Disclaimer: The World Ends With You and its characters are property of Square Enix, and are used here without permission.

A/N: ARGH, this chapter has given me fits trying to sort it out. Lemme know if it worked? It's been a beat-my-head-against-the-keyboard-repeatedly kind of deal.


nine: let's see what happens


Let's talk about how we can jack this Game.

The words hung in the air, a promise too bright to look straight at, for fear of being burned. Neku sat in their glare for a moment, and tried to remember how to breathe. "I'm listening," he managed.

"Good. Here's the thing," Joshua said. "They're doing this for a lot of reasons, but the one they've hung their hat on, in terms of forcing it to happen, is the instability. You have to understand, entry fees are usually much smaller. An item, a talent, a memory—" He glanced at Neku, a knowing light in his eyes. "Or collection of memories, obviously."

Or a person? Neku almost asked, but this wasn't the time to start a fight about what had happened to Shiki, or the other players in his third Game. Or about the offhand tone in Joshua's voice, as if the things that were smaller were meaningless. As if it hadn't obviously been a punch to Beat's gut every time Rhyme had looked at him and not known who he was, as if Shiki hadn't nearly turned herself inside out trying to be somebody else, as if waking up with nothing but his name hadn't been the single most terrifyingly helpless moment of Neku's life up to that point. (Granted, the following weeks had kind of blasted that record out of the water, but… still.) But Joshua knew exactly what those losses had done, and he knew exactly what he sounded like, and there had been a dare in that glance: Go ahead. Call me on it. See how that works out for you.

Later. "Go on," Neku said quietly.

One corner of Joshua's mouth turned up, and Neku wondered, again, if the Composer was reading his mind. "Here, obviously, the consequences are going to be much larger-scale. Their laws wouldn't let them do this if they didn't have what they deemed an appropriate justification, and they do follow their laws, scrupulously. Which suggests that if Shibuya's reality were repaired—fully repaired, not just patched over—they would let go of it, I think. To do otherwise would be interference on a scale they could no longer condone."

"So we fix the instability," Neku said slowly. "Before the Game starts?"

"Mm. Unfortunately, that's where it gets slightly tricky: we can't. I could, if I weren't under constant surveillance—and if," Joshua added pointedly, "I had a Conductor who knew his work."

Neku couldn't help rolling his eyes at this. Don't look at me. You're the one who— no, also not the time.

"But they're watching me too closely, and even if they weren't, and even if you accepted the job with a minimum of argument—" the dryness in Joshua's tone suggested he knew the odds of the latter—"a week wouldn't be enough for you to learn everything you'd need to know."

Neku's heart sank. "But once we're in the Game, Shibuya will be gone."

"Well… no. It won't be erased yet, just shifted out of reach. So the challenge will be to bring it back in reach. To keep the instability from spreading, the higher-ups are most likely going to have to hold it in a sort of stasis, in an imaginary space something like this one—but it's going to take a lot of them to maintain it."

"So how the hell do we get into a space like that?"

Joshua's answering smile was slight. "Not easily. But it'll exist in their minds, so…" He shrugged. "We find one of them, and we get in through their mind. The good news is that they're so keen on oversharing that if they don't see us coming, they're unlikely to put up much in the way of a mental defense. And if we can get in, it might actually be easier to repair the damage there, with everything put on pause, than it would be from the Underground. The bad news… well."

Neku snorted softly. "—Is every other fucking thing that's happened in the last twenty-four hours?" But he said it without much rancor, his spirits lifted more than he quite wanted to admit. Hope could hurt if he wasn't careful, and he wasn't ready to get too close to it yet. But there was a plan that didn't involve blindly doing the bidding of the Higher Planes, and regardless of whether or not it worked, he'd rather think about going down fighting the enemy, together, than the alternative.

Besides, in the context of the last month, the fact that someone with an actual freaking clue what was going on was actually telling him about it was borderline miraculous. And it was Joshua telling him, which… well.

Which meant maybe, in whatever screwed up way Joshua was capable of, Joshua did actually care, and maybe Neku wasn't actually a complete idiot to trust him.

Which… mattered, to a degree that Neku would probably not have admitted at gunpoint, and which he shied away from examining almost as warily as he'd shied away from letting himself hope, because it threatened to hurt just as badly. But there was a warmth to it, to the fact that Joshua for once was keeping the mind games and condescension and insults at a minimum and talking through this, confiding in him as if they were actually partners, and on some kind of equal footing.

Which should have been a very low bar to clear, but, well, it was Joshua.

"Well, yes," Joshua said, "but I was going to say that neither one of us has the strength to go toe-to-toe with them, and sneaking up on a single member of a millions-strong hivemind with eyes everywhere is going to be slightly difficult. Still, we have a point or two on our side."

He sat back and gave Neku an expectant look, and Neku thought about it. "They can't read our minds. Against millions strong, eyes everywhere, though, that's not much."

Joshua laughed softly. "Sometimes, Neku—as you politely refrained from shouting at me just a few minutes ago—the small things are important. The higher-ups are so used to plucking whatever they need out of people's heads that they're genuinely hindered by the fact that they can't, here. That isn't speculation, either. I've been…" There was the slightest hesitation, so brief that Neku wondered if he'd imagined it. "Testing it a bit."

Neku eyed him narrowly. "Testing it how, exactly? I thought you said you were on your best behavior after you got caught."

This got a wry, rueful smile and a shrug. "I didn't say best. I said that as far as they're concerned, I took what I got for it and learned my lesson. This was before we'd gotten to that, anyway, so it doesn't count." Joshua toyed with a strand of his hair, twirling it around his finger and studying it intently for a moment before he continued. "I can say this, with some certainty: they have real trouble grasping the idea that someone might not be scared of them. They think that given time, surrender to their power is all but assured. And they don't have the nerve to call a bluff when the stakes are too high."

Joshua, Neku did not say, I am scared of them. I am fucking terrified of them. "Do I want to know what you did to test that?"

Joshua watched the crowds far below, the lights of the city reflected in his eyes. After a moment he said, "Anyway. It gives us certain advantages. If we both appear to resign ourselves to the Game as written, they're going to buy it, because they honestly think that we're only struggling against the inevitable, and that we're both reasonable enough to see that, eventually. Which is to say that they're not above seeing what they want to see. And that? That we can use. It's what any successful illusion runs on. It will break, but if we're careful, that won't happen until after Shibuya's future is on safer ground."

Below, a crowd of late-night commuters spilled out into the scramble from Shibuya Station. In the glare of the advertising screens and storefront signs, they were a river of jostling, shifting colors, rushing along. Neku thought about that, and thought about watching from someplace so much higher that they were all barely flecks of paint on a brush or pixels on a screen, tiny motes in a far, far bigger picture. It was probably easy to forget they all mattered, when that was your constant vantage point.

"You think it's really possible?" he asked, very quietly. "Don't bullshit me on this, Joshua."

"Possible? Yes," Joshua said, and then was silent for a moment before adding, "Likely? I can't give you odds, Neku. There are too many unknowns, and I… have no way to make most of them known. If we play our hands well, we may be able to learn more once the Game begins, but ultimately we're still going to be heading deep into 'try it and see what happens' territory."

Neku nodded. That was about what he'd expected, though he'd been curious to see if Joshua would admit it honestly.

"Of course," Joshua added quietly, "there's another difficulty which I expect you can work out."

There was, but Neku found he felt strangely calm about it as he said it aloud. "If we pull this off, they're not going to be happy about it, are they?"

"No. No, they're not." And Joshua's sudden grin was an expression far too feral for a boy who was currently wearing a fuzzy hoodie with sparkly purple trim and bunny ears. A sudden breeze stirred, and he leaned forward into it, precariously far; his hand shifted on the edge of the roof as he braced one foot against the side of the building, and his eyes lit, and Neku tensed, because for an instant in that light the mad wild boy from Udagawa was back. Back, and dying to jump, just for the rush of it.

And maybe this space was Joshua's own imagination, not the real thing, but they were still eight stories up from the pavement, and it being Joshua's imagination didn't actually mean it couldn't be deadly. Actually, now that Neku thought about it, it probably meant the exact opposite. So he waited, ready to lunge sideways and haul the Composer back from the edge—because things being what they were, if Joshua jumped, he'd probably pull Neku with him.

Yeah, or you'd grab him and refuse to let go. Even when you realized you couldn't hold him back.

The thought shook him, and he shoved it away, but it sidled back and whispered: You know it's true.

And then the instant passed, and the light faded, and Joshua sat back, his smile shifting to something softer. "No. That's the catch, of course. The two of us teaming up to defy their authority—they very much don't want that to happen. At that point, Neku, we've really got two options. We make a run for it—skip worlds, keep moving, see how far we can go. Or…" He shrugged and tucked one foot up on the edge of the roof, pulling his knee to his chest, and tilted his head to one side. "We charge in on them with guns blazing, and see how far we can go." There was something odd, almost wistful, in his smile now, and something in his gaze said he was watching worlds Neku could not see. "Either way, once they're no longer holding Shibuya for ransom against our good behavior, we make a lot of noise in the right directions. Try to draw enough attention that anyone who could do more might, and try to sway the consciences of the more cautious patches of the collective, the ones who are going along with this because they see the risk the instability poses, but who aren't so keen on it beyond that. They do exist, I think. But I'm afraid I can give you our odds at that point, Neku: they're extremely bad. I'd go so far as to say abysmal. If we ran and we were very lucky, we might make it for a few years, though."

Neku nodded, slowly, taking a moment to breathe and take this in. This too was about what he'd expected, except for the possibility of any time at all. And except for— "Did you say skip worlds?"

"Oh yes." At Neku's stare, Joshua added, patiently, "Alternate realities. I'd explain, but if you've ever watched any science fiction show ever, you probably know the basics. Everything happens somewhere. Well…" Again the faraway look. "A lot of things, anyway." Then he brightened. "There's one where everyone plays Tin Pin instead of killing each other. One Yoshiya Kiryu writes a weekly column for the game's top fan magazine, and you—well, that reality's version of you—" Joshua leaned in slightly, his tone turning confidential. "You pretend you can't stand him, but you secretly save all of his columns in a scrapbook. It's adorable."

Neku blinked at him. "You're joking."

"I'm actually not. I visited the place not long ago, and happened to meet both of them." Amusement lit in Joshua's eyes, and he winked. "I don't give your alternate self good odds of keeping his indifferent facade for long, though. That Yoshiya was clearly willing to go after what he wanted."

"Oh." Neku stared bemusedly into space for a moment, considering this. It probably said something about the month he'd had that he was willing to take it pretty much as read. "Lucky… other me. Question: do you live to make my life hell in every universe, or just most of them?"

"Oh, only the ones where we've met, I expect. And where we're anything like ourselves." Joshua grinned, flashing him a sidelong glance. "But honestly, would you really want me not to?"

Neku considered that for a moment, and decided, on the whole, that it was safest not to answer.

"The point is," Joshua said, "the multiverse is a vast place full of countless possibilities, and there are so many possible paths you can travel that it can take even an angel quite some time to work out where you've gone." He coughed, and there was something entirely unrepentant in his voice as he added, "That one's also not speculation."

Neku narrowed his eyes. "Mr. H have to track you down, did he?"

"Once or twice, possibly." But the humor faded from Joshua's expression, and he sighed. "He did manage it in the end, though. So… you know." A nod to the crowds far below. "Regardless of which way we went, Neku, there'd be no waking up at the scramble afterwards."

And there it was. Neku managed a shaky chuckle. "Well. That'd be one relief, anyway. Sleeping on pavement was getting old."

"Well done," Joshua murmured. "There's always a bright side." He propped his chin on his hand, his gaze pensive. "Look, I can't promise you any miracles on this, Neku. Only a chance at a future for Shibuya—and let's be honest, they've already given you that, and thrown a chance at your own future into the bargain. I wouldn't make it easy for you, we both know that, but you…" He searched Neku's face, and it suddenly took all Neku had not to look away. "You could, I think," Joshua said quietly. "Given the time to get stronger. If you could bring yourself to."

Neku swallowed, his mouth dry, and looked down, and shut his eyes, his arms aching at the memory of the gun's leaden weight in his hands. And his throat closing up at the memory of Shiki's voice, small and frightened: Don't kill me. "A month ago I could have. Now…"

Joshua's laugh was soft and fond. "Oh, Neku. A month ago, I'd have taken you to pieces if you'd tried. If I was feeling generous, it would have been over before you knew it had started—but let's be honest, I wouldn't have been feeling generous." Neku looked up at him sharply, but there was only quiet self-deprecation in Joshua's smile. "We're neither of us quite who we were a month ago, Neku. Nothing to do but live with that, I'm afraid. Until we don't."

Neither of us. Neku looked away again, down at the scramble, trying to ignore that disconcertingly easy warmth rising in his chest once more. Joshua had murdered him, and Joshua had saved him from himself; that wasn't news at this point. And he'd… figured that the events of the month had had some kind of impact on Joshua, as well, or why had Shibuya stayed standing? But it was the first he'd heard Joshua acknowledge it openly.

"The thing is," Joshua added, "daring last stands are all well and good for the conscience, Neku, but they're still last stands, and they rarely turn out to be anything else. In theory, the higher-ups' version would offer you a slightly better chance at survival, at least for a while longer. Still, we both know you've developed some… how did Kariya phrase it? Some hangups on the subject." A brief, wry grin crossed his face at those words. "So… you know. Think on it."

Tiredly, Neku said, "Joshua, I don't need to think on it. I'm in." He looked up, meeting the Composer's eyes, holding his gaze. "You know I'm in."

"Oh. Fine. That was easy." Joshua stretched his arms over his head and yawned, and a faintly sleepy note crept into his voice. "Well, that bit of it. The real trick will be making it look believable when I don't take any of the approximate five hundred chances to kill you that you're undoubtedly going to hand me before the end of day one."

Neku snorted. "Says you."

That soft laugh, and silence, and they sat and watched the scramble for a bit. And then it was Neku who stretched and lay back to stare at the stars, feeling—for the first time since this mess had started—oddly contented, not just as if he was shoving the horrors back to think about them later but as if things were really going to be all right. Which was funny, he thought, given that he'd just pretty well cemented his own odds of surviving this thing at zero… but really, after the last month that wasn't anything new, and no waking up at the scramble afterwards sounded, at least, far more restful than the perpetual circles Shades had run him in. He still had questions—so, so many questions—but they no longer felt so urgent as to drive him to the edge of panic. He wasn't going to be in this alone, and that was more than he'd thought he was going to get, and it was enough that as he felt the exhaustion of the day creeping back to take him over, he didn't feel like he had to fight it.

Though it was cold up here. He lifted his head and eyed Joshua in his hoodie for a moment, and then thought, hang on. This was an imaginary space—and it was Joshua's imagination, mainly, but the two of them were linked through the pact, and Joshua had said it was something like their shared psych space, right?

Experimentally, Neku imagined he was wearing his favorite J of the M jacket. Nothing happened.

He thought for a moment, and then tried to reach for the same sense in his mind that he'd had using psychs—not just imagining, but knowing they were going to happen, and putting a burst of energy into them in that way he couldn't have explained.

And there was the jacket, warm and soft around his shoulders. He blinked, faintly startled it had worked, and then grinned. Oh, that had potential, or it would when he was a little less tired.

Joshua, still sitting up to watch the city, glanced back over his shoulder. One corner of his mouth turned up. "Settling in to stay?"

Neku shrugged. "You got anywhere else to be?"

A tilt of Joshua's head conceded this. "No. No visitors at the moment beyond a couple of extremely stolid and untalkative guards. If someone does turn up unannounced, though, I may have to step away, so if you suddenly find yourself back in your room—"

Neku laughed tiredly. "As long as you're not dumping me at the scramble this time, we're good."


Joshua smiled faintly as he turned back to the city. He'd expected little less, really. Neku's worries were for those he cared about; he feared unjust blood on his hands, at this point, far more than he feared his own death. A path that promised to let him avoid that greater fear had been all he'd needed to pull himself together.

You've come a long way in a month, Neku. Just a bit further to go yet, but you'll get there.

A shift in Neku's frequency said, before long, that he'd fallen asleep. Joshua tilted his head to one side, noticing the change in the other's breathing as it slowed and relaxed, at the same time as the energy coming across their pact link lost a few more of its tense, sharp edges. It wasn't the kind of thing he was usually in a position to notice firsthand, and there was something strange and faintly uncomfortable about the way it caught his attention now, when he hadn't meant to notice it. It was too human a thing.

As was the brief, painful burst of wonder that had swept through him at the realization that Neku was trusting enough to fall asleep here.

It had been one thing in the last month to pretend to be nothing more than human again: an entertaining novelty, to deliberately step out of connection with a good nine-tenths of his senses and abilities, and see the world from that limited vantage point. Dangerous after a fashion—and he'd needed that rush of danger far more badly than he'd realized when he started it—but it had only been a game.

It was another thing, far more dangerous and far less needed, to find himself slipping back to it unintentionally.

He pulled his focus away and sat in silence, letting his mind and self drift out across the skyline. He had a city to attend to. Though this was an imaginary projection of Shibuya, it was drawn straight from the real one, and if he looked for them he could see, from here, the ripples and faultlines where reality had begun to grow unstable. He looked, and breathed a silent curse. He'd been unable to check on them in the last day, thanks to the higher-ups' interference, and they were spreading; yesterday they had barely been perceptible to his sight.

One whorl centered on Neku's apartment; no surprise there. He looked more closely, and found it swirling through the soul of his former proxy's mother.

Some knowledge was automatic, written in her frequency: Ayako Sakuraba, age 38. Left a promising start in journalism to raise her son, but untreated depression in a Noise-heavy work environment would very likely have ended her career by now if she hadn't. Slightly more psychic than average, but with no awareness or control of that fact.

She lay awake on her bed, staring bleakly at the wall; Joshua glanced briefly at her thoughts, but he'd heard enough of her conversation with Neku that there was little question how the instability had hit her. Though the past month's reality had been shifted, Neku's death carefully excised, Neku had hung onto the original version with a far stronger grip than most could have managed. From his perspective it had still happened—and his perspective was spreading, and his mother's mind was sensitive enough to those types of shifts that she'd have picked it up sooner than most.

And so even as the world around Ayako was telling her that everything was fine, she was having increasingly vivid flashbacks to a conversation that had told her something very different: Mrs. Sakuraba? You might want to sit down, ma'am…

And the trouble was, Joshua thought as he pulled his perspective back and began scanning through the other problem spots, that it wouldn't end there. One or two people would be manageable, but Neku had spread it to his friends, and their souls didn't shine as brilliantly as his did, but they were still returners from the Game, and that never came without a promise and a price: You'll change the way that people see the world.

And they were—by little more than proximity, by the looks. Shiki hadn't said a word about the Game to her beloved Eri, but Eri had sketched an image in her design book just this morning of a man in sunglasses and a tailored suit that shimmered with a hint of scales, and on a whim she'd given him black wings. She'd stared at it for a long moment, unsettled for reasons she couldn't name, and then torn the page out and crumpled it and threw it in the trash, which was a thing she hadn't done to one of her sketchbooks in years.

Beat's parents weren't having flashbacks like the unfortunate Ayako, but until the angels had snatched him up and plastered over the very fact of his existence, they'd known something was off, and this morning his father had nearly started an argument with him before flinching away from it, as sharply as if the consequences could have been deadly.

Even little Rhyme, back only because—well, officially because dedication like her brother's had deserved some reward, and after everything Beat had done it would have been cruel to send him back without her. Unofficially, they'd both been sent back mainly as a peace offering to Neku. (At least if, by peace offering, one meant preemptive strike in the upcoming negotiations over the appointment of Shibuya's new Conductor.) Rhyme hadn't had time to grow in the same way that Shiki or Beat had—but it was becoming apparent now that whether she knew it or not she had picked something up from her time as Noise. Something that got into people's heads instinctively, and pulled uncomfortable truths up to the surface. She'd been sitting on the apartment step this morning, and a car had gone by much faster than it should have, and the driver had glanced over and caught sight of her and his eyes had widened and he'd slammed on the brake, his face going white with shock. And then the moment had passed and he'd driven on, wondering what had come over him.

And that was just in the last day. It must have accelerated after Neku's reunion with his friends; faint hairline fractures were starting around Ramen Don, where the four had gone for lunch together yesterday, and a delicate spiderweb was beginning to lace through and out of 104. People who worked in a shop with a Reaper decal for any length of time tended to become pretty thoroughly immune to psychic strangeness, but the girl who worked at Edoga had gone home wondering uneasily if that kid with the spiky orange hair was the same one whose face had been on the news a few weeks ago, for… reasons she couldn't remember now. And why she'd kept hearing tires screech in her thoughts every time she'd looked at the sweet little blonde girl who'd been tagging along with her brother and his friends.

A stray broken note, seemingly unconnected to any of the others, caught Joshua's attention in the vicinity of Hirō Hospital, and he took a closer look, curious. It was coming from a young man on life support in the ER, mid-twenties, who'd been rushed to the hospital in critical condition that afternoon after—ah. Suicide attempt, but how was that connected to the instability? Joshua skipped his focus back through the day, frowning. The man had begun the day in good spirits, out to buy a present for his girlfriend's birthday, and somewhere in the middle of it he'd flipped from cheerful anticipation to frantic desperation—

There. Joshua narrowed in on the moment the change had begun—and saw, and realized, and sighed. Too much on his mind, or he'd have recognized the man sooner.

He was the driver who'd hit Beat and Rhyme. Which hadn't happened, in this reality, and the event should have been gone from the man's mind, and it had been. Until he'd passed Beat on the sidewalk, as Beat was heading home from his encounter with the Reapers, and the man had frozen, paralyzed by the sudden appearance of the ghost—and Beat had stopped, and stared, and breathed, "You."

Then Beat had shaken his head and turned and bolted for home, fists clenched, but it had been enough. In the burst of rage and fear and anguish in that word and in that stare, the man had been hit with the entire story, in barely a heartbeat—not just the accident, but everything after.

And now he was in the hospital,

Well. That explained a lot about how cavalier the angels had been about snatching Beat away. Joshua wondered if Neku would feel better about it or worse, if he knew that their trip to see the Reapers hadn't been the reason at all—only an excuse lit on after the fact, presumably on the rationale that it would be a shame to waste a perfectly good intimidation opportunity.

Unfortunately, it also meant that the angels had, after a fashion, a point. Beat hadn't meant to do what he'd done, but it was a prime example of why Players who went back didn't keep their memories. Too much of that sort of thing, and the city would fall apart.

And Joshua hadn't seen any of it before it happened—should have, and hadn't, and he didn't know why.

He took a deep breath. Well. There was, at present, nothing he could do but watch and wait for the Game. He'd told Neku as much, though he'd understated the extent of it.

After double-checking that his former proxy was still asleep, he pushed his sleeves back now, eyed the twisting dark lines that wound around his arms. He'd yet to find a way around them; Sanae, under scrutiny himself, had been meticulously thorough in his work. They stretched up his arms and across his back and over his wings, and sealed his power completely. It was still there, but he couldn't use it. This rendezvous with Neku didn't count; their pact was purely in their own minds, and the seals couldn't block what they couldn't detect. But he couldn't shake them off even here, and he couldn't do anything to affect the outside world.

Well. Even without the seals, what he'd told Neku was true: he couldn't have done much under the watch of the higher-ups, anyway. And while having a competent Conductor wasn't quite as necessary as he'd insisted, it would certainly make the work easier and less risky, which meant that it was really just as well the city was being shifted out of reality until Neku had time to learn his half of the bargain. And the risk that Neku would snap and do something drastic before they could get to that point had now been significantly lessened. Right now, then, they could only wait, and see what else they were dealt, and trust in their own abilities to do more when an opportunity did present itself.

There was nothing to be gained by worrying, so Joshua wouldn't. And he'd had every bit as long a day as Neku had, so he might as well rest while he could.

Cautiously, he settled back next to Neku to watch the stars, and told himself sternly that he was only doing it because there was nothing better to do right now.

And that there was nothing at all comforting in the sound of the other boy's breath, quiet and steady, next to him.


A/N: Thanks, as always, for reading. Feedback would be much welcome. :)