CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“I know you’re upset,” Harada said in the car, his voice low and controlled. “But I hope you’ll reconsider.”

“I can’t talk to you any more until I calm down,” Thalia said, though her voice stayed soft on behalf of little Daishiro. “I don’t trust myself to see clearly yet what I should do in light of what you said to me. What I said before was an emotional reaction, and I need to think about this calmly.”

“I respect that,” he agreed. They rode the rest of the way in silence, but the pain between them was a living thing, stabbing them both every time they caught a glimpse of each other’s profile, or remembered some part of the beauty and ancient magic they had shared on the beach that night.

Harada stayed with Daishiro at Thalia’s cottage, sitting outside in the moonlight while she took a shower and cleaned up for bed. When she was ready, they bade each other good night, and she closed the shoji screen while he walked across the grounds toward his quarters.

Kato saw him and called him over to a post-midnight meeting with Okada and Yamamoto which he had forgotten about.

“The report from the first watch was interesting,” Okada was saying, “because soon after they received a visit from Harada-san and Lieutenant Cairde, there was an uproar a few streets down. The Tigress and her henchmen claim you both attacked them unprovoked, which of course is ridiculous. However, there were three deaths, and the Tigress herself got her wrist crushed.”

“No doubt she deserved it,” Harada said.

“No doubt,” Kato agreed. “What we’re wondering is whether that was you two or not, because it says you fled the scene.”

“The Lieutenant was in her Fury, hunting the Tigress,” Harada explained. “I have no wish for her abilities to be known yet by anyone apart from those of us here, because that will put her at tremendous risk. I think we can all agree that’s obvious.” There was murmured agreement all around, even from Okada. “So when the Tigress screamed and I knew people were on their way, I deemed it best to get her out of there. Her eyes and teeth – you know how she gets.”

Yamamoto was fascinated, not having witnessed the Fury in action. “I actually don’t know,” he said.

“You will, I have no doubt of that,” Kato assured him. “When she smells blood-guilt on someone, she doesn’t stop until justice is served. I don’t think she can stop; it’s part of who she is.”

“She can stop if you get her to hear you and snap out of it,” Tetsuya pointed out. “It’s just getting there that’s difficult.” He reached into his pocket for his pen.

When he had filled out the top portion of his report, he looked up to find his co-workers staring at the floor next to him.

“What?” he demanded, then looked at the floor to see Thalia’s missing undergarment pooled on the floor, breast-cups staring up at him in accusation. His face got very hot very fast.

“Want to tell us what else happened tonight?” Kato suggested, looking concerned.

“Put it this way,” he said. “Either she agrees to marry me, or I commit seppuku. Those are the options.”

Okada came at him, and he didn’t dodge the blow; he felt he deserved it. The blow landed under his eye and sent him crashing into the wall, where he stood and braced for the next attack.

“I don’t have the right to hit you again yet, if you asked her to marry you,” Okada said, still furious.

“I did, pretty much. She refused, then said she needs to think about it,” Tetsuya explained, calm despite the swelling that had already begun under his eye. “Don’t worry, Seizo; I don’t think she’ll have me. Soon enough I’ll be out of your way, and you can be Vice-Chief, as you’ve always wanted.”

With that, he picked up the betraying garment and walked out, needing to be alone with his bleak thoughts and his catastrophically beautiful memories.

The other men stood looking after him, dumbfounded.

***

Thalia and Tetsuya spent the next few weeks avoiding each other by implicit agreement. It was not very hard to do, since they were both busy with separate tasks. This was due to Kato’s oversight; he perceived the need for space and time to do some healing, so he assigned Thalia to patrol each district of the city by turn with each of the twelve squads, in order to get familiar with it and with all her other coworkers.

Chief Kato, the Vice-Chief, and the Lieutenant also met with relatives of Daishiro who traveled to Edo from Gifu Prefecture the same week, traveling via the Nakasendo Road; they were a couple in their late 20s who had a six-year-old daughter of their own. The wife had been Daishiro’s father’s cousin; there were no nearer relatives. They were willing to take the child into their home, and financially well-off enough to do it without undue hardship.

Thalia sensed no significant guilt in them, and they were very kind. They assured her that the Shinsengumi, particularly she and the Vice-Commander, would always be welcome to visit Daishiro-chan, and they were very grateful for all she had done for their young relative. They tried to pay her, but she refused, saying it had been her joy to care for him.

Daishiro had to be reintroduced to his family, since he had not seen them since he had been too small to remember them, but he was fortunately still young enough to adapt quickly so long as he felt safe. He was now playing happily with his six-year-old girl cousin while the adults shared in a Tea Ceremony.

Thalia watched the interactions of the little ones carefully at first, but relaxed once she saw how the little girl was gentle and bossy with him by turns. Thalia knew from her own experience this was a sure sign she was assuming the big-sister role. She smiled, confident Daishiro would be going into a situation that would help him thrive.

So after tea Thalia brought Dai-chan around to say his farewells; he clung to her and Harada longest, while Thalia stood awkwardly averting her face, both of them blushing and full of pain. Once that was over, Thalia held him one last time, kissed him, packed his few things, and sent him with his relatives, smiling and waving until he was out of sight.

She went back to her cottage when he was gone and gave herself an hour to grieve, crying into her pillows.

She did not know it, but Tetsuya came to her porch. He stood outside as she cried, then sat down beside the door, hating that he could not go in to be with her, to hold, comfort, and soothe her as she had done for that child. When she was calmer, he went away.

He didn’t realize these were healing tears for her; she was not remotely sorry she had taken Dai-chan in rather than consigning him to the anonymous care of a hospital. On the contrary, she was happy to have shared a little of his life, to have given him love when he needed it. She would miss him, with his sweet innocence and unguarded affection; that was the loss she allowed herself to cry over.

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Thalia had learned the value of love, and knew the pain it inevitably brought was the price of life’s greatest treasure; that price was steep, but still well worth paying for what it gave you in return: a soul that was more whole, more complete, more fit for continuing the journey.

She finished several things that afternoon, some of them domestic self-assigned tasks for which Chief Kato wanted to have her sainted in every possible religion, others paperwork involving the hijackers and other cases they were processing.

She also had her appointment with the tailor, who took measurements preparatory to creating a custom uniform for her.

When in the Commander’s office at one point, she glanced at the schedule and saw she was listed to take stakeout duty with Captain Okada the next morning, from six a.m. through noon. Not remembering that he was the one who assigned stakeout duty, she wondered how he felt about that, considering how much he had avoided contact with her since the night he saw her comforting Daishiro.

In fact, Okada had realized finally that avoidance was not going to solve his problem; it would have to be faced, and he chose to face it with her in an empty building for six hours.

Between eight and twelve the night before, she arranged with Kato that she would take her owl form and go into the woods to hunt with Alecto. He chose her path in and out of Headquarters with care, so it was least likely anyone would see her. He chose well; only two people did: Tetsuya, who on some level was always looking for her everywhere, and one other, who made careful note of it.

Harada had spent that morning and early afternoon taking care of a few annoying but important diplomatic aspects of his job and walking in the park wondering whether he would still be alive in a month, or if he would commit seppuku before then for breaking the code he himself had put in place, dishonoring the samurai way of life and conduct. There were more than a few moments when he felt seppuku was called for regardless of her willingness to marry him. Her decision did not mitigate the selfishness of his.

He came to think of himself as having violated her, though in reality it had been nothing like that; out of long habit, he fed his self-disgust so that it grew into a ravening parasitic monster, eating him from within.

While he could still be useful, however, he was willing to stay alive.

***

Thalia crawled groaning out of bed at five-thirty to get ready for her shift on stakeout with Seizo. She dressed, then straightened her bed, still groggy. At about five after six, a knock came at her shoji screen.

“Come in,” she called. Okada Seizo entered and without a word handed her a steel thermos full of coffee. She tasted it; it was strong and sweet with a dollop of cream, exactly the kind she loved most. She looked up, dazed, and declared Okada her hero. He laughed, and they departed together on excellent terms.

The pair they relieved at the stakeout reported no unusual activity; same as it had been the entire time so far. Thalia had brought a blanket she was knitting, anticipating she would have an abundance of time for it. As she sat there, needles clicking gently, sunlight streaming in the window and lighting her hair on fire, she hummed.

Seizo was silently ravaged by this; it shook him, being so much like what he now suspected were actual memories he had of her from other lives. It was this he needed to confront her about. He had not known how to broach such a bizarre subject, but when he saw her knitting in the sunlight humming, he lost his composure.

“Mother,” he said from a heart full of bitter pain.

She looked up at him, her eyes full of recognition and knowledge, and a sort of relief that he recognized her as well.

“Yes,” she replied.

One tear spilled from an over-full reddish-brown eye; his lower lip quivered. “I hate you, you bitch,” he said. She put down her knitting, knelt in front of him and placed her hands on his shoulders.

“I know, love,” she said, allowing her own tears to fall. “No one could blame you for that.”

Seizo’s expression remained murderous a moment longer, then broke. He leaned his head against Thalia’s shoulder, hiding his face against her, and shook with great, heaving sobs. She put her arms around him and held him, rocking a little every now and then in a gentle swaying motion, as if he was a baby in her arms again.

Eventually, Seizo pushed away from Thalia, but gently. His eyes were swollen, redder than usual, but clear and alert.

“I don’t understand this; I have memories of growing up with you as my mother, yet I also see so clearly a time when you took your life and tried to take mine with it. Is any of it real?” he asked.

She nodded. “All of it is real. You and I have lived a long, long time, through many mortal lifetimes, and we’ve more than once or twice been together as mother and son.”

“I see,” he said, and took several moments to absorb this in silence. Finally he spoke again, looking up at her with pain and anger in his face. “Since all of it is real, I need to know why you did it,” he said. “I know you tried to murder us both, and you only succeeded with yourself. If I ever knew why you hated me so much, I have forgotten.”

Tears leaked out of her eyes; she put her hand up and brushed his hair away from his face on one side, then touched his cheek.

“I never hated you,” she said, “but I don’t expect you to believe or understand that. I owe you the best explanation I can give; will you let me show you, rather than tell you? It will be much more effective.”

He nodded, unable to trust his voice.

Thalia leaned forward and pressed her forehead against Seizo’s. He closed his eyes by reflex. Before long a scene unfolded, as if they were watching a movie.

Seizo saw Thalia when she was a far younger soul, before he himself had even awoken as a soul. She was a laughing, joyful, tenderhearted creature, her soul mated with Harada’s even back then. They had both been Fae, not human.

Tetsuya, too, had been very young and innocent, hard as it was to believe now. He was always more serious than she had been, even back then, but they complemented each other. No couple was ever happier than they when they first arrived upon Gaia with the rest of their tribe.

Their innocence betrayed them, however, when a warlike race called Fomorians came against their people unprovoked and committed unspeakable war crimes against them.

The young creature who would much later become Thalia lost her mind in grief and rage when her beloved suffered a horrific first death at their hands, and it was then that she became a Fury.

She was given power to bring about justice, to restore the balance of Creation; but she had ultimately been unable to restrain her lust for Fomorian blood, even when it was innocent. Since she had been entrusted with justice, but had also brought injustice, the higher gods punished her for a thousand years, stripping her of her power, then sending her back as part of a mortal Faerie species, which would over millennia interbreed with other races to form humanity.

When she was first sent back, she went without Tetsuya. That second lifetime had been a punitive sentence intended to punish her for her war crimes; he had been her cause, but had not been directly involved, so he was not permitted to share her punishment, though he demanded to. He refused to watch her being punished alone, and rebelled against the gods in his turn. Neither of them had ever been biddable, it seemed.

The Fomorian leader was there when Thalia first returned, alone and vulnerable without her power or her intimacy with the Earth. He remembered her well and lusted for revenge. He found his opportunity when she was in the fields one afternoon, and raped her.

She did not discover her pregnancy until she was nearly five months along; she was new to this method of reproduction. The rapist discovered the pregnancy at the same time and taunted her; he tormented her with promises to take the child by force and either teach it to be like him, or if it would not, to slowly kill it. She never doubted that he both intended to do this and would succeed. Her punishment was cruel indeed; she had no means of defending herself or her child against a far more powerful enemy, with relatively little connection to the elements around her.

She feared for the child inside her, knowing his father would make his life unbearable from beginning to end, seeing him as an extension of her, an object to punish and torture. She saw a life for him surrounded by hatred and filled with cruelty, and it broke her heart that she could do nothing to prevent it.

Her mind grew darker and darker until she could see no way out for herself or her child - except the knife.

So she took a knife with a long blade and cut her belly open, attempting a radical method of self-abortion. She then sliced as deeply as she could into one of her inner thighs, severing a femoral artery and bleeding out in minutes.

She had not known then that her baby survived. Thalia’s sister found him with her cold, stiff body, and brought him home with her. She raised him, loved him, nurtured him, but lost him when the rapist got wind of the child’s survival.

That child would, many lifetimes later, become First Division Captain of the Shinsengumi, Okada Seizo.