"Beast, /quit/ being stupid!" Satsuki flicked her tail of hair over her shoulder and planted her hands on her hips, glaring through her thick lenses. Unrepentantly Beast pinged and repeated its error message, the words gleaming white across an outside screen. "I /know/ there isn't enough room on the disk! Just follow the priority list I gave you and copy whatever fits." For the third time in the last ten minutes, the computer fastidiously scanned the removable drive that she'd cabled to it, and Satsuki hissed through her teeth. She was stressed and in a hurry--surely Beast was aware of that. What a time for it to decide to be temperamental!She supposed she couldn't blame it, though. All the computer knew was that she was behaving erratically, and there was no way to tell it why. How could she explain something that she didn't even understand herself?
What was it that had made her decide to leave the Dragons of Earth?
Magician
An X/CLAMP Campus Detectives fanfic
By Natalie Baan
Part 3
Slipping a couple more disks out of their box, she snapped it shut with fingers that only trembled slightly. She hadn't told the computers about her decision yet--she hadn't told anyone. She'd been through this business once before with the Freemasons, and she knew that getting out of such associations was a hell of a lot harder than getting in. Being keenly aware of the value of her own talents and recognizing that the others wouldn't want to let her go, she didn't intend to make even the least miscalculation.
She could have been long gone already, in fact--could have walked right out the front door of the Government Building and vanished into the city's crowds. It would have been ridiculously easy, and no one would have suspected a thing. But Beast, her lovingly created computer prodigy, had one major flaw: it wasn't portable by any stretch of the imagination. She could rebuild it, of course, and she was going to have to do that anyway, but she couldn't bear to lose everything she'd worked so hard to create. If she could manage to copy just the most essential bits of code, it would save her endless hours of reconstruction....
And aside from her computer, she was discovering now, there was nothing in particular to keep her here. She'd hooked up with the Dragons of Earth in the first place for no special reason: just because she'd been born with that power and because she was bored with the tedium of the ordinary world. She hadn't really cared one way or the other about the outcome of the final battle, and as for the rest of the Dragons of Earth...she thought about Yuuto and there was a tiny faltering stutter, like a fading beat of wings inside her chest. Maybe she would have liked to...if she had known about it sooner...she might have felt something like this for him.
If she had really understood what it was to feel the center of a universe shift.
But she knew deep down inside that to Yuuto she'd always be that "cute Satsuki." Living for the present as he did, moving carelessly from day to day, he didn't have any real interest; there was nothing that he cared about enough to stop and pay serious attention to it. She had been like that too, if not nearly as gleeful: one thing exactly the same as everything else. But she had been stopped in spite of herself, and the shock of that had struck her world like a hard system crash. It had split her entire reality into "before" and "after," and she could only grasp that somehow, from that point of transformation on, everything had been changed.
From that moment of being struck motionless by contradictions, by seeing nothing as she'd believed it to be....
Shaking her head, she shucked her lab coat and slung it into the storage cabinet that was built into the curving, high-arched wall of Beast's room. Her instincts told her that trying to analyze the situation further at this point was useless--it was still too new to her, and she didn't have enough distance yet to be able to see it in context. All she could do was what she was doing: look for some way to start moving forward. If she was lucky, somewhere in the process of working out what to do next all this chaos would fall into place, like subroutines finding a perfectly interlocking pattern.
At least, that was how it worked in programming.
Peering up at the outside monitor, Satsuki scowled. While she'd been mooning about like a idiot, Beast had been sitting in silence with an innocent ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO COPY THIS FILE? message decorating its screen. Stubborn child...sighing a white frost into the refrigerated air, Satsuki started back toward her computer. "All right, Beast. Hold on. I'm coming."
"Having problems?"
That voice...she turned to face the intruder before she had fully recognized it, and without warning her heart jolted and clenched as if someone had hit her with an electrical shock. A calm, steady regard that seemed to see right through her, a smile that quirked one corner of the sensual mouth...her throat tightened as if fighting down something that wanted to burst its way out from inside her, and for a hallucinatory second, a tiny, astonished voice fluttered at the back of her brain, /why, he's exactly like--/
The Kamui of the Dragons of Earth studied her from the basement's shadows, watching her with eyes that were dark and amused.
No. Nothing like. Nothing like at all.
"No problems," she answered, and she rubbed at her arms, glad the cold air gave her a reason to have gooseflesh. She stared back at Kamui with what she hoped was a normal, moderately unfriendly moody look. "Just some routine maintenance."
"I see." He started to stroll toward her, his sneakers scuffing a faint ring from the metal floor. "And how are things going with the CLAMP Campus computers?"
"I haven't got into their system yet. They have good security." As he approached, she swung away from him to stuff the disks back into the cabinet with only half-feigned irritation. She heard the footsteps stop before they quite got to her; he was just near enough that she could feel his presence, like a great pressure weighting the air. Latching the cabinet door, she turned to face him again, meeting his gaze without a flinch. "I'll get it done."
"Hmm." Slouching there with his hands in his pockets, he looked for all the world like any other tall, vaguely disreputable young man, but those eyes stared into hers and it was as though they hid a lightless fire, a heat that stole the breath right out of her lungs. "I hope so."
Satsuki found her mouth was open; she closed it and shrugged. "They're only ordinary humans. Ordinary computers." The words seemed to stumble out of her, painfully slow, as if fighting their way through the impedance of fear and adrenaline. "They're no match for me and Beast." Kamui smiled at her as if it was a good joke that they were sharing, and his gaze let go of her eyes to take in all the rest of her instead, a lazy and consuming look. She fought the urge to cross her arms over her breasts. Pivoting on her heel, she sprang to the top of Beast, one light and careless motion as if she was tired of talking to him already, and God, let him not see that she was fleeing for her one safest shelter. She reached up for the touchpad that would open the computer's canopy.
"Who is 'Magician'?"
Icy metal burned her knees and the hand that grasped Beast; all the world seemed to narrow down to the wild thunder of blood beneath her skin. "What?" She looked back over her shoulder, and Kamui gestured idly with his chin. Glancing at where he indicated, she read the words that had appeared on the monitor, and if her fingers hadn't been paralyzed into near rigor mortis she might have slid right off the computer in panic.
HELP KAMUI HELP BEAST KILL MAGICIAN KILL KILL....
"A Dragon of Heaven." Stupid clumsy mouth that didn't want to work right, stupid biochemistry that blurred her perceptions with its atavistic responses, run, fight, hide.... "He interfered with us the last time we tried to break into the CLAMP Campus computers. The onmyouji...the one that you fought that day."
"No problems, huh?" There was a chuckle behind the words, and Satsuki glared, fiercely glad to be angry, a feeling close enough to fear that it could serve as some release. "Do you need any help?"
"No, I /don't./" She rammed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. "I have a few things to take care of and then I'm going to finish the job. If you want to stick around, go ahead, but there's not going to be much to see."
Kamui's hands slid out of his pockets and started toying with something, a strip of dark blue cloth that he drew slowly between his fingers. "I think I'll wait."
Satsuki stared for a long moment at the familiar man's tie that Kamui was playing with.
"Fine," she said then. "/Whatever./" Turning her back on him, she placed her hand against the touchpad, feeling acutely through that contact Beast's distress and urgent demands--its agitation at a circumstance that didn't fit within its parameters, its dim machine grasp of betrayal. She let out a cloud of breath in an effort to master herself. "Beast. It's me. Open up."
She reached through the panel's interface and connected with Beast, an intimate touch and command. Despite Beast's disturbance, it responded to her, as it had to. The canopy hissed upward, and she tumbled into the chamber, hitting the inside control to close it up again behind her. Collapsing onto the seat, she curled forward into a ball and wrapped her arms around herself, shaking helplessly. She was aware of Beast's consciousness, an almost subliminal whine at the back of her mind as it waited anxiously for reassurance. That, more than anything, kept her from falling completely to pieces.
She knew that she couldn't count on Beast to understand this.
"Wait," she told it thinly. "Be quiet and wait. I'll give you the input that you want in a moment." She pressed her forehead against her knees, the frame of her glasses digging into her face. After a couple of minutes she lifted her head again, just enough to glance toward the monitors. The surveillance camera that observed the basement was in operation, showing her what lay beyond Beast's carapace of armor.
The Kamui of the Dragons of Earth was staring directly into the lens: a precisely focused gaze, as if he could see her.
Slowly Satsuki straightened and then leaned back in her seat. She could feel her chest rise and fall as it dragged in shallow breaths, a movement that didn't sync with her still-thumping heart. She looked into those eyes--not like the eyes of the Kamui of the Dragons of Heaven, those eyes that had wanted to call something out from inside her, evoking something new and wonderful into existence. These held a void that wanted to unmake everything into its own image.
The ultimate nonbeing, the infinite and unformed potential that came before and after this created world.
/Keter,/ the Crown of the Sefirot.
/The one who represents the majesty of God..../
Satsuki closed her eyes and fumbled the camera off by feel. Beast was an expectant, nearly silent hum around her. Sitting there as her heartbeat stilled, she quieted her thoughts as well, bringing them steadily down into the focus of magic or coding. She set her intention firmly before opening her eyes once more, holding it at the front of her mind so that Beast could see.
"All right, Beast," she whispered. "Let's go now.
"Let's go and kill 'Magician'...."
* * * * *
Suoh sat perfectly upright in the hospital's straight-backed chair. His hands rested on his thighs without so much as twitching a finger; his gold eyes gazed ahead, half-lidded and scarcely blinking. The rectangle of intense sunlight that fell in through the recovery room's window shifted centimeter by centimeter across the floor. With a temple guardian's absolute and unmoved composure he observed that crawling light, just as he noted everything other detail that passed through his awareness, watching over the room and its sole other inhabitant with a seemingly exhaustless patience.
Inwardly, he was in anguish.
He remained motionless, because there was nothing that he could do in this place except be ready if Nokoru should need him. It wasn't customary for anyone but doctors and nurses to be in the recovery room so soon after an operation, but the people that worked for the Imonoyama family were accustomed to irregularities. Useless though he was, he knew with painful certainty that he could not be anywhere else. He was as helpless to leave his Director's side as a sword was to wield itself in battle.
Even if it was true that the world was about to end....
He allowed himself a moment of distraction then, sparing a sympathetic thought for Akira, who had remained behind to man the computer center. Steadfast and loyal Akira, who must have wanted desperately to stay close to Nokoru but had told Suoh to go ahead while he maintained the defense...it shamed Suoh to think of how he'd left the other there, abandoning Akira to hold that lone and futile watch against the enemy. But Akira had always been the generous one, putting his own needs after everyone else's...while the imperative that drove Suoh was an inner demand as selfish as the necessity for breathing.
The need to protect that one person without whom, for him, the world would have no center and no light....
He sat as if in contemplation, guarding the sleep of the unconscious figure in the bed. A skein of tubes and wires ran to machines that beeped at intervals, monitoring the respirator and the IV fluids, checking and rechecking the pacemaker implanted next to the damaged heart. Suoh set his jaw against a faint, rebellious tremor. As soon as he knew for certain that his Director was out of danger, he'd go back and take over for Akira. And when this war was finished, he would dismantle that damned experimental interface.
With his own two hands.
* * * * *
The connector cables writhed out of the shadows and pierced her, spreading out like roots beneath her skin. The white shock of fusion, mingled pain and ecstasy, was exactly as it had always been. Arching, she tilted her head back as careful tendrils lifted the glasses from her face, replacing them with the face-screen. Readouts flickered across her vision, and she fired commands at Beast, ordering a full diagnostic of all systems in preparation for battle. She could feel the computer pulsing with renewed satisfaction--content now that it had her instructions, familiar orders that it could process and carry out. While it busied itself, she quickly scanned through all the data that she'd need, distracting herself with unadorned names, places, statistics, filling her mind so she wouldn't have room to think in the interval. The computer displayed a clean and ready status at last, and despite herself her fingers tensed on the arms of her chair.
"Okay, Beast," she muttered. "Let's do it!"
A swift flash of perception through Beast's awareness, then--the route opening up like a series of portals as a connection was established, passing from switchpoint to switchpoint until the nexus was fond that linked to the CLAMP Campus gateway. They'd accessed it almost before her mind had registered the transition, and then she was looking down that long, unobstructed dataline into what her computer's networking protocols identified as unreadable nonspace. Beast hung there, waiting, as she gathered herself--
--and then, she leaped--
She leaped without strings, freefalling down that passageway, the rush toward the CLAMP Campus system no different from before except for Beast's presence receding rapidly behind her until it started to leave the range of her senses. She could feel a distant echo of astonished query trailing her; batting its wavefront aside, she watched the firewall swell to fill her mind's eye, like a solid ground that she was plummeting toward. Reaching out with her whole being, she sent forward the impulse of her desire, communicating in that language surpassing all hardware and telecom standards. A section of wall lost substance and she fell through that shimmering portal, hearing at the back of her brain a remote howl of uncomprehending anger and loss.
***SATSUKI***
She passed into the CLAMP Campus system and that cry was cut off as every emanation from the outside world vanished at once.
Peace.
She dropped down through layered currents of electron impulses, cloud streams of bright, swiftly moving signals that carried meaning in their patterned dance. She hadn't been sure that she'd be able to do it--hadn't been sure she could send her consciousness completely out of her body in that way. But since she'd been able to pull another person's mind into her system, mistaking it for a program...the thin thought-substance that she was composed of twinged, a feeling that somehow registered as pain. Looking back, she wanted to kick herself for being such a fool, for being so blindly confident that Magician could have been nothing else. For never even dreaming that some other human could enter the computers as she did, even if only by means of a crude, cobbled-together mental interface...her mind had ignored every hint that it might be a human that interested her, probably because, somewhere inside her, she really hadn't wanted to know.
It made perfect sense, though, now that she thought about it.
What person would be willing to see her entire world turned upside down?
Satsuki forced her mind firmly away from the past and from the half-formed, impossible longings that threatened to crumble the vital focus of her will. She didn't think she had very much time left, and there was a lot to do. Querying the computer, she found a nearby terminal with an e-mail program that could send to the outside. She opened the program, composed a short message, as quickly as she could, and fired it off.
YOU'RE IN DANGER
DON'T GO BACK TO THE GOVERNMENT BUILDING....
And that was the best that she could do for Yuuto. If he was still alive, the message would reach him at his job, and it was possible he might even heed it. If he was dead...well, maybe it would give the police some kind of lead to investigate, a tiny, insignificant inconvenience for the leader of the Dragons of Earth. It had been a fatal mistake on the part of that bastard....
Had he really thought that she'd believe in the promise he'd hinted at--that she and Yuuto would safe if she only did what he asked?
Slowly she grew aware of a far off tugging sensation, like a doctor examining some anesthetized part of her. The pulling grew more persistent, until she felt a dim but oddly decisive yank. Something tore, a gentle violence that caused her no pain but that resonated through her whole being. It made her flicker, trying to gasp without any capacity for breath--
Something impossibly essential had been ripped from her, and she could feel herself starting to fray. Tatters of brightness lifted and unfurled from that place, shedding minute particles from their edges. The full shock of loss and realization struck her then, harder than the actual experience.
Her body....
Somehow, it was gone....
::beast:: she whispered, guessing, though she had no way to know for certain. Beast was nothing but a child; it had been angry enough, and she already knew it could be spiteful. She hoped it /had/ been Beast, and that in its rage the computer had done a spectacular job of lashing out at its surroundings. She didn't think she was lucky enough for it to have brought the roof down on Kamui's head, but she grasped for the vague comfort of imagining him at least somewhat put out. Possibly injured, if only slightly, and having lost his one best tool for breaking down the Imonoyama's technological fortress....
Gossamer flakes of light, like scales from a butterfly's wings, continued to float away from her unceasingly. They vanished one by one into the data, and for the first time, she knew a real fear. A brilliantly white and blinding fear, one that was purely of the mind, a fear that came without any physical distractions like twisting guts and shaking hands.
She'd been able to exist within this computer space as long as her body was undamaged.
But now....
After a moment, she managed to thrust the terror down far enough that her perceptions cleared and she could put one coherent thought after another. But she couldn't shut out the bittersweet pang of realization entirely, the acknowledgement of what she'd found and what she'd lost. Before, she hadn't cared at all about her life or death: both had been the same, identically unreal and empty.
Now, she was discovering, she desperately didn't want to die....
Holding onto herself, trying vainly to slow the escape of her being, she opened up a new e-mail document. Urgently she began to pour data into it, writing out the information that she'd been carrying in her memory. Every word that she relinquished was painful, because as she wrote it, it was gone--more and more of her slipping away, but she kept on going, determined that at least her asinine sacrifice wouldn't be in vain.
Ryoku Kanoe
Governor's Office
New Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, ShinjukuShiyuu Kusanagi
Japanese Self-Defense Force
Ichigaya GarrisonAnd there was more: more names, the accompanying physical descriptions, notes about habits and powers, all the scraps of information that she'd collected during the gathering days, trying to perfect her database on the parties involved in the end of the world. She released them into her document, feeling herself growing lighter and less present; addressing the message to "root," she quickly sent it off. Her task accomplished, she wavered, the strength of intention that had sustained her until then breaking apart, and as it sloughed away a deeper and truer urge began to appear from beneath it.
The unspoken, unadmitted impulse that pulsed in fragile rhythm at her center.
At her heart....
Releasing the e-mail program, she began to fly through the computer system, application calls and functions flashing past her as she winged in between them. She dove down, a sparkling tail of thoughts and memories streaming behind her like stardust. Going fast and far beneath the users' layers of the network, she touched the machines there, letting that imperative pass from her into them like a silent cry....
::protect::
::this place::
::this CLAMP Campus::
::protect::
::this person::
::protect....::
Wire to wire, circuit to circuit, she wrote that desire over and over, tracing it in the light of soul and fleeting life. She imprinted it onto the computers until they took it for their own and began adapting their deepest functioning to include it. Over and over and over--the yearning that could never be fulfilled for herself flowed outward, a torrent of passionate feeling discovered a little too late. She gave herself up to that flood, heedless now of the cost as the surge of release eroded her away. Wide swaths of memory tumbled away from her, glinting like mirrors, throwing back flashing glimpses that couldn't be held onto as they fell....
The black and white checkerboard floor and gently arched ceiling of the Tokyo Freemason's lodge, unfamiliarly lit by candles...the serious faces of men, grave as if enduring a bleak necessity.
The lightning burst of magic, moving from inspiration to manifestation, zigzagging down the Sefirot until she felt the warm glow of achieving her goal.
Dark closeness of a computer womb, pulsing with diodes of light--a monster child coming to life for her, one carefully written line of code at a time.
The Shinjuku skyscrapers sliding into each other, fire and night....
A large hand grasping hers, incomprehensible as it pulled her along--her dull defiant anger, an unanswered "why?"--
--a devouring Dragon, dark eyes set in an aura of power, dark hunger yearning to be free--
--::daddy?::--
Sunlight falling through moving, many-fingered leaves onto the sidewalk--the wind and trees beautiful symbols, if she could only grasp their meaning.
Those blue eyes looking back at her, as if knowing that she would be there--as if needing her to be there--encounter and response--
::you::
She was a golden constellation of motes now, traveling the system, fractured recollections and purposes dropping away entirely--no use to her any more. But she was looking and looking restlessly, moving across the network, seeking across the machines....
/There./
She was getting nearer to what she was searching for, more by tropism than anything else--tired now, she let the current of longing pull her along, leading her to where she wanted to be. She skimmed the data that passed her, most of it beyond her ability to read, but some lingering instinct disclosed what it was important for her to know.
::i-mo-no-ya-ma::
::no-ko-ru....::
Spurred on by a glimmer of feeling, an imageless recollection, she gathered strength for an instant and then leaped.
<dokun>
There was a safe place, a shelter in a world that had grown too large for her, a place that was only for her.
<dokun>
And curling herself up close beside that fathomless rhythm, knowing that she would never be alone, she fell asleep.
* * * * *
"Rijichou!" Suoh breathed, uncoiling from his chair and crossing the room in two swift strides. The patient monitor continued to chime an intermittent, mild tone, waiting for a nurse to come and see if the momentary heart rate flutter was a cause for concern. Nokoru's eyelids had lifted, their lashes glimmering and wet; his hand fumbled up from his side--so slow and awkward!--groping toward the bandages that wrapped his chest. "Rijichou...."
"Hush, Suoh...don't speak." The voice was a broken whisper; the fingers trembled helplessly against the gauze. "An Angel...is passing...."