To: @pomegranate-belle
From: @chainek (galagaleeny)
Merry Christmas! Enjoy!
Tag: pomegranate-belle
(For the Holidays You Can’t Beat) Home Sweet Home
To: @hardcoreprince
From: @pomegranate-belle
This was some of the fluffiest fluff I have written all year and I hope you like it! Happy holidays!
It was 9:23am when Carlos heard the knock on his apartment door. He had been cleaning and gathering ingredients since 7:15 in preparation for that knock, and although two hours and fifteen minutes had certainly seemed like plenty of time at the start of it, the truth was that he was still trying to get everything organized.
With an unopened bag of flour still tucked beneath his left arm, Carlos tugged open the door to reveal Junpei and Akane, both of their faces flushed adorably from the cold. He smiled.
“Hey, guys.”
“Hi Carlos!” Akane chirped.
“Hey,” greeted Junpei with a crooked grin.
“You know, my place is pretty far for you two,” Carlos pointed out, quirking a brow as he leaned against the doorjamb. “Why did we do this here and not at one of your apartments, again?”
“Think of it like… A test run!” Akane said pleasantly, her arms piled high with bags of Hershey kisses.
Carlos laughed.
“What, so if you guys like my kitchen enough you’ll finally move in with me?” he joked as he held the door open for her.
“Pretty much,” agreed Junpei, sweeping past with a massive bowl of chilled cookie dough cradled to his chest.
A glance out at the street revealed that Junpei’s junky red car was still stuffed to bursting with baking supplies. And so, after dropping his sack of flour onto the kitchen table and dropping a kiss on each of his partners’ foreheads, Carlos headed down to the car to help transfer things to his kitchen. Even with all three of them, it took two round trips to get everything. The kitchen was overtaken, and the less messy ingredients like bagged candy, pretzels, and nuts were tossed onto Carlos’s bed to make room. Then the three of them washed their hands carefully.
“You couldn’t convince Maria to join us?” Akane asked as she cleared a space on the table to roll out cookie dough.
Carlos shook his head.
“No. Apparently the Klim family is doing a little holiday baking today too, and Phi invited her over. Can’t compete with that,” he explained with a wink.
“Are they actually dating yet, or are they still fucking around ‘not labeling things’?” wondered Junpei.
“Between you and me, I think Phi might ask her out today,” Carlos said. “With any luck. I’m sure we can trust Sigma to be pushy and embarrassing in our place.”
Then he picked up his bag of flour from before and opened it and began ladling flour onto the table with a measuring cup. Junpei pulled the cookie dough out of Carlos’s fridge and began peeling off the Saran wrap covering it. Meanwhile, Akane dug through one of the boxes and produced a plastic bag of metal cookie cutters.
She unsealed the bag and dumped them on a corner of the table that wasn’t covered in flour.
“That’s quite the collection,” Carlos noted, sifting through the pile. “Bells, wreaths, snowflakes… Are these gingerbread people?”
Side-by -side sat two vaguely humanoid cookie cutters, one of which seemed to be wearing a dress.
“It’ll be great!” Akane enthused. “We can make little cookie people that look like us!”
“I dunno,” said Junpei, studying the cookie cutter critically. “Don’t you think it’s a little disingenuous to make gingerbread people out of sugar cookie dough?”
“What I think is that you two are putting way too much thought into this,” Carlos said with a laugh.
That seemed to end the discussion. With the cookie dough unwrapped, Junpei went to lift it out and onto the table, but when he tried to release it globs stuck stubbornly to his palms.
“Ah, jeez, just—!”
Junpei flailed his hands, trying to shake the dough off.
“And that’s why we use flour, Jumpy,” Akane said primly, her palms already caked in a layer of it.
She carefully took the majority of the dough out of his hands. Though the dough didn’t come off onto her palms in big chunks like it had for Junpei, it still seemed to want to stick to her. Carlos dipped up another half-cup of flour and sprinkled it over the dough. Akane shot him a grateful smile. After coating the rolling pin in flour too, Akane began rolling out the cookie dough.
“Why don’t you two work on the cookies while I start some of the other things?” Carlos suggested.
Then he detoured into his rooms to grab two bags of pretzel rings and two bags of Hershey kisses. While Akane and Junpei cut out sugar cookies and placed them on baking sheets, Carlos set to work filling another with pretzel rings in careful rows. Then he unwrapped the Hershey kisses and set each one in the center of a pretzel. Almost the moment he had filled the tray, the oven dinged to alert him it was preheated.
Popping on a pair of oven mitts, Carlos slid his tray and one of the trays of cookies into the oven. When he turned back to start filling another tray with chocolate and pretzels, he caught sight of a head of brown hair coated liberally in white.
“Junpei,” Carlos said with a fond sigh, “you’ve got flour in your hair.”
“Ughhhh! It’s not my fault it gets everywhere!” complained Junpei, trying and failing to brush it out with his equally floury hand.
After a few seconds of his flailing, Carlos finally took pity on his boyfriend and, from his higher vantage point, ruffled Junpei’s hair until all the flour was out – or at least, as much as would be dislodged without a shower. There was still a faint stain of whiteness in his hair that reminded Carlos of snowflakes.
Smiling softly, Carlos set the microwave timer for two minutes and an egg timer for twenty, and set back to work filling a baking sheet. Two minutes later, the microwave beeped at him insistently and he turned it off, slipping on his oven mitts again.
“Could someone get the M&Ms?” he asked, pulling open the oven door.
“Got it!” cried Akane, wiping her floury hands on her jeans and leaving stark white handprints behind.
She hurried into the bedroom and returned, ripping off a corner of the M&M bag in her hands. Carlos slid the tray from the oven and held it out for Akane, who carefully pressed one M&M into the center of each melted Hershey’s kiss, squishing them flat and filling the small pretzel rings. After the final one was finished, before Carlos could turn away to set the pan on a cooling rack, Akane stretched up and pressed a kiss to the tip of his nose.
Despite himself, Carlos could feel his ears burn with heat at the unexpected kiss. He was comfortable with them, certainly, but having spent so much of his life single and not interested in more, he was still sometimes startled by such displays. While he was distracted, Akane drew a little heart on his cheek with the flour coating her finger. Then she danced away to do the same to Junpei, though he protested halfheartedly while cutting out a sleigh-shaped cookie.
Their morning continued in such a manner, filled with flour and silly kisses and the ding of timers, until at last the dough had all been used up. The chocolate pretzel rings were cooling on the counters, and Carlos was cooking a pot of caramel to coat their homemade Chex mix. Akane had rolled their dough for thumbprint cookies into evenly sized little balls.
It was only then, as Junpei went to gather supplies to mix up frosting for the cookies, that they realized something was missing.
“We forgot the powdered sugar?” groaned Junpei. “No way, I double-checked everything!”
“I don’t have any in the house either,” Carlos added sheepishly from the stove. “And with this much cooking at once I don’t know if we can afford to send someone out to buy more without burning something.”
The three of them fell silent.
“Two choices lie before us,” Akane said solemnly, her eyes closed, though neither of her boyfriends knew if she was truly consulting the morphogenetic field or not. “We could call Aoi for help and potentially invite disaster, or we could not call for help, in which case we will definitely invite disaster.”
Junpei and Carlos glanced at each other, and then back at Akane.
“Uh… I’m going to go with my gut and pick potential disaster over certain disaster,” Carlos replied.
“Ditto,” agreed Junpei.
Akane’s shoulders slumped.
Ten minutes and one embarrassing phone call later, there was a knock on Carlos’s front door.
But when Junpei opened it, instead of Aoi Kurashiki, in through the door stepped Santa Claus with a gray Wal-Mart sack slung over his shoulder.
“Uhhhhhhh…”
Junpei glanced from the Santa Claus in the doorway back to Akane and Carlos to see if they were seeing what he was. By their expressions, they were.
“I heard there was a good little girl around here who needed some baking supplies?” the red-clad stranger asked in a false-deep voice, and Junpei realized that they weren’t dealing with Santa Claus at all, but another Santa entirely.
There was a smack, and Junpei’s eyes darted to Akane again to find her hand pressed to her forehead.
“Ugh, please tell me you didn’t go to the grocery store dressed like that,” she muttered.
Aoi smirked back, though his sister wasn’t even looking at him.
“How else would I go?”
“It’s December fifth, Aoi!”
“I think you mean Christmas fifth,” he retorted, handing off his shopping bag to Carlos.
The bag was rifled through quickly to make sure it contained what they needed, and then set in the kitchen. Instead of rejoining the group, though, Carlos moved past them into his bedroom.
“I do not mean Christmas fifth,” Akane complained, making her way back into the kitchen with Aoi and Junpei on her heels. “Why do you have to be so embarrassing? I’m grown up now, you don’t have to pretend to be Santa anymore, you weirdo.”
“You know, Akane,” said Aoi, “insulting Santa Claus is a good way to get coal in your stocking. You might have to shift to a different timeline to get any presents.”
“How about I shift to a timeline where you’re not so annoying?” Akane huffed.
“Good luck finding one.”
Aoi and Junpei startled at having spoken in unison, then shared a quick fistbump. Akane groaned piteously.
“Please just take the beard off,” she said to Aoi. “I’m begging you. God is begging you. The entire morphogenetic field is begging you.”
“It’s not in the spirit of Christmas to ask Santa to take off his beard.”
“Aoi…!”
“No, no,” he protested. “Call me Santa!”
“You are the worst!”
Aoi planted his hands on his hips.
“If I was the worst, would I have brought you that powdered sugar you needed?” he asked, taunting his sister by shaking his head to wave his fake beard at her.
Akane puffed her cheeks out angrily. And then she shoved him.
“Whoa—!”
Aoi toppled backwards with a yelp.
Luckily for him, Carlos stepped back into the kitchen just in time to catch him under the arms.
“Hi Carlos,” Aoi said, looking up at Carlos with a grin that even the floofy fake beard couldn’t hide.
“Hey!” Akane protested. “No flirting with my boyfriends! I never flirt with your dates!”
Aoi didn’t deign to give that claim a verbal response. Instead, he leveled Akane with the flattest stare he could manage while wearing a Santa costume and still half-draped against Carlos. Akane glanced away, and had the decency to look a bit ashamed of herself.
A loud beep filled the kitchen.
“That was one time,” she muttered, turning back to get the paper bag of caramel Chex mix out of the microwave. “And she was really cute.”
Akane shook the bag violently, pretending it was her brother. Setting Aoi upright, Carlos cleared his throat and placed the bag of pecans he’d gone to get on the counter. As he did, his eyes glanced over the microwave’s digital clock, and he did a double-take. It read 1:03pm.
“It’s that late already?” he murmured.
Then Junpei was at his shoulder looking too.
“No wonder I’m starving. We should break for lunch.”
On cue, Akane and Aoi’s stomachs growled loudly. Junpei laughed.
“Want to join us for lunch, Aoi?” offered Carlos.
He shrugged in response.
“What’re you guys having?” he asked.
A glance around the kitchen told them all that, whatever it was, it wouldn’t be homemade.
“We can just order something from that burger place downtown,” suggested Junpei. “Cheap, quick, convenient. I don’t really care as long as I get food.”
“Oh, I want their crispy chicken sandwich!” Akane said. “But no tomato. And a small order of French fries?”
“They got wraps there, right? I’ll just take one of those with chicken in it, I guess,” Aoi added.
“Double cheeseburger and fries,” said Junpei.
Carlos nodded, rubbing his chin.
“They still have that burger with the swiss cheese and the mushrooms, don’t they? That sounds good to me, so I guess we’re all in agreement. But who should go order?”
“I’ll go get it, you lovebirds keep cooking,” Aoi insisted.
“No!” Akane raced past him and blocked the door, her arms spread wide. “No way! You’re not going out there dressed like that again!”
“And are you going to stop me, little sister?”
“Yes!”
The argument only devolved from there, into childish insults and mocking nicknames. Junpei watched with interest, nibbling on a leftover pretzel stick that hadn’t made it into the Chex mix. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to intervene. Which, Carlos realized, meant it was up to him.
“I’ll go,” he said, then louder when the bickering siblings didn’t hear him. “Hey! I’ll go.”
“I will take the ring to Mordor,” Junpei stage-whispered in falsetto.
Carlos bit his lip to cover up a smile.
“Seriously. I’ll get the food, you two,” he said, placing a hand on each of the Kurashikis’ shoulders. “Just keep going with the thumbprint cookies for me, alright?”
Twenty minutes of work later, the caramel Chex mix was drying on wax paper, the small batch of thumbprint cookies had all been baked and thumbprinted, and the chocolate pretzel rings were boxed up in the fridge. Aoi had just finished pulling a tray of sugar cookies out of the oven when Carlos returned with a huge paper bag in his arms.
“Sorry I took so long,” he apologized. “The line was huge.”
“Just gimme the food,” Junpei replied, making grabby hands.
Aoi stripped off the Santa Claus beard at last, so he didn’t end up getting food in it.
“Let’s see…” said Carlos, digging through the massive paper sack and pulling out meals. “A crispy chicken sandwich for Akane, hold the tomato. A double cheeseburger for Junpei. A chicken salad wrap for Aoi… And a mushroom swiss burger for me.”
Akane went up on her tiptoes, peering into the bag.
“And one, two, three orders of fries,” she counted, pulling out her own little box of French fries. “That’s everything.”
Satisfied that everything was as it should be, they settled in to eat.
“Trade you a bite of my sandwich for a bite of yours,” Akane bartered five minutes into lunch, holding out her half-eaten chicken sandwich.
“Tempting,” Junpei replied sarcastically. “Unfortunately, I am already too… Chicken.”
The pun, paired with Junpei’s deadpan expression, caught Carlos so off guard that he snorted soda up his nose and started coughing.
Thankfully that was the only mishap, and once they had all finished eating and thrown their trash in the garbage can, Akane lugged Carlos’s mixer onto the table and started mixing up the frosting. It took several adjustments to get the balance of powdered sugar and milk right for the perfect frosting consistency, but in the end everyone was satisfied with it.
“And now,” declared Akane as she lifted the spatula in the air, “we frost!”
“What colors should we do?” Carlos asked.
“We have to have red and green!”
“Blue,” suggested Junpei, digging through the tiny box of food coloring for Akane’s picks and his own. “And yellow.”
“White,” Aoi said. “You should just leave some plain.”
Carlos nodded, accepting the little bottles from Junpei.
“And what about brown?” he asked.
The other three paused, and then looked at him with equally skeptical expressions.
“Who wants to eat brown frosting?” Junpei demanded, sticking out his tongue.
“But, you know it… I mean… For reindeer and tree trunks and stuff…?” fumbled Carlos.
Akane squinted at him. There was definitely something weird… Carlos could be a hell of an actor, but he also wasn’t good at keeping secrets from the people closest to him. What kind of secret he could have involving the color of frosting was beyond her, but something told her it would be a good surprise so she didn’t ruin it by trying to take a glance downstream in the timeline.
“That makes sense!” she chirped instead.
There was no brown food coloring, of course, so in the end they mixed a few different colors to get it. Carlos was oddly specific about the shade he wanted, and Akane reminded herself very firmly not to cheat with her ESPer powers.
Once five bowls of frosting had been mixed with color and the sixth left plain, Carlos rummaged around in his lower cupboards and pulled out a box filled with white piping bags, plastic rings, and metal tips. Quickly and efficiently, Carlos fitted six bags with the icing tips and secured them with the plastic couplers.
“Wait, you actually have piping bags?” Junpei asked. “What are you, a cooking channel chef?”
“How do you think I frosted Maria’s birthday cake?” retorted Carlos, spooning a glop of red frosting into the bag.
“Uh, I thought you bought it, like a normal person.”
Nonetheless, Junpei pitched in by filling another bag with green frosting. Akane grabbed a spoon and helped out with blue, while Aoi, predictably, filled another piping bag with white frosting. With all four of them working, all six colors were soon bagged and ready to frost with.
“Gonna help us frost cookies, Santa?” Junpei asked with a smirk.
Aoi snorted.
“No way in hell, I’m out. Santa eats cookies, he doesn’t make ‘em. I did my part and now I’m gonna go home and hibernate.”
With a quick half-hug around Akane’s shoulders and a wave for her boyfriends, Aoi was out the door with his Santa Claus beard in hand.
“I’d file that under not-disaster, I think,” Carlos said optimistically.
Akane gave an irritated huff, but made no verbal protest. Then she, Junpei, and Carlos sat down to begin frosting the sugar cookies.
Only a few minutes in, it was clear that the task would not be as easy as it sounded.
“Will it just…! Oh, come on!” Akane muttered, swiping another glob of yellow frosting off the tip of the icing bag with a finger after it refused to stick to the cookie.
Moodily, she stuck the finger in her mouth and ate the frosting off so it didn’t go to waste or make a mess. Junpei, sitting across from her, wasn’t doing much better. But instead of trying to get his designs as pretty as possible like Akane, he had embraced his lack of icing skill and just scribbled lines of blue across several of the cookies nearest him. Carlos, of course, was completely in his element, which Akane found particularly unfair. Still, even he had to occasionally scrape clumping frosting off the tip of his piping bag.
“We definitely made too many cookies,” Junpei groaned after a full hour, massaging his cramping hand. “We’ll never finish frosting them all.”
“If you need a break, you could take the red and start filling the thumbprints,” suggested Carlos. “The red frosting is kind of thin,” he gestured at the cookies with red frosting oozing off them and onto the plastic tablecloth, “so it should be the easiest to use.”
With a worn-out sigh, Junpei got to his feet and picked up the piping bag with the red frosting. But he didn’t complain as he started to fill the divots in the pecan-speckled cookies – Carlos had been right, it was easier. His fingers were still sore from trying to squeeze the blue frosting onto the sugar cookies earlier, but the ache started to ebb. And standing at the counter with the cooling rack full of thumbprint cookies gave him the perfect vantage for looking at his boyfriend and girlfriend. Akane, who faced him straight on, had a cute and familiar concentrated look on her face, the tip of her tongue peeking out of the corner of her mouth. And from the side he got a view of Carlos’s forearms, bared by his rolled-up sleeves and flexing as he worked. Junpei grinned.
Ok, he thought, maybe this was worth a little ache in his hands.
It didn’t take long to finish up with the thumbprint cookies, and Junpei settled back down between Carlos and Akane and dutifully continued frosting sugar cookies.
The next time any of them looked at a clock, it was after 7:00pm.
Carlos sighed, leaning back from the table.
“We should eat supper,” he murmured.
“Ehh, I’m not really hungry,” Junpei admitted.
“Me either,” said Akane. “I guess we’ve been snacking all evening, so…”
In truth, they all just wanted to be done. Seeming to realize this, everyone returned to frosting – this time with a little less creativity and finesse. Carlos even ate a few unfrosted cookies as he worked just to trim down the number they had to finish.
When the final cookie, a bell, was frosted, all three let out a sigh of relief and stood to stretch.
“That… Was a lot of cookies,” Junpei sighed.
Carlos nodded in agreement.
“Maybe next year we only need a half batch of dough.”
“But we did such a good job!” offered Akane. “We should at least take some time to admire them and show each other our favorites.”
Junpei smiled indulgently, leaning back into Carlos’s chest as the blond slung an arm around his shoulders.
“Why don’t you go first then, Kanny? Since it’s your idea.”
Akane gestured to a small forest of green tree cookies in one corner of the table, covered in red and blue garlands and yellow stars.
“Look how good they got!” she said proudly.
“That’s really something,” agreed Junpei, looking impressed.
“Yeah, they’re great!” Carlos said with a smile. “You picked up icing pretty quick, Akane.”
She beamed at them both.
“How about you, Jumpy?”
In reply, he leaned forward and pulled out a cookie from the lineup with a flourish. It was splattered with blue and white frosting in a seemingly random pattern.
“Uh… What is that?” Akane wondered.
“It’s a Funyarinpa, Kanny,” Junpei explained impatiently.
Akane squinted and tilted her head, trying to find any familiarity in the scribbles of icing.
“If you say so Jumpy,” she said at last.
“I think I can see it,” Carlos told them. “It looks good, Junpei. The frosting is really even.”
They all stared down at the Funyarinpa cookie for a few more seconds, thoughtfully.
“And which ones are your favorites, Carlos?” asked Akane.
At that, he moved closer to the table, blocking the cookies from view. After a little bit of shuffling, Carlos stepped out of the way to show the other two.
“Taadaa?” he said with a shrug, splaying his hands.
“Ohhhh, Carlos, they’re so cute!” exclaimed Akane, clapping and bouncing on her toes.
There, in a line, sat three gingerbread-person sugar cookies, carefully frosted. The first had several streaks of brown hair and a grumpy face; it wore a red shirt with a blue vest and blue pants. The second cookie-person was the kind wearing a dress. It also had brown hair, though it fell over the front of its little cookie shoulder in a ponytail, and its face was neutral, almost thoughtful. It wore a white dress with a brown belt, and blue pants underneath. The last cookie had yellow hair, a smiling face, and a simple green shirt with blue pants.
“Of course you blew the rest of us out of the water,” Junpei scoffed, but he was smiling too.
Together they packed up all the cookies into Tupperware and put them into the fridge so they wouldn’t get stale, then bagged the Chex mix. Though there were still plenty of baking supplies and tools scattered around, the kitchen looked kind of empty without the results of their work laid out everywhere.
The glowing numbers on the microwave clock told them it was 9:35pm.
“You can go, if you want to,” Carlos said, suddenly a little hesitant. “I’ll clean this up in the morning, it shouldn’t take too long, so you don’t have to stay if—”
“There’s no way in hell I’m driving home tonight,” Junpei declared.
And so, with floury stains all over their clothes and hands tinted by smears of colorful frosting, the three of them piled into Carlos’s bed for a good night’s sleep.
“… Love you,” Carlos said quietly, in lieu of a goodnight.
A soft yawn filled the air.
“We’re gonna move in,” Akane answered.
“Mmm,” agreed Junpei. “Yeah. But you have to cook breakfast. That’s what firefighters do.”
Too tired to laugh fully, Carlos just let out an amused whuff of air, smiling.
“It’s a deal.”
The Miracle
From: @chessanator
A bonus gift for Pomegranate-Belle, because there’s a ZTD timeline in need of a fix-fic and only Carlos is badass enough to save the day.
Sorry if it’s a bit on the subtle side: it took a bit of work making all my gifts consistent with each other. In any case, a few unanswered questions fits this story thematicallySecond in The Firetruck Trilogy (My official gift was the first): Ao3 link
“Fuck the Anthropic Principle,” Junpei spat. His stinging cheek gave extra weight to his anger. The ring that lay like lead against his fingers made that pain even sharper. The sight of Akane walking away sealed the grievance inside Junpei’s heart.
“Junpei…?” Carlos started to say. He hesitantly placed his hand on Junpei’s shoulder.
Junpei shrugged Carlos off. “I’m fine,” he lied. He walked back over to the table at the centre of the lounge where he had left his bottle of beer. “I just want to have a little bit more of my drink. That’s all.”
Carlos frowned. “I thought you didn’t feel like drinking anymore. Isn’t that what you said earlier?”
“Hmph.” Junpei shook his head. “I guess things change quickly. Isn’t that right, Carlos?”
“Whatever you say, Junpei. I’m not up for an argument right now.” Carlos turned to walk away.
“Thanks, Carlos,” Junpei said bitterly. He picked the bottle up from the table and swirled it around gently, listening to the satisfying gurgle of the liquid that remained at the bottom. Then he lifted the bottle up, the pleasurable coolness of the glass tingling his lips. “Seriously, fuck the Anthropic Principle.” With that epithet, Junpei drank deeply from the bottle.
As he swallowed the alcohol, his vision went black.
Junpei’s mind swirled, just as his beer had. For a moment he found himself kneeling in a fireplace, screaming as hot flying bullets tore his spine apart. Before the pain caused him to pass out entirely, Junpei’s mind was ripped away again. He tumbled through the Morphogenetic field for what seemed like hours until he finally came to rest.
Junpei stirred to find himself sprawled on the hard metal floor of the power room. A thin layer of water shimmered on the metal and soaked into Junpei’s shirt. Despite having trickled from the slab of ice that blocked the channel running through the centre of the room, the water was in no way cold. The sheer sweltering heat in the room that had warmed up the water quickly roused Junpei into full wakefulness.
The screeching alarm and the unnaturally bright light shooting through the blast window may have had something to do with that as well.
As Junpei clambered to his feet he saw Akane and Carlos on either side of him; once they had stood up as well he yelled at them, raising his voice above the noise. “Where the hell are we?!”
Carlos looked around. “It looks like the power room. We must have been knocked out by our bracelets again, then brought here.”
“That can’t be right,” Junpei snapped, “We had at least forty minutes to go!”
“More importantly,” Akane said, “we remember that. We can’t have been knocked out, or we would have lost our memories as well.” Akane just stood there for a moment, thinking. “I believe we may have shifted.”
“‘Shifted’?” Carlos asked.
“We’ve had our consciousnesses thrown into another time – maybe even another timeline – and occupied our bodies here. It’s hardly unprecedented. Right Junpei?”
“I should have known all this esper bullshit was going to show up again.” As Junpei scowled, something struck him. “Wasn’t it supposed to be the case that esper abilities only activated when someone was in great danger? Whatever you say about it, we’d just won the fucking lottery. Why would we jump out of that?”
Akane raised her hand to her chin nervously. “I think… I think it might have been the other way round. We weren’t the ones who chose to shift. The versions of us here were. They jumped to our timeline and we… we were forced back.”
“I’m not entirely sure what you are talking about, Akane,” Carlos stated, “but if you’re saying we’re now in danger, I don’t suppose it could be because of that?” Carlos pointed at the blast window. Inside, the glowing orb began to spin faster, sparks of energy leaping off it and crashing against the walls of the reactor.
If that wasn’t enough, an announcement soon conclusively answered Carlos’ question. “Countdown over. Detonation is now unstoppable. Please evacuate.”
“‘Evacuate’?!” Junpei gasped, “We can’t, Goddamnit! The door’s still locked!” His chest constricted his breath; panic took him. “Hey, Anthropic Principle? What I said earlier… I was just kidding okay? No need to do this to us, so we can go back, right? Let us back! Let us back, damnit!”
Akane reached out towards Junpei. She patted his shoulder and caressed it gently, until Junpei’s shivering died down.
“Akane…” Junpei whispered. The rest of the strength of his voice wouldn’t come. “We can get back, right? We’re the ones in danger now. That means we can shift back to the timeline we were in, and force those bastards to deal with the shit they left for us.”
Akane sighed sympathetically. “‘Those bastards’ are just us, Junpei. No more, no less.”
“Well, if one of them’s me, then he’s definitely a bastard.” Junpei turned squared on to Akane and clenched both her shoulders desperately. “Can we go back?”
Akane bowed her head. “I’m sorry, Junpei. I think there was… somewhere in between, when we shifted here. I might be able to make it back but” – the agony of a million bullets piercing his back flashed through Junpei’s mind again – “You and Carlos wouldn’t.”
Carlos started a methodical pace around the room. “There’s got to be a more mundane way out of here, guys! If we look for it, we’ll find it.” Carlos’ search took him to the other door out of the power room – this one had been opened – and into the small room inside. “Huh? Junpei! Akane! Have a look at this!”
Junpei and Akane joined Carlos to see him standing at one end of a pair of linked consoles. Junpei made his way over to the other; as he looked at the screen Akane peered over his shoulder. The words on the screen read, ‘Rules of the AB Game.’
“‘AB Game’?” Akane murmured, “I’ve heard of that.”
Suddenly she reached past Junpei, tapping the screen multiple times in rapid succession with her index finger. Several screen’s worth of text blinked past without stopping. Junpei squinted, trying to read what he could, but it was hopeless. From Carlos’ frustrated expression, it was clear that the instructions had flown by too quickly on his screen as well.
“Junpei, Carlos,” Akane said, her voice full of authority, “All you have to do is press ‘Ally’. Try to do it at the same time: I’ll give you a countdown. Are you ready?”
Junpei and Carlos both nodded.
“Okay. Three… Two… One.”
Two rounds of the Ambidex Game later and the door out of the power room had opened. “Let’s go!” Carlos shouted as he led the way down the short corridor beyond. The floor and walls trembled around them as they ran but the three of them still made it, bursting into the lounge and gathering in front of the X-door.
“Well? Can we get out or not?” Junpei asked, his question yelled fruitlessly at the X-door itself.
Somehow, the question was answered. “Now announcing the current casualties. Q-team: Q, Mira, Eric. These three are now deceased.” Three unusable X-passes were then released.
“Goddamnit!” Junpei roared, “What was the point of that? We’re still gonna die from that reactor, only now we’re doing it a few metres further away. Great job!” Junpei curled his hand into a tight fist and hammered it against the X-door.
The door shuddered slightly. So did the entire room.
As the tremors from whatever was happening in the power room reverberated throughout the facility, the walls of the lounge shifted; a wave of change rippled outwards from the frame X-door. Where it passed, the mottled brown of the walls and every feature on them vanished entirely, to be replaced only by a uniform whiteness. Where the ripple hit the floor it spread into that as well, removing all texture and colour from the carpet.
When the lounge had finally settled, Carlos gazed disbelievingly around. “The walls were just… holograms?”
“It seems so,” Akane replied, “I don’t know why Zero would go to this much trouble, but he must have had some reason behind it.”
As Junpei looked around as well, he noticed that something had been added when every other detail had been removed. He had noticed the doors. The two doors that had led into the rest of ward C were still there, but two other doors had appeared alongside: one exactly in the centre of the wall opposite the X-door and one tucked in the far right corner.
Junpei pointed them out to Akane and Carlos. “We should check them out,” he said, “There’s got to be something here that’ll help us, and since it wasn’t in the parts of ward C that we already explored it’d damn well better be in these new parts. I’m not gonna just lay down and die.”
“That’s the spirit, Junpei.” Carlos put on a grin that was only somewhat forced. “I’ll take that middle door. You two take the other one, and we’ll meet back here when we’re done. We can do this! We have to.”
Once Carlos had left, Junpei and Akane headed through their door. Beyond was a long corridor – one which looked much like the ones they had previously been through in C-ward – with a sharp bend to the left at the end. Junpei had only taken a few steps along when Akane stopped him, placing a hand nervously on his shoulder.
“Junpei…” Akane only got that name out before falling silent.
Junpei turned around. “Yeah, Akane?”
Though her voice remained quiet, Akane managed to say what she wanted to say. “Junpei… I’m sorry about what I said earlier. You know… back in the timeline we came from. I wish I had been able to celebrate with you, back when we had the chance. It’s… That’s just not how I am, anymore.”
Hearing Akane’s voice like that, Junpei’s hand dived instinctively into his pocket. To his relief, the ring was still there, even in this new unfamiliar timeline. Still, even as he fondled the ring, Junpei knew that it wasn’t the right time. He forlornly withdrew his hand. “It’s okay, Akane,” he said, wincing inside at how bland his words were. “There’ll always be time later. We can celebrate once we’re out of here.”
Junpei’s thoughts were interrupted by a faint groan that came from the far end of the corridor. By the way Akane’s eyes darted up, she had heard it as well. Without needing to say anything, both Akane and Junpei started sprinting towards the source of the sound.
As they reached the end of the corridor they found the room that the groans originated from. The label on its door read ‘Pod Room’. They burst in. The first thing Junpei noticed about the pod room were the thick green lines that ran in parallel along the floor, belonging far more to a sports pitch than to an underground bunker. The second thing Junpei noticed was the extensive bloodstain that covered one of the walls, marring a faded and battered portrait of a family that had been mounted there. The third thing that Junpei noticed…
“If this is the pod room… where the hell are the pods?!”
When Junpei looked over, Akane had gone unusually still. Even so, Junpei could see her perfectly focused will: the slightest tension in her poised body revealed her intentions. “Shush, Junpei.” That was all Akane said.
Junpei did as she asked. When he did so, he heard the groan again, though it was much fainter than he expected given that he was sure it was in the same room as the source of it. He glanced at Akane again, making sure that she saw his quizzical expression.
Akane pursed her lips. “I think it’s coming from below us.”
With that explanation Junpei started examining the pod room again; this time he had a specific goal in mind. After first noticing what looked like retractable panels in the floor on each side of the room, he found what he was looking for when he looked back towards the door they had entered by: a button whose label read ‘Pod’. Junpei reached out to press it, but a glass panel barred his way.
Junpei knew that he couldn’t break the glass with his bare hands. He’d need something to help get through: something hard, something that would fit stably and ergonomically in his hand. The item came to mind immediately, but this time that instinctive thought brought with it a dreadful guilt. Even so, Junpei had no other options.
He placed the ring on his hand – the right hand, since the thought of that ring on a left hand was too poignant – and threw his fist towards the glass. It shattered. The jewel pierced the glass as it struck, and Junpei’s hand continued through to push down the button.
When Junpei turned back around, he saw the pods rising from beneath the floor panels he had noticed before. He was grateful for that, because while Akane was distracted by them he was able to slip the ring off his finger. Before he placed it back in his pocket, Junpei inspected the ring.
His heart fell. The top facet of the ring had chipped: only slightly, but enough to ruin it. Junpei hid it as quickly as possible. He couldn’t let Akane see it.
Once the ring was safely back in his pocket and the pods had finished their circuit around the arc of the room, Junpei rejoined Akane. She had been standing closest to the pods on the left hand wall, so they naturally turned their attention to those first. One of the pods was just slightly higher than Akane could comfortably see inside, so Junpei rose on his tiptoes and wrest open the pod’s lid.
Sigma was inside.
The slight flutters of his eyeballs beneath their lids were the sole sign of any level of consciousness from Sigma. Still, it was clear that the groans that had drawn Akane and Junpei to the pod room had come from Sigma: those rough vocalisations were much more audible once the pod had been open. Junpei looked down at Sigma – still clearly on the far side of consciousness despite those fits and starts – and an idea formed in Junpei’s mind. Without any conscious direction, Junpei’s hand reached out towards Sigma’s neck. If he just… they could escape.
Junpei’s cheek stung. There was no reason for it, save that thought and memories of all-too-similar thoughts. Junpei’s arms fell back to his side.
Within a few seconds of Junpei’s decision, Sigma recovered. He opened his eyes. “Akane? Junpei? How did you get here? Argh: my ears are still ringing. Why are they ringing? Wait… This isn’t D-ward.”
Akane pulled Sigma’s pod down – all the other pods rotated with it – until it was low enough for her to help Sigma out of it. “When you put it like that, Sigma,” she said as he let go of her offered hand, “I’m beginning to wonder if the wards have any meaning at all. After all, this isn’t C-ward, either.”
Back on solid ground, Sigma used the space to stretch his limbs. “Phi and Diana are around here as well, right?”
“We’ll just have to look in the other pods,” Akane replied.
They did so. Rotating the pods around their rail first brought Phi’s pod into reachable range. Phi climbed out quite eagerly, once she was awake, and hurriedly dusted herself off. “I’m okay, I’m okay!” she snapped. Once she had recovered enough to observe the other players around her, Phi asked, “What about Diana?”
“I guess that she’s in the very next pod,” Sigma said, “It would make sense.” He strode forward and guided the pods onwards with a strong but smooth movement. When the pod he was looking for was level with his chest he pried open the lid. Diana was inside.
Diana was only halfway out of her pod when the distant power room boomed once again.
The next few seconds passed with lightning speed, almost too quickly for Junpei to follow. In the first second, the shockwave rushed through the ground, horizontal cracks appearing at regular intervals as the floor rose and fell on either side. As the next second passed, Sigma threw Diana towards the door with a desperate swing of his arm. Then the third second struck.
An entire segment of the room began to revolve. Sigma’s right foot gave way as the floor moved beneath it; what had been the wall slammed into Sigma as he fell and catapulted him backwards. Junpei – not just Junpei, but everyone else – could only watch as Sigma was tossed brutally about by the rampaging segments of the pod room.
For a moment, a different terror entered Junpei’s heart. He became certain – a certainty he hadn’t felt since the Sudoku that had saved Akane’s life – that Carlos had been caught by the power room’s emanation.
But then the terror that was right in front of Junpei’s eyes took precedence, and the vision faded to the back of Junpei’s mind. When the segments of the pod room finally slowed to a halt, Sigma’s bruised body fell limply into the corner that had become the bottom of the room. Diana took a fearful step forward.
Phi reached out towards her. “Diana! Don’t go! It’s not safe!”
“I have to!” Diana cried back as she broke free of Phi’s grasp, “I can’t watch if Sigma is this close to death again.” Then, Diana paused in mid-stride. “Again?” she muttered, her trembling voice recalling a half-gone memory. Even so, it was only a brief pause before Diana rushed to Sigma’s side.
When Diana helped Sigma up Junpei finally got a look at what had happened to him. Blood was streaming down the right side of his face from where his head had been battered. His right arm dangled limply at his side. Junpei realised that it had been the sickening crunch – which had heard for a millisecond of that devastating whirl – that had mangled Sigma’s arm. Junpei was surprised that Sigma could stand at all, even with Diana’s help; he was even more surprised that Sigma could climb back up to the only fixed platform of the pod room.
Sigma put on a brave face: the half of his face that could be seen past the blood.. “Hmm… I guess I’m still one arm up over last time.” He waved his left hand freely to demonstrate.
Sigma’s gesture was punctuated by the sound of another explosion. Junpei braced himself for another disaster, but he soon realised that this explosion was of another nature entirely. For one thing, it sounded completely different: a brief – almost purposeful – bang rather than the crackling and drawn-out roars that emanated from the power room’s core. For another, it came only from the direction of the lounge.
That realisation came with another. With exactly the same amount of certainty that Carlos had been imperilled by the previous eruption, Junpei was now sure that Carlos was alright. He couldn’t explain. He just knew that when they returned to the lounge, they’d find Carlos safe and sound.
Following that intuition, Junpei announced, “Let’s go! We need to get out of here before it starts spinning again. Diana: patch Sigma up as we go, but move!”
Junpei led the others back down the corridor and into the lounge. When they entered, a storm dust was swirling in the air; it obscured Junpei’s vision and choked his breath. Waving his hands before his eyes to clear them, Junpei staggered towards the one detail he could perceive.
It was Carlos’ face. Carlos was safe, just as Junpei had predicted.
Carlos noticed Junpei only moments after Junpei noticed him. “Sorry about the wait. I promised, didn’t I? That I’d come back for you.”
Junpei shrugged. “Well, we did agree to meet back here.”
Carlos beamed. “Yeah. I guess we did. And it worked out okay, too.” He peered over Junpei’s shoulder; his eyes widened as he saw Phi and Diana helping Sigma along. “Sigma! Diana! Phi! You’re here too?”
“We are,” Phi replied, “Akane and Junpei found us in these pods. We must have been placed there after our bracelets last knocked us out. By Zero, I guess.”
“I’m glad the three of you are okay,” Carlos said, nodding. He swept his gaze around the dusty crumbling lounge. “What happened here?”
The room fell into silence, save for the creaking of the walls, the tremors of the floor, and the omnipresent thundering from the power room. His heart sinking, Junpei realised that Akane had fallen most silent of all; she had failed to explain to Carlos everything she knew that he didn’t, in an opportunity Junpei knew she shouldn’t have been able to resist. Junpei turned to look at Akane and see what was wrong.
Akane’s face had gone pale, completely white. “I…” she muttered under her breath. As sweat glistened on her forehead, Akane forced her voice louder. “I think I remember what I – what the other me – did, back in the power room. That machine there: it’s the reactor that powers the entire bunker. I think I blocked the control mechanism and forced it to overload. Because of me… this entire bunker, and all of us with it, will be obliterated.”
“But we can get out, right?” Diana asked. She pointed, vaguely towards the X-door. Junpei’s eyes followed the direction of Diana’s finger and noted that, despite the mounds of rubble that would hinder progress in that direction, the X-door itself had vanished, leaving a gaping hole out of the bunker.
Akane just shook her head mournfully. “We could, but it won’t be enough. If that reactor is as powerful as I think it is then the explosion won’t be limited to the bunker. There’s no way we could get far enough to survive.”
“That’s not true,” Sigma stated, firmly despite his pain, “I’ve lived for forty-five years with something much more dangerous than that reactor never more than a hundred metres from me. There are always ways to contain the damage. By this point, it’s too late to stop the meltdown from happening, but I think I know how we can vent enough of the energy, shrinking the explosion’s radius enough to allow us to escape.” Sigma paused, frowning. “The problem is that someone will have to stay behind and operate the controls to let the others escape. I’d do it myself, but with my arm like this…” Sigma shifted his right shoulder slightly, grimacing.
“I’ll do it.” Carlos had gone just as pale as Akane, but his tone brooked no argument. He reached into his pocket and drew out a set of keys; after a quick look round, he decided to pass them to Phi. “There’s a fire-truck at the surface. You’ll be able to escape in it.” With that said, Carlos turned to Sigma and nodded. “Sigma. Tell me what I have to do.”
Solemnly, Sigma did so.
With forced, purposeful strides, Carlos made his to the door that led back to the power room. But before he went through he turned around, looking Junpei and Akane squarely in the eyes in turn. “Junpei… Akane… It’s my fault that you were dragged here from that safe timeline.”
Junpei didn’t understand what Carlos was saying. As he tried to parse Carlos’ words, he noticed that the dust had settled enough that he was able, for the first time since they had reunited in the lounge, to see Carlos’ clothes. They seemed to radiate a celestial golden aura; strange, since Carlos had only worn a muted pink earlier. Taken together, Carlos’ bearing and announcement were something Junpei could not ignore.
“To think all that would happen and then I’d end up right back here,” Carlos continued, “I guess the universe wants me to remedy my sins. Well, I guess that’s what I’m going to do. Goodbye Junpei, Akane. I’m glad I got the chance to know you.”
Before Junpei could respond, Carlos backed out of the lounge and disappeared.
“Come on! Let’s go!” Phi commanded.
She led the way, helping Diana manoeuvre Sigma over the debris that obstructed the way out. Akane followed, still slowed by the memory and understanding of what her other self had done. Finally, Junpei joined them, clambering up the fallen rubble and stepping through the hole where the X-door had been breached.
The moment he crossed the threshold the knowledge that Carlos was in danger returned as a crashing wave. More details filled in that intuition: Junpei knew that the danger Carlos faced was not that of the sacrifice he had freely chosen. It had been sudden, meaningless and violent. Something was horribly wrong.
Without even thinking about it, Junpei swivelled around and dived back into the bunker. He ignored Akane’s calls after him, instead leaping off the rubble to land in the centre of the lounge. Coughing through the ever-rising levels of dust, Junpei scanned the room for any sign of Carlos. Junpei found him quickly but not where he expected. Carlos wasn’t close to the door towards the power room; instead he had collapsed only just on the other side of the middle door which he had searched earlier.
Junpei rushed over. As he got closer, he saw that the top of that door’s frame had collapsed; by the way Carlos was partially concealed beneath, it had fallen right onto his head. Junpei didn’t have time to wonder how it had happened. He shook Carlos awake.
“Huh? Junpei?” Carlos slurred, his eyes rolling lazily in their sockets.
“What are you doing here?” Junpei asked, his tone laden with frustration, “You were supposed to be…” Before he could finish that sentence, Junpei cut himself off. Even he wasn’t rude enough to complain like that.
Carlos slowly tilted his head to look at Junpei. “There wasn’t anything useful,” he mumbled, “There was this manufacturing bay, but none of the tools there would be strong enough to cut through the door. I made my way back, there was this quake, and…”
There was nothing for it: Carlos was too confused to offer a coherent answer – perhaps even more confused than his injuries accounted for. The only thing Junpei could do was help Carlos out of the bunker along with the others. Part of Carlos’ pink shirt had been pinned to the ground by some of the fallen debris so Junpei ripped it off, leaving only Carlos’ vest. With Carlos able to stand, Junpei led him across the lounge and towards the way out.
Glass rained down around them as the fake skylight warped and ruptured. The entire structure of the bunker creaked and groaned behind them as the reactor at its core began to force the walls outwards. And the ceaselessly vibrating floor made Carlos’ already-unsteady steps even harder to manage. Eventually though, they made it out, finding the others, along with Gab, gathered on an elevator platform in the space beyond.
Their reaction to Junpei’s return was momentary relief, followed by despair. Diana was the first to voice that despair. “Carlos? That would mean…”
“Yes. The meltdown will not be stopped,” Akane stated. Her lip trembled. “My actions have doomed us all.” Junpei had only heard Akane’s voice become that monotone once before: back in D-Com, when he had pressed her to talk about their previous Nonary Game.
Sigma stumbled forward. “There’s still a chance,” he gasped, “I can still…”
“It’s too late,” Phi interrupted, “You’ll never make it in your condition, old man. I’m not going to let you throw your life away for nothing.” Before Sigma could take another step Phi slammed her palm onto a button on the elevator’s control panel.
The elevator began to rise, carrying the six surviving players towards an uncertain freedom.
The fire-engine was parked in the desert outside, just as Carlos had promised. As Phi ran for the driver’s compartment, bearing the keys like a dagger, Junpei, Akane and Diana helped Sigma, Carlos and Gab into the back. Once Diana had joined them – it had to be her; she was the only one who could tend to them – there was no room for Akane and Junpei, so they stood on the platform on the right-hand side, clinging to the railing.
“Listen up, everyone!” Phi announced, her voice projected from the fire-truck’s speaker system, “We’re going to have to outrun this thing. Hold on tight, because here we go!”
Before the sound of Phi’s voice had faded away, the vehicle lurched forwards with sirens blaring. They rapidly picked up speed and for a few brief moments, Junpei’s hope bloomed. He almost convinced himself that they would escape the blast unscathed.
They were five hundred metres away when the first beam of light lanced out of the bunker and straight into the sky.
That tower of unleashed energy was quickly joined by three or four others, then by so many that it was impossible to count. The fire-truck began to swerve as the sand shifted beneath it; even from his limited vantage point Junpei could feel Phi fighting to keep the vehicle under control. And then an ominous boom sounded deep beneath the ground, the sound carried to Junpei’s ears by a suddenly-rushing wind.
“Junpei…” Akane whispered beside him. Her voice was weak and hesitant.
Junpei frantically pre-empted what she was going to say. “It’s not your fault!” he yelled, “You didn’t do this. Even if you had, I’d forgive you.”
“Of course you would. You’ve already forgiven much worse things I’ve done.” For a moment, Junpei thought he saw a faint smile on Akane’s face. But then it faded. “I’m not sure I can forgive myself any longer. The detonation of a reactor of that size won’t just kill us. It will destroy everything for miles around. This is a universe that God abandoned, a universe of the sort I thought I’d dedicated my life to preventing, and the other me created it just to give herself the slightest advantage. ‘Those bastards are just us, Junpei. No more, no less.’ I have to accept that this is what I’m capable of. And if so… I’m not sure I… deserve…”
Akane turned her face away. Her right hand shifted along the hand rail as though reaching out to Junpei. But then her grip loosened and her hand began to fall.
“No!” Junpei lashed out, snatching Akane’s right hand with his left and forcing it against the rail. He squeezed without restraint, just to make sure he could hold on. “I’m not letting you go! Goddamnit, I’m not letting you go!”
At that moment the sound intensified. A shockwave raced over the fire-truck: a terrible wall of wind carrying a storm of sand that cut through every piece of exposed skin. Junpei closed his eyes, sure that everything was over.
And it was.
Only a second after the shockwave had hit, the winds died and the cloud of sand dispersed. Looking back along the route they had come, Junpei saw the beams of light which had broken out of the bunker fade harmlessly back into the natural night sky. Once everything had calmed, Phi gradually slowed the fire-engine to a halt.
Only then did Junpei release Akane’s hand.
She looked at her hand, turning it over and over as if she wasn’t sure it was real. “You were right, Junpei,” she murmured, “You were right.” Her strength failed her and she fell off the fire-truck’s platform, cushioned safely by the dune. “This really is the universe that God has blessed.”
It took all the survivors several minutes to recover – Sigma was so brutally injured that even after being patched up by Diana he could hardly be said to have ‘recovered’ – but they eventually they steadied themselves to the point where they could talk about what had happened. Carlos had healed particularly well, showing no sign that he had been completely delirious only a while back.
“What was that stuff you were talking about back there, Carlos?” Junpei asked.
“What stuff?”
Junpei sighed. “You know. ‘To think all that would happen and then I’d end up right back here,’ and stuff like that.”
Carlos laughed awkwardly. “Did I really say that? I must’ve been right out of it, because I don’t remember that at all.”
Junpei’s questioning was interrupted when Diana spoke up. “So… Is this really the end?”
“I believe it is,” Akane replied. She gazed pensively across the horizon back towards the bunker, her eyes betraying fear that the explosion would restart at any moment, but eventually satisfied herself. “The reactor’s meltdown has stopped, at least. But… that shouldn’t be possible. There’s no way it could have…”
“There’s always a way,” Sigma stated, “Just because we don’t know what it was doesn’t mean it wasn’t possible.”
Diana tilted her head to one side. “Um… That’s kind of why I asked it was really the end. It doesn’t feel like a proper ending. There’s still so much stuff we don’t know.”
“We can make educated guesses about a lot of what we don’t know,” Phi said, “Like, for example, Radical-6. Akane?”
“Definitely eradicated,” Akane answered, “If Free the Soul had any stocks of it elsewhere, thus entire mission would have been pointless. Of course, there’s no way the Radical-6 stored in the bunker survived that.”
“Zero?” Phi asked.
“To call yourself ‘Zero’ is to put your own life on the line,” Akane explained.
Phi glanced at Sigma, who nodded.
“Whoever he was, this Zero understood that. He didn’t escape with us, so…” Akane finished by merely nodding.
“And Q-team didn’t survive,” Junpei said, “We know that.” He grunted bitterly, before glancing at Diana. “I see what you mean, Diana, about this not being a proper ending. I thought everybody was supposed to get out at the end of these things. ‘Happily ever after.’”
“It’s not perfect,” Akane admitted, “But it’s still good.” A playful grin spread across Akane’s lips, which Junpei hadn’t seen for a decade. “Just like that ring you’ve got.”
Junpei gasped. “You saw?” He clumsily fished it out of his pocket. “But it’s chipped. Right there.”
Akane’s grin just broadened. “I saw how it got that chip, too. Only three people were ever supposed to leave the Decision Game alive. That was Zero’s plan. Thanks in part to that ring and what you did with it, six of us escaped. Six! That ring’s not ‘perfect’, not any more. But it’s still good.”
“I-Is that… a ‘Yes’?” Junpei stammered. He stood there for a few seconds before remembering to drop to one knee.
“Yes. Yes. Of course, yes.”
By Christmas day of 2029, the former site of the Decision Game bunker was declared safe for entry. Junpei and Akane returned, hoping to find any clues to the miracle that had stopped the reactor’s explosion. Only one awaited them, hidden among the ash. It was the visor of a fireman’s helmet: scorched and cracked, warped and melted, and stalwart to the end.
From: @choco-maize
for @pomegranate-belle!! it’s carlos saving the day! (or, well, a cat to be specific!)
happy holidays and i hope you’ll enjoy this gift!!
What We Make of It/MK-END: 1 (for 8lotuses)
To: @8lotuses
From: @pomegranate-belle
Happy holidays, 8lotuses! I ended up getting a little carried away, I think, but that just means there’s more for you to read, right? This is mainly to fill your alternate ZTD ending prompt, but I threw some Phi/Maria in too. Hope you like it!
What We Make of It/MK-END: 1
Everything is… wrong. Everything is too much. Forward, or backward? Through time? Through space. No, that isn’t right either. It’s like… A book. With all the pages out of order. Or trying to swim to the surface when you don’t know which way is up anymore. If there ever was an up. A swift jerk to the left, or the right. It’s hard to tell. Last time you didn’t press the button, but this time you have to.
“You have two choices.”
Live, or die. Live, or…
Die.
You have to die. Again. Again. Just to see what will happen, just to see what will happen, just to s—
(Hello? Is… Someone there…?)
The voice is jolting. A static shock. Familiar.
I know that voice. But… Who is it? And… Who am I?
“Maria! Miss Serezo! Please don’t move! You’ve only just woken up again—!”
Maria…? That’s… Me.
Then everything tilts sideways, everything changes, and she’s sliding backwards down a long, dark tunnel. There’s blinding whiteness and a chemical smell that itches at her brain. A hospital room. Familiar hands grasp at the with sheets of the bed. Every sense feels layered with a tinny ringing noise.
“I need to get up,” says her voice. “It’s been two weeks. I can’t wait any longer. I have to go.”
But she’s not the one saying it.
“You need to stay here, Maria. We still have to make sure you’re all right. You know we can’t discharge you yet.”
The nurse is saying this. He looks troubled. The features of his face shift a few times before settling into a stable image. She is not controlling the movement of her eyes, but Maria still feels them haze and water.
“You don’t understand.” Maria’s voice is filled with an anger, frustration, that isn’t hers. “My family’s in danger. I need to leave.”
But then. But then… The images, thought, minds, decisions, that had sucked her under as surely as an ocean tide start to bubble back up to the surface and the voice-that-is-not-her is right. Carlos is in danger. He’s already died once. Twice. Five ti—No. No. He’s alive and he needs her help. Carlos—
Maria squeezes her eyes shut, clutches her head in pain, and this time it’s her to do it. Conflicting timelines don’t fit well inside a human body, but she pushes past the pain.
“I’m sure your family is just fine,” the nurse says soothingly.
(Maria…?)
Yes? She asks the encroaching mind. Who are you?
(My name is… Kyle. I need your help.)
She knows she’s heard that name. She knows she’s been that name.
Kyle… Klim…?
(Yes! That’s me!)
“We have to go,” Maria says aloud, but whether it’s to Kyle or the nurse she isn’t sure. “We have to save Carlos.”
(And my father.)
“Him too.”
Maria moves to get out of the hospital bed, but the nurse grabs her arm. The hold is gentle, and on the arm without the IV drip.
“Maria,” he tells her, “you need to lie back down. Carlos is fine, he’s volunteered for a social experiment, and he won’t be in contact for a while, that’s all. Please. You’ve been making so much progress.”
But Maria shakes her head.
“I can’t lie back down. I have to go now. It might already be too late.”
And it hurts to say that. But it’s the truth. She doesn’t know what day it is, or what time. She doesn’t know how far she is from Carlos.
“You’ve only been out for twelve hours now,” the nurse explains, voice placating. “It’s 8:00AM on New Year’s Eve. Whatever it is, it can wait a little longer.”
But he’s wrong. It can’t wait. New Year’s Eve means it’s the final day. Means she has less than 24 hours to save her brother.
“I understand,” her mouth says without her permission, and she’s thrown back into the corner of her own mind.
It’s terrifying and wrong – until she realizes that it’s Kyle. His mind, hand in hand with hers, telling her that this is how things have to be done. And if ‘Maria’ has been awake for a while, that means he’s had more time to acclimate to this hospital environment than she has. They lie back down, but Maria firmly seizes control of the body back, holding the reins tightly.
We still have to get out. Get unhooked and get out.
(I don’t suppose you could possess him) Kyle says, and it’s not really a question.
The idea is ludicrous.
I’m not a ghost! We’ll have to think of something else.
Maria can attach herself to other consciousnesses, certainly, but only those of ESPers or SHIFTers or whatever they’re being called now. More than that, her requirements are the same as the others’ – danger. There is none here, except the danger of being too late to save their families.
(Tell him you’re tired. You want to rest more. Something to get him out of the room.)
“I think,” Maria says numbly, “I want to rest a little more.”
The nurse looks at her, understanding and concerned.
“Ok. Just push the alert button if you need me, for any reason.”
Maria nods.
“I will.”
The nurse leaves, and she and Kyle are finally alone.
“Now what?” Maria demands.
Kyle’s uncertainty on that topic is not at all reassuring.
(I don’t… We need to get out of the IV if we want to go anywhere. I know where they keep the supplies to bandage your arm, but we’ll have to get up to get them.)
“But the IV…”
(We have to carry the bag.)
Maria shakes her head. Everything is still strange and tinny. Her balance is not something Maria wants to test, not while carrying something that’s stuck into her vein.
“I don’t think I can do that,” she admits.
(But I can. Just for now. You’ll… Have to give me back control of the body, though.)
She doesn’t like that idea. Having been so long divorced from her body, she’s worried to let it go again. But it’s the only plan either of them can think of, and the people they’re trying to save are too important. She gives her consent.
Going is slow with only one good hand, and though she’s not completely connected to the body anymore, Maria can still feel Kyle’s exhaustion, having to hold the IV bag up in the air. Still, he makes it across the room in good time. He removes the top off the jar full of cotton balls and grabs one. Then, with her final two fingers pressing it to her palm, he opens a cupboard and pulls out a roll of bandages. Both hands full now, he shambles to the bed and hooks the IV bag back in place over it.
The second her back hits the hospital bed, Maria is in control again.
Kyle?
(I’m fine. It’s your body, I know it’s uncomfortable for you to have me in charge of it.)
Thank you.
But she doesn’t know what’s next. The theory of it is easy enough to imagine, but in practice…
(We just have to carefully pull out the IV, then put pressure on it – cotton ball, then bandage over the top. Simple.)
“Maybe,” Maria mutters.
Her stomach is already flopping as she gently pries the tape from her skin.
(Turn off the IV before you pull it out.)
“How do I do that…?” she asks.
He guides her through shutting off the flow of IV fluid, and then she’s back at the part she doesn’t want to deal with. Maria takes a slow, deep breath, lets it out, and pulls. There’s a slight pinch, and then she begins to feel sick. There’s not much blood slipping down her arm, but it is, and that’s what matters. It takes a second, two, to fumble for the cotton ball but finally Maria has it against her skin.
“There,” she murmurs to herself. “There.”
Except, she can’t seem to make her thumb press the cotton ball hard enough against her arm. Blood dribbles past it, and Maria begins to feel faint.
“Kyle,” she gasps. “I can’t, I can’t—”
Maria’s hand tingles strangely. Then, the pressure increases. Her hand is no longer her own. The rest of her is still… Her. But the hand is Kyle, now.
Is that even possible?
A soft laugh echoes around in her skull.
(I’ve learned to stop asking questions like that.)
Slowly, carefully, Kyle wraps up her arm. The wooziness eases, although Maria still can’t bring herself to look at the discarded IV tube. It’s strange, not paying attention to what her arm is doing, but she trusts Kyle with the body they share. He taps the fingers of the hand he controls against the back of their other hand, drawing Maria’s attention back to her arm. The puncture wound has been safely bound and the spilled blood wiped away.
“Thanks.”
(It’s no problem.)
With that done, Maria simply has to get back out of bed. Which is more of a struggle than she’s happy with, but she’s determined to do it. Kyle doesn’t argue the point, since they are now free of the IV. Thankfully, the hospital bed is one of the kinds with a small railing, and Maria is able to lean on that to steady her balance. Goal number one is clear – there’s a pile of clothing and other items across the room that she needs to get to. There are counters and chairs to assist her movement, but Maria starts to wonder if maybe she’ll have to commandeer a wheelchair. It makes her heart twist to think of stealing equipment from the hospital, from people who probably need it, but her brother’s life is on the line. The lives of the entire world are, in fact, but his is especially.
(Focus.)
Maria shakes herself free from the spiral of worry and guilt.
Right.
As she reaches the counter her clothes are on, Maria is again hit with the fact that she’s been in a coma for ten years. The jeans and blouse she’d worn into the hospital are laughably small. But, settled next to them, pristine and with the tags still on, are things that might actually fit her. And, beneath them, articles of clothing that slowly decrease in size. Emotion clogs Maria’s throat for a moment, thinking about Carlos buying these clothes, all of these clothes, for ten years, in the hopes that she might wake up and need them. She clutches the purple plaid button-up at the top of the pile to her chest, and rolls her gaze to the ceiling in an attempt to force her tears back down before they can fall.
She still has one hand white-knuckling the edge of the counter.
(Maria.)
Right. Sorry. Right.
With her free hand, Maria reaches around behind her to untie the hospital gown. The sting in her shoulder as she stretches her arm too far is almost comforting. A reminder that she is back in her own body. She keeps her gaze trained upward, for both their sakes, as the gown falls away to pool at her feet. The flannel is unbuttoned so she slings it on and lets it hang open as she grabs a pair of jeans. Alternately looking away and with her eyes closed, Maria dresses herself. She’s steadier on her feet now, doesn’t need to lean on the counter anymore.
But it’s still weird – to have woken up in a woman’s body. Her own body, fully through the turbulence and changes of puberty. Well, to be more specific, it feels weird to button her shirt over a full chest instead of a flat one.
(For both of us, trust me) Kyle jumps in, reminding her that the absent drift of her consciousness is not private.
I hadn’t thought of that.
Dressed, she moves on to the items sitting next to her clothes, which look to be miscellaneous possessions. Her eyes drift over them, recognizing one or the other, and then stop on something unfamiliar.
There’s a bus ticket sitting on the pile of her personal effects – sandwiched between her decade-old smart phone and her small blue coin purse. And despite the fact that everything else is from her life prior to the fire… As Maria picks it up, she can see the bus ticket is dated for the current day. New Year’s Eve, 2028. It’s for a line that runs straight from Sacramento to Las Vegas.
“Kyle,” she breathes, giddy and disbelieving and still a little dizzy from removing the IV. “This is it! This will get us to Nevada!”
(That’s too much of a coincidence.)
But it isn’t a condemnation, not the way he thinks it. Kyle’s wary, but the ticket is something they can’t afford to pass up, not when they’re so far away from where they need to be. And so, Maria tucks the ticket into the pink drawstring bag at the bottom of the pile, along with her coin purse, her probably useless phone, and a couple of trinkets she can’t bear to leave behind.
“Ready?” she asks, even though she already knows the answer.
Kyle humors her.
(Ready.)
They wander the halls of the hospital, trying to look inconspicuous. Thankfully, it doesn’t take long to find a wheelchair, and they can finally rest Maria’s overtaxed legs. Then it’s just a matter of slipping out of the hospital itself before anyone realizes she’s missing. It’s a lot easier than she would have expected. Perhaps that’s because she’s in everyday clothes, and perhaps it’s because she has Kyle helping her watch for anyone who might catch them. He’s not a second pair of eyes in the most literal sense – he can only see what’s in her field of vision – but they notice different things.
Once they’re several blocks from the hospital, Maria stops and pulls out the bus ticket. The station isn’t one she recognizes, but it’s named for a street that she does vaguely recall. And so, they make their way there. By the time they reach the station, it’s 8:45, and the bus is set to leave at 9:00.
We made it.
(Thanks to you. I’d have been completely lost.)
Well, you did the wheeling for most of it, so you’ve gotta take half the credit Maria says, and finds that while she is sincere she is also teasing him.
It’s a moment of levity before a storm of anxiety. The wheelchair lift rises slowly. Every second she worries that she will be found out. That the ticket will be fake, that it’s all a trap, that something will go horribly wrong.
But it doesn’t.
Instead, she is escorted to a space designated for a wheelchair, and the bus begins to move.
Across the aisle and ten rows up, Light Field taps away at his smartphone, eyes closed and listening carefully through earphones.
“Are you telling the others?” asks his sister, who is herself in the middle of texting Alice.
Light shrugs his shoulders and continues to type. He makes a mental note to download a VoiceOver app with a less grating voice.
“Yes,” he says after another minute. “But I think they’ll be able to feel her anyway. We did.”
Clover pauses, and frowns.
“You mean… She’s not projecting on purpose?”
With a laugh, Light shakes his head.
“Doubtful. It’s loud but there’s no finesse to it. I don’t think she even realizes she’s sending out what amounts to a giant distress beacon.”
Kyle and Maria are able to distract themselves for a few hours just watching the scenery go by. So much has changed in ten years that Maria can hardly recognize the world around her. For Kyle, it’s all brand new.
(There’s so much color. I’ve seen pictures, movies, but… This is still…)
Maria nods, to herself and to him.
I know what you mean.
Anything would be overwhelming after the stark metal and neon of Rhizome-9. Is overwhelming. She’s come from there too, from Rhizome-9 and from the Mars Mission Test Site. And so together they while away the morning marveling over the world they see around them now, new and different and alive with so many people.
Before they realize it, the bus has stopped at a large rest area so that its passengers can get lunch. There are a number of selections, of course, but one immediately draws Maria’s eye – a burger joint.
Oh, yes.
She’s wheeling to it the second the lift lets her down, but her roommate has some complaints.
(I don’t think that’s a good idea.)
“I haven’t had a cheeseburger in ten years, Kyle. Nothing you say will stop me from getting one now.”
(You have not had anything in ten years! You’re just going to make yourself sick and then it will take us even longer to reach the Test Site.)
Maria groans.
“I hate it when you’re right,” she mumbles, rubbing a $5 bill between her thumb and index finger. “Fine, Doctor Kyle, what would you suggest? I can’t just not eat.”
(Something soft or liquid, and bland. Soup, maybe?)
And so they end up with hot broth – barely thick enough to be called soup at all, but cheap – inside a three-dollar convenience store thermos. It’s better than nothing. And it warms Maria’s hands, which are chilled with anxiety as her mind turns to the second half of their journey.
(We’re fine.)
There isn’t a trace of a lie in his thoughts.
How do you know that…?
(I can still feel him, his mind, through the morphogenetic field. My father. Sigma Klim is alive.)
They wheel slowly back onto the bus. But Kyle’s reassurances aren’t helping much.
I can’t feel anything.
(You’re not used to searching for other people through the field) Kyle explains. (That’s all. I’ve been getting other blips, too, one of them is surely your brother.)
Maria desperately hopes he’s right.
“But why…”
She stares down at the thermos and shakes her head, then finishes the question, mumbling under her breath.
“Why did you choose me?”
He’s had time, if what the nurse said is anything to go by, to acclimate to her body. But why bother? Why not SHIFT to someone much more convenient? If he was sharing a body anyway, why not with Sigma?
(I’ve been awake in your body for two weeks now. It’s been… A struggle) admits Kyle. (But you weren’t… Chosen. I didn’t realize the body I was jumping to would be yours. I don’t think anyone did. We weren’t sure who or what you were, just that you interfered in the AB Project – helped it to be successful. We knew that you changed it, broke us out of a loop of failures. That you were a powerful SHIFTer who could SHIFT to bodies other than your own, and we needed someone of that caliber because I don’t exist yet in 2028.)
“So my mind is powerful. But my body…”
Is that of a decade-long coma patient. In other words, useless.
Her hands are shaking, trembling. Maria almost drops the thermos, can already feel the burns to come, all over her chest and legs. Kyle takes over and the shaking stops immediately. It’s as though a great weight has been taken off her, although Maria doesn’t know why.
(I’m more used to it, right now) Kyle answers as he takes gentle sips of soup from the thermos. (Controlling this body.)
Maria can feel the warm glow of heat as he drinks, but nothing more concrete. The gestures and body language he adopts are not hers. It’s a strange feeling.
They are both silent for some time, snatches of incoherent though drifting past them both, unexamined and undiscussed.
(What did you see in there?) Kyle asks at last. (In the Test Site?)
The images flash before the eyes they share, unbidden, at his question. Things Maria would have eased into gently, had she been speaking. The coin toss. The plague doctor mask. Carlos’ deaths. Junpei, scattered into pieces, the creeping gory realization, knowing they would find his head sitting on that shelf before she knew anything else. A chainsaw. An axe. Two gunshots – one for Sigma, one for Diana. Phi’s face through the incinerator window. A pin atop a pile of ash. Two babies, swaddled, and placed in separate pods, with names written on their tiny feet. A sinking feeling, an awful question – whose eyes had she been watching from…? An aged face, eyes covered with red-tinted glasses. Death. Death. Death.
Kyle almost drops the thermos. Maria’s fingers are trembling under his control but not for the same reasons they had been before he took over.
I’m… I’m so sorry, Kyle.
(No, it’s not. Not your fault. You couldn’t control it.)
They’re your siblings, you know. Both of them, Phi and Brother. Delta.
Kyle begins to understand it, then, the feeling of rightness he gets when he thinks about Phi. Because she, too, is part of his family. But the idea that the villain they’ve been fighting against all this time is his own brother is… It’s crushing. He can only imagine what his father feels, will feel, when he finds out.
They fall silent. Neither wants to think about it, about the bonds or family or what Brother’s true identity means for both of them. Instead, they focus on the soup, on the physical needs of the body they share. Nourishment is important, and they’ll need strength to save everyone at the Mars Mission Test Facility. Because that’s still their mission, their goal. No matter what, no matter the revelations they make, they won’t give up on that.
Half an hour after finishing the thermos of soup, another physical need presents itself. That is, Maria finds she really, really has to use the restroom.
Can you maybe… Turn off?
Kyle’s sigh from inside her brain is almost audible.
(You do know I’m not a robot, right?)
Or close your eyes or… I don’t know! Just stop watching! I really have to go to the bathroom!
(I’ve been going to the bathroom as you for two weeks) Kyle points out.
And it’s weird!
(I know.)
But even as his tone is wry and argumentative, Kyle’s presence fades until it’s just a faint haze at the back of her mind. Relieved, Maria wheels herself to the unfortunate bus toilet and hauls herself up to go inside. There are, thankfully, plenty of walls in easy reach to hold on to in such a cramped place, and Maria finishes up her business quickly, washes her hands as best she can, and stumbles back out into her wheelchair.
“Whew.”
As she leans her head back and sighs, Kyle rebounds to become an equal presence in their shared head.
(Good?)
Yeah. I’m good.
(You have no idea how glad I am that you’re here to do that now.)
That startles a small giggle out of Maria as she maneuvers the wheelchair back to their ‘seat’. The two of them, once again, spend time staring out the window, but after only a few short minutes Maria can feel her eyes drooping. A yawn drifts past her lips.
If I sleep…
The worries are myriad, sparking around in their shared brain like a thundercloud. Will I drift away? Will you? Is there a way we can both sleep, to try not to overtax the body? What if I leave again? What if I can never come back?
(It’ll be fine) Kyle reassures her. (All of it. I promise.)
Thank you, Kyle. I… I’m sorry. I know this is hard for you too.
(But we have each other. That’s enough. Between us, we’re strong enough.)
And she believes him. They don’t know what they’re doing, not really. There’s no big plan, nothing but stopping Delta and saving their families, but she knows he’s right. They’re going to do this. That surety allows Maria to close her eyes and drift away. It’s as though there’s a hand in hers.
When Maria wakes up, there’s a crick in her neck and the sleepy buzz of Kyle’s mind next to hers. The bus rolls to a stop soon after, when the two of them are blinking at the shimmering lights of Vegas. Not as vibrant as they would be after the set of the sun, of course, but there’s no time to wait around and find out.
They’re lowered down on the wheelchair ramp, and that’s the end of their guidance. It would be simple if their location was within the city. Well, not simple, really, but simpler. Instead, they need to find transportation to take them to the Test Site. And there’s no bus line running out there.
(Our best bet is a car, but we’d have to steal it. You don’t have enough in that coin purse to rent one.)
It’s true. There’s no way for them to legally get a car, not on the remains of a twelve-year-old’s pocket money. They roll their way down the street, considering. Trying to think of any other way. They’ve broken out of a hospital and used a very suspicious bus ticket, but they haven’t done anything outright illegal yet, and both are hesitant to resort to it. Still, after forty-five minutes have been wasted away, they both concede there’s nothing else to do.
“We need to get out into the desert,” Maria says. “So, something… Off-roady.”
(There’s a jeep off your two) Kyle points out helpfully.
“That works.”
It’s a struggle to wheel up to the jeep, but the end of the world isn’t going to wait for her body to recover. Thankfully, the door is unlocked. Maria thinks she remembers that being common – for a car like that with soft windows and a soft roof, locking the doors only leads to more property damage if it’s stolen.
Gripping the car for dear life, Maria stands. She opens the door. She knows she doesn’t have the strength to lift the wheelchair into the back of the car, even if it would fit, which she isn’t sure it would. They’ll have to leave it behind. She’ll have to do without it for the rest of their journey. The thought is terrifying, even with Kyle’s own musings warming her with the knowledge that her legs have at least had a good amount of rest on the bus trip. So Maria pulls herself inside the car and settles in the driver’s seat, clicks the seatbelt, and places her hands on the wheel.
But she doesn’t have a key.
There’s a sound in her head like the clearing of a throat.
(I can fix that.)
Meanwhile, in a café across the street, a stylish Japanese woman in a green dress has just sit down to drink bubble tea with her bookish girlfriend.
“Um… Nona…?”
She blinks, glancing back at her date instead of through the café window.
“Hm?”
“Um. Did… Wasn’t that your jeep? Did… Did that girl in the wheelchair just jack your car?”
Nona just smiles an attractive, mysterious smile – one that makes her girlfriend inhale sharply and almost choke on a tapioca pearl.
“Everything’s fine,” she says quietly, checking the time on her phone instead of directly answering the question. “Right on time.”
Pulling up her text messages, she taps out two words – ‘you’re up’ and hits send before returning to her date.
Though he says nothing aloud, Kyle’s internal monologue as they drive down the street is a mantra of ‘oh god’s. There’s no shake in her hands, so maybe someone on the outside wouldn’t be able to tell, but it’s very clear to Maria that Kyle has very little idea what he’s doing.
You know how to hotwire a car but you don’t know how to drive?!
“I lived on the moon,” he reminds her in her own voice. “In a rhizome! Why would I have ever learned?”
Oh jeez—give me the wheel, Kyle, you’re going to get us killed!
“But you don’t know where we’re going!” retorts Kyle, making a shaky and terrifyingly fast left turn. “You can’t feel the other SHIFTers!”
You can navigate from the back seat, moon boy!
Maria’s hands are white-knuckling the steering wheel and she isn’t sure which of them is doing that. However, actually fighting him for control of the body sounds like a perfect recipe for a car accident, so she refrains.
“It’s not like you can drive either!” he cuts back defensively, forgetting to signal as he changes lanes and by some miracle not getting them killed with his negligence. “You’ve been in a coma since you were twelve!”
Oh yeah? Well I at least know how to work the brake pedal and the turn signal, so I’m years ahead of you, buster!
That’s right around the moment that they realize the gas tank is almost empty. Because of course it is, of course they chose the one car with an almost empty tank. Thankfully, Kyle spots a gas station. They pull in, going too far past the nozzles and having to reverse.
I don’t have a credit card Maria points out.
“Can you pay inside, in cash? That’s something you can do, right?”
I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?
Properly chastened, Kyle relinquishes control of the body. Either that or he’s chickening out, which Maria doesn’t entirely blame him for. It’s not like she relishes going into the gas station’s convenience store and admitting she has no idea what she’s doing.
But the situation calls for it, so that’s exactly what she does.
“Y-yeah, um… I need… Like… Ten gallons…?”
With sweaty hands, Maria dumps the small pile of crumpled bills which are the last of her money on the counter. The cashier gives her an odd look, but he also seems too bored and underpaid to take his suspicion any farther than that.
“That’s barely enough for six,” he informs her after sorting through the money.
“Here,” interrupts a guy standing behind her in line, gesturing with his KitKat. “I’ve got it. Just put it on my card. However much it takes to fill her tank.”
Maria turns to stare, unsure what to think. Part of her is wary, wanting to know why he would do that for her. Another part of her – one she’s having trouble distinguishing from Kyle – is urging her not to question her good fortune. Because… And she’s not sure if the thought is hers or Kyle’s, but KitKat guy looks… Familiar.
“What?” he mutters, scuffing a hand through a mess of white hair. “Can’t a person do something nice?”
Maria shakes her head, slowly.
“No. I. Er. Thank you.”
She steps aside, and he swipes his card. While KitKat guy and the cashier are talking, Maria’s legs begin to shake. She grips the counter as subtly as she can. Kyle snatches control of her legs, steadying them a little through force of will. By the time they’re settled, KitKat guy is heading towards the door. They follow after him.
KitKat guy’s car is small, generic, and blue. It’s parked at the next pump over from the jeep.
“I was gonna pick up some family,” he admits to Maria as he unhooks the nozzle and twists off the jeep’s gas cap. “But I think I’ll need something bigger, now. Forgot how many distant relatives will be there.”
Maria just nods, not sure what to make of him.
(I swear, I swear, I’ve seen him somewhere. Maybe Ms. Kurashiki or my father had a picture of him…? Agh. I can’t recall…)
The frustration is shared. KitKat guy is like a word on the tip of their tongue.
“New Year’s party?” asks Maria, bringing herself and Kyle back to the conversation.
KitKat guy barks out a laugh.
“You could say that.”
His response seems to end the conversation, because neither Maria nor Kyle can think of a fitting way to reply. And so they’re silent as gas flows into the jeep, until a loud click is heard. KitKat guy removes the nozzle and puts it back. Only then does Maria realize that he did all the work for them. Which is probably strange, but she’s too grateful to care. She and Kyle have no idea what they’re doing, so if someone else is willing to do it for them, that’s great.
Maria puts on the gas cap and shuts it away. KitKat guy is already heading for his own car.
“Is… Is that it?” Maria asks softly.
(I suppose…?)
Whether it is or not, they get back in the jeep, start it up, and drive. This time, Kyle relinquishes the wheel to Maria. She has about as much experience as he does – that is to say, none – but she’s a much more careful driver. Soon, they make it to the edge of the desert, and realize they’re going to have to pull off the road. There is no path to the Test Site, not a paved one, anyway.
(It’ll be easier) Kyle suggests, hopeful. (No traffic.)
There are reasons it will probably be harder, but neither of them wants to think about that. Slowly, ever so slowly, Maria maneuvers the jeep off the road. It’s almost therapeutic, driving across the desert. There’s no speed limit, no other vehicles. No turn lanes or red lights or honking horns.
Maria is just beginning to enjoy it when her vision starts going wonky. At first it’s just a stray spot of red here and there, which she attributes to the brightness of the sun. But then the hallucination begins to take over more and more of her field of vision and her grasp on the world wavers.
“Take the wheel,” she mumbles, a little hysterically.
All she can see are red spiders flickering across her vision and that’s less than helpful for avoiding cacti and other desert debris. Her fingers and the left sides of her hands have gone numb, and she can’t seem to build up the leg strength to push the gas pedal as far as she needs to. But Kyle’s hold on her body is less tenuous than her own, as wrong as that seems.
(I’m sorry. This wasn’t supposed to happen. We’re pushing your body to the limit right now, and I…)
“As long as we save Carlos and the others… As long as we do that, I don’t care what happens to me.”
She recedes and he takes over, free of her visual hallucinations, and they speed across the desert leaving a dusty trail behind them.
As they race against time he speaks in her voice about things she could have never known, and it’s soothing. Stories of the rhizome. They can be lonely, and strange, and sad. But there’s a wealth of love inside Kyle that defies his circumstances.
“I understand now, fully,” he says. “The world my father was fighting for. And Ms. Kurashiki too. This is it. The air and the grass and the sand, and the people. People like you.”
And you.
There’s a long and wavering pause.
“Yeah,” Kyle says at last, softly. “Me too.”
It’s half an hour later when the knowledge hits.
Maria can feel it under her skin, an itch between bone and muscle. It’s so deep and so horrifying that she jolts into her body all at once. Her foot slams on the brakes and the jeep skids to a stop, fishtailing in the sand.
“I know what timeline we’re in,” she says, her mouth dry.
The one where Brother is about to blow them all up. The one where everyone dies. A shiver runs down her spine but it’s actually Kyle’s, as he hears, sees the track they’re following. Desperate, Maria slams her foot on the gas. They have no time. If they’re late… If they’re late, everything they love goes up in flames.
There’s no more time.
Everything until they reach the facility is a blur of fear, of potential fire licking at their peripherals until it’s almost too much to stand. But when they reach it and the walls are still standing, when Kyle can still feel the steady pulse of his father’s mind through the morphogenetic field, they both heave a sigh of relief through Maria’s lungs.
They stumble out the driver’s side of the car, not bothering to close the door behind them, and approach the entrance to the Test Site. It’s locked, of course. Maria reaches out, as if she’s going to press her palm flat to the metal doors. The heat beaming down on her makes her think twice about the action. She drops her hand, and sighs.
We have to get in there. We have to stop the detonation, reprogram the Force Quit Box. And I don’t know how.
But the response she receives from Kyle is a wave of overwhelming confidence.
(That’s what I’m here for, remember?)
A smile spreads across Maria’s face, and it’s shared between them.
Go for it.
Kyle flexes their hands a few times and laughs.
The elevator is locked, and there’s no way out. They’re all going to die. Lights flash above them, lighting everything in crimson. Gab is dead. And Delta, calm as ever, is sitting placidly on the floor with a shotgun to his face, about to tell them what the second ‘good’ thing is.
But then, the flashing stops. The lights return to incandescent yellow-white, instead of emergency red. Delta’s already gaunt face tightens.
“Self-destruct aborted,” says a feminine computer voice, slightly garbled.
For a few moments, no one can think of anything to say. Eric’s arms drop, and the shotgun hangs limply at his side. They all wait, with bated breath, for a few more seconds. But the Force Quit does not start up again. Tension begins to fall from shoulders all around the room. Delta stands, brushing off his sleeves.
“Technical difficulties?” Junpei mocks.
“You could say that.”
But the answering voice does not belong to Delta. Everyone turns, as one, to see a haggard young woman standing triumphantly in the open doors of the elevator. Carlos is the first to find his voice, although it’s hoarse.
“Maria…?”
She manages an exhausted smile in return.
“Hey there, brother mine,” she says.
“How… How did you get here…?”
Carlos stumbles forward a step but doesn’t move closer than that. Maria can feel Kyle straining in the back of her mind so she turns her eyes away from Carlos’ shocked expression to run them across D Team. The warmth of his relief is overpowering. She understands.
“Kyle and I,” Maria answers, letting her eyes linger on Diana so Kyle can study her, “we woke up and… Made our way here. I, I saw it. I mean, all of it, all the timelines, I was following all of you and I couldn’t, I had to…”
Sigma mouths, cannot seem to say aloud, ‘Kyle’. With a dip of her head, Maria tries to convey the truth. When Kyle looks up through her eyes, she can see that Sigma understands. Then Delta shakes his head slowly and it draws Maria’s—no, still Kyle’s, reluctant gaze.
“No, this is… Impossible,” Delta insists, as though he’s trying to make himself believe what he’s saying.
Maria cocks her head to the side and plants a hand on her hip.
“I like to think of it more as… Highly improbable.”
“You, you cannot be—The consciousness I was channeling was not merely human.”
Delta all but spits the words, his hands and shoulders tight with tension. His insufferable calm, what she had seen after blinking herself away from his eyes, is melting away like snow. What’s left behind is vicious and disgusted.
“Well, we all make mistakes, don’t we?” mocks Maria.
Her chest is radiating cold, like all the life and warmth has drained out of it. She can feel Kyle trying to help, to stabilize her both mentally and physically, but it doesn’t help.
“It doesn’t matter,” decides Delta, and his mask of tranquility slides back across his face. “The true problem with this scenario is your presence here, in that body. You’re unraveling any good that could come from this entire history.”
“Me?” Maria demands. “This is somehow my fault?”
Delta has the gall to nod at her.
“I had everything planned,” he explains with a wave of his hand. “Down to the last detail, in order to ensure the safety of everyone in this facility and in the entire world.”
There’s a snarl, but it doesn’t come from Maria.
“You did this, all this death and destruction, that’s on you! Whether it was for us or not, it doesn’t matter!” Phi argues. “How can you even talk about ensuring anyone’s safety, you jackass!”
But even that doesn’t dissuade Delta from his cold surety.
“And yet despite all this supposed ‘death and destruction’ here you all are, alive. In fact, every creature in this facility would be alive, were we to continue as I had intended all along. No casualties. No injuries. No loss.”
He looks from the bar, which hides Gab’s corpse, to Maria as he speaks, and a shudder of rage ripples down her spine.
Oh he did not just say that!
(Um. Maria, I’m not sure you should—)
But her anger is mounting like a raging inferno.
“Get fucked, old man!” she shouts. “You killed Gab, that was your choice! Your pointless cruelty! And can preach all you want about your victimless future but Alice’s dad is dead because of you! That’s something that can’t be changed now!”
“Maria!”
The blonde jolts. And then slumps.
“… Sorry, bro.”
She apologizes, despite the fact that Carlos’ tone is more shocked than outright upset. And honestly she’s not really sorry, and she knows it. Everyone in the room probably knows it. But it’s also not the best way to express herself. Express what’s so monstrous about all of this, all the damage Delta has caused and refuses to admit to. All the memories, the horror she can feel crawling up her spine.
“What I mean is… For this world, the one you’re willing to discard as nothing. For myself. And for all the people I had to watch die because of you. Every single one…” Maria smothers the sob crawling up her throat, and shakes her head to ward off the tears. “I could never forgive you.”
Delta just tilts his head down to look at her over his tinted glasses and sighs. The action is condescending in a way that burns in the back of Maria’s throat.
“My motives are more complex than you can yet comprehend,” he says. “But this isn’t the time or place to continue sharing them. You’re the one who’s disrupted this Decision Game, and put that ideal future out of reach.”
“No.”
Delta jerks backward slightly at the rejection.
“Excuse me?” he demands.
And this time it’s both of them responding, Maria and Kyle together, one mouth full of too many angry voices.
“I said no,” they repeat, seething. “You’re wrong. A person like you doesn’t get to say which future is ideal! You wouldn’t know anything about it!”
“What I know,” argues Delta, “is that there is a religious fanatic out there somewhere who will destroy this world and everyone in it. What I know is that I did all of this, planned all of this, to stop it. Among all my other reasons, that is the final one.”
But they can see something, flickering, in his purple eyes.
“You’re lying,” Maria realizes slowly.
Her lips are numb, and she doesn’t quite know the meaning of what she’s seen, but it’s there. Something, huge, something he’s not telling them. She thinks it must be about Left, but she’s never been able to learn enough about him or about Free the Soul to be able to determine now what Delta’s motives truly are.
“Am I?”
But Maria shakes her head.
“Even if you weren’t, you can’t get away with all of this!” she insists.
“You would rather a world where everyone is dead? You would rather sabotage a world without casualties in order to punish me now?”
“But you can’t know that!” Maria insists. “There’s no way! You can’t SHIFT, you’ve admitted it, so it isn’t like you’ve been to that future! How would you ever find out about it? How would you know? You say it’s a religious fanatic that starts all of this, but you’re the one who created a sect of religious fanatics! Even if it is true, who’s to say you didn’t set it all in motion? Beyond that, how did you know you were part of a bootstrap paradox in the first place? How would you know to create the Decision Game at all? It doesn’t make any sense!”
Delta does not respond to these accusations. He just… Smiles? Grimaces? The corners of his mouth are tight and his eyes are narrowed. But Maria can’t tell if that means she got it right or if she was completely wrong. Kyle can’t seem to tell either.
(His eyes… It’s like… It’s as though I…)
Just like the man at the gas station, they both feel as if they’re missing something important. But then, they’ve forgotten that they aren’t the only people in the room.
“You did this to us! Made us play this sick game! Killed Gab! Tried to blow us all up! You deserve to die!”
Eric is raising the rifle in his hands. Perhaps he doesn’t really intend to shoot it – to Maria, he’s been an unpredictable loose cannon, and she knows it makes him feel safe to threaten anyone he sees as an enemy. But the final memory etched into Maria’s skull tells both her and Kyle that Eric’s intentions are negligible. Delta’s grimace widens into a terrifying smile.
“No!”
There’s an explosion of sound – it rips through the air of the lounge and Maria finds herself on the ground, clutching her hands over her ears. She’s afraid to open her eyes, but then, it wasn’t her who closed them in the first place. Kyle uncurls from their defensive crouch. A quick glance around proves there’s no blood. Instead, Eric has been tackled to the ground – by Carlos, Junpei, and Sigma, who apparently all had the same idea.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Junpei snarls, shoving Eric’s shoulder further into the floor.
The rifle has spun across the room, to Diana’s feet. She picks it up slowly and Maria has a terrible feeling. Again, the rifle is pointed at Delta. But this time, there’s a terrified look in the potential shooter’s eyes. Diana is struggling to point the gun away, but she can’t.
There’s a split second where Maria knows what she has to do, and desperately doesn’t want to.
And then she slingshots forward into Delta’s brain. He can feel the intrusion and tries to push her out, but that means he no longer has the energy to ‘mind hack’ Diana. Through Delta’s eyes, she can see Diana drop the rifle. Phi picks it up and smashes it against the wall. But then, as much as he had been trying to get rid of her, when Maria tries to return to her own body Delta snatches on to her. The feeling is like a hand grabbing the ankle of her consciousness. Panic begins to set in, watching her body move through another person’s eyes. The fear she’d had, that she would never be able to return.
Then there’s a harsh thunk, a sharp pain at the base of Delta’s skull that jars them both. Phi is looking into Delta’s purple eyes with a rage that burns like acid. And then, there’s a cool, reassuring presence reaching out to Maria.
Kyle…
Taking a chance, Maria flings herself back into her own body. Her ears are ringing and her head aches – an echo of Delta’s pain, but Kyle relinquishes control of the body to her immediately.
Kyle, I…
(It’s fine. Really. Thank you… For helping her.)
Because in some way, Diana is his mother. The mother he should have had. The two of them, aching, sit on the floor of the lounge and let the others handle everything else for a while. Delta is restrained. Diana and Sean find a cloth to wrap Gab’s body in, and move him away from the bar. Sigma, Akane, and Carlos begin to discuss what their plans should be – both in the short and long term.
“We need to find some way to call my brother,” Akane insists. “He’ll be able to gather the resources to get us all out of the desert together.”
“I don’t know if there’s anything we can use,” says Carlos, looking troubled. “And I don’t know how long Maria can afford to wait here, she needs to get back to the hospital. I think you should take whatever it was that got her here and go back with her. It’ll be easier to call your brother from a city, and the rest of us can afford to wait a little longer.”
“I’m fine,” Maria says when she hears that, struggling to her feet. “We’re fine.”
The last is said to Sigma, who nods his head subtly. Maria doesn’t want to separate, to leave her family, and Kyle feels the same. They need the tangible proof of their success within reach. It was, in many ways, too close a call for them both.
“Maria…” murmurs Carlos.
“Kyle and I are both…” Maria casts around for the word. “We’re doing our best to…”
(Stabilize?)
That works.
“We’re both working to keep my body stable,” she concludes. “Even if I can’t handle it, he SHIFTed into my body two weeks ago, so he knows how to handle this. And, we have a jeep outside. I don’t know how many people it’ll hold, or how much gas it has, but… I don’t want to separate if we don’t have to.”
“It’s better than nothing,” Sigma concludes. “Right?”
Carlos and Akane share a long look, and then nod.
“We’ll probably need water,” suggests Akane.
“And there might be more gasoline somewhere in here, just in case,” Carlos adds.
“And there’s our plan,” says Sigma, grinning slightly.
Maria heads to the bar area, although the sight of the bloodstain on the floor makes her heart squeeze painfully in her chest. But it’s the most likely place to find water, even if most of what she sees is clearly alcoholic. She doesn’t know much about it, but Kyle says he recognizes a few brands from the lounge in the rhizome. Maria had never had the time to study them while dogging Sigma’s consciousness. The two of them are distracted, discussing the topic. So they’re both startled into a jump when someone else speaks.
“So. You’re Maria, huh?”
The thing is, most of Maria’s time following these people around has been overridden with stress. With trying to keep them all alive, or following them to every eventuality in a desperate gambit to learn more. So she’s never seen Phi’s piercing gaze locked on her and only her, has never had the extra capacity in her mind to process it. Not until this very moment.
Oh no, she’s hot.
There is immediate protest from her ghostly roommate.
(That’s my sister!)
Maria purses her lips.
Dude, you didn’t even know she was your sister until I told you.
“Something wrong?” Phi asks.
Her expression has morphed into something on the line between amused and sanity-questioning.
“N-no, it’s… er. Just, Kyle said something. It’s not important.”
Phi quirks a single eyebrow above the frame of her glasses, but does not question it further. Kyle and Maria are both endlessly grateful for that. And then Maria realizes she hasn’t answered the question.
“Yes, I… I’m Maria,” she stammers out. “I mean. Well. Mostly. Kyle’s… In here too.” She taps her right temple with a finger. “Obviously. Because I, I already told you that, didn’t I. Um. So.”
She goes back to digging through cupboards, looking for water. Phi sighs and joins her. For a few minutes, they’re silent.
“You were there, then,” Phi says quietly. “In 2074?”
“I was,” admits Maria. “Kyle… Well, he was here, with me. My body. I mean… He’d already SHIFTed to 2028.”
Phi nods, tossing aside a stack of paper plates.
“Because Akane was in the armor that time.”
“Exactly.”
The two of them end up reaching for the same cupboard door and their hands brush. Maria jolts her hand back, embarrassed. Inside is a case of bottled water. Together, they haul it out and set it on the bar.
And then Sigma is standing before her. Studying her.
“So… It really was you that whole time,” he says. “Guiding my hand.”
For a moment she doesn’t understand what he means. She’s never met Dr. Klim, only his 22-year-old counterpart. Except…
“Of course… Kyle said the AB Game was a closed loop, until I entered the equation. Which makes you the ‘young Sigma’ I was following that whole time.”
After all, the younger Sigma she had followed had ended up in the timeline leading to the AB Game. The man who was already Dr. Klim at that time failed at Dcom. She hadn’t been there for that, she had been inhabiting Kyle’s body, the way he had inhabited hers for the past two weeks.
Sigma holds out a hand, and Maria shakes it. His grip is warm and reminds her of her brother’s.
“Nice to meet you,” Sigma says.
Which just so happens to be the precise moment that Maria’s overtaxed legs give out.
“Whoa…! Hold on, we’ve got you.”
Sigma is steadying her from the front, his hands cupped beneath her elbows to keep her from pitching forward. But there’s also a pair of arms looped around her ribs, holding her steady from behind.
“Why didn’t you just say something?” Phi mutters, and her warm breath hits Maria’s right ear in a way that makes it difficult to try to regain her balance or breathe or focus. “We’ve got a couch right there, you know.”
“I did know,” Maria croaks back.
She’s pretty sure her suddenly dry throat has nothing to do with her hospitalization. Slowly, Phi and Sigma maneuver Maria’s uncooperative body over to the couch, and lay her down on it. Carlos is at her side immediately, smoothing her hair with a hand. His face is starting to swell, and the bruises are only getting darker. Maria’s heart squeezes in her chest at the thought. If they’d just gone through with Brother—with Delta’s scheme, Carlos wouldn’t be hurt. Gab would be alive. But…
(You made the right choice, you know. We did.)
Maria searches her brother’s green eyes and finds pride in them along with overwhelming concern.
I hope so.
She doesn’t want Carlos to ever be manipulated the way Delta intended. She doesn’t want him to have to make those kinds of impossible choices. Not for a man made of a paradox, not for a person built on lies and sacrificing others like they’re only toys. Carlos deserves better than that. Everyone deserves better than being manipulated like that.
“We’re going to have a talk about the curse words,” Carlos says suddenly, cutting into her thoughts. “Because I know I didn’t teach them to you.”
The smile on his face is mostly teasing. But there’s a small, wary cast to his eyes. He’s wondering what Maria’s been secretly wondering for half a day now – is she still herself? But really, what is ‘herself’? She’s been drowning in pasts and futures for an entire decade. Those experiences are hers, the same as her memories of watching the sunrise by a lighthouse with Carlos.
“I blame Dio,” Maria finds herself saying.
There’s a snort from across the room. Phi, standing between Diana and Akane, is covering her mouth. And honestly, seeing that, Maria can’t stop the goofy smile that spreads across her face.
(Not when I’m still here, please.)
The smile transforms into a laugh, one Carlos looks at her strangely for, but Maria can’t stop. They did it, they saved the day. She can afford to laugh and smile and relax now, and it feels good. She sighs and nestles back into the couch, and listens to the strains of conversation around her.
“We’ll need your expertise while you’re still here, you know,” Akane is pointing out. “We’ve captured Brother, but the rest of Free the Soul…”
“Of course,” agrees Sigma. “But you can’t rely on me forever. Soon, things will be back how they should be.”
Diana, standing next to him, clutches at Sigma’s arm, but can’t seem to bear meeting his eyes.
“But then I… I’ll never see you again. Will I?”
“Of course you will,” he answers softly, brushing his fingers across her cheek.
But Diana shakes off his comfort.
“Not like this,” she insists. “Not… Not this you, the one I…”
The word she wants is ‘love’, and Maria can feel Kyle’s anguish deep in her soul. The knowledge that he is meeting his mother only to lose her again immediately nearly crushes them both under its weight.
“I can’t stay,” Sigma says, once it’s clear that Diana won’t finish her plea.
“Then take me with you! Don’t you care at all?!” the redhead throws out an arm, pointing to the door that leads further into the facility. “We have the transporter! I could, I could…!”
Though her gestures become wild and angry, Sigma takes Diana into his arms as though he doesn’t even notice. The conversation he had been having with Akane has clearly dropped from his mind. Akane seems to understand, though, and steps off to the side to wait.
“Of course I care,” he soothes. “You know I do. But I’m an old man, Diana. And I… I couldn’t bear to lose you again. Not there in the rhizome, not the way I did before. I… I know it isn’t the same, but the Sigma who will return to this body is still me. He can still love you like I do.”
Diana pulls away, shaking her head. Sigma lets her go, although he looks pained as he does.
“It, it’s not the same,” insists Diana. “I’ve only just found you, we’ve only just made it out of this alive and you’re already leaving me!”
“I’ll stay a little longer,” Sigma says quietly. “I’ll be here until my younger self jumps into this body again. I’m not sure exactly when that will be.”
He takes a moment, breathes. Flexes the fingers that are and are not his own. The way he looks down, aside, is one Maria knows intimately because Kyle recognizes it as his own – a nervous tic to hide his fear of rejection.
“I understand,” Sigma continues with a slight hitch in his voice, “if you don’t want to risk being around for that.”
Diana says nothing. Perhaps there is nothing to say, or perhaps so much that it’s clogging her throat. Maria understands both. But, though there are no words, Diana twines her arms around Sigma and presses her face to his chest. At last, a single, muffled word emerges from her lips.
“No.”
Though he hugs her back without pause, Sigma sighs. His expression is one of slight amusement.
“No what?”
“Don’t leave, of course,” answers Diana as she tightens her hold on Sigma.
Watching them is painful for Kyle, but he doesn’t look away. This is a future that was never his, somewhere he has never belonged. The Akane Kurashiki here is not the woman he knows. Diana is the mother he had wanted, but she doesn’t know him. There are ways it’s less painful, certainly, but wasy it is more so, too. Like Delta’s supposed ideal future, this one is wrong for him. Or he’s wrong for it. So he feels, anyway, and Maria has no idea what to tell him, for all that they’ve been two halves of a single mind for what is probably the longest day of her life.
(I… I need to go.)
Go where? Maria asks him, though she already knows.
(Back. To my own… My own timeline. There’s someone I need to apologize to. Someone I need to see.)
The images he sends to her are not from his own memories, but hers. A woman with braided red hair and sad blue eyes. A memory of Maria’s own aching sadness on behalf of this woman, a memory of a feeling that is vast and terrible and untethered to any physical form. The tears of a ghost.
Oh.
(No one… No one needs to be alone anymore, and…)
And Luna’s your family too.
The truth hits them both pretty hard. And the impending feeling of an ending, of a goodbye, is… It’s hard, for Maria, whose whole life for ten years has been endings and goodbyes. Death, parting, and unacknowledged goodbyes from someone who could only spectate.
I’ll never see you again, will I?
(No, I expect not.)
This isn’t fair. We just saved the day together! Kyle—
(But what we expect isn’t always what comes to pass, you know.)
W-what…?
(If you ever meet Kyle Klim again… Will you do something for me?)
She doesn’t even need to stop and think about it.
Of course. Anything.
(Will you tell him, “welcome home, Kyle”? And if he says, “I’m home”… That’s how you’ll know it’s me.)
There’s a slight nudge, and Maria hands over control of their body to Kyle. He stands up from the couch. Then, with head high and shoulders back, he approaches Sigma, who has just finished speaking with Akane. Whether it’s the posture or the look in their eyes, Sigma seems to be able to tell who he’s talking to.
“Kyle?”
“I’m going now,” Kyle tells Sigma in her voice. “Back home.”
He knows, has to know, that she would let him stay however long Sigma is planning to. But just as he must know that, she knows in the same way that he wants to go. For a kaleidoscope of reasons both good and painful. They flit across her consciousness and she tries to ignore them for the sake of his privacy. All the same, his intense and tempestuous feelings of longing wash through her.
He doesn’t ask if Sigma really will follow. Because he doesn’t want to know, and because he can’t bear to ask in front of Diana. But the look in Sigma’s eyes says he already knows the question that hasn’t been asked.
“I’ll see you soon,” he promises, placing a hand on their shoulder and squeezing gently.
“Right. Of course.”
Kyle begins to turn away, to shrug off the hand that’s so warm on their shoulder. But Sigma’s voice draws him back.
“Kyle.”
They lock eyes.
“Yes?” Kyle asks softly.
“You know…” Sigma sighs and scuffs a hand through his hair. “Now that all of this is over, we don’t have to stay in the rhizome anymore. Or even on the moon. We… We can go anywhere. Do anything. Our work is finally over. So we can all be…”
Silence hangs between them, tremulous.
“A family…?” Kyle suggests.
A smile spreads across Sigma’s face.
“Yeah. A family.”
Kyle’s eyes draw over to Diana, and Maria suddenly knows that this moment is one that needs to be private. She focuses on a sort of mental retreat – a feeling like leaning back, away from her own vision – and allowing Kyle the ability to speak to Diana as no one but himself. What’s happening around her, around them, fades away, but she can feel soothing heat and sadness and an ache in their chest.
The moment Kyle leaves is…
To Maria, it feels like breathing in except all of the air is leaving her lungs even as she tries desperately to inhale. She collapses again, because whatever residual strength he had given her – two minds willing one atrophied body to work when it never should have – is gone. This time, it’s her brother who catches her, and he hauls her up into his arms like she’s still a child.
“I’ve got you,” he says.
Then, everyone begins moving for the elevators and up, up, back to the burning day.
As Maria is carried out into the sunlight, she has to blink a few times to adjust her eyes. And then she sees him. Standing there, arms crossed, with his hip leaning against the front of what looks like a military transport truck, is KitKat guy. Except, in this context, surrounded by these people, with just the remaining spark of Kyle’s memories, she knows him immediately as Aoi Kurashiki.
“Guess you did your job,” Aoi tells her, with a smile that’s slightly too manic to be anything but the sudden release of tension. “Would’ve been a waste to spend all that time calling in a favor with the SOIS just for everyone to blow up at the last minute.”
On the heels of her realization, Maria can’t think of anything to say. But that’s fine, because Aoi is immediately distracted by Akane flinging herself into his arms. Junpei follows in her footsteps slowly, with his hands in his pockets, but all the forced nonchalance in his movements can’t hide the intensity of whatever it is he’s feeling. He and Aoi nod at each other over Akane’s shoulder.
Then Maria is distracted by movement from the corner of her eye.
Alice steps out from behind the back of the truck and her eyes dart across the collected people. They fix on Eric and Mira for a second. Perhaps she’s just imagining it, but Maria thinks she sees Alice’s eyes harden. And then Alice has her full attention on Delta.
“So,” she says with a smile that would be more appropriate on a wolverine, “this is Brother, is it?”
Delta’s veneer of calm is back. He seems to be just going with the flow. Maria isn’t entirely convinced he actually is going with the flow, but he certainly seems that way. With his hands tied, literally, that’s really about all he can do. Well, he still has his bullshit mind hack powers, and Maria wonders if he’s going to try to use them on Alice, but she approaches and he does nothing. Perhaps he knows there’s nothing more to do. Not in this timeline, anyway, and he can’t SHIFT.
“We have a very special cell at SOIS headquarters just for you,” continues Alice.
She grabs Delta by the arm. It’s not gentle. But halfway back to the truck, she stops and turns. Everything in the body Maria and Kyle once shared tenses. But Alice’s gaze turns towards Mira again, and there is no panic in her eyes.
“And from what I’ve heard, you’re a serial killer, so if you’ll follow me to the back we’ll get you settled too,” she says calmly. “And don’t try to run, because I just had this manicure done yesterday and I’d really hate to ruin it.”
Mira and Eric look like they’re about to protest. Well, Eric does anyway. Maria isn’t sure how to categorize the expression on Mira’s face as she stares at Alice. Creepy, she decides. It’s really, really creepy. But whatever their issues are, Mira begins to shuffle to the back of the truck with Alice. Although, the look of anger and desperation on Eric’s face is telling.
He tries to make a break for it. To grab Mira’s hand and pull her towards the still-abandoned jeep.
Alice trips him with one of her long legs. Then a couple more people – SOIS agents, Maria assumes – hop out from behind the truck and usher Delta and Mira into the vehicle. There’s a clang like doors closing. Eric gets to his feet, wiping sand of his face, and begins to argue loudly with Alice.
“So,” Aoi says suddenly and loudly, drawing everyone’s attention away from the spectacle. “I guess we did it.”
Akane is actually grinning, joyously. The sight is disconcerting, but in a good sort of way.
“We did,” she says, brushing off her cream sweater and clapping her hands together. “It’s done.”
“What now?” asks Sigma. “Are we going to start a support group? SHIFTers Anonymous?”
Junpei, apparently, decides to play the quip straight.
“Sounds good to me,” he says with a shrug. “I could use some therapy after all this bullshit.”
Phi snorts.
“Same.”
A soft, weary wave of laughter washes through their group. Then, they all begin to pile into the front half of the truck. Aoi is explaining to the others how everything was orchestrated – catching hold of Kyle’s presence, Maria’s involuntary SOS, the incident going on at the Test Facility. But there’s something else that’s bothering Maria more, and she can’t bring herself to pay attention.
It’s Carlos who notices.
“Hey,” he says. “Are you ok?”
Even after ten years as someone, something else, she can’t lie to her big brother.
“I don’t know,” admits Maria. “I just keep thinking, about that future Delta talked about…”
“You said it yourself,” Carlos reminds her gently. “There’s no feasible way, even with SHIFTing or mind hacking, that he could have known about something like that.”
“What if I’m wrong, though?” she asks, and can’t meet his eyes. “What if he’s not lying? What if there really will be an attack?”
“Then we’ll deal with that when the time comes,” says Carlos. “But letting him loose just because he might be the lesser of two evils according to his own paradigm would be…”
She nods.
“Yeah. Right.”
With a soft sigh, Carlos ruffles her hair. Maria lets herself sink into enjoying that feeling, the feeling of home, instead of fretting. There’s nothing she can do for the moment. And Carlos is right. For now, she’s done enough. They’ve all done enough. Maria rests her head on her brother’s shoulder and sleeps.
Maria wakes up in her brother’s arms again. He’s settling her into a wheelchair, in a very familiar parking lot in Las Vegas. There are more people with them now, but Maria doesn’t recognize most of them. They all appear to be close to Akane and Aoi, though. Seeing Clover with them, Maria wonders if maybe these are the children of the 2018 Nonary Game. She blinks at them sleepily for a minute or two.
“Finally up, huh?”
But it isn’t Carlos who’s asking. It’s Phi. She’s standing next to the wheelchair, looking uncomfortable. Carlos has been dragged over to the larger group by Junpei and Akane. Sigma, Diana, and Sean are standing off to the side, talking. Sigma’s hand is on Sean’s shoulder.
“Yeah,” Maria says slowly. “Finally up.”
The sun is either rising or setting, Maria can’t tell which. The atmosphere is dreamy, and warm. The two of them stay silent, watching the others, for several minutes. It’s a silence wavering on the line between comfortable and uncomfortable.
“You like coffee?” Phi asks suddenly, glancing away towards the horizon.
Maria can’t help it – a laugh spills from her mouth. It’s like everything is bright and warm and colorful. The whole world is ahead of them.
“I don’t know!” she admits with a huge grin, shaking her head. “But I’d be willing to find out with you.”
The tips of Phi’s ears go red against her snow-white hair. She clears her throat, grabs Maria’s offered hand, and says just one word.
“Good.”
~ 20 Years Later ~
“Kyle…?”
He blinks his eyes open, and they drift slowly from left to right, taking in a myriad of faces. The person who’s just spoken is a tall, muscular man whose messy black hair is streaked liberally with gray. Next to him stands a redheaded woman with deep, beautiful laugh lines and tears in her eyes. On her other side is a woman who might be her twin, except that she looks perhaps a few decades younger. To the right of her are two teenagers: a boy with long dark hair and a grim face, and a girl wearing teal-framed glasses who is flexing her hands nervously. They resemble the women left of them, somewhere around the eyes. And then, again, like bookends, there is a white-haired woman who looks exactly the same as the teenage girl except older. And holding her hand in a white-knuckled grip…
“Welcome home, Kyle.”
The blonde woman on the far right bites her lip after speaking. Her bright green eyes search his. Under her scrutiny, there is a squeezing sensation in Kyle’s chest, where his heart beats steadily. Although the room is crowded, for a moment it is just him and the blonde woman, just the two of them in the entire world. Kyle levers himself up to a sitting position. He wets his lips, and his heart squeezes again.
Then he speaks.
“I’m home, Maria.”
From: @thefireinthewire
Here’s my gift for @pomegranate-belle , who requested “Little Field siblings, playing in the snow together”
Happy holidays! I hope you like it!
And Then Sigma Died – Alice Bad End (for haveanicetragedy)
From: @pomegranate-belle
The point of view ended up hopping around a lot while I wrote – wait is that a rabbit pun? – but I’ve got them labeled. Fingers crossed I got all the route details right. Hope you enjoy it, and Merry Christmas!
The final result flashed up under Alice’s name. Betray. Everyone looked down at their own bracelets, not quite able to comprehend what had just happened. Then Sigma stumbled, and collapsed onto the floor in a heap.
[Phi]
“Sigma!” Phi shouted, her face suddenly as white as her hair. “Sigma! Hang on!”
Her hands twitched and flexed. She wanted to run, wanted to find a way to fix—but there was nothing, and she would have to watch him die this time. She would have to— The urge to jump away was strong, but she couldn’t, couldn’t just…
She couldn’t leave him.
[Clover]
“Oh no! Sigma!” Clover gasped out. “Get up!”
If he could get up, they could get him to the infirmary, and… And… He couldn’t die, it wasn’t fair! It wasn’t— The thought of her brother dying, of thinking he had died, rattled in her skull and shot like ice down her spine. They had all made it so far, without dying. Even with the bombs looming over their heads, still…
The warehouse was like an echo chamber, everyone calling Sigma’s name. And then there was Luna with her hands clasped in something like a prayer. Her expression was devastated.
“No…” she murmured. “Why…?”
As he lay on the floor, Sigma’s head lolled to the side, and his eyes fluttered open.
“Al…ice…” he murmured, almost too low to hear.
Clover’s head shot up. And there, in the doorway of the second AB Room from the left, was…
It looked like Alice, but… Clover wasn’t so sure. Because the expression she wore was… It was just…
Sigma’s bracelet clattered to the floor.
[K – Akane]
Akane took a deep breath through the nose, flexing her fingers inside Kyle’s metal suit. Closer. He had gotten closer, at least. His mistake had been… Picking Ally in the first round. Yes. She was sure that had been the cause. But the river of her new Nonary game was so complex. He was closer than he had been, that was the point. He could try again. He would try again. But for this timeline… Akane tipped her head back and closed her eyes, seeing a vast explosion against the backdrop of her eyelids. Yes, of course.
And all around her, little more than background noise to the horrible symphony of time, the others were reacting. Sigma was dead, the story was over. But no one else knew that. No one but Luna, who was nonetheless fluttering through the beginning stages of human grief anyway.
[Luna]
“My fault,” Luna said softly as she stared down at Sigma – or rather, the body of Dr. Klim. “It was my fault, I… I should have known, I…”
The redhead covered her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut.
“Sigma…”
She’d known only what she was supposed to. Even if Ms. Kurashiki had known about this outcome, she wouldn’t have told Luna anything of it. And yet, and yet… She was stuck in the wrong timeline. The wrong—
Somewhere out there in time and space was a Luna who would see a successful, casualty-free ending to the Nonary Game. But it would not be her. Luna pressed calm into her features and opened her eyes. There was nothing more she could do. Her part in the game was over. She could only watch as Phi knelt down, gathered Dr. Klim’s upper body into her arms and laid his head on her lap.
[Clover]
Clover searched Alice’s face, desperate for any sign of her mentor.
“You killed him!” Phi shouted. “What the hell is wrong with you, you killed him!”
She wouldn’t let go of Sigma’s body, not even as Luna and K tried to lift him from her arms and off the floor. Alice just stared at them all with dead eyes, swaying on her feet. A noticeable shudder rippled down her spine, but she didn’t answer Phi’s accusations. Just stood there, brow slightly furrowed, as if the world was a dream she couldn’t quite make sense of.
“Alice,” Clover said, voice thick.
She reached out a hand, not even sure what she meant to do with it – soothe, or accuse? Sigma was dead. They could all see it. He was unnaturally still, skin pallid, his grey hair lying across Phi’s lap in a sickly halo. Even when her eyes were trained on Alice, Clover couldn’t find a way to be unaware of his…
His corpse.
“I,” said Alice at last.
And then she broke into a run.
Dio dodged for the [9] door, but Alice’s feet carried her past it and through the Cyan door instead. Phi was still kneeling on the steel floor, trembling. No one seemed to be able to think of anything to say. The silence echoed in Clover’s ears, an endless ringing.
How, how had…? How had this…?
“We should,” said Luna in a deceptively calm voice for the way she was twisting her fingers, “take him to the Infirmary. We can’t just leave him here.”
K and Dio hefted him off Phi’s lap and seemed to have things well in hand, but she wedged her shoulder under his torso and helped anyways.
[Luna]
When they reached the infirmary, Quark was still unconscious, with Tenmyouji next to him, stroking his hair. But when he saw their burden, he leapt to his feet.
“Is it radical-6?” he demanded. “We don’t have any antidote left…!”
No one answered him. His gaze immediately fell to Clover. She met his eyes for a second, and shook her head. It was then that Tenmyouji seemed to notice Sigma’s bare left wrist.
“No!” he shouted, an instinctive exclamation, an instinctive denial.
“Alice, she,” Clover tried to explain.
“His BP,” continued Luna when the pink-haired girl faltered. “It… It dropped below zero.”
Tenmyouji’s face hardened. Anger filled every line of his old face, but Luna could still make out a flicker of guilt in his eyes.
“Where’s Alice?” he all but spat.
No one answered him.
“Where is she?!”
Again, there was no response. Tenmyouji picked up a tray of medical supplies and flung it across the room where it buried into one of the large screens. Many of the others in the group flinched back, but Luna had seen from the start that the trajectory of his throw would not come near anyone human… The living or the dead.
“I told her about, I told her everything! I told her the vote was still going on!” Tenmyouji shouted, and though his eyes were narrowed in anger, Luna could still see the telltale glisten of tears unshed.
Dio and K settled Dr. Klim’s body onto one of the infirmary beds. Not, Luna noticed, the one Alice had been lying on. Then Dio straightened up and gestured back over his shoulder with a thumb.
“I’m gonna go back and guard the [9] door,” he said. “Alice could get out anytime with that bracelet of hers. She might double back to fuck us all over while we’re in mourning.”
No one protested his leaving, and he vanished out the door quickly. But the suddenness of Dio’s comment had at least broken up the tension in Tenmyouji’s shoulders, even if his eyes still spoke of anger and regret.
“What now?” he asked, not meeting anyone’s eyes.
[Clover]
“We have to keep playing,” said Clover quietly. “Don’t we?”
“And the bombs,” added K. “They are still…”
Clover nodded, hugging herself as a sudden chill overtook her. The bombs… It had to be, the Myrmidons. It had to be. So, that meant one of the other players was her enemy. But who? She’d been trying to puzzle it out before, but hadn’t made much progress.
She needed to find Alice. No matter what, that would definitely… They still needed to stick together. Alice could help. She had to. And so, Clover set off alone into the twists and turns of the building, looking for Alice.
It took her half an hour of their allotted eighty minutes. But, at last, there was Alice sitting on a bench in the B. Garden.
“Alice,” she said quietly, approaching the wooden bench but not sitting down on it.
It was a strange feeling, to be taller than Alice. To look down at her, she suddenly seemed… Frail. And then Alice looked up, dazed, a little lost. And yet… Determined.
“He was supposed to pick Betray, he… I knew he would pick…”
But Clover didn’t believe her. And maybe Alice saw that on her protégé’s face, because her expression turned intense and pleading. She grabbed Clover’s cold hands in hers, and warmed them gently – a calming tactic that had been standard for the two of them nearly their entire partnership.
“I’ll get out of here,” Alice said. “I’ll get out and get help. For you, and for all the rest of them too.”
Clover opened her mouth, but then closed it and shook her head.
“I will, Clover, you can trust me! I’ve only done what I thought was right!”
Clover shook her head again.
“No,” she said. “We all get out. We have to. Those bombs…”
“We don’t have time to wait fifty minutes until the white doors open!” snapped Alice. “If I get out now, I can get help much faster!”
“And what if we’re in the middle of a desert, like last time?! If you leave me here, I might… I could…”
The hurt on Alice’s face was visceral. But not moreso than the fear curling in Clover’s gut. She would never see her brother again. If she died, he would never know what happened to her.
“Clover,” Alice tried again, but suddenly Clover didn’t feel like trying anymore.
So she just ran.
[Phi]
In the end, no one could agree on what to do. That was hardly shocking. Alice tried for the [9] doors. Twice. The second time, Clover was the one to stop her. Violently. That was, perhaps, a bit shocking given how close the two of them had seemed. But it didn’t matter. Not really.
For her part, Phi stayed quietly in the infirmary by Sigma’s side. Quark awoke during the confusion, and that was good for him, but… Sigma’s hand had gone waxy and cold, and somehow that seemed much more important. She sat there next to him and waited while time slipped past.
They could try again. She would save him. They would try again. They would fix it. They would fix everything. The two of them would make it out of the game alive. They would. She just had to try again.
Phi’s eyes closed just as the white of the explosion engulfed the warehouse.
And then she jumped.
Peace on Earth (for endless-nine)
To: @endless-nine
From: @pomegranate-belle
“When I saw your wishlist the prompts all combined into one story in my head, so I hope you like it! Merry Christmas!”
Time is swimming in her head. Maybe it has always been doing that, it is so hard to remember when…
She was small once, Akane is sure of it. With worries other than the way the world oscillates between life and death, the weight of shifting its course. Now each decision seems so minute, the people so tiny, toys in her hands and she’s forgotten, again, how to…
When she closes her eyes she is dancing between 2028 and 2018, simultaneously past and future, but her feet are planted on the steel floor of Rhizome 9, and the year is 2070.
“It’s Christmas Eve,” says a small voice, as if attempting to further ground her.
“Is it?” Akane asks, lightly, though she knows the GAULEM would never dare lie to her, would never even think to.
“I thought,” Luna continues, “perhaps…”
Akane opens her eyes, turns, and sees exactly what she knew she would. The redheaded android, fiddling with her fingers like an errant child. She’s sweet, and small, and demure. Akane does wonder, sometimes, if there’s something a bit macabre about Luna. About using a dead woman as a template for an android. She’s got no feeling on the matter, one way or another, and it stands to reason that Luna must exist – simply to keep time on its proper track. She has seen much worse things in the void of time and space, the dead eyes of a thousand worlds, the things children fear in the dark, so that the macabre is for her but a play. She’s watching, over all of it, the branching streams, and the veins of gore that run through them. In a way, then, nothing is shocking. To feel is to be small, and she is no longer small. But everyone, everything else has shrunk, that is—
“We could decorate,” Luna cuts in, reeling Akane back into the present-past-future place-she-is-now.
“Yes,” Akane says, and adjusts the lay of her sleeve, reorienting herself to the reality around her.
There are still four years. Everything has slowed, but they are almost prepared and that is fine. In their Rhizome with only Dr. Klim, herself, the GAULEMS, Lagomorph… And Kyle.
Kyle.
“I think Kyle would enjoy that,” Akane adds, folding her hands in front of herself demurely, which she has found herself doing a lot. “Call Dr. Klim up from his labs, would you? We could all use a Christmas break.”
Ten minutes later, they are all gathered together and planning as if celebrating Christmas is some big thing. And maybe it is. Life has to continue on, and perhaps celebrating, relaxing every once in a while, is as much a defiance towards Brother as anything else Akane does. She pulls herself back to the moment before thoughts of her nemesis send her reaching into timelines and gathering them into her arms like a greedy child, or a goddess.
“I’m sure there’s a synthetic tree in storage somewhere,” Dr. Klim mumbles, rubbing his chin. “Lagomorph?”
“Well,” says the CGI bunny with a wicked grin and a salute, “lettuce see!”
The projection screen showing him turns off with a pop. It’s an unnecessary maneuver, Akane knows – Lagomorph can scan the security cameras of the entire Rhizome and still keep the projection screen on. However, he seems to have picked up the behavior, a non-digital creature’s mental spatial singularity. An altogether ridiculous mannerism, considering that the AI was created by ESPers. Even she isn’t sure where Lagomorph acquired it.
Exactly a minute later, he flickers back into sight.
“Storage Room C!” Lagomorph proclaims with a little bow.
“Thank you, Lagomorph.”
It is an easy thing, between the four of them, to shuffle the artificial pine and the boxes of decorations that go with it into the Rhizome’s elevator and up to the main warehouse. Next, however, they have to set it all up. Akane wonders when the last time she decorated for anything was – and how she can possibly measure that time with any real accuracy relative to her situation.
“This sort of thing needs music,” Klim insists, with his hands on his hips like a much younger man.
“Ooh, ooh, pick me!” Lagomorph cries from the wall, hopping up and down and waving one paw in the air. “I am a wonderful singer! My talents are un-hare’d of!”
Kyle shakes his head.
“I don’t think so,” says the clone.
“Why Kyler, how rude! I carrot even imagine why you wouldn’t want me to sing!” Lagomorph insists airily.
“That much should be obvious,” Akane replies with a little smirk on her face.
With that she turns and begins unpacking a box. Inside are long, shedding strands of gold and silver tinsel that will surely get everywhere. The next box contains glass ball ornaments in every color of the rainbow. On the third try she finds the star. Meanwhile, Kyle and his father work in silent tandem to build the artificial tree, hooking branches into the pole-like base.
And, seeing himself thoroughly ignored, Lagomorph consents to playing recorded Christmas music and operating the warehouse crane to string up blinking Christmas lights across the warehouse.
“Tinsel!” Dr. Klim barks once the tree is finally set up in its entirety.
Akane rolls her eyes and tosses him the end of a gold one, intending to feed it towards him slowly and prevent tangles. Instead, he yanks on his end, sending her toppling forward into him in a comic display. Idiot. But he’s having fun, and actually so is she, even as the glitter of gold threatens to yank her mind to some past-future—
The revolver, yes, she remembers now. The revolver from Building Q, digging into her temple, and—
She comes back to herself with Dr. Klim’s artificial hands clutching her shoulders, a little too tightly. His expression is even and says nothing, but the look in his eye is one that tells her he knows she has been feeling the tug of Time. He pulls away quickly, but swipes a palm over her forehead. To anyone else it might be just a brush, accidental, but Akane sees it for what it is. A check for fever.
She turns back to the boxes, but she also catches a glimpse of Kyle’s face as she does. He’s studying them, eyes narrowed, thoughtful. Assumptions are being made. But Akane is dizzy and washing through a million timelines as much as she’s standing in a warehouse on the moon, and instead she focuses everything on the here and now, as much as any of those things can have meaning.
“Would you like to put the star on?” she asks Kyle once she retrieves the tree topper.
She recalls, as though it’s the lore of an ancient civilization, that putting the star on is the most coveted part of decorating a tree. Kyle’s answering smile proves her right. With just a slight stretch onto his toes, the young clone slips the gilded star onto the topmost, upward-pointing branch. It’s a little crooked, but some aesthetic part of Akane is pleased about it. No one else seems to mind either.
It is only when she sees Luna move out of her peripheral that Akane realizes the GAULEM has been missing.
“I, I made some hot chocolate,” Luna offers, holding out a silver tray with three steaming mugs.
They’re decorated with frolicking cats, and Akane suggests to herself that she ought to have packed – should pack, once the Ambidex Nonary Game is over in four years’ time – the dishware herself. But she accepts a sickeningly cute mug anyway, blowing gently over the top and sending steam spiraling away from her. Luna has tucked a peppermint candy cane into each mug, the way one might a swizzle straw.
“Thank you, Luna,” Dr. Klim says kindly, offering the GAULEM a smile.
As Kyle takes his drink, Akane surmises he and Luna are still a bit awkward around one another. Given their past, it’s not that unexpected. Now is certainly not the time to ponder the Chinese Room Argument, in any case. The android is clutching her empty tray to her chest, watching Klim and Kyle drink their hot chocolate.
“It’s good,” Kyle comes out with at last, voice stilted but not dishonest.
“Mm, it is,” his father agrees, before letting out a loud yawn.
Luna’s cheeks pale in pleasure as ABT fluid flows to color, or rather de-color, them.
“You should sleep,” Akane finds herself telling Dr. Klim, with a wry smile. “You’re getting old, you need your rest.”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” he mutters mutinously, taking another sip of hot chocolate that leaves him with a foamy moustache.
Akane feels a bright laugh falling from her lips. It’s effortless, and Kyle is looking at her adoringly, in a way that might have made her cringe hundreds of years ago. Now, she’s old enough to accept it – to accept all things, however poorly suited they are to her disposition. She can’t remember if she had ever wanted children or not. Now humans seem too breakable, doll-like with limbs she could so easily splinter, that the thought doesn’t even come into her head.
Relationships are based on equality. She’s not sure if it’s something she’s heard or something she will, but her mind turns to Junpei and falters for the briefest of moments. He will be old now, as well. But he’s not alone. He’s found something precious by now, she thinks, and she’s – was, will be – miles away in the Nevada desert anyway. Has been all along.
Relationships, after all, are based on equality, and humanity is something Akane Kurashiki has left behind her with all the trappings of childhood.
They continue to sit and enjoy the decorating they’ve accomplished, Earth’s Christmas on the moon. Luna bustles about, adjusting tinsel here and there to her liking. After finishing the hot chocolate, Klim is struggling to keep his one good eye open. However, he refuses to sleep until they all sing a rousing chorus of “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer”. Akane joins in, loud and slightly off-key, once he’s linked his arm through hers and another through one of Luna’s. She offers her free arm to Kyle, and they form a ridiculous sort of chorus line. Lagomorph insists on conducting them with his furry white CGI paws.
Finally, they all manage to drag Dr. Klim into the Lounge using the very line formation he created, and settle him in on the couch. It’s likely he could have, with some trouble, made it all the way to his own room, but this is further from the labs and he’s been working much too frantically even in Akane’s eyes.
And she wants him close for whenever they have to take down all the decorations.
Luna tucks Dr. Klim in with such tenderness, it’s difficult not to watch. The GAULEM brushes a hand through her inventor’s gray hair and lets out a strange sigh. It would unnerve Akane, or it should, perhaps. But whatever is unnatural about Luna, whatever is or could be or might be—
Whether she’s human isn’t the question, was never in question. Simply, it doesn’t matter. She is an android, and she’ll play her part. Akane knows that with utmost certainty even in her shifting world with its infinite splitting paths, and whether the loyalty stems from programming or a higher spark is meaningless. Its existence is all that matters.
One of Dr. Klim’s hands comes up to skim Luna’s cheekbone. His words are quiet, intimate. But Akane is used to witnessing intimate scenes, witnessing the thoughts and feelings of others, and it doesn’t really stir her.
“Luna,” Klim says. “You know, people get presents on Christmas.”
The redhead fidgets.
“I didn’t, that is… I don’t really have anything to—”
Dr. Klim laughs, softly.
“I meant I’m giving you one,” he clarifies, reaching into the pocket of his coat, draped over the top of the couch.
Then, he pulls out a necklace. Its chain is golden and simplistic, with a large pendant in the shape of a birdcage with a little blue bird inside. The base of the cage is thick, but when Klim fiddles with it a moment and a tinkling little tune begins to play, Akane understands.
She’s seen the necklace before, though, of course. Fragments, bits and pieces down the river. She just hadn’t… Well, Luna is something of a constant, rather than a variable. Not of particular note. And then Dr. Klim begins to tell a story, about a little boy and a little girl, and something about it sends Akane’s thoughts spinning dizzily into the past – the sure, true past, sitting on a hill. A little boy with a mop of brown hair. A little boy with a blue-and-purpled face and a missing-toothed grin. A time when, perhaps, there might have been another option for her.
But the map of tributaries, the spread of treelike roots, that is a constant now. As much a part of Akane as she is of it. Regret, anger? Those are such small, childish things. Human things. Now she pushes pieces into place and that’s all. The people around her have needs, emotional needs, but she—
Then there is a hand, awkwardly large, tentative, curling around two of her fingers. Akane glances up, to her left.
“Midnight,” says Kyle.
They exit the Lounge together, back out to the warehouse and the lights and the tree. And shining under the base of the tree is a small box, wrapped in red. Kyle seems to notice it the same time she does, and he lurches forward, forgetting to release her hand. The stumble forward drags Akane back into the reality of her aging body – how strange it is to feel old, after living an eternity. Physicality is something a bit secondary, to her, when all that matters is minds and connecting them in an intricate web. Kyle lets go, gently, looks back at her with worry puckering his brow the way it had – would – the young Sigma Klim’s.
“I’m fine,” Akane insists, amusement curling her lips.
Kyle studies her eyes a moment longer before he races to the tree and lifts the flat, rectangular box.
“It’s got my name on it!” he tells her, pulling it closer to his chest.
“Well,” she replies, tilting her head to the side, feeling an odd tug in her chest, “I suppose you’d better open it then.”
Watching Kyle is exacerbating the strange discomfort around the area of her heart, so Akane moves her gaze just past his right shoulder. He doesn’t seem to notice. Which is… Good, she supposes. She doesn’t want him to think she’s being dismissive, because that’s not what she’s doing, it’s only that… Something about the situation, she can’t put a finger on quite what the detail is, something is…
When he rips away the paper around his gift, that is when Akane realizes. The shiny red wrapping, with little silver-white snowflakes, she’s seen it before, on a present, for her. One her own personal Santa had left her very long ago – a few hundred years? A decade? Yesterday? It all blurs together as usual, but…
“Why are you crying?” Kyle asks her, softly, and he has paused, leaving the unadorned cardboard box resting in the crook of his arm unopened.
She reaches her right hand up, slowly, brings her fingers to the corner of her eye. And there, right there, is…
Yes, wetness. A tear. How strange.
Is this, Akane wonders, what it means to feel again? She’d forgotten, how…
The colorful wrapping paper is familiar to her, but she doubts Dr. Klim knows that, though she saw him secretly pointing it out to Lagomorph in Storage Room C. In any case, it’s only a momentary lapse, a…
Or, rather unexpectedly, the feeling – if that’s what it is – stays.
“Merry Christmas, Kyle,” Akane says instead of answering him, and sits down on the metal floor with her legs folded up under her.
The boy – that’s all he really is, eighteen is so impossibly young – drops down next to her, fingers still fisted around crumpled red gift wrapping. He offers her an eager smile, as if this moment is one he has been waiting for his entire small, mortal life. The sentiment is one she recalls, hazily, from long ago.
“Merry Christmas, Ms. Kurashiki,” Kyle replies, and they sit in the middle of the warehouse with red and green and blue lights winking at them overhead, and the smell of cinnamon and peppermint in the air.
Kyle opens the box at last, and immediately clutches the blank research journal – a mirror image of the ones his father fills up endlessly – to his chest. For a single moment, clear and bright and smooth, Akane feels anchored in time. Tethered down, at last, to a timeline, a place, without the eddies and currents of the morphogenetic field splintering her into a million godlike fragments. She sits, quietly, with Kyle, in the stillness. She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes, aware of the GAULEM lingering in the doorway, of Dr. Klim asleep on the Lounge couch, of the hum of the Rhizome around her, the twinkling Christmas lights coloring the backs of her eyelids.
The word she’s looking for lingers on the tip of her tongue, because it’s one she hasn’t used in so very long. The word, it’s… Another deep breath, sparking her senses, filling her head with the white of snow, of candies, of Aoi Kurashiki’s hair.
Peace.
A soft smile spreads across Akane’s face, even as her death, deaths – four years in the future and yet feeling somehow already behind her – flash past her eyes like a dream. They flash like stars, like the lights strung across the room. Peace, she thinks again, the word, again, remaining, though she’d forgotten, before.
Ah, yes. Peace on Earth.
And, oh, she knows, someday, someway…
There will be.
ZEcret Santa 