Heartless to Heartless

By Yaijinden

"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.