castleinthemist | .5th Fantasy Impromptu [Closed to Harth]

Entry tags:

.5th Fantasy Impromptu [Closed to Harth]

She hasn't seen Duo since that day in the common room.

She had helped him with the leather he'd gotten from the fountain, helped him with his hair and he had even given her a small weapon - a knife - to defend herself with out in the castle. It had been a good evening. One she enjoyed. One of the few she actually enjoyed in her time there. She really did seem to like being around him, though she couldn't exactly explain why her mechanical heart always felt so fluttery and light whenever he was around, or why she became so flustered and awkward at the drop of a hat with him.

And suddenly he wasn't there. And she noticed.

Haku waited a while, quietly worrying while trying so hard to not outwardly show it. She didn't want to cause undue panic, thinking that maybe, just maybe, she was being needlessly paranoid. He was sleeping more than usual, or had explored further in the castle and was there, just fine and alive with no need to be worried over.

But when a full day passed she couldn't take it anymore. And that's when she did something foolish.

Taking up the knife that he had given her, she tied her long skirt up and did her hair back in a loose bun, setting off without telling anyone where she was going. She had hoped she was wrong, that she wouldn't get very far and find him safe. Sure he might scold her for going out alone like an older brother to a younger sibling, but she wouldn't care so long as she knew he was okay.

And if she got to the end of the trolley - the furthest she had ever gone - and he wasn't there... then she would come back before anyone could realize she'd left. No harm, no foul. Any shadows? She'd run. Any other sign of trouble? She'd scream then run. In her mind it was a decent plan, for all it's holes.

Quietly she headed out to the bridge, past the stair tower and on to the next level, looking around as the wind brought the scent of the sea to her nose and fluttered loose strands of white hair past her face. She tucked some behind her ear instinctively, pausing to look around and strain her ears to listen. There were no sounds aside from the distant cry of gulls flying over the crashing sea.

"Not here..." she muttered to herself, continuing up the next stairwell. That was when she finally took note of the off-colored stairs that led to the broken domed roof over the building next to the upper platform, above the trolley tracks. She paused and strained her ears once again, but the same silence met her.

What if he was down there... what if he was hurt... ?

"Duo-kun... ?" she called out nervously, then cleared her throat and tried again, actually letting her powerful voice carry for once. "Oiiiiiii! Duo-kuuuuuuun!"

Her voice echoed back at her, but she thought that for a moment, just a moment, she heard another voice calling softly back to her...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He'd watched her leave, the singing robot who was so shy, not unlike a mouse. Now, she seemed to be brave enough to brandish a weapon and head out to a place that seemed teeming with the thing they all feared. Shadows who would drag them away into that void, a void he'd need not see. Already been.

So he followed her silently up the steps, lurking in far away shadows where he could still watch her move. Even as a droid she expressed emotion vividly as any he'd ever seen. Maybe even more advanced then whatever existed in the uppers, yet from years by gone. It was toy, but he accepted it, he'd seen it.

But what attracted him to follow her then was the look on her face. Worry, concern, love. She'd lost someone. Toph?

It wasn't until she screamed the name of that boy that he knew. He could just dream up the scenario in his mind, he'd seen him at the table the other night griping as he worked. Heard the conversation between Heero and him about the girl.

He'd gone to find her. He'd unfortunately not disposed of the body as thoroughly as he would have liked. It lay half shrouded in the trees growing out of the castle wall off the edge.

Wonder if anyone's seen it? Wonder if Haku would?

And if so, what'll happen?

Haku was unaware that she was being followed at all. She had no sense for that sort of thing, and it completely went unnoticed by the android. She remained focused on getting up the stairs as carefully as possible, making it to the very edge of the broken dome. She got down on her knees there, looking down, down, down in to the darkness below. Though light spilled in from the hole itself, it looked like the room it covered went so far that even those rays of sun couldn't reach the floor and illuminate it.

But she still heard something. A voice? No. But scraping. Like something was moving there.

"Duo-kun?" she called out again, but only received the echo of her own voice back at her this time, louder than before. She changed her vision through a couple of settings, hoping one of them would let her see through the shadows. None of them went far enough. Wherever the floor was, it was definitely a drop.

She sighed, tucking hair behind her ear again and straightening to look around again, thinking she might try moving on and looking further when a glint caught her eye. Metal in the sunlight, reflecting off another part of the roof. She squinted, but couldn't make out the shape with the glare, and instead stood to awkwardly balance her way across the distance over to it. She bent once she was there and lifted the object by it's handle to inspect it.

Duo's machete.

So he was here. But now... ?

"Duo-ku--..."

He head raised and her voice caught her throat. She couldn't feel illness, but she knew she felt something inside her that was very close to queasiness. There were eyes staring back at her. Clearly dead eyes, but ones that had also once been blind.

"Toph... o-oh... Toph-chan..." she choked on a sick sounding sob, putting a hand over her mouth while her foot took an awkward step back and her hand went slack on the handle. She was dangerously close to that broken, crumbling edge.

There it was. She found it. He stood at the stairs just out of sight below the roof line, watching Haku as she spotted the body below stuck in the trees below the domed room. He didn't move, didn't want her to detect his presence quite yet, just wanted to see what the robot was going to do with this knowledge? Break down? Or had she gained some strength from hiding around with those boys with such strong wills?

Hmm. Not on very stable ground, Haku. Might want to move. He wasn't going to help you.

Had he made himself known, had he revealed himself and gave any indication to being the one responsible for Toph's death, she would have foolishly fought back with the two weapons now at her disposal. She knew she would have likely lost, too, but being around Duo and his friends had given her sense of self preservation a boost it didn't normally have.

Though she was afraid, too. Saying she wasn't would have been a bold faced lie.

But for the moment she was simply looking around with wide red eyes, mechanical heart hammering so fast it nearly drowned out all other noises. She didn't notice how unstable the roof was becoming under her feet. She was torn. Fight or flight, fight or flight, she didn't know what to do.

creaaaak

She froze.

That was not a good sound.

Slowly, she looked over her shoulder. Her stomach dropped. Her knees trembled.

"No... no no no please no..."

Her voice was tiny, pleading, begging with whatever force may have had a sliver of mercy for a poor android that she could lift her foot, keep going forward, find some other way down from the roof.

She moved. An inch at a time, foot rising to step back the way she'd been going earlier, but that was all it took.

creaaaak-CRACK

She didn't scream. She didn't have time to scream. All at once her world tilted back, body arching in a manner that would have been almost graceful, if not for the sickening snap of her body hitting the weakened part of the roof not a second later. Her stomach dropped with the sensation of gravity pulling her down hard and fast.

What time she didn't have to scream made for even less time for her systems to react. No alarms activated in her HUD even as her body plummeted, striking rafter after rafter, tearing through each of them like a boulder dropped through a tree. Pain receptors sent waves of agony through her body each time, parts breaking off in a shower of sparks and a spray of fluids. Arm, leg, a finger - no, two - one lung crushed from the back, upper torso impaled from an errant spike of rotten wood, down and down and down she tumbled and crashed falling what felt like forever past the last ray of light and in to darkness.

And then it stopped. With a crash she landed in the room below, crumpled on the stone like a heap of so much discarded scrap. Dust kicked up in a small plume from the dirty floor, and settled just as quickly on and around her. Fluids dripped from the torn limbs and ligaments, and sparks still sputtered about from ripped wires - still alive, but not for long.

She lay there, drifting somewhere near the edge of awareness, in pain but not in a way any human had ever felt. It was constant. No one place hurt worse than the others. It was too intense for that. Her breath came in weak, whimpering gasps, the fans placed inside her lungs for cooling sputtering and faltering as they tried to find some way to continue working.

Her red eyes stared upward towards the distant hole in the ceiling, wide with the fear she had felt with falling, and now with the slow realizations that were dawning on her.

Overheating. HUD gone dark. Connections to primary systems lost. No response from the primary hard drive. Backups failing. Kokoro unit losing power...

Her eyes moved down, head just barely capable of lifting enough to see that a dull glow was coming from her chest, nearly directly at the center. The spike of wood that had pierced through was still there, the light just barely able to shine past it.

Ohgod... my kokoro... i-it's been punctured... I'm... I'm going to die...

The only thing that still seemed to be working was her voice, which she cried out with, the sound plaintive and pathetic, laced with sobs as tears started to roll down her cheeks.

"H... h-help... please... ! S-some one... p-please... help me... ! Please... I don't want to die..."

Miku-nee... Miku-nee I'm so sorry... D... Duo-kun... I made a mistake... I made a horrible mistake...

"Help me... ! A-anyone... ! Can anyone hear me... ? ... please..."

Twenty minutes... thirty, if I'm lucky... some one...

"Please... d-don't leave me here..."

Some one has to find me...

Edited 2012-04-04 10:55 (UTC)

She was heavy. He knew a bit of that just from studying her. Heavier than your average human in any case. So her weight on that stone? With little in added support. It was no surprise when she fell, and Harth rose from the steps to go do the edge, watching as she fell, but holding onto the metal. She'd landed by the time he looked. Down below in some Chasm or another room far below. He couldn't tell really what was down there, only that she was down there, shrouded in the afternoon shadows.

"So another dies." He said quietly. "More a loss if you weren't just a little doll." He mused, watching down below. He could still see the slightest of movements, see her down before and hear her words.

How long would it take for death to take her?

She couldn't hear his voice. She couldn't even really see him, vision obscured by her own damaged optics. They were just shadows playing with the light above.

She continued to cry out, not so much a broken record as she was too afraid to think beyond her repeated pleas for help.

But nothing ever met her cries. No voice called back, no rope lowered, no help came to her. The minutes ticked by. The sparking stopped, the light from her chest fading bit by bit. Even her pain was ebbing but only because there was so little energy left to devote to her pain receptors.

Haku was still afraid, though. Afraid of dying. Afraid of ceasing function. Afraid of no longer being, and never seeing the faces of those she cared about again.

After a time she went quiet. She wasn't gone yet, but an desire to hang on was slowly leaving her.

She didn't want to be left there, though. So she started to sing, with one final hope that maybe some one would hear the tune and at least find a way to take her broken body out of there.

But even that song started to go quiet after a while.

Soon enough, the last weak notes carried from her lips. Her body gave a sudden jerk, wide eyes going blank and head slumping to the side. The last bits of light from her chest flickered and died.

system error

system error

sys... sys... system... er--...

He started down. Climbing and scaling down the side of the building. How did he do it? Luck and the fact that even if he did fall, he wouldn't be broken. He let go and grabbed the branch of a tree, looking at the corpse of Toph and moving it down closer to the edge so it would be less visible. He started scaling again, and soon he was down below on the platform. On the floor of this dark shaded area. It wouldn't be easy to make it back, may take all day. No idea how far he was away now. But here she was.

He stood over, listening to her song as he scaled down to the floor below but now she was almost done. It was there he picked up her body and began to move away.

She was done, but soon enough there was this dark mist. A shroud of shadows as the body shook. He dropped it, only to see a shadow emerge.

...So this is what happened to Toph? She turned? Ah. If even a robot can transform into a shadow, than what of him? He didn't have a soul.

Even her shadow was timid. The other shadows normally moved with a sort of urgency, gracefully shifting along lacking fear of anything they might encounter. Haku's shadow simply stood, hunched slightly, spindly hands held about where her chest would be.

The glowing eyes stared at Harth, but she didn't advance on him, nearly cowering where she stood.

Harth ventured towards her and grabbed at her wrist, key word, try.

"Haku, Shadow, whatever you may be." He said in a commanding voice.

"If you can use your portals to bring me back to the fountain, I will try to help you." He said, a smirk lacing his features. "You don't want to be a shadow, do you?"

Maybe he didn't know how to make it work, but he'd find a way. Find another vessel for her.

The shadow didn't pull away, and there was enough solid mass for Harth to grab and not go through her wrist. There were no words, not even a moan or a noise, and she didn't nod.

But a portal did open, just below her shadowy feet.

And Harth would hope that she would help him instead of bringing him back to those caskets only to be drained of what benefit he'd gotten from eating Toph a few days prior.

See, if he didn't get what he wanted, he'd only work to destroy her.

She stepped back away from the portal, motioning towards it with a hesitant wave of her spindly hand. She wasn't going to drag him down, which meant he was more than likely going to get what he wanted out of this.

Harth turned his head and nodded curtly, dropping into the portal gently. He wasn't at all disturbed by the cold or the bizarre sensations. Actually, to him? It felt almost warm. Luke warm.

And down he went.

And the shadow followed shortly after Harth vanished from sight, both of them appearing not in the sarcophagus room, but a few feet from the fountain.

She was still a shadow, though. An agent of the darkness of the castle, and while her living mind seemed to be controlling most things, the natural reaction to the light of the fountain caused her to recoil almost immediately after appearing.

As Harth stood there, looking at her reaction, his smile became deeper as he began to understand something. Something beautiful. There was a chance it was just due to her being a robot, but he doubted she'd have such a knee jerk reaction to it.

"You don't like it, do you?" And the gamble. It would either hurt or or something else.

He moved swiftly, grabbing her around the waist and diving into it with her, pushing her into the forefront.

She didn't have a chance to get away from him. She had wanted to - the shadow part of her had wanted to - and she had begun to back up in an effort to distance herself from the fountain and from him. But she hadn't been fast enough.

She was grabbed, hurled in to the fountain with him, a loud splash sounding their entry.

The room fell in to silence after that, ripples in the water the only sign that they had even fallen in.

Harth pulled away, sitting back up to look at the results of his little experiment. He hadn't fallen into another portal yet, and it seems? Some how or another, he wasn't laying upon half tangible form here.

Her normal form had returned to her, solid and real, with only the tiniest bit of shadow curling from her limbs as it left her.

She was still, though, not even drawing air in to her mechanical lungs. No longer broken, she had no reason to remain shut down, but something was preventing her from waking up fully.

Whatever it was, Harth didn't quite care to know. All he did now was pick her up and throw her over his shoulder like a fireman and pray that there was nobody else in at the rooms at this hour. He didn't hear anyone, but you could never count on that. So he moved, shifting himself just in case he did come across anyone so she lay draped across his arms.

Even moving didn't wake her. She lay limply in his grip, more or less a doll to be carried around.

Oh, but she was a doll, wasn't she? Didn't see herself that way? Miraculously, he carried her all the way to his own room and set her on the bed. From there, he started flipping through his books.

Some time passed. A hour. Probably more. Eventually things started working in Haku again. Clicking, whirring, systems starting up, checking, scanning.

Soon enough her red eyes opened, staring blankly at the unfamiliar ceiling above her. What had happened? Why was she here and why did she feel so strange? Disjointed, even.

Right.

She had died.

But she wasn't dead anymore. She was whole. No parts shattered, no limbs torn away. Just... herself, and a lot of frightening memories.

Another chapter, another page turned. Harth had turned his attention to the droid for a bit, then back to the book. He waited for her to say something before he responded.

"Working properly again?"

"... yes," Haku said quietly. Her head turned, red eyes staring at Harth in quiet, tired confusion.

"Why... ?"

"I don't need to explain it, do I?" Harth asked, flipping through another page of his archaic book.

"You fell, completely avoidable."

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject