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Who: Fayt Leingod, Albel Nox, and later Cliff Fittir, Okita Souji and Law.
What: A spar gone awry.
When: January 13th, afternoon
Where: Battledome
Summary: Fayt is tired of Albel avoiding them over lingering discomfort from the mistletoe shift, and tries to help him regain a sense of normalcy the only way he knows might work.
Rating: PG-15 for violence and heavy injuries.

Fayt had given it nearly two weeks. Two weeks of Albel sulking around, avoiding so much as talking to him or even looking at him. He'd barely seen the man, and even when he had it had only been for a second or two before Albel darted off.

He wasn't an idiot. That Albel seemed to be avoiding him was obvious enough, and he supposed he should have expected him to react this way-- Fayt had shrugged off the shift just fine, long used to the Malnosso messing with them by now, but Albel obviously didn't know how to. Albel avoided physical and emotional affection like it was the black plague, and shifted or not it had probably made Fayt's presence difficult for him to deal with.

It was more than a little awkward. Albel was eccentrically reactive at the best of times, but Fayt felt bad for making him so uncomfortable, even if it wasn't technically his fault. He had to do something.

A few messages sent Albel's way over the journals to try to smooth things over had gotten no response, though that wasn't surprising. Fayt finally just decided on the direct approach, heading to the battledome where he knew he'd find Albel training more likely than not.

When he finds the room the swordsman is using, he walks right in. There would be no running away this time.

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"He..." He what? "He what?" Abducted? As in kidnapped? Forcibly removed against his will?

Souji blinked, staring at Fayt for a moment with the astonishment clear on his face. "And yet you still became friends?"

"His words, not mine." His expression turns a little impish at Souji's reaction.

"Some pretty nasty stuff happened that ended up with me stranded on a planet without any help. Back then I wasn't the best at fighting or protecting myself, and I ended up in a tight spot. He rescued me. Turns out he'd been trying to locate me for a while. 'I'm here to abduct you' he says. Wasn't the most reassuring thing to tell someone, but he saved my life and was my only way off the planet, so..." He'd shrug, if he didn't know the motion would be painful. Cliff had been suspicious, but ultimately a decent guy from the start.

Souji sighed and leaned back in his chair - that did sound like something Cliff would say. As straightforward as the man could be sometimes, he had a very unique way of spinning things. Putting his elbow on his knee, Souji sat forward again and put his chin in his hand. "That does sound like something he'd say to someone. But why had he been looking for you? And apparently across an entire galaxy to find you stranded on a strange planet?"

"....Well, his 'boss' wanted to meet me, actually. You know, Maria? Me getting stranded threw a bit of a kink into that plan, though." That, and a Vendeeni pursuit stranding them on yet another planet. To say Luceti was Fayt's first experience getting stranded in an unfamiliar place would be far from the truth of the matter.

Boss - Maria, the girl Souji had mistaken for Fayt's sister. Cliff had told him a bit about her, but how they all fit together was still a bit shaky for Souji. There were a few things Cliff was tightlipped about - and home was number one on the list.

"So Maria-san was interested in meeting you then. Was there a reason why?"

"Because of my father's research. Who she really wanted was to speak to my dad, but.... he'd been captured by the Vendeeni." Fayt's expression loses a bit of his humor as he says this.

Vendeeni was an unfamiliar term - obviously a rival faction or race, one that was after his father and his family. Souji recalled hearing that Fayt was still a student. If his father was an important man, apparently a scientist or researcher, then whatever he was working on was important enough either to a war (perhaps the war that Cliff talked about sometimes) or to the Vendeeni themselves, but Fayt's father hadn't wanted them to have it.

He frowned, knowing that was the easiest and best way to show concern and sympathy. "...I'm sorry to hear that. So she came to you, hoping you would know what your father had been working on?"

"Not exactly.... I didn't know what he'd done until later. Both of us wanted get him back, for our own reasons." Him simply, to get his father back, Maria, for answers.

What he'd done. It was an important distinction, one that said his father had either found his answer and implemented it and that had lead to his capture. Or that he had found his answer, hidden in, and the opposite side had taken him to torture him and find out where it was.

"What had he done that would make kidnapping him a priority?"

'What' indeed. Fayt pauses, mulling over what he should tell Souji. After everything that had happened, and how closely involved he'd gotten, he knew Souji should know. Fayt knew it, and he was sure Cliff had realized it too. Perhaps it was a combination of trust and the fever easing up his guard, but he knew it'd come out eventually.

"His research. The same thing Maria wanted answers about. I don't think we ever got the full story of why the Vendeeni wanted me and my dad, but I know what they wanted."

It was a roundabout answer, but more of an answer than Souji had gotten in a long time. His father's research had accomplished something important, something both Maria (and thus Quark and Cliff) and the Vendeeni wanted control over. It was a power struggle on a larger scale than anything Souji had experience with in his own life, but it all boiled down to a familiar concept: someone wanted what Fayt had. He had knowledge, intrinsically or explicitly about his father's research.

"What was his research about that two warring factions went after the both of you?"

"My father's the Federation's leading authority in Symbological Genetics-- It's the study of the symbology and the genetic potential living beings carry to use it. Symbology's kind of similar to what you'd call 'magic' here, I guess."

Fayt closes his eyes for a moment, breathing out. It was safe to tell him, right?

"Before I was born, he and his research team found out there'd be a large scale threat to our universe in the future by accident. Because of that...." It was easier, speaking in a neutral manner like this, even if he was far from it in the matter.

"He and his team used Genomorphy to give three kids different abilities so they could try to stop it, by embedding special symbols in their genetic material."

There were a lot of words in there that Souji didn't really understand - genetics, being the leading one. Still, he listens to Fayt's story, knowing that this was something secret, something that had been kept from him. A large scale threat to their universe that maybe had something to do with that 'realms' thing that Albel had mentioned in his rage last night. His chin unconsciously floated up and off his hand as he listened, all his attention on trying to understand what Fayt was saying.

Before he was born, three kids, different abilities - Souji's eyes widened slightly and he lowered his hand, straightening as the gravity of Fayt's explanation came to bear. His father had experimented on him before he had even been born - Fayt had to be one of the children with this chosen ability to save their universe. He, himself, was a weapon or a weapon wielder who had the task of saving everyone and everything.

How did he even respond to something like that? He saw Fayt in a new light now; one tinged with sympathy. To be so young with such responsibility had to be a terrible weight to carry. "It's no wonder Maria-san and the others were looking for you then. Did she know or was it just a hunch?"

Fayt watches Souji's reactions carefully as he spoke, looking for any sign that it wouldn't be accepted well. He was grateful that there wasn't any fear there that he could see. Such modifications to human beings, even in his time, were considered taboo and prohibited, and that wasn't even going into the 'danger to the entire universe' that made it necessary.

"She knew. She found out on her own and wanted answers, which was why Cliff was trying to track me down and Quark was looking for my dad. She's the one who told me about our powers, though she does something a bit different than I can do." He pauses, before hesitantly continuing.

"I know it sounds crazy. Trust me, I didn't want to believe it either at first."

Edited 2014-02-02 07:44 (UTC)

"I stopped believing that anything could be too crazy after I woke up here with wings, Fayt-kun." He smiled faintly as if to urge the boy to keep talking. Honestly, crazy had stopped being a word he used to describe anything here - the lights in the ceiling, running hot water, bathrooms indoors, machines that cooked food, stoves that needed no firewood, carriages that had no horses, deaths that remained impermanent, lizard people, talking purple ponies.

After seeing everything that he had seen here, he wasn't even certain what could be called 'crazy' anymore. He'd been to space, gone to an enclosure and fought off the undead, he'd even heard of cities built under the sea - to anyone from his era, it would sound like the ravings of a madman, but here, some people thought it was normal. Crazy was an entirely subjective term.

"Would you tell me what you can do? I promise I won't call you crazy for it."

"...Guess you kind of have a point." Crazy experiences like Luceti and otherwise, in Fayt's case, had pretty much confirmed that somewhere out there, just about anything you could call 'crazy' wasn't as impossible as you'd have thought. He'd have called himself mad if he'd gone back in time to tell his 19 year old self of everything that had happened, after the events on Hyda.

That's generally one of the biggest reasons why he didn't mention those things, though.

"It's a kind of Symbology, like some of the stuff I used during the draft, but a lot more powerful. My dad called it the power of 'Destruction'." He grimaces a little at how that sounds.

"Pretty morbid sounding, right? From what I've been told, it does pretty much what the name describes."

The power of destruction. The name didn't leave a whole lot to the imagination as to what it could do and what it was meant to do. Souji didn't understand how Destruction could be used to save Fayt's universe, but there was still much about the universe itself that Souji did not know. This talk of realms had left him with only a hazy idea of how Fayt's world worked. Add to that this universal threat and Souji was basically staring into a void where anything could happen.

Still, the most important thing here was not whether he understood all of the ramifications of what Fayt was confiding in him. It was the fact that Fayt was confiding in him at all and that he was a boy caught in the middle of a war because of something his father had done to him. Fayt had never asked for whatever power Destruction was supposed to bring, it had been pushed onto him like the steel weight of the world. Souji couldn't imagine how hard it had to be to keep a secret like that - especially when it meant he was unwittingly a threat to the village.

"It does sound morbid, but war tends to do that to everything." Souji reached out and touched Fayt's arm, squeezing it lightly. The conversation was going places that Fayt might later regret once the drugs wore off and even Souji knew when he had heard all he needed to know. The rest would come with time - and he'd press someone less vulnerable for it. "I won't tell anyone. You should sleep some - it can't be good for you to talk so much in your condition."

Fayt would regret it some, later, but not entirely. Souji deserved to know, and in his opinion, he would have found out sooner or later. It wasn't like they didn't leave things out, or refuse to explain things. Meeting Albel and Cliff at all wouldn't have happened if it weren't for everything that had happened back in their universe, if it wasn't for the Vendeeni's pursuit. Eventually, questions would be asked and answers would be necessary.

Teenagers didn't just go jaunting around the universe with total strangers who found them in the middle of nowhere, after all. He'd been teasing when he'd quoted Cliff's intent to 'abduct' him, but it really would have only made things suspicious in a similar manner if they left out the truth of the matter once Souji wanted to know more about them.

He trusted him, and he knew he'd keep quiet about it, even without the verbal reassurance. There's a faint, sleepy smile on his face as he closes his eyes, sleep indeed creeping up rapidly. "Thanks, Souji..... and sorry."

He smiled, as he always did, and smoothed Fayt's hair back before pulling the blankets up around him carefully. He didn't want to disturb the bandages or Fayt's wing, but he also knew how cold one could get when a fever took hold. He still only had fragments of the whole picture, but at the very least now he had a bit more of it than before. Cliff was tightlipped about the whole affair and Souji wouldn't have known to ask except for Albel's slip of the tongue. Now with Fayt's information, he was beginning to wonder just what the three of them had actually been up to out in space.

But it wasn't the time to ask about that and so he just smiled and shook his head. "You don't need to apologize. I'll tell Cliff-san you're resting, so sleep well."

Souji took the rest of the thermos and set it on the bedside table, wrapping the straw in a cloth and putting it beside that. There was still half a bottle left in case Fayt needed more later, and he knew Cliff would notice it when he came in. Once he was certain that Fayt was almost asleep, he quietly rose up from his chair and took his leave.

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