http://clampfix.fanworks.net/x-fix/guilty2.txt </head><body><pre>Guilty (2/2) by Lika On the lake before them, ducks floated peacefully on the clear membrane of the lake. Yuzuriha leaned on the side of the bridge, her arms crossed over the smooth polished wood. The wind played with her short hair, held in place with bright blue barrettes. She looked so peaceful and happy, smiling at the ducks and humming quietly. Kusanagi looked at her resting against the wood and felt his stomach turn. He clenched his fingers into a loose fist and then cleared his throat. "Ojou-chan." He immediately felt queasy. He tightened his fists. Yuzuriha turned to look at him. Sunlight touched her face and showed the wide innocence of her eyes and the kissable tints of her cheekbones and chin. He relaxed his hands and tried to loosen the tightness in his chest and stomach. It was time. "I have to tell you something." She waited patiently, smiling at him, having no idea what the horrible secret he was going to tell her was. He told her then, and watched the lithe figure before him grow rigid. On the lake, a muted beating noise was heard as the ducks raised themselves and spread out their wings, flapping them against the air and causing droplets of waters to sparkle in the sunlight like diamonds. * * * * "She was strangled." A chorus of gasps echoes the large room. The Dragons in the jury box puts their hand to their mouths or their hearts and mutters something about the atrocity of it all and demanding for justice. Vengeance for a slaughtered innocent. "Dead?" asks the judge coolly. "Yes." The officer puts the body down before the stand like he is offering a sacrifice. "She's dead." In the front, Kusanagi starts to wail. * * * * The sun was still shining on them, but somehow, a shadow managed to cross Yuzuriha's face. She stared at him, her side pushing painfully against the wood, one hand up to her mouth. Her eyes were large with disbelief, with disillusion. Her whisper is sharp. Painful. "You're – a Dragon of Earth?" He nodded his head vacantly. "No!" she said. He couldn't say anything. He simply looked down at the water directly by bridge. Ducks were paddling off to another side of the lake. Yuzuriha tightened the hand at her face into a fist. "No," she repeated. " No No NO!" She stamped her foot and glared at him. "We can't be enemies!" He raised his gaze and look at her pain stricken face. "We're not –" He tried to put a hand on her shoulder but she pulled away. "We are enemies!" she said. "It's your fate. You're going to have to fight us!" Kusanagi shook his head furiously and said loudly, "I'm not going to-" "Yes you are!" she snapped back. "Don't you understand? You're a Dragon of Earth! It's in your /nature/ to hurt us!" "Oh God!" he cried desperately. Why couldn't she understand? "No, I'm not—" but he couldn't finished because he didn't know anymore. Yuzuriha already accepted it though, as she had accepted everything in her life without questioning it. She closed her eyes and moaned. A single rolled down her cheeks. "You are. I'm such a fool. I should have seen it. Your ability to feel the pain around you! It's because you were chosen to destroy everyone who hurt the Earth!" "Ojou-chan--!" "Don't!" she yelled, and her body was trembling, her eyes wide and wild with pain. A mirror image of his own eyes at that moment. "Don't say that like we're friends! We're not friends! We're going to have to fight each other!" "No!" Kusanagi said sharply. That much he knew. He filled the short distance that separated them. "I won't let that happen." He tried to put a hand on her shoulder again but this time she shoved his hand away. "Don't touch me!" The words stung more than he thought possible. He started back in pain and clenched his fists. His chest tightened again, making it hard for him to breath. He stared at the girl shaking before him. Tears were streaming down Yuzuriha's face. "Why didn't you tell me earlier!? Why did you have to wait until now, when I'm already-- when it's already too late?" She put two fists to her chest as if her heart was breaking and perhaps it was. He knew his was. "Go!" she commanded. "Leave me." "Ojou-chan-" "GO!" She put her face in her hands and started to cry. "Just go, Kusanagi-san. I don't want to see you anymore." * * * * "And then what?" the Judge asks. Kusanagi, his features contorted in grief, looks at Yuzuriha lying dead at the foot of the stand. Both hands are clasped firmly to his mouth. He doesn't answer. The judge indicates the body on the floor and persists. "You didn't leave her like she asked you to, now did you, Mr. Shiyuu?" Kusanagi continues to look at Yuzuriha. Half his mind is blank, grief stricken, the other half is reeling in disbelief at what the judge is saying to him. "When she rejected you, you flew into a rage. You grew angry and put your hand around her throat and you strangled her." No. People break out into a combination of blurriness and voices around him. The jury hissed at him. This time, the judge has to pound his mallet on the stand for a whole minute before the courtroom quiets down again. "Is that the charge, officer?" the Judge asks the man standing by the body. The officer looks at Kusanagi with cold contempt. "Yes." No, Kusanagi thinks with the half of his mind that's still able to think. Impossible. "The Murder of Miss Nekoi Yuzuriha." Insanity. This is insanity. "Mr. Shiyuu," the judge says. "What do you have to say about this?" He doesn't say anything. He just stares at the body in front of him, his hands still over his open mouth. He's trying to remember if he did leave her like she had asked him to. He's trying to remember if he put his hands around her neck. Did he tighten them there and– Oh my God. Was he capable to killing her? Did he kill her!? The Judge grows impatient and turns to the jury. "Do you have a verdict?" he asks. All the jurors nod in turn, starting from one side, one grim head after, until it reached the last person. The last person, someone with long pale hair, stands up. He casts Kusanagi a blank look of pity and then reads from the paper in front of him. "We, the jury, find the defendant, Shiyuu Kusanagi, guilty." Guilty. Blood on his hands. Smears on his soul. Weight on his conscience. "You heard the verdict," says the Judge to the man who still isn't moving from behind his table. "You're guilty." He is guilty. Guilty of what? The bombing? The earthquake? Yuzuriha's death? Oh God. Yuzuriha is dead. It doesn't matter. Guilty or innocent; Yuzuriha is dead. That is all that matter. The Judge is gone. Everyone starts to the leave the courtroom. One of the officers picks up Yuzuriha's broken body and disappears. Kusanagi sits back down on his chair and puts his face in his hands. He weeps bitterly. A hand on his shoulder makes him turn around. It wasn't an officer here to take him jail as thought it was. It was one of the juror, the one who read this verdict, the one with the long pale hair. "Come on," he says. "She's dead. Nothing you can do will bring her back. You killed her." He stares at the person with the long white hair. "I killed her." "Yes," says the person. "How?" he demands, his eyes dull and burning in his tear stained face. "I loved her." The person closed his eyes sadly. "She didn't love you back. Her rejection caused your true self to emerge." "My true self?" Kusanagi says blankly. What is his true self? He sees himself crossing pinky fingers with Yuzuriha, promising that they would let each other know when they were in pain so they can help one another. "Yes, your true self," the other man answers. "You're a Dragon of Earth." "It's just a name," Kusanagi protests weakly. "It's more than your name. It's your fate. You were fated to fight for the Earth and destroy the Dragons of Heaven. You were fated to kill Miss Nekoi and you have done so." He had been fated to kill her. It was his fate to have done so. One couldn't argue with fate. Suddenly, he hated that word more than anything else in the world. "No," he whispers, but with conviction. The face before him is sad. "You have to accept it. Your Fate has caught up with you. You can't escape it." He feels an anger sear through him. "Bullshit," Kusanagi swears quietly but vehemently. The other person jerks in surprise. "Fate does not control my life." It's fascinating to watch the surprise in the juror's face grow, while a spider web of jagged lines and cracks starts to bloom behind him. Kusanagi looks around him and sees there's no one in the courtroom. In fact, there hasn't been anyone in the courtroom since the juror started talking to him. The cracks and lines are growing longer and thicker, spreading to the walls and the tables around him, until there is a virtual map of them all over the room. The wood and marble splinters at the lines, making clean, crisp noises as they do, and then fade away into nothingness. There's only a void now, except the chair he sits on. Blackness except for the person in front of him. He looks at the stranger. "Who are you?" "Kakyou," the stranger says. "I'm a dream seer who can see into the future. Only I know what the outcome of the earth is." Kusanagi suddenly recognises him. His dull expression shows recognition, but no interest. "Of course. You." Then a little bit hope flickers in his deep-set eyes. "How much of this dream is real?" He jumped out of his chair. "Is Ojou-chan still alive?" The dream seer nods again. "Oh thank-God!" He gasps in relief, and feel the immense weakness that relief can bring a person. He sinks back down into the chair slowly. He looks up at Kakyou with both fury and curiosity. "Why did you do this to me?" Kakyou's impassive face softens. "Because I wanted to show you what you really are, what your Fate is, but…" He stops and looks confused, "something's wrong. You changed yours." "Of course I did," Kusanagi says fiercely. The confusion grows. "How?" Some things just can't be explained. "I don't know," Kusanagi says honestly. "I just do. And I will continue to do so until I die." "Even if the girl you love rejects you?" Kusanagi closes his eyes for a moment, controlling the pain that is threatening to break through. "Yes," he tells the Dream seer. "Even if she rejects me." Kakyou's face grows both pleased and sad at the same time. There's a trace of regret in his melancholy eyes. "All right then," he says softly. He reaches out and puts a hand on Kusanagi's cheeks. The large man feels a lightness start to take over his body. It starts at the tips of his finger and toes, and spread down his limbs, towards his center. He's slipping out of consciousness, which is strange because in reality, he is unconscious. The Dream seer smiles at him. "You will wake up soon," he says as the edges around Kusanagi's vision start to dim and waver. "And you will live your life the way you want to." Darkness and lightness causes Kusanagi to lose control of his body and he feels himself leaving it. He distantly hears Kakyou speak. "Perhaps that girl was right." Darkness overtakes him completely but his feels the rough softness of his armchair against his back, his legs bent over the edge and his head tilted backwards above the headrest. Back into his living room. Back into reality. And still, he can hear the Dream seer's words: "Maybe the Fate of the World isn't decided after all." * * * * Yuzuriha was waiting for him outside his building when he finished work the next day. She started crying the moment she saw him. "I'm so sorry!" she said, running up to him and holding him tightly around his waist. "I'm so sorry I hurt you like that yesterday!" The relief and joy he felt at that moment was immense. He found himself thanking God – all of them, every single one of them – for this. He put his hand on her dark head and made her look at him. "It's all right," he assured her. She smiled at him through her tears. "I talked to Arashi about it yesterday," she said. "And I realised that it doesn't matter if you're a Dragon of Earth. It's just a name." It was as if the verdict was changed right there. "What's important," Yuzuriha went on, "is that you chose not to be one of them. And you're not one of them, whatever Fate says. You're Kusanagi-san, my Kusanagi-san, the nicest guy I know. You're him and not a Dragon of Earth." It was as if a great weight was lifted off Kusanagi, a weight he had carried for so long he had forgotten it was there. Dragon of Earth. Angel of Destruction. Guilty. He was no longer any of those. He felt freer than he has for a long, long time. The feeling was overwhelming. For a moment, he was so overcome with emotions that he couldn't say anything. Finally, he put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to his side. "Thank-you," he said sincerely. She snuggled against him and didn't say anything. He ruffled her hair and with his hand and then lead her out the building district. They held onto each other like this and walked down the streets together. - - - - - - End of Fic Notes: My knowledge of law and courts comes from Judge Judy and soap operas. <grin> So I know this is completely inaccurate, but hey, Kakyou is orchastrating it and Lord knows that guy has been under house arrest for years so his knowledge of the law is probably close to mine: it ain't much. ^^ A big thank-you, as always, to Satsuki-chan for reading this and telling me it doesn't suck and for all your great comments. ^_^</pre><p><a href="./">Back</a></p><p><a href=http://www.dreamhost.com/donate.cgi?id=216><img border=0 alt="Donate towards our web hosting bill!" src=https://secure.newdream.net/donate1.gif></a></p></body></html>