Archive of Our Own ^beta

(They meet at a train station. One arriving, one leaving. A change in stops.)

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0.

There's something familiar about her. Familiarity threaded in the slope of her shoulders, in the idle tap tap of her finger against the board as she traces her route on the map. She's almost dwarfed by the sports bag resting by her ankles, trinkets hanging from its zippers. A hockey stick pokes out over the top; a tennis racket is slung over her shoulder. 

He crosses his arms and tries to doze. 

Souji doesn't know how long he's been asleep. He awakens to the bench juddering beneath him as the girl flops into the seat to his right. The bench-frame creaks from the weight of her bag. He turns his head slightly and shifts his foot, in case she decides to put her bag down.

She's clad in reds and oranges -- autumn colours. Demeter, bringing the harvest. Music hums quietly from the earphones looped around her neck. He feels warm sitting next to her. Must be the scarf. 

He checks his phone. His train should be coming any minute now.

"Long day?" she asks. He nods, then points at her bag and sports equipment with his chin. "Heading for the athletics convention?"

"Oh! Haha, no. Not really." She doesn't elaborate. He doesn't ask.

"Where're you headed off to?"

"Inaba."

She smiles. "Transfer student, huh."

He glances sharply at her. He doesn't think there's anything that gives him away. Maybe. "Yet again, yeah."

"And where did you transfer from?"

A strange look passes over her face, when he tells her. Tatsumi Port Island. 

"You been there?" he asks. He feels rude; like he should be carrying his share of the conversation, too.

She smiles again, a faraway look in her eyes. "You could say that," she replies. There's an edge of sadness to her voice, now. "I really miss it, sometimes. All the time."

A train roars past. And another. His pulls up eventually and he gets up, shouldering his bag.

He turns around, opens his mouth. "Thanks for the ch--" 

There's nobody else on the platform with him.

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1.

On the train, he falls into a dreamless, fitful sleep. Or so he thinks, at first.

First, he sees a car, its engine purring as it slides through the fog. Blue light, pressing against his eyelids.

Inexplicably, the girl from the train station is there. She wears a Gekkoukan school uniform; he doesn't remember seeing her at school before. 

His eyes fall to something, hanging loosely at her hip. A gun holster.

"Oh! Hello," she says, switching her gun to the hand further away from him. Its grip glows pale blue against her palm.

"Why're you here?" is the first thing he blurts out.

"Because we're both on journeys," she says, after a moment's pause. "And we're both looking for something we can't quite find."

He says, "I'm not looking for anything." She gives him a strange look.

"You will be," she says, confident. "We all are."

He tries another tack. "Is this a dream?"

"Maybe!" the girl says, and twirls the gun around her forefinger. 

"Maybe?"

She takes careful aim with her gun, its muzzle pointing at him. Souji wonders if he should be afraid. 

Her gaze shifts to something over his shoulder. He turns, and follows her line of sight. Blue butterflies flit lazily past the car windows. When he turns back to her, she's no longer smiling.

"Once upon a time, Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly. He did not know he was Zhou, for all he was in that time, in that moment, was a butterfly. Suddenly, he awoke, and was palpably Zhou. He did not know whether he was Zhou, who dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly, dreaming that he was Zhou."

Her finger rests over the trigger. She closes her eyes and places her other hand over her heart, and pulls.

There's a sound like breaking glass -- explosive, in the small space. Cracks spiderweb the windows, the windshields, blue light filtering in through the faults in the glass. The air is ripe with the metallic smell of gunpowder and ozone. 

She has the same sad, serious look on her face as their surroundings crumble to glittering shards and diamond dust. 

He's falling through empty space. He can see her figure through the shards, image distorted by the overlap of broken glass. Her voice whispers through the whistle of air against jagged edges, so faint he can barely hear her. He tries to reach out towards her, towards her hands. His fingers close around glass and he crushes ghostly blue shards against his palm. Something stirs at the back of his mind; something that says it is him, and they are one and the same.

Their voices mingle in his brain. "The distinction between waking and dreaming is a false dichotomy. If you distinguish them, how can you tell if you're awake, or if you're dreaming?"

He awakens to the train's wheels screeching against metal as he arrives at Yasoinaba station.

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2.

He thinks it's weird, to dream about a stranger. Weirder still, when she responds to him.

"Look, I'm not doing this on purpose."

"I know," she says. One of her headphones is clipped to her ears. She taps her foot to a beat only she can hear as Souji tries to pry his hands off the sword he's holding. 

"Where are we?"

"I wouldn't know. It's your dream, isn't it?"

Souji frowns. "I don't normally dream about people I don't know. Or about weird, cryptic things." He doesn't mention the dreams about the tower, and of climbing endless, spiraling steps towards a bloated yellow moon slung low in a green sky.

"They say dreams are your repressed subconscious. Your innermost hopes and desires, taken form and flight." 

"I don't really think I want to be lost in a foggy maze with my hands glued to a sword."

"No, of course not," she agrees. "You've got better form than some of the people I know, though."

"It's not rocket science," Souji pants as he picks up speed whilst trying to keep the sword from slicing his feet off. His companion keeps pace easily, footsteps silent in the mist.

She hums in disagreement. "A guy I know ... knew, well, he held it like a baseball bat."

Souji's too distracted to ask about the past tense. 

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3.

She's there when he goes shopping at Daidara's. He's not sure if he's awake or dreaming, until Yosuke taps him on the shoulder to get him moving.

"Dude, you're blocking the door?"

"Uh, yeah," Souji says, and sidles aside.

The others cluster towards the new goods section, admiring equipment he can't afford. High school economics did not prepare him for budgeting for equipment for four people and various other items to heal their wounds. High school economics did not prepare him for negotiating the prices of pieces of shadow-tongue, for god's sake. There's no law of supply or demand if Daidara's the only one selling, and he's the only one buying. While they're preoccupied, he makes his way to the back of the shop, towards the antiques section.

The girl watches him approach. She has startling eyes; mahogany-red -- or cherry-brown, he isn't sure. 

"How was the athletics convention?"

She laughs, and picks up a spear. "Not quite to my taste. I got tired of hitting balls." 

Souji snorts, a little. She and Kou would get along like a house on fire. Or maybe not. 

She twirls the weapon experimentally; he watches her shoulderblades shift beneath her blazer. She moves the polearm as though it's an extension of her body, as though everything is just muscle memory and she no longer has to think about it. He only just notices the thin scars on her hands and knuckles, some faint and white, some faded brown. 

He wonders if he should ask. She replaces the spear and picks up a naginata, running her fingers along the flat of the blade.

"I had something like this, once," she says quietly. "It was beautiful."

He doesn't know what to say. 

She's unperturbed by his silence; once she sets the naginata back down, her hands rest on the handle of a sword. A western sword, not quite like the ones he uses. "I never quite had the talent for swordplay my ... my ... brother did. Must be a man thing." She laughs, more to herself than anything; Souji feels his face heat up, ever so slightly. 

"Brother?"

"Of a sort. Not quite of the same blood, but of the same origin. He was the harbour, and I, the sea. One was the port that stood against the ebb and sway of the other's tide."

"... I see," Souji says. He doesn't. "Where's he now?"

The girl looks up at him. She's more than half a foot shorter than him -- but she's frightening, somehow, and he immediately regrets asking the question. 

"That's what I'm on a journey for."

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4.

He realises why she's familiar, now. 

It's like a flicker in a candle flame; the endless shift of masks and facades. And, against him, she burns fierce and hot and brilliant, power older and greater than his. Hers is experience shaped and honed and tamed, sharpened into a weapon; he can't feel or sense the individual shapes of her personae but has a vague inkling of them, lingering at the edges of the sea of her soul. Indistinct shapes and foreign names he doesn't recognise -- and probably won't, for a long time to come.

"You're a Wild Card," he says.

She turns to look at him, sidelong; he can't quite make out her features when she's silhouetted against the glare of the sun like this -- just like her personae, he thinks. Just like the shadowy figures of her personae, silhouetted against the strength of her will. 

The corners of her eyes crinkle in a smile. "Bingo!" she singsongs, shaping her forefinger and thumb into the shape of her gun and pointing them at him.

"Do Igor and Margaret know? Maybe you should see them. Wait. You were in the Velvet Room that ti--" He stops. He doesn't think he should mention that first dream. If it even was a dream. He isn't even sure, not any more.

The mask cracks and splinters along fissures and faultlines. When he blinks it's back in place, but her smile looks strange and forced. "I shouldn't be there. Or here, for that matter."

"... but here you are."

"Here I am," she agrees.

He turns his head back to the Samegawa and tugs on his fishing line. The wind picks up, ruffling her hair, the ends of her scarf, the edge of her skirt. 

"But screw the rules," she says, a little louder, until she's shouting into the wind. "Screw the rules, I'm already here!"

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5.

Neither Margaret nor Igor are surprised at her presence in the Velvet Room.

And, unlike the people of the outside world, they notice her. Thin lines furrow the space between Margaret's brows and tug at the corners of her eyes. 

"You must be Margaret. Theo told me heaps about you."

Souji wonders how they know one another. Who this Theo person is.

Margaret's hands fold and unfold atop the Compendium. Igor shuffles and reshuffles his tarot deck, making no comment on the strangeness before him.

"How's Theo?" the girl asks. Her voice trembles slightly. "Elizabeth?"

"Still searching for an alternate means," Margaret says. For the first time, she sounds angry, almost. "Neither you, nor Elizabeth's charge, made this easy for any of us."

"I know," the girl says. She props her chin in her hand, and gazes out of the window. "It was the only way. The only right choice. Surely you'd understand."

"Humanity wishes for whatever it wishes for," Margaret says. They both play the enigmatic-and-evasive game well; Souji's lost track of what they're talking about. "And what of you? Why are you here?"

"A temporary break from babysitting." Her tone is light, but, reflected against the window, her expression shifts. 

"You do not belong here -- not while you have that duty to fulfill," Margaret says quietly. Matter-of-fact. She doesn't sound angry any more; just tired.

The girl laughs and she sounds bitter, almost. "Yeah, I know."

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6.

"Your friends are a lively bunch," she says as they walk through the Shopping District. 

Souji laughs. "That's one way to put it, yeah."

"Reminds me a bit of the people I used to hang around with," she says, half to herself, as she tucks errant strands of hair behind an ear. "We were a mismatched bunch and didn't get along most of the time ... but I guess we rallied together where it was important."

"What were they like?"

"Hm?"

"Your friends."

"Oh." She laces her fingers in front of her and stretches, then lets her hands fall limply back to her sides. "Everyone had ... well, their issues. But their hearts were in the right places. I miss them, you know? Junpei's dumb jokes and Yukari playing straight man ... Fuuka's, um, unique cooking style. Going for walks with Aigis and Koro-chan. Watching the senpai bicker about the weirdest things. Going to eat fast-food after hitting some mean rallies against Rio. That time Saori and I broke into the PA room. Everyone."

"Can't you go back?"

She doesn't reply for a long time as she preoccupies herself with pinning and re-pinning her hair, the pins forming into neat Roman numerals. Twenty-two. The white pins are stark against her auburn hair. 

"Not really. Even if I do, it won't be the same, not for a long time."

"... and your brother?"

She laughs a little. "I'm not really sure, actually. We always trod different paths, and never at the same time. It didn't work like that, because we were one and the same, yet different. We were always like two ships, passing in the night. Never to meet, head-on, except for seeing one another from the periphery."

"Sounds lonely." And cryptic, he wants to add, but doesn't. He wonders if it's a euphemism for twins separated at birth. Foster care? 

She stops and waves him on, shielding her eyes against the sun. He tries waiting for her, but she instead turns, and walks away in the opposite direction. She reaches the edge of the Shopping District and turns, and mouths something. 

It was, she'd said. Oh, it was.

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7.

"So why'd you want to look for him, if you've never really met properly?"

She arranges the hem of her skirt around her knees as she settles down on the shrine steps. The fox eyes her warily; she beckons it with a hand held out, palm-down. It edges closer and she strokes the back of its ears.

"Curiosity," she says. "To see if the grass really is greener."

"Well, fair enough."

Souji sits down next to her, the fox wedged between them. The tip of its tail brushes his hand. He remembers something about animals -- about how they can see things people can't. He wonders if that's the case now. He bends his head to the fox's ear and whispers, "what do you see?" and it flicks its eyes towards him, then turns its head away.

Cicadas drone and whine in the trees. The fox presses against him, leaning its weight against his shoulder. Wind whispers through leaves and ema alike, the stillness momentarily lifted by the clack-clack of wood against wood. 

"... and a little bit of selfishness, too," the girl says softly, after a very long time. "I got tired of sitting around and watching and waiting for my turn again. I just wanted to go back, even though ... even though I signed and fulfilled a contract. That I chose my fate, of my own free will."

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8.

Later, he recognises other things about her -- things he's gone through himself.

She carries keepsakes around with her everywhere, keepsakes he recognises as proof of bonds forged between Wild Cards and the people around them. A pink leather strap, dangling from her phone. A ring of mismatched keys with a grinning pig key-holder. A pair of mismatched rings on her fingers. A slightly-worn coin purse. A whiskey reserve tag and a creased letter, folded several times and placed carefully in a luggage tag tied to her bag. A rabbit doll, swinging from another zipper, its glass-button eyes reflecting Souji's face back to himself.

And those are just the ones he can see.

He wonders what her story is. The keepsakes are signs of a completed journey, and yet she's still here.

She catches his eye as he's trying to make out the stitching on the foot of the rabbit. 

"It's because I have unfinished business to attend to," she says, very seriously. Something about her phrasing sends a shiver down his spine. He thinks of his friends, unable to see her even when he points her out to them. Of the denizens of the Velvet Room who are able to perceive her. The Velvet Room, a place caught between dream and reality, immersed in the sea of the unconscious. 

"Sorry," he says guiltily. Then, "I just realised I never caught your name."

"I never gave it," she says cheerfully. "Don't feel bad," she adds.

"Ah," he says. He doesn't bother giving his. If she wanted to know, she'd have found out long ago.

He wonders if, perhaps, she's another facet of Izanami. An observer, sent to study the choices he makes and the consequences of his actions, long after the fog has gone. It's a convincing argument -- the crimson eyes, the invisibility of her presence.

Izanami was a goddess of death and the dead; he wonders if, perhaps, this girl will fade to fog once her business is done. Like Kusumi-no-Okami intended to. Like Izanami did, at the very end.

And Izanami -- she had a brother, didn't she? Izanagi, with whom she created the land. Then, was this brother the girl spoke of an aspect of Izanagi she searched for? Izanami, journeying back through the land of the living, in an inversion of the myth.

She sticks her face in front of him, interrupting his train of thought. "Penny for your thoughts?"

"It's nothing," he says. He has no idea where to begin.

.

9.

"Well," she says, leaning back against his couch. "Looks like your business here is finally done. This is it; the cumulation of your Fool's Journey."

"Yeah," he says, an continues packing his bags. "What about you? Are you going to keep looking for your ... ?"

"Nah." She closes her eyes and allows herself to fall sideways. Her bangs fall over her eyes. "You can't look for something that was never there. That was no longer here, long before this time."

"Pardon?"

"Selfishness," she says and sits up. Her hands dart to her face, roughly scrubbing at her eyes. "I just wanted to see the world again. See how it changed, after us. Whether what we did had really made a difference."

"Did you find your answer?"

She takes a deep, shuddering breath. "Yeah. Yeah, I did. And you know what? I don't regret it. Not a little. If I could do it again, I'd do it, over and over. The same choice, every single time. Until Elizabeth or Theo figure something out, anyway."

"So ... where's he now, then?"

She looks up at him and smiles sadly. Her eyes are wet, but she doesn't cry.

"Taking my place while I indulge myself here. And then it's back to business, for the both of us."

He remembers something she told him, at the start of the year. "You said dreams are the repressed subconscious. Innermost hopes and desires, taken form and flight. Was this ... is this all a dream?"

"Maybe," she says.

They're silent for several minutes.

"It's just a false dichotomy," he says. "We met. Our paths crossed."

"The sea, ebbing into the shallows. And then it leaves, the current returning to deep water."

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10.

The last time he sees her is on the train platform.

He's visiting Inaba for the summer when he sees her standing on the opposite platform, gigantic sports bag on one shoulder and tennis racket on the other, hockey stick poking from the bag. The stuffed rabbit's eyes regard him from across the train tracks.

He says, "long time no see".

"I thought it was rude to leave without saying goodbye last time," she laughs. The wind snatches at her voice, at the hem of her skirt. "So I guess this is it."

"You know, I'd like to meet him as well. Your brother. Bring him around sometime, won't you?"

"Hahaha! Maybe." She holds out a hand and splays three fingers. Me. You. Him. "After all, we are all connected by the sea of the soul."

"The collective unconsciousness."

She folds down a finger, and points to herself with her other hand "The endless sea. Never truly known. A place where memory collects." Another finger goes down. She lifts her hand to point at him. "The currents. Never remaining in place. Never returning to the same place for long." One finger remains. She points it up, towards the ceiling, towards the sky. "The harbour that shelters. Unchanging. Unmoving." 

"Will I see you again?"

She shrugs, a faint smile curling around her lips. "I dunno! It'll depend on what happens. Whether humanity will stop wishing for things it shouldn't wish for. Maybe then I'll have some time to myself."

Souji swallows when he says, "I'm a part of humanity."

"Yeah! You totally are."

Before he can say anything else, the roar of an approaching train rumbles through the air. She's saying something else, but he can't hear her. 

The train rushes past and he can't see her; he tries to crane his neck to peer between the carriages, to no avail.

By the time the train passes, the opposite platform is empty.

.

(He never sees her again -- a ghost of a girl with trinkets that would mean nothing to any other person; keepsakes that tethered her, perhaps, while she searched for answers.)

.

(They parted at a train station. One arriving, one leaving. A connection to be made, with no return ticket.)

.

∞

2009, Tatsumi Port Island.

He doesn't know if he'll be in Tatsumi Port Island long enough to graduate high school. His classmates are probably being too ambitious, talking about graduation like it's a done deal. He'll graduate from Gekkoukan Middle to Gekkoukan High, at the very least. It's a start. The rest will depend on whether his parents will cart him elsewhere or not.

"Are you going to stand there forever?" one of his friends yells. "Yeah, yeah," Souji says and shoulders his bag, hurrying to catch up.

As he runs past the Gekkoukan High gate, he almost collides with somebody.

"Sorry," he mumbles and looks up to see who he almost ran into.

"Oh, so you're that kid."

"What?" He frowns. The other boy looks like he can't be older than seventeen.

"She wanted me to pass on a message."

"Who did? Who're you?"

There's something familiar about the other boy. Familiarity threaded in the loose slouch of his shoulders, in the idle tap tap of his finger against his mp3 player as he lowers the volume slightly. 

Souji meets his eyes; grey gazing into grey. One of his eyes is obscured by the fall of his hair. His face is expressionless; unsmiling. That's where the familiarity ends. Souji vaguely remembers someone else with a mischievous grin and fire in her eyes, someone with white pins in auburn hair.

"She said, 'see ya around, Souji-kun'."