FicWad

Author's Note: Sorry for the delay. This chapter was hard to write, even though its not that long. Thanks, as always for reading.

The plastic bites into my palms; my hands clenching anxiously around the steering wheel as Ken and Sena careen out onto the road, two small lights streaking off into the night. I glance furtively at the backseat, checking to make sure my sword is still there, lying on the floor by Omi’s foot.
A nervous tic, assuming it could disappear.
Gritting my teeth I press my palm against the horn, letting the car scream, the abrasive sound echoing through the blackness, seeming to rebound off the walls of the building back to us.
There is no reason for this trepidation curling up in my stomach.
My hand freezes over the wheel as Omi shakes my shoulder.
“If he’s not down in a couple more minutes I’ll go up and get him, alright?”
I nod, shrugging the hand off.
No doubt the other two have already arrived, our positions having already been decided upon hours ago. The vent seems strangely scripted, a blank taste in my mouth.
I slap my hand against the horn again, reliving my tension in the sharp burst of sound that results.
Finally, he appears in the doorway and makes his way to the car, settling in the passenger seat.
“What the hell took you so long?”
The words hiss out between my teeth. He shrugs, turning his face towards the window.
“Damn it Yohji, we don’t have time for-”
“Abyssinian.”
Omi’s voice slips quietly into the soft monotone that he used as Persia.
I wonder if he’ll still use it when he goes back.
Shooting Yohji a glare, I gun the car, wrenching it onto the highway with squealing tires.
When I lean forward, I can feel the paint on my chest crack.
It is a strange sensation.
_____________________________

Ken and Sena’s bikes are nowhere to be seen as we pull into the clearing, checking to ensure there is adequate tree cover before leaving the car behind.
The school rises up before up, a dull faceless edifice, as bleak and mundane as the first day we arrived here. The windows are dark, empty, betraying no being inside.
We quickly make our way onto the path, twigs and gravel snapping beneath the heavy boots all of us wear, betraying our presence. There is no reason to skulk about through the woods tonight, arriving so expected.
It is almost a disappointment that there is no one waiting to greet us.
My hand flies instinctively to the hilt of my sword, measuring its swing as we walk; constricting about the thick metal with each step nearer to the hulking building. My face hardens with each movement; my throat tightens, heavy with anticipation.
I refuse to think. Strange, how even that denial seems to reveal something.
Ken and Sena fall into step with us suddenly, seamlessly, darting out of the tree line as we approach. There is a somber tone to our walk, our backs stiffening as we approach, faces set in grim masks, eyes focused intently ahead, behind, helplessly alert and strung up on adrenaline.
Gravel shifts ahead of us, corresponding to neither our step, nor that of anything we can see.
A line of bodies. What a flimsy barrier.
They seem to drift out of nowhere, gathering behind the stiff, useless figure of that politician, Shimojima, their faces contorting in masks of vague hatred and a terrible zeal, bodies leaning forward in tense readiness. A whole host of them.
Numb, I stop in tandem with Yohji, the force of the ground jarring hard through my leg with the abrupt pause, and wait for some rage to reveal itself and validate this apprehension.
____________________________

Flute music beats through my skull, a strangely harsh sound pulsing through my temples, the notes straining through their faces taut and flushed with rage. They lean forward, swaying on their feat, mouths curled in a sick sneer, a bland unimaginative anger, automatic. They’re practically foaming at the mouth, crowding behind Shimojima, waiting for leave to strike out, animals or slaves, sick renditions of a human likeness, somehow grotesque for all its realism.
Ken’s claws unsheathe with a sharp click at my side, snapping me back again, my hand drifting up to my watch, fingers wrapping listlessly around the catch that will spill out the wire. .
Shimojima’s mouth slides open, spewing out a garbled stream of questions, barking words that grind, blurred and mute past my ears. Aya tenses as he speaks, lips ghosting into a smirk, his hand sliding over to his sword, features narrowing, sharpening almost as the man rants on, a if Aya could cut the words through with his skull alone.
“Such cheap last words”
These moments, gripped in that chilling twist of his lips, I wonder how horrible it would be if that smile was real.
Shimojima blanches, his eyes narrowing at Aya, blanching slightly with frustration. Did he expect us to keel over? It is a weakness not allowed us.
Or Aya would say.
And so much worse if it wasn’t- that steely grin narrowing down, flared out and consumed again in the pitiless glare of his darkened eyes.
I wonder suddenly, if the confrontation is his alone, if the rest of us are simply here as an audience, stock still in the shadow of his anger, his retribution and this voyeurism is just incidental, fading in the fury of his hour.
I can’t read anything in that twist of lips, my gaze breaking as Shimojima begins to sputter.
“What? Attack them!”
Desperate. He leans back against the building as the animals leap out around him, red uniforms flaring out in a wind bought with speed, legs and arms flashing around us.
It’s almost grotesque, their faces contorted with a half understood rage that fades half formed as Aya slides his sword across them.
He seems to grin at death, welcoming it among them, his sword biting through the air with a terrible greeting, a fearful light rising through his skin. His eyes are drenched in shadow as he moves.
“Yohji- you’re slower than usual!”
I whip around, catching one by the neck as Ken shouts at me.
Bastard. As I wring the wire tighter, I wonder why move at all.
Through the bodies I glance around at the rest of Weiss, each taking his shot at oblivion in stride, a sort of relief is heavy in their movements as they skirt it skin intact and disappointed. You always lag as you move away from a target, or anyone vanquished, there is some innate desperate curious desire to flee, to escape entirely that is obstructed by winning.
Aya is only frustration and ease- denied the only relief he’d allow himself, fearing some shattering betrayal if he pauses.
Will it be betrayal once I’m gone? The thought slides over me, weighing me again with that decision, that inevitable death.
I lag as the bastards fly at me. I wonder if it would be better to end it here, letting my blows fall halfway, barely connecting as they whip around, catching my cheek in hard bruising hits, straining against my wire too lax to cut or bind tightly.
Somehow, none of them go for the neck. I wonder if Tsujii told them I was to be left alive.
I doubt it, a cool revulsion thrashing up inside me.
Aya shoots me a strange glare as he passes by me, forcing two of z-class away from me.
I won’t be denied my oblivion any longer Aya.
“You can’t change what you have become so easily.”
The sentence is heavy in the way he moves, vindicated in a thousand ways with each wave of his arm, affirmed in each strike of his sword or lunge of his body.
“You have to. Otherwise, you’ll only continue to suffer.”
I bite my lip as I whip the wire out at a girl with short hair and hard fists, her hands beating against me. Her features mold under my wire into Tsujii, and she struggles against my chest, kicking my legs out from under me.
When I manage to stand again, she’s gone, dodging Omi’s darts.
“Good. That’s enough.”
Nothing. They glide back behind him as our blows fall through the air, meeting nothing.
He rants on, delivering a stream of accusations. As if we weren’t heavy enough with those.
“Because of you Weiss, my reputation has fallen to the ground and my pride is covered in dirt, everything I’ve built up has been wrecked by you. Well- who should be the first to repent?”
His hands shake as he pulls a gun out from his jacket, a rabid smile contorting his features as he aims at each of us in turn, finally resting the sight on Aya.
“I suppose it has to be you.”
Aya lifts his sword as he cocks the gun.
A thrill of fear courses through me as the shot rings out, barreling towards Aya’s face.
He doesn’t move, his features tensing into an impregnable rage.
The bullet pauses.
Perversely, I believe for one moment that Aya made it drop by the very force of his glare, of his unmistakable and unbearable zeal for this.
“Aya-kun!”
Omi runs over to Aya’s side, staring with him at the bullet rolling on the ground.
Aya’s eyes narrow, and he whips around.
A sudden fog rolls out from the edge of the forest, wrapping around our legs as it parts and curls up like smoke to dissipate in the night.
Nagi of Schwarz steps out, bracing his vision.
Shimojima screams, firing the gun off at him, bullets crashing into a sonic force emanating off his skin and falling with a metallic clang to the ground.
Nagi’s threats roll low from his throat. I do not listen, merely watch as Z-class is bent into piles of broken bone at Shimojima’s urging, twisted heaps of flesh streaming blood over the ground.
It is the most terrifying thing in the world when he begins to laugh, waving the gun about in the air, screaming at the corpses sprawled out around him.
I close my eyes as he presses it to his forehead.
Even he deserves his privacy.
The shot sends a strange shock through me. My eyes fly open again as the body drops with a wet sound to the dirt, the eyes open with a milky sheen and the mouth jerked into a maniacal grin. You can almost hear him screaming through that gaping jaw, voices flooding up through that empty hulking body.
Will it be that much better?
I turn away, focusing again on Aya.
Let him find what peace he can. I wish all the rest in the world to him.
Aya stalks over to Nagi, raising his sword threateningly, his voice thick with spite.
“You.”
As he begins to bring it down, Omi runs over, grabbing Aya’s arm in the air.
“Wait! Aya-kun, Nagi-kun is our partner!”
“What?”
Aya sounds hoarse with shock, his features darkening at he turns his glare on Omi.
“He was keeping an eye on an organization in Germany for us. It’s a long story.”
“I see”
Aya sounds no less disgusted for understanding, lowering his sword, and turning back to face the school, approaching it with a silent challenge written in the rigid hold of his body, his knuckles white from gripping his sword.
It is, for me, no surprise to see Schwarz here. After all, what more could be expected of Omi now?
A bitter taste rises in my mouth recalling that betrayal. No worse than what I am waiting for.
Ken comes over and claps Omi on the back, shooting him a smile that is horribly familiar. As if we were just beginning.
Is it simply a silent refusal to acknowledge it tonight- or has it been forgotten?
Almost as if one could come back.
________________________________

He speaks without glancing back at me, the low rumble of his voice cutting through the night air thick with an iron stench of blood rolling from the fog with that half bitter, crisp reek of autumn and breaking leaves curling through it. A reminder of place, of time that is faintly obscene.
“Are you alright?”
A ritual question, how fitting in this night air, a light wind rustling the clothes on the corpses, rushing through the hacked off ends of his hair over his stiff color. It belies that promise again, tightening in my stomach in a sick coil of astonishment.
He would ask? He has to ask?
Swallowing, I bite back the bark of laughter creeping from my throat, a desperate anxious adrenaline fueled laugh that may as well be a sob.
“Yeah…”
Devoid of assurance.
He is silent, as if digesting the simple, empty response. My fingers tense, palms sweating in my gloves with a jittery and inexplicable need to suddenly divulge, to explain this impending separation.
No, not impending, not when it sits and slips about so heavy on my shoulders.
Strange, the thought shooting cold and slick up my spine, striking me hard in the chest as he responds, half whispering, his voice heavy and expectant and strangely, undeniably, wrong. Wrong that I should have to hear that soft inflection, that murmured determination and denial of what belief he has in anything.
“Let’s go.”
My hands clench, lungs spasming.
I will not betray blindly. I glance about furtively, finding nothing but empty unresponsive, and unrevealing backs turned away already to approach the doors of Koua with such somber conviction.
Somehow- I have a perverse need to know they will not be mistaken, that there will be no accident or hope or forgiveness about it.
Just a ruthless understanding. Easier, somehow.
Not all of us can leave- but we can’t all remain here.
They keep walking, my heart beating furiously. They can’t leave now! Not without-
My fingers twitch as I grasp the pin on my watch, springing it free and whipping out a thread of wire, settling it with a firm snap around Aya’s neck. His shoulders tense as he stops, dead in his tracks.
“What is the meaning of this?”
His voice is deadly, curious, angry, the emotion liquid through the meaningless words.
I pull my hands together, tightening the wire enough to cut through skin, watch with fascination as a dark stain begins to touch the tip of his white collar, blending with his hair to turn his whole head into a raw open yielding wound, glistening in the half light, preserving somehow my chance at oblivion.
“Don’t move! I can’t let you go! Listen to me!”
The words are raw from my lips, scraping along my throat as I spit them out, my hands tightening the wire again with an unmistakable compulsion, the blood looming large in my blurring vision, pressure throbbing against the back of my eyes.
My face is cool with salt, wind drifting along slowly pooling tears, liquid force of desperation.
The red glares across his shoulder, burning with all the fury of his eyes, everything else suddenly dissipating, left only with rage, as if to mark the separation.
“What’s gotten into you Yohji-kun!”
Omi’s voice squeaks suddenly by my shoulder, innocent, chirping up, driving into my skull admonishingly, as if I’d skipped a shift at the shop or taken to smoking in the shower. As if this was innocent.
Reparable.
“Aya!”
That damned kid screams back, half crying and biting at his lips. What does he know of this? Half stupored, I sneer at him, narrowing my eyes in a brief flash.
Nothing matters here but the man caught up before me, unable to move, paralyzed for one last moment so I can explain.
So I can somehow, despite what it is, do it right.
A perverse idea. I swallow hard, waiting for him to respond, anxious suddenly to end it, to shove it off, to drop it all here and run, run even from oblivion back into-
Where do you go when you’ve refused oblivion? So irreconcilable, this biting tension in my chest, this constriction of my throat, tightening of my palms on the wire, I can hear it, half lucid, as if through a dream, beginning to slice through the glove, strained too hard against the leather.
His gaze is smooth, unyielding over his shoulder.
“You understand that if we face one another, one of us will die.”
A whisper.
Stunned, I let my grip loosen, the wire clinging regardless in the wet cut of his opened neck.
A long sobbing breath breaks through me- a body catalyzed somehow by immaterial words, voice scattered around shapes into the air.
“Either you or me.”
It is almost tender the way he says it.
I incline my head, bowing to this strange and faintly horrible idea.
Would this somehow fulfill that promise?
Tensing my hands again, it’s terrifyingly attractive, a thin smile breaking across my lips.
It vanishes as Ken drops a cautious hand onto my shoulder.
“Hey now, man, you’re just tired. I mean, you were in Europe and as soon as you get back, its this.”
Its such a feeble explanation, a frail and useless and dishonest as the reassuring laughter Ken forces into his voice. And as persuasive.
Ken- why don’t you take it now, that’d be almost as natural, gut me with those claws of yours for treachery like all those times I threatened to you, after Akira, after Kase or any of the others you tried to save-
I’m not even trying to save anyone.
I don’t even shrug his hand away, leaning forward in anticipation, curling the wire around my hand for leverage.
“Wait! Are you serious?”
He backs away, retreating back to Omi and Weiss and everything else I had to rope him along for so many years- and here I am. Abandoning it.
Aya’s face is expectant.
“I’m going to be reborn! Throw away Weiss and pain and everything from my memory. I’m going to be a new being!”
It sounds ridiculous, screamed like that, an arbitrary and instinctual attempt to convince that rages through the heavy beating of my heart the panting breathlessness with which I speak, the tenseness of my aching arms, aching with a narrow harsh sort of eagerness.
“With Esset’s cursed ways?”
His voice is smooth, heavy with disdain. As if this is about Esset anymore.
I am gripped with a sudden and frenzied belief- to attack this, to persuade him to save him or myself or just die here.
Just to make him do something and end this burgeoning moment, this sick swelling of disease in me, as if my blood in congealing in my veins with waiting.
“Nothing can be worse than this.”
The look Aya sends me is chillingly certain, an inviolable force extended from those swirling violent eyes to wrap around me, a force biting through my veins, shocking my nerves, bending my fingers around the wire, narrowing my eyes.
A force I will never be from, an answer spit out among his tense angry words.
“You think its that easy to escape? Just by erasing your memory and forgetting it all? Are you happy with merely tricking yourself.”
I remember. I remember your voice calm and tremulous and thick with a nervous loss over the rasping static of the phone, talking about delusion.
I remember your eyes wrecked and stunted and turned in, almost as if they could look at themselves and were as you returned with dirt on your knees and smelling of incense and rain- reminded irrevocably that what this is will never loose its fingers from us. Your own irreconcilable answer.
It is met with a choked resistance, a clawing discontent making its way over my tongue in a stream of keening desperate feral words.
“Is that not allowed? Is tricking yourself not allowed?”
I blink away a tear, squinting to look past it to him, welling on the seam of my vision.
“Tell me, why do we have to suffer so much!”
Another hard face to answer that.
Unlike Michelle, he carries a serenity in his certainty, rather than her confused and estranged and half realized disgust.
“Tell me! I don’t even know what we’re fighting for anymore!”
Nothing. Nothing at all.
It echoes through his eyes- or maybe I’m imagining it, trying to use him as a mirror for the last moment.
Would that make it more peaceful? More natural, as if I’d kept my promise?
“I don’t want to fight anymore. I don’t want to kill, I don’t want to betray or be betrayed!”
It becomes true as I say it, the words working themselves into a fervor around me.
No matter what this is itself.
“I just don’t want to hurt anymore. I’m sick of it all.”
My voice breaks on the last word, trailing off into a jagged whisper that seems to drops against the ground and spit up against my face in shards.
“Yohji-kun!”
I ignore the cry. Let him pretend he is a child tonight, as every night before if it brings him peace.
“Is this what you wished for?”
The whisper is meant for Aya, seems to reach Aya alone, striking him in the face with a sort of numb shock.
“Is this what you wished to be?”
His mouth hangs half open, as if spilling our wordlessly his reaction invisibly, settling it into the air.
“Say something Aya!”
My lips crack as I yell out his name, my stomach churning as he lifts his sword, bring it high over his face and leaning back to strain at the wire- a sick thrill and shudder going through me thinking of the metal bite of wire at his nape.
Maniacal, I let a grim laugh slip between my lips with a sort of relief.
What a way to be absolved.
“So that is how it has to be.”
It is a concession. My skin seems to expand with it, draping hot and thick over my bones, bursting with this new leap towards oblivion, or hell, I don’t care.
I’m not sure I believe in either anymore, having been answered.
_____________________________________

It seems strangely inevitable and unreal all at once, and inherent to Yohji; inimitable in his tense posture, his raw angry empty words, the twist of his face and eyes that glow with a viral sheen, like pus.
“Why, do you expect me to keep my promise?”
His drawling sneer. Why can’t either of us forget that!
It’s a sickening sight, him leaning over the wire, face annealed with a desperate sweat that seems to me toxin, panting with a strange and horrible anticipation that seems all at once something inhuman and yet, intrinsically what we are. What humanity we have lingering among us at least.
The words thrum through my head like a mantra, a chant boring through my veins, propelling my nerves with an anxious pressure. His eyes gleam at me under low lids, half beckoning- daring me to move, to kill him. An invitation in a way, to give him that oblivion he is tense for. That liberation that he is giving himself to deliria for.
That estrangement from what he ever was that I hate him for, the words hissing uncontrolled from my lips, spat in his flushed face, muttered now under my breath.
“I hate you.”
Always an urgency on the second word, hurrying to get it said, spent, meant and over with.
The wire makes a faint clang as I cut through it, slicing it off my neck in one quick movement.
I can feel the rest of them watching, nervous, oblivious to everything we’re missing; that has been set into motion and we must stop- slice the head off the Hydra so it can grow another more venomous one.
“I’ll take care of this. Continue on with the mission.”
I hear their footsteps rushing away, crashing against the gravel of the pathway with a sort of relief. A heavily intimate feel settles around us, crackling through the still stagnant air with a tense electricity that shots through the both of us, snapping us upright, focused, steeled against and towards this impossible moment.
“I won’t let you get to Tsujii!”
His yell is weak, muffled almost, lacking the vitriol that fueled the other ones.
How much that oblivion must mean to him.
I narrow my eyes.
That betrayal.
“I’m going to be reborn!”
The words have no force, dropping against my chest, as if in one final weak attempt to convince me to-
What? Stand aside and let him go to her, to oblivion, to betrayal and all the disease?
To join him?
I push the thought aside. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
He lunges suddenly towards me, the wire striking out towards me face in a bright blur that I slap away with the flat of my blade, feeling half catatonic.
His face is flushed dark, contorted in rage, worry bleeding through his eyes, gleaming in the light.
No matter how sickening the sight, it is beautiful.
“Don’t you ever do that again!”
A different flash, interrupting a different catatonicism. Yohji’s face hot and angry and beautiful leaning deep against mine, shaking me, no matter that he was bleeding from a bullet wound.
My cheek feels raw from the slap still, my sword suddenly heavy, turning dark in front of me as I deflect his wire mechanically; as if still stained by that rooftop and that smoke, the rust of Takatori’s blood still fresh and smeared on my face, on my hands and stiff on my clothing.
“What’s the point, Aya, if you just die with him? What does all of it mean then?”
Later, quieter, his hand soft on my shoulder.
“What did you want from it, Aya?”
Questions I didn’t answer. A different sort of promise as I looked him in the eye, brushed his cheek with my finger.
And his smile.
Without thinking, I catch my blade along his shoulder, leaving a thin line and trail of blood.
He smirks, eyes darkening, something resolved within them, his voice coming quiet, purposeful.
“So is that your answer?”
He’s answered them himself, those questions.
I lunge forward, suddenly awake, steeped and alive in the thrill of adrenaline coursing through me.
“What did you want from it Aya?”
An end that didn’t come.
I aim the blade at his limbs, avoiding any vital places carefully, with a terribly trained eye.
What does it matter? My blows strengthen in force.
Who am I fighting here? The look in Yohji’s eye is strange, animal, pure unbound frenzy, blind, as I was to the endlessness of this, that the blankness that seems to be an end, a breaking point, is eternity. On and on and on. I deflect the wire, wincing as it cuts into my arm, grazing over the skin of my hand. He’s using it like a whip.
Weiss is an anomaly- always blind.
He pauses suddenly, his breath pounding hard through his parted lips.
I let him, studying his face- a face that suddenly, in this begrudging pause, belongs to no one. A shattering horrible image.
“Do you expect me to keep my promise?”
No. Not you. You’ve made me no promises with your angry shameful eyes and wry exhausted face, so sick of life, bearing it like a burden on your back. It wears you down even now, slowing your movements.
That promise is broken, in you and not of you, as if you’ve swallowed it with your miserable deliria and raging words. Proclamations of a nothingness you can’t bring on yourself. And why proclaim it! Where is it!
Without waiting for him to resume himself, I cut the blade at him, bringing it down fast over his back. Wincing, he jumps away, straightening up again and drawing a new sheaf of wire. All words dismantled.
“What did you want from it Aya?”
Freedom. If that’s anything to fight for, that we haven’t fought for and won and relinquished again in a word, in a movement, silently, without regard or remorse or even understanding.
He begins to strike faster, lunging at me with his fists, this body that is not Yohji. I strike back, hitting him with the hilt of the sword, as if fighting this Yohji is a revenge or recompense for that promise he made me.
Is this- this what you promised and in doing so made me swear? Did I help you to renounce yourself to this?
A mute fury rises through me, stretching its claws in the blows of my fist, the blade raining down cool and blinding as it catches the light, the choking wonder and boundlessness, and jittery feel of adrenaline.
It is all shattered as a sonic blast catches under our feet, ringing from the distance.
Instinctually, my head whips around, scanning the tree line.
Movement.
Crashers.
How serendipitous.
Turning back to Yohji, I hardly manage to dodge another loop of wire aimed for my throat.
There is a pause, our eyes locked together in a seething mass of color, as if this one moment could decide everything, save or damn the both of us, act as vengeance or insult for Aya and Asuka and Asami, all seemingly teeming around us, a font of ghosts to witness this, bled out form our eyes.
All of them suspended there, waiting for the last blow, which surely must come now, strike us now with shattering force.
A truth bared. His face crumples from rage, smoothing into a strange worry as the ground rumbles again, harder, nearer, the sound roaring through our ears, rattling our vision.
Compulsively, I reach out for him- to steady his arm, to strike him down. I am not sure. It does not matter as the ground begins to break and light swells around our eyes, between us, crushing our bodies, up, away, inside themselves.
Amidst the light, my vision fades, spinning to black with one last image of Yohji crumpling from his knees and thrown back in a haze of merciless smoke.
The truth bared and not enough to sustain us where we stood.
Black.
___________________________________

Coughing, I shove a pile of small rocks and dust off me, pulling myself to my feet.
My legs ache, my head screaming with what is likely a knot forming on my temple. I can feel bruises welling along my spine.
I’ll manage.
A wave of panic hits me as my memory presents itself.
“Yohji!”
Glancing around, I see nothing, pushing aside piles of dirt and brick to reveal only crushed furniture, broken glass, ripped pages of books scattered and burnt on the floor.
A sick feeling settles in my stomach.
His tense anxious face, his steeled eyes, gritting teeth, lunging body- grim, the understanding shows itself- I would have killed him given that one chance. Right then, denying whatever he was and is now.
Am I any better that his oblivion? At least that isn’t a condemnation.
My hand tightens regretfully, fitfully, around the hilt of my sword. Quickly I look it over for damage, screaming his name out again in a way that I’m sure is futile.
“Yohji! Yohji!”
Panicked, I search further, stumbling through rooms and counting the minutes in my head.
Fuck- if only I knew how long I was unconscious- I’d know how long until the last bomb.
The last one was only a warning.
Despite myself. I shudder thinking what the full blown explosion could do to Yohji sprawled out somewhere in this mess.
And if Tsujii finds him?
Gripped with a sudden dread I search faster, rifling my way through halls I’ve never seen before, labs and offices that must be deep under the school.
A movement pulls at my eye.
A shadow spills out into the hall, amorphous.
I rush towards it, not caring now that a moment ago he’d been slashing at me with all the urgency and terror of a target, all the viciousness of an animal or desperate enemy.
Asami’s broken body spurting blood, thrown hard on the floor by a laughing, smirking, inhuman hand and a blistering laugh.
I move faster, letting out a sigh of strange, contradictory relief when I pause before the door and see only one body standing there.
“Yohj-”
I stop, the name choked in my mouth, my lips curling up into a viral glare.
“Fujimiya-sensei, how kind of you to join us. The pleasure’s all mine.”
Tsujii smirks, her fingers trailing unconsciously up the white lab coat she’s ridiculously wearing, the lab around her suddenly some obscene and plastic setting. Perversely, I consider wrenching my sword through the walls and tearing the illusion down.
“Where’s Yohji!”
“I’m sorry, I haven’t an idea of what you mean.”
“Where is Yohji damn it! I know-”
The words die in my mouth. I don’t know anything.
“What? You know what I’m doing here? You know where we have him?”
She laughs, the same chilling sound she crowed out over Asami’s body.
“Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t know where he is.”
“What do you think you’re doing?”
My voice is tense with disbelief, shooting out suddenly with the empty question.
“Finishing the experiment.”
She cocks her head to one side, a mocking approximation of playfulness. One of Asami’s little idiosyncrasies.
“Z-class? Or Epitaph? Where is it?”
She laughs again, the sound more chilling with each intonation.
“You think I’d tell you? Ah, Fujimiya-sensei, you and your Weiss are even more innocent that I’d thought. “
I narrow my eyes, half wishing I’d looked at the disk I’d retrieved with Asami’s planner.
The thought of touching it is still sickening, absolutely and utterly abhorrent.
“No. Z-class is only a prototype. A little game, really, small fish compared to what I’ve really come up with. They make a nice security force though. It looked like you had fun with them.”
I grit my teeth, glaring at her, wordless, stomach twisting in a sick dread for Yohji.
Sick suddenly with the thought that she has had his lips, his hands along her skin, his touch and panting breath and immaculate face when he orgasms.
I wonder how he stomached her, my own turning with revulsion even from across a room.
“The goal of the original experiment was to create a humanoid computer that would contain all of Esset’s data. However, as I continued to run experiments I found I was able to activate a larger portion of the human brain, thirty percent more than what usually functions.”
It is never anything short of astonishing what amazing heights these ‘dark beasts’ reach, what they manage to achieve.
But is it not the end we judge or are sent to judge, but the means.
Would such breakthroughs be possible without the human sacrifice involved, the slaughter and abuse of minds and persons?
Is it, that now we have surpassed the need for human sacrifice to sustain us as we are, we need it now to push us further still?
“I can create something that is closer and closer to god.”
So we have a face to sacrifice to? I feel like laughing, or vomiting.
“So you’ve toyed with lives this way the entire time?”
It doesn’t matter to me. All these lives wasted one way or another.
Seething, under this mask of somewhat righteous anger- as if anyone had a right to it- I cast at her a thousand accusations. Build a cross around her with Asami’s face, and Yohji’s face lost somewhere, probably crushed under rubble- I choke suddenly, my eyes narrowing as breath fails me- for Aya’s two years squandered.
Shaking, I raise my sword, causing her grin to widen, baring teeth.
“You can throw away the past, and start anew, Aya”
She stretches my name out like a curse, warping it with a long inflection.
“Don’t you have any desire to live eternally?”
Live eternally?
I can only carry this weight for so long, only survive it until my bones break. And my bones are far less dense than eternity.
What redemption can she offer me, so empty, so struck barren and sickly innocent, so convinced in the meaning and inevitability of what she’s doing.
So easy to be convinced, what delusions am I counting around me?
“No.”
She smirks again, sounding amused.
“Don’t tell me you’re still upset over what happened to Asami-sensei?”
My eyes narrow, the single, searing promise to myself rising over my lips at her in a strange outpouring.
“No matter how terrible of a past one has, or how pathetic, or how sinful of a cross on is burdened with, I’ll live with it all.”
I close my eyes, not wanting to look at her smug, useless face. It seems false itself, too smooth, inflated somehow out of wax.
“If you try to rid yourself of your sins artificially, you’re as good as dead!”
It can’t be so simple. What mockery to think it could be, that suffering, that conflict, that these piercing nightmarish dreams and moments that blur together to create whatever has come of my being- whether it is a waste or a triumph or an endurance of some strange consequence or indictment- lifted away so easily. That what we are is so- negligible.
“And what are you waiting for so anxiously, Fujimiya?”
Death that is death. An end, that is not surreptitious betrayal and falsity, weak and puerile. And empty.
The answer rears its head as always, sickening and irrefutably trite and as disgusting as it is expected. Nothing.