Disclaimer: Saint Seiya is the property of Masami Kurumada, Toei Productions (anime) and Shueisha.

A Wife By Any Other Name

Ikki ran the towel through his hair again before hanging it up and walking out of the bathroom. Li's studio was smaller than the one-bedroom they had shared, probably small enough to fit inside the Kido mansion's foyer. The bathroom door he had come out of opened into the tiny kitchen; along the opposite wall, the room continued into a compact living space, separated with a room divider from the sleeping area on the bathroom side. The last of the afternoon light streamed in through the blinds, making stripes of Li's bare legs and the smoke that twirled off her cigarette. He walked over to the armchair where they had tossed her long coat and his leather jacket, and felt his pockets for the pack he had bought earlier. Upon finding it, he went to set one knee on the edge of the bed, bending forward with the cigarette in his mouth. She could have handed him the lighter, but she sat up instead, as she had a million times before. He inhaled deeply as she touched the tip of her cigarette to his. A long strand of blonde hair came out from behind her ear and brushed the back of his hand. When the spark bloomed, she retreated back to the far side.

"That was quite the stunt you pulled back there."

Ikki had learned very early in their relationship that Li's preferred treatment for intoxication — anybody else's, at least — involved vigorous cursing and very cold water. Back when they lived together, he rarely drank without her. If he did, it was always bad news, and as soon as he was in through the door, she would give him the look that she threw burly, churlish guys from behind the bar, one that he had seen work successfully on more than one occasion. (On some other occasions, it was true, he'd emphasized her point by stepping up close and throwing a look of his own; two or three times he'd thrown a fist too, for good measure. He may not have been a great husband, but he was always a hell of a bouncer.) In his case, at home, the look was usually a preface to a string of mixed-language name-calling so creative it bordered on the lyrical, building up to a grand finale of being unceremoniously shoved under a cold shower, him and whatever clothes he hadn't managed to strip while she pushed him around. He had never had the pleasure of reciprocating, because she was too good a bartender — and generally much too smart — to ever get drunker than he did. He had sobered up enough now to be immensely grateful for this; more drama was probably not what they needed here.

"I'm sorry."

"As you fucking should be."

He couldn't help but smile at this: classic Li, no holds barred. He could tell by the sound of her voice that it was too soon to joke, but not by long — her tone was cold, but the anger had emptied out, likely from all the yelling she had already done. Possibly also from the elbowing that she had used to educate him on where to put his hands when riding pillion.

The thought made him smile. He had been riding motorcycles since long before he legally could — there had been nothing like law enforcement in Death Queen Island, and if there had been they would certainly have had bigger fish to fry. The best way he could describe the feeling of riding was that it was real. He wasn't watching the road through a screen, he was in it, looking and leaning where he wanted to go. The acceleration certainly didn't hurt, either. He used to think about teaching Shun one day, but during the war they were never in the same place. Ikki knew this was safer; they had much better odds if they split up and he could monitor attacks on Shun and his group without being directly vulnerable to them. This gave him an edge he had used countless times: he helped his brother by showing up as soon as he was needed, and he helped himself by not showing up any sooner. In the year after the sacred wars, he had flirted with the idea of moving back to Japan, but between Li and Saori he wasn't sure which side of Tokyo he trusted himself to be in less, and it never happened.

Now that he would never have the chance to teach Shun, he was glad to at least have taught someone he loved. Li had been on the back of many motorcycles before his, but she had never learned to ride one. One time she asked him if it was hard and he asked if she wanted to find out. The twinkle in her eye at that question was one of those tiny memories that every once in a while made him feel like that entire swath of his life was far more than he'd ever done anything to deserve. He remembered the first time she'd stalled his bike in the back of a church parking lot (and the fifth time, three minutes later), but when she got it, she got it. They went there everyday, first to start and stop, then to shift, then to turn, then to maneuver... He got some traffic cones to set out for her, and he still remembered the first time that she nailed all her slow turns, then made a tight u-turn without setting her foot down and rode back without breaking the streak. It was the only time he could ever remember whooping. She had climbed off squealing of joy and thrown her arms around his neck, exuberantly happy. About a month later, she had her own bike.

"Do you want my bike?"

"What?"

"Do you want to take this bike? I didn't bring it here from California, believe it or not. I left it with my brother at that Kido place. But that's stupid. He didn't even ride. You should have it."

"It's too big for me."

"You learned to ride on it."

"That's how I know it's too big."

He laughed.

"Thanks, sugar, but I still have the one you picked out for me. I like it better. And aren't you gonna move? Back to Japan? What's the story?"

Ikki took a long drag of his cigarette. That was a perfectly reasonable question to which he had no reasonable answer.

"I don't know what's gonna happen, Li."

"You seemed pretty sure this morning."

"Shows how stupid I am."

The fact that she didn't take that bait told him how worried she was.

"What the hell went on in that house?"

Another perfectly reasonable question, in search of a reasonable answer.

"I just got pissed off."

"I gathered that much."

"I was expecting her to freak out. But she just acted… cold. Like it didn't matter."

"Lame."

"I feel like I don't even know her."

"I thought you'd known her forever."

"Yeah, but… that was more like, knowing her from work. I don't know." He pondered, unsure whether to say what he was thinking. He did. "I don't know her like I know you."

She was trying not to smile, he could tell. "We lived together. It's different."

"We were married."

"Eh, technicality."

"It isn't."

"Ok. You're right. We are married."

Ikki was not quite sure what to say to that.

She winked. "Now it's a technicality again, huh?"

He leaned against the upholstered headboard, taking another slow drag of his cigarette, glad to be indoors and smoking at the same time. They were lying in bed chastely now – him on his back, her on her side, propped up on an elbow. They used to argue like this sometimes, lying on opposite ends of the bed, not facing each other, talking to the ceiling. Getting up and pacing when they got outraged at something, sitting on the edge of the bed to listen and reconsider, lying down again when they realized the outrage wasn't as justified as they had thought. Rolling towards each other when someone said what someone else wanted to hear. Rolling away when nobody did. He turned on his side to look at her. She looked beautiful, and he wished he knew what to do with that. "What I'm trying to say is that I shouldn't have left."

She smiled, but rolled away from him and got up, walking around the other side of the bed to go into the kitchen. "You probably shouldn't have. I shouldn't have said what I said to you, either. But I did. And you did. Now we're here."

He had wondered if it would come up, that last fight between them. That had not been a long and faltering bedroom argument. It had been a short but relentless living room fight. She had raised her voice and he had lowered his. He had slammed the door and run mile after mile to the part of town where he could just punch something, which in this case had turned out to be a rock the size of a house. It had been on the paper the next day. Li raised her eyebrows slightly at the headline in the morning, then pursed her lips. He pretended not to notice.

By that point, of course, she understood that he could do that. Sometime well into the first year, he had finally explained to her, after recurring allusions, that he was a saint of Athena. Having decided to tell her at last, he took her up the mountains to a respectable but seldom visited waterfall where he could inconspicuously perform the classic bronze saint party trick: reverse the course of the stream. She was quiet at first; then she laughed; then she cried. She asked a million questions; he answered a select few. People knew saints existed; that was what made the Galaxian Wars so successful. Few knew what they could do. "Most people have the five senses of the body, plus what is called the sixth sense, intuition. But there is actually a seventh sense. When you move an object," he said to her, "the things that your senses can detect and manipulate are solid bodies, with mass, with a surface. You're moving matter. But when I move an object, I'm just moving energy. That's what the seventh sense is; the ability to perceive and manipulate energy." He demonstrated this principle by tossing up a small rock and then sustaining it in the air with his cosmo, slightly embarrassed to let her be impressed by what he knew amounted to pulling a quarter out of a child's ear.

After the big revelation was out of the way, he liked to have fun with it now and then. Once on her birthday, he had insisted that they ride up the same mountain at dusk, hiking a short distance with headlamps and flashlights to where a beautiful small pond was encrusted in a grove of pine trees. When he turned off the lights she assumed they would be stargazing and looked up to the skies, gamely naming the constellations she knew even as her teeth chattered. But then he said he wanted to show her something else, and covered her eyes with his hands. It began slowly, a faint, warm glow; he wasn't used to holding back so much. He saw it reflected on the lake, that red-gold light of his cosmo highlighting the gentlest laps of the water, outlining pebbles, catching on the pine needles like ornaments. Li shifted, asking if he was getting warm. He let his cosmo burn a tad brighter, just enough to illuminate the outlines of the trees lining the far side. Then he whispered, "OK, you can look now," and set his chin on top of her head. He couldn't see her face, but it was enough to feel the shock that moved through her body as he slowly removed his hands from covering her eyes to rest on her shoulders. Her first reaction was to squeal, "What the fuck," which cracked him up. She looked back at him, incredulous, covering her open mouth with her hands before mumbling, "Are you doing this? How are you doing this?" He put his lips to her ear, pleased. "Moving energy, remember? Just moving energy."

It still took months, perhaps years, until she came anywhere close to grasping the magnitude of his powers, and even then she probably thought of them as harmless magic tricks rather than destructive prowess. He never told her all the specifics; he intuited that it could not possibly do her any good to know about the horrors of the underworld, the precariousness of peace. She understood that he had extraordinary powers, but it was not her fate to be fully aware of all the worlds around her. Li never knew that he could (and had) come back from the dead, or that Saori was a deity. She had, however, seen him once in the Phoenix cloth, healthy, strong and triumphant, and Ikki would never forget how the tears immediately welled in her eyes, how she looked like she might rip apart with pride.

He looked at her now, walking to the bed with a cup of tea in her hands. When she sat next to him, Ikki shifted to reach for it. She smiled at the familiarity, watching as he grinned behind the edge of the cup and took a generous sip.

"Oh! Did you want some?"

She laughed in response and pushed his shoulder lightly, making him laugh as well. Then she reached for the cup and suddenly none of it was funny anymore; he took her hand and held it lightly, his thumb grazing her knuckles as she smiled shyly and then looked away. Her shoulders moved as she began to cry softly. Having nothing to say, he squeezed her hand as she squeezed her eyes shut, both of them willing her tears to stop. She turned to him finally and mumbled, "I'm sorry, I just—" but Ikki cut her off by pulling her into his arms, where she surrendered completely to sobs that threw her like waves. He played with her hair, violet roots showing at the top of the long strands of blond. It took several minutes until her breathing started to steady again and she finally spoke.

"Didn't you ever think of coming home?"

He snorted. "Why do you think I moved to California, Li? Sunny beaches?"

"To take up surfing?"

"Please kill me on the day I take up surfing."

She lowered her head again, rubbing her eyes, and smiled against his shirt. "You could have just come back."

"I wanted to."

"Then why didn't you?"

The question made his head hurt. Why hadn't he? "Wasn't that the deal? That I was supposed to leave eventually?"

"That deal was stupid."

He agreed silently. She slipped out of his arms and leaned back on her elbows.

"You know what's weird? I was almost starting to think the deal was off. That maybe after the hell that we went through, it was real."

It hurt, the implication that it wasn't. He reached for his cigarette, more because it was a good excuse not to answer than because he was particularly interested in finishing it.

Here was what no one explained in training: it wasn't so much the fight that you had to worry about. As long as you managed not to get your head chopped off, the adrenaline would keep you going for much longer than you might give yourself credit. As long as the enemy was standing, the threat would fan your cosmo. It was the moments after they were knocked out that were the most dangerous. Once your guard was down even an inch, the shock began to take over. That was when your body caught up with you and you actually felt the pain. That was when people died.

The day after Li got her antidepressant prescription, Ikki had a nightmare about walking mile upon mile on a trail of sharp rocks with a bundle in his arms. In his ear, Shaka's voice tempted him to set that bundle down and free himself. When he looked down, sometimes he saw Shun's face, but most of the time, he saw Li's. He had that nightmare over and over, for weeks. He never told her about it, just like he never told her how many men he had killed, or seen die.

He could never go back to sleep after those dreams, but when they started, he was still scared to leave her alone. So he got into the habit of getting out of bed and doing the most punishing workout that he could pull off in their living room without waking her up. One time he failed, and found himself looking up at an upside-down image of a sleepy Li, staring expressionless as he performed handstand push-ups in the pitch-black darkness of three in the morning, sweat streaming down his hair. He stared back in silence, worried that if he so much as began to explain what he was doing, something he had been working very hard to contain might finally crash over them both. When she asked, "Can't sleep?" he just nodded. But then she asked, "Bad dream?"

They were never the kind of couple to be particularly open about their emotions, positive or negative, but they were also never afraid to fight when fighting was warranted. Upon discovering that the famous little brother she had never met lived less than ten miles from them, Li had shouted that she was tired of being nothing to him, and actually begun to pack. For the first time in his life, Phoenix Ikki asked someone to stay. An incredibly surprised Shun was invited for dinner a few days later, and became an occasional guest after that. For a young kid who had grown up idolizing his older brother, Shun took to ganging up on him with Li shockingly quickly, which amused her to no end. Shun never called him — it was part of the unspoken treatise between them — but he called Li sometimes. Ikki knew he had heard about their separation from her.

Much earlier than that, before they had even moved to Japan, he had once arrived early to pick her up from her shift and been so incensed by the sight of a coworker's hand lingering on her forearm that he had just loudly gone on past them, leaving Li without a ride while he spent the day on the open road. When he showed up at her apartment at dusk, she asked him angrily what made him think she belonged to him. In return, completely against what he consciously believed, a primal side of him thundered, "What the fuck makes you think you don't?" It only took a glance before they collided in the middle of the room, her legs climbing to his waist while he fumbled for his belt buckle.

But none of these tried-and-true strategies worked well for what unfolded after Li began to get better. It started small. When she came out of the thick of it, he gently asked her questions; how she had felt, when it had started, if anything had triggered it. But her answers were vague and elusive. He tried to be understanding, to let her uncoil in her own time. Ikki could relate to not wanting to talk about it; there were plenty of things that he didn't want to talk about. Li started spending more time with Ae-young, which was good; he felt strongly that they owed the friend Li's life, for suggesting the psychiatrist. First it was short phone calls with the door open, then longer ones with the door closed. He noticed she started writing extensive emails, and that they were for her friend. It only took a quick glance at the screen to realize what she was writing so prolifically about.

It wasn't that Li didn't want to talk about her depression. She didn't want to talk about it to him.

He tried so hard not to be hurt by this. He wanted his desire for her to have a friend she could trust to outweigh his disappointment not to be that friend. He didn't want to be jealous of every minute that Li spent tending to her friendship rather than mending their relationship. He refused to believe she was turning away from him.

By this point, he had gotten in the habit of hiding concern from her to prevent her from becoming upset. He'd been so intent on it that for a time he missed the gripes piling up in the corners, gathering dust, until it started to feel like he couldn't walk across the room without tripping over his own resentment, toppling some old grudge. When he came down from that handstand, he focused his gaze and braced his core in order to set his feet directly behind his wrists, slowly and with control, like he had learned to do as a child. But somewhere along the way he seemed to flail. Somewhere along the way, he seemed to knock something over. "Don't worry, I'll just talk about the dream to Ae-young."

He could practically hear it, the tall pile of grievances that came crashing down to scatter at their feet. The jealousy and the grief. "It used to be you and me against the world, Li!" The blame and the skepticism. "You ever think maybe that wasn't healthy?" The resentment and the entitlement. "I'm supposed to be your husband!" And at last, the truth, so sharp it was almost painless. "You're not what I need right now!"

For a long time, when he mulled over the end of his marriage on the windy roads of the California coast, he used to take some pride in the fact that he had not left that day. He thought that meant something, that the delay lent him legitimacy. But it was easy to construct these narratives with no one to test them against. Here, now, sitting on this bed with Li, he knew he might as well have left that very night. He had thought obsessively about everything she said, dissecting and injecting meaning. If he was more honest with himself than he was really willing to be, the words had felt less like indictment, and more like permission. After all the struggle and the strife, in the end he just wasn't what she needed. It wasn't meant to be forever, after all.

"I almost thought it was off, too. Till that night."

"Ikki..."

"I'm not saying that to be a dick. It's just… that was what I thought at the time."

She paused and sighed before turning to look at him. "All I need."

"What?"

"You're not all I need. That's what I meant to say. I've been wanting to tell you that for a year."

"Li, come on."

"No, I'm serious."

"Our marriage didn't end because you misspoke, Li."

"Of course I know that. I saw what was going on, Ikki, as much as you tried to hide it. I know a lot of shit went down before it came to that. What I'm saying is that I saw you. I know how hard you were trying."

"Doesn't mean I succeeded."

"If I'm walking this earth today, it's because you succeeded."

"It wasn't like that."

"How was it, then?"

He fell silent, disturbed to find that he had no answer.

"Here's the thing, Ikki. You had done so much for me already. You tied yourself to me. Like a buoy. I'm not blind to how fucked up that was. It was... embarrassing." When she looked at him, he saw the tears in her eyes. "There came a point where I had to just… not need you so much anymore. I saw how you felt responsible for me. I had to be responsible for myself. I didn't need someone better, I just needed someone else, I guess. For a while. And I hate that I didn't know how to explain that to you at that time."

The concept was not particularly new to him. While Ikki drifted beyond the known universe and Saori lay on the steps of the Aries temple, Shun had fought and defeated a gold saint on his own. It was the first major opponent he had ever taken on without any help, and Ikki remembered his own ambivalence at the notes of Shun's voice when they talked about it for the first time. Guilt for not having been there, relief for not having had to. So much wasted in the push and pull of those feelings, in his inability to negotiate a proximity that didn't make him claustrophobic.

Li's voice pulled him up out of his thoughts.

"I think I lashed out at you earlier because it's hard for me to admit that I pushed you away."

"I should have just pulled you back in."

She shrugged and reached for the cigarette he had set back on the nightstand. She took a long drag and passed it to him before answering. "You tried. But you were right, that wasn't the deal."

"That deal was stupid. We've been over that."

"Why were we so—?" she sighed, falling back on the bed again. "You know, I almost thought that, seeing you here—"

"What?"

"I guess I didn't realize you were getting married."

"What would you say, if I wasn't?"

"What does it matter, if you are?"

Ikki let himself fall back next to her. "Why couldn't we just get it right, Li?"

She just waved it off. He turned and looked at her eyes, bright black and far apart, fixed on the ceiling. They were a stark contrast to her now platinum-blonde hair, which was starting to grow on him after all. When he had seen her for the first time, the first thing that had caught his eye was that long violet hair that she shared with someone else. But while Saori had that exotic, hard-to-place look of pale skin and big blue eyes, Li was distinctly Chinese, with short straight eyebrows, high cheekbones and a soft oval jawline. Whatever resemblance he had once seen was lost now. When she gestured for his cigarette again, he passed it, watching without thinking as the gentle movement of her chest caused the spark to flare, as the slight parting of her lips allowed the smoke to billow out. In all the times he had imagined himself back in her bed, this particular scenario had not come up once.

"How about you and me get out of here?"

She came up to her elbows again. "And go where?"

"Remember that joint by our place we used to go to?"

"Oh god. With the mystery puddle that would never dry?"

"And the perfect highball."

"You know I could make that highball in my sleep."

"Yeah, but then I wouldn't get to watch you miss the dart board by two feet."

"One time. One time, that happened."

"One time to remember."

"You think that place is still there?" Despite the skepticism in her voice, she sat up.

"Trust me, there could have been a nuclear apocalypse and that place would still be there."

"You don't want to sit here and finish this tea?" She was smirking by now.

"Li, you know I love tea," he dead-panned, making her laugh. "But my only brother just died. My girlfriend just found out I have a wife, and my wife found out I have a girlfriend. And here's my best friend in the world who I haven't seen in a year." At this, Li smiled. He rose to his feet and extended a hand. "Tea is bullshit."

She took his hand and shook her head. "Man, your wife must be pissed."

One more chapter! We're almost 80% done now. Next one coming soon. :)