Someone blinked, lowering the phone from her ear. She didn't remember exactly where she was or what she had just been doing. All she knew was that it felt like someone had taken a bunch of clouds out of the sky and stuffed them into her head.
She looked around with wide eyes.
She was in a room she recognized, but something about it looked off. Everything was so much bigger than she expected, as if she'd suddenly shrunk without realizing it.
This looks like… my house? No, that wasn't quite right.
She wandered around the house, running her fingers along the walls as she tried to remember where everything was. The feeling of the smooth paint against her fingertips was oddly unfamiliar. Her first instinct was to touch everything, like a child.
She poked around until she found what seemed to be a bathroom, and bounced on her toes, trying to see the mirror above the sink. But she was too short; the edge of the sink blocked her view of the reflective glass mounted on the wall.
She jumped as high as she could and managed to haul herself up over the edge of the counter, propping herself up on her elbows. Finally, she saw what she'd been looking for. The person in the mirror was a young girl, with choppy black hair. The color of her dress matched her eyes; both were sky blue.
The girl's name popped into her head. Mayuri. Shiina Mayuri.
The person looking into the mirror tried to speak, but her mouth felt weird.
"Mayuri," she managed eventually, addressing the girl she saw in the mirror. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears. She did recognize it, but couldn't shake the feeling that it had been a long time since she'd heard that voice. The girl in the mirror looked like an old picture, too, now that she thought about it. "Shiina Mayuri. Mayushii?"
The girl inside the mirror mouthed the words along with her, but no sound came out. In the mirror, Mayuri was mute. She couldn't say anything even if she wanted to.
The girl outside the mirror stretched her arm as far as she could reach and poked the surface of the glass. The girl inside the mirror reached towards her at the same time. Their fingertips met, but instead of warm skin, the person on the outside only felt glass.
Everything the girl outside the mirror did, the girl inside the mirror did too.
I guess she is my reflection, after all…
She let herself drop back down to the floor, still feeling like her head was filled with clouds. As she continued walking, she stuck one finger into her ear, trying to drag out the white fluff. She peered at her fingertip hopefully, but the only thing on it was earwax.
She barely noticed where she was going as she wandered through a doorway.
"There you are, Mayuri," said a voice, and she automatically turned towards it. A few feet away, Mayuri's grandmother was sitting in a chair next to someone's bed.
Whose room was this?
She looked around, peering first at all the furniture and then up at the place where the opposite wall met the ceiling, far above her head. She was momentarily preoccupied by the way the line looked, following it from corner to corner with her eyes.
Had it always looked like that? She couldn't remember, for some reason.
Had it simply never occurred to her to look at the line between the wall and the ceiling before? She found that hard to believe. Mayuri always spent a lot of time looking at things that no one else bothered to pay attention to.
Is this my room? It looked familiar.
But it wasn't Mayuri's room.
She looked at the bed and saw a familiar person sleeping there. His name… Okabe Rintaro. Mayuri always called him Okarin, she remembered.
Why was it so weird to see him lying there?
She tried to think.
In her memories, she didn't see Okarin nearly as often as she saw Mayuri. But he was always there. She could feel it. Every memory that she saw Mayuri in was distinctly a Mayushii-and-Okarin kind of memory. She tried to remember a time when Mayuri had been there and Okarin hadn't, and found that she couldn't.
If Okarin was sleeping here, this must be Okarin's house.
Mayuri's house was different.
"Why is he still asleep?" she asked her grandmother. The words came out slower than she was expecting, and she was momentarily distracted by the way they felt against her lips. It was like she had never talked before, or at least not like this. She found herself silently mouthing the words again as she studied Okarin in detail.
"He's very sick," her grandmother replied gently.
"Oh," she said, running her fingers along the edge of his blanket. It was very soft and warm, shielding the boy in bed from the cold of winter. It was winter now, right? She was having a hard time remembering… She found herself talking for the silent girl she'd seen in the mirror. "Mayushii hopes he gets better soon."
"So do I," her grandmother said softly.
The girl with the clouds in her head reached out and patted Okarin's head. His hair was all messed up from tossing and turning in his sleep. His face was flushed with fever, his eyebrows drawn together. He looked strangely small.
"Let him rest, Mayuri," said her grandmother. "Come here."
She withdrew to the older woman's side, looking up at her with questioning eyes.
"Let's pray together. Let's pray that your friend wakes up soon."
She figured that the funny feeling in her head would go away soon enough, but it was still there the next morning. It was still there as she went to school and people who she barely knew came up to talk to her as if they were best friends. She vaguely recognized them, and had maybe talked to them once or twice before, but that was all. Still, she tried to act just as friendly to them as they were acting to her now. She didn't want to be mean.
But it was hard to communicate properly with people when she didn't know them very well. They were always trying to talk to her about things she didn't understand, or maybe didn't remember. There did seem to be a small gap in her memories. Maybe those memories had gone poof and turned into all those clouds.
If she couldn't figure out what someone was saying after a few minutes, she asked them questions. She got a few weird looks. Someone asked her if she was feeling okay.
Apart from the clouds in her head—which she was sure would go away soon—she felt fine, but they sent her to the school nurse. The nurse asked a lot of questions, and it took her a while to answer some of them, but she managed.
Most of them were Do you remember…? and then something about a specific event she was supposed to remember. And the weird part was that she didn't remember, exactly. But she remembered Mayuri telling Okarin about all of those things. So she just repeated all of the stories Mayuri had told him for the nurse.
Eventually, the nurse decided she was probably just a little confused.
The nurse said that it must be upsetting that Mayuri's best friend was so sick. The nurse said she was probably just distracted, and that she probably just hadn't been paying attention to what people said to her lately, and that's why she didn't remember.
The nurse asked if she'd been sleeping okay. But she was sleeping just fine. It was being awake that wasn't going so well. Her brain was always so cloudy…
When she came home from school that day, her head hurt from thinking so much. She climbed into her grandmother's lap and closed her eyes. She could hear the ticking of the old woman's pocket watch; the sound slipped into her mind through the fog. For a moment, she could pretend the clouds were gone and her head was clear.
Mayuri always listened to the watch to calm down. She remembered that, although she wasn't entirely sure why she had it in those memories instead of her grandmother. There was some kind of long, twisting road between now and then (shouldn't it be then and now?), and of course, she couldn't see through the fog to the end of it.
The girl with the clouds in her head checked the mirror every day, wondering if she would turn into someone else, but she always saw Mayuri on the other side of the glass. She wasn't sure who she was expecting to see instead.
A few weeks later, Okarin finally woke up. Her brain was still full of clouds, but at least Mayuri's best friend was back. She had been starting to get lonely.
She'd wished on a shooting star that he would wake up. And then he did.
He told her that the last thing he remembered before he'd gotten sick was that his vision had gone blurry, and the world had twisted around him, and the ground had started to shake so badly that he couldn't stand. And somehow, she knew exactly what he meant. As he spoke, she felt as if she was almost experiencing what he was describing herself. Along with the sensation came a strange sense of déjà vu.
There was something about Okarin that made him easy to understand, much easier to understand than the classmates who stared at her like she'd suddenly been replaced with a stranger. It was almost like she felt whatever he was feeling. Or… almost like she remembered how he was feeling, somehow.
They spent most of their time together. It was Mayushii and Okarin again, just like she remembered. Or maybe it was Okarin and Mayushii now.
Things almost went back to normal. But the clouds never went away, and Okarin felt a little different, somehow. Maybe the two of them had accidentally broken whatever 'normal' was and then put the pieces back together in the wrong order.
And she still felt a sense of wrongness whenever she looked at her reflection.
She saw the girl in the mirror, and she could see that she had the same arms, the same legs, the same dress, the same everything… except her face. She could never see her own, and she had no way of knowing whether it looked like the image of Mayuri in the mirror. She touched her forehead and her cheeks and her nose, trying to map her face by touch (in the mirror, Mayuri's reflection did the same), but that wasn't enough.
So she pulled Okarin over to the mirror and asked him whether the two looked the same. Anyone else might have told her that she was being ridiculous, but he didn't. He looked at her face and then the mirror and then back again a few times before telling her that she looked exactly the same in person as she did in the mirror.
She believed him. Okarin wouldn't lie to her.
But deep down, she still wasn't totally convinced that she was Mayuri.
Who am I? she couldn't help wondering every time she looked in the mirror. She stared at the reflection that was her perfect image, unblinking, until something—usually Okarin's concerned voice—pried her gently away.
He didn't know why it was important to her, but he knew that it was. He could tell that there was something different about her now. She could tell he felt guilty, wondering if his being so sick had affected her this way. But then again, being so sick had affected everything in Okarin's life this way. Everyone else had lived an entire month without him.
Before he'd gotten sick, he'd had friends other than Mayuri. But it turned out they had never been as close as he'd thought—none of them had come to see him when he'd been sick. They had all moved on during that time, filling the gaps left by his absence as if he'd never been one of them at all. When Okarin went back to school, he found that he couldn't fit in anymore. He couldn't connect with anyone.
She could tell it hurt him. He never wanted to talk about it, but it was like she could see straight into his heart. She could tell he was sad. After school, they'd walk home, to either his house or hers, and she'd give him a big hug without saying anything.
He wouldn't say anything either, but he'd hug her back. She knew he was thinking that at least Mayuri would always be there for him. They were best friends; they'd known each other for so long that neither of them could remember meeting for the first time. Their friendship was one with no beginning and no end.
Okarin used to worry that people would think their friendship was weird—after all, Mayuri was two years younger than him, and a girl—but she didn't have to know all the things that he did, or be anything like him, for them to get along.
They watched a lot of anime, curled up together on the sofa.
If she focused intently enough on the characters in the screen, the girl outside the screen felt like she could climb out of her mind and into theirs. Their thoughts were like clear blue skies—there wasn't a single cloud in any of their minds. She marveled at the clarity. As soon as she looked away from the screen, the clouds gathered in her head again, but it was nice to pretend, even just for a little while.
Sometimes, Okarin could tell she was feeling down, though he didn't understand why. All he knew was that if she was sad, he'd do whatever it took to make her smile. It didn't take him long to learn that she liked it when he imitated the characters from their anime, so he started doing that to cheer her up.
His mad scientist impression would always make her smile.
Years passed. She got older, but her mind never seemed to change, even as Okarin actually grew up beside her. Maybe a person could only grow up once, and she had already wasted her chance. She wasn't sure when that had happened, but she did remember it. She remembered being little, a long time ago, and then getting big, and then becoming little again. That last part had happened the day at Okarin's house. The day when she'd picked up the phone and ended up with all these clouds in her head.
Her head had been full of clouds for so long now that she'd almost stopped noticing them most of the time. But the clouds swallowed up all the big words other people said, distorting them before they could reach her brain. As hard as she tried, she could never understand them. There was a limit to what she could learn.
People thought she was stupid. She knew it made her a burden.
She wasn't sure if the clouds were getting thicker, or if she just hadn't noticed the way they twisted things when she'd been a child. Back then, people hadn't expected her to understand complicated things. Now they did. And she still couldn't.
But Okarin never called her stupid. Neither did her grandmother.
Mayuri's grandmother tried to teach her things whenever the teachers failed. The old lady would simplify it all, one word at a time, until something finally pierced through the fog and made sense. Her grandmother took the whole terrifyingly complicated world and turned it into something she could understand.
But then Mayuri's grandmother got sick. Then she had no translator between her and the world. And somehow, she knew how this would end. If she pushed through the fog with all her might, she could see the path ahead. She saw that her grandmother would die and she would have to live the rest of her life without her.
She told herself that the memories of having no grandmother weren't real. Her grandmother was here, so she couldn't have died. Memories were always of the past, not the future. She might be dumb, but she did know that.
But then it happened.
It happened.
It happened.
Her parents told her that her grandmother had passed away, and she had stared at them, somehow uncomprehending and understanding perfectly at the same time.
And then the clouds in her head broke open.
And in her head it was raining and raining and raining.
She saw things that she couldn't understand. She saw Mayuri and a brown-haired boy at a computer and a girl with long red hair wearing a lab coat. She saw a girl in a pink dress, blushing shyly. She saw a girl with two braids sitting inside a strange machine. She saw a girl with pink hair looking out the window at the top of a skyscraper. She saw a girl with a phone in her hand and such sad red eyes.
She saw Mayuri die and Mayuri die and Mayuri die.
She saw and she saw and she couldn't un-see.
She ran outside, even though it was raining outside just like it was raining inside her head. She slid slowly to the ground, crying. There were huge puddles all around her, and in them, Mayuri's reflection cried along with her. She cried and cried and cried, trying to let all the rain in her head leak out through her eyes.
But it didn't work. The rain kept pouring long after she had no more tears to cry.
After that, she felt lost. She walked through her life in a trance—unable to smile, unable to speak, unable to think. The clouds in her head, once so fluffy and white, were dark now. They rumbled constantly with thunder so loud that she couldn't hear anything else. She was trapped in her mind with nothing but the storm.
A long time ago, she'd accidentally stolen Mayuri's voice from the girl in the mirror. She'd been talking for her ever since, but she still wished she could give it back.
Maybe she had now. She didn't speak anymore. She couldn't.
There were no words.
After the funeral, she went to the graveyard every day. She stood in front of her grandmother's grave and looked up. She stared at the sky, unseeing and unthinking and unfeeling. Someone had given her grandmother's pocket watch to her, knowing she loved the sound it made, but she couldn't even hear it anymore through the storm in her head.
She was just empty, drowning in her own mind.
But was it really even her mind? The day she hadn't known exactly who she was, the day the clouds had first formed in her head… had she accidentally overwritten the real Mayuri? When she stood staring at the sky in front of her grandmother's grave, was she really looking for Mayuri so she could give back her body and her life?
She didn't know.
All she knew was that every day, it was exactly the same. One day blurred into the next. No matter what the weather was like outside, the clouds in her head never stopped pouring. Somehow, she went to school every day. Somehow, she did what was expected of her… which wasn't much, anymore. Everyone knew how slow she was.
And then one day, something changed. The clouds in the sky above her broke open, letting sunlight pour through. She blinked, suddenly seeing again. It was beautiful.
She reached up with one hand, as if she could touch the rays of sunlight. She could remember Mayuri doing the same over and over again, reaching for the stars even during the day when no one could see them. For a moment, they were united in this action.
She could feel the sun's warmth. She could actually feel it.
She stretched upwards to the sky, marveling.
Maybe she could capture the sunlight in Mayuri's hands. Maybe that light could clear away the clouds in her head like it had just cleared away the clouds in the sky. Maybe she could release whoever she was and then the real Mayuri could come back and she'd be smarter than the girl always looking into the mirror, and happier, and—
And then suddenly Okarin was there and he was holding her tight. "I won't let you go. I won't let anyone take you away." For a moment, she was startled; her arms were pinned to her sides, her head tucked under his chin. She could remember his fear. "You're my hostage now. My guinea pig! Th-there is no escaping me! Muahahaha!"
He did an evil laugh, just like the villain in his favorite anime. He sounded fierce, but she knew what he meant as clearly as if he'd said it outright. She knew.
He was afraid she was going to disappear.
He didn't want her to disappear.
In his eyes, she was as real as the Mayuri she'd displaced. As real as the girl in her memories and in the mirror. He didn't distinguish between the two at all. It didn't matter to him that she was ditsy and dumb because she could never shake the clouds out of her head. He loved her exactly the way she was.
"Oh," she said, finding her voice. She sniffled. "Mayushii's your hostage… I guess I'm stuck here, huh?" The words were as slow and strange on her lips as they always were, but that didn't matter. She'd finally found them.
"Ehehehehe." She laughed a little, smiling through the tears she only noticed now were staining her cheeks. When had she started crying? She didn't know.
She buried her face in Okarin's chest.
For a long time, the two of them just stood there in the beam of sunlight, clinging to each other. The girl with the storm in her head let its warmth soak into her skin. Slowly, the rain in her head slowed. The black clouds faded back to white. The pocket watch she was still clutching in one hand began ticking audibly again.
The storm was finally over.
Afterwards, she looked into the mirror and wondered if she really was Mayuri after all. She wished she could ask the girl on the other side of the glass. But Mayuri's reflection could only mimic what she was saying. She could never say anything for herself.
One after another, the memories she'd seen the day her grandmother died repeated themselves in real life. She couldn't remember everything clearly enough to predict the future, and she didn't like remembering either—it always made her head ache. She tried to wrap all the sharp memories in soft, fluffy clouds, but she couldn't always ignore them. Everything that happened brought with it an increasing sense of déjà vu.
She kept living Mayuri's life.
Sometimes she would smile at the mirror and the girl in the mirror would smile back, but she couldn't tell if it meant that Mayuri approved of her or just that she had no other choice. She took to raising her hand towards the sky every once in a while, in the same offering she'd made that day in the graveyard. If the real Mayuri wanted to come back, the girl outside the mirror would let her.
Okarin didn't realize exactly what that was about. He only knew that she liked to shake hands with the stars. It was easier to let him keep thinking that was all there was to it, so she never explained the other reason she kept stretching up to touch the sky.
She somehow got into high school, where she met Luka, the priest's son who was more feminine than most girls she knew. Okarin knew him too, and liked him, and that was enough to make her want to be his friend too.
She tried her best to be useful and managed to get a job at one of Akihabara's many maid cafés. It was there that she met Faris, who Mayuri always called Feris-chan. She remembered Okarin and Faris having lots of conversations about things that made no sense to her, but the conversations between Mayushii and Feris-chan were all new. The clouds in her head didn't go away when she was at work—the clouds never went away—but it wasn't as confusing as being around Okarin and having the present overlap with the past. Or was it the future? She never knew for certain.
Eventually, Okarin created the Future Gadget Laboratory, and she knew without knowing how that he was doing it to find more people like him, who understood him. Other people understanding him had always been his dream, that elusive thing he craved. She always knew how he was feeling, always, but she couldn't keep up with what he was saying most of the time. It made her feel so helpless.
But she was all he had right now, and she had always been his partner in everything. So she came to his door one day, a few weeks after he'd founded the lab, and asked to join. And then she was Lab Mem #002 and Okarin was no longer alone.
Daru was the next person to join them. His brain wasn't cloudy like hers, but it was always full of all kinds of naughty thoughts, so there weren't a lot of people who liked him. Still, Okarin had always liked him, and he was loyal, so she liked him too.
Okarin and Daru made all kinds of things that she didn't understand, but it didn't matter that she didn't because she knew it made them happy. One of the Future Gadgets stood out among the others. Okarin called it the PhoneWave (name subject to change), but it was simply PhoneWave-chan to Mayuri. She'd forgotten how many of her bananas they turned into gelbanas by doing the same experiment over and over again.
And then Kurisu came. Mayuri had always called her Chris-chan. The red-haired girl could be prickly sometimes, but she remembered how kind she was. She remembered how much Chris-chan cared about Okarin, and how much Okarin cared about her. Okarin had a lot of interesting thoughts about Chris-chan; whenever she was there, he was always paying attention to her, although he didn't seem to notice it himself.
She gave Chris-chan a big hug when they first met. The other girl was surprised by it, but she didn't care. She knew somehow that Chris-chan desperately needed to be loved. She remembered hugging her in a dark room beneath a rainy sky.
It wasn't much longer after that when she met Suzuha, otherwise known as Suzu-san (there was a kind of complicated memory behind the nickname that she didn't fully understand). The other girl was a part-time worker at the CRT shop below the lab. Okarin called her a Part-Time Warrior. She was fierce and kind and always cheerful.
Mayuri liked whoever Okarin liked, but she also had her own soft spot for Suzu-san. Whenever she said "Tutturu!", Suzuha would return the greeting. Not many people were so accepting of her quirks that they'd adopt them as their own. In fact, Suzuha and little Nae were probably the only two who did.
Next came Moeka, the girl with the sad eyes who only talked through her phone. Okarin found her annoying, sometimes, but he couldn't bring himself to actually hate her. Okarin could never, ever hate a lonely person. So he made her a lab mem, like Mayushii and Daru-kun and Chris-chan. It was his way of saying, We're all lonely, too.
Mayuri had always tried her hardest to make Moeka smile, but Moeka never did. There were times that Moeka would simply stare at her, and for some reason the girl with the clouds in her head felt something that was almost fear. But Moeka-san wasn't really scary. She was just so very sad, and Mayuri had always wanted to make her happy.
It was around that time that the clouds started getting denser. She stopped seeing Mayuri as much. The memories that reached her through the clouds were all of Okarin with Chris-chan and Moeka-san and PhoneWave-chan and an old computer. In the real world, Okarin didn't talk to her as often as he used to, either. And although the lab had more members than it ever had before, she started to feel alone.
She started to miss Mayushii and Okarin.
Around the same time, a strange memory began drifting to the front of her mind. August 13th, 7:30. That date and time seemed vitally important for some reason.
Now that they'd unraveled the secrets of the PhoneWave, which could be used to send D-Mails to the past, it was only a matter of time before their other friends found out. And when they did, they were desperate to send D-Mails of their own.
Luka joined the lab as #006, sending a message to his mother 17 years ago, so that he'd have a chance to be born as a girl instead of a boy.
Faris joined the lab as #007, reaching out to the father she'd lost half a lifetime ago so she could save him from the disastrous results of her own mistake.
Suzuha, the Part-Time Warrior, joined the lab as the final member, searching for her own father, who she'd never gotten to meet but had heard was in Tokyo.
It all felt familiar, but the girl in Mayuri's body could barely remember anything clearly through the ever-thickening clouds. It was like she was going through life blind, except she could still see what was happening right in front of her. She just couldn't see anything that had happened before and would happen next.
So she was startled when Okarin decided to upgrade the PhoneWave.
She tried to understand the machine Chris-chan was building for them. But again, the clouds warped everything on its way into her brain. The more she tried to understand, the more her head hurt, until the clouds started pounding on the inside of her skull like they were trying to get out. But she knew the clouds couldn't escape. For all these years, they'd been a constant in her mind and her life.
Eventually, she gave up trying to figure it out herself and decided to ask Okarin to explain it to her. After Mayuri's grandmother died, he had become her translator.
They were shopping for parts at one of Akihabara's many electronic stores. She had offered to come with Okarin to help him carry their bags, but she didn't know what they were looking for, so she wasn't being very useful at the moment. Still, all the different electronic parts were interesting. She spaced out, only blinking back into focus when Okarin warned her to stay close to him so she wouldn't get lost.
"Okey-dokey! I'll be careful," she promised. Now was her opportunity to talk to Okarin. "Um, by the way, how is time leaping different than time travel?"
"Time travel means your whole body travels through time," he said, impatiently. His tone might have hurt her feelings if she hadn't known he was only irritable because he was worried she was about to wander off (again?). She felt bad for worrying him, but she couldn't always help it—something would catch her eye and she'd stare at it for hours, captivated. "The time leap will only send your memories to the past. It's simple."
"Oh…" It wasn't, though. She had so many questions. "Does that mean you can do things with time leaps that you can't do with D-Mails?"
"D-Mails can only send instructions to the past," Okarin explained, continuing to look for the items they needed as he spoke. How could he do both at once? Just trying to think about the time leap machine made her head hurt. "The past may change, or it may not. The results are unpredictable, and depend on the recipient. And when the past does change, the worldline is reconfigured. Everyone loses their old memories. With a time leap, on the other hand, you can give your past self not only instructions, but all of the memories you have right now… or at least, that's the idea."
Not everything made it through the clouds; his mouth kept moving, but she didn't hear words. She tried her best to avoid staring blankly at Okarin. Normally it helped her figure things out if she peeked into his mind, but the clouds didn't let her do that now. It was strange. Normally she could always get into Okarin's head.
"Ummm,"—the letter m always felt so strange and lovely on her lips, so she drew out the sound as she tried to think—"so I could send the costume I'm making back to last week? I would love to have another week to prepare for ComiMa."
"That might be possible with time travel, but not with time leaping," Okarin said. He paused for a moment, searching for words she'd understand. "Say you had a test last week. Now that you know the answers, you could send that knowledge to yourself and ace the test. But you couldn't go back and hand yourself a cheat sheet."
"So Mayushii's mind goes into Mayushii one week ago?" she asked.
"Exactly." Okarin looked pleased that she understood.
This new knowledge settled into her brain. Finally, something had made it through the clouds intact. "You can't bring stuff, but you can bring your memories… I get it. But, then what about Mayushii one week ago? Where do her memories go?"
"I assume they get overwritten," he answered.
"She disappears?" Something began swirling around in her mind. If I time leaped, my past self would disappear… like the real Mayuri disappeared?
"Your memories right now include your memories from back then," he pointed out. "So even if she does disappear, you don't really lose anything. I guess you could say you're just adding your memories from one week in the future."
Oh. So it wasn't like what had happened all those years ago. That was a relief.
"Then, if Mayushii's memories leap into Mayushii one week ago, what happens to Mayushii now?" She wasn't sure why understanding this mattered so much to her, only that it did. The clouds felt like they were getting heavier, like it was about to start raining in her head, but she persisted. "Mayushii's memories jump to the past, but my body's still here, right? What happens to me when my memories go bye-bye?"
"You become an empty shell… no… that can't be right. That wouldn't make sense." He thought about it. "My assistant's device merely records your memory data… in other words, it's just a backup. Your original memories are still inside you. Your body shouldn't become an empty shell, and your consciousness shouldn't leap either. Actually, won't you become a new Mayuri, one who received memories from the future one week ago?"
"Then, does the Mayushii who had the normal memories before the time leap get erased by the Mayushii who repeated the week with extra memories?" Inside her head, it began to rain; thankfully, it was just a drizzle this time.
"That's right. She's erased." The idea didn't bother him, but of course it wouldn't—he wasn't like her. He had never accidentally erased someone else. "In other words, you relive the week. You can do things the same, or you could so something completely different. And you'll keep your old memories of the week that disappeared."
"Then does that mean…" She struggled to find the words for what she wanted to say. Rain was dripping all over her head; the pitter-patter was distracting. "So I redo the week, okay… but what if I decide to go to Ikebukuro with my friends instead of coming to the lab today? What happens to the Mayushii talking with Okarin now?"
"The present would change to match the past, and this conversation would never happen." Okarin spoke patiently, but she could tell that he was wondering where all these questions were coming from. The clouds whispered his thoughts into her ear.
"Oh… and you wouldn't notice the difference, Okarin?"
"Right. No one would notice."
All those happy memories she had of Mayushii and Okarin… how would she feel if Okarin didn't remember any of them? "That would be kinda sad…"
"For who? Me?" He looked puzzled.
"No. For Mayushii. Maybe that's why Chris-chan doesn't want to change the past." She had to stop following that train of thought, or the clouds in her head might get dark and scary again. "Oh! I just thought of something. Can you time leap into the future?"
"Maybe, but there wouldn't be a point," he said, fondly exasperated now. "The whole point of our time leap machine is to affect past events. We don't need to worry about the future. Besides, you're less likely to reach the future than you are the past. And that's because the future is inherently unpredictable. For example, do you think you'll have the same phone number for all eternity?"
"How should I know?" She smiled back at him, giggling.
"Exactly my point," he said, turning to look for something on a different shelf. "And remember, pagers became obsolete with the advent of cellphones. Similarly, our phones may be replaced by some other device in the future."
"Oh… I guess I can't go back to grade school, can I?" she realized, disappointed. That was always where her mind went whenever she thought about the past. Even with the clouds in her head, things had been simpler then. "I didn't have a phone back then."
"You want to go back to your elementary school days?" he asked. "Heh heh heh. I know exactly how you feel. If you repeat elementary school with the knowledge you have now, you'll get top grades and have an easy time bending children to your will."
"Yeah," she agreed absently. "And I thought maybe I could see Grandma again."
He looked concerned. Whenever she talked about her grandmother, Okarin always thought back to the day at the graveyard when he thought Mayuri was going to vanish. It always made him nervous. "…I see. I'm afraid that's not possible."
"Yeah… It's too bad, but I guess I don't really need to see her," she reassured him. "I still remember her words, her smile, and her wrinkly hand patting my head. So even if I don't see her again, I'm okay. What I really want is to see little Okarin again! Ehehe!" That was part of the memories that had never come back after the clouds appeared.
"Heh," Okarin scoffed. "Back then, I was already a scientist without equal, a titan towering above the other children. You can hardly be blamed for desiring to meet the child prodigy who would one day be feared as the great mad scientist, Hououin Kyouma."
"I don't want to meet Hououin Whatshisface," she corrected him. "I want to meet Okarin!"
"Anyway, there's no point," Okarin said dismissively. "You haven't matured at all since that time, so nothing would change if you went back to elementary school anyway."
"Hey!" she said, stung. "That's not true. Mayushii's all grown up now."
"The only thing that's grown is how much you eat," he teased.
"That's not true!" she insisted. "Mayushii's a real woman now." She'd been trying so hard to grow up. She might not have actually succeeded, but she didn't want to hear Okarin say that. "Besides, I think Okarin's the one who hasn't changed since then."
"Isn't that what I said?" he said smugly, doing one of his Hououin Kyouma poses. "I was already a genius mad scientist when you met me. MUHAHAHAHA!"
That wasn't what she'd meant, and both of them knew it, but she let it drop. As Okarin gathered the rest of the materials Chris-chan needed, she closed her eyes and tried to quiet the clouds in her head. She took deep breaths. The pattering of the rain slowed and came to an end, and then the clouds were quiet again.
She could handle this. She could do it.
On the way back to the lab, they chatted about her cosplays. It was nice. She hadn't talked to Okarin like this in a while. Being with him again put her at ease.
There was something about the PhoneWave and the Time Leap Machine that had always unsettled her. She felt as if it was pulling Okarin further and further away from her every day, slowly but steadily changing him into a different person. She couldn't help but worry that one day it might change him into someone she didn't know anymore.
But right now, she could still hear him. Behind his quiet voice, his thoughts were as clear to her as they'd ever been. Right now, he was still her Okarin.
At last, as the 13th approached, she remembered why it was so important.
That was the day she'd seen Mayuri die.
And if she really was Mayuri, that was when she would die.
She stared into the mirror in the lab's bathroom with wide eyes. In her reflection, Mayuri looked just as scared as she felt. Her heart beat lopsidedly in her chest, protesting against what she now remembered was her fate. Mayuri was shaking.
She was suddenly aware of how fragile her life was, and how much she had always taken for granted. Her brain might have been cloudy and useless for as long as she could remember, and she might not be real, but at least she had always been alive. No matter how strange her mind was, being alive was much better than being dead… right?
More than herself, she was scared for Mayushii and Okarin.
Mayuri hadn't been able to control her life for years. She was trapped in this body that the girl with the clouds in her head had taken from her, completely powerless. But it was still Mayuri's. This life wasn't hers to lose.
And somehow even more importantly, would Okarin be okay without her? She remembered the day in the graveyard when he'd first taken her hostage. She had felt with perfect clarity how much he feared losing her.
She watched him with the lab mems, trying to sense his feelings and guess how he would feel if she disappeared now. He had so many friends now. He'd miss her—of course he'd miss her—but maybe he would be okay. After all, he had Chris-chan. He and Chris-chan might fight a lot, but they would always take care of each other.
But then Chris-chan and Suzu-san started fighting, and it hurt. She was about to die. She didn't want to see them argue when she was about to die.
She had to know for certain that they'd be okay after she was gone. So she waited until Okarin was alone on the roof and then went up to join him.
She looked up at the sky, so beautiful, clear and full of stars. It was so unlike the sky inside her mind, and yet… it was a part of her—the only sky she had ever known. The same sky over everyone's heads, regardless of what the inside of their heads looked like.
She was going to miss this world.
She didn't want to die. She didn't want Okarin and Daru-kun and Chris-chan and Moeka-san and Luka-chan and Feris-chan and Suzu-san to keep on going without her. Even though the night air was hot and humid, she shivered.
Was there anything she could do about it, though? In her memories, Okarin tried and tried and tried to save her, but he never succeeded. If she told him what she knew, would it make any difference? Or would it just upset him and everyone else?
"Hey, Okarin," she said, trying to smile.
"Hm?" he asked, turning to her. He noticed immediately that something was off. Or maybe something was off about him, too. It was difficult to tell the difference between his emotions and her own sometimes, especially when they overlapped like this.
"It's been really lively here these past few weeks, huh?"
"Yeah, I guess it has."
"It's fun~" she said. Okarin looked out over the edge of the roof again, distracted, and she found herself talking to get his attention back. "Um, now that there are eight lab mems, Mayushii thinks it's getting a little cramped in here. First, we don't have enough chairs. We should buy more. Do you have money, Okarin?"
"New chairs will take all my savings," he responded.
"I guess you can use part of my salary." It wasn't like she would need it anymore. But even knowing that today was her last day, she still couldn't stop herself from thinking ahead. Her brain couldn't process something as strange as her own death. It didn't fully understand that this would be permanent. It didn't fully understand that she would just be gone. The words spilled out of her mouth. "We need a new microwave too. Otherwise, I can't warm up my Juicy Chicken Number One."
Talking about something that she knew she would never see made her feel awful. As the time between now and then (or was it still somehow then and now?) got smaller and smaller, her heart seemed to beat louder and louder. Her body seemed to scream I'm alive! I'm alive! I can't just stop existing!
But she knew that it could and it would.
"Yeah, sorry about that." Okarin felt a little bad, but not much. She clung to his feelings instead of her own, burying herself in his distraction. "But Mayuri, when we turn over the Time Leap Machine, the reward money will solve all our problems."
"Will it be enough to pay for chairs and a microwave on top of the higher rent?"
"It'll be enough," he said confidently. She felt his pride in their invention. In his mind, the Time Leap Machine was invaluable. It was the world's first (technically second after the PhoneWave) time machine. The machine was valuable because of what it could do, but even more so because of everything his friends had done to create it. Kurisu and Daru had worked so hard. He was proud of them. "More than enough."
"Wow!" she said, smiling brightly. "That's great, Okarin~"
"Why are you so happy?" he asked.
"Just look. We've made so many friends." She still remembered when it had only been Okarin and Mayushii, and they hadn't had anyone else. She remembered the way the two of them had been so isolated. Making other friends had seemed so impossible. It had always been Okarin's impossible dream. But now… "There's Daru-kun, Chris-chan, Luka-chan, Suzu-san, Moeka-san, Feris-chan, Braun-san, Nae-chan, and more! In the spring, when you started this lab, you seemed so lonely. But now you're fine."
She realized as she spoke that it was true. Immense relief washed over her. Okarin was going to be okay. "You don't need me to be your hostage anymore."
"What do you—?" he started.
He didn't get to finish his question. At that moment, the door flew open and Daru-kun was there, telling them they had to see the news. His face was unusually anxious.
They all went downstairs. The TV in the lab was on, showing the news.
The words printed across the screen were bright and glaring, piercing painfully through the clouds in her head. She tried not to wince as she read them. Terrorist bomb threat suspends Yamanote, Sobu, Keihin-Tohoku lines.
"A bomb threat?" said Suzu-san, her shoulders stiffening.
"Hang on," said Daru, making the connection that the girl with the clouds in her head hadn't. "Those lines all pass through Akiba. How's Mayu-shi gonna get home?"
"Oh yeah," she said, numbly. "I should call home."
But what could she possibly tell her parents? Goodbye?
For a moment, everyone was silent. She remembered Okarin's unease.
"Okabe Rintaro," Suzuha said suddenly. There was a strange intensity in her green eyes. "I need to know. You've completed the Time Leap Machine, right?"
"Huh?" said Okarin, startled. "Well, yeah…"
"Okay," said Suzu-san, but she didn't relax; if anything, her intensity only grew. "I just remembered I've got something to do. I'm going out." With that, she was gone.
"What's wrong with her?" asked Kurisu, but no one responded.
The girl who was going to die took out her pocket-watch, half for the comfort of its ticking sound and half in morbid curiosity. The tiny hands told her it was 7:24. She was going to die at 7:30. Six minutes. How was she supposed to react to the knowledge that her own death was only six minutes away?
In the silence, the girl with the clouds in her head felt her anxiety building. It was woven together with Okarin's. Okarin was worrying about things she didn't understand. His panic was overwhelming. She reached out and grabbed his hand, compulsively.
Okarin looked down at her, startled. He didn't understand how she always picked up on his emotions, when she barely picked up on anything in the world around her.
She didn't understand, either. She didn't understand anything.
The door flew open.
In her head, a crack of thunder split the clouds.
Five strangers stood in the doorway, holding weapons. They were strangers—but she recognized them with a twist of fear and horror.
"Hands in the air," one of them barked. "Nobody move."
Daru-kun lifted his hands. Chris-chan and then Okarin did the same. The girl with the clouds in her head hesitated a moment longer, wondering if moving her hands to lift them would be going against the order to not move, before following her friends' lead.
Through the thunder, she heard the clicking of high heels. Behind the men with the guns, a woman stepped through the doorway. A familiar woman.
"Kiryu… Moeka…" Okarin said faintly.
"Um… Moeka-san?" asked the girl with the clouds in her head. Her heart pounded in her chest. She tried to speak, but she couldn't figure out what to say next.
Moeka ignored her, avoiding eye contact with everyone even as she spoke to Okarin and the others. Her voice was low and menacing. But the girl in the blue dress couldn't hear what she was saying; she couldn't hear anything besides the thunder in her head and the sound of her own heartbeat. Maybe they were actually the same thing.
The time was coming. Was she about to die like this, devoured by a world she could no longer understand? She wanted to do something, say something, but she was simply frozen. She felt as if she was the one inside the mirror for once, trapped in a prison of glass. Separated from the outside world. Unable to move on her own.
But there was no glass. There was no one looking back at her. No one to tell her how to move or what to say or what to do. She was helpless.
The tension in the room grew as Okarin and Moeka spoke back and forth with one another. Okarin didn't understand what was happening; he was in shock. Moeka, on the other hand, looked calm, but her eyes were still so sad.
"M-Moeka-san," the girl tried, finally managing to break through the glass. No one else seemed to notice it shatter, but she persisted. "You're a lab mem too… aren't you?"
Moeka didn't look at her, only raised her gun. She continued to speak to Okarin. Then she began to mumble something under her breath, and somehow that was the only thing the girl with the clouds in her head could hear. "For SERN… for FB…"
And then lightning struck. All she was aware of was that Okarin was trying to resist, and she was reaching out towards him, and then everything went black.
The memories after that were strange, broken into fragments that overlapped with one another, like a tape that had been rewound and recorded over, time and time again. The 13th of August looped over and over again, starting and stopping again, always ending with that wall of darkness slamming down in her path. And yet she always opened her eyes after it was over to find her heart beating and her lungs filling with air.
Meanwhile, Okarin was spending all his time trying to stop the cycle, to get her through the day alive. He tried everything he could think of by himself, running from the truth in every direction until he'd run out of options and he was forced to ask for help.
He turned to Kurisu, the genius girl, his last hope.
Together, they met again and again, piecing together a plan to save her. Every time Okarin was about to fall into the pits of despair, Kurisu would pull him back out.
Together, the two of them dragged Mayuri back from the edge of darkness, shifting her death from the 13th to the 14th to the 15th to the 16th. Each day was something of a victory, a day she'd never expected she would ever get to see, but it wasn't enough. They sought a future in which she wouldn't have to count the days she had left. Where she could keep going for years after the moment that was supposed to be the end.
None of those extra days came for free. But there was nothing that Okarin wouldn't give up for Mayuri. He said goodbye to Suzuha, knowing he would never see her again; he convinced Faris to let her father slip between her fingers again, leaving the regrets to settle back into place on her shoulders; and transformed Luka back into a boy, putting him back in the body and the role he'd never been comfortable with.
But he couldn't let Kurisu trade her own life away to save Mayuri's. She was too important. Besides, she'd done nothing but help and support him, taking some of his pain onto her own shoulders. He couldn't repay her by making her another sacrifice.
And yet even as he tried to save both of them, he was painfully aware that he was looking for an option that didn't really exist. He wasn't God. He was only human—a man who had tried to play at being God and was now being punished for that hubris.
Suzuha had told him that the world was governed by attractor fields, and that they were trapped in a world where Mayuri could not survive. The only alternative was a world in which Kurisu died and their time machine never came to be.
Before that, the most recent branch in the world's attractor fields had been 10 years ago, in 2000. He had only been a child then, and yet…
He'd already relived the past few days more times than he could count. It felt as if the loop would go on forever, and yet he knew that the slightest wrong move could break it, preventing him from using the Time Leap Machine to try again.
And besides all that, he was exhausted.
He didn't know if it was possible to Time Leap that far back into the past. He didn't know what it would do to the mind of his younger self. Kurisu had warned him not to try leaping back more than two days at a time. His brain structure would be too different. It would be like leaping into the mind of an entirely different person.
He didn't know what he'd be able to accomplish anyway.
According to Suzuha, the attractor field divergence in the year 2000 was related to the Y2K problem. The worldline he'd grown up on was in the attractor field in which the problem had been avoided, thanks to Suzuha's intervention using the IBN 5100. Could he find her in 2000 and convince her to simply let it happen instead?
He had no idea what issues would arise if the Y2K problem was left unsolved. But whatever the outcome, it had to be better than this.
After that, all he'd be able to do was wait for 10 years until August of 2010 came around again, praying that things wouldn't play out the same way. But if he traveled back far enough, and sent the world down the opposite path, could he manage to slip free from this entire situation? Could he simply choose not to invent the Phone Wave? Choose not to create the Future Gadget Lab at all? Would that save Mayuri?
Even if he had to live out those 10 years dreading these days, overwriting his past self's identity and blissful ignorance, at least he would escape from this hellish loop for a while. At least he would broaden his options.
Maybe he could find a way to save Kurisu without ever sending a D-Mail. He knew when she would die, after all. He could intercept her killer and save her. SERN wouldn't be involved. They would all be safe. They would all be free.
Regardless of what Kurisu said, it was worth the risk.
He set the Time Leap Machine for December 1999, dialed in his home phone, and pressed the button, gritting his teeth as the Phone Wave sparked with lightning. And yet—
For the first time—
The Time Leap failed.
His consciousness hadn't budged. He was still in the Future Gadget Lab, with the Time Leap Machine's headset on. The smell of ozone still tinged the air, remnants of the electricity that had arched through it only moments ago.
Why hadn't it worked?
His heart hammering in his chest, he tried to remember what he had been doing around the end of the year 1999. Why hadn't he answered the phone?
Of course. That had been when he'd been sick, unable to wake from a feverish haze for almost a month. He couldn't have done anything, much less answered the phone.
As he stood there, his senses returned to him. He couldn't afford to be so careless with the Time Leap Machine's effects. If he broke his own mind, then he wouldn't be able to do this again. Trying to go back to 2000 would be running away, plain and simple.
He had to find another way.
He put it out of his mind, not knowing that his failed Time Leap had ended up with a vastly different result than he'd been expecting. On the other end of the line, 10 years in the past, a little girl in a blue dress answered the phone and disappeared.
In the end, Kurisu convinced him to let her go. Even as the decision tore his heart in half, there was nothing Okarin wouldn't give up for Mayuri.
But things wouldn't stay that way.
Suzuha came back to the Future Gadget Lab from a different future, warning of a different but equally terrible fate they needed to avoid. She had a plan to go back in time to save Kurisu, to create a world where everyone lived.
Okarin went with her into her time machine, which vanished, only to reappear again a moment later. Okarin staggered out covered in blood. It wasn't his, but he looked like he was in so much pain that it could have been.
The girl with the clouds in her head couldn't tell exactly what he was thinking or feeling anymore—not the way she used to. But she knew him. His mind was her mind.
He had been through so much. He didn't think he could do it anymore.
But he couldn't give up. He had never given up on Mayuri, so she couldn't let him give up on Kurisu either. She couldn't let things end this way.
This whole time, she'd been powerless to save herself. Okarin and Chris-chan had done all the work to save her themselves. But she wasn't powerless now.
"Okarin!" She slapped him across the face.
He reeled back, stunned. "Wha…"
She stepped forward and embraced him, as if the pressure of her body against his could staunch the bleeding from the invisible wound in his heart. "Okarin… you're not a quitter. Mayushii knows. You never, ever give up. Not until the very end."
For once, the words weren't difficult at all.
And on the other side of that hell, when Kurisu had been saved and they had all found their way to Steins Gate, the girl with the clouds in her head found that she could no longer see glimpses of the future or feel Okarin's emotions as though they were her own. She was just an ordinary girl, living in the present, leaving the tangled web of worlds where she'd perished in the past, where they could no longer hurt her. And in her mind, where there had been no sunlight for years, the clouds finally parted.
They weren't completely gone—she thought they might not ever be—but it was as if the sky in her mind was now only partly cloudy.
She didn't know what that meant, exactly, but it seemed like a good sign.
She looked into the mirror, feeling as if she finally had a better idea of who she was now. She wasn't quite the same as the girl within the glass, but she wasn't the same person as Okarin either. She was a mixture of the two, and yet at the same time she was someone with an identity all her own. A girl finally freed from the hands of fate.
I'm just me now. And now I can be whoever I want to be.
And who was that? She touched her chin with one finger, thinking.
It was so much easier to think now that the clouds had started to clear.
She thought about a lot of things. Like how she had been living this life for so many years already, with clouds in her head but surrounded by friends. Like how she had been the one that Okarin and Chris-chan had worked so hard to save, even if she wasn't the first Mayuri. Like how there was another Okarin, but there was no other Mayuri anymore.
I think… I like being Mayushii. Is that okay?
She smiled. And in her reflection, Mayuri smiled back, as if there was some secret passing between them—a secret that only the two of them knew.
Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed!
This story is based on a theory I had while playing through Steins;Gate Elite for the first time. Although I ended up being wrong, of course, I couldn't help but continue to think about what it would be like in Mayuri's head if I had been correct. Except for making the Time Leap Machine's two-day time limit a suggestion rather than a hard rule and adding the scene where Okabe tries to jump back to just before 2000, I didn't have to make any substantial changes to make it work. Everything just happened to line up really well to make my theory plausible.
I actually started writing this story a couple of years ago, and I wasn't sure when I'd end up finishing it. But it came to my attention that August 13th was a Friday again, just like in Steins;Gate, and I knew I had to finish it by today. So you can say that this fanfic's completion and posting today was the choice of Steins Gate!
