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When your eyes open, you instinctively can tell it’s too early for you to be awake. The cabin rocks side to side, as it has for weeks now and will for weeks more, the bus-boat trudging onward on its roundabout journey towards Inferno, wherever it lies.
Forever onwards, forever headed somewhere. Where? That’d be a luxury to actually know. But then again, it’d be a luxury to know anything on this journey, about your destinations or the City itself.
And you find that amnesiacs like you don’t get such luxuries granted.
Immediately, one thing becomes apparent – despite your tiredness, you will find no more rest, now that you’ve awakened. You sigh, the ticking of the seconds hand just barely audible in the still air of your tiny dwelling.
With a trained motion of your arm, you light the lamp on your desk and shuffle to sit up. As you move your hand to instinctively rub at your face, it brushes against something soft. Right, the stuffed bear.
A new addition to your few belongings. Don Quijote grabbed it as we were exiting the gnomes’ factory, alongside the sack of decorations. Later that same day, she’d drag everyone to help her decorate the boat, in spite of several people’s insistence that Christmas is several months away.
In the end though, even the loudest protesters caved in. It was actually rather fun. Don ran about excitedly, with Meursault following her, there to pick her up when her small stature proved an obstacle on her quest to deck the boat’s deck. You couldn’t stifle the small laughs of amusement of seeing her be carried around like that.
Hong Lu took to the task rather eagerly, since as he mentions, it’s usually the servants who handle decorations. From what you’ve learned of him, you’re pretty sure his house is so big it would take dozens of people to prepare it for the holiday in a timely manner, and it’d be work his family wouldn’t undertake anyway.
There was a slightly heated moment when Ryoshu’s vision didn’t exactly align with everyone else’s but you proposed she have her own corner just to herself and that placated her artistic aspirations.
Even Sinclair joined in the decorating, in spite of what you know he associates with Christmas… and you appreciate any time you get to see him loosen up and relax.
The Sinners spoke of their home traditions back then. Rodya remarked about the feasts that everyone would pour all their savings into for just this one night of cheer. Yi Sang recollected about how the League spent their first Christmas in K Corp., having to find alternatives to colourful ornaments in a district devoid of hues. Gregor admitted he didn’t have many memories of such celebrations, but that he used to get gifts when he was a child. Vergilius didn’t bother sticking around, you guess it’s for the usual reasons of everyone being too loud for his liking.
They talked and talked for hours. You merely listened, soaking it all in. It’s nice to hear their voices and learn their stories…
You didn't have anything to contribute anyway.
After the regular procedures of finishing the work day (if faffing about like this is even considered “work”), you went off to your room to retire for the night, when Don stopped you by the entrance of her room.
“Manager Esquire, I, um… wished to speak with thee.” Her demeanour was much quieter than mere minutes ago. You leaned in, instinctively sensing she wanted this to be more private.
“I wanted to apologise, once more, for it was due to my poor judgement of the gnomes’s intentions that our adventure hath gone awry.”
“<It’s alright, like I said.>” Besides, it’s your job to make judgments on how good your team’s plans are. You’re the one responsible for these people… It was your poor decision making that put them all in danger, like they said.
“Still! I wished to show my repentance otherwise than merely with my words. So! In the spirit of early holiday cheer, I wished to bestow a gift upon thee!” She pulled something from behind her back, holding it up right in your face. A pair of beady black eyes stared at you, reflecting your clock face in them.
“Merry early Christmas, Manager.”
“<A… toy?>”
She nodded, excitedly, shaking it just slightly to indicate you should take it. You did just that, holding it tentatively under its armpits, turning it around. Its fur is tan and fuzzy, and it has a tiny, scrappily cut but surprisingly well sewn red coat. Is it… supposed to resemble what you wear?
“A worthy page for thee, Manager Esquire. Every knight ought to have one.”
“<I’m not a knight, though.>” Not even a fighter.
“Thine valliance in our mission leads me to think otherwise.”
She then proposed several names for the plush bear, all with rather elaborate titles and detailed reasoning behind each, many inspirations taken from famous fixers, even some Colours. You caught only parts of it, and it wasn’t because of how quickly she tends to speak when she’s excited, you’ve grown accustomed to honing your focus to absorb as much as you can in such moments… you were distracted. Probably tired. That’s it.
You move the bear to lay it on the pillow, even tucking it in, as if to say “you get to rest a bit longer”.
You haven’t given it a name yet. You’re not sure you ever will.
You heave yourself onto your feet and get dressed in the matter of minutes. Exiting onto the hallway, you’re unable to keep yourself from glancing deeper into the Corridor… What else lies in its many halls? If mere steps keep you away from the Outskirts, where else could it take you, were you to explore it?
Out of the Corridor and onto the bus-boat, its insides bathed in colourful lights. Past that, quietly pass the seagull’s nest on Gregor’s seat.
Trinkets hang from the top of the front window: Yuri’s mask, the photo of the League of Nine, Queequeg’s rope, all swaying with the boat. You linger just for a moment before finally exiting and making your way to the front of the deck.
The night won’t be ending for a while longer, you guess. What time exactly it is you haven’t checked, and your clock is pretty bad for actually being used as a timekeeper.
You lean on the side of the boat, looking onward.
It’s funny. Are you copying Ishmael now? She’d do this so often back when you set sail, like she was merely another element of the bus-boat.
And now here you are, doing the same, except at a time no one is likely to interrupt your broodings.
Just like her, you lean over the edge of the boat to look at the Lake’s surface. It’s dark out, but your head is always enveloped in fire, allowing you to see the face of a clock staring back at you, contemplative, asking what you’re searching for.
You still observe. One of the clock’s hands has moved, ever so slightly, closer to midnight. You noticed it not too long after you left K Corp. The significance of it, however, like so many other things, eludes you.
So many things you only know in passing, so many things you had to go out of your way to learn from the many identities the Sinners assume, so many things you still don’t understand, so many things there’s no time to explain or there’s no one willing to give you information beyond “the essentials”, so many damn things that you are certain you should know beyond the narrow frame of what you’re told, maybe even once knew, before you got your head replaced and your memories disappeared.
Before you were a blank slate.
… You’re not stupid. You’re naive, and maybe too trusting, and definitely too reckless for someone who can’t even hold a knife properly yet, but you’d like to think that, in spite of it all, you’re not stupid.
Before you were the Manager, you were someone else, doing something else for some reason, surely. But who were you? You couldn’t have been a Fixer of any sort, you wouldn’t survive a bar brawl. Were you just a civilian? Did you bet it all on this because there was so much to gain and so little of value to actually lose, like so many others who gamble with the City’s systems?
More than once, Vergilius called your head, and you by extension, “company property”.
Did you also sign a contract? You must’ve, all the other Sinners did it, aware of all the consequences and requirements that would hold them to.
Why did you do it then? You must have known this would, or at least could happen, that replacing your head could cause you such extensive memory loss.
What was so damn important that you’d put everything on the line just for a chance of getting it?
… That one thing you can answer without assistance. The Aspect. Whatever it is, whatever engraving it does, whatever the star is, you feel it in your very bones – it’s important, more than even the erasure of all your memories from before could take away from you.
It is at your core.
But… as much as you want it, need it… it doesn’t feel right, at times.
It’s not your desire. Not Dante’s.
… What was your name before all of this happened? Faust and Vergilius simply called you Dante and you accepted it because what else were you going to do, refute it when you had nothing to counter it with? For all you knew, that has always been your name.
And by now, these many months into the journey, it is. You are Dante. Everyone in your life that matters to you calls you that, or some variation of “Manager”.
… But the one who desires the Aspect, the one who found themself in the dark wood, facing powerful foes right before the bus arrived, they’re not you as you are now. You’ve got what, six months of actual life experience? Most of that is just work.
You have few ties besides the Sinners, and in most cases, it’s the other people who know you, and not you who knows them. You think of Demian, still wondering what he meant by “drawing him a sheep”. You’re glad he seems to at least be on your side, but… You don’t know him. And he’s likely helping you because of who you were, not who you are.
You haven’t a life outside your job either, you don’t even know the very City you were presumably born in. You’re a foreigner in all but name – your words obscured and your knowledge lacking make you a stranger in a strange land.
And you want to stop being that. It’s why you take rigorous notes, why you try to understand, why you batter some identities with questions after battle.
You want to stop being so clueless.
Faust and Vergilius promise you that, in fact – once you’re done, you’ll get your head back, all the memories included, and you’ll engrave the Aspect. You’ll get everything you’ve been asking for.
But… what will happen to the current you?
That head, it will have memories of its own. It doesn’t know the Sinners, the journey you’ve gone on, the pain you’ve suffered throughout, the bonds you’ve forged.
Will getting it back merge your memories, creating some strange amalgam, or simply return you to the person you once were, before you signed the contract and joined Limbus Company?
…What will happen to Dante?
… Will the Sinners stay by your side if you’re not Dante anymore? Will that person you once were even care about them as much as you do? Are you simply… destined to disappear once this is over, and everyone will go their separate ways because nothing will be keeping you together anymore?
This is the City… if you’ve been told one thing over and over, is that caring for a complete stranger isn’t something people tend to do. And once you stop being Dante, go back, you might as well be just that.
Just a stranger.
Your hand clenches on the gunwale. When did your ticking become so erratic?
You force yourself to quieten.
Faust’s words echo in your mind. “Follow the stars, Dante. Star by star. Then… you will one day learn.”
You have to focus.
You don’t know what awaits, and allowing the hypotheticals to overtake you… it benefits no one if you’re distracted.
In the end, it won’t matter, right? … It’s what ‘you’ wanted all along.
But, right now, you are, first and foremost, the Sinner’s Executive Manager. Your task is to take care of them, and make sure they get through it all.
And you’ll ensure that, no matter what.
Even if by the end, ‘you’ won’t remember it or care much about it.