WHAT: Katou and Briar meet up at Disneyland, and Briar realizes Katou's not everything he appears to be WHERE: Disneyland WHEN: March 22ndish? WARNINGS: Lots of language, a brief discussion of dissection, some fear about being magically controlled, Aerosmith STATUS: Complete
Briar Moss liked to think of himself as pretty worldly, particularly for his age and even more particularly for a kid who at the age of ten had been seconds away from being sentenced to a lifetime’s hard labour for theft. He’d travelled all over the world, from the coast of Emelan to the hot streets of Chammur, from the high mountains of Gyonxe to the open plains of Namorn. He’d seen things most people never got to see, let alone all by the age of eighteen, but in the last cycle of the sun he’d seen more inexplicable things than he could have ever imagined. He had the uncomfortable feeling of not having enough space in his head for all of it.
They’d given him a phone thing and, in response to his utter bafflement, a book that wrote magically with messages from other people, most of whom seemed to have been displaced from even more places, the same way he had been. The book on its own was a marvel; he’d stared at it for hours before even thinking to try writing in it himself. It was a kind of magic he’d never even heard of, just like every other magical thing he’d encountered here so far.
The buildings were enormous. He’d never seen anything taller than four stories. The bag in the glasses (his name had flown out of Briar’s mind as soon as the explanation had begun) had shown him where he could live for free, and he’d taken a room on the lowest floor allowed, which was the sixth. He didn’t mind heights, usually, but looking out of the window made him queasy. He couldn’t help thinking that Tris would love this place, with its magic books and absurd heights, but he was a plant mage who liked his feet on the ground.
He’d gone out to explore the forest for only an hour or two before it got too dark; the last thing he needed was to get lost. He felt untethered from all his anchors; the magical ties to his sisters were not gone, precisely, but as thin and ethereal as if he were only very far away, and his early attempts to call to them in his mind had been in vain. Even the plants here felt strange in a way he couldn’t quite define; another reason he hadn’t quite dared go too far on his own. He didn’t have his mage kit, which he could have counted on as a defense against almost anything, and the handful of knives had had hidden under his clothes would not do much good if he came across a “Great Beast” or whatever was hiding in the deeper recesses between the trees.
I’m getting out of this city as soon as I can, though, he thought as he made his way out on the second day, following the general direction of the crowd towards the newly appeared place they were all so excited about. It gives me the crawls.
Vallo wasn’t much different from the world Katou remembered. At least, not in terms of architecture. Tokyo was filled with skyscrapers and everything else. Technology had changed: the internet, when Katou had left, had been something that was used pretty much solely by nerds. There was a lot less magic, too, none really on Assiah, and all these mythical animals were new, but he’d done a tour of pretty much all the celestial planes and nothing really surprised him anymore.
Except Disneyland showing up. He’d always wanted to go to Tokyo Disneyland. It had been right there. His father had taken his sister a few times, and she’d told him about it in her simple, kind-hearted way, hoping to share her enjoyment with him and not realizing until it was too late that it had only made him resent her more. Once she’d managed to convince their dad to buy him an Aladdin toy – maybe she had tried saying it was for herself, Katou had never asked – and Katou had smashed it in front of her and had thrown the pieces at her. He’d run away from home not long after that, but he suspected that even if he hadn’t, she probably wouldn’t have told him about any more Disney trips.
But now, he could go to Disneyland as much as he wanted. He had a job, he had money, and if he wanted to spend his entire day in a theme park, then that’s exactly what he was going to do. He’d spent the entire first day there, some of it with Syd, some of it by himself. Sae had complained, a little, of the long lines, but there was none of that here, despite the fact that the park seemed crammed with people. He didn’t know how long this park would last, but he hoped it would stick around for at least as long as it took him to explore the whole thing – assuming it didn’t just stick around forever.
Day two of the park saw him sporting an overlong sweater and a pair of tight, black bondage pants tucked into leather combat boots, a lit cigarette hanging from his mouth. He slowed, and then stopped, when he noticed the guy who looked a little lost though. He looked familiar, and it only took Katou a moment to realize where from.
Briar looked around, surprised to be recognised, but then he realised the young man calling his name had the same face as the stranger he had exchanged pleasantries with in the magic book. The one who liked to swear a lot. Briar used different words when he wanted to curse something, but something about the way this kid used his words made it all too obvious which ones might be considered out of place in polite company.
Fortunately, Briar only played at being polite company.
“I am,” he confirmed, taking in the full picture; if the buildings were strange, it was almost nothing to the variety of people, in their dress and their looks. He’d seen at least two people so far with blue or green skin, and people just walked past as though it were nothing odd to look at. Briar did his best to be nonchalant in turn, but there were limits to his control. “I’m sorry, there’s been so much going on… I’ve lost your name in the whole muddle.”
Katou tilted his head. "Nah, I haven't given it yet," he said after a moment, grinning. "I'm Katou. You headed to Disney?"
“Pleasure to meet you properly,” Briar replied, with the manners that had been drilled into him by Rosethorn over the last eight years. “And… I think so? Everyone’s saying it’s good fun, and I could use a bit of that after the last few days I’ve had, but I’m not really sure what to expect.” He grinned boyishly. “It’s been a while since I did anything fun just for the sake of it.”
Katou snorted. “No it ain’t,” he said, though there wasn’t any heat in his voice. He’d be surprised if there was anyone who’d consider it a pleasure to meet him. “You’ve come to the right place though. I’m an expert at doing things just for shits and giggles.”
Katou headed toward the gate, paying for his ticket, and, after a second of frowning at him, one for Briar as well. He’d probably just been given a grand, but the tickets were cheap and Briar would probably need that for, like, food or clothes or settling in and whatever.
“Too busy dodging lovelorn kidnappers to go out and have a good time once in a while?”
“It’s been a busy year,” Briar said in his defence, watching Katou carefully as he purchased the tickets. He hadn’t been off the streets so long that he would complain when someone bought something for him in good faith, and doubted he ever would. But he needed to know how money worked here - he had spent his whole life with a good sense of what everything was worth, and Tris and Daja had made him an expert haggler, but the money in Vallo was completely different and he still had no idea of the exchange rate. “And the year before that there was this war, and before that I was travelling and working and teaching, so “just fun” wasn’t much on the agenda.” He shrugged. “Course, fun can happen by accident. I quite enjoyed taking down the kidnappers. And they were hardly “lovelorn”, just ambitious and too stupid to know what they were trying to handle.”
He looked up at the great arch overhead as they walked in, his hands in his pockets. He was still wearing the clothes he’d arrived in, soft trousers and boots, a white shirt and a green tunic with delicate vine embroidery in a similar shade, one of Sandy’s most subtle designs and his current favourite. It was all spelled to resist dirt, to never wrinkle and to make no sound when he moved. “So what is this place, then?” he asked, glancing around at the excited crowds rushing around them. He could see a statue ahead surrounded by a very neat round hedge and a spiral of mathematically spaced orange and pink flowers; as they came near there was a shift as every one of the flowers turned towards him, clamouring inside his head for attention. He took one tattooed hand out of pocket to brush their petals with his fingertips, calming them. The statue was a man holding the hand of an oversized mouse wearing shoes.
“Guess war does kinda put a damper on the whole fun and games sorta thing,” Katou agreed. He hadn’t hated it so much, really. He probably wouldn’t have said it was better than his regular life, but at least he’d been somewhat useful in war. There wasn’t a lot that Katou would ever claim to be good at, but killing assholes probably topped the list.
He hesitated a little bit when the flowers all seemed to shift to face Briar, feeling weirdly uncomfortable about the whole idea. He hadn’t thought much about what a plant mage could do, but he was uncomfortably aware that he was made of plants, and the idea that someone else could control him wasn’t the greatest idea. He’d had his mind taken over more than his fair share of times, and while he’d managed to break free in one way or another from that, he wasn’t sure if the same would hold true if someone took control of his body.
He managed a convincing display of nonchalance at it though. No point in worrying about a thing until there was cause to worry about it.
“Disney? It’s this theme park in my world. A bunch of other people’s world’s too. Disney like, makes movies and shit. For kiddies. And then they built this park based off those movies?” He rubbed the side of his head. “Like, that person over there, she’s dressed like some girlie from one of the movies. Jasmine or Justine or something.” It was definitely Jasmine. Katou had loved Aladdin as a kid. “And then there’s rides based off them too. The rides are the best part though. We should definitely hit some of those.”
He paused, frowning. “Unless you’re asking about what Vallo is, in which case you’re S.O.L. You probably watched the same video as me.”
“I saw something,” Briar confirmed, “I’m not sure I’d be able to define it in words. Is that what a movie is, then?” The girl Katou had indicated looked rather like a Chammurian dancer, or how Tris had described the yaskedasu, entertainers from the land of Tharios. He wasn’t sure he understood the concept of a ride in this context, but he was perfectly willing to be taught. “Lead the way,” he said, “If you really don’t mind a tagalong.”
“The video with the song? Naw, that ain’t a movie. That’s just a video. Though, I guess movies do sometimes have explosions and shit in them too. A movie’s longer, like, an hour or two, and it tells a story. You don’t got movies and shit where you’re from?”
That sounded fucking awful. Katou had spent a lot of his sober time when he’d been alive watching movies. A lot of the time he’d spent high, too. And there was nothing like sneaking into a movie in the middle of the afternoon and discovering you were the only person in the theatre. Those afternoons in the movie theatres… Well, they hadn’t saved him, since he’d still died when he was seventeen, but they’d been like a little oasis in a dessert full of shit.
“What sorta rides do you want? Something that spins you around, something fast and exciting, or something boring and lame?”
Briar shook his head at the question about movies. “We have books to tell stories,” he said. “Or the theatre, I suppose, and dancers, and street performers. And we tell them to each other.” A wave of homesickness came over him then, thinking of his family. They had only just managed to reconnect after so many years apart, and they’d been spending evenings lately in the warm sitting room in their house in Cheeseman Street, working on jewellery or miniature trees or spinning, exchanging anecdotes and tales of their separate adventures. Half the time they spoke mind-to-mind without thinking about it, a far cry from this time six months ago when their magical connections to each other had been cut off entirely.
He shook it off. There was nothing he could do about it, so he might as well try to make the best of the situation. He could hear faint screaming in the distance, which didn’t exactly bode well, but he had to assume it was the scary kind of fun, like running along a high wall. “Definitely not something boring. Whatever’s your favourite.”
“Ugh, books,” Katou snorted, but he was grinning. “It’s close to theatre, I guess, but like, better.” Katou’d never actually gone to the theatre, except for the shows they sometimes held at school festivals. “Disney does a bunch that are animated. So like, moving drawings, I guess.”
It sounded lame when he said it like that, but there really wasn’t any other way to put it.
“Alright, we’ll go on the Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster,” Katou said, leading the way. “Aerosmith’s lame as fuck, but the ride’s alright. What you guys do for entertainment in your world anyways, other than sitting around telling stories and beating up kidnappers?”
Moving drawings sounded nothing less like a kind of magic, but Briar nodded as though he understood. For a moment it almost reminded him of something he’d once seen, but there were so many other things going through his head that it was impossible to grasp.
He looked around instead as they walked, by habit letting his power spread out amongst the many trees and garden installations that stood between the very wide pathways. The plants were happy, for the most part, well taken care of, but there were a lot of hedges that disliked being trimmed into such strict squared-off shapes. He did his best to settle the ones he could reach, telling them they looked very handsome, before they could get too excited and start shooting off leaves that would only be cut back later. Fortunately his control over his magic was such that he could do all this while walking and talking.
“Well, in Summersea there’s a weekly market, and there’s always something to see there,” he said. “My sister Sandry has a student who’s a dance mage; he gets big crowds these days now he’s inventing all his own spells.” He grinned. “I prefer to watch the pretty girl dancers, personally, but each to their own.”
Katou snorted. “Yeah, I bet,” he said, shooting Briar a knowing grin. He didn’t particularly care much for watching pretty girls dancing, but he’d spent long enough pretending that he did that the response was automatic enough.
“So like, what? You can just pick any hobby you want in your world and turn it into magic?” He raised an eyebrow.
It hadn’t been a long walk to the roller coaster, and he took his place in the short queue, the sound of Aerosmith coming from the speakers near the ride.
“No, it doesn’t work like that,” Briar said, standing on tiptoe to see over the heads of the crowd. The loud music was totally alien to him, and it made him wince a little and move to Katou’s other side so it wouldn’t assault his ears quite so much. “Ambient magic is pretty rare - that means magic that comes from other things. There are a lot more academic mages. But either way you have to be born with magic, and ambient mages can only do magic in a particular discipline - you don’t get to choose. The most common ones are stone or stitch magic, or cooking, or carpentry. But I’ve never met anyone who hated their own discipline, so maybe the magic makes it easier to enjoy it, or something. I have a former student who’s a stone mage, and you should hear her go all gooey over mountains.” He rolled his eyes. “What’s magic like where you come from, then?”
That was a question, and one that Katou wasn't anywhere near equipped to answer. He scowled, rubbing the side of his head. "Fuck, I don't fucking know," Katou said, pointedly ignoring the dirty look and the gesture to her child that the elf woman in front of them shot him. "It ain't really magic, I guess, but astral powers? Like, humans and shit," the woman pointedly cleared her throat, "they don't get nothing. But there's angels, and demons, and they've got powers to lesser or greater degrees. Like, there's four archangels, and they've got control over the elements. Uriel, my master, he controls Earth. And Setsuna, he's like, above them in the angelic hierarchy? He's got all sortsa powers, like time manipulation and shit, and since I ate a piece of him I guess I do too?"
Katou never really tested that out. He was stronger and faster than he had been in life, and he could call forth the three wings that marked Setsuna and Rociel as higher angels, but the only time he'd messed around with his astral powers was when he hatched the Egg of Wormwood and brought about the end of the world.
"Demons have their own powers too, but it weren't like anyone was gonna waste their time explaining this shit to me." The woman huffed noisily, grabbed her child by the hand, and left the line. Katou grinned widely and stepped into her place. "Or if they did, I didn't pay any attention."
“Sorry,” Briar raised an eyebrow. “Time manipulation?” He’d never met anyone who could do anything like that. “And do I want to know what it means that you ate part of a person?”
Katou considered telling Briar no and letting him imagine whatever scenarios his sick little mind came up with when imagining Katou eating someone, but he decided to be nice. “He was an angel,” Katou said. “He fed me a feather. It was like…” He shrugged. “Like a baptism, I guess. Cleansed my soul, made it so that I could start over again.”
As for time manipulation, Katou shrugged. “Yeah,” he said. “Don’t ask me how it works. The first time I died, I think time got reversed a little. I didn’t really know what happened; I was still human then so I didn’t really know it. I just remembered a weird dream. It came to me after I ended up in the underworld. The death, I mean; I weren’t exactly around for the time reversal. And then when we was off galavanting around Heaven and Hell and everywhere else, this angel, Adam Kadamon, he stopped time on Assiah. On Earth. So we could try to save it before it was destroyed. Setsuna too, he used it a little after someone had torn out his eye and a couple of his wings; he reversed the damage.” If Setsuna used it again after that, he’d never told Katou about it.
Briar blinked and tried not to stare. A lot of that had gone over his head, but it sounded pretty insane. “Lakik’s teeth,” he muttered. “You really do live in interesting times.” He was about to question specifically the part that at stood out to him, namely the words I was still human then, but they had reached the front of the queue. He had been sufficiently distracted to this point that he hadn’t thought too hard about what he was getting into, but seeing the large metal contraptions people were willingly climbing into gave him a little pause. The track extended upwards at first, but there was clearly a long steep drop on the other end. He might be a powerful green mage, but if he fell a few hundred feet out of that thing, he would splat just as hard and as fatally as anyone else. “This is safe, right?” he asked as they were strapped in next to each other. “Not that I’m worried, at all.”
Katou knew Briar had never been on a ride like this before, he’d pretty much straight up said it, but up until this exact moment, it hadn’t clicked what, precisely, that meant. And so, he waited until the bars were secured and the ride started rumbling to life, inching its way forward, that Katou turned to Briar and shrugged. He’d have looked almost laissez faire, if it wasn’t for the wide, mischievous grin on his face. “Most of the time it’s pretty safe, I guess. What do I care? I’m already dead.”
“Great.” Briar tried to look just as unconcerned as Katou was as the cart rattled along the tracks, but if his tight grip on the bar holding them in place wasn’t enough of a giveaway, the vine tattoos that spread over the tight skin between his knuckles started sprouting black thorns like mad. “The very first person I meet here is going to get me kill - ”
The contraption reached the crest of its track and, after a moment’s heart-stopping hesitation, tipped over the edge as though pushed by an invisible hand. Briar wasn’t able to stop the boyish yelp that escaped him as the cart went careening in a sheer drop towards the ground.
His instinct was to shut his eyes, but he forced them open, the wildly rushing air making them water, his heart feeling like it was about to explode out of his chest.
Katou couldn’t help it; he let out a whoop of laughter at Briar’s yelp, at the sentence that had been about to precede it, at the wind rushing through his hair at the sudden drop.
The roller coaster did not, in fact, go careening into the ground, but veered up at the last moment, sending them through loop-de-loops and corkscrews before, finally, ending back near the starting point. The bars lifted, and Katou clapped Briar on the shoulder.
“There, that wasn’t so bad, now was it?”
Briar gasped. He was pretty sure most of his life had flashed before his eyes in the last sixty seconds, but he’d barely had a chance to recover from the sensation of being hurled through the air at unnatural speed before something even weirder was happening.
As a kid, during the plague that had hit Summersea during his first year at Winding Circle, he had tried to imitate the temple healers by putting his magic into other people to try and clear them of the disease. It had never worked, because his magic wasn’t made to work on humans. It simply had nowhere to go. But when Katou touched his shoulder, Briar felt him. Not just physically - the physical touch barely registered - it was like suddenly being connected to the oddest root system he’d ever encountered.
What it was was impossible.
He clambered with no grace whatsoever out of the cart and staggered to one side, staring at Katou with eyes almost as wide as his face. “You’re not human,” he said, breathless. “You’re… how can you… you’re made of plants. I can feel it.” Now he knew, he could reach out in his mind without actually touching, and see just as he would have inside any tree or bush or single blade of grass. It was not just that the boy was somehow made of green things, but the power of whatever or whoever had done this was running through Katou’s veins like liquid lightning, and was so intense that Brain had to struggle to keep his feet.
“Ah, yeah,” Katou said, hand going to his neck. He rubbed the back of his neck self-consciously. He wasn’t that shy about his body, not usually. He certainly didn’t keep it a secret, if he thought he’d be able to get a fun reaction out of telling someone he was made out of vegetable matter, but this was different. He’d been hoping Briar wouldn’t find out, if only because he didn’t want someone who could control plants knowing that he was made out of plants.
It seemed like a bad mix.
He should’ve kept his hands to himself.
“Yeah,” he repeated. “I told you, my master was the Archangel of Earth. And Death, I guess. He made me a body after I died so I could go out to the physical realms.”
Briar pulled his magic back into himself; it was starting to make him feel dizzy. He didn’t know what an archangel was, in his defense, but perhaps he should have asked earlier. “This place is too strange,” he muttered. His teeth hurt. “Sorry, I wasn’t… I just wasn’t expecting…” he swallowed and shook it off. “Your master must have been incredibly powerful. Does it… I mean, does it feel different? To when you were.. before you died? Do you eat normally, or do you take energy from the sun?” He didn’t know if it was rude to ask such questions, but he could hardly not ask them.
“I can eat,” Katou said, rubbing the side of his head. He wasn’t sure if he needed to eat, but given the fact that his diet so far had been sweets, booze, and whatever Hades and Persephone fed him, he thought he probably didn’t need to. “I don’t think I need to. I’ve been places where I ain’t seen the sun in a while and it hasn’t done me no harm, but I do like getting to bask when I can.”
He moved out of the disembarkation area, fished around for his pack of smokes, and lit one. “To tell the truth, I don’t really know how this thing works. I figured I wouldn’t survive the war,” and he didn’t think he would have, if he hadn’t ended up here; he would’ve died for what he was pretty sure was the last time if Persephone and Hades, gods with power over plants and death, respectively, hadn’t found him dying on the street, “but if I did, I figured Uri would take care of everything. Didn’t think I’d wind up in a whole different dimension, so it wasn’t like I asked for an owner’s manual or nothing. There was this one angel that wanted to dissect me who said I had a whole peripheral nervous system and said that my body worked like a normal one so….” He shrugged. He was kind of dumb, so he was pretty sure even if someone sat him down and explained things to him, he wouldn’t get it. Better to not even bother.
People around were giving them dirty looks, but Briar had no idea if they could overhear their bizarre conversation or it had something to do with Katou smoking. Either way he was too interested to care much. “Dissect you?” he repeated, wincing. He’d had people want to kill him, certainly, and many others want to control him towards their own ends, but dissection somehow seemed so much worse no matter what you were made of. “These angels sound… well, terrifying, frankly.”
“Terrifying’s a good word for it,” Katou said. “They all had screws loose somewhere or another. I managed to convince Rivet to wait until I was dead for real and didn’t need my body any more, but then I ended up here just before I kicked the final bucket, so I guess joke’s on them.” He shot Briar a toothy grin. “They got my arm though, so they’ll just have to play around with that until they get bored, I guess.”
Briar actually found himself checking, even though he knew perfectly well that the boy had had both arms only a moment ago. “Looks like you’ve got two to me,” he said.
Katou glanced at his hands. “Ah, yeah, it grew back,” he said, and left that hanging for a minute before he grinned. “Or rather, Hades, a god who hangs out here in Vallo, he helped me grow it back. I had a fake one for a while – Rivet made it in exchange for the arm I gave them – but this body wouldn’t heal around it. Started rotting and shit, so we figured it was probably better to just… you know.” He opened his hand and closed it.
Rotting. Briar’s head filled for a moment with a rush of horrible images; he closed his eyes and shook it quickly, letting the plant life around him - with the very deliberate exception of Katou - ground him in the current moment. He resisted the urge to check to see if Katou’s arm was just as healthy as the rest of him appeared to be. Now that he had control of it, it seemed rude at the very least to use his power to look inside a… well, a person, even if they weren’t precisely human, and immoral besides. It also occurred to him that if he wanted to, he might have some measure of control… but he stopped that thought before it could go much further at all.
“Well, you might just be the most interesting person I’ve ever met,” he said, gathering, “and that’s saying something. I hope you don’t mind all the questions - I.. it’s not really any of my business to be sticking my neb in, it just… er, surprised me, that’s all.”
“No, it’s… you know, fine or whatever,” Katou said, rubbing the back of his head. It was definitely better to get to answer questions instead of Briar taking it upon himself to use whatever freaky plant magic he had to figure out the answers himself. Katou hadn’t met a lot of people who’d ask instead of just taking what they needed, provided they had the power to take what they needed. Briar definitely had that power.
He wasn’t about to mention that though. Maybe the reason Briar hadn’t used his magic yet was because it simply hadn’t occurred to him yet. Katou wasn’t about to go putting the idea in his head. He wasn’t a complete idiot.
Even if he might’ve been an idiot to keep hanging out with him once he’d realized what he could do.
“Like I said, I ain’t much of a details guy. I never asked questions myself, so I don’t know a lot of how all this works, but I’ll answer any questions you got. But first I’m gonna need to get me one of the chocolate peanut butter brownies they sell over here. C’mon.”
“I’ll never say no to food,” Briar said, happy to be distracted. The whole situation might require more thought, and perhaps more questions, but he could take the time to consider them before asking. “But don’t blame me if I throw it up if you’re going to take me on another of those death rides.”