Chapter Text
Third District. Apartment 634. Loop: N/A.
Your name is Wai-Yin (Y/N to your friends) and you are the sole receptionist of the Third District’s least seedy hotel. Which is to say, you are consistently the one pleasant smile between this hotel and a zoning code violation fine. If there were a PR agent in the hotel’s employ, they’d owe you everything—their microdeeds, their contraband cassette collection, their stem cells frozen in some Juncture citadel-bunker—but, unfortunately, the hotel gets jack in profit, so there is no PR agent, which means you get jack in bonuses on top of jack in wages.
The Diamond Galaxy Skate! figurine collection on your bedroom shelf has been a long time in the making and will be an even longer time. In some future, all eight polyurethane boys of impossible beauty prance motionless across the entire surface, your plastic slab their ice rink, your domestic dust their fresh snowfall. This future will be yours. Thinking about it imbues you with a fresh, cold hunger for getting paid.
But currently you’re not at work. It’s Saturday, which is errand day for you. You’re hair up, bare-faced, elbows deep in the stinking refuse of the week when someone knocks on the door. Looks like your medication’s getting delivered early today. They’ll want you to sign for it, because you’re enrolled in JunctureCare Basic, and they can’t take the thought of their molecules floating around in undocumented directions.
“Coming!” you yell. You slap a kitchen faucet open and dart your hands under the trickle to rid them of trash juice.
Sneak up to the door like you’re trying to scare it. Eye in the peephole. Don’t forget. Once, you didn’t look, and you let a debt collector in. They’re like vampires—can’t hurt you unless you let them in because the door’s got your landlord’s name on it, and your landlord’s name is Juncture. Nothing with Juncture’s name on it can be hurt without inviting divine, disproportionate retribution.
The peephole’s muddy, so whatever image you see takes several circuits to refine and register in your brain.
First neural circuit: it’s not your meds guy, which is a shame. You like when he comes because he has nice forearms and flirts back, but you’ve never asked him out because you can’t stomach the idea of dating a bloke who knows what new flavor of SSRI you’re on before you do.
Second neural circuit: whoever this is is much hotter. Even nicer forearms; Jesus, you didn’t know the human hand had that many separate muscles. Tall with no gangliness, broad but fine-edged facial features, eyes wide-open and sunken like that of a small night predator. Medium-build male aged 15-30 with shoulder-length black hair wearing a black bathrobe. Hold on. That’s not how you’d word it, so who did?
Third neural circuit: You’ve seen him… three times. One: Murdower Lobby. Two: your secret second job being receptionist for the SRC, which they tell you is a security risk to even think about. Three: the evening news. He was just a thumbprint of pixels on some CCTV feed, bastardized even further by your rat-chewn cable signal, but you saw the blood, you saw the blur, and it made you sick, so sick, to think that you asked a mass murderer on a date—oh, but, in your core, where everything is animal and mushy, it felt so electric and alive knowing you were one of the only to brush shoulders with the Dragon and live. And you wouldn’t even have talked to him if he weren’t hot. You wouldn’t even looked at him.
The 5,000 cred bounty for him (that's not one, not two, but four Diamond Galaxy Skate! figures!) also made you feel electric and alive.
So now your body needs air faster than your windpipe has diameter for. When you back softly away from the peephole, your vision stays etched in mud. There is a mass murderer at your door because you told him your address when you thought, silly you, that all you were doing was shooting your shot for D-list cosplayer dick like you’ve always dreamed of.
You open the door, utterly confused and bewitched by the simultaneous thoughts of D-list cosplayer dick and 5,000 chit bounty, before remembering that no, he is not a cosplayer, and he will not have cosplay pics of Michiya from Diamond Galaxy Skate!. He is a mass murderer on the run from the law, and you have removed the barrier between you and him.
“Hi,” the mass murderer on the run from the law says.
You blink. He blinks. “Um… hi,” you say back. You are an idiot.
You can’t think of anything else to say, and it seems neither can he. You sneak glances down the hall to make sure no one else witnesses him. The hallway stretches cavernous and empty, but Saturday is errand day for a lot of people. At any moment someone could meander in or out on a laundry run.
It’s too late to call the police, isn’t it? You’ve opened the door. Juncture has forfeited responsibility for you, and you'll be implicated for whatever comes next. If you don't call the cops, someone else can—and they will . 5,000 creds means something different to everyone, but it's a lot of money to most.
“Okay, okay fine, you—you come inside, alright?” You step aside, leaving ample space for his wide frame. “Just take your shoes off, okay? I just bought a new rug and I'm not sure how to clean it yet.”
“I’m fine out here,” he says. No change in expression.
“Ah… Okay…” What are you supposed to say to that? “S-So…”
You won't deny he's handsome, gorgeous, even. But the look in his eye is so haunted supermarket-dead-fish-on-ice that you are not feeling as particularly charmed as you were when you saw him in the Murdower, and you very much would not mind if he left. “...Is there anything I can do for you?” you venture.
A flash of—what is that?—across his face. “We met at the Murdower. You said to come find you here.”
“Um, yeah, after work? Not a whole two weeks later, silly!” You can't help but flirt because you're scared. Your voice is an octave higher than normally—stupid! Are you using your customer service voice?
“Sorry for bothering you, then. I'll get going.” As he backs into the hall, there’s a lurch to his gait. The swing of his head is belated, as if he’s being pulled away instead of moving of his own volition.
You wait for him to disappear into the staircase, the tension melting from your bones, but then you realize those are your 5,000 creds walking away from the door! “Nonono, wait, wait!” You run into the hall, your bunny slippers soaking grime from the concrete. “Come back! Um, let me take you out for…” What’ll stall him for long enough? “Have you had lunch? Let’s get lunch! I love lunch!”
The guy stops, back to you. He looks up and laughs drily. “God, you were right. I shouldn’t have come back.”
“...What? What does that mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. Oh, yeah, almost forgot—” He reaches into the folds of his bathrobe and pulls out a wad of creds. “Here’s five thousand.” Only when he holds the stack out to you do you recognize that his hand is shaking. “In case anyone gives you trouble because I was here.”
You blink at the money. It doesn’t blink back. You move to take it but jerk back before you touch the money, fingertips only fluttering the top few bills. You’re loath to take it from his hands—you won’t cross into his radius. Not because you’re that scared of him, or because he smells kinda weird, but because he trembles with a low-energy resonance that tightens and intensifies the closer you get to him. You don’t know how you know this, but you know you shouldn’t make physical contact with any part of his body.
“Alright,” he sighs. He backs away, bends down, and slides the money onto the ground. “Alright.” He can’t look at you. His masseters bulge taut.
“Hey, do we… um, do we know each other? I mean, like, beyond the lobby.”
“No,” he grunts. Eyes locked on crack in the paint on the drywall.
“Uh huh…”
“Look, I wanted to—no. I shouldn’t—We don’t know each other.”
“Okay…"
“You don’t know me.” He says it loud and monotone like you’re standing at opposite ends of the hall, when you’re really still only a few feet from him and majorly weirded out.
So you get scared. “I said, okay, sheesh! …Didn’t say I did…” You're not cool with this anymore. You pick the money up—it’s thick and feathery in your palms, still warm from being tucked near his skin. “Probably for the better since you’re a murderer and everything…”
You don't look back up at him because you know he's staring at you, and you don't like the way he's doing it. “I, um, I'd like you to leave now,” you say, praying it doesn't sound like a squeak. “Unless you have anything else for me.”
“Then I'll go.” His shadow over you wanes away. You track the thumps of his footsteps into the hall. Doing the math in your head—seven steps is far enough away, right? Or should you wait till ten to look up? Who are you kidding? You've seen the tapes of him on the broadcast; he won't be too far away to hurt you until he's in prison.
When you look back up, he's turning the corner into the stairwell. His shadow splashes monstrous across the east wall, the spikes of his hair distorted by the light’s oblique angle into claws. As he walks down the stairs, the shadow slinks little by little down to follow him. “Hey, uh,” you say, your voice tiny, despite yourself.
The shadow freezes.
“I don't know what your deal is, or how you're connected to me, but thanks, I guess? If what they say about you’s true, it's probably better if we never ever meet again.”
A shuffle. “Agreed.”
“Having said that… “ There is something in the way he looks at you—something powerful that you can’t even pretend to understand. No one will look at you this way again. You know this. This is a truth that drapes upon you as real as your own skin, and you know you will be old one day, joints distended, all the little hopes you didn’t even know you had squashed by time—and you’ll think of him and wonder if it would have been different then, if you’d followed him down the stairs. But what future would be better with a murderer in it, even if just for a little while, even if he loves you? You can't think of any that don't involve the collapse of everything you know. “Maybe after the world ends.”
He snorts, and then his shadow’s gone. The lights dangling from the ceiling wires flicker and buzz like they always do. You don’t live to the ripe age of twenty-one by tangoing with any ol’ public enemy.
You duck back into your living room, counting the cash, fast flicks by fifteens like you’re good at because you’re the best receptionist in the Third District. Yup. That’s a meaty five thousand in your hands right now that’ll surely raise alerts if you try to scan all of it into your bank account at once.
Whatever! You kick your slippers off and flop back into a beanbag. You’ve got a pen, now where’s that Diamond Galaxy Skate! catalog? It’s time to do some shopping!
That’s how it happens. It happens like that, and, once it does, it can never happen another way. But you said to him, in a time that was dead right out the womb, that he forgets, always, that he can reverse anything but the crimes he committed against his own psyche. That it wasn’t worth sacrificing his peace of mind for anything in the world. And that’s why you refuse to see him ever again.
Breathe in. Alright, feel that? Your lungs are massive, burgeoning against your ribs, trained to capacity by one thousand near-death experiences. Spare yourself the games; take the costume off. You aren’t her. You don’t know how she thinks, even though (as a byproduct of hundreds of hours spent getting fast food with her, trotting through the megabuilding tunnels with her, picking popcorn ceiling crumbs out of her hair and her picking it out of yours) you know everything there is to know about her and can anticipate her decisions with adequate accuracy even without your looping ability. But you don’t really know how she thinks, do you? You’re guessing.
As for him? You hate it, but you know exactly how he thinks. You know this because he’s you.
You have no name (Gamma NULL Zero, or the Dragon, to your enemies) and you are the worst kind of multi-hyphenate in the world. You’re a mass murderer–cum–failed government experiment–cum–cosmic plaything–cum–ex-child supersoldier. You were two days into a stable Chronos supply you paid for—in far too much blood—and then you started masticating on what you were to do with your life now that you didn’t have to spend all of it killing just to clear yourself a corner to breathe.
It felt good to be alive, but you lived like an animal. You shambled on and off the interdistrict trains, grocery bags in your hand. You found someone subletting their sublet, so you moved into their moldy basement and fought a fungal infection in your esophagus for a while. You made money from selling your excess Chronos to that other guy, NULL Fifteen or something, who has excess money but no Chronos and hates your guts. All through this life, you tossed a glance over your shoulder every minute or so, sometimes more frequently, and you never let yourself live a moment you hadn’t foreseen.
There was a fat hole in your head you had to plan your life around. Sometimes, if you were late on a dose, your backwards glance caught on a swaying, twitching figure with a silver mask and a tattered lab coat. Go later than that, and he’d fill your head with thoughts of rending. Sometimes he talked to you.
Last interaction went this way:
( HE waves at YOU from over the packed bald spots in a rush-hour subway car. )
HIM: Well met! Oi, errant heart!
YOU:
HIM: Thou peepest mine presence, ‘tis true, ‘tis true! Lie not to thine old friend, no?
YOU:
HIM: Feh, no fun to be had with thee. Thou thinkest thou art a free actor? But is a free actor no actor nonetheless?
YOU:
HIM: You will return to blood.
( The subway doors pry themselves open. YOU elbow your way off the train. On the platform, you whip back and flip HIM off through the train windows. HE’s no longer there; YOU’ve just flipped off a whole mass of confused day-laborers. )
You didn’t want to return to blood, so you didn’t. Simple as that. So now there was the matter of the fat hole in your head, which you’re not sure used to be anything of worth anyway. You never went to middle or high school. You never watched cartoons. You never ate cheese sticks and peanut butter celery made by your mom when you came home for school. Even though you remembered nothing, you knew these things didn’t happen because, for your entire life, you were either training for the war, fighting it, or running away from it.
So there was no harm to filling the hole.
On a Saturday morning, you let yourself seek love. You took a fifty-minute shower at the gym where you also scrubbed the bloodstains out of your robe. You marched your dumb body to Apartment 634—the numbers of which you made a note of as soon as you got home the night you first met her.
You didn’t know how this whole dating thing worked. You didn’t know if she was that type of modern woman to eschew dates altogether. You didn't even really remember what she looked like. You knew this: she was the only person you remembered having ever shown any kindness to you, besides the girl. But the girl was a different matter, being of a different plane, one that disappeared when you went back on twelve-hour dose cycles of C.
You knocked on the receptionist’s door not knowing much of the world besides that allies were rare and love may have been a lie invented to peddle the masses the will to live. Just to see if you could. Just to see if some trick of fate would chop off the hand that she’d inexplicably extended to you.
The loop begins when she opens the door and ends when the police arrive.