Chapter 9: Mimoto - Identity
Yuusuke grinned himself silly, playing with the kids. He loved Minori's charges, every last one of them, and helping them with their flower growing projects was nothing but fun. He cut and pasted right along with them until they had a whole wall of blossoms to keep their spirits up until the real ones they'd planted bloomed. With the warmth of summer and the buzzing of cicadas, it surely wouldn't be long.
Ra'Baruba'De stood off to the side, watching him as he guided small hands holding safety scissors along the lines drawn on paper. She didn't help much, but Yuusuke didn't think she was being as reserved and stand-offish as she had been, either. Something in the way she stood seemed soft to him, and maybe... hurt? Longing? He wasn't sure what name to give to the emotion he thought he felt from her. But a look at Minori where she stood off to one side confirmed that his sister had seen it too.
He waited until it was recess time and the children were playing in the yard before stepping softly to Ra'Baruba'De's side and waiting for her to speak.
"They are so noisy," she said eventually, watching the preschoolers, "the children of the Rinto."
"Well, they're kids," Yuusuke replied, shrugging.
She turned to look at him. "You, too, are noisy," she stated. "It is the Rinto blood within you." She turned to look away again.
"My Rinto blood?" Yuusuke said, choking a little on the idea, trying not to laugh. "I am a Rinto. Not a Grongi."
"You are Grongi," the Grongi replied, "at least in part. Else Kuuga's belt would never have called to you."
Yuusuke blinked. "Wait, then... you mentioned crossbreeds. Halflings. You said Kuuga was one of them."
"They would have survived," Ra'Baruba'De said tonelessly, "and bred, watering down their blood with the Rinto. Even so, you are distant kin."
"You know," Yuusuke said after a moment, "if I'm kin, that means so is Minori. And so are they, probably," he added with a nod at the children. "After all, after how many thousands of years we probably all have a little bit of that blood in us."
Her lips parted slightly, but she nodded.
"Maybe," he suggested softly, "you'd be happier if you thought of humans, Rinto, as people too and not just as animals. As prey. Because you're the only one of the Grongi left, and you're going to be living among us for the rest of your life, which might end up being a really long time."
Ra'Baruba'De's eyes widened.
"There was a child," she said, looking back away, not even at the children, but at the crown of the tree they played around. "A girl."
"Yours?" he asked.
She replied with the barest nod, a whisper of movement. She smelled faintly of roses. "The Rinto bound her beneath stone and rope ward." Her eyes were in the distant past. "Bound her into the land and I could hear her scream, but I could not reach her past those barriers. Eventually she grew weak, and one day... I heard her no more."
"I'm sorry," Yuusuke said quietly. "But an eye for an eye... it only leads to two blind people."
"Forgiveness?" she asked with scorn. "Such a Rinto trait."
"Forgiveness isn't the same as weakness," he argued.
She eyed him. "No, I suppose not," she agreed icily, and swept away.
Ichijou sat at his desk filling out paperwork. Each report and form was filled out in neat handwriting, the work precise, concise, and meticulous, as he'd trained himself to be. It was no guarantee, of course, but a sloppy policeman was marginally more likely to end up either dead or bribed. Ichijou had no interest in being either.
In the top drawer of his desk were a blank set of transfer request forms. He'd gotten them from Mawatari as soon as he'd arrived, earning a strange look from her, and had promptly shut them in the drawer. Not filling them out hadn't kept them from his thoughts, though.
He'd once chided Godai Yuusuke for fighting the Grongi with his heart only half committed, and the adventurer had surprised him by committing wholly to the battle. In the end, the carefree young man who had so little impressed Ichijou on their first meeting had more than proven his dedication, dying twice in Tsubaki's hospital and then nearly a third time before Ichijou had hauled his unconscious body out of that wintery mountain plain. Godai's commitment to a relationship would be no less than his commitment to fighting the Grongi had been. Ichijou could answer in no less than kind. Which meant... Tokyo.
He found he wasn't as bothered by the thought as he should have been. Coming back from the year and more he'd spent in the capitol, Ichijou had felt a bit like a schoolboy trying on an outgrown uniform. Nagano was quieter than Tokyo. In some ways it seemed like it moved more slowly. There was a joke that he'd never understood before which said that the only things to do in Nagano were snowboarding and masturbation. He thought he understood it now. Not that he'd ever particularly engaged in either.
Boyfriend.
The thought occurred to him and stopped cold the movement of Ichijou's pen. He'd never thought to have anyone to think of that way... never thought he'd make that choice. That anyone would ever be important enough for him to take that chance... it was a strange feeling. A strange realization, that the priorities in his life were beginning to reorganize themselves without his entire conscious control.
He filled out the last line on autopilot and set the report in his out box with numb fingers. He hesitated a moment, then opened the top drawer and pulled out the transfer request forms. He laid them on his desk, smoothing a hand across the papers automatically. He looked at them, took a deep breath, then picked up his pen and began to fill them out.
Ra'Baruba'De read aloud, keeping the children of the Rinto quiescent. The book was at best inane: a story about a giant man from another world and the giant monsters he battled against to keep the world of the Rinto safe. The story seemed to be a favorite, though, and the children cheered their mythical hero on in what were apparently all the right spots. She found herself comparing the Rinto children to her own lost little one, sealed and starved in stone so long ago. Disquietingly, she became increasingly certain that Kuuga was right and that the Rinto of now were indeed her distant kin.
"Bara-san," one of the little girls, Hikari, asked, "what's wrong?"
"Don't you like Ultraman Tarou?" another, a boy named Shingo, asked.
"It's not that," she replied slowly, lowering the book back to her lap. "I was simply thinking you all remind me a little of my daughter."
"You have a little girl, Bara-san?" they clamored. "Can we meet her? How old is she?"
"She died a long time ago," Ra'Baruba'De replied, remembering dark eyes and vining fingers, the soft voice that had been raised in laughter. The little one had died nameless, barely older than these Rinto children, too young yet to have a name or a rank.
The smallest of the girls, Akane, surprised Ra'Baruba'De by climbing into her lap and pressing a soft kiss to her cheek.
It was what her own little one might have done.
"Thank you," Ra'Baruba'De heard herself say. She placed one arm around Akane, awkwardly at first, to steady the child on her lap, and picked up the book again. "Shall we continue?" She didn't pretend that a crystal tear hadn't kissed her cheek as well as the child's lips, or that she didn't see Kuuga's sister Minori smiling at her from the doorway. She may have been guilty of many things, according to the words of the Rinto warrior who was Kuuga's boon companion, but fooling herself was not among her crimes.