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rallamajoop...can anyone else believe this thing has made it to part 30 and is still going? Because I'm writing it, and even I'm not sure quite how that happened. o_O
Other parts: The original ficlets, Plot notes, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25, Part 26, Part 27, Part 28, Part 29, Side Story 1
There had been a time when Kurogane would have done anything for Tomoyo. He couldn’t quite place how long ago that was now; it seemed like someone else’s memory rather than his own
Like Souma, the day the world ended left him an orphan, but Tomoyo had found them both in the back when the Complexes were first in construction and seen potential in them, or taken pity on them, and had raised them herself through the worst years when the project was still young. As adults, they'd become her personal bodyguards, though she rarely needed either of them in that role. No-one in the Complex would ever have dreamed of hurting her. She was like a goddess to them, and the worshipped her as the one who had brought hope to this dying world.
There may well have been no-one else in the world who could have done it as well as she. So much had been lost, and in the aftermath so many more sacrifices had to be made just to keep the human race alive; by rights the rules which governed the new Complexes should have been doomed by controversy from the very beginning. It was here that Tomoyo came into her own. With eyes that shone with unshed tears she had told her people that there was no shame in mourning all that was lost, but the task was now theirs to look to the future. When she spoke, every harsh compromise they made became necessary beyond the slightest doubt, every supposedly inhuman measure justified in the name of the greater good. It was something that went beyond question. She would always do what was best for all of them, and her boundless wisdom and vision would be what they all looked to to lead them for as long as it took to repair the world once more.
She was exactly what the people needed.
Kurogane had dedicated his life to supporting that, but he wasn’t sure whether he’d ever taken real pride in it. It was just the job he did.
For a long time, he’d blamed his growing doubts on proximity.
As Tomoyo’s personal bodyguard, no-one saw more of her than he did. She may not have needed guarding, but she did need someone who could do whatever was necessary and who took orders directly from her, and Kurogane and Souma had been raised just for that role. No-one else could make you feel as important as she did. When she made her speeches to her people to tell them how completely essential the efforts of every man, woman and child was to the Complexes’ success, it was never just pretty words from her, it was something she honestly believed from the core of her being. One-on-one, the effect was even more overwhelming in its sincerity.
The upshot was that no-one ever argued with her. Her advisers and direct subordinates tried on rare occasion, but never won. They never seemed to mind either. Tomoyo would listen with the utmost sincerity to what they had to say, and she would listen the same way to any doubts they voiced, and then she would explain with words that no-one could ever question why her decision was the only possible decision that could be made.
There were a lot of those meetings over the years, with a lot of different representatives and committees, all the endless divisions that had been established to run their project, but none of whom were ever capable of making their most vital decisions without Tomoyo’s input. For Kurogane, always watching the proceedings from his place behind her chair, the performance had started getting old. It was like seeing a magician repeat the same magic trick every night to a captive audience that never tired of it. He never could figure out quite how it was done, but he couldn’t convince himself the magic was real either.
Wrapped in Tomoyo’s silver words, any atrocity could be justified. It became unquestionable that supplies that supported the young and healthy could not be wasted supporting the old and sick beyond their useful lifetimes, or that the people left scraping out a living in the deadlands could be so utterly forgotten and ignored. It had been her inspiration that had allowed the Complexes to be established so fast and prosper so well, but it also meant their future hinged on one person always being right.
To Kurogane, that didn’t seem right at all.
It wasn’t just proximity, it was distance too. As Tomoyo’s agent, Kurogane was one of very few who’s duties took him outside the safety of the Complex on occasion, and brought him into contact with the outsiders. They were unpleasant, desperate people with little sympathy to spare for their more fortunate counterparts on the inside. The Complex dwellers considered them barbaric, and Kurogane himself could rarely muster more than pity for them. But even limited contact with them proved one thing very clearly: they were still people. They had every bit as much right to survive as those on the inside did. The only difference was luck, and that kind of stark reality would have made anyone uneasy.
Tomoyo was endlessly sympathetic, but just as resolved. There would be no compromise, no quarter spared for those outside. It was for their own good. She would speak of them on occasion in her speeches to her people, of their less fortunate brothers and sisters, but in the world weaved by her words what the Complexes did was for the benefit of the future of the whole human race, the outsiders included, and the people inside the Complex went away with their consciences clear; the outsiders so rarely remembered in their thoughts that they might have belonged to a whole other world. It was just that little bit too easy.
Of course, there was no way anyone as perceptive as Tomoyo herself could have gone long without realising that something was bothering someone so close to her as Kurogane, and she could not possibly leave him to struggle with it on his own. Nor could any well meaning person last long when Tomoyo meant to extract an answer from them. She sat and listened with the serenest attention as he made the long and halting admission about his doubts, then she clasped both of her hands around one of his own and replied, “But of course you must question me if you ever fear my decisions may be wrong. I rely on all of my closest advisors to challenge me to justify the judgements I have made. If I can make you understand and agree, that is how we will know the path we are taking is correct.”
Kurogane couldn’t find it in himself to doubt she meant it. If she ever lied, she must have lied so convincingly that even she made herself believe it. She did rely on the people beneath her in every decision she made – that much was obvious. She depended on them to bring her news and information and to offer her their advice, but when it came to making the final decision it was always she who made it, and once her mind was made up nothing would ever make it change.
“What if she makes a mistake?” Kurogane asked Souma one day. It made him uneasy to bring it up out loud, but if anyone in the Complex should have understood, it was her. Souma had been as close to Tomoyo as he was, and must have seen as much of her magic as he. However, Souma took a very different view.
“It is because she’s never lead us wrong that the people trust her,” Souma countered. “Lady Tomoyo has done more for her people than anyone else has – than anyone else could. She has earned our faith in her a thousand times over. Why would you ever question that?”
“So that means she’s infallible?” Kurogane asked.
“She has never claimed any such thing,” said Souma, offended. “That is exactly why she depends on you and me to ensure she never fails. That is why she encourages you to argue with her. That is why she deserves our faith.”
Kurogane may have spent his life in the tutelage of a master wordsmith, but he never mastered the art himself. If anything, he developed a growing distrust for words over the years. There was nothing he could say to an argument like Souma’s.
Nonetheless, the doubts never abated. They weren’t idle concerns either. Just because he never won an argument with Tomoyo didn’t mean he stopped thinking about the ones he’d lost.
The cloning project was one of the worst ones.
As usual, Tomoyo’s logic was unassailable. “We can’t put all our efforts into merely surviving. Our world will not repair itself for us if we only wait. We must make an equal effort to improve ourselves – to prepare for new challenges which may lie ahead,” was how Tomoyo had put it, and like all her proclamations, no reasonable person could have argued.
By the very nature of its isolation the Complex was rendered more terrifically vulnerable than few but Tomoyo’s closest confidents and the scientists she tasked with analysing the danger had ever been allowed to discover. One major outbreak of disease could decimate the population before anything could be done to stop it. Even if a cure was found and it became safe for other Complexes to send aid, a whole valuable installation could be left empty for generations to come. There was no longer any question that suitable replacements might be found from the people of the deadlands – it had been far too many years since any of them had had any contact with civilisation. Every principle the Complex management had based itself on was intended to limit population growth to levels the scant areas the domes protected could support – there would be no one who could be spared to repopulate an empty Complex.
The supposed aim of the project was to create a way to build a population back up again as fast as possible. Humans would be engineered so that they would grow and learn many times faster than usual, so a whole new generation could make it to adulthood within the space of only a couple of years. It was far more than idle fantasy; the main principles behind the process had been discovered years ago. All that remained was to turn theory into practice and fine tune the result.
“There will be other applications too,” Tomoyo had said enthusiastically. “The processes we have developed to reclaim damaged land continue to improve. Plans to expand our Complex may be realised before the year is out. Before long, we will be able to move to entirely new sites to establish ourselves. Think how much faster we will be able to work if such a great limitation is removed.”
All of which only came down to a lot of very fancy words and justifications for human experimentation.
Even after he got his head around the rationale behind them (which was more like him and it declaring a ceasefire so it could be pushed to the back of his mind), Kurogane never did get used to that army of clones she was raising. He maybe could’ve dealt with the failure rate they were turning out – the way so many of them were born visibly broken, that moved like they were in a trance and looked at him with those soulless eyes and so often didn’t even live through their first year. What got him was the way they all looked exactly the same – that every pair of empty eyes that turned to stare right through him as he walked through their midst was the same pair, over and over again.
“Do they have to be made like that?” he asked her flat-out, when the project was in its second month.
“That too has its purpose,” Tomoyo told him regretfully. “If they aren’t able to act as control specimens for each other, we won’t know which variations to the method have been effective. Once we have perfected the process for these two, then we can move on the creating new complete genetic make-ups.”
The impeccable logic of it all didn’t make it any less creepy.
It wouldn’t have been nearly so bad if he hadn’t had to see them so often. The project was kept to one isolated wing – it was little more than rumour to the general population, even to most of Tomoyo’s staff. But few of them had jobs requiring them to be at her side as much as Kurogane’s did, and Tomoyo insisted on taking a personal interest in just about each and every batch. She was delivered an updated report on their progress every morning, her lips pursing sadly whenever she read of a new death. She found the time to see them in person a couple of times each week, her face lighting up with a fond smile which few of them ever figured out how to return as she walked through their midst, stopping to take a hand or stroke a head, to peer into their faces and see which were doing well. It was too easy to believe the clones recognised her too – when she came by, the ones who were most awake would turn to face her, like flowers following the sun. Kurogane didn’t know how she could tell them apart – whether it mattered to her which was which, but still she doted on them as if every one were her own beloved children. Children who would grow up in no more than a year or two, if they lived that long.
“Is it wise to get so attached?” he asked on another occasion.
“It’s the only way we can raise them,” she’d replied, her conviction, as ever, unshakable. “Who will love them if we do not? And how can we trust ourselves to remember that they are to be as human as we are, to work tirelessly to fix them, if we do not care for them?”
Kurogane thought it wasn’t much a case of fixing – that at last check, objectivity had more value than emotional connection when you were saving someone’s life, but there was no arguing with Tomoyo. To love them was to punish herself for every death she caused, and there was a justice to that – however discomforting – that he couldn’t help but see.
***
When the day came when news of a murder at a neighbouring Complex was brought to Tomoyo’s ears, she responded officially by expressing her deepest sympathies for the woman’s family and her hopes that the perpetrator would be caught and brought to justice. No-one expected what the investigation would really reveal.
The Flowright scandal was not the reason Kurogan left. It wasn’t even the last straw – it would be another two year and more after that before he finally made his fateful decision. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t even Tomoyo’s fault. She may have dictated the laws by which they lived, but the job of deciding how they were enforced so far away was one of few things she did leave to others.
Ashura Flowright was a madman. You could argue back and forth about whether it had been life in the Complex that had sent him that way, but the conclusion was inevitable, and so was his punishment. It was harder to be sure what one was supposed to feel about the plight of the two Flowright boys. Their case generated some real sympathy from the whispers that passed through the other residents. Others suggested the twins were probably just as insane as their father.
No matter how long he spent turning the matter around in his mind, Kurogane could never satisfy himself that the ruling should have been as black and white as it was presented. Evidence that the twins had played any accessory to the murder was shaky at best. The crime they were sentenced for was conspiracy to conceal their father’s deeds. Ashura Flowright – mad or otherwise – had risked everything to protect his children. They’d been raised knowing nothing but secrecy by a man who’d taken insane risks to protect them, and now they were being punished for not betraying their own father.
Kurogane didn’t know what the right way to deal with the situation would have been, but he was sure this wasn’t it. Tomoyo’s usual sympathy was as useless for comfort to him as it was to the Flowrights. The incident had genuinely saddened her, but condolences were all she could offer.
“I know how bad it feels to be required to stand useless while events like this pass, but it is not your part to interfere, nor mine,” she told him. “Haven’t you spoken before on how I cannot hope to govern every facet of my kingdom? The other Complexes must be able to deliver their own judgement according to our laws.”
It was strange to find himself wishing Tomoyo would interfere with a decision that wasn’t hers to make. But even if she had… “Would you have handled it the same way if it had happened here?”
“Kurogane, do you believe the twins did not deserve punishment?” Tomoyo asked, looking him directly in the eye. He didn’t have an answer.
“Put yourself in their position. Are you sure this is not just? Everything their father has done – good or ill – he has done for their benefit. He will receive judgement for what he did for them, and they will live always knowing that he was punished for their sake. Do you think they would accept that? Do you think they would prefer that their father shoulders the burden for what he did for them alone? This way, a limited sentence, may be the only way they have to ever feel they have made amends for what he endured on their account.”
“You think they should be grateful to be punished?” Kurogane felt physically ill. “You think they would have asked for this?”
“I believe,” said Tomoyo, “that the kindest thing we can do for them is not to ask them to make such a judgement. This way, they will not be forced to decide what they or their father do or not deserve. They may serve their sentence and return with the knowledge that they have atoned for any crime they have committed.”
“They won’t be back again,” said Kurogane. “Living or dead.”
“Even you cannot predict everything that may pass for them in the next two years,” Tomoyo replied. “Their fate is not yet decided. We can but wait and see.”
Kurogane did wait and see, though it was barely intentional. He didn’t even notice the day had come that marked the end of the Flowrights’ sentence until someone else reminded him of it; it had been so obvious to him that none of the Flowrights would be returning that he’d never bothered to mark it. In any case, it would have been something exceptional if even the twins had been able to time their return that exactly, and several months longer passed before he allowed himself to feel even the slightest empty vindication that his prediction had been correct. But it was hardly much of a victory when he knew that Tomoyo would never admit it even if he brought it to her attention, and for all he could actually prove of the matter, the twins might have had every intention of returning only to fall victim to any of the myriad dangers of the deadlands within a day’s travel of making it back. It was only in his own head that the clarity existed, the knowledge of just how repulsive the thought of returning to the Complexes must have become to anyone who’d seen so clearly what their laws could mean.
It still took him another couple of months after that to come to terms with just where that train of thought was leading him; by which point he must’ve been heading there steadily for years. There was no final trigger in the end, nothing beyond a slow build up of everything he’d never been able to stop himself thinking for so long. If even once he’d seen Tomoyo doubt herself – ask for reassurance, that might have been enough to change things, but she never did. Not even when faced with undeniable proof of what the rules of her Complexes had inspired good people to do had she ever expressed the slightest feeling of guilt – the least wish that maybe the world might have granted her the means to find a better way – even to her closest confidant.
It wasn’t even that she was wrong – god knew what was right in a world like this. He just couldn’t be the one to stand up and defend her anymore.
He’d meant to leave in secret, even if he was sure this was the one thing Tomoyo wouldn’t be able to talk him out of, it was still a conversation he didn’t need to have. Obtaining the supplies he’d need to survive even a few days outside gave him ample opportunity to rethink what he was doing, but he’d been careful to keep that hidden until the last minute too, or at least he’d thought he had.
It was probably more than bad luck that Souma caught up with him on the way out.
He hadn’t meant to kill her. The argument they had could never something have been resolved with words, not even by agreeing to disagree, so vehement was she that he was insane to consider leaving at all. She’d been the one to declare she’d stop him by force if she had to, and after that he hadn’t had much other choice, and he’d been too angry to think straight. He’d been aiming to disable – only she’d seen it coming and jumped in the wrong direction, and that part really had been just bad luck. Kurogane had been too mad and in too much of a hurry to go back and make for certain, but it should have been instantaneous. He hadn’t lost too much sleep over it in the years since, people died for worse reasons. At Her command, Souma had surely killed for worse.
The only thing that made the difference was that Souma had been his ally, had been there at his back to support him when no-one else had been, had known him since childhood. Relationships like that weren’t meant to end that way.
But after a betrayal like Kurogane’s, a fatality or two on the way out could only seal the matter. Once or twice in the years that followed the knowledge of what had happened had even been some kind of cold comfort. He was committed. There was no going back.
Other parts: The original ficlets, Plot notes, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25, Part 26, Part 27, Part 28, Part 29, Side Story 1
There had been a time when Kurogane would have done anything for Tomoyo. He couldn’t quite place how long ago that was now; it seemed like someone else’s memory rather than his own
Like Souma, the day the world ended left him an orphan, but Tomoyo had found them both in the back when the Complexes were first in construction and seen potential in them, or taken pity on them, and had raised them herself through the worst years when the project was still young. As adults, they'd become her personal bodyguards, though she rarely needed either of them in that role. No-one in the Complex would ever have dreamed of hurting her. She was like a goddess to them, and the worshipped her as the one who had brought hope to this dying world.
There may well have been no-one else in the world who could have done it as well as she. So much had been lost, and in the aftermath so many more sacrifices had to be made just to keep the human race alive; by rights the rules which governed the new Complexes should have been doomed by controversy from the very beginning. It was here that Tomoyo came into her own. With eyes that shone with unshed tears she had told her people that there was no shame in mourning all that was lost, but the task was now theirs to look to the future. When she spoke, every harsh compromise they made became necessary beyond the slightest doubt, every supposedly inhuman measure justified in the name of the greater good. It was something that went beyond question. She would always do what was best for all of them, and her boundless wisdom and vision would be what they all looked to to lead them for as long as it took to repair the world once more.
She was exactly what the people needed.
Kurogane had dedicated his life to supporting that, but he wasn’t sure whether he’d ever taken real pride in it. It was just the job he did.
For a long time, he’d blamed his growing doubts on proximity.
As Tomoyo’s personal bodyguard, no-one saw more of her than he did. She may not have needed guarding, but she did need someone who could do whatever was necessary and who took orders directly from her, and Kurogane and Souma had been raised just for that role. No-one else could make you feel as important as she did. When she made her speeches to her people to tell them how completely essential the efforts of every man, woman and child was to the Complexes’ success, it was never just pretty words from her, it was something she honestly believed from the core of her being. One-on-one, the effect was even more overwhelming in its sincerity.
The upshot was that no-one ever argued with her. Her advisers and direct subordinates tried on rare occasion, but never won. They never seemed to mind either. Tomoyo would listen with the utmost sincerity to what they had to say, and she would listen the same way to any doubts they voiced, and then she would explain with words that no-one could ever question why her decision was the only possible decision that could be made.
There were a lot of those meetings over the years, with a lot of different representatives and committees, all the endless divisions that had been established to run their project, but none of whom were ever capable of making their most vital decisions without Tomoyo’s input. For Kurogane, always watching the proceedings from his place behind her chair, the performance had started getting old. It was like seeing a magician repeat the same magic trick every night to a captive audience that never tired of it. He never could figure out quite how it was done, but he couldn’t convince himself the magic was real either.
Wrapped in Tomoyo’s silver words, any atrocity could be justified. It became unquestionable that supplies that supported the young and healthy could not be wasted supporting the old and sick beyond their useful lifetimes, or that the people left scraping out a living in the deadlands could be so utterly forgotten and ignored. It had been her inspiration that had allowed the Complexes to be established so fast and prosper so well, but it also meant their future hinged on one person always being right.
To Kurogane, that didn’t seem right at all.
It wasn’t just proximity, it was distance too. As Tomoyo’s agent, Kurogane was one of very few who’s duties took him outside the safety of the Complex on occasion, and brought him into contact with the outsiders. They were unpleasant, desperate people with little sympathy to spare for their more fortunate counterparts on the inside. The Complex dwellers considered them barbaric, and Kurogane himself could rarely muster more than pity for them. But even limited contact with them proved one thing very clearly: they were still people. They had every bit as much right to survive as those on the inside did. The only difference was luck, and that kind of stark reality would have made anyone uneasy.
Tomoyo was endlessly sympathetic, but just as resolved. There would be no compromise, no quarter spared for those outside. It was for their own good. She would speak of them on occasion in her speeches to her people, of their less fortunate brothers and sisters, but in the world weaved by her words what the Complexes did was for the benefit of the future of the whole human race, the outsiders included, and the people inside the Complex went away with their consciences clear; the outsiders so rarely remembered in their thoughts that they might have belonged to a whole other world. It was just that little bit too easy.
Of course, there was no way anyone as perceptive as Tomoyo herself could have gone long without realising that something was bothering someone so close to her as Kurogane, and she could not possibly leave him to struggle with it on his own. Nor could any well meaning person last long when Tomoyo meant to extract an answer from them. She sat and listened with the serenest attention as he made the long and halting admission about his doubts, then she clasped both of her hands around one of his own and replied, “But of course you must question me if you ever fear my decisions may be wrong. I rely on all of my closest advisors to challenge me to justify the judgements I have made. If I can make you understand and agree, that is how we will know the path we are taking is correct.”
Kurogane couldn’t find it in himself to doubt she meant it. If she ever lied, she must have lied so convincingly that even she made herself believe it. She did rely on the people beneath her in every decision she made – that much was obvious. She depended on them to bring her news and information and to offer her their advice, but when it came to making the final decision it was always she who made it, and once her mind was made up nothing would ever make it change.
“What if she makes a mistake?” Kurogane asked Souma one day. It made him uneasy to bring it up out loud, but if anyone in the Complex should have understood, it was her. Souma had been as close to Tomoyo as he was, and must have seen as much of her magic as he. However, Souma took a very different view.
“It is because she’s never lead us wrong that the people trust her,” Souma countered. “Lady Tomoyo has done more for her people than anyone else has – than anyone else could. She has earned our faith in her a thousand times over. Why would you ever question that?”
“So that means she’s infallible?” Kurogane asked.
“She has never claimed any such thing,” said Souma, offended. “That is exactly why she depends on you and me to ensure she never fails. That is why she encourages you to argue with her. That is why she deserves our faith.”
Kurogane may have spent his life in the tutelage of a master wordsmith, but he never mastered the art himself. If anything, he developed a growing distrust for words over the years. There was nothing he could say to an argument like Souma’s.
Nonetheless, the doubts never abated. They weren’t idle concerns either. Just because he never won an argument with Tomoyo didn’t mean he stopped thinking about the ones he’d lost.
The cloning project was one of the worst ones.
As usual, Tomoyo’s logic was unassailable. “We can’t put all our efforts into merely surviving. Our world will not repair itself for us if we only wait. We must make an equal effort to improve ourselves – to prepare for new challenges which may lie ahead,” was how Tomoyo had put it, and like all her proclamations, no reasonable person could have argued.
By the very nature of its isolation the Complex was rendered more terrifically vulnerable than few but Tomoyo’s closest confidents and the scientists she tasked with analysing the danger had ever been allowed to discover. One major outbreak of disease could decimate the population before anything could be done to stop it. Even if a cure was found and it became safe for other Complexes to send aid, a whole valuable installation could be left empty for generations to come. There was no longer any question that suitable replacements might be found from the people of the deadlands – it had been far too many years since any of them had had any contact with civilisation. Every principle the Complex management had based itself on was intended to limit population growth to levels the scant areas the domes protected could support – there would be no one who could be spared to repopulate an empty Complex.
The supposed aim of the project was to create a way to build a population back up again as fast as possible. Humans would be engineered so that they would grow and learn many times faster than usual, so a whole new generation could make it to adulthood within the space of only a couple of years. It was far more than idle fantasy; the main principles behind the process had been discovered years ago. All that remained was to turn theory into practice and fine tune the result.
“There will be other applications too,” Tomoyo had said enthusiastically. “The processes we have developed to reclaim damaged land continue to improve. Plans to expand our Complex may be realised before the year is out. Before long, we will be able to move to entirely new sites to establish ourselves. Think how much faster we will be able to work if such a great limitation is removed.”
All of which only came down to a lot of very fancy words and justifications for human experimentation.
Even after he got his head around the rationale behind them (which was more like him and it declaring a ceasefire so it could be pushed to the back of his mind), Kurogane never did get used to that army of clones she was raising. He maybe could’ve dealt with the failure rate they were turning out – the way so many of them were born visibly broken, that moved like they were in a trance and looked at him with those soulless eyes and so often didn’t even live through their first year. What got him was the way they all looked exactly the same – that every pair of empty eyes that turned to stare right through him as he walked through their midst was the same pair, over and over again.
“Do they have to be made like that?” he asked her flat-out, when the project was in its second month.
“That too has its purpose,” Tomoyo told him regretfully. “If they aren’t able to act as control specimens for each other, we won’t know which variations to the method have been effective. Once we have perfected the process for these two, then we can move on the creating new complete genetic make-ups.”
The impeccable logic of it all didn’t make it any less creepy.
It wouldn’t have been nearly so bad if he hadn’t had to see them so often. The project was kept to one isolated wing – it was little more than rumour to the general population, even to most of Tomoyo’s staff. But few of them had jobs requiring them to be at her side as much as Kurogane’s did, and Tomoyo insisted on taking a personal interest in just about each and every batch. She was delivered an updated report on their progress every morning, her lips pursing sadly whenever she read of a new death. She found the time to see them in person a couple of times each week, her face lighting up with a fond smile which few of them ever figured out how to return as she walked through their midst, stopping to take a hand or stroke a head, to peer into their faces and see which were doing well. It was too easy to believe the clones recognised her too – when she came by, the ones who were most awake would turn to face her, like flowers following the sun. Kurogane didn’t know how she could tell them apart – whether it mattered to her which was which, but still she doted on them as if every one were her own beloved children. Children who would grow up in no more than a year or two, if they lived that long.
“Is it wise to get so attached?” he asked on another occasion.
“It’s the only way we can raise them,” she’d replied, her conviction, as ever, unshakable. “Who will love them if we do not? And how can we trust ourselves to remember that they are to be as human as we are, to work tirelessly to fix them, if we do not care for them?”
Kurogane thought it wasn’t much a case of fixing – that at last check, objectivity had more value than emotional connection when you were saving someone’s life, but there was no arguing with Tomoyo. To love them was to punish herself for every death she caused, and there was a justice to that – however discomforting – that he couldn’t help but see.
***
When the day came when news of a murder at a neighbouring Complex was brought to Tomoyo’s ears, she responded officially by expressing her deepest sympathies for the woman’s family and her hopes that the perpetrator would be caught and brought to justice. No-one expected what the investigation would really reveal.
The Flowright scandal was not the reason Kurogan left. It wasn’t even the last straw – it would be another two year and more after that before he finally made his fateful decision. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t even Tomoyo’s fault. She may have dictated the laws by which they lived, but the job of deciding how they were enforced so far away was one of few things she did leave to others.
Ashura Flowright was a madman. You could argue back and forth about whether it had been life in the Complex that had sent him that way, but the conclusion was inevitable, and so was his punishment. It was harder to be sure what one was supposed to feel about the plight of the two Flowright boys. Their case generated some real sympathy from the whispers that passed through the other residents. Others suggested the twins were probably just as insane as their father.
No matter how long he spent turning the matter around in his mind, Kurogane could never satisfy himself that the ruling should have been as black and white as it was presented. Evidence that the twins had played any accessory to the murder was shaky at best. The crime they were sentenced for was conspiracy to conceal their father’s deeds. Ashura Flowright – mad or otherwise – had risked everything to protect his children. They’d been raised knowing nothing but secrecy by a man who’d taken insane risks to protect them, and now they were being punished for not betraying their own father.
Kurogane didn’t know what the right way to deal with the situation would have been, but he was sure this wasn’t it. Tomoyo’s usual sympathy was as useless for comfort to him as it was to the Flowrights. The incident had genuinely saddened her, but condolences were all she could offer.
“I know how bad it feels to be required to stand useless while events like this pass, but it is not your part to interfere, nor mine,” she told him. “Haven’t you spoken before on how I cannot hope to govern every facet of my kingdom? The other Complexes must be able to deliver their own judgement according to our laws.”
It was strange to find himself wishing Tomoyo would interfere with a decision that wasn’t hers to make. But even if she had… “Would you have handled it the same way if it had happened here?”
“Kurogane, do you believe the twins did not deserve punishment?” Tomoyo asked, looking him directly in the eye. He didn’t have an answer.
“Put yourself in their position. Are you sure this is not just? Everything their father has done – good or ill – he has done for their benefit. He will receive judgement for what he did for them, and they will live always knowing that he was punished for their sake. Do you think they would accept that? Do you think they would prefer that their father shoulders the burden for what he did for them alone? This way, a limited sentence, may be the only way they have to ever feel they have made amends for what he endured on their account.”
“You think they should be grateful to be punished?” Kurogane felt physically ill. “You think they would have asked for this?”
“I believe,” said Tomoyo, “that the kindest thing we can do for them is not to ask them to make such a judgement. This way, they will not be forced to decide what they or their father do or not deserve. They may serve their sentence and return with the knowledge that they have atoned for any crime they have committed.”
“They won’t be back again,” said Kurogane. “Living or dead.”
“Even you cannot predict everything that may pass for them in the next two years,” Tomoyo replied. “Their fate is not yet decided. We can but wait and see.”
Kurogane did wait and see, though it was barely intentional. He didn’t even notice the day had come that marked the end of the Flowrights’ sentence until someone else reminded him of it; it had been so obvious to him that none of the Flowrights would be returning that he’d never bothered to mark it. In any case, it would have been something exceptional if even the twins had been able to time their return that exactly, and several months longer passed before he allowed himself to feel even the slightest empty vindication that his prediction had been correct. But it was hardly much of a victory when he knew that Tomoyo would never admit it even if he brought it to her attention, and for all he could actually prove of the matter, the twins might have had every intention of returning only to fall victim to any of the myriad dangers of the deadlands within a day’s travel of making it back. It was only in his own head that the clarity existed, the knowledge of just how repulsive the thought of returning to the Complexes must have become to anyone who’d seen so clearly what their laws could mean.
It still took him another couple of months after that to come to terms with just where that train of thought was leading him; by which point he must’ve been heading there steadily for years. There was no final trigger in the end, nothing beyond a slow build up of everything he’d never been able to stop himself thinking for so long. If even once he’d seen Tomoyo doubt herself – ask for reassurance, that might have been enough to change things, but she never did. Not even when faced with undeniable proof of what the rules of her Complexes had inspired good people to do had she ever expressed the slightest feeling of guilt – the least wish that maybe the world might have granted her the means to find a better way – even to her closest confidant.
It wasn’t even that she was wrong – god knew what was right in a world like this. He just couldn’t be the one to stand up and defend her anymore.
He’d meant to leave in secret, even if he was sure this was the one thing Tomoyo wouldn’t be able to talk him out of, it was still a conversation he didn’t need to have. Obtaining the supplies he’d need to survive even a few days outside gave him ample opportunity to rethink what he was doing, but he’d been careful to keep that hidden until the last minute too, or at least he’d thought he had.
It was probably more than bad luck that Souma caught up with him on the way out.
He hadn’t meant to kill her. The argument they had could never something have been resolved with words, not even by agreeing to disagree, so vehement was she that he was insane to consider leaving at all. She’d been the one to declare she’d stop him by force if she had to, and after that he hadn’t had much other choice, and he’d been too angry to think straight. He’d been aiming to disable – only she’d seen it coming and jumped in the wrong direction, and that part really had been just bad luck. Kurogane had been too mad and in too much of a hurry to go back and make for certain, but it should have been instantaneous. He hadn’t lost too much sleep over it in the years since, people died for worse reasons. At Her command, Souma had surely killed for worse.
The only thing that made the difference was that Souma had been his ally, had been there at his back to support him when no-one else had been, had known him since childhood. Relationships like that weren’t meant to end that way.
But after a betrayal like Kurogane’s, a fatality or two on the way out could only seal the matter. Once or twice in the years that followed the knowledge of what had happened had even been some kind of cold comfort. He was committed. There was no going back.
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Date: 2008-06-20 02:50 pm (UTC)Actually, my really big problem with the decision to exile the Flowrights is that it meant three highly trained workers left the Compound's complement. Not good for the Compound, ne?
No, but when you start letting people who've broken the law get light punishments because of their status or usefulness, then any attempt at keeping order is as good as over, and as as far as the Complex's law were concerned, they had broken some very important rules. Anyway, at least in theory, they should've been able to come back to the Complex after their sentence was up. (If they survived that long, that is.)