First of all, I'd like to clarify that no, I am not dead.

In all seriousness though, I have to apologize for such a ridiculously long absence. There's no real reason for it, though my motivation kind of died off once school started. A couple months slipped by before I realized it :( But I'm somewhat back now, and I do promise to at least finish this story, rest assured. I understand that this chapter is extremely short by the story's standards, but I felt the need to post SOMETHING...

Anyways, please enjoy.

Chapter 23: Final Mistake

Kazuto had never been one to be impatient to open a mysterious present; after all, whatever resided within the confines of what could be a literal or figurative box would reveal itself eventually. His aunt and Suguha had always questioned his relative lack of enthusiasm on Christmas mornings; it wasn't like he didn't appreciate the novelty of the holiday. He was equally excited by the idea of getting presents, for sure, but he had never felt an overwhelming need to tear open the wrapping and look at what resided within.

At least, until today.

The sea breeze slipped landwards, buffeting gently against his back as if to usher him on. Encouragement that Kazuto absolutely did not need. He would have been running into the interior of the seaside warehouse already if Hideki would just hurry up with the lock.

Briefly, he wondered if it was unnatural for it to take something of such magnitude to make him truly restless. Was that a showing of true temperament, or did it just mean he was emotionally insensitive? Asuna's brother had called them both in the middle of class, startling his lover in the middle of a test. The overcast clouds of August were sliding by outside at the moment, reminding him vaguely of a thick wet blanket settling around the entire sky. Asuna's cell had been the one to vibrate in her pocket first, making the young woman start and jerk about in her seat for a moment before managing to calm herself. After drawing a few looks from the students around her that brought a slight blush to her face, she'd made eye contact with him across the room and waggled her eyebrows. Obviously in an attempt to tell him something, but the contents of the message were unknown to him.

He was notified soon enough, however. Soon his own phone began to buzz, and having finished the exam rather early, Kazuto stood up and excused himself before answering the call outside in the hall.

"Hello?"

"It's done."

It took him a moment to figure out what exactly the voice on the other end was talking about; he had failed to check caller ID before answering. "What?"

"Your daughter, Kazuto. She's very close to final stage. Where are you right now?"

Kazuto's blood ran ice cold and searing hot all at once, and he had to lick his lips first to compose himself. "I...um, I'm at the college right now..."

There was a moment of confused silence at the other end before Hideki's electronized voice muttered a low curse. "Right, I forgot, the school year started..."

Though it was a very small sample size, those words were enough to breed some guilt inside of Kazuto. Regardless of his relation to Asuna, the entire issue with Yui was his and his lover's alone. Hideki's help had turned out to be essential to realizing their goals, but at the same time he couldn't let the older man assist them passively. There were some times where Asuna's brother seemed to be working harder than them, ironically enough. Fuzen was consistently flooding his office with additional paperwork, and the excruciating stress of being responsible for a future life was no doubt getting to him, yet he had yet to truly falter. Whether their campaign were to fail or succeed, Kazuto knew he would always feel a great gratitude, and a massive shame, at having to force Hideki through such lengths. It wasn't in his nature to draw others into his problems.

"So...you said Yui is almost done?" Kazuto asked softly, trying his best to keep the inevitable excitement out of his voice. "How close is she?" He hadn't been to the warehouse in over a week; school was resuming, and Hideki had ordered them to stay away for fear of raising too much suspicion. It had been hard, but necessary.

"According to her cellular demographics, we're done with ninety-six percent of the physical half of her," Hideki's voice murmured back. "If you could come and help, we'd be able to finish the rest by the end of today; all that's left is simple skin growth in some specific areas. Though of course, there is still the data to worry about."

Hideki was right. They were still far from finished. It had been several months since the beginning of their counter conspiracy against Fuzen, and after the great labors they had laid into the physical building of Yui's body it had felt like completing that would be the end of everything. Only it wasn't. The capsule would only be a living corpse without their daughter's data to dwell within it. It still made Kazuto cringe morally a bit at the ethical issues surround their entire project, but he had given up on such misgivings long ago. If it didn't facilitate their success, it was probably unnecessary.

From what information they had been able to gather, stealing the data wouldn't be easy. All of the SAO server's data was currently being stored within a certain chamber of the Complexity building, most likely guarded around the clock due to its massive value. Not to mention, none of them would be able to come within a hundred yards of that room without having a bullet sent through their heads. Additionally, Hideki had learned that the data would be shipped to a more secure location in a month; which meant that they really had only a single shot. Even if they were to miraculously fly under the radar after a failed attempt, it would be impossible to break into a highly guarded facility.

"The capsule will die twenty days after it has reached full development," Hideki had said solemnly.

Although, Kazuto had never been one to melt down under the face of high stakes and even higher rewards. He wouldn't be alive today otherwise. Despite this, he felt more nervous about this part of the plan than any other. Mainly because he wouldn't be in control of the outcome.

Since the three of them were unable to reach the data without somehow bringing a couple tanks to the building, exterior assistance was required.

"I've asked Dr. Fletcher for help," Asuna's brother had said.

His younger sister frowned at this news. "You told him about Yui? Are you sure he can be trusted? Say he slips up, or gives it all away to Fuzen directly."

Kazuto shared his lover's doubts. "I used to work under him. He doesn't seem very fond of helping people."

Hideki just shook his head in denial. "No. Dr. Fletcher is a good man, and we have been friends for some years now. I don't trust him completely, but enough to let him help us. We have no choice, after all."

That was true.

"He isn't in charge, but he is one of the staff members working to stabilize the SAO data. The computer that's housing the game is a top-notch one, but even still it's difficult to keep that much information in one place; Aincrad broke records for production costs, after all. So there's a team tasked with compressing it. Obviously, they'll have to handle the computers quite a lot to do so, and Fletcher is one of them."

"Well, I can see the logic behind that, but still..." Kazuto murmured, still unsettled by the amount of things that could go wrong with the idea.

Hideki sighed. "I'm aware of the risk this brings to the table. But at the same time, its our best option. Going after it ourselves would just be suicide."

Kazuto had forced to accept that fact. Now, as Hideki muttered as he tried to unlock the slightly frozen warehouse lock, he could only feel a form of anxiety. So he couldn't be in complete control. Fine, fuck it. Right now, he just wanted to see his daughter's face. Since the ten days he'd been absent from the warehouse, Yui's body had still been underformed; a mass of bright pink flesh, really, about the same size as a small human child with vague representations of limbs and a head protruding from the main body. A couple pictures he'd received the next day offered a view of the facial details beginning to take shape, but beyond that he knew nothing. Hideki had told him that they were essentially done, aside from a few minor details. So surely, once this door opened...

A grunt of triumph came from Hideki as the lock finally clicked, and the door grated open like a yawning beast. Swallowing, Kazuto instinctively reached out with his hand and was somewhat surprised to find Asuna's fingers meld with his in response.

"We've waited a long time and sacrifice a lot of things to see this," She murmured quietly to him so that only he could hear. "Come on, let's go."

Sensors by the threshold prompted the automatic lights above the flicker to life, momentarily blinding the young couple as the interior was illuminated sector by sector, revealing the computers and the wires and the paper strewn everywhere until...

"God," Kazuto cried out softly as he felt an odd, wet pressure beginning to form behind his eyes. Yui - and he meant Yui, not a suspended pile of quivering skin - was floating in the growth chamber at the end of the warehouse, looking for all the world like she was simply asleep and not lacking of a consciousness. Feeling instinct take over, his feet began to propel him forwards until he was flat out running for the opposite wall, tugging Asuna along behind him but not pulling her off balance because his lover was sprinting too, also trying to hold back tears as they reached the growth capsule, until suddenly all that separated them was an inch of plexiglass.

"Kazuto," Asuna whispered almost fiercely to him, as she covered her quivering mouth with one hand while the other gripped his own tightly.

He didn't answer immediately. He couldn't, not when the person he had been literally dying to meet for so long was finally before them, in her complete form, more with them than she had ever been since that fateful day the servers had been shut down. He took in everything, the way her eyebrows arced in a manner only Yui's could, the distinctive curve of her jaw, the fluttering eyelids that had haunted his dreams for months on end. Her jet black hair was floating around her skull in the liquid, looking thoroughly drenched, but all that mattered to him was that it was hers.

On impulse, Kazuto's free hand reached out to touch what he knew would be his daughter's soft supple skin, stroke her hair in a way that would make her finally smile, but found his efforts thwarted by the glass standing between them. It was then that he came to his senses. It felt very much like Yui was floating before them at this very moment, seemingly plunged in slumber, but this wasn't true; he couldn't forget that this was still a capsule, just a living corpse, not yet the daughter that had plagued his thoughts for all this time. It was a hurtful thought to force himself to believe, but it something that both of them had to understand, Kazuto knew.

This wasn't over yet.

Kazuto heard Hideki's footsteps clicking across the concrete floor behind him.

"I expected you to be more emotional about seeing her," The older man asked indirectly in a soft voice, understanding the tension of the moment.

Kazuto felt his smile directed at the capsule begin to dissipate. "Yeah. Me too," He admitted. "But she's only half of Yui. We aren't done yet. And I won't celebrate until everything is for sure."

Hideki chuckled sadly at that. "I've said this a lot already, but it really depresses me that you're smart enough to say that at your age."

He smiled wryly at the comment. "I'm not as old as I should be. The world has aged me faster than everyone else, I think."

The older man nodded. "And my sister is the only one who can empathize with you on that, I think..."

The air inside the warehouse was so tense it seemed to be made of glass.

The atmospherical discomfort was somewhat justified, however. After all, if this was a novel their story was about to reach what most would consider the climax. The point of no return.

Kazuto was sitting on top of a recently cleared table in the warehouse, planting his feet on the seat of a chair, hands clasped together before his knees. Asuna was sitting beside him, leaning into his side in quiet presence. Hideki was sitting in a large chair nearby, keeping a trained eye on the timer of his cellphone.

Kazuto set his jaw and tried his best not to start screaming in frustration. He hated waiting for things to simply happen while he sat idly on the sidelines. It made him feel out of control, mostly because he trusted very few people more than he trusted himself, so letting anyone else take up the task always felt like a tactical and mental blunder to him. Exactly seventy-four minutes ago, Fletcher had called Hideki's cell to notify him that he would be entering the SAO data room soon.

Meaning that they really had passed the point of no return. Phones and other forms of communication would be taken from all data-compressing staff and placed in a box outside the room, according the Fletcher, so it wasn't like they could make a call and have him stop in the middle of it all. The minute the scientist entered the room he would be searching for a chance to download the data into a small hard drive. Though it would usually have been impossible to download the entirely of Aincrad into a single drive, Fletcher would only be taking in info concerning NPCs and system management entities, which could fit into the small disk. The key was simply avoiding notice, although calling such a requirement easy would have been ridiculous on Kazuto's part.

That had been over an hour ago. After successfully pulling off the heist, Fletcher was supposed to have excused himself to the bathroom in order to flee from the building and bring the data to the warehouse. Why was it taking so long for a response to come through? Was it really so difficult to download something without other people noticing? Perhaps Fletcher had been found out. Maybe Fuzen was on his way over here right now, fifty men armed with guns in tow, ready to fill them all with bullets as soon as he tore down the door.

Kazuto sighed and shook his head. No. He was getting paranoid.

The slight movement roused Asuna, who shifted her neck to look up at him. "Are you all right?"

"I guess..." He said. "Just worried."

His partner hummed in understanding and moved to bury her nose into his neck again. "I'm worried too," She whispered against his skin. "But it's out of our hands, now."

Kazuto couldn't help noting some relief in those words.

But she was probably right, he thought as he closed his eyes and leaned his cheek against the silky surface of Asuna's hair. Sure, it was driving him insane to not to know what was going on at the moment, but there was nothing he could do about it. Finally, the responsibility was laid upon another's shoulders. Both a blessing and a curse. Then again, being the one liable for everything had its own merits and disadvantages. If the last nine months had taught him anything, it was that no situation was ever ideal.

Nothing I can do... He thought, feeling dreaded sleep beginning to overtake him. He was exhausted and he could no longer deny it. Nothing-

Hideki's phone blared to life, startling both of them so badly that Kazuto fell off the table in his haste to run over to the cellular device. Hideki coughed and fumbled to answer it, finally succeeding in punching the right button, and the call was broadcast on speaker mode.

Kazuto strained his ears, desperate to hear something, anything. At first there was nothing but static, the sound of wind whipping by the receiver, a muted shouts in the background. Then there was the sound of the phone being pressed to an ear, and suddenly Fletcher's voice was shouting,

"HIDEKI! I have the data, but I was found out and they're after me! You've got to help me, or else they'll...oh, SHI-"

The line went dead, and Hideki's hands began to shake so badly that his phone fell from his fingers and clattered to the floor, sending deafening echoes through the warehouse.

Kazuto's hopes faded with them.

Not much substance here, I know, other than Yui's full appearance and the cliffie. But I do hope you'll leave your thoughts in the reviews? :) Just to say "welcome back," if nothing else...

I kid. But do review!

~Shrrg