The Rebound Effect: Again!
Chapter 2: Awakening

Disclaimer: Characters and setting copyright Ken Akamatsu. Spoilers, those that might appear, would be from the end of the manga series (vol 14).

Again, thoughts are in the style /thought/ much like "spoken" works.

The world swirled softly around Urashima Keitaro and memories best kept buried bubbled across his consciousness. Always, the same nightmare rushed in on his sleep. The seaside inn that they had gone to that fateful night to celebrate after Seta and Keitaro's big find slid across before him. Followed by the creatures that had come... after. And, as always, that sickly sweet taste welled up in his mouth and made him want to vomit. The dreams had grown more vivid over time and more horrific. During his wakeful time, he knew that many of the things the dreams showed him had not happened, but they were a consistently growing cancer in his nocturnal reverie.

The specters of memory persisted even as he fought to free himself from the visions, and Keitaro didn't know whether to run, fight, or collapse. Guilt and anger and fear warred within him, even after having the same dream every night for six hundred years. Guilt at having lived through that night when so many others did not was strong, but not as strong as the guilt at having done... what had to be done after. He would have been dead within days after it was all over if it hadn't been for the actions of his partners. The same thought drove a wedge into the dream as it always did, and he used the memory to draw himself free of the worst of the dreamscape.

Sour emotions sheeted from his mind as so much rainwater across glass as he pulled himself free from the dream and into a state somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. There was light on the other side of his closed eyes, though the lethargy that had settled about him made opening them a rough prospect at best. In this half state between sleep and wakefulness, between life and death, he found himself oddly at ease. The waking world held little for him and the sleeping world was only torment, but here, in the "between", he found some solace. It would not last for long as voices drifted through the void in which he floated, each of them sinking one of a small hook of consciousness into his being and pulling him slowly toward the surface.

"What was he... bath? ... You ... nephew?" Words slipped through his mind like tiny fish in a stream, swirling and darting in a cloud of color and movement. As he rose higher and higher, fish become larger and fewer for some reason, and their colors more complex.

Another voice cut across, stronger and older, accompanied by a faint whiff of cigarette smoke. "He... nothing wrong... should be..."

And then, as though his mind were a soap bubble floating up from some great depth, he found himself thrust into another realm of awareness, though whether he had just awoken or slipped back into the dreams he could not be sure. Sometimes the dreams started like this, though the pain filling his skull was definitely something new. The pain forced a groan from his lips before he could still them, and his hand involuntarily drifted to his face. "Where am I..." he asked in slurred Basic.

"I thought you said he was your nephew, Haruka. Why's he babbling in Chinese?" His eyes flew open at the voice which was speaking in rich, perfect Japanese. His eyes found the speaker quickly, a young girl still in her teens, and he could only stare at her dumbfounded, though her name was right at the front of his mind. The whole situation was mind-boggling and quite likely a dream, but he hadn't survived over six hundred years by being slow on the uptake. Not after that night, anyway.

"I am sorry, Mit... ma'am. I have been abroad for a little while," he said with a wavering voice. He laughed nervously though the sound of his own voice painted the inside of his mind with a forest of needles and jagged knives. In his dreams, they were always older, as he had seen them before their deaths. He stopped laughing and the lancing pain in his head receded a bit and it was almost possible to think.

"Wierdo," one of the girls growled. With his head clearing, Keitaro didn't have to look to know that the voice belonged to none other than Narusegawa Naru. Her voice was etched forever on his soul, though it was more spiteful than he remembered. Regardless of what she said, he found himself reluctant to look in her direction. In his nightmares, his subconscious self often saved the worst of its nastiness to heap out upon her, and looking at her too soon might cause his subconscious to begin the slow spiral of torment all the faster.

"You should be more careful where you take a bath," said another of the assembled women, though this time it was his aunt who spoke. She was younger than he remembered her, though not as young as the others looked. He hadn't known her when she was really young, of course.

"Sorry," he mumbled as he managed to take in his surroundings. Someone had laid him out on a soft surface which appeared to be the couch in the lobby of the Hinatasou. All around him the landscape of his memories was perfectly preserved, though he hadn't been inside the Hinatasou, or what was left of it, in many centuries. Seated and standing around him were the girls he remembered from the happy days of his youth, full of vibrant life. Even glancing at Naru did not bring on the normal pangs of the nightmare world, which brought forth the strong suspicion that this might be something other than a dream.

"So, what's with the sudden visit? Miss your dear aunt?" Haruka chided, apparently doing her best to diffuse the tension in the room. Thoughts swirled through his head. If this weren't a dream then he was going to need to play along for a while. However, how did reality fit in here? He couldn't very well tell them that he'd just gone unconscious aboard an Imperial frigate while traveling the stars. Even if this were a trick of some sort, such an absurdity would serve him no good.

Seeing that he was still groggy, Haruka apparently decided to drive the conversation a little more. "If you're looking for grandma, she's not around. It's getting pretty late, though. This is a girl's dormitory now so you probably can't stay here, but I've got a spare room down at my tea house if you like. You're at Toudai now, right? Are you heading back in the morning?"

"Well, I guess..." he began, but didn't have a chance to finish as the word 'Toudai' seemed to electrify the girls. He had been roped into staying at the Hinatasou for the night and given his grandmother's room before he could get his verbal and mental feet back under himself. It was only when he got a moment alone in his room and saw his things that he remembered that he hadn't gotten into Toudai until he'd been at the Hinatasou for over two years.

He pawed through his things, but not finding anything useful, ducked out of his room via the window before he could do any more damage.

The cool night air through the trees cleared his mind and made the dream a pleasant one. /Is this a dream?/ he wondered to himself. Certainly, he'd never experienced one like it before. Usually, the change from pleasant to horrific did not take so long and was far more predictable than this.

/No, his time is different,/ he decided. Maybe it was a different kind of dream, and it was waiting for something to trigger the nightmare, though what that could be was a complete mystery. /Maybe I'm dead? This could be heaven./ The thought made him smile slightly. Certainly, he had spent six hundred years dreaming of a world where that night hadn't happened, and this seemed to be it.

It all was so real, like a page ripped from his memories, though even more vivid than he could recall. Even now, he couldn't remember the way the wind would whip across the land around the Hinatasou, but if he opened his eyes and watched it, it felt right and true. /If this isn't a dream, what is it?/

His last memories were clear. He had caught a fleeting glimpse out of a porthole and seen the space itself buckling and warping in an impossible wave of energy that rushed toward them. It was bigger than any blast he had ever seen, and would have ripped the frigate into a thousand rusted pieces if it had impacted. Maybe it had, and by some miracle he hadn't been obliterated. Maybe he was floating in vacuum, frozen and cursed by his immortality, waiting for a chance to burn up while reentering some atmosphere somewhere and this was his mind's way of passing the time.

Whatever was going on, he was reliving his childhood. Or, rather, the start of his life. He smiled softly at that thought. When he looked back on his life, he always started with this day and went forward, never backward. Maybe it was a second chance to do everything over again, and do it right.

He laughed to himself. Time travel was impossible, he knew. Science and magic both had show that a change to the past would result in a paradox which would result in the change never having taken place. Thus it was impossible to change anything. He sighed and thought about it for a bit. If this was some method of time travel that actually worked, then why was he the only apparent victim?

Thinking quickly, he knew of at least five immortal beings still active in his time, two of them near and dear to his heart. However, when the girls had all been around him, she hadn't shown a glimmer of confusion or recognition. /Maybe the accident changed something.../ He shook his head to clear the thought. Speculation now wouldn't do anyone much good.

Grumbling to himself, he rose, stretching. His body certainly felt different. It was younger, certainly, but also much softer. Soft was an understatement, actually. He felt positively weak. Of course, that shouldn't have come as a surprise. At this point in his life, he hadn't gone through even a iota of the hardship and toil that six hundred years could bring, much less the hardening of training and experience.

He sighed, and felt about mentally. He was as weak as a kitten, and twice as slow in this state, but he could still feel his power there, waiting to be tapped. He drew some of it into himself and blinked in surprise at how little of it there actually was. Even from an early age, he had always been surrounded by a low level magical shield which warded off damage, but the small amount of power he could channel was almost startling. /This is all that kept me alive living with Naru?/ he wondered to himself, letting the magic go.

/Geeze, it's a miracle I ever saw 25,/ he thought as he summoned up the magic again. Already, he could feel sweat forming across his brow from the effort. /How the mighty have fallen,/ he lamented. In his time, he was arguably the most powerful magician still in existence. With the activities of the Inquisition, those with the ability to use magic, or the "taint" as they called it, had grown fewer and fewer. He pulled on the energy and wove it into a simple spell. "Comperio, pactio!" he intoned and he felt the magic swirl around him only to dissipate.

The spell had worked, he was fairly certain, but there was nothing to reveal. He did not have a contract with a Ministra Magi. What, exactly, that meant, he wasn't sure. If this were anything but time travel, he would have expected to feel the pull of at least one if not both contracts, but he'd felt none.

Silently, he resolved to stay out of trouble until he could figure out what was going on.

Author's notes: Needless to say, Negima is getting mixed in with the rest of the story (my intent from the start or the re-start, at least). This chapter was going to be a little longer, because I know where I want to end the next one, but I've decided to let it be short and go on and get it out there.

Comperio, pactio : Bad Latin on my part, but the words mean something akin to "reveal all, the contract" or the like. It's not conjugated at all. If someone can do better with Latin, please help me out ;)