CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Seizo had been about ten years old in his first lifetime when his father kidnapped him from his aunt, took him to a place of filth and evil, then began the long process of beating all the light and love out of him. His mother’s Fae blood made this an impossible goal, dooming him to a species of often-killed hope that refused to entirely die.

Ten years later, there was a confrontation between the aunt who had nurtured him and the father who sought to corrupt him; Seizo turned on his father and killed him to protect the aunt he loved, who had been the only mother he knew. He grew into a troubled man with an eternal war inside him between his Fomorian and Faerie sides.

The Fae are fully conscious before birth and retain their memories, though they may be obscured from one lifetime to the next. Seizo was originally half Fae, and he remembered being born in his mother’s blood and pain, then how her body had cooled around him instead of nurturing and warming him.

When he grew older, he recognized that she had tried to kill him along with herself before he was born. His mother’s rejection cut as deeply into his soul as her knife had cut into her own body; how monstrous must he be, he wondered, if his own mother tried to kill him before he was even born?

His aunt had rescued and loved him, had been a mother to him; she had shown him beauty and kindness. That meant everything; he loved and protected her always as well as he could.

Still, the mother who bore him had not loved him – had in fact tried to kill him, and preferred to die rather than live and raise him. The pain of that knowledge never left him, since he never understood what had been in her tormented mind; therefore he never saw that she had been trying to protect him in the only way she thought possible.

The scene changed. Seizo was born into a new life, centuries later in Earth’s history. Thalia was his mother again; she loved him with all her heart and this time was an excellent mother.

Their lives were hard; his father died at sea when little Seizo could not yet walk; but Thalia made do. They lived in a little stone house near the inlet that sheltered their tiny fishing village, where she sang to him every night until he grew old enough to fall in love and marry. When he moved away, the darkness that still lurked in him began to catch up.

The evil planted deep in his soul by his Fomorian father grew and festered, until he beat his wife so hard one night in a drunken rage that she miscarried their first child. When he realized what he had done, he went to the cliffs and threw himself off. Thalia wept for him, so many tears they could have formed a canyon.

Two hundred years later, in a different part of the Multiverse, she birthed him again; they were Dark Faeries, but their darkness was natural and right. They loved the beauty of the night, which was part of their charge; its creatures were their companions, the night noises their music.

Thalia and Tetsuya were reunited for that lifetime, which was by far the happiest any of them had enjoyed in centuries. Thalia was then Seizo’s only parent, since Dark Fae reproduce asexually.

The males could reproduce as well as the females, though their method was slightly different, but neither Seizo nor Tetsuya had chosen to. Thalia produced a little one every so often, and that was enough for them all.

Her light went out first, though they lived long and happily. She was caught in a net one night near dawn by a galumphing, enormous humanoid creature, who brought her home and put her in a glass jar on his windowsill. The creature was too stupid to know that her kind were consumed in direct sunlight, or that she would die without water, shelter or freedom.

She suffered greatly, but not for long; when the ignorant buffoon checked the next day, she was a perfect sculpture of agony in ash. He thought this was still lovely, so he left it where it was for decoration.

This was how her mate and firstborn found her when retracing her steps, worried because she had never come home. Seizo managed to get the jar open, and Tetsuya immediately leapt inside, not letting hope die entirely until he touched her shoulder and she disintegrated before their horrified eyes.

All of them since their first lifetimes had been prone to vengeance, to rage in their grief; this time was no exception. Even the most magnanimous creature could not face such horror with composure, but to any relative of a Fury, the default mindset was already Revenge. Tetsuya went still and silent when she imploded in a cloud of ash at his touch, and when he looked up his eyes were swirling pits of fathomless, pitiless bloodlust.

Seizo brought moths the next night; thousands upon thousands of them swarmed the giant’s home at his direction. They wrapped the great clumsy murderer in a silken cocoon of black and grey thread, then withdrew to the woods outside. The two Dark Faeries, avoiding their grief in a flood of wrath, appeared in front of the inadvertent killer to break his mind with fear. His ignorance did nothing to mitigate his guilt in their unforgiving eyes.

Tetsuya used all the strength he had left after his first flood of grief to set the cocoon and the house on fire, a terrible vindictive smile on his face as he watched the stupid creature scream and burn to death. The one he loved had burned alive; so did her killer. That was justice.

But it did not make Tetsuya’s prospect of life without his beloved at all bearable to him. He added his light without hesitation to the conflagration he wrought, refusing to live on without her; and Seizo was left alone with his younger siblings. He cared for them, but his heart was never truly joyful again, and grew bitter in his loneliness.

In the course of time, he let his own light die out, not caring enough to keep it burning.

There was more, for they were thousands of years old in this journey by now, but Thalia let the rest go. This was all he needed to know for now; he was greatly loved and always had been, though his mother’s love had been twisted by fear when he had first sojourned in her womb.

She brought him out of their journey backward in time, grounding him again where they were, on the second floor of an abandoned warehouse at the docks in Edo, on a stakeout.

***

Seizo’s face was wet but composed. He seemed much calmer than she had yet seen him. “My entire life and character make sense now,” Seizo said in a low voice. “I’ve always been at war inside, and now it seems I always will be.”

“That’s a choice for you to make,” she told him.

“Is it?” he said, his eyes glinting red. “Choice has never been part of my existence – not for you, nor for me. Your rapist did not give either of us a choice. You had the right idea to begin with,” he said bitterly, referring to the knife with which she had cut her belly open.

“Stop it!” she said. “Don’t twist what I’ve shown you.” The storm in her eyes surprised him. She would fight his destructive fire with her floods if she must, and she would win, he saw that.

“Raping me was your father’s choice,” she continued without flinching, “but continuing to carry you in my womb was mine. I knew herbs well enough that I could have aborted you at any point; I didn’t because I wanted you, and instead I tried for too long to find another way for us both. I kept hoping for mercy, for a miracle that never came.

“What you and I both need you to see is that you were always loved; I made the wrong choice because I was afraid. I couldn’t stop thinking of what your life would be like with the Fomorian rapist, and I could not see any way to get either you or myself out of the trap he’d made; I let him dictate what I saw.”

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“Perhaps you chose unwisely,” Seizo said, indulging a moment of bitter self-pity. “His blood tainted me from the first, and you just showed me that has never changed in any lifetime. I’m always fighting, always violent.”

“You believe his bloodline follows you when you’re born into an entirely different species?” she retorted. “What you call his blood is no more nor less than his time-bound mark on your eternal soul. He left it when you were very young, and he made sure it scarred you deeply enough to last.

“But you’ve always been far stronger than he ever was; you’ve shown you’re more than capable of conquering his legacy when you decide to, and creating something of rare beauty with your life instead. You’re also capable of making his evil even deeper, even wider, until it becomes all you are.

“It is, in the end, always your choice who you become. You are both darkness and light; like your mother – who has chosen you many times, not only once.” Including now, she did not add aloud. He had been the other part of her reason to cross the Eridanus Portal.

“Why, then, does the same choice continue arising over and over? When will I be finished with this?” His eyes reflected the exhaustion of his war-torn soul. When you were locked in deadly battle against yourself from your first moment of consciousness, there was no such thing as Peace. It seemed unfair to possess the capacity to yearn for the impossible.

“Choice is a poor description for what is really more a process of choosing. You have a lot of work to do just in repairing what was done by others, through no fault or act of your own. It’s unfair; you were scarred deeply by both your parents from your first breath. But I, at least, have long repented the harm I did, and have always loved you with all my heart and soul – even that first terrible time. I hope I made that clear enough.”

Her eyes searched his when he looked back at her, anxious for him to understand, to be able to heal and continue the journey toward finally learning to be at peace with himself.

His heart surged with love for her, this complicated, imperfect, beautiful mother of his. He reached for her hand, lifted it to his lips, and kissed it. “You have given me a great gift, Okaa-san,” he said, amazed at how right it felt to call her 'Mother' even though in this lifetime she did not appear more than ten years older than he. “I will use it as well as I can. Thank you.”

Tears shimmered and fell when he said this, on both sides. She pulled him into her embrace, relieved and thankful. He rested his head on her shoulder and awkwardly rubbed her back and shoulders; he had not been affectionate with anyone but his obaa-san and his lost love Akemi in this lifetime, and they had both died years ago; he did not know how to give or receive affection with any grace yet, though he was starved for it.

“I’m glad you showed me Harada-san also,” he told her after a few moments. “I’ve never understood why we have this strange, tense, combative yet mutually loyal friendship. He infuriates me, but I’ve always felt close to him. I thought it was just because we’re both so fucking hopeless,” he laughed.

“He is at least as much in need of healing as you are,” she said, her face full of pain again. “He understands so much, and at the same time he understands nothing at all.”

“I’ve tried to fight him over you twice now,” Seizo admitted to her. “I didn’t understand my feelings until I saw you holding that child back when you first joined us, but I knew you were like family to me. I didn’t want him to have you, because I thought of you as mine. But it turns out you were his first.”

“Don’t put it in such a sexist way,” she rebuked. “I belong to myself.” She looked so arrogant Seizo could not help smiling as she continued:

“He and I have belonged to each other since we first awoke, yes, but ever since the Fomorians invaded, we consistently run into obstacles of some kind in finding ourselves or each other – or both. I know how wounded he is, and I swear to myself every time that I’ll be patient and not get angry no matter what stupid thing he does, but I’m wounded too – and no one can hurt me quite like he can. And of course, when I get hurt, it pisses me off.”

They both knew they were now talking in present terms.

“Which leads me to ask, Okaa-san, what the hell happened the other night? He accidentally dropped your underwear on the floor in front of us, you know. Then he said something about asking you to marry him, and you refusing. That can’t be right, can it?” he asked.

She blushed scarlet; no one had mentioned this before, but now she understood why Chief Kato had been so solicitous recently, handling her as if she were some volatile, precious object.

“Ohhh, I have the most irritating pantheon of gods in existence,” she groaned, hiding her face in one hand. “They think they’re funny. They are often actually funny, it’s just you lose perspective when you’re caught up in a timeline.”

Seizo smiled with new sweetness. “Look, I’m not going to get upset when you defy societal conventions of morality. At least, not from now on. If you went and fucked the guy you’ve loved for thousands of years, no one can fault you. But you’re clearly furious at him now, and Harada-san is in a deep depression. Did you actually refuse him? I can’t imagine you would.”

Seizo was being practical, so unshockable it almost shocked her. She loved that side of him; it made her smile.

“I did refuse him, kind of,” she mused, frowning as she looked back on it. “However, he didn’t really ask. Not in a way I would consider ‘asking’, at least. He tossed a reluctant proposal at me like a used tissue, as if it were some kind of unfortunate result of his lack of self-control.”

“Ah. I see,” Seizo said, rolling his eyes. That was typical of Harada.

“He’s got this idea that he doesn’t deserve to be loved – so the more he cares about someone, the less he lets himself be close to them. He thinks he’s poison, that he’ll bring nothing but misery to anyone he’s near, and that makes him act in such a way that he does bring nothing but misery. That idiot.” Thalia looked more sorrowful than angry, though she still felt both.

“Given what you’ve shown me, I realize the causes stretch far back past this lifetime, but would it help if you knew what happened in this lifetime to make him that way?” Seizo asked. “I grew up in the same rural town with him, you know.”

Thalia looked up, intrigued. “Yes, it would probably help a lot,” she said.

So she listened as Seizo described Tetsuya’s nearly loveless childhood, the attack in the fire that blinded his brother, his instantaneous vengeance on the attackers at barely twelve years old followed by the entire town’s utter rejection of him, born of fear. The nicknames he’d had – Demon Child, Berserker Bastard – that set him apart as evil, supernaturally strong and swift but inherently tainted.

“It was one of those situations; Harada-san couldn’t win no matter what. The rich kids wanted to beat him up because he was a bastard and not a ‘real’ son, but the poor kids wanted to beat him up because he lived in the big house. He had a private tutor come when he was five years old; everyone said that guy hated his guts and beat him every day.

“But he just got more and more stubborn, and never broke; after his brother was attacked, he decided to become stronger than everyone else so he could protect what he cared about. He was the one who picked fights after a while, single-handedly taking on gangs of thugs like a lunatic.

“Kato-san found him unconscious in the street, beaten within an inch of his life. Turned out the gangs got together and decided they’d had enough, they’d just all attack him at once and get rid of him. Kato-san moved him to our medical ward where he recovered. Otherwise, he would never have joined our dojo.”

When Seizo finished, she understood. “Everything he does makes sense now,” she said, considering it all in panorama. “As you know, all three of us are descended from Furies in some way; we have a penchant for vengeance. It’s natural he would lash out on behalf of his brother, the one person who showed him any love. But what a terrible childhood; no wonder he hates himself so much – he doesn’t know any other way to be.” Thalia shook her head.

“So you see, Kaa-chan, he really doesn’t feel he deserves you, and he really believes he would only make you miserable. They sound like the lame excuses of a man-whore, but he’s a special kind of sincere idiot. He doesn’t even feel worthy of a normal woman, and you’re ten times more appealing to him, even without memories of the long love you’ve shared.”

She nodded slowly, her face lit with compassion and love, unshadowed by the confusion that had haunted her over the past few weeks. It added to her glow to hear Seizo call her Mother; that was a particular kind of warm happiness she had missed all that lifetime up until that moment.

“I see that, yes, Sei-chan,” she said, grinning when he blushed at the nickname. “And I see he hasn’t changed underneath; his strength is still intact, or he could never have kept going in the face of all that hate and fear. What I can’t see yet is how to convince him that all those voices for all this time have been wrong, and that he should throw out everything he’s learned to believe about himself.”

“Somehow I don’t doubt it will come to you at the right time,” Seizo assured her, smiling. “I hope Hellfire Rising hasn’t landed while we’ve been off on other planes,” he added, looking out the window. Nothing had changed.

“Do you think they’ll really come?” Thalia asked.

Seizo shrugged. “No idea. But I’m glad we’re here waiting for them today,” he added.

“Me too,” she agreed, resting her head on his shoulder.

She later looked back on that moment and shook her head at her complete lack of premonition.