Episode 12: Recognition (Waking)
He woke to a gentle rocking feeling as she carried him in her arms, but did not let himself be lulled back to sleep. Eyes snapping open, he gritted his teeth as both memory and pain flooded his senses. He'd made a total idiot out of himself in the presence of the one man whose opinion truly mattered. And he'd been duly punished for it.
Twisting his body to roll out of the girl's hold, Clair landed clumsily but was soon on his feet again, hidden pistol out and pointing at her. He surveyed the surroundings: they were atop a building somewhere. No way down without the girl. "Don't move," he cautioned her, smirking grimly.
She stepped backwards in surprise, hands straying to something around her neck. "You shouldn't be...Master!"
Seeing the bud into which she spoke, he yanked it out of her ear and crushed it underneath his heel, grinning as he ground it back and forth. "I don't think so, Papa," he exulted to himself. "Not after what you did to me." Anger, hot and sluggish molten lead that it was, replaced the drug in his circulation. Anger at being used...anger at being hit...anger at being humiliated...anger at something else, something horrible and unspeakable that flitted in the corner of his mind and whispered that the past two years of his life had been meaningless.
Deprived of her lifeline, the girl plainly had no idea what to do. He had seen (though dimly) her prowess with her knife, yet in the face of her Master's son she plainly did not know whether or not to draw her blade. Hands on the thing hanging around her throat to fuel her courage, she closed her eyes and began to breathe shallowly. Sleep? A trance? He didn't trust it.
Her eyes sprung open, tears decorating them, as he grabbed her ragged blue hair close to her scalp and wrenched it. "I hate trash like you," he told her as she struggled in his hold. "What good's a flunky who can't relieve her employer of problems?"
Gasping, she tried to enter her trance again; he grabbed the amulet around her neck and, pulling the string over her head, yanked it free. Dangling it from the barrel of his gun just out of her reach, he twisted her hair again with the other; she moaned softly. "You shouldn't be..."
Letting her go, he kicked her side as she stumbled backwards, stomach wide open. "I'm full of surprises. And I always wake up with a clear head. Now listen here..."
"Usagi," she whispered, cowering on the ground. "My name is Usagi."
What, did she think he cared? "Fine, Miss Bunny. You'll do what Papa said and keep hopping. You'll hop me all the way back to my friends like a good little girl. And we'll decide what to do with you from there."
Her eyes lingered hungrily on the amulet; he slipped it around his own neck and felt it—pulse?--against his bruised skin. The pain lessened, and he pointed the gun at her again. "Now let's go. I'm not in a good mood and hate being kept waiting."
She nodded dumbly, picking him up again and leaping into the air with the barrel of Clair's gun still staring at her head. Settling himself back into a more comfortable position in her arms, he frowned and passed a finger over his bottom lip. The ring was gone.
"That's petty, Papa..." he muttered, amused in spite of himself. It was so much easier to laugh at his father's squeamishness over body piercings than to grapple with the rest of what had transpired in the apartment. He knew it all had happened, but his mind had built a shield around the awful implications of the encounter, and so long as the shield held he was safe.
It would not break. He could not even entertain the notion for an instant that it would break. Because the minute he admitted the weakness of the shield, it would shatter. And it was all that was keeping him standing.
O0o0o0o0o0
"Usagi? Usagi!" The line had gone dead shortly after crackling awake. Walking to the window with the phone still held to his ear, Leorza stuck his fingers through the slotted blinds and, through the resulting peephole, looked out at the city around him. Nothing on the skyline or the streets below belied what might have happened to the girl. He hadn't expected it to.
Frowing, he tried another number. No reply on that line either. This kept getting worse. Trinity never switched off her phone unless she had tired of an ongoing conversation. Usagi's earbud had stopped transmitting. Trinity didn't want to be disturbed.
"Damn the woman," he scowled to himself, and tried the front desk of the Barony. Finally, a human voice answered. He asked it a few fruitless questions and hung up, still discontent. No one knew where Baroness was. The arena was temporarily closed. The picture just kept getting bleaker.
Well, there wasn't anything he could do for the time being but sit back and wait for the worst, was there? It would be fruitless to go flying out the door in a frantic search for the girl and his son lest they have run into danger from the syndicate. He had to trust Usagi to be resourceful as ever, to defend his son to the death if need be. Clair certainly wasn't in any condition to defend himself.
Damn it, he had left his weak link even more vulnerable! If Trinity caught Clair—if she explained to him what Papa was really up to—it was all over. And if Clair fell to the syndicate before his allotted task had been completed, that left a posse of Judoh citizens running around with the knowledge that the old Vampire still lived. To say nothing of Nona and her whelp!
He had felt enemies encroaching around him in a circle before, but never had the sensation endowed him with the same pathetic feeling of helplessness. Such worry, he reminded himself, was useless. He did not wish to entertain notions and emotions he could not later use.
Sitting back in his armchair, Leorza switched on his television. No point in just sitting around fretting when he could watch the news for possible updates.
Technology, as was its intended purpose, provided instant gratification. "While we dare not enter the Celestial ship proper," reported the young lady on camera, "we all nervously await the outcome of the attack. Police have surrounded the ship and are calling for the attackers to come out. It is only a matter of time now before they are captured. We can only hope the Celestials will emerge from this unprovoked attack unscathed and still willing to negotiate with us."
He poured himself a glass of wine as the screen went to a commercial and sipped thoughtfully. Only one person in all Magnagalia had the guts to pull off something like attacking the guardians of the city—yet that same person stood to gain nothing from such a maneuver. Was this some new threat, then, and not the syndicate? It would explain Trinity's deactivated phone, however...
The news bulletin sprang back onscreen. "New developments in the harbor where the Celestials' vessel has been assaulted! The police are currently in the process of dealing with unruly pedestrians claiming their friend is being held hostage aboard the ship! No word as of yet whether there is any truth in the statement."
"I saw 'im!" someone just off-camera yelled. "When the ship was taken! There was a boy with a blindfold on!"
"Thank you!" another voice, a young woman from the sound, shouted in reply; gunshots were heard and the camera panned, then suddenly the screen filled with clouds of smoke.
"A bomb?" someone yelled; silhouettes could barely be seen running around.
"The camera! Take out the camera, Kyo--"
The camera cut out abruptly, buzzing into static, then silence. Leorza finished his wine and poured himself another. Surprisingly to even himself, he felt much better already about the overall situation. At least now he wasn't the only one with an inordinate amount of problems.
O0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0
As before, Boma sensed the girl before he saw her, keeping to back alleys with his two companions so as to remain unseen. He did not inform his companions immediately, however; the situation was not as dire as they had feared after all.
None of the trio, after a thorough going-over of the area where their quarry had vanished, could hazard a guess as to where the kidnapper and her captive had fled, so Boma had simply led them along routes he knew well, areas where the lowest of the low hid from the law. He himself had never sought refuge for long in these shadowy places, being prey for some of the fallen populace, but he and Brad had often skulked in bars between jobs while the cops were still on their tails. They were lonely, run-down places, no-man's-lands where even the police dared to tread; nothing united the scum of the earth like a common threat, and no person wearing justice's brand had escaped a raid of the Low Area in over a decade. The escaped beasts and those long overdue to be beasts ran in flea-bitten packs along these streets. Boma, unwilling to be recognized, kept his holograph mask on.
They had been braving the taverns and holes, asking for news of a blue-haired girl who moved like lightning and her possible burden, but had met with only drunken stares and jeers. Most of the latter had been directed at Shun, whose meticulous appearance and dignified bearing shone like a beacon of hated respectability in the dingy urban swamp. Giovanni had threatened, much to Shun's poorly-stifled indignancy, to dunk the man's platinum head in the garbage lining the streets, were he to "interfere" with the search again. Boma could sympathize with the bodyguard's irritation, and in fact found him to be rather forgiving. On his own, more illusory quest, he had killed men for similar slights.
At length both men noticed the werewolf's bristling tension. "What is it?" Shun asked, muffling insistence about as well as he had covered his earlier anger regarding Giovanni's snide threats. "What's out there?"
Giovanni himself didn't waste his breath asking questions. He just drew both guns.
A slim figure dashed from one side of an adjacent alley to another; the three pivoted and gave pursuit. Boma grabbed the girl as she dropped her cargo on the ground, but like fog she slipped from his hands and disappeared again. He scolded himself for not attempting to wound her before making the capture. Once again, he had been careless. At least they had their objective back now.
"Who let her get away?" Clair demanded, his eyes wide and repellent as Shun and Giovanni ran up to him. "Boma! Where'd she go?"
"She is gone," Boma reported grimly as Giovanni took his Vampire by the shoulders and stared at him for several long moments, as if wanting to ascertain it was really him. Clair passed inspection, apparently, with a sly smile.
"Yes, it's really me, Giovanni. It's only been a few hours, after all. You've spent longer without me."
"Vampire...damn, what happened..." Giovanni wavered between touching the puffy skin on his young master's face and maintaining a respectful distance. Choosing the latter, the outstretched hand clenched into a fist. "Where's the bastard that did it?"
"This is how much Papa loves me," Clair replied, indicating the bruises with an almost casual hand. He smiled. "You should have more faith in me, Giovanni. I wasn't lying."
"Are you suggesting that Lorenzo Leonelli is alive?" Shun demanded, sounding every bit as extraneous as he looked.
Clair looked over, disinterested. "Oh." He sounded vaguely surprised. "You're here. Where are the others, then?"
As quickly as he could, Giovanni brought his employer up to date on the Special Unit's recent activities. Listening, Clair jerked his head in Shun's direction.
"So why's he here if the others went after his brother?"
"Beats me, Vampire."
"Excuse me." Shun stepped between the pair. "I am here and can speak perfectly well for myself."
Boma, sensing nothing of great importance was going to be happening anytime soon, allowed his mind to wander slightly. He cast his thoughts back in particular to the few moments in which he'd managed to hold onto the girl. She had stared at him in fear, to be certain, but there had been another component to the expression—was it recognition? Why would she know him? Certainly he had never seen her before...but then why did she nag at him so? People came and left his life all the time, slipping past his senses unobtrusively. Why the hangup over this girl? This very familiar yet alien girl, for whom he'd neglected the original rescue? What about her touched him so?
Stoically he combed his memories of Magnagalia, searching for any day, any glimpse, he might have had of her...but only Kyoko swam into his mind. Kyoko? Why? She was not from his home, she had no relevance...yet there she was, filed precisely alongside the girl in his thoughts. Kyoko in the rain, speaking kindly to him after he'd saved her life. He hadn't known her as Kyoko then; he had at first mistaken her for...
But that girl was dead, he reminded himself. That girl was dead, and he had never even known her. She had not been his sister. He couldn't even remember ever seeing a photograph. The person for whom he had mistaken Kyoko had never actually lived.
Yet her vague shadow overlapped and filled in the contours of the lightning-girl in his mind. The conjured memories returned, with the new girl's face atop the body in the field...or had it been the same face all along?
"Clair." He did not know if he would be interrupting anything, and did not care. "Did your kidnapper tell you her name?"
His three companions looked over at him, Clair's eyebrows quirking in mild irritation: so he had been speaking. "Usagi," the young man replied crossly, lazily shoving one hand into his only grenadeless pocket. "Does that really matter? She got away."
"Usagi," Boma repeated, thunderstruck; in his ears a young girl's laughter crashed and danced. It was all coincidence. She was not real. He had conjured her from nothing. No one had ever laughed with him like that, no one had so desperately needed his protection. Certainly not this new girl, this Usagi who could stop bullets with knives and escape even him. She was not...he would not admit she was...
He looked down at his hands, hands that had just minutes ago held her. Suddenly he understood why Clair had been taken so easily: in the aftermath of seeing the dead alive and well, the entire human microcosm refused to operate properly until the paradox was sorted out. So he, as usual, invented a solution. "My Usagi."
o0o0o0o0o0
Whoever invented Blue Tab shock bullets deserved either her eternal gratitude or her utter condemnation, Kyoko decided. On the one hand, she could fight opponents without having to worry about killing men and women with families and futures waiting for them elsewhere. But on the other, they were so enabling. Knowing no one would die, she became so much more reckless.
"The camera! Take out the camera, Kyoko!"
The news team screamed and ran as the young woman dispatched their equipment with one well-aimed round of charged ammunition. She felt like cheering—she'd hit her target!--but knew that in the middle of a raid was not the time. And if they ever were going to get to Daisuke, it was best to do so when his opponents were cornered like they would be aboard the Celestial ship.
"J! Rapid cooling cycle again!" she ordered, running towards the ramp. "The smoke's clearing!"
"Roger," the android replied, shooting out steam from the twin pipes on either side of his head. "Hold on, Monica." Picking up the small girl, he dashed with prodigious speed to the ship and jumped aboard. Kyoko followed, trading shots with the police barricade. Neither could see the other well through the steam, so she had no idea how many she had knocked down. Bullets whizzed past her head and bounced harmlessly off the Celestials' ship as she made it, gasping and heart pounding, safely aboard.
"Infiltration successful," she reported, ducking into the same hallway as her friends. "Now what, J?"
But the machine was having second thoughts. "We should not have fired at officers of the law," he pointed out. "I will apologize."
"You will get back here," Monica corrected crossly, grabbing him by the black trenchcoat to get his attention. "And you will tell us where Daisuke is, assuming your telemeter's working right now."
"The abnormality is strange. I will mention it to Antonia when next we meet."
"J!!"
"Daisuke is in the lowest level of this ship. I will retrieve him." Holding onto his hat, J took off down the hall, leg pistons pumping.
"He better not get himself blown up," Monica said sourly as she and Kyoko ran after him. "We didn't bring anyone who knows how to fix him. And we're still too full."
At that moment, however, Kyoko would have preferred their ranks to have perhaps swelled a bit more, or at the very least that Clair wouldn't have been taken and thus the group remained intact. Again she wondered at Shun's disappearance, but she had to focus on finding Daisuke now, not on where his brother had gone.
To that end, she began counting her paces as she ran, gun lowered but ready. "One, two, one, two, one, two..."
"You are such a freak."
"Excuse me!" Kyoko was offended. "I believe I have every right to infiltrate the way I want--"
They both nearly ran into J, who had stopped rather suddenly. "Celestials ahead," J explained. "Should I capture them?"
"Celestials?" Monica ran out before Kyoko could stop her, readying her camera. The pair of white-clad people rounding the corner of the bright hallway threw their arms across their faces in shock and fear as an even brighter light flashed before them.
Opening their eyes, the two Celestials—both male--stared in curiosity and fright at the group as Monica lowered her camera. "Why have more come?" one asked. "We are speaking things over with your master in the conference area. There is no need for you here. Please leave."
"We have come for Daisuke Aurora," J replied. "Is he in the conference area as well?"
The two Celestials exchanged glances. "We heard gunfire outside," the other ventured carefully, skirting the question. "Why have you brought such evils among us?"
Kyoko popped a Blue Tab out of her ammo pouch and showed it to them. "Stun bullets. We don't want to kill anyone or spread evil. We just want to get our friend back, who is being held hostage here. Could you please show us to him? He's about this tall" --she gestured-- "with curly blond hair and green eyes. He's probably smiling, too."
"Where is Nona?" one of the Celestials asked. "Did she send you?"
"Nona?" Monica frowned. "Who the heck is that?"
"Accessing memory banks." J's eye sensors adjusted to call up the information. "Nona Aurora is Daisuke's Celestial mother. She left the family eighteen years ago with the coming of the Loah Celestials, causing great emotional stress on her eldest son, Shun Aurora, which ultimately culminated in--"
"We lived that part, J," Kyoko reminded him gently, not liking the way the two Celestials were viewing the tall "man" warily. Then, suddenly, one broke out in a grin.
"Is he a machine?" She nodded, and they stepped forward to get a better look at him, ran their hands over his arms. "Amazing! It's so primitive! Yet it's also very impressive, given your exiguous technology."
"With our what?" Monica asked blankly; Kyoko nudged her to be silent and returned to the initial line of conversation. "We didn't even know Nona had come with you, sirs. But Daisuke is our friend from Judoh and we don't want anything to happen to him."
"You came all the way from Judoh? In what?"
"A yacht," Kyoko put in before J could supply the make, model number, comprehensive alterations, brand of paint used, or any other extraneous information about the vessel. Really, the fate of the world rested on such scatterbrained people? How had it managed to survive all these years? "Could we have Daisuke back, please? We don't want to intrude on you any longer than we have to."
"He is in the conference room," they replied, turning and motioning for the trio to follow. "We are very glad you have come. No one knows what to do about the other machine, but you can help us!"
Oh dear, Kyoko thought to herself, loading her gun with Red Tabs despite her earlier placation. Other machine?
O0o0o0o0o0
Lying flat on her back, the sun baking down on the rooftop, Nona's mind flew through the air on the winds. Spreading out her perception of the living, breathing natural world around her, she sought others with similar connections, pale hands folded over the amulet resting gently between her breasts. Most of the auras, of course, projected themselves from the harbor where her people had docked; were they looking for her? Scrying took more intuition than most of them possessed: you needed to know the precise waves of the individual token you sought, and Nona's was a particularly difficult one to grasp. No, they would not find her easily, especially since her mind was closed to them now. They could not help her feel better. They could not make the bad feelings go away. Only one person, one person who knew more than was his due, could perform that service for her—much as she detested crawling to him.
There he was, now, there was his amulet's signal. After eighteen years, it remained fresh and new in her mind: old friendships, she supposed, died hard, even after too much transpired between individuals to merit continuation of the same feelings. The new blood was supposed to guard against such harmful attachments. She was not supposed to feel pain at their estrangement, at how much he had changed. But Marius had changed her, as much as she tried to slip back into her old ways of being. He had made her wonder how she felt about things for the first time in her life.
That was how she had discovered she knew how to love. How she loved Marius more than anyone else she had ever met. How she...had loved...another before him. And how that love had turned into hate upon discovering what that earlier man really was, what he was intent on making her brother become.
She had sworn never to speak to him again after his success. Yet here she was, seeking him still. Walking over to the trapdoor whence she had ascended to the top of the building unseen, Nona began the long trek back down to earth in pursuit of the aura firmly pinpointed in her mind. He was not so far away, she could catch him easily! It was almost all over!
Yet things were not destined to be so simple. She arrived--bruised, cut, and smudged from slogging through back ways; out of breath from running after a leering man who stank of alcohol tried to touch her hair—only to find the amulet hanging around the wrong neck.
Staring in disappointment and walled-off hurt, Nona numbly realized that she would never find the one she sought now. She had never seen this young man before in her life; nor did she recognize at first his companions. Then, something stirring in her mind, she turned to one of them in wonder. It wasn't quite the same face...but it was so close.
"Go away!" He whirled on her, pointing his gun at her chest; his companions raised a cry but, confused, made no move to interfere.
"Brother?" Trembling, she reached out for him despite the gun; he recoiled but did not fire. "Brother, it's me. It's Nona. Is it really you?"
The man choked on something, pale-faced and sweaty; he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose as she came closer in now-rapt curiosity about him. "N-no," he forced his through his tightly-drawn lips; the gun dropped as she drew close enough to touch. "It's not Echigo. It's me...Mother, it's me."
Nona stared; a small boy in a car watching his mother leave stared back through pale green eyes. The next thing either of them knew, she had him tightly around the chest, holding him close to her and breathing in the scent of a little boy she had sung to sleep on countless nights. All the emotions she'd denied came rushing back to bathe both of them: the hurt, the pain, the love, the determination that her sons were happy, happy, happy. Her sons were happy without her, together with their father where they belonged. No, their father was dead, and her brother was dead, and her son had killed him, but here was her son, alive, and that was all that mattered.
A lone tear trickled down his cheek as she breathed into his ear. "I've missed you...I missed you, Shun."
Slowly, robotically, his arms wrapped around her as well, and he rested his head on her own. "I...missed you too, Mother."