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David dreams of falling again that night.
The darkness hangs over him like a physical thing: the unwelcome, stifling weight of a heavy blanket, smothering him and harshening his breath. His shirt clings to his skin, dampened by sweat and scratchy with starch. He turns over in bed.
His eyes are heavy and swollen with weariness, making them ache, and he blinks hard against the blackness, trying to clear them. Only half-awake, his mind drifts lazily, flowing like a slow river, vague thoughts brushing past him, remaining amorphous, unable to take full form. The dream was unpleasant, but nothing he’s not already used to. His heart pounds in staccato rhythm. One beat, two. One beat, two. He focuses on the calm silence of the room, trying to get his bearings. He can’t bring himself to sleep again, not yet.
In the darkness, he practices a smile to make sure he still can, blank as a fresh sheet of paper, giving nothing away. His heart twists and pounds in his chest anyway. One beat, two. One beat, two.
As immutable as the laws of the universe, deaths come in doubles here, victims and murderers intertwined. Here lies a fundamental flaw in his attitude, he thinks: he dreams of his own death in singular, disconnected and solitary, no person present to push him, no face attached, nor bloody hands. The nothingness gives him neither expression nor form, neither anger nor regret nor pity.
He’s heard before that experiencing pain or death is impossible in dreams, read it in books and heard it in the years-past reassurances of his mother, after he’d wake up with the memory of wind whistling through his hair and the ground dropping away, making his heart pound. Way back when the idea of dying would disturb him to his core, unfamiliar and fresh. The memory of his dream still prickles at him anyway.
(Everything hurts beyond what he’d thought he could imagine, every nerve ending fraying and burning away. When he tries to move, there’s nothing but a moist, gritty crunch, like grinding together gravel and meat. He opens his mouth, but can’t draw in breath. Bystanders step around him on the sidewalk, either unnoticing or uncaring or both. Perhaps he’s just unrecognizable, his limbs bent into twitching forms at impossible angles, face reduced to a mass of wet gore and exposed cartilage. The knowledge hangs dimly at the back of his mind: if he survives, he’ll never be the same again.)
(It’s all pointless, though. The moment he falls, he is already dead. His body and brain just hasn’t had time to catch up to it yet. All he can do with his remaining time is suffer and cling to a life that’s already been taken from him.)
The air is warm, but he feels cold. The cheap synthetic cloth of his button-up (half-undone, nearly cutting off circulation at the crooks of his arms when he bends them too much) traps clammy heat against his torso that refuses to wick into his bones. He twists in place, struggles free for precious seconds against the cling of his sheets, twisted into tangling ropes from his tossing and turning. If someone had broken in here, you’d already be dead.
He goes to the bathroom without bothering to turn the lights on, splashes chilly water over his face and lets it drip down his neck without much fuss. It doesn’t help much. He’s still sweating, body feverishly oscillating from hot to cold and back again.
He looks up, examines his reflection in the mirror: even in the darkness, he can see that he looks like an utter mess. Without gel and pins to tamp his hair down into a slicked shine, it grows in chronic unkemptness, sticking out in every direction with neither rhyme nor reason. It’s a small victory, at least, that he’ll never have to deal with the fuss of taming it ever again. The shadows of the dim bathroom twist his mirrored face into a grim, unrecognizable caricature.
He realizes that he’s going a little stir-crazy, all cooped up like this. It’s an unpleasant feeling, but not an unfamiliar one. If he were at home, he’d take a walk now: pace and pace the empty streets of his darkened apartment complex until he’s chased off the cabin fever.
He reflects on the unfairness of it all. He’s the complete opposite of an outdoorsy person, but he hates being trapped in a small space just as much as anyone else would. The air here is even stuffier than that of his cramped studio apartment, with its curtains drawn and with its heaps of clothes and piles of dirty dishes stuffed to the side, away from his ring light and microphone, out of view of the camera. He sighs. He might as well be a thousand miles underground, now.
It occurs to him that, underground or not, there’s still nothing stopping him from taking a walk to clear his head.
Logically, he knows it’s safest to lay low: that popularity is currency within a closed circle, and he’s already lost it all in a zero-sum game. A murder easily justified is a murder easily committed. David is no fool; leaving his room in the middle of the night is as ill-advised an idea as he’s ever thought of.
Emotionally, he thinks, he can’t handle sitting still for a second longer.
He goes.
It’s the small hours of the morning, and yet — to his chagrin — it remains close to impossible to find real privacy outside his room. When he thinks about it, it does make sense that he isn’t the only person enduring a sleepless night — memories of blood and cold bodies, death and execution, lingering fresh and clinging stubbornly like a stain, impossible to scrub away. He skirts any rooms where he hears the sounds of soft voices, and mercifully doesn’t run into anyone in the halls or elevator as he wanders aimlessly. Ultimately, he finds himself in seemingly the only fully deserted location remaining in the building: the playground.
After entering, he stands still for a while, stiff and uncomfortable. Eventually, he remembers why he left his room to begin with, and begins pacing back and forth like a hungry wolf, hands shoved deep in his pockets. The thought of it being the site of Arei’s death doesn’t bother him as much, perhaps, as it might bother the others. Maybe due to the lack of blood or gore, it’s been cleaned in record pace, leaving no trace of the offending event behind. Out of sight, out of mind, he tells himself. He’s never believed in ghosts, anyway.
When he gets tired of pacing, he sits on the swings and lets the ambient breeze from the fans sway him back and forth. He gets tired of that far faster, and eventually retreats to sit on the floor instead, half curled up, back pressed to the entrance wall and knees drawn flush with his chest. It’s closer to a fetal position than he’d be comfortable admitting, but it’s not like anyone is there to see him.
He sighs. Try as he might, it’s impossible to avoid. He’s thinking about Arei’s death again. Perhaps it had been a bad idea to come to the playground after all. But if nothing else, at least he can take pleasure in the pain her killer must have suffered before dying.
It’s a sordid thought, even for him, and he shakes it off before it can fully take root in his mind, feeling slightly ashamed of himself. Grim satisfaction at a karmic fate is one thing, but the vindictive glee that comes with mob justice is another entirely. He pictures a crowd in uproar. The visual, not unfamiliar in the slightest, fills him with its usual sense of vague nausea. He’s not sure whether he misses his normal life or not.
Though he’ll never go back to normalcy now. Even if he survives, whatever he’d had outside the game has been scorched away beyond any hope of repair. He might as well have panned a camera over his room as it truly is, filthy, lingering musty and uncleaned for months. Hey, everyone, take a look at this! Take a look at what really goes on in your idol’s head! There’s no life he can build for himself now, not with his reputation in shambles. He might as well kill someone. He might as well die.
There’s a sick grin on his face that he can’t quite scrub off, and he wraps his arms tighter around his knees, staring fixedly at the swingset. There had been a cooling corpse hanging there, barely a day prior. Now, only the swings sway in the breeze of the fans, nothing but cold metal and plastic. Forlorn, as far as memorials go. Almost pathetic.
“The look on your face right now… that embarrassing display in the trial wasn’t fake in the slightest, huh?”
The voice startles his expression into momentary blankness, and, turning his head, he can make out Teruko’s form, halfway inside the room, one hand resting on the frame of the doorway. She doesn’t look happy to see him. But then, why would she ever?
He grins, with teeth. “Teruko! Bit hasty to come kill me, huh? The next motive hasn’t even been announced yet. Might get a freebie if you wait a while.”
She rolls her eyes, not even dignifying him with a protest. “I’d actually prefer it if you just left me alone right now.”
“Hmm. Well, unfortunately, I was here first, so no can do.”
“I see it’s impossible to get privacy outside my room even in the middle of the night. I thought I could at least find some peace here.” She runs fingers through her bedraggled ponytail. Her hand trembles, and then it doesn’t. “Guess I forgot how much fun some of us were having at the trial.”
He smiles. Unamused. “Oh, you too?”
“Shut up.” To his surprise, instead of leaving, she steps fully inside the room and leans against the wall as well, staring resolutely up at the ceiling. He would be more curious about why she’d come here for privacy instead of her own room, but it’s obvious — the tight, stuffy quarters of their rooms are suffocating, and the gentle breeze from the fans, while not quite fresh air either, makes even the stern lines of Teruko’s features soften a little.
Now that he’s thinking about it, she does seem different somewhat. A little softer, perhaps, or more likely, just too tired to glare as fiercely as she usually does. There are visible bags under her eyes. He knows his own must be worse.
Surely she’s had time to come to terms with what’s coming to her, or at least more time than he has. The killing game is her work, after all.
Before he can think of anything else to say that might get her to leave, she slides down the wall into a sitting position, cementing her decision to stay in the room with him. She’s not sitting close enough to touch — far from it, actually — but he’s taken aback nevertheless. Is this some strange attempt at an olive branch, he wonders, or merely a bet that he’ll crack and leave her be first? Neither of them should have anything to say to each other. There’s no understanding they can come to to make things better. He has her secret, and she knows it.
He absently notes Teruko’s brow, usually tightly knit, has smoothed. Her eyes have found the playground swingset, and her face is hazy with melancholy. Something prickles at the back of his throat — the desire to say something cruel, or something kinder than she deserves?
There’s something languid about the atmosphere. He looks back at the swings as well, and the odd sense of melancholy grows heavier. He bites his lip hard, and tastes blood. What should give Teruko the right to care — when she’d as good as murdered Arei?
What should he care, either, when he knew perfectly well he would soon join Arei in death?
Vaguely, he recalls swiping tears off Arei's cheek with his thumb; she’d cried for herself then, nobody else, mourning what could have been — what she couldn’t have been, through no fault of her own. What an idiot she’d been, to think she’d have any say in her own future. Pushing away the thought, he glances over at Teruko again, reminding himself a second time how absurd it is, for her to be sad, of all people. Her gaze is unseeing, a thousand miles away.
He wonders if he’s going to cry. He wonders if Teruko’s going to cry. He thinks about wiping her tears away, her face unguarded and crumpled just like Arei’s, and the sheer insanity of the thought makes his stomach turn. It’s amusing. It completely nauseates him. It’s as paradoxical as already being dead, but still breathing. He doesn’t think she has the capacity for tears, not anymore. He doesn’t know if he does either.
Either way, there’s no point in it now. Mourning is for the benefit of the living, not the dead. He feels worn out and frazzled, like he’s only now coming down from a multi-day adrenaline high. Since when did he start giving so much of a shit about everything? Since when is he this disturbed by the idea of death?
“Why did you tell them it was Xander’s?”
He tilts his head, looks over at her again. She’s glaring at her fingernails. Bitterness fits on her frame more familiarly than grief, he thinks. The brief moment of weakness, if there ever was one, is over now.
He follows her lead. Slots the smile back into place like a puzzle piece. “Oh, you know. Wanted to see if you’d be a decent human being for once in your life and come clean yourself.”
“It wouldn’t make any difference even if I did,” she says.
He supposes he can’t argue with that. But still.
“Then why didn’t you?” He flexes his fingers. “Even though they have no reason to, they trust you a lot. Would surely be a shame if they found out at this point, hmmm?”
“So that’s the real reason, then? Blackmail? Guess I can’t put anything past you at this point.” The bitterness in her voice is strong, beyond her usual standoffishness, and he shifts a little uncomfortably, his skin prickling. “Do whatever you want. It won’t work on me.”
He gives an overexaggerated sigh. “Blackmail is a nasty accusation. I was telling the truth before. You’re usually so convincing about wanting to be upfront about what an asshole you are, Teruko, so I thought you might do the right thing. But it seems like, in reality, that’s just a bit of deflection. Tragic.”
Silence stretches on for tense seconds, and he finds himself unable to resist adding, “Not like there’s anything the mastermind of the killing game could offer me, anyway.”
And in response, Teruko—
Teruko laughs. Doesn’t just laugh, but outright bursts into giggles, like a model of a supervillain or an ordinary, cheerful teenage girl. As if this wasn’t enough, she continues on chuckling for seconds upon seconds, hand over her mouth like she can’t help herself, like what David said had really, truly caught her off guard.
Like there was really, truly something funny about it.
It reminds him of Xander’s trial. When she’d stopped even trying to pretend that she wasn’t bitter and rotten to her very core in the face of their accusations. David can’t help himself. He drops any pretense of false amiability, and glares at her outright.
“What?” he demands sourly.
“Sorry, it’s just—” Teruko waves her hand vaguely, still grinning. “Did you just call me the mastermind? Like I’m some sort of genius planner who came up with this whole killing game all by myself? God, just because of the stupid secret, is that really what you—? Sorry, David, but that’s absolutely ridiculous. The phrasing and the idea of it both.”
He gets to his feet and turns to face her, hands clenched into fists by his sides. He forces a smile back onto his face, trying to tamp down his anger. Teruko looks wary, and her smile fades.
“Regardless,” David says. “The point still stands. People like Min and Arei might have been utter fools, but you still essentially killed them. No matter what you do, you’ll still be nothing but a murderer. I don’t think I could blackmail you even if I wanted to. You’re just too shameless, don’t you think?”
She regards him dispassionately. “Okay, and…? What do you want me to say?”
He pauses. “Huh?”
“You’ve clearly already convinced yourself I’m this lunatic mastermind figure. So what do you want me to say, David? Whatever I say, what difference will it even make to you?” She gives an exasperated sigh, shrugging listlessly. “Weren’t you chomping at the bit to get yourself and the rest of us executed at the last trial? Why would you of all people even care if I was or wasn’t the mastermind?”
He wants to say, because you killed Xander. He wants to say, because you killed Arei. Instead, he can only laugh.
“I knew I wouldn’t die in the trial. Don’t mistake it for me being suicidal. I just didn’t want to make things too easy for you,” he says eventually. He shakes his head and smiles at nothing, because he doesn’t know what else to do. “You still haven’t had enough fun to let us all die. That much is clear. Say, I was doing you a favor by not exposing you then, but you don’t seem the slightest bit thankful. You should get me something nice in return. Since you’re the one in charge and all.”
“You’re insane,” she says, and he almost laughs again. He wants to mock her. He wants to scream at her. “There’s no rhyme or reason to what you say or do. Do you want to live, or do you not?”
Regardless of what he wants, it doesn’t matter. It won’t be up to him in the end. He licks his lips. His throat is tight.
“Are you happy?” he says, spiteful.
“Of course not,” she responds. Worse, he actually believes her when she says it.
“I should tell everyone else who you really are,” he says, half laughing. It’s a ridiculous threat at this point, and he knows it: even if everyone knew, they could still do nothing. Better to leave them ignorant of the snake in their midst. Maybe having some illusion of safety will bring them comfort before the end.
She scoffs. "Have you forgotten they blame you for the deaths of two people, because you convinced everyone to reveal their motives? Even though I’ve tried to warn them off, they'll still trust me over you."
It's true, he knows, and he's dwelled on it before, dragged his feet on revealing the truth when he had the chance, and now it's far too late. Even if there was something they could do, he’ll never know now. He wants to laugh more. He wants to cry. Instead, he continues, saying, "They'll find out, you know. They'll put it together sooner or later. They found the truth in both trials, so why shouldn't they find it again now? Aren’t you afraid?"
And who exactly spearheaded those trials in the first place? His voice sounds weak even to his own ears. The desperate protests of someone who knows they’ve already lost. He's never quite been able to believe his own lies. Teruko hasn't made a move, seemingly no more fazed than she had been minutes ago, laughing like she’d heard the funniest joke in the world. The words pour from his mouth as wretchedly as those of a dying man.
David thinks of falling again. When you fall from a height, even if you’re still breathing before you hit the ground, you’re already dead from the moment your feet slip. He thinks of wringing the life from Teruko’s neck while he still has the chance. Death comes in pairs, here. It’s pointless, it’s all pointless. He knows she can’t be working alone.
“Seriously, again — you already told them it was Xander. It makes sense for it to be him. Why should anyone question it now?” She cranes her neck to look at him, lips pursed. Perhaps his face gives away more than it should — more desperate than spiteful, more frightened than smug — because her expression almost softens. "I'm not going to kill anyone, David. I'm not. Believe me."
“You, you’re seriously gonna try and tell me…” He throws up his hands in bewilderment. He wants to say, you already have. He wants to say, I don’t know what to do. What comes out instead is, “We’re all going to die. I’m going to die because of you.”
Teruko deflates a little — on a kinder person, he might have believed her face fell in sadness or regret, sorrow showing through in the slump of her body as she digests this. However, her next words shatter the illusion. “Maybe you will.”
There’s something heavy in her voice — apologetic, almost, perhaps as close as she’s ever come to saying I’m sorry, and he hates it. Something roils in his stomach, and it takes him a moment to realize that it’s not anxiety or even grief: it’s rage.
In the moment he takes to process the realization, Teruko turns and begins to walk in the direction of the door, clearly intending to leave, and no, he refuses to let things end here. He turns and stalks after her, teeth gritted.
“You think you just get to shrug all this off?” he demands. She ignores him. He grins, heavy with the irony of it all. “Well, you don’t. Deny it as much as you want, but you as good as killed Xander and Min and Arei with your own hands. You’re usually so upfront about all the ways you’re a worthless human. The fact you avoid talking about them tells me something.”
Teruko has stopped walking, back ramrod-straight, hands clenched into fists.
David continues toward her, letting his eyes brighten with false cheer, letting his mouth fall into a gentler smile, mocking. In a facsimile of encouragement, deliberately unconvincing, he croons, “But it’s fine, Teruko! You can kick back and relax all you want and talk about how you love it here and never want to leave, it’s not like people dying because of you means anything. Xander’s and Min’s and Arei’s lives were clearly all worthless compared to yours, you’ve basically said as much yourself—”
Intending to force her to turn and face him, he roughly catches her by the shoulder, and—
—And before he knows it, he can’t move, and his head is being twisted backwards, almost to the sky.
He’d thought he was ready to die. It was inevitable, after all. There’s a knife pressed to his throat.
David chokes, scrambling for words, weapons, anything, but they elude him. He can’t breathe, can’t think. Oh god. Oh god. Oh god. He’s really going to die here, choking undignified and terrified on his own blood. He doesn’t want to die, he realizes suddenly. He doesn’t want to die. His fingers scratch feebly at Teruko’s forearm for a moment, before she presses the knife in harder, and the pain sears—and he’s going to die helpless, a victim, just like Arei, spasming bloody on the playground floor like a gutted fish. In the corner of his vision, he can half-see Teruko’s face, teeth bared all the way to the gum line, shiny like daggers.
“You—” she hisses suddenly, irises ringed with white all the way around, all pretense of apathy gone, and he has no choice but to listen. “You of all people, don’t you dare—Don’t you dare say that to me, that these people’s shitty decisions were all my fault, that just me being here and existing has somehow caused them to do these things—They, they had free will, it’s not like my luck was the only cause, it couldn’t have been—”
He scrabbles weakly at her forearm, but her grip is like steel, and she continues to rant. “—And you, you, trying to play these mind games with me, with everyone, trying to burn it all down just because you can? Why, David? Because you’re mad you got blamed for Arei? Just like you blamed me for Xander? Is it because you’re tired, and want it all to end? Guess what, I’ve been tired since before I can even remember." An animalistic sound of pure frustration escapes her, and her grip tightens even further. “If I could die right now so everyone could live, I would. But that’s impossible, and it’s never going to happen."
Shaking, he manages to say hoarsely, “They’re all still dead.”
“I know. I know.” She’s shaking too. He can feel it. Maybe he really is going to cry. Or pass out. She’s holding him tightly enough to choke him.
“Xander,” she breathes suddenly. “Xander, he, he—when he was alive, he loved you, you know, looked at you like some kind of inspiration. Like you were actually making a difference. He wanted to be just like you. And look at you now. It figures.”
In the moment, the words don’t mean much to David. His legs have almost given out from under him. The only thing holding him up is Teruko’s arm around his neck.
“It was so obvious. I knew something was off since the moment I fucking saw you, but Xander still trusted you and not me like the idiot he was… You were a complete stranger to him, yet I was still worth less than—” Her voice cracks.
A warm trickle of something weeps down his neck from the knife, down to Teruko’s bare forearm where she has him in a headlock — and she drops him suddenly, stumbling backwards, and he pitches over and rolls, half-ragdolling before scrambling to put some distance between them. His fingers curl, drawing rough scratches into the hard foam of the playground floor, and he wheezes — more out of shock than actual breathlessness, trying to regain his bearings. Hair falling into his eyes, he raises his head and regards her warily, every muscle in his body tensed.
Her free hand is over her face and the only part of it he can see is her eyes, wide and staring into nothing, as if she’s already forgotten he’s there. Her other hand, holding the knife — the bloodied knife — is shaking like a leaf.
“You,” she says, and it comes out stilted, almost surprised. “You, don’t make me do that ever again — if I kill you, you don’t know what the consequences will be for everyone else…”
It’s an absurd thing to say, really — if not for the blood dripping from his neck, he might have burst out laughing, but as is, it’s like he’s frozen to the spot where he’s sprawled, completely struck dumb.
Teruko exhales, slow and deliberately measured, and tucks the knife back into whatever fold of her jacket she’d whipped it out from, and it’s only then he finds it in him to slowly push himself into a sitting position. His throat is stinging, and he can feel his collar sticking to his skin as it slowly soaks through, but he can tell the wound isn’t deep. Not enough to kill him. He still can’t stand. He feels as wobbly and helpless as a newborn. He can’t do anything. He can’t do anything.
He looks up at her and bares his teeth in frustration, practically snarls. He feels like a cornered, cowering animal. The emotion has gone from Teruko’s face, leaving it an impassive mask. Somehow, that makes him angrier.
“I hate you, ” he hisses. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. I hate you.”
Teruko runs an unsteady hand through her hair — if she’d looked tired when she’d first entered the room, she looks completely wrecked now, her face pallid and her clothes rumpled. “Guess that makes two of us, huh? Leave me alone from now on.”
She stumbles as she makes her retreat, sways but does not fall. David remains sitting on the floor for a long time, long after her footsteps have faded to nothing. When he returns to his room, he doesn’t bother to bandage his throat, or even change out of his bloody clothes. He can’t. He’s too tired. He simply goes back to bed.
He dreams of death again that night, just like every other night. It has a face attached.