Ch. 10: You Can't Keep Running

"Wow," Ichigo sighs. "Aren't the stars beautiful tonight?"

Kisshu giggles a bit before answering, "They are beautiful, but I'm looking at an entirely different star – far more beautiful than any of them. You have grown into such a gorgeous woman, koneko-chan."

Ichigo raises one eyebrow and teases, "Are you telling me that I was ugly when we were kids?"

Kisshu tells her, "Not at all. You were the cutest thing when we were kids." Ichigo ends up laughing when Kisshu kisses the side of her head. Her laughs then turning into giggles when he leans his head against hers.

Right now, both Ichigo and Kisshu are sitting in the fields and are staring up at the night sky, gazing at the stars. Or they were until one of them wanted to compliment the other's looks. Also, they're holding hands during this time and Ichigo's head is leaning against his shoulder while his is resting on top hers.

"Kisshu?"

"Hum?" Kisshu looks at Ichigo confuse as she looks like she's preparing herself to say something but can't put the sentence together right. He asks, "Koneko-chan, what's wrong?"

"Well something's been…bugging me," she answers.

"What has?"

"Well," she starts. "What I'm trying to say is that…you've been alive for so many years and we could never find you. We sent search parties after you and you've never come back. Why is it?"

Kisshu was silent before he answered. When he did, he let out a sigh first and answers with a low, guilt-filled voice, "I was…lost and I wasn't myself all those years. I'm not surprised that the people I used to know didn't exactly recognized me. But when I started to find my real self again, you weren't home and things there were awful."

"Awful?" she asks. "What do you mean?"

He lets out another sigh, unable to look at her and mumbles, "I was hoping I didn't have to tell you this until later, but the Mew Mew Land is basically destroyed. Deep Blue allowed the kirema animas to take over. There's no food, no water, and pretty much everyone else left that place. The only ones who remained are the animal beings and the aliens who have to stay there because of royal duties and the kirema animas." Then Kisshu's eyes widen in surprise as he just realizes something. He looks at Ichigo and points out, "But your mother was the previous ruler of the Mew Mew land so you're the rightful heir. You can return things to normal if you go back and take the throne that is justly yours!"

Ichigo was shock to hear about what happened to the Mew Mew Land soon after she left but now she's surprise that Kisshu is pointing out this out. He's telling her to go back. It's her turn to look away and she pulls her hand away as she tells him, "I can't, Kisshu. It's complicated but please, just understand that I can't go back."

Kisshu's face fell from her words but not because he's confused. Downcasting his eyes again, he tells her, "I do understand. It's because of what happened with the stampede, isn't it?"

Her heart nearly stops when she hears that. Snapping her gaze back to him, she asks, "You know about that? Did Deep Blue tell you?"

"He told everyone but that's not how I know. I was there that day." Now she's in shock.

"You..were there?" she asks him in disbelief. "You saw me nearly getting killed by the stampede and you watched my mother die instead?"

"Yeah, but I didn't exactly see it. I was feeding on a wilder beast while that was happening but I heard you screaming for me. I tried to go to you but my so called brothers stopped me."

"Brothers? What brothers? You were an only child before your father died."

"Yeah I know." Not once has he looked at her when admitting that he was there and Ichigo can clearly see that shame on his face. She wants to know why he has such an expression but something catches her eye instead. There's something on his ear. Something she didn't see earlier. She didn't have a good view from where she's sitting so the panther-being grabs his ear and pulls to look at it better. Kissuh whines, "Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!" He was going to tell her to let go but the look on her face made him shut up. She looks deeply confused as she stares at the scar on his ear. From how it appeared and felt, it looks like something was ripped off him. Then a memory flashes in her mind. A memory of Kish trying to eat her when she was running away but she blinded him and ripped off his earring to make him let her go. Realizing what that scar could be, her hand is shaking after she releases his ear; fear and dead shock shown on her face.

She looks at him in the eye and asks, "A-Are you…K-Kish?" Instead of being confused like she hope he'd be, his face gave an entirely different reaction.

"You really couldn't tell." He looks surprise that she really didn't know.

"How could I?!" she yells. "At the time, you were different than the boy I used to know. M-Maybe I recognized something but I didn't…" Then she realizes something else. Thinking about it a little harder, there is something else further in the past that she is starting to remember, something that had once haunted her for many sleepless nights. She backs away from him and mumbles, "You tried to eat me, Kisshu. You tried to kill me."

His eyes are filled with sadness and guilt, mentioning that but all he can say to her is, "I'm sorry, Ichigo."

Unlike how it was blissfully beating in her chest, now Ichigo's heart is pounding in the most painful way it possibly could. She just can't believe she's hearing this. She didn't want to believe it is, and she didn't want to believe that he seriously tried to carry out THAT promise. So comes the frightening question. "Did you..do it of your own free will?"

'Please say no!' she screams in her mind. 'Tell me that you had no idea it was me, like I did, and that you didn't mean to hurt me! Please!'

But he answers, "Yes. It was of my own free will."

Slap

Kisshu's check turns red from the hit as he looks back at Ichigo, surprised that she just slapped him. Her hand is red and stinging from the hit as hot fresh tears are now falling from her eyes.

"Koneko-chan?" he asks, reaching for her. But she stands up, backing away as far as she could.

"Stay the hell away from me." Then she runs away.

"Ichigo!" he calls, but she doesn't stop. She continues running and then jumps into the forest, her body transforming into its animal-form so she can run far away in a faster speed. He doesn't go after her. Kisshu watches her go before cursing under his breath and then curling into a ball. He mumbles, "I'm sorry, Ichigo. I'm so, so sorry." He keeps saying that over and over again until he started sounding like a broken record player.

Whack

Something hard then just hits Kisshu right on the head and instantly, he's out of self-loathing mood. "OW! The hell was-" He didn't finish his sentence because he sees Keiichiro sitting in front of him with a cup of tea as if he's been sitting there the entire time.

Taking a sip from his cup first, the monkey-being greets, "Good evening."

Kisshu is seriously confused as he asks, "When did you…? How did you…?"

"I can't answer your questions," Keiichiro tells him, "when you can't even finish them." That made Kisshu upset real fast. He's so not in the mood.

Kisshu stands up and says, "Whatever! I'm leaving!"

Keiichiro takes another sip and asks from behind, "Why not stay and enjoy my company?"

"Because I don't want your company." Then he says in a softer voice, "Especially from a smart mouth monkey." Then something trips his foot and then push his back so he could fall to the ground head first. "What the hell was-" He was going to ask but once again, he stops when he sees Keiichiro sipping tea and sitting in front of him like he's been in that spot the whole time instead. "How did you get here when you were just there?" Kisshu asks, pointing from the spot in front of him to the spot behind him. Keiichiro still smiles after another sip.

"Now that's a question. Here." He passes him a cup of tea from….somewhere. "How about instead of leaving, you stay and have a cup of tea? Maybe something good will happen." Kisshu raises a brow but stares at the cup of tea. He lets out a sigh and picks himself up so that he can sit up straight.

He mumbles, "I shouldn't be doing this." Then he accepts the tea and looks at it while Keiichiro takes another sip of his. What Kisshu sees inside of it is what looks like black goo with big chunks of tea leaves and bugs still alive inside of it but they look more like fleas and ticks. Like his fist reaction to the plate of bugs, Kisshu's stomach turns and his face looks like he's turning green. "I'm not thirsty," he tells Keiichiro while looking away from the awful looking thing.

"Don't worry, it's safe," Keiichiro tells him, lowering his cup. He makes Kisshu look at his cup and he says, "See? I'm drinking the same thing." True, but it still makes Kisshu's stomach twist in a sickly way again. Then Keiichiro pulls the cup back and takes another sip. Kisshu is still disgusted but he looks back at his cup. His choices of food and drinks today are just fascinating. He sniffs the tea and it smells good but looks terrible. He gulps and just like the bugs, he takes a sip with a crunched up looking face. After one sip, his eyes widen in surprise. He takes another and the results are the same.

"It's good!" he says, surprise by the taste. Keiichiro just smiles at him.

"See? And all that drama for nothing." Keiichiro shakes his head before taking another sip and Kisshu just smiles a bit from it. Yep, he feels stupid right now.

Then Kisshu puts the tea down and says, "It tastes good, but I don't feel like drinking." Keiichiro looks at him as Kisshu hugs his knees together and confesses, "I'm upset right now."

Keiichiro stares at him for a bit before sighing. "I have to teach two lessons to two people, how troubling." Kisshu looks up at him, not expecting for him to say that. "I have to teach one about how to stop feeling guilty and I have to teach the other about how not running away. Oh, but yet again, they're both the same thing." Then Keiichiro starts laughing at his own inside joke and Kisshu is now not only confused but a little 'I can't believe this'.

"Confused monkey," Kisshu mumbles while Keiichiro laughs.

"I'm not confused," Keiichiro tells him, after he stopped laughing. "The one who's confused is you."

Kisshu takes a small offense to that. "Oh yeah? And how the heck would you know? Who are you anyway?"

"Shouldn't you be asking that to yourself, Kisshu-san?"

Kisshu is surprise to hear that and then he reverts back to his mode. Looking away, he admits, "I'm a cyniclon who has done terrible things to the only person I ever really cared about."

"Is that all?"

"What do you mean 'is that all'?"

"Well let's think of it this way. You're the son of Flamiche-san, a friend to Ryou, a friend to Mint-san, a brother to Sardon and Tart, and a precious friend to Ichigo-san. Or do you prefer lover?"

Kisshu chuckles for a moment before saying, "I don't think Ichigo would like the idea of me being a lover right now."

"But you want to be, right?" Kisshu nods. Then he notices what just happened.

"Hold on! How the heck did you know all that stuff?!" Kisshu asks, a bit upset since some random monkey just read his life like a book. Keiichiro still only smiles but then he suddenly reaches for Kisshu's head and pucks a single strand of hair before the guy could stop him. "Ow! What was that for?!"

"By things that belong to people," Keiichiro starts, quieting Kisshu, "or by things that they touch," he reaches for the cup of tea that Kisshu drank out of and drops the hair inside, "I can tell a lot about a person." He spits in the tea and Kisshu's skin crawls. Then Keiichiro starts swirling the liquid around inside and examines it. He reads out, "It seems that you can't tell the difference between doing things you were influenced to do or things you did out of your own free will."

"Huh? What do you mean?"

"When you were an outcast, didn't you used to wear a silver earring? When was it given to you?"

"What does that thing have anything to do with it?"

"When you were five, maybe? After your father passed away." Kisshu's eyes widen and his body becomes tense. Bullseye. "Losing a parent really is a terrible thing – especially when you two were really close. And at such a young age, too. It's possible to make irrational decisions to escape such pain."

Keiichiro was going to drink his tea again when a blade is pressed against his throat to prevent him from doing so. He looks up at the threatening alien who holds that Sai.

"You just love to blab your mouth, don't you? How about blabbing the answer to my question on how the hell do you know all that!"

Since he knows that prolonging this any further isn't going to get them anywhere, Keiichiro calmly replies, "We never met but your father enjoyed talking about you." Kisshu blinks to that and the monkey pushes away the blade with his finger. "I was there that day at the competition. I was there the entire time. I'm a soothsayer and faithful servant to the Kings of our past, as my father was before me. So even if I never met your father, I knew him. He's a great man."

Calming down his nerves, Kisshu mumbles, "He was a great man, you confused monkey. He died, remember?" Relaxing completely, he makes his Sai disappear since he no longer needs to use it.

"And I can imagine when he died, you felt like you were left all on your own. Being left alone is surely a painful experience and you felt anger – anger at the competition that took your father's life and anger at the future champion of that competition. Why did that competitor win the throne when it should have been Flamiche-san?"

"Pfft!" Kisshu leans his chin on his palm when he asks, "You a soothsayer or a social worker? Don't try to sound like you know what I went through."

"But I'm not wrong, am I?" Kisshu can't disagree on that. Keiichiro is pretty spot on. "Back to the earring, what were you told when you were asked to put it on?"

"Aren't you a psychic?"

"I don't really know everything."

Kisshu rolls his eyes. Of course he doesn't on that knowledge. "I was told that my pain would go away. That I could forget it all and that I wouldn't have to feel those awful emotions anymore – especially towards Ichigo and her mom."

"So you did know," Keiichiro assumes, not looking as surprise as he sounds.

"Of course I did. I wanted to know who the victor was and when I saw it was Sakura, I…I hated them and I didn't want to because it was them."

"That's a lot of conflicting emotions to rage in one small toddler's body."

Kisshu half-chuckles at the remembrance. "No kidding. So when I was offered a way out, I took it. Accepted the damn thing and been an outcast ever since. There was no way I could face Ichigo without feeling that resentment."

"You took the easy way out and became her enemy instead." Kisshu is startled to hear Keiichiro say that so bluntly, but he doesn't stop there. "Then Deep Blue took over the Mew Mew Lands after his sister's death and you helped create Kirema Animas to keep all the subjects in the castle in check. You ate to your heart's desire because all you felt was that fierce hunger, which by the way is a side effect of the earring since it consumes a lot of your energy, but you stopped. You didn't have the earring because Ichigo-san pulled it off before you chased her off, and with your memories no longer compressed you started to become a nuisance to Deep Blue's rule when you tried to help promote a rebellion against him."

"Didn't work now did it, Mr. Know-it-all? Bastard found out and then tried to get me killed. I don't need you to remind me things I already know."

"But you need to be reminded that you ran away, again."

"I had no choice!" Kisshu snaps. "Sardon and Tart are still that asshole's brainless puppets! He can still alternate their reality and make them do whatever he says without question. I'm not proud for leaving the others behind but the least I can do for them out here is find help. Maybe other animal-beings or cyniclons who left the Mew Mew Lands to survive."

"But instead of finding them, you found Ichigo – the rightful queen to the throne. She's their only hope now."

Despite being annoying right about everything else(that Kisshu cannot deny), he's not annoying about this fact. Ichigo is the Mew Mew Land's hope for salvation, but Kisshu shakes his head in guilt. "She doesn't want to go back because of what happened to her mother. I can't blame her. I understand her pain perfectly."

"This is true," Keiichiro agrees, putting down his tea. "She also ran away, just like you did. It's the easiest way to avoid the pain, but it doesn't last." Then all of a sudden in one split second, he picks up the staff that laid by his side, hidden from view by the tall grass, and he whacks Kisshu's head.

Bonk

"OW!" Kisshu cries. That one hurt! "What the hell? Hold on…You were the one who hit me and made me trip before!"

Still holding the staff for all to see, Keiichiro grins, "There was a lesson to be learned when I did that."

"A lesson? What kind of lesson?"

"Well let's think of it this way. You were hit in the head and you tripped because you tried to leave instead of staying to face those attacks. You've been running your whole life to escape the hurt but from how I see it, the farther you run the more pain you've created until eventually, it affected those important to you. Has there once been a time when it didn't hurt, without fooling yourself?" Kisshu shakes his head. "You can't keep running away forever because eventually, it will catch up to you. One needs to face the past if he or she wants the pain to stop. Besides, you can learn many things from what made you suffer the most."

Keiichiro swings his staff again and this time, Kisshu ducks before it hits him again. Seeing this reaction pleases the monkey as he puts it back down, no longer feeling like he needs it for now.

Picking up the tea cup, he says, "So tell me, Kisshu-san. What do you plan to do now?"