Of One Blood - Ar Tonelico fanfiction (Shurelia, Mir, 949 words, no warnings)

"We be of one blood, thou and I," Mowgli answered. "I take my life from thee, to-night."
--The Jungle Book


The hallways were saturated with it.

I would have called it a stink, a stench, this metallic bitterness that assaulted the back of my throat, but for that it was not quite a taste or a smell or a sound; it was something more living even than music, a feeling worming its way through my systems like no feeling I'd ever known. It made my throat want to close up, made all the pathways in my brain want to constrict in self-defence, my overloaded mind protesting with painful static hiss. Through the noise, awareness flickered dimly: it wanted to shut me down.

I knew it couldn't overpower me, no more than it could take out the Tower itself, but the desfel thing was trying, and that alone wrenched at me. It had entered my inviolate space, was trying to clone its filthy self into every segment of my being; it was trying to be where it didn't belong. Trying to be everywhere, to fill up every bit of breathing room, to bloat out my code with its garbage.

I couldn't tell if it was me or the hallways that reeked with it anymore, the taste of corruption, and it occured to me that there was no difference; and I fell to my knees, my mind churning with purgative code. It felt like my brain was trying to vomit, largely because it was.

It was everywhere, everywhere in the Tower, and that meant it was everywhere in me too, sickening, no escape--

I tried to raise my voice in song, something to drive off the feeling, but controlling any part of myself felt like an effort. So this is it, I thought, ruefully. If I can't even sing.... The temptation to just lie down and close my eyes was great, but I knew if I did I'd never wake up. At least, not as myself. Life from behind the eyes of some virus-controlled puppet: an unthinkable fate, and it stirred what little fight I had left in me, my brain redoubling its efforts to push out the invader.

It wasn't enough. I was walls, barriers, solid things, and it was liquid, flowing around every obstacle I threw at it, finding the cracks in my defences and battering me directly. Why, Mir? was my last coherent thought before I drowned. Or rather, that was what I expected; but somehow, in the midst of what felt like waves of feeling-sound, I was still there, still conscious, a spark of life within the swirl of the Tower's corrupted data.

As I waited-- no, to wait implies a sense of time; as I existed within the swirl, it began to take on a structure less corrupt, coalesced into some kind of order, within which I thought I could pick out meanings, sentiments. Was Mir trying to communicate?

Leave me be, wretched virus! I wanted to shout, but Mir's presence now seemed to massage the edges of my anger, weakening my desire to protest. The harsh, spiking feelings in my brain were all but gone, replaced by something almost deceptively fond; a cruel parody of a mother's love, a caress that should have made me shudder but, insanely, verged on being comforting. I knew what that meant: she was changing me, drawing me in, confounding my common sense with her creeping seductions; but it was so hard not to want, even as I knew the purity I felt in her was the infection numbing my instincts. Again I fought the desire to close my eyes, this time to relax into the feeling, relentless lapping at my brainstem like surf against a shore.

You remember the ocean, don't you? It was less a voice and more a string of concepts, welling up like memories as if from within my own mind; so familiar, so insidious. You remember when the world wasn't ravaged scraps of land clinging to life. So peaceful, so... hopeful. Let it be perfect again; let's make a paradise....

Presia, Shurelia....

"Shurelia, please!" Mir had screamed, her face twisted and reddened. "You have to understand why I want this. Don't leave me, no, please don't, don't go! You're the only one! Shurelia!"

I'd closed the door on her prison, but I could still hear her squalling from inside, a bird in a gilded cage. No, a monster justly barred. They may have made her a monster, she may not have been to blame, but she was a monster no less. Ironic that in imprisoning what was probably once an innocent, they had made something that now could never be set free.

"Don't hate me! Don't abandon me! Please, Shurelia...."

It was not my place to dwell on it. My only duty was to ensure she did no harm; my only loyalty, to humanity. Not to one such as her, a rogue element, a corruption in the system that preserved the lives of countless people. I wanted to protect. She wanted to annihilate. We were fundamentally at odds; I could not suffer her to proceed.

"Shurelia...."

Shurelia....

The concept, the name and all it stood for, reverberated through me, an appeal to my heart. Pity tore at me, but I swallowed it down, and lashed back at her with pointed thoughts. Stop manipulating me! Hateful creature, world-destroyer, genocidal fiend! I'll play no part in your self-absorbed wallowing!

I thought I felt, for a moment, a stinging sensation; like salt in my eyes, a flash of nauseated pain. The surf of Mir's mind rolled over me one last time, lingeringly, drawing out that last, incongruous wave of consoling oneness.

Then it was gone.

I didn't have time to regret it before my world exploded in light.



From the author: Thanks to-- darn, now I can't remember who it was, but if it was you who quoted that line from the Jungle Book in context of Mir and Shurelia's relationship, this shoutout's for you.