The Bronze Labyrinth Chapter 2: Where the Oceans Die, a gundam uc fanfic

After War Gundam X: Olba Frost
The Bronze Labyrinth, Part II

NOTE: I don't think I made mention of this, but since someone asked, this is a "kind of AU" fic. You'll see at the end. I'll post the long author's notes after all of the chapters are up. Thanks for reading!

After War Gundam X
Where the Oceans Die

The boy child is locked in the fisherman's yard
There's a bloodless moon where the oceans die
A shoal of nightstars hang fire in the nets
And the chaos of cages where the crayfish lie

The last thing Olba Frost had expected, after they had pulled him from the wreck of his Gundam, was for them to bundle him onto a medical transport bound for some Earth port which he did not know the name of, and rush him into emergency surgery.

He had expected at least the one who had managed to crack open the melted, fused metal of the ruined cockpit to be carrying a gun, a weapon, something pointed between his eyes, saying, this is for you and all the pain and suffering you have caused the world, and here is your final judgement.

He would have preferred that. Because his brother was dead.

He had not actually seen Shagia die. He was grateful for that, because it would probably have driven him mad if he had. He had seen the bright beam from the Gundam X's cannon, had screamed in terror and tried to drag his brother's Gundam aside. If he hadn't, perhaps he would have died and Shagia would still be alive, because all he had managed to do was throw Virsago in the path of the incoming blast, and his brother's mobile suit had shuddered, strained, and then exploded.

Ashtaron had been thrown clear, tumbling over on itself as he tried frantically to work the flight control surfaces through bits of sparking electrical connections and the smell of something burning in the cockpit, and there had been a smaller, more muffled explosion somewhere close by his head, and when he eventually opened his eyes, space was quiet and his brother was not there.

He had clutched his head and screamed. Then he had fainted.

The men who had rescued him hadn't even said a word, just cut him loose from the straps and taken him away. He had resisted as much as he was able, because he had done something to his right arm and he couldn't quite see out of his right eye because so much blood was running down from his forehead, blinding him. But he had tried to tell them no, he was staying here. Right here, in space, to die like his brother had died, because without Shagia there was nothing.

They hadn't listened, of course. He hadn't expected them to.

Olba hated hospitals. He hated them even more than he hated other people, and that was saying quite a lot, because he hated other people more than he hated most other things, too. But there was something about the quiet wariness of a hospital's walls, something that was oppressive, waiting, closing in around him, mocking him. He heard it now more than ever, because he was alone.

Other people did not understand what that word meant - alone. Alone to them meant solitary, one person quiet and in tune with his surroundings, waiting for the next great word the universe might throw at him and preparing to catch it, whatever it might be. But Olba knew differently. There was nothing that could truly describe the sheer terror of alone, because alone meant that he had been cut loose, set adrift, cast aside. Alone meant that for the first time in his life, for the first time in his waking memories, the thoughts he heard in his own head were simply...his own thoughts.

For the first few days he had struggled to grasp that idea, to try and give it some life, to stand it up on some kind of pedestal or maybe frame it in some kind of metal frame to hang on the wall so he could stare at it and figure out exactly what it meant. Because he did not know. All he knew was that it was a great, hollow, echoing emptiness in his mind and his heart every time he woke up, painful with a pain that transcended tangible human sensory experience, so painful that he could barely keep from screaming. So he would try with all his might to fall back asleep, and when he slept, he would dream of Ashtaron and Virsago and the Gundam X all locked again in combat, and he saw his brother die. Over and over.

And then he would wake up.

He wanted to kill himself but he did not know how. For all the medical attention that had been given him, he knew he was still a prisoner of war. The lock on his hospital door and the alarms that were obviously activated by his bedside, warnings of his every move, were enough evidence of that. If he could have at least explained to his captors that if they would just shoot him, they would be doing him and the rest of the world a very huge favor, he would have. But he never saw them, just a few nurses and sometimes a doctor who would come in and inject him with something or to take his temperature and record his vital signs on some tablet.

He didn't know how long it had been since he had been pulled from the wreckage of Ashtaron and carried down to this hospital, but on the eighth day after he had first woken up to see the white hospital ceiling staring back down at him, someone came in who was neither a nurse nor a doctor.

This man was unremarkable, bland in appearance, nondescript in a three-piece suit, with quiet eyes and a weak chin, and Olba almost sneered at him before he remembered that he would gain nothing by doing so. So he kept quiet.

"Mr. Frost," the doctor said, without preamble. "Someone is here who would like to see you."

Olba kept quiet, still. It was hard, but he did.

"Good morning, Olba Frost," said the man. "My name is Keesler Swallow, and I'm your lawyer."

Olba blinked. Twice.

"You'll probably find it odd that you had a lawyer while you were laying in bed unconscious, but there have been negotiations going on for the past two weeks for you, and seeing as they just ended, I thought I'd come by and meet the man I have been representing."

"Sounds fine," Olba sneered, unable to resist, knowing he was supposed to be keeping quiet but it was too much for him. "Makes me sound like I'm some kind of vegetable. How noble of you, to take someone's case who you've never seen."

The man simply smiled, and Olba seethed, wanted to pound the smile on that bland face in until the man was a puddle on the floor. "Actually, Mr. Frost, I've been in to see you quite a few times, but you have been unconscious for all of them."

Olba eyed the man warily, wondering if he was going to produce a gun in the next few seconds and shoot him at last. Sometimes the quietest ones could be the most dangerous. Maybe there was hope.

But no, Olba's hope deflated in the next instant when the man smiled again and said, "Whatever the case, Mr. Frost, I am pleased to tell you you've been acquitted of your war crime charges and are no longer considered an international prisoner of war."

"That's not right," he said desperately, the words escaping him before he could stop them, and the lawyer frowned.

"Mr. Frost-"

"Kill me," he begged, knowing he could not move from the bed, but begging him with his eyes, begging, hoping he'd see the longing there, the need. "Please kill me. End it. I want...I need..."

There was a certain wariness in the lawyer's face that had not been there before, and Olba wanted to cry. But he couldn't, not in front of this neatly dressed lawyer with the bland eyes, because he realized that this man did not understand. And then he realized that there was most likely not another soul in the world who could understand, because his brother was dead, and he collapsed back to the bed in despair.

"You'll be leaving the hospital as soon as your injuries are healed enough for you to be transported," the doctor said from the lawyer's side, and Olba wanted to strangle him. Would have if he could move his hands well enough. Because neither of them understood. No one understood. What it was like to be so alone.

"I don't want to leave," he announced.

"I'm afraid you have no choice," the lawyer returned, obviously trying to sound soothing, but to Olba's ears only sounding snide, superior, secure in his own victory. Victory because they had everything now and he had nothing. "I believe your discharge date is coming up soon, and the state is not willing to pay for your medical expenses after that."

"And someone else is?" He could hardly believe that.

"Apparently so," the lawyer said. "Sleep well, Mr. Frost."

Before Olba could ask anything else, the two of them, the doctor and the lawyer, were gone through the hiss of the closing door.

Where is the fisherman, where is the goat?
Where is the keeper in his carrion coat?
Eclipse on the moon when the dark bird flies
Where is the child with his father's eyes?

He found out all too what it meant to be leaving, as the morning of his discharge date arrived, and the nurses came in to wheel him out.

He had graduated from lying all day in bed to only lying part of the day in bed and spending the rest of it in some sort of makeshift wheelchair with a reclining back and leg rest and a tray table so he could take his meals on it while staring morosely out the window at the sea of trees that surrounded this place. Trees, as far as the eye could see, brown and gray branches swimming up out of an ocean of green.

He hated it.

Olba was sure he would hate this new place too, but all the same he was glad to leave the trees behind, though he was quite sure he was going to prison and had no illusions of ever getting out again. It was all right, though, because at least in the prison he could curl up in a corner and refuse the food they would try to give him, and maybe he could starve to death.

The nurses didn't speak to him as they pushed him down the hallway in his makeshift wheelchair, and he didn't speak to them either, just propped his chin up with one hand and glared at everyone that happened to glance his way, even with the slightest twitch of the eyes. There was a little girl running down the hallway and he caught her eye and he glared and she burst into tears.

It was petty, but he didn't care.

They gave him paperwork to read and sign, but he didn't read, just signed, because what did it matter, anyway? He had already signed his soul over to the devil once, not in such tangible form, but the marks were still there, and he should have died up there in space, but he hadn't.

He didn't know why.

The paperwork was handed back over and there was the sound of clicking on computers and he scratched one arm restlessly, noticing only afterwards that his fingernails had grown very long and he'd left long red marks up and down his forearm, like claws. He made a face.

"Time to go, Mr. Frost."

It was the damned lawyer again. He rolled his eyes.

"Get lost."

As he had known, the lawyer smiled his smooth lawyer smile, and for the first time Olba noticed that smile didn't reach his eyes. He smiled like the leader of the New Federation had smiled when Shagia would whisper something to him, something smooth and false and entirely believable, and the president would smile. Just like that.

He almost reached out to tell his brother about the lawyer, to tell him that he was another one of those kinds of men, and found himself staring into the void of nothing, because it was just not there anymore. He shuddered, recoiled, tried to stop the tears that came involuntarily to his eyes.

"Mr. Frost, are you all right?"

"Shut up," he said.

The lawyer did not smile this time, just stared with a look that Olba realized was something like pity. He wondered if the lawyer thought he was insane. "Let's be off," the man said, grasping the handles of Olba's chair, and Olba realized they were at the front door, and beyond the door was a walkway and then beyond the walkway there was a car.

"Where are you taking me?" he demanded with a jerk of the wheelchair's arms, but the lawyer's pace didn't stop, didn't even slow, simply guided the chair between the opening of the automatic glass doors.

"You'll see."

He didn't like that answer, but sensed it was all he was going to get out of the man for the time being. Once upon a time, when he hadn't liked an answer, there were myriad ways he could have gone about getting a better, more satisfactory one. That was when Olba Frost had been Olba Frost, Gundam pilot, New Federation colonel, mercenary for hire, world revolutionary.

Now, he was just Olba Frost, prisoner.

He might be young, and he might be naive, and perhaps he was stupid. But in that moment, as he sat in a wheelchair helpless to walk because his legs had been broken, wheeled down the path by a man he did not know and who had decided his fate for him because he had no power any longer to decide his fate for himself, he realized that the war of which he had dreamed for so long was indeed over.

And he, Olba Frost, was the loser.

He's the king of the ninth world
The twisted son of the fog bells toll
In each and every lobster cage
A tortured human soul

He fell asleep five minutes into the car ride and woke up as the car pulled into a long, narrow lane between two rock faces. In the distance, he could see a suspension bridge. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he peered outside the window and saw, as far as he looked in any direction, an ocean of trees.

Feeling more resigned than anything else, he dozed as the car crossed the bridge and crossed under and into the canopy of trees. It was quiet here, quiet and cool, and little spears of sunlight streamed down from where the netting of branches did not mesh near enough to provide a complete blanket against the light, but other than those odd, broken places, it was nearly dark with the darkness of dusk.

Olba had always preferred the darkness.

The car broke from the tree canopy with a suddenness that seemed almost supernatural, and he pressed his forehead to the glass, blinking at the large house that seemed to rise up in the middle of the forest like a ghostly memory. It was not quite large enough to be called a mansion, but not small enough to be just a house. It was old, he could tell, because even from some distance, he could see the ivy clinging to its walls.

A house that had escaped the destruction of the colony drop? He had never heard of such a thing.

His curiosity grew as the car wound its way down meandering roads towards the house, and he almost forgot the sense of aloneness that had been squeezing his mind since he had woken up in the hospital, the feeling which he had almost grown accustomed to, if not almost fond of. It was not that he liked it. He hated it. But it was part of him now, just like the telepathy had been part of him, and it was always there to remind him of everything he had lost.

It was, he supposed, a fitting punishment for his crimes.

The house was surrounded by a high stone wall that was obviously new - smooth, cut stone that was too white and too bright to be part of the original building. The cat stopped at the elaborate, iron-wrought gates, and as they swung smoothly open, Olba saw a vast white and green courtyard, white stone and green grass. A large stone fountain bubbled merrily in the center of the smooth grassy field, and there were little birds everywhere, twittering from branch to branch of the slender saplings which he did not know the name of, landscaped so carefully around the fountain.

"What is this place?" he demanded, but there was a pane of glass separating him from the front seat. If the lawyer or the driver heard him, neither of them turned around. He did not expect that, but he would have liked an answer.

He supposed he could either sit and glare at the backs of their heads, or look out the window and enjoy his last few moments of freedom, so he looked out the window instead. The mountains were quite close, and there seemed to be at least one, if not more, sharp and craggy cliffdrops into nowhere. When his legs healed, if he still had not found a satisfactory way to find someone to kill him, perhaps he could jump off one of the cliffs.

The car pulled up to the door and there was a silence as the purr of the engine cut and he was sitting in a cocoon of nothingness, with the nothingness in his ears and the nothingness in his mind, and he wondered if that was what it was like to be dead.

Can you hear me, niisan?

Then the car door opened and the lawyer was pulling out his chair, helping him into it. He looked up at the house, realized that there were at least two sets of stone steps leading up to the massive front entrance, and opened his mouth before then realizing someone had built a wooden ramp on one side of the stairs. It was crude and hastily constructed, by the looks of it, but functional.

Interesting.

The inside of the house was dark and cool. It was elegantly furnished, but not overly gaudy, with dark wine-purple draperies and mahogany wood furniture, tiny crystalline sculptures on mantle of the foyer fireplace and a tinkling crystal chandelier that hung overhead, lit with the softest of soft glows so that everything around him seemed also to be glowing with the faintest of light. Shagia would have loved this place, Olba realized, and the ache that thought brought to his heart was so strong that he almost keeled over in his chair, clutching his chest. Tears burned in his eyes.

"Your clothes," the lawyer said, setting down a battered-looking suitcase next to him, and Olba stared.

"I don't have any clothes."

"You do now."

Olba was about to reply, the retort on the tip of his tongue, and found himself staring at the man's outstretched hand. The skin of the lawyer's hand was very tan, he realized, in contrast to the paleness of his face. He wondered how one man could have such different shades of skin.

"Goodbye, Olba Frost," the lawyer said, and Olba realized that he was supposed to shake the man's hand, except he'd never shaken anyone's hand in his life. He had never had to. People of his position, of his rank and of his social standing did not shake hands.

He stared at it.

The lawyer sighed, removed the hand. Olba could feel the man's eyes on him, judging, gauging, and then the door slammed with a final sigh.

It was quiet.

Olba let his eyes wander around the room, wondering if this was some sort of test - if he was to wander the house on his own and he would come across some horrible secret as to why he was to be left here. He tried not to be too conspicuous as he gazed around at the walls, at the door, just in case they thought he would want to steal some of the trinkets. He was not a thief. He was a soldier and a mobile suit pilot.

The world just hadn't understood, that was all.

Just as he had decided that it would be best for him to at least head into one of the many entrances surrounding the foyer to see what he could find, he heard voices coming seemingly from overhead, footsteps on what sounded like stairs. He froze, tucked one strand of hair behind his ear, wiggled his toes inside the clunky cast covering his left leg. His right toes weren't doing so well, but he had discovered yesterday that he was able to wiggle his left toes, and was quite proud of the fact.

Not that he would ever admit that to anyone.

The footsteps stopped, the voice grew louder, then the footsteps pounded down the rest of the stairs, slowing as they came to the end, turning into clicks on the wooden floor as whoever it was rounded the corner and entered the room.

Olba was not prepared for the sight of the pale, young face under the shock of bright golden hair, the pale blue eyes looking out at him over a pointed, hawk-like nose that spoke of the bloodline of the old European nobility. He had hated people like that before this, hated them because they were born to a power and prestige that he and his brother had had to earn through hard work and years of struggling and much blood.

But now he simply stared at the boy who was standing in the doorway with a strange expression in his eyes, not sure whether to smile or frown, and said, "Who are you?"

"You don't remember me?" the boy wondered, and the delicate mouth curved into a shy smile. "I suppose not. We've met before. I'm Caris Nautilus."

"I have a wager," the brave child spoke
The fisherman laughed, though disturbed at the joke
"You will drink what I drink, but you must equal me
And if the drink leaves me standing, a soul shall go free."

He didn't remember much of the rest of that afternoon, as Caris had picked up his bags for him and showed him how to use the elevator to get up and down from his room on the second floor, had showed him around the house, which was a little bigger than it had appeared on the outside, but not much.

Caris Nautilus was a Newtype.

Not a true Newtype, it was true, but a Newtype nonetheless, one of the creatures Olba had sworn forever to hate, on which he had promised with all his heart to take his revenge, because they had been good enough and he hadn't. Never mind that the system they had been good enough for had toppled in the end, leaving them adrift, shadows of their own power. There was something, a certain ring of the word Newtype that sent his blood burning and his skin prickling.

He hated Newtypes.

So why he did not hate Caris, he didn't know, but as the boy rolled him along the corridors of the house in his wheelchair, he nodded politely to the words coming from the boy's mouth and looked where Caris told him to look, repeated obediently the advice Caris told him to pay attention to, such as don't try and go down that back stairwell when you start being able to walk, because the back door is always locked, or if you take the elevator to the third floor, you'll be able to access the laundry room that way, if you'd like.

Caris had been in that final battle, against the two of them, in league with the Gundam X, and now he remembered the boy, the artificial Newtype. Shagia had dismissed him, calling him worthless, a piece of cheap human-manufactured labor that was no more useful than a broken machine. Such were all Newtypes, he had believed, artificial or not. Newtypes were nothing to be admired, nothing to be looked up to. All Newtypes were simply pawns, mistaken by the world into thinking they were God's gift to mankind.

He had never thought of Newtypes as human.

But Caris Nautilus was definitely human. He had a curiously soothing voice, strong and direct for a boy who looked so young, a voice that was obviously used to giving commands and used to being obeyed, but strangely that did not bother Olba either. His speech was formal, yet friendly, and he liked to talk. He was proud of this house, proud of the fact that he was the owner of a genuine before-war 19th century house, and his enthusiasm for it would have been infectious if Olba had cared.

He had told Caris he was tired after a walk around the house, and Caris had left him in his chair with his bags in what was now to be his new room, and promised to call him when dinner was ready. He spent the rest of that time until the evening meal staring out the window at the trees.

Dinner was a simple affair, and he discovered that even though the food was good, much better than the hospital food he had been choking down for weeks now, he was not hungry. He spent most of the meal either staring out the window at the trees again or at Caris in a roundabout way so that the boy wouldn't realize he was being watched. He had spent years perfecting that technique, and he wondered if it would work with Newtypes.

Caris, if he noticed, didn't seem to mind, chatting nonchalantly about neutral topics like the weather and the history of the house. He had apparently inherited this particular house from an uncle twice removed on his mother's side, and this particular uncle had passed away just two months ago. So Caris had returned from the war and moved in.

"Weren't you governor?" Olba said. "Of some city or town or something?"

Caris said softly, "I was. But I...abdicated. I gave the position to someone more worthy than I."

Olba thought about that for a second, about those words coming from a Newtypes mouth. "But you're a Newtype," he said at last.

The corners of Caris' mouth turned up a bit and he put down his fork, folding his hands in front of him. He had very long, very delicate fingers. "Tell me, Olba Frost," he said. "Why did you start this war?"

"Because we were special," he said automatically, reaching for the one answer that he had always thought to be true. "We were special and no one cared."

He expected Caris to laugh at that, laugh and refute it, but instead the boy just looked at him with those bright, uncanny blue eyes and said nothing.

"My brother-" he faltered, faltered and then continued, rushing as if nothing had happened, "my brother and I were born like that, you see. We were just as good as the Newtypes, just as good, just as special..." He trailed off, because the rest of the passionate speech he used to know had faded in his mind and he no longer remembered it, and felt the faintest vestiges of annoyance stir, because he was sitting in this chair in front of a Newtype giving him reasons that were no longer valid, because he was no longer even special.

They said we were not needed.

Caris waited, and when it was obvious Olba was not going to continue, ran one hand through his hair thoughtfully. "Do you want to know something, Olba?"

"Depends on what it is," he said. Let Caris think he was cruel, unfeeling, ungrateful.

"It's about why I took you in," Caris said. "They were going to put you in prison. Then they were going to send you off to a manual labor camp and let you spent the rest of your life digging ditches and building houses. And then they were going to kill you."

His head came up at that, and he stared at Caris with fever in his eyes and a bit of a wild pounding in his heart.

"Kill me?"

"But I said no. I sent my best lawyer there to plead your case, so that I could step in and claim you under my protection, and he won."

"And why on earth," Olba said, "did you do that?"

Caris' eyes came up to meet his, and something in them made him pause, for just a little bit, as if they held some secret which he had never seen before, a secret which if he had known it sooner, would have turned the tide of his life to some happier time.

"Because I see myself in you."

"And what's in it for me, my pretty young thing?
Why should I whistle, when the caged bird sings?
If you lose a wager with the king of the sea,
You'll spend the rest of forever in the cage with me."

That wasn't true, Olba told himself in the days that followed. He could not accept that. Caris and he were two entirely different beings, two very different people in a world that, true, had forgiven the existence of neither of them, but Caris had everything he wanted and Olba had nothing. Caris had a home and friends and a peaceful existence, and Olba had the shell of himself and his tortured memories and an emptiness inside his head that mocked him day and night, telling him exactly how alone he had always been meant to be.

Not alike at all.

By the end of the second week, he could get out of the chair and walk, albeit very unsteadily. Caris had gotten him some crutches from somewhere, and he walked with their aid, hobbling up and down the long hallways of the old house, passing in and out of rooms - libraries and studies and rooms which appeared to serve no purpose except as showcases for some extraordinarily beautiful and extraordinarily useless furniture. Shagia had hated those types of rooms, that type of furniture. Wasted potential, he would call it.

The thought of Shagia did not bring the pain it once, had, though the emptiness inside his head was still there. The pain had lessened to a twingeing in his gut, like the ends of a bad stomachache. He squashed it and wiggled his toes. He could wiggle the toes on both feet now, and at the end of the third week, when the doctor came weekly to look at his injuries, the heavy plaster casts had been replaced with fiberglass ones, ones in which his legs felt light as bird's wings.

He began to read more. There was very little to do in Caris' house every day. Caris himself was almost always away during the day, and once when he asked the boy where he went, Caris had replied that he'd been offered the position of war historian by the new World Federation government, and he would be busy these next few weeks with meetings and material gathering.

So he read. He was never much of a reader before. Shagia hadn't read much - he preferred to play chess in his spare time. Olba had always felt a little bit guilty that he didn't like chess, but he had tried, for Shagia's sake, and had discovered he was good at it. But Shagia was no longer here, and he had no one to play chess with. When he had asked Caris, the Newtype had confessed rather guiltily that he didn't really like chess either, though with his upbringing, everyone always seemed to expect so. The startling confession, more than anything, made Olba smile.

Caris' house had myriad libraries, and he started to go through them all. He read old books, new books, classics and trashy romance novels, mysteries and great works of science fiction and fantasy, detective stories and sword and sorcery and what had been known in the day as cyberpunk. He read poetry and essays, treatises on politics and country studies of countries that no longer existed, books on languages and lightning and neuroscience. He did not always understand what he was reading, but he read on anyway.

It was not long before he discovered that he actually liked reading.

When he had first arrived here, he made it a point not to speak to Caris unless spoken to, but slowly he began to discover that it was lonely in the house all alone with his own thoughts inside his head, and though Caris' Newtype powers didn't involve that kind of telepathy, Caris was a living, breathing, person, and could speak. It soon progressed to the point where they would have lively discussions over the dinner table, on subjects as deep as religion or as shallow as why on earth did Caris' gardener insist on wearing the same pair of dirty blue overalls with a tear all the way down the front?

One thing they never talked about was the war. Except for that first night, neither of them mentioned it again. It hung in the air between them, and Olba could almost reach out and touch it if he wanted to, but he didn't want to, and Caris seemed to be content to let it hang there, as if believing that if neither of them spoke of it, it would go away.

Olba knew it wouldn't go away. Things like that didn't just go away. It was there like the emptiness inside his head was there, always there, but the emptiness was almost bearable now, and when he thought of Shagia it was with a certain detached fondness that accompanied the ever lessening twinge in his gut. He found one day that he couldn't quite remember the way Shagia's mouth twitched when he was amused about something, and to his horror, he found that he didn't really quite mind the fact that he couldn't remember.

About a month and a half after his arrival, when he was getting the hang of hobbling around the house on his crutches, it began to rain. It rained every day after that. Caris said it was always like that, that the rain would continue for about a week and then stop, but two weeks went by and it was still raining. Odd, said Caris, looking out the window one night at dinner, which they were having in one of the smaller studies because Caris had work to do on the computer. "The weather must be screwed up again."

Olba raised one eyebrow but did not comment at the "again." He hadn't experienced any weather anomalies here except for this one, his first, but it was a well known fact that weather all over the globe in these years after the war was unpredictable, to say the least. Instead, he concentrated on finishing his dinner. Dinner that night was scallops with pasta and some kind of soup that he was not familiar with, but which was very good and tasted faintly of garlic and butter. He tipped the last of the soup into his mouth. "You'd better finish your food before it gets cold," he said instead, "or else the cooks will have your hide."

"They can have it," muttered Caris. "My hide's not worth much these days...I'm overworked."

He did look tired, Olba realized, and worn out. "You need a break," he said, aware that his words weren't doing much good, but what else could he say?

"I deserve a break, dammit, but Jamil needs this done as soon as possible, and I can't afford one."

"Jamil?" Olba echoed, and something wobbled just a bit on his precariously balanced after war shelf of life, the shelf where he kept everything neatly organized so he wouldn't have to risk it falling over, risk it tumbling to the ground where he would have to sort it all out again, or maybe find something unpleasant that he didn't want to deal with. "You mean Jamil Neate? The Frieden Jamil Neate?"

"You didn't know?" Caris sounded surprised. "Jamil is the head of the Federation now."

Olba opened his mouth but no words came out.

Caris looked like he was about to say something, then changed his mind, thought better of it, came away from the window and sat down and started drinking his soup instead. Olba watched him.

"No, I didn't know," he said at last. "It's not like I watch the news around here."

"You should, once in a while," Caris prodded gently. "You should keep up with world events."

"Why?"

Caris blinked. "Well...because. Because they're important."

Olba's hands gripped the coffee table so hard that he could feel his teacup shaking, balancing precariously on its china rim, about to tip over. "We may not talk about the war, Caris," he said. "But it happened. It happened, and I am a constant living reminder of the fact that it did. I do not need to be reminded of it again!"

"That's not what I meant-" Caris began, and Olba grabbed the table, shook it. This time the teacup really did fall over.

"Shut up."

"Olba-"

"I'm trying," he said slowly, between great, deep breaths. One hand reached up to hold his head, which was pounding, the empty space there pounding, trying to break his skull open. He felt the void stretch, twist, inflate like a balloon. It hurt. "I'm trying, but it doesn't go away. You have no idea what it's like to wake up every morning only to be stared in the face by a great black hole, always on the edge of your thoughts. I should have died up there in space, Caris, and you should have let me die! You have no idea what it's like!"

The blue eyes blazed with a sudden anger that Olba didn't know they were capable of, but he felt a delicious sense of satisfaction at the sight as Caris sprang up from his chair as if jerked by some invisible string, taking a stride toward him until the boy was staring down at him, hands on hips.

"How about this, then, Olba? You want my Newtype powers? You can have them!"

"I don't care about your-"

"I thought I wanted them," Caris went on, plowing over him with the force of a starship hurtling through space. "I thought I wanted them, and I got them, and I realized that they all meant nothing! At least yours meant something! Be grateful for what you had!"

"How dare you-" he spat, and the empty space pulled, shrank and expanded, and he was furious, more furious than he remembered ever being except when he had gone in against the Gundam X and his brother had to pull him out and been injured in the process, and he had vowed revenge. It was a delicious word. Revenge.

All this flashed through his mind in a single instant, and he knew exactly what he meant to do when he balled his hand into a fist and punched Caris on the side of the head.

At least, he had meant it to be on the side of the head. Standing, the boy was taller than he had expected, and Caris' eyes had widened at the last second as he realized what Olba was about to do, and he dodged, not quite successfully. The punch hit him in the collar bone, and there was a sickening crack.

He thought Caris would fall, but the boy did not, did not even make a sound, and the next thing Olba heard was a similar crack as Caris' fist came out of nowhere and slammed into the side of his face. He fell back against the chair. His hand scrabbled for something, anything, and there was the dinner knife on the table and his fingers closed on it, and he brought it up, aiming for Caris' throat.

Caris twisted. The knife met air, and his fingers were caught in something, something warm, and the pressure of a body against his.

"Olba, Olba, stop. Stop it!"

"Let go of me!" he shrieked, jerking back and forth, trying to escape the encircling arms and hands that held him. But the boy's grip was strong and he could do little but writhe, as Caris tried to pull him out of the chair and onto the floor into a kind of wrestler's hold. He was aware that he was crying, that he did not want to cry but was doing so all the same, and he could not seem to stop.

But there was something he could do, that Caris could not prevent.

The dinner knife was warm and slick in his hands, and he turned it quickly and desperately, a flash of silver in the warm, golden-lit room, and aimed it towards his own chest.

"OLBA!" Caris cried, and he felt the very tip of the knife catch his shirt, just the tip, as it was turned aside sharply by another human hand, heard his shirt rip, saw the knife fly up into the air, sparkling in the light like silver wine, and heard it clatter against the floor somewhere over towards the door.

The empty space in his head yammered at him, chattered like the teeth of living skulls, and he gave a loud, shuddering sigh and collapsed forward onto the floor.

Caris' loud gasps for air were the only sounds in the sudden silence. His own sobs made no sound.

"Maybe you should have died," the golden boy said finally, between gasps. Olba did not look up, staring at the carpet which met his open eyes, carpet that was now wet with the tears which he still could not stop, and the images dancing in front of his eyes were that of his brother's face, though blurry, indistinct, because he could not really remember what his brother looked like anymore. "Maybe I should have left you up there in space to die. But the fact of the matter is that I didn't. I didn't because I remembered what I was like once, when I believed that all I needed to have complete happiness was Newtype power, and then I remembered what I was like when I discovered I had been wrong, and that I was just an anomaly, useless, unneeded."

They said we were not needed.

"But, here I am. Maybe I'm not the best example of humanity, Olba, but I told you before that I saw myself in you. There were people who told me I was crazy, that I shouldn't help a monster like you. But if you're a monster, then I'm a monster as well. Both of us, you and I. I believed I was, once, just like you."

The world belongs to people like us. People who are...special.

"You know what though, Olba?" Caris' voice was gentle now, his breathing easier and his voice lighter, back to the high tenor that he had grown to know, become familiar with through these long months together, and with a sickening lurch, he realized that if Caris had said that he could not stay here any longer, that he had to leave, he would miss Caris very much. "You know what, though? I don't think either of us are monsters. I think that we could have become monsters, but I believe we were saved. I was saved by a group of people who believed in me enough to save me."

"So I'm your pity party," Olba said to the carpet. "You saved me because you want someone else in your little crowd. You felt sorry for me."

"No," Caris said softly. "No. I saved you because all you needed was someone who believed in you. And I thought...that person could be me."

A body lies open in the fisherman's yard
Like the side of a ship where the iceberg rips
One less soul in the soul cages
One last curse on the fisherman's lips

Summer turned into autumn, and by the end of October, Olba found that he could walk without the crutches. He kept them by his bedside just in case, because sometimes his legs still pained him and he would come down to breakfast or to dinner on the crutches, and Caris would ask with a worried look if he was all right, if he needed a doctor.

"No," Olba said, "It's probably just the weather."

It actually was probably the weather, because those painful spells would happen the night before a heavy rainstorm, or before a cold front rolled through, and he had a particularly hard episode just prior to the first snow of the year. He knew Caris had similar spells, though not related to the weather but to the fact that he was an artificial Newtype - twinges of pain at odd times, days when he could not get out of bed. They used to be much worse, Caris confided, but the former doctor on the Frieden had taken the time to do some studies and recommend some treatments and medicines for him which had made the spells much easier to bear.

Caris no longer had to get up early every day to go meet with strange people in odd places that were not close to home, but he would shut himself up in the downstairs study every day now, and work. He would work through meals, sometimes not coming out even for the dinner meal. Those were a little bit lonely to for Olba to have by himself, because he had grown used to having someone to talk to and joke with over a cup of coffee at the end of the day.

When Caris did come out, they would still talk over dinner. Now they would sometimes talk about the war, in soft, wary tones, knowing to stop if Olba set his shoulders back a certain way or if the food suddenly turned to ashes in his mouth and he had to put down his fork or his spoon. There were things that Caris did not want to talk about either, sometimes.

But he found that talking about the war was not as painful as he thought it would be, after all. It still hurt, but it hurt in a good kind of way, as if by talking about it, he was bringing the ghost of his brother closer to him in a kind of bond they had never had before, even though they had been closer than two people in the world could ever have been.

He had read his way through half of Caris' library when, one afternoon, turning the last page of a book of collected short stories by some twentieth century Spanish writer, he came to a realization so silly that he threw back his head and started to laugh, laughed till he heard the downstairs study door open and the footsteps on the stairway.

"Is there something really funny that I have missed," Caris wondered, sounding slightly annoyed, "or have you finally gone insane and I should call the men in the white coats?"

Olba had simply looked at the blond boy whose face had grown as familiar to him as Shagia's face had for the first sixteen years of his life, and shook his head. "I know you're overworked, and you're tired," he said. "If you need any help on your history of the war...I'd be glad to."

Caris had blinked at him, the pale blue eyes darkening to a deeper blue shade for just a moment before narrowing, then widening, then crinkling at the corners as he smiled.

It was the small things in life that made it worth living, Olba thought to himself, watching him. The small things, little things like coffee in the evenings, books, friends, watching someone smile because of something you just said, knowing that you made them happy. It was a good feeling. He wasn't quite sure if he could get used to it, but he thought he might be willing to try.

"I would like that," Caris said.

He dreamed of the ship on the sea
It would carry his father and he-
A Newcastle ship without coals
They would sail to the island of souls

end part II