Author's Note: This was written for Kisaragi-Gentarou's Golden Week Tokusatsu Giveaway Challenge, for the Ryouma/Takatora prompt. Spoilers through roughly episode 24; written between episodes 25-26, so relationships may change as we learn more about them. Enjoy!
Redrawing the Lines
"Do you think he might be right?"
Ryouma pauses, blinking at the unexpected sound of Takatora's voice. He hadn't been certain that Takatora had even seen him come into the room and head over to the filing cabinets, the man seemingly absorbed in something on his computer. He had been hoping that Takatora was otherwise engaged, actually, because he wants to get back to his work, to analyzing the new data Kaitou has acquired for him and the infuriatingly cryptic glimpses he has gotten of Kouta Kazuraba's new abilities.
"Kouta Kazuraba." Takatora continues to stare at his screen, and when Ryouma walks to the man's side he sees that Takatora is watching Kazuraba's destruction of the Scalar System. It is the feed from only one security camera, played on loop, repeating the sequence every one minute and fifty-eight seconds, from the time Kouta appears until the time he looms tall and destroys it.
"Where did you get that suit, boy." Ryouma can feel the right corner of his mouth twitch up as he studies the unfamiliar seed nestled snugly in the youth's belt and the raiment that it gives him.
"The belt doesn't—" Takatora begins to snap out a reply and then cuts himself off, his left hand moving to steeple against his temple. "No. Of course it matters. If we have someone handing out lock seeds without oversight, we need to know who and how and stop them."
"But more than that, you want to know why the boy's doing what he's doing." Ryouma leans back, the tip of his tongue running gently over his upper lip as he puts his personal quests and desires on hold for a few minutes. It's not often that Takatora allows even Ryouma to see his uncertainties, and when it happens Ryouma needs to speak carefully, to ensure Takatora does what he needs him to do. "You want to know that we're still on the right path, that we haven't overlooked something."
"I told him about his friend." Takatora finally tears his eyes away from the screen. "I watched him break, his idealism smashed against the truth of the world. And yet..."
"Kazuraba is a madman, destroying the very objects that could save him in fits of pique." Ryouma drapes himself on the corner of Takatora's desk, meeting his old friend's eyes evenly. "He knows, now, what Helheim is, and what we're doing, but he doesn't actually understand. He isn't intelligent enough to understand, perhaps."
"No. That's not it." Takatora narrows his eyes. "The boy is many things, but he's not an idiot."
"But he is just a boy. Just a child." Ryouma reaches out, places his right hand gently on Takatora's left shoulder. "Immaturity can be just as damaging as stupidity when decisions have to be made. He believes that some magic will descend from on high if he protests long enough, some mystical way of avoiding what we both know to be true."
"But do we know it?" Takatora's eyes narrow, and there is a tightening of his shoulder muscles that Ryouma long ago learned to read as danger. "How do these children know more about the forest, after a few weeks, than we know after years?"
"Luck." Ryouma spreads his hands, palm up. "If an event is exceedingly rare, as glimpses of these... more creative Inves seem to be, then luck can be a huge component. They were in the right place at the right time."
"Just luck." Takatora's eyes continue to be hard, boring into Ryouma. "There's nothing you've been keeping from me, nothing you want to tell me now?"
"Takatora, you wound me." Pressing his right hand to his chest, giving just the right amount of humor and honest injured pride to his voice, Ryouma doesn't flinch as he meets his friend's eyes. Curse the Kazuraba boy for not understanding the nuances of the situation he's found himself in, for making this more difficult on everyone than it needed to be. "I tell you everything that I think could be of interest or use to you, and you come up with the plans needed to save the world. Now, if you really want me to tell you everything, we'd have to go back to basics and restart the calculus of string theory lessons—"
"No." The faintest hint of a smile touches Takatora's mouth. "That's quite all right. One night of that was enough to last me for a lifetime."
"Thought so." Ryouma jumps to his feet, dashing around the desk and grabbing the chair situated there. With a little skip he brings it around to Takatora's side, throwing his body into it and stretching his long legs out in front of him, legs crossed at the ankle, displaying himself in a way that he knows Takatora likes. "Now, since you are the paragon of logic, let's consider the problem of the Kazuraba boy and his actions logically."
"All right." Takatora leans back in his seat, open, receptive.
Trusting, so trusting once you've done something to make him think you were worthy of it, and Ryouma feels a thrill run through him as he studies this man who is one of his best pawns. A friend, yes, a very old and dear friend, the closest Ryouma has probably ever come to a best friend, but also a pawn, because he can never understand things as Ryouma sees them. Perhaps that's for the best, though. "So. The world is going to be destroyed in ten years by the forest. We know that. The only extra piece of information the boy might have had when he decided to go on his little chaotic rampage was that there are Inves who carry tools."
"Inves who have retained their pre-transformation identity." Takatora's brows draw together.
"No, no, no." Ryouma shakes his head, wagging one finger back and forth. "Inves who carry tools, that's all we know. We've never seen them use them."
"They could just have picked them up." Takatora relaxes again, though he frowns slightly a second later. "Though why would they do it when no others have? There's at least some possibility they've retained intelligence."
"Is there?" Ryouma spreads his hands again. "Then where is their city? Where are the signs of their lives marked upon their world? From the very first human civilization, we've been marking and changing our world. Where's their art? Where's their culture? Where's their curiosity? And where are their numbers?"
"Numbers?" Takatora's fingers drum across his desk.
"They haven't multiplied. They haven't been able to stand against the Inves of their world." They don't need to, not if Ryouma's assumptions are correct. If Ryouma is correct the tool-carrying Inves are gods standing in a world that they mold to their liking, as separate from anything human as humans are from rats. But their small number makes it clear that very few can actually achieve their state and maintain it, and Takatora, though he is many things, is not the type of man that Ryouma can ever see as a god. "They didn't save anything and they haven't created anything. You're going to save one billion people, Takatora."
"By murdering six billion." Takatora doesn't close his eyes any more as he says the number, the statistic long ago having lost the power to shake him—partly through conversations like this with Ryouma.
"Yes." Ryouma pulls his chair closer to Takatora, leaning forward to rest a hand on Takatora's knee. "By doing what is necessary. We're both too old to believe in heroes, Taka. We know that there isn't any god or magic out there that will save the world because we wish it. So we'll save what we can, by the means that we have."
"We'll be monsters, so those who come after don't have to be." Takatora watches the hand on his knee.
Watches as it slides up, gently, slowly, and Ryouma can't help the wolfish smile that breaks across his face as he watches Takatora's desire fight with his better sense.
Eventually, as always, better sense wins out, and Takatora spins his chair around. "Not here."
"Of course not." Ryouma continues to smirk as he stands, then leans in and places a quick kiss on the back of Takatora's neck. "Kazuraba is a boy, screaming about the unfairness of the world as boys do; you're a man, making the difficult decisions and doing the difficult deeds so that there can be more boys, some day, who won't have to."
It's the story Takatora holds to, the wind that has defined his path for years, and Ryouma watches in fascination as the hesitancy fades from Takatora's eyes, replaced once again by resolve.
He is not like Takatora, in any way, and he thinks, sadly, that Takatora will not have a place in the battle for the forbidden fruit and true godhood, but there is something fascinating and beautiful about watching this man willingly self-immolate for a future that all of them can barely imagine.
A future with perhaps a billion people and a world stripped of everything that makes it unique.
A future where Ryouma is a god, whatever that might mean, and Takatora maybe still a useful pawn, a friend, a man who can be steered into doing what is necessary if just the right words can only be found.
The door to the office hisses open, and Ryouma raises his head, a fierce grin pulling at his mouth as he takes in Mitsuzane Kureshima, glaring at him.
"Thank you for the updated report, Ryouma." Takatora's voice is calm, perfectly bland, and he stares at his computer screen as though Ryouma hadn't just been kissing his neck.
Not that this fools Mitsuzane. Ryouma can see that, can see more echoes of himself than of the boy's older brother in the fierce, cold calculations going on. Not enough like Ryouma, though, not cold and steady enough, burning too hot with too many conflicting emotions, and it makes the boy a fun sparring partner.
"Perhaps you should ask Mitsuzane about Kazuraba, too." Ryouma wanders close to the boy on his way to the door, not quite close enough to bump his shoulder but close enough that he can see the way Mitsuzane tenses for confrontation. "They're of a similar age, after all, and friends as well."
"I'm nothing like Kouta."
"He's nothing like Kazuraba."
The Kureshima siblings speak in unison, Mitsuzane with a burning, frustrated heat, Takatora with bland aplomb, stating the obvious.
Mitsuzane freezes, expression faltering as he studies his brother. So quick to dismiss any similarities between himself and Kouta, but not liking another dismissing it as swiftly. Yes, the younger Kureshima brother could be just as much fun as the older... provided he doesn't interfere in Ryouma's work.
"I'll be by later for a full report."
Takatora's words are a clear dismissal, and Ryouma gives a jaunty salute as he heads out the door, back toward his lab and his true work.
He will find the forbidden fruit, and he will be a god.
He thinks even gods might get lonely, though, and the Sengoku Drivers are a beautiful piece of crafting, so there will be a place for Takatora and Mitsuzane, the brothers who are so much alike and so very different, in his new world.
Smiling to himself, Ryouma quickens his step, eager to continue his work and see what possibilities emerge from the new information Kouta Kazuraba has so helpfully provided.