Chapter Text
“You’re an invaluable subject,” Wakaba told him, before carefully adding, “and collaborator.”
That wasn’t good enough for him. It must have shown on his face because she held up a hand.
“You’ll get your day in the sun, Takuto. I promise.”
He leaned back, looked away. Her office at the university reflected the woman who commanded it; that is, utterly chaotic. Doubtless she could lay her hand on anything she needed to at a moment’s notice, but his mind wasn’t as quick as hers. All he saw was mess.
She was smiling when she looked at him. He tried to smile back.
“Now,” she said, “let’s discuss your newest revisions.”
He was going too far. He had to turn back. Peach-tinged water lapped at his feet. His every step dissolved the world he stood on, if only a little. Breathing was - it was strange there; like his lungs had to learn the trick all over again, like the air was an alien density he wasn't acclimatised to.
“Dr. Isshiki?” He fiddled with his earpiece.
Her reply was filled with static.
Yes, I’m here. What -- see, Tak--?
He didn’t want to be there. He wanted to be back at his desk, in his room, pouring over his sources and drinking his third cup of coffee for the night.
“I see…”
No. The correction thundered roughshod over his thoughts. He wanted to be there. He never wanted to leave. It was what they had been working for.
If he turned left, his face felt warm. Fake light, hot - as if someone was holding up a magnifying glass amplifying the sun right up to this cheek. His eyes fluttered open as wide as they could go.
“It looks like a hotel? One of those really fancy ones, like in Vegas.”
No response.
“Should I, uh, walk to it?”
No. More static peppered her encouraging words. Come -- for now. You-- great.
His chest shrank and expanded as he breathed that world away. His consciousness rushed back to the real world, where colours made sense and people had faces.
Takuto Maruki opened his eyes, and immediately found himself squinting to adjust. Wakaba held two fingers to his pulse point and stared at her watch.
“State your name for me.”
He did.
“Some pigs are predators. No predator is a pet. Conclusion: some pigs are not pets. True or false?”
“I’m fine,” he said gently.
“If you’re fine, then answer the question. Some pigs—”
“True.”
She sat back in her chair. There was no desk between them; not now, not in these trials. This was entirely unknown territory in the field of metaphysical research (“I think we should call it cognitive psience,” she said, and all he heard was we) and Wakaba followed her own rigorous template of ethical considerations to the last letter. How could she not? There was no precedence for this, aside from Wakaba's own leadership. She was always particularly fussing with him after he came back.
Breathing, check. Memory, self-awareness, check. Higher level brain function, check.
He asked, “How long was I in there?”
Wakaba glanced down at her watch again. “Eighteen minutes, thirty-one seconds.”
He rubbed his face.
“Honestly, felt… longer. It’s a lot.”
Her eyes never left his face. “Tell me everything,” she said.
He didn’t tell her everything. Maybe, if he had, things would have played out differently.
He was barely out of the building before his phone was out of his pocket and his thumb moved to dial a familiar number.
She picked up on the second ring. “Takuto?”
“Hey.” His voice warmed. “How are you?”
“Good. Busy.” Rumi sounded a bit out of breath.
“Is this a bad time?” he asked.
“No, no. Uh... here. Talk to Kasumi.”
There was the rustle of the phone switching hands, the faintly ambient noises of a household - air conditioning, soft footsteps - and then Kasumi’s equally soft voice filling his ear.
“Maruki-san! Hello.” He barely had a chance to get his greeting out before she continued. “Sorry, Rumi is a bit nervous about her thesis defense tomorrow.”
There was a light thump.
“Aaaaand that was a pillow she threw at me.”
Maruki couldn’t keep the amusement out of his voice. “Does she need help? I can come over tonight and cook you girls dinner.”
That got her attention. “Dinner?” And then: “Hey, Rumi. Can Maruki-san come over tonight?”
Another thump.
Kasumi returned to the phone. “She’s done her presentation. She’s just having trouble choosing an outfit. I don’t think tonight’s a good night for— hey!”
“Sorry, Takuto.” Rumi’s voice took over and he couldn't help but smile wider. “Tonight’s not great. Mom and Dad are coming home and… Um, are we still on for tomorrow?”
“Of course! Tomorrow, you dazzle the panel and then I will take you out for evening crepes.”
She was silent for so long he thought she might have hung up. And then Rumi said, “I love you.”
He regretted not saying it back. He regretted a great deal, in the end.
He accompanied her to the morgue without needing to be asked. Rumi wore a charcoal coat, he remembered, and her nostrils were red; and her eyes were waterless. He kept one hand on her back, and answered the questions she couldn’t.
When the cloth shrouds were pulled down, one at a time, revealing three cold bodies, he felt her sag. A hand on her back, felt her breath; it was broken, and staggering against between her shoulders.
“Miss.” The morgue attendant was soft-voiced and patient. “We need you to positively identify them, if you can. For the records.”
He couldn’t say how long it took Rumi to gather herself. It might have been minutes; hours, possibly.
“That’s - that’s them. Do you need me to say their names?”
The coroner nodded.
“Yoshizawa… Shinichi, Chiasa, and Kasumi.”
In the weeks that followed, Rumi was inconsolable. They both took leave from their respective labs, citing bereavement and family responsibility. Maruki exercised every bit of patience given to him; he abandoned his own apartment to sleep on the couch in Rumi’s family home, and did his best to guide her through funeral preparations. He cooked her meals. At most, she ate a few bites. She walked through those days like a ghost, barely cognisant of anything or anyone around her.
And then, about a month after the wake and laying their ashes to rest, Rumi stopped getting out of bed altogether.
“Some maggots are flies. No fly is welcome. Conclusion: no maggots are welcome.”
With a blood pressure band around his upper arm, Maruki answered. “False.”
Wakaba said nothing. She wasn’t even looking at him.
He cleared his throat, spoke louder. “False.”
Her gaze was fixed out the window. Her desk was… sparse, he noticed; absent the previous lived-in chaos of a mind that worked without limits. If it could be called neat, it was the sort of sterile sort of cleaned up that would also describe a crime scene after the blood and viscera had been scrubbed away.
Maruki tried for a third time. “False.” A pause. “Doctor?”
She looked back at him. Behind the thick rim of her glasses, he could see puffiness in and around her eyes. Emotion, perhaps, or exhaustion.
Wakaba told him, “You’re fired.”
“‘In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again,’” he read aloud; his eyes were active behind his glasses - from the page, to her, back to the page. “‘The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well. Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going to happen next.’”
Rumi didn’t appear to be listening. But when he stopped to watch, she blinked up at him - aware, mercifully, when he spoke and when he was silent.
He tried to mask his despair with a smile. “Sorry. I’m not really good at this, am I?”
“No, it’s… nice.” Rumi was curled up in a plush chair across from him, her feet bare and tucked under her legs. He wanted to believe she was doing her best. She continued, “I’m listening. I promise.”
Physically, she looked worse than ever. Sunlight therapy, peace and quiet, and the opportunity to withdraw from society following her severe depression… It should have been working. But her eyes were sunken in, her skin was sallow, and her hair was greasy and too long about the eyes. He knew she wasn’t eating her meals, either. She had lost an uncomfortable amount of weight, each joint now razor-thin angle.
He had thought her voluntarily checking herself into the mental health facility was a sign of growth; of wanting to grieve and get past this.
Now, Takuto Maruki was sure he had been wrong.
The truth, he reflected bitterly, was proving to be far simpler: she had gone there to die.
In a deceptively pleasant tone, dressing up his anguish in soothing words, he kept reading. “‘First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything…’”
Margaret had taken over her training now, and Lavenza was quite bored.
Not that she would ever admit it out loud. She enjoyed it when her siblings paid attention to her and she loved to learn. But compared to Elizabeth’s zest for life’s quirks and Theodore’s desperation to please, Margaret was prim and dry, and dreadfully uninteresting to listen to.
Naturally, everytime Lavenza’s attention drifted, Margaret was there to crack the whip. In her infuriatingly even tone, she said, “If you are unwilling to take this seriously, I don’t need to bother.”
Lavenza resisted the urge to squirm down in her seat. “I apologise, Margaret.”
“Repeat what I just said to you,” said Margaret.
Lavenza’s girlish tone was very far from Margaret’s middling mezzo-soprano, but she could imitate the inflection quite well, and she couldn’t quite keep herself from doing what she knew as a bad idea. “‘If you are unwilling to take this seriously, I don’t need to bother.’”
A faint sigh broke the brief, dangerous pause. “Before that.”
“Oh.” Lavenza played innocent with the best of them. “You were explaining the best methods for building a rapport with your customer, and outlined the various ways in which I may accomplish that task. But...”
“But what?” asked Margaret.
“Is it really so transactional as you describe?”
“Well—” Margaret looked away and didn’t finish her sentence. “Hm.”
“Sister?” Lavenza could make out the faintest lines of puzzlement on Margaret’s brow.
“I’m sorry. We will need to pick this up another time. There is something I must go and take care of,” said Margaret.
Those were the last words they shared for a long time. Lavenza was docile and quiescent, as she had been taught--in stark contrast to the hidden faults of her manner, a childish temper that flared occasionally—only nodding and wishing Margaret a safe farewell. Someone else would be by soon, she presumed, to continue her training so she would be prepared when it was her turn to guide a guest. I hope it’s Theodore, she thought, for she both deeply enjoyed teasing him and she appreciated that he never talked down to her even though he was quite a bit taller.
In that room - not of velvet or shadows, but something between - she clicked her heels together and waited.
It was easy, when you didn’t need rest or food; when time was nothing but the negative space they existed around, not beholden to.
And so Lavenza waited, and waited, and waited—
Until she was so very lucky, the Master himself came and got her. His skin hung off his bones and his voice was roughened like gravel but Lavenza was too delighted by his personal attention to care. He had a new device to show her, he said; and she followed him dutifully.
“ - fired? You? From Isshiki’s lab?”
Shibusawa set down his drink in disbelief. Both of them were deep in her cups, half-propped up by the solid table beneath their arms, words breathy if not slurred.
“Yeah.” Maruki rolled his shoulders. “I think - I think she figured out I wasn’t telling her everything.”
He would regret this level of inebriated honesty later. Their research was deeply confidential, after all; the NDA he had signed upon his induction and the one he had signed after his exit interview had been robust: with their pages upon pages of intimidating legalese; with the sound thwap they made when dropped onto a flat surface. Cognitive psience was very important to its backers, and there were numerous interested parties—both in the private sector and among the Diet—that were gravely concerned with security breaches.
Yet, here he was, up to his elbows in sake, speaking animatedly about all that in spite of himself. He was Jobless, bereft of his funding, unable to make another month of rent.
The same advisor who had called him invaluable just a couple of months ago…
She looked right through him now. She looked through everyone like they weren’t there.
So, Maruki thought, what does it matter? Fuck corporate confidentiality.
“There was someone else in there,” he continued. “It was like - you know, it was like when you can feel someone breathing on your neck. Or, uh, when you hold your finger very close to your nose—”
Maruki demonstrated this by holding his finger just above the tip of Shibusawa’s nose.
“Right. Okay.” Shibusawa poured a glass of water and pushed it across the table. “Drink this, buddy.”
“Not only that, but - I could hear a voice. It talked under her, created static.” He stared down the barrel of his glass. “It tells me— no, it told me I would change the world. You want to know what it tells me now?”
A muscle twitched in Shibusawa’s cheek. “What does it tell you now?”
Maruki’s smile was grim about the jaw, and far too sober for how much he had been drinking. “Nothing at all.”
Walls rose up around him; the world was distorting and reshaping itself into consciousness laid flat. Red-tinged water splashed with every step he took. Wakaba’s impish voice wasn’t a soothing beacon in his ear anymore. Maruki was truly alone.
She had promised him his day in the sun, once.
Lifting his hand to shield his eyes from the unrelenting brightness in the distance, he supposed this was a good start.
As he walked, he spoke jovially to himself.
“Some doctors are fools,” he said, loud as he wanted. “All fools are rich. Conclusion: some doctors are rich.”
Sand was in his shoes now, a hot and bitter wind rising up around him.
“True or false, Takuto?”
He smiled. For once, it - this place - felt more real than reality.
“True.”
Correct.
The voice slammed across his skull, nearly driving him to a knee. It wasn’t his own, or so he thought. It was too forceful, too certain. He was just--
Spare me your assumptions. I have been grafted to your pitiful side from the day you set foot into his realm. You galavant in a landscape you cannot possibly understand and call it research. Your writing is truly nauseating.
He gritted his teeth.
You use ‘I believe’ as your declarative sentence. You undercut the crux of your own argument through passive declaration. Do you believe something, or do you know it? Are you a doctor of psychology or are you a weak little boy playing king of the castle in a hidden world?
“I—”
Some doctors are dead. All dead are lost. Conclusion:, all doctors are lost. True or false?
Maruki dragged himself up to a standing position. The voice came crashing down around his forehead, a splitting pain that began between the eyes and coursed through to the back of his neck. Between blinks, he could see flashes of yellow. It was the sign of a concussion, he knew, and he smiled grimly despite himself. The colour of spinal fluid; or sand, or the distant sun.
“False,” he said. “Who are you?”
Correct.
“You’re Correct. Well, nice to meet you, Mr. Correct.”
He thought cheekiness was probably a bad idea; he also couldn’t help himself.
The voice surprised him. A deep, calm chuckle burst across the back of Maruki’s skull.
Some Yoshizawas are alive. All Yoshizawas are dead. Conclusion: Rumi Yoshizawa is dead.
Maruki sucked in a breath.
True or false?
“Why are you doing this?”
I am not doing this. The voice reverberated across the sand and sky. More yellow, in his eyes and across his teeth. You are.
The limousine hummed along, light shining in rippling waves against the window. Margaret felt her eyes close; her lashes crinkling against her cheek. Even with her eyes shut, she could make out the dent in the door, the crumpled metal of mind and matter that kept her firmly locked inside. Nyarlathotep hadn’t lacked for claws.
“Forgive me, Master,” she said even though he could not hear her. “I should never have left her alone.”
She was going to be here for a while. Weeks, perhaps; or centuries.
Margaret opened the book in her lap and began to read.
INCOMING MESSAGE FROM d.shibusawa. ACCEPT?
> Accept.
Hey, heard about Dr. Isshiki. That’s rough. If you need to talk, give me a call. Okay?
His chair clattered to the floor, forgotten, as Maruki made a beeline for his phone. His thumb worked on a fevered autopilot, punching out the buttons to get to Shibusawa’s contact information. It rang once, twice…
Shibusawa’s voice was tight. “Hey, Takuto.”
Maruki felt his mouth go dry, pressure accumulating in his forehead.
“What happened?” he demanded.
“Sorry, I thought you knew,” Shibusawa stammered. “I’m not sure yet. Some people are saying car accident, other people are suggesting suicide— she’s dead.”
Some doctors are dead.
Maruki murmured a desolate thanks and hung up. The hum of his computer’s harddrive filled the air, occupying the otherwise soundless room. Grief clotted his throat, his heart picking up and waning back down in turn. His face felt hot, mouth curling, eyes prickling. He counted backwards from ten.
All dead are lost.
She had promised him his day in the sun. She had fired him instead, effectively ending his doctoral candidacy. But she had done it with dark imprints under her eyes; with a glassy, hollowed look, with a gaunt sharpness to her cheekbones that had not been there a month ago. Her desk had been precise and ordered that day. Almost empty.
Before that...
Therefore, all doctors are lost.
Before that, he swallowed, they had gotten along. She had every intention of supporting him, guiding him, elevating him; and all she had asked for was his eyes and ears inside the Metaverse. They had taken their lunches together with her other doctoral students, and it hadn’t mattered that she was fifteen years their senior; she fit, and she charmed them with her easy wit and her ability to show interest in every field of study.
Maruki felt his anger ebb, the final vestiges of it leaving him. The cold intangibility of grief was a poor replacement. He scrubbed at his face, swiping away moisture from his cheeks.
True or false?
“True,” he murmured, his knees crumpling beneath him.