Fandom: X
Title: Akai Tennyo
Pairing: Seishirou + Setsuka
Rating: PG -13
Description: A closer look at the relationship between Setsuka and Seishirou... (Seishirou and Setsuka pairing)

Disclaimer: X belongs to Clamp.

Like a goddess that looked as graceful as someone who walked silently on their tippy-toes, there was a gentleness that only she would give to the room. The scent of a freshly killed human would permeate the air like sugar instead.
And her right hand dripped of blood on the frozen ice she was standing on. As if immune to any type of pain or pleasure, she tilted her head and smiled at me though her feet were stuck to the ground around her.
Ice should make you very cold.

She was colder.

Her eyes would lift themselves in reverence to the sakura trees around the backyard as if it was spring. As if it was the most normal thing to look at cherry blossom petals in the dead of winter.
But what can you do to people who are numb from their very core?

Many would say she was their beautiful killer with just looking at her eyes. Others would say she had killed them with a smile. Still others would say she was a psychopath with a seductive and enigmatic air around her...

I called her mother.

Akai Tennyo (Crimson Goddess)
by Yui Miyamoto

"Seishirou?" her bell-like voice beckoned me with that girlish innocence. Blinking, she shook her head coyly. "Seishirou, you're not coming to me?"
I walked across the living room to get to the entrance of the backyard where she was standing. I no longer felt fear when I saw her. It was such a natural occurrence to see that living red stain dripping from her hands. So much so that I would be disturbed if it were not there.
As I stood in front of her, she buried her face on my chest and took in my scent upon the high school uniform.
I embraced her kimono trying to warm the petit shoulders in front of me. Kissing her on top of the head, I said, "Tadaima."

Even though I should have greeted her as any other woman, the only difference it made to me was that this one was called Mother. And 'Mother' I would call her though it held no significance to me whatsoever. I was told to meet her years ago even if I didn't care who my parents were or what they did.

I never questioned anything. I didn't care about anything. How can you possibly want something that isn't there in the first place?

And so, when this woman called 'Mother' lived with me, inside, she was the one named Setsuka. I lived with a woman with the same last name as my own.

That's all. There was nothing strange in this.

She could have been my sister for all I cared. I just really held a fondness for this killer wrapping her arms around me and drowning me with her blood. Whether it was dropping from her hands or coolly flowing through my veins, it really made no difference to me.

"What did you do today?" she asked as she looked up to me, blinking her shining eyes once more.
"School. I ate the wonderful lunch you gave me, got another love letter, and passed another annoying test." I laughed with a bit of bitterness. Sometimes I wished time would go as fast or as slow as I wanted it to.
I wished it would be slower right now as I looked at her.

Maybe she suspended time itself. I sometimes wondered how she did that.
Mother looked much too young to give birth to someone as old as me...

Turning around, she leaned her back onto my chest. As she held my hands to her chest and looked up to the sky, she mumbled, "Ah, another letter?"
Though she tried not to show it, she was a bit annoyed every time I mentioned something like that to her. But her actions would betray her calm and frigid demeanor: She held my hands a bit tighter.

When we ate dinner later...
"Your father had given me a love letter when he first talked to me. He had said he wanted me to be with him. I immediately laughed at him."
"Why did you do that?" I asked in between eating my rice.
"Because he said to meet him here." She pointed to the garden. "He was so straight-forward, I couldn't keep from laughing..."

[flashback from Setsuka's pov]
I blinked at the dinner before me. I didn't know that a fifteen-year-old boy could be so self-sufficient. But then, I found out that he did not even have a servant though his belongings obviously showed him to be of a very high-class.
He kissed me, but then he laughed, "You feel so cold."
I smiled back at him the only way I knew I could.

He led me to the bedroom...

When we put our clothes back on, he pulled my hand and led me to the back. "It's a land of mystery," he had said to me.

And I was awed at the magnificent sakura trees around me blooming in the middle of winter. Something like that seemed imaginable, ne? But he had made it possible. In some strange way, I couldn't understand how, though.

He then looked at me straight in the eyes. "I don't care if you are a witch or whatever you are. Just promise to kill me when the time comes. Shoving a ring onto my finger, he then said, 'Stay with me for the rest of my life.'"

I sighed and lowered my eyes. I didn't know what to do at that moment. Here was a fifteen- year-old boy asking me to marry him.
Did he really know how old I was? I could have been a possessed doll trapped for a million years for all he knew!
And yet, he had chosen to court a girl he had seen in passing while walking in Ueno Park. I had felt nothing because I had been locked for so many years by my family. When they had heard the oracle's prediction for me, they shunned me from the world...

...but I had broken free...with blood on my hands...
It had been the only way. But knowing not of compassion or mercy, I thought nothing of it.

There was something about him that wouldn't make me say no. Maybe it was his look or his touch...
But the numbness in my heart was somehow defrosted and so as the petals fell to the ground, I nodded my head.

And we lived happily for a year. I almost felt human then...

But afterwards, the boy who had asked me to love him, asked me to kill him because he had loved me. "I've already explained everything...so...If I'm to be killed, can it not be by you, Setsuka?"

He held my hands so warmly as he said this with much sincerity.

My own name made me blink. I had had no name until I met him. He had been the one to name me Setsuka. And though I was usually quiet, he had learned of my fondness for red camellias.

So, when I blinked at him, I felt the urge to cry. But if that's what he wanted, then how could I possibly say no to his request?

We knew we couldn't live like this forever.
[end of flashback]

"…You watched with your innocent eyes the death of your father by my hands. You were sitting here in your bassinet watching me slash through his heart. Some speck even fell on your cheek and rolled down your face. But you were not scared, Seishirou. Your father had named you 'Life and Death' anyway."
She glanced back at me. "Someday, you will do the same to me. And the one whom you love will also."

Mother sat in my lap while wrapping her arms around me and started to cry. It was the third time she had cried in her life. Birth, my father...and now for me.

Now Mother kissed me warmly sweetly on the lips.

Letting go, she giggled as she ran away from me with the steps of one who was not human, bells attached to her body giving a melody wherever she flowed and meandered.

As I followed her, she sat on the staircase and tilted her head again. "My beloved is going to replace me? Yes, someday, you will."
I smirked and stood at the bottom of the stairs shaking my head. "Now, why would I not want that?"
I stepped up closer and closer, but she would step back further and further until we found ourselves in the bedroom. She bit her finger until it bled.

Pulling my collar, she placed her bloodied finger on my mouth. "Are you really sure?"
Sucking on the blood and grinning, I answered, "Of course, I am...Mother..."
"Prove it to me, Sei-chan." Her eyes flashed as if they were golden.

Blink, blink.
As she sat on the bed, her leg showed through the kimono and her disheveled hair fell every which way making her look like an angered goddess who would feast on human flesh.

Looking straight at me, she asked the same question that she would always ask me, "Do you love me, Seishirou?"
I nodded reassuringly as I smelled the scent of camellias in her hair.
"Hounto ni?" Her arms wrapped themselves around my neck almost strangling me teasingly.
"Hounto," I answered.

"You know what? You look like your father when he was fifteen." She then blinked her eyes at me and bit my neck like a vampire. And we watched the stream of my blood flow down my body.
But she drank it all the same.

"I love you, Seishirou..." her silent, yet threatening tone rang in my ears playfully.
Enwrapping me with her now open red, embroidered kimono, she consumed me wholly...

+/+/+/+/+/

When I came back from school the next day, Mother grinned at me while smelling flowers in the garden. Again, blood was dripping from her fingertips onto the snow beneath her.

As I walked closer and closer towards her, I was disappointed at this game we'd been playing all this time.

As I took a hold of her into my arms, I closed my eyes and embraced her. Looking into her eyes, I knew they weren't for me. I now understood something that she would always deny to herself: She truly did not love me.
Her body was so cold no matter how much I embraced her. Mother had died after Father died. Only a living corpse had remained in its place, keeping a soul which was searching for what she couldn't possibly understand. Something that was only within my father.

So somehow, she had found a way to suspend time itself. Living upon the death and blood of others, she kept alive. An exquisite, golden-eyed vampire.
She had lived in her painful stillness. Mother lived so many years in seclusion with no warmth or light in a cemented cell called a broken sanctuary. She wasn't smiling because she thought things were amusing, she was smiling because she was truly sad. But, not experiencing many or enough emotions, she could not express it otherwise.

Earlier that morning, I'd realized all this when she whispered with a smile, "Seishirou, you have the same name as your father, did you know that?"

She had not seen me.
She had seen Him.

And so, all this time, Mother had been waiting slowly with a smile.
She had waited patiently for me to grow up only to fulfill her wish of...
...Wanting to be killed by the one she loved the most.

When she closed her eyes peacefully, I said, "Sayonara, Okasan."

Though she did not love me, I could honestly say I had deeply loved this female who had given birth to me. Not as my mother, but as a woman.

I looked at the first sincere smile on her face.
Then, I passionately kissed my Akai Tennyo for the very last time.

When I did so, it was as myself.

"I hope you will accept it as thus..." I whispered to her ear knowing she could no longer hear me. I embraced her closer in my arms as her blood painted the snow gorgeously.

Owari.

Author's note: I don't know why, but I've had this stuck in my head for some time now.
But I don't think I did as well as I should have. *sighs*

I didn't know how to conceptualize Setsuka's character until I had heard Seishirou's character file yesterday. (Thank you, Winnie!)
I don't scare easily, but her voice was so creepy, yet beautiful and seductive that I could feel the hairs on my neck stick up. It was then that I realized that the X anime, brief as she may have appeared, had nothing compared to the Setsuka in the character file.

I know I'm not talented enough to bring her character to its full-potential either, but I hope you liked it anyway. I really did enjoy making this fanfic too! ^_^v

I thank you humbly, as always, for reading my fanfics.

Love,
Yui

2001