FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Life had been strange for Klein after he had moved back to North America.

His trip back on the boat with Bridges had gone swimmingly. He'd known what to expect, and he'd had to deal with none of the stress of having started out as a stowaway the way he had when he had climbed on board of Bridges' ship the first time. Still feeling strange from having developed an attraction to Fugue so soon after having had to move away, Klein had wondered whether or not he'd started having a crush on Bridges, or if it had just been his frustration at having left Fugue behind that had manifested itself by displacing his feelings onto another object of affection.

When they had reached North America, Bridges had gotten off the boat onto land for a short time to bring Klein to a place that he'd called the Bolgia. The Bolgia had been a bar and nightclub where people could go even if they were so weird in some way that they often couldn't go anywhere else, at least nowhere near as easily a lot of the time. Bridges had been well-liked there.

Now and then, the Bolgia had put up a ring and held sparring matches where contestants could earn prizes. Klein had enjoyed watching some of the Bolgia's other customers pit their skills against Bridges' Jeet Kune Do. Bridges had almost always won, except for when he had been beaten by that Thai fighting red fish that one time. Klein had been impressed with her, even though she'd been beaten by a bat soon after. He'd have to spar with that bat sometime, maybe.

It had been at the Bolgia that Klein had first met Shinai. Klein had first known Shinai the weasel as a contestant in the ring of the Bolgia, who would go there to test his skills against all comers, even though he would sometimes lose. Fighters at the Bolgia weren't allowed to kill each other, but they came from all walks of life, some much less well-known than others, and they'd presented a set of unique challenges to train against.

Shinai and Klein had become friends with benefits while Bridges and Klein had still been friends with benefits as well. Shinai had also been seeing someone named Ogun on the side. One day, it had been Bridges who had become the object that Klein mysteriously couldn't find around him. Certainly the otter couldn't have stolen himself! But where could he have gone? This sort of thing had never happened before. Bridges came and went, flitting about like a butterfly, but with Klein around, he'd at least usually tried to let Klein know what he'd been up to and where he'd be going, so that Klein wouldn't worry too much. This time he had said nothing.

Klein had been shocked to learn that Bridges had finally ended up in jail. Shinai had been cynical about it, even though he'd tried to be understanding of Klein's feelings about having lost someone that he'd cared about. Shinai had always believed that Bridges would end up in jail. Klein just couldn't believe that, after an entire lifetime of having deftly evaded the long arm of the law, Bridges would have finally gotten caught after all. How could it have been possible?

Klein had gone to visit Bridges in prison to talk to him about what had happened. "How did they catch you?" he'd asked. "I let them catch me," the otter had answered the skunk dejectedly. "But why?" Klein had shaken his head in disbelief. "Because I deserved to be caught." Bridges had looked downcast. "Why now, after all this time?" Bridges had sighed. "Because I finally took something from someone that I really shouldn't have taken."

Klein had had to think about what Bridges had said. Clearly, there could be multiple situations in which Bridges could have accidentally stolen something from someone that would have made a really negative difference in their lives. In some ways it had only been a matter of time. But what could have been so bad that Bridges could have decided that it was the one mistake that would be the last straw? It had been so bad that Bridges hadn't wanted to say.

"It's not so bad, here," he'd tried to reassure Klein on his visit. "I can finally exist somewhere on land in the same location and not have the authorities looking for me because of something I stole. I can just stay where I am for once. My body protects me. The prisoners can't touch me. I've already completely destroyed the underground cigarette economy in jail by now... I have sixteen on me right now, I can give you some now before I give them away to the prisoners who have the fewest cigarettes if you want." Klein had tried to force a smile. Bridges had been so equal to himself. "I'm sorry, Bridges," he'd answered gently, "I don't smoke."

Bridges had shrugged. "Neither do I."

***

Shinai had grown up in Arizona. He'd always liked the desert because of the relentless challenge it presented. 'Try and cross me,' it would dare you, 'just try.' Shinai had been a man who had loved challenges. Growing up as a teenager, he had found the Bolgia early, and had made it his home away from home. When he had moved out, it had become the main way that he'd started making a living, along with just a few side jobs. He'd fought to continue to exist.

He'd found his first love on the Bolgia's ring. He'd seen a scorpion in it, looking like a fierce warrior in shining armor from another world with his glistening chitin. Somehow, even in the midst of battle, the scorpion had always managed not to have hit the other contestant with his tail. One strike of his tail could have killed someone, which had had a way of gripping the mind to be sure, but he had always been perfectly careful, getting it out of the way just in time.

They had shared their devotion to Greco-Roman paganism together. They had worshipped Mars, the god of war. To them, this had meant not only actual warfare and one-on-one combat. It had been a symbol for the courage, skill and effort that anyone had to have in them to be able to overcome all forms of adversity and obstacles. Everything was kind of like a war, if you only looked at it the right way. Every war could be won, if you fought hard enough.

They had often talked about how they would join the army someday. The scorpion had been proud that he could openly get into the army without having to neither ask nor tell, and looking forward to making the most of this new advantage. He'd hoped that Shinai could follow him to the front, and that they could do battle with each other side by side, spurring each other on to greater and greater feats of bravery and glory on the battlefield as the Spartans of old had.

When time had come for them to enroll, the scorpion had made it through, but Shinai had not. He'd twisted his ankle and broken his arm during his entrance test, and had been unable to complete the physical portion of it until after having waited for it to heal. He would have to reapply another time, as he would have been no good to them the way he had been then regardless. Shinai had cursed his luck as his scorpion had regretfully waved goodbye to him.

At first the weasel's scorpion boyfriend had sent him news from the front. It had been a bit of a shock but he'd been getting used to it. He'd been looking forward to seeing combat, but actually seeing it had been very different than he'd imagined. He'd been respected for his skills by his peers, something for which Shinai would always be proud of him. Then, there came a day when Shinai's boyfriend had become trapped on the battlefield by a circle of fire around him.

Scorpions had never reacted well to that.

Shinai's heart had shattered into a million pieces. At the Bolgia, he'd started going after more and more ridiculously overpowered opponents with the desperation of a drowning man coming up for air, hoping that one of them would make a mistake and accidentally kill him just because of the sheer power discrepancy between the two of them. He'd thrown himself against robots, witches, golems, shapeshifters, entities from beyond space and time who ate stars whole.

He'd wanted to die.

Eventually, Shinai had decided, in a last ditch effort to make something of his life before he would die, to go on a trip to the Himalayas. He'd wanted to find a hermit monk who he had overheard someone at the Bolgia talking to someone else about. Apparently, this monk had been exiled from his Buddhist temple by the other monks because of his ideology, but he had been grudgingly known as one of the most skilled in battle and even in terms of mental discipline. He had been known to gladly accept students, even though he had been a recluse, since he had seen it as an opportunity to spread his ideology while getting help for chores and of course to train.

His name had been Rajiv.

Shinai had painstakingly made the journey up the snow-covered mountains to Rajiv's isolated, diminutive temple away from the other, bigger temple on a more prominent peak that other visitors to the mountain would go to. He had gone from having been at his lowest, hottest point at the bottom of the Grand Canyon to having been at his highest, coldest point there. While he had acted predictably eccentric, Rajiv had accepted Shinai as his student.

As Shinai and Rajiv had trained, Rajiv would often talk to him, sharing his own beliefs about the respective values of war and peace. The other monks had excommunicated him because they had told him that his beliefs had not been truly Buddhist, and that while he may have meant well, he had been too misguided to do good. Shinai's informants hadn't lied, though: the snow leopard's physical training and meditation techniques had been at a very high level.

As they had trained and talked, Shinai had learned that there had been a man who Rajiv had loved before as well. When this man had been killed by one of those who oppressed his people, Rajiv had gone on a frenzy, and had killed the man who had killed his boyfriend. Delving into Buddhist texts for solace from his ordeal, Rajiv had found the condemnations of the monks for his violent revenge grating and misplaced.

He had also come to believe that the bodhisattvas had been very literal entities that could be summoned from where they'd resided. Throwing aside the philosophical interpretation of Buddhism as insufficient, he had become a proponent of the belief that the powers that had been rumored to exist for monks who had trained hard could be attainable by all of his people. Rajiv had come to believe that, if all of his people trained and meditated hard enough, they could become impervious to bullets, and could turn the wrath of their bodhisattvas against their oppressors themselves, reducing them to dust as they would beg for mercy.

He had not wanted to wait for someone else to save his nation. He'd do it himself.

The monks had told him that the loss of his love had clouded his mind. If they had attempted to rise up against their oppressors the way that Rajiv had been advocating that they do, they would have been massacred, they had told him. Even if Rajiv's literalist interpretation had been real, they had told him, then the same bodhisattvas could just as well be summoned against them by their oppressors. In the long run, Buddha did not take sides. He had wanted everyone to reach enlightenment someday. Why not leave his people the dignity that their continued belief in the value of peace had still granted them after all, the monks had attempted to reason with him?

So he had gone off to live on his own, thinking himself misunderstood by his peers.

It had been a twist of fate that, paradoxically, it had been through hearing about Buddhism through Rajiv because of his disagreements with the other monks that Shinai had left the troops of Mars to march with the Buddha himself. Rajiv had naturally been frustrated by this to an extent, but he had also taken the philosophical challenge that it had represented for him as one to be approached as eagerly as he would have approached any physical challenge all the same. The more Rajiv had learned about Mars from Shinai, as the weasel had told the snow leopard about the story of his own life, the more Rajiv had come to respect this foreign Mars.

It had been while meditating with Rajiv that Shinai had finally had an epiphany.

The military had been a cult. All forms of military conditioning were a form of cult conditioning. His scorpion boyfriend had died because he had joined a cult, and this cult had led him into a twisted mass suicide, just as all true cults eventually did. Shinai began to think of himself as someone who had narrowly found a way out of a cult, and to think of it as his mission to help those whose lives would also be destroyed by that cult if he did nothing to stop it.

When time came for Shinai to return to Arizona, he had already decided that, the next time that he would attempt to join the military all over again, it would be to figure out a true way to destroy it from within. Not just his own nation's military - the very concept of the military for everyone, everywhere in the world. Killing had always been murder, regardless of where anyone involved had been from. Anything that existed to pretend otherwise had to be destroyed.

He'd become determined to use the mental training that he'd received from Rajiv to try to figure out how military conditioning worked from the inside, so that he could learn how to reverse-engineer it and destroy it. He would have to figure out a way to do it everywhere, in a way in which every soldier at the same time would be exposed to it, but he'd been convinced that, if it had been exactly the right form of sensory input in just the right context, he could deprogram all soldiers. When he had started seeing Klein once back, Shinai had always talked about how he'd been going to join the military. Klein had always tried to talk him out of it.

The two of them would spar physically at the Bolgia, then spar verbally about whether or not Shinai should join the army, so that they were always sparring, in a sense. Their antagonism had even perversely fueled some of their feelings for each other. The more Klein had felt like Shinai had been going to be taken away from him, the harder he'd fought to convince him to stay. On some level Shinai had liked that someone would have cared, but not enough not to go.

It had been the day before Shinai had been going to enroll.

"So you're going," Klein had said, "Just like that. What does war have that I don't, after all?" Shinai had sighed. "Do you really want to know?" Klein had nodded. He had always been a pacifist. The truth was that he couldn't understand why anyone who had another option to continue to survive available to them would choose to join the army of their own free will. It had been unimaginable to him.

So Shinai had finally told Klein the story of his scorpion boyfriend and Rajiv.

"So, Klein... Do you understand now, why I have to go?" Klein had shaken his head. "I understand that you're not a bloodthirsty killer, just like I always knew you weren't. I even on some level appreciate what you're trying to do. I can't understand why you need to join the army yourself to be able to do it, though." Shinai had seemed perplexed. "What don't you understand about it?" Klein had looked at him thoughtfully. "It seems to me that, if you want to break military conditioning, you should study psychology, or research cult deprogramming, or historical cases where soldiers have dropped their weapons. There are other ways to do that."

Shinai had looked displeased by Klein's assessment. "What were you doing when you first realized that you no longer believed in war?" the skunk had asked the weasel. "I was meditating," Shinai had replied. "Well then," Klein had told him, "don't you think that it might be better for you to meditate more to figure out how to decondition other soldiers the way you dream to do?"

Shinai had scoffed at him. "You Daoists are always looking for opportunities to postpone important decisions," he'd teased Klein, as they'd done. "No, we're not!" the skunk had defended himself. "But no matter how much you've heard about the military, actually joining it and going on the battlefield is going to be radically different from that! How can you possibly know that you're prepared to do something like that, for any reason, even for a good one?"

"So you do admit it's for a good one," Shinai had said. He'd always gone for the openings in Klein's guard. "You just said it yourself: I don't know what it's like. How can I know for sure that my system to break military conditioning works if I'm not willing to test it on myself by joining and breaking out of it myself?" Klein had looked exasperated. "The doctor who experiments on himself has a fool for a patient!" he'd said.

"Then maybe it's time for me to be The Fool," Shinai had mused. "It's not really such a bad card deep down, you know. Sometimes, you have to be willing to be The Fool, if that's what it'll take to get things moving." Klein had sighed. "We Daoists also believe that weapons are always funeral implements, and that if every person on Earth was unwilling to let harm come to a single one of their hairs, the whole world would be saved. Charity begins at home, Shinai. What if you fail, have you thought about that? What if your mind isn't strong enough to withstand the horrors you'll face? What if in the end it's the military that corrupts and destroys you?"

Shinai had shrugged. "I've lived a good life." Klein had frowned at him. "Have you? I don't think you think you have. I think you still want to die, to go be with your boyfriend in the afterlife."

"SO WHAT IF I DO?" Shinai had snapped at him.

"You're the one who always accuses me of running away from things," Klein had answered as calmly as he'd been able to. "But this isn't about me trying to convince you to run away from something. This is about you trying to convince yourself to run away from something, and me trying to talk you out of it." Shinai had tilted his head at him. "How do you mean?" Klein had spread out his arms. "This is what you're running away from, Shinai! You're afraid that, if you stay here, and we keep seeing each other, what we have might get deeper than sex. You're afraid of loving someone again, and of losing them again. So you're running away."

Shinai had stared daggers at him. "So what if I am...?"

Klein had sighed. "You shouldn't let the dead bury the living, Shinai... They have a way of doing that, if you let them. They outnumber us by far. We wouldn't last long. It's being willing to stick by people through the hard times, being willing to be with them from day to day for better or worse no matter what, to convince them to continue to put one foot in front of the other even when it gets as bad as it can get... That's what really takes courage, Shinai."

Shinai had seemed to have stopped, and to have really thought about what Klein had said.

"... I'll send you a postcard, Klein," Shinai had kissed him goodbye.