Disclaimer: I do not own this world setting. Only the OCs belong to me. This is just a fun writing exercise.
Chapter Two: A Very Affectionate And Friendly Light
When the sun rose over the village, Tenchi woke up. His bed was a mat on the floor in the main room of his aunt's house. There was loud snoring coming from the back room. Tenchi tip toed over there, pulling back the curtain that acted as a door. He looked in on his sleeping, snoring aunt. She slept in a real wooden framed bed with a straw mattress, that took up way too much of the room's small floor space. A sleeping beauty she wasn't. Tenchi knew better than to wake her, that was a quick way to another beating.
There was no going back to sleep for him. With the sun up, Tenchi never could sleep unless he was really sick. He never knew why before now. It was the Fire Nation blood in him. Iroh was his grandfather. Just thinking that sounded so weird. Taylor had always loved Avatar The Last Airbender, ever since the first time he saw it when he was six years old. He hadn't really gone nuts over it until last year though. It was weird to think of Iroh as his grandfather, but it was downright freaky to realize that he was now somehow an even littler kid than the first time he saw Avatar The Last Airbender. He was in that universe now. He was a part of it. This was both exciting, wonderful, yet creepy and sad too.
He literally wasn't himself, the self he had been yesterday. No, he couldn't think this way. He couldn't be having an existential crisis (a psychology term that he only knew because his mother, Taylor's mom, had been a psychologist.) He couldn't afford any kind of identity crisis. That way led to madness and self harm, and maybe even death. He didn't want to wind up like the suicidal cases he knew his mom, Dr. Martha Bennett, had had to deal with; his mom never would talk about that to him, but Taylor had overheard her and his dad a few times.
He stared at his hands, child's hands. These were his. He wasn't the Taylor he'd been yesterday. He wasn't the Tenchi he'd been either. He was both. If his body was him, he was Tenchi now. He had to accept this and move on to other things. But his heart hurt thinking about where he'd come from.
As Taylor Bennett, his parents had been Dr. Carroll Bennett and Dr. Martha Summers Bennett, highly respected medical professionals, a pediatric surgeon and a child psychologist. He would never see them again; and they would never mourn him. They would never even know he was gone, for in a sense he wasn't.
As Tenchi, his parents were people he never knew, people he couldn't know, for both were deceased. His mother was an Earth kingdom peasant named Mei-Lien. His father was a Fire Nation officer, and he now knew, Prince Lu Ten, the former second in line for the Fire Nation throne.
Tenchi laid back on his mat. Tears fell from his eyes as he curled up in as a tight a ball as he could. He didn't know who he was mourning, the parents he would never see again, or the parents he would never know.
It was a while before Tenchi could stop crying. His body was racked with near silent tears. Sobbing loudly only got him whipped. Any noise would get him hit, if it woke Min up too soon or made her mad. Child abuse had just been a term, an abstract concept from his parents the Bennetts' work. It was shocking, sickening to know that he was now a victim. But he was. And he had to leave. He had thought about leaving last night, and he thought about it even more now. As Tenchi dried his tears, he schemed.
He rolled up his mat. He carefully and quietly open the bottom drawer of an old beat up dresser. It was hard to open. His small arms were not very strong. But there was a bag in there he wanted. He held it his treasured bag and looked through it. With the newly merged mindset that had come upon him late yesterday afternoon, he no longer valued the things in it. Like everything in the room, it was mostly junk, all of it made of unpainted wood or bamboo: little toy soldiers poorly hand carved, a yoyo, a rattle drum, and reed pipes. The last one, the pipes, were the only thing he found that he still wanted. Everything else seemed so simple, so childish and boring. He suddenly missed the video games and DVDs that he'd had in the other world. Even the old action figures long since put away in the Bennett's attic were ten times better than this stuff. He hadn't wanted his Transformers toys in years, but he found himself longing for them. But those had been Taylor's toys, not Tenchi's. They were no longer his.
"I am Tenchi," he whispered softly. He held on to the reed pipes, but put everything else away. He was just closing the dresser, when he heard creaking floor boards behind him. Tenchi spun around real fast.
His aunt was up. Her long brown hair was a wild mess, going everywhere, reminding him of a scene in Frozen where Anna had the worst bed hair ever. If anything, his aunt's was even worse. Tenchi would have laughed, but the glare on her face stopped him. She looked down at the pipes in his hands. "What are you up to this early? Planning to prank me child?"
"No, Aunt Min! No!" Tenchi stood ram rod straight, hiding the pipes behind his back. Staring up at his aunt, at her frightening expression, he never felt as small and helpless in his life, not as Taylor anyway. He couldn't stop her. Anything she wanted to do to him, she could. He was at her mercy. And all his Tenchi memories told him she was very seldom very merciful.
Min's hand came down on him in a stinging slap. Tenchi could feel her hand on his face even seconds later when it was gone from there. He didn't know what to do. Just that he had to do something. He had to get her talking about something, the past maybe. When her mind was focused on dreams of times long gone, sometimes she wasn't so mad. But this could backfire too, could escalate things too.
Tenchi fingered the pipes he was trying to hide, and stopped hiding them. He held them up to his Aunt. He put on his most sweet innocent facial expression possible, trying his hardest to look earnest and angelic. "I wasn't trying to wake you, Aunt Min. Honest. I was thinking of my mother."
Min put a hand on her hip. "And just what do those reed pipes have to do with that?"
"She was a talented musician," Tenchi said, "Wasn't she? I just wanted to practice out in the woods nearby. I just wanted my mom around. When I play, I feel closer to her. I feel like my mother is with me." Tenchi wasn't lying exactly. He remembered feeling that way several times. But he was mostly saying this to manipulate Aunt Min. Sometimes this sort of thing worked. Sometimes it failed epically. Before he hadn't fully understood that this was a manipulation tactic. To the Tenchi who existed before yesterday, it was just a protective instinct.
Tenchi gave his aunt his best smile. "I want to start playing everyday. I want to be as good with music someday, as my mom was."
His aunt snorted. "Hmph! You will never be as good as Mei-Lien." Min's face softened a little. "My sister truly was a beautiful lotus flower. She was a pearl beyond compare. Talents like hers are one in a million."
Min shook her head. "Go ahead and practice if you want. Take some fruit for breakfast and get out of here, Tenchi. I don't want to see you again till noon."
Tenchi bowed respectfully to his aunt, the courtly manners she had taught him ages ago (actually just months ago), which now felt very strange and new. He then made a grab for two apples on the low table in the center of the room. He ran out the door of his aunt's house.
The village was once prosperous enough that it still had walls around it. It was not however a very large village and never had been. It was a quick run to the gates now opening for trade for the day. He waved at the guards and kept running for the woods.
The high school Taylor had gone to was bigger than this entire village. But the school he'd gone to had the attendance of all the high school students in the county it was in. His sense of scale, he realized, may be off. Taylor's world was one of cars and planes and trains. It was a world of easy quick transportation, and in most of America, wide open spaces, a world where a mile was nothing to cross. This world was not at all like that. Well, there might be trains of a sort here, if the ones at Ba Sing Se counted. And there were machines, just not any near this village. The Avatar world in this era was what Taylor's school books might have called an early industrial era. It was sort of like he was in the 1850's now, instead of 2017, and a very rural backwater area at that.
It was dawning on him, that unless he had a sky bison or a Fire Nation steam ship, Tenchi was not going to be moving fast through this world. There was so much he hadn't figured out yet. He turned around to look at the village. He climbed up in a tree and stared at it. He couldn't leave those walls for good until he had a plan of where he was going next. Not unless he had no any other choice. He hated the idea of staying with his aunt any longer than he had to. As Taylor he was used to loving parents and a modern twenty first century American life style. He would never have those things again.
Still it stung to know how bad he had it as Tenchi compared to his old life as Taylor. Because of what he once he had, he knew could never settle for what he had now. A rebellious attitude was rising up in him. There was things now he was considering, that as Tenchi he had never even dared to dream of before, things that he couldn't accomplish yet. But even the American Revolution hadn't gotten started or won in one day.
Tenchi leaned back against the tree. He raised the pipes to his lips and played. The music was fast and not very good, but it reflected all the anger and injustice and sorrow he was feeling. He poured all his heart and energy into his music. It calmed him. It quieted the violence of his feelings. This let him think better without the furry or the sadness tainting his thoughts. He was up that tree for hours playing and thinking. He dreaded going back home, but he did. Until he could get enough gear and supplies and maybe a wagon to stowaway on, he couldn't leave.
Tenchi came back again, and again to the woods at the edge of the village as often as his aunt would let him. Almost everyday for a week he came, going deeper into the woods each time. Then one evening he was still out there, and had been out all day. He was up in a tree playing a slow sad melody. The sun was slowly setting, with the extra strength it gave him gradually fading. It was then that Tenchi saw something strange.
Something pink was floating on the wind. No, it was flying. It was a little ball of pink light. It was about the size of a golf ball. It came right up to Tenchi. He paused in his music playing and almost fell out of the tree. The light made a noise like little bells being rung.
Tenchi tilted his head back and forth looking at the little pink light. "What are you? A Tinker Bell wanabe?" This light made him think very much of Tinker Bell, from the stage versions of Peter Pan, which the Bennetts' had made their son sit through more than once during trips to New York and London.
The light made that bell noise again, a different pitch, a different melody. Tenchi's sharp mind and ears had been getting very used to subtle changes in musical notes over this past week. It was the strangest thing, but Tenchi felt like the ball of light was squawking at him, like it was yelling at him.
"You don't like being called Tinker Bell?" Tenchi asked teasingly.
There was more of that squawking bell sound.
"How about Hikari?" Tenchi suggested, but this didn't please the pink light either.
"Sakura?" No.
"Ichigo?" Again no.
The light circle around Tenchi's head. It landed on his reed pipes, then flew up. It landed again and again.
"You want me to play some more?" Tenchi asked.
The bell noise this time sounded somehow like a yes to him. Tenchi couldn't understand how he knew what this thing meant, but he did. It wasn't words exactly. It was feelings. The light was communicating to him in emotions. It had to be some kind of spirit. Tenchi should have been wanting to run away. In the Avatar world, in Aang's time, spirits were always shown to lead to trouble. In the Legend of Korra, they were usually even worse. He was incapable of explaining it, but Tenchi felt perfectly safe with this light. It was kind of cute too. He suddenly remembered a scene in Galaxy Quest where really cute creatures turned out to be really dangerous. He didn't think this was the case here. He didn't want to believe it.
Tenchi stared up at the sky, at the stars appearing. "My aunt is going to ready to kill me."
The pink light made a questioning sound, laced with the feeling of worry. The bell peals became frantic.
"Calm down!" Tenchi shouted, "Geez, relax! She's not literally going to kill me. She's not going to be happy with me. That's all." He climbed down from the tree and ran for the village walls. The pink ball of light followed him.
"Stop please," Tenchi said pleadingly, "You're really cute. You're beautiful even. Your bell voice is very pretty."
The pink light rang out a pleased little five second melody.
But-" Tenchi raised a hand. "You can't come with me. My aunt really would be mad then. I should be back here tomorrow morning though. If not, then the day after."
The light continued to follow him.
Tenchi waved his hands frantically at it. "Go back! Go back! I like you. But my aunt won't! She won't let me keep a dog or even a fire ferret!"
It still followed him.
"No! No!" Tenchi yelled "Stay in the woods! Please!"
This didn't work either.
Tenchi made it to the walls, just as the guards were closing the gates. The light was right beside him. He just couldn't get it to know that no meant no.
"One second later Tenchi," one of the guardsmen said, "and we'd have shut the gates on you."
Tenchi looked at the guard and then the light. The guard wasn't reacting to it. Neither of them were. The guards couldn't see it! So why could he? His grandfather, Iroh had been able to see spirits. He knew that from the show. But that was only because Iroh had been to the spirit world. As far as Tenchi knew, he hadn't been there himself, unless the way he had been brought here to this world counted. There was so much that he didn't understand about his arrival or rebirth here, no matter how much he thought about it.
The pink light followed Tenchi home. He stood in front of the door of his aunt's house, feeling like he had just gotten the attention of an unwanted stray pet that had decided to follow him home. It wasn't that he didn't like the strange little spirit. He did. It was that he just knew that somehow it was going to add a new complication to his life. In both series, Aang's and Korra's, the spirits always seemed to cause trouble every time they showed up.
The little ball of light rubbed against Tenchi's head in loving sort of way like a cat rubbing up against its owner. It was hard not to like it. It's touch was like feathers rubbing against him. Tenchi laughed as it's touch tickled him. "You're so affectionate and warm. I ought to call you Nuan."
The little pink light flared so brightly for a few seconds, turning an incredible scarlet red. It was so brilliant, so bright, that Tenchi had to blink and cover his eyes. There was an excited and happy trilling from it too.
Tenchi groaned as he uncovered his eyes. His voice, however, was good humored as he spoke, "You like that name, do you? You really are like a stray that followed me home."
The pink light turned a hot pink. It's bell peals shouted out, broadcasting their meaning to his heart: Yes! Yes! Yes!
Like he had thought before, more complications, more trouble. But this felt like the first good thing that happened for him since he got here. Nuan was a spirit, not an animal, not a pet. Perhaps though, she could be a friend, his first friend ever in this lifetime.