If you've ever looked up Asclepius or Ophiochus, then you know some of the mythology referenced in this chapter. I did take certain liberties with the myth ahem for the purposes of the story. In a nutshell, Asclepius was a son of Apollo and a physician who became so skillful that he was able to bring the dead back to life. For this challenge to the natural order of things, Zeus struck him down with a thunderbolt. To honor his importance to mankind, however, he placed him in the sky as the constellation Ophiochus, which means Serpent-Bearer. The constellation refers to Asclepius' rod, a staff entwined with a single serpent, which is now a well-known symbol of the medical professions. (Anybody else catch that the Thunder God was the one to take him out? Eep!) As always, the Get Backers belong to Rando Ayamine and Yuya Aoki.
Midou Ban and the Bound Woman
A string of multilingual curses coursed through the cold alley as the Ladybug sputtered to a halt. The hustle and bustle of the big city had abruptly and inexplicably died not two minutes before, as if the Get Backers had crossed an invisible barrier that separated the old witch's neighborhood from the rest of the city. Even so, there were still five miles or more to Maria's. The dark, narrow streets, so queerly separated from the rest of Tokyo, were dangerous for outsiders. Ban did not count himself as an outsider, exactly, but in this part of town, self-perception wasn't the issue at hand. The smalltime thugs that haunted the alleys were sure to put in an appearance. Not that he was especially concerned about them.
But he was irritable, and sleepy, and confused as hell, and the last thing he wanted was to be stuck in this creepy place with pointless but inevitable violent encounters looming over him and blocking his path to Maria, and to some answers.
"Ban-chan," Ginji said, with a maddening, wheedling note in his voice, "Relax. With everything that's being going on, it's no wonder you forgot to get the oil changed. At least you made it into a parking space, so we won't get a ticket, right? And it can't be that far to Maria's."
Ban glared at his partner, who cowed under his blue stare. "I'll shut up now," Ginji said in a small voice.
"Do that," Ban replied from behind clenched teeth.
The roar of another vehicle saved Ginji from his flaring temper, because sitting astride the motorbike that had pulled up beside them was someone who annoyed Ban even more than the Thunder Emperor.
"For someone who claims to love their car, you sure don't take very good care of it," Himiko noted clinically, cocking her head to one side. "Smells like she's bone-dry. Poor girl." She patted the trunk of the car sympathetically. "You deserve better than this hotheaded, unstable excuse for a driver, Ladybug."
"Now's not the best time, Himi-chan," Ginji told her, wincing.
"You snot-nosed breast-less little brat!" Ban threw open his door and lunged for her, but he was tired, and she was as fresh as new-fallen snow. He landed hard on the concrete, adding two scraped elbows and one badly abraded forearm to his other miseries.
The flash of concern that leapt into Himiko's eyes was quickly drowned by a scathing disinterest. "If you're going to see Maria, Ginji," she said, an evil smirk tugging at her lips, "I wouldn't mind giving you a lift."
"Ban-chan's the one that needs to see Maria, Himi-chan. I'm just along for the ride, this time." Ginji waved his hands in front of himself.
"What's wrong, Ban-chan?" she said, laying an outrageous emphasis on the suffix. "Poor widdle Ban-chan got magical woes?"
Ban ground his teeth together and pulled his lips back over them in a fair approximation of Shido Fuyuki's beastly snarl. "Yes."
That caught her off-guard, as he had intended it should. She stared at him, obviously curious, and not at all sure how to save face and still wriggle out his secret. Finally she shrugged. "Me too."
"I didn't ask," he pointed out in a dismissive tone, picking himself up from the street. "I don't care."
"Ban-chan…" Ginji started weakly, looking at Himiko, who had turned bright red.
"Well…" she floundered for a moment. "I don't care that you don't care!" It sounded very silly, and Himiko's flush darkened dangerously with her rising embarrassment.
Ban ignored the danger and mocked her, imitating her tone without forming coherent words. "Ne ne ne ne ne ne ne." She raised a hand as if to slap him, he raised a hand to block it, and Ginji darted in between them, just in time to catch the brunt of the blow.
Her eyes went wide in a wordless apology as Ginji gingerly inspected his now-red jaw line.
"You two are just sad." Both Ban and Himiko took at step back at the surprising flatness in his voice. He stared at his feet. "You don't even know how lucky you are to have each other." The flat quality in Ginji's voice was replaced by something infinitely worse, and as sadness bled into his tone, the hostility in the air evaporated into an awkward silence.
Then Ginji looked up, abashed. "Sorry, guys. I think I'm tired. Forget I said anything." He smiled.
Ginji's emotional quick-change routine amused his partner sufficiently to cool his temper, and Ban reached out to ruffle two heads of hair by way of apology. "So, Himiko, if we're all headed in the same direction anyway…?"
She rolled her eyes, but the angry flush had faded from her cheeks. "I've always got extra oil. Maybe you didn't ruin the engine. Cross your fingers."
Himiko retrieved the oil from her motorbike – today without the sidecar – and popped the hood for Ban, who was relieved to find that the car had stopped before the lack of lubrication made the engine completely unsalvageable. With just a little luck, they could get it to Maria's and maybe even to a shop before it died.
They managed to start the Ladybug, and Ban followed Himiko through the twisting alleys that led to his former caretaker's home. Unsurprisingly, the old witch stood at her doorway, as beautiful and falsely perfect as ever in her gypsy-queen guise.
"Both of you together, eh?" She stretched her long body languidly, crooking a finger at Himiko, who approached her as bidden. "I have to admit, I was only expecting you, dear." Maria enfolded the slim young woman in her arms, pressing her uncomfortably close to her ample bosom.
Himiko pulled free and gestured at Ban. "You can deal with him, first, then. I'd just as soon keep my affairs to myself."
Ban glowered at her. "As if I wouldn't?"
Ginji coughed, and both Ban and Himiko looked away, each a trifle shamefaced.
Maria laughed. "Oh, beautifully done, Ginji-kun. Superb. If I'd known it was that easy to shut him up, his time with me might have gone much more smoothly."
A knowing grin lit up Ginji's face.
Ban flicked his forefinger against the back of Ginji's skull with a very satisfying thwomp.
"Be nice, now, Ban. Seeing as Himiko-chan did actually make an appointment to see me, I think I'll accede to her wishes tonight." She tilted her head back so that the bright evening lights of the city glinted off her eyes. The effect was startling, almost menacing. "What can I do for you, my little one?"
"You can start by not calling me that." Ban grunted and hauled himself up onto the railing of Maria's porch. He looked out into the night, trying to sort out the significant bits of his dreams, things he should reveal, and things he shouldn't.
He felt Maria's eyes boring down on him, heard her dismiss Ginji and Himiko with an offering of whatever was in her refrigerator – "Don't open the green jars, dears" – and felt her return to his side, waiting for him to collect his thoughts.
When he had, he looked down at her from the railing. "I've been having these dreams," he began, and as Maria moved closer, he rattled off the events he had witnessed in his sleep over the past few nights.
"It would be better if I were able to see your visions for myself," she told him bluntly when he had finished. "There are certain indicators that you can really only notice from the outside."
Ban nodded. "I wake up, and I know that there are things in those dreams that I can't have imagined for myself. There are revelations that I don't respond to like I should.
"But then again, Rehema and the four guardians would almost have to represent Ginji and the Kings. Especially considering that one of them was from the Shiki clans. And happened to have the Fuyuki ability."
"Did you consider that it could be a mixture of the two?" Maria asked, tapping a thoughtful finger on Ban's thigh. "That your subconscious could be expanding and elaborating on dreams someone else has planted in you?"
Ban shook his head. "I hadn't, but I doubt it. There's a definite sense of continuity. Whether they're mine or someone else's, the dreams are all related. I want to believe I'm inventing them." He winced inwardly as he admitted that last.
"It's possible, Ban, but plausibility doesn't eliminate the other possibility – that these dreams are not your own creation. And if they're not, you seem to be frighteningly vulnerable to someone else's influence. It's not a risk I would take. And it isn't a risk I could fathom you taking, either."
Ban cursed. "How can I be sure?"
She shrugged, a smooth, sensual ripple of flesh and muscle that made her half-exposed breasts tremble under the faint glow of the city nightlights. "You'll have to allow me see them. I'll be able to tell."
He frowned, hesitating.
"I won't pry any further than I have to, Ban, but if you want to know, definitively, that these dreams are yours, and not someone else's memories or illusions being shunted off into your mind, then this is the best way. The only way, really. And you can't prevent these visions from haunting your dreams until you know where they're coming from."
Ban cursed again. "What do I do?"
"Go to sleep," she replied, smiling. "I'd ask Himiko for a little sleeping potion, me."
He grumbled, but seeing no alternative, he followed Maria as she sashayed back into the house.
Himiko looked a bit skeptical when he asked her – through gritted teeth – to put him to sleep.
"Sleeping poison is meant to drop someone into an almost catatonic state, Ban, at least temporarily. Even a little too much could knock you out for a week or more, and I guarantee you that you would be too far gone to be dreaming."
"Just enough to make me sleepy, Himiko," he told her resignedly. "Shouldn't be too hard; I've hardly slept the past three nights."
Still looking doubtful, she waved Ginji and Maria out of the room, and popped the cap off one of her vials of poison. She immediately replaced it and caught Ban as his legs gave way.
His tongue tangled up with weariness, he couldn't even protest as she slipped her arms under his knees and shoulders, and lifted him like a child. She called out, and Maria appeared and pointed to a door. Ginji lunged forward to open it, almost tripping in the process, and Himiko carried him into a dark room filled with strange and peculiar things.
Ginji spread some blankets on the floor as Ban fought to remain awake, realizing through the sleepy fog that encumbered him that he hadn't asked Maria not to reveal the content of his dreams to his dumbass partner and the silly kid that smiled like Yamato. His tongue refused to obey the commands of his fading consciousness. He felt Himiko release him, only to crawl away to sit crosslegged at his feet.
Ginji surreptitiously took his hand, trying not to be worried. Ban would have been hard-pressed to know whether to hit his partner or laugh at him, if he'd had the ability to do either.
Maria knelt beside him, and he was as painfully aware of her presence as he was of the other two buffoons. Surrounded by the tools and wares of her trade, she reminded Ban of things he'd tried long and hard to forget, and stirred emotions he wished he could fully remember.
He was suddenly taken back to his childhood in this place, not long after his grandmother had left him in the gypsy's care. Bitter and resentful, the boy Ban had not generally welcomed Maria's indiscriminate – and sometimes inappropriate – affection. But sometimes at night, she sang to him, old ballads about people long dead, and drinking songs whose meaning, if there ever had been meaning, had been forgotten decades or centuries earlier, and lullabies that were even older than the drinking ditties or the ballads. And while he was hovered at the gates of his dreams, her soft-fingered hands would occasionally alight on his brow to stroke his hair, leaving him with a profound sense of sanctuary before he slipped into slumber.
Two gentle fingers touched his forehead, and he was lost.
She swayed gently in the water, pulled alternately toward and away from the rocks with the currents and the tides. Light filtered strangely through the water, refracted from the timeworn cliff faces, lighting her pallid flesh with an unearthly glow. For a long while, the water would occasionally pull her just so, and the noon sun would reach just deeply enough that an observer from the surface might have noticed the metallic glint of the bronze chain that bound her to the ocean floor, or the shine of her pale skin under the weak light.
No more. Her hair had long since grown long enough to knot about the chain in the shifting tides, indeed, the strands of hair that had tangled in the chain encased much of her body in a black cocoon, and thus hid all evidence of her grisly fate. She seldom struggled; there was no point to it, for only time would serve to break her bindings.
The masses and masses of black hair that hadn't caught in the chain flowed out around her, floating wildly on the tides, blotting out the weak light that had once trickled down to her. The world of twilight and darkness, intended to be her grave, had become instead a black prison, in which noon was indistinguishable from midnight, winter from summer. She had passed through years, centuries perhaps, thus imprisoned; yet she did not comprehend the passage of time.
Movement attracted her in the darkness. She did not open her eyes, though she instinctively turned her face to the disturbed waters. Nothing her prison had presented her with had frightened her, as yet. Nothing could harm her in the depths. Only her soul was vulnerable, and there had been no opposing soul to torment her in a very long time.
The moving thing reached her, and touched her belly. She remembered how to frown; she was confused. There was nothing in the ocean that felt like that, that had that rough, ribbed texture, and although she remembered the feeling, she could not place it.
The thing moved again, this time touching her face.
Her eyes snapped open, though in the darkness they discerned nothing. A hand. A human hand had touched her.
A silent cry, of fear or for help, she did not know, fell from her lips into the black water. The hand jerked away, and she wept, because it had left her, and because she had forgotten how sweet the feel of another body could be.
She remembered now, and having remembered, had lost the touch that triggered the memory.
A new sensation broke into her rediscovered loneliness; she was floating freely, no longer suspended in the water by the bronze chain.
Before she could fully comprehend her freedom, the hand returned, and with it a body, a man's body, long and firm and powerful, and the hand felt its way about her waist, bringing an arm behind it. Its legs sliced through the water, propelling her upward, upward, until finally the harsh noon sun split the black locks of her hair and illuminated her closed eyes with an ugly red glare.
The red glare hurt, and she reached to cover her eyes. Her hair tugged at her scalp; the body was tangled in it – the person, she remembered, the human being that had brought her up from the depths. Despite the pain, she cupped her hands over her eyes and opened them, searching for hand, for the body, for the person.
A voice – yes, language, speech, she remembered it now, lips that moved and tongues that danced behind teeth to make sounds. It spoke in Greek, and the fragments of the language she had once attempted to learn flooded back, enough that she could understand that it wanted her name and history.
It – he – untangled itself – himself – from her hair, and sought her face. Yes, she remembered all of this. It – he – cupped a hand beneath her chin, and she almost swooned with the pleasure of the touch, rough and cold though his hands were.
"Your name," he repeated, rolling her jaw back and forth in his big hand.
She parted her lips to draw a breath, to speak, but found she could not. Instead she began to retch violently, and seawater poured from her mouth to the sandy shore. He said something that she did not understand, and when her lungs had emptied themselves of their burden of saline, she held her hands over her eyes and caught his gaze.
"What is your name?"
She licked her lips, suddenly disgusted with the traces of salt she tasted there. Taste – she remembered taste, tastes other that salt.
Her mouth formed her name, and she relished the feeling of moving her tongue and her lips and her jaw, but no voice emerged. She frowned and tried again, forcing air through her mouth.
A husky whisper finally escaped a throat that had been silent for uncounted years.
"Merit."
"Merit, bandages!"
Asclepius called to her, his voice thick with urgency, and she hastened to his side. "It's too late," she told him gently. "He's gone, Asclepius. I'm sorry."
"No," the Greek spat, his dark hair spilling into his eyes. "No, it's not over yet. I'm not finished! I can save him!"
"Asclepius."
He turned to her, and her heart wrenched to see the desperation on his face. It always happened like this, she mused sadly. In the end, she was the elder, the wiser, no matter how she had relied on him in the beginning.
"I can," he whispered fiercely. "I can save him."
"Even you cannot raise the dead." The note of finality in her tone finally killed the urgency in him, and he sank into her, defeated.
She stroked his hair, something maternal rising in her breast. Experience was a cruel teacher, and though she tried to serve as a buffer between her idealistic young friend and the cold realities of life, she could protect him only so much.
He clawed at the dirt with his fearful right hand, fighting tears. The ground gave easily under the powerful grip, and she reached down to stroke the rigid fingers. They relaxed under her touch. She slipped her hand into his.
"You did all you could. You've nothing to be ashamed of."
"I didn't fight. If I had been there –"
"He may still have died." She squeezed his hand. "You were here, helping the wounded. Charis was proud of your abilities as a healer. You were precisely where you ought to have been."
"It isn't fair." An aquiline nose bit sharply at her collarbone as he buried his face in her shoulder. "I can't give him life any more than I could give you death."
"You tried," she pointed out, truthfully, "which is more than most will do. What's more, you care, and that also is more than most are willing to do."
She held up his right hand. "This hand, it is a reminder, Asclepius, a reminder that you are not a god. You, in your brilliance, you were able to breathe life into a boy that had drowned, that should have been dead; you made his silent heart beat again. And the gods rewarded with great strength for that. But you are not a god, no matter what greatness you attain. The sorrows that accompany this gift are there to keep that firmly before you."
Releasing his hand, she wrapped both arms around the now silently weeping Asclepius. "Child… you can't save them all."
He clung to her briefly, and then he dragged her into his arms, as if it were she that required comfort.
"I will save you. I swear, Merit. If not you, then no one."
She laughed softly against his breast. "Do not make promises you cannot keep. Nothing good ever came of that."
Asclepius settled his hands on her shoulders and locked his gaze with her own. Though wet trails of spent tears lined his face, he was no longer crying. "Then someone stronger than I. On all that's holy, Merit, your curse will be ended before mine."
She shook her head and would have spoken, but he cupped a hand beneath her jaw, forcing her to meet his eyes, eyes that burned with conviction. "I swear."
Thank you, everyone who's reviewed! I know this isn't exactly your typical GB fanfic fare, but I'm having a lot of fun with it. So, thank you for your interest, thank you especially for your sweet reviews, and please don't hate me too much for the slow updates.