Author's edit 6/11/06: I rewrote the second half of this chapter and cleaned it up a little.

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The Last Night of the World

Chapter 2

Return to Gaea

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They landed with a jaw-rattling jolt. Hitomi's legs began to slide off Escaflowne, one followed by the other, and she knew she was going to fall. She tried to hold on tighter to Van, but the impact had loosened her grip on him as well, and her fingers slipped over his wrist and grasped only air.

"Van!" she shrieked as she plummeted to the ground.

"Hitomi!" Van leaped down after her, but no matter how far Hitomi stretched her arm, he seemed to be just out of reach.

There was the sound of someone running below, and Hitomi landed against something that felt like two metal bars across her shoulders and underneath her knees. When she saw a man's face looking down at her, she realized that he was the one who had caught her. His hair, the color of sand in the surf, was parted on the left and swept across his brow like a wave in still motion. "Are you all right, Miss?"

"I'm fine. Thank you." He helped her to her feet, and she saw that he was really only a boy, a teenager whose limbs seemed far too gangly to bear the heavy armor he wore.

A boy wearing armor? Now that the ground was firmly beneath her feet, she took in her surroundings for the first time. She was in the middle of a town, a city, and it looked like someone had taken a wrecking ball and swung it haphazardly about. Some buildings were missing their upper stories, some had completely collapsed, and the rest were missing corners and eaves as if they had only taken a glancing blow.

Van rushed to her side. "Hitomi, are you all right?"

"Yes, I'm fine." Fine was relative. Where were they? She was certain they were on Gaea, because nobody lived in buildings of wood and bamboo tiles on Earth anymore. But was it Palas? Freid? Or—she almost dared not think it—Fanelia?

Van turned to the boy; he recognized him as the same page who had announced the attack on Fanelia earlier. "What's your name?" he asked.

"It's Ardonis, Your Majesty."

"Ardonis, I want you to take her to safety, with the other women and children. Quickly!"

The youth saluted smartly. "Yes, Sir!" he said, and led Hitomi by the hand in the direction of the hills.

"Van-sama!" came a deep voice, and several men rushed up, their armored steps clanking together in a wartime chorus.

The one in front was a middle-aged, balding man with a neck nearly as thick as his head, and whose leathery, sun-beaten face bore several pale scars. "General Maltek. What's the situation?"

"Your Highness, it is most puzzling. We were able to find no enemy soldiers, invisible or otherwise." As he spoke, his bushy golden mustache moved with his mouth, and his brow was furrowed like a farmer's plowed field. "There is not a single scratch on our troops or our Guymelefs. It's as if the city was falling by itself!"

"Falling by itself…" Van echoed, dumbfounded. He took a step forward and listened carefully. There was no sound of fighting, no clash of steel on steel, no roar of fire consuming the city, no screams of dying soldiers. There was not even the sound of buildings crashing to the ground, he realized. It was eerily silent. He could hear the birds chirping.

"It stopped," he said. He took another step forward, as if doing so would reveal the sights and sounds of battle, for some reason hidden from him. But there was nothing. "It stopped," he repeated. Then, addressing his General, "When? When did this happen?"

Maltek huffed through his great mustache in bafflement. "Only just now, my Lord. We saw a beam of light striking from the heavens and we hurried over, to find you and Escaflowne and the lady over there."

It was then that Van noticed Hitomi had not left and was standing next to Ardonis, watching him. Hitomi, who did not look like the Hitomi he knew five years ago.

Having only been king for half a decade, he was at a loss for what to do. Then again, even the battle experience of half a century probably would not have prepared him for a scenario like this.

But he had to do something. "Maltek. I want you and Sabin to bolster our defenses and be on the lookout for enemy activity and report to me anything that appears suspicious. Alert the rest who are on active duty to march at a moment's notice and put the reserve on standby. We'll regroup in the palace when the preparations are finished."

Maltek and his men saluted and dispersed. "Ardonis, I want you to go with them," Van said to the page. The young man with sandy hair saluted and followed on Maltek's heels.

Now that they were alone, Hitomi—Hitomi with the long braids, the yellow dress—trotted up to him. "Van, what in the world happened here?" Her green eyes looked up at him, bright and deep and disarming in their clarity. This was Hitomi, no doubt about it.

"I don't know," he said numbly, and gazed at the ruins of his city. There was nobody left; all of Fanelia's citizens had been evacuated by now. The jagged rooftops reached for the sky, cruelly cut down in their noble attempt to stand tall. The birds continued to chirp and fly across the sun as if nothing had happened. A lonely ache began to fill his heart. "I don't know."

Without a word, Hitomi slipped her fingers into his palm and squeezed his hand.

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They walked back to the palace, hand in hand. If the soldiers noticed, they didn't comment. But Van knew that before they reached the Inner Palace, rumors would already be flying through the barracks.

Of all the structures within Fanelia, only the palace remained untouched: another mystery to add to the day's growing list. He pushed open the door to his private sitting room, still holding Hitomi by the hand. She was back—he could hardly believe it. She was back, and he was not going to let her go. He knew better than that, now.

Facing her, he gazed at her more closely, more leisurely. Two long braids trailed over her shoulders, and the wispy strands around her face danced like threads of gold in the sunlight. He was more used to the Hitomi with short hair, but long hair suited her in her blossoming womanhood. "Hitomi," he said, his voice welling up expectantly.

"Van," she replied, her eyes wide and liquid like those of a frightened deer. Was she nervous? Well, nervous was understandable. He was nervous, too. They had not seen each other for five years. Where to begin? He tried to speak, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.

"Van-samaaaa!" cried a shrill voice, and the door to the room burst open. In bounded a girl who was marked like a tabby cat, the ringlets of her short pink hair bobbing with unbridled joy as she smothered Van in her embrace. "Van-sama, I was so scared! I thought it was Zaibach all over again!"

"Whoa, easy, Merle!" he laughed, as she licked his face incessantly.

"Merle?"

The cat-girl released Van to scrutinize the other person in the room. Hitomi could hardly believe that the creature in front of her—tall, curvy, and slender—was the same Merle who used to follow Van around like an oversized housecat. In a very feline manner, she cocked her head to the side, as if trying to remember something. Then her eyes sparkled with recognition. "Hitomi?" she exclaimed.

"That's right."

"Hitomiiiii!" she shrieked, and threw her arms around Hitomi with such exuberance that Hitomi staggered backward. Soon her face was covered with the affectionate kisses of the cat's sandpaper tongue. Some things, it seemed, never changed. "Hitomi, you've come back! Now Van-sama won't be lonely anymore!"

"Now, Merle, that's enough," Van said, flushing faintly at her last remark as he tried to peel her off Hitomi.

"You're not going to leave again, are you? You came back for Van-sama, didn't you?" Merle asked, barely able to contain her excitement in her rapidly swishing tail.

"Ah…yes," Hitomi replied, forcing a smile. She quickly covered her left hand, but too late; Merle had already caught sight of the ring.

The cat-girl narrowed her eyes, no longer an affectionate tabby, but a hunting cat that had spotted its prey. "What is—"

"Merle," Van interrupted. "Is that a message for me?"

"Oh!" Merle had almost forgotten about the folded piece of paper in her hand. Promptly, she handed it to Van, who broke the seal and skimmed the contents. "Hmph. Those fellows from Basram, treating me like I'm some messenger," she complained, and then glanced slyly at Hitomi. "But I wonder what was so important about their message."

Clearly, there was something going on that Hitomi was not aware of. Van folded up the letter and put it in his pants pocket. "Thank you, Merle. I'll talk to you later, ok?"

"Yes, Van-sama," she said, ducking her head. She bounded back out of the room, but not before casting one last, hard look at Hitomi.

When Merle was gone, Hitomi righted her braids—which had been knocked askew by the cat's affections—and said, "What was that all about?"

"Nothing. Nothing important, anyway," he replied. Fanelia was falling and Hitomi had come back. He needed to sit down. Taking Hitomi's hand, he led her to the couch.

They sat facing each other, Hitomi with her hands folded demurely in her lap. "There might be another war," he explained. Though what Van really wanted to say was how happy he was that Hitomi was back, how confused and shocked he was by the attack on Fanelia. But the words wouldn't form. So instead, he talked about the only thing he knew how."The past five years have been peaceful, but there have been political tensions."

Hitomi nodded, remembering all too well the mass anarchy that took place within the Zone of Absolute Fortune five years ago. After all the backstabbing and massacres, it made sense for the nations of Gaea to eye each other uneasily. "Who do you think was behind the attack?"

Van shook his head. "I don't know. Daedalus, Cesario, Egzardia? It could have been anyone."

"You don't think it could be Zaibach again, could it?"

"Probably not. Their forces were nearly decimated during the war, and they signed a treaty with the allied nations that imposed rather strict reparations."

"They might hold some resentment against you, then," Hitomi suggested.

"Maybe. I won't be able to say for sure until I know what my generals found."

Oh no, Van, Hitomi thought to herself, watching him carefully as he spoke, his expression stoic and measured in the face of everything that had happened. I can't believe Fanelia is being destroyed again, not after all you've been through during the war.

"But Hitomi," he said, and there was something about the way he said her name that made her feel like they were sitting closer than they really were. "When you came, the fighting stopped."

"It did?" she said, surprised.

Van nodded. "I don't want you be involved in another war, but…" He gazed intently at her, the brown of his eyes dark with unspoken emotion. "I'm glad that you've come back."

"Me too," Hitomi said, even as her stomach turned uneasily. Being back on Gaea, in Fanelia, with Van, was impossible. But here he was, in front of her, a vision from another life. He looked no different from the way he did five years ago—except maybe he was a little taller—and he was so close that she could touch him. She could easily close the distance between them and even kiss him if she wanted to. Kiss him? Why am I thinking about kissing him?

But when Van's fingers closed around her hand, when he leaned a little closer, kissing him was all Hitomi could think about. As though her body were acting on its own, she reached out for his arm. Her heart beat fast as he lowered his head and his lips tentatively brushed her forehead.

Suddenly the ring around her finger felt too heavy and too tight. "Van," she mumbled, wanting to say something about…

He slowly moved down her nose, her skin tingling at his touch. About what? she wondered vaguely, tilting her head up to meet him. He found her mouth, and soon she forgot about wanting to say anything at all.

At last they parted, and they held each other, Hitomi with her head on Van's chest. As she listened to rise and fall of his breath, the quiet beating of his heart, she could not deny that Van felt very real. She closed her eyes and tried to ignore the small voice in the back of her mind, the one that kept bringing up the band of gold and diamond on her hand. If this was a dream, it was not one she wanted to wake up from, not yet. But if this is a dream…what am I doing, dreaming about Van?

Hitomi shifted in his arms and sat up straighter. She opened her mouth to tell him about her, about what had changed over the last five years, but her eyes strayed to a slender gold chain around his neck that dipped into the front of his shirt. Her heart quickened again. Could it be…?

So instead, she asked, "What is that you're wearing around your neck?"

"Oh, you mean this?" He hooked a finger under the chain and lifted a rosy jewel tipped with gold from under his shirt, holding it up for her to see. "It's the pendant you gave me. But here, I should give it back to you," he said, taking it off. "It belongs to you, after all."

He looped it over Hitomi's head, carefully threading her braids through the chain, and adjusted the pendant until the jewel was centered on her chest. There came a knock at the door.

"Enter," Van called.

Merle appeared from behind the door, this time with more self-restraint. She stared for a moment at the way Van held his hands on Hitomi's shoulders, his thumbs resting on her collarbone. Then, bowing, she said, "Van-sama, the generals are ready to call a meeting."

"Thank you, Merle." He stood, and Hitomi rose with him. "And before you go, please show Hitomi to her room."

One of her ears gave a twitch, and a self-satisfied look crossed Merle's features. "Of course, Van-sama."