Names from behindthename.com

___'s seperate comments from the story.

Tsubasa, Misaki, Haruka, and everyone else mentioned thus far (c) ME

Enjoy or go away.

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______Chapter 3_

Misaki tried to take in the situation; she was now on the floor, which was funny because there didn’t really seem to be a difference between the floor and the…whatever was at the end of her view. That was all that there was to see, just plain white and no distinguished floor or ceiling or walls. Except for the gate.

The gate was enormous. The doors alone were about twice Tsubasa’s height, and the lining of these doors spread at least a foot away from them. And yet, nothing finished the touch quite so well as the carvings on the gate.

Skeletal figures were etched into the gate, depicting an ominous image that wasn’t too easy to directly interpret, but Haruka was fairly certain that she saw hands at the top holding up a baby as if as a sacrifice. Tsubasa, however, didn’t seem phased in the least by the gate itself. In fact, he seemed to be screaming at it in a fiery rage that Misaki didn’t remember him having.

“Get out here, you coward!” shouted Tsubasa. Even with the lack of known walls, his voice somehow echoed. “Come out from behind your precious little gate and face me like the real man you wish you were! And if you even think of sending one of your cute little messengers, I swear, I’ll kill you if it’s the last thing I do!”

The gate opened. Tsubasa grinned slightly and muttered, “Well, I didn’t expect you to come out so soon.”

Misaki looked inside the gate and saw another void—but not the white one she was in. Now the space behind the gate was pure black—until she saw opened eyes. There weren’t any detectable bodies, but there were definitely several dozen pairs of purple eyes of various sizes, opened and staring at her and Tsubasa and everything else outside the gate.

Nothing else happened for a short time. Tsubasa’s grin fell into a frown, and he called into the gate again, “Hey, you coming out or not?”

No response was heard, although Misaki thought she saw some of the eyes squint at him, as if to say, “Oh, will you shut up already?” before they closed and disappeared entirely.

As if replying in the hopes that Tsubasa would shut up, a bubble in the black void boiled to the edge. As the bubble grew, the black crept away in a pattern much like water falling over an egg to wash away paint, revealing—a person. Whoever it was fell to the strange ground, curled in a tight ball.

Tsubasa grinned again, more nervously this time. “It’s about time. What took you so long, Loki?”

The person looked up, revealing a feminine face. At first she seemed speechless.

According to the look on his face, this wasn’t what Tsubasa was hoping for. He frowned again, while his body seemed more relaxed. “Does the name Loki mean anything to you, girl?” he asked, more rudely than Misaki would have.

The girl seemed extremely confused. “U-um,” she stammered, “I-I don’t think I’ve heard that name recently…”

Tsubasa sighed. “And here I thought I might finally be able to have a real excuse to punch him in the face.” He looked at the girl, as if one problem had been postponed for another to come in. “Girl, you look very familiar, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Do you know who I am?”

Misaki looked at the girl as she shook her head no. It seemed impossible, but the black hair swept across her forehead seemed as familiar to Misaki as the back of her hand, even if her incredibly and unevenly short hair seemed to cancel that. And yet something told her that she hadn’t seen this girl even in this lifetime…

The girl seemed to know Misaki, too. “Misaki?” she asked. “Is that really you, or do I just want to see you that bad?”

“Probably,” answered Misaki vaguely. “I might not be the person you’re looking for. Who are you?”

“Oh, um,” the girl was taken aback, but she still told Misaki, “My name is Haruka…Haruka…I can’t remember my last name.”

Tsubasa sighed. “Well, I guess that means you’re one of us now,” he decided. “Now, he probably expects Misaki to be your partner, but…” he looked up at the gate. The girls followed suit, and saw that the gate had closed. Tsubasa frowned and began yelling at it again. “Loki, get out here! I need to talk to you, and I’ll most likely do my best to restrain myself from punching you if you come out now.”

Nothing happened for a few heartbeats, and then the gate opened. No eyes appeared, and no bubbles surfaced, but instead someone was seen walking towards the gate from the inside as though he was walking down a dark hallway.

Tsubasa grinned slightly and noticeably tensed up. “Took you long enough. Care to explain Misaki’s memory loss?”

The man hadn’t even finished coming out of the gate when Tsubasa said this, but he emerged seconds after he finished. He turned to Tsubasa and stared at him coldly with his red eyes. This new man’s skin was extremely pale, and his hair was darker than Tsubasa’s. Then he opened his mouth to speak.

Maybe it was just the general mood of the situation, but Misaki honestly expected his voice to be a demonic deep rumble that shook the nearly nonexistent ground. Instead, his voice almost cracked as he said, “Tsubasa, I thought I told you. She’s going through her transformation, so if we don’t want her to feel so much pain then—”

“You went too far,” Tsubasa growled menacingly. “She forgot too much—she can’t walk, she can’t even stand up by herself, she can’t write—she doesn’t remember her job. And now you throw us a new Gatekeeper—”

“ ‘Us’?” the new person—most likely named Loki—asked Tsubasa, grinning teasingly. “I know you two were close, and I know that you always di—”

“Shut up!” Tsubasa ordered. “You’re changing the topic for no reason. Loki, do you seriously expect her to teach someone else when she doesn’t remember even what she is? I know that she kept a journal, but she can’t read. Why do I get the feeling that you’re trying to make things harder for her, not helping her emotionally?”

Loki’s grin disappeared. “I’m trying to make it as easy for her as possible,” he declared. “Think of it however you like, but this will be best for her. It’s the physical attribute of having memories that’s going to hurt so much.”

“Then don’t take the memories until she’d reached that point!”

“I can’t,” Loki began. He closed his eyes, inhaled, exhaled, and opened his eyes again with a distant expression before continuing. “I know what she’s going to become, but I don’t know all the stages in between. I would have taken all of her memories and her ability to make more until she was done, but I was a little late. The method I had to use took too long, and I couldn’t finish my work. She remembered how to talk. She’s only lost half her memories, at the very most. Her subconscious still knows too much, and she can still have more, and those will hurt so much more. If I’d acted sooner, I could have kept her from hurting at all. But someone else opened the gate on the other side, and then I had to do all that I always have to do when someone does that and don’t have a pass…” he ruffled his own hair with his eyes clenched shut, as if the very memory of the work gave him a headache. “Taking them in, keeping the seams closed so everyone else doesn’t spill out while I’m doing everything else, searching through files to see who’s next to go out, browsing through more files to find that person’s identity, finding the one who the identity belongs to in the first place…even if I could do all this without batting an eye, I’d still go back in time at the first chance so I could repent while I had a chance and I wouldn’t be chained to this damned gate…” Loki was actively frowning by now.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Tsubasa challenged rebelliously.

“Yes I did,” Loki pointed out crossly. “I told you I couldn’t have if I wanted to. Sure, I got a little sidetracked and forgot to say why, but I did tell you whether or not I could. If it’ll make you shut up, I can tell you exactly why I couldn’t just wipe off her memories just before she reached that point.” He waited for Tsubasa to retaliate, but when he didn’t, Loki continued. “It’s simple. Well, not as complicated as most things, but…

“My process is something like alchemy. I have to know every little detail that I’m trying to change and what might be effected and what might effect it—it doesn’t matter what the chances of that complication are, just as long as it’s more than zero. Then I change it, and all that stuff. You don’t really need to know all the details of that. Anyway, Misaki’s transformation is a complicated one. I’m not even entirely sure what it will come out like. I can see eight possibilities, and only one of them wouldn’t cause pain merely by having memories. Well, technically, there are millions, but…well, after a while…I need to explain something else first.

“When Misaki transforms, she’s going to have a lot of different stages in it. The number is nearly infinite—and it’s possible, if unlikely, that she’ll physically have infinite stages. The phases change so rapidly that she’s probably gone through anywhere from two to a dozen just in this sentence. I can’t calculate all the details that fast—it’s just not possible. And near the point where memory hurts—that’s the most unpredictable period. I wouldn’t even be able to change it as she felt it; it’s just too unpredictable. I had to take the memories as late as possible while she was still entirely human. Even a few seconds after that, I wouldn’t be able to do a thing for her to save my life. And she’d have nothing in the world to worry about now if only some idiot hadn’t thought that the gate is suicide. Sheesh, humans these days. Don’t even remember when their lives were actually worth something. It wasn’t that long ago, was it? Since they had an actual purpose?”

“I don’t suppose you could stop talking about my species like a cat with a dirty litter box,” Tsubasa requested almost dryly. “I am standing right here you know. And two other humans are listening, too.”

“Oh,” Loki seemed to have completely forgotten that someone else was there. “Well, you guys go and do whatever it is that you people do now. I’m going back to my gate. I can’t exactly go anywhere else now, can I?” he added tiredly. He turned around, snapped his fingers, and the gate opened.

He was about to take his first step into the gate when Tsubasa called, “Wait!”

Loki turned back around and asked, “What, do you want to keep me from going back to sleep? You’re really evil, Tsubasa. I’m really tired after all this. Someone coming in, someone going out, all the paperwork, erasing memories, explaining why I erased memories,” his last complaint had a bitter emphasis. “What’s your problem and do you seriously think I can help you?”

“What about the girl?” Tsubasa asked.

“What girl?”

“Haruka. The girl who came out of the gate when the new Tollkeeper came in.”

“Oh, her…whatever. I just needed to get her out for a while. I was going to keep her in this realm until I had a chance to brief her and find her a mentor…hey; it looks like her life as a normal human was linked to yours and Misaki’s. How about you two mentor her?” Loki didn’t wait for a response, and the gate closed the moment Tsubasa knew what to say.

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