A/N:
I do not own or profit from any of what Kazue Kato has created.
Shiro had felt the shirt glue to his back during the maths exam. The pen had been slippery in his fingers, and fine creeks of sweat had tickled his temples and stained the paper in the stifling summer heat: but oh how grateful he had been for having maths!
Being stiff and sore from exercise was nothing new to him – Gokuro-sensei had seen to that, as P.E. had moved into more combat-oriented fields – but this was on a whole different level. Yes, he could make his muscles perform beyond their limits; but like employees forced to work overtime, they made sure he felt their displeasure afterwards. It ached. Itcreaked. It felt like his joints were ball bearings full of gravel and his muscles sprinkled with splintered glass. But it also meant his body was adapting to the increased strain, and growing stronger.
Shiro didn't take one more step than necessary outside, clinging to the shade the buildings gave and-
"Smoking on Academy premises is still not permitted, Fujimoto-kun." Well well, if it wasn't the same hot prefect that had spotted him on the first day of this school year? "That's your third warning: you're going to the principal's office."
Shiro didn't bother checking his grin. He rocked back on his heels, hands in his pockets and the glowing tip of the cigarette lolling up and down between his teeth like a dog's tail. Going to the principal's office, eh?
"It's a week and a half 'til graduation: do you really think he'll bother kicking up a fuss about this in that time?"
"He will, if it's the school's most notorious pest", she snapped confidently – hmm~ he did like a girl with bite.
"The school's most gifted prodigy", Shiro corrected, earning a scornful snort from the prefect. "Tell you what – exam results are announced before graduation, yeah? My name will be in the top ten." And she would believe that when carrots grew out of her ears. "If it's not, you can report me to Me- Faust. And for good measure, since you look so cute when you're glowering at me, I'll even confess a few things I've done that haven't been put on record." She was doubtful, but listening. Excellent. "That I promise", he added, taking the cigarette butt from his lips. "But if I'm in the top five…" He dropped the smoke and ground it out under his shoe, leaning forward with his best rascal-smile as he did. "…you give me a kiss."
"You're shameless!"
"You're pretty."
She was. Blushing and glaring at the same time – such a cute little thing~ And she did, in the end, accept the bet.
Come afternoon, Shiro had meticulously eliminated all wonky hair-tufts from his cut, shaved off what little facial hair he had, and silently cursed the universe for the red zit that had sprouted above his eyebrow. That last thing aside, he looked fresh and ready for going to the crafts market with his friends; and with certain friends' cute sisters.
The universe doesn't normally take offense when humans across the globe blame it for various misfortunes; sometimes, however, it does. When Shiro left the dorm building, the universe had knitted its eyebrows into a sinister black palisade of thunderclouds and glared balefully at him, and the swallows skirted low in the billowing air over the Academy's sun-heated rooftops. The universe got its message through rather clearly, and he doubled back and fetched a free-to-use umbrella from the holder in the dorm hall.
Weather didn't bother Shiro. When other children at the orphanage had sat indoors, reading or playing board games in the blinking light of faltering light bulbs, eleven year-old Shiro Fujimoto slunk out the window – the doors were always locked when there was no one to supervise outdoor activities, he recalled – to stand in the hammering rain and feel the force of nature churn his blood. The iron-fenced yard was different when storm came: even dull, confining orphanage grounds could gain a vicious beauty, when nature crushed the manmade illusion that it could be controlled. Light drops drew frothing breaths of steam from the sun-warmed pavement; heavy drops whipped the ground into a hissing cauldron, and the sky lowered itself down onto the rooftops, so close he could almost touch it…
"And the thunder…" A nostalgic smile ghosted his lips.
Some children curl up under their bedcovers when thunder rolls across the sky; others want to stand in the midst of it and feel the booming waves streak their skin with goose-bumps. Then rain had washed down the collar of his shirt and licked it stuck against his skin, and he'd laughed - glowing, like the fog-wrapped cracks of lightning above…
The orphanage staff soon learnt where to look when he went missing. It was always Shiho-sama who came running out under a yellow umbrella, grabbed his arm and marched him back in. She was left-handed; his cheekbone remembered, from all the times her wedding ring had struck when she slapped him for getting soaking wet in the rain. Or other inappropriate things he did: there were quite a few of those, after all.
Weather wasn't the problem, when he trotted down the walkway to pick up Sen and Midori at their dorm. There were other creatures than unruly little boys that stirred when the sun was swallowed by dark skies, and his leisurely day at the marked promised to be not as leisurely as he'd hoped.
Sen had embarked on an ambitious project to teach her girlfriend how to properly style hair, and had lent her long, raven black curtain to experimentation. That had been all and well, if Midori hadn't set out to do what seemed to be all hairstyles at once. More than one student they passed by looked the other way to hide their smiles, but Sen didn't seem to care at all; of course. She was far away from other humans. Far away from strong emotion that could tip the balance between her and her goblin familiar.
"And she's lived like this for years…?" Shiro didn't know what to think of it. Was it tragic? Was it proof that it was possible to live half-alive? Should he grieve for her, or should he consider her an inspiration…?
"Do you think it will like it there?"
Shiro had just enough time to catch sight of the lizard's tail before it disappeared into the mess that was Sen's hair.
"I think it's a lovely home for a lizard", he chuckled with a smile.
Sen responded with one of her distant smiles, and Shiro hoped to high heavens that his own hadn't looked like that. Her smile had always made his skin crawl, but he'd never before been able to pinpoint why. It was the smile of one who knows what a smile looks like, but hasn't smiled a true, heartfelt smile in years.
Midori, who was the expert provider of lizards, cast one glance at him, one glance at Sen's hair, and returned her golden eyes to him with her eyebrows crinkled together and lips pursed in an offended pout.
"What? I'm not saying anything mean about it", he pointed out with a shallow grin as they strolled down the stairs from the academy campus.
"Mouth is quiet, but face is loud."
Midori preferred walking on the low stone banister, jumping over every knob and pouncing on the small lizards that skittered into cracks and joints. She didn't bother at all that the saffron-yellow yukata she wore wasn't intended for that kind of movement – but, on the other hand, it didn't bother Shiro either. She had such nice legs…
"Sorry, I didn't catch that", he said, snapping out of his daydreams with a sheepish look.
"Your face speaks very loud, little ero-kun", she tittered like raindrops on leaf gold. "So loud you hear nothing else, hm~? I said I think Sen looks cute in that."
"I think she looks like a fashionable broomstick in that."
To that, Midori slapped him over the head and shot him a reproachful glare, marred only by the laughter that tugged the corners of her lips.
"You were raised in woods, not me."
"You will never get a girl by being honest, Shiro-kun", said Sen with that smile that made him cringe inside.
"Too bad, he likes girls so much~" When the stairs left them on the road to Mepphy Land, Midori jumped down next to them. "Shouldn't Shiro have a girl for market day, hm~?" she chirped, and telepathically conveyed a devious plan to Sen through a single, sparkling glance. "Or maybe two…?"
"Two is a good number", Sen agreed, and hooked her arm into Shiro's. "Two is for balance in duality."
"And two is amount of arms", Midori fell in, swiftly yanked the umbrella out of his grip and replaced it with her arm.
"Number of arms", Sen corrected at his other side.
"Number and amount; is both not for how many there are of things?"
"Just what are you two up to…?" Shiro definitely didn't mind strolling through town with one girl on each arm, but when said girls were plotting together any man would do well to be wary.
"We make sure you have a girl to go to the market with", said the little fashionable broomstick with a dead smile and eyes that twinkled in a way oddly reminiscent of Mephisto's.
"I'm quite sure I would've managed that myself", he replied with raised eyebrows.
"No you wouldn't~"
"Not when you have two already."
For then all available girls would think he-
"That isn't fair", he complained.
"But you enjoy it, ero-kun~"
"I can at least enjoy people's jealous glares", he observed, craning his neck to see the throng that milled at the brightly coloured entrance to Mepphy Land. "Speaking of that: would you care to ensure that I have a girl or two to celebrate my graduation? This old man's on his final school year, after all."
Sadly, no. Sen's father celebrated his sixtieth anniversary, and both she and Midori would attend. Getting to and from the Futotsuki village was a bothersome business: they had to leave immediately after their last exam to arrive on time, and they had planned to remain there over summer.
A/N: Reply to UmbrellaBat: Hi there! I'm so happy to hear that I… ruined your studies… x'3 Every author likes feedback, even more so when it's so overwhelmingly kind. QwQ Thank you! Since you don't have an account I can PM, I'll answer your question here.
It's inconvenient, in a way, that you bring up that particular conversation. x') The vague phrasings throughout the dialogue in ch 39 are, in my opinion, deliberate and there to confuse. I tried to sort it out, but I can't say that I know for sure how it should be read. ^_^'
I find it hard, many times, to bring my ideas of the underlying structure of AnE into writing that is comprehensible to others. I've organised it as best I could in a fairly linear way, but I'm not sure I'm getting my thoughts through. ^_^'
So this was my line of thought behind the interpretation…
I don't trust Samael. ^_^' Pure survival instinct, probably. He's the kind of character that forces a reader to adopt the world-view of a conspiracy theorist. 1. What you're being told serves a hidden agenda, and what you're not being told are the things that you really ought to pay attention to. 2. Whenever you encounter strange phrasing of words, you can assume it's done to conceal something (and from there, the first imperative applies).
Samael has a habit of telling parts of the truth only, namely the parts that will make people do what he wants them to do. In ch 39 he wants to motivate Rin to work harder, and to that end he shows him how much he has left to learn before he can stand a chance against Satan. Rin gets the whole tour, with a practical demonstration of the kings' powers and a run-down of Gehenna's hierarchical structure. The part of the truth that Samael doesn't tell him is that the kings are powerful because they are Satan's sons. It's a logical move, but it complicates things. It's logical to withhold that part of the truth, because if Rin learnt that Samael is also Satan's son he might become (even more) suspicious of him – and Samael, well; he wants a weapon aimed at his father, not at himself. It complicates things, because that means Samael wants to hide the fact that the kings and Satan are connected, and will lay his words so that they seem to be two separate groups of demons with no relation to each other: as he does in ch 39. And that's where I began to develop a headache… =.=' Whenever you encounter strange phrasing of words, you can assume it's done to conceal something. In ch 39 we're given three terms to complete the chaos:Gehenna's hierarchy, royal family of demons, and Gehenna's men of power. That, to me, looks very odd. =/ There's no reason to confuse Rin with three ambiguous terms, unless confusion is the very purpose. The central question you posed is if those three mean the same thing, and the answer is that I'm not sure they do. We're made to think that they do, but that's probably Samael's/Kato's intention; and I can say, in vague words so as not to spoil anything for you, that Kato has pulled some major ruses on her audience in AnE before. I do not put it past her to hide some crucial scrap of information under Samael's smooth tongue, but what that information might be I'm not qualified enough to decipher. I broke those three sentences down to the extent of my abilities, and better than that I cannot do… ^_^'
If Amaimon is "Gehenna's seventh man of power", and there are six kings above him and eight kings in total, it's safe to assume that "Gehenna's men of power"refers to the eight kings, Satan excluded. So that's one down.
However, Samael uses "the royal family of demons" interchangeably with "Gehenna's men of power" to speak of the kings only; and that… puts scowl lines between my eyebrows. Think about it. The royal family of demons, but the kings' father doesn't count? They wouldn't be brothers, and by extension wouldn't be family, if they didn't share the same blood through their father, no…? I would argue, unless demon genealogy follows some mighty strange rules, that Satan is indeed part of the royal family – but that's something Samael doesn't want Rin to know. =w=' And by stating that the kings are all there is to the royal family, he's effectively cutting off its blood ties to Satan. And there, we can't be certain anymore.
It seems to me like he's establishing "Gehenna's men of power" and "the royal family of demons" as apart from Satan, whether or not that is true in that last case. We're inevitably stuck in a loop of "is he lying for the benefit of his plans or is he telling us the truth – or parts of the truth?", and I'm afraid we're not getting any further there. "Gehenna's hierarchy" is slightly different from the other two, but in no way easier to pin a definite denotation on. It has no immediate context, as the others have, so I resorted to analysing its constituents as best I could. "Gehenna's men of power" and "the royal family of demons" are both restrictive, singling out Gehenna's power-elite and its blue-blooded inhabitants respectively. "Gehenna's hierarchy", in a strictly linguistic sense, denotes the hierarchy in Gehenna as a whole. There's nothing in it to restrict it to any caste of demons specifically; but it could also be worth taking into consideration that there's nothing in it that could tie Satan to the kings in any other sense than that they all live in Gehenna. That means it should be a safe term for Samael to include Satan in, since it doesn't give away their family relation. Does he include Satan in it? "Det vete fan", as I'd say in Swedish. "Only the Devil would know." Kato is good at this, and this time around I'll admit she defeated me. x') Analysis of language yields uncertain results in this case, since I can't tell what the original phrasing looked like in Japanese. "Men of power" sounds to me like something that could denote a distinct concept that exists in Japanese but not in English, for example; some word relating to social hierarchy in ancient Japan, or such. A linguist's analysis doesn't necessarily reflect what the author's intentions were, either."Gehenna's hierarchy" I interpreted in a strictly linguistic sense, and TEotB utilises that hierarchy as the complete power structure involving every being in Gehenna, Satan included. If that is correct, Samael is the most powerful of the kings: if it turns out "Gehenna's hierarchy" only includes the eight kings, I'd place my bets on Azazel the King of Spirits as number one. (I'd also have to figure out how to work my way around that in the fic, which promises to be one huge bitch of a task. x') ) Just as a curious note on the subject of translation, it's debatable whether "half demon" is the correct label for Rin's existence. People who know kanji better than I do have remarked that AnE doesn't use 半悪魔, whichwould bethe most straightforward way of saying "half demon", but the much longer and more ambiguous 本物の悪魔とのハーフ. This would be read literally as "half with a pure demon". I'll leave you to ponder the meanings of that; I've been wagging my figurative chin for far too long already…
Pardon the lengthy line of thought. ^_^' It's a suggestion for an interpretation: it's not a claim to absolute truth. I'm happy to share (most of) the musings I build this fic on, but since they tend to look more like essays it's done on request only. x') I hope it made things clearer for you, UmbrellaBat: and if it didn't, throw a rock at me and I'll try to word it better.
/ Dimwit