This is the first post of the series "Variance", inspired by various tumblr gifs, and archiveofourown fictions on Nobuchika Ginoza. This is most;y non-canon. Also, in this universe Sybil governs the entire world, not just Japan.
Fandom: Psycho-pass
Characters: Nobuchika Ginoza, Akane Tsunemori, Chief Kasei, Mika Shimotsuki, and various. Post season-1.
Relationships: Nobuchika Ginoza/Akane Tsunemori
Genre: Hurt/comfort, angst, Mystery, Crime, not-so-sure-about-romance-sorry
Ginoza
He was twenty-four and a fast-track bureaucrat when a trip wire cut against his shin and destroyed most of his life.
At that moment, he thought, all of it. In the Isolation facility, in the plant, watching his father's burnt, dying face. Now lying in the bed of his enforcer-issue studio apartment, he wonders what had gone so wrong. He wonders about a lot of things. The mechanism of the booby trap Makishima had laid out for them is often at the forefront of his mind.
At the dead of the night, with Dime lying on top of his feet, he often fantasizes about recreating Makishima's trap. He lets his mind comfortably drift into the machinations of various devices, not all of them innocent in their application. it is quite liberating to think about their mechanisms and to loose himself in the calculations. Such is the gift of being a latent criminal.
He no longer has to use all the zen meditation techniques that his therapist taught him to keep his hue clear and clean.
He no longer has to care.
His cybernetic hand feels like his own nowadays, the bio-mechanical nerves now completely integrated to his biological neural network. The hand is strong enough to crush hardened steel into powder. As an enforcer, he is eligible to get latest and best cybernetic technology and care.
Perhaps, all that happens, happens for the best indeed.
Sybil is kind to him, because he is privy it's secret. He was given an apartment, for example, when Enforcers are generally supposed to stay in dorms. He was allowed to keep Dime. He was allowed to be authorized for an assault Dominator. He is allowed to work as a statistical analyst alongside Rika, and he is allowed to visit the forensic lab.
Sybil is indeed very kind, when it visits him in the form of Chief Kasei.
"You have been allowed privileges only a handful of Latent criminals have been allowed," She caustically tells him, her fingers rapidly manipulating the holo-rubics. "Remember that, Mr. Ginoza. Sybil is kind to all who deserve it. For the undeserving..."
She never completes the sentence, looking up to gaze at his face over her half-moon spectacles. The gaze is supposed to scare the shit out of him.
It doesn't.
"Of course, Chief Kasei." he inclines his head to her.
You need to keep me silent more than I need that apartment, and the lab privileges. The myth of Sybil being a benevolent program is more important than an Enforcers life. The myth of you being a human being is more important my life.
"And, Ginoza. The offer of rehabilitation of your admirable deductive powers is still open." Kasei presses her lips together, the gesture meaning to turn out as friendly smile, and failing miserably.
"I do not understand, why you offer me the rehab." He asks her carefully. "I am not quite qualified, as evidenced by my crime coefficient."
"That is not a big hurdle to Sybil." She dabs her thin lips with a monogrammed kerchief. "The reason, until, you decide to join the rehab program, is classified."
He does wonder if he should take up Kasei on the offer, just to find out what incentive his brain held for Sybil.
Two months after he had become an enforcer, he visits his father's dorm room, after an email finds him, telling him to urgently clear out the stuff, so that the room could be re-assigned.
He makes the journey.
The dormitory compound stands on the top of a small hillock, a large hexagon surrounded by a concrete wall. Old, colossal Magnolias and cherry trees stand just inside the walls, ringing the white building. Standing at the base of any one of it's base, a filigree of shadows falls on your face and the blue sky was feathered with green. The campus was abundant in five things—Trees, space, scanners, drones and security cameras
The concrete path leading from the gate is neatly lined with mahogany trees and continues long and straight across a broad square, two two-store sterile white dorm buildings facing each other on either side of the path. They are large with long, grilled windows and every room has a small balcony. He sees cleaning drones and surveillance drones whizzing about.
When he entered the building where his father's room was, it was through a corridor so sterile and clean that it reminded him of a hospital corridor sans the smell, lined with security cameras and scanners. The corridor is tiled with gray marble and he could hear hole-televisions and play stations ping through open pneumatic, heavily frosted doors. Beyond the two dormitories, the path leads up to the entrance of a two-story security building. Broad green lawns fill the square, and the edges are flower-beds full of roses and dahlias and chrysanthemums and sprinklers catch the sunlight and glint as they turn in their 360º arcs. When he came to balcony of his father's room, he saw the back of the building had a swimming pool, a football field and a couple of tennis courts. The complex was a beautifully decorated and superbly equipped jail, fully capable of containing and if the necessity arose, to eliminate the two-hundred latent criminal enforcers that it housed.
He wonders how he would have felt about living here.
Not bad, he concludes. The room is quite spacious and there is an attached bathroom. His father was a clean man, and the table was neat, only with his tablet, some paper and pens. There was an old fashioned bookcase—Ginoza wondered where Masaoka had acquired the old thing from—filled with actual paper books.
This is where he discovers the reason behind Sybil's name.
It's an old dog-eared book, printed first in—he sees in 1996, 117 years ago. This copy was printed in 2030, quite some time ago.
It attracted his eyes first because of the golden print on the spine of the book—Sybil. He picks it up and sits down on the synthetic fur rug on the floor, interested and inquiring.
It is a book about a young woman who is haunted and hunted by the different personalities her brain had invented, in an attempt to re-imagine the reality around her to be something tolerable.
Sybil—a girl who had 26 different personalities, but was perceived to be one person.
Sybil—the system run by 1,200,000 different criminally asymptotic brains, believed to be a single program, a single entity.
Ginoza sits in the darkening room. Outside, through the window, the moon glimmers dimly, and he sighs, the knowledge of his father's wisdom and his own memories sitting heavily on his finger-tips, as heavily as the blue silence that surrounds him, in this purple twilit room. He feels a sharp stab of belated kinship with his late father, Tomomi Masaoka.
Is this why you became a latent criminal, dad? Did realization taint you, outcast you? Did you loose hope like me? What else did you know, dad, and how can I know what you knew?
There is a soft wind blowing through the open balcony, and he can hear leaves rustle, and for the first time, Ginoza feels the feeling of orphan burn into his fragile, papery bones.
It's poetic, really.
He finally gathers everything he needs and wants, finishing up around 20:00. Masaoka had only a few belongings, and he takes them all. He packs them up, the books, some clothes, paints and paint-brushes, the tablet and little day-to-day things. The bookcase he takes down first, and puts it into the backseat of the small car he was given by the MWPSB for the day.
As he runs up back to get the second lot of stuff, he comes face-to-face with Akane Tsunemori, who is coming out of a room on the left of the same corridor as his father's, maybe five doors down. She is carrying a box piled high with stuff.
It could be either Kagari's or Kougami's room, but his intuition tells him it's Kougami.
She looks too small to carry such a big box with it's seen and unseen burdens. It's sad how he processes the view—comparing her with an ant with load.
She had seen him always. She can't wave at him, arms being loaded, so she gives him a smile—both awkward and hopeful.
He, feels the familiarity of the guilt and self-reproach.
After their last talk about why he used to wear glasses, he had made it a point to stay away from her. The bonds they shared were too painful to discuss, and he was so full of self-hate that he couldn't even look at her, much less talk to her.
Akane had made attempt after attempt. She was an extraordinarily bad cook, but he would often find heat-sealed packets of home-made misdo and udan at his desk. Once he found a small cactus on his desk.
He had wondered who had told her of his proclivity towards plant-life.
She had approached him outside MWPSB, and every single time, like the selfish bastard, he had turned away, too drawn into his own circle self-hatred and self-recrimination. Every one of those time she had respectfully walked back. He hated him for abandoning her, hated himself for being unable to respond to her grief, when she had shouldered his. He wanted to apologize and that seemed quite impossible, because of his overpowering desire to run away from the past.
Akane had stuck around, with her kind smile and her slowly improving home-cooked food.
They stand, facing each other, thinking what to say. Two months have made Ginoza's mouth a graveyard of words, and he flounders.
"Hello." he says, the word so hollow that he wants to cringe.
"Hello, Mr. Ginoza," she says, "Do you need some help?"
they both know the reason behind each others visit.
"I don't think you are really in a position to help me," He tells her, "Anyway, I am nearly done."
"Well, in that case,"Akane smiles again, because the conversation sounds hopeful, "I will wait for you here, and we can go down together, perhaps?"
This is the beginning, he thinks. This is the beginning of the beginning and the root of the root, and if I don't do this now, I can never do it—they are not like ships passing each other in the dark of the night—but they will be, if not this.
"You can come in. I'm clearing out my father's stuff."
"Do you want to come out for a cup of coffee?", Akane offers as he is securely loading the bookcase into the bubble car.
"Now?"
"Yeah? There's a new coffee-shop around the corner and it's quite okay, I hear."
"From whom? Shimotsuki?"
Akane laughs at the skepticism in his tone. She knows Ginoza doesn't get along with Mika.
"She has quite good taste in bistros, you know."
He snorts in quiet derision.
But they do go out for coffee, after remotely instruscting the cars to go their respective apartments.
The place is called "Talisman", and it reminds him of the time, they had ventured out in the commufield together. It is a reminder to better times and the pain it brings is not quite unexpected. It's lit in dark pastel tones and Beethoven's Archduke Trio is playing in the hidden speakers.
They settle into a table by the window-side, and it has started to rain outside—fat drops stick to the glass, before flowing down as small rivers. They remind him of tear-tracks.
Ginoza sits quietly as Akane scrutinizes the menu closely, tongue in cheek. He listens to the music, the music that had been composed by Beethoven for the Austrian prince Rudolf.
He is a fan of old classical music, from the time he was introduced to the piano and the viola, at the age of three by his musician mother.
It brings old, dim memories.
The trio is played by the Oistrach trio. He loves their structured, classic approach to the music.
"What do you want, Mr. Ginoza?"
He starts at Akane's voice, and she is looking at him, one eyebrow raised, waiting for his order.
"Same as you, Ms. Tsunemori."
her second eyebrow joins the first one and both threaten to disappear in her hairline.
"Really?"
"Really, what?"
before she can answer, the serving drone is here, and she touches the serving menu and swipes her card. Two decaf cappuccinos. He would have preferred the caff one, but that's okay.
She turns to him, and grins. "Since when do you call me,'Ms. Tsunemori'?"
He shrugs and smiles. The muscles of his face feel a little frozen.
"Please call me Akane."
It is more than a salutation she is offering him, and she knows it. It is a gesture of respect, a gesture from the respect he had earned from her when he was a senior inspector and not the dregs of society.
"Please call me Ginoza."
In return he offers her informality and she gladly takes it up.
"You look much better." She remarks, sipping her decaf.
Ginoza frowns at her. "Seriously?"
"You seem to fit your clothes better."
"Well, I have been working out," he confesses, leaning back and stretching his long back. "The enforcer job requirements are quite different from the inspector one. Also, now I can indulge in—what do you say, more violent forms of exercise, now that I don't have to worry about my psycho-pass."
"so there are perks of being a latent criminal."
"Only if you are an enforcer, I suppose."
They smile and it seems effortless at this point.
They talk for a long time, ordering dinner at one point. They are careful though, when they refer to the past as the every slip holds pain.
"I'm sorry." Ginoza says at one point.
Akane doesn't need to ask why.
"I knew you were unable to, Ginoza-san." she says, softly and kindly. She had always been the kindest of all of them, but now touched with tragedy, she has become more kind. "we all deal with things like this differently. You don't need to justify yourself."
he isn't resolved of his negligence towards her, whatever she said.
But at least now, he knows how to look for retribution.