Gravity A CLAMP fanfiction Amet & Sephy Prologue We are not inheriting the Earth from our fathers, we are borrowing it from our children. --Native American Saying "Do it." The knife fell, arching swiftly and slashing gracelessly, tearing flesh and bone, catching briefly on what might have been tendon or vocal chord and he watched with a detached sort of shock as garish red sprayed across the polished stone of the inner chamber's walls and absorbed into the pristine white robes of the Dragon of Earth standing before him. Pain blossomed outward, twisting tendrils of fire radiating through his torso as the tearing agony spread, a strangely warm wetness pouring over the open buttons of his filthy dress shirt and seeping into the cracks in the marble where he knelt as though in supplication, watching the pale, elegant face of Kuzuki Kakyou tighten in something that might have been sympathy before the dream seer turned away, busying himself with whatever supplement the spell required. "I wonder," said Kakyou, voice still low and slightly rough from years of disuse, stilling to stare at the bloody instrument in his hand, "Imonoyama-sama, is this bravery or foolishness? You could very easily have dragged in a sacrifice from outside -- one of the dying on the streets would have served our purpose. By now they outnumber the living, certainly." The pale man paused, head tilted to listen as another explosion rocked the campus above them, sending a few battered crumbles of ceiling-turned-debris to the floor. "But you insisted on doing this yourself. Why?" Why? So many answers to that question, so many righteous lectures on morality and compassion he could let fly at the idea of human sacrifice, but in the end his motivation really all came down to selfishness. He hadn't seen Akira, not after his friend had been torn from his arms and from what Miss Kasumi had told them there hadn't been enough left of him to identify. That had left him ill for hours, but his reason lay in the fact that he had seen Suoh, watched the life fade from startled amber eyes as the other man clung to him, lips so recently kissed for the first time flecked with blood as he heaved and sputtered helplessly, in a way that never should have disgraced the proud Takamura. He had seen the mockery that was his corpse, the battered shell with glassy, lifeless eyes that accused him at every glance he couldn't help but steal as someone -- he thought it might have been that Nekoi girl -- attempted to pry him away from it. Its eyes crinkled at the corners, little smile lines Nokoru had always told Suoh proved he had a sense of humor hiding somewhere beneath all that proper disapproval. Its brow was high and proud, the familiar sweep of dark hair nearly covering one eye and he remembered the amusement of Suoh's rather vehement reaction the last time Nagisa-jo had attempted to convince him to cut it. Its hands were large and calloused in the strangest of places from years of handling those damned shuriken -- but the thing that was all he had left of Suoh was not his old friend, it was not... anything. It didn't radiate quiet contentment, still as the early mornings the man had so loved, didn't squeeze his arm to reassure him without being terribly obvious, always mindful of propriety. It just lay there, broken and withered and pathetic in a way that he refused to associate with his friend, his protector, his dearest love... There was nothing left of him to give, except this. Except blood and life and mortality, because any notions of giving a damn went out the window the moment he'd thought to tell his friends' wives that they were gone and realized that the girls were probably dead by now as well. For the first time in his life, Imonoyama Nokoru knew what it was to give up, to feel the hollow ache rise up and overwhelm all hope and feeling, all sense that there was something good and pure and worthwhile about the world. Logically, he knew this was simply grief overcoming him, that it would pass if he held on long enough to see it through and he might have, if there had been something further to take care of that would at least convince him he was needed. But from what Kakyou had hinted the Seven Seals were dying, Kamui himself barely holding back his dark counterpart with help from the Sumeragi and there simply was no time. The world was rending, breaking, splitting apart at the seams with every blow from Monou Fuuma's shinken and what was his purpose against the rising tide of preternatural war? He had none, he had nothing. What was he without Akira's carefree smiles and stolid insistence that sugar could solve any problem? Without Suoh's quiet support and protection, the only constant in his little ivory tower, in his self-imposed isolation, the one to whom he'd cleaved so tightly he'd had trouble distinguishing where one of them ended and the other began? Duty had sustained him, with liberal applications of distraction that his friends so graciously allowed him, but even that was lost to him now with the campus crumbling above his head. Nothing left to do but die and hope that it made some difference to those who were left, that they might not lose what little hope they still harbored. He wondered if anyone would remember them. If he even wanted them to. Nokoru's eyes fluttered shut against the pain, fighting the heaviness settling into his limbs that made it difficult to stay awake at all, and he knew that he should simply let himself drift away but it seemed that even in the depths of despair it was still in his nature to fight the inevitable. Suoh would laugh at that, chide him for his notorious inability to let anything go, and he almost smiled -- choking and sputtering and feeling that steady pressure build inside his chest as his lungs ached for air. He wondered idly how a wound like this would actually kill him, whether the blood loss or the suffocation would get to him first, if he would merely drown on the blood pooling in his lungs, wet and sticky and wholly uncomfortable. Akira would have known, could have told him every tendon severed by the cut and how much blood he'd lost at a glance, but Akira had always been good with medical knowledge despite how flighty he'd seemed, another pity amongst a deluge of others that he had never finished his training. All because Nokoru had asked for his assistance. "You see," Kakyou was saying, "I told you not to do it this way. You can't speak now." The Dragon sounded almost disappointed, and Nokoru forced his eyes to slit open, tracking Kakyou's movements as he gathered his materials and bundled them up, neatening the objects not directly in use, some long denied nervous habit. Kakyou was frailer than any grown man had a right to be, pale enough to see the faintest webbing of vein and capillary beneath his skin, snow white hair grown nearly to his waist during long years of convalescence, and the effect was rather startling -- as though one were speaking not to another human being, but a creature of snow and ice, long since frozen and dulled to human kindness. His features were unerringly placid, pale hair falling forward to obscure most of his face as he paused and looked down at where Nokoru crouched, looking for all the world as though gore drenched men were nothing so extraordinary to bother with any stronger reaction. Nokoru supposed there was some truth to that, for a dream seer and a man so long isolated in higher government's attempts at "humane" containment, kept outside the realm of human contact in the hope of minimizing any damage his power might cause. What little contact most people with powers such as Kakyou's were allowed, in dreams and visions that showed the darkest depths of the collective human soul -- Nokoru himself had seen a lot of disheartening things in his lifetime but he could not even begin to imagine what it must be like to see nothing of humanity but the ugliness of death and destruction, robbing warmth of all meaning beyond the bitter ending visible in the same instant one laid eyes on another person. And yet it was the dream seer, this broken husk of a man with little past to speak of and no notions of a future, who had come to him. Who had approached the scion of the Imonoyama, harborer of his master's enemies with the most insane plan to stop the coming destruction, one last desperate bid for life in a world that wouldn't have it, that barely clung to existence under the barrage of the Dark Kamui's power and the ticking of inevitability. Nokoru knew that this couldn't possibly work, given the infinite number of variables worked into the endeavor, one little detail misjudged and the whole plan would go up in smoke, and yet -- his own convictions paled in comparison to everything he'd witnessed since he'd agreed to guard the Kamui's shinken, that last great scientific conundrum that had so fascinated him as a child once more dislodging the mantle of more adult skepticisms. If there was one thing he'd been taught in his time with the Seals it was the very simple lesson that if the great wheel of destiny still turned, there was still the ghost of a chance, and that was all they really needed, wasn't it? Some small chance at deliverance? What was his life in comparison to that? "What is--?" Kakyou said, face creasing in consternation, "Is that hope I see in your eyes, Imonoyama-san?" The Dragon seemed almost pained, leaning down to kneel before Nokoru and meet his eyes. "Oh no, my friend, that is foolishness. Pain shelters from further pain, but hope--hope is what truly murders, exposes and leaves raw whatever tenderness we have left. Hope is what fails us when all else is lost." Nokoru allowed his eyes to slip shut. There was nothing he could say to that, even if he had still possessed the ability to speak, and the pain in the pale man's eyes was too deep to bear. Kakyou would never understand his reasoning, Nokoru wasn't entirely sure he understood it himself anymore and frankly he was tired of thinking, of trying and reaching and grasping when he had always been so very alone. There was nothing left to do now, no little details to organize, nothing requiring his signature or even a scrap of his concentration beyond willing himself to bleed to death before time ran out. Wasn't that just ridiculous? Darkness rose to greet him, senses clouding even as he heard Kakyou take a few shuffling steps away, readying himself for that crucial moment when the seal sketched so hurriedly onto the floor beneath them would receive their sacrifice, their payment for every universal law they were about to break. And he found a strange sort of peace in that desperation, that the Dragon was as desperate to change this horror as he, and that perhaps against all logic and reason, he had made the right decision. 'Please,' he thought, slumping towards the cool bite of marble beneath him, 'just let this work.' And the world shattered. -------End of Prologue [ back ]
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