Author's Notes: Reiki is a Japanese art of healing without touch, much like what Sage does to restore Ryo's vision in the series. If my medical mumbo jumbo doesn't make sense, forgive me. All I'm going off of is anatomy & physiology.

Chapter Two: Navy On Black

Any visitors to the Mouri home were greeted with a note taped to the inside of the glass, written in exaggerated sweeps of girlish kanji:

DO NOT KNOCK. COME INSIDE - QUIETLY

Ryo was the first to arrive that cold and rainy morning, parading unceremoniously into the front hallway and shaking the rainwater on the floor. Sayoko, excusing herself from the stove, regarded the absent-minded gesture in silence before leading him into the kitchen for a speech she was prepared to recite several times over today. She told him of the obscure illness that had befallen her little brother. The signs, the symptoms, even a warning to keep his feet soft around his room.

The dark-haired boy said very little. Instead he went to Cye's bedside and merely stood brooding over him.

Sayoko hated to admit it even to herself, but she was glad when Kento of the Hardrock showed up on her doorstep. There was nothing wrong with Ryo - she knew that she had him to thank for her life. It was the intense grief with which he looked upon her brother. Did he genuinely see something wrong here, or was his mood always so fervent?

It was Kento who remarked on the heat radiating through the thin sheet draped over the body. This he said in a rough whisper, and nothing else.

"I hadn't noticed," was all Ryo said.

Where Cye laid, he heard only muffled voices. He had been floating in the void within the waves of sleep that he had spent hours delving for. It was their smell that permeated, sharp as he grazed the shallows. A sharp smell overtook him at first. He knew a familiar trace Sayoko's soap and shampoo. And then there was Kento with the underlying odor of his muscle's salts. Then came the pungent smell of burnt leaves clinging to Ryo's clothes.

"Hey buddy, how ya feeling?" Kento leaned in rather close the moment Cye opened his eyes.

"I've been better. Hungry. What are you guys doing here?"

"I called them in," Sayoko volunteered.

"Why?" Cye's vision suddenly went red around the edges.

"I asked Rowen to take a look at you. Maybe he can figure out what's going on. These guys just wanted to make sure you're doing okay."

This satisfied Cye, who was too weak to let his temper rage for long. He was just thankful they saw him here in the darkness.

The boys immediately offered their assistance in cooking. Sayoko, much relieved, slipped into the living room to call home and report in to her husband.


Sage and Rowen arrived in tandem. Sayoko could only guess their identities by their hair - the blue-haired must belong to the sky and the other with gold hanging over sharp eyes was surely the one of Halo.

As she received the new guests she kept her voice low. "He only gets up for the bathroom or to take a shower. That he still does religiously. Everything else, though… he's helpless. And he hates it. Don't be surprised if he snaps at you."

She knocked on the doorframe and walked into the dim room, where her brother shoveled food into his mouth from the plate laid on his chest. Wildfire and Hardrock shut the stove off and came in to watch.

"Rowen and Sage are here."

"Hey buddy, I need to turn on the light so I can take a look at you," Strata reached for the chain swinging from the ceiling fan.

"Wait!" The plate was thrown daringly onto the nightstand. Torrent dove under his sheets and clapped his palms over the fabric before his eyes. "The light hurts! Let my eyes adjust."

Rowen glanced uneasily at Sage and flicked on the bulbs. Torrent's hands were covered in hair so thick it nearly looked like fur. The nails were long and clouded. He would have to be going on three months without cutting those things!

For a moment nobody said a word. And then Cye broke the silence.

"I know what you're looking at. If that's weird to you, don't jump back now."

Slowly he pulled down the sheet. They all followed the hem, waiting for a break in the hairline to reveal itself. Instead the auburn sprawled over the forehead, the cheeks, the once-bare jaw. He saw their shock and turned his gaze away from theirs. "I tried shaving it, but what's the use? It's back within two days."

"How long ago did this start?" Strata dug a notebook from his kit and peered at him over the top of the paper with a pen at the ready.

"I don't know, I've been sleeping a lot lately. Sayoko?"

"Maybe a month?" the girl's eyes rolled back to recall. "He was sick when I was up here a few weeks ago. Our mom has been looking out for him."

"Where is she?"

"On the road for the annual art show."

"Mm hmm," the pen didn't record anything about these last details. "What else?"

Cye ran his nails through the hair on his forehead, reveling in the scratch. "Aside from this damned itch from all the hair that's been appearing over the last week or so? It's like I've had a case of the flu that I can't shake. I've got a fever, my body's weak and I feel like puking all the time. But I can't stop eating."

At this, Rowen stopped writing and stared at him again. "How often do you eat?"

"Whenever I can."

"All I do if I'm not at the store is cook," Sayoko remarked from where she stood in the corner.

"Right. Well, let me take a look at you." He turned and glanced at the others. "Privacy, please?"

"Oh. Right," Kento cleared his throat as he got moving. The others followed suit and Rowen shut the door behind them.

"I don't know why they called me in to do this. You really should go to a doctor, not a med student."

"With me looking like this? Right. They'd quarantine me into a sterile room and jab me with needles until I was half-dead."


"I need my pathology book," Rowen announced the moment he shut the door and headed for the front of the house, where his backpack sat by the front door. The Ronins and Sayoko said nothing, only trailed and waited as he leafed through the pages.

"His bones feel brittle, like they're decaying. It's like he has osteoporosis, but that takes years and shouldn't be happening to someone of his age and health." For a moment he scanned the pages before continuing, "Judging by what you said about his diet, Sayoko, it sounds more like a metabolic disorder. The disease that even remotely matches is Paget's disease."

"Paget's disease?" Ryo urged him on.

"Right. The osteoclasts in his bones work at a higher rate than the osteoblasts."

"In plain Japanese, Ro." Kento's forehead wrinkled in confusion.

"The cells that tear down the bones work faster than the ones that build. Usually it strikes only one bone, not the entire skeleton. So I can't really say what it is yet. I'll need to take some blood and urine samples to take back to the school lab."

"You want me to piss in a cup?" Cye grumbled from the doorway, where he was shielding himself from the living room light with the shadow of his hand. He was barefoot and stripped to the waist. The hair never stopped; it had swept over every surface of his body these past few days.

"You shouldn't be out of bed!" Sayoko immediately took him by the elbow and tried leading him back to the room. He merely stood unmoved against the yanks on his arm. His sister considered Strata's words and stopped tugging for fear of hurting him.

"No, he should get up and walk around. The pressure exercise exerts on the bones is said to stimulate the building cells."

Sayoko blinked at Rowen. "Well then, Cye, take a few laps around the house. I'll finish up dinner and you can eat on the deck. It's a nice night out."

The Ronin of water nodded sullenly and trudged out the back door, fighting a strange anger. He felt their pitying eyes on him the entire way. Was he really that horrid? He wrestled the heat and the nausea, yes. But he felt an underlying power fueling him. He wished he could claim it as the faint waves he still felt these years after bearing Torrent for battle. It was not. It tormented his body and it hungered. For what, he did not know. Food satiated him, of course, though it seemed so less and less as the days cycled on.

Being up and walking like this did feel good, he mused as he started out for the deck wrapping round the house. He felt the slight dips in the glazed shale tiled out on the kitchen floor. The air flowing in with the door soothed his forming bedsores, the only bits of bare skin on his back. What was more, the moment he set foot outside, he could see everything as clear as day evening with clouds cloaking the moon. The patches of ray-soaked earth shone from the shadows cast by the trees. The sea horizon split against the sky, navy on black. Suddenly there were so many more stars, even over the light pollution of Yamaguchi to the north.


"So what about all that hair?" Ryo asked as his eyes raked the illustrations of Rowen's textbooks.

"I honestly don't know. My only guess could be that all the excess activity of his body is causing the integumentary system-"

"The what?" Kento cut in.

"The skin, nails, and hair. The fast metabolism has somehow thrown it into overdrive. It just makes me wonder what else is going on in his body. I'll take samples with me back to the school lab tomorrow. In the meantime, Sage, can you treat him with Reiki?"

"I'll do everything I can short of calling upon Halo. If only I could go that far. My sword is far more powerful than anything here in this plane."

"Can't you summon your armor?" Sayoko asked over her tea.

"Possibly," Sage admitted. "But to do so is disrupting the balance. That would be a last effort."

"Until then we will find any way to stem this," Rowen said into his book as he flipped the pages toward the treatment section. "You'll have to keep up with his appetite and, judging by the condition of his bones, you should start giving him vitamins. All the calcium and vitamin D you can. Have you told your mom about how much he's been eating lately?"

"No, while she's away I don't want her to be thinking of him any more than she already is."

Out on the deck, Cye heard this and felt shame wash over him. Sayoko had been sacrificing her time and money just to feed him and now she was hiding him from their mother. What a burden he had become!

In her worrisome report, Sayoko had forgotten to begin this last round of food. Cye felt an flash of anger with his sister for this, then swallowed it down. Somewhere in his head he realized how foolish this was. So long as he was mobile like this, he must quit troubling her and find his own means. Town was not far away.

And then he looked down at the hair gleaming red in the light. How would he obtain food without alarming the holy hell out of someone?

Little flits of silver below the sea's surface danced and rolled. Fish. Never before had he considered slicing them alive and even now the idea quelled his stomach for a moment. But his hunger was too powerful. After a time the fish looked more and more like writhing bits of meat, beckoning to him with shining scales.

He had to do something. Just standing here, the moonlight was boring into his eyes. He wanted to scream. Even her light was too much for him now as she bared herself from the clouds.


"Could he have contracted more than one illness? Like a compromised immune system let something else in?" Sage leaned over Rowen's shoulder to study the books. He turned away after a moment, not understanding half the words on the page.

"Maybe. The strange thing is how fast this is acting."

"Sayoko, has he bee able to get up like this since he's been sick?" For the first time in a long while, Kento of Hardrock, spoke from where he sat on the chopping block.

"No."

"What are you getting at, Kento?" Rowen finally looked up from his books.

"Well, she said he was fine about a month ago. And he's been getting worse lately, but he has the energy to get up. He's always hungry, but look at him! He's gotten bigger since I last saw him."

"That could be the Paget's disease. It distorts the bones."

"Yeah, but that doesn't totally explain the hair. And I've never seen him with such a bad temper."

Nobody knew what to say. Kento went on, "Do you think it's more than just a sickness?"

Sage, always the skeptic, scoffed at the idea forming among them. "You really think…?"

"I do," Sayoko jutted in. She pushed her chair back just as she realized she hadn't seen her brother walking around for a few minutes. She cupped her hands on the glass, saw nothing, and threw the door open.

The Ronins watched as she disappeared around the right side of the house and came around from the left only a moment later. Fear played upon her face.

"Cye's gone!"