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I thank all the owners of the Tenchi characters who have chosen not to sue me for suggesting some alternative uses for them.
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I thank all the readers who have perused my other submissions and favorite authors.
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Love, honor, and obey.
^Tenchi Muyo: Sanctuary and Asylum^
-Verse Seven is Mother-
-Part 1-
Better for knowing barren seeds---senseless killers understand.
The failed midwife will show the way---to justify bloodied hands.
-ZJS
He steers the waterfall spray into a cloud above the canopy, stretching its halo belt to color a flock of black bats, sending white noise throughout the lush green. Perception darts back up to the blue background, sealing, resealing blue to match its eyes. For a forest there had better be more than trees when he looks back down there. Plenty of wind to spare spirals loose leaves up from their churning homes. Some branches grow larger and twist to accommodate him and the glare-less glass beneath his feet. But it wasn't clear. Not enough.
He stops the descent and removes himself from the picture for a better unveiling. A worm-desiccated tree takes the place of just in time for another more invisible look. Just this cancer veins bark tower and its shadow to compliment the clearing, or, maybe no more than a moss-less stone. It must be large enough for his standing when he makes himself from the tree's shadow like a plume of smoke and a crumble of paper.
He steps out into the scattered sunlight standing taller to observe his surroundings, affected disorientation recreating curiosity. A black coat and slacks gleam around his milk skin like volcanic glass, dressy as a dress but able to maintain formality over elegance. Lost or free; fascination banishes what could have been fear when he realizes he's not alone.
She watches him shyly, only half her face visible behind a large tree. Inquisitive yet inviting, the perfect boyish smile to lure the rest of her forward. The flattering wonder he looks upon her halos them both with an inviting blush. She flutters on transparent wings that flicker with better pinks and greens than the waterfall could capture. Her slender young body is covered only by a short dress knitted from silky green moss and leaves like scales. Dainty feet and smooth legs stay together, yet her arms curve gracefully as she moves towards him with a broken branch in one hand. Wings rest and feet touch to the ground as the two face each other half an arm's reach apart. They maintain eye contact even now that she is nearly two heads shorter.
With a slightly anxious smile she lifts her branch up like a torch and removes a single piece of red fruit. The delicate motion releases a jingle of tiny leaves and a few drops of water. He needs little coaxing to allow her to feed it to him. Although the offering is not half a mouthful, the delicious taste savor-slows his jaw enough to pull down his eyelids. Their smiles almost match and as a drop of juice escapes from the corner of his mouth they share a laugh.
The offering is swallowed without so much as a passive whisper. He takes a moment to relish it again alongside every other sensation and the question of how long it has been since he's done so. She breathes in deeply; it has to be the strong musk emanating from the visitor's thick clothes, it must be why his imposing formality is so strangely alluring. The girl in green wavers slightly in eager anticipation for him to open his eyes and see how beautiful she is.
A cold breeze scatters leaves about them, each dead enough for the desert. The man in black, once lost in thought, has found the map's legend and roles it into a sword. His smile deflates, opens his eyes at the speed of memory. There are no new insights, just new inspiration.
The girl in green looks up into his suddenly serious expression and is remotely unnerved. She hides it well and inches closer to be thanked for such generosity. Her small dress tightens slightly as she bats the violet pollen dusted around her eyes and pouts her candy pink lips.
The man in black exhales through a thinly opened mouth and angles his stare, eyes sharp and ridges hard. He smiles smugly at how this excites her, and takes her hands in a gentle motion, holding them against the sides of his face. Her palms are as soft and warm as he expected them to be. She trembles lasciviously and he smiles wider still.
Leaving her hands to hold over his cheeks, his eyes drift into her hair. Her bangs dangle thinly and should tickle; the rest is held in a casual ball by a large metal pin. His fingers float around her head like antennae, this sensual mass of fibers excites him for the moment. He sees the hairpin catch a ray of sunlight and feels the girl in green lightly clench her hands at the lusty spread of teeth between them. In one elegant gesture two fingers pull the pin. With the other hand he collects her wrists and brings them together. While he appears to help her pray, he marvels at the sight of now freely dangling tresses. They are poorly groomed, but color has been smeared through them with a passion. Calm earth hangs into beaches of cake yellow sand and rivers dyed red from vain and poisonous insects.
Quick enough not to need force he impales the girl's hands together with her own hairpin. Sweet eyes explode with shock and instantly began to water, once inviting lips tremble as if the cool breeze about them were freezing. The man in black looks down and inhales her horrid confusion like a fine and luxurious smoke.
She sinks to her knees, sweeping up leaves with her hair and shaking bloody hands to hurry past prayer and into begging. His satisfied sigh is how she should've done hers if she would've had the reason. But, knowing no better than to bleed and whimper a little more, he grows uninspired, bored, disappointed, revolted; all so quickly and thoroughly that he frowns at the impulsiveness of it. The girl in green is a memory with only a turn of the man in black's coattail. Every tree bends elaborately rather than mundanely uprooting itself from his path.
In an attempt to reassure himself he checks both sides of his hands, trying hard to breath without a sigh. Soon then, more effortlessly with his pockets full of fingers, he rides the glass elevator back into the sky, gazing about with mild interest. With a shrug lazy wrist flick the colors of the forest change like catalog pages.
---
Seita's eyes sprang open as an energy dagger pierced the pillow behind his head. A small cloud of feathers glided down around him while he cock- crowed a small gasp into the silence. Gradually, he tilted back and stared at the glowing blade jutting out of his forehead. His eyes followed the weapon up and across to a face clearly exhausted and pulsing with terrified vengeance. The couch stayed silent as he rose through the weapon and sat with hands pressed to his knees. Ryoko kept the pillow impaled and ignored the stuffing plumes in her hair. Hard breaths stung her teeth.
"Well Ryoko--that actually ^was^ a good try," he complimented with a surprised but still uninterested voice. "As a matter of fact; in your position I probably would have tried the same thing."
For long enough to bring down the last feather they both remained as silent as the pre-dawn world.
"I...I w-w-will..k-^kill you^." Ryoko's dagger disappeared with a weak mutter of a rage whisper. She clutched at the wounded pillow, launching another small feather into the air.
"No little pirate, I doubt you will."
The sigh before the reply and both are too quiet amid his steps toward the back door. A few couch springs relaxed as Ryoko gave up, the sound stopped him like an embarrassingly rusty hinge and gruffly twisted his face downward.
"However-"
The would-be assassin raised her embargo in reflex to the target's curious compassion. She could only see his profile, but even half of his violent expression made her tense, but all her memory hoped against being drawn into another fight.
"It's just as well that you try." The same strangely depressed voice contradicted his almost raging face.
"W-w-what?"
"I don't sleep particularly well, anyway."
Ryoko watched him in pained confusion as he walked out towards the sunrise. She remembered collapsing into an unconscious heap after everyone had left her by the tree, but she couldn't remember how she was able to wake up in the living room recliner under a soft afghan. Instinct told her then as it told her now that Seita returned, carried her back to the house, made her comfortable, and went to sleep across from her on the couch. The very idea of his touch, particularly in that context, twisted her stomach and she clutched at it, ready to disembowel herself to remove his hands. Humiliation spreads a heavy slime around the back of her throat, stripping emotion and begging sake.
***
Just how the late afternoon can take over the morning early, some quiet discomfort turns into a little laziness, then people are calling every clock an impatient cheat. Tenchi and his father both had a habit of blindly dashing about from chore to chore when this happened, trying to make up for losing so much 'plenty of time', and cursing the curse of lethargy that hid under their breaths. Between repairs and readjustments neither had time to actually make anything new or be present when Sasami Jurai used her share of the plenty for a new species of flower.
Hollow but contented hums filled the silence between the crumple and crease of colored tissue paper. She had promised Grandfather Misaki that she'd make him something to brighten up the office shrine and had covered the living room table with tiny pastel squares. Her humming hit a bright satisfied note, almost a squeak as she finished another pink paper flower and planted it into a vase modest enough for the shrine. She smiled up at Katshuhito, faintly showing off that she had completed nine already while he was still working on his first. For his part, he remained focused and calm, showing as much dignity as an old man making a paper flower could.
During the fluffing up stage of her next addition, Yosho finally deposited his piece of décor as if it were a finely crafted sword being presented to an emperor. The noticeably more complex twist of petals stuck out from its companions exactly like a blue flower amidst a group of pink. An expression of slight disapproval darkened Sasami's face.
"Those colors don't really match you know."
Katshuhito looked up from his next flower, barely at its stem, and smiled wryly at her near-rudeness. She had tried to convince him to let her do it all but likely, he thought, to get the control as well as the credit.
The screen door slid open slowly and Seita entered, stepping out of his shoes and melting a dirty pair of jeans and white T-shirt into a black and red-trimmed silk Kimono. His hair tied itself back in a neat and almost feminine bun. After a few pantomime gestures the work clothes appeared neatly folded and held like a waiter's tray. Yosho's raised eyebrow almost asked if such a display could replace the need for a bath, but he returned his attention to Sasami as the guest entered the living room with a curious smile.
"Remember the words of a wise man Sasami," he began in his moderately sage-like voice, "that no flower can be truly beautiful without diversity."
Sasami eyed the display thoughtfully this time then looked up at Seita just as he was making himself comfortable and adjacent to them both on the couch.
"What do you think, Mr. Seita?" she asked earnestly, though she returned her attention to the next flower as soon as he settled himself.
Rather than look at her growing bouquet Seita cast a side-glance and a clever grin at the priest who let his glasses catch the light. He raised two fingers above the table gently like a medieval portrait of a saint. Each loose piece of tissue began collecting beneath it immediately. The ruffling sound was missing but a flower slightly larger than Yosho's began to build itself into a violet rose complete with tiny twists of brown for thorns. Sasami stared at it with starry eyes, leaning forward to see the tissue paper bumblebee come flying out.
"Diversity," Seita began in a soft and knowing voice, "is as inevitable as egos are necessary."
He checked and smiled at their collective attention before looking back down at the table. All the different shades of green began scuttling towards him with the jerky charm of a child's stop-motion film. They began to crinkle themselves into a rather unpleasant looking weed as he revealed the inevitable other cent of wisdom.
"It is AD-versity not DIE-versity that deserves recognition; the struggles between brothers and lovers and so on and so off are what make beauty possible." Sasami's eyes grew sad as little paper petals glided down onto the table.
"It is the conflict, not the coexistence, that maintains the universe itself. If real flowers were as immune to weeds as these paper ones are, why, they wouldn't have needed to be half so pretty, would they Sasami?"
Yosho tore his concerned eye away from his somewhat distraught youngest sister and to catch Aeka's as she almost managed to enter the room unnoticed then almost managed to hide the foul taste of whatever emotion she was swallowing.
"^Sasami^! Um, Sasami?" The princess quickly replaced her anxious tone with an excessively softer one.
"Yeah?" Sasami made no move to hide the solemn affect of today's mixed decorating lesson.
"Could you please help me in the kitchen with something?"
Sasami rose and went to her sister's side lifelessly, Seita stood up and looked into Aeka's eyes with even less emotion. Yosho's glasses, catching a different glare of light, hid his attention. A quick, almost startled breath caught some extra thus excessive politeness in the First Princess's throat.
"Seita, here let me take your laundry so that you and Grandfather may continue, the display is quite lovely." She marched over and took the bundle from his hands, never moving her eyes up from his chest.
"But Aeka-" Sasami began to protest with a little more energy.
"This won't take long Sasami." The two began walking curtly towards kitchen before Aeka gracelessly altered their course to the laundry room.
Sitting back down in Sasami's place, Seita eyed his little garden with amused disappointment. Katshuhito quietly inserted another blue flower into the vase and looked at him over his glasses, collecting new leaves and petals as he spoke in with teasing curiosity.
"And what wise old man said all that?"
The competing philosopher reclined slightly, and looked up only briefly enough to acknowledge that he'd been spoken to. Petals frozen in air mid- illusion unwound and slid back to their piles on cue from an auction bid from the slender man in the front row with the makeup.
"Hm, I'm afraid I can't remember."
The two men sat unspeaking amid kitchen sounds. Following the same unknown cue, they withdrew their selected books and read for long enough to become comfortable with the arrangement. Neither looked up till at last a yawn broke Katshuhito's peace.
"I believe I still have some things to tend to at the shrine." He placed his book down dutifully and picked up the nearly filled vase as he stood.
"There are times when I would prefer to simply relax with a book all day," light exasperation fringed the nostalgia in his voice, "but," he accepted with a sigh, "we all choose our commitments."
Katshuhito looked down for a moment, seeming to expect a reply. When none came he tipped his head politely and began his walk back to the shrine alone.
"Indeed we do," potential for rudeness was softly averted in the last second before the screen door closed, yet the priest missed a miniscule grin and a lingering whisper behind the pages of Seita's book:
"...^grandfather^."
***
Nobuyuki stretched his arms out into the morning luxuriously this time, arching his back and stretching a rejuvenated smile to the limits. He lumbered forth from his lair with the jolliness of a bear waking to spring with some fat to spare. The first morning without an alarm clock in weeks brought on by a masterfully if hurriedly completed list of chores; he was still so drunk with sleep that he barely bothered to open his eyes fully, grasping about lazily for the bathroom door handle.
"Excuse me, Mr. Misaki!" Sasami called out cheerfully as she dashed past him into the facilities with Ryo-ohki fast on her heals, bumping into the door on the first try and phasing through it on the second. The man of the house chuckled and shook his head at the floor then began shuffling rather than walking down the stairs, further savoring every glance he didn't have to make towards any clock. A naughty thought crossed his mind.
"No-no-no, I couldn't do that." He mumbled to himself, rubbing more sleep from his eyes.
Going back to bed, he reasoned, just wouldn't do. It might have been a week since he'd had a night of sleep uninhibited by work or worries of WWIII erupting in his back yard, but he couldn't just get out of bed, walk down the hall, and return like a groundhog. With a few more scratches and a stretch or two, he entered the dinning area with his eyes still closed, hopping to smell one of Sasami's famous breakfasts. All he smelled was the floral air freshener. He looked around, surprised first to see the kitchen empty and secondly to see Tenchi and Aeka eating not breakfast, but lunch. His son regarded him with a slightly amused smile.
"Afternoon dad, did you sleep well?"
Nobuyuki blinked rapidly, looked at the state of the sun outside and slapped his forehead.
"Oh no, how long was I asleep?" He groaned, easing himself into the seat at the head-end of the table. Tenchi, took another bite of his sandwich and looked at his watch, answering after at least swallowing halfway.
"It's about two in the afternoon now."
An exaggerated moan of defeat drug Nobuyuki's head into his forearms. He turned from side to side in futile denial.
"Don't worry dad, I asked Sasami to let you sleep in. You looked like you needed it."
"You don't sound so energetic yourself, kid."
Tenchi hadn't noticed his own monotone, but Nobuyuki had been raising a teenager long enough to tell the difference between boredom and weariness. Still, he had to keep the front.
"Huh? What do you mean? I feel fine."
"You sure about that?" His father pressed with a teasing glance.
"Of course." Tenchi took his plate to the sink, hiding a twinge of annoyance.
Nobuyuki watched him for a moment and shrugged. He took another look around and narrowed his brow a little.
"Say, where is everybody?"
Tenchi walked over to the screen door with his hands in his pockets. He answered the question in an interruption.
"Well, grandpa must have some food stored up at the shrine because I haven't seen him since practice yesterday. Mihoshi took Seita on patrol with her again and-"
"Washu's still in her lab." Nobuyuki added, looking at the closet with a measure of concern.
"Of course." Tenchi's own worry manifested in a sarcastic sigh.
"What about Ryoko?"
There was a pause, Aeka silently took her plate to the sink.
"She's been making herself scarce lately. She stays long enough to eat, but then she disappears again."
Nobuyuki scratched his head that his son was speaking like a disappointed father. The tone unnerved him and resolved him to lift it with some humor.
"Ah, I see, a lovers quarrel."
"Dad." Tenchi slumped his face into his hand with a groan. "Do you ever give it a rest?"
Aeka gave the table Nobuyuki's share of her evil eye.
"Come on son, don't let her get you down. She'll come crawling back. Besides, where else does she have to go?" His lighthearted encouragement was met with a pained steel that disappeared as soon as it came. Ignoring it, he straightening up and out in his chair.
"I need to go run some shopping errands today anyway. I'll buy some flowers...^and^ some more sake." He chuckled while Tenchi massaged each of his eyes with a finger.
"Cut it out, dad." The usual whine was gone.
"Hey, would you two like to come with me. I've got a lot to do and I could use some extra hands."
"No thank you dad, I've got---things to do." Tenchi slid out and started walking towards the front door.
"How bout you, Lady Aeka."
"Oh, um, thank you for offering Mr. Misaki," Aeka answered softly, after being startled from her cloudy trance, "I'm afraid I also have some items that require my attention."
Honorable father's breath slouched him.
"I'll go with you, Mr. Misaki!" Sasami's voice sang out as she ran down the stairs. Ryo-ohki echoed her in kind.
"Oh good!" Nobuyuki perked up instantly.
"Sasami, I don't think-"
"Aeka, would you stop it, please?"
Everyone was a little taken aback by the outburst of annoyed maturity in her voice.
"I'm not a baby anymore. You can't worry yourself to death every time I try step out from under your kimono."
Aeka prepared the proper cross between a command and a plea. But when she noticed everyone looking at her she bit down hard enough to swallow 'overly protective'. Most of her still screamed in agony as she submitted to the floor with a lifeless voice.
"Very well, Sasami."
The hug came faster than Aeka thought her sister could move, and she almost chocked with surprise.
"Thanks sis! Tell me when you're ready to go Mr. Misaki, I hope I can find what to wear by then." Sasami dashed off to the guest room in a burst of giggles, Ryo-ohki once again picking up the slack.
"Hey Tenchi, where are you going anyway?" Nobuyuki called out just as his son was closing the front door behind him.
"I, uh," He hesitated, itching to close the door all the way and searching for the final answer frantically. Aeka's eyes, watching him with a contagious sadness, returned his solemn attitude. The door closed, his head drooped with a weightless answer.
"I just need some air."
***
Aeka crocheted in the living room alone, trying to remind herself with each stitch that the silence was peaceful. There was hardly a wind to stir the trees outside and she knew better than to listen to grandfather pendulum for the next bell. She reminded herself that this was an absence of noise rather than an absence of sound; she should be grateful for a lack of Cartoon shows from Mihoshi and a lack of snoring from Ryoko. The thought of her rival made her pause and raise her head for another look around. After regarding the closet door with a worry she instantly fought back, she stared back down at the insignificant rag of yarn. Solitude confirmed.
*The house is spotless, but empty. I know well enough the difference between boredom and loneliness---I-I just wish I could be like that demon and escape into a nice bottle of sake.
The liquor cabinet slowly crept into Aeka's vision but she shook her head down with a pang of guilt.
*I suppose I can't really blame her, there's no point in denying what was going on that night, and if what he did to her was anything like what-
Aeka's throat swelled shut in a tight knot. The memory she'd been struggling with for more than a week now managed an upper hand, replaying its essence with merciless attention to detail. The crochet crinkled in her hands. Teeth ground together so tightly that her lips peeled back, ready to catch a single tear wailing down the side of her face. Once fully relived, she fought again for the pin; opponent, coach, the whole team. Finally muffled and transparent, the memory gave her back her present. In a lingering moment of panic she eyed her needle and considered pricking a finger to see if any of her senses would waver or fade from the distraction. With shaky hands she lifted her idle distraction and set it to the side. Two deep breaths and one swallow later, she looked from the ceiling to the closet door with helpless anxiety.
*I know what's happening. I know I can't simply try to live with this...person, but I get so frightened when I remember---that I can't even think straight. Ryoko and Washu have likely gone through something similar and they have ^both^ become just as withdrawn.
Anger flashed across Aeka's face and she gripped her knees roughly.
*This is unacceptable! A princess, the First Princess of Jurai, must not allow herself to become a prisoner in the home where she is a guest. If only I could tell Tenchi I-
Terror rose up in her belly and she clutched at the pain through flashes of cruel blonde and young blood. Mid-panic, she tried to convince herself that everything would soon begin to improve, that after Ryoko he would be satisfied and eventually leave without harming Tenchi, or anyone else.
*Mihoshi! He's alone with her now, what if he, what if she-
Helpless panic was clawing at her again, royal reserves clawed back, whitening her knuckles as she dug into her thighs and released a fresh pair of tears. She was not so absorbed, however, to miss the distinct sound of Ryoko phasing through the roof and startled at the figure descending onto the couch next to her. In a reflexive movement she moved her crochet onto the coffee table without taking her nervous eyes away from her new commiserate.
Ryoko settled down slowly with the overly cautious movements of someone trying to hide their intoxication, though she made no effort to acknowledge the miserable judge beside her. By comparison, Princess Perfecta's eyes did not look half as heavy with strained vessels.
No one had said anything about the quantity of sake bottles about, but from the sickly hair shine and foul skin odor Aeka began to wish she had. By no small quantity of effort, she opened her mouth to offer some constructive criticism, but luckily all that came out was a timid greeting and a whisper of concern.
"H-Hello, Ryoko. Where have you been?"
Just when Aeka was beginning to sense the first layer added to a wall of silence between them, she received a distant sign of life.
"Around."
The demon's voice did not slur, in fact her intoxication could have easily passed for severe depression and perhaps, Aeka thought, vice versa. After gathering another mountain of courage, she pushed again to turn the cause of their mutual alienation into some sort of connection.
"It's just us here. Sasami went shopping with Tenchi's father, Washu is still in her lab, Yosho is still at the shrine, Tenchi asked to go on a walk alone, and Mihoshi is---is with Seita." The update came with the same timid anxiety, but Aeka slowly made progress by dragging her eyes over to Ryoko's profile a little more with each word.
Liquid sloshed loudly as Ryoko lifted her bottle, took a loveless gulp, and tilted her face, pressing it into the cold glass to hear the ocean in 'Captain Morgamoto's' sake.
"I guess you already knew that." Aeka deduced softly, looking back down at her hands for another quiet moment.
"Aeka, what are we going to do?"
The fearful despair jerked the princess upright and flashed an anxious look across her face. With a weak and hesitant movement, Ryoko gradually turned her head to combine stares.
There had been no real eye contact between them since Aeka's 'session', but in only a few moments the two rivals recognized a reflection of the crippling fear they carried. There was no further need for Ryoko to explain herself, yet Aeka's mouth still quivered, trying to ask a question, but only managing half an answer.
"I---I don't know."
Aeka swallowed and focused back to her lap. Ryoko closed her eyes and flattened more of her cheek against the sake bottle for a cold comfort.
"But you know we have to do something. Who can guess what his big plan is, but he---he-"
"Yes Ryoko, I saw it too." Pained though they were to remember the surreal detachment in Seita's eyes, they took a small comfort knowing that someone shared their experience.
Soft and heavy, gold strained for some assertiveness while also struggling to re-suppress sensations of wasted energy and talking dolls.
"Mihoshi, he'll have done something with her before the day's out." A bitter gulp stalled her voice for a few seconds. "Do you think she'll be okay?"
"I don't know...do-do you think he'd---to Lord Tenchi, I mean?" Aeka stuttered back sobs to the clenched fists and growling face beside her.
"Maybe, but I'm not gonna give him the chance." Ryoko clung desperately to the few liberating hints of rage she could find, begging them to lift her despair.
The incredulous expression on Aeka's face eventually faded into forced seriousness, she gathered a little more of her kimono into her hands and tried to speak with some measure of strength.
"What do you intend to do?"
Cold comfort receded in the peel of a sake bottle down from Ryoko's face. She stared at it in her lap for more than a minute, gathering the clarity it would take in her alcoholic state to explain what had obviously been on her mind when she first asked Aeka essentially the same question. Though she could not hide her drunkenness, sincerity overshadowed even the fear in her voice.
"I remembered something just as Mihoshi was leaving with him, something that happened the day after my date with Tenchi."
Aeka tried not to show any reaction to the iodine splashed across her already raw emotions, and was glad that Ryoko remained too absorbed in her explanation to notice.
"When I'm drunk his tricks don't work. So long as my brain is swimming in booze he can't make me see anything, and-and I can see him, I mean, I can see what he ^really^ looks like."
She turned with a sickly smile that slightly enjoyed Aeka's wide eyes with a drunken chuckle.
"Don't worry, he's not some hideous beast with six arms and two heads, but he's not nearly as impressive as he'd like us to think. I don't know ^what^ he is, really. All I do know is that so long as we're a little tipsy he won't be able to make us see anything more than a card trick, and that---and that might get us one step closer to catching him off guard."
The previously suppressed slur began to resurface as Ryoko became more excited with her plan. Aeka withdrew slightly with a look of disbelief and slight disgust.
"Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking; 'how the hell are we supposed to do anything if we're drunk'? We'll you know that people can still do ^some^ things when they're drunk, and we don't have to get totally pissed. I think that so long as there's some kind of cloud in our heads he won't be able to get through. Do you hear what I'm saying?" Ryoko placed the bottle on the coffee table, re-corked it, and leaned closer to Aeka with a pleading look in her eyes.
"Please Aeka, we have to do ^something^, if we don't then-" Ryoko looked away and hung her head for the weight of plugged tears. She spread her hands into her hair with mounting stress while her unlikely ally looked on.
When it seemed the sake captain would be running aground at any moment, Aeka shook her mixture of repulsion and fear, stirred it, and poured it down the drain to pick up the bottle in a hesitant movement. She brought it close to her face and removed the cork with no attempt at ladylike grace. The aroma filled her with a pleasant warmth, but she remained solemn. Never looking up from the exaggerated label for fear of what her rival's expression might say, she tilted the neck at Ryoko to grudgingly offer a deadpan acceptance.
"Cheers."
***
Spaceships offer the kind of quiet isolation that most people can only imagine with smiles or shudders. The scientific horrors of the surrounding vacuum, the loss of sound, the absence of gravity, and the merciless temperatures; they all become secondary in the face of purest black. Surely nothing short of a morbid desire for discovery, or escape, could compel a person into it. Thus, within the confines of a spacecraft, a single line can be drawn between angels who could not sleep without a small comfort-light, and imps who would hide themselves in the darkest places, indulging in search party fantasies, or ways to begin anew as the monster in the shadows. Irony through and through: the final frontier was all this time the first.
---
Mihoshi thought Seita was cute. It had taken her a while to admit this to herself, working through formal indifference, fear of shallow first impressions, and passive states of 'not ^UN^-attractive'. After repeating this opinion to herself enough times, she gradually took comfort in one of the few concepts best left subjective. A languid combination of yawns and stretched limbs filled the captain's seat as she leaned back, hopping to find the unlisted passenger looking at her when she opened her eyes again, but he remained focused on the passing stars.
*Just like last time, I get him alone on my ship and all he wants to do is look out the window. Hel-lo-oh, there's more scenery to enjoy over here!
Mihoshi pouted to his back for a moment, slouching forward till her frustration wilted into hopelessness.
*Besides, I thought you could look at any part of the universe whenever you wanted. After the first trip was only ^half^ a disaster I thought you might want to see more of me...
Hygiene practices and metaphysical abilities flashed red across her cheeks in an unnerving combination of mental imagery. But for the first time in a while potential humiliation was beginning to be exciting, and this only made her more embarrassed. She tried to look busy at the controls, but kept him in the corner of her eye.
*What am I going to do? We're already friends, I guess, but I'm getting worse every time I see him. He seems perfectly happy just reading or watching the lake sometimes, but he's still always polite...and charming.
A youthful smile wormed its way into her self-pity.
*I don't know why Aeka and Ryoko have been so shy around him lately, sure the guy's made a couple of jokes, and that 'dimension' is kinda unnerving, but I bet he's lonelier than he lets on. Well darn it, I already gave up on Tenchi. Life's too short to always be so shy, let's see if I have any sort of chance of---of.
Mihoshi lowered her head and tried to look at something near him, in case he caught her stare this time. Still flustered, she exhaled and searched out her own window, hopping to maybe first share ^then^ catch his interest.
*No more delays! It's time to question the suspect detective Mihoshi!
A quarter of her lightheaded giggle escaped before she could catch it, thankful that Seita hadn't noticed. She smiled almost deviously and turned her chair to face him.
"So, uh, here we are again." Mihoshi managed with nervous and barely hidden expectation.
The silent posture rotated his chair, unaffected by the coquettish posture of his captain as she pressed the side of her face into the headrest and looked directly into his eyes. He replied in soft textures, either unaware of how it would feed her allure, or trying to compete with it.
"Here we were before."
Tan cheeks tightened pink to nip a giggle in the bud.
"It's probably gonna be another boring patrol."
"Hm, boredom is worse a sin than most people know."
Mihoshi's blush faded a little with her confusion as he turned back toward the window, but rather than struggle to analyze his riddle, she asked him another. Almost bursting with embarrassment for some unexplainable boldness.
"So why do you look so bored all the time?"
Seita's half smile rotated back and made her melt as much as it ever had, but she was enjoying the excitement too much to go limp now.
"Do I?" He answered slyly.
"Well," she hesitated slyly, "it's kinda strange that you can do so much that most people can only dream of, but most of the time it seems like you're just in your retirement, just reading and---watching the sun set."
*He HAD to have caught that! And if he didn't, he's sure to do something with this-
"And you don't ^look^ like an old man."
Smile dropping dead then rising like a phoenix, Seita lowered his head and shook it with a silent chuckle.
*Yes! Yes! He's finally going to blush! Mr. Pretty Boy Ghost is going to act like a person for a change.
The sparkle in Mihoshi's eyes snuffed out when Seita raised his own with an icy, almost challenging depth. Reflected blues in different hues offered an invitation she could not refuse. As smooth and clever as his voice became Mihoshi focused on the softness it maintained.
"Most of the times I've tried to be more---'entertaining', well, the princess wasn't too happy, and Tenchi's father has been watching what he says around me ever since."
It took a moment for the giggle to come, but there was no stopping the memory of Nobuyuki's truly inspired disgust. Seita chuckled silently with her, but broke eye contact again. She continued long after he was done, not noticing how he stared at the floor with an increasingly serious expression. By the time she calmed herself his brow had wedged together.
"That was ^really^ funny." Mihoshi exhaled, nearly wiping away a tear.
"Apparently." His voice turned cold and pivoted his feet toward the window again.
*You're loosing him detective, got to think fast. Catch him off guard again.
Mihoshi tried to hide the effort needed to bring the latest conversation piece to life. She forced her blush to fuel her smile and leaned forward a little, trying her best at a seductive voice.
"So...^did^ you ever take a peak?"
The passenger stopped breathing for a moment, and remained stone silent. Unable to see his face, Mihoshi imagined her own blush spreading to him and inviting her progressive lean.
"Do ^I^ look like an old man?"
Her own boldness and wit cheered her on, readied her for Seita's slowly rising face, closed her eyes, and pushed her lips forward to where she hoped his would be. She had to steady herself in her chair slightly, but she kept the kiss going. For a few seconds their intimacy was complete with all that fantasy could offer. Each position she shifted her mouth into brought her greater pleasure, till at last she realized that his lips had remained completely lifeless. Not wanting to deny the moment, she leaned back slightly and advanced again with every intension of making this kiss as deep as possible.
She puckered up to darkness, tilting forward more, and more. For some reason the chair's fabric brushing the end of her nose felt like the most bitter and empty experience she could imagine. A moment's time carried the same emotion through to each of her senses, and Mihoshi knew the essence of a loathing that would consume and discard the universe. In the seconds before she recoiled in terror, she saw white.
Gasping and clutching her arms, Mihoshi flung back into the chair with eyes opened too wide to see. By the force of confusion came sight through a look of disbelief as the two blue eyes met again. The repulsion and malice clenched in his expression petrified her, though they demanded that she flee in terror. Rusted metal pipes groaned distantly in the back of her throat as Seita's thin fingers shot forward and clawed into the headrest to pin a few strands of hair. Now, his own confidence urged him forward, nearly touching his nose to hers as he spoke through the spiteful vapors of his subhuman hiss.
"How Tenchi's guests do love to ^flatter themselves^!"
It was finally enough to reach her enforced instincts. Mihoshi twisted in her chair, feeling the miniscule scratch of a fingernail on her ear as she sent the headrest into his wrist. She dove away and rolled while drawing her blaster, she faced him again with a rigid defensive posture, aiming at his chest. Despite the focused precision of her move, her face could not hide features torn between a sob and a scream.
Seita took a step towards her, crossing his arms in annoyance and looking down at the weapon like a bad joke.
"S-S-Stay back!" Mihoshi cried, no less distraught when he shook his head at her feet and sighed redundant exasperation.
"It would not do to have you shooting holes in your ship, you know."
Boredom took enough of the depravity from his voice for Mihoshi to think coherently. The next instinct mirrored the first and she began to back away. An oblivion portal swelled between them, vanished, and reappeared behind her in the next second. She turned around in time to see Seita emerge from it and feel her whole body clench as it closed behind him. The physical uneasiness subsided, but for the first time the mental chill from his window still lingered. Like dizziness wound into a ball tighter than horror, it was a bullet nestled between her throat and skull that gained crippling heat under his cruel glare.
"Wha-what are-" Between her mouth and her gun, Mihoshi's quivering finally attracted him with helpless frailty. He continued towards her, walking in slow rhythm with his words, humoring himself with his own smugness.
"I must commend you on some rather lucky detective work; you're the first to catch a glimpse of my nature before I could release a glamour for it."
Though clenched and narrowed, his eyes stretched like rubber, neon into sky blue as smooth features carved into ivory gloss. Striking, stabbing handsome.
"Fortune smiles on both of us; rather than spoil or distract it, this unexpected little display should only increase the potency of our session."
Mouthing the words to another half-formed question, she heard her passenger suck saliva around his tongue. It sounded closer than her own teeth.
"I really doubt it would be worth my time to try to explain my work to you Mihoshi, but rest assured, you and all the others will be among the first to read the final report---if it's ever published."
To her surprise his voice changed back to the charming croon it had been moments before burring her beneath this surreal and obscurely motivated intimidation.
"Please stop cornering yourself, detective. Driving strong women to trap themselves can only offer so much. And I've already gotten closer to you than I ^ever^ intended." A spark of malice gleamed for a moment, sparking Mihoshi's shock enough for her to process the content behind his delivery.
"What are you talking about!?" She blurted out with eyes clenched and weapon pointed inadvertently upwards.
"Really Mihoshi," he clicked his tongue effeminately, "are you so lax an investigator? Do you honestly think it's a coincidence that Professor Washu confined herself to her lab shortly after examining me? Do you really believe that Aeka and Ryoko shy away from me now for the sake of your ^misplaced attraction^?"
The bitterness sparked in his words again, anger lining his face like the foreboding first steps of a monstrous transformation.
"What-what did you-" Lips sagged and eyes widened amid her fading voice.
"The same thing I've been doing for ^eons^! I told you already: I won't tell you today!"
A fast breath pulled his smile to the side.
"Now kindly shut your ^silly mouth^ so that we can get this session under way."
His hiss returned full force, a goblin's toothy smirk crawled up his face, wicked glee sparkled at the ends of his eyes in revelry at such quick rhyming. The dark silver dress shirt darkened into iron across his torso. Already pulled back hair tightened and whitened, stretching the remaining color from his face. At last the fear began to weaken Mihoshi's guise of resistance, the blaster slowly weighed down her hands. He seemed to see this as an encouraging sight to accompany her lack of response.
"Thank you. Now, exactly what did you think you were doing trying to seduce ^me^? Did I really strike you as someone waiting to 'get a date'?" He interrogated with arms crossed and face angled in a superior stance, going so far as to clutch the air over his chest for emphasis. Mihoshi began to shake the early shock in her head, unclear if she did so to express ignorance or make one last attempt to deny how he was speaking to her.
"I took the liberty of looking through one of those photo albums you try to keep hidden, and I was a little surprised to see just how many failed romances you've accumulated. Someone with your proportions should have no problem attracting potential mates.
Two binder wings grew out of his forearm and flapped open with plumes of photos, Seita flipped through them idly.
"I wonder what all the other girls who've coveted your appearance would say to see your list of squandered opportunities. Indeed, some of them were almost as handsome as me."
Smile unsheathed again in a mocking show of teeth, the increased horror on Mihoshi's face must have hurt his cheeks.
"Oh, but maybe it wasn't your fault. Maybe they just weren't ^worthy^ of you." He closed the folder invisible and put his hands up sarcastically.
"Were they 'harsh'?" A step forward and turned Seita into the photographed memory of her third boyfriend. His jaw strained and tensed, momentarily turning to flesh-colored stone.
"Were they 'cold'?" A cloud of breath hissed out over lover number four's teeth as they parted like icicles. Mihoshi finally managed to close her eyes and turn away with a gasp.
"What are you afraid of ^now^ Mihoshi? That I'll leave you feeling just as empty as they did, that your hopeful--fairy--tails will always turn out to be lying--demon--tongues?" Moving closer again, Seita reverted fully to his subhuman hiss. Both of them clenched their teeth.
"Or is it something worse? Are you afraid I'll try to 'take' all that they ever wanted? You look like such a victim huddling into yourself like that, it almost makes me consider-" He paused his approach and rubbed his chin in contemplation, blatantly adding more villainous bravado to their session.
Mihoshi could not help but drag her eyes out of hiding and repeated a prayer to herself that she would not see every woman's nightmare swirling in blue venom. She watched as he moved his hands behind his back and took a long step forward, coming close enough to pull her into an embrace. She watched as he lowered his head like a bird of prey. She watched the corner of his mouth rise in a sneer to express the unmistakable darkness of resentful lust. A cruel calm in his voice savored his drawn-out description.
"It almost makes me consider it---that strange expression of desire---with the uncanny ability---to make the recipient feel ugly."
Mihoshi clenched her eyes shut again and whimpered helplessly. As she hugged her blaster like a useless teddy bear, two reactions to the imminent violence passed through her mind: to offer one last plea, and to use her now obsolete weapon for one truly final defense. Silence endured, she could barely hear him breathing. In microscopic movements she began to open her eyes while positioning the blaster beneath her chin. A voice stopped her, the voice she had heard Tenchi's sixth guest speak with when he first arrived. Yet, the suppressed self-pity was now laced with the vibration of discarded humanity. She might never have thought it possible to simultaneously feel so much hatred and so much pity for any single creature.
"Taking action rarely fills me with the kind of transcendent power that I absorb when I encourage, when I ^inspire^ action in others. In all my experience with the act you fear from me now, I have found something that I'd like you to consider among any other ideas you take from our session here.
"A person might think that encouraging such a thing would be a standard calling for me, surely the formation of a sexual predator would adequately support the kind of energy you believe I represent. When it does occur, the only justice to be considered is whether or not the offender is punished. As much as wills can be twisted from either outcome, there is a crime that can, indirectly, have a significantly larger impact.
"When someone is falsely accused of this act, there is an ^inevitable negative outcome^: either an innocent-accused will be turned into a monster, or a future innocent-accuser will have cause to be thought a liar. The idea of this crime alone is enough to chill the mind, but the greatest power, and the strongest pull towards the of heart of oblivion, is the painfully resistant doubt that people must, nonetheless, apply to any and all who would accuse someone of it."
There was no place left in Mihoshi's mind to hide, every potential sanctuary was overflowing with the polar flux of the fear and curiosity Seita had inspired. For some reason she believed that he was not going to even touch her again, that he was fulfilling all his cruel desires simply by speaking to her this way. Once more curiosity won out and forced her to look at her would be attacker for more answers.
His head was bowed toward the meditative wedge shape she'd seen him make with his hands a number of times before. She stood slightly more erect and lowered her blaster till it hung limply at her side. Her hand tightened on it again as his head rose slow and ritualistic to gaze upon something beyond the ship's nose. Mihoshi's brow tilted in momentary confusion till she turned around and propelled it upward in terror. Yukinojo was flying directly into the center of a gigantic oblivion portal. Every aspect of time and space shut out behind them, every one of her senses clenched like a fish thrown into coarse burning sand. She could not have screamed enough, so she almost welcomed the black out.
The circuitry above the cockpit came blurred then bright then blessedly mundane. Mihoshi could not understand why her breathing was not labored after such trauma, but the unsettling fact of the matter was that the only discomfort she felt was that of the hard metal beneath her head. She reached up to the armrest of the captain's chair and pulled herself to her feet. A groan emerged to dull the memory of the hell she'd passed through in less than a few blinks. Simpler recall pulled her back; she reached down instinctively for where she might have dropped her blaster, but it was gone. Though she knew he would be standing there when she raised her eyes again, the sight of Seita in the same cold, contemplative posture made her whole body tense.
"I put it away in your quarters, I didn't think it would do for you to have any needless accidents after all we've been through." He stated plainly, his once charming voice now eternally sinister. The detective's mouth shook again for the right question.
"Our time here is up Mihoshi, but I've prescribed some time 'away from things'. It is likely that, before you can truly experience the warmth of returned affection, you need to experience isolation in greater depths." His smugness half-smiled more reflexive than affected, but the hard glare and bitter voice that followed were terribly convincing.
"Think of me as you will---as you must, and from this day forward: view every pretty face that crosses your path," his pit widened white behind him, "with ^doubt^."
Seita stepped back and out with a rush of oblivion air, slightly less interesting now for Mihoshi's new understanding. Her assignment to the floor was slow and silent in coming. Head tipped against the back of it, the chair swiveled idly with each rocking to pump streams down her face.
"Mihoshi, what's wrong, and who have you been talking to, my sensors have not registered any other passengers." The ship offered its programmed compassion.
"Where am I?"
A pause drank her whimper and chewed computing beeps with her heavy breaths.
"Our current position is unknown, Mihoshi. We are out of range of any G.P. communication."
***
Tenchi kept his face downcast on the familiar path, watching his sweep over the sponge paint of warm light that made it through the trees. Dust rose from the path behind him, fogging the path for escaped dandelion seeds. So buried in pockets, his hands held scenery down to simple green and wind down to thin air. Love songs, the birds and the crickets, soaked and drowned to carbon bubbles under a tyrant rant of thought.
*What's going on? Ryoko and Aeka are acting like they're almost afraid of me, grandpa and Seita are even quieter than usual, and every second I worry that Washu will blow us all to atoms before she finally comes out of her lab. The only one's who seem okay are Sasami and Mihoshi.
*And there's not a thing I can do about it, because I just can't think of what to say anymore. Everything in my life is starting to seem--- wrong. The littlest things are just setting me off, back and forth, angry or depressed. I've tried meditation, but all I ever get are the silly debates I'm in now. I want to talk about it so much, but I look at everyone here and instantly predict how the first few lines will go. Then I just can't do it, and I end up going back to acting like another normal student and it just gets worse.
*I know that coming out here has helped before, but what if it doesn't this time? Who will be left if I can't even talk to her?
The path ended at a large headstone, carved well enough that, even after another few decades of weather, the name would remain. Tenchi tried to take comfort in this rather than feel guilt that it had been almost so long since he'd last visited. Like one stone facing another, he stood for long enough to believe he couldn't think of anything to say, then long enough to say what he felt.
"I miss you, mother." His voice began in whispers, but quickly filled with solemn monotone of trances and prayers. Wind and throat to chest pain answered, he listened intently.
"I know I'm always going to miss you a little every day, but right now, these past couple weeks even-"
First eyes, then the rest closed tightly, forcing Tenchi not to cry in the sole company of someone who'd seen more of his tears than any other.
"I keep wishing you were here. I live in a house full of exotic gir-- -full of exotic people, but sometimes all I can think about," he stopped for a breath, "is how only ^you^ could make me feel better when something was wrong."
One gulp, then another, helped him along.
"Course, now I don't even know what's really wrong in the first place. I don't know why Aeka and Ryoko are avoiding me and almost everyone else. I don't know why I give up ^really^ ^talking^ to anyone before I even start, but I know it's something I'm doing wrong."
Kneeled, head down before his mother's memory, Tenchi's tears spilled over when he closed the lids. A few sobs shook through him like a gust of freezing wind, his stomach howled and was silent with a cough and a thick sleeve under his nose.
"Sorry," he sniffed weakly, "It's probably not very fair to expect you to how to deal with all this." A small chuckle broke through but only made it more obvious that he'd been crying. "Actually, you might have even disapproved of having so many girls and some ghostly stranger staying in your house."
The moment of relief faded back into wind, and Tenchi tried to listen for a gentle encouraging voice...or a whisper, or an echo of it, anything to drain the hopeless swell of this blister.
"Mother, Grandpa always tells me that you're watching over me, and I want to believe that," his voice wavered again, "I want to believe it so badly." Another hearty sob chocked back. "But something is wrong with my life now, and I don't know what it is. Please mother, please tell me how to make things happy again."
The wind around him seemed to pull away, slowly inhaled by mountain giants. Tenchi tightened his hands, waiting for the exertion to warrant some reply from the next world, pleading till he neared that first and greatest grief he'd felt so many years ago. A child again, crying out for his mother to comfort him, but he was too consumed with the pain of loss to feel the inevitable shame. Through more sobbing grabs for the few comforting moments left in his memory, this call for the mercy of his mother's spirit was so loud that he almost didn't hear it when it came.
"Please do not cry, Tenchi."
Achika's request wavered with sad sympathy, but with more life than she'd had weeks before passing. Her son, despite self-assurance that he deserved this contact, could feel his heart stop beating for a few seconds before it started again strong enough to pump salve. Not from inside his head and not from around the wind; he'd heard his mother's voice in front of him, but was no less terrified to jerk his head up to a semi-transparent image of her. Luckily, for manners' sake, the instinct to run screaming was overcome by petrified awe.
"M-Mother?" A fair imitation of what spirits were supposed to sound like glided over Tenchi's lips.
"Don't be afraid." The same soft tone reassured and locked their eyes, gentle mirrors sinking into astonished lakes.
Tenchi could peer through enough of his mother to read her name as she sat very ladylike upon her gravestone. But even if there'd been a little ring over her head he still would have seen her more clearly than any memory could recreate. Hair and skin, perfect down to the pore along every unmistakable line of her face. One smile did the work of a hundred hands in pulling him to shaky knees by the base of his heart. He took a step forward with hands slightly outstretched, the joy of seeing her again already overshadowed by the most basic of instincts. At that moment he would have given his life to be able to run crying into safe mother's arms one last time. Though completely muted, he hoped that she would be able to tell, as she always had, when her son needed her love.
Another tentative crush of leaves, another step closer, Tenchi's hands quivered but hardly rose above his waistline. Even by so close a smile, it was still transparent and eventually brought back the helpless agony of watching her lie sick in bed. He clenched under the weight of more grief than he'd endured before his wish had been granted. But, feeling like child again after so long, he nonetheless forgot about seeming ungrateful. Luckily a young man's hands can hold and offer out more questioning emotions, a young man's voice can deepen them just above a whine.
"^Why^?"
Pray strength, beg forgiveness, Achika did it all in the freshly pressed temple of her dainty hands. She could speak passively enough to make her tears hide in shame.
"Oh, my Tenchi-chan, my darling son. I never wanted to leave you. You must know that."
Unable to even attempt a guise of maturity, Tenchi hugged her answer to himself and lowered his head with a sob. It took minutes of this to remember that he could still speak to her, and he willed himself to be as happy as he'd thought he'd be when still praying for a voice. The strongest of smiles trembled for the burden.
"Mother, I-"
"Shhhhhh, hush now my baby boy, my perfect little angel." Her voice was light, bright enough to replace the sun, and thin enough to waft in between every cell in his body.
Holding to the lapels of her kimono, Achika sat up from the stone, at last becoming slightly more opaque. Tenchi chuckled tears that he should even notice the disorientation of having her a little shorter than him for the first time. She tilted her head and tingled his nerves with eyes that could replace Tsunami's matriarchy. Down to the tips on each lose strand of hair, up through the diamond dust at the corner of each eye, her son watched as she tilted her head to gentle fingers pulling back the cloth over her left breast.
"Come to me, my Tenchi-chan. Mama's here.
The tip pushed up a bit of her white silk undershirt, ghostly as it still was, Tenchi could see it clearly. His heart let him know that it was stopping and starting up again, beating backwards this time; the gears of the first clock howl, twisted counter by unnamable hands, the first songbird cheats death with an imploded beak, must forever screech for a mate.
Achika stepped forward, pulling her kimono open a little wider. One of her son's hands, no longer frozen in reverence, peeled up in revulsion.
"Everything can be perfect and safe again. Be helpless, and happy to take of my life."
She looked up at Tenchi the way she wanted to watch over him, delirious with a mother's purpose. He fell hard onto his rear, scuttling back like an orphaned cub, still trapped shocking between his mother's chest and overwhelmed eyes.
"Mother, what are you-"
"Return to peace, my baby, drink innocence again. It is sweet," mother cupped the bottom and managed a caressing squeeze, "and ^pure^."
The advertisement's clincher drifted and echoed like sea mist, milk began to ooze, darkening Achika's clothing with a bleeding violet marker. Grape candy, the emperor's dye, it streamed freely down her body, dripping onto her feminine feet as she took another step over her paling son's incoherent gasps.
"Mother knows best, Tenchi-chan."
Her stern frown grabbed his jugular and set his frantic eyes searching down her body to the ground between them. Brighter violet milk was pooling towards him, swirling to mirrored mercury with an oil slick's rainbow aura. He wheezed something like 'no' as it continued between his legs to show a melting reflection of his terror.
"Isn't this what you wanted?"
"Wha---Wha-"
"You don't want answers, you just want to curl up to mother again."
Boring his eyes back into the apparition's, Tenchi clenched the ground at her cold disappointment, fingernails bending back a pain to match her voice.
"I know this, I ^have^ been watching over you and everything else in our home, not as a guardian, but as a prisoner. Your father, your grandfather, and all of my friends have accepted my death, but you Tenchi, you continue to cling to me like a child younger than you were when I last saw you."
Achika looked down at a toddler with intense disappointment then held both hands over her kimono to keep it shut, though it still bled. She wept for him to see.
"You have not honored my memory, you have only honored your own sense of loss. Such a self-absorbed boy I raised, it's no wonder he can't see the problem with his extended family when it's right before his eyes."
The following sigh was enough to drain a ghost's life, and reanimate the chaos in Tenchi's frozen innards.
"You will never abandon your childishness, so I must take you on again as my baby, nurse my Tenchi-chan forever."
His mother had only spoken crossly on a few occasions, and it had always upset him. Now he was crying as much as he ever had, all but sucking his thumb as defensive disbelief folded in the face of a mother's scorn.
"^But Mother, how-^"
"Follow me my little angel," her nursing voice cooed again as she turned and stepped away, "hopefully someone else will come to save your family."
Achika's tough love paused with arms folded behind her back as Tenchi shook up to his knees and clutched the sobs in his head almost oblivious that the milk was disappearing into the ground.
"Save them? Save them from what?"
Tenchi chocked out a plea more than a question, and through the warming wind heard his mother sigh in exasperation the way she never did.
"Their spirits seem di-^luted^ because they've been dis-^illusioned^. Can't you see that the man who saved your hide is now toying with their minds? And if you're not strong enough to let your mother go, then surely you wont be able to make that monster leave."
Hammer to stone, fire to petrol, beat his heart back in the right direction, stealing all the blood from his skin in the process.
"SEITA! What has he done?!" Protective natures began boiling over into the few spaces not still clogged by self-pity.
Achika looked down to the side with sad finality, then walked before her headstone to sink and mumble into the ground.
"More now than you can ever understand, and more soon than he can even imagine."
A last desperate spark crawled onward with Tenchi's knees just as the final strands of hair were disappearing beneath him.
"Mother! Please! Tell me!"
He clutched the dirt in his hands again, moments away from digging in after her. During the hesitation another warm wind sent dust up his face. It went unnoticed as more violet milk seeped out of the earth, burning sweet perfume and clinging like tar. Sick slaps mocked his efforts to clean his filthy hands with his filthy hands. Something smooth atop the gravestone chuckled.
***
Into the cutting circuitry, from the sticky rubber, through blinding goggle sweat, and the cracks in Washu's lips never widened. Single minded obsession had consumed her once, then again for good measure, bringing back a paradox of sorts: if she was going to devote every spare moment to this project, she'd have to take moments away to hold back her body's interruptions. Carbohydrate pills turned her stomach's random growls into a steady whimper. Five-second sterilization showers kept things from itching or feeling organic. All these mechanical unpleasantries would maintain her functions well enough to forget them for the long enough to stop counting seconds.
While the latest piece of plasma welding cooled, she rose and looked around her lab with almost jaded emeralds. Nearly every previous invention had been sacrificed to supply the power necessary to create the latest and surely the greatest. The fact that it was finally on the brim of testing capacity struck her as less surreal than terrifying. All the pride she might have been able to allow herself for simply ^trying^ such a thing would not be recognized. There was only room for focus, none left for premonitions of failure, and certainly none for success.
She wiped away some fluids from herself and her workstation and inhaled finely filtered air through a small isolating mask. Machines spoke to themselves out loud and work began again with renewed fervor. It lasted and lasted, but she would outlast him, it was obvious by each beast of burden jerk the tubes made beneath her pitiless little hands. This assembly, an inquisition of molten sparks, might as well be pouring onto his flesh, spread out beneath her gloves all pale and vulnerable. He was going to be a stripped snail, a puddle under a salt block, another kaleidoscope for the microscope, then finally she'd use any leftover slime to seal and gloss her next project.
When a singe met the smallest finger on little Washu's hand she screamed louder than necessary and strangled it. The grind and steam clenching up from her teeth to her temples was very audible.
*Damn him! Damn him! Damn him!
Sputtering breaths caught between a sob and a cough. Washu flipped a switch on the mask away and tried to reclaim both.
*Focus. It's almost finished.
Her fingers went ambitiously relaxed, almost elegant as they prepared to finish conquering. The movement, Washu thought, was Seita-like, even when they clenched in disgust.
*What if it isn't enough? Did I abandon everyone for nothing?
One glove was warmer than the other for lying so close to the project, but putting them back on almost felt reassuring.
*Ryoko, I'm so sorry. He won't hurt you anymore, mommy won't let anyone hurt you again.
It ^was^ almost finished, Washu could tell by hefting it up closer to the light. The weight seemed almost too much but quite reassuring.
***
Moving back in a crustacean scramble, Tenchi kept his eyes fixed on blue oblivion. He noticed the painted fingertips closely enough to see the little ones sharpen each other as they led the way closer. Seita did not pass through the headstone like a ghost, instead his torso grew from it in an ether to match the now vanished milk. The taller man grew over in a monochrome rainbow too slow to dodge. The earth and dead leaves were painful in Tenchi's frozen fists.
"Don't fret young hero, your mother didn't roll over for such a performance." The imposter lowered his hands and crossed them on his back, angling his head to savor the wind through his hair.
None of Seita's seductive calm sagged with his ethereal body before it came to the ground like a dead kite and dissipated back into his legs.
"She's still very dead."
Seita turned casually away and went over to bend over at a right angle. Unnaturally postured to be sure, but he phased his hand into the dirt with the easy movements of somebody reaching in to pull the plug from the bath. Another extreme angle to look Tenchi perpendicularly in the eye.
"And quite buried."
"Sh-She-" Tenchi's rage shivers could have started in shoulder knots, or just as easily in broken organ dams.
"Hm? Speak up Tenchi, I can't hear you." The coroner stood straight and reapproached with a professor's tone.
"She...was...^cremated^!"
One eyebrow raised enough for two, surely Seita could only let his eyes move down to check his incomplete notes. The now mundane dis-hallowed ground smeared his mouth to one side like an artist disappointed but not yet frustrated with the direction of his latest piece.
"Oh. Well doesn't that make me look silly?"
Tenchi was unmoved by the misplaced apology as he backed against a tree and inched to a more upright position, never wavering his glare. After a sharp breath to straighten one then both shoulders, Seita raised his eyes and spoke again with a shrug.
"Mistakes. Misdeeds. Mismatched? Maybe, but let us try to stay focused on the business at hand."
A new fear rippled Tenchi's rage with the sharp lines pulling a smile from the pretty, damned, cruel face. His thoughts crashed, each one speeding from different directions. Questions muffled and accusations blurred over each other.
"Interesting. Inspiring. Invested." Pressing his little point into his thumbprint, he watched the joint flex with each word. The musing gurgled twice for the appropriate voice till a vain poet and a pompous tyrant, fluttering cherubs, could wrap it in sinister velvet.
"Tell me Tenchi, why do you think it is that you all have the same reactions? Why respond with anger rather than relief when these unpleasant little confrontations prove to be mere illusions?"
With two steps fewer between them now Tenchi straightened himself more against the tree and flexed his hands by his pockets instinctively. A kind of clarity was finally entering his thoughts as he realized he was searching for a weapon; misery for malice was a fair and driving enough trade. If only there was something to exchange for terror, perhaps some more rage.
"Why become hostile already? Did I show you a part of yourself you'd rather not admit to? Still waiting for your mother to return to fight your battles?
"Search inside yourself, do you really miss ^her^, or just the ^comfort she provided^?" Red lips remained curled back over his teeth as he spoke, the calm half of his voice seeming to surrender a section to the hiss.
Now that his guest didn't seem to need any closer a podium, Tenchi could reorganize his notes into strength. He looked back into oblivion blue, it had to be undeniable evil and so it had to be met with unwavering courage. For some reason, however, envisioning his last defeated enemy didn't bring back any more than the defiant voice he'd used.
"But-but why would-"
The accusation and challenge in the question fragment wilted and rotted Seita's wiry grin into a cold frown. Like knuckles over a hilt, his face became whiter, smoother, more beautiful to match alluring with dangerous. Stealing light as a trophy, both eyes broke each law of depth and brightness, even for blue. Something swirled to reel Tenchi's initial rage and the rest of his senses into a blank maw, the same unyielding emptiness that this imposter used like a trolley. Connections into questions into bullets through his mind.
*That's where he gets his powers from---that, that ^place^---that horrible ^blank^ ^place^---but what is he trying to do---but what-
"What ---^are you^?" Tenchi muttered, eyes widened and waiting to be swallowed.
Seita closed his eyes to open them at the ground in a half grimace and silent snort.
"I asked you ^one^ specific question, Tenchi. Stop fretting and delaying with why-fors and what-nots and focus on ^how-now^ you'll explain whether you miss your mother, or merely the comfort she provided."
Tenchi half expected to see the blue lights slit accordingly when they rode a slithering voice back up at him. Unable to ignore the re-question any longer, its morbid nature filed into his mind on cold scales. The oldest wound opened fresh again, whimpering retreat from an acid shadow.
"I don't know---"
The air needed savoring again, and Seita brought both hands back to his chest to do it. Slender fingers intertwined, inverted, and bent forward with a crisp snap. Like dust from a rug, the wind carried his sinister hiss off the billows of his velvet tongue.
"That's quite alright, Tenchi. The important thing is not that you answer the question, but that you keep it close." Smugness dotted his closing then crossed his arms.
"Now then, since you only ^half^ answered my question, it would only be fair for me to answer ^one^ of yours."
If formal conversation could match with cruel mind games then hospitality and now hostility could both match with curiosity. Tenchi told himself not to question this strange thought line. The second chapter to Seita's story wouldn't want to share space, and the new narrator couldn't be let out of sight. He tried to control his shaky hands, endure 'it's' freezing expressions, and ignore the throat knot pulled between them.
"Why-what. What-why." A tongue twister married a whistle in Seita's mouth out of refined spite. "Not that you won't assign your own answers regardless, but at least ^what^ won't give away too much of the ^how^."
"'What'---am I?" He mused almost sarcastically. "Mean. Monstrous. Generic. Geriatric." He walked to the side of a large tree, looking toward the mountains for some unseen and invaluable audience. A short pace started his hands in motion, three steps, sermon, lecture, critique, all to the left all to the right. An anchored glare kept every neck muscle in flex.
"Same. Old. Meaning. Less. Destruction and dishonesty, whether direct or indirect, they are both greater in their shrines than in their wakes. No 'justice' can undo the mistrust a charlatan creates."
It was too cold a sensation to be nausea, but Tenchi fought it back the same as he watched Seita trace a little fingernail from the center of his bottom lip up the side of his face to pull back a few stray but completely yielding hairs.
"I am, above all, someone who understands this. I am, beyond all, someone who ^wields^ this."
The word softened in his throat as he paused to run his fingers along the tree bark in a light caress.
"Your other guests will simply dismiss me as a promise breaker-"
Tenchi yanked his weak joints from the ground but focused too much energy into his fists to step forward. It was difficult to project his voice beyond a growl.
"What have you done to them?"
"First and foremost; I've started a session with ^you^, breaking their, 'our' agreement. It might have lasted quite a while as it wasn't particularly hard to combine their love and their shame---into silence, for your sake."
Both fists shook more sporadically when Tenchi forced his face down and away. He was ready to explode, but forced to implode when he looked back up and almost into Seita's chest. The defensive step back was all reflex, the entertainment on the taller man's face all assurance.
"Hm. They, and you as well, have all been merely warm ups for a much more personal project, but that goes back to the 'why' and 'how', and I've still not the time to explain them, certainly not now that I've just more than worn out my welcome."
Tenchi showed no sign of disagreeing with his slight of humor.
"But when I am finished here, ^what^ will ^you^ remember me as?!
Seita pushed Tenchi back another step with only a face full of teeth and eyes. He ran both hands along his scalp, pulling his hair and face back in a tense smear of psychotic grandeur. His fingers dug in, each elbow trembled like a bleeding wing.
"Should it be the stage title I presented to Ryoko? The 'Ghost of Madness'? Should I flatter myself further, and suggest that I not be mentioned by any name, less I am ^summoned^ by it?"
The first few breaths were painfully deep, but at last Tenchi caught a glimpse of focus. He could see this madman burning under ^his^ steadying glare, and he could feel Jurai energy at his fingertips.
"I am what I see, and I see what I will! And I WILL!" Something bloody and coarse imitated speech in Seita's throat as it was swallowed into a point.
"The doctors into merchants. The merchants into gods. The last-real- friend into the first-real-enemy. The 'religious' 'retreat' into the ^insane^ ^asylum^!"
It might have been cold sweat running down Tenchi's cheek; he was remembering his mother's imitation and reeling for a touch of his mother's memory, begging it tell him not to be afraid. The laugh should have come with a spray of slime but only carried Seita's voice higher.
"I have seen the black pooling blood meet the white ice! I have watched mothers and fathers---turn their sons and daughters---into ^dolls^ and ^martyrs^!
Only showy clothes and hair seemed to catch this wind. Tenchi winced at the next scream; so shrill it should have begun a sob.
"I have taken my name---from the ^grave^ of ^fate^!"
Elegant hands tore away from Seita's head like claws and clutched up at the air. Something too white to be milk bled down his forearms and veined into his sleeves. One welling power was just overwhelming enough to pull Tenchi from this glimpse of the unspeakable.
"I will twist the highest genius into the deepest isolation! I will press sterile compassion into festered cruelty! I have been the acting nemesis of life itself, and I am ^more invulnerable every moment^!"
The Light Hawk Wing tingled up Tenchi's forearm, but now it wouldn't let him take his eyes off Seita anymore than Seita would look away from his own hands. Sensual lips tested the air around the words, passing a specter calm over and behind the prince's eyes.
"By my design---every being in every layer of existence---will bow to the illusions of the mind---and cast off the illusion of the soul. I saw the ends of the universe yesterday---and I will see the end of the universe tomorrow."
This sword doesn't feel strong enough for this, Tenchi thought. It did start to feel heavier though, when Seita lowered his hands and walked slowly forward, stepping on every syllable like a path of flower petals.
"I am a hateful reflection captured in a fistful of mirror shards." Seita clenched his hand beneath his chin. A watery tar dipped off his bottom lip into his palm. "I am a rainbow chewed to white powder," he clenched his hand, "carried on a blown kiss". His lips puckered coquettishly and spread dust to settle between them.
"That's as far as you go." Tenchi forced in a memory of Kagato, forced himself to believe that it had been more frightening than this. This half smile was no more confident. It couldn't be.
"Can you truly trust the Jurai power---knowing that so much of it has invested itself ^here^?"
"I won't let you hurt anyone else."
"All the stars in the universe could not touch me, Tenchi." A large circle of nothing dilated behind his long blink of taunting calm. "But would you try your luck beyond them?"
*I'm going to collapse if I don't charge soon. Tsunami, please help me.
"Come be the hero, Tenchi." Seita stepped into the portal but leaned forward. "Come and sacrifice yourself for your hearth and ^harem^!" He managed to make a smile violating. "Dare you imagine what I have planned...after I leave you as helpless as I left them?"
Lighthawk power lunged into oblivion. The sixth guest merely stepped back to guide it into an unmarked spot in the surrounding forest. Momentum sucked away and in a moment the blink of emptiness knocked the wind out of Tenchi's courage and sent him rolling through the pine needles and shrubbery. Enough adrenaline remained to pull him back to his feet, ready to meet every opponent in any arena. He spared a breath to check his weapon and shuddered. The reflection on the blade melted into empty androgyny. Bloodless confidence read its own lips.
"You've been a very gracious host, and a mostly cooperative subject. My work here is finally coming to climax; yet, till then, I must put some distance between us."
The reflection blinked on a grin while the sword readied to wane or explode.
"There is one more thing you should consider during your race to stop me."
*Tsunami...how did this sword get so heavy?
"In regards and reevaluations to all these headstones, ask yourself this: how will your children grieve in ^your^ passing? Will they be like so many snails, brooding in thick raincoats? Or, will they be like fireflies with tattered umbrellas...^dancing^ in your ashes?"
Tenchi roared through the fading hiss and cried into silence.
***
He crossed over again as he had before, taking a moment to be absorbed into both the ends, the loss of all perception tempting and terrifying him. Ambrosia swallowed pure white and within reach. But once more he reminded himself that he was still far from ripe, and thus sight and sound returned as the only necessary tools. Consciousness and will unencumbered, transcendence known at last to be merely removal, Seita studied the time and space he'd just left, pleased that Tenchi was still screaming at his encore illusion rather than trying to find a way back home. A hunger for the omnipresence required to enjoy his host's futile race struck him, at once tormenting and invigorating. That very ambition would focus and maneuver a memory into a map and a compass. Lining up puzzle pieces was easy when immune to matter and removed from time. Mechanically divine speed and precision had taken some time and space, but they were the only ways to travel.
---
Seita stepped purposefully out of an oblivion portal just inside the Masaki front door. Soft boot taps echoed hauntingly through the house, exorcising any other sound. He could count and measure and listen to his steps with one hand behind his back and another caressing his lips. All the tranquilizing wonder he'd walked through on that first day could have: ^had^ been extracted through heated lard and perfume-spray-painted onto his nails. It was all plainly visible there, in his tiny reflection, in blue eyes turned purple in the cherry gloss. Both palms near his face he could breathe it all in, but something, a chuckle started in his nose and spread to his teeth. Revealed as rage; soft hands and smooth face crushed something into each other for a trembling moment.
The gasp was silent; keep control, but first check if that was a noise from the living room. Seita could keep this step even with both hands behind his back. Nostalgia forgot itself in a finely framed mirror and he kept watch over himself as he passed, kept walking till the smallest corner of his eye rewound and paused him. It could have been a planned detour.
A cold glare affirmed that it was not. Through every colored line, from the angles and curves of his features to the creases and folds of his clothes, the costume was flawless. Even the darker tones and sharper corners were warm, but they were all holding themselves up to spite and up for nothing. Seita still kept strangling his androgyny into bloom with a depth that impressions can only project.
There were no lighthearted giggles from boy's voluntarily kidnapped to play dress up with the girls. There was no peacemaking or comradery between opposite ends. There wasn't any artistic experimentation. The reflection only caught a few glares of light while it sharpened the already razor chisel. Harnessed vanity: ever consuming and violently unwilling to be denied fullest power over ^all^ genders. In a pirouette-fraction he pursed his lips, narrowed his eyes seductively, and spread his fingers to crush adoring worlds against untouchable cheeks. What might have given him pause only widened the sails that fanned the flame. He left the stage with a grin, sinister smug to keep the public's addiction.
"So where did everybody go?" Seita thought out loud in a delicate voice. Slightly heavier steps took his glance into the kitchen then squeaked rubber to wood, twisting him toward a sharp snorting sound.
The princess and the pirate were sprawled out either side of the largest couch, their bodies so limp that Seita wondered how 'dead' asleep they could be. In answer to his question, Ryoko rolled her head over and continued snoring more evenly. Aeka meanwhile began to snore in a decidedly more feminine manner as if trying to 'unconsciously' out-charm her rival. One eyebrow raised in curiosity soon slid down and narrowed and shined a new reflection at the collection of sake bottles on and around the coffee table. He approached with the most hushed and chilling chuckle he could manage, looking from the impressive display of glass below to the shameful women on either side.
By casual selection, he picked up a bottle and held it in front of his lips. A low whistle billowed out and filled the living room like a gently rising foghorn. When neither of them even stirred at the serenade, he crinkled his mouth to the side and put his instrument down roughly. The sudden clang of glass against the coffee table made one bottle roll off onto the floor. Still no reaction or sake left.
The fabric tightened around his crossed arms and made them as slender as his eyes were narrow. He looked out the window at the light, looked down at the floor to his left, and watched his shadow move between them like a winding clock hand. Even with all the silent brooding and throaty breathing, with dresses wrinkled and hair tangled, the two young women managed a tranquil infant innocence. A pull at the corner of his lips could have been a reflexive smile or a nervous tick but didn't last long enough for either.
Ryoko shifted slightly with another small snort and Aeka rubbed her nose reflexively. Stone readiness covered Seita's face till it was dry enough for another layer of glossy malice and a wonderful idea. He breathed himself ready and again twisted the threat of reflection again to the glory of projection. Two steps back and both hands together.
"I was wondering if I'd ever get the proper opportunity for something like this," he began in a seductive croon.
Ryoko turned over gently and knocked another empty bottle from the end table to the floor.
"You've both been very good about keeping our sessions out of Tenchi's concern. But, since he knows about them now, I guess were back to where we started." A thoughtful hum stretched bitter lines into his face and pressed his fingers together more tightly.
"Now this usually isn't as potent as the direct approach, but I just can't resist an opportunity for two birds...with one egg." What might have been a chuckle, sucked in through his clenched teeth into a hideous, jerking wheeze.
"It was a clever idea Ryoko---to remember that intoxicated people are out of my reach. However, ^unconscious^ people are practically in the palm of my hand---" Ceremony brought Seita's hands down and lust clutched them to his belly "--- in the walls of my womb."
***
The afternoon sun beamed through the blinds and made tiny specks of dust into floating faeries. Aeka gently nodded back and forth in a homey rocking chair. Her face was tilted downward but it held a smile far away enough to be utterly lost in a beautiful memory or completely aware of the wonderful present. As she rocked herself she hummed a tune rather like a lullaby. The melody and the soft quality of her throat filled and soothed the entire room. Aeka ran her hand over a large bulge on her lap. It was nice to enjoy the softness of her maternity dress, a pleasant intermission between joyous kicks of life. She stopped humming and ran both hands down as if preparing to hug the child within even closer. For a moment she thought she felt a response. Her eyes widened, her head shot up, and she cried out the father's name in a gasp of pain.
---
The waterfalls of the onsen sang about Ryoko's feet as she simultaneously brushed her hair and caressed the bulge of flesh. She tickled it with the longer strands spoke to the extra buoyancy in a playful yet motherly tone.
"So how long are you planning to stay in there huh? If you get any bigger I actually ^am^ going to need Tenchi's help to take a bath-" her eyes shimmered with the water's reflection as she stared intensely at the beads of condensation on her belly.
"Isn't that right?" She called over to the man walking towards her with a wooden bucket of bath supplies over himself. He merely smiled and began to crouch down at her side.
"Wow Tenchi! Feel!"
Ryoko grabbed his hand and pulled him forward roughly, he barely kept his balance but relaxed instantly at the reminder. After he felt no movement for a few seconds Ryoko grabbed desperately onto his shoulder. She looked up at him with wide and nearly terrified eyes; her own sense of pain seemed to overwhelm him past the possible severance of a limb. They knocked the bathing bucket into the water as they stood each other up.
---
A chaotic flurry of sterile turquoise fabric and the clamor of medical equipment swirled around the first princess of Jurai. But the doctors, along with her second thoughts about having her child on earth, were completely obscured in an explosion of pain.
---
Ryoko looked around desperately at the masked faces surrounding her. Her whole body clenched in frustration that every time she tried to call out for Tenchi a surge of pain made it impossible to do anything but scream.
---
Aeka took one last look into Tenchi's eyes and tried to deliver her will. She managed one small prayer before every sense that she possessed replaced itself with agony. It finally ended with the sight of a doctor bending to retrieve the prize, but was it always so painful?
---
Every triumph in her past cowered before the pain Ryoko screamed her every breath at. Just as Ryoko's scream delivered its fire the heat was replaced by an icy doubt; this was not how giving birth was supposed to be.
---
Both new mothers collapsed backwards in exhaustion. They tried to smile up at their Tenchi but neither could manage more than a weak grimace. The new fathers remained motionless in prayer as the mothers slowly dawned confusion at the lack of sound coming from their children. Ryoko and Aeka sat upright in a whisk of sweat and a wave of fear.
The doctors kept their faces in the shadow holding the newborns in thin white towels, at arm's length, and without breath. At first sign of life from the mothers they robotically set the bundles down on metal tables at the foot of the beds. The fathers' hands slipped and fell to their sides as if they'd been struck dead while the mothers lowered their knees and wiped their eyes to get a better look. The towels slid away slowly from the wet new skin.
***
Washu leapt from her chair and clutched her skull. It would have been such a crippling scream had it escaped, luckily she only managed a gasping dead version of a choke. Emeralds flew up from the stone and the genius braced against the nearest control board.
Within the hospital room she noticed platinum hair flowing down the shoulders of two identical doctors. Their faces simmered in the dark while fingers flexed and mouths ungulated with chewed tongues. She felt for a moment that a rubber glove was suffocating her and the vision was gone. With heavy steps and heavier breathing she walked towards a machine resembling a fire hose nozzle. Panic reflected off and filled in its bulk and complexity then ran partly down the length of a thickly twisted black wire python.
"Now. I have to do it ^now^!" Bits of saliva sputtered out as Washu spoke in a desperate whisper.
She clutched the machine's handles and began to drag its unending burden behind her with more insane determination than any slave.
***
"It's just as I suspected," the doctor began in cold monotone, "the baby is deformed... and stillborn as a result of inbreeding." Every ugly enough word exited the doctor's mouth with an extra sentiment of disgust, yet with an almost poetic dignity of someone waiting to speak the line.
The doctor didn't look up from his diagnosis even as a princess stared wildly at him. She trembled her head over to her child. Two points and the initial shock dissolved; Aeka's hands flew to her mouth as her organs and face strangled themselves. Her child was white rot doused with sickly purple. Blood dripped from erratically bloated, curled, and fused little fingers onto the loose skin around its ribs. The skull was gnarled and lumpy, grasped and squeezed like a piece of clay. Its left eye socket lulled in folds of flesh as if half its face had tried to melt away. One pupil-less but bloodshot eye stared back with cold and miserable accusation.
Aeka noticed that Tenchi had moved to the doctor's side with a pale face and no expression. She was in hell and had given birth to a piece of it. It was impossible to gather the energy to look up amid the stench pouring forth from her fruit, her tree. A quagmire of filth bubbled in the First Princess's throat as she began to slowly convulse.
---
"Oh my GOD doctor, what...what ^is it^!?" The nurse wailed as she cowered behind the doctor. Authority, still masked, merely starred at child. She trembled and looked pitifully from the doctor, to Tenchi, then at the back of the seemingly normal baby's head. Ryoko leaned forward in hideous fear that the first child had not survived. Her heart jumped as it began to turn and face her.
The baby's first sound filled the room and poured rusty slime into its mother's lungs. Something between a hiss and a gurgle grew louder, into a growl, a putrid vibration. When it finally faced Ryoko she saw blood bubbling in the back of its throat and oozing out over jagged teeth that jutted forth like splintered wood. Yellowed emaciation stretched over the tiny skeleton, ribs expanded and paled as it breathed.
Mind like a heated, swelling boil, Ryoko listened to her baby grow louder, watched its pupils catch a glare of deathly green light. When she saw it trying to claw towards her with viciously pointed little fingers she dug her own hands into her sides and sobbed hysterically into her knees. Even with eyes buried, that monstrous face reminded her that she was indeed the most despicable creature in the universe. Thoughts smashed and crumbled into each other, discarding her in pieces among this draining shower.
Somehow the mothers were able to choke out Tenchi's name, and somehow he didn't seem to hear it as he shuffled away, speaking aloud but obviously to himself.
"What have I done..." Guilt rivers ran to fill disgusted lakes. ---
The masses on either side of the couch began to shrink insanely into fetal positions. Seita watched them with a Cheshire bite till his doctors picked up the metal trays, still holding them at arm's length as they turned towards the wall. A furnace door opened and received the packages with a gristle sizzle, a steam scream, and two belches of flame.
Ryoko and Aeka exploded into consciousness with screeches that tore their throats down into wailing sobs. They clutched their heads and hugged their knees like terrified children waiting for be saved or devoured. Their horror shocked a pause rather than dissipated as they stared at each other. When finally still enough to make lasting eye contact their red faces turned pale. The third source of heavy breathing in the room gradually became the most pronounced. They both moved to face Seita at the same time, neither with any more enthusiasm than a rusted hinge.
He drove air through a perversely accomplished smile and into the dead spider cage of his fingertips. Ryoko and Aeka could see their agony being relished in piercing blue cruelty. In a single fluid motion Seita rose to his feet and parted his hands in triumphant closure. Aeka shivered her eyes wide enough to see past him and noticed the long-sealed door to Wash's lab. It unveiled a disheveled yet determined young soldier who dragged her bulky weapon along like life itself.
"Think nothing of accuracy, your visions---" Seita trailed off but gradually regained some composure in a few knuckle cracks. "Real doctors would never behave in such a manner...they always require ^much^ more paperwork."
A smug smile and a straightened posture brought his sharpness to a point. Aeka glanced over at Ryoko and saw the deep gouges she was making in the couch as she also struggled to look away.
"Isn't that right, Dr. Hakube?" Freshly pursed lips asked curtly; ^he^ didn't need to turn to flaunt of his acute perception. Washu stopped about five feet behind him, but her violent determination was engraved. Seita turned leisurely to face her while Ryoko and Aeka stared at the bulky machine the miniature scientist was hefting up her side.
"My-my Little-Washu. What have you got there?" The imposter asked and took her apparent age seriously.
Professor Hakube looked up and matched hatred to any sinister amusement, face quaking from cutting brow to grinding teeth. She fused her hand onto the machines coarse lever like a demon's bridle and pulled it over and past emergency. Its cylindrical nose emitted a slow light that spread like a slide projector into fog. Once the space an inch beyond Seita was illuminated, Washu pushed forward again causing the light, the man, and the family chair all to vanish. The three women kept an entire minute empty till Washu dropped to one knee without letting go of her machine. Ryoko and Aeka rushed forward a few reflexive steps but were both still too shaken to do more than stare. The day's mother of invention looked down at her new child and gasped out a mad smile.
"I'm...^a genius^!"
***
^Tenchi Muyo: Sanctuary and Asylum^
-Verse Seven is Mother-
-Part 2-
Effortless and unrepentant---will beg to be restrained.
Begging a will for vengeance---can justice be maintained?
-ZJS
***
Soft, stylish, stealthy, Jurain Nobles spared no expense when it came to footwear. Duke Mitziru remembered something someone had said somewhere 'a royal guard can hear a cotton ball decal drop across the room'. He thought on this, then told himself not to. This was more than an important trip; it was a monumental honor of an assignment. He'd take whatever passage instructed and give no more information than was allowed, even if it did make him look suspicious...even if it ^would^ make him look suspicious ^should^ anyone see his route. Not likely, so 'walk like a Noble in all places at all times, head high, feet sure'. Though he couldn't remember when he'd heard it last, it had been his father saying it, and that was good enough.
Quiet, clean, Queenly, Funaho listened to one Noble footfall after the other, one too many cotton balls. She considered how to place her own steps out from her hiding place. There were so many natural notches found in the old, inefficient, and conveniently obscure passage, surely people had hid...'waited' in them before. If no one before herself (enough recent times to count) then her judgment would justify this new use, and that was good enough.
With a popular tune sung under a whisper, the Duke passed by, feet sure, head high. Funaho thought on how his shoes hardly matched his robe, then told herself not to. And, since his oblivious shoulders beckoned her not to waste an element of surprise, she remained calmly leaned into the wood grooves.
"Duke Mitziru."
Never let them see you taken off guard, his father might have said that shortly before he died. Was the diagnosis still an unknown virus? No matter, Mitziru told himself, just take a few more steps before you stop and don't turn till after you've spoken.
"Who is there?" The Duke surely knew already, but had decided to be formally polite.
"I must have a word with you." Funaho stepped out onto the main path, both arms folded calmly into her sleeves.
An unfamiliar and very feminine voice: how curious. Not too young, not quite old enough for a Duchess.
Ah, that was it, must be, surely his intuitions were as flawless as his instructions. He turned to face ^another^ of his all too many disappointing and discharged concubines. Wasn't it his place to forget them as he chose? Did they all have to seek him out in private?
"My dear lady," Mitziru began, not even quarter turned yet, "I am sorry, but it is not my place to offer you fertility treatments. If you'd like a recommendation for a-"
Funaho remained calm, almost serene, save for the heavier left corner of her mouth.
"M---M-M-My Queen!" Executions hadn't been carried out through beheading for eons, but, for Mitziru's last moments, it felt right to clutch his throat anyway.
"These tunnels to the landing docks are quite old...but I doubt you're traveling for historic scenery."
Clearly The First Queen of Jurai had a great deal of patience, too much in fact to waste it on formalities in this situation. The business at hand would have to begin now and wait another time.
"Your highness, please forgive my foolishness." Clammy hands hadn't felt so out of place round his neck till he had to fling them to his sides for a deep bow.
"Rise Duke."
Perhaps if she'd have said 'be at peace' or 'at ease' or even 'A- rise'...or ^please^, then he figured he would have done so more smoothly. Shiny skin did not befit a Noble, but in this case it was better to sweat than urinate. In person and impatient, the Queen really was more striking than a rendering; to think she was an off-worlder.
"It is an honor to---is there anything at all I can do for you, my Queen?" It wouldn't have made his father proud, but it was a quick recovery just the same.
"Just the one thing," she blinked slowly to make sure she was looking him directly through the eyes and almost felt pity for the suddenly fragile man.
Duke Mitziru barely opened his mouth and clearly heard his teeth click from slamming it shut again.
"Whatever your 'immediate' plans are, change them. Where you are going; remain a distant spectator, do not make your presence known. Then, when you return, report that The Princess Aeka did not respond."
It was an unpleasant thing to hear a man gulp from a few meters away. In her position she thought she'd have grown accustomed by now. While she was silently considering being less intimidating this time, or perhaps the next, Duke Mitziru spoke, recited, and tried to make his case a statement rather than a plea.
"I'm sorry, your highness. My plans---my ^orders^ come from The Emperor himself."
"I doubt that."
Having not meant to sound so cold, Funaho cleared herself with a breath, hoping the Duke would take the opportunity to do so himself.
"I think it is far more likely," she continued with a lesson for any future diplomat, "that your orders come from someone representing my husband. Therefore; a direct order from myself or my Sister-Queen would supercede it."
Funaho hoped relaxing her voice a little further might keep the man in one piece.
"That is the case, is it not?"
Disregard a formal request with the Emperor's seal...or lie to The First Queen of Jurai? Perhaps there had been a more difficult crossroad somewhere down the Mitziru family line, but that didn't matter now. There was no bride more sought after than Princess Aeka, no more noble a task than saving her from the glamours of that unknown and unfit planet, and no wrath more terrible than a Queen's.
What would Tsunami want? Honor the father's hand or honor the mother's face? Who held his family's name in the palm of his hand? Who had The Great Yosho named his tree after?
"It is." The Duke bowed with the ordeal's first real breath, taking it in reverence would be an appropriate and wise decision.
"Good. Thank you." Funaho formally relieved them both mid turn.
"Of course, anything---anything for the mother of our-"
"That will be all, Lord Mitziru."
Speaking sharply while still walking away, Funaho was far more intimidating than her husband's seal.
***
Washu's legs swayed slightly as she remained hunched and perhaps welded over the bulky apparatus. Ryoko and Aeka each took a step back, respectfully afraid to burden their lingering shock with anything more. Emeralds burned sulfur up from the ground, glaring at them under a mat of septic red bristles, speaking between another set of exhausted breaths.
"Greatest...invention...yet."
Her stunned audience slowly looked down at the achievement in question, plainly ominous for its lack of smoke, noise, or even a blinking light. Looking from her daughter to Aeka, Washu followed their eyes back down to apparent but uncertain salvation.
"Wha---what just happened?" Ryoko leveled a weak stare, sitting back on the couch, bent over tightly gripped arms.
"Seita? Did you-" Aeka managed to whimper before her own hands tried to seal her mouth.
A spark of excited pride for the muted, a bit lip for the crippled, then Washu traded it all for a hesitant glance back down at her machine.
"I'm not sure, I didn't exactly have an opportunity for a test run." She breathed in another step away from hyperventilation.
"Then what the hell ^did^ you do?!" Ryoko furled her hair up and around clenched teeth and fists. Were her jaw not chattering, were her elbows not still cowering in her stomach, she would have looked ready for battle.
Washu sensed, reflected, and displayed her daughter's fear for a blink. Speaking to the machine was easier, even if it darkened her voice past any professionalism.
"Ryoko, Aeka, this here is likely the most powerful atomic transmitter in the entire universe. I couldn't explain how difficult it was to simply make a prototype."
"But, isn't that-" Aeka began pointing in anxious disbelief.
"Yes, well, it's basically the same system that all higher grade ships have for transporting cargo and passengers. It essentially draws all the atoms in a selected area into manageable size and reassembles them in a new location...hm, such a simple concept now for something that was once thought impossible." Washu grinned in a failed attempt at humor and continued, still trying to rebuild some degree of confidence. "The problem is...Seita's atoms do not function like any I've ever seen, and trust me, I've seen a lot.
"What most people don't realize is that every time, say, Aeka transports from her ship and back, a few atoms get lost along the way, usually within loose skin cells and other detritus. Even the most advanced transporters can only hold onto atoms that have some sort of structure condensing them together.
"Now, like I said, he's different, he can't be transported easily for the same reason he can't be touched; his atoms won't hold still. It gets more complicated from there, but the main point is that I did not vaporize him, I merely transported him to a 'containment unit' in my lab."
A wicked little genius grin disturbed a reminder of the subject in question. Both younger women cringed a little, but Washu took no notice and continued with a convincing mad scientist quiver.
"I'll decide what to do with him from there. It's taken almost all my available resources to construct the equipment necessary to function at such a complete atomic level...but I think it will be worth it."
"You're sure he's...^contained^?" Aeka gulped.
There was silence till Washu finally regained her breath, professional tone, and a better posture.
"If anything in science can bring him down to size, it's this." The little genius hefted the big device a little more.
"Now that you finally know what I've been confining myself to the lab for; try to have some faith in it. You've both found out first hand that Seita is more than just a pretty trickster, and we may never know exactly ^what^ he wants, but I'm not about to let him make guinea pigs of us!" The spitting violence in her vow brought out an eye-shimmer of unspoken and currently unspeakable empathy between the three women.
Aeka stepped back and bowed her head, speaking in formality to hide whatever damage she could.
"There's no telling what might have happened had you not intervened, I am eternally grateful Miss---I-I mean-" Formality stuttered nervously.
"Don't worry about it, ^your highness^," Washu managed a weak smirk as she began dragging the heavy device and its thick hose back to her lab, "I'm doing this for everyone."
Ryoko's head unburied itself from her hands with mouth faltering between faint throat noises.
"For everyone." Washu whispered again to herself, or perhaps simply thought it very directly. Her daughter closed her mouth and sank back into both hands.
Hardly noticing that she was hugging herself with her mother's strength, Aeka spoke gently to the air.
"Please Tenchi, come home safely."
***
If the lab seemed farther removed, Washu had reasoned, she'd be less worried about damaging the house and less tempted by Sasami's cooking. This would make it easier to pour every resource she had into Seita's capture. Now, as she lumbered down a less than aerodynamic flight of dimly lit steps, the mass of her still unnamed invention made her wondered if it had all been truly necessary. One generic lifting android, she could have spared just one, a simple arm even. She'd have to type soon, raw or numb or not, her little fingers hadn't earned their break yet.
Keeping the lights dim was definitely overdoing it, keep this up and you'll need glasses by age 30,000, she joked to herself. The brutal efficiency that had taken her this far spoke up now, arguing that the light path was technically expendable itself; the hose led directly back to where she needed to be, through and around the armored arches left ajar. It was almost surprising that college memories could still resurface at such a time; all those extension cords smuggled into restricted reactor rooms, all those professors following them back to her dorm with sure path, short fuse, and small wonder.
The automatic recognition doors sealed again the moment she and the hose were clear. Head down, still retracing step residue round to the right, she'd have only to glance up-left to see what the near entirety of her science was good for. But haste made waste. But the greatest scientific genius in the universe didn't need to rush. But Little Washu was in no hurry to face those eyes again; she watched and waited for the hose to retract completely, snaking its way back into the wall with a cold steel over rubber shuffle. Until there was power to spare she'd have to use stationary computers, during the final equipment check the lights behind her reflected on the dark screen. There was a humanoid figure standing very still and very tall.
Even as she digested it, she could still taste iron. The deep baritone vibration of the largest generator was faintly shaking the floor, but the lab was otherwise silent. Out of habit or reflex she listened for the distinctive beeps of a vital function monitor, forgetting that she'd never even thought of adding one.
No time to dote and doubt on such things, she should be like a Samurai, hesitant to re-sheath his sword after a battle won too easily. By all means the analogy should have made her smile or at least more willing to turn around. There was no room for reluctance now and only track enough for one train of thought.
*Face him, Washu.
*An unnecessary risk.
She steadied her hand on a small box in her pocket.
*I could end this all right now.
*An unnecessary risk.
*Perhaps I should wait till I'm better prepared.
*An unintelligent risk.
Something very primal, an instinct injection made her ankles hurt as she pivoted one eighty---one, just in case.
*Show him who the ^real^ genius is.
*An unintelligent-
Two walls of rain gray tubing and onyx mirror panels shared a room-size box between them, faint orange light as sturdy a face as glass. The recliner was on its side in the far right corner, Seita smiled a forgiven debt of patience from the near center. Till she was more or less a meter away Washu kept her approach slow. Once decided to inversely cross her arms in front of her she kept their eyes locked.
*It's easy, people have said 'you look emotionless' lots of time, especially when I was working.
"There was nothing but a disorienting white light." Recounting a major turning point in his youth, Seita let the biographer feel both fortunate and unnecessary. "And for a moment I remembered vividly my first glimpse of oblivion, to truly feel 'nothing' again as a result of someone ^else's^ will."
Seita brought one arm forward with grace-like leisure. Washu watched him watch the minute details between his thumb and seemingly longer littlest nail.
"So, in quaint remembrance of empathy, and since you went through all this trouble, I'll at least let you say your peace before I depart to finish my work here."
"Try it."
Washu savored every fraction of Seita's face as it sank to her instant ice challenge. He squinted, searching insistently till at last he retreated back into a smug smile.
"Are you sure you wouldn't like to ask me a question or two first? Surely there must be some curiosity lurking around all that fear." He took half of the step between himself and the energy field. Washu sunk her fingernails stoically deeper into her biceps.
At first it was encouraging just to blink, to know she could. When Seita did the same, more or less naturally, there wasn't as much reassurance as she'd have liked. From there Kagato was next in line in between them. One of the few beings she'd ever considered a formidable opponent, he'd almost never directly looked at anyone unless he was looking down on them. That should have been an early warning. So what was it about that story introduction that should have been telltale?
*All of it. I should have been nothing but skeptical, instead I let myself get curiouser and curiouser. Why did he-
*No, Washu. Don't ask him any questions, not yet, not on his terms.
Without breaking contact, Seita positioned his hand against his face, knuckles on cheek, thumb on jaw, and nail into bottom lip, prodding, ticking. She was far enough away for him not to have to angle his head much; regardless of significant heights, he obviously wasn't looking down. This was an entirely new game.
He could project private memories, but Washu figured he wasn't a telepath, couldn't be literally probing her thoughts. At worst he was speculating better than he should. She knew that she was still focused on the beginning stage, finding a point of inspiration to focus and advance from. Somewhere behind all that lovely blue was the thing that found it--- 'fitting' that she remember her lost son by all but reliving one of their most traumatic moments together.
*Is that what he wanted, just to re-salt and old wound?
As soon as she let herself frown she regretted it. Small favor that Seita didn't seem to notice, in fact, he seemed to be something like perplexed as well. No, not perplexed.
*Not perplexed at all. He still thinks he's going to walk effortlessly out of this thing, he must still be planning what to do afterward.
*But, that must mean he hasn't actually tried to yet.
Washu breathed her frown back into dead balance.
*I hope.
And then there it was, a shrug of an exasperated sigh. He'd simply been looking for a hole in her confidence and thus a crack in his box. That part was over.
"Very well," Seita brought his hand up, little finger pointing and ready test the wind's direction.
A ripple of static crackled softly at the point of impact and physically bounced his entire arm back. He watched incredulously as countless atoms from the sharp colored tip dispersed then regrouped like a school of fish accidentally swimming into a dam. In two quick motions he tried to make an 'x' but only the first slash had enough matter. It took a little longer for the entire finger to reform.
He took a relaxing breath, raised his hand again in a beauty queen wave, and readied to push with both eyes shut tight. Washu marveled, having never seen him exert any physical energy away from outdoor chores. Similarly she could not help but be startled when he shot his fist forward with a loud strike of static.
Steeped in confused frustration, Seita stepped back, right knuckle over his lips, left hand crossed over his midsection to support the right thinking elbow. It was still obvious that he wasn't evaluating a work of art, but an infuriating equation. Washu could not keep herself from taking another step forward, unknowingly imitating a sinister grin.
Seita refolded his hands back behind him and genuinely scowled pure enough to melt emerald. The subhuman hiss, the perverse whisper, all of the effeminately affected yet surreally chilling voices Washu had heard through Ryoko fell away. She could only bet half her degrees that this was a glimpse into the voice he spoke with before Kagato's experiments. The strikingly mundane combination of nasal isolation and analytical masculinity froze her thoughts.
"Congratulations Professor Hakube, you have created and atomic containment unit more powerful than I imagined possible."
Moving as naturally as pseudo silence, Washu dropped her hands into her pockets and tried not to squeeze the contents of one too tightly.
"My form cannot relax enough to phase through this field, however-"
After so much focusing will, it infuriated Washu to be distracted by a foreboding little wiggle across his fingers. When she looked back up there was no room or time to reassert herself in the game.
"I doubt it is imposing enough to affect my capacity, my connection to-"
Cutting himself off, Seita's clenched brow weighed his head down with a jerk. Washu squinted then stared shivers at a white circle no larger than a golf ball hovering at slender chest level. Her prisoner's eyes widened as well, but with a completely different emotion.
He violently arched his fingertips together behind the opening and tightened his mouth in a desperate rage. It wavered in size, increasing diameter an inch or so, then falling back even smaller. This continued on for an hour's minute; the prisoner shaking with determination while the captor stood rigid, petrified that his efforts would be successful despite her own.
The unofficial but obvious ending tore oblivion from Seita's grasp as the sweat on his hands slipped his fingers to intersect together. Washu allowed herself to breath again as he pumped air through clenched teeth and shook his hands involuntarily, the motion of it made her pause long enough to catch a glimpse of a comparatively frail body. The veins on his forearms and tendons in his neck were ready to burst forth from his skin and strangle everything in sight. A few minuscule taps of static sounded on the containment field as spittle flung over his barred teeth. Through all this only his eyes spoke of anything more than a child's tantrum, pitiful despite the rage necessary to destroy all of existence.
Like animals cornered, Washu knew that tyrants were most dangerous when forced to acknowledge impending defeat; she should be cautious. Yet, she was so eager to need such caution, that she threw it aside. She tasted her enemy's pain and savored it with countless years of maniacal laughter held back in the name of good form.
Euphoria erupted from her, head raised to the ceiling, arms squeezed even tighter, bits of color sparkling behind her welded eyes. Time and space stepped aside to properly observe her triumph. But, in the same turn, that emotion ruined thought's endurance, so too did a thought ruin emotion's moment.
*And so the mad scientist has defeated the shape shifter. This must be something like the power he felt over us.
Flinging her eyes open, bending her head into both hands, Washu desperately pushed cackles back into the cauldron. Her eye's watered from the strain, but she could not relent, shamed and grateful to catch herself on the edge of her enemy's world. Her will for and concept of morality began returning home, just in time to be tested again.
She'd offered a barely conscious prayer to anything never to hear the 'original' voice speak again, so instead it roared. If the hiss were subhuman, surely this could only be described as post-human. A gurgling moan torn into a siren by tenor hooks, Seita's fists were going to implode, his jaw was going to detach, and shards of falling sky were going to cut his throat to thinner ribbons.
It faded in half a minute, but the volume carried pain through the other half. Between everything else, Washu's reflexes had surged to the forefront, and she needed to look up at her captive with both hands still over her ears. She knew instantly that he could see her terror, and reflex spoke again, and again in his old voice, releasing her grip and lowering careful digits towards the pocketed unnecessary risk.
"I suppose I should have foreseen this, if atoms cannot escape this prison surely they cannot make room enough for an oblivion opening."
Washu searched desperately for the terrifying fury that had been in his voice, but only found the far greater threat of vanity, of a readying countermove. His hands had become claws at his sides during the roar, but once again they moved elegantly up to form a wedge of fingers beneath his chin.
"I don't really care ^how^, but I'm sure to find out ^why^, as soon as you tell me ^if^...I still look pretty."
A whole lot of glamour; he looked the same part he'd played during introductions. Washu did not answer, however, and just stared back with too many clenched teeth and not enough concentration to speculate why this would make a difference in their standings.
"I'll take that as a 'yes'." In an effortless transition his sharp smile opened wide, shooting ethereal cruelty through his teeth.
"^Gooooood^."
Washu caught his meaning in a cold iron bar through the stomach as a duplicate Seita moved forward through the containment field in the same shedding manner that Ryoko formed her double. It walked forward at its leisure and her privilege, gliding its hands out of the meditative pose and down into its pockets.
"Tell me where to go---I'll tell you what to see. Now, what do we say? Now, who could've known?"
Duplicates of Tenchi, Ryoko, and herself approached, spaced out in word turns, each distinct voice leaning or bending into an imitation of him. Washu stepped back and clutched the small device in her pocket.
"Im-Impossible!" She gasped back another step in retreat from her glaring mirror image.
"Come now professor Hakube, did you really think that ^thought^ traveled on ^atoms^?"
With that the duplicate slowly dispersed into countless colored ribbons, each particle worming through the air and into the floor. Washu starred back at the tarted bit of insanity smiling smugly inside her prison. A combination of emotion and reflex bent her head forward, hair pulled all but out and eyes clenched all but inward. She trembled, trying desperately again not to think of the weight in her pocket.
"Hmmm, not a particularly creative strategy professor; will you make yourself ^deaf^ as well as blind to escape me?" The rasp sounded ready to flick a forked tongue in her ear; knowing that it was an auditory hallucination made it no less vile.
Someone was caressing a church organ in slow contemplative chords, echoing through a lab far larger than her own. It took an instant to recognize one of Kagato's favorite pieces, and less to detect a different, and very un- musical sound in the distance. A little girl sobbing for her mother grew older, then familiar, then Washu slapped her ears so hard that a similar noise festered, almost answered in her throat. She remembered her own prison aboard the Soja and the cries that would permeate it night after night till she prayed for the mobility to cover her ears as they were now. The accident with her lost son had been a bitter thing to recall, but the months that passed before Kagato finally silenced Ryoko's cries were painful enough to be wielded as a weapon.
And so she tried to shield herself. For longer and longer still, Washu cowered full and futile for deafened darkness, terrified to imagine any more illusions beyond these memories. Sobs fought back and pressed down, her logic, her precious logic struggled back to its throne like a desperate infant to a nurse.
*Must---THINK! How?! How can he still do this? Dammit Washu, you can't let him beat you! For the sake of everything don't let him think you've given up! This is^ your^ mind, ^your^ will!
* It's his arrogance---his arrogance that let him get caught. Use it Washu! Defy him and wait for another mistake---he is mortal---he is ^mortal^!
Once again the single line of reason surged her forward, filled her with energy enough to wield worlds...to imprison beings beyond existence. She lowered her hands and raised her eyes with as much dignity as a queen. With all the confidence she could spare she convinced herself that this enduring gesture could stop any future invasions. Seita was sitting cross- legged, the tip of a more relaxed hand arch beneath his lips, blue waters all but level.
"I'm glad to see that didn't take long. Now, before you waste time on another strategy, could you perhaps tell me now---tell me ^why^? Why go to all this trouble?" His voice transition was soft only to stress the question.
Washu crossed her arms again and reformed a shaky version of her professional posture. Hoping that a glimpse of sincerity would simultaneously satisfy him and catch him off guard, she attempted exactly that.
"It's your question that wastes time on what should be obvious. You are a threat, to me, and to the people I care for. For whatever reason: you exploit memories and twist dreams. You violate the mind, Seita.
"You may not have physically harmed anyone here, but one look into those 'pretty eyes' of yours and it's clear that making us doubt our senses is just the beginning.
Washu frowned a little dark sarcasm for her classroom, then a little more at a rising corner on Seita's mouth.
"Go ahead and take this as flattery, but know that, whatever you are, whatever ambition it is that drives you, this power is not a discovery and not a gift. It is a ^mistake^. And I intend to correct it."
A part of her still wanted to mock him with his own speaking style, but she kept a close watch on herself, fiercely determined not to be drawn in again. Their glares locked and stood fast, silent again as they both tried to muffle their own heartbeats. To her surprise, Seita broke the moment, not with a flamboyant or sinister gesture, but with a tired sigh from beneath a hanging head.
"...I try so hard to give you people a different perspective of things, and this is the thanks I get. I may make it look easy, but let me assure you; it takes a good deal of energy to conduct our little sessions, not to mention the ever invaluable and inconsistent spark of creativity."
Mister Misunderstood spoke of passive peaces, but clearly without enough sincerity to make Washu's glare even flinch. He raised his head to see this and crinkled his lips to the side in a favorite grimace of disappointment. The next sigh and almost cynical response was much more believable.
"Ah yes, I suppose that is a little hard to swallow, isn't it? The old 'road to hell paved with good intentions'----it just seems to wind in the same tired circle." Seita crossed his arms and lowered his eyes reflectively. "That self-delusion wore off before it even bore fruit."
Washu tensed as he began rubbing flattened hands together, for warmth, for effect as he put on another layer of seduction.
"I do think you're too wise for that, in fact, I think you're perceptive enough to understand me quite well, even if you don't know it. And herein lies the true motivation."
He offered up a glance just in time to savor her deeper frown.
"Rage as you may against 'threatening projections', your truest violence is reserved for ^unflattering reflections^."
Washu felt pocket lining again while he chuckled characteristically in his own praise. He seemed to be trying to crack her frown wider with his knuckles
"Come now professor, take this opportunity to destroy me---and prove me right! For surely---surely one so powerful could only be afraid of herself." He griped his knees tightly. "Is that it? Do you hesitate to ^destroy me^ for fear that you will ^know me better^?"
The stressed whispers gave way to tiny chuckles, barely human so much as the tiny grunts of a rodent giving birth.
"If not that, then indeed there is a second, still correlated possibility, a near paradox. Have we indeed trapped each other? Am I still alive to satisfy your own fascination, your own ^hunger^ for my power? Do you want me to beg for mercy at your feet, offering up all my secrets in exchange for my miserable life."
He rose and spread himself back down onto his chest, arching his back enough to fit the tip of his prayer beneath his chin. The sinister velvet completely melted into perverse latex.
"Dare we explore one-level-deeper? Would you keep me imprisoned, knowing that I'm sure to find a way to escape? Is there the sadist's shadow in that brilliant mind of yours; the desire to be ^defeated^?!"
Pretty, ecstatic, Seita's mouth and eyes shook wide and ready to burst from the pleasure of so diagnosing the greatest genius in the universe. Washu shook as well, tensing her finger over the equivalent of a trigger, but relaxed it in shock as her prisoner quickly forced some degree of calm back over himself. Wild features were drug back down by unseen chains till at last his face hung solemn. She searched hopefully for signs of exhaustion rather than wait for her curious head to betray her with new consideration for Seita's perception.
Blue eyes rose then drained to pure and empty white. His bloodless smile didn't move, so when his voice whispered so close to her head she naturally mistook it for direct telepathy.
"^None of these answers would surprise me, being as you are such an unethical scientist...and such a sad excuse for a mother^!"
Washu felt the camel's back snap into jagged splinters beneath her. Quickly as a gentleman drawing during a pistols duel, she pointed the small remote directly between Seita's eyes. Neither of them wavered at the generic computer stewardess's announcement, echoing about them amidst the rearrangement and repetition of lights.
"Attention. Atomic containment field will begin compression in 10.864 seconds. Please take precautionary safety measures."
A second button on the remote made a transparent sphere shimmer around Washu's body. It was large enough to contain her adult form, and held her firmly in a levitating position inches off the floor. Still she matched her prisoner's stillness.
"Compression in 5---4---" The countdown halted and the field around Seita began to darken in color, he grinned a little wider for anybody special before his features were obscured in dynamic flashes of warning light.
"Attention. Containment field unstable, probability of collapse-" The tendons in Washu's arm flexed as she repressed the initial button. "--- compression resumed."
She narrowed her eyes on the blurred figure now sitting patiently again in the ultimate prison cell. Consuming emotion allowed for one last unprofessional musing; she hoped that he'd receive his judgment with that smug smile intact.
The containment field wavered like pieces of sheet metal with sounds of hot grease on static rather than soothing thunder. Washu closed her eyes with real serenity.
***
The lighthawk wings had carried Tenchi high above the treetops, searching for his house, the lake, even a plume of smoke to lead the way home. In frustration he'd started flying in random directions, but this just made him feel more lost and more foolish for the time wasted trying to get back to the home base area Seita had left him in. Eventually, after deciding that developed countries like his shouldn't still have so much wilderness, he threw himself in the lucky direction of a familiar-looking mountain range.
Now, as he burst inside, he nearly tumbled forward as he tried to support himself on the front door handle. With the Jurain garments faded he could feel again how exhausting it could be to stress himself to wit ends of the universe. Barely held back from the brink of gasps for air and fear, he listened and listened closer in the hideous silence. His instinct to call out swelled painfully in his lungs, but he could only S.O.S in an impotent exhale.
More thoughts of Seita; Tenchi didn't need any more reasons to dash forward again. Veering into the living room for as good a reason as wasn't needed, he balked still at the spark of Ryoko's energy sword combined with the hum of Aeka's force shield. The suddenness of it readied him for another lighthawk wing in the moment before he saw their faces.
They quivered, stoic and pitiful, stringing out their last thread of will to defy an impossible adversary. Ryoko spoke first, angling her sword forward as menacingly as possible. A child could have smelled her fear, Tenchi thought, but listened intensely.
"Is that you, Seita?"
The pain he'd felt during the impersonation returned, corkscrewed into him, and swelled. With the greatest of clarity came the depth of failure; he'd been oblivious while something unspeakable violated the very minds of the women, the family he had sworn to protect. The agony swell, the forced mistrust of the face they'd pledged their hearts to, it was all caused by his inability to recognize a surreal threat.
Unworthy, he continued to beg strength of himself, refused to consider asking them the same question. All he could do was drop his arms in despair and bitterly hope that their tears were true.
Ryoko lowered her sword and let it dissipate, Aeka followed suit, taking a step forward. They each crept towards him, hating themselves for each moment of doubt trying to pull them back into a defense. By the time they were close enough to touch him their faces were equally lined with tiny rivers. The sound of their timid breaths was enough to keep Tenchi's blinks short. His one chance at redemption shone through their mire and lifted his arms out, offering them all he could.
***
The wreckage of Washu's lab piled up with so much material that it might as well have been the welded pieces of a chaotic sculpture. Throughout the process of dragging herself from beneath a large conduit tube she was the only one to budge, and squish, and crack, and grunt but mostly whimper. There were some lighter pieces of debris that crumbled and avalanched beneath her blackened hands and tangled in her hair. She crawled upward through a thistle of wires toward what looked like firelight glare.
Emerging at a stile top, Washu rested her chin on her forearms and looked about at the devastation. Some metal garbage transport truck had been disemboweled with a flamethrower to dump its guts over her lab. Fossil fuel yards had looked more promising, and indeed parts of this one were still on fire. Little by little her eyes adjusted to the dim light and began to recognize various components, each one to some degree severed, dented or charred beyond repair. She reached out for a piece of thin piping and tried to pull herself toward what looked like a patch of floor but what was probably the flat surface of some other destroyed component. This motion screamed out any argument that her left leg and right ankle were not broken. The following motion to look back on them similarly reminded her that she had, conservatively, one cracked rib.
With a glazed gaze around and a regretful breath of the putrid rubber fires, Washu smiled weakly to herself.
*The carbon converters must have gone before the main reactors, must be why everything was trashed in a fireball instead of being completely vaporized.
Washu pulled herself along what might have been an easier path toward a smaller fire.
*Lucky me. They must not have been punctured, though they could start to leak any minute now.
Another cough and she collapsed her head onto her folded forearms. The pain there was catching up with the rest of her body in good time. When she opened her eyes she could barely make out a shape, far to her left. It looked like a huge melting candy bar made from Alpha quality metal. It looked like a part of the containment field.
She stared, listened to arch's of electricity starting new fires, and didn't feel too disappointed. After a few minutes of nothing she let herself chuckle no matter how much it hurt. A wet cough worked its way up and out her throat. She didn't bother to check the color of what she spat out, but did wipe it off her chin and did notice the relative size of her trembling hand-cloth.
*I guess the internal power source that kept me little used itself up to keep me from being crushed.
She tried to move again and her leg tried to secede.
*Completely.
Her eyes softened and began to water at the painfully light feeling in her skull. The sound of her voice was drab, but added ringing ears to the list of ailments.
"Ah well, guess I can't really play innocent anymore, can I?"
The fire nearest to her cracked and sizzled out. In the distance some lose wreckage fell in on itself. Washu felt her eyes growing heavy then weightless for a new sound just behind her. She lifted herself up on both hands, then one arm, then both elbows. A bending and scraping weight pressed itself into the lighter wreckage, then pressed in again. Two nearly identical noises now, slowly working their way up to her feet then separating, one settling on each side of her hips.
***
He could not tell who collided with him first, as the second was less than a second behind. Both women clutched his chest with every breath of life, yet they were still somehow too frail to do more than scratch him. In proper balance he wrapped his arms around them and squeezed with all his strength. His head fell in surrender, landing between the two conflicted yet equally soft patches of hair. They clutched tighter and he shook his head in shame, letting the motion evolve into a nuzzle, a touch of how precious they were. Two muffled sobs died mid birth before one managed to crawl out of his throat.
"I'm sorry. I'm ^so^ ^sorry^!"
They commiserated silently for long enough to feel the cramps in their positions, however, it was the part of Tenchi that rose above pain that broke the soothing embrace. They looked at him at first in desperation, frail enough to share him so long as it meant not letting go, delusional enough for another moment.
The understanding between them chose another opportune time to assert itself. Each stepped back, hands crossed before their waists. Aeka lowered her head and began to speak, in a monotone characteristic of a person still confronting trauma. Ryoko's head just kept sinking farther away from Tenchi's eyes.
"He---Seita, I mean---Washu; she stopped him somehow, with a new device. I believe she has him trapped in her lab now."
Tenchi gaped at a new battle for the right questions, this time looking at Ryoko to fill them in. She confined her face to the floor and her breath to a shudder.
"What should we do now, Lord Tenchi?"
Aeka looked away from the closet door. Tenchi felt something weaken in the face of so much longing, at the sound of something ever fragile for being broken more than once. His first instinct asked that they all pray, however, memories of what had answered the past two times he'd done so--- sincerely, they came back like rising bile. He held his arms and tested a rebuilding seriousness on the closet door.
"We wait."
***
Washu never took her eyes away from the floor in front of her, but she could see Seita perfectly, standing over her as she crawled through the ruins of her lab. She ignored the pain and kept both elbows strong.
Tense hands, fingers slightly parted, spread over either side of her vision. They overlapped at the tips and moved slowly to cover her eyes, she willed herself not flinch as they divided again a millimeter from her nose and caressed along both cheeks with all the delicate patience of a curious blind man. His thumbs resting against her head, his middle fingers pulled strands of hair back over her ears.
Seita's flesh was cold and smooth like she'd imagined, the envy of a snake for all the power it could hide. A nauseating fear bore its roots through her from the tips of tiny sharpened nails as they traced her jaw line and pressed into her jugular with arrogant restraint. The rubble shifted under his feet as he moved them up, quiet lechery trembled a breath against her ear. For some strange reason she believed that if she imagined a pit of all the unspeakable acts he could do to her he'd feel compelled to think of something else, something unexpected.
"It looks as though you've been keeping secrets as well---'Little' Washu." Steaming venom over twisted fangs frightened the marrow of the stars slightly less than continued silence would have.
She could almost feel the hair behind her ear rising into his nostrils as he filled his lungs with more than should have been able to fit in such a slender frame. Washu had to close her eyes now, he was not just gloating; he was savoring the moment. Whether or not the tactic would have worked; whatever this creature had planned for her she surely couldn't have imagined it without screaming herself mute.
"Though I suppose, if I had this much beauty to offer, I wouldn't let just ^anyone^ see it either." Seita moved his lips closer to her ear, slow breaths hardly obscuring his excitement. Washu's own clenched teeth turned merely melted composure into a shivering steam.
"It's a shame how much reassuring I've had to do here; even if you feel helpless now, I already feel terribly bold just making this much physical contact. Indeed, I had thought our first session to be the last." The hiss had softened slightly into an attempt at perverse seduction. Washu tried in vain to think past fear, to obtain some glance at whether he was being sincere, and to debate whether or not it mattered.
"But my time here grows shorter with each of its rewards; I only wonder which will run out first."
Washu clutched manically at the rubble beneath her hands, considering again some final desperate attack. She heard him step back, and could feel him standing over her again, she tried to judge his position as she reached for a piece of sword-sized pipe.
"Perhaps we'd have had a better chance under ever inverting circumstances, but I still have my masterpiece to offer and-"
Seita cut himself off, apparently considering a sudden inspiration. Washu grasped the pipe tightly, not daring to even move her eyes to check its length. A rising chuckle froze her.
"How ironic that what was once delaying me has now given me more time--- everyone will be waiting patiently in the living room, thinking that you are having your way with me in here, never knowing that all the while I'll be-"
His air wailed to be taken in so coldly. Washu recognized the feeling of white in her knuckles.
"Hmm, yes, oh yes!" He appraised himself with wicked glee. "A perfect analysis; as I leave you for someone else now-" he paused dramatically and Washu felt his breath against her ear again.
"The phrase: ^age before beauty^, it suddenly seems so very fitting!"
Almost bright with pride, his sharpened emptiness lifted and left her with the same untouchable chuckle. The loathsome sensation she instantly recognized as oblivion came and went in a spare moment. Seita's choice of words pieced together in her mind clearly enough to make her choke in renewed terror. She demanded the further advanced pain pilgrimage turn back in the name of dragging herself unburdened. Another motivational line drove her forward again, this time only a word, the simple name of a quiet man.
***
Tea steam billowed out from three separate angles of the living room, one from an idle cup on the center table and the others from tense hand cradles. Ryoko shifted her palms over her knees, studying tiny kimono creases. She looked up at Tenchi then across to Aeka, both engrossed with their own leaves. It was now the fourth time she had to tell herself not to look over at Washu's door. A strange thing to count, she thought, but better than any other distraction from the heavy silence. She'd already lost count of how many times she'd built up and lost the will to speak. When Tenchi took the initiative his low voice filled house.
"Ryoko?"
She had to swallow thickly and stare back to make sure she had actually heard him. Although he didn't look up, she couldn't help replying in as polite a voice as she could manage.
"Yes, Tenchi?"
"Do you-" he began with obvious difficulty. She could not tell if he were about to break something or burst into tears. The vision of him doing both made her bite her lip and clench her fists till he continued.
His renewed attempt at deadpan seriousness was only slightly less unnerving.
"Do you think that Washu will---will really kill him?"
"I don't know." She nearly whispered, head down again, guilty glad for the strands of hair hiding her eyes.
Tenchi's silence brought her to number five. Maybe five and one now that she had to also fight off the urge to listen in on her mother's thoughts, to attempt it anyway.
She found seventy-three folds in the curtains this time. Her ears began to strain, searching through the silence like a ravenous cloud. Wind and insects seemed to wonder what all the fuss was about. She grabbed her tea and took a quick sip just so she might have a sore tongue as a new distraction. By some subconscious need for balance, Aeka set her own cup down on the table. She began in a voice showing Tenchi the proper way to be seriously afraid.
"Tenchi...what is he?"
His face froze with the pressure of a million thoughts. He wouldn't have imagined it was a strange comfort to both of them to hear him speak so much like Yosho, even if his answer seemed an ominous deterrent of any other questions.
"I managed to ask him, and I don't think even he knows."
***
Seita looked at the first step up to Misaki Shrine, letting his focus blur to keep from blinking a little longer. No trance intended, calculations moved perfect circles and parallel lines into his jaw. A similar busy signal poked points into both thumbs till they couldn't hold back the tremble. He closed his eyes and covered nervousness with a long breath let out in a quick jab. Frowning with seriousness, no, not with displeasure, he squinted up an estimation of the ascent; no, distance by step size by leg strength didn't equal good time. Puffing back lean shoulders and puffing up a vivid smile, his thoughts were clear.
*No more plan. No more wait.
A tiny blossom came gliding down on a collision course with the tall man's face. Grin shifted to the better side, he caught it and nearly crushed it in his fist. Neck muscles loosening to better appreciate this prize as each finger opened better than a blossom. He picked up the tiny hors derv with his favorite little nail. He'd enjoy it, the way he'd enjoyed all the other 'natural' beauties Tenchi's home had to offer, more so now by looking down his tiara on the quaint and homey runners up. It should be honored for any kind of admiration.
The light pink offering passed on and back to the wind, freeing itself from Seita's nail. He imagined it moving the same way from a spider's web or a decaying pile of countless other castoffs. This frown took his brow down with it, but no, not displeased, just very serious. The oblivion portal crossed the distance between himself and the last step in one step.
As planned, he would spread his arms out and inhale pungent tree sap, mildewed stone carvings, and sweet incense. As planned, he would stroll into a little paradise, untouched by the acidic and polished urban excretions. Such an apex of purity and tranquility would invigorate him. He squeezed both hands to his sides in curious frustration and sniffed as rapidly as a rodent.
The midday sun was still bright, the tree noise still white, the shrine's courtyard empty, and he frowned again. His heartbeat had quickened, all the pleasant smells were there, but they were not washing over him in a symphony, they came one at a time on assembly line notes. How could they be suddenly so mundane and simultaneously make him so physically tense? He shot his breath through a grounded brow, forcefully spreading both hands, throwing his lungs in wide fishing nets to consume all the ethers of the euphoric soup offered to all other visitors. A strong west wind didn't change anything but his skin texture. He sucked his tongue to the roof of his mouth. He bit down and waited for an attack. Three leaves and another blossom passed through him like bullets through a ghost.
More wind shook the trees then caught and tried in vain to tangle Seita's perfect hair, the flag kept claiming in his name. Squinting, nearly sneering the distance to Katshuhito's office, he took one, two, three, calculating steps forward and stopped for another look around, this time moving his head till an inspirational grin clenched violently back into his neck. The wind kept pouring over him, he now imagined, like a locked chain rattling on a gate. He sucked it in through his teeth till his lips crinkled. Old stones shone in the sun, he now envisioned, like useless old men, their helpless indignity trembling to replace his own nervousness.
"There is emotional residue here," Seita churned a whisper in his throat.
Rolling one shoulder back at a time, shedding a robe. The dark lavender business suit swirled on like a glove while a black tie slinked out of a ticket machine. Clear gel on invisible hands pulled his hair into a tight ponytail.
"A lot of it." The judgment strolled him forward, hands held confidently behind his back. Yosho's office starred back unflinching.
"Making peace with lost relatives."
Not a trance, too sharp for that, but his voice did slither out for himself and anything special lurking in the empty quiet.
"Asking spirits to watch over their children."
Icicle blue thinned enough to drip malice into the cracks round the office door. He took ever more leisurely steps, but hissed with such enthusiasm that he sounded less like a demon and more like a decrepit basilisk.
"^Making peace^...^asking spirits^."
An even stronger wind dissipated his hair tie and blasted platinum forward. Old wood groaned and whistled under the scratch of dead leaves. He stopped and opened his mouth enough to let it quiver, lifting his chin to sensually closed eyes. Ready to shadow the angles in white cake makeup, the song stopped on a haunted recite and a mistrusting dimple grin.
"These energies bend around me. Revulsion."
"Adversity.
"They'll forget their heavens as I have them forsake their soils. And they know it."
Reopened softer, his eyes wavered, unaffected by a strand of hair blown into his mouth. It slid out along his bottom lip. The wind was still blowing when the locks retied themselves in one and sat perfect, still.
"Acting us past the heroes.
"Painting us past the gods.
"Thinking us past the stars...and now they know it."
His shoe settled onto the first step with an audible 'tap'.
"And now it feels like my very presence here is a desecration."
The final steps up to the door pressed his lips together roughly and puckered them back out like a teasing whore; Seita spoke with delaying excitement, a first time customer holding tight to their venom in glorious, merciless refinement.
"My vision---soon---avenged.
"My vision---soon---reborn.
"The ghost---of madness---ascends.
"Oblivion's---oath---be ^sworn^!"
Another impromptu verse shook him giddy and vile, he clenched it quiet and stopped at knocking distance. He could smell the tea brewing inside, told himself he would hear the old man's breath were it not for his own, told himself the grandest projected entrance would still not be enough.
A fresh cloud of leaves rained down across the courtyard. Seita smiled a moment's peace and nearly thought aloud.
*It almost sounds like water...
What might have been a burst of laughter strained to snap through his neck.
He refocused it on what he hoped was the sturdiest part of the door, and kicked for real.
I thank all the owners of the Tenchi characters who have chosen not to sue me for suggesting some alternative uses for them.
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I thank all the readers who have perused my other submissions and favorite authors.
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Love, honor, and obey.
^Tenchi Muyo: Sanctuary and Asylum^
-Verse Seven is Mother-
-Part 1-
Better for knowing barren seeds---senseless killers understand.
The failed midwife will show the way---to justify bloodied hands.
-ZJS
He steers the waterfall spray into a cloud above the canopy, stretching its halo belt to color a flock of black bats, sending white noise throughout the lush green. Perception darts back up to the blue background, sealing, resealing blue to match its eyes. For a forest there had better be more than trees when he looks back down there. Plenty of wind to spare spirals loose leaves up from their churning homes. Some branches grow larger and twist to accommodate him and the glare-less glass beneath his feet. But it wasn't clear. Not enough.
He stops the descent and removes himself from the picture for a better unveiling. A worm-desiccated tree takes the place of just in time for another more invisible look. Just this cancer veins bark tower and its shadow to compliment the clearing, or, maybe no more than a moss-less stone. It must be large enough for his standing when he makes himself from the tree's shadow like a plume of smoke and a crumble of paper.
He steps out into the scattered sunlight standing taller to observe his surroundings, affected disorientation recreating curiosity. A black coat and slacks gleam around his milk skin like volcanic glass, dressy as a dress but able to maintain formality over elegance. Lost or free; fascination banishes what could have been fear when he realizes he's not alone.
She watches him shyly, only half her face visible behind a large tree. Inquisitive yet inviting, the perfect boyish smile to lure the rest of her forward. The flattering wonder he looks upon her halos them both with an inviting blush. She flutters on transparent wings that flicker with better pinks and greens than the waterfall could capture. Her slender young body is covered only by a short dress knitted from silky green moss and leaves like scales. Dainty feet and smooth legs stay together, yet her arms curve gracefully as she moves towards him with a broken branch in one hand. Wings rest and feet touch to the ground as the two face each other half an arm's reach apart. They maintain eye contact even now that she is nearly two heads shorter.
With a slightly anxious smile she lifts her branch up like a torch and removes a single piece of red fruit. The delicate motion releases a jingle of tiny leaves and a few drops of water. He needs little coaxing to allow her to feed it to him. Although the offering is not half a mouthful, the delicious taste savor-slows his jaw enough to pull down his eyelids. Their smiles almost match and as a drop of juice escapes from the corner of his mouth they share a laugh.
The offering is swallowed without so much as a passive whisper. He takes a moment to relish it again alongside every other sensation and the question of how long it has been since he's done so. She breathes in deeply; it has to be the strong musk emanating from the visitor's thick clothes, it must be why his imposing formality is so strangely alluring. The girl in green wavers slightly in eager anticipation for him to open his eyes and see how beautiful she is.
A cold breeze scatters leaves about them, each dead enough for the desert. The man in black, once lost in thought, has found the map's legend and roles it into a sword. His smile deflates, opens his eyes at the speed of memory. There are no new insights, just new inspiration.
The girl in green looks up into his suddenly serious expression and is remotely unnerved. She hides it well and inches closer to be thanked for such generosity. Her small dress tightens slightly as she bats the violet pollen dusted around her eyes and pouts her candy pink lips.
The man in black exhales through a thinly opened mouth and angles his stare, eyes sharp and ridges hard. He smiles smugly at how this excites her, and takes her hands in a gentle motion, holding them against the sides of his face. Her palms are as soft and warm as he expected them to be. She trembles lasciviously and he smiles wider still.
Leaving her hands to hold over his cheeks, his eyes drift into her hair. Her bangs dangle thinly and should tickle; the rest is held in a casual ball by a large metal pin. His fingers float around her head like antennae, this sensual mass of fibers excites him for the moment. He sees the hairpin catch a ray of sunlight and feels the girl in green lightly clench her hands at the lusty spread of teeth between them. In one elegant gesture two fingers pull the pin. With the other hand he collects her wrists and brings them together. While he appears to help her pray, he marvels at the sight of now freely dangling tresses. They are poorly groomed, but color has been smeared through them with a passion. Calm earth hangs into beaches of cake yellow sand and rivers dyed red from vain and poisonous insects.
Quick enough not to need force he impales the girl's hands together with her own hairpin. Sweet eyes explode with shock and instantly began to water, once inviting lips tremble as if the cool breeze about them were freezing. The man in black looks down and inhales her horrid confusion like a fine and luxurious smoke.
She sinks to her knees, sweeping up leaves with her hair and shaking bloody hands to hurry past prayer and into begging. His satisfied sigh is how she should've done hers if she would've had the reason. But, knowing no better than to bleed and whimper a little more, he grows uninspired, bored, disappointed, revolted; all so quickly and thoroughly that he frowns at the impulsiveness of it. The girl in green is a memory with only a turn of the man in black's coattail. Every tree bends elaborately rather than mundanely uprooting itself from his path.
In an attempt to reassure himself he checks both sides of his hands, trying hard to breath without a sigh. Soon then, more effortlessly with his pockets full of fingers, he rides the glass elevator back into the sky, gazing about with mild interest. With a shrug lazy wrist flick the colors of the forest change like catalog pages.
---
Seita's eyes sprang open as an energy dagger pierced the pillow behind his head. A small cloud of feathers glided down around him while he cock- crowed a small gasp into the silence. Gradually, he tilted back and stared at the glowing blade jutting out of his forehead. His eyes followed the weapon up and across to a face clearly exhausted and pulsing with terrified vengeance. The couch stayed silent as he rose through the weapon and sat with hands pressed to his knees. Ryoko kept the pillow impaled and ignored the stuffing plumes in her hair. Hard breaths stung her teeth.
"Well Ryoko--that actually ^was^ a good try," he complimented with a surprised but still uninterested voice. "As a matter of fact; in your position I probably would have tried the same thing."
For long enough to bring down the last feather they both remained as silent as the pre-dawn world.
"I...I w-w-will..k-^kill you^." Ryoko's dagger disappeared with a weak mutter of a rage whisper. She clutched at the wounded pillow, launching another small feather into the air.
"No little pirate, I doubt you will."
The sigh before the reply and both are too quiet amid his steps toward the back door. A few couch springs relaxed as Ryoko gave up, the sound stopped him like an embarrassingly rusty hinge and gruffly twisted his face downward.
"However-"
The would-be assassin raised her embargo in reflex to the target's curious compassion. She could only see his profile, but even half of his violent expression made her tense, but all her memory hoped against being drawn into another fight.
"It's just as well that you try." The same strangely depressed voice contradicted his almost raging face.
"W-w-what?"
"I don't sleep particularly well, anyway."
Ryoko watched him in pained confusion as he walked out towards the sunrise. She remembered collapsing into an unconscious heap after everyone had left her by the tree, but she couldn't remember how she was able to wake up in the living room recliner under a soft afghan. Instinct told her then as it told her now that Seita returned, carried her back to the house, made her comfortable, and went to sleep across from her on the couch. The very idea of his touch, particularly in that context, twisted her stomach and she clutched at it, ready to disembowel herself to remove his hands. Humiliation spreads a heavy slime around the back of her throat, stripping emotion and begging sake.
***
Just how the late afternoon can take over the morning early, some quiet discomfort turns into a little laziness, then people are calling every clock an impatient cheat. Tenchi and his father both had a habit of blindly dashing about from chore to chore when this happened, trying to make up for losing so much 'plenty of time', and cursing the curse of lethargy that hid under their breaths. Between repairs and readjustments neither had time to actually make anything new or be present when Sasami Jurai used her share of the plenty for a new species of flower.
Hollow but contented hums filled the silence between the crumple and crease of colored tissue paper. She had promised Grandfather Misaki that she'd make him something to brighten up the office shrine and had covered the living room table with tiny pastel squares. Her humming hit a bright satisfied note, almost a squeak as she finished another pink paper flower and planted it into a vase modest enough for the shrine. She smiled up at Katshuhito, faintly showing off that she had completed nine already while he was still working on his first. For his part, he remained focused and calm, showing as much dignity as an old man making a paper flower could.
During the fluffing up stage of her next addition, Yosho finally deposited his piece of décor as if it were a finely crafted sword being presented to an emperor. The noticeably more complex twist of petals stuck out from its companions exactly like a blue flower amidst a group of pink. An expression of slight disapproval darkened Sasami's face.
"Those colors don't really match you know."
Katshuhito looked up from his next flower, barely at its stem, and smiled wryly at her near-rudeness. She had tried to convince him to let her do it all but likely, he thought, to get the control as well as the credit.
The screen door slid open slowly and Seita entered, stepping out of his shoes and melting a dirty pair of jeans and white T-shirt into a black and red-trimmed silk Kimono. His hair tied itself back in a neat and almost feminine bun. After a few pantomime gestures the work clothes appeared neatly folded and held like a waiter's tray. Yosho's raised eyebrow almost asked if such a display could replace the need for a bath, but he returned his attention to Sasami as the guest entered the living room with a curious smile.
"Remember the words of a wise man Sasami," he began in his moderately sage-like voice, "that no flower can be truly beautiful without diversity."
Sasami eyed the display thoughtfully this time then looked up at Seita just as he was making himself comfortable and adjacent to them both on the couch.
"What do you think, Mr. Seita?" she asked earnestly, though she returned her attention to the next flower as soon as he settled himself.
Rather than look at her growing bouquet Seita cast a side-glance and a clever grin at the priest who let his glasses catch the light. He raised two fingers above the table gently like a medieval portrait of a saint. Each loose piece of tissue began collecting beneath it immediately. The ruffling sound was missing but a flower slightly larger than Yosho's began to build itself into a violet rose complete with tiny twists of brown for thorns. Sasami stared at it with starry eyes, leaning forward to see the tissue paper bumblebee come flying out.
"Diversity," Seita began in a soft and knowing voice, "is as inevitable as egos are necessary."
He checked and smiled at their collective attention before looking back down at the table. All the different shades of green began scuttling towards him with the jerky charm of a child's stop-motion film. They began to crinkle themselves into a rather unpleasant looking weed as he revealed the inevitable other cent of wisdom.
"It is AD-versity not DIE-versity that deserves recognition; the struggles between brothers and lovers and so on and so off are what make beauty possible." Sasami's eyes grew sad as little paper petals glided down onto the table.
"It is the conflict, not the coexistence, that maintains the universe itself. If real flowers were as immune to weeds as these paper ones are, why, they wouldn't have needed to be half so pretty, would they Sasami?"
Yosho tore his concerned eye away from his somewhat distraught youngest sister and to catch Aeka's as she almost managed to enter the room unnoticed then almost managed to hide the foul taste of whatever emotion she was swallowing.
"^Sasami^! Um, Sasami?" The princess quickly replaced her anxious tone with an excessively softer one.
"Yeah?" Sasami made no move to hide the solemn affect of today's mixed decorating lesson.
"Could you please help me in the kitchen with something?"
Sasami rose and went to her sister's side lifelessly, Seita stood up and looked into Aeka's eyes with even less emotion. Yosho's glasses, catching a different glare of light, hid his attention. A quick, almost startled breath caught some extra thus excessive politeness in the First Princess's throat.
"Seita, here let me take your laundry so that you and Grandfather may continue, the display is quite lovely." She marched over and took the bundle from his hands, never moving her eyes up from his chest.
"But Aeka-" Sasami began to protest with a little more energy.
"This won't take long Sasami." The two began walking curtly towards kitchen before Aeka gracelessly altered their course to the laundry room.
Sitting back down in Sasami's place, Seita eyed his little garden with amused disappointment. Katshuhito quietly inserted another blue flower into the vase and looked at him over his glasses, collecting new leaves and petals as he spoke in with teasing curiosity.
"And what wise old man said all that?"
The competing philosopher reclined slightly, and looked up only briefly enough to acknowledge that he'd been spoken to. Petals frozen in air mid- illusion unwound and slid back to their piles on cue from an auction bid from the slender man in the front row with the makeup.
"Hm, I'm afraid I can't remember."
The two men sat unspeaking amid kitchen sounds. Following the same unknown cue, they withdrew their selected books and read for long enough to become comfortable with the arrangement. Neither looked up till at last a yawn broke Katshuhito's peace.
"I believe I still have some things to tend to at the shrine." He placed his book down dutifully and picked up the nearly filled vase as he stood.
"There are times when I would prefer to simply relax with a book all day," light exasperation fringed the nostalgia in his voice, "but," he accepted with a sigh, "we all choose our commitments."
Katshuhito looked down for a moment, seeming to expect a reply. When none came he tipped his head politely and began his walk back to the shrine alone.
"Indeed we do," potential for rudeness was softly averted in the last second before the screen door closed, yet the priest missed a miniscule grin and a lingering whisper behind the pages of Seita's book:
"...^grandfather^."
***
Nobuyuki stretched his arms out into the morning luxuriously this time, arching his back and stretching a rejuvenated smile to the limits. He lumbered forth from his lair with the jolliness of a bear waking to spring with some fat to spare. The first morning without an alarm clock in weeks brought on by a masterfully if hurriedly completed list of chores; he was still so drunk with sleep that he barely bothered to open his eyes fully, grasping about lazily for the bathroom door handle.
"Excuse me, Mr. Misaki!" Sasami called out cheerfully as she dashed past him into the facilities with Ryo-ohki fast on her heals, bumping into the door on the first try and phasing through it on the second. The man of the house chuckled and shook his head at the floor then began shuffling rather than walking down the stairs, further savoring every glance he didn't have to make towards any clock. A naughty thought crossed his mind.
"No-no-no, I couldn't do that." He mumbled to himself, rubbing more sleep from his eyes.
Going back to bed, he reasoned, just wouldn't do. It might have been a week since he'd had a night of sleep uninhibited by work or worries of WWIII erupting in his back yard, but he couldn't just get out of bed, walk down the hall, and return like a groundhog. With a few more scratches and a stretch or two, he entered the dinning area with his eyes still closed, hopping to smell one of Sasami's famous breakfasts. All he smelled was the floral air freshener. He looked around, surprised first to see the kitchen empty and secondly to see Tenchi and Aeka eating not breakfast, but lunch. His son regarded him with a slightly amused smile.
"Afternoon dad, did you sleep well?"
Nobuyuki blinked rapidly, looked at the state of the sun outside and slapped his forehead.
"Oh no, how long was I asleep?" He groaned, easing himself into the seat at the head-end of the table. Tenchi, took another bite of his sandwich and looked at his watch, answering after at least swallowing halfway.
"It's about two in the afternoon now."
An exaggerated moan of defeat drug Nobuyuki's head into his forearms. He turned from side to side in futile denial.
"Don't worry dad, I asked Sasami to let you sleep in. You looked like you needed it."
"You don't sound so energetic yourself, kid."
Tenchi hadn't noticed his own monotone, but Nobuyuki had been raising a teenager long enough to tell the difference between boredom and weariness. Still, he had to keep the front.
"Huh? What do you mean? I feel fine."
"You sure about that?" His father pressed with a teasing glance.
"Of course." Tenchi took his plate to the sink, hiding a twinge of annoyance.
Nobuyuki watched him for a moment and shrugged. He took another look around and narrowed his brow a little.
"Say, where is everybody?"
Tenchi walked over to the screen door with his hands in his pockets. He answered the question in an interruption.
"Well, grandpa must have some food stored up at the shrine because I haven't seen him since practice yesterday. Mihoshi took Seita on patrol with her again and-"
"Washu's still in her lab." Nobuyuki added, looking at the closet with a measure of concern.
"Of course." Tenchi's own worry manifested in a sarcastic sigh.
"What about Ryoko?"
There was a pause, Aeka silently took her plate to the sink.
"She's been making herself scarce lately. She stays long enough to eat, but then she disappears again."
Nobuyuki scratched his head that his son was speaking like a disappointed father. The tone unnerved him and resolved him to lift it with some humor.
"Ah, I see, a lovers quarrel."
"Dad." Tenchi slumped his face into his hand with a groan. "Do you ever give it a rest?"
Aeka gave the table Nobuyuki's share of her evil eye.
"Come on son, don't let her get you down. She'll come crawling back. Besides, where else does she have to go?" His lighthearted encouragement was met with a pained steel that disappeared as soon as it came. Ignoring it, he straightening up and out in his chair.
"I need to go run some shopping errands today anyway. I'll buy some flowers...^and^ some more sake." He chuckled while Tenchi massaged each of his eyes with a finger.
"Cut it out, dad." The usual whine was gone.
"Hey, would you two like to come with me. I've got a lot to do and I could use some extra hands."
"No thank you dad, I've got---things to do." Tenchi slid out and started walking towards the front door.
"How bout you, Lady Aeka."
"Oh, um, thank you for offering Mr. Misaki," Aeka answered softly, after being startled from her cloudy trance, "I'm afraid I also have some items that require my attention."
Honorable father's breath slouched him.
"I'll go with you, Mr. Misaki!" Sasami's voice sang out as she ran down the stairs. Ryo-ohki echoed her in kind.
"Oh good!" Nobuyuki perked up instantly.
"Sasami, I don't think-"
"Aeka, would you stop it, please?"
Everyone was a little taken aback by the outburst of annoyed maturity in her voice.
"I'm not a baby anymore. You can't worry yourself to death every time I try step out from under your kimono."
Aeka prepared the proper cross between a command and a plea. But when she noticed everyone looking at her she bit down hard enough to swallow 'overly protective'. Most of her still screamed in agony as she submitted to the floor with a lifeless voice.
"Very well, Sasami."
The hug came faster than Aeka thought her sister could move, and she almost chocked with surprise.
"Thanks sis! Tell me when you're ready to go Mr. Misaki, I hope I can find what to wear by then." Sasami dashed off to the guest room in a burst of giggles, Ryo-ohki once again picking up the slack.
"Hey Tenchi, where are you going anyway?" Nobuyuki called out just as his son was closing the front door behind him.
"I, uh," He hesitated, itching to close the door all the way and searching for the final answer frantically. Aeka's eyes, watching him with a contagious sadness, returned his solemn attitude. The door closed, his head drooped with a weightless answer.
"I just need some air."
***
Aeka crocheted in the living room alone, trying to remind herself with each stitch that the silence was peaceful. There was hardly a wind to stir the trees outside and she knew better than to listen to grandfather pendulum for the next bell. She reminded herself that this was an absence of noise rather than an absence of sound; she should be grateful for a lack of Cartoon shows from Mihoshi and a lack of snoring from Ryoko. The thought of her rival made her pause and raise her head for another look around. After regarding the closet door with a worry she instantly fought back, she stared back down at the insignificant rag of yarn. Solitude confirmed.
*The house is spotless, but empty. I know well enough the difference between boredom and loneliness---I-I just wish I could be like that demon and escape into a nice bottle of sake.
The liquor cabinet slowly crept into Aeka's vision but she shook her head down with a pang of guilt.
*I suppose I can't really blame her, there's no point in denying what was going on that night, and if what he did to her was anything like what-
Aeka's throat swelled shut in a tight knot. The memory she'd been struggling with for more than a week now managed an upper hand, replaying its essence with merciless attention to detail. The crochet crinkled in her hands. Teeth ground together so tightly that her lips peeled back, ready to catch a single tear wailing down the side of her face. Once fully relived, she fought again for the pin; opponent, coach, the whole team. Finally muffled and transparent, the memory gave her back her present. In a lingering moment of panic she eyed her needle and considered pricking a finger to see if any of her senses would waver or fade from the distraction. With shaky hands she lifted her idle distraction and set it to the side. Two deep breaths and one swallow later, she looked from the ceiling to the closet door with helpless anxiety.
*I know what's happening. I know I can't simply try to live with this...person, but I get so frightened when I remember---that I can't even think straight. Ryoko and Washu have likely gone through something similar and they have ^both^ become just as withdrawn.
Anger flashed across Aeka's face and she gripped her knees roughly.
*This is unacceptable! A princess, the First Princess of Jurai, must not allow herself to become a prisoner in the home where she is a guest. If only I could tell Tenchi I-
Terror rose up in her belly and she clutched at the pain through flashes of cruel blonde and young blood. Mid-panic, she tried to convince herself that everything would soon begin to improve, that after Ryoko he would be satisfied and eventually leave without harming Tenchi, or anyone else.
*Mihoshi! He's alone with her now, what if he, what if she-
Helpless panic was clawing at her again, royal reserves clawed back, whitening her knuckles as she dug into her thighs and released a fresh pair of tears. She was not so absorbed, however, to miss the distinct sound of Ryoko phasing through the roof and startled at the figure descending onto the couch next to her. In a reflexive movement she moved her crochet onto the coffee table without taking her nervous eyes away from her new commiserate.
Ryoko settled down slowly with the overly cautious movements of someone trying to hide their intoxication, though she made no effort to acknowledge the miserable judge beside her. By comparison, Princess Perfecta's eyes did not look half as heavy with strained vessels.
No one had said anything about the quantity of sake bottles about, but from the sickly hair shine and foul skin odor Aeka began to wish she had. By no small quantity of effort, she opened her mouth to offer some constructive criticism, but luckily all that came out was a timid greeting and a whisper of concern.
"H-Hello, Ryoko. Where have you been?"
Just when Aeka was beginning to sense the first layer added to a wall of silence between them, she received a distant sign of life.
"Around."
The demon's voice did not slur, in fact her intoxication could have easily passed for severe depression and perhaps, Aeka thought, vice versa. After gathering another mountain of courage, she pushed again to turn the cause of their mutual alienation into some sort of connection.
"It's just us here. Sasami went shopping with Tenchi's father, Washu is still in her lab, Yosho is still at the shrine, Tenchi asked to go on a walk alone, and Mihoshi is---is with Seita." The update came with the same timid anxiety, but Aeka slowly made progress by dragging her eyes over to Ryoko's profile a little more with each word.
Liquid sloshed loudly as Ryoko lifted her bottle, took a loveless gulp, and tilted her face, pressing it into the cold glass to hear the ocean in 'Captain Morgamoto's' sake.
"I guess you already knew that." Aeka deduced softly, looking back down at her hands for another quiet moment.
"Aeka, what are we going to do?"
The fearful despair jerked the princess upright and flashed an anxious look across her face. With a weak and hesitant movement, Ryoko gradually turned her head to combine stares.
There had been no real eye contact between them since Aeka's 'session', but in only a few moments the two rivals recognized a reflection of the crippling fear they carried. There was no further need for Ryoko to explain herself, yet Aeka's mouth still quivered, trying to ask a question, but only managing half an answer.
"I---I don't know."
Aeka swallowed and focused back to her lap. Ryoko closed her eyes and flattened more of her cheek against the sake bottle for a cold comfort.
"But you know we have to do something. Who can guess what his big plan is, but he---he-"
"Yes Ryoko, I saw it too." Pained though they were to remember the surreal detachment in Seita's eyes, they took a small comfort knowing that someone shared their experience.
Soft and heavy, gold strained for some assertiveness while also struggling to re-suppress sensations of wasted energy and talking dolls.
"Mihoshi, he'll have done something with her before the day's out." A bitter gulp stalled her voice for a few seconds. "Do you think she'll be okay?"
"I don't know...do-do you think he'd---to Lord Tenchi, I mean?" Aeka stuttered back sobs to the clenched fists and growling face beside her.
"Maybe, but I'm not gonna give him the chance." Ryoko clung desperately to the few liberating hints of rage she could find, begging them to lift her despair.
The incredulous expression on Aeka's face eventually faded into forced seriousness, she gathered a little more of her kimono into her hands and tried to speak with some measure of strength.
"What do you intend to do?"
Cold comfort receded in the peel of a sake bottle down from Ryoko's face. She stared at it in her lap for more than a minute, gathering the clarity it would take in her alcoholic state to explain what had obviously been on her mind when she first asked Aeka essentially the same question. Though she could not hide her drunkenness, sincerity overshadowed even the fear in her voice.
"I remembered something just as Mihoshi was leaving with him, something that happened the day after my date with Tenchi."
Aeka tried not to show any reaction to the iodine splashed across her already raw emotions, and was glad that Ryoko remained too absorbed in her explanation to notice.
"When I'm drunk his tricks don't work. So long as my brain is swimming in booze he can't make me see anything, and-and I can see him, I mean, I can see what he ^really^ looks like."
She turned with a sickly smile that slightly enjoyed Aeka's wide eyes with a drunken chuckle.
"Don't worry, he's not some hideous beast with six arms and two heads, but he's not nearly as impressive as he'd like us to think. I don't know ^what^ he is, really. All I do know is that so long as we're a little tipsy he won't be able to make us see anything more than a card trick, and that---and that might get us one step closer to catching him off guard."
The previously suppressed slur began to resurface as Ryoko became more excited with her plan. Aeka withdrew slightly with a look of disbelief and slight disgust.
"Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking; 'how the hell are we supposed to do anything if we're drunk'? We'll you know that people can still do ^some^ things when they're drunk, and we don't have to get totally pissed. I think that so long as there's some kind of cloud in our heads he won't be able to get through. Do you hear what I'm saying?" Ryoko placed the bottle on the coffee table, re-corked it, and leaned closer to Aeka with a pleading look in her eyes.
"Please Aeka, we have to do ^something^, if we don't then-" Ryoko looked away and hung her head for the weight of plugged tears. She spread her hands into her hair with mounting stress while her unlikely ally looked on.
When it seemed the sake captain would be running aground at any moment, Aeka shook her mixture of repulsion and fear, stirred it, and poured it down the drain to pick up the bottle in a hesitant movement. She brought it close to her face and removed the cork with no attempt at ladylike grace. The aroma filled her with a pleasant warmth, but she remained solemn. Never looking up from the exaggerated label for fear of what her rival's expression might say, she tilted the neck at Ryoko to grudgingly offer a deadpan acceptance.
"Cheers."
***
Spaceships offer the kind of quiet isolation that most people can only imagine with smiles or shudders. The scientific horrors of the surrounding vacuum, the loss of sound, the absence of gravity, and the merciless temperatures; they all become secondary in the face of purest black. Surely nothing short of a morbid desire for discovery, or escape, could compel a person into it. Thus, within the confines of a spacecraft, a single line can be drawn between angels who could not sleep without a small comfort-light, and imps who would hide themselves in the darkest places, indulging in search party fantasies, or ways to begin anew as the monster in the shadows. Irony through and through: the final frontier was all this time the first.
---
Mihoshi thought Seita was cute. It had taken her a while to admit this to herself, working through formal indifference, fear of shallow first impressions, and passive states of 'not ^UN^-attractive'. After repeating this opinion to herself enough times, she gradually took comfort in one of the few concepts best left subjective. A languid combination of yawns and stretched limbs filled the captain's seat as she leaned back, hopping to find the unlisted passenger looking at her when she opened her eyes again, but he remained focused on the passing stars.
*Just like last time, I get him alone on my ship and all he wants to do is look out the window. Hel-lo-oh, there's more scenery to enjoy over here!
Mihoshi pouted to his back for a moment, slouching forward till her frustration wilted into hopelessness.
*Besides, I thought you could look at any part of the universe whenever you wanted. After the first trip was only ^half^ a disaster I thought you might want to see more of me...
Hygiene practices and metaphysical abilities flashed red across her cheeks in an unnerving combination of mental imagery. But for the first time in a while potential humiliation was beginning to be exciting, and this only made her more embarrassed. She tried to look busy at the controls, but kept him in the corner of her eye.
*What am I going to do? We're already friends, I guess, but I'm getting worse every time I see him. He seems perfectly happy just reading or watching the lake sometimes, but he's still always polite...and charming.
A youthful smile wormed its way into her self-pity.
*I don't know why Aeka and Ryoko have been so shy around him lately, sure the guy's made a couple of jokes, and that 'dimension' is kinda unnerving, but I bet he's lonelier than he lets on. Well darn it, I already gave up on Tenchi. Life's too short to always be so shy, let's see if I have any sort of chance of---of.
Mihoshi lowered her head and tried to look at something near him, in case he caught her stare this time. Still flustered, she exhaled and searched out her own window, hopping to maybe first share ^then^ catch his interest.
*No more delays! It's time to question the suspect detective Mihoshi!
A quarter of her lightheaded giggle escaped before she could catch it, thankful that Seita hadn't noticed. She smiled almost deviously and turned her chair to face him.
"So, uh, here we are again." Mihoshi managed with nervous and barely hidden expectation.
The silent posture rotated his chair, unaffected by the coquettish posture of his captain as she pressed the side of her face into the headrest and looked directly into his eyes. He replied in soft textures, either unaware of how it would feed her allure, or trying to compete with it.
"Here we were before."
Tan cheeks tightened pink to nip a giggle in the bud.
"It's probably gonna be another boring patrol."
"Hm, boredom is worse a sin than most people know."
Mihoshi's blush faded a little with her confusion as he turned back toward the window, but rather than struggle to analyze his riddle, she asked him another. Almost bursting with embarrassment for some unexplainable boldness.
"So why do you look so bored all the time?"
Seita's half smile rotated back and made her melt as much as it ever had, but she was enjoying the excitement too much to go limp now.
"Do I?" He answered slyly.
"Well," she hesitated slyly, "it's kinda strange that you can do so much that most people can only dream of, but most of the time it seems like you're just in your retirement, just reading and---watching the sun set."
*He HAD to have caught that! And if he didn't, he's sure to do something with this-
"And you don't ^look^ like an old man."
Smile dropping dead then rising like a phoenix, Seita lowered his head and shook it with a silent chuckle.
*Yes! Yes! He's finally going to blush! Mr. Pretty Boy Ghost is going to act like a person for a change.
The sparkle in Mihoshi's eyes snuffed out when Seita raised his own with an icy, almost challenging depth. Reflected blues in different hues offered an invitation she could not refuse. As smooth and clever as his voice became Mihoshi focused on the softness it maintained.
"Most of the times I've tried to be more---'entertaining', well, the princess wasn't too happy, and Tenchi's father has been watching what he says around me ever since."
It took a moment for the giggle to come, but there was no stopping the memory of Nobuyuki's truly inspired disgust. Seita chuckled silently with her, but broke eye contact again. She continued long after he was done, not noticing how he stared at the floor with an increasingly serious expression. By the time she calmed herself his brow had wedged together.
"That was ^really^ funny." Mihoshi exhaled, nearly wiping away a tear.
"Apparently." His voice turned cold and pivoted his feet toward the window again.
*You're loosing him detective, got to think fast. Catch him off guard again.
Mihoshi tried to hide the effort needed to bring the latest conversation piece to life. She forced her blush to fuel her smile and leaned forward a little, trying her best at a seductive voice.
"So...^did^ you ever take a peak?"
The passenger stopped breathing for a moment, and remained stone silent. Unable to see his face, Mihoshi imagined her own blush spreading to him and inviting her progressive lean.
"Do ^I^ look like an old man?"
Her own boldness and wit cheered her on, readied her for Seita's slowly rising face, closed her eyes, and pushed her lips forward to where she hoped his would be. She had to steady herself in her chair slightly, but she kept the kiss going. For a few seconds their intimacy was complete with all that fantasy could offer. Each position she shifted her mouth into brought her greater pleasure, till at last she realized that his lips had remained completely lifeless. Not wanting to deny the moment, she leaned back slightly and advanced again with every intension of making this kiss as deep as possible.
She puckered up to darkness, tilting forward more, and more. For some reason the chair's fabric brushing the end of her nose felt like the most bitter and empty experience she could imagine. A moment's time carried the same emotion through to each of her senses, and Mihoshi knew the essence of a loathing that would consume and discard the universe. In the seconds before she recoiled in terror, she saw white.
Gasping and clutching her arms, Mihoshi flung back into the chair with eyes opened too wide to see. By the force of confusion came sight through a look of disbelief as the two blue eyes met again. The repulsion and malice clenched in his expression petrified her, though they demanded that she flee in terror. Rusted metal pipes groaned distantly in the back of her throat as Seita's thin fingers shot forward and clawed into the headrest to pin a few strands of hair. Now, his own confidence urged him forward, nearly touching his nose to hers as he spoke through the spiteful vapors of his subhuman hiss.
"How Tenchi's guests do love to ^flatter themselves^!"
It was finally enough to reach her enforced instincts. Mihoshi twisted in her chair, feeling the miniscule scratch of a fingernail on her ear as she sent the headrest into his wrist. She dove away and rolled while drawing her blaster, she faced him again with a rigid defensive posture, aiming at his chest. Despite the focused precision of her move, her face could not hide features torn between a sob and a scream.
Seita took a step towards her, crossing his arms in annoyance and looking down at the weapon like a bad joke.
"S-S-Stay back!" Mihoshi cried, no less distraught when he shook his head at her feet and sighed redundant exasperation.
"It would not do to have you shooting holes in your ship, you know."
Boredom took enough of the depravity from his voice for Mihoshi to think coherently. The next instinct mirrored the first and she began to back away. An oblivion portal swelled between them, vanished, and reappeared behind her in the next second. She turned around in time to see Seita emerge from it and feel her whole body clench as it closed behind him. The physical uneasiness subsided, but for the first time the mental chill from his window still lingered. Like dizziness wound into a ball tighter than horror, it was a bullet nestled between her throat and skull that gained crippling heat under his cruel glare.
"Wha-what are-" Between her mouth and her gun, Mihoshi's quivering finally attracted him with helpless frailty. He continued towards her, walking in slow rhythm with his words, humoring himself with his own smugness.
"I must commend you on some rather lucky detective work; you're the first to catch a glimpse of my nature before I could release a glamour for it."
Though clenched and narrowed, his eyes stretched like rubber, neon into sky blue as smooth features carved into ivory gloss. Striking, stabbing handsome.
"Fortune smiles on both of us; rather than spoil or distract it, this unexpected little display should only increase the potency of our session."
Mouthing the words to another half-formed question, she heard her passenger suck saliva around his tongue. It sounded closer than her own teeth.
"I really doubt it would be worth my time to try to explain my work to you Mihoshi, but rest assured, you and all the others will be among the first to read the final report---if it's ever published."
To her surprise his voice changed back to the charming croon it had been moments before burring her beneath this surreal and obscurely motivated intimidation.
"Please stop cornering yourself, detective. Driving strong women to trap themselves can only offer so much. And I've already gotten closer to you than I ^ever^ intended." A spark of malice gleamed for a moment, sparking Mihoshi's shock enough for her to process the content behind his delivery.
"What are you talking about!?" She blurted out with eyes clenched and weapon pointed inadvertently upwards.
"Really Mihoshi," he clicked his tongue effeminately, "are you so lax an investigator? Do you honestly think it's a coincidence that Professor Washu confined herself to her lab shortly after examining me? Do you really believe that Aeka and Ryoko shy away from me now for the sake of your ^misplaced attraction^?"
The bitterness sparked in his words again, anger lining his face like the foreboding first steps of a monstrous transformation.
"What-what did you-" Lips sagged and eyes widened amid her fading voice.
"The same thing I've been doing for ^eons^! I told you already: I won't tell you today!"
A fast breath pulled his smile to the side.
"Now kindly shut your ^silly mouth^ so that we can get this session under way."
His hiss returned full force, a goblin's toothy smirk crawled up his face, wicked glee sparkled at the ends of his eyes in revelry at such quick rhyming. The dark silver dress shirt darkened into iron across his torso. Already pulled back hair tightened and whitened, stretching the remaining color from his face. At last the fear began to weaken Mihoshi's guise of resistance, the blaster slowly weighed down her hands. He seemed to see this as an encouraging sight to accompany her lack of response.
"Thank you. Now, exactly what did you think you were doing trying to seduce ^me^? Did I really strike you as someone waiting to 'get a date'?" He interrogated with arms crossed and face angled in a superior stance, going so far as to clutch the air over his chest for emphasis. Mihoshi began to shake the early shock in her head, unclear if she did so to express ignorance or make one last attempt to deny how he was speaking to her.
"I took the liberty of looking through one of those photo albums you try to keep hidden, and I was a little surprised to see just how many failed romances you've accumulated. Someone with your proportions should have no problem attracting potential mates.
Two binder wings grew out of his forearm and flapped open with plumes of photos, Seita flipped through them idly.
"I wonder what all the other girls who've coveted your appearance would say to see your list of squandered opportunities. Indeed, some of them were almost as handsome as me."
Smile unsheathed again in a mocking show of teeth, the increased horror on Mihoshi's face must have hurt his cheeks.
"Oh, but maybe it wasn't your fault. Maybe they just weren't ^worthy^ of you." He closed the folder invisible and put his hands up sarcastically.
"Were they 'harsh'?" A step forward and turned Seita into the photographed memory of her third boyfriend. His jaw strained and tensed, momentarily turning to flesh-colored stone.
"Were they 'cold'?" A cloud of breath hissed out over lover number four's teeth as they parted like icicles. Mihoshi finally managed to close her eyes and turn away with a gasp.
"What are you afraid of ^now^ Mihoshi? That I'll leave you feeling just as empty as they did, that your hopeful--fairy--tails will always turn out to be lying--demon--tongues?" Moving closer again, Seita reverted fully to his subhuman hiss. Both of them clenched their teeth.
"Or is it something worse? Are you afraid I'll try to 'take' all that they ever wanted? You look like such a victim huddling into yourself like that, it almost makes me consider-" He paused his approach and rubbed his chin in contemplation, blatantly adding more villainous bravado to their session.
Mihoshi could not help but drag her eyes out of hiding and repeated a prayer to herself that she would not see every woman's nightmare swirling in blue venom. She watched as he moved his hands behind his back and took a long step forward, coming close enough to pull her into an embrace. She watched as he lowered his head like a bird of prey. She watched the corner of his mouth rise in a sneer to express the unmistakable darkness of resentful lust. A cruel calm in his voice savored his drawn-out description.
"It almost makes me consider it---that strange expression of desire---with the uncanny ability---to make the recipient feel ugly."
Mihoshi clenched her eyes shut again and whimpered helplessly. As she hugged her blaster like a useless teddy bear, two reactions to the imminent violence passed through her mind: to offer one last plea, and to use her now obsolete weapon for one truly final defense. Silence endured, she could barely hear him breathing. In microscopic movements she began to open her eyes while positioning the blaster beneath her chin. A voice stopped her, the voice she had heard Tenchi's sixth guest speak with when he first arrived. Yet, the suppressed self-pity was now laced with the vibration of discarded humanity. She might never have thought it possible to simultaneously feel so much hatred and so much pity for any single creature.
"Taking action rarely fills me with the kind of transcendent power that I absorb when I encourage, when I ^inspire^ action in others. In all my experience with the act you fear from me now, I have found something that I'd like you to consider among any other ideas you take from our session here.
"A person might think that encouraging such a thing would be a standard calling for me, surely the formation of a sexual predator would adequately support the kind of energy you believe I represent. When it does occur, the only justice to be considered is whether or not the offender is punished. As much as wills can be twisted from either outcome, there is a crime that can, indirectly, have a significantly larger impact.
"When someone is falsely accused of this act, there is an ^inevitable negative outcome^: either an innocent-accused will be turned into a monster, or a future innocent-accuser will have cause to be thought a liar. The idea of this crime alone is enough to chill the mind, but the greatest power, and the strongest pull towards the of heart of oblivion, is the painfully resistant doubt that people must, nonetheless, apply to any and all who would accuse someone of it."
There was no place left in Mihoshi's mind to hide, every potential sanctuary was overflowing with the polar flux of the fear and curiosity Seita had inspired. For some reason she believed that he was not going to even touch her again, that he was fulfilling all his cruel desires simply by speaking to her this way. Once more curiosity won out and forced her to look at her would be attacker for more answers.
His head was bowed toward the meditative wedge shape she'd seen him make with his hands a number of times before. She stood slightly more erect and lowered her blaster till it hung limply at her side. Her hand tightened on it again as his head rose slow and ritualistic to gaze upon something beyond the ship's nose. Mihoshi's brow tilted in momentary confusion till she turned around and propelled it upward in terror. Yukinojo was flying directly into the center of a gigantic oblivion portal. Every aspect of time and space shut out behind them, every one of her senses clenched like a fish thrown into coarse burning sand. She could not have screamed enough, so she almost welcomed the black out.
The circuitry above the cockpit came blurred then bright then blessedly mundane. Mihoshi could not understand why her breathing was not labored after such trauma, but the unsettling fact of the matter was that the only discomfort she felt was that of the hard metal beneath her head. She reached up to the armrest of the captain's chair and pulled herself to her feet. A groan emerged to dull the memory of the hell she'd passed through in less than a few blinks. Simpler recall pulled her back; she reached down instinctively for where she might have dropped her blaster, but it was gone. Though she knew he would be standing there when she raised her eyes again, the sight of Seita in the same cold, contemplative posture made her whole body tense.
"I put it away in your quarters, I didn't think it would do for you to have any needless accidents after all we've been through." He stated plainly, his once charming voice now eternally sinister. The detective's mouth shook again for the right question.
"Our time here is up Mihoshi, but I've prescribed some time 'away from things'. It is likely that, before you can truly experience the warmth of returned affection, you need to experience isolation in greater depths." His smugness half-smiled more reflexive than affected, but the hard glare and bitter voice that followed were terribly convincing.
"Think of me as you will---as you must, and from this day forward: view every pretty face that crosses your path," his pit widened white behind him, "with ^doubt^."
Seita stepped back and out with a rush of oblivion air, slightly less interesting now for Mihoshi's new understanding. Her assignment to the floor was slow and silent in coming. Head tipped against the back of it, the chair swiveled idly with each rocking to pump streams down her face.
"Mihoshi, what's wrong, and who have you been talking to, my sensors have not registered any other passengers." The ship offered its programmed compassion.
"Where am I?"
A pause drank her whimper and chewed computing beeps with her heavy breaths.
"Our current position is unknown, Mihoshi. We are out of range of any G.P. communication."
***
Tenchi kept his face downcast on the familiar path, watching his sweep over the sponge paint of warm light that made it through the trees. Dust rose from the path behind him, fogging the path for escaped dandelion seeds. So buried in pockets, his hands held scenery down to simple green and wind down to thin air. Love songs, the birds and the crickets, soaked and drowned to carbon bubbles under a tyrant rant of thought.
*What's going on? Ryoko and Aeka are acting like they're almost afraid of me, grandpa and Seita are even quieter than usual, and every second I worry that Washu will blow us all to atoms before she finally comes out of her lab. The only one's who seem okay are Sasami and Mihoshi.
*And there's not a thing I can do about it, because I just can't think of what to say anymore. Everything in my life is starting to seem--- wrong. The littlest things are just setting me off, back and forth, angry or depressed. I've tried meditation, but all I ever get are the silly debates I'm in now. I want to talk about it so much, but I look at everyone here and instantly predict how the first few lines will go. Then I just can't do it, and I end up going back to acting like another normal student and it just gets worse.
*I know that coming out here has helped before, but what if it doesn't this time? Who will be left if I can't even talk to her?
The path ended at a large headstone, carved well enough that, even after another few decades of weather, the name would remain. Tenchi tried to take comfort in this rather than feel guilt that it had been almost so long since he'd last visited. Like one stone facing another, he stood for long enough to believe he couldn't think of anything to say, then long enough to say what he felt.
"I miss you, mother." His voice began in whispers, but quickly filled with solemn monotone of trances and prayers. Wind and throat to chest pain answered, he listened intently.
"I know I'm always going to miss you a little every day, but right now, these past couple weeks even-"
First eyes, then the rest closed tightly, forcing Tenchi not to cry in the sole company of someone who'd seen more of his tears than any other.
"I keep wishing you were here. I live in a house full of exotic gir-- -full of exotic people, but sometimes all I can think about," he stopped for a breath, "is how only ^you^ could make me feel better when something was wrong."
One gulp, then another, helped him along.
"Course, now I don't even know what's really wrong in the first place. I don't know why Aeka and Ryoko are avoiding me and almost everyone else. I don't know why I give up ^really^ ^talking^ to anyone before I even start, but I know it's something I'm doing wrong."
Kneeled, head down before his mother's memory, Tenchi's tears spilled over when he closed the lids. A few sobs shook through him like a gust of freezing wind, his stomach howled and was silent with a cough and a thick sleeve under his nose.
"Sorry," he sniffed weakly, "It's probably not very fair to expect you to how to deal with all this." A small chuckle broke through but only made it more obvious that he'd been crying. "Actually, you might have even disapproved of having so many girls and some ghostly stranger staying in your house."
The moment of relief faded back into wind, and Tenchi tried to listen for a gentle encouraging voice...or a whisper, or an echo of it, anything to drain the hopeless swell of this blister.
"Mother, Grandpa always tells me that you're watching over me, and I want to believe that," his voice wavered again, "I want to believe it so badly." Another hearty sob chocked back. "But something is wrong with my life now, and I don't know what it is. Please mother, please tell me how to make things happy again."
The wind around him seemed to pull away, slowly inhaled by mountain giants. Tenchi tightened his hands, waiting for the exertion to warrant some reply from the next world, pleading till he neared that first and greatest grief he'd felt so many years ago. A child again, crying out for his mother to comfort him, but he was too consumed with the pain of loss to feel the inevitable shame. Through more sobbing grabs for the few comforting moments left in his memory, this call for the mercy of his mother's spirit was so loud that he almost didn't hear it when it came.
"Please do not cry, Tenchi."
Achika's request wavered with sad sympathy, but with more life than she'd had weeks before passing. Her son, despite self-assurance that he deserved this contact, could feel his heart stop beating for a few seconds before it started again strong enough to pump salve. Not from inside his head and not from around the wind; he'd heard his mother's voice in front of him, but was no less terrified to jerk his head up to a semi-transparent image of her. Luckily, for manners' sake, the instinct to run screaming was overcome by petrified awe.
"M-Mother?" A fair imitation of what spirits were supposed to sound like glided over Tenchi's lips.
"Don't be afraid." The same soft tone reassured and locked their eyes, gentle mirrors sinking into astonished lakes.
Tenchi could peer through enough of his mother to read her name as she sat very ladylike upon her gravestone. But even if there'd been a little ring over her head he still would have seen her more clearly than any memory could recreate. Hair and skin, perfect down to the pore along every unmistakable line of her face. One smile did the work of a hundred hands in pulling him to shaky knees by the base of his heart. He took a step forward with hands slightly outstretched, the joy of seeing her again already overshadowed by the most basic of instincts. At that moment he would have given his life to be able to run crying into safe mother's arms one last time. Though completely muted, he hoped that she would be able to tell, as she always had, when her son needed her love.
Another tentative crush of leaves, another step closer, Tenchi's hands quivered but hardly rose above his waistline. Even by so close a smile, it was still transparent and eventually brought back the helpless agony of watching her lie sick in bed. He clenched under the weight of more grief than he'd endured before his wish had been granted. But, feeling like child again after so long, he nonetheless forgot about seeming ungrateful. Luckily a young man's hands can hold and offer out more questioning emotions, a young man's voice can deepen them just above a whine.
"^Why^?"
Pray strength, beg forgiveness, Achika did it all in the freshly pressed temple of her dainty hands. She could speak passively enough to make her tears hide in shame.
"Oh, my Tenchi-chan, my darling son. I never wanted to leave you. You must know that."
Unable to even attempt a guise of maturity, Tenchi hugged her answer to himself and lowered his head with a sob. It took minutes of this to remember that he could still speak to her, and he willed himself to be as happy as he'd thought he'd be when still praying for a voice. The strongest of smiles trembled for the burden.
"Mother, I-"
"Shhhhhh, hush now my baby boy, my perfect little angel." Her voice was light, bright enough to replace the sun, and thin enough to waft in between every cell in his body.
Holding to the lapels of her kimono, Achika sat up from the stone, at last becoming slightly more opaque. Tenchi chuckled tears that he should even notice the disorientation of having her a little shorter than him for the first time. She tilted her head and tingled his nerves with eyes that could replace Tsunami's matriarchy. Down to the tips on each lose strand of hair, up through the diamond dust at the corner of each eye, her son watched as she tilted her head to gentle fingers pulling back the cloth over her left breast.
"Come to me, my Tenchi-chan. Mama's here.
The tip pushed up a bit of her white silk undershirt, ghostly as it still was, Tenchi could see it clearly. His heart let him know that it was stopping and starting up again, beating backwards this time; the gears of the first clock howl, twisted counter by unnamable hands, the first songbird cheats death with an imploded beak, must forever screech for a mate.
Achika stepped forward, pulling her kimono open a little wider. One of her son's hands, no longer frozen in reverence, peeled up in revulsion.
"Everything can be perfect and safe again. Be helpless, and happy to take of my life."
She looked up at Tenchi the way she wanted to watch over him, delirious with a mother's purpose. He fell hard onto his rear, scuttling back like an orphaned cub, still trapped shocking between his mother's chest and overwhelmed eyes.
"Mother, what are you-"
"Return to peace, my baby, drink innocence again. It is sweet," mother cupped the bottom and managed a caressing squeeze, "and ^pure^."
The advertisement's clincher drifted and echoed like sea mist, milk began to ooze, darkening Achika's clothing with a bleeding violet marker. Grape candy, the emperor's dye, it streamed freely down her body, dripping onto her feminine feet as she took another step over her paling son's incoherent gasps.
"Mother knows best, Tenchi-chan."
Her stern frown grabbed his jugular and set his frantic eyes searching down her body to the ground between them. Brighter violet milk was pooling towards him, swirling to mirrored mercury with an oil slick's rainbow aura. He wheezed something like 'no' as it continued between his legs to show a melting reflection of his terror.
"Isn't this what you wanted?"
"Wha---Wha-"
"You don't want answers, you just want to curl up to mother again."
Boring his eyes back into the apparition's, Tenchi clenched the ground at her cold disappointment, fingernails bending back a pain to match her voice.
"I know this, I ^have^ been watching over you and everything else in our home, not as a guardian, but as a prisoner. Your father, your grandfather, and all of my friends have accepted my death, but you Tenchi, you continue to cling to me like a child younger than you were when I last saw you."
Achika looked down at a toddler with intense disappointment then held both hands over her kimono to keep it shut, though it still bled. She wept for him to see.
"You have not honored my memory, you have only honored your own sense of loss. Such a self-absorbed boy I raised, it's no wonder he can't see the problem with his extended family when it's right before his eyes."
The following sigh was enough to drain a ghost's life, and reanimate the chaos in Tenchi's frozen innards.
"You will never abandon your childishness, so I must take you on again as my baby, nurse my Tenchi-chan forever."
His mother had only spoken crossly on a few occasions, and it had always upset him. Now he was crying as much as he ever had, all but sucking his thumb as defensive disbelief folded in the face of a mother's scorn.
"^But Mother, how-^"
"Follow me my little angel," her nursing voice cooed again as she turned and stepped away, "hopefully someone else will come to save your family."
Achika's tough love paused with arms folded behind her back as Tenchi shook up to his knees and clutched the sobs in his head almost oblivious that the milk was disappearing into the ground.
"Save them? Save them from what?"
Tenchi chocked out a plea more than a question, and through the warming wind heard his mother sigh in exasperation the way she never did.
"Their spirits seem di-^luted^ because they've been dis-^illusioned^. Can't you see that the man who saved your hide is now toying with their minds? And if you're not strong enough to let your mother go, then surely you wont be able to make that monster leave."
Hammer to stone, fire to petrol, beat his heart back in the right direction, stealing all the blood from his skin in the process.
"SEITA! What has he done?!" Protective natures began boiling over into the few spaces not still clogged by self-pity.
Achika looked down to the side with sad finality, then walked before her headstone to sink and mumble into the ground.
"More now than you can ever understand, and more soon than he can even imagine."
A last desperate spark crawled onward with Tenchi's knees just as the final strands of hair were disappearing beneath him.
"Mother! Please! Tell me!"
He clutched the dirt in his hands again, moments away from digging in after her. During the hesitation another warm wind sent dust up his face. It went unnoticed as more violet milk seeped out of the earth, burning sweet perfume and clinging like tar. Sick slaps mocked his efforts to clean his filthy hands with his filthy hands. Something smooth atop the gravestone chuckled.
***
Into the cutting circuitry, from the sticky rubber, through blinding goggle sweat, and the cracks in Washu's lips never widened. Single minded obsession had consumed her once, then again for good measure, bringing back a paradox of sorts: if she was going to devote every spare moment to this project, she'd have to take moments away to hold back her body's interruptions. Carbohydrate pills turned her stomach's random growls into a steady whimper. Five-second sterilization showers kept things from itching or feeling organic. All these mechanical unpleasantries would maintain her functions well enough to forget them for the long enough to stop counting seconds.
While the latest piece of plasma welding cooled, she rose and looked around her lab with almost jaded emeralds. Nearly every previous invention had been sacrificed to supply the power necessary to create the latest and surely the greatest. The fact that it was finally on the brim of testing capacity struck her as less surreal than terrifying. All the pride she might have been able to allow herself for simply ^trying^ such a thing would not be recognized. There was only room for focus, none left for premonitions of failure, and certainly none for success.
She wiped away some fluids from herself and her workstation and inhaled finely filtered air through a small isolating mask. Machines spoke to themselves out loud and work began again with renewed fervor. It lasted and lasted, but she would outlast him, it was obvious by each beast of burden jerk the tubes made beneath her pitiless little hands. This assembly, an inquisition of molten sparks, might as well be pouring onto his flesh, spread out beneath her gloves all pale and vulnerable. He was going to be a stripped snail, a puddle under a salt block, another kaleidoscope for the microscope, then finally she'd use any leftover slime to seal and gloss her next project.
When a singe met the smallest finger on little Washu's hand she screamed louder than necessary and strangled it. The grind and steam clenching up from her teeth to her temples was very audible.
*Damn him! Damn him! Damn him!
Sputtering breaths caught between a sob and a cough. Washu flipped a switch on the mask away and tried to reclaim both.
*Focus. It's almost finished.
Her fingers went ambitiously relaxed, almost elegant as they prepared to finish conquering. The movement, Washu thought, was Seita-like, even when they clenched in disgust.
*What if it isn't enough? Did I abandon everyone for nothing?
One glove was warmer than the other for lying so close to the project, but putting them back on almost felt reassuring.
*Ryoko, I'm so sorry. He won't hurt you anymore, mommy won't let anyone hurt you again.
It ^was^ almost finished, Washu could tell by hefting it up closer to the light. The weight seemed almost too much but quite reassuring.
***
Moving back in a crustacean scramble, Tenchi kept his eyes fixed on blue oblivion. He noticed the painted fingertips closely enough to see the little ones sharpen each other as they led the way closer. Seita did not pass through the headstone like a ghost, instead his torso grew from it in an ether to match the now vanished milk. The taller man grew over in a monochrome rainbow too slow to dodge. The earth and dead leaves were painful in Tenchi's frozen fists.
"Don't fret young hero, your mother didn't roll over for such a performance." The imposter lowered his hands and crossed them on his back, angling his head to savor the wind through his hair.
None of Seita's seductive calm sagged with his ethereal body before it came to the ground like a dead kite and dissipated back into his legs.
"She's still very dead."
Seita turned casually away and went over to bend over at a right angle. Unnaturally postured to be sure, but he phased his hand into the dirt with the easy movements of somebody reaching in to pull the plug from the bath. Another extreme angle to look Tenchi perpendicularly in the eye.
"And quite buried."
"Sh-She-" Tenchi's rage shivers could have started in shoulder knots, or just as easily in broken organ dams.
"Hm? Speak up Tenchi, I can't hear you." The coroner stood straight and reapproached with a professor's tone.
"She...was...^cremated^!"
One eyebrow raised enough for two, surely Seita could only let his eyes move down to check his incomplete notes. The now mundane dis-hallowed ground smeared his mouth to one side like an artist disappointed but not yet frustrated with the direction of his latest piece.
"Oh. Well doesn't that make me look silly?"
Tenchi was unmoved by the misplaced apology as he backed against a tree and inched to a more upright position, never wavering his glare. After a sharp breath to straighten one then both shoulders, Seita raised his eyes and spoke again with a shrug.
"Mistakes. Misdeeds. Mismatched? Maybe, but let us try to stay focused on the business at hand."
A new fear rippled Tenchi's rage with the sharp lines pulling a smile from the pretty, damned, cruel face. His thoughts crashed, each one speeding from different directions. Questions muffled and accusations blurred over each other.
"Interesting. Inspiring. Invested." Pressing his little point into his thumbprint, he watched the joint flex with each word. The musing gurgled twice for the appropriate voice till a vain poet and a pompous tyrant, fluttering cherubs, could wrap it in sinister velvet.
"Tell me Tenchi, why do you think it is that you all have the same reactions? Why respond with anger rather than relief when these unpleasant little confrontations prove to be mere illusions?"
With two steps fewer between them now Tenchi straightened himself more against the tree and flexed his hands by his pockets instinctively. A kind of clarity was finally entering his thoughts as he realized he was searching for a weapon; misery for malice was a fair and driving enough trade. If only there was something to exchange for terror, perhaps some more rage.
"Why become hostile already? Did I show you a part of yourself you'd rather not admit to? Still waiting for your mother to return to fight your battles?
"Search inside yourself, do you really miss ^her^, or just the ^comfort she provided^?" Red lips remained curled back over his teeth as he spoke, the calm half of his voice seeming to surrender a section to the hiss.
Now that his guest didn't seem to need any closer a podium, Tenchi could reorganize his notes into strength. He looked back into oblivion blue, it had to be undeniable evil and so it had to be met with unwavering courage. For some reason, however, envisioning his last defeated enemy didn't bring back any more than the defiant voice he'd used.
"But-but why would-"
The accusation and challenge in the question fragment wilted and rotted Seita's wiry grin into a cold frown. Like knuckles over a hilt, his face became whiter, smoother, more beautiful to match alluring with dangerous. Stealing light as a trophy, both eyes broke each law of depth and brightness, even for blue. Something swirled to reel Tenchi's initial rage and the rest of his senses into a blank maw, the same unyielding emptiness that this imposter used like a trolley. Connections into questions into bullets through his mind.
*That's where he gets his powers from---that, that ^place^---that horrible ^blank^ ^place^---but what is he trying to do---but what-
"What ---^are you^?" Tenchi muttered, eyes widened and waiting to be swallowed.
Seita closed his eyes to open them at the ground in a half grimace and silent snort.
"I asked you ^one^ specific question, Tenchi. Stop fretting and delaying with why-fors and what-nots and focus on ^how-now^ you'll explain whether you miss your mother, or merely the comfort she provided."
Tenchi half expected to see the blue lights slit accordingly when they rode a slithering voice back up at him. Unable to ignore the re-question any longer, its morbid nature filed into his mind on cold scales. The oldest wound opened fresh again, whimpering retreat from an acid shadow.
"I don't know---"
The air needed savoring again, and Seita brought both hands back to his chest to do it. Slender fingers intertwined, inverted, and bent forward with a crisp snap. Like dust from a rug, the wind carried his sinister hiss off the billows of his velvet tongue.
"That's quite alright, Tenchi. The important thing is not that you answer the question, but that you keep it close." Smugness dotted his closing then crossed his arms.
"Now then, since you only ^half^ answered my question, it would only be fair for me to answer ^one^ of yours."
If formal conversation could match with cruel mind games then hospitality and now hostility could both match with curiosity. Tenchi told himself not to question this strange thought line. The second chapter to Seita's story wouldn't want to share space, and the new narrator couldn't be let out of sight. He tried to control his shaky hands, endure 'it's' freezing expressions, and ignore the throat knot pulled between them.
"Why-what. What-why." A tongue twister married a whistle in Seita's mouth out of refined spite. "Not that you won't assign your own answers regardless, but at least ^what^ won't give away too much of the ^how^."
"'What'---am I?" He mused almost sarcastically. "Mean. Monstrous. Generic. Geriatric." He walked to the side of a large tree, looking toward the mountains for some unseen and invaluable audience. A short pace started his hands in motion, three steps, sermon, lecture, critique, all to the left all to the right. An anchored glare kept every neck muscle in flex.
"Same. Old. Meaning. Less. Destruction and dishonesty, whether direct or indirect, they are both greater in their shrines than in their wakes. No 'justice' can undo the mistrust a charlatan creates."
It was too cold a sensation to be nausea, but Tenchi fought it back the same as he watched Seita trace a little fingernail from the center of his bottom lip up the side of his face to pull back a few stray but completely yielding hairs.
"I am, above all, someone who understands this. I am, beyond all, someone who ^wields^ this."
The word softened in his throat as he paused to run his fingers along the tree bark in a light caress.
"Your other guests will simply dismiss me as a promise breaker-"
Tenchi yanked his weak joints from the ground but focused too much energy into his fists to step forward. It was difficult to project his voice beyond a growl.
"What have you done to them?"
"First and foremost; I've started a session with ^you^, breaking their, 'our' agreement. It might have lasted quite a while as it wasn't particularly hard to combine their love and their shame---into silence, for your sake."
Both fists shook more sporadically when Tenchi forced his face down and away. He was ready to explode, but forced to implode when he looked back up and almost into Seita's chest. The defensive step back was all reflex, the entertainment on the taller man's face all assurance.
"Hm. They, and you as well, have all been merely warm ups for a much more personal project, but that goes back to the 'why' and 'how', and I've still not the time to explain them, certainly not now that I've just more than worn out my welcome."
Tenchi showed no sign of disagreeing with his slight of humor.
"But when I am finished here, ^what^ will ^you^ remember me as?!
Seita pushed Tenchi back another step with only a face full of teeth and eyes. He ran both hands along his scalp, pulling his hair and face back in a tense smear of psychotic grandeur. His fingers dug in, each elbow trembled like a bleeding wing.
"Should it be the stage title I presented to Ryoko? The 'Ghost of Madness'? Should I flatter myself further, and suggest that I not be mentioned by any name, less I am ^summoned^ by it?"
The first few breaths were painfully deep, but at last Tenchi caught a glimpse of focus. He could see this madman burning under ^his^ steadying glare, and he could feel Jurai energy at his fingertips.
"I am what I see, and I see what I will! And I WILL!" Something bloody and coarse imitated speech in Seita's throat as it was swallowed into a point.
"The doctors into merchants. The merchants into gods. The last-real- friend into the first-real-enemy. The 'religious' 'retreat' into the ^insane^ ^asylum^!"
It might have been cold sweat running down Tenchi's cheek; he was remembering his mother's imitation and reeling for a touch of his mother's memory, begging it tell him not to be afraid. The laugh should have come with a spray of slime but only carried Seita's voice higher.
"I have seen the black pooling blood meet the white ice! I have watched mothers and fathers---turn their sons and daughters---into ^dolls^ and ^martyrs^!
Only showy clothes and hair seemed to catch this wind. Tenchi winced at the next scream; so shrill it should have begun a sob.
"I have taken my name---from the ^grave^ of ^fate^!"
Elegant hands tore away from Seita's head like claws and clutched up at the air. Something too white to be milk bled down his forearms and veined into his sleeves. One welling power was just overwhelming enough to pull Tenchi from this glimpse of the unspeakable.
"I will twist the highest genius into the deepest isolation! I will press sterile compassion into festered cruelty! I have been the acting nemesis of life itself, and I am ^more invulnerable every moment^!"
The Light Hawk Wing tingled up Tenchi's forearm, but now it wouldn't let him take his eyes off Seita anymore than Seita would look away from his own hands. Sensual lips tested the air around the words, passing a specter calm over and behind the prince's eyes.
"By my design---every being in every layer of existence---will bow to the illusions of the mind---and cast off the illusion of the soul. I saw the ends of the universe yesterday---and I will see the end of the universe tomorrow."
This sword doesn't feel strong enough for this, Tenchi thought. It did start to feel heavier though, when Seita lowered his hands and walked slowly forward, stepping on every syllable like a path of flower petals.
"I am a hateful reflection captured in a fistful of mirror shards." Seita clenched his hand beneath his chin. A watery tar dipped off his bottom lip into his palm. "I am a rainbow chewed to white powder," he clenched his hand, "carried on a blown kiss". His lips puckered coquettishly and spread dust to settle between them.
"That's as far as you go." Tenchi forced in a memory of Kagato, forced himself to believe that it had been more frightening than this. This half smile was no more confident. It couldn't be.
"Can you truly trust the Jurai power---knowing that so much of it has invested itself ^here^?"
"I won't let you hurt anyone else."
"All the stars in the universe could not touch me, Tenchi." A large circle of nothing dilated behind his long blink of taunting calm. "But would you try your luck beyond them?"
*I'm going to collapse if I don't charge soon. Tsunami, please help me.
"Come be the hero, Tenchi." Seita stepped into the portal but leaned forward. "Come and sacrifice yourself for your hearth and ^harem^!" He managed to make a smile violating. "Dare you imagine what I have planned...after I leave you as helpless as I left them?"
Lighthawk power lunged into oblivion. The sixth guest merely stepped back to guide it into an unmarked spot in the surrounding forest. Momentum sucked away and in a moment the blink of emptiness knocked the wind out of Tenchi's courage and sent him rolling through the pine needles and shrubbery. Enough adrenaline remained to pull him back to his feet, ready to meet every opponent in any arena. He spared a breath to check his weapon and shuddered. The reflection on the blade melted into empty androgyny. Bloodless confidence read its own lips.
"You've been a very gracious host, and a mostly cooperative subject. My work here is finally coming to climax; yet, till then, I must put some distance between us."
The reflection blinked on a grin while the sword readied to wane or explode.
"There is one more thing you should consider during your race to stop me."
*Tsunami...how did this sword get so heavy?
"In regards and reevaluations to all these headstones, ask yourself this: how will your children grieve in ^your^ passing? Will they be like so many snails, brooding in thick raincoats? Or, will they be like fireflies with tattered umbrellas...^dancing^ in your ashes?"
Tenchi roared through the fading hiss and cried into silence.
***
He crossed over again as he had before, taking a moment to be absorbed into both the ends, the loss of all perception tempting and terrifying him. Ambrosia swallowed pure white and within reach. But once more he reminded himself that he was still far from ripe, and thus sight and sound returned as the only necessary tools. Consciousness and will unencumbered, transcendence known at last to be merely removal, Seita studied the time and space he'd just left, pleased that Tenchi was still screaming at his encore illusion rather than trying to find a way back home. A hunger for the omnipresence required to enjoy his host's futile race struck him, at once tormenting and invigorating. That very ambition would focus and maneuver a memory into a map and a compass. Lining up puzzle pieces was easy when immune to matter and removed from time. Mechanically divine speed and precision had taken some time and space, but they were the only ways to travel.
---
Seita stepped purposefully out of an oblivion portal just inside the Masaki front door. Soft boot taps echoed hauntingly through the house, exorcising any other sound. He could count and measure and listen to his steps with one hand behind his back and another caressing his lips. All the tranquilizing wonder he'd walked through on that first day could have: ^had^ been extracted through heated lard and perfume-spray-painted onto his nails. It was all plainly visible there, in his tiny reflection, in blue eyes turned purple in the cherry gloss. Both palms near his face he could breathe it all in, but something, a chuckle started in his nose and spread to his teeth. Revealed as rage; soft hands and smooth face crushed something into each other for a trembling moment.
The gasp was silent; keep control, but first check if that was a noise from the living room. Seita could keep this step even with both hands behind his back. Nostalgia forgot itself in a finely framed mirror and he kept watch over himself as he passed, kept walking till the smallest corner of his eye rewound and paused him. It could have been a planned detour.
A cold glare affirmed that it was not. Through every colored line, from the angles and curves of his features to the creases and folds of his clothes, the costume was flawless. Even the darker tones and sharper corners were warm, but they were all holding themselves up to spite and up for nothing. Seita still kept strangling his androgyny into bloom with a depth that impressions can only project.
There were no lighthearted giggles from boy's voluntarily kidnapped to play dress up with the girls. There was no peacemaking or comradery between opposite ends. There wasn't any artistic experimentation. The reflection only caught a few glares of light while it sharpened the already razor chisel. Harnessed vanity: ever consuming and violently unwilling to be denied fullest power over ^all^ genders. In a pirouette-fraction he pursed his lips, narrowed his eyes seductively, and spread his fingers to crush adoring worlds against untouchable cheeks. What might have given him pause only widened the sails that fanned the flame. He left the stage with a grin, sinister smug to keep the public's addiction.
"So where did everybody go?" Seita thought out loud in a delicate voice. Slightly heavier steps took his glance into the kitchen then squeaked rubber to wood, twisting him toward a sharp snorting sound.
The princess and the pirate were sprawled out either side of the largest couch, their bodies so limp that Seita wondered how 'dead' asleep they could be. In answer to his question, Ryoko rolled her head over and continued snoring more evenly. Aeka meanwhile began to snore in a decidedly more feminine manner as if trying to 'unconsciously' out-charm her rival. One eyebrow raised in curiosity soon slid down and narrowed and shined a new reflection at the collection of sake bottles on and around the coffee table. He approached with the most hushed and chilling chuckle he could manage, looking from the impressive display of glass below to the shameful women on either side.
By casual selection, he picked up a bottle and held it in front of his lips. A low whistle billowed out and filled the living room like a gently rising foghorn. When neither of them even stirred at the serenade, he crinkled his mouth to the side and put his instrument down roughly. The sudden clang of glass against the coffee table made one bottle roll off onto the floor. Still no reaction or sake left.
The fabric tightened around his crossed arms and made them as slender as his eyes were narrow. He looked out the window at the light, looked down at the floor to his left, and watched his shadow move between them like a winding clock hand. Even with all the silent brooding and throaty breathing, with dresses wrinkled and hair tangled, the two young women managed a tranquil infant innocence. A pull at the corner of his lips could have been a reflexive smile or a nervous tick but didn't last long enough for either.
Ryoko shifted slightly with another small snort and Aeka rubbed her nose reflexively. Stone readiness covered Seita's face till it was dry enough for another layer of glossy malice and a wonderful idea. He breathed himself ready and again twisted the threat of reflection again to the glory of projection. Two steps back and both hands together.
"I was wondering if I'd ever get the proper opportunity for something like this," he began in a seductive croon.
Ryoko turned over gently and knocked another empty bottle from the end table to the floor.
"You've both been very good about keeping our sessions out of Tenchi's concern. But, since he knows about them now, I guess were back to where we started." A thoughtful hum stretched bitter lines into his face and pressed his fingers together more tightly.
"Now this usually isn't as potent as the direct approach, but I just can't resist an opportunity for two birds...with one egg." What might have been a chuckle, sucked in through his clenched teeth into a hideous, jerking wheeze.
"It was a clever idea Ryoko---to remember that intoxicated people are out of my reach. However, ^unconscious^ people are practically in the palm of my hand---" Ceremony brought Seita's hands down and lust clutched them to his belly "--- in the walls of my womb."
***
The afternoon sun beamed through the blinds and made tiny specks of dust into floating faeries. Aeka gently nodded back and forth in a homey rocking chair. Her face was tilted downward but it held a smile far away enough to be utterly lost in a beautiful memory or completely aware of the wonderful present. As she rocked herself she hummed a tune rather like a lullaby. The melody and the soft quality of her throat filled and soothed the entire room. Aeka ran her hand over a large bulge on her lap. It was nice to enjoy the softness of her maternity dress, a pleasant intermission between joyous kicks of life. She stopped humming and ran both hands down as if preparing to hug the child within even closer. For a moment she thought she felt a response. Her eyes widened, her head shot up, and she cried out the father's name in a gasp of pain.
---
The waterfalls of the onsen sang about Ryoko's feet as she simultaneously brushed her hair and caressed the bulge of flesh. She tickled it with the longer strands spoke to the extra buoyancy in a playful yet motherly tone.
"So how long are you planning to stay in there huh? If you get any bigger I actually ^am^ going to need Tenchi's help to take a bath-" her eyes shimmered with the water's reflection as she stared intensely at the beads of condensation on her belly.
"Isn't that right?" She called over to the man walking towards her with a wooden bucket of bath supplies over himself. He merely smiled and began to crouch down at her side.
"Wow Tenchi! Feel!"
Ryoko grabbed his hand and pulled him forward roughly, he barely kept his balance but relaxed instantly at the reminder. After he felt no movement for a few seconds Ryoko grabbed desperately onto his shoulder. She looked up at him with wide and nearly terrified eyes; her own sense of pain seemed to overwhelm him past the possible severance of a limb. They knocked the bathing bucket into the water as they stood each other up.
---
A chaotic flurry of sterile turquoise fabric and the clamor of medical equipment swirled around the first princess of Jurai. But the doctors, along with her second thoughts about having her child on earth, were completely obscured in an explosion of pain.
---
Ryoko looked around desperately at the masked faces surrounding her. Her whole body clenched in frustration that every time she tried to call out for Tenchi a surge of pain made it impossible to do anything but scream.
---
Aeka took one last look into Tenchi's eyes and tried to deliver her will. She managed one small prayer before every sense that she possessed replaced itself with agony. It finally ended with the sight of a doctor bending to retrieve the prize, but was it always so painful?
---
Every triumph in her past cowered before the pain Ryoko screamed her every breath at. Just as Ryoko's scream delivered its fire the heat was replaced by an icy doubt; this was not how giving birth was supposed to be.
---
Both new mothers collapsed backwards in exhaustion. They tried to smile up at their Tenchi but neither could manage more than a weak grimace. The new fathers remained motionless in prayer as the mothers slowly dawned confusion at the lack of sound coming from their children. Ryoko and Aeka sat upright in a whisk of sweat and a wave of fear.
The doctors kept their faces in the shadow holding the newborns in thin white towels, at arm's length, and without breath. At first sign of life from the mothers they robotically set the bundles down on metal tables at the foot of the beds. The fathers' hands slipped and fell to their sides as if they'd been struck dead while the mothers lowered their knees and wiped their eyes to get a better look. The towels slid away slowly from the wet new skin.
***
Washu leapt from her chair and clutched her skull. It would have been such a crippling scream had it escaped, luckily she only managed a gasping dead version of a choke. Emeralds flew up from the stone and the genius braced against the nearest control board.
Within the hospital room she noticed platinum hair flowing down the shoulders of two identical doctors. Their faces simmered in the dark while fingers flexed and mouths ungulated with chewed tongues. She felt for a moment that a rubber glove was suffocating her and the vision was gone. With heavy steps and heavier breathing she walked towards a machine resembling a fire hose nozzle. Panic reflected off and filled in its bulk and complexity then ran partly down the length of a thickly twisted black wire python.
"Now. I have to do it ^now^!" Bits of saliva sputtered out as Washu spoke in a desperate whisper.
She clutched the machine's handles and began to drag its unending burden behind her with more insane determination than any slave.
***
"It's just as I suspected," the doctor began in cold monotone, "the baby is deformed... and stillborn as a result of inbreeding." Every ugly enough word exited the doctor's mouth with an extra sentiment of disgust, yet with an almost poetic dignity of someone waiting to speak the line.
The doctor didn't look up from his diagnosis even as a princess stared wildly at him. She trembled her head over to her child. Two points and the initial shock dissolved; Aeka's hands flew to her mouth as her organs and face strangled themselves. Her child was white rot doused with sickly purple. Blood dripped from erratically bloated, curled, and fused little fingers onto the loose skin around its ribs. The skull was gnarled and lumpy, grasped and squeezed like a piece of clay. Its left eye socket lulled in folds of flesh as if half its face had tried to melt away. One pupil-less but bloodshot eye stared back with cold and miserable accusation.
Aeka noticed that Tenchi had moved to the doctor's side with a pale face and no expression. She was in hell and had given birth to a piece of it. It was impossible to gather the energy to look up amid the stench pouring forth from her fruit, her tree. A quagmire of filth bubbled in the First Princess's throat as she began to slowly convulse.
---
"Oh my GOD doctor, what...what ^is it^!?" The nurse wailed as she cowered behind the doctor. Authority, still masked, merely starred at child. She trembled and looked pitifully from the doctor, to Tenchi, then at the back of the seemingly normal baby's head. Ryoko leaned forward in hideous fear that the first child had not survived. Her heart jumped as it began to turn and face her.
The baby's first sound filled the room and poured rusty slime into its mother's lungs. Something between a hiss and a gurgle grew louder, into a growl, a putrid vibration. When it finally faced Ryoko she saw blood bubbling in the back of its throat and oozing out over jagged teeth that jutted forth like splintered wood. Yellowed emaciation stretched over the tiny skeleton, ribs expanded and paled as it breathed.
Mind like a heated, swelling boil, Ryoko listened to her baby grow louder, watched its pupils catch a glare of deathly green light. When she saw it trying to claw towards her with viciously pointed little fingers she dug her own hands into her sides and sobbed hysterically into her knees. Even with eyes buried, that monstrous face reminded her that she was indeed the most despicable creature in the universe. Thoughts smashed and crumbled into each other, discarding her in pieces among this draining shower.
Somehow the mothers were able to choke out Tenchi's name, and somehow he didn't seem to hear it as he shuffled away, speaking aloud but obviously to himself.
"What have I done..." Guilt rivers ran to fill disgusted lakes. ---
The masses on either side of the couch began to shrink insanely into fetal positions. Seita watched them with a Cheshire bite till his doctors picked up the metal trays, still holding them at arm's length as they turned towards the wall. A furnace door opened and received the packages with a gristle sizzle, a steam scream, and two belches of flame.
Ryoko and Aeka exploded into consciousness with screeches that tore their throats down into wailing sobs. They clutched their heads and hugged their knees like terrified children waiting for be saved or devoured. Their horror shocked a pause rather than dissipated as they stared at each other. When finally still enough to make lasting eye contact their red faces turned pale. The third source of heavy breathing in the room gradually became the most pronounced. They both moved to face Seita at the same time, neither with any more enthusiasm than a rusted hinge.
He drove air through a perversely accomplished smile and into the dead spider cage of his fingertips. Ryoko and Aeka could see their agony being relished in piercing blue cruelty. In a single fluid motion Seita rose to his feet and parted his hands in triumphant closure. Aeka shivered her eyes wide enough to see past him and noticed the long-sealed door to Wash's lab. It unveiled a disheveled yet determined young soldier who dragged her bulky weapon along like life itself.
"Think nothing of accuracy, your visions---" Seita trailed off but gradually regained some composure in a few knuckle cracks. "Real doctors would never behave in such a manner...they always require ^much^ more paperwork."
A smug smile and a straightened posture brought his sharpness to a point. Aeka glanced over at Ryoko and saw the deep gouges she was making in the couch as she also struggled to look away.
"Isn't that right, Dr. Hakube?" Freshly pursed lips asked curtly; ^he^ didn't need to turn to flaunt of his acute perception. Washu stopped about five feet behind him, but her violent determination was engraved. Seita turned leisurely to face her while Ryoko and Aeka stared at the bulky machine the miniature scientist was hefting up her side.
"My-my Little-Washu. What have you got there?" The imposter asked and took her apparent age seriously.
Professor Hakube looked up and matched hatred to any sinister amusement, face quaking from cutting brow to grinding teeth. She fused her hand onto the machines coarse lever like a demon's bridle and pulled it over and past emergency. Its cylindrical nose emitted a slow light that spread like a slide projector into fog. Once the space an inch beyond Seita was illuminated, Washu pushed forward again causing the light, the man, and the family chair all to vanish. The three women kept an entire minute empty till Washu dropped to one knee without letting go of her machine. Ryoko and Aeka rushed forward a few reflexive steps but were both still too shaken to do more than stare. The day's mother of invention looked down at her new child and gasped out a mad smile.
"I'm...^a genius^!"
***
^Tenchi Muyo: Sanctuary and Asylum^
-Verse Seven is Mother-
-Part 2-
Effortless and unrepentant---will beg to be restrained.
Begging a will for vengeance---can justice be maintained?
-ZJS
***
Soft, stylish, stealthy, Jurain Nobles spared no expense when it came to footwear. Duke Mitziru remembered something someone had said somewhere 'a royal guard can hear a cotton ball decal drop across the room'. He thought on this, then told himself not to. This was more than an important trip; it was a monumental honor of an assignment. He'd take whatever passage instructed and give no more information than was allowed, even if it did make him look suspicious...even if it ^would^ make him look suspicious ^should^ anyone see his route. Not likely, so 'walk like a Noble in all places at all times, head high, feet sure'. Though he couldn't remember when he'd heard it last, it had been his father saying it, and that was good enough.
Quiet, clean, Queenly, Funaho listened to one Noble footfall after the other, one too many cotton balls. She considered how to place her own steps out from her hiding place. There were so many natural notches found in the old, inefficient, and conveniently obscure passage, surely people had hid...'waited' in them before. If no one before herself (enough recent times to count) then her judgment would justify this new use, and that was good enough.
With a popular tune sung under a whisper, the Duke passed by, feet sure, head high. Funaho thought on how his shoes hardly matched his robe, then told herself not to. And, since his oblivious shoulders beckoned her not to waste an element of surprise, she remained calmly leaned into the wood grooves.
"Duke Mitziru."
Never let them see you taken off guard, his father might have said that shortly before he died. Was the diagnosis still an unknown virus? No matter, Mitziru told himself, just take a few more steps before you stop and don't turn till after you've spoken.
"Who is there?" The Duke surely knew already, but had decided to be formally polite.
"I must have a word with you." Funaho stepped out onto the main path, both arms folded calmly into her sleeves.
An unfamiliar and very feminine voice: how curious. Not too young, not quite old enough for a Duchess.
Ah, that was it, must be, surely his intuitions were as flawless as his instructions. He turned to face ^another^ of his all too many disappointing and discharged concubines. Wasn't it his place to forget them as he chose? Did they all have to seek him out in private?
"My dear lady," Mitziru began, not even quarter turned yet, "I am sorry, but it is not my place to offer you fertility treatments. If you'd like a recommendation for a-"
Funaho remained calm, almost serene, save for the heavier left corner of her mouth.
"M---M-M-My Queen!" Executions hadn't been carried out through beheading for eons, but, for Mitziru's last moments, it felt right to clutch his throat anyway.
"These tunnels to the landing docks are quite old...but I doubt you're traveling for historic scenery."
Clearly The First Queen of Jurai had a great deal of patience, too much in fact to waste it on formalities in this situation. The business at hand would have to begin now and wait another time.
"Your highness, please forgive my foolishness." Clammy hands hadn't felt so out of place round his neck till he had to fling them to his sides for a deep bow.
"Rise Duke."
Perhaps if she'd have said 'be at peace' or 'at ease' or even 'A- rise'...or ^please^, then he figured he would have done so more smoothly. Shiny skin did not befit a Noble, but in this case it was better to sweat than urinate. In person and impatient, the Queen really was more striking than a rendering; to think she was an off-worlder.
"It is an honor to---is there anything at all I can do for you, my Queen?" It wouldn't have made his father proud, but it was a quick recovery just the same.
"Just the one thing," she blinked slowly to make sure she was looking him directly through the eyes and almost felt pity for the suddenly fragile man.
Duke Mitziru barely opened his mouth and clearly heard his teeth click from slamming it shut again.
"Whatever your 'immediate' plans are, change them. Where you are going; remain a distant spectator, do not make your presence known. Then, when you return, report that The Princess Aeka did not respond."
It was an unpleasant thing to hear a man gulp from a few meters away. In her position she thought she'd have grown accustomed by now. While she was silently considering being less intimidating this time, or perhaps the next, Duke Mitziru spoke, recited, and tried to make his case a statement rather than a plea.
"I'm sorry, your highness. My plans---my ^orders^ come from The Emperor himself."
"I doubt that."
Having not meant to sound so cold, Funaho cleared herself with a breath, hoping the Duke would take the opportunity to do so himself.
"I think it is far more likely," she continued with a lesson for any future diplomat, "that your orders come from someone representing my husband. Therefore; a direct order from myself or my Sister-Queen would supercede it."
Funaho hoped relaxing her voice a little further might keep the man in one piece.
"That is the case, is it not?"
Disregard a formal request with the Emperor's seal...or lie to The First Queen of Jurai? Perhaps there had been a more difficult crossroad somewhere down the Mitziru family line, but that didn't matter now. There was no bride more sought after than Princess Aeka, no more noble a task than saving her from the glamours of that unknown and unfit planet, and no wrath more terrible than a Queen's.
What would Tsunami want? Honor the father's hand or honor the mother's face? Who held his family's name in the palm of his hand? Who had The Great Yosho named his tree after?
"It is." The Duke bowed with the ordeal's first real breath, taking it in reverence would be an appropriate and wise decision.
"Good. Thank you." Funaho formally relieved them both mid turn.
"Of course, anything---anything for the mother of our-"
"That will be all, Lord Mitziru."
Speaking sharply while still walking away, Funaho was far more intimidating than her husband's seal.
***
Washu's legs swayed slightly as she remained hunched and perhaps welded over the bulky apparatus. Ryoko and Aeka each took a step back, respectfully afraid to burden their lingering shock with anything more. Emeralds burned sulfur up from the ground, glaring at them under a mat of septic red bristles, speaking between another set of exhausted breaths.
"Greatest...invention...yet."
Her stunned audience slowly looked down at the achievement in question, plainly ominous for its lack of smoke, noise, or even a blinking light. Looking from her daughter to Aeka, Washu followed their eyes back down to apparent but uncertain salvation.
"Wha---what just happened?" Ryoko leveled a weak stare, sitting back on the couch, bent over tightly gripped arms.
"Seita? Did you-" Aeka managed to whimper before her own hands tried to seal her mouth.
A spark of excited pride for the muted, a bit lip for the crippled, then Washu traded it all for a hesitant glance back down at her machine.
"I'm not sure, I didn't exactly have an opportunity for a test run." She breathed in another step away from hyperventilation.
"Then what the hell ^did^ you do?!" Ryoko furled her hair up and around clenched teeth and fists. Were her jaw not chattering, were her elbows not still cowering in her stomach, she would have looked ready for battle.
Washu sensed, reflected, and displayed her daughter's fear for a blink. Speaking to the machine was easier, even if it darkened her voice past any professionalism.
"Ryoko, Aeka, this here is likely the most powerful atomic transmitter in the entire universe. I couldn't explain how difficult it was to simply make a prototype."
"But, isn't that-" Aeka began pointing in anxious disbelief.
"Yes, well, it's basically the same system that all higher grade ships have for transporting cargo and passengers. It essentially draws all the atoms in a selected area into manageable size and reassembles them in a new location...hm, such a simple concept now for something that was once thought impossible." Washu grinned in a failed attempt at humor and continued, still trying to rebuild some degree of confidence. "The problem is...Seita's atoms do not function like any I've ever seen, and trust me, I've seen a lot.
"What most people don't realize is that every time, say, Aeka transports from her ship and back, a few atoms get lost along the way, usually within loose skin cells and other detritus. Even the most advanced transporters can only hold onto atoms that have some sort of structure condensing them together.
"Now, like I said, he's different, he can't be transported easily for the same reason he can't be touched; his atoms won't hold still. It gets more complicated from there, but the main point is that I did not vaporize him, I merely transported him to a 'containment unit' in my lab."
A wicked little genius grin disturbed a reminder of the subject in question. Both younger women cringed a little, but Washu took no notice and continued with a convincing mad scientist quiver.
"I'll decide what to do with him from there. It's taken almost all my available resources to construct the equipment necessary to function at such a complete atomic level...but I think it will be worth it."
"You're sure he's...^contained^?" Aeka gulped.
There was silence till Washu finally regained her breath, professional tone, and a better posture.
"If anything in science can bring him down to size, it's this." The little genius hefted the big device a little more.
"Now that you finally know what I've been confining myself to the lab for; try to have some faith in it. You've both found out first hand that Seita is more than just a pretty trickster, and we may never know exactly ^what^ he wants, but I'm not about to let him make guinea pigs of us!" The spitting violence in her vow brought out an eye-shimmer of unspoken and currently unspeakable empathy between the three women.
Aeka stepped back and bowed her head, speaking in formality to hide whatever damage she could.
"There's no telling what might have happened had you not intervened, I am eternally grateful Miss---I-I mean-" Formality stuttered nervously.
"Don't worry about it, ^your highness^," Washu managed a weak smirk as she began dragging the heavy device and its thick hose back to her lab, "I'm doing this for everyone."
Ryoko's head unburied itself from her hands with mouth faltering between faint throat noises.
"For everyone." Washu whispered again to herself, or perhaps simply thought it very directly. Her daughter closed her mouth and sank back into both hands.
Hardly noticing that she was hugging herself with her mother's strength, Aeka spoke gently to the air.
"Please Tenchi, come home safely."
***
If the lab seemed farther removed, Washu had reasoned, she'd be less worried about damaging the house and less tempted by Sasami's cooking. This would make it easier to pour every resource she had into Seita's capture. Now, as she lumbered down a less than aerodynamic flight of dimly lit steps, the mass of her still unnamed invention made her wondered if it had all been truly necessary. One generic lifting android, she could have spared just one, a simple arm even. She'd have to type soon, raw or numb or not, her little fingers hadn't earned their break yet.
Keeping the lights dim was definitely overdoing it, keep this up and you'll need glasses by age 30,000, she joked to herself. The brutal efficiency that had taken her this far spoke up now, arguing that the light path was technically expendable itself; the hose led directly back to where she needed to be, through and around the armored arches left ajar. It was almost surprising that college memories could still resurface at such a time; all those extension cords smuggled into restricted reactor rooms, all those professors following them back to her dorm with sure path, short fuse, and small wonder.
The automatic recognition doors sealed again the moment she and the hose were clear. Head down, still retracing step residue round to the right, she'd have only to glance up-left to see what the near entirety of her science was good for. But haste made waste. But the greatest scientific genius in the universe didn't need to rush. But Little Washu was in no hurry to face those eyes again; she watched and waited for the hose to retract completely, snaking its way back into the wall with a cold steel over rubber shuffle. Until there was power to spare she'd have to use stationary computers, during the final equipment check the lights behind her reflected on the dark screen. There was a humanoid figure standing very still and very tall.
Even as she digested it, she could still taste iron. The deep baritone vibration of the largest generator was faintly shaking the floor, but the lab was otherwise silent. Out of habit or reflex she listened for the distinctive beeps of a vital function monitor, forgetting that she'd never even thought of adding one.
No time to dote and doubt on such things, she should be like a Samurai, hesitant to re-sheath his sword after a battle won too easily. By all means the analogy should have made her smile or at least more willing to turn around. There was no room for reluctance now and only track enough for one train of thought.
*Face him, Washu.
*An unnecessary risk.
She steadied her hand on a small box in her pocket.
*I could end this all right now.
*An unnecessary risk.
*Perhaps I should wait till I'm better prepared.
*An unintelligent risk.
Something very primal, an instinct injection made her ankles hurt as she pivoted one eighty---one, just in case.
*Show him who the ^real^ genius is.
*An unintelligent-
Two walls of rain gray tubing and onyx mirror panels shared a room-size box between them, faint orange light as sturdy a face as glass. The recliner was on its side in the far right corner, Seita smiled a forgiven debt of patience from the near center. Till she was more or less a meter away Washu kept her approach slow. Once decided to inversely cross her arms in front of her she kept their eyes locked.
*It's easy, people have said 'you look emotionless' lots of time, especially when I was working.
"There was nothing but a disorienting white light." Recounting a major turning point in his youth, Seita let the biographer feel both fortunate and unnecessary. "And for a moment I remembered vividly my first glimpse of oblivion, to truly feel 'nothing' again as a result of someone ^else's^ will."
Seita brought one arm forward with grace-like leisure. Washu watched him watch the minute details between his thumb and seemingly longer littlest nail.
"So, in quaint remembrance of empathy, and since you went through all this trouble, I'll at least let you say your peace before I depart to finish my work here."
"Try it."
Washu savored every fraction of Seita's face as it sank to her instant ice challenge. He squinted, searching insistently till at last he retreated back into a smug smile.
"Are you sure you wouldn't like to ask me a question or two first? Surely there must be some curiosity lurking around all that fear." He took half of the step between himself and the energy field. Washu sunk her fingernails stoically deeper into her biceps.
At first it was encouraging just to blink, to know she could. When Seita did the same, more or less naturally, there wasn't as much reassurance as she'd have liked. From there Kagato was next in line in between them. One of the few beings she'd ever considered a formidable opponent, he'd almost never directly looked at anyone unless he was looking down on them. That should have been an early warning. So what was it about that story introduction that should have been telltale?
*All of it. I should have been nothing but skeptical, instead I let myself get curiouser and curiouser. Why did he-
*No, Washu. Don't ask him any questions, not yet, not on his terms.
Without breaking contact, Seita positioned his hand against his face, knuckles on cheek, thumb on jaw, and nail into bottom lip, prodding, ticking. She was far enough away for him not to have to angle his head much; regardless of significant heights, he obviously wasn't looking down. This was an entirely new game.
He could project private memories, but Washu figured he wasn't a telepath, couldn't be literally probing her thoughts. At worst he was speculating better than he should. She knew that she was still focused on the beginning stage, finding a point of inspiration to focus and advance from. Somewhere behind all that lovely blue was the thing that found it--- 'fitting' that she remember her lost son by all but reliving one of their most traumatic moments together.
*Is that what he wanted, just to re-salt and old wound?
As soon as she let herself frown she regretted it. Small favor that Seita didn't seem to notice, in fact, he seemed to be something like perplexed as well. No, not perplexed.
*Not perplexed at all. He still thinks he's going to walk effortlessly out of this thing, he must still be planning what to do afterward.
*But, that must mean he hasn't actually tried to yet.
Washu breathed her frown back into dead balance.
*I hope.
And then there it was, a shrug of an exasperated sigh. He'd simply been looking for a hole in her confidence and thus a crack in his box. That part was over.
"Very well," Seita brought his hand up, little finger pointing and ready test the wind's direction.
A ripple of static crackled softly at the point of impact and physically bounced his entire arm back. He watched incredulously as countless atoms from the sharp colored tip dispersed then regrouped like a school of fish accidentally swimming into a dam. In two quick motions he tried to make an 'x' but only the first slash had enough matter. It took a little longer for the entire finger to reform.
He took a relaxing breath, raised his hand again in a beauty queen wave, and readied to push with both eyes shut tight. Washu marveled, having never seen him exert any physical energy away from outdoor chores. Similarly she could not help but be startled when he shot his fist forward with a loud strike of static.
Steeped in confused frustration, Seita stepped back, right knuckle over his lips, left hand crossed over his midsection to support the right thinking elbow. It was still obvious that he wasn't evaluating a work of art, but an infuriating equation. Washu could not keep herself from taking another step forward, unknowingly imitating a sinister grin.
Seita refolded his hands back behind him and genuinely scowled pure enough to melt emerald. The subhuman hiss, the perverse whisper, all of the effeminately affected yet surreally chilling voices Washu had heard through Ryoko fell away. She could only bet half her degrees that this was a glimpse into the voice he spoke with before Kagato's experiments. The strikingly mundane combination of nasal isolation and analytical masculinity froze her thoughts.
"Congratulations Professor Hakube, you have created and atomic containment unit more powerful than I imagined possible."
Moving as naturally as pseudo silence, Washu dropped her hands into her pockets and tried not to squeeze the contents of one too tightly.
"My form cannot relax enough to phase through this field, however-"
After so much focusing will, it infuriated Washu to be distracted by a foreboding little wiggle across his fingers. When she looked back up there was no room or time to reassert herself in the game.
"I doubt it is imposing enough to affect my capacity, my connection to-"
Cutting himself off, Seita's clenched brow weighed his head down with a jerk. Washu squinted then stared shivers at a white circle no larger than a golf ball hovering at slender chest level. Her prisoner's eyes widened as well, but with a completely different emotion.
He violently arched his fingertips together behind the opening and tightened his mouth in a desperate rage. It wavered in size, increasing diameter an inch or so, then falling back even smaller. This continued on for an hour's minute; the prisoner shaking with determination while the captor stood rigid, petrified that his efforts would be successful despite her own.
The unofficial but obvious ending tore oblivion from Seita's grasp as the sweat on his hands slipped his fingers to intersect together. Washu allowed herself to breath again as he pumped air through clenched teeth and shook his hands involuntarily, the motion of it made her pause long enough to catch a glimpse of a comparatively frail body. The veins on his forearms and tendons in his neck were ready to burst forth from his skin and strangle everything in sight. A few minuscule taps of static sounded on the containment field as spittle flung over his barred teeth. Through all this only his eyes spoke of anything more than a child's tantrum, pitiful despite the rage necessary to destroy all of existence.
Like animals cornered, Washu knew that tyrants were most dangerous when forced to acknowledge impending defeat; she should be cautious. Yet, she was so eager to need such caution, that she threw it aside. She tasted her enemy's pain and savored it with countless years of maniacal laughter held back in the name of good form.
Euphoria erupted from her, head raised to the ceiling, arms squeezed even tighter, bits of color sparkling behind her welded eyes. Time and space stepped aside to properly observe her triumph. But, in the same turn, that emotion ruined thought's endurance, so too did a thought ruin emotion's moment.
*And so the mad scientist has defeated the shape shifter. This must be something like the power he felt over us.
Flinging her eyes open, bending her head into both hands, Washu desperately pushed cackles back into the cauldron. Her eye's watered from the strain, but she could not relent, shamed and grateful to catch herself on the edge of her enemy's world. Her will for and concept of morality began returning home, just in time to be tested again.
She'd offered a barely conscious prayer to anything never to hear the 'original' voice speak again, so instead it roared. If the hiss were subhuman, surely this could only be described as post-human. A gurgling moan torn into a siren by tenor hooks, Seita's fists were going to implode, his jaw was going to detach, and shards of falling sky were going to cut his throat to thinner ribbons.
It faded in half a minute, but the volume carried pain through the other half. Between everything else, Washu's reflexes had surged to the forefront, and she needed to look up at her captive with both hands still over her ears. She knew instantly that he could see her terror, and reflex spoke again, and again in his old voice, releasing her grip and lowering careful digits towards the pocketed unnecessary risk.
"I suppose I should have foreseen this, if atoms cannot escape this prison surely they cannot make room enough for an oblivion opening."
Washu searched desperately for the terrifying fury that had been in his voice, but only found the far greater threat of vanity, of a readying countermove. His hands had become claws at his sides during the roar, but once again they moved elegantly up to form a wedge of fingers beneath his chin.
"I don't really care ^how^, but I'm sure to find out ^why^, as soon as you tell me ^if^...I still look pretty."
A whole lot of glamour; he looked the same part he'd played during introductions. Washu did not answer, however, and just stared back with too many clenched teeth and not enough concentration to speculate why this would make a difference in their standings.
"I'll take that as a 'yes'." In an effortless transition his sharp smile opened wide, shooting ethereal cruelty through his teeth.
"^Gooooood^."
Washu caught his meaning in a cold iron bar through the stomach as a duplicate Seita moved forward through the containment field in the same shedding manner that Ryoko formed her double. It walked forward at its leisure and her privilege, gliding its hands out of the meditative pose and down into its pockets.
"Tell me where to go---I'll tell you what to see. Now, what do we say? Now, who could've known?"
Duplicates of Tenchi, Ryoko, and herself approached, spaced out in word turns, each distinct voice leaning or bending into an imitation of him. Washu stepped back and clutched the small device in her pocket.
"Im-Impossible!" She gasped back another step in retreat from her glaring mirror image.
"Come now professor Hakube, did you really think that ^thought^ traveled on ^atoms^?"
With that the duplicate slowly dispersed into countless colored ribbons, each particle worming through the air and into the floor. Washu starred back at the tarted bit of insanity smiling smugly inside her prison. A combination of emotion and reflex bent her head forward, hair pulled all but out and eyes clenched all but inward. She trembled, trying desperately again not to think of the weight in her pocket.
"Hmmm, not a particularly creative strategy professor; will you make yourself ^deaf^ as well as blind to escape me?" The rasp sounded ready to flick a forked tongue in her ear; knowing that it was an auditory hallucination made it no less vile.
Someone was caressing a church organ in slow contemplative chords, echoing through a lab far larger than her own. It took an instant to recognize one of Kagato's favorite pieces, and less to detect a different, and very un- musical sound in the distance. A little girl sobbing for her mother grew older, then familiar, then Washu slapped her ears so hard that a similar noise festered, almost answered in her throat. She remembered her own prison aboard the Soja and the cries that would permeate it night after night till she prayed for the mobility to cover her ears as they were now. The accident with her lost son had been a bitter thing to recall, but the months that passed before Kagato finally silenced Ryoko's cries were painful enough to be wielded as a weapon.
And so she tried to shield herself. For longer and longer still, Washu cowered full and futile for deafened darkness, terrified to imagine any more illusions beyond these memories. Sobs fought back and pressed down, her logic, her precious logic struggled back to its throne like a desperate infant to a nurse.
*Must---THINK! How?! How can he still do this? Dammit Washu, you can't let him beat you! For the sake of everything don't let him think you've given up! This is^ your^ mind, ^your^ will!
* It's his arrogance---his arrogance that let him get caught. Use it Washu! Defy him and wait for another mistake---he is mortal---he is ^mortal^!
Once again the single line of reason surged her forward, filled her with energy enough to wield worlds...to imprison beings beyond existence. She lowered her hands and raised her eyes with as much dignity as a queen. With all the confidence she could spare she convinced herself that this enduring gesture could stop any future invasions. Seita was sitting cross- legged, the tip of a more relaxed hand arch beneath his lips, blue waters all but level.
"I'm glad to see that didn't take long. Now, before you waste time on another strategy, could you perhaps tell me now---tell me ^why^? Why go to all this trouble?" His voice transition was soft only to stress the question.
Washu crossed her arms again and reformed a shaky version of her professional posture. Hoping that a glimpse of sincerity would simultaneously satisfy him and catch him off guard, she attempted exactly that.
"It's your question that wastes time on what should be obvious. You are a threat, to me, and to the people I care for. For whatever reason: you exploit memories and twist dreams. You violate the mind, Seita.
"You may not have physically harmed anyone here, but one look into those 'pretty eyes' of yours and it's clear that making us doubt our senses is just the beginning.
Washu frowned a little dark sarcasm for her classroom, then a little more at a rising corner on Seita's mouth.
"Go ahead and take this as flattery, but know that, whatever you are, whatever ambition it is that drives you, this power is not a discovery and not a gift. It is a ^mistake^. And I intend to correct it."
A part of her still wanted to mock him with his own speaking style, but she kept a close watch on herself, fiercely determined not to be drawn in again. Their glares locked and stood fast, silent again as they both tried to muffle their own heartbeats. To her surprise, Seita broke the moment, not with a flamboyant or sinister gesture, but with a tired sigh from beneath a hanging head.
"...I try so hard to give you people a different perspective of things, and this is the thanks I get. I may make it look easy, but let me assure you; it takes a good deal of energy to conduct our little sessions, not to mention the ever invaluable and inconsistent spark of creativity."
Mister Misunderstood spoke of passive peaces, but clearly without enough sincerity to make Washu's glare even flinch. He raised his head to see this and crinkled his lips to the side in a favorite grimace of disappointment. The next sigh and almost cynical response was much more believable.
"Ah yes, I suppose that is a little hard to swallow, isn't it? The old 'road to hell paved with good intentions'----it just seems to wind in the same tired circle." Seita crossed his arms and lowered his eyes reflectively. "That self-delusion wore off before it even bore fruit."
Washu tensed as he began rubbing flattened hands together, for warmth, for effect as he put on another layer of seduction.
"I do think you're too wise for that, in fact, I think you're perceptive enough to understand me quite well, even if you don't know it. And herein lies the true motivation."
He offered up a glance just in time to savor her deeper frown.
"Rage as you may against 'threatening projections', your truest violence is reserved for ^unflattering reflections^."
Washu felt pocket lining again while he chuckled characteristically in his own praise. He seemed to be trying to crack her frown wider with his knuckles
"Come now professor, take this opportunity to destroy me---and prove me right! For surely---surely one so powerful could only be afraid of herself." He griped his knees tightly. "Is that it? Do you hesitate to ^destroy me^ for fear that you will ^know me better^?"
The stressed whispers gave way to tiny chuckles, barely human so much as the tiny grunts of a rodent giving birth.
"If not that, then indeed there is a second, still correlated possibility, a near paradox. Have we indeed trapped each other? Am I still alive to satisfy your own fascination, your own ^hunger^ for my power? Do you want me to beg for mercy at your feet, offering up all my secrets in exchange for my miserable life."
He rose and spread himself back down onto his chest, arching his back enough to fit the tip of his prayer beneath his chin. The sinister velvet completely melted into perverse latex.
"Dare we explore one-level-deeper? Would you keep me imprisoned, knowing that I'm sure to find a way to escape? Is there the sadist's shadow in that brilliant mind of yours; the desire to be ^defeated^?!"
Pretty, ecstatic, Seita's mouth and eyes shook wide and ready to burst from the pleasure of so diagnosing the greatest genius in the universe. Washu shook as well, tensing her finger over the equivalent of a trigger, but relaxed it in shock as her prisoner quickly forced some degree of calm back over himself. Wild features were drug back down by unseen chains till at last his face hung solemn. She searched hopefully for signs of exhaustion rather than wait for her curious head to betray her with new consideration for Seita's perception.
Blue eyes rose then drained to pure and empty white. His bloodless smile didn't move, so when his voice whispered so close to her head she naturally mistook it for direct telepathy.
"^None of these answers would surprise me, being as you are such an unethical scientist...and such a sad excuse for a mother^!"
Washu felt the camel's back snap into jagged splinters beneath her. Quickly as a gentleman drawing during a pistols duel, she pointed the small remote directly between Seita's eyes. Neither of them wavered at the generic computer stewardess's announcement, echoing about them amidst the rearrangement and repetition of lights.
"Attention. Atomic containment field will begin compression in 10.864 seconds. Please take precautionary safety measures."
A second button on the remote made a transparent sphere shimmer around Washu's body. It was large enough to contain her adult form, and held her firmly in a levitating position inches off the floor. Still she matched her prisoner's stillness.
"Compression in 5---4---" The countdown halted and the field around Seita began to darken in color, he grinned a little wider for anybody special before his features were obscured in dynamic flashes of warning light.
"Attention. Containment field unstable, probability of collapse-" The tendons in Washu's arm flexed as she repressed the initial button. "--- compression resumed."
She narrowed her eyes on the blurred figure now sitting patiently again in the ultimate prison cell. Consuming emotion allowed for one last unprofessional musing; she hoped that he'd receive his judgment with that smug smile intact.
The containment field wavered like pieces of sheet metal with sounds of hot grease on static rather than soothing thunder. Washu closed her eyes with real serenity.
***
The lighthawk wings had carried Tenchi high above the treetops, searching for his house, the lake, even a plume of smoke to lead the way home. In frustration he'd started flying in random directions, but this just made him feel more lost and more foolish for the time wasted trying to get back to the home base area Seita had left him in. Eventually, after deciding that developed countries like his shouldn't still have so much wilderness, he threw himself in the lucky direction of a familiar-looking mountain range.
Now, as he burst inside, he nearly tumbled forward as he tried to support himself on the front door handle. With the Jurain garments faded he could feel again how exhausting it could be to stress himself to wit ends of the universe. Barely held back from the brink of gasps for air and fear, he listened and listened closer in the hideous silence. His instinct to call out swelled painfully in his lungs, but he could only S.O.S in an impotent exhale.
More thoughts of Seita; Tenchi didn't need any more reasons to dash forward again. Veering into the living room for as good a reason as wasn't needed, he balked still at the spark of Ryoko's energy sword combined with the hum of Aeka's force shield. The suddenness of it readied him for another lighthawk wing in the moment before he saw their faces.
They quivered, stoic and pitiful, stringing out their last thread of will to defy an impossible adversary. Ryoko spoke first, angling her sword forward as menacingly as possible. A child could have smelled her fear, Tenchi thought, but listened intensely.
"Is that you, Seita?"
The pain he'd felt during the impersonation returned, corkscrewed into him, and swelled. With the greatest of clarity came the depth of failure; he'd been oblivious while something unspeakable violated the very minds of the women, the family he had sworn to protect. The agony swell, the forced mistrust of the face they'd pledged their hearts to, it was all caused by his inability to recognize a surreal threat.
Unworthy, he continued to beg strength of himself, refused to consider asking them the same question. All he could do was drop his arms in despair and bitterly hope that their tears were true.
Ryoko lowered her sword and let it dissipate, Aeka followed suit, taking a step forward. They each crept towards him, hating themselves for each moment of doubt trying to pull them back into a defense. By the time they were close enough to touch him their faces were equally lined with tiny rivers. The sound of their timid breaths was enough to keep Tenchi's blinks short. His one chance at redemption shone through their mire and lifted his arms out, offering them all he could.
***
The wreckage of Washu's lab piled up with so much material that it might as well have been the welded pieces of a chaotic sculpture. Throughout the process of dragging herself from beneath a large conduit tube she was the only one to budge, and squish, and crack, and grunt but mostly whimper. There were some lighter pieces of debris that crumbled and avalanched beneath her blackened hands and tangled in her hair. She crawled upward through a thistle of wires toward what looked like firelight glare.
Emerging at a stile top, Washu rested her chin on her forearms and looked about at the devastation. Some metal garbage transport truck had been disemboweled with a flamethrower to dump its guts over her lab. Fossil fuel yards had looked more promising, and indeed parts of this one were still on fire. Little by little her eyes adjusted to the dim light and began to recognize various components, each one to some degree severed, dented or charred beyond repair. She reached out for a piece of thin piping and tried to pull herself toward what looked like a patch of floor but what was probably the flat surface of some other destroyed component. This motion screamed out any argument that her left leg and right ankle were not broken. The following motion to look back on them similarly reminded her that she had, conservatively, one cracked rib.
With a glazed gaze around and a regretful breath of the putrid rubber fires, Washu smiled weakly to herself.
*The carbon converters must have gone before the main reactors, must be why everything was trashed in a fireball instead of being completely vaporized.
Washu pulled herself along what might have been an easier path toward a smaller fire.
*Lucky me. They must not have been punctured, though they could start to leak any minute now.
Another cough and she collapsed her head onto her folded forearms. The pain there was catching up with the rest of her body in good time. When she opened her eyes she could barely make out a shape, far to her left. It looked like a huge melting candy bar made from Alpha quality metal. It looked like a part of the containment field.
She stared, listened to arch's of electricity starting new fires, and didn't feel too disappointed. After a few minutes of nothing she let herself chuckle no matter how much it hurt. A wet cough worked its way up and out her throat. She didn't bother to check the color of what she spat out, but did wipe it off her chin and did notice the relative size of her trembling hand-cloth.
*I guess the internal power source that kept me little used itself up to keep me from being crushed.
She tried to move again and her leg tried to secede.
*Completely.
Her eyes softened and began to water at the painfully light feeling in her skull. The sound of her voice was drab, but added ringing ears to the list of ailments.
"Ah well, guess I can't really play innocent anymore, can I?"
The fire nearest to her cracked and sizzled out. In the distance some lose wreckage fell in on itself. Washu felt her eyes growing heavy then weightless for a new sound just behind her. She lifted herself up on both hands, then one arm, then both elbows. A bending and scraping weight pressed itself into the lighter wreckage, then pressed in again. Two nearly identical noises now, slowly working their way up to her feet then separating, one settling on each side of her hips.
***
He could not tell who collided with him first, as the second was less than a second behind. Both women clutched his chest with every breath of life, yet they were still somehow too frail to do more than scratch him. In proper balance he wrapped his arms around them and squeezed with all his strength. His head fell in surrender, landing between the two conflicted yet equally soft patches of hair. They clutched tighter and he shook his head in shame, letting the motion evolve into a nuzzle, a touch of how precious they were. Two muffled sobs died mid birth before one managed to crawl out of his throat.
"I'm sorry. I'm ^so^ ^sorry^!"
They commiserated silently for long enough to feel the cramps in their positions, however, it was the part of Tenchi that rose above pain that broke the soothing embrace. They looked at him at first in desperation, frail enough to share him so long as it meant not letting go, delusional enough for another moment.
The understanding between them chose another opportune time to assert itself. Each stepped back, hands crossed before their waists. Aeka lowered her head and began to speak, in a monotone characteristic of a person still confronting trauma. Ryoko's head just kept sinking farther away from Tenchi's eyes.
"He---Seita, I mean---Washu; she stopped him somehow, with a new device. I believe she has him trapped in her lab now."
Tenchi gaped at a new battle for the right questions, this time looking at Ryoko to fill them in. She confined her face to the floor and her breath to a shudder.
"What should we do now, Lord Tenchi?"
Aeka looked away from the closet door. Tenchi felt something weaken in the face of so much longing, at the sound of something ever fragile for being broken more than once. His first instinct asked that they all pray, however, memories of what had answered the past two times he'd done so--- sincerely, they came back like rising bile. He held his arms and tested a rebuilding seriousness on the closet door.
"We wait."
***
Washu never took her eyes away from the floor in front of her, but she could see Seita perfectly, standing over her as she crawled through the ruins of her lab. She ignored the pain and kept both elbows strong.
Tense hands, fingers slightly parted, spread over either side of her vision. They overlapped at the tips and moved slowly to cover her eyes, she willed herself not flinch as they divided again a millimeter from her nose and caressed along both cheeks with all the delicate patience of a curious blind man. His thumbs resting against her head, his middle fingers pulled strands of hair back over her ears.
Seita's flesh was cold and smooth like she'd imagined, the envy of a snake for all the power it could hide. A nauseating fear bore its roots through her from the tips of tiny sharpened nails as they traced her jaw line and pressed into her jugular with arrogant restraint. The rubble shifted under his feet as he moved them up, quiet lechery trembled a breath against her ear. For some strange reason she believed that if she imagined a pit of all the unspeakable acts he could do to her he'd feel compelled to think of something else, something unexpected.
"It looks as though you've been keeping secrets as well---'Little' Washu." Steaming venom over twisted fangs frightened the marrow of the stars slightly less than continued silence would have.
She could almost feel the hair behind her ear rising into his nostrils as he filled his lungs with more than should have been able to fit in such a slender frame. Washu had to close her eyes now, he was not just gloating; he was savoring the moment. Whether or not the tactic would have worked; whatever this creature had planned for her she surely couldn't have imagined it without screaming herself mute.
"Though I suppose, if I had this much beauty to offer, I wouldn't let just ^anyone^ see it either." Seita moved his lips closer to her ear, slow breaths hardly obscuring his excitement. Washu's own clenched teeth turned merely melted composure into a shivering steam.
"It's a shame how much reassuring I've had to do here; even if you feel helpless now, I already feel terribly bold just making this much physical contact. Indeed, I had thought our first session to be the last." The hiss had softened slightly into an attempt at perverse seduction. Washu tried in vain to think past fear, to obtain some glance at whether he was being sincere, and to debate whether or not it mattered.
"But my time here grows shorter with each of its rewards; I only wonder which will run out first."
Washu clutched manically at the rubble beneath her hands, considering again some final desperate attack. She heard him step back, and could feel him standing over her again, she tried to judge his position as she reached for a piece of sword-sized pipe.
"Perhaps we'd have had a better chance under ever inverting circumstances, but I still have my masterpiece to offer and-"
Seita cut himself off, apparently considering a sudden inspiration. Washu grasped the pipe tightly, not daring to even move her eyes to check its length. A rising chuckle froze her.
"How ironic that what was once delaying me has now given me more time--- everyone will be waiting patiently in the living room, thinking that you are having your way with me in here, never knowing that all the while I'll be-"
His air wailed to be taken in so coldly. Washu recognized the feeling of white in her knuckles.
"Hmm, yes, oh yes!" He appraised himself with wicked glee. "A perfect analysis; as I leave you for someone else now-" he paused dramatically and Washu felt his breath against her ear again.
"The phrase: ^age before beauty^, it suddenly seems so very fitting!"
Almost bright with pride, his sharpened emptiness lifted and left her with the same untouchable chuckle. The loathsome sensation she instantly recognized as oblivion came and went in a spare moment. Seita's choice of words pieced together in her mind clearly enough to make her choke in renewed terror. She demanded the further advanced pain pilgrimage turn back in the name of dragging herself unburdened. Another motivational line drove her forward again, this time only a word, the simple name of a quiet man.
***
Tea steam billowed out from three separate angles of the living room, one from an idle cup on the center table and the others from tense hand cradles. Ryoko shifted her palms over her knees, studying tiny kimono creases. She looked up at Tenchi then across to Aeka, both engrossed with their own leaves. It was now the fourth time she had to tell herself not to look over at Washu's door. A strange thing to count, she thought, but better than any other distraction from the heavy silence. She'd already lost count of how many times she'd built up and lost the will to speak. When Tenchi took the initiative his low voice filled house.
"Ryoko?"
She had to swallow thickly and stare back to make sure she had actually heard him. Although he didn't look up, she couldn't help replying in as polite a voice as she could manage.
"Yes, Tenchi?"
"Do you-" he began with obvious difficulty. She could not tell if he were about to break something or burst into tears. The vision of him doing both made her bite her lip and clench her fists till he continued.
His renewed attempt at deadpan seriousness was only slightly less unnerving.
"Do you think that Washu will---will really kill him?"
"I don't know." She nearly whispered, head down again, guilty glad for the strands of hair hiding her eyes.
Tenchi's silence brought her to number five. Maybe five and one now that she had to also fight off the urge to listen in on her mother's thoughts, to attempt it anyway.
She found seventy-three folds in the curtains this time. Her ears began to strain, searching through the silence like a ravenous cloud. Wind and insects seemed to wonder what all the fuss was about. She grabbed her tea and took a quick sip just so she might have a sore tongue as a new distraction. By some subconscious need for balance, Aeka set her own cup down on the table. She began in a voice showing Tenchi the proper way to be seriously afraid.
"Tenchi...what is he?"
His face froze with the pressure of a million thoughts. He wouldn't have imagined it was a strange comfort to both of them to hear him speak so much like Yosho, even if his answer seemed an ominous deterrent of any other questions.
"I managed to ask him, and I don't think even he knows."
***
Seita looked at the first step up to Misaki Shrine, letting his focus blur to keep from blinking a little longer. No trance intended, calculations moved perfect circles and parallel lines into his jaw. A similar busy signal poked points into both thumbs till they couldn't hold back the tremble. He closed his eyes and covered nervousness with a long breath let out in a quick jab. Frowning with seriousness, no, not with displeasure, he squinted up an estimation of the ascent; no, distance by step size by leg strength didn't equal good time. Puffing back lean shoulders and puffing up a vivid smile, his thoughts were clear.
*No more plan. No more wait.
A tiny blossom came gliding down on a collision course with the tall man's face. Grin shifted to the better side, he caught it and nearly crushed it in his fist. Neck muscles loosening to better appreciate this prize as each finger opened better than a blossom. He picked up the tiny hors derv with his favorite little nail. He'd enjoy it, the way he'd enjoyed all the other 'natural' beauties Tenchi's home had to offer, more so now by looking down his tiara on the quaint and homey runners up. It should be honored for any kind of admiration.
The light pink offering passed on and back to the wind, freeing itself from Seita's nail. He imagined it moving the same way from a spider's web or a decaying pile of countless other castoffs. This frown took his brow down with it, but no, not displeased, just very serious. The oblivion portal crossed the distance between himself and the last step in one step.
As planned, he would spread his arms out and inhale pungent tree sap, mildewed stone carvings, and sweet incense. As planned, he would stroll into a little paradise, untouched by the acidic and polished urban excretions. Such an apex of purity and tranquility would invigorate him. He squeezed both hands to his sides in curious frustration and sniffed as rapidly as a rodent.
The midday sun was still bright, the tree noise still white, the shrine's courtyard empty, and he frowned again. His heartbeat had quickened, all the pleasant smells were there, but they were not washing over him in a symphony, they came one at a time on assembly line notes. How could they be suddenly so mundane and simultaneously make him so physically tense? He shot his breath through a grounded brow, forcefully spreading both hands, throwing his lungs in wide fishing nets to consume all the ethers of the euphoric soup offered to all other visitors. A strong west wind didn't change anything but his skin texture. He sucked his tongue to the roof of his mouth. He bit down and waited for an attack. Three leaves and another blossom passed through him like bullets through a ghost.
More wind shook the trees then caught and tried in vain to tangle Seita's perfect hair, the flag kept claiming in his name. Squinting, nearly sneering the distance to Katshuhito's office, he took one, two, three, calculating steps forward and stopped for another look around, this time moving his head till an inspirational grin clenched violently back into his neck. The wind kept pouring over him, he now imagined, like a locked chain rattling on a gate. He sucked it in through his teeth till his lips crinkled. Old stones shone in the sun, he now envisioned, like useless old men, their helpless indignity trembling to replace his own nervousness.
"There is emotional residue here," Seita churned a whisper in his throat.
Rolling one shoulder back at a time, shedding a robe. The dark lavender business suit swirled on like a glove while a black tie slinked out of a ticket machine. Clear gel on invisible hands pulled his hair into a tight ponytail.
"A lot of it." The judgment strolled him forward, hands held confidently behind his back. Yosho's office starred back unflinching.
"Making peace with lost relatives."
Not a trance, too sharp for that, but his voice did slither out for himself and anything special lurking in the empty quiet.
"Asking spirits to watch over their children."
Icicle blue thinned enough to drip malice into the cracks round the office door. He took ever more leisurely steps, but hissed with such enthusiasm that he sounded less like a demon and more like a decrepit basilisk.
"^Making peace^...^asking spirits^."
An even stronger wind dissipated his hair tie and blasted platinum forward. Old wood groaned and whistled under the scratch of dead leaves. He stopped and opened his mouth enough to let it quiver, lifting his chin to sensually closed eyes. Ready to shadow the angles in white cake makeup, the song stopped on a haunted recite and a mistrusting dimple grin.
"These energies bend around me. Revulsion."
"Adversity.
"They'll forget their heavens as I have them forsake their soils. And they know it."
Reopened softer, his eyes wavered, unaffected by a strand of hair blown into his mouth. It slid out along his bottom lip. The wind was still blowing when the locks retied themselves in one and sat perfect, still.
"Acting us past the heroes.
"Painting us past the gods.
"Thinking us past the stars...and now they know it."
His shoe settled onto the first step with an audible 'tap'.
"And now it feels like my very presence here is a desecration."
The final steps up to the door pressed his lips together roughly and puckered them back out like a teasing whore; Seita spoke with delaying excitement, a first time customer holding tight to their venom in glorious, merciless refinement.
"My vision---soon---avenged.
"My vision---soon---reborn.
"The ghost---of madness---ascends.
"Oblivion's---oath---be ^sworn^!"
Another impromptu verse shook him giddy and vile, he clenched it quiet and stopped at knocking distance. He could smell the tea brewing inside, told himself he would hear the old man's breath were it not for his own, told himself the grandest projected entrance would still not be enough.
A fresh cloud of leaves rained down across the courtyard. Seita smiled a moment's peace and nearly thought aloud.
*It almost sounds like water...
What might have been a burst of laughter strained to snap through his neck.
He refocused it on what he hoped was the sturdiest part of the door, and kicked for real.
