Here With Me

Prologue; Not Ready Yet

Caelestis Kibeth

As I stared up into the heavens that night, my hand tightened around the hilt of the sword at my side. I was unusually calm, given what I knew I was about to do. Even as I felt the sharp edge of cold steel nudge insistently at the skin of my bare chest, my heart skipped no extra beats. This time, I was ready.

A thud resounded throughout the trees, and a searing pain permeated my body. My vision wavered, my eyes watered, my hands clenched around the hilt of the sword… and then, slowly, it all ebbed away.

The last thing I saw was her frightened face hovering over me... and my last thought, with sudden clarity, was that I was not ready.

I was not ready yet.

- A Place in Time, Prologue

Twigs snapped underfoot, branches sliced bare skin, wind whistled past a young girl's ears in a noisy blur as she raced through the forest just after sunset. Blinding speed and inhuman perception as her ally, she flashed through each would-be obstacle standing in her way, focusing her mind on one thought and one thought only: This is it.

This time, they had come to her. This time, she would kill them. This time, they would not get the better of Pan Satan.

This is it.

Feet bounced lithely off rocks and tree limbs, over streams and clearings with the graceful ease of a practiced dancer. These skills of hers which she drew upon now were like second nature, despite that she had never and would never understand why she had been blessed with them. All she had known her whole life was that they were the one thing standing in between this world and those menacing pieces of scrap metal, and she was ready at any second—at that second—to use every last ounce of them to make sure that this mindless massacre finally came to a stop.

This was it. The moment she had felt that spike of energy from somewhere off near the northern horizon, followed by a sickening plummet that inevitably occurred whenever the androids had decided upon their next victim, she had known that the time had come.

Their reign of terror came to an end tonight.

There was no fear in her stance, no hesitation to grip her as she crouched down further to slice through the air like a bullet, coaxing every last ounce of speed that she could out of her body. On the contrary, fighting was in her blood. Just the thought of feeling the crunch of metal when her fist crashed against one of them was enough to send a rush of adrenaline surging through her. And dying... well, once you had managed the courage to try and do it to yourself a couple of times, the thought of death at the hands of a real enemy seemed like a childish worry.

If there was one thing that Pan Satan had not been for a long time, it was a child.

As she came to a carefully measured stop out at the outcropping of the cliff marking the perimeter of the woods, the face revealed by moonlight was indeed anything but a child's. For certain, the fighter's diminutive height and petite build suggested nothing more than a girl of 15, maybe 16 years. It was not until one got to her face, hard as a rock and framed by overgrown raven hair, that one could glimpse the haunted chill of her dark eyes and realize that Pan was not a child at all. By any estimation, she may have been more of an adult than anyone left on that god-forsaken planet.

Hands flexing and contracting into fists at her sides, impatient to feel the rending of metal beneath them, she stared out over the long valley ahead of her. Narrowing her eyes, she was all prudence and precision, alert and attentive to every fluctuation of the atmosphere of the area, even as confusion began to whisper at her louder each second that she sensed nothing.

—was she going crazy?

Just seconds ago, she had known that she had felt the distinctive surge and immediate wane of power—or whatever it was; she had never understood this sixth sense she had or what specifically it was that she was always feeling—which was the signature of a life blinking out of existence. Without moving her head, her eyes darted around, still poised and at the ready to take a surprise attack from any side. With a deep breath, Pan forced herself to dig deep down and reach out around her, to try and force herself to feel her surroundings and understand where her enemies were hiding this time.

But they weren't there. Impossibly, the two familiar signatures which always hung heavily in the air like swirling miasmas of evil intent when they were nearby, were not.

Knowing it must have been a mistake, Pan forced her senses out further, understanding that there was no room for error in this. But again she came up blank. On all sides she was blanketed by nothing more sinister than the gentle green glow—at least that's how it appeared in her mind—of the nature surrounding her, peaceful and unmarred by the touch of menace.

Reluctantly, gingerly as a frightened animal, she allowed herself to withdraw from her perceptions in millimeter increments until she had finally drawn back into herself, shut down to normal levels of alert once again and now convinced that she had been imagining things.

Finally allowing her tensed muscles to relax, Pan closed her eyes and ran a hand over her face. She had suspected for years that her life had been dark and twisty enough to mess up any human being forever, and even sometimes wondered if her 'senses' and 'feelings' were all just some screw that had gone loose in her head long ago. But now she wondered if maybe she really had gone completely crazy. The sensation from earlier had been so piercing, so real... To think that it had been her mind playing tricks on her in such an extreme degree was scarier than the stupid androids themselves.

Go home, Pan. Get some sleep, or when they really do come you might go full-on crazy and get into a fight with a tree instead.

She groaned then, a groan of dismay and frustration.

Except she didn't.

She had heard it, loud and clear as if in her own head, but the groan hadn't come from her mouth. Rather, Pan could have sworn that the noise had been distinctly male, and distinctly pained. Almost like a wounded animal or a—

She gasped.

It had only taken one whip of her head around to the left before she saw him. There, off about 50 meters away on the adjacent outcropping, there was something metal sticking up from the ground, a sort of stake or—no, no it was a sword, hilt and all. And it was not stuck in the ground, but in a body. Even squinting, she could barely make out the form from under the curtain of tall grass, but that was undeniably a male, human body laying on the ground there.

And he was groaning. He was still alive.

Forcing her muscles to move, she took one soaring, augmented leap over the cliff side to where the man lay, touching down a few meters off and quickly clearing the short distance between them. Pan instantly dropped to her knees at his side, hands hovering in the air over his bloodied, tensed form in apprehension and concern, no idea what to do to help someone who had been impaled—

He could not have been laying there long, she thought, for he was still holding onto the last threads of consciousness. Sweat and grass matted his lengthy lavender hair, sticking to his brow which was twisted up in agony. Pan's gut told her that if she was finding a man so recently attacked out here, she should have been up and back on her guard that very instant. She should have been on alert right away if she didn't want to end up just like he had, but—

—no, even taking an extra second to reach out again, she still felt nothing malicious. All in the forest was calm tonight, except for the weak pulse of fear and pain that waned in and out with this man's quickly slipping life force, retreating a bit more every second that he lay there.

Then she understood, with sickening clarity.

No android had done this to him. This man had done this to himself.

And for the first time, that realization truly gave Pan pause.

She suddenly felt a great connection to this anonymous man writhing before her. Because no matter how she preferred to forget the darkest periods of her unpleasant past, she had been here, in his position. She knew that feeling, of being trapped in a cage built of all her regrets and agonies. Of being so desperate to break free that she would do anything to find a way out of the hell of her daily life. Even to that day, Pan still often felt that desperation creep up on her and had to force it back, because dying for her was to doom the rest of the survivors of earth, to add that blood to her hands. On top of her grandfather's. On top of her mother's. On top of everyone else's who she hadn't been able to get to before those despicable machines had ripped their lives away. Pan knew, even in her darkest hours, that her soul could never hold all of that extra guilt on its back when it finally traveled into the netherworld. So she had to live. She had to fight to her last breath, and do everything that she could with the strength she had been given to put a stop to the madness.

But this man—

—he was different.

He was an innocent. He had the right, the freedom to live and die as he pleased. There was no responsibility to tie him to this planet if he wanted to take the easy way out.

She was jealous. For a moment, she hated him for it. But just as quickly as it had come, the surge of hate gave way to pity, and understanding.

She didn't know if she could take this from him.

Feeling deflated, Pan's shoulders slumped and she finally laid a gentle hand on the anonymous man's shoulder, the other going to brush the hair away from his face, a face slowly fading to calm. With her touch, his eyes finally eased open. Unfocused, almost seeing through her, and yet they were such a piercing shade of cerulean that she still felt as if they were reaching deep into her soul. Bypassing words and sending a message straight through to her mind.

Help.

Her heart skipped a beat.

No. This was not what he wanted. That was not the look of a man contentedly passing to the other side. With that last bit of his strength, he was trying to tell her something: this was a mistake. He was not ready. She had to help him.

Just as quickly as he had reached out to her, his touch withdrew and she felt a sudden cold emptiness punch a hole through her as the remainder of his wavering life force began to drain. Involuntarily, her hand on his shoulder tightened, her body springing into action before she had even managed to catch her breath or understand what she was doing. And then the man was up in her small but capable arms, all hints of consciousness gone from his body and her mind driven by a frantic wish to do everything in her power to somehow, some way reclaim his life before it was too late.

He was not ready. And as she bounded off back into the woods with his body pressed against her, she could only hope that this mistake of his had not been realized a moment too late.

A/N: For those of you who are familiar with my story, A Place in Time, you have probably figured out that this is the prequel~ I haven't given up on that story at all, but every time I go to write the next chapter I've been blocked and wanted to do this instead, so I am taking a little break to try and clear my mind so that its next chapter is all that it is supposed to be and not some haphazardly, half-heartedly thrown together piece of crap.

For those of you unfamiliar with that story, you don't need to read it to read this and understand it, but it will help you understand it faster if you do. So if you have the time, go ahead and do so!

Read and review, ladies and gentlemen, thank you in advance! :3