A/N: Warning for Werewolf Attitudes.
“Tae.”
Aching in the dark of her bedroom, Tae listened to her older brother’s voice outside the door and tried not to cry. “Go away.”
“Tae, let me in,” Ryozo pleaded.
Curled around her stitches, Tae dug her fingers into a plush pink pillow. One inch. One inch more, right or left; one heartbeat of hesitation in applying Kaoru’s family lessons on how to dodge claws, and- kami. “If you want in here that bad, why don’t you just break the door down?”
From the sudden growl, he was considering just that.
Don’t move. Don’t cry. Don’t breathe.
A raspy whuff, and Ryozo’s weight thumped softly against the door. “I’m sorry about Sings-With-Shadows.”
Yeah, me too, Tae thought, not caring that he’d smell her anger. Sorry that bastard’s not a rug.
“But-”
Oh, here it comes.
“-He’s a Red Talon, Tae! He’s-”
“One of the last wolf-born Garou, mad as hell at what all the monkeys have done to Gaia, and oh, such a nice guy for letting me keep breathing after I insulted the caern by bringing in a little human concern that oh, by the way, some Get bastard is going to kill my best friend!” Hot tears retraced the dried crusts of salt on her cheeks; Tae gulped at the water Dr. Gensai had left on her bedside dresser. Fingered the green chalcedony pendant she’d found at her neck when she woke; her mother’s, one of the more subtle healing magics her tribe laid claim to, and probably the only thing that had held blood in her veins long enough for the doctor to tend the rest.
Ryozo sighed; she could all but hear him rolling his eyes. “She’s not going to die.”
Hope stirred. Tae sat up. “You’re going to help her?”
“What? No!” A snort. “And mess up the whole vision? You know better than that.”
Crossover Queen's Creative Chaos 
“And mess the whole vision, no way!” this sounds so very petulant to me. does it sounds petulant and childish to anyone else?
The only way i see him so sure is if either he expects Kenshin to intervane, in which case its a very indirect and painful way to get a certain Get of Fenris garou into trouble…
Or he is in for a surprise, and not expecting a certain Wanderer – in which case they all totally deserves what will befall said Get .
LikeLiked by 4 people
It sounds like over the course of THOUSANDS OF YEARS OF THE CONSISTENT THEME OF VISIONS ONLY DO GOOD THINGS IF YOU DO GOOD IN RESPONSE TO THEM, these twerps have not caught on.
Seriously, even the GREEKS recognized that if it was going to happen, it was going to happen, you have to make the best of it; doing bad things to try to influence it? You’re going to get slaughtered.
I am having levels of head-against-wall previously only triggered by Tony Stark in full geek snit.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Which is, indeed, one of the themes in the original Werewolf books. The Garou keep going in their “someone else has something we want, Rage until we get it, oops the people who had what we want are dead, repeat,” cycle.
There’s actually some in-universe arguments that this is why Kitsune were created. “Hey, wolf guys. You had a chance to play nice with werebears; you blew it. You had a chance to not murder humans in job lots; you blew that too. Here’s an entirely new Breed of Fera that are too young to have any of those grudges; can you play nice with them?”
…So far, results are not looking good for the majority of Garou this time either. The Hakken are mostly pulling it off….
LikeLiked by 2 people
I can see Kenshin using a line like this if someone calls Kitsune the youngest.
“Oro? Are they? After all if one looked at the Garou, one could be forgiven for thinking them the youngest of Gaia’s children. Spoiled ones at that. If you see someone with a toy you don’t have you’ll throw a tantrum and Rage until you hold it. Not caring if you break it or can even use it once you hold it. Like a toddler all that matters is someone has something you do not, and that makes you want it.”
LikeLiked by 4 people
Yeah, I agree. That sounds like an excuse to not do anything. “Oh, it’ll work itself out! I don’t have to do anything, interference might ruin it!”
LikeLiked by 5 people
“And I would rather be proactive by beating up innocent bystanders!”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Imagine you’re a ruler.
You’ve been told there’s a problem.
You can lash out in a forceful, simplistic manner to assert your authority.
You can attempt to intervene intelligently, and potentially screw up, and be known as a screwup.
Or you can sit on your ass and say “well, that’s how destiny wills it.”
There’s a reason so many rulers have been tricked by con artists.
They’re good at telling them what they want to hear.
LikeLiked by 4 people
So true.
LikeLike
It should. Ryozo is low man on the wolf totem pole in his pack. Any abuse the higher ranks hand out, he’s got to take – unless he can challenge them and win.
Unfortunately, by the way Garou work, that still puts him above any Kinfolk.
…And we know too well what humans tend to do in that position.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Not just the Greeks. Any culture has this same treatment toward prophecies. Especially the bad guy’s “I’m going to stop my demise by preventing the birth/kill the one who is supposed to kill me before they can.”
And then they get piledrived by karma so hard they become part of the landscape.
But at the same time…how do you know you’re going to ruin said prophecy if you don’t do anything? And since when are prophecies set in stone? They’re suppose to happen in the future, which by its nature isn’t set in stone until it goes to present, for about a tenth of a second, then to the past for the rest of time.
And now I’m wanting to introduce a wall to my head. While wanting to cackle at the idea of said prophecy getting turned on its head by a wide-eyes, “Oro?”-ing redhead.
LikeLiked by 4 people
:raises finger: Ah, one minor difference! It isn’t specifically relative to this situation, I just find it really, really shiny.
Judeo-Christian prophecies tended more towards the “I am going to tell you exactly what will happen, but you’re not going to realize it until it has happened and smacks you across the face for trying to control it.”
It’s a proof-to-build-trust thing.
…it’s also usually involving a pun and/or impossible things for long-term prophecies.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Also, as I understand it, in the judeo-christian framework, prophecies of troubles and tribulations can be averted if the people involved repent and stop doing the thing that was bringing it about.
In the hellenic tradition, if the prophesy is “your cities will burn and you will eat your children” you’re screwed regardless of what you do. It’s not happening for any reason beyond you’re just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The WoD prophecies seem more like the latter than the former.
LikeLiked by 2 people
True, I honestly was mentally classifying “X is going to happen, unless you do Y/don’t stop A” as somehow not real prophecy.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Puns! Where puns?
And I didn’t think about Judeo-Christian prophecies since I always saw those as guidelines: “You do X, you will be blessed. Do Y; you’ll be punished until you repent.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
That is exactly the reaction I had!
I don’t have a good list, because most of them require understanding ancient Hebrew, but a MAJOR one is knowing that the way that the phrase translated as “name” was phrased is literally “called.”
So, in the prophecy of Emanuel? “His name shall be Emanuel” is actually “and he will be know as Emanuel.”
Which is translated either as God Walks Among Us or God Is With Us.
So, the prophecy looks like it’s saying “His name is going to be X,” when it is actually saying “So, the Incarnation is coming.”
And doing it via a freaking pun.
LikeLiked by 3 people
“Conditional prophecies” come up in a lot of Biblical commentaries, because a lot of people have trouble distinguishing this stuff.
Standard format prophecy in the Bible is a message from God set in the present, and just telling people something they already know. The hilarious bit is that in most of the OT, it is announced in the format of a royal decree or diplomatic message. “Thus says X” is one of the markers for this; an ambassador or messenger would read out a king’s letter like that.
Because God is supposed to be Israel’s king, and because the agreement with Israel is a covenant similar to diplomatic covenants, attached to various ideas that if you are part of a covenant alliance, you have to listen to the king when he tells you stuff, like listening to the head of the family. And if you don’t listen and do it, punishments occur.
(There are lots of kinds of covenant, like family adoption and marriage ones, and the Bible plays with them all as explaining the relationship between God and people. Often during prophecies. But this is about a standard format.)
So anyway… In the Bible, prophecies of the future are a subset of prophecies, and more liable to be punished by humans if proven factually false. (Occasionally punished before the prophecy is even tested. Jeremiah had people who made false prophecies beating him up for allegedly being a false prophet. No wonder he lamented a lot. There was a divine law about how to properly determine false prophecy and punish it legally, but…)
And conditional future prophecies are another subset. The Book of Jonah is pretty much about conditional prophecies and inflexible commands to the prophet, so good commentaries tend to explain the conditional thing.
Arguably, the entire NT is an argument between people who responded to Messianic prophecies in different ways. The Pharisee faction wanted the seventy weeks Daniel prophecy to work out, so they advocated all Jews following the conduct laws for priests (as being a priestly people) and all their extensions. So disagreement was a serious matter, and that is why things were very touchy.
But there were also various ideas about what the Messiah/s would be like, and deep disagreement among the various factions. The NT explains the Christian POV on this (and various faction members getting convinced by Jesus in various ways, or being offended for various reasons); and Josephus’ histories explain some of what the other guys were thinking, and how their candidates worked out.
Which of course has led to more factions with different ideas about prophecies….
LikeLiked by 4 people
Clue, ahou. If it’s a set-in-stone, done deal Divine Vision, nothing you do can mess it up.
If anything, you acting on it may even be *critical* for it coming to pass.
If you *can* mess it up, somebody‘s been screwing with you. Might even have been yourself.
In this case though… there‘s a five foot zip redheaded Spanner In The Works.
Whatever vision you had is dead. Gone in a slice. Kaput. It has been hitokiri-ed. It has encountered Battousai and joined the choir invisible, it has passed yon Pearly Gates and wondered how it got there so fast. It’s an ex-vision, and if you weren’t so busy trying to reanimate it, it‘d be fertilizing the sakura trees.
Now excuse me while I go heat up the popcorn…
LikeLiked by 5 people
And, honestly, that is one of the things I fundamentally appreciate about JudeoChristian theology: free will is a thing and visions are warnings about how there’s is a non-trivial probability that going down path ‘x’ will get everyone dipped in so you shouldn’t do that, mkay?
My personal suspicion is the whole point of Revelations is to sign God’s promise the church will never fall, because if things get that far He will personally intervene and a warning to kindly not let it get to that point until the heat death of the universe.
LikeLiked by 5 people
This goes for the people of Israel as well. Mess with them too much and God will drop a pile-driver on your nation in the future.
Modern Israel has a rather dark sense of humor about the fact that so many nations have tried to wipe them out and *failed* so spectacularly they don’t exist anymore. This is to the point that one of the t-shirt designs I saw at many tourist spots (most of which are archeology parks) in Israel was a whole list of nations that had gone after Israel all with an “X” next to them… except for Iran which had “???” next to it instead. Underneath the list was a line about Israel being a very small nation with friends in very high places so maybe other nations should try being nice to it…
LikeLiked by 6 people
*G*
LikeLiked by 1 person
Is it available on Amazon? Feeling the need to pound some sense into idiots.
LikeLiked by 1 person
You want some funny reading? Look up the events of The Six Day War.
The Israeli Air Force’s opening move was to launch all their planes they had flight capable and bomb the crap out of almost a dozen enemy airfields and destroy all the planes on the ground.
Then they flew back home, refueled, rearmed, and went back out and did it again.
And then a third time.
In about three hours’ time, Israel seized near total air superiority of the area.
Yeah the Israeli Armed Forces don’t mess around.
LikeLiked by 5 people
If there’s one thing Israel learned *hard* it’s to believe the people who say they want to kill you and take them seriously.
They finally have (part of) their land back after several thousand years and they are going to make *very* sure they’re not going to lose it unless they’ve thrown everything they have at whoever is trying to force them out again.
LikeLiked by 4 people
If there’s one thing Israel learned *hard* it’s to believe the people who say they want to kill you and take them seriously.
What I don’t get is how their neighbors keep thinking it’ll be different this time. -.-
LikeLiked by 4 people
Well, see any believer in Karl Marx… “They just didn’t do it right! Next time will be different!”
LikeLiked by 5 people
Even funnier? They bombed halfway down the Egyptian runways.
The Egyptians promptly turned around and did the same.
Only, the Israelis had actually practiced short takeoffs and landings….
LikeLiked by 4 people
Only, the Israelis had actually practiced short takeoffs and landings…
OK, that is some high quality loony toons trickster skill stuff, right there!
LikeLiked by 5 people
*G* Isn’t it just?
LikeLiked by 4 people
The runway bombs were a sweet touch too – prior to the Six Day War most attacks were done with impact detonations. Makes a nice, but nasty little crater you have to fill in but that’s just putting down backfill and new cement. Your runway would be up and running again in a day or so provided you had easy access for both quick-set cements and proper backfill.
The Israeli bombs… were a new type. With a secondary rocket, penetrating head and delayed impact detonator.
So the bomb falls and at a short distance to the ground the secondary rocket triggers, sharply increasing speed. The penetrating head lets the bomb *through* the tarmac.
Then and only then does the charge go off.
Now you have a small crater at the surface… and a large void beneath.
Backfill and patch will not work – there would be voids still beneath, and then the “repaired” runway would subside beneath your planes trying to run over it.
Extensive removal of tarmac to fully expose the pit is required. Then you have to backfill, and only then can you patch over.
Required elapsed time… more than 6 days. Thanks for playing, enemy coalition air forces!
LikeLiked by 3 people
The funny thing is how many Israelis, back in the day, were Jewish atheists raised atheist, on Jewish socialist communes. Some of the guys only read the history/conquest books, and some had never read the Bible or gone to a synagogue.
So there is a subset of these guys who had Jewish conversions when X or Y happened. You can find a lot of videos about this on Amazon Prime, YouTube, etc.
But there are also a lot of high up Israeli guys who are still atheists raised on communes, or their kids.
Pressfield’s nonfiction book, The Lion’s Gate, is very good about these currents in the Six Day War. Everybody knows everybody because Israel was pretty small yet, but people’s raisings are wildly different.
LikeLiked by 1 person
So the reason they’re allowing this farce of a challenge go forward is Because Destiny Says So? Something tells me they have misinterpreted the vision somehow. Fortunately, Kenshin’s there to show Destiny the door while pretending he’s not the one who placed the banana peel
LikeLiked by 1 person
The thing about prophecy? People rarely think of the negative to them. Never mind any potential monkey paw twisting of the prophecy.
Take Anakin Skywalker, “The Chosen One” thought to be there to fill the prophecy of ‘bringing balance to the force’. Well the end of the Prequel Trilogy had the Force balanced. Two Sith and two Jedi.
This was not the interpretation the Jedi Council had of that prophecy…
LikeLiked by 1 person
*Thumbs up*
LikeLike
If I had prophecy that someone was going to try and kill me and fail I would still really like help NOT DYING! “Not getting killed” leaves alot of space for other bad stuff!
LikeLiked by 1 person