A/N: Old fic that I can't polish any more and is three years overdue to be posted. My attempt at -ahem- horror. Warnings for general creepiness, death and melodrama.
Dans Endroits Sombres
(In Dark Places)
The world is ending.
It began mere days ago and has continued ever since in some terrible waking nightmare, and it continues even now, as Ulrich Stern steps into a small cafe that's entirely too ordinary. The room is brightly-lit against the evening's chaotic weather, and obscenely cheerful music emanates from some hidden sound system. A closer look tugs an eeriness into focus with small signs - the emptiness of the place, the upturned chairs. The television mounted on the wall, covered deliberately with a heavy sheet.
Wherever he goes, wherever there is what remains of life and people, the screens are covered.
As though that can save them.
Ulrich turns his gaze deliberately away and, aware of the wet squeak of his shoes against the floor, crosses noisily to the counter. There is a girl there, humming to herself. An expression that treads the line between absurdly wide grin and terrified grimace stretches over her face, just visible to him beneath the top of his hood. She may be real, she may not; he can't see her eyes, so he doesn't know.
He chooses his sandwich from the chilled tray, pays for it silently and slides into a cushioned seat that faces the door, which he keeps firmly in the corner of his eye as he peels away the plastic wrapping with shaking hands. Fuck, he thinks, as his fingers slip, he's fucking terrified, and he almost wishes for a moment that they'd find him, just so he could break free from the awful limbo of waiting.
The sandwich, ham salad, is cardboard in his mouth, but he wolfs it down anyway and licks the crumbs from his fingers, wasting nothing of the purchase which has emptied his pockets of change. It's a transparent, last-ditch attempt at staying human, the use of money - what good is it now without a society to function in? - but today Ulrich kids himself that it makes sense and perhaps the waitress is kidding herself that there's some shred of normality left in the world. He's surprised she hasn't scrutinised him more closely, looking for Eyes. Perhaps she's afraid to.
Ulrich sits there for a long time. His eyes flicker from the rain-flecked window to the closed door. He is painfully aware of how alone he is and he allows himself to indulge in fantasy for a while, filling the empty spaces in front of him with his imagination. He wonders, if they were here now, what they would say, and in his mind it goes like this-
There's Yumi, book in hand, her knee not quite bumping against his as she shifts position on the cushioned seat beside him. Odd, improvising pea-shooters out of straws to aim at Jérémie and Aelita, whose heads are pressed together as they bend over Jérémie's laptop.
"Do you think Ulrich will save us?" Odd asks no one in particular. He tears paper into tiny pellets, stockpiling ammunition.
Yumi's head snaps up from her book as she glares at him. "Of course he will," she says, fire in her eyes as Odd withers beneath her gaze. "He's never let us down."
Odd shrugs. He turns to the window, wide hazel eyes staring right through Ulrich. "Well, yeah," he says. "But he's on his own now, right?"
Jérémie and Aelita flicker. Ulrich doesn't like where his imagination his taking him, but he'd rather they were here than not, so he pulls them quickly back into focus.
"Ulrich's the only one who can," Jérémie points out.
"And really, it's quite simple," adds Aelita. "We need to deactivate that tower, and go back in time. Undo as much as we can, given the circumstances."
"We can't just rely on that though," says Jérémie. "After all Aelita, we don't even know if you're still alive."
Ulrich watches the tears trail down her cheeks, sees them vanish before they hit the table. The surface remains dry. "Don't say that!" she protests. "I am. I am!"
"I sure hope so, Aelita." Yumi closes one pale hand over her book. Ulrich tries to meet her eyes but she is dreamlike and blurry, his breaking concentration dissolving her like static. "There's only one way to find out, Ulrich."
And then the call comes from the other side of the room, and they all fade, and he is alone once more, as he always was, at the table.
"We're closing soon!" the girl at the counter says, her voice far too cheerful, and adds unnecessarily, "We always close at eight." She doesn't notice the way Ulrich jumps at the sound of her voice, with hands clapped over his mouth to suppress the shouts drawn by frayed nerves and years' worth of tension in his shoulders. Instead he nods, pulls his hood further down his forehead, rises with his hands gripping the edge of the table. A door opens in the back again and his heart skips a beat, worn-in instincts flaring and ready to have him run, but it's only an older woman's voice, warm yet tired.
"Lucie, have you wiped down the tables?"
"Not yet, Mama."
The woman sighs. "I don't suppose there's much point, now."
The atmosphere changes almost palpably; a spark of terror flits through the younger girl and betrays itself in her voice as she protests. "But you said, if we carry on as normal, help will come."
"Maybe it will. But they're saying no one else will be able to get out. All the planes crash, and the military vehicles trying to cross the border... the monsters-"
"NO!" the girl yells. Ulrich, crossing the room, shrinks against the wall. "Just... just stop with the news, okay? I don't want to hear it. I don't want to think about it. I just want to talk about something else, anything else, please..."
Ulrich stares at his shoes, uncomfortable in the presence of the sobbing that follows, but it's anger that curls his hands into fists at his sides. She doesn't know fear; she has no idea. She has no idea what this means for his friends, or for him.
Through the clamorous sobbing he hears the older woman - "Hey you, kid. We're closed, d'y'hear? Scram!"
Reluctantly he pushes open the door and the sobbing is cut off abruptly as it swings closed after him, ushering Ulrich away from light and warmth and humanity into storm-ridden darkness.
That café was an oasis - they are the only ones who didn't get away, or the only ones that lived, in the aftermath - the other buildings are all empty here. Empty shells that scrutinise Ulrich dispassionately with smashed-window eyes as he makes slow and steady progress from one block to the next.
He knows where he will end up, eventually. Every step takes him closer, a magnet-pull he barely resists.
Ulrich walks on.
He keeps to the edges of the roads, though the complete absence of cars makes itself known in the black, empty tarmac and near-soundless sky. Sometimes late at night when the roads were quiet, they would walk defiantly along the middle of them, amused at the novelty that was the lack of traffic. Odd would-
His mind swerves away from this topic so fast he's almost dizzy, and Ulrich thinks determinedly of trees and houses and clouds and the cold attacking his fingers – anything he can see or touch or feel in this present moment, anything else. But the world lives to mock him tonight because moonlight washes a ribbon of silver over him in a sudden parting of clouds, illuminating the papers littering the street.
Ulrich doesn't know what they are at first; just sodden squares that peel reluctantly from the pavement, tearing in his hands in limp strips, until he takes steps forward and finds one a little less damaged, sheltered by the bushes on the roadside. He turns it gently in his hands and a chill runs through him, turning his body to ice from the outside in.
Yumi stares up at him, faint smile curving her lips, every detail of her face just as he remembers it. He frowns; he's seen this photograph before, its familiarity is striking. School? Or the framed memories on Aelita's desk, or-
The supercomputer.
Of course, he thinks, of course it would be that photograph; it's the one that accompanies her Lyoko avatar, the one that flashes onscreen amidst every virtualisation. And the most dreadful part of it is the detail he's been avoiding, that could have first been a smudge of mud but which, when he lifts the paper away from his shadow, is unmistakably clear.
Across her face is a huge red X.
She's crossed out. Crossed out of existence, but no, he can't even think that.
A fit of energy seizes him, and suddenly Ulrich is running; now, sinking to his hands and knees, grabbing fistfuls of papers in his hands until he's found all of them, the complete set, and he fans through them with a mad fervour, his mouth dry and his mind numb.
Yumi. Odd. Jérémie. Aelita -
(no William, where is William)
- All with crosses marring their photographs. Every copy of his friends faces are marked in the same way and Ulrich wants to do something but he can't even scream, possibilities crowding his mind and overriding all sense, all thought. Until he looks down, still trapped in the glare of the moonlight, and from beneath his foot his own face stares up at him.
Unmarked.
And in being unmarked he is marked, in a way. Because he is the only one left, and there are civilians left here, trapped in this wasteland, who will see Ulrich's surrender as the end and who will do anything to make it so. There are times like this when he can stop running for a moment and simply walk, nursing the small false hope of escape. There are other times when he is actively hunted. Just as, Ulrich supposes, all his friends were.
How desperate must these people have been, to turn them in? It's yet another missing gap in his knowledge and memory, one flooded instead with his own terrible imagination, possibilities that torture him through wakefulness and sleep like a tiny thousand needles pricking his brain.
"Please, no!"
Yumi Ishiyama has been desperate before, but this level of despair in her voice is something else. Not the cry of fear as a comrade falls on Lyoko, or the quiet sadness as her father slams the front door closed behind her. This is a side of Yumi rarely seen - one that tosses her pride aside and begs.
"Please!" she says again, struggling further against her bonds. "You don't understand! You can't just… you can't hand us over, we're the only ones who can stop this!"
She flings her weight up from the ground, leg extended and hips rotating in a roundhouse kick, but she's caught in mid-air by yet another one of them. Tackled, she finds crude ropes wound tightly and mercilessly around her wrists.
"Quiet!" her captors yell. "Unless you want the boy's death on your conscience?"
Her head is turned, forcibly, and she sees Jérémie slumped, the ropes tying him to his captor the only thing holding him upright. She takes in the situation with quick, precise analytics born from years of fighting. There's an ugly bruise blossoming darkly over his forehead, and a thread-fine shattering in the left lens of his glasses. And they need him, for Lyoko. Without Jérémie, without Aelita, the whole thing falls apart.
She tells the crowd as such.
"It - XANA - will be angry if you hurt him," she says, fighting to keep the panic out of her voice. She has turned away from Jérémie since, but like an afterimage burning beneath closed eyelids, her thoughts linger with that wound, deceptively small and possibly nothing but possibly not. With effort, Yumi straightens her back, forces her clenched fists to relax and stop pulling the rope that binds her. She can feel the merciless burn where the ropes have scraped her skin away and she focuses on it, harmonising with her own inner, smouldering rage.
Odd and Aelita are nearby. One of their assailants is covered in deep scratches and Yumi feels a twinge of pride for whoever of the two inflicted them. Aelita's face is stained with tears and Odd is trembling with the effort of standing upright and of keeping his own emotions together. It's always been a marker for Yumi, on some level, of how serious a situation is - if Odd can crack a smile then it can't be too bad. Right now, he's perfectly solemn.
"Let us go," Yumi pleads, one last time.
One of her captors is older than the rest, a man whose face is creased with age and anger. His eyes are bright in the dimming sun, the sharp glint of desperation and a more than a touh of madness.
"That thing killed our families. The military have stopped sending in troops. This is the only way to end this."
"Yes," Yumi says, with a brusque nod. "This will end everything. Just not in the way that you hope."
The factory looms ahead. They are so small, an army of ants, and its shadows swallow them up.
The Lyoko warriors turn to face it with their heads held high.
Or maybe that's not how it happened at all. Maybe they were forced to split up, hunted down one by one, blackmailed and threatened and beaten and smoked out of their hiding places like rats.
Ulrich might never know, and that is perhaps the worst part.
He thanks his good fortune and all the deities he has never believed in that he has had the sense to cover his face. Between his hood and his scarf he has some semblance of anonymity, and though the scarf muffles his breathing it makes him feel safer, if anything ever could.
He remembers where he found it, how he unwound it from the unconscious body of the last person he tried to ask for help.
It's a bad punch - Ulrich's Pencat Silat instructor would have cringed. Nonetheless it has the desired effect; Ulrich feels the man's nose twist out of shape, hears the sickening crunch, but his own fist stings from the impact. The man goes down, eyes rolling back in his head, and Ulrich pauses with heavy breathing in the now-empty room, and then takes the scarf from his neck and quietly wraps up his stinging knuckles.
He's backing towards the door, the warm firelight of the abandoned house gone from comfort to warning beacon in a minute flat. Fear runs through him as a side door opens. A young woman steps up and brushes matted hair from her eyes, which widen as she recognises him.
"Shit," she breathes. "It's you. And you're just a kid."
Ulrich doesn't know what to say to this so he waits, passive, but not for a moment does he pause in the slow backward inching of his feet towards the exit.
"Shit," the woman says again. Then an undercurrent of hardened resolve cuts through her expression and her grip tightens on the gun that Ulrich now sees clasped in one shaking hand. "I'm sorry, but it- that thing… I have a little girl, she's beautiful, she's just turned one…"
With a scarf and blood on his hands, Ulrich bolts through the door behind him and runs before she can steel herself enough to take a shot.
It's a story that has kept repeating itself, the difference in details each time (words, faces, locations) inconsequential. The cry goes out for Ulrich's blood and perfectly kind strangers are ready to kill him, desperate for anything to end the madness and all too willing to believe XANA's false promises. He's seen humanity turn on itself like a starved body consuming its own tissue, has seen each and every military plane torn from the sky to spiral, in smoke and flames, to the earth below, or else plunge hopelessly into a vast and watery grave. No longer bound to a single battle, XANA's influence has stretched much further than possession and destruction. Its presence itself corrupts, plants the seed of fear into the cold ground of France.
Now, back in the awful present, Ulrich notices that the rain has stopped.
He feels disgusting however, in days-old clothes which cling to him uncomfortably and reek of mud and dried sweat. He washes himself in water when he can find it - things like packaged food and running tapwater are relics of the past - but these clothes, the ones he went to school in that morning, are all that waits for him when the illusion of recovering cleanliness ends, and he shivers as he pulls him back on like a second skin. Ulrich's skin crawls when he thinks about how filthy he is. He probably reeks, but he's grown used to the smell so he wouldn't know. The rain doesn't really make a difference.
He wonders if anything can.
/
He walks the streets that he's walked so many times before and thinks about how much has changed since the first time, when he was still injured and mildly feverish. His leg still twinges with an old pain if he leans his weight on it just so, and the exhaustion follows him always, like a deep, tired ache all its own. There are bodies rotting even here, in the neat roads of the suburbs. The Ishiyamas house is a few streets away but he's avoiding it on purpose, afraid of who or what he might find there.
That this could happen in such a short time amazes him. These places, once so orderly and full of life, are now a shrine to the post-apocalyptic. Allow the picture to reveal itself slowly, the details fading in, and all the misgivings of ruin will creep along the edges. The broken windows, the lingering dead, the darkly staining blood and the complete, too-perfect stillness. Clatters and snarls as feral animals scavenge through upturned trash cans. There's a faintly charred smell in the air that Ulrich recognises as laser fire, and another, stronger smell that he's come to know as death and decay. Even the looters and pillagers who revelled in the destruction are long gone. It's too quiet, with none of the night-sounds he's grown used to hearing as he falls asleep in his dorm at Kadic, and he begins to think that he's truly the only one left.
He considers going back to the café, but that would take him back past the posters and, well.
Something someone said once drifts through his mind. A quip that might have been made by Yumi or Odd or Jérémie, or Jim, or even his father.
"Best foot forward, Ulrich!"
An old pain in his leg threatens to resurface, but he shifts the weight from his foot and takes his first step with his left one. He still keeps to the very edges of the road and finds it difficult to shake the feeling that someone is following him. There are Kankrelats and Bloks scuttling around, he suspects, but they won't attack without a direct command.
Kadic Academy - what's left of it - isn't far from here.
Ulrich takes a deep, shuddering breath.
"Why not, huh?" he whispers to himself. "One last look."
He knows when he's within sight of the place that his odds of finding anything here are slim. Like everything else, Kadic Academy is a shell of its former self. One side of the building is merely rubble, the other a hollowed out husk with its skeletal framework of walls and ceilings just barely holding it together. Plaster crumbles to dust in Ulrich's hands as he touches it. Again the moonlight, in treacherous cloudless flashes, reveals things best kept hidden - he can deal with the upturned chairs and tables, the smouldering bedsheets and splintered wardrobes, but it's the other things he squeezes his eyes closed against.
The empty clothes. The personal belongings. The remains of bodies.
The ground gives way beneath him suddenly, and Ulrich lurges forward as though he's been pushed. He spins around, catching his breath, only to lose it again on a choked sob as he realises he's standing on someone's outstretched hand. He draws his own hands deeper into himself, still swathed in his pockets, and his eyes are empty as he follows the hand to its abrupt conclusion - a charred stump of elbow, nothing more.
"I'm sorry," he whispers, to people that can no longer hear.
The last time he apologised out loud was the last time he saw someone alive.
"Ulrich, I'm scared!"
Ulrich has to laugh a little - there's something ironic in Sissi's admission of fear because a second later she's delivering an impressive kick to a small Kankrelat, which scuttles and bounces down the walls like a tin can in a child's game. Her hair is mussed and her clothes torn; she winces, and Ulrich fears for a moment she might be hurt, but she's only caught a glimpse of herself in a nearby mirror.
"You're doing great, Sissi," he reassures her, and he means it, because Sissi has always come through for them even if she doesn't remember it, and sometimes he wonders why they haven't asked her to be a Lyoko warrior yet. He thinks the day might come when they get desperate, when there'll be five Lyoko avatars on the screens instead of four, and she's really the only person he can think of. "I need to go and see if anyone else needs help!" he says. "Besides," he adds under his breath, "it's me they're after."
"Ulrich!" Sissi screams at him over the sound of laser fire. "Ulrich Stern, don't leave me here!"
"You're doing fine, Sissi! I'll come back!"
"Ulrich!"
"I'm sorry Sissi, but I need to go!"
He allows himself one last look over his shoulder before he dodges through the doorway. She's using a collapsible chair from the science department to fight off a Blok.
That's the last time he sees her.
These and other memories wash over him. It's a kind of penance that he forces himself to relive them, though perhaps he couldn't fight them off if he tried. Ulrich blinks hard as an unexpected wave of exhaustion hits him. He wanders blindly in the rubble, finds a set of stairs and a second floor still climbable and walks up them with his arm trailing along the banister.
He walks a corridor that his feet remember better than his head, and with a faint surprise finds himself at the door of his dorm room. Ulrich hesitates.
"Stupid," he chastises himself. "What are you even expecting to find here?"
He pushes the door open.
The room's relatively undamaged, all things considered. Huge cracks creep along the wall and ceiling, and more plaster crumbles away in a shower of fine dust at the slightest movement, but most of the mess is their own. Homework on the desk, Kiwi's chew toys on the carpet. Clothes everywhere, backpacks, video game consoles and the mouldy remains of half a sandwich. Odd's wardrobe has fallen open and everything he shoved in there before the last dorm inspection has spilled onto the floor.
This fact is so extraordinarily funny that Ulrich can barely contain himself. Laughter bubbles in his throat and he indulges in the rare sound, the elation that comes with it. He sinks onto his unmade bed, hunched over with his elbows on his knees, and laughs, elation fringed with hysteria.
"Odd!" he says, breathless. "Even XANA couldn't make a worse mess than us!"
You've finally lost it, the voice of the everyday Ulrich Stern in the back of his mind tells him, but this little pocket of uncontrollable elation is addictive and he clings to it for as long as he can. At last he recovers his breath, draws them in long and shuddering. He looks around the room, wiping tears from the corner of his eyes without even being aware of the action, and takes in the space. It truly does look as though a bomb's hit it.
Ulrich sighs, folding his arms over his head and flopping back down onto the bed, never mind the uncomfortable dampness of the sheets. The cracked ceiling unnerves him and he soon rolls over to better take in the familiar, natural mess of the floor. Allowing his eyelids to drift closed, he pillows his head on his arms. He can almost kid himself it's another ordinary night with Odd lying across from him in his own bed. Night-sounds quieting as Kadic settles down, and sleepiness drawing their own secrets out of them, letting them swirl in the darkness above their heads.
Ulrich's words push out of him in a mumbled kind of slur.
"Please be okay, Odd."
"I have faith in you, good buddy," the Odd of his mind replies. But it's not a direct answer and it's that need for the truth that eventually pushes Ulrich up from his bed again, winning the battle against the urge to sleep here forever.
Tugging his hood back over his head and his scarf over his face, he is about to rise when he hears the soft rustle of paper. His hands press down the coverlet, wandering up to his pillow where he finds a hard, rectangular shape and with it the memory of the last time he wrote in his journal. Ulrich flicks to the final entry, although he already knows what's written there.
Dear journal,
Not much happened today - I guess that's good, since I've been so tired with all the XANA attacks. I should have caught up with homework, but instead I went to the park with Yumi and Aelita, and then played Galactic Invaders with Odd. We even got Einstein to come away from his computer and join us! I forgot how much fun he can be when he's not stressing out. Overall, it was a good day. I'm making a point of writing this down because I realised that, when I'm older and reading back through his journal, I don't just want it to be a reminder of all the bad times, the records of all our Lyoko fights. Sometimes I wonder if-
Ulrich strains to recollect that last sleepy thought. What had he been about to write, just before he fell asleep? He'll never know, realises with a vague sense of loss that it vanished the moment his eyes slid shut and his hand lost its grip on his pen.
He tucks the journal back under his pillow and closes the door behind him.
It's still cold outside but it's now a manageable sort, with Ulrich warmed by the bit of hope gathered in his and Odd's old room. He retraces his steps along the corridor, down the damaged stairs, and crosses once more over the rubble. It's such a wide-open space, the ruins of Kadic, that Ulrich has a strong sense of how very vulnerable he is out here and how unsafe it is to be alone in the open, when any unseen threat could be hiding amongst the surrounding trees. He feels a twinge of self-loathing as he realises he misses the warm weight of a weapon in his hand.
He had a gun, once, quite early on in the madness. Found it quite by chance in a tangle of undergrowth, a shiny silver scar against the muddy ground. He remembers the feel of it in his hands, how dangerous it was but how safe it made him feel, and the few Kankrelats he killed with it before the bullets ran out. The mingled disappointment of its loss, and the relief that it happened before he had to use it on anything (or anyone) else. Perhaps the last dying vestiges of his luck have run out at last, for he can find no such weapon again. Or at least, nothing that's light enough to carry.
It's been a long time since he saw a clock, too. His own watch was lost some time ago. Without it, Ulrich feels adrift in a vast expanse of time that goes on forever with nothing to tame it or condense it down into something tangible. He wonders if he'll survive until the sun comes up.
The night has been one long countdown.
/
His feet have taken him down a familiar course, as he knew they would, and he stands at the edge of a familiar clearing, and he knows that sooner or later, consciously or not, he would have come to this place. Sinking against a tree and ignoring the seeping of water into the seat of his jeans from the damp ground, Ulrich presses his palms against sunken, shadowed eyes, and breathes, and remembers.
Most of what he knows, about what happened, comes from fragmented phone calls and his own guesswork. He was so helplessly distant from the battle on Lyoko as he worked on evacuating the school, diving away from laser fire which scored his clothes as the virtual and the reality bled into one another, the images of Lyoko's monsters in Kadic difficult to process, even in memory. His connection to the battle was nothing more than a scattered mobile phone call, replayed over hundreds of times now in Ulrich's memory.
"The supercomputer- XANA's monsters are- Odd, help!"
"Got you covered Einstein."
A sickening crack – Ulrich guesses something metal scavenged from the factory combining with hard Krab shell.
"Yumi, Aelita, come on! The tower's only two hundred metres away! Ah, Ulrich, hold on there, they're almost at the tower but there's been a glitch in the weapons programme-"
Ulrich shifts the phone to his other ear. There's a lengthy crackle of static.
Then something, something else... and a gasp from Odd as though he can't quite believe it, and a moan from Jérémie as he sinks into despair.
Ulrich breathes deeply in the present as he remembers that sound. Easy-going Odd and calm, assured Jérémie. The sound of their hope draining away.
"Aelita's been- no, NO!"
"Jeremie!" Ulrich yells into his phone. "Jeremie what's happening?"
But in his heart, he already knows.
He imagines it in flashes, quick and vivid, the same scenario playing itself out in different 'what ifs' each time.
Lyoko thrumming with rapid footsteps, battle cries rending the air, and in all of that chaos one stray beam of red light hitting Aelita square in the chest... The small 'oh' of surprise forming of her mouth and mirrored in wide green eyes that squeeze shut as she loses her footing, thrown forward with the impact, as within reach of the tower, she stumbles... Hands outspread to break a fall that never comes as her virtual structure tears, collapsing into silver-blue nothingness like a pitiful pack of cards... In his recollection all the world goes silent, as though to capture the echo of that one fateful laser being fired.
And then are all the other things Ulrich doesn't know, which happened afterwards.
Her return to Earth, the expression of complete bewilderment as the scanner doors slide open; tears forming on her face as she slumps to the cold ground. All of them drowning in the impossible because this could never have happened, Aelita can't get devirtualised, she just can't...
There is always a point, before the inevitable tower-deactivation, one integral moment where it's life or death and that sweeping white light comes over the horizon to save you. The last phone calls were rattling in Ulrich's brain, every detail so perfectly entrenched in his mind, and the world around him bright and hyperreal with the adrenaline rush of panic. There'll be a return to the past any moment now, he remembers telling himself, And before I know it, we'll be sitting down in the cafeteria and talking about what a near-miss we had this time.
He waited, and waited.
The return to the past never came.
After a while, the events become scattered in his memory. Everything from I have to get to the factory and I have to help everyone here, he remembers trying to get away across Kadic's grounds and the intense pain from laser fire which tears mercilessly through his leg. The world blurring, sounds growing fainter and him making his way into the woods. Some instinct preserved him, compelled him to hide himself amongst the shrubs and leaves, out of sight and mind whilst he succumbed to a pained and feverish unconsciousness.
He will never know the details, only that, when at long last he woke up, the world was changed and his friends were missing. The guilt he feels at surviving is just one of the emotions that still threatens to tear him apart.
That's as much as he can manage to think about. Ulrich struggles to his feet, hand braced against the tree trunk for support, and makes his way slowly down towards the river. The factory is an ominous blot on the horizon and Ulrich tells himself he doesn't have to think about it just yet. There are other things to deal with, closer tragedies.
He blinks, slowly, peering ahead. There is an unmoving shape sinking in the wet grass not too far from the banks of the Seine.
Ulrich doesn't want to look but feels compelled to, somehow. Scarf pressed over his face to ward off the stench, he presses forward slowly until he is just close enough to see. The air is thick with the sound of buzzing. Flies crawl greedily on the dead flesh, rising in swarming spirals when they sense his presence.
The skin is marble-white, a canvas puckered with festering wounds. Ulrich has to turn away and vomit when he sees the stomach and torso... and right through them, to the bloodied grass below. No human weapon could have done this, scourged a perfectly circular hole with the edges charred, black crumbling flesh, ribs and entrails jaggedly splayed in gory abstract. He's reminded of the meat he's just eaten and it churns in his stomach. He presses his knuckles there to keep it down.
The flies crawling over the corpse's face shift suddenly, moving to the neck and shoulders to mar the husk's surface like an ugly black spot. And Ulrich... Ulrich knows this face, knows this decaying husk of a human being, but he squeezes his eyes shut, shaking his head like a child who doesn't want to hear the end of the story because this, this isn't fair, this is too horribly close to home.
Ulrich knows this face, its dark hair, its stubble.
Its band-aid, its red and blue jacket.
The impression of this will burn on the back of his eyelids forever, will be the first thing that greets him when he slips into sleep and the last thing he remembers as he jerks fearfully awake. He's seen dead adults, swept past them with an empty gaze, but Jim isn't just any adult, and Ulrich doesn't think he could be shocked or hurt any more but this cuts him through to the core.
Ulrich finally turns from that slack-jawed and vacant face when one wriggling maggot squirms past the single closed eye socket.
He doesn't have any tears left, so this mourning feels incomplete. He can't touch the body in the state that it's in, and certainly he can't carry it, bury it, give it the respect it deserves. The realisation of his helplessness has anger surging through him, powerful and relentless and red hot, bending his body into a doubled-over husk on the ground, which receives his punches unflinchingly.
I've let you all down, forgive me (I don't deserve it); this is my fault.
When the skin of Ulrich's knuckles blossoms purple with bruises and his palms are wet with blood, he stands and walks on without looking back.
Ahead of him, discarded weapons litter the grass. There's nothing useable - he tries them all, pressing triggers on guns of all kinds - and their presence disturbs him because they're a surefire sign that their owners are missing. He's caught snatches of stories, of military operations that send soldiers into the elusive factory, and of these soldiers never coming back. The evidence of an unknown fate marks his path out before him, warning Ulrich of what he's already figured out:
To walk over the factory bridge in plain view is madness. To cross through the freezing waters below is even more so.
But he's weighed up all the options. Wait things out in a torn world, its survivors still hunting him. Seek help, as he's attempted so many times. Or face the battle (his battle, the one they all began two years ago) head on, claim victory the only way he knows how.
The decision was made for him long ago.