Chapter Text
When Sonia stepped out of her coffin, unsteady on her feet as a newborn fawn but moving more like a zombie thanks to cramped and stiffened limbs, the first thing she did was seek out the vessel bearing Gundam Tanaka's name. In the half-light, she was grateful to see that it was printed in Latin letters as well as in Japanese.
The green lights within and the thick glass obscured her view of his face, but she could see enough. He had a beard, now, not as long as Hinata's but thicker than Kuzuryuu's. There were no marks on his face or head; the scar over his eye was almost invisible without the cosmetics he'd once used to highlight it. Both his hands were intact. She could see nothing else. But he was still there, and that was enough.
She wanted to keep looking at him, to hold onto what she could and reconstruct the most ragged of her memories, but the others were there, each a walking question, an illustration of the life she didn't want to remember. Above his scraggly beard, Kuzuryuu's eye was still covered in bandages. Souda's hair, cropped short, was half black and half bleached to a harsh yellow. Hinata's hair reached below his knees and his beard was so long and flowing she couldn't help thinking of Saint Nicholas, and Owari was gaunt. Sonia wondered what they saw in her. She felt the casket at the back of her knees like a support.
Their coffins were arranged like the spokes of the wheel around a central hub of electronics, and the trio who'd come into the simulation for them stood outside that wheel, watchful and quiet. No one was speaking. Sonia cleared her throat, delicately, and then Owari, raspy-voiced but still so clearly herself, asked, "So Hinata. Need me to smack some sense into you?"
Wakefulness felt as though it had come slowly, but when he finally emerged from the half-death of sleep, it was in a rush, an abrupt awareness of sundry aches and sorenesses, the cramped space he was in and the open space in front of him. He sat up, pushing at the walls constricting his lateral movement, and was immediately confined again, arms wrapping around him as a woman cried out, "Tanaka-san!"
Struggle was reflexive and only half-conscious. "Unhand me!" he said. His voice was uneven with disuse, yet his throat felt raw. He was hungry, weary despite sleep, and he had no idea where he was. What had been done to him? The woman did not release her hold, though she'd left one of his arms free. There were others, keeping a distance that suggested they, at least, had some fear of his powers. Yet the woman's grasp of him was closer to an embrace than an attempt to detain him. "Who are you?" he asked. When he pushed at her shoulder with his unencumbered arm, he was more gentle than he'd intended in his initial struggle.
"Tanaka-san!" she repeated, though her tone this time was reproachful. She loosened her grip, pulling back to look at him.
Golden hair, deep blue eyes, skin like porcelain, and a look of hurt and confusion on her beautiful face. She was... she... His heart lurched and reeled. Tanaka-san? Do you not have anything to say? she asked, her voice very small. He remembered her wrapping the end of his scarf around her neck, saying, This is quite soft! I understand why you wear this scarf all the time! and beaming at him; while he was still flustered, and unable, of course, to pull away, Sun-D had begun traversing the scarf between them, sniffing and investigating the whole way, and she'd begun to giggle. Venturing beyond the borders of the Tanaka Kingdom? she'd said. I shall have to check your passport.
He didn't remember what he'd done, whether he'd scooped up his wayward dark deity and fled in flustered bewilderment or let her take charge of Sun-D for a time, but he remembered her smile, the feeling that they were physically connected, the fact that the look in her eyes was directed at him. And he also remembered her imperious tone in the school dining hall: Tanaka-san, keep your rodents off the dining table. It's unsanitary! You're not the only one who has to eat here.
"Sonia," he murmured, and the way her face brightened made all his confusion and discomfort small and unimportant, yet the other memory was just as real. What did this mean? Some sort of spell, no doubt, but which was the illusion and which was reality? And he felt a silent dread, a nagging reminder that he was just a deluded little boy playing pretend. "No," he whispered. "What is this?"
"Do you remember the trial?" someone asked behind him.
He remembered a trial. More than one, but he remembered being on trial, remembered panic as the tide turned against him and relief that he had not doomed the others. But the trial was an odd, dream-like echo of other memories, of the broadcast murder game, where Monobear presided as opponent, judge, mastermind and executioner. There had been a statue of one of those students in the Muscat House.
"Can you stand?" Sonia asked him.
"Monobear was..." They'd seen Monobear for the first time on the island, and in Junko's dorm room, passing the prototype from hand to hand. A mascot, a symbol, a representation of the twins; it was perfect, they'd all agreed. Much more useful than Tanaka-san's pets, Sonia had commented.
"You," he said, trying to draw away from Sonia. "What are you scheming, she-wolf of Novoselic? Is this sorcery your doing?"
"Of course not!" A poorly chosen time for an accusation; he could barely be certain she was smiling, let alone watch for any change in her expression. "Tanaka-san, you remember the island, don't you?"
A spell. She'd cast some sort of spell on him, engineered this dream to weaken him and confuse him and make him trust her. He was at a grave disadvantage here — disoriented, weak, near-helpless and outnumbered. If this was an attack or plot, if he was imprisoned, he would do well to proceed with care, yet caution had never been in his nature, and he might already have shown his hand. "I remember," he said, finally.
"That was real too. Everything we experienced there was real."
"Impossible. Weakened I may be, but—"
"It's complicated, but please trust us. We'll do our very best to explain everything," she said, and a murmur of assent from the others echoed her. He took a moment to look around at those behind her. A tall, thin woman with wild, windblown hair; a short, baby-faced lad with an eyepatch; a young man who looked utterly ordinary save for the one cowlick of hair that shot skyward from his head; and a fellow in mechanic's overalls with short hair, all dyed an intense, unappealing pink. Their appearances were all unsettling, just slightly at odds with what he expected... from his memories of the island. From his real memories.
It was as though the people he'd known — for he recognized most of them as followers of Lady Junko — had attempted to remake themselves as the students from the island. Yet he knew they were the same people; he knew the island had been populated, dream-like, by people he'd already known, though some were virtually unrecognizable.
"Let's get you out of here, first of all," the young man with the cowlick said.
Gundam ignored the proffered hand, the attempt at support from Sonia, and put his hands on the sides of the vessel that had confined him. He pushed himself up, only to stagger when he tried to stand upright, and he was in no condition to avoid Sonia's help, or that of the thin woman on the other side. He refused to move further until the dizziness subsided. Weak, indeed. He hadn't realized the extent of it.
"Where are—" he began, then cut himself off. He'd meant to ask after the Four Dark Gods of Destruction, the four hamsters he'd kept as his constant companions throughout his school days. They'd all died of old age by the middle of his third year. He felt foolish and ashamed of showing weakness by reverting to his youth in that way. Had the others caught his blunder? He couldn't be sure. His vision swam when he looked from one face to the next. He could focus on the vessel beneath him, and when he moved his eyes, slowly, over the rest of the room, starting at the floor, he realized it was one spoke of a wheel of... sarcophagi of some sort. Only a few were open as his was. He'd been entombed, and then released— to what purpose? Small wonder he felt so lightheaded.
"We're going to take you to your room, all right?" That was Sonia.
"My chambers or my cell," he said, finally. "I may be in no condition to defy you as yet, but I assure you all, your time will come."
"Well, he sure sounds like himself," the short one said, with a sardonic touch that Gundam vowed to remember when his vengeance was at hand.
The five of them, the survivors of the simulation, spent the first days after they awakened trying to recreate themselves as they wanted to be, or felt they should be. Souda bleached the dark half of his hair, and then dyed all of it pink once more. Hinata cut his hair, with assistance from Kuzuryuu to tidy it; they both started laughing when his ahoge emerged. Owari stuffed herself at every meal, then dropped to the floor by the table to do pushups. But Sonia found that her greatest disconnect was not in the mirror but in her pocket. What tripped her up, every time, was the hamsters.
They'd come to her after Tanaka-san's execution, the largest of them (Cham-P, she thought) dragging a scrap of scarf. She'd taken them into her room and demanded of Monobear that he open Tanaka-san's cottage, and she'd spent all night moving their habitat — he would never have called it a cage, because who could cage even a defeated deity? — into her room. Hamsters were territorial and prone to fight, even those as well-trained and preternaturally intelligent as Tanaka-san's Dark Gods, and Sonia wasn't very adept in handling them, so she'd leave three in their habitats in her cottage, and take the fourth — a different one each day — in her pocket everywhere she went. The fourth hamster and the scrap of scarf.
But of course, the real hamsters had long since passed away, well before they ever entered the simulation. Tanaka-san's companions on the island had been based on his memories. Several times a day, Sonia reached into her pocket to find it empty, or to find a few sunflower seeds she'd slipped into it without thinking. The real scarf, too, was long gone, and while it crossed her mind to learn to knit or crochet to make him another, she didn't have the patience. For weeks after she awoke, Sonia was restless, constantly fidgeting when she had to sit still and always on the move whenever possible, as though by walking over every inch of the real islands, pacing the ferry boats and rummaging through the markets, she could outrun her past.
And it did give her something to tell Tanaka-san. Every day, in the evening, she'd begin making her way back from her explorations to the Future Foundation building, already composing her daily report. She'd bypass their quarters and go below ground, to the facility they'd all taken to calling "the pod room," and tell him what she'd found that day.
"Tanaka-san, it's me. Sonia. I don't know if you can hear me like this, but they say patients in comas can sometimes hear their visitors, so it's worth a try, isn't it?
"I've been exploring the real island now that I'm strong enough to move around. The island really was eerily accurate! The simulation, I mean. There are more things on most of the real islands, but every location that was in the simulation has been precisely the same in reality. The only thing the simulation was missing was dust, I think. And weather."
"Tanaka-san, it's so exciting! I saw parrots up in the trees today! I know that's absolutely normal for a tropical island, but it's my first time staying on a real tropical island. I remember that the lack of animals in the simulation bothered you, so of course I thought of you right away."
"I finally made myself go to the fourth island today. They call it the Tulgey Wood. The amusement park is real, but it's completely different from the one in the simulation — it's all done with a Lewis Carroll theme, of course. That was kind of a relief, but I still didn't spend very long there.
"I did see a dolphin jumping while I was riding the ferry back from there, though! That was exciting. And I think I saw a monkey in one of the trees while I was walking back to the hotel. The rest of us are staying in the same set of bungalows we had in the simulation — it was very strange for a little while, but I think I'm used to it now."
"Tanaka-san, good news! If you heard some sort of commotion earlier, there was a good reason for it. Hanamura-san woke up!"
Gundam had no intention of saying so to his captors or comrades, but his "room" certainly had the appearance of a guest's accommodations rather than a prisoner's. He watched suspiciously as the five of them fussed with curtains and checked a chest of drawers and otherwise hovered like a improbably large group of doting parents leaving a child at boarding school for the first time. A report sat on the nightstand, and while at least three of them had assured him, separately, that it would explain everything, holding it and reading it seemed an impossible burden. Nonetheless, he remained upright, refusing to get under the covers or lie down on the pillow Sonia fluffed for him.
"Have I not slept enough?" he demanded.
"Maybe so, but take it from me, it helps," Kuzuryuu said. "We all went through the same thing."
But none of you were Tanaka Gundam, he thought. Something stopped him from saying it aloud. Finally, they filed out, leaving him with a third reminder about the location of the bathroom, and he was alone.
Entirely alone, without animal companions of any kind, for the first time in years. But that wasn't strictly true — he'd been alone in the Future Foundation's custody, as well. It only felt true because of the immediacy of the false memories.
A spell. An illusion. A ploy by the Future Foundation, an attempt at mind control; he had heard them refer to a "simulation."
Gundam was no longer sixteen, no longer the boy who introduced himself as the world's next ruler. He knew that even when he was sixteen, he and Sonia Nevermind had scarcely spoken, yet the false memories from "the island," as the party who'd awakened him had called it, felt as real as the true memories, and more recent. When he resisted their reality, he still found himself suspecting a magical plot, machinations by his enemies. Perhaps Sonia Nevermind herself was a sorceress, tinkering with his thoughts and heart for her own ends.
Ludicrous, yet in its way, no more or less implausible than the vision or dream or spell he'd experienced. No less implausible than the idea that he might have become a very different person under other circumstances; that he might have been surrounded by comrades, even friends. That he and Sonia Nevermind might have been lovers. That these bonds might have moved him to put his own life on the line rather than passively accept death.
Those bonds were not real. Whatever the source of the dream of the island, he knew his mind was compromised and his emotions suspect. No, friendship was an illusion, love a fleeting intoxication. Nothing could change a man that way except despair, or hope. The illusion lacked even plausibility. A foolish attempt, all in all, whatever the purpose may have been; an attempt at undermining his dedication to despair, at humiliating him or confusing him, at controlling him...
But was he really so important as to merit such an attempt? He did not, and never had, lived in the realms of sorcery and demonic powers. Tanaka Gundam was not a cursed soul fated to solitude and eternal sorcerous struggle; he was just one of Lady Junko's lesser minions. Perhaps he should read that report after all, but it was true that the comfort of the bed was welcome after his enforced stasis in the sarcophagus. Too welcome for him to wish to leave it merely to bathe and groom himself. At some point he had moved to a reclining position.
Tanaka Gundam might not be a unique, cursed, demonic soul fated to solitude and to eternal sorcerous struggle, but one thing had never changed; he was not the kind of person meant for happiness, success or love. Why should he be fooled by an amateurish attempt at convincing him otherwise? Why should he fear what he might dream next, if he gave in to the heaviness in his limbs and succumbed to real sleep? Why should he worry that it was his own mind, and not that infernal coffin, that had supplied such childishly optimistic visions?
He needed more information, and he needed to refresh himself, but more than that, he needed oblivion. Needed it badly enough to risk dreams.
Whatever dreams his beleaguered and addled brain chose to create were harmless, at least, and failed to linger. By the light slanting through the window, it was late afternoon when he awakened, and only then did he realize he had no idea of the approximate time when he'd come to this room. Nor did he know how much time had passed. It could have been more than a day, for all that he knew. But it mattered little, all in all. It was daylight; he could tend to his ablutions in the facilities his five possible captors had so insistently indicated, and then read this report that was to explain everything.
He was surprised to find that they trusted him with a razor, but there was little point to ending his existence here and now. Senseless self-destruction by individuals did nothing to spread despair, after all. It took publicity and scale to transform death into a message. Perhaps they remembered as much.
A shower, and the somewhat haphazard removal of a fairly established beard — trimming it first might have been advisable, he realized midway through the process — left him feeling as if he were really alive again. The clothing he found in the chest of drawers, a black tee-shirt and pair of loose pants, strongly resembled pajamas, but at least it was not a hospital gown.
He was still somewhat uncomfortable with his hair, however. It was no longer partially shaved as it had been when he was younger, and he felt the need to remedy that, but suspected the small razor he'd been given would be no match for the task. He further suspected the urge itself; was it physical comfort that motivated him, or some desire to return to this illusory field trip?
No matter, for now. The report awaited, and it promised to be slow and dry reading.
Slow and dry it was, but its subject matter was absorbing, describing the nature and purpose of the simulated field trip he and Lady Junko's other surviving heralds of despair had experienced. Their captors had determined that the seeds of despair had been sown, for each of them, in high school, the result of isolation, loneliness, and rejection. Therefore, their captors had concluded with childish naivete and optimism, if their high school days could be replaced with memories of friendship and trust, they could be recreated as obedient little devotees of hope. The simulation was designed accordingly, to give them a relaxing, peaceful setting and an incentive to interact with and befriend one another.
They had underestimated the power and dedication of Super High School Level Despair, though, as they admitted to his great satisfaction. The second section detailed the ways the plan had been undermined, and he was nearly to the end of its introduction when a knock at the door made him jump. He set the papers aside and rose to answer it, absently noting that the room had darkened noticeably as he read. Perhaps if he had been unoccupied at the time of the knock he would have considered who might come to seek him out, or braced himself for the sight of her. But he was surprised by the sight of Sonia Nevermind, haloed by the hallway light, and her smile shifted the world's axis a hair for his treacherous, contaminated heart.
"Good evening, Tanaka-san! I hope you're feeling better after your rest?"
Tanaka-san, if you want us to put any faith in your magical powers, why don't you show us some results first? Your little pets certainly don't amount to much.
Don't worry, Junko had replied, Gundam's stopped lying about spells. Haven't you, sweetie?
At his silence, she quickly grew serious. "I see the report over there on the bedside table. You've been reading it?"
He nodded, and she continued. "Tanaka-san, I have to ask. Do you have any memories of the time we spent in the simulation?"
"I still have the false memories," he admitted, before the thought of lying occurred to him.
"They're not false!" she said. "It may have been a simulation, but you know we all thought it was real. To us, it was real. Everything we did there was determined by our own free will, so it might as well have been in reality. It wasn't a dream. Everything we felt and thought in the simulation was as real as— as our experiences at school."
"Oh? Then which of your faces is real, she-wolf of Novoselic?"
Her face darkened immediately. "Tanaka-san, if different experiences showed a different side of you, don't you think the same could be true for me?"
He looked away. He didn't believe that either of them could have turned out so differently, that she had somehow, at school, hidden away the kind and disarmingly straightforward girl who could chatter for hours about cults and serial killers and unsolved mysteries. If nothing else, the real Sonia Nevermind had never believed for a second in his magical powers or his special understanding of animals. But the false memories still held sway over his emotions, however he might resist, and he had difficulty bringing himself to say as much to her.
He'd shown weakness, and she pressed her advantage. "When I first came to the school — do you remember our first meeting? Our very first? You told me this story about a cat you were caring for, and I didn't know whether to believe you or not. I thought you were mocking me, so I was very curt with you, and—"
"Enough!"
She stopped short, but she had no intention of ceding the field. "Listen," she said, her voice bright. "I didn't come here to discuss all that with you. I wanted to show you to the kitchen facilities, and invite you to join me and Hinata-san for dinner. But if you'd rather eat in here and continue reading, I can bring you a tray." She reached for the wall, fumbling a second before her fingers found the switch he'd never noticed. "I can't believe we didn't point out the light switch to you."
"An oversight, indeed... I will eat here."
"All right. We'll show you the kitchen facilities tomorrow morning, then. I'll be back with your meal in a minute or two."
"Oh, what a cute little kitten!"
He'd almost immediately blushed, and ducked his head into his scarf, but she was leaning over the desk, reaching for the cat. Which meant reaching close to him. "Beware," he blurted out in a moment of panic.
Sonia's hand stopped, hovering near the kitten's head, and his own chest. "Eh?"
And now he had to explain himself. "The beast may look small and helpless now, but she is an avatar of Sekhmet, the lioness of the Egyptian desert, the Eye of Ra."
"What?"
"Sekhmet, the lioness whose thirst for blood could not be quenched until she was drunk on slaughter, who would only touch beer if she believed it to be the lifeblood of her prey, the Lady of Pestilence— truly, the most terrifying of creatures, to be raised in loyalty to me, Tanaka Gundam, the Ascendant Ruler of Ice!"
"I... see." He recognized the look on her face; doubtful, and perhaps a little amused. Possibly laughing at him, or possibly just wondering why he was so strange. "Can I pet her?"
"If you have the courage, mortal!" It was the only way to react to that look, he'd decided before he entered Hope's Peak. No backpedaling, no ‘just kidding,' no doubts or hesitations. Not anymore.
And so Sonia, not really looking at him anymore, had rubbed the kitten's ears for a few seconds, and then she'd given him a nervous smile and retreated to her desk. It was the last they'd speak for many months. If she ever gave him another thought as anything save the strange boy with the cute kitten, there was no sign of it. And, he hoped, there was no sign of the way he'd berated himself for stupidity back in his dorm room after classes, or the way he'd wonder, each time he saw her, how things might have gone differently had he said something else.