A/N: Happy new year! Thanks as always to Shana, who did this during her very busy holidays, like a true champion.


It hadn't taken them long to set up a discreet camp, sheltered against the base of an overgrown outcropping outside the city limits. It was low, and quiet, and well-concealed.

And apparently Raiku couldn't be trusted to set it on fire until it was done, so she had been banished outside until they were finished setting it up.

Sulking, Raiku twisted a blade of grass between her fingers, absently tearing it into strips. She could make the best of this situation! Right. Bright side, she got this time to think. Downside, she had basically been put into time-out based on a mild incident in which no—

Well.

In which one person had been hurt, by their own hand no less! She twisted her lip. There was no point in dwelling on the incredibly unfounded banishment; she may as well get back to thinking.

One, she thought, making deliberate use of the mental verb; one weird thing could be an accident. It was possible that Daisukenojo had said eight, instead of nine. It was possible that she had misheard, that she'd been too distracted to focus properly. But twice? A second time, a second of blankness, of the Plot that was Ryuu stuck, trapped in time until the moment passed? That couldn't be a coincidence. The two things had to be connected.

A change in Plot could do it. Peripheral plots, like Ryuu's, were often fragile and poorly conceived. Her presence alone could be putting it on the defensive, forcing it to make sacrifices to keep the ground it had already gained. It wasn't fragile, though. She'd seen it slide over his skin; she'd seen it seep in through the pores and saturate him. It wasn't fragile, regardless of its relative universal insignificance.

Raiku tugged another piece of grass free from the ground and began to twist, long fingers tensing and tearing at it.

And then, the issue she had been skirting around. The man. The mental image of his face, sliding away even now.

Well, she reflected, what did she know? He wasn't a Gairano. He wasn't part of her family; the Genematrix shouldn't have been able to see him, not the way it saw-didn't-see the Gairano. It didn't see normal people properly as far as she knew; just perceived them as vehicles for events and messages. It barely respected her own fail-field enough to give her as wide a berth as it did. She had to duck its enthusiasm almost constantly, like many of the less talented Gairano.

But she had seen it. That hole in the shadow cast around their feet. She could still see that perfect circle of emptiness when she closed her eyes.

It went without saying that these events had to be connected somehow. Maybe because of a missing piece of the Plot; it had no Device except timing and location combining against Ryuu's backstory. It could be overextending itself in trying to keep as many options open as possible, and that could in turn be aggravating other storylines in the area. The narrative balance of the setting could be getting thrown off, the man in question falling out of a Plot Hole and then back into one as quickly as he'd come.

Plot Holes were a sore point for the Gairano; they played havoc with people's memories just as much as they did the fabric of the space-time continuum.

She frowned. It still didn't sit right with her. Even to start with, what narrative balance could there even be to disrupt? She had clearly kicked at least some of this off when she destroyed the other Plot, even if the criminal activity was the original cause. But to cause this much of a ripple? Iji was in the middle of nowhere and Naruto hadn't and wouldn't ever stray there. ...Well. At least if her father's meticulously mapped out storyline was accurate. That wasn't a given, obviously, but Iji would still only have been a brief interlude. There shouldn't be enough there for it to go wrong so spectacularly; it just didn't make any sense. But twice now she had seen examples of far too much free narrative potential going haywire. Worse yet, the idea that that much potential could be growing in this area, unchecked, even with a Gairano present? Her fail-field wasn't the strongest, but Konoha-nin passed through here all the time and there were enough Gairano in the profession that it should have been impossible without direct Naruto interference.

Raiku dusted off her hands and let them hang for a moment, forearms resting on her knees. And then there was her own emerging… pattern. Ordinarily it wouldn't have worried her; after all, she'd had involuntary flare-ups before, both reactionary and routine. Part of having that specific effect on electrons was a certain level of unpredictability, and part of having it to such an extent was the kind of mishap she'd been experiencing recently. But in the past they'd always had an obvious cause. Heightened emotional intensity, Plot proximity, hormonal changes; there was always something. Sure, she was upset about Ryuu, but she hadn't been in any particular distress at the time of each power surge. In fact, she'd been the calmest she had been in days at the teahouse.

'You done? I think we've got enough to finish the camp,' Daisukenojo said, the better part of a log under each arm, jerking his head to gesture at their small makeshift rest area.

Raiku looked down and found that the grass at her feet was torn into perfectly equal strands. 'Yep,' she said, and she could easily pass off any strangeness in her tone as her usual idiosyncrasies. She dusted her hands off and got to her feet. 'Need any help?'

Daisukenojo snorted. 'We're not building a fire, remember?'

She simpered at him mockingly. He flashed her a tired grin, but stopped up short before he actually bent to enter their shelter. Raiku leaned around, assuming that Ryuu was there with a knife or something equally nostalgic.

'Hey,' Daisuke said suddenly, half-turning to face her. 'You'd tell me if there was something weird going on with Ryuu, right?' She realised he'd lowered his voice. A rare sign of The Serious Daisukenojo. 'If you knew about it.'

Raiku shot him a look that she knew was too openly cautious. 'Yeah,' she said. 'If I knew about it.' She couldn't see anything in his expression to give her a clue on how to proceed. 'Why, have you noticed something?'

How the hell could he have noticed something? That shouldn't be possible. The narrative sheen of all normal people, all non-Gairano, should have been patching that perception up before it ever got to Daisukenojo.

Daisukenojo shrugged, jostling the wood in his arms a little to settle it into a more comfortable position. 'Nothing specific. Something just feels...' He made a face. 'Off. And with everything that's happening, the last thing we want is more suspicious, inexplicable shit going on. This close to Rivers, especially.' The look he sent her was surprisingly pointed. He didn't know as much about what happened with Ryuu and his family, even what had happened years ago, but he clearly knew enough.

Raiku tapped her pointer finger against her thumb, hoping it would come off as thoughtful rather than stressed. She really had to stop forgetting that Daisukenojo could be observant when he wanted to be. They did test for it when assessing them at the Chuunin exams, but here she was yet again, surprised. God, Raiku, she admonished herself, why don't you just forget he's alive? She really had to do better. She made a promise, then and there, to pay at least thirty percent more attention to Daisukenojo.

She probably should have started right at that moment, though, because he'd already started talking again. 'Just. Keep an eye out for anything weird?'

She creased her eyes at him. 'Yeah. You got it.'

He nodded and ducked under the entrance they'd made, muttering something about like recognising like that she didn't care to examine too closely. Probably just something related to those Gairano rumours and not a personal statement about her. Definitely not.

She looked around for any more Plot before she followed him in, and saw nothing.


'Right.' Daisukenojo was always, somehow, the head of these little meetings. He sat cross-legged across from her, Ryuu making up the last point of the triangle as they brainstormed. 'Yamada is our top priority.'

Raiku nodded. 'Definitely.'

'So. I know you guys woke up somewhere else, but I was just back at camp after it all went crazy, and there was no sign of him,' Daisukenojo informed them.

'Are you sure?' Ryuu asked. 'Maybe you missed something.'

Daisuke glared. It was probably a testament to the seriousness of the matter at hand that this was the extent of his irritated response. 'Yep,' he gritted out. 'I'm sure. You wanna waste time going to check?'

'Maybe I do, are you going to stop me?'

'They've never abducted someone before, and they've been known to kill ANBU without issue,' Raiku pointed out, trying to get them back on track. 'We should keep in mind that he could be dead already.'

Daisuke settled back, folding his arms. 'True,' he admitted. 'But something feels off. This isn't their usual thing, right? Didn't they kill everyone before? I don't think anyone got out alive.'

She nodded. But it also hadn't found what it was looking for before then, if her musings were correct. A Plot, reaching out for traction and finding nothing, would starve and discard what it couldn't eat.

They couldn't be told that. Wouldn't understand, even if she did. Worse, it may not even be the real reason, if she had come to the wrong conclusion. There was just her best guess to go by, and she was doing it alone.

'We did suggest before that they might be looking for someone to capture and interrogate, trying to lure them out. Yamada does sort of stand out, if they were looking for someone who seems powerful.' Another irritatingly good point from Ryuu.

'There's not a lot of use in speculating without any evidence to go on,' Raiku concluded, already sick of this fast road to nowhere. 'We should look for evidence of disturbance. Better yet,' she added, jerking her head at Daisukenojo, 'we should send you around and see what you can sense. You're better at it than both of us.'

'Unless they can conceal themselves,' he countered, flushing. Possibly at the praise, possibly uncomfortable with their plan resting on his admittedly more advanced chakra abilities. Hard to tell, with that boy. 'In which case, you'd be better. You can sniff them out, chakra or no chakra.'

This earnt her a considering look from Ryuu that she didn't particularly enjoy. 'Anyway!' she said loudly. 'If we form a search pattern, we can at least establish familiarity with our environment. Worst case scenario, we still know our surroundings and can defend ourselves better when they come back!'

Daisukenojo grimaced. 'They do know the area better than we do…'

'Sounds like a plan,' Ryuu conceded. It and Daisukenojo exchanged reluctant looks.

Raiku glared. 'What, what's wrong with my plan?'

'We-ell,' Daisuke hedged. 'It's just that a lot of your plans end in… explosions and death.'

Raiku gasped. 'How—how dare you!'

'I'll take that way! Daisuke said, steamrolling over her injured sputtering and literally stepping over her just to add insult to injury. 'Bastard, you take that one.'

Raiku growled and got to her feet, brushing off the backs of her legs. Explosions, she'd show them explosions!

Or she. Wouldn't show them explosions? She would show them the most resounding lack of explosions.


Forty minutes into her own search-slash-reconnaissance mission, Raiku was already regretting that promise. How bad could a single explosion be?

She swung around another tree trunk, seeing nothing and feeling precisely nothing in the way of metallic conductors. Not that she would find any, until the Plot summoned them from the goddamned abyss. Or wherever it was keeping these enemies stockpiled.

She sighed.

She should have suggested that they burn the forest down. At least a little bit of it. Plot-abomination or not, Ryuu could have contained it before it got too bad, and they could have literally smoked them out!

She blew hair out of her face and cast her mind wider again. There was a river towards the east, and Iji still settled at the back of her brain, like the two points of a compass. This was for the best, since she ruined compasses without fail. There were those, and nothing else. Barring their camp, but most of the metal there was sitting with Daisukenojo. A much faster-moving point in her awareness.

Raiku had settled into a nice saunter when a sudden breeze warmed the air around her, a rush of warmth that would have made her furious on an already warm day had it not been so familiar.

It occurred to her that relying on Plot was enabling her to be the laziest she'd ever been in her life. Could it really be so easy? Think of Plot and it appeared?

Speak of the devil, right? she asked herself in a distinctly grumbling internal voice, before launching herself into the canopy to find Ryuu. It wasn't hard to locate; it'd gotten closer to her area that it should have and fake or not, any reasonable representation of Ryuu was liberally covered in metal killing objects.

Raiku landed on the branch next to it, dropping into an easy crouch. 'What is it?' she whispered.

Ryuu looked at her with an eyebrow raised. 'What?' he whispered back.

She nodded to prompt it, expression expectant. 'What did you find?' She quickly scanned the forest floor beneath them and found nothing of note.

Ryuu tilted its head quizzically.

Raiku frowned. 'If you didn't find anything, why did you call me here?' she asked, raising her voice now that it was clear whispering wasn't called for.

'I didn't,' it said, looking at her like she was the one acting weird. She suppressed a hysterical giggle purely because it would only make things worse.

'Yes, you did,' she said, because the Plot would survive some correction and they had a system, damnit. 'You raised wind flow and temperature! Raise for Raiku, drop for Daisukenojo, that's how it's always been. It's alliterative and everything. It is the entire reason you are our early warning system.' Daisukenojo had cracked jokes about Ryuu and Raiku heating things up before Raiku had challenged him to a game of Mercy and burnt his eyebrows off, frying the fine hairs on the back of his hands. Later he had denied ever making that innuendo, so the team had admittedly gone on to pretend it never happened, but this just seemed negligent.

Ryuu turned to look at the forest for a moment, then waved a hand at her dismissively. 'No. I just wasn't thinking.'

Raiku gaped. 'You weren't—you weren't thinking? Who the hell are you?' she blurted out, reflexive, a query meant for someone who wasn't there anymore.

Ryuu didn't notice her falter, the way her expression darkened. Or it didn't seem to, anyway. 'We have a lot going on, Raiku,' it said tersely. 'Excuse me for wanting to be a little more comfortable.'

'You exist in a state of perpetual discomfort,' Raiku pointed out, just for the thrill of perverse pleasure at correcting the thing. 'You are characterised by only being comfortable when someone else is miserable, it's like your zen state.'

Ryuu shot her a glare.

She raised her hands. 'Sorry, sorry. If you haven't found anything, I'll get back to my own area.' She sent him a quick salute and straightened, stretching her back just to hear it crack, and leaping away.

Or pretending to, anyway.

Actually she swung around another branch and pressed down out of sight, slowing her breathing and keeping her ears pricked. There was no way the Plot had this kind of stamina. This had to mean it was up to something, Ryuu wouldn't make mistakes like that. No matter how bad the story was.

She heard it sigh.

'This can't go on,' it muttered. 'We have to do something.'

Raiku rolled her eyes. Brooding, apparently. Nothing she could use. Just enough to raise its Drama quotient, which wasn't a good sign for her. If it was trying to build up steam again, even without a Device to re-trigger the Plot she'd accidentally crushed, it could still initiate with enough momentum. On the one hand, she needed it to do something. On the other, if it got too big, it could take her or Daisukenojo down with it.

Or Yamada. Raiku grimaced. She almost felt sorry for whoever had Yamada. If they had him, and he wasn't just… frozen, somewhere.

Frozen in place, eyes staring at nothing.

She shook her head and blinked hard. She shouldn't think about that. She crept around the branch instead, ducking around to get a good look at wherever Ryuu's Plot shadow might be. Surely the Brooding would kick it into gear, right? Or at least make it start looking for a way forward?

She narrowed in on it and discreetly fist-pumped. Yes. It had elongated along the forest floor, stretching out almost wire-thin into the distance. And back towards her searching radius, as well.

She was tempted to click her heels together, but she was a consummate professional and only allowed some cheerful scampering from branch to branch as she followed the line of darkness in the dirt, stretching to the next vulnerability in the Plot's progression.


It took more time than she would have expected for it to lead her anywhere. It seemed to loop back in on itself three or four times, hurtling away into the underbrush just when she thought it was slowing down. She'd sprung out of nowhere on poor Daisukenojo, whose shriek would definitely have alerted any enemies in the area had fate not clearly had other plans. Eventually it slowed to a crawl in a clearing, and pooled in its customary waiting position.

Raiku kicked back on a tree branch and waited.

And then waited some more.

And then some more.

And then it became obvious that Raiku just wasn't built for that kind of mental endurance. She wasn't the most patient at the best of times, but when she started to sweat under what was probably the noonday sun—when she had bounced out of bed at dawn—that was a bit too much to tolerate.

She swung down from the tree branch and stalked over to the Plot, standing over it with her hands on her hips.

It had the decency to shy slightly from her fail-field. Slightly. She hovered near it, torn between uncertainty and irritation.

She could get the gist if she got close enough, just… super close.

She eyed it. It wobbled non-threateningly.

Raiku glared and stepped back. Oh no. It wasn't getting her that way. Close? Non-threatening? She snorted in contempt at its feeble attempt at trickery. She turned her nose up at it pointedly, because ha! It wasn't going to get her that way. She turned to walk away and another patch of blackness glimmered at her from the ground where she had been about to put her foot. She squawked and hopped back on one foot, clasping her knee to her chest protectively. 'How dare you!' she yelped. 'What do you think you're doing?!'

She awkwardly swivelled in place, managing to do this mostly through core strength and sheer bloody-mindedness. She cast her eyes around to find a clear path away.

The Plot wove around her, doing a strange taunt in abstract symbols, ink flooding and receding across the soil.

Raiku huffed impatiently. 'You know we're not going to do this!' she called warningly. She pulled one hand off her knee to gesture for emphasis. 'You know I'm not going to fall for this!'

'You seem like you might fall in general, though,' a male voice said thoughtfully.

Raiku huffed again and swivelled, doing the awkward in-place shuffle. She managed to get herself facing the other way just for the Plot to ripple, to shudder across the ground and start drawing away. A black tide, pulling back from the start of the treeline.

Her leg dropped to leave her standing on both feet.

The man from Iji, the man who was neither young nor old, knocked on the tree beside him in a caricature of good manners. 'Hello,' he said. 'I was hoping to speak with you.'

Raiku could feel her skin stretching tight over her face, lips stretching over bared teeth so wide that it hurt, not a smile but a signal of aggression and raw, painful hostility.

He tilted his head. 'Is now a good time?' he asked politely.

Raiku found herself mirroring the tilt of her head when she realised her neck had twinged, the muscles so tense that the movement hurt.

He gestured to the nothing in front of them. 'My name is Tsuji. Spelt for "crossroad",' he added, like she would ever need to write his name down. 'I think I gave you the wrong impression earlier.'

Raiku scoured his features for something she could use to remember him by. Asymmetry. Scars. Freckles. Anything. She drank him in with hungry eyes and found nothing.

'What may I call you?' he asked, maintaining that same curiously polite tone. Something about it made the memory rise, unbidden, of learning to write a letter. Doing something she'd only read about.

Raiku realised she'd been standing too still, poised to attack. Eyes tracing him when he moved but readying herself without ever having made the decision to do so.

He smiled, eyes too wary to pull it off. It made the expression awkward, almost a grimace. She wondered idly if hers was like that, if it would be if she tried.

He frowned instead when she didn't respond. 'So we'll get right to it then. What do you see?' he asked bluntly, politeness dropping in that nothing voice, those nothing eyes really taking her in now. 'How did you get out?'

Raiku was too tense to answer by then, muscles almost vibrating under the strain. She couldn't unclench her jaw enough to speak.

There was something in his face, a flash of something she couldn't identify but that made her gut twist in response. In symmetry. 'Are there more like you? Like us?' he asked slowly, each word careful and distinct and heavy in a way she wished she understood.

'There is no "us",' Raiku got out through gritted teeth. Even the word, that connection however tenuous that stretched from her to her family, that connection he was trying to sniff out—even that felt too sharp, too close to shattering on her teeth before she could spit it out. A predator sniffing at the door and she sat there praying-mute there's nothing here for you, even as it started to dig.

He tilted his head. 'You and I can see it,' he pointed out, tone nothing but reasonable, the echo of claws scraping against hardwood. 'We came from somewhere.'

She managed to force the snarl down just enough to respond. 'We are not the same,' she told him. 'We are nothing alike.'

He considered this, eyes heavy-lidded as he looked into the distance. 'How did you pull the threads loose?' he asked after a while, evidently deciding that line of discussion wasn't going to be productive.

'What threads?' Raiku asked, baring her teeth again and wishing the mask wasn't on. Wishing he could see the sparks in her teeth and understand, and know what she would do to him. This wasn't going to go well and she knew it. He wasn't one of them, narrative awareness or no. He was—he was something, but he wasn't a member of her family, and the Gairano had spent generations honing a shared vocabulary specifically so that the causal weave of the universe could be discussed over dinner. He didn't know that, didn't know any of that, hadn't been socialised the way he should have as a relative of theirs. He could have been talking about a Plot, or a Character, or a Device or any number of a hundred things her family had developed efficient means of communicating amongst themselves.

He gestured around them; suddenly paranoid, Raiku scanned the area for Plot.

Nothing. Nothing since it had fled from him.

When she looked back, he was watching her. 'Those threads,' he said.

Raiku stared back for a moment in bewilderment, before something in the front of her brain seemed to snap shut, a slamming down of the protective wall training had carefully instilled against any unwelcome emotional expression. It puzzled her for a moment, because

oh.

Raiku struggled to maintain that blankness as the realisation started to fully penetrate; as an unpleasantness, an idea like nausea started forming, something it had occurred to some shinobi part of her long before the rest, because oh.

This was so much worse than she'd thought.

'I see them,' she said eventually, making sure her tone stayed even. 'Of course I understand.'

He nodded, something she hadn't realised was tense in his shoulders relaxing minutely. 'You've been pulling them loose. How do you do that?'

Raiku's anger was freezing over, turning brittle, fragile around the edges, because there were no Plots around them anymore. Plots were likely too smart to come into a space with this much fail-field and this, now, this was bad. This was really, really bad.

'You've been the only one who can see them for a long time, haven't you?' she asked, trying to avoid his intense, unblinking stare, trying to keep her tone neutral.

He tilted his head and she knew that feeling, that cold sinking feeling of having made a mistake. 'Yes,' he agreed, the far-off look taking on a shrewd edge. 'Why do you ask?'

Raiku had spent her life with a context for what she saw, a framework to understand it with and it had still almost killed her a thousand times, had twisted her mind into knots in the dark. This man, with none of that, with stories coming to life all around him and people who couldn't see them, couldn't understand what was happening to them as that darkness took over their lives. Those threads, those whatever he saw them as, dragging people to where they wanted them.

Gairano children were always raised in at home. There were no exceptions, and they could still be lost.

He changed tactics. It was good, she had to admit; wait until her eyes skipped to something else, a sure sign of the brain refocusing, then try to mirror her own sympathies. If she hadn't been raised by Gairano Chitose, she would never have known. 'I'm going to kill your friend,' he told her gently. 'You know it isn't him anymore.'

Raiku felt her breath catch on an agreement, her neck tense against a nod, because yes, Ryuu had to die. It couldn't be allowed to do this to him. She knew that.

Except that she didn't, some part of her said, in a voice so far down it felt like bones shifting. She knew Ryuu was gone and she knew what was left had to die, but these were upwards thoughts, the rational part of her brain ticking over, and deep down there was just the blue-white-hungry fingers stretching across her family, their faces, her burnt fingerprints scorched across her mind's eye and Gairano weren't possessive, they weren't, because the Gairano knew that they just kept borrowed time but

they aren't yours

the thought thrummed down her spine, the resonance of her thoughts with every physical atom of her, because Raiku was bad at being a Gairano and always had been, and

they're mine.

Raiku knew that Tsuji could kill Ryuu, that he would vanish and she'd never hear from this twisted, impossible man again, and she could let Ryuu go, then. She could let him go, once his heart stopped beating. It would be a win for everyone. She knew that the abomination was just wearing his skin, that it had stolen his whole life, that it would be gone and there would be nothing there rubbing her failure in her face.

But,

that's mine.

She couldn't. She couldn't uncurl her fingers where they were digging into her palms, couldn't force her consent past her throat where she was choking on it. She couldn't just give Ryuu away, not even this half-Ryuu, this grim puppet that just stood as a testament to just how bad a Gairano she really was. She could stomach killing Ryuu herself, could have done it that second if it had been there ready for her, but for some reason she just didn't understand, this man offered to do it for her and it was all she could do not to—

'You touch any of them,' she said, in a voice gone raspy from the strain, 'and I'll kill you.'

The air between them was getting brighter, the shadows on his face more pronounced. There was a cage of lightning in her chest and it was shining through her skin, violent and bright and blinding. Plot was gathering again at their periphery; she could see its sickly shine, brightness on oil.

'I was wondering,' he said eventually, 'why you hadn't killed them yet. But that's not what I should have been asking, is it?'

He sighed.

He looked at her with something like pity. 'It must be hard. Things would have been simpler before.'

Raiku bit back a snarl. 'Yes,' she snapped. 'Things were a lot easier before fate ate my teammate and you showed up.'

'I mean now that you have to think about it, you have to choose,' he said, tilting his head, looking at her closer than she would ever have wanted. 'Choose who to hurt. Choose what to take away.'

Raiku was dizzy, then, a sudden tear ripping open in her chest,

it is, it said,

what? she thought,

'No, no, not yet!' Tsuji cried, voice cracking with frustration when the tidal wave of darkness surged back to fill the void he had created and she

opened her eyes to see Ryuu staring down at her.

She blinked rapidly.

Blinked some more.

'Are you alright?' it asked softly, giving her a wary look while she reached a hand up to rub grit from her eyes, trying to understand what she was seeing. 'You were…' It waved a hand. 'Crackling.'

Raiku wet her lips, tasting copper. She tried to blink the sleep out of her eyes, to orient herself. To situate herself in the dark, and Ryuu's blue-lit face. She saw the roof of their improvised shelter. She could hear Daisukenojo's distinct snoring pattern, because he snored adorably and in a puppy-like way that he refused to acknowledge.

'What?' she asked, voice husky with sleep. 'Where am I?'

She couldn't see Tsuji. She was not sitting in a room across from him. But he had been real. He had been there. Her imagination wasn't good enough to fabricate him. She lunged up into a seated position. 'Where is he?!' she demanded.

Ryuu was already on his feet and crouching awkwardly in a shelter too short for him to fully stand in. He was a few steps back, hands lifted cautiously to ward her off. 'Who, who are you talking about?'

She clawed at her face in frustration, mostly to avoid going for Ryuu's before it was time to rip it off. 'Tsuji! I was just in the forest, and he—'

'Raiku, we got back hours ago, you're still dreaming!' it exclaimed, while Daisukenojo made the discontented noises of someone woken by Raiku's hysterical screams.

Raiku hissed at him. In retrospect, she would conclude this was a needlessly ostentatious display.

At the time she did it, it just felt satisfying. It had the added benefit of jumping Daisukenojo into full wakefulness.

'Raiku!' Ryuu snapped. 'Hey! What are you talking about?' She reeled from the sudden contact to either side of her face, jerking back but held fast by the grip there before realised it had just taken hold of her face.

'What the hell do you think you're—' she stopped, eyes widening.

It was looking right at her, irritated but guileless. Its naked palms pressed to the exposed skin of her face like it was normal, like it had no reason to be afraid, and Ryuu, Ryuu even when he'd been everything else she could think of,

lying fighting hurting loyal vicious

had never been guileless.

Raiku stared past the hands braced on either side of her face, the gentle pressure that threatened to crush her, and she said,

'You're not Ryuu,'

Like a revelation, or a prayer. Some form of higher insight, suddenly revealed.

It stared back at her, something flickering in its gaze.

'Raiku, what are you doing?' Daisukenojo asked carefully, somewhere behind her. 'What are you talking about?'

She could feel how wide her eyes were, how they burned from her unblinking stare, but,

'You're not Ryuu,' she repeated. 'You never were.'

Raiku reached up and grasped it by the wrists, fingertips suddenly crackling with energy, the thing crying out and dropping to its knees. It tried to yank away but its muscles had already locked, her fingers wrapping around to trap its own in her grip. 'Tell me who you are,' she told it, almost distantly, mind lit up and hurtling through everything she'd seen, everything she'd missed.

It glared up at her, from a face just enough like Ryuu's to make it hurt, clear enough in reality now to seem unreal. 'What are you talking about?!' it gritted out. Its whole face taut with pain. 'What's wrong with you now?!'

She looked down at it, incredulity and something like lightness swelling in her chest for the first time since the whole damn thing had started. 'You're not Ryuu,' she repeated just to hear herself say it again, relief cracking her voice open mid-sentence.

It narrowed its—his—eyes, and closed its mouth. Its yellow eyes, so like his, but just too warm. Just too amber, too warm-blooded. Too human around the edges to hide behind the Plot, now.

Raiku stood over it, and started to smile with her wide eyes and her white teeth, her fingers digging in more than hard enough to bruise where skin wasn't already splitting open. It was bleeding red and not black, now. It was real enough to bleed. She smiled wider when it flinched, when blood started to pool around her fingertips. 'Tell me where he is.'

'Raiku,' Daisukenojo said slowly behind her, and the thing shook his head slowly. 'What's going on?'

'This isn't Ryuu,' she said, fingers digging in until they felt hot, until she felt flesh give under her nails, the tremors in his rigid arms. 'He's been pretending, they took him before they ever got Yamada.' She could smell blood, a sharp metallic note through the rising smell of ozone. 'Look at me.'

His eyes flicked towards her once, twice, then held.

Raiku nodded, still seized by that light, almost beatific feeling. 'Tell me where he is.'

His eyes narrowed, but she could see where his jaw was clenching, teeth forced together under the current. She could feel his nerves, could see them laid out like she was walking across them, pouring herself through the endings in his skin.

'Raiku, hand him over to me,' Daisukenojo said, quiet but firm. She looked away from her captive slowly, each turn away from him feeling unnatural, each deflection from the circuit she was completing with her hands.

Daisukenojo didn't look shocked anymore. His gaze was steady, his tone was measured, and she could trust that face.

Her grip tightened convulsively.

'Toaster, he can't talk like that,' Daisukenojo said cautiously. 'He gets it. You have to stop now.'

She was trembling, Raiku realised distantly. Not with stress, or excitement. Because Daisukenojo was telling her to stop and he was right there, the Plot was finally something flesh enough for her to hurt, and he was saying no.

She stared into Daisukenojo's eyes, unblinking.

Eventually, she dropped the false Ryuu unceremoniously, the imposter falling to the ground and immediately gasping for air, convulsing. She took a reluctant step back.

'Just. Let me do it, okay?' Daisukenojo said, putting himself between her and the imposter. 'I'll take care of this. He's not going anywhere.'

Raiku nodded numbly.

He tentatively reached out and touched her shoulder. 'Just leave it to me.'

She nodded again, unable to tear her eyes from the floor. The world crept back in.

She felt cold.


A/N: It would probably be poor form to leave it here, but I'm too set in my ways to change!