Love's Weakness, Part One
"Once upon a time," Ru Sa said, entirely grim except for his eyes. "There was... a basket. And in this basket, the ruler of all the lands kept..." He leaned close, grinning at his captive audience. "The secret... of LIFE."
Kinusayo wriggled a little out of general principle; it was fortunate that b this stage in their relationship, nakedness was very comfortable. "What?" she asked, dryly.
"And then!" Ru Sa suddenly declared, kneeling upright on the bed and raising both hands dramatically in the air; apparently, being naked removed more of his inhibitions than the obvious . "One night, the gods were all completely drunk!"
She laughed this time, resting her fingertips lightly on his thigh and caressing.. "You're telling me stories at a time like THIS? Ru, I don't think the gods are the only ones that are drunk -"
" - and they DROPPED the basket like the clumsy fools they are," Ru Sa continued melodramatically, interrupting her without hesitation. "And three magical gifts fell out of it that made ALL of life worth living!"
Kinu snorted softly. "Only three?" she said lightly, twining her tail with his and loathe to admit she was curious.
Ru Sa responded by flopping forward, propping himself over her and pinning her wrists to the pillow. "Do you want to know what they were?" he rumbled seductively, snaking his tail around her leg.
"Sure," she said, as casual as if she were in the heat of battle - which in a way, of course, she was.
Ru Sa grinned. "They all start with 'f,'" he announced, and she arched her head back and laughed at him, tugging a little against his arms.
"Gods, you're in a mood...."
He leaned forward and brushed his lips against her ear. "They are fighting..."
"Mmmm, I would never have guessed," she said slightly breathily, and twisted against him.
"Food," he said, shifting between her knees and bending lower over her face.
"Uh, huh," she said, distracted, wriggling against him for a moment; and then, she kicked him. Item number three took longer to cover because that kick led to a scuffle, and scuffling was always fun at a time like this - or any time at all, really - when the participants were both Saiyan. By the time he finally had her subdued, both of them were laughing and sweating and had nearly forgotten the conversation.
"Wh... what was the last one?" she asked, squirming pleasantly beneath his weight, enjoying the feel of his skin against hers and not really trying to get away.
"Oh," he said with an air of a man who's forgotten to button his sleeve. "How silly of me - why, THAT'S the most important one of all." And grinning as only a victorious Saiyan could, he bent down to whisper obscenely in her ear.
Of course, that started another fight.
"Hentai!" she shrieked, and struggled, both of them laughing, both of them happy -
And then, Ru Sa woke up.
He stared at the ceiling, taking a moment to adjust to vividness of his seventy-year-old recollection and the unexpected reaction of his body. Gods, what a nightmare; unexpected, unwelcome, and definitely not something he wanted to think about. Throwing back the covers, Ru Sa rose from his cot and prepared to take on his day.
After a few moments of scratching and stretching, Ru Sa stalked over to the control panel and checked their heading. Hell; still three more days to earth - the earth in this timeline, that was - and at this rate Vejiita might be dead again before they could reach it. At least with Vejiita's track record, he'd probably come back.
Yawning sleepily, Ru Sa entered a few queries, edited the day's schedule, and checked to see that all assigned duties from the night before had been done. This completed, he headed for the shower, and was actually walking through the doorway when he realized that he had been wondering if Kinusayo had used up all the hot water.
He stopped.
"What the hell is this?" he muttered quietly to himself, contemplating the floor tiles at his feet and wondering just when his brain had gone on vacation. Solemnly, he regarded himself in the mirror. "She's dead, you know," he said, not minding his own naked and disheveled morning state and being very serious indeed. "She's been dead for seventy years, and you haven't even thought of her in all that time - so why are you doing it now?"
No answer from the reflection was forthcoming; so, shrugging, Ru Sa stepped into the shower. His brain was being weird, apparently, but he felt no concern; the Kyuujinshu body had never been meant to last as long as his people had forced it to, and there were occasionally some funny side effects. Sometimes they had flashbacks. Sometimes one of them would go mad for a day or two, but it always passed, and things returned to normal without much bother. However, this hadn't been a total shift of brain cells; he still seemed to have acceptable cognitive powers, and so the mission should be able to proceed without problem. He didn't have time to go crazy right now.
Completely calm and humming as he dressed, Ru Sa finished his morning routine and went out to breakfast.
Perhaps he hadn't bathed well enough; nobody joined him.
Ru Sa was annoyed; everybody around him, it seemed, had partnered up today, and were all eating together in cliques, which normally didn't happen. He eyed the grey slop they called food, stirred his spoon through it a couple of times, and then pushed it away with a sigh. Bah; this was absurd. He had enough to do today, and certainly didn't need to be sitting in the cafeteria, moping because nobody was with him. Gathering up his food with every intention of going back to his quarters and eating while he worked, he had actually begun to wonder if Kinusayo would like to share his nasubi mash with him when someone from behind him spoke.
"Captain," Cumber said, and Ru Sa jumped. He blinked at Cumber for a moment without comprehension.
It had happened again. He'd started to think about her again. Oh, this was really not good; this was going to be one of THOSE days after all, and at this particular point he didn't have TIME to take a hiatus for mental health reasons...."Cumber," he growled darkly, projecting his irritation onto the man who stood before him.
Cumber cleared his throat nervously. "Um... I have a report... to make...."
Ru Sa snoted. Cumber's inherant reticence and submissive behavior grated on his nerves at the best of times; right now, they seemed like a very bad idea indeed. At least, as far as Cumber was concerned. "WHAT do you WANT?" he snapped, cradling his breakfast in his arms as if afraid of it being stolen.
Cumber cleared his throat again. "It's regarding Earth, sir," he said, shifting a bit and trying to stand straighter. No matter what he did, Ru Sa seemed to loom - often dangerously, as the case seemed to be at present . "We may have a problem generated from the last time-jump. It looks as though we're going to have to go back."
There was silence for a moment as the two men regarded each other, neither quite willing to have to say what "going back" meant.
"Go back?" Ru Sa said in a low voice; the sounds and smells of the cafeteria seemed to fade into the background in the wake of those words. "Why the hell would we HAVE to?"
"Because of the Black," Cumber said evenly, and Ru Sa closed his eyes and cursed with a sigh.
Yup. This was going to be one of those days.
Ru Sa sat in the captain's quarters, in conference with Chive, Cumber, and Cabbage - his most trusted officers and the most efficient in his command. At the moment, however, he was extremely displeased with what they were saying.
"So you're saying we have to go back," he said, "because we need to get the rest of this... book."
Chive and Cumber silently looked from Ru Sa to Cabbage and back again; the latter two were carrying the conversation, and the former were simply watching as if at a game of tennis. It was morbidly amusing.
"Yes," said Cabbage, and held up the ruined document in question. It was a largish, ugly thing, bound in leather, and torn in half. The covers looked as though they had been sliced open and then clumsily sewn back together.
"And - tell me again, just so I understand - WHY do we need to get the rest of this book?"
Cabbage looked at Ru Sa, meeting his gaze squarely. This was not shocking; almost everything about Cabbage - from his jaw to his skewed humor - was square. "Because it has information about the Black - and the parts that are missing could give us something that we can use."
Ru Sa sighed and leaned back. "'Could,' Cabbage? I'm not sure I'm willing to risk the lives of the people on this ship for 'could.' You're going to have to do better than that."
Cabbage shrugged once and opened his mouth.
"Furthermore," Ru Sa said, interrupting, "from what you had given me to understand before, we had already gotten any information we could use from this book. That's how we discovered that Gero was the one who was responsible for the Black in the first place. What makes you think we need to go back NOW?"
Cabbage once again opened his mouth to answer, and that's when Ru Sa's No Good Very Bad Day took a trip down the luge slide to Hell.
"Hello," said Kinusayo, sitting down across from him and crossing her legs as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
Ru Sa jumped upright, knocking over his chair - and she disappeared. Waggling her eyebrows.
"What the FUCK?" he exclaimed, plastered against the wall with his fallen chair between his feet, and then realized that the others were staring at him.
Cabbage's eyebrows were threatening to meet his hairline. "Something I said, Ru?" he asked, flavoring his confusion liberally with sarcasm.
"No," Ru Sa said, trying to relax but still resembling a spooked deer. "Not you - I was distracted. Say that again?"
Cabbage snorted and, by an effort of will, refrained from further comment. "I was saying that we thought we had everything we could from this book - until I found this." He held up one half of the leather cover, and peeled back the outer skin - to reveal a small, worn corner of paper.
It was Ru Sa's turn to raise his eyebrows. "And that is...." He righted his seat.
"Proof that something used to be hidden inside this cover," Cabbage said, handing it over. "There's only one word on it. It says 'kuro.'"
Ru Sa stared at the tiny slip of paper and inhaled very slowly. In the traditional Japanese tongue Gero had used when he wrote, "kuro" meant "black." And in context...
The Black.
"All right," Ru Sa said, suddenly wanting to just be alone and have a chance to think about all of this. "Do we have fuel enough to make the jump, search for the book, and then come back here?"
"We do," Chive answered, speaking for the first time since the beginning of the meeting. "And what little we use now can be replaced. I suggest we return to a point prior to the unleashing of the Black and do our search then. The book was found in Capsule Corporation laboratories; we can find out when and where Briefs acquired it and go from there."
Ru Sa nodded. "Okay. Make it happen." And the three people across from him all stood, bowed, and left.
Ru Sa sat and contemplated the very different ways each of them had bowed - Cumber submissively, Chive coldly , and Cabbage grinning at him like a damned pantaloon - and tried to calculate just how many days this new adventure was going to take. This could be bad, really; what if the Black ate this universe before they got the chance to plunder it? What if they ran out of Vejiitas?
Then behind him came a voice that he should, by rights, never have heard again.
"So they're all still around. You surprise me, Ru - putting up with these people for so long."
Ru Sa inhaled again, slowly, sitting absolutely still. He was a logical man, and knew immediately that only four possibilities existed for the voice he heard behind him:
One - he had gone mad and was hallucinating. Already considered; madness he could handle.
Two - some god or demon was trying to get revenge for real or imagined wrongs done to him/her/them/it. This happened on occasion; the Kyuujinshu landed and infiltrated a people, and the kami in charge disapproved - usually this resulting in minor weirdnesses and catastrophes for a while. Again, no biggie.
Three - his teammates were playing some sort of purile and extremely tasteless joke; this was highly unlikely for the pure and simple reason that no one would dare.
Four - this was real. And Kinusayo was a ghost. Having tamped down these four logical probabilities - and feeling better already for having done so - he turned his chair around.
Kinusayo was looking at him. Slightly opaque and just a bit blurry, she seemed otherwise to be very real and as large as life - well, as large as she'd been in life, anyway. Her head barely topped the back of his chair.
"Kinu-chan," he said calmly, and waited to see what she would do.
Kinusayo - phantom, curse, or dream - seemed to consider. "I suppose that's as good a rejoinder as any. See you tonight, Ru-chan," she said with ominous tone, and disappeared.
Oi. She was being... playful. And... tonight? Why tonight? Was she going to "get" him - whatever that entailed - when he was asleep?
Well... there was only one way to find out. Resigned to his fate - because really, there was nothing else he could do - Ru Sa went about his day with no more than his usual roughness, getting things in order and making sure everything on the ship was running properly without giving the weirdness a second thought. He neither saw nor heard Kinusayo at all during his shift, and by the time he went to bed, he'd begun to wonder if he'd actually dreamed her.
It was only as he lay back under the covers and began slipping into sleep that he felt a strange, physical, somehow not completely solid sensation pressing against his - she was kissing him, and before he could do anything about it, he was unconscious. The dreams took hold, and all of life became dark.