Witch Hunter Robin Fan Fiction ❯ A Long Night ❯ Alone ( Chapter 2 )

Alone

 

Looking up a few hours later, Michael sighed. He was alone now. The moon had risen outside and there was silence save for the gentle whirring of his computer. He leaned back on his chair, looking around at the deserted office. These nights were the worst. Once, he had lived for the night time, spending all night dancing through the Internet, accessing people, places, information, walking freely. Now, nights were when he was alone, completely alone. He could no longer escape to the Net, it was a twisted pleasure, swimming through information as he had always done, but this time, with his gift bound to serve another. Unable to choose where he moved, instead he was constantly searching for information to aid the Hunt, their slave, in real life and in the cyber world. He enjoyed the work for the most part, but that did not change the frustration of losing his freedom within the only place which had ever provided him with acceptance and power, the Net.

 

He looked at the large pile of work in front of him, requests from the STN-J team for information, details, searches, etc. Tonight, though, he had no motivation to complete any of it. He burned with a deeper frustration, and, turning to his computer, he opened not the STN-J search pages he had created, but a normal Net search engine. Typing with his usual confidence, he entered several names into the search box. Then, he paused, his finger hovering over the “enter” key. The name inside the box was that of a school, his old school. Sighing, he hit enter, and then clicked the first available link. Within a fraction of a second, STN-J's high speed Internet link had obtained the pages, and they were sat on the large screen in front of him. “Welcome to Central High School” read the banner across the top of the page, below it, photos and links to brightly coloured pages. He ignored the words, but examined the pictures closely.

 

A twisted, ironic smile came to his lips. He had never really enjoyed high school, he had always been the smart, gawky kid who sat at the back, seemingly ignoring everything but still obtaining full marks on tests. He had been desperate to leave, to take advantage of the world promised by the Internet, sick of jumping through hoops set up by other people, people who feared his intelligence and who tried to crush him. Now, in a twist of fate, he was looking through the pages of his school's website as a comfort. It was full of pictures of people he had once known, it would have been his graduation this year had fate not intervened, and the pictures of his ex-classmates, beaming with delight as they stood in the courtyard of the school, bathed in warm summer sunshine, filled him with a jealousy that made him gasp. He wondered if any of them remembered the boy who was missing, who had simply not arrived for school one Monday morning. Did Noriko remember the quiet boy who had sat gazing at her, looking away whenever she turned to glance at him? The boy who did her homework for her, and was rewarded by hurtful comments and nasty, bitchy giggling about his Western name and appearance?

 

He doubted it. He had discovered early on in his “career” at STN-J that all traces of his previous life had been erased by the “system.” There had been a picture of him on this website, once. Standing with his class, on their first day of high school, dressed it that horrible militaristic uniform, scowling, even then, with reluctance, hiding at the back where he was barely visible. That picture was still there, brought to prominence on the site now, as his classmates graduated. He was missing from it, however. Though he had tried to hide from the picture at the time, he had always been visible on it, a head poking through. Now that face was gone, and there was no trace it had ever been there, someone had done a great job on the image. Immediately after his capture, he had done some looking, finding out what had happened to him in “the real world”, holding on to the hope that someone would come looking for him, though it was unlikely. He remembered that horrible, horrible feeling when he had read the police reports which had described how he had died resisting arrest, throwing himself in front of traffic. There had been a body and everything. His parents had been told that he had been working for a drug trafficking gang, his school had been so terrified at the mention of drugs that they had complied straight away with the request to forward his records and delete all record of his existence. There was little record anywhere of the boy who had been born a month after his parents had moved to Japan.

 

He sat, looking at the pictures for a long time, trying to organise the tangle of emotions within him. He felt like a thirsty man in the middle of the ocean, compelled to drink seawater in a desperate attempt to quench his thirst, but feeling the burning salt with each mouthful, slowly poisoning him. He knew they would not be looking for him. He had always been forced into keeping a distance from his classmates, both by his strange name and appearance, and by his parents' fighting and arguing. His mother had cried any time he spoke Japanese at home, and made constant comments about how she was losing him to “them,” to this alien culture she had been forced to move into by her husband's job. He was unable to bring friends home, isolated from their social activities and struggled to make friends and socialise. His father, out of guilt, had brought him the computer at the age of seven, and he had learned fast, building his own at the age of ten, learning ways through the internet, helped by the fact he was bilingual. He remembered nights spent playing Counter Strike with his clan, feeling accepted for his skill. He missed those days, there was no gaming allowed here, nothing to break the monotony of searching, typing, working, then remembering, hurting and sleeping.

 

Shaking his head, he pushed away from the desk, escaping the pictures on the screen. Aware suddenly of how cold he was, he stood up, getting the blood back into his arms and legs. The full moon stared down at him from the other side of the glass window, mocking him or comforting him, he could not tell. He remembered staring at the moon in another place, at another time, when he was no longer able to concentrate on his computer at home, when the volume switch on his headphones would go no higher, he would stand by his window, gazing at the moon, listening to the sound of his parents screaming abuse at each other in the living room below. At least here it was silent, he had craved silence for so long before, but, he thought, smiling wryly, after two years of night time silence, it would be good to have noise again, to walk through the streets listening to the hubbub of life around him. He shook his head again, that was unlikely now. He knew too much for STN to ever let him go.