Disclaimer: Thought it'd be the same again didn't ya? Either way, I own no rights to Escaflowne or any of the characters therein.
A/N: Yay! A new chapter. I'm glad that all of you liked the last one. At the moment it's one of my favorites. I've been trying to use some of the devices I learned in AP Comp and AP Lit, but it's really hard to make them fit in subtly to the point of not screaming HERE I AM! I'M THIS DEVICE ect. Some of you will be happy to know that Merle comes in in this chapter. I put her in this fic for one of the fans of Club Escaflowne, who missed her. But everyone else was in on the party so why not her, right? Thanks for the reviews everyone (I'd list your names if I had them in fron of me but I don't have the Internet on my main computer.) Now the moment you've all been waiting for! On with the story! Whoo!
Chapter 9: Any Such Place
Hitomi was wallowing, but somehow she just didn't care to stop herself. She'd asked one of Allen's crew what the date was, wanting to know exactly how long it was she'd been away from home, and barely remembering that the last Track Meet she'd participated in had been on April 12th. Instead of hearing some day in the month of July, as she'd expected giving that Dilandau had told her she'd been his prisoner for at least three months, the man had told her it was ten Red Moon.
She sighed, picking at a plate of some strange stuff in a strange smelling sauce that reminded her of Alfredo when it came to tasting, which she hadn't done a lot of during the past hour she'd been staring at it and moving it around with her fork. She realized she'd been wallowing a lot lately, and it probably only served to make her look like a pessimist with everyone around her. She decided to make an effort to stop…when she was in public anyway.
An aggravated sigh came from the entrance of the kitchen that she was sitting in and she turned to see who it was intruding on her wallowing. She let a chipper smile make its way to her face, but it quickly evaporated upon seeing the grim and slouched version of Van come in and work his way around until he was sitting across from her with a plate of the same gray mass of stuff that she was.
"What is this, if you don't mind my asking?" Hitomi wanted to know.
Van looked up from his plate. He hadn't bothered to take a bite yet, but was instead moving things about with his fork as she had been doing only minutes ago. "Do you like sea food?" he asked.
Hitomi was confused at his sudden change of subject and didn't bother to hide it. "No, not really," she answered. Everyone had thought her weird because her culture thrived off of seafood.
"Then don't ask. If you like it, then it would ruin it for you, and if you don't, then it would probably just make you sick."
"Right," she said with a slow nod, expecting him to elaborate, but not bothering to push when he didn't.
For a while they sat in silence, neither one finishing their food and leaving, but occasionaly taking a small bite. Both jumped a foot high when whistling came suddenly at the door. Looking, they found Allen, whose whistling had suddenly ceased.
"Oh. I didn't realize I was interrupting something."
"You're not," they stated in unison, and he came in, digging into the same pot that they had.
"I'll just get something to eat and be on my way. And Van? It's not good to wallow." He walked away without waiting for Van's reply.
"I'm not wallowing!" he shouted after Allen's retreating form.
"Looks like you're wallowing to me," Hitomi muttered, taking one her far and few between bites and trying to discern what she was eating.
"Like you have any room to talk," Van snapped.
"All I'm saying," Hitomi said, pointing her fork at him, "is that it takes one to know one and we're both wallowing."
Van sighed, and Hitomi grinned in triumph.
"Do you miss your home too?" he asked, looking sad at the thought of being away from it.
"All the time. I don't know how long it's been since I've been home. All I have is a rough approximation. Your calendar is different than the one used on Earth."
"I don't know Earth. I didn't know there was any such place on Gaea."
"There isn't. What you call the Mystic Moon, I call Earth. That's all there is to it."
Van blinked in confusion. "You're from the Mystic Moon?" Suddenly he looked as though he was interested. "What's it like there? Is it really cursed?"
Hitomi couldn't help but snort at the idiocy of everyone on this planet. "No, Earth is not cursed. It never has been, and it never will be. As far as I can tell, the people are the same, but other things are just plain different. We have different technology and weapons, for example."
"So tell me about it," Van urged. He seemed distracted from feeling the loss of his home when she talked about hers, and it was helping her feel somewhat better, so she couldn't find any reason not to tell him anything.
"What do you want to hear about first? There's a lot of differences that you wouldn't believe if I were to tell you."
"Your technology, then. What's it like?"
Hitomi thought about where to begin. "We have machines that will do almost anything for us. We have washers and dryers that do our laundry for us, and dishwashers to wash out dishes. We don't have those guymelef things that you have here."
"What?" Van snorted and burst out laughing. "No guymelefs? How is that possible?"
"We have vehicles. Cars, trucks, vans, things like that. We use them to haul things and get to where we want to go faster, but you have to have a license to operate them, and you have to be a certain age. When you can drive legally depends on where you live."
"You don't say? So it's a big land?"
Hitomi nodded. "I don't think that there's anyone in our history that's seen our entire world. That's how big it is. It has tons of countries, and seven different continents. I lived on an island. There's a lot of those too. We speak hundreds of languages, and a lot of them I've never even heard of."
"We have a lot of countries too, but I'm pretty sure we all speak the same language. My father visited a lot of places before he died, but I don't think that he managed to go everywhere."
"I wonder how long it would take someone to go to every single country in my world. It would be interesting to find out. It would take even longer if they tried to visit every single city."
"I don't think anyone would want to put that much effort into anything."
"Depends on what the person doing it is like, I suppose. I'd just be happy to go home."
"Me too, but there's nothing to go home to, until I can find my people and start gathering supplies to start rebuilding."
"What happened?"
"We were attacked by Dilandau's forces. They burned the whole place to the ground. Most everyone was killed, but I think a lot of people got away too. Our country was actually more like a town. You could see the whole thing when you stood on top of a hill nearby."
Hitomi could tell that it pained him to talk about it and fluttered about in her mind for something to change the subject with. "My country is made up of a few islands. All of our cities are overpopulated and we're struggling with housing, especially in our capital."
"What's your country called?"
"Japan. Yours is Fanelia isn't it?"
"Yes."
For awhile there was an awkward silence, but Hitomi didn't know how to break it without out making Van miss his country even more than he did already. It made her glad that she wasn't royalty having to be responsible for an entire place all by herself.
Van was the one that broke the silence.
"Thanks Hitomi. I've enjoyed talking to you, but there are some things that I need to take care of."
All she could do was nod and watch him go, not really knowing what to say. She watched him leave, the majority of his food left uneaten. Standing, she picked up her plate and his, looking for a way to dispose of the uneaten food, of which she still had to clue of what it could be, expect that it probably involved seafood.
Plates suddenly crashed to the floor and her hand flew to her cheek as nails dragged themselves a crossed it and blood began to well up.
"What was a foreigner like you doing talking to Lord Van?" demanded a very pink, very catlike creature that also appeared to be part human. Her fur was up on end, and Hitomi could tell that she was angry, but had no idea how she would be able to answer her.
A/N: Here's one small fact that some of you may not know. April 12th is also referred to as 12 White Moon (and while I'm not a major know it all on the Gaean calendar I did find this online) and it also happens to be Van's birthday. Also, I know that some are concerned about who Hitomi was going to end up with. At frist is was going to be Dilandau, but the starting chapters were rewritten so many times that the plot has changed from when I first started it. At this point in time, I don't even know who she's going to be with in the end.+
