Author's Notes: Oh, yeah. It's another Black Rose Arc-centred fic. (Honestly, I don't think I'm genuinely capable of writing anything else.) It's quite an odd little piece but I like to think that's what gives it its charm (and here's hoping it actually HAS some charm, one supposes). Once again I look for something a little bit different than the usual fare, and well. This is what resulted. It's set perhaps one year after the fire at the building that would become Nemuro Memorial Hall, and it's very strange indeed.

But given the source material…

Thank you to all those at livejournal who kindly remarked on the mess I made of this, and no. The series doesn't belong to me. Nice for some. ;)

World Looking In

My sister doesn't like me coming to this place. I think that I have to admit that I don't particularly like coming here either, but it's not something I feel like I have a choice in. It's something that I just feel like I have to do, and it can be so hard to fight against feelings like that. We all have our duties, and I convinced myself long ago that he is one of mine.

This place, it's…it reminds me of hospitals, I guess. It's not so strange that that should bother me, given that I know my way around a hospital better than do some doctors, and I never wanted to be in those buildings. Still, there is a…heaviness about this place that isn't quite matched by a simple hospital. After all, not everyone goes to a hospital to die. Most people hope to walk out alive…or if not walk, at least be taken outside again. The people who come in here…they might come out again. One day.

I think everyone on the outside hopes that they will stay inside, though.

So like I said, my sister doesn't like me coming here. But then my sister doesn't like me doing a lot of things. That doesn't stop me from doing anything that I need to do, and there is something that I must do very soon. That is the reason why I am here today, of course. Even though it's winter again and the snow is colder than ever against my frail skin, I am standing outside this ugly building waiting for my sister to finish talking with the attendant who will be looking after me today.

I'd think it was funny, if it actually wasn't. My sister never comes into the building with me although I know she wants to. She can't bear the thought of me alone with him, but then she can not bear the thought of being near him herself. These things are mutually exclusive of one another so she originally tried to stop me from coming here at all. I must come, however, so she spends fifteen minutes before letting me go inside explaining to the attendant my entire medical history.

It's not like she has to – after a year, most of them know me very well indeed. This place is also a hospital of a sort anyway. The doctors might be specialists in something utterly alien to my own condition, but they still know enough to save my life should I need it. And I wouldn't ever need it. My life is beyond being saved, and that is one of the reasons why I have to come here today. It is also one of the reasons why I kept coming back even before now.

My sister is getting back into the car now, promising to be back in a strictly scheduled hour. She won't be late because she never is, and her kiss is dry and hot against my cheek. She smells like jasmine, her new scent; she always used to smell like tea-roses but she stopped wearing that fragrance after she left her last position in Houou. She told me once the smell made her sick, but she was drunk at the time and I think everything makes her sick then.

She doesn't drink much, you know. I'm glad about that.

I used to bring flowers here. It's not the kind of place designed to be made more cheerful by flowers, but I thought it was worth the effort at first. I only bring them rarely now, and never roses. I don't grow them anymore anyway, but the only time I brought him roses he cried.

Today, seeing as this will be my last visit, I decided to bring him some more flowers. I've brought him all kinds of flowers before. Rosemary, daisies, hyacinths, irises, lilies, proteas. I've never brought him forget-me-nots before, but I decided that the cliché was worth it. I don't want him to forget me when I'm not here anymore. I'd like to live on in his memories, which is all very ironic indeed as the other ways he offered me in which I could live forever never really appealed at all.

Usually I don't need to lean on anyone else for support when I walk up the cold stone stairs and into the silent corridors of this dark building. Today I need both the support of the icy railing and the tall orderly at my side. It's not that it hurts my pride, but I do wish I didn't have to. The cold is also damper here than at home, and it makes me shiver near-constantly. I see pity in the orderly's eyes and that makes me sadder than anything else right now. We were becoming sort-of friends, before. It's all gone now, because that pity is that of a stranger for a dying child.

I suppose I am still a child. I only just turned fourteen. A teenager by anyone's standards, beginning to leave long behind the years of childhood, but I'm not sure that I ever had those carefree years to begin with. How can I stop being a child when I'm not sure I ever was one? And how is it that no-one else but me can see that?

The orderly signs in for me, even though the receptionist probably could have filled in all my details blindfold. They know me too well, but the eyes of the receptionist are glassy when she says hello to me. How quickly bad news travels. It's like a fire, I guess – it is quick to feed on the next fuel it finds, and human minds are always ripe kindling for bad news. I'm quite familiar with real fire and how it moves, having watched a building burn nearly to the ground. I wonder if bad news destroys everything it comes into contact with, or merely the source of it.

Not that I would wish my fate upon anyone but myself.

She's saying something to me, something mundane about the weather. I don't reply with much more than a brief hum of agreement, mostly because I've never liked talking about the snow. It's heavier here than it was in Houou, which I always think odd because my sister wanted to move away from all the memories of that place. She probably will do that after I'm gone, I think. After all, I'm so tied up with her memories of that place that I guess she doesn't want to taint the new as well as the old. I don't mind. I can understand why she does what she does, quite possibly so much better than she ever will.

They take my gloves, hat and heaviest coat but leave me with every other layer. And there are a lot of them. I feel the cold terribly, given I'm so thin that I really am nothing more than a bag of old bones. I used to love winter, when I was younger and so much healthier, so a part of me still likes the cold. It just hurts so much more than it used to, and in this building it's just so much worse. The cold here is as internal as it is external.

I don't bother to hide my shivers as we walk the corridors even though the orderly and the nurse who joins us try to hide their exchange of pitying looks. When you're dying it's suddenly like you are going blind and deaf, too, even if your illness leaves you as coherent as the next person. I think it's a little like a developing photograph in reverse…instead of becoming clearer, more distinct, you are fading away. The colours blur, darken to grey, then fade away into nothingness. It seems to work as a metaphor to me. That's just because people used to think photographs caught a little bit of their soul and held it forever. If the picture one day fades away to nothing, then surely the soul is released again.

They haven't moved him, because the path we walk is familiar. I know these corridors altogether too well – better than he does, which is so strange because he lives here while I only come and go. I don't know that they'll ever move him, and the thought depresses me. He gets no worse, but then he gets no better. He's more than what he has become, and it's just…I think that's the reason why I kept coming here, insisted on doing it even when it made my sister cry.

I remember him the way he was. I want him to be that way again. And somehow I just can't help but think that I am his only hope. Maybe that's arrogant of me, but it's just…I can't really explain it. I know only a little of what he was before he came to work on Himemiya-san's project at the academy, but he was…a cold man. There was no-one who was real enough to his mind to matter, but…my sister and I, we did something to him. She did it more than me, I know that, but because she will never forgive him for what they say he might have done, that leaves only me.

I visit him in his room. Though we have the illusion of being alone, we're not – we are constantly watched through by a guard who stands in the corner, trying to be invisible. I understand that it is hard to be invisible with a truncheon at one hip and something approaching a stun-gun at the other, but he does try. I don't notice the changing faces of the guards so much any more, but I'll remember this one today. The fire has spread this far you see – he looks at me like he is trying to picture me in a coffin and failing miserably at the task.

I don't know why everyone finds that so hard to do. That image in my mind is as natural as what I see when I look in the bathroom mirror every morning.

He is staring off into space as I enter the room; it is slightly warmer in here than in the corridor, and I think it has been done more for my benefit than his. I've heard that he reacts only rarely to external stimuli, and I'm the one who is dying here. Dying people tend to get a lot of benefits, I've found. I usually think it's kind of funny, until I remember how much it makes my sister cry.

"Hello, professor," I say to him quietly, not yet sitting down across from him at the table. The nurse is murmuring something about being right outside if she is needed, though I need the reminder no more than does the guard. I know that we're not alone, and we never will be. He's a committed madman and I'm a child dying before his time. Our kind are never left alone – we scare those not like us far too much for that.

With a sigh, I set down the small posy of flowers and push it across to him. "I didn't grow these," I say in that inoffensive voice that I have perfected over many years of being as inoffensive as possible. I offend too many people's sensibilities just by being myself, you see; most people do not like such tangible evidence of their own mortality to be so obvious to them. "I haven't been able to grow much, even in my greenhouse. The plants haven't taken well to being transplanted…except the camellia tree. It bloomed last summer. I told you about that, didn't I?"

He makes no reply, simply stares off into space and taps his fingers absently on the desk between us. The first time I saw him make this nervous movement I wondered if he had ever learned to play the piano. The movement is rhythmic and precise, controlled and calculated. I can't help but think that such an ordered mind would appreciate music very much, but…he doesn't play. Or so they say. One nurse once suggested his fingers move like they are at a typewriter, and now I am inclined to agree.

As far as I know, they've never taken heed of my suggestion to put a keyboard before those questing fingers. He continues to write out his empty theses into empty space and now I know I never will read a page of what he writes upon the air.

"Professor," I try again, voice as soft as the petals of the dying flowers. "I won't be coming to see you again after today. Please speak to me."

That gets his wandering attention. In the beginning, they were always so surprised that I could break through to him, given that none of his attending doctors can get any real coherent speech out of him for more than a sentence at a time. I think that's why they've never objected to my continuing visits. I am something of an anchor for his drifting mind – at least, I think that is what they see me as. Though no-one else can seem to break through to him, he speaks to me.

Even though sometimes I am left wishing he wouldn't.

He is looking straight at me now, and I as always feel uncomfortable under the unblinking gaze. What bothers me is not the emptiness of his eyes, though. It's the fact that I can see them so clearly. When I knew him before he always wore glasses with violet-tinted lenses. I'm told that they've tried to give him his glasses back, but he's broken so many of them they've given up trying. He apparently sees just fine without them though his medical records say that he is myopic and has astigmatism.

I wonder what he sees without his glasses, sometimes, and why it is so preferable over what he sees with them.

"Mamiya," he says, and I wish again he would use an honorific. He says my name so strangely when he refuses to adorn it with anything like this. "I didn't think I would see you today."

"I always come, don't I?"

He steeples his fingers, frowns as he looks at me with greater care. His manner reminds me of a physician, disseminating and diagnostic. "You're fading away."

"People always do," I reply quietly, and look down at the flowers like they could echo my words for me. "Like old photographs upon the wall."

He looks away, looks up to the wall and frowns. I don't see anything there when I follow his gaze, but I've become long used to his ability to see what I can't. "The light changes, and then you're gone. But photographs are only an illusion anyway. A trick of the light." He looks back at me sharply then, narrowing eyes that should be near-sightless and yet seem to see everything clearly anyway. "You're just a trick of the light, aren't you?"

I know from experience not to become defensive when he becomes accusatory. It only upsets him more. "I'm as real as you are, professor," I tell him gently, still not sitting down at the table empty of everything but the flowers with petals browning at the edges and his invisible typewriter.

"And what if I am not real?" he asks me, the question a riddle spoken by an enigma. I don't think he enjoys these games. It makes me wonder why he plays them.

"Then maybe all life is only an illusion."

"It is." He nods at me then, his little game apparently completed, and waves a too-pale hand at the empty chair. Like me, he looks like he could use more sun than we ever actually see. Invalids, the both of us, locked away from a world that can't really do anything for us now. "Please sit."

"Thank-you." I sigh as I do so; my bones ache so much. Even though I will never get to be eighty, I have already experienced many times over what it must be like to be so old. "How are you today?"

"I'm waiting for the snow to never melt."

The words make me sigh again; they make so little sense and yet they hurt more than any sense he ever speaks. "The snow is going to melt, professor. You can't stop it."

"I can make everything stop." He looks at me carefully, like an anatomy lecturer working out the best way to pull me to pieces to demonstrate to his students what makes up my physical presence. "I can make you stop."

"I'll stop whether you have anything to do with it or not."

"I'll keep you just like this," he tells me seriously, tone mild but decisive. "It's what I always wanted."

He talks like this often, and it makes my heart hurt. Strange, given that it is usually everything but that which hurts me. "It's what my sister always wanted."

"She doesn't care about you." Even though it's not true, it makes me wince all the same. "She doesn't care about me. I'm the only one who cares about you. Are you the only one who cares about me?"

My headache is getting worse. It's been around since I got out of bed this morning, but I'm not sure I've had one get this bad in a long time. Not since around this time last year, when I took the bad turn that…well. I don't remember much about that. I don't think that the professor does either, and he was there too. Though then…I never really felt like I was there at the time. Those three days have a dream-like, hazy quality in my mind. Like I lived them through someone else's body with my mind only a spectator inside.

I'm beginning to feel that way again, now. I know it's not a good sign, but then I've been listening to my body whispering that it's the end for several weeks now. Nothing can surprise me anymore.

"Professor." I rub my fingers against my tired eyes and sigh again. "I always wanted to be your friend."

"Friends are a frivolity."

"Then why do you care about me?"

"You're more than a friend, Mamiya. Much more than that."

"An experiment?"

"Never that." He looks deeply offended at my words, which is odd for him – extremes of emotion are usually alien or outmoded concepts to his linear mind. "My work is not the kind of thing that you perform for people who do not matter. It is important work, powerful work – and those who benefit from it may only be the worthy."

"And you can judge those who are worthy recipients of your knowledge?"

"It is my work, after all."

I find I have little to say to this. The professor's madness is a peculiar thing, after all. He works day and night, writing on the walls with pens no one else can see and rubbing off non-existent chalk with dusters composed of musty air. He calculates equations with no answers and builds scientific instruments out of paper that crumble mere seconds later. He adjusts his glasses that he no longer wears and talks in conspiratorial whispers to walls that remain tight-lipped to the rest of us. Only to me do any of his actions make any sense, though I have never explained it to his doctors.

They wouldn't understand.

It's not that the professor believes himself to still be in Houou, working in that office that was so often filled with the long shadows of sunset. I know that theory would make sense to his caseworkers, because it once made sense to me. The theory is inherently flawed. It's wrong because the professor is still in Houou.

It shouldn't be possible. I know that. It is happening all the same. After all, a lot of things shouldn't be possible. No-one should be able to burn down an academic building, killing a hundred students, and then bear no responsibility for the crime. It happened all the same. Just as a cold and lonely man shouldn't have ever thought it possible to make my life into a perpetual motion machine, but…he thinks that anyway. Dreams of it. Works for it. Wants it more than he has ever wanted anything in his entire life.

I know something of what he sees here. We are in his office, naturally – sometimes he offers me tea, and I drink from imaginary cups and clink imaginary spoons against imaginary sugar bowls when he says I look like I need the extra energy. I always politely look out the window and nod when he offers some observation of the changing season. He has never offered to show me his work, but then he's never needed my approval for that.

"How close is your work to completion?" I ask, gently stroking the dying petals.

"Close. I spoke with the co-ordinator of the project, and he's pleased with the progress. The web I have made of the consciousness of the hall has done much for the project. I feel that I am approaching a climax." The pleasure in his voice is palpable, mixed in with a pride that would have been arrogance in any other individual. The professor is taking pride in his illusory magnum opus only because he thinks it will make me happy. "You'll never stop, Mamiya. Never."

"I won't be coming back, professor."

"What do you mean?"

"I am leaving Houou." I paused, pushed the flowers across the table. "You should leave Houou too."

"What are you talking about?"

"I thought I'd left a long time ago, but…I realised something. As long as you are there, I am there too. You're doing this all for me, even though even when you were doing this for my sister, I didn't want that either. You don't need to do this for either of us. Let it go. Let it all go. Leave Houou."

"Mamiya." He holds a hand to his head like he is getting a headache not dissimilar to my own, shakes it slowly. "You can not leave Houou."

"I can and I will. I have made my choice." I trace aimless patterns on the cool Formica table, remember the rich stain of the wooden desk he had once possessed. It's easier to look at the table than into his intense gaze, though I know it is weaker as well. But standing up to a man who is trapped in some kind of mental illusion of purpose and scientific impossibility is not something I ever thought I would need to learn to do.

"My work is near completion. If you leave now…you'll leave everything. I am your last chance!"

"I think that I am yours." I lean across the table, take his hand in mine. It is strangely cold to me. Given how cold I am everything should feel as if it is on fire, but not this…he is like an animated corpse. Strange. That's usually how people see me, not how I see them.

"Professor," I tell him in the most reasonable voice I can find, "I am going to die. Maybe not by the end of this week, though my doctor has given me only a week to live. You can't put dates on that kind of thing, though…but it's like birth. You can predict when the baby will be born, but that doesn't mean it will happen then…but it will happen. Sooner or later."

"Your doctor is a fool." His words are cool and clinical. "Stay with me, Mamiya. I can set you free." And with that last word his tone becomes grand, as if it is a magical incantation that can move worlds. Perhaps it is, for some. "Free from all the shackles of this mortal world. Free from all the false laws and rules of a world that doesn't need them at all."

"But the world needs physical laws to define it. Without those laws, there's nothing to define any of us as individuals. We're all just the same."

"There's just you and me, Mamiya. We are all that matters." He pauses, his scholarly enthusiasm passing as he then gives me a dark look that has me shuddering. I'm not often afraid of him, but sometimes…the world outside of us darkens too much when I look into those scarlet eyes. "Will you leave me alone?"

I don't want to die, you know. It's never been a matter of wanting to be dead, it's just…no person should live forever. It isn't natural. Death is. That is one of the reasons why I accepted my fate before my first remission, and why I accept it even now. If I am meant to die, I will. My sister hates my acceptance of it, which is why she became involved with the academy's peculiar research. I watched her try to find a way to keep me alive while all I wanted was a little peace, but…I felt so selfish. I still do. I'm not the one who is going to be left behind, after all. It will all end for me the day I close my eyes for the last time. It will just begin for them.

But you know, I am dying with my eyes wide open.

"There is a world outside of Houou, professor. Why don't you want to see it, even when it is right in front of your face?" I tighten my grip about his hand, breathe in a long slow breath. "I can't take anything you offer me. But I want you to take something from me."

"You will take what I offer you."

"I will not." I pause again, wish the tears weren't biting at the backs of my eyes the way that they are. The ring on his wedding finger is as cold as ice and yet it burns me deeper than any flame. "Tell him no."

"I've given him my final answer."

"I know you signed the contract." The ring would laugh at this, if it had a voice to do so. I know it would. "But there will be an out. A loophole. I know—"

"I removed all the loopholes," he dismisses easily, the revelation seemingly not the least extraordinary to him. It should be. "I know what I want. And I want you. He offered me a way to keep you forever, and I will."

The guard's frowning at this. I'm not sure this particular one has ever heard our conversations take this course before. I wonder what he'll say to the nurse about it, because I know most of the others are usually distinctly disturbed by the professor's possessiveness of me at certain times.

"You could only have kept me if I let you, and I won't. I am leaving Houou forever, but I don't want to leave you there all alone."

"If I leave Houou, I will always be alone. Do you want to die?"

My answer to this question is as honest as it ever was. "No."

The urgency in his voice makes me want to scream. "Then allow me to show you how to live forever!"

There are tears blurring my vision as I stand up then, swaying on feet that don't feel like they belong to me at all. "I have to leave."

"Mamiya."

My whisper doesn't echo in this cavernous room even though I know that it should. "I can't stay."

He stands then, halfway between fury and frustration. "Mamiya."

I walk around the desk, stand before him for one last time. I bow my head, a lesser to his better. "I always did enjoy knowing you, even before all of this happened. The conversations we used to have in the conservatory were some of the best I ever had, after I got sick. Sometimes you forgot what was happening to me and treated me like a normal person. And you never spoke to me like I was a child. I will never forget that."

He watches me so carefully, his head tilted to one side like I am an experimental animal running amok. The affection in his eyes is more disturbing than comforting. "What are you doing?"

"I'm walking away. Goodbye, professor. I had hoped I could talk you into leaving your precious Houou, but I…I was just being arrogant. Thinking I could help you." I do feel so much like I'm going to cry, but I don't want that to be his last vision of me. Thickly, but without tears, I say: "You have to save yourself."

"Save myself? Mamiya. I need only to save you."

The fact that his words sound so sensible makes them only all the more improbable. I must walk away now if I am ever to leave this place with my own mind in my own body – a luxury the professor lost himself nearly a year ago. "I don't need saving. Save yourself, professor. Goodbye."

"Mamiya."

Knowing I'll never see him again is what makes me turn around to face him again. "Yes, professor?"

He moves quickly. I don't really see it coming. His lips on mine are hot, utterly contrary to the coolness of his fingers that I feel even through the thick layers as he grips my upper arms. I've never been kissed before. I hadn't thought I ever would be. The professor's kiss is clumsy and possibly not the best introduction I could have had to the fine art of it all, but it lasts only bare seconds anyway.

"Who are you?" he demands of the guard as he pulls him away from me; I am left to stumble towards the nearest chair, all breath stolen from my lungs. I am not left alone for long, of course; the commotion has brought in another guard who joins the first in subduing the professor. This leaves me the nurse, who is gripping me and asking in mint-scented breath with her lips too close to my ear if I am all right.

I'm suddenly struck with the hysterical idea that it might be fun to scream at the top of my lungs: of course I'm not all right, I'm dying! Dying dying DYING!

But of course I don't say a word.

The professor doesn't know what is going on, of course. He thinks that the guards who are subduing him are intruders into the Hall in which he walks. And anyone not a part of the project is considered an intruder…though I wonder who works on it now, aside from the professor and Himemiya-san. The boys are dead, my sister no longer inspects on behalf of the Board of Trustees. Just two shadows in a building that burned down one night while I thought myself to be dying…buried alive beneath the snow that kept me warm even as it froze me into oblivion.

I only half-hear his shouted commands to be released, and for the intruders to leave his space. Another nurse is entering with a syringe in hand. I can't say what it is, but I suspect I'd recognise the name of it. Even though I don't take tranquilisers or antipsychotics myself – antineoplastics and narcotic analgesics are more my poison – the too-many-syllabled words are likely to be familiar. I've memorised too many of them lately.

"I think it is time for you to go now, dear," the nurse tells me quietly, and I have to agree. I don't want to leave him, leave him screaming for freedom even as he locks himself firmly in his own prison, but…I have lived on a year of borrowed time and then spent it all coming here to tell him that everything he sees is all in his head.

And even though I'm the one they're about to put in a coffin, I think the professor is more familiar with the enclosed space than I will ever be.

My sister comes ten minutes later to collect me. She doesn't find anything odd in my waiting for her, because I always do – she has never had to collect me from him. So she doesn't know how badly our final visit ended. She won't want to know so it is perhaps far better this way.

As always, she doesn't ask me how the visit went. I think she cares, but her mind and heart won't let her ask about it. Too many shadows in the back of her mind that that laugh at her concern, I think. What she does let herself say doesn't surprise me.

"I don't want you going back there, Mamiya," she says as the tall dark building disappears into the rear-view mirror, melts into the copse of trees that hides it from the outside world that is to sane to appreciate its presence. "Please promise me you won't."

I sigh, look away from the building I can't see anymore anyway. "I promise I won't."

The car stops then, as she pulls over to the side of the gravelled road. She leans her head on the steering wheel, and she cries. I sit in silence, and stare out of the window. Her tears are a private thing and I can't stop them. The fact that I can't is one of the reasons why she weeps them.

I'll never travel this road again. My paediatrician gave me a week to live yesterday, and though I know he's wrong, I also know that I will be dead by the end of the month. My body whispers these things to me and I've learned how to listen to them. It doesn't make them hurt any less, but the truth was always designed to hurt.

Perhaps he'll never travel this road again, either. I couldn't save him, and now there's no more time for me to try. This mental institution is perhaps the only place he'll live for the rest of his life, because once I am gone…he is alone. I am the only one who cared.

Unless Himemiya-san really isn't finished with the mad scientist he made out of a clockwork professor. I know it should be impossible, but…the dark man did something to the professor. The professor left the academy but his mind stayed there. I wish I could have brought it back.

I can't save anyone if I can't save myself, though.

He'll be safe enough here, I hope. They never proved he did anything. There was no evidence to prove that he set the fire, because in all actuality it was not set by the candelabra that he carried. I think the inquest decided it was an electrical fault, and that the professor who went mad was just ripe for it…and the tragedy set him off. The building where his body stays now is just a facility for the insane who are likely never to be able to be returned to the outside world. They'll just look out on the world while we look back in…and only one side will ever see the truth.

I wonder which side it really is, sometimes. But then I suppose I won't have to wonder much about anything, soon.

And as I listen to my sister sob in the seat next to my own, I wonder sometimes how nice that will be.