Disclaimer: The World Ends With You and its characters are the property of Square Enix, and are used here without permission.
A/N: Back! And a belated happy 10th anniversary to TWEWY.
Also, I am nerdily delighted that this has hit 109 favorites- 109 is the real-life version of 104, so it seems like an appropriate number to have hit around the anniversary. Thanks so much, folks. :)
eight: just listen
He could still hear Shades's voice. "Now then. As for your new entry fee…"
Neku froze. "You're taking my memories again?" What was the point in giving them back? Just a carrot, to dangle in front of him and then yank out of reach? Anger surged up in him, and then panic, though he tried to hide it. If Shades took everything back that he'd just returned, would he take the last week, too? Neku would be starting all over, no idea what was going on, no understanding of how important this was. If there wasn't someone like Shiki this time, to shout and cajole him into making a pact and going along with things, he'd be dead for good.
Shades's smile was cold and indifferent— the smile of a lab tech who had long since stopped thinking of the rats he dropped into electrode-filled mazes as anything beyond just a job; there was no comprehension there that they might have thoughts and feelings of their own, and if they did, he wouldn't have cared. "This time," he said, "you're playing for Shiki Misaki."
The world stopped.
Wait, Neku wanted to say. No, go back, you can't do that to her, that's not fair. I'll give you my memories back instead, you can't— she won, she was out, going back to see her best friend, you can't do that to her—
But the words got stuck somewhere, crashing into a mangled heap as they all tried to get out at once, and what mostly made it out of his throat was a scream.
And now they'd done the same thing, but to Beat.
Beat, who'd sold his own soul trying to save his little sister, and then basically gone into bankruptcy to save Neku. Who'd finally been at ease yesterday, grinning and showing off tricks on his board to the general awe of Shiki and Rhyme (and Neku, though of course Neku had pretended not to be that impressed, because it wasn't like he hadn't seen what Beat could do with that thing— never mind that this was the Realground and there were no psychic powers boosting him along, here).
A little later in the day Beat had pulled Neku aside while Shiki and Rhyme were off examining something in a 104 window, and after visibly steeling himself had asked in a low voice if Neku was any good in school. "I gotta try to turn things around, man. I promised Rhyme, but I can't keep leaning on her for all that stuff. I mean, her helping me study's the only reason I got into senior high at all, and she's eleven. It ain't fair to her. But she's the only one who ever takes the time to explain stuff so I get it, and— look, I'll put the work in, I swear, it's just they throw all these goddamn kanji and names and dates and equators—"
Neku blinked at that one. "Equations?"
"Yeah, that, and see, that's what I mean. I get stuff mixed up and it comes out wrong, even when it's simple, even when I know it, and I gotta—"
"Beat," Neku interrupted, seeing a nervous-energy-fueled diatribe incoming. When Beat's tough act fell apart, it tended to fall hard. "Yeah. I'll help you study."
"—And I just, like, then I get stuck on it and I— oh." Beat paused. "You will?"
Neku rolled his eyes, gave Beat a light punch to the shoulder. "You gotta ask? Of course I will."
And now Beat was gone, because Neku had tried to find a way out of murdering someone else he cared about.
"Rhyme?" Neku heard his voice crack, hated himself for it. "I'm going to call you back as soon as I can, okay? I think… think I know what happened. It'll… it'll be..." He couldn't make himself say the word okay, could still feel his hands shake and fall to his sides when he'd tried to pull the trigger, and if he couldn't get past that, nothing was going to be okay.
If he could get past it, nothing was going to be okay, either.
"I'm gonna try to work this out," he told her, because there was no sense in saying anything more optimistic. She'd already demonstrated her skill at reading lies over the telephone in his brief conversation with her that morning.
"'Kay," she said, subdued, and there was a surreptitious sniffle on the other end of the line. "Neku, be careful, okay?"
"Yeah," he said. "You too."
There was a long moment of silence after he hung up the phone. Neku sat on his bed, still and blank, and the angel watched him silently.
The moment after that was a blur of noise and motion. Neku lunged across the room, and in the small background part of his mind that was consciously thinking about anything, he was aware that in that instant he'd worked out the trick Kariya hadn't known how to teach him. His frequency had flipped to Underground levels, and now— okay, now things were going to be different. He could feel control coming back to him already, fire and lightning crackling under his skin, itching to leap out of his hands, the air ready to make itself a blade if he wanted it—
Neku. Joshua's voice, out of nowhere, calm and controlled. Stop. None of us need you to get yourself killed.
He froze, as much out of startlement as anything, his fist approximately a foot from the angel's face.
An instant later he felt himself flip back to the Realground. He couldn't have said how he'd done it, hadn't meant to do it, but there was no question that was what he'd done; it was all draining away again, as quickly as it had come, leaving him shaky and useless as he stepped back and folded his arms over his chest. The angel hadn't moved, watching him with something like disdain, inasmuch as Neku could make out any expression at all.
Better, Joshua— said? Thought? Don't respond openly at present, please. They can't hear me, but if you start talking to thin air they're liable to catch on. If you really need to say anything, just think it loudly. I'll hear you.
A brief wave of dizziness swept over him. Oh. Fine. Joshua was in his head now. Fine. There were any number of things Neku intended to think loudly about this, when he had time, but right now— "Good going," he shot at the angel. "You attack my friends and traumatize a little girl who's already been through hell, to get at me. That's really fucking angelic of you."
"It was no attack, Mr. Sakuraba," the angel said quietly. "Merely a clarifying statement, as there seems to be some confusion on your part. The Game will go forward. The boy is unharmed, and will be returned with the rest of your fee pending your victory— an act of good faith on Our part, may we add, as his chaotic soul never earned its return to the Realground in the first place." The sense of a smile, incongruously gentle, passed across the not-quite-there face. "You spoke of taking the Composer's throne, but such responsibility requires a commitment to a good greater than any one individual's life or whims. Kiryu has forgotten that in recent years, and his latest Game— far from refreshing his memory— appears to have further encouraged his downward spiral. If you are to replace him, you must come to understand that. We realize it will take time."
Deep breaths, Neku told himself, fighting down nausea. It was like talking to the ghost of Shades, minus the horrible unsettling reverence for Joshua— which should have been a change for the better and yet really wasn't, which added its own edge of surreal horror to the whole thing. Point was, he'd gotten through multiple encounters with the former Conductor without punching anyone, and really, the resemblance was striking. More stupid bureaucracy, more utter disregard for human lives and needs, more unfair ridiculous rules thrown in his way any time he looked like he might be getting somewhere. The weight of it all pressed in on him, made his lungs and his chest and his throat ache, made the room lurch dizzily around him. "Time," he said dully. "Right. Yeah. Hope you brought a good book, because you're gonna have to wait quite a while."
"We are prepared," the angel said patiently, "to give you sufficient time. We are aware that you currently have neither the resolve nor the skill needed for the task ahead of you, Mr. Sakuraba. The Game, then, will be to determine whether you can develop both. Once Shibuya is off the board, its instability will not progress further until its fate is determined, and so you will be given that time, to learn and to grow and to understand how much larger the world is than it seems from your eyes." Another horribly gentle smile. "You know the value in such growth."
Neku's throat hurt with wanting to scream. "I don't know the value in killing my friends." He could still feel the ghost of energy that wanted to surge up and and blast this condescending bastard to vapor, and— hang on. That had been psych energy, and how did that work exactly? He didn't have any pins, and he wasn't in a—
And abruptly he realized what he should have realized right away. Would have, if he hadn't been so busy being furious at the angels and Joshua alike. The awareness of a second person at the back of his mind was so familiar— so reassuring, after three weeks where losing that presence would have meant death— that all he'd consciously registered of it as he'd flipped into the Underground was that for an instant, angry as he was, he'd been right in the world and safe in his own skin. Ready to take on anything, absolutely anything, that threatened the people he cared about.
He was in a pact.
The room spun a little faster. What the hell— when the hell— how—?
"Shibuya's Composer," the angel said, still quiet and calm, "is not your friend, Mr. Sakuraba. If that had not been evident to you previously, surely his behavior at your last meeting made it clear? If he truly cared for you or for the city, do you think he would have spoken of the upcoming Game with such anticipation?"
Neku shook his head, dazed and only half-listening, now. He tried to chase along the mental link to see the person at the other end of it more clearly, but they glided out of reach whenever he started to get close. It didn't matter; he knew the energy that hummed through the link, still had nightmares about it going out in a smile and an explosion of light. It was Joshua, he was back in a pact with Joshua, and how did that even— how did the angel not see it?
We'll talk in a bit, Neku. Say something conciliatory to your guest.
Neku stared down at his hands, clenched and unclenched them. "Look," he said, as levelly as he could. "Josh is an ass, no question. And I'm not arguing that he and I have some majordisagreements to sort out. But there's disagreeing, and then there's murdering the guy I disagree with. The murdering thing, I am not okay with. You're talking about a greater good?" He threw his hands in the air, his voice rising. Okay, not so level. "That's what Mr. H was thinking too, wasn't he? And you kicked him out for it. You want Joshua dead so bad, give the guy an A for effort and tell him to try again."
"We had no quarrel with the fallen's aims," the angel said. "His methodology, however, was unforgiveable."
"His methodology." Neku gave an incredulous laugh. "Okay. I'm guessing you aren't talking about the bit where a whole bunch of people who were totally uninvolved in the whole thing got slaughtered—"
"Mr. Sakuraba—"
"—Because hey, guess what—"
"Mr. Sakuraba," the angel said patiently, "you may wish to keep your voice down. Your mother is approaching."
He froze guiltily, shutting his eyes, and a moment later he heard his mother call, "Neku? Are you on the phone? It's dinnertime."
He opened his eyes. The angel watched him imperturbably.
Aloud, to the air in general, Neku said, "Yeah— gotta go, bye."
To the angel, he glared and pointed at the window and said, through gritted teeth, "Out."
"Was that your friend on the phone? The one you went to meet earlier?"
It was some kind of offering on his mother's part, that she'd cooked dinner, and Neku's insides twisted at the cautious, almost wary look on her face. It wasn't like he couldn't understand where she was coming from with that; he hadn't really done interpersonal relationships for years, and the last time he'd tried had ended… badly. "Yeah," he managed as he picked at his plate of noodles. "Yeah, one of them." He couldn't talk about Beat right now. Just thinking about Beat made the dark reach back up, try to pull him down. And he had to call Rhyme as soon as he could, would have to say… something, that it was all his fault and he was sorry and he'd do what he could and it probably wouldn't be enough. "Um— her name's Shiki." He blinked a couple of times, unsteadily, at his plate, and hoped fervently that his mother wouldn't be inclined to latch onto the fact that this close new friend was a girl. Assumptions about his romantic life were something else he really wasn't up for at this moment in time.
"She's from school?"
"Yeah." They did, in fact, go to the same school, though their paths had never crossed. "Yeah, we started hanging out in the spring. Um." There was absolutely nothing he could say that would convey it. Even if he could talk about the Game he'd have trouble explaining their relationship to anyone who hadn't been there. So that thing where I died, that I can't tell you about because it didn't happen? Yeah, so after that, Shiki kind of saved my ass in the afterlife, and then I repaid her by, um, trying to murder her. So we worked through that. Then this really creepy guy kidnapped her because apparently I cared about her too much, and then I helped the guy who murdered me to murder the creepy guy, and so I sort of rescued her, and… you know, we're best friends now. That makes sense. Right?
The room swam around him; he could feel a headache starting. Aloud, Neku said, "The yakisoba's really good, Mom. Thanks for making it," and then managed to keep the wince off his face. Teenage boy who's Friends With A Girl makes the most obvious and pathetic attempt ever to redirect his mother's attention.
But his mother smiled slightly and ducked her head, and maybe he'd really been that terrible and self-absorbed in recent years, that even such a small expression of appreciation— which was clearly, blatantly a self-serving change of subject— would make for a successful distraction. "I know you used to like it," she said.
"Yeah." He forced a smile. "Still do. Listen, Mom…"
"About earlier," she said quickly, before he could marshal his excuses and bolt. "Neku, I promise you, I'm not trying to cut you off from the rest of the world. I just need to know where you're going, not come home and find you gone with no note and no call and— and I know it's been—" She hesitated. "We haven't talked much, for a long time."
"No," Neku conceded quietly, and abruptly that word, we, jarred an old resentment loose. No, we haven't. Two-way street, Mom, and you've been sitting just as still at your end of it as I have at mine.
No. No, she was trying. He pinched at the bridge of his nose, trying to shove the headache away. "Look, there's been a lot of stuff I've—"
"Just listen, all right?" she said, and he swallowed a frustrated sigh. "Everyone's been on edge lately, and— what I said about the mural, I know that's not going to happen again, but that's not—"
Neku's head throbbed, and he was starting to think that maybe the room-spinning thing wasn't entirely a mental response to the stresses of the day. He shut his eyes, his mother's voice blurring into the hum of distant street noise, and for a moment everything slowed and stabilized.
From a long way away, his mother said, "Neku? Are you all right?"
He almost laughed. He ought to make a list, he thought, of hilariously inadequate things to say when the world was ending.
He opened his eyes, shoved away from the table, uttered a hasty "Excuse me," and made it to the bathroom just in time before the few bites of supper he'd eaten came back up.
"I'm just really, really tired, Mom. Couldn't sleep so well last night, and I think maybe something I had at Sunshine—"
Also, Joshua said helpfully, you've just been skipping betwen planes of reality with no training, protection, or even the faintest understanding of what you're doing.
Neku, busy insisting to his mother that he'd be fine with a little rest, ignored Joshua. He stumbled back through his bedroom door, shoved it safely shut behind him, gave the room a blearily cursory once-over, found it empty of angels as far as he could see, and toppled into bed.
Your frequency's completely haywire, Neku. Focus.
He dug in his pocket for his cell phone. "Gotta check on Rhyme."
I don't think she'll be reassured by you throwing up at her. Get yourself under control first. Imagine you're giving the room a scan.
He'd have liked to go on ignoring Joshua, but there was some obvious sense to this, and reluctantly he rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling and listened for Noise. If they were drawn to negative emotions they should have been flooding the apartment, but he couldn't find any.
When he thought that he could move without losing whatever was left in his stomach, he pulled out his phone and hit Rhyme's number in the call list.
"Neku?"
"Rhyme. Hi. I'm sorry I couldn't call back sooner." He paused, struggling with what to say. "Listen, I…"
"You still remember him, right?" she asked. "I'm not going crazy? It's something because of the Game, right?"
"You're not going crazy, Rhyme. Yeah, it's because of the Game."
"Wasn't anything else it could be," she said, her voice small and strained. "Is it because he and I didn't really win? Are they—" She cut off, and Neku shut his eyes, hearing the rest of that question without her needing to ask. Are they coming back for me next?
"No," he said, with more conviction than he felt. "No. It's not— it's because I—" He couldn't tell her about any of it— couldn't risk them coming after her next, and oh, gods, what if they went after Shiki because of what he'd already said? No. Breathe.
He could still tell the truth, much as he didn't want to. He swallowed. "It's because I asked him for help this morning. I shouldn't have. I knew I shouldn't have, and I did, and I'm so, so sorry. It's all my fault."
"Neku," she said.
He shook his head and hurried onward, because apologies over something this terrible were useless if they didn't come with action. "He's still alive, okay? I'm going to do everything I can to get him back. I just…"
"Neku," she said again, as he paused to take a deep breath. He could hear her voice shaking, but it was her turn for conviction now. "Stop. I don't know what's going on, but I could hear how scared you were this morning. Did you think they were going to take him away if you asked? Did you make them do it?"
"No, but I—"
"Then it's not your fault," she said, in a terrifyingly reasonable tone, and okay, Neku thought, he really needed to turn this conversation around. It was completely backwards, and completely fucking unfair, for her to be the one trying to reassure him. Dammit. He was rapidly coming to see why Beat's attitude towards his little sister was a confused tangle of love and frustration and abject guilt. "It's like what they did to Shiki, right? Beat told me."
"Yeah," he admitted. "Yeah, it's… I'm pretty sure it's a lot like what they did to Shiki."
"Okay," she said. "Are you in another Game?"
Conversation has to stop there, Neku, Joshua said. You've got to get out of the habit of thinking this is the kind of thing you can talk about to anyone you please. Believe me, it never ends well.
"Rhyme, I'm sorry," Neku said tiredly. "I really… really can't talk about it, okay? If I pull you into it too—"
"I'm already in it," she said, her voice turning ever so slightly stubborn. "My brother's gone."
Fair point. "Yeah, and he'd never forgive me if I let— if I didn't do all I could to keep the same thing from happening to you. And I'd never forgive myself, either. Please, Rhyme? Don't ask me."
A long silence, and then a sigh. "Is there anything I can do?" she asked, and then added, a flash of unexpected humor in her tone, "Other than stay away from sharks?"
It startled an exhausted laugh out of Neku. "Honestly, that's the big one right now, Rhyme. Keep your head down, okay? Pretend things are normal, as much as you can. I think they're… pretty set on us pretending things are normal, right now. I'm sorry. I know it completely sucks. Look…" He hesitated, staring out the window at the fading light, and hated himself a little more for what he was about to say. "Give me a week, okay? If I haven't gotten him back in a week, then…" Then Joshua has killed me again, and you won't actually be here to know about it. "Then the version where I go it alone hasn't worked, and we'll try a different way. I promise."
Sometimes, he remembered Shiki saying, a white lie to someone you care about is okay, Neku.
"Neku," Rhyme said soberly, "if you haven't gotten him back in a week, will you still be here?"
It was getting difficult, very difficult, to speak. "I'll try to be, Rhyme. That's the best I can promise you."
After he'd hung up the phone he lay in a daze for a while. The space around him wasn't as much of a blur as it had been, but his head still pounded, and he still didn't think he trusted himself to stand up anytime soon. Or to do anything at all that wouldn't bring the Higher Planes crashing down on everyone else's heads for it.
Joshua said nothing. The pact link had faded into something barely perceptible, so faint that Neku wasn't sure he wasn't imagining his sense of it, like a phantom limb. A part of him wondered if the link and Joshua's voice had really been there at all, or if he'd cracked under the stresses of the day and conjured them up in an attempt to distract himself. He could have thought some loud questions about that in Joshua's general direction, but edged away from doing so; if Joshua was there, then the pact certainly counted under 'further contact with the Underground,' and Neku didn't want to know what the angels would do for a second offense.
He didn't sleep, afraid of waking to another angel in his room uninvited, bringing news of some new catastrophe, but he drifted. The sun set, and his room went dark, apart from the multicolored city lights that cast dim, ghostly half-shadows through his window and the neon green glare of the digital clock by his bed.
Minutes slipped by, and hours. And then there was a familiar sigh in his mind, and the pact link settled into his awareness again, and Joshua said, Still with me, Neku?
He snapped out of the fog. Yeah. But—
Good. Follow me.
It was and wasn't like their fusion psych had been. The sense of his body's own weight slipped away as the world blurred and spun into something dizzy and bright, and he was hurtling through space, and a hand reached out—
This way.
—And Neku was sitting on metal and concrete, gazing out over a sea of city lights, his legs dangling over the edge of a high, cold rooftop. He reeled backwards and kicked his feet up and scrambled back from the edge, gasping. "Holy shit. Warn a guy next time." So much for the prohibition on speaking aloud to Joshua, but if the angels were watching then they couldn't exactly have missed this.
"You're welcome." Joshua sat down next to him, no longer in his horrifically expensive dress clothes, but back to looking like a more-or-less normal teenager in jeans and that stupid bunny-eared hoodie he'd insisted on buying (or, more accurately, he'd insisted on Nekubuying) from Lapin Angelique. "You clearly needed a change of scenery. So did I, for that matter." His expression darkened for a moment, his gaze going distant. "House arrest has gotten unbearably dull. They confiscated my phone."
"Your phone." Neku wanted to laugh and cry and punch him, hard. "I'm so incredibly fucking sorry for your loss, Joshua."
"Yes, so am I," Joshua said, impervious as ever to bitter sarcasm. "But it turns out they aren't at all fond of cameras that can see them. I don't think they actually have a regulation against it, because they're refusing to produce the relevant bit of the rulebook, but they're certainly pretending very emphatically that they do."
Neku shook his head and said nothing to this, too tired to be drawn into an argument about the importance of Joshua's goddamn cell phone versus Beat's actual life. His headache had gone, at least; that was something to be glad of. Then, belatedly, the facts of the situation sank in, and he scrambled to his feet, backing away from the edge of the building and from Joshua. "I'm not supposed to be talking to you," he said flatly. "They want me out of contact with the UG."
"I know." Joshua swung his feet out over the edge of the building and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, as thoroughly at ease as if he were sitting on a bar stool at WildKat.
"And you're supposed to be locked up in your throne room."
"I am." Joshua grinned, studying his overview of the city as if it were a chess board. "Relax, Neku."
"Relax?" Neku spluttered. "Joshua, when they catch us— if they haven't caught us already, because hi, I'm pretty sure they're watching my apartment and you just teleported me across the city again—"
"Neku," Joshua said, sounding faintly cross. "They aren't going to catch us, because neither one of us is here. Not physically. You're still in bed— sleeping off the effects of your unexpected jaunt to the Underground, as far as they can see— and I'm still in the Room of Reckoning, bored out of my skull. This is…" He tilted his head to one side. "Call it an extension of psych space."
Neku hesitated. "Which means?"
"Well, as you noticed earlier— eventually— we're back in a pact. I tweaked it a bit, so that we don't need to be in a Noise pocket to make use of it. After that it's just a question of having a strong enough bond and a strong enough imagination. You must have realized that you and your dear Shiki, for example, didn't really rampage through the streets of Shibuya astride a giant toy cat that shot lasers from its eyes."
"It was a pig," Neku said, rankled for reasons he couldn't quite explain by the tone in which Joshua had said your dear Shiki. "Shouldn't the angels have noticed a pact?"
Joshua laughed softly. "Normally. But I took a few precautions." He reached out, making a pretend gun of his hand, and tapped his index finger gently on Neku's forehead in an echo of his gesture the previous day. "Physical contact as a conduit, for starters— no open space for the initial spark to cross, where it would have been harder to mask."
Neku stared at him. "Wait, that's when you—"
"Yes. And happily, you were already on your way to building a decent set of mental defenses, without even realizing you were doing it. I shored them up a bit for you once I was in, just to be safe. Not even the angels can read you now." Leaning back, Joshua stretched his arms and then folded them behind his head, lying back on the rooftop with a satisfied smirk on his face. "Which is already driving them absolutely crazy, but don't worry— they're not blaming you. They think I did something when you and I were in the Game."
"Oh," Neku managed, not sure he could be as enthusiastic as Joshua currently sounded about the idea of deliberately thumbing his nose at the people who held Beat's life and Shibuya's fate in the balance. "Great. You know, you said they couldn't see us last time, either."
"Yes, well. I lied."
Neku almost choked on this. "What you mean is, you got caught."
"Neku," Joshua said, in a now you're being slow tone, "Sanae put the barrier in place. I can shield my thoughts from them; he can't, not with any reliability. I knew when I asked him to modify it that he'd be found out."
"You're kidding me." Neku had the sinking feeling that he was going to be giving Joshua a lot of disbelieving stares in this conversation. "Then why even—if we've been in a pact since yesterday, why not just start with this?"
"Hm." Joshua's smile was not entirely pleasant, but his voice was mild. "You've met these people now, Neku. Do you think, given the choice, they would have told you anything more than they absolutely had to?"
"They haven't told me anything more than they had to. They've barely told me that."
"I'd rethink your definition of had to," Joshua said. "But perhaps they'd have had a point. Would you have preferred not to have to pretend for the next week? It might have been kinder to let you go on thinking everything was normal."
Neku recoiled from the thought. "No."
"At least until you woke up a week from now—"
"No."
"—And surprise," Joshua went on relentlessly, "and welcome back. Taking our duel as a trial run, we can already guess how well you'd have handled that one. I already know what you look like when you freeze up, Neku; I don't need to see it again." He gave Neku a sidelong glance, a cheerfully dangerous glint in his eyes. "Not on someone else's terms, anyway."
"Yeah," Neku muttered. "I get the picture, asshole."
Joshua ignored this. "So I thought I'd force their hand. I couldn'ttell you truly in secret, because honestly, you have a terrible poker face. They'd have worked out you knew, and then they'd have worked out that we were talking. And I couldn't tell you openly; they'd have stopped me before that ever happened. But a secure channel that wasn't quite secure enough had its benefits. You now know; they know you know, so you don't have to pretend you don't; they know how you know, and they've got to acknowledge— at least briefly— what they're doing to you. It's not much, but it's more than it sounds like."
Neku let out a shaky breath as he considered this. "Okay. Yeah. That… seems like way too much work for not much, but okay."
"Mm. Well, that's only your side of it; there were others." Joshua's expression turned pensive, his eyes narrowing slightly. "They get to feel quite smug about themselves for catching me out in an act of open defiance, for starters, and are thus reassured that I may be clever, but I'm not quite clever enough. And of course I was duly chastened by the slap on the wrist I got for it, and I'm now being a good boy who wouldn't dream of disobeying them again." He flashed Neku a bright, thoroughly disingenuous grin. "Which is a far more useful state of mind for them to be in than their previous one, and strongly suggests that not only can they not see us here— they won't even think to look."
"Oh," Neku said, weakly. "Right."
Joshua spread his arms wide, taking in the rooftop and, by extension, Shibuya. "So here we are, and you're welcome. Because you needed somewhere safely out of their sight and hearing, Neku. I mean, no offense, but you've been a wreck. You don't really do stress well, do you?"
Neku snorted. If that were true, Joshua, our pact would have killed you the first time a Taboo rhinoceros tried to trample me. There was something deeply wrong with the fact that the words the first time were actually needed in that sentence."This is a little beyond stress, Josh."
Joshua shrugged. "So learn to take a favor when it's handed to you. And take this as an opportunity to step back and clear your head, in the company of the one person you can safely and honestly discuss all this with. Me."
Neku choked out a bitter laugh. "Safe and honest. Yeah, those are the two words that come to mind when I think of you."
Joshua's answering chuckle was quiet and insufferably smug as ever. "And yet you trust me."
"Yeah, well, don't push it." Never mind that Joshua had already pushed it far enough to circle the globe at least once or twice. Neku shook his head and turned to stare out over the glittering city, sidling cautiously nearer to the edge of the building. "Are we on top of 104?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I like the view. Thought you'd appreciate it as well."
Neku sat back down, peered gingerly down at the hordes of pedestrians swarming across the scramble, and tried not to think about the height. "Yeah, because I haven't seen this place enough in the last month."
"Well, sometimes all that's needed is a new perspective on the familiar. You ought to know that as well as anyone." Joshua laughed, very softly. "But that wasn't actually the view I meant, Neku. Look up."
Neku looked up, and his breath caught in his throat.
It wasn't like he'd never left Tokyo, of course. He'd seen stars in large numbers, albeit mostly when he was younger and he and his parents hadn't yet stopped trying to be a family and had done occasional family-ish things, like going on vacations out of the city. In more recent years he'd… well, he'd been to the planetarium once on a class trip. In real life, the city lights drowned out the sky.
But of course this wasn't real life. This was Joshua's imagined "extension of psych space," whatever the hell that really meant, and apparently one thing it meant was that the effects of light pollution had taken a hike. The sky glittered to match and outdo the city beneath it, like— like one of those goddamn long-exposure photographs that people took on clear nights up in the mountains, and then probably tweaked in Photoshop to make them sparkle even more, just to rub in the fact that they weren't the kind of sight your average twenty-first century human being was ever actually going to see.
"Oh. Okay, yeah," he heard himself say, dazedly. "Yeah, that's… that's a view."
"Told you."
Neku craned his neck and stared up at the sky for a few minutes, not quite willing to lie back and make himself comfortable. That would have meant conceding a level of breathtakingness to the whole thing that he wasn't remotely willing to admit to Joshua, never mind give him any credit for. But he was just as unwilling to turn his gaze away, and he couldn't help thinking of the mural in Udagawa, and all the time he'd spent just looking, hungry for the brightness and the life it gave off.
He pushed the thought of Mr. H aside. He wouldn't have admitted it aloud for the world, but Joshua was right; Neku needed this, this moment of stillness and peace and beauty, more than he could have put words around.
Miracle of miracles, Joshua was silent; not one snide comment about the look on Neku's face or know-it-all lecture about the constellations, not one word about whatever the fuck else he was dying to make sure everyone knew that he knew. For some measureless stretch of time, Neku felt like he could breathe again.
Then he thought about sitting in silence with Shiki the previous night, and wondered, uncomfortably, if this was so different.
It didn't feel that different, except for the knowledge that Shiki would be yelling he shot you, Neku, get out of there in his ear right about now.
It wasn't that complicated, she'd insisted. And on some level, Neku knew she wasn't wrong. But a month ago, stripped of his memories and reduced down to whatever he was at his core, Neku had almost killed her. And if she hadn't, somehow, gotten past what he'd done, they'd both have died. (Though he wondered if she really had gotten past it, or if her world would always freeze and break around her when she remembered being trapped and unable to breathe, as his did when he remembered the gun.)
But she'd disentangled it from him, somehow, pulled apart who he was from what he'd done, even though in that instant they'd been exactly the same thing. She'd had to. They were partners, and they'd needed each other to survive, but it had been more than a temporary truce to save her own neck. She'd still snuck out to see him last night when he'd called, when he'd needed more than anything in the world not to be alone.
And that was the thing, that was the piece that Neku kept circling back around to: what Mr. H had said, the day Neku had made that goddamn sprint across Shibuya because of Joshua's stupidly effective fake mission mail: In a way, he's been alone all his life.
Neku knew exactly how much damage isolation and loneliness could do. And that if they went on for long enough, they convinced you that you wanted them, that they were keeping you safe, that you were better than the people they'd cut you off from.
And he had the sudden, dizzy sense that this whole teleport-to-the-rooftop thing might be Joshua's version of that one a.m. call, or at least the closest Joshua would get to it, because it wasn't only Neku who had no one he could safely talk to, was it?
And because it wasn't only Neku who'd been betrayed in all this, even if Joshua seemed inclined to wave away attempted murder as a minor disagreement.
Awkwardly, reluctant to break the silence but no longer able to hold onto it, Neku asked, "You hear any news about Mr. H yet?"
Joshua sighed, and for a moment didn't say anything; Neku looked down at him, and found him still watching the sky. At last Joshua said, "He's alive, and apparently behaving himself. They brought him back, made him rework the barrier and put some additional wards in place— all far more closely scrutinized for illicit modifications, this time. We… didn't get a chance to talk, but he looked well. I mean, inasmuch as a man cast from paradise and almost certainly condemned to a bitter end can look well."
"Oh."
"I don't think they'll do anything with him before the Game," Joshua said, his expression distant. "He's still Shibuya's Producer— they execute him, they'll have to put another one in place, and there's no sense in going through that before they've worked out if there's going to be a Shibuya." He gave a matter-of-fact shrug. "Anyway, depending on how the Game goes, I…suspect they've got hopes of keeping their hands clean there, as well."
Neku winced, but it made sense. Mr. H was surely as intertwined with the city as Shiki or Beat or any of them. "You mean he'll go too, if Shibuya does?"
A pause. "Yes, Neku, that's what I meant."
Joshua fell silent again. Neku went back to watching the stars, out of things to say that wouldn't fall straight onto that list that he'd wished he could give to his mother.
"You know," Joshua said a minute or two later, "there's something you haven't asked me, since all this started."
There were a lot of things, Neku thought, a hell of a lot of things. He found himself morbidly curious to know which one Joshua thought was the important one. He glanced down. "Yeah?"
"The angel said it himself." Joshua's eyes were unreadable, his voice calm. "With everything that's at stake, surely I ought to surrender now? They aren't me, Neku. They will take it all if you lose. If I were simply to let you kill me, a great deal of trouble— and hundreds of thousands of lives— would be saved. I expect it's occurred to you."
Neku swung his feet over the edge of the roof, stared down at his sneakers, his fascination with the sky abruptly gone. "Yeah. Yeah, it has."
"And?"
Neku shrugged, kicking his heels against the concrete, and watched as a band of teenagers streamed out of 104 and down the sidewalk, laughing and calling to each other. "And what?"
Joshua's answering silence stretched out. At last he said, "And so there's something I want to be very certain you understand."
"What's that?"
Joshua sat up and silently held out his hand, and his mouth twisted into a wry half-smile.
Neku looked into his eyes, and then braced himself and, warily, took the offered hand. In spite of himself he flinched as they touched, half expecting some kind of jolt or explosion— or gunshot— but there was nothing, just Joshua's fingers closing around Neku's palm, and Neku shifted awkwardly, trying not to feel completely trapped by the gesture. It was a small thing, surely. They'd been in a pact, were back in one now, and compared to that— the sharing of soul and imagination and life force— holding hands was probably not a big deal.
It still felt weird and overly intimate. Again he thought of Shiki; it hadn't felt that way with her, and his thoughts immediately responded, defensively, with Yeah, but she's a girl. After longer consideration, he thought, Yeah, I don't think that's actually it. She's not an arrogant asshole who thinks she owns my soul, and she's never shot me, and if she had she wouldn't have fucking laughed about it. I think that might have more to do with it.
I trust him. I trust him. I trust him. I trust him. Mostly. I think.
"Relax, Neku," Joshua murmured, a spark of humor in his voice. "I assure you I'm not as interested as you think I am."
Neku's face burned, and he snatched his hand away, and snapped, "If you're not interested, quit reading my mind."
Joshua laughed and held his hands up, palms out, in mock surrender. "I wasn't. Just your face. I did tell you you'd be terrible at poker."
Neku scowled and looked away. "It's a real mystery why anyone would want to kill you, you know that?"
"Oh, don't sound so wounded."
"I'm not wounded." Gods no. It wasn't like he had wanted—no, not even finishing that thought, no matter how sincerely Joshua swore he wasn't reading minds right now.
"Neku. You're adorable, but you're fifteen. Actually fifteen, not died-in-your-teens-and-stayed-there fifteen. And I'd tell you to come back in a decade or two—"
"I didn't say I wanted—"
"—But we've both got rather more immediate concerns right now, so—" Again, Joshua held his hand out. "I won't say I don't bite,because we both know that's not true, but I've no intention of doing so just now. Fair enough?" And there was that rare, open, friendly smile, which Neku was strongly beginning to suspect he should take as his signal to run like hell. "Trust me, Neku."
Neku gave a quiet, resigned snort. "I'm going to regret the day I ever said I did, aren't I?"
"You don't already?" The soft laugh. "That's something, at least. Now shush, and take my hand, and listen."
Neku sighed and took his hand. "What am I listening f—"
It had felt, before, like a soundtrack just out of hearing.
Now he could hear it, and soundtrack was an utterly inadequate word. It should have been chaos. It was chaos, a million different tunes all playing at once, all in different keys, at least half of them firmly believing they were the main melody, but it— it worked, in a way it completely shouldn't have. They wove together in impossible harmonies and clashed off of each other in furious dissonance and somehow they made something that rose above the mess, that spilled through the city, that was the city— everyone and everything in it. It picked him up and swept him away from himself, pulling him through empty alleys and packed nightclubs and quiet cafes. And crowds, almost everywhere. He remembered talking to Rhyme in the Game about how it had felt to scan a crowd, like trying to pick up every radio station at once— but that had nothing on this. This wasn't cheap surface-level stuff about the latest entry on freaking Eiji Oji's blog or the latest episode of the Tin Pin show. This was everything, hopes and joys and terrors and he shouldn't be looking at any of it, except there were so many of them that each one was barely a drop in the ocean, for all that every last one he could see thought themselves the center of it all.
And then Joshua let go of his hand, and Neku remembered, abruptly, that he was one person in a single human body, and he opened his eyes and sucked in a sharp, startled breath as the music faded and the usual city noise filtered back in. "Oh," he managed, after a long moment.
Joshua had drawn his knees up, hugging them tightly to his chest; for a moment, he looked young and weirdly vulnerable. He gave Neku a long, intent, expressionless look. "That's what you're fighting for in this, you understand? That's what's at stake."
Neku, still reeling, was hit by a sudden flash of anger. "And you— you'd just—" He struggled for words. "You'd win, and let it all—"
"Neku," Joshua said quietly. "A month ago, I thought it was broken beyond repair, and I was ready to wipe it out myself. I chose otherwise, and I stand by that choice. I'd still prefer— very much prefer— that it not end that way." He tugged his shirtsleeves over the palms of his hands, and Neku was suddenly aware that the night was colder than he'd noticed. "But what I won't do," Joshua went on, "is hand it over to someone who doesn't have the strength to protect it. That does, in fact, include the ability to make choices which one may, on a personal human level, find painful and unjust. If it comes down to that, then yes, Neku." He shrugged. "I'll win. It'll be kinder than leaving it— and you— to fall apart more slowly."
Neku stared at him for a long, silent moment, and then turned away, and rested his head in his hands, and shut his eyes.
"Of course," Joshua added, his tone once again as cheerful as if they weren't about to be shoved into a stupid freaking Battle Royale with the fate of the city at stake, "I do say if. And I wanted to start with that, because you do need to understand what's on the line, and you do need to understand that regardless of what we do, it may come down to that. However. We do, now, have an actual secure channel, as opposed to my heavily-monitored throne room. You understand?"
Neku froze. Joshua, I swear. If you don't have an actual fucking plan, and you make me hope…
Slowly, shakily, he raised his head and nodded.
"Good." Joshua nudged him with his elbow, in teasingly friendly fashion. "Let's talk about how we can jack this Game, then, shall we?"
A/N: And that's that. Thank you, once again, for reading! Feedback is always much appreciated. :)
