Inversion

Trigger warnings – rated for eventual eating disorders, strong language, and canon-typical violence.

Chapter 1 – She Makes Things Explode With Zios

His ribs and shoulder had still been howling protests under the barrage of painkillers when Mitsuru had invited herself in his room, charts in hand, and told him Hamuko should be the leader. "Huh?" he said.

"I've looked over the readings." Mitsuru closed the door behind her with a nudge of her foot. Her hair was swept back into a bun, pencil lodged behind her ear. She flipped over the top sheet on the clipboard and on second thought hit his light switch – a quick, distracted gesture. "Her power levels are astronomical. I've never seen the like – neither has the chairman."

"We all had huge power leaps when our personas first awakened," Akihiko said, and also he was half-naked. He wondered if he should be making more of an attempt to cover himself. "That's no reason for her to take the reins just because of that. She's just a kid."

"Take a look at these levels and tell me if you disagree."

Her slippers whispered on the floorboards as she crossed the room. He took the clipboard from her, glancing at her briefly before turning his attention to the top sheet. "Her power level was so high it caused a momentary lapse in the grid," Mitsuru said. "The computer was essentially knocked offline. It's why we lost connection to Takeba's com in the middle of battle."

"Yeah, but…" … those numbers were really damn high. Mouth going dry, Akihiko squinted involuntarily to bring them into better focus in the low light. "You sure that's…"

"We triple checked. It was all her. Her power levels are still jumping, in fact– it's causing malfunctions in the hospital equipment. So far they have attributed it to a mechanical error but can't locate the cause."

"Power doesn't mean she's ready to lead," he said, handing it back over. The action hurt his ribs. The earth's voyage around the sun hurt his ribs. "If anything, that'd make her a better second in command. That way she can focus on just hitting as hard as she can, and not be distracted by giving orders."

"Let me put it this way," Mitsuru said. "Would you rather have Takeba or Iori lead?"

… well, okay, no, but the blunt dismissal in her voice confused him. "I'll lead like I always do. I might be out of commission for now, but sooner or later I'll—"

"You and I both know it's going to take at least a month for you to heal, Akihiko. We can't afford to hold up the operations because of your carelessness."

Taken aback by the sharpness in her tone, Akihiko shut his mouth. Mitsuru sighed shortly, running her hair out of her face, and sat on the side of his bed. He studied her, taking in the subtle curve of her shoulders – weariness she'd never let the juniors see. "She's been in the hospital for three days already," she said. "None of us were out that long."

"With a power jump that high, it's no wonder she's worn out," he said, kind of wondering what was really going on here. "She'll be okay."

"If she had parents I'd contact them, but she's practically a ghost." Mitsuru eased herself back on her hands. "Penthesilea can't get a read on her. She keeps… changing. Shifting, I guess is a better word."

"Maybe it's a part of her persona's ability. Cloaking or something."

"Perhaps," Mitsuru said, and said nothing else.

Akihiko finally read into her silence. "Look, it's not you. If Penthesilea can't sense her, then it's got to be something she's doing on her own."

"Well, whatever it is, it's effective. We'll just have to wait until she's out on the field to determine the full extent of her abilities." With a sigh she pushed herself off the bed, then looked down at him. He met her disapproval with a bland look of his own. "You've erred, Akihiko," she said. "Rather egregiously."

"It sucker punched me," he said, getting a little defensive. "You want to tell me how I'm supposed to defend against that many appendages?"

"Summon Polydeuces instead of flailing at everything with your fists," Mitsuru said. "Not everything is a boxing match. You're fortunate we were able to adequately explain the injury at the hospital."

Flailing with fists. He felt something throb in his forehead. "Listen—"

"If you want to be useful to us anytime soon, you'll keep yourself still and focus on recovering." Mitsuru paused just outside the door, hand on the frame, then said, "You were lucky this time, Akihiko. I would prefer you didn't press your luck in the future."

When she was gone, he hauled himself out of bed and slipped on his shirt, and sat down at his desk to do homework.

He tried to finish his math because he really did need to catch up. The next week faded into cosines and tangents and autumn eyes and the girl who looked like Miki lying in the hospital bed. All of it, he quickly discovered, being equally relevant.

The way Arisato wielded her naginata in battle was… well, he was pretty sure it was wrong. But whatever. She made it work. Much more elegantly than Junpei's rookie-league swings with his spiked bat, though it made his blood-pressure skyrocket to watch how close at times the blade whizzed by her neck.

Akihiko was really bad at being injured. It wasn't that big a secret. The entire boxing team knew it, Mitsuru knew it, and now so did a bunch of juniors he barely knew. It wasn't even that he missed the fight as much as he just had too much time to think, and a lifetime spent fussing over details didn't allow for casual thought.

He couldn't sit still. He worried over nothing, endlessly paced the floors, crowded Mitsuru at her equipment until she lost patience and snapped at him to go to bed, for goodness sake, Akihiko. Then he'd lay on his back and listened to time pass with his whole body, counting down until morning, wiling away the time until the sun came up and made a little more sense of everything again.

Eventually Mitsuru let him come to Tartarus, provided he come after the juniors were in the tower and left before they returned. Listening in on battles over Mitsuru's com was illuminating. So far they were fighting as a unit, which was something. On the other hand Yukari had a tendency to hesitate and Junpei had a tendency to ignore orders, and more often than not someone would end up on their ass during the fight.

They'd pull it together in the end, but Akihiko spent a lot of the battles hovering somewhere between an aneurysm and an ulcer. Yukari being a little nervous… that was fine. She'd get over that. Junpei's insubordination, that was the real problem. It'd be different if Arisato was making bad calls, but for the most part, she was actually weirdly intuitive. A lot of the time she knew where to hit before Mitsuru even called out a weakness.

After a particularly rough night with a Thebel guardian, remembering how hoarse Arisato had sounded in his earpiece, Akihiko caught Junpei before he went up the stairs for the night and pushed him against the wall to have a talk. "Really, man, I had it," Junpei said. "She just dove in without asking. I was all ready to go critical on that mother—"

"She did it to save your skin." His ribs hurt, manhandling Junpei like this, but he needed to make a point. "Look, enough is enough. We get it, you're tough. But the fact is, we put Arisato in charge, and you put the mission and everyone around you in danger with your showboating tonight."

Junpei's eyes flashed. He was a good kid. Akihiko had read over the report the Kirijo group had compiled on him a few days after Akihiko had brought him in. Abusive home, acting up in school, but there was potential there under all that. "Come on, back off, senpai," Junpei said tightly. "I did my job out there."

"This isn't a video game. There aren't any saves or continues. If you die, no amount of Yukari's magic is going to be able to bring you back."

"I don't care about that!"

"Then care about her. Care about the trust she's placed in you. Frankly," Akihiko said, "it's not me you have to worry about. If Mitsuru thinks you're endangering the group, she has the ultimate veto power. You were brought here to be an asset. If you're in any way a danger to the member of SEES, we have the right to toss you right back out."

The color dropped out of Junpei's face. Instantly Akihiko felt like a bastard. Stupid or not, Junpei had worked hard tonight. He'd stripped to the waist on the couch and Yukari had treated what she could while the Dark Hour still let her use her power, but he was bloody still, in need of a shower and a good night's sleep. It'd been harder to ignore the fading bruises on his back and shoulders, but when Mitsuru had met his eyes from across the room she'd shaken her head slightly. Leave it alone. "I," Junpei began, then cleared his throat and continued with a stubborn hitch in his voice. "I wouldn't do that."

"You sure?" He still felt bad, but this was important. This was about Arisato's tired eyes and bloody uniform and the half-smile she threw at him in the lobby when she caught him looking at both. "Because this is more than you or me or anyone here. We mess up, innocent people are going to suffer. Do you understand?"

"I'm not—"

"Do you understand?"

Junpei's mouth closed. Color was starting to return to his face, blazing high in his cheeks. Akihiko half-expected him to launch into another tirade, but when Junpei spoke it was low, through gritted teeth. "I understand."

"You have to follow orders. I know sometimes it's hard to swallow, but—"

"Look, I get it, okay? I get it," Junpei said. "And I know… what this is. I get that. I'm not stupid. I'm not in the way, senpai."

Akihiko scanned his face. Junpei was still flushed, body still tense with anger, but he was no longer trying to get away.

All of a sudden he felt crushingly tired. He clapped Junpei lightly on the shoulder and said, relenting, "I know it was tough. I'm sorry I couldn't be out there with you. It'll go better next time."

Junpei's nodded curtly, avoiding Akihiko's gaze. Akihiko let him go, and Junpei went up the stairs without another word.

Leave it alone.

He blew up eight shadows in his head during morning assembly and fourteen during the budget meeting after school, which was cathartic until he remembered that no, even that would be different now. An hour each night was still dedicated to full-out ball-shrinking weirdness, sure, but now there was… context. Or at least the who and why had gotten more confusing.

When it had just been him and Mitsuru, there'd been the odd strategy meeting with Ikutsuki, write-ups every once in a while, maybe a conference with the Kirijo group. The evenings they weren't preparing to battle shadows had mostly been spent doing mundane things. School was still really the biggest thing. Mitsuru would sometimes fall asleep on the couch during exam week, and he would stay up a little later than he maybe should have, working on the seams in his gloves, pretending not to care if Shinjiro walked through the door. It hadn't been normal, exactly, but it'd been… nice. In its own way.

Now all of a sudden there were showers running and food cooking and the television was always on and there were footsteps on the stairwells in the middle of the night. The juniors had brought in energy, which was also kind of nice. They were also clumsy and loud and needy – even Arisato, who seemed to spend ninety percent of her free time making sure everyone liked her.

In the meantime Shinjiro was still missing and Junpei needed help with homework and Yukari was complaining about the girls in her archery club and something, somewhere, was missing. If he could put his finger on it, he'd put it back into place. He couldn't put his finger onto it.

"Breathe, Akihiko," Mitsuru said after he dropped the needle for the third time while repairing his gloves. "Things are progressing smoothly."

"I know." Akihiko felt along the couch blindly and swore when the point reintroduced itself to his fingertip. "That's what worries me."

"Well, based on the nature of the damage," Edogawa-sensei said, "I'd place my money on a hydra or a mail truck."

"It was a human."

"Are you sure?" Edogawa squinted, ink-stained fingertips probing the skin over his shoulder and his ribs lightly. "No exobiological indicators whatsoever? No gleaming eyes, no claws? Because I could venture a few suggestions as to future counterattacks. It never hurts to stock one's arsenal with the proper spells."

Akihiko really didn't want to encourage that kind of terrifying accuracy. "It's not as bad as it looks."

"Well, now, let's take a look." Edogawa pulled back and half-turned on his stool, sliding the clipboard from the counter to scan it. "Your general practitioner sent over a harrowing tale about how the convex nearly became the concave. Quite the stuff of legends."

"It wasn't that big a deal. And I heal really fast."

"Not as quickly as you'd probably like," Edogawa said, not looking up from the sheet, "but faster than you should be, maybe."

He didn't really want to touch that one either. "I just need to be cleared to practice. My supervisor says I have to get an okay from you before I can get back into the ring."

Edogawa didn't answer a moment. Then he returned the clipboard to the counter and laced his fingers around his knee. "Did you know the ancient Chinese invented what they considered to be a fool-proof lie detector centuries before the use of modern polygraphs?"

The change of subject caught Akihiko off-guard. Edogawa's face remained blandly pleasant. "Sorry," Akihiko said. "What was that again?"

"The polygraph," Edogawa said. "You know, in a way, the process hasn't really changed – only been expanded to include more indicators. The polygraph itself is merely a standardized measurement of involuntary physiological responses to stress. Rate of respiration, changes in electrical resistance, blood pressure, heart rate."

"Okay," Akihiko said.

"Before these, however, the Chinese used a far simpler technique to determine the party's guilt." Edogawa swung his stool around again. Jar lids clinked on the counter; when he turned back around, there was a small pile of white rice gathered on his palm.

Akihiko stared at it. "What's that for?"

"Guilt," Edogawa said. "Or rather, a way of detecting guilt. Maintaining a falsehood elicits certain physical responses, among these being the decrease in the production of saliva. To gauge this, they would have the suspect hold a small amount of rice under their tongues as they were asked the questions. If the rice became wet, that was the proof of their innocence. If the rice remained dry, that was taken as proof of their guilt."

Akihiko stared a while longer. "You're going to make me eat dry rice?"

"If I did that, I'd have no visual aid for the next person," Edogawa said. "No, my polygraph is much simpler. Lift your arms, Sanada-kun, if you please."

"Huh?"

"Lift your arms. Just for a moment."

Still not understanding, Akihiko obeyed. Edogawa reached out without warning, prodding his ribcage briskly, and Akihiko's breath rushed out in a pained grunt.

Edogawa was still smiling. "That wasn't fair," Akihiko said.

"Blame the Chinese," Edogawa said, and turned, plopping the dry rice back into the container. When he turned back around he held out a signed form. "Two more weeks."

Akihiko took it. His stomach growled as he did, which was probably the biggest lie he'd told so far.

Without training or the Dark Hour to wear him out, the dreams slowly began to come back. Not bad, just weird. In one dream he was frustrated because he was supposed to pick up supplies for Miki's bento, but somebody kept moving the pickled plums. He'd try to track them down, but he had a hard time reading the labels because the characters kept jumping, and none of the attendants would tell him where they were. In another dream he was combing the town for Shinjiro and Mitsuru, because the three of them were supposed to turn in a school project the next day that nobody had started working on yet.

He figured there was probably some kind of psychology at work there – always searching for something and never being able to find it – but mostly it was really fucking annoying. It would almost be better having nightmares, because he could dismiss nightmares as trauma. Dreams like the one with Miki made him lie awake in the morning and think about how it would be kind of nice to make Miki a bento again, never mind if he couldn't find the pickled plums.

Then he'd get up and change and start his morning jog, and think that it'd be kind of nice to see her grow, too. To ditch the pigtails and enter middle school and eventually be embarrassed by him, because what girl didn't eventually come to be embarrassed by her brother. He'd be tolerant when she'd pretend not to know him when she and her friends ran into him at Paulownia. He'd help her with her homework even when she'd storm off, saying she just didn't get it, he didn't get her, niichan, you don't know what it's like to be me. Later she'd grow to like him again. She'd get a boyfriend (one that he approved of; one that could hold his own in a fight and protect her when Akihiko couldn't) and graduate. Akihiko would pay for college. Watch her get her first job. Get married.

He knew better than everyone else that he wasn't entitled to anything, but there wasn't too much else to think about during a 10k run. Eventually his pace would even out and his heart would calm down and every slap of his footfall on the pavement would echo in his head: not fair. Not fair. Not fair.

Shinjiro would have a field day with it, but that wasn't the point.

Akihiko stuck his head into the faculty office. "Sorry, sir, you wanted to see me?"

"Sanada-kun!" His English teacher was currently rifling through the bottom drawer of his desk and didn't look up. "Good timing. Come in."

A small chair had already been pulled up to the desk. Akihiko made his way in behind it and waited. "One of these days I'll find what I'm looking for at the time I'm looking for it," Miura-sensei said. He didn't hit his head on the underside of the top drawer as he came up, but it was a near thing. "Have a seat."

Akihiko came around the chair and lowered himself into it. Miura-sensei slapped his knees briskly, looked at the desk for a few seconds expectantly, then seemed to rally his attention. He reached over and rescued a stapled assignment from a clothspin holder, then swiveled a bit in his chair and held it out. "Let's get right down to it. Do you recognize this?"

Akihiko glanced at it, then back at him. "The assignment from last week?"

"I'm going to hand them back tomorrow."

The grading corner stood blank. "Okay," Akihiko said.

"Do you remember what the essay was on?"

"Sure."

"Tell me."

"You asked us to discuss between three to five differences between the American education system and ours."

"I'd like you to read a bit of your paper for me."

Akihiko blinked, caught off-guard. "Huh?"

"Your paper," Miura repeated patiently. "I'd like to hear from you before I grade it. Here."

"The whole thing?"

"If you like, but I think a sentence or two will be enough of a refresher. Here, take it."

Mystified, Akihiko took it. Devoid of any corrective marks, it was hard to know what he was supposed to be focusing on. His handwriting looked fine – or at least it was more or less readable. Maybe it was a test to see if he could pronounce the loan words?

He shifted his gaze to the top. The first few lines looked fine. He was about to open his mouth to ask what this was all about when he came across the first error. 'Travail'? What had he…

Oh, right. He'd been working on it while Mitsuru had been going on about her own thing across the coffee table from him – something about French architecture and its influence on modern designs in the east. She'd slipped into French somewhere down the line and he hadn't corrected her because he'd had a feeling she wasn't really talking to him. It must have accidentally gotten into his head. As mistakes went it was fairly minor.

Still, it was kind of stupid, so maybe Miura just wanted to ding him a little for carelessness. That was fine. Akihiko was about to correct it when a line further down caught his eye. He brought the paper a little closer to his face.

… greater emphasis on communication in the classroom results in more class peanuts

… right. It'd been evening and Junpei had been going on and on about his peanut butter being missing. It ended up being in the freezer, probably due to Junpei's habit of stumbling in half-asleep in the middle of the night and making himself a snack and not paying attention to what he put back where.

Akihiko skipped down a little more quickly. There was some shorthand from when Yukari had needed his help on some math and he'd been trying to get the sentence done before he'd lost the train of thought. The second page was full of stray nonsensical marks, like a pencil had gotten up between the papers in his book bag as he traveled. There were four redirectional arrows on the third page, indicating some text reshuffling that never happened. He must have accidentally stapled a sheet from the rough draft into the final when he'd overslept and grabbed up the papers up that morning. The fourth page was missing entirely. The last page…

He studied it until one eye squinted shut.

"It's my policy – and school policy, actually – to accept the work as-is," Miura-sensei said. "But frankly, I'm embarrassed."

"Okay," Akihiko said, kind of right there with him.

"Barring the obvious mistakes, I was more concerned that the body of work itself was not up to your usual standard. You usually have a very precise manner of writing, Sanada-kun. Very insightful, very astute. I was genuinely curious to read your observations on the differences between the systems."

"I'm sorry, sir. I don't know what happened. I don't usually do this kind of thing."

"Yes, I know. To be honest, if I didn't know any better…" Miura-sensei hesitated, then seemed to think better of whatever he'd been about to say. "Well, what's done is done. The reason I summoned you in here today was because I want to offer you a deal."

Not wanting to look at it anymore, Akihiko had been busy trying to slide it underneath some papers already on the desk. At this he looked up. "A deal?"

"The long and short of it is, I would like you take the time to revise this and turn it into me at the beginning of class on Saturday. Bring me both copies. What I will do is average the grade between the two, and that one will be the one I input into the books."

"You want me to redo it?" Akihiko tried not to look surprised and failed. "But you said that was against school policy, isn't it?"

"Oh, probably."

"I can turn it in a new draft tomorrow—"

"I want you to take time on it. Feverishly working on it through the night won't do you any favors. Or me, for that matter." Miura-sensei studied him a minute. "You're a conscientious student, Sanada-kun – nearly top of the class – which leads me to believe this was a mistake borne from stress, not carelessness. I think that having you redo it will be more instructive than giving you a failing grade. As a matter of fairness I'll extend the same opportunity to others in the class, but I wanted to call you in here in particular to make sure you understood the conditions of my offer."

"Why me?"

"Because you're the only one in the class in danger of failing the assignment."

Akihiko thought, oh.

"Until Saturday," Miura-sensei said. He slid the paper out from under the others on his desk and snapped it out briskly to Akihiko. "Make it count."

He didn't realize he was stressed until he doubled back to touch the cold handle on the door to the dorm with his other hand. It was a childhood tic that re-emerged when he was tired and it was hard as hell to stop. If one toe barked against something, he had to bark the other. If one ear itched, he scratched it and moved on to the other ear. Balanced and equal on both sides.

Eventually he'd toned it down because it'd worried Miki and driven Shinjiro crazy. By the time he'd been in middle school, he'd more or less had it under control. Alone in the kitchen, though, wired and kind of pissed off and with no one to take him to task over it, he let it come back with vengeance. He tapped each toe three times as he got a drink from the fridge, shook out both hands, cracked a knuckle on one hand and then the same knuckle on the other. Some water spilled out over his fingers as he poured it in the glass; he let a dribble out over the other hand, then wiped up the drops from the counter.

Knowing it'd get out of control if he let it, Akihiko indulged himself one more time – pressure on the outside of his foot, then the other – then made himself stop. He ran some times tables in his head to get his mind off of it as he fixed himself a snack. Arisato would be home soon, Junpei in tow. Yukari would come back from practice after that, and Mitsuru would come in last of all, fresh from student council.

Protein drink in hand, he jogged upstairs, intent on taking advantage of the momentary peace to work on his essay. He downed half the can in two gulps, then set it on his desk momentarily as he went about unearthing all the relevant pages. He pulled apart the final draft from the staple, recovered the rough draft from his revisions folder, then laid them all out on the floor. He still couldn't find the fifth page of the final draft, but whatever. He needed to reconstruct the entire thing anyway. With his luck it'd probably show up in the freezer next to Junpei's peanut butter.

He studied them all for a while, holding the can to his lips absently, taking sips as he took in the data. When he was finished with the drink and his thoughts were more or less in order, he tossed the can, got out a fresh sheet, and got to work reorganizing his ideas on paper.

He got as far as listing the properties of each section when he heard the door open and shut downstairs. Arisato, probably. Knowing it'd be impossible to work as soon as Junpei got in, Akihiko sped up the pace. The light in his room continued to mellow, throwing shadows over his work, until the day gave way to evening.

He was just considering turning a light on when he heard Junpei's bellow from downstairs. Figuring now was as good a time as any to stop, Akihiko put down his pencil and stretched, feeling the echo of discomfort in his ribcage. When he felt loose, he gathered up his papers and made his way downstairs.

He could tell just from the way they banged around the common room that the juniors planned to go to Tartarus. Yukari was irritable, eating like a bird at dinner and constantly looking at the clock. Junpei cracked overly loud, unfunny jokes until Yukari finally told him to put a sock in it. The atmosphere was tense and charged, making even the noise of the television seem grating.

Akihiko was a little surprised that Mitsuru approved tonight's mission, seeing as it involved backtracking through Tartarus to look for items. Considering the risks involved with every exploration, it seemed kind of frivolous to him. When he cornered her in the kitchen to ask her about it, however, she lifted a shoulder and said, by way of explanation, "The corporation wants me to expand our knowledge of the current shadows for further research. The fact of the matter is, as far as we know, there's no summit of this tower. Therefore, there is no hurry to reach the top."

Akihiko made his usual preparations that night to follow them in after the fact. His uniform was freshly washed and ironed, so he pulled on some workout pants and a long sleeved t-shirt instead. He didn't put on his gloves, knowing from experience that it'd test Mitsuru's patience, but he did strap on his evoker. On the roster or not, it was SEES policy to never go unarmed during the Dark Hour.

The juniors had all filed out ahead by the time he came down. Mitsuru, the last one out as usual, paused at the door and looked back at him as he jogged down the last of the stairs. "I would prefer you remained here for tonight," she said.

"Huh?" Keyed up himself, Akihiko frowned at her. "Why not?"

"The mission is nonessential and we will not be covering new ground. There is no need for you to supervise."

"What else am I going to do? Come on, we're gonna be—"

"It has come to my attention," Mitsuru said, still mildly, "that your time might be better spent here on schoolwork."

Akihiko stared at her for a while. Mitsuru returned his gaze coolly.

Suddenly it clicked, and Akihiko blurted, "Wait a second, you know?"

"You know I keep myself well-acquainted with all the SEES members' academic records." Mitsuru had only the barest hint of a raised eyebrow. "While I realize there has been a certain amount of upheaval here as of late, I expect you to perform as well as you always have, Akihiko. Failing to do so could potentially result in meddling from the school, and for reasons I don't have to explain to you, I would prefer that that not happen."

Akihiko was still stuck on more important things. "Miura told you? But he was already offering me a way to change the grade."

"Yes, that was convenient," Mitsuru said, mellow enough that he was instantly suspicious. "It would behoove you to take advantage of that opportunity. Good night, Akihiko."

He stood there, still staring, as the door swung shut gently behind her.

Eventually he retreated upstairs, changed out of his workout clothes, and sat down at his desk. He couldn't focus. When the Dark Hour came he was forced to give up entirely, seeing as there was no light in the dorm by which to work with. Instead he sat on his bed, watching the moonlight angle unnaturally into the window, listening to the darkness move in the night, brushing up against the living and sliding back off again, slick as oil.

When the Dark Hour was over, he rolled over, slammed his pillow over his head, and closed his eyes until his body got bored fighting off sleep.

In other news, Arisato could apparently make shadows explode with zios. Akihiko tried to pretend it didn't piss him off, but really, it sort of did. Probably most of all.