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Banri came back to awareness in total darkness. He blinked up above him, or at least tried to blink, but nothing changed; his eyes did not even begin to adjust to wherever he was. He tried to push himself up, but found that he could not move his limbs; in fact, he could not feel them or any part of his body at all. Were he not conscious, he would be unsure if he existed in this space at all; as it was, he could already find himself doubting the reality of his situation.
How did I get here? he thought, or perhaps said aloud—he couldn’t tell. What happened? Does anyone know where I am? …Yuki?
But no, Yuki wouldn’t come looking for him, wouldn’t come helping him. Banri had spent the last year pushing him as far away as possible, and, for some odd reason, had the strangest feeling that he’d succeeded completely, broken Yuki’s trust in him and love for him so entirely that Yuki would run to freedom and never look back. It was a strange confidence, and a solid one; it seemed more real to Banri than almost anything else here, and so he clung to that thought in the darkness. Yuki hates me. Yuki hates me. Yuki hates me, and now he’s gone free. He’s free. He’s safe. He hates me, and he won’t be coming to help me out of…wherever I am now. He’s free, he’s safe, he hates me.
But why did Banri think that Yuki was free and safe? Even if Yuki hated him now, there were still other obstacles Yuki would need to overcome to get out. Had he already done so? How? And what had happened? Was it related to the reason he was here, in this strange condition, in the first place?
Usually, Banri thought, he would have panicked far more, awakening into nothingness with no idea how he had gotten there. And yet, just as he couldn’t feel any part of his body at all, he could not grasp at any emotion outside of a detached calm with some slight curiosity. He could not find it in himself to care about where he was, or what he was doing there, or really anything other than the two things he knew to be true: Yuki hated him, and Yuki was free.
After some amount of time, Banri managed to muster up the willpower to gather his focus enough to think back on how he had gotten here, to see if his belief about Yuki was grounded in anything at all. It was strangely hard; at first, when he thought back to what he could remember, he could only picture an ordinary stormy day, until finally he caught a flash of himself setting an EMP to go off. Yuki must have been planning to escape, then, and he’d realized it and chosen to help, and then…
Banri strained himself further, but was not able to collect any memories past the sound of gunshots and some sort of horrific pain throughout his entire body. That was strange—Banri would except some form of memory loss after head trauma, but he didn’t remember any especial pain in his head. Though—maybe that made sense. Maybe the head trauma had been after whatever else had happened…or something. Or maybe something else was keeping him from remembering, the same thing that kept him from feeling fear or any physical sensation in his body. He couldn’t find it in himself to care either way. Whatever had happened to him, whatever he had done that night, it wasn’t real. Nothing was real, nothing at all in the whole entire universe, and none of it mattered, not his life, not his goals, not his pain, not one single person or value or fact or object or belief—nothing except for the two things he knew for certain. Yuki hates me. Yuki is free.Yuki hates me. Yuki is free. Yuki hates me. Yuki is free. Yuki hates me. Yuki is free. Yuki hates me. Yuki is free. Yuki hates me. Yuki is…
Yuki is…
Yuki…
…What is a ‘Yuki’?
Yuki…is free. Yuki hates me. ‘I’ am a ‘me’ because I am hated by Yuki, and Yuki is free. Am I not free? What am ‘I’? What makes ‘me’? Yuki hates ‘me’. Yuki is free.Yuki hates me. Yuki is free.Yuki hates me. Yuki is free. Yuki hates me. Yuki is free….
He continued repeating this to himself long after even the sounds the words were made up of had lost all meaning to him. He repeated the sounds that were the only real thing in the world, though he could not hear them, could not tell the difference between speaking the words aloud or silently thinking them, because he could not hear a sound, just as he could not see the fluorescent lights above him or feel the IV pumping chemicals into his arm.
“How annoying,” said the man standing over his bed, casting a cold glance over at Banri’s parents, unhappy to be in the same room with each other and even less happy that one of the company’s sponsors was here to clean up the results of their son’s betrayal. “This has done nothing to get us the location of his stolen goods. It’s time for another strategy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Assuming this failure hasn’t lost his mind completely, he knows where that boy he stole is stashed,” the sponsor said. “So set him after it. He seems to have lost enough touch with reality that you could convince him to run straight to wherever he stashed it. It’s worth a shot, isn’t it?”
“And what if he doesn’t lead us to the missing researcher?” asked one of Banri’s parents. “If he disappears as well, we’ve lost our only lead.”
“Put a tracker on him,” said the sponsor. “If he doesn’t lead us to the stolen researcher, then he didn’t know where it was to begin with and was never a lead at all.”
“Understood.”