Work Text:
Sprawling himself out, half-lying and half-sitting, Sho took up about eighty percent of the couch. H propped himself casually up on the left-hand arm in the other twenty percent, one leg crossed over the other, the coffee mug he had just poured for himself shaking slightly in his grip. The double-cosine had stepped out to text her half-secant while the triad took a break from sigil experimentation.
The last anti-Angel sigil Sho and the double-cosine had drawn had knocked H flat on his back, and Sho had called for a recess.
The warehouse that had once served as H's spare inventory space for CAT projects lay uneasily still without the bustle of the double-cosine's constant whining and noisy spraypainting and eager giggling every time they tested a new sigil design. Just rows of texts, and partly painted easels, and bits and bobs of materials, and a few masterpieces Sho'd made while rooting around for sigil motivation. Heh. The yield signs he had dragged in and arranged in a cage around the lurid 104 sales notice——ʏᴏᴜ ʜᴀᴠᴇ 7 ᴅᴀʏs—had a particularly eye-catching silhouette. Not that he had stolen the 104 sign, either: he had left a traffic light, scrunched perfectly into the pinhole torus shape of 104's cognitive data, everything pushed forcibly through a central point and homogenised like a factoring food grinder.
Four years back, he had learned of the Taboo here, had taken it into himself, though he'd wanted to do it in the upstairs room at WildKat. Now, present day, present time, he observed H: a thin line of sweat on his brow, his grasp on the mug still unsteady, a nonchalant smile on his lips.
"Not bad at all, kid. Got a feelin' we'll be ready to put on the show sooner'n we expected."
"Can't stop wasting my 𝑡-interval on these simple equations fast enough." Sho stretched his left arm out on the couch's spine. "Only when I've summed that pretty little variable of the Composer's title can I really start crunching numbers."
"Just be careful, Pi. Gotta keep your head screwed on." H sipped his coffee, smiled into the rim of the mug. "It'll be a test of endurance, not raw strength. Don't get too aggressive too early 'n' end up under some vending machine again."
"Don't underestimate me. As if I'd repeat an erroneous calibration."
H chuckled. The odd function had taught Sho well enough on Dives and people-watching routines that he could detect the slightly dissonant timbre of that laugh. Something in the sadness space of the Markov chain. Melancholy, statistically. "And don't worry. I know just how hypocritical it is for me of all people to say that."
Sho's gaze swept from his mentor to his left hand. The short-sleeved jacket he wore today allowed him to track the black of the Taboo where it had metastasized up his arm, leaving millimetre-thin spirals of his natural skin. The first time he had fashioned this jacket and donned it nearly a year back, the tattoo had broken up into a flame-like crown around the sleeve's hem. Now the hem all but swallowed the black, the faintest gaps just around his bicep hinting that the Taboo had not yet formed a whole unbroken line across his body. Not too much of a spread, considering how many times he had died. Smaller of an acceleration than the double-cosine had predicted.
But still a living timer. No different than the ones that had seared his palm as a Player.
"Heh. Not a thing you could have done to control me. Even with the faulty refinery you completed. I derived every move from my own matrix. My own determinant." Sho curled his fingers into a fist. "I've factored everything out myself. You left me. Didn't want me to be part of the remainder, because the Composer had recurred to being your Plan 𝐴. Told the Composer where I was going—am I right? His cardinality matched my trajectory too closely. Let 'im get that low blow on me."
H rubbed the back of his neck. The hmmm sound he made solved the problem before he even showed his work. "Figured I'd hafta do something about the Pi-flavoured problem headin' our way. And it worked out. Though, that was before Josh surprised me with..."
"Using the same function he always did? The same functions that made you teach me how to eradicate 'im in the first place?"
He shrugged. "Guess I shouldn't call it much of a surprise. Wishful thinkin' on my part. I've got no excuses, Pi. I did what I did for Shibuya, and now I'm doin' what I'm doin' for Shibuya, too."
"I know." When he pressed his nails into his palm, the crescents left behind didn't catch to the quick nearly as satisfyingly as before he'd taken the Taboo. "That's the only reason I'm here. Because you'll do whatever you have to do to all your scalars, variables, and constants to keep this series from converging. But get one thing right. Only I pick what I do. Your miscalibrated refinery didn't do a radiamn thing."
H lifted his non-mug-hand up as though in self-defense. "A'ight, kid, I plead guilty to the charge of assuming. Didn't mean to make an ass outta you or me. I know. You had your head screwed on right that whole week, right up until the seventh day. Jumped the gun a little there, fighting the boys at Pork City before touching up the sigil...but you didn't try to swat J before that. I respect it. Just thought the full-body version might cause enuffa pain to twist you up a li'l inside. And I thought it did. But after the young lady brought you back, you've kept it under control for years. I dig it."
"Hmph." Sho turned his arm over and flexed his hand. The angles of his tendons and the amplitudes of their rise from his skin were well within parameters for biological change. "Just like all that temporal trash."
"A little birdie told me that 'temporal trash' made you go berserk, kiddo."
"Hmph. An unexpected term that didn't change the final summation. I just had to subtract it back out with a side trip. And that side trip gave me exactly enough expressions to finally solve for those last few variables. If I hadn't honed that radar to reach escape velocity for the 𝑤-axis, I would never had displaced my vector into that parallel world. And then we wouldn't even have a plan for our combinatorial angel problem." Sho grinned. "4's a number like any other. You think the possibility of death could stop the number line?"
Another long sip of coffee. "S'been quite the windfall. Everything in its place. My waiting for the right moment to join the table, Atarashi's bottomless lust for revenge, Josh's refusal to play his cards, your attachment to Shibuya and persistent belief in yourself...the chips fall where they need to, even if it looks in the moment like the house were cheating."
"Nothing about belief." Sho leaned slightly forward, right elbow on his knee. "It's just the highest probability. The numbers speak for themselves. I ran the numbers when you first helped me figure out the Taboo, too. I knew exactly what I was doing. Transmuting myself to a weapon that could bisect obtuse angles...ha ha ha ha ha."
"Wanna fill me in on the joke, Pi?"
"When you defined the Composer's identity, I thought, what the trig was that going to do. Not like I could swagger up to that yoctogram with a gun adjacent to his skull and ask him his full name. But you said this integration would help me reduce the possibilities down to one. I didn't have an expected value when I popped into the RG and set my trajectory to Udagawa, except that I was looking for some fifteen-year-old monomial with grey hair and a button-down. Heh." Sho unclenched his fingers and examined the barely visible marks left. The red and the black. The red on the black. "Can't say I've ever felt such an irrational urge to factoring murder a hectopascal as when I entered his coordinate space."
H hmmmed into the mug again, tapped his forefinger against the handle. "S'why it's Taboo, Pi. And s'why taking on the Composer's title and keeping it part of you is gonna be an even tougher test of endurance than gettin' it. The resultant discordance between the Angelic harmonic and yours." He whistled. "Ain't gonna be pretty, kid. I know you've dealt with some real bad hands, Pi, but this is gonna be somethin' else."
"Fear and mercy are garbage, and pa—"
"Progress and pain are balanced equations. I know, kid. I know it's taken me more years than either of us would'a liked, but I'm startin' to get how you think." H sighed, lowered his voice. "And how much of that's my fault. And I know you're going to say none of it. I getcha. We've just got different nontrivial solutions to those same simultaneous equations."
"It's pain and progress are balanced equations. A non-associative operation. Look, H, even 49's a number like any other. I've factored it out. Some of the nontrivial solutions do converge to 4. And if that happens, I've factored something else out." Sho jabbed his Taboo-tattooed finger in H's direction. "You'll make sure this function keeps generating trash until your solution converges to 4 too. If I'm out of the equation, doesn't make a difference to me which variable goes to the highest power as long as that variable's large enough to keep 428's chaotic attractor from collapsing."
H's eyebrows rose. Sho interpolated the splines of his features: the wrinkles across his brow, that particular angle of his wrist on the mug, the thin line of his mouth. Thoughtful. Calculating. Musing. Poised to pose a question. "Pi, mind if I ask ya somethin'?"
"Shoot."
"Think I'll leave the shootin' to you, kid." Sho smirked. H's mouth thinned out further. Sho watched the θ of his spine increase until H sat ramrod straight. "The Taboo you took gives you that homicidal instinct when you're near an Angel."
Sho tipped the visor of his hat up. "Some Observant Hellhounds Can Always Hear Their Opponents Approach."
"I never asked you how it makes ya feel 'round me."
"You got a question for me—or what?"
"Pi...how do you feel around me? Just from the Taboo. S'all I'm askin'."
He pinched the brim of the cap between his forefinger and thumb, lifting it a little more, just enough that he could see the upwards swoop of H's hair. The other obtuse angles had a distinct plot for that: a single vertex on the right sides of their faces, a fanning-out at the back that the double-cosine had said looked like an ugly goose's ass or the half-secant had more charitably called a bird's nest. "Like I want to radiamn kill you where you stand."
"That so."
A few months ago Sho would have observed but not been able to derive the significance of the slight tilt in the angles of H's eyebrows, in the negative curvature of his mouth, in the increase of tension of the muscles across his cheeks. But he still couldn't define the variable. Something adjacent to the melancholy from earlier, but what? He'd have to ask the odd function.
A problem he couldn't solve? He dug his fingers into the couch's spine.
"Knew you were part of the same set from it," Sho went on, not letting the silence settle in again, "and that you had made yourself part of a different set, too. I've iterated on my willpower enough to make it zetta solid. And my perfect calculations lead to perfect results. Doesn't matter if you make me feel out of my vector, because the feelings don't weigh even a yoctonewton. I'm right in my vector, H. Don't underestimate me. It's so zetta annoying. I waited seven days during the first Impurification. I waited three years for my observer sigil to activate." H arched his eyebrows. Sho hadn't told him that part. Not yet. "I've waited the past few months while we've been deriving these sigils. I don't give a digit about this garbage body. Pain, intent, instinct, hunger, drive: irrelevant. I do what I want."
"You sure do." H peered down at the mug of coffee and ran his forefinger around the rim, producing a faint euphonic vibration. "You've got the loudest Soul of any human I've ever met. I'll give you that. Human, Reaper, Noise, or Angel."
Sho grinned.
"And it's more stable than it's ever been. You really are in your vector. Somethin' 'bout that multiplicative function where points of view converge, izzat what you called it? Hmm...." Another circle around the mug's rim. "Kinda wanna ask you somethin' else, kid, but I don't think it's fair of me."
"Fair?" He threw his head back. The fabric of the bandanna tails bunched up against the back of his neck. "Ha! Nothing's fair except mathematical axioms. We're not kernels of constant pairwise interaction. We both chose to converge here because we're aiming for something greater than the cross-product of both our vectors. Ha ha ha ha ha!"
"Do ya hate me?"
The laughter cut.
H leaned back into the couch, all informal, his other hand resting where Sho could see it on his crossed knee. "I don't mind if you do. Hate me, that is. Won't change a thing about my actions; we're both here for Shibuya."
Not an attosecond of quiet. "Doesn't make a difference to me. You just solved it yourself. We're both here for the city, and I'm plugging every integer of effort into this function. Between me, you, and the double-cosine, we've made it to exponentiation. Heh. We'll see just how far we can take it. The Composer's number will be up, and then he'll be the former 𝑗-invariant." Sho laughed again, smirking to himself. "I've pushed past the limits of dropping the freaking moon. This time, I'm dropping the whole freaking monstrous moonshine, eradicating that monster set right out from the upper half-planes."
Pausing for a moment, Sho listened for the next step in the proof, but H produced no prepositions, no corollaries. Just silence.
"That's not a variable I define for myself, H. I let you carry a zettagram's weight because your knowledge, motive, Soul code, and focus on 428 above anything else, including you or me, is irreducible. No trivial solutions. The rest of it is uninspiring garbage."
The sound of something straining almost to a rip brought Sho to stand suddenly from the couch. H raised his chin, glanced at the couch's spine, and then gazed at Sho over the rims of his shades. "Think I've had enuff of a coffee break."
Sho turned on his heel. "Sure. I'll recur the double-cosine."
"Yeah." That euphonic vibration again. Behind him. Speaking to his back. "I'll get ready for whatever you judge justified."
