What If? - in the stillness

Title: in the stillness of the shining sky
Universe: Trauma Team
Characters/Pairings: Rosalia Rossellini, CR-S01/Erhard Muller, Maria Torres; slight Maria/CR (you probably saw this coming, didn't you?)
Rating: T for character death
Summary: [Semi-AU. For the "What If?" contest.] "No matter what kind of future it is, I'll definitely find you and meet you again." A promise is a promise, and even after death, Rosalia Rossellini is determined to keep hers.
A/N: A re-imagined version of Trauma Team. The quote in the summary is from the KHR doujin L'Ultimo, which is T-rated, slash, and not suitable for young eyes. Download it if you wish, but don't ask why I was reading it.
Warnings: Second person POV. Character death. Bad puns. Some Homestuck references if you really, really squint.

Your name is Rosalia Rossellini, and you are currently running for your life.

Why? Well, you don't want to die; really, who does? You are simply a victim of unfortunate circumstances, just a girl who carries a virus in her blood, a virus that is a double-edged blade. This virus has the potential to both hurt and heal, and as things turned out, it ended up hurting people. In fact, it didn't just hurt people, it made their lives a living hell for the few hours that they had it before they died. So you and your adoptive father escaped to Mexico, where he's been studying the Rosalia Virus, the virus that lies dormant in your blood, for five years. He stares at you now, a wild look in his eyes as he holds the gun up and aims straight at you. You don't know why he's doing this all of a sudden. Right now, you can't really stop to ask why, to wonder about these circumstances you've found yourself in. He's shot once already, and the gun is still loaded; there's no time. You keep running, stumbling when a piece of glass cuts the tender sole of your foot, and scream in pain when the next bullet sears through your leg. Finally, you collapse in the middle of the red asclepias, closing your eyes for the last time. You know that you won't be getting up again. A memory flits through your brain for a brief moment; "no matter what kind of future it is, I'll definitely find you and meet you again," you remember your silent promise to your brother and the girl who helped you at the orphanage.

You realize that you won't ever get to see them again. The man you loved and called "Dad" stands over you now, taking careful aim with shaking hands. The gun spits one last bullet, it enters your chest, and you say your goodbyes to the world with one last word.

"Beginning..."

Your name is Rosalia Rossellini, and you are deceased.

You've been dead for about three years now. One would think that you would be somewhere else by now- heaven, perhaps, hell if you'd really been bad, or hey! maybe there's nowhere left to go, and your spirit should just have dissipated- but the fact is that your spirit remains bound to this earth.

"A promise is a promise," a girl said in a bedtime story that your brother read to you once. Your guess is that that's what's happened here. Your promise that you remembered just before death has tied you to the world, and since you've been given this extra time, you're determined to fulfill it.

Upon attempting to come through on your promise, though, you've run into a bit of a roadblock. Your spirit remains bound to the area surrounding your body; a sort of network of intangible, black, tangled threads links you to the flower field where you lie, and you can't leave the field where you spent your last moments.

But one day, your problem's solution comes in the form of monarch butterflies, which feed on the asclepias growing around your body every year. (Interestingly, over time, the asclepias have shifted from red to blue; you don't come to comprehend what this means until much later.) The monarch butterflies feed on the asclepias, then take off on their annual migration route. Strangely, this year, the black threads seem to lift up from the flowers, attaching themselves to the butterflies instead, and your spirit is tugged along behind them, like a wakeboarder catching air up high in the sky.

So you follow the butterflies all the way back to where it all started: Cumberland College. The butterflies shed their scales upon the unknowing population below, and you descend along with the golden scales. Suddenly, the tangled threads that have been towing you along mysteriously untangle themselves and jerk you in all sorts of different directions. You flinch, expecting pain, but your spirit is simply split into thousands of smaller pieces, trailing at the ends of the black threads. As if the threads have a mind of their own, they attach themselves to random people and cling on.

Nothing happens to these randomly selected people for a time. Nothing you can see, anyway. You simply observe what happens as the people who bear the scattered fragments of your spirit go about their daily lives, unaware of their new "shadow".

One of the people that the threads have tied you to looks familiar to you. She wears a policewoman's uniform; a badge shines on the right side of her chest and a taser hangs at her hip. With brown hair, tan skin, and jade-green eyes, she looks strikingly like someone you know. However, you can't for the life of you (er, death of you?) remember who she is.
You observe the woman for a little while, hoping that her behavior will give you some clue as to why you remember her. The first hours of her day don't help you in your quest to remember at all; she simply wakes up, eats breakfast, and rides a motorcycle to work. Taking off her goggles and slinging them around her neck, she parks her motorcycle in front of a building that looks like a hospital. The sign by the building reads "Resurgam First Care". You wonder why a policewoman is going to work at the hospital as she enters the building. Following behind, you see her approach a prisoner's cell— what's a prisoner doing in the hospital?— and flash an ID badge at the guard on duty. The two switch places, and the other guard exits. The woman stays at the guard post for a while, then a big man who looks slightly like that old 1960's star your father listened to once or twice- what was his name, Alvin? Elvin? Elvis, that was it- comes and talks to the woman for a few minutes. Rolling her eyes, the woman nods her head and pushes a button. The door to the cell opens to reveal a young man, dressed in a white prisoner's outfit, a silver helmet, and a lab coat. The woman strides over and unlocks the helmet, and it falls to the floor with a clang. He looks up to reveal a pair of scarlet eyes, and you gasp. This man is your long-lost older brother.

Why is he a prisoner? you wonder while your brother and the woman talk for a few minutes. They have a friendly sort of banter going, even though it seems to be more of Maria doing the talking and your brother just nodding along. He smiles shyly, and she punches him in the arm. Still wondering, you try to reflect on the last time you saw your brother. Then you remember the accident eight years ago, and how you and your father fled while your brother stayed behind. He took the fall for your father, you realize, and feel a pang of regret that you couldn't save him too. But at least you've seen him again...

You snap back to reality. Your brother seems shy around the policewoman, but she doesn't notice anything. He was always sort of antisocial, you remember, so perhaps this is just his antisocialness at work? She takes a key and unlocks the pair of handcuffs locked around his wrists, and he follows the Elvis man obediently down the hallway. You try to follow him, but overshoot him and end up looking down at a woman on the operating table. The room is all prepared for surgery; the woman's garbed in a hospital gown, the lights shine down brightly, and a tray of neatly arranged, sterilized instruments sits next to the operating table, ready for use.

Your brother and the Elvis man walk in, both wearing surgical gloves, and start without much preamble. He picks up the scalpel, slices the woman open with one neat cut, and the operation begins. Things seem to be going well. You don't quite know, since you've never witnessed an operation before, and- ohgod look at all that blood wait is that thing her liver ew look it's all pink and slimy and gross and oh wow that looks absolutely disgusting.

Well, now you see why your father kept you out of the lab when he and your brother cut the lab rats open. You look away for a moment, but turn back when your brother lets out a cry of pain. Your silent cry echoes his as you view the woman's liver, now covered in a familiar pattern of black bruises. The bruises, shaped like a hand, seem to clench around the liver.

It's happening again, is all you can think. These black bruises are identical to the ones that appeared in that accident eight years ago.

After that first bruise appears, more and more begin to crop up. All the people that you're linked to suddenly develop bruises, begin bleeding, slowly go insane, or a combination of all three. You know what it is: the Rosalia Virus has come back with a vengeance. Some of the infected begin to do crazy things: one begins to blow celebrities up; another kills her own daughter when hallucinations caused by the virus tell her to; another attacks her parents, then dies trying to claw her way out of her locked room. You can't take it anymore. You have to do something.

That woman might be able to help, you think. She's a policewoman, she can investigate things like this, right? You try your absolute hardest to appear to her, but only come out as a jumbled clump of purple, red, and black, whispering "Beginning..." She must think she's crazy or something, you think bitterly. You've got to try harder. The fate of the thousands that you're linked to depends on it.

So you try again and again, appearing to the woman as much as you can. Each time, your image grows stronger and stronger. It's not that you've gotten any better at "appearifying" yourself, as you put it; it's that your virus is infecting more people by the day. "Beginning," you whisper each time you appear, and she doesn't know who you are or what you're doing. But you remember her now. She's the girl from the orphanage, Maria: the one who saved you from the fire and protected you from the bullies. You still consider yourself indebted to her for that, and you're determined to help her out in return.

But helping Maria out turns out to be harder than you thought, like almost everything is these days. The epidemic of Rosalia has officially begun, and three out of every five people are infected now. A black thread now connects you to Maria, and you know how that's going to end. You hope that an antidote will be found before anything goes badly, but of course, nothing goes the way you want it to. One day, as she and the other guard are preparing to transfer your brother to a different prison, she collapses in front of the cell, coughing up blood. Frightened, the other guard thinks that your brother has somehow infected her and that he's going to try to escape again. In his panic, he accidentally hits the "open cell" button, and your brother bursts out of the cell. Scooping Maria up and carrying her bridal-style, he runs down the hall toward the nearest operating room. The other guard's shouts of S01's escaping! echo down the hall behind him.

A few hours later, Maria is ensconced safely in a hospital bed, and your brother, having regained his memories of you, your father, and the Rosalia virus, has been returned to his cell. When you return to watching Maria, she's talking to a woman with white hair, and you realize with a jolt that she's speaking about you. She has an embarrassed look on her face, and she doesn't seem eager to admit that she may be crazy, but she insists: I saw her, Naomi. You believe me, don't you? She lived in the old orphanage down on Strider Avenue. I used to live there, and she sent a letter there for me a few years ago. Could you go check it out for me? The white-haired woman promises she'll investigate and look for the letter. She disappears around noon; when she returns, it's evening, and she holds a faded and slightly yellowed envelope in her hand. She empties its contents delicately onto Maria's lap and examines the included photo of you. When Maria proves unhelpful (beginning was all she said, I've got no clue what that means), the woman moves on to interrogate your brother.

I don't know anything about a beginning, but monarch butterflies aren't in America at that time of year, he says, turning the photograph over in his hands and examining it with a critical eye. Rosalia might be in Mexico...

So the woman (Dr. Kimishima, a timid voice calls her) travels to Mexico and finds your body. You appear to her as she unravels the truth of how you died. When she figures out the mystery of the Rosalia Virus and finds a possible antidote, she returns to Resurgam as fast as possible. The antidote turns out to be a success: the black threads that tie you down are slowly being severed one by one. Every day, the doctors administer the antidote to more and more people. It's too late for some, but overall most of the infected have been healed. However, there's one last victim of the Rosalia Virus left to cure: Dr. Kimishima. Your virus has interacted badly with some other disease inside her, and things are not going well at all. Coughing up blood, she collapses in the hallway outside a little girl's room. A nurse finds her and rushes her straight to the operating room. Your brother suits up and pulls on his surgical gloves, a glint of determination in his red eyes, and prepares to do battle with the Rosalia Virus once more.

The battle goes quickly. He injects the colonies with an orange liquid, uses the laser on the shell that the colonies form, stitches up any lacerations from flying bits of the shell, and injects something directly into the heart. He repeats this process over and over, until finally, he stops her heart and goes straight in to get to the heart (oh, ha ha, the heart, wait, why are you making bad puns now) of the disease. The virus appears as a sort of worm, or maybe a caterpillar. You find this ironic, since the disease was spread by butterflies. Whatever it is, he extricates it quickly and absconds from the heart as fast as is humanly possible. He stitches up her heart, then her chest, then rubs antibiotic gel over the stitches and applies a bandage.

Let this disease pass from the world, he murmurs, as her heart starts again.

The sun shines down as Maria and your big brother stand over your grave, his arm wrapped around her shaking shoulders. Your connection to the world is fading; the Rosalia Virus has truly "passed from the world", and once the last shovelful of dirt has been placed atop your cold, dead body, you know you'll finally leave this place and go on to whatever comes next.

You haven't fully accepted what's happened yet. You're still sad that you didn't truly get to grow up, to really live life to its fullest, and experience it at its best and worst. At the same time, though, you're sure that your big brother and Maria will be happy together, and the two of them will have the happily ever after you never had. Oh, sure, there'll be fights, most likely. There will be fists and angry words, cold words and masks of indifference, because that's just the way the two of them work. But there will be smiles, hugs, kisses, and grins, and those will more than make up for all the fighting. And you hope, you pray, no, you know that the two of them will be just fine.

Your brother drops the final handful of dirt on your grave, and Maria places a single white rose on top. It's finally time for you to go: your promise has been kept, your debts have been repaid, and your work here is done. You appear one last time, smile at them, and finally, you ascend into the stillness of the shining sky.

kagayaku sora no shijima ni wa
anata no ie ga aru
tsuki no ochiru yami no mukou
minamoto e kaeru
hosoimichi

(in the stillness of the shining sky
is your home of return.
beyond the darkness where the moon sinks
is a narrow path that leads you
back to the beginning.)

- "Kagayaku Sora no Shijima ni Wa", Kalafina