Through a glass darkly - Long Live The Queen (1/6)

[bottan]

Title: Long Live The Queen
Prompt: Through A Glass Darkly
Parts: [prologue] [chapter 1] [chapter 2] [chapter 3] [chapter 4] [epilogue]
Word count: ~ 28,000
Rating: NC-17 (because mooks are dying all over the place, SORRY NO PORN)
Warnings: violence, blood, terrorism, minor character death, major character death (somehow, but somehow not - it is complicated. >.>;; )

Summary: The desert metropolis of Clow, 109 a. i. FTL: The coronation of a child Queen has the nation in an uproar. A fourteen-year-old boy vanishes. The underground stirs, and somewhere, someone is building a bomb. Amidst all of that, a man without a past appears on private detective Kurogane’s doorstep and pulls him right into the chaos that is rising out in the streets – when all that Kurogane wanted to do was leaving this shithole of a city behind.

PROLOGUE

Fai barged into the tunnel rooms beneath the palace. His breath was unnaturally loud, his steps reverberating from the cool stone walls. A single body, tiny and curled up, lay at his feet. Dark blood was seeping into the sand.

“Syaoran,” Fai whispered. “No.”

Two weeks of search, two weeks passed in the desperate attempt to make contact – lost. The boy was dead.

Fai did not have time for the regret pooling in his stomach. He swallowed it, whirled around to face the chest-high machine. Hidden beneath the smooth, rounded hull were explosives, and the knowledge of what it could do sent shivers down Fai’s back. The bomb was strong enough to wipe out not only the palace and the Child Queen above, but to blow a crater into the structure of the city. A third of the population dead, the military weakened, unrest and panic spreading among the population, Clow itself spinning out of control. Ticking in front of his eyes was the ruin of a nation. Fai ran, almost stumbled, towards the machine, almost dropping the tools as he pulled them from the pockets in his coat.

“No, no, no, it will work, this time it will work,” he chanted. Things had not gone as well as expected, but he had thought he had had things under control, he had thought, he had thought, after watching himself fail so many times, that he would be able to save them all. He should have tried harder, despite the rules, he should have gotten help-

The casing came off and underneath, a forest of cables opened up into the pale light of the tunnels. Feverishly, he fumbled with the holographic glasses on his nose, pulling up the blueprints of the bomb that he had secured. From above, possibly through an old gutter, possibly through a thin part of courtyard tiles, he could hear the ceremony.

Do you swear to rule the country of Clow wisely and according to the holy law? Do you swear to rule in the name of your people?

I swear.

I thus declare you Queen.

He didn’t recognize the layout. He tilted it with shaking hands, using the other to rip off more and more of the thin casing. It were mere seconds that he had left. He had sworn to protect these people. He had sworn.

Cheers broke out. Long live the Queen, they sung, long live Queen Sakura!

They had changed the layouts. They had changed them. He, Fai himself, had changed the flow of events so heavily that the layouts were wrong. 20 seconds left. And he couldn’t prevent it.

“Damn!” Fai shouted. “Yuui, listen to me – don’t trust the blue prints, they’re wrong!” Blindly, he grabbed for one of the wires close to the battery, his hands so slippery with sweat that he barely managed to get a grip. He closed his eyes, and breathed. Then he ripped it out.

For a moment, nothing happened. Fai breathed.

A flash of blinding light. Afterimages through closed lids. A roar so loud is was physical agony. Then, nothing.

Clow City was swallowed in a ball of flames and burned for almost three days.

 ~ go to Chapter 1 ~