A Sense of Dark

by Penguinkye

Chapter Sixteen

October 13, 199X 2:18 A.M.

When I woke up, Crawford stood by my bed. He is a shocking thing to find standing by your bed, and he was standing there. I would have jumped, but I decided the killing Kudou had drained me of the will to move for at least a year. I settled for squinting. It made something pull on my cheek.

"Crawford?" I said, touching my face and remembering Kudou's hand spiking out to claw me.

"You never knew Schuldig whilst he lacked the control you are accustomed to, did you, Nagi?" Crawford said it mildly, in that way that meant what he was saying either was worth less than nothing or it was a really big something and because it was Crawford, who didn't bother with nothings, it was something really big. He stood still, too, which was unnerving. He wasn't pacing. Why wasn't he pacing? Here he was, a looming dark figure speaking cryptically in the almost-dark. Farf gets a lot of rep for that, but Crawford really pulls it off better. Damn creepy, like he might at any moment turn into a vampire and swoop down and rip out—

Sharp flashes of memory recalled what we'd done earlier. There were glimpses of Farf's—of Tsukiyono—that I hadn't known I'd caught. It was worse than usual, I now realized. Because it had been revenge. And Kudou—

I had caught a hundred last words in my time, short though my time was, but nothing had caught me like Youji Kudou's. I had to push them away, hard, to keep from feeling sick. I groped until I found something relevent to talk about, to distract me.

"Unmei?"

"She spoke to him," Crawford answered, since he's come to understand my one-word-at-once speech. "The parasite—whatever—whoever it may be—has been with him for weeks. The shot that killed Ouka Takatori came from Farfarello's gun, but it was jarred by something in Schuldig's mind. He called it a "buzzing". That is what killed the girl, not incompetance."

He looked pained. He cared that he'd been wrong, not for Schu's sake, but he cared.. Of course, I could have told him about the buzz, but he hadn't asked me. Or Farf. He didn't think we were smart enough to know these things. I noticed that Crawford was pausing between his mild words, which was also not normal.

"Weiß was not his fault either," Crawford said at last. I startled, because that, I hadn't known. Crawford looked tired, and now really pained, and I wondered if it was not only because he'd been wrong, but because he had blamed Schu for getting himself hurt. It made Crawford's brain twitch, and maybe even his conscience. "It was there. The parasite. Schuldig only could not hear the enemy coming because this thing was preventing him. Preventing him seeing them, without obscuring anyone else. Which means of course that it is sentient, and also powerful. Terribly powerful, I am afraid. When Weiß did approach, Schuldig was practically blinded. He had no way of escaping, and no real way of even knowing his danger.

"And you know about this morning," he added , as though trying to shake off some almost-guilt. I wanted to hit him.

He sat down and I felt my back prickle. Why was he sitting? Why was he sitting? Everything he'd said was bad, but it wasn't enough to make Crawford sit. The anger froze and shivered in my stomach.

"What else?" I said. Even these few words sounded edged with apprehension.

"Another incident has occurred," he said. "Since our return." And he paused again. At this point Schu would have said, Dammit, Brad Crawford, spit it out already! But I only stared at him, looking ridiculous but hardly even realizing it.

And then he did spit it out.

"It was around midnight—I'm afraid I was distracted from such things as the precise time. I would tell you what I saw, but I do not think I can describe it any better than if you see it.The thrust of the situation is--" I thought wildly, in growing foreboding, that only Brad Crawford could use the word "thrust" without even thinking it might have something to do with screwing-- "Whoever this attacker is has removed Schuldig's barriers. All of his barriers. There is, from what Unmei says—Unmei has returned here—nothing between Schuldig and millions of very loud minds. He is reading everything."

I was stunned into a sickened silence. I thought of Schu's mind in mine, his one laughing voice, or worse, the sheer force of the rebound when Fujimiya had stabbed him in the shoulder. I tried to test the waters, to double it in my head, and I couldn't imagine…I couldn't imagine two. Millions of minds? Millions? Having one was hard enough.

I gaped and paled like a fish drowning in air until Crawford said, "You should go and see him in order to assess—to begin to grasp, at the least—the extent of our handicap."

I gaped a little more and Crawford's eyebrows twitched inward and down, so I figured I should get up before he did something violent. I rolled sideways and out of bed, and when my feet hit the floor, my legs realized with surprise that I wanted them to hold me up. They almost didn't—I felt my knees start to buckle and saw everything slant at a sudden strange angle. Crawford reached down from somewhere and propped me up.

"What did you do to Kudou? You haven't recovered your strength yet, and your eyes are still bloodshot."

"Killed him with himself," I said, trying to steady myself. Crawford helped, and we started towards Schu's room. I must have looked pathetic, the invalid visiting the hopelessly insane.

"How?" asked Crawford. I'd done something he hadn't understood. I almost wanted to keep it a secret.

"Sped things up," I said at last, "Two minute cancer. Liver failure. Lung failure. All his fault."

"That…is vengeful, Nagi," said Crawford. He sounded pleased. I was pleased too, except that I was limping over to visit the hopelessly insane, and that was nothing to be pleased about.

And he was hopeless. God, I knew that when the door swung open, when I saw Unmei's face—with glinting eyes and a serious mouth that showed her less composed than usual. I knew it when I looked at Schu and had to snatch away my gaze and bite against my teeth hard and turn back to try again.

It was different somehow, different to see him tied up and hurt, amazingly more bearable to see him at the mercy of Weiß, than it was to see this. Weiß, I thought, Weiß was supposed to hurt us. They were supposed to make us look vulnerable and horrible and unsafe. But they were dead, and this was our home, and we should have been able to stop him being hurt. As for the hurt, blood was a thousand times less jarring than the total destruction of the control that made Schu, Schu.

Twitches and sloppy grimaces, eyes that shot open and wavered shut, muscles that clenched and loosened, and one hand that seemed always to sketch out other people's stories in the air by his hip. A mess was made out of his hair, and if anyone had tried to fix that, they'd failed. He muttered, but that was all.

"Part of why your treatment of Kudou impressed," said Crawford softly by my ear, making me jump, "is that you slept through the screaming." He made me cold, saying that. Unmei's glittering eyes caught ahold of mine and froze me from that side as well. I pushed past their stares and statements, stumbled towards him, feeling sick and not knowing what I was going to try to do.

I grabbed his sketching hand, struggled with it, forced it still with what little mental power I had.

"Schu," I said his name, "Schu, for God's sake. Stop it." He didn't take any mind, of course, just gibbered quietly and twitched his face towards the wall. I had a sudden, long-forgotten urge to cry, not because I was sad but because I was angry, and that anger swooped up from inside, and like a sob and a shout coming right out of my hand, I hit him. Of all the people I could have hit, I picked the one who loved me the most and whom I liked best, who couldn't do anything to stop me but should have been able.

"Nagi!" said Crawford, but I ignored him.

"Schuldig, you bastard! STOP it!" I roared, as well as I could roar, and Crawford grabbed me from behind, his hands hard on my arms, and shook me until I stopped shouting.

"Nagi, control yourself!" he snapped, and I went dead still. I felt all of my weariness, and now I was exhaustedly angry as well.

"I hate you!" I said at large, and Unmei started up from the bedside, where she wasn't needed because I hadn't changed anything, and Crawford began to pull me away from Schu, which I hated, and then he was pulling one way while I pulled another, and, like the skin on my cheeks snapping free of dried blood, I snapped free of him and felt everything darken and forgot to stay conscious to shout some more.

As I passed out, something echoed huge and hollow in my ears: the last words of Youji Kudou.

April 6, 2006