Chapter Text
It went wrong, was the first thing she thought once she saw them. That was probably the saddest thing ever.
Many of them were asleep, or pretending to be asleep, or wishing to be asleep, and some were in a state of constant agitation, of fretting and wandering, of biting nails and drumming fingers. Few of them paid attention, at least for the first few days. Then, Nanami decided to make herself heard.
In the end, it was easier to talk to them than she’d thought.
It could’ve been said that she was helping herself too, this way. In fact, she really was, that being one of the reasons she was there in the first place. It was harder now, to only realise that she’d forgotten things because she heard them spoken to her. It was scary, how ignorant she’d been of her own state of mind.
They were talking to her and she was growing, more and more, back towards what she once was. What she thought she’d been. She also learnt so many new things. Nanami would’ve never guessed how many types of rabbits there were if not for listening to Tanaka’s long, anxious explanations as he struggled to eat in between words. She wouldn’t have known all about coaches if not for Nidai and Owari’s bedtime stories (they always talked to her late in the night, maybe because they had the most problems sleeping). She would’ve been ignorant of the intimacies requested by cross-country affairs were it not for Sonia’s speeches as she embroidered canvas late in the morning. She had known a lot about all of them before meeting them, and she could still find so much to learn.
It was, in consequence, an indulgence on her part to spend almost all of her afternoons with Hinata. She could’ve easily detached herself and attended to her other duties too, but she somehow always chose not to. Maybe it was because the first, biggest part of her life she’d spent impersonating a human being that she was so set upon these odd ways now.
Hinata was calmer now; somewhat kinder. Just as Nanami would think this (a flashback of connections), he would blow up in a torrent of emotions that had never crossed his face before, a whirlwind of rage and grief and pain which, as much as she tried to be human about it, fascinated her, and added still more to her being. All in all, Hinata was still himself, only with two sides of him split and trying aggressively to blend together again. He screamed once to be gentle for a day. He had to be cruel to be kind.
“I sometimes think that this was a bad idea,” Hinata tells her one late afternoon, legs crossed on the bed and his chin pressed on his right hand.
Nanami imagines herself on the floor in front of him, back leaned against the cold white wall. “...Why?”
He’s drumming a rhythm on his thigh and, as she observes it involuntarily, Nanami finds it almost familiar. “I don’t know...” But he does, and she knows. “It’s just this whole facility, it’s so austere –” That’s not one of his words. “—it makes it kind of hard to get over it? Does it make sense?” he lifts his chin a little, looking at her for confirmation.
Nanami nods; it does, but not only because of what he’d said. “It keeps us locked in secluded rooms with only our thoughts to fester in,” Komaeda had told her two nights before; he had been in a particularly talkative mood. “It’s not for much longer, I’m told...” Nanami tells Hinata this time, and his eyes seem restless as he looks almost through her.
“Yeah, I hope not...” he tries for a laugh, averting his gaze now. His hand is still drumming the same tune, fast and erratic.
When she’s allowed to connect to his screen, she finds Komaeda pacing across the room with a book. He has personally asked to be given a few volumes along these past weeks of semi-solitary confinement, probably the only one of them who bothered to think of requesting anything. It occurs to Nanami that he must have done so because of his reluctance to come into contact with the others. It’s not really her thought, and she can’t place it.
Komaeda glances at her with eyes lit up by unanticipated bliss, as if he’s just seen a childhood friend again. She knows it’s only a fleeting sentiment, but she can’t help but feel a little happy too. That’s good, she’s feared for her emotions while she was being reactivated.
“You’re early today,” he says, gratefully. “Look, I found something earlier,” he turns from her to his book and changes his tone so abruptly she feels her circuits getting ahead of her own perception. “Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.” If possible, she would have been almost distracted. “It means fortunate who was able to know the causes of things,” Komaeda goes back to his own delusion of a carefree tone and smiles at her.
“That’s unusual...” she imagines leaning her head to the side.
For him, an instant reaction. “Oh? Am I wrong?”
She has learnt that the more emotions he displays, the more he hides himself. That was partly the doctors, partly herself, partly Hinata’s look of concern whenever this happened around him. “I meant the Latin.”
Surely, he checks himself. “Ah, that. No, that’s not all of it. Can I read it to you?” It would be a first time, and she’s always in need of more learning.
Besides, through some means his voice has started resonating in unknown lovely tones in her mind. He reads to her in English, and that still doesn’t change, and she revels in the feel of rhythm his intonation offers her. It occurs to Nanami she has yet to acquire some poetic library; one comes so hard by those now that the world is in ruins.
“Byron,” Komaeda explains as he finishes with another easy smile, which she returns. “Just a little something to relieve this grotesquely austere atmosphere.”
She knew she had heard that word before. It keeps the smile on her face, for a moment. “Do you also think this is a bad idea?” she asks out of dim curiosity.
Komaeda looks at her with wide eyes, then sighs noncommittally and drops on his bed. “I don’t think... I’m in the right state of mind to give my opinion on that.”
“Hinata seemed to think so, though,” Nanami pursues, if only because she doesn’t like feeling so far away from the people she’s speaking with.
With a light chuckle, he gives her an enigmatic grin. “Hinata is... quite ahead of me in a lot of aspects.”