![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
[X/TB/CCD] Clamp Campus X (5/5)
*gasps* Finished! After almost two years since I posted the first part on November 12th, 2001, Clamp Campus X is finished. I can finish an X fic. Fancy that.
Series: X, CCD, TB
Pairings: Seishirou + Subaru, Tooru x Saya, OMC x Kazuki, Karen + Aoki
Warnings: Almost total AU, fluff, major OOC, original characters, shojo-ai, shonen-ai, romantic attachment of a child to a teenager (platonic only)
Summary: A WAFFy school fic concerning a special group of friends in Clamp High. One of them is followed by sakura petals, another loves computers, yet another's surname is Magami...
Rating: PG-13
CLAMP CAMPUS X: CODA
by Beth (renfri@astercity.net)
The woman seemed like a cancer-ridden child. She was small, fine-boned. She lay in the hospital bed, the sheets as white as her skin. Her head was hairless.
Kanoe remembered white robes, white hair, both just as long and silky.
The doctor by her side moved restlessly. "The brain is still active, but frankly after all these years we've abandoned hope. Even if she wakes up, her body is too ravaged. She would be barely able to open her eyes, and with her congenital defects this-"
She nodded. "I know. Leave us, please."
Once the room was empty, she sat on the bed. Her long black hair fell across a bird-like, emaciated hand, and she imagined she saw the fingers twitch.
But no, she had done her task far too well for that.
She replaced her hair with her own hand. "Let me in," she whispered.
A flash of darkness, and she was falling into a starlit night. A clock face before her, golden and bare, the wheels turning. Then shattered.
The fragments of gears fell around her, changing the landscape.
A woman - a girl, almost - in a small car. Her belly was swollen with pregnancy, and her hair dark and long, as if it had never seen scissors.
"We'll get away from them," she whispered, putting one hand on her abdomen. "We'll escape. You'll fulfill your destiny, my son. Kamui."
Her eyes shone with tears. Her face was drawn with the effort of holding them back. Her mouth was a straight line; it had not laughed in a long time.
Again the broken gears tinkled, chased around by the shadow of a red dragon, and the scene in front of Kanoe's eyes changed. It was the maternity ward of a Tokyo hospital now, and the woman-girl on the bed had long blond hair. She was holding a newborn boy, his face red and wrinkled with the effort of birth.
A man stood by the side of the bed, and the woman looked away from him. He was kind and loved her very much. And she had just given birth to a boy who was not his son, to a boy whose destiny was to die before he turned eighteen.
A calendar by the bed gave the year as 1982, but as she watched the numbers twisted into 1999.
The next transition was accompanied by bright flashes and the tinkle of broken glass. Beyond Kanoe's eyes, an ancient chart of heaven and earth shone in golden tracery on the inside of her eyelids.
In the depths of a dark research facility a baby girl barely one year old sat in a cradle of metal. Around her, wires writhed and twisted. Then three of them shot towards her, piercing her skin.
She did not flinch. Instead she stared at them with wide, blank eyes.
The same eyes shone in the face of a young, young man watching her. His hair was black and short, and his hands clenched tightly on the rail of a viewing platform. His lips moved in a silent mantra.
"Perfect control..."
There was fire in his eyes, but not love.
A shimmer took Kanoe to another research facility. An old man in black robes watched a tank in which a body floated. The person - creature - inside the tank was ageless, genderless, beautiful. And its eyes were completely blank.
"My granddaughter..." he whispered. "My son..."
Flames consumed this scene, and left Kanoe with another. A church, dark and full of candles. A body on the floor, a woman. And a child kneeling by her, a girl in a tattered dress and with the red imprint of a slap on one cheek.
"I'm sorry, mother!" she wailed. "I know I'm a monster, I won't do it anymore, please, just wake up! Mother!"
A swirl of wind and the next scene was barely more than a still image. A boy in the uniform of one of the best private schools stood before a record store, watching a poster of X. He smiled, wistfully, then hurried along.
Good boys don't listen to that kind of music. They grow up, go to university, get an office job and marry a good girl. They never do anything wrong. They're normal.
As he turned away, a sharp gust of wind tore the poster off the window.
Then the scene was obscured by sakura petals, and Kanoe's view changed again.
A cherry tree grove. A high-school boy and one much younger.
"I can't hear you... the wind is too strong..."
"The next time we meet... If at the end of the year I truly love you, I'll let you go. If you mean nothing to me but this body... I'll kill you.
"Let's make a bet."
And a swirl of sakura petals again, and another hospital room - darkness - tears - the sick snapping sound of a breaking bone -
And a girl lying at the foot of a sakura tree, her robes white and her blood crimson red. Her eyes were those of Subaru Sumeragi.
The last image, the funeral portrait of the dead girl, shattered again. Beyond was only darkness, and white feathers. And one person.
Kanoe faced her sister again. The older woman looked the same as in the memories Kanoe recalled: childlike body, white robes, white hair falling to the floor from an old-fashioned arrangement of loops and knots.
Hinoto's smile was twisted and malicious. "Did you like it? You cannot stop destiny. I have all but solved the dream maze you've wrapped around me. Do you think the few weeks I spent here are going to help you?"
Kanoe shook her head mutely. Her face was blank, a china mask.
Hinoto called up still frames of the earlier visions into being around her. They surrounded the two dreamgazers like mirrors. A gallery of human suffering caused by Hinoto's version of destiny. Tooru Magami, fleeing her pursuers. Saya Monou, loved by her husband but unable to love him, and giving birth to a child that would be her undoing. Blind jealousy in Tetsuo Yatouji's eyes as he watched his daughter, the new Mistress of Machines. The creature that was no longer Kazuki Toujou, and would some day answer to the name Nataku. Karen Kasumi, tainted with the stigma of her mother's prejudice and death. Seiichirou Aoki, forced into a mould by lack of a better choice. And the two who loved and despaired, and loved again. Seishirou Sakurazuka, Subaru Sumeragi and the girl whose death bound them forever while shattering any hope of happiness they might have had.
Hinoto smiled. "All this will come to pass."
Kanoe shook her head. "The time for all this to pass - is past."
"What??" The crimson eyes were wide, crazed, wholly unlike her sister.
"You have been here for twenty years. All your plans fell apart."
"NO!"
The scream echoed through the space. All feathers burst into flame and turned into black ashes. Somewhere, something shattered with the tinkle of broken glass.
When Hinoto-who-was-not-Hinoto spoke again, her voice was quiet, spent.
"Why did you do this? To your own sister?"
Kanoe's eyes held no pity. "Because she would have asked me to."
She broke contact abruptly, and she was back in the hospital, sitting on the bed. She moved her fingers to Hinoto's forehead and smiled sadly. "I'm sorry, dear sister."
Around her, the machines started beeping frantically. Doctors and nurses ran in, muttering something about heart failure and brain aneurysms. The one who had talked to her before paused to look at her with a question in his eyes.
She nodded once, decisively.
As she took the elevator to the parking lot, she thought she could smell incense and feel the touch of white silk. On the edge of her hearing a voice whispered, thank you.
* * *
By the time she arrived at the Clamp Campus laboratory building, she had calmed down completely. The furniture of her lab had been rearranged, and her favorite ex-students were already there.
"Kanoe-sensei, I can't believe it's already been ten years since graduation!" a dark-haired woman laughed. Tooru Shirou, nee Magami, had grown her hair out again, but only to her shoulders. "It's going to be great to meet everyone again!"
"But I'm glad we're also having this private reunion," Kazuki put in. She was dressed in a charcoal power suit. "I even managed to get my dear to cut work to get here!"
Her 'dear' scowled, and the facial expression was unmistakably Tetsuo. Apart from that, he was barely recognizable - his hair was short and jet black, and the creases of his Saville Row suit were sharp enough to cut, completely unlike the ever-present wrinkles in his uniform a decade earlier. "It's also a good opportunity for the kids to get to know each other," he pointed out.
Indeed, Satsuki Yatouji and the Shirou children - Fuuma, Kamui and Kotori - seemed to be having great fun playing with the lab equipment. All three mothers looked at them in the kind of rapt adoration only conveyed by the female of a species on their cubs.
Kanoe spared them an indulgent look, remembering her sister's visions. "Anyway, where's Sakurazuka-kun?"
"Oh, he called and said he'd be a bit late," Saya explained. She turned to her life companion. "He called while Tooru-chan was bringing the car around. Something came up with his - ah -"
"Ah?" Tetsuo's eyebrows rose.
Tooru grinned mischievously. "You'll see - while you've been in America leading the Toujou Pharmaceuticals office these last three years, many things changed. Anyway, Aoki-kun, how's the marriage bliss?"
The man in question ran a hand through his artfully cut hair. "Couldn't be better. We've had great fun on the honeymoon." Then he noticed what he had said and blushed crimson.
"Why, Aoki-kun, I'd never tell!" Tooru laughed so hard, she almost fell over her partner's lap. Saya took the opportunity to correct her crooked necklace. "Thanks, love."
"I think that after Karen-chan led him by the nose all those years, Aoki's entitled to some compensation," Tetsuo smirked, then yelped as Kazuki elbowed him.
"I will not comment on that." Karen shook her immaculately coiffed hair and adjusted her Dior skirt. High life obviously suited her, especially on the arm of the owner of an international art and fashion media empire. Her less publicized activities included running an orphanage that was already known in the appropriate circles for taking in occultly gifted children.
Kanoe laughed with her former students, then paused as she heard voices in the corridor. Someone seemed to be apologizing to someone else, and she clearly heard the other person mutter "You're too kind... that will be your undoing. And probably mine, too."
Then silence, and she realized she was not the only one listening to the voices.
Tooru smirked and tiptoed to the door.
"Oi, Sei-chan! Don't you two have a house with a bedroom and a proper bed for that kind of thing?!"
A yelp, and then a perfectly composed Seishirou barged in, intent on murdering his best friend. He was barely restrained by the other person - a fatally blushing and achingly beautiful green-eyed figure that several of those present took a few moments to recognize.
"That was not nice, Magami-san," Subaru said clearly.
"Sorry!" Tooru said insincerely. "Got you in here though. Now that we're all present... I declare this meeting of the Clamp Campus Magic Division Class of 1983 open!"
~OWARI~
Notes:
In X, all Kanoe does is to act against her sister, to stop Hinoto from fulfilling her destiny. In a way, to save her soul. Here, she has perhaps a bit more of dreamgazing talent, and takes a more direct approach.
This has been an exercise in "solve X while killing as few people as possible and keeping everyone approximately in character". Now that you've reached the end of Clamp Campus X, why not tell me what you think about it?
Series: X, CCD, TB
Pairings: Seishirou + Subaru, Tooru x Saya, OMC x Kazuki, Karen + Aoki
Warnings: Almost total AU, fluff, major OOC, original characters, shojo-ai, shonen-ai, romantic attachment of a child to a teenager (platonic only)
Summary: A WAFFy school fic concerning a special group of friends in Clamp High. One of them is followed by sakura petals, another loves computers, yet another's surname is Magami...
Rating: PG-13
CLAMP CAMPUS X: CODA
by Beth (renfri@astercity.net)
The woman seemed like a cancer-ridden child. She was small, fine-boned. She lay in the hospital bed, the sheets as white as her skin. Her head was hairless.
Kanoe remembered white robes, white hair, both just as long and silky.
The doctor by her side moved restlessly. "The brain is still active, but frankly after all these years we've abandoned hope. Even if she wakes up, her body is too ravaged. She would be barely able to open her eyes, and with her congenital defects this-"
She nodded. "I know. Leave us, please."
Once the room was empty, she sat on the bed. Her long black hair fell across a bird-like, emaciated hand, and she imagined she saw the fingers twitch.
But no, she had done her task far too well for that.
She replaced her hair with her own hand. "Let me in," she whispered.
A flash of darkness, and she was falling into a starlit night. A clock face before her, golden and bare, the wheels turning. Then shattered.
The fragments of gears fell around her, changing the landscape.
A woman - a girl, almost - in a small car. Her belly was swollen with pregnancy, and her hair dark and long, as if it had never seen scissors.
"We'll get away from them," she whispered, putting one hand on her abdomen. "We'll escape. You'll fulfill your destiny, my son. Kamui."
Her eyes shone with tears. Her face was drawn with the effort of holding them back. Her mouth was a straight line; it had not laughed in a long time.
Again the broken gears tinkled, chased around by the shadow of a red dragon, and the scene in front of Kanoe's eyes changed. It was the maternity ward of a Tokyo hospital now, and the woman-girl on the bed had long blond hair. She was holding a newborn boy, his face red and wrinkled with the effort of birth.
A man stood by the side of the bed, and the woman looked away from him. He was kind and loved her very much. And she had just given birth to a boy who was not his son, to a boy whose destiny was to die before he turned eighteen.
A calendar by the bed gave the year as 1982, but as she watched the numbers twisted into 1999.
The next transition was accompanied by bright flashes and the tinkle of broken glass. Beyond Kanoe's eyes, an ancient chart of heaven and earth shone in golden tracery on the inside of her eyelids.
In the depths of a dark research facility a baby girl barely one year old sat in a cradle of metal. Around her, wires writhed and twisted. Then three of them shot towards her, piercing her skin.
She did not flinch. Instead she stared at them with wide, blank eyes.
The same eyes shone in the face of a young, young man watching her. His hair was black and short, and his hands clenched tightly on the rail of a viewing platform. His lips moved in a silent mantra.
"Perfect control..."
There was fire in his eyes, but not love.
A shimmer took Kanoe to another research facility. An old man in black robes watched a tank in which a body floated. The person - creature - inside the tank was ageless, genderless, beautiful. And its eyes were completely blank.
"My granddaughter..." he whispered. "My son..."
Flames consumed this scene, and left Kanoe with another. A church, dark and full of candles. A body on the floor, a woman. And a child kneeling by her, a girl in a tattered dress and with the red imprint of a slap on one cheek.
"I'm sorry, mother!" she wailed. "I know I'm a monster, I won't do it anymore, please, just wake up! Mother!"
A swirl of wind and the next scene was barely more than a still image. A boy in the uniform of one of the best private schools stood before a record store, watching a poster of X. He smiled, wistfully, then hurried along.
Good boys don't listen to that kind of music. They grow up, go to university, get an office job and marry a good girl. They never do anything wrong. They're normal.
As he turned away, a sharp gust of wind tore the poster off the window.
Then the scene was obscured by sakura petals, and Kanoe's view changed again.
A cherry tree grove. A high-school boy and one much younger.
"I can't hear you... the wind is too strong..."
"The next time we meet... If at the end of the year I truly love you, I'll let you go. If you mean nothing to me but this body... I'll kill you.
"Let's make a bet."
And a swirl of sakura petals again, and another hospital room - darkness - tears - the sick snapping sound of a breaking bone -
And a girl lying at the foot of a sakura tree, her robes white and her blood crimson red. Her eyes were those of Subaru Sumeragi.
The last image, the funeral portrait of the dead girl, shattered again. Beyond was only darkness, and white feathers. And one person.
Kanoe faced her sister again. The older woman looked the same as in the memories Kanoe recalled: childlike body, white robes, white hair falling to the floor from an old-fashioned arrangement of loops and knots.
Hinoto's smile was twisted and malicious. "Did you like it? You cannot stop destiny. I have all but solved the dream maze you've wrapped around me. Do you think the few weeks I spent here are going to help you?"
Kanoe shook her head mutely. Her face was blank, a china mask.
Hinoto called up still frames of the earlier visions into being around her. They surrounded the two dreamgazers like mirrors. A gallery of human suffering caused by Hinoto's version of destiny. Tooru Magami, fleeing her pursuers. Saya Monou, loved by her husband but unable to love him, and giving birth to a child that would be her undoing. Blind jealousy in Tetsuo Yatouji's eyes as he watched his daughter, the new Mistress of Machines. The creature that was no longer Kazuki Toujou, and would some day answer to the name Nataku. Karen Kasumi, tainted with the stigma of her mother's prejudice and death. Seiichirou Aoki, forced into a mould by lack of a better choice. And the two who loved and despaired, and loved again. Seishirou Sakurazuka, Subaru Sumeragi and the girl whose death bound them forever while shattering any hope of happiness they might have had.
Hinoto smiled. "All this will come to pass."
Kanoe shook her head. "The time for all this to pass - is past."
"What??" The crimson eyes were wide, crazed, wholly unlike her sister.
"You have been here for twenty years. All your plans fell apart."
"NO!"
The scream echoed through the space. All feathers burst into flame and turned into black ashes. Somewhere, something shattered with the tinkle of broken glass.
When Hinoto-who-was-not-Hinoto spoke again, her voice was quiet, spent.
"Why did you do this? To your own sister?"
Kanoe's eyes held no pity. "Because she would have asked me to."
She broke contact abruptly, and she was back in the hospital, sitting on the bed. She moved her fingers to Hinoto's forehead and smiled sadly. "I'm sorry, dear sister."
Around her, the machines started beeping frantically. Doctors and nurses ran in, muttering something about heart failure and brain aneurysms. The one who had talked to her before paused to look at her with a question in his eyes.
She nodded once, decisively.
As she took the elevator to the parking lot, she thought she could smell incense and feel the touch of white silk. On the edge of her hearing a voice whispered, thank you.
* * *
By the time she arrived at the Clamp Campus laboratory building, she had calmed down completely. The furniture of her lab had been rearranged, and her favorite ex-students were already there.
"Kanoe-sensei, I can't believe it's already been ten years since graduation!" a dark-haired woman laughed. Tooru Shirou, nee Magami, had grown her hair out again, but only to her shoulders. "It's going to be great to meet everyone again!"
"But I'm glad we're also having this private reunion," Kazuki put in. She was dressed in a charcoal power suit. "I even managed to get my dear to cut work to get here!"
Her 'dear' scowled, and the facial expression was unmistakably Tetsuo. Apart from that, he was barely recognizable - his hair was short and jet black, and the creases of his Saville Row suit were sharp enough to cut, completely unlike the ever-present wrinkles in his uniform a decade earlier. "It's also a good opportunity for the kids to get to know each other," he pointed out.
Indeed, Satsuki Yatouji and the Shirou children - Fuuma, Kamui and Kotori - seemed to be having great fun playing with the lab equipment. All three mothers looked at them in the kind of rapt adoration only conveyed by the female of a species on their cubs.
Kanoe spared them an indulgent look, remembering her sister's visions. "Anyway, where's Sakurazuka-kun?"
"Oh, he called and said he'd be a bit late," Saya explained. She turned to her life companion. "He called while Tooru-chan was bringing the car around. Something came up with his - ah -"
"Ah?" Tetsuo's eyebrows rose.
Tooru grinned mischievously. "You'll see - while you've been in America leading the Toujou Pharmaceuticals office these last three years, many things changed. Anyway, Aoki-kun, how's the marriage bliss?"
The man in question ran a hand through his artfully cut hair. "Couldn't be better. We've had great fun on the honeymoon." Then he noticed what he had said and blushed crimson.
"Why, Aoki-kun, I'd never tell!" Tooru laughed so hard, she almost fell over her partner's lap. Saya took the opportunity to correct her crooked necklace. "Thanks, love."
"I think that after Karen-chan led him by the nose all those years, Aoki's entitled to some compensation," Tetsuo smirked, then yelped as Kazuki elbowed him.
"I will not comment on that." Karen shook her immaculately coiffed hair and adjusted her Dior skirt. High life obviously suited her, especially on the arm of the owner of an international art and fashion media empire. Her less publicized activities included running an orphanage that was already known in the appropriate circles for taking in occultly gifted children.
Kanoe laughed with her former students, then paused as she heard voices in the corridor. Someone seemed to be apologizing to someone else, and she clearly heard the other person mutter "You're too kind... that will be your undoing. And probably mine, too."
Then silence, and she realized she was not the only one listening to the voices.
Tooru smirked and tiptoed to the door.
"Oi, Sei-chan! Don't you two have a house with a bedroom and a proper bed for that kind of thing?!"
A yelp, and then a perfectly composed Seishirou barged in, intent on murdering his best friend. He was barely restrained by the other person - a fatally blushing and achingly beautiful green-eyed figure that several of those present took a few moments to recognize.
"That was not nice, Magami-san," Subaru said clearly.
"Sorry!" Tooru said insincerely. "Got you in here though. Now that we're all present... I declare this meeting of the Clamp Campus Magic Division Class of 1983 open!"
~OWARI~
Notes:
In X, all Kanoe does is to act against her sister, to stop Hinoto from fulfilling her destiny. In a way, to save her soul. Here, she has perhaps a bit more of dreamgazing talent, and takes a more direct approach.
This has been an exercise in "solve X while killing as few people as possible and keeping everyone approximately in character". Now that you've reached the end of Clamp Campus X, why not tell me what you think about it?
no subject
And there's little Kamui, Fuuma and Kotori, even if just mentioned *_* Needless to say, I loved it very much from beginning to end. Big congrats to you!
no subject
what a nice ending...
...
Does this mean I have to start working on Goblins again? ^^;;;
no subject