Chasing Shadows: An Alice In Borderlands Fanfic (Completed)

Chapter 23: The Cave (Jen 3.0)

After Niragi stepped backwards through the portal, carrying me, he turned and set me gently on the ground.

"Your burns don't look as bad. Can you walk?" he asked.

I took a tentative step, then another. "Seems so." I twirled to face him. "Tada!"

He snorted and whispered, "Baka," but he smiled.

"So, where are we? This isn't Tokyo."

"No, it's the mountain my parents live on. If you follow the trail there, it'll lead back to their house." He shifted the rifle on his shoulder. I looked in the direction he pointed to see a narrow trail carved between the trees.

"Are we going to visit them?"

"Tch. Not if I can help it." He stalked toward a cave off to our right.

"Is this where your rabbithole was?"

"Yeah. I was in a bad place that day. I came here to cool off."

I followed him inside. The cave wasn't very deep. Just enough to where the back was always in shadow. There was a low ledge the left, and, at the back, a hole in the floor was boarded over.

"I like to lie on the ledge and forget myself," he said. He walked over to the boarded hole and leaned his rifle against the cave wall beside it. "That day, the day I went down the rabbithole, I visited my parents only to have them go off on me about how much of a disappointment I was. Twenty-six and no girlfriend. A disappointing job. They couldn't even talk to their friends about me because everything I did disgraced them. How I would never be like my brother. Like they dreamed my brother would have been." He squatted and picked at a board. "I wanted to die that day."

I knelt beside him but remained silent.

"It's funny. That day I found this very rifle in this very spot. I picked it up and took a step backwards. Suddenly, the hole was no longer boarded up. Everything went dark. The next thing I knew, I was walking out of the cave into a desolate Tokyo." He stood. "I don't need this anymore." Kicking lightly at the gun, he left it before walking back out into the sun.

Niragi sighed. "I thought coming back was the right thing to do. Maybe I was wrong. This isn't where I want to be. Here, I have no friends."

"You had no friends in Borderland, either." I shouldn't have said it but I did.

"True. But people feared me there. I had power there. Respect. Here, I'm just a nerd who does coding for games." He kicked at the dirt.

Niragi was different here. All that power he had in Borderland, all that anger and hatred and lust...it was dulled...or gone all together.

"I have nothing," he said.

"You have me."

"My parents will never accept you. They'll just add 'dating a foreign girl' to their list of disappointments."

That hurt. I stepped to him, staring up into his face. "Fuck your parents," I said. "You are not a disappointment."

He stared right back at me. "I am. Fuck." He turned away. "What am I even doing here? I should have stayed in Borderland."

I brought him back to me. "We don't have to stay here. Not Tokyo, not Japan. We can go anywhere. America, Europe, Australia. Where would you want to go? Where do you want to be?"

He got a mischievous look on his face. "Inside you."

I laughed. "Do it, then. Take me right here."

That seemed to snap him back to the Niragi I knew. He attacked my lips with a ferocity that would have bowled me over had he not been holding me.

Niragi backed me up against a nearby tree, pulling up my skirt then pulling down my panties just like after that first game we won together.