FicWad

The floor is wet underneath me. Shaking, I draw my knees to my chest, letting the slick, jarring blackness lend itself closer, cut itself nearer to my skin and about my throbbing head. I tense, listening, waiting for a hint of his footsteps to wake me up again, the hiss of his blade on the air. Anything, at all to break this strange hollow silence of my eyes clenched shut, shocked with the thrum and rage of a blast that’s faded already. My skin itches with smoke.
Still shivering, I force my eyes open, almost gasping at the surprising effort and the chill that assaults the numb sockets.
There is nothing but gray, the smooth dark angles of walls rising around me, blank and empty, nothing to decorate them but the cracks edging up around the floor, the rubble spread across the small room. Chunks of brick and plaster block the door, one wall a jagged leering hole. Edges of plaster are stirred in a faint cold breeze seeping around me.
Grimacing at the chill, I pull myself to my knees with a grunt, realizing with a faint relief that the wetness wasn’t blood, but the remains of a shattered vase that glitters half crystalline in the moonlight forcing its way in. My chest gleams with welts of small cuts, pricks of glass tuck in the skin and a film of dampness. Hesitantly, I pressed my hand to my stomach, to my neck and forehead checking for bruises, or breaks.
My wire was piled on the floor, almost neatly, as if someone had bothered to coil it for me. Nerves jumping with a furious adrenaline, I retract it, watching it retreat into its cage with an anxious sneer.
Bastard.
I don’t yell out anything, my throat is too thick, too heavy and strange from the smoke of the explosion, tight with the interrupted fight with Aya. Uselessly, nervously, I glance around the room for him again, peer outside to see if he remained there, waiting for me with blade drawn and ready.
With me thrown out of the way, he’s no doubt been freed to go ahead and cover the mission.
Strangely, suddenly, I am gripped with an unwelcome familiarity. Rushing over to the gaping hole in the wall, I look again, not seeing the gravel outside the wide doors of the school, or the woods from which we emerged, but a dry barren stretch of dark asphalt, glittering as it stretches out into the highway. A sickening recognition hits me.
Tsujii.
Furtively I glance around, suddenly expecting her to materialize, confront me here, in this goddamned antechamber, this fucking abandoned doorway that shows itself to be magically in proximity to us all along.
The wind stirs outside, displacing a small pile of dust from the collapsed wall. It curls off in a white streak, a strange displacement of particles across the night, spackling the night. Stretching it somehow.
Far off, farther than I remembered, the twin lights of a car streak by, apparently oblivious to the explosion that has just occurred and is still ringing in my ears, to everything that is undoubtedly happening inside.
They vanish, flickering out into the distance. Nothing follows them.
With a strange bark of laughter, I tear my gaze back inside to look at the dull stark walls.
Waiting!
As if they knew, as if it fucking mattered that I’m standing here waiting for any one of them to-to.
To what? To come here and hand me that oblivion? To free me? To make it fucking easy at the last moment so I won’t have to fight or beg it out of either one of them?
Screaming, right up until the end, no matter how apathetic, or emptied, or sickened.
My fingers trail unconsciously up my arm, grasping around the flesh, my watch a heavy cold presence scraping skin.
When you gonna learn? I don’t even have to read it.
It’s not even about sin, not really. What’s the point in naming your actions as anything? Is it supposed to dictate some sort of reaction? Grant it a meaning and a fatalistic purpose, as if your soul didn’t have better things to do than keep a sheet of scores.
Kicking a pile of crumbled bricks out of the way, I push through the jammed and battered door into the hall. Pausing, taking in the thick smell of smoke and burning debris, I listen for anything. Unlike last time, there is no furtive stretch of conversation and footsteps behind doors, no lights snapping out.
Absolute silence, as if I’ve already been tumbled down.
Glancing back at that empty foyer, at the huge break in the wall-- the night wind nipping at my lips, biting my blood with its stirring adrenaline, churning and tearing wet trenches through me, raw and eager.
I could step through there. Now. Walk and find the car or hitchhike. Let them assume I’m crushed under some immovable rubble, untouchable, irreproachable in the gilding confines of death.
I fantasize for a moment, imagine the thrilling relief of stretching miles of road behind me. Imagine knowing that I’d never have to do this again, that these faces, these bodies, these ideals and innocents and so many words would no longer be my concern.
Its that lightening, reeling sensation of being totally loosed, unbound.
I step forward down the hall, my shoulders tight and heavy with guilt, preemptive and ancient, both crackling up through my bones, rioting through my blood with a strange disfiguring burn with each step forward, faces clashing silenced in my mind, muted by that grim knowledge of my refused break, my rejection of that easy instantaneous freedom- and the bondage that would follow. Whether hunted or not, discovered or not, condemned or not- simply stilling the flood of red over my hands would not remove the stains already there. I drag myself along, limbs tight and heavy.
I hope either of them sees me from behind. Ends it, this clusterfuck of burgeoning humanity, of loss and dreams, and agonizing outcries and repentances that come to nothing. Tears sting at my eyes, play havoc with my movement, making me lightheaded, as I give in to my clouding vision and pitch forward, catching myself with a sharp shock on my hands, the fall leaving me breathless. I let my arms give out, dropping with a sigh to the floor, my head half jammed in a doorway, eyes closing tight, instinctually in response to the glaring light streaming from within.
“You can throw away your past and start anew.”
Her voice streaks out with the light, jarring and terrible with a shrill biting edge.
Not these damned voices again! These damned bleaching tones and promises and hollow ringing in all of them!
No more! Shifting, I pull my arms out from under me, clasping my hands tight to my ears.
“No!”
The protest is loud enough to break through the muffling of my palms, an echo to my own refusal.
His voice, snarling and rasping around my head. Always! This insufferable match, this relentless dichotomy of irresolute forms! Preying off each other, building where the other left off. Gripping at me! As if I’m anything for them to stretch over, to war over- and in front of me!
Tsujii’s voice rolls out, white and stinging, like bleach, circling around my senses, screeching with all of hers lost, her broken and fragile way of being cobbled together on nebulous hells. My hand slips along the floor, slapping against the concrete- and all she can offer.
“Don’t tell me you’re still upset about what happened to Asami-sensei?”
The hand jerks back, stunned by the words. The hell?
She follows the statement with a small chuckle, propelling me forward, scrambling onto my feet and inching forward, my back pressed against the wall as the room opens up to me, horrifyingly familiar, all machines and dials. Strangely, it is worse emptied, worse without even the touch of human bodies to warm it.
I pause, struck suddenly at the response to her smug question, the low thick whisper that echoes through the room.
“No matter how pitiful of a past one has, or how pathetic, or how sinful a cross one is burdened with, I’ll live with it all.”
Ridiculously, his use of religious imagery strikes me, that odd half venomous fascination of his with crucifixion.
“If you try to artificially rid yourself of your sins, than you’re as good as dead!”
Dead. Isn’t that what I’ve been waiting for, expecting, all along? What’s so wrong with that?
I swallow hard against the sudden constriction of my throat.
Everything, everything is wrong with that. Leaving, abandoning, that doesn’t matter as much- it’s not what I’m leaving behind or what I’m losing or even what pain I’m inflicting. It’s the basic betrayal of yourself, everything thrown up and mocked and left to crash without my body to cushion it, to match the fall. And then it all fades away-
Dead.
“….Dead.”
The words whistles from my mouth, unconsciously exhaled to meet his voice.
It is sickeningly absolute, implacable and irrevocable. And strangely appealing, this pain that is also desire, this burgeoning awareness of my own latent decay and betraying body. Dead. Why not? I shudder, suddenly caught by a strange chill, my skin itching with it, spasming in unnerving twitches.
“That’s right. I am.”
It’s quiet, a soft husk of voice wavering, almost on the edge of a sob. A sort of admission.
I whip around, taking in the curve of her body against a table, her hair spilling out over her forehead and brushing her cheeks with soft short amber.
“Asuka!”
It is a greeting, the only kind appropriate to this. Raw and stunned and estranged all at once.
Her skin is just as translucent as before, her gaze just as penetrating, as warm and almost brutally reassuring, choking my throat with inexplicable tears- desperate because I can not respond to her, I can not have this, be this….thing, this being that her presence seems to demand.
“But not as dead as I could be, not as dead as I was.”
Her voice is grim, soft, almost inaudible as she fixes her eyes to mine. It seems as if it would be impossible to tear my stare away.
“God- I don’t think that you know Yohji, what it was to think you had died. Or worse, that you’d been resurrected and it was better, even though you knew nothing, felt nothing except a numbed vacancy of a feeling and a life that had been yours. Is that what you’ve been playing at?”
Nauseous, completely bereft of words, I don’t respond.
“Your agony- damn it Yohji, your agony is good, or if not good, its real. It’s alive Yohji.”
She switches to muttering, the words easier understood by reading her lips than listening.
“No matter how much misery it caused you, or how disgusting it or I was, I won’t apologize for what I did- what I compelled you to do. I had been as good as dead, convinced of nothing, waiting for nothing, not even living. Just acting- does that matter? Is that a good enough trick? You saved me Yohji.”
“Saved you?”
It seems impossible. That so much could be explained with so little, and most of all that she, that Asuka, should apologize to me. To me, for watching her die. For every moment lost in her name.
It seems wrong.
“Is it better I should have gone on like that? You’re so close to it now-”
I shrug, straining my ears to try and hear beyond her voice.
I hardly notice as she moves closer, pressing in front of my face, her eyes dark and swimming with fury. Her hand tries to grip my shoulder, sliding through awfully. I clench my eyes shut.
It is not enough to block the rage in her tight voice.
“Was I really right then Yohji? That you’re weak?”
“No!”
The word is torn from me strangely, confused, an unnamed force in me rising up to present itself, that innate resistance that had forced me to run from Tsujii that night, that had made me promise not to forget.
She smiles, pushing herself back from me.
“You said you didn’t want to forget me Yohji. Than don’t. But don’t linger here, don’t wait around for me, or try and remember what it was, try to recapture the exact feeling we shared, or the exact meaning it had. It doesn’t matter. You’ll die too soon if you don’t live, if you don’t feel it now- regardless of me.”
I don’t understand, my throat closes, my whole body shakes with a new sort of guilt, a warmer less defined feeling of abandon, of everything I’ve ignored for loss and phantasms. Everything I’m no doubt ignoring now, all slipping away from me as I press on away from them- strangling their presence inside me even as I mouth their names.
Has it been enough to mourn!
Her voice is soft again.
“This way Yohji, my memory won’t be strangled. I can stay alive like this, as long as you live. As long as you live, we’ll be able to meet again.”
Something flickers across her eyes, a strange flare of an unreadable emotion.
I do not question it, staring wide eyed as she fades away, her voices retreating and roughening into a mocking sneer.
“The heart? The heart is just a product of the mind. I can replace it however you like, using the program I created, with any information in the world.”
My heart throbs in my chest, beating so fast it threatens to rip through the skin entirely and present itself to me.
I wait, desperately, strangely, for his voice, as if that beat hinges on it.
“What a stupid man.”
She chuckles, the sound abhorrent, slick and disgusting, a splintering masklike substance defiling the room itself, pervading my senses in a burning antiseptic reek.
I leap out from behind the machines, gripped with a dazed, half realized resolve.
My wire whips out, cutting into her neck. As she whips around, she seems to be a strange mirror of Aya earlier, her eyes gleaming with a sickening glee.
I hear rather than see Aya’s arm go limp with shock, the katana scratching across the floor, his jaw slacken and his eyes go wide.
“Yohji!”
“Leave her to me.”
Half conscious of it, I smile at him. I think it serves more a reassurance for myself than him, standing there immobile, his eyes dark with something that almost looks like relief.
“I’m still alive. I’m not going to let Asuka die again.”
He looks confused, his mouth tightening into a strange grimace. Suddenly he snaps up, straightening his back, holding the sword tight in his fist, something beautiful and terrible and blinding- completely shattered and implacably whole. Complete in a way I can’t fathom- the end of everything. Aya seems to gleam in the stark light, an answering image to Asuka’s translucent skin and absolute voice.
“Yohji-”
I interrupt, my voice strangely raw, as if each word came at the price of my throat eaten out entirely.
“I’m going to live.”
I catch his eye in a hard stare, the room circling down around us to drain away in the weight of our eyes.
“I promise.”
My voice is strangely muffled, inaudible to my own ears.
“But I have to end this myself in order to move forward. You go ahead.”
I feel oddly free of doubt, almost lightheaded from the pressure suddenly released. He glows with my vision dazed and frenzied with this relief, this immediate rising into a suddenly empty air.
He nods.
“Yohji- don’t die.”
Repetition, that question again, heavy and tight with all the implicit expectation I’d always missed.
And an answer.
Even if my body is buried here- I can promise that.
I smile at him again, my mind stilling to nothing, a resolute and unabashed calm in the midst of this fury.
He darts past me, a swirls of white and steel glinting in the clinical light, and disappears.
I am strangely certain that he will be fine. I do not need a promise to assure that.
I shift, experimenting with this new lightness, this brilliant certainty that fits tight along the skin, a slippery surface down which Tsujii’s considering glare seems to slide off, her voice rebounding against the walls hollow, brittle, echoing.
“Are you going to give up your new being for the memories of that pitiful woman?”
She looks so pale, diseased as she speaks, the vacancy of her eyes screams at me more than her voice does.
I retract the wire, smirking at the swish of it through the air, the cutting brilliance of its thin form.
“Yeah. She’s such a strange woman too, dead, but alive with me.”
She rolls her eyes, barks out a malignant laugh.
“How pathetic- you make a good match for your Fujimiya-sensei.”
I wonder how this certainty will fade later as I grip the wire again, pull it tight between my fingers.
How I will be thrown adrift again.
It doesn’t matter at all as I grin at her, smile at the blood coursing through me will indefatigable fury, the warmth of my limbs, the searing heat of cuts scattered through my skin.
It doesn’t matter as she lunges forward, slipping through the wires to catch me in the stomach, forcing me breathless and heaving for air, my stomach screaming its injury.
I grin at her, whip the wire out to catch her arm with all the forceful belief of a child.
Something new.
Did I ask for any less? I feel so inviolable, vital, my sight stretching on behind her to approach a lustrous and inevitable perpetuity.
This is not the end.
I dodge her fist and laugh, the sound clean and clear.
Stretching on.
_______________________________________

I run, feet pounding inexorably against the ground with a crisp hard sound, a jagged pain making its way up each leg as I propel myself forward through the complex, taking in the distant sounds of yelling and bodies slapping to the ground, the reek of smoke as I make my way deeper through the halls, towards the center of the building.
My mind is gripped with anticipation, a wild adrenaline pushing its way through me with a feeling of almost eagerness, of excitement.
“I’m going to live.”
The words scorch through me, lifting my foot up again, tightening my grip on the hilt of my sword. My skin sings, tingling with a strange relentless hope as I run. Hope, of all things. It feels ridiculous, warping its way through me in a smile, an unfamiliar feeling of levity, of ease in movement that is not mechanical. As if the air opened itself up before me.
I try and shake the feeling off, running faster, as if I could drop it from me, brush it away like dust on my coat.
I don’t dare to question it now, heavily in its throes- a thrill of anxious joy spreading over me, quickening every step, every intake of breath with its foreign weight.
I rush even more on account of it, itching to reach the principal’s office, throwing my entire body forward with unanticipated impatience. To kill. I am suddenly eager to dig my blade through her, force her corpse to the ground- end all of this.
For what?
There is still no answer to that question.
To give rise to more of these instances? Right now, as ever, what will come after means nothing.
My breath quickens, panting from me as I turn into the right hallway, wondering at the open door, the light spilling out from the office.
My curiosity is interrupted by a gunshot.
The fevered excitement breaks within me, flooring me with a wracking realization pulled form me in an agonizing yell that eclipses everything else, the world narrowing down to a name.
“Sena!”
A wet smack echoes through the hall, pressing up to my ears and pressing me on again, the sword carving the air in front of me as if that could ensure an easier passage.
“Sena!”
Anguished, I throw myself down on the floor next to his crumpled body, landing hard on my knees, sword clattering from my hand.
There is a bald, stark sort of peace about his face, in the slackness of his jaw and the whites of his eyes that return me anguished stare.
It is always the most likely, the most obvious that escapes us as sacrosanct. Incorruptible because it is so near, so seemingly essential- as if without it there would be a gap torn through life itself, as if we would fall through without that to keep us in its grip.
More now than before, this seems like an end.
His skin blanches as he bleeds into the blood, the warm sticky mess of it leeching up into my pants, assaulting my nostrils with a heavy accusation. A sentencing really, a burgeoning finality.
Ended in that skin, in that innocent eye. I clench my eyes against the sight of his stiffening body- for no reason, the sight forces itself behind my eyes in vivid relief.
The end of Weiss, this white rigid helpless thing. It seems- so inescapable.
That it will not stop, but it is over.
The thought overtakes me, sickening, almost repulsively inevitable- we could just leave. Never make a final report or assurance of our survival and the two of us could….
We could gather our funds and leave the country. It would work, at least for awhile.
It is not as if our skills aren’t demanded everywhere.
The idea is thick on my tongue, on my lap with the weight of his corpse.
My escape- is it worth it for those hands? For that practiced smile and easy apology?
I sigh, my hands tightening around him.
What a difference. The cold skin, the limp gaping jaw. No comfort here, no remorse of satisfaction or- remnant even.
I glare up at the principal, narrowing my eyes at her in an automatic and unreasoned hatred, a spiteful condemnation- Why should you be allowed to kill him when I fought so hard, lost so much for her? Is it any different a sacrifice demanded?
Carefully I lower his body to the ground, pressing my hand over his eyes to slide the lids down, for all the rest that will grant him now.
Pain shoots through me as I grip my sword again. This pain that is also desire, and misery and corruption and all the festering madness of this impossible justice that seems so resigned to follow me.
Taking on his death- I glance down at Sena’s rigid form.
Almost as if I’m feeding off of it- what hasn’t been forced on me through death? Precipitated by it? Moved by it?
My life has been moved by spectres.
“Why did you shoot your son?”
The question breaks from me unexpected.
She pales at the question, turning almost as white as Sena on the floor.
“My….son?”
Her voice is thin, nervous, dazed and thick, slurred almost.
“T-Takeru?”
She stiffens, catatonic, looking as much a corpse standing as her son. Devastated, mouthing that unfamiliar name over and over again. Trying to grasp it with her lips.
I level my stare up to her from where I kneel, meeting eyes that I know don’t see me, don’t see anything, clouded over with tears and confusion. Whited out.
Calm washes through me, fury fading behind this stiff display, this shock.
How many have I killed blindly? Without question?
Her hands clutch and relax, propelled by the shallow intensity of her breathing.
“Please…kill me. I know that’s what you’ve come to do.”
It is not begging, her voice quiet and still, cold and bereft of anything but the demand. This plea is not a resignation, does not seem to be as she fixes me with her eyes, cleared slightly and swirling with a broken anguish.
My breath hitches as I look at her, glancing back down at the small body in front of me. He has stopped bleeding, red crusting up over his chest in a smooth scab, congealing thick for lack of heat to dry it quickly.
“Now! Kill me! What are you doing? Didn’t you come to kill me Weiss? So do it now!”
I hardly hear her screams.
“I will live.”
How? Sickened, I choke back the urge to laugh. Is this some serendipitous sort of sacrifice? Some balance of condemnation?
Sena could have made it out whole, he hadn’t met the fruitlessness of it all yet. He hadn’t attained everything and felt it a failure, felt the hollowness of revenge and salvaged memories, patched over pasts that aren’t redeemed in this disjointed way.
Like Takatori made no difference at my parents grave once it was erected- Yohji has no meaning here, before this grief, this new weight catching at my breath, lending a new edge to this strange firing eagerness.
“Kill me!”
I bite my lip. There is no balance in this. Just the madness of this endless entropy.
A new voice breaks into the room, rough and shallow and grating against my ears, grabbing my by the throat and forehead to jerk my face upwards.
“Kisaragi Fumie, I will not allow you to die.”
Fumie’s voice is frenzied, exasperated.
“Epitaph!”
Epitaph? I glance around, searching for another person, finding nothing but the glaring blue screen of the computer mounted in the wall behind her.
The voice screeches out again, blaring from speakers in the wall.
“Kisaragi Fumie. I order you to eliminate the intruder.”
Fumie jerks about with the words, gripped by some invisible compulsion, her face contorting in a strange shape of grief as she shudders.
“Throw away those useless emotions.”
I glare at the wall, damning the lifeless thing for Tsujii’s words regurgitated.
A pang of worry shoots through me, drowned as I grasp the meaning behind the voice, the flickering screen.
A fucking computer. The core of what we’ve been trying to destroy.
Fumie grips her hands to her head suddenly, groaning.
“Please. Stop this.”
She seems to address the plea at me.
“What’s wrong?”
Her eyes focus on me, clouded over again.
“My conscience has been controlled by Epitaph. Even so- even so I killed my family. My son….I wasn’t strong enough to...and with my own hands. If this continues Epitaph will-”
“Fumie. Eliminate the intruder.”
She gasps, half bent over, clutching her arms around her stomach as if in pain.
“Kill me!”
Her scream drowns out my thoughts, consigning them to the mechanical words and her desperate beseeching demand.
Shaking on her legs, she lifts the gun again, still smoking from the last shot. A wild, tortured look on her face, a terrible injured grimace, she fires, squeezing off a series of bullets around me, gasping in pain each time her finger spasmed around the trigger.
Flinching, I dodged them, wincing at the hot pain of one cutting through my shoulder with a wet sickening sound and the rip of cloth.
There is a tightness about her face, a rage, and misery- pitching forward, I drive the blade through her stomach, thrusting it in harder as she groans.
My voice is rough, shaking as I speak.
“Rest in peace. I’ll carry your cross for you.”
A strange serene smile passes over her face, relief showing through the strange cloud of her eyes as she beings to slump forward.
“Thank you.”
Brushing past me, she struggles past, limping, towards Sena. Blood slips down behind her, dripping from the sword to match the leaking of her wound.
I wonder who will take my cross from me.
She falls to the floor, dropping face first across Sena’s corpse, protection come too late.
I watch as she convulses a while longer, stiffening suddenly with a low moan and catch of breath before going still.
The scent of blood permeates the room in a putrid haze, forcing on me the horrifying realization- I will have to beg for it as well.
Not even out loud, not even with prostration- but I will have to lose everything for that.
Closing my eyes, I stand over them, keeping a blind, silent vigil over the broken forms, the blood itching on my hands, heavy on the sword. My chest itching with its mark.
And the smell swirling through it all, metallic and overwhelming. Further conviction of that resignation, that supplication demanded of me.
Not tonight.
The crackling of the computerized voice stills, settling into the arid air of the room and the dense feeling of aftermath, of everything ripped open to be examined, and then buried away.
_______________________________

The floor cracks up under my chin with a jarring shock of pain, my breath coming in harsh coughs as I scramble to look back up at her, standing unbruised and smirking over me, her feet planted to either side of my head.
“You only have now to change your mind.”
I cough, shaking with the pain of my battered joints and strained cuts, the blood seeping down my chest to smear the cross painted there.
Unable to speak, I shake my head at her. She laughs, a repulsive sound, slick and disgusting. It turns my stomach.
“Fine. Than die here.”
Turning away, smug and sickening, she kicks me in the chest, causing me to hack and splutter, gasping for breath.
Walking away, her boot is smeared red, tracking along the floor.
Strangely, on the ground, Michelle presents herself in my mind again. Smiling and calm- and then wrapped in smoke, glaring and desperate and maniacal.
What I was so close to resigning myself to.
God, Shell.
I try to call up her face, desperately, inexplicably, try to recall every detail I can of her, every curve of skin, every shadow on her face, every smile differing by a degree of warmth, or by angles, or by some insensible thing. Too natural, to whole to be deciphered.
Finally, the picture forms itself, flickering and uncertain. Nothing so whole as Asuka, a thin fragile image fading between spasms of pain.
Tsujii’s heels click across the floor as she switches something open with a gust of pressurized air, making the room colder.
Michelle’s smile wanes in the cold, fading away entirely as Tsujii’s voice grows louder, stranger, more delirious.
Farewell again. Another face to wait for.
“-the world is ours!”
Tsujii’s voice gushes with excitement, with a tremulous anticipation as she steps aside. Behind her is a fragile looking teenage boy bound in white cloth, his skin pale and luminescent.
He is still, stoic, immovable as she rants at him, calling him the heir to the world, the god of the new order. A delirious spiel, horribly reminiscent of the Elders, of Schwarz, of any of the shadowy forms we’ve been pitted against for little reason other than this, this aspiration.
It is revolting, his dead glazed look and dull eyes.
“And finally- to replace Epitaph!”
Turning, she seems to guide the child by sheer force of her proclamation.
My stomach turning, I pull myself to my feet, ignoring the wave of pain shooting up my legs, throbbing in my chest.
“Wait!”
She turns around, a slow, syrupy smirk spreading her face.
“Do you really want to die that badly?”
It would not be betrayal even if she were to kill me now.
I stretch the wire, unthinking, thick in instinct, breathing an urgent need to feel my life in motion, to feel my continued breath and vitality in movement.
“I told you. I’m going to live.”
Alive in the swing of my arm I toss the wire out at her, stunned as it pauses midair.
“Break.”
His voice is low, reverberating into my arm with a sickening crunch as the bones crack apart. Stunned, I stare at him, watching his brow furrow in amusement as he speaks again.
“Fly.”
I black out as my body is hurled across the room, landing in a heap on the ground, a twitching bleeding mess of skin and fractured bone, wheezing as they leave, Tsujii’s receding laughter the only evidence of their withdrawal.
The sound shoots high and long into my temples, spiraling me into blackness.
_____________________________

The silence is broken by the crackling of the screen, Epitaph evidently lost for a command, given no one to receive it.
I glare at it, jumping slightly when Ken and Omi barge into the room, weapons flying.
“Aya-kun!”
Omi pauses, glancing from the computer to the pair of bodies on the floor.
“Oh. Aya-kun.”
A miserable look wells up in his face, of guilt and of a strange inflexible remorse.
“Be careful.”
He tears himself away from the corpses, wondering strangely at Sena, his step lagging as he turns back towards us. Ken is wide eyed and silent, almost resigned, his entire body tense seeing it.
“His mother.”
It is a whisper and without question, his voice tight and quiet, wavering with an unrealizable rage.
Silently, the two of them stand above the corpses, uncomprehending and insensible, grief hanging from their eyes, streaming from them in waves of discomforting sympathy- a sick sort of pity from Omi, a jarring envy from Ken, obvious in the deep furrows on his brow, the clattering shake of the bugnuks and his wince when they hit his hands, the backs of the metal thick reminders of our setting.
“Do you think-”
“Quiet Omi.”
Ken’s voice is sharp, choked with a strange congested misery, a vehement sorrow clear in the way his hands hang limp at his sides, the insensible glare he shoots at Omi.
I close my eyes, unwilling to let these pull at me any longer, or at least for this moment to interrupt the strain of those bodies.
So nameless, now that they can no longer claim theirs.
The moment is broken by a grating screech, a dry empty intonation that infects use with a feverish rage, an exhaustive anticipation.
“Warning. You are not permitted to be here.”
Ken bares his claws at the thing, suddenly incredulous.
“A computer.”
“That’s Epitaph.”
He shoots a venomous stare at me, his eyes swimming with accusation. As if it was worth this? As if a hunk of technology was worth that body there on the floor rotting in front of us? Was worth everything he saw and wondered without anyone to answer him?
I look away, unable to think under the weight of that glare.
What answers could I have offered him?
It doesn’t matter, not with this flickering screen before us and bodies behind, bathed in the artificial light.
Omi is tense, silent, paused before the bodies as if he could offer them anything.
No one is surprised when Tsujii enters, laughing so mechanically she could have been mistaken for Epitaph herself.
“So that’s how it was! Fumie was nothing more than a fake human computer- or no, really just a component of the system.”
Her presence shoots a cold panic through me, a break of inexplicable fear.
“What did you do to Yohji!”
My voice betrays too much, wavering, choking on words with a frustrated and miserable rage. She smirks. It is the most horrible sight in the world.
“He was useless, didn’t even serve as a warm-up for this child here.”
She spits the words out with a strange glee. I flinch at each of them.
You bastard! Are promises anything to you!
I catch myself before I fall to my knees, clenching my fingers about my sword for support, glaring at this cruel shell, this perverse and terrible woman.
God- why did you have to die now? Be so weak now? Before- before it would have been right. Couldn’t you have made it sooner, while it would have been something for you?
Choking, drowning under his absence, the envy of his departure, I stiffen, raising the blade to Tsujii’s face.
If I have to join you- it will be through retribution, cutting her open where you wanted her so badly.
And if I have to beg! Beg for this, from this damned insatiable, interminable body? From this vile corruption of a woman in front of me? From that computer? How about the whole host, dead and alive, a parade of approvals to be met, accusations to accept, knees to grovel before! Beg!
I repress a long shudder, stiffening against it.
Begging. Was it for any less that you promised me?
I bite my lips, tense with pressure building behind my eyes, insoluble tears and tensions, thankfully, sickeningly, unwelcome, interrupted by that grating voice.
“Tsujii Mayumi. Summarily eliminate the intruders.”
I am shocked away from any of it, pitched forward in the abrasive current of her smug voice.
“Of course. In order to input your knowledge into this child’s brain, I have to.”
I fade out again, letting the computer’s indignation slip past me and Tsujii’s maniacal certainties, her inane prophecies and declarations.
These are nothing, nothing at all to die for.
“I will live.”
Choking behind these words- is there any more you could demand? That I could be left to give you?
I glare at Tsujii. She will die because I have to live. Stripped again, without choice, to support everything, to bear so many lives I can’t even remember-
I’m begging! Does it mean nothing!
It means nothing- this retribution. I can already feel its hollow distaste as I imagine running my blade through her.
“Be gone.”
A gust of wind grabs us, tossing our limbs around to the timbre of that mock-Todo’s voice, that damned experiment, Tsujii’s ‘god’.
Sprawling on the floor, I watch, vaguely stunned, my head slammed against the wall, as Omi shoots an arrow at him- only to cry out as it turns back, driving into his shoulder instead.
Tsujii laughs, her dark, half sinister, ridiculous laugh.
“The time is ripe and the time of the gods is near. Throw away all previous faiths and hear his sermon. Be glad! You are all listening to the words of a child destined to become a god.”
And if you have no faith but the hope of your own death?
Sickened, I imagine that laugh over Yohji’s corpse and use the rage stoked by the image to pull myself to my feet, raising my sword to her again.
“I have the ability to create an infinite number of these children! Don’t you see, the world put together by these perfect beings, that I can create, is inevitable! It is what we have been evolving towards!”
Ken sneers from beside me, flexing his claws.
“What is this bullshit- a sermon?”
Tsujii’s face flushes with the force of her spewing, words cluttering the air around us, seemingly drawing it in tighter, hotter, clammier.
Omi groans, still on the floor, brushing off my concern with a thin look.
Tsujii steps up to us, positioning herself directly in front of my sword, daring me with blankly amused eyes.
“Move. No one can stand in the way of this child.”
Steeling myself against every thought, every movement or feeling but the desire to watch her die, to feel the give of her organs as I slit her open, I mutter at her.
“No matter what, we will finish what we came for.”
She smirks, stepping towards the computer. Ken and Omi are tense behind me, their weapons raised. A dart flies over my head, aimed at Tsujii.
It whistles and crashes to the ground as the building shakes, echoing with the crumbling glare of another bomb.
Everything goes white around us, shattering through my skin as my blade is ripped from me and I’m hurled toward the wall- my vision splitting off into nebulous color.
__________________________________

Fumbling along the broken floor, I find the edge of the blade, pulling it towards me wincing as it digs into my flesh.
Glancing around, I can see Ken and Omi collecting their senses, pulling their weapons to them.
Sena’s corpse seems to have disappeared.
I stare at the center of the floor where he had lain, catatonic with his sudden lack, this shock of it.
Ken’s voice jars me out of it, loud and nauseating as I try to pull myself up, struggling against bruised legs, hands bloodied and slick against the ground.
“The voice of god? If he can’t speak, he’s no different than any other human being!
Aya!”
I jerk around, flinching slightly at the acute pain in my neck that flares red before my vision.
“Run this bastard through with your katana while I hold him down!”
This expiates nothing.
I yank myself up from the ground, gasping, made heavy with clothes soaked through with sticky blood, hands almost unrecognizable underneath it as I grasp precariously at the hilt. Staring at the child god’s hollow eyes, his tense angry stance against Ken’s panting chest, I am gripped with the irresolute horror that I will survive this too, have to carry this and him as well, merge their blood to mine- that irascible poison. Swinging the blade out in front of me, I lean forward heavily, dragging my legs along, it seems, by the impetus of the blade itself.
I feel none of it, none of the blood that leaks down my face, aches in bruises along my body. I arc the sword over my head, yelling as I bring it down, plunging it hard through the god’s stomach, taking in his sickening howl and the crunch of bone snapping as the blade slams against bone.
Twisting it, I ignore Ken’s yell, trying to push us both away as the blade cuts through him as well.
“I know. I mean, you’re strong.”
The words fly back in the tattered flesh, the sickening squelch as I shift the blade, cutting through every vital I can imagine with a venomous fury and a vengeance that earns nothing.
Tsujii runs up behind up, her clicking footsteps amplified by the ring in my ears.
The child screams, throwing her to the ground, his eyes darting back to focus on me with a thick clumsy hatred.
“You! I won’t forgive you!”
I am forced to the ground by his inchoate scream, knees shaking under the weight of the blade as I yank it out, letting it hand from my lifted arm.
An Atlas without relief.
The child screams again, clutching at his head, casting off his power around him in gashes of searing white and yellow.
“Die! Die! All of you die!”
It dances around him, consuming his form in front of me with a blistering heat, the piercing shriek as he sets himself on fire, searing himself to a small pile of dust clinging to the blood on my katana.
I slump forward, body shaking with the force of his shriek. Looking up, I can see Ken’s mouth moving, watch as Tsujii begins to laugh again- all ringing sounds in my ears, indecipherable, swirling over my head in a nauseous colorful tumble of faces.
I clutch my arms around me, using the sword as support. God I envy all of them. My skin is hot with a film of drying blood, feverish and terrible.
I want to suffocate under it, die here in the rubble and the waste and let it end.
Please! Is that begging enough!
I’m sick of supplication.
The building shudders again under my legs, jarring my wounds.
Tsujii whips around suddenly, bolting out the door.
Thoughtlessly, I rise up, struck out of my deafness by Ken’s hand heavy on my shoulder.
“Aya, hurry!”
He helps to wrench me off the ground, shoving me forward with a grim smile.
“Go, Aya.”
The sword is almost abominably light as I cross out of the door into the wreckage of the hallway, her steps clacking ahead of me.
Relentless, I push ahead, ignoring the numbness of my limbs, the inexorable weight of my skull. There is no choice but this, to push this on to its end.
There is nothing more terrifying than the thought that it might not- that I might not. Immortality is terrible.
Her back weaves down the hall, a spot of white against the thick dust.
As she smirks, sealing herself in an elevator I scream, beating my fists against the sliding doors, trying to wrench them open, succeeding only in splitting apart the skin of my fingertips.
Head reeling with lack of blood and height of rage, I throw myself down the stairs, sparing a quick thought for Omi and Ken, disabling Epitaph.
I envy them, my throat catching with it. Somehow, despite themselves and everything they would claim or confess- they are still innocent. They believe in an end to this, an ease to this, that we’ll come out tomorrow and alive and ready to begin all over again.
I’m tired. I cut through a jammed door, snarling at the hinges.
It is not a crime to lose your innocence, it just means you see too clearly, too hard.
Irrevocable, and difficult.
I cough in the flood of ash that assaults my nostrils as I shove my way inside, running towards where her lab should be, where that elevator should take her.
I will not begin again. A promise to myself if anything.
So much for begging.
Hacking, shaking with the effort not to collapse, I shove my way through what looks to be the door to her lab, finding myself perched on a narrow metal balcony.
I pause, silent, stunned as the fatigue drains from me.
All thoughts of begging dissipating.
_____________________________________

My breath comes heavy, thick with dust lined up my throat. The room sputters with electrical discharge, spitting wires and broken panels strewn across the floor, leaking colored chemicals and spumes of thick white smoke.
Nothing emerges from the electrical haze, the floor cracked open and blistering under my chest, the air scorching as it reaches my lungs, sending spasms through my sore body, pain exploding through cuts spread across my stomach, bruises welling tight and hard on my legs, the wet tang of blood as it slips down my face, dripping across my mouth.
I twitch with each inhalation, arms scrambling over the broken floor, searching for nothing, feeling their way along the ruptures and jagged concrete, the bits of shrapnel that dig their way into my palms.
My fingers close around something cool, a thin angular shape. I pull it close, the clear plastic light of the cover glinting, baring the astonishingly pristine circle within.
Fumbling with the case, I manage to pry it open, despite some melting around its edges, and lift the disc out, marveling at the silvery unscratched sheen of it, its unmarred brilliance.
My lips pull up into a creasing smile, heavy with anticipation, a careless intent rising tremulous from the core of me, out of all my wounds and scrapes, out of my ringing head and sore body with a sort of triumph. Panting, I grasp the disc carefully, holding it through the hole in the center with a perverse caution, as if I should be afraid to break it at all. That one hand lifted up, clear of the debris, I slide my knees towards my chest, pushing my body up with a free hand, my body progressively clearing the dust and mounted refuse of broken walls, ruptured ceilings. Trembling, imbalanced, I waver to my feet, gasping for air, my body shuddering with the effort and a cold tight sheen of sweat forming in my joints, under the suffocating leather of my coat in this hot stagnant air.
Holding the disc up to the still overly bright light, I glance at the mirror like surface, taking in my reflection.
Dusty face tracked with blood, a torn lip, a scrape above the eyes, which are bloodshot and ringed with bruises. The whole effect is broken by a wide grin, a serenity hinted at in the gaze. Staring at myself, I am taken over by that glance of someone completely foreign, setting me on edge.
I am awake.
I glance down at my body, wondering at its relatively undamaged state, this- birth almost that it has pulled itself up through.
The word, unbidden, circles my mind with an uneasy expectation, a hallowed sort of weight and riling urge to move from here.
I will let its meaning come later, pressing myself back against the wall, making sure my body is hidden behind a set of overturned machines and daises.