(no subject)

[chu_totoro]

Title: Memories of Dreams - chapter 3
Author: Fwoom
Pairings: Kurogane/Fye
Disclaimer: CLAMP owns the characters.
Warnings: Not a happy chapter. Also heavy in Chobitsverse.
Summary: AU taking place in the world of Chobits (first chapter here), originally written for the 2008 Spring Challenge. Of course that challenge has long since ended.
Comments: chibito may not frequent livejournal any longer, but she is still my one and only beta, and I love and respect her for it.







Chapter 3

“I felt it as soon as I woke up that day,” Fye told Minoru. “Something’d gone.” The little boy looked at him with large black eyes and sipped at his soda. “I could feel it in my bones,” Fye added. He picked up the glass with his long, tapered fingers and studied it for several seconds, then threw his head back and drained the remaining liquid in one gulp. “I couldn’t say what it was exactly,” he continued, setting the glass back down with a small chink, “but something was… was missing.” He leaned back a little and closed his eyes. “Like someone had cut a part out of me,” he sighed. “And- just left the hole there, raw and gaping wide with cold air blowing through, through, through...” He shivered and reached for the bottle. “You shouldn’t drink so much,” Minoru observed, as Fye poured himself another glass of sake. “You’ll damage your liver.” The blond head snapped up, blue eyes narrowing. The boy held his gaze steadily. After several seconds, Fye laughed, relaxing back into his seat. “Trust me,” he said lightly. “I’ve been places much worse than this.” Almost lazily he swirled the liquid in his cup and brought it to his lips. “I know how much I can take.” Your words are beginning to slur, thought Minoru. He sipped his soda and stared at the yellow Duklyon logo on the window. Across from him, Fye seemed to have taken it for granted that the conversation was over. The glass chinked as he splashed more of the clear liquid into his cup. The boy looked away. Low thrums of conversation floated past from other late-night customers. Somewhere, an old man wheezed with laughter, reliving college memories with an old friend. Just three seats behind them, a couple was curled up together, murmuring sweet nothings into each other’s ear. Far away a group of teenagers laughed raucously, half-drunk. Minoru started when Fye suddenly spoke. “It’s silly, isn’t it?” he asked, gazing at an empty patch of air to the left of the little boy’s head. Minoru shrugged, though he was fairly certain Fye did not see him. “I, I could have sworn,” Fye continued, “when I found him that day, found him, thought everything was gonna be all right-” Minoru didn’t know who ‘he’ was and didn’t ask. “-he was wrong too. He was, everything was wrong, like the world was just a little bit off but you couldn’t quite put your finger on it, and when he said ‘Fye’ it was wrong, all reluctant, like he was spittin’ out something vile he didn’ want to say, then, then I knew.” Mechanically he picked up the bottle, drank from it, and set it back on the table again. “The world’d gone bad and I didn’ know why.” Minoru felt as though he should say something, but he didn’t think Fye was talking to him any longer and besides, he had no idea what to say. A waitress swept by them, gave Minoru a smile, and moved on, repeating, ‘it is now eleven twenty, the cafe will close in ten minutes, it is now eleven twenty, the cafe will close in ten minutes.’ “I have to go soon,” said Minoru. “My sister will be worried.” Fye lay half-slumped on the table, fingers curled around the bottle neck, and did not appear to hear him. “F,” Minoru repeated, louder. “I have to go.” “Nnnnngh?” groaned Fye. The little boy’s mouth twitched in a half-smile. “I’m going,” he said, and jumped off his chair. Fye lifted his head and watched his retreating figure for several seconds before falling back onto the table. “I started it,” he mumbled into the wood. “Di’ I ever tell you that, Fujitaka? Not you, not an’one. I li’ the match, the match...” + That was the most Fye ever said about his past, and they never broached the subject again. However, Minoru thought he found out who ‘he’ was several months later, when Fye left him a coded message on BBS inviting him over to his apartment. “You look very happy today,” Minoru observed. “Hmm?” Fye seemed distracted. “Happy? Oh, of course, of course. Come down and take a look at this, M-chan, I think you’ll like it.” Minoru followed him into the elevator, taking in the surroundings with mild curiosity. He had only ever been here once, and then not for long. It was a very nice apartment – nicer, he suspected, than Fye could ever afford. The place itself was a gift from a man Fye referred to as Icchan, that much he knew, but who this Icchan was, how they were related, why he would extend himself so far on the behalf of a hopeless nutcase... he hadn’t a clue. The elevator dinged. The doors slid open. Minoru, despite all he had prepared himself to see, could not keep his eyes from widening. + Are those what I think they are? he wanted to ask, and How did you do this? and Do you know what you’ve accomplished, man? but those were stupid questions, and Minoru was sensible. “Where are the cables?” he asked, examining the foremost figure. It looked, in every way, like a real human being. Even the ears were normal. “The connectors?” “Ah, yes,” said Fye. “I had a little trouble with that, in the beginning.” He gesticulated toward the other end of the room, and Minoru saw a number of the bodies sprawled there with strangely shaped computer ears poking out of their spiky black hair. Some were still haphazardly connected to cables that strung them up in oddly limp angles, while others were half-assembled, nuts and bolts and memory chips strewn around them in a jumbled mess. “The prototypes,” Fye added with a dismissive wave. “I removed many superfluous features in the latest versions.” Minoru did not hear him. His probing fingers had already discovered the minute catch behind each ear and eased them open. Gently nudging the figure’s hair out of the way, he proceeded to explore the space with his fingertips. Two connectors. No ports, no drives, none of the elements common in even the most primitive workaday computers, just two small connectors, one behind each ear, and that was it. “-‘d finally got the personality chip perfect-” Fye was saying. Those aren’t enough to parallel transmission, thought Minoru, brows furrowing imperceptibly. Even if you adapted the right programs to hook up to it, the whole thing would crash from sheer lag. Which means whatever personality chip it has was programmed manually, tested manually, wired manually- Minoru closed his eyes, then opened them again, exhaling slowly. He shook his head. Then, painfully aware all the time of how childish his experimentations on Blanche and the other angels now seemed, he pulled several folded sheets of paper from his backpack and handed them to Fye, muttering, “This section won’t boot up properly and I can’t figure out why.” Fye blinked as though coming out of a reverie. “What?” he said. “Ah...” Absently he took the sheets from Minoru and began scanning the lines of code. “Look here,” he said after a minute, “change this ‘for’ to a ‘while.’ You can’t set a ‘do’ function with a ‘for,’ it won’t read. And you’re missing an endtag here, but I don’t think that registers, so it doesn’t matter. Why don’t you use a loop here, though, it would save you all those embedded repeats...” + In the days to come Minoru would often think back on that day in the basement and the absent tender look on Fye’s face as he scanned through the lines, seeing but not really seeing. What is it, he wondered, what is it that made a man look like that, hollow but not hollow? What power could there possibly be to empty a man out like that, drain him like a flask of water and leave him there, stuffed full of little bits of lies and little bits of laughter but really nothing, nothing, nothing... Minoru sat and thought about these things, a little boy in a house too big for him with eyes too black and too deep for his own good. But his sister called to him, and he went to her. “What were you thinking about?” she asked with a warm smile. “What to eat for dinner today,” he said, taking her hand. “Oh, really?” She sounded genuinely pleased. “I was thinking about making some sukiyaki tonight-” “I love sukiyaki!” And he really meant it. “All right. Sukiyaki it is, then.” She smiled. + “He... helps out around the house.” Fye stood there, his smile helpless and awkward and a little lost. “Just, you know, with chores and stuff.” Minoru blinked, but did not say anything. Instead he turned his back on the black-haired figure he had seen lifeless in a laboratory only a month ago and carefully consulted Fye on a variety of technical questions. + “How was the match today?” he asked his sister. “Oh!” she said. “Blanche was roughed up quite a bit, the poor dear. You’ll have to take a look at her when you have some time. Sai and Shirahime had a fairly rough match as well...” “I heard Sai was doing well...” “Yes, yes indeed she is. They’re calling her the Ice Machine now, did you know that?” She giggled, and Minoru laughed with her. “The Ice Machine and the White Princess. What a combination.” “Oh, I know...” “I’ve got the algorithm down for the workaround now. If all goes well, Blanche should be able to snap into a sort of hyper mode that will maximize both speed and strength during battle.” “It won’t hurt her, will it?” She turned to him, and for an instant her loose brown braids framed the worry in her eyes. “No, of course not.” He smiled, genuinely pleased to be telling the truth. “All right.” She gave him a hug. + Minoru had bad dreams at night. Fye’s face came back to plague him, wearing that helpless smile and irrevocable look of tenderness. It sickened him. He felt as though he was not looking at a man but half a man, a ghost, a translucent shell of nothingness, and it made him so sick he wanted to cry. In the beginning it had been better. Kurogane (for that was how Fye introduced him) was always there, but their discussions were mostly technical and often he was neglected as Fye enthusiastically tried to explain some complicated precept or the other to Minoru, delighted in the existence of a mind as sharp as his own. As time wore on, however, the discussions dwindled. Fye laughed less, joked less, talked less until Minoru could hardly get a word out of him without prompting with a question. And then he had the strangest sensation that all the responses were merely a reflex, an echo of all that this blue-eyed man had learned over the years, and that the heart, the soul behind the words had gone somewhere he could not follow. Again and again he saw in his dreams that first twisted panorama when the elevator dinged and the door rolled open. His eyes widened. The basement stretched out before them. To the right, the left, above, below, everywhere the same face mirrored itself over and over again, some with eyes closed as though sleeping, others with eyes open, sightless, staring vacantly out into nothing at all. The same rough hair, the same red eyes... echoes in echoes, mirrors in mirrors in mirrors until they all shattered into a million gleaming pieces and he was so dizzy he wanted to puke. He woke to his sister clasping his hand. He looked to her and she smiled, and he smiled gratefully back, giving her hand a little squeeze. + And then without warning his sister was gone, poof, like a firefly winked out of existence. From the time the doctor gave the bad news to the moment she died it could not have been more than five days, and it happened so suddenly he did not even have time to cry. He held onto her hand and all he could see was her face, her smiling up at him, her smiling on her deathbed, her smiling at him even as she grimaced in pain and cried out from the disease working its way through her body. All her friends wept at the funeral but he could not; he stood with his eyes downcast and willed the tears to come but felt only a profound blankness, a sense of unreality. And so he returned. + “Look, M-chan!” Fye cried. “We went shopping today!” He was wearing a dressy white shirt with the collar flipped up and the buttons loosened, and beside him Kurogane wore the equivalent in black, with the addition of a red sash flipped over his shoulder. “Who are you?” growled the black-haired persocom, eyeing Minoru with distaste. “Little twerp!” “Hey, hey, be nice,” Fye scolded. “I’m sorry,” he explained to Minoru, “he tends to forget things. Got a bit of amnesia, like.” Two months ago Minoru would have turned and left. Two months ago he would have felt ill at the sight of them. And he still did. But somehow, at the same time, there was a little dark spot in the cracks of his heart that envied them their happiness. Somewhere there was pity, but pity hit himself like a battering ram because if they were on the verge of drowning why then he was in the water, and oh, it hurt to breathe. He looked at them and thought of his sister, sitting in front of the mirror and braiding her hair. His sister, smiling. His sister, hugging him and whispering soothing words into his ear. His sister, gently ruffling his hair when she got home. His sister, holding his hand on the way to the beach, talking and laughing about all the inconsequential things. His sister, sitting him down and telling him earnestly, earnestly that they were on their own now, they had only each other now, the world was big and the world was deadly but as long as she was there she would protect him, okay? Kaede, Kaede, Kaede. And finally the tears splashed down his face and onto his chin, and he stood still and let them fall. Somewhere, someone called to him. M-chan! M-chan? Someone lead him to a table and sat him down, where he put his head in his arms and kept crying, shoulders shaking uncontrollably. Somebody was saying something to him but he couldn’t make out the words, couldn’t hear through his own chattering teeth. “-ong? What’s wrong? What’s wrong, M?” Fye’s face hovered in and out of focus like a flickering candle, and behind him, behind him – “How long will your happiness last?” Minoru asked bleakly, a single tear sliding down his cheek. “How long can you keep this up? How long will he l-” He stopped, because something had broken in Fye’s face. It twisted in and scrunched up upon itself, and he opened his mouth to speak but no words came out. “I-” he said. “I, he-” The blue eyes flashed intermittent anguish, despair, then slowly, slowly calmed back down to normal again. “Why, amnesia,” he said as though it were a new discovery. “He has amnesia, that’s all.” Minoru nodded, then buried his head in his arms again. He cried not because Fye was a broken puppet after all, a marionette with a wax doll smile twisting and cutting its own strings, but because he knew that he would never be able to delude himself even that far, and that he would try anyway.