Dr. Xadium: Created page with " Heartless to Heartless

Heartless to Heartless

By Yaijinden

"Maaaaaaanngoooo..."

The voice was next of a thousand that ha..."

2014-11-15T21:05:14Z

Created page with "<HTML> <TITLE>Heartless to Heartless</TITLE> <h1>Heartless to Heartless</h1> <h2>By Yaijinden</h2> "Maaaaaaanngoooo..." The voice was next of a thousand that ha..."

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<TITLE>Heartless to Heartless</TITLE>

<h1>Heartless to Heartless</h1>
<h2>By Yaijinden</h2>

"Maaaaaaanngoooo..." 
The voice was next of a thousand that had haunted her. She could not
sleep without dreaming of their negotiations, she could not make
breakfast without a whispered entreaty, she could not work alchemy
without conjuring their pact-makers, and she couldn't even cry alone. 
Mango Kattan was a woman of many talents and powers, but getting on
with her life was currently not one of them. She had been propositioned
by extradimensional powers for a thousand years, now, by a hundred
thousand different voices making a million different offers. They
promised power, happiness, and more to her- if only she would surrender
herself to them for the briefest of moments. She had rebuffed them for
a milennia now, but that did not seem to dissuade them. 

Perhaps they thought that she would be more willing to listen with her lover gone. 
Furu was gone. Dead and gone. Gone forever- extinguished,
disintegrated, reduced to his component subatomic particles and
scattered beyond the reaches of the galaxy. Even the malignant machine
awareness couldn't recover from that hefty a blow- even Devil Furu
couldn't reintegrate itself. 
Mango had lost track of time. It felt like she had been mourning him
for the blink of an eye- but there were fleeting images of people
growing up, normal human men and women, growing older and having
children and brining them to Magellan Orbital. Realistically, Mango
understood that this meant she had lost at least two decades of her
life to a blur of sorrow and pain. Twenty years, in the blink of an
eye- the sort of sin her past life would have condemned her for
committing. 

But really- what was time to someone who was going to live forever? 
She had been tempted to try the same trick on herself, once the deed
had been done. After Sakura had exhausted herself screaming, after she
had finally and suddenly come to realize the fact that he was not
coming back, Mango had seriously considered trying to find a way to end
her own life for keeps. She had thought, and pondered, and finally come
to the conclusion that the only way out of her existence was to drown
her sorrows in chemicals. 

The chemicals could only do so much, though. Staying sober to play the
part of Sailor Magellan- that was easy. Her Heartless physiology could
reset her body almost at will- hangovers, bad trips, and brain damage
were meaningless concepts to someone such as herself. These things were
balanced out, though, by the fact that chemicals rarely affected her
for long. She didn't have perfect control of herself the way others
did- what hope for perfect control she'd once had was essentially lost
when she took in the Sailor Crystal. 
"Maaaaanngooooo," the voice hissed again, soothingly. Mango ground her
teeth and buried her head deeper between her legs. The only way to blot
out the voice was to wear the Sailor fuku- but she was always reluctant
to do that for longer than she had to. Nobody knew whom Sailor Magellan
had been before- and the lessons Minako had learned more than a
thousand years ago were still fresh in her mind. Constant
transformation bore the danger of personality alteration, and whoever
Sailor Magellan had been before, that woman had been a very, very angry
person. 

Better to stay mundane and bear the brunt of the voices than to be locked away by her friends. 
"Why does it cry, Mango?" the voice whispered- and when Mango felt a
feathery touch running down the back of her neck, she bolted upright
and away. No mere broker had ever managed physical contact- not through
the veil, and especially not through the spirit wards. 

"Why does it cry?" the voice repeated, sounding almost curious. 
"Whatever you're peddling," Mango retorted, running through a list of
countermoves, "I don't want it. When the hell will you people give up?"
 "You... misunderstand." For a brief moment, she thought she
could see the flicker of a smile, before it faded into the darkness she
had been meditating in. "I have not come to bargain with you for
something I already possess."
 The woman's blood ran cold. "Show yourself," she demanded,
taking a step towards where the smirk had been. "Before I find you and
fashion a more permenant solution." 
"I do not think you will be doing such a thing," it responded, adopting
a vocal inflection that was suddenly very familiar. "Even as talented
as you are, I have yet one... crucial... advantage over you." 

From the shadows, a human hand produced a small, steel box- and Mango's
breath caught in her throat. She had never seen this box before, but
she was completely and frighteningly aware of its importance. The box
itself was padlocked, and further wrapped in a length of silver chain
that had neither beginning nor end. She recognized symbols of an arcane
nature inscribed upon the box- wards, sealed to protect any outsiders
from looking into and gaining access to the contents. 
Through all these barriers, though, Mango could feel a painful,
intimate tie with the thing inside there- and was suddenly acutely
aware of the hole inside her chest. "Yaijinden," she snarled, the word
leaving her lips like an epithet as she slowly pulled herself to her
knees. "Why did you come here?" 
"Why do I come anywhere?" he responded lightly, still lingering in the
shadows- save his hand, still stretched forth into the dim station
lights. "That was an unusually silly question, especially coming from
you." 
"...come for a little joke at my expense, then." Mango's eyes narrowed
hatefully at him before flicking back to the box he held. "Come to mock
my pain, have you? Like you do with everyone else." 
Yaijinden was silent for a moment, regarding the woman with a critical
eye. "If Minako knew what she had done to you," he observed. "If she
knew, would she have done it anyway?" 
He tossed the box into the air, catching in the next heartbeat as he
watched her gaze follow it perfectly. "If Furu had known I was in
possession of this... I wonder. Would he have been content to kill you
over and over again? Or would he have settled for extinguishing your
light from the universe forever?" 
She wanted that box. She wanted it out of his hands. Sailor Crystal or
not, Mango needed it back in her possession. Why couldn't she make her
legs work? "You know," Yaijinden continued absently, tossing the box
from hand to hand, "back in the day, when I said 'technically immortal'
to all those people, I wasn't lying. The Heartless Khadi have one
universal weakness- when our hearts are removed, we become something
other than human. Our spirits are, in part, bound and removed beyond
the concerns of mortality- but that binding also makes them keenly
vulnerable." 

"Please," Mango whispered, eyes locked on the box. "Don't do that." 

"Most of the ancient world believed that the heart was the throne of
the spirit," he added, either not hearing her or deliberately ignoring
her request. "Modern science understands that the mind is in the brain-
consciousness is a quantum effect, a snapshot of neurons and chemicals
and all those wonderful little organic bits." 
"Don't do that," she repeated, more loudly this time. If she could
build enough strength in her legs, she might be able to jump for it... 
"Just the same, the heart continues to be radically important to our
understanding of the mind." Yaijinden watched her for a moment, and
then suddenly elected to spin the box on one finger. "We speak of
matters of the heart. Heart-break. Heart-felt emotions. Hearty meals,
even. It's an obvious thermometer of an individual's emotional state-
and because we believe it to be important, it has become important-
especially in older magics, where the heart IS the end-all, be-all of
power. 
"So, when the first would-be immortal sorcerer underwent the
procedure... well, the heart was a natural choice, wasn't it?" He
flashed another smile and took the box firmly in one hand, holding it
out to Mango again. "You have to have somewhere to bind the spirit- and
that binding point has to be terribly important. After the ritual, you
have a bound spirit, a flesh-form to work your will through, and a
crucial weakness. The center of Khadi immortality is the security of
one's heart- and in those days, long ago, to hold the heart of another
was to exhibit complete and total power over them." 
"What do you want from me?" Mango asked, a note of desperation in her
voice. Why couldn't she stand? "I won't turn against them. I won't. I
don't care if you destroy me or not." 
"I want you to understand what I'm going to offer you," Yaijinden said,
a sudden hardness in his voice. "You accepted this on a whim before. I
will not let you do so again." 
It took an effort of will to make her eyes look from the box to his
face. When she met his eyes, she was briefly reminded of a sandstorm-
but she nodded, and his features softened a bit in return. "It's not so
much that the khadi are not supposed to be emotionless," he offered.
"We are all consumed with our passions- and sometimes, those passions
demand emotional responses. The life of a khadi becomes that of
single-minded dedication, and more often than not leads to a simpler if
more corruptible life. 
"But you... you are complete, in a way that none of the rest of us
are." Mango was unsettled by the sadness in his eyes. "If you had
possessed that Sailor Crystal when I cut it out of you," Yaijinden said
quietly, "it would have been taken along with you. It would have become
unbalanced like the rest of your soul would have, and you would have
fallen into blissful detatchment. But in ways I don't quite understand,
the crystal is mediating. Keeping your soul from self-cannibalizing
your flaws." 

"And that's a bad thing, huh." She was unimpressed with his words, and actually made herself sound like it. 
"More crucial than you understand." The box disappeared within the
folds of his robe, though Mango found that she could still sense where
it had gone. With it out of her immediate sight, she found her strength
slowly returning to her. If Yaijinden noticed this, or knew it, he
wasn't showing any interest in the fact. "The mortal mind is not meant
to endure," he said forcefully. "It is meant to grow, wither, and die.
The Sailor Crystal is keeping you quasi-human- and if you thought Furu
was a terrible loss, you have not even begun to conceive of the regrets
you will accumulate soon enough." 
"Why do you care?" Mango said suddenly, a cold look in her eye. "You've
never cared before. You aren't capable of it. Why is this so important
to you?" 

"If I TOLD you," he replied crisply, "then it wouldn't be a surprise, would it?" 

"Humor me." 

"No." 

She rolled her eyes. "What are you going to do, then? Cut my heart out again?" 

Yaijinden clicked his tongue disapprovingly. "I should have expected
this sort of reaction," he snorted. "You'd rather wallow in your own
self-pity and your mourning than find a way out of the whole mess. If I
had a dime for every time I've heard that..." 

"Then you'd have a spaceship full of useless currency, wouldn't you." Mango smiled bitterly. "What DO you want, then?" 
"Hmph." He folded his arms contemptibly, but there was the hint of a
smile in his eyes. "I feel obliged to offer you a choice in the
matter," he said, shrugging. "If you decide you would rather not go
through the whole trouble of the human experience, there are two
options. The first sees to the removal of that Sailor Crystal
haphazardly integrated in your body..." 

"And what would that make me? Liverless? Pancreasless? Appendixless?" 
"Not... quite." Yaijinden winced and shrugged. "Magic is a wonderful
thing, but it doesn't mix well. If I tried to bind the Sailor Crystal
and remove it from your body, it might just not work. While I know what
the crystals are, I don't truly understand them- not having one and
all, and not having a chance to experiment. In order to remove it, I
would need the thing that put it in there." 

"Galaxia's bracers." 
He snapped his fingers. "Yeah, that's it. I could just point and shoot,
and then you'd be well back on your way to your destiny of inevitable
mania and relative insanity." 

"And to get those," she said dryly, "you would have me get you past
palace security. And I would have to trust you to return them, too..." 

"You technically wouldn't have to trust me to give them back in order to get them," the man acknowledged, shrugging, "but yeah." 

"Thought so. What's option number two?" 

"Self-destruction. Kill yourself and get this over with." 

"...wouldn't the whole heartless thing get in the way of the whole dying bit?" 
"Not if I help you around it." Yaijinden patted his robe, over the box.
"If I destroy this," he said, pleased, "then there is nothing binding
your spirit to this mortal coil. You will enter whatever afterlife
there is, and you will effectively cease to be who you are." 
Her eyes involuntarily shot back to the box before she made her gaze
fix back on his own. "And what about this?" Mango said, tapping her
forehead. "This is like a soul, isn't it?" 

"I... I don't know!" His eyes suddenly lit up with an interest she had
seen him take in things he was about to destroy. "It'll be an
experiment," Yaijinden announced. "You ask me to destroy your heart, I
do so, and then we see what happens to the half-soul that's left in
your body! Will it go back to Galaxy Cauldron? Will it take control of
your body, leaving a half-crazed maniacal soldier of RAGE? Will it
BECOME your new replacement heart?!" 

"I don't like this idea either," she observed clinically. 

"...oh. I see." His face fell. "You're sure?" 

"Positive." 

Yaijinden sighed weightily. "Oh well. Can't blame me for asking, can you?" 
"No, not really." She stood, brushing the seat of her pants off and
watching him. "You're the crazy sort of bastard who would think that
asking someone to kill themself is a reasonable request." 

"Always have been," he nodded. "I'm sure you feel better now, don't you?" 

"Somewhat," Mango agreed warily. 
"Don't get used to it." Another sinister smile flickered across his
face. "You'll remember Furu soon enough. The way he talked, the way he
moved, the way his skin felt against yours... soon enough, it'll all
come back to you. Then, you will have no Void, and the ninjas will get
your fish. And then, you will be sad." 

She tilted her head to the side, not particularly impressed with his ranting. "Are you done yet?" Mango said critically. 
Yaijinden scratched his chin. "Yeah, I think so," he nodded, hooking
his thumbs in his pants pockets and turning about. "Oh, and if you ever
change your mind? Just... think hard enough about me coming. I'll see
if I can't find you." 
She tensed her body up, ready to leap forward and make a grab for the
box he carried- but by the time she sprung, he had already disappeared
into the darkness from which he had come. Mango rolled to her feet on
the metal floor, quickly conjuring an alchemic circle; the light
fixture she created brightly illuminated the hallway, leaving nothing
to doubt. 
He was gone, the rat bastard, and she couldn't track him... and perhaps
it was better that she didn't. Mango suddenly wondered if he hadn't
meant to toy with her like that- show her something to focus on, in
order to put her loss behind her. Get what he wanted out of her without
having to actually exert himself. 

Or maybe he wasn't. 

She didn't know. Things could go either way, really, and that was what was important. 
Finding it in herself to smile, Mango leaned back in a long stretch and
started making her way down the hall. She would bother with mourning
soon enough. 
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Heartless to Heartless - Revision history

Dr. Xadium: Created page with " Heartless to Heartless

Heartless to Heartless

By Yaijinden