Disclaimer: Yeah...although it would be greatly entertaining to own Weiss, I, in fact, do not.
Notes: This is kind of Yohji POV, except it's in third person, so it's not really a POV. The "he" at the beginning is Yohji, but I don't use his name until he starts to recover who he is--until that point he isn't really Yohji anymore.
Also, in case this is confusing, it was written to run parallel to Aya and Yohji's story during Episode 12 of Gluhen.
Storyline: Tsujii has promised Yohji she can make him forget if he'll betray his team and serve her. Yohji attacks Aya, but as they fight, Crashers detonates their first (warning) explosion, which effectively interrupts the duel. Yohji then makes his way into Tsujii's lab, where Tsujii offers Aya the chance to forget, and Aya refuses. Yohji then sees his Asuka hallucination telling him to live. Yohji fights Tsujii while Aya continues on. Later, Aya returns, with Omi and Ken, and they kill Tsujii's supergod project. Then, Tsujii goes for her notes in her lab, where she finds Yohji, who crushes her disk in his fist. She tries to kill him, but Aya gives Yohji his katana, and Yohji uses it to kill Tsujii. Crashers has now detonated their second and actual explosion, and the building collapses. Yohji, wounded and holding Aya's katana, chooses not to forget anymore, and Aya promises to come back for him.
A Moment Longer
All he can remember or see or feel anymore is a colorful blur, and white noise, and the hope of the nepenthe that Tsujii has offered. All he believes anymore. All he cares about anymore.
Once upon a time, there was a man who cared about too many things, but once-upon-a-time men never live happily ever after. He doesn't care anymore. She told him there would be a price to pay for her offer, and the price would be the people he should have cared about most, but he doesn't care anymore, so it's not much of a price.
Some part of his mind feels like maybe this man is familiar, the man standing before him, with the cold eyes and the hard smile, blazing with scarlet as red as frozen fire. But he doesn't remember anymore, he doesn't know this man, he doesn't care. He'll kill the man if it gets him closer to his goal.
No, he thinks, no. Your eyes should stay cold. Are you crying? But it's a hallucination, and the illusion comes tumbling down with a loud sound, almost like a firework going off in the distance. All he remembers anymore is that he has a goal, and that is to find the beautiful woman with the answer to everything. He doesn't remember the cold eyes and the hard smile, lying on the equally cold, hard ground.
He walks in to the building that he does not remember, through hallways he has never remembered, and sees test tubes filled with creatures he wouldn't remember if he'd ever seen them before. But, the scarlet flame, he remembers that, distinctly, for no reason at all. The beautiful woman, the beautiful, cruel, cruel woman, offers the scarlet flame the nepenthe as well.
But, the scarlet flame rejects that life. He wants to live, for real, with all the pains and hurts of the past. Because, he says, they make him who he is. Please, please live, she whispers to him, the woman from the dreams, I never wanted this. And he knows he's tried to take the easy way out, the loser's way out, and he knows what the right choice is.
He takes it because he never really had a choice in the first place. Because the pretty dream girl would be sad if he chose wrong, and he knows he needs to help the man across the room. His name is…Aya…
And then he fights and fights, and Aya comes back like he promised. Yohji looks into his eyes, and they're filled with something a little less dark than they had once been, and Yohji wonders why he ever wanted to forget them. Aya, and the other people Yohji cares about, come to his side, and together, one last time, they kill the dark beasts and finish the mission.
He made his choice long ago, when he chose to live, and he wasn't allowed to turn back since then. It's been years and years and days and months since he's seen them, since he's heard them, since he's known anything. It's been seconds and minutes piling into a neat forever since he's let himself remember that he loves Aya, even if it's against both their wills. Because at the end, it's Aya he's dying for, and living for, and it's Aya who saves him with the beautiful dangerous katana.
Once upon a time, there were people who loved, and a man who chose to remember that, because it made up who he was, even if it wasn't happily ever after. Then Yohji laughs and laughs because fate is cruel, as the songs always say, and the sky is falling and falling and falling, and Omi is screaming, and Ken is trying to stay in one piece.
And Aya is staring at him, and Yohji thinks he can see the love in the eyes, which aren't quite so cold as he thought. They stare at each other, and would have to the end of the world, but the world is ending now, because the sky is tumbling down in large blocks of concrete.
So he loves and loves and loves, until his heart hurts, and maybe, he thinks, Aya will see it. They both know his time is running out.
Just a moment longer, he begs heaven, both of them do, just a moment. I want to see him smile just a moment longer—