Tokyo Babylon: Sound part 11: Ringing / Joining The phone rang twice before it was picked up. "Hai, Shirou desu!" a bright female voice answered. "... Hello. May I speak to Kamui, please?" Subaru asked hesitantly, wondering who the woman was. Kamui's wife, perhaps? Her voice sounded familiar.... "May I ask who is calling?" "Sumeragi Subaru." "Oh!" Subaru could hear the slight shock in her voice. "Hold on a moment, please." The receiver was set down and Subaru could hear light footsteps running on the other end. Then the phone was picked up again. "... Hello?" "Kamui?" The voice of the other Dragon of Heaven had changed only very slightly, deepening just a little over the past eight years. Subaru knew it was him instantly. "Subaru?" "... Yeah." "It's been eight years. I didn't know if you'd forgotten us or what...." "How could anyone forget that?" They were both silent for a minute, then Subaru forced himself to speak. "What's happened to you since, Kamui?" "Yuzuriha and I got married four years ago," Kamui said softly. "We have a one-year-old daughter. And we've stayed in touch with Arashi; she never got over Sorata... she became a writer, and teaches at CLAMP Campus." "Congratulations, then," Subaru murmured. "Your life is stable?" "Mmm," Kamui agreed. "Yeah. You?" "I'm engaged to a lady I knew briefly then." Subaru didn't have to illuminate or even stress the "then." "She and I have a son... seven years old. This past month has been a surprise in regard to that...." "Congratulations to you, too, then," Kamui replied, sounding slightly startled. "I'd never thought of you as the type to...." His voice trailed off. "'Engage in illicit affairs'?" Subaru supplied. "I'm not... I wasn't. Midori was just the one. The right one. And the fact of what she was... what she knew... made it easier for me to survive what we all went through." He stopped, then finished softly, "I'd like to invite you and Yuzuriha... and Arashi... to the wedding. I'd like you to meet her." * * * Midori sat still and listened to the counts of her breath. Then, carefully, she reached out of her own soul and touched two of the three others that were in the room with her. One was very nearly empty, having only the faintest gloss of emotion, and that towards the other, who was frightened, but calm, restrained. The Sakurazukamori and a future Balancer. With a single heartbeat, she dove into the mind of the former, seeking the depths of the empty heart, needing to find only a single abberation of the void there to tie her guarding magics to and build them from. Aside from the gently swirling presence of affections for her son, Midori found nothing. Nothing alive, that was. But locked and buried in the depths of Sakurazukamori's heart were the emotions he had killed over the years, feelings he had had for others... two others in specific. Midori did not touch the emotions that her brother had once felt for her, knowing already what they would be. But the ones related to Subaru she felt no compunctions about rifling through. She needed the truth there. She needed to know if her suspicions were correct... if her brother had ever felt anything for their shared lover... she needed to know if he had ever cared, even the slightest, for Subaru, before he had had to win their "bet." * * * Love. That was the first thing Midori found. Absolute, unconditional love for Subaru, so deep and rich that it made her want to cry that her brother had had to kill such a thing. And mixed in with the dead love were all the things that had made Subaru love Seishirou in return: the compassion, the gentleness, the passion, and an overwhelming *need* to be loved in return. And below that, buried the deepest, even more never admitted to, was the hatred. The hatred of himself for having to destroy the one person he loved, the hatred of what he was, and then a quieter, subtler hatred of Subaru for being so innocent and incapable of seeing through the maboroshi, the illusion, of words that Seishirou had created. //GREEN// Midori blinked, startled, as the flashing sense of... something... prompted her to continue her searching, sifting through the ashes, until she did uncover a small, burning spark of emerald. Life. Growth. Emotion. Emotion. "Gods," Midori whispered, cupping the tiny, infinitely precious piece of love in her hands. She cradled it carefully as she brought it up to eye level, knowing exactly what it meant. She didn't need to know if he still cared for her. So long as Seishirou-niisama loved her son... and had this tiny remainder of his one love.... * * * Midori smiled sadly, closing her eyes as she nestled the small light back into the death and void she had found it in, covering it and hiding it from her brother's view. It wouldn't do, no, not at all, to let Seishirou-niisama know of this living spark of his own heart, for he would only destroy it. Quietly, she stood and began to lay the groundwork of her magic, tracing her diagrams in glowing green and silver and black until they matched what she needed, circles and stars of many points and pieces of scripts in languages dead and alive, forming beautiful patterns that reached between two souls and nearly, almost, possibly, touched and connected them to one another. As she watched, a thin gold thread reached from one apex to another, and hung delicately between them. Midori breathed a soft sigh. "Thank the Gods," she murmured, and opened her eyes. * * * Seishirou watched as Midori woke from the trance that connected his soul to her son's. He had felt within him, as she did her magic, a stirring of something that he had thought he had killed, and it disturbed him that he felt it still. He did not glance at Subaru-kun; that might give him away, and he needed to sort through this now. The thought had almost a sigh about it, one that was unexpected. He had quenched the part of himself that had lusted after the shounen, and killed the part that had attempted to *care*, hadn't he? But still, there was that something... and it, damn it, was the reason he had not killed Subaru-kun. He hadn't accepted Hokuto as payment, though that was what Subaru-kun and Midori-chan no doubt thought. He had simply never killed Subaru because Subaru had won the bet. Seishirou thought to himself, Seishirou mused as he watched his other half, his heart, help Midori to her feet. A smile twisted the corner of his mouth. ***** Linguistics: "Hai, Shirou desu" means "Hello, Shirou residence." "Maboroshi" literally does mean "illusion."