Sound pressed against his ears, pulling Go out of the warm darkness, dragging him into - into what? He felt pressure against his shoulders and hips and heels, tugging against the inside of his arm, air moving across his face, and he had no idea where he was.
Something was missing. "Chase," Go said, lips and teeth and tongue uncoordinated. "Chase," he tried again, but the darkness dragged him back under.
Brightness flared at the center of his vision and he flinched away, the effort monumental and leaving him exhausted. Keeping his eyes open was a daunting and herculean task, thoughts slipping away from him before they had a chance to form.
"Go?" came a familiar voice, the relief that came with it so stark that it took what little strength Go had and poured it out into the ether.
"Chase," he managed, voice shaking.
"No," Kano said, turning to face him, one hand still on a vase of flowers right where Go could see them without moving. "Hold on, I'll tell someone you're awake."
"Where's Chase," Go tried to ask, but his eyelids closed without his permission and took any semblance of wakefulness away.
The third time was easier, the rusty feeling in his head less constricting, the weights pulling at his skin just a little lighter. The disorienting fog had nearly dissipated, but Go still didn't know where he had been or where he was now or why he felt apprehension curdling in the pit of his stomach. He would remember. He had to remember.
Wasn't - there was a Roidmude. Shin was fighting. Shin was fighting, and I helped.
Putting words to memory felt painfully wrong, as though liquid were running along channels left dry, but the more he tried, the easier it got. Memory after memory tumbled past, until he thought he knew where he had been. The last Roidmude - Go had woken up in a warehouse, worked his way free, and followed the sound and fury of Shin fighting off the last Roidmude. They'd tag-teamed it. They'd - had they defeated it?
Go frowned. It would be easier, he thought, to figure out if the Roidmude was dead if he could just look at it, but everything around him was pitch dark. There was no light at all. He tried to blink, and realized that his eyes were closed.
"Goddammit," he muttered, and opened them.
A white ceiling swam into view. Go frowned at it. He was absolutely certain he remembered being outside. For that matter, he was also certain he'd remembered seeing Chase, and Chase had been acting odd. He'd just stood there, instead of helping, and - the memory was hazy.
"Mr. Shijima?" came an unfamiliar voice, and it took Go several seconds to realize that it was talking to him.
Some agonizing hours later, Go found himself in possession of several unalterable facts. Fact: he and Shin had defeated the Roidmude. Fact: the Mach driver had been too much for Go to physically be able to handle, and he'd blacked out from the strain; he'd been in a hospital for days, apparently, recovering. Fact: Go wasn't entirely certain he was anywhere near recovered, which didn't matter, because Chase had completely snapped and no attempts had been made to repair him.
"You can't just leave," Shin said. Kiriko had already given up, glaring at him over her son's head as though that was going to make any difference.
Go kept pulling his shirt over his head, finally stymied by the line attached to his forearm. He blinked at it, followed it to the little pump next to the bed, grabbed it with the other hand and pulled it out. It bled, enough to stain his shirt, and he pressed his palm against it for a moment. "I can, and I will."
Pants, pants were next. He got his feet through the right holes, managed to stand long enough to settle them around his hips, and clung to the side of the bed for support.
"You can't even stand up straight," Shin said, which was exactly the wrong tack to take, and he knew it. It was as though he were encouraging Go to leave.
"Watch me," Go muttered. Everything he'd been wearing when he'd woken up was in a heap at the foot of the bed, and all he had left to do was put on his socks. "Chase -"
"Chase isn't in any danger," Shin said.
"You don't know that," Go said doggedly. Chase had been unresponsive since he'd been incapacitated, and neither Rinna nor Kyu had been able to make heads or tails of what was going on inside his head. Go wasn't entirely sure they'd actually tried.
"Professor Harley," Shin started, and those were words that mattered. Go sat down on the edge of the bed. "Is looking into it," Shin continued, with a barely noticeable pause.
"Aside from Professor Harley," Go said, "The foremost experts on Roidmude programming are Krim and me." It was a technically true statement, although Go's expertise was so far behind the other two as to be nearly laughable.
Shin's hesitation told Go exactly what Kiriko's verbal dancing around the subject had; Krim had refused to look into Chase's programming to see what had gone wrong. She'd tried to distract him with an explanation of how the Special Investigation Unit had located the Roidmude base, and that it looked as though no unknown individuals had made use of it. She hadn't come right out and said that Chase had been the one to build the Roidmudes and set them loose on the general populace for reasons unknown, but it wasn't difficult to read between the lines. Go was also familiar enough with his sister to see right through her distraction.
"If Chase was compromised by something external," Go said, "hooking Krim up to it might leave him vulnerable, too."
"That's what Harley said." Shin didn't have to sound surprised, Go thought resentfully. He knew what he was talking about.
"And?" Go prompted.
"And he can't come all the way to Japan to figure out what's going on."
Not the right words after all; Go levered himself off the bed again, ignoring the way his vision grayed out around the edges, and started for the door. "Then what you have is me."
"Rinna -" Shin started.
"Doesn't know as much about Chase's programming as I do, not any more. Neither does Kyu. You know they don't." One foot in front of the other, and he'd made it to the door. The hallway loomed outside, bright and shiny with clean tile. It seemed huge.
"Go," Kiriko said.
"It can't wait." Go leaned against the doorway. "It can't wait," he repeated. "What if whatever is wrong - what if it's getting worse, and we can't tell? I can't do this again, Kiriko." He clamped his mouth shut before he said too much. What if the only reason he looked at you at all was because something was wrong with him, continued the litany in his head, even as he kept the words off his tongue. What if you made it worse. What if he dies again, because of what you forced on him.
"You can't help him if you can't see straight," Kiriko said acidly.
She wasn't wrong, technically. Go was beginning to think standing in the doorway was a bad idea, but he didn't think he could make it down the hall, either. Shin pulled him back across the room before his knees buckled, depositing him on the bed he'd worked so hard to get away from.
"I can't help him at all if I sit here and do nothing," he snapped, and she gave him a hurt look. Regret wound its way through him and he raised shaking hands to cover his face. "I - I can't just do nothing," he said.
"You're not doing anything without supervision," Kiriko said, and it sounded like a compromise.
Signing himself out of the hospital against medical advice felt, somehow, like one of the most reckless things Go had ever done, even if he could objectively point to multiple decisions he'd made that had had a much higher risk and a much greater chance of failure. It might have been Kiriko behind him, face taut with worry as she tried to juggle an unhappy Eiji and keep an eye on her wayward little brother.
Sheer force of will kept Go awake through the soporific drone of Tridoron's engine across the city streets, and the Drive Pit looming up outside the windshield seemed wavery and oddly unreal until they passed through the entrance and came to a halt. Go leaned on the side of the car for a moment after climbing out, seeing what he knew to be Chase's prone form out of the corner of his eyes and not quite ready to face it head on. He pushed himself away from Tridoron before Shin could walk around the car and offer either help or advice.
Chase might have looked asleep, if one didn't look too closely; Go couldn't shake the feeling that he looked like a wax doll, like something that had never been alive. He was still wearing clothes Kiriko had picked out, jeans and long-sleeved button-up shirt, sneakers, even the Driver slung low around his waist, all of it covered in dust and smudged. A streak of soot ran along one cheekbone, and Go reached out without thinking to brush it away.
Part of him had irrationally, madly hoped that his touch would precipitate some sort of miracle, that Chase would open his eyes and everything would be all right. Instead, Chase's skin was cool to the touch, and Go flinched away.
"How did you access his Core?" he asked, because Chase still looked human.
"Here." Go didn't know if Rinna had been there when he'd walked in, or if she'd just appeared while he wasn't paying attention, but she showed him how to integrate Chase into the Drive Pit's monitoring systems. "Before you look at it," she said, eyes warm with sympathy. "It's a mess in there. Professor Harley left some notes, but there was only so much he could do remotely."
Going over the set of notes and Chase's base code was reminiscent of the months Go had spent trying to put him together in the first place, except worse. Chase was right here, silent in a way that was both deeply unsettling and utterly in character, and Go couldn't reach him. He spoke to Chase while he worked on the off chance that Chase could hear him, sleeping only when he had to.
The core programming was in shambles; Go knew what it was supposed to look like, but furthermore, he could see traces of something else hidden in Chase's base code. There had been something he'd missed. This was my fault. If he hadn't been convinced before, he was now. He had a copy of the original code he'd used, and by comparing it to the mess it had become, he could see exactly what he'd missed and how it had hidden itself in plain sight.
"You're not responsible for this," Rinna told him, three days into the project.
"If I hadn't missed it to begin with, this wouldn't have happened." Go thought he'd cleaned out the infection, but he was far from finished.
"You're not the one -" Rinna started.
"No," Go interrupted. "It was just Banno. Just my father, buried deep in Hypnos, worming his way into the code that Hypnos took from my memoryto rebuild Chase, hiding in Chase's subconscious where I failed to see that there was something in there that didn't belong!" He was shouting by the end, and Rinna had gone from sympathetic to startled to angry.
"You didn't see it. I didn't see it. Kyu didn't see it," she snapped. "That doesn't make it anyone's fault."
"He was my father," Go said, bitterly. "That makes it my responsibility."
Rinna didn't have an answer to that.
Shin tried, too, five days after Go had staggered into the Drive Pit mostly under his own power and started a task that didn't look like it had any possibility of completion. He didn't even have to speak.
"I already know," Go said. "Chase rebuilt the Roidmudes. Banno left a copy of himself in Hypnos, like a virus, and it infected Chase when Hypnos wrote his code. I don't know how much Chase knew about what he was doing, but he must have worked on them while I was asleep. Or while I thought he was working. I don't know."
"Not that," Shin said, and right, Go had had that conversation with Shin shortly after his confrontation with Rinna. "I wanted to see how you were."
"I got my best friend - my boyfriend - braindead. I'm doing great." Go turned back to the screen; he thought he had untangled some of the twisted skeins of nonsense, and if he was right, it should start to fall into place. He was letting the Drive Pit systems - a copy of the software, in a closed loop that went no farther than the machines go was using and Chase himself, just in case he'd missed Banno again somehow - work in the background, compiling the pieces that had been left into the framework Go had recreated.
"You don't have to…" Shin's voice trailed off, and Go glanced over at him.
"What else am I supposed to do?" he asked, the words coming hard and barely loud enough to hear.
"He wouldn't want you to - to drive yourself into the ground," Shin said, gently.
Given that Chase had said almost exactly that when Go had revived him the first time, Go couldn't argue. "I won't," he said instead. "I know what I'm doing, this time."
Shin didn't look convinced, but he left Go alone, or as alone as he ever did; someone was always in the Drive Pit with him, making sure he ate at least at irregular intervals and reminding him that the outside world still existed. It had been less than a week, but Go felt as though he'd been in the round white room forever.
Six days saw Go almost sure he'd repaired Chase's code, absolutely sure he'd rooted out every trace of Banno, and ready try to bring Chase back. Again. Kyu had been in the room while Go was arranging and rearranging the connectors, uploading the restored code, and preparing for the final run, but Go was alone when he took a deep breath and prepared to hit the metaphorical button.
A moment of doubt rose up - should I have used the original framework? - but Go had avoided putting Chase into the metal frame he and Rinna had used months ago to revive Chase in the first place out of a sense of superstition. Or paranoia. As if, he shied away from thinking, if he put Chase in that frame, he was acknowledging that the Chase he'd spent the last few months with was gone forever.
"Ready," he said. "Set." He couldn't say the final word, and hitting the button seemed anticlimactic. "Come on, Chase."
Instead of Chase opening his eyes, the system beeped in a rapid series, and the display screen flashed the word error. Go frowned at it. There were no errors. He'd tested the code before uploading it. He tried running it again, with the same result.
"Chase, what the hell," he said, frustrated and suddenly angry at Chase for stubbornly refusing to cooperate. He knew it wasn't rational, knew that it was a ridiculous reaction, and he couldn't help it. Go picked up the nearest item - a wireless mouse, sitting innocently on the desk - and flung it toward the wall. It cracked and fell to pieces, scattering across the floor, and Kyu peered around the doorway.
"Please don't throw things at me," he said.
"That wasn't - I didn't - I'm sorry." Go turned away, trying and failing to get himself under control. "I just. Um."
Kyu edged into the room, looking less apprehensive than he had in days. Go had no idea why. "Maybe you should step back for a few minutes," he said.
"I have to - I can't stop." If he stopped, he would be letting Chase down. He would have let his best friend die, again, because he couldn't get his act together.
"Look," Kyu said, and squared his shoulders. "Whatever you were - were doing with Chase before, no one could say you aren't working as hard as you can to help him now."
"But if I stop," Go said.
"Perspective." Kyu had crossed the room while Go wasn't looking at him, and he put his hands on Go's shoulders and steered him toward the door. "Distance gives you perspective."
"I don't need distance, I need to know why this isn't working." Go wasn't about to move, and Kyu wasn't strong enough to make him.
"Okay," Kyu said. "Show me what you've been doing. Take me through it, line by line."
It didn't help; Kyu couldn't find the problem, either. As far as Go could tell, Chase should be awake and functioning and back to the way he'd been before, and yet, he had a lifeless doll instead of a person.
Eight days after Go had walked into the Drive Pit, he woke up to find Shin standing over him, sympathetic in a way Go hated to see. He waited to speak until Go peeled himself off the desk, coughing to try and clear the dust out of his lungs, and then leaned against it in a mockery of a casual position.
"Go," he started, and then hesitated. "We need to close the Drive Pit down again."
"But he's not ready," Go said.
Shin hesitated again. "It might be time to let this go," he said.
"Him," Go corrected, and when Shin just looked at him blankly, he glared. "Let him go. Chase might not be human, but he's still a person, and you're asking me to let him die."
"I'm not asking you to let him die," Shin said. "I'm asking you to recognize that he's already gone."
It felt like a knife to the chest, and the only word that Go could think of was betrayal. Shin was stabbing him in the back, him and Chase both, and he wasn't going to stand for it. "You can't," he said. "He's not gone. Just. I just need to figure out how to bring him back."
"The equipment in the Drive Pit," Shin said, and paused, as if weighing his words. "It's too sensitive, to take the chance of something like this happening again. If this falls into the wrong hands -"
"The answer isn't to just lock it away," Go said. "We tried that. It didn't work."
"It's not - we're heavily restricting access," Shin said, and then Go knew what was really going on. They wanted him out, wanted him gone, they knew that he was the one who was responsible for the entire mess. It was almost a kindness, not acknowledging his liability, and instead letting his guilt weigh him down. Almost a kindness, except that they were letting him punish himself.
"Let me at least say goodbye," he said. "Give me until tomorrow."
"I'm staying down here with you, then," Shin said, one hand tapping on his phone. "Until tomorrow morning."
Go almost could have laughed; Shin clearly thought he was going to do something stupid. He suppressed the sound, and went back to Chase, disconnecting him from the system. By the time he'd coiled up the wires, he'd all but forgotten that Shin was still there.
Chase's Signal Bike had been retrieved along with the Ride Chaser and Chase himself, and Go folded Chase's hand around it. It stayed closed, fingers gripping the Signal Bike, and Go had an irrational moment of hope. For all that he looked like a wax doll, Chase's body had been completely limp. Heart pounding in his throat, Go made himself look upwards, from Chase's hand up toward his face. Disappointment ate into the back of his tongue like acid at the sight of Chase's eyes still closed, still unaware and unresponsive.
There was nothing left to do, nothing but talk, and he couldn't even do that. The steady stream of words that had flowed from him for days had dried, his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth. Go pulled a stool next to the table and sat on it, resting his head on Chase's shoulder. "It's not fair that you left, after I worked so hard to bring you back," he said.
The Signal Bike pressed against Go's palm, reminding him that it was there, and it felt simultaneously out of place and achingly familiar. Go worked it out of Chase's grip, turning just enough to be able to see the Mach Driver settled over Chase's hips. Idly, he slid the Signal Bike into it.
"Last time," he said, and pulled the switch.
Go didn't expect it to work.
The wash of energy from the Driver fading, Chaser giving way to Mashin Chaser only for the Roidmude's outlines to slip into Chase's familiar features with his eyes open and clear was the last thing Go was sure he remembered before waking up in a hospital for the second time in as many weeks. It had taken him three days to escape, with full authorization of his health care team, and in all that time, he hadn't seen Chase once. No one would tell him where Chase was, either, and Go was starting to doubt what he thought he had seen. He'd tried texting Chase, even, but he hadn't gotten an answer, and every time he sent a new message only to see that it hadn't been opened was like another sharp object lodged in his chest.
Kiriko wouldn't let him dwell on it, instead redirecting his attention to preparing him to stay with her for the remainder of his recovery. Go put his foot down at the refusal to let him go home, which resulted in apparent rotating shifts to babysit him. He bore it with good grace for the first half hour, and then it was clear that Kiriko was both overprotective and far too highly motivated. His attempts to annoy his older sister into leaving met with a surprising amount of resistance.
"Why," he said, for at least the twelfth time in as many minutes, just to see if Kiriko would crack this time.
"Do you want a list?" she asked. "I have a list. It starts with the word arrhythmia, goes past electrolyte imbalances and an upper respiratory – why are you asking if you're not going to listen to the answer?"
"That was last time," Go said. He couldn't quite argue that he felt fine, but he didn't think he needed to be supervised; he just needed sleep. Unfortunately for his sanity, Kiriko was both more persuasive and more terrifying than he was.
"Before you spent over a week attempting death by self-neglect, after which you tried to electrocute yourself on someone else's Driver." If looks could kill, Kiriko's death glare would have flayed him alive. "You're not going anywhere until I know everything is fine."
"But I'm bored." Kiriko had installed a low couch in his living room, taking up far too much space behind the kotatsu, as if in anticipation of Go refusing to stay in the bedroom to rest. He was sitting on it now, feet curled underneath him and wrapped in a blanket despite the electric heater keeping the room more than warm enough. The persistent chills were a side effect of something that was a result of something else, none of which Go had paid attention to; all he knew was that he felt terrible and had an offensively cute little box labeled with days and times for him to take pills he didn't think he needed.
"Should have thought of that before you pulled that little stunt." Kiriko could somehow manage to make what should have been a comfortable seat on the other end of the couch look like a professional presentation, and she was pulling out all the stops now.
Go couldn't blame his sister for being worried. He could blame her for taking out her ire on what she had decided was the source of her problems. "Where's –" he started, intending to ask about Shin, so he could spread around some of the misery and boredom before wondering where Chase was drove him stark raving mad. The question died in his throat as he heard the unmistakable sound of the front door opening. Barely-audible footsteps made their way down the hall slowly enough that Go wondered if Kiriko had been serious about having Shin keep an eye on him after all before the living room door opened, and Chase stepped through it.
"Go," Chase said. "Kiriko."
Go closed his mouth with a snap. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that Kiriko looked just as surprised as he felt, but he didn't have enough attention to parse the implications. "Chase," he said, which took up every bit of focus he had.
Go had all but come to the conclusion that he'd hallucinated Chase waking up, that Shin had sealed Chase into the Drive Pit after Go had failed him yet again. By the time he walked through his front door – more winded by the three flights of stairs than he cared to admit – to find his apartment empty, he'd started trying to resign himself to the reality that Chase was really and truly gone. It had hurt, far more than he'd wanted to share with anyone else, even if the quiet sympathy in Kiriko's eyes told him that she knew exactly what he wasn't saying. I can't let him go warred with What else can I do until Go was dizzy and sick with it, and maybe Kiriko had had a point about not leaving him alone after all.
Kiriko looked between the two of them. "Did Shinnosuke talk to you?" she asked, pulling Go out of his thoughts.
"Yes," Chase said, and that was apparently enough for Kiriko. With a stern look at Go, she left the room, closing the door behind her. The front door opened and closed a few minutes later, and Go let out the breath he'd been holding.
"You were damaged," Chase said. He stood uncertainly by the door, as though he couldn't make up his mind whether or not to enter the room. Ridiculous, since he was already standing in it.
Go shrugged in answer to his question, response slow and late enough that Chase had started to look worried. "Just a little damaged," he said, downplaying the severity of his condition even though the Mach Driver had been sabotaged – by Chase, was the only reasonable explanation, even if no one had said it in so many words – in such a way that he had sustained cumulative internal injuries. Most of it would heal fairly quickly; the rest wouldn't really affect him one way or another and would also probably heal, over time. "It's really not that bad." Trying to sit up straight in an attempt to look healthier pulled on something and left him breathless. "Are you okay?" he finally managed. "No one would tell me anything about you at all. I thought – I thought you were still gone."
"I am in working order," Chase said, which wasn't quite an answer. "Optimal working order," Chase amended, which was a little better, but he still hadn't moved from his position by the door. "Shinnosuke has been supervising a thorough evaluation of my core programming."
Knowing what Chase had been doing eased the sting of his lack of communication, although Go would have been happier if someone had simply told him where Chase was instead of staying silent on the subject. He didn't need to be protected; if Kiriko and Shin thought they could just not tell him that he'd managed to revive Chase after all on the off chance that Chase was still compromised, Go had some words for both of them. Explaining as much to Chase now was a moot point, though, not with Chase staring at him as though trying to decipher a particularly difficult puzzle. "You're sure you're okay," he said instead.
"Yes," Chase said. He hesitated again. "I think," he said, and then fell maddeningly silent.
"You don't have to stay all the way over there," Go said, and counted it as a minor miracle that Chase actually sat next to him when he beckoned. Chase took one of his hands, meshing their fingers together as though Go might break if he touched him too roughly.
"I think I am experiencing distress," Chase said, and Go looked up from their linked hands in confusion. "Because you're hurt. Because I hurt you. Because you didn't take care of yourself." Chase shook his head. "I don't understand."
"You – you feel?" Go asked, sitting straight up. It didn't hurt, this time, not in the face of this new revelation; Chase had shown bits and pieces of human emotion, but nothing full-fledged, and the thought that the alterations to his programming that Go hadn't been able to avoid might be allowing him a closer approximation of humanity was exhilarating.
"I'm not sure. It isn't entirely pleasant." Chase almost frowned, but he didn't let go of Go's hand.
"None of it was your fault," Go said, trying to reassure him. He didn't want Chase's first feelings to be negative. "I was the one who didn't find the – the virus in your system. If it's anyone's fault, it's mine."
"No," Chase said, after a moment, and did not elaborate further.
"If I'd found it in the first place," Go said, when it was clear that Chase wasn't going to explain.
"You are not at fault for not finding a hidden trap, and you deny my fault for allowing myself to be used," Chase said, and glared when Go opened his mouth to protest. "The only one at fault is the person who created the trap."
"You're very talkative today," Go said finally. The conversation wasn't going the way he'd envisioned it at all. Chase wasn't accepting his apologies – he wasn't even giving Go the chance to make them, taking away the blame with reason and logic. He wasn't reacting positively to Go having resurrected him for a second time, either, although Go hadn't really expected that, after the way the first time had gone.
Chase tilted his head to the side and simply looked at him.
"Now you're doing that on purpose." Go wasn't sure, but he thought he saw a hint of a smile, and it gave him the courage to finally ask. "Chase, did you – were you – was…" The words were harder to get out than he'd thought, and Chase's nearly blank gaze wasn't helping. "You and me," Go finally got out. "Are – do you still want… want us?"
Chase blinked twice, slowly. "I believe the correct phrase is Are you breaking up with me," he said.
"What? No! I'm – I was – I wanted to give you a way out, if you'd been coerced into doing something you didn't want to do because of whatever was in your head!"
Chase stared at him for so long that Go could almost hear six different responses, none of which sounded like Chase in the slightest, all of which seemed equally likely, and none of which were anything he wanted to hear. "I still have a lot to learn," he said eventually, which was not on Go's list of possible answers.
"I understand," Go said. He couldn't look Chase in the eye, but he couldn't bring himself to pull his hand away either. He'd known this was coming. He'd known that Chase would move on.
"I still want you to be the one to show me," Chase said. "What it means to be human."
The words took a moment to settle, Go opening his mouth to tell Chase that it was all right and that he understood even if it ripped him to shreds inside before the meaning sank in, and he couldn't speak at all.
"Go?" Chase said again, and now he actually looked worried.
"Are you sure?" Go finally got words out, not the ones he'd wanted to say, but better than clinging mutely to Chase with a death grip.
"Why wouldn't I be?" Chase looked from their still-linked hands to Go's face. "You're my best friend. I think I might be in love with you."
"Because I just want you to be okay, and happy, and I don't want you to do anything you don't want to, and…" He couldn't stop talking. He couldn't stop his traitorous tongue from trying to convince Chase that he didn't want exactly what Chase was trying to tell him that he did want, and now even his thoughts were running away from him in the face of Chase saying exactly what Go had wanted to hear since he'd cost Chase his life.
The not-quite-panicked babble was silenced by Chase leaning forward to kiss Go softly on the mouth, and then sitting back with an insufferably smug expression as Go fell entirely silent. "I'm sure," he said.
"That was cheating," Go muttered, but at least his heart felt lighter and less like it was about to leap out of his chest.
"Tactics," Chase countered.
"Who taught you that all is fair in love and war?" Go demanded, and when Chase just gave him a confused look, he flopped back onto the couch and groaned. "Definitely cheating," he said. "Please never stop using that tactic, though."
"As you wish," Chase said, and now Go was sure Chase was teasing him somehow. He shifted until he could lean comfortably against Chase's shoulder, keeping their hands loosely entwined. "I'm not going anywhere," Chase said softly, an echo of the promise Go had nearly broken.
The breath hitched in Go's throat at the thought of how close he'd come to losing Chase, and he couldn't stop himself from squeezing Chase's hand until it hurt. "Welcome back," he said, voice suddenly hoarse.
There was a long pause, and Chase said the words Go had thought he'd never hear from him again. "I'm home."
One Week Later
"This is not a relapse." Go glared at Chase. "I haven't touched the damn thing, and you know it."
Chase looked at him, inexplicably unruffled, and it was irritating. Go wanted to prod at him, get under his skin, get some kind of reaction other than the stoic calm that Chase still projected incessantly despite the unpredictability of his new emotions. "I can list symptoms for comparison, if you wish."
"Oh, fuck off," Go hissed, and the door opened on what Go was hoping would have been a full-blown argument before it was derailed by an actual medical professional with a presumably expert opinion on why he suddenly couldn't climb three flights of stairs without stopping at every landing to breathe.
"This is not a repeat of your earlier condition, Mr. Shijima."
Go pointed a victorious finger at Chase. "I told you."
It was a further victory when Chase actually looked annoyed. He turned away from Go, smoothing his face into a pleasant expression, asking for clarification, and the sense of having won something drained away. Go rubbed his forehead. His current situation wasn't Chase's fault; he'd said it over, and over, and over. He was the one to blame for what Chase had done to the Driver, if there was blame to be shared apart from his father, and taking out his frustration on Chase wouldn't do either of them any good.
"Mr. Shijima?" he heard, and looked up.
"I'm listening," he said, and reached for Chase's hand. Chase had opted to stand next to him, while he waited on the stupid paper-covered table, and he gripped Go willingly now. Forgiveness, in the face of Go's uncalled-for hostility, and Go didn't deserve that kind of forbearance.
The rest of the appointment didn't take long; he'd had a reaction to the antibiotics that were supposed to clear up the respiratory infection he'd picked up as a consequence of Chase's meddling with the Driver, which meant more ridiculous details to keep track of, and Go desperately wanted to throw a tantrum, but he was too exhausted. You don't need a transfusion to replace your red blood cells had been a sentence that was supposed to be encouraging, but all Go had wanted to do was throw a chair into the nearest wall.
"Are you upset with me?" Chase asked in a low voice on the drive home, after Go had sullenly buckled himself into the passenger seat of Kiriko's car. The Ride Macher, which he'd refused to put back into the Drive Pit, was sitting unused in the parking lot below the apartment building until Go felt better.
"What? No." He wasn't, not really. Go knew it wasn't Chase's fault, and Chase didn't deserve to have to deal with Go on top of building a life. "You don't need this," he muttered.
"Need what?" Chase said, and Go didn't know if he'd spoken louder than intended or if Chase had been straining to hear whatever he'd said.
"To put up with all of my shit," he said more loudly, staring out the window.
"It is distressing," Chase said, "that you have attempted to convince me multiple times that I should want nothing to do with you."
"Well, maybe you shouldn't," Go snapped without thinking.
Chase didn't answer, and Go didn't look at him; the silence stretched out through the rest of the drive, and when Chase reached the parking lot, he left the car running.
"What are you doing?" Go asked, the edge in his voice still there.
"Returning your sister's car," Chase said, his tone brittle. It might not have been noticeable to most of the people Chase knew, but Go could tell.
"Right." Go climbed out of the car and watched Chase drive away, the three flights of stairs between him and the door an absurdly daunting task, and he sat down heavily on the bottom step of the first flight. "What are you even doing," he asked himself. He was just sick of it, sick of feeling tired, sick of not being able to do anything he enjoyed, sick of not being able to work. Chase wasn't earning enough to pay the rent, Go was sure of it, and that was just something else to worry about.
"Go," he heard, and looked up to see the light coming from a different direction entirely, a single ray of late afternoon sun slipping through the buildings to fall across Chase.
"Hey." He waved with one hand, trying to pretend he'd been sitting on the stairs the entire time Chase had been gone on purpose. "How was the drive?"
"Your sister is very wise," Chase said, instead of answering, and pulled Go to his feet.
"What? What are you – hey!" Chase had started up the stairs without him. Go followed, feeling less drained, and made it to their floor with only a single break. "What are you talking about?" he said, when he finally made it into the door and worked his shoes off. He left them neatly off to the side, before Chase could rearrange them.
"She says I should pay no attention to your whining," Chase said, mimicking Kiriko's inflections perfectly.
"I don't whine," Go said indignantly. Chase just looked at him. "Whatever."
"She also wants to talk to you." Chase handed him his phone, which Go had somehow lost track of and failed to notice.
"Of course she does." The balcony was a good place to talk, Go thought, and it was almost warm enough in late March to not be miserable standing outside.
What Kiriko wanted definitely qualified as talking to Go, with almost no listening; it would have been irritating, but Go was somehow obscurely comforted by his sister telling him that he was an idiot. It was the natural state of the universe, even if the particulars of this conversation were that – as the person in the relationship with experience with both emotions and interacting with others, as opposed to the Roidmude just figuring out how human emotion worked – Go was going to have to be the one who took the high ground of maturity, and that was antithetical to how he'd interacted with everyone, ever. It was worth the work he would put into it, though.
Chase was frowning at an open book on the kotatsu when Go went back inside, sliding the door firmly closed, and Go sat on the floor next to him. Chase glanced at the low sofa, which Go was beginning to hate with a passion, and then gave Go an uncertain look. "I'm sorry," Go said. "I feel shitty, and it's not your fault, and I shouldn't yell at you for it."
"Is that part of being human?" Chase asked.
"Fighting? Sure. Arguing is part of being around people." Go folded his arms on the kotatsu and propped his chin on them. "No one who spends any time around anyone escapes without fighting once in a while. You just have to, um." He wiggled one hand in an attempted handwave that went precisely nowhere. "It's how you work out your problems that makes things work or not."
"I don't like the arguing part," Chase said, and something about his turn of phrase struck Go as almost funny.
"Yeah, neither do I." Go smiled, but it felt wrong. "Doesn't mean I don't want you around. Doesn't mean I don't love you." Chase's hand rested on his shoulder, hesitantly at first and then more firmly when Go leaned into the touch. Go found himself yawning. "How the fuck can I be tired," he said, "when all I did all day was nothing."
"I want you to be with me as long as you can," Chase said suddenly, and the echo of the words that Chase had tried to use to warn him suddenly struck Go hard, but Chase was still talking. "I will learn how to work things out."
"It's not all on you," Go said, reaching up to cover Chase's hand with his. "Takes both of us to make it work."
One Month Later
"This is the place?" Go kicked idly at the wall, skipping backwards when it cracked under his feet.
Shinnosuke nodded, apparently possessing infinite patience to answer people asking rhetorical questions. "The city's kept it blocked off until we can evaluate it."
Potential traps, Go heard, and wondered for a moment why Chase wasn't part of the environmental threat assessment. There was always the slight possibility that he'd missed something, or that Professor Harley had, or that Rinna and Kyu had, and while potential triggers couldn't be predicted, the place where Chase had done most of the work under Banno's direction was the most likely to contain a trap specifically directed at him. "Looks okay from here," he said, and grinned at Shinnosuke's exasperated expression.
The warehouse was relatively small, odds and ends tucked into strange corners and nothing quite where Go would have expected to find it. He wore the Mach Driver, ready in case of unexpected occurrences, but for the first time, Go felt almost apprehensive about it. He didn't want to use it, even if it had been thoroughly inspected and the safeguards reinstalled.
"You don't have to do this," Shin said, and Go rolled his eyes while Shin wasn't looking.
"You were specifically waiting for me to pass my physical," he said. "Don't lie."
Shin stared at him, affronted. "That wasn't the only consideration."
"Please," Go said. "We both know you wanted me here because I'm excellent at blowing things up." He grinned, trying to project bravado he didn't really feel, and some of it leaked into truth. He felt better about the Driver, about the warehouse, about the possibility of Chase having built a Roidmude that hadn't been one of the ones they'd defeated already.
Shin muttered something inaudible.
"I'm sorry," Go said, "I couldn't hear that over the sound of how awesome I am."
"You take the south end," Shin said, with the air of someone repeating himself, although Go knew perfectly well he'd said something entirely different.
"Yes, sir." Go fired off a deliberately sloppy salute, and jogged southward. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Shin's mouth twist up into a half-smile shot through with exasperation. "You missed me!" he shouted over his shoulder. "Don't pretend you didn't!"
"You'd have to go somewhere for me to miss you," Shin yelled back.
"And yet," Go called. The first sweep of the warehouse hadn't turned up anything, but Go was of the opinion that they should just burn it down and start over. The city felt that controlled arson was a last resort. Go had wondered if he should set fire to it anyway, but Chase had given him an offended look when Go had started researching how likely it would be for unintended buildings to catch fire and Go knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Chase would either try to stop him, or – worse – send Shin to stop him. "Maybe if I claim it's an accident," he said, and noticed a door both he and Shin had missed the first time around.
"Hey," he shouted over his shoulder, the word getting lost in a fit of coughing as dust hit the back of his throat. Without intending do, his hand grazed the door, and it slid willingly open.
The space inside was small, but lights flickered on. Go caught his breath at the sight of the workbench – identical to the three they'd identified in the main warehouse, where both the original Roidmude hybrids and the shock troop copies had been constructed – with a figure lying on top of it. The body was perhaps three quarters complete, missing bits and pieces and one leg from the knee down, but the head and skull looked done. Go hesitated in the doorway, hand hovering over the Mach Driver, but the figure didn't stir.
"I found something!" he called, the words coming out on the second attempt, and Shin was looking over his shoulder in a matter of seconds.
"Banno?" Shin said. The Roidmude body on the slab was tall, as most Roidmudes were, and closer to human than any uncopied Roidmude Go had ever seen. He could tell that it would have been both strong and quick, and he felt a momentary wave of gratitude that Banno hadn't been copied into it.
"New body, I guess," Go said. Something looked slightly off about it, and Go crossed the room.
"Hey," Shin said, catching Go by the elbow. Go shook him off.
"I think I see something," he said. Most of the connections weren't completed, the Roidmude not in anything resembling a functional state, but when Go opened its head and chest, he could see that it never would have worked. "Look."
Shin had no idea what he was looking at, but he got it when Go explained that the Roidmude had been – for lack of a better phrase – incorrectly assembled. "So Chase was just, what, making gibberish?" he said.
"That's a good way to put it." Go poked at the inside of the Roidmude-shaped doll. "Even while Banno was possessing him, he was still putting up a hell of a fight."
"Of course he was," Shin said, as though there had ever been any question, and a knot of tension Go hadn't known was still there melted away. He trusted Chase, both implicitly and explicitly, but it had been hard to look at him, sometimes, over the past month.
"I owe him an apology," Go said, because Shin was looking at him expectantly.
"Go," he said, the tone of his voice too complex for Go to parse, and Go was saved from answering by Shin's phone ringing.
"Well, I'm not going to tell him," Go said to Shin's back, because it would just cause unnecessary hurt and suffering. Chase didn't need to know Go had apparently still been holding onto some lingering feelings of betrayal, or at least not right now. Maybe that would be a lesson for some time in the future, when Chase had learned more about being a person instead of just a reaper or a Kamen Rider.
As if on cue, Go's phone chimed with a message. Chase had sent a picture of a classroom, eerie mannequin at the front, and that was the other reason Chase wasn't down here in the warehouse with Go and Shin; he was starting his coursework.
First day of class! Go texted. Don't kill anyone accidentally.
Would on purpose be acceptable came back almost immediately, and Go laughed out loud before sending a negative reply.
The warehouse held no further surprises, no traps that Go could identify, and he felt lighter when he left.
Six Months Later
"Don't be ridiculous." Go perched on top of the couch; he hadn't gotten around to getting rid of it, even though it had been a while since he'd gotten a mostly clean bill of health. He didn't quite have his stamina back, but he was working on it. The slow lightening of the summer heat mirrored the loosening of the grip of persistent lethargy around his limbs, for which Go was profoundly grateful. Chase, for his part, had taken to his coursework with far too much enthusiasm and apparently thought Go made for an excellent case study. Or maybe it was just that Go was easily accessible.
"I am less skilled than my classmates," Chase said. "I need to practice."
"You stop pointing that thing at me right now." Chase was between him and the door, but Go thought maybe he could make it to the balcony. The next building over was less than a meter away, and if he couldn't make the roof, he could always aim for one of their second floor windows.
"Go," Chase said, and if Go hadn't known better, he would have said Chase was whining. "A 22-gauge needle is objectively narrow. It will cause you no pain."
"I told you last time, I am not a guinea pig for you to practice sticking things into," Go said. He'd already suffered through non-invasive assessment tests, although he was fairly sure his shirt didn't need to come off for Chase to listen to his lungs and heart, and if Chase was doing to potential patients what he'd done to Go after putting down the stethoscope, Go was going to have to dramatically re-evaluate his opinion on Chase's choice of profession.
The corners of Chase's mouth turned down in disappointment, and Go hated that look on him. The time he'd spent being pieced back together after the Mach Driver had nearly torn him apart had led him to hate needles more, though, and he cast about for a different solution.
"Did you try asking Shin?" Go said desperately, not that he thought Shin would be cooperative. "Or Kyu? Rinna?"
Chase brightened almost imperceptibly, and Go apologized silently in his head to their mutual friends and family for the horror he had just unleashed on all of them. "I have not," he said, but he put the needle away, still unopened. Go eyed the bag now lying at Chase's feet with apprehension, not trusting that Chase wasn't going to pull something else out of it for practice. To his credit, Go had to admit, Chase didn't ask to practice the same procedure twice. It was just that he kept finding new ones.
The bag stayed on the floor, though, and Chase dropped gracefully onto the sofa next to Go's perch. Go slid down the back of it until he was leaning on Chase instead of the wall. "I like how much you like your classes," he said into Chase's shirt.
"Humans are more complex than I was led to believe," Chase said. "It's fascinating."
"Roidmudes aren't exactly simple," Go pointed out.
"It is a different type of complexity," Chase said. "There is more predictability."
"Uh huh." Chase's arm settled around his shoulders, and Go couldn't stop the contented little sigh that escaped him. "Are you happy?" he asked suddenly, the words tumbling out before he could think too much about them and convince himself that they didn't need to be said. The emotion Chase had thought he'd felt the first night he'd come back hadn't been consistent, had come and gone unpredictably for a while before stabilizing into what Go felt was a low-key approximation of a human heart.
Chase was silent for a long moment, but it was the type of quiet that meant he was giving whatever Go had asked his full concentration and consideration. "I don't know what it means to be happy," Chase said slowly. "If what I think I feel is – human." He paused again, and Go looked up at his face. Chase wore the expression that meant he was searching for the right words, and Go waited patiently for him to find them. "If knowing that I will contribute something of value to humans, that I have a family, the – the warmth that is there when I am with you, if that is happiness, then yes." Chase looked at him with an expression Go couldn't quite read. "I think that I am happy."
Go wrapped his arm around Chase's chest. "That's good," he said. "I want you to be happy."
"What about you?" Chase asked, regarding him steadily.
Go thought he'd learned a lot about himself, throughout the near idleness of recovery and the time he'd spent trying to piece together something out of the work that had been interrupted by more important things, but what he really knew was that somewhere along the way he'd stopped feeling like he had something to prove. "I think I am," he said, and he meant it. Even if he and Chase eventually went their separate ways, Go would be all right. "I'm happy," he repeated, with a sense of wonder at the truth to the words.
"Good," Chase said seriously, and Go couldn't stifle the laugh. "Did I say something wrong?"
"No," Go reassured him. "You said something right."
Chase gave him an extremely dubious look that Go pretended not to see, settling himself around his partner.
"Something exactly right," he repeated.
"Are you asking because it was today?" Chase asked, almost too quietly to hear, and the date clicked into place.
"You died today," Go said, feeling his heart contract painfully and skip a beat, and he couldn't stop himself from holding onto Chase more tightly. "It was today, three years ago."
"You weren't responsible for my death," Chase said, sounding as though he were trying the words on for size, as though he weren't quite sure they were relevant to the topic at hand, but of course it had been Go's fault that Chase had died.
"If –" Go started, but there might have been the possibility that Chase wasn't wrong. "Maybe," he said instead, and the word didn't sound like a lie. The road he'd started down all those years ago, when he'd run away overseas, had taken him to places he couldn't have imagined in his wildest adolescent dreams, and even with the regrets he would never quite manage to lay to rest, Go wouldn't have traded it for anything anyone could give him. "When Hypnos was in my subconscious," he said, remembering what he hadn't wanted to say to the shadow of Chase in his dreams.
"Banno wasn't your fault either," Chase said, almost sharply.
"That's not what I meant," Go retorted, poking Chase hard in the ribs, but he didn't sit up. "You were in my dream."
"You told me," Chase said, and moved Go's offending hand away.
"I wanted to tell you something else." He'd been so happy to see Chase, even if it hadn't been the real Chase. The figment of his imagination had represented what he'd wanted most in that moment, and in the months since then, nothing had changed. "I wanted to tell you," Go said into the expectant silence, "that you're the most important person to me."
"But I already know that," Chase returned, sounding puzzled.
"Yeah, well, I wanted to say it out loud." Go shifted until he could see Chase's expression clearly. "I want it to be absolutely clear that I love you."
"Go," Chase said, turning to face him with an almost dour expression. "Since you have made it abundantly clear how you feel, I can only conclude that you are either trying to play a practical joke on me, or that you are feeling unwell. Which one is it?"
Go poked him again. "You're impossible. I try to say something nice, and you just dismiss it."
Chase narrowed his eyes. "Is stating the obvious part of being human?"
"Damn robot logic," Go muttered.
"I'm your damn robot," Chase countered, and Go melted all over again, ridiculous quoting of a cheesy line or not.
"Yeah, you are," he said, and he couldn't seem to stop himself from smiling. It wasn't worth it to try, he was thinking, and then Chase poked holes in the mood.
"Does that make you my damn human?" Chase had an innocent enough expression on his face that Go couldn't tell if Chase was serious or trying to be funny, and either way the moment was over.
"I give up," he muttered. "I just. I give up. You win."
"So I get to keep you," Chase said, voice low and soft.
"Yeah," Go managed around the inexplicable lump in his throat. Chase hadn't ruined the moment after all, just turning into something uniquely reflective of him. "You get to keep me."
"I'm glad," Chase said, and reached up to stroke Go's hair.
"You and me both," Go said, feeling a sense of rightness and contentment settle into him. "And I wouldn't want it any other way."
never the end