The Get Backers universe belongs to Yuya Aoki and Rando Ayamine.
Star-Crossed
Chapter One: Midou Ban and the Invulnerable Woman
If looks could kill, Midou Ban's sleeping partner would have died a very painful death at two forty-six a.m. on the morning of December seventeenth – Ban's twenty-first birthday.
Amano Ginji was, of course, sleeping soundly. There had been a time, back when they had first left Mujenjou together, that his sleep had been troubled, broken by terrible dreams and unfamiliar noises. Some of the terrors in his sleep he had refused to name; recognizing the horror with which his partner regarded those terrors, Ban had never pressed him to reveal the substance of his nightmares. In return, when he awakened from his own occasional horrors, Ginji would simply express his regrets that Ban had dreamt badly, and wait, quiet and uncharacteristically reserved, while Ban again sought slumber.
Tonight, though, Ban would have liked to have been able to discuss his dream, and his irritating partner was snoozing comfortably in the passenger's seat, oblivious.
That ought to have been proof enough that his dream was unusual. When Ban's old guilts and hurts surfaced in nightmares, Ginji inevitably wakened him. How Ginji knew when to do so was a puzzle Ban had never solved, and in fact, had stopped wondering about it entirely.
Until tonight.
To the best of his ability to recollect, Ban had never talked about his nightmares, not with Ginji, and not with anyone else. They generally consisted of strangely contorted memories, some half-forgotten and some starkly clear, but all so painful that it seemed they had been scored into the very essence of his being. Every once in a while, his phenomenal imagination dreamed up things that belonged in horror flicks, not in anyone's head. A part of him always knew that those dreams were false, however, so he really didn't mind them, he wasn't afraid. Remembered or imagined, very, very few nightmares had the power to frighten Midou Ban, who was the master of bad dreams.
This bad dream hadn't frightened him, not while he had been dreaming. He hadn't even been a part of it. Yet, he had witnessed it with such clarity, had been so emotionally engaged with the strangers in his mind, that the nightmare felt less like a dream than a vision, and now, wide-awake, he could admit to the little ripple of fear that shuddered down his spine.
It felt as though the Jagan had been used against him, as though something outside of his own brain had been forced into his mind. The dream itself had been strange, set in a place he had never been, but recognized, and unfolding in a language he had never heard, but which he understood.
Ginji hadn't wakened. Ban watched him with a sour frown for a moment before shoving his door open to step out of the Ladybug. Pulling his Marlboros from his shirt pocket, he cursed under his breath; only one cigarette remained. He lit up and leaned against the Ladybug's door, eyes fixed on the still-dark eastern horizon.
Finding the Ophiochus constellation, he scowled at it. His dream may have had nothing at all to do with the fact that he was the Serpent-bearer, but his instincts told him otherwise.
"Ban-chan?" Ginji murmured sleepily from the car.
"Just smoking, Ginji."
"It's three in the morning." His partner stretched tiredly, looking at Ban with worried eyes.
"I know that, doofus," he snapped. Then he relented; he had wanted Ginji awake, after all. "Sorry. Weird dream. I'm a little off." He took a long drag off his Marlboro.
Ginji got out of the car, and rounded the hood to stand beside Ban. "Weird, huh." It wasn't really a question, and a reluctant smile tugged at Ban's lips around the cigarette. Ginji wasn't exactly subtle; curious but unwilling to pry, the former thunder god was inviting Ban to share.
"Yeah, weird," he replied, and out of sheer devilry, he divulged nothing further, looking for the slightest shadow of aggravation on his partner's face. Ginji was hard to annoy – Ban sometimes felt it was one of his missions in life to discover a way to get under his partner's skin. He felt a twinge of guilt when disappointment rather than exasperation flickered in Ginji's eyes.
"I dreamed about a woman," he admitted, turning his eyes back up to the sky.
Ginji leaned against the car beside him. "What kind of a woman? A pretty woman?"
"Gorgeous," Ban answered candidly.
Ginji grinned. "Well, what's so weird about that? I dream about pretty girls all the time."
Ban rolled his eyes and snorted. "Her being pretty probably would have been a lot more interesting if there hadn't been a dozen people trying to kill her."
Ginji's smile fled. "Why?"
Ban huffed, blowing a cloud of smoke into the parking lot. "They were afraid." He tried not to smile as Ginji attempted seriousness. Ginji failed. Ban didn't.
"Maybe you should start at the beginning, Ban-chan."
He pursed his lips, took a final drag off the Marlboro, and began, half-reliving the dream as he spoke.
Running. She was running, bare brown feet falling heavily on the flagstone, white linen robe and silky black hair flying out behind her as she fled. They were coming for her. He would not be spurned a second time.
They called for her, and her feet fell harder and faster on the painted pavement.
A door, a door, anyplace to hide.
Her luck could not hold; the road ran out, disappeared in the limestone of the palace's southern wall.
They dragged her back, pulled at her hair and slapped at her breasts when she defied them.
He was waiting.
Ban had been spared the details of the girl's rape, and omitted it entirely as he related the dream to Ginji.
"So, my dear," the old man said when he had finished with her, "I am not good enough for the likes of Khaldun's daughter?"
For answer, she spat at him. He backhanded her almost absently, and sent her sprawling across the floor.
"You're a fool," the old man noted matter-of-factly, "for I have powers most men dream of, but will not credit, even when they witness them with their own eyes. I will yet forgive you, and reward you with all of the things you most desire, if you will yield to me. If not, you'll be punished for your insolence."
"I will never yield," she said through gritted teeth. "I would rather die."
The old man lowered his face to her, his expression bemused. "There are many who would claim that death is a blessing. Before I have done with you, you will have joined them."
He beat her then, with his hands and with a cane rod designed specifically to raise welts, but not to draw blood. When he was done, he handed her a goblet of wine, his solicitousness at odds with his brutality. Weary and in pain, she took the cup without complaint and downed it.
And then she slept.
When she wakened, she was laying on a stone slab, beneath a tent, an ibu, the so-called 'place of purification' in the complex of Anubis' temple. She smelled of palm wine and river water, and her fingers were sticky with sweet wine. A priest wearing the jackal mask approached; she heard a boy scream that its eyes had opened.
It took her several moments to realize that 'it' meant her. The jackal-headed priest turned away, to calm the boy – an apprentice, presumably. "Sometimes the eyes do open. It is unimportant. Come, and I will teach you the most important first cut."
She bolted upright, and the boy and the jackal-headed priest screamed. She scrambled off of the slab, feeling as though she were going to be sick; the stench of death and natron filled her nostrils. Gagging, she stumbled away.
The screaming brought others, and they gathered round her like lionesses round an unexpectedly aggressive target. Someone thought to attack her with one of the sacred embalming knives, and she shrieked as the black obsidian of the holy implement fell upon her.
It should have been a clean stroke, but the knife shattered into a thousand fragments of black glass against her skin.
Her would-be murderer raced away, leaving others to attempt what he had been unable to do. Yet every blade that landed upon her met the same end as the first, and she was surrounded by priests and apprentices and black glass before she finally collapsed of exhaustion.
She woke again, in a room with four limestone walls painted with prayers for protection against Osiris' cursed. There were no windows. And there were no doors.
Ginji stared at him, wide-eyed. "It sounds like you were watching a movie, Ban-chan."
Ban nodded, watching the sky. It was an hour or more until dawn, but he fancied that the horizon looked a little brighter than it had. "I saw her one more time," he said, and couldn't suppress a slight shiver.
Ginji waited silently.
"She was standing alone in an empty city. I think it was probably a necropolis, a complex of tombs. She," he hesitated, "she was naked, but her hair had grown so long that it pooled in piles at her feet, and it mostly covered her up, even her face." Telling Ginji about the girl's nudity wrenched at him painfully, as if somehow he had betrayed her. That thought disturbed him, so he went on. "Then the wind picked up."
He shoved his hands in his pockets. "The wind picked up, just before I woke. And it blew her hair out of her face and out behind her, and it seemed like it went on forever, it was so long, even matted and tangled. It was easily a lifetime's growth. More." Looking away from the sky, he looked at his now genuinely serious partner. "But, Ginji, she hadn't aged a day."
