Fic: Learning Curve (Heroes; Kensei)
I know, I know. You're thinking, "But why, Diana, with new Heroes in less than two days, are you writing Kensei fic that will just be completely jossed when his actual canon ability is revealed?"
So before you say it: I KNOW.
Takezo Kensei. A companion fic to "Worldly Appetites".
Good intentions are like the plague: the sickness is catching.
Learning Curve
Help us, they beg. Spain will overwhelm us if we don't do something. Join us and help us protect England. It is our destiny.
However in the world did they find him, the mercenary asks with polite interest, and they proudly present Harry: tall, spotty and ginger-haired; the man who can find anyone. The mercenary asks for the night to think on it. They grant it on the silent condition that he'll say Yes.
Honest to God, he doesn't make a habit of using his power on Other People Like Him, but this time, he decides, he will have to make an exception.
By the time they go into his room next morning, he is already halfway to Portsmouth with a fresh horse and a newly acquired ability. Neither of which, he imagines, they are very happy that he has stolen.
*
Back when the word used to mean minutes instead of days, weeks instead of years, he was what you might call a quick study. ("Cheeky bugger! Think you can disarm me? You just try that a second time. Gaw'n then.")
There are some lessons, though, that won't be rushed, and it was a good thing that he had so much time on his hands because immortality can take several lifetimes of getting used to.
In his case, that meant two hundred years before the urge to leap off cliffs and stick thin, sharp objects through his chest just because he could was no longer a compulsion he acted upon (or, in any case, not regularly). Another hundred years of trial and error before the faculties (or lack thereof) which tell him when (and when not, and how far) to engage in the affairs of those still attached, however briefly, to the mortal coil, were blunted, worn down by the horrible impermanence of it all.
Perhaps there was a smidgen of envy behind the cynicism, too. They, poor miserable sods that they were, at least had a fair chance of making it to Heaven, which was more than could be said for a half-witch, a half-demon, like him. (It wasn't until the 1470s that he started to question if Heaven truly exists.)
And that was when he at last mellowed into a pleasant state of numbness that was more conducive to his seeing his way through the fourteenth century with his sanity (more or less) intact.
So it's not as if he is running away, he tells himself yet again somewhere between Calcutta and Rangoon, taking another prodigious swig from his flagon. This is merely protective avoidance. Good intentions are like the plague: the sickness is catching. And the world never, ever, gets any better.
The last thing he wants is to get involved.
*
The little man who fell from the sky stares at the mercenary through owlish glasses in a way that makes him feel rather like a strung up fish before a starving person.
"Takezo Kensei? I know all the stories about you."
Kensei's first thought: I most certainly hope not!
The End
30 September 2007
So before you say it: I KNOW.
Takezo Kensei. A companion fic to "Worldly Appetites".
Good intentions are like the plague: the sickness is catching.
Learning Curve
Help us, they beg. Spain will overwhelm us if we don't do something. Join us and help us protect England. It is our destiny.
However in the world did they find him, the mercenary asks with polite interest, and they proudly present Harry: tall, spotty and ginger-haired; the man who can find anyone. The mercenary asks for the night to think on it. They grant it on the silent condition that he'll say Yes.
Honest to God, he doesn't make a habit of using his power on Other People Like Him, but this time, he decides, he will have to make an exception.
By the time they go into his room next morning, he is already halfway to Portsmouth with a fresh horse and a newly acquired ability. Neither of which, he imagines, they are very happy that he has stolen.
*
Back when the word used to mean minutes instead of days, weeks instead of years, he was what you might call a quick study. ("Cheeky bugger! Think you can disarm me? You just try that a second time. Gaw'n then.")
There are some lessons, though, that won't be rushed, and it was a good thing that he had so much time on his hands because immortality can take several lifetimes of getting used to.
In his case, that meant two hundred years before the urge to leap off cliffs and stick thin, sharp objects through his chest just because he could was no longer a compulsion he acted upon (or, in any case, not regularly). Another hundred years of trial and error before the faculties (or lack thereof) which tell him when (and when not, and how far) to engage in the affairs of those still attached, however briefly, to the mortal coil, were blunted, worn down by the horrible impermanence of it all.
Perhaps there was a smidgen of envy behind the cynicism, too. They, poor miserable sods that they were, at least had a fair chance of making it to Heaven, which was more than could be said for a half-witch, a half-demon, like him. (It wasn't until the 1470s that he started to question if Heaven truly exists.)
And that was when he at last mellowed into a pleasant state of numbness that was more conducive to his seeing his way through the fourteenth century with his sanity (more or less) intact.
So it's not as if he is running away, he tells himself yet again somewhere between Calcutta and Rangoon, taking another prodigious swig from his flagon. This is merely protective avoidance. Good intentions are like the plague: the sickness is catching. And the world never, ever, gets any better.
The last thing he wants is to get involved.
*
The little man who fell from the sky stares at the mercenary through owlish glasses in a way that makes him feel rather like a strung up fish before a starving person.
"Takezo Kensei? I know all the stories about you."
Kensei's first thought: I most certainly hope not!
The End
30 September 2007