By the time Lu could motivate herself to walk back outside, the sun had spilled over the hill and illuminated the yard. Taiga, true to his word, was on his knees in the garden, and for the second time that day Lu had to muse at how unlikely a scene Taiga made when contrasted with the semi-normality around him.

There was a trowel lying in the dirt, half-rusted away. She bent and picked it up idly, walking over to stand behind Taiga.

"I deserve to know," she said darkly. "I don't understand you, 'borg. I just don't."

Taiga might have shrugged--but maybe he was just pulling up a weed. "That day--I was just so angry. So angry with everything. With being a Cyborg, with being chased, with the unfairness of it all--all I wanted to do was kill."

"So you killed the people here," Lu said.

"No," Taiga responded--very, very carefully. "I didn't."

"You--"

"I didn't do it," Taiga said, digging around a particularly stubborn root. "I didn't kill the people who lived here."

"Are you saying it was all the ICI? Or Seiken, and his chip?"

Taiga stopped digging, looking at her. His eyes were still slightly red from tears. "I said I didn't kill them. I couldn't."

Lu threw down the trowel. "Dammit, cyborg!" she snarled. "Do you plan on making sense anytime soon? You fought them, you didn't kill them, you came here the first time you deserted, you came here after you were reconditioned--you can't keep pretending you're not telling some lies!"

"I'm sorry for what happened here. They deserved better," Taiga said absently. "The woman who lived here. And the girl--especially the girl." He went back to the root, digging... mechanically. "I don't know what happened to her--where she is. I wish I could see her again. I want to tell her how sorry I am."

"Sorry for not killing her entire family?"

Taiga didn't answer.

Lu shook her head. "I think this malfunction is starting to get to you, 'borg," she snarled. "You're going insane."

Taiga paid an excruciating amount of attention to the stubborn root. "Maybe," he said. "Maybe I am."

Lu turned away, irate. Taking slow, deep, painful breaths, she told herself to calm down. "...how long are we staying here?" she asked.

Taiga looked up, as if he had never considered that. "...what?"

"I suppose we're not going to live here for the rest of our days. How long are we staying?"

Taiga faltered. "I... don't know," he said. "I didn't plan that. All I wanted to do was get here."

Lu sighed. For a while, then. "I'm going to go put the house in order. Or try to. You really did a number on it, however long ago that was."

"Yes," Taiga mused. "I did."

Lu resisted the urge to turn around and kick him, mostly because she knew it was a stupid thing to do with his ICI acting the way it was and partly because she knew it wouldn't do any good. Instead, she stalked back out of the sunlight and into the ruined abode.

A noise from behind her stopped her in the doorway, and she glanced back. Taiga was pulling up on the root, saying something as if to himself.

"Directive. ...define insanity."

There was a pause.

"Analyze host."

There was silence again. Then Taiga exhaled sharply once, as if in dark amusement. Lu quickly slipped inside.

-

The ferry was on time.

Amid the muted whispers of the other passengers and the certainty that Hell was freezing over even then, the group of five slipped into the seating area and took their places. The ferry wasn't much more than a raft with walls and a tent ceiling--it was boxy, uncomfortable, and starkly functional. Only Raijin seemed to care.

Fujin was unusually quiet and morose as they settled in--and, for Fujin, that meant that she was spectacularly subdued. Once in a while Seifer or Raijin would glance over to verify that she was still breathing--which she was, albeit shallowly. Her one-eyed gaze was fixed on something out of the window, although all that could really be seen were the muddy waters of the channel.

At times, glancing over, Seifer would have killed to find out what was going on behind that eye.

Asking, on the other hand, would be an incredibly unpolitical thing to do--so, contenting himself with the fact that he was there as best he could, he bit his tongue.

Had he managed to get an answer from her, however, it would have raised some disturbing sentiments--the overarching feeling of walking to a thick fog, of slipping off a cliff, of being pulled underwater by the current. Fujin wasn't the sort to admit any weakness or unease, but that didn't stop her from feeling it.

They were going into Lower Centra in order to find a murderer. They had followed the trail of death to one place--a place that existed in faded memories, in nightmares and dreams alone. They were going back to a time when she was powerless--when she could be subjected to the worst nightmares imaginable, unable to wake from them, unable to escape. That was all the meaning that this trip had for her, it sometimes seemed.

She drew no comfort from the presence of her friends. The Posse was a newer development--nothing to compare to these older demons. She wasn't afraid of anything that could be fought and killed--not really. She was afraid of what she might find, down there.

And, most of all, she was afraid of herself.