In Loki's Honor

> {Curse Suppression}

It felt as if awakening from a daze. Or going into a lucid dream that would last only one hour. I remembered everything and the bittersweet knowledge that my very being was scattered to the four corners of this world and up in orbit made my heart ache.

Yet this was but a vacation, a lull in our ordinary adventures. I would find Nenandil and Pandora, and we'll be as one again. The wait, however, was excruciating. I've always shed bits and pieces of myself behind every time I walked in this world. People I left behind, people I thought I would never again meet. But now they were coming back, jumping out of the woodwork. Reminding me that they once were.

It was like I was leaving breadcrumbs as I traveled and now I was finding my own old trails back.

I always used the childhood years, when I got them, as a form of vacation between lives. Haru went into hiding in the orphanage exactly for that. With a fresh brain, childhood hormones, and time, I sorted my thoughts, put my old memories in place, cried my grievances away, then set foot into a new life. The past was a bittersweet painting hung on a neverending wall. Not anymore.

I wove an Illusion spell to hide what I was about to do to people outside this hilltop. Then I changed shapes. Percival, my first transgender existence and the last [Emperor] in this world set foot on the grass.

"Sister," I said with Percival's voice. "I'm so happy we met again."

Kasumi, [Saintess] and still a girl inside despite being more than a hundred years old, looked up. What use is a century of stagnation in a gilded tower full of sycophants in one's development? It was just a testament to her resolve, how she was able to endure those dull years.

"Hus—" she clamped both hands over her mouth as her eyes filled with tears like a dam after a storm, threatening to spill.

I could sense her soul. I could sense the marker I placed on her just like the one I placed on Barbara, several hundred meters away. Sensing both at the same time confirmed my suspicions. Someone had shuffled them both around so that they were indistinguishable from one another. Was it Fate's meddling? People always regarded Fate as being whimsical but did Fate also have a conscious mind? Like an Overgoddess who watched over several worlds?

That might be the case. The Pantheon of this world always knew they were incapable of harming Loki even though he was here only through an avatar. Such was the discrepancy between power levels. It wasn't absurd to think Fate was some major Goddess who presided over those who dared meddle in Her domain and used them as Her plaything.

So long she gave me what my heart yearned for, I would kneel and grovel and worship Her with all my being. I would be a clown upon her cosmic circus and die another hundred times in her honor on top of those I owed Loki. My wish might one day come true, but that was another story.

Pushing those musings aside, I gently grasped Kasumi's wrists and pulled them apart. Smiling, I grasped her chin and placed a chaste kiss on her lips. Was it a kiss between siblings or lovers? It didn't matter, it was neither.

Just like Demi Moore was actually Kissing Whoopi Goldberg possessed by Patrick Swayze's "ghost", making Unchained Melody a gay song, Kasumi was kissed by an amorphous and asexual monster. Fuck that notion. And now, back to our regular soppy scheduled programming.

Before she could react, I delivered my piece.

"Regardless of who you once were or what roles we played in another life, I know you," I said to the bedazzled Kitsune. "And I love you as much as two thousand years ago. These roles are something hidden from my sight, however. You and Barbara, Madge and Mona. Which one of you is which, I'm not allowed to tell. I believe even the recollections you have are scrambled. Sister, wife, companion, lover, soulmate, this matters not. I might be your brother or husband, which one I cannot say for certain. But I can see your soul, I can feel what's in your heart of hearts."

I embraced her, one hand on the small of her back, the other on her nape.

"Welcome back, I missed you."

I could hear her breathing turn into a staccato of sobs as the dam broke in a very cliché way.

"I'm sorry I made you wait so long."

This fleeting moment would also vanish and be ground to dust by the sands of time. That's what made it so precious.

Can you imagine what is it to be born knowing you are destined to someone who was not yet born, with a power coveted by the whole world, make a bargain that would later go unfulfilled, wake up every day for a hundred years, half a million days because every single one bores you like ten, get betrayed, run away across half a world, knowing the one you yearn for will probably swipe left in your face? Such was the pain harbored by Kasumi. Such was the anxiety she lived with for a hundred days.

Perhaps Pandora was cruel by granting her the power to survive this long. Fate was the cruelest of all, giving her duplicitous memories, making her believe something that might not be true. I would walk over these eggshells with the same level but not the nature of the care a mother had for her newborn baby.

That's what made it so important to make sure I could give her what comfort I could without breaking my pact with Barbara. Just like I wouldn't make Lorna's reincarnation my wife or lover in this life, so too would Kasumi and I remain unrelated but for the bond between our souls, a bond that stretched far into a foregone age and land.

I used a pinch of [Saintess Magic]. With my full Status unlocked, it was rather easy. The miracle I wished for? Understanding. I bared my soul, my feelings and offered them to Kasumi on a gilded plate. The magic took the shape I imagined from a movie about a boy wizard. A strand of silver light attached to my stretched index finger, coming from my temple.

"This..." she stared at the silver thread with her lips parted and a confused expression.

"Can you see it for what it is?"

Kasumi nodded.

A guy would reject it. The old me from New York would beat on his chest and say, "I don't need this, I believe in your words," as an act of bravado, his curiosity be damned.

Kasumi, she was a she. The need she felt to understand people, especially those she had feelings for was too strong to halt on such considerations as privacy or personal boundaries. I understood her because I too had been a she and then that other she, and yet another she. Hindsight being as keen as an eagle's, the understanding I gained of the human, no, sentient condition on both sides of the gender aisle and then in the middle was no longer a curse.

She touched my finger. Like Elliot to E.T., Adam to God on the Sistine Chapel, we connected. She pulled the string of light to her own temple, and for that moment, we communed. My feelings, thoughts, memories, and impressions about her from back in the Empire to the contemporary days when Netherbane mused about Percival's estranged family, forced to sacrifice themselves to be spared an envious Goddess' final blast, all of it became bare to her.

There's no love purer than that between Empaths. When the other person's feelings are as visible as the crease between their eyebrows, as precious as the light reflected in their eyes, as concrete as the feeling of their hands in yours, there's no space for falsehoods or doubt.

The hard boundaries at the edge of the self melted like Ayanami Rei had come to break our A.T. field at the Third Impact.

Then Kasumi used the same magic I did. Having dallied for a century, she didn't wait for me to accept her strand. She shoved it into my temple from the other side with a whimsical grin only Kitsune can make.

The feedback loop was as intense as climaxing with one's true love but on a spiritual level, without the kinky implications. I lived her one hundred years in an instant, locked in a gilded tower. Kasumi's feelings blew over Overly Attached Girlfriend levels and well into dangerous territory. Hadn't she had the support of System Attributes like Willpower, Soul, Ego, and a ridiculous high Faith score, she would be clinically insane. Seeing her memories made me think of her which made her think of me thinking of her and it was turtles all the way down.

I lived another hundred years with her in that cathedral tower at the heart of the Auvani Kingdom but this time we were together. Side-by-side. A hundred years in which no words were uttered for they were mere clumsy artifacts made to clumsily convey feelings. It was the 14k dial-up to our optic fiber connection.

Alas, we had only one hour to share our souls. I felt the curse take hold of me, a dark cloud in the shape of dragon claws that covered my mind, my memories. I cut off our link, afraid it would affect Kasumi's memories too.

Our time was over. I was once more just Netherbane, the book mimic.

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Kasumi's POV.

Sitting on the hill, she felt a sharp headache from the magic breaking before its time. She knew the curse had taken over her important person's memories away. Feeling powerless despite her world-altering magic, Kasumi could only sigh with sorrow.

She held tight onto the cloth doll on her lap. Could she call her love unrequited anymore? The [Saintess] had no idea. Despite that doubt, it was no more the tumultuous, gut-wrenching, desperate feeling from before. She now knew she was loved back.

In her eagerness to be with her husband once more, she'd forgotten about her sister. The life they shared was tripartite at every step of their journey. She did her sister a great injustice.

Netherbane asked.

She decided to turn a new page, write a new chapter on her tale. And look, she had a book right here, ready to document her change. She caressed the ribbons on the doll's head and squeezed its soft body.

Kasumi held back, keeping her feelings both old and new in her heart of hearts. It wasn't fair to Netherbane to burden the mimic any longer. She felt she had her closure. And so long they deemed possible, she could see her beloved family again. This was both an end to her century of waiting and a new beginning.

She did. Hearing it from them even after their memories were sealed away was a ray of sunshine on her chest. She clamped her mouth shut before she could say, "to her." Barbara was no longer a rival. She was her sister.

Kasumi's lips creased upward.

Then she shared a bit of her tale, again, with clumsy sounds this time.