I don't own Tenchi Muyo.

No Choice

By The Great El Dober

Chapter Three - Of Love and Loss

She stood on the moonlit veranda, traces of the warming comforts seeping through the open door and tickling her turned back. However not even the fading glow of a lit house or the dissipating drones of a deserted television could detract from the still beauty of the sleeping sky.

A bold blanket of dark had been drawn over the world as it softly slept. She couldn't hear the people talking, the birds weren't singing their sunshine songs, even the flowing streams seemed to rest, the daylight's background noise had gently died away and in its place reposed a rich silence.

She stood perfectly still, even her blazing locks that would sway and swing with every frantic movement were settled into a pacified passion, their sapped red at peace under the silent moon. A soft whispering wind stroked at her skin, the touch of the chilled night air embracing her, heightened the soft feeling of fabric against her skin and adding a constant sensation that gave every movement, every moment extra depth. It was a threshold feeling that fuelled her thoughts and coaxed her emotions.

But how could anyone not be moved by this wondrous site? The vast majestic night sky spilt its black blood over the world as constellations of glittering grains were scattered across in a random yet magnificent pattern making the dead sky look like an enchanting graveyard of lost lights, ghostly quiet, hollow yet somehow alive.

This ceaseless stretch of wonder threw its mammoth mass over the world, casting its grand shadow over all below. Without the soulless glow of her creations even Washu found herself swallowed by this dark eclipse. Definite outlines became faint, colour was drained and horizons ceased to exist, after five metres the world seemed to slip way into limitless darkness, a darkness that she was a part of. She felt like a drop in the ocean, the shades of darkness like waves on a storm lashed sea and as she looked up to the jewelled sky she imagined herself as a wave amongst an ever-changing ocean.

She would be ceaseless, powerful, eternal . . .

. . . yet she would never go anywhere, she would always be restricted to the deep. There would be nowhere to run, no place to hide and should she fall under then she would drown, she would forever scream silent cries as the slaying pain choked her soul but there would never be any release. Her existence would be escapeless, she would be a prisoner to herself.

So what did the mighty sea with all its thunderous rage and splendour have to strive for? Another timid lapping of the boundary shores? Another tantrum storm, lashing out at its cell walls? What was left?

That was were her thoughts really lay, not to the picturesque night sky but to the raging storm that brewed just beyond the surface, the colossal clash of fates that was destined to erupt under this silent sky.

She knew that things would never be the same, life could never return to the same routines and practices, never again. She had chosen this path and despite her daughter's impulsive assumptions she knew exactly where it would lead . . .

. . . after tonight she could never see Ryoko again.

This was no meagre act, just like a falling raindrop landing in a tranquil puddle the effects would ripple out significantly and indiscriminately. The radius of the repercussions would be immense, both desirable and unfortunate, but nowhere greater than the focal point, Washu herself.

She was on a crash course with a volatile fate, an emphatic hour steeped in sorrow and influencing impact. A phoenix can only rise from ashes and if Washu desired to give birth to change she would have to demolish, she would have to destroy.

She could hear it, just below the still surface of the sleeping sky she could hear the roar of the beast she had created, a brute titan with an earth shattering might and a cruel purpose. It strained at its chains with looming thunder its cry and Washu knew she couldn't restrain it much longer, the moment of unleashing came closer with each turn of time.

Yet despite imminent disaster the calm motionless peace of this soft nightfall was a fitting setting. As she looked into the endless streaks of space she dipped back into her own infinite history. Days, years, centuries, what span of time had her eyes witnessed? How many lost moments were nurtured only in her memory, how many keys did only she hold? Countless faces, forgotten names, dead languages, buried civilisations, the empires that had rose and fell as she slept, she had lived through them all. She had marvelled at the beauty of blossoms on foreign fields, seen a hundred alien starlit skylines and observed the lives and loves of countless cultures. For every star in the sky there was a moment in Washu's mind.

And now all that would change.

It was the twilight of an era, the gentle sky lulling the ghosts of the past into oblivion like dying embers. It wasn't the cataclysmic cry of war, the sounds that played in her soul weren't the crashing cymbals or thunderous drums as they throbbed with the intense beat of lethal fate. Instead it was the soft, tender sound of the cello as it wound down to the end of the song.

". . . the end."

-------------------------------

"Why?"

The lone word strayed down the chilled breeze but was only answered with the continued march of tired footsteps. Ryoko had patrolled the grounds for hours trying to exorcise the demons that invaded her mind but like her wandering feet her thoughts had no destination, they simply drifted between fears.

Her strewn memories were haunted by desecration, butchery and death, and the implied malice of the day had awoken all these gorged nightmares in her soul. They painted all of her expectations with streaks of blood and aroused her greatest fear, that the cushion she had hoisted her dented life onto was being torn away and she falling back into the filth of murder and malevolence.

The past had held greater perils with more baleful brutes but nothing ever as distressing as her mother's apparent mutiny. It was like a tumour, an internal invasion that couldn't be stopped unless they surgically slice and sever the bonds that held them together which gave rise to yet another soul seizing fear, that she could be amputated, that she could once again carry the infamy of another's sins, that she might become a collateral victim of this fabled association.

Fabled?

It was this other topic that had become Ryoko's respite as she drove her grim forecasts out her mind with deep consideration over the derelict relationship that Washu seemed determined to drag from its grave.

Perhaps Washu was right, perhaps they had once belonged together like two tight cogs in the workings of life but so much had changed since those days of innocence, now they were both battle scarred, bruised and beaten. Like worn cogs they no longer fitted together, their harmony had been eroded into obstruction and damage.

The soured purity now reeked of stale memories and vinegar tears. It had become another stain on Ryoko's soul, another imposed burden to pin her liberated spirit. Her life was already built on bones and blood, her confused memories echoed with shrill screams that bled away to silence and she was ceaselessly haunted by the most foul of all demons . . .

. . . herself.

As fresh, crystal cool water slipped down her throat her tongue would recall the thick coppery taste of blood, the warmth of a welcoming fire brought back the smoking smell of ruins, burnt and pillaged, and Sasami's innocent laughter reminded her off the countless children just like her treasured friend, the silenced souls that had lay stomped and brutalised under her unholy march. Every joy of life had been corrupted for her but of all the poor victims her chained fist had crushed she herself was the poorest.

The most fiendish of dreams, so vile that not even hell could hold them, would waft and wind their twisted way up from the underworld, through her pillow and torment her sleep. She loosely led a bewildered existence riddled with flaws and rotten with guilt yet all her loving mother could offer was another pressure to crumble her fragile foundations.

She struggled to live as an acceptable human being, how could she become the good daughter that Washu yearned for?

She couldn't.

The soft mumblings the warm house began to awake in the air as her fruitless roamings completed the circle of infinite questions and escaping answers as she found herself where had first embarked from. Weary and worn she relented to stop chasing phantom answers and wash her mind of the matter for now. With a heavy mind and thin hope she trudged her body back into the . . .

"I've been waiting for you," a chameleon voice called out through the camouflage of darkness. Despite the short startle of panic that it detonated in Ryoko's heart the voice was soft, warm and brimmed with affection. Even before she saw her mother's shadowy figure she had knew who it was. Washu sat on the steps, her back against the beam and her eyes gazing towards her daughter as if she was as magnificent and distant as the stars themselves.

Ryoko turned defensively round to face the seated and strangely placid Washu. There was something unusual about the limp poise of her seated, almost slumped mother. Something was different . . .

. . . but Ryoko's concerns were not.

"So are you going to tell me now?" she demanded, her ruthlessly stiff tones wedging a formal distance between them. Her hard-hearted expression was without a thread of sociability and her golden eyes glared under the moonlight, burning with resenting emotions that lay somewhere between fierce impatience and muted hatred.

"No," Washu replied, a brief stab of pain, the bite of her daughter's icy heart, escaping in her timid voice. But lurking fate became the wind under her wings as they prepared to spread once more.

She scrapped and scrambled at the base of her soul salvaging the last remnants of herself. The silenced lecturer, the forsaken mother, the slaughtered hope, she implored them all, the frozen ruins of lives long vanished. Yesterday she would have ran away and soothed her broken soul by dreaming of a better tomorrow but there was no longer a tomorrow left.

Every emotion, every thought, every reserve in her soul was being burned to fuel her actions and as they smouldered into smoke Washu knew that this would be her final stand.

"I still can't tell you that," she repeated with a gentle yet absolute voice, her words still as calm and lovesome but built on firmer ground, "but there is something you need to know, something you need to understand."

"I'm listening," Ryoko complied, her bold irritation being faded by a reluctant interest but not washed away, impatience was still the cutting edge of her wounding words.

"I don't blame you," came the tender reply, a intertwining duet of soft sorrow and sedate sincerity, "its not your fault."

"What?" Ryoko furrowed in disorientated response. She didn't blame her? It wasn't her fault? These two fresh arrows struck Ryoko's bewildered soul with rupturing tips laced with a new poison . . .

. . . doubt.

"These words haven't yet ripened into their full meaning but hold them close until they do," Washu's praying eyes pleaded to her daughter's iron wall expression that voiced her stinging suspicions, "Please, I'm not going to lure you into accepting or forgiving. I'm not trying to sell you a sermon either, these are simply words that I think you should hear. What you do with them is up to you."

It was an offer she could easily refuse, another lecture on the alleged merits of compulsory relationships and imposed ideas, but just as that dismissal prepared to leap from her tongue, just on the brink of that reaction was the nipping memory of their last talk. As always she understood the obligation expected of her, she despised the idea of being chained to it but for once she felt she deserved it. She had been tactless then and she had to atone for it now.

"Fair enough," she softened after a weighing pause, a sharp "but you better not try anything," quickly added to balance her stance and maintain her social distance. However Washu brushed this tactical afterthought aside, cast her yearning eyes towards the magnificent choir of stars and spoke softly in a lingering gentle voice that drifted through the breeze with the subtle emotion and mournful beauty of a dying cello.

"Did you know that the light from the stars takes millions of years to reach here? To think that our lives are lit by things that no longer exist. Perhaps the same is true of you and me," Washu began, her words like a sorrowful song of love and loss, "All that we shared is erased, so much love, such words of warmth, such acts of affection, all reduced to buried whispers locked in a perished past. Only I hold the key Ryoko. Where does that leave us? Halfway between memory and fantasy. I can't overthrow my nightmares with wisps of dreams, I realise that now. I can light a candle, I can nurture that glow in my heart but the darkness still surrounds me and it always will."

There was a dead desperation in her voice, a fear that had already conquered her soul. It filled Ryoko with a sharp remorse that sliced at her heart's tough hide, not so much that it burst with shame, but enough for it to bleed.

"You see the damage has been done, the past is not only set in stone but a part in us, a thread weaved into what we've become and we can no less change the past than we can unravel ourselves. If only you could see my dreams, a thousand thoughts of freedom, all of how I would change the what has passed, but just like there is no point in wasted wishes and naïve dreams there is also no point in denouncing the truth," Washu's words building to a climax, the brewing storm now over their heads. She took a deep icy breath, calmed her quivering lips and opened the heavens. "I know that I am a broken mother Ryoko, I know that I have been a condemnable failure but at least understand that I tried, that above it all I said I loved you and I meant it."

"Perhaps you did," Ryoko admitted, her words suddenly coated with wisdom and candour. She spoke with the maturity reaching far beyond her appearance, her voice becoming sincere, a straight and righteous path to bear the truth. She removed her masks, scrapped away her walls of deception and opened up the shielded core of her thoughts. "Perhaps you meant every word of it and perhaps I even believe you but that doesn't change a bit of what's happened. It won't save you from whatever punishment awaits you and trust me, as someone who has already condemned themselves, I can assure you that whatever your intentions were they weren't worth it."

"Perhaps not," Washu insisted, her gentle words reaching out like a soft stroke of a cheek, her voice sailing soothingly on sturdy seas of conviction and sentiment. "Only time will tell."

A strong silence followed those words, the thoughts had been aired under the frosty sky and the cruel mistake had been repented. They had little else to discuss, but for friction they shared nothing.

The silence hung in the wintry air between them like a gaping canyon, a crater caused by a mangled past, but now that the surface of voice was broken two soft sounds emerged from their sanctury in the shadows. First was the rough rhythm of frayed breaths, the sound of a struggling body on the threshold of collapse. It was only then that Ryoko noticed the silver tears of sweat trickling down her mother's cheeks and her sharp pants of nipping breaths as she lay slumped and slung against the stiff beam like a broken puppet.

It conjured alarm in Ryoko's heart but it was swiftly overshadowed by the second sound, the surfacing sound of approaching footsteps, each step closer, each sound louder as it was exhaled from the warm womb of the house. Even before his welcoming face emerged from the snug glow of the open door they both knew who it was.

"Here you two are," Tenchi greeted, his warm words not inconsiderate of the crisis, instead they were simply coated with a deathless optimism, his pleasant approach a symbol of his concrete hope as it burned brightly, resolutely and naively, "What are you talking about? Have you figured out how to save Ayeka?"

It was only then, in the sterile silence that followed, that Ryoko realised they hadn't even skimmed the issue of the endangered princess. Instead they had indulged in minor matters of personal discord but now that those issues were spent perhaps her talkative mother would finally release whatever secrets she harboured. Ryoko settled her anticipating eyes on her mother and watched as Washu's frost-kissed lips opened like the gates of truth.

"I have ordered some flowers Tenchi," Washu spoke with waning strength yet her words fortified by a strange calm and peace in her voice, "Some red roses. Could you please grant me one favour?"

"I guess so," he replied with slight confusion and a slither of concern, concern that these words alluded to some grave meaning, that it might hold some grievous connotation and these words were leading to sorrow. Whatever tepid fears and thoughts singed his mind they were merely pale shadows what what would follow.

"Could you place them on my grave."

Washu's words struck Tenchi and Ryoko like falling planets, their cosmic impact overwhelming them with its potent might and it's vast consequences so heavily severe that for a moment they were almost incomprehensible. Fresh thoughts were being generated in their minds and fresh blades were being slid into their souls, this was another puncture in their strained hearts and weary minds.

"I don't think that . . ."

But Tenchi's hopeful dismissal was abruptly silenced as Washu's slumped spine was jarred by a strained spluttering cough, the coarse sound of which scrapped through their ears like an awkward whine. The strong splutter juddered her weakened body, her forceless limbs thrown into a short spurt of convulsion. It was then that those fearful thoughts that had been imagined but not entirely considered were given true birth.

A small glass medicine bottle clunked softly on the damp ground as it fell from Washu's watery grasp and slowly rolled out into the light. Suddenly this simple container, a mundane instrument of everyday life, provoked a flurry of hectic thoughts in its masters' minds. It became a vehicle for possible futures, a doomful glimpse of what was about to pass.

Ryoko curiously knelt down in the dew to examine this strange yet worrying discovery as it lay there, uncapped and empty. The ruddy orange tint glowed under the white moon with the same soulless shine as amber street lamps, the haunted glass like a vial of ghostly dreams.

The bandage label was filled with unfamiliar names and undecipherable terms but as her mother failed to wholly contain a muffled groan of pain Ryoko no longer needed to read the overdose warnings in order to understand the dire horror of what was happening.

She looked fearfully up at her slouched mother, straight at the heavy eyelids that threatened to conceal those deep green eyes as they stared back, full of apologetic emotion but also, for the first time Ryoko could recall, peacefully serene.

"Mom?"

That one word spoken with such distraught dread was a window to Ryoko's soul and despite all the rejections and pain, despite all of the words and weapons, Washu could see that in that window a candle still burned for her. As she looked into Ryoko's fraught eyes she once again saw the reflection of a mother, even if that reflection was steeped in tears.

With the murmurs of strength she still commanded Washu smiled a feather soft smile. That one word, although an omen for sorrow and misery, had warmed her bleeding heart, thawed her icy isolation and lifted the dismal mist that hung over her soul. It was only in her dying breaths she was finally healed.

And as she watched helplessly, frozen with confusion and concern, Ryoko felt a falling raindrop gently kiss her head and although she couldn't hear it, in a world far detached the eternal one note drone of the soulless machines finally faded to silence.

She was abandoned amidst a torrent of realised fears and breaking hearts, the brackish waves lashing her soul ceaselessly and drowning her in the flooding despair of the moment. The terrified pain she had seen in Sasami, the face of a soul being broken by fate, the downwards spiral winding between confusion and fear, that miserable image was now echoed on her own face.

She was desolate, barren of answers and void of comprehension. The distressing scenes that unfolded before her seemed like a hellish nightmare whose logic had already vanished into waking sunlight, however the world was still soaked in shadows and the heartless nightmare was still very much alive.

The demonic beast had snapped its shackles and climbed down from its cage in the clouds. It now clutched Ryoko's scarred soul in its brute fist, its crushing fingertips piercing her heart until it finally burst.

She couldn't understand, she couldn't trace whatever phantom reason or unknown logic that governed over them now but as her mother's body began to shut down the gates and guards of the mind began to disintegrate like the crumbling walls of a falling fortress. The sacred link, the only surviving thread between them surged with one last spurt of life, it became a burning chariot of truth and understanding.

"No," she gasped, the energy and power of her voice grasped by the sheer shock and haunting horror of unmasked reality. Her knees buckled beneath her and she collapsed to the ground, kneeling in grief as the salty tears began to streak down her quivering numb cheeks. She sobbed into her hands for she knew the reasons, she knew everything that her mother had knew.

So as Washu's last pulses of life dwindled to eternal rest the only sounds under the silk soft sky were her daughter's soul-broken tears and Tenchi's scrambling sprint as he frantically sought help for Washu . . .

. . . his love.

End of Chapter Three

Note - Confused? Enlightened? Perhaps things will make a little more sense now but if not there will be one more chapter to answer the unresolved questions, to fill the major plot holes (like just what happened to Ayeka anyway?), to give insight into the true mind state and motives of the characters and most importantly to show the outcome and consequences of it all.

Secondly but far more importantly, I couldn't fit this into the story and for many it will go without saying but I want to make clear that any attraction Tenchi had would have been towards Washu's adult form. It matters little in the context of this story but I don't want anyone to misunderstand my opinions.

And finally a lot of people say they are confused by the way the story is written. I know the story is a bit more complicated than normal but I wanted to push myself a bit further this time, trying to use more complex language, touching upon more serious issues and trying to weave in some more profound thoughts. Basically I tried to write a more mature (not that kind of mature) fic and at times I was probably in way over my head so if you have any questions I'll be more than happy to clarify what I meant.