Work Text:
It has always been very clear, what their father thinks of each of them. Wakana is his beloved daughter, to be guided and shaped into a worthy successor. Raito, as he is now, is nothing more than a tool. A uniquely valuable and useful tool, to be sure, but ultimately disposable, should it come to that.
Saeko, of course, is both.
Saeko is eighteen and understands nothing.
“Raito?” she whispers, stopping in her tracks to stare down at the production floor. Below the walkway, tiny in the shadow of the Museum’s machines, is the ghost of her brother.
She has never seen a ghost before, but surely this is how one would appear - dressed all in white, hair hanging over his eyes, drifting blankly behind one of those scientists. Haunting the place that he died.
Her father catches her wrist. “Saeko.”
She hadn’t even known she was moving, one hand raised as if to rest on the spirit’s head, until she startles. Her father’s tone is low, commanding, and deadly serious. A year ago, it would have been a tone utterly unfamiliar to her; but by now Saeko is attuned to the nuances of command in the new structure of their household. This is not what her father sounds like when he disciplines his children. This is what he sounds like when he disciplines his employees.
His grip on her wrist is too tight. Saeko turns, tearing her gaze away from where the ghost has disappeared beneath the walkway, and quietly straightens her arm. “Yes?” There is an odd burst of pride in her chest when her voice comes out steady. Professional.
“Control yourself. That is not your brother.”
For one blessed moment, she believes she has made a mistake.
“It is simply the Earth recalling his face.”
Saeko is nineteen and drowning in paperwork.
She learns quickly, and then Saeko is twenty years old and her daily planner could belong to a CEO. Meetings, test reports, invoices for replacement parts. She does the background checks on the sales team. Does them again when a vendor has to be silenced.
She trains. There’s a new memory in the works. Taboo . It’s meant for her and everyone knows it, but she’s not ready yet.
She trains harder.
“Back foot further forward on the strike. Again.”
Her instructor stands impassively as Saeko runs through her forms for the twelfth time. One, two, three, step back, turn, strike. Her arms tremble, muscles straining to move with the precision she’s demanding of them. Four, five, six, step forward, turn, strike -
Sweat runs into her eyes, and in a moment of stinging pain Saeko’s stance goes wide and she falls.
She’s moving again the moment her knees hit the mat, ready to stand and start over, but the end of a staff thunks into the floor in front of her.
“No. Enough for today. Go cool down and stretch.” Saeko looks up, squinting against the harsh ceiling light, to see her instructor looking down with an expression she can’t name. Disappointment, probably.
She kneels properly and nods into a half-bow. “Yes, sensei.”
When she goes to rinse off, the steam from the bath is suffocating. Saeko pulls back her hair, wraps herself in a robe, and heads to the kitchen for a glass of water.
As she nears the stairs, Wakana’s high, drawn-out voice comes floating up from the foyer - “Papa, I’m fine .”
Saeko stops, looking down from a corner of the balcony. Wakana is perched on the arm of a chair, her chin and one arm draped petulantly over the back. Her other arm is held out to the side, to where their father is kneeling on the floor and dabbing antiseptic into Wakana’s open palm.
He says something softly that Saeko can’t catch, and then, “Now, stop trying to fix everything yourself. I don’t mind the vase, but we can’t have you getting hurt.”
Wakana manages to slump even further into the upholstery. “Yes, Papa.” Chastened, she sits in silence and doesn’t flinch as he presses gauze to her hand and wraps it neatly. Afterwards, when he says something else Saeko can’t hear and pats her head, Wakana bears up with all the indignance her eleven years can muster, sticks out her tongue, and runs off.
Saeko’s hair drips a puddle into the carpet as she watches her father gather up the gauze and bottle of antiseptic. Suddenly exhausted, and not thirsty at all, she turns and walks back to her bedroom.
Saeko is twenty-one and clinging to a facade of controlled disinterest. Her nails bite into the meat of her palm and she breathes deep, matching the rhythm of her heels on the tiled floor.
It’s a test , she repeats to herself, and continues down the hallway, passing rooms she’s never bothered to learn the contents of. Just another test. I know how to talk to the staff. He’s just another employee.
This thought settles her, right up until she sees him and thinks, look how tall he’s gotten.
When Saeko opens an unmarked door at the end of the hall, Raito is - no, not Raito, she has known for years that her brother is dead and she will not forget this fact now - the child is intent upon two sheets of paper, brow furrowed as he appears to compare one with the other.
He is also, impossibly, older than Saeko remembers. The boy in her memories is tiny, round-faced, barely able to run without tripping over his own feet - and she knows she saw that boy in the facility three years ago. How is she supposed to believe that those same memories produced this thin, serious child whose sleeves barely cover his wrists?
Saeko steps closer and recognizes that one of the papers in front of the boy displays a schematic for a connector gun - a newer model than the ones she’s been distributing. The other is blank.
“Hello,” the child says without looking up. “Are you here for the Memory? It isn’t done yet.” He makes a small mark in red on the schematic.
“No,” Saeko blinks, refusing to admit she’s caught off guard. “I’m here to -“
“Oh!” The child’s head snaps up, but his expression remains eerily unchanged, piercing through Saeko as if she, too, is a complex diagram he’ll need to replicate later. “It’s you!” He scrambles around the table to stand in front of her, never losing that uncanny focus.
“…Have we met?” Saeko swallows. There’s something stuck in her throat.
“Oh, I don’t think so. I was waiting for you to come. You’re the one they want the Memory for, right?” Saeko barely nods. “Right. So I thought, if I waited for a while, and I didn’t finish it, someone new might come see! And you did!” He is not quite bouncing on his toes, not quite the picture of a schoolchild desperate for recognition; but it’s a near thing.
Saeko will say, later, that her response to this was controlled, calculated. That she paused for a moment to take stock of the situation, and made a decision that would clearly demonstrate the conduct expected of Museum employees. That she would never have acted rashly or without reason, especially while presenting herself as a high-ranking member of the organization and as an ambassador of her father’s wishes. That she knew what she was doing.
In the moment, Saeko’s mind is utterly blank as she slaps her dead brother across the face.
Neither of them move for several long seconds. Saeko’s eyes are wide, and the boy’s are hidden behind his hair.
Slowly, he brings one hand to his cheek, breaking the awful silence with an involuntary hiss of pain. Then he looks up, and his expression of shock is so grossly naive it tips Saeko abruptly from panic into fury.
“You will address me as Miss Saeko,” she bites out, trembling. “And I expect your future work to be completed without the attempted manipulation of other staff.” The utter lack of contrition on the child’s face is somehow sickening, an instinctive horror rising in Saeko’s gut the more she looks at him. “Do you understand?”
On the surface of it, the boy’s quiet nod and perfunctory bow should have been satisfactory. Still mildly insubordinate, but understandably so.
Instead, Saeko looks into the dark eyes peering out from behind crooked bangs, sees their persistent spark of curiosity still boring into her, and bites the inside of her cheek so hard it bleeds.