Chapter 21: Flaws

She hadn't really been planning on carrying a conversation with anyone that day, but humans really were such spontaneous creatures.

Of course, she couldn't really say the NPC sitting dejectedly among the ruins of a small stone cottage was totally human, but he had been designed to imitate humanity and was thus acceptable, if she had been searching for such a thing. It had occurred to her at that moment that her standards must have fallen quite low; if a mirage of a person was enough to please her, how would she be able to handle a genuine individual?

She had been performing her usual circuits of the many floors of Aincrad, deciding to explore randomly as she had already visited every general location, in order to understand profoundly the nature of the world which had bred her. She had stopped under the shelter of a maple tree for just a moment, contemplating on how the heat of the sun could affect her negatively, although she didn't draw any benefits from having the flaming ball in the sky. Even in pitch darkness, she could see just fine; and her body composition did not require light to remain healthy.

The tree had rooted itself upon the crest of a large hill, like a small crown atop a balding head that stood alone among the vast plains of the eighty-fifth floor. She had seen the ruins of the stone cottage out of the corner of her eye but had chosen to not think about it; only when the sounds began did she pay any heed.

Turning, Yui saw the small boy sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest, back to a small portion of the wall that had still managed to keep itself standing, staring sightlessly at the ground. Upon another occasion, she might have simply turned and let him be. But there was something odd about this situation; what was such a small NPC doing out here, alone? Usually, they were programmed to stay in groups, and only under extraordinary circumstances would they be allowed to break from the hive mentality.

Against her instincts, Yui shifted her feet and began to take steps towards the boy. He apparently heard her coming, not that she had taken any especial care to remain unnoticed, because the boy's head lifted to observe the approaching newcomer. There was a slight jolt in the girl's chest when their eyes met; she had expected to be met with the misunderstanding, blank stare of an NPC, but instead the irises staring back at her were bright, intellectual, and...human.

No words were exchanged immediately, even when Yui had walked all the way so that she could stand not three feet from him, her bare toes sinking softly into the loose dirt under the grass. The NPC stared back at her, not bothering to leave his position in front of the broken wall, though whether it was out of indifference or fear she couldn't really say. Finally, Yui decided that she couldn't let this silence last any longer. It would be a waste of her time to turn around and forget about this now. Squatting on her heels, Yui tilted her head and asked,

"What's your name?"

He looked younger than her, though not by much. Yui knew after a long time that, despite her age correlating with the release of SAO, she appeared to be about ten years old. The NPC sitting before her seemed to be about eight. Dark brown hair wafted quietly over a set of black, deep eyes, and there was nothing really special about anything on his countenance. Standard for any NPC. So perhaps she had been wrong after all; maybe there wasn't anything different about him.

Those eyes, though.

"...Taichi," The boy answered almost meekly, as if answering incorrectly would warrant some sort of punishment. Taking a moment to roll the name around in her head, Yui nodded in acceptance and allowed herself to take a seat against the shattered wall beside the boy. The NPC tensed up a bit at her proximity, but said nothing and did not move.

After a few moments of silence, Yui tore a few blades out of the grass and asked, "What are you doing here, Taichi?"

He didn't answer immediately. Her immediate instinct was that his response parameters were buffering. Then there was the nagging thought that perhaps he felt too guilty to divulge a response.

Nonsense. He's a computer.

Well...so am I.

Taichi picked his own blade of grass before deigning to answer. "I...did bad."

"Bad?"

"Mommy. She got mad at me cause I did bad."

"What did you do wrong?" Yui asked almost blandly, her thin, nimble fingers weaving the grasses together as if she were knitting.

Taichi observed this for a little while before remembering that he was supposed to answer her questions. "I burned all of the bread in the oven," He admitted guiltily. "Mommy and I have a bakery, and she says we can't eat and live if we don't have our bread, and then I burned it..." The NPC had to cease his speaking in order to wipe the tears forming at the corners of his eyes, and Yui let him.

"I'm always giving my Mommy trouble," Taichi continued once he had recovered somewhat. "I always do bad and she gets upset at me. It makes me feel ugly sometimes."

"Ugly..." Yui murmured, the pace of her fingers increasing somewhat, until she was weaving and picking up more grass at a rather incredible rate. Allowing silence to reign supreme for a little while more, she made up her mind and said, "So is that why you came here?"

Taichi nodded. "I'm going to stay here forever. Then I won't have to give Mommy trouble or do bad or anything. It's better like that."

"And what if she comes after you?"

The NPC took a moment to think about that. "Well, I don't know, really. My Mommy's always coming for me."

The last sentence was spoken with a hint of pride in it, a pride that made Yui want to scream. It was absurd to her that someone would be happy when someone went through trouble to come get them.

"I'll be a bit lonely, I guess," Taichi admitted. "But it's okay. Because at least I won't give any trouble-"

Yui's grass weaving snapped in half from all of the force being exerted upon it, and the small boy's words were cut off by the abruptness. He had barely gotten all of his thoughts in order when the older girl sitting beside him flung the torn grass blades away and seized him by the shoulders, squeezing with an almost inhuman strength that betrayed a separation between what was genuine and what was not.

"I want you to go back to your Mommy right now," Yui said, knowing that she had begun speaking at too high a speed but not caring. "Just because you think it's for the best doesn't mean that it really will be. Go back and give her more trouble. Give her all the trouble in the world! Because if you choose to trap yourself here like this and be so alone, you'll wish-"

"Yui-san...?" Taichi cut her off, albeit with an almost impossibly soft voice. It occurred to her that he must have read her name from her HUD.

"Why are you crying?"

Yui pulled one death-gripping hand away to probe her cheeks and was surprised to find them stained with tears. Blinking hard and feeling more streaming from her eyes, she gritted her teeth and wiped the stuff away aggressively.

"You'll wish you could change your mind," She continued, ignoring Taichi's observation. "Once you realize that making someone come after you isn't for the best, you can't ever forget it. So don't realize. Go back and believe that your Mommy will always search for you, and that that's okay. Go now. Leave."

She let him go then, and the small NPC sat, squatting, staring at her in speechlessness. Finally, after what felt like an eternity of waiting, Taichi reached out and trailed the tips of his fingers along Yui's tearstained cheek, making the older girl go frigid at the skin to skin contact.

"Yui-san..." He began, then stopped because he hadn't gotten his words in a straight line just yet.

"Where is your Mommy?"

She couldn't help herself. She laughed, a half-choked sound that felt more like a death cry than an actual expression of amusement. "Far away," She answered.

"Don't you want her to come looking for you?"

"...No."

Taichi sat there for a little while long before nodding in acceptance and getting to his feet.

"Okay," He relented. "I'll go back, then."

And then he was really gone, but he had failed to take her pain with him.

It came to Kazuto's attention that he really had to start waking up earlier on weekends.

He had been disturbed from his slumber yet again in the wee hours of the day, the period where the sun has just risen and is still struggling to burn off the last remainders of the previous night's chill. He had been dreaming about cicadas, oddly enough, except it wasn't exactly a conventional dream; it had been more like he was dozing lightly for a very long time while simultaneously thinking about a random topic. Albeit, his thought processes were rather skewed and unimportant, but they had nonetheless taken place.

He had remembered rather vaguely that he had learned in biology of a specific type of cicada...a species that grew and bred itself underground patiently for seventeen years before emerging to the surface, only to swarm in large numbers for a very limited amount of time before dying to make way for the new generation of cicadas. Only the new generation would only spend another seventeen years underground. Just what was the point? Why choose to trap oneself somewhere for such a long time, and only feel the sun for a moment? Better to have never committed to such an existence, or perhaps never even see the sun at all...Of course, he could understand the evolutionary advantages of this. It had originally been to avoid coinciding with a particular parasite.

A parasite of guilt.

Wait...no.

Languidly, Kazuto pondered as he slept on how the maturing cicada must feel, trapped in its own earthen grave for nearly two decades. How it must feel awfully lonely, with nothing to interact with but the tree roots it sucked its sustenance from, probably feeling like the only sentient organism within the nearest thousand miles. They would be forced to tough it out until it was their time to either emerge or die, unless someone decided to take the time to dig them up from the ground, but that might kill them, disrupt the natural cycle of their lives and only cause ruin in the end.

No, it certainly wouldn't do to force the cicada out of its natural habitat, because-

Ding, dong.

...ugh.

"Are we going to ignore them again?" Asuna murmured groggily from her position on the other side of the bed. She was facing away from him, but she could tell somehow whether he was awake or not, an ability Kazuto had never really gotten an explanation for. His eyes fell briefly upon her honey-colored hair, fascinated at how it didn't look messy or frizzy in the mornings. Suguha's hair had grown somewhat, but it was still much shorter than his lover's, yet she had always suffered from terrible cases of bedhead.

Humming something incoherent deep in his throat, Kazuto reached over and yanked Asuna close to his chest, making the slim girl yelp in surprise at the relatively rough treatment. After she had recovered enough from this sudden development (and suppressed her irritation at being awoken so rudely), she humphed with emphasis and said nothing, though her heartbeat did quicken when he buried his nose into her neck and inhaled. He never failed to excite her.

Meanwhile, the ringing at the door continued.

"You should probably get that," Asuna suggested.

"Why do I have to do it?"

"Because I'm too lazy and you love me."

Kazuto didn't bother peeking through the door to see who was on the other side before opening it. He had always found that oddly disturbing, the notion of staring at someone through a one-sided glass. Felt like an invasion of privacy, despite the fact that the visitor was the one doing the potential invading. Thus his nasty habit of pressing his eye to door-glasses, waiting for the house's residents to peek through only to be confronted by his iris.

He spent a few seconds staring at the woman standing on his threshold before wiping the gum out of his eyes and asking, "Can I help you?"

"Yes," Hitomi said bluntly. "Sorry that this is so sudden, but you have fifteen minutes to get dressed and ready. We're going somewhere."

Kazuto found himself strangely unfazed by the nurse's spontaneity. Running his fingers through his tangled hair and noting duly that he required a haircut, he asked, "Where are we going? And Asuna's still asleep."

"She isn't going with us. Hurry, now."

He eyed the slightly older woman a bit more before deciding he couldn't get any more information out of her. Pulling the door open a little wider, he said, "Then come in and wait a bit," before retreating to his room for a change of clothes.

"Who was at the door?" Asuna asked still groggily upon his return, deigning at last to sit up in the bed.

He found no reason to be discreet. "Hitomi."

There was silence behind him as he darted into the bathroom and began brushing his teeth.

"What's the matter?" Kazuto called out behind him throughout a foaming mouthful of paste, trying his best not to swallow any of the stuff in the process.

"Uh...nothing really," Asuna assured him. "I just didn't expect Hitomi to come here so early in the morning, that's all."

"Oh," He accepted. A few minutes passed as he finished cleansing his enamel and washed his face. Dodging his way into the closet, Kazuto quickly threw on his standard black themed clothing. "I'm sorry I have to leave so early in the morning on a weekend. But it looks like she needs something important."

"That's okay," Asuna murmured. "Just don't talk about too much."

Kazuto paused a moment to contemplate the possible meaning behind those words, then decided he didn't have the time. Reaching over to steal a quick kiss, he said "Be back soon," and slipped out of the door.

The ensuing car ride passed almost entirely without comment. There were a few instances where Kazuto may have had the opportunity to open some avenue of communication, such as whenever Hitomi was forced to cease her reckless driving at an intersection, but the tight expression on her face dissuaded such an action. The nurse's driving took them far past the reaches of the suburban area where he lived, beyond the college grounds and the surrounding plazas and markets and shops, until suddenly they were driving along a road that almost certainly was headed for the beach.

Under alternate circumstances, Kazuto could not have cared less about where they were going specifically; but lately, something very important to him had become stationed by the sea, and having someone head almost directly for said important thing wasn't exactly relaxing. Especially when that someone was not supposed to know about it.

Kazuto allowed himself to relax a bit when Hitomi took a different turn and steered them towards a small, remote parking lot that still overlooked the sea. It occurred to him that they could still see the warehouses where Yui was, far below them and closer to ocean level, the structures like tiny ants from the height they were at.

Even when she had shut off the vehicle, Hitomi didn't begin to speak. Kazuto took the liberty of opening the window a bit to let some of the morning breeze in, and the nurse did nothing against it. Finally, just when he was about to lose himself among the heavy clouds in the sky over the water, she decided to talk.

"How's your daughter been, Kazuto?" She said, the question jolting through his brain like a lance.

Feeling his fingers twitch involuntarily a bit against the armrest, he licked his lips and answered, "Daughter? Oh...uh, she's doing fine, I guess. I hope. I don't know what she's up to."

"Mmm," Hitomi murmured, pulling the keys out of the ignition and studying the jagged teeth along the metal edge. "Have you been doing anything to maybe...see her again?"

Having regained his composure, Kazuto shrugged nonchalantly and said, "The servers have been shut down. There's nothing else I can do about it."

"Kazuto," Hitomi sighed at last, reaching over to grab his right arm tightly and pull their faces a bit closer for emphasis.

At first, he fought the pull. "You aren't coming on to me, are you?"

"No, you dolt. I know about what you're doing with Yui."

"But you - what?"

"Asuna let it slip by accident," The nurse shrugged, letting him go and sitting straight up again. "It was a pretty tiny mistake, but knowing her as well as I do, I knew there something to be known. You have every right to be angry at me; I pretty much had to wrestle the answers out of her, and I'm sure there are some things she hasn't told me about. So don't blame her."

"I don't really want to blame anybody," Kazuto said as he pinched the bridge of his nose. He had to take this latest development in stride; having another person in on their secret shouldn't topple his resolve. "So what will you do, now that you know about this?"

At the inquiry, Hitomi looked away and began nervously playing with her hair. Kazuto noticed the beginning of a touchy subject. "If circumstances were different, I wouldn't have done anything at all. It's yours and Asuna's business regarding what you do with your daughter, and even as a friend I shouldn't infringe on that. But that's only if I have no connections to what you are doing. Yet I do."

He could feel his heart rate increasing, like he was about to discover something he both desperately wanted to know and was afraid to hear. "How are you even remotely involved with our project for Yui?"

"While Asuna was telling me these things, she happened to mention the name of the man who is responsible for driving you to these lengths," Hitomi said almost cautiously, like saying the wrong words would cause Kazuto to implode. "The head of Complexity, a ruthless person, but at the same time, someone I happen to know personally."

Kazuto didn't say anything. He simply waited, trying to maintain eye contact in order to better coax more words out of the nurse, but Hitomi looked away in almost tangible shame.

"Fuzen is my father."

It was so quiet inside the car that they could hear the seagulls cawing below, far below on the roofs of the warehouses.

Kazuto had many times heard people describe what shock felt like, and over his years and experiences he had compiled a myriad of definitions. Shock was the knowledge that death was around every corner. Shock was the profound depth of one's helplessness. Shock was the feeling of a grenade exploding and leaving the body singed with shrapnel. It was the sudden acknowledgement of a loss, or perhaps a rather abrupt gain. Shock was the pure surgical precision of a blow that leaves one gasping in pain on the ground. It was an immobilizing agent, a precursor of demise, and something to avoid at all costs.

Shock was the silence reigning with the car.

Hitomi refused to say anything further now, instead allowing the deafening ringing to continue between them, and Kazuto knew that this was a bad move. Shock couldn't be left to last and slowly settle down; the pace had to be continued, to swamp the sensation away with an overwhelming array of information, but she wasn't doing that, instead choosing to sit there and not say anything as if allowing the thought to sink in wouldn't spread the toxin of pure agitation. This wasn't good, something had to happen, something to kickstart the brain process before-

"He wasn't a good father, I can assure you that," the nurse said, her soft undertone blasting in his ears like a gunshot. "In the days when I was very little, not even a teenager, he wasn't exactly successful. It took him a long time to rise to the presidential position; over ten years, really. It should have taken even longer, but even I can admit that lies and treachery can accelerate any process."

"But you're..." Kazuto tried to say, but his tongue had suddenly inflated. "You're-"

"I have no obligation to him," Hitomi established quickly. "Growing up with him was almost impossible; it was either I returned home to receive beatings or he came after me to administer them. I lived every day, every hour in fear of his wrath. And he instilled it well. I didn't even think of escaping until I was almost an adult."

He could see the that the thoughts in her head were beginning to overtake her. Undoing her seat belt and leaning over, Hitomi seized his shoulders and continued to speak. "But once the thought came to me, it would never leave. It spent my days daydreaming about how I would never have to see him again, the person who was indirectly responsible for killing my mother, sending the family down under both financially and emotionally, and spawning a girl's hatred of her own father. But I was too scared. Absurd, right?" Hitomi asked with a stutter, laughing awkwardly. "I could think it but not do it. I was too much of a coward. Just a shadow, like Fuzen had said. And then he became trapped by the SAO crisis."

A small modicum of comprehension dawned on Kazuto.

"It was the push I needed. I got a job at the hospital where he was being housed while simultaneously working to get into a good college. All things he would have been against. Then, after a while, I left. I guess I wasn't being as brazen as I thought I was; I didn't go very far. He could even have sent men to retrieve me, if he wanted to. But once all the SAO victims were freed, nothing happened. I was gone and it didn't matter to him. It made me so happy that it broke my heart."

"Hitomi, I-"

"Why didn't he come after me?" The girl before him almost shouted, cutting him off. Kazuto was immensely shocked to see a profound weakness of her face for the first time. "If I had gone missing, shouldn't he as a father come after me? Then at least, I would be able to pretend that he didn't hate me...and act like he wasn't such a bad person after all. But he didn't care about my absence and despite my low opinion of him, it...it hurt. He took away my faith in family without even blinking an eye. I can't let him do the same thing to you, or else I'll-"

"Hitomi!" Kazuto yelled, grabbing the nurse's wrists harshly in order to calm her down. Caught off guard by the rough treatment, she stemmed her words.

Letting out a pent up breath he hadn't known he'd been holding, Kazuto relaxed his grip, feeling a stab of regret at the slightly red, angry marks on her skin. Retracting his arms, he allowed Hitomi to shrink back to her position in the driver's seat. Finally, after feeling that the atmosphere had loosened sufficiently, he spoke.

"It's just...okay, let's just get out of the car and have some fresh air, alright?" Kazuto suggested softly. "It's kind of hard to think straight in here, right?"

After a moment's contemplation, Hitomi nodded and crawled out of the car.

Exiting the vehicle himself, Kazuto could feel his heartbeat relax just a tad when the morning's sea breeze struck him fully for the first time. It wasn't very early anymore, but the winds were still strong enough to ruffle his hair. And clear the near-hysterical fog from his head, as well as Hitomi's, hopefully. Stretching his arms a bit before leaning against the hood of the car, he watched as the girl walked forward until she was standing just in front of the metal fence built to keep vehicles and people from tumbling to their deaths into the ocean. She was holding her arms close to her chest, as if to protect her vital organs, the gesture such a startling dichotomy from her usual charisma that Kazuto could barely wrap his head around it. Hitomi had never deviated from the proud, witty woman who held way too much faith in her own philosophies, until now.

Fear really could change people.

It finally struck Kazuto that Hitomi was struggling with how to resume her words; searching for a way to come out feeling more confident than she really was. He could empathize with her; there were moments when words were nothing and only actions would act as communication. Unfortunately, the setting allowed for none of this.

At last, she took a deep breath and tucked her long brown hair behind one ear, her small ponytail flapping frantically in the wind. Turning to face him, she looked a bit more composed. "I didn't call you out here because I want to tell you what to do, or try and make your decisions myself," She began. "I grew up never having a choice, and I'd never force the same pain onto someone else. Being able to choose another option, even if that choice is much worse, is a mark of freedom in its own way. So having said that, all I can do is beg and plead."

Leaving these words hanging in the air, Hitomi moved and closed the distance between them, finally twisting Kazuto's shirt between her fists when she could reach and pressing her nose into his chest.

"Please," She whispered, "Don't challenge Fuzen any further. He may seem idle now, but when he moves, he will take your faith in family away like he did to me. He made me feel like a bastard child; don't become the bastard parents."

"But our situations aren't the same," Kazuto said back, feeling agitated at the tense air. "While it is unfortunate, your father feels animosity towards you. Me and Asuna will always love Yui, and we know she feels the same."

Pulling herself away from him, Hitomi smiled tearfully and said, "I felt safest when my father was locked away in the virtual world. My problems were put to rest, at least for the time being. People say virtual reality is a form of escape, but I think it's a prison. A prison for the people who hurt you the most."

Kazuto felt something catch in his throat. "Yui isn't hurting us."

"Isn't she?" Hitomi asked so softly he knew it was rhetorical. "Ever since Asuna woke up, you've been trying to reach her, and it's cost both of you dearly. I've watched it happen. When the servers were shut down, I thought you would be able to move on, but now you're trying to bring her into a foreign world..."

Feeling an ugly tightness rising in his chest, Kazuto gently but firmly forced some distance between them, allowing the wind to fill the space instead with its cold fingers.

"You don't understand how Asuna and I feel about Yui," He said gruffly. "You couldn't even begin to imagine. If you did, you wouldn't be against this."

Hitomi smiled again, with the same sad tinge. "You're right. I only know what I know. And what I know is that, as long as Yui exists to you, you'll never really free yourself from what happened in Aincrad."

"What do you mean?"

"It might have been before we met, but Asuna told me about Takashi. And about how you let him go. After learning much more about your history, I'm impressed that you managed to release a catalyst for all the pain you experienced in the virtual world. But now you're getting pulled back in again, and it's hurting you both. You live in this reality but you think in the other one. There are friends that you have here, in the real world, who are waiting to be with you. But you're neglecting them as well as your family to chase what is the cause of your pain to begin with."

Abruptly, Kazuto remembered a time very long ago when he'd sat with Agil in his bar, discussing his frustrating inability to trust reality and its contents. The bartender had told him that virtuality had taken root inside him, perhaps permanently. And that too much of anything was bad for someone. That the virtual reality was just that, virtual, and therefore unreliable. But friends would always be there to love and support one another.

So what was Yui to him? A daughter? A pseudo-human?

Or a part of the virtual world that he apparently poisoned him?

It shocked him to realize that tears were spilling down his cheeks. At first he thought they were meaningless, perhaps a product of all the stress he'd been under lately, but further thought negated this hypothesis. His real problem was fear. The same gripping fear that haunted Hitomi. The fear that everything he had believed in until this point might have been a fraud, a fallacy fabricated by wishful thinking and warped ideals. Was that his true motivation behind bringing Yui to the real world? To prove that his tenet for always being in the right was justified? If his fear was genuine and realistic, then it would mean that he had been lying to himself and everyone around him. A crushing guilt.

Enough to spawn doubt.

"Stop it," Kazuto choked out finally, taking a few steps away from the nurse. "Stop making me doubt what we're doing. You're going to ruin everything."

Hitomi stared at the rocky ground. "Better to have doubted and rethought, than acted and regret."

Far below, two gulls began laughing at each other on the roof the the warehouse.

Doubt can destroy trust in anything, even the greatest of ideals.

Hope you guys didn't mind the very serious tone too much, and if you actually enjoyed it, I'm glad.

If you have any thoughts you'd like to leave behind, please put them in the reviews!

Thanks for reading!

~Shrrg

P.S: Also, I must apologize for being unable to post last week. One of my friends did something really stupid and I had to help him out. Other uploaders might not be so worried about posting as regularly as possible, but that's just the way I'm wired.