A/N and Disclaimer: I do not own To Love-Ru, nor do I own 'Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol', each respectively belong to Yabuuki Kentaro and the public domain. I would recommend listening to the song I have at the end; I can't do it justice just by praising it, but thought it would fit perfectly for the end of this piece...

Been awhile, and thought this one-shot would fit here, as it connects to a certain character within this story. It might be a start to a new storyline to accompany the new year.

"...a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more gravy than grave about you, whatever you are!'...

'Hear me!' cried the Ghost, 'My time is nearly gone.'...'That is no light part of my penance,' pursued the Ghost. 'I am here to-night to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance and hope of my procuring...'...

'This is all nonsense - nonsense - a nightmare - nothing more than a bad dream.. Yes, of course. That explains it. I'm having a dream. Ha, ha, ha; a nightmare..."

*
Memorze
Ten Years from Now

The world was washed in white, wobbling like the air was heated and reflected the light all around, as the harsh desert sunlight comprising a mirage bends its image and gives a weary wanderer false hope. That was what he thought as he was blinded by the light, only to awake to the madness that was now his reality, as the cold harsh truth closed in on him from every side. Darkness, there was no starlight, no sunlight, no heat to speak of as it was currently the middle of the night, and the sun was still three hours from rising over the desert sand dunes to begin the process of baking him once again for fourteen inhospitable hours. He had woken to this daily hell as he did every day, freezing from the lack of heat the desert let loose in the evening with no living thing to keep the heat in the eroded ground, nor any water to soothe his parched throat. The only sole thing he could lay claim to was the helmet that he wore over his head in the daytime, to keep the harsh sunlight from beating down on him in the daytime, yet was too suffocating to sleep in in the evening, despite the tolerable temperature the life sustaining armor could supply to his body to survive this arid environment as long as he had.

It could be called irony, a hell of his own making, or a variety of other things, but for now he called this wandering lifestyle of his, dragging a heavy burden with makeshift rope of length of cable, the beginning of an eternity of journeying to make up for the sins of his past. He had forgotten more than he could remember, but he knew enough to come to the most basic of unfounded conclusions about his current situation, and that this was the life of one reborn Rito Yuuki now. Death had symbolically claimed him for the third time: the first was a near brush that had remade him into something with inhuman powers, the second his life was consumed by a monster that wore his skin and bones for its own agenda, before the third brush with death had exorcised that demon in the form of a bullet hole that tore through his armor like tissue paper; a bullet of Orichalcum shot by the infamous weapon of his former comrade the monster in his skin had killed, fulfilling the promise he had made to bring him low if he had ever aimed too high.

And by the hands of his own daughter, blood related or not, he was mortified that she would have to live with that choice for all time, despite the guilt and blame resting solely on his own shoulders for having let it come to that point. Though being trapped within that monsters shadowy embrace for ten years had been more than a living hell itself, watching from within ones own mind as his body was used by a ghost of a man to commit atrocities in the name of an empire that should have ended with its former king.

Gid was a noble man, and he had long known he wouldn't fill his shoes. if it had made him any more happier, at the very end Gid had realized that it was Creed Diskenth who wore his frame, who abused and manipulated his youngest daughter into marrying him, who used the death of his eldest daughter as an excuse to carry out an unending campaign against 'evil', for the sake of a love that had died with his own sword impaled in his true love.

'Don't blame yourself'

Those were her hauntingly final words, no matter how he tried to ignore them, block them out from his mind, as he screamed over her lifeless body, he knew that in the very end she did not want him to blame himself over the fact he could not control his own body. Azenda had paid for those crimes in the harshest of ways, too harsh for the man she knew him to really be, so it was his greatest regrets that he failed her and let Creed's darkness consume his own light. Now he had the chance to redo his mistakes, but only by traveling this empty desert could he see with his own eyes the truth of his new reality.

Rito knows now why somebody would have mistaken this for his own personal hell, as he continues now for the ninth day walking an endless desert, that something must have happened due to the mere fact that the world of Memorze was utterly changed from the world he knew from the week and a half of walking the untouched continent. Completely and utterly, it was devoid of any form of life, neither plant, insect, nor animal had crossed his path in these utterly tedious, repeating landscape, sand dunes and waterways devoid of a single sign of man, woman or other beings walking its surface. It was as if the entire cycle of life had been removed, erased, or otherwise wiped clean of any tinkering, tool, or building mankind, or rather Memorzeankind, had ever made. Except for a single five meter bubble of reality he dragged behind him in his journey.

He would have abandoned it, except for the fact that it was the sole comforting piece of reality he had left to reassure him that he was not insane. The underground bunker he had been killed in had not, in fact, been torn down and replaced by desert dunes overnight as some cruel prank, that the single remaining reminder of civilization having not been a collective figment of reality, was being dragged behind him. If he was ten years younger, he wouldn't have been able to move the one ton piece of machinery, but the device was obviously something of Lala's making for it to survive the total destruction of reality and still not work right. That's right, he did try to get it to work, but the complex combination of gears and gizmos seemed to be lacking a proper power source, if the three foot cord that was hooked up to the base of the machine that ended in broken wires and insulation was any indication. Whatever powered it must have required quite a bit of energy that a building with a dedicated power source could have probably solved, but as stated previously, he was finding himself wandering an empty desert with nothing around him or likely ahead of him as a final destination.

That was his goal after all, something he had decided after realizing that his circumstances weren't as bleak with his body not requiring food or water as much as a normal humans would require with his highly adapted body having been trained to utilize the minimum. His survivability was enhanced further by the suit of armor he wore, having been created from the remnants of ancient and advanced weaponry and designed to make its wearer self sufficient and utilize the dark matter his body produced to create nutrient rich water that his body could subsist off of when his food and water reserves were low. It was perfect for a world as harsh as Memorze was with the seeming lack of civilization and lack of vegetation.

But his body still required rest, and after wandering the desert for yet another fruitless day of hopeless searching for any signs of civilization, he collapses to the ground in frustration and rips his helmet off. "ARGGGGGGHHHHH!" he screams to the heavens, the twin suns in the sky beating down on him from above, as they continued to spin mercilessly equal upon the planet in orbit as they had since the beginning of its creation. Dropping the helmet to the ground, he lets go of the makeshift rope and feels the beads of sweat forming on his brow from the high temperature effecting him without any relief over his head. He couldn't keep walking forward, he would rather give up and let the desert sun claim his bones, but the thought of him dying before figuring out the purpose of his coming back to life on a planet suddenly and seemingly void of life, it kept him from fully surrendering himself to the inevitable. Taking the helmet from the ground and holding it in both his hands, he suddenly stands up and throws it with all his might at the useless machine he had dragged through miles of empty desert, striking the machine directly in the powerless console and causing it to dent from the force of the impact. A piece of the machine seems to pop off, but Rito ignores it in favor of the desert ahead of him. Pitching forward into the ground, he would rather let himself bake and surrender himself to the sweet release of unconsciousness brought on by the oncoming heat stroke he would no doubt suffer in this sun.

"Why are you giving up?" as a shadow suddenly passes over him, Rito looking up to see a pair of boots in front of his face as he lay prostrate on the ground, "Get up, please; you aren't dead yet, so why are you resting?" Dragging his face up from the desert sand, granules falling in clumps from where the sweat of his brow met the ground, and he found himself staring straight into a shadowy form, face eclipsed by the sun shining around him like a halo. "Aren't you going to ask me how I'm here?" she asks, as Rito slowly gets up in disbelief to stare at the person before him, who tilts her head with a smile framed by the pink curls falling to frame her face, "Hello." She says it with a smile, but Rito feels like punching himself to make sure that he wasn't dreaming as she removed a hood of white that protected her delicate features, to reveal the remainder of her pink mane. He drinks in her beauty, the clothes she wore, the way her face seemed to shine as she stood enlightened by two suns, and the fact her perfectly flawless skin was not marred by the scars he gave her, his ugly sword lodged betwixt her two perfectly shaped breasts, the scarlet red staining her clothes as her life bled from her body in his arms.

She wore a provocative dress, layers of blue trailing behind her in the sand, covered by a translucent opalescent layer that blended seamlessly with the actual bodice of the dress. An upside-down arrowhead crisscrossed with white netting beneath a thin strip of clothe like a V. The bodice continued to split upward as part of a second, deep v-neck cut that exposed a good amount of her abdominal muscles, before curving over her breasts and reaching her armpits, before continuing downward to connect with pure white gloves that extended from her fingers up to the crook of her arm. At her neck was a choker of pure white, the same white netting that covered the exposed portions of her abdomen, extended up her exposed upper arms from the gloves to her shoulders, ending at the choker to make the entire dress one seamless piece. A small cloak seemed to be seamed into the back of the dress, the outside of which was the same stark white as her dress, while the interior seemed to be a breathtaking ombre that reminded Rito of the night sky descending onto the sunset, a deep, dark blue that held sparkling white gems that reflected the light like stars, before bleeding to a violet, that blended with the orange at the bottom in a wash of color that evoked the sunset.

She took a few steps closer to him, her hand ghosting down his armor, never truly touching as she drank him in as much as he had viewed her. Her smile was as dazzling as the stars that seemed to dance in her eyes as they stared longingly at each other, before she broke the spell with her words. "I can help you, you silly boy, with that machine of mine," she states, as she trails around him to stand in front of the broken pillar that reminded him that she was not here, she was dead by his hands, and the girl that had brought his humanity back to him had returned to her world, leaving him with ghosts of the pasts haunting him here now that his very future seemed bleak. A cruel hallucination brought to him by the twin suns of Memorze no doubt and for a brief moment he nearly wished to pull his eyes away from her; if only to break the intoxicating stupor her very presence brought upon him, even as an illusion. She touched nothing, stood above the very sand without leaving footprints in her wake, and was very provocative clothing only a mind as sullied as his could have dreamed up; her very features probably pulled from his mind, evoked by the memories of an older Nana and Momo, and applied to this ghostly future version of Lala, her perfect skin seemingly holding onto its youth drawing upon the faint memories of Queen Sephie, as well.

He turned away from her, prepared to let the desert sand take the illusion of her away from him, when he feels the ghost of a touch upon his face. Looking to the side, feeling a soft palm caress his right cheek from behind, he finds her lithe fingers drawing him effortless, his body reacting to the faint feelings of touch pulling him behind her. "This, here, please remove it," she commands, as she points to the dented panel he had made when he tossed his helmet at the broken machine, popping a bolt or screw of some form free, "I need to view the state of the power source." He doesn't know why he obeys her, but he removes the panel, peeling the metal back like one peels back the lid of a tin can to free its contents. An unearthly glow fills the box, as the source of the light is exposed to the light, which is quickly fading as the second sun begins to dip below the horizon, the first realization Rito has at seeing how lost he was not noticing the quickly approaching night. She moves around him, he too backing up out of instinct, as she examines the simple glowing fixture by crouching down to get a better view of it.

"A crystal lattice has replaced the White Taoist Pearl," she states in surprise, much to his own as he lacked knowledge that such an important artifact had been integrated into a now useless machine, as she examines the simple black crystal pillar. It seems to encase a golden imperfection that is reminiscent of a cats eye marble, if it was lengthened and twisted to fit such a unique piece, or something similar to a helix that had been unwound. "I think I know what's going on," Lala states, pulling up from her position to look with confidence at Rito, "It needs you, Rito, the machines been... well, changed for you to use it, but it needs more..." She looks puzzled, as if contemplating, something Rito found odd for a hallucination, before she looks down at him in the quickly failing light to observe the tail he had largely ignored, trailing behind him, flicking here or there in autonomic response to his own nerves, made possible thanks to the armor that acted as an exo-skeleton utilizing the ancient technology and making it truly a part of his body, more akin to a phantom limb. Lala crouches down once more, almost causing him to reflexively move as she grabbed for his tail, but she chooses to lightly ghost over it, a smile growing ever clearer on her face as she stands to put her hands on his shoulders, before faulting and putting them to her sides.

"You still have nano-machines inside you," she states as more than a question, but he realizes that she knows more than he, if that were possible for a heatstroke induced illusion of his unconscious mind. She moves over to the back of the machine,pointing to something he can't see. "You have a way in, with this broken piece here," she states, and he moves to see she is pointing to the exposed wiring that was still connected to the power source, before she walks around to the front of the machine, where the base of the machine was still whole, connected to pieces of the ground that hadn't been erased with everything else, "There's enough raw material here, that... yes, it just might work!" Giddily, she skips around the machine, her dress flowing around her in sweeping motions, leaving no trace in the sand as she twirls with delight, before she stops to focus upon Rito. "You can do it, the machine, the nano-machines, will do the work and use you," she states, pulling up an arm to point at him directly, "You'll be the spark that ignites the flame; the machines will draw upon your will to complete their task, and we can..." She trails off, before coyly smiling at him.

Stepping back, she covers her face shyly with the iridescent cloak of white, the colorless gems catching the fading sunset light and casting her beauty in a stunning new shade. "The journey, Rito, is yours to make," she states, "A second chance has been given you, if you so want it, we can be together again, out there!" She twirls around, stretching her hands out to the cosmos above, as the faint starlight begins to dot the vast desert landscape, mirroring the night sky like a sea of glass,a s shadows fall across it.

He doesn't understand, how she can be here, how he could feel the hope rising in his chest as she uttered every word. Wanting to believe her, he stared at the glowing obelisk at the center of the machine, a broken thing that he dragged and carelessly brought with him, as his future slipped further and further from his grasp with every hopeless step he took. Now she had opened the doors to a very possible reality for him, the chance to do it all over again, to save her, somewhere out there, to meet her and be one with her again, a second chance; no in reality a fourth chance, to have her in his arms again. He grabs his helmet, long discarded in the cooling sand, and utilizes every ounce of his control to activate his tail and drag it swiftly and precisely across the surface of the plain, unmarred helmet, carving deep but important reminders into it. Putting the helmet onto his head, he faces the machine as the sun dips further into the sky, dragging down the night sky upon the surface of the desert planet like a curtain on the end of an act of a play.

The curtain closed, his face beneath the guise he wore, he smiles as he raises the tail like appendage from the ground and stands proudly upon the base of the device, preparing himself for this final verse. He lowers his tail slowly into the mass of wires and feels it connect as it sends an electric shock that forces him to his knees. "AGGGHHHHH!" he cries out for the second time that day, before staring at the form of his beloved standing before him, gaining strength from her appearance before him still.

"I am with you Rito, you are never alone again," she states, watching as his body takes over the machine, control wrested from him as he writhes in pain silently inside the immobilized armor, "Always with you, from the beginning to the end." His senses extend from his armor to the machine, he feels the heat of the crystal as it connects and draws from the spark of his life force to ignite into a burning furnace of power, drawing on the machines from his body as the raw materials that once seemed useless to him are consumed along with his consciousness. Like a newborn star, the crystal lattice seems to consume the night in its glow, as it ruptures the sky with its brilliant golden light as bright as the core of a newborn star, before the heat begins to crystallize the very sands that blow around them with the wind. In a flash the light and heat is gone, and for a few moments the brilliance of a hollow sculpture of freshly blown glass, a fragile mass of glass strands that reminisces of an upside down jellyfish, a perfectly round void caused by the displacement of mass, is left before the first gust of sand breaks it in a tinkling rain.

"Yes, here with you from the beginning..." the cloaked white figure seems to reminisce as she states those words, her eyes are drawn to the night sky where a burning mass falls from the sky to impact with a nearby sand dune, after being ejected from a glowing rip in the sky that had shortly appeared after Rito had disappeared, "...all the way to the end." She descends upon the loose earth, her dress losing its light as she cloaks the ground and causes ripples in the sand as she walks with the long train dragging behind her, footsteps trailing behind her quickly covered and erased, as if she had never stood upon the sand at all.

Lost in the shadow's lonely embrace
I'm trapped in a web of my own mistakes.
What was my light, fades away

My mind's swarming with these memories
That still haunt me

Time and again
I call out your names
So hopelessly certain you'll do the same
Please, wait for me, my dear friends

Though I did what I thought I had to do
I still lost you.

A/N Cont.: I also do not own 'The Master's Lament', by Lizz Robinett.
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If you liked the story, please don't forget to favorite and review. I plan on creating two other separate but connected one-shots, the first of which I'll likely place in 'Stories of Our Lives' since the other story doesn't really fit the theme yet. Again please like, review, and let me know your feelings!