Takeshi—DL

Takeshi Fumimota and DL are bound by more than a shared life of flight and unusual work: their relationship has been governed by a recurring agreement that both limits intimacy and requires them to return to the Kunoichi Attentives Sisterhood Mountain Retreat. The eventual renegotiation of their no-sex clause exposes how much desire has persisted beneath those terms, while leaving their partnership entangled with the dangers and obligations that first shaped it.

A Partnership Under Constraint

The arrangement is part of a history DL has never fully explained to her mother, Norleen. Two or three years before the events at the Zero Inn, DL and Takeshi were following a Thanatoid trail through oil-country bank accounts in their Trans-Am when they made an impulsive detour to Houston to visit her. Norleen found an opportunity to praise Takeshi to her daughter, describing his charm and bearing and urging DL to recognize how devoted he seemed. DL responded gently but did not present their life as a conventional romance: Takeshi, she warned, might be crazy, and people of various kinds were after him. She understood herself as his accomplice in a life of international crime, though she was unsure what to call it.

Norleen’s enthusiasm made DL unexpectedly tender, but she kept the relationship’s origins and terms from her mother. She did not tell her about the Japanese brothel where she and Takeshi had met, the Vibrating Palm, or his resurrection through the Puncutron. Nor did she mention that they returned every year to the Kunoichi Attentives Sisterhood Mountain Retreat for examinations and to renew the agreement that held them together. DL feared that explaining the arrangement would eventually require disclosing its no-sex clause, a revelation she thought might distress Norleen enough to earn her disapproval. The secrecy was not simply concealment of an eccentric past: it protected a relationship whose rules DL herself had not yet chosen to challenge.

Renegotiating the No-Sex Clause

At the Zero Inn, while a party gathered around them, Takeshi recognized that DL was thinking about someone she missed and urged her to go for a visit. The suggestion led them to acknowledge how long it had been—nearly fifteen years—and that Brock Vond was no longer there to stand in the way. Their exchange turns the end of his presence into an opening: the relationship can now be reconsidered without the old obstacle dictating its terms.

DL’s hesitation had lasted beyond any single conversation. She had kept quiet about the origins of her partnership with Takeshi and about the yearly returns to the Kunoichi Attentives Sisterhood Mountain Retreat, where they underwent examinations and renewed the agreement binding them. That year, however, the no-sex clause was renegotiated and dropped. Only then did DL recognize the extent of what the restriction had cost them. Her exuberant reaction marked a release she had not previously allowed herself to name.

Takeshi treated the change with teasing lightness, attributing it to oriental love magic and gesturing with the glasses he still wore. DL’s response was less certain: the altered agreement had not made their feelings immediately legible to her. She admitted that she had not known how much he wanted intimacy, or how much she wanted it herself, and wondered what was happening between them. Several days passed after the clause was removed before they made love. The delay matters: permission changed first, while the recognition and enactment of desire took longer.

Their conversation about that delay reaches back to Tokyo, where DL had been so intent on killing Brock Vond that she missed the sexual encounter Takeshi recalls as their first. Takeshi finds the mismatch funny rather than hurtful. Sister Rochelle, meanwhile, interprets DL’s fixation on Brock as an obstruction to her real karmic purpose: the pursuer seemed to reappear at the end of every path DL took. Their intimacy thus develops alongside, not apart from, the history of violence and pursuit that had narrowed DL’s attention.

When they finally make love, they are in an attic suite overlooking Amarillo, with strong wind outside and the sun setting through a range of colors. DL watches Takeshi at the window with renewed attention, but her question about their desire arises only after the encounter has left her disoriented. The scene presents intimacy neither as an automatic consequence of lifting a rule nor as a cure for their dangerous life together; it is a newly available closeness that both partners must still discover.

Intimacy Amid Pursuit

The year Takeshi and DL let the no-sex clause fall, they returned to the Kunoichi Attentives Sisterhood Mountain Retreat. Their visit unfolded beneath dark conifers that rose behind them into the clouds, and the retreat’s Superior was interested, at least scientifically, in whether Eros would strengthen or weaken the forces pressing upon the pair. Their intimacy remained inseparable from the pursuit and unresolved grievances that had shaped their lives: the same faceless pursuers had once boarded Takeshi’s plane and had been involved in the destruction of the Chipco laboratory, while the couple’s Karmic Correction had not made those forces disappear. The changed agreement opened a new possibility between them, not a sanctuary from the dangers surrounding them.

On the night Brock Vond was carried across the river, Takeshi and DL stole a few hours from the demands of their law and found themselves dancing together in the restless center of a crowded party at a country tavern. The Thanatoids were arriving in such numbers, and so much else was happening, that almost no one noticed the pair’s embrace. Their closeness appears not as a separate, quiet resolution but as one movement within a gathering that swells around them: Radio Thanatoide records and broadcasts the night, tourists arrive and some discover they are Thanatoids themselves, and the music continues across the night. The relationship’s new physical freedom is thus set against its persistent uncertainty and danger, but also against a communal celebration in which the two can briefly move together without becoming the focus of anyone’s attention.

Desire, Attention, and Karmic Purpose

The relationship’s turning point is not simply that a prohibition disappears, but that DL can finally recognize what its long duration has meant. She wonders whether those years were shaped by the Buddha’s triad of passion, aversion, and madness, and whether she had been attending to something other than the purpose her life required. The question reframes their intimacy as a struggle over attention: Brock Vond’s recurring presence had occupied DL’s paths so completely that, in Sister Rochelle’s account, it obstructed her karmic realization. Takeshi’s recollection of their first sexual encounter in Tokyo sharpens the irony: DL had been so absorbed in trying to kill Brock that she failed to register what was happening between them. Their later intimacy does not erase that history; it makes visible a desire that had persisted without becoming the center of her awareness.

The retreat’s interest in whether Eros might strengthen or diminish the forces pressing on the couple gives their changed agreement a wider, deliberately unresolved frame. Takeshi and DL’s bond has been renewed through yearly examinations and an agreement, yet the agreement’s terms can change, and desire arrives neither as a tidy reward nor as proof that danger has passed. Their embrace at the country tavern on the night Brock is carried across the river places this new closeness amid a crowded Thanatoid celebration, almost unnoticed as events and arrivals multiply around them. The relationship’s movement is therefore from regulated intimacy toward a shared possibility, not a settled escape: even as they find each other in the dance, the forces and old grievances surrounding their lives remain in motion.