Fic: Not Quite Paradise, 15/?

[reikah]

Title: Not Quite Paradise [15/?; ongoing]
Fandom: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Pairing: Fai/Kurogane/Yuui
Author: Co-write between mikkeneko & reikah
Rating: R
Word count: 10,711 this chapter (117,121 total)
Notes: "In a future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery. AU, Kurogane/Yuui/Fai."

Part One - Earth: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Part Two - Mars: [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]

Part Three - Europa: [13] [14]

← back to chapter fourteen

Part three: Europa
poisoning my lonely soul

they liked to tie you down.

a long time ago - or now, maybe, time works strangely for him - fai thinks that would have been something to giggle about with yuui. 'tie you down,' bondage, rope play. one of the strippers at the club they worked used to do this thing with handcuffs and the patrons loved it. Lots of beer spilled to clean up after they were gone. You/Fai remembers.

this was not that sort of tying down. all thick leather cuffs, legs, feet, hands, belly, head. not the throat. no suffocation. lights in your eyes and needles in the dark, fai remembers. no walls, no sense of time, the only way to measure out the moments was in heartbeats and tiny amount of give that let you bang... bang... BANG his hand against the table.

... bang, bang BANG...

There was a soldier, used to come pick him up. Shaggy brown hair, small scar on the jaw, eyes that sometimes forgot to be neutral and looked almost like - that emotion, the one you distantly remember from Yuui who always was too kind for his own good... Oh. That's right, that's it. Soldier had kind eyes, as he bent and cinched the bonding, tight to stop him moving.

It's for your own good, he'd say, or had said. You don't want to move around with what they're doing to your eyes.

You know what they're doing to your eyes, but Fai thought he would be in trouble for saying so. Shocks. Always with the shocks. So he said nothing and you cringed. Safest way to play it. Safest way to be.

Except it's not safety, not then and not now-then, if time can be measured in then and now then now is always then, until they blur (blurred) together; he can see across a million light-years and know things that are happening and he knows safety and he knew he wasn't. Safe, that is, not knowing. He knows he knows. The soldier with the kind eyes was on the ship. Is on the ship. Different face, maybe, but sometimes Fai can see through the jagged rents. They said space and time were entwined, they said the universe is four-dimensional, they said... ant crawling on the blanket, fold the blanket and suddenly opposite corners meet, and maybe he should just take Yuui and fold the blanket -

no, he isn't doing that. can't leave. Shocks.

The brown-eyed soldier is on the ship and Yuui doesn't know enough to be scared. Fai can't go, not with him, they'll hurt him. He can see them now in their faraway rooms, talking to each other, laying plans. Traps. Or perhaps now is then and... and this used to be easier, before they cracked him, he knows. Thinking. That was... oh, what's the word, for things that happened then and not now... ah. Before. What's the other one?

"After," Yuui said. He's sitting in a corner of the bunk reading a novel on the handheld device, but he was stroking Fai's shoulder soothingly. "You're thinking of the concept of 'after,' Fai. Before and after, remember?"

"They're going to catch us," you said. Fai said. Says. Oh, names and dates and times, he used to understand. He remembers.

Yuui breathes out softly through his nose, barely perceptible. Fai sees. He saw most things, now, whether he wanted to or not. "So you've said."

Fai pushes himself up, off his belly, and anxiously curled against his twin. "The brown-eyed man -"

"Syaoran-"

"He was there, I saw him -"

"Fai. Syaoran has been on this ship for the last three years. He wasn't there, okay?"

Fai quiets, fiddles with the threads at the cuffs of Yuui's trousers. 'Syaoran' isn't what the man back then had called himself. He has... had a label on then. Specialist Sergeant. It had been back with the needles in his eyes, scooping out the aqueous jelly. Upgrading it for service. Something. Fai doesn't... didn't know. He leans - leaned against Yuui, and his twin put an arm around his shoulders.

"I saw," Fai said, fretful. Yuui wasn't... he didn't know. That was okay. Fai had always done the knowing for them both. But...

"It's okay, Fai," Yuui said. "Syaoran's the pilot. He's not who you think he is, and he won't hurt you."

Fai turns this concept around in his (crowded) head, found it just made things more confusing. Why, he wants to ask - is asking? He's not sure - why would you put a man like that in the pilot's chair? The man with his military uniform and his breast label, Specialist Sergeant Sagara Sousuke- kind eyes are lies! Kind eyes are lies!

Yuui lets go of his electric book, both hands on Fai's shoulders. His body was stiff, forbidding, even as he made shushing noises. Fai realised he'd been shouting again with a lurch in his stomach and settled, gaze locked with his twin's sad, sympathetic one. "Calm down," Yuui said, with some urgency. "Don't shout, Fai, everyone else is sleeping..."

He speaks... spoke as if to a crazy person, in a hushed, patronizing tone of voice. Fai squinted at him. He's not crazy, he thinks.

"They want me back," Fai said, to remind him. "They want me back. They need me back - kind eyes . Specialist sergeant - they need me back there because, because I can, I'm worth, I can do things, they need me to see - I can't stop, Yuui, they -"

"Ssssh," said Yuui. "It's okay, it's okay. We escaped them, Fai. They'll never get you."

Fai can see it ahead of them, sleek and shining with reflected light. Waiting. Patient, but blind. "The Mihara might."

"I don't know what a Mihara is," Yuui said, fiercely, "But they can't have you either. I... I promise."

"They put things in my eyes," Fai says quietly. "Just so I could... I don't want to see, Yuui. Maybe if I - if I gave it back, they could -"

"What? Fai! No!" He had begun to rub at his eyes. Yuui's hands were strong around his wrists. Kazuhiko made you that, Fai thinks, thought. Before.

He was starting to remember how before and after worked.

"Please don't do that," Yuui said, and he sounds distant. "I... I'll see if I can scrounge some optician's equipment on Europa, or if - if Kurogane knows anyplace likely to have some. But you can't scratch yourself, Fai. You'll hurt yourself. Promise me you won't, okay? Because if you keep on, I'll have to... to handcuff you or something, to stop you..."

"They tied me down," Fai says, and thinks of the stripper with the handcuffs again. Suddenly he recalled the tall dark man who had come into the cabin the day he met Sakura/Suu, whenever that was. Was that Kurogane? Were they his handcuffs? Who was he?

Yuui shook his wrists gently, jogging him away. "Fai?" he said, like he was waiting for something. Fai tried to remember. Had he been asked a question, asked to do something? Before was so muzzy. After was dark, but Now, now was the clearest of all.

"We're not safe," he said, and Yuui sighed softly. "They're waiting, I don't..."

He couldn't get them out of here. But maybe if he tried... maybe... they had wanted him to do something. Perhaps he could do it. Yuui was watching him with that sad, disappointed look, so Fai looks - looked away. Specialist Sergeant Sousuke was onboard, eating dinner in the galley and talking to Sakura-Suu; the tall dark man was in his cabin performing maintenance on a sword. And ahead of them was the Mihara.

He'd have to save them. The thought was startling clear, like a drop of icy water into the seething chaos of his head. None of them could See, not like he could. So he'd have to save them. But he couldn't... he couldn't tell them, because they couldn't See. So. He'd have to fix it himself, even if it was dangerous. He smiled at Yuui, who gave him a worn-down but genuine one in return.

"I think I want to read," he said. "Can I look at your book?"

Surprise flashed across Yuui's face. "My reader? Um..."

Fai says nothing, just watched. Yuui was frowning at the device. Eventually he sighed and tapped at the screen with the pad of his forefinger a few times, logging out of the shipboard network. This is something that makes sense to Fai. He watched as Yuui signed him into a guest account, stripped of administrator access to core data; he could change nothing, just view. For now that was acceptable.

There had been a Before and as always a Now, and even as the Now became the Before, Fai was beginning to see the shape of the After.

Sakura stared at the new, blank entry in her vision journal. The empty fields stretched out in front of her, mocking her.

Always start with the five W's, Yuui had instructed her. Who, what, when, where, and how. He'd made it sound so reasonable, so simple, like the world would always line up neatly into meaningful little packets like that.

Well, where was simple enough. Sakura wrote, Int'r Mokona shuttle. She recognized that much. Her pen hesitated in the blank space beneath, tapping at the space left empty for her to write distinguishing details, things added or out of place. Yuui had been drilling her on that. He'd have her look at a scene, then close her eyes; while her eyes were closed, he'd change a few things (usually with his kinesis, so she couldn't hear him get up and move around) then have her open her eyes and tell him what had changed. It was harder than she'd thought it would be, but she was getting better.

The bland interior of Mokona's shuttle, unfortunately, stumped her. She didn't know it so well as the rest of the ship, and there was just nothing there to be distinguishing. In the end she gave up, left that section blank and moved on to the next part.

Who. Just her. She'd been piloting the shuttle alone, and that was strange enough by itself. She knew how to pilot small spacecraft, of course - the driving age on Mars was fifteen, and everyone on Kurogane's crew had been trained in emergency procedures of all sorts - but in the three years since she and Syaoran had come onboard, she'd never once needed to take the shuttle anywhere by herself.

When. This part was hard. When Yuui had suggested putting calendars on every wall, Sakura had assumed her problems would be solved. Unfortunately, the Mokona's shuttle was one place where the projected displays did not reach. On the other hand, she'd been looking at the computer display, intently, in the vision. There ought to have been a timestamp on that screen, lost in the text somewhere. If only she could remember…

Sakura shut her eyes and lifted her chin, tilting her head back while she tried to concentrate, to bring the captured vision up before her mind's eye. Like the scene recognition exercises, Yuui had been drilling her on her detail memory. He'd set out sets of cards on the table, turning them over to give her brief glimpses before flipping them face-down and challenging her to find matches.

The exercise was similar enough to a game that Sakura had once played on the computer that she'd asked him why she couldn't just do her drills on one of the Mokona's consoles. She'd meant the question to be playful, but the look he'd given her had been completely serious. There are some things that can't be done on computers, Sakura-chan, he'd told her. You have to get out of the habit of letting the computer remember things for you. Your memory must be your own.

That was why he'd insisted that her vision journal be off the computer as well, an old-fashioned bound notebook of flimsy plastic sheets and an actual ink pen to go with them. It felt strange and awkward, but she was getting used to it, and somewhat to her surprise she discovered Yuui-san had been right: it was much easier to remember things she'd written down herself than things she'd looked up or recorded knowing that Mokona would store them for her.

But, like all of Yuui-san's lessons, the memory drills had been interrupted when Fai-san had woken up. More than a month had passed and he still wasn't well, still required all of Yuui-san's time and attention to caring for him. At least the poor man looked much better, all cleaned up and neatly dressed and with his hair clipped smartly. With good medicine and regular meals he was beginning to look a little less skeletally thin, his skin losing some of that awful pallor and his limbs steadying, losing some of that frightening twitch. But he still had trouble carrying on anything like a coherent conversation; he still couldn't focus well on his surroundings, still couldn't remember most of what anyone said to him. He clung to his brother constantly, and Yuui-san had not had time to continue their lessons.

Well, Sakura couldn't exactly expect him to neglect his own brother just to hold her hand through lessons. It was her talent, her responsibility; he'd already shown her the right way to go about things. She'd just have to do her best on her own, that was all, and make him proud of her.

She frowned, her brows tightening as she tried to recall that one piece of the vision to mind. Suddenly, it blazed up before her, a red LED set of numbers. "That's it!" she exclaimed aloud, and hurried to write down the date and time before it escaped her again.

"What's it?" Syaoran's voice came, as the young man ducked his head through the hatch to look at her. "Princess, there you are! Er, I'm not interrupting, am I?"

"Oh -" Sakura found herself blushing, embarrassed at being caught talking to herself. "I'm just doing my, um, homework."

"Homework?" Syaoran looked blank for a moment before his expression cleared. "Oh, your precognition training!"

He said this with a mix of daunted reverence that Sakura found totally unwarranted, considering that all she was doing was racking her brains to write down the details of one little, insignificant vision. "Yes, but I'm a little stuck," she confessed sheepishly.

"I'm sorry to hear that. I know that Yuui-san..." Syaoran trailed off, and involuntarily the two of them glanced off in the direction of the twins' cabin. Syaoran climbed the rest of the way into the gallery, and lowered his voice. "Is there anything I can do to help?"

There probably wasn't, but Sakura didn't want him to go away. The issue of her talent had always been a wedge between them; she knew that he regarded her precognition with a sort of awed respect, as though it put her on a higher level than a non-esper like himself. But Sakura just felt uncomfortable and almost ashamed by his respect, as though she were deceiving him somehow. It wasn't like she had done anything to earn it - she was just born with this talent, nothing more. And nothing she could say had ever been able to convince him that it wasn't as useful or amazing as it sounded; it was mostly useless, boring and frustrating.

So if there was any way she could get Syaoran to stop treating her talent - and by extension her- like some awesome thing on a pedestal, Sakura was willing to give it a try. "Um - sure!" she said.

Syaoran's face lit up in a smile, and Sakura found herself beaming in return as he came and sat beside her on the couch. She turned the pad of paper towards him, and he frowned as he tilted his head to read it.

"Mokona's shuttle interior," he read aloud. "Date - hey, that's barely three weeks from now!"

"Yes," Sakura said. "We'll have arrived in Jovian space by then, so - this is probably something that happens there."

"Where, When, and Who," Syaoran ticked off the filled fields. "So I guess the next question is, what are you doing there?"

"I wish I knew!" The words came out with more vehemence than she would have liked, and Sakura tried to rein in her frustration. "I'm looking at a computer display in the shuttle. But it goes by too fast - I don't know what I'm doing!"

"Would it help to go down to the shuttle now?" Syaoran offered. "You could look at the screen and see if it reminds you..."

Sakura thought about it, chewing on her lip, but then shook her head. "I'd better not," she said fretfully. "I - I don't think I'd be able to tell the difference between what I remember from the vision, and what I was seeing right in front of me. I just don't know!"

"Okay, okay," Syaoran said soothingly. Somehow, his hand found its way to the back of the couch, patting her shoulder gently. "Let's just look at this another way. Logically. There are only so many different kinds of displays that the Mokona's shuttle could have been showing, right? So let's start with that. Was it an inventory display, personnel directory, broadcast, game..."

Sakura shook her head to each one. "It was an astro plot," she said. "I - I couldn't tell you where, but it was definitely an astrography plot."

"So now we're getting somewhere," Syaoran said. "Were you traveling somewhere? Maybe from the Mokona to a station?"

"Maybe..." Sakura said doubtfully. It was logical, but... "There were - there were some things on the side of the screens. Algorithms - running some sort of countdown..."

"A tracking plot?" Syaoran the pilot suggested.

"Yes!" Sakura cried, the sudden certainty bursting like an explosion of euphoric certainty. "That's it, that's what it was! A tracking plot!"

"Wow!" Syaoran sat back, his ears turning pink, trying not to look too pleased at having come up with the answer. "What could you be tracking out there, though?"

Sakura shrugged slightly, as she blissfully wrote down 'tracking plot, local space' on her form. 'Running scan for - ?' "I'm afraid I really don't know," she said. "If there's any clues, it must be hidden in the..." She frowned, and tapped the end of the pen against the one remaining blank space.

"How it feels," Syaoran finished for her. "That's not much use, I agree. Well - again, let's look at it logically. There's only so many things that you could be tracking out in deep space. If it's bad, it might be a bomb or a missile. If it's good, then it might be - I don't know, maybe some cargo or something? Maybe deep-space salvage?"

Deep space salvage was the dream of every cargo pilot, licensed or not. Every year, hundreds of ships hauled freight back and forth across the system; every year, a few never came back. Space was the ultimate storage locker - even if the ship had been destroyed and the crew killed, the cargo itself was theoretically still good and still retrievable. And according to intrasolar salvage tradition, whatever a pilot found was his by right. For that reason, ships of all sizes - including the Mokona - carried along apparatus for retrieving items from space and stowing them in their cargo bays.

Of course, just because deep space salvage was possible didn't make it likely - the sheer size of space meant that any lost vessel or cargo was a grain of sand lost on an entire desert planet. But still, the dream of lost treasure persisted. If it was indeed salvaged cargo in Sakura's visions, it would be an unquestionable boon for the crew of the Mokona.

Sakura stared unseeingly into the familiar space of the galley as she tried to concentrate on the feeling, or aura that accompanied each vision. Under Yuui's encouragement, she'd tried to develop a system - 'gold' for good, 'blue' for bad. Slowly, over time, the association of feelings with colors had grown stronger, giving each vision an unmistakable 'tint.' But this one was...

Red. A bright crimson around the edges, a strident vermilion curling and trembling from the outlines as if to a heartbeat. It wasn't bad or good that she felt, not exactly, it was... urgency. A frantic desperation, fear tangled with hope, as though there were one chance, one chance left in the universe...

"Princess?" Sakura blinked back to herself, jolted by the familiar nickname, to find that Syaoran's hand had migrated down her arm to clasp her fingers, curled in a loose embrace. She looked up to meet Syaoran's eyes, familiar and warm and brown.

"Whatever it is I'm tracking," Sakura said softly, "it's the most precious thing in the universe."

Yuui was relieved to find Sakura in the gallery. Of course, in a ship this small there were only a limited number of places she could be - rec room, engine room, bridge or private quarters - but if she'd been working, or in her own private space, Yuui wouldn't have felt right intruding on her.

As it was, he almost turned around and snuck out when he saw Sakura and Syaoran sitting together on the rec room couch, hands clasped and faces only inches apart. It was too late, though; they'd heard the hiss of the door as he entered and it was obvious from their guilty expressions and fidgets that the mood had been broken. Sakura coughed slightly. "Um, hello, Yuui-san," she said. "Syaoran was just helping me -"

"With her journal," Syaoran said hastily. "I was just helping her with her visions. Not to say that you couldn't help her better, of course -"

"No, I didn't say that -" Sakura objected.

"I'm sure you two were able to accomplish a great deal," Yuui assured the children. He felt a guilty twinge at the way he'd been neglecting Sakura-chan's lessons, but… there just wasn't time for that any more. He had to focus on Fai, Fai who needed him, and he couldn't afford himself the luxury of indulging in outside relationships.

Which was why… "I was wondering if you could help me with something," he continued, getting to the point of the visit.

"Of course, Yuui-san," Sakura said. She glanced around. "Where's Fai?"

"Asleep," Yuui said, with a wry grimace. It was no wonder Sakura would ask. In the month and a half since Fai had awoken, Yuui had mostly asked for her help in staying with Fai while Yuui did something - had a shower, ate dinner, or just took an hour or so of exhausted sleep for himself. Sakura and Fai had really hit it off - he was biddable and calm in her presence, almost (but not quite) lucid and reasonable. Yuui hadn't been willing to risk him in Syaoran's presence again, not when he was still going on like he had been this morning. And the captain hadn't even darkened his door in weeks, Yuui thought, and tried not to let the thought be bitter. So he had no idea how Fai would react to the tall man.

He caught himself as his thoughts began to drift. The lack of sleep was really getting to him. Too much more of this and he would be as disconnected from reality as… Fai. He forced his mind back to the task at hand. "I hoped you could… do something else for me," he said, casting a helpless look at Syaoran.

The teenager got the message, and jumped to his feet. "I'll be up in the engine room if you need me," he promised, and shimmied his way down the hatch and out of sight. Once he had gone, Yuui checked to make sure that the doors had closed behind him, and came up to perch nervously at the end of the couch. He pulled the reason for his visit out of his pocket, and fiddled with it between his hands.

"I wondered if you could… cut my hair," Yuui said. "Like Fai's. Since you did such a good job on his," he added quickly.

Sakura looked briefly surprised by the request, but her expression quickly turned thoughtful. "Of course," she said. "That would explain…"

Yuui blinked. "What would it explain?" he said.

"Well, it's something I've seen in some of my visions," Sakura said. "At first I thought it might be Fai-san, but there were some where that didn't quite fit. Like being with me in the engine room, in zero gravity. But if it was you with shorter hair, that would make more sense."

"Oh." Yuui sat back, feeling a bit disgruntled. Although logically he knew that it wasn't Sakura's fault - she couldn't control what she saw - he nonetheless felt irrationally peeved that she had known about his decision to cut his hair before he did. This wasn't a choice he was making easily, or lightly. It wasn't just some strands of hair he was cutting, it was bonds - bonds to people he couldn't be with, couldn't devote time to any more.

"It's kind of a shame, though," Sakura added. "Your hair is so pretty. But I guess I can understand. It's a lot of trouble to take care of in space - that's why most spacers have short hair, like me and Syaoran-kun."

Kurogane likes it, too. And had told him so, and had asked him to keep it long. Cutting it was an act of - not quite defiance, since Kurogane did not now and never would control him, but - contrariness, at the least. A drawing of boundaries.

Well, some boundaries needed to be drawn. Yuui made himself smile, and handed the scissors to Sakura. "I do appreciate this," he added, before he turned around and sat himself down on the floor before the sofa.

Sakura was a good cutter, her hands gentle and light as they smoothed strands of hair down across his scalp, lightly pulling sections taut before shearing the blades closed, a vibration and tug and sudden lightness as the hair sprang back. It was slightly curly when it was shorter, a curl not evident when its own weight pulled it close - but Yuui could see the curls perfectly well in his mind's eye even without a mirror, because he saw it in his brother's face every day. The only mirror he would ever need.

The door hissed, and Sakura and Yuui both glanced in its direction with surprise. The surprise grew into astonishment when a head of fair, white-blond hair peeked over the edge of the hatch, followed by Yuui's twin climbing quickly the rest of the way into the gallery.

"Fai-san?" Sakura said with some surprise.

"How did you get in here?" Yuui demanded. Although the doors to individual cabins could be locked or unlocked if the inhabitant desired, as basic security all doors on the Mokona were sealed when closed and could only be opened by a registered member of the crew. Yuui had been registered when he'd signed on board the Mokona, and his access had later been upgraded so he could open any door on the ship that wasn't locked or sealed by the Captain - but Fai had never been registered.

Fai gave his brother a look that said clearly that Yuui was the crazy one for asking such a question. "I flew, of course." After a beat, with Yuui and Sakura both staring at him, he clarified, "In a spaceship. How else?"

"Mokona?" Sakura raised her voice slightly, addressing the ship's AI. "The last person to enter the gallery - how did they gain access?"

Mokona's rabbit-like avatar flickered on screen. "Passenger Yuui Flowright has full access to nonrestricted areas," the toneless voice responded.

"Yes, I know he does," Sakura said with some exasperation. "But I mean the other person - passenger Fai Flowright."

"Passenger Fai Flowright," Mokona recited. "Redirect passenger Yuui Flowright. Passenger Yuui Flowright has full access to nonrestricted areas."

Sakura groaned. "I think I see the problem," she said. "When you first came on board, Yuui-san, you gave us a different name. Remember?"

"Oh," Yuui said, feeling foolish. "Yes, I did."

"So we registered you in the system as Fai," Sakura explained. "Then when you told us later what your real name was, Syaoran went in and renamed your profile as Yuui Flowright. But 'Fai' still points to that file, and all the permissions were inherited."

"What, Mokona can't tell us apart?" Yuui's brows drew down, baffled. They looked outwardly similar, but modern biometric systems should have made it easy to distinguish between them. All of the doors at the Academy had been guarded by retina scanners, and even the oldest buildings had used fingerprint locks. "That doesn't make sense. Don't the doors on this ship have print locks, at least?"

"Um, no," Sakura said, giving Fai a worried look. "They have the option, I think - I'm pretty sure - but the Captain keeps them turned off. He doesn't like them, he says they slow him down. So most of the doors just use a basic bone-scan facial recognition program."

"You're not serious!" Yuui said with astonishment. He'd gotten the idea that Kurogane was something of a technical dinosaur, but this was just taking it to ridiculous levels. "Look, that shouldn't matter. Scans or no scans, any decent AI ought to have picked up on the fact that I'm already in here and Fai is a different person from me! She's a tenth-generation AI, isn't she? Aren't they supposed to be almost as good at interpreting context and intention as humans?"

Sakura made a face. "They are, but," she said, putting stress on the but. "Most of the comprehension programming assumes that they're going to be running with their personality cores turned on. When that's not enabled, a lot of the higher nuances get short-circuited. So when the captain took out her personality core..."

Yuui winced. "I see," he said.

"She's broken," Fai volunteered brightly. "Wouldn't it be better if she was a real person again? I can fix her. It's much easier to fix broken things than broken people." He wandered towards the nearest console. Yuui made an abortive movement to get up and grab him, but Sakura still had hold of his hair and he didn't want to stop with half a haircut.

Instead, he reached out with his power and gently tugged Fai back from the console. "Not now, Fai," he said. "She's not broken. The Captain likes her this way."

"I'll have Syaoran go in and make a separate profile for you later, Fai-san," Sakura offered, as she continued making careful snips of Yuui's hair. Fine, golden threads fell about him in a cloud, making the back of his neck itch.

Fai continued pushing towards the console, stretching out his arm, and Yuui pulled back a little more forcefully than he'd meant to. Fai suddenly whirled around to face them, and his face was distorted by anger. "It's not right!" he yelled.

"Fai, calm down," Yuui said, wincing at the volume of the shout. He shot an anxious glance at Sakura, but she didn't seem terribly shocked or frightened.

"Calm, calm, calm! They always want you to be calm!" Fai said, with an increasingly rising volume. "No thoughts! No feelings. That's just how they like it. Just do, do, do, and never feel!"

He must be talking about his own conditioning at the hands of the Feds, Yuui thought, and his heart twisted painfully inside his chest. "Fai, it's all right," he said. "Nobody here is going to do that to you. You can think and feel whatever you want. It's all right..." He held his arm open to Fai, encouraging him with another gentle tug of kinesis to come and sit by him, hoping to soothe his twin out of the fit of anger.

"No! Not me," Fai said, ignoring the outstretched hand with an angry jerk of his fist. "The Mihara!"

"What's he talking about?" Sakura asked Yuui. Yuui gritted his teeth. He thought Fai had finally gotten off this subject, after ranting about it for the better part of an hour this morning.

"I don't know," Yuui said. "Fai, calm down. There's not -"

"There is," Fai insisted, overriding Yuui's words. "There is. I've seen it. Can't you see it? Suu has - Suu has - Suu has seen it, haven't you?" He looked towards the girl appealingly.

"I'm not Suu," Sakura said, picking up immediately this time that Fai was mistaking her for the girl they'd once known at the Academy. "And I haven't - I haven't seen anything like you're talking about. Sorry."

"Suu's sorry, Suu's sorry - no!" Fai broke off, reaching up to press his palms against his face. "Not Suu. She's not-Suu and she's sorry. Sorry. But you have seen it, right? You've seen it, the Mihara? Not-Suu?"

"Sorry about this," Yuui muttered to the girl, feeling irrationally embarrassed for Fai's behavior. It was one thing when it was just the two of them in their quarters, but he couldn't - he hated for other people to have to see it, the evidence of Fai acting so irrationally. "He's been obsessed with this topic all day. I don't know what he's talking about - I don't know of any ship called the Mihara, there was nothing like that back when we were at the Academy together. I don't know where he's getting this."

"I'm getting it because I get it," Fai interrupted, his tone emphatic. "Planning. An ambush. Where we're going. What's not to get?"

"You know they can't, Fai!" Yuui said, trying not to let his frustration drive his voice up to match his twin's. "There's no docking facilities in Europa space that can handle heavy warships - every time they try to build one, the locals sabotage it. There can't be any Fed battleships out there, and it would take them months to get out there! Anything small enough to make the trip faster than the Mokona would barely be a blip on our radar."

Sakura looked from one twin's face to the other, her expression uncertain. "Um," she said. "I - I haven't heard of anything called the Mihara either," she said. "But if you're asking if I've seen any visions about an ambush at Europa... well, I haven't seen anything like that. Everything I've seen is just normal, day-to-day things about the ship."

"See!" Yuui's voice held a note of weary triumph. "That's what I've been trying to tell you."

"But I don't see everything," Sakura quickly warned them. "It's possible that something could happen that I haven't seen... but well, in terms of any of us being captured or killed, there's just no way that I could miss something that big. After all, before, when..." She trailed off, no doubt troubled by the reminder of her painful departure from her home planet. "I - I didn't actually ever see them coming for me - but I saw myself, after..."

"I understand," Yuui reassured her. "And of course, if that changed, you would tell us, right?"

Sakura nodded firmly, strands of hair bouncing about her face. "Of course!"

Fai's face fell. "You don't see," he muttered. His voice, previously loud enough that it nearly shook the bulkheads, dropped down to a mutter that Yuui had to strain to hear. Not that he particularly needed to, since it all seemed to be a variation on the same things he'd been babbling that morning. "It's not about... after. I don't mean after. It's about the now. She sees after... but not the now. I'm the only one..."

He was going on about before and after again, Yuui realized helplessly. He needed to find some way to snap Fai out of it, to short-circuit this rambling loop he was getting trapped in. "Fai," he said sharply, and his brother's blue eyes fixed on him, blinking uncertainly.

He held out his arms again. "I need you," he said simply. "Come to me?"

Fai's expression lit up with happiness, and he made a beeline for the couch and plopped happily down next to Yuui. "Yuui," he said. "And Not-Suu. Don't worry. I'll take care of it. I can see, I can."

"I'm sure you can," Yuui said soothingly, and he put his arm around Fai's shoulders and rubbed his back. Fai cuddled against his side, and Yuui was torn between melting in relief against his twin, and weeping with the knowledge of what had been lost between them.

Not too long ago, Fai would have meant it when he told Yuui not to worry, that he'd take care of it. No doubt he still did, but that competence - that fighting spirit - had all been lost, shattered and muddled into incomprehensibility.

"Sorry about this," he muttered to Sakura again, rolling his eyes up to the limits of his vision to try to meet her eyes.

"Don't worry about it," Sakura said in a half-whisper, and then her small fingers released from his hair and she gave the top of his head a pat. She stood up, brushing cut strands of hair from his shoulders to the floor. "There, you're all evened up now. I'll go and get the hand-vac."

"Eh?" Fai turned to look at Yuui, his eyes piercing and searching, and he seemed to notice Yuui's haircut for the first time. "You did it!"

"I did what?" Yuui said, somewhat bemused by the abrupt shift of mood.

Fai raised his hands to cup Yuui's face, long, slender fingers brushing back through the newly shorn locks. They tickled. "You look like us again," he said happily.

Yuui couldn't speak through the lump in his throat; and it was just as well Sakura had gone to get the vacuum, since it let him grab his brother and hug him as tightly as he wanted to.

Kurogane sat on the bridge, scrolling through lists of inventory and checking it against data dredged from the Europa mining station. Even though the colonies were tightly clustered, they'd save a lot on fuel if they didn't make a lot of unnecessary side trips. They'd need to restock on food and fuel as well as new armor plating to patch the ugly hole in the Mokona's hull; the repair nanobots had gotten their ship airtight again, but there was simply no way to fix a breach that big without the right materials on hand. At least the armor plates would be cheap out here so close to the heavy mining facilities.

It was boring, tedious work - but paperwork was part of being a ship's captain, and Kurogane didn't neglect any of his responsibilities just because they weren't much fun. They'd be coming up on Europa fairly soon, so this couldn't be put off much longer.

The hatch sounded, and Kurogane's attention sharpened as the head that came up over the railing was blond - blond and short, fluffing out around the man's head in stubborn defiance of the full-gee field. For a suspicious moment he wondered if the crazy twin had made his way onto the bridge; but the body that made the little flip onto the bridge's gravity moved too gracefully for that. "Captain," Yuui said, a little out of breath, and the steady tone of his voice cemented it. "Good. You're here."

The question was, why would Yuui come up here? For the past few weeks they had rarely seen each other; there was no particular need for them to come into contact, but on a ship this size it was ludicrous that their paths wouldn't have crossed even once. Unless Yuui had been deliberately avoiding him and using Mokona to alert him to Kurogane's movements so that they wouldn't run into each other.

Yuui straightened and steadied himself in the new gravity field, and Kurogane's frown deepened as his gaze swept the other man from foot to head. "You cut your hair."

"Yes," Yuui said, and there was a touch of defiance in his voice. "I did."

Kurogane didn't much like the change. Not only was the loss of all that pretty golden fluff to be mourned by itself, but the change made him look even more like his brother. Given how starved and debilitated Fai looked, even now that he'd begun to recuperate some of his lost weight and condition, the similarity was not an improvement in Kurogane's book.

"Well," Yuui said at last, breaking the silence between them. "This is the first chance we've had to speak in a while, eh?"

"You've been avoiding me," Kurogane said pointedly.

"I..." Yuui looked away, hands fiddling with the back of the pilot's chair. "Well. I've been busy with Fai, mostly. He needs me." He shot Kurogane a pleading look, begging for understanding without having to ask out loud.

Kurogane wasn't about to let him get off that easy. "So what did you want to talk to me about?" he asked, folding his arms over his neck.

Yuui took a deep breath, and the shadows from the lights of the cockpit played over the lines and angles of his neck as he swallowed. "I've been thinking a lot, the past few days... About a lot of things, me and Fai, Earth, the Feds, and - a lot of things. But also about you. And me. And I think..." He looked up at Kurogane, his expression solemn. "I think we should break up."

It wasn't like Kurogane hadn't seen it coming, but it was still a slap in the face. "For fuck's sake!" he exploded. "Again with this hot and cold shit! Why is it so hard for you to figure out what the hell you're doing?"

Yuui flinched from Kurogane's anger, face pale, but held his ground. Finally he managed, "It took me this long to figure what what I needed to do," he said. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have even mixed you up in this in the first place, but -

"So - all that happened before," Kurogane said savagely. "When you kissed me before, did you not mean it? That night in the infirmary, did you not want me near? Did you change your mind about wanting me?"

"What?" Yuui stared at him, blue eyes wide and shaken. "No! I mean - yes, of course I meant it, I -"

"If it's not you, then is it me?" Kurogane interrupted him, riding over him relentlessly. "Something I did, some line that I crossed? Have I done you wrong somehow without realizing it?"

"No, no!" Yuui protested, confused. "You haven't. It's not you, it's -"

"If it's not me, and it's not you," Kurogane said, "then what the fuck is it? 'Cause whatever's between us only involves you and me! If you can give me one reason - one reason - why we should end this that has to do with either of us, then I'll accept it and say no more."

And Yuui stood there on the bridge, mouth opening and closing for a moment, and Kurogane felt a moment of satisfaction, bright and triumphant against his seething anger. Thought so. You don't have one, do you?

Finally Yuui cleared his throat and said, in a strained voice, "It - it's me. I just can't... do this any more, Captain. I'm sorry. But Fai needs me now, and I just don't have anything left to give for you -"

"You've got a funny view of relationships," Kurogane said, "if the only thing you think they're about is taking. Maybe your brother is -" an albatross, he thought, a weight around your neck, a burden -"an invalid," he said instead, "but I'm not. I don't need you chase after me all day and wipe my ass."

"Captain Kurogane," Yuui said in a low voice, his hands twisting into fists. "Please don't make this any harder than it is. My first priority has to be Fai - has to be, because he's my only family."

"Most other people can have relationships with their family and other people at the same time," Kurogane snapped. "What's wrong with you two that you can't even manage that?"

"Because we're not like most people!" Yuui shouted. His face twisted with distress, and he turned away abruptly, hugging his arms across his chest and hiding his face from Kurogane. "We can never be like most people."

Kurogane stared at Yuui's quivering back, his mind racing. He'd assumed - from the way Yuui kissed, if nothing else - that the other man had been in other relationships before him, that he'd had experience with other people. But the way he was going about this - thinking of everything in terms of absolutes, all-or-nothing, ready to scorch the earth at the first sign of trouble - made it seem like he hadn't. So which was it?

If Fai were more together - if he'd been the one behind this sudden idea of Yuui's to terminate their relationship - Kurogane would have directed those angry suspicions his way. It was a sure sign of an unbalanced, unhealthy relationship if one half became controlling, demanding their partner cut off all contact with any outsiders due to jealousy or fear. But from what he'd seen of the traumatized blond, he still wasn't anything like that coherent. Which meant this dysfunction was all Yuui's.

That didn't make his part in this any easier.

"Sorry," he said at last, gruff and grudging, but sincere. "I guess maybe I was out of line."

"Just a bit," Yuui said stiffly, turning around again. He'd managed to paste a smile over his face, but his body language was still tense and tight, his arms wrapped tightly over his chest. "I'd expect nothing less from Captain Boundary Issues. The point is, whatever was between us - it's over."

"No. It's not," Kurogane snapped.

"Just so you know, throwing tantrums and ordering me around isn't doing much to change my mind," Yuui said with faux-brightness. "If you can't respect my decisions, then I've got no further business on this ship after Europa."

"What the hell do you take me for?" Kurogane snapped. "I'm not going to try to keep you on board against your will, or make you do anything you don't want to do. You or your precious brother, understand? Give me that much credit at least."

He turned and went towards the hatch, brushing against Yuui as he went; the blond rocked slightly, but stood stiff and still as Kurogane passed him. As he took hold of the top rung of the ladder, he added without turning around, "But I'll tell you something, blondie: this relationship does matter to me, even if it doesn't mean much to you. And I don't mean to give it up without a fight."

He slammed his way out into the corridor, and headed for his personal quarters, where Yuui couldn't follow him. He could use some time alone to cool down, practice his katas in the peace and quiet of his personal sanctuary.

Besides, if Yuui thought that running and hiding was the best way of dealing with his relationship troubles, see how he liked a taste of it for a change.

It is dark. Not just in his cabin, but in other places too; except in Hong Kong, where it's midmorning. Fai can't see into Hong Kong so well. The Eurasian Federation military staff employ a lot of low-level clairvoyants as staff. He knows this. Clairvoyants cancel each other out. They are being told that. Were being told that, whatever. It's hard for them to see, but he watches carefully anyway, until Yuui shook him and said it was time for his pre-bed shots.

He hates the shots. They made him woozy, and he needed to be clear tonight. But if he doesn't have them he hurts, he knew that too. The hurting had started before, in front of not-Suu, the girl with the green eyes. Yuui isn't... wasn't there, and Fai hurt, so he had gone looking for his twin. Not physically, although he tries - tried that, too. But with his sight, which was easy enough. Yuui was in the bridge with the big scary man from before. They'd been arguing. Yuui was upset.

Fai hates the drugs. They slow his brain down. They make it hard to...

…. Oh, he can see, there in the window, a brilliant swirl. He's not aware of going to investigate but he stands there, hands pressed against the ship walls, nose to the glass, and looks. Sees a world with emerald grass and summer skies of blue and gold, moon rising over the horizon. Sea and forest and green. Things gone from his life.

"Fai? Fai, it's time for bed." Yuui is shaking him gently by the shoulder. "Come on, Fai, you've been standing at the window for nearly a quarter of an hour. There's nothing out there but space."

Yuui still doesn't understand. "There's a summer world," he says, "A forest and a beach."

"On Earth? Probably, but we're not going there anytime soon," Yuui says absently. He's sifting through the drawer underneath their bunk for their sleeping t-shirts and boxers. They don't have proper sleeping gear.

"Of course not Earth," Fai said scornfully. Earth is where people plot and hurt. "Out there. Out there."

Yuui looks up. "Well, there might be habitable planets in deep space, too, but it's ten years by cryo-sleep to any of the human colonies," he said in exasperation.

"Ten years nine months sixteen days twelve hours -"

"Yeah," Yuui says. Said. He dragged his wrist over his forehead, eyebrows pinched together. "That. Okay."

"If we were in cryo," Fai said. "I'd let you have the best pod."

Yuui glanced up at that and smiled, only it wasn't really a smile. The edge of his mouth twisted, but his eyes looked sad and distant. "And that's love, isn't it," he said, softly. He sounded like he was talking to someone else. Fai drifted over to him, touching Yuui's cheek with his fingers; Yuui covered his hand with his own, but Fai hardly noticed. There was another scattering of light over Yuui's shoulder, violet this time.

He came back to himself when Yuui gently but firmly pushed him backward until his knees collided with the edge of the bunk. The smile was gone from Yuui's face; his eyes were set and serious as he tugged at Fai's shirt, pulling it up and away from him. Fai let out a muffled protest as his arms were trapped, but Yuui was using his talent and cheating. The shirt came off despite him.

"You have to get dressed for bed," Yuui says/said. "You can't sleep naked, all right?"

Fai thinks about this. He seems to recall they used to sleep naked quite often, together, even. "Why not?"

Yuui hesitated, balling up the old t-shirt slowly, and then looks away. His eyes are soft and sad. "Because you're not you," he said, in a low voice, and then crossed the room to load the shirt into the laundry dispenser.

"I'm always me," Fai says. "I'm me and you're you. And the captain is full of anger."

Yuui glanced over his shoulder at him. "You noticed that, huh? He's... the captain. You - you won't be seeing much of him for a while. I promise, Fai."

"He's not going to try to keep us here," Fai said thoughtfully. Yuui started, and then gave him a long, thoughtful glance. "I wish..."

"What is it?" Yuui held out his hands and the clean shirt floats across the room into them neatly.

"You've got the fine control down good," Fai notes. He can't remember what he wished. A long time ago it was easy; he wanted a home and his Yuui, that was it. And a job that didn't leave them blistered and sore. For food. Now everything is blurry and jumbled and he can't think. Can't wish without thinking.

"Yeah," Yuui said. Once those words had made him glow with pride. Now he seemed sad, like Fai had said something wrong. "Come on, Fai. Time for bed."

"It's ten oh six in Hong Kong," Fai protests.

"We're not in Hong Kong anymore, Fai," Yuui says, sounding slightly frustrated, and Fai goes quiet, watching him carefully. Something changes - changed in Yuui's face at that. "I'm sorry, Fai, I didn't - I'm not mad at you or anything. Just... get changed. Do you need help again?"

Fai frowned down at the shirt. Sleeves are tricky and his hands were shaking. "Yes."

Yuui helped him get changed, which was easy, and then gave him the drugs, which wasn't. Fai didn't like needles, he has never liked needles, and he hates them now.

His twin was careful, though. And after he was finished, he taped a bandage over the injection site and then crouched down next to the bunk, pulling Fai's arm toward him to press a kiss to the crook of his elbow, a few centimeters off the bandage. Fai didn't remember that happening at the R&D centre.

Fai rather thought this meant he needed to kiss Yuui back, but when he leaned over Yuui stood up and took a few steps away, capping the needle with his back to Fai. "I'm sorry if this still leaves you hurting a little," he said. "We've got to decrease the doses bit by bit, to get you off the stuff. We're getting there."

"Yuui," Fai said. "Yuui, will you... I want..."

Yuui rubbed at his face with both hands and then tipped his head back, looking up at the ceiling. Fai followed his gaze and his eyes met space, he was zooming out and out and out into the deep blackness while the kilometers ticked by the millions out of the corner of his eye. Somewhere out there might be something, somewhere, if he kept looking long enough - Yuui had to shake his arm to get his attention.

Still, it was hard to hold a grudge when Yuui made him lie back under the blankets and then asked Mokona to turn the lights off. Yuui didn't sleep naked either, at least not now. He wears a t-shirt far too big for him. Borrowed off the captain.

"Are you angry at the captain?" Fai asked. They'd both looked pretty upset. Fai wasn't sure what the captain had said to Yuui, but if it was bad - if it was bad he would do something. He knew martial arts.

"No," Yuui said, after a pause. "Did Sakura say something to you when you were with her today?" When Fai didn't answer, he sighs. "Sakura and Syaoran are good kids. They're just... bored. It's just gossip. Don't listen to them, Fai, me and the captain are just friends. That's all we are and all we will be."

"Friends are good. Friends help," Fai said agreeably. He angled his head to further press his nose into the crook of Yuui's neck, just behind his ear, and closed his eyes. Friends were good, but machines were better, so he needed... needs... either. "Good night, Yuui."

After a moment Yuui rolled onto his side and put an arm over Fai's hip. His lips, chapped and dry, brushed softly over Fai's forehead. Fai kept very still.

"I love you, Fai."

Well, he knew that. He kept his eyes closed and waited, and waited some more, and he is still waiting when Yuui finally drifts off, his breathing evening out in the steady rhythm Fai remembers from the couch and a ratty little apartment near the river.

Then he moves.

He wasn't an idiot; he checked on the ship's other occupants first. The captain was in his rooms, going through some katas. His movements were fluid and controlled, and he moved like Ginryuu was a part of him. It was a nice sword. Fai hadn't seen many better, and there were a lot flying around amidst the EFS high brass. The sergeant was in the engine room with not-Suu. They were playing music, taking advantage of the ship's inbuilt sound-baffling to keep from waking up the twins or disturbing the captain. His arm is around her waist and Fai kept half an eye on them as he gently began to work himself free of Yuui's sleeping embrace. Typical of the sergeant to hold people down and then dance with girls.

Well, Fai would see to it that they were safe from his machinations.

Yuui stirred when Fai began moving, but Fai knew Yuui, or had known him, had slipped away from him plenty of times when they were young. Fai knows what to do, to push and pull the right way, so that all the sleepiness goes to Yuui and all the wakefulness comes to him. Up till now the shots had made him too sleepy to try this but they didn't, tonight. Maybe he was getting better.

Thinking is becoming clearer.

He doesn't like to do this usually, because it feels unfair; but this is an emergency, Yuui won't listen to him and Fai knows. He doesn't know how long he has until the music and the dancing stop and the sergeant goes back to the bridge.

Fai knew he was going to regret it in the morning. It was easier to live in Now.

He stops only to pick up Yuui's jacket, a huge fluffy thing he got from the captain. It hangs past Fai's hands and off his shoulders and smells kind of musty. Fai's not sure he likes it. Yuui seems to, but then, Yuui seems fond of the captain. Nobody was in the corridor; he crept past the rec room, past the engine door. The friction matting was cold under his bare feet. Under the captain's room with its serpent door painting, undulating and twisting silver on silver. Toward the bridge. He had a goal.

The sergeant had too much control, he'd worked his influence upon the ship in unsavory ways, and Fai had to fix it. He had no choice. They (a confused, unspecified they, that could be the Sergeant or the Captain or some shadowy conglomerate of the two) had broken Mokona, had put their arms around not-Suu, had argued with Yuui and made him upset. As he approached the door leading up to the bridge he checked again on the other crew members; the captain was still doing his katas, only he'd taken his shirt off. Fai paused between one cold step and another, momentarily arrested by the sight of this. Not a bad view, Fai supposed; not at all.

He tore his mind and his Sight back to the sergeant and Not-Suu. They were dancing, fingers entwined, connected to each other and the wall by a single line from the sergeant's belthook. Not-Suu was smiling; "We must look ridiculous!"

"Probably," the sergeant said, with a grin. "But Princess... do you mind?"

Fai wished he had Yuui's talent. He'd've separated them, dealt with the sergeant himself by now. But he was alone, and he only had the Sight, so there wasn't a whole bunch he could do. Well. He could do more, but there would be Shocks, and anyway the universe was vast and -

He walked into the bridge room door face-first. He'd expected it to open for him, and hadn't seen it still in place until he'd been inches away.

"Provide identification," the AI said.

Her terminal next to the door had lit up; Fai covered his nose with one hand and squinted at it thoughtfully. It showed a person putting his thumb on the screen, then standing still and staring at a light just above the terminal. Ret scan? Print scan? Both?

Tentatively, he put his thumb on the screen. Mokona bleeped at him red rejection. So. They had acted, They had shut him out. They didn't want him interfering with Their plans.

Fai stepped back and squinted at the terminal. There was a light at the bottom, green and blue and gold, and he was filled with the curious urge to watch what it led to...

He forced himself out of it. He reached into a pocket of the fluffy jacket and found the reason he had brought it, besides the warmth and the making him look like Yuui from a distance; Yuui's handheld reader.

Fai opened the terminal's cover to reveal the complicated mess of wiring that made up most computers. Her chipboard was of an older make than he was used to, and it took him a moment to find the right cable. It was there in the end, hidden behind the panel itself, and he plugged it into the reader without any difficulty.

He could have transmitted the virus he'd built on Yuui's account, but that would have raised flags in the system. He'd spent most of the day using the reader to go over the Mokona's programs in read-only mode. The sergeant and the captain had two different approaches to writing code; the captain bulled ahead, puffing up his combat protocols with outdated and sometimes illegible languages (who used python in a combat protocol? Honestly.) The sergeant, by contrast, was neater but simpler. His code was tied off at the edges, if unimaginative. The sergeant's skill lay in his own intuitive knowledge and his use of his programs rather than any clever coding.

Still. Basic and unskilled as either of them were, they'd notice a virus. Even Mokona would notice, she wouldn't understand it was for her own good. So. No virus.

Besides, a virus wasn't always necessary. Not when the computer had such glaring weaknesses already built-in, left wide open by the absence of her core personality. The reader already had copies of Yuui's retinal scans, of his fingerprints. It was just a matter of convincing the computer that what was coming in from the read-port was data from the optical reader instead; that what the computer saw was what he wanted her to see...

The door slid open.

He'd never actually set foot on the bridge. He'd seen it before, of course, while spying on the sergeant; but the bridge itself was a new thing, a mystery, and he glanced around briefly when he stepped inside. There were rainbow edges around things, some ports and terminals stood out solid and heavy against the rest and he knew, with a sinking feeling in the pit of his belly, that he didn't have long at all until the rainbow edges became the walking roads.

He crossed to the main console and sat down. The keypad was rolled up and stowed, so he unrolled it and looked carefully at its keys; the sergeant had written - with pen - Cantonese characters over Japanese ones. After a moment of thought, Fai pressed the button that bore no characters but instead the Ichihara company logo of a white butterfly.

The screens unfurled in front of him, winking on one at a time, and after a second Mokona's avatar appeared on the dash; first as an image on one screen, then shining brighter as back-up lights appeared to cast her as a seemingly multi-dimensional hologram. Fai narrowed his eyes.

"Password," she said.

Well, that was easy. He'd watched the sergeant enter this earlier today, while he was looking for Yuui. He glanced down at the keypad and typed in 'zu beng hu'. He wondered what it meant; it wasn't proper Earth Cantonese. Probably Martian; their local dialects were nothing like his own when it came to idioms.

The Mokona's screens switched to the project Syaoran had been working on before bed; a mapping program for the shuttle, to help it make its way back to the ship. Fai glanced briefly through the code, saw six major errors that would cause the program to lock up, freeze or corrupt itself, and forced himself not to correct them. Instead, he dropped out of the GUI and down to the command level.

The captain couldn't have 'removed' Mokona's personality, he knew that even if Yuui didn't. You couldn't do that, not with an Ichihara model. The worst you could do was jailbreak them and partition off the part of the AI that covered emotional responses. The programming was usually sloppy and poorly constructed by part-time or amateur code writers, because nobody else would be stupid enough to cut out a vital segment of the AI. But people were old-fashioned, and after Suwa, well. Distrust of AIs was at its height and you could find programmers to do anything, if you wanted.

Rainbows, around the edges of Mokona's screen; a far-off asteroid field, drifting in perfect serenity...

He was gone ten minutes. Mokona's own clock told him that when he glanced back, and he could feel it in his head, his brain sluggish and slow - and the colors are spreading...

I don't want to be this way, he thought. It was miserable and sad, but resigned. He raised a hand, tangling his fingers in his hair, and yanked - but it is too short, he can't get a grip. Desperately he cast a glance around, found the arm of the chair, and brought his palm down against it. The sound seemed to jolt some of the rainbows away, and with a plummeting feeling of relief in his chest he did it again, then three more times, chasing the colors back.

They'd return. He bent his head toward the computer and set to work. He has a lot to do. And there isn't much time.

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