The Deaths: Legend chapter 2 part I
Author: MeyRevived
Betas and proofreaders: compli_cait , lumina17 and reitsch.
Synopsis: Cast into an alien world they did not choose to come to, a small human community struggles to survive. With the help of a group of talented brave men and women, they sustain, as struggles from within only add to dangers which seem to add up around them as if for some spectator's pleasure.
Previous chapters:
Chapter 1
Disclaimer: The characters and events of the manga series X/1999, Cowboy Bebop and Hellsing and the television series Doctor Who were not my creation, though I have made several adjustments with them for plot and explanations' sake. I make no profit from publishing this fic.
Author's Thanks: To the readers of the more fanfiction-centered early version of this story. For one of this story's biggest fan and proofreader, lumina17, for my long time friend and proofreader, compli_cait, and to the new and lovely beta Nat-Eddie-Baby (^_~), a.k.a reitsch. None of this will be here without you guys.
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Chapter 2 - Intruder
A month passed in the world where the Earth battled with its humans and the humans' leader disappeared. With Kamui gone, the battle stopped as the cogs of Destiny's game with the Earth ground to a halt.
The warriors on Earth's side, almost all of them grown men with day jobs and responsibilities, resumed their lives as they were before the year 1999 and its events unfolded on them.
The warriors of the humans' side, however, were mostly children in their teens and a lot less easy to distract from something as shocking as Kamui's disappearance. For the moment they tried distracting themselves, focusing on their new school in Tokyo and to the independent lives outside the temples and shrines where they grew up, though the question of Kamui - and their destiny - still clung to their minds.
The two adult members of the humans' warriors, had busy lives to return to, but also the clarity and wisdom to ponder deeper over Kamui's issue. They worried ever so much more than the younger members.
Then, one sunny day, Kamui appeared again.
He didn't know it, but he was the only one to ever make it out of the Lost Dimension and back into his own world.
As he lay on the grass above the underground chamber from where he was taken a month ago (in this world, but almost six months ago in the Lost Dimension), the memories of his out worldly experiences started fading away, like colors in the sunlight, leaving behind them a faint anxiety at the harshness of the sun's ray beating down on him.
He shaded his face, blinking confusedly, and tried to remember how he had gotten here; for now he didn't even remember his own name. Sitting up, he reached for a sword strapped diagonally to his back, and pulled it before him. He ran his slim fingers down the long flat body and felt the carved figures of square letters decorating the swords spine.
As the sun caught the body of the sword and flashed Kamui with light, so did memories of his life here, and how he came to be with this sword; his mother fleeing Tokyo after their neighbor's mother's mysterious death, his psychokinetic powers blooming in his small growing body, his mother burning with his house in Okinawa commanding him with her last words to come back here to Tokyo to get hold of the sword.
His fingers twitched the sword loose as he stared around at the view before him; a lush green campus, distant skyscrapers and an endless rug of buildings and roads stretching in all directions. Now he remembered what happened when he came to Tokyo; his two beloved neighbors gone for good - Kotori dying, Fuma changing - and the talks of the Battle of the Apocalypse between humanity and nature, for the earth's sake.
Ah yes, Kamui blinked away the last mists of amnesia and confusion, he was supposed to seal this sword here in the campus and go defend Tokyo from the Dragons of Earth, the warriors of nature, with his Dragons of Heaven, warriors of humanity. He cringed and ran his fingers through his untamed coal bangs; how on earth did he end up living in a tacky comic book plot?!
Finally climbing to his feet, feeling groggy, he began making his way towards one of the campus' gates as best he remembered it; it was the only place save for the campus' hospital he remembered being in and he didn't want to go there. The only times he spent in this campus were sorrowful days of recovering the injuries Fuma gave him, while mourning Kotori's death, so Kamui kept his head down in case he cast his eyes on a site that brought him painful memories.
Dressed as he was, with a long dramatic black cape and a shirt too small for him and carrying a sword almost his size, Kamui might have looked to the campus' students as if he was on his way to, or from the Clamp Campus Theater Club; but he still attracted strange and amused stares.
One pair of eyes, however, looked on him with recognition and delight. "Kamui…." the Shingon Buddhism monk from the temple of Koyasan dressed in the casual street wear of the average university sophomore, turned around to follow the slim dark figure passing him by. In the short few months since he arrived in Tokyo, Arisugawa Sorata's eyes became adjusted to his leader's features and were now telling him that none other than Kamui could possibly run around with that teenage guilt-and-anger-ridden hunch of the shoulders, "Kamui!!"
The boy stopped, recognizing the high pitched yelp of joy and that half screeching voice.
"It's you? It is you, isn't it?" the monk was at the boy's side, arching his back to try and catch a glimpse at the small pale face to see if the eyes held a silencing glare or an awkward miserable 'get me out of here' look (the only two expressions Sorata ever induced in Kamui). Instead, the boy looked up at him, scanning his face with wonder.
"Sorata, Arisugawa Sorata…of Koyasan…" the boy mumbled.
That took Sorata aback a bit, and as his nature depicted it, he spoke his thoughts rather than keep them to himself, "You remember that? I never thought you listened to me long enough to notice, you always seemed to tune me out after a while, I always thought it's kinda rude but you do have that teenage angst look, so I thought…."
"It is you. Well…I'm back."
"I was right, wasn't I?"
Kamui blinked, "About what?"
"Never mind. Hey, you're back!! You're back, come here."
"No, no…" there was no escaping Arisugawa Sorata's friendly bear hug when he was in full steam. "If I'm back then….the battle is back on….isn't it?" Kamui's solemn voice untangled him from Sorata's arms, at last.
The monk stared down at the boy too frail looking and too young to bare the burden of humanity's destiny on his shoulder, "I'm afraid so…I think…the Dragons of Earth haven't tried doing anything while you were gone; I guess their dreamseer told them the Battle stopped, just like Hinoto did to us when you went bye-bye and we asked her what was going on."
"Hinoto…" Kamui's mind wondered. There was a midget of a woman, blind, deaf and dumb, in a basement under Japan's parliament building, who was able to dream about the future and predict what was to come.
She is the one who contacted the heads of the shrines and temples from which Kamui's warriors came and called together humanity's weapons to battle.
Never raised around the occult or aware that 'Destiny' was anything beyond a tacky phrase for daytime soaps or teenage fantasy books, Kamui was very rude to Lady Hinoto when first they met. Those were troubled times for Kamui, as he was struggling to get a hold of life back in Tokyo, alone without a mother, to comprehend her death and try to make contact again with his beloved Kotori and Fuma.
Must not think about that now, must not think of Fuma or Kotori.
"How come Hinoto couldn't see me going?" the snappy bitter sharpness filled Kamui's eyes and made Sorata weary.
"Uh…that's a good question, actually."
"I don't want to talk to Hinoto." Kamui started walking away towards his original destination; to the gate, out of the campus, back to his rented one-room apartment in the downtown Tokyo slums, but Sorata stopped him.
"Eh, I think we should." He laid his large palm on Kamui's narrow shoulder.
"I want to go to sleep." There was a threat laced in the boy's voice that said 'if you won't let me go, I'll blow something up'.
Kamui's been like that in his first few days back in Tokyo; kicking and fighting everything and everyone he came across, save for Fuma and Kotori, and remembering those days made Sorata seriously fretting for the lives of the innocent students around them. "We moved here, to the campus, Kamui, all of us. Missy and Yuzuriha-chan and I, we moved to the students' dorms and have an apartment of our own. It's lovely; it's got a kitchen and a living room and all the rooms are furnished really well." Kamui took a step forward, "There's a room for you, too, Kamui. We all moved in there."
For Kamui, the sky was closing down on him slowly, like a trap ceiling in a cheap Hollywood film about adventurous grave robbers. All the young Dragons of Heaven moved to Clamp Campus, where the sword will also be hidden, and then battle can continue.
They were moving them there because they're too vulnerable. No, because he's too vulnerable, and needs the constant watch and attention of a bunch of kids like him whom he never met and never liked…except for Sorata, to whom he sort of warmed up to a little and was certainly liking better now after a long and confusing departure, the events of which he doesn't even remember.
Still, the sting of the decision to move him somewhere safe left a bitter taste in Kamui's mouth; had he been stronger he wouldn't need protection, had he been stronger Kotori would have been alive now and Fuma…Fuma would still be himself.
His head sunk in dark thoughts; Kamui let Sorata lead him to his new apartment and new life.
As soon as Kamui slid shut the door of his new Clamp Campus room, he locked behind him the memory of his body sinking into a liquid-like floor, the disturbing void of his memories and waking up to find himself back in Clamp Campus.
He began a new life, in a new place, once more; school, patrol in Tokyo, and long cold nights mourning for his lost neighbors and childhood friends - Kotori and Fuma.
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A gasp echoed in a huge freezing hall below Tokyo metropolitan government building where one of the mayor's seemingly small secretaries created a headquarters and a haven for the Dragons of Earth.
Sister of Lady Hinoto, Kanoe was a weak dreemseer capable only of looking into her sibling's dreams. Like her sister, she was equally appalled and confused when no dream warned them of the Dragons of Heaven's Kamui disappearing. Her annoyance grew even worse as Kakoyou; a weakly, sickly waif of a man her leader fetched from a hotel where his MP father locked him for life, yet capable of walking through dreams and seeing the future, was warned that Kamui would disappear.
Kakyou was somehow able to reach for the life-support equipment around him and shake it weakly enough to attract attention from Kanoe. Then, with a cracked dry voice, he whispered he saw a sweet woman in a field of white flowers and pink skies tell him Kamui would disappear. The boy did, for their leader's sword; a twin of Kamui's sword, became powerless.
A month later the metallic, creaking noise of Kakyou's call for attention rang through the corridors to Kanoe's ears, waking her from her sleepy listless boredom with a gasp.
She shot off her chair, nearly spraining her ankle as her needle-like high heels slid dangerously on the smooth marble floor, and shot off to Kakyou's room.
Their leader was there, tall, dark, broad and ominous as a heavily cast sky. "Kamui of the Dragons of Heaven has returned." His voice boomed as he pulled his head out of the thin canopy veils around Kakyou's sickbed.
The frail dreamseer's arm was still rattling the little trolley of gauze pads and syringes; the dream's message was not over. "I-I think he still has something to say…" Kanoe flashed a charming, stark bleach smile against her dark red lipstick.
"The Battle resumes." The voice of the young man once named Monou Fuma and now leader of the Dragons of Earth fell into graveness as he brushed past Kanoe, "Call together the Harbingers; the city must fall at last."
As soon as he left the room, Kanoe allowed her obedient Office Lady mask fall, "Ugh, read too much Tolkien as a child, have you?" she cast a pitying glance at Kakyou who lay as pale and withered as his white bed sheets and was almost out of energy, rattling the medical trolley. His helplessness reminded Kanoe of her own sister and how the world became cut off to her as her senses crippled to make her a better dreamseer; her anger at Hinoto's cruel fate slithered into contempt at Kakyou's misery and she stormed out of the room too.
Stomping her way from one end of the chain of underground rooms to the other, Kanoe neared the room, which spread the bone chilling air through the network; Beast's room, and Igarashi Satsuki's room too.
Satsuki Igarashi was a young girl, who was capable of talking to computers like no one could. Chords and cables from the machines simply plugged themselves into the girl's flesh, rendering her limp and seemingly lifeless, as if she was now another monitor or a keyboard. But her mind logged into the network of software and screens and with the internet's power, other computers were Satsuki's oyster whenever she pleased it.
When Kanoe found her she was a tool of the government and had since then, ran away. Now, with Kanoe's help, she was fulfilling her real destiny in life; a Dragon of Earth using a massive monster-sized computer she built, which could make the electricity, telephone and television cables in the ground turn streets into canyons.
Satsuki was also capable of sending electronic messages with a flick of her finger; it took only that in the technologically obsessed Japan to inform the Dragons of Earth of the new situation. Everyone had a cell phone or a beeper these days.
Standing in the freezing room was a tall handsome man with outstanding blond hair who beamed sweetly and seductively at Kaone, "News from the front?"
"The battle is on again, Kakoyou saw it." Kanoe snarled, impatient now for the man's Don Juan games, "And he's all about doom again."
Kigai Yuuto's face dropped the smooth smirk, "Oh? You used to want this battle to happen."
"I used to not think of you getting killed." Her back was to him but he could see she was saying it through her teeth; her pride flaring defensively in the presence of the young girl seated on the huge computer, Yuuto's latest flirtation prey.
"You mean that after all this time, somewhere in that ample frozen chest of yours you had a lady's heart, a real lady's heart?"
She smoldered his soft giggle with a deathly glare.
"The Sakurazukamori received my message, Shiyu-san left his cell phone and beeper in his barracks." Satsuki's distant voice loomed down on them like the cold air from the conditioning vents.
"Ah, the technophobic tree hugger strikes again." Yuuto beamed, arching himself at Kanoe to try and melt her cold hard jealous anger.
"Go and tell Him to send Nataku and find that great big oaf." She spat, looking away from him and folding her arms on her large soft chest.
"Aww, why me?"
She let the freezing silence be her second command and Yuuto shuffled out of the room, until the very last minute trying to impose his fake puppyish misery to coax some sweetness out of her.
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