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

Thicker Than Blood

The dome of the planetarium emerged slowly in front of her. The city has too many buildings emanating light, so they made another building to put the darkness inside. She knew this was strange, but it was also necessary. Some things could only be seen in that darkness.

The purpose of the planetarium had been her education: Mr. Kido had made sure she could recognize all the constellations, even the ones they couldn't see from this part of the world. As a child, she would spend hours in here, preparing for her grandfather to join her later with endless quizzes. She had no idea, at the time, why this was important, but it didn't matter to her: every constellation she spotted held the endlessly renewable joy of hearing a myth told yet again. Cassiopeia, Hercules, Ganymede, Orion. To this day, looking up at the sky was like seeing old friends.

Now, of course, she wondered — she'd be a fool not to — whether that time wouldn't have been better spent learning how to fight. She remembered, somewhat vaguely, donning Athena's cloth in Hades, full-skirted and lethal. Her power was immense, but she knew she lacked dexterity. The gold saints could wield their cosmo like a surgical instrument, make it converge at a point of their choosing. Hers was an explosive: it could only diverge. She longed sometimes for that control, and wondered what it would have enabled her to achieve. Which lives she might have been able to spare.

The doors opened, and she walked straight to her chair. As a girl coming here with her grandfather, she had had the habit of sitting on the floor by his feet, looking up to both the man and the sky. There hadn't been much difference to her, at that point, too young to have discovered his humanity. For years he had been her hero: her only parental figure, the source of all truth and justice in the small world of her childhood.

When the orphans appeared in that small world, they were mere facts of life, as much as the host of servants that skittered along hidden hallways or the toys that materialized in her nursery as if directly from her dreams. In fact, back then the boys had been something between servants and toys, in existence for her convenience just like everything else. It wasn't really until she began to receive news of those orphans returning, or never to return, that she began to understand the magnitude — and with it, the horror — of what her grandfather had done. The reports of deaths began over time to sound like the happier ones. Missing limbs were commonplace, as were addiction and psychosis. One child had been paralyzed from the neck down by an accident early in training. Another had murdered a friend in what seemed to have been a psychotic rampage. More than one had taken their own lives.

As these reports filled in the orphans' humanity, she also began to see Mr. Kido himself as human. Fallible. The suffering she bore witness to, the loss of lives to death or trauma - all of it had been shaped by the choices he made in the boys' stead, choices that had also shaped her own life. By the time she understood the legacy that was left to be set on the scales of justice, he'd been long gone. She had taken his place.

Yet it could be said for Mr. Kido that he had foreseen, however incompletely, the fate of Athena. He had been told of the evil in the world and given sparse direction to fight it; he had made a questionable means of those children, but towards an unquestionably noble end. The same could not be said of his young granddaughter, whose only end was her own sense of entitlement. Saori hated that girl, and would have been thankful for the opportunity to shake her into some sense. In the absence of that possibility, the thought of the things she had said and done to those boys sometimes made her want to jump through her bedroom's glass door and watch herself bleed.

She had shared this with Shun once, in less violent terms, and his response still ached within her. They had been sitting in his bedroom, her on the edge of his bed and him on the floor across the room, talking about Seiya's move to Greece, at that point an unrealized plan. She had a knot in her throat that he sensed but didn't comment on; Shun could read her like a book, but rarely did it out loud. She told him that night that she would miss Seiya, knowing that Shun would peel the layers of that comment and understand it for all that it meant. He had nodded and smiled reassuringly, remarking that it would be a big change from seeing their friend almost daily, as they were used to. And then, because love for her seemed to always be laced with guilt and regret, she mentioned to Shun that she still found herself trying to make up for how she had treated Seiya in their childhood, for how spoiled she had been. "You were a child, Saori. You did the best you could."

But she was suspicious of this answer, always had been. Because didn't it mean that she was being too easy on herself, refusing to admit that she could have done better? Couldn't that have justified practically anything? So she pressed him. "How do I know it was really my best?" At this, he looked at her warmly and smiled, the smile that he showed her sometimes after Hades, far too aged for his face and for his years. "Know yourself. Have faith."

She remembered wanting to. But she worried that Shun was too generous a judge of her character. Shun had never hated her; even Seiya, as she had so shamefully begged him to admit just earlier that day, had never truly hated her.

Only Ikki had. Ikki had made himself the guardian of all those boys' memories, all those boys' anger. Unlike Shun, he seemed to hold her to almost as high a standard as she held herself: just within sight, just out of reach. Sometimes she wondered if that was what she was still looking for, some long-sought absolution that he managed to withhold even as he offered her his love, its absence ringing in the air every time he walked away.

She remembered him as a boy; always cross, except when looking at Shun — and even then, sometimes, still. His brother, on the other hand, radiated warmth. She liked him, she had always liked him, but Ikki didn't let him talk to her. Whenever she tried, he seemed to take Shun away. Once she overheard him tell Shun that they couldn't be friends with her, because she was the reason their parents were dead. And to this day, while there was no version of this story that she knew to be factually true, she was still not convinced that it was altogether false.

She understood now that Mr. Kido had chosen orphans on purpose; young men with no one else to be loyal to, other than her. No loved ones to fear for or go back to. She suspected, in a corner of her heart she rarely visited, that he had had a hand in Seika's disappearance for this reason. But Shun and Ikki were the flaw in his plan, the exception that proved the rule. She thought maybe this had been overlooked, the fact that they were brothers. Or perhaps Mr. Kido had assumed that, since they would both be saints, it wouldn't matter; saints were also loyal to each other.

Once walking on the grounds of the Kido estate, she had come across a tree grove and heard grunts and noises. This was a common occurrence after the orphans came, but there was a ferocity this time that frightened her, and she hid behind a tree before venturing a look. She saw Ikki, drenched in sweat, wrapped in bandages, practicing punches on a tree trunk. Something she saw in his eyes scared her, even then. He caught a glimpse of her, and his next punch was so strong that she heard the thick bark of the tree crack from top to bottom. She gasped in fear and ran inside, confused to feel threatened, to tell Tatsumi that Ikki was destroying the trees.

For years now, she had told herself that she'd done that innocently, without the faintest idea that Tatsumi would jump on this chance like a fresh carcass. But in that same rarely visited corner of her heart was the certainty that she'd known.

Ikki wasn't allowed inside to eat or sleep that night. Tatsumi told him that if he was going to destroy Mr. Kido's tree, he might as well finish the job. When the butler came out the next evening, Saori cowering a few steps behind, and found that the tree was still standing, he sent Shun outside without dinner and told Ikki that if he couldn't get the job done by himself, his brother would stay out with him to help for as long as it took. The minute Tatsumi turned around, leaving Shun behind him with tears in his eyes, Ikki drove another punch to the tree. At first there was only stillness. Then smoke started to drift to the sky, and suddenly the tree cracked open from bottom to top. The inside was smoldering. If she thought about it now, that was probably the first time she had ever seen real power. It was Ikki's cosmo that burned that tree, before any of them really knew what a cosmo was.

No one else seemed to think that anything extraordinary was happening. Ikki simply put his arm around Shun's shoulder and said gently, "Let's get some dinner, little brother." When they walked by her, he shot her a look she would recognize years later. "Are you threatening Athena?" "I'm threatening you."

She pressed a button to find Phoenix, not visible from this part of the Earth. She spotted Ankaa first, its subtle orange glow, and then the other stars, barely visible in comparison. It felt like a month ago, but just the night before she had laid on the grass outside the cabin in the mountains, looking up at the sky, dutifully reciting legends as Ikki pointed out constellations. He made fun of her studiousness, and when he asked, "How do you know all this shit?" she looked at him sternly. Saori smiled now, remembering what he had said in response: "Sorry, this crap." She explained to him that the stories of the stars — the cycle of life and death, of love and hate — were also theirs. That the myths of the past held clues to the future.

She pressed a button again, and Andromeda appeared right above her, looking much as she had last night when they had found her in the sky. Ikki asked then if she knew about the version of the legend that Shun had been taught in the Island of Andromeda. In that telling, Andromeda had hardly been helpless when Perseus flew by on his winged mount. Her fervent prayer (or one might say, her cosmo) had already animated the chains that bound her, which had of their own will released her and trapped Cetus instead. By the time Perseus came along, the monster was bound to the rock and dying. She had already freed herself, and, as Ikki put it, "All she needed was a ride home." That was the true story, islanders claimed, suppressed later by a culture that could only accept such power in a man. "That makes so much more sense to me," she replied. "I remember how much it meant to him that he lived through the sacrifice. That he did it without anybody's help. Even though I think he understood, somehow, what it meant. His fate." And it was then that Ikki asked her if she thought they could change their fates.

As if in response, the air itself shifted; she looked around, startled, struggling to pinpoint the subtle change. Then gradually, just on the edge of the darkness, a cold, purplish glow began to set in. There was something familiar about it. Saori turned around, half hopeful, half terrified.

"You disgusting cheat!"

Ikki broke down laughing. Li was staring at him fiercely. She looked around herself for witnesses and tapped the shoulder of a man of about thirty, sitting by himself at the counter just a few feet away. He was bent over with laughter while she asked the man, "Sir? Sir, excuse me, did you see that?" It was time to step in.

"I'm sorry for my friend, sir, she had a little too much to drink."

"He's a cheat!" she added, hands in the air. "Nobody saw that?"

"You must be seeing things, Li."

She turned back to him and narrowed her eyes. "I know what you did, cheat."

She was right. He had thrown a dart embarrassingly far from the board, making her eyes light up with glee, until at the last possible moment the dart glowed and swerved almost 90 degrees to hit the bull's eye at a bizarre angle.

"And what was that?"

"You used your..."

"What?" he teased.

She lowered her voice to a whisper. "Your cosmo."

Ikki chuckled. "Was there a rule we couldn't use it?"

She threw up her hands again. "Of course there's a rule you can't use fucking magic!"

Someone turned around from the far end of the counter, to see what the commotion was about. Ikki flashed a brilliant smile and made a gesture of "too much to drink," cocking his head towards Li. The other patron raised his glass with a smile of his own, then turned away. Still laughing, Ikki put both of his hands on Li's shoulders and led her back to their tiny table, over by the window at the front of the bar.

"You know what's funny?"

"The place I'm gonna tell you to stick that dart?"

He acknowledged this only with a smirk. "When we were kids training, Shun and I used to run laps around a tree grove. When we started, I'd sprint out with everything I could till he couldn't see me anymore, then I'd cut through the trees and come around behind him pretending I'd done the whole loop. He thought I was the fucking Flash."

"What a dick."

"I know. Isn't it awful?" Ikki laughed. "But it was good for him. Gave him something to strive for."

"Such a role model!"

He shrugged, affecting resignation. "What can I say? I was great."

They both laughed, but then she reached for his hand and squeezed it lightly. "You were. I saw how he looked at you. That doesn't just happen."

They weren't this serious often, certainly not while this drunk. Ikki was tempted to deflect, say he should have done better, but decided against it. He could accept what she had said for just a minute, feel it settle inside of him. What would that be like, to believe it?

He took the last sip of his drink; her glass had been empty for a while. Taking stock of the board, he saw his last dart right in the bull's eye, the others scattered tightly around the middle, Li's included. She'd gotten better, but not better than him.

"I guess I won in here. You want another drink?"

"Nightcap?"

"No way, the nightcap is the Hakushu I saw at your place."

"Ah, the Hakushu. You know that's the same bottle?"

"You're joking."

She shook her head.

"Damn. I didn't realize." He'd given it to her as an anniversary gift, that first year. The plan was to drink it once a year and see how long they could keep it up. In the second year he'd drunk alone, unable to rouse her from bed. In the third year, he'd been gone. Maybe she had drunk alone, too. He didn't feel like asking.

Li nodded, smiling broadly. "I thought I was never gonna drink that shit again, but now you're here."

He found the energy to joke. "I know you're mad at me, Li, but let's not insult good whiskey."

She put her hands together, in a mock apology.

"Alright, let's get out of here."

Li nodded and started reaching for her coat. He waited by the door while she put it on, then extended a chivalrous hand when she was ready. She pulled his arm around her shoulders like a scarf, interlacing right fingers with his as her left arm wrapped around his waist. He squeezed her lightly and kissed the top of her head before they walked out of the bar. A couple walking hip to hip like this was an unusual sight, but it was late, and they were drunk, and this was a bad neighborhood — on the fringes of the red light district, close to the tourist zone they both hated but closer still to where they had lived.

"So..."

"What?"

"Nobody else you're drinking that Hakushu with?"

"Is that any of your business?"

"Very much isn't."

"Damn straight. And no. Not right now."

He wondered what that meant, "right now," and why he cared.

"I'd tell you my deal, but you already know."

"I'm kind of wondering if you know."

"I wish I knew what to do."

"If you need help figuring it out, sugar, I hope you know it ain't coming from me."

He looked at her. "I know that. I didn't mean to—"

"I know," she added quickly. "I just... always figured I'd go first, you know? Or at least that's what I wanted. For you to be happy, just not before me."

He laughed, but looked around himself for a different subject. The street was empty, although he knew that two blocks away the bars they avoided were still bustling. There had been a brief period, around the time they first moved here, when she worked in one of the nearby tourist traps and he walked her home after her shift, a route not far from where they were. For Tokyo standards, it was a dangerous walk.

"Still working the same joint?"

"That same place I got after the restaurant. Day manager again."

"Thank god."

As effective as Li's bartender glare was, he didn't like to think of her having to use it.

"I miss the night shift."

"Why?"

"People are weirder. More interesting."

"You're the fucking weird one," he said out the corner of his mouth, laughing.

She grinned. "Met you on the night shift, sugar."

Ikki thought about the first time he saw her, pouring him whiskey at a bar in China, and about the divorce papers waiting from them in her apartment. He had known for a year that they would do this eventually, go through the rituals in reverse, retract the promises they had never made yet somehow broken. It never seemed like the right time. It still didn't, and yet here they were, two blocks away from her studio. The air felt taut with the bite of early fall, darkness chased away by screen after screen advertising nocturnal enterprises. Near the corner, uncharacteristically, he saw a piece of litter, and the image of Shun bending to pick it up came so suddenly it made him dizzy.

"You know the thing about him?"

She didn't ask who. "What?"

"When we were kids, he never wanted to throw anything out. Not that we had a lot of stuff to spare, but when we were getting bigger they would get us new clothes. He never wanted to throw the old ones out. He'd try to get the small kids to take them, or he'd make puppets and weird hats, all kinds of things." Li smiled. "I think he genuinely thought the clothes were going to get sad."

"That's so sweet."

"He kept trying to give stuff away to the other kids. Stuff he didn't think he needed. Treats and whatnot. Some stuff he definitely did."

"I can see that."

"And not just with me, with all the boys. Even the ones who tried to bully him. I was worried he'd never be able to fight."

"Was he?"

"He never wanted to. Ever since we were kids. I was the opposite, I was always looking for a fight to pick. He was always trying to talk someone out of one."

"Usually you, I'm sure."

Ikki reminded himself that this was to be known. For a long time after Li, and for much longer than that before her, there was no one to guess at what he was thinking, to know what he meant before he knew it himself. He forgot, these days, what it felt like to lean on somebody, to look around the room and spot the one other person who got the joke.

"Usually me. Usually me wanting to fight some kid who picked on him. But see, here's the thing, he could fight. He really could. I didn't realize that till he was grown, I was worried that he was too fragile. Or a coward, god forbid. But it wasn't that. He knew he could hurt people. He just didn't want to."

"He was an all-around good guy."

"He was the most noble person in the world."

Li gave him a small smile. "That's exactly what he said about you."

"That's not me, never was. But I've tried and I'll always try, and I hope he can see that, wherever he is," he said, instinctively looking up. "Sometimes I don't know if I love this city or hate it," he added. The city lights were blinding. "I can't see a single star." Tucked under his arm, Li looked up with him.

"I kind of like that, actually. People put too much on these damn stars. I like to think we can make enough of a ruckus down here to muddy whatever's written up there."

"But wouldn't you rather have clarity? Look up and know?"

"Except that you don't, right? You don't look up and know. You look and interpret. You tell yourself a story and you start living by it. What if it's the wrong one? Hard to come back from that."

"So fate is some kind of mistake?"

"That's not what I mean. Fate is fate, it's just that most things aren't. Most things are just stories. And that's the trap, it's buying into the stories and thinking they're fate."

"But you write these stories yourself."

"That makes them all the more dangerous, as far as I can tell. You look for a blueprint and convince yourself you found it. You stop looking for other ways."

"That's a weird way to think about fate."

"Well, we've established that I'm weird."

They both went quiet, as if digesting this, while they walked the rest of the way to her apartment. Li unwrapped his arm from her shoulders as she fished in her purse for the keys, then opened the door to the stale air and muffled sounds of the enclosed space. He took his jacket off and went to sit on a chair while she poured two glasses of whiskey, as promised. After setting his in front of him, Li went to open a drawer in her closet and came back to hand him a thick envelope, silently, drink still in hand. He pulled a stack of papers out and started flipping the pages to where the little signature flags stuck out. Her side was already signed.

"Didn't exactly imagine this when I got that bottle. You got a pen?"

"You don't want to read it?"

He shrugged. "I trust you."

She smiled back. "That, and you're even more broke than me."

Ikki laughed. "That too." He looked at the papers again, pulling out the sheets with dotted lines. He owed it to her to sign these without pause or question. She had waited long enough, had wondered long enough. When she handed him a pen, he scrawled his name on page after page, only glancing at the terms. At the last signature he stopped despite himself, pen hovering over paper, and looked at her.

"Thank you."

"For what?"

"Just… thank you."

She nodded, then looked at him as if deciding something before she spoke.

"I saw him once. After."

"You did?"

"He wanted to meet. Check in on me."

"He would."

She smiled. "He was so caring. Just like his brother."

"Not sure a lot of people would agree with that," he scoffed.

"They don't know you like I do. You took such good care of him, sugar."

"Where did you get that idea?"

"From him. He told me. How you were brother and mother and father to him."

"He sure got the short end of that."

"You were a kid, Ikki."

"But then I grew up to be a jerk."

"You loved him too much."

"Please don't make excuses for me, Li."

Her voice hardened a bit, higher now. "I'm not planning to. I'm not making excuses for the mistakes you made with him. Or with me, while we're at it. I don't deny those. Neither did he. And you should learn not to make them again." She paused here, meaningfully, and he thought of barking at Seiya in Saori's studio, storming away and slamming back drinks, nuzzling Li's neck on the front door steps. "But do you know what he asked me?"

"What?"

"If I still loved you."

He felt tears, unexpectedly, and realized he had held them back all night. "And what did you say?"

"I asked him, if the best man you ever knew hurt you, would you still love him?"

Ikki shook his head vigorously, looking down.

"And he said, I don't need to imagine that. So I said, neither do I."

"I'm not the best man you know, Li. I'm not the best man anybody knows."

"Oh, sugar. Look at me." The tears were on his cheeks now, and she took his face in her hands to brush them away with her thumb. Somehow that made him cry harder. "If you killed someone, I'd help you bury the body. Because I know who you are. I've always known."

He shook his head again, aware that she couldn't imagine how many bodies she had just signed up to bury, that she couldn't imagine the extent or the depth of his crimes. And yet somehow he believed her when she said that she knew who he was. If anyone knew, it was probably her.

"Isn't that what matters? Not what you did, but who you are. You see sadness and you want to fix it. You saved my life. You saved his. Why can't that be enough?"

Ikki took another deep breath. Why couldn't it? Li's hands were still on his face. He remembered her words, "it ain't coming from me," and realized he had taken too much and offered little. Deal or no deal, she should not have to catch his tears before they fell on the last line of his signature, the last page of their story. He had gotten them here, and he would see them both out.

Ikki kissed her palm and moved her hand away, gently. Turning back to the papers, he asked an unfair question.

"Ready to call it?"

She nodded, face dry. In the perfect silence that followed, he heard the crinkle of a page and the scratch of pen on paper. He found he had no interest in the liquor now. The thought of toasting to this made him sick. She seemed to feel the same, glass untouched still sitting on a side table. He straightened the stack of papers, set the pen on top neatly, and looked at Li. She raised her eyebrows.

"Doesn't quite seem like it should be this easy."

"No," he said. "But then again, it wasn't."

"No. No, it was not." When he said nothing to this, she asked, "Is there any of your old stuff that you want? Anything you left behind?"

Ikki let out a soft, joyless laugh. His wife. His life. "Nothing I haven't already lived without for a year."

"Good. I burned a lot of your crap."

He laughed harder now. "I'm… weirdly glad, I guess."

"Like I said, I don't deny the mistakes you made."

He laughed again and used the energy to stand up. Her face softened, looking up at him, and she got up as well. Their steps to the door were soft, slow. He cursed how small this studio was. Li stood aside, quiet, while he put his shoes back on. He stood up and opened the door, facing her.

"I guess this is goodbye, then."

"I guess so."

"Unless you want to close that door and catch up on our anniversaries."

He hoped she didn't notice he had just looked at her lips. "It's too late and I'm too drunk to pretend that's not tempting."

"I'm messing with you, Ikki. Make things up with your princess. She's the one, right?"

Ikki pulled her in for a hug. She buried her face in the curve of his neck, arms on his shoulders, tears on his collarbone. He nuzzled the violet-blonde roots of his wife's hair and filled his lungs with cigarettes and shampoo and longing, held it in like a drug. She wasn't messing with him if she was calling him Ikki. He would either leave right now, or not until tomorrow morning. He knew that like he knew the color of his shirt.

So he let go.

A.N.: The third act I'm building here is completely different than what I originally had in mind, and I wonder sometimes how much that shows. This chapter might be one place where is does. Two or three more chapters (I'm waffling a bit on how to break up the last sequence), a short epilogue, and we'll be done. :)