Thank you to everyone who reviewed; your feedback means a lot to me. You're awesome, and I'm glad you're still with me. :) Also big thanks to the people who verified the plausibility of my theories explained in this chapter: Lothlorien1, Alura, and my students.

The music:
Dido - Here With Me
X TV OST - Sadame (piano version)
Seether - The Gift
Sarah McLachlan - Full of Grace

Warning: Depressing. No, really.

-

Against the Wind
Chapter Seven

-

"How can you distinguish reality from illusion? You can't tell the difference, can you?"

Backed against the wall, Watari shuddered. Not this time, he thought, and he turned his focus inwards, shutting out the sound, ignoring the pressure of that hand upon his chest.

"Poor, poor Yutaka," she intoned, swinging to the rhythm of her own voice. "So lost. Just like when you died."

Lost? Watari's inner voice laughed. Lost didn't cut it. But suddenly it didn't matter; when he found himself at another point of no return – one too many, he had lost the track of those – he decided it was time to stop fighting and let the current take him home.

Wherever that was.

He leaned back his head and closed his eyes. Lips slightly parted, he let out a deep, calming sigh. His head rolled to the side until his cheek touched the cool surface of the wall. He reached for his glasses, sweeping them out of the way, and waited. For what... it no longer mattered, either. She was still talking, somewhere there; he could hear her, but he no longer distinguished the words. They melted into a background noise around the corners of his mind, and he found himself not caring at all.

Strange kind of relief, that.

It could have been minutes, or hours – his perception of time had warped - but in the end, he heard himself laugh. Softly at first; the sound rose from the bottom of his chest, vibrant, bright yet broken. Such a perfect contradiction, he caught the fleeting thought before it disappeared, and a perfect end to a useless fight.

So he laughed, the echo like a chorus to his own voice that rang across the empty halls. And the building could have shuddered and collapsed, for all he cared; it would just bury him under thirty years of bittersweet dreams.

When he opened his eyes again, Tategami was gone – she, or an illusion, or perhaps a memory of her that had haunted him all along. She didn't make it, they had told him back then, and that painful failure had gone on his account. Mother had gone mad, he remembered someone say; completely out of control, shutting everything down at the moment of their simultaneous connection. On his part, Watari remembered fear, that instant he had gone in, and the feeling of being violated, torn apart. The last thing he remembered was his own shattering scream.

Yet no matter how many times he had gone over the program afterwards, often all throughout the years, he could not find the fault. There had been nothing wrong. It should have worked.

He looked around, his eyes tracing the long shadows; jet black against the dark, gloomy gray. He could swear something around him whispered, is this real? Time and again, like an afterthought vocalized by a reluctant memory that clung to his mind like a wet shirt. Scattered pieces of memories flashed before his eyes, and he found himself asking each and every one of them – did it happen? as though there he would find an answer convincing enough to believe it. But he knew he had crossed the threshold beyond which he was too numb to register the need to verify any of this. To find a way to do that; any way, anything to save his sanity from what now seemed like an inevitable fall. In all perfect honesty of the heart, he could no longer tell – suddenly he realized that for all he knew, everything since the beginning could have been unreal. Perhaps he had never woken, twenty five years before. Perhaps all the time it had been a dream. Who could tell him now whether reality was indeed what it appeared to be? Who had what it took to make him believe it?

When he could not trust himself, he knew, he could not trust anyone else, either.

In this somber place, the pull of gravity seemed to have steadily grown stronger. He'd had a resolve, once; it used to burn bright before him, a beacon that showed him the way. And when that flame had gone out and he began to walk, only because he could not think of anything else to do, absently running his fingers along the wall, he understood. He had not underestimated Enma by far; not enough to deem it a grievous mistake. But he had overestimated his own resilience, and now it was slipping away; dissolving into nothingness, melting into silence along the sound of his footfalls against the floor.

This should have been the moment when he realized that everything Enma had done had been just a ploy; a way to get him back, a game, one he could just shrug off as he had done before and move on. He wished he could have said it had not worked. But it had. And the aftermath of the play that had yet to see its true beginning was already pushing him down the slippery slope.

He made his way outside and the first lungful of the crisp night air made him wonder how possibly perfect illusion could be. He knelt down at the bottom of the wide stairs and touched the dirt, and he wondered if that was how reality felt between his fingertips. The salt on the tip of his tongue as he ran it along his lips – was it real, or just a memory? And he found no way to tell; there was no tangible anchor left to go back to and gain a clear perspective again.

He sat heavily on the stony steps and let his head drop into his hands. The chilly wind tugged at his hair, whispering; it had been so long since he got used to the perpetual cold. His own breath felt warm on his palms; a strange contradiction, and he felt like giggling, the sound caught quickly behind his hand. I thought you needed me, he mused, and for a second he was not sure whether he had said that aloud. I thought you wanted me sane.

"Maybe that doesn't even matter to you. Or to me," he said quietly, tiredly.

The night seemed heavy, or perhaps it was just his head that felt that way. He realized that only a couple of hours must have passed, but it felt like days, weeks, months, time devoid of meaning in his mind – as though he had been running up the hill all his life and afterwards, unable to stop or turn away and leave.

"Fine," he said at last and stood. "Have it your way."

His voice grew louder now and he turned to face the building, head tilted back, his narrowed eyes staring the quarters up and down. "You hear me? You win!" he shouted. It brought a strange, exhilarating release, hearing his own voice shooting through the dark.

Then he walked away, slowly, dragging his feet, stifling choked laughter. If there was no other way, he would do it like that. Maybe all it amounted to was suicide. The second death. Maybe slavery was a better way to put it. Maybe he was giving up, maybe he wasn't – but he couldn't deny that Enma had a point. He thought back to the words they had exchanged before. You will finish what you started, he had said. Nobody in their right mind opposed Enma DaiOh.

Then again, Watari was not sure he was still in his right mind, himself.

He stopped under a street lamp and rolled up one sleeve. The bruises around his wrist still gave his skin a faint, fading sickly shade. Intriguing, that, he thought; his body should have healed a long time ago. Another trick, or perhaps just an illusion. Another way to force him into a cage. Illusion had locked it, he knew; he was looking at the world around him from behind the bars. Leave it to a god to defeat him with a weapon he had invented himself.

He wandered aimlessly under the eternal sakura trees until the night began to wane. He had wanted to go somewhere, to do something, but he failed to muster anything resembling a sense of purpose anymore. His purpose lay elsewhere, deep underground in the building far behind him. It was calling him, beckoning, teasing and tempting with a promise of relief.

But that had to wait. He still had something to do.

-

Watari returned to EnmaCho before sunrise. He wanted to make sure nobody had come to work yet as he cleaned out his desk. He felt bad about disappearing on his longtime friends without so much as a goodbye. But he knew they would have questions; too many of them, and his truthful answers would bring no good to anyone at all. He didn't trust himself to tell a convincing lie; it felt even worse, anyway. Disappointing them hurt, but better safe than sorry, he thought – in regards to them more than to himself. If he could not fall any further down, he would at least make sure nobody followed suit.

He cleaned up his lab and locked it, having gathered only the most necessary of his belongings. He would drop them in his apartment later, before he went to wrap up the last thing on the list of his errands for the day. But as the lock clicked and he realized he would not come back tomorrow to open that door again, a sudden sorrow filled him to the bottom of his heart.

He had done it before. That memory still burned fresh in his mind. He had left everything behind once already, in this world, this... afterlife. Only that time, quarter of a century ago, his regret was not for the people he had left in his wake. Today, it was so completely different. This was like a family, or as close to one as he could get.

And he was leaving again.

He left the Ministry building a few minutes before eight o'clock, careful not to run into Tatsumi, in case the man decided to start his workday early, as he often did. Watari remembered the promise he'd given the night before; it would not let him forget with the aid of a lump in his throat that grew larger each time he thought about it. But before that he needed time to gather his thoughts, to put everything in order in his mind, so that when the time came, he would say exactly what he had to say. No more, no less.

With a few hours left until the evening, Watari spent most of the day strolling down the streets, recalling past events and the people he had met over the past twenty five years. He thought back to the few difficult cases he'd had, the Shinigami that were no longer there, everything that had changed. Meifu might have been the land of the dead, but life still somehow went on at its usual pace. So he wandered to the places he had not visited in ages, refreshing the memories, focusing on all the positive things he could think of. He offered a smile to those who passed him by, and they smiled back, like they would on any other day.

And everything would have seemed just like always, if not for the stubborn sting of doubt interlaced with his thoughts. You can't tell, his inner voice chimed on. Real, or not? But he drank in the warm sunshine anyway, and let it wash away the darkness of his thoughts. He inhaled as deeply as his lungs allowed, and savored the sweet scent of the sakura that lingered in the air. Even if one day he found out it had not been real, he told himself that it took away nothing of its beauty today.

The lack of sleep had slowly begun to catch up with him, but Watari resisted the need. He spent an hour reclining on a wooden bench in a garden under the shelter of a giant tree. He tried to rest, but his whirling thoughts kept him wide awake and his body tense. Food did not look appealing, either; his stomach, twisted into a tight knot, opposed the idea of eating rather violently.

His thoughts kept straying towards Tatsumi, and Watari eventually gave in. He had worked hard to rid himself of the icy chill, the residue of Enma's using the Shadow Master against him in the dirty fight for the upper hand. It was none of Tatsumi's fault, he knew, and even none of his own. Still, he caught himself wondering if the man he would soon speak with was as real as he wanted him to be. Doubt, he mused, was such an easily planted trap. It made such a powerful tool.

And all over again, try as he might, he found no way to tell. A desperate anger flickered at the edge of his mind. He could choose to let go, write it off as an illusion and do none of the things that could still be done. Or, he could go and hope he would not misjudge the situation again. A feeble hope, he thought sadly, but still worth a try.

Past eight o'clock, the lights in the Shadow Master's house blinked on and Watari rose from where he had been watching the windows. He suspected Tatsumi would be anywhere between angry and furious; he had not shown up at work without any sort of notice. But that no longer mattered. After tonight, he would not have much left to worry about at all.

He prepared himself for a small storm as he knocked on the door. He was not wrong.

"Watari-san!" Tatsumi's voice was stern as he appeared in doorway, carefully studying the scientist with critical eyes.

Watari caught that familiar, dangerous glint in them and froze. He held his breath.

"I hope you have a very good excuse for missing work today," Tatsumi said. "Feel free to start from that before you explain everything else."

Nodding slowly, Watari smiled. Tatsumi as he had always been. "That's why I'm here," he said. "I'm sorry for today. I had... important matters to attend to."

Tatsumi's guarded pose spoke of disapproval, yet there was a hint of concern as well. His words, though, carried the former best. "You're notorious for excuses much better than this," he said.

"No more excuses." Watari shook his head. "We need to talk."

Tatsumi sighed. "Indeed, we do. Come in," he said, gesturing for Watari to enter.

"Not here," he said quietly. He measured Tatsumi carefully from head to toe. "Grab your coat."

The Shadow Master's brow furrowed. "Where are we going?"

"Chijou." Smiling, Watari pointed his thumb up.

Tatsumi cocked his head, unconvinced. "What for?"

"You'll see."

-

The city of Tokyo shone brightly with millions of sparkling lights beneath them; the commotion bursting with color, that never-ending pounding of life, spun onwards into a rush by the evening hour. Watari had caught Tatsumi's arm in midair as they had materialized in the world of the living. For a short moment, he ignored the questioning looks and the attempts at outrage on the Shadow Master's part. He took in the sight spreading beneath and all around him. Breathed in the polluted city air, and even that seemed beautiful to him right then. If it were to be his last chance to experience it like that, he decided he would make the most of it.

Tatsumi was beautiful, too, in flight; gracefully shifting in the free air by his side. Even his apparent impatience didn't bother him; it was a part of Tatsumi, he had learned a long time ago, and now he appreciated it all the more. He wanted to remember that man, exactly like this. That lingering scent that was uniquely his; all of Tatsumi's usual ways, that look on his face, the endless blue of his eyes and his hair ruffled by the wind. The long coat fluttering around him, much like his own, and the glasses sliding down his nose. The way those soft, dark strands fell lightly over his eyes. A sight well worth remembering, that.

Watari caught himself wishing he could touch him, longing for a chance to let his hands carry the memory as well, wherever he would go from there.

"Watari-san?" Tatsumi moved smoothly to his side and regarded him with a quizzical look. "Why are we here?"

Here goes nothing, Watari mused, and he braced himself for everything he had come here to say. "Meifu has eyes and ears in places you would never imagine, Tatsumi," he said, his voice gravely serious. "And what I'm about to tell you had better stay between you and me."

"I'm listening," Tatsumi agreed with a small nod.

Watari gave his head a light shake. "You're not taking me as seriously as you should be. Believe me, I've never been more serious than I am right now. You'll have to take my word for it, but you do not want to face the consequences of Enma's finding out that you're in on this."

The god's name wiped the remnants of doubt from the Shadow Master's face. "I understand." He nodded again.

Watari took a deep breath and let his eyes briefly slide shut. The wind whined around him, as if channeling his own overwhelming unease. Yet, as he spoke, it carried his voice loud and clear.

"This place, and all the others – Meifu, Gensoukai, wherever you go – they all have something in common. Look around you," he said, pulling Tatsumi a short way down towards the city. "Wherever you turn, you'll find an energy which is a constituent present in every single element of this world. And it's the same everywhere else, as well. Everything; metaphysical, living, inanimate, take your pick – if it exists within the borders of the universe, and if it were to disintegrate into the most basic elements, in the end what you're left with is energy itself. It's an integral part of the makeup of each plane, like a link that is holding it all together."

There was an expression of focus on Tatsumi's face, and he nodded. Watari suspected he had to wonder what that had to do with anything, but the Shadow Master kept his silence.

"If you had a chance to take such a close look, you would see that those links are everywhere. Every organism, every object, every cell and particle and even every thought ever produced is intertwined with the world it exists in. The flow of energy within a plane, and between the parallel planes is constant, uninterrupted by anything, except a purposefully calibrated spell. But then again, those carry energy as well, so eventually it would be released into the circulation anyway. It ignores boundaries, any and all of the limitations of the physical world. There's no beginning or end or any sort of limit to this; it's been the primary constituent of everything in the world since day one, and it will likely be so after everything else is gone. You could say it's eternal, though that's scientifically impossible to prove."

"That sounds interesting," Tatsumi said carefully, but his eyebrows drew slightly together in a frown. "But I don't see what that has to do with Enma DaiOh... or you."

"Bear with me, Tatsumi, I'm getting there." Watari shrugged. "What you have to understand about this is that this energy is like a net that connects everything together. But the most important thing is that it also serves as a data carrier of limitless capacity."

Tatsumi drew back a little, surprised. "Data carrier?" he asked suspiciously.

"Yes." Watari rubbed his arms, pulling his coat tighter around himself against the cold wind. "It carries information about everything it has ever touched, about everything it has ever been a part of. It remembers it, if you will. You know how nothing in the universe disappears without a trace? Think of it as of a kind of linking lines; eternal, limitless, connecting every element of every world and then all the worlds together, all of it into one enormous universe. And the memory of everything that has ever occurred keeps circulating everywhere. All the time."

He paused, took a deep breath. Tatsumi's eyes were fixed upon him, a light frown still creasing his forehead as though he had frozen in time and space. A dark star of shadow against the velvet black.

"You have to realize the enormity of this," Watari continued after another deep breath. "We're talking every event, every memory, every thought, even the extremely strong emotions, to an extent. What the first human being was like, the first god, the first death, all the history of the universe remembered, stored, in a limitless network of links. Here, in Chijou. In Meifu. Everywhere you go, you'll find it. And the options that offers are immeasurable. A possibility to explore things that no longer exist and, in turn, a chance to recreate them. A way to learn what nobody remembers anymore, all the things that have never been documented anywhere. It's there. In this city, this plane; in us, even. Inside us and all around us."

Tatsumi shook his head. "But that is only theory, isn't it?"

"We'll get to that." Watari pursed his lips. "Now think about this: all this information exists. What would happen if someone gained unlimited access to it?"

Tatsumi's eyes grew large as understanding slowly dawned upon him. "Unlimited access? To every piece of information that has ever existed on this plane?"

"Not just this one, Tatsumi." Watari pointed down at the city beneath them, then drew a full circle around himself with his hand. "All of them."

"Information is power," Tatsumi whispered. His face had paled a little. "Unlimited information equals unlimited power." For a moment he fell silent, then he shook his head. "But it's only a theory. How would one go about gathering that kind of data? It's impossible."

Watari shrugged. "That's what you think."

"You're not trying to say there is a technology capable of that?"

Watari moved closer, until he and Tatsumi were face to face; floating yet motionless against the starlit sky. "That is precisely what I'm saying."

"You can't be serious." The Shadow Master narrowed his eyes. "Where?"

Watari held up that ice-blue stare, unblinking, though his heart was pounding. "In Meifu."

"What?"

"The Mother computer." Watari looked away. That glimpse of shock on Tatsumi's face was more than enough to cut his heart open in many unbidden ways. "Which happens to be in Enma's exclusive possession. It's more than capable of capturing all that information, and I suspect it's doing so even right now as we speak."

Adjusting his glasses, Tatsumi let his hand linger there as he massaged the middle of his brow. "If I understood correctly, it means that everything, including this very conversation, can be captured."

Watari nodded. "Yes."

"But that means..." Tatsumi broke off. He looked up. "How do you fit into all of this?"

Sighing, Watari ran his hand through his wind-tangled hair. "Mother might be the most sophisticated, the most advanced computer currently in existence, but on the basic level, it's still only a machine. The kind of data we're talking about is purely abstract to computers, even to one such as this. To process it, it needs an intermediary. A translator, if you will, which will transform the incoming signal into a language a computer system can understand."

"And Enma wants you to create it?"

Watari shook his head. Something in his heart cringed. But he had promised to carry this through, and he had come too far to back away now. "No." He lifted his head and met Tatsumi's gaze. "You're looking at it."

"The intermediary... between Mother and the rest of the world... is you?"

"Yes."

When Watari forced himself to look at Tatsumi again, he met a pair of eyes that watched him as though they had never seen him before. Past this point, he knew, the decision what to do with the information no longer belonged to him.

"But how?" Tatsumi managed at last, and the words seemed to have had difficulty passing through his constricted throat.

Watari tapped his temple with a finger. "Thanks to this," he said levelly, careful to show none of the apprehension that washed over him. "And something I was born with that makes a smart guy out of me."

The weak attempt at humor seemed lost on Tatsumi. "So Enma is forcing you to do this?" he asked.

Watari winced. "Not exactly." He crossed his arms over his chest and shuddered. "Let's go down, shall we?"

-

The streets were crowded, though not overly so, despite the early evening hour. Watari took in their surroundings, breathing deeply to calm down his nerves. It had gone better than he had expected, he had to admit; so far, anyway. At least Tatsumi did not make it any more difficult than it already was. Still, going back to all of this and putting it into words amounted to making it final; after this night, another part of his existence would end. How sad, he thought to himself, watching the bright, colorful lights around them. Shame.

"Thirty years ago, I had the misfortune of dying in a lab explosion," he started, glad that they were walking. It made it easier to contain himself. "Wasn't pretty, and you can imagine just how thrilled that left me. But when I got my second chance..." he paused, realizing in that instant how bitter his voice had become. "I didn't get assigned to the Shinigami work, like I thought I would. Instead, I got pulled into the Mother Project, which was sort of crawling by that time. It was created and overseen by The Five Generals."

Tatsumi avoided his gaze. "That's where you got that device?"

"Yes." Watari nodded. "It allowed me to connect to Mother and make the entire project happen. They had discovered a way to tap into the energy nets and pull the information out of them, but to process it they needed someone willing to act as a demodulating tool, of sorts. Someone capable of holding that tremendous amount of data constantly flowing in within their mind, so that the pre-implanted terminal could translate it into binary that Mother understood."

"And you did it."

Watari's mouth twitched; a small, wistful smile. "I did. By that time we were taking it one step at a time, mind you; it's an enormous overload, all that signal coming in and passing through you..." He shivered at the memory. "Amazing experience, that. But at that point, we're not talking information from the entire world; not yet, anyway. It was still quite far ahead of us. Slow work, mostly the analysis of everything they'd managed to collect over time. The goal was to create an environment in which the process of capturing and translating the data was instantaneous. For testing purposes, I developed a program... an interface, really, in which my parter and I could work on the synchronization and get used to the new conditions. It was a virtual reality of sorts, compiled from the data that had previously been collected in Meifu."

Out of the corner of his eye he watched Tatsumi's confusion dissolve in the understanding of his words. "And what happened yesterday was..."

"An illusionary mirror reflection of reality. Twenty five years ago, it was my workplace, so to speak. And it was a rat race, Tatsumi; the highest level kind." Watari swallowed thickly. He felt himself shiver. Tatsumi walked beside him, silent, nodding thoughtfully and only glancing sideways once in a while, as if hesitant to ask lest it be a wrong question.

"And it took five years, but eventually we got to the point where we were ready to go live. Test it in the real environment, that is." He shrugged. "Only something went wrong, and it didn't work."

Tatsumi half-turned and looked at him closely. "What happened?"

"I don't know." Watari shook his head. "What I do know is that when I regained consciousness it was to find out that three months had gone by and my partner was gone, too."

Tategami's angry face flashed in his memory again, and her words continued to assault him with a dull echo inside his mind. Whose fault it was?

"And you never found out what had gone wrong?"

The Shadow Master's question pulled Watari out of his thoughts. "No. I wanted to, but I got cut off, and not long afterwards I left altogether." He took a deep breath. "See... The thing is... I cleaned up my mess before I left. The virtual interface and the crucial elements pertaining to my part of the Project were destroyed."

"Why?"

Watari pressed his lips tightly together. He stared ahead, looking but not really seeing the blurry lights in front of him. "Because they forgot to tell me that the ultimate purpose of Mother was to give Enma continuous access to the information in question. Like a spy that never sleeps. It's as close to omnipotence as he could get, and as close to slavery as I could."

Tatsumi pushed his glasses up his nose. "Even Enma DaiOh has to abide by the laws. He can't force you to do this."

Watari bowed his head. He stared at his feet, subconsciously slowing down, for he suddenly felt heavy. "He can. Not force, per say, but he has every right to request my return." He stopped, searching for words, although it could not have been any simpler than to just say it straight. He felt faintly sick and swallowed hard, subconsciously letting one hand rest over his stomach.

"I made a deal with him, Tatsumi," he said at last. "According to which my extension and means of research were granted in return for my cooperation, until the completion of the Mother Project. However you look at it, he kept his part of the agreement. I didn't. I always feared this day would come, but I still hoped it wouldn't. Call me naïve, if you will, but it was a fifty-fifty type of case. I destroyed most of my work, after all. Or so I thought. Until yesterday."

It's getting harder to face him, he mused as he looked up. He met a pair of sapphire eyes and even the darkness and the glasses failed to conceal the flicker of bittersweet understanding in them. I lied to you, he thought. In a way, I did. In many ways.

"I'm telling you this for a reason," he continued, focused on keeping his calm. "If it comes to that and Enma gets what he's after, there has to be someone who knows. If that happens, all of you will have to watch your backs. Enma holds grudges, and with the means to have eyes and ears all over the place, he won't hesitate to use it."

Tatsumi slowly tilted his head, never letting his sight stray from Watari's blurry amber eyes. "Are you saying you will give him what he wants?" he asked.

"Do I have a choice?" Watari let out a short, bitter laugh. "I have to admit his ways of getting the point across have become rather creative. For all I know, all of this," he motioned around him, "could be another illusion. How do I know it isn't? I couldn't tell once, how can I be sure now? Maybe this conversation never happened at all. Maybe you're not even here. Maybe there's no 'here', except in my mind."

Watari looked away. For a moment there, he had hoped that letting it all out would make it somewhat easier. But he had caught a hint of hurt, dancing somewhere at the back of Tatsumi's gaze, and he was back to square one with too much weight upon his chest to let him breathe free air again.

"He left me with only one option, Tatsumi. None of us, myself least of all, has any chance against him in an open fight. Maybe there's a way, maybe there isn't. And I only have one way to find out."

For a few long minutes silence hung between them. Watari chased away every other thing he had wished to say, glad to just stay silent together. He had replayed this moment in his mind countless times during the past day, and all it got him was a dull ache in his heart. He let out a quiet sigh.

Tatsumi threw back his head, turning his face up towards the night sky with a sigh of his own. His hands came up and he brushed them across his mouth, taking off his glasses in one swift movement.

"I can't believe you're giving up," he said, a sharp edge around every word.

Watari frowned, surprised. "I'm not," he said, though he realized he didn't do a great job at being convincing. "I'm just doing the only sensible thing I can do. If there's a way out of this, I'll find it. If there isn't..." he paused and bit down on his lower lip. "If there isn't, then I guess it's only fair. I got myself into this and it's my problem to bear it."

He shifted into the spirit form the second his eyes began to burn. It made no sense to continue this. The last thing he wanted was an argument with Tatsumi, when it could have been their last chance to talk at all. He crossed dimensions back into Meifu, to where they had come from, vaguely aware of Tatsumi doing the same close behind.

He leaned back, bracing his shoulders against the wall. Consciously aware that he should have left, while he still kept his composure, he found himself almost unable to take that final step. He crossed his arms, and he felt himself tremble. The deep breath he took was a shuddering one.

He opened his mouth to finally end it, but a sudden thought stopped him at once. After all, what did one say in a moment like that? To someone he cared for, he refused to say a simple 'goodbye'.

"I should go," he said quietly. "I probably should have said something to the others, but I didn't want to lie again."

Tatsumi nodded, not looking at him as he asked, "What should I tell them?"

"I doubt you'll have to say much," Watari said. He cleared his throat. It felt strange to be straightforward like this, about all those things he had never thought he would come to say. "I believe you'll find a copy of a request for my transfer on your desk tomorrow morning. Enma's orders, that's all. I'm not the first one to go."

With that he tore himself away from his spot, almost forcefully, and took a few steps towards the stairs. He clenched his teeth, squeezed his eyes shut for a second and waved to Tatsumi with one hand, not trusting himself to turn around.

"Be well, partner."

He took another step, the first one on his way down the shadow-rimmed staircase, and he knew something in him began to break.

"Watari."

No, Tatsumi, he thought, and his heart stopped at the sound of footsteps behind him. He kept walking, a slow descent and he cursed himself for holding back, for being too weak to just do what he knew he had to do. The steps behind him grew louder, quicker, and he thought how stupid it would be to run, and that he should, that it made so little sense to let the moment drag--

"Yutaka."

Tatsumi's both hands were on his shoulders, stopping him; and Watari couldn't fight, though he knew he should have. For the sake of them both. Slowly he shook his head, bit his lips, tried to keep moving but failed miserably.

"Stay."

"I can't," he whispered, and his voice betrayed him. As did his eyes, shedding twin tears that escaped the net of shattered self control. He choked back a sob as they rolled slowly down his cheeks. And he all but let himself go when a warm pair of hands found their way around his neck, as those strong arms embraced him, pulled him back against the heat of Tatsumi's chest. A warm breath, shuddering like his own, carried the soft, broken voice.

"Just tonight. Stay."

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Author's Note:

Due to the recent questions regarding the similarities between the Against the Wind series by yours truly and Pawn by my friends, Macx and LaraBee, from their Darkness Unleashed series, I'd like to follow their example and quench the fire before it spreads. :) The similarities stem from the fact that we are using the same canon base. Any other similar elements, should you find any, are coincidental and neither of us minds it being so. :)