A/N: And I'm back with another update. Lots of angst and Tsubasa and Nixon and Masooma in this one for you guys to enjoy. By the way, thanks for all your votes you guys. If this keeps up, I think I might end up having to write that story after all. ;) The poll on my profile is still open if you guys want to vote by the way.

Now enjoy the update~

"Thank you." she smiled gratefully at him as her fingers danced through the air, tracing out crimson runes that swirled around them, kicking up the ash and debris once more before he was plunged into darkness yet again. The whispering voices were back, echoing all around him as he tumbled through nothingness, until it all grew silent suddenly and he was slammed into a familiar place, his heart catching in his throat as he took in the dimly lit cell, the scents of blood, sweat and human waste assaulting his nose with a vengeance.

He…he was back in hell…

He couldn't breathe, nor keep himself from trembling all over. It had all been a trick. They had just been looking for a way to get him back to the dungeons, and he had played right into their hands. Shaking his head in wide-eyed terror, he stumbled backwards until his back collided painfully with the slimy walls of his holding cell.

"I-I'm back…" he gasped, chest heaving with the effort to draw a proper breath as his vision began to swim. His insides churned violently as he took in his surroundings for a fraction of a second before squeezing his eyes shut. His body kept on shaking even as he pressed himself deeper into the wall. He couldn't be there. He shouldn't be there. Why had she done it? If she had been working for them after all, why had she tried so hard to make him trust her? Was it all just some sick game? To see how many times they could bring his hopes up before shattering them again? And his father… Was that the reason she brought him up? He should have known better. His father was nothing more than a memory inside his body, after all. How in the world would she have been able to talk to a memory? He had been a fool to trust her.

Wrapping his arms around his middle, Syaoran slid down to the grimy floor, keeping his eyes clenched as he fought against the urge to be sick. His stomach had nothing but bile to throw up, after all. He was so sick of it all. He wanted it all to just end. Why couldn't they just let it end? They had been dragging his torture out for so long, going so far so as to pull him back from the jaws of death just to continue this sick game. And now he had earned himself a new tormentor. The stench of blood was strong where he was, his nose sensitive to the smell after having spent so long breathing in the air stinking of nothing but the crimson liquid. He lost the battle to keep it all in as acidic bile bubbled up his throat and he doubled over, heaving violently as he vomited on the grimy floor.

The door to his holding cell opened with an ominous squeal and he flinched at the sound, tears of frustration streaming down his cheeks as fear gripped his heart. He had to get out of there. He had to-a warm hand rested on his shoulder, making him jerk violently as he wrenched away from the touch, slipping on the pool of his sickness and crashing into the grimy floor with a pained yelp.

"Syaoran, calm down." The woman spoke in that same disgustingly calm tone of hers that she had used earlier.

Calm down? Calm down? How the heck could she expect him to calm down after she had dumped him back in the dungeon? For a fraction of a second, he had harbored hopes that he would never see this place again but she had gone and brought him back. He had known of nothing but pain and betrayal in this prison and just when there had been a small chance that he might have finally escaped, this… this horrid woman had brought him back. Was there a chance he could make it out of there? Maybe if he could somehow get rid of this woman, he could get out of this hell… Of course there was nothing but the desert past the limits of the city but even dying out there was preferable to being back here. At least, his agony would end once he perished on a sand dune. In here… they just kept on bringing him back.

The loud clacking of heels mingled with the heavy thuds of several footfalls approaching the place where he was. His breath hitched up in his throat as his eyes shot open in panic. All thoughts of escape flew from his mind as he registered one thing. She had invited them.

"This isn't real, Syaoran." Her words made him freeze in the motion of scrambling away.

"Wh-at?" he rasped weakly. His throat burnt from the leftover feeling of bile that he had thrown up as he swallowed thickly. All sounds muted next to the violent pounding of his heartbeat in his eardrums. How… how could it not be real? There was no way, no way in hell, that this couldn't be real. The grime under his fingers, the reek of blood, the chill of the stones, everything… it was all too real to be something conjured up by his imagination.

"It's not real," The woman repeated as she took a slow step in his direction, stopping when he hurriedly pushed away. She sighed before slowly sitting down on the ground, a few feet away from him. "Look around you and tell me what you see, Syaoran?"

The footsteps were almost outside the cell now. Breathing in short, heaving gasps, his eyes darted in the direction of the dungeon door, which no doubt had a guard stationed outside of it. The woman's words flew from his mind as trepidation of the people stepping through that doorway cemented its hold on him. Any second she would step through that door and with her, would come pain and agony and-

"Syaoran, focus."The woman was suddenly blocking the door from his vision, crouching right in front of his face. With an alarmed yelp, he scuttled back. His eyes once again shot in the direction of the doorway. He could hear voices speaking outside but he could not make out the words they were saying. "Hey, look at me." The woman said as she moved to block his line of sight once again, though thankfully, she kept her distance from him this time around. "Breathe, alright?"

Breathe? But he had been breathing, hadn't he? The burning of his lungs told him otherwise. Forcing his lungs to draw in some air, he tried to look past the woman to the door, only to be stopped by her.

"Relax, Syaoran. I promise nothing will happen to you."

"B-But…"

"Relax and focus on breathing for now, okay? I'll tell you what's going on." The voices were still speaking outside, and though he could tell that one of them was female and the others male, all of them sounded foreign to his ears. He had never heard any of them in his life before. Did this mean they had gotten bored with him and passed him on to someone new?

"You said you couldn't remember when Kurogane, Sakura and Fai turned on you, right?"

Why was she asking him that again? Hadn't he already told her?

"Look in that corner," she said, pointing towards the back of the holding cell.

His eyes followed the direction she had been pointing in and his heart skipped a beat at the sight that met his eyes. There, on the other side of the tiny room, with a small amount of blood seeping through his slightly torn short and his hands shackled high above his head, hung Syaoran. But unlike himself, that Syaoran was completely healthy looking. Apart from a small bruise blossoming out on the right side of his face and a little bit of blood, he looked completely normal…that Syaoran looked just like he had before things had gone to hell.

"This is your memory, Syaoran." The woman told him softly just as the voices stopped talking outside. The time it took him to wrap his head around the idea was the time it took for whoever was outside to enter the room. It was a group of four people, out of which only one was female. They were all dressed in dark clothing, or maybe it was just due to the dim lighting of the room. The woman, and the man that stood beside her, were the most memorable due to their appearances, yet Syaoran could not remember having ever come across them. If this was a memory, why couldn't he recall meeting them before?

The woman had waist-length silver hair, dark, inky eyes and a cruel, twisted sort of smirk playing about her lips. The man on the other hand was completely bald, dark-skinned and eyes the same color as Kurogane's. Was he somehow related to that man? Aside from the tan and the red eyes, he couldn't really find any similarities between the two. Unlike his female companion, this man's expression betrayed nothing, though only a blind man could have missed the sadism burning bright in his eyes.

The two men behind them were like the guards that she had ordered to teach him a lesson whenever she was in a mood to just watch him suffer. Who were these people?

"Can you recognize them?" the woman that had brought him here-Masooma?-asked as the duo stalked up to the Syaoran that was tied to the wall.

"No." He shook his head, frowning in concentration as he tried to remember. If this was a memory, why couldn't he remember these people?

"I suspected as much." He heard Masooma murmur as a sharp pang assaulted his head. Crying out, he clutched at his head just as his other self, the one tied to the wall, gave a pained yelp as well.

"Shit! You're not supposed to feel the pain." He heard Masooma mutter as the witch crouched next to him. He instinctively tried to shy away from her, but her hands kept a firm hand on his shoulders as she observed him closely. "Something isn't right." She frowned at him before looking back at the boy in the memory. "Are you trying to do something?"

The people in his memory were speaking, but he couldn't hear their words past the pounding of his head.

"I'm trying to remember." He grit out against the pain.

"Don't force yourself, Syaoran." She admonished him sharply as her soft fingers pressed against his temple and he felt a soothing magic flow into his body, forcing the pain away. "It will come to you. Trust me; you won't be able to handle the rush of those memories if you force them all out at once."

Not forcing himself meant having to wait to regain those missing memories. Speaking of which, why was he missing memories in the first place? Was his amnesia part of one of their twisted games? It was a possibility. The princess had lost her memories once upon a lifetime. It was entirely possible they wanted to reenact it all in some twisted rendition of the journey his father and her other self had gone on, only this time he was the one with the missing past. They could have planted Masooma there as a mockery of the past. His father had been there to help her other self who had been blindly trusting of the brunette. Trust… it all came down to that in the end. She wanted him to trust her just as blindly as she had his father.

"Trust needs to be earned." He said bitterly, turning his gaze away to observe the memory just as his other self cried out again. He was different than her. After everything he had gone through, he'd be a fool to just hand it out to just about anyone who asked for it.

"Then I guess I better start by explaining to you who those people are." She replied and despite himself, Syaoran found himself listening.

"- you and your friends thought you could break into the highest security building and steal something that didn't belong to you?" The bald man was saying to his memory self. "You magi are all the same."

"His name is Bauld." Masooma told him just as the man punched his memory self in the gut. "He's one of the high-ranking hunters."

Taking note of the sudden shift in her tone from normal to almost mechanical, he cast a small glance in her direction out of the corner of his eye and noticed the paleness of her skin for the first time. Tiny beads of sweat stood out sharp against her pallid skin. Looking a little lower he noticed her hands that were clenched into tight fists. There was a tiny frown on her face and she almost seemed to flinch every time his memory self got hit by the bald man. It was almost like the sight of him being beaten was bringing back memories of a bad time for her. He did not let himself dwell on that thought for long though. He refused to believe that she could be someone like him. After all, it could all be a brilliant act on her part. They were pretty brilliant actors and if she was planted there by them, who's to say she wasn't one as well?

"The woman standing next to him is his apprentice," she added in the same robotic manner, "and the two behind him are just some lowly grunts."

The pained yelp of his memory self drew his attention away from the witch. The woman beside the bald-man was digging her sharp nails into his memory-self's face, hissing something in his ear that he couldn't quite make out. Tiny crescents of crimson blossomed out on his cheek as the apprentice drew away on an order from the Bauld. Masooma said he was a high ranking hunter. That word caused something to stir within the deep recesses of his mind but whatever it was, slipped through his grasp when he tried to latch on to it. How was it that this witch knew who they were if they were something from his missing memories?

-0-

Nixon hastened his footsteps, fearing that the ninja might try to come after him again. His heart thundered inside his chest as he made his way through the winding tunnels, guilt clawing viciously at his insides.

What he had told Kurogane about wanting the blond to remain dead to spare him the horrors that awaited him next was true, but it wasn't the complete truth. Part of him had wanted Fai to die. For a second, he had even hoped the blond would die. It wouldn't have bothered him this much if his reasons for hoping for such a thing had been just what he had told the ninja, but as it was, they were a lot more selfish than noble. Afraid that the ninja might call him up on his deception, Nixon quickened his pace to a light jog.

Letting Fai die to spare him the agony of having to recover some semblance of sanity upon waking up… if only that had been his only reason… It was never that simple though. Not for Nixon. Despite all his sacrifices… despite everything, nothing was ever simple or easy for him. For a little while, his wish had been granted. Upset would be an understatement to depict his feelings when he had sensed the life escape Fai's body, but… a tiny part of him had actually rejoiced at the magician's death. Feeling disgusted with himself, he broke out into a run, skidding to a halt outside the sun cavern.

Slowly, struggling to push away the guilt tearing him apart inside, he focused his attention on the three auras he could sense inside on the raised metal platform. Masooma's deep crimson aura was burning the brightest, telling him that she was still engaged in maintaining her spell. A steady stream of her magic was flowing into Syaoran's rather erratic aura. He figured it best not to focus his attention on that, lest he be drawn in by the brunette's wild magic and cast into the same spell. That might lead to a disaster. A little ways away, Neumro's calm aura told him that the captain was waiting for the healer to come out of her trance. The man had enough sense to know not to disturb her in the middle of a spell.

Taking in a deep breath, he put on a mask of collectiveness before stepping out into the magical sunlight. The warmth, however, could not chase away the cold knives that were constantly clawing at his insides, making him sick enough to want to throw up. "Captain Neumro," he called out, noting that the man turned around to face him, "you can return to your post now."

"Sir." The captain offered him a brief salute before turning on his heels and taking his leave.

A long while after the captain's footsteps faded away, Nixon remained rooted in his spot, making no moves to reach the platform. Heaving a small sigh, he shook his head and approached the duo sprawled out on the steel mesh that made up the platform's base. He closed his sightless eyes, imagining the way the sunlight must be bouncing off of Masooma's hair that was spread out around her form like a halo of crimson. It was the source of her magic, thus it was the thing he could sense the easiest when it came to the witch in question. He basked in the feeling of peacefulness that enveloped him for a moment as his senses filled up with nothing but her soothing presence. But then, guilt and bitter anger returned with such a vengeance that he stumbled back a couple of steps, almost losing his balance when his foot collided with the raised edge of the earthen pathway that connected the platform to the rest of the cave.

Gritting his teeth as he straightened up and hurriedly climbed to the platform, Nixon settled down on the sun-warmed steel mesh. He felt a few stray strands of her soft hair beneath his fingers as he placed his hands on the platform. Jerking away from her as though her hair had burnt him, he closed his eyes and turned his back towards the witch and the brunette beside her.

Everything always had to come back to her, didn't it? He loved her more than life itself, but his was a one-sided thing. She did not see him in the same light. She wouldnever see him in that light. She belonged to someone else, after all, and he knew he had no right wanting her… not after everything that had happened. But… the amber-eyed witch had been the other reason he had wanted Fai dead. There had been so many times in his life when he had wanted the blond dead, heck there had even been a time when he had actively wished for such a thing. But that had been so long ago. He had been so sure he had gotten over those feelings of bitterness towards the magician when they had gotten close enough to be considered brothers in everything except blood.

Everything that Fai had gone through in his captivity, he had known about it. He knew about the times when that bitch had her goons hold him down as she poured water down his throat. He knew about the times when she had them shove that feeding tube into his body so that she could feed him that rotten gunk. He knew about the times she had the blond beaten black and blue. He knew about everything,and he had done nothing at all. Masooma had begged him to do something, to find a way to save him, going on nothing but her imagination and memories of her own time spent in their clutches to try and come up with the horrors the blond must be going through in his captivity. He did not need his imagination to know what was happening to Fai, though. Any time he wished to know, all he had to do was find the tiny thread of blue that connected him to the magician, and he would know what was going on with the blond. She had begged him. Oh, how she had begged him to do something. Anything, really. But he had not budged.

His hands were tied with due to the deal he had made with the Shaman. That was the excuse he gave her every time she asked. Deep down inside, though… he knew that wasn't the reason. If he had truly wanted it…If he had really wished for it, he might have been able to find a way to circumvent the Shaman's bond. All he had done, however, was present an excuse and sit back and watch the blond suffer. As if…as if Nixon wanted Fai to remain in the Complex. After all, if he wasn't there, the blond would have been in Magihidusi. After he had found what he had been searching for, he would have left with his companions, and Masooma would have gone along with him, leaving Nixon all alone in a world of strangers. His deal had been different from the one Masooma had made with the Shaman after her rescue. He could not leave that world, not as long as the threat of the hunters remained. Masooma, on the other hand, only stayed there to be with her friend. She could leave anytime she wanted and he knew- even if the witch herself never said anything about it- he just knew she would have left with the blond when the time came for him to leave. Her friendship was all that he had left, and though he pretended to be selfless, his selfishness would never have allowed him to let her go. Of course, he wouldn't ever outright ask her to stay. Not when her happiness was on the line, but he couldn't let her go.

And so…he acted like the selfish bastard that he was and presented her with that weak excuse. So what if the Shaman was the most powerful being in that world. He was the Oracle. He should have been able to find a way if he had wanted it…but he hadn't. So he didn't. The part of him that had rejoiced upon feeling the life leave Fai's body, that selfish part of him had actually purred in vicious satisfaction every time Nixon learnt of the blonde's deteriorating state in captivity, secretly hoping he would die before his companions arrived. After all, with the magician out of the way, who would Masooma turn to for comfort but her best friend? And maybe…maybe if given time, they would have been able to turn into something more…

But she wasn't his to want or keep or hope for, and so the guilt for wanting her, coupled with the guilt of leaving the man that was supposed to be his brother to suffer in hell, added to the guilt of secretly wishing for the same man's death, kept on eating away at him. It was too much for him to take and the jumble of opposing emotions raging a war for dominance inside him was enough to make him physically ill. Guilt, disappointment, relief, happiness, bitterness, anger… everything was struggling for control over him and he was in a miserable state. Clutching at his stomach and fighting to keep the nausea at bay, he tried to bring everything under control.

Up till now, from the time that Fai had been captured, he had focused his energy into the act of wanting to save Fai. He had been playing that little game of fooling himself so well that even with all the guilt and the loathing and the anger, nothing had vied for his attention. But then, he had gone and kissed Masooma and a tiny trickle of those feelings had leaked into his consciousness. Not long after that, Kurogane and Sakura and Syaoran had arrived and with them had come the prospect of Fai's rescue. The trickle of feelings turned into a stream. His little act ended when the blond died right after they had gotten him to safety. The stream turned to raging waves as the dam keeping all those negative feelings at bay broke, drowning him. Now he was struggling in a vast ocean, blindly searching for a piece of driftwood to latch on to.

This raging storm of tumultuous emotions did not show up on his face, though. Oh no. After all, he was just as practiced in the art of hiding behind masks as Fai, so no one but the most observant of people, such as that Japanese ninja for instance, could actually catch a glimpse of his inner turmoil. He hated to admit it, but the ninja's uncanny ability to guess what was going on in his mind at times was unnerving. That was probably the only reason why he had lashed out at the other man outside the infirmary. He was afraid that if he didn't warn the man to back off, the ninja would tear of his mask and lay his emotions bare for the entire world to see. Clenching his sightless eyes shut, he curled in on himself, hoping that no one came this way for a while. His mask was starting to crumble and he was afraid of what the world might end up seeing in his moment of weakness. He had no doubts, though, that the sight that would meet their eyes would only make them hate him forever. He was so disgusting and repulsive on the inside.

"I'm so sorry,"he mumbled weakly, burying his head into his drawn-up knees, feeling his arms digging into the flesh of his stomach at this action, but this only made him curl up even more. He deserved the pain and discomfort for being the wretched, loathsome creature that he was. 'For wanting you dead, Fai. And for wanting you to be mine, Masooma.' He added inwardly as the tears that had not spilled from his eyes until now finally began to leak from between his squeezed lids. 'I'm sorry for all the pain I've caused you two. I'm so, so sorry…'

A/N: So can anyone tell what's going on inside Nixon's head? Did he really do all that or is this just the guilt talking? What's your opinion? Do you hate him for what he did or are you like me and actually feel sorry for the guy?

Edit: I just realized I forgot to add the links to some new fan-art for this fic. Well, I'm not really sure whether it oughtta be called fan-art or just art seeing I'm the one that drew the sketches but anywho... here's the links to the pictures I uploaded in my Deviantart account. Feel free to browse through the rest of the gallery as well

Masooma and Nixon: http: / .com /art /The- Guardians2- 281793534

Sakura: http: / .com /art / The- Warrior- 281794892

Masooma in Celes: http: / .com /art / Free- Me- 281795102

Just remove the spaces. I hope the links show up. If they don't just go to my Deviantart account through the link on my profile and see the latest uploads in my gallery, k?

Until next time

~Obsidian