Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Sae forgets her.

Neon knows that consequence of retiring from the game, that listless walk back to reality with your tail between your legs and an aching void where your dreams once sat, because she’s seen it enough times before to notice the marks it leaves upon a retired Rider’s face. She saw it first in the dark of Keiwa’s eyes in the labyrinth, that hollow unknowing in the way her friend looked at her even as he stepped in, without knowing who they were, to try and help the others, and that made her wonder just how much leaving the game behind had changed him.

She saw it again in a chance encounter with one of the other former competitors, another in a long line of faces who Neon struggles sometimes to put a name to, and one who held nothing but contempt for her when their game was in session. He smiled an awkward smile at her, and asked for an autograph because his daughter was a fan of her channel.

He had bruises on his face that told Neon he had gotten in a fight the night before.

Then, once she learned that her father sponsors the Desire Grand Prix, it became impossible for Neon to ignore that same look in the eyes of her mother’s bodyguards, once the world reset and they lost their memories of being Riders for a second time. It’s not just Ben and John, either. Every so often, whenever she’s forced back into her mother’s home or is ushered into her father’s building to talk to him, Neon catches a split-second glimpse of an employee with that hollow emptiness in their eyes, and she knows without truly knowing that they once found themselves in the same position she did.

In her own small way, Neon knows that she has felt that empty feeling herself, in those brief shadows of her life between the end of one season and Tsumuri’s inevitable return, with that sad smile tugging at her lips, to draw her back into the game once more. When the fight is drained out of her, and all Neon can do is stare up at the ceiling, with her channel and her fans and her will to escape— to find true love for herself— taken from her, and wonder why she feels an indescribable longing for a life she’ll never live.

So Neon knew this would happen.

But with Sae, it stings. That someone could sacrifice so much for Neon, give up her chance at finding happiness not only for herself but for her family, and not even remember it.

And worst of all for Neon is the thought that Sae has been this way for a long time. That maybe the Sae she knew— the one who grabbed her and held her close when she felt like everyone else had turned their back on her— was just an echo of whoever Sae was before her desires were taken from her, and whatever hollow-eyed vestige sits in her place now that her game has ended has been the ‘real’ one for so long that it would be cruel to drag her back into that game again.

Still, Neon believes she owes it to Sae— to Sae’s family— to try and repay that favor, and help them like Sae tried to help her.

Her first plan was bad.

Neon can admit that, because you don’t get to fifty-two consecutive failed escape plans without a few bad ones along the way. She thought to give Sae her dreams back, to find wherever she was living with her brother and her sister and— while she was there— contrive a way for Sae to coincidentally brush her fingers against the Na-Go ID core, and hope that would be enough for Sae to remember being Sae again— her Sae, even if it feels selfish to call her that after they only spent a few short weeks getting to know each other— and Neon would smile and pose like the camera was on her and make one of the cat puns she loves making and Sae would half smile and call her one of those supposed-to-be-insulting pet names that she can never really muster enough venom to seem hurtful, and everything would be perfect.

Tsumuri, appearing to her suddenly in that way she always does whenever Neon feels like she had a moment to herself, simply told Neon that it is still against the rules of the DGP to involve outside parties.

Her second plan is worse. But it’s worse in a way that Neon thinks she can live with, and it involves asking her father for help.

If there’s any profound irony to Neon’s participation in the DGP, it’s this: she finally has something to talk to her father about.

He’s always been distant, too caught up in his business to adopt the willful malice of her mother, a man who inflicts his cruelties through spreadsheets and accounts and impassionate neglect where her mother opts for frequent scoldings and the occasional slap. So Neon ignored him, and he ignores her except for those wistful moments when he tries to speak with her about her life before the kidnapping and grows intensely sad in a way that Neon always finds confusing, like she’s not really in the room with him, and life goes on.

But now Neon can speak to her father in a language that he understands. He can acknowledge her as a Kamen Rider, even as he struggles to acknowledge her as his daughter, and she can speak to him about the game and its workings without risking another knowing glare from Tsumuri.

And so, after her first plan fell into tatters, Neon asked her father this: Why does he keep hiring former Riders as staff?

And her father had replied, with a somewhat-impressed huff at her for figuring that part out, that if the Riders are skilled enough to survive against the Jyamato, while remaining smart enough not to face a more permanent end to their game, he thinks they might make for productive employees.

Most crucially, for her father, a retired player in the DGP could be trusted to place the company ahead of their own ambitions, because whichever impulses drove them to participate in the game in the first place have been stripped from them.

That part matters most to him, he tells her. Loyalty.

Neon remembers frowning in the office chair as he told her this, but remaining unwavering in what she planned to ask him. So Neon told him she wanted to make some suggestions for her security. Someone she trusted, who she believes she owes a debt, and would be more comfortable around than the security detail hand-picked by her mother.

He stared at her for what felt like forever.

“I told your supporter this would happen,” her father had said, finally. He gives her a firm shake of his head in disapproval, she remembers, the same way he did when she told him she didn’t want to marry that hand-picked heir she’s already forgotten the name of. “You’ve made a friend.”

Her mother’s bodyguards stand watch outside the single door into this cute little bakery in the suburbs as Neon eats a chiffon cake with a matcha tea to steel herself for a short trip down a busy street to a restaurant on the other side of the main road, where she will introduce herself to a Sae who won’t remember her.

Neon has no idea what to say to her once she walks through those doors, or even what she will find inside. An unhelpful thought creeps its way up her spine and lingers in her mind: the thought of walking in to see Sae brushing those loose strands of hair that frame her face out of her eyes while she works— Neon has only seen her cook once, during the time they were staying together in the Desire Shrine’s green room, but she’s exceptional at it— and saying something to the effect of ‘the cat’s got your tongue’ in that playful way she likes to bounce back Neon’s own jokes, finding those little twists of phrase to tease her.

But that’s a dream of a woman who doesn’t exist, and might never again, so Neon sinks her shoulders and buries her sorrows in cake and tries to think about literally anything but what she’s come her to do as if running from her problems isn’t the reason she’s fallen into this mess.

Catch and return, Sae had told her. You can’t find true love if you’re always running.

An even more unhelpful thought snakes its way into her head: Does she love Sae?

Neon has no idea. She always felt like true love wasn’t something you need to cultivate like a plant, it’s something that you fall into, like a nice dream after a terrible day, or a taxi that pulls up to the curb on a rainy night right when you need it the most. Neon has always expected to know at the point of contact whether she’s met her true love, for it to be something that’s silent but immediate and earth-shattering, until Sae pushed her in a different direction.

A more useful but equally unhelpful thought: Could she love Sae?

Neon thinks that she might like to.

She’s long come to realize that her true love could be anyone, that her prince on a white horse could be a princess, and that to assume otherwise would be lying to herself about what she wanted and who she was looking for. It’s definitely a topic she has raised before, with Sara, when she had wondered whether the true love she’s looking for was the unconditional adoration of her most devoted fan.

(Sara has sunk her chances for the time being after Neon attempted to tactfully broach the subject of never-having-been-kissed-before over tea and Sara, with her characteristic energy, had shouted “I GET TO BE MY FAV’S FIRST TIME!” with the kind of breathless enthusiasm usually reserved for crowds at idol concerts. Neon thinks the staff at that cafe will never forgive her.)

Running feels like her only option right now, so Neon is left with nothing to do but fiddle with her Spider Phone— because taking any other electronic device with her opens her up to being tracked by her mother— and thumb through her unread mails from Keiwa and Ace (mostly Keiwa, since Ace has what Neon would describe as a pathological aversion to texting, responding to every message with terse clarity that borders on the rudeness she would expect from Michinaga had he not blocked her number) until she reaches the cute cartoony depiction of Tsumuri apologizing for the lack of she’s read fifty times since it arrived on her phone two weeks ago:

The Desire Grand Prix is taking a temporary production break while our partners broadcast the Winter Olympics. All Jyamato incidents during this time will be handled by our staff. We apologize to our fans and participants for this delay, and we look forward to once again bringing you the best in entertainment when the Reality Rider Show returns in three weeks time.

“...Reality rider show.” Neon mouths, as quietly as she can, and throws her head back in a groan.

Neon will never get used that: being a player in the Desire Grand Prix for an audience rooting for her to succeed or fail. Being a celebrity is something she can manage, something she opted into to find a love her parents never gave her, but having so many eyes on her, all focused on whether she can save the world, is another kind of pressure entirely.

Still, it’s become her life now, to the point where she’s unsure which part is truly the dream and which is her reality. Neon has become too accustomed to that adrenaline rush, the feeling of getting stronger and fighting for something she believes in. This is the longest Neon has been back in her old life since her first Desire Grand Prix. Maybe that’s why her mind keeps darting in so many different directions.

No more delaying, she decides. She pays for the food on her card and rises to her feet, prompting her mother’s bodyguards to immediately scramble to prevent her inevitable escape attempt, but Neon just tells them that she’s still hungry, and crosses the street to push open the door to the restaurant.

After everything, Neon can’t bring herself to look up from her feet when she walks in. She just drops an envelope off with the staff behind the counter, and scurries out before she bursts into tears.

Then, almost as soon as her fumbling hands push open the door to the restaurant, screaming.

That’s the first thing she hears, followed by that tell-tale chant of the Jyamato down the winding street.

Neon can see no obvious boundaries to the Jyamar area, or any obvious indicators of any game starting, but she doesn’t need to.

Even if the DGP itself is on hiatus, those people need her help.

Now Neon has a reason to run. She slips into a side street, pops her ID Core into the Perfecter and, in one fluid motion, moves her arms in her familiar dance to— as Ace once explained when he was trying to show Keiwa and Neon how to activate their Drivers for the first time— calibrate the Adcrest.

That’s the part of the ID Core that carries her dreams and memories, Neon remembers.

It’s the part she needs to work.

Set.

“Henshin.”

Her armor forms around her.

BEAT. Ready? Fight!

This part comes easily to her, now, the dance of blows against the Jyamato. Neon is a flurry of claws, moving in step with the pounding beat of her heart, jumping and slashing to carve a path for the people in the area to escape to the relative safety of the main street.

Find your pace, Sae told her once. Be in position for the pass.

With no clear objective, it’s all Neon can do for the time being. As the only Rider in the area, to do anything less would be leaving these people to die. If she falls, this entire area is reset, and everyone in this area— including Sae, and her family— will die.

Neon can’t let that happen.

But it’s a losing battle. She’s strong, but there’s a lot of Jyamato in this tight street, and they’re getting smarter and stronger with each game. So Neon tries to get a better vantage point, scale a staircase up to the second floor and—

A Jyamato Rider strikes her through the open window.

Neon might be a cat, but she doesn’t always land on her feet.

Torn between lying in the dirt hoping for a miracle and trying to figure out some kind of plan to pull herself back from the brink, Neon thinks back to scratching at the flat of her fingernail in her father’s office, trying to choose her words as carefully as possible so as not to dissuade him from listening to her request.

“As a sponsor of the Desire Grand Prix,” she begins. “I would like you to request the ID Core of a retired competitor.”

Behind the desk, her father puts his hands in his pockets and shakes his head. Neon knows she’s asking for a lot— getting the DGP to part with an ID Core can’t come cheap, either in money or favors. But Neon has an idea for why her father has kept the ID Cores for Lancer and Garun in his office after all this time, and she knows that she can use this to get what she wants.

“Which one?” He asks, finally.

“Lopo.”

A gray-blue figure pounces like a wolf, knocking down the Jyamato Rider. With one fell swoop, Neon has a chance to grab her Beat Axe and strike— she pulls the strum lever over and over, unleashing a torrent of fire towards the Jyamato Rider, and her prince on a white horse has their Desire Driver back.

Neon breathes with a painful rasp like there's a weight crushing her chest, still on her back against the hard concrete pavement. Even with her armor breaking the fall, Neon feels sore in a way she hasn’t for weeks.

The worst part is this: she's also happier than she's been in weeks.

"What's a stray doing outside my restaurant?" Sae is all confidence and that warm smile she only seems to use around Neon as she ducks down beside her to grab the discarded driver and the Raise Buckle the Jyamato left behind, wipe the dirt off the Torus Reactor, and hold out a hand to help Neon back to her feet that Neon ever-so-gratefully takes. “C'mon, princess. You’re not going to get points burning through your extra lives.”

That depends on whether there’s a even a game to be played. Neon watches Sae snap her ID Core into the Driver, and hopes for the best.

Entry.

It works.

“I still have nine left.” Neon offers, counting on her fingers. She wishes she had a spare buckle to throw to her, but she only keeps the Beat buckle on her. "I'm sorry for the present."

“Stealing my ID Core.” Sae exhales, mockingly clasping her hands together to thank Neon for the gift before skipping the warm-up and firing her Driver as quickly as she can. “Why would you do something as crazy as that?”

Neon doesn’t have a good answer for her, so she gives Sae several bad ones instead.

Chapter Text

Two-thirds of the way through a marathon, every cell in the human body is screaming in agony.

It’s not designed to be pushed that hard, over such long distances, and the combination of both stresses on the system causes the body to burn itself to stay alive. Eight percent of a marathon runner’s weight is lost through water alone over the course of a race and, in a panic, the body swells to retain as much water as possible. This is such a shock to the runner’s biological systems that, even if the runner drinks as much water as they can, their body would reject it. Sodium in the blood stream grows so diluted that a runner’s organs no longer function properly.

Neither can the brain.

Fainting is common among inexperienced marathon runners. So are seizures.

Glycogen, long-term reserves of energy stored within the liver and muscles, deplete to the point of non-existence. Anything a runner takes with them will not be enough to sustain them for the race, and it is impossible to fulfill the body’s requirements during a race. A marathon runner can not, in a very literal sense, breathe in enough air to keep the blood circulating through their veins. In the absence of oxygen, their muscles shred themselves to produce Lactic acid, the body’s emergency fuel, at exponential rates.

Even this, the failing body’s last ditch attempt to protect itself from the strain of long-term use, is not designed to be sustained for this long. Lactic acid is a trauma response, designed to sustain the body for long enough to reach safety. It requires even more oxygen to clear from the muscles once circulation is restored.

Damaged cells clog as they dissolve in their own acid. Oxygen debt accrues, and the pain lingers in every pore of your body.

To run a marathon is to eat yourself alive.

So the winner of the race isn’t the runner who’s the smartest, or the strongest, or even the fastest. None of those things can sustain a runner once the body activates its ancient mechanisms to tear itself to pieces in search of something, anything, it can use to survive.

It’s the runner who can push their body beyond all reason, to tear themselves apart with each heartbeat from the starting gun to the finish line, endure the pain that comes with plundering every reserve in the body, until the wall breaks around them because their desire to win outstrips their desire to survive.

Sae knows this: once an ID Core is in a Rider’s hands, it can be used to power the Driver whether the Desire Grand Prix have bestowed the right to be a Kamen Rider or not. Buffa alone is proof of that, rising from beyond the grave with a cracked ID Core, but Sae has seen it happen before on a smaller scale. One of the riders in her first DGP, a former baseball coach who Sae recognized from a match-fixing scandal that made national headlines but only remembers now under his Rider name of ‘Sorry,’ lost by the smallest of margins and attempted to circumvent his retirement by hiding his ID Core outside the Jyamar Area and then stealing the Driver of another Rider once his memories were restored.

The other Rider was eliminated, and Sorry stole a second chance.

It worked, for about half a round, until the Security Riders caught wind of it and disqualified him from further competition. Sae has no idea what happened to him, but she knows it probably wasn’t pleasant.

So the Driver has its own counter-measures to prevent unauthorized access: excruciating pain.

This Desire Driver is fighting against her. Sae can feel it in the burning pain in her muscles as the Torus Reactor draws hydrogen from her body to fuel itself, and in the pull of the ID Core fighting against the software safeguards designed to prevent unauthorized entry to the Desire Grand Prix.

Sae has run five marathons. She’s won four.

So this pain feels like a stroll through the park in comparison.

Entry.

“Henshin.”

In all of those races, long past the point where her body felt like it was holding together by a wire-thin thread, only one thought pushed her through that pain: Sae has to protect her family.

That old desire to win seemed so distant, an echo on the edge of hearing, until a stray cat wandered into her family’s restaurant with tears in her eyes and her tail between her legs holding a stolen ID Core of her own.

Some things devour through their absence. Sae has not trained in so long, spending so much time trying to keep the family restaurant open as its own debts mount, that her body resents being pushed like this even with the Desire Driver bolstering her strength and speed.

Now, even through the hazy fog of pain and fresh memories, Sae is herself again.

“Jun, Mio.” Sae calls to her siblings, standing in the awning of the restaurant, once Neon is back to her feet. In the Desire Grand Prix, revealing her identity to her family would already have disqualified her— but this isn’t a game, it’s a distraction, and she’s not in the Desire Grand Prix any more. “Stay close to Na-Go.”

Sae knows her brother and her sister too well to think they’d head to safety without her. They’re both brave, maybe too brave, and if what Sae thinks is coming is on its way, they both need to get out of here as soon as they can.

They have a break between Jyamato waves, so now is as good a time as any to get them to safety.

Neon sinks back down into a squat, struggling to catch her breath. “Did you read my letter?”

“No.” Sae ducks down to join her.

“Good,” Neon decides, her voice low and level through the modulated filter of her mouthpiece. “It was embarrassing.”

“I know this game.” Sae’s mind goes back to the game with Sorry and the stolen Driver. He ‘rescued’ six civilians but, as a consequence of his retirement, none of them would ‘count’ unless another player saved them. “There’s an extraction zone on the edge of the Jyamar Area. Only active players can rescue the civilians.”

“Lopo.” Neon bows her head down, as the adrenaline starts to fade and the feeling starts to show in her body language that she blames herself for this. She looks as if she’s about to sink to her knees and beg Sae for forgiveness, which is the last thing either of them needs right now.

(Neon wants to say this: I’m sorry. I missed you. I wanted to help you. I placed your family in danger. I placed you in danger. I don’t want them to take you from me again.)

“Neon.” Sae places a hand on the boxy shoulder pads of the Na-Go armor and presses her forehead to the cat helmet. “I’m trusting you to rescue my family. Go.”

Even through the fog, some things operate on trust, and instinct, and both are hard to dull through time and pain. Sae and Neon have always made a good team.

After giving her siblings instructions on how to keep their heads down as they move through the main street— it’s not a goodbye, because Neon will save them— Sae turns back to the restaurant and heads inside, because she doesn’t put it past herself to follow the example set by Sorry and keep a buckle hidden among her belongings.

Instead, she finds Tsumuri sat— bereft of any of her usual forced cheer— with one leg crossed over the other upon one of the stools by the bar. There's a tropical cocktail beside her, a kind that Sae knows they don't serve in this restaurant, with a tiny black and white umbrella sticking out of the glass.

Someone has pulled the navigator back from vacation for this. Sae laughs, because she can do nothing but laugh in a hoarse pained rasp.

Tsumuri scowls, taking a pointed slurp from the cocktail.

“Sae Ganaha.” Tsumuri finally offers Sae that sad smile of hers as she slides an plastic case along the bar, containing the Spider Phone and the familiar outline of a Boost Buckle. “Following a period of careful evaluation, you have been chosen.”

In that moment of hesitation, once the pain from her stolen Driver finally subsides, Sae feels like she needs to hold onto something before she collapses in a heap on the cold floor tiles.

When Sae awakens, moments later, she finds that Tsumuri has relocated her to the couch.

Neon is the first to arrive on the plateau of the Desire Temple when Tsumuri summons her.

This means, she assumes, that the other Riders are presently either unwilling or unable to participate in this latest contest— whichever form it might take— or that she was the only one frantically checking her Spider Phone for updates when the message went out. After guiding Sae’s siblings to the extraction zone, Neon had sat on the edge of the Jyamar Area during the oppressive silence between the end of the game and the walls fading away trying to find any sign that Sae had accomplished whichever goal had kept her away from helping them.

Instead, she received a mail from Tsumuri addressed ‘to all available Kamen Riders’, containing instructions to return to the Desire Temple through the usual methods, and Neon is left to stand alone among the cold stone pillars with more questions than answers.

So Neon stands, with some trepidation, awaiting any sign of Sae and the other riders, feeling every one of those invisible eyes around the temple bearing down upon her like the unblinking gaze of her mother’s army of terrifying dolls, as the realization of what Neon has done to Sae finally takes root in her chest like crawling vines tightening around her heart and threatening to choke the life out of her.

All Neon wanted, as selfish and childish a desire as it seems in the cold light of the Desire Temple, was to have Sae back, to give Sae her memories back, and to use all the resources she has access to as heir to the Kurama Group to make sure Sae had a way of protecting her family.

Instead, she imagines Tsumuri taking both of their ID Cores. Both of them adrift, devoid of both desire and their memories, forced back into that waking dream.

Neon chokes out a sob, and then tries in vain to put on a brave face for the cameras.

By the time Ace arrives, hand in his pockets and that knows-too-much look upon his face, Neon thinks she’s doing a good enough job at forcing a smile to greet him.

Keiwa arrives later, friendly as ever but still unable to look her directly in the eyes after one of Sara’s excited outbursts on the way back from their favorite soba restaurant let the cat out of the bag that she and Neon had spent a night together. Neon likes Sara, a lot, but she came away from that night with the belief that her unconditional fannish devotion, bordering on worship, is not the True Love she’s looking for.

Some new faces enter the plateau. Ace recognizes them from prior games, and greets them as politely as he can muster beneath the weight of years of competing against some of them. Neon, with her own forced smile, tries to greet them all in turn. Neon recognizes two faces among the crowd, who look impossibly different once their ID Cores restore their memories and return whichever parts of themselves they’ve been missing since they entered into her mother’s service.

There’s still something familiar about the way that Ben and John chip their heads towards her with a curt “Miss Neon,” as she greets them.

“You are some seriously dedicated bodyguards.” Neon suddenly stands still, shoulders stiff as thoughts swirl in her head of this— probably her sole sanctuary away from her mother’s control— is no longer safe from her influence. "Don't report this to my mother."

Ben offers her a curt nod, trying to reassure her that her mother will not find out. “That’s grounds for disqualification, Miss Neon.”

But there’s still no sign of Sae.

Then, a strange and guilty kind of relief.

Sae staggers up to the plateau like she’s just crossed the finish line of a marathon, gritting her teeth as she sips from a bottle of energy drink provided by the new concierge. Neon wants to drop to her knees and apologize to her, to say everything she tried to say but couldn’t on the streets below, but the words escape her. So Neon just stands there, balling her hands into fists as she tries not to burst into tears, as Sae ducks down to look Neon in the eyes.

“Thank you.” She says, Neon buries her face in Sae’s shoulder and lets the tears flow out.

Tsumuri gently pulls them apart as she appears on the plateau, because they’re blocking the way to her podium.

Neon dries her eyes on a black-and-white Tsumuri provides her, and watches as Tsumuri climbs back onto the podium in a graceful motion. Tsumuri has always reminded Neon of an antique doll, with the stutter-stop cadence to the way she moves and that strange billowing dress she wears as a uniform, but if she is a doll, she’s a doll of a kindlier sort than her mother’s porcelain spies.

“We apologize for recalling you all from your break.” Tsumuri looks at the gathered Riders, suddenly serious, and then returns to her usual navigator cheer. “The Desire Grand Prix has not returned to its normal operations.”

“Which means,” Ace looks up from the floor, thinking for a moment. “This is a Special Round.”

“A Desire Grand Prix Special.” Neon murmurs, thinking back to those curious games with Sarami in between the early rounds, before Michinaga sacrificed himself to fight the Battleship and came back with the Jyamato.

“You’ve done this before?” Sae, arms folded, cants her head over to Neon.

“Yes!” Neon offers Sae a genuine smile, clasping her hands behind her back to lean in close to her. “We went bowling.”

“Bowling.” Sae responds, brow furrowing as she attempts to determine whether Neon is joking. None of the others are stepping in to back Neon up, so Sae is left to her own devices. “Right.”

“Correct, an Interim Game Master has been chosen from the Desire Grand Prix staff for a Special Round.” Tsumuri smiles. “The winner will be granted one additional wish, as written upon their Desire Cards.”

Neon glances down as the card appears in her hands, the DGP’s staff handing them out to her and the other competitors. Her first thought is to write down something that she’s willing to sacrifice for Sae to achieve her own extra dream, to pay her back for the sacrifice she made for Neon to find her own True Love. Something that’s a joke, like ‘A World Where I Can Pet Every Cat’ or ‘All The Cake I Can Eat.’

Something stops her from putting pen to board, though, as she looks around the other Riders all making that decision for themselves. Everyone on this plateau is willing to fight and die to protect their dream— it would be a disservice to all of them, and herself, to treat that as a joke.

It’s a selfish desire, but it’s a truthful one.

So Neon, with some hesitation, writes this: A WORLD IN WHICH SAE GANAHA RETAINS HER MEMORIES, EVEN AFTER RETIRING FROM THE DGP.

Neon shows nobody, not even Sae, her card. Instead, she flips it over, and hands it back to Tsumuri.

Chapter Text

Tan sits cross-legged on a chair she brought down from the office, clicking the end of a ballpoint pen against her cheekbone, as her boss works on the underside of the company van on the road outside their building.

By all accounts, this van should be a wreck. A client wanted the two of them to investigate a thief in the neighborhood, when the police found no trace of the stolen goods or any kind of concrete evidence, and Tan insisted to him that they could not only find the thief but return everything they had stolen. And her boss had huffed and puffed, but eventually that soft-hearted part of him took the reins, and he agreed to help.

They found their thief hiding out in a warehouse down by the bay. They got most of the stuff he took, too, but with no sign of who each item belonged to. So her boss took the wheel of the company van to try and track him down to get him to spill the beans on where he took the stuff from, chased after that culprit until a stack of loose pipes blew out something in the engine, and the two of them just about managed to will the van back to the office with the goods in tow before the engine gave up.

“Knocking the world,” Tan pulls her glasses off, and wipes them with a cloth from her jacket as she absent-mindedly hums a melody. “Over—”

“What was that?”

“Nothing, man.” Tan mumbles. “Just some song I got stuck in my head.”

“Whatever.”

So her boss, in lieu of calling a mechanic, has insisted he can fix whatever problem is ailing the van in a matter of minutes. With the benefit of foresight, Tan knows that he will, within the next five minutes, finally realize that this is a problem with the engine, and not the oil line beneath the van like he’s been telling her. At that point, he will ask why Tan never told him anything about that, and Tan will shrug her shoulders and fiddle with her braids and tell him that she did tell him to open up the engine and that he’d completely ignored her.

But that’s Michinaga for you, she thinks. Always rushing in without considering the consequences.

It’s why she chose to become his supporter in the first place.

It’s also why she chooses to maintain this little fiction for the two of them until the Desire Grand Prix returns.

“New observation:” Tan recites, writing her latest observation down on her reporter’s notepad. Tan is, in an official sense, his assistant on a ‘trial’ basis after their first day of working together went so well. In practice, she’s pretty sure she has a job for life now. “Bossman Michi always looks for the most complicated solution to a problem.”

Michinaga wheels himself out from under the van on his little trolley, scrunching his nose up like a bull reeling back to charge. “I don’t see you sorting through the junk.”

“Yes, boss!” Tan cheers, sliding off the chair. “On it, boss!”

Michinaga grumbles and returns to his fruitless attempts to diagnose the problem. Tan sifts through the wreckage they recovered from the thief’s hideout, where something curious catches her eye. Tan digs for it, grasps a hold of the familiar object with both hands, and yanks out one of the Hypnoray Helmets she’s seen adorning the unlucky players who get ‘chosen’ to become GM Riders.

Inert. No visible markings that might tell her which Vision Driver it was tied to, but Tan can make her guesses. It’s not one of hers, because she’s always preferred using other methods to craft her favorite puppets, and it’s definitely not one of Archimedel’s because it doesn’t carry that distinctive Jyamato stench of dried moss and broken dreams. Which means, by her reckoning, that one of Girori’s dogs must have finally slipped the leash in the chaos of his Fox Hunt.

Now, she just needs to relay that information to Michinaga without letting slip that she knows what’s going on.

After all, Tan isn’t supposed to know what a Kamen Rider is.

“Check it out, boss!” Tan is excellent at playing dumb, as it stands. It reflects quite well on her to adopt that kind of childish whimsy. It helps her feels young again. “Looks like… some weird kinda helmet?”

Michinaga wheels out from under the van, eyes wide once he locks eyes with the dome-shaped helmet in her hands. “Don’t put that on.”

“How come?” Tan asks, turning it over to examine it.

“Just don’t.” Michinaga rises to his feet, snatching it away from her. “Where’d you get it?”

“Warehouse.” Tan pouts, performatively, pointing down to the plastic crate. “It was in the box with all the other stolen junk we picked up.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Pretty sure.” Tan clasps her hands behind her back, stretching out her shoulders. “Unless you were the one who packed that crate.”

“I’m heading back there.” Michinaga furrows his brow, tossing the helmet down and storming down the street. He knows exactly who she is, deep down, but he also knows that he’ll never be able to prove it. That’s the best thing about him, Tan thinks. Smart enough to realize what a fool he is. “Don’t follow me.”

“Boss!” Tan kneels down on the pavement to pick the helmet back up, dusting it off. She cups her hands around her mouth, and calls down the street. “What about the truck?”

“I’ll fix it when I get back!” He calls, and Tan spots the flash of purple as he pulls the zombie buckle from his overalls.

Tan hums, and runs off after him. A flick of her fingers, and this comfortable dream is burned by the harsh light of morning. What a wonderful misery that would be.

Two cat ears poke out the open lid of a dumpster.

Once the rest of the Na-Go helmet joins them, Neon props her elbows on the rim of the dumpster and cups both hands around her bug-eyed visor to block the glare of the morning sun. This Jyamato area feels cold and lifeless, despite the piercing sunlight reflecting off the maze of corrugated iron storage facilities, with no signs of life save for marching footsteps and the sing-song murmur of the Jyamato’s ritual chanting as they patrol the warehouses.

Desire Grand Prix Special Round: Sneaking Game
Time Limit: 60 Minutes
Victory Conditions: Evade the Guard Jyamato and Reach the Exit!

A strange sense of nostalgia lingers on the coastal breeze, a faint smell of sea brine filtering through the mouthpiece of her helmet over the ambient hum of the recyclable waste as she shifts her weight to get a stable perch to observe the Jyamato for Sae. This place feels familiar, even if Neon has never visited these specific warehouses before, unraveling around her like the distorted echo of a childhood memory.

It takes her a moment to discern why; Neon never likes trying to cut through the mire of her life before the kidnapping. Too often she thinks about how kindly her parents used to treat her before it, how even through that rose-tinted sheen of childhood nostalgia they both felt more like full-fledged human beings back then, and not the vicious husks they eventually devolved into.

Better to force a smile, and bury herself in the adoration of others. There’s nothing good waiting for her in the past.

But this particular memory rises to the surface easier than most. It was winter then, too, because Neon remembers wearing a bright red coat that was too big for her that her mother insisted she would ‘grow into.’ She accompanied her father to the warehouses by the bay with some of his executives, on one of the few days her father felt like getting his hands dirty with the inner workings of his business, and Neon scurried through a maze like this one, crying because this overbearing world of steel and concrete felt so much bigger than her that Neon felt as though the walls would collapse in on themselves and swallow her whole like a giant whale.

Neon remembers telling her father that this place felt like a prison, and some of the executives laughing at her. It was rare for her father to smile, even then, but she remembers that he knelt down to tell her, as reassuringly as he could, that places like this are only a prison if you let them be.

They took her to the docks to watch a bright orange crane cut through the billowing smog, lifting huge storage containers emblazoned with the Kurama Group’s logo off the deck of a cargo ship the size of a city to deposit them, with a rattling thud that shook the Earth, in vast towers that stretching upwards like skyscrapers.

Neon clutched her stuffed cat to her chest as her father picked her up in his arms and tried to calm her by listing off what each shipping container held, where it came from, and where it was headed. With the benefit of hindsight, Neon knows this: her father was trying to impress her with the scope of the company she stands to inherit.

At the time, the only thing Neon wanted was to be safe, to be quiet, and for the cat she held in her arms to never leave her.

Neon can’t remember the name of that cat. Which troubles her, because she loved that thing, and she can’t imagine discarding something she loves so easily.

No, the cat was named Neon— her father suggested it, because the bright fur that dulled after time and dirt and her mother’s careful needlework to repair the tears in the seams reminded him of a neon sign.

She remembers that.

But why would she name it after herself?

Shadows dance along the pavement as the Jyamato approach.

Maybe she’s just remembering things wrong. It was a long time ago.

Even with the glare of the sunlight peeking through the cracks in her gloved fingers, Neon can discern the vague shapes of the two Jyamato patrolling the length of the alleyway, dressed in those black-and-red uniforms Neon remembers the Desire Grand Prix staff wearing. They stop to speak with each other in that Jyamato chant, kick over a stack of boxes that looks the right size to hide a Rider behind it. As they split off, moving in opposite directions on the street ahead, a forceful hand sinks into her shoulder and pulls Neon back down into the pit of crushed cans and plastic bottles below.

Lopo is all business above her. Neon spreads her arms out, and lets the pile of trash swallow her whole.

This is a long way away from the triumphant reunion with her prince on a white horse that Neon spent all those long nights dreaming of.

More importantly: it’s not safety, either. There’s a clock ticking down on the segmented display of their Spider Phones, along with the names of retired contestants she will never get to truly meet, and their initial plan to rush the objective had backfired— Sae thought they could move quickly enough to win the game before the guards arrived, until the Guard Jyamato turned its gaze on the Rider with a parrot helmet and retired her with a single glance. Instead, they’re stuck between two exits with guards on both watching as the seconds tick away.

So Neon can understand why Sae has been nervously rattling her foot against the uneven floor while Neon poked her head out of the dumpster. She’s eager to get back on the move.

“What did you see?” Sae asks.

“You are one seriously demanding dog sometimes.” Neon pushes herself up off the pile of trash, raising both index fingers and leaning in close enough for Sae’s frustrated huff of breath through the modulator to mist up her helmet. “I saw two guards. One going left, the other going right.”

“There might be a route along the roof.” Sae traces a line with her gloved finger along a sturdy-looking pipe riveted to the adjacent warehouse up to an overhanging roof. It’s a flat roof, so they would have a straight run to the other side. But that also means they have nowhere to hide, and an errant glare from a single Guard Jyamato could eliminate them both. “I can sprint for it. Give you time to escape if there’s Jyamato up there.”

“Lopo.” Neon says. “No.”

“Why?” Sae asks, leaning forwards.

Because this is her mistake, and she needs to fix it herself. Because Neon couldn’t bear to look at Sae as she was once her dreams were taken from her. Because Neon is the one who tried to selfishly drag Sae back into her life, to sink her teeth and claws into her in one final act of petulant defiance, despite everything Sae has sacrificed for her family.

Because Neon refuses to let Sae throw her dreams away on Neon’s behalf. Not now, and never again.

“Because,” Neon slumps her shoulders, pulling her knees to her chest. It feels so petulant, even as the words struggle to leave her lips, but Neon needs to hear herself say it. “I don’t want them to take you away from me again.”

For the briefest of moments, Sae lets her game face slip beneath the Lopo helmet. Her shoulders relax in one fluid gesture, the harsh edges of her body language sanded away, and in their place is the usual ease Neon feels with Sae when the two of them sit together in their corner of the Desire Temple eating desserts between rounds, as Sae talks about her family and all the places she wants to see and all those mountains she wants to climb and Neon sits there so painfully envious of everything that Sae has, those beautiful things that she never even takes for granted, and they would talk about how one of these days they were going to have to put all these skills to better use.

Neon remembers frantically hiding her DezaStar card beneath her pillows as Sae walked into her room in the dead of night with two plates of dessert from the new concierge, because she felt that Neon might need cheering up after a brutal round of the Desire Grand Prix, and the two of them sat with flashlights pointed at the ceiling as they ate parfait and pieced together Attempt Number Fifty-Three: one final escape plan to free Neon of her parents’ control forever.

Sae has a couch in the attic above that little restaurant that Neon could walk into to ruin her happiness but barely bring herself to look at through the tears. She could sleep there, for as long as it took to make enough money through Neon TV to rent an apartment somewhere her mother could never find her, and once Sae got back to peak performance she could travel the world and cheer her on.

It was nice to believe, when Sae was a distant point in her past that Neon could safely dream about, that she had been genuine that night. That someone she cares about had cared enough about her to listen to all her problems, to tell her that she was right to despise her parents and the golden bird cage they kept her locked away inside, and to make plans— real, tangible plans— to help her break out.

Now, Neon feels less certain. So much of that popularity game feels like a jumbled maze of false smiles and betrayals as it recedes into the past, even when Sae scarified herself for Neon’s happiness, and now Neon struggles to discern how much of it was real and how much was a promise Sae never intended to keep.

Even now, with Sae back, she still doesn’t know how much of Sae was just humoring her that night, in hopes of building an ally in the voting out of that lonely girl willing to spill her dreams to a woman who should have been her rival.

But when Neon thinks back to how much time they’ve spent planning their own escapes together, this new escape doesn’t feel quite so intimidating any more.

“You have any better ideas, rich girl?” Sae says, so softly that Neon barely even registers it as a playful insult any more.

For escaping? Escaping is easy. All you need is a distraction.

So Neon fishes around on the floor of the dumpster for anything big enough and noisy enough for her to throw, grabbing hold of something metallic wedged deep beneath the broken bottles.

All that power in their Desire Drivers, all those secret missions for Raise Buckles, and Neon is about to save them both with a dented soda can.

“Kick the can.” Neon replies.

She’s smiling behind her helmet, but she doesn’t know whether Sae appreciates it.

Six hours later, after Tsumuri debriefs the surviving contestants and sends them crashing back down to reality, the bruises still feel fresh on Neon’s skin beneath the layers of concealer.

If her mother cares how those swelling purple blemishes came to marr her cheeks, when Neon stepped back through those burnished oak double doors into a house that has never felt like a home, she never cared to show it beyond her usual attempts to add her own marks to the collection as punishment for Neon’s latest defiance. With said defiance registered, Neon ate dinner in their usual steely silence as a private physician dabbed at her cheeks with alcohol-soaked cotton balls.

Then, she retired to her bedroom.

Now, Neon lies deathly still in her too-soft bed, arms hanging limply off either side of the mattress, and burns the after-image of her ceiling light into the back of her retina in one final desperate bid to tap into her deepest reserves of motivation and muster up the fortitude required to pick her phone up off the nightstand and hit record.

But Neon doesn’t think she’s moving any time soon. A frigid chill washes over her from the bedroom window, the cold night’s air carrying the faintest trace of rain in the morning. With getting up to close the window out of the question, Neon settles for rolling onto her front, rapidly blinking to stave off the familiar migraine, and burying her face amidst the growing mountain of plastic bags filled with clothes forming on her bed.

Despite all the pain, the throbbing bruises and the dull ache of her muscles, Neon thinks this: it’s the clothes she hates the most.

That’s not for a lack of trying. Neon wishes she could pretend to like them, in the way all her favorite streamers could make even the drabbest wardrobe look like a steal through their infectious enthusiasm, but some impenetrable barrier raises the moment Neon turns on the camera and attempts to read those lines on the script provided for her by the clothing brand.

These blind bags are part of a promotion; Neon TV’s first official collaboration with an outside brand.

Something felt off the moment she received the first email from the representative, on her new business account, but Sae’s escape plan still felt fresh in her mind and Neon knew she needed to stash away her own money in case her mother tried to shut down Neon TV again. And her surprise was genuine when she opened the first bag, thinking that she had won the lottery, until she opened the second to the same results and realized that there was nothing random about the bags they drew for her at all, that the brand picked out the ‘best’ bags to send her so she could make their promotion seem more appealing to her viewers, and Neon felt sick to her stomach that a company would expect her to lie to her fans in the hopes that they would waste her money in a doomed bit to emulate her success.

So Neon stopped. She laid down flat on the bed, stretched out both of her arms, and she hasn’t gotten up.

It’s too late to cancel the promotion now, and doing so would ruin her reputation with future sponsors, so Neon has to find some way to get through it with her dignity intact.

Worse, Neon now feels like she has tainted the only space that truly feels her own.

Until this promotion, Neon has always been able to pretend she only streams for herself. It’s a strange kind of lie to tell herself, that she only performs for others for her own sake, but it has always felt true to her that she puts herself in front of a camera purely to express herself. When all other avenues had been taken from her, she pulled out her phone and cried for help— and thousands of faceless strangers answered her.

That blind, anonymous devotion has never been the true love Neon searches for, but it kept her alive at a time in which Neon was, if nothing else, strongly considering her alternatives. Better, it allowed her to pretend to be who she wanted to be— that bubbly and outgoing girl she always dreamed she could be while her true self sat alone in her room— until the mask blended into her skin and became who she truly was.

Streaming became her escape, and then it helped her gather the courage to truly escape.

So Neon feels a responsibility to repay the kindness those strangers showed her. Which includes, she thinks, not selling them a false promise.

After discarding three more takes due to her script read slurring into a writhing mass of fumbled words and murmured talking points, Neon wants to curl up in a ball and die.

If whatever is tapping at her wall doesn’t kill her first. Neon hears the rapid sound of clattering metal outside her open window, and initially discards it as just one of the birds that like to nest on the roof around this time of year. Then, it grows louder— like the rhythmic beat of steps against a dance floor.

Neon jolts to her feet.

Two hands grasp at the window frame, almost impossible to discern in the darkness. Neon tenses, and tries to reach for a Desire Driver she can’t find amidst the piles of plastic. A canvas backpack is flung through the window, and lands by the foot of her bed.

Then, a familiar face climbs through.

“Grab what you can.” Sae says, all business. “There’s a drop at the bottom. It’s a straight run from there. I’ll slow down, so you can catch up.”

“Tonight?” Neon glances down to the floor, fiddling with the strap of the empty backpack.

Sae plants a hand on her shoulder. “Tonight.”

While Sae raids the en suite bathroom for enough toiletries to last her the week, Neon scrambles to fit nineteen years worth of memories into a single carry-on bag.

It takes less effort than she hoped it would.

Chapter Text

Ichiko pencils in exactly three letters of her morning crossword before the wrought iron gates of the Kurama mansion stutter open to let their car filter through.

As Nagura— wafting cigarette smoke through the driver’s seat window, because he claims not to ‘trust’ her enough to let her drive at night— wheels down the window to ‘negotiate’ with the building’s staff in his usual brusque fashion through the intercom mounted on the gate, Ichiko stows the newspaper in the glove compartment, pulls out her standard-issue flashlight and a haphazardly-stapled wad of papers Nagura shoved in her face back in the precinct, and adjusts her glasses.

Kousei Kurama is nouveau riche, a real-estate vulture who built an empire on cheap imports and kept it vibrant by plundering land at fire sale prices after the bubble burst, but his name still has enough pull in the precinct that the Chief Inspector stressed the value of discretion when a distraught wife called in the early hours of the morning because her influencer daughter flew the coop.

That ‘discretion’ has placed two detectives into an unmarked, and distinctly un-police-like, beige sedan borrowed from the wife of one of their senior officers. It is imperative, Ichiko has repeatedly been told, that the Kurama’s neighbors not discover that the police are snooping around.

This is the part of the job she hates more than anything. Not that whirring mechanical rattle of spring-loaded iron scraping against concrete in the early hours of the morning— though she does wince at the nails-on-chalkboard sound as the gates spread wide— or having to filter out the usual barking of her senior investigator as she reviews the case files. It’s the clandestine secrecy of nights like this, hushed whispers in the precinct that they need to make this problem go away more than they need to solve the crime, and that sinking feeling deep in Ichiko’s stomach that she’s just a paid-off stooge for whoever is contributing the most to the Chief Inspector’s retirement fund.

In the distance, and in that moonlight glow as the first cracks of a winter morning shine through on the horizon, the mansion itself seems to unimpressive beneath this thin layer of snow. One single bedroom light illuminating a sea of austere white bricks, uniform windows and an awning propped up by those ever-present art deco pillars of last resort— the inevitable cry for help from an architect working with rich clients of limited imagination.

An open window on the third floor, and ornate lead pipework strangled by creeping vines leading up to the guttering. Marble fences topped with a kind of ornate barbed-wire motif to deter assailants.

It’s no wonder this girl ran, Ichiko decides, this place barely even disguises that it’s a prison.

Ichiko joined the police, almost eleven years ago to the day, because she wanted to protect people. Not to track down some businessman’s influencer daughter because she got a boyfriend and flew the nest.

But Ichiko also knows better than to rock the boat, if she ever wants to get out of this dead-end precinct and back to where she might actually be able to help people, and she guesses that the disappearance of a girl who has already survived one kidnapping attempt does constitute special circumstances.

So she treats it, despite Nagura’s objections, like any other case.

Ichiko flips open the stack of papers and reads them by flashlight. Their missing girl is Neon Kurama, Nineteen. Right age-range to have a ‘sparkling’ name like that, but Ichiko doesn’t figure the parents to be the type. At least her parents’ insistence on hiring private tutors after her first kidnapping spared her the joyful experience of childhood bullying. Files highlight the possibility of a pseudonym, either for professional purposes or to cut ties with the parents— there’s vague records of another child in the family but nothing concrete. No records of the girl ever changing it.

YouTube star, which means Ichiko has never heard of her. Heavy social media presence, uploads dance videos and makes a public spectacle of running away from home, so the mother— wealthy through her family ties, so Kurama tried to get some ‘old money’ legitimacy through a match— hiring a security detail. Colorful employment history for both of the bodyguards, so either this Irumi has a soft-spot for eccentrics or there’s something the paper trail isn’t telling her. Tied to Ace Ukiyo— who Ichiko has heard about, if only because his presence has been utterly inescapable since he emerged on the scene eighteen months ago. Speculation of a romantic relationship on various channels after they were seen together at a cafe six months back, but nothing concrete.

Then, more details on the kidnapping. Kazuo Numabukuro, low-level member of a various anti-social organizations tied to the real estate industry, tries to extort a ransom. Hostage situation turns ugly— so ugly that half the case file seems to be missing or blocked out with black ink. Stand-off with the police— father wants to go alone to pay the ransom, there’s a communication breakdown that delays things, issues of jurisdiction. The SAT is gearing up to raid the place. They get the girl back, Kousei finds better uses for his money, and Numabukuro is dragged out of the building in handcuffs.

No record of Numabukuro’s time in prison, which is nothing uncommon— she knows how detention works, information like that gets ‘lost’ in the beating-detainment-beating routine. Suspicions that he was hired by an external party— maybe one of Kurama’s rivals— but he never gives them anything solid. It’s marked down as a lone wolf incident. Ichiko narrows in on the one final sentence of his criminal record. ‘Disappeared from his cell.’

No date, no time. No record of further investigation. Just the absence of evidence, and everything that implies, but Ichiko’s not going to lose any sleep knowing that Kurama used his influence to make the kind of monster that kidnaps an eight year old girl disappear.

Ichiko finds a hand-written note from Tachibana from Forensics on the final page. It just reads: Pending background check on the Kurama girl. Forwarding results to Nagura.

“Tachibana send over that background check?” Ichiko asks, trying to ignore Nagura beating a cranberry stain out of his lambswool sweater. Ichiko can’t believe what she’s about to ask, but she needs to leave no stone unturned: “Any prior convictions?”

“Slap on the wrist for filming without a permit. Some mall in Yokohama.” Nagura shrugs his shoulders beneath the suit jacket. “Kept her out of the books at the Bay, but the father wanted to make a show of scaring her straight before paying the fine— took some prints, confiscated her equipment, got one of the nicer detectives to do a mock questioning, that kind of thing.”

More evidence for the ‘ran away’ pile. Ichiko brushes a loose strand of hair from her eyes, checking the state of her bun in the rear-view mirror. “Is that common in the Bay?”

“Well, it ain’t standard procedure.” Nagura huffs, scratching at his thinning patch of gray hair. He stubs his cigarette out in a well-worn ashtray. “But I’m not raising any eyebrows over it.”

“Those prints still on file?”

“Yep.” Nagura offers a nod, parking the car up on the dip where the gravel meets a snow-flecked artificial lawn. “Tried to check if we’ve still got the gear, but they never got back to me.”

An old crank wheels the windows back up, and Ichiko neglects to mention the irony.

“Look around the place.” Nagura decides, pushing open the car door. “I’m gonna go take a piss.”

Classy as ever.

Ichiko sprays herself down with an atomizer as Nagura stomps his way past the gate and onto the main road, because smelling of perfume always beats smelling of too much smoke when it comes to first impressions, and climbs out the passenger door into the mud— it’s just like Nagura to park the car in such a way that she feels like she’s climbing out the hatch of a crashed space shuttle.

Ichiko pulls her black winter coat tight around her chest, rubbing gloved hands together for whatever scraps of warmth she can gather in the cold winter air, and starts confirming her suspicions up close.

It’s easier to guess the escape route from here. Not just because there’s two sets of footprints in the snow— looks like the off-beat athletic tread of trendy running shoes, like the kind Ichiko used to wear when she ran track in high school— trailing from that overarching awning towards a shorter side wall, where a motorbike’s tracks cut through the slush. That pipework looks sturdier up close— half a meter wide and solidly fastened to the wall with thick rivets that remind her of old images of ocean liners.

Ichiko takes a photo of the footprints with a digital camera, and then the pipework. From there, it’s only a short trek through the snow and up three long steps before Ichiko finds herself face to face with those bleached-white walls, those art deco pillars, and the too-ornate door. Ichiko knocks twice, and it’s the mother who answers.

Late fifties. Sullen look on her weather-beaten cheeks. Buttoned-up sort of woman, reminds Inomata a lot of her stern-faced grandmother.

“Assistant Inspector Inomata.” Ichiko offers, pulling her glasses off her face to wipe down the frosted lenses. She wants to say something along the lines of ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ but she knows the words would ring hollow. “My partner is gathering evidence outside. May we come in?”

“Yes.” Kurama says, plainly, and calls for someone to close the door behind them. “I’ll show you to her room.”

“How did you discover that your daughter was gone?” Ichiko asks.

“She has a meeting with a prospective suitor tomorrow.” Kurama says. Parents hired a match-making agency for a good marriage— that’s another prospective lead. “I wanted to get her opinion on an outfit for her to wear, but she didn’t answer.”

“Is that how you and your husband met?”

“Yes,” Kurama shifts her features nervously. “But my daughter is…”

“Picky?” Inomata offers.

“Caught up in childish fantasies.” Kurama says, as they traipse through a hallway and ascend a second set of stairs.

“Like what?”

“Princes on white horses.”

“Wanting someone to whisk her away?”

“No, nothing like that.” Kurama says. “She just has… fanciful ideas about finding ‘true love.’”

So they’re back to ‘picky.’

There’s a business-like quality to the way Kurama speaks, and the way she seems to glide across the stone-tiled floor to meet her, that sets the hairs on Ichiko’s arms on end. She’s seen mothers in these gated communities close to tearing their hair out because their sons were caught on the wrong side of town, but there’s no sign at all, in Ichiko’s mind, that Irumi cares to express any kind of fear for her daughter’s safety.

“Has your daughter given you any reason to suspect she might run away?” Ichiko asks, wiping her boots on the carpet and following Kurama up a curving staircase.

“Not recently.” Kurama says, her voice calm and level. “I thought she had put it past her.”

“You mean those…” Ichiko searches for the right words. “Escape attempts. On her stream.”

“Entertainment.” Kurama says. “Nothing more.”

“Her channel went down for a few days.” Ichiko says. “Is that why?”

“I asked her to stop, and she did.” Kurama offers. “I told her that it reflects poorly on us as a family for her to spread those falsehoods, and she understood.”

Ichiko wants to needle in on that point, because she can’t see a good reason why a teenager would try and pretend to escape from their parents upwards of fifty times— bags packed— without some truth to the story, but they’re already at the wooden door to Neon’s bedroom, and Kurama holds the door open for Ichiko to walk in.

Inside, the place looks like a rich teenager’s bedroom. It’s the type of place Inomata always dreamed of living when she was growing up in a one-bedroom apartment and trying to block out the sounds of her parents fighting in the kitchen— broad, spacious, with an en suite bathroom and a walk-in wardrobe and a mountain of cat plushes. There’s an armoire lined with fairy lights on the near wall, covered in make-up brands Ichiko isn’t trendy enough to recognize and a mass of gold and silver jewelry inlaid with bright gemstones. Easy things for any kidnapper to grab for pocket change— but Ichiko figures a girl like that would take them with her. A figure appears to be sleeping beneath the sheets of a double bed. Ichiko grabs a hold, and pulls it back:

A mass of porcelain doll parts, arranged in the shape of a human body. There’s her decoy.

It also means that Kurama is lying about finding her daughter missing, unless she set the bed again for the detectives to uncover. That means the possibility of hidden cameras— so whatever happened here, there should be footage of it.

Hidden cameras in her own child’s bedroom. People really disgust Ichiko sometimes.

“Do you recognize these?”

“They’re mine.” Kurama says, flatly. Pointing to a dusty shelf flecked with spattered spots of clean wood where the dolls once stood. “I thought she liked them.”

A phone buzzes on the bedside table, and Ichiko crosses the room to grab it. The pink phone case feels weighty in her hands, the phone itself feels expensive, and Ichiko presses her thumb to a side button to bring the screen back to life.

There’s a photo of Neon posing with three boys on the lock screen. Ichiko recognizes the knowing grin of Ace Ukiyo on instinct alone at this point, his arms wide around the other boys while Neon holds the camera, but the other three are a mystery. One looks tall from the photo, a nervous smile on his face and a bruise beneath his eye, with the telltale rough bangs of hair cut with scissors in the bathroom mirror. It’s a feeling that Ichiko knows all too well. Another seems like he doesn’t want to be seen with them— an intense man, slightly older than the others, with sallow cheeks and wild hair. They’re in the woods, all wearing matching black-blue raincoats. Some kind of camping trip, maybe.

“This is her phone?” Ichiko asks.

“She never goes anywhere without it.”

“Even when she tries to escape?”

“Like I said,” Kurama repeats. “She never goes anywhere without it.”

“The others in this photograph.” Ichiko holds out the phone for Kurama. “Do you know them?”

Kurama looks over the photograph, eyes widening. From the looks of things, it must be the first time in years she’s ever seen her daughter looking happy. “…No.”

“Are you certain?” Ichiko taps at the smug visage of Ace Ukiyo. “He’s a big-name idol. There’s rumors online that they’re together.”

Kurama shakes her head. “If there are, I haven’t read them.”

That brings Ichiko to the unread text sitting on the lock screen. Without unlocking the phone, which is asking for a six digit code or a thumb print, Ichiko can’t see the text itself, but she can see the sender’s name on the lock screen: Sara Sakurai.

On a hunch, Ichiko taps in the birthday on record for Neon on the case files: 04-01-04, but the phone just pops up a notification that the code is incorrect.

“Sara Sakurai.” Ichiko asks. “Is she a friend of your daughter?”

Kurama thinks for a moment, and then shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

“A fan, maybe?”

“That seems more likely.” Kurama admits. She folds her arms, patience thinning.

“I understand that this line of questioning might feel invasive, Mrs. Kurama, but I need to know this to find where your daughter went.”

“I know what your job is, Inspector.” Kurama snaps back, before catching herself in an apologetic hiss of air. There’s the worry. Ichiko knew she could prise it out of her eventually. “And unless there’s anything else you need from me, I will leave you to your investigation.”

“That’s everything, ma’am.” Ichiko nods. Then, she waits for Kurama to leave.

Ichiko gets to work looking for those hidden cameras as soon as the door closes behind her, sweeping with her flashlight for any unusual glares. Nothing behind the posters on the walls, or in the eyes of the plushes— until Ichiko carefully turns over the porcelain doll at the head of the decoy and finds an eye gouged out.

No clearer message, Ichiko thinks, that someone doesn’t want to be spied on any more.

Nagura emerges through the doorway, reeking of smoke and ammonia, clutching at a stack of polaroids he must have taken on the way back to the car.

“Specs, I got our getaway vehicle.” He huffs, holding up the washed-out image of tire tracks cutting into the salted snow. “Zephyr 400. Real outlaw bike. Haven’t seen one in twenty years.”

“You got all that from the treads?”

“Nah, I just asked the neighbors.” Nagura shrugs, holding out an A4 print-out of two figures on a motorbike. A taller figure driving, a shorter one in a jacket the same shade of black-blue as the raincoats on the lock-screen riding on the back. Both of them are wearing helmets. Looks like they didn’t want to give anyone who saw them reason to pull the bike over. Shame the photo's so blurry, or they'd be able to track it on the plates alone. “They got a camera feed on the main road. Caught our motorbike blazing off.”

"That's not a Zephyr." Ichiko narrows her eyes, focusing on the details. It's a naked bike, jet black, raised passenger seat and a single exhaust pipe jutting up on the side. "That's a Wolf."

“Didn’t know you liked motorcycles.”

“Product of a misspent youth.” Ichiko murmurs, tapping her thumb to the screen to bring up the photo, and holds up the A4 photo of the getaway for comparison. "Same coat, I'd say."

"Kinda kid leaves their phone behind?" Nagura leans in, matching them up. He nods, seeing the resemblance. “Thought they’re all supposed to be glued to the things.”

“One who knows she’s being spied on.” Ichiko says, propping up the mutilated doll. “Looks like some thought went into this.”

“Smart kid.” Nagura shakes his head, planting his hands on his hips. “Shame we’re gonna have to haul her back here.”

Neon pulls Sae’s blue-black motorcycle jacket tight around her shoulders, hopping from one foot to the other in a dance-step cadence against the graying slush of the sidewalk, as she ducks below the awning and shivers between fluffy white heaps of freshly-salted snow piled up against the cozy stone facade of the restaurant.

A canvas backpack, containing everything that Neon could carry that she trusts not to contain one of her mother’s unwanted ‘presents,’ sits by her feet with a blue stuffed cat poking out of the flap. It took a lot of digging around in her parents’ rooms to find the old thing, looking so lost and alone without her, buried at the bottom of a wardrobe in her father’s study in a cardboard box filled with mementos from her life before the kidnapping. In her freezing hands, on this cold night, the doll feels so much smaller now than it did when she was small— the threadbare fur fraying at the seams— but it’s a part of her, as much as anything else in her life was, and Neon never knew how much its absence truly stung her until she took it back.

Neon ducks down to fasten that well-worn little cat back into its perch atop her neatly folded clothes, fastening the flap on the backpack with a sharp click. This cat had been a constant companion to her, back when she was small and slightly terrified of the world, so it feels good to have her oldest friend back alongside her for this strange new adventure.

Sae rattles chains behind the building, trying to stow their getaway vehicle as far away from the street as possible, while stands out of the dim glow of the streetlight. Looking into the warm of the restaurant will only make the wait outside feel longer and the cold feel more severe, Neon knows, so she focuses on the lines drawn onto this quiet little road— the fading treads of car tires cutting through thick snow, bisected by the harsh trail their motorbike cut into the road like black marker pen scrawling on a map, the only sign that Neon and Sae wove through these quiet little lanes on their flight from the Kurama Estate.

In the dead of night, with everyone but them tucked up in their beds, it’s easy for Neon to pretend that she and Sae are the only two people left in the world. By morning, all those trails carved along the road will be covered by a fresh layer of snow. All the parked cars will filter out from the suburbs towards the towering office blocks that glow in the distance, and dozens of fresh new markings will replace those fading tracks. All her footsteps, borrowed shoes crunching in the wet sludge, will fade beneath a torrent of new ones as everyone goes about the rhythm of their lives. And that final tether cut into the ground, connecting her old life to her new one, will be long gone.

Maybe that’s for the best. To be forgotten by the world.

Forgotten beats freezing, though, and Neon whines through her chattering teeth as Sae closes the back gate and finally trudges around the side of the building so that Neon can watch her equally cold hands fumble with the key to unlock the front door. Neon glances away from the door as Sae curses beneath her breath, and comes face to face with an ominous carved sculpture staring at her with unblinking wooden eyes.

Melting snow drips from the lip of the awning and down the back of Neon’s flimsy sleep shirt, and she screams at the icy chill that runs down her spine. If they don’t get inside soon, Sae is going to have an incredibly cute ice sculpture ready to join that haunting idol outside the restaurant.

Now, with Neon shivering over Sae’s shoulder, the pressure is on. Sae misses the keyhole once, and then twice, until on the third attempt Neon plants freezing hands on Sae’s bare arms and Sae jolts sharply, with an uncharacteristic yelp, as the keys clatter down to the ground.

“I thought wolves,” Neon teases, ducking down to snatch the keys off the pavement. She reaches out to plant a cold palm on Sae’s cheek, as she rises, and Sae weaves her head out of her grasp with startling speed. “Could handle a little cold.”

“And I thought cats were supposed to be crafty,” Sae offers, in turn, with that stiff-shouldered lopsided gait she slides into sometimes, the result of a knee tear that never healed quite right. She looks intense in this light, all harsh contours and lean muscle in her racer-back tank-top and baggy jeans, but those wide brown eyes and that deceptively warm smile on her chapped lips shine through. “If you let me finish, we’d be inside by now.”

Neon hums, mischievously, as she flicks through the keys to find the one for the door. That hum falls to a low drone of confusion, and then frustration, as she rattles through identical key after identical key— how Sae can distinguish between them is a mystery to her— until Neon settles on something cute and familiar. A little cat charm dangling from the keyring, which Neon holds up to her face.

“What’s its name?” Neon asks.

“It’s a keyring.” Sae cants her head to one side, curiously. “It doesn’t have a name.”

“A stray…” Neon hums again, deftly evading Sae’s attempt to grab the keys from her hand, as she tries to think of a good name for the charm. “Momo.”

“Momo.” Sae repeats.

“Momo,” Neon pulls the charm back to her face, angling it so that Sae has to stare at its cute little cat eyes if she wants to talk to her. “Would like to know which key unlocks the door.”

“Momo lives on the key ring,” Sae laughs, snatching it out of her hands. She filters through the keys, and pulls up a key that looks— to Neon, at least— indistinguishable from the others. “He would already know it’s this one.”

Sae turns the key, a bell behind the door rings, and the door itself swings open. Neon hums a song as she scurries over to scoop her backpack off the curb and slip it over her shoulder. With one final look back towards the tire marks along the empty street, and the sprinkle of snow starting to fall from the sky, she walks inside.

Inside the restaurant, a sudden crash of warm air hits her. In the absence of the immediate numbness of the cold, Neon finally feels the full bite of that winter chill, stinging tears welling in the corners of her eyes. An itching sneeze overcomes her as she slips her shoes off, a battered pair of canvas high-tops she stole-borrowed from Sara after a marathon shopping trip in Yokohama left her with blisters atop blisters, and sets her backpack down by the store.

Neon needs to return those shoes, at some point, but she likes them too much. She knows that she could buy an identical pair just like them, only flawless and pristine, and hand the ones she’s borrowed back over to Sara. But they wouldn’t be Sara’s then, and Neon wouldn’t associate them with Sara’s awkward smile as Neon tried on an outfit they both knew was terrible but Sara couldn’t bring herself to critique because Neon was the one wearing it, or the playful way Sara slaps her arm when she’s overly excited about something, or the way she nervously paced the length of her room loudly despairing because she knew that Neon had never been over to a friend’s home before, and wanted to plan out the perfect evening for her.

Sara is going to worry about her.

Even if her sudden disappearance doesn’t make the gossip columns, Neon has no access to her phone— or her YouTube account— from here. When she misses tomorrow’s update stream, her fans will suspect that something has caused her sudden disappearance. Sara is going to send her a frantic flurry of text messages— she’s always overzealous about checking in on Neon, the perils of being forced to be both older sister and substitute parent to her brother— and then Sara is going to pace around her apartment nervously contorting her face and trying not to scream as she loudly imagines every single possible thing that has or will gone wrong.

Neon wishes she had an easier way to contact Sara. When Tsumuri calls the Kamen Riders back to the Desire Temple, Neon is going to need to put in a quiet word with Keiwa to reassure his sister that she’s doing alright.

She’s doing alright. Neon turns that phrase over and over in her head until she means it.

It’s a strange feeling, to Neon, walking into a building and considering it her new home. It’s a stranger feeling still for the bottom floor of that home to be a restaurant.

Even before the kidnapping, Neon only left the walled gardens of the estate to go to the local school— she remembers her mother insisting she needed to meet more children of her age— or accompany her parents on their own infrequent trips outside the mansion. So she remembers wondering, whenever her father used to vanish into his car with his usual procession of stern-faced men in graying suits, why he could never bring the work home with him.

Now, Neon understands the answer better than anyone: home should never be somewhere you need to escape from.

Neon has been escaping for so long that the boundaries of her world are defined by that metronome pulse of fear and adrenaline, blue lights and sirens and the shouts of her mother’s bodyguards, biting back a scream to dance and sing for the cameras. That constant cycle of run-stream-sleep was wearing away at Neon, grinding her down into a fine paste, even before Tsumuri’s sad smile added another step to the cycle— competing against other riders to save the world, that chanting cry of the Jyamato, and the horrifying screams of their victims.

Nothing feels real any more.

But this feels like a home.

That smoky smell of barbecue lingers in the air, alongside the telltale disinfectant sheen of a freshly-washed kitchen, like they have only just turned off the cooker and closed up for the night. Neon finds a cute rustic charm in the wooden paneling and the artificial plants, like those out-of-the-way bakeries she used find from photographs online and insist upon going towards when she felt like disrupting her mother’s carefully planned itineraries. Small booths line the walls, interspersed with rows of wooden chairs, and Neon slithers past them on her way up to the bar.

Most importantly, a fluffy cat bed sits out of the way of the seating area, containing a cute little tabby that’s been begging for her attention. Neon ducks down as the cat stretches its arms out towards her, gently grasping their little paws and draws them in a familiar motion.

“Hen-shin.” Neon laughs, setting the cat’s paws down to scritch at its cheeks.

“I knew you two would get along.” Sae offers, finally flipping a switch behind the bar and bringing the restaurant flickering to life. “He does have a name. Taro.”

This restaurant feels moodier than Neon expected once the lights are on, a midnight blue that washes over her and reminds her of sitting in a cinema after the lights have dimmed but before the movie starts, and Neon feels all the more like she is stumbled into a comfortable dream.

As Sae slips behind the counter to boil a kettle, illuminated only by the faint glow of the lights outside reflecting off brightly-colored bottles of alcohol, she reaches for milk from a refrigerator peppered with little dog fridge magnets holding photographs— a younger Sae after winning the nationals, Jun smiling with his team after winning the U-15 championship, Mio holding her tennis racket— and Neon’s own hand-written letter in a pink envelope, with every single embarrassing word it contains.

Neon whines, slumping her shoulders in a petulant huff. Sae laughs twice. First, when she spies Neon’s immediate reaction— second, when she closes the fridge door with the carton of milk in hand and sees what caused her ire. Sae grabs a hold of it, turning it in her hand like a Desire Card.

“I still haven’t read it.” Sae says, setting it down on the bar.

Neon moves to take it before Sae can snatch it back, slamming her hand down on Sae’s. She must be getting warmer, Sae doesn’t immediately recoil from her touch.

Neon looks her dead in those ever-focused brown eyes. “If you try, I’m burning it.”

“Burning it,” Sae repeats, slipping her hand out from under Neon’s— from the sound of bubbles rattling against cheap plastic, the kettle is done boiling.

“Beat Buckle. Tactical Fire.” Neon insists, miming the flames dancing with her fingers. “Thwoosh.”

Sae stares at her incredulously from behind the bar, miming the motion of slotting a raise buckle into a Desire Driver. “Not in the restaurant, Na-Go.”

Neon pretends to think about it for a moment, picking at a black-and-white cocktail umbrella on the bar that reminds her of Tsumuri. “Not even if the Jyamato attack again?”

“They can wait outside next time.” Sae offers, setting down a cup of tea that Neon graciously accepts. Sae returns behind the counter, to an old chrome-plated coffee machine, to make her own drink. “What was in that letter you wrote?”

Neon hums evasively, warming her hands on the teacup. “Nothing important.”

“Lancer. Garun.” Sae regards her curiously as she froths the milk. “How long have you known they were Kamen Riders?”

“...Since I learned my father is a sponsor of the Desire Grand Prix.” Neon thinks for a moment, trying to figure out how best to phrase it. “I wanted to offer you a job.”

“At your father’s company.”

“No, for me.” Neon says. “I thought that if I can’t escape, I can at least—”

“Surround yourself with people you can trust.” Sae stares at her for a long while, before deciding: “I would’ve hated it.”

“You never would’ve agreed to it,” Neon sets the teacup down and rubs her hands against her face. “It was a really bad idea.”

“No, I said I’d have hated it.” Sae turns, resting her elbows on the bar. “I’d have done it, because you were the one asking.”

That feels worse, to Neon. To restore Sae’s memories, without asking her, is one thing. Knowing that Sae would’ve followed her into that prison without question is another thing entirely. A pang of guilt sits in the bottom of her empty stomach, and she puts her face in her hands. For a brief moment, she feels so impossibly small and selfish. “…Sorry.”

Sae gives her hand a slight squeeze as she waits for two streams of coffee to strain through the espresso maker. “Breathe. It’s over.”

That’s true, even if the reality of it hasn’t sunk in yet.

Neon can finally breathe again. For one thing, it’s warmed up enough indoors that she no longer feels like she’s gasping jagged icicles with every shallow breath. For another, everything that Neon has been fighting against seems so genuinely distant now, a world away, and Neon can focus on the quiet, the warmth, and the fact that she’s finally free.

So Neon mimes raising her phone to the sky, plants herself down on the counter and tries to angle Sae into the ‘shot,’ and makes her trademark sign on. It’s not a real escape attempt until her viewers find out about it.

“This is—” Neon makes the sign, and nudges Sae with her elbow to join in. Sae, smiling, does her best to emulate it. “A Neon TV special broadcast. Live from the scene of Escape Attempt No. 53 for my audience of—”

“One viewer.” Sae nods, quite seriously.

“You’re behind the camera,” Neon cants her head. “Who’s the viewer?”

“Taro.” Sae offers, pointing to the cat.

“My third-biggest fan.” Neon gasps, in feigned surprise, and puts a hand to her chest. “Witnessing my first successful escape attempt!”

“Not too loudly.” Sae smiles, heading back to the fridge to retrieve a plate wrapped in foil. “My mom’s asleep upstairs.”

“Sorry, sorry.” Neon clasps her hands together in profuse apology, before moving them back to miming one of her livestreams. “I’m very quietly joined tonight by Sae Ganaha, a real-life Olympic Athlete!”

“Olympic candidate.” Sae corrects her, setting the plate down on the counter. She leans down to open the dishwasher behind the bar, and Neon angles her fake ‘camera’ to follow her down. Sae rises, with two forks in hand, and sets them down on the counter. “I never officially made the team.”

"You will." Neon points. "I'm pre-emptively correct."

"If I get back to my best shape before the next one rolls around."

"So let's all root for her, Chat!" Neon leans in. “Sae Ganaha. What are your plans for this evening?”

“Rolling out the sofa bed.” Sae offers. “Carrying your luggage up to the attic.”

Neon pouts, tracing the line of a single tear from the corner of her eye down her cheek. “Chat, she wants me to sleep on the couch.”

“It was your idea to sleep on the couch.”

Neon feels a childish pout tug at her lips, but hides it behind the cheerful affectations of her streaming persona. “All these nice people in the chat say that you should give up your bed for a guest.”

“If,” Sae offers, pointing a finger. “You carry your own bag up the stairs.”

“Look at those muscles.” Neon pokes at Sae’s bare arms. “And she wants me to carry my own bags.”

“One bag.”

“But it’s so heavy.” Neon leans in, raising an index finger on both hands, before pointing them down to the foil-covered plate. “Second question from the chat. What do you have there?”

Sae unwraps the half-eaten cake. “My cheat day.”

Chiffon. She remembered.

“Chat. Tell her I can have some.”

“If you stop pretending to stream.” Sae slides a fork across the counter.

Neon leans in to her fake camera, lowering her voice to a stage whisper. “She drives such a hard bargain.”

Neon scoops her legs underneath herself and turns around on the counter, taking the fork and carving out a slice of the cake. She offers it to Sae, who regards her curiously for a moment, before offering her own fork in return.

Then, Neon does something impulsive, and immediately regrets it. Not for the act itself, but for the state that she is in as the thought crosses her mind. Her cracked lips must taste of dried blood and leftover chiffon cake. Her teeth are stained with tea. There’s still that welling bruise on her bright red cheeks, dried out from the cold, her eyes puffy from stepping into the warm.

If Sae notices any of these things when their lips touch, she says nothing.

It’s not true love. At least not yet. But here, for tonight, it’s close enough.

Neon poses in front of the movie camera.

Desire Grand Prix Special Round: International Movie Maker
Time Limit: 150 Minutes
Victory Conditions: Defeat the Director Jyamato, and get the Film Reel to the Audience!

She’s a tiny bit disappointed that it doesn’t result in a buckle dropping from the skies.

A cockroach crawls between the blades of a long-broken ceiling fan.

Michinaga lurches awake from the usual nightmare with a real sharp pain in his side and the phantom pain of Jyamato vines tightening around his arm. It takes him a moment to remember both, as that thick fog of sleep starts to lift. A Jyamato dressed like a film director nicked him, in the weak spots on his abdomen where bulky armor gives way to a suit that feels too much like rubber, in the last game. He fought. They, if he can even consider himself to be on the same ‘team’ as the other Riders, now or ever again, won. Those Riders tried to drag him back to the Desire Temple to get checked out by the navigator and whatever medical staff they dredge up from that ominous pyramid. Michinaga refused, lurching back to this home he’s carved out for himself under his own power.

He made it, but he collapsed on the floor of the cramped office— there’s the wreckage strewn about the place to attest to that, he remembers. That fraying floral carpet they pulled out of a dumpster to make it seem a little more ‘lived-in’ is stained with his blood.

Michinaga told Tan, as she dabbed at his cut with rubbing alcohol to keep it from getting infected, that he’d gotten into a fight at one of the bars the other construction crews like to drink at after work.

Tan didn’t ask for more details. She just chewed gum, blew a bubble, and asked him whether he won the fight.

The last thing Michinaga remembers before he passed out for a second, more final time is telling her that he did.

So there’s a ragged laugh on his lips, as consciousness draws closer, like he’s not sure whether the pain in his past— those nightmares that have tormented him ever since his best friend died in his arms— or the pain in his present feels worse.

Before he opens his eyes, he hears music playing through the tinny speakers of their archaic computer, because Michinaga doesn’t trust anything more modern not to spy on him. Bubblegum pop, high-tone wailing, all synthetic voices and driving beats. Tan always listens to music while she works.

A screeching whine from that constantly-sticking concertina gate in the alleyway past the old telephone pole and the broken-down van but before the metal staircase leading up to their crumbling building tells him that someone is coming for them, through all that ice and snow, but he just can’t bring himself to push through that intermingled fear-and-pain response to slap the Desire Driver to his chest and force himself down the stairs to face them head on.

So he lays there, waking up slowly and then all at once, until a violent coughing fit sends sharp jabs of pain through his chest and empties his lungs so thoroughly that, once Michinaga finally jolts upright to empty out what seems like desiccated plant clippings from his lungs, it takes a few gasping breaths of cold air to feel remotely human again.

“Are you, like, dead, boss?” Tan stands over Michinaga, in a blue-pink woolen sweater that hurts to look at for too long and a hand-knit scarf on top of her usual too-trendy get-up, a pint glass of tap-water from the kitchen sink in her hands. Michinaga snatches it out of her grip, and drinks the glass in three big gulps.

Death feels a hell of a lot better than living does right now.

“Not yet.” Michinaga pushes himself up, pulling his hair out of his eyes. His hairband is digging into his wrist, where he left it, so Michinaga ties it back. He needs something to take his mind off this pain in his gut, and in his chest, and rattling around in the back of his brain. He needs something to take his mind off everything. “We got a job today?”

It’s also freezing cold in here, Michinaga realizes, which explains why Tan has herself bundled up like a snowman right now. That space heater must be broken, too.

“Not a single call, dude.” Tan offers, heading back over to the stack of purple milk crates filled with the junk from the warehouse. Even with the sudden crash back into the DGP, they’re making progress finding those original owners. More than half the growing pile of clutter in their office is being shifted back to where it belongs. “All that snow last night must’ve knocked out the phone line again.”

Michinaga staggers to his feet, swaying as knees that he’s already sure are deep in the throes of arthritis from years of hard labor and harder fights try to steady themselves. “I’ll fix it.”

“No you won’t.” Tan says.

Michinaga doesn’t agree with her, but his body sure seems to get the point. He slumps back down onto the couch before his legs give out.

“New observation:” Tan gets out her little reporter’s notebook, scrawling another jab at him. “The Boss doesn’t know when to quit.”

Michinaga huffs out an amused wheeze, taking it as a compliment. It’s not the first time someone’s pointed that out about him, and it won’t be the last.

“Just help me sort all this stolen stuff out so we can get it back to those guys.” Tan chirps, heading back over to the desk and holding up a hand-written manifest of everything they’re expecting to find in the crates. “I managed to get in touch with a couple of them.”

“Good work.” Michinaga groans, clutching the ragged wound on his side, and Tan pumps her fist in the air. “Keep that up, I’ll raise your hours.”

“Oh!” Tan remembers, pointing a finger in the air as she ducks beneath the wooden desk to retrieve a smaller yellow crate containing the broken helmet and a dozen other pieces of ‘DGP’ ephemera. “I got more stuff to go in our ‘Weird Future Crap’ box.”

“I told you,” Michinaga grunts. “It’s not from the future.”

Even with his memories toyed with, after every second-place retirement, Michinaga has a good enough grasp of how the Desire Grand Prix operates— no bodies, no evidence, not even a memory. Everything in the Jyamar Area gets wiped clean once the cameras are off.

Another game just wrapped, and Michinaga has the fresh scars to prove it. If the ‘production crew’ are still doing their jobs, Tan shouldn’t know about any of this stuff. Instead, she has a box full of crap that could get both of them killed if Tsumuri or the latest Game Master finds out what they’re hoarding, and she’s treating it all like toys.

That sets Michinaga on edge, more than anything. Either the Desire Grand Prix doesn’t know what’s happening, and they’re both about to suffer the consequences once they find out. Or, worse, the DGP does know this is happening— and they’re stringing him along because it makes for better viewing for their audience.

“Anything good?” Michinaga says.

“Nah, man.” Tan offers, tapping at the cherry-red broken helmet of the GM Rider. “I’d have woken you up sooner if there was something cool.”

Michinaga squeezes his eyes shut, and coughs up scratchy black dust into his hand. He thinks he needs another glass of water.

“Oh, there was this one thing—” Tan says, rummaging around in the box for a yellow and black plastic card. It’s about the size of a hard-drive, emblazoned with an abstract animal motif. It looks like one of those data cards the creeps from the future use to transform. Michinaga is pretty sure he’s seen Beroba use it before, firing the gun at a mirror to erase an unsightly blemish on her face that nobody but her had noticed. “Some kinda hard drive, maybe?”

“It’s a hard drive?”

“I dunno, dude.” Tan chirps, stepping around the desk and crossing the blood-stained carpet to hold it out for Michinaga. “’S why I’m askin’.”

“Might be an ID Card.” Michinaga takes it, and turns it over. It’s not Beroba’s, that red and black card emblazoned with his buffalo logo, he knows that much. “Security system, or something.”

Tan just shrugs, pulling a brightly colored sweet from a bag that’s spilled over on the wooden coffee table, alongside a growing collection of unwashed cups. “So, you gonna tell me how you transformed into that big, uh—”

“Buffalo.” Michinaga corrects her, on instinct, before realizing that he’s just said enough to get himself retired.

“Zombie Buffalo guy, yeah.” Tan offers. “How’d that happen?”

“If I told you,” Michinaga wheezes, pulling himself back to his feet. He props himself up on the coffee table, and then the desk, until his footing is a little surer. “I’d have to kill you.”

“Sure. Super secret.” Tan recoils with a surprised look on her face, before tapping at the side of her thick-framed glasses and grabbing the notebook. Michinaga doesn’t try and stop her. “Another new observation. Bossman Michi has a super secret past.”

“Just…” Michinaga shakes his head, focusing on the manifest. His head is still spinning, so the whole thing reads like even more of a jumbled mess than usual. He’s never been too good with letters. “It’s just some crap I haven’t put right yet.”

“That’s super secret.” Tan points, but decides not to write anything else down for the time being.

“Until it’s over.” Michinaga shakes his head. He hands the manifest over to her. “Read this out for me.”

“Okay, so. There’s an old vintage tape deck that—”

Footsteps echoing down the hallway through the thin walls of the office, even over Tan’s trashy pop music. Three harsh knocks ring out against the bright red door to the cramped office. Michinaga gestures for Tan to go get it, and she heads over to peep through the keyhole. Michinaga remembers that fight-or-flight panic now, still unsure of whether it was real or just part of that nightmare, and scrambles to grab his Desire Driver from the drawer he usually stashes it in while Tan is distracted— and comes up empty— nothing is in there but the keys to the broken-down van propped up on cinder blocks in the street.

Michinaga curses, loudly. It was in his hands, clutched tight, when he collapsed in the snow outside the gate that was stuck solid with ice. Tan must have moved it. Any other possibility doesn’t bear thinking about.

“Guy at the door says he’s a friend of yours.” Tan chirps, and Michinaga knows that’s not true, because he’s got so few friends left and even fewer who are still breathing. “And that he’s got a parcel for you.”

A coughing fit. Michinaga doubles over, hacking up dirt like he’s just clawed his way out of his own grave again, and Tan pulls the door off the latch to let them in because, she says, they can drive him to the hospital if he needs it.

In the back of his mind, Michinaga always knew who would walk through that door. He is, however, still disgusted at the sight of Geats— in that too-sharp suit he always wears when he’s trying to impress someone— walking through his door with one hand in his pockets and a Desire Driver clasped in the other. He plants it down on the desk, staring up at him with that knowing smirk on his face.

“You dropped this outside.” Geats says, setting the cracked ID Core down on the desk beside the driver. Michinaga, still spluttering, reaches out for both, and drags them towards himself. “I thought I’d return it.”

“What is your problem.” Michinaga barks, balling his hand into a fist. He’ll take the loss of points if it means wiping that smug grin off Geats’ face, but what really pisses him off is the welling pain in his side and the fact that every part of his brain is screaming at him not to start a fight he knows he can’t finish..

Geats smiles like he knows the answer. Then, he looks over to Tan. "I don't think we've been properly introduced."

"We helped you out before a show once." Tan chirps, holding out a her reporter's notebook for the 'star of star of stars' to sign. "Tan. Tan Shitama. Massive fan, dude."

"I thought that was you." Ace smiles, pulling off his winter gloves to scrawl an autograph. Tan pumps both fists, snatching the notebook back. She mouths her excitement to Michinaga, who furrows his brow. "I never forget a face. Could you give us the room?”

“Sure, star-man.” Tan shrugs, and scurries to grab her coat and rush out the door. “Boss, I’m going to the store. Have fun with your super secret crap!”

Geats waits until Tan is well out of earshot before he starts talking. “Friend of yours?”

“Part-timer.” Michinaga wheezes. “She just works here.”

"Big fan." Ace shakes his head, pulling his gloves back on. “This Desire Grand Prix is a trap.”

And Michinaga just stands there like he’s seen red, because it takes a special kind of blindness not to realize that the Desire Grand Prix has always been rigged from the beginning. Newsflash, Geats, every single one of them are. Every single part of this game has been for that smug ‘star of star of stars’ and his benefit, for as long as Michinaga has had to stare at his self-satisfied face.

“What, you pretending to care about something other than coming first now?” Michinaga shakes his head, disgusted.

Geats pulls his Spider Phone from the inside pocket of his jacket, and navigates over to the rankings. There's a new notification on the screen, bright red text declaring that Tycoon is 'out of range,' but that's not what the self-absorbed star is trying to show him. There, behind Geats and Lopo, sits Buffa in third. Not bad progress for only being in the DGP for one single game, Geats must be scared that he’s catching up on them. “You’re on the boards, so you deserve to know.”

“You tell this to the others?”

“Not yet.” Geats says, sifting through the box of salvaged junk on the desk. He turns over a burned out husk of metal and plastic that was once a buckle, before reaching over to the cherry-red helmet in the crate and holding it up to the light. “Where did you find this?”

“None of your damn business.”

“You didn’t ask why you got a special entry, when the producers fought tooth and nail to keep you out of the last game?”

“’Cause I’ll take them all on if I have to.” Michinaga retches, false bravado crumbling in the face of another violent coughing fit. “Tear their whole game apart with my own two hands.”

“Play the game, or don’t. It's your dream on the line.” Geats hands over the helmet, and heads for the door. “Just don’t let them use you as a pawn.”

Michinaga wants to respond with the kind of language that would make a bar-room brawl between sailors lurch to a halt. He wants to know where this prize animal gets off pretending that he hates the spotlight, or pretending that he suddenly cares about the people who get crushed beneath his boot, or that they’re in any way similar.

Michinaga is going to crush everyone in his path to building a world where people like Geats can’t exist.

“Don’t get too comfortable, Geats.” Michinaga calls, slamming his ID Core back into the Desire Driver. “When this is over, I’m still coming for the top spot.”