MARK AS UNREAD

A Modern Day Claymore Short Story

Thanks to the writers any Animesuki (MisterJB, Yosei, Shiek, Ryuken, ShippU) for the comments & critique in helping me with this story. It will probably be the first & the last time I'll do a modern day AU.

This story was written on a whim. But owes its inspiration to Modern day AUs like Useful Oxymoron's Life Sucks! & Supreme Distraction's Enter New York City.

PART ONE

"I'm counting them down yeah, one by one;
it feels like forever till I return to you -
but it helps me on those lonely nights -
it's that one thing that keeps me alive"
- Wait for Me, Theory of a Deadman

1.

"Get up – I don't fight my opponents from behind."

Circling her opponent, she blinks once – then twice, eyes not daring to depart from the figure now scurrying to stand, desperate to secure her footing. She holds her head high, her eyes glancing forward, as if to show her opponent how real fighting should be conducted. In the sweat-scarred delirium of battle, however, Clare finds her fists unconsciously curling, as if around an invisible sword – a blade made of air.

And all around their fighting, the bright swaying sweep of outback scrub frame their duel. A sky missing clouds watches them. Wind whips soiled sand into their dancing legs.

Her opponent comes, cutting, flying: an elbow pummeling toward her face –

"Good!" She encourages. "Come at me!"

But Clare has already seen everything: she flattens her hands, and then parries the blow, absorbing so much force she feels her right leg buckle. A wave of panic – but no, she fixates herself on the force of her hand instead of the yoki building up from beneath. And with an upward cut she pulls her opponents' elbow and flips her overhead in an effortless, fluid sweep.

When her opponent staggers up again, she assumes a guard, and lets her opponent swing, swipe and batter her as hard as she can. Then Clare prepares a fist – knuckles pulled so tight that when they collide with her opponent's abs she feels an entire shockwave of adrenaline-laced force dribble through her arm. A snarling yell of pain, and her opponent totters like a drunkard. The fight is over; Clare knows her victory is secure. So she extends an arm to her floored sparring partner, who is sprawled in the sand, breath bursting for reprieve.

"Work on your speed," Clare tells her opponent, who attaches a hand on her shoulder for support. Her head of dirt-scrubbed hair barely clears Clare's monstrous protruding shoulder, an emblem of pure muscle.

"Wasn't I fast enough?"

"Not fast enough to beat Marianne."

"But I was trying!"

"Then we have to try harder, Aisha."

Clare knows she has never been the affectionate kind, but at that moment – perhaps out of some impulsive reflex action – she finds herself shaking the sand out of her young sparring partner's hair. And Aisha laughs: girlish, high-pitched but, most importantly of all – innocent, naïve, yet untouched by the wide wayward world. She swats Clare's hand away with playful cut of her arm, which reminds Clare of –

"You know, sometimes I feel you're like an older sister," Aisha ventures.

But Clare is already walking away. She picks up the remnants of their fight – torn fabric, extra clothing, a water bottle – and throws them into her haversack. Then, steadying her red Super-Four, she calls Aisha. It will be a short ride back to town.

Throughout the ride, she keeps the visor of her helmet open, so at every turn the wind slaps her like a fist across her cheeks, but because she is after all, immortal, such inconveniences are but sensations of a fleeting kind. Aisha's arms, wrapped like a lanky ribbon tight around her waist, tug at her navel when she tackles the final crest of the outback road.

After ten minutes of pushing speed above the limit, she decelerates when she sees the sign: TOWNSVILLE, QN. As she cruises down the street, the entire city opens up under her, flanked on both sides by leafless scrub, sand rises and quiet houses. The sea blinks beyond the clutter of the urban sprawl. Clare flicks the brakes, negotiates a turn and outclasses a slow moving car. Ten minutes later, she can smell the sea. And she is home.

2.

On times when she wants to preoccupy herself with an aimless round of thoughts, she rehearses a repetitive sequence: there are reasons why she – Clare – renegade warrior of the long sword, survivor of the notorious massacre at Pieta, member of the legendary seven ghosts, chose Townsville as her adopted town. Clare would like herself to believe the reasons are mostly aesthetic: bright and sunny Queensland, friendly locals, good locale, no snow, and – Australia! (Who wouldn't want to live in Australia?) She likes these reasons; they push her one step further towards an immortality of contentment.

But she knows, as she races through the streets to get to work, a few reasons are instrumental: historical erasure of a recurring past, for example. And to get away from the others, especially Miria. Whom she has not spoken to face-to-face since the turn of the century.

She knows that down under, ten thousand miles away from where her comrades have settled down, she is invisible. No one knows – or cares – who she is. She can be Clare, the Super-Four junkie; or Clare, the Muay Thai instructor.

Or Clare, the lover/ girlfriend.

Shaiful is, of course, not the best man in the world, but at Clare's age (shudder), she feels he will do. To her, he is taller, weaker, ridiculously pampering and – as Clare can attest – a good fighter. The last factor is important, because Clare first caught him eyeing her at one of her classes. When challenged, Shaiful did not back down. He could last twenty minutes with Clare going all out, and an extra five before being floored. As a reward, Clare thought he was worthy date-material. And she is proud at herself for being right.

"Do you always have to be in control?" he would ask her.

Clare would lie in the leathered cradle, the seat of her Super-Four, as he draped his arms over her from behind, his chin like a tooth jabbing deliciously into the flesh at the side of her neck. She preferred him without long hair. She would tell him to keep his hair short; she likes him when he is in a G2000 shirt and a tie. Clare thinks herself old-school.

"There's one thing that you can't control, Clare, whether you like it or not."

Clare does not like to admit her own wrong. But Shaiful, a Corporal with the ADF, is actually right. Just like every location she has settled down in had its downsides – London and its weather, Mumbai's hypocritical poverty, Hanoi during the Indochinese War, New York's restless crowds – Townsville is home to the 4th Field Regiment of the Royal Australian Artillery, of which Shaiful is trained as a battery officer. And, in what she has deemed a potential curse to everyone she comes into contact with, Shaiful's regiment was picked for overseas deployment in Afghanistan.

It has been six months since his departure, and Clare still drives by his barracks on the way to work, taking a long detour of ten minutes. But she settles not for a wistful longing, or the nostalgia of a girl who has a boyfriend in combat. She chooses an embittered irony, laced with an indifference which only can be shed by two things: a Super-Four and Aisha.

In his emails to her, sent across seas, oceans and hostile lands, he always ends with the phrase: take care of my baby sis. Even though Aisha hates being called a baby, and even though Clare still thinks she can be a bit whiny, she accedes, for his sake.

Sometimes she rides faster when she thinks of all this – this tiny obstacle to complete utter happiness. But mostly, she accelerates and lets the wind rip through the loosened strap of her helmet because she finds this too familiar. Aisha the bright-eyed youngster in awe of her fighting skill and rugged lifestyle – her elder brother the persistent gentleman in uniform who says things solemnly like, "I'll be back, I promise" and, "serious – you'll just have to survive, like me." Sometimes it reminds her too much of –

3.

After work, which involves the arduous instructing of fitness freaks and Orientalist enthusiasts who are abashed that a blonde lady can perform Muay Thai like Tony Jaa, she rides down to Aisha's school. She has promised the young punk she can expect her every Wednesday and Friday.

At the stretch of road mutilated with zebra-crossings for students, she settles herself at a position with a good view of the gates. She gets bored, lights a Malboro, and stares out into the students trickling down from the steps of the school.

From a distance of at least three hundred metres, she sees Aisha, her white uniform undone, a tongue of blouse over her darker skirt. She is surrounded by three – no, four other girls. In a movement almost blinding to the eye, Clare sees her throw a punch at the largest girl behind her – but, Clare thinks, the jab lacked killing intent. Sure enough, the larger girl absorbs it, and with an outstretched palm smashes into Aisha's forehead. A yell of laughter or triumph or both decks across to her, and to concerned parents watching the show. Aisha, clutching her head, receives a crude roundhouse kick from the larger girl as her contemporaries yip and circle her like gut-deprived yoma.

When Aisha finally trudges out of the gates to meet Clare, she fastens her eyes at a point to the left of Clare's face. A hand clutches the back of her head; without a word she mounts the bike.

"You didn't hit hard enough," Clare says, as she kicks off, swinging into traffic.

"You were watching?" Aisha's sudden retort almost throws both of them off balance. "You were watching and do you didn't even help?"

They drive out of the city, as Clare plans. Past the lonely billboards and the outposts of petrol kiosks, the city ends and fades away into a sandy suburban stretch of streets which all look the same. Further still, and they reach their favourite sandbank. Even before Clare parks behind a dumpster bleached by dirt and surrounded with plastic bags like gravestones, Aisha is off and circling Clare.

"Why didn't you help?" she screams, with more hurt pride than anger.

Clare does not like shouting. Or talking. So she chucks her helmet aside, unbuttons the first two slots on her shirt and they begin fighting, upstaged only by the dying sunlight.

It is an elbow to the side of her face that takes Aisha down. She stumbles and has to latch onto the dumpster for support. Now all the lights are on: the streetlights which guard the main road back to Townsville look like a hideous tongue extending from the brighter, fiercer metropolitan glare. She does not go to help Aisha up. Instead, she retreats to the Super-Four, pries open the box and removes the beer.

She stations herself within reach of Aisha, whose white uniform blouse is so spotted with blood that it looks fashionable. Clare knows the hostility is gone. And within minutes they are sitting together, Aisha's head mounted on Clare's shoulder, the tilted bottle in her hands flicking light all over the dark shade of the dumpster.

"You still haven't told me why you didn't help."

Clare lights a Malboro. "I don't fight other people's fights."

She remembers that phrase very clearly – like an apology, an excuse, a declaration of independence which she threw at Miria's face once upon a time.

"But you saw Marianne with her friends."

"Which gives you an advantage."

Aisha laughs hopelessly. She plucks the cigarette from Clare's fingers and takes a drag herself. "You're impossible to deal with, you know. How did you convince my bro to date you?"

Clare smiles. But now she is not in the mood for talking. Aisha takes the empty bottle and flings it across the sandy ban k, towards the road, where it lands with a satisfying clink. Fragments dust the road. The younger girl lingers around. Sometimes, as buses from inland shoot down the road, Clare watches their headlights blink and pattern Aisha in frantic light. She thinks she sees Shaiful there, in that fallible frame. But she sees Afghanistan too: the dumpster a tan k, the lights gunfire and the blood –

"You're going to wash this for me since you made this mess, right?" says Aisha, as she examines her blouse.

The cigarette hangs defiantly from her lips like loose tooth. Its fiery light is long dead.

4.

I hope you're not teaching Aisha all your bad habits, like your smoking, Shaiful writes back in his emails, which Clare always marks as unread after reading them. His messages are clean of detail – so clean they seem as if the computer were generating the alphabets itself.

"Every day, I promise," Clare remembers Shaiful telling her. She can still remember the scene of his departure: the door of her house, his full-pack making him look bigger than usual, the impatience of his fellow mates and their wolf-whistling. Clare had remarked, how damn melodramatic.

He was supposed to write to her every day, but Clare is tired of rapidly bruising her fingers clicking the refresh button. I'm not as free as I thought I would be, is his excuse. And as she hits the mark as unread button for the one hundredth time, she does not really know now what to believe.

But it is Shaiful's injured comrade, Shane Locke, who Clare is inclined to believe. He was discharged from combat after surviving an insurgent ambush, Shaiful had written, although she cannot see anything wrong with him other than his extremely active social life – he is all around the city, cruising in a borrowed sports car, his military-shorn head already sporting a clean, faux Mohawk. On the occasions when they meet, Shane always offers her a wide smile, a smile purchased with being the sole man to crawl out alive after an attack.

"Life is tough there. But they'll be back soon," he tells her, his smile increasing as he steadies her Super-Four. "That's a nice bike."

Don't trust everything he says, Shaiful advises.

So she keeps her distance. He asks her out for drinks; lunch too, but Clare refuses. Sometimes, when she does late nights or when she drives Aisha home, he sees Shane's car parked outside the houses of his fellow mates' lonely girlfriends.

5.

Summer in Townsville comes with Christmas, and New Year's Day. It comes with one of Aisha's classmates getting a house call by smiling Shane, who now has the duty of delivering the news of his fellow unit members killed in action – Australian casualties in Afghanistan hit the first ten combat deaths.

It also signals six months of Shaiful's absence, which Clare commemorates by taking herself down to the Strand, a strip of beach lining the edge of the city as it dissolves into the Pacific Ocean.

She circles the traffic junctions, not bothering to park, until she feels the wind bracing against her fingers. She dismounts, crosses the Strand to a headland with a scattering of trees like wayward dust and a bench perched ominously, facing the sea.

Clare unlocks the strain in her knuckles, dabbed with red, swollen flesh at her bare-knuckled spars with Aisha, who is sincerely getting better. Leaning one hand on the salt-encrusted wood of the bench, she throws her eyes up to the watery white line of the horizon thousands of miles east. She takes a deep breath: the stirring wind is so strong she feels she is breathing in water.

It is just her and the sea, she thinks, as it has been for years now. Drifting, floating, with the horizon always too hard to reach.

When she gets back, Shaiful's email is marked unread by her Yahoo browser. It is short, but clear enough: I miss you too.

6.

"Did you see me? Did you see me floor her?"

She did. Clare will be forced to admit that Aisha did almost everything right: non-provocation, letting the opponent make the fatal mistake, the angle of her blows, the elbow swipe which she taught her and the near-nonchalance which Aisha walked away. The final move is, to Clare, a sign which she interprets simply: that this young punk is getting more mature.

She had been teaching Aisha some of the finer moves of close combat, Muay Thai-style, where even elbows and shoulder blades were offensive. So watching Aisha apply almost everything she had learnt in their late-night sparring sessions near the dumpster, Clare cannot help but feel she has finally made a willing, fast-learning disciple – at no cost.

Marianne did not stand a chance. She had started the fight, attempted some half-hearted jabs to Aisha's face, and then Aisha had responded. One-two-three uppercuts to the ribs, as rapid as a machine gun as Clare had taught. Then, as the larger girl reeled, Clare remembers watching from the jumble spectators outside the gate how Aisha had crashed into Marianne with the deadly elbow, completely sweeping her off her feet like a swarm of dead leaves. The concerned parents outside were – concerned. Even before Aisha had exited the school, they were yelling, aghast, frantic.

"Was flooring her worth detention till the end of the term?" Clare asks her quietly.

Aisha is leaning on the dumpster, the lights tracing the trunk roads back to Townsville bloom in her eyes and give her cheeks their crimson-brown deepness. Clare thinks the cigarette clenched between her pencil-thin fingers looks almost natural, as if she had been born with it.

"Screw authority," she says. "Screw detention."

Clare wants to tell her that, no, screwing authority (and detention) will have consequences, but for now she does not really care. She just wants to smoke away the evening which, she recalls, is their first time spending the evening at the dumpster without fighting.

"So Clare, will you train me then?"

The question seems strange to Clare. "I'm already teaching you."

"No, seriously. Train me at your school or whatever. Train me to be like you."

Clare looks past Aisha into the other end of Townsville, where the road with lights burning brightly all along its side stretches far from the city centre. It goes along the coast, further north to the collection of unknown towns by the Great Barrier Reef beaches, strung out like beads on a string. She is reminded of herself staring out at the sea, one hand on a bench behind her, lights from afar like stars tossed by the water.

For a second she almost tells Aisha: no, you can never be like me, because I'm… She almost lets fly everything from Pieta to the unusual ingredient in her blood to why she is so good at combat. But she doesn't. She knows she could because, after all, no one is around to tell her not to.

"Fine."

"Fine?" Aisha pinches the cigarette stub from her hand and hurls it across the sandbank with a finger. "What's that supposed to mean, Clare?"

"What do you think?" Clare replies. And before she knows it Aisha is swarming over her, but the force is affectionate, and Aisha is mumbling her thanks into her stomach.

As she drops Aisha off at her empty house, Clare thinks life could never be better. Then, checking her email, she finds nothing from Shaiful. Instead, in its place is message from someone whom she has not talked to in years. She does not know whether she should even open it. But she does, and upon that click the message becomes apparent: Miria wants to meet.

TBC

Part two will be posted next week, when I've finished by last round of edits.

NOTES:

1. Townsville is NOT a cartoon town. It is a city in the state of Queensland, Australia.

2. Muay Thai is traditional Thai martial arts.

3. Any other things look strange, then ask me. I'll be glad to answer :)