Episode 50

(Frankfurt, January 28, 2002)

Parting from Sree had been anticlimactic. It wasn’t until a few days later that Daryl really felt her absence, and by then he was caught in a whirlwind of logistics. The failure of their two subsequent hunts didn’t strike him as attributable to bad luck. To Daryl’s eye, those missions had been carefully planned and executed. He couldn’t identify any specific critical misstep, but somehow they felt different than before.

Perhaps he was jaded. When he first went hunting with Rin, everything had been new and exciting. Now he had spent too much time around immortals, and nothing seemed novel. Was that what everything was like for Rin? He doubted anything could be new for her.

Maybe it actually was Rin who was off her game, but that seemed unlikely. Daryl doubted she would be careless in the pursuit of her precious immortals. He strongly suspected that he somehow was the problem. If so, she had remained uncharacteristically silent about it. There was no recrimination or criticism or abuse, or at least no more recrimination and criticism and abuse than usual.

Though their recent missions had failed, Daryl’s personal quest for information had not. In the last couple of months, Rin had become far more liberal with answers. He had no idea why, but preferred not to question his good fortune. He would take advantage of her newfound munificence while it lasted, which he was certain would not be long.

Rin had by no means transformed into a patient teacher. Her temper made itself known frequently and with unabated flair. The difference was that when she did choose to explain something, her answers now were forthright and detailed. He wondered if this was because she no longer needed to keep up the fiction of being the evil Queen.

He had meant to ask her about that but never found a suitable time. The whole concoction amused Daryl, though he dared not show it. She didn’t need to play the evil Queen to be a villain in his eyes. She accomplished that quite well on her own.

Daryl decided that the most plausible explanation for her new openness was simple apathy. The desire to deal with a bothersome ‘other’ in the least troubling way. Anger and violence and cruelty required energy. Even rejection required effort, or at least a willingness to argue. There was good reason to suspect that such a malaise had indeed taken hold of Rin. Even her cruelties felt obligatory.

This disturbed Daryl most of all. He had not seen this side of Rin before, but she probably had many sides he had not seen. His five-year exile had driven that home. However, this particular disposition felt oddly incongruous with the Rin he knew. Most worrisome, it meant he could not predict how she would react. In a way, this excited Daryl. Maybe a new Rin would be the perfect cure for his own listlessness. He wondered whether he would miss the old one.

Of all the things Daryl learned through her newfound liberality, the most important was that Rin’s explanations — however pregnant with detail — still made little sense. Her erstwhile evasions and distortions and outright lies now were replaced with equally incomprehensible truths. Only the source of Daryl’s confusion had changed. The one thing he fully understood was its reason. That reason was simple and incurable and endlessly frustrating. It was that Rin herself made no sense.

Daryl often wondered whether her words reflected how she truly saw the world. Maybe she still was toying with him, and her devices merely had grown more subtle. Ultimately, it did not matter. Whether truths or elaborate falsehoods, Rin’s explanations never made much sense and always seemed to unravel on close inspection. Daryl could not tell whether this was a failing on his part or just the completely nonsensical nature of Rin’s world.

Case in point was their present mission to destroy Karkov. Despite her earlier reticence, Rin finally had revealed to Daryl how she used spheres to bind immortals. He only could follow small parts of her explanation and suspected that was intentional. For all he knew, she could be spouting nonsense. He wouldn’t know the difference. Was her apparent new openness a sham? It didn’t strike him as such, and he wanted to believe in her. But he couldn’t shake the sense that she wasn’t actually talking to him.

Daryl was reminded him of when he was in the army. He once had seen an instructor teach the same lesson to two soldiers on different occasions. The words and concepts were the same, but in one case his tone was bored and perfunctory while in the other it was enthusiastic and encouraging. The man left little doubt what he thought of each pupil.

Did Rin see no potential worth cultivating, yet somehow feel obligated to teach him these things anyway? Not for the first time, Daryl realized he very well could be just one in a long line of assistants. Perhaps she had high hopes for him in the beginning, but he had dashed those.

He suspected Rin would leave or kill him rather than drag out their time together, but he was not sure. Despite her general demeanor, she could feel some sort of obligation toward him. She had used that word a lot in regard to Sree, so presumably such things held significance for her.

Even more worrisome was the possibility that Rin no longer saw him as a person. Was he just furniture? Perhaps she was talking to herself this whole time, and he just happened to be nearby. One day she would realize he wasn’t a couch or a chair, and the whole fiction of their relationship would vanish in an instant. His fiction, not hers.

When he had such thoughts, Daryl did his best to dispel them. On the off-chance Rin actually cared about him, succumbing to such insecurities would convince her not to. At the very least, she would mock him relentlessly for them.

The spheres weren’t the only the thing Rin spoke more freely about now. Without prompting, she even shared details of her initial foray into his home country. That was a subject he often had wondered about but never felt comfortable broaching.

It wasn’t that Daryl didn’t care or was afraid to ask, as his perennial willingness to incur abuse in the pursuit of answers could attest. Nor was he satisfied with his existing knowledge of an event which bore great personal significance to him. He did not view it as particularly traumatic or as something to shy away from. Quite the contrary, he saw it as a formative moment in his life.

Daryl had a different reason to steer clear of the subject, albeit an equally compelling one. He still was insecure around Rin, not because of her threats or bullying or unpredictability but because he felt unworthy of her. Recalling the events of that day could alert Rin to her mistake.

This wasn’t some vague concern about being seen as furniture until a distant reckoning. It was a concrete fear that she would discard him for a specific reason at a specific time. What if her reason for sparing him was absurd? She had suggested as much in the past, and he was sure the real explanation would seem that way to him. But his opinion wasn’t the issue. What if it also seemed absurd in retrospect to her? What if she finally realized he was nothing more than an ordinary soldier?

Whatever illusion she operated under would lift, and she finally would see him for the fraud he was. Then he would be nothing more than an ordinary soldier, and an old one at that. Even if he was just a convenient piece of furniture to her, Daryl did not want things to change.

Without understanding why Rin had favored him over his comrades, he could not assess the degree to which this fear was warranted. Nor would that be enough. Even in the best scenario imaginable and armed with perfect knowledge, he still would not be sure. Sree had warned him about this. As she put it, the Rin of yesteryear would have killed him for the slightest insolence and the Rin of tomorrow very well could too. He had appreciated her concern, but there was nothing he could do. It was a premonition about an insuperable eventuality. However, it did suggest caution in certain other regards. Daryl knew himself unworthy of Rin, and only a fool would call her attention to this. He at least could avoid being that fool.

When Rin raised the subject of her own accord, Daryl feared the worst. By then he had grown certain that revisiting the fateful day would only bring misfortune. Instead, it brought a rather long-winded disquisition on the shortcomings of his fellow soldiers, replete with unflattering annotations on their manhood, military prowess, and intelligence. By the end, Daryl had grown quite indignant. He almost was moved to defend his former comrades, even if he did not materially disagree with Rin’s assessment of them. Nor was it lost on him that she carefully sidestepped their own little encounter. Whether this was tact or a slight remained unclear.

Either way, Daryl was relieved that his own worth had not come under scrutiny. However, he also was reminded of a question which had bothered him for some time.

“Why now?” Daryl asked.

“Why what now? You’ll have to be more specific, since something always is happening now and there’s rarely a why for it.”

Daryl was unsure how to read Rin’s current mood. Was she done answering questions or was she just being snippy as usual? He decided to plow ahead. “Going after Karkov. Why now?”

Rin smirked. “Already quaking in your boots, boy?” She shimmied closer to him on the bed and brought her face close to his. “Is the little tin soldier terrified of dying?”

She looked away. “Karkov’s nothing to be scared of. You’d know if you ever met him.”

Daryl was about to point out that he had met him but thought better of it. There was no telling how Rin would react to such a revelation, even if she probably already suspected as much.

“I’m not afraid of him, but you said that even a Two could be a formidable opponent for me. I want to go into this fully prepared.”

Rin smiled at Daryl. “That’s why you have me.”

“If I didn’t have you, I wouldn’t need to worry about Karkov.”

“No, you’d just be worrying about kissing some officer’s ass in your pissant little backwater.” Rin grinned. “Hey, who knows what else you’d be doing with that officer’s ass. Are you wondering whether that would have been more fun?”

Daryl managed not to take the bait but couldn’t help rolling his eyes. It was something he finally had learned from Rin, though he wondered why he had bothered. A man did not lash others with his tongue or eyes. That was what fists were for. Well, these days, guns.

“I mean, why are you doing this now?”

“Me? What happened to we? Am I doing this alone? I thought all this fucking had earned me your strong right arm. You know, the one that got worked out so much before all this fucking. Now I just feel like a whore.” Rin ostentatiously pouted.

Daryl sighed. “No, successfully trading sex for military prowess would make you a whore. Trading sex for an empty promise just would make you a sucker.” Before she could summon a retort, he continued. “Of course I’m coming with you. And it’s not because I owe you anything. I still need to learn how to kill you.”

Rin nuzzled him with her head and gazed up into his eyes longingly. “You always know just what to say to a girl. And I so look forward to it. Please hurry, I’m getting impatient.”

Refusing to be goaded, Daryl calmly repeated his question.

Rin sat up, any trace of flirtation gone. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

Taking her look of confusion for reserve, he elaborated. “Is it because we haven’t been able to catch any immortals lately?”

“I guess it’s harder when I have to stop every few seconds so my incontinent mutt can piddle all over everything. I should use a shorter leash and a bigger stick.”

“I thought maybe you needed some closure with Karkov to get your head back in the game.”

“My head?” Rin snapped. “You won’t have a head, even a shitty one, if you don’t watch your tongue.”

Her mood suddenly brightened and she gave a lethargic stretch before poking Daryl with her finger.

“See, that was a queenly thing to say. I’ll do it too.”

She regarded him with more curiosity than anger. “What the hell would possess you to suggest that my head isn’t in the game? And where did you even learn that expression? You barely could speak English five minutes ago.”

So far Rin had remained chipper, if volatile. But now there was a certain edge to her voice. Daryl wondered how far he could push before the storm arrived. It irked him that she was so difficult sometimes. The immortals were her damned purpose, not his. He didn’t even know why they were hunting them, beyond some nonsense she had spouted about a debt to the gods. Even if that was true, it was her debt and her purpose and her damned failure. Why should he get beaten up by her in order to help her? Despite this very clear reason not to, his mouth formed the words anyway.

“Five years. And it’s my business too if you expect me to help.”

Rin gave him a look of disbelief but remained seated. “Expect? EXPECT? You signed up for this, buddy boy. What the hell are you whining about?”

“I’m just curious: why now?”

“As opposed to?” She really didn’t seem to understand what he was getting at. Was that why she was so touchy about it? Daryl wondered what she thought he meant.

“It’s been twenty years since you first tried,” he explained. “Why wait this long? Presumably you could have gone after Karkov any time. He’s probably been in the same place, by the sound of it.” He looked at her. “Do you actually want to destroy him?”

Rin was on her feet in a blink, with his hair tightly gripped in her right hand.

“You want to know why we’re doing it now, little soldier?” she growled.

Daryl tried to nod, but found it difficult under the circumstances.

“I’ll tell you why. Because your fucking general tells you to.”

With that, she kicked him on the left side. Their respective positions gave Rin very little leverage, and the blow was more annoying than painful. But it was far from the last. What her ensuing diatribe lacked in eloquence it more than made up for in clarity. Like any good pedagogue, Rin repeated her central thesis several times and backed it up with incontrovertible arguments. Daryl’s muscles cushioned him, but he knew better than to overtly block any of her blows. Though none of the individual punches or kicks were damaging, in aggregate they resulted in some respectable bruising.

By the time Rin had finished, he had the same firm understanding of her opinion as at the beginning. Basically, it amounted to, “do as you’re goddamned told you worthless sack of horseshit.” In fact, she had stated this verbatim at least four times. Daryl didn’t have the temerity to ask why Rin would want the services of a worthless sack of horseshit. Presumably, that was supposed to be self-evident.

Eventually, the onslaught subsided, and Rin plopped back down, exhausted. Daryl grabbed her and kissed her violently, pressing her into the mattress. In mere seconds, he had her stripped and was inside. As Rin moaned, he wondered whether he tolerated the abuse because of this. Part of him knew he wanted the abuse for this. It was a large part.