A great blue light continued to turn its focus round and round, from the new Cathedral of Causality. Something of a building was there, but it had no structure and simply let the rain pour in from the darkened sky. Two possibilities were likely: it was in shambles, or it had been left unfinished. A window was missing in more than just one place; the lack of a roof was the most obvious feature.
It was to be four stories, but after the second story, it was just bits and pieces. Columns rose into nothingness from this third layer, and stairs grasped for a destination. A system of wires ran up from the lower layers and was wrapped around a large structure suspended precariously at the top—the great blue light that kept turning in the sky. The light was powerful and shielded within thick glass, but compared to the large building it was above, it looked small and weakly supported. The wind was so strong, too, especially this night—and it might seem as though, at any given point, its support might just snap, and the whole light would come crashing down on the almost-building below.
Around the facility, a circular area was paved into a city road, complete with stop signs and street lights. Beside the cement stairs that led up to the first floor door, a little road was being driven on just now. The vehicle was a child's imitation of a police car. "WEEEE-WOOO!" The driver, Murumuru went at a pleasant 5 miles per hour (8 kmph) toward a little hole by the door. "WEEE-WOOO!"
Like the outside, the inside was not much to look at. It was as grey as anything else, made even darker by its newfound wetness. The road stopped halfway through the large room; Murumuru parked the car in her reserved spot as usual. The door clicked open, and she emerged in uniform with a great big red umbrella over her head. While her right hand held the umbrella in place, she used her left hand to shine a flashlight forward, straight into someone's eye.
Kurusu Keigo sat in what appeared to be a replica of his old chair at the police station. The soft yellow light in Murumuru's hand showed that most of his face was patched up. All that remained showing was his nose, his left eye, and the skin that remained in between. Over what had once been his right eye, the white bandaging was a deep red.
"Kurusu Keigo, sir!" Murumuru shouted, saluting with the hand the held the flashlight. When she brought the hand back to its original position, she found his face unphased. He was just staring ahead, his left eye fixed on the expanse ahead. Murumuru wandered up to Keigo and, unceremoniously, hopped onto his lap. His hands were flat on his knees, and she smushed them now between her own knees. She leaned forward and waved her hand in front of his face. "Earth to Kurusu Keigo! Fourth, wake up!" He did no more than blink.
She heaved a sigh and shone her flashlight around. Nothing had changed since last time she had checked up on him. The debris was still in the same places. "You must be looking at something pretty interesting, if you're going to keep on looking like that," she said both to him and to herself. She shone the flashlight straight into his eye now. He winced lightly. "You know, you could just heal yourself if you wanted to! You're the god of time and space now!"
She turned about on his lap and sat her bottom on his leg. She dangled her own legs ahead and crossed her arms. Murumuru's red umbrella was over both of them. She would like to think that he was at least a little pleased, to not have the rain coming down on his head any more. "But instead, you've just been sitting here like a lazy bum, boring me to tears!"
Keigo's hand suddenly clasped Murumuru's throat, and in one swing of the arm, he hurled her off of him. She crashed into the wall, before springing back onto her feet. "You have no right to talk about tears to me, imp," Keigo snarled. He remained focused ahead, but Murumuru felt quite happy that she managed to finally get a response out of him. "I have a lot on my mind, Murumuru."
She nodded, as though suddenly remembering. "Your son, right?"
Keigo's eye moved her way. She held her flashlight toward him, and for the first time in a while, it felt like they were having an actual conversation. "It isn't even so bad," Murumuru remarked, quickly. "If you were able to win the survival game, this situation with your son should be no problem at all." His gaze returned to its original spot.
"For starters," Murumuru began, deciding to float in front of Fourth's range of vision, "You used your alliance with Yuno and Yuki to its fullest, before killing them in the police station. Then, you uprooted scandals that made 10th a criminal." She grinned. "Most impressive, however, was how you used Nishijima to take down 9th! Because he aided a terrorist, he was able to show up on your Crime Investigation Diary. You tracked them down and, knowing that 9th would be able to use her Escape Diary, went after Nishijima. It was when you killed him that 9th's composure broken, and she let her anger get the best of her. You couldn't lose at that point."
Rather than cheer him up, her words seemed to sullen his expression—although it was hard to truly tell, with his face all wrapped as it was. For the longest time, he said nothing. Murumuru knew he had returned to his silence. She had been so close to getting him to open up; she could not help but wonder if it was something she had said. That was what she was wondering, when she opened up the door to her little police car.
"I'm going to go visit your son now," she said as she got in. "He's at least a little less boring than you are." She slammed the door shut and backed out of her parking spot. Murumuru then turned around and drove out the same way she had entered. He had become a permanent fixture of this place, just as the walls were to her—lost potential.
She drove along the road that ran around the almost-building. When she looked out the window, she could see the endless sky. Somewhere, down below, there was a dried up world. While Keigo sat, staring ahead, there was a whole dried up world down there. She was not so much upset about that, as she was upset that he had not given her anything else to play with, other than just this car. Neither soul in the Cathedral of Causality was much for conversation, either, so she did not have many places to even go in her little vehicle.
Murumuru parked her car in the middle of the road. The likelihood of it getting into an accident, when she was the only driver, seemed pretty slim. She got out of the vehicle, just as before, with her red umbrella in hand. Murumuru then leaned her back against the door and used her free hand, which had earlier held the flashlight, to draw out a cigarette from her pocket. She held it between her fingers and brought it to her mouth. With a simple exhalation of her breath, the end began to burn. She took the opposite end to her lips and began to smoke, as she observed Keigo's son at the edge.
He was standing over, looking down. She knew how it would probably go. The boy would try to jump, and then Fourth, as usual, would immediately detect it and shout for Murumuru to catch him before he'd hit the ground. It was the same whenever he tried to do something drastic. The first few times, she was alarmed by Keigo's urgent orders, but now it was becoming too commonplace.
"Murumuru, is that you…?"
Murumuru walked toward him, umbrella in one hand, cigarette in the other. "Mmhmm," she chimed. "Your old man was boring me."
"He's not my 'old man' anymore," the boy corrected, in a monotone voice. He had no turned to face her. "My old man was a hero. He saved people. He stopped bad men. He didn't kill people."
Murumuru breathed out a puff of smoke. She was now standing on the edge, at the son's side. "You're still hung up on that, huh?" She shook her head. "You humans really do get worked up over the silliest things."
He backed away from the ledge a little and turned away from her, quickly. "Murder isn't silly. It's a crime. Cops are supposed to stop crime, not make crime. Cops are supposed to be the good guys. My father is supposed to be one of the good guys."
Murumuru did not want to dismiss either him or his father as a lost cause, but he was beginning to sound like a broken record. She remained at the ledge. Her back faced his. "Aren't you happy, that he did it all to help you?"
"I would rather have died," the boy answered, simply.
"He loved you so much that he sacrificed his code of honor," Murumuru suggested.
"He should've kept it."
"But what happened, happened—"
"It hasn't stopped happening in my head."
"But you should at least make the most of it, and be happy—"
"I can't be happy any more. I'm stuck on this floating rock with a murderer, the man who killed my real father, and I am not even allowed to die. He's damned the three of us here."
The boy began to kick at Murumuru's car. Her eyes widened, and she rushed toward the vehicle, arms reaching out. "Hey! Hey! That's mine!"
He changed tactics. He slammed his fist into the window and used his bleeding hand to unlock the door from the inside. Murumuru increased her speed. The boy got in and started the vehicle up. He was not playing around; he ignored the speed limit on the signs when he brought the vehicle into reverse, nearly running Murumuru over.
It appeared as though he was going to back up all the way past the edge, but he stopped right as the tires would have gone over. Murumuru was waving her hands, shouting something, but he had blocked out her voice. Keigo's son slammed his foot down and sped forward, so that it could go crashing through the wall of the first floor and slam into the person sitting inside.
Before the vehicle could reach the building, however, something miraculous happened. The light towering above went from blue to red, and a great siren was sounded from within the Cathedral of Causality—a sound greater than what any natural disaster on earth could muster. The boy took his hands off the wheel, in a desperate attempt to plug his ears.
Murumuru did the same, as she watched in horror from afar. Something came out from each side of the building. These two shapes were ambiguous at first, appearing as large, fuzzy forms of light. Then, they materialized and appeared as two giant, golden wings. There was one coming from each side, meeting where the vehicle was about to crash. The miniature police car was the moment it touched them. After a flash of light, all that remained was Keigo's son, kneeling before the building, and Murumuru, sobbing over the loss of her vehicle.
"Now look what you did!" She whined. Murumuru was floating and throwing wimpy punches at the son's back, as he remained kneeling, head down. "What are we supposed to play with, now?"
A gun was fired. They both looked, from the positions they were in, and found that Keigo had wandered to the back of the building. He had one hand on the wall, as if for support, and the other holding up a gun to the sky.
"Son, I need you to—"
"I don't want to hear it! I'm not your—"
"No!" Keigo fired his gun once more. The boy's mouth shut. "Listen to me! I need you to listen to me." His eye slithered back and forth, from his son to Murumuru. "I wanted to create a world where my son could be safe. I wanted to create a world where the people I loved could be safe… Could anything be of better intention?"
Silence.
"I wanted to create a world where one would never have to call the police—because they'd always be there, always protecting the innocent from harm. Son, I knew that the last god was not just, when you suffered—you were going to die, although you've done nothing wrong! You were going to die!"
He let go of the wall and, after leaning slightly to the left, managed to steady himself. "So, I wanted to do a better job. I wanted to create a world, where you could be happy. But I see now… That my existence makes that impossible. I cured you of a terminal illness, only to lock you here, with a monster. More than just my flesh is forever ruined. I am walking death. Some god I am!" He tried to laugh, but it came off as a different sound.
Keigo put the gun in his hand to his temple. "But I want to at least do one thing right, in my reign as god—and that is, to end it. I was never meant for this power. I stole it. I killed for it. This power has blood on it. A good man can't be god."
Murumuru launched herself forward. She was screaming about how he could not do this. What it would mean. How it was beyond dangerous. Why she needed him.
But he pulled the trigger.
