Mitochondrial Eve
- hapsby

Kokonoe is smirking. Her yellow eyes, slitted hatefully, are bright with mirthful scorn.

Lotte composed himself earlier. His already long hair had grown wild like black vines, thick and matted and unwashed. He combed it, slowly and meticulously (such a waste of time, there is not enough time, why don't you understand?) and fastened it in a loose ponytail at the base of his neck. With his glasses perched on his nose and a cigarette in his taut mouth and a placid smile on his freshly-shaven face, Lotte looks normal again. (did i not look normal before? what criteria have you been using to judge me? i have not changed. i have only learned. i have seen. seen. grown. but i am still myself.)

But smug Kokonoe is unimpressed. (always better. always perfect. but her knowledge is lacking because of her stubborn arrogance. open yourself. open yourself.)

She rolls her ever-present catnip lollipop around in her mouth. The clinking, scraping sound it makes when the candy brushes against her teeth is loud and horrid in the quiet room. Leaning forward, she lights Lotte's cigarette. She does not pull away, and their noses touch.

"I'll listen just one more time, Roy," she says. Her voice is low and husky, fittingly animalistic.

Tager needs a few adjustments. Nothing interesting or fun, Kokonoe laments - just some routine maintenance. She sits straddling one of his massive thighs, screwdriver in hand and an assortment of bolts clenched between her teeth.

"Lotte has been acting strangely," Tager says, his tone as calm and even as always. Kokonoe taps her screwdriver sharply against his cheek and spits the bolts into his lap.

"Maybe instead of upgrading your weaponry for your next overhaul, I should just screw your goddamn mouth shut." She pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose haughtily.

"Why are you getting so angry?" Tager scoops up the bolts and rolls them idly in his hand. "Is his behaviour affecting his work performance?"

"No, goddamn it. Roy could die and not be any more useless than he already is and always has been!" Kokonoe snatches the bolts from Tager's hand. "Just shut the hell up, okay?"

Tager shrugs. "It's not my business anyway, Kokonoe."

"Then keep it that way." Kokonoe grits her teeth and gets back to work. The pair remain in a terse silence until Kokonoe is satisfied with her adjustments.

In the next room over, Lotte Carmine vomits blood that is not his own.

Lotte is sitting on his knees in the floor of Kokonoe's office. His hair is unbound. Over the past three years, it has grown almost as long as Litchi's, but with several obvious differences. While Litchi cared for her hair with the reverence of a mother to her child, Lotte has clearly ignored his own. It pools in the floor, a mess of knots and tangles. He takes a long, heavy drag from his cigarette, and when he exhales, the smoke smells like stomach acid.

Kokonoe stands over him, glowering. "You haven't learned."

"I have," Lotte breathes. "Hazama, from the Bureau, he is willing to share his knowledge. With his help, we can finally catch up to the Bureau. He has access to the Cauldron in the lowest, angriest, most broken tiers of Kagutsuchi. He has given me, shown me, given me-"

Before Lotte can finish his rambling sentence, Kokonoe strikes him. Her clawed hand leaves three scratches in his pretty face, and she cannot help but gasp when the flesh simply falls from his cheek and into his lap. He stares at it, or perhaps through it, and takes another drag from his cigarette. The smoke snakes its way out of the gashes in his cheek.

"I fucking reversed the erosion." Kokonoe's hands clench into fists. "I saved you. And you went back, you stupid son of a bitch!"

"I don't care to die, I don't care, don't care, don't care. I have seen what happens. The white mask has killed me over and over. I have lost count. I come back again and again. Every time is another chance to get the truth. You goddamn fool. Why don't you see?" Blood has completely flooded his mouth and soaked his cigarette, and the weight makes it fall from his mouth. "I could show you, but you won't listen! You're not a scientist, you're a coward!"

"You're just talking nonsense! You don't know what you're dealing with! Yuuki Terumi is using you!" Kokonoe shoves him and he sprawls onto his back. "Get out! Get the fuck out! You're just a liability to me at this point!"

"You're a liability to the world, to the future we cannot reach, and you must be erased. I have always... as a person you are so very important to me, but we could never see the same things because you could not open your eyes... It will be gentle. Gentle, gentle, gentle." Lotte's head rolls back and he laughs until he chokes on his own blood.

That night, Litchi visits Lotte in his room. He is scribbling furiously in a leather-bound notebook, and his right cheek is bandaged with thick gauze.

"Roy! What happened?" Immediately, she is at his side, love and concern pouring from her like a fountain.

"Like an idiot, I burned myself," he says, a smile stretching his wound. Distantly, he knows that it should hurt, but it does not. The gauze makes a rustling sound like dead leaves. "I... I think I angered some elements I was trying to combine." He laughs, then.

Litchi laughs, too, but weakly. She hasn't understood his sense of humour in months.

Hazama's smile is sinewy. "You're back, I see?"

"The world is the Blue, the creation of the world." Lotte runs his fingers through his hair. Litchi had insisted on cutting it into a more manageable length. Such a waste of time, but because it was Litchi, he could not refuse. "I told you before. Do with me what you see fit. I will transcend the Boundary and I will learn every single pathway that leads to every road to every possibility to every side of every phenomenon. I will open the Gate with my own hands and release the Blue, let the Blue take me. I know the truth about the masou. I know what must be done."

Hazama chuckles. "Well, this will certainly be interesting... Ah, you might want to call out of work for the next few days." Beneath Hazama's lips, his teeth seem too white, too sharp. "We're going to the Gate of Sheol."

Lotte thinks of Tager, pure and kind and steadfast. He thinks of Kokonoe, who he wants so desperately to show the truth, because only she has the potential to understand the way Lotte does. He thinks of Litchi, and the beautiful world he will open up for her; an endless paradise that transcends the unending wheel of time and lies and despair.

"Then let's go," Lotte says, and the world spins madly on.

"Kokonoe," Lotte chokes out, and though his words sound clear, they taste thick and heavy in his mouth. "Kokonoe." For a moment, a brief sliver of time, Lotte could almost swear he saw pity in that wretched cat's eyes.

"Kokonoe," he spits, when she doesn't speak. "Kokonoe. Adam stood in the Garden and he was alone and he was stubborn, he waited, he waited for knowledge to come to him. Eve was no fool. She was willing to sacrifice to eat the knowledge, to eat everything, to absorb, to learn. She was willing to be cast out."

"And she was tricked by a snake. And Adam was dragged down with her." Kokonoe's voice is cold. "I won't let you ruin Litchi, too."

Lotte stumbles backward, suddenly dizzy. "You understand me? How can it be that you, only you, only you..."

"Roy, I." Her eyes seem strange, her mouth the wrong colour for her face, her ears twitching. He wants to kill her, rip her apart, eat her insides so that he can take the knowledge she wastes. "Roy, I always understood you."

Lotte stoops, grabbing her shoulders. She doesn't flinch. He wants Kokonoe to kill him, rip him apart, eat his insides so that she can finally see the truth she stubbornly ignores. "Then you must know, must have seen, today it's 2197 and next year will be 2198 and next year will be 2199 but we won't go past that. Time will flip over, it keeps looping, don't you see? They think I'm crazy but outside these years we do not move, we go ever onward ever backward because they cannot find the complete Blue, the real Blue, not the Grimoire of the Blue but the complete Blue, Blue, Blue..." He stumbles away from Kokonoe, gasping and clutching his throat. "The insects, they..."

Kokonoe closes her eyes when Lotte screams and does not open them again until long after he is gone. Behind him he leaves the distinct scents of death, magic, and cigarette smoke.

Somehow, she knows that he will never come back.