Festschrift
I hadn't planned on crossposting this little contribution to the Muraki's 40th birthday meme here, but I find on re-reading that I managed to misspell Hisoka's name when I posted it last night. And LJ is refusing to let me fix it -- I keep getting some bizarre error message when I try -- and I am evidently too obsessive to just shrug and let it go. (Although not obsessive enough to have proofread adequately the first time. Go figure.)
As some of you tolerant folks know all too well, I have certain . . . difficulties . . . with the Kyoto arc. It's beautiful; it's angstalicious; it makes so little sense to me in terms of the Muraki we seem to know up until this point that I have difficulty accepting that what seemed to be going on therein could possibly be what was really going on.
But what's fic for, if not to fix these little disturbances in the fabric of reality? Behind the cut, then: the text of a letter written recently in a timestream in which what Muraki was trying to accomplish in the course of the Kyoto arc was not actually reanimating his brother so that he could kill him again.
Text of a handwritten note found shuffled into the middle of an incomprehensible set of documents (including copies of technology transfer agreements, a business plan, a description of corporate structure and key shareholders, a trust agreement, a cover letter from a lawyer at a well-known international firm with a Tokyo office) delivered to Mibu Oriya by courier on December 4, 2004:
My dear Oriya,
It is my hope that my all-too-diligent security detail will take this note as part of the package of comments I am assembling for the company’s lawyers,* and that the mistake will remain uncorrected for long enough for it to be delivered to you. (If not - if all you have received is a bundle of documents - I am reasonably confident that you will know what to think upon the receipt of shares in a biotechnology startup company called “Meifu Advanced Theraputics.” But I hope for better.)
Please do not be offended by the gift. Whatever value these shares may ultimately have (and in purely financial terms they are essentially valueless now), they represent an avenue of communication: while my opportunities for personal correspondence remain limited (as you will have gathered, seeing me reduced to smuggling notes into packets of offputting legal and financial documents), as a shareholder you will be entitled to regular and routine communications regarding the progress of the firm. It is not satisfactory, I know, but given the Americans’ current hysteria over security, and their suspicions about the deaths of a number of prominent virologists in recent years, it is likely to be the best I can do for some time to come. (They’ve been feeling a bit overprotective: retinal scans and protection that verges upon custody are the order of the day for a surprising number of scientists whose work is considered potentially helpful in the area of bioweapons defense.) It has taken me this long to create any avenue of contact at all, so despite its inadequacy, I hope that you will accept it as the best I can manage. For now.
You will in your usual efficient way have read the cover letter before touching the documents themselves, and so you will already be aware that I am asking you to act as trustee for a trust whose assets consist of a second block of shares in the company. I am once more imposing upon your good nature, I know, and you are of course free to refuse - but I hope you will not. The role should give you no trouble, since my lawyers have been instructed to do the work associated with the trust; and by the time the trust’s assets have any significant value I hope to be able to discuss the matter with you directly. But for legal and financial reasons, the trust is best established now, and for practical ones, it is best established with you as trustee.
You are, I believe, acquainted with the beneficiary, one Tatsumi Seiichirou: he will have been one of the gentlemen who arrived to claim the laboratory key cards from you during the unpleasantness of six years ago. I find I owe him a debt of gratitude for the form his intervention ultimately took, and for its results. This is annoying, as you can imagine: in setting up this trust it is my hope both to repay the debt in some tangible form and to annoy him in his turn.
(No, he’s not the one you liked so much. That would have been Kurosaki Hisoka: very young, delicate-looking, green eyes, nerves of ice and steel - do I guess aright?)
I would tell you about the unpleasantness, if I could. Some day I hope that I will. For the present, though, I can only ask that you accept my assurances that I had reasons I believe you would approve; that those reasons made it impossible for me to tell them to you at the time; and that these six years of silence have not been by my wish or design. And, of course, that knowing that much, you will reserve judgement until the time when you know the rest.
I know, I know. I never ask you for anything simple, do I? But at least this is better than last time - or so I hope.
Yours, etc.,
Muraki
*Jonathan - If you are reading this, could you be a gentleman and pretend that you are not? Mibu Oriya is not, I promise you, a threat to my security or to the security of the United States. If you feel compelled to check on him, you will find that his discretion is absolute, and his protection considerable; and that no one our security services would be concerned about is even aware of his existence. And you will have difficulty in finding that much, which ought to reassure you.
- MK
I do know what he was doing during the Kyoto arc, and how he escaped and wound up where he is. But I'm trying to avoid having another WIP before I finish at least one of the half-dozen I'm already fighting with.
As some of you tolerant folks know all too well, I have certain . . . difficulties . . . with the Kyoto arc. It's beautiful; it's angstalicious; it makes so little sense to me in terms of the Muraki we seem to know up until this point that I have difficulty accepting that what seemed to be going on therein could possibly be what was really going on.
But what's fic for, if not to fix these little disturbances in the fabric of reality? Behind the cut, then: the text of a letter written recently in a timestream in which what Muraki was trying to accomplish in the course of the Kyoto arc was not actually reanimating his brother so that he could kill him again.
Text of a handwritten note found shuffled into the middle of an incomprehensible set of documents (including copies of technology transfer agreements, a business plan, a description of corporate structure and key shareholders, a trust agreement, a cover letter from a lawyer at a well-known international firm with a Tokyo office) delivered to Mibu Oriya by courier on December 4, 2004:
My dear Oriya,
It is my hope that my all-too-diligent security detail will take this note as part of the package of comments I am assembling for the company’s lawyers,* and that the mistake will remain uncorrected for long enough for it to be delivered to you. (If not - if all you have received is a bundle of documents - I am reasonably confident that you will know what to think upon the receipt of shares in a biotechnology startup company called “Meifu Advanced Theraputics.” But I hope for better.)
Please do not be offended by the gift. Whatever value these shares may ultimately have (and in purely financial terms they are essentially valueless now), they represent an avenue of communication: while my opportunities for personal correspondence remain limited (as you will have gathered, seeing me reduced to smuggling notes into packets of offputting legal and financial documents), as a shareholder you will be entitled to regular and routine communications regarding the progress of the firm. It is not satisfactory, I know, but given the Americans’ current hysteria over security, and their suspicions about the deaths of a number of prominent virologists in recent years, it is likely to be the best I can do for some time to come. (They’ve been feeling a bit overprotective: retinal scans and protection that verges upon custody are the order of the day for a surprising number of scientists whose work is considered potentially helpful in the area of bioweapons defense.) It has taken me this long to create any avenue of contact at all, so despite its inadequacy, I hope that you will accept it as the best I can manage. For now.
You will in your usual efficient way have read the cover letter before touching the documents themselves, and so you will already be aware that I am asking you to act as trustee for a trust whose assets consist of a second block of shares in the company. I am once more imposing upon your good nature, I know, and you are of course free to refuse - but I hope you will not. The role should give you no trouble, since my lawyers have been instructed to do the work associated with the trust; and by the time the trust’s assets have any significant value I hope to be able to discuss the matter with you directly. But for legal and financial reasons, the trust is best established now, and for practical ones, it is best established with you as trustee.
You are, I believe, acquainted with the beneficiary, one Tatsumi Seiichirou: he will have been one of the gentlemen who arrived to claim the laboratory key cards from you during the unpleasantness of six years ago. I find I owe him a debt of gratitude for the form his intervention ultimately took, and for its results. This is annoying, as you can imagine: in setting up this trust it is my hope both to repay the debt in some tangible form and to annoy him in his turn.
(No, he’s not the one you liked so much. That would have been Kurosaki Hisoka: very young, delicate-looking, green eyes, nerves of ice and steel - do I guess aright?)
I would tell you about the unpleasantness, if I could. Some day I hope that I will. For the present, though, I can only ask that you accept my assurances that I had reasons I believe you would approve; that those reasons made it impossible for me to tell them to you at the time; and that these six years of silence have not been by my wish or design. And, of course, that knowing that much, you will reserve judgement until the time when you know the rest.
I know, I know. I never ask you for anything simple, do I? But at least this is better than last time - or so I hope.
Yours, etc.,
Muraki
*Jonathan - If you are reading this, could you be a gentleman and pretend that you are not? Mibu Oriya is not, I promise you, a threat to my security or to the security of the United States. If you feel compelled to check on him, you will find that his discretion is absolute, and his protection considerable; and that no one our security services would be concerned about is even aware of his existence. And you will have difficulty in finding that much, which ought to reassure you.
- MK
I do know what he was doing during the Kyoto arc, and how he escaped and wound up where he is. But I'm trying to avoid having another WIP before I finish at least one of the half-dozen I'm already fighting with.