"You may be right, sidekick mine," Shinji responded, nodding thoughtfully. "Regardless, we must press on with our duties."
"I have not had this much tape wrapped around me in ages," he retorted crossly. "If I were claustrophobic, I would have flipped out and electrocuted myself by now to escape it. Why can't Xadium be here to share our pain?"
Shinji raised an arm to accomodate the tailor's measuring tape. "Don't you remember? We all took a sneak peek into the future and he was wearing a nicer version of his normal suit."
"With frills." Yaijinden sighed and exhaled deeply, letting a second tailor take another measurement. "So many frills... well, at least I don't resent the couple in question enough to make an arse of myself during the ceremony."
"So you DO resent some couples?" Furu chimed in, grinning.
Yaijinden was quiet a moment. Shinji and Furu, had been recruited as groomsmen, as had he himself, for the wedding of Dr. Xadium to the famous Sailor V herself. As groomsmen, they needed to wear the universal uniform of the modern Western wedding- the tuxedo. Souichi had opted out of going, laughing maniacally and claiming to possess his own tuxedo.
Personally, Yaijinden was certain Souichi was just avoiding having to get measured. As Xadium had been more than reluctant to find a different suit, Michiru had elected to make the groomsmen match the groom, and that meant custom-ordering garments tailored to her exact specifications... and really, what good was mad science if it couldn't save you a few hours in a fitting room?
"Yes," he said after a thoughtful moment. "In fact, I think I resent every pairing of human beings to some extent."
"Because you're not in a pair yourself?" Shinji said dryly.
"And because I am not subject to the magic of a pair-bond," Yaijinden replied sagely, "I am fully qualified to speak on them."
Shinji sighed and rolled his eyes. "This is going to be good."
"It's going to be good because I'm a genius."
"Raise your leg please, sir?"
Yaijinden compliantly lifted his leg. "Sure, anyone who's not half of a pair is going to be occasionally bitter about it," he acknowledged. "Human beings were forged in a manner to seek that sort of physical and-or emotional contact. Sex drives and all. But here's the kick: you go without for long enough, and you begin to analyze things in an impartial manner."
Furu frowned. "You call yourself impartial?" he said skeptically.
"I am pre-eminently impartial to the point of being mildly sociopathic." Yaijinden smirked and shifted legs at the tailor's request. "I don't resent them all equally, naturally- there're several factors involved in my resentment of anything. They all have the factor of 'Yay I have smoochies!,' but attempting to annoy simple things is boring and uneventful. Am I right or am I right?"
"I must concede that insight," Shinji agreed.
"So, naturally, I go to secondary factors. People who think too highly or too lowly of themselves are the next obvious things to be resentful of. It's why I give Ying and others so much crap when she's down, and why I inevitably poke at the proud. Sic gloria transitis munda, et sic doloris transitis munda- it all passes if people let it. I hate because I care about my own amusement."
Shinji raised an eyebrow. "You are eventually going to steer this back to why you resent couples, right?"
"I have a modus operandi to explain," Yaijinden said testily. "All other things will follow. Can I talk or can I talk?"
Relative silence. "Right. So, anyway, being the person I am, when I am made to be in close contact with couples, I begin looking for things to needle. Some pairs don't need the needling for things to be weird- case in point, you and the Wasp Queen."
"Go-Go, you mean?"
"I like 'Wasp Queen' better, because she is ornery, unpredictable, and full of poison. Did you know she once decided to leave me with mere marks on my face instead of actual sword injuries?"
Shinji wisely elected to remain silent. Accepting this, Yaijinden continued, "She's erratic enough to care deeply...ish... and erratic enough to... well, she's erratic. And for me, that sort of extreme confusion is highly amusing."
The other man sighed. "At least one of us enjoys that."
"It's the same sort of thing with Furu-san and starcat," the heartless one added. "The two of you embody the anime high-school relationship. Both of you desperately want the other, but have neither the privacy nor the knowledge of what exactly you're going to do when you have it."
Furu predictably turned red. "Uh..."
"Something they don't teach you in porn, son," Yaijinden observed wisely, "is that there is great fun in the smooch itself. Use this technique wisely."
Furu turned a deeper shade of red in response. "Moving on?" Shinji suggested, grinning.
"The last example I can think of is Moonstar and Haruka," Yaijinden shrugged, satisfied that Furu was close to shrinking up into a small ball. "Moonstar is gaga for Harkua, Haruka sees her as a friend and nothing else... save when the both of them are wasted, I guess. That sort of interplay is comedy gold if you are highly amused by fruitless pining, and every so often it strikes me as hilarious.
"The next brand of couples," he coninued, "are the ones that are too good to be true. Take Solar and Shaldra, for example- just the act of seeing one another is enough to send the other one into happy conniptions. It's... well, I don't know exactly what it is, but there's something synthetic about it that rubs me the wrong way. And if they weren't so impervious to criticism, I would make a bigger stink of it.
"In fact, most of the couples that ARE doing the dirty emotionally fall under the new-pair bond." Yaijinden was apparently startled by this revelation, as he took a moment to ponder it. "Lots of sex," he mused. "Lots of those little physical signs- touching, giggling... that sort of thing. We are surrounded with new couples who will never stop being new."
"Haruka and Michiru aren't exactly a new pair," Shinji pointed out.
"And if they didn't have explosive fights and rock the upstairs every night or so," he replied, smirking, "we might never know they were still together. They are old-school together, and I cannot help but be cool with that because they are honest with themselves about it."
"What about Minako-chan and Dr. Xadium?" Furu asked, having found his voice.
"Minako and Xadium-sensei are... well, strange." Yaijinden stroked the thin pfoof of facial hair that marked his chin. "Her part in the relationship reminds me of some of the neater girls I've known when they were attached," he confessed. "The sex talk is her domain because she has only what modesty is required for an incarnation of the love concept. Xadium is hilarious in his consternation, and she's a tease but that's okay."
"'That's okay?'" Shinji repeated, one eyebrow quirked.
"With some girls it's okay to be lovey," he explained. "They know how to cleanly divide between platonic and romantic, which means there's never confusation."
"Is that even a word?" Furu wondered.
"And Xadium-sensei is like a small child who's just been handed his grandfather's gold watch," Yaijinden continued, oblivious to the younger man. "He KNOWS what he has is precious, and he's petrified of breaking it, but he could just stare at it for hours... oblivious to everything else in the world." He paused, coming to a mental conclusion, then said, "They're organic. It's kind of neat, that."
"Fair enough." Shinji had progressed to the stage of actually trying on the jacket of his tuxedosuit. "If the Doctor and Minako-san are organic," he mused, "then what do we have as an example of the inorganic?"
"I think," he replied, "that we both know the answer to that. We've hashed and rehashed that matter so many times I'm not even going to bother. I have, though, been struck by another thought."
"Oh? Do tell."
"It is traditional that one the wedding be delayed by anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour by the absence of a bridesmaid and-or a groomsman." The twisted grin on Yaijinden's face was unmistakable. "I am counting on one, or both of you," he intoned, "to mar the wedding by secluding yourself in a closet with a girl until just before the big event."
Shinji snorted a laugh; Furu merely shrunk a few inches in embarassment. "And you aren't going to be trying for that yourself?" Shinji chuckled.
"Who would I smooch?" Yaijinden replied helplessly. "I'm afraid if I smooched Matsumi she would end up dancing in my intestines, and everyone else here is taken beyond belief. No, sadly, the only way I'm going to ruin this wedding is if someone sets a pack of wild dogs on me."
There was a long pause before Yaijinden looked upwards. "And that is NOT an invitation, big guy," he said sternly. "I get myself into enough trouble with violent women as it is."
"I wouldn't have pegged you for a religious type, Yaijinden," Shinji observed dryly.
"Some forces will listen to you if you beseech them hard enough," Yaijinden shrugged. "The rest of them just push on. Humanity and its attendant ceremonies, happily enough, are some of them. Hey, I found twenty bucks on the sidewalk- who wants to spring for a bottle of vodka and some OJ later?"
The general assent on that matter was the high point of the otherwise very boring day.