Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction ❯ Coming Home ❯ Coming Home ( Chapter 1 )

1

When the music stops, the rest is silence.

Vertigo...free-fall...cold...

Mother...!

Confusion gave way to comprehension with the maddening slowness of heavy traffic. I gagged on a mixture of saltwater and air: not the breathless trauma of birth, but a rebirth from the womb of the sea. Retching sounds resolved slowly to be from my own tortured lungs. My head hurt; each spasm brought a fresh wave of agony, turning my vision to white.

White. Weiß. Jesus...

A warm, strong hand gripped my shoulder, tried to lift me from the clinging sand. It was not a familiar touch, but then again, no touch was. Nothing was familiar at the moment but breathing, and that only slightly.

"Schuldig, you have to get up."

The voice, I knew that voice. It was softer than usual, rough around the edges and carrying so much emotion in those few words I felt my shields slam into place against the onslaught. My head felt like it was going to explode.

I pushed my hands down, my back arched up, and my face came away from the imprint it had left in the sand. The gentle and strong touch remained on my shoulder, growing more insistent.

"Come on, get up. We have to get out of here."

The moments between the sand and standing did not exist. The world flashed into color and back into black and white. Black...black hair, tangled, wet and coated with sand. White...white shirt, ruined suit, clinging to a body that was starting to tremble with shock. Still his hand remained firm upon my shoulder, not allowing me to fall.

I looked into his eyes. His glasses were gone, washed away to the eternity of the ocean. Washed away with all our fears, perhaps? All our sins? Our dreams?

I allowed Crawford to steer me toward a tiny beach house. We went unseen, but it was only a matter of time before rescue workers and the curious descended upon us like locusts. Something wasn't right.

"Nagi!" The name clawed its way from my throat, and I struggled weakly against Crawford's insistent grasp.

"We'll go back and find him, Schuldig. But first we need a place to regroup." He looked worried, a rare thing for him.

I watched as he drew the shutters and made his way through the two-room cabin. Cabin? Hell, it was a fisherman's shanty and stank of fish. Just the place for human flotsam judged too small and thrown back by the sea. That absurdity brought wild laughter up and out of me like vomit. Each manic bray jolted my head, and light flashed behind my eyes. The floor floated up beneath me.

"Schuldig!" Crawford saw me keel over and cried my name, hurrying to my side.

My hands could not inflict enough pressure on my head to stop the pain inside, but the damn thing wouldn't just get it over with and pop. I tasted wet salt on my lips, and realized I was crying.

Crawford knelt in front of me and gazed into my face as though trying to divine a way out of our situation by the pattern of my tears. Strong hands cupped my face, brushing the tears away with astounding gentleness. I looked into his eyes and for the first time saw a man there, a real human man with regrets and fear in his deep, dark soul.

"We'll find them, Schuldig. Trust me to know when to look."

He did not say whether we would find them alive.

We probably stayed there only a few minutes, long enough for my breathing to even out and my headache to recede a few millimeters, before he announced it was time to go back to the shoreline. Amazingly enough no one had yet come to investigate the tower's collapse. Evidently the power that was Esset had ensured that we would not be immediately disturbed, even under circumstances such as these.

Crawford turned left, I turned right. The wet sand sucked at my bare feet as though tasting me and debating whether to swallow. For a moment I wondered why my shoes were gone, while Crawford's were not. Apparently loafers are less seaworthy than oxfords. I reached up to push dank strands from my face and noticed that my hand was bloody. That's right, I remembered: I had been fighting...

I heard a weak and windy cough. Dropping my reverie, I hurried to find its source.

The smallest Weiß lay face down in the sand, moving with the slowness of a sleeper trying to wake from a nightmare. He struggled to pull himself through the sand by his forearms, his legs dragging limply behind him.

I paused only a moment; he was not my enemy, never truly had been, but until my own team was safe I could not afford the distraction. He was alive; that was enough. I moved on.

Not far from the kitten, two other figures lay unmoving. A chill coiled itself at the base of my spine: Kudou's long coat encased his slender form like a waterlogged coffin, and loops of razor wire decorated his neck in an obscene mockery of jewelry. I couldn't force myself away; I had to know.

Kudou looked like he was sleeping, his face turned up to the sky and his eyes closed in a care-free mask. As I approached, I feared the worst. But no, he was breathing. Thank God. Beads of fresh blood seeped from his throat where the wire had cut its master. I knelt and reached out my hand, likewise cut and stained by that cruel weapon, and loosened the wire a little more. I let my fingertips linger on his throat a moment as I contemplated what might have been. I stopped short of kissing his parted lips and forced myself to my feet.

The other man, Fujimiya, lay sprawled on his belly, katana just beyond his fingertips as though he had finally let go in exhaustion. He must have cut the wire; by the look of things, he had dragged his teammate to shore and then collapsed. It was a miracle neither man had drowned. His back moved with his breathing, so I did not linger. They were not what I was searching for, though I would never deny my relief at seeing at least one of them alive.

::Schuldig, take cover, now.:: Crawford's mental voice held no clue, only command. I dived beneath a piece of wreckage.

A low-flying helicopter cruised by. I didn't dare look. The moment its tone shifted, signaling distance, I got up and ran. Weiß was waking; I did not want them to know I had survived. I don't know why, but it seemed important that they not know. Not until we had Nagi, anyway.

I didn't hold any hope for finding Farfarello alive. I had felt him die.

Tears threatened, but I fought them down. My head still hurt worse than any practice session at Rosenkreuz, and crying would only make it unbearable.

Another shape in the sand, too big to be Nagi. If it were Farf, at least I'd know...

A powerfully built old man lay in the sand, blood washed from his breast, mouth slack in death. Disgust rolled through me. Without really thinking about it, I reached down and grabbed him by the feet and dragged him back to the water, pushing him into the current. I watched him go out and sink. I couldn't resist the urge, so I spat after him, then scrubbed my hands with water and fresh sand. I had touched the corpse of an Elder of Esset. Gross.

Time was running out. I worked past the pain and sent my thoughts out searching. And they found something.

I followed them as fast as I could.

I almost missed him. The tiny figure lay curled, half-buried in the sand. Strands of seaweed clung to his hair and face as though the sea had been reluctant to let him go. My heart skipped painfully in my chest as I skidded to a halt and knelt at his side.

He wasn't breathing.

"Oh, no you don't, kiddo," I muttered as my hands flipped him onto his belly in the sand and pushed water from his lungs with unpracticed vigor. I didn't care if I broke a rib, so long as he started breathing again. "Don't you dare fucking die on me!"

Water poured from his mouth. I pushed a couple more times, then flipped him over again. My left hand flew to his nose, the right pried his lips apart then rested sensitive fingertips against his throat. I lowered my mouth to his and breathed for him, counting the moments.

::Schuldig, come back. I found Farfarello.::

::I FOUND NAGI!:: I screamed back at him, my thoughts too loud even for me. Panic wavered near the edge of my sight, or perhaps it was just lightheadedness from breathing all my air into another human being. Maybe it was just pain.

A tiny sound, something between a gag and a whimper, then the frantic rhythm of a near-dead heartbeat fluttered against my fingertips.

I sat back and breathed for myself again. He looked smaller than he was, lying there like that, all wet and tempest tossed. He reminded me of some kind of changeling, born of no mortal woman. This tiny boy had defeated the Elder, and very likely saved our lives. Careful as though he were made of spun glass, I picked Nagi up and carried him back to the cabin.

Crawford met me at the door. He looked exhausted and hurt. He must have dragged Farfarello back all by himself.

Reaching out to take the boy from me, he said, "Footprints, Schuldig."

Shit.

I eased Nagi into Crawford's arms and sprinted out, looking for something to drag across the sand. I found a branch that wasn't too bulky and set out, following Crawford's too-clear trail leftward, then returning to my own tracks in the opposite direction.

On my way back toward the shack, I saw that the smallest Weiß had dragged himself closer to the water's edge, where he cradled the unmoving form of the clawed assassin. As though he felt my gaze, the boy looked right at me. His eyes were too dark, pupils dilated with shock, most likely. The angle of his legs didn't look right. Still, he had managed to cross the distance from where he had washed up to the side of his stricken teammate.

I don't know why, but I reached out my mind to the agent who had fought Farfarello. The young man with the claws was not dead, though he was terribly injured. There was nothing I could do; I couldn't even help my own team. But my ears tuned in to the approaching roar of vehicles, presumably called by the red-haired vixen.

The kitten stared at me, all hate and anger washed away by sorrow and pain. I spoke into his mind, not caring that it hurt me to do so. ::He's alive. So are the others. They're about twenty meters further down, well above the tide line.::

He blinked, then nodded and mouthed the word arigato.

I returned to the shack without a backward glance. I knew he would keep my trust, though why I could not say.

A/N: If you are interested in my author's notes, soundtrack and such for this story, please visit www.hopeforlorn.net. You will find my story there (under GuiltyRed) along with my other fictions and the fictions of many other great authors. Also, I tend to post there first before I post anything here, just in case you are interested.