Chapter Text
*
If you start over, can I redo mine, too?
penny & sparrow
*
“And you never forget your first.”
Someone coughs, another lets out a sort of bewildered, puttering chuckle. He decides to continue smiling, confused by their confusion. It’d been going so well, too, surprisingly good at this part of the job. Took him a while to get it pitch perfect, but can now do mission talk in his sleep. Maybe that’s the hiccup? Too much jargon, skimmed an obvious redirect, silver on the tongue? The blank faces make it hard to tell, and Taichi doesn’t like being unsure.
The reporter’s microphone is quivering between her outstretched fingers, an odd blush making her stutter. He opens his mouth.
A hand comes to his shoulder, pulls him into the waiting car behind them. “All right, summary bulletin is on its way to your inbox. Thanks, everyone. See you in the press pit after tomorrow’s ceremony.”
The beat of silence could have been scripted; so could the collective burst of chatter that sounds just as the doors shut. Taichi stares through the tinted window, the vague clamoring on the other side muted as the car draws away from the curb. “Rosa?”
“Seatbelt.” Her acrylic nails clatter expertly across the screen of her phone.
Starts to draw the safety clasp forward, mechanical in the movement. “Was, uh—was that live?”
“Was what live?”
He’s worked with Rosa for three years now. Yuri’d assigned her to him almost immediately upon hire, found her ready for the bullpen after three tours in North America and Eastern Africa, and two in the Digital World. You need someone who won’t bullshit to you.
This, Taichi’d long since accepted. What about someone who won’t bullshit for me? he’d countered, trailing after their deputy chief at the last General Assembly, wading through the Digital World Mission’s rented office eight blocks south of UN headquarters.
Yuri’d actually laughed, a rarity. Everyone bullshits you, Taichi. Whether you realize it or not is your own problem.
Demanded Yamato over drinks, back home for a quickfire two-night holiday, if it were true, and even he did not miss the intense interest Jou suddenly developed in their laminated menu—a pitiful performance, all things considered. They frequented that watering hole for the sole reason that it did not serve edible food, each of their tastes too distinct for any one to be truly happy at an eatery, dive bars therefore the only tolerable compromise. Koushiro’d tried to keep the peace by offering to split a plate of something confoundingly called “fairy bull wings,” while Yamato had simply stared at him from across the booth. Of course, not, but in a deadpan that had Taichi very pouty for the rest of the night.
Blinks a few times into the cab, his hand still around the seatbelt clasp at his waist, not yet buckled. “The interview. Those interviews I just did—you know, back there, with the, uh, with the television cameras and all that—,” swallows thickly, “—was that live?”
Rosa doesn’t look up from her phone. “Are you asking me if the fabric of our shared reality is ‘live’?”
“Are the finger quotes necessary?”
“Yes.”
Hesitates. “Yes, they’re necessary, or yes, that was live?”
“Taichi,” and finally looks at him. She’s even lowered the mobile to her lap, meaning she’s extra business. It’s times like these that he’s forced to admit Yuri is a very good, very prescient deputy chief. “Would you please keep your attention on today’s agenda? We have a very full diary.”
“You’re the one who sets it,” because he’s feeling surly, “so whose fault is that?”
Rosa merely smiles, and Taichi changes his mind: Yuri is a very mean, very petty deputy chief.
Leans as far back out of kicking distance as he can, as he isn’t yet so stupid as to underestimate her taste for retributive justice, having heard enough stories from Ken of their meeting on that impromptu world recruitment tour stop in Mexico back in ‘02 to know better. Taichi could barely handle her now; imagining this intensity as a child is bone-chilling. None of this helps to deflect from the present problem that is the clammy heat crawling up his back, made worse by the fact that he is Yagami Taichi, and Yagami Taichi does not get cold sweats.
He flattens both palms to either side of his head, unruly curls pressed to his temple. “Just tell me how bad it is. If it is?” Can’t help but be hopeful, a futile plea.
Rosa has no patience for either. “If by ‘how bad,’ you mean ‘how far has the clip gone,’ then suffice it to say that you are already starting to trend on three different social media apps.” That’s why she’d been on her phone. Turns the screen around towards him.
Taichi opens his mouth. Something like a wheeze sounds instead of intelligible words, and Rosa has the decency to at least pretend to appear sympathetic. It doesn’t suit her. He wants to tell her this, prone to distraction when at his most chaotic. His mouth is still open, and he’s still wheezing.
“I’ll see what I can do,” says Rosa, which Taichi believes is her meanest joke to date, because they both know only G–d could intervene now.
Sure enough, his personal phone begins to ring. Takes one look at the caller ID, then the exponentially growing number of text and group chat notifications, and pulls weakly at the collar of his suit jacket, wondering if it might indeed be death by sweat-ridden linen blend in the backseat of a chauffeured sedan after all, single and unattached at his big age with nothing but a studio flat on the seventh floor of a Midtown East highrise and the world’s most judgemental cat to show for it. Tragic, really.
“How many holidays do I have this quarter?”
“Not enough.”
Slides as far down his seat as he can without reverting fully into a toddler. Punting the air with his feet does nothing to slow this reversion. “Can’t you say just one helpful thing?”
“You help yourself plenty—,” the dings of several outgoing emails sound in quick succession, and she takes a pause more dramatic than he thinks is fair, “—when it comes to saying just one thing.”
Taichi’s private line rings again. He wonders if it’s better to jump out of the car after crossing the 405 or before. Might not be a kid anymore, but he’s sure he’s still fast enough on foot to lose Rosa in Shimbashi. They’d just opened a new Digital Gate at the station, under provisional testing, of course, but with his global security clearance, he could—
“Hi, Sora. Yes, I’m well, thanks. Yes, we’re heading to the hotel now. Yes, he is avoiding your calls. Mm-hm. Mm. Yes, I’ll put him on now. Taichi,” Rosa leans forward with his phone in her hand, “Sora would like a word.”
He slides as far away as he can get. It is not at all far. “No, thank you.”
“Well, that’s surprising,” Sora’s tone is even more clipped on speaker phone, sharp as a blade, and his whole body flinches, “as you appear to have plenty of words to spare.”
“I don’t do these things on purpose!” He grumbles this half into the seat cushion, having slumped all the way onto his side.
Rosa tosses the phone at him, and he shouts again, scrambles to catch the device before he’s out another hefty deduction of that month’s salary. Only his oldest friends found it amusing that someone so analog had become the face of the pro-Digital World movement, though Yamato had since banned Koushiro from comping Taichi’s bill for damages to the proprietary prototypes Izumi Tech sends him, so the fun had sort of lost its appeal in recent years.
There’s shuffling on the other end of the line, too, so that by the time Taichi has gotten the phone in his hand properly, a new voice joins the conversation. Koushiro has never sounded more resigned and disgusted at once. “It’d somehow be less upsetting if you did.”
Kicks the air again, feeling thoroughly ambushed, ignoring Rosa’s muttering about his loafers scuffing the upholstery when he slouches down the seat again. “How was I supposed to know they’d ask about that?”
“No one was asking you about that—,” snaps in Yamato’s voice on a third line, merging seamlessly with the fourth and final open connection, this one in the form of Jou sputtering out, “Why would anyone ask you about that?” in a voice so comically high Taichi could laugh, stopping the impulse just in time to not become the first human in two worlds to be murdered through the phone.
“Rosa was there!” Sits up at last, desperate eyes landing on his junior colleague’s perpetually unimpressed expression. “Tell them, Rosa! Tell them how the reporter asked if—,”
“—if you were looking forward to co-chairing the Odaiba Memorial ceremony tomorrow,” parrots Rosa with perfect recollection.
“—and I said, yes, of course, every year—,”
“—and if everyone would be there, since Lieutenant Ishida and Mr. Takaishi may still be on bereavement leave—,”
“—so I said, I can’t speak to personal matters, but—,”
“—but we can expect to see Director Izumi, yes? Miss Yagami, Dr. Kido? Will attorney Hida—?”
“—there will be many in attendance who continue to be the most directly involved with Digital World matters—,”
“—though less often Mrs. and Inspector Ichijoji—,”
“—I think they’re a bit busy, next generation to raise and all—,”
“—and Mr. Motomiya, the heiress Takenouchi—?”
“—not sure on the specifics just yet, but we’ve all tried to make it a point to gather on the anniversary if there isn’t another obligation—,”
“—so then we shouldn’t expect Miss Tachikawa to—?”
“—oh, she’s a given, goes without saying—,”
“—but with her recent news, won’t she be—?”
“—no, no, not Mimi. She’s there, for sure. Yeah, she wouldn’t miss this, not if it’s for me—,”
“—‘Not if it’s for you,’ Counsellor—?”
“—well, yeah. I mean, we all show up for each other, but anytime you need her, Mimi’s there. Never have to ask twice. She’s just special like that, far back as I remember. And you never forget your first.”
That’s when Taichi gestures open-palmed with both hands, as through any of them would be able to see this over the phone, but more so as if to say it were inevitable where such a leading line of questioning could only go, and to absolutely no one’s fault, as the rehearsed record clearly demonstrated. “Well?”
The interior of the car is silent but for the hum of mid-morning Tokyo traffic. A whole minute goes without a word. Rosa hasn’t blinked.
Koushiro at last heaves a dispirited sigh. “How did you get early admission to Soumei?”
Rosa snorts, and Taichi glares harder at the phone, not that his childhood friends now turned sworn enemies would be able to tell. “They trapped me for the clickbait, and you all know it.”
“And you know your delusions are your own,” snaps an impatient Yamato, with Jou rounding out the paternalistic tone with a sternly worded warning of his own: “But you’d better figure out how you’re going to handle this before it’s all anyone will talk about tomorrow.”
Taichi just grumbles again in reply, both because they’re right and because his stomach twists into a very tight knot at the reminder.
A glance out the window confirms they’re now halfway to the hotel, and that much closer to another new personal low for him. With his luck—which is to say, with his unrivaled ability to find yet another hidden compartment in Pandora’s box to heedlessly pry open—the news will have circumnavigated both worlds tenfold by the morning. If he thinks he’s cooked now, there’s no telling what wrath awaits him at the anniversary ceremony—wrath that surely will come in the form of a very petty pair of eyes and a very long memory.
Seeming to sense his internal flailing, Rosa lifts a bottle of water from the drinks compartment between their seats. It is not lost on Taichi that this is likely the nicest she will be to him for the rest of however long the fallout of this public debacle will last, but he’ll take whatever pity he can get.
He allows himself a long sip before wiping his mouth, back of a calmer hand. “This is why I can’t be left unsupervised at these things.” The closest he can allow himself to come to talking about his feelings.
Sora snorts, fairly inelegantly. Usually drops all pretense around him, the way that each of them do when back with another. Jou says it’s sweet and Yamato calls it regression, while Koushiro says there’s always room for growth, but in a tone that seems to imply he’s all but given up on Taichi’s specific capacity for growth far earlier than the rest of them.
“Yes, a live birth is just what this all needs,” says Sora.
“Come on, you’re not that big—far along,” Taichi course correcting with haste when he catches Rosa’s eyes bug out, the sound of Yamato’s breathing changing.
By some grace, Sora appears to have not heard him, while Jou interjects sternly, “And yet bedrest it is.” Not often bossy, but Jou will throw his weight around on medical matters, even if they don’t always heed him. Still, he cares, and a heck of a lot, and for this reason Taichi doesn’t try to make another joke about it.
“You really have terrible timing, Taichi.” Koushiro’s way of saying, if they could be there, they would.
“Yeah, but when’s the last time we were altogether on the anniversary?” This doesn’t help, which he only realizes after he’s said it. “Not that it matters,” he starts, and makes it worse.
“Of course, it matters.” Sora sounds frustrated with herself most of all, but Taichi still feels bad. “If I—,”
“—if any of us,” says Yamato, voice less sharp, which they each saw coming. Notoriously soft and gooey at his center.
“—we would,” finishes Jou, declarative and far louder than normal, as though this might will such a reality into existence.
Uncomfortable all over again now, Taichi makes himself roll his eyes, intervenes before the sentiment gets any more out of hand. Really, there’s only so much he should be expected to tolerate. Has gone his whole life without having to look a feeling directly in the eye, and they aren’t about to make him start now just because he might miss them a stupid lot this time of year. “Get more mushy, and we’re revoking all future invitations.”
“Whose ‘we’?” pipes up Rosa, forever willing to distance herself professionally from him with a quickness Taichi thinks he ought to find insulting. “All Odaiba Chosen are VVIP.” She pauses then, thinking her statement over. “Though Ms. Tachikawa has asked we don’t use that term anymore.”
Taichi looks at her in surprise, saying nothing, while Yamato snorts at the moniker he’s never much liked anyway, “‘Odaiba Chosen’?”
“Since when?” Jou asks at the same time, while Sora talks over all of them, Mimi’s most faithful translator, “She means VVIP.”
“Ms. Tachikawa says we ought not classify people by value.” Rosa relays this explanation in her usual nonchalant cadence, so that only Taichi sees the little blush in her cheeks. It’s an affection he’s well acquainted with. Doesn’t know anyone who’s met Mimi, however briefly, who hasn’t had that look in their eyes after.
“She’s always been that way,” says Jou, his voice softening.
“Yeah, not always,” says Taichi, absently, and only belatedly remembers the present context when everyone on either end of the phone line begins speaking over each other to talk back at him. “All right, all right! I said I was sorry!”
“You most certainly have not!” Koushiro’s voice climbs over all the others, a rarity that puts the rest of them in their place, too, because having Koushiro disappointed in you remains the most grievous of situations. Chided, Taichi even shrinks a bit hearing him, not, again, that he could see this over the phone. “And if you are going to do any good tomorrow, Taichi, you’ll need to apologize directly before the ceremony.”
He opens his mouth, catches Rosa’s death glare, and swallows his instincts. “I said, all right, didn’t I?”
“Unbelievable,” mutters Yamato, while Sora joins in, “There’s no way you could think tomorrow would go off without even acknowledging this, Taichi.”
“I never said I wasn’t—look, this is all getting besides the main issue.”
“Oh, I’d like to hear this, too,” says Rosa. She even puts her phone in her lap, screen down again.
Taichi avoids looking at her after a second glance in her direction. “We’re forgetting how quickly terrible things happen. This will be long gone by morning.”
“I’m not sure if, as a public servant, it gives you any credit to be…wishing for bad things to happen to people?” The doubt in Jou’s voice is far more than Taichi deserves, but he still huffs over it.
“I’m not wishing for—look, if it’s never even bothered any of us what went on that night, so why should it matter what a couple of strangers think?”
“‘A couple of strangers’?” starts Jou, but then Yamato interrupts, hitting at the heart of the matter. “What do you mean, ‘any of us’?”
“I mean,” and here, for the first true time, Taichi falters, hesitant, “you all were there.”
That silence is markedly different from the pause that had followed the re-creation of how he’d arrived at this stupid point, and for a minute Taichi thinks another worlds-collapsing event may have rescued him—er, that is, may have so unfortunately just happened—until he discovers that his analog thumb has struck again, looking on with dismay at the dead phone left in his hand.
“Well, fuck.”
“Seems to be your issue, yes.”
Rosa clears her throat, sitting straighter in her seat, and even irritated Taichi marvels once again at her innate sense of cardinal direction, the car slowing to an easy stop before the valet entrance of the Capitol Hotel Tokyu. A growing cadre of reporters have already begun assembling, eagerly chattering amongst themselves.
Taichi feels his body clench up, while Rosa just nods at his passenger door. “I’ll take care of the press,” making this seem like a favor than a literal line in her job description, but Taichi is aware he does not make it easy.
Taking a breath, he steps from the car without glancing in either direction, carrying just the handheld travel case stored under his seat and not exactly sprinting into the hotel lobby but not exactly leisurely walking it either. The attendant at the front desk is already prepared with a room keycard extended in a gloved hand, bowing his greeting, and Taichi at least remembers to return the respect before charging off to the elevator bank, tracing the route he has had two to three times a year for the last ten. Always the same corner suite, with the same view over the city, and the same brand of whiskey already opened and decantered beside the same single glass tumbler.
Ensconced without the threat of instigating another public disaster (but let’s just give it time), Taichi retrieves his mobile from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and sets it on the docking station on the nightstand to charge. There, he waits, because apparently he is unrecognizable even to himself, staring at the dark screen until the single battery icon appears, reawakened.
His plan had been to scroll through the press feeds himself, but his unread inbox tells him there’s no point. His message count grows even as he stares, horrified, at the piling on, all while more phone calls make their way straight to voicemail.
Most names he recognizes. One name doesn’t appear at all.
This wouldn’t really be a problem, but then he bites the bullet and calls her, and is answered by precisely one ring tone and the click of her own voicemail cutting him off, the kind of abrupt end the machine will only do when manually instructed. He doesn’t try again.
Instead, defeated, Taichi lays himself facedown fully dressed over the sheets and submits to his fate. Outside clothes on the bed is what he deserves.
*
In the back pocket of his jeans is tucked the letter.
Crisp white stock, fine inked script, embossed emblem across the header. The whole of his future in five lines of writing, no more and no less.
Taichi’s tempted to tell Koushiro first, in confidence. He can trust him, implicitly and entirely, a fact that he’s been known to exploit to his benefit. This is not a thing to be proud of, and mostly Taichi isn’t. It’s just that when he’s not terribly confident in a decision, or still working out what the right thing to do might be, especially when it doesn’t immediately appear before him, there are just four people in the world he can ask, and in one very specific order.
In fact, by rank, Koushiro and Yamato take turns. Yamato will just fight him more along the way, and sometimes, this sort of becomes the worser option. Pleasantly, Taichi has recently come across a handy trick for getting Yamato off his back; presently, the problem is that Koushiro’d also sampled some of the spiked lemonade, too, which has left Taichi without either of his most stable anchors as he prepares to make the most important decision of his nineteen years.
The other present problem being, of course, that by this point, running on no sleep and all audacity, Taichi’s sampled plenty of the same illicit alcoholic concotion, and has only a fleeting grasp of nurturing said problem at all. Instead, he has become a problem for Sora and Jou, aka, his third and fourth most trustworthy moral mirrors, whose level headed maturity have until this precise moment guided him through a whole host of stupider decisions than the letter in the pocket of the jeans he’s decided on abandoning in favor of delayed distraction.
“This is not how a birthday should be celebrated,” shouts Jou in a panic, who’s about two seconds away from trying to pull Taichi’s jeans back on for him.
Taichi hops away from him, shaking off the second leg. “Look, let me go first, and I’ll show you—,”
“You’ll do no such thing!” Jou manages to grasp his elbow, and drags him back from the rocky edge on the highest cliffside in Akigawa Valley, picked by the birthday girl herself.
“But that’s so far!” Mimi squeals, buries her face in her hands, stumbling backwards.
Sora wraps an arm around her waist, catching her near tumble. They’re giggling, just a bit too drunk for this early in the morning, or this late into a night that had had until this point gone exactly as she’d wanted, the center of all their attention. Had bemoaned, in fact, that she had only about twenty three minutes left to be the center, which is all the time she has left until the first sunrise of her eighteenth year, and Taichi had had enough of the whining. Then do something about it, he’d declared, which meant, of course, he would be the one to do it first.
Taichi bends at the waist, fists the back collar of his T-shirt to pull off over his head. Upright by the time Jou has grabbed at a sleeve, frantic. “Don’t even think about it—,”
“I don’t think, Jou.”
“That’s not comforting!”
Throws open his arms for a bear hug, crowing over Jou’s retreating yelps, “Let me comfort you another way, then.”
“Are we doing this or not?” Mimi peers back down, scares herself all over again at the sight.
As though realizing only then that neither of them had been joking when the final birthday festivity had been first posed, Sora tightens her hold, grasping for good sense even in their inebriated states. “Not! We’re not—Taichi, don’t—I said, don’t!”
“I’m just seeing how high it actually is—,”
“You don’t need to know that information!” yells Jou, voice strangled.
Sticks out his tongue. “Koushiro wouldn’t curbstomp on my education like this.”
Jou looks close to tears, either from the alcohol or the perpetually failed endeavor that is keeping his friends from doing stupid things. Turns around to raise helpless hands to Koushiro and Yamato passed out on their picnic blankets, surrounded by food wrappings, empty bottles, knitted throws and all their jackets. They’d only gone down minutes earlier, just around the time that Taichi came up with his grandest dare yet, at his most creative when the least supervised. Like he already knows whose fault this is all about to be, Jou pleads with the pair, “Wake up.” A pathetic whisper.
Taichi claps his shoulder, drags him back along to the end of the rocky path. “What do you think? Eleven metres? Thirteen?”
“It can’t be that much!” Mimi worries her cheeks with her fingers. “Can it?”
“Only one way to find out,” declares Taichi.
“It’s too scary!”
“Then don’t look.” Shrugging all worry off, running the back of a hand under his nose. Has never had much patience for easy problems.
Mimi, on the other hand, just whines again.
Honestly, this is why she doesn’t rank for him at all, and he’s never felt sorry about this fact. All their lives, Mimi’s just been there, perpetually at the edge of his vision, but rarely in his line of sight. Pretty, big hearted, and even bigger mouthed, but mostly just lowkey terrifying, the way she’ll do whatever she wants while managing to get away with it at a success rate he has never been able to match. Newly eighteen, too, as of about midnight, so as much as she liked to boast—and loudly proceeded to do throughout the weekend camping trip, commemorating both their origin story as a mismatched friend group and her entrance into adulthood, the last of them to cross that threshold and, as of midnight, coincidentally no longer bitter about this natural order—still kind of a baby about most things, sheltered and weird, possessing something like a fashion sense but he’d be put out to tell you whose sense precisely. Neither stable nor an anchor, but friends, to be sure. What else is there?
She turns to him, “How will I know where I’m going if I don’t look?”
“What’s that matter?” Steers back several paces, gearing himself up. “Only one direction you’ll even go.”
“Taichi, I mean it, don’t you dare—,” and in her panic, Sora lets go of Mimi to rush at him, force him back, “—Jou, help me!”
He flails the arm she’s captured, Jou rushing to his other side. Both arms pinned, bands of light rising behind them, and he’s yelling, “It’s not even that far!”
“You’re too drunk!”
“The water’ll sober me up!”
“That’s not—Mimi?” because she’s kicked off her skirt, whipped her hair out of the loose braid Sora’d plaited for her at the start of their night, nearly ten hours past. Jou sputters something unintelligible, his face so beet it’s nearly purple by the time Mimi’s down to a pink bra and matching panties.
She takes a single step towards the cliff’s ledge, then glances back over her shoulder, windswept hair flying off the slope of her neck. Has a wild glint to her eyes that makes Sora gasp, Jou swear, Taichi laugh. Seeing her in the light of a new day, or maybe just finally seeing her. The edge of his vision. “One way, right?”
“Yeah.” Taichi grins, delighted to have a co-conspirator after all, “But you’ve got to get fast enough, watch for the rocks, keep your knees—,”
“Too many rules!” And leaps into the sun.
*