All December, intermingled with cramming for college entrance exams, going to school, playing pokemon go, and attempting (but largely failing at) being social, Mamoru's been on-and-off stalking someone. Following him by rooftop in the night, finding what bar he goes to after work with his colleagues, watching him interact with them, social-hacking his job by discussing the man with his drunk colleagues on nights that he left early--
--and on New Year's, he sent the man a postcard. Just the standard traditional hopes for a good future, good luck in the new year-- something that one sends to family, friends, and acquaintances, growing gradually more personal the closer the degree of separation. Nothing, then, for two weeks.
It's Sunday after the second set of exams, it's cold, there have been crises, he's a little tired, and he's a lot less angry than he was yesterday, but there's still a buried simmering disapproval of his target. Mamoru Chiba is standing on the man's doorstep in his expensive peacoat and a scarf from Usagi, dark dress pants and classy shoes, and glasses. He knows Hiroshi Takeba is home. He knows his schedule. He doesn't know if the door will be opened to him.
Hiroshi Takeba is a man in his fifties, growing steadily more gray with slowly less hair. He lives alone; the lion's share of his waking hours are spent at work, where he is ensconced squarely in middle management. As befits this position, the next highest share of his waking hours is spent out with those colleagues. Sundays he sleeps, and performs those rote chores that are necessary to enable the next week's worth of work, and has perhaps two or three hours left over to do something for himself: television one week, reading part of a book another, visiting a shrine just after the new year to stand in line in order to turn last year's omamori over for burning and return home with new.
His colleagues have a good opinion of him: no-one ever admits that some of the management in the company are there simply because it was their turn, but Mamoru can overhear the quiet side discussion of who to take problems to, and Takeba's name comes up more than once. He's drawn aside several times for private conversations, too. Apparently there's more than one person near him -- his direct superior, and at least one of that superior's other reports -- whose work Hiroshi quietly ensures is actually done. Apparently, also, by rights Hiroshi should hold that superior's position -- it's significantly past his turn. But there were ... problems. One doesn't discuss these things. They have to be assembled from the holes left in the conversations. But something about his home life counts against him, holding him back when seniority says he should move forward.
The man who answers the door is dressed very nearly as he would be for work. Dark trousers. White shirt. Carefully calculated tie. He does not, thank heavens, wear the suit jacket at home, but he seems to share with someone else Mamoru knows the tendency to assemble one outfit and duplicate it as necessary, rather than spend time on actually having to think about clothing.
He regards Mamoru over his bifocals for a moment, then through them, examining them for a moment. "Good evening." Nothing less than that; but also nothing more.
"Good evening," Mamoru says, standing far enough away to bow slightly to Hiroshi. "Chiba Mamoru. If it wouldn't be too much of an imposition," of course it's an imposition, "may I come in? I'd like to speak with you about your son, and where he's been, and how he's doing."
He takes an ungloved hand back out of his pocket to straighten his glasses, and he looks amiably mild-- but nevertheless, there's an almost uncanny presence to him. It might be in his bearing, casually regal; it might be in the way he holds his head, or behind the kind and ancient eyes kept penned by wire and lens. "He did not send me, but he is-- indispensible to me, and I would like to make sure that he and his father are not estranged if it can be helped. If you have no interest in this, I'll leave you alone hereafter."
"My apologies that my home is too humble to properly entertain a guest, Chiba-san," Hiroshi replies, mirroring the bow, increasing it slightly now that etiquette has reversed itself. There was no blink at the name; he knew it already. But, again, one does not discuss these things out loud. The polite deflection, too, is reversed in a moment: "But if you truly wish, there is at least tea." And he steps back to allow Mamoru entrance.
(There are guest slippers at the entrance. They are perhaps entirely unused.)
Nothing else is said on his part until Mamoru is ensconced in a seat, and Hiroshi has returned from the kitchen (the same small kitchen, the same unassuming beige tones, forgettable and with no sign of individuality or disorder) with a tea set and a hastily-assembled plate of sweets presumably lingering from New Year's, and cups have been poured.
In honesty, nothing else of note is said even then. A few small, prescribed comments about the new year, and the weather, and the recent snow. If he is still searching for news, it doesn't show in person. Not yet, at least.
Every piece of protocol -- sans calling ahead -- is followed to the letter: the offer of tea is accepted with compliments, as is the tea itself; shoes are left at the door and unused guest slippers donned; Mamoru's coat and scarf are hung up by the door. He's not wearing a suit jacket, but he is wearing a vest that goes with his trousers, a white button-down, and an equally carefully chosen tie -- blue, it turns out. A calming color.
The kitchen is noticed; of course it's noticed. The same house. The house that Kazuo grew up in, the house that Kazuo minded, essentially alone, since he was eight or nine-- and Mamoru remembers being just that alone, even if there were adults nearby, when he was the same age. His heart's at war with itself, but he can remind himself again, as many times as he has to, that it was not the intention to deprive in either situation.
Until the teenager -- this polite, reserved, self-composed and oddly powerful teenager -- finishes his first cup of tea and a very slightly stale dango, and the second cup is poured, he stays with the verbally uncommunicative communication; his responses are harmless and pleasant as well. He takes the time to read the older man, determine whether the delay of the topic at hand is putting him at ease or giving any tells for increasing anxiety. He doesn't want him to be anxious. It will determine his tone: if the former, he is more kind, and if the latter, more businesslike.
Either way it's a mixture of the two when he takes the second cup in his hands and sits up again, then says quietly, glancing up at Hiroshi from his cup, "I apologise for having intimidated the detective you hired, but I took offense at her rudeness and her invasion of my privacy." Another sip, and he puts the hot cup down. "He hasn't been on medication, but he hasn't had a single seizure in the year and a half I've known him. Aside from that, what would you like to know first?"
Neither at ease nor increasing anxiety. There is no dread and no anticipation; there is only a resignation, rote as the pleasantries. This is what is done; therefore it will be done. Something else will happen, thereafter, but it is neither a return of the prodigal nor a notification from the police. At least not so far.
"The doctors said that he might grow out of them." Hiroshi regards his own cup, meditative, remote. "I apologize for the woman's rudeness. Whatever she did, I am certain it was uncalled-for. She did, however, relay to me your message."
I see you have no bodyguard with you at the moment is not spoken, but there's a brief pause in which it hangs in the air between them.
"To judge by that, it seems as if he is functioning as an adult, and no longer my responsibility. I would like to know, if possible, why he left the university. He was still my responsibility at that time."
"It was not his intention; it was--"
The envelope, though ... that slips to the floor, sliding silently half-under the desk.
The shiver is nearly imperceptible, the pain only flashes behind his eyes, invisible in his expression and inaudible in his voice. "--through no fault of his own." Mamoru picks up his tea again, and this time it's to hold in his hands, likely even after he's finished it. "He just re-took the entrance exam and will be returning to university at the beginning of the semester, accompanying me." The last two words have him looking up at Hiroshi once more, and he looks calm. There's the answer to the unspoken observation's implicit message. He doesn't accept the man's apology regarding the detective, but neither does he reject it; he doesn't address it in any way.
"The events surrounding his disappearance were nothing you could have known about or done anything about, at that time. They are extremely unpleasant. The short version is that certain abilities he has made him extremely attractive to a firm with extraordinarily unethical goals and methods, and they performed experimental surgery and psychological conditioning on him--" The high-schooler sips his tea, watching Hiroshi. "--which rendered him both loyal to them and unable to recall his life or identity." The cup travels back down to his lap. His tone is both mild and somehow inexorable as he delivers his answer.
"You may recall from what the detective discovered that I was absent from school for months last year; illness was the cover story constructed by my people. The truth is that I was abducted by the same firm and subjected to the same ill-treatment, and he knew who I was and broke his own conditioning in order to get me out. He was caught and broken again, and it took the resources of all of my connections to dismantle it and recover him. His recovery thereafter has been a slow process, but he has proven unshakeably strong of will in accelerating it as much as possible -- especially since he has also been supporting my own gradual recovery, and those of the others we rescued."
Mild, and somehow inexorable, and...
Hiroshi is giving Mamoru a perfectly calm look, absolutely level. It is not completely impossible that he might have learned it from his son; it might also simply be native to him.
"You could simply have said that you preferred not to discuss the matter." Hiroshi settles both hands around his cup, holding it lightly. That one Kazuo had from his father; it wasn't Kunzite's habit. "Very well, then. I'm pleased to hear that your health has been improving, all the same. And to hear that he will be returning to university after all, if he manages to be accepted." That Mamoru will be, apparently, may be taken on faith.
"I am of the opinion that you deserve answers to the questions you have -- not only because he was your responsibility, but because he is your son," says Mamoru, his own expression flat, his voice taking on a tone that can't possibly involve rebuke, disappointment, or disapproval. How could it, given their difference in age? That ancient presence has focused the full immensity of its attention on Hiroshi, and it judges by not judging. "I am certain you understand that I, given my upbringing, am interested in parents knowing the achievements of their children, and the potential for children to know that their parents are proud of them."
He sips his tea again, bringing the cup calmly to his lips and holding it halfway down, so as to sip it once more when he's finished. "Of course he'll be accepted," he says with an air of absolute certainty. "Thank you for your well wishes on our health."
There's the second sip. He's a magical boy. He's the reincarnated head of the guardians of the ancient Crown Prince of Earth. I saw how you treated him when he was a child. I see what of him comes from you, even if he doesn't remember you. You're his father, you're his father, and he's saved the world, and I want you to be proud of him, I want him to have a father who's proud of him! he wants to scream in the man's face.
He wants to touch those kitchen counters, he wants to see Kazuo's room, he wants to see photographs. He wants to befriend this man. He wants to fix a relationship that's been broken for nearly twenty years. Hiroshi Takeba is not a bad person. Endymion is grateful to him for raising the boy who was Kunzite before he had any inkling of it, making sure his needs were seen to. He is grateful in the same way that he is to his own childhood caretakers. But he's not a caretaker. He's his father.
"I have the impression," he says after a momentary silence, and his voice is faintly colder, "that you don't believe me. Would you like proof?"
"He is my son," Hiroshi acknowledges. "But once he reached his twentieth birthday, he had a right to make decisions about what that meant. I hope that he will choose to maintain a respectable job," not so much as a blink over whether his current position qualifies, "and that he will find and court and marry a respectable woman. But whatever else has happened in the last several years, he's chosen to maintain silence these last six months. It's regrettable that he's also chosen to stop visiting his mother. But perhaps in a few years he'll change his mind on that. If he ever has children of his own."
He says nothing about that offer of proof. Nothing at all.
Experimental surgery and psychological conditioning. Really. How ... California.
"He doesn't remember her. He doesn't remember you," Mamoru says matter-of-factly; a reminder, since he'd mentioned the loss of identity and history once already. The 'respectable woman' part-- that has him fighting not to lock off another part of his heart. This man does not understand a lot of important things, and many of those are unlikely to change -- and he can't judge him. He can't. He won't, and it's a conscious decision that needs to be actively maintained.
The boy's silent for a few seconds, looking at his tea. He made a mistake, and it's cost him what little ground he'd gained. He's out of practice dealing with people like this, and even when he was in practice, his methods were very final when he couldn't make any more progress with words. He doesn't want this to be final. But-- he's uncertain if he can recover from a mistake like that, and wouldn't that be worse than a little bit of sledgehammering now? An explanation he can't accept, that his rational mind will come up with an excuse for and fill in the blanks that Mamoru's ill-thought-out words left, making it believable?
Mamoru looks up at Hiroshi again, and repeats, calmer, "I have proof. Please allow me to provide it," he says, standing up and reaching in his pocket to take out his phone. It's swift motion, well-choreographed, as he unlocks it and steps over, bringing up a screen with a lot of files on it and reaching down to give it to Hiroshi.
The files have anonymous names, because this isn't what's important, what's important is that his bare hand will come into contact, a carefully constructed blunder, with that of the middle-aged middle manager.
There's little reaction from Hiroshi; the faint hint of a compression of lips, but otherwise the bland expression of someone who's sunk himself into being a politely obligated gear for the vast majority of his adult life. There is, presumably, a personal face beneath the social one, somewhere. Actual opinions and actual reaction. But the expression Mamoru is receiving is only one step away from the one he'd be using in an eight-hour meeting, and that one step is only that he's remaining active and alert, instead of letting half his mind sink into the kind of daze that does most of the job of sleep while still letting him look awake and respond on cue.
And then Mamoru's moving.
Hiroshi's head tilts away from Mamoru, the beginning of polite reluctance, the start of a refusal, but that offer is quick, and Hiroshi is lifting his hand to turn the phone away and --
-- he is younger, and his back doesn't ache, and he can crouch down like that without a twinge of pain in his knee, and scoop his little boy with the eerie white hair up into his arms. His hands want to shake with relief, but Kazuo's four now, and big enough that his weight doesn't allow for that much movement. He keeps his voice stern. "What are you doing here? You shouldn't run away like that."
The boy would probably be easier to hear if he hadn't pulled his face against his chest. Still, it's understandable. "Wanted to see Mama."
Hiroshi glances back at the marker, Akemi's name in black, his own waiting in red, the old way. It hurts every time, but he doesn't have time to deal with that; he turns away and starts to walk without putting his son down. "You ask when you want to see Mama," he tells the boy firmly. How did the child even get there? It's four kilometers from home; it's the barest luck that he thought to look there at all. "You ask. You don't run away."
The boy never answered. And he never did stop running, every chance he got.
This other boy, now, who thinks he can do something about that with good will and bad stories ... he'll learn. Probably the hard way.
Everything for Hiroshi Takeba is suddenly warmth and acceptance, golden and still like the magic hour of a summer day; there is a quality to this, this thing that gently unburdens him of his aches and offers peace and home as a gift, expecting nothing in return. The presence that Mamoru carries with himself, as part of himself, is there and is patient -- but so is the heart of a teenaged boy that loves deeply and unreservedly, and who very much wants Hiroshi to understand. This is magic, and this is ancient, and this is also the desperation of a mother- and father-less child who wants one of the most important and indispensible and loved people in his life to have something of what he can never have himself--
There is the quick background catching up: the Golden Kingdom, the first iteration of Kunzite and the other Shitennou and Endymion himself; the betrayal is left out, but it ends with the Fall, and it includes Endymion's death and the wretched horror on Kazuo's-- Kunzite's-- Kazuo's familiar features, older. There is an abbreviated summary of the parallel events in Mamoru's and Kazuo's lives, and then there is a whirlwind tour of his own stay in the Dark Kingdom and Kazuo's care of him, knowledge of who he was, of who he'd been looking for his whole life -- the worst and most unspeakable parts are left out, the parts that nearly drove Mamoru insane. Kunzite's sacrifices made to get him out are implied.
Suddenly, he can feel the pulse of the earth's heartbeat in his veins, and he perceives -- just like seeing in color, or hearing sounds audible to the normal human range, or feeling that it's cold outside -- the life of the world, its connections, its solidity, just like it's a part of him. He's holding his breath, and he reaches out to touch a small door in an empty room in a house that smells of dust and sunlight and stopped time.
A vision within a vision: the feelings are there and solid, recognisably Kazuo. Focused and determined and driven, well past the point of obsession.
It's even stronger on this door than that of the room, but Mamoru's braced for it this time, and it's with a sense of inevitable completion that he reaches inside, around the corner and just out of sight. His hand closes on cloth, and he pulls out a nondescript backpack, top-facing surfaces of its angles covered in dust.
Hands, callused and strong and deft and young, practiced, steady, packing things into it in another place, zipping it up.
"This is yours," he says unnecessarily, words hitting the still air like bricks, shattering the held breath of the house. "You used this place to keep this here. Can I open it?"
"Yes." The 'of course' is unnecessary, too. Kazuo's voice, but not aloud.
He knows there was an argument; but the context is missing, the knowledge of with-whom. All that mattered was that he might not have been able to reach these things, if he'd kept them where the person he'd been arguing with could find them. They had to be somewhere else. The risk of a stranger stealing them, here, was less than the risk of the known, less than the risk of someone well-meaning trying to help.
The things in the backpack -- varied and useful to someone prepared to run at a moment's notice. One thing is focused on: the passport. Too valuable, too useful, to leave where it could be taken away. Better to risk it in the strange place where no-one else set foot, that never seemed to move beyond a particular state of decay.
Mamoru's real, present voice, speaking aloud as his hand keeps closed around Hiroshi's, his phone fallen to the floor: "That's how he found out his name, Takeba-san. The passport he hid, because he didn't intend to stop running until he found what he sought."
Instantly, Mamoru's glasses come out of his shirt pocket and he fumbles them on. The fumbling is better than the unsteadiness thereafter as he opens the passport and looks inside. Expired. Never stamped. Dated. A birthday. These things are filed reflexively in the back of his head, because it's the face and the name he stares at. The thunder of his own blood in Mamoru's ears is deafening in the vast stillness of the house.
He can't see the writing anymore; his vision has blurred.
His voice comes out as a cracked and breathless whisper. "I-- I'm sorry, Kunzite. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I wish--"
"Shhh." Not silencing the urge, or the wish. Not silencing him at all. Gathering in, rather, so much as he can by will alone. "I know. So do I. But if we could have had better -- we could also have had worse. You have us back. You won't lose us again."
The rebuilding will take a long time, they've all missed years, and what's been done to them-- done to them all, but done to them-- can't be taken back, can't be forgotten, can't be smoothed over, is in no way acceptable but there's no way to do anything but accept it and move on; she's dead, they killed her, she can't do it again. But that doesn't fix any of this. That doesn't give years back, memories back, lives back; doesn't make might-have-beens possible--
But they can rebuild themselves from that. They are. They are family. They run on love.
"He found what he was looking for, and he's stopped running, sir," Mamoru says softly. "You can catch him again, if you want to. I hope you want to. He's picking himself up, and he's already worked so hard, and I will make sure in every way that I can that you will be able to speak of him proudly."
Hiroshi Takeba does not understand magic.
It is not that he never had the capacity. He is human; he was born; he was a child. His heart was open, once. It closed slowly, colors worn away by a reality that conflicted with his dreams, by taking on responsibility for things outside his control, by death and loss and grief and lack of understanding. But it did close; and he does not have the capacity now.
His world is gray and clinging and cold, hope limited to rigid forms and quiet endurance. One fits oneself to those forms, or one falls away.
Now there is gold; now there is warmth; now there is acceptance; and he has forgotten what gold is, does not know what to do with warmth, has forgotten acceptance in the two decades of its absence. Now there is love, and love is something that rotted away in him, and left behind only the hard shells of etiquette and responsibility.
His world is a narrow thing, now; once, perhaps, it was wider -- there is a flicker of memory, a boy's head tipped back to stare up at the Kasumigaseki Building, the great dizzying grid of shadows and light, impossibly and breathlessly tall beyond all the limits of the older laws; taller than anything but Tokyo Tower itself, and this was a building, rather than the airy brilliant lattice of dead weapons and empty air -- but now the routines are all the same, and there is nothing outside them. The world that Mamoru's awareness and Endymion's memories pour into his head is far beyond what he understands. It shatters his own laws and boundaries in all directions, not one. Up and down; the four quarters; back into the past --
Forward into the future? That's yet to be seen.
Fragments. He claims fragments. The voice, not aloud. The hints of what Kazuo might have been thinking, might have thought; he does not understand them, does not understand how, but they are something, something with which to try to reason out two decades of living with that constrained desperation.
The thought that perhaps his son was running toward, rather than away. A perspective he's never had, that might change things, given time.
The sight of that face, older, too old, but --
It is not, it should be stressed, the sensations that go with that particular memory that trigger the problem. It is, if anything, that the sudden pain is different from the memory of the sword that alerts Endymion to it in time to take action.
Lack of understanding. Fear. Fear with no understanding of how to flee, because there is no physical threat, is no threat at all, except a world too great and bright and interconnected for Hiroshi to take in all at once. Adrenaline surges into the bloodstream. Calcium channels open, flooding the muscles of the heart, forcing it to beat harder, stronger -- a natural reaction; but one that threatens for an instant to go too far, into a convulsive shudder --
-- that is soothed and healed before it can ever spin out of control, gold weaving itself through the nerves, singing the electrical patterns back into harmony, coaxing the rhythm of the muscle back into order, repairing the faults in the channels that would otherwise have simply repeated the problem at the next sufficient shock.
He does not faint from lack of blood flow; the matter is controlled and repaired far before it could ever reach that point. It's only too much. Far more than he was ready for. His mind shuts itself down rather more gently than his body tried to.
How much he retains, how he interprets it ... that will always be the question.
But the last words he heard, at the least, were gentle. And that may make the difference.
The prince is regretful, apologetic; he is as gentle as his words of a second ago when he lays Hiroshi gently down on the couch, propping his head so he doesn't get a crick in his neck. The older man's shoes are already off, of course, but the slippers are removed and placed in front of the couch where he'll find them easily.
Then Mamoru stands, moving through the house toward the room he'd seen in Kazuo's past, when the Return card shared things it had no right to; he goes in and takes a blanket, then comes back to drape it over Hiroshi.
These things he does are the least he can do; the most he can do will come in a moment, when he's gone back into the kitchen to find and take out a thermos to put the rest of the tea in, and has fished through his coat pockets for the pen and notepad he keeps in there. (The notepad, in point of fact, that he'd once used to make marks in for the princess leaderboard he'd run for himself in the early days.)
Tea settled in what will keep it hot for when Hiroshi awakens, Mamoru proceeds to jot down the most formally informal of notes: it observes what protocol it can for what it is, and it's left on the table next to the thermos and Hiroshi's cup. The gist is essentially,
:Dear Sir,
:I apologise for the inconvenience I seem to have caused in addition to my imposition on your hospitality, and for any unsettling of your life that may have resulted. If you wish to ignore that this meeting has occurred, I will understand. If, on the other hand, you wish to contact me with questions, or wish for me to arrange and potentially assist in a meeting with your son, I would be humbly honored to aid you in any way I can.
:I hope that you will enjoy good health and feel well rested upon waking, and assure you that you were in no danger when I left.
:My personal number is __________, and you know my address; you are welcome to visit at any time, only please give notice so that I can be sure that someone is home, and that you will be treated as the honored guest I would consider you.
:Best Regards,
:Chiba Mamoru
He glances back, hand on the doorknob and shoes back on his feet, and looks at the tired man more-or-less asleep on the couch once more before leaving silently. He locks the door behind him.
Almost the room he'd seen in the past. Very nearly. The place is right, the gut-certain familiarity of location from the borrowed memories; the things in the room are right. The folded bedding is the correct colors. The books on the shelves include the books that had been on the desk, and dozens of others that offer familiarity, from Rumi's poetry to Bronze Age history to von Clausewitz to an English translation of Pliny's Natural History. (There's a bookmark in that one, and Mamoru knows without needing to look precisely which page it must be on, the one that speaks of Venus's aspects as morning and evening star, and in the next breath of the moon, and of why a certain person might have been claimed to love her --)
There is a knife laid out on the desk, and the desk is the same, and the knife is the same.
There is very little in the room but study and practical things; but so many of those practical things were brought back from that tiny space Kazuo inhabited elsewhere while he was at university, that first time. Brought back and set out and kept free of dust and corrosion.
There is one photograph, here, the glass of its frame likewise free of dust. A younger Hiroshi, his hair still black and still present, dressed in the standard-issue black suit that's been corporate uniform for decades. A woman seated beside him to disguise her height -- she must, from the look of her, have been taller than her husband; darker than he was as well, and with clear gray eyes lending her face a faintly eerie look overall. But she was smiling for all that, and alive, and Hiroshi's composed expression was still effort rather than habit, and the three-year-old in her lap with the cropped white hair and one small fist closed on his mother's bracelet ... that child had only an intent look, not a guarded one.
Kazuo's room, easily found, still kept. The kitchen, still organized the same way it had been, enough for Mamoru to call on a pair of memories and find that thermos without trouble. Note left, quietly.
There is silence behind him as he leaves.
There is silence for days, for weeks, for months.
There is silence until the note arrives, stilted and awkward, inquiring whether it would be inconvenient to cope with a visitor on the fifth of May.