Author's Note: This story was started shortly after I saw episode 12, and contains spoilers through that (Zed's appearance episodes). Hope people enjoy!

Unraveling Darkness

"I hate him."

Right whispers the words to Hikari, late at night, his head resting on Hikari's shoulder. Hikari's left arm is around Right's shoulder, his right hand toying with his kendama, the ball sliding in and out of its resting places with a gentle thwock every few seconds.

Hikari raises his head, his eyes refocusing from whatever visions he had been seeing. He doesn't ask Right who he means. There is only one he who has been haunting Right's sleep these last few days, one person who has frightened him in a way that no one else can.

Right doesn't turn his head away from the window, instead watching Hikari's actions in mirrored reflection. Lights flicker by outside, flashes of brilliance in the darkness, and he tries not to shudder, tries not to see them as he would see them, tries not think of the Emperor's voice worshiping light even as he tries to smother it.

"I hate him so much." Right's voice rises with each word, the unfamiliar emotion choking his throat, burning his chest, tensing his fingers around his knees. "I want to see him again so I can shoot him, stab him, punch him, my fist colliding with his face, I can see it, Hikari. I can see it."

His voice trails off again on the last sentence, fading away into the dimness of the dining car at night.

"That's fine, Right." Hikari's arm tightens around his shoulders, comforting, the anchor that has kept Right sane since he woke screaming from his latest nightmare. "He hurt us. He hurt you. His very existence is going to drown the world and everyone in it in darkness. If there's anyone who deserves hatred, it's him. If there's anyone we should want to defeat, it's him."

Right draws a deep breath, relief soothing a bit of the burning in his chest away. Hikari understands this part of the tight knot the Emperor tied around Right's heart, at least, and he doesn't think it's bad. He doesn't think it's wrong. He doesn't think that Right's over-reacting to the pain that the Emperor inflicted on him, stripping his friends away, dimming the shining hope and life and magic in their eyes, even if it was thankfully only for a little bit.

"Hate him if you need to. Envision us winning—because we have to win. There's no other option." Hikari finally sets the kendama down, his reflection leaning forward, and suddenly Right is torn away from the window, Hikari's arms around both his shoulders, holding him, his face buried in Hikari's shoulder. "But don't let the hate tear you up inside like this. Balance it with the reasons we're fighting—our friends, our home, the people that we see. Fight smart—don't sacrifice tactics for revenge. Don't look for revenge. Just look to win. And we will, I promise, and he will never, ever tear us apart like he did before."

Hikari's body trembles, just slightly, his breath hot on Right's neck, and Right thinks there is a bit of the hate-heat in Hikari, as well—hatred for the cloud that the Emperor ordered cast over them, hatred for their enemy, hatred for the ones who threaten their world and stole their lives and have made them go from children to soldiers with no memory of the in-between.

Right understands the hatred, now, in a way that he didn't before, and that mirror-echo is why he gave this piece of the puzzle to Hikari, and Hikari's answer is the proper one to give back in turn. Straightening, Right smiles at his friend. "We fight for friends. We fight for the light. We fight with our love, not our hatred."

Hikari nods, just once, tightening his hands on Right's shoulders, and then picks up his kendama.

Right continues to watch the light outside the windows for a few minutes, but he is tired, finally. When he stands to head back to bed, he offers a hand to Hikari, and Hikari takes it easily, their fingers twining together, warmth against the cold of the dark.

XXX

"I pity him."

Right's nightmare was different, tonight, not the violent mishmash of revenge and death that had been his lot since he first realized what the Emperor was. Tonight he saw the man—beast, creature, thing that looks like a man, and who says what is human and what is not?—die at his hands, and there was a puzzled, awed expression on the Emperor's face that caused Right to wake in a cold sweat.

He hadn't woken screaming, at least, so Hikari and Tokkati hadn't been wrenched from their well-deserved slumber. Instead Right stumbled on his own to the dining car, literally running into Kagura.

The woman is seated across from him now, a table between them on which she has spread a late-night smorgasbord all for him. Her own eyes are dark-ringed, but her hand is firm and steady as it slides across the table, coming to lie across his. "The Emperor?"

"Yes." Right pokes at the food in front of him, his gut twisting into a knot at the thought of eating. Bad, that—there are very few times he doesn't want to eat. But he supposes it makes sense, that the knot around his heart would tie the rest of him in knots too, and he thinks that Kagura can help with this strand. "When I first met him... he was so excited about everything. He stayed so excited about everything. He..."

He was a child—younger even than Right, though they both look so much older than they are—unaware of the existence of money, unaware of the existence of rules, determined that he should be able to go wherever his feet led him.

Determined to have everything shiny, to touch and hold and chase the light that defines the world... to capture and control the one thing that he can never, ever actually have.

"He really seemed to love the light." Right's hands are shaking, and Kagura's fingers tighten around the one that she is holding. "Or... love's not quite the right word. He was fascinated by it. He... wanted it. Before I knew what he was—who he was—I thought... it might be fun, helping him explore the world. Showing him all the shiny physical things he was fascinated by—balloons and fireworks and candles... helping him find names for the not-physical things he called by the same name. For hope and joy and love and..."

Kagura stands abruptly, and Right breaks off his halting explanation as cold swarms over his hand, an emptiness where her fingers had been, a shock that brings images of his friends staring at him in disbelieving disillusionment flooding into his mind.

Then Kagura is on his side of the table, her arms wrapped tight around him, and Right relaxes with an audible hiccup. He should have known not to worry. Kagura is like this—silent and still until she knows what she wants, then an explosion of movement and force and warm arms around him, helping to hold him together.

His words start tumbling out again, faster and faster. "He hurt you—he took who you are, who we are away from you—and I still pity him, I still think how horrible it must be to love the light so much and have it destroy you and... how can I hate him and pity him at the same time?"

"Because he deserves both." Kagura whispers the answer into his ear, her own voice trembling. "What he did was awful—what he's ordered done is awful. What's been done in his name... there is nothing, nothing in all the universe, that can justify intentionally hurting people like his soldiers have done."

The dark snarl of hatred, the string that Hikari helped pull loose, pulses dully.

"But... you said he was fascinated by a balloon. He loved the sun. He can see the light in you—the fire, the beauty, everything the four of us love about you, the shining light that helped us break through the dark fog he had us drowning in."

Kagura's fingers are warm where they run through his hair, firm where they rest on his back, and Right manages to pull in a deep breath as he straightens a little, meeting her eyes.

Her tear-filled eyes, shining brightly, and he has to look away as he hears a very different voice whisper shine.

Kagura doesn't let him look away for long, her fingers firm on his chin, turning him so he meets her gaze. "And it's... it's so damn sad, Right. It's awful to think that he might really be interested in what light is, but really just can't understand it because it would kill him. It's really, really sad."

A sob rocks Kagura's body, shakes the hand holding his chin. Before he thinks about it Right finds himself holding her as tightly as she's holding him, giving as well as receiving comfort as unexpected tears squeeze from his eyes, too.

"And it's all right to pity him, because he makes what was already hard—fighting and killing and trying to save the world—into something even harder." Kagura straightens, sniffling away the last of her tears, and runs a hand through his hair and then her own, straightening both. "It's all right to both hate him and pity him. As long as we do what we have to do, as long as we remember that we're protecting people and hold on to our own light... I think... if we didn't see how sad it was and pity him a little bit... if we didn't... then we don't deserve to see the light, either."

Nodding slowly, Right draws a deep breath, wiping one hand surreptitiously across his cheeks to clear away the remains of tears. Another strand of the band wrapped tight around his heart—this one a dark orange, he thinks, to go with the blue-black of hate—loosens.

He can hate the Emperor and all he's done, and know that he has to kill him.

He can imagine the face of the young man he played with, the confusion and abject hunger, and pity the circumstances of existence that make him crave the very thing he will destroy.

He can do both, and he can let neither control him.

It doesn't erase the entire knot. It doesn't even erase the strands that have loosened. But it makes it easier to breathe, easier to think, and Right smiles at Kagura, squeezing her hand tight.

Kagura smiles back, lowering her eyes self-consciously, and then gestures toward the food before them.

They share a meal, Right devouring more than his fair share, and then share one last hug before heading back to their respective beds.

Right collapses into his bed and sleeps soundly, any dreams he has too weak to survive into the pale, beautiful light of morning.

XXX

"I'm afraid of him."

Right makes the admission with his eyes closed, not willing to look even at Mio's reflection in the window.

"Of course you are."

That wasn't the response Right was expecting, and surprise opens his eyes wide.

The reflection of Mio stares back at him disconcertingly, illuminated in odd internal flashes by the lights that they pass. She doesn't look angry or disgusted or upset... well, maybe mildly exasperated, but that's almost Mio's default response to him. "You're not a complete idiot, Right, and only a complete idiot wouldn't be afraid of that person."

Not man. He notices the choice of address, the careful distancing of the Emperor from anything as human as a gender... from his name, even, from the foreign final letter that the darkness incarnate has been given as his designator. Turning so that he's facing the real thing instead of her reflection, Right offers Mio a shaky smile. "Sometimes you don't seem very impressed with my intelligence."

"You and I see things differently." Mio returns the smile with a tired one of her own, her right hand snaking out to lie atop his right. "I see the bigger picture, usually; you've a frustrating ability to focus on details. But you're very good at focusing on details, and if something is important you'll understand that."

"So..." Right allows his smile to slip away, his eyes going to the shadowed train corridor. "I guess that means the fact that he's dangerous is both a big picture and a small picture problem?"

"Oh yes." Mio's hand climbs slowly up his arm, until she is resting up against him, her arm across his shoulders, her head pillowed on his shoulder. "It's a huge problem for the big picture. He's much more dangerous than the others, and he's also much less easy to predict. The fact that he's interested in playing with us and testing us instead of just trying to smash us into little pieces means that guessing what they're going to do and how they're going to do it is going to be harder than it was before. Plus it means that they've got someone really strong on their side—though thankfully he's bound by the darkness."

"Oh." Right's voice comes out smaller than he'd expected. He hadn't thought of any of that. He had been afraid because in his dream—a different nightmare, yet again, a different bit of terror stealing away his sleep—the Emperor had been standing over him. He had a sword in his right hand, but it was his left hand that Right had stared at as it came down, down, down, and slid into him, into his chest, rooting around inside him while he sat paralyzed, and the look in Zed's eyes as he whispered shiny while red blood filled with firefly lights pooled around them—

Mio's grip shifts, pulling him into a full embrace, her head still buried on his shoulder. "And it's a small-picture problem because he's dangerous. He could kill any one of us. He could probably kill all of us if he fought us somewhere the darkness had claimed. He stole me and Tokatti and Kagura and Hikari. He erased who we are now, took away the choices we made... and then he tried to kill you. Because he wanted to see how stubborn light could be, he tried to wipe it out. He's absolutely terrifying."

"He..." Right draws a deep breath, though he wants to hyperventilate, squeezing his eyes shut and forcing himself to breathe, his heart to beat, even if it keeps rubbing up against the white-red ribbon of stark terror woven into the knot around his heart. "He hurt you guys to get to me. But I couldn't let myself be hurt. I couldn't be scared. I had to find a way to reach you. I had to save you—to save myself. I had to stand up to him, because if I didn't there wasn't anyone else, and I did it, you all did it, you came to my rescue, but I still... he still scares me."

His hands are tight balls in her shirt, his breath a rasping huff moving the small hairs that are floating around her head, but she is warm and firm against him as she says, "I know. And he scares me too."

Strange, that all it should take for the bit of knot to loosen is hearing Mio, strong, stubborn, sturdy Mio, admit that she's frightened too.

"We won. I won." Mio pulls back slowly, and her lips are pressed into a thin white line but she meets his eyes as she speaks. "He tried to erase what we are but I remembered. I thought about what you said and I pushed through the darkness and I found my own light. But the fact that he could do that... I hate him, and he scares the hell out of me."

Right nods, slowly. "You don't act afraid."

"What is there to acting afraid?" Mio shrugs, though her eyes drop away. "There are lots of things that scare me—not being strong enough. Tokatti and I talked about that. Not ever being able to remember or go home. Kagura and I... well... you're not the first Toqger to have nightmares, Right. Not being imaginative enough. Ah, I think I've talked about that with both Tokatti and Hikari. Not being there when others need us. Not winning this... whatever it is. Shadow war. Silent war. Invisible war."

Invisible war. He likes that one. What else to call a war between the darkness and the light, a war that only children and those who have lost everything but little scraps of their childhood can see? Where he's beginning to think neither side quite knows exactly what the other is made of...

"It's all right to be frightened." Mio's hand tilts his face until they're eye to eye again. "It's smart to be frightened. But we're heroes. We're fighters. That means even when we're frightened we keep going. We get up again and again and again and we never, ever give up."

"We didn't." Placing his hand over hers, sandwiching her hand between his cheek and his fingers, he smiles again at Mio.

This time the smile is true, and is returned, and he feels the knot inside loosen even more. "We didn't. And we won't. So go back to bed, Right, and have good dreams."

Leaning forward, Mio places a kiss in the center of his forehead. Then she disentangles her hands from him, stands, and walks toward her own bed.

Right stays in his seat a little bit longer, watching the lights flare up and fade away again in the darkness outside the window.

The fear isn't gone, any more than the hatred and the pity are, but it is free now, no longer knotted and sticking in ways it shouldn't.

When he sleeps again, he dreams of Zed, and though he cries when he kills him, he does kill him, light slashing through darkness, action in the face of fear.

It isn't the type of dream he wants, but for now, it will do.

XXX

"I'm fascinated by him."

Right makes the admission to the tabletop, his hands wrapped around a cup of warm tea.

Tokatti doesn't answer, and Right feels his shoulders hunching up slightly, a defensive posture. "I mean... I don't want to keep having dreams like this. I don't want to keep thinking about and remembering what he did. I just..."

"He's something different." Tokatti adjusts his glasses, a distinctive movement and sound that Right can recognize even just in his peripheral vision, and then rests his hand on Right's back. "Oh, you don't have to try to explain why you're fascinated. I can understand being entranced by something beautiful and dangerous and impossible to get out of your head."

"Really?" Right risks a quick glance up.

Tokatti isn't really looking at him now, though, his attention instead focused in the middle distance. What memory is he staring at so intently? What dredged-up piece of himself has he found floating in the darkness that used to be their life, and why does it make him give that little smile? "Really really."

Right narrows his eyes. "When?"

"Hmm?" Tokatti's eyes finally focus on Right again, and he blushes, rubbing at the back of his head with his left hand. His right hand stays on Right's back, a comforting weight and warmth. "Oh, all the time. Books aren't just about numbers and random bits of fact, you know. There's all sorts of fascinating things in them. That medical book I bought three weeks ago, after we got all beat up and I realized Wagon was the one who knows the most about patching us up? That's just filled with horrible things."

Right finds his eyebrows rising in silent query, though he's not sure he wants to know.

"It has a table that shows the average amount of blood in the human body and symptoms related to blood loss, liter by liter, going from mild confusion to death. And the section on concussions! It makes it a little more frightening and a little less fun to have things exploding when I know what it's doing to my brain to get flung around like that, even if the suits are pretty good so far as armor goes. And the section on infectious disease—do you know that prions are misfolded proteins that are able to hijack the proteins in your body to kill you?"

No, and he's not sure he likes the thought of it.

"And it's not just medicine. That book on the history of trains—it's fascinating mechanics, but the number of people who died over the course of the train's invention and improvement! Accidents were common, and then there were the ones who died of things like inhaling coal dust for too long." Tokatti's voice has been getting steadily louder and faster. "Even the stars come with fascinating and terrible things—black holes aren't just a hole in space that eats everything, it's a hole in time, and something that falls in has a time dilation effect that essentially makes it look like it's falling forever, and of course because nothing can get out of a black hole we don't know what it's like for the person falling but can you imagine being crushed and stretched into pieces even smaller than atoms and having the process extended for eternity and having no way out because even light can't escape the gravitational force of a black hole?"

For a moment he can. For a moment he can picture vividly falling forever, in darkness and cold, a candlelight stretched and twisted by the all-encompassing, voracious, fascinated dark.

"No."

Both Right and Tokatti jump at the forceful exclamation. Tokatti's hand jerks back, off of Right's shoulder, and he adjusts his glasses again before swallowing and reaching out to touch Right's shoulder gently. "Right?"

"No." Right repeats the negation, and the final band in the knot around his heart, a strip of elastic bright blue-green, slides free. "I don't believe it. There's nothing that light can't escape."

"But—" For a moment Tokatti's mouth moves silently, though his hand stays firm on Right's shoulder. "It's not light like you're thinking of, not metaphorical light, it's a fact of physics and—"

"Light is light." Right smiles at his friend, reaches out and pats his cheek gently, acutely aware of the dark circles under Tokatti's eyes and how responsible he is for a part of them. "Whether it's the light of hope or the light of a star, light is light, and light never disappears. It's never destroyed. It's never swallowed. Whatever happens in a black hole, it's something good, because anywhere that light gathers like that, it has to be good."

"Ah..." Tokatti tilts his head to the side, clearly uncertain about the validity of this theory. "I suppose... there's one theory that on the other side of black holes, whatever that means, there's a white hole, where light erupts in a stream—"

"Yes." Right can feel himself grinning, ear to ear, the first time he's done it in what feels like far too long. "That's it exactly. A white hole, where light erupts to fill the universe."

Tokatti returns the smile, his puzzled expression clearing. "Is that you?"

"Nope." The grin somehow manages to widen. "That's us. Me alone, I get swallowed up by the darkness. But me with the rest of you... then we overcome. Then we explode out of the darkness as a force of light to wash across everything. And it's okay if the darkness is terrifying and it's okay if we pity it and it's okay if we hate it, because it's the opposite of all that we are. And it's okay if we're fascinated by it, because it's different and it's pulling on us and it's shaping where we can go. But none of that controls us. None of that can bind us, because we're the white holes, spitting light out into the darkness whether it wants it or not."

He can feel the moment when the knot comes undone. The individual strands don't fade away, the blue-black hum of hatred, the orange-red embers pulsing with pity, the white-red tremor of terror, the blue-green flicker of fascination. They are all emotions that Zed has earned in his brief, brilliant debut. They have become a part of Right, something he cannot erase without erasing bits of himself.

But he is more than that. He is a Toqger. He is light in the darkness, even when the darkness slips inside him, inside his friends, and he will not let it control him.

He hugs Tokatti, a fierce embrace that almost knocks the taller man off the seat. "Thank you."

Tokatti fumbles once more at his glasses. "I didn't do anything."

"You were here. You were you." Right pats his friend's cheek. "That's all I've needed from all of you, because that's the most precious gift you can give me. Feel up to heading back to sleep?"

"I'm not sure it takes much energy to go sleep." Tokatti smiles, pushing himself up with the table. "But I'm happy to head back to sleep if you think you'll be all right now."

"I'll be fine now." Right takes Tokatti's hand, leading the way toward their beds. "I don't think it'll stop the nightmares entirely, but I'll be able to handle them now, I think. And if I can't... well, you'll all be there, right?"

"Absolutely." Tokatti smiles, squeezing Right's hand. "Right."

Right laughs, and it feels good, emotion welling up, his heart expanding without any painful constrictions.

He sleeps well that night, and though the dreams don't stop he's usually able to handle them on his own.

And when he can't... well, he's there for the others, whenever they need him, light in the darkness. The fact that they return the favor, never complaining, never asking for anything in return, is just one of the many, many reasons he loves his team.