HOLY EFFING HELL! I only just realized something... I have more reviews than any other author in the PSO category of ! Man I feel successful. Oh and this fic, yeah the one I started doing just cos I was bored, is now over 140 A4 pages long, really if I remove the authors notes and rewrite a few things I could really have a novel in the works here.
"I'm getting kinda bored here!" Mei complained as she tried to find something interesting to do in the vast black expanse. "Hey maybe that's how I get out of here, I'll just sit around until I'm bored out of my mind!"
"Ah the simple and understated logic that only Mei Lung could possibly come up with"
"Hey who's there?" Mei spun around and found herself face to face with, herself. "Oh it's you, at least you changed out of that tacky green outfit." It was true, the other Mei was now dressed entirely in a deep shade of blue.
"Well if that's the kind of welcome I get I suppose I'll just be going then."
"No, please stay." Mei begged "I was getting really lonely."
"I'm always lonely, nobody wants to be around me."
"Hey that's not true! Magus likes you, I mean me, I mean us."
"You're sure? he doesn't always look happy to see us."
Mei bit her lip and thought for a while "I guess he has other stuff to think about sometimes, but there are always other people to talk to, Mery, Crimson, even Raven talked to us a bit, and he didn't like talking to anyone."
"You never thought that maybe we just irritated them? Maybe nobody really wants us around, they just tolerate us because they have to?"
Mei hadn't thought about that at all, but she would now, for quite a while, as the blue dressed Mei disappeared again. When was someone going to let her out of here? It wasn't very fun having only yourself to talk to."
Tatsu raced up the hospital stairs taking them two at a time. The nurse at the counter had said that only two people had checked in last night, the man was fine but the force girl was still in intensive care. He hoped to god that it wasn't anything life threatening. He raced down the hallway, his footsteps echoing in the quiet building. He slowed down as he reached the IC ward, he shouldn't have been running in a hospital anyway he reprimanded himself, sick people needed peace and quiet. He opened the door quietly and stepped inside.
"What do you want?" A voice asked despondently
"Oh, sorry I thought a friend of mine was here." Tatsu apologized, feeling very foolish indeed.
"Tatsu is it?"
"Yes, that's me."
"Then one of your friends might be here."
"What do you mean?" Tatsu asked curiously and stepped closer to the bed that the person was sitting on, it took him a moment to recognize the person lying in the bed, probably because she wasn't bouncing around like she usually was.
"Mei?" Tatsu said as if it were a sudden revelation "That means you're, Magus! How have you been?"
"Better off than Mei, and please don't use my name, I'm trying to keep it a secret."
"Oh, right, what happened to Mei anyway?"
"If you must know, a monster we were fighting threw her through a wall and now she is in a coma and as a matter of fact it's all my fault and I feel horrible about it"
"Umm sorry to hear of it, I hope she gets better soon, it doesn't seem right, her just lying still."
"No, it doesn't does it? I can't stand seeing her like this, you can't imagine the guilt."
"If you don't mind me asking, how do you figure that it's your fault?"
"I picked her as my ally for the fight even thought I knew it would be dangerous, I didn't look out for her while the fight was going on. If I'd have chosen Mery then she would still be alright, who else could be to blame?"
"I always find it helps to blame god." Tatsu smiled "But sometimes there's nobody to blame at all, you can't go through life dwelling upon past mistakes, what's the point? you'll never be able to change what happened, so I'd concentrate on solving the problem at hand. Mei isn't going to wake up just because you're sitting here feeling sorry for yourself."
"And she won't wake up if I do anything else either. There is nothing I can do and I hate it."
"Of course there is something you can do, you can sit here hoping she recovers."
"Why not, I've got no other ideas that would work." Magus said bitterly.
Tatsu shrugged "When all else fails there's always faith, sometimes belief is so strong it can change reality. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go home, Alice will be waiting for me, it was good to see you again, when Mei wakes up, tell her I said hi." Tatsu turned away and walked out of the room. Magus listened to his footsteps fade away. He looked down at Mei and smoothed back a stray strand of hair, she had always insisted that she look just right.
"Faith" Magus repeated to himself. If it was true that faith was all he had left to hold to, he wasn't going to let go anytime soon.
Mei felt another stirring in the shadows behind her. She stood to face the figure as it emerged. As she suspected it was herself again, this time dressed in red.
"Umm hello?" She greeted the newest her
"What the hell do you want?" The other Mei snapped
"Sorry, I was just saying hi."
"Yeah? Well maybe I don't want to talk to you? You think of that? huh? did you?"
"Umm well no, all the other Mei's wanted to talk, and I'm the only other person here, so I didn't think you could be here for any other reason."
"Then you shouldn't bother thinking should you! So damned self centered, little miss "I'm the center of the bloody universe", nobody could POSSIBLY have something better to do than listen to your childish whining!"
"I'm sorry, really I am, I didn't mean to make you angry." Mei had backed down so far that she was sitting again.
"You've got no spine either! God forbid somebody might be angry at you, no no no, little Mei Lung has to be liked by everybody."
Mei drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. "I'm sorry."
"Look at you! you're godamned pathetic, you know that? No wonder nobody loves you! you're a miserable whining cowardly bitch."
Tears were streaming down Mei's face tracing silvery lines down her ivory skin. "Magus..." She said quietly
"What was that? I didn't hear you."
"Magus." Mei said between sobs "He loves me."
"Loves you so much he'd leave you to fight dragons? Loves you so much that he's not even here for you? He's never even said it to you has he? Be honest, has Magus ever kissed you? Ever said that he loves you?"
Mei buried her face in her knees and sobbed louder.
"Didn't think so." The red dressed Mei disappeared leaving Mei alone in the dark, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Mei had cried before. When she was growing up cruel children made her cry. When she was at school the exams made her cry, when the first boy she ever had a crush on rejected her, he had made her cry. But never before in her entire life had Mei made herself cry.
Magus started at the slight noise that came from the door to the ward being opened. Why did people keep intruding on his grief? Couldn't they see that he wanted to be left alone? He shot a quick glance at the doorway to see who was there, it was the nurse.
She carried her clipboard ever present clipboard close to her chest, cradling it almost protectively. Magus got to his feet.
"Why are you here?" He asked bluntly "Do the doctors have news for me? Or have I simply stayed too long?"
"No, that's not it." The nurse looked extremely uncomfortable.
"What then?"
"Well umm, whilst you were unconcious, I had to check for any kind of brain trauma, you know, to make sure everything was alright?"
"Yes." Magus tensed, he felt that he knew what was about to come next, he wasn't wrong.
"Well I sort of had to take your mask off, because the metal would have interfered with the machine, and your face looked sort of familiar so I ran a check on the computer." She paused
"And you found out exactly who I am?" Magus finished for her.
"You aren't mad at me are you?" The nurse bit her lower lip. The words and the action reminded Magus suddenly of Mei. He got to his feet and advanced on the now frightened nurse.
"You give me one good reason why I shouldn't kill you right now." He threatened her.
The nurse backed away. "Please I won't tell anyone, it's part of the doctor/patient confidentiality agreement, I won't tell anyone anything about you."
Magus stood still "Good, for a moment there I thought you were going to start spouting some drivel how someone would find your body and that I would never get away with it. Because I would you know."
"I know." The nurse agreed "You escaped a ship wide man hunt by the army and survived several hunters who were contracted with your assassination."
"Yes, and there is still quite a nice sum of money on my head, I should probably kill you just to be certain that you don't give in to temptation and "accidentally" let slip my identity."
"I already promised you that I wouldn't do that." The nurse was now fearful again.
"I'll tell you what, If you can guess why I don't want to kill you, then I won't do it. If you come up with a stupid answer then they probably won't ever find your corpse."
"Umm well maybe it's because of..." The nurse faltered and then abruptly changed her answer "It's because you're not a murderer."
"That's right" Magus said smiling at her "I don't want to kill you or anyone else."
"But that poor soldier, they found you standing over him even as he died and his blood was all over you."
Magus sighed "A horrible coincidence, I'll admit that I wasn't being all too pleasant to that man but I never wanted him to die."
"So what really happened." The nurse sat down with her clipboard in one hand and her pencil in the other.
"First lets get rid of that." Magus said and took the pencil from her "You have a bad habit of scribbling everything down and I'd rather somebody didn't find this conversation in the trash somewhere."
"Oh, sorry." The nurse hastily set her clipboard aside
"Quite alright." Magus reassured her "Now where to begin? Well I don't think you need to know all the details, a lot of it I would rather was kept quiet. All you need to know is that a man I greatly admired was killed, by whom? I still don't know. But that soldier did. I saw him drinking in a bar and something in my memory just clicked and I remembered him as being there when that friend of mine was killed. I acted friendly towards the soldier and brought him a few drinks, tried to loosen his tongue with alcohol, that didn't work. He told me that he had best be getting back to his barracks and that I had best stop asking sensitive questions. Anyway I shadowed him for a little while and when he took a turn into an alley way I took my chance and pounced on him. I roughed him up a bit and demanded that he tell me what he knew, the first minute or so he denied everything but after I broke a few things he was almost ready to talk. Only thing was the second he opened his mouth to tell me who killed my friend something strange happened with his eyes and he just died. A second or two after that and a couple of his buddies came round the corner, I figure they were worried about him going back so drunk. But all they saw was me covered in his blood and him stone cold dead. I didn't even think, I just ran off as fast as I could and spent the next few years of my life hiding."
The nurse had listened to Magus' monologue without saying a word, now she spoke in whisper.
"How old were you?"
Magus scratched his chin "Not too sure, think I might have been 17 maybe."
"What did you mean by something strange happened to his eyes?" The nurse asked "There are a few toxins that would make pupils dilate or the iris change color before death."
"Know of any that would turn a mans eyes pure black?"
"Dexycotamine has been known to affect the iris pigment, and it is lethal even in small doses."
"I mean the whole of their eyes, iris and whites just suddenly turning black."
"I'm sorry, I've never heard of a case like that." The nurse sounded sincerely apologetic.
"You're taking this pretty well" Magus noted.
"What?" the nurse was confused.
"Most people would be freaking out a little about being in the same room as a infamous murderer."
The nurse shrugged "You're just another patient to me, I became a nurse to heal people not judge them, and besides, its not true that you're a murderer, I believe you when you say you're innocent."
"Thanks" Magus smiled.
There was a small gasp from Mei as she lay in her bed, it was the first signs of life she had shown all through the day and night. Magus hurried over to her and clasped her hand reassuringly. There was no further movement from the little girl, but Magus would always swear that she squeezed his hand back.
"I should leave you two alone again." The nurse moved towards the door. "Thank you for trusting me Magus."
"It's not a problem, but don't ever call me that outside of this room."
He received no answer as the nurse had slipped quietly away.
-.-.-.-
Okay, I know, it took me FOREVER to write this chapter, must have seemed even longer after my brief burst of creativity. My copy of MS word is messing right up and I don't have a clue why. I've had to retype this chapter in WordPad. I hate WordPad, I have to manually check for all spelling errors, this sucks cos I use big words a lot. My money situation is getting worse, I had some money, but then I spent it on buying .hack manga style book things. Ah well, some day I'll go and get a real job, until then I'll keep pretending to be a writer.
"I'm getting kinda bored here!" Mei complained as she tried to find something interesting to do in the vast black expanse. "Hey maybe that's how I get out of here, I'll just sit around until I'm bored out of my mind!"
"Ah the simple and understated logic that only Mei Lung could possibly come up with"
"Hey who's there?" Mei spun around and found herself face to face with, herself. "Oh it's you, at least you changed out of that tacky green outfit." It was true, the other Mei was now dressed entirely in a deep shade of blue.
"Well if that's the kind of welcome I get I suppose I'll just be going then."
"No, please stay." Mei begged "I was getting really lonely."
"I'm always lonely, nobody wants to be around me."
"Hey that's not true! Magus likes you, I mean me, I mean us."
"You're sure? he doesn't always look happy to see us."
Mei bit her lip and thought for a while "I guess he has other stuff to think about sometimes, but there are always other people to talk to, Mery, Crimson, even Raven talked to us a bit, and he didn't like talking to anyone."
"You never thought that maybe we just irritated them? Maybe nobody really wants us around, they just tolerate us because they have to?"
Mei hadn't thought about that at all, but she would now, for quite a while, as the blue dressed Mei disappeared again. When was someone going to let her out of here? It wasn't very fun having only yourself to talk to."
Tatsu raced up the hospital stairs taking them two at a time. The nurse at the counter had said that only two people had checked in last night, the man was fine but the force girl was still in intensive care. He hoped to god that it wasn't anything life threatening. He raced down the hallway, his footsteps echoing in the quiet building. He slowed down as he reached the IC ward, he shouldn't have been running in a hospital anyway he reprimanded himself, sick people needed peace and quiet. He opened the door quietly and stepped inside.
"What do you want?" A voice asked despondently
"Oh, sorry I thought a friend of mine was here." Tatsu apologized, feeling very foolish indeed.
"Tatsu is it?"
"Yes, that's me."
"Then one of your friends might be here."
"What do you mean?" Tatsu asked curiously and stepped closer to the bed that the person was sitting on, it took him a moment to recognize the person lying in the bed, probably because she wasn't bouncing around like she usually was.
"Mei?" Tatsu said as if it were a sudden revelation "That means you're, Magus! How have you been?"
"Better off than Mei, and please don't use my name, I'm trying to keep it a secret."
"Oh, right, what happened to Mei anyway?"
"If you must know, a monster we were fighting threw her through a wall and now she is in a coma and as a matter of fact it's all my fault and I feel horrible about it"
"Umm sorry to hear of it, I hope she gets better soon, it doesn't seem right, her just lying still."
"No, it doesn't does it? I can't stand seeing her like this, you can't imagine the guilt."
"If you don't mind me asking, how do you figure that it's your fault?"
"I picked her as my ally for the fight even thought I knew it would be dangerous, I didn't look out for her while the fight was going on. If I'd have chosen Mery then she would still be alright, who else could be to blame?"
"I always find it helps to blame god." Tatsu smiled "But sometimes there's nobody to blame at all, you can't go through life dwelling upon past mistakes, what's the point? you'll never be able to change what happened, so I'd concentrate on solving the problem at hand. Mei isn't going to wake up just because you're sitting here feeling sorry for yourself."
"And she won't wake up if I do anything else either. There is nothing I can do and I hate it."
"Of course there is something you can do, you can sit here hoping she recovers."
"Why not, I've got no other ideas that would work." Magus said bitterly.
Tatsu shrugged "When all else fails there's always faith, sometimes belief is so strong it can change reality. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go home, Alice will be waiting for me, it was good to see you again, when Mei wakes up, tell her I said hi." Tatsu turned away and walked out of the room. Magus listened to his footsteps fade away. He looked down at Mei and smoothed back a stray strand of hair, she had always insisted that she look just right.
"Faith" Magus repeated to himself. If it was true that faith was all he had left to hold to, he wasn't going to let go anytime soon.
Mei felt another stirring in the shadows behind her. She stood to face the figure as it emerged. As she suspected it was herself again, this time dressed in red.
"Umm hello?" She greeted the newest her
"What the hell do you want?" The other Mei snapped
"Sorry, I was just saying hi."
"Yeah? Well maybe I don't want to talk to you? You think of that? huh? did you?"
"Umm well no, all the other Mei's wanted to talk, and I'm the only other person here, so I didn't think you could be here for any other reason."
"Then you shouldn't bother thinking should you! So damned self centered, little miss "I'm the center of the bloody universe", nobody could POSSIBLY have something better to do than listen to your childish whining!"
"I'm sorry, really I am, I didn't mean to make you angry." Mei had backed down so far that she was sitting again.
"You've got no spine either! God forbid somebody might be angry at you, no no no, little Mei Lung has to be liked by everybody."
Mei drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. "I'm sorry."
"Look at you! you're godamned pathetic, you know that? No wonder nobody loves you! you're a miserable whining cowardly bitch."
Tears were streaming down Mei's face tracing silvery lines down her ivory skin. "Magus..." She said quietly
"What was that? I didn't hear you."
"Magus." Mei said between sobs "He loves me."
"Loves you so much he'd leave you to fight dragons? Loves you so much that he's not even here for you? He's never even said it to you has he? Be honest, has Magus ever kissed you? Ever said that he loves you?"
Mei buried her face in her knees and sobbed louder.
"Didn't think so." The red dressed Mei disappeared leaving Mei alone in the dark, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Mei had cried before. When she was growing up cruel children made her cry. When she was at school the exams made her cry, when the first boy she ever had a crush on rejected her, he had made her cry. But never before in her entire life had Mei made herself cry.
Magus started at the slight noise that came from the door to the ward being opened. Why did people keep intruding on his grief? Couldn't they see that he wanted to be left alone? He shot a quick glance at the doorway to see who was there, it was the nurse.
She carried her clipboard ever present clipboard close to her chest, cradling it almost protectively. Magus got to his feet.
"Why are you here?" He asked bluntly "Do the doctors have news for me? Or have I simply stayed too long?"
"No, that's not it." The nurse looked extremely uncomfortable.
"What then?"
"Well umm, whilst you were unconcious, I had to check for any kind of brain trauma, you know, to make sure everything was alright?"
"Yes." Magus tensed, he felt that he knew what was about to come next, he wasn't wrong.
"Well I sort of had to take your mask off, because the metal would have interfered with the machine, and your face looked sort of familiar so I ran a check on the computer." She paused
"And you found out exactly who I am?" Magus finished for her.
"You aren't mad at me are you?" The nurse bit her lower lip. The words and the action reminded Magus suddenly of Mei. He got to his feet and advanced on the now frightened nurse.
"You give me one good reason why I shouldn't kill you right now." He threatened her.
The nurse backed away. "Please I won't tell anyone, it's part of the doctor/patient confidentiality agreement, I won't tell anyone anything about you."
Magus stood still "Good, for a moment there I thought you were going to start spouting some drivel how someone would find your body and that I would never get away with it. Because I would you know."
"I know." The nurse agreed "You escaped a ship wide man hunt by the army and survived several hunters who were contracted with your assassination."
"Yes, and there is still quite a nice sum of money on my head, I should probably kill you just to be certain that you don't give in to temptation and "accidentally" let slip my identity."
"I already promised you that I wouldn't do that." The nurse was now fearful again.
"I'll tell you what, If you can guess why I don't want to kill you, then I won't do it. If you come up with a stupid answer then they probably won't ever find your corpse."
"Umm well maybe it's because of..." The nurse faltered and then abruptly changed her answer "It's because you're not a murderer."
"That's right" Magus said smiling at her "I don't want to kill you or anyone else."
"But that poor soldier, they found you standing over him even as he died and his blood was all over you."
Magus sighed "A horrible coincidence, I'll admit that I wasn't being all too pleasant to that man but I never wanted him to die."
"So what really happened." The nurse sat down with her clipboard in one hand and her pencil in the other.
"First lets get rid of that." Magus said and took the pencil from her "You have a bad habit of scribbling everything down and I'd rather somebody didn't find this conversation in the trash somewhere."
"Oh, sorry." The nurse hastily set her clipboard aside
"Quite alright." Magus reassured her "Now where to begin? Well I don't think you need to know all the details, a lot of it I would rather was kept quiet. All you need to know is that a man I greatly admired was killed, by whom? I still don't know. But that soldier did. I saw him drinking in a bar and something in my memory just clicked and I remembered him as being there when that friend of mine was killed. I acted friendly towards the soldier and brought him a few drinks, tried to loosen his tongue with alcohol, that didn't work. He told me that he had best be getting back to his barracks and that I had best stop asking sensitive questions. Anyway I shadowed him for a little while and when he took a turn into an alley way I took my chance and pounced on him. I roughed him up a bit and demanded that he tell me what he knew, the first minute or so he denied everything but after I broke a few things he was almost ready to talk. Only thing was the second he opened his mouth to tell me who killed my friend something strange happened with his eyes and he just died. A second or two after that and a couple of his buddies came round the corner, I figure they were worried about him going back so drunk. But all they saw was me covered in his blood and him stone cold dead. I didn't even think, I just ran off as fast as I could and spent the next few years of my life hiding."
The nurse had listened to Magus' monologue without saying a word, now she spoke in whisper.
"How old were you?"
Magus scratched his chin "Not too sure, think I might have been 17 maybe."
"What did you mean by something strange happened to his eyes?" The nurse asked "There are a few toxins that would make pupils dilate or the iris change color before death."
"Know of any that would turn a mans eyes pure black?"
"Dexycotamine has been known to affect the iris pigment, and it is lethal even in small doses."
"I mean the whole of their eyes, iris and whites just suddenly turning black."
"I'm sorry, I've never heard of a case like that." The nurse sounded sincerely apologetic.
"You're taking this pretty well" Magus noted.
"What?" the nurse was confused.
"Most people would be freaking out a little about being in the same room as a infamous murderer."
The nurse shrugged "You're just another patient to me, I became a nurse to heal people not judge them, and besides, its not true that you're a murderer, I believe you when you say you're innocent."
"Thanks" Magus smiled.
There was a small gasp from Mei as she lay in her bed, it was the first signs of life she had shown all through the day and night. Magus hurried over to her and clasped her hand reassuringly. There was no further movement from the little girl, but Magus would always swear that she squeezed his hand back.
"I should leave you two alone again." The nurse moved towards the door. "Thank you for trusting me Magus."
"It's not a problem, but don't ever call me that outside of this room."
He received no answer as the nurse had slipped quietly away.
-.-.-.-
Okay, I know, it took me FOREVER to write this chapter, must have seemed even longer after my brief burst of creativity. My copy of MS word is messing right up and I don't have a clue why. I've had to retype this chapter in WordPad. I hate WordPad, I have to manually check for all spelling errors, this sucks cos I use big words a lot. My money situation is getting worse, I had some money, but then I spent it on buying .hack manga style book things. Ah well, some day I'll go and get a real job, until then I'll keep pretending to be a writer.