Title: Guardian
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: PG
Length: 800 words
Content notes: vague background war situation?
Author notes: Giant Robot Shenanigans Once More~ WITH HIKARU. (Some translation/culture notes at the end.)
Summary: For Hikaru, the drift was red.

oOo

The drift was red.

They were two months into training before they had their first experience with drifting. Fuu said it was to give them time to understand what was going to happen, and prepare for it. Umi, on the other hand, thought it was so that they were so used to the craziness about here that they didn’t run away screaming.

When Hikaru asked Clef about it, he just laughed, and said he wouldn’t have expected anything else from Umi.

He didn’t actually say she was wrong.

But Hikaru had been listening to the tech people, the mechanics and the computing team. She knew just how hard they had been working – all of them, including Clef – to get the new AIs to the point where this was possible. What she didn’t know was why they had made them wait for these new AIs. Though it made this Rayearth’s first drift, as well as her own, and somehow that felt… right.

They were brought into the control pods of the mech which would be theirs. Somehow, someone had already decided who would belong with which – Hikaru didn’t know why they had given her Rayearth, or offered her up to him, but she had been drawn to the red-gold head from the first day on base. Perhaps they had merely been paying attention.

And now they were connected, tied together for the first time, and the drift was red.

Clef hadn’t spoken of it as a colour, and none of the training manuals or the recorded interviews with other pilots had mentioned it. But, for Hikaru, everything was washed in shades of that one colour – everything which was triggered by the neural connection as it sent sparks through her nervous system. The random memories and all the thoughts which appeared, as if from someone else’s mind, or dredged out of her own – those, she had been expecting. They had been told that configuration would ping against random parts of the brain as the AI learned how to read the responses, understand her.

Things flickered through her mind, and she concentrated on letting them pass by, as they had been told. Her brothers, on her birthday last year, giving her a crimson-wrapped present. The fires of the Kurama Fire Festival, that year they had gone to Kyoto on holiday and she’d begged until they left the Festival of Ages in the city and headed out to the village in time for the fires to be lit – she had been so small, and it was so crowded, but Satoru put her up on his shoulders where she could see the fires being carried to the shrine gates at the foot of the mountain. A bright red apple on a summer’s day.

Red was danger, on the battlefield – blood, and explosion. She knew that. But to her, those weren’t the first thoughts which came to mind. Instead it was these, and more – a warmth through each memory, things worth protecting, and defending.

That thought held, and caught fire, and there was a flash of new images one after another as a starburst of nerves lighting up through her mind, her brain, cascaded through the bright red clothes she’d been put in the one time she ever caught a bad fever as a child, how Kakeru sat and worried and told her they would help chase the illness away with a bright smile. The warmth of the embers of an autumn bonfire, the scarlet of the daruma doll which still sat on her shelf at home, waiting for her to achieve her goal (to study veterinary medicine at university) and draw in the second eye.

(That would be a long time coming, now. But she wasn’t giving up yet. Mech pilots tended to be retired young, if they retired at all – she might do her best and still be injured, unable to battle but not incapable of saving other lives.)

The bright but fading colour of the cloth tied about the necks of the komainu which guarded the shrine closest to her home, sat by the flame-coloured gates and enduring all weather. And the darker colour of the painted skin on the gate guardians at the temple three blocks further on.

Red was protection, and warding off demons and evil. In the mech, they were the same as those guardians, standing between the people of the world and the creatures which threatened them, holding the lines.

So what better colour could there be, for this drift?

oOo

Slowly, Hikaru opened her eyes, the sounds of the control pod filtering slowly back into her perception. She could hear someone reading off percentages and calibration progress, but it wasn’t important enough to pay attention to; instead, she was brilliantly aware of the controls about her, the systems they connected to, and the warmth of the pressure at the base of her neck. Not a presence, not quite. But the ghost of one.

Or, perhaps, the promise.

“Good to meet you, Rayearth.” She said, quietly, and smiled.

oOo

end

oOo

Notes: These are all as far as I know, and given I'm english and only spent a year in Japan, if I am wrong about any of this please please tell me and I shall fix? But I wanted to think about red from Hikaru's point of view, so tried to remember (and back up with google) what I could.

The Kurama Hi Matsuri (Kurama Fire Festival) takes place the evening of the same day as the Jidai Matsuri, in summer, which is Kyoto's Festival Of Ages - both are huge tourist draws so I figured I might as well send Hikaru to it? (Yep, cheated and used the festivals I've been to. XD I like the Kurama one!)

Daruma dolls come with both eyes blank, and according to ~various sources~ (mostly, um, manga and dramas - it certainly turned up in Honey and Clover? XD) you draw in the first eye when you set a goal or wish, and the second when it's fulfilled. They're in red clothes, and are also lucky, I think? Manekineko (beckoning cats) are also quite often red or in a red collar, as good fortune, I think.

Komainu are the lion-dog statues which sit either side of the gates in Shinto Shrines, which frequently have neckscarves tied on them? and Buddhist Temples usually have LARGE statues of guardians in the gate-building. (I went to Ninnaji in Kyoto the day after I watched the Dr Who episode 'blink' which implied at the end that all statues might come to life. I was very mildly terrified by the ones there. XD They're awesome, though!)

The red is, supposedly/apparently, associated with keeping out or driving away demons and evil. (My Japanese isn't up to going and finding any Japanese articles to support this, but it seems reasonable given the usage! I just don't trust the internet as a main source of information...) At any rate, it's certainly associated with the guardians who do so.