Glow, a yu-gi-oh fanfic

Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh is the intellectual property of Kazuki Takahashi and Konami, and is being used in this fanfiction for fan purposes only. No infringement or disrespect is intended by this fanfiction.

Description: The one time in his life that he'd tried to do something right instead of something safe, he had lost his home and his mother, all for a stranger he'd never see again.

Note: Written for Round 2 of Season 8 of the Ffnet Fanfiction Contest, this story is a Mizushipping (Priest Seto and Kisara) AU in which the events of the canon story have been transposed to a modern setting. ~ The main character's name has been changed since the story was first posted.

Glow

by Animom

[1956]
.

"Oh, comrade, baby baby!"

That was how it started, the first of three days that changed his life. He'd raced out of school to take the downtown bus, and had been flipping through the bins of used 45s at the back of Michigan Mike's record store when the jocks came in, buzz-cut and swaggering in their senior varsity jackets. Compared to them freshman Seth was the bottom of the food chain, and so they had ignored him.

He'd looked up again a few minutes later when the girl came in, accompanied by the whistles and catcalls. Pale, dressed in dark, drab clothes, her hair tucked under a hat, from where he was standing she looked a little like Eva Marie Saint, who he'd had a crush on ever since he'd snuck into the Palladium to see the forbidden movie On the Waterfront when he was 12.

Seth had taken the only single he had found, something by a monk, and moved closer to the front of the store, re-reading the list he'd been given and then pretending to flip through the bins of the long-playing records while he had listened to the girl talking to Mike about some band named Coal Train. She had a lilting, strongly accented voice.

"Don' she look like one of them Beat girls?" the tallest jock had said. "I hear beatnik girls are easy. Comes from listening to all that Negro music."

"No kidding?" One of the jock's smaller attendants looked the girl up and down. "I didn't know commies liked Negro music."

Seth went to the counter and watched from the corner of his eye as the girl paid for her purchase from a small coin-purse. Close up, he could see she didn't really look that much like Eva Marie, but she was still pretty in a weird, exotic way.

"It's what I hear." The pack of jocks snickered. "Betcha those skinny stick legs've seen lots of action."

The girl had taken the bag from Mike, flashed a small smile at his "Do svidaniya," then turned and, head down, made quickly for the door.

The jocks blocked her way. "Ike oughtta kick all you red freaks out of the country," one of them said, giving her shoulder a shove.

"Stay cool, boys," Mike warned easily.

The girl slipped through them and out the door. The jocks smirked and murmured after her. "I don't know. What do you want to do tonight, Marty?" laughed one.

"Well, I'm at football practice right now, daddy-o," said the tallest. "With the rest of ya. Right? Coach will vouch for me." He had then led his pack out of the store, ambling in the direction the girl had gone.

Seth, his face burning as Mike rang up the record, had hated himself for being a coward. The sound of the cash register slamming shut had been a reprimand.

"You gonna go after her?" Mike had asked, holding out the bag. "Those guys look like trouble."

"I – " He had taken the bag, told himself he was just one guy who, despite Charles Atlas's instructions, wasn't bulked up like Superman. "I gotta go. My foster father gets mad if I don't go right home after school."

"Tell your mom I hope she likes the Monk, okay?"

He had meant to go right home. He had really meant to board the Number 36 bus, the bus that pulled up right in front of the record store just as he came out, but instead he turned and followed the bobbing letter jackets.

"This is all your fault, Lillian!" his foster father seethed in the car on the way home from the police station. "If you hadn't been barren, we never would have had to put up with this, this – bad seed." He shifted, cursing as the gears ground.

His foster mother's weeping was almost drowned out by the rumble of the Packard.

"Dad, I told you – " Seth started to explain, but the snarl from the front seat cut him off. "Not another word from you, or so help me God I'll get out the belt when we get home and you won't be able to sit for a week."

Seth had tried to explain that he had followed the jocks to make sure they didn't do anything to the girl, but despite the blood on his face, the cops who appeared in the alley – he found out later that Michigan Mike had called them – hadn't listened at first, instead cuffing and shoving him in the police van along with the jocks. And now, thanks to trying to act like Terry to that girl's Edie, as far as his foster parents were concerned he had a criminal record. It didn't matter that, after the foreign girl told the police that Seth had been trying to protect her, the charges against him had been dropped; no, he was still a juvenile delinquent in his parent's eyes. And worse.

"What are the guys at work gonna say when they hear that I'm harboring a pinko, eh?" his foster father stormed at him. "That'll be the end of my promotions, I can tell you that."

"You've got it wrong!" Seth shot back. "I was just helping that girl!"

It made no difference. He went to sleep holding his pillow over his ears, trying to muffle the shouting and the sobbing pleas, but he wasn't that surprised in the morning when his red-eyed foster mother told him that it had been decided that he'd go back to the group home.

"You'll see," she said in a fearful whisper as she stood by and watched him pack his battered cardboard suitcase. "It's for the best. It'll all turn out for the best."

He gritted his teeth and didn't reply. The one time in his life that he'd tried to do something right instead of something safe, he had lost his home and his mother, all for a stranger he'd never see again.

The worst thing was that he'd never even asked her name.

[1960]

It wasn't so bad being at the home again: the state covered room and board. Within a year he grew tall and filled out, and soon he was able to work part-time as a stock boy. Life was good. He started saving up for a car, went to see whatever was playing at the Palladium once a month, and on weekends hung out at in the park with his friends making fun of the brainiacs playing chess. After a while he stopped scanning the streets for a girl who almost looked like Eva Marie Saint, and started dating a brunette who let him rub her breasts through her sweater and gave him a hand job in the car after the homecoming dance; but the two of them never had anything to talk about, and when she accused him of being more interested in his math and physics homework than he was in her, he told her it was true and they broke up.

In February of his senior year he received two letters that changed his life for the second time. The first was from CalTech, admitting him to their engineering program and offering a small scholarship "for overcoming the handicaps of your disadvantaged upbringing." The second was an expensive looking envelope with a law firm return address. "Dear Mr. Seth Erik Passotte," it went, "We are acting on behalf of Mr. Kenneth A. Haden. He sincerely regrets his decision to force your biological mother to give you over for adoption at your birth, and wishes to re-establish contact. If you wish to pursue this matter, please consider our firm your intermediary."

"I'm related to Haden?" Haden, the inventor who'd been written up LIFE and Popular Science in the same year? The Haden who had an engineering building at CalTech named after him? The Haden who hob-nobbed with big shots in Washington? That Haden?

The most surprising thing was that the news didn't surprise him more.

He said yes to both offers.

[1962]

"It's a good arrangement, Seth," Kenneth Haden said. "They'll underwrite a portion of your tuition at least until you finish your bachelor's, and I'd be surprised if they didn't carry that over to paying for a master's or doctorate as well."

"What, you get caught cheating on your taxes or something? Are we broke now?"

""Of course not," Haden frowned. "It' snot the money, it's the principle."

"The principle of The Kids of Employees We Want To Suck Up To?"

Haden ignored the remark. "You're still free to study whatever you want. All they ask in return is that you be willing to solve design problems that I'll bring to you from time to time. For which you'll be paid. If things work out there'll be a job waiting for you once you decide you're done with school."

Seth lit another cigarette. "Why are they being so generous?"

"It's good business," he said, frowning at the cigarette."I told them you're a smart boy, a hard worker."

"So," Seth blew a slow stream of smoke, watching how the edges curled and dissipated in the light from the table lamp, wondering if he could calculate the Reynolds number that described their behavior, "Who will my actual paychecks come from? The Mysterious Company Dad Works For ?"

"That's nothing for you to be concerned with." His father swirled his cocktail glass, the ice cubes clinking pleasantly. "I'll be depositing the money in your bank account; spend it however you like." Haden took a sip of his scotch. "It's a great opportunity for you. Aside from the fact that you'll be making your old man proud by helping your country and your president."

"So I should ask not what Jack and Ken can do for me, but what I can do for Jack and Ken?"

"Don't be so disrespectful," the older man said sternly.

"Did I tell you that Cal-Berkeley offered me a scholarship if I transferred next year?" Seth took a deep drag, watching his father slyly. "I told them I'd arrange my midterm projects so that I could go up there next week for an interview." He blew a perfect smoke ring.

"Berkeley!" His father snorted, pursing his lips in disdain. "Drug addicts and fairies pretending to do science. Rabble-rousers and atheist hipsters. Not a patriot among them."

"Oppenheimer and McNamara went there."

"And those two are all they can boast of. Don't be stupid, Seth – Berkeley is beneath you."

Seth shrugged. "Well, I told them I'd come and have a look. I don't have to say yes. And Grangran is expecting me."

The University of California at Berkeley was certainly different, Seth gave it that. The campus' central quad seemed to be filled with the sort of people that his father would despise: unshaven boys and girls with long uncombed hair and peasant dresses lounging on blankets under the campus trees, drinking wine, eating fruit, reading poetry, playing folk music, kissing.

Seth, sweating in the sun in his black suit and white shirt and thin black tie, with his crew cut and his briefcase, realized that in this place he was the freak – and he didn't like it.

Scowling at the hand-drawn campus map he'd been sent, trying to match up the buildings he could see with the rectangles on the paper, he was just about to ask for directions when a shirtless blond boy with a sun painted on his chest in green paint ran into the quad and began shouting, "It's going down at the administration building! The Man has been sighted!"

He followed the crowd.

The sight of campus security struggling with students shocked him, and so at first he was able to stand a safe distance from the altercation. But then more people arrived, pressing him closer despite his protestations. When he saw police cars pulling up he began to panic, flashing back to the alley outside Michigan Mike's record store and how being arrested, even briefly, had ruined his life.

And then, feeling half in a dream, he saw her, recognized her as clearly as if he'd last seen just yesterday that Slavic, slightly exotic face. Hatless, long white-blonde hair flying as she shook her fists and cursed at the uniformed men, he could hear that same foreign cadence in her voice as he had heard six years before in the record store.

Even then, he might not have done anything if he hadn't seen a blackjack come down on her shoulder, and a second blow on her arm that made her fall. A moment later he was using his briefcase as a shield to bulldoze through the crowd; he grabbed her hand, pulled her up, and then they were running.

"I know you," she said breathlessly, even before she asked where they were going.

In the end, mostly because he was afraid of being arrested if he walked around the campus, he decided to drive straight to his Grangran's. He remembered his father saying derisively that the "old broad" had been arrested before the First War for handing out pamphlets on women's suffrage, and so he hoped that she'd be willing to hide him and his strange co-fugitive.

The combination of a beautiful woman in the front seat of his car and sensation of having narrowly escaped arrest was exhilarating, and he was still buzzing an hour later when he pulled up in front of his great-grandmother's bungalow in Santa Cruz. Out front, the tiny old woman, wearing a print dress and a straw sun hat, was watering flowers.

"Seth!" She beamed at him. "Oh, it's so good to see you!" Her dark eyes sparkled as she looked at the girl. "Introduce me to your friend!" she said as she took the girl's hands in hers.

"This is my great-grandmother, Mrs Cantor," Seth said, then paused, embarrassed: he still didn't know the girl's name.

"Katarina Sarah Arlovsky," the girl said with a small bow, and leaned forward to peck the old cheek. "Thank you for allowing me in your home, Mrs Cantor. It is an honor to meet you."

"Such a strong name, for such a lovely girl! She has the glow, Seth. Never seen a brighter." She didn't seem to have noticed the blood and grass stains on Katarina's dress.

"How did your interview at the university go?" Grangran asked as they sat around the small square kitchen table waiting for the teakettle to boil. "This was for a job?"

"No, for school." Seth realized that in all the chaos he'd missed the interview: he'd have to re-schedule. "They're offering me a big scholarship if I transfer from CalTech for my last two years."

"You know," Grangran said, waving to them to stay seated as the kettle began to whistle. "During the Depression, so many people were out of work, almost no one could afford college. I'm glad to hear that things are working so well for you. And you have a job already waiting when you get out of school?"

"Oh, so you talked to my dad?"

"Yes. When Kenneth told me that you'll be doing important work for peace, I was overjoyed. Anything that can end wars sooner is good."

"You are against the Asian war, Mrs. Cantor?" Katarina cupped her hands around the steaming teacup, and Seth found himself staring. He'd remembered her from the record store as thin, almost boyish, but she had grown into a ripe, rounded woman. He forced his eyes up from her breasts and was hypnotized by eyes as deep and mysterious as the ocean.

"You can call me Joy," he heard his great-grandmother say as she took the milk bottle from the icebox and sat down, "and yes, I am against all the wars. Too many good young men dying. Too many widows and orphans left behind. And for what?"

"To preserve freedom and democracy," Seth said. He didn't believe it quite as strongly as his father did, and so he shrank a little as both his great-grandmother and Katarina gave him pitying looks.

"Stay to dinner, won't you?" Grangran said suddenly. "You young people like pizza? Seth, go take some money from my purse and get something from that Italian place on Lawrence Street. "

He felt like a third wheel when he came back from the pizzeria, as the two women were sitting by his great grandmother's phonograph, singing along with Doris Day.

When I was young, I fell in love
I asked my sweetheart what lies ahead
Will we have rainbows, day after day?
Here's what my sweetheart said.

Que Sera, Sera,
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours, to see
Que Sera, Sera
What will be, will be.

After dinner and a game of Scrabble he drove her back to her dorm at Berkeley.

"Why don't you come up?" she said, "My roommate is never there. We can visit a little longer."

He knew what that meant at CalTech, but with Katarina – he wasn't sure.

Her room was up three flights of stairs. Their scuffling footsteps echoed in the concrete stairwell, then through a heavy wooden door and down a hallway. He felt like he was following royalty – almost everyone they passed greeted or nodded at her.

Finally she stopped at a door. "Here we are." Instead of turning on the overhead light, she lit a half a dozen candles crowding the top of the bureau – and then closed and locked the door. "So we won't be disturbed."

He glanced around the room. One bed was heaped with dirty laundry; the other had an ethnic bedspread with tiny round mirrors sewn to it. Taped to the wall above it were posters, one titled "Joan Baez" with a picture of a dark-haired woman playing a guitar, and one of a thin dark man with a saxophone.

"Who's that Negro?" he asked, pointing.

"Black," she said softly, taking a bottle of wine from the windowsill and pouring some into two mismatched coffee cups. "That black man is John Coltrane. He's a genius."

"I see."

"Don't say Negro. It's an insulting word." She handed him the cup of wine, then opened a portable phonograph and put a record on the turntable. "I remember that you like jazz. Monk, right?"

"Who?"

"Thelonius Monk. That was the 45 you bought that day."

"His – that's a last name? I thought it was Monk Thelonius. Like a title. That he was a friar."

Katarina laughed and laughed, but it was such a lovely, welcoming, warm sound that rather than feeling stupid for his mistake, he laughed with her, and when she held out her cup he clicked his against it and then gulped the wine down, and when she took his hand and pulled him down onto the bed where the mirrors glittered like stars he put his empty cup on the floor and kissed her.

In the candlelight he could see the bruises from where the police had hit her, and he tenderly pressed his lips to every one.

They found a small town, Avenal, midway between Berkeley and Los Angeles, and rented a tiny house where they spent almost every weekend and semester break making love, playing music, reading, talking. Sometimes they met in Santa Cruz and spent the weekend with Grangran Cantor (who continued to tell Seth that Kay had "the glow").

Truth was, he didn't need his great-grandmother's spiritual powers to know that Kay was special; he knew it from that first night, as they lay in her dorm room's narrow bed. As they drifted off to sleep Kay had talked softly about music and civil rights, and he had avidly drank in her words while his fingers memorized her body: breast, waist, hip, thigh ...

He had never met anyone like her, and he knew, every time that they were together, that he never would again. Unlike any other girl he'd known, Kay was a guide, leading him discover so much he had never known existed. Not just pleasant new experiences – ethnic foods and art forms and amazing works of art and thought and things to do in bed he'd never even heard of – but also unbearable injustices and atrocities in parts of the world that had just been names in his geography book. She helped him tap his own wonder and anguish and rage, and to his amazement he found that they were as deep as she told him they would be.

Because of this, though, being with her began to make him vaguely uneasy. What did he have to offer her? He was a just an engineer, an average looking guy, an average lover. Sure, he got good grades and was already making more money than he ever imagined he would, but what was special about that? Plenty of guys could offer her that, and probably much more. Kay's decision to be with him seemed miraculous.

"You belong with a prince. Or a poet," he said once, kissing the top of her head after they caught their breath.

She twisted around to look up at him. "To say such a thing proves that you have the soul of both a prince and a poet." She kissed his chest, skimming her hand over his belly. "I want no other lover than you, Seth. How can I prove it?" She caressed him boldly until he rallied, then slid her leg up around his waist to invite him in once again.

"He's going to hate me."

"He's going love you. Not as much as I do, though," he added quickly. "By the way, I'm glad you put a dress on. You look nice." He turned on the wipers as a sudden downpour began to splat the windshield. "Not that you don't look good in a sweater and slacks, but my dad's kind of old-fashioned. Comes with working for the government, I guess."

"You and I are from completely different worlds," she fretted, tucking her peace pendant inside her dress.

"Yeah, we're Tony and Maria," he said with a laugh.

"And look at how that turned out," she said darkly, spinning the radio and stopping on Peter, Paul and Mary singing "Blowing in the Wind."

"I like Bob Dylan's version better," he said as they pulled into the long gravel driveway of his parent's home just as the rain stopped and the sun came out. "I wish they'd play that over here."

"Dylan's too ethnic for most Americans," she said. "The melting pot likes milk and white bread. Not Jewish caraway."

"Well I," he said as he turned off the car and came around to open her door, "I like caraway bread." He gently pulled her out of the car and against him, kissing her lightly, muttering as he nuzzled her neck. "And pita and naan and tortillas. But my favorite is that bread soup you make with black sourdough."

"Such a big flatterer," she said, pulling away and smoothing his lapels with a wry half smile.

When she looked up at him her eyes were such a heart-stopping shade of blue that all he could do was take her hand and lead her to the front door.

"You shaved your beard, dad," Seth said after the housekeeper escorted him and Katarina into Kenneth Haden's study.

"Yes. And I see you're letting yours grow." Seth's father opened a drawer of his desk, then gathered up assorted papers spread on his blotter.

One of the pages fluttered to the floor and Katarina stooped to pick it up. "What a strange way to write Russian," she said.

"What did you say?" Haden asked.

She shrugged. "This page of numbers and letters – there are Russian words in them."

"How do you know?" His eyes were narrowed.

"I am Estonian. I speak Russian since childhood."

"I see. What does it say?" His brows were drawn together.

"The gray dove is in Paris," Katarina said, tilting her head and turning the page this way and that. "Or perhaps is going to Paris. The rest is just nonsense."

"Where does it say that?" Haden asked, putting the sheaf of papers he'd collected into the drawer, locking the drawer, and then coming around the desk. "About the dove going to Paris? Which characters correspond to each specific word?"

"It's not specific." She frowned. "It's … there are patterns on the page that make me think of words." She waved a hand, shook her head. "Like the way you look at sheet music and hear the notes as you see them?"

"How amusing." Haden stroked his non-existent beard. "Well, let's go in to dinner, shall we?"

"Where's Mother?" Seth asked as he spread the crisp linen napkin on his lap.

"She's not feeling well," Haden said, nodding to the maid to ladle out the soup. "She said she would make sure to meet your young lady the next time you visit."

"Your family has servants?" Kay asked Seth.

"Employees," his father said, not looking up from his salmon bisque.

"I think Kay thought that Adele was Mother," Seth said with a grin, referring to the way that Katarina had introduced herself to the housekeeper who answered the door.

"Sometimes I wish she was," his father said. "Adele doesn't cost me a fortune in headache and nervousness pills." He asked Katarina, "You object? Is my having a housekeeper and a maid exploiting the proletariat?"

"Of course not," Katarina said, taking a sip of her wine. "You do not force them to work for you."

"It's just the two," Seth said, a delayed response. "The housekeeper and a maid."

"Three if you count the cook," his father added unhelpfully.

"But they're not slaves, Kay, they're all paid. Well-paid," Seth stressed. "Right, dad?"

Katarina didn't say anything, but Seth saw the faint frown lines on her forehead.

"Arlovsky," his father said suddenly. "Is that a common Estonian surname?"

"I don't know," she said. "We emigrated right after I was born. Before the war."

"The Berkeley phone book doesn't show any Katarina Sarah Arlovsky," Haden said.

"You looked her up?" Seth asked.

Kay set down her soup spoon. "I use K. Sarah Lowe on my bank account and for my bills. My parents said it wasn't a good thing to appear Russian in America. After the war."

"Are your parents still alive?"

"Dad, why the interrogation?" Seth cut in, trying not to sound angry.

"Just getting to know my potential daughter-in-law," he said easily.

"My father worked at the railroad yards and died a few months after we came here. My mother pined for him and died of cancer when I was eleven. After that I was raised in a group home." She lifted her head. "Much like Seth."

There was silence as the soup bowls were removed and the salads set before them.

"So," Haden said, just as the lull in the conversation was about to become painful, "Seth tells me you go to Berkeley. What do you study there?"

"Languages, with a minor in political science. I would like to be an interpreter at the United Nations." She stabbed lightly at her salad.

"Why is that?"

"If countries could communicate better, they might understand each other more clearly," she said, passion warming her words. "Then perhaps there would be fewer wars."

Haden gave a soft harumph and said to Seth, "She sounds like my grandmother." He leaned back as his salad plate was removed, and raised his eyebrows as Katarina held up her hands to refuse the steak that the maid was about to set down in front of her. "That's a Porterhouse, girl," he said. "Damn good cut."

"I forgot," Seth slapped his forehead. "Kay's vegetarian."

"It's no matter," she said, taking a dinner roll. "The soup and salad were delicious."

"You barely touched them!"

"It's alright," she smiled.

"So," Haden said, vigorously slicing onto his steak, "Languages, eh? How many do you know?" He signaled to the maid to bring Katarina's salad back.

"A few," she said, studying her salad.

"Which?" he pressed her.

"Estonian, Finnish, English, Russian, French, German, Polish, Italian, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Japanese, and Mandarin." She suddenly looked abashed to have named so many, and finished, blushing, "and little bits of Arabic and Turkish and Thai and Laotian. I love learning each new one, each has its own wonderful music."

"Impressive," Haden said, chewing. "You fluent in all of those?"

"Oh no. Only a few for speaking. A few more for listening. If I have a good dictionary and am not hurried I can read most of them."

"Interesting." He chewed for a moment. "Thai and Laotian, but not Korean or Vietnamese?" When Kay didn't answer right away he raised his eyebrow at her, questioning.

Her face was stony. "No. Not Korean. Not Vietnamese."

Seth, confused, looked from his father to his lover. "Did I miss something?"

Kay turned to him and smiled her thousand-watt smile. "No, you have everything."

"So, I understand you two like music?" Haden asked heartily. "Sing Along with Mitch is on tonight."

"Dad, thank God. I didn't know who else to call."

"What's wrong, son?" His father's voice sounded tinny through the pay phone's earpiece.

"Kay was supposed to meet me yesterday at – this place we go to." Seth glanced around, as if he expected her to drive up any second. "When she didn't show, I got worried, so I drove to Berkeley and tracked down her roommate, who told me that she thought she had seen someone who looked like Kay being handcuffed and pushed into a car!" He took a deep breath. "I've called the Berkeley police, but there's no record of an arrest. I'm really worried, Dad. What if she's been kidnapped?"

"I see." His father sounded calm. "Where are you calling from?"

"A pay phone in Oakland."

"Stay right there, in case anyone contacts you. I'll keep an eye on things at this end." There was a pause. "I'm sure she'll be fine, son."

Seth hung up the phone. Something wasn't quite right, but he was too distracted to think it out.

He went to the only place he wanted to wait for her.

The concrete stairwell seemed even emptier and foreboding than usual, and the dorm's hallways were deserted.

The door to Kay's room was open a crack.

Inside, both mattresses had been torn open. The phonograph was smashed. Every drawer of the bureau and desk had been dumped out. All the clothes in the closet were in a heap on the floor. The posters of Baez and Coltrane had been torn down; Seth found them crumpled in a corner.

The only thing untouched were the candles. He lit them and lay down on the bare mattress, staring at the flames, curled on his side, hugging himself. His world was out of control, and it scared him.

And then he sat up. His father had told him to stay at a pay phone in Oakland, but if Kay had been kidnapped, there wasn't any way the kidnappers would know to call him at that number.

"Son of a bitch," he said. "God-dammed son of a bitch."

Five hours later, having driven from Berkeley back to Los Angeles in record time, he brushed past Adele and strode into his father's study. "You have her, don't you? Or you know where she is?"

Haden sat very still. Finally he said, "Yes."

"Why?" Seth clenched his fists. "She's just a girl."

His father answered patiently. "Do you know what that girl did? She glanced at a page that a team of cryptographers have been working on for months. And she read it."

"So what? She didn't do anything wrong!"

"Son, haven't you been watching the news lately?"

"She's not a Communist, Dad. She loves America. She just doesn't want people to die in wars."

"Does she know about those special projects you do for me?"

"My ... projects?" Seth paled.

"I didn't think so." Haden leaned back into his leather desk chair with a faint smile of satisfaction. "How well do you think it will go down with her that you've designed dozens of components for the military? Tanks and bombers and anti-aircraft cruisers now kill people more efficiently, thanks to you. You're working for the very people she despises."

"I didn't – those were just engineering projects! I didn't know what they were going to be used for!" But he had suspected, deep down. He had.

"That girl has a gift, Seth. They tell me she's a cryptographic genius. Do you know what idiot savant means? That's French for What it takes hundreds of computer hours and years of human effort to do, she can do in a second without even thinking about it. It doesn't matter that she doesn't know how she's doing it: all that matters is that she can." He leaned forward again and folded his hands. "She's going to use that gift to help us win this war."

"I doubt – "

"And you're going to convince her to cooperate, because if you don't we'll tell her – I'll tell her – about your projects. And then we'll have her locked up as an undesirable. She'll spend the rest of her life in solitary confinement, hating you."

"You wouldn't – "

"Oh yes, my boy. I would. To save this country, to stop the communists, to win this war, to stop American soldiers from dying? I would." He folded his arms. "So .. what's it going to be?"

He'd expected Kay to be held in a detention facility under heavy guard. What he didn't expect was that she'd be in a house in the suburbs.

Granted, the house was the only residence in its cul-de-sac, separated from the neighbors by a high, lacy wrought iron fence. And the door was answered by a man who, though dressed in a golf shirt and slacks, might as well have had MP tattooed on his forehead.

"We'll be out back," Haden said. "See to it that we're not disturbed?"

"Yes sir."

Kay sat cross-legged on the stone floor of the enclosed patio, her eyes closed, meditating. She jumped up and flew to Seth, joyous. "I knew you'd come!"

Seth's throat was so tight he couldn't speak.

"It's horrible," she said, shivering. "They said they just want me to read some Chinese, but it's about Diệm and Saigon and Hanoi and troops and assassina—"

"Shhh, shhh, it's okay," he said, stroking her hair. "I'm here now." He let out a deep breath. "Kay, sweetheart, unless you agree to cooperate with them and do these translations, I'm not going to be allowed to see you again."

Her face crumpled, and tears welled up. "Not allowed? But why?" She looked past him to his father. "I thought you two came here to take me away from this place!"

"Well," Seth brushed the hair out of her eyes. "Yes, we did, but you need to do what they asked first. If you do, they'll let you out and we can be together."

"I can't," she whispered. "It's for the military. I won't do anything to help them. I just can't. Even if it means … "

He could see in her eyes that no matter what, she would never abandon her principles, even though he knew what it would cost them. He was so proud of her his chest ached. "I know." He kissed her, and it was a kiss like no other they'd ever had; he could feel the force of their love emanating and surrounding them, a warm, blue-gold pulse, thick and sweet as honey.

"Well, Seth," he heard his father say, "You had your chance. Now we'll do it my way." There was a click, and Seth spun around to see his father aiming a revolver at him. "You'd better start translating those papers, my girl, or by God I'll shoot him."

Kay gasped.

What happened next was a scene Seth replayed over and over for the rest of his life: Kay pushing him down, then flinging herself fearlessly at his father; himself, unable to react in time to save her; the muffled boom, the red mandala unfolding on her back as she fell; Kay smiling at him as she died in his arms; next to them his father dropping the gun and collapsing.

He was too mindless with grief, after they pulled him away from her body, to say anything; and by the time that the funerals – his father's in Los Angeles lavish and poorly attended, Kay's in Monterrey completely the opposite – were over, he'd realized that he was the only one who knew the real reason Kay had been at the safe house. The few dark-suited men that spoke to him seemed to have assumed that his father – who they referred to as a brilliant engineer and cryptographer – had had her detained on suspicion of spying, and that Haden had taken Seth had gone to the safe house to confront her, to get her to confess. In their version of the story – provided by the MP who had been watching them through the windows overlooking the patio – Kay had attacked Haden and been fatally shot in the scuffle. The coroner ruled that Haden's death was due to a fatal heart arrhythmia, triggered by the stress of the event.

The shock of finding out that his father was not at all the man Seth had thought him to be was something he would come to terms with later, once the agony of losing the woman he loved had receded a little from the empty spaces in his heart.

As he pulled up in front of the tidy bungalow cottage with its perfect garden, he saw the familiar wide-brimmed straw hat floating over the rose bushes. He took the package from the passenger seat next to him and got out of the car.

His great-grandmother straightened up and waited for him, setting aside her pruning shears and gardening gloves to hug his waist fiercely.

"Oh, sweetie," she said. "I am so sorry I couldn't make it to the funeral. I know it wasn't far, but I don't drive any more."

"It's alright, Grangran," he comforted back, and he could barely hold back his tears as he rubbed her frail shoulder, bones like bird's wings through the thin cotton. "I'll take you to where she's buried some day. It's beautiful, near the coast. You can hear the ocean."

"Oh, she must love that. I'll plant flowers there," the old lady nodded, wiping her tears. "Blue irises and white snapdragons and red roses."

"Very patriotic." He handed her the package. "Here are some things of hers I thought she'd like you to have. A few of her favorite songs, some crystals, a candle."

"Aren't you thoughtful! Come in and have some tea."

As Seth sat at the kitchen table the sight of the unoccupied third chair was heart-wrenching.

His great-grandmother patted his hand. "So what are you going to do now?"

"Finish school," he said, forcing his eyes away from the chair. "I'm thinking of taking Berkeley's offer and doing a double major. Engineering and political science."

She smiled. "You're joining the Resistance?"

Seth ducked his head, embarrassed. "I'm hoping to change the system from within. Linus Pauling has been getting scientists all over the world to sign a petition to stop the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. I'd like to do something worthwhile like that with my life."

She reached out and placed her hand, wise and anciently frail, over his heart. "She's here now, joined to you, her soul glowing with pride for you. Can you feel her?"

"Yes," he said, finally not ashamed of his tears. "Yes, I can."

~ The end ~

Author's Notes

First off, big thanks to Rroselavy, who let me babble at her about this story for over a solid hour on Tuesday morning; said babbling (and her occasional timely stirring) helped me rouse a number of plot points that were lying about like useless things that were useless. And then she took the time out of a hectic week to beta the result! * kissu *

I was clueless about much of the political and social history of the late 50s and early 60s – so I cheated and wiki'd everything that popped up in the story. Any anachronisms or errors are due to either bad wiki or my misinterpretation of what I read. Quotes that follow are from the corresponding wiki article.

The Beat generation – sometimes derisively called beat-niks – were "an anarchic group of young men and women who combined poetry, song, sex, wine and illicit drugs with passionate political ideas that championed personal freedoms." One of the key Beat poets was Alan Ginsberg, who, like Walt Whitman before him, "wrote passionately about the promise (and betrayal) of American democracy; the central importance of erotic experience; and the spiritual quest for the truth of everyday existence."

Films referenced:

On the Waterfront, 1954 ("Terry and Edie")
Marty, 1955 ("What you doin' tonight, Marty?")
West Side Story, 1961 ("Tony and Maria")

The names of the four main characters in this story – Seth, Kay, Haden, and Grandmother Cantor – are connected to their YGO counterparts. Details are in my DreamWidth and LiveJournal journal post about this story.

(10) 13 Aug 2014 clean up typos.