Chapter Text
“So that’s it? You’re just running away?”
It’s the first thing Aiba says, as Date enters his apartment. Mizuki’s apartment.
“I’m not running away…” He lies. Why he feels the need to do so to someone who can see his thoughts like an open book is beyond him. …As is why he never got that update that prevented her from being able to do so. Maybe because after years of living with her he didn’t have anything to hide anymore.
He closes the door behind him, walking straight to the couch and lying down on it, groaning. Now that he’s home, the embarrassment of what just happened is playing on his head in repeat.
“And there I was thinking you didn’t have any shame.” The usual sass from Aiba, even if it’s delivered a little softer than usual. She’d known how this night was going to go. He’d known how this night was going to go. So why had he still gone?
…Hitomi had invited him over for dinner. That wasn’t weird on its own, because he’d slowly been making amends to her. Except it wasn’t just Hitomi that was going to be there. It was Iris. And Mizuki.
Worse, Mizuki with no ‘Bibi’. Those two girls had been basically attached to each other since the Naix incident a month back, and yet Mizuki had made the deliberate choice to not invite Bibi along. As much as he got the impression that the senior Mizuki didn’t think much of him, at least she’d have been a buffer.
A buffer between him and his past.
Because that’s what the dinner had been about, hadn’t it? A family reunion. Hitomi and Iris, the family of Hayato. Mizuki and Aiba, the family of Date.
He'd been doing pretty well since returning. Cracking jokes, fixing bridges that had burned when he'd vanished for six years. Settling into the life he'd left behind, and ignoring the itchy, burning feeling under his skin. So, despite his best judgement, he’d agreed to go.
And yet, seeing them all at that table… It had been too much. Hitomi didn’t look that different, but Iris and Mizuki were undeniable reminders of time gone by. Honestly, he might have counted himself lucky that he’d been the one to wear Aiba and not Mizuki, or he’d have been hit with a stronger image of how she’d grown.
(Rock paper scissors, coin tosses… there were quite a few ways Date and Mizuki had decided on who got Aiba. She always complained about it, but Date thought that maybe Aiba was flattered by the attention. Even if things got heated when Mizuki accused him of cheating…)
Guilt. That’s what he’d felt. Guilt, pain, regret, the feelings he’d been battling with ever since he came back from Atami. Ever since he’d remembered who he was.
Who he was…
He'd immediately excused himself on the grounds of feeling ill and had gone home. Yet, he made the mistake of glancing back when he’d left. They’d all looked disappointed… and unconvinced.
And now here he was. Slumped on his own couch, complaining about it to the one person he could always talk to. The one person who’d been paying very close attention as he thought all this over in his head.
“Is that was this is about?” Aiba asked, gently. “About you still wearing that mask…”
“What this is about?” Date asked, confused. “It’s about me vanishing for six years! It’s about me not being there for her, again! It’s about all the people I let down, and-“
“And yet you lingered on your own identity.” Aiba states. She always sounds so certain… either it’s a machine thing, or he really is that easy to read. Probably both. “I have a hard time believing it somehow isn’t connected to this. Hitomi’s forgiven you. Iris has forgiven you. Even Mizuki has forgiven you! Despite all that, it seems you can’t forgive yourself.”
“Did Boss update you with a therapy subroutine or something?” Date asks, scratching idly at the mask, and the vocal collar hidden under his jacket. “I just… can’t face them right now, okay? Not all of them together. It’s too… seeing both my pasts together like that, it…”
He struggles to make his point, but Aiba seems to get immediately at what he’s saying. If anything, she’s a bit too perceptive. She reacts with glee he thinks almost isn’t appropriate for the situation. “Ah hah! So, this is about your identity!”
“I… wouldn’t put it like that.” Date says, unconvincingly. Slowly he’s relaxing, after the mad dash to get here. It’s not like he doesn’t want to talk to Aiba about these things. She’s one of the only people out there he feels like he can say anything to. “But seeing them all together like that, it’s bound to be complicated. All that history with Hayato…”
“Who you still don’t consider yourself to be.” Aiba says, ignoring his half-hearted attempts to dissuade her. She knows he wants this, really. “Although, I don’t think that’s a big secret. Why else would you be wearing such an inappropriate mask?”
“Hey! People have known me a lot longer than they’ve known Saito!” Date argues. “Is it really inappropriate to claim what was mine?”
“Do I really need to point out Hitomi’s history with Saito stretches back much further?” Aiba says, unamused. They’ve had this argument too many times to count since he’d returned… and before it, too. She’d been against the mask from the beginning, though she’d given in once she realised what it meant to him.
He steps up from the couch, heading to the bathroom. His own reflection looks back at him, unimpressed. Better than a maniacal grin, anyway. How anyone could look at his face and see Saito was beyond him… the difference was night and day in expression alone.
“Don’t trail off and leave it at that.” Aiba pushed, insistent. He appreciates her letting him say it, instead of just dragging it all out of his mind. It means something, to actually be able to say it out loud himself. “You realised something back there at that table, didn’t you? Among all that pain you’d been trying to keep down. I still think you should have talked to someone about that, by the way…”
“The only person I need to talk to is you. Even if you can be a bit of a pain about it.” Date says, absent mindedly adjusting the mask a little. “The last thing those three need is me dumping my problems on them, after I’ve already done too much already.”
“Your problem is their problem. It all stems from the same…” Aiba trails off, and Date can just imagine her frowning in annoyance. “Hey! We’re getting sidetracked again!”
“You’re the one who did that, this time.” Date smirks. “Want me to open up about my feelings to someone or want me to open up about my realisation to you?”
“…I can ask for both.” Aiba says, as she begrudgingly adds: “But I think for now I’d rather focus on the moment. Tell me Date, what really caused you to run away back there?”
“You know how I said things have never been normal when it’s the five of us?” Date asks, thinking back to that dinner table. “It got me thinking. I realised something else… the moment everything went wrong.”
“I find it hard to believe there’s a single moment.” Aiba says. “Probability dictates that several moments, many of which were out of your control, were what ultimately-“
“Can you wait till I’m done to start trying to comfort me?” Date asks, semi-amused. “Don’t tell me you’re not at least a little curious about what my conclusion was. That moment.”
“Perhaps a little.” Aiba says. “Even if it’s most likely nonsense.”
Date finally walks away from the mirror. He’s not sure if he can stand to look at himself as he says the next part. Instead, he goes to the couch once more, now sitting as opposed to lying. He clasps his hands, looking down at them. No matter what he does, they’re still Hayato’s. The scars are in the wrong places. It feels so different. No, he can never escape. No matter what mask he wears.
“I’ve… damn it all.” He curses. “I decided that the moment I swapped bodies was the moment it all started to go wrong. When my life started to spiral out of control. Everything can be traced back to that one moment.” He hisses, anger rising just thinking about it. Saito… and his quest for revenge. He’d gotten his body back, but at what cost? Aiba vaporising his skull. He could have died anywhere at any moment. He’d have deserved it. But no… it just had to get to the point where he’d stolen that body. Date’s body.
Now he was stuck in Hayato’s.
“That’s…” Aiba sounds like she can hardly wrap her circuits around it. “I understand that you associate a lot of your struggles with Hitomi and Iris to their history with Hayato, but… how could it be responsible for all your troubles? Nothing could have predicted that boulder. Not even my advanced calculations could have guessed what would have happened after Tearer triggered that explosion.”
“It’s not the explosion I care about. It’s after that I’m hung up on.” Date laughs, without humour. Here, alone, there’s no image he needs to maintain. No mask he needs to keep on. …He’s aware of the irony. “You know why I think I didn’t remember? Why I didn’t remember Mizuki, or any of it? Because life was just so damn simple.”
Aiba’s silent. Good. He needs to let this out.
“I didn’t have a conflict with my past. I didn’t need to deal with the fact that I used to murder people out of a twisted sense of justice. I didn’t have to live up the image of a man who died with a psync malfunction…” Date says. His words are dripped with shame. The idea that he’d been too weak to remember Mizuki. And yet… there’s no denying that life at Atami had been a peaceful one. And now it was tearing him up inside. “…I felt like I was missing something. You. Mizuki. My life. And yet, I never bothered to investigate it. Was… my subconscious preventing me?”
Aiba remains silent. Is she judging him? Is she shocked? Or maybe she just knows he’s not finished yet.
“…I love you.” He says. Words he’s said before, and desperately needs to reaffirm now. “You’re like a part of me. Wouldn’t as much call being without you as having a phantom limb as I would call it a phantom soul. I love Mizuki… She deserves so much better from me. And yet… I still didn’t remember.”
“Date…” Aiba finally tries to step in, but he won’t let her.
“I wish Saito had just died in some ditch, without me even knowing his name. Tombed in some corpse, forgotten.” Date scowls. “I wish the memory of Hayato would have died with him. I could have been close to Hitomi without feeling constantly torn between two different people. I could have come back when Mizuki needed me, because I wouldn’t have something to cower from. Life… could have been so much simpler.”
“You don’t mean that.” Aiba says, firmly. “You have no way of knowing how things would have played out, if they’d have changed like that. Everyone deserved to know the truth! To say otherwise… I’m sorry Date, but it’s selfish.”
Gently, he reaches his hand up and takes Aiba out of his socket. She wobbles for a second, before gaining her hamster form. She still manages to give off an air of disapproval, even when she can only express herself with an eyeball. “Is it? If we all could have just moved on, and been happy together… does it really matter if that truth remained buried?”
“How would you know you’d even be happy?” Aiba questions. He brings her up to his chest, but it seems like she’s not in the mood to cuddle. Fine by him, he just wants to hold her. “Date… I’m worried about you. You wouldn’t hold over people to this standard that you’re holding yourself. I’m wondering if you can even empathise with your own struggle…”
“I told you my realisation. That’s what you wanted, right?” He yawns. “That feeling of switching bodies… it’s the one experience I have I don’t think you could ever truly understand, Aiba.”
“…I can’t for certain say that’s not true.” Aiba says, begrudgingly. “I suppose if we’re making wishes, it’s that you could have someone to talk to who DOES understand. But whether I entirely understand what you went through Date, I’ll always be there to lend an ear nonetheless.”
Of course she would. His one constant… barring a certain six-year detour.
But he’s feeling tired. There’s a lot he’ll have to answer for tomorrow, and he’d rather be rested up for it. “How’s your charge doing?”
“31 percent.” Aiba says, after a moment. “Tomorrow Mizuki said she was thinking about finally taking me up on my offer to go to the museum, so I’d rather be charged for it.”
“Well, better get you ready for it then.” Date says, standing up and walking over to her charging station.
“Don’t think we’re finished here.” Aiba says, well aware he’s running from this conversation just as much as he ran from that dinner. “I’d like to return to it, when we both have cleared heads. Though for you, I’m not sure how long that’ll take…”
He chuckles, shaking his head. “Goodnight, Aiba. But I think you’ll find my minds not so easily changed.”
“Don’t I know it… stubborn idiot.” Aiba says, not unkindly. “Mizuki’s wrath tomorrow will be enough of a wakeup call, I’m sure.”
He grimaces at the thought, as Aiba’s seaweed extract body collapsed back into the ai ball, and she fit snugly into her socket. The yellow of her eye faded… Aiba was switched off.
Time for him to do the same. As he got comfortable, he couldn’t shake his thoughts today. The thought it could all have just been better… Hayato’s body has been nothing but trouble. Isn’t in the nature of humans to ask ‘what if’, anyway? And there’s so much he could change if he could.
He dwells on it, right till the moment he falls asleep.
If he dreams, he doesn’t remember it.
----
He wakes up to the sound of someone in the bathroom, making a hell of a noise. Mizuki, no doubt about it. She’s always crashed around in there like a bull in a china shop, though she’d fervently deny it whenever he brought it up and write off the whole thing as ‘him being a pervert obsessed with what people do in the bathroom’.
Yeah, it’s his pervy nature that wakes him up early in the morning. Sure.
He yawns, stretches, and steadily gets to his feet. One glance at the charging socket confirms his suspicions, Mizuki has taken Aiba. It’s empty.
That’s alright. Aiba won’t tell on him, or anything. She’ll just wait for him to be ready to talk about it… which will probably be never. He doesn’t need Mizuki holding onto what could have been too.
With that out of the way, he turns to much more pressing issues. Checking to see if she vandalized any of his stash last night out of annoyance. He’s been working hard on rebuilding his collection, and he doesn’t need a vengeful Mizuki hampering his progress.
Carefully, he turns the speaker around, scratching at its back until he finds the right point to… there we go. The back falls out, and it reveals a sight Date never could have expected.
Magazines… there were tons of them! It reminded him of the glory days of his collection. But… they were all destroyed by Mizuki when he was gone! How on earth had they…?
His excitement dies down the minute he picks one up and moves it out of the dark confines of the speakers hollow. It’s… not got a naked woman on it. It doesn’t even have a nearly naked woman on it. Worst of all, there’s not so much as a fully clothed woman on it!
…He groans, looking down at the magazine, as the truth hits him. So, this is how Mizuki got her revenge… and with Aiba’s help too! She’d moved the rest of his stash and replace it with… this!
Why else would the interior of the speaker be full of various insect magazines?
Oh to be betrayed by his two closest… alright, so maybe this isn’t unexpected. It’s certainly a lot more elaborate than Mizuki’s usual approach of destruction, but she’s more then rich enough to afford all these without even breaking a sweat. He sighs, dejectedly putting the magazines back and sliding the speaker back into place. Maybe if he grovels enough, she’ll tell him where she hid his stash?
Absently he wipes some sweat from his forehead and goes to remove the mask. Mizuki’s likelier to forgive him if he…
The mask isn’t coming off.
He can’t even tell where it ends, and his body begins. No groove to peel it off from. He scratches at his neck… and realises too that his vocal collar is missing.
“What the hell…?” He mutters. In his voice. Not Hayato’s.
Oh. Oh, there’s no mask. It’s his face.
He stands there, stunned, not even noticing the sound of the bathroom door opening. Seems Mizuki’s just as tunnel visioned as he is though, because he can hear her opening the fridge without so much as a word to him.
He scratches again. And again. Nothing changes. There really is no mask.
He turns around, to vainly ask Mizuki if this was somehow a joke… only to be hit with something somehow even more surprising.
Yes, it was Mizuki in the fridge. She was tending to her clione, kneeling over them. But that’s not what has his attention. It’s the bright yellow jacket she wears, the large ponytail. His attention is on the fact that Mizuki looks like she’s twelve years old.
She’s muttering to herself (or maybe to her clione.), all while Date can just stand and stare.
Finally, he wills himself to move. A step forward, and then a croak of surprise. No response, she’s alone in her own little world right now.
“Mizuki…?” He asks, finally able to muster the willpower. And that gets her attention.
She looks towards him, confused… before her expression twists into one of fear and shock.
Before he can even ask a question, she’s let out a battle cry. He should know, because it’s the one HE taught her, back in the day. But the warning isn’t enough to save him. Mizuki’s elbow goes crashing into his stomach, sending him bending over and weezing… giving the short girl the perfect chance to slam her fist onto his head.
Date’s thoughts were a jumbled mess. The last thing he sees, before darkness closes in, is a scared Mizuki watching over him with wide eyes, nudging him with her foot as if making sure he was real.
He passes out, then and there, with his world flipped upside down.