Categories > Anime/Manga > Yami no Matsuei > Absit Omen
Originally posted as a one-shot side story, Absit Omen is now an edited standalone, as well as a backstory to another piece of YnM fanfiction I'm writing, Against the Wind. However, after all the changes I've made it is no longer necessary to read one to understand the other. Both stories, however, share the prologue - I've made the decision to include it in this story as well in order to avoid confusing the reader.
That said, you would probably be best off treating this story as an AU. The concept draws heavily on Chapter 58 of Yami no Matsuei, published in Hana to Yume, issue #2 2001. It is, however, vague enough to leave most things with no explanation whatsoever, and so I've taken liberties with it to create this story. The characters besides Watari you're going to meet here are only partly original - they are based on the nameless people featured in Watari's flashbacks in the manga.
I think it's quite needless to repeat that this isn't canon. It's my take on Watari, and this is the story I came up with while developing the plot for Against the Wind. Add the usual to the disclaimer: Yami no Matsuei is not mine; if it were mine, I wouldn't be writing fanfiction.
-
Absit Omen
Chapter One
by Rhea Logan
-
I was born. I lived. I died. It was that simple.
Ambition must have been my middle name; inherent or not, it was always there. And so, in the flash that is your life you're supposed to see upon your death I saw not what I had done, but what I hadn't.
Frustration was alien to me, back then. I had the curiosity of a child and the patience of a saint, at least where work was concerned. That was what drove me straight to the fire with no fear of getting burned.
I always knew that when it was my time to go, it would be spectacular. And so, when I did get burned, it had to be all the way down to ash.
At the age of twenty-four, my sentiments on dying were nothing short of fury. I wasn't ready to let go and, if I had anything to say about it, it wouldn't end like that. By the time I had exchanged the first greetings with Enma DaiOh, I had a perfect plan. I would use this time, how much of it he was willing to grant me, to do all I would have done, had that lab not exploded and taken me with it.
The offer was superb; astounding, even. Unlimited equipment, life as long as I fancied, in exchange for committing myself to a project that, even in its early stages, had already tickled my sense of feat.
It was that simple.
Soon enough, I was caught up in what had to be the work of my life - afterlife - whichever. The project was enormous, with me as its head; in both the figurative and the literal sense. The sheer amount of power that came with it was overwhelming. Not the administrative power, either; when I first merged with Mother, and I saw myself do the things I could have only dreamed of doing while I lived, I became a whole league of my own. Far ahead of everything I'd ever thought was possible.
My body and my mind - a shrine in its own right to the scientific glory of success.
The inherently restraining calls upon the ethics of the Project were a calculated risk. While my mind had powered Mother, and I had used that vast capacity myself to experiment at will, those who dared raise questions outside of the spectrum of interest vanished, never to return. To me, it didn't matter. For all I knew, they had moved on to work elsewhere and it never crossed my mind that you could be more dead than you already were.
It's ironic that even after death - or especially then - it is invariably an intrinsic human trait to be blind, once the right buttons are pushed. And I still saw myself as human, if one of a somewhat altered sort.
In the end, there were three of us left; the masterminds behind the Mother. Hinote Katai - a quick, brilliant mind and my second-in-command in one highly experienced and dedicated person. Tategami Yukiko, or my partner in crime as called her in jest, whose knowledge and connection to Mother took the Project to a level I would not have achieved on my own. Finally, myself; Watari Yutaka, the Chief Researcher of The Five Generals.
As the Project progressed, we had grown close enough to almost read each other's minds. We played deep, Yukiko and I, each time going a step further as we synchronized with the system that was no longer merely something we worked on. It was life at its best. It defined us, until I could tell no difference between being in and out, except that being out left me regretful of the wasted time.
When the request of the ultimate synch came in, there was no doubt it had to be where we had been heading all along. To me, it was nothing short of the final step - I was about to go where no human had gone before me. She had hesitated; I hadn't. It would be like always; only deeper, stronger, more profound and so much more rewarding. We would reach our final goal, I told her, our lives would be complete. It was brilliant. It was that simple.
Or so it seemed, until the raw sensation of my body burning in places I didn't know existed woke me up from slumber. At least I had returned, they told me; Tategami had no such luck. The ambition that drove us had me end up exploited to the fullest; now bound in the lab that used to be my own, once - for reasons I hadn't understood until a lot later, when the pieces of the puzzle started falling into place. That was a lesson I learned the hard way: Mothers might be sweet on their children, but the rest of the family can go bad while you're not looking.
That day was marked with a realization that dawned upon me like a bucket of cold water. I should have seen this coming.
It was never that simple.
--
1982
"Look at that. He's back."
"Impossible."
Whispery voices filled his mind. Heavy shoes clicked against the hard floor, no doubt approaching, though the sounds were muffled, as if coming from behind a thick veil of glass.
"He is. Pay up."
Harsh, slightly choked laughter. Where have I heard this before?
"No surprise there." Another voice, older, equally familiar. "Mother said he's out there somewhere."
A snort. "Took him long enough."
Mother. Mother... the Project. The Five Generals. They were supposed to--
"Take that thing out."
A pull, and then another. A faint sensation on the edge of perception - at first merely tingling, then burning that rose and grew as it reached his consciousness and settled in. A wave of sickly heat wrapped him 'round and 'round; involuntary contractions stirred his muscles into a trembling rhythm.
"All of it? Are you sure? He's going to--"
"Do it."
More pulling, and a sequence of vicious snapping sounds crushed his still dull senses. From one second to another his mind couldn't help but acknowledge the presence of pain, cold shivers running across the burning flesh, the rapid shifts of perception and ever-increasing impulses assaulting him from all directions.
"You're not going to make it easy on him, are you?"
Another snort. "He can take it."
Metal instruments clicked somewhere to his left. A cacophony of beeping sounds tore into his mind. He tried to swallow to tame the nausea but found that he couldn't; responding instinctively, his body shuddered in violent convulsions. Someone caught him; cold, brutal hands. He fell forward, boneless, gasping for breath. He tried to open his eyes, but his body followed rules of its own, disobeying him completely.
"Put him down somewhere. I'm going to need this terminal."
The same hands pulled him up. "Hook him up to the morphine IV?"
"No. I want to monitor his progress."
The arms holding him stiffened. "That's--"
"Do it." The answering voice was a cool command.
His body arched on its own as he felt hard, cold surface beneath him. He couldn't keep from shaking; the ever-growing searing pain clouded his mind. Soon the sounds around him muffled once more as he gave in, wishing only to succumb to darkness, but something kept him on the verge of consciousness. The walls of the black void that promised relief wouldn't give.
"Once he's out of the haze, he's going to kill you for this."
A low chuckle reached him from afar. "Highly doubt it. He won't remember much."
-
The world Watari returned to was a blur of pain, altering waves of searing fire and piercing cold, and a harsh smell of antiseptics. No matter how much he wanted to let himself go and drift away, at most times sleep was just out of his reach. That welcome escape from the sheer torture of breathing was not his to have. So he would lay still for hours, for days, not so much as opening his eyes, not even when the medical staff came to tend to him.
Days shifted into nights, then into days again, but he couldn't tell the time. He couldn't care less. The lab had no windows; located deep underground, in the lowest levels of the JuuOhCho, it lived at its own pace all unlike the rhythm of the rest of the netherworld.
The first sensation he could recall was a faint flicker of light just behind his heavy eyelids, and a distant sound, just barely brushing at the edge of his consciousness. Heavily sedated and blissfully numb, he now barely remembered the first minutes back in the waking world. Next had come pain; a burning that spread across and through him, inside and out, deep down to the core.
Had someone told him, back then, that he would miss the fire that had burned him alive, Watari would have laughed.
Yet 'cold' must have been the first word he uttered, barely audible as it passed through his chapped lips, straining past the long-unused vocal chords that barely complied as he tried to speak. For days and days he tried, in vain, to keep his body from shaking. In the moments of full consciousness, rare as they were at the time, he had begun to work his way through the fog that veiled his mind and find the answers to every 'how' and 'why'.
It had been a puzzle that remained unsolved until a few weeks had passed and Hinote, his second-in-command last time he checked, finally decided to pay his chief a visit. For the first time, that day, he offered something vaguely resembling an explanation. He said something about changes, modifications, and Watari having to 'get used to it'. Something about 'no other choice' and how it was now 'too late'. For what, he wondered, but then he would slip back into the semi-conscious state and nothing outside of his private chilly world mattered.
People had come and gone. Strangers, most of them. They never said much of anything, and those who did, were vague enough to have given him nothing he hadn't already known. What they did not say, Watari slowly pieced together on his own. As the days rolled past and his awareness and focus served him better again, the unease that had been always there had begun to grow all over again. As did his fear and, with it, the burning, scorching rage.
At least that kept him warm, he told himself. Warmer, anyway. So he held to it, and he held tight. Inscrutable and oblivious to virtually everything on the outside, Watari harbored that fire and carefully tended to it, night by night, day by day. With each new information read between the lines. With every scrap of sentences overheard when the assistants thought he was asleep. With every night - or maybe day, he still couldn't tell - when he lay awake, shivering with cold, trying hard to pay it no heed. Trying to push past it, to bury what was left of himself within.
His memories from these months when he had been trapped inside Mother were eerily strange. On some subconscious level he knew he must have been partly aware of his surroundings at all times. The mainframe had used him as a living, breathing set of sensors through which it had gathered information, among other things. Yet he had no recollection of anything, save an acute certainty that those memories had to be there somewhere, locked away, stored in some dark place in his mind where he couldn't reach. Yet, anyway.
Only his mind was no longer just his own, nor was it anything like before. He had been told it would never be the same again. He would never be the same.
For them, it had been just words. On his part, Watari often found himself wondering if they knew how that felt.
He knew what was expected of him. He was supposed to understand that in the name of science, of the Project he had willingly committed himself to, no sacrifice was too great. He was supposed to accept that he had signed his life away and so nothing that had been done to him was against the rules. He was supposed to agree that they had the right to decide for him, to use him as they had. And so he liked to blame them. He scorned them for it all often in his bitter thoughts. But somehow, each time that angry, sour 'you' before the accusation had turned into 'I'.
It would have been a lie to say his body had accepted the challenge with ease. On the contrary, it had taken long before he'd stopped involuntarily rejecting the necessary adjustments made to accommodate the changes. Implanting Mother's terminal inside him had been rough. After many mis-starts and even more mid-testing failures that caused the tiny intricate elements to melt and die inside him, a system had been developed that turned his natural body heat down enough to accommodate them without the risk of overheating.
Except that the last time he was in charge, it was under his control, and intact only when he worked in the core. It was never supposed to have been hard-coded. That terminal was never supposed to have become an integral part of him. He was never supposed to have become dependent on it.
Never.
-
absit omen (Latin) - 'may there be no evil omen'
That said, you would probably be best off treating this story as an AU. The concept draws heavily on Chapter 58 of Yami no Matsuei, published in Hana to Yume, issue #2 2001. It is, however, vague enough to leave most things with no explanation whatsoever, and so I've taken liberties with it to create this story. The characters besides Watari you're going to meet here are only partly original - they are based on the nameless people featured in Watari's flashbacks in the manga.
I think it's quite needless to repeat that this isn't canon. It's my take on Watari, and this is the story I came up with while developing the plot for Against the Wind. Add the usual to the disclaimer: Yami no Matsuei is not mine; if it were mine, I wouldn't be writing fanfiction.
-
Absit Omen
Chapter One
by Rhea Logan
-
I was born. I lived. I died. It was that simple.
Ambition must have been my middle name; inherent or not, it was always there. And so, in the flash that is your life you're supposed to see upon your death I saw not what I had done, but what I hadn't.
Frustration was alien to me, back then. I had the curiosity of a child and the patience of a saint, at least where work was concerned. That was what drove me straight to the fire with no fear of getting burned.
I always knew that when it was my time to go, it would be spectacular. And so, when I did get burned, it had to be all the way down to ash.
At the age of twenty-four, my sentiments on dying were nothing short of fury. I wasn't ready to let go and, if I had anything to say about it, it wouldn't end like that. By the time I had exchanged the first greetings with Enma DaiOh, I had a perfect plan. I would use this time, how much of it he was willing to grant me, to do all I would have done, had that lab not exploded and taken me with it.
The offer was superb; astounding, even. Unlimited equipment, life as long as I fancied, in exchange for committing myself to a project that, even in its early stages, had already tickled my sense of feat.
It was that simple.
Soon enough, I was caught up in what had to be the work of my life - afterlife - whichever. The project was enormous, with me as its head; in both the figurative and the literal sense. The sheer amount of power that came with it was overwhelming. Not the administrative power, either; when I first merged with Mother, and I saw myself do the things I could have only dreamed of doing while I lived, I became a whole league of my own. Far ahead of everything I'd ever thought was possible.
My body and my mind - a shrine in its own right to the scientific glory of success.
The inherently restraining calls upon the ethics of the Project were a calculated risk. While my mind had powered Mother, and I had used that vast capacity myself to experiment at will, those who dared raise questions outside of the spectrum of interest vanished, never to return. To me, it didn't matter. For all I knew, they had moved on to work elsewhere and it never crossed my mind that you could be more dead than you already were.
It's ironic that even after death - or especially then - it is invariably an intrinsic human trait to be blind, once the right buttons are pushed. And I still saw myself as human, if one of a somewhat altered sort.
In the end, there were three of us left; the masterminds behind the Mother. Hinote Katai - a quick, brilliant mind and my second-in-command in one highly experienced and dedicated person. Tategami Yukiko, or my partner in crime as called her in jest, whose knowledge and connection to Mother took the Project to a level I would not have achieved on my own. Finally, myself; Watari Yutaka, the Chief Researcher of The Five Generals.
As the Project progressed, we had grown close enough to almost read each other's minds. We played deep, Yukiko and I, each time going a step further as we synchronized with the system that was no longer merely something we worked on. It was life at its best. It defined us, until I could tell no difference between being in and out, except that being out left me regretful of the wasted time.
When the request of the ultimate synch came in, there was no doubt it had to be where we had been heading all along. To me, it was nothing short of the final step - I was about to go where no human had gone before me. She had hesitated; I hadn't. It would be like always; only deeper, stronger, more profound and so much more rewarding. We would reach our final goal, I told her, our lives would be complete. It was brilliant. It was that simple.
Or so it seemed, until the raw sensation of my body burning in places I didn't know existed woke me up from slumber. At least I had returned, they told me; Tategami had no such luck. The ambition that drove us had me end up exploited to the fullest; now bound in the lab that used to be my own, once - for reasons I hadn't understood until a lot later, when the pieces of the puzzle started falling into place. That was a lesson I learned the hard way: Mothers might be sweet on their children, but the rest of the family can go bad while you're not looking.
That day was marked with a realization that dawned upon me like a bucket of cold water. I should have seen this coming.
It was never that simple.
--
1982
"Look at that. He's back."
"Impossible."
Whispery voices filled his mind. Heavy shoes clicked against the hard floor, no doubt approaching, though the sounds were muffled, as if coming from behind a thick veil of glass.
"He is. Pay up."
Harsh, slightly choked laughter. Where have I heard this before?
"No surprise there." Another voice, older, equally familiar. "Mother said he's out there somewhere."
A snort. "Took him long enough."
Mother. Mother... the Project. The Five Generals. They were supposed to--
"Take that thing out."
A pull, and then another. A faint sensation on the edge of perception - at first merely tingling, then burning that rose and grew as it reached his consciousness and settled in. A wave of sickly heat wrapped him 'round and 'round; involuntary contractions stirred his muscles into a trembling rhythm.
"All of it? Are you sure? He's going to--"
"Do it."
More pulling, and a sequence of vicious snapping sounds crushed his still dull senses. From one second to another his mind couldn't help but acknowledge the presence of pain, cold shivers running across the burning flesh, the rapid shifts of perception and ever-increasing impulses assaulting him from all directions.
"You're not going to make it easy on him, are you?"
Another snort. "He can take it."
Metal instruments clicked somewhere to his left. A cacophony of beeping sounds tore into his mind. He tried to swallow to tame the nausea but found that he couldn't; responding instinctively, his body shuddered in violent convulsions. Someone caught him; cold, brutal hands. He fell forward, boneless, gasping for breath. He tried to open his eyes, but his body followed rules of its own, disobeying him completely.
"Put him down somewhere. I'm going to need this terminal."
The same hands pulled him up. "Hook him up to the morphine IV?"
"No. I want to monitor his progress."
The arms holding him stiffened. "That's--"
"Do it." The answering voice was a cool command.
His body arched on its own as he felt hard, cold surface beneath him. He couldn't keep from shaking; the ever-growing searing pain clouded his mind. Soon the sounds around him muffled once more as he gave in, wishing only to succumb to darkness, but something kept him on the verge of consciousness. The walls of the black void that promised relief wouldn't give.
"Once he's out of the haze, he's going to kill you for this."
A low chuckle reached him from afar. "Highly doubt it. He won't remember much."
-
The world Watari returned to was a blur of pain, altering waves of searing fire and piercing cold, and a harsh smell of antiseptics. No matter how much he wanted to let himself go and drift away, at most times sleep was just out of his reach. That welcome escape from the sheer torture of breathing was not his to have. So he would lay still for hours, for days, not so much as opening his eyes, not even when the medical staff came to tend to him.
Days shifted into nights, then into days again, but he couldn't tell the time. He couldn't care less. The lab had no windows; located deep underground, in the lowest levels of the JuuOhCho, it lived at its own pace all unlike the rhythm of the rest of the netherworld.
The first sensation he could recall was a faint flicker of light just behind his heavy eyelids, and a distant sound, just barely brushing at the edge of his consciousness. Heavily sedated and blissfully numb, he now barely remembered the first minutes back in the waking world. Next had come pain; a burning that spread across and through him, inside and out, deep down to the core.
Had someone told him, back then, that he would miss the fire that had burned him alive, Watari would have laughed.
Yet 'cold' must have been the first word he uttered, barely audible as it passed through his chapped lips, straining past the long-unused vocal chords that barely complied as he tried to speak. For days and days he tried, in vain, to keep his body from shaking. In the moments of full consciousness, rare as they were at the time, he had begun to work his way through the fog that veiled his mind and find the answers to every 'how' and 'why'.
It had been a puzzle that remained unsolved until a few weeks had passed and Hinote, his second-in-command last time he checked, finally decided to pay his chief a visit. For the first time, that day, he offered something vaguely resembling an explanation. He said something about changes, modifications, and Watari having to 'get used to it'. Something about 'no other choice' and how it was now 'too late'. For what, he wondered, but then he would slip back into the semi-conscious state and nothing outside of his private chilly world mattered.
People had come and gone. Strangers, most of them. They never said much of anything, and those who did, were vague enough to have given him nothing he hadn't already known. What they did not say, Watari slowly pieced together on his own. As the days rolled past and his awareness and focus served him better again, the unease that had been always there had begun to grow all over again. As did his fear and, with it, the burning, scorching rage.
At least that kept him warm, he told himself. Warmer, anyway. So he held to it, and he held tight. Inscrutable and oblivious to virtually everything on the outside, Watari harbored that fire and carefully tended to it, night by night, day by day. With each new information read between the lines. With every scrap of sentences overheard when the assistants thought he was asleep. With every night - or maybe day, he still couldn't tell - when he lay awake, shivering with cold, trying hard to pay it no heed. Trying to push past it, to bury what was left of himself within.
His memories from these months when he had been trapped inside Mother were eerily strange. On some subconscious level he knew he must have been partly aware of his surroundings at all times. The mainframe had used him as a living, breathing set of sensors through which it had gathered information, among other things. Yet he had no recollection of anything, save an acute certainty that those memories had to be there somewhere, locked away, stored in some dark place in his mind where he couldn't reach. Yet, anyway.
Only his mind was no longer just his own, nor was it anything like before. He had been told it would never be the same again. He would never be the same.
For them, it had been just words. On his part, Watari often found himself wondering if they knew how that felt.
He knew what was expected of him. He was supposed to understand that in the name of science, of the Project he had willingly committed himself to, no sacrifice was too great. He was supposed to accept that he had signed his life away and so nothing that had been done to him was against the rules. He was supposed to agree that they had the right to decide for him, to use him as they had. And so he liked to blame them. He scorned them for it all often in his bitter thoughts. But somehow, each time that angry, sour 'you' before the accusation had turned into 'I'.
It would have been a lie to say his body had accepted the challenge with ease. On the contrary, it had taken long before he'd stopped involuntarily rejecting the necessary adjustments made to accommodate the changes. Implanting Mother's terminal inside him had been rough. After many mis-starts and even more mid-testing failures that caused the tiny intricate elements to melt and die inside him, a system had been developed that turned his natural body heat down enough to accommodate them without the risk of overheating.
Except that the last time he was in charge, it was under his control, and intact only when he worked in the core. It was never supposed to have been hard-coded. That terminal was never supposed to have become an integral part of him. He was never supposed to have become dependent on it.
Never.
-
absit omen (Latin) - 'may there be no evil omen'
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