Daylight. It seeped through my windows in a dusty winter dawn color, illuminating the putty-colored walls and making the room dimly bright. It was more comforting than the harsh fluorescent fixture on the ceiling, the one that hadn't been lit for a week now. I came awake suddenly, breaking out of the haze of REM with the echo of a voice hanging in the dream-dark corridors of my mind. I waited breathlessly in the too-still air, hoping valiantly for the sound of my roommate whacking his alarm clock, or the rumble of a car on the road outside, a shower coming on somewhere in the dorm, anything. Silence. Not even the emaciated radiator in the corner wheezed out with a rattle and clang of steam pipes, the antiquated heating system was eerily mute.

I sighed resignedly, letting out the breath I was holding, waking up to weirdness as I had every day since Tuesday. A week ago today. Not that I should keep track of how long it had been- that would simply drive me mad. I wished I could return to my dream, where my friends and family still dwelled, but several days worth of sleeping from sundown to sunup had left me wide awake, alert even when before 'morning' was a word intoned with dread. What I wouldn't give for a term paper right now. Not that I couldn't do one out of spite- thank god the library was unlocked or I really would have lost it.

A soft, heart breaking cry slid into the room, and for a moment I was puzzled, knowing I had not made it. Then I remembered, and moved quickly to the other bed in my dorm room and the pale figure lying trembling there, my roommate's sheets tangled around his hips.

"Shh." I tried, cautiously, stroking back some of the unruly blond hair. My strange charge thrashed with nightmares in the sleep he had been in since I had found him. I worried that the gash in his side would reopen. The bandage wound around his ribs was not stained, though, and for some reason my touch quieted him.

"Rioh," he murmured, a noise I had heard him murmur frequently in his sleep. There were a few others, something that sounded like ' tohmah' and another word with lots of 'ki-ki-kou' sounds in it. I had heard "tomodachi" clearly once, enough to make me pretty sure he was speaking Japanese.

If I was right, it meant 'friend'.

I wondered if his friends had gone where mine had gone- where everyone had gone. "What are you dreaming?" I whispered to the now-composed features that were caressed by the morning light, as though the two were familiar companions long separated. "How can I help you?"

His fingers tightened in mine, surprising me, I did not recall taking his hand. If anybody had been there to see it it would have embarrassed the hell out of me, but for once I was glad we were beyond alone, and I needed the human touch maybe more than he did. It didn't matter if he was conscious or not. It comforted us both.

I found him two days ago, when I had gotten adjusted to the fact that the city and maybe the world was deserted. I'd gone on a scavenger run to the store, although there was no power at least the doors were unlocked to everything, and as the only remaining survivor of SOMETHING I helped my self to anything I could use. Bottled water, a small generator, first aid supplies, non-perishable food. No one else seemed to have disturbed anything- the whole population was just-

Gone.

One day I woke up to a planet empty of people- everything else was there, animals and wildlife, but it was as though Rod Serling had begun narrating my life. I had come back to my abandoned dorm to find him standing bewilderedly on the front step, holding his side awkwardly and leaning heavily on the sword that was as tall as he was. Blood stained one side of his armor, and the white gauntlet pressed to the spot, leaving red streaks down one white armored thigh and emerald green leg plate. The puddle at his feet was mixed with rainwater, a metallic gunmetal and claret shade of pain. He looked at me blankly, with eyes the same heavy grey as the clouds that were threatening snow, and made a soft noise in his throat. I thought of everything that I could say- like 'you're hurt' but something told me he was pretty aware of that fact. And he looked so confused; it was more like facing an injured animal than a person. The armor and sword were almost commonplace, just another weird thing in an increasingly weird world.

"Let me-" I began, but he shook his head urgently, I heard his teeth gritting. The fall of blond hair almost blocked his grimace of pain. He said something, something I could tell was urgent and hopeless but unintentelligble. It only connected later that he wasn't speaking English.

He collapsed suddenly, the sword falling with a clang of defeat, the rainwater and blood soaking his hair and smearing one cheek. I just stared for a second. Then I went on autopilot. The armor was tricky to get off but he was bleeding to death inside of it; I was glad of all those yeas of working in a costume shop. I could get an actor in and out of a three-piece suit in under two minutes, and they usually weren't dying under my hands.

I didn't let myself look at the wound in his side, or wonder how it got there. It screamed danger to me somewhere, and if I got panicked I wouldn't be able to help him. Instead I concentrated on naming each bit of armor as I removed it, Pauldrons, greaves, breastplate, helm... anything to keep my mind off the implications of this person's arrival.

Whatever they may be.

At least I had gotten supplies. I stripped him down to nothing, bandaged whatever was bleeding, grateful for boyscout first aid. I grabbed the blanket I had in my appropriated shopping cart, and wrapped him up in it, trying to move him as little as possible. Carrying him upstairs was going to be a bitch. And I couldn't leave him here, cold on the concrete. He didn't weigh as much as I feared, although it worried me that he didn't stir when I picked him up and carried him to my room, lodging him in my roommate's vacant bed. It was after I'd gotten all the strange green armor, the huge sword, all my food and supplies upstairs that I realized there was a strange, naked, sword-wielding drop-dead gorgeous dude sprawled in my room.

I laughed until I began to worry I might have already lost it, then prayed he wouldn't die- hurt somewhere inside I couldn't fix. I rebandaged the wound, dosing it with antiseptic and whatever else would prevent infection, and frowned at the collection of bruises on the smooth white skin. He'd been fighting a lot. Who was he? Where had he come from? What had he been battling that left him so close to death and lost? Would it come after me, for saving him?

I glanced warily at the armor stacked in the corner, and the sword that was like a claymore gone eastern. Sometimes it seemed to reflect more light than was readily available in the room.

'Please." I whispered to him. "If you die- I'm all alone. Please." If he didn't wake up soon he never would. And I so wanted to at least know his name.

I gathered the blankets that he had flung off in his sleep and wrapped them back around him, keeping him as warm as a could. Luck had given me one of the dorm rooms with a chimney in it connected to the fireplace downstairs, so at least it was not too cold in the room. His skin was not feverish, so that relieved me. I had just started to go down to the main lobby under my room and build the fire back up for the day when he stirred again, one hand coming up to the soft blond hair that I had washed the blood out of carefully.

He tried to sit up before I could tell him not to, a hiss of pain escaping his lips when he discovered that fact for himself. He fell back against the pillow, silent even though he must be hurting still.

"Nani?" His voice sounded different when he was not weak with pain, as his eyes swept over the room and found me. His lips made words I didn't understand, ending with a querying sound. He suddenly pressed a hand to his chest, some anguish evident on his face. I worried suddenly that he might be hurt there and I didn't know about it.

"I... I found you." I said at last, lamely, and he looked at me with gold brows lowered, apparently shifting gears.

"Where am I?" His English was like a purr, with a kind of thrum" beneath all his words. It made me forget how to speak for a moment.

"I.. You're in my room. I think it's safe here. No one else is around. Anywhere." I sounded tinny and strange to my own ears. His eyes had thawed from snow clouds to pale violets; he looked like an angel. My heart seemed to be beating so fast he must surely have heard it.

He shifted, wincing, and noticed the armor and sword in the corner of the room, hideously out of place with my stereo equipment and paperbacks of Byron and Shelley. The look that crossed his features was subtle, and I was unsure if it was relief, resignment, or love.

"I need my sword."

"I-"

His gaze, cool and controlled, silenced me. He eased himself upright, and twisted to get out of the bed.

"Wait, you'll hurt yourself-" I might as well have been a snowflake melting on his cheek for all the notice that was taken of me, and even when he went to his knees I could not reach to help him more than a vague twitch of my hands.

Somehow, when he was awake, to touch him would be not permitted. He reached out one arm, muscles moving smoothly under the pale skin, and twined his fingers around the hilt, pulling himself to the blade until he was kneeling beside it, grasping the grip with both hands.

"bokunokokoro," he whispered, and glimmerings of green light began to dance sluggishly along the length of the blade, moving slowly at first and then whirling until it and him were bathed in a verdant glow. The light filled up the room and lit him with green fire, his head going back as strands of green white energy stirred his hair and flashed like heat lightning over his body. The bruises blossomed into pink and then vanished like flowers blooming in reverse, the gauze wrapped around him crackled silently and burned itself to nothing in sparks of furious emerald. My room blazed with foxfire. His eyes were shut but I could not close mine. The beauty of what I was seeing birthed poetry in my mind that I could never have put to paper, I think I fell to my knees. I realized as the glow ebbed and flickered that it was worth the cost of everything I ever knew to have seen this once. He was beautiful in an awesome, terrible way, like the word, and I thought then, as I do now, that they are twin beings.

The last light exhaled itself, his hair stilled in the absence of power.

Not even a scar remained of the cut on his side.

For a moment he did not move, a tableau of steel and human strength, and then his shoulders fell slightly, his head lowering. The sword dissolved with a strange sound like bubbles popping musically, and the armor and blade vanished into a green orb he cradled in his palm.

"Kourin is weak," he said, I suppose to me. "It does not survive well on its own."

"Korin?" The word sounded flat when I spoke it. "Is that.. the sword?"

"The armor." His eyes stopped scryring in the small crystal and he turned to me, and now I knew where that power had coiled. "I owe you my life."

He made it sound like I'd loaned him my Tori Amos albums, as if his life were not of much more value to him than that. "I- it--.. Forget it, I was just trying to help, ya know" I fumbled vainly, wishing he would twitch or something. That motionless regard was unraveling me.

"Thank you," He said, and something about him was a little softer, and it made me smile without realizing it.

"You're welcome."

He stood fluidly, not even batting an eyelash at the fact that he was not wearing so much as a 'censored' blot, and frowned out the window. "And you say that you're alone?"

"There's no one. They all vanished."

"Hn." It sounded like a growl. My skin prickled.

I struggled with my words as though I was trying to do up buttons with bulky gloves on. "um.. I'm Tal. Well, it's what everybody calls me, anyway."

He sat down on the bed, and I was not sure if I was relived or disappointed that the blanket shifted to cover him. "What is your given name, then?"

I rolled my eyes in humiliation. "Edmund."

He smiled, a tightening of his lip and a lift to his almond eyes. "Tal?"

"It's short for Taliesin. He was a bard-"

"The Welsh one."

I tried to ignore the innocent thrill that went through me that he knew my borrowed namesake. "Yes."

"Toma is fond of him."

I was silent, unsure how to respond to that.

"My name is Date Seiji, as I am sure you're wondering."

"Date?"

"That is my family name."

Oh, duh, I thought. He's Japanese- family name first. "Seiji, then?"

A nod, he looked suddenly tired.

"You should rest."

He didn't argue, whatever healing had happened had not cured his exhaustion. "Would it be possible to arrange a bath?"

I knew I was blushing, but I pretended greatly that I wasn't. "The showers still work but there's no electricity to heat them... I'll warm some water- can you make it downstairs? There's a tub by the fireplace-I drug it up from the laundry room yesterday. It's not high class or anything-"

"It will suffice." My hand was caught suddenly in cool strong fingers. "I owe you a debt, Taru." He flipped the r to approximate an l; the u must be some Japanese addition. It made my brief nickname seem somehow richer, and I turned my head so that my hair shielded me.

"You owe me nothing," I returned, a strange ache welling up at the warmth in his tone. I turned and left quickly before I could make a fool of myself, the memory of cool skin and frosted eyes following me.

to be continued...

by Tenshi no Korin
yoroiden samurai troopers
b i s h o n e n i n k