sga_flashfic | Tadaima, by Losyark

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sga_flashfic

Tadaima

losyark

Challenge: The Return

Characters: Miko Kusanagi

Spoilers: Up to and including “The Return”.
Rating: PG-13

Author’s Notes: Why do I only write Miko stories when I’m in airports? This is a companion piece to “Zoh-Onna Omote” and the second in the 'Nihongo' series. Thanks to

pearbean, my lovely beta.

Summary: “Mina-sama, tadaima,” the flight stewardess said over the last whine of the cutting plane engines.

***

Returning wasn’t easy for any one. How can you go from that to this? Miko Kusanagi – though she suspected that she ought to get herself used to being Kusanagi Miko again – knew that as well as any of them.

“Tadaima,” is generally translated as ‘I’m home’, but what it really means is just a cold and clinical ‘here; now.’

It rang true.

***

The SGC could afford to send an expedition to another galaxy, to fund searches for ZPMs and battles against Ori. It could afford to build spaceships, pay consultants, develop and reverse engineer death gliders and star drives. It could afford to hire ‘the best and the brightest’ (and how everyone was so sick of that phrase) from all over the Earth and pay them with the taxes gleaned from the American citizens and those of several other unspecified countries besides.

It could not, however, it seemed, afford to use said reverse engineered death gliders and star drives and Asgard transporters to send ‘the best and the brightest’ back to their own countries of origin.

Right, okay, so it was a first class ticket. Still. That didn’t make the flight from the Denver International Airport, to the Vancouver International Airport, then to the Kansai International Airport one minute less than fifteen hours.

Passengers surged to their feet to retrieve their luggage from the overhead bins, desperate to be up and walking and off. Miko sat still and watched the ground crew in their photophoresant vests through the oval window and thought about the glow over the southwest pier at sunset.

“Mina-sama, tadaima,” the flight stewardess said over the last whine of the cutting plane engines.

***

Miko theorized that Osaka Umeda Station was a black hole of bent space and time and if Miko had the chance to run around the place with an EMF scanner, and a Tablet, and an LSD and all the other beautiful artefacts and gadgets they’d been told by the Lanteans to leave behind and mostly did, she was sure it would prove true.

The station was one long mess of shoving people and moving sidewalks and ups and downs and colour coded train platforms – two separate privately owned train lines (the Hankyu and the Hanshin) crashed up against the national JR line, and three or more subway systems. They boiled together, frothed, turned people in circles and spat them out four stories below ground when they had originally been three above. To make matters more complicated the maps never had a directional orientation and some buildings were labelled incorrectly with the French words for North, South, East, and West.

Miko Kusanagi stood in the middle of The-Ancestors-knew-where and frowned mightily at the ‘You Are Here’ arrow on the latest in the series of maps. In English it read “Your Were Here”.

“The Hep Five building,” she said to someone she stopped for directions. “It has a big red Ferris wheel on the top? Whales inside the foyer?” She thought that if Colonel Sheppard were here he’d be able to use his internal-Ferris-wheel-radar to find it.

But Colonel Sheppard was in Colorado.

The person gave Miko the latest in a set of contrary directions and amazingly this time the glass and red-steel building floated into view over the heads of the hundreds of people waiting to cross the road that ran between the Sud and Est buildings of Umeda.

When she got there, her older sister was not. At least, she thought she didn’t see her. It had been two years – she could have changed.

Miko certainly had.

The cellular phone that she had arranged to purchase from America and picked up as she left Kansai jangled in her pocket, to the tune of Arashi’s “Wish”. She didn’t know who Arashi was, she had been away for too long and the reverse culture shock was already starting to eat at her, but the sales lady assured Miko that Arashi was very hip and Jun-kun, one of the singers, was ‘totemo kawaii.’ Too cute.

Miko flicked open the cell phone and held it to her ear, and it felt clunky and too heavy and she missed simply tapping her earpiece. You never misdialed or misplaced something that was wedged into your ear.

“Moshi moshi?” she said.

“Miko-chan!” her sister squealed. “Doko desuka?”

Miko sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose and let her carry-on flop to her feet on the sidewalk, pressing herself back against the red tile side of the Hep Five building to avoid the bustling brash pushy crowd.

“Tadaima,” she said softly.

***

While Miko had been on Atlantis, she had turned both twenty nine and thirty. She had watched a friend die of extreme fear, brain terrorized by nanites. She had shot a Wraith in the face, fallen in love, invented a better way to convert left over cooking grease into fuel to recharge battery cells, learned to accept insults about her intelligence for the compliments they sometimes were, and got addicted to Athosian bean paste preserve.

She had watched “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” thirty one separate times, memorized the entire “Best of the Arrogant Worms” album, and was nearly choked to death by a Genii soldier with a revenge complex.

She had missed fresh fried octopus balls, straight from the vendors pan, and learned how to crawl double-time through an air-duct, how to disassemble and clean a nine millimetre berretta sidearm, though she always forgot to put her finger over the spring and her coiled wire always shot across the room.

She taught a handful of Athosian children how to warble their voices to produce the deep resonance needed for proper Noh Recital and helped them put on a short version of “Tenko”, the ‘Boy of the Heavenly Drum.’ She taught half the marines how to use chopsticks and learned to eat fried not-chicken with her fingers, and tuttleroot soup with the too-long Athosian spoons.

She had helped bury the man she loved and knew the deep ache of wishing she’d been brave enough to do more than fold his napkin and occasionally sit at the same table in the mess as him. She suspected that he had suspected, but now it was too late.

While Miko had been on Atlantis, Prime Minster Koizumi had visited Canada and Graceland and then had been replaced with Prime Minister Abe. Princess Sayako had married a commoner, a nobleman she had met through her elder brother the Crown Prince’s circle of friends, and had been severed from the Royal Bloodline with a fat inheritance and media fanfare.

Crown Prince Naruito’s wife, Princess Masako, had only one daughter. However, the second son, Prince Akishino’s wife gave birth to a long-hoped-for son ensuring that they Japanese Empire could once more pass into male hands and silencing all pushes for a reform that would have allowed the baby Prince Hisahito’s older cousin, Princess Aiko, to be the first woman on the throne.

Miko’s older sister had a second son and her younger sister had gotten married and moved to Nagoya with her husband so he could take a better position in the company.

SMAP had their own cooking show, Hard Gay had come and gone, and the “Hana Yori Dango” live action adaptation had been so popular that the sequel series was airing. It also starred Jun-kun, who seemed to be doing a cooking show, too. Miko was confused. There were three new “Super Sentai” teams, and three more “Masked Riders”. There had been two “Pokemon” movies, one “Doraemon”, one “xxxHoLiC”, and two “Detective Conan”. There were new bands Miko had never heard of, new slang that she didn’t understand and couldn’t decipher, and everywhere people wore leggings and legwarmers and sometimes Miko wondered if something had gone wrong with the Stargate and she had been returned to the 1980s by accident.

Miko’s grandfather had passed away, three weeks before her return, and when there was talk of selling the glorious old house Miko protested and bought it from her oldest aunt straight away. It wasn’t like the Americans hadn’t paid her what she was worth and hazard pay besides, and with nothing to buy on Atlantis...

It’s bad luck to live in another person’s house, where the ghost of them and all the ancestors who had died there sometimes linger, so it would have been torn down by anyone who’d bought it, right to the ground.

Nobody wanted to live with the ghosts of someone else’s ancestors.

So the lovely centuries old garden would be scrubbed and the workshop demolished and burned. Miko couldn’t bare the thought of having such a magical and marvellous place destroyed.

She made the second bedroom her study, installed wireless internet and left the workshop exactly as her grandfather had. She put a picture painted by Jinto and Wex in the tokonoma recess in the tea room, instead of a proper seasonal scroll with a haiku, and a long slim piece of ancient tech that had once been nose-hair trimmers but was now out of power where the ikebana was supposed to go in front of the picture.

In the small closet-shrine beside the recess, where the pictures of Grandfather and Grandmother and great-Grandfather and great-Grandmother and aunts and uncles and cousins Miko had not known or vaguely remembered hung, Miko added her photograph of Peter, the group photo of the permanently MIA SGA-7, the candid security feed printout of Stackhouse, the official file shot of Sumner. She carefully cleaned out all the ash from the old incense, wiped the statuettes of the gods clean, so they would be happy and continue to look after the dearly departed, and put one tiny white candle on the pokers that stood before each photograph.

She lit the candles and told them “tadaima,” and went to sleep on the musty old futon that still smelled like Grandfather.

***

Going out was hard.

On Atlantis, there had been about three hundred people, give or take.

On Atlantis, she had never had to do anything more elaborate to get from point A to point B than either 1) step into the nearest transporter, 2) get in a puddlejumper, 3) walk through the Stargate.

On Atlantis, most of the personnel were Western, so they really liked their three foot personal space bubble.

On Atlantis, she had to barter or trade for goods and treats, entertainment and stories.

On Atlantis, she never had to think about what to make for dinner, about buying food, about doing dishes. She just had to go to the Mess.

On Atlantis, Miko had Kate to talk to when things got hard and Girls Poker Night for when they weren’t.

In Kyoto there are 1.5 million people.

In Kyoto she has to walk to the nearest bus station to get to the nearest subway station. She has to go down stairs, buy a ticket from the vendor, feed it into the machine, take the ticket again, go down more stairs, decide which platform she needed and if the first train stopping at it would stop where she needed to go. She has to line up in two queues, shove her way onto the trains, hope she gets a seat and resign herself to being crushed up against the wall if there weren’t any. She has to elbow her way towards a door when it was time to get off. She has to go up stairs, feed the machine her ticket again, find a map so she can choose the right exit, and then walk with the crowd in order to keep from getting knocked down.

She has to shove her way in beside old women and men who move for no one and no natural disaster to get at the shelves in the supermarkets and the old Mom and Pops places that had the freshest fish and vegetables. She has to burn her own rice. She has to squeeze around gleeful teenagers to get to the doors in clothing stores, has to dodge around bicyclists on their cell phones like a slalom skier.

What Miko had forgotten about Japan is that it was overwhelming.

In Kyoto, Japanese people live in close quarters their whole lives and as such have almost no spacial awareness or sense of a personal bubble.

In Kyoto, Miko has to rent box sets, get a credit card to join the rental store so she can rent them. She has to peruse shelves at libraries for books instead of asking to borrow some, and are were too many to choose from. It leaves her confused and frustrated and she exits the library with nothing but a bad mood. She hears music everywhere and it gives her headaches, and walking into a blindingly-lit manga store is like walking into the lower levels of Atlantis – a confusing, terrifying labyrinth of half-naked girls and wide anime eyes and bright red and blue striped spines.

In Kyoto, her mother calls her daily, pesters her about working too hard at her job in the science labs in Osaka, how she’d never meet a man if she lives alone and commutes forty minutes to work every day on the shinkansen unless she meets a handsome businessman on the train, and thirty isn’t too old to start a family and shouldn’t Miko be thinking about going maybe to see the matchmaker soon? Arranged marriages weren’t bad, and her mother knew many couples who had used a matching service company and were completely happy. Miko’s sisters call to talk about diaper rash and school fees and cooking dinner and the sale at Uniqlo and Miko couldn’t tell them about how wrong she felt because they just said, “Silly, you’re home, what’s wrong about that?”

Miko Kusanagi was not claustrophobic, but Japan was too close.

“Tadaima,” she said to her empty house as she took off her shoes in the genkan entryway. A blessedly people-free silence answered back.

***

Miko thought about getting a cat, but then she remembered how much Doctor McKay had mourned his own cat, left behind, and she thought maybe if the Lanteans let them come back she would mourn the loss of her companion too, so she didn’t get one, even though it would have been nice, maybe, to have someone to say “tadaima” to when she got home at night.

***

Miko didn’t really feel like she fit in. Part of her knew it was because he had been in a different galaxy for almost two years. She knew the world better, the blurry edges and the Dark Things in clearer focus to her than to any others.

But when her mother said, “It is because you’re not so Japanese any more,” Miko listened.

For once, her mother might actually know what she was talking about.

It was true – Miko drank coffee with breakfast instead of tea most days, now, and rarely had nattou because it looked like the way Wraith brains splattered, and liked riding every single Ferris wheel she could find just to get up, above, away from the crowd for fifteen or twenty minutes. She understood now why Colonel Sheppard liked them – they were quiet.

She was more inclined to shake hands or touch foreheads than make a forty-five degree bow, which confused old friends and family members alike. Miko wore jeans, just because she could, but at home, alone in the Kyoto house, she wore the bottom of her BDUs because they were worn in and comfortable. She stated her opinion loudly and clearly without waiting for consensus approval and when someone was knocked down on the street she helped them up.

She still said “itadakemasu” before each meal and “gochishosamadeshita” after, but she was more inclined to eat KFC with her fingers. She wanted bean paste for her toast, but the closest she could get was Nutella from the Sony Plaza Import Shop.

Maybe, Miko thought, repairing this lack of Japanese-ness would make the empty aching spot inside feel better. She went to the old flea markets in the ancient parts of Kyoto – bought a shamisen guitar and dozens of old kimono and antique tea sets. She had the kimono dry cleaned and the shamisen re-stringed and painstakingly tried to remember the fingering, carefully bleached the stains out of the tea sets. She went to Tea Ceremony Classes and Ikebana Classes and Calligraphy Classes but spent more time giggling with the foreigners who were living in Japan as English Teachers and taking the classes to keep themselves busy and learn about their Host Culture, than actually doing her own work.

She sat in seiza at home, but folding her legs under her like that just made them numb and tingly. She liked the onsens well enough, but the ever-present old women stared at the star-shaped scar between her breasts. No one ever stared at the scar on Atlantis. Almost everyone had a matching one.

She did all the superficial things that made one ‘Japanese’ and still felt Atlantean.

She turned the kimono into a patchwork quilt, quite horrifying her older sister, because she couldn’t bring herself to wear them. You can’t run in a kimono. You can’t escape in the little clacky geta sandals, and there was no where to conceal a gun.

She tried to read the Japanese Science Journals but found herself scribbling in red in the margins in English, photocopying sections and painstakingly translating them and mailing both to Doctor McKay at Area 51 and Doctor Zelenka in the Czech Republic’s Academy of Science, Institute of Physics. Doctor Zelenka’s copy would have a little anime version of her self in the corner pulling a face. Doctor McKay’s would have long winded sentences about how stupid Other People were trailing sideways up the edges of the copy.

At the end of her second month home, she met Doctors Kurosuwatsu and Tanaka quite by accident at an astronomy conference in Fukuoka, and the three of them went for coffee and stared at each other helplessly over the frothy strawberry cakes.

Miko said, “Tadaima,” and Tanaka snorted into his latte.

***

Miko let her carry bag flop to the floor of her quarters. Her equipment, her research, her clothing and her box of personal belongings, was en route with the Daedalus with the rest of the Expedition’s things. Her sisters had gone to shut up the house for her, winterized it. Someone was hired to care for the garden once a month, and the whole place would wait with held breath for Miko to return. If she ever did.

The Daedalus was bringing all the things that were too big to fit through the Stargate or had been left behind in her Kyoto house and her rush of excitement.

The IOA didn’t understand. They wanted to repopulate Atlantis cautiously, carefully. Wanted meetings and protocols and procedures and they couldn’t quite manage the huge wave of delighted Expedition members that had all but knocked down the doors to the SGC when they’d be told the news – they were going back. They wanted to go home.

Now.

A few things had changed since Miko had last been in this room. The bed had been moved back to its original position, not against the window where Miko liked it. The shower curtain she had made from scavenged fragments of mission-wrecked tarpaulins, and that she had left in the bathroom, was gone. So was all the toilet paper.

There was a soft white dress hanging in the closet, a pair of well-worn boots, and several of the corset-like lace-up tops that the women Lanteans favoured to put over their white blouses. The shirts were all soft and cream coloured and made of a material that felt like silk but was sturdy like canvas.

There was a throw over the foot of the bed, a bright and iridescent sapphire shot through with wavy lines of sea-green, and a small round ball of grey metal on the bedside table that threw out a projected static image of a man and a woman holding a baby boy when Miko picked it up.

Someone, who had also once called this place home, had made it theirs again. Wrested it back from Miko and the ghost of her that had lingered in this room. Miko did not want to wrest back, she did not want to fight with the dead. She did not want to tear it down and build it up again. She didn’t mind living with the ghosts of these Ancestors.

Carefully Miko folded up the clothing and put it in a pile at the back of the wardrobe. She laced the boots and set them beside the pile. She left the dress hanging in the closet, beside her own shirts and uniform jacket.

She spread out the throw on the bed, checking for blood stains. There were none. She smoothed down the fabric, added her own throw to the foot, folded up. It was the one made of a patchwork of old bits and pieces of obi and kimono that she had bought at the second hand flea markets in the streets of Kyoto.

She liked the way the two blankets looked together.

She set up her small shrine in the correct corner of the room, carefully placed each picture, lit the incense, placed the slim white candles under each smiling face and the large all-night candle in the middle. Then she added one more, for the person who had once lived and loved and probably died in Miko’s room. She put the grey photo-ball behind it.

Then she stood up, went over to the window, watched the clouds scud over the sky above the southwest pier.

“Okaeri nasai,” she said to Atlantis. Functionally, okaeri nasai meant “welcome home”.

It rang true.

Next: Kizu

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From:

darkrosetiger.livejournal.com

I love your Miko so very much. This was just gorgeous; I loved the way that she didn't feel home until she was back on Atlantis--and that she included the Ancients in her shrine when she got back.

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