Work Text:
44°: Death, Death, Lion
"So, like. How'd you die, anyway?"
Shoka leaned against the wall on the street across from SPICY CURRY DON. The brick behind her felt comfortably sturdy on her back, comfortably rough on her palms, comfortably warm on her body from having heated up in the summer sun all day. Now that the evening chill that cooled off Dogenzaka to some extent, she could actually exist without either foregoing her fashion sense or getting heatstroke, again. Sometimes the RG life freaking sucked. Bumping into people when walking down the street. Having to make money to survive. Eating out of necessity and not just because she wanted to. Needing to take her rage out in constructive ways instead of beating the shit out of Noise until she felt better. Passing out from the heat at summer's peak if she didn't adjust what she wore in this loser human body that couldn't even make its own serotonin without meds.
Not like that ever stopped him, even in the RG, since the guy wolfing down ramen on her right-hand side apparently couldn't live without wearing some kind of black jacket or trenchcoat at all times. Wow, sometimes he actually swapped the long sleeves out for shorter ones, but never in a season or weather pattern that actually made sense.
The two of them probably looked bizarre as all hell, a pair of weirdo pseudo-goths baking like freaking lasagna into their all-black outfits, her leaning on the wall, him squatting down in those thick-heeled boots with the bright red tongues, his face in a bowl of satou ramen. If someone had put a gun to her head—the Composer, maybe—and asked her whether she could have possibly imagined forming this habit a year ago, she would've told them to pull the trigger. Better make it count, she would've said. Better make it hurt. Better kill her in one shot.
No, she couldn't say better make it count anymore, or Minamimoto would find that funny, and she'd never live it down if she actually got him to make that chainsaw noise that supposedly made for a laugh.
But they had this—they had this thing now. Whatever she could call it. Thing made her gag, but she'd die—again—before she called it anything resembling friendship. And she couldn't call it an understanding when she barely understood one out of twenty words of whatever incomprehensible math shit he wouldn't stop spewing out. Maybe something like the relationship between a cryptid and the person who kept, against her better judgment, freaking feeding him because having ramen in his mouth kept him from talking—if she were lucky—and he'd stay no matter what bullshit she said until he finished eating.
This thing. Where she spotted him—through the busy cars and the constant streams of fashionable Shibuyans crossing this way and that—hanging out across the street with his hood up, his arms crossed over his chest, his face—intentionally, probably—obscured by his sullen pose, signalling for food like some kind of particularly irritated peacock.
Where she told Mr. Doi she was going to go prep some ramen in the back and evaded his questions—with the agility and grace of a movie martial-artist spin-kicking through one of those rigged rooms with the fifty red lasers—about this mysterious friend who liked a very specific kind of ramen she'd learned how to make just for him, when no one had requested this kind of ramen in like four years. Where she cooked up this completely disgusting abomination she could barely call 'ramen': meatless shio, no veggies, an absolute dumptruck worth of sugar, like more sugar than the rest of Mr. Doi's customers went through in a year, so much sugar that the shit crystallised in an off-white film like some kind of nasty crust. Where the overpowering smell of boiling sugar mixed with ramen—both of those pretty good on their own—nearly made her puke.
Where she brought it out, looked both ways before crossing the road just like Mr. Doi had asked her to, and delivered it to him on the other side of the road.
Why'd the teenage girl cross the road? To get the other side. Just kidding! Been there, done that. No more UG for her.
Why'd she cross the road? To vent about her stupid life.
Where he crouched down by the brick wall and scarfed down ramen, calling it not bad as if she hadn't just descended from the high heavens of SPICY CURRY DON and bled her hands out preparing the most ambrosial gift of the gods' nectar ramen that ever existed.
Where she leaned against the wall next to him and just talked about her life. Talked about her life in a way she couldn't with other people. Not with Rhyme, not with Beat, not with Nagi, not with Fret, not with Mr. Doi, not even with her Rinrin, as much as she wanted to.
She couldn't stand the frowns, the drawn brows, the hesitant questions.
They meant well. And she did talk to them plenty. Nagi, who'd convinced her to go for therapy, which had—really—helped her so much more than she could ever have put into words. Fret, who'd listen to her nightmares and tell her about his own, making her less alone. Rhyme, who'd tutored her through some of the more challenging school subjects. Beat, who'd somehow make her feel at ease with his shenanigans. Rindo, who'd accept anything she told him, anything at all, and then probably beat himself up about it later that he hadn't figured out the right thing to say to magically push her into the not-wanting-to-mcfreaking-kill-herself direction.
Not that she would. Not ever again.
Most of the time it didn't even cross her mind anymore. And when it did, she could practise her mindfulness, do those worksheets she had loaded on her phone, reach out to people to break her spirals, take out that shoebox full of mementos of her daily life—tickets from concerts and receipts from restaurants, slamming pins she'd gotten at Stride and sticky notes Mr. Doi left for her on her door his hilariously bad drawings of cats, FanGO QR stickers from events and weird little thingies from the arcade gachapon—and hold crystallised memory tenderly in her palm, reminding herself that she had friends now, that she had a family now, that she had a roof over her head and food to eat and a father who hadn't even once raised his voice at her except to welcome her heartily back home after a long day at school.
She could tell she had, ever so slowly, dragged herself up the steps. And she had friends who cared. They sincerely cared. They wouldn't act the way they did if they didn't care.
But sometimes she just had to vent. Vent to someone who wouldn't really give a damn. Vent to someone who wouldn't sit there moogling how to help someone with—ughhh—diagnosed major depression. Vent to someone who wouldn't worry about her afterwards. Vent to someone who would just laugh.
When she failed a test and had to treat herself with grace instead of getting mad about it. When someone said something stupid to her and she had to solve the conflict peacefully instead of saying deuces, dummy! and deucing 'em right in the jaw. When some moronic thing she did made her seethe so hard that she had to write down her feelings on a worksheet instead of smashing her fist into the wall until the wetness heated her knuckles and trailed down to her elbow.
Everyone else would treat her with kiddie gloves. Not really. They talked to her honestly and candidly about their thoughts. Compassion and kindness. Understanding and love.
But sometimes that kindness suffocated.
Sometimes she really just needed to say she thought someone in her class was a freaking idiot and have Minamimoto laugh that corny loser laugh of his and call that freaking idiot a mindless monomial for messing with her. Sometimes she really just needed to scuff her trainer heel against the cement and tell him how pissed she was that she'd studied all that shit about meiosis and then the quiz had actually mostly covered mitosis and listen to Minamimoto scoff and degrade school as complete and utter garbage that didn't evaluate for any variables of intelligence.
Sometimes she really just needed to whisper the word fuck and snicker at how seriously he barked that Pops—Mr. Doi—wouldn't want her to say something so factoring trashy.
Sometimes she really just needed to explain what stupid thing she'd done earlier that day and hear him snort and affirm her self-definition, because that algorithm was as pointless as a hypersphere.
Sometimes she really just needed to talk to someone who accepted everything she said because he had no metrestick for normal.
And sometimes she really just needed to ask the kind of question she couldn't ask anyone else without making them concerned. Oh, they'd believe her, probably, if she told them that they didn't need to worry and that she wasn't planning anything. And she'd talked to them all about her grief, about her longing, about how much she missed...Ayano.
And most of the time, the words they said and how they said it reached her like so many ripples along the surface of the lake she floated on. But sometimes she didn't need ripples. Sometimes she needed the kind of asshole who would cannonball right on top of her and laugh when she flailed.
Maybe the closest she could think of, with this weird thing between them, was like...siblings. Technically. By adoption. Since Minamimoto had passed through Mr. Doi's place before, and then she—no, scratch that, gross, ew, disgusting, just the thought of it made her skin crawl. Which kind of proved her point.
Ugh. Nope. She'd crumple up that particular thought and overhand it right into the trash can. Except then he'd probably dig it out and add it to one of those—those—those whatever he had made, that literal pile of garbage, the first time he'd shown up across the street at SPICY CURRY DON.
And now this annoying tool had spent the past few minutes annoyingly shovelling ramen in his annoying mouth instead of answering her damn question. So she nudged his side with her trainer, hard. "Uh, hello? I asked you a question, stupid."
His chopsticks didn't even slow down for a second. If anything he practically sped up, not bothering to look at her. Not even when she kicked him in the hip for real.
"I go out of my freaking way to make you your cringey satou ramen and you won't even grace me with an answer?" She crossed her arms. "Fuck this."
That made him fish the chopsticks out from his mouth and point the sugar-encrusted tips rudely at her. "How many times do I need to reiterate such a simple equation, zeptogram?" Oh yeah. Because he couldn't even remember her name. Feliform zeptogram, he called her. Whatever. At least he got the animal right. "Subtract that variable from your function or subtract yourself from Pops's quadrant."
She burst out laughing. "You're so predictable sometimes, Mr. Minami."
He lowered the brim of his cap over his face. "What's the problem?"
"I asked how you died."
Minamimoto scoffed. "I'm integrating this first." Then he resumed eating like she hadn't just slammed him in the side.
"Fine, whatever, but you better not just run away afterwards. You can tell me you're not gonna answer if it's—" She air-quoted. "—your private business or whatever, but don't just leave me—" The next word couldn't come out of her mouth soon enough. "—hanging. Don't leave me hanging."
He grunted.
"Ugh, you know, it sucks. People get so up in your face about stuff that shouldn't even matter. I know they're just trying to be nice. But it suuuuucks. I hate it. You know what I'm talking about." She dragged the heel of her trainer along the sidewalk. "Pity. Everyone's like, waiting for me to say something, right? So finally I go, okay, whatever, I wanna do something for Ayano's death anni this year. Maybe see what Kaie and the rest of 'em wanna do, if they wanna do anything. And everyone acts relieved. Like, okay? The hell's up with that? Everyone was just waiting for me to notice the calendar? That the day that—that—that fucking Noise—"
Minamimoto opened his stupid mouth. "Δ𝑡 < 60𝑠. Stop that progression."
"—erased her. Woooow, can't believe that even Shoka knows what date it is today! Mystery freaking solved. I hate it. And they go, well, we didn't want to force you into thinking about it or anything. Big whoop. I hate that I know they're right. I would've been so much more pissed if they'd shown up and gone, hey Shoka, hey Shoka, you gonna do something about the death of the first person you ever really trusted?"
Her fingers curled into her palms. The way her fists shook made her push them into the pockets of her hoodie. The trembling. The trembling. She ground her heel down into the cement.
"I shouldn't be mad at them. I'm trying not to be. I'm doing my mindfulness. I know I'd be taking it out on them...and I'm not. I haven't snapped at anybody. I've just told them that it's been a lot for me to think about it and that I need some more time. And I asked 'em not to assume I'd want to do anything. They said they didn't. They just hadn't wanted to miss it if I'd wanted to do anything. Kept their calendars open for me, you know? Really sweet, honestly. More than I deserve." She paused. "No, wait, that's one of those—"
"Garbage self-subtraction," Minamimoto finished for her. "If you're really a 000, get crunched. Or show me the limit of 𝑈 as 𝑡 goes to infinity. Takes a real futureless fractal to divide itself out."
"...yeah. I know. I don't deserve bad things. If my friends want to do things for me..."
With a shrug, he tipped the bowl up higher to drain some of the broth. "Not my problem if they're too scalene-stupid to even bother balancing their equations."
Shoka stuck her tongue out of the corner of her lips. "Kinda ticks me off that I actually get what you're saying sometimes."
As he lowered the bowl from his mouth, he grinned at her, all teeth. Did his canines get sharp from going Reaper like she had? Or had he filed them before he'd died? Or had he just popped out into the world like that, biting off fingers like a gator? Maybe that last part would explain a quarter of what Nagi saw in his chaotic ass. Since she was literally the only person who would eat that nasty shit at SBY BBQ. "Finally reaching a fraction of your tetratial potential."
If she had rolled her eyes any harder, she would've figured out a way to roll her entire body around her eye sockets. "Oh, thank god. I totally didn't get a word you just said. There's hope for me yet."
Minamimoto wiped his chin on his wrist and then ducked his head into the bowl to slurp up the last of the noodles and broth. With how enthusiastically he ate that satou ramen, like his motherfreaking life depended on it, like he'd spontaneously explode in the middle of the street if he didn't drink that stuff down in ten seconds flat, she'd made the mistake of trying it once.
Once.
"Had a nice trajectory from the roof of Pork City," he said abruptly.
"Huh?"
He just kept going like she hadn't even said anything, the chopsticks rattling around as he unceremoniously shoved the licked-clean bowl back into the carry-out bag to give to her.
Oh, yeah, Minamimoto had standards. No plastic take-out bowl for him, no sir. He had to have it on actual dinnerware which meant she had to stand around and wait for him to finish before hauling his gross saliva-coated remains back to SPICY CURRY DON. And unlike someone with even slightly more tact—where she might have suspected that he'd demanded that on purpose to give her an excuse to vent to him—she figured that he really meant it.
"Aesthetic arc," he was saying, so infuriatingly smug despite the fact that his words were total freaking nonsense, "but didn't even reach terminal velocity. Ha ha ha ha ha! Garbage. Hardly hit 82.8673639016 metres per second when the factoring hectopascals put my sternum through my heart. Zetta weak RG body." He rolled his shoulders back and adjusted his cap. "But gave me just enough mass of material to transform it into the next term in the sequence. Heh heh heh. Purificatus non consumptus."
"Wait." Shoka stared at him, her mouth opening into an 𝑜. "You're answering my question."
"Ha! Self-evident axiom."
She waved her hand as though she were trying to physically beat away his irritating language. "So, what? You fell off a building? What? How?"
"Hmph." He looked at her the way she imagined he'd look at walking garbage. The way he would look at walking garbage, not some non-whackjob who avoided garbage, all curiosity, like he'd throw all the cards onto the table for her—no tricks—and see if she could figure out how to stack 'em into a house herself. "I said I had a nice trajectory. Upwards arc to a local maximum before my velocity vector inverted and accelerated down."
Shoka couldn't stack the cards, no, but she could topple them over and see where they fell, scattering over the table in patterns she knew all too well. "You...jumped."
"Ninety degrees." With that he stood up in a single motion, suddenly so tall that he towered over her at practically double her height. Or maybe the hood over his head and the fanning-out of his coat just made him look that much bigger. Minamimoto turned.
She saw her hand in her peripheral vision and felt the surprisingly soft fabric of his heavy coat before it registered to her that she'd reached for him, that she'd grabbed his sleeve and yanked on it. Like some freaking two-year-old. He glanced back at her with something like mild interest, or whatever passed as mild for a guy who only had two settings, ᴛᴜʀʙᴏ and ᴏʜ ɴᴏ ᴏʜ ʜᴇʟʟ ʜᴏᴡ ᴅᴏ ɪ ᴛᴜʀɴ ɪᴛ ᴏғғ. She clumped the cloth in her fingers. If she knew how to do anything well, she sure knew how to double down on her bad decisions. "Don't leave. Wait. Just. Wait. I want to talk about this."
"Define the variable." Minamimoto sounded unimpressed, but he hadn't shaken her off, either. If he'd really wanted to ditch, no amount of her pathetic sleeve-pulling would keep him here.
"About dying." Square breaths. Another one of those mindfulness techniques her therapist kept reminding her about. Four seconds in through the nose, four seconds out through the mouth. One thing at a time. "I want to talk about dying. You're...you're the only other person I know who's killed themself. Like this. I mean I know some people who, like, let themselves die? And that's...that's suicide, too. Letting yourself die like that. But killing yourself. Straight-up just killing yourself. I want to know...I want to know what happened." If her hand trembled one more time, she'd tear her arm out of her socket like she'd gone Sphingas Cantus or something and chuck her limb out into the road. "You don't have to tell me."
"What, you considering repeating that calculation?" Suddenly his face was way too close to hers, taking up most of her view, his eyes narrowed as he studied her like a piece of meat about to go in the pot. "Your Soul's got enough exajoules to factor nicely into the obtuse angle modulation seal. Better stay on this plane."
Shoka stumbled away from him. Her body tipped backwards. Oh. Towards the road. Shit.
His hand shot out. The heat of it around her wrist made her yelp as he pulled her back onto the sidewalk. Snapping her arm away, she rubbed the skin where his fingers had burned into her flesh, the sensation smouldering as if she'd bumped her hand against some too-warm metal, or someone with a peaking fever. "Worthless trash! I said stay on this plane."
"Shut the freak up! I'm not gonna die! You scared the beans outta me you loser! Ugh! Get outta my face!" Pushing him back, Shoka stomped towards the wall. The glares of the people walking past could have jammed screwdrivers in through her shoulder blades for how much they hurt. She dragged the ears of her hoodie down over her face, listening to Minamimoto's bootfalls approach.
He huffed. "What variable is this? Humiliation?"
"Sure, fine, whatever. Humiliation." She pulled the hoodie down further until the collar dug into her collarbones from the stretch. "Look, I just wanted to ask you some things, okay? If you're gonna leave, then leave already. Don't sit there pretending you give a crap about me."
"Ha ha ha ha ha! Who gives a digit? You said you'd recur to Pops. If you're not following that function, all your other propositions can get zeroed out for all the difference it makes to me." He slammed his palm against the wall over her shoulder. "I told you to stay on this plane for those exajoules. But it's garbage if it's not from free will."
"What's that supposed to mean, dweeb?" When Shoka peered up at him, she found nothing of pity or even care in the lines of his face, in the sharpness of his smirk, in the depths of his inquisitive gaze. "You'll just let me kill myself again if I pick killing myself?"
Minamimoto hehed. "Pop quiz. What's the probability of you actually having any value to Pops if you 'pick' wasting all the potential area under the curve from here to the end of the 𝑡-axis?"
"Uh."
"Zero!" He threw his head back in laughter that led Shoka to mouthing question marks. Funny, really, how his wholly absurd nonsense horseshit took her mind off of whatever spiral she'd slip-'n'-slid down, because she spent more of it trying to figure out what was wrong with half the things he said. Half? Underestimate of the century. More like almost all. "I jumped because I wanted to. My factoring head and heart didn't function how I chose 'em to. Didn't matter that I never miscalculated if the outputs all came out trash anyway. College is garbage. Having to do randomly generated tasks with no inherent value is garbage. The path bifurcated. Seeming binary. Either I yoked myself to whatever those factoring hectopascals wanted from me, or I failed and burdened Pops. I wasn't going to let my body win. So I displaced my own vector to whatever spatial coordinates I wanted instead."
"So you killed yourself. And you said college is garbage." Shoka stopped. "...wait. Hold on. I'm connecting the dots here." She watched his expression, that widening of his grin at whatever calculations he read in her features, that slight jittering of his pupils in his fascination at whatever equation she was trying to solve for or whatever. "Mr. Minami. Pops blames himself for you dying."
That forced his eyebrows into a 𝑉. "Hhhhhha? Why the helix—it was my free will. Never took him to be an inverse idiot."
"I don't know why he thought you died, but I think I know...what he's worried about. One of the first things he said to me is that I didn't need to go to college or even finish high school. He doesn't get on my case about me saying those naughty words you don't like me to say, even though he somehow intimidated you so bad that you even get your trig textbooks in a twist over me saying them."
He dropped the cap lower on his brow. Shoka refused to believe he could feel anything like embarrassment. "Factor's a zetta higher-value word either way. Digit. Radiamn. Helix."
"Cute," she said dryly, "but not the point. Point is that he doesn't care if I say it. I think—I think he thinks he was too hard on you or something. So that's why he's been trying to do things so differently with me. Because he's afraid that he could've caused you to..." Her voice trailed off; she ogled him. The bracelet on his wrist jangled where Minamimoto had brought it up to his mouth and bitten down on it. The grit of his teeth and set of his jaw made him appear almost—hurt? "Are you serious? What, you got hurt feelings over this?"
"Garbage," he hissed around the metal. "I jumped from this orbit because I wanted to. That self-centred shortsighted supplementary angle can't blame himself. Correct his miscalculation. Nothing he did factored in."
"Wow." Her hand drifted to her hip. "You really care about the guy."
Minamimoto made a sound that came up to half of an indignant growl. "Null matrix! I'm taking credit for my work."
"Well, Mr. Taking Credit for Killing Yourself, I can't walk up to him and tell him that I had a sudden vision of Junior appearing from the night and telling me that he didn't have anything to do with you jumping off the roof. Tough break. You'll just have to tell him yourself."
"Radiamn feliform." Spitting the metal from his mouth, he lowered his arm. "Fine. If that wrong-functioned ramen-revving radian wants to miscalibrate...not my..." The choking noise he made, like the one time she'd accidentally brought him some ramen with—oh, the horror—veggies in it, made her blink. "Why the helix did you subtract yourself?"
"Why'd I kill myself, you mean?"
Minamimoto returned to crossing his arms. "Don't waste my time."
"Just felt like it, I guess." Shoka bit her lip. It hurt. Her teeth hadn't gone back to normal when she'd returned to the RG. A permanent reminder of the weapons of the Higher Plane all the Reapers turned into at some point. "My parents...sucked, okay? And I wasn't gonna be able to get rid of them without, ugh, financial independence. And I was just...tired. And being stuck as...me. Being trapped in this body. Being trapped in a city that wanted me to be a certain way. I didn't wanna go to college. I didn't know how to get a job. And my parents wouldn't let me get therapy or anything. Because I was stronger than needing help, or something. Morons! Going to therapy is what makes you strong..." She winced at herself.
"Hmph. Garbage generators yielding trash material that underwent the operations needed to turn into hecto quality material. Not bad."
She squinted. "Is that...a compliment?"
"Congruent to myself. Garbage generators all around. So what's the underlying variable you're solving for?"
If Fret were here, she would have elbowed him until he kweh!?ed for her. "The hoozit what-now?"
"The underlying variable," he repeated as if saying it again made it any less confusing. "You didn't just ask me to go over the gravitational force for fun. There's a complex term to this polynomial. What is it?"
"I..." Shoka sighed. Her fingers loosened. "I guess that I was trying to figure out...why Ayano would do that.
"If you don't have enough simultaneous equations," he observed, "you'll never solve for those variables."
The words he said meant nothing, but the weird warmth in his timbre, that sort of roughness and softness at once, told her what she'd needed to hear. "...yeah. I'm never gonna know either way. No one's ever going to be able to tell me what exactly Ayano was thinking. Or whose fault it was. Or...or any of that. I only know...that it happened. So I...I guess I should accept it."
"Naturally." He spoke at his typical way-too-loud volume, yet something about the thickness in his voice made it sound almost...gentle.
Her arms slipped down the hoodie front. This time, they didn't tremble. "I still don't know...what I'm gonna do about her death anni. But I...I'll think about it." Instead she lifted her hand to tug on his sleeve again. "Uh, Mr. Minami? Thanks for answering."
"I told you, you zepto-memory zero matrix. This is my city, and I'll take care of it." He brought his hand abruptly down onto her head. Gently. She stiffened, but through the fabric of the hoodie, the overbearing heat of his palm just felt like...warmth. "You're one of the integers integrated into that city. So you and your exajoules count too."
"...guess I only get one shot at that...area under the curve or whatever." Shoka closed her eyes and leaned, letting the stability of his hand on her head keep her weight from falling back. If she fell, she'd fall forward into him. "...better make it count."
It rumbled out of his chest: that chainsaw noise that supposedly made for a laugh. Whatever. Maybe this time she could live it down. Because when she did fall forward and push her face into his chest, it didn't sound like an ear-bleeding chainsaw at all. More like a lion's purr.
A guardian lion, huh...taking care of his Shibuya.
Okay. Maybe she could deal with having an older brother after all.