Horned Copper Sun

Written by Cat/Naoya Tatatsu

It was late afternoon, and the remains of a heavy rainstorm were retreating across the stony Coruscant sky. The entire quadrant of the city had been dulled by the downpour; all the lights dimmer and all the colors grayer. The air smelled fresh and clean, and was heavy upon the shoulders of the city's inhabitants as they moved groggily about the streets -- walking with fragile steps as if they had just been awakened from a long, deep sleep. Beyond the emptied clouds the sun was setting, glowed through them as a bright copper halo, hovering above the horizon.

Suri Rose loved the rain. It cleansed the world so completely. From the impurities in the air and the trash in the gutters to regret for yesterday and fear for the future, the rain made it all trickle down the drainpipes, deep into the belly of the planet, where it would be incinerated in the infernos of creation that burned there.

But unfortunately, on the sub-levels there was no rain, and the air was oppressive and stale and stagnant. Some days were better than others, and some were worse. But no matter how bad or good it got, it never rained, and it was never pure; things never started again down there, and the air never got a second chance.

Suri Rose loved the rain, and although she lived primarily underground, whenever she heard that it was raining up above she made an effort to go and see it. It wasn't often that she found herself free to travel up to the surface, let alone during one of the infrequent rainstorms. But this afternoon found her there, appreciating the aftermath of the rainstorm, free due to a last-minute cancel by one of her usual performance spots.

There was an abandoned building in one of the poorest sections of the upper city that she went to when she ventured to the surface. The bedrock in this section of the planet was thin and fragile, and couldn't support large skyscrapers or more than the three lower levels that it held beneath the surface. It was a perfect location for housing projects and shorter buildings -- places for more of the poor of the planet to dwell.

Although by all means not a skyscraper, the abandoned housing project Suri visited was one of the tallest buildings in the area; at sixty stories it soared above the residential slums that surrounded it. The community was not a pleasant one. By nature, Suri detested all things that were dirty and dangerous like this place was, and on the short walk from the shuttle to the building she kept her hands on her bell and her eyes on her feet. The building, too, was falling down and filthy, the floors littered with trash and the few objects left in the rooms covered in a layer of dirt and grime. By nature, Suri detested filth and filthy places, but for some reason, this place was an exception. She never really came here in a mood where she cared about cleanliness, and she only ever went to the roof anyway.

The view from the roof was peaceful and sad. It was the perfect place to stand and watch and think; to breathe and relax and let go or to cry and scream and twist your insides up with worry and fear. And after a rainstorm, on the roof it was just so quiet and so still, a refuge and a haven and a retreat. Suri didn't go there purposely that afternoon to find respite, but respite was what she found there, with dirty puddles lapping at the heels of her purple lacquer shoes.

She let her hands rest gently on the rusty iron parapet, feeling the damp moss growing across it beneath fingertips. And from the flooded roof she watched her fellow Coruscant citizens, watched as they stood with newspapers over their heads, waiting for the hoverbus or buying fruit from the vendor on the corner with the ratty yellow umbrella over his stand.

"Good evening, Miss Rose."

Suri's heart skipped a beat as she was pulled from her silent contemplation. She whipped around to face the masculine voice, her hands flying to grasp the handle of her transformation bell as it hung on her waist. She almost gasped when she saw who it was -- it was certainly one of the last people she would have expected to run into here.

"The rain always makes me introspective, too," he said.

Naoya stood stone still before her, about halfway across the narrow roof. His signature carnation hair was slightly damp -- had he been caught in the rain? It fluttered in the slight breeze, across his soft lavender eyes, eerily in sync with the flapping of his long gray raincoat. All the buckles and zippers on it were undone, and beneath it he wore simple, understated clothes, all in white and gray. He looked oddly peaceful without his usual scarlet uniform; Suri had never imagined him without it. He looked surprisingly harmless like this -- so gray and pale that he seemed in place against the cloudy sky. He looked like he had been painted into it.

"Naoya," she said, narrowing her eyes at him. "What are you doing here? How did you find me?"

"I have many secrets, Miss Rose, some that I'm willing to divulge and some that I am not," the man said, smiling softly. "My means of finding people are those of the latter kind of secret."

Suri didn't say anything, but tightened her grip around her bell. Her manicured nails dug into her palm.

"I know, my genius scares even me sometimes," he said, grinning.

"You've only been here for ten seconds and you're already pissing me off. If you think that you can..."

"Oh give it up, Suri. I'm not here to hurt you," he said, interrupting. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his wrinkled gray pants and looked away from her, off into the distance, towards the sunset. "If you honestly think that I would come here to fight unarmed, you have a lot to learn about me." He glanced back at her. "I saw you standing here alone, and figured that you probably needed someone to talk to."

Suri was a bit taken aback, but didn't take her eyes off of him, not even for a moment. She trusted him about as far as she could throw Coruscant. "And just why did you figure that?"

Naoya shrugged, beginning to fish around in his raincoat pockets for something. "Usually when someone comes out of their way to stand on the roof of an abandoned building after a rainstorm, they're not doing it for the hell of it. I know that from experience."

After a moment of searching his coat, Naoya pulled a crumpled, half-smoked deathstick from his pocket, and a small metal lighter from the other. He placed the deathstick between his lips and bent over against the wind to light it.

"Listen, even if I wanted to talk, you'd be the last person I'd want to talk to. I suggest that you leave before I decide to ring my little bell here," Suri said defensively.

"You can ring your damned bell all you want. I don't care. If it makes you more comfortable to be transformed while around me, be my fucking guest. But I'm not leaving."

Suri wasn't expecting it when Naoya began to walk towards her. She moved away from him as he came to the edge of the roof and leaned over the waist-high overhang, smoke curling from his lips. Now that he was closer, she noticed that his eyes looked darker and more sunken than usual. His skin was pale and looked dry and used. Had he always looked like this, or had she just never noticed it before?

"You look like crap," she commented. Naoya looked at her from the corner of his eyes, and chuckled slightly.

"Yeah, well, I've been up for awhile... Staring at a computer screen for a few days straight doesn't do much for your complexion, as I'm sure you know." He looked back out over the city, taking a drag from the cigarette in his bony fingers.

"There's something you can do about that, you know. It's called beauty sleep," Suri said sarcastically. Why was she talking to this guy? She let one of her hands fall from her bell.

"Well, I try not to sleep. Sometimes I do, but I get..." he gestured to his head. "Terrible dreams."

Suri paused for a moment before answering.

"They have medication for that."

"I know." He took another drag from his deathstick. In the distance, the sun was starting to slip below the edge of the planet. "I was on it for awhile, but I decided I didn't like it. It made it difficult to concentrate, I always felt distracted and groggy," he said. "We have dreams for a reason. I don't want to block them anymore."

There was a moment of awkward silence between them. Suri crossed her arms over her chest and shifted uncomfortably. She wanted to look away from him, into the street or into the sunset or into the sky. She didn't like looking at him -- he was sickly and his eyes were almost inhumanly bright, but she was wary about letting him out of her sight.

"I don't blame you for not trusting me Suri. But I don't have any problems with you and would never think of ever laying a finger on you," he said casually.

Suri furrowed her brow at him in frustration. "I don't appreciate you lying to me like that."

"I'm not lying to you."

"You're my enemy. Why WOULDN'T you have a problem with me? I have no reason to believe that you're not lying to me and you know it. We're on opposite sides."

"My enemies aren't senshi, and you know that." Naoya paused, and shrugged. "My enemies are people who deserve to be my enemies. And you do not deserve to be my enemy."

Suri felt a shock - one of realization - at the back of her head.

"How do innocent people like Caden and Anastasia deserve to be your enemies, then? What's the difference between me and them?" Her voice was rising; she was suddenly nervous and unsure and angry. She felt suddenly... interrupted.

Naoya shook his head slightly, almost imperceptibly. He didn't answer her, but instead, took another drag of smoke from his deathstick.

"Are you going to answer my question?" Suri pressed.

"No. You know the answer to that question anyway. I am going to change the subject. Do you like architecture? Skyscrapers and the like?" Frustrated with his antics, Suri grunted. She began to tap her fingers against the parapet that Naoya was leaning over, she began to shiver and run her hands over her arms, but she did everything but speak, as it was her turn to not answer the questions posed to her. Naoya continued anyway. "The tallest building on Coruscant is 1,620 stories high. Do you know how tall the tallest building in the galaxy is?"

"No, I don't."

"Two-thousand stories exactly. Two-thousand exact. What is the tallest building you have ever been in?"

"Not very high."

"No? That's a shame. Whenever I get the chance, I try to get... higher and higher, up off of the earth. I'll walk past a building and look up at it, watch it disappear into the clouds... I'll say to myself, Naoya, today is the day where you get on that lift and you go to the top of this building. Sometimes the buildings are hundreds of stories high, sometimes more than a thousand. It doesn't really matter -- the outcome is always the same. I'll go inside the lobby and I'll look around, and then I'll shell out the credits for tickets to the observation deck at the top. I'll step in line to get on the lifts, sometimes I'll even get on them, but I never make it to the top. I get these terrible panic attacks... my heart starts to pound and I hear voices screaming in my head... I have to get off. Sometimes I don't make it past the tenth floor. But I always get off before two-hundred. The highest I've ever been in my life is three-hundred and eleven. I think I've wasted thousands of credits over the years, paying for tickets to observation decks that I never make it to."

There was a moment of tense silence. Suri didn't know what to say to that. She had never pictured him as the type to be so afraid of anything, let alone afraid of heights. Why was he telling her this? And why did she understand it so well?

"What are you, afraid of heights?" she eventually asked. Naoya shrugged.

"In a way, I guess. When I was in school, the building of my academy had two-hundred and eleven floors. On the top floor was the office of the President of the Academy. It was a beautiful room, all mirrors and glass, with an expensive wooden desk and a nice set of chairs, just lovely. Most students never got to go up to that office, but you could say I had a very special relationship with the family that owned the school. You could see for hundreds of miles from up there... you could see the curve of the planet, the patterns of the buildings below, and the streets and hovercar lanes winding between them."

Naoya paused for a moment to tuck a lock of his hair behind his ear and put out the smoldering orange end of his deathstick in the moss.

"There wasn't any real significance in the top floor of that building, I guess it's just the building itself, all the things that happened to me while I was in it," he said, blowing the last of the smoke out and over his tongue. His voice turned softer as he reminisced. "I was just a young, simple boy when I first entered the gates of the academy. Nobody knows the things that I saw and heard and learned there. And when I was done, I had lost... so much of myself. Not many people know what it's like to have your childhood, your purity and your innocence, ripped away from you like it was from me. I was always afraid of the world of adults, and I was terrified of the day when I'd have to enter it. I wanted to stay a child forever, and I planned on running away from adulthood for as long as I could. But... I guess that wasn't really meant to be, huh?"

There was a terrible tightness in Suri's throat. For a moment, she couldn't swallow, she couldn't speak, she could barely breathe. Naoya wasn't looking at her, and Suri was grateful for that, because she would have felt like a fool had he seen her wide eyes clouded with tears, with her thick eyeliner and mascara beginning to run.

"I love Coruscant, and I love being up high... when I first came here, I had never seen a skyscraper before. I fell in love with them, and I still love them. I want to be able to go to the very top of the tallest one, to know that I am as far from the ground as I can possibly be. I want to reach that apex, but... I'm terribly afraid of making it to the top. It's like I can't move past that one milestone in my life, that place where I lost the innocent and pure part of me," Naoya sighed. "It's holding me back. It's blocking me from... going as high as I would like to go."

Suri put a shaking hand over her mouth. Naoya continued.

"That's what I have dreams about. I have dreams about being a child again, and I have dreams about the people who took that childhood away from me. I have dreams about him, about Chida... I have dreams about his death, about watching him fall off of the roof of the academy building and falling three-hundred and eleven floors to the ground. I have dreams where he comes to me and... screams at me for not being able to save him. They're not pleasant dreams by any means... but I have this... sick obsession with them, and the pain that they cause me. It's such a bittersweet pain, because as much as they hurt, they're my only links back to that time in my life, the last days of my childhood. And they're some of the only memories I have left of him. I loved him so much, but cannot help but look back on him with contempt and... rage, for stealing that part of my life away from me."

Neither of them spoke for a long while. Out of respect, Naoya didn't look at Suri as she let a few tears stream down her cheeks. He kept his eyes trained on the sun on the horizon, nearly halfway set, and the way the last rays of its light gleamed off of the skyscrapers in the distance. Talking about these things made him feel so weak; he didn't really feel like being here with her anymore. He just wanted to go home.

Behind him, Suri was trying to hurriedly wipe away any signs of her tears. It wasn't until he was sure that she was done that Naoya spoke again.

"You know what, there's something that I think you should have." Naoya patted down his pockets, searching through his coat once again. There was a small sound, a slight clatter, and from one of the many folds of his raincoat Naoya pulled a tall white prescription container of pills. He looked over the writing on the bottle, turned it a few times in his hands. The pills rattled around in their metaplastic container. Then, he held it out to Suri, and stared earnestly into her teary eyes. "Because you have dreams about your past too, don't you, Suri?" he asked.

Suri didn't have to be transformed to punch Naoya square in the jaw. The pills went tumbling over the edge of the building, and he would have went with them if Suri hadn't grabbed him by the collar and hauled him up to face her. She was stronger than him, especially when he was sleep-deprived, and in her heels she was taller than him, too. She loomed over him, holding him tight and almost strangling him with his own raincoat. Her eyes could have burned holes in him.

"How DARE you, how DARE you assume... You don't know me..." she sputtered, shocked and infuriated.

Naoya began to laugh. His gasps and spasms of laughter shook her through her hands.

"This isn't funny! Do you think I'm some sort of JOKE?!" she spat.

"No, no, Suri, it's not that..." Naoya stopped laughing long enough to catch his breath. "We're just so much more alike than you think!"

Enraged, Suri threw Naoya to the ground. He landed on his arm with a painful-sounding crunch, his hair scattering itself around him on the wet, dirty roof. It knocked the wind out of him, and he was gasping for air, choking and coughing, when Suri spoke again. Her voice was shaky and unsure, and cracked around the edges.

"I'm NOTHING like you."

She felt like she had been kicked in the stomach. Why was she crying? She couldn't stay here, she couldn't talk to him anymore -- she didn't want to think about why, but she couldn't. It was overwhelming and painful and frightening, and she had to leave, so she wiped the streaks of makeup from her cheeks, turned on her heel, and began to walk away.

"No! Please, Suri, don't go."

She glanced over her shoulder. Naoya was struggling back to his feet, trying to support himself on the parapet. His light hair was stained dark at the tips by the dirty rainwater he had landed in; it was running down the arm of his raincoat and dripping off of his nose. There was a purple bruise already forming on his chin.

"You really got me good there. Lucky shot," he said, grinning at her.

"I'm leaving now."

"No, please don't leave yet. I just want to give you something."

Naoya coughed violently, doubling over and clutching his stomach. He lost his footing, and fell forward a few steps before catching himself again. Suri watched in a kind of disgusted sympathy as Naoya pulled a piece of scarlet flimsi from under his coat.

"Here. Take this. It's my address -- directions to my apartment. I want you to have it. In case... you ever want to talk to me."

For a moment, Suri didn't move in either direction. She needed to turn and walk away. But he was staring at her with those impossibly crystalline eyes of his, and for some reason they were making resisting him impossible. What had he done to get such enchanting lavender eyes? She couldn't take the paper, she couldn't go over there again, she couldn't encourage him, everything inside of her was screaming in anger and frustration to just walk away... but she didn't. She couldn't. And the most frightening part of it all was that for some reason, she didn't want to. She stormed over to him and snatched the paper out of his fingers.

"I hope you know I'm going to show this to Caden. She'll make you regret you ever came here today," she said, putting the paper, unread and unopened, into her skirt pocket.

"You just do what you feel is right with that information, Suri. And tell Caden that I want her to teach you to wield a sword. I'd like to duel you someday Suri. It would be a very interesting match, don't you think?"

Suri didn't say another word to him. She glared for one moment more into his lilac eyes, before turning and stomping down to the street.

Suri was entering the Embassy just as Caden was leaving. She opened the door to find herself face-to-face with the tall, aristocratic woman.

"Oh, hi Suri! Where have you been?"

Suri smiled.

"Just at the coffee shop," she answered. Caden smiled back at her.

"That's a nice way to end a rainy day. I'm on my way to see Argent, and then to the Eye of Venus. The fleet is being shipped out to the Hapes cluster to settle a trade dispute. I won't be back for about a week, so I guess I'll talk to you then."

"Okay! Good luck!"

"Thanks. Bye!"

The door shut behind Caden. She straightened her jacket and headed down the front stoop of the Embassy, not even noticing the tiny red bits of torn-up paper that she was trampling beneath her feet.

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