Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The afterlife is a white room. White floors, white walls—it’s a light box, and Rui is standing in its dead center.

He knows what got him here. The chemical solution he experimented with was contaminated. It blew out half his room when he mixed it, and him with it.

He was careless, just that once. Now he’s paid the price… or might, soon. For now, he has bought himself time.

The being he’s just made a deal with—a so-called Reaper—wears goth punk. Or something similar. Rui’s not too keen on the what; he’s more interested in the why and the how. He plans to explore both those questions the moment the rule-makers loosen his leash.

The Reaper paces a slow circle around him, appraising him. When she comes back around to his front, he breaks the silence.

“This isn’t what I expected,” he offers. “I don’t feel very dead.”

It’s the only reason he’s able to stay calm, but he keeps that to himself.

“Oh, you’re suuuper dead,” she says, borderline gleeful. Her voice echoes when his hadn’t. It must be a higher being thing then, even if her tone is decidedly not divine. “You wouldn’t be able to register for the Game otherwise!”

She tosses him a small drawstring bag. Metal clinks when he catches it.

“Everything’s in order. I’ve already collected your entry fee. You have one week—survive, and you get to reclaim your life. Isn’t that exciting!!”

She giggles. The decorative spikes on her faux leather belts gleam, but they’re duller than her grin. “Have fun!”

Rui forces himself to keep his vague, polite smile. This won’t be a game to him, or any of the other Players. He’ll play by the rules, but not by the book.

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The 1st Day

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When Rui wakes up next, it’s high noon, and he’s on the crosswalks of Scramble Crossing.

He’s standing still in a crowd that flows around him, but he doesn’t bother trying to blend in. There’s no need to—he’s invisible to them. In different circumstances, he’d be beside himself theorizing how it worked, but now, he takes inventory.

Is his death on the news? He cranes his neck up. An ad for a game called Tin Pin Slammer covers the distant highrise billboards. Its bright primary colors combine with jagged action bubbles to convey excitement. When it begins to loop, Rui tunes it out.

The only things he has on him are the clothes on his back, his phone, and the pouch the Reaper in the white room had given him. When he checks his list of contacts, it’s blank. He only had his parents’ information stored in there before, but this is enough to know that the Reapers have hacked his phone.

He doesn’t have cell service either, and he can’t access any apps, except for his messages. When he checks that, he finds that his log has been cleared out as well.

Rui backs out into the home screen and eyes the rows of icons. All those apps, rendered inaccessible. Even the one he wrote for tracking Robo-Nene is out for the count. 

If he just had his bag with him, he might be able to restore it and find her. She’s the closest thing he has to a friend who shares his passion for theater, and is the robot he’s the proudest of creating.

That said, sentimentality isn’t the only reason he wants to find her. If it turns out that she can fight what he’ll be up against, he might have more time to figure out the inner workings of the Game—and how he can bend the rules.

He scrolls to the next page of apps, then pauses. An unfamiliar app sits in the bottom corner. Its icon is a grayscale Ferris wheel among floating park attractions.

He has the oddest feeling that it’s frozen in time, as if it’s normally animated… but he’s never seen it before. He shouldn’t expect it to be moving at all.

The Reapers said they’d take what he cared about the most as his entry fee. Is this strange expectation of his somehow connected to that? Why would he care about an app so much?

…No use pondering it now. He files the oddity away and stows his phone back into its pocket.

The pouch contains a set of round pin badges, each printed with a unique abstract artwork. He was told they would be his weapons: against the Reapers, against the Noise, and even against other Players.

He wouldn’t have believed it, but now, when he touches each one for the first time, he suddenly knows what power lies inside each: telekinesis, fulgurkinesis, pyrokinesis….

Rui huffs a laugh as he recalls a pitch he once made to someone: my specialties are earthquakes, thunderstorms, and pyrotechnics. Ironically, it’s as if that pitch is about to take a level in accuracy now that he’s dead.

That said, he can’t tell if he’ll be able to use them unless he makes a pact with another Player. Until he does, he’s a sitting duck.

It follows, then, that he should really begin looking for one.

He moves with the last of the crowd to the curbside, on the off chance that cars can still run him over. People shift around him as if they can see him. He knows they can’t, but when he notices a pair of downcast children waiting by the lamppost, he juggles his pins in front of them anyway. Just in case.

Predictably, they don’t see his makeshift show. They step off the sidewalk with frowns still on their faces, and Rui feels his heart sink. Being invisible makes him feel the reality of the situation more: he’s just a ghost now, haunting the living.

In a week, or less than that, maybe he won’t even be a ghost. He might be nothing, erased.

Rui rejects this thought so much that it hits him harder than the realization that he’s actually dead. He hates the idea of being erased to the point where his stomach twists in protest.

Because, in his mind's eye, he sees the unrealized blueprints still stacked high on his desk; he remembers the stage plays he has painstakingly adapted for a robot cast. And, with such warmth that his heart hurts, he feels the dream he carries of connecting people across borders with his stage direction.

Rui is dead, but he also isn’t yet. He’s going to take back what is his—no matter what.

He leans against a railing and flips the Player pin in his hand. If he had his robots, he could put on a flashier show and identify Players from the ones who pause to look, but he isn’t sure about heading to his house to pick some up at this stage.

The only option left is to manually look: with his eyes, and with the mind scanning ability the Player pin affords him.

Nothing to do but to get to work. If he’s lucky, he can make a pact before the Game truly starts.

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As luck would have it, the Game starts before Rui finds a partner.

His phone beeps cheerily first, followed by a deep pain in his right palm. He raises his hand and sees a countdown tattooed on it in jagged black and red text.

0 hours, 59 minutes, and 57 seconds. 56… 55…. It flickers with live updates.

He checks, briefly, to see if he can peel it off. He can’t, so he leaves the magical tattoo alone and looks instead at his phone.

Building 104… Rui looks across the intersection again. So many people, and not a single one so far had a Player pin. He catches flashes of green in the spaces between people’s feet: frogs, larger than they have any right to be. They hop unmistakably toward him.

Those are the Noise, then. They look relatively harmless, but considering they’re manifestations of negative feelings and are out to erase him, Rui won’t take his chances. He turns tail and runs west. He’ll have to bet on meeting someone along the way.

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“Someone help me!! Please!!!”

The shout is loud as thunder, clear to Rui’s ears as if the station entrance is devoid of people. It isn’t—it’s packed so full that he can’t see the owner of the voice.

But he needs to find him, and fast. Not a single person has paid the voice of distress any mind: he’s a Player, and likely one without a partner.

“Over here!” Rui shouts. He hasn’t shouted like this in ages, but he manages to pitch his voice over the crowd just fine. “I’m next to Hachiko!”

“Gahhh! Okay!” The voice comes closer. “Stay away!! Leave me alone!”

A boy sprints into view and veers toward him. His amber eyes are blown wide with fear, but when he spots Rui, they fill with relief. 

He doesn’t seem like much of a fighter; Rui doesn’t see a lick of determination cross the boy’s face even when the possibility of power dangles before them both. However, next to the fish logo on his blazer is the gray and black pin of a Player, and that’s all Rui needs.

“Will you make a pact with me,” he says more than asks as he rushes forward. Three frogs follow the boy, but they’re a few seconds away—enough time to seal a deal. “We’ll be able to fight them.”

I’ll be able to fight them.

The boy nods, frantic, and just like that, light envelops them.

When it fades, a new energy rushes through Rui’s veins. The power in the pins he touched earlier thrum now not over skin, but deeper now in the very fiber of his being. He breathes in deep, feels warmth spark at his fingertips.

Ah, yes. He can fight now.

He raises a hand, and the frog nearest to them bursts into flame. Only a second later, it disintegrates into pixelated dust. Mopping up the rest feels like child’s play.

The boy rushes up to him when the final one disappears. He’s beaming, wide and bright and a touch too familiar for an absolute stranger. Rui is about to chalk it up to individual personality, but then the boy opens his mouth. “Rui!”

Rui’s blood freezes. How does he know?

…How does Rui not know?

The boy continues, “Thank goodness we met up. I’m sorry I couldn’t help with the fighting, but it looks like you didn’t….” Something makes him trail off and shrink a little, but Rui doesn’t care to guess what. He’s still stuck on the implication of this stranger knowing his name. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to be deadweight. I’m not very good at—“

“I’m fine with that,” Rui cuts him off, a little brusque. When the boy stiffens up, he makes an effort to soften his tone. “Using pins isn’t possible without a pact. I couldn’t have gotten rid of them without you.”

The boy relaxes, the tension leaving his shoulders, so Rui offers a smile and moves on. “But why do you know my name? I don’t”—know you—“remember you.”

The boy’s mouth drops open. “You… you don’t?!”

Rui nods with a wince. For someone so quick to apologize, he really has pipes. It’s a strange mismatch.

Anyhow, he does a cursory sweep of the station—no Noise drawn by the boy’s shout. Good.

The boy continues, “What about Emu? Emu Otori?”

Rui shakes his head. But that family name… he does recall two other Otoris. Are they related? He tries to follow the thought, but it evades capture like water through a sieve.

“Nene Kusanagi?”

“It doesn’t ring a bell,” he says, though he does recognize that the name matches Robo-Nene’s. He’s beginning to suspect that’s not a coincidence.

The boy’s eyebrows shoot up. “Not even Nene? She’s your childhood friend! You two walk home together almost every day!”

Ahh. If Rui thinks about why he built Robo-Nene, he remembers that he wanted a companion. He’d picked facial features based on a random image he found on the internet—or so he thought.

Or so he was made to think.

His head is beginning to hurt.

“Any other names?” he hears himself ask.

Get more data. He needs more data. It’s too early to draw conclusions. How much has he forgotten? What else is different?

The boy purses his lips, then suggests, quieter, “Shosuke Otori?”

One of the Otoris he remembers. The name is familiar and comes with a face—sharp pink eyes, short brown hair that’s styled on the wilder side. But any details of how he knows the man are missing. He says as much and watches the boy’s eyebrows furrow.

“Mizuki Akiyama?”

That one’s a yes. “We met on the rooftop in middle school.”

“Toya Aoyagi?”

Another yes. “He’s a lowerclassman at my school. We met during a gig for a wedding.”

The crosscheck goes on, and two hunches become unavoidable truths.

The first is that Rui is missing all of his memories of three specific people. Anything related to them in his memory has been erased or modified to exclude them.

The second is that those people are his closest friends.

They form a troupe called Wonderlands x Showtime, the boy tells him. As he goes on answering Rui’s questions, he beams with pride and gestures animatedly to go along with his words.

Apparently, they were traveling as ambassadors for the local theme park and had put on shows together for almost a year. With Emu’s acrobatic prowess and gutsy personality, Nene’s versatile singing and quality acting, and Rui’s own creative stage direction, their shows were full of warmth, hope, and fun. They even went viral with a show that turned their entire park into a stage.

Rui asks for details about the stage productions they’ve put on, and the boy lights up even more. In Rui’s memory, the plans and experiments the boy describes are still just that, but the troupe had helped him bring them to life.

He’d tossed Emu toward the moon countless times, both on stage and just for fun. Sometimes, the boy adds a little more softly, he had launched him too. As he shares that, his smile shifts, mellowing around the edges. The feeling it carries is one Rui is well acquainted with: yearning.

Rui can see why he would feel that way. Just from hearing about it, Rui feels the same. The boy’s retelling of their shared past feels like all of his dreams come true. It certainly seems worthy of being his entry fee.

He just has one final question, and he asks it while looking straight at the boy. “What’s your name?”

The boy falls silent, then looks away.

“Tsukasa,” he says, simple and quiet. “Tsukasa Tenma.”

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Welcome to the Underground

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Chapter Closed.