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After conferring with the sponsor, they fully sedated the boy and moved him into a different, more private hospital room. An incision was made in his upper arm and a small tracking device inserted; the cut was sewn up and bandaged tight. His arm, broken in the spasming of his muscles during his electrocution, was re-broken and put in a cast; his body was cleaned and his cuts were opened and then bandaged. They did not waste stitches on his face. A gaping wound, a cast on an arm…the boy would be much better bait if he was visibly injured, and they needed to reel in their fish desperately. After that, they removed the IV and waited for the boy to awaken on his own.
It took hours. All of the drugs in the boy’s system took time to wear off, and his injuries had taken quite the toll. Though he had technically come out of his coma a week and a half after he had stolen away Orikasa Yukito, they had kept in under since, and he was still extremely concussed. Even when he finally awoke, breaths coming quick with agony, he did not move from where he lay still in his hospital bed, eyes unfocused up at the ceiling. This stillness did not save him, however; a few moments after he woke, a woman’s face appeared over his.
“You’re finally awake…” she said. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you’ve caused us?!”
The boy remained silent, though his eyes focused on her face. She was entirely unfamiliar to him, though something in the unfamiliarity felt wrong. He should have known who she was. He should have known where he was laying. He should have recognized her and begun formulating a plan by now.
He couldn’t. He couldn’t think of a single thing. He’d caused her “us” trouble? Who were they, and why was he supposed to care? He didn’t know who she was. He didn’t know who she represented. He didn’t know anything.
…No, that wasn’t quite true. There was something, something on the tip of his tongue…sounds that were phonemes that were words that were sentences. What were they? What did they mean?
“You thought you could let that boy escape, did you?” she said. “You’ve bankrupted the company and destroyed our family!”
“Our” family… Probably, he thought, it was the same “our” as her earlier “us” had been. Nothing to do with him. Not his family. He didn’t know what she was talking about, and he didn’t care. More importantly, what was that thing he knew? That one thing, that was truer than the truth, that had rattled around in his head even when there was nothing left…that thing…that was his family, he thought, that had some knowledge of his own real family, and it was true, and if he could just remember it…
“What were you thinking?” the woman continued. “You’ve ruined us, and it was for nothing. The boy didn’t even get away. That child…your precious Yuki… died in the escape attempt.”
“Yuki…” the boy echoed, and the syllables were familiar on his lips, and then memory crashed into him and sucked him under like a tidal wave. Yuki hates me. Yuki is free. Yuki hates me. Yuki is free. Come with me, ___. You’ve already unlocked the gate. No, oh, no. I couldn’t, Yuki. I really couldn’t. You can. I won’t, then. Not even if I tell you I need you? Not even then. And if I tell you I love you? Yuki hates me. Yuki is free. Please, just tell me what I need to do for you to forgive me. I miss you. I love you. Yuki hates me. Yuki hates me. Yuki hates me. And Yuki is free. It hurts. RUN! You’re shaking, ___. I need you. It’s a lie. You’ll survive just fine out there without me. Yuki hates me. Yuki is free. Better even. Two people are more conspicuous than one. Yuki hates me. ___, I love you. Yuki is free. His breath quickened. He couldn’t remember what Yuki looked like. He couldn’t remember what name it was Yuki had called him by. Why couldn’t he remember? He needed to find Yuki. He needed to find Yuki.
“You were the one who killed him, who destroyed the company’s very important resource. You failed your job more spectacularly than anyone even feared from you.”
“Yuki…” the boy said again. “I need to find Yuki…”
The woman stood. “Yes, you do,” she said. “Find him—if you can. Or will you just fail us again?”
Again with her “us”. The boy didn’t care about that. He had his own “us”. He had his own family, and it was real, and its name was Yuki. Yuki hated him, but that was probably for the best, if he was such a failure. He just needed to find him and remember more about him and learn what he looked like, that was all. Maybe Yuki would hate him even more after that. That would be nice. Then he wouldn’t be so damn alone.
The door closed behind the woman, and the boy struggled into a sitting position. “Yuki,” he said again. “Yuki, Yuki…Yuki hates me.” A truth. “Yuki is free.” A truth. “Yuki hates me.” But what else was true? “Yuki is free.” The woman had said he was dead. “Yuki is dead,” he tried. The words felt wrong on his tongue, but hearing them in the air, in his own voice, made them sound almost as true as his truer-than-truth repetitions. Yuki is free, Yuki hates me, Yuki is free, Yuki is free, Yuki is free…free…free…dead…
He screamed, doubling over, pressing his head into his hands and howling all the louder when one of them came away bloody and a sharp pain shot through his head. He screamed and he screamed, his head snapping backwards to stare at the ceiling, at the walls, at the security camera nestled between room and roof watching him, recording him. He screamed at it, wordless grief, keening rage, and pushed himself off of the bed in its direction—but his legs would not hold him up, and he collapsed to the floor, writhing with agony. His screams tapered off into gasps, which morphed into sobs, which faded into whimpers, and still he remained there, curled alone on the hospital room floor. Tiny gasps and wheezes escaped from him, the only cries he had the energy to make, because if Yuki is dead was truth there was nothing for him to live for anymore.
On the other side of the security camera, the woman who had told him this fact turned to the sponsor.
“Kujo-san, are you sure this will work?” she said. “He still hasn’t given any indication of the Orikasa boy’s location.”
“Not yet, but he will,” said the sponsor. “He won’t be able to help himself. That asset bought his loyalty somehow, and he surely knows where it went. He’ll make a beeline straight to it. He won’t be able to help himself.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the researcher is just like Zero,” said the sponsor. “All of Zero’s potential is born again in him, and it just needs to be drawn out…and I would never in a million years send Zero off anywhere that I didn’t know well. I know what this boy will do because I know what I would do in his situation. He will run to where he has stashed his Zero and lead us straight to the property he so cleverly stole away half a year ago. There is no doubt about it. All we need to do now is drop him off in the nearest city and wait and see where he goes.”
“Understood,” said the woman. She looked at the other employee in the room. “Shall you dispose of him, or shall I?”
“I’ll do it,” said the other employee. “He’s my son, too.”
The woman scoffed. “Have it your way,” she said. “This isn’t goodbye, you know.”
“I know,” he said. “But just because you had custody at the time of his betrayal doesn’t mean that you’re the only one who gets to punish him.”
The boy’s tears had already dried to salt on his lips by the time the door to the hospital room opened. He didn’t look up as footsteps made their way over to him, but he did glance upwards when he was pulled off the ground. It was another stranger, a man this time, wearing similar clothing to the woman who was there earlier. The boy couldn’t care less about this; he didn’t struggle at all against the man as he was brought out of the room, placed in a wheelchair, and pushed through the building until he was outside, where he was left alone on a bench at a bus stop, wearing nothing at all but a cast and a hospital gown.
It was a beautiful day, which felt somewhat insulting. It shouldn’t have been beautiful, not if Yuki was dead, but the sky was cold and the clouds were all kinds of shades of silver and grey, like the hair of a beautiful boy, and snowflakes drifted down on the boy’s skin and hair and clothing like a hundred gentle kisses, as though he were sitting alone at the top of Mt. Everest, and Mt. Everest loved him dearly for it. The city was moving around him, a hundred thousand strangers like the veins of a great giant, and Yuki might have been dead, and the boy didn’t even know who Yuki was, not really. He didn’t know who he was, either. He didn’t know anything at all, other than his two truer-than-true truths, but as he sat in the cold and watched the beautiful silver sky a song could be heard from a nearby speaker, and the voices singing it soothed his tattered soul in a way he couldn’t quite describe.
“…new idol group, Re:vale,” someone nearby was saying, and the boy thought, Re:vale…that sounds nice. Their music sounds nice. I like it.
The song ended, and another one came after it, and the boy continued listening until the bus arrived and the owners of the speaker got onto it, still chatting about the idol group, and he was sorry when they were gone. He wanted to hear more Re:vale songs.
I guess that’s something I know about me, he thought. I love Re:vale. That’s good. Three truths. Yuki hates me. Yuki is free. I love Re:vale.
The last one felt different, even though he knew it was true down to his bones, just like the others. But unlike the others, it was a truth that seemed to have emerged from his bones, rather than a truth drilled into them. How odd. Those two truths were truer than truth itself to the boy, and yet the third one that had just joined them seemed somehow truer even then that. It was natural. It was real.
The sunlight changed. The clouds shifted. The day grew warmer, and then colder, as darkness crept up from the hidden horizon and surrounded the city, and still the boy sat there, replaying the Re:vale music in his mind. When night had well and truly fallen, and his teeth were chattering loud enough to drown out even the song in his head, the third stranger of the day approached him, a blonde man with worried red eyes.
“Are you alright?” he said. “You’ve been sitting here for hours, young man. Who are you? Where did you come from?”
“I don’t know,” the young man said, or tried to say, but his teeth were chattering too hard to speak.
After a few moments of this, the stranger noticed that the boy’s attempts at answering weren’t working, so he took off his coat and wrapped it around the boy’s shoulders and said, “Why don’t you come inside and warm up, and then you can tell me all about it?”
The boy nodded, clutching the coat tighter around himself. It was warm from the stranger’s body heat, and soft, softer than anything the boy had felt so far today. He tried to stand, and staggered; before he could hit the ground, though, the stranger caught him and helped him stand.
“It’s alright,” he said. “I’ve got you.”
“Thanks,” the boy managed to say, warmed ever so slightly by the coat and the stranger, and unable to resist leaning closer in to the warmth offered to him.
“You’re very welcome,” said the stranger, helping him walk inside the building. They rode an elevator up to a higher floor, and then the stranger brought the boy to a room with a desk and a couch and a rabbit, and he sat the boy down on the couch and placed the rabbit onto his knees. “Is that better? Have you warmed up some?”
“Yes,” said the boy. “Thank you very much. That was very kind of you.”
“Of course. Anyone would have done this much, seeing an injured child like you out in the cold so long,” said the stranger. “Why were you there? What happened to you?”
“I don’t know,” said the boy. “Somebody I don’t know brought me there from a hospital. Before that, another person I don’t know told me that my dear family, my beloved Yuki, was dead, and that I had betrayed and failed some organization. Aside from that…I don’t remember anything else. I only know a few other things.”
The stranger frowned. “Like what?”
“One, that Yuki is free. Two, that Yuki hates me. Three, that I love the idol group Re:vale’s music.”
“They are very talented,” said the stranger. “They’re new to the music scene, too. Their rise has really been astronomical. How do you know about them?”
“Earlier today, someone was playing their music, and mentioned their name,” said the boy. “And I loved the music that I heard.”
The stranger smiled at him, and the boy smiled back, running his fingers through the rabbit’s fluffy fur.
“Do you know your name?” asked the stranger.
“No.”
“Do you know the name of the hospital you were in?”
“No, but I know what it looked like. Do you know if Yuki is alive or dead?”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” said the stranger. “I don’t personally know anyone by that name, though there is a boy named Yuki in the group you’re so fond of, Re:vale.”
“Lucky them,” said the boy. “It probably isn’t my Yuki, though…he’s a researcher, I think. A very good one.”
“I see. I’ll keep my eyes and ears open for him.”
“Thank you,” said the boy. “He probably knows my name, so he would be able to answer at least one of your questions for you. What’s your name?”
“I am Takanashi Otoharu,” said the former stranger. “I own a small company that works in this office building, and I have a young daughter at home. We have a guest room, if you’d like to come stay with us. We would give you food, and medical care, and a warm and safe place to stay.”
“What, just, for nothing?” said the boy. “That’s ridiculous. And a poor investment, besides. I–I don’t know much about where I came from, but I do know that I failed them. And I probably failed my Yuki, too. Why would you want to take me in if I can’t do anything for you?”
“You are clearly in trouble, and you need help,” said Takanashi, “so that’s what any decent person would do. And besides, I’m interested in wherever it was that you came from. I want to know what exactly it is that those people you mentioned wanted to happen when they dropped you off at that bus stop, in your condition. And, if possible, I would like to make it so that nothing like what happened to you happens to anyone, ever again.”
“I don’t know what happened to me,” said the boy.
“You know how it ended,” said Takanashi, “and that end on its own is impossibly cruel. You didn’t deserve that.”
“Oh,” said the boy, something burning behind his eyes and at the back of his throat. “Okay.”
The man smiled at him, and ruffled his hair with his hand, which was large and warm and safe, and avoided aggravating the injury on the boy’s face, and the boy felt a rush of affection through his body as he leaned into the man’s touch.
“Alright,” the man murmured after a moment. “Let’s get you home so you can get some rest, okay?”
“Okay,” said the boy, and he was helped up again, and walked back out into the cold and into an entirely new life.