A/N: Written for the
Diversity Writing Challenge, i59 - write a doppleganger! AU
Chapter Set Boot Camp, #029 - 7 chapters
The 100 Prompts, Up to 100 MCs Challenge, #046 - anecdote
Advent Calendar 2015, Day 7 - write about game characters
He began as an empty slate, but now he overflowed. The persona he'd created with Ikuko warred with the one who tried to rear itself up from the depths of his past –
And he refused it. He had a new place now, a new life. A peaceful place and it warred with the murky waters that slowly emerged…and, like a title wave, submerged him as well.
He knew how to swim. He kept his head afloat. But the truth was his present was feeble and the past was strong and one day it could – or would – pull him under its currents and he wouldn't be able to twist free again.
But still, he couldn't give in. He wanted to stay as Hachijo Tohya, wanted this peaceful life and shouldn't that tragic man of the past prefer to stay buried in his head as well?
And yet they fought, an invisible battle on a board that not even the two of them could see.
Until one day he cracked, and the border between reality and illusion revealed the game spread and the endless sorcerer was there to receive him.
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Game for a Memory
Chapter 1
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There was no headache. Instead, his mind echoed hollowness as though it knew there should have been something except there wasn't. There always were headaches when he tried to remember, and the worst when he did and after that, when the memories began to flow unbidden into his mind despite how he tried to stop them…
The headache was the sign of his struggle, and it was no longer there in the darkness with him.
Was this freedom?
'This is where you gamble,' was the answer, 'for that freedom.'
He opened his eyes. The man before him was a haze but he still remembered.
And it was still impossible. 'I killed you.'
'You will try,' the man responded calmly as he sat, cape twirling behind him.
He remembered that red hair, but not the cape.
'I will try,' Tohya repeated. Yes, he would try, wouldn't he? 'Battler Ushiromiya.'
'Hachijo Tohya.' Battler's lips tweaked into a smirk. 'This here will be the battle between your past and your future. And to the victor goes the present: the right to live on into that future.'
The right to live on… and yet he remembered clawing his way up the road until it was too slick to crawl up anymore. And he remembered the flashing lights like the welcome boats in the river to guide his spirit on.
The one between them that won would live? But hadn't he already chosen to die?
Battler's smirk widened. 'Then lose,' he said. 'It's simple enough, isn't it? I'll get your body and you'll be free to die. Isn't that what you want?'
Yes, that was it. 'Fine,' he agreed. 'Let's play.'
Neither of them needed to ask what game it was.
.
He awoke alone and in a chapel.
From there, the setting quickly clicked into place. Rokkenjima island on the fifth of October, 1986. The cat-box of the Rokkenjima murders which cultivated the book they'd written together, he and Ikuko. But that book was just one of the many possible versions and even when the memories began to seep in, there was no telling truth in them to kill the possibilities.
So this was a challenge and his one and only chance for closure before the timer ran out?
Or he could simply allow the timer to run out, for wasn't that what it meant to surrender the game?
How long, he wondered? There was no clock in the chapel and he wasn't wearing a watch on his wrist. The sun was a poor approximation as well, since it hadn't risen yet or else had already set. Was it midnight? And the start of the day or the end?
But there was something about the end of the fifth day – of course. The explosion that wiped all evidence off the map and created the unsolvable cat-box that was the Rokkenjima murders. He knew that even before his past was a cat-box in and of itself. It was the famous island murders that had caught Ikuko's interest and prompted her to start writing the tale in the first place. The sequence of dominos that led to him opening the genie's wishing bottle so that the cat-box in his mind was no longer a cat-box but a reflection he could not accept as his own.
In the silence of the chapel, it clawed at him again. Searching fingers found nothing to grip but the unsoiled ground and he gripped at it and it wouldn't grip him back so the pads of his fingers tore and left rough lines beneath the dust. And inside him was the same battle, where he tried to grip that new him but the old one slipped in instead, and before he'd tried to grab the he he'd been before only to find it was impossible, that Battler Ushiromiya was the sun that was just too far away and yet it still brought its flames all too close –
'If you don't move, the game doesn't start,' said Battler Ushiromiya's voice from behind him.
He spun around and his dry lips stung and only then, in that moment of silence, did he hear the echoes of his fit. And it still clung to him, even if it slowly ebbed away.
The presence of Battler Ushiromiya in the flesh seemed to taper the one inside of him just a little bit.
But still he gasped for air like he'd been underwater until his lungs almost burst and his lips and throat both burned like he'd been breathing acid instead. He should know, really, how it felt to be drowning, almost drowned, but he still didn't remember that part. Maybe he'd never remember that part, assuming he was conscious at all. The waves might have carried him to land and then he'd walked, dripping wet and still drowning in his lungs until he'd collapsed, face down, upon the road.
But there was no road this time, nor water, nor anything to tread except memory and exposition and another persona. And himself, kneeling on the floor stained with disuse and new blood – blood that might even mark the beginning of the tragedy of Rokkenjima island…or else it's end.
He turned, slowly. There was no Battler Ushiromiya behind him. There was no-one, but the chapel door was open when it had been closed before. Inviting him outside, onto the island. Inviting him into the game of his moth-bitten memory and he wasn't even allowed to sit and wait for it to end without his hand?
He stood up shakily. Still, he wanted to sit and waste away and wait but what sort of desperate man would eventually crawl their way out…assuming Battler Ushiromiya didn't interrupt his self-battle once more. So he stumbled his way through the rows of pews and the heavy creaking door –
And then he froze, because that wasn't Rokkenjima island of October five after all, because there was smoke billowing upward and colouring the sky grey, and a glow where the picture of a mansion stood in his mind.
This was the sixth of October, some time after midnight and the island was aflame.
But then…
How was the chapel still standing, unsoiled? Why had he smelt no smoke at all? And what was the point of coming here, to this point of time when the lid on the cat-box had already slammed closed.
'This is the game-board,' said Battler's amused voice from behind him again.
He was quicker this time to turn, and catch the phantom there.
'Why?' he asked. 'Why today? Why not yesterday?'
'Because it's always yesterday,' lamented the other, looking past him. The dark cape billowed with the smoke. The same smoke that stabbed at Tohya's eyes and made them water but Battler Ushiromiya didn't blink at all. 'Against you, I see no reason not to skip straight ahead to today.'
He didn't understand. Perhaps he was missing some key memory or other to understand but he knew enough. The two of them were on a ghost island now, and if there were any surviving souls that weren't already adrift on the ocean, they could only be he himself…or the island's only survivor, Eva Ushiromiya.
'So get going,' ordered Battler Ushiromiya. 'The game won't move unless you do.'
'Go where?' asked Tohya hazily but the man was gone again, vanished like an apparition into the smoke. And the island blurred around him. Everything but the chapel that still stood tall and unstained by the smoke (and stained instead by dust and the sisters to the blood under his nails).
He couldn't recall the layout of the island anyway. The mansion would have been in the centre or thereabouts, he presumed, but it was nothing but faintly glowing rubble now. And then there was the forest which covered most of the island and gave direction and landmark to nothing…and something else. Something buried in the forest canopy. But the forest was either ash or aflame and the smoke would only thicken in it all.
So the game was to answer whatever riddle had been posed to his deaf ears before he choked to death on the smoke or fried in the fire?
He laughed. And supposed burning would be a preferable death to drowning twice over, but neither of them would top the split-second decision (or even that) of throwing himself upon the road that had almost killed him and yet given him a second lease on life as well.
He picked a direction and walked. They were all the same, after all.