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[NANO 2007 cont'd][Catfish: Ghost Story]
Previously: take one | take two | take three | take four | take five | take six | take seven | take eight
JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS OVER?!
Nahhh, I still suspect I've got something like 30K to go on this story. But I'm taking a break for the week in terms of writing, which has been sort of nice! Instead, I'm working on a fic that occasionally makes me stop, scratch my head, and ask what the hell am I doing?
TODAY: Stuff happens! Sen talks a lot, and Ken doesn't like heavy books.
Please tell me if you're reading and you like this! I will love you long time. :Db
+++++
Ken awoke with a horrible taste in the back of his throat and a pounding headache between his eyes. He pushed himself upright and cringed at the stab of pain in his head from the movement. He doubled over, breathing hard through his mouth and holding as still as possible until he no longer felt the urge to simply curl up and stop from moving ever again. When he could manage to lift his head, he found himself in alone his own bedroom with the blankets tucked haphazardly around his hips. He ground the heel of one hand against one eye and pressed down as hard as he could as he swung his legs -- carefully -- over the side of his bed and stood. For a moment he wobbled, and he had to slap a hand against the wall for balance for long seconds before he felt steady enough to let go.
Step by slow, tottering step, he made his way to the door of his bedroom, and then into the hallway beyond. A few times he stopped, pressing his forehead to the cool plaster and breathing slowly against the stabbing pain in his temples before forcing himself to continue.
He found Sen tucked up into one corner of his couch, apparently asleep. As soon as he staggered in, however, she sat up, blinking hard at him a few times before her face lit up. "Ken! How are you feeling?!"
He cringed, holding up a hand and pinching his nose with the other. "Not so loud," he mumbled. His tongue felt thick and clumsy in his mouth. "God, what the hell hit me?"
"Sleep spell, actually," Sen said. She slid off the couch and walked towards him, stopping an arm's length away. "Vincent's not very good at them, though; he kinda wields 'em like a bat. I'm not surprised you're feeling it now." She reached out, hesitated, then completed the motion, resting her fingertips on his chin. "How about the rest? Other than the head, how d'you feel? No naseau or anything, no feeling tweaked out or ready to do anything stupid?"
He forced one eye open so he could glare at her properly. "I think that I've *already* done the stupid thing," he sighed. He thought about the look of shocked pain on her face, completely at odds with her current uncertainly worried expression, and tried to smile. From the way her eyebrows shot up, it wasn't terribly successful. "Look, Sen, about what happened--"
"Nah, don't worry about it," she cut said quickly. "It's okay, really. Well, okay, it was actually really *stupid*, but you know -- no lasting damage, no permanent harm done, so it's all ultimately okay, and that's what matters." She prodded his chest a little, then caught his wrist when he swayed, actually pushed off-balance by that. "And whoa, let's get you sitting down, okay? Roy can get you something to drink -- hey! Roy!" She caught Ken's shoulders when he winced again at her sudden shout. "He's awake! Get him some, I dunno, water or something!"
She tugged Ken's arm over her shoulders, and though she was too short to be a really effective crutch, he still found himself leaning heavily against her as they hobbled for the couch. It felt almost disgustingly good to just sink down into it, letting his head loll back against the cushions with a groan. Sen perched on the arm beside him, and he felt her hand settle atop his head, petting through his hair. He rolled his head into the touch and cracked one eye open. Her expression was almost gentle, her brows arched in quizzical fondness. "... nngh?"
"Been a bit of a rough day, huh?" she asked gently.
Ken snorted, letting his eye drift shut again. "You could say that ..."
She laughed. Her fingers dug gently into his scalp, kneading out pressure points. "I do," she said wryly. "I will, even. God, another day like that in my lifetime will be too soon." The couch squeaked as she moved, though she continued stroking his head. "Let's not do it again."
"Yeah," he muttered. "No arguments from me."
"And I really mean that," she said. "Never again -- hey!" Her hand pressed down for a moment atop his head, and he opened one eye to watch as Roy walked into his field of vision, holding two separate glasses of water. She reached for both, then handed one to him; it took an embarrassingly long amount of time to get his fingers to close properly around the cup. Ken lifted his head with some effort, staring down into the cup.
"You should drink," Roy told him. He crossed his arms, leaning against the wall facing them. "It'll help you feel better."
"It'll get rid of some of the taste, at least," Sen added brightly.
Ken blinked a few times, squinting his eyes against the too-bright light. His body felt leaden and stiff, and he wondered idly if a drink would be worth the effort of lifting his cup. "Really?"
"As well as anything can," she said. Her fingers curled in his hair and tugged a little, pulling his head up a fraction. "No matter what the temptation, don't mix that stuff with alcohol. Ugh." She gave a theatric shudder.
He peered at the cup again, then shrugged and brough the cup to his mouth, drinking slowly. Sen's fingers remained curled in his scalp, tiny cold fingertips along the back curve of his ear. When he turned to look up at her, she was making faces into her own cup, already empty.
"What was that?" he mumbled, lowering the cup and letting his head fall back again. "The stuff they gave me."
"Some pill or other," she said absently, lifting her cup to the light and peering at the dregs, like it might magically refill under her stare. "I don't actually know what goes into it -- it's a 'secret family recipie' or something, Avery's really hush-hush about the whole thing."
"Avery?" Ken's brows furrowed. "Was he here?"
The couch creaked under Sen's moving weight. He could feel her looking at him but couldn't be bothered to open his eyes and meet her gaze. "You don't remember?"
Ken licked his lips. They were dry and peeling. "Not really," he admitted. "Uh, I think there was -- I mean, I remember the mirror, and you said Elizabeth was ... wasn't?" His brows drew closer together, and he finally made himself lift his head slightly, cracking his eyes open to peer at Sen. "She's okay, right ... ?"
Sen's eyes widened, then softened into that same weird, almost *maternal*, expression. "She's fine," she said. "You took the hit for her."
He sighed and slumped back again. "Her eyes were missing," he mumbled. "In the mirror, I mean."
"Not surprising." She moved again, till her hip bumped up against his elbow. "Those coins I gave her, they're meant to act as a blindfold. They hide her eyes and cloak the memory of seeing -- that's what keeps her safe. Safer."
He lolled his head to one side, towards the sound of her voice. "Will she still be all right?" he asked softly. "I mean. You said that her -- her soul's all right, but your spell ..."
"Shouldn't be a problem." The couch squeaked, and he cracked open his eyes enough to see Sen slide off the couch arm and start pacing. "They might've been picked a bit loose, but if, you know, she didn't start babbling about the stuff that happened to you guys before, I think she's still all right."
"Elizabeth doesn't babble." Ken wriggled deeper into his couch. "It's not her."
"Ehhhh." Sen's tone was dismissive. He heard her begin to pace, four measured steps in one direction, a pause, and then four steps back. "At the very least, she would've probably said *something* if she remembered. Humans are kind of like that, they like to blurt whatever's on their minds when something weird happens to them."
He made a vague noise, though of agreement or protest, he wasn't sure himself. He was finally comfortable again, the vertigo from moving was fading the longer he remained still, and the aftertaste of the pill was fading away. Even when the cup slipped from his fingers, spilling a cold line across one leg, he couldn't make himself do more than twitch in response.
A hand grasped his shoulder and he grumbled in his throat, sluggishly trying to wriggle away. "Ken? Hey, c'mon, kiddo, you need to stay with me just a little longer."
"Nnngh," he said intelligently.
"Yeah, same to you. Cooooome on now, sit up." The grip on his shoulder vanished, only to be replaced by two hands hooking in his armpits, bodily hauling him back up. He groaned protest at the manhandling, wrestling himself up the rest of the way and forcing his eyes open. Sen's face hovered over his, so close that the angle and shadows made her face look long and narrow and sharp.
"Awake now?" she asked.
He muttered and flapped a hand at her. She leaned back, her face coming back into purely human focus.
"Listen to me," she said. "You're *not* in any real trouble, but there are a few things you've got to do. It's not punishment, not really."
"... huh?"
"I said listen." She patted his cheeks sharply, and when he made a face and tried to lean away she followed. "Look, so. What you did with the mirror was stupid. Most people in our circles would've strung you up for using something like that, never mind that you're just a kid getting started." She caught his chin and turned it back to her when his head started to loll again. "Hey, no, *listen*." She gave him a brief shake. "This is serious. We're going to have to play it carefully for a while, all right?"
Ken blinked hard, trying to focus. "Right ..."
"So here's what's going to happen." She reached out and this time pressed her fingers to his eyelids, scissoring them open. He winced, but when he leaned his head back, trying to escape, he found himself stuck against the head of the couch. Sen crawled back onto the couch arm, rising onto her knees above him so she could look straight down into his eyes. "I've called some friends of mine. They'd like to talk to you, when you're feeling a bit better."
"Friends ... ?"
"Don't worry," she said, and there was a bit of wry humor in her voice and in the faint tilt of her head. "They're all human. It'll be good for you to talk with them, we think. They'll give you perspective."
He licked his lips again, feeling his eyes sliding shut again, even against the pinching pressure of her fingers. "I already talked to Avery ..."
"Like I said," Sen said gently, and to his relief she let go of his face, slipping back to perch on the edge of the couch's arm, too far away for his heavy hand to reach. "They're all fully human, so they'll be able to understand you better."
His eyes dropped shut completely, and before he could try to ask, he was gone.
+++
Ken dreamed:
He watched a young man walking through the streets of a busy city, dressed in a plain brown kimono and holding a slip of paper in one hand. Occasionally he would consult it, look around, then continue on his way. The man didn't seem terribly concerned by being apparently lost; there was a faint smile on his face -- which was oddly blurred and fuzzy, like it wouldn't quite come into focus -- whenever he looked around, something outright fond settled on his expression. Even when someone bumped into him, sending him skittering a few steps sideways to regain his balance, his good mood never faded.
He turned a corner and Ken abruptly recognized the long narrow street as the one that led to Vincent and Avery's shop. The buildings around the walker had taken on a faint pearlescent glow, all growing steadily stronger until the young man stopped in front of the little bookstore front, which blazed so brightly that Ken had to look away. There was a faint metallic jingle from the door opening, and then he was inside, watching the young man turn and bow to the dusty armchair pushed up to the window.
Sitting in the chair was a young woman. Her back was ramrod straight and her hands were folded in her lap; her feet were hooked at their tiny ankles. She wore a long flowing black dress, with a thin black choker at her throat, set with a bright yellow stone. Her long hair was piled atop her head in intricate loops and buns, pinned in place by a multitude of gemstone butterflies. All of her long thin fingers were heavy with thick silver rings except her left ring finger, which had only a single thin gold band. Something in her face and posture was familiar, but though Ken leaned in to study her face closely, he couldn't place that feeling of deja-vu.
"Honored lady," said the young man. "You wouldn't happen to know if my wife's here, would you?"
The woman lifted a finger and touched it to the red bow of her mouth. She glanced to the side, towards the narrow rows of bookshelves. The young man followed her gaze, then chuckled. "Downstairs, then?"
She gave him a demure little smile.
The man straightened, and Ken saw his face clearly for the first time. It looked almost exactly like his own -- a little older, a little longer, but unmistakably recognizable. Something in Ken's chest lurched and tightened painfully.
"Well then," said Daisuke Suzuki, smiling broadly. "Would you mind opening the way?"
The girl in the chair rose to her feet, her hands still clasped neatly before her. Her sleeves were long enough to trail to the floor, but neither they nor her full skirt left any trails in the dust on the floor as she glided towards the bookshelves. Ken, watching, half-expected her to get stuck as he had before, but she simply arrowed her way between them, neat and easy as a ghost. Daisuke folded his arms, looking around the little shop with the same clear-eyed affection he'd given the surrounding city.
A moment later there was a familiar low grinding noise. The bookshelves swung open like double doors. The girl stood at the revealed doorway, her hands wrapped in folds of her skirt. She dropped into a low curtsy before Daisuke, glancing up through her lashes at him with a sharp-toothed smile. He reached out and ruffled her hair when he passed, somehow managing to avoid mussing her artfully-arranged curls.
"Thank you, Lady Jibrielle," he said, and disappeared down the stairs.
Ken froze, staring at the woman who turned her head slowly to look straight at him. Her face flickered in and out of focus, but her wide hungry smile never faded. She dropped her head forward and advanced slowly towards him, her lithe long body swaying with a cat's easy slinking ripple. Ken backed up, sliding sideways, and when she gathered herself up and left, he ducked with a nimbleness that surprised himself and threw himself towards the open doorway.
Somehow he managed to make his way down the entire long flight of stairs without falling. At the bottom he turned and looked back, and sitting in the doorway was a small black cat, her tail neatly curled around herself and watching him with amused golden eyes. When she saw him staring, she arched her neck, licked her shoulder twice, then rose gracefully to her feet and padded out of sight. Ken shook his head in a halfhearted attempt to clear it, then squared his shoulders and continued down the hallway, towards the shop door.
"I'm sorry about that," a man's voice said, just before his hand closed on the doorknob. He jumped and jerked to look; his grandfather stood leaning against the wall, hands tucked into his sleeves and smiling wryly. "I forget how much Lady Jibrielle likes to play."
Ken swallowed around the lump in his throat. "Uh," he managed, with some effort. "That was the--"
"Master Avery's cat," said Daisuke Suzuki. He shook his head. "There's a story behind that. There's a story behind everything. You know that, don't you, Kenichi?"
His hand dropped away from the doorknob, hanging limply by his side. "I'm dreaming," he said.
His grandfather nodded.
"I'm dreaming, and you're just ... here. You look like you do in that photo Yuki found--"
"You still have that?" Daisuke looked suddenly pleased. "I'm glad to hear it. I had to hide it from your grandmother, you know. She has this odd superstition about cameras, even though they're nowhere near as effective as a good spelled mirror." He shook his head fondly. "But yes, you'd call this a dream, by strictest definition. You're asleep, and your mind is free to wander."
"And I'm not ... going crazy, am I?" Ken asked hesitantly. "After everything that happened, with that mirror--"
Daisuke's face darkened. He shook his head slowly. "That was certainly nasty," he said. "You're a lot of untapped potential, grandson, and you're just starting to learn -- it's a bad place to be."
Ken shoved his hands into his pockets and stared at his feet, scuffing the ground with one foot. "Crazy or not?"
"Not." Daisuke sighed, and his tone of voice was familiar enough to make Ken's chest ache. "You've inherited your grandmother's blood, and that's an awkward thing for a human to carry." His feet appeared in Ken's line of vision before a solid warm hand caught his shoulder; he looked up in surprise. Daisuke was smiling again, but only barely, his eyes dark and more than a little sad.
"You're not going crazy, Kenichi," he said again, more gently than before. "Even if it feels like that right now. There's a lot you have to take in. I'm sure your grandmother's been teaching you what she can."
Ken bowed his head further, taking a deep breath and holding it for a full ten-count before he slowly let it out. "... I feel like I can't keep up," he admitted at last, the words leaden in his mouth. "No matter how much I try to follow everything that Sen throws at me, and I just can't--"
Daisuke cuffed the side of Ken's head gently; his hand was steadier and stronger than he remembered, but the touch was still the same. "You'll learn," he said. "I promise, you'll learn. It's just like all of your other studies: once you learn the basics, the rest will come to you easily. Isn't that how you've always worked?"
He glanced up. "But I really *don't get it*," he said again. "She goes so fast, she can't keep a linear explanation going, and Roy tries to help, but he already knows everything too--"
"Just like your teachers when you were younger," Daisuke said. His hand slid through Ken's hair, petting fondly, like he hadn't in years -- not since Ken had been tall as his grandfather's knee. "Just like your brother. You remember, you were always so upset when Jun understood things faster than you. No matter he's five years older, ahh, you would always get so frustrated ..." He chuckled, and Ken flushed, squirming in place. "Ahh, you were such a cute kid ..."
Ken muttered, batting his grandfather's hand away from his head. "Get off," he muttered. "I wasn't ever."
Daisuke just laughed again, unconcerned, his hand dropping back to Ken's shoulder again. He shook his head fondly. "Oh, you were," he said. "And such a good boy. You were always such a good boy."
"Grandfather," Ken said, pained. He covered his eyes with one hand, working to keep his breathing even. "I don't know ... I feel like I'm in over my head. I think I've done the right thing to help my family, and it makes things worse and I--" He sucked in a sharp, shaky breath, and the next confession came out small and awkward, so that Daisuke had to crane forward in order to hear it. "I'm afraid."
There was a long silence, broken finally by a long sigh. "Fear is a healthy thing," he said at last. "It keeps you sharp, and it reminds you of what's important. The trick is how you handle it." Fingers brushed Ken's cheek, turning his face up again. Daisuke looked at him seriously, and in the flickering hall light he looked older, more like the grandfather that Ken remembered. "You just need to find your own way of handling things, and you'll do well. Don't let your grandmother bully you into following her way; I love her--" and his face softened briefly with warm nostalgia before returning to the same stern look--"I love her dearly, but she isn't patient. She's never been patient. She's lived for a very long time, and sometimes ..." He shook his head. "What works for her will not always work for you."
Ken bit the inside of his cheek, holding his breath. After nearly a minute, it burst from him in a rush. "... You know," he said, "for a dream, this is awfully ... clear, isn't it?"
His grandfather blinked, then broke into another wide grin. "A bit," he agreed.
"And you ..." He tilted his head, looking at Daisuke speculatively. "You're awfully real for a subconscious creation."
Daisuke spread his hands and continued to grin.
"If things like werewolves, and fox-spirits, and demons -- if those can exist, then ..." He paused. He reached out and put a hand to his grandfather's chest. For a moment there was solid resistance against his palm, and then his arm sank through, halfway to the elbow before his hand hit the opposite wall.
"Should you be here?" he asked quietly.
"Maybe not," said Daisuke. He tilted his head and raised an eyebrow. "But with all the fuss, I couldn't just leave on good conscience."
Ken withdrew his hand and stepped back. "Is that okay?" he said. "I mean, all those stories you used to tell us, about how ghosts that stick around the living are trapped for some reason--"
"I may be breaking some rules," Daisuke said. He winked. "I wanted to check on you, see how you were doing."
"Me?" Ken looked away, kicking at the ground. Petulance bled into his voice when he added, "Why not Grandmother? You and she ..."
Daisuke sighed. "Kenichi," he said, his tone repoachful, "I wanted to hear from you myself. I'm not going to pick her over you, not when she can take care of herself."
Ken flushed and hunched his shoulders. The world around them flickered and he looked up sharply. Around the naked bulb of the hall light were swirling clouds -- like dust motes in sunlight -- that grew steadily larger with each heartbeat. He backed up in surprise, looking around with some alarm. "What--"
"You're waking up," said Daisuke. He tucked his hands back into his sleeves and smiled. The hallway was beginning to shimmer and shift, the far ends of it unravelling like pulled threads, leaving whiteness behind. His eyes were calm as he met Ken's gaze, steady as a rock in a humbling faith. "You'll be all right, Kenichi. Listen to your grandmother, but know when not to." He winked, then turned to face the ending dream. "I'm on your side, even if I'm not around."
"I miss you," Ken blurted. He took a step forward; his body felt oddly light, and when he looked down, he saw his feet were no longer completely touching the ground. "Every day. I wish -- I'm sorry that I --"
Daisuke shook his head, still smiling. "Why be sorry?" he said. "I know I was loved, by you and your family, and by her." He turned, looking up, and his expression was so warmly affection that Ken felt oddly embarrassed to see it. "Give her my best, won't you?"
Ken licked his lips. He rubbed his hands against his legs and nodded. "I will," he promised, and closed his eyes as the world went white.
+++
He woke in his own bed, curled on his side. He reached for his glasses, slipping them on before he lifted his head and saw Sen sitting at his desk. His desk lamp was flipped on over her head, bowed low over an open book. When he moved she looked up, cocking her head. "How do you feel?"
He licked his lips. Most of the horrible aftertaste from the pills had faded, lingering more in memory than anywhere else. "... all right," he said.
"Have interesting dreams?" Her face and her voice were completely neutral, almost as deadpan as Roy at his best.
Ken rubbed his face and sat up, resting his hands loosely in his lap. "Yeah," he said. "They were."
"Ah," she said, and raised the book again -- one of his physical chemistry reference books, he recognized, probably pilfered from his bookshelf -- over her face like a shield of paper and cardboard. "Good."
He laced his fingers together, staring at the book like he'd eventually be able to see through it to Sen's face on the other side. He wanted to say something about his dream, about his grandfather's smiling face and parting words. Instead, he looked at his hands and said, "You're a fox, then?"
"Since the day I was born," Sen agreed. She let the book drop back to her lap with a huff. "Damn, this thing's heavy. Did you really need this?"
"Mom thought it'd be a good idea for me to have extra references," he said, and managed a faint smile. "Since I kept telling her about what a nightmare the class was, she insisted."
"Did you actually even use this?"
"Not once." Ken leaned until his back touched the wall and let himself relax a little. "Well, maybe as a doorstop when I was moving. But not for its actual purpose -- I keep meaning to sell it, actually. Let someone else deal with it." He shrugged, watching how carefully she didn't quite meet his eyes -- when she turned her head, she would look at a point just to the left of his face, close enough that she almost fooled him. "Sen--"
"Roy's making dinner," she said. She turned to put the book on his desk, then hopped to her feet. "I'll bring you food, you don't have to worry about getting up. You sit tight--"
"Sen," he said again, then took a deep breath. "... Grandmother."
Sen stopped. For a moment, he didn't think she was even breathing.
Then she sighed and turned to him, crossing her arms over her chest. She drew herself up to the fullest of her ridiculously short height and somehow still managed to stare him down. She finally met his eyes, her own hard and unblinking. "You already knew that," she said. "You've known that for a while, in fact. If you're going to have a crisis now that you know what I really am, I have to tell you, I'm not interested--"
"I'm the most like you," he said. "That's what everyone keeps saying, that I inherited everything from you."
Her eyes narrowed. "That's right," she said. "You've got fox-blood in you, and pretty strongly. Anyone who knew what to look for would see that in you."
Ken licked his lips. "What about Grandfather?" he asked. "Did he -- was there anything special about him? Was he ever ... you know," he waved a hand loosely. "I mean, there had to be something about him that made you interested, right? Sort of ..." He trailed off and flushed at her raised eyebrow. "I mean, why him? Why my grandfather? Was it just that he was ... there, and you were there, and ..." He blushed harder, covering his face with one hand. "I mean. Well."
At first he thought she wouldn't answer; then she sighed, and he heard the chair creak again under her weight.
"He was special," she said quietly. "I'm not very -- you sort of know me at this point, don't you? I get distracted easily. We're all like that, foxes. We like the things that shine, or the things that stand out. Your grandfather was like that. And ... he knew."
Ken peeked through his fingers, and saw her gesturing to herself. "Knew?"
"What I was," she said. "He looked right at me and greeted me by name. Not this one, not 'Sen,' but as a fox." She sighed, leaning back against his desk and tipping her head towards the ceiling. "Daisuke was special, but he never *did* anything about it, or with it. He was content to just ... have it. He said it comforted him to know it was there." Her head lolled to one side, and he saw she was staring blankly ahead, not even bothering to pretend to focus. "I kept offering to teach him, but he'd always say no, and then there were the boys, and ..." She shook herself abruptly, like a dog coming out of the water, and straightened. "Yeah. He did have *something*, but he never used it, and I never knew exactly what it was."
He sat up, eyeing her; she met his eyes for a moment, then shrugged. "I'm serious. There was definitely something, but he never said what, if he knew himself."
"And you didn't ask?" He peered at her. "You?"
She made an irritated sound, glaring down at him. "If he didn't know, he couldn't very well say, could he? It's not like I was going to force him to learn when he had no interest in it."
Ken pushed his glasses up his nose. He stared at her. After a moment her cheeks puffed out and she kicked her legs, hunching her shoulders till she looked like nothing more than a kid caught misbehaving. "*What*."
"I just have a hard time believing it," he said. "He had some weird power, he was your *husband*, and you never once--?"
"No, see, that's it," she said. "He was my husband! So I was around all the time -- well, most of the time, at any rate -- and he didn't have to learn! I went *with* him when he visited his parents, I was there when he took the kids somewhere; we were *always together*." She pressed her lips together into a frown. "You've got your own life, though. I'm not going to be sticking around forever--"
"You didn't with Grandfather, either," he pointed out quietly. "My dad wasn't that old when you left. He was younger than Yuki is now, even, and you still just left them all."
She didn't flinch. Maybe it was a trick of the light behind her, but when she folded her arms over her breasts and tipped her head just fractionally to the left, she looked more inhuman than she had when halfway through her transformation.
"There were a lot of reasons," she said. She tilted her head in the other direction now, never once blinking as long seconds ticked past. "Some of it has to do with the incompatibility of the human world with the supernatural. Some of it was because I had business I couldn't avoid any longer." Her eyes narrowed suddenly to thin slits of green. "And as for the rest, they're just none of your business."
He drew in a sharp breath to protest. One of Sen's eyebrows quirked just faintly, like a dare. He stared at that silent challenge for a moment, then sagged down again.
"Dad still hates you, you know," he said quietly. "For leaving."
"If that's all he hates me for, I'll be grateful," said Sen. Ken glanced up sharply at that, but she'd already moved, clapping her hands decisively. "Now, seriously, I don't know about you, but I am *starving* at this point -- Roy insisted on waiting till you woke up before we'd eat. And I gotta tell you, favorite grandson or not, I am seriously going to kick your ass if you keep me from food any longer. This is what, the second time you've done it? You still owe me a dinner at a nice resturant." She struck a wide-legged stance, pointing straight at him. "Got that?"
He blinked at her, thrown by the switch in her attitude; already gone was the serious-eyed woman who'd stared him done, the inhuman creature borrowing a young girl's skin; all that was left was Sen as he'd first met her, loud and careless with her voice, already skipping ahead to another subject. "I ... what?"
"It's settled, then!" She nodded decisively at him, then crossed over to his bed, grabbing his wrist and pulling. "Come *on*, let's *go*."
Ken let her pull him off his bed to a tottering standing position, out of his bedroom and down the hallway. Halfway to the kitchen, he said, "When will you tell me what's going on?"
Sen paused. She looked back over her shoulder at him, and though the corner of her mouth twisted up, it wasn't really a smile there on her face.
"After dinner," she said. "I'll tell you everything if you can wait that long."
He met her eyes and nodded, turning his hand in hers to squeeze once as punctuation. "Yeah," he said. "That's fair enough."
+++
"I've got these friends, see," Sen said. She'd kicked back in her chair so that it was balanced only on its two back legs -- and how she managed to find the room to do that in his narrow kitchen, Ken wasn't sure he wanted to know -- and had her feet propped on his table, crossed at the ankles. A half-empty beer bottle dangled from her fingers. "They live in Boston now, but they used to be here in Seattle for a good, oh, twelve, thirteen years or so. Marina and John Priestly -- good people, those two. They're the ones I want you to talk to, when there's time. Anyway, they're kind of settled down now, they've got a kid and everything, but John's a priest, and not only a priest, he's got enough innate talent to actually be *effective*, rather than just yapping all day at a bunch of--"
Roy cleared his throat pointedly. Sen pouted, but went on: "So, okay, like I said, they've got a kid, right? And Jenny's really a great kid, she's smart for her age, but she's still a kid, and Marina's not too keen on letting her stay by herself, and most babysitters aren't comfortable with staying in a haunted house. And yes, I can see what you're going to say, and yes, there are ghosts, so let's move on, okay?
"About oh, half a year ago? John calls me up and says that there's something weird going on down in Portland. A, what did he call it?"
"A rash of demonic activity that may have been connected to an old Devil's Gate located in the area," Roy said, not looking up from the apple he was peeling.
"Right, right, that. And see, it's right around the time the school year is starting, so neither he nor Marina want to go off and leave Jenny to face that by herself. I mean, would you?" She raised an eyebrow at him.
Ken shook his head. "So you went--?"
"Yeah, yeah." She waved a hand, tipping her chair back further. "Roy and I go to check it out as a favor to them. I didn't really think there'd be much of a problem with it, since most of the time? These things are really tiny and they blow over fast. Nothing to worry about, and usually nothing big enough that we'd need a full-class exorcist like John.
"So there we were, skulking around a big old warehouse. Everything's real quiet, and me, I'm ready to call it quits when Roy sees something moving inside. I get him to boost me up and look, and there's a little kid sitting by herself next to the window." Abruptly, Sen moved her feet from the table, letting her chair thunk forward. She put her elbows on the table and put her bottle aside with a frown, and even Roy paused in the middle of cutting his apple into slices. Ken looked from one to the other, but before he could ask, she went on: "And I mean, okay, sure, demonic and activity and all, but -- that kid couldn't have been more than, like, six years old. So I told Roy to call the cops, and I went around to try and get the lock for the door open. Who the hell leaves their kid in an empty warehouse at night?"
Her expression turned grim as she answered her own question: "Same sort of guy who likes to dabble with summoning demons, I guess." She laced her fingers together and rested her chin on the net of them, her eyes hooded. "The moment I opened that door, I got hit by -- man, I don't even know exactly what they were. Big, though. And ugly. I was stupid, they caught me off-guard." Her lips thinned into a white line. "And of course Roy came running, because hell, at that point I might've been screaming. I dunno."
"No," Roy said quietly. "You don't have to scream when there's a demon."
Sen nodded, lapsed into thoughtful silence. Ken studied her, then turned to Roy, who handed him an apple slice. He turned it over in his fingers several times. "You say ... demons," he said hesitantly. "Is that like -- I mean, you're a fox--"
"That's *nothing* like what I am," Sen cut him off sharply. She looked genuinely angry for a moment, lips curled back to show sharp teeth. "Demons are a completely different creature. Foxes, raccoons, all of us, we're native to this world, just like you humans." She drew herself up, never once blinking. "Things like *that* -- they're from somewhere else entirely."
Ken put the apple down and pushed his plate away. "So, what, you're saying Hell exists?"
"For a definition of Hell, sure." Sen's head lowered, her lip never uncurling from its half-snarl. "But that's a theological debate, and one you should save for Avery or John, once you meet him. Like I was saying ..." She shook her head. "There was a fight. There were demons -- a lot of them. And man, you only think an empty warehouse is big till you're fighting fifteen of those guys." She dropped one hand to the table, idly picking at a dry piece of food stuck to the top. "It got pretty messy, really, worse than either of us were expecting. And I mean, you know, you *try* to be careful, you try to keep things contained, but it's still--"
"The girl was dead," Roy said softly, almost gently. "We checked later. Someone had set up a protective circle around her, but she wandered out of it, and ..."
"Who the *fuck* brings a kid to a demon-summoning, anyway?!" Sen thumped her fist down onto the table, hard enough to make the plates jump. "Seriously! You can't expect a little kid to just sleep through all the screaming and the--" She trailed off with a noise of frustration, scrubbing both hands hard through her hair and glaring at Ken. "And before you say *anything*, it wasn't my fault. Okay?"
He lifted his hands slowly. "I didn't say it was," he said slowly. "But ... a little girl, that's--"
"It was a mess," Sen groaned, pressing her fingertips into her closed eyes. "There was a lot of *yelling* and accusations and just thinking about it makes my head hurt. Because of couuurse daddy-dearest shows up while I'm freaking out and Roy's just standing there and there's a dead little girl and -- cops! Did I mention the cops? I don't think I mentioned the cops."
"You mentioned the cops," Roy said mildly.
"Did I? Great." She rubbed circles over her eyes. "So. We hightail it out of there, but I don't think the summoner was that fast; he wasy too busy freaking out about the little girl. Fast forward six months, and I hear that my husband's dead. I go to pay my last respects, and hey, what do you know, the grandson I stopped checking at actually has some talent! Color me shocked."
"I told you that you should have made sure," said Roy.
"Oh, shut up. Anyway, few days later, bam!" She punched a fist into her open palm. "Revenants start showing up, I get a call saying guess who escaped from prison, and by the way, you might want to keep an eye on that kid, and ... tah-dah." She flicked all her fingers wide open, expression dour. "Here we all are."
Ken sat silently for a few minutes. His own hands were tightly clasped on the tabletop, whiteknuckled and trembling a little. "... Yeah," he muttered. "Here we are."
Sen pinched the bridge of her nose, screwing her face into a scowl. "... damn," she said. "My throat hurts. See, Roy, this is why I don't do tell-all confessions. They're a pain." She took her bottle and finished the rest of it with several long swallows, then coughed, making another face. "Man, why did you let me just talk and talk like that?"
"Because you promised to talk," said Roy, and pushed the plate of pale brown apples at her. "And because at this point, Ken deserved to know."
"Hah." She took an apple slice, nibbling delicately at it and fixing Ken with a pointed look. "Well? Do you feel better now, that you know everything? Are the angels breaking through the clouds on high to sing choruses since I've done my big tell-all?"
He leaned forward a little, forcing himself not to look away. "That little girl," he said quietly. "You really didn't kill her?"
"What? *No*!" She looked immediately offended. "Holy hells, Ken, weren't you paying attention? I wouldn't lay a hand on a little kid--"
"All right," he said hastily. "All right, yeah, I'm sorry. It's just ..." He shook his head. "It's weird. And terrible. That poor girl, I don't even know ..."
Sen began to peel the label of her beer from the bottle. "Not everyone loves their family as much as you do, Ken," she said. "Or if they do, they're not as careful. The guy who brought her there put protections around her, but he still *brought* her into a situation where, you know, there'd be demons. I bet if you asked him, he wouldn't think he'd done anything wrong." She sighed, shaking her head. "That's why I'm trying not to pay attention to the rest of the family, by the way."
His gaze, wandering to the side, snapped back to her. "What?"
"There's a good chance no one would've ever found you if I hadn't gone to Daisuke's funeral." She didn't look at him, apparently fascinated with picking at the thin stripes of glue on glass. "I mean, yeah, maybe someday someone would've been all, 'hey, that Suzuki kid, he's yours, isn't he?' -- but that might've been years from now. I didn't really plan on showing up and hanging out with you. Not that I really expected Mister 'I'm a big tough summoner' to hold a grudge, but. You know."
"I don't think I do," he dared. "Why don't you tell me?"
Sen slanted a brief glare at him. "Kid, if I were to show up on your doorstep and introduce myself, your father would probably kill himself with an aneurysm." She shook her head. "Shigeru was so high-strung as a kid, I've no idea where he got it from. Must've been Daisuke's side of things." She shook her head. "There would've been a fuss, and you can't tell me that little sister of yours isn't the sort to just blurt it out at first opportunity."
"Yuki's not really ..." Ken paused and considered. "Well. She's seventeen."
"*Exactly*." Sen lifted her bottle and squinted one eye into the mouth. "Then everyone would've known about you guys and let me tell you, I've had a bitch of a time trying to keep *you* out of that much trouble, and at least you can be taught how to take care of yourself. The rest of them? Forget it." She sighed. "Satisfied now?"
Ken blinked several times. He licked his lips and swallowed. "Uh. Wow." He shook his head. "You really *are* telling everything."
"God, don't remind me." She crossed her arms on the table and leaned her chin atop them. "So. There's some crazy guy who thinks I'm the one who killed his kid who's playing around with demons, and there's *you*." She looked at him, and Roy turned to him as well, and he'd rarely felt so small or pinned in place. "You still with us?"
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "With great power comes great responsibility," he said.
Sen lifted her head, staring with him. "Spider-Man?" she asked. "You're quoting Spider-Man, and you were razzing me about Star Wars? At least *I* came first."
He shrugged, offering her a weak smile. "I'm in," he said. "I, it's not like I can just -- turn everything off, can I? I've already looked back, I've already seen everything, and ... now I know all of this, and ... well, it seemed like a fitting thing to say."
"You're a *dork*," she said, and grinned widely. It relieved him more than he wanted to admit, and that stayed with him, even when she bounced her half-eaten apple slice off his forehead and began to laugh.
+++
"Mister Suzuki? Mister Suzuki!"
Elizabeth glanced back curiously. "Ken, I think he's calling for you," she said, and put a hand on his arm. "Oh, I recognize him, doesn't he usually sit in the front row?"
Ken stopped, but didn't look. Part of him felt like being sick; he could hear the heavy pounding footsteps as Jeff Miller jogged to catch up with them. "I guess," he said. "He's not one of mine, though. I don't have office hours right now, anyway."
She frowned at him, then smacked his arm lightly. "Oh, come on," she said. "It can't hurt that much, can it?"
He swallowed down the *you have no idea* and turned, forcing his expression to remain neutral as Miller stopped before them, breathing hard. The light jog had left him redfaced and sweat beading on his upper lip, the latter of which he swiped away with a quick nervous tongue. Ken blinked at him.
"Did you want something?" he said, in his best intimidation tones -- the one that still sometimes worked on Yuki, depending on how guilty she felt for something. Elizabeth kicked the back of his shin lightly, and though he cringed, he managed to hold his posture and his expression.
Miller looked nervously from one side to the other and licked his lips again. "Well," he said. "Uhm. Well. I was wondering if we -- could we talk privately? I, uh. I've got something to ask you."
"It might be better if you asked us both," Ken said cooly. "Elizabeth might know the answer if I don't."
The other man gave him an unhappy look. "Mister Suzuki," he said. "*Please*, I really, uh, I really need to talk to *you*. Just you. It's. It's really important. I'm sorry, Miss Lowe, but this is--"
Elizabeth glanced at Ken. He could read her doubt in her quirked eyebrow, and maybe something of an apology for making him stop. Again, he said, "If it's about class, then there's nothing wrong with both of us knowing, right?"
"*Please*," said Miller again, his face crumbling into an expression of pathetic misery. Ken saw Elizabeth cringe from the corner of one eye in automatic sympathy. He ground his teeth for a moment, breathing slowly and evenly as he could. "It's got to be you, Mister Suzuki, it's about the -- um. The thing. That I, uh, that I asked about last week. You know. The ..." he wrang his hands, hunching his shoulders like a dog expecting to be kicked.
"Ken," Elizabeth said in a soft voice. She touched his arm again, looking up at him. "I need to track down Lilian -- do you want me to wait?"
Ken swallowed. He glanced briefly at Miller, who was now staring at Elizabeth with open hostility. It was strong enough to make Ken's skin crawl, and he shifted his own weight, imposing him slightly between her and Miller's line of sight. Deliberately, he leaned down and pecked her cheek, so that she squeaked and pulled back, touching her face with wide-eyed surprise and a tiny smile blooming.
"Go on ahead," he said. "I'll see you later, all right? Dinner on the Ave, maybe?"
"Sounds good," she agreed, her eyes sparkling -- though it faded a little when she glanced at Miller and apparently caught the tail-end of his glaring. "Call me, all right? I'm counting on you to rescue me if Lilian decides to pour out her boyfriend woes again."
"Sure," he said, with a lightheartedness he didn't quite feel. "You only love me because you can use me against her."
"You betcha." She winked and walked off, letting her hand linger against his arm for a long moment before letting it brush off. Ken watched her go, waiting until she'd gone through Bagley's double front doors before turning back to Miller. There was a fresh layer of sweat on the man's forehead and lip, heavy enough to slick his thinning hair to his skin.
"So," he said flatly. "What do you want?"
Miller flinched. "Mister Suzuki, please," he said. "You have to understand, I gave you that mirror for *your own good*. It was, um, it showed you the truth, didn't it? You saw what kind of beast that green-eyed demon really was--"
"I know that *I* almost died from it," he said flatly. "I asked some friends about it, you know. They said that mirror just sort of reaches into you and messes you up. Makes you think you're seeing the truth, when it's really just twisting things around."
"No," Miller protested, though he glanced aside, squirming obviously from one foot to the other. "No, no, Mister Suzuki, it wasn't anything like that, I, uhm, I don't know why you'd think I would ever--"
"Look, Miller," Ken cut him off flatly, "I really don't know what you're trying to pull, and I frankly don't give a damn. If you'll excuse me, I've got a date--"
He turned partway, then pitched forward with a pained grunt as something blunt and heavy smashed against the back of his neck. He staggered for a moment, turning his head in time to see Miller raising what looked like a textbook high over his head. The other man's face was almost regretful, his brows drawn together and the corners of his mouth pulled down.
"I'm sorry, Mister Suzuki," he said, "but you just don't understand."
He brought the book down again, hard, and the world went black.
JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS OVER?!
Nahhh, I still suspect I've got something like 30K to go on this story. But I'm taking a break for the week in terms of writing, which has been sort of nice! Instead, I'm working on a fic that occasionally makes me stop, scratch my head, and ask what the hell am I doing?
TODAY: Stuff happens! Sen talks a lot, and Ken doesn't like heavy books.
Please tell me if you're reading and you like this! I will love you long time. :Db
+++++
Ken awoke with a horrible taste in the back of his throat and a pounding headache between his eyes. He pushed himself upright and cringed at the stab of pain in his head from the movement. He doubled over, breathing hard through his mouth and holding as still as possible until he no longer felt the urge to simply curl up and stop from moving ever again. When he could manage to lift his head, he found himself in alone his own bedroom with the blankets tucked haphazardly around his hips. He ground the heel of one hand against one eye and pressed down as hard as he could as he swung his legs -- carefully -- over the side of his bed and stood. For a moment he wobbled, and he had to slap a hand against the wall for balance for long seconds before he felt steady enough to let go.
Step by slow, tottering step, he made his way to the door of his bedroom, and then into the hallway beyond. A few times he stopped, pressing his forehead to the cool plaster and breathing slowly against the stabbing pain in his temples before forcing himself to continue.
He found Sen tucked up into one corner of his couch, apparently asleep. As soon as he staggered in, however, she sat up, blinking hard at him a few times before her face lit up. "Ken! How are you feeling?!"
He cringed, holding up a hand and pinching his nose with the other. "Not so loud," he mumbled. His tongue felt thick and clumsy in his mouth. "God, what the hell hit me?"
"Sleep spell, actually," Sen said. She slid off the couch and walked towards him, stopping an arm's length away. "Vincent's not very good at them, though; he kinda wields 'em like a bat. I'm not surprised you're feeling it now." She reached out, hesitated, then completed the motion, resting her fingertips on his chin. "How about the rest? Other than the head, how d'you feel? No naseau or anything, no feeling tweaked out or ready to do anything stupid?"
He forced one eye open so he could glare at her properly. "I think that I've *already* done the stupid thing," he sighed. He thought about the look of shocked pain on her face, completely at odds with her current uncertainly worried expression, and tried to smile. From the way her eyebrows shot up, it wasn't terribly successful. "Look, Sen, about what happened--"
"Nah, don't worry about it," she cut said quickly. "It's okay, really. Well, okay, it was actually really *stupid*, but you know -- no lasting damage, no permanent harm done, so it's all ultimately okay, and that's what matters." She prodded his chest a little, then caught his wrist when he swayed, actually pushed off-balance by that. "And whoa, let's get you sitting down, okay? Roy can get you something to drink -- hey! Roy!" She caught Ken's shoulders when he winced again at her sudden shout. "He's awake! Get him some, I dunno, water or something!"
She tugged Ken's arm over her shoulders, and though she was too short to be a really effective crutch, he still found himself leaning heavily against her as they hobbled for the couch. It felt almost disgustingly good to just sink down into it, letting his head loll back against the cushions with a groan. Sen perched on the arm beside him, and he felt her hand settle atop his head, petting through his hair. He rolled his head into the touch and cracked one eye open. Her expression was almost gentle, her brows arched in quizzical fondness. "... nngh?"
"Been a bit of a rough day, huh?" she asked gently.
Ken snorted, letting his eye drift shut again. "You could say that ..."
She laughed. Her fingers dug gently into his scalp, kneading out pressure points. "I do," she said wryly. "I will, even. God, another day like that in my lifetime will be too soon." The couch squeaked as she moved, though she continued stroking his head. "Let's not do it again."
"Yeah," he muttered. "No arguments from me."
"And I really mean that," she said. "Never again -- hey!" Her hand pressed down for a moment atop his head, and he opened one eye to watch as Roy walked into his field of vision, holding two separate glasses of water. She reached for both, then handed one to him; it took an embarrassingly long amount of time to get his fingers to close properly around the cup. Ken lifted his head with some effort, staring down into the cup.
"You should drink," Roy told him. He crossed his arms, leaning against the wall facing them. "It'll help you feel better."
"It'll get rid of some of the taste, at least," Sen added brightly.
Ken blinked a few times, squinting his eyes against the too-bright light. His body felt leaden and stiff, and he wondered idly if a drink would be worth the effort of lifting his cup. "Really?"
"As well as anything can," she said. Her fingers curled in his hair and tugged a little, pulling his head up a fraction. "No matter what the temptation, don't mix that stuff with alcohol. Ugh." She gave a theatric shudder.
He peered at the cup again, then shrugged and brough the cup to his mouth, drinking slowly. Sen's fingers remained curled in his scalp, tiny cold fingertips along the back curve of his ear. When he turned to look up at her, she was making faces into her own cup, already empty.
"What was that?" he mumbled, lowering the cup and letting his head fall back again. "The stuff they gave me."
"Some pill or other," she said absently, lifting her cup to the light and peering at the dregs, like it might magically refill under her stare. "I don't actually know what goes into it -- it's a 'secret family recipie' or something, Avery's really hush-hush about the whole thing."
"Avery?" Ken's brows furrowed. "Was he here?"
The couch creaked under Sen's moving weight. He could feel her looking at him but couldn't be bothered to open his eyes and meet her gaze. "You don't remember?"
Ken licked his lips. They were dry and peeling. "Not really," he admitted. "Uh, I think there was -- I mean, I remember the mirror, and you said Elizabeth was ... wasn't?" His brows drew closer together, and he finally made himself lift his head slightly, cracking his eyes open to peer at Sen. "She's okay, right ... ?"
Sen's eyes widened, then softened into that same weird, almost *maternal*, expression. "She's fine," she said. "You took the hit for her."
He sighed and slumped back again. "Her eyes were missing," he mumbled. "In the mirror, I mean."
"Not surprising." She moved again, till her hip bumped up against his elbow. "Those coins I gave her, they're meant to act as a blindfold. They hide her eyes and cloak the memory of seeing -- that's what keeps her safe. Safer."
He lolled his head to one side, towards the sound of her voice. "Will she still be all right?" he asked softly. "I mean. You said that her -- her soul's all right, but your spell ..."
"Shouldn't be a problem." The couch squeaked, and he cracked open his eyes enough to see Sen slide off the couch arm and start pacing. "They might've been picked a bit loose, but if, you know, she didn't start babbling about the stuff that happened to you guys before, I think she's still all right."
"Elizabeth doesn't babble." Ken wriggled deeper into his couch. "It's not her."
"Ehhhh." Sen's tone was dismissive. He heard her begin to pace, four measured steps in one direction, a pause, and then four steps back. "At the very least, she would've probably said *something* if she remembered. Humans are kind of like that, they like to blurt whatever's on their minds when something weird happens to them."
He made a vague noise, though of agreement or protest, he wasn't sure himself. He was finally comfortable again, the vertigo from moving was fading the longer he remained still, and the aftertaste of the pill was fading away. Even when the cup slipped from his fingers, spilling a cold line across one leg, he couldn't make himself do more than twitch in response.
A hand grasped his shoulder and he grumbled in his throat, sluggishly trying to wriggle away. "Ken? Hey, c'mon, kiddo, you need to stay with me just a little longer."
"Nnngh," he said intelligently.
"Yeah, same to you. Cooooome on now, sit up." The grip on his shoulder vanished, only to be replaced by two hands hooking in his armpits, bodily hauling him back up. He groaned protest at the manhandling, wrestling himself up the rest of the way and forcing his eyes open. Sen's face hovered over his, so close that the angle and shadows made her face look long and narrow and sharp.
"Awake now?" she asked.
He muttered and flapped a hand at her. She leaned back, her face coming back into purely human focus.
"Listen to me," she said. "You're *not* in any real trouble, but there are a few things you've got to do. It's not punishment, not really."
"... huh?"
"I said listen." She patted his cheeks sharply, and when he made a face and tried to lean away she followed. "Look, so. What you did with the mirror was stupid. Most people in our circles would've strung you up for using something like that, never mind that you're just a kid getting started." She caught his chin and turned it back to her when his head started to loll again. "Hey, no, *listen*." She gave him a brief shake. "This is serious. We're going to have to play it carefully for a while, all right?"
Ken blinked hard, trying to focus. "Right ..."
"So here's what's going to happen." She reached out and this time pressed her fingers to his eyelids, scissoring them open. He winced, but when he leaned his head back, trying to escape, he found himself stuck against the head of the couch. Sen crawled back onto the couch arm, rising onto her knees above him so she could look straight down into his eyes. "I've called some friends of mine. They'd like to talk to you, when you're feeling a bit better."
"Friends ... ?"
"Don't worry," she said, and there was a bit of wry humor in her voice and in the faint tilt of her head. "They're all human. It'll be good for you to talk with them, we think. They'll give you perspective."
He licked his lips again, feeling his eyes sliding shut again, even against the pinching pressure of her fingers. "I already talked to Avery ..."
"Like I said," Sen said gently, and to his relief she let go of his face, slipping back to perch on the edge of the couch's arm, too far away for his heavy hand to reach. "They're all fully human, so they'll be able to understand you better."
His eyes dropped shut completely, and before he could try to ask, he was gone.
+++
Ken dreamed:
He watched a young man walking through the streets of a busy city, dressed in a plain brown kimono and holding a slip of paper in one hand. Occasionally he would consult it, look around, then continue on his way. The man didn't seem terribly concerned by being apparently lost; there was a faint smile on his face -- which was oddly blurred and fuzzy, like it wouldn't quite come into focus -- whenever he looked around, something outright fond settled on his expression. Even when someone bumped into him, sending him skittering a few steps sideways to regain his balance, his good mood never faded.
He turned a corner and Ken abruptly recognized the long narrow street as the one that led to Vincent and Avery's shop. The buildings around the walker had taken on a faint pearlescent glow, all growing steadily stronger until the young man stopped in front of the little bookstore front, which blazed so brightly that Ken had to look away. There was a faint metallic jingle from the door opening, and then he was inside, watching the young man turn and bow to the dusty armchair pushed up to the window.
Sitting in the chair was a young woman. Her back was ramrod straight and her hands were folded in her lap; her feet were hooked at their tiny ankles. She wore a long flowing black dress, with a thin black choker at her throat, set with a bright yellow stone. Her long hair was piled atop her head in intricate loops and buns, pinned in place by a multitude of gemstone butterflies. All of her long thin fingers were heavy with thick silver rings except her left ring finger, which had only a single thin gold band. Something in her face and posture was familiar, but though Ken leaned in to study her face closely, he couldn't place that feeling of deja-vu.
"Honored lady," said the young man. "You wouldn't happen to know if my wife's here, would you?"
The woman lifted a finger and touched it to the red bow of her mouth. She glanced to the side, towards the narrow rows of bookshelves. The young man followed her gaze, then chuckled. "Downstairs, then?"
She gave him a demure little smile.
The man straightened, and Ken saw his face clearly for the first time. It looked almost exactly like his own -- a little older, a little longer, but unmistakably recognizable. Something in Ken's chest lurched and tightened painfully.
"Well then," said Daisuke Suzuki, smiling broadly. "Would you mind opening the way?"
The girl in the chair rose to her feet, her hands still clasped neatly before her. Her sleeves were long enough to trail to the floor, but neither they nor her full skirt left any trails in the dust on the floor as she glided towards the bookshelves. Ken, watching, half-expected her to get stuck as he had before, but she simply arrowed her way between them, neat and easy as a ghost. Daisuke folded his arms, looking around the little shop with the same clear-eyed affection he'd given the surrounding city.
A moment later there was a familiar low grinding noise. The bookshelves swung open like double doors. The girl stood at the revealed doorway, her hands wrapped in folds of her skirt. She dropped into a low curtsy before Daisuke, glancing up through her lashes at him with a sharp-toothed smile. He reached out and ruffled her hair when he passed, somehow managing to avoid mussing her artfully-arranged curls.
"Thank you, Lady Jibrielle," he said, and disappeared down the stairs.
Ken froze, staring at the woman who turned her head slowly to look straight at him. Her face flickered in and out of focus, but her wide hungry smile never faded. She dropped her head forward and advanced slowly towards him, her lithe long body swaying with a cat's easy slinking ripple. Ken backed up, sliding sideways, and when she gathered herself up and left, he ducked with a nimbleness that surprised himself and threw himself towards the open doorway.
Somehow he managed to make his way down the entire long flight of stairs without falling. At the bottom he turned and looked back, and sitting in the doorway was a small black cat, her tail neatly curled around herself and watching him with amused golden eyes. When she saw him staring, she arched her neck, licked her shoulder twice, then rose gracefully to her feet and padded out of sight. Ken shook his head in a halfhearted attempt to clear it, then squared his shoulders and continued down the hallway, towards the shop door.
"I'm sorry about that," a man's voice said, just before his hand closed on the doorknob. He jumped and jerked to look; his grandfather stood leaning against the wall, hands tucked into his sleeves and smiling wryly. "I forget how much Lady Jibrielle likes to play."
Ken swallowed around the lump in his throat. "Uh," he managed, with some effort. "That was the--"
"Master Avery's cat," said Daisuke Suzuki. He shook his head. "There's a story behind that. There's a story behind everything. You know that, don't you, Kenichi?"
His hand dropped away from the doorknob, hanging limply by his side. "I'm dreaming," he said.
His grandfather nodded.
"I'm dreaming, and you're just ... here. You look like you do in that photo Yuki found--"
"You still have that?" Daisuke looked suddenly pleased. "I'm glad to hear it. I had to hide it from your grandmother, you know. She has this odd superstition about cameras, even though they're nowhere near as effective as a good spelled mirror." He shook his head fondly. "But yes, you'd call this a dream, by strictest definition. You're asleep, and your mind is free to wander."
"And I'm not ... going crazy, am I?" Ken asked hesitantly. "After everything that happened, with that mirror--"
Daisuke's face darkened. He shook his head slowly. "That was certainly nasty," he said. "You're a lot of untapped potential, grandson, and you're just starting to learn -- it's a bad place to be."
Ken shoved his hands into his pockets and stared at his feet, scuffing the ground with one foot. "Crazy or not?"
"Not." Daisuke sighed, and his tone of voice was familiar enough to make Ken's chest ache. "You've inherited your grandmother's blood, and that's an awkward thing for a human to carry." His feet appeared in Ken's line of vision before a solid warm hand caught his shoulder; he looked up in surprise. Daisuke was smiling again, but only barely, his eyes dark and more than a little sad.
"You're not going crazy, Kenichi," he said again, more gently than before. "Even if it feels like that right now. There's a lot you have to take in. I'm sure your grandmother's been teaching you what she can."
Ken bowed his head further, taking a deep breath and holding it for a full ten-count before he slowly let it out. "... I feel like I can't keep up," he admitted at last, the words leaden in his mouth. "No matter how much I try to follow everything that Sen throws at me, and I just can't--"
Daisuke cuffed the side of Ken's head gently; his hand was steadier and stronger than he remembered, but the touch was still the same. "You'll learn," he said. "I promise, you'll learn. It's just like all of your other studies: once you learn the basics, the rest will come to you easily. Isn't that how you've always worked?"
He glanced up. "But I really *don't get it*," he said again. "She goes so fast, she can't keep a linear explanation going, and Roy tries to help, but he already knows everything too--"
"Just like your teachers when you were younger," Daisuke said. His hand slid through Ken's hair, petting fondly, like he hadn't in years -- not since Ken had been tall as his grandfather's knee. "Just like your brother. You remember, you were always so upset when Jun understood things faster than you. No matter he's five years older, ahh, you would always get so frustrated ..." He chuckled, and Ken flushed, squirming in place. "Ahh, you were such a cute kid ..."
Ken muttered, batting his grandfather's hand away from his head. "Get off," he muttered. "I wasn't ever."
Daisuke just laughed again, unconcerned, his hand dropping back to Ken's shoulder again. He shook his head fondly. "Oh, you were," he said. "And such a good boy. You were always such a good boy."
"Grandfather," Ken said, pained. He covered his eyes with one hand, working to keep his breathing even. "I don't know ... I feel like I'm in over my head. I think I've done the right thing to help my family, and it makes things worse and I--" He sucked in a sharp, shaky breath, and the next confession came out small and awkward, so that Daisuke had to crane forward in order to hear it. "I'm afraid."
There was a long silence, broken finally by a long sigh. "Fear is a healthy thing," he said at last. "It keeps you sharp, and it reminds you of what's important. The trick is how you handle it." Fingers brushed Ken's cheek, turning his face up again. Daisuke looked at him seriously, and in the flickering hall light he looked older, more like the grandfather that Ken remembered. "You just need to find your own way of handling things, and you'll do well. Don't let your grandmother bully you into following her way; I love her--" and his face softened briefly with warm nostalgia before returning to the same stern look--"I love her dearly, but she isn't patient. She's never been patient. She's lived for a very long time, and sometimes ..." He shook his head. "What works for her will not always work for you."
Ken bit the inside of his cheek, holding his breath. After nearly a minute, it burst from him in a rush. "... You know," he said, "for a dream, this is awfully ... clear, isn't it?"
His grandfather blinked, then broke into another wide grin. "A bit," he agreed.
"And you ..." He tilted his head, looking at Daisuke speculatively. "You're awfully real for a subconscious creation."
Daisuke spread his hands and continued to grin.
"If things like werewolves, and fox-spirits, and demons -- if those can exist, then ..." He paused. He reached out and put a hand to his grandfather's chest. For a moment there was solid resistance against his palm, and then his arm sank through, halfway to the elbow before his hand hit the opposite wall.
"Should you be here?" he asked quietly.
"Maybe not," said Daisuke. He tilted his head and raised an eyebrow. "But with all the fuss, I couldn't just leave on good conscience."
Ken withdrew his hand and stepped back. "Is that okay?" he said. "I mean, all those stories you used to tell us, about how ghosts that stick around the living are trapped for some reason--"
"I may be breaking some rules," Daisuke said. He winked. "I wanted to check on you, see how you were doing."
"Me?" Ken looked away, kicking at the ground. Petulance bled into his voice when he added, "Why not Grandmother? You and she ..."
Daisuke sighed. "Kenichi," he said, his tone repoachful, "I wanted to hear from you myself. I'm not going to pick her over you, not when she can take care of herself."
Ken flushed and hunched his shoulders. The world around them flickered and he looked up sharply. Around the naked bulb of the hall light were swirling clouds -- like dust motes in sunlight -- that grew steadily larger with each heartbeat. He backed up in surprise, looking around with some alarm. "What--"
"You're waking up," said Daisuke. He tucked his hands back into his sleeves and smiled. The hallway was beginning to shimmer and shift, the far ends of it unravelling like pulled threads, leaving whiteness behind. His eyes were calm as he met Ken's gaze, steady as a rock in a humbling faith. "You'll be all right, Kenichi. Listen to your grandmother, but know when not to." He winked, then turned to face the ending dream. "I'm on your side, even if I'm not around."
"I miss you," Ken blurted. He took a step forward; his body felt oddly light, and when he looked down, he saw his feet were no longer completely touching the ground. "Every day. I wish -- I'm sorry that I --"
Daisuke shook his head, still smiling. "Why be sorry?" he said. "I know I was loved, by you and your family, and by her." He turned, looking up, and his expression was so warmly affection that Ken felt oddly embarrassed to see it. "Give her my best, won't you?"
Ken licked his lips. He rubbed his hands against his legs and nodded. "I will," he promised, and closed his eyes as the world went white.
+++
He woke in his own bed, curled on his side. He reached for his glasses, slipping them on before he lifted his head and saw Sen sitting at his desk. His desk lamp was flipped on over her head, bowed low over an open book. When he moved she looked up, cocking her head. "How do you feel?"
He licked his lips. Most of the horrible aftertaste from the pills had faded, lingering more in memory than anywhere else. "... all right," he said.
"Have interesting dreams?" Her face and her voice were completely neutral, almost as deadpan as Roy at his best.
Ken rubbed his face and sat up, resting his hands loosely in his lap. "Yeah," he said. "They were."
"Ah," she said, and raised the book again -- one of his physical chemistry reference books, he recognized, probably pilfered from his bookshelf -- over her face like a shield of paper and cardboard. "Good."
He laced his fingers together, staring at the book like he'd eventually be able to see through it to Sen's face on the other side. He wanted to say something about his dream, about his grandfather's smiling face and parting words. Instead, he looked at his hands and said, "You're a fox, then?"
"Since the day I was born," Sen agreed. She let the book drop back to her lap with a huff. "Damn, this thing's heavy. Did you really need this?"
"Mom thought it'd be a good idea for me to have extra references," he said, and managed a faint smile. "Since I kept telling her about what a nightmare the class was, she insisted."
"Did you actually even use this?"
"Not once." Ken leaned until his back touched the wall and let himself relax a little. "Well, maybe as a doorstop when I was moving. But not for its actual purpose -- I keep meaning to sell it, actually. Let someone else deal with it." He shrugged, watching how carefully she didn't quite meet his eyes -- when she turned her head, she would look at a point just to the left of his face, close enough that she almost fooled him. "Sen--"
"Roy's making dinner," she said. She turned to put the book on his desk, then hopped to her feet. "I'll bring you food, you don't have to worry about getting up. You sit tight--"
"Sen," he said again, then took a deep breath. "... Grandmother."
Sen stopped. For a moment, he didn't think she was even breathing.
Then she sighed and turned to him, crossing her arms over her chest. She drew herself up to the fullest of her ridiculously short height and somehow still managed to stare him down. She finally met his eyes, her own hard and unblinking. "You already knew that," she said. "You've known that for a while, in fact. If you're going to have a crisis now that you know what I really am, I have to tell you, I'm not interested--"
"I'm the most like you," he said. "That's what everyone keeps saying, that I inherited everything from you."
Her eyes narrowed. "That's right," she said. "You've got fox-blood in you, and pretty strongly. Anyone who knew what to look for would see that in you."
Ken licked his lips. "What about Grandfather?" he asked. "Did he -- was there anything special about him? Was he ever ... you know," he waved a hand loosely. "I mean, there had to be something about him that made you interested, right? Sort of ..." He trailed off and flushed at her raised eyebrow. "I mean, why him? Why my grandfather? Was it just that he was ... there, and you were there, and ..." He blushed harder, covering his face with one hand. "I mean. Well."
At first he thought she wouldn't answer; then she sighed, and he heard the chair creak again under her weight.
"He was special," she said quietly. "I'm not very -- you sort of know me at this point, don't you? I get distracted easily. We're all like that, foxes. We like the things that shine, or the things that stand out. Your grandfather was like that. And ... he knew."
Ken peeked through his fingers, and saw her gesturing to herself. "Knew?"
"What I was," she said. "He looked right at me and greeted me by name. Not this one, not 'Sen,' but as a fox." She sighed, leaning back against his desk and tipping her head towards the ceiling. "Daisuke was special, but he never *did* anything about it, or with it. He was content to just ... have it. He said it comforted him to know it was there." Her head lolled to one side, and he saw she was staring blankly ahead, not even bothering to pretend to focus. "I kept offering to teach him, but he'd always say no, and then there were the boys, and ..." She shook herself abruptly, like a dog coming out of the water, and straightened. "Yeah. He did have *something*, but he never used it, and I never knew exactly what it was."
He sat up, eyeing her; she met his eyes for a moment, then shrugged. "I'm serious. There was definitely something, but he never said what, if he knew himself."
"And you didn't ask?" He peered at her. "You?"
She made an irritated sound, glaring down at him. "If he didn't know, he couldn't very well say, could he? It's not like I was going to force him to learn when he had no interest in it."
Ken pushed his glasses up his nose. He stared at her. After a moment her cheeks puffed out and she kicked her legs, hunching her shoulders till she looked like nothing more than a kid caught misbehaving. "*What*."
"I just have a hard time believing it," he said. "He had some weird power, he was your *husband*, and you never once--?"
"No, see, that's it," she said. "He was my husband! So I was around all the time -- well, most of the time, at any rate -- and he didn't have to learn! I went *with* him when he visited his parents, I was there when he took the kids somewhere; we were *always together*." She pressed her lips together into a frown. "You've got your own life, though. I'm not going to be sticking around forever--"
"You didn't with Grandfather, either," he pointed out quietly. "My dad wasn't that old when you left. He was younger than Yuki is now, even, and you still just left them all."
She didn't flinch. Maybe it was a trick of the light behind her, but when she folded her arms over her breasts and tipped her head just fractionally to the left, she looked more inhuman than she had when halfway through her transformation.
"There were a lot of reasons," she said. She tilted her head in the other direction now, never once blinking as long seconds ticked past. "Some of it has to do with the incompatibility of the human world with the supernatural. Some of it was because I had business I couldn't avoid any longer." Her eyes narrowed suddenly to thin slits of green. "And as for the rest, they're just none of your business."
He drew in a sharp breath to protest. One of Sen's eyebrows quirked just faintly, like a dare. He stared at that silent challenge for a moment, then sagged down again.
"Dad still hates you, you know," he said quietly. "For leaving."
"If that's all he hates me for, I'll be grateful," said Sen. Ken glanced up sharply at that, but she'd already moved, clapping her hands decisively. "Now, seriously, I don't know about you, but I am *starving* at this point -- Roy insisted on waiting till you woke up before we'd eat. And I gotta tell you, favorite grandson or not, I am seriously going to kick your ass if you keep me from food any longer. This is what, the second time you've done it? You still owe me a dinner at a nice resturant." She struck a wide-legged stance, pointing straight at him. "Got that?"
He blinked at her, thrown by the switch in her attitude; already gone was the serious-eyed woman who'd stared him done, the inhuman creature borrowing a young girl's skin; all that was left was Sen as he'd first met her, loud and careless with her voice, already skipping ahead to another subject. "I ... what?"
"It's settled, then!" She nodded decisively at him, then crossed over to his bed, grabbing his wrist and pulling. "Come *on*, let's *go*."
Ken let her pull him off his bed to a tottering standing position, out of his bedroom and down the hallway. Halfway to the kitchen, he said, "When will you tell me what's going on?"
Sen paused. She looked back over her shoulder at him, and though the corner of her mouth twisted up, it wasn't really a smile there on her face.
"After dinner," she said. "I'll tell you everything if you can wait that long."
He met her eyes and nodded, turning his hand in hers to squeeze once as punctuation. "Yeah," he said. "That's fair enough."
+++
"I've got these friends, see," Sen said. She'd kicked back in her chair so that it was balanced only on its two back legs -- and how she managed to find the room to do that in his narrow kitchen, Ken wasn't sure he wanted to know -- and had her feet propped on his table, crossed at the ankles. A half-empty beer bottle dangled from her fingers. "They live in Boston now, but they used to be here in Seattle for a good, oh, twelve, thirteen years or so. Marina and John Priestly -- good people, those two. They're the ones I want you to talk to, when there's time. Anyway, they're kind of settled down now, they've got a kid and everything, but John's a priest, and not only a priest, he's got enough innate talent to actually be *effective*, rather than just yapping all day at a bunch of--"
Roy cleared his throat pointedly. Sen pouted, but went on: "So, okay, like I said, they've got a kid, right? And Jenny's really a great kid, she's smart for her age, but she's still a kid, and Marina's not too keen on letting her stay by herself, and most babysitters aren't comfortable with staying in a haunted house. And yes, I can see what you're going to say, and yes, there are ghosts, so let's move on, okay?
"About oh, half a year ago? John calls me up and says that there's something weird going on down in Portland. A, what did he call it?"
"A rash of demonic activity that may have been connected to an old Devil's Gate located in the area," Roy said, not looking up from the apple he was peeling.
"Right, right, that. And see, it's right around the time the school year is starting, so neither he nor Marina want to go off and leave Jenny to face that by herself. I mean, would you?" She raised an eyebrow at him.
Ken shook his head. "So you went--?"
"Yeah, yeah." She waved a hand, tipping her chair back further. "Roy and I go to check it out as a favor to them. I didn't really think there'd be much of a problem with it, since most of the time? These things are really tiny and they blow over fast. Nothing to worry about, and usually nothing big enough that we'd need a full-class exorcist like John.
"So there we were, skulking around a big old warehouse. Everything's real quiet, and me, I'm ready to call it quits when Roy sees something moving inside. I get him to boost me up and look, and there's a little kid sitting by herself next to the window." Abruptly, Sen moved her feet from the table, letting her chair thunk forward. She put her elbows on the table and put her bottle aside with a frown, and even Roy paused in the middle of cutting his apple into slices. Ken looked from one to the other, but before he could ask, she went on: "And I mean, okay, sure, demonic and activity and all, but -- that kid couldn't have been more than, like, six years old. So I told Roy to call the cops, and I went around to try and get the lock for the door open. Who the hell leaves their kid in an empty warehouse at night?"
Her expression turned grim as she answered her own question: "Same sort of guy who likes to dabble with summoning demons, I guess." She laced her fingers together and rested her chin on the net of them, her eyes hooded. "The moment I opened that door, I got hit by -- man, I don't even know exactly what they were. Big, though. And ugly. I was stupid, they caught me off-guard." Her lips thinned into a white line. "And of course Roy came running, because hell, at that point I might've been screaming. I dunno."
"No," Roy said quietly. "You don't have to scream when there's a demon."
Sen nodded, lapsed into thoughtful silence. Ken studied her, then turned to Roy, who handed him an apple slice. He turned it over in his fingers several times. "You say ... demons," he said hesitantly. "Is that like -- I mean, you're a fox--"
"That's *nothing* like what I am," Sen cut him off sharply. She looked genuinely angry for a moment, lips curled back to show sharp teeth. "Demons are a completely different creature. Foxes, raccoons, all of us, we're native to this world, just like you humans." She drew herself up, never once blinking. "Things like *that* -- they're from somewhere else entirely."
Ken put the apple down and pushed his plate away. "So, what, you're saying Hell exists?"
"For a definition of Hell, sure." Sen's head lowered, her lip never uncurling from its half-snarl. "But that's a theological debate, and one you should save for Avery or John, once you meet him. Like I was saying ..." She shook her head. "There was a fight. There were demons -- a lot of them. And man, you only think an empty warehouse is big till you're fighting fifteen of those guys." She dropped one hand to the table, idly picking at a dry piece of food stuck to the top. "It got pretty messy, really, worse than either of us were expecting. And I mean, you know, you *try* to be careful, you try to keep things contained, but it's still--"
"The girl was dead," Roy said softly, almost gently. "We checked later. Someone had set up a protective circle around her, but she wandered out of it, and ..."
"Who the *fuck* brings a kid to a demon-summoning, anyway?!" Sen thumped her fist down onto the table, hard enough to make the plates jump. "Seriously! You can't expect a little kid to just sleep through all the screaming and the--" She trailed off with a noise of frustration, scrubbing both hands hard through her hair and glaring at Ken. "And before you say *anything*, it wasn't my fault. Okay?"
He lifted his hands slowly. "I didn't say it was," he said slowly. "But ... a little girl, that's--"
"It was a mess," Sen groaned, pressing her fingertips into her closed eyes. "There was a lot of *yelling* and accusations and just thinking about it makes my head hurt. Because of couuurse daddy-dearest shows up while I'm freaking out and Roy's just standing there and there's a dead little girl and -- cops! Did I mention the cops? I don't think I mentioned the cops."
"You mentioned the cops," Roy said mildly.
"Did I? Great." She rubbed circles over her eyes. "So. We hightail it out of there, but I don't think the summoner was that fast; he wasy too busy freaking out about the little girl. Fast forward six months, and I hear that my husband's dead. I go to pay my last respects, and hey, what do you know, the grandson I stopped checking at actually has some talent! Color me shocked."
"I told you that you should have made sure," said Roy.
"Oh, shut up. Anyway, few days later, bam!" She punched a fist into her open palm. "Revenants start showing up, I get a call saying guess who escaped from prison, and by the way, you might want to keep an eye on that kid, and ... tah-dah." She flicked all her fingers wide open, expression dour. "Here we all are."
Ken sat silently for a few minutes. His own hands were tightly clasped on the tabletop, whiteknuckled and trembling a little. "... Yeah," he muttered. "Here we are."
Sen pinched the bridge of her nose, screwing her face into a scowl. "... damn," she said. "My throat hurts. See, Roy, this is why I don't do tell-all confessions. They're a pain." She took her bottle and finished the rest of it with several long swallows, then coughed, making another face. "Man, why did you let me just talk and talk like that?"
"Because you promised to talk," said Roy, and pushed the plate of pale brown apples at her. "And because at this point, Ken deserved to know."
"Hah." She took an apple slice, nibbling delicately at it and fixing Ken with a pointed look. "Well? Do you feel better now, that you know everything? Are the angels breaking through the clouds on high to sing choruses since I've done my big tell-all?"
He leaned forward a little, forcing himself not to look away. "That little girl," he said quietly. "You really didn't kill her?"
"What? *No*!" She looked immediately offended. "Holy hells, Ken, weren't you paying attention? I wouldn't lay a hand on a little kid--"
"All right," he said hastily. "All right, yeah, I'm sorry. It's just ..." He shook his head. "It's weird. And terrible. That poor girl, I don't even know ..."
Sen began to peel the label of her beer from the bottle. "Not everyone loves their family as much as you do, Ken," she said. "Or if they do, they're not as careful. The guy who brought her there put protections around her, but he still *brought* her into a situation where, you know, there'd be demons. I bet if you asked him, he wouldn't think he'd done anything wrong." She sighed, shaking her head. "That's why I'm trying not to pay attention to the rest of the family, by the way."
His gaze, wandering to the side, snapped back to her. "What?"
"There's a good chance no one would've ever found you if I hadn't gone to Daisuke's funeral." She didn't look at him, apparently fascinated with picking at the thin stripes of glue on glass. "I mean, yeah, maybe someday someone would've been all, 'hey, that Suzuki kid, he's yours, isn't he?' -- but that might've been years from now. I didn't really plan on showing up and hanging out with you. Not that I really expected Mister 'I'm a big tough summoner' to hold a grudge, but. You know."
"I don't think I do," he dared. "Why don't you tell me?"
Sen slanted a brief glare at him. "Kid, if I were to show up on your doorstep and introduce myself, your father would probably kill himself with an aneurysm." She shook her head. "Shigeru was so high-strung as a kid, I've no idea where he got it from. Must've been Daisuke's side of things." She shook her head. "There would've been a fuss, and you can't tell me that little sister of yours isn't the sort to just blurt it out at first opportunity."
"Yuki's not really ..." Ken paused and considered. "Well. She's seventeen."
"*Exactly*." Sen lifted her bottle and squinted one eye into the mouth. "Then everyone would've known about you guys and let me tell you, I've had a bitch of a time trying to keep *you* out of that much trouble, and at least you can be taught how to take care of yourself. The rest of them? Forget it." She sighed. "Satisfied now?"
Ken blinked several times. He licked his lips and swallowed. "Uh. Wow." He shook his head. "You really *are* telling everything."
"God, don't remind me." She crossed her arms on the table and leaned her chin atop them. "So. There's some crazy guy who thinks I'm the one who killed his kid who's playing around with demons, and there's *you*." She looked at him, and Roy turned to him as well, and he'd rarely felt so small or pinned in place. "You still with us?"
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "With great power comes great responsibility," he said.
Sen lifted her head, staring with him. "Spider-Man?" she asked. "You're quoting Spider-Man, and you were razzing me about Star Wars? At least *I* came first."
He shrugged, offering her a weak smile. "I'm in," he said. "I, it's not like I can just -- turn everything off, can I? I've already looked back, I've already seen everything, and ... now I know all of this, and ... well, it seemed like a fitting thing to say."
"You're a *dork*," she said, and grinned widely. It relieved him more than he wanted to admit, and that stayed with him, even when she bounced her half-eaten apple slice off his forehead and began to laugh.
+++
"Mister Suzuki? Mister Suzuki!"
Elizabeth glanced back curiously. "Ken, I think he's calling for you," she said, and put a hand on his arm. "Oh, I recognize him, doesn't he usually sit in the front row?"
Ken stopped, but didn't look. Part of him felt like being sick; he could hear the heavy pounding footsteps as Jeff Miller jogged to catch up with them. "I guess," he said. "He's not one of mine, though. I don't have office hours right now, anyway."
She frowned at him, then smacked his arm lightly. "Oh, come on," she said. "It can't hurt that much, can it?"
He swallowed down the *you have no idea* and turned, forcing his expression to remain neutral as Miller stopped before them, breathing hard. The light jog had left him redfaced and sweat beading on his upper lip, the latter of which he swiped away with a quick nervous tongue. Ken blinked at him.
"Did you want something?" he said, in his best intimidation tones -- the one that still sometimes worked on Yuki, depending on how guilty she felt for something. Elizabeth kicked the back of his shin lightly, and though he cringed, he managed to hold his posture and his expression.
Miller looked nervously from one side to the other and licked his lips again. "Well," he said. "Uhm. Well. I was wondering if we -- could we talk privately? I, uh. I've got something to ask you."
"It might be better if you asked us both," Ken said cooly. "Elizabeth might know the answer if I don't."
The other man gave him an unhappy look. "Mister Suzuki," he said. "*Please*, I really, uh, I really need to talk to *you*. Just you. It's. It's really important. I'm sorry, Miss Lowe, but this is--"
Elizabeth glanced at Ken. He could read her doubt in her quirked eyebrow, and maybe something of an apology for making him stop. Again, he said, "If it's about class, then there's nothing wrong with both of us knowing, right?"
"*Please*," said Miller again, his face crumbling into an expression of pathetic misery. Ken saw Elizabeth cringe from the corner of one eye in automatic sympathy. He ground his teeth for a moment, breathing slowly and evenly as he could. "It's got to be you, Mister Suzuki, it's about the -- um. The thing. That I, uh, that I asked about last week. You know. The ..." he wrang his hands, hunching his shoulders like a dog expecting to be kicked.
"Ken," Elizabeth said in a soft voice. She touched his arm again, looking up at him. "I need to track down Lilian -- do you want me to wait?"
Ken swallowed. He glanced briefly at Miller, who was now staring at Elizabeth with open hostility. It was strong enough to make Ken's skin crawl, and he shifted his own weight, imposing him slightly between her and Miller's line of sight. Deliberately, he leaned down and pecked her cheek, so that she squeaked and pulled back, touching her face with wide-eyed surprise and a tiny smile blooming.
"Go on ahead," he said. "I'll see you later, all right? Dinner on the Ave, maybe?"
"Sounds good," she agreed, her eyes sparkling -- though it faded a little when she glanced at Miller and apparently caught the tail-end of his glaring. "Call me, all right? I'm counting on you to rescue me if Lilian decides to pour out her boyfriend woes again."
"Sure," he said, with a lightheartedness he didn't quite feel. "You only love me because you can use me against her."
"You betcha." She winked and walked off, letting her hand linger against his arm for a long moment before letting it brush off. Ken watched her go, waiting until she'd gone through Bagley's double front doors before turning back to Miller. There was a fresh layer of sweat on the man's forehead and lip, heavy enough to slick his thinning hair to his skin.
"So," he said flatly. "What do you want?"
Miller flinched. "Mister Suzuki, please," he said. "You have to understand, I gave you that mirror for *your own good*. It was, um, it showed you the truth, didn't it? You saw what kind of beast that green-eyed demon really was--"
"I know that *I* almost died from it," he said flatly. "I asked some friends about it, you know. They said that mirror just sort of reaches into you and messes you up. Makes you think you're seeing the truth, when it's really just twisting things around."
"No," Miller protested, though he glanced aside, squirming obviously from one foot to the other. "No, no, Mister Suzuki, it wasn't anything like that, I, uhm, I don't know why you'd think I would ever--"
"Look, Miller," Ken cut him off flatly, "I really don't know what you're trying to pull, and I frankly don't give a damn. If you'll excuse me, I've got a date--"
He turned partway, then pitched forward with a pained grunt as something blunt and heavy smashed against the back of his neck. He staggered for a moment, turning his head in time to see Miller raising what looked like a textbook high over his head. The other man's face was almost regretful, his brows drawn together and the corners of his mouth pulled down.
"I'm sorry, Mister Suzuki," he said, "but you just don't understand."
He brought the book down again, hard, and the world went black.
no subject
... that's meeeean. *hugs Ken protectively* My name's Elizabeth, that means I can do that right?
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And yes, yes, you're allowed to fuss over him. ;) He'd be very bemused, but won't mind.
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Also, poor Ken. DDDDDDDDDDDDDD:
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... this just has not been that poor guy's month. XD; IT GETS BETTER! EVENTUALLY. 8D
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...I had a thought right about the point Ken woke up from his dream, but it's escaped me now. I think it was associated with Joyce's Ulysses, which makes me a geek.
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... I never did read Ulysses; I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man instead. But hey, I'm okay with geeking. :Db
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I can't imagine the weight of YOUR textbook.
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Somehow, it seemed like a fitting end to post during my week-long hiatus. >D
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Beyond that, good job with the exposition. It was suspenseful and not at all heavy-handed XDXD. And thanks for the clarification about the mirror and Avery's Magic Pills XDXD.
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Yay, I'm glad the exposition worked out! :Db NEXT TIME, there will be more! Only from a totally different pov. XD
♥
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Nice to get all the exposition-y background stuff cleared up--though it's also kind of nice that the whole story didn't come out at once.