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You shouldn’t feel relaxed in Tartarus. You know, in your head, that there’s no room for complacency in the tower, especially not as high up as you are now. The lights of the fifth block, Habarah, swirl around you, rainbow coloured, over-bright and dizzying against the darkness of the rest of the floor. The shadows are powerful, and they know those light and dark curses that can rip the life from you before you’ve drawn breath to respond.
But it’s being going so well lately; it’s hard not to feel relaxed. Before your last trip you summoned Narcissus again. You’d used him for a while on some lower floors, for his wind spells and to get his gift of a charm-proof flower, but dropped him for stronger magic users after that. Now you had summoned him as an experiment in charm-based offense, and the entire trip had been like a dream. His dance hypnotised about half the shadows you faced in every fight, meaning half your opponents became your allies, attacking each other and healing you in between. Your team had made it to your target floor barely scratched and completely ecstatic about your new advantage.
This trip is going about as well, too; you’ve only been exploring for about twenty minutes, but you’ve put down every group of Knights and Wheels that gets in your way. Ken is openly thrilled about how fast the group is ascending, and Mitsuru seems pleased, even if she still has her reservations about your new tactic. Akihiko told you he’s glad to have you as the leader, which gave you the quiet sort of warmth it always did. You wonder if you’ll get used to it.
You suppose you’re happy, too. You want to ascend quickly. Uncharted floors of Tartarus always weigh on your mind, like you’re caught in the shadow of the tower whenever you aren’t inside and haven’t climbed as high as you can. Maybe nothing would happen if the full moon came around before you’d reached the top, but at least this way you’re prepared. The higher you go, the stronger you are, and the stronger you are the better you can protect the others. It is both pleasant and annoying to have people you want to look after. It feels like a very long time since you’ve had so much purpose.
You lead your group along the hundred-and-eighty-third floor, eyes scanning ahead and spear tight and ready in your hand. It can be hard to spot the shadows on these floors, as they can blend into the blackness between the lights. But you need to see them before they see you. With Narcissus, if you can get the first round in a fight, you will win.
You didn’t see them first. There’s a roar from behind you, close behind you, and you spin around in time to see the shadows lurching in. It’s not too large a group and you’re still feeling confident; you all have your magic, you can survive one round. Mitsuru yells out a warning as the inky blob twists and warps and manifests, splitting into two pairs of snakes that coil around each other and the heavy symbols they carry.
Akihiko and Ken tense up at the shadow’s shape, but they always do when it’s snakes, and you don’t have time to reassure them. The snakes took you by surprise and the four of you are still readying weapons and evokers when the shadows attack. Fuuka’s still calling out her analysis as the first one lashes out at Mitsuru, smacking her hard on the arms as she tries to block, and you try to calculate the damage. It can’t be too bad if she can still hold her rapier.
The second snake is writhing strangely, and you reach for your evoker, trying to plan what needs to happen next; you’ll summon Narcissus, charm the snakes, maybe heal Mitsuru, and beat the shadows down. The cold metal of your gun in your hand is reassuring; it will be normal. It will be easy.
You’re still feeling in control when the snake finishes its spell, a bright spark of fuchsia light that hurts to look at. You’re a little less calm when you realise the snake is looking at you and foul pink smoke is rising up around you. The smell is atrocious and alien, sickly-sweet and deathly, and it crawls up in through your nose. There’s a single dull throb of pain behind your eyes, and then you’ve lost your calm, you know your team is staring at you, you know your eyes are wide open with panic, and you know the snake’s spell is working.
It feels like a hand has reached into your head and started turning things around. It doesn’t hurt anymore, but it throws you off balance, and you lose a few moments to staring dizzily at the floor while shadowy fingers run through your mind making changes. Panic dulls down under the strange sensation, and after a moment, you’re not sure why you were panicked at all.
When you look up again, there’s a fuzzy filter to your vision, a pink haze over everything, and you gaze over the battlefield with confusion, looking at your friends and at the shadows and at you team and the enemy and your team, the enemy, the shadows, your friends, until the words are dripping through each other and losing all meaning. The other humans are yelling, panicked, shouting, “Does anyone have Dis-Charm?” and “He was holding it,” and “Let’s end this fight as quickly as we can! Hurry!” The smallest one is backing up, away from you, terrified. You gaze at them all with a light hold on your spear, evoker hanging limply from your other hand, feeling disoriented, knowing something is different but not quite able to tell what.
And then the one you know is Akihiko yells, “I’ll end this now,” and charges forward, hits the snake that charmed you with a boxer’s practiced punch, and everything makes sense again. Seeing the snake lurch backwards in pain was the clarity you needed, and you feel instinctive response rise up inside you; the human hurt your friend. Protect your friends. Hurt the enemy. You drop your evoker so you can settle both hands on your spear, eyes fixed on Akihiko as he bounces back from the snakes. You run forwards
You feel so disconnected as you move, your thoughts clouded by that smoke and smell of sugary rot, and you know something isn’t quite right. But more than that, the hand in your head is squeezing down tight, directing you. Protect your friends, and the words are familiar, and hurt the enemy, and you draw your spear back to lunge.
The smallest human screams out a warning and Akihiko turns, a little too late, raises his arms to guard, and your spear misses the mark of his heart, sinking deep into the flesh of his forearm. He roars in pain and you yank your spear back, feeling victorious and giddy (do you ever feel giddy?) It’s so odd, something’s so odd – but you hurt your enemy, like you should, and there’s a bright red blotch spreading down his arm fast. He’s staring at you and swearing, but you just stare back, still holding your spear with both hands. You’ll do it again. He hurt your friends; you’ll kill him.
“Penthesilea,” a woman’s voice yells, and you feel the rush of cold air before the familiar burst of ice that follows, sharp crystals that consume the snakes and shatter, destroying both shadows with them.
You shout in anger (shout? You never shout) and whirl around to face her, completely livid. You’re going to pay her back, pierce her through the heart, let her see her own blood stream down your spear’s shaft and bleed her out, she killed your friends, and you can see fear in her eyes as she watches you approach. The smallest one is somewhere behind her and he’s shouting at you with a tremor in his voice, and you spare him one glance; he’ll be last, you think.
Something slams into you from behind and the black, glittering floor rises up to meet you, completely unforgiving as you hit it face-first. There’s a heavy weight on your back, pinning you down and you struggle, reaching out to your spear beside you, wishing you hadn’t dropped it in the impact. You need the spear, you need to kill the humans who killed the snakes, maybe it’s not too late, maybe you can still revive your team, maybe it’ll be okay, maybe, maybe…
You feel something wet drip down onto you and you realise it’s blood. Akihiko’s the one pressing you down, then? You stop reaching for your spear, instead feeling for him above you, touching the arm still slick with warm blood. He stiffens at your touch, suspicious – and you prove him right as you find the wound you made and claw at it. He gasps in agony, but you’re feeling calm, you’re always feeling calm, and you just need to damage him as much as you can to get him off you, so you can get your spear, so you can do what you need to, but he knocks your hand away, forces you to stay down.
You’re a little surprised he still can, but he always surprises you with his strength. He can always keep going, he’s so reliable, that’s why you – that’s why you like him? But you don’t like him. Do you? You can feel the long fingers in your head begin to pull away as the smell of sugary rot finally begins to dissipate. You feel better without it, though you’re not sure why. Your head throbs, but there’s nothing in it that shouldn’t be. The glowing light of the floor is right up against your face, too bright, hurting your eyes. You try to get up again, but there’s still someone on top of you, pressing you down. Why would they be doing that?
Oh. Oh.
You’ve had shadows confuse you before, spin you around and play tricks on your eyes so that when you pull back from an attack you find you’ve hit friend not foe. You’d stagger back from your mistake, horrified and apologetic, and they’d forgive you, because you hadn’t meant it. But you’d hated yourself; the damage had still been done.
This was worse. You had meant it. Every inch of you had meant it, been aware of it, you’d stabbed Akihiko, would have turned on Mitsuru, and that had been what you wanted to do.
You suddenly feel very sick. “Akihiko,” you murmur, and you’re not sure what to say.
Speech seemed to be enough to prove you’d come back to yourself, and he gets off you slowly. You look at the long bloody wound on his arm, saw red scratches where you’d tried to make it worse and felt a surge of nausea rise up in you. Ken’s already summoned his persona, and he executes the healing spell while you watch, knitting Akihiko’s skin back together, a smooth patch under the bloody shirt that remained testament to what you’d done.
Ken lets his persona vanish, and you can’t help but notice the way he’s standing, so Akihiko is between him and you. He’s shaking. Akihiko rubs the new skin on his arm, and you can’t tell what he’s thinking, even though he’s looking right at you. Mitsuru’s mouth is a hard, thin line, but she stays quiet, letting you make the call. You think that you’re probably not going to throw up, and take a few moments to breathe in deep, feeling the absence of another’s influence in your mind, trying to restore some of the detachment you need. You can’t quite get it.
All three of them watch you, looking guarded and wary. You all still have plenty of magic and strength in you, and you’ve only been in Tartarus half an hour. It would be a total waste of a night to turn back now. “Let’s go back,” you say anyway, and they all seem relieved that you did.
It’s a quiet trip back to the transporter, a quiet trip back down, a quiet walk home as Yukari and Junpei stare at your group with wide eyes but don’t ask questions. Or, at least, Yukari slams her foot down on Junpei’s whenever he starts to ask a question. Normally you wished they’d get along better, be a little more mature so that you could rely on them, but for once, you’re grateful. There are a lot of firsts for you that night.
Fuuka saw it all, you know she did, and she’s looking at you with fear and sympathy, but that’s not something you really want right now. You don’t know how much she said to the others. You’re not sure if it matters. They should be aware of Tartarus’ dangers, but they also need to be able to rely on you. Fuuka looks like she wants to talk to you, but you walk away from her too quickly. Tell them or not, whatever she did was fine.
Everyone unanimously agrees on an early bedtime, and the best you can say is, “We’ll do another trip soon,” before you can’t quite handle them looking at you anymore and have to leave. You’re the first up the stairs and you don’t stop on your floor, you keep going up. You’re feeling off-balance again, like you did back in the tower, right before you turned to Akihiko and - and you don’t want to go to your room, not yet. You go to the roof instead.
It’s one in the morning and it’s freezing and that’s good, it’s exactly what you want. Cold air to rush over you, push through you, chill you to your core. Cold has always made you feel awake and alive and real, connected, and that’s what you need right now. You need to feel alert. You need to be able to know all your thoughts are your own.
Akihiko is the one who comes to find you, and you’re not really surprised. Well, you hadn’t thought anyone would want to see you tonight, but it wasn’t a surprise that Akihiko would be the one. He sits beside you on the air conditioning unit and the two of you look out into the city, and don’t say anything for a while.
After a few minutes he says, “It’s freezing,” and you nod.
Another minute passes and you say, “I’m sorry,” because you are but you don’t know what else to do about it. You don’t turn to look at him.
He rummages through his pockets and pushes something into your hand. It’s familiar; a flower. Narcissus’ flower. Bright yellow and beautiful, if getting a little crinkled from continual rough treatment. You turn it over in your hands for a long time before you look back at him. “I thought we’d agreed you would have this,” you say, and even you can tell how distant you sound for once. He’s complained about that before.
He shakes his head. “I thought we agreed it would go to whoever would do the most damage.”
He hasn’t changed his shirt, and you’re on the side you stabbed. You look at where the cut had been, dried blood over smooth skin, and you wonder how much it had hurt him, really. You want to give the flower back, but you don’t. Instead, you ask, “This was worse than last time?”
Last time was something you still took the blame for. You shouldn’t have kept the expedition going so long, should have turned back earlier. You’d never be so careless now; but then, you’d thought it was okay. You and Akihiko and Mitsuru and Ken, trying to ascend Arqa, without a drop of magic left between you.
You’d finally decided to turn back when you were cornered by the red shadow, a pair of lustful snakes, an enemy you’d never seen before. They’d come up behind you and gotten the first round in; underwhelming physical attacks.
And it was the stupidest thing you’d ever done not to run then, but you thought you had a chance, you thought – and you remember thinking it so exactly – that their red glow must have been a mistake somehow. You directed everyone to attack, and you all did, and you thought another round or two would finish them off. You were thinking about the prize for beating a red shadow.
They both cast that damn charm spell, “Marin Karin”, and they both targeted Akihiko. The first one missed, the second one didn’t, and it had been the first time you’d ever seen that puff of pink smoke before, hadn’t known what it meant, but since Akihiko hadn’t seemed hurt, you thought it had been fine and still hadn’t run.
Ken had moved first, lunging out with his spear, getting an incredible critical hit on one of the snakes.
Akihiko had broken Ken’s nose.
You can still remember the crunch of it, remember how time had slowed down at the impact of his fist, and you and Mitsuru had stared, together, and everything had gone horribly, bizarrely surreal. Akihiko had pulled his fist back, and blood streamed down Ken’s face. You remember thinking, for the first time, that Ken might be too young for this, and you remember the guilt as you watched the shock on Ken’s face slowly collapse into pain as he staggered away from Akihiko and started to wail. You weren’t quite sure what happened next, just a huge blur of panic and movement and sound, Fuuka wailing and Mitsuru shouting and Ken terrified and crying and covered in blood, looking every inch his age and sending cold waves of fear and guilt rolling through you.
You fled the fight. You’d had to drag Akihiko away with your arms under his shoulders, and Mitsuru swept Ken off, running him back to the transporter first on your direction. Akihiko had struggled in your grip half the way back, but as the hissing of the snakes had faded behind you, he fought you less and less, and by the time you’d gotten him to the transporter he was just staring at his bloodied fist with the most wretched expression you’d ever seen on him.
Yukari healed Ken at the entrance, but it didn’t stop his shoulders from quivering. You could see him trying so, so hard to be as brave and mature as you usually treated him, but he’d idolised Akihiko and now his blood was drying on his chin. The spell took all traces of the injury from his face, but left it in how he walked with his head down, shoulders drawn, close to you, as far away from Akihiko as he could get.
You’d sat up with Akihiko that night while he shook and recounted what it had been like, and the horror of how deliberate it had all been. He wouldn’t stop looking at his fist. Ken hadn’t looked at Akihiko for two weeks. Akihiko stopped his training for the first time since you’d met him.
And so you’d given Akihiko the flower. Narcissus’ gift to you, the one that would make the bearer immune to charm spells. You’d stopped using Narcissus after he gave you the flower, but you’d been holding onto it since; and you handed it to Akihiko, telling him that since he was the one who did the most damage, he was the one who should have it. You picked up your invigorate mark at the same time; you’d never run out of magic with it, a two-for-one ‘let’s never let this happen again’. You told Ken you gave Akihiko the flower, and that’s what it took for him to feel safe enough to re-enter the tower with you.
And now Akihiko is giving it back.
You turn the flower over in your hands, and wait for him to answer you; had it been as bad as last time?
“You’d have to ask Mitsuru,” he says, and you notice that his voice is shaking a little. You don’t think it’s from the cold. “Since last time, I was… I mean, I don’t know how it was for you, to watch.”
You’re quiet for a long time. You didn’t actually tell him back then how it had been for you to watch. You didn’t think it would help him. You tell him now; “I watched you break the nose of the kid you swore to protect. I didn’t know why. It was…” and you don’t want to say ‘horrible’ or ‘disgusting’ or ‘I thought you were insane and I’d have to fight you, stop you’ but he knows what you mean anyway.
He breathes out slowly and tries to put it together for you. “You’re the leader,” he says. “You’re the one who gives out directions. You’re… you monitor our health and say when it’s too much and time to go back and when to rest and heal. You look out for us. And… just, the look in your eyes…”
You try to imagine it. You wish the charm had addled your memories at all, but it didn’t and you still have all your thoughts from when everything was backwards, and you know exactly what you were thinking and why. And you know, that when Akihiko had struck the snake, you had been livid, you had wanted to kill him for it, and the only reason he hadn’t was because he’d blocked in time…
You’d wanted to kill Akihiko. You’re feeling sick again, tasting the real, palpable hate you’d had for him, and it was foreign and disgusting on your tongue. “I’m sorry,” you say again, and it means a little more now that you’ve dredged it all up fresh. You were feeling numb before, but now you’re sick and sad and you look at him, and you know you’re normally too cool, too distant for him, so you let him see every ounce of regret in your eyes.
He’s looking a little bit shaken from everything that happened still. He’s not weak, but maybe it rattled him more than he wants you to know, that it was you that did it, and not you-as-the-leader but you-as-the-friend, you-as-the-maybe-more. You’ve only just started making more together, between Tartarus and sporting practices and the dozen other people you each have obligations to. You know things between the two of you are fragile. You don’t know what else you can do.
He gestures to the flower in your hands, and he must have guessed some of your thoughts, because he says, “I’m not being selfish, giving that to you. It’s not because I couldn’t deal with you – It’s, it shook Mitsuru and Ken too. I did talk to them a little, before I came up here. I don’t know if it’s worse, but it’s… Ken’s fine with it, with you having this.”
You feel a little worse hearing that, though all ‘worse’ meant was the sick pit in your stomach got a little lower. You knew the team were reliant on you, knew they were attached, but you hadn’t realised how damaging it would be for them, not now they knew what Marin Karin did. But apparently Ken would rather have his hero break his nose then see you like that again.
That settles it for you. You tuck the flower on the inside of your coat, and look up at the sky. Akihiko does the same, and his hand finds yours, and you can stay like that for a while. You imagine you can feel the flower pressing against you through your shirt. You have to protect your friends.
“It’s too cold,” Akihiko says eventually, and you know he’s right, and his hand can ground you better than the night wind can. There’s school in the morning. You follow him inside.
It’s only three days before your next trip into the tower, because you can’t afford to be wasting so much time, not with the moon shining brighter every night. You told your team you took the Narcissus flower back, and they all nod, all still guarded. Ken’s been looking miserable for the last three days, and you think you ought to spend some time with him soon.
Before you begin the night’s ascent, you spend some time in the velvet room. When you emerge, Narcissus is no longer on your roster. It might be a tactical error; charm-based offense is strong, and you should be clinging to every advantage you can get. But you don’t want to use it anymore; even against the enemy, that pink smoke’s sugar-rot scent still makes you sick.