Oh no, it's my 'One Last Night' deconstruction. So where will this end up? *mild suspense*.

You know me :P

CHAPTER 9

KURAIN

PHOENIX :

Well, the physical injuries may have healed, but the emotional scarring will take longer. How much longer, nobody can say. But it's not a problem, only to be expected, not like I haven't spent endless years of my life in abstinence….

But admittedly, it's not Maya insisting on prolonging our abstinence. It's.. me. Nothing could be a bigger turn-off than her flinching in fear at my touch!

It's not me. Maya's insistent it's not me. It's things that subconsciously remind her somehow, then it's like she's back when it was actually happening, literally returned to the actual atrocity. And I believe her. In fact, it really looked like she'd become disoriented and believed herself back when it was happening, except I had somehow turned up there as well, and she started begging me to save her. Which really made me feel a million times better! Because, of course, I didn't save her, and it's too late.

It's not me. But I feel like it's me. And it is me, because really this is all my fault, and every time it causes her distress, it just reminds me. I can't forgive myself, and I feel even worse because I can't hide it from Maya I'm beating myself up over it, and she wastes all her time encouraging me and telling me it's "not my fault" when I should be looking after her!

And it's n-not like Maya isn't handling it well, all considered…

That's part of the problem. Maya goes about all her daily activities and interactions with other people as if nothing ever happened, I can only admire the level of strength that must take. But of course by the time we finally retreat to the Master's Wing she's an emotional wreck. (Not that I wasn't the same way for seven years.) Maya was in pretty poor health as it was with the stress of continuously repowering my protection charm, and now this.

Then there's the trauma nightmares. It's as if every subconscious trauma scar of the past has been torn open and she's got to relive them all, in an irrational compressed string of concatenated torture. She levitates out of the bed, totally disoriented, and all I can do is hope to wake also and go enfold her racing heartbeat to my own.

"Maya, Maya! It's okay now, it's only a dream."

"But no, no it isn't, it's real," she chokes. And it stabs at my heart, because no comfort I can give can ever change that.

Nobody else can know. It carries even more stigma here because women are considered dominant over men. Hence she would be seen as a laughing stock to her female peers, not a victim. The injustice! Like any of this was her fault! Just thinking about how those bimbos would all gossip and claim how they would have of course channelled the ghost of some mass murderer instead to…!

During the day I try to channel my rage into productivity, spending as much time in spirit training with Maya as possible, it's largely because of me being weak enough Maya has to drain her power into the magatama with protection charms that this happened anyway, and I figure any increase in my personal strength at all will be beneficial, it also gives Maya a distraction and ourselves more alternate opportunity to bond. The training is harsh, but I don't care. I visualize, as Maya taught me, that I'm welcoming and subsuming the outside assault into my own being to become part of my own inner power. I picture myself channelling all my anger at this injustice into an internal fire, my outside totally inscrutable, then I hit the clueless Kristoph with the force of my psychic powers and he gives an unearthly scream of pain as he explodes, erased from existence.

…This doesn't make me feel better when I'm more than semi-unconscious though, it just feels like something off a really dumb TV show – not even those Steel Samurai shows, more like something off the small-kiddie-target end like Zappy Samurai.

I WANT TO KILL HIM! Apart from knowing murder is 'wrong', there's the problem that bastard is already dead! I try to focus instead on one of those training mantras. 'The truly strong are externally neutral and inscrutable, and do not retaliate with antagonistic angered force, but use it to stoke an eternal fire that can never be destroyed.'

Injustice! Feel it burn!

Maya doesn't want to seem to have cold feet. Maya seems to have some idea we should figure out what does and doesn't freak her out by painstaking trial and error, but I don't quite feel up to it. Sometimes recently it's like my feelings have taken a time warp, back to when we first met and maybe a few years after. I would never have dreamed of taking advantage of her or exploiting her trust. My feelings were pure, I just wanted nothing but to protect her… DAMN IT!

It's all really awkward. N-not like we're not still fine with affection and all.

Like just now, I was giving her a body massage, same as usual. I like doing this, she never flinches away. You have a cute body, Maya. It's not like I don't still have desires! But they short-circuit pretty quick… Or something.

Like, when I then felt drawn to her, and my lips met hers, but when we cross that invisible boundary and press deeper, she seems to stiffen, just a moment, and it's enough to throw me off entirely. I back away.

"N-Nick…"

Her tone hinted I'm the party consciously insisting on derailing operations. (Heck, maybe it was only my paranoid imagination?) I gave a feeble grin of awkward affability, hoping it was enough not to cause offense.

I bet it wasn't.

We exchanged innocuous words a bit like nothing was up, but I soon excused myself.

It's all very awkward, and sometimes I just have to get away from her.

Too many misplaced feelings I can't categorise or label in too many quantities, it's damn irritating. But I do know I'm angry – at Kristoph, at myself. Before, whenever someone hurt my little Maya, I could just channel my emotional belief and obsession into getting them jailed (and probably executed.) Here I can't even sue: we're not sure if Kristoph is channelled or some kind of embodied super-ghost, but Maya said it looked different to the planned channellings here, so it's probably some senile medium now too weak to control her spirit power being possessed, yet another innocent victim.

I'm ANGRY! I'm super gentle and caring with little Maya and the discharge of negative affects in training isn't enough to dispose of them all. I kick a rock in blind fury, but just get a stubbed toe, negating anything accomplished by the exercise.

I'm still consumed with every conceivable category of frustration as I arrive at the one place I can avoid Maya without her getting hurt by it seeming like I want to avoid her: the Male semi-Hot Spring.

They do have separate segregated ones, on account of the old hags who like to strip naked, but I don't know why they bother, as I'm usually the only man in Kurain these days. I guess it's like my private sanctuary (even if it is akin to your refuge being a male restroom) so going here has become sort of habitual lately.

I'm not stupid enough to think it is private though, I know some of those desperate old mediums probably spy in hope of seeing something. For this reason and my own natural reticence, I keep a pair of boxers ON. (I don't care if they get all wet, no way am I changing in public!)

I strip off my other clothes, taking care to wrap my Magatama securely so nothing will accidentally shatter it, and stow the bundle in the receptacle for valuables, safe from the steam and splashing of the spring. I take the long, circuitous path toward the entry ladder of the spring itself. I'm spacing out as I cross the rocky arena, when my feet practically trip as I stumble in the gravel-sand.

"I-Iris!"

The figure had suddenly emerged out of the wall, through that other narrow 'emergency' passage that winds to the women's spring, right into my line of vision, so my eyeballs were pretty much required to look.

Iris is wearing what's kind of analogous to a bathrobe around here, this piece of cloth they wrap around themselves when they've just gotten out of the hot spring. In English we call it a 'modesty drape', but it's kind of a misnomer…. I avert my gaze. Guess she's made a mistake.

"Um, Iris. The womens' spring is on the other side…" I gesture awkwardly to the huge rock wall and narrow, twisting passage separating them.

A cloud of pesky big insects suddenly flap in my direction, on course for my face. I hastily reel a few steps back – till my path is blocked into a rocky corner. One of them alights between my eyes. I take a swipe at it, but it won't budge.

"Oh! Is that so?" Total innocence (almost too innocent) crosses Iris' face. "But I thought I'd visit you. Feenie."

I feel a curious tingling sensation pulse through the insect's feet. Iris takes a step forward, and suddenly my swatting hand drops limply to my side, ceasing to obey my instructions.

Three more of them –butterflies – land on my skin, crawling, crawling… with unusual synchronisation. It feels… GAH!

She takes another step forward, close enough to brush. I'm pinned into the corner wall.

My consciousness and will is wavering spacily in time with the pulsing between my eyes. Whatever neurotoxins that moth thing's injecting into my brain – I gotta get it off me! My paralysed hands start for my Magatama… but of course I don't have it.

My limbs don't obey my instructions, trapped in an unnatural type of paralysis. I try to raise an iron will or spirit power – but there's just wooziness where sentient thought and sanity sometimes are.

"Iris! Stop it!"

What started as forceful degenerates to a feeble waver by the time it's expelled.

"Stop what, Feenie?"

I try to limit my breathing so we won't touch as my chest rises, but I've lost control of that as well.

Two of the horrible things have actually crawled into my pants, still crawling with more than random irritation. Iris leans ever closer, gazing into my eyes. I fight through the insanities swirling my absented brain.

"Iris, I… I don't feel well. Maybe I'm getting the flu." (Or a cold.)

Suddenly her eyes flash the old, insecure, Iris.

"D-do you like Mystic Maya because she can channel?"

"Huh? "

"Or is it because she's Master?"

"Iris, I d-don't know what you're insinuating, b-but can you take your butterfly off me, please?"

I've broken into a putrid sweat, I feel vaguely hot and parts of me are shaking. Once I may have interpreted this as 'lovesick', but now I know it is just 'sick'. True love makes you sick also, but it's the kind of utter visceral devastation from having your little Maya murdered by a demon jumping off Eagle Bridge, or her being murdered by an assassin whilst dying to defend your honour.

Oh god, it's crawling.. there…

But her eyes are back from glancing downward, back in a confident lure.

"Feenie, you are enjoying this."

*O…b…*

The mere though wavers away before it can form, I've forgotten any will of resistance, conscious thought ceases at all, there is none left except…

Iris leans in, pressing her lips to mine. Suddenly something surges through me, something I've felt on only one other occasion.

IMPOSTER!

Disgust at the nerve of that imposter filth replacing my little Maya! A weapon we both know and Iris fears shoots through to my lips. "I like Maya because she would do anything to protect me!"

Suddenly the paralysis breaks and my fury is violently, blindly shoving. Iris goes flying in a way that last time got me trialled for murder; it's only luck rather than forethought that she lands on the shallows of the water rather than dashed on the rock. Iris' head drips out as I continue to scream.

"She never betrayed me, and I can trust her! She never abandoned me, even when I abandoned myself."

"Y..you really were in love with Dahlia!" Iris breaks into a sob.

What the hell? But I can't be bothered correcting or clarifying. I drop my pointing finger and storm out, just remembering to grab my clothes on the way past, and go pound my awareness into numbed oblivion under a freezing waterfall until late that night. I'm all hot and bothered, and I really want Maya, but in the context and situation it would all be awkward and sickeningly wrong.

NOTES:

Phoenix isn't using a spirit power here, but the same power he used in 3-5 to exorcise Dahlia, the strength of his emotion wanting Maya (rather than that imposter.) This, as precedented, can break through the 'spell' of the Dahlia-Iris supernatural seduction type powers. A power of pure emotion. "Nothing else matters!"

###

MAYA:

It's damn late, but Nick's not back yet. Not late enough that I really should worry though, he's a big guy, I should remember he can look after himself. (Sometimes. Or at least, my Magatama can…)

It's obvious he'd want alone time after I messed up this evening yet again, this has happened before. Like yesterday afternoon, and Wednesday, and Tuesday, and Monda…

I admit it's kind of a relief. He's too polite to say so, but I know he feels like I'm contaminated since the… the Gavin t-thing. I can't blame him. I feel contaminated. Why couldn't his injustice nightmare stay dead? Now every time he sees me, I guess I personally reanimate it.

Sometimes I HATE being a spirit medium.

Guess I'll just… go to sleep. My waiting eyes give up and close.

My feet are cold flailing around that big empty space instead of being crushed against that big annoying lump b-but….

I'm re-trodden on by another depressing though. Nick doesn't want to do that any more either. 'Sleep Together' I mean. The other kind. (Well, actually, as I muse into the floating empty Nick-space, any kind.)

I can't blame him. It was like winning the lottery he ever did in the first place. It was almost too good to be true he ever saw me that way. (N-no! I won't think that...)

And it always was that Kristoph Gavin thing torturing him, wasn't it, and I knew it. And then I didn't protect him. It's my fault for being so weak.

…Yeah, so I should definitely stop thinking! Just shut up and sleep so I can get up and train tomorrow!

But as usual, my eyes soon open in the place of no rest. Fear, pain, torture, violation, loss and abandonment. Not much logic but an endless stream of emotive repetition, my annoyingly small body trapped as usual in the ultimate disempowerment. I can't even move!

A hell of disorientation mires around me, all- or none- of my worst place memories melding spectrally together as I fight for any guidance or bearing to cling to. Is it that mountain? Is it dead in the ground? Is it some stone lantern or pyre?

But as always, I know one thing. I'm totally, totally, alone.

"NIIIIIIICK!"

"Maya?"

The cry from my lips had been both instinctive and futile. I'm almost bemused to actually see his darkened face spike through the prickly bedroom fog.

"Maya? I… I… I won't abandon you."

I throw myself and seize him, for once my limbs again able to move, the usual bed again manifested around us. My fingers fight through the soggy clothes and random spikes of weird body hair, wondering vaguely why he's all wet but not really caring as I feel his lips connect mine.

Nick...

We deepen the kiss, resolute not to break except maybe for air - no, not even then - static in a kind of equilibrium.

For the first time since then, he's not holding back.