Here and Now, Part 5
This is the fifth and final chapter of Here and Now, a.k.a. The Meeting Fic. More Monstersocks will commence in the hopefully not-so-distant future.
Big, huge, mega thanks to V and Lytton for their beta skills!
For a moment, nobody spoke. In one fell swoop, Mamoru had sucked all the excitement out of the room, and he really felt a little guilty about that, about shattering that moment of pure shared joy, but more than that, he felt an overwhelming grief that he could not quite explain.
A black mug with a Batman logo clattered on the table in front of him. Neil set down a second beside it and poured coffee into each. "So, straight facts. We've all been back for about two years, more or less. Some of us longer than others."
Looking up at him, or at anyone else, seemed too much for Mamoru right now, so he watched Neil's tanned hands moving over the table in front of him, scooping heaps of brown sugar into each of their coffee mugs. That was one of many culinary wonders he had introduced to Mamoru--the brown sugar. Coffee had never tasted the same since.
"Going from non-corporeal to corporeal is really shitty. You spend the first few weeks trying to figure out how to exist again. How money works, how to put your pants on, basic shit. So it's really a good thing that we got our instructions before we got thrown back into our bodies."
A spike of confusion temporarily pushed its way past Mamoru's other emotions, and he glanced up. Instructions?
Neil slid the Batman cup, now swirled with a splash of heavy cream, towards him. "See, I think there's a good reason why somewhere called Elysian got passed down in mythology as the resting place of the dead. Maybe it's just because we've got a connection there, or something. But after hanging out in rocks for however long, we got pulled in there."
Mamoru took a small sip of coffee--obscenely decadent coffee, thanks to the man who thought that bacon was a food group--as he tried to sort through what Neil was telling him. "Helios brought you back?"
The brunette slid into the chair next to him, taking a swig from his mug, which simply said the words "BIEBER FEVER!" in neon letters. "I wouldn't really say he's the one who brought us back. He's more like a... guide? He led us out. Sort of helped us wake up. He was waiting for us when we made it to Elysian. He talked to us a lot, about what we were doing and why. Why we wanted to come back. If we wanted to at all."
A silent skirmish was taking place on the other side of the table as Neil spoke. Sasha pulled out a chair and shoved Jaden down into it. He then planted the carton of juice on the table beside him, with a glare that said he could either drink the juice or wear it. Jaden's sneer said that he could wear the juice, thank you very much. Mamoru remembered belatedly that he should have reminded Jaden to take it easy, should have somehow slipped that in there in between the blissful high of rediscovering his guardians and the crushing low that he now found himself in.
But Neil's voice was warm and rich as the coffee Mamoru held between his hands, and Mamoru sank back into it. "It sounds simple, right? Who wouldn't choose life over death? But it's different, when you're on the other side of that decision. Coming back meant facing everything that happened. And living with it. It's easier to stay a rock. But you know, all of us did make the decision to come back, and that's not nothing."
It was amazing how Neil could so casually discuss life and death, reclining in the kitchen chair, barely clothed, one hand wrapped around his Bieber coffee mug, as natural as if the topic were the intricacies of hockey instead of the ultimate question. He made everything seem so deceptively simple, or he would have, if Mamoru could ignore completely the tightness in his chest when he tried to sip his coffee. If he did not notice how Jaden and Sasha hovered close by, but did not meet Mamoru's gaze. If Kain did not seem intent on keeping his back turned to every one of them.
"Choosing wasn't enough, of course. It was all we could do, but actually doing it, bringing someone back from the dead, even someone who was still tied so strongly to life, well. That's something only you can do."
"....What?"
"Well, and Sereninty, I guess." Neil shrugged. "Gotta give the girl some credit." Neil took a swig from his mug, while Mamoru's brain attempted to recover from a dizzying summersault. The brunette caught the look on his face, and laughed. "What, bro? Who else do you think would have the power, the skills, and the inclination to drag us out of our rocks? We're here because of you in more ways than one."
"But I don't... I can't..."
"Oh, you can't now. I know. You tried so many times. But that doesn't mean you won't."
Slowly, he caught up with where Neil was going with this. "You're talking about... my future self?"
Neil smiled over his coffee. "Now you're getting it. I guess there's a senshi who controls time? I never got to meet her, but I bet she's a sexy MILF."
"But why--"
Neil cut him off, his eyes dark and glistening. "Yeah, it still doesn't make sense, does it? You, future king of the world, you figure out how to bring us back. But it's not good enough for you, bringing us back in your own time. You wanted what you could have had with us before you got to be a great and powerful king. So you go back in time, you enlist the help of your priest, and you do it, but why in the hell, if you have all of time at your disposal, do you choose to bring us back when you did? And why do you send us back with the instructions that you did?"
"What instructions?"
"You had terms. Very specific terms. You told us if we wanted to do right by you, if we wanted to serve you properly this time, we were going to obey those terms, no questions asked, no matter how hard it got, no matter how wrong and even downright fucked up it seemed."
Mamoru doubted he would have (or will have?) used those precise words, but he was too caught up by the story to be concerned about Neil's embellishments. "What were they?"
"To stay away from Tokyo. Don't come find you. Don't tell you where we are. Don't even give you reason to believe that we're out there, somewhere. When the time came, and only when the time came, would we see you again. And not in Tokyo. In Boston."
He did not know what to say. Surely he and his future self should be on the same wavelength, but he could not even begin to comprehend his own motivation, here. Did becoming king mean that he forgot all the pain and loneliness that he felt, his desperate need to have his guardians returned to him? Was Mamoru truly destined to be so callous? "Why would I say that?"
Neil stood, and retrieved the coffee pot. "Honestly? We've been asking ourselves the exact same thing for two years." He leaned over the table, topped up Mamoru's mug. “You hinted at major earth-shattering space-time paradoxes ending life as we know it if we showed up before it was time. You suggested we were doing this for you. Because you needed us to. But you never gave us a straight answer, and don’t think I didn’t put up a fight about that.
"When I first came back, I was pretty optimistic. At worst, I figured we'd wait maybe six months for you to show up. I spent a few months with my family, and then I moved straight here to wait for you. I enrolled in Harvard, because you're the fucking king of the world, and if you're coming to Boston, it's because you're going to attend one of the best damn schools on the planet." He slid back into his chair, shrugged one broad shoulder. "Hey, I got that part right."
"We all found each other, eventually. That made us think you were going to appear soon. Everything was in place. But then you didn't." Neil took a long swig from his coffee, and it somehow seemed a bit too long. Sasha was studying his nails. Jaden kept eyeing the door, like he would rather be elsewhere. The sounds of cooking from Kain's end of the kitchen had turned slow, rhythmic, deliberate. Neil took his time swallowing, and continued, his voice low. "We were prepared for it to be hard on us. We thought this was... I don't know, punishment? Retribution? Just, you know, a temporary exile. That made it okay, sort of. You never said that's what it was, but you never specified that it wasn't, because I think maybe you knew that was what it would take to keep us from breaking our word. You gave us a second chance, and this was our first test, and after breaking your trust so many times, the world would have to end before we did it again this time. But then you got sick.
"In the past, if you had given us an order like that, told us to stand by and watch you suffer and not do a damn thing, not even--not even offer some kind of comfort or be near you or tell you that you're not alone... we would have laughed in your face, man."
Neil took a breath. A bitterness that Mamoru had never heard before crept into his voice. "You stopped calling us. Probably you were too weak to. We pushed through anyway, as much as we could. We heard you struggling to breathe. We watched you cough up blood. We watched your aura turn black. And we couldn't do a thing. And you know what? Every one of us had to be talked down at some point from jumping on a flight to Tokyo, or just... fucking trying to teleport halfway around the world and probably winding up in the ocean instead. It was a hard fucking time, okay, and if you ever start to believe that we liked sitting around here without you, then just remember that we spent every moment we possibly could watching over you then, and if Kain’s hair weren’t white before that it sure as hell would have turned that way during those few months.”
The kitchen had become uncomfortably hot, either because the oven was on or because Neil was describing, in horribly graphic detail, one of his weakest moments. Mamoru had tried to shut even Usagi out of his life when Nehellenia’s curse began to take its toll, and he thought now, for all of Neil’s perceptiveness, he was wrong about one thing. It wasn’t that he could not have called his Shitennou to him. He had chosen not to, because he never wanted any of them to see him like that.
Neil turned to the pair across the table. “Feel free to jump in any time, you know.”
Jaden looked up from a tower he had been carefully constructing out of two cups, a salt shaker, and a spoon--apparently sitting still for so long was too much even for a Jaden who was still recovering from near-mortal wounds. “I almost died. I’m exempt from all responsibility today.”
Sasha shrugged. “You’re doing such a great job on your own. I don’t want to upstage you now.”
“You’re all a bunch of pussies. I get first dibs on the bacon for this shit. Speaking of--hey! Kitchen bitch! Where the hell is my bacon?”
The temperature in the previously too warm kitchen plummeted so fast that Mamoru hugged his coffee to him, fearing it might otherwise turn into an icy frappuccino. Neil seemed entirely unbothered by this turn of events, a slow grin forming on his face as he stretched his pointedly naked broad shoulders and leaned back to bare his abs to the nearly frigid air.
Kain did not seem to walk towards the table so much as apparate from across the room in a breath of cold mist, his eyes two slivers of ice that could have given the very sun a chill. “I didn’t quite catch that. Say that again.”
“I said, I’m going to buy you a pretty little apron to keep your pretty shirts clean while you cook me bacon. It’s going to have lace, and it’s going to say ‘kitchen bitch.’” Neil tucked his arm behind his head, aiming a hairy armpit at Kain’s face. “Now bacon me, princess.”
If it were possible for a man of Neil’s size to be wrestled out of his chair and into a headlock any faster, he likely would have at least suffered whiplash. Jaden made a noise of indignation as his carefully-constructed tower toppled after someone’s limb crashed against the edge of the table. Mamoru held his coffee even closer, fearing its loss in the midst of such chaos.
Despite the danger to his precious caffeine, he was relieved at the brief respite. The story that Neil had told him was almost too much to process--he had gone from believing himself to be guardianless less than twelve hours ago to having four flesh-and-blood guardians whose return had been brought about by his own future self.
That was the real curve ball. Mamoru did not know much about the king he would become, but he had to assume--had to hope, anyway--that he would still be a reasonable and understanding individual even once he ruled over the world. He must have had a reason for doing things the way that he had, as cold as it may seem. Seemingly dangling their reunion before them all, yet forcing them to keep their distance for far too long.
But now he saw that his biggest question, the why, had split into two. Why would he do that to himself? And why would he do that to them?
Neil’s gleeful laughter was so loud that Mamoru did not hear Sasha move into the chair next to him, but his warm presence brushed through the remaining chill left by Kain’s anger, which was now finding a better conduit through his fist. “It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it?”
Mamoru ran a hand through his black hair. “Yes. It is.”
Sasha drew his knees up to his chest, hugging the soft flannel he wore. “Neil wasn’t exaggerating. It wasn’t always an easy time for us. Nothing ever seemed right without you here.” He tugged at the rip in his sleeve, unraveling it further. “But actually, I’m sort of glad that we had some time before we met you. You don’t know what kind of a mess we all were when we first came back.”
He looked over at Sasha, whose hair was still hanging loose and wild and seemed to flood his entire field of vision with fiery hair. “What do you mean?”
“Everything that happened. The past. The Dark Kingdom. The disappearing. Our lives ended when we were caught by the Dark Kingdom. All of our families and friends went almost a year thinking we were dead, or... worse. It was a lot to deal with. We could barely look at each other, because all we saw was a past that we didn’t want to own up to. We couldn’t function as a unit, we could barely function individually.”
“And Sasha almost set me on fire,” Jaden added helpfully.
“And I almost set Jaden on fire. I think if we’d returned to you then, if we’d tried to be Shitennou again before we were ready, it would have been a disaster for everyone. We would have fucked it up from the beginning, and probably proved to ourselves and everyone else that we aren’t good enough and never will be. I don’t know if we could have taken that again. The knowledge that we have one purpose in life and we are destined to fail at that purpose again and again.”
Across the kitchen, Kain appeared to have brought the scuffle to a standstill. Neil was simultaneously laughing and begging for mercy. “Waiting for you gave us something to work for. It gave us a reason to rely on each other. As much as it hurt, as much as we hated it, we needed that time. That’s what you gave us. Even though it meant waiting a little longer on your own. You let us have that.” Kain and Neil were now chatting over the stove as warmly as if they had not just been attempting to beat each other senseless a moment ago. “I know it probably feels like you’re late to the party. But it’s more like, we got here early to clean up the mess we made. Get a few balloons blown up. The real party hasn’t happened yet.”
Jaden carefully placed the spoon at the top of a new tower. “This is the party. Right now. Here in our shitty kitchen.” He stifled a yawn. “Couldn’t have picked a better time of day, could you?”
Mamoru looked at Sasha, who was now contemplating his orange toenails. Could that be true? Did he do it to help them? It had never occurred to him before that being his guardians was something that could be intimidating, even frightening. It was enough for him that they were here. He’d never expected, never even hoped, for more than that. But if he considered his own role, as a prince and as one of the senshi, he knew what the weight of responsibility felt like, how crushing it could be. Given the choice, he would not wish it on anybody, especially not his own guardians.
Kain’s hand leaned against his shoulder, warm despite the ice it could create, as he set a plate on the table before Mamoru. “Eat up.”
A small knot coiled in Mamoru’s stomach surreptitiously uncoiled itself. “Thank you.”
“I hope it’s okay, I don’t know what you normally--Jaden.” Kain’s voice turned firm. “Put the screwdriver down.”
The blond meekly set the tool on the table, beside an upside-down toaster. Mamoru could not even figure out at what point he had left his seat or produced either object, but evidently the toppling tower of kitchen supplies had failed to provide adequate entertainment. “I just wanted--”
“That is not yours to take apart.”
“I know, but if I just--”
“No.”
The blond poked at the screwdriver, sending it skittering across the table. He looked so morose that, if Mamoru had a toaster to give him, he would have offered it up to be gutted in the other’s place.
“Go get a plate,” Kain instructed, rescuing the toaster before Jaden could give in to temptation again, “and get yourself some breakfast.”
“I thought I’m not supposed to do anything today.”
“I do not want you to jump on your skateboard and wind up passed out in a ditch, no.” Kain pocketed the screwdriver, standing imposingly in the center of the kitchen. “But I think a trek across the kitchen is worth the risk, if the alternative is losing half of our appliances.”
“I’d put it together again. I know how to do that.”
“Which is precisely why we no longer have a functional blender.”
“It’s not my fault that parts went missing. They shouldn’t make them so small if they don’t want people to lose track of them.”
Eventually, Jaden forgot any notion of taking apart appliances and retrieved some food instead. Breakfast featured what they informed Mamoru was a breakfast burrito, consisting largely of eggs, green onions, and salsa folded into a soft white tortilla; a pile of crisp bacon; fried seasoned potatoes and onions; and, because Kain did not seem to be the sort who did anything halfway, a row of sliced melon to round it off. Mamoru did not realize, until he took his first bite of burrito, that he was absolutely famished. As though the entire ordeal of the past twenty-four hours suddenly expressed itself in the desperate need to refuel, suddenly he could not stuff it into his mouth fast enough. This must have been what people were talking about when they used the words “comfort food.” Food that was warm and heavy and made you feel the same in turn, that made you forget your anxieties and fears.
It seemed like their first meal together should have been a solemn occasion. A formal one, maybe full of speeches and tears, like a wedding scene out of a movie. Here they sat instead, around an old kitchen table that was not quite big enough to seat five grown men, in various stages of undress. They clinked mugs of coffee and a carton of orange juice over mountains of bacon, Sasha and Jaden stole off of each other’s plates, Neil piled all his other food ingredients into his burrito to form a super-burrito the size of his head, and no meal had ever felt so important. Kain barely touched the meal he had prepared them, only sat back and watched, and listened to their chatter, as though taking in the moment.
Mamoru still had questions. A lot of them. He still was not entirely certain what this meant for his--for their future. He had never known what it meant to have guardians, to have a team the way that Usagi did, but now he realized that, for the first time, he had time to find out.
“Oh.” Sudden revelation intruded on his fuzzier thoughts. He looked around the table. “I still need to tell her. Usagi and the other senshi. They’ll have to know.”
His companions unanimously sobered. All eyes turned to him with a hint of, dare he say, fear. Mamoru very much hoped that, somewhere in his hidden past, he’d developed skills in diplomacy that he could somehow draw upon in a time of desperate need. “Let’s just... take that one step at a time.”
Big, huge, mega thanks to V and Lytton for their beta skills!
For a moment, nobody spoke. In one fell swoop, Mamoru had sucked all the excitement out of the room, and he really felt a little guilty about that, about shattering that moment of pure shared joy, but more than that, he felt an overwhelming grief that he could not quite explain.
A black mug with a Batman logo clattered on the table in front of him. Neil set down a second beside it and poured coffee into each. "So, straight facts. We've all been back for about two years, more or less. Some of us longer than others."
Looking up at him, or at anyone else, seemed too much for Mamoru right now, so he watched Neil's tanned hands moving over the table in front of him, scooping heaps of brown sugar into each of their coffee mugs. That was one of many culinary wonders he had introduced to Mamoru--the brown sugar. Coffee had never tasted the same since.
"Going from non-corporeal to corporeal is really shitty. You spend the first few weeks trying to figure out how to exist again. How money works, how to put your pants on, basic shit. So it's really a good thing that we got our instructions before we got thrown back into our bodies."
A spike of confusion temporarily pushed its way past Mamoru's other emotions, and he glanced up. Instructions?
Neil slid the Batman cup, now swirled with a splash of heavy cream, towards him. "See, I think there's a good reason why somewhere called Elysian got passed down in mythology as the resting place of the dead. Maybe it's just because we've got a connection there, or something. But after hanging out in rocks for however long, we got pulled in there."
Mamoru took a small sip of coffee--obscenely decadent coffee, thanks to the man who thought that bacon was a food group--as he tried to sort through what Neil was telling him. "Helios brought you back?"
The brunette slid into the chair next to him, taking a swig from his mug, which simply said the words "BIEBER FEVER!" in neon letters. "I wouldn't really say he's the one who brought us back. He's more like a... guide? He led us out. Sort of helped us wake up. He was waiting for us when we made it to Elysian. He talked to us a lot, about what we were doing and why. Why we wanted to come back. If we wanted to at all."
A silent skirmish was taking place on the other side of the table as Neil spoke. Sasha pulled out a chair and shoved Jaden down into it. He then planted the carton of juice on the table beside him, with a glare that said he could either drink the juice or wear it. Jaden's sneer said that he could wear the juice, thank you very much. Mamoru remembered belatedly that he should have reminded Jaden to take it easy, should have somehow slipped that in there in between the blissful high of rediscovering his guardians and the crushing low that he now found himself in.
But Neil's voice was warm and rich as the coffee Mamoru held between his hands, and Mamoru sank back into it. "It sounds simple, right? Who wouldn't choose life over death? But it's different, when you're on the other side of that decision. Coming back meant facing everything that happened. And living with it. It's easier to stay a rock. But you know, all of us did make the decision to come back, and that's not nothing."
It was amazing how Neil could so casually discuss life and death, reclining in the kitchen chair, barely clothed, one hand wrapped around his Bieber coffee mug, as natural as if the topic were the intricacies of hockey instead of the ultimate question. He made everything seem so deceptively simple, or he would have, if Mamoru could ignore completely the tightness in his chest when he tried to sip his coffee. If he did not notice how Jaden and Sasha hovered close by, but did not meet Mamoru's gaze. If Kain did not seem intent on keeping his back turned to every one of them.
"Choosing wasn't enough, of course. It was all we could do, but actually doing it, bringing someone back from the dead, even someone who was still tied so strongly to life, well. That's something only you can do."
"....What?"
"Well, and Sereninty, I guess." Neil shrugged. "Gotta give the girl some credit." Neil took a swig from his mug, while Mamoru's brain attempted to recover from a dizzying summersault. The brunette caught the look on his face, and laughed. "What, bro? Who else do you think would have the power, the skills, and the inclination to drag us out of our rocks? We're here because of you in more ways than one."
"But I don't... I can't..."
"Oh, you can't now. I know. You tried so many times. But that doesn't mean you won't."
Slowly, he caught up with where Neil was going with this. "You're talking about... my future self?"
Neil smiled over his coffee. "Now you're getting it. I guess there's a senshi who controls time? I never got to meet her, but I bet she's a sexy MILF."
"But why--"
Neil cut him off, his eyes dark and glistening. "Yeah, it still doesn't make sense, does it? You, future king of the world, you figure out how to bring us back. But it's not good enough for you, bringing us back in your own time. You wanted what you could have had with us before you got to be a great and powerful king. So you go back in time, you enlist the help of your priest, and you do it, but why in the hell, if you have all of time at your disposal, do you choose to bring us back when you did? And why do you send us back with the instructions that you did?"
"What instructions?"
"You had terms. Very specific terms. You told us if we wanted to do right by you, if we wanted to serve you properly this time, we were going to obey those terms, no questions asked, no matter how hard it got, no matter how wrong and even downright fucked up it seemed."
Mamoru doubted he would have (or will have?) used those precise words, but he was too caught up by the story to be concerned about Neil's embellishments. "What were they?"
"To stay away from Tokyo. Don't come find you. Don't tell you where we are. Don't even give you reason to believe that we're out there, somewhere. When the time came, and only when the time came, would we see you again. And not in Tokyo. In Boston."
He did not know what to say. Surely he and his future self should be on the same wavelength, but he could not even begin to comprehend his own motivation, here. Did becoming king mean that he forgot all the pain and loneliness that he felt, his desperate need to have his guardians returned to him? Was Mamoru truly destined to be so callous? "Why would I say that?"
Neil stood, and retrieved the coffee pot. "Honestly? We've been asking ourselves the exact same thing for two years." He leaned over the table, topped up Mamoru's mug. “You hinted at major earth-shattering space-time paradoxes ending life as we know it if we showed up before it was time. You suggested we were doing this for you. Because you needed us to. But you never gave us a straight answer, and don’t think I didn’t put up a fight about that.
"When I first came back, I was pretty optimistic. At worst, I figured we'd wait maybe six months for you to show up. I spent a few months with my family, and then I moved straight here to wait for you. I enrolled in Harvard, because you're the fucking king of the world, and if you're coming to Boston, it's because you're going to attend one of the best damn schools on the planet." He slid back into his chair, shrugged one broad shoulder. "Hey, I got that part right."
"We all found each other, eventually. That made us think you were going to appear soon. Everything was in place. But then you didn't." Neil took a long swig from his coffee, and it somehow seemed a bit too long. Sasha was studying his nails. Jaden kept eyeing the door, like he would rather be elsewhere. The sounds of cooking from Kain's end of the kitchen had turned slow, rhythmic, deliberate. Neil took his time swallowing, and continued, his voice low. "We were prepared for it to be hard on us. We thought this was... I don't know, punishment? Retribution? Just, you know, a temporary exile. That made it okay, sort of. You never said that's what it was, but you never specified that it wasn't, because I think maybe you knew that was what it would take to keep us from breaking our word. You gave us a second chance, and this was our first test, and after breaking your trust so many times, the world would have to end before we did it again this time. But then you got sick.
"In the past, if you had given us an order like that, told us to stand by and watch you suffer and not do a damn thing, not even--not even offer some kind of comfort or be near you or tell you that you're not alone... we would have laughed in your face, man."
Neil took a breath. A bitterness that Mamoru had never heard before crept into his voice. "You stopped calling us. Probably you were too weak to. We pushed through anyway, as much as we could. We heard you struggling to breathe. We watched you cough up blood. We watched your aura turn black. And we couldn't do a thing. And you know what? Every one of us had to be talked down at some point from jumping on a flight to Tokyo, or just... fucking trying to teleport halfway around the world and probably winding up in the ocean instead. It was a hard fucking time, okay, and if you ever start to believe that we liked sitting around here without you, then just remember that we spent every moment we possibly could watching over you then, and if Kain’s hair weren’t white before that it sure as hell would have turned that way during those few months.”
The kitchen had become uncomfortably hot, either because the oven was on or because Neil was describing, in horribly graphic detail, one of his weakest moments. Mamoru had tried to shut even Usagi out of his life when Nehellenia’s curse began to take its toll, and he thought now, for all of Neil’s perceptiveness, he was wrong about one thing. It wasn’t that he could not have called his Shitennou to him. He had chosen not to, because he never wanted any of them to see him like that.
Neil turned to the pair across the table. “Feel free to jump in any time, you know.”
Jaden looked up from a tower he had been carefully constructing out of two cups, a salt shaker, and a spoon--apparently sitting still for so long was too much even for a Jaden who was still recovering from near-mortal wounds. “I almost died. I’m exempt from all responsibility today.”
Sasha shrugged. “You’re doing such a great job on your own. I don’t want to upstage you now.”
“You’re all a bunch of pussies. I get first dibs on the bacon for this shit. Speaking of--hey! Kitchen bitch! Where the hell is my bacon?”
The temperature in the previously too warm kitchen plummeted so fast that Mamoru hugged his coffee to him, fearing it might otherwise turn into an icy frappuccino. Neil seemed entirely unbothered by this turn of events, a slow grin forming on his face as he stretched his pointedly naked broad shoulders and leaned back to bare his abs to the nearly frigid air.
Kain did not seem to walk towards the table so much as apparate from across the room in a breath of cold mist, his eyes two slivers of ice that could have given the very sun a chill. “I didn’t quite catch that. Say that again.”
“I said, I’m going to buy you a pretty little apron to keep your pretty shirts clean while you cook me bacon. It’s going to have lace, and it’s going to say ‘kitchen bitch.’” Neil tucked his arm behind his head, aiming a hairy armpit at Kain’s face. “Now bacon me, princess.”
If it were possible for a man of Neil’s size to be wrestled out of his chair and into a headlock any faster, he likely would have at least suffered whiplash. Jaden made a noise of indignation as his carefully-constructed tower toppled after someone’s limb crashed against the edge of the table. Mamoru held his coffee even closer, fearing its loss in the midst of such chaos.
Despite the danger to his precious caffeine, he was relieved at the brief respite. The story that Neil had told him was almost too much to process--he had gone from believing himself to be guardianless less than twelve hours ago to having four flesh-and-blood guardians whose return had been brought about by his own future self.
That was the real curve ball. Mamoru did not know much about the king he would become, but he had to assume--had to hope, anyway--that he would still be a reasonable and understanding individual even once he ruled over the world. He must have had a reason for doing things the way that he had, as cold as it may seem. Seemingly dangling their reunion before them all, yet forcing them to keep their distance for far too long.
But now he saw that his biggest question, the why, had split into two. Why would he do that to himself? And why would he do that to them?
Neil’s gleeful laughter was so loud that Mamoru did not hear Sasha move into the chair next to him, but his warm presence brushed through the remaining chill left by Kain’s anger, which was now finding a better conduit through his fist. “It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it?”
Mamoru ran a hand through his black hair. “Yes. It is.”
Sasha drew his knees up to his chest, hugging the soft flannel he wore. “Neil wasn’t exaggerating. It wasn’t always an easy time for us. Nothing ever seemed right without you here.” He tugged at the rip in his sleeve, unraveling it further. “But actually, I’m sort of glad that we had some time before we met you. You don’t know what kind of a mess we all were when we first came back.”
He looked over at Sasha, whose hair was still hanging loose and wild and seemed to flood his entire field of vision with fiery hair. “What do you mean?”
“Everything that happened. The past. The Dark Kingdom. The disappearing. Our lives ended when we were caught by the Dark Kingdom. All of our families and friends went almost a year thinking we were dead, or... worse. It was a lot to deal with. We could barely look at each other, because all we saw was a past that we didn’t want to own up to. We couldn’t function as a unit, we could barely function individually.”
“And Sasha almost set me on fire,” Jaden added helpfully.
“And I almost set Jaden on fire. I think if we’d returned to you then, if we’d tried to be Shitennou again before we were ready, it would have been a disaster for everyone. We would have fucked it up from the beginning, and probably proved to ourselves and everyone else that we aren’t good enough and never will be. I don’t know if we could have taken that again. The knowledge that we have one purpose in life and we are destined to fail at that purpose again and again.”
Across the kitchen, Kain appeared to have brought the scuffle to a standstill. Neil was simultaneously laughing and begging for mercy. “Waiting for you gave us something to work for. It gave us a reason to rely on each other. As much as it hurt, as much as we hated it, we needed that time. That’s what you gave us. Even though it meant waiting a little longer on your own. You let us have that.” Kain and Neil were now chatting over the stove as warmly as if they had not just been attempting to beat each other senseless a moment ago. “I know it probably feels like you’re late to the party. But it’s more like, we got here early to clean up the mess we made. Get a few balloons blown up. The real party hasn’t happened yet.”
Jaden carefully placed the spoon at the top of a new tower. “This is the party. Right now. Here in our shitty kitchen.” He stifled a yawn. “Couldn’t have picked a better time of day, could you?”
Mamoru looked at Sasha, who was now contemplating his orange toenails. Could that be true? Did he do it to help them? It had never occurred to him before that being his guardians was something that could be intimidating, even frightening. It was enough for him that they were here. He’d never expected, never even hoped, for more than that. But if he considered his own role, as a prince and as one of the senshi, he knew what the weight of responsibility felt like, how crushing it could be. Given the choice, he would not wish it on anybody, especially not his own guardians.
Kain’s hand leaned against his shoulder, warm despite the ice it could create, as he set a plate on the table before Mamoru. “Eat up.”
A small knot coiled in Mamoru’s stomach surreptitiously uncoiled itself. “Thank you.”
“I hope it’s okay, I don’t know what you normally--Jaden.” Kain’s voice turned firm. “Put the screwdriver down.”
The blond meekly set the tool on the table, beside an upside-down toaster. Mamoru could not even figure out at what point he had left his seat or produced either object, but evidently the toppling tower of kitchen supplies had failed to provide adequate entertainment. “I just wanted--”
“That is not yours to take apart.”
“I know, but if I just--”
“No.”
The blond poked at the screwdriver, sending it skittering across the table. He looked so morose that, if Mamoru had a toaster to give him, he would have offered it up to be gutted in the other’s place.
“Go get a plate,” Kain instructed, rescuing the toaster before Jaden could give in to temptation again, “and get yourself some breakfast.”
“I thought I’m not supposed to do anything today.”
“I do not want you to jump on your skateboard and wind up passed out in a ditch, no.” Kain pocketed the screwdriver, standing imposingly in the center of the kitchen. “But I think a trek across the kitchen is worth the risk, if the alternative is losing half of our appliances.”
“I’d put it together again. I know how to do that.”
“Which is precisely why we no longer have a functional blender.”
“It’s not my fault that parts went missing. They shouldn’t make them so small if they don’t want people to lose track of them.”
Eventually, Jaden forgot any notion of taking apart appliances and retrieved some food instead. Breakfast featured what they informed Mamoru was a breakfast burrito, consisting largely of eggs, green onions, and salsa folded into a soft white tortilla; a pile of crisp bacon; fried seasoned potatoes and onions; and, because Kain did not seem to be the sort who did anything halfway, a row of sliced melon to round it off. Mamoru did not realize, until he took his first bite of burrito, that he was absolutely famished. As though the entire ordeal of the past twenty-four hours suddenly expressed itself in the desperate need to refuel, suddenly he could not stuff it into his mouth fast enough. This must have been what people were talking about when they used the words “comfort food.” Food that was warm and heavy and made you feel the same in turn, that made you forget your anxieties and fears.
It seemed like their first meal together should have been a solemn occasion. A formal one, maybe full of speeches and tears, like a wedding scene out of a movie. Here they sat instead, around an old kitchen table that was not quite big enough to seat five grown men, in various stages of undress. They clinked mugs of coffee and a carton of orange juice over mountains of bacon, Sasha and Jaden stole off of each other’s plates, Neil piled all his other food ingredients into his burrito to form a super-burrito the size of his head, and no meal had ever felt so important. Kain barely touched the meal he had prepared them, only sat back and watched, and listened to their chatter, as though taking in the moment.
Mamoru still had questions. A lot of them. He still was not entirely certain what this meant for his--for their future. He had never known what it meant to have guardians, to have a team the way that Usagi did, but now he realized that, for the first time, he had time to find out.
“Oh.” Sudden revelation intruded on his fuzzier thoughts. He looked around the table. “I still need to tell her. Usagi and the other senshi. They’ll have to know.”
His companions unanimously sobered. All eyes turned to him with a hint of, dare he say, fear. Mamoru very much hoped that, somewhere in his hidden past, he’d developed skills in diplomacy that he could somehow draw upon in a time of desperate need. “Let’s just... take that one step at a time.”