Here and Now, Part 4

[ellorgast]

If you're behind or need a refresher:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3



When the shock had passed, when the sting of regrets and apologies had begun to fade, when they could look one another in the eye without fearing a loss of composure, they spoke. Haltingly, at first. Mamoru, who had kept an ongoing mental list of all the things he would ask his guardian upon meeting him, finding himself unable to remember the contents of it. Kain, who had long steeled himself for this day, as much at a loss for words as if it had taken him by surprise. But slowly, the words came. Mamoru avoided the biggest questions. How? When? Why? He could hardly believe that the guardian who sat across from him was more than a wonderful illusion that, if questioned too much, might vanish completely.

But he did not vanish. Not when he confirmed his real name, his true name. Not when he said Mamoru's. He was alive. He spoke English. His pale eyebrows knitted with thought when he spoke, and sometimes his fingers drummed on his knee when he fell to silence. Sometimes when he smiled, and almost laughed (actual laughter did not seem to come often) his left eye twitched, just a bit, like it was considering winking. Details that were so much more than Mamoru had ever dreamed, painting over his sketchy imaginings of what it would be like if, just once, he found himself face-to-face with Kunzite.

Mamoru found himself laughing nervously. "I'm sorry, I--don't even know what to say."

"Then let me go first. Why don't you tell me what happened today. Why did you lose control?"

His stomach twisted uncomfortably. Too personal. But being a flesh-and-blood education student who Mamoru had only met a few weeks ago did not make Kain any less the guardian he had always confided in, even if he no longer appeared in the form of a rock on his desk. He took a breath, studying the comforter piled around his knees instead of those steel grey eyes that watched him so calmly. "When Jaden got hurt, I remembered something. From the past. It's been... well, years since I remembered something new. It was... awful."

Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Kain's hand tighten on the arm of the chair. "The attack on the Moon?"

"Not all of it. Just when Jadeite..." He swallowed around a growing lump in his throat.

The silence stretched out, two heartbeats too long, and Mamoru stole a glance up at Kain. The guardian was staring out the window again, his eyes glistening slivers of ice. "I never knew whether you were still--alive--" he ground the word out, as though it had lodged in his throat, "to see it happen. By the time we got to you..."

"He still saved me."

"Yes. He did."

Mamoru turned to the window as well. Outside, the oak trees swayed and rustled in the wind, silhouetted against a sky that was slowly taking on a paler shade of black. Dawn was only a few hours off. "He's Jadeite, isn't he? Jaden?"

An unexpected chuckle, still rough with bitterness, sounded beside him. "Is he ever."

The comment brought a smile to Mamoru's lips. Of course he was. Jadeite, the trickster, the illusionist, who had quick feet and a quicker tongue. Was it only this morning, or was it years ago, that they had run side-by-side on the court together, like a wild rushing current to break through the cracks in their friends' defenses? He'd felt it then, the power that resonated between them, even if he had not noticed or admitted it to himself.

Just as he'd sensed the power in his opponents, and knew instinctively how to break through their defenses. Knew that Kain was a fortress unto himself who had to be carefully skirted instead of faced head-on. Knew that Neil was ferocious and deadly when challenged, but all too imprecise when goaded into a rage. Knew that he could trust Sasha's judgement even when he seemed not to be watching, because his eyes traced the details and the patterns of their movements as elegantly as any painting.

Kain was right. In some ways, deep in his subconscious, he had known from the moment that he sat down across from Neil in that library, and found comfort in his presence, that these men were more than new acquaintances. Something about them had called out to him, just as, he realized, he had always been calling out to them. And finally, they heard.

He shifted hesitantly. "Will you... tell me about them?"

His guardian smiled. "I will tell you everything you wish to know."

***

The night passed in what felt like a few breaths, and Kain watched as the pink light before dawn brought color back to his prince's cheeks. They had spoken through the night, yet it felt as though they had barely said anything. Two entire lifetimes needed catching up on, and it would be a very long time before the thirst for each other's company had begun to quench.

When dawn broke golden through the prince's window, Kain stood, stretching his cramped legs. "You must be hungry. Would you like breakfast?"

"Sure. Um, there's a cafeteria close by, but..."

"We'll go back to my place. Neil's sure to come running if he smells food, and he'll be loud enough to wake the rest of the house."

Mamoru looked up at him, his smile nervous, as if the thought of finding himself faced with his full guard was as intimidating as it was exciting. "Yeah. Let's do that."

Kain moved the chair out of the way. "Then come here."

"What?"

He chuckled, taking Mamoru by the arm. "I didn't exactly travel here by car. Now brace yourself."

"Why?"

Though he knew it would seem slightly cruel in a moment, Kain could not help the slight smirk that formed. "Because you hate this part."

He jumped without further preamble. Mamoru's panic was immediately apparent, but for Kain, it was expected. He shifted his already-firm grip on his prince's arm and pulled him close, and though no voice could travel through those breathless moments in-between, his arms spoke for him. I won't let you go.

The journey took all of a few seconds. They landed in the middle of the kitchen, Mamoru nearly toppling over at the sudden presence of floor beneath his feet. Maybe it was inappropriate for Kain to laugh as he caught him by the shoulders, but laughter seemed to come all too easily with a newly found prince in his hands. "Steady on. You okay?"

Mamoru blinked around himself at the completely altered surroundings. "Was that... did we just teleport? Just the two of us?"

"Never done that before?"

"No. Not--not like that. We always did it in groups."

Kain shook his head. "Silver Millennials. They never could get individual teleportation figured out. Too dependent on their machines to do it for them."

"You can all do that?"

"Of course. You could too. You just never wanted to."

Mamoru sank into a chair, holding his head. "I can't imagine why."

Kain patted his shoulder as he turned to the cupboard. "Give it a moment. It's a bit different from group teleportation, isn't it?"

"Yeah. It's more..." He was not sure how to finish that sentence. No word that he yet knew in the English language seemed quite capable of describing the overwhelming freefall, the compression of his lungs, the terrifying moment of disorientation like he'd been dropped into ice-cold water and had no clue where the surface was or how to reach it.

"More everything, yeah," Kain finished helpfully. He was pulling pots and pans out of the cupboard. "Going as a group shields you a bit more. Like if you go out on the ocean, the bigger your boat, the less you feel the waves."

"How do you manage to get over that? To actually get where you're trying to go?"

"Just practice. Concentration. I'm not saying it ever becomes the most pleasant experience, but it gets a bit easier when you're used to it." He fished a heavy frying pan out of the back of the cupboard and began replacing the other pots he had pulled out. "It's always been harder for you, though."

"Why?"

He set the frying pan on the stove and opened the fridge. "When you teleport, you feel disoriented, right, like you've suddenly gone blind and don't know why?"

"Yeah." It surprised him to hear it described so accurately. Even when he had teleported with the senshi, that sensation had always bothered him. He had never told anyone, because none of them seemed to feel the same.

Kain gave him a knowing glance as he set a carton of eggs on the counter. "It's because you, more than anyone else, use the Earth beneath you to sense the world around you. It's as natural for you as the other five senses are for the rest of us. But when you teleport, for just a moment--"

"There is no Earth."

"Exactly. There's nothing. For you, that's like going blind."

Mamoru had never had anybody tell him about himself like this before. No parents or relatives to tell embarrassing childhood stories. Nobody who remembered him as any more than a background character in their past lives. He had often listened to Luna describing the details of Serenity's life to Usagi, while his own history remained as much a sterile void as his lost childhood.

He realized that Kain no longer had his back turned to him. He stood at the open door of the fridge with two big onions balanced neatly in his broad hand, watching Mamoru with those eyes that were still, to him, unreadable.

He stood, to distract himself. "Could I help? With um, anything?"

"Can you make coffee?"

"I make it pretty strong."

"That's perfect."

Mamoru set to work finding the coffee grounds, noting that the first cupboard he opened contained an entire shelf stuffed with instant ramen, and the shelf beneath it mostly consisted of various forms of boxed pasta-and-powdered-cheese. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the confident way that Kain cracked each egg and beat them with a fork. He was reminded of Makoto, the way she handled food brusquely and effortlessly. He did not, like Ami, tentatively reread a recipe book five times before completing each step, or, like Usagi, start and abandon five different tasks at once, panic that nothing was getting done, and either drop or burn the lot of it to make up for lost time. And apparently, unlike his housemates, his food did not involve any packages with "just add water" on the label. "So have you always been good at cooking?"

Kain shrugged as he spread bacon in the frying pan, where it began to sizzle and pop. "I guess I started pretty young. My dad and I were on our own, and he didn't cope too well with my mom being gone. I just really wanted to eat something that hadn't been frozen, so I started trying to imitate the way she used to cook."

Mamoru carefully measured coffee into the paper filter. Kain had mentioned his dad being single before, but this was the first he had heard about his mother. "That's the opposite of me. Nobody ever really cooked for me, so I guess I just never bothered. I think I used my kitchen at home for studying more than eating."

"So you don't cook at all?"

"I can make coffee. And I can operate the rice maker."

"Wow. Next you'll be telling me you can even make toast."

"If I have a toaster. Don't ask me to operate a toaster oven." He pushed the filter into the slot and flicked on the little machine. "How did you lose your mom?"

Kain slid a plate of tortillas into the oven. "Cancer. I was eleven. Why has nobody ever cooked for you?"

The coffee maker began to make pleasant rumbling sounds. "My parents died when I was six."

"Both of them?"

"It was a car crash. I was the only survivor. It... took me a long time to figure out why I did."

Kain scooped bacon onto a paper towel, and poured the egg mixture into the greasy frying pan. "You've been on your own ever since?"

"I've had some foster families, but nothing ever stuck. I wasn't exactly a cheerful child."

In the tense moment that followed, Mamoru worried that Kain would make a fuss over his situation. But Kain gave him a glance as he moved to open the fridge again, and said, "I could cook sometimes when you move in."

"You want me to move in? With all of you?"

"If you want to. I know you're supposed to live in campus housing for your first year, but after that..." He turned on the tap, ran the water over a red pepper. "Well, think about it. I don't like the idea of you on your own without protection."

Mamoru was about to point out that he had done just fine on his own since he was fifteen, but something made him shut his mouth. Kain was offering him something he had never had.

Whatever he was about to say next was lost behind the sound of an overenthusiastic yawn. "Goddamn you get up early. I think I have the hangover of the century." Jaden shuffled, zombie-like, into the kitchen, his hair sticking up in blond tufts, the waistband of his ragged sweatpants hanging two inches below his boxers. He wandered right past Mamoru to the fridge. "You couldn't have, like, stopped yourself from banging pots around for another hour?" He stooped and snatched up the carton of orange juice.

Next to him, Kain cleared his throat.

"I mean, it's not like I almost bled to death or anything." He took a swig directly from the carton.

"Jaden--"

"Oh shut up, I'm not putting it back in the fridge after. They give you juice when you donate blood, right?"

"Jaden."

"So I think I deserve all the juice. Also those breakfast burritos."

"Jaden."

"You need to make something when Endy gets here. Because you're the only one who can cook real food."

"Look."

"As long as it's not like, slathered in Marmite. In fact maybe we should just order pizza. Dude are you wearing the same thing you wore yesterday? You're turning into Neil."

Calmly, Kain set down the paring knife in his hand, took Jaden by the shoulder, and swiveled him around.

Two sets of blue eyes locked, and suddenly prince and guardian stood frozen. Kain discretely removed the juice from Jaden's hand before it could slip to the floor.

Mamoru tried to study his face for signs of lingering trauma, tried to focus on whether his skin was just a shade too pale and the rings under his eyes more than the result of just waking up. He tried to, but all he could see was the way that the sharp curve of his jaw would have looked so striking against his high-collared uniform. He opened his mouth to speak, but it was some seconds before any voice would come. "Are you alright?"

The blond broke into a cocky grin that brought to mind races across sun-heated fields and late-night card games amidst the sweet smell of pipe tobacco. "Come on. There is no way I'm gonna be killed by something that licks its own testicles." The comment was so unexpected that Mamoru almost forgot to laugh. "So are we supposed to hug or something, or am I expected to bow? That could get kind of awkward in public. Could we just instate some kind of royal high five or something?"

"Jadeite." Mamoru could barely croak out the word, but the sound of it, of his true name spoken by his liege, caused the smile to dissolve. He looked soberly at Mamoru, Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed hard.

And then it was the slap of bare feet running across the kitchen floor within a fraction of a second, and Jaden's hug evoked images of tightly-coiled whirlpools. His thick hair smelled like warm morning rain.

"I thought it was you," Jaden muttered. "Goddamn, did I want it to be."

The sudden prickle of heat on his skin, like the sun emerging from behind a rain cloud, drew Mamoru's attention. Wild copper hair hung in a loose mane around Sasha's thin shoulders and filled the doorway to the kitchen. When his green eyes met Mamoru's, he dropped his gaze to the floor, playing with a thumb-hole he had ripped into the sleeve of his oversized shirt, teeth tugging at his lip ring. He approached tentatively, but his greeting was bolder than the others, pulling Mamoru down by the shoulders to kiss him below the jaw (a curious sensation with the lip ring) and squeezing his arms around his prince's neck to press burning tears into his cheek. Mamoru remembered belatedly to wrap his own arms around Sasha's--Zoisite's--ribs, and felt that he was holding something both dangerous and vulnerable.

And then a sound that could only be compared to the beginnings of an earthquake, or an oncoming stampede, shook the very ground beneath Mamoru’s feet. Sasha quickly darted from his grasp, and before Mamoru could wonder why, something giant and brown and solid as a truck slammed into him and locked him in a rib-crushing embrace. The floor rushed away from his feet and the kitchen did a twirling dance three times around his head before he went crashing onto the linoleum beneath his assailant’s heavy bulk.

Winded and dizzy, Mamoru could barely register Jaden’s laughter overhead through the thick cloud of brunette curls that had settled over his face. “Don’t crush him before you even get to say hi to him, you hairy bastard!”

Mamoru’s ear, pressed into what must have been Neil’s throat, only barely interpreted the muffled rumble offered as response. “It’s Endy! He can handle it!”

Kain’s bland voice cut through the mirth and hair. “Neil. Don’t hurt him.”

The enormous weight shifted away from Mamoru as Neil lifted himself onto his elbows. His vision was suddenly filled with nothing other than the brunette’s broad and hairy torso, mere inches from his nose, smelling like sweat and sleep. “I’ve been waiting seven hundred and sixty-three days do to this, and not even you can stop me this time, Commander Frowny-Face.”

He planted his hands on either side of Mamoru’s head, and the mass of flesh overhead gave way to Neil’s grinning face. He looked like he could barely contain himself. “Hey Endy!”

Mamoru coughed, still attempting to replace the air in his lungs. “Hi... Nephrite.”

Just when he was getting used to breathing again, the newly-established guardian grasped him by the shirt, sat him up, and squeezed him again. “You have no idea how long I’ve waited to hear you call me that, man.”

“If I had to hazard a guess, seven hundred and sixty-three days?”

“That, or my whole life, depending on how you look at it. But it could have been seven hundred and sixty-two,” he glared up at Kain, “if not for Captain Buzzkill, who by the way is a jerk and a hypocrite and probably wants you all to himself.”

“Plans change,” Kain’s voice noted dryly. Mamoru noticed that the sounds of cooking overhead had continued despite the circus show being staged in the kitchen.

“Plans change only to benefit you. I bet you didn’t want me to tell him just so you could make it a private special moment between the two of you.”

Mamoru rubbed at his probably bruised ribs, trying to piece together what Neil was implying. It was suddenly occurring to him that a lot of time had elapsed between when he’d revealed himself to Kain and when Kain revealed himself to him. Time that was blurred behind a haze of guilt and fear of losing his friends. “Was that why you were mad yesterday? You were angry at Kain?”

“What? Yeah, of course. What, who did you think I was mad at, you?”

Mamoru stared at him. The answer must have been apparent on his face, because Neil leapt up and rounded on Kain. “Hear that? Do you hear that shit? This is why keeping secrets is a shitty thing to do. This is why we use our words like grown ups.”

The irony of Neil lecturing Kain on maturity could not have been lost on anybody, least of all the man who now glanced over his shoulder, eyeing up the brunette. “Neil, we have our prince, and I made bacon. What could possibly upset you today?”

Neil prolonged his glare, seeming to consider this carefully. He hooked his thumb in the pocket of the well-worn jeans that he had apparently thrown on with no shirt before dashing out of his room. “I am letting you off easy only because this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Do not think that you can solve all your problems with bacon.”

Sasha smirked as he helped Mamoru up. “Being more important than bacon is a big honor in Neil’s world.”

Mamoru gave him a distracted smile. Distracted, because he was in the middle of calculating something that Neil had said. Seven hundred and sixty-three days. Approximately two years. “Why two years? What happened two years ago?” He looked to Jaden, because something told him that Jaden would answer honestly, immediately, without hesitating over matters of tact.

“Huh? Oh, that. That’s how long we’ve been in Boston. Waiting for you.”

Two years. A lot happened in two years. Like watching an innocent girl nearly become the destroyer who would bring down the glaive on the world. Like suffering crippling illness as a curse consumed both his planet and body from the inside. Like being destroyed, the essence of his soul ripped from his body and nearly lost in the source of all life forever. And through all of it, grasping at the fading connection to his guardians, trying desperately to hold on to them, cursing his limited power and his inability to bring them back. They had told him often that they would be with him again, but not once had they explained why he did not need to lie awake at night, wondering what he had done to lose the closest thing he had to family before he ever knew them.

“Oh.”

He sank down into a chair. There was nothing else to say.