Chapter 2
D-
D stood and walked away from Leon's body, the shell that remained of who Leon truly was. That
part of Leon no longer mattered to D. He knew that Leon would be returning one day, but there
was something he had to take care of now.
Chris was mute, unable to speak for almost a year now. Since before he'd come to live here with D and Leon, Chris had not been able to find his voice. That was another story. Though Chris' mouth was open in a soundless scream, Tet-chan and D could clearly hear his mournful cry. It was something like telepathy, but not exactly. It was as good a word as any. Chris and the pets could understand each other's speech for the same reason that Chris could see their true forms. He was innocent and needed them. Leon used to have the same ability, though he didn't even know it. Most humans grew out of the ability as they grew up.
-He's dead!- Chris wailed, clutching Tet-chan's brightly colored silk vest. -My brother! My brother-
Tears streamed freely down Chris' face and his mouth was open in a silent scream of anguish. The
poor child had been turned away from the rest of his family and now his only blood relative who
loved him was dead.
"Shhh." Tet-chan stroked Chris' hair as gently as his clawed fingers would allow and held Chris on his lap. Tet-chan, as much as he loved Chris, didn't know what do to with his armful of a crying child. He'd only just gotten used to being a baby-sitter for the young human, this tragedy wasn't something he'd been prepared to deal with. Tet-chan looked at D desperately, even as he held one hand over the wound in Chris' arm and tried to comfort him. "It'll be all right, Chris."
-He killed Leon!-
D held out his arms and Tet-chan gratefully tried to hand over his teary burden, but Chris wasn't so willing to let go of his protector and held onto Tet-chan as tightly as he could. In the end, D sat on the floor and helped to comfort Chris the same was Tet-chan was, by simply petting him and whispering words of reassurance. "Oh, my poor little Chris." D said when Chris was finally starting to calm down, exhausted by his own hysterics. "You must not upset yourself so."
Chris looked up at D with a horrified expression of betrayal. -Leon's dead! Don't you care?-
It made D's heart hurt to hear such a tone in Chris' voice. "I care very much, but Leon is not gone."
Chris looked over D's shoulder at Leon's body and then back to D. He started to shake and D knew that Chris was nearing a break down. Even his mind voice, the only voice he'd had since he'd learned that he'd killed his mother, was chaotic and noisy. He couldn't think straight enough to speak even with his mind.
"My little one, Leon will come back to us. He is just going to be away for a little while." D began to stroke Chris' face, running his long fingers down Chris' cheek. He is the mirror image of dearest Leon from his ice blue eyes to his golden hair. "Only his body is dead, not his spirit. You will need to sleep for a short while and when you wake, he will have come back to us."
Chris leaned back against Tet-chan's chest. -I'm not tired. I don't want to sleep. I want to be awake when Leon comes back.- As usual, he had accepted what he was told without question.
D wasn't used to taking no for an answer. This time, when he reached for Chris, the boy came to him willingly and cuddled into my embrace trustingly. D carried Chris away from Leon's body, thinking that there was no sense in making Chris stay in the same room as his brother's corpse, and into the back of the petshop.
For anyone who has never been granted the privilege of seeing passed the front room of the petshop,
it was almost indescribable. There were two parts of the petshop, basically. The front room was
for the customers to roam and shop for their desired pets. Then there was a separation area where D
had his parlor; the room where Leon often joined him for tea and sweets, where Chris did his
homework, and the place where most customers never passed. Two large red doors that led into the
back room. The back room was a simple name for a very complex area. It was simple to D's mind,
how such a place existed in the tiny area of a Chinatown petshop, but D could never explain it to a
human. Their minds weren't designed for such knowledge.
There was a labyrinth of passages and an uncountable number of doors that led into wild rooms.
There were rooms that held entire deserts and rooms for jungles. There were more human style
rooms with beds for the pets that liked that sort of thing and there were rooms beyond imagining.
Misty and dark or filled with light, a place where a single stairway rose into infinity were a few of
the more odd rooms. Among these fantastic rooms were my personal bedchambers and Chris' room.
In all of the Petshop, Chris' room was perhaps the most out of place room. The walls were a bright,
cheery blue and had airplanes painted in bright yellow. There was a baseball glove on the floor
along with several comic books and the bed hadn't been made. It looked like any child's room and
most of it had been done by Leon. He'd always felt guilty that he hadn't been able to give Chris more
of a home. "I can't do much for the kid, D." Leon had told D when he was struggling to make his hand
painted airplanes look as real as possible. "So I think I should do as much as I can." Leon had
looked simply adorable with yellow paint on his cheek after wiping his face with one hand.
Leon's own feelings of his inability to raise a child was yet another of the difficulties of D's two favorite humans. Leon was a police detective and a very hard working one. He also was not terribly well paid. That one fact make it almost impossible for him to have Chris live with him. The only home Leon could afford was a one room apartment and he rarely ate well. Leon had a lot of bad habits that he was well aware of and he had his own issues. He believed that he would never be a good parent, though D knew he was wrong. Because he loved Chris, Leon had chosen to have Chris live with D. Not that D minded. Chris is a good boy, smart and responsible. D couldn't want a better child.
D took Chris to his bed and lay him down before examining the bullet wound on his arm. It wasn't terrible, but D would heal it after Chris went to sleep to spare him any pain. Tet-chan, never far from Chris, crawled under the bed. He had always seemed to like being under things, though normally he stayed under the sofa or the coffee table in the parlor. It was almost normal to see Tet-chan's goat form doing that, but in his human shape, it was pretty odd to see his face peering out at you from under the furniture.
-I don't want to sleep.- Chris objected again as D pulled up the blankets around him. -I want to see Leon.-
"I know. But you need to rest and Leon will be a while in coming back." D leaned down and, as he did every night, kissed Chris on the forehead. This time was a bit different. When he kissed Chris, D made him sleep. It was a soft, gentle suggestion and Chris just closed his eyes and fell into a deep sleep. "Tet-chan."
"Yes, count?" Tet-chan peeked out from under the bed and looked up at D.
D saw that even Tet-chan's eyes looked a bit watery, as if he wanted to cry, but was resisting it. Sympathetically, D held his arms out to Tet-chan. Though Tet-chan looked like a teen-ager, he, like Chris, was only a child and sometimes needed a hug.
All right, so he was man-eating child with very big teeth and a savage disposition. He was still a child.
Tet-chan loved and admired D more than anyone else, and though he didn't want to show weakness in front of him, Tet-chan just couldn't resist the invitation. He crawled out from under the bed and up into D's arms. It was the place he most loved to be, in D's arms, but Tet-chan didn't look much happier.
"Are you sad to lose Leon, too?" D asked, petting Tet-chan's shaggy hair.
"Of course not!" Tet-chan tried to sound tough while he was sniffling, but it didn't work well. "I just wanted to eat that dumb human, you know that, Count. He was stupid and clumsy. He always made a mess anywhere he went and...and..." Tet-chan cuddled into D. "I'm just sad for Chris. He's a good kid and now he has to be so sad."
D didn't bother to contradict Tet-chan. He was almost as stubborn as Leon was. "Chris is going to sleep for a very long time, Tet-chan. While he is sleeping he is going to be completely helpless."
Tet-chan looked at D fiercely. "He won't be helpless, I'll be with him! I'll take care of him."
"But can you do that all on your own?" D asked softly, lazily running a long fingernail down the side of Tet-chan's face. "It may take many years for Leon to return to us. Even you can not stay awake long enough to guard him all of the time. I wish you to chose two to help you guard Chris while he sleeps. I trust you with his life, Tet-chan."
At that, Tet-chan puffed out his chest, almost comically, with pride. "I'll chose Ten-chan and Pon-chan."
D admit to being a bit confused about Tet-chan's choices. Ten-chan was a kitsune, one of the nine tailed fox spirits, and was extremely clever. Where Tet-chan was savage and strong, Ten-chan made up for it with his speed and wits. Ten-chan also had the ability to disguise himself as any other living creature he chose.
D couldn't understand why Tet-chan had chosen Pon-chan, however. "Are you sure about Pon-chan?"
Tet-chan nodded. "Chris trusts her and she's loyal to him. She can keep him company if nothing else and she'll do everything she can to protect him. She can raise an alarm and call one of us, if she needs to. I know Chris would want Pon-chan with him."
D nodded, satisfied. It wasn't as if there was any real danger this deep in the petshop and nothing was likely to get in without D's knowing about it. Still, there was always a chance that something could happen and D was not willing to take the chance of losing Chris as well as Leon.
Time passed.
The Earth, despising stagnation, changed.
While humans continued destroying the only home they had, D's clan, the Kami clan, worked to save it. Setting in motion events that would lead to a change so great that survival was not certain.
The Kami clan of Earth was made up of only three living creatures. Sofu D, D, and then little baby D were all of the Kami that existed on Earth. All three of them were exact copies of each other, except for their eyes and hair. D had one purple eye and one golden eye. His grandfather, Sofu, had golden eyes while his younger brother had purple eyes, as our papa once had. Sofu had his hair trimmed quite short while D's hair nearly reached his shoulders and Baby D's hair was sort of in between.
"I don't like this idea, Sofu." D told Sofu when they all met in the petshop's parlor one evening. At this point, nearly fifty years had passed since Leon's death and Chris' induced sleep. The petshop had remained open for business as usual, though D found much of his pleasure in life had been lost after Leon had died. "To kill so many..."
"We are killing no one, grandson." Sofu corrected D. "I will arrange events that will give humans a choice. They will chose to kill themselves with war."
Baby D, no longer a baby, asked, "What if they don't chose to kill themselves? It's a choice so they might chose another way." Baby D looked as if he was nearly ten, in human terms. He was young enough that he still spent most of his time with Sofu, but old enough that he was starting to develop opinions of his own.
"They will chose what I wish them to chose, little one." Sofu kept smiling at his younger grandson.
"I am well versed in human nature and I know what they will chose." Then he turned back to D. "I
will take baby D with me and we will start this war. No," He said before D could interrupt. "I do not
care what you like or do not like. The humans are destroying the Earth and we must stop them. For
the good of all the millions of lives, we will sacrifice the humans."
"There must be another way." D insisted, though he already knew what Sofu would answer. Papa D had hated humans as dearly as D love them, but Sofu was indifferent. He refused to give his heart to any animal, human or otherwise.
"You are far to involved with humans." Sofu said in a tranquil tone. "You have given to much of yourself to them to
often and it colors your judgment. There is no other way. You will stay here in your petshop and
care for the animals. I will send them to you, enough of each species to save the race, if need be.
This will devastate the Earth and I wish to restock the planet with animals when the humans are
finished with their destruction."
"Will you also send me enough humans to restock them if their species is endangered?" D asked, a bit testily. The suggestion that D was unfit to do his duty as a Kami hurt, even if D knew it was true. Sofu didn't trust D to do this. For the good of the Earth, humans needed to have their technology and civilization taken away. If millions or even billions of them died, D shouldn't care. That was the way of the Kami.
But D did care and believed that he always would.
Humans were the most destructive of all animals on Earth and thinning the herd, so to speak, would be good for them in the long run. D couldn't help but worry, what if Leon was reborn only to be killed in this coming war Sofu was planning?
Sofu didn't bother to answer D's question for a long moment. "The humans will be allowed to become extinct, if they are not fit to survive."
And so it was allowed to happened. D kept to himself in the small San Francisco petshop, selling pets to those who would come to him, and seeking out new and wondrous creatures for his vast collection of pets. He had no contact with Sofu or his younger brother for many years while they influenced certain humans into making certain choices.
It was in the petshop that the greatest treasures of Earth were kept. Like the ancient fable of Noah's ark, animals slowly made their way to the petshop where they were given shelter and D protected those who would populate Earth in the coming years.
D never could bear to see harm come to any living creature, and he could not bring himself to help his family bring death to humanity. Oh, he could manage it on a small scale; the customers of his shop who broke their word or mistreated D's beloved pets were the most notable example. It hurt D to hurt any living creature, but unlike Sofu, D had never learned to harden myself to this emotion. D love humanity as surely as he love felines or reptilians or any other of the magnificent, beautiful creatures of Earth.
'I ca not help it. I am Kami. I was created to love Earth and all of her children. I, like the rest of my clan, had been created to protect life, not destroy it.'
The war was a gambol. A chance that none of them liked to take, but one they all knew was necessary. A small conversation between three humans was all it took to start the third world war. It was pure devastation on a global level. There was not a species of animal or plant on the face of the Earth that was left unaffected by the war.
"We had to do it." Sofu D had told baby D and D afterwards to reassure them. "To save the Earth we had to purify it. The humans had caused to much destruction. They do to much damage and we must be fair to all creatures of our world."
Baby D, looking as if he were about the human age of thirteen, left Sofu's side and came to embrace D. "It was awful, Da Ge. There was so much death. It hurt." Baby D was shaking, sounding like he wanted to cry. This was the first time he'd witnessed such a mass of death. "I could feel them all dying. Everything's dying."
"And they will keep dying." D told him as he rubbed his brother's back. "You will have to try to feel the ones who still live." D took his brother's face, an almost perfect copy of his own face, and lifted it so his brother would look at him. "There are many who still live and those are the ones who will give you pleasure with their lives."
"And those are the ones who will revive the Earth." Sofu spoke softly as he watched them. "My dear little ones, we are the guardians of this world. We must not let the pain of a few deaths take us from our work."
Baby D nodded but didn't pull himself away from D. "That's not just a few deaths, Sofu." Baby D said. "We...we killed almost everything."
"No, little one," Sofu corrected, his smile never faltering. "We did not kill anyone. We are Kami. We do not kill. We merely presented the humans with a choice. It was their decision to begin this pointless war."
"But," Baby D continued. "We didn't give any of the other creatures of Earth a choice. Why do they have to suffer and die, too?"
Sofu turned away, keeping his reasons to himself, as always.
"It's not fair." Baby D was suddenly angry and D held him tightly to prevent him from doing anything that he would regret later. Baby D was old enough to understand that Sofu was not one to be made angry, but he was still young enough that he wasn't quite able to control his emotions.
"Nothing is fair." D told him. "But we will survive and the Earth will flourish again. If you had not done what you did, humans would have destroyed the Earth beyond repair. This way is better, in the end. I do not have to like it, but I do understand."
Baby D didn't look convinced and clung to D for a few minutes longer. 'He is so unlike papa.' D thought back to the few memories he had of their papa. Our papa had been quite insane. It was because of papa's death that baby D's life was created.
D shook his head to rid myself of these thoughts. I didn't like thinking about the necessary death of their papa. It had happened long ago, but still hurt.
The plan had worked, thankfully, and Sofu and Baby D had set to work trying to rebuild the Earth.
The animals sheltering within the petshop were released back to the Earth and given instruction to
start breeding as soon as possible.
Humanity, surprisingly, had survived the war. Sofu had decided, after a while, that he would allow the humans to rebuild themselves without interference. "They will be given another chance." Sofu told D. "Just once more, we will see if they are capable of survival." It was in this rebirth of humanity that something...unexpected happened.
"I was not expecting this development." Sofu confessed on one of his many visits to the petshop. The petshop had long since ceased to be a petshop and now merely looked like a small house in the middle of a young forest. "These newcomers are not apart of my plan."
D merely poured himself another cup of tea, knowing that Sofu wouldn't drink any. "What will you do about these intruders?"
Sofu looked at D from under the cowl of his ever-present robe. "You are taking the news of this invasion very calmly."
"Invasion?" D looked up at Sofu with a mildly confused expression. "You make it sound as if we are at war with these Vulcans."
"At war? Do not be absurd, grandson. We are not a people to fight with lower creatures. I am simply curious about why they are here. We were not asked, after all."
D really didn't care. He hadn't been outside the doors of his home in almost seventy-five years and lately had little concerned about what happened outside. What happened outside was the business of Sofu and Baby D. "Why do you not just kill them?" D suggested. "They are not of Earth and as they have come here it is within our rights to do what we please with them." Since these Vulcans were not children of Earth, D had no feelings for them one way or the other. D was content to let them be or kill them. Whatever.
Heaving a heavy sigh that was actually very unlike him, Sofu turned away slightly. "It would cause difficulties with others of our kind. For now, I think I will try to ignore them."
D almost laughed, but wisely held himself in check. "Sofu, perhaps you underestimate humans, again.
You have described Vulcans to be a highly civilized people. Perhaps they will help humans to regain
their civilization."
"Do you think that is so wise an idea? Civilization was what nearly killed Earth in the first place. I was thinking about keeping humans living in caves for a while. It may do them some good."
"Change is unavoidable and desirable, Sofu. Perhaps it is time for humans to grow up a little. Where is my little brother, by the way?" D asked.
Sofu stood up and began to walk out of the petshop. "Hardly little any longer. He is nearly a century old, after all."
And so, while we looked on, watching and waiting for the Earth to rebuild itself, the humans strengthened with help from the Vulcans. Humanity grew and prospered, even going so far as to stretch out into the stars and away from the loving mother that had given them life.
Sofu had been furious, though he didn't show it outright. He did not rant and rave, threatening to destroy all humans as my papa would have done. Instead, he was hard on the humans who would leave our home world. "They chose to leave us and our protection, I will waste no effort on retrieving them." He told D at one time. "They can live or die out there in the empty void they have chosen."
There came a war with a people called Klingons followed by many years of peace and the world seemed to be settling down around the petshop. D had not opened the doors of his home for several centuries when he knew, beyond all doubt, that he should go to the stars that his little humans seemed to love so dearly.
He don't know why, but he had to go.
The Earth no longer needed D as little Baby D, now with the appearance of a twenty-year-old human, had his own petshop in England and was doing very well. He was now known as Count D and D believed Earth and her children were in good hands with the younger Kami.
"Everyone," D said, gathering most of his pets around him one early morning. "I will be leaving Earth shortly." There was a stunned silence as they all watched him with wide, frightened eyes. Some of them were frightened and some looked puzzled, but most just waited for D to continue. "It would be unfair of me to ask you all to come with me, so if you wish to stay on Earth, my younger brother will take you all into his menagerie."
Tet-chan, taking a small break from his guard duty with Chris, stepped forward and spoke for everyone. "We won't leave you, Count. We won't ever leave you."
D's heart could have broken with happiness at that one statement. They had such faith in me that they were willing to follow him away from their mother and into the unknown.
To be continued...