Tempus Fugit: Nephrite
So this one required a ridiculous amount of research, hence it being saved for last because I'm lazy like that. Apologies in advance if anything's inaccurate. I know nothing and blame the internets :P
Title: Tempus Fugit
Characters: Nephrite, Makoto, Setsuna, Motoki and Reika, plus some OCs. Very much with the M/N.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: All I need is my one star in the sky, to wish for you every day.
I.
T’Iis is twenty when she meets Jordan Stone when he stops in the Navajo crafts shop during a summer thunderstorm. They do not come often in Apache County, Arizona, and the handsome young man in the khaki uniform shakes his tawny hair out of his face as he smiles down at her and asks if he can wait out the rain on his lunch break. His eyes are the same colour as the turquoise beads in the necklace she is stringing, and his deputy’s uniform is still so new that she can see the creases where it had been folded.
It happens so quickly, so fiercely, not unlike a summer thunderstorm. Before the rain even lets up, she has already agreed to go to dinner with him with no consideration for the tongues that would undoubtedly wag within the tribe. He smiles and the tips of his ears blush as he suggests a place, a small but fancy Italian restaurant that is slightly beyond his budget, but maybe somewhat worthy of the lovely, dark-eyed girl with strings of beads and silver glinting against her ebony hair. He can’t quite get the intonation of her name right, and calls her ‘Tess’, and she smiles as the sun comes out and haloes around his wavy hair.
He’s only twenty-two and his parents are baffled and outraged. Her tribe is suspicious and she is warned that no good can come of it. But thunderstorms are as strong as they are rare hereabouts, and not six months afterwards, T’Iis stands in City Hall next to Jordan as they swear to love, honour and cherish each other for better or worse in front of a judge. A strong-willed young girl. An idealistic young man. The judge exchanges glances with the sheriff who is Jordan’s boss and makes a genial comment about Romeo and Juliet and young love after the short ceremony. But T’Iis and Jordan are too blissfully focused on each other to notice or care.
T’Iis gets a job at a local cafe waiting tables and they rent a tiny flat, hoping to save up for a house someday. They can barely keep the roof over their heads, and for their first Christmas together, they can only afford the tiniest, mangiest little plastic tree marked down half-off as damaged from the general store, but he greets her with a kiss every evening and she weaves him a blanket, in the old and traditional way, for cold nights. Perhaps they are foolish, but they get the gift of two years of perfect happiness.
When T’Iis finds out that she is pregnant, both of them are nervous but ecstatic, and Jordan makes her stop working doubles, get off her feet more. He buys baby books and takes extra shifts of his own; maybe by the time their baby is old enough to walk and talk, they’ll have enough money for a little house with a real yard, perhaps be able to buy their kid a puppy to play with. When he comes home, often very late at night now, he heats up the dinner T’Iis always leaves him on the table and watches her sleep and dreams about little boys with his courage and her strength, of little girls with her hair and his eyes.
One night the call comes through just as he is about to go home. Domestic dispute, backup requested from all units in the area. Well. One more hour of work is one more hour of pay. Maybe with the next check, he’d buy their baby a crib. T’Iis -- though he still calls her Tess-- looks like a goddess. At the pre-natal appointment last week, the doctor said that they are having a boy. They still hadn’t chosen a name.
The wind picks up and howls like an angry witch as he parks the cruiser and approaches the house of the domestic dispute, but he can still hear the screams of a woman, the wails of a little child, perhaps not too much older than the baby he himself will be having. Fearless, idealistic and perhaps more than a little foolish, Jordan kicks the door in without double-checking with dispatch or calling for back-up.
The gunshot hits him straight in the chest. He falls, a handsome, impulsive young man of not yet twenty-five, and even though the gunman is taken down by other officers within seconds, it is far too late. Jordan Stone is pronounced dead by the paramedics when the ambulance arrives several minutes later, and the sheriff himself brings his personal effects to a stoical T’Iis later that night.
She quits her job at the cafe altogether, sells the flat, and returns to the Navajo reservation with her plain gold wedding ring on her finger and Jordan’s badge, the hammered gold star engraved with the words ‘To Serve And Protect’, in her pocket. Though several of the tribal elders shake their heads and several of the more tactless members of her clan tell her that she should have known it would happen, she is accepted back, and brought to the home of her mother.
It is during another rare summer thunderstorm that her son is born, and a flash of lightning illuminates his face as he opens his mouth to let out his first, lusty cry. T’Iis names the boy Niyol-- for the wind. The wind had brought her happiness, and taken it away with the same abruptness, but with her son, she would always have both her joy and her grief. And when she holds her baby in her arms for the first time, and smooths her fingers over his fine, downy hair, she weeps.
“You come with the wind and the storm, and I am afraid that your life will be full of the same. Perhaps you will suffer, and be lost, and be afraid. But I hope that you will have the strength to bear it, and find enough joy in the end to be worth it.”
Niyol frets and whimpers in her arms, and the storm seems to take pity and abate. T’Iis falls asleep quickly, worn out from grief and love and the exhaustion of giving birth, but the newborn stays awake, his fathomless eyes fixed on the dark night sky outside as the clouds clear to make way for thousands of stars.
II.
Niyol is raised by his mother on the reservation, in the traditional way of the Diné. From the ritual “Baby’s First Laugh” blessing ceremony by the medicine man in the hogan at dawn to the history of the four sacred mountains that border their land to the legends of the coyote and beaver and eagle who had helped them build each of their successive worlds, he grows up being taught the importance of the way and the lore that runs through his blood. Though he attends Apache County’s public schools during the day, he learns, in the evening, the rites and folklore of his mother’s ancestors.
He is a gregarious, friendly little boy, with his father’s quick grin and dense brown hair curling over his ears and his mother’s dreamy dark eyes. Perhaps it is due to the fact that he does not quite fit in with the rest of the tribe that he befriends the wise, infinitely patient and tolerant medicine man rather than the other children. But certainly even the medicine man has no explanation for his dreams or visions.
He doesn’t remember when he first started hearing the ethereal music of the stars, or noticing the patterns in the sky that recall the ages past and foretell the ages to come. He doesn’t understand why he hears echoes of lost love and broken kingdoms late at night when he is at that edge between waking and dreaming.
He doesn’t know any girls, either in school or on the reservation, who wear earrings shaped like pink roses and stare mournfully at him with eyes greener than the leaves of the sagebrush, but he sees flashes of her face-- beautiful and vivid as a mesa sunrise-- in his mind as though they have known each other for a thousand years.
III.
The medicine man is quietly dignified, eighty years old, with a leather-coloured face toughened and scored by the years and the strong sunlight and a rain of iron-gray hair. His name is Aditsan, the listener, and he is T’Iis’ grandfather.
The story he listens to now is one he has heard before, certainly, as he has watched and cared for Niyol since the boy was born. Though Niyol has always been outgoing and fond of the company of others like any other boys in the tribe, he has a deep, spiritual side and a striking sense of intuition about the future, a deep understanding of the Earth and the sky. Aditsan, sensing his gifts, teaches him the chants and the rites, because their people will always need a healer and confessor, and he himself is getting old.
But now Aditsan frowns at the sandpainting that Niyol has made on the buckskin-lined floor of the hogan. The technique is flawless, the lines of sand perfectly formed. The scene is a night sky improbably filled with both stars and thunderbolts over two figures -- a man and a woman-- that reach toward each other. Since Niyol’s youth, he has always spoken of the woman.
“It is like I was born with the ghost sickness,” the young man-- little more than a boy, really-- murmurs at Aditsan’s side. He is tall, and though his hair is also long, it falls in wood-brown waves. The face, one that smiles so easily, is drawn. “I don’t even know who she is. But I must find her.”
It is taboo for them to leave their lands, but then again, no traditional cure has been able to rid Niyol of these visions and dreams. Aditsan mulls it over as Niyol takes the gnarled hands in his own strong, capable ones.
“I am skilled with the animals, and I have a strong back, a good eye. I can find work.”
Aditsan sighs, and nods his permission. “I will prepare for a Blessing Way ceremony.”
IV.
Niyol does not have any clear idea of where to go, or what to do, and the stars overhead speak only in riddles. But he is young and determined and earns enough to keep food in his belly and the occasional roof over his head through any number of odd jobs as he hitch-hikes and takes the buses from city to city.
He arrives in Las Vegas a month after his twenty-first birthday, and meets the magician quite by chance at a blackjack table. Perhaps because it is his first day in the city of lights and sin, perhaps due to beginner’s luck and the fading echoes of celestial advice, but the ten thousand that he wins after a mere few hours attract the magician’s notice. The other man buys him dinner at the fanciest restaurant Niyol has ever dined in, and by the dessert course-- fancy chocolate gateau drizzled with raspberry sauce and topped with tissue-thin curls of shaved white chocolate-- Niyol is offered a steady job.
The magician’s arts rely on deception, electronic machines that blow smoke and flash lights at opportune moments, and he does not believe that the stars are anything but balls of burning gas millions of miles away. He does not remember his dreams when he sleeps, but he is personable and charismatic and is in the process of coming up with his acts for a new show. Several of the stunts and tricks will involve animals ranging from the traditional white rabbits to peacocks to a powerful black panther.
Niyol fits the magician’s bill for an animal handler in the entertainment business, with his quick hands and intuitive knowledge of nature and his dashing good looks, but he is told that he will have to go by the name of Neal for the sake of easy pronunciation.
Thinking of the opportunities he would have for free, comfortable travel and all the people -- perhaps among them a girl with rose earrings and emerald eyes?-- he would meet, Niyol acquiesces.
V.
The animals are kept in cages and special trailers, and despite the differences in species, Niyol-- Neal-- does not find the work any more difficult than raising and herding the sheep on the reservation. The big black panther, with its velvety fur and powerful legs and molten amber eyes, is tame enough to eat out of his hand, and though it communicates only with looks and responses to hand gestures and whistles, it is like a friend in this strange and hectic land. Its name is Jove, and something about that strikes a chord in Neal.
The magician’s show is a stunning success on its opening run at the MGM Grand, and the end of the night finds countless bottles of champagne and endless rounds of congratulations in rooms filled with glittering lights of all colours. One of the showgirls-- buxom, tanned, with a cascade of chestnut curls, flirts with him over alcohol and caviar. Neal is drunk and excited over the success of the show, but when she leans in to kiss him, he shifts away.
“Your eyes are not green. You’re not her,” he slurs in bewildered hurt. “I can’t... it wouldn’t be fair.”
She must have gotten the assumption that he’s speaking of a beloved, a girlfriend, someone whom he is in a relationship with and whom he knows as well as he knows himself.
If only it were so simple.
He stays away from the after-parties from then on and focuses on the animals. Jove may be fierce, but he will never have any ulterior motives.
VI.
The magician tweaks his show, lengthens it, and with the start of a new season, hires a new assistant for some of his fancier tricks. She is lovely, a curvaceous redhead, but something about her sends a shiver down Neal’s spine. He avoids talking to her, a strange way to behave for someone so sociable as a rule.
He thinks that maybe the stars are warning him about her, about what is to come, but their portents are incoherent and muted like muffled screams. He starts losing sleep, waking up in the middle of the night shivering despite the dry heat of desert summer as images of the girl with rose earrings-- dead, green eyes open and unseeing in an eternal accusing stare, a bloodied tomahawk embedded in the ground next to her-- appear within his mind in grisly not-quite-flashbacks.
The night before the grand opening of the new show-- entitled ‘Master Chaos’ Dark Kingdom’-- he goes up to the observation deck on the Stratosphere casino, in a desperate attempt to get some answers from the stars.
But perhaps the flood of artificial lights that is Las Vegas is too strong, too bright. When he looks up and strains his ears, he can see and hear nothing.
Neal is quiet and withdrawn in the wings backstage as the audience begins filing in and the ushers guide everyone to their seats. He can feel the eyes of the redheaded assistant on his back as he talks quietly to Jove, who growls though he is fed and rested and in no apparent pain or danger. The sleek black panther seems to glare at him with its gold-coin eyes, but that might be a trick of the light.
The curtains go up and the show begins. By rote, Neal waits for his cue, as the eerie music plays and the smoke billows on-stage. The audience will watch as the magician locks up the redheaded assistant in a heavy iron cage, identical to the one that contains the black panther. A moment later, after a crack of lightning and thunder, the assistant will be free, and the panther will be in the cage instead.
The lightning flashes before his eyes, and Neal watches terrified as before his eyes, the redhead seems to morph into the panther-- emblem of death to various tribes, he belatedly remembers-- and spring out at him with claws outstretched and teeth murderously bared. A part of him realizes that this is not one of the tricks in the roster.
His head hits the wall as he backs away from the predator, and everything goes black.
VII.
He wakes with painful muscular cramps in what definitely feels like a bed, in a room bright with fluorescent lighting and nothing at all like the slightly seedy glitz of Vegas. Though it takes a while for him to focus his vision, it eventually settles on the statuesque form of a woman standing by the window. The setting sun throws her face into shadow, but she cuts quite a figure, wearing a strange sort of outfit that consists of knee-high boots and an eyebrow-raisingly short black pleated skirt under a white nautical top accented with red bows. The outfit is skimpy, but something about her air-- stern, remote and somehow all-knowing, differentiates her from any of the showgirls he has ever seen.
“Who are you?”
“You can call me Pluto,” the woman replies, and even in a city of aliases and artifice, the name seems like a strange one. She turns her head slightly to glance at one of the machines that he belatedly notices attached to his body. “Your heart rate is normal. That is good.”
“What happened to me? Where am I?”
“You suffered, among other things, a severe electrical injury, some physical trauma. You will probably notice some cramping, some tingling in your limbs, though that may go away in time. You have a few scars from electrical burns, but you are lucky that there is no extensive neurological damage or deep tissue trauma that would require amputation. As for where you are...” She pauses and steps forward, and Niyol notices that her face is beautiful, olive-skinned and fine-featured. “You are in Kindred Hospital, in Nevada. It is July 23rd, 2010. Happy twenty-fifth birthday, Niyol Stone.” She smiles faintly at the look of surprise that crosses his face. “You’re very lucky. You have been given a second chance, and you will heal. Remember that.”
For some reason he senses that she does not simply speak of his injuries and the fact that he has apparently been asleep for four years. But before he can ask, she walks out of the room, shutting the door silently behind her, and he is left staring at the space she occupied.
Through the open window, however, comes a breeze that smells strangely of sweet summer roses, and as the sky darkens with night, he can see the stars. He feels something wanting-- some atonement that must occur-- but it is still a comfort.
He lets the familiar, welcome music of the stars lull him to sleep.
VIII.
The woman who calls herself Pluto gives Niyol both good news and bad with the sort of quiet fortitude that means a lot more than sympathetic platitudes. She brings him news that the magician, along with his menagerie of animals and his redheaded assistant, is long gone. In this world of transitory partnerships and fair-weather friends, it is no more or less than Niyol might expect. She also tells him, however, that his initial winnings at the blackjack table all those years ago had been invested on his behalf, and while he is not rich, he has the means to start anew with his life should he wish.
Niyol lies in bed that night, awake and alert, as thunder rolls in over the desert and rare rainfall patters against the window. He will always have faint, circular scars on the soles of his feet where the electrical current grounded itself, and perhaps his fingertips have lost a little bit of their original sensitivity, but he has recovered with remarkable speed since he’d awoken. It is now September, nearing the Autumn Equinox, and a summer storm not unlike the one that accompanied his birth thrashes the air outside.
He cannot see or hear the stars in the face of the thunder and the rain, but he already knows what he must do.
Perhaps the woman called Pluto can read minds, or perhaps she, like him, has ways of deciphering the lines of destiny and fate. The day that the hospital gives him a clean bill of health, she visits him and patiently listens to his plans, though not all of them are fully formed or carefully plotted, and does not look skeptical when he murmurs something about a lost girl who he has only met in dreams. When he finishes talking, she smiles a mysterious, all-knowing smile, and slides something towards him across the nightstand.
It is a bus pass, not unlike the many he had purchased back in the day before everything fell into disarray. Somehow, that she’d anticipated him does not surprise him at all. He glances at the writing on it, the information that he would be taken back to the reservation of his childhood years, then looks up to find her gone.
When he leaves the hospital, it is nighttime, and he pauses to look up at the stars. “Thank you,” he murmurs up at the black velvet sky, and hopes that the woman called Pluto will hear him somehow.
IX.
The four mountains that border the Navajo Nation remain unchanged, imposing and eternal and unspoiled as they have been for thousands of years. There are a few new faces, and a scattering of new houses and roads as the bus drives through Apache County, but Niyol recognizes his home and makes his unerring way to the traditional hogan with the eastward-facing door.
Aditsan the medicine man looks up, and though his hair is snowy white now, his back bent with age, he clasps the younger man’s hands strongly in both of his own.
“You have not found your ghost girl. And yet you have returned.”
“I won’t be able to find her until I am worthy of her,” Niyol answers quietly. “She deserves nothing less than a man of honour.”
“I will perform the Enemy Way ceremony,” Aditsan remarks, not unkindly. “In the event that there are any demons and skinwalkers that have attached themselves to your body while you were beyond the mountains and need to be exorcised.”
Niyol nods. “You have my thanks. I will cleanse and prepare myself. And afterwards, I will see my mother.”
X.
Perhaps it is the Enemy Way ceremony, or perhaps just the familiar land that surrounds him, but when Niyol walks out of the hogan three days later, he feels refreshed, lighter somehow. Though several had shunned him in his youth, and certainly might look askance at his decision to leave the tribal lands in pursuit of a ghost from a dream, a surprising number of people give both him and Aditsan support and encouragement during the ceremony.
T’Iis, like she had all those years ago before her fateful meeting with an idealistic young deputy named Jordan Stone, weaves blankets and makes jewelry at the craft shop. Niyol walks in, meets the eyes of the still-lovely, strong and steadfast woman who gave life to him, and takes her in his arms. She is smaller, frailer than his memories, but she beams when she looks up into his face.
“You have become a fine man,” she declares, brushing his long, curling brown hair away from his face with slender fingers callused from loom-work. “Strong and courageous and wiser than your years.” The smile widens, though there is a soft note of sorrow in it. “And you have the look of your father, aside from your eyes. He always put others first, gave his time and energy and life to help those around him. He loved you before you were even born.”
“I won’t shame him,” Niyol promises as he holds her tightly.
That night, as the stars shine and sing their whispered hymns overhead, she gives him Jordan’s badge, the hammered gold still polished to a gleam after all the years that have passed. In T’Iis’ eyes, Niyol sees a glimpse of grief, but also deep, abiding, faithful love. In the same box where she keeps the badge is a faded photograph, taken by the sheriff of Apache County at a City Hall so many years ago, as a tall young man and a willowy young girl kiss in front of a judge. Niyol picks it up, sees himself in both their faces.
“Love can happen in a moment, and last for lifetimes,” T’Iis murmurs, looking at the photo herself as she stands next to him. “We were happy. I will never be sorry for what time we had.”
The words invoke the strangest sense of deja vu, and the porcelain-bell peal of the stars rings louder. And then his eyes fall onto the badge itself, the words engraved on the gold star.
To Serve And Protect.
“I, Kōmokuten, Lord Nephrite of the North American Kingdom, swear my allegiance to the Elysian Heir and the Golden Kingdom of Earth. For as long as I shall live, I shall serve and protect my Prince, my country and my people.”
Riddles unravel and the patterns in the sky suddenly become crystal-clear. He stares down at the golden star, thinks of the thunderstorms that always seem to bring difficult but everlasting love, and remembers.
XI.
There are promises to be kept, and more than ever he understands the need to make atonement. He gets in contact with the sheriff’s department and the Navajo Nation council, purchases a small, ramshackle house on the reservation and uses the money he has saved to renovate it, add on a few outbuildings, repave the roads around it. The land surrounding him is rugged and somewhat desolate, but overhead, the stars shine bright and unimpeded.
Over the winter, he spends his days herding sheep for the tribe and rescuing injured and displaced wildlife. Through the Christmas tourist season, he provides free water and cheap provisions to people passing through, gives directions and tips to campers. He helps a stranded young man with a flat tire get his car back on the road, then discreetly helps him find and purchase an engagement ring for his girlfriend from T’Iis’ craft shop.
In the springtime, a riot of wildflowers bloom around his hut-- Earth’s blessing, perhaps. He sees the pink cactus flowers and snowy white phlox and fiery Indian’s paintbrush and feels, for the first time in memory, at peace.
It is a week before the start of another summer that he receives an invitation to a wedding in the mail. The young man he’d helped in the winter invites him to Tokyo for the ceremony and reception. It is the city of the lost time, the place of his missing memories and the people he only knows from flashbacks of lives before.
Niyol takes it as a sign.
This time, when he asks for the medicine man’s blessing before he leaves, he does not go as someone lost, someone adrift in a storm, haunted by ghosts. He leaves secure in the knowledge of where he is going, of what he will find, and when he will return.
Carrying his father’s gold star and wearing one of the rings that his mother had fashioned, he boards the plane, and watches through the window as it ascends towards the stars.
The sky is clear and there are no storms in the horizon.
XII.
It is like a different world when he steps out of the airport. The city is crowded, frenetically modern in a completely different way than Las Vegas, and he stands out in the crowd of suited, laptop-toting businessmen and decorous, chic girls in fashionable summer dresses. Niyol takes a cab to his hotel, then calls the soon-to-be groom.
“I am very happy that you made it here safe,” Motoki’s voice is as happy-go-lucky as it had been when they’d met in Arizona. “Reika was so pleased with her ring-- the uniqueness of it, the traditional design. Her exact words were that anyone can have a diamond solitaire. And if you hadn’t helped me that day, I might have not made it to her campus on time at all.”
Niyol smiles at the other man’s transparent, shameless happiness, but knows that somehow, helping Motoki out was the least he could have done. As Motoki waxes on about his bride-to-be’s perfections and his happiness, Niyol silently recites one of Aditsan’s blessings for the happy couple, and nearly misses the other man’s question.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You haven’t eaten yet, right? Reika wants to meet you. There is a very nice restaurant-- quite new, opened by a dear friend of mine-- called Flower Storm. Would you like to meet us there in an hour?”
He agrees, and changes into a suit. The clerk at the front desk gives him directions to the restaurant-- walking distance, with spectacular desserts and an excellent wine selection-- and he shakes hands with a beaming Motoki and a lovely brunette at the door. Reika, who had gone abroad to study Geology and physics in California, speaks flawless English and asks him all about the ways of the Diné.
The wait staff are efficient and seem to know the happy couple very well, and the meal-- from the smoked salmon canapes to the Italian cream cake-- is delicious and exquisitely presented. They pass a pleasant hour like a group of good friends and are lingering over coffee when out of the corner of his eye, Niyol sees a young woman in a chef’s apron walking towards them, white hat set over auburn curls, and every single cell in his body goes on alert.
“Mako! A delicious meal, as always,” Motoki effuses, then pauses when he sees his guest and his old friend staring at each other like ghosts. Confused, he glances at Reika, then at Niyol. “I did not know that you knew each other.”
Niyol is on his feet and at her side, blind and deaf to everyone else, and doesn’t hear Motoki’s question. She has a faint smudge of flour over one cheek, and her eyes are wet and green as dewy grass. Rose-shaped earrings twinkle against her slender neck. She is neither holding flowers nor calling down thunder, and when a smile gradually curves across her lips, his heart almost stops from her beauty alone.
“Forgive me,” he whispers, taking her hands in his larger ones. “Ayóó ' ánóshní. I love you. I never stopped.” A tear escapes and slides down her cheek, and he reaches up to brush it away. “You’re the stars in my sky, the rain that sometimes comes to the desert and leaves it forever changed. I’ve dreamed about you for as long as I have had dreams.”
She smiles, radiant as the summertime, and loops her arms around his neck. He kisses her lips, sinks his fingers into her chestnut curls, and it feels like a lightning strike to the heart. Neither are aware of Motoki speculating to Reika that Makoto always did talk about a sempai whom she had never stopped loving.
Much later, in a room lit only by starlight streaming through an open window, he strokes his fingers through her silky hair as she sleeps in his arms. The stars’ music sounds like a symphony of celebration as their master reunites with his beloved and everything comes full circle. Niyol thinks of his mother’s words, of love that can come in an instant and last for lifetimes, and pulls her closer. Her hand rests, quite naturally, over his heart.
It is as it should be, and he will rest without ghosts haunting him that night. And when he does dream, it will be of a future, a time of peace, a second chance. Eternal love, promises kept, a little girl with her smile and his eyes.
After the storm, the calm.
He falls asleep smiling.
Title: Tempus Fugit
Characters: Nephrite, Makoto, Setsuna, Motoki and Reika, plus some OCs. Very much with the M/N.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: All I need is my one star in the sky, to wish for you every day.
I.
T’Iis is twenty when she meets Jordan Stone when he stops in the Navajo crafts shop during a summer thunderstorm. They do not come often in Apache County, Arizona, and the handsome young man in the khaki uniform shakes his tawny hair out of his face as he smiles down at her and asks if he can wait out the rain on his lunch break. His eyes are the same colour as the turquoise beads in the necklace she is stringing, and his deputy’s uniform is still so new that she can see the creases where it had been folded.
It happens so quickly, so fiercely, not unlike a summer thunderstorm. Before the rain even lets up, she has already agreed to go to dinner with him with no consideration for the tongues that would undoubtedly wag within the tribe. He smiles and the tips of his ears blush as he suggests a place, a small but fancy Italian restaurant that is slightly beyond his budget, but maybe somewhat worthy of the lovely, dark-eyed girl with strings of beads and silver glinting against her ebony hair. He can’t quite get the intonation of her name right, and calls her ‘Tess’, and she smiles as the sun comes out and haloes around his wavy hair.
He’s only twenty-two and his parents are baffled and outraged. Her tribe is suspicious and she is warned that no good can come of it. But thunderstorms are as strong as they are rare hereabouts, and not six months afterwards, T’Iis stands in City Hall next to Jordan as they swear to love, honour and cherish each other for better or worse in front of a judge. A strong-willed young girl. An idealistic young man. The judge exchanges glances with the sheriff who is Jordan’s boss and makes a genial comment about Romeo and Juliet and young love after the short ceremony. But T’Iis and Jordan are too blissfully focused on each other to notice or care.
T’Iis gets a job at a local cafe waiting tables and they rent a tiny flat, hoping to save up for a house someday. They can barely keep the roof over their heads, and for their first Christmas together, they can only afford the tiniest, mangiest little plastic tree marked down half-off as damaged from the general store, but he greets her with a kiss every evening and she weaves him a blanket, in the old and traditional way, for cold nights. Perhaps they are foolish, but they get the gift of two years of perfect happiness.
When T’Iis finds out that she is pregnant, both of them are nervous but ecstatic, and Jordan makes her stop working doubles, get off her feet more. He buys baby books and takes extra shifts of his own; maybe by the time their baby is old enough to walk and talk, they’ll have enough money for a little house with a real yard, perhaps be able to buy their kid a puppy to play with. When he comes home, often very late at night now, he heats up the dinner T’Iis always leaves him on the table and watches her sleep and dreams about little boys with his courage and her strength, of little girls with her hair and his eyes.
One night the call comes through just as he is about to go home. Domestic dispute, backup requested from all units in the area. Well. One more hour of work is one more hour of pay. Maybe with the next check, he’d buy their baby a crib. T’Iis -- though he still calls her Tess-- looks like a goddess. At the pre-natal appointment last week, the doctor said that they are having a boy. They still hadn’t chosen a name.
The wind picks up and howls like an angry witch as he parks the cruiser and approaches the house of the domestic dispute, but he can still hear the screams of a woman, the wails of a little child, perhaps not too much older than the baby he himself will be having. Fearless, idealistic and perhaps more than a little foolish, Jordan kicks the door in without double-checking with dispatch or calling for back-up.
The gunshot hits him straight in the chest. He falls, a handsome, impulsive young man of not yet twenty-five, and even though the gunman is taken down by other officers within seconds, it is far too late. Jordan Stone is pronounced dead by the paramedics when the ambulance arrives several minutes later, and the sheriff himself brings his personal effects to a stoical T’Iis later that night.
She quits her job at the cafe altogether, sells the flat, and returns to the Navajo reservation with her plain gold wedding ring on her finger and Jordan’s badge, the hammered gold star engraved with the words ‘To Serve And Protect’, in her pocket. Though several of the tribal elders shake their heads and several of the more tactless members of her clan tell her that she should have known it would happen, she is accepted back, and brought to the home of her mother.
It is during another rare summer thunderstorm that her son is born, and a flash of lightning illuminates his face as he opens his mouth to let out his first, lusty cry. T’Iis names the boy Niyol-- for the wind. The wind had brought her happiness, and taken it away with the same abruptness, but with her son, she would always have both her joy and her grief. And when she holds her baby in her arms for the first time, and smooths her fingers over his fine, downy hair, she weeps.
“You come with the wind and the storm, and I am afraid that your life will be full of the same. Perhaps you will suffer, and be lost, and be afraid. But I hope that you will have the strength to bear it, and find enough joy in the end to be worth it.”
Niyol frets and whimpers in her arms, and the storm seems to take pity and abate. T’Iis falls asleep quickly, worn out from grief and love and the exhaustion of giving birth, but the newborn stays awake, his fathomless eyes fixed on the dark night sky outside as the clouds clear to make way for thousands of stars.
II.
Niyol is raised by his mother on the reservation, in the traditional way of the Diné. From the ritual “Baby’s First Laugh” blessing ceremony by the medicine man in the hogan at dawn to the history of the four sacred mountains that border their land to the legends of the coyote and beaver and eagle who had helped them build each of their successive worlds, he grows up being taught the importance of the way and the lore that runs through his blood. Though he attends Apache County’s public schools during the day, he learns, in the evening, the rites and folklore of his mother’s ancestors.
He is a gregarious, friendly little boy, with his father’s quick grin and dense brown hair curling over his ears and his mother’s dreamy dark eyes. Perhaps it is due to the fact that he does not quite fit in with the rest of the tribe that he befriends the wise, infinitely patient and tolerant medicine man rather than the other children. But certainly even the medicine man has no explanation for his dreams or visions.
He doesn’t remember when he first started hearing the ethereal music of the stars, or noticing the patterns in the sky that recall the ages past and foretell the ages to come. He doesn’t understand why he hears echoes of lost love and broken kingdoms late at night when he is at that edge between waking and dreaming.
He doesn’t know any girls, either in school or on the reservation, who wear earrings shaped like pink roses and stare mournfully at him with eyes greener than the leaves of the sagebrush, but he sees flashes of her face-- beautiful and vivid as a mesa sunrise-- in his mind as though they have known each other for a thousand years.
III.
The medicine man is quietly dignified, eighty years old, with a leather-coloured face toughened and scored by the years and the strong sunlight and a rain of iron-gray hair. His name is Aditsan, the listener, and he is T’Iis’ grandfather.
The story he listens to now is one he has heard before, certainly, as he has watched and cared for Niyol since the boy was born. Though Niyol has always been outgoing and fond of the company of others like any other boys in the tribe, he has a deep, spiritual side and a striking sense of intuition about the future, a deep understanding of the Earth and the sky. Aditsan, sensing his gifts, teaches him the chants and the rites, because their people will always need a healer and confessor, and he himself is getting old.
But now Aditsan frowns at the sandpainting that Niyol has made on the buckskin-lined floor of the hogan. The technique is flawless, the lines of sand perfectly formed. The scene is a night sky improbably filled with both stars and thunderbolts over two figures -- a man and a woman-- that reach toward each other. Since Niyol’s youth, he has always spoken of the woman.
“It is like I was born with the ghost sickness,” the young man-- little more than a boy, really-- murmurs at Aditsan’s side. He is tall, and though his hair is also long, it falls in wood-brown waves. The face, one that smiles so easily, is drawn. “I don’t even know who she is. But I must find her.”
It is taboo for them to leave their lands, but then again, no traditional cure has been able to rid Niyol of these visions and dreams. Aditsan mulls it over as Niyol takes the gnarled hands in his own strong, capable ones.
“I am skilled with the animals, and I have a strong back, a good eye. I can find work.”
Aditsan sighs, and nods his permission. “I will prepare for a Blessing Way ceremony.”
IV.
Niyol does not have any clear idea of where to go, or what to do, and the stars overhead speak only in riddles. But he is young and determined and earns enough to keep food in his belly and the occasional roof over his head through any number of odd jobs as he hitch-hikes and takes the buses from city to city.
He arrives in Las Vegas a month after his twenty-first birthday, and meets the magician quite by chance at a blackjack table. Perhaps because it is his first day in the city of lights and sin, perhaps due to beginner’s luck and the fading echoes of celestial advice, but the ten thousand that he wins after a mere few hours attract the magician’s notice. The other man buys him dinner at the fanciest restaurant Niyol has ever dined in, and by the dessert course-- fancy chocolate gateau drizzled with raspberry sauce and topped with tissue-thin curls of shaved white chocolate-- Niyol is offered a steady job.
The magician’s arts rely on deception, electronic machines that blow smoke and flash lights at opportune moments, and he does not believe that the stars are anything but balls of burning gas millions of miles away. He does not remember his dreams when he sleeps, but he is personable and charismatic and is in the process of coming up with his acts for a new show. Several of the stunts and tricks will involve animals ranging from the traditional white rabbits to peacocks to a powerful black panther.
Niyol fits the magician’s bill for an animal handler in the entertainment business, with his quick hands and intuitive knowledge of nature and his dashing good looks, but he is told that he will have to go by the name of Neal for the sake of easy pronunciation.
Thinking of the opportunities he would have for free, comfortable travel and all the people -- perhaps among them a girl with rose earrings and emerald eyes?-- he would meet, Niyol acquiesces.
V.
The animals are kept in cages and special trailers, and despite the differences in species, Niyol-- Neal-- does not find the work any more difficult than raising and herding the sheep on the reservation. The big black panther, with its velvety fur and powerful legs and molten amber eyes, is tame enough to eat out of his hand, and though it communicates only with looks and responses to hand gestures and whistles, it is like a friend in this strange and hectic land. Its name is Jove, and something about that strikes a chord in Neal.
The magician’s show is a stunning success on its opening run at the MGM Grand, and the end of the night finds countless bottles of champagne and endless rounds of congratulations in rooms filled with glittering lights of all colours. One of the showgirls-- buxom, tanned, with a cascade of chestnut curls, flirts with him over alcohol and caviar. Neal is drunk and excited over the success of the show, but when she leans in to kiss him, he shifts away.
“Your eyes are not green. You’re not her,” he slurs in bewildered hurt. “I can’t... it wouldn’t be fair.”
She must have gotten the assumption that he’s speaking of a beloved, a girlfriend, someone whom he is in a relationship with and whom he knows as well as he knows himself.
If only it were so simple.
He stays away from the after-parties from then on and focuses on the animals. Jove may be fierce, but he will never have any ulterior motives.
VI.
The magician tweaks his show, lengthens it, and with the start of a new season, hires a new assistant for some of his fancier tricks. She is lovely, a curvaceous redhead, but something about her sends a shiver down Neal’s spine. He avoids talking to her, a strange way to behave for someone so sociable as a rule.
He thinks that maybe the stars are warning him about her, about what is to come, but their portents are incoherent and muted like muffled screams. He starts losing sleep, waking up in the middle of the night shivering despite the dry heat of desert summer as images of the girl with rose earrings-- dead, green eyes open and unseeing in an eternal accusing stare, a bloodied tomahawk embedded in the ground next to her-- appear within his mind in grisly not-quite-flashbacks.
The night before the grand opening of the new show-- entitled ‘Master Chaos’ Dark Kingdom’-- he goes up to the observation deck on the Stratosphere casino, in a desperate attempt to get some answers from the stars.
But perhaps the flood of artificial lights that is Las Vegas is too strong, too bright. When he looks up and strains his ears, he can see and hear nothing.
Neal is quiet and withdrawn in the wings backstage as the audience begins filing in and the ushers guide everyone to their seats. He can feel the eyes of the redheaded assistant on his back as he talks quietly to Jove, who growls though he is fed and rested and in no apparent pain or danger. The sleek black panther seems to glare at him with its gold-coin eyes, but that might be a trick of the light.
The curtains go up and the show begins. By rote, Neal waits for his cue, as the eerie music plays and the smoke billows on-stage. The audience will watch as the magician locks up the redheaded assistant in a heavy iron cage, identical to the one that contains the black panther. A moment later, after a crack of lightning and thunder, the assistant will be free, and the panther will be in the cage instead.
The lightning flashes before his eyes, and Neal watches terrified as before his eyes, the redhead seems to morph into the panther-- emblem of death to various tribes, he belatedly remembers-- and spring out at him with claws outstretched and teeth murderously bared. A part of him realizes that this is not one of the tricks in the roster.
His head hits the wall as he backs away from the predator, and everything goes black.
VII.
He wakes with painful muscular cramps in what definitely feels like a bed, in a room bright with fluorescent lighting and nothing at all like the slightly seedy glitz of Vegas. Though it takes a while for him to focus his vision, it eventually settles on the statuesque form of a woman standing by the window. The setting sun throws her face into shadow, but she cuts quite a figure, wearing a strange sort of outfit that consists of knee-high boots and an eyebrow-raisingly short black pleated skirt under a white nautical top accented with red bows. The outfit is skimpy, but something about her air-- stern, remote and somehow all-knowing, differentiates her from any of the showgirls he has ever seen.
“Who are you?”
“You can call me Pluto,” the woman replies, and even in a city of aliases and artifice, the name seems like a strange one. She turns her head slightly to glance at one of the machines that he belatedly notices attached to his body. “Your heart rate is normal. That is good.”
“What happened to me? Where am I?”
“You suffered, among other things, a severe electrical injury, some physical trauma. You will probably notice some cramping, some tingling in your limbs, though that may go away in time. You have a few scars from electrical burns, but you are lucky that there is no extensive neurological damage or deep tissue trauma that would require amputation. As for where you are...” She pauses and steps forward, and Niyol notices that her face is beautiful, olive-skinned and fine-featured. “You are in Kindred Hospital, in Nevada. It is July 23rd, 2010. Happy twenty-fifth birthday, Niyol Stone.” She smiles faintly at the look of surprise that crosses his face. “You’re very lucky. You have been given a second chance, and you will heal. Remember that.”
For some reason he senses that she does not simply speak of his injuries and the fact that he has apparently been asleep for four years. But before he can ask, she walks out of the room, shutting the door silently behind her, and he is left staring at the space she occupied.
Through the open window, however, comes a breeze that smells strangely of sweet summer roses, and as the sky darkens with night, he can see the stars. He feels something wanting-- some atonement that must occur-- but it is still a comfort.
He lets the familiar, welcome music of the stars lull him to sleep.
VIII.
The woman who calls herself Pluto gives Niyol both good news and bad with the sort of quiet fortitude that means a lot more than sympathetic platitudes. She brings him news that the magician, along with his menagerie of animals and his redheaded assistant, is long gone. In this world of transitory partnerships and fair-weather friends, it is no more or less than Niyol might expect. She also tells him, however, that his initial winnings at the blackjack table all those years ago had been invested on his behalf, and while he is not rich, he has the means to start anew with his life should he wish.
Niyol lies in bed that night, awake and alert, as thunder rolls in over the desert and rare rainfall patters against the window. He will always have faint, circular scars on the soles of his feet where the electrical current grounded itself, and perhaps his fingertips have lost a little bit of their original sensitivity, but he has recovered with remarkable speed since he’d awoken. It is now September, nearing the Autumn Equinox, and a summer storm not unlike the one that accompanied his birth thrashes the air outside.
He cannot see or hear the stars in the face of the thunder and the rain, but he already knows what he must do.
Perhaps the woman called Pluto can read minds, or perhaps she, like him, has ways of deciphering the lines of destiny and fate. The day that the hospital gives him a clean bill of health, she visits him and patiently listens to his plans, though not all of them are fully formed or carefully plotted, and does not look skeptical when he murmurs something about a lost girl who he has only met in dreams. When he finishes talking, she smiles a mysterious, all-knowing smile, and slides something towards him across the nightstand.
It is a bus pass, not unlike the many he had purchased back in the day before everything fell into disarray. Somehow, that she’d anticipated him does not surprise him at all. He glances at the writing on it, the information that he would be taken back to the reservation of his childhood years, then looks up to find her gone.
When he leaves the hospital, it is nighttime, and he pauses to look up at the stars. “Thank you,” he murmurs up at the black velvet sky, and hopes that the woman called Pluto will hear him somehow.
IX.
The four mountains that border the Navajo Nation remain unchanged, imposing and eternal and unspoiled as they have been for thousands of years. There are a few new faces, and a scattering of new houses and roads as the bus drives through Apache County, but Niyol recognizes his home and makes his unerring way to the traditional hogan with the eastward-facing door.
Aditsan the medicine man looks up, and though his hair is snowy white now, his back bent with age, he clasps the younger man’s hands strongly in both of his own.
“You have not found your ghost girl. And yet you have returned.”
“I won’t be able to find her until I am worthy of her,” Niyol answers quietly. “She deserves nothing less than a man of honour.”
“I will perform the Enemy Way ceremony,” Aditsan remarks, not unkindly. “In the event that there are any demons and skinwalkers that have attached themselves to your body while you were beyond the mountains and need to be exorcised.”
Niyol nods. “You have my thanks. I will cleanse and prepare myself. And afterwards, I will see my mother.”
X.
Perhaps it is the Enemy Way ceremony, or perhaps just the familiar land that surrounds him, but when Niyol walks out of the hogan three days later, he feels refreshed, lighter somehow. Though several had shunned him in his youth, and certainly might look askance at his decision to leave the tribal lands in pursuit of a ghost from a dream, a surprising number of people give both him and Aditsan support and encouragement during the ceremony.
T’Iis, like she had all those years ago before her fateful meeting with an idealistic young deputy named Jordan Stone, weaves blankets and makes jewelry at the craft shop. Niyol walks in, meets the eyes of the still-lovely, strong and steadfast woman who gave life to him, and takes her in his arms. She is smaller, frailer than his memories, but she beams when she looks up into his face.
“You have become a fine man,” she declares, brushing his long, curling brown hair away from his face with slender fingers callused from loom-work. “Strong and courageous and wiser than your years.” The smile widens, though there is a soft note of sorrow in it. “And you have the look of your father, aside from your eyes. He always put others first, gave his time and energy and life to help those around him. He loved you before you were even born.”
“I won’t shame him,” Niyol promises as he holds her tightly.
That night, as the stars shine and sing their whispered hymns overhead, she gives him Jordan’s badge, the hammered gold still polished to a gleam after all the years that have passed. In T’Iis’ eyes, Niyol sees a glimpse of grief, but also deep, abiding, faithful love. In the same box where she keeps the badge is a faded photograph, taken by the sheriff of Apache County at a City Hall so many years ago, as a tall young man and a willowy young girl kiss in front of a judge. Niyol picks it up, sees himself in both their faces.
“Love can happen in a moment, and last for lifetimes,” T’Iis murmurs, looking at the photo herself as she stands next to him. “We were happy. I will never be sorry for what time we had.”
The words invoke the strangest sense of deja vu, and the porcelain-bell peal of the stars rings louder. And then his eyes fall onto the badge itself, the words engraved on the gold star.
To Serve And Protect.
“I, Kōmokuten, Lord Nephrite of the North American Kingdom, swear my allegiance to the Elysian Heir and the Golden Kingdom of Earth. For as long as I shall live, I shall serve and protect my Prince, my country and my people.”
Riddles unravel and the patterns in the sky suddenly become crystal-clear. He stares down at the golden star, thinks of the thunderstorms that always seem to bring difficult but everlasting love, and remembers.
XI.
There are promises to be kept, and more than ever he understands the need to make atonement. He gets in contact with the sheriff’s department and the Navajo Nation council, purchases a small, ramshackle house on the reservation and uses the money he has saved to renovate it, add on a few outbuildings, repave the roads around it. The land surrounding him is rugged and somewhat desolate, but overhead, the stars shine bright and unimpeded.
Over the winter, he spends his days herding sheep for the tribe and rescuing injured and displaced wildlife. Through the Christmas tourist season, he provides free water and cheap provisions to people passing through, gives directions and tips to campers. He helps a stranded young man with a flat tire get his car back on the road, then discreetly helps him find and purchase an engagement ring for his girlfriend from T’Iis’ craft shop.
In the springtime, a riot of wildflowers bloom around his hut-- Earth’s blessing, perhaps. He sees the pink cactus flowers and snowy white phlox and fiery Indian’s paintbrush and feels, for the first time in memory, at peace.
It is a week before the start of another summer that he receives an invitation to a wedding in the mail. The young man he’d helped in the winter invites him to Tokyo for the ceremony and reception. It is the city of the lost time, the place of his missing memories and the people he only knows from flashbacks of lives before.
Niyol takes it as a sign.
This time, when he asks for the medicine man’s blessing before he leaves, he does not go as someone lost, someone adrift in a storm, haunted by ghosts. He leaves secure in the knowledge of where he is going, of what he will find, and when he will return.
Carrying his father’s gold star and wearing one of the rings that his mother had fashioned, he boards the plane, and watches through the window as it ascends towards the stars.
The sky is clear and there are no storms in the horizon.
XII.
It is like a different world when he steps out of the airport. The city is crowded, frenetically modern in a completely different way than Las Vegas, and he stands out in the crowd of suited, laptop-toting businessmen and decorous, chic girls in fashionable summer dresses. Niyol takes a cab to his hotel, then calls the soon-to-be groom.
“I am very happy that you made it here safe,” Motoki’s voice is as happy-go-lucky as it had been when they’d met in Arizona. “Reika was so pleased with her ring-- the uniqueness of it, the traditional design. Her exact words were that anyone can have a diamond solitaire. And if you hadn’t helped me that day, I might have not made it to her campus on time at all.”
Niyol smiles at the other man’s transparent, shameless happiness, but knows that somehow, helping Motoki out was the least he could have done. As Motoki waxes on about his bride-to-be’s perfections and his happiness, Niyol silently recites one of Aditsan’s blessings for the happy couple, and nearly misses the other man’s question.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You haven’t eaten yet, right? Reika wants to meet you. There is a very nice restaurant-- quite new, opened by a dear friend of mine-- called Flower Storm. Would you like to meet us there in an hour?”
He agrees, and changes into a suit. The clerk at the front desk gives him directions to the restaurant-- walking distance, with spectacular desserts and an excellent wine selection-- and he shakes hands with a beaming Motoki and a lovely brunette at the door. Reika, who had gone abroad to study Geology and physics in California, speaks flawless English and asks him all about the ways of the Diné.
The wait staff are efficient and seem to know the happy couple very well, and the meal-- from the smoked salmon canapes to the Italian cream cake-- is delicious and exquisitely presented. They pass a pleasant hour like a group of good friends and are lingering over coffee when out of the corner of his eye, Niyol sees a young woman in a chef’s apron walking towards them, white hat set over auburn curls, and every single cell in his body goes on alert.
“Mako! A delicious meal, as always,” Motoki effuses, then pauses when he sees his guest and his old friend staring at each other like ghosts. Confused, he glances at Reika, then at Niyol. “I did not know that you knew each other.”
Niyol is on his feet and at her side, blind and deaf to everyone else, and doesn’t hear Motoki’s question. She has a faint smudge of flour over one cheek, and her eyes are wet and green as dewy grass. Rose-shaped earrings twinkle against her slender neck. She is neither holding flowers nor calling down thunder, and when a smile gradually curves across her lips, his heart almost stops from her beauty alone.
“Forgive me,” he whispers, taking her hands in his larger ones. “Ayóó ' ánóshní. I love you. I never stopped.” A tear escapes and slides down her cheek, and he reaches up to brush it away. “You’re the stars in my sky, the rain that sometimes comes to the desert and leaves it forever changed. I’ve dreamed about you for as long as I have had dreams.”
She smiles, radiant as the summertime, and loops her arms around his neck. He kisses her lips, sinks his fingers into her chestnut curls, and it feels like a lightning strike to the heart. Neither are aware of Motoki speculating to Reika that Makoto always did talk about a sempai whom she had never stopped loving.
Much later, in a room lit only by starlight streaming through an open window, he strokes his fingers through her silky hair as she sleeps in his arms. The stars’ music sounds like a symphony of celebration as their master reunites with his beloved and everything comes full circle. Niyol thinks of his mother’s words, of love that can come in an instant and last for lifetimes, and pulls her closer. Her hand rests, quite naturally, over his heart.
It is as it should be, and he will rest without ghosts haunting him that night. And when he does dream, it will be of a future, a time of peace, a second chance. Eternal love, promises kept, a little girl with her smile and his eyes.
After the storm, the calm.
He falls asleep smiling.