pedal.) At the same age, Nodoka could add a long column of figures in her head and pick a lock as fast as a professional burglar. At five, Kyo sculpted a statue of their neighbor's aggressive dog out of mud that looked so real his mother called the pound to have it picked up. At the same age, Nodoka began to learn French, decided she wanted to become a doctor, and started writing the first of many diaries, using blank Moleskine journals from Italy. Six of the blank journals arrived for her by mail every year directly from the company that made them. Her father used the same kind of journal to keep notes for his articles. Nodoka suspected that he had them sent, but when asked, he would merely smile and say, "They're from a secret admirer."
The turning point for the Law family came when the twins were six years old. Kyo decided he wanted to catch a bear. He and Nodoka dug a five-foot-deep pit in the backyard, covered the opening with brush, and caught their mother, who became as angry as a bear. The twins didn't understand why she was so upset. They had not used the sharpened stakes in the bottom of the pit which the instructions had called for. (Kyo wanted the bear alive for show-and-tell at school.)
While Mrs. Law was in the hospital recovering from her injuries, she got to thinking about the direction her life had taken. She missed her husband. She missed her former independence. But most of all, she missed the wild places her cameras had taken her to. If I'm going to fall into pits, I might as well get paid for it, she decided, and soon after her release she took the twins and joined Mr. Law in the field. This did not work for very long. Nodoka was afraid of everything that moved (and many things that didn't). Kyo was afraid of nothing except ghosts, which he had only read about.
For the twins' own safety, the Laws decided that Kyo and Nodoka should stay at home. They hired a succession of live-in nannies to care for the children, but none of them lasted long. One by one, these disgruntled women fled the house with hastily packed bags, shouting back at the twins' panicky parents, "your son is as wild as a hurricane and that daughter of yours is just plain creepy."
"But they're only first graders!" Mr. and Mrs. Law would yell back helplessly.
To which the fleeing nanny would shout, "First graders from_"
Well, you get the point. The Laws had a major problem with their minors, which was finally resolved when they discovered the Omega Opportunity Preparatory School while on a magazine assignment in the Swiss Alps.
In many ways, the school had been very good for the twins. Nodoka was allowed to be as smart as she wanted to be, and Kyo had learned to turn some of his wild streak into paint strokes and spices. But of the two, Nodoka liked the school best. Kyo merely tolerated it and tried to curb his wildness so he (and more important, his weird sister) would not get booted out. He liked Nodoka that much.
Nodoka and Kyo spent several weeks with their parents every summer and saw them on most holidays, which was more than many of the other students saw of their parents in any given year. During the remaining days of summer the twins were sent to camps and courses all over the world. Nodoka had attended Medical Camp, Physics Camp, Astronomy Camp, Poetry Camp, Shakespeare Camp, and Latin Camp. Kyo had gone to Mountain Climbing Camp, Scuba Diving Camp, Whitewater Camp, and Cowboy Camp.
It was not an ideal family relationship, but Nodoka and Kyo had grown accustomed to their globetrotting parents and accepted them for who they were. Or at least who the twins thought they were.
((A/n ok new fic and yes it is the chap with small changes to it which is why im saying I DO NOT OWN CRYPTID HUNTERS OR SOUL EATER IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM THEY BELONG TO THE RESPECTED OWNERS OF THEM, R&R oh and ill try and be getting my other fics updated too so until the next chapter PEACE….THE WORLD IS MADE OF LOVE AND PEACE virtual cookie to those who know this xDD))