Takashi has been up for some time, though he's taken refuge from the hostile sun in the shade within the massive cargo hold of the Eclipse aircraft that he'd comandeered - in what had become the living space for himself and Ami. There's a curtain that gives Ami some semblance of a private space, except for the fact that Takashi regularly intrudes on it.
And today is no different, as Takashi pokes his head through the split between the wall and the curtain, a very, very common 'something up his sleeve' smile on his face as the rest of his body is hidden. "Ami~" he calls in a singsong voice. "You awake yet?"
At home, with the comforts of fantastic air conditioning and a high-rise apartment, Ami Mizuno is prone to wearing long frilly sleeping gowns that most might suggest belong on the previous generation's women. The simple truth is that in the Peruvian rainforest's hottest season, such an attire would be awful overnight, leaving poor Ami dehydrated at best, and sickly at worst. So it is that just before leaving, Naru helped Ami acquire a few sets of cute silk pajamas: a camisole and short shorts each, to wear overnight.
Last night, aware of the passage of time, Ami pulled out a new set: a pair of red pajamas with white snowflakes dashed across them artfully. She's awake, when Takashi pokes his head through the curtains, but still lounging on her cot with a thin sheet pulled up to her stomach, rocking back and forth while she reads something on her tablet.
Peering up at Takashi over her glasses, Ami arches an eyebrow at the look on his face, then closes the tablet and raises the other brow. "You're up early," she observes. "Everything okay?"
Takashi shakes his head. "No, nothing's wrong. In fact I'm making good progress. Just some old Eclipse ciphers that haven't been in use since before I was born to break through. Axion's working on that, though, and I have something that is slightly more important."
He looks over at her for just a little longer than is strictly necessary before he talks again. "It's Christmas, after all, despite the local heat and humidity. And you know what that means, right, Ami? With both of us here?"
Ami's brows lower back to their usual altitude when he explains that Axion is working on the codes. Well at least he didn't go delving without her like she'd thought he might have.
What he does bring up, however, has her blinking in surprise and opening her mouth to say ... nothing, for a moment. "Uh." Yup, she's so elegant at this time of morning.
Reaching up to pull her glasses off, Ami squints a little, then asks, "It means we're working on Christmas day?"
Takashi laughs and takes a testing step into the room. Now with more of his body exposed Ami can see that both of his hands are somewhere behind his back, and they stay there instead of gaining their usual animated status.
"To hell with that, we are not working the entire day on one of the most romantic days of the year." Takashi takes another step in. "Not if I can help it, anyways. And besides, Christmas means something else needs to happen."
Ami's concern starts to grow almost immediately when he steps in the room--not because he's stepping in the room, but because the words he's accompanying the act with, and because he's got his hands hidden. That's never good.
She scoots around a little on the hammock to a more upright position and clutches the thin sheet to her chest. "Takashi," she says in a semi-chiding tone of voice, "I'm not going to do anything inappropriate with you," she points out uncertainly. "And if you've got mistletoe behind your back, you can forget kissing me under it. I'm not... ready for that, yet. Not yet."
"What?" is the first word out of Takashi's mouth, before one of his hands breaks free of whatever nefarious purpose it's being used for behind his back so he can properly flail about with it. "No, no. That's not what I meant or how I meant it." And then a sigh. "You know in most circumstances I am actually pretty good with words but..." he mumbles, before he takes his other hand out from behind him.
In it is a box, wrapped... well, haphazardly. It's obvious it wasn't store-wrapped. It's about the size of a shoe box, in red and green wrapping paper with a shimmering blue bow.
"It means you get a present."
Honestly, she should have expected that. Mentally, Ami kicks herself for thinking he might have untoward thoughts. It's so hard not to prejudge him, knowing that his morality is skewed by the darkness within him; knowing that his understanding of 'right' and 'wrong' just aren't the same. Especially knowing just an inkling of what it feels like to be tempted by that same darkness.
"Sorry," Ami mumbles straight away, as she stares at the box in confusion. "I didn't mean ..." but she did, and she can't really take it back. At least he doesn't seem that hurt by it. Taking a deep breath, Ami casts aside her mistake and lets the blanket drop to her waist. She twists and swings her feet out of the cot, then lets them dangle over the side as she sits up fully.
"You didn't have to do this," she notes quietly as she looks up at Takashi, worry in her eyes. Ami pushes off the cot and sets her glasses down on her suitcase-turned-nightstand. Reaching for the box, she accepts it gingerly, then very carefully tests the weight. "I didn't get you anything," she says apologetically as she leads him out of the little private area into the common room, where they have a few comfortable pillows set up for sitting on. It is here that Ami takes her evening calls to Japan, and here that she studies. Here that Takashi frequently invades her space by using her as a pillow. And here that she decides to kneel on a pillow and set the present on the ground before her, studying it like she's afraid of it.
Takashi manages to pretty much stuff all of the emotional responses to that back, and only lets a little bit of his distaste out of the box, as it were. "I didn't have to but I did because I wanted to. I like giving you things." Takashi admits, his voice a bit soft as he comes to sit in front of her, rather than coming up behind her or lounging atop her. "It makes me happy. And it's christmas."
"You don't have to get me anything, Ami. You travelled halfway around the planet and you put up with all of this. And all of me." he adds, leaning forward. "Your presence here on this expidition is really present enough. I do appreciate your help, and your companionship."
Then he leans forward and taps the present. "And I promise it will neither bite nor cause trouble. Mostly."
Ami looks up at Takashi, blue eyes meeting green, and blushes just a little at his words. "I ..." she trails off, then swallows her emabarassment with a half-hearted smile. "You're not that hard to put up with," she notes quietly, "at least not when you're like this." She shrugs a little, nervous energy clearly getting to her, then looks down at the wrapping.
She takes another few moments to just stare at it, then sighs and says, "I guess it's not going to open itself," and begins to carefully unwrap the box with perhaps more caution and care than even he put into trying to wrap it.
Inside the box is a silver charm bracelet with small sapphires in the flatter clasp, though it's largely lacking charms - there is an astromical Mercury charm already on there. "I had a severe concern that if I keep buying you jewlery you'll end up weighed down or something." Takashi explains with a smile. "But this way I can get you little things whenever I feel like it and you can put them on at will."
"I very nearly got you a locket with a picture of me in it, though, but I couldn't decide if that was sweet or too egotistic." Takashi admits. "A lot of the things I thought of, I wasn't sure if they were too intimate. Like, I don't think I could buy you a swimsuit."
Then there's a little bit more quiet, and he admits. "I'm not as good at this as I am at most things." Which passes for humble, for Takashi.
Ami sets the wrapping paper aside as carefully as if it were clean linens, then opens the box itself and peers inside at the bracelet. Despite usually wearing the pieces he's gotten her before, she left them home for this vacation. Other than the small glaive charm worn on a necklace and her everpresent sapphire stud earings, she hasn't had any jewelry on this trip.
"Takashi," Ami says, chiding or perhaps a bit concerned again, as she looks up from the bracelet to his face. "Taka, you ..." she sounds like she's going to tell him she doesn't want it. But as she looks at him, the words fade, and she just blushes again and sighs, then holds the box out to him with one hand, followed by her bare wrist with the other. "You're right, a swimsuit would be too intimate," she agrees, "and the locket too egotistical. This is ... it's too much," she tells him. "But thank you."
Takashi reaches forward, stopping for just a moment and looking at her. "You understand I had to do something, right? And I didn't really have the time for an interstellar excursion like I did for your birthday." he adds, and seems entirely serious - there's no impishness there, no idea that he might be joking or leaning on her stammering.
"It's not too much." he continues, firmly. "It's not even enough." Takashi looks into Ami's eyes as he puts the charm bracelet around her wrist.
Ami blushes at the reminder of the bit of mercury he brought home for her. "It's way too much," she tells him quietly, "but ... I don't mean you should be ashamed of that. I'm not really upset. Just somewhat overwhelmed by it all. This whole thing ... us. I never wanted a boyfriend," Ami explains to him.
"Or at least I didn't think I wanted one," amends the bluenette after a moment's thought. "And I still don't know what it means to be a girlfriend, or have a boyfriend, and there's all this complication with the dark energy and us being here and magic and ... sometimes I just wish we could be normal," she says quietly. "But then we probably wouldn't have met in the first place. You'd just be some genius at another school."
Takashi puts both hands behind his head and sorta leans back, floating a bit, supported by magic - albeit magic that is not inheriently evil in any way. Like he's just reclining in a way that shuns gravity. He leans up for a moment between 'I never wanted a boyfriend' and her clarification. But settles back in.
"And you might not have met all your other friends, I assume. I mean, I presume you all didn't... just connect and then find out you were Sailor Senshi?" Takashi offers. "Or if you did, there's no way to know it wasn't influenced by the past and all that."
"I wouldn't want to be normal." Takashi notes with a lot of emphasis. "I think. I guess I don't know what it's like to BE normal. But it doesn't sound very interesting. I mean, that's what normal is. Boring."
"I do wish it didn't make US more complicated, though. I mean. I'm convinced you're worth it, just. It feels like it's always a roadblock and a prejudgement and you feel the need to put up a wall between us?"
"But maybe I'm so pushy you have to." Takashi has, perhaps, been thinking about this in the quieter times digging around an ancient temple in the South American interior.
"I ..." Ami trails off, then shakes her head. "I don't know if we would have met or not. I'm not just fifteen, you know," she points out gently. "I'm also millenia old. From another time, another here, another me. I was reborn to be the girl I am, and also the Princess of Mercury, and S--Usagi's guardian of Wisdom and Intellect. I didn't know them before Luna literally landed on my head and introduced me to her, but it was innevitable that it would happen. Like you, I've never really been normal. I just didn't know it."
She sighs, then leans back a little against a pillow, twisting her wrist beneath the charm bracelet as she studies the mercury charm. "The wall isn't just for your benefit," she notes quietly. "I've never been good at getting close to people. With Usagi-chan, Makoto-chan, and Rei-chan, it's been different. But even Naru-chan isn't the same. We aren't as close. It's ... I don't know. I'm sorry," she says, looking back up to him. "I don't trust easily ..." well, because of her father. But she's not ready to say that aloud. So instead she pauses briefly before explaining, "And I feel awkward and embarassed all the time around people, and especially around you."
Takashi nods a bit. Somewhere, some analytical part of him is filing all of that information away, but there's a more clear part that's just listening to her. "You had the illusion, at least." Takashi notes as he shifts - in air - from being across from her to being next to her.
"That's, I guess, because you knew them as the old you. As the Princess. And I guess we can mark us being time-lost lovers off the list, then." he muses, half joking, half serious. "I probably don't help matters. I don't do it entirely just to make you squirm. Only a little bit. I really just love being near you, being around you."
"In a way it keeps me grounded, keeps me focused. I used to have to think about possibilities and such to keep me going, but now I have you."
"But 'me' isn't enough," Ami points out to Takashi gently, not objecting to him moving in beside her. And if their hands touch, just a little, she doesn't shy away from it. "You've still got this burning ambition to change the world; to make it 'better' in some way. Not to protect it from evil reactively, but to proactively destroy what you perceive as the wrongs in the world and rewrite them such that they cannot happen except through you."
She sighs a little, then says, "I'm not enough."
And if their hands did touch, just a little, he wouldn't shy away either. He turns, looking at her from his strange perch, moving some hair out of the way of his eyes, and asking her a question she once asked of him, from the other direction, with a different emphasis.
"We don't have to go back to Tokyo, you know. We could leave it all behind, I could call in favors, get us new lives. London, Paris - or somewhere closer but farther like Hokkaido. But just like I wouldn't let down my ambition, you wouldn't let down your duty. That's not a reasonable option for you, to just pick up and go somewhere else, leave your fellow Senshi behind."
"So in a way, I'm not enough either. Because you wouldn't leave your duty for me, just like I want to have you and my ambitions." And then after a period of silence, he continues on. "The difference is, I would never ask you to, because I understand that."
Ami tilts her head a little, considering the supposedly rhetorical question perhaps more than he intended her to. She intertwines her fingers with his as she does so, then takes a deep, slow breath before responding to him.
"Usagi already told me I could," she explains to him softly. "She said if I wanted to quit--to just go and be a doctor--she would understand, and she wouldn't be upset with me. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted, and not just for your sake.
"So you're wrong," Ami continues. "I ... if that is what it would take for you to put aside your ambition, I think I could do it. Maybe would do it. But I know that you won't, and thus I can't. Because as long as you continue to hurt people, Takashi--and have no doubt that your actions do hurt people--then I have to remain Sailor Mercury so that I can protect them ... and protect you."
Takashi actually thinks on this for a long while, himself. It leads to a surprisingly long period of quiet. He considers what she said with a serious, studious look on his face.
"Do you really think we'd both be better off uninvolved, that we could stay uninvolved?" He squeezes her hand. "Do you think the universe, the threads of fate, destiny, whatever - do you think we even could if we tried to go off the grid, so to speak? Could we both keep ourselves held back if something happened nearby? I mean, it's not just Tokyo, in the end. Hell, I can tell you it's not even Earth."
"Even if I shelved everything I've worked for, everything other people have worked for on my behalf, just to be normal, I don't think the world would allow it. I don't have a transformation pen to leave behind. I am me. Even without Axion to focus the energy, I've still got a little bit of it, I still see that world."
"If we're walking down the street and someone gets attacked, could either of us keep ourselves distanced?"
For several moments Ami says nothing, just listening to him, and then thinking about his words. She doesn't shy away from looking at him as she does so; doesn't take her hand from his. But neither does she lean into him closer.
Eventually, she looks away and lowers her eyes towards the bracelet around her wrist, gives that free wrist a little twist, which sends the bracelet to twist counter. Then a soft sigh escapes her lips as she notes, "No one could stay distanced from that and be sane. I'd be a doctor," she explains; "I'd try to help them medically. And you'd be a scientist, and a good person; you'd try to help them because it's the right thing to do." She seems a bit caught in the fantasy, right now. Speaking words she knows aren't true. Of course he wouldn't help them. But it's important to her to be in that place, for now. "We wouldn't have to stay distanced. Just ... put up the magic. Put up the impossible. Constrain ourselves to the laws of thermodynamics."
Takashi laughs a bit. "And what, pick up a baseball bat, a bookbag, a physics book? I didn't think you liked tending to me while I was injured quite so much." he notes, poking a little hole in the fantasy. But he sighs, and - as so many times before, he leans on her shoulder.
"I do wish something like that could work out. Or that you could see like I do, or even vice-versa. I hate the distance it puts between us. But I'm also not going to let that distance keep us totally apart."
Ami wrinkles her nose just a little when he puts his head on her mostly bare shoulder, but she doesn't shove him off. Instead, she just looks away, vaguely embarassed but with no real response to it. For a while she just sits quiet, saying nothing--doing nothing. Eventually, she twists her wrist again before asking, "Are we really not going to go in today?"
Takashi sighs. It's a bit of an overdramatic sigh. And sort of a signal that to some degree the major conversation has been left to die in the heat. "I mean, if you'd rather spend Christmas down in the ruins then we can. But if you'd rather do something else that's fine too. It is a holiday. I'll leave that choice up to you, though."
Ami now reaches up with her free hand, and gently pushes some of his bangs off of her shoulder where they're tickling her. Then she does it again, as if petting him, before realising what she's doing. She stops herself, but keeps on thinking for a moment before admitting, "I'd like to go into the village on the other side of the valley. We haven't gone there, but I saw on the internet that they have some really wonderful foods at their local stands."
Takashi leans for just a moment into the petting that isn't, stopping himself about the same time she stops herself. "That sounds good, then." Takashi finds his footing on the floor and then reaches a hand out to help Ami from her seated position.
"Oh... I'll have to grab Axion unless your computer can help translate for us?"
Ami gives Takashi a slightly withering look, then arches a brow. "We've been here three months, and you haven't bothered to learn Spanish, yet?" she asks him, then sighs and pats his head gently. "The Mercury computer can translate, but so can I. I'm going to go take a shower and get dressed."
Takashi grumbles at this admonishment. "I was busy playing with a giant hole torn between dimensions. Spanish was like, if we had any time after finishing but before you had to return." Or at least that's his excuse. "Alright. I showered already, so I'm just going to wait in here and try not to ruin that fact by stepping outside again."
Ami rolls her eyes just a little and pats him on the cheek. "You could have been studying Spanish while I was studying for my entrance exams," she points out. "Your priorities need some reconsideration," she notes, then disentangles her hand from his, and slides her shoulder out from beneath his head. "I won't be long," she promises, as she pads back towards her little private space to get what she needs for a shower.