Author's Note: So I thought it might be interesting to hear this story from the point of view of a character we don't get to hear too much from when it comes to inner thoughts... :) It's quite a short chapter, more like an interlude, really, while I work on the meaty stuff that's coming up pretty soon.

#09: The Many Ways of Being K. Tatsumi

Once upon a time, in a bygone era, the place used to be a legitimate bathhouse. It had sensuous curls of steam rising from the bubbling baths, and a level of humidity and heat that actually was what you might expect in a frikkin' sauna.

The other Kanji was really starting to resent the arrival of that awful female version of his human self. She was the leading needle in a cross-stitch of frigid blue dark through his lovely rosy paradise, and now everything was falling to shit. Life, or, rather, existence as he lived it, just wasn't fair.

Things had been going so well, too, and he'd nearly garnered his own sense of individuality when his moronic human self kept rejecting him, but then that girl had to go and mess that up too, by humanizing him like that! Shadow Kanji wasn't human; couldn't she see that? Why did she have to treat everything like it was a person?

Shadow Kanji sat, stewed over this, and sulked, submerged in one of the few baths that had retained some of its original glory. Not even the heat could relax his muscles, though… god, he was so tense! Wouldn't it be nice if someone came in and gave him a shoulder rub…?

Whenever he got into this train of thought, his mind kept floating back to that handsome youth in the blue cap… really, for all his exaggerated sexuality, there wasn't anyone who actually made this Kanji all gooey inside like that boy had… it was what had awakened this side of him, he was sure of it. Of course it had been hiding all this time, hiding from the girls and their pointy little comments…

Shadow Kanji sunk his head all the way under the water and blew bubbles out his nose. There. Now it was a Jacuzzi. What a wonderful invention.

He really hated the way that Girl Kanji hadn't acted, well, all that much like any other girls. She'd acted like his male self – well, she was his male self down to most of her life story, just with one chromosome changed – and that was puzzling because Kanji had been so sure that one chromosome meant a lot more than it seemed to. Why wasn't she happy, either? I mean, come on, she clearly still had an interest in sewing, judging by that that magnificently hand-tailored jacket she was wearing, and yeah, she was a girl, so then why would anyone make fun of her because of that? Why did she act the way she did? The questions just kept going round and round in the other Kanji's brain.

From one point of view, Shadow Kanji could probably have stayed underwater indefinitely, since he didn't derive his energy from oxygen but from his host's own mind. But, since he was in human form, it was courteous to obey certain conventions, like breathing, and so he rose out of the water and took a deep lungful of air.

And now this water was getting cold too. Well, screw this. He wasn't going to accommodate himself to any chilly-ass baths. Besides, he didn't want his fingertips to get all wrinkly.

He crawled out and reached for a towel. When none, to his irritation, appeared, he called up a tiny Shadow and wove it quickly into soft inanimate terry-cloth before it could develop into something more alive. He didn't want to wear something even slightly sentient around his nether regions; that was just nasty. Even he had to draw the line there.

And since it was cold, Shadow Kanji was also slightly regretting turning down the girl's offer of her coat, but if he'd taken it and worn it, it would have felt like she had some kind of power over him. And he wasn't going to fall for that. Nuh-uh. He was Kanji's Shadow and he was either going to smoke that kid out and be accepted or he was going to kill him. Two possible endings, nice and simple. None of that 'take a third option' crap.

The barely dressed Shadow boy stretched himself out languorously. A cat-like smile formed over his features. It was time to go Kanji-hunting. He'd left the two humans alone for long enough, and hopefully that girl had been sucked back into her own dimension by now so that when he confronted his human self again, there wouldn't be any more icky complications.

Shadow Kanji didn't just love men, after all, he loved being male, and taking that to every extreme. There was something so exhilarating about being strong and sturdy and never having to shrink away from anything, never having to fold over in willowy deference to society… and then the fun began when you played with it, made it something that people didn't expect. Something that could delicately sew and paint and then turn around and crush people's spines with its bare, meaty hands. But it wasn't fair when girls got to do it too, right?

Except he didn't really feel like that, not deep down where the core of his real power resided, which was a tiny kernel of sparkling truth in a sea of fog and shadow. That spark didn't care about boys or girls… it just wanted to feel wanted, to make it feel loved. Won't someone, anyone, please accept me?

Shadow Kanji tried to act as though that spark of truth didn't exist. He didn't quite see the irony of this, but he knew it just didn't feel all that easy to accept. Wouldn't it make more sense if he was actually 'strange' or 'queer' – some state of being that actually had a name? It occurred to him that just being the person that you were wasn't something you could neatly label, and that was too much to handle sometimes. Every person had many sides to them. There were just too many ways of being K. Tatsumi.

The self, the shadow, the female self and her own shadow, even that stupid Laughing Table was surely carrying a little piece of K. Tatsumi around with it. Too many Kanjis, too much self to go around, and no one simple way to say what their problem really was. And it had to be all one thing, right? One unifying principle that explained what it really meant to be the person that they all were, deep down.

So Shadow Kanji started searching, sending out tendrils of thought into the realm of the bathhouse, trying to pinpoint the place where the tendrils were rejected – that would be where the human soul was hiding. But right now, all that the other Kanji was drawing was a big blank question mark of nothing. Such a bother… this night should have been over hours ago, the moment that the fog left the Shadow World.

It was apparent that the Shadow boy would have to look for his human Kanji the boring way. He slouched out of the room, pouting with grumpy resignation. Again, it was oppression, plain and simple. That girl was probably distracting Kanji by making him worry about her and consider her own problems and boost up his own confidence on their interaction and that was like an active camo suit when it came to a Shadow-self's senses. Which, because it meant he would have to trudge around this place like a human, would invariably make him more human, and add more of this complex guilt over his very existence. If he didn't know himself better than that, he'd think that his girl self planned it out like that. But of course she didn't. She was just bumbling along and somehow, for whatever reason, she was getting things to turn out her way. Both of them were, as a matter of fact. They'd just waltzed right out of Shadow Kanji's clutches and started beating up Shadows left and right, like it wasn't any big deal.

A sense of fond familiarity softened Shadow Kanji's heart, just a little. Of course they would do that. It was just such a Kanji thing to do.

The Shadow set out on his pursuit, padding along the carpet and leaving behind a trail of wet footprints on the hardwood floor. What level could they have reached by now? Well, it didn't take a genius to figure that they would have headed down, so Shadow Kanji could at least go in that direction and hope to catch one of them as they blundered about.

All around him, the lesser Shadows were really starting to get restless. They were such lovely minions at some times, but at others they were a real pain in the ass. The other Kanji could feel the twisted up thoughts emanating from the walls, and he couldn't help but look over his shoulder every so often. Oh for the love of… what had gotten into his silly little head now? Was he actually starting to fear the other Shadows? Wouldn't that be something?

Just then, a shudder ran through the architecture of the building, and the disoriented Shadow Kanji smacked face-first into a newly formed wall. Someone had triggered the reset on the stairs, hadn't they? Normally Shadow Kanji wouldn't notice, because he'd be drifting around through the ether like all the rest of the Shadows when no one was looking at them, one towel-clad, smokin' hot Schrodinger's pussycat.

But seriously, why was he having to deal with this corporeality crap right now anyway? If he got his head twisted around enough, he was going to end up with a Shadow self of his own, and that would just make things too meta for his comfort zone. And it took a lot to get outside of Shadow Kanji's comfort zone.

He stepped outside of the room which had used to be a hallway, rubbing his forehead. He had to take a moment to fix his hair in the reflection of a bath – because all of the baths were totally un-bubbly and flat by now, still as mirror glass. It had to be the creeping effects of the girl's presence here, and Shadow Kanji wasn't sure if his control over the bathhouse – well, it wasn't like he was really so much in control of it as he was the most sentient part of it – could be harnessed to fix this problem. He decided that he was pissed off enough to try.

His fist closed in the air. Steam began to rise from one of the baths. Would you look at that… so it really could work! Not bad, not bad… He sashayed over to a second one and twirled heat into it. The surface of the bath roiled with convection. Ah… now he was getting somewhere! Why couldn't he have tried this earlier—?

A very unsettling thing caught the corner of his eye. One of the lesser Shadows, which had followed him here, was sleepily oozing back into the floorboards. It was almost as if the steam was bringing back the fog as well… And come to think of it, perhaps it was. That steam didn't all look like natural water vapor to his Shadow senses. It was making him feel rather drowsy and calm and peaceful…

Shit! This was perhaps not as good of an idea as he'd thought. He didn't want to fill the place with fog again; if he did that, then he'd be forced to slink away with the rest of the Shadows, missing his chance to confront his human self. That would simply not do at all. Shadow Kanji pulled out of his trance and tried to flap away any threads of fog that had appeared. "Go on, shoo!" he said, swatting at them. "Shoo, shoo, shoo! Back to the human world you go…"

Shadow Kanji rubbed his eyes, irritated. Because of one cold Girl-Kanji, his whole sauna was ruined. That, or his power as a Shadow. Why couldn't she just leave him alone?

Come to think of it… if she was out of the picture somehow, then that outside influence on this reality would be gone… and so would the thing keeping Kanji from having to face his Shadow. Yes, the only solution here was really to remove the contaminating element. So many birds killed with one stone…

If he could freakin' find them, that is! Shadow Kanji felt a bit of him writhing inside at all this injustice, the anger cutting through the façade he kept up – no, it wasn't a façade, shut up, shut up, shut up… He took a long, deep breath. Okay, he was calm. He was calm and cool and smooth and he was going to find those little shits if it took him all night— okay maybe he wasn't all that calm. But still. As long as he kept it in his head, it was sort of like it didn't really exist, right? Right?

Oh, for crying out loud… He was definitely going to end up with a Shadow at this rate. Argh! Why was it so difficult to be a sexy gay sauna-goer when what he kept ending up as was just… plain old Kanji Tatsumi? Why was it so hard to be Kanji without, well, being Kanji, with all the bells and whistles attached? Like, there was only so far you could go down that route before you started to get reactive and sensitive and full of both rage and compassion and being a total dork in every way that you weren't either unfailingly angry or unfailingly kind. Sure, he kind of had a complex when it came to certain things, but that just wasn't strong enough to smother up all the rest of his personality.

Shadow Kanji stomped through the halls, not even bothering to sway his hips in the slightest. This was too much of an outrage. One way or the other, he was going to end this lunacy right now, before his existence got any more tangled up than it already was.

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