Mink arrived at his old home country with mixed feelings. He had brought some books to read on his long flight from Japan to his destination of course, but he had barely been able to concentrate on their content no matter how hard he had tried. The words the Gas Mask had said to him still rung in his ears, and lingered even after he had disembarked from the aircraft and continued his journey on food now, lost deep in thought.

The bonds he had shared with the members of his former Rib team had been forged by earning their trust and respect either by using force or by talking to them to convince them that they shared his goals of revenge against Toue, simple as that. Being made up of criminals and ex-convicts the description "family" never had crossed Mink's mind when thinking about his team members before. If Mink had to compare his team to anything else, they were probably more like a pack of wolves than a group of humans. They hadn't always been easy to control, sometimes overstepping their bounds and having to be reminded who their head was, including using brute force if other methods were likely to be useless instead. But those same people had shown great concern for him when he had vanished without saying anything to them after Oval Tower had collapsed. They had searched for him and appeared to be almost overjoyed to see him after the Gas Mask had intervened with him taking his own life.

He had disbanded Scratch the next day, telling his former team members to either go on their separate ways or to elect a new leader if they so cared about keeping their Rib team alive even now. Some of his men had been disappointed by Mink's choice, others had just silently respected his decision. Mink hadn't cared much about how they would react. He would have left them not knowing where he had vanished to earlier, but thought they might try to go search for him again if Scratch kept being a team with him as their leader. It had been Mink's way to say good-bye to them before he had packed his belongings and made preparations to enable himself to get on a plane while hiding the fact that he was an ex-convict on the run, since Toue's software might still recognize him as such as soon as he would enter an airport.

And then this white-haired weirdo had shown up in front of him again and despite Mink's warnings not to meddle with his affairs, he had insisted on throwing those useless words at him about caring for his team members as if they were his family now.

Family...

Mink had only one family once, and all of its members were already dead now, save for him. He had cursed every day after Toue had wiped out the lives of so many people Mink had cared about. And Toue had done it for no apparent reason other than to satisfy his scientific curiosity and to feed his own narcissism by showing Mink's tribe that not sharing their secrets to outsiders like him meant immediate death due to being deemed worthless to the man.
Mink clenched his teeth so hard that his jaw hurt from it as the memory of that day had resurfaced in his mind. Then he spat out on the beaten and barely visible track he was currently following to make his way around the mostly deserted landscape around him.

He still wished that he could have been the one killing Toue, but fate hadn't chosen him to be victorious over that bastard in person. He had tried to confirm the man's death with Aoba, but hadn't gotten much out of the blue-haired guy aside from the info that Aoba had defeated him in a Rhyme match, all of it being accompanied by cries and hiccups, for which he had been reprimanded by Red immediately. Scratch had succeeded in their plan to blow up Oval Tower, though, the tower's main system suddenly giving in on its own for some reason adding to the destructive force being released. Toue had at least been confirmed to be in his office on the topmost floor by Aoba, when the tower crashed and none of the members of Scratch or Benishigure had seen him leaving the building afterwards. So him having ended up crushed to death by the debris after his fighting spirit had been broken by the golden eyed demon child was a very likely conclusion.
It had been enough, in fact, to lift a heavy weight off Mink's shoulders, because he felt his late family members and comrades, who had died on the order of Toue, to have been avenged sufficiently. Therefore he had thought it time to finally join them and end his journey towards death by preparing himself to take his own life. But then the white-haired gas mask wearing guy had shown up and ruined this moment for him.

The sound under Mink's feet changed from crunching down on sand to a rustling of leafs and dry branches or the occasional appearance of moss below his soles as he made his way through the woods now. He was headed for the only house out here for miles to come. It was a thing made up of wood and effort in an attempt to approve being alive even after all the horror had entered Mink's life. It had proven to be useless the moment Mink had tried to move into it to settle down there, though. He wasn't a man capable of forgetting his own heritage and it spoke to him from every hand-woven fabric hanging from the walls or lying as a carpet on the floor, from every pillowcase, every blanket and every statue and candle used for praying to the old Gods. And of course there was also the known odor of herbs and incense wafting through the rooms. Mink had tried to move on, to live on with the sadness and anger eating at his heart for loosing everything he had held dear in the past. But he simply couldn't do it then. He was unable to forget what had happened, unable to forgive the man responsible for it and unable to forgive himself for not having done something then, anything to prevent all of these lives from being lost.
Still, the house was the only place he could imagine himself to be able to calm down at, before he would attempt to end the journey that his life was and to face death anew. And to be frank, now that he thought about it, it would feel a little better knowing his body would be in a place where his heart was rooted in, instead of rotting in some foreign country. Not that it mattered much where his mortal remains ended up at, as long as they would rejoin with the soil to serve as a source of new life. Nevertheless the thought of dying here sat more favorable with Mink. He would, however, pay his respects to his late tribe members first and bring back something he had borrowed from them once - an item to strengthen his resolve whenever he might falter on his way to take revenge for them. Now that all was over, he could finally return it to its rightful place.

All of these things had to wait at least until tomorrow, though, since Mink was tired from his flight and the jet-lag hit him quite hard by now.

Putting his bag down by the frontdoor, Mink checked around the house whether there was any of the firewood he had cut before leaving the country was still usable. It had been a few years since he had been here, but the wood seemed to be at least dry enough to burn it, so he took some logs of hardwood and headed back to the frontdoor to enter the house. The lock was somewhat jammed after all this time, though, so Mink had a bit of trouble opening the door.
Suddenly he felt a stare on his back and turned around, but there was no one to be seen in the woods surrounding his house. It was highly unlikely that anybody would show up here, who didn't know that a house had been built here in the first place. Maybe it had been some kind of animal wondering who had dared to set foot in its territory. Mink shook his head and tried resumed his efforts to open the door with the result of the lock finally giving in and allowing him to enter the house.
The house hadn't been used for quite some time and even if it wasn't empty of interior - most things had been covered by a cloth - it was bare of any life inside of it. Mink stopped in the entryway for a while, welcomed by old memories and familiar, if weak smells floating towards him as soon as he had closed the door. He would probably not need to use much of what was left inside the house. For now his main concern was to lit a fire so as not to freeze to death during the night and to uncover the couch usable as a seat and as a sleeping accommodation.

Meanwhile out in the woods a few dozen meters away from Mink's house, two pink, marble-like eyes glistened as the sun was reflected in them. The person clad in white they belonged to had followed Mink ever since he had left Midorijima.
Having lost sight of him at the airport for a while, Clear had managed to get back on Mink's track after he had snapped out of his temporary state of utter confusion due to having seen his own face for the first time. Since that moment the usually ever present smile on his face, which force had sometimes even bled right through his then worn gas mask and appeared to his conversation partner as some kind of imaginary flowers, had vanished from his facial features. Clear now wore an expression of indifference boarding on sorrowfulness on his unmasked face. It fit with his state of mind best at the moment.

Tailing Mink had been hard on him. When the thought of wanting to save his friend from killing himself had finally been able to resurface in Clear's mind, Mink had been nowhere to be seen. At first he had tried to search for him on his own, but then he had stopped himself to think for a moment and had realized that security was high on the airport and that security cameras were installed practically everywhere. Therefore he had headed over to the surveillance room - it had been quite a hassle to find that place - and since the guards on duty wouldn't give him the information he was searching for on their own free will, even after he had asked nicely, he had to use a bit of force to send them to a short nap. He had then looked at the monitors and searched the videos until he finally spotted Mink on one of the screens. He had known two things for sure then: Mink had not boarded another plane, but had been headed for the exit and, according to the time displayed on the monitor, he had left the airport by now. He had not been that much ahead of Clear, though, since the surveillance room happened to be located close to the airport's exit and Mink had only left the building a few minutes ago.

Clear had followed after him and had trouble deciding which way to take at first, but then had decided to ask around if anybody had seen a tall man fitting Mink's description. The answer he had gotten the first time was nothing but gibberish to his ears, but then something clicked inside of Clear and he had asked again with the result of the person in front of him seeming to understand now what he had been talking about and their answer made sense to Clear as well then. He had briefly wondered why the language he had used had sounded so foreign to his own ears, but then he had remembered that he was in another country, a country using Latin letters and another official language than Japanese. Yet, he had been able to recreate his own vocabulary without problems right then, as if his brain was using another dictionary than before. He had huffed an ironic laugh at himself. It was that self evident what he truly was then.
He had thanked the person who had given him the general direction Mink had taken and had sprinted after him until he had been able to see the back of his head again. Then he had reduced his speed and followed Mink in a distance where he might not be spotted immediately should Mink turn around, but which still had enabled him to catch the sound of Mink's footsteps in the distance. The fact that Clear was even able to hear him this far had let him smirk and shake his head. Why had he never noticed this before? It was so obviously abnormal...

If he had been still in his old mood-set then, he probably wouldn't have cared to make himself noticed by Mink, even if the man probably would reproach him for having followed him this far. But Clear wasn't in the mood to make some friendly conversation at this point. He had a lot of questions swirling in his head, but was quite sure that the person he should ask them to was no longer around, so there was no use in dwelling on answers he was unlikely to ever get now. Most of his questions concerned life as a state of existence and the only person still capable of probably giving him at least some of the answers he sought was about to throw his life away soon.
Clear had wondered more than once if he should have just stopped tailing Mink, but his feet had still kept following him, no matter how far and where he had went, stepping from sand and stone onto grass and moss and dry branches lying on the ground as he went. Then he had been able to see a house in the middle of a forest and Mink had headed towards it. So Mink did have a real place to return to then, not just a general direction, he had thought. Clear wouldn't have found it odd if Mink had headed straight towards a graveyard instead, though, he somewhat had anticipated it to be honest. But there Mink was: arriving at an accommodation to live in rather than to die there - though Clear knew firsthand that a person could die inside of a house pretty easily as well.

He knew that Mink had wanted to pay his respects to his people first and to take his life afterwards, so the chances of him killing himself inside of his own home at this point in time seemed rather low. Clear wondered if he should ask to be let in by Mink, but decided against it. He sat down on an half overgrown tree stump instead, which enabled him to keep one eye on Mink's house while he waited for things to happen. Maybe Mink would reconsider taking his life on his own, without needing Clear's intervention. Clear's facial features darkened as he tried to remind himself of his reason for not simply letting Mink decide what to do with his life on his own. The concept of value concerning a person's life just seemed to have slipped from his grasp at the moment.

Why exactly was it so bad if another person's life ended anyway? Was is bad at all?
Clear's evaluation on that subject had something to do with how he had felt when the old man he had lived with for quite some time had ceased to be and left him all alone. He had been so lonely then, a feeling he never wanted to experience again. Therefore his arguments towards Mink as to why he shouldn't throw away his life had been to think about the feelings of his comrades, his family, the people caring about him. They would feel left behind if Mink died, they would be sad, therefore ending his own life was a bad thing, simple as that. But now that Mink was here, there was nobody around besides Clear who would care if Mink's life simply ended the next day. Nobody would know, so nobody would mourn him. His gang members might wonder where he had gone off to, but they might never know their leader died. If there was nobody to grieve, was dying by choosing to do so that bad a thing then?

Clear had trouble deciding on that. The thing that hampered his train of thoughts the most was the fact that he had lost the concept of what "being alive" meant in the first place ever since he had seen his own face in that mirror. At that very same moment he had suddenly realized that the face looking back at him hadn't been one of a kind. In fact, it had been one amongst many, many more with the same facial features as him. He had no twins, though, he had duplicates. Things that looked exactly like he did; same face, same stature, probably even the same voice as him - if not then still a voice that could be used as a weapon to make people go crazy upon hearing it. That's what he had been made for, why somebody had bothered to put his parts together, to create him; he was a man-made thing, a machine. Seeing his own reflection in that mirror had triggered all of that knowledge inside of him at once, as if a veil had been lifted from his eyes. But it had left him partially blinded, too. He had never questioned being human. But now things that once seemed clear as day to him suddenly felt vague and things he never thought to query were shaking up his very being. His self-perception had just crumbled.

What exactly was he?
No, wrong question, he knew what he was, but why was he?
No, he knew that, too, his purpose was pretty much clear, but was that all? Wasn't there more to his existence than that?
Was he just some kind of weapon to control people with brute force, and nothing more?
Or something to blend in among humans, to imitate them even down to being usable as a sex toy if necessary?
Or was he just a thing to toy with people's hearts by using his voice to bent them to his master's will?

He didn't even have a master anymore.
The person he should have called "master" was gone now already, and the person he kept calling master instead was a... a...
Well, what exactly was Aoba? A fraud? No, that wasn't it...
It hadn't been Aoba's intention to be registered by Clear as his master after all, he hadn't acted like it.
A wrong decision on his part?
Why had his recognition been wrong in the first place?
Why hadn't he been with his true master Toue?
Why hadn't he been with the dozens of brothers he remembered he had, who were built the same as him?
Why had he been always so alone?
The person he had called his "grandfather", who was he really?
They had lived close by a dump, so had he been... dumped, too?
Was he just a piece of junk?

His whole existence had become one huge question mark for Clear, and there was nobody providing any answers for him.
He could feel something wet sliding down his cheeks and slid one of his gloves off to inspect it further.
What was it? Tears?
Weren't tears reserved for humans to express an emotion described as sadness or despair?
If so, why did anybody even bother enabling him to spill tears?
He wasn't human after all.
If anything, he was a bad copy of a human.

He couldn't stop the tears streaming down his face for the next hours to come.

The night was cold out there in the open and Clear shivered since the sun had set and left him without warmth. He was still wearing his usual attire, a long lab-like, white coat topped by a yellow scarf, with a shirt below it followed by gray, baggy pants and almost knee-high, white boots. But those kind of clothes were still not enough to keep the cold from engulfing him, the layers were too thin, the shirt too short. He smiled at himself that he was even programmed to shiver, since this humanly rhythmically repetitive contraction of different groups of muscles to generate body heat was pretty useless for a machine like him. He might possess something similar to muscles when it came to force transmission or the providing of movability, but using it to reheat himself? He was pretty sure that he wasn't even cold, his temperature management worked flawlessly after all, so that his functions wouldn't be impaired by his surroundings. But whatever sensors he might possess to measure temperature with, they signaled that it was "cold" outside, so the right thing to do was to "shiver" - he was a thing made to copy human behaviour after all to blend in with them perfectly.
The tears that had finally stopped just a few minutes ago began to form anew in his eyes and Clear wiped them away and tried to force himself not to think about this so much. But he was alone and had nothing else to do but to wait and think, it was useless.

Looking back at Mink's house, the man was still awake, judging by the faint light emitted from behind the curtains. Clear briefly wondered if he should ask him whether he could stay over at his place for the night after all. But even if Mink would be willing to let him in, what would he do tomorrow, or the day after that? He hadn't even thought about any of this when he had boarded that plane and followed Mink to his home country. This was not Midorijima, there were no houses he could sleep inside of. His home wasn't there either. The house he had lived in with this grandfather had not been big, but at least it had provided a roof to sleep under. Out here there was nothing save for Mink's house and the forest. But a forest afforded little protection against coldness or rain - Clear was thankful that it didn't rain right now. He hadn't thought far enough.
Well, he probably would be fine until tomorrow, but what would happen then? If Mink tried to commit suicide again Clear was still set on keeping him from succeeding. But what if he managed to save Mink from throwing away his life this time again? There was no telling whether he wouldn't try later, when Clear wasn't by his side. Mink had come all the way to his home country just to die here after all. And even if Mink would reassure him not to take his life ever again, what exactly would Clear do afterwards? He faintly remembered to have seen a village on his way to Mink's house - Mink had walked around it, but it was the nearest place for people to live at out here.

Maybe Clear could live there, too, some day? But what would he do there? You had to earn money to live in some place, he knew at least this much, but it was a thing that had never concerned Clear up until now. The house of his grandfather had simply always been there as far as he had been involved. Could he even work? Would they let a machine like him work with them? Would they accept him? It was probably better to deceive them and not even tell them that he wasn't human in the first place like he had done it back in Midorijima. But it had been different then. Clear hadn't mean to lie to anybody about what he truly was then, he simply hadn't known, hadn't remembered, hadn't even questioned it. Being sure about himself had enabled him to open up to people, to approach them with an open mind. But ever since Clear had learnt what he truly was he feared to be rejected by society. No, to be honest he had always have that fear, it just had been concentrated on his face, not on his entire being. The fear of becoming and outcast had always lingered inside of him since he had known that he was different from others by his grandfather.

Would Mink accept him?
Would he accept words from a machine telling him not to take his life, when technically said machine wasn't even alive itself?
What did Clear even understand about being alive?
What was it that made you being "alive" in the first place?
Was it just the fact that humans were something organic?
Was it the fact that they could die that made them alive?
Was death really so bad then?

Questions, questions, tons of questions and nobody to answer them.
He felt more lonely then ever before.

The light behind Mink's window went out.
He must have gone to sleep now.
Sleep.
Sleep might be a good idea.
Clear was unsure that he could sleep, though.
The closest state to being asleep he could manage was probably going on standby mode.
He bit his lower lip.
He had liked it better when he still had thought that sleeping was possible for him.