"Because we separate like ripples on a blank shore, in rainbows."
Someone once said that the Psycho-Pass is the canvas on which our hearts paint. My canvas is a blank slate without even a hint of paint on it.
"Long time no see."
Surely we all begin like that, pure. An alibaster sheet ready for the world to colour. No one can ever remain perfectly white forever, all it takes is a single drop of black ink and you're forever tainted.
"Kougami-san..." She tried and failed to hide her shock.
Kougami Shinya was that drop of ink, he crashed right in the middle of me without warning and as soon as he had, he was gone. Completely disappeared from this world, without a trace. Without a single mark on me. Everything returned perfectly to normal, as if he had never even existed.
"In the flesh." He mutters in that smug way she always hated.
Everyone tells me not to blame myself and for the most part, I don't.
For the most part.
She couldn't move, she couldn't speak. She raised her gun up to eye level and found her hands shaking slightly. He wasn't supposed to be here.
"What are you doing here, Kougami-san?" He raised his brow at the question, then looked away from Akane to scan the room with his eyes.
"Here in this room or here in this part of the world, part of an anti-Sybil rebellion?" He asked sarcastically.
"You know what I mean, answer the question." Her hands tighten around her Dominator.
"You know the answer to the question, It's not like I'm here to further some personal agenda. I'm here to destroy the Sybilsystem, same as the rest of them." He moves his stare back to her pointedly. His face doesn't move, his eyes don't waver.
"You're serious."
"Of course I am, do you think I ran away to spend the rest of my days laying low, staying quiet, catching up on my reading?" A slight smirk appears on the side of his mouth.
"I don't know, a part of me hoped maybe you'd escape it all and go live in peace, but I guess know you better than that Kougami-san."
"Then why do you look so surprised?"
"BECAUSE YOU THREW EVERYTHING AWAY!" She snapped. Everything she'd been holding in since he left finally exploded. Every ounce of sympathy her friends have given her, every look thrown her way, every whisper of her 'caring for a traitor', every time she cried listening to the last message he sent her. everything.
"Tsunemori, what did you exp-" She cuts him off.
"No, Shut up. There's nothing you can say to justify leaving."
"I had no choice, didn't have one from the beginning. I refuse to live within a system that favoured that Makishima. A system so ass-backwards it would allow him to do whatever he wanted to whoever he wanted. You were there Tsunemori, I shouldn't have to explain this to you of all people." She takes her finger off the Dominator's trigger, unwraps her hands and slowly lowers it to her side.
"That's right, I was there. Makishima, he spent his entire life in a world which refused to recognize him. His thoughts, his pain, his very existence were all nothing to Sybil. You think the system favoured him but you're wrong, the system didn't care one bit about him. You're the one who felt the strongest about him, a hatred so strong you were willing to sacrifice everything to see him dead. You were the only one that acknowledged him and in his own sick, twisted way it made him happy." She takes her eyes off of him for the first time in the conversation and turns around to face away from him. She didn't want him to see how sad she was feeling at that moment.
"Sybil doesn't favour anyone, it doesn't choose who will be criminals. That choice always has and always will lie with us. We were both there together. Sasayama, Yuki, Kagari, Masaoka. Because of Makishima so many people died but we're still alive. I'm still here Kougami-san." She wraps her arms around herself and she can feel them once again, tears stinging her eyes and threatening to fall.
"Are you still here?" Neither of them speak and for a moment, all his silent.
"Akane..." Her shoulders tensed at the feeling of him standing behind her, his mouth so close to her ear she could feel his breath on her skin.
"I'm flying over the rainbow."
She remembered it like it was yesterday, it was the hottest it had been that summer.
She remembered the smell of sweat and cigarette smoke, the sound of the cheap fan blowing in the corner of his barracks, the thick taste of the coffee he always made for her whenever she visited him.
She remembered them both complaining about the heat for hours, thanking god that they didn't have work that day.
She remembered him telling her that he's always hated the heat, that when he was a kid he would stay indoors all summer long and read in his room. She told him that when she lived back at home with her parents, whenever it was too hot to be outside her and her mother would watch old movies.
She remembered him smiling softly as she told him this.
She remembered him asking her what her favourite movie to watch as a child was, she made him promise not to laugh if she told him.
She remembered him breaking that promise when she answered 'The Wizard of Oz'.
She remembered her surprise once he finally stopped laughing and quoted the movie to her.
"A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others."
She remembered him saying that that described the Sibyl system flawlessly.
She remembered wishing that the world operated a little less like that, that the Sibyl system could see what she saw in him.
She remembered how everything seemed to disappear after awhile, words like Inspector and Enforcer all but vanished from her mind and all that remained were two people. Nothing more, Nothing less.
She remembered wishing that they could stay like that forever, and knowing that they couldn't.
She remembered telling him that she always loved 'Over the Rainbow'. She could still picture his shocked face when she began singing it.
"Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly. Birds fly over the rainbow. Why then, oh why can't I?"
She couldn't believe he remembered.
A single gunshot rings in her ears, aimed at the pipelines above their heads. Thick, grey smoke quickly fills the room, covering his hastened escape and by the time she finds her way through the smoke, she's lost any chance of chasing after him. She curses him loudly, knowing he's already too far gone to hear it. She calls to her squad to pursue but she knows it's pointless.
Kougami Shinya was gone once again.
How does one determine what is right and what is wrong? What is just and what is evil? Who is a criminal and who is not? Who is just human and who is something more? Before becoming an inspector I never once asked myself these questions and if someone had posed these questions to me at that time, I can't even imagine what my answer would have been. Back then, if someone had told me I would be working with latent criminals, leashed dogs whose brains operate far outside of what I then considered to be familiar territory, I wonder what I would have thought. They are each of them foreigners forced to occupy a land that they cannot understand, speak a language they do not know a single word of. They instinctually reject the standards of this society, and the society rejects them all in turn.
The Sybil system likes to pretend that it has evolved beyond the human psychology which it is based from, but just like humans they fear all that which they do not understand. These people that stared into the eyes of the Sibyl system and saw it for what it truly is, a thinly veiled dream. The truth is the Sibyl system is terrified of these individuals, those who can see right through it in a single glance, who can see the truth without even explicitly knowing it themselves.
They are both the ones who protect the Sibyl system, the very law that rejected them, and the proof that the system isn't infallible and everyday I ask civilians to not worry, to place their trust in the Sibyl system and to let it protect them.
But it's all lies, I don't mean a single word of it. The law can't protect people, only we can do that. Inspectors and Enforcers. Stupid, weak, fallible humans.
Before I began working in the MWPSB. Before I met all of my colleagues. Before I began to see the world for what it truly is. If you had told me where I was gonna end up, I'd have laughed in your face. It would have been the funniest thing I had ever heard.
Now, I can't remember the last time I really laughed, the last time I smiled completely involuntarily. That's the world we live in today, that's the perfect society we fight everyday to protect.
"What a joke."