Growing Pains

05: Freeze your Brain

Auteur : Rain

Disclaimer : Shaman King…. Doesn't belong to me! How surprising! I am only playing with borrowed toys.

Notes :

To kill; to long; to rest.

Or: Jeanne has a panic attack, Tamao feels very alone, and Hao doesn't have half the bad time he thought he would.


She doesn't have time to process it, not really. They are not here to dawdle; they are here to board the Patch plane. So they hang back, in the far recesses of the American base that her people take to like fishes to the water, and wait.

And wait.

Because, though people are slowly boarding the plane, Hao hasn't. He is, apparently, wandering aimlessly around the base, nicking food left and right, threatening children. Every soldier on the team knows in their bones that boarding before him would be equivalent to drawing a bull's eye on them, the plane, and everyone in it.

So they wait.

And wait.

Marco speculates that he's noticed and is waiting them out and Jeanne wishes he hadn't because now she thinks it too. They have to board soon or they'll miss the plane. He does, too. So why is he still not boarding the plane?

While she can't see her men she knows they are fidgeting. The energy around is restless, waves on a fitful ocean, and she cannot help but feel like she is drowning in it.

Complex thought is always difficult in the Iron Maiden. Her people are talking and she should listen, but it grows more difficult with each passing second. The sea rises and the pain takes a backseat to the weight on her chest, the swell of thoughts in her head.

Hao knows they're here. Hao is waiting them out. Hao is toying with them, and he's so close, she saw Luchist with her own two eyes. Everything is suddenly too close. They are here and the tournament is here and she has

No

Idea

What she's doing.

Luchist bears Hao's words.

Fear washes over her and she tumbles under its tidal wave.

The Iron Maiden no longer feels like a seat of power, a tool, a throne. It feels like a hiding spot. A terrible one. She is hidden but in plain sight, and vulnerable. Chained up, literally; any confrontation would have her start slow. And she suddenly knows all too well how good metal is at heating up.

She is shivering even as heat flashes through her. Breathing is difficult; her chest is full of coal and cannot for the life of her expand. Something deep inside clamors to scratch the walls of her prison, burst out, take off for once and for all.

It is not too late to stop the train, twinkle in the treacherous thoughts. She could still jump off. Could still run.

But as the fear continues to ravage her insides she knows it is. There is no escape from the chains and the blood and the fight. There is nowhere else to go. She is dying and she is dying now, by herself, before Hao even gets to –

This doesn't make sense, Shamash cuts through, and forces her to step back. It is strange, an out of body experience, to think of the Iron Maiden in the middle of her team, and then further out, the base, Tokyo, Japan.

From all the way up there her emotions coalesce into candles. The air of the base is full of volatile oxygen, and she can see them flaring beyond her control. Fear, betrayal, incomprehension, fear, fear.

No.

Just candles.

Breathing out she focuses on visualizing the candles, on gently tapering their flames. Shamash helps her. One by one, she snuffs them, and the waves associated gently recede. As the last candle goes dark she focuses on her hand, on feeling it fully, and refuses to think of anything else.

She is holding it in the space between the pain, and focuses.

"Marco," she says at length, when she feels nothing anymore. "We should board."

And they do.

As they board she hears someone snarking about Marco's 'weird baggage', and there's almost a fight. But it's only almost a fight, and they board, and her candles stay dark.

As the plane takes off, she focuses on her hand.

The day after Yoh leaves for the Shaman Fight, Tamao cleans up his room. She dusts off his things, lets the air in, and makes sure no spirit is mucking it up in there. She may end up doing it a tad more often than necessary, but it helps, somehow. As if she were doing something for him, even though he's gone.

Once she is done she wanders downstairs. Anna is watching a new series, exactly like she was yesterday. Like nothing changed. Like…

Anna looks up.

"Do you need something?"

Tamao freezes, then blushes. What could she say?

How are you so calm? Don't you miss him? Aren't you worried?

She can't say any of that. Instead she fumbles.

"I… I just wondered. How you felt. If you are, you know… okay?"

Anna stares at her with this blank expression she so often has, and Tamao feels her hands tightening over her notebook. She shouldn't have said anything. It's not her place. Yoh isn't hers. Yoh isn't even on her skin.

And as she crumbles into excuses she watches Anna quietly run a hand across the back of her neck, where her words are. She has never read them but she knows they are Yoh's.

"Tamao, he's fine. I would know, otherwise," Anna says, and Tamao can only nod and scamper off.

Can she really tell just by her mark? It did not look like a simple body movement. It looked like Anna really… really found an answer by touching it. Like there was a thread connecting her to Yoh.

With a sigh, she sits out on the porch and rubs at her ankles. On impulse, she draws up a pant leg, the one with the Japanese on it. Would it…?

No. The words are lukewarm and quiet.

Is it selfish to feel so alone?

So.

He's met Yoh.

And Yoh is everything he wanted and nothing he wanted. He found him eating fast food on the ground of the Patch's little plane festival, idly listening to his friends. The boy is surrounded by 'friends'.

A child, really. He supposes he could not expect otherwise.

A marked child. He hasn't seen it immediately, but the boy isn't trying to hide it, and leaves his shirt open. Flared, then, and not by him, he can tell.

He isn't miffed by it. Not at all. He prefers it that way.

He still lets an ear or two wander and catches the name of 'Anna'. His brother's fiancée. How quaint. He'll have to meet her at some point, no doubt. It would be good manners to apologize for eating her betrothed.

As he finally boards the plane, almost full by that point, the chaos of so many thought processes at once hits him. Young teens, adults of all stripes, one or two children who really shouldn't be here, all screaming at him. Ah, yes. He has twelve hours of that to look forward to.

His eyes fly by the group of soldiers standing very straight at the front of the plane. They're far from him, and yet they manage to be among the loudest on this dreadful machine. He can hear the murder fantasies from all the way over where he sits, and that's almost better than some of the other thoughts he captures.

For every hour spent on this plane he will kill one of them, he decides. Not a very magnanimous thought, but he isn't trying to be. It will be just desserts for those who allow themselves to be so loud. His head is already killing him and they've barely left the ground.

Except instead of the headache setting in as time goes by, he feels… nothing. A numbness spreads over his thoughts. He still hears the words, still senses the conversations, but as if through a wall.

It is an uncomfortable sensation because it is unfamiliar, and it is also strangely pained. But it is new, and mute, and much more bearable than the chaos of the plane. Cautiously, Hao lets himself bask in the sensation, and relaxes.

One question remains.

Why do all his thoughts focus on his hand?