Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2021-04-30 11:40 am
rionaleonhart) wrote2021-04-30 11:40 am
Entry tags:
Fanfiction: City of Cards (13 Sentinels)
13 Sentinels fanfiction!
This is more a collection of missing scenes than a single linear fic. Each set of location details marks the start of a new character's perspective.
The connecting theme is 'psychological suffering', because that's what I'm about. The working title was 13 Breakdowns.
Title: City of Cards
Fandom: 13 Sentinels
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Allusions to various canonical or canonically implied pairings.
Wordcount: 5,800
Summary: Different home times, different lives, but the thirteen all have one thing in common: they're not doing very well right now.
Warnings: Blood, dark themes, full spoilers for 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim.
Kurabe House, Juro’s Bedroom
He thinks he might be in love with Yakushiji.
He doesn’t know her. He doesn’t know her interests, her family, her history.
All he really knows is that she moved unexpectedly into his house, and she’s a good cook, and he shot her dead in cold blood.
No. Juro curls up on the bed, as tightly as he can. No. Yakushiji is still alive.
He saw her. He came home and she was there, she was in the kitchen in her apron, she was cooking dinner and she was alive and he dropped his schoolbag and backed up so fast he cracked his shoulder against the pillar. He remembered killing her, he still remembers it. He remembers her begging him not to shoot.
But he saw her. She was breathing, she spoke to him. She’s alive.
She asked him if he was okay. He ran past her, bolted up the stairs to his room.
He can’t go downstairs again. She’s there. Or she’s not there, because he killed her, and he can’t—
He can’t handle either of those things, he can’t—
He shot so many people, he shot friends of his. Fuyusaka. Amiguchi. They’d done nothing to him. But he had to kill them, there was a reason.
He can’t make sense of it now. What possible reason could justify what he did?
He thinks he might be in love with Fuyusaka, too. Is that why he killed her? Or is that just how you feel about people you’ve killed? Maybe guilt feels like love if it’s strong enough.
“You’re pretty useless like this, huh?”
Juro cracks his eyes open. Shiba is standing next to his bed. His expression looks strange, somehow. Flat. Clinical.
Not that that matters. What matters is that Shiba’s in danger. If he stays, Juro will kill him, just like he killed all the others.
“It’s fine,” Shiba says. He doesn’t seem to be talking to Juro. “I’ll figure this out.”
Juro opens his mouth, to tell Shiba to run, to get Shiba away from him before it’s too late. But what comes out instead is “Don’t leave.”
Shiba looks a little surprised.
“Hey,” he says, after a moment. He takes Juro’s hand. “I’m not going anywhere, buddy.”
Juro closes his eyes again, tightening his hold on Shiba’s fingers.
It doesn’t occur to him to wonder how Shiba got into his house.
*
Sakura High School, Class 1-B
“Fuyusaka-san? Class is over.”
Iori blinks her eyes open.
She’s in a classroom? Why is she...
Why is she surprised by this? She falls asleep in class twice a week. Why wouldn’t she be in a classroom?
But there’s a part of her that forgot, for a moment, that she’s still a student.
“You okay?” Kurabe asks, stooping to check on her.
“I-I’m fine.” She ducks down, tries to focus on packing books into her bag. Hopefully he won’t see her blushing.
It’s getting hard to keep track of what’s real, what’s a dream. She keeps glancing at mirrors and being surprised by how young she is. She keeps...
She keeps forgetting what role people play in her life. She keeps dreaming about people she knows, and then she can’t look at them normally any more. It’s ridiculous, but that doesn’t change the way she feels.
She’s in love with Kurabe; she has been for years. That’s what her memories tell her. But that can’t be right, because he only transferred here a few months ago.
Kurabe’s a danger, and she needs to stop him before he kills again. That’s definitely not right, but she can’t shake the feeling. It’s regrettable, but he has to be destroyed.
Why is she thinking about destroying people? What’s wrong with her?
Kurabe’s her weird classmate. He seems nice enough, and they talk about their intense dreams sometimes, but they don’t know each other that well, and Iori doesn’t really know how to respond when he starts talking to himself. That’s reality. Every time she wakes up, it feels like it takes longer to pin that down, it’s harder to believe it.
“I can’t just let her miss her classes,” Kurabe is saying, hushed and irritated, to absolutely no one. “It’s not like that.”
What would it mean for Iori’s future if someone confessed to her, one of the people she’s been dreaming about, and she ended up accepting because of some ridiculous dream-based emotion? They might not be the same person in real life. She can see herself getting swept up in the romance of the moment, making a decision she’d regret.
Are her feelings even her own?
*
Sakura High School, North Building Girls’ Bathroom
It’s all happened so fast that it’s kind of a blur to Natsuno. Usami tried to shoot her. And then Natsuno was hiding in the bathroom stall, petrified, feeling the walls shake, for what simultaneously felt like forever and no time at all.
And then she walked out into the wreckage of the bathroom, a normal room just minutes ago, to see Usami’s stripped mechanical skeleton. To see Tamao, in the wrong time, wearing the uniform like she belongs here.
And now...
Tamao is saying something, but Natsuno can’t take it in. She’s standing, frozen, staring at the gun.
This isn’t happening. Right? This is way too much, this can’t be happening. There’s no way she’s about to get shot by a girl from forty years ago.
Tamao doesn’t even waver before she fires.
Natsuno isn’t aware of falling. She’s just on the floor, eyes tightly shut, her hand pressed against her cheek. Her whole body is cold and prickling, her heart racing like it’s trying to escape her chest before the end.
Is she dying right now? Is this dying? It feels like her – her memories are blurring together, fading, it’s getting harder to think.
She can’t die here. What about Yuki? What about BJ? She has things to do, she can’t just die here in the school bathroom.
She has no idea how long it’s been by the time sensation starts to come back to her, something other than the screaming awareness of her own body. There’s water under her bare knees, shards of broken tile. It doesn’t feel like her cheek is bleeding.
Why would her cheek be bleeding?
Where is she?
*
Kurabe House, Guest Bedroom
Keitaro still doesn’t understand how the Kurabe house can be standing. It burned forty years ago. He was there; he saw it. He doesn’t think he’ll ever forget.
He’s been dreaming about the fires. He sleeps lightly, he has since the war began, and he jolts awake several times a night. There’s always a terrified moment when he recognises the Kurabe guest room, he realises where he is, and for a moment he genuinely believes he’s trapped in a burning house.
It always takes him a while to get to sleep again afterwards. He can’t escape the memories here: searching through the burning village, pleading for Chihiro to be safe.
This probably isn’t the best place he could be staying. But he doesn’t have anywhere else.
He doesn’t think sleep is going to come now. Maybe he should go for a walk.
-
Juro Kurabe is in the kitchen, hunting through the fridge, in the flickering light of the television. The sound is off.
“You’re hungry?” Keitaro asks.
Juro jumps, shuts the fridge door, stares wildly at him for a moment.
“Ah, sorry,” Keitaro says. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Sorry,” Juro says. “I thought maybe you were...” He hesitates, then opens the fridge again. “I didn’t have anything to eat,” he mumbles.
“Megumi-san always cooks supper,” Keitaro says. “You should come home earlier. The hemborger is excellent.” He pauses. He probably shouldn’t say anything too reproachful to his host, but... “She cooks it for you.”
Juro looks up at him. His expression is strangely hunted. “I know.”
“I think it hurts her that you spend so much time away.”
Juro swallows. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
They don’t sound like empty words. There’s more pain and more passion there than Keitaro would have expected. But, if he doesn’t want to hurt anyone, why would he treat Megumi’s feelings so carelessly?
“Eat with us tomorrow,” Keitaro suggests.
Juro hesitates. Keitaro is sure, for a moment, that he’s going to refuse.
“Us?” Juro asks at last. “You’ll be there too?”
“Oh,” Keitaro says. “I... don’t have to be. If you’d prefer to be alone.”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying.” Juro pauses. “I think it might help. Having someone else there, I mean. It might be safer.”
Safer?
“I’ll try to be home on time tomorrow,” Juro says. He hesitates again. “Um, thanks.”
Keitaro isn’t sure why he’s being thanked. He was speaking more for Megumi’s benefit than Juro’s.
And, privately, perhaps a little for his own benefit as well.
Megumi never eats with Keitaro; she’s always waiting for Juro. If Juro could be there, if the three of them could share a meal together, spend an evening eating and talking as friends—
If Keitaro can form new fond memories of the Kurabe house, perhaps he’ll be able to think of those, rather than constantly seeing it ablaze.
*
Sakura High School, North Building Girls’ Bathroom
There’s a hand dryer near the door, pretty much hanging on to the damaged tiling by a thread. Yuki wrenches it off the wall and hurls it through the window.
It might hit someone. She doesn’t care.
Where the hell is Nat-chan?
She’s hunted for days, she’s chased down every lead she could find. And here she is again, back in the destroyed bathroom she’s already searched, and Nat-chan is still missing.
Maybe she missed something. Maybe there’s nothing left to find.
Yuki kicks down the last stall door standing.
Natsuno’s not the kind of girl who’d just run off. She’s kind of spacey, in more ways than one, but she’s a good kid. She’s not Yuki; she wouldn’t ditch school for no reason.
Which means something is wrong. And Yuki has no idea what it is.
Her fist leaves a spiderweb of splinters when it hits the mirror.
“Uh.”
Yuki whips around, breathing hard.
It’s Ogata in the doorway. “You okay?”
“You know this is the girls’ bathroom, right?” Yuki asks.
“Sounded like someone was being murdered in here,” Ogata says.
Yuki narrows her eyes. “Not yet.”
Ogata’s gaze drops. He swears.
“My eyes are up here,” Yuki says, “and they’re the last thing you’ll ever see.”
“You’re bleeding.”
For a moment she can’t comprehend the words, she can’t process them. He can’t be talking about her. She doesn’t feel like she has a physical body right now; she’s nothing but blazing rage.
She looks down.
There’s glass embedded in her knuckles, blood welling up around it. She flexes her fingers, which does not help the situation at all.
She hadn’t felt a thing.
“You need help?” Ogata asks.
“I’m fine.”
“What, you’re planning to just stand here and bleed?”
“What, you’re a doctor now?”
Ogata scowls. “I was gonna walk you to the nurse’s office.”
Yuki raises her hand to show him the back of it. The blood is starting to run down her wrist. “Gonna have a hell of a time walking with this hand injury, but I’ll figure something out.”
“Fine.” Ogata turns away. “Just get there before you pass out, a’ight?”
He closes the door behind him.
Yuki wipes the sweat off her forehead, realising too late that she’s probably smearing blood across her face, and goes straight back to trashing the bathroom. She’s not going to let anyone tell her how to deal with this.
*
Tokisaka Shrine
Miwako isn’t here.
Miwako isn’t—
Miwako isn’t here, she—
They left her behind. They were in 2025, those androids were coming for them, and Miwako is still there.
Sekigahara says that Universal Control must have determined that she was an inconvenience to this world, and what does that mean? What does that mean? What the hell does that mean?
Tomi doesn’t sleep at all.
She drags herself to school the next morning. She hasn’t spoken to Miwako’s family; she hasn’t gone to the police. She doesn’t know what she’d say. How do you explain what’s happened when you don’t understand it yourself?
But she’s going to see Iori in class, and she’s going to have to—
“Usami-chan!”
Tomi’s first instinct is to drop her bag and/or pass out. She manages, with great effort, not to do either of those things.
It’s Miwako, standing under the tree where they always meet on the way to school. She’s smiling. She looks as solid and real as the world around her.
“Oh, my God, Miwako!” Tomi rushes up to her and gives her a hug. “Holy crap, you freaked me out. Are you okay? How did you get back?”
“Um—”
“Are you hurt?” Tomi pulls back to see her face, then hugs her again. “I seriously thought I’d never see you again!”
“Usami-chan, is something wrong?”
“Everything’s great! I can’t believe you’re here!”
Miwako is looking alarmed, Tomi registers when she finally breaks the hug off. Maybe this is a bit too much for this early in the morning.
“So how did you escape?” Tomi asks.
Miwako hesitates. “Um, escape from what?”
“Uh, the androids, obviously,” Tomi says. “The weird underground gate place. The future.”
It’s weird to realise she’s thinking of it as ‘the future’ herself now, rather than thinking of this as the past. It didn’t feel like her home time, really, seeing the wreckage of the city.
God, she misses the internet, though.
“I don’t really know what you mean,” Miwako says.
“How can you not know what I mean?”
“The future?” Miwako asks. “Androids? Are you talking about a film?”
Tomi goes very still.
“You... don’t remember the ruined future?” she asks.
Miwako looks bewildered.
Miwako’s not the kind of person to pull pranks. Especially not when things are this important. She must be able to see how much this is freaking Tomi out; she wouldn’t joke about it.
Which means one of two things. Either she genuinely forgot somehow – forgot about being stranded for days – or this isn’t the real Miwako.
It looks like Miwako. The same tidy uniform, that familiar pose, her hands clasped in front of her.
Some kind of perfect imitation? Or is she just in Tomi’s head? A night of no sleep, panicking about leaving her behind; maybe Tomi’s just snapped.
“Usami-chan?” Miwako asks, quiet and anxious.
There’s another option, Tomi guesses: her own memories of the ruined future aren’t real.
It’d be really nice if the possibilities weren’t all terrifying.
“Sorry,” Tomi says. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” Is she a fake? Is she dangerous? “Uh, let’s get to school.”
*
Kurabe House
“Does it concern you at all that you’re trying to kill Juro Kurabe?” Fluffy asks. He’s lounging on the top of the television, tail lazily twitching across the screen.
Megumi tenses. “I’m trying to save him.”
“You’re trying to save Juro Izumi,” Fluffy says. “Whatever Juro Izumi’s worth. The moment you succeed, Juro Kurabe is dead. He’s gone.”
Megumi swallows. Sets down the kitchen knife, halfway through chopping vegetables.
She’s not killing Juro Kurabe. Juro Kurabe isn’t real. He’s an artificial personality, a fake in the body of someone she loves.
“He was never supposed to exist in the first place,” she says.
“Nobody’s supposed to exist. The fact is that he’s here, and you’re trying to replace him. How does it feel, cooking so tenderly for him each evening when you’re planning your little murder?”
She doesn’t want to think about this. “You’re the one who offered to restore his memories.”
“I already know where my principles lie,” Fluffy says. “I’m curious about yours.”
She shot Tomi. She doesn’t have any principles left.
She’s abruptly furious, angry enough to drown out the guilt. Fluffy could have brought this up days ago, let her think about what she was really asking for before she entered into their bargain. But he let her carry out his dirty work, and now he’s testing her to see if she’ll back down.
“I’m bringing him back,” Megumi says. “I’ve come this far. I don’t care what it costs.”
Her heart still leaps whenever she sees Juro Kurabe, even knowing that he’s not the same person. She’s been trying to keep him fed, she’s been watching over him at school. But she’ll kill him with her own hands if that’s what it takes.
She doesn’t want to be this person. But she needs to see Juro again. If the price is her soul, that’s what she’ll pay.
*
Kamazumi Station Line, No. 5 Platform
What was it Okino said? The more loops we do, the more stress your brain gets put under. If you don’t find it soon, I can’t promise you’ll survive.
Nenji’s not even the one with the key. He’s just some guy who happened to be convenient, he guesses. And these bastards are still happy to stick him in that machine and risk his life.
He can’t put Minami into the hands of people like that.
Which means he can’t tell them he’s found the key. Which apparently means he’s just trapped here, looping, until his brain’s totally fried.
He keeps thinking he can feel this weird pressure in his head. Maybe he’s just imagining it, after what he’s been told. Either way, though, whatever’s going on in there can’t be pretty.
He’s going to die in this fake train station. Is he ready to handle that?
“Well, that’s my train,” Kisaragi says. “Bye or whatever.”
Nenji jolts back into reality. Or maybe ‘awareness’ is a better word. “You can’t get on that train!”
“You ignore me and then try to tell me what to do?” Kisaragi asks. She steps through the train doors. “Oh, look. Turns out you can’t control me.”
It’s not even real. But he doesn’t want to go through this shit again.
It’s hard to forget the first time the train crashed off the rails. He wasn’t prepared to know, so suddenly and with such total certainty, that he was about to die.
By this point, it’s like a crap rollercoaster he’s been on way too many times.
He thinks, for a moment, about letting the doors close between them. Letting the train pull away, staying right here on the platform. He’s got to have a better chance of surviving the kaiju if he stays on solid ground. At least he won’t have to hear the passengers screaming.
But Kisaragi’s on that train, and he can’t just let her go through that alone.
*
Sakura High School, Nurse’s Office
She wakes in the nurse’s office. Ms Morimura asks her if she knows what year it is; it’s 1985. Her head hurts. She takes her pills, goes out into the school.
Gouto insists on accompanying her. He watches her with a caution that she finds frustrating. She wants to tell him they’re not together any more, but she can’t be certain they were together in the first place; it’s hard to get it clear in her head, somehow.
She wakes in the nurse’s office. Because she’s not well? Or because she doesn’t have anywhere else to sleep? Her head hurts; she can’t remember.
A boy with glasses escorts her through the school. He won’t leave her alone. It’s frustrating. She thinks she might be getting a headache.
Shu Amiguchi finds her on the stairs. She can’t remember how she got away from her escort. Amiguchi feels too familiar, somehow, in a world where nothing seems recognisable to her. Her head feels like it’s breaking apart.
She wakes in the nurse’s office. A woman asks her if she knows what year it is. There’s a bottle of pills in her hand.
A boy stops her on the stairs and calls her senpai and asks if she’s all right. She’s never seen him before. Her head hurts.
She’s on her knees in the schoolyard, clutching an empty bottle.
Her head hurts. Her head hurts. Her head hurts.
She wakes in a room.
*
Sakura High School, Old Building
“Don’t – don’t stand so close!”
“You don’t like it?” Okino drums his fingers against his own wrist for a moment, apparently in thought, and then reaches out to drum his fingers against Takatoshi’s wrist instead.
Takatoshi flinches back. “Why would I like it? You’re a man—”
“Close enough, I suppose.”
“—in a dress—”
“A uniform skirt, technically.”
“—and you violated my mind!”
Okino pauses. “Well, I don’t have any corrections to make there.”
“What was that contraption?” Takatoshi demands. “How did it let you see inside my head?”
“It was really just confirming what I already knew,” Okino says. “I was inside your head already. I don’t need technology to look around in there.”
Takatoshi crosses his arms. Stares fixedly over Okino’s shoulder, at the polished wood of the classroom door. “It’s difficult not to think about someone so infuriating. That’s the only reason you... may have been in my thoughts.”
“Is that so?” Okino asks. “I’d better not become bearable; I’d hate it if you forgot me.”
He somehow, impossibly moves even closer. Takatoshi tries to back away and feels his heel hit the wall of the corridor.
Something isn’t right. When did Okino change back into the girls’ uniform?
And—
This building is disused, it’s forty years old. Why would the classroom door have been polished?
Did they go back in time again? Or—
“Is this real?” Takatoshi asks, his voice less stable than he’d hoped.
“Is it easier to believe it isn’t real?” Okino asks, very softly. He’s so, so close.
“I’m still in the machine,” Takatoshi says. “Aren’t I? This is—” What did Okino call it? “This is what you did to Ogata, this is the simulation.”
His chest feels tight; it’s hard to swallow. It feels real. It can’t be.
“You remember that we couldn’t see what Ogata-kun was seeing, right?” Okino asks, softer still. He reaches out to touch Takatoshi’s neck. Just cupping it, gently, but with his thumb a little too firm against the pulse. “Whatever happens in here, the real Okino won’t know the details unless you tell him.”
Takatoshi needs to communicate with the real Okino. He needs to beg him to let him out.
Or... ask, rather than beg. Something less humiliating.
It’s difficult to think, with Okino standing so close, but Takatoshi tries to remember how it worked with Ogata. He said he was experiencing some sort of scene at a train station, a kaiju attack. Ogata could communicate with Okino whenever the scenario ended.
Which happened whenever Ogata died, inside the simulation.
Takatoshi swallows. He doesn’t want to ask this, but he doesn’t have a choice. “Could you kill me?”
“Kinky,” Okino says. “Not the request I was expecting, but it could be interesting.”
-
“Your heart rate was going wild in there,” Okino says, turning away from the monitors. “Something happen?”
Takatoshi stares very hard at the wall. “No.”
*
City Outskirts
“How are you doing?” Shu calls over the roar of the engine.
It’s easier to ask Yuki than to ask himself. Thirty kilometres. What Inaba told him is insane, it’s impossible, and it’s also true; they’ve just seen it with their own eyes.
He’s still shaking. He hopes Yuki can’t tell.
“Honestly, I just want to go to bed and find out this was a dream tomorrow,” Yuki says.
Actually doesn’t sound that implausible, given how vivid and weird Shu’s dreams have been lately. That’d be nice. “Bed, huh? You want company?”
“Okay, pull over,” Yuki says. “It’s not gonna go well if I strangle you when you’re driving this thing.”
That doesn’t make pulling over sound appealing. Although, in a way, it kind of does?
He pulls up to the side of the road. Waits for Yuki to dismount before he does, so the bike doesn’t just fall on her. Although he doesn’t know if they really have to worry about injuries, after what they’ve learnt.
The sun’s mostly set, sky gold at the horizon, shading almost to black on its way up. Trees silhouetted against it, the houses at the outskirts of the city. Shu can hear birds calling from somewhere, feel his shoes hit the pavement, see Yuki’s hair move as she takes off her helmet and shakes it out. The road is quiet; it’s just them here. Is any of it real?
“Is there a reason you’re just flirting non-stop?” Yuki asks. “Like, is it a medical condition? We’ve just learnt something impossible and terrifying, and you’re still hitting on me?”
“You’re just that beautiful,” Shu says. “How can I help myself?”
Yuki gives a low growl, which is sexy, yes, but also a little alarming. Maybe it’s time to be serious.
It’s uncomfortable to be honest about this stuff. But it’s also pretty uncomfortable to learn that your memories are fake and your entire world is thirty kilometres across. He’s kind of resigned himself to being uncomfortable.
He sighs and leans against his motorbike, as if that can somehow make what he’s saying cooler. “I’m not great at talking to girls.”
“Well, that’s obvious,” Yuki says.
“Flirting’s a game, you know? It has rules, it has a goal. It’s just something to focus on. It... y’know, it makes conversations easier.”
Yuki makes a quiet, surprised noise. Shu doesn’t want to see her expression. He looks up instead, at the darkening sky, trying not to picture that metal grid stretching endlessly up into blackness.
“I told Kurabe about it once,” he says. “He said it sounded way more stressful than having a normal conversation.” He shrugs. “I don’t know, maybe for him. It works for me.”
“You know the girls you’re talking to are finding it more stressful too, right?”
He doesn’t really know what to say to that.
“We’re talking normally right now, anyway,” Yuki points out. “You’re not bursting into flames or anything. And, honestly, it means I like you more.”
It surprises him into looking at her. “Yeah?”
“Or dislike you less, at least,” she says. “No miracles.”
He gives her a wink. “Hey, so long as we’re heading in the right direction.”
“Ugh.”
There’s a pause. He’s trying to keep his mind off it, but he finds himself thinking again about passing through the invisible boundary around the city, seeing the world he knew just disappear.
“Don’t really know if the people I’m talking to are real any more,” he says. “I guess it’s stupid to get intimidated by conversations.”
“I’m real,” Yuki says. “And you should definitely be intimidated by conversations with me.”
“How do you know we’re real?” Shu demands. Asking the question aloud seems to make it harder to breathe, somehow. “You remember what we saw, right? You think the entire real world has just been one Japanese city the whole time, and we’re the only people who ever found out about it?”
Yuki shrugs. “I said I’m real. I didn’t say anything about you.”
He’s been trying not to freak out. He’s been keeping the panic at bay, mostly, by concentrating on Yuki instead. But now he is definitely thinking about the boundaries of their tiny world, and he is definitely unable to stop. “And you know that because?”
“I feel real,” Yuki says. “No point believing anything else.”
It gets him to focus on himself for a moment. His breathing, too fast. His guts, feeling like they’re somehow in a tumble dryer and a trash compactor simultaneously. The terror of tipping forward into a chasm and knowing that, if you throw your hands out to break your fall, they’ll just hit more nothing. He’s definitely not projecting the calm, suave image he aims for around girls.
He feels awful. But it doesn’t seem like he could feel this terrible if he weren’t real.
“Okay,” he says. “Maybe that’s a good way of looking at it.”
“You okay?” Yuki asks, looking sideways at him.
He wasn’t expecting the question. It feels kind of good to have Yuki worrying about him.
He wants to wink at her, cool and confident and invulnerable. Yeah, of course. You’re here.
“Not really,” he says. “But, uh, I think you’re helping. Thanks.”
*
Rainy Back Alley
Morimura is dead.
His head feels like it’s splitting. He saw—
He saw who did this. He couldn’t make sense of it. A little girl, a gun, only room for one Chihiro Morimura—
He digs his fingers into his hair, into his skull.
What did he see?
Morimura is dead. She’s lying dead in the alleyway, in the flickering lights of – of whatever building this is. Did he not know before? Or is it that he knew, but now he’s forgotten?
What happened to her?
He looks down the alleyway, squinting through the pain. There’s nobody else here.
There’s something on the ground. A gun.
He picks it up to examine it, although it’s hard to focus.
There’s something in his mind. A vague sense that he shouldn’t be doing this. But he can’t think of why; any clear thought is drowned out by the screaming pressure in his skull.
Why does his head hurt so much?
Is he holding a gun? Why?
He’s on his knees in an alleyway; he can feel grit digging into the heel of his empty hand where he’s braced it against the ground. He should probably go home.
He can’t remember what that means.
When he looks around, he sees a woman on the ground, unconscious or worse. Flickering lights.
He can’t remember how he got here. Maybe it’s just because of the pain. His head’s in agony; it seems strange that he’s only just noticing it.
It doesn’t look like she’s breathing.
He looks down. He’s holding a gun.
*
Ashitaba City
“That’s five on the strike team,” Kurabe says. “Will that be enough?”
There’s silence. Just enough for Renya to know that nobody else feels well enough to battle.
“I should be able to manage another round,” he says.
In truth, he’s at his operating limit. But he knows that, if he doesn’t volunteer, Shinonome will.
The last time Shinonome pushed herself to fight beyond breaking point, she spent the entire battle screaming over open comms. Afterwards, she hadn’t seemed to remember it at all. The entire affair had been extremely bad for morale. It’s in everyone’s interests to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
“You sure?” Kisaragi asks. “’Cause you’ve been fighting pretty much the same battles I have, and my head is killing me right now.”
Renya is careful to keep his voice steady, to prevent any pain from seeping into it. “I’m sure.”
He knows almost instantly, when he reactivates his Sentinel after barely a minute on solid ground, that he’s made a mistake. He can’t do this.
But someone has to.
He’s learnt enough from Shinonome to keep communications disabled. If he’s breathing through gritted teeth, if he cries out with the effort of keeping his Sentinel airborne, nobody has to know.
But the others look to him as a tactician. So he still has to try to keep his focus, to pay attention to what’s happening elsewhere on the battlefield, when just concentrating on his own Sentinel and his own foes seems like more than he’s physically capable of. He still has to activate comms occasionally, give advice and instructions, trying to sound like he isn’t falling apart.
Two minutes. It’s an eternity.
When he dismounts, he wants to collapse to his knees, curl up and take a moment to recover. A moment to assess the damage. It’s difficult to think; he can’t tell whether it’s temporary, an effect of the overexertion, or he’s permanently affected his own mind.
But Minami is nearby, preparing to take to the front in the next battle.
Renya keeps himself on his feet by sheer effort of will. Gives her a nod, cool and composed. It’s crucial that they feel they can win this; he can’t show anything that would cause discouragement.
With any luck, she won’t notice his suppressed trembling.
*
[NO LOCATION FOUND]
It’s more comfortable than Juro would have expected, standing nude alongside the others, looking out over the hills. Or less uncomfortable, at least.
They’re all in the same situation. They fought together, they almost died together, they were prepared to be trapped in the ruined city together for the rest of their lives. Even if he’d barely met some of the others before they went into battle, he feels like he knows the people here with him more deeply than he’s ever known anyone before.
Well, except Okino. But Okino seems so completely unconcerned by his own nudity that it’s hard to feel too awkward about it; he’s radiating a confidence that seems to cancel out any discomfort in the air. He’s standing with his hands on his hips and as wide a stance as possible, laughing at Hijiyama, who has his hand over his eyes and is blushing furiously.
It’s around this point that Shiba materialises next to Juro, just as nude as the rest of them.
Juro yelps.
“Gotta say,” Shiba says, “I wasn’t expecting you to actually pull it off.”
Juro tries to snap his name, Shiba, or maybe Izumi, and accidentally ends up saying both names at the same time. “Shizumi! Put – put some clothes on!”
“What? I didn’t want to be the odd one out.”
It was fine, it was comfortable, and suddenly it’s weird. Suddenly Juro is very aware of his own nudity. It doesn’t help that people are starting to look over at the guy who’s talking to himself. “You’re making it awkward!”
“It wasn’t awkward already?” Shiba asks. “You know that’s your hot grandma over there, right?”
Juro had not, in fact, realised that his grandmother was over there. There are a lot of people here, and he’s been trying to avoid staring. “Shiba!”
Shiba shrugs. “She’s not my hot grandma.”
“Wait,” Juro says. “You’re here.”
“Uh, yes?” Shiba says. “Yeah, I kind of got that.”
“You’re here. On the new world. You came out of the pod with me?”
“Yeah.” Shiba holds his hand up, inspecting his fingers. “I mean, I’m in your nanomachines. I kind of expected it. I guess it’s good to actually know.”
Juro doesn’t know, for a moment, how to feel about the revelation that he still has another person in his head. The knowledge that he’s still not normal, even here; he never will be.
But he thinks...
He thinks he might be okay with it.
They’ve got a lot of work to do here. Creating a world. It’s such a huge task that it’s hard to get his head around it. It’ll be good to have Shiba by his side; maybe their friendship was a lie, but that doesn’t mean Juro wouldn’t miss him.
They’ve all been through a lot, but there’s a chance for something good here. He’s looking forward to getting started.
They should probably find some clothes first, though.
This is more a collection of missing scenes than a single linear fic. Each set of location details marks the start of a new character's perspective.
The connecting theme is 'psychological suffering', because that's what I'm about. The working title was 13 Breakdowns.
Title: City of Cards
Fandom: 13 Sentinels
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Allusions to various canonical or canonically implied pairings.
Wordcount: 5,800
Summary: Different home times, different lives, but the thirteen all have one thing in common: they're not doing very well right now.
Warnings: Blood, dark themes, full spoilers for 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim.
Kurabe House, Juro’s Bedroom
He thinks he might be in love with Yakushiji.
He doesn’t know her. He doesn’t know her interests, her family, her history.
All he really knows is that she moved unexpectedly into his house, and she’s a good cook, and he shot her dead in cold blood.
No. Juro curls up on the bed, as tightly as he can. No. Yakushiji is still alive.
He saw her. He came home and she was there, she was in the kitchen in her apron, she was cooking dinner and she was alive and he dropped his schoolbag and backed up so fast he cracked his shoulder against the pillar. He remembered killing her, he still remembers it. He remembers her begging him not to shoot.
But he saw her. She was breathing, she spoke to him. She’s alive.
She asked him if he was okay. He ran past her, bolted up the stairs to his room.
He can’t go downstairs again. She’s there. Or she’s not there, because he killed her, and he can’t—
He can’t handle either of those things, he can’t—
He shot so many people, he shot friends of his. Fuyusaka. Amiguchi. They’d done nothing to him. But he had to kill them, there was a reason.
He can’t make sense of it now. What possible reason could justify what he did?
He thinks he might be in love with Fuyusaka, too. Is that why he killed her? Or is that just how you feel about people you’ve killed? Maybe guilt feels like love if it’s strong enough.
“You’re pretty useless like this, huh?”
Juro cracks his eyes open. Shiba is standing next to his bed. His expression looks strange, somehow. Flat. Clinical.
Not that that matters. What matters is that Shiba’s in danger. If he stays, Juro will kill him, just like he killed all the others.
“It’s fine,” Shiba says. He doesn’t seem to be talking to Juro. “I’ll figure this out.”
Juro opens his mouth, to tell Shiba to run, to get Shiba away from him before it’s too late. But what comes out instead is “Don’t leave.”
Shiba looks a little surprised.
“Hey,” he says, after a moment. He takes Juro’s hand. “I’m not going anywhere, buddy.”
Juro closes his eyes again, tightening his hold on Shiba’s fingers.
It doesn’t occur to him to wonder how Shiba got into his house.
Sakura High School, Class 1-B
“Fuyusaka-san? Class is over.”
Iori blinks her eyes open.
She’s in a classroom? Why is she...
Why is she surprised by this? She falls asleep in class twice a week. Why wouldn’t she be in a classroom?
But there’s a part of her that forgot, for a moment, that she’s still a student.
“You okay?” Kurabe asks, stooping to check on her.
“I-I’m fine.” She ducks down, tries to focus on packing books into her bag. Hopefully he won’t see her blushing.
It’s getting hard to keep track of what’s real, what’s a dream. She keeps glancing at mirrors and being surprised by how young she is. She keeps...
She keeps forgetting what role people play in her life. She keeps dreaming about people she knows, and then she can’t look at them normally any more. It’s ridiculous, but that doesn’t change the way she feels.
She’s in love with Kurabe; she has been for years. That’s what her memories tell her. But that can’t be right, because he only transferred here a few months ago.
Kurabe’s a danger, and she needs to stop him before he kills again. That’s definitely not right, but she can’t shake the feeling. It’s regrettable, but he has to be destroyed.
Why is she thinking about destroying people? What’s wrong with her?
Kurabe’s her weird classmate. He seems nice enough, and they talk about their intense dreams sometimes, but they don’t know each other that well, and Iori doesn’t really know how to respond when he starts talking to himself. That’s reality. Every time she wakes up, it feels like it takes longer to pin that down, it’s harder to believe it.
“I can’t just let her miss her classes,” Kurabe is saying, hushed and irritated, to absolutely no one. “It’s not like that.”
What would it mean for Iori’s future if someone confessed to her, one of the people she’s been dreaming about, and she ended up accepting because of some ridiculous dream-based emotion? They might not be the same person in real life. She can see herself getting swept up in the romance of the moment, making a decision she’d regret.
Are her feelings even her own?
Sakura High School, North Building Girls’ Bathroom
It’s all happened so fast that it’s kind of a blur to Natsuno. Usami tried to shoot her. And then Natsuno was hiding in the bathroom stall, petrified, feeling the walls shake, for what simultaneously felt like forever and no time at all.
And then she walked out into the wreckage of the bathroom, a normal room just minutes ago, to see Usami’s stripped mechanical skeleton. To see Tamao, in the wrong time, wearing the uniform like she belongs here.
And now...
Tamao is saying something, but Natsuno can’t take it in. She’s standing, frozen, staring at the gun.
This isn’t happening. Right? This is way too much, this can’t be happening. There’s no way she’s about to get shot by a girl from forty years ago.
Tamao doesn’t even waver before she fires.
Natsuno isn’t aware of falling. She’s just on the floor, eyes tightly shut, her hand pressed against her cheek. Her whole body is cold and prickling, her heart racing like it’s trying to escape her chest before the end.
Is she dying right now? Is this dying? It feels like her – her memories are blurring together, fading, it’s getting harder to think.
She can’t die here. What about Yuki? What about BJ? She has things to do, she can’t just die here in the school bathroom.
She has no idea how long it’s been by the time sensation starts to come back to her, something other than the screaming awareness of her own body. There’s water under her bare knees, shards of broken tile. It doesn’t feel like her cheek is bleeding.
Why would her cheek be bleeding?
Where is she?
Kurabe House, Guest Bedroom
Keitaro still doesn’t understand how the Kurabe house can be standing. It burned forty years ago. He was there; he saw it. He doesn’t think he’ll ever forget.
He’s been dreaming about the fires. He sleeps lightly, he has since the war began, and he jolts awake several times a night. There’s always a terrified moment when he recognises the Kurabe guest room, he realises where he is, and for a moment he genuinely believes he’s trapped in a burning house.
It always takes him a while to get to sleep again afterwards. He can’t escape the memories here: searching through the burning village, pleading for Chihiro to be safe.
This probably isn’t the best place he could be staying. But he doesn’t have anywhere else.
He doesn’t think sleep is going to come now. Maybe he should go for a walk.
Juro Kurabe is in the kitchen, hunting through the fridge, in the flickering light of the television. The sound is off.
“You’re hungry?” Keitaro asks.
Juro jumps, shuts the fridge door, stares wildly at him for a moment.
“Ah, sorry,” Keitaro says. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Sorry,” Juro says. “I thought maybe you were...” He hesitates, then opens the fridge again. “I didn’t have anything to eat,” he mumbles.
“Megumi-san always cooks supper,” Keitaro says. “You should come home earlier. The hemborger is excellent.” He pauses. He probably shouldn’t say anything too reproachful to his host, but... “She cooks it for you.”
Juro looks up at him. His expression is strangely hunted. “I know.”
“I think it hurts her that you spend so much time away.”
Juro swallows. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
They don’t sound like empty words. There’s more pain and more passion there than Keitaro would have expected. But, if he doesn’t want to hurt anyone, why would he treat Megumi’s feelings so carelessly?
“Eat with us tomorrow,” Keitaro suggests.
Juro hesitates. Keitaro is sure, for a moment, that he’s going to refuse.
“Us?” Juro asks at last. “You’ll be there too?”
“Oh,” Keitaro says. “I... don’t have to be. If you’d prefer to be alone.”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying.” Juro pauses. “I think it might help. Having someone else there, I mean. It might be safer.”
Safer?
“I’ll try to be home on time tomorrow,” Juro says. He hesitates again. “Um, thanks.”
Keitaro isn’t sure why he’s being thanked. He was speaking more for Megumi’s benefit than Juro’s.
And, privately, perhaps a little for his own benefit as well.
Megumi never eats with Keitaro; she’s always waiting for Juro. If Juro could be there, if the three of them could share a meal together, spend an evening eating and talking as friends—
If Keitaro can form new fond memories of the Kurabe house, perhaps he’ll be able to think of those, rather than constantly seeing it ablaze.
Sakura High School, North Building Girls’ Bathroom
There’s a hand dryer near the door, pretty much hanging on to the damaged tiling by a thread. Yuki wrenches it off the wall and hurls it through the window.
It might hit someone. She doesn’t care.
Where the hell is Nat-chan?
She’s hunted for days, she’s chased down every lead she could find. And here she is again, back in the destroyed bathroom she’s already searched, and Nat-chan is still missing.
Maybe she missed something. Maybe there’s nothing left to find.
Yuki kicks down the last stall door standing.
Natsuno’s not the kind of girl who’d just run off. She’s kind of spacey, in more ways than one, but she’s a good kid. She’s not Yuki; she wouldn’t ditch school for no reason.
Which means something is wrong. And Yuki has no idea what it is.
Her fist leaves a spiderweb of splinters when it hits the mirror.
“Uh.”
Yuki whips around, breathing hard.
It’s Ogata in the doorway. “You okay?”
“You know this is the girls’ bathroom, right?” Yuki asks.
“Sounded like someone was being murdered in here,” Ogata says.
Yuki narrows her eyes. “Not yet.”
Ogata’s gaze drops. He swears.
“My eyes are up here,” Yuki says, “and they’re the last thing you’ll ever see.”
“You’re bleeding.”
For a moment she can’t comprehend the words, she can’t process them. He can’t be talking about her. She doesn’t feel like she has a physical body right now; she’s nothing but blazing rage.
She looks down.
There’s glass embedded in her knuckles, blood welling up around it. She flexes her fingers, which does not help the situation at all.
She hadn’t felt a thing.
“You need help?” Ogata asks.
“I’m fine.”
“What, you’re planning to just stand here and bleed?”
“What, you’re a doctor now?”
Ogata scowls. “I was gonna walk you to the nurse’s office.”
Yuki raises her hand to show him the back of it. The blood is starting to run down her wrist. “Gonna have a hell of a time walking with this hand injury, but I’ll figure something out.”
“Fine.” Ogata turns away. “Just get there before you pass out, a’ight?”
He closes the door behind him.
Yuki wipes the sweat off her forehead, realising too late that she’s probably smearing blood across her face, and goes straight back to trashing the bathroom. She’s not going to let anyone tell her how to deal with this.
Tokisaka Shrine
Miwako isn’t here.
Miwako isn’t—
Miwako isn’t here, she—
They left her behind. They were in 2025, those androids were coming for them, and Miwako is still there.
Sekigahara says that Universal Control must have determined that she was an inconvenience to this world, and what does that mean? What does that mean? What the hell does that mean?
Tomi doesn’t sleep at all.
She drags herself to school the next morning. She hasn’t spoken to Miwako’s family; she hasn’t gone to the police. She doesn’t know what she’d say. How do you explain what’s happened when you don’t understand it yourself?
But she’s going to see Iori in class, and she’s going to have to—
“Usami-chan!”
Tomi’s first instinct is to drop her bag and/or pass out. She manages, with great effort, not to do either of those things.
It’s Miwako, standing under the tree where they always meet on the way to school. She’s smiling. She looks as solid and real as the world around her.
“Oh, my God, Miwako!” Tomi rushes up to her and gives her a hug. “Holy crap, you freaked me out. Are you okay? How did you get back?”
“Um—”
“Are you hurt?” Tomi pulls back to see her face, then hugs her again. “I seriously thought I’d never see you again!”
“Usami-chan, is something wrong?”
“Everything’s great! I can’t believe you’re here!”
Miwako is looking alarmed, Tomi registers when she finally breaks the hug off. Maybe this is a bit too much for this early in the morning.
“So how did you escape?” Tomi asks.
Miwako hesitates. “Um, escape from what?”
“Uh, the androids, obviously,” Tomi says. “The weird underground gate place. The future.”
It’s weird to realise she’s thinking of it as ‘the future’ herself now, rather than thinking of this as the past. It didn’t feel like her home time, really, seeing the wreckage of the city.
God, she misses the internet, though.
“I don’t really know what you mean,” Miwako says.
“How can you not know what I mean?”
“The future?” Miwako asks. “Androids? Are you talking about a film?”
Tomi goes very still.
“You... don’t remember the ruined future?” she asks.
Miwako looks bewildered.
Miwako’s not the kind of person to pull pranks. Especially not when things are this important. She must be able to see how much this is freaking Tomi out; she wouldn’t joke about it.
Which means one of two things. Either she genuinely forgot somehow – forgot about being stranded for days – or this isn’t the real Miwako.
It looks like Miwako. The same tidy uniform, that familiar pose, her hands clasped in front of her.
Some kind of perfect imitation? Or is she just in Tomi’s head? A night of no sleep, panicking about leaving her behind; maybe Tomi’s just snapped.
“Usami-chan?” Miwako asks, quiet and anxious.
There’s another option, Tomi guesses: her own memories of the ruined future aren’t real.
It’d be really nice if the possibilities weren’t all terrifying.
“Sorry,” Tomi says. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” Is she a fake? Is she dangerous? “Uh, let’s get to school.”
Kurabe House
“Does it concern you at all that you’re trying to kill Juro Kurabe?” Fluffy asks. He’s lounging on the top of the television, tail lazily twitching across the screen.
Megumi tenses. “I’m trying to save him.”
“You’re trying to save Juro Izumi,” Fluffy says. “Whatever Juro Izumi’s worth. The moment you succeed, Juro Kurabe is dead. He’s gone.”
Megumi swallows. Sets down the kitchen knife, halfway through chopping vegetables.
She’s not killing Juro Kurabe. Juro Kurabe isn’t real. He’s an artificial personality, a fake in the body of someone she loves.
“He was never supposed to exist in the first place,” she says.
“Nobody’s supposed to exist. The fact is that he’s here, and you’re trying to replace him. How does it feel, cooking so tenderly for him each evening when you’re planning your little murder?”
She doesn’t want to think about this. “You’re the one who offered to restore his memories.”
“I already know where my principles lie,” Fluffy says. “I’m curious about yours.”
She shot Tomi. She doesn’t have any principles left.
She’s abruptly furious, angry enough to drown out the guilt. Fluffy could have brought this up days ago, let her think about what she was really asking for before she entered into their bargain. But he let her carry out his dirty work, and now he’s testing her to see if she’ll back down.
“I’m bringing him back,” Megumi says. “I’ve come this far. I don’t care what it costs.”
Her heart still leaps whenever she sees Juro Kurabe, even knowing that he’s not the same person. She’s been trying to keep him fed, she’s been watching over him at school. But she’ll kill him with her own hands if that’s what it takes.
She doesn’t want to be this person. But she needs to see Juro again. If the price is her soul, that’s what she’ll pay.
Kamazumi Station Line, No. 5 Platform
What was it Okino said? The more loops we do, the more stress your brain gets put under. If you don’t find it soon, I can’t promise you’ll survive.
Nenji’s not even the one with the key. He’s just some guy who happened to be convenient, he guesses. And these bastards are still happy to stick him in that machine and risk his life.
He can’t put Minami into the hands of people like that.
Which means he can’t tell them he’s found the key. Which apparently means he’s just trapped here, looping, until his brain’s totally fried.
He keeps thinking he can feel this weird pressure in his head. Maybe he’s just imagining it, after what he’s been told. Either way, though, whatever’s going on in there can’t be pretty.
He’s going to die in this fake train station. Is he ready to handle that?
“Well, that’s my train,” Kisaragi says. “Bye or whatever.”
Nenji jolts back into reality. Or maybe ‘awareness’ is a better word. “You can’t get on that train!”
“You ignore me and then try to tell me what to do?” Kisaragi asks. She steps through the train doors. “Oh, look. Turns out you can’t control me.”
It’s not even real. But he doesn’t want to go through this shit again.
It’s hard to forget the first time the train crashed off the rails. He wasn’t prepared to know, so suddenly and with such total certainty, that he was about to die.
By this point, it’s like a crap rollercoaster he’s been on way too many times.
He thinks, for a moment, about letting the doors close between them. Letting the train pull away, staying right here on the platform. He’s got to have a better chance of surviving the kaiju if he stays on solid ground. At least he won’t have to hear the passengers screaming.
But Kisaragi’s on that train, and he can’t just let her go through that alone.
Sakura High School, Nurse’s Office
She wakes in the nurse’s office. Ms Morimura asks her if she knows what year it is; it’s 1985. Her head hurts. She takes her pills, goes out into the school.
Gouto insists on accompanying her. He watches her with a caution that she finds frustrating. She wants to tell him they’re not together any more, but she can’t be certain they were together in the first place; it’s hard to get it clear in her head, somehow.
She wakes in the nurse’s office. Because she’s not well? Or because she doesn’t have anywhere else to sleep? Her head hurts; she can’t remember.
A boy with glasses escorts her through the school. He won’t leave her alone. It’s frustrating. She thinks she might be getting a headache.
Shu Amiguchi finds her on the stairs. She can’t remember how she got away from her escort. Amiguchi feels too familiar, somehow, in a world where nothing seems recognisable to her. Her head feels like it’s breaking apart.
She wakes in the nurse’s office. A woman asks her if she knows what year it is. There’s a bottle of pills in her hand.
A boy stops her on the stairs and calls her senpai and asks if she’s all right. She’s never seen him before. Her head hurts.
She’s on her knees in the schoolyard, clutching an empty bottle.
Her head hurts. Her head hurts. Her head hurts.
She wakes in a room.
Sakura High School, Old Building
“Don’t – don’t stand so close!”
“You don’t like it?” Okino drums his fingers against his own wrist for a moment, apparently in thought, and then reaches out to drum his fingers against Takatoshi’s wrist instead.
Takatoshi flinches back. “Why would I like it? You’re a man—”
“Close enough, I suppose.”
“—in a dress—”
“A uniform skirt, technically.”
“—and you violated my mind!”
Okino pauses. “Well, I don’t have any corrections to make there.”
“What was that contraption?” Takatoshi demands. “How did it let you see inside my head?”
“It was really just confirming what I already knew,” Okino says. “I was inside your head already. I don’t need technology to look around in there.”
Takatoshi crosses his arms. Stares fixedly over Okino’s shoulder, at the polished wood of the classroom door. “It’s difficult not to think about someone so infuriating. That’s the only reason you... may have been in my thoughts.”
“Is that so?” Okino asks. “I’d better not become bearable; I’d hate it if you forgot me.”
He somehow, impossibly moves even closer. Takatoshi tries to back away and feels his heel hit the wall of the corridor.
Something isn’t right. When did Okino change back into the girls’ uniform?
And—
This building is disused, it’s forty years old. Why would the classroom door have been polished?
Did they go back in time again? Or—
“Is this real?” Takatoshi asks, his voice less stable than he’d hoped.
“Is it easier to believe it isn’t real?” Okino asks, very softly. He’s so, so close.
“I’m still in the machine,” Takatoshi says. “Aren’t I? This is—” What did Okino call it? “This is what you did to Ogata, this is the simulation.”
His chest feels tight; it’s hard to swallow. It feels real. It can’t be.
“You remember that we couldn’t see what Ogata-kun was seeing, right?” Okino asks, softer still. He reaches out to touch Takatoshi’s neck. Just cupping it, gently, but with his thumb a little too firm against the pulse. “Whatever happens in here, the real Okino won’t know the details unless you tell him.”
Takatoshi needs to communicate with the real Okino. He needs to beg him to let him out.
Or... ask, rather than beg. Something less humiliating.
It’s difficult to think, with Okino standing so close, but Takatoshi tries to remember how it worked with Ogata. He said he was experiencing some sort of scene at a train station, a kaiju attack. Ogata could communicate with Okino whenever the scenario ended.
Which happened whenever Ogata died, inside the simulation.
Takatoshi swallows. He doesn’t want to ask this, but he doesn’t have a choice. “Could you kill me?”
“Kinky,” Okino says. “Not the request I was expecting, but it could be interesting.”
“Your heart rate was going wild in there,” Okino says, turning away from the monitors. “Something happen?”
Takatoshi stares very hard at the wall. “No.”
City Outskirts
“How are you doing?” Shu calls over the roar of the engine.
It’s easier to ask Yuki than to ask himself. Thirty kilometres. What Inaba told him is insane, it’s impossible, and it’s also true; they’ve just seen it with their own eyes.
He’s still shaking. He hopes Yuki can’t tell.
“Honestly, I just want to go to bed and find out this was a dream tomorrow,” Yuki says.
Actually doesn’t sound that implausible, given how vivid and weird Shu’s dreams have been lately. That’d be nice. “Bed, huh? You want company?”
“Okay, pull over,” Yuki says. “It’s not gonna go well if I strangle you when you’re driving this thing.”
That doesn’t make pulling over sound appealing. Although, in a way, it kind of does?
He pulls up to the side of the road. Waits for Yuki to dismount before he does, so the bike doesn’t just fall on her. Although he doesn’t know if they really have to worry about injuries, after what they’ve learnt.
The sun’s mostly set, sky gold at the horizon, shading almost to black on its way up. Trees silhouetted against it, the houses at the outskirts of the city. Shu can hear birds calling from somewhere, feel his shoes hit the pavement, see Yuki’s hair move as she takes off her helmet and shakes it out. The road is quiet; it’s just them here. Is any of it real?
“Is there a reason you’re just flirting non-stop?” Yuki asks. “Like, is it a medical condition? We’ve just learnt something impossible and terrifying, and you’re still hitting on me?”
“You’re just that beautiful,” Shu says. “How can I help myself?”
Yuki gives a low growl, which is sexy, yes, but also a little alarming. Maybe it’s time to be serious.
It’s uncomfortable to be honest about this stuff. But it’s also pretty uncomfortable to learn that your memories are fake and your entire world is thirty kilometres across. He’s kind of resigned himself to being uncomfortable.
He sighs and leans against his motorbike, as if that can somehow make what he’s saying cooler. “I’m not great at talking to girls.”
“Well, that’s obvious,” Yuki says.
“Flirting’s a game, you know? It has rules, it has a goal. It’s just something to focus on. It... y’know, it makes conversations easier.”
Yuki makes a quiet, surprised noise. Shu doesn’t want to see her expression. He looks up instead, at the darkening sky, trying not to picture that metal grid stretching endlessly up into blackness.
“I told Kurabe about it once,” he says. “He said it sounded way more stressful than having a normal conversation.” He shrugs. “I don’t know, maybe for him. It works for me.”
“You know the girls you’re talking to are finding it more stressful too, right?”
He doesn’t really know what to say to that.
“We’re talking normally right now, anyway,” Yuki points out. “You’re not bursting into flames or anything. And, honestly, it means I like you more.”
It surprises him into looking at her. “Yeah?”
“Or dislike you less, at least,” she says. “No miracles.”
He gives her a wink. “Hey, so long as we’re heading in the right direction.”
“Ugh.”
There’s a pause. He’s trying to keep his mind off it, but he finds himself thinking again about passing through the invisible boundary around the city, seeing the world he knew just disappear.
“Don’t really know if the people I’m talking to are real any more,” he says. “I guess it’s stupid to get intimidated by conversations.”
“I’m real,” Yuki says. “And you should definitely be intimidated by conversations with me.”
“How do you know we’re real?” Shu demands. Asking the question aloud seems to make it harder to breathe, somehow. “You remember what we saw, right? You think the entire real world has just been one Japanese city the whole time, and we’re the only people who ever found out about it?”
Yuki shrugs. “I said I’m real. I didn’t say anything about you.”
He’s been trying not to freak out. He’s been keeping the panic at bay, mostly, by concentrating on Yuki instead. But now he is definitely thinking about the boundaries of their tiny world, and he is definitely unable to stop. “And you know that because?”
“I feel real,” Yuki says. “No point believing anything else.”
It gets him to focus on himself for a moment. His breathing, too fast. His guts, feeling like they’re somehow in a tumble dryer and a trash compactor simultaneously. The terror of tipping forward into a chasm and knowing that, if you throw your hands out to break your fall, they’ll just hit more nothing. He’s definitely not projecting the calm, suave image he aims for around girls.
He feels awful. But it doesn’t seem like he could feel this terrible if he weren’t real.
“Okay,” he says. “Maybe that’s a good way of looking at it.”
“You okay?” Yuki asks, looking sideways at him.
He wasn’t expecting the question. It feels kind of good to have Yuki worrying about him.
He wants to wink at her, cool and confident and invulnerable. Yeah, of course. You’re here.
“Not really,” he says. “But, uh, I think you’re helping. Thanks.”
Rainy Back Alley
Morimura is dead.
His head feels like it’s splitting. He saw—
He saw who did this. He couldn’t make sense of it. A little girl, a gun, only room for one Chihiro Morimura—
He digs his fingers into his hair, into his skull.
What did he see?
Morimura is dead. She’s lying dead in the alleyway, in the flickering lights of – of whatever building this is. Did he not know before? Or is it that he knew, but now he’s forgotten?
What happened to her?
He looks down the alleyway, squinting through the pain. There’s nobody else here.
There’s something on the ground. A gun.
He picks it up to examine it, although it’s hard to focus.
There’s something in his mind. A vague sense that he shouldn’t be doing this. But he can’t think of why; any clear thought is drowned out by the screaming pressure in his skull.
Why does his head hurt so much?
Is he holding a gun? Why?
He’s on his knees in an alleyway; he can feel grit digging into the heel of his empty hand where he’s braced it against the ground. He should probably go home.
He can’t remember what that means.
When he looks around, he sees a woman on the ground, unconscious or worse. Flickering lights.
He can’t remember how he got here. Maybe it’s just because of the pain. His head’s in agony; it seems strange that he’s only just noticing it.
It doesn’t look like she’s breathing.
He looks down. He’s holding a gun.
Ashitaba City
“That’s five on the strike team,” Kurabe says. “Will that be enough?”
There’s silence. Just enough for Renya to know that nobody else feels well enough to battle.
“I should be able to manage another round,” he says.
In truth, he’s at his operating limit. But he knows that, if he doesn’t volunteer, Shinonome will.
The last time Shinonome pushed herself to fight beyond breaking point, she spent the entire battle screaming over open comms. Afterwards, she hadn’t seemed to remember it at all. The entire affair had been extremely bad for morale. It’s in everyone’s interests to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
“You sure?” Kisaragi asks. “’Cause you’ve been fighting pretty much the same battles I have, and my head is killing me right now.”
Renya is careful to keep his voice steady, to prevent any pain from seeping into it. “I’m sure.”
He knows almost instantly, when he reactivates his Sentinel after barely a minute on solid ground, that he’s made a mistake. He can’t do this.
But someone has to.
He’s learnt enough from Shinonome to keep communications disabled. If he’s breathing through gritted teeth, if he cries out with the effort of keeping his Sentinel airborne, nobody has to know.
But the others look to him as a tactician. So he still has to try to keep his focus, to pay attention to what’s happening elsewhere on the battlefield, when just concentrating on his own Sentinel and his own foes seems like more than he’s physically capable of. He still has to activate comms occasionally, give advice and instructions, trying to sound like he isn’t falling apart.
Two minutes. It’s an eternity.
When he dismounts, he wants to collapse to his knees, curl up and take a moment to recover. A moment to assess the damage. It’s difficult to think; he can’t tell whether it’s temporary, an effect of the overexertion, or he’s permanently affected his own mind.
But Minami is nearby, preparing to take to the front in the next battle.
Renya keeps himself on his feet by sheer effort of will. Gives her a nod, cool and composed. It’s crucial that they feel they can win this; he can’t show anything that would cause discouragement.
With any luck, she won’t notice his suppressed trembling.
[NO LOCATION FOUND]
It’s more comfortable than Juro would have expected, standing nude alongside the others, looking out over the hills. Or less uncomfortable, at least.
They’re all in the same situation. They fought together, they almost died together, they were prepared to be trapped in the ruined city together for the rest of their lives. Even if he’d barely met some of the others before they went into battle, he feels like he knows the people here with him more deeply than he’s ever known anyone before.
Well, except Okino. But Okino seems so completely unconcerned by his own nudity that it’s hard to feel too awkward about it; he’s radiating a confidence that seems to cancel out any discomfort in the air. He’s standing with his hands on his hips and as wide a stance as possible, laughing at Hijiyama, who has his hand over his eyes and is blushing furiously.
It’s around this point that Shiba materialises next to Juro, just as nude as the rest of them.
Juro yelps.
“Gotta say,” Shiba says, “I wasn’t expecting you to actually pull it off.”
Juro tries to snap his name, Shiba, or maybe Izumi, and accidentally ends up saying both names at the same time. “Shizumi! Put – put some clothes on!”
“What? I didn’t want to be the odd one out.”
It was fine, it was comfortable, and suddenly it’s weird. Suddenly Juro is very aware of his own nudity. It doesn’t help that people are starting to look over at the guy who’s talking to himself. “You’re making it awkward!”
“It wasn’t awkward already?” Shiba asks. “You know that’s your hot grandma over there, right?”
Juro had not, in fact, realised that his grandmother was over there. There are a lot of people here, and he’s been trying to avoid staring. “Shiba!”
Shiba shrugs. “She’s not my hot grandma.”
“Wait,” Juro says. “You’re here.”
“Uh, yes?” Shiba says. “Yeah, I kind of got that.”
“You’re here. On the new world. You came out of the pod with me?”
“Yeah.” Shiba holds his hand up, inspecting his fingers. “I mean, I’m in your nanomachines. I kind of expected it. I guess it’s good to actually know.”
Juro doesn’t know, for a moment, how to feel about the revelation that he still has another person in his head. The knowledge that he’s still not normal, even here; he never will be.
But he thinks...
He thinks he might be okay with it.
They’ve got a lot of work to do here. Creating a world. It’s such a huge task that it’s hard to get his head around it. It’ll be good to have Shiba by his side; maybe their friendship was a lie, but that doesn’t mean Juro wouldn’t miss him.
They’ve all been through a lot, but there’s a chance for something good here. He’s looking forward to getting started.
They should probably find some clothes first, though.