Celestial Being Chronicles - Chapter 95
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the Gundam series, nor any of the various series which are used or referenced in my fic, so please point that damned lawsuit cannon at someone else, also, don't read this if you are not of legal age to read such material. The story contains possibly disturbing content and should not be read by close-minded people (i.e., people who are easily offended.) Everything in the story is fictional. I am also not responsible for any actions taken by people who read this story and society's problems. I do, however, own my original character; Hope Yamato.
Kira walked around one of the giant redwood trees that made up the forest which surrounded the private mansion that he shared with his family. The tree itself, along with most of the others in the forest, were wide enough for a mobile suit to play hide and seek with. The amethyst-eyed man wore a pleased expression on his face, but his happiness quickly faded into confusion when he heard a faint crackling noise, one that was familiar to him, but all the stranger for that.
"Is that fire?" Kira asked himself, puzzled, looking around for flames and seeing none.
The crackling sound, very definitely the sound of flames hungrily devouring solid, flammable materials, kept growing louder and louder and louder, coming from more and more directions at once, until it was all around them, coming from above, until it was as loud as a jet engine, to the point where regular speech became impossible. By that point in time the night gloom had been lifted, replaced with a hellish red-orange glow, as the canopy of redwood trees a hundred meters or so over their heads burst into incandescent flames, fire spreading down the tree trunks and branches like they were made from dry candle wicks!
Kira gaped upwards in shock and confusion, seeing that it was no isolated blaze; the forest canopy was on fire for as far as he could see in every direction, and it was burning like the very end of the world itself! Even from a hundred meters, the heat was enough to plaster the amethyst-eyed man with sweat and make him feel lightheaded. Without even needing to talk, he began running as fast as he could back towards the mansion, dodging sparks and falling branches, some twice the size of Kira himself, which had been turned to glowing cinders by the impossibly hot and rampant inferno. Such fallen cinders smouldered on the ground and extinguished themselves without setting the underbrush alight, even as trails of hungry fire crawled down the tree trunks like they were nothing but tinder dry deadwood.
Kira could hear, even above the roar of the conflagration, the sound of tree branches popping and snapping and splintering as they gave way beneath their own weight as the fire ate through them, and the rain of sparks and cinders became first a downpour and then a torrent, to the point where there was no way that he would be able dodge them all, just having to throw his arms and shirt over his head and run hunched over, hoping nothing big fell on him. He were still about sixty yards from the mansion's ground level entrance, leading into the main dining hall from where he he had left, his view obscured by choking smoke and falling cinders.
Kira felt a certain amount of burning and heat on his skin and within his body, but it was nothing like enough to set him alight, and in truth the oppresive heat from the forest fire was a much more pressing concern. The geneticly engineered redwood trees did not catch fire easily, but when it did, it burned hot enough to melt some metals, and it burned for a long time. But strangely, this fire burned very quickly, consuming in minutes what should have burned fiercely for nearly an entire week! Kira realized he didn't have time to sit around and ponder, because with a crack like the world splitting, the central section of the mansion's roof shattered under the strain of fire weakened sections, and over a hundred tons of wood and metal, along with thirty tons of bright pink shuttle, came crashing down to the ground in an avalanche of fire and jagged wood and metal splinters. Kira dove for cover behind another burning tree, and he was still half buried in cinders and ash when the debris struck the earth, throwing up choking clouds of smoke and dust that prevented him from even seeing his hand in front of his face!
Squeezing his eyes shut, trying to ignore the pain of scorched skin and lightly smoking hair, Kira reached out for the telepathic bond with his family, which would allow him to home in on their locations, even though he could not see, hear or smell anything but fire and smoke. He reached out for that bond and found it, trembling with fear and supressed pain, Yumi and the children coming through strong and clear from only forty meters or so away and right on his level. They must have woken up when the treetop caught fire, and headed down into the dining hall, on their way to the safety of the mansion's underground shelter. Immensely relieved, Kira sent a mental pulse of reassurance to them, telling them with far stronger intent than words that he was on his way, to the rescue, as much as anyone could be rescued in this inferno. Before Yumi could send her reply though, a huge tearing sensation of terror, horror and agony slammed through the link, and Kira felt heat against his skin like flaming wood pressed inexorably against his chest, though he was still standing in the clear at the moment. And then...the link went dead.
The telepathic link went dead, it simply disappeared! There was the terror, the pain, the fear, maybe a smidgeon of love unexpressed and then crushing darkness and oblivion and no link, no bond! Kira's eyes snapped open wide, filled with disbelief and agony beyond expression. Ever since that day, more than two millenia in the past, when he and Yumi had first returned to the living world, she had ALWAYS been in the back of his mind, a faithful presence, like the sun and the moon, felt more by their effect on everything within him, like light, like gravity, holding his world together at the seams. That presence, and the newer but no less familiar presences of Akira and Aoi, like twin torches that warmed his heart, they were gone! Snuffed out in an instant. Gone, and ripping a huge hole in his heart and soul as they left.
Kira fell to his knees in the cinders, unheeding of the fact that he was, for most intents and purposes, kneeling in a campfire, his flame retardant clothing being all that kept him from a series of third degree burns along his calves and ankles. His purple seed, veined with gold, dropped through the howling void within his mind and being, and exploded with a familiar omnipresent rush of power, vitality and awareness. But even in his Seed mode, as strong as he could possibly get without using his more divine power, something that he had vowed not to do for his own benefit, Kira could not find Yumi, Akira or Aoi within his telepathic connections. They had simply vanished! He refused to believe it of course. It couldn't happen, not to him. Not to his family. They could not be dead. It was impossible. Not in a sudden rush, during an event he did not understand and was powerless to stop. Not when he wasn't even around to be with them at the end!
He was still disbelieving it when a muted crack sounded from directly above him. Looking up, Kira's seed hazed eyes easily picked out a tumbling branch falling towards him, the branch was afire and was easily as thick as his neck. It was falling right at him, but he could easily evade it. He could dodge it just by rolling to the side, a sidestep of less than a foot. He saw exactly where it was going to go. All he had to do was not be there when it landed, in a few seconds. Kira stayed on his knees, and watched the branch come. Yumi was gone. Akira was gone. Aoi was gone. His family was gone. Why should he remain? Why should he stay behind without them? Kira was still puzzling out the answer to those questions when the branch struck him squarely on the top of the head. He barely felt the crack, as darkness and heat claimed his entire world.
The next thing he kenw, he was fully upright and running, now living in not just a nightmare but a living hell. His balance was all screwed up from the knock on his head, his skull might even be cracked, but he didn't have time to be hurt, so he staggered onward, ankles kicking through shin deep ash piles, stumbling over roots that had only been mostly burnt through, as he charged towards the manson. Or where the mansion had once been anyway. Only blackened stumps of the building remained, the stumps reaching like the fingers of a dead hand for twenty meters into the sky, just a fragment of the former majesty of the huge building.
It had still burned VERY badly though, badly enough to warp metal, melt plastic and leave everything else as cinders and ash. The roof had collapsed at some point in time, as had several walls. Frantically calling out into his oppressively silent telepathic link, Kira waded into the debris, slipping and falling and gashing his palms and chest open on protruding splinters of unburnt wood and partially melted metal, which had been under other materials and thus shielded from direct exposure to whatever had caused the fire in the first place. Seeing the unburnt debris gave Kira fresh hope. If some debris had survived, then there must be a room or two that was just buried, rather than burnt. In that room he would find his lovers and his children. Unconscious maybe. That had to be the reason he couldn't feel them. It had to be!
Kira found more than a few bodies and pieces of bodies while digging frantically through the smouldering remains, some of them so badly burned even the bones turned to dust at his touch, some more like overly barbecued cuts of meat, from where they had been spared direct exposure but trapped under fast burning pieces of roof. Undeterred, Kira continued to scoop at the still painfully hot ash with his bare hands, throwing aside partially melted metal beams and wood boards, kicking away technological debris, searching for that hidden nook, cranny or crawlspace where Yumi would have taken the kids at last resort. Where they were waiting for him to come and rescue them!
And then, as he levered away a particularly heavy half burned log twice as long as he was tall and almost as thick as his thigh, he found it. He found where Yumi had gone to ground to escape the hungry flames, Akira and Aoi huddled beneath their mother as she shielded them from the flames with her body. He found it, and his hopes, just like everything else around him, turned to ash and blew away in the wind. Kira fell to his knees, and then to his hands and knees, hot tears falling from his eyes like blood from a wound, staining the ashy ground dark. He tried to shout, tried to scream in denial, but his throat was burned raw from smoke inhalation, and he could barely even croak his soul crushing despair and distress, as he stared down at the pitiful remains. There wasn't much to see. There wasn't much left. The fire had burned fiercely here. There wasn't much to see and there was too much for him to want to see. But he could not look away.
Kira could not rationalize away the evidence which was before him. He could only stare in abject horror as the bottom dropped completely out of his world. It was a human arm, from just above the elbow down to the fingertips. Creamy pale skin, soft and silky to the touch, had turned to a lattice of black scorchmarks, sickeningly like those of meat on a grill, just much more tangled, like Yumi had pressed her arm down against a red hot waffle iron multiple times and held it there long enough to cook away skin, muscle and fat, and bare bones. It was Yumi's arm, her left arm, the bones of her humerous gritty and brittle where they poked from the grilled skin and meat just above her elbow. Most of the forearm had split open, puffy marrow protruding like half cooked marshmallow from the scorched bone. Her hand was curled into a fist by the heat, her fingers, the fingers that he stroked and stroked him in turn, so many times when his own sleep was troubled, turned to greasy sticks of charcoal.
And upon the ring finger of that hand, a bit melted, a bit warped, but still more than recognizable, was the ring. The special ring. The plain silver ring that Lacus had once given him as a token of her love, as part of a promise that he would come back to her, as he was leaving to participate in the Battle of Jachin Due. The ring he had first kissed her for, the ring that she now wore in everyday place of their wedding band. The ring that symbolized their union, their love for each other, their sworn oaths to be by each others side, to support and protect one another for all time, until death did them part. The melted, warped, scorched band of metal, sticky with bits of cooked flesh, that showed the entire world that he was a goddamned liar, that he couldn't even protect the people that meant more than life itself to him, when they needed him most.
Kira reached out with shaky hands, cupping the arm, afraid it would break apart at his touch, but the burns weren't so bad as that. Her arm had been trapped under a piece of wood or metal that had not directly caught fire, and so had been preserved, while the rest of her was nothing more than a vague outline of deeper ash amongst the rest, with two mounds where Akira and Aoi had huddled in their mother's shadow until the fire had reached them too. Kira held the arm to his chest, his entire body shaking with tears he could not shed fast enough or loud enough, kneeling among the remains of his family, his life, his love! He brought his head down and kissed the ring as gently as he could. Despite his care, flakes of smoky skin rubbed off against his lips, smearing, staining them black, leaving the taste of overcooked pork on the tip of his tongue, which was enough to make him convulse and dry heave. Underlaid by the taste of burnt meat was the familiar taste of Yumi's sweat and skin oils.
Clutching the last mortal remains of his lovers and one of the world's greatest peacemakers to his chest, sitting in the piled remains of his children, Kira pointed his face at the achingly blue sky and howled, his throat constricting and bleeding with the effort of forcing air and sound past all the smoky soot in his esophagus, his howl fading away to a deathly rattle that shook his entire body, like his soul was trying to tear itself loose from its earthly prison. He was still shouting, soundlessly, up at the sky, when his personal shuttle arrived several hours later. Kira was the only living survivor for thirty miles in any direction. Everything else had been burned to ash.
After returning to the Excalibur, Kira had decided that he would finally end all conflicts. One way or another, all conflict would be eliminated. Humanity didn't understand. They never understood. They never could understand.
Now, nearly two weeks after the still unexplained fire which had claimed the lives of Kira Yamato's lovers, the tapping of keys was the only sound in the Divinity's cockpit, where the amethyst-eyed man now sat with the keyboard folded out, as he rapidly typed. It was probably the only place on the massive ship where he had enough time alone, supposedly running diagnostics on the Divinity's OS, to actually get this done. A majority of the Excalibur's crew had a nasty way of intruding.
Kira looked at the dim reflection of himself in the Divinity's dark cockpit screens and shook his head. His eyes were more red than amethyst, and a steady stream of tears still silently made their way down his cheeks. The amethyst-eyed man jumped slightly as the cockpit hatch suddenly hissed open and an instant later, Shinn Asuka and Lunamaria Hawke stuck their heads into the now open cockpit.
"You look like a train wreck, Kira." Shinn commented flatly.
"What do you expect?" Kira asked. "I've effectively lost everything." As he continued, his voice lowered to a nearly inaudible whipser. "I've lost my lovers and my children."
"You haven't lost everything." Luna said, a friendly smile crossing her lips. "You still have us, you still have your friends."
Kira merely nodded, he hadn't really lost everything, but to him, it certainly seemed like he had.
"History is much like an endless waltz." Kira Yamato's image calmly spoke over an open-channel, all-frequency comminucations line. "The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever." He paused for a few seconds, before continuing. "The current beat; the one of war, has taken my wife from me." The amethyst-eyed man paused again, this time to stomp down his rising sadness, replacing it with anger. "And I, Kira Yamato, will usher in the beat of peace, by any means nesscary."