Title: A Sordid Web

Author: Utenakun

Series: Tokyo Babylon / X, alternate universe.

Summary: Fate selected four dreamgazers to carry out its machinations: a pair of sisters, a comatose man, and a frail young woman. But before Kotori could grow into her powers, as Hinoto and Kanoe were just beginning to untangle their foreboding dreams, Kakyou was already plagued by visions he understood only too well. When one of these visions demanded the blood of his love, he not only changed Fate, but also threw it into a chaos that could only be resolved by the forcing in of another bystander to take his place.

Rating: PG-13 for violence. Kakyou/Hokuto, some Seishirou/Subaru

Disclaimer: X is not mine, and you don't know how much that hurts me.

Notes: The title comes from a lyric of "War Child," by The Cranberries, a song I find quite appropriate to Hokuto's eventual (and yes, very much OOC according to Tokyo Babylon) outlook and personality.

A Sordid Web

Part 1- 1992

Ch 1.

A ghost is slumped on the floor. His long white hair pools around him in lazy curls, cascading over the folds of white cloth that drape his body. A ghost, indeed; his true form is pale and still in a hospital bed, unmoving and unreceptive for years now. Can one be more ghostlike and still exist in the world? And here, he does not exist, he is but a distant dream conjured by his fevered brain and the inevitable workings of fate. He savors nonexistence. He waits, though he knows not for whom.

He waits for her. And she suddenly appears in the quiet sanctity of his simple wooden dream-room, another ghost, but as impossibly vibrant and energetic as a ghost cannot be. The orange of her baggy shirt burns his eyes, even as her wide green gaze warms a glass heart he had thought could feel no heat. And when she opens her mouth to pierce the silence he's kept for so long, he leans forward, automatically, to catch every musical sound.

"Where am I?" She wonders, staring about her and bringing up a hand to ruffle at her pixie cut, "It doesn't seem like one of my dreams, so…" with a sudden movement so out of place it seems perfectly normal, and a smile the likes of which he can't remember ever having seen, she turns to him, "it must be your dream!"

"It… is…" he murmurs, the words sticking in a throat jammed from long disuse. Then it fails utterly and he can say no more, only gaze at her with wide, disbelieving, delighted golden eyes.

"Well!" She exclaims, wonderfully oblivious to the somber hush she is breaking with every word, "how on Earth did I get into your dream?" Her lips part again, just for a moment, to let a cheerful little giggle through. She laughs, not so much at anything said but at the sheer joy of life, and her status as a ghost shifts from impossible to utterly inconceivable. Surely, she is everything people mean when they speak of life, and surely, he has never known life because he has never known her.

"I brought you here," he admits, dropping his eyes ashamedly. He is painfully conscious of how little she deserves to be shut up in such a place, how selfish his motives must seem. But nevertheless, he looks her in the eye again and continues-- he can do nothing else, with such a girl in front of him. "I wanted to be with someone."

Wonder of wonders, she smiles again. She does not frown, or narrow her eyes, or shout to be brought back immediately, she smiles. And when she replies, it is just as warm as before; ill will is so utterly foreign to her. "Well, here I am, and very pleased to meet you! I'm Sumeragi Hokuto, and you?"

His eyes go wide as she introduces herself, and for a moment, his brain cannot wrap itself around the idea that she does not want to go, that she wants to get to know him. That she is smiling. Finally, uncertainly, he smiles back-- no more than a nudge at the corner of his mouth, but it is more than he ever has. And he murmurs, "I-- I'm Kuzuki Kakyou. I'm-- very pleased to meet you as well, Sumeragi-san." Without even realizing it, he draws himself a little bit forward and up, to be closer to this vision, this utterly new sensation of warmth.

"Please!" She laughs, her voice more delicious to him by the second, "you make me sound like my great-grandmother!" She sits herself down cross-legged right in front of him, and stares seriously into his eyes, though her mouth, it seems, cannot stop smiling in delight at the sight of him. "Please, call me Hokuto-chan. And may I call you Kakyou-kun?"

Will the words make it out of his disbelieving throat? Perhaps it is only her entreating gaze, which calls them forth. "Of-- of course… Hokuto-chan." Whispered by him, it is not a term of endearment. It is a prayer, a hallowed invocation of his adored goddess.

She beams, he melts. "Wonderful." But then her smile fades, her eyes turn puzzled and worried, and he nearly weeps. "Before I got here, Kakyou-kun, were you alone? Must you always stay like this, in here, or do you like it?"

It's… not possible that she could care, is it? He is dreaming, of course, he is always dreaming, but this so surpasses everything he's ever dreamed that he cannot even respond, only shake his head no as his liquid gold eyes do their best to take all the pain in hers and contain it only in him. He would do anything to see her smile again.

And smile she does, and more than that, exclaims happily, "Then if you can't leave by yourself, I'll take you! Where do you wish to go?" She catches up an icy hand in both her warm, strong ones; perhaps she has the power to simply pull him out of his fugue and into the real world.

He hears this statement and smiles with the simple trust of a child who believes his goddess, responds to her warmth, and knows she can do anything. Yes, she can take him out of this dreary, lifelong dream; she can take him anywhere he wants to go, even… "The ocean, please."

The world around them shimmers and blears from dark wood paneling and whisper soft rice paper walls boxing him solidly in to glorious space, blue farther than the eye can see, a rocky shore beneath them and seagulls-- seagulls, of course, that's what seagulls are!-- wheeling and crying overhead. Their sounds, the crash of the ocean: all this would be music to him, were it not for the infinitely more wonderful voice in his ear.

"It's much better than this in real life," she confesses, "this is just from one of my dreams. You know, Kakyou-kun, I want to meet with you again, and not just in a dream, in real life. We could go to the ocean together! Couldn't we?" She looks at him expectantly, and his heart breaks with the answer he must give.

"No," he mumbles, tears forming in his eyes and already making a bright blur of the scene before him. "I would love to, but I cannot leave… ever."

How is she undeterred by this? How is it his goddess can be so bright, so warm, so lovely, and have so much hope, as well? For she simply smiles all the more, leans closer to him, and states firmly, "There's no such thing as 'ever'. It'll be alright…" she laughs a little, "you're with me. Do you believe me?" And her hand is extended to him yet again, promising friendship, promising warmth, promising freedom.

"I do," he says, eyes dried by her words and will alone, lips learning how to smile more easily by the moment. "I do." He takes that promise, that promise of friendship and warmth and freedom, even as his hand clasps hers and two ghosts stand alone on a rocky ghost beach, both that much closer to reality for having met one another.