Walk me through the Valley
Disclaimer: Characters and premise are the property of Kazue Kato. I'm just borrowing them for a little non-profit fun.
Chapter Five: Fettered
Thursday rolled around again, with it the next of the Seven Mysteries: the moving statue.
Bon pulled Rin aside as they approached Mepphyland's central square. "Adachi-Sensei has been teaching us some chants to aid in identifying demons. I want to try them out. You keep the statue busy while I figure out it's fatal verse."
Rin grinned. "So pretty much the same plan as always?" he asked flippantly. Bon scowled and gave him a light shove toward the square.
While Bon and Rin approached the statue the rest of the Exwires and Tsuzo waited just outside the square. Bon stopped about three meters from the statue, he pressed his hands together and started chanting. Rin sauntered right up to it's base and knocked on it's leg. "Yo! Clown Replica!" he called. Then he jumped back to avoid being kicked as the statue came to life.
The statue took on a pale red glow and Bon's chant changed it's rhythm. "Not Kin of Amaimon then," Konekomaru murmured.
Rin heckled and made faces at the statue while he dodged it's blows.
The statue took on a green glow. "Kin of Azazel," Konekomaru commented. "That's Leviticus, or the Book of Enoch. I hope Bon's not planning on reciting both books in their entirety."
Rin darted between the statue's legs then drove his sheathed sword into the back of it's knee with all his strength. The statue twisted as it fell, trying to crush Rin with it's mass.
Bon started reciting short random passages in quick succession. Konekomaru frowned thoughtfully for several minutes then said, "Oh, it's generally low level demons that animate things. Bon's reciting all the fatal verses he knows for low level Spirit demons. It's a less comprehensive approach but if he does know the right verse he'll defeat it in ten minutes or less."
"Don't be so sure," Shima remarked. "Never underestimate Bon's willingness to memorize things. I bet he's got at least twenty minutes of possible verses to recite."
The Exwires weren't the only ones to figure out Bon's strategy. The statue turned and glared at the Aria-candidate."
"Rocks for brains!" Rin shouted as he jumped on the statue's shoulders. "Don't turn your back on me!" He pounded the statue's head repeatedly with the hilt of his katana.
The statue reached up and grabbed Rin, it's giant hand enveloping his head and upper body. It threw him roughly to the ground then turned on Bon. Bon stood his ground and kept chanting, only breaking off when the statue smacked him into a near by building.
The other Exwires started forward, but Rin was back on his feet and Bon held up a hand to stop them. "Don't screw up our grade," he protested. Shakily Bon pulled himself back to his feet and resumed chanting.
Rin darted across the square and planted himself between Bon and the demon. "Okay, I'm done playing," he announced giving the statue a dark look as he grasped Kurikara's hilt in one hand and the sheath in the other. Rin pulled, but nothing happened. The Koma Sword remained sheathed. He stared at the sword in shock and pulled with all his might. Kurikara could have been welded to it's sheath for all the good it did.
"Rin!" Izumo shouted as the statue took advantage of his distraction and kicked him viciously. The sound of Rin's ribs breaking was audible across the square as Kurikara was sent flying in one direction and Rin in another.
Bon broke off mid-verse as Rin landed in a crumpled heap. For a moment he looked torn. The statue smirked when Rin groaned weakly and started trying stand. Then it turned it's attention to Bon again. The Aria-hopeful took a deep breath and began reciting as he drew his gun and fired at the statue.
"Mike! Go!" Izumo ordered pointing toward where Kurikara had landed.
Bon's bullets put small craters in the the statue's cape and hat which only served to annoy the demon. The focus needed to aim and fire caused Bon's recitation to falter.
The statue was almost on him when RiIn pulled himself to his feet, burning blue despite the seal, and charged. He drove his shoulder into the statue's legs toppling it for a second time. Before it could rise Rin grabbed it by the ankle and heaved it away from Bon. Then he went after it.
Bon froze, unable to decide between holding himself in reserve to cast a protective barrier around Rin or to continue to work his way through the likely fatal verses or to continue trying to shoot the statue.
Mike brought the Koma Sword to Izumo. She drew it without difficulty and Rin's low flames exploded as the seal was breached.
Bon's shoulders relaxed. He went back to the last verse he'd flubbed while trying to shoot and repeated it smoothly.
With his powers unleashed Rin caught the statue's next blow and shoved it's fist back.
Bon gave up on verses from Leviticus and moved on to the Book of Enoch. Half a minutes later the statue froze, it's eyes lost animation.
Konekomaru walked over to Bon, "Sometimes I don't know what to think of you," he announced. "You have a giant statue about to smush you and you're worried about maybe getting a 'B'?"
"I guess I've gotten too used to having Rin's flames as an ace in the hole," Bon admitted.
On the other side of the square Shiemi was trying to pull up Rin's shirt to see how bad his ribs were.
"I'm okay," Rin declared, flushing and stumbling backwards to avoid Shiemi's ministrations.
Izumo sheathed Kurikara and returned it to him, incidentally getting between Shiemi and Rin as she did so. "What happened?"
"The sword got stuck." He tried and failed once again to unseal his powers.
"I didn't have any problems," Izumo said with a frown. She took Kurikara back and demonstrated.
"Let me try," Konekomaru said. After he successfully drew the sword Bon took it.
"Cut that out!" Rin exclaimed as he burst into flames for the third time.
"Sis, do you know what's going on?" Shima asked.
Tsuzo shook her head.
Mephisto listened politely as Bon and Izumo interrupted one another while describing the situation. "So do you know why I can't draw Kurikara anymore?" Rin asked when they ran out of steam.
"May I ask when was the last time you successfully unsealed your powers?" Mephisto asked. He narrowed his eyes. "I will assume it was not your assigned therapy?"
"Rin still hates letting us see him unsealed," Bon reported when Rin didn't immediately respond.
"But you have been doing your therapy?" Mephisto asked with a chilling smile.
"Oh yeah," Rin replied. He nodded toward Bon. "I won't let them watch so he unseals the sword and times my hour. He thinks I'd lie about doing it if he wasn't making me."
"You tried scrubbing up with holy water afterwards back when you still could. As if you were going to get better pulling stunts like that," Bon replied unrepentantly. "You're my teammate, I worry about you. I'm not gonna standby and let you hurt yourself if I can stop you."
Rin gave Bon that was part frustration part gratitude. He appreciated the reassurance that Yukio was wrong, that his very nature didn't make people hate him. Still Bon's style of caring tended to be a bit high-handed and controlling. Izumo was pretty much the same but somehow she had a knack for taking over his life without making him feel like a child.
Rin remembered fighting with his Dad about wanting to be treated like an adult just over a year ago, a life-time ago, when he'd still thought he was human and that demons were imaginary. Yet another fight Rin wished he hadn't provoked, if he could have Shiro back he would have gladly put up with being treated like a kid until he was thirty.
Truth be told Rin was starting to give up hope of ever not being treated like a child. As soon as he'd found out about Yukio being an Exorcist his little brother had started bossing him around. Yukio had called himself both Rin's caretaker and his jailor. The others always made a huge fuss about the holy water, but for Rin the worst of it had been the feeling that he was nothing but a burden to Yukio.
Now, because of the suicide attempt, Mephisto was keeping a closer eye on him and his friends would barely let him take a bath without checking up on him. Rin didn't know how to convince them he was okay and they didn't need to worry. He wasn't sure that he was okay. He wanted to believe them; to believe that Yukio was wrong and that being Satan's son didn't make him a bad person, but when the nightmares came it was hard to remember. Still his friends didn't have to stay and as long as they did Rin knew he wouldn't try to end his life, he didn't want to hurt them.
"The last time you, personally, drew your sword?" Mephisto prompted.
"When I fought the Masked Guy… um Neuhaus' wife," Rin corrected himself.
"Before you learned that I'd prevented you from dousing yourself with holy water," Mephisto sighed. "I was afraid it was then. At some level I think you still believe that you were purifying yourself and that it is necessary that you do so. It is a mental block, you won't allow yourself to unseal your powers because you still fear that your flames are corrupting."
"So how do we fix it?" Bon demanded.
Mephisto shrugged. "I don't know. Neither you nor I can force Rin-kun to be at peace with himself. And given that this latest manifestation of his unease seems to have been caused by my efforts to help, I do not think it would be wise for us to try."
Izumo lay in bed trying to figure out what had woken her up so early in the morning. She listened to the creaking of the old building and Paku's soft snores from the other side of the room. More distantly she could hear one of the boys on the next floor down padding down the hall to their bathroom. Her demon blood was thin and weak, but it had given her the enhanced senses of a fox: her eyes easily pierced nocturnal gloom, Rin's cooking filled the whole dorm and the fields around it with delicious scents and her ears caught every whisper.
Her hearing had been a double-edged sword for as long as she could remember. Her classmates at her old school who called her names and harassed her had been bad enough, but much worse were the ones who tried to be nice only to have their whispers behind her back give away what they truly thought of her. Poor crazy girl. My mother says we should be kind to her, it's not her fault she's so weird. Bad blood. I heard they locked her mother up, the same thing will probably happen to her some day. Paku had been the only one who never joined in the gossip. Still, as hurtful as it was to hear, Izumo preferred knowing the truth to believing their lies.
As she lay in bed remembering, Izumo heard the stairs creaking, then the rattle of dishes in the kitchen. With a groan she got out of bed and pulled on a robe. Downstairs she found Rin getting breakfast started. "It's way too early to be up," she yawned.
"Itamae expects me at 5:30," Rin explained.
"Yeah well you don't have to fix breakfast for us too," Izumo said. "You should be sleeping."
"I was up anyway," Rin said.
"At least let me help," Izumo said. She tied her robe more tightly and leaned over the counter to get a better look at the cookbook. There was a notebook filled with Rin's messy scrawl beneath it.
Izumo didn't get much more than the impression of a letter before Rin snatched the notebook away and tucked it high on a shelf behind his cookbooks. "I'm going to make waffle batter, you can chop up the fruit for the compote topping. When everyone wakes up they can just put the batter in the waffle iron. Even Bon can manage that much."
"Don't be too sure," Izumo smirked. "Remember the toast?"
Rin winced. "I still don't know how Bon managed that."
The kitchen doors burst open and Amaimon charged through. Shiemi, wearing only her nightshift, slung over his shoulder. Shiemi was beating her fists against Amaimon's back. Izumo's mouth dropped open as she picked out something about, "Not decent!" Amaimon paused long enough to give Rin a challenging look then kicked open the back door and rushed outside.
Amaimon paused in the yard behind the old dorm. He shifted Shiemi a bit so that she was comfortably balanced on his hip while he waited for his pursuers to catch up. Shiemi gave him a watery-eyed look, "I just wanted to put on my robe," she told him.
Rin was out of the dorm a moment later. He didn't waste time trying to draw the sword strapped to his back, instead he attacked Amaimon with feet and claws, his tail lashing angrily behind him, the fur at the end of it wreathed in flames. Despite the power leaking past his seal Amaimon fended Rin off easily while still toting Shiemi around.
"If you don't want her back I might just keep her." Amaimon taunted. "She's kinda cute like this."
Shiemi blushed and crossed her arms over her chest, bunching up the thin material of her nightshift over her breasts.
Rin bared his fangs at Amaimon, welcoming the protective rage and the way it weakened the seal.
Izumo rushed out into the yard and summoned her familiars. "Don't let him run, harass him, try to make him drop Moriyama," she ordered. The Byakko stared at her for a moment, then plopped down on the pavement. "Why should we?" Uke asked rebelliously.
Rin slid the strap of his sword bag over his head. "Izumo!" he shouted as he tossed it to her.
Amaimon intercepted the sword. "No cheating," he tsked. He 'returned' the sword to Rin by slamming it into his half-brother's stomach with enough force to knock the wind out of the younger demon. While Rin was doubled over, Amaimon turned to Shiemi. "Let's get married," he suggested, watching Rin's reaction out of the corner of his eye. "Now you promise to love, honor and obey me until death do us part, okay?"
"Not unless you say it first," Shiemi replied impulsively.
Amaimon, still paying more attention to Rin and the increasingly volatile flames surrounding him, shrugged. "I promise to love, honor and-"
"That's enough," Shiemi interrupted quickly. "I don't think it's very honorable for you to pick fights with my best friend."
Rin and Izumo both stared at Shiemi in shock, but their reaction was nothing compared to Amaimon's. The green-haired demon shivered violently as the oath settled in to his bones. He set Shiemi carefully back on her feet. Then he stared at her for a moment in horrified disbelief before fleeing.
"Wow," Izumo said blinking. "I'm impressed," she told Shiemi.
Shiemi bit her lip. "I hope I stopped him soon enough. I don't want him to have to obey me," she said. "I just wanted to stop him from using me to tease Rin."
Rin realized Shiemi had regulated him to friend status once again, a small part of his mind was surprised at how little it stung this time. "Well, it's you," he told her. "Even if he does, you won't order him to do anything bad."
"Right," Shiemi said with determination.
"We probably don't want to mention this to anyone," Izumo cautioned. "You know what the Grigori is like." Rin and Shiemi both grimaced and nodded.
"Big Brother?" Amaimon poked his head into Mephisto's rooms with what he hoped was an ingratiating smile. "I may have said something I shouldn't."
Mephisto shut off his TV and listened with a combination of bemusement and disbelief as Amaimon explained what had happened. "What ever did I do to deserve such reckless younger brothers?" Mephisto asked when Amaimon was done.
The Earth King opened his mouth to answer and was met with a quelling glare. Wisely he silenced himself.
Mephisto paced across his sitting room, thinking out loud. "Obviously your vow was given without ceremony, seriousness… or thought," he said with a pointed glare. "However it was based on a marriage vow and thus has the weight of tradition behind it, even foolish marriages count. Though I suppose calculating the precise weight is a moot point: the vow was made, you feel it in your bones, thus it has enough weight."
"I feel it, I feel a connection to her," Amaimon confirmed. "When she asked me to stop the fight, maybe I could have broken it, but… I didn't want to."
Mephisto nodded. "So what precisely have you promised? To love and honor… at least she had the sense to stop you before you promised to obey; her oath will be equivalent to yours." Amaimon quailed at the bite in Mephisto's voice.
Mephisto sighed. "Love... As your other little brother has demonstrated love places very little restraint on actions. One may quite easily do terrible things to people they love with all their heart… However, I strongly suggest that you quickly develop a platonic love for my little student, at least until she is of age," Mephisto added with a toothy smile that reminded Amaimon that as the True Cross Academy's Headmaster Mephisto had promises of his own to uphold with regards to his students' well-being.
'Of course it is big brother,' Amaimon thought to himself, 'He has some sort of escape clause.'
"Well-being is not so broad a term as love, but it isn't particularly narrow either," Mephisto said, divining the direction of his younger brother's thoughts. "Sending Yukio away causes me no particular conflict. It's for his own good as much as Rin's, although I do hope he suffers before he takes my advice and develops interests apart from his fixation on his twin. Seeing him dead would not have been impossible but it would have required elaborate maneuvering had I chosen that path... As I am not inclined, at the moment to exert myself on your behalf, I advise that you consider Ms. Moriyama nothing more than a dear friend for several years to come," he warned Amaimon.
The Earth King shrugged, "It's fun teasing little brother, he gets so riled up. I really don't get all the fuss about sex myself," he admitted. "But judging from all those stupid shows you subjected me too while I was pretending to be dead you're a… what was the word? A prude. I thought twelve was the age of consent anyway."
"In Europe, from the 12th to the 16th century," Mephisto replied disapprovingly. "Here, it is twenty without her mother's approval and I wouldn't recommend discussing this with her mother."
"Back to the subject at hand. Honor will bind you a bit more stringently than love, as you have discovered. Due to Moriyama-san's personality and your own it seems her sense of honor will define honor for the both of you. She knows her own mind, since coming to Assiah you've just been amusing yourself… Although you claimed you wished to be here to better understand the division between your parents," Mephisto scolded.
"And between you and Father," Amaimon interrupted. "It's just a game, why do you hate each other so much? And why will neither of you give it up? Mother thinks you're both fools to care so much about this place."
"You mother cared as well in her time," Mephisto asserted. "But like all the other elders she's grown distant and apathetic. Father has been corrupting the game for generations, the humans think of Gehenna as divided into Heaven and Hell… and the more knowledgeable ones only believe in Hell."
"Who cares what humans think? They're just our pawns," Amaimon pointed out.
"The game is our coming of age rite," Mephisto disagreed. "And the playing pieces sense that it's been despoiled."
"That's not what Mother says you think," Amaimon challenged. Then remembered that he needed Mephisto's help and added, "I came to play the game as it was meant to be played, not as a tool for Father to use to vent his rage."
Mephisto gave Amaimon a warmer smile. "And you have made your first serious mistake in the game, but it could have been much, much worse. Sheimi is kind. But do you understand your mistake? We may consider humans to chess pieces in our game but they are not without their own desires. If your game piece may usurp control over you is it truly a chess piece or is it actually another player in the game? "
Amaimon squirmed a bit. "Maybe she has some Gehenna blood in her?"
Mephisto laughed and shook his head. "It is a game of course," he added after a few minutes. "A marvelous game, but we never play it to the end. Like toddlers we throw the board on the floor just when it gets interesting. Our esteemed father would do more than that: If he can't play anymore he would see the game board torn to shreds so that no one else may have a turn. I would see how the game ends. Although that is a topic for another day."
"For now, let us see how we may mitigate the effects of your foolish oath. Although…" Mephisto paused, he gave Amaimon a long look "Having someone to help keep you out of trouble has a certain appeal."