Disclaimer: It's for the good of this kids' series that I don't own the rights.
Notes: I should probably add a warning specific to this chapter. I'm not going to do that. Observe the rating. And hug your children, if you have them.
Haunting
Renn Ireigh
Chapter Two: Scythe Moon
Clair found her- well, girlfriend wasn't the right word for it, not yet- in the usual place, which was to say the highest point of Indigo Plateau's Hall, the roof of the building. She shut the trap door- carefully, as the shingles were slick with rain- and let her eyes adjust to the darkness, cut though it was by the stars and the sliver of moon.
Karin was on the other side, which wasn't unusual; she'd climbed out of the window of her bedroom and was sitting in the sill. Clair would have joined her by that entrance if she hadn't suspected that after leaving the common room in which they'd all met, Karin had sprinted headlong down the corridor and up the stairs and locked and bolted her door. She figured that Morty and Will would try that path, which was all the more reason Clair had taken the alternate route.
"The stars are beautiful tonight," Karin said without looking as soon as she heard the cautious footsteps.
"And the moon," Clair agreed, sitting next to the younger woman.
"It's not," Karin said, and Clair startled- she hadn't been expecting that, at least not in that cool, flat tone. If anything she'd been expecting a snap. "We call this a scythe moon. Look at the shape." She pointed, and the crescent did look like a blade. "It means nothing good is coming."
"In whose lore?"
"Gravekeeper." This time she did snap, but only slightly; then that same eerie calm returned. "The night I was born, this moon was in the sky. And I came out with the shape on my forehead in blood. No surprise my mother handed me off to the nearest nursemaid. If you believe in all those signs and portents and all that crap, which she does, you'd know that I was one kid she wasn't going to manage to turn."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Well, let's put it this way," she said with a little smile- the kind that wasn't friendly, or happy, or humorous. "Clan name of Gravekeeper. You're the latest in an unbroken line of ghosts- and you look around, and all your family is managing to produce is psychics. You know some pretty strong psychics, but you also know that they can't keep ghosts quiet for long, because fact one, ghosts hate psychics, and fact two, the ghosts in the Tower hate very strongly, ergo fact three, ghosts like to kill psychics, drink their energy, and then kill more of them. So it becomes a matter of Clan importance that you get some little ghosties into the blood, and fast. You get yourself over to the strongest ghost you can find and you slaughter something important on the nights you intend to conceive, you do all your rituals so your kids are born on a solstice or an equinox, and after a couple years, you get four kids. Your first one's born under Absol, and no mistake- his scythe is on her forehead. She's marked. Your second one's psi. Your third one's psi. Your fourth one's psi. You hit menopause. You're totally fucked. What do you try to do?"
Clair said nothing.
"Right, well, you are a reasonable human being, and if you ever had kids, you'd probably love them even if they were blithering idiots." She fell silent, staring at the moon.
"You said three psychics."
"Yeah. That's how it started."
"So Morty is…"
"Well, he isn't dead," she said. "Although he's going to be, if he doesn't finally quit it with the heroin. But he didn't start out with ghosts." Karin stretched and said, very firmly, "That scythe moon is the same kind of beautiful as the icicle that falls on your head and kills you."
She and Clair sat in silence in the rooftop cold, the bedroom light at their backs, looking at the stars and the moon.
"You've never talked about it," Clair said suddenly.
"About what?"
"What it was like growing up in there."
"Hell," Karin said shortly. "Pure hell. No way she was winning mother of the year, that's for sure."
"What happened?"
"I was born. She regretted it. She tried her best to rectify that mistake. The end."
"By which you mean she tried to kill you?"
Karin snorted. "No. You don't kill a daughter of Absol. That would mean that the scythe cuts for you."
"So what…" Karin's jaw clenched, and Clair hurried, "Look, if I'm prying- what are you doing?"
Their relationship, if you wanted to call it that (and oh, Clair did) hadn't yet progressed beyond a few upright make-out sessions in corners of Indigo. Clair tried not to stare too obviously as Karin pulled off her shirt, not to stare at the creamy curves cupped in cotton, at the stretch of skin turned lush in the moonlight-
-and then stared blatantly, unable to help herself, at the scars.
"Have you ever wondered how ghost attacks work?" Karin said conversationally. "How it is that something or someone technically dead can manipulate enough energy to physically harm another creature?"
It became obvious that the question wasn't rhetorical. "I suppose I thought it was similar to psychic energy," Clair said. "Manipulated by force of will."
"That's part of it. The other part is emotion. Ghosts shape emotion. Especially strong emotion. When they feel hate, they throw knives. And one of the ghost specialty can do the same thing, with enough practice. What you're looking at is the end effect of Shadow Ball."
"Used by…"
"My mother. Directly. Straight by her own hand. This one here?" She stretched one hand between her shoulder blades, arching her back - Dragon Lords, Clair thought, her thighs tightening despite herself- and pointed to a particularly tight cluster in the middle of her back. "Five years old."
"What had you…" Clair trailed off. There was no good response to that.
"Done? Gotten in her way. It wasn't the in thing to be born under Absol when you come from a long line of people who swear they're to protect the spirits of the dead. Depending on your point of view, my kind either cause those souls to be dead in the first place, or lay them to rest. I don't mean quiet them, like a ghost does; I mean cause them to cease to exist. Send them on. Either way, we're no friends of ghosts. And you'd better bet that nobody in Gravekeeper Tower ever forgot that. Including the practitioners, who know we can do the same thing to them."
"How did…" Clair cursed her ineloquence, but there were no words for this.
"She do it? How could she?" Karin's voice was still calm, strictly modulated, all inflection controlled.
"No," Clair said. "How did you live. How did you survive that."
"She wasn't trying to kill me. Like I said, Absol would- he is not what you'd call the type of protective force that sort of sits idly by at that kind of thing. She'd have wound up meeting an accident, and since the entire problem was that she had no heir, she was really, really trying to avoid that."
"So only a ghost could inherit the… what is it for you, the family name, the Tower?"
Karin shook her head. "More complex than that. Like I said, Gravekeepers, the idea is that the family protects the spirits of the dead, keeps them calm. We don't kill anybody and we don't rouse anybody after they're dead, either, at least not usually. You don't get to do that without a very particular affinity, and you can't just become a ghost trainer if you weren't born to do it, at least not without… something happening. You leave the Tower of resting souls with nobody to keep them at rest, and things tend to happen."
"So the Tower and the job would pass into a different branch's hands. What's the problem with that?"
"Because my lineage has held the Tower since it was built, and because my mother is too much of a damn fool to figure out that every woman in the Clan giving birth to psi kids, not ghosts, for ten years straight, ought to be a sign."
"And one dark type."
"Yes. And me. I tended to get lost in that shuffle. Or conveniently forgotten."
"But you were the one who could bring the whole house of cards down around their ears…"
"Yes."
"Why didn't you do it?"
"You don't just do something like that… every action has a reaction. And Absol's children, we heal, we don't take away. At least when given our choice. The strength we draw from the moonlight is purifying, not destroying- yeah, we deal with death, but mostly in making it not happen. If I'd called disaster onto the Tower, it would have recoiled. A lot of people would have died that didn't have to. I'd have lived long enough to regret it."
"How did you live through it?"
"Well, that depends on what you mean." Karin stretched her hands behind her head and cracked her back, staring up at the moon. "How did I live through her clocking me a few solid ones with Shadow Ball? That wasn't hard; we don't die easy, and we're built resistant to tricks like that. They hurt like a bitch, but it's one of the perks. Or do you mean how did I live with being ignored for most of my early childhood, shoved up in the top of the Tower with a couple Gastly for company? I have a sister who could teleport from age three, who brought me food from the kitchen when she could pull it off without getting caught, at least once she found out she actually had a sister. When she got better, she could teleport me down, too."
"That's actually not what I meant," Clair said quietly, following Karin's gaze up to the scythe in the sky. "What I meant was, how did your mind live."
Karin was silent. Finally she said, "You sound awfully sure that it did."
"You make a very convincing argument that it has."
"Imagine something. You're… oh, let's say you're five. And for the sake of the argument, your youngest brother has just been born, and you've just heard your mother scream bloody murder- professional assessment, not turn of phrase- just like she did at the births of your other two siblings. That means your sibling is psi, like they were. The Tower is silent for three days, not the peaceful quiet of the resting dead, but the kind that means every spirit inside of it is hiding. And you can't hide."
"What did you do?"
Another long pause. "There are ways to manipulate the mind without psi powers," she said. "They work best on your own mind. Ways to… to not feel things. To push them away. Like they're happening to someone else. Some people do that with drugs. Other people use the drugs to wake up after they've done the trick with their minds."
"You are the latter group?"
"I don't need the drugs."
Clair's turn to be silent.
"It doesn't make it not hurt. It just hurts someone else, not you. But it doesn't feel all that far away sometimes, especially if hurts that someone else a lot."
"So your mother hurt you."
"She hurt someone else. Someone who wasn't me. This body got the scars, but it wasn't me she hurt." Karin tucked her knees up to her chest and hugged them close. "She didn't hurt me."
"Whom did she hurt?"
"The other person," Karin said, in a tone that prohibited further enquiry. "But not me. That's what mattered."
"How often did she hurt… this other person?"
"Whenever she could catch her," Karin said. "Which got to be less and less often, over time. I got better at hiding, so no one got hurt. And then I left, of course, when I was thirteen. Me and all the other people."
"Left how?"
"Out the front door," Karin said with a little smile. "Me and all the other people and Mitsu- just a Gastly then. We decided we didn't want to be in the Tower anymore. And that was all right, because the Tower didn't want us, either. It didn't want my sibs, either, but the difference between psis and darks is that yeah, psis will exorcise ghosts, but the ghosts have a really good chance of taking them down first. But ghosts can't take down someone of my type, and that makes us a lot scarier."
"Where did you go?"
"North," Karin answered. "Not through Rock Tunnel. It was… it was very dark. And you can't see the moon from inside the tunnel. We tried it, but we didn't get very far. So we went over the mountains instead."
Clair gave a low whistle- raised in mountains herself, she knew how easy that wasn't for a thirteen-year-old.
"It maybe wasn't very smart," Karin agreed. "But to the north was the fastest way to get out of Gravekeeper lands."
"Out of Kanto."
"Out of Kanto," she confirmed. "I was headed for Ecruteak City if I could manage it. Word had come back that, Dragon lands notwithstanding, they were inclined to be more hospitable to Absol's kin."
"How were you intending to get there?"
"That was the flaw in the plan. I was shooting for Mount Moon- there are priestesses of Absol there who could get me through to Johto. But there'd just been an avalanche. The cave was blocked not too far in. I had to turn back around."
"Like you had in Rock Tunnel."
"Yes. So I did the same thing." She took a deep breath. "And then did it again. The priestesses would have been able to get me ship's passage. Without their help… and the rumor was that Gravekeeper Tower was in an uproar, looking for something. So I bolted. Just… ran. We hit Viridian, didn't look left or right, and climbed the fucking mountains into Johto."
Clair hissed. "Dragon Lords, Karin. And you lived through it."
She nodded. "I was a lucky little snot and no mistake. Lucky it was warm, lucky I'd run out in stout boots, lucky there were just enough trainers on the way that Mitsu and I could win some food money and lucky I knew enough about edible plants to feed the two of us when the food ran out. Lucky to have met Art, too."
"Artemis?" Clair guessed, naming Karin's Umbreon.
"Yes. They're constructs, Eevees are, and you don't find them in the wild… unless they're runaways too. Better to have two Pokemon with me than one. Especially when we stepped foot out of the mountains."
"Why?"
"Because things happen to people in Dragon lands when they come in with Ghosts," Karin said succinctly. "If I was with an Eevee I was just another kid. The problems started when I wasn't smart enough to leave it at just Eevee."
Clair bit her lip, and hard.
"Bad things happen to people who bring Ghosts into Dragon lands," said Karin, very quietly.
"Bad things happened to you?"
Karin shook her head. "No. Bad things happened to someone else. Someone who met two teenaged Dragon boys in the woods and called out two Pokemon to protect her, not just one. Someone who showed up as a Gravekeeper in Dragon lands. Someone who didn't belong. Who wouldn't be listened to. Who wouldn't be missed." Karin hugged her knees tighter.
"And you…"
Karin shook her head to clear it. "I ran like hell," she said. "It was becoming very clear that I needed to be able to show who I was if I wanted any help at all, not just which family I came from. I wasn't much of a trainer, but I was going to have to be. I ripped through Violet City gym and kept on running. Met Cernunnos-" –naming her Houndoom- "-and Belladonna on the way. Bella was wonderful, the whole time," she said of her Vileplume. "She helped us sleep when we couldn't."
"When couldn't you?" Clair said, very carefully, aware she'd stepped into something much, much bigger than she'd prepared for. She ignored the voice in the back of her head shrilling, And you had no idea!
"When bad things happen, the people they happened to remember them in sleep," Karin said. "They don't want to, but the bad things come back anyway."
Do you still remember them? What kind of bad things? Karin, what happened to you? Clair set her jaw against the questions begging to burst out. "So you had a team then."
"Yes. A team. And my team and I were going through gyms and we just kept going. Absol's kin aren't fighters, not usually. But sometimes they have to be. I figured that if I were going to serve Absol as a healer I needed to be in a place where I wouldn't be hurt myself, and where no other people would be hurt either. And that meant I needed power, because people don't hurt strong people."
"You didn't stop in Ecruteak like you'd planned."
"No. Towers or no, there was a strong Dragon presence in Ecruteak at that point. I know that not all Dragons are like the two I'd met- obviously, given my most extraordinary present company-" Karin flashed a smile, and Clair felt herself relax minutely, since this was a grin she recognized. "But there were other people with me, not just me, and they didn't think that they would be safe around Dragons. So we kept going, kept training, kept getting stronger."
Clair had a horrible thought. "Karin," she said. "Karin, what did you do when you hit Blackthorn City?"
Karin was quiet for a moment. "I think you won't like this," she said. "But you may be able to accept it. People who do bad things get punished." She dug into her pocket, where she kept her keys hooked onto the long chain where she kept her badges. "I earned this Rising Badge from someone who had only very recently taken over the gym. He'd taken the position after touring the country with a friend who happened to also be in the gym that night. He didn't stay in the gym very long."
"Did you…"
"I'm not a killer, Clair. Absol's kin do not kill. But some other people do."
Clair thought of her second cousin, the one who had held the gym before her. She and Seig had never known each other well. He'd always been a jerk full of the typical Dragon blather about duty and honor, the kind who didn't believe that any of it actually applied to him, but she'd still cried at his funeral after he'd been found dead on the gym floor with his friend Arc. Autopsy on both had diagnosed aortic rupture.
"What did you do then?" Clair said, to stop thinking about them.
"Well, we couldn't stay in Dragon lands after that person had done that. Back to Kanto, this time over the falls instead of the mountains. I stopped off in Indigo Plateau for supplies and found out something interesting. They were due for a change of Elite. Three members were stepping down, and the Champion with them. The remaining Elite was stepping up to Champion, for however long that would last. A selection trials was to be held in three days. I figured what the hell and signed up."
"And here you are."
"More or less," Karin said. "My mother was one of the Elite stepping down- citing reasons of needing to retire to matters closer to home, and everyone knew at that point that one of her sons had nearly died not long ago, so they figured that was why. In order to advance into the new Elite, one had to first beat most of challengers, then beat the resident Elites. She was the last one I faced."
"How did the battle go, Karin?" Clair asked when she fell silent, trying to suppress a shiver. It was cold out here on the roof in the moonlight.
Karin's sudden smile was bright enough, but there was no warmth to that either. "A ghost does not stand tall against one of Absol's kin. I wiped the floor with her."
"You let her live."
"As I said, I'm not a killer."
"Sometimes other people kill," Clair said.
"More often, when they are in this body, they don't."
Clair swallowed hard, but she had to know. "Whom am I speaking to?"
"To me, of course."
"Who are you?"
"Ah," Karin said. "Yes. I hadn't gotten to that part of the story. Will had also made it through the trials. Morty tried- but after what had happened to him, he wasn't as strong as he was born, and your cousin Lance wiped the floor with him and beat him out for the final Elite position. In either case- Will and I got to catch up. We…" She swallowed hard, paused, then continued in a determined fashion. "We hadn't seen each other since I left the Tower. It had been a few years at this point. I hadn't known what had happened to him. He's very resilient, Will is. Don't let him tell you that Morty saved his mind. It was going down with the ship- Will blasted his mind, his soul, and his power into midair while he was sinking with the full intentions of having Morty just catch his power as Will died. As it happened, as you know, Will didn't die, and all of that went straight back into him. He saved his own self. And he saved Karin."
"How so?"
"I told Will about some of the bad things. He knew about some of them. We'd grown up together, after all. We had a very similar conversation to the one you and I are having now. I told him about the other people."
"And?"
"And he made them go away," Karin said simply, staring up at the moon. "We talked about- about who the other people were, and about how they knew me and how I knew them. And about how they might be other people, but they were still in my body, which meant I was still responsible for them. It's not my kind of power, what a psi can do to someone's mind. I can- I can see spots where the mind is dead, and I can take that death away. But he can see where the energy is twisted, and he can untwist it, he can make it work again. So we agreed that he could make them go away."
"So they're all gone?"
"No," Karin said quietly. "No, they're still with me. But we agreed that we could all... that I would be the voice for all of us. We agreed to that. Mostly."
Words flashed through Clair's mind as she thought again of her second cousin dead on the floor of the gym. Not guilty by reason of insanity.
"I'm just as sane as you are," Karin said, as though she'd read her mind. "Now I am, anyway. I… even after Will helped me with the other people, I did some things to prove to myself that I am Karin, and that no one else is. To prove that I'm the only one in charge of this body and I can make my own choices, I can do things for myself, because I want to."
The five boxes of condoms that Clair had found in Karin's bathroom closet when she'd ventured in looking for a tampon immediately made more sense.
"But I… there are things that you have to do when you realize you want to have a relationship with another human being, on an equal plane, where you're both sane people," she said with difficulty. "And when the other person is someone you admire enough to want, but to know you can never have, if you keep on like you are. And one of those things is to recognize when you're doing stupid shit and stop doing it."
Clair swallowed hard. "Is that as much of an apology as I'm going to get for that time this summer when I found you in the pool with my cousin Alira?"
"It's that, and it's as much of a declaration as you're going to get," Karin said, very determinedly not meeting her eyes. "I was pretending your cousin was you."
Clair couldn't speak for a moment. Fortunately, Karin saved her the trouble.
"Which is a brilliant example of stupid shit that doesn't help anyone. Except your cousin. And not even her, since as soon as you walked in and I saw you looking like you'd been stricken by something terrible, I shoved off and left, and neither one of us had done anything but a little creative stripping. Let's say it was a wake-up call."
Clair rested a hand on Karin's knee, looking up at the moon. "I can't figure how you'd want to be in the same room as me after what happened to you," she said quietly. "After what Dragons did."
"It was a long time ago," Karin said in the same tone. "And whatever Will did, it happened to someone else. And you're not them." She unlaced one hand from around her legs and placed it lightly atop Clair's.
"I'm not," Clair agreed. "I don't make practice of hurting people." She wrapped her other arm around Karin's shoulders and let the younger woman lean in. Still without her shirt, Karin was shivering. Slowly her body calmed.
"That scythe moon…" Karin said after awhile.
"Hmm?"
"I don't think it's shining on us."
Clair smiled. "No," she said. "I don't think it is."