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Now that Sara had finally left him alone and stopped trying to pry into his history with Midori, Sou was honestly ashamed of himself for what she’d caught him doing. As soon as he hadn’t had to stick around with everyone anymore and they could all go their separate ways, his legs had taken him directly to the fifth floor library, to the bookcase that had the Tsukimi Shin AI test log. He’d known that was where he was going to go ever since they picked that stupid book up, that he needed to see what was inside of it as soon as he possibly could, and a vice had started compressing his chest as he reached out to grab it.
Of course, nothing had actually happened when he pulled it from the shelf and flipped it open. It was all in his mind, Midori wasn’t going to pop up out of nowhere and start needling him about it, everything was fine. Naturally that was when Sara interrupted him, scaring him out of his skin with the shame of getting caught reading this only making it worse, and then she’d ripped the book out of his hands to go leafing through it herself. No one in this goddamn death game had ever heard of privacy or minding their own business.
At least after she gave it back, she just went on her merry way without asking him why he was here. Sou returned to its pages.
The text itself was…well…very Midori. It was less a test log than it was a series of poems and diary entries—Today, Shin said good morning to me first and smiled at me! With a smile like the sun and eyes like the sea, a perfect visage of summertime!—but as he skimmed the first few pages, there was obviously some internal logic to it. Almost everything Sou knew about coding he’d learned from Midori, so maybe that was why he was able to follow it and see patterns where there should've just been insufferable nonsense—the flow of logic, the if-then pathways, the order of the relevant variables, all of it was familiar to him.
He traced over the lines of a poem with one finger. Was this…really how Midori saw him?
It was sickening in a way, thinking about it. Disgusting. Midori had probably only gotten close to him as part of the preparations for this sick game, and he’d manipulated Sou into helping work on the very programs that were currently being used to torment everyone. Hell, Sou wasn’t even the only person Midori had contact with—he’d shown up to everyone, from the sound of things—and yet…
Sou’s stomach was tying itself in a knot, the same way it had when he’d first encountered that painting of himself smiling in the gallery, when he’d first heard his own voice pipe up from a monitor in the control room. It wasn’t like there were smiling pictures of anyone else, or someone else’s AI running the computers. And now this. Midori was the enemy, someone who had been conspiring to trap them all in this game from the very beginning, ever since he’d first shown himself to Sou ages ago after he’d graduated into high school, and yet…
Sou turned the page.
He’d told Sara that Midori was always doing meaningless things and making it seem like they mattered. He’d talk about and do things with such gravitas that it made Sou feel like he had to treat them the same way, only for him to reveal it was all just a joke or that he was just leading Sou on to see how he’d react. It was always so hard to tell what was and wasn’t serious with him, and that meant that Sou could look at these pages full of gushing affection dedicated solely to him and not tell what the hell it meant. If it meant anything at all. If Kanna had survived instead of Sou, would there have been Kanna portraits and pictures on the walls? A Kanna AI manning the control room, a Kanna diary in the library? Sou felt sick.
And what he was most disgusted with was himself, for hoping that all this meant that he had meant something to Midori. That he still meant something to Midori. He’d already said things assuming that he was—that Midori would be even more fired up because Sou was here—that he was special to Midori in a way no one else was. But was he? Was he, really?
He was grateful no one was pushing the topic whenever they asked about his connection with Midori. He was grateful that no one was pointing out the fact that they wore the same scarf, or that Sou would cling to it like a lifeline whenever he was feeling uncertain. He was grateful, especially, that no one had confronted him to ask why he would take the name Hiyori Sou if the original person it had belonged to was like this, or why all the pictures of him that Midori had taken were so happy.
Sou turned the page. The next section was clearly a log from when Midori had been perfecting the AI’s visual display, based off of all the photographs he’d taken during the years they’d been together. It was getting a bit difficult to breathe again.
Midori had just…taken tons of pictures of him. It was practically his hobby. Sou had always kind of hated it, but after a while he stopped making a big deal out of it and just glowered at his friend whenever he caught him taking another one, and then Midori would take a picture of that expression too. He put the ones he liked best in frames, the way a stereotypical office worker would’ve put up pictures of his wife or kids or pets or something, and now that his memory had been jogged, Sou could remember the context for each one of them.
A photo from a time Sou had stayed too late at Midori’s but before he’d been comfortable enough to stay the night, and Midori had walked him home. They’d passed through a park that overlooked a hill, and Sou had been marveling at the city lights from above when he heard a click and looked over to see Midori grinning at his phone. A photo from when Midori had suggested they go cherry blossom viewing together and Sou had said it was going to be boring, but he’d gone along anyways. Once they’d gotten there, even surrounded by other people, Sou had found himself a bit entranced by the flowers and the petals dancing in the air, and click went Midori’s phone camera. A photo from Sou’s two-person birthday party, where Midori had presented him with a very expensive desktop computer rig, and Sou had been so excited about it he hadn’t even noticed Midori had taken a picture of him until the frame went up.
The photo that had been turned into the painting in the gallery was from later in their friendship, when Sou had impulsively bought a scarf of his own and Midori had told him it suited him. He’d never said it out loud, but on some level, he’d grabbed it so he could emulate Midori a little bit, and given how smart Midori was, he probably knew that. The stupid photo that had popped up when stupid Sara used that stupid fake ID card was…one of the few pictures that Midori hadn’t taken without Shin knowing. Getting it thrown back in his face in a place like this still made him feel icy cold thinking about it.
Sou tried to turn the page, but at some point his hands had started shaking so badly he needed a few attempts to actually manage it.
He hated Midori and the fact that so much of this floor was a shrine in his honor. He hated having so much of his face, his past, his shame on public display. He hated that even when Midori had shown up, he hadn’t tried to take his name back, practically handing the rights to it over like a present, and he hated that he himself hadn’t tried to go back to being…Shin.
Sou had missed Midori enough after he vanished that he kept going back to his place, sitting, waiting, wondering if he’d ever see him again. Hell, he’d even slept there for a week just to be sure Midori wasn’t just coming and going during the night or something, and it was probably sometime during then that he’d picked up Midori’s scarf and started wearing it. His memories surrounding how that’d started were still a little fuzzy, and Sou immediately had to squish down the thought that the reason he couldn’t remember picking up Midori’s scarf was because Midori had come back, given it to him, and then removed the memory of their meeting—it was at least plausible, wasn’t it? There was already solid proof of Midori having tampered with some of his memories. It wasn’t that he was hoping that Midori had come back just to see him, or anything like that, he just—
Sou snapped the book shut, the sound echoing through the library, and for a few moments, he considered throwing it at the floor as hard as he could. He stood there, gripping it so tight his knuckles were turning white, and waited as his heartbeat came back somewhere close to normal. If he was going to throw this at anything, it needed to be at Midori’s head for writing this garbage. It was doing something to his brain.
He took a deep breath and, after another few moments, opened it again to a random page. He was being absolutely pathetic right now, and he knew it.
Maybe what Sou hated most was the fact that he was having to face what a weak person he was all over again. When Tsukimi Shin had been faced with the fact that not once in all the AI simulations had he survived, he'd broken down, destroyed the evidence, and...thrown himself away. He hated weaklings. He hated himself. And he hated that when he'd been desperately thinking of an idea of strength to become, he'd settled on Hiyori Sou.
Of course, at the time, Hiyori was just...a long-absent friend, and someone who Shin could've easily admitted he still cared about a lot. He'd been weird and unsettling and the photo-taking was kind of creepy, but there'd been a strength and charisma there that had led to Shin feeling comfortable with him anyways, and he’d learned about computers from him, told him all sorts of secrets, crashed on his couch for weekends. They'd spent so much time together, his parents had asked him a couple times if he was planning on moving in with Hiyori, and honestly, he'd just been too timid to ask if he could. Hiyori had already given him a key, and he spent almost all his time there during breaks and after he graduated high school anyways, so they were already mostly there, but…
Hiyori Sou had been an ideal, shining like the sun. Strong, composed, charismatic, intense, talented at everything he touched and skilled at keeping himself on top of everything else. Sometimes his dark jokes went a little too far, and he really had enjoyed Shin's discomfort when they did, but over the years he'd gotten more comfortable with all that and started brushing it off as just that—jokes. Hiyori saying that maybe he'd make Shin fulfill his wish hadn't been a threat. No, Shin had just idly wondered what wish someone like Hiyori could have that someone like him could grant. He'd wanted to, if he could've.
And then one day Hiyori vanished, leaving a note behind, and Shin had never seen him again. It had been a relief to no longer have him constantly staring at him, snapping pictures, sizing him up the way a snake looks at a frog. And it had been the worst thing in the world to no longer have his constant presence nearby.
A few weeks later, when the news of one of Samurai Yaiba's band members having killed a man hit the news, the thought had crossed his mind that Hiyori was the victim. It made more sense that Hiyori was dead instead of having run off to abandon Shin and his home and everything that had been in the space they shared. No one was that cruel, not even someone like him.
...Shin hadn't lost hope, though. The idea of Hiyori abandoning him was still better than the idea of never seeing him again. Shin had traced and tracked him as best as he could, desperately trying to keep track of a tall, green-haired man who hated the heat but always wore a distinctive scarf, and he'd been willing to do a lot of things for so much as just the chance to see him again. He would've done anything. Everything. It was almost an obsession, or maybe it flat out was. Shin hadn't cared.
Shin searched for him, slept in his home, wore his clothing, texted him whenever he thought about him, tried to call him every night. He’d even run Sou’s heater at max while he stayed there, in the hopes that he’d wake up one morning and find it turned off the way Sou preferred. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, months turned into two and a half years.
It was only natural that Tsukimi Shin would reach for Hiyori Sou as a way to be a better version of himself. Like Icarus reaching desperately for the sun, shining so brightly, so dangerously, always out of reach.
But Sou only felt sick now. He had ever since he'd first seen Midori's picture in Kai's files, connecting that idol to the people forcing them to kill each other, which was something he...still hadn't come to terms with, even after all this. He’d scrambled away from the rest of the group and puked his guts out into a toilet, trying to put two and two together and not coming up with any answers that didn’t make him retch harder, before shoving his thoughts to the side so he could focus on what was in front of him: saving Kanna. Midori wasn't here. He was gone. Sou had his name and his scarf and no contact for two years, even after his desperate searching. But if he’d taken a few minutes to huddle on the bathroom floor, clinging to Hiyori’s scarf in a futile attempt to reassure himself, that was his own damn business.
If he hadn’t been able to ditch the scarf then, what made him think he’d be able to now?
Sou slumped against a bookcase, feeling tired. It wasn’t like he or anyone else had really been able to rest in the days since the game started, physically or mentally, but coming face to face with Hiyori Sou again after watching Kanna die so horribly had him at his limit. He thought he’d already hit it a while ago, but life had a way of surprising him, didn’t it? Sou closed his eyes, blocking out the words on the open pages, and took a deep breath. Retracing his memories wasn’t going to help, and it wasn’t going to make the reality that he was having to face any different. Midori wasn’t going to just pop up and call the whole thing off or let him go out of sentimentality. Even if Sou caught him alone and asked him, as if him asking would be different from anyone else—wouldn't it? If Sou called him Hiyori again and asked him to save him, the way he had when Sou's timid, meek, weak past self had needed to be protected, would he do it?
Sou shook his head. At some point, he'd ended up on the library floor, knees tucked up to his chest, still clutching the book in his hands. He couldn't let himself think about this. He couldn't let himself so much as entertain the idea. He couldn't let himself be so weak anymore.
No, if this all wasn’t an act, if the pictures and the AI and the book in his hands weren’t here just because Sou was here and had always been there, then Midori would’ve preferred seeing him struggle and fight against him. That was just the kind of person he’d always been.
Not that he’d ever really known anything about Hiyori in the first place. He got…scary when Shin tried to ask him about things like where his parents were, or about how he was affording to keep a place as nice as his, or what he was doing when he didn’t show up to school for days at a time. After a while, he’d just stopped asking, but not knowing anything important about him had made Shin feel even worse after he vanished. All he knew were stupid, superficial things, like how he wore that scarf even though he always complained it was too hot out, that he liked watching foreign slasher flicks and startling Shin at the same time as the jump scares, his favorite ice cream flavor, how he tied his hair up in the morning, the way he frowned just a little when he was focused, his preferred tactics in fighting games, and a hundred little other details that meant nothing. Knowledge that had weighed like a stone as he saw Hiyori reflected in everything around him. Knowledge that still weighed, now that he was face to face with him again.
Sou turned the page. Were these actually letters in front of him, or just meaningless scribbles? He couldn't tell.
Even the AI version of himself knew more about Midori than he had. It had timidly said all that stuff about how Midori was researching human memory, how he was a scary person who loved humans and toyed with them to satisfy his curiosity until they broke, and it could still call him a friend and Hiyori in the exact same tone Sou had used, the one that had gotten him teased back in school. If he had known about all of this back then, would he have acted the same? Would he have been intimidated, but still thought of him as…
…As...
Sou turned the page. His thoughts were chasing themselves in circles. Things shouldn’t be this difficult. Midori was the enemy conspiring to kill them. Sou had just been dancing in the palm of his hand since the day they first met. It was that simple.
So how Sou felt about Midori was…
…how Shin felt about Hiyori...was…
Sou turned the page. He was getting nowhere. He was just getting more and more conflicted, and if he kept thinking about this, it was going to get harder to convince everyone else that he fully intended to kill Midori for the game. He couldn't let these emotions show on his face or in his voice or the predators around him would mark him as prey again.
When Shin saw me today, he once again gave me a smile, and playfully said good morning! Just like the real one used to! He’s almost perfect, almost taken exactly the way he should be from my memories, but something is still missing. I should be able to perfectly recreate him and be able to talk to him the way we used to! But can a recreation really not match the original, even when I know him better than anyone? Can I really be satisfied with that? Can the moon really not be more than a reflection of the sun’s light?
Shin turned the page. He absentmindedly reached up and touched the scarf around his neck, rubbing the soft fabric between his fingers, the way he always did when he wasn’t feeling well.
Well, I can always reset it and try, try, try again!
Someone turned the page.