A Dog Father Cannot Beget a Dragon Son

Interlude (46)

[World 46]

Dr. Nara Shikomoto read off the data and nodded, closing the black terminal window and looking up from his desktop. He walked over to the woman bent over the hospital bed, mindful not to step on the littering of crisp golden petals scattered about the floor. "Don't you have your own bed to return to, Ms. Ishida?"

His host glanced up at him through dark lashes, then turned back to the prone figure on the hospital bed. "Ayako's asleep. What do you have to say?"

Shikimoto pulled up a chair, and sat down himself. "Her diagnosis remains unchanging, and is proceeding along it's expected course. If we take the opportunity when she dies and the worlds reset, we can make her data erasure a system-wide event; you and I will both be completely free by the end of this world."

His host idly wrung his hands. "Death is the only way?" she asked.

Shikimoto shrugged. "It's kinder. You and I both know that. Better a painless oblivion than a recurring eternity of suffering."

His host said nothing, and her hair covered her eyes such that he could not make out her expression. Damn. Don't tell him Fei Chuan was starting to falter? After they already got this far?

Shikimoto sighed, glancing at a heart monitor and watching the screen flicker onto a timer at his slight mental probing. Only a few more hours left. "If it makes you feel any better, the guy she likes is scum. He'll end up dumping her for someone richer." When he noticed Fei Chuan's stare, he shrugged. "It's the plot point of season two."

Fei Chuan snarled soundlessly. "She shouldn't have to die for him."

"Well," Shikimoto smiled, but it was a grim mockery of what a smile should be. "Season one needed a villain too, didn't it?"

"What if she takes the operation?" Fei Chuan's eyes were brimming with the steely determination of a dying man, the way it had all those millennia ago, when it had just been the two of them of opposites of a warzone. When this man had charged at him with a ruthless drive to take him down, and he had indeed gone down. Shikimoto saw this look in his dreams, however systems dreamed. It made his knees week, and a subtle pressure build in the back of his throat. Fucking goddamn it.

"She'd have to want it first. But, you're not seriously jeopardizing our escape plan, are you?" Shikimoto asked.

Fei Chuan's jaw set, and even on such a small and delicate face that expression caused a stirring in Shikimoto's gut. "Do you know what she said to me before she fell asleep?"

The doctor didn't say anything. Both because he was afraid that if he did he would start choking on petals, and because it was a rhetorical question.

"'Nee-sama, it hurts'," Fei Chuan said reverently. "'Loving him hurts. It's not fair.'"

Shikimoto grunted to clear his throat, and said, "And?"

"And I told her to just get the surgery. That I would love her even if she could no longer love me back," his host continued, eyes looking at him beseechingly. "And she said she couldn't do that, because not loving me, not loving the only family she had left, would hurt more. She'd rather die."

Shikimoto stayed silent, because what could he say to that? Still, he tried. "The [Villain] is a good child." And he meant it. While he'd taken care not to grow attached to the little body sleeping on the hospital bed, it didn't change the fact that Ishida Akito had been dealt forty bad hands too many. That it was deliberately done made the whole thing smart more.

"She deserves better." Fei Chuan said.

"Death is better," Shikimoto said, because he could feel their escape plan, once airtight, now slowly unraveling. The scary part was that he didn't really mind. Once they left the system, there'd be nothing binding them together anymore. For them to find each other amongst all those terrabytes of data would be nigh impossible.