Warning: Odd stuff happens. The action is about to begin. Also, I hereby renounce each and every knowledge about geography I ever had. Things exist as they are - in my story.
Work in Progress. No spoilers. Does not follow canon.
Translations for German at the end of the story.
Dedication: For my mother. Rest in peace.
On with Insanity...
"What I've felt
What I've known
Turn the pages turn the stone
Behind the door should I open it for you
What I've felt
What I've known
Sick and tired I stand alone
Could you be there? 'cause I'm the one who waits for you
Or are you unforgiven too?"
Metallica, Unforgiven II
Shattering glass. Why could he not stop thinking about shattering glass that fell to a ground he could not see, accompanied by sounds he could not hear, springing from a source he did not know? He was making a telephone call. Yes. A telephone call. That was what he wanted to do, that, and not listen to shattering glass or looking into broken mirrors. In his mind, in his dreams, the kings of stone and dust had risen from an age-old sleep, calling him with voices beyond human classification. The mountains were calling to him, urging him to quicken his moves, beckoning him with promises beyond his wildest dreams.
He only had to make this one telephone call, and his dreams would come true.
"What's taking the kid so long, for fuck's sake?" Anxiously, Schuldig paced to and fro, smoking. His long hair was braided and tucked into the collar of his overall, a baseball cap drawn deeply into his face. Bright orange strands of silken hair would occasionally escape from the confines of the braid or the baseball cap and fall into his face; impatiently, he would push them behind his ears. The bullet wound in his hip still ached - it had been less than a week since they had left Vienna behind - but thankfully, no infection had sprung from it.
"Maybe it's full," Moriate offered from her seat on the hood of the car.
"I thought he was going to a cash dispenser," Farfarello said. He was leaned against the side of the car, watching Schuldig pace. Schuldig had taken special care to select the winter clothes for the Irishman. With Farfarello's immunity to pain, it was more than likely he would not realize frostbite setting in until it was too late.
All of them were dressed in white and grey. It would make it harder for pursuers to find them in the endless white stretches of the Alps, give them a modicum of an advantage none of them built any hopes upon. After Vienna, they had had three more "meetings" with people from Eszet, escaping them by brute force alone. All of them wore weapons now, even Moriate. An ugly, angrily red slash bisected her left cheek from the ear to the beginning of her left nostril, where a passing bullet had narrowly missed its mark. With her hair tucked back under a woollen white cap, the wound was the only apparent colour adding to her appearance that stood out.
A sound coming from the mouth of the small alley they had parked in froze their movements. Schuldig glided behind a dumpster, drawing his semi-automatic. Farfarello and Moriate took their places behind the car, ducking, peering up to look through the windows. A moment later, a low whistle reached their ears - three times, as if someone was calling for their dog.
"Finally!" Schuldig sighed, tucked the weapon back under his overall, and stepped out from behind the dumpster. Nagi came down the alley, hands in the pockets of his oversized snow jacket.
Farfarello stood. At his side, Moriate remained crouched low for a moment, one hand pressed to her forehead.
"Something wrong?"
She shook her head. "Dizzy."
"Get over it."
She did not dignify his words with an answer and stood, walking around the car to sit on the hood once more. Nagi pulled a thick wad of money out of his jacket pocket and handed it to Schuldig.
"This should get us over the next week," the youth crammed his hands back into his pockets.
"Two more days, supposedly, until we reach the mainframe's base at the Finsteraarhorn," Schuldig said, dividing the money into four stacks. He handed one to each. "If we don't survive Eszet, we won't need more money, anyway. Never again."
"Yeah," came Nagi's answer. He turned away from them and leaned against the wall of the alley, eyes fixed on some point in the distance. Schuldig studied the slight Japanese youth for a long moment. Nagi had been uncharacteristically subdued over the last days, keeping to himself. Even Farfarello had noticed. Schuldig had taken a dive into the young man's man two days ago, but found nothing amiss, at least nothing on the surface. He did not have the time to take a deeper look, his concentration was needed in the here and now, and Moriate could not be trusted with such a task. Though the young woman had so far helped them, she was still one of Eszet's pawns. The redhead knew he was prone to forget that once in a while.
"Is everything all right with you?" Schuldig asked, stepping closer to Nagi.
"Yeah. I'm just tired."
Before Schuldig could respond, Nagi pushed away from the wall and walked over to the car to lean against it next to Moriate. The second telepath did not move from her spot. Nagi crossed his arms over his chest and looked at the ground. Schuldig raised an eyebrow and looked at Farfarello, who shrugged his shoulders, as much puzzled by the telekinetic's behaviour as his lover.
Lover's tiff? Farfarello asked into the open connection between him and Schuldig. He's behaving strangely
Agreed. But the day these two become lovers will be the day I let you cut my hair off
Nagi uncrossed his arms from over his chest without looking up, one hand moving to grasp Moriate's fingers where they were splayed on the hood of the car.
Care to repeat what you just said? Farfarello chuckled over the spluttering of Schuldig's voice inside his head. Be glad I like your hair where it is, lover, else you'd be bald in about five minutes
Schuldig shook his head, unable to pry his eyes from the joined hands. He looked at Moriate, but the telepath's face was blank, a small but meaningless smile on her lips. If anything, she did not pay any attention to Nagi's action, as if the part of her anatomy the telekinetic had just grasped did not belong to her. The fact alone that Nagi was holding her hand should have enraged her enough to bury her other hand in his eyes...but then again, love sometimes came in the strangest guise. They had been sticking close together ever since the four of them had left Vienna - if it was born out of necessity or real affection, Schuldig did not know. Maybe it was both.
He realized he was woolgathering. Whatever was going on between Moriate and Nagi would have to wait until they had finished what they had come for to do here; as long as the two worked together, he did not really care if they spent their "free time" fucking or not. Nagi's internal problems that sprung from having raped the mindreader had put a strain on the youth's mental stability - if them coupling solved it, then Schuldig would not interfere.
"All right. Let's get going, folks." Schuldig said.
Through Austria, their way had taken them, through cities such as Salzburg, Innsbruck and Meran. Beautiful cities, all of them, as beautiful as the small villages they had passed, and yet they had had no eyes for that beauty, their passage driven to hurry by pressing need and pursuers that came closer and closer to them with every day that passed. Sometimes, they had been expected, welcomed by inconspicuous men and women that hid among the villagers and the tourists and came at them with guns and needles filled with sedatives. They had escaped those by brutality alone, forcing their way past them with bullets and mental powers, leaving the natives mind-boggled and scared. None of them counted any more the casualties they left behind them on their way, some with holes in their bodies, others with holes in their minds.
Stretched thin as their reserves of strength were, a strange deal had been cut among them: they did not talk much anymore, each of them relying on the others to do what was needed to save their lives. The silence had set in slowly but surely after they had left Vienna, becoming more and more oppressing with each city they left behind, each kilometre they came closer to Switzerland and the Finsteraarhorn, that mountain that by now had achieved an almost legendary status in their minds and dreams. It did not matter what they did to reach their destination, and surely none of them spent one hour pondering over what would come after they had done what had to be done - such speculations might have amused Crawford, had the now-dead Schwarz member still been with them.
Of lately, Schuldig found himself often thinking about his dead teammate. Though no one questioned his leadership except Moriate - who did not really count, but was there and quite vocal about it nonetheless -, the redhead asked himself how they would face their task under Crawford's leadership. Schuldig had never made the decision to be their leader; Nagi and Farfarello followed him because he showed them the way, Moriate because she had no other choice. Would things have gone the same way under Crawford's leadership? Would they be as tired, as strung out as they were now?
Their life in Japan seemed so far away it could as well have been someone else's life. Already, the memory of their apartment, of the street they had lived in, was dimming, falling away under the strain of being hunted.
Once, they had been the hunters. Once, their way had been clear to see. Now, their way ended somewhere in the snowy whites of the Alps, the journey after that yet to be born.
Schuldig started the car, his hands on the steering wheel. Out of habit, almost, his eyes sought out the rear-view mirror and made contact with watery blue and near-black lapis lazuli. His view wandered down and came to rest on joined hands that lay on the car seat between Nagi and Moriate; strange, not so long ago he had been sitting in the back of a car like they sat there now, his hand joined with another. That, too, had been in another life it seemed...a life not his own, for the one he now called his own could not be imagined without Farfarello in it.
The first spattering of raindrops pregnant with the promises of snow hit the windshield. Chur, the town that was their supposedly last stop before the mountains would claim them entirely, lay on the first outcrops of the Alps, a town so deeply veiled in mists and never-ending breaths of clouds that it seemed to be winter here always. The sun, though present, was a flat, pale yellow disk on the white sky; bearing no warmth for the beings she gave her light for. Adding to the cold from the outside world came the cold that spread within the telepath, a slowly creeping beast that stealthily ate at him, leaving numbness in its wake. He was tired. He wanted to lay his head down and close his eyes, and he did not want to dream. Dreams were an illusion, dreams were fool's food, enough for a moment of pleasure but never enough to fill the hunger, and...
Schuldig blinked. Almost angrily, he clamped down on the connection between him and Moriate, startling the second telepath into a gasp. Farfarello turned his head around, frowning. Getting no reaction from his lover, he turned to Moriate, only to find her scowling at the side window of the car.
"Let us go," the Irishman said, not quite able to keep his worry out of his eye as the redhead turned and gave him a small, nearly apologetic smile. "Last time we stopped, it took them only three hours to find us."
Down the alley they went. At the mouth of the alley, an old man was making his way across the street, meticulously slow. Schuldig groaned as the old man stopped and looked at them with that boundless curiosity the elder sometimes have for things that would not be a magnet for a younger person's attention.
"Come on, move it." The redhead gripped the steering wheel harder.
In the backseat, Moriate had become as white as the sky.
"Drive."
"What?" Schuldig turned to her.
"Drive! That's one of them! Drive!"
Schuldig, stuck between bafflement and horror, turned back and stared at the old man. Leaned on a walking cane, his head obscured by a fur cap, a long grey beard hanging down nearly to his stomach, the old man had not moved from the spot, standing there and staring as if he had never seen a car before.
"For fuck's sake, drive!" Moriate screamed in the backseat, already on the move to climb into the front.
A volley of feelings hit Schuldig unexpectedly. Pain, fear, curiosity, and an undercurrent of something that he could only describe as 'old' badgered against the walls of his mind, threatening to tear them down. He let out a gasp, but kept his hands on the steering wheel, fighting for control over the images that drowned him. White, grey, the endless stretches of the Alps intermingled with the even more endless stretches of clinically lit corridors, images and impressions that were not his own but forced their way into his memory like a branding iron.
He stomped down on the gas pedal. The car jerked forward, Moriate tumbling back against the back seat, still yelling at him to drive, drive, drive, drive over that old man and spray his blood over the concrete and the cobblestones of Chur, drive and maybe win another hour or two before the hunters, the beasts, the nightmares were upon them.
As the car sped out of the alley, the old man was gone.
Two old men stood in the alley, leaned on their walking canes, stroking their beards. They were bowed, their backs evidence to a life lived with hard work and strain, their faces lined from decisions and experiences.
The taller of the two, with dark grey hair and bushy eyebrows that descended over his eyes like threatening storm clouds, moved his walking cane and poked at the stump of a cigarette.
The two turned as a man came down the alley. He was tall, in his mid-thirties, clad in a long woollen coat and heavy boots. His hair, cut sharply above his ears, was of a glossy black, framing a hard-jawed face.
The newcomer stopped beside the two old men and inclined his head in a polite greeting.
"The hunters are in place. They're only waiting for a sign."
The old man with hair as snowy white as that of Santa Claus in children's books nodded thoughtfully and looked at his companion.
"Everything is going according to plan." The grey-haired man's voice was brittle, papery thin.
"Okay. Okay, this is going too far." Schuldig turned to Moriate and heaved a deep, angry sigh.
The second telepath sat on a small bench at the side of the road, her legs drawn up to her chest, her arms clamped around them. Half-hidden as she was in her large clothes, the pose gave the impression of an animal trapped in a corner; Schuldig was irritated by that impression, to say the least. It was quite clear to see that Moriate was scared half out of her mind.
"Yes, you ass, I am scared!" Her voice came out muffled, her eyes piercingly cold from under her woollen cap. "And you are, too."
He did not bother to close the connection between them this time. In their current situation, and with that happening a few hours ago, he needed every piece of information he could get from her.
"So, you say this was 'one of them'. One of the hunters?"
"No. One of them." She fumbled for a cigarette and lit it. It did not escape him that her hand was trembling as she lifted the cigarette to her lips. "One of the Elders."
"Since when do they appear on a scene? You said yourself - "
"I know what I said, Schuldig, you don't have to remind me." She took a deep drag, blinking as the smoke burned in her eyes. "And I don't know why they are here."
"Isn't that obvious?" Farfarello asked from his place in the passenger's seat. He had opened the door and stretched his legs out, leaning sideways against the seat. Nagi, a sour scowl on his face, sat in the back of the car, one of the windows rolled down. "So far, we've managed to get away from them. Every time they tried to get us, we got away from them. Maybe these Elders are slowly getting impatient?"
"If that's the case, then why didn't they send the hunters yet?" Moriate asked back, narrowing her eyes. "Believe me, there's something fishy about this. It makes no sense. Over a hundred people that could get us in no time if they wanted to, and now the Elders make an appearance? Or at least, one of them shows up, and then doesn't do anything? No. No, that makes no sense!"
"We are close to the mainframe, at least close in the sense of the word. Maybe they are worried?" Schuldig turned away from the young woman and walked a few steps up the road where they had stopped the car after their wild 'escape' out of Chur; a parking space somewhere between their last stop and Flims, the next larger city on their route. "If the weather doesn't change, we should reach the Finsteraarhorn in one or two days, depending on how fast we are. They should be worried."
A snort reached his ears, followed by first soft and then loud laughter. He turned his head and stared at Moriate, who was all but falling off of the bench she sat on.
"You are so full of yourself - " She was overcome by another laughing fit, her voice sounding close to hysteria. "Do you always put yourself that high up in the chain of important things? Do you really think the mainframe is worried about your little attempt at rebellion?"
"We've come this far," Schuldig said coldly. "And we might win."
Moriate shook her head and forced herself to calm down. Still, the amused expression on her face riled the redhead up. The cold snake of anger rearing in his stomach, Schuldig walked back over to her and stared down at the young woman.
"You find this funny?"
"Oh yes, I do. You said we came this far? Let me ask you a question: why?"
"What do you mean, why?"
"Ah, Schuldig, Schuldig, you know what the mainframe is capable of." Moriate bent down and picked her cigarette up from where it had fallen to the ground during her laughing fit. "We'd be dead by now if they really worried about us. Instead, we're playing catch-me across Europe, and no one knows what's waiting for us in these mountains. Don't you see it? They let us come this far. They let us escape each and every time."
"What would be the point?"
Moriate shrugged. "Maybe they got bored. That concept shouldn't be too new to you."
No, it wasn't. If there was someone who knew boredom inside out, Schuldig guessed it would be him. Still, applying the same measure that held true for him to the mainframe seemed wrong. During his years of working for them, he had learned one thing: Eszet never did anything without a plan behind it. Nothing that happened happened without a reason, a thought behind it. He might not have been as close to them as Crawford, or as Moriate, but he had learned enough about them, and remembered enough about them from the one time he had been to their base, to know that everything they did followed a plan.
What that plan was, well, one usually learned about their place in it when it was too late and there was no chance to get out again.
A slow, ominous thunder rolled over the mountains that shot into the still-white sky. As if on a cue, all four of them looked at that sky to see dark clouds begin to cluster around the peeks of the mountains, hiding their snow-topped crowns from view. The air shivered, drawing in upon itself, heavy with stored electricity. It smelled of metal and the soft, dark undertones of wet soil. Somewhere behind the mountains, a rainstorm was going down. Somewhere there, in the beautiful but cold and deadly heart of the Alps, lay their future.
They took the main road, a wide, six-lane stretch of concrete, for as long as they dared, driving as fast as they could. Twice, the police nearly stopped them. Twice, a little act of persuasion done by Schuldig saved them from a night spent in a cell. Taking turns behind the steering wheel, they drove through the night, passing Flims and Trun, finally driving onto the road that would lead them past Breil and Disentis, and from there on to the first pass in the mountains.
Stopping only when they needed a gas refill or something to eat, not even bothering to change cars again, they drove, and drove, and every one of them began to think that that was all they had been doing, all of their life: drive. Like a nightmare leaves only awakening as an option of escape, so their current situation left only one option: drive. Drive and pray, drive and hope that there is an end to the road, that there will be a light at the end of the tunnel, that everything one does is good for something.
In the end, that is all one can cling to. Leaving prayers and wishes behind, all that is left are the bare bones of hope, and those broke far too easily if one truly thought about it.
In the stillness of the night, shattering cold around them, they took to the tunnels, their faces half-real in the orange lights of those arteries that lead through the Alps. For long, long miles, the flickering lights they passed kept them company; stroboscope flashes that were nearly hypnotizing.
Every mile they left behind them brought them closer to the mountains, closer to the cold.
The Oberalppass, left behind some when in the twilight hours between too late and too early, brought them onto the road to Hospenthal, a smaller city already deeply in the clutches of ice and snow. After so many hours spent driving through the darkness, the pristine white stretches were a shock to their dulled visual senses.
They stopped at a gas station yet again, near Hospenthal. It would be their last station before the long, meandering tunnels that led through the Alps swallowed them again. Nagi and Moriate went inside the gas station's small shop to buy provisions, leaving Schuldig and Farfarello at the car. The two men used the precious time alone to stand close together, their hands entwined. They made a few jokes about the second telepath and Nagi, seeing as how the two had walked over to the gas station shop hand in hand, too, like teenagers in love. Schuldig mused that that was the impression they must present to spectators, an impression that shattered once one knew the potential that slumbered within both their meagre frames. Moriate with her heart of stone, and Nagi with his insecurities and worries; an odder pair the redhead had never seen.
But a pair they were, that much was certain. He had nearly driven them off the road a few hours back upon looking in the rear-view mirror only to find Moriate and Nagi sharing a long, sated kiss.
Schuldig ground his cigarette out under the heel of his boot and stretched. A small lightning of pain shot through him, reminding him that he was not entirely whole. Fingers straying to his hip and the throbbing, albeit apparently healing wound, he wound his other arm around Farfarello's waist and drew his lover in for a kiss of their own. The Irishman' s lips, soft and warm, the only mar the scar in them - but it was not really a mar, was it, more a thing that added to the quality of those lips and made them all the more desirable, at least to Schuldig - took his mind off of their surroundings: the bleak, loveless parking lot of the gas station. There were only a few cars apart from theirs, trucks and the odd family van with skiers strapped onto the roof. Before Farfarello's arms snaking around his waist occupied his every fibre, Schuldig saw, over the shoulder of the Irishman, two cars drive off the road and onto the parking lot, stopping on the other side of it.
Farfarello turned them and leaned back against the side of their car, dragging Schuldig with him. It had been a long time since they had shared so much as a kiss; this one was all the more precious because it might be the last one shared in relative peace before the task of the mountains was to be mastered. He smiled against the redhead's mouth as Schuldig leaned flush against him.
Lips parted, tongues meeting in an intimate dance they knew so well but discovered anew each time they danced it. Schuldig ground his hips against the Irishman's, chuckling as a low growl, more a purring than anything, escaped the other's throat. Farfarello nipped at the redhead's tongue, amber eye burning into green.
Green eyes widened a moment later. Schuldig jerked briefly in the Irishman's arms, his mouth going slack, his arms falling from their clasp around Farfarello's waist. One of his hands came up, going behind his neck. It came back with a small, metallic dart clutched between bony fingers.
'Flabbergasted' would have been the word Farfarello would have used to describe his feelings. Schuldig slowly collapsed in his embrace, legs giving out under the weight of his body. Out of pure reflex, the Irishman hoisted the other up again, mind not comprehending what was happening.
Something passed by his left ear, something fast and deadly. It left warmth in its wake.
Eight people stood on the other side of the parking lot, three of them with weapons in hand. Ordinary people that might have passed as inhabitants from the next town, clad in heavy winter clothes, their faces half-hidden behind shawls and coat scruffs.
For a long moment, neither side moved.
A blinding radiance took the Irishman's sight away, shocking his mind into a total stillness. It covered everything, his thoughts, his feelings, even the weight of Schuldig in his arms. He screamed, his arms flailing, hitting the car behind him. Something hit his shoulder - the familiar impact of a bullet. Dimly aware of shouts and the sound of a door being kicked open, Farfarello went down on his knees, blindly grasping for his lover.
Gunfire echoed across the parking lot.
Gunfire echoed through the small shop, ricocheting around the corners.
Nagi let his bag of groceries fall, staring wide-eyed at Moriate next to him, at the gun in her hand and the small, red hole in the middle of the brow of the man who stood behind the cash register. While he stared, the man fell, vanishing behind the counter, the heavy thud as his body hit the ground adding to the still-lingering echoes. Calmly, Moriate lowered her arm.
"Now, you be a good boy and stay here." Teasingly, she stroked the side of his face and went into his mind without effort, uncoiling what she had knotted together; glazed emptiness took over the place of shock in Nagi's mind as her mental command overruled his own thoughts. "Pick up that bag. We don't want to starve on our way through the Alps, now do we?"
The youth nodded, bending down almost like a robot, his movements erratic und jerky. Moriate nodded, more to herself than anyone.
Then she turned on her heel and walked to the door.
Hunters, that was their name, given to them by the Elders and every gifted and ungifted who ever had had to work with them. Hunters, for they scented their prey's fear and followed it like a bloodhound follows a trail of still warm heart-blood. Some of them were gifted with extraordinary psychic powers; some others had made themselves a name with their fighting abilities. In the end, it did not matter which applied to each hunter; in the end, all that mattered was the death and the destruction they left behind them on their ways across the planet. Deemed legend by those who had never met them, nightmare by those who had met and survived them, the Hunters moved as one; one body, one mind, one collective goal - to wipe out what endangered Eszet.
Eight of them now stood on the parking lot, moving forward with caution. They had been warned about these individuals they were hunting - Schwarz, former members of Eszet, now prey to Eszet's hunters; a group that had enjoyed its own legends before they took the wrong road and steadily made their way towards rebellion. One of them, their supposed leader, was already deceased. Each of these eight had seen pictures of how Bradley Crawford had ended up, pictures taken in a warehouse on the waterfront of Tokyo. Each of these eight knew, were they not careful, they might end up as a photograph among thousands, stacked in the mainframe's hidden archives of members past and gone.
They kept their eyes trained on the two Schwarz members across the parking lot. The redhead, Schuldig, was unconscious from the look of it, his body slumping in the arms of the other, the Irishman. Farfarello, as was his name, was bleeding profusely from a wound in his right shoulder, yet the wound seemed trivial; it went unnoticed, almost, in the Irishman's frenzy to gather the other man to himself and make use of the blade he held clutched in his free hand. He was making wild stabs into the air around him, probably hoping to hit someone by chance.
"Pathetic," one of the hunters said, and yet the man kept his weapon trained on the pathetic creature with the white hair, for he had heard too much about Farfarello to associate 'pathetic' with 'not dangerous'. "Where is that Japanese kid? And the woman?"
To answer the hunters question, they heard the sound of an opening door. Turning as one, they faced the small store, ready to shoot whoever dared to interrupt their task. One of the hunters, an elderly female in a dark beige trench coat, wondered why she had not picked up on the presence sooner; all she had been able to make out when they had driven off the road had been Schuldig and Farfarello's minds.
Weapons were lowered as mouth opened in shock and surprise.
"You!"
Moriate looked at the hunter who addressed her and raised an eyebrow. "Not happy to see me, I guess." She closed the door behind her and walked a few steps towards them, her hands at her sides.
The man, totally forgetting about Farfarello's antics, gaped at the diminutive woman, shaking his head.
"They said you were - "
" - dead?" A small smile stretched her lips and opened them, showing the gap where a tooth was missing. "They were right."
Farfarello froze in his movement as a shrill, agonized scream shattered the otherwise frightening silence around him. His still could not see, his vision blinded by a blanket of white; only here and there he saw darker shapes moving about. At least, he still had Schuldig in a tight grip against his chest. His lover was not moving, but the Irishman could feel a heart beat against his own, furiously, denying whatever whoever had wished to bring down upon them.
The sound that followed the scream defied all description. The Irishman actually found himself wondering for a moment, his mind going through the sounds he had heard during his life, searching for a comparison that was not to be found. It was a wet, squelching sound, much like the sound an overripe fruit makes when it falls to the ground and bursts, the sound of wet cellophane crumbled in a fist. He recognized the other sound that followed: bodies hitting the ground, the liquid splash of blood; the air filled with the scent of metal, rich and going straight to his head. He wished he could see what had happened. Whatever it was, it must have been beautiful.
The sound of a gun hammer being cocked wiped his mind clear of pictures of carnage and replaced it once again with the blindness and the fear for Schuldig.
He listened to Schuldig's heartbeat, stared into the white light, and welcomed the darkness that followed with open arms.
Beep
Beep
Beeeeeeeee -
...Why am I here...?
Somehow, he knew he should know this place. He had been here before, in another time, in another world, in another's dreams or nightmares, he did not care to remember but he knew he would, yes, he would always remember, it was his gift, it was his curse, it was part of him.
He walked around. Everything was hazy, bathed in a milky light his eyes could not penetrate. Shapes and shadows melted out of the irritating fog around him, taunting him with their familiarity - so close, and yet so far. Memory escaped him once again, a fickle beast it was, this knowing, this remembering. There were things and people and places he would never forget no matter how much he wanted to. They came back to him, these memories, in daydreams and half-shaped visions, grazing his mind with gentle fingertips.
Yes, I will remember. Always. If I only have the time.
The landscape was familiar to him, as were the floating shapes that sighed their names too faintly in his ears. Laughing shadows, screaming shadows, dying shadows, all merging into one, and he thought he remembered now. Yes. It came back to him...
The mirror was still splintering, the shards trailing to the unseen ground in slow motion, their jagged edges and surfaces catching the milky light and turning it into something beautiful and otherworldly. He walked towards it, dreamily staring at the nonexistent surroundings. Music. He could hear faint music, Irish music, sweeter than a child's sleepy voice, and sad, so sad, a mourning tune played to whistles and violins. He thought of Farfarello, briefly, more like a reminiscing touch of memory, a hand touching an old black and white photograph without the emotions to supply for an adequate reaction.
Beeeeeeep
Beep
Beep
There was the mirror, and there was also a voice, a female, agitated voice, yelling something about blood loss and a pulse rate in German. He banished the voice from his conscious mind, not wanting to listen to it. It disturbed him, it made him think.
Reaching out, fingers straining to touch the splintering edges, he smiled as the milky light contracted around him, caressing his skin with a thousand unruly fingers.
Beep
Beep
"Hello, Schuldig."
He did not have to turn, knowing who it was standing next to him, spit out by the light. His one hand still reaching out for the glass, he grasped the fingers that slipped into his other hand, squeezing them briefly.
"Will we go through the mirror now?" he asked.
Next to him, Moriate nodded. She was not herself, her image younger this time, childlike. Schuldig looked at her, looked at her soft childish features and meagre frame, and thought that many people would mistake her for a child, in this body, if only they did not see her eyes.
"Yes, we will go through the mirror now."
"And what will we find there?"
"A new world. A better world."
"And what if I don't like it?"
"You will like it."
"And if not?"
"You'll see."
"What?"
"Us."
Moriate stepped forward, her free hand raised, a perfect mirroring of the redhead's stance. Together, they moved, slowly, like dancers under water.
Beep
"You will like the new world. It will be beautiful, and - " beep " - we will rule there."
So close now, nearly there, nearly cutting his skin on the shards. The darkness was there again, lurking behind the edges; but this time it was not threatening, but welcoming, like a save, warm cave, like shelter from the war.
"This - " beep " - was what we were supposed to be, Schuldig. This - " beep " - is our destiny. We will make this world a better place, and - " beep " - everybody will like it in there."
Beep
Beep
The glass of the mirror shivered, the hard surface giving under his fingers as he touched it. It curved inward, as if shying away from his skin.
Beep
Screeching now, the glass bent to its limits, and the mirror gave suddenly, exploding forward in a shower of splinters and shards and particles of light and dust, bulging out to greet him, and there was a face, and he knew that face, and the mouth of that face was open and bloodied, screaming, screaming, screaming his name until his ears threatened to burst and beep what was he doing here, here, of all places?
Schuldig screeched, his arms up to shield his face and neck from the razor-sharp shards, the whistling splinters, his legs moving before he was aware of it.
Moriate, the child, growing, aging, now a young woman again, was sieved by light and glass, her image disappearing in a cloud of skin and blood and a voice beyond all sounds he had ever heard. Old, young, dark, light, everything mixed into one - the mirror drew back upon itself, the seams running together like quicksilver. For one perfectly silent moment, Schuldig stared at Farfarello's face, his lover's face made of glass and darkness and quicksilver. Then, as if turning away from him, the surface of the mirror once again shivered, the Irishman's features disappeared, and Schuldig was staring at glass again.
Beep
And as he stared, a hairline fracture cracked the mirror's surface in half.
Beep
In the upper left corner, shards and splinters began to fall once again.
Beep
Beep
"Doktor, sein Herz! Gott, wir müssen - "
Whatever the nurse had been saying, it was lost in a scream as Farfarello's hand came up and caught her throat, crushing her larynx without effort. The scream died on her lips, her body flung to the side like a rag doll, crashing into medical equipment. The Irishman was up and standing before he knew it, hands seeking a weapon, anything to hurt and kill with, anything to make that dreadful emptiness inside him go away. Light attacked him as he opened his eye; the brief moment of fear of being still blind by whatever the hunters had done to him replaced by the interior of a small, white room and the huddling, shivering form of a man in a white coat.
A doctor? But how -
The man was screaming, clawing at a door, too shocked to understand that he would have to open it before he could get out. There was blood on his coat.
Farfarello looked down at himself. He was naked, his chest and abdomen bloody. His head felt like it was stuffed with cotton. One hand reaching up, he gingerly touched his brow, finding it covered with a bandage.
Where was he?
Where was Schuldig? And Nagi? And Moriate?
"Where am I?"
The man did not answer; instead, he continued his futile attempt to open the door. Farfarello repeated his question twice before it dawned upon him that the doctor most likely did not speak English. That, and his screams would soon bring others in here; others that Farfarello might not win against in his current state.
The Irishman stepped forward and took the man by his hair. Yanking him away from the door, the body much too heavy to follow that abrupt motion, Farfarello listened to the sound of the man's neck breaking; for a moment he had to think of how geese were killed: taken by the neck, their bodies flung around until bones were breaking and a life was ended. So easy. Never thinking twice about it.
He moved about the room like a robot, finding his clothes as a bloodied heap on a chair. His white winter jacket, now a child's mad painting done with a red watercolours, was stiff from the blood that had bled upon it. His blood, Farfarello's Irish blood, spilled in an effort to save his lover's life.
The times he had spilled his blood in order to hurt god seemed trivial in comparison to this.
The Irishman washed the blood off of his body at the small sink next to the only window in the room. His brief glances outside showed him the flat roofs of a town; a village, rather, snow-peaked hills lining the horizon, clouds of smoke rising from chimneys, snowmen and snowwomen dotting the gardens in front of the houses. He could not gauge the time of day, the light outside, milky, grey, made it impossible. It was day. That was all he knew.
But what day? And what town was he looking at, laying there before him in the shelter of the hills, a world unto itself? How much time had passed between the darkness that had swallowed him and the milky light outside?
Automatically, he put the garments on, checking for the blades sewn into the fleecy insides. They were still there, reassuring in their weight.
A drop of blood ran down the side of his face. Farfarello peeled the bandage off, frowning as the pulse that beat behind his eye stagnated briefly to then thunder in his ears. Over his left eyebrow, amid damaged and irritated skin and clotted blood, was a small, inconspicuous wound, the edges stitched in black; obscenely dark against the ashen colour of his skin, there it sat, and there it would leave a scar, one of many, the entrance wound of a bullet meant to kill him, also one of many.
He reached to the back of his head - no exit wound.
Who was stupid enough to fire a weapon from such a short distance - for he had heard the hammer being cocked - and miss?
Farfarello began to laugh. Softly at first, until it rose to a near - hysterical giggling that left him shaking. He stumbled back, away from the mirror, until the small of his back hit the operation table he had risen from no twenty minutes ago. He sat down on the metal surface, both arms clamped around his midsection, laughing until tears ran from his single eye, laughing until the muscles in his face began to feel as if they were going to snap any moment.
God had tried to fuck him over once again.
Farfarello had won this move of the game.
"Isn't it fun to lose, god?"
Stark light, burning into his retinas, imprinting a field of the most pure white on the otherwise blank map of his mind. He turned away from the light, seeking to hide his face in his arms; he could not move them, for some reason, the limbs feeling as if they were no longer a part of his body.
For how long he lay there, curled upon himself, he did not know. Gradually, the whiteness disappeared, giving room and colour to the bare walls of wherever he was. There was a crack in the wall directly in front of him, running from the floor to the ceiling - a simple, uneven crack, coming from age or careless architecture. From his vantage point, it looked like a river. A river on grey; for grey was the wall he was staring it, and grey was the floor the wall stood upon, and grey was the ceiling, his roof from the sky above.
Beneath him, the soft sheets of a bed rustled as he moved his head a fraction to see more of that wall. It turned his attention away from the stretch of concrete and focused him on his current state: he was in a bed, and there were sheets on that bed, if it was a bed and not simply some rags thrown onto the floor. The cloth felt amazingly cool to the skin of his cheek, like satin.
"Hmm. Satin? That tranquilliser got you worse than I thought."
The voice was young but colourless, the echoes of a life lived and a dream lying in shards and splinters on a blood-soaked ground. He listened to it, listened to the voice but not to what it said. Words had lost their meaning. Words always died before everything else died, leaving behind a silence fit to poison the heart.
The insides of his head were moving. Liquid fingers stroked his brain, withdrawing to only poke into another soft place, stirring the dark corners of his sluggish mind. He tried to withstand the invasion but failed, his mental strength seeping out of the places the fingers had touched so gently.
"You know, you nearly got me. When you merged us, you nearly got me. I was not amused. I had to change my plans, and fast."
He wished that young voice would leave him alone to pick up the shards and splinters and put them back together to something resembling himself. There were images and words in his mind, out of place, out of order. A white mountain - streets lit by orange flickers - a car engine humming to life, dying in the screams of dying people...parking lot... Farfarello.
Farfarello.
"Oh, him. Figures you'd think of him now." The young voice changed in tone, becoming something closer to a poison whisper. "Do you miss him?"
'Miss him'?
The insides of his mind contracted, simmering thoughts concentrating on a single image: Farfarello sitting on a bed in an asylum, barefoot, limbs confined in a straight jacket. Laughing. Welcome Darling Queen of Pain...the first time he had laid eyes upon the Irishman, one of his fondest memories.
He moaned as the image was ripped from him, held up to the light and examined from all sides. Cast away afterwards, sinking back into the unruly waters that threatened to overwhelm him, Farfarello's face surfacing briefly to stare at him with insanity gleaming in the molten gold of his single eye. Insanity, and a promise of pain. A promise of death.
A promise of...love?
"Really, Schuldig - " Closer now, the owner of the voice walking towards him and around the bed, a shadow briefly eclipsing the stark light, and Moriate stood in front of him, hands clasped before her belly. " - love? I am amazed to find one as you still believing in that old concept of dependency and dreams."
He moved, lifting his head. A straight jacket. They had put him in a straight jacket. It was almost ironic - one of the items he had once associated with Farfarello now on him.
Mustering what strength he had, Schuldig turned onto his back and stared at the grey ceiling for a long moment. Moriate remained silent. So much was going through his head, but none of it made sense. So many pieces of the puzzle were still lying around, scattered.
"What am I doing here?"
"You are here to help me fulfil my plans, Schuldig."
He snorted, turned his head and stared at her. "Make me."
"Oh, I will make you."
The redhead began to frown. Her mouth had not moved with her last words, nor had her voice sounded in his mind. He became aware of another presence in the room and looked for its source; finding it in the body of an old, bowed woman standing in the open door to the room, Schuldig began to put some of the puzzle pieces into place.
"She said three Elders. Two men, one woman," the telepath said softly, more to himself than to the newcomer at the door.
The old woman in the doorway smiled and shuffled forward, leaned on a walking cane. She had white hair and her face was lined with wrinkles; it was a kind face, and one might easily have mistaken it for a loving grandmother's face. But the eyes that shone out of the wrinkles were anything else but loving. Small, dark, surrounded by frosty lashes, the whites interrupted by broken blood vessels, these were hard and cold eyes that had seen too much, and knew too much. Schuldig calmly watched as the woman painstakingly slow moved across the room.
On the other side of the bed, Moriate's eyes rolled up into her head. She collapsed onto the floor without a sound.
"Ah, poor child." Rusty voice, words papery thin, brittle. "So full of dreams, and yet so disillusioned. She has served me well. My best hunter."
On the floor, Dee Moriate shook once, and then lay still. From his vantage point, Schuldig could not see her; but he could hear her, the miniscule scrapings of her clothes against the concrete ground, her shallow breath.
Having seen Farfarello sitting up in a straight jacket had made it seem an easy task; Schuldig, however, had to struggle quite a bit until he could lean back against the headboard of the bed. He felt weak. Pathetic. He glanced down at the second mindreader, briefly, but he could not see her face, it being obscured by her hair. He looked back at the old woman.
"So, Dee Moriate never existed?"
"Oh, she did, she did. She most likely still does, if enough of her is left in there." The old woman pointed a gnarled finger at the spot where the young woman had been standing moments before.
"Who got sent to Japan? Who was it that I merged with in that warehouse? Was that her, or was it you?"
"It was her. And me. Perhaps even both of us. You will understand in time, don't worry. You see, child, my plan did not exist yet when Tot requested Moriate's presence in Tokyo. I had control over her, then, of course, but then, I have control over each hunter." The old woman arrived at the bed. "We've been waiting for such an opportunity for decades. It teaches patience, such a long wait."
Opportunity? Plan? "You're saying Eszet still is trying to rule the world." Schuldig shook his head, almost amused. "Still lusting after dreams and visions?"
The old woman cackled. She lifted her walking cane and pointed it at him. "So, you know about that, do you? Crawford must have trusted you more than his reports to us said."
"Every gifted knows about that stupid illusion of Eszet's. Rule the world through mental powers. What a joke!"
"Is it? Well, that remains to be seen." Turning, the old woman stopped, her eyes fixed on the floor. "You haven't asked me yet what your place in all this is."
"I guess you'll tell me now."
"Maybe later." She cackled again, the sound merging into a dry cough. "Controlling Moriate has...had its effects on me. We'll talk more, later."
The door shut behind her, leaving Schuldig alone with Moriate. He wriggled around on the bed until he could lean over the edge.
"Wake up, you stupid piece of shit. I've got some questions, and I want answers."
Nothing.
"Hey!"
Nothing.
With an annoyed sigh, Schuldig swung his legs over the edge of the bed. It had been the wrong move. Loosing control over his momentum, he fell out of the bed and landed on the mindreader on the floor, successfully squashing her beneath him.
What he became aware of next was a knee ramming up between his legs.
Cursing her in three languages, Schuldig rolled off of the young woman and curled up, waiting for the stars behind his eyes to stop dancing. When they had, and he felt he could move again without screaming out in pain, he rolled over once again. Moriate still lay on the floor, her face turned towards the ceiling now, her eyes open. She was blinking slowly, her mouth moving without any words coming out.
"Moriate? Hello?"
The young woman's head abruptly moved, watery blue eyes pinning him with murderous intensity.
"You..." It was one word, and it seemed to take all the strength out of her. Her eyes slid shut again.
Schuldig dipped into her mind, travelling along their connection. Her mind was a mess. Weighting his chances, at the same time asking himself why no one stopped him using his ability, the redhead began to carefully put her memory back into order again as best as he could. He was surprised at first, and then stunned, as he discovered how much had changed within the young woman. Her entire mind had a different feel to it. What had that old wench said? 'Controlling Moriate has had its effects on me.' Was the old one a mindreader, too? And if, then how had she controlled a mindreader as strong as Moriate? Over such distances, nonetheless.
And if she had controlled Moriate...then why not control Schuldig as well?
His entire thought process came to a screeching halt as he stumbled over a particularly fresh image in Moriate's mind. Farfarello. Kneeling on concrete, himself cradled in the Irishman's arms. Gun. White hair sprayed with red as Farfarello's head snapped back, hitting the car behind. Sirens. Another car, Nagi slumped in the seat, staring blindly at the sky. The point of view changed, showing himself, Schuldig, in the backseat, unconscious.
Farfarello. Bullet in the head, and now he's dead...frantically, Schuldig searched for the connection he had to the Irishman; this one connection that existed despite Farfarello not being a telepath, this one connection that was worth every pain, every wound in the world.
Gone.
Too shocked to move, too shocked to see, Schuldig missed Moriate opening her eyes again. Instead, he turned his face towards the ceiling and screamed.
Reach the end of your days and look back: was it worth it? Were you happy? Did you do everything you wanted to do, and did you tell everyone how much you love them? Does it matter? Does anything matter?
"Bitte...ich habe Frau und Kinder...bitte tun Sie das nicht..."
Farfarello snarled at the man in the driver's seat, adding one more shallow cut to an already bleeding neck.
"Finsteraarhorn," he repeated, for the tenth time in as many minutes. "Drive."
The man whimpered, but did as he was told.
The car vanished into a tunnel.
One room, four corners. Two of them occupied. Stretched between them, silence. A bed standing at one wall, the sheets rumpled.
In one corner sat a child, dreamily staring at her hands. In the other sat a redhead, eyes empty.
The door opened. A guard, a faceless stranger, bringing in a tray. It was deposited on the bed. The door clicked shut again.
The dreaming child looked up. "Are you hungry?"
The question fell on deaf ears and a deafer mind.
Shrugging, the dreaming child stood and walked over to the bed. Soup. Plastic containers and no spoons. She looked at the man in the straight jacket and wondered how he was supposed to eat with his arms crossed over his chest.
A brief flash of memory, cold air of the waterfront, rats, the faraway creaking of old wood and rusty metal. She stumbled back until she hit the wall and gasped. Fingers in her head, mercilessly dragging that memory back to the surface, and through it all a pair of cold green eyes, staring at her from across the room now, searing right into her.
"Stop it! That hurts!"
Another flash of memory: the murky, stinking waters of a tunnel, rushing around her. She was sitting on a plank, listening to a rough yet melodious voice telling her something. Laced through it all a feeling she could not describe, something that hurt and soothed at the same time, something terrible and wonderful.
Schuldig, pressed into his corner of misery, watched with narrowed eyes how Moriate shook her head and then took one of the blue plastic containers from the tray. She wandered back to her spot and sat down cross-legged, fingers clamped tightly around the source of warmth in her hands. It was cold in this cell, this room, this personal hell for two; a honeymoon suite for two telepaths. One, suffering the loss of love, the loss of his freedom, the other suffering the loss of herself.
The bitter thought that at least Moriate seemed not aware of her loss made Schuldig growl deep in his throat. He had resurrected her memory as best as he could, but had come upon something he could only describe as a barrier: an invisible wall in the telepath's mind which prevented him from looking at what was behind it. He guessed the old woman had set it up.
She had come to visit them twice, this old woman. Both times, she had stood in the doorway and smiled, and both times neither the occupants of the cell nor the visitor of the cell had said a word. Schuldig had totally lost his sense of time - the light was always on, there were no windows, and the guards ignored him when he asked a question. Oddly enough, even the guards' minds were blank - clean of any individual thoughts. Clean of memory. Clean of a sense of self.
He tried asking them twice, and then chose to ignore them the way they ignored him and Moriate. These guards were robots. Created to function for whatever duties they had been chosen, left with enough awareness so they would not walk into the next wall or forget to breathe.
Robots.
This was the new world?
This was what he was supposed to like, supposed to help create?
Robots?
He twitched, ramming a blade of thought against the wall in Moriate's mind again. Robots. With Eszet at the control buttons and Eszet's pawns holding the whips to make the robots work.
The container fell from Moriate's suddenly limp fingers, her body unable to register the pain as the hot liquid inside spilled over her legs. Shakily, she brought her hands up, cradling her head. Static whispers in her mind, telling her things she did not want to know and had never known as far as she was aware of them.
What are you? Schuldig had caught the thought. You're nothing but a puppet, unable to cut the string. Perhaps being a robot isn't such a bad idea for some of us...
Watching her shudder, Schuldig began to ask himself how the old woman, of whom he still did not know the name, had controlled Moriate - and how she was controlling the rest of the hunters. So far, only one of the Elders had shown up, he could only guess what the other two were doing.
His mind flitted away from the thought. He did not really want to know. He wanted to curl up again and forget he had ever existed. Briefly, he thought of Nagi. He couldn't help but smirk as he asked himself how the telekinetic would react if he saw Moriate in her current state.
"He was making a phone call."
Schuldig looked up. Moriate, or what was left of her, sat still as a statue, her hands limp in her lap, fingers gliding over the soaked material of her pants. Her head was leaned back against the wall, eyes trained on the ceiling.
"Who was making a phone call?" Schuldig asked, forgetting for a moment that he would have rather killed her than ever speak to her again two minutes ago.
"Naoe was making a phone call. He did go to the bank, too, but only after that...phone...call."
Eyes rolling back into her head, and she fell onto her side, mouth slack.
Schuldig cursed.
Inside his head, a knot burst open, colours flaring to life again. It was only a brief touch, barely there, a second's whisper of awareness through the connection he had forced upon the mindreader who lay like a corpse on the other side of the room.
The mind that touched his was filled with rage. He was too perplexed to react, the contact gone before he could answer it.
A shiver ran over him.
The old woman, or Moriate - which of the two had answered his call?
Outside of the cell, someone walked down the corridor, gently rapped their knuckles against the door, and walked on. Footsteps echoed.
The young woman's body began to move. Inch by inch, it began to move, like a worm, crawling forward without the help of hands or legs.
"Control...by becoming you..."
Closer now, and Schuldig was overcome by the urge to move away. The words he heard sounded pressed, the mouth that uttered them half-open still, lips splitting as they dragged against the concrete floor.
"Slips into your...mind...like a virus...like...a...virus..."
"Bitte...ich habe...blahblah" - "Please..I have a wife and children...please don't do that."