TMiL: "Onmitsu No Ai"

DISCLAIMER: I didn't create the characters. They were created by 
the wonderful people at Pioneer/AIC.  

EDITOR's NOTE: This story takes place *DURING* Tenchi Muyo in Love,
but in a slightly different universe. There are some scenes from the
movie in this story as a result.

-CHAPTER 1-

      He was cute.
      That was the first thing Tanaka had thought when a young man
 with chestnut brown hair walked into the classroom for the first 
 time. His eyes were a pale shade of silver. A ray of sunlight had 
 come into the classroom and shone in his eyes, turning the surprisingly
 reflective pupils a soft shade of golden yellow. The effect was 
 breathtaking.
      The bus stopped to pick up a few more students, but Tanaka took
 no notice of this, she was too busy contemplating the new student who
 had so intrigued her and had stolen her heart so easily.   
      The other students had their own opinions of their new classmate.
      "Spooky." Some said.
      "Creepy." Others agreed.
      "His eyes are weird." One elucidated. "His pupils are slitted."
      "Like an animal's eyes." Another pointed out.
      It was clear that the new student was feeling self-conscious 
 about all this talk. He had taken to keeping to himself, sitting quietly,
 not raising his hand in class, even taking lunch in solitude.
      Tanaka could sense deep sadness in him, sadness he tried desparately
 to hide behind a facade of stoicism. Or perhaps he was in shock, she told
 herself.

      But why? She wondered. People just didn't wander around in shock for
 no good reason, did they? So what had happened to him? She thought of 
 asking the teacher, but the regular teacher was out and the new substitute
 seemed to have been picked from the bottom of the barrel. She was fairly 
 good, but she got frazzled easily and seemed jittery in the way a bunny in
 a fox's den would be.

      The sound of the bus coming to a stop pulled Tanaka's mind back to the
 present. She stepped off, cheerfully, and made her way into the crowd on 
 the school lawn. She could see the young boy in one of the nearby rows and 
 she smiled to herself.

      The morning was pretty much the same as always at first, Then 
Tanaka remembered that she still had a magazine she had borrowed from 
her friend Achika.  Achika... her confidante, and one of the finest 
people she had ever known. And, who just happened, Tanaka smiled to 
herself, to be in the same homeroom as the young man she'd fallen in 
love with.

       After asking politely to be excused, Tanaka rushed to get to the
 classroom where Achika and that wonderful boy were attending. She raced in
 and saw him leaning on the window. He was gazing, intently, at Achika, and
 for a moment Tanaka thought her heart would shatter. Was this young man in
   love with Achika? Then Tanaka realized that it wasn't love she saw in the
 young man's eyes, but fierce protectiveness, not the protectiveness of a
 lover, but of a self-appointed bodyguard. 
    "Achika," she called hoarsely. She was, after all, just recovering 
 from a sore throat.  She had only seen the new boy on the first day he'd 
 arrived.  "I'm...returning your magazine"

    "I haven't seen you for days, Tanaka." Achika replied, then smiled. 
 and asked, "How's your cold?"
    "I still have a sore throat, but I've got a test, too." Tanaka 
 explained. 
    Nobuyuki blushed as Achika paused by his desk and waved to him.
 Tanaka could see that he was in love with her and wished that the new boy 
 would love her just as much as they loved each other.  "Achika, are you 
 listening to me?"
    "Yes." Achika turned away from Nobuyuki for the moment and went 
 over to her friend. 
    The two discussed the articles Tanaka had read while the boy 
 Tanaka was so deeply infatuated with gazed over in their direction.
 Tanaka wished he was looking at her with love in his eyes, but she knew
 it was Achika he was looking at. He's being protective again, she told
 herself.
    She smiled to herself, then frowned. Why was he being so 
 protective of Achika? He wasn't in love with her, just protective. Tanaka
 wondered if he knew of some danger Achika was in. If so, why hadn't he
 told the teachers? Or hadn't he? He did seem a bit more mature than the
 other students. Maybe he really was a secret service man, or some kind of
 secret agent, she thought, maybe he's here to stop something awful from
 happening to Achika.
    That's when Tanaka noticed a girl with outragiously spiked blue 
 hair.  She was looking at the chestnut haired boy with a gaze of bitter 
 mistrust.  He noticed this and quickly turned to look out the window."
 Achika, who hadn't noticed that he was watching her, returned to her 
 seat while Tanaka blew the chestnut haired boy a kiss. He must have
 caught what she'd done out the corner of his eye, because Tanaka fancied
 she caught a hint of a blush on the boy's alabaster cheeks. She blushed a
 little, too, at her own forwardness, then rushed back to her own homeroom.

    'Naoki' had noticed that the blue haired girl was not the only one who
 had been watching him in the classroom. Achika hadn't noticed him watching
 her, or perhaps she'd thought that he was simply a shy boy who thought she
 was pretty, which, he had to admit to himself, she was, but couldn't bring
 himself to tell her or was trying to gather up the courage to do so.
    'Naoki' laughed in his mind. Him trying to gather up courage was like a
 cherry blossom trying to gather up beauty. He didn't need any more. In 
 fact, the people he'd lived with before he'd come here felt quite the 
 opposite was true. They called him reckless, foolhardy, daring. Bravery
 was on adjective which described the boy very well. But here, in this place,
 people thought of him with only two adjectives... quiet and shy.
    If those he'd lived with had heard him described those ways, they would
 have been amazed. But then he had come her unprepared, torn from his home,
 and from those he'd called his family. His heart ached as he thought of
 them, the nightmare vision he'd seen forever etched upon his soul. That
 nightmare had a name. A name he hated with the very essence of his being. 
 The name belonged to a creature that those he'd cared about had, in their
 own arrogance, thought they could contain forever in their devices. And,
 for a hundred years, they had. But now it was free, and its first act of
 freedom had been to slaughter those around him, as it fled. Not all of them
 were massacred by the evil that had escaped their strongest prison. But he
 knew that those who had been there had perished. He had seen it happen, the
 demon's energy slamming through the station, electrocuting and executing
 all in its path. And while it had attacked, the creature had been building
 up another energy wave, the one that would take it back to 1970 where it 
 would destroy, once and for all, the only people who could stand against
 it. And then, the creature had made a mistake. One that had saved the boy's
 life. When it had reached out with energy to destroy him as it had those
 around him, it had lashed out the *wrong* energy at him, transporting him
 in an instant back to 1970. At first, he'd been dazed, unable recall who
 he was or where he was from. Then something in his mind, which he later
 realized was a memory recall device in his internal computer, switched on
 and he remembered who he was. He also remembered the nightmare he'd seen,
 and he remembered its name.  It's name was Kain.

    He was sitting alone at lunch, as he always did, and Tanaka almost
 sat with him. Almost. As she reached his table, she could have sworn she
 heard him growl at her, or maybe he was arguing with a tough bit of meat.
 He didn't have the best table manners in the world, she'd noticed, but a
 boy as cute as he was could afford to be impolite now and again. After 
 all, she told herself, everyone was entitled to one or two faults. He
 had brought his own meal, not that anyone blamed him, school lunches are
 notorious for tasting horrible, which consisted of spareribs and some 
 teriyaki steak, it was a lot of meat for a Japanese meal, but he was an 
 exchange student... and was tearing at them, growling with each bite, like 
 some wild animal enjoying its meal and warning off scavengers. The growl 
 was frightening and Tanaka told herself he was obvious not in the mood for 
 company, so she sat at a nearby table, keeping her eye on him. When he was
 finished, he licked the teriyaki sauce from his hands and then lickgroomed
 his face to clean off any teriyaki sauce that might have got there. He
 quickly finished and took a sip of his milk. A moment later, he crushed
 the small carton in his hand as if he'd suddenly realized what he'd done
 and was angry at himself for such a major slip-up. He got up and walked 
 over to the door with an amazing amount of dignity considering how he'd 
 been acting during lunch, slipping a hand into a pocket so he appeared
 almost regal, then tossed his milk carton into the trash as he left the
 room.

    'Naoki' studied his face in the bathroom mirror. A little pale compared
 to most of the other students there, but quite handsome otherwise. It
 was his eyes that troubled everyone. He'd had a pair of contact lenses
 that would've helped matters considerably, but they'd been lost along 
 time ago. He recalled vividly the events surrounding the loss. He'd been
 attending an medal-giving ceremony at which the being who had saved his
 life when he was a child, a being whom he was later reunited with as a
 youth when he'd first arrived after graduating at the Academy, was being
 honored. When he had returned to his cabin, down the hall from the one 
 belonging to his rescuer and friend, he had discovered, to his amazement,
 that he'd been robbed! Several items had been taken from him, including
 his contact lenses and, to his embarrassment, his diary. 
    Of course the thief had never mentioned any of the entries in his diary.
 'Naoki' had never spoken of these facts to anyone and talking of them would
 have given the thief away, and so his private life had remained at least
 mostly private, known only to himself and the thief. He'd never recovered
 his lost property, but in the years that followed, his work had earned him
 more than enough money to replace the items he'd lost. He never, however,
 started another diary, and he also failed, entirely, to replace the contact
 lenses. He hadn't really thought they'd be neccessary. He'd only gone to 
 Earth once before, and then no one had ever looked him in the eye. Not even
 just once. 

    "You know," a student observed, walking into bathroom and lighting up a
 cigarette, "you're never going to win her over with this shy routine. If I
 were you, I'd stop moping about and go after her."
    "And if I were you, I'd put that damned thing out before I shove it 
 down your throat." His enhanced senses had their drawbacks and one of them
 was the smell of cigarette smoke. He had nothing against smokers, or their
 habit, and to be fair he had spent more than his share of time in the
 proverbial smoke-filled room, that was inevitable in his line of work. But
 today, he wasn't in a very accomodating mood. Already he'd had managed to
 embarrass himself at lunch, and he was sure he'd been recognized by that
 damned blue-haired girl. Why couldn't she keep her mind on what she was
 doing and just leave him alone. She was going to blow it, he knew, and it
 irritated him. And now this mere boy was presuming to try to give *him*
 advice like he was an idiot.
    Within a few seconds of the boy's rather expected comeback of "I'd like
 to see you try it.", 'Naoki' was on his way back to class while the other boy
 was lying sprawled out on the floor of the boys' room.
    
    In her next class, Tanaka found herself seated next to the boy who 
 she had been daydreaming of all day. With him so close, she found it
 difficult to concentrate on her studies. He was very handsome, she
 reasoned, that's why she couldn't keep her mind on her schoolwork, and
 she was falling in love with him. She blushed at the thought, knowing
 that he would've blushed, too, if he could've read it. 
     Something, perhaps the latent maternal instinct in all women,
 told her that he had clearly faced more than his share of traumas. 
 Despite this, she was sure that he was as pure as she was.
    "That might be a problem on our wedding night." she remarked,
 not realizing at first that she'd spoken aloud.
    He looked over at her with a bewildered expression on his face and
 his head cocked to one side in puzzlement. 
    Tanaka realized she'd spoken out and blushed, deeply, turning red
 all over. 
 She looked totally flustered. "Oh my!" she gasped, in a state
 of near-panic. "Oh dear..." The boy put a hand onto hers, meaning to
 soothe her and ease her mind. Instead, the act had just the opposite
 effect. Her heart leaped up into her throat and the butterflies that
 were in her stomach began to dance the minute waltz. Then he looked at
 her and she saw the twin slits of his pupils up close for the first
 time. Those eyes, entrancing, exotic... They held her spellbound for a 
 moment and she gazed back up into them, Her own eyes shone with love
 and admiration, and perhaps just a twinge of fear. He leaned forward and
 she wondered if he was going to kiss her. The butterflies gave up the 
 minute waltz in favor of mimicking the combat of her favorite anime
 series' mecha and she thought she would faint.
    Just then, the schoolbell rang.
        "Damn," she though to herself, though she was too polite to say
 the word aloud.