They made their way through nearly a quarter mile of corridors before they reached the plant room that held Anne. Knives noted all the crossroads that could easily be filled with troops, the twists and turns of the halls that could hide an ambush with little trouble. They had been stashed in a very out of the way section of the plant. Knives spent the journey weighing the most likely reason for the humans' decision to stash them there. To keep the rest of the populace safe from their presence? Likely. To keep them safe? Unlikely. To make them easier to control? Most likely. Because the room was a convenient destination?
Ludicrous.
The idle musing served to keep his mind off the one thing that was worrying him. He knew that it was hardly reasonable for him to avoid a topic of thought just because it caused him some minor emotional anguish. He would find out the answer to his question soon enough, so it wasn't as if his musing on other topics provided him with much surcease from the problem.
Regardless of the pathetic nature of his desire to think on other things, he found himself nearly overwhelmed by a strange distress as they approached the door to the plant room. He could sense the mind of the angel in the bulb, but there was nothing of Anne. He forced his stomach to stay calm even as a wave of nausea crested within him.
The door to the room seemed to open so very slowly, though objectively he knew that they were proceeding at their usual pace and that it was him whose perception of time was off. Still, he was impatient.
He was in the room as soon as the impediment had slid far enough out of his way to allow him to snake through. He stalked towards the bulb, ignoring the humans clustered around the monitors.
Anne had not been passed into the bulb by his hands. That task had fallen to Vash and Alex, as at the end of the healing he had been to exhausted to even move. Then he had been taken out of the room by the humans before his body had a chance to recover enough for him to awaken. His first site of Anne in her natural form would be this moment, this span of time separated from him by nothing more than a flight of stairs.
He took the steps two at a time, not even feeling the muscles in his legs stretch at the unaccustomed distance. He stood at the entrance to the platform for the moment it took his eyes to adjust to the light from the bulb. The angel was easy to see but the way that it cradled Anne's form in her arms made it difficult for him to see her. Walking counterclockwise he moved around a quarter of the platform before he could see her with any clarity.
She was beautiful. Slowly he was drawn closer to the surface of the bulb, entranced by the vision before him. His nose bumped the edge of the bulb and he ceased his forward motion with as much thought as he had started it. His mind reached out for hers, hoping that he would be close enough to detect some sort of activity. She had to be healing, had to be trying to come back to the world. To come back to him.
But there was nothing. He delved deeper and deeper into her mind, past abandoned layer of self in search of the spark that animated everything, that made her who she was. Fear jolted through him, making him want to move faster and faster, but sense told him that if he tried he would only be tearing apart what was left of her mind. Lower and lower he went, farther and farther into her mind in his search. Even this close to the bulb, his skin grew clammy and he felt a chill as he could find nothing, no matter how hard he looked.
As he reached the very last reaches of her mind he finally caught a glimpse of something, a small spark guttering out in an empty corner of her soul. He flew towards it, hope and fear mixed with the elation of his find.
Cautiously, he examined his find. His mind reached out to encompass it, to gently surround it, but not to touch it. He opened his thoughts to what was left of her mind and waited to see why she was hiding so far away from the world.
Betrayal filtered in first. Ace's, his, the world's, her former world's, all of it in a Gordian knot of pain and loss that nearly staggered him. Next was the wounded innocence of realizing that the world was never fair that never left one, no matter how calloused a soul could grow. He worked through her emotions, letting them flow through him with little effect.
He wondered how she had managed to hide such pain from him. He had know that she was not entirely pleased with her new world, but these deep wounds in her soul ought to have been glaringly obvious. Negative emotions radiated from her in waves, and Knives rode them all smoothly until the last one.
Despair. With her last conscious moment she had decided that there was nothing for her to live for, that she was tired of the pain of living. She had tried having a second life, tried to shoulder the burden of a species that didn't even know she was a member. She had tried to love again, to believe that there could be someone in the universe that would accept her regardless of her scars. His actions with Ace, and the girl's response to anything to do with Anne had destroyed her in a way that she had never let on. The heart had died in her when the dog crushed her throat, and she accepted the death that one she had adored had handed her.
Anne had given up.
