_ _ _Hiiro

"Aw crap." I uttered, realizing how completely screwed I was.

I was so far out of my depth it wasn't even funny. I looked everywhere, even did a full three-sixty left-right first, then up-down. There was nothing here! It was completely disorienting. I thought I was standing on a wall looking down but my ears couldn't tell if I was floating or falling or what. I tried running but the universe was a treadmill I couldn't touch. My legs were moving but I wasn't.

"Bim! It's me, Hiiro!" I screamed into the void.

There wasn't even an echo.

How the hell was I going to find Bim if she wasn't here?! Even if I did see her, how would I reach her when I couldn't even move? There had to be a way!

No, there didn't.

I slumped down as the revelation hit me. Sometimes there was no way out. Sometimes you just died, alone and helpless. No! It couldn't end like this!

"BIM!!! Where are you!?" I screamed into the void.

The void didn't have the curtsy to scream back.

I ran full tilt, going nowhere fast for minutes on end. There was nowhere to go. There was only Nothing. I leaned further into my stride but it made no difference. I couldn't even tell if I was pointed the same way I'd started. Running wouldn't solve anything. I sat down, surprised I could do that much in this empty void. I should have been sucking wind, a sopping mess on the verge of collapse, but I wasn't even sweating.

Maybe I had died.

It seemed odd that the afterlife would just be… empty. It was, I don't know, sad I guess. You went through your whole life and then you got a big desolate void for all your trouble. If God was real and I was right about being dead, then I knew I was also right about his sense of humor. There wasn't even the solace of true oblivion because I was still here, despoiling all this nothing with my own being.

I hoped I wasn't right about being dead but somehow it seemed like I was on to something. I still had my body but everything was effortless here. Not the floaty haze of dreams but definitely surreal enough that I wasn't sure I was still among the living.

I idly tossed a few more fireballs into the void. Up, down, left, right, life, death; it was all lost in abstract here. This could be Heaven for some people, Hell for others. It wasn't really either to me. It just was. As was I.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I wasn't dead just yet. All I had to do was wait a few days to starve to death and I'd know the answer for sure then. Assuming time still worked like it was supposed to here. Assuming I'd know when I should be getting thirsty or sleepy or hungry. I didn't feel any of those right now and try though I might, I couldn't recall if I'd been thirsty back in the plaza before everything had gone to hell.

I should probably get up, but I didn't see much point. It's not like I could keep moving. That put me at something of a loss, like all I knew how to do was keep moving forward. Always trying to put something behind me while chasing something just up ahead without ever catching it. That was life, wasn't it? And now that seemed so mundane, so ridiculously futile.

I still knew I had to find Bim. I had to do whatever I could to help her, it's just that there wasn't a lot I could do right now. I tried to lie down, but without a floor I just found myself standing again now with some minor vertigo. I sat back down and scratched my head. I couldn't move on, so thinking was basically my first and last resort here.

I shouldn't be sitting here thinking about myself like this. It didn't matter if I was dead or not, Bim needed me! If I couldn't save her than Treu would… I didn't really know what he'd do but it'd be bad. I mentally kicked myself over and over again. Get up you lazy bastard! Figure it out! Save Bim! Instead, I just sat there in all the nothing and thought.

All our time together and I still barely knew anything about Bim. I should have focused more on her. Shouldn't have been so stubborn, so awkward, so damned weak! I should have told her I loved her sooner. Maybe if I had things wouldn't have ended up like this. Maybe then I wouldn't be dead or dieing or alone in this nothing. It was selfish, but I thought it wouldn't have been so bad if Bim was in this void by my side. No one should have to die alone.

Something brushed against my skin.

I would have jumped right out of my bones if I could actually move. I still flinched but it just wasn't the same. I looked and there was nothing. But I knew something had been near me. I swatted my good hand around, feeling for invisible cobwebs or whatever. Nothing, no surprise there. I scratched my brain and put it to work feeling like it was the first time I'd done so in a long time.

Something I could feel but I couldn't see it or touch it. Magic?

I reached for my inner flames and let them run amok over my skin. I scanned over every inch I could. There was something there, I knew it, but the flames gave me no answers. At least not directly. Princess might have seen something I didn't. Bim could have figured it out way faster than me. Hell, I'd take Treu right now if it meant getting a second opinion from someone who actually knew how all this magic crap worked.

But me? I didn't have the slightest. I called the flames and they answered. I felt the heat and drank it in. When I wanted something spooky done, I threw fire at it and let it do its own thing. I was never really controlling it, more like steering it to the right ends. I didn't actually know how it worked. Didn't know the science behind it— if there even was any.

I could try burning my way out of this place. No, that was stupid. It was empty for one thing and even if I could burn literal nothing, there was a good chance it'd take way more energy than I had to spare. I could kill myself trying as a last resort if I got desperate enough, but I wasn't there yet. Assuming I wasn't already dead. Assuming I even could kill myself in here. Still… I felt like there was something to the idea.

I didn't know scat about all this devil stuff, but Treu did. He'd said I needed to draw Its attention here. Bim needed a distraction. I lobbed another idle fireball into the distance, watching it intently. It was hard to tell how far it went but it burned for a good thirty seconds before snuffing out. I hadn't played with random fireballs before, I didn't know if that was better or worse than what I could do normally. I pieced it together as best I could.

I was in a void but there was air I could breathe. It wasn't much but that was more than nothing. Could I use the air as kindling? Weren't there bombs that used air as fuel? Princess would know, half the mercs probably knew the answer but I could only guess. Fuel-air bombs sounded like something I'd heard before… If I burned up all the air I needed to breathe, what would happen then? A minute, maybe two, to die knowing I was a damned stupid fool. Assuming I didn't kill myself before then.

Damn it all! I wasn't a planning sort of guy. Most my thinking was all guts and spine. How did Leeroy do it? I could think of a dozen people smarter than me. Not that that did me any good since I was the only one here! How the hell was I supposed to do anything in this place?

"Dammit!" I snarled in feral rage.

The void didn't reply. I don't know why but that pissed me off. I felt the killing heat surge up inside me, begging to be cut loose. All I had to do was let go. The flames would send me to oblivion and that would be that.

I teetered on a knife's edge while my blood boiled. Solitude on one side, Oblivion the other. No way back, nothing but hope for a way forward. I didn't know what to do! Was there even anything I could do or was I already too late?

"Why am I always too weak to protect anyone? Bim… Just once, I wanted to save you."

Something brushed against my skin, like the push of a magnet or something with a static charge passing nearby. I didn't try to grab it this time. Didn't fight it.

"Is that some part of you, Bim?"

The electric sensation didn't dissipate. I let it be. My silent companion as I ruminated in this stygian void.

"I hope it is. I'd feel like a real jackass if I was pouring my heart out for some other girl." I mused with a solemn dry chuckle. "I'm sorry, Bim. Just once, just once I wanted to be the one to save you. You deserve that much. I guess I wasn't man enough to pull it off though. I wish I was strong like you were, brains, confidence, magic. You're brave enough to jump into the unknown every time without regrets but me, I feel like I've spent my whole life looking back. If you were here, I know you'd have figured out a dozen different ways to bust out of here so you could come rescue me like you always do. But not this time, eh?"

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My entire arm was engulfed in the magnetic tingling. I pictured Bim holding my hand and the thought made my heart weep.

"I don't want you trapped in here too, but damn it if I don't wish you were actually holding my hand. Why couldn't you just let me love you, Bim? Even if we're different, even if you could never love me back. Is it really so bad to have someone out there who cares about you? It would have killed me to do it, but I always knew you were too good for me, I would have let you go. I know you couldn't stick around forever. You had to go back to whatever that 'next life' is sooner or later. If you didn't, how would we meet up on the other side?"

I gave the phantom hand at my side a gentle squeeze. In my mind, Bim squeezed my hand back. I closed my eyes to keep the tears from falling even though there was no one around to see.

"I'm sorry Bim. This is all my fault. If I'd never left Intatenrup chasing you, you wouldn't be falling apart right now. I can't imagine what kind of Hell your going through because of me. Because I'm just a stupid fragile weak human. I know there's no way I can stop Treu or whatever that tree-thing is or this stupid Nothing. Maybe I'm just a damned fool thinking impossible thoughts. I'll probably get myself killed trying to make a difference, but I'm still going to try. I couldn't live with myself if I didn't. Even if I do die, well, at least I'll see you on the other side. Maybe I'm just an idiot but at least I'm yours, Bim."

I rose to make my final stand, but the hand interlocked with mine tugged insistently. I opened my eyes and she was there. Only… this wasn't Bim. I could have been looking at Bim's younger sister, her features less defined and still filling out. This familiar stranger was no more my Bim than the burnt copies I'd passed were the real me.

"Bim?" I croaked in a hoarse whisper. "I don't-"

"Yes/No. Kind of? No time." She spat, words flying in a blaze. "No time at all! I'm just a copy of a copy so far down the line I'm practically human. Hiiro! I love you, She loves you! She loves you so much it's literally killing her. Tree? B̵̳̥̌̃u̴̬͝n̶̝̳͒e̸̡̬̒͒ is the thing. It's killing her/me."

Bim's younger clone winced, clutching at her head as pain racked her mind.

"Tell me what to do!" I commanded. The young clone stared at me, confused. "How do I save Bim!"

"You don't." She said with absolute certainty. "There is no saving me. I'm a dead woman walking on borrowed time, but since I'm going to die anyway I wanted you to know. You helped me experience things I'd never know without you. You will be a part of me until the very end. These final minutes together mean more to me than I could ever express. This was always the cost, moments with you or eternity without. I don't regret my choice. I love you, Hiiro."

"I love you too, Bim."

There was so much I wanted to say, so many things she needed to know. Bim's face was convulsing in agony but her eyes held mine and I knew she felt the same. There was no time left for us to find the words we needed. There was no time left to do anything but hold each other and wait for annihilation.

I wrapped her in my arms wishing there was something else I could do. I felt her trembling hands on my back. She was so small right now. Bim had always been taller than me before. I buried her deeper and deeper in my arms, desperate to shield her from what we both knew was coming. If love was enough to save her Bim would have lived forever, but that was a fool's impossible dream. The end was coming.

I'd charged into Hell and all it got me was a few more seconds to hold her in my arms. I cherished each and every one. I couldn't let myself be afraid, couldn't bring myself to think about what would happen after. There was only the woman I loved in my arms for one tragically beautiful moment after then next. The sands of time slipping away from my desperate reaching fingers.

I tried not to think at all, to simply be present in our final moments. Right now, it reminded me of holding Zoe-Esther as she'd died in my arms with a confession on her lips. Was this all I'd ever be? The man who let one woman after another slip through my fingers because I was too weak to save them. Zoe, Sophia, Shenhua, the girl I'd strangled, the Polaris survivors I'd ate to save my own sorry skin all those years ago. If I lost Bim too, I'd never be able to live with myself.

"No! It can't end like this. I refuse! Bim, you're the smartest woman I know but you're wrong. You have to be! There has to be a way I can save you!"

"I wish there were. There's no time. B̵̳̥̌̃u̴̬͝n̶̝̳͒e̸̡̬̒͒ knows I'm here."

As soon as she'd spoke that abhorrent name I could feel Its attention trawling over us. I felt myself being crushed under Its scrutiny, an entire ocean of curiosity bearing down on my back. My brain was being driven out of my own body! I was a ghost staring down at myself vainly shielding Bim's clone.

The void around me looked nothing like it had to my normal senses. This place was like a massive archive of thoughts and impressions all being scanned and sorted and filed by a thing like a cube with fifty-four blank faces. The many-faced Archivist was ripping open Bim's mind, tearing out dozens of moments simultaneously for review. I saw them too, only I wasn't just seeing Bim's memories I was living them all at once, just like the Archivist.

Some it accepted without incident: scribing in a blue grimiore, appreciating the historic significance of a painting, wondering at the molecules that composed the scent of a flower. Most memories weren't so cut and dried. Treu mutilating Bim in the seconds after she'd realized his betrayal. The numbing poverty of the mind that came with being severed from her home plane. Months of tactile abrasion from existing in a dimension so geometrically mundane. Crushing isolation. Physical anguish. Mental duress. Weeks of hardships assailed me in a single second, compounding into a cataclysmic turmoil that should have killed me as the Archivist sifted through days and weeks and months all at once.

It would have shattered me if not for a single beacon in all that churning storm. Me. The Hiiro that Bim had been drawn across dimensions and between stars to meet. In all this unknown chaos and suffering I was some small measure of certainty. Hundreds of moments together were pulled to the fore. It wasn't all bliss and easy breathing. I was the only good thing that hadn't been taken from Bim, yet. It soured every tender look, every sweet embrace, every brief reprieve that wasn't abject misery to her had that dark cloud looming over the horizon.

Because I was a mortal man.

I lived entire weeks of Bim's life in those instants looking through her eyes, knowing her thoughts and experiencing her feelings. She was everything I'd thought she was and so much more. She was a crippled goddess in a strange and alien place. She'd been tortured, deceived, violated and she had learned how miserably powerless being human really was; but she'd also come to know about friendship, small moments of happiness made all the brighter by contrast and above all else she'd discovered the sublime bliss of true love and every single second of every day she'd been terrified of having that used against her. Of having me taken away.

The Archivist couldn't parse the bad from the good. It couldn't tear the hope she'd felt for a future with me from the fear of losing me. Couldn't rend the pleasure of her body against mine from the abrasion of a coarse existence. The Archivist didn't want these vile sensations tainting its pool of knowledge. It cast these memories aside seeking uncorrupted samples, understanding spared from the tainted blight of such blasphemous sensations. It was impossible. Life was sweet and sour all at once without any clean lines to distinguish the two.

The Archivist reached its verdict. The vessel calling itself Bim was unfit for reassimilation. Such corruption was only fit for extermination lest its cancer spread unchecked.

I was falling! I was back in the void, back in my own body again. Bim's clone still trembling in my arms trying to put on a brave face for me. There was no point, I'd seen enough to know it was a front. She was supposed to be an immortal demigod yet her death was barreling down on us. The end was coming for every last shred of her being.

"Hiiro," she said voice quivering. "You have to save yourself."

"No!"

"Yes! You have to live. If B̵̳̥̌̃u̴̬͝n̶̝̳͒e̸̡̬̒͒ annihilates you here you'll-"

"Then I'll have the same fate as you, Bim. I wouldn't have it any other way. You and me, Always and Eternally."

We weren't alone. The Archivist was here too, filling the void on all sides at once. The blank-faced cube was gone, replaced by a crisscross cage of undulating watery eyes connected by a matrix of teeth the color of learning and destruction and devouring. It was the mirror image the living cancer from my nightmares, an interconnected lattice forming triangles that formed helices that formed hexagrams that formed shapes I didn't even know the names of all while thousands of eyes glared down on us.

"Just once I wanted to be the one to save you Bim." I whispered breaking from our embrace, a raging inferno alight in my body.

"I know. Hirro, just save yourself. That'll be enough."

"No." I growled, opening myself to the killing heat inside of me. "Both of us or neither of us. I will never abandon you Bim and like Hell is anyone ever going to take you from me."

The Archivist attacked in a constricting prison of gnashing teeth.

An explosion of flame raced out to meet it.

I'd never truly controlled the flames before. Fire had never been mankind's slave. Ever since the beginning, we'd had an uneasy partnership. Fire demanded respect, discipline and fuel. In turn it was humanity's greatest ally. We never dominated it, we were just steering it to the right ends. I was going to save the woman I loved, no matter what.

The air ignited. The void became a star in fusion, incinerating the Archivist's bared fangs and flash-boiling its eyes. It howled in anguish. It had known of pain without ever experiencing it. I set to task educating this immortal creature. Everything was burning, consumed in the inferno. Even my unnatural flame-retardance wasn't enough to keep my skin from igniting.

I needed more heat! The air was spent, I couldn't breathe the poison atmosphere I'd created! I and I alone was drowning in soupy miasma. Minutes at best, seconds at least. There was nothing left to burn!

The Archivist reformed itself. Compacting in on itself, altering its composition and presenting less surface area for me to blast. I was it a poisoned void with nothing to burn! Nothing between It and Bim except for me.

That was it!

I spared a glance at Bim, so small in my shadow. There was so much I wanted to say. I'd seen inside of her head and I'd have given anything if it meant she could do the same. I didn't want my final actions to get lost in translation. I saw it in her eyes, those perfect golden windows into another life. She understood and that would have to be enough.

The reformed Archivist launched its next barrage of teeth now aimed at me instead of Bim. I was a threat, the bringer of Pain. Hundreds of needle-sharp teeth lanced into me. A fresh hell of icy agony stabbed into me everywhere at once. Shock obliterated all thought in an omnipresent flood. I was dieing.

My brain couldn't process it. My guts took over and my spine gave the order. All that I was, all that I am and all that I ever would be, was fuel for the galaxy's biggest pyre.

My soul went supernova in a blinding final flash.