Title: Patternmaker
Fandom: The World Ends With You
Pairing/Characters: Minamimoto
Warning(s): None
Genre: Gen
Mathematics, really, is just patternmaking -- so Sho and mathematics had gotten along since he had fought his way out of the womb. He could add and subtract before his first birthday, figured out multiplication before he turned two, and implicitly derived long division before he learned how to read. He may never have bothered learning his letters if it wasn't for the fact that, once he entered the first grade, he realized that the big stuff was crowded amongst letters in books. After his parents had failed for six years he taught himself in one week by treating words like equations for sounds.
When he was in the fourth grade, his teacher would ask who knew what four times four was, and he would respond by asking if a cosine wave could be represented with an infinite polynomial since it was just a regular function with infinite intercepts. His third grade teacher would have sent him to the office for pulling that sort of thing (back then, he was still wondering about the relationship between derivatives and integrals), but his fourth grade teacher just sent him into the hall. Mitsuki, who was zetta cute even back then, would wink at him – and that's when he began to realize that it was making him popular with the ladies.
In the seventh grade he bought (well, stole, but they're pretty much the same thing) a textbook on linear algebra and opened his eyes to n-dimensional space. Everything seemed to get fuzzy; for the first time in his life, he struggled to understand a concept. The image of a six, seven, twenty-dimensional space haunted him…for two or three days, after which he realized that the human brain is too zetta slow for some patterns.
When he was sixteen he had been rederiving Euler's Formula by way of differentiation rather than Taylor Series when a truck driver, drunk on love, high on life, hadn't stopped when he was crossing the road.
He woke up flat on his back in the Scramble. The ability to organize complex functions must have been considered integral to the Game, so they took the next most important thing to him -- his voice. For seven days he and some random radian of a Partner had fought their way to the moon and back, and at the very end when they asked him if he would kill his Partner to become a Reaper, she was dead before he bothered to nod.
Being dead was zetta awesome. As he descended into half-madness, scribbling formulae on walls and roads and Players' corpses, all he could think about was how much time he had to play with patterns.
