Archives: Sure, but please ask first! ^_^

DISCLAIMER: All featured Tekken characters are the property of Namco and not the authors.

Notes: Constructive criticism is welcomed!

Warnings: Eventual lemon parts, language & violence.

At the heart of the Mishima Financial Empire rose a skyscraper built in the dusk of Mishima Kazuya's ambitious life, and the patriarch of the zaibatsu claimed the citadel in downtown Tokyo -- higher than any other building in its wake -- for himself after he made short work of the architect. To this phallic landmark Mishima Heihachi summoned his grandson, Kazama Jin. The facade of dispassion that Hayase Keika tried to wield in her everyday life managed to make relaying the summons of her boss relatively brief and to the point; when she commandeered Jin, she hoped the boy could not see the quiver in her eyes for him.

Having its peak at one hundred and thirty floors, the skyscraper housed Heihachi's personal office from the taint of Heaven just beyond the window, and outside this chamber veteran Tekkenshu stood with the young teenager, armed and militant. They had been told to wait.

Many things accounted for Jin's minor pallor, his damp palms and his dry throat. He disliked tall constructions, and the farther he was lifted from the ground in the elevator, the more anxious he had become. But that his grandfather had contacted him, much less summoned him to such a place in doing so, solidified as a stone in the pit of his stomach. They shared the same house but had no possibility for chance encounters, and slowly Kazama had been growing confident that his grandfather was as comfortable leaving Jin be as Jin was with the virulent man. Apparently, however, something was different today.

"Is he very busy?" Jin asked gently, turning his eyes from the massive wooden door to his positioned company. The man gave no answer, for the truth was obvious.

Largely enough, Jin measured the situation as clearly as Heihachi's perspective shaped it; the old man's plans for the boy required a minimum amount of contact, and he felt himself noble for extending enough distance and freedom that Jin might enjoy the short-lived amenities of youth. Or this was how Heihachi's immediate inferiors understood his indifference to his grandson. Much of Jin's recent behavior had simply been kept from Heihachi, despite his demands of perpetual omniscience, for fear of the ramifications -- this is a man who threw his ten-year old son from a mountain cliff for finding a little-girl's bunny. The memory still lulled the master to an eerie chortling.

Now the doors were slid open, the capacious quarters of the elder thrown open by a stern-faced Hayase-san, who beckoned Jin enter with her stare. When she marched past him to exit the door, she clutched a month old newspaper in her hand, headlining the release of Kazama Jin from the hospital.

With a slowly drawn breath swelling his chest Jin moved forward through the entrance, his steps nearly soundless as though gravity was losing its grip upon Jin so far from the earth.

"Ojiisan," he said politely, and lowered soulful, swarthy eyes as he bowed.

Hardwood floors glistened under Jin's stride. It used to be black marble, but Heihachi had the morose, shining trappings of his deceased son stripped away a year ago. The earthen tones and elaborate screens of a dojo ruled here now, and where a mammoth, obsidian desk once loomed rested a low table the hoary Mishima prostrated silently before, his gi-swathed legs crossed, each large, wooden geta poised beneath a knee. While a china bowl steamed beside a complimenting geta, courtesy of Hayase, Heihachi remained in a meditative stasis, his eyes closed.

Jin waited more time than was necessary to be assured that Heihachi remained unchanged in position. Finally, he slipped off his shoes by the door and on socked feet moved directly forward, his paces now silent by choice. Several paces from the desk, Jin lowered to his knees and tucked his shins below himself, a nervous hand spreading over the tops of his thighs. He would wait here; it seemed the most logical and mannerful option.

"Oi, boy," the golem growled, the bass in it resonant enough to knock a more humble edifice from its foundations. The sagacious creases around his grey eyes stretched as they opened on Jin, the glare livid with a crawling disgust - the first time such a reaction escaped his veiled front. He looked at Jin with hatred, the depth of it and the fervor of it so transient the boy could have imagined it. Only the disgust remained.

"You smell like a gutter," Heihachi rumbled.

Jin opened his mouth to speak and then closed it blankly again. After a short hesitation he quietly blurted, "I'm sorry, sir," and lowered his head and shoulders in a sitting bow.

"Sorry!" he boomed, louder than a thunderclap, the marvel being that he hadn't made one movement from his position of mental balance.

"I never want to hear that from your mouth!" And just as this vitriol seemed the rule for the present exchange, the colossal erupted into a scathing laughter that shook him, and he heaped his attentions on the tea.

Enormous hands, seamed with grey, glistening fur, grabbed the bowl and lifted it to his mouth. His words boiled over it, " .. but it is good to see that you would bend over for your grandfather too."

"Is there something that you wanted to talk to me about, sir?" Jin asked, as though the comment had slipped past him undetected and wishing that it were so.

"Watch your tone, boy," Heihachi warned through lips that shined with the green tea he hadn't bothered wiping, or licking clean. They were thick and framed in the wiry hairs of his meticulously groomed goatee.

"You know I don't waste breath. Why are you sticking your dick gutters?"

Jin found that his lips were beginning to grow dry, and moistened them with his tongue. His fingers dug lightly into his knees.

"Ojiisan, I don't know what you're talking about," he said, almost fumbling over the words in his desperation.

The blatant deception drove Jin's grandfather to annihilate another table with his fist. The streams of electricity preceded the violence of a blow that cracked the wood in half, spraying splinters of wood into the air. He would have thought that whore who seduced his son taught Jin better.

"THIS IS HOW YOU SHOW YOUR GRANDFATHER RESPECT?! HOW YOU REPAY ME?!"

Jin's eyes were closed long enough for the fragments of ruined wood to fall from his face. That face, weathering such malevolent force, retained a level of composure for which Jin should have been proud. In the echoing silence that loomed after the outburst, Jin swallowed.

"I am speaking honestly, ojiisan, because I do respect you," he stated gently.

He would have said what he wanted to say to Kazuya. He would have called Jin spineless, invertebrate, emasculated, inferior. Weak. And then he might have thrown the boy at the window - were Jin his father. But Heihachi neither raised this boy, nor wished to incite the anger which drove his son to damnation, and having perceived the potential for diablos in Jin over the past few months, he determined to channel this power for his own purposes.

Forgetting the ruins before him and in a blur of speed, his hand shot across the table to clutch Jin's throat. It was neither gentle nor suffocating, but it effectively held the boy's face firm.

Jin gurgled for air but found little, his eyes flashing with a heart-freezing panic far more asphyxiating than the grip of that hand which he was keenly aware could crush his throat in the span of a moment.

"You will not heap such embarrassment on your name again," he instructed with a dull roar. " .. or you will answer to me. Not Hayase-san. Do you understand me, boy?"

He would have to leave this house. He would take his Joon and move far away, beyond the clutches of this vile blood, and there they would be happy. Jin could reverse that unprotected grip and slam his grandfather into the table; snap his arm -- and end his own life. Or far worse, endanger Hwoarang's. Such thoughts sprinted blindly through his mind as he sought desperately for some means of avoiding the use of a lie.

"Then let me leave," he uttered thinly before a strangled gasp. "Erase your name from me and I'll take him away, ojiisan, and disappear." He swallowed feebly against those fingers, and whispered, "We're in love."

Heihachi forgot himself, and squeezed. He rose until he was standing, lifting Jin by the throat during this feat of strength, and glared at him with the fires of Jun Kazama's death in his eyes. But around the wicked lines of his mouth, an acidic smile burgeoned, and he dropped Jin like a sack of rocks, rather than throwing as he wished. His grumble was its kindest yet.

"And how do you think your dead mother, who sent you to me, would feel if you left? Didn't she know what was best for you, Jin?" Using his grandson's name at this point was as low a maneuver as evoking his mother.

Jin rubbed at his throat and forced his lungs to admit a painful breath.

"The great lesson that my mother taught me was to live for the heart. I am honest and do what I believe is right. My mother would be proud of me -- is proud of me." Jin's eyes were searing holes into the costly flooring.

The wall of his voice pushed against Jin even when he ceased to. His hulking back was turned on the boy, and he was walking away. Heihachi had already imagined the sound of his grandson's cracking bones, and controlling the urge entailed removing the weakling from his sight.

"You go to school. Make your ancestors proud and show your grandfather respect. I don't want to be bothered with this nonsense again!" The conversation was closed, if the volcanic rise in the spry ancient's voice dictated events.

Jin rose from the floor, watching his hands as they brushed the dust of the former table from him as though they were those of some distant, unknown being.

"Do not mention my mother again." His full mouth formed each succinct syllable, though all remained unvoiced. Jin retreated to the door, slipping his feet back into his shoes, and he left the room, his grandfather, and the enormous, vile building.

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