Author's Note: This is set between episodes 46 and 47 of Gaim, as Akira deals with Kouta's disappearance and Zawame rebuilds. It was written for bighead98, who requested Akira dealing with Kouta's departure from Earth.
Rebuilding Hope
She looks for him among the dead.
She checks the living first, of course. Akira is Kouta's sister in more than one way, and she starts her search among the handful of survivors that the SDF pulls out of the ruins after the hole in the sky sucks away all the monsters. She is able to give them Zack's name—his first name, at least, but any name is better to have on the charts than the blank emptiness that stares from the files of those in the beds next to him.
She is glad he survived. He seemed a brave and honorable young man, from what little she was able to get to know him. Different than the brash, over-confident almost-bully that she vaguely remembers Kouta describing to her months ago, when Kouta wobbled between wanting to be a part of the dancers' world and wanting to grow up in an instant, but who wouldn't be different after facing a war and the end of the world?
A war in which Zack was willing to risk his life, to betray a man he trusted and respected because that man had made terrible decisions.
The war turned Zack from a boy into a good man, a man who will maybe, hopefully, survive the process.
It wasn't so kind to others, and she goes looking for her brother's corpse among the dead.
Instead she identifies Kaitou's corpse.
She doesn't know if someone else will be by to confirm it. She doesn't know who Kaitou lived with, whether they will be back to join the tired, quiet procession wending its way through the chilled warehouse full of corpses. His parents are dead, she thinks, if she is remembering the right friend that Kouta talked about.
Kaitou's parents are dead, and his guardians are gone, and he died a monster, and she doesn't want to keep walking down the line.
She sits by Kaitou's body after they mark it—KUMON KAITOU, in big block letters, a tag attached to his wrist and a tag attached to the body bag that holds him. She stares at him, at the hole ripped in his gut, at the pale skin that looks human again in death, and tears begin trickling unbidden from her eyes.
Tell the others I'll take care of Kaitou and Zack.
He'd been so confident. He'd been so sure. He'd been so strong, even as his voice broke, telling her that he brought the loss of his humanity upon himself by wishing to grow up. Wishing to become something more, something different, someone new.
"You idiot." She snarls the words down at Kaitou's body, tears choking her voice. "You absolute idiot. How could you do this to him? To yourself? Could you really see no future but death? Could you really see no hope except through destruction?"
She can't speak for over a minute, her face buried in her hands. She is not the only one sobbing. There are others crying in the warehouse—a woman's voice, keening a name over and over, her grief making it unintelligible; a man screaming no over and over, as though that negation could change what he has found; a child's voice crying brother, sister, and she can't bring herself to look towards that sound. She does not want to see what grief is there.
"Was this what you wanted, Kaitou?" She sinks to her knees by the body, breathing shallowly through her mouth. In another day or so they will have to find another place to store the unidentified bodies, somewhere colder to stop the creep of rot. "Was this all you could imagine? Was this... all we let you imagine?"
The corpse, the boy-man, the child who broke cold when Kouta grew strong as pressures they shouldn't have had to face bore down on them, doesn't say anything. He said all he had to say by arriving here, gutted by a sword and empty, killed by a man who respected and cared about him.
A man she needs to find, still, and she answers her own question as she forces herself back to her feet, shivering in the cold air.
No, they did not leave only grief and loss for their children—at least not all their children. Kouta is proof of that; Zack is proof of that; Rat and Rica are proof of that; Jounouchi is proof of that.
She is proof of that.
Rejoining the winding snake of people wending their way through the warehouse, Akira adopts their steady forward pace. Shuffle forward three steps; pause; study the body before her; move on.
She goes through the warehouse twice, not stopping at Kaitou's body the second time, but finds no other trace of Kouta.
XXX
She is the one who starts the bulletin board.
She starts it the day the SDF allows them back into Zawame, finally declaring it free of Helheim infestation.
She knows—everyone knows—that it was not Helheim that the SDF was busy taking apart, though, but rather Yggdrassil. Truck after truck has entered Zawame empty and left full. She takes photos of them, urges others to take photos as well, because she is not going to let this happen again.
She is not going to let darkness flourish under her nose, to fend just for herself and her own until the nightmare comes pounding on her door in the middle of the night.
(It is unfair, a small portion of her mind whispers when she cries at night, to blame herself for what has happened. She was raising a brother, keeping a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs, doing the best she could for a boy she sacrificed her own future for. She was trying to make him a good person, someone who would reach out and change the world, and she succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.)
She starts the bulletin board because she doesn't know what else to do, how else to continue her search. She needs to find Kouta—to find his body, to find some fragment of him, to know what occurred in the end.
(She thinks she knows. She thinks that there was something familiar in the shining, shimmering, crying ball of energy that flew into the crack in the sky after the Inves, but she doesn't know and that is what she needs.)
She was the last one to see Kouta before everything ended—the last one conscious, at least. She doesn't know, still, if Zack saw him, but Zack still teeters between life and death. She goes to see him daily, chatting with him, promising him treats from Charmant when he awakes.
(She doesn't bring flowers. Very few people bring flowers, both because there are not many available in the disaster-torn town and because they are too reminiscent of the plants that grew from Inves victims, beautiful and deadly.)
She places a picture of Kouta, labeled with his name and the last place he was seen, in the center of the bulletin board that she sets up just past the main bridge into Zawame. She puts her telephone number at the bottom, as well as her e-mail address. The picture looks small and lonely at first, surrounded by blank brown corkboard, but at least it is doing something. Memorializing him. Looking for him.
(Remembering him, placing him high on the priority list, when for most he is not even on the agenda. The man who sacrificed his life for the world, and no one will know his name, no one will know his sacrifice, no one will understand what he did.)
Other pictures have joined Kouta's within hours. By the end of the day Akira has had to hang two more bulletin boards, and those soon fill as well.
(Some people do leave flowers beneath the pictures of the missing, and Akira decides that she likes that better. Under the sun, waving in the wind, they do not remind her of the people screaming on the news or the broken bodies that were retrieved from the hospital. Did they hurt more, as they died, as the hole in the sky dragged the parasites from their bodies, or were they just glad that it was done?)
Shaking morbid thoughts away, Akira focuses on keeping the bulletin boards neatly arranged, the pictures all visible.
It may not be much, but it is something that she can do to help her city and its people recover.
XXX
Her days take on a pattern. In the morning she goes to see Zack, waiting still for him to wake and tell her what he knows of the end. When she is done talking to the comatose young man, she goes to check the bulletin boards, to esnure that nothing needs fixing, that Kouta's picture is still present. After standing there for minutes that feel like hours, looking at the smiling face of her missing brother, she joins one of the work crews heading into Zawame.
(She ends each day at the bulletin board, as well, staring quietly at Kouta's image as the sun sinks in the sky. Hoping that he sees light and beauty, wherever he is. Hoping that he has not been consumed by the same darkness that devoured Kaitou, that broke his friend Mitsuzane, that left Zack a still form in a hospital bed.)
During the second week another picture appears by Kouta's, and Akira stares in shame-faced fascination at the girl she should have been looking for, too, but has neglected.
"I hope you don't mind." Rica's voice startles her, and Akira spins to look at the two dancers standing behind her.
"We just..." Rat bites at his lip, shrugging. "I know that Kaitou was saying a lot of crazy stuff about her dying, but there hasn't been a body found and..."
"And she and Kouta's pictures should be together." Rica stares up at Akira defiantly. "Because they were a great team."
"I don't mind." Akira shakes her head. How could she mind Mai's picture being by Kouta's? How could she have forgotten Mai? How could she have neglected to look for the girl who was always only a phone call away, ready to support and encourage and, when necessary, scold Kouta? "I'm sorry I didn't think to put her picture up."
"'S'okay." Rat's shoulders shiver convulsively. "Nobody else had, either. We thought maybe her folks would come back and do it, but they haven't returned and we just..."
"We just..." Rica repeats the words but can't seem to finish the sentence, her hand instead snaking out to glasp Rat's.
Akira knows what the end of the sentence is, though. She has been living the end of that sentence. We just need to have answers. We just need to be doing something. We just need to have some power.
"I'll make sure her picture stays right there, right by Kouta's, until we know for sure what happened to both of them." Taking a step towards them, Akira smiles at the two dancers. She wants to hug them, instead, to reach out and console them like she would Kouta, but she doesn't know how they would respond, and she doesn't want to frighten them more.
Rica's eyes fill with tears suddenly, moisture which she blinks away viciously. "I hope... that we find an answer. But I'm afraid... sometimes... Rat and I... did you see the light? On the tapes?"
Akira closes her eyes as she nods. She can never unsee that light, the pale blue that followed the monsters into a star-scape that is unfamiliar to all the astronomers that have studied it. That light haunts her dreams, would haunt her days if she gave it the power to, if she didn't have the bulletin board with Kouta's picture on it.
"We think..." Rat's voice comes out low and strained. "Sometimes... that maybe Mai and Kouta..."
"Maybe." Akira answers the unspoken question, forcing her eyes to open. "There's so much we don't understand about what's happened, and maybe that was connected to their disappearances. But all we can do is keep moving forward. Look for the missing. Mourn the dead. And try to rebuild, either here or somewhere else."
"Here." Rica speaks firmly, her eyes scanning over the pictures filling the bulletin boards. "This is our home. And I'm going to help make sure it comes back. Make sure all the awful things that happened weren't in vain."
Rat doesn't say anything, but it's clear from the way he holds Rica's hand that he shares her sentiments.
"That's the spirit." Akira reaches out, gently touching a shoulder of each dancer. "I was going to join one of the work crews heading into Zawame, trying to clear out the last of the rubble. Did you want to join me?"
The two young people nod, following Akira in silence.
XXX
Rat and Rica become part of her routine. They meet her at the bulletin boards in the morning, and together they join the volunteer crews that are helping to repair the city.
Akira makes sure to keep herself and everyone else aware of how the repairs are going—and of where the money is coming from. Some of it is government, and she accepts that happily. Some of it is corporate, and she makes new friends among investigative journalists as they try to track down who and why.
Because while philanthropy is acceptable, buying off the silence of those in power is not. She will not allow Yggdrassil or those who supported the company to get away with what they did.
Within a month Zawame is suitable for human habitation again. So are most of the American cities that were damaged, the radiation that had fallen having disappeared around the time the Inves and Overlords vanished from Zawame.
She doesn't move back into the apartment she shared with Kouta. She chooses somewhere new, somewhere different, somewhere with only one bedroom, where each morning won't be an exercise in torture as she remembers again that her baby brother is lost. Jobs begin reappearing, and she finds herself suiting up for work at the bank instead of throwing on whatever old clothes are closest at hand to help sift through rubble for missing corpses.
Zack wakes from his coma. She hears about it the day it happens, his parents texting her. She is glad that they accepted her halting, disjointed explanation for her interest in their son, though with their arrival she found herself spending less and less time with the young man. She goes to see him the day after he wakes, though, a box of chocolate in hand because she still doesn't trust flowers indoors.
He remembers nothing of the day he was injured, nothing of Kouta and only a bit of what happened with Kaitou. She holds his hand and strokes his hair as he cries at the news that Kaitou is dead, that Kouta is missing; then she leaves him to his family and a jubilant Peco, knowing that they will be better for him than her own disappointment and grief.
Slowly, despite grief, despite all the holes that are still present, life begins taking on a sheen of normalcy.
She still visits and keeps up the bulletin board. It is a place of community, a place of bonding over shared loss and over the hope of reunion.
She loves seeing the reunions.
There are more of them than she expects, especially as Zawame returns to life. Children with parents; parents with children; friends; coworkers; schoolmates. So much joy in simply existing, in simply having survived and returned, and each reunion is another stitch for the gaping wound still present at the center of her own soul.
(She tries not to dwell on those who stand at the boards for hours, walking back and forth, up and down, as though staring at all the pictures could make something appear that is simply not present. Those people are worse for her than even the ones who collapse in tears, having finally gotten confirmation of death.)
Zack's parents stay in touch with her, texting her frequently, inviting her to dinner at the hospital.
Rat and Rica accept her invitations to lunch, keeping her updated on how the slowly cohesing youth population is doing.
Oren makes sure that she eats breakfast most days, the flamboyant man somehow a rock-steady presence in her life. His restaurant is the first to re-open, and for the first two weeks he charges by the ability of the costumer to pay, saying that any returning to Zawame have likely already given more blood than any single piece of cake is worth.
She and her city have both rebuilt, she thinks after two months, as she stares out her apartment window at the shimmering skyline of Zawame reborn.
She hopes that Zawame's infrastructure is not as scarred as her own is.
XXX
The dream starts with Kouta sharing a meal with her.
She knows it isn't real, from the moment it starts. She has spent too much time mourning and missing Kouta over the last three months to forget that he is gone, even in a dream. But it is nice, and she smiles at him even as tears threaten her eyes, because this dream-version is so much like the boy she loves. The same smile. The same humor. The same voice.
As the first tear falls from her eyes the smile fades from his face. His hair shifts, from the black it has always been to a golden-blond that isn't quite human. His eyes change, though more subtly, a red-gold glow seeming to lurk behind the black. "I'm sorry, sis."
"Kouta?" Akira stands, pushing off against the dining room table that fades away even as her hands touch it.
"I just wanted to taste your cooking one more time." His clothes change as well, becoming white armor and a flowing cloak. Her apartment fades out and a beach replaces it, the roll of the ocean sounding like a heartbeat to her confused ears. "But I've only got so much time."
"Kouta!" This is a dream, she knows, because the world doesn't just shift and fade and change, but Kouta is not a dream. Kouta is real, her brother changed but present, and he is warm against her chest as her arms go around him. "Kouta, where—how—I've missed you!"
"I know." His hand strokes her hair, gentle, comforting. "I'm sorry."
That isn't right. He shouldn't be comforting her. She should be comforting him, being the big sister that she's supposed to be. Pulling back, she cups his face in her hands. "What happened? Where are you? How can I—"
"You can't get me back, sis. I can't come back." His eyes flash with that red-gold light, and his smile is the same heartbreaking one he flashed her as he ate Helheim's fruit. "I'm a part of the forest now. Not human. An Overlord, or even something... more. Mai and I, we made it so that Earth is safe, so Zawame's safe, so you're safe, but we can't live here anymore. We have a world of our own to protect and nurture."
"But..." Akira can feel her fingers digging into Kouta's arms.
"I just wanted to see you again. To tell you I'm safe. That I'll come see you when I can, and keep you in my thoughts always." His thumb runs across her cheek, soft and gentle, and there are tears in his voice still. "And... to ask you a favor."
"A favor?" The words come out numb and neutral as Akira tries to assimilate what she is hearing. Kouta is alive; Kouta isn't human; Kouta needs her to do something. That last is the most important, and she gives her head a shake, trying to smile for him. "What do you need?"
"There's a man. Kureshima Takatora."
Akira nods, slowly. "Mitsuzane's brother. One of the Yggdrassil higher-ups. I thought..."
"He's got a good heart. He hasn't always been a good man—he's made some really big mistakes—but he's got a good heart and he's trying." Kouta's breath trails out in a sigh. "He's just woken up at the hospital. He's going to need help—Mitsuzane is going to need help. And—"
"Mitsuzane tried to kill you." If her hands weren't already grasping on to Kouta with all her strength—keeping him here, keeping him present—they would tighten. "And you want to help him?"
"Takatora used me and my friends as guinea pigs. Lied to everyone. Would have burned Zawame to the ground if he thought he needed to." Kouta's eyes fall to her hands, one of his rising to cover hers. "But he's still good. He was still trying. And Micchy... he got so lost. He got so tangled up in trying to be what he thought would be good and trying to control everyone that he didn't even know what he wanted any more by the end. I can't hate either of them."
I can, she doesn't say. She could hate Mitsuzane forever, for being here, for being alive, for going unpunished when she has lost Kouta. She can feel horror welling up in her at Kouta's quiet recitation of Takatora's crimes—can wonder how Oren could revere, even love, a man so much who could do such things. "You don't want him punished?"
"What would you have done to him?" Kouta looks at her with that red-orange glow in his eyes, and she knows, watching him then, that he is not just her brother anymore. He is a man who controls a planet. He is a god. Then he grimaces, and he is just Kouta again. "He's hurt so much. We've all hurt so much. I was willing to die for him. Isn't that enough to wash away sins?"
"A sacrifice's blood can never wash away the sins of the sacrificer." It's something she believes, now, though she has never really thought about it before. How could one person's goodness cure another of selfishness, greed, envy, wrath? How could one person being good erase another's evil? Maybe mitigate the actions of the wongdoer, maybe help save their world and their community... maybe, if the person doing the sacrificing wanted to change... maybe open up the possibility for salvation... but the act of sacrifice itself could not clear away any sins. "But I don't know what to do with him, I suppose. I don't want him dead. And what would his going to jail do for anyone?"
"Nothing." Again Kouta's thumb strokes across her cheek, and she is grateful for the contact, for the joy that her answer has lit in his eyes. "Help him help Zawame. Help Takatora help Zawame. Make our city beautiful—really beautiful, like it could never be when Ryouma and Sid and the Overlords sat at the heart of it."
"I'll try." She makes the promise with a smile, trying to keep the tears from her eyes.
"Thank you." He steps back, and her hands are no longer locked on his arms, they are held gingerly between his shaking fingers. He smiles up at her, and his grin wavers slightly. "Are you mad at me?"
"Mad at you?" She shakes her head. "Why would I be?"
"Because I can't tell if what I did was very selfish or very selfless." Kouta closes his eyes, his head bowing under a weight. "I just... couldn't see any other path. I kept trying to make good decisions—to help my friends, to help our community like you said—and things kept getting worse and worse and—"
Akira steps forward, gathering Kouta into her arms, and though he is a god now, though he is a being capable of ripping holes in the sky, though he is the savior of her world and her city, it still feels like hugging her baby brother. "You're a good man, Kouta. A better man than I could ever have dreamed of you being. And I can't answer that question—losing you hurts me so much, cuts my life in half... but you've saved so many, here and around the world..."
"I tried." His head nestles against her shoulder, his words a cracked whisper.
"And that's all you can do." She strokes his hair. "Try. Make the best choices you can. And then live with the consequences."
"Have everyone live with the consequences." He raises his head, and there are tears streaming down from his eyes. "I'm sorry, sis. I want to be with you. I want to be home. But Mai and I, we're doing good. We're trying to make a good world. To make Helheim and the Snake into something better."
"Then I wish you all the luck in the world." She squeezes him once before letting him go, and even though the cold that replaces his warmth cuts through her like a knife she knows from the look in his eyes that it was the right thing to do. (He cannot leave while she holds him, though he is not meant to be here anymore.) "I'll love you forever, Kouta."
"And I'll love you." He smiles as he cries, an honest expression. "Take care of yourself, sis."
The dream dissolves before she can say she will, which means he doesn't get to hear her voice crack on the words.
XXX
She cries for an hour after she wakes.
She cries for the world that will never be—for the world where Kouta grows up, and they both have families, and she plays with his children and he plays with hers and they tell stories to their nieces and nephews to embarrass each other.
She cries for the months she has spent looking for him, knowing that she would never find his body but still having hope, until this final message.
She cries until her breath hitches into hiccups, until she feels sick and nauseous.
She cries until the tears are simply trails of salt from staring eyes.
And then she dries her tears, changes out of pajamas into work clothes, and heads for the hospital.
She has lost her brother, though at least she has the comfort that he is still alive, still being his wonderful, amazing, too-good self somewhere out there in the universe.
She has not lost her home, though. She has helped to rebuild it, piece by mismatched piece, and Kouta has asked her to help with the next painful step.
Somewhere in the hospital where she watched Zack fight his way back to life two brothers are trying to decide what to do now, and she will help them. She will find hope in the darkness for them, in Kouta's name.
And somewhere along the way, as tiny victory is added to tiny victory, hope added to rekindled hope, maybe the scales will be balanced, and her pain, Kouta's pain, Mai's pain, Rica and Rat's pain, Zack's pain... maybe all of it will be deemed to be worth the world that they have created from the broken fragments they have inherited.