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"The Fox, The Monk And The Mikado Of All Nights Dreaming "Written By: Seraphim Grace View Commisioned art for this fic. Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing or its characters, they belong to Bandai etc. Feedback: Always appreciated and replied to. Pairings: 1x2, suggested 13x6 Notes: This is a version of a fairy tale that
Neil Gaiman published as The Dream Hunters, I have changed it a lot
to fit the story I wanted
"The Fox, The Monk And The Mikado Of All Nights Dreaming " Chapter 2 He watches her through the rain for at least an hour before he joins her in the gazebo. None of the other children that crowd around her have braved the heavy rain. She smiles when she sees him. She is knitting, her thermos of cocoa open beside her. It is clear that she was waiting for him to join her. “I suppose you want to hear the next part of the story,” she says softly, smiling at him. He sits down cross legged as she adjusts her knitting. “It’s a very long story,” she tells him, as he pushes back his hair behind his ear, “I doubt that we’ll finish it today.” He nods, looking, for the first time since she has seen him, his age. He is wearing a stained and oversized tee shirt and there are paint spatters on his jeans. “I brought food,” she said, “just some sandwiches and some bottles of soda.” He is quiet for a while, and then offers her a smile through broken teeth, “I’d just like the next part of the story.” She is old which allows her luxuries that she might not have any other way. She gets away with things that she would have allowed only an old lady herself. “You remind me of someone I know,” she says, her needles clacking, “and he told me this story.” “I want to know about the boy,” the boy insists, “I want to know what happened next.” He is demanding as youth often is, without understanding that he has all the time in the world to know this story, to know how this story was learned, of the whims of an old woman who tells it. She smiles at him fondly because he was exactly the same, and in some ways he still is. “This part of the story,” she says, “isn’t about the boy raised by monks, but instead about a fox.” In the lands of the clan of Oda there was a young lord with an eye for a pretty women and a heart that was made of stone. He was handsome and proud. He wore the best clothes his family, who were very wealthy, could afford, and he was known throughout the kingdom as a rogue and a lover of women. Women considered him to be a great prize and vied for the attention of such a man. When they were truly cunning they would lie on the wooden pathways around their palaces and let the moon fall on their bellies in order that they conceive a child knowing that his family were wealthy and would keep her in great luxury, they would move her to the Oda estate. Now at that time in Japan there were great witches and wizards, and demons walked through the great forests, before they were cut away to grow rice. There were monsters and wicked shadows, goblins and lost children that cried on the wind. Word of the prince’s desirous ways, of the women he used and then left reached a fox. The foxes of Japan were cunning and quick, and tied to the magic of the forest and the land. They belonged to the moon and the stars, and they could be anything they wanted to be because they were magic and beauty and cunning and quick. This fox came to the lands of the clan of Oda and spied the prince. She saw his beauty and his pride and how he would be unable to resist her. She took human form and wearing her pride and her hair and knocked on the gates. The servants saw her amazing beauty and thought of their prince, who was away, and they dressed her in the finest robes and dressed her hair. They painted her nails and rouged her lips. They layered the finest incenses about her and treated her like a princess. When the prince came she was the perfect silent princess of which he had always dreamed. She did not lie naked under the moon. She made no move towards his wealth and refused all gifts the that he offered her. She would not tell him her name and refused all of his wooings, for such had been her plan. She had meant to ignore him, to drive him mad with love for her and to leave him. He brought artists from Edo to capture her beauty. She smiled and told him that she had no interest in him. He paid courtiers to write haiku and waka to serenade her every breath. She remained aloof. He woke her up to tell her the words with which he had wooed other women. She sent him away. But his eyes were like lavenders and his hair was the colour of finely burnished wood, and sometimes, despite herself she found her own golden eyes drawn to him when he wasn’t looking. Sometimes she smiled behind the ivory fans they gave her at things he said. Despite herself, and her intentions to shame him, she found herself lingering on the curve of his cheek. He proposed and she refused him. He proposed and she refused him again. He proposed marriage a third time and she refused him a third time. Then he woke her in the night to show her the stars in the sky, stars that were linked to her being, and he gave her the human names for the constellations, and she sat on a rock, in a garden that he had built for her and she wondered if it would be so bad, then steeled herself against him. He proposed marriage a fourth time, a fifth, and she refused him. The more determined he was the more she denied him. The one night, when the moon was full and the stars were bright she sloughed off the robes of many colours that they had given her, and undid her hair and her human form and ran through the forest to remind herself that human men were merely trinkets to be played with and that bad things came to those who forgot that. She hunted, chasing a rabbit into the bushes, ripping out its throat and glorying in her fox form. She returned come dawn, her belly heavy with blood and meat. And took her human form and put on the robes of many colours and drank heavily of his liquor and when he came to her she was slovenly and drunk and denied his suit, but removed her robe and lay with him. They were married the next spring. She had a pup in human form, a child with her large golden eyes but his father’s hands and because he had another wife, she was given free rein in how to raise the child so she gave him a name in the fox fashion. She had a single pup in that litter so she called him Solo and he was best beloved of her heart. She gave him every pleasure of both his human form and his fox form. Although most women gave their babies to women of the household to nurse she nursed him herself. And her son was as beloved of his mother and his father and denied nothing. By the time he was three years old she came again to child. This infant was a chubby creature of burnished oak hair and his father’s lavender eyes, but his smile was cheeky and he demanded like a fox. As he was her second son she called him Duo. If Solo was the apple of his mother’s eye then Duo was the jewel of his father’s. He went everywhere with his father and was shown to passing lords with the greatest pride. He was denied nothing. He had both a father and a mother that loved him, and a brother that adored him. He was happy. Then one day plague came to the Oda lands. It was quick and ruthless and left the servants and the lords equal in the mud, with large buboes on their bodies. Their eyes were eaten out of their heads and their hair fell away in hanks. Fearful for his wives and children, which at that time numbered six, the prince sent them away in a golden carriage, making sure that they were outside the clan lands before the emperor closed them. One day on the road one of the other children began to cough. By nightfall the child was dead in a stream of thin white vomit. The next morning his mother and two of his siblings was dead. The fox did what any mother would do; she took her babies and ran. Within a week she began to sweat, her eyes felt dry and water burned her throat. What food she caught she gave to her sons, Solo, who was golden and Duo who looked like his father who by now was dead. She was dead by week’s end, having spent so long in human form that their plague destroyed her. Solo sat by her deathbed, a young boy, and promised to look after his brother. The two fox cubs were known amongst the foxes of Japan, because they were cunning and quick. They were not good hunters but they were fine thieves and the youngest of them was known for his beauty. They were children and the other foxes were indulgent of them as long as they passed through. A human plague killed Solo, he had gone to the town to steal food but he came back with fabric and a small jade dragon that he claimed had belonged to their father. Unsure what else to do Duo took on his fox form and ran, but even though he was not old enough to be on his own the other foxes drove him from their lands because they feared the wrath of his mother who was known. They feared him because he had the colouring of his human father and he was not one of them. He ran and ran and ran. He eventually came across an old nun who lived alone in a ruined temple in the woods. She was blind and was amazed at the naked young boy, starved and ragged on the broken steps. She could not see his hair which was the colour of foxes and his eyes which was the colour of twilight and she picked him up. She carried him into the temple and she cared for him, she taught him human language and never tried to take from him the little jade dragon that he sometimes clutched and sometimes suckled on. As a fox he would hunt the forest where her temple lay, and as a human he played her games. She taught him to read and to write and called him her little gift from the gods. He knew his own name and nothing else when she found him but in her care he became a child. She dressed him in her own clothes, bound tight about his much smaller frame. He bundled him into her bed when she slept, and though she didn’t have much she shared it with him. When they brought gifts to the temple she took his tiny hand in hers and took the long walk to the town nearest her, though it took the best part of a day. When he tired she picked him up singing songs to him as they walked. No one questioned where she had gotten the boy with the bright eyes and the long, long hair, for he would have no one cut it, remembering when he slept the feel of his brother curled up beside him, clutching handfuls of it in his sleep. Summers and winters passed with the old nun, singing her songs and cleaning her broken temple. She wound cord to tie the jade dragon about his throat, she taught him many things, the soft arts to wash his hair, how to powder his skin, for she suspected that the only life he might have was with a brothel, where he could be beloved. There was a brothel to the west where the emperor himself was known to visit. She hoped for that for her boy for she had no treasure, she had no wealth, or land that she might buy him a bride. She loved him well, but she was practical. She had been a princess and she knew those arts. She took him to the town where the eyes of both men and women watched him as he walked through the dirt streets. He was strong and brave and carried her bags on his shoulders and they walked hand in hand back to the temple singing her happy songs. There were bandits on the way. She heard the rustling in the trees and sent him on ahead, “but Nana,” he called her, “how will you find your way?” “I am old,” she said, “and sometimes I need to stop on the way, surely you know that, my little angel, go ahead and I shall be back for nightfall.” He waited and he waited and she never came. He waited till nightfall and she never came. He waited till morning and she never came. He waited for a week, tending the paths and temple as she had taught him, singing her songs and waiting for her, but she never came. When the villagers came to take the stone from the temple for their houses they were surprised to find the boy there for they thought that like the old nun that he had been murdered. They took him back to the town, for he was still too young to be on his own, being just past his tenth birthday but he was strong and could be made to work in the fields, and fair so he could be sold to a brothel for a large amount because not a man in the village had not looked lingeringly on the boy’s thighs. Sitting in the house of a family who could scarce afford another mouth to feed in their house he heard them speak of him, they called him names, a foundling, a goblin, a demon and not the angel his Nana had called him. They heard just how much they could get to sell him to the local brothel, but it was not a nice place for he had helped Nana many times give the rights of the dead on the whores as they died for they had never given them the proper care. That night as the moon was full he placed the jade dragon on its cord in his mouth, as he had when he was much smaller and took his fox form. He ran. He ran for as long as his fox legs would carry him and promised he would never again go to the places where the men lived, or the foxes had their dens – that he would travel to the very centre of Japan where the gods still lived and he would find a home there, where he could be alone. After many weeks travel, through the trees and the mountains until he found a small waterfall that fell into a small pool that sang sweetly in the mornings, and the ferns smelt rich. There was a tanuki in the area but he did not care for the adolescent fox in his territory except that sometimes they talked. He found himself a small den under a large rock beside the waterfall and filled it with moss and dried ferns, burying the jade dragon under a small pile of pebbles so that it would be safe. He took the scraps of fabric that still held Nana’s scent and the hairs he had from his brother and as he lay in the moss and the ferns in his fox form he would remember his mother, and her soft scent that was almost the same as Nana and almost the same as Solo and he carried their love with him and knew he would need no one else ever. “Is that the end of the story?” the boy asks, biting into the tuna sandwich she had given him. It had sat in its foil before him until she had almost finished. She throws her braid over her shoulder, “no, tomorrow if it’s still raining I’ll tell you the story of how the fox and the monk met, of a challenge between the tanuki and the fox.” He chews thoughtfully, then washes it down with the cocoa before he speaks. “It’ll rain all week.” She wraps the dark blue wool around her needles before stabbing it through the ball and placing them in her giant black bag. “Will you be here tomorrow?” “I’ll be here.” She looks out the doorway of the veranda, “it’s not going to stop any time soon, I can get my driver to give you a lift, if you like.” His face hardens for a moment, “I don’t live that far away.” He says crisply. “I’ll be fine, but thank you.” As she watches him she makes a decision. Her driver comes down the path, his black suit under the black umbrella, and he bows his head when he sees her, “My lady,” he says. She smiles with a smile she would have despaired of herself as a girl for its sweetness before looping her arm through his. She enjoys the luxuries she gives herself as an old woman that she never could have taken even ten years before. “Is that the boy to whom you tell the story? He reminds me of Master Heero, Lady Relena, is that perchance why you take such an interest?” She smiles, leaning on the muscles of his arm, “Danny,
if Heero and Duo had ever had a child, I think that boy would be it.
Tomorrow, arrange for someone to follow him, to make sure he gets
home safe.”
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