Game for a Memory
Chapter 5

This time, when he closed his eyes and opened them, he was exactly where he'd been. Kuwadorian still surrounded him in its stilted and dusted beauty. Kinzo, if indeed he'd built it and it wasn't another embellishment that was born of silence and spread, had wasted no finery and yet the finery was wasted and who knew how long it had sat idle for? The placed had been lived in, once upon a time, but for how long and how long had it sat empty for afterwards? Eva was here for a time, but barely a night and what could she have done to unsettle the dust? Very little, he imagined. This settled dust told of a longer, deeper tale – but that wasn't the mystery he was interested in, unless it unearthed the witch of the island –

No, that was Battler Ushiromiya's wish and even that wish was dampened now, as though the identity of the witch had been unearthed, somewhere, in the island filled with foliage and fire and blood.

The witch drowned in the sea weighed down by gold. Was that a retelling of the Wizard of Oz on a wider scale? Was she the wicked witch of the west that required an entire ocean's worth of water to douse her as opposed to a household bucket? Or was that the price of a human who'd lived too long in abandonment and despair and who chose to finally throw their lives away in a place where a tiny bit of hope had still drifted.

Or had the witch given up Battler Ushiromiya as dead as well?

Somehow, that scene after the boat spoke otherwise. The pair that sunk. The peaceful expression turning into sudden agony and maybe it hadn't been because the air had run out at that point and reason had been overcome by the instinct to keep on living…

Was he the same, then? Even the person who jumped from a building of their own free will, watching their own body fall before them before it splatters on the ground, might feel regret before the impact… even when it's far too late?

Is this the moment of his regret, then? Someone said it once, didn't they? That the hardest battle was to keep on living…

But here was his problem. Whose life was he supposed to live because he couldn't do both of them. He couldn't even do one of them. But at least one of them was a possibility.

Who would win? Hachijo Tohya or Battler Ushiromiya? And where was the fight, because to him it seemed to be all about Battler Ushiromiya and Hachijo Tohya was only the carrier of the soul.

.

He left Kuwadorian after combing it through one more time. Eva Ushiromiya was still on her hands and knees and crying her son's and husband's name… And this time, with the memories of Battler Ushiromiya sitting quietly, Hachijo Tohya felt his heart go out to her. No doubt a lot of people cried like that, or near like that. Maybe only one other person had the right to cry with those same tears: the tears of losing one's closest family, and that would be Ange Ushiromiya. But family wasn't the only thing in the world. There were acquaintances of many kinds: friends, classmates, love interests, coworkers… Many people who were touched by many other people. Eighteen people died and their impact rippled onwards and outwards – or that's how it should have gone. Those ripples wound up masked anyway, by the general public who saw only a mystery that needed to be solved.

And perhaps it wouldn't have even become such a tale if it hadn't been for those mystery bottles. They might have considered it a family tragedy and that would be the end of the matter, but the bottles suggested premeditation and suddenly there was a conspiracy to be uncovered.

There was that and the final confirmation of gold. And it wasn't long underground before Hachijo Tohya found himself standing in the room of gold.

.

The room was both familiar and unfamiliar. He assumed from that that only the Endless Sorcerer had ever seen the room and not the mortal Battler Ushiromiya. Or else Battler had only ever seen it in a dream and never in reality. It didn't really matter. It was wondrous in itself. Wondrous and unreal and utterly useless. A thousand gold ignots… Or not a thousand, exactly. The witch had been carrying one and drowned with it, and who knew of the thousand there were rumoured to be, how many had been moved or converted into current cash… Or if there'd even been a thousand initially. Who knew, and who really cared? To the victor went the spoils but the police that raided Kuwadorian had found nothing except what Eva Ushiromiya had been carrying herself…

And maybe that was how Eva Ushiromiya had made it off the island, if Beatrice and Battler had taken the one and only boat. What had she thought then, curled up upstairs as she cried for her family? Had she tried to escape but realised the boat was gone and wondered who could have taken it? Or had she stayed cooped up in that mansion until the police raided it days later, trying to pierce the island back together.

He sighed and looked away from the gold – and there were the bodies. He froze.

No children. Only adults. Rosa. Hideyoshi. Natsuhi. Krauss. And blood that could belong to any of the adults of the Ushiromiya family not there: Kinzo, Eva, Kyrie, Rudolf… or Beatrice.

His head splintered and his hands immediately went searching for migraine tables even as his knees collapsed and his mind caught up with the fact that he wasn't at home and Ikuko wouldn't come running with them and a glass of water as soon as she heard him fall. Inside his body, Battler Ushiromiya screamed anew, and the scream of the present was mixed with the pass and the detached Tohya who could only think about the physical pain also saw with surprising clarity that Battler Ushiromiya had seen this room of gold – because he'd seen the bodies. And he'd seen them all except Eva Ushiromiya's. That's how he'd thought her to be the instigator of it all.

But Tohya now wondered at that. The way she'd mourned her husband and child didn't make her look like their murderer. Was it even as simple as a single person being responsible for it all? The witch Beatrice sunk to the bottom of the ocean with a single gold ingot. Eva Ushiromiya holed herself up in Kuwadorian. Battler Ushiromiya had drifted ashore without his memories or a hint of his identity and that had set him free from the tragic curse that was Rokkenjima until the memories came swimming back…

Did Eva Ushiromiya keep her silence because nothing had set her free? Was her anger towards the vultures who smelt blood and came swooping, to people like he and Ikuko who saw the message bottles and wanted to pierce together the tale that surrounded them? Or maybe…

There was Ange Ushiromiya as well. Maybe the aunt simply wanted to protect the niece from the truth.

The Battler inside of him wailed at Ange's name, just as he screamed at the corpses. Tohya simply knelt, eyes barely seeing, body folded into itself like a puppet whose strings had been cut but limbs not quite splayed. He was detached from it all again. Watching the events as though he was watching a movie and there was some heart-wrenching scene on screen that wasn't quite resonating with him. And even if the Ushiromiyas had been complete strangers instead of the family of his old soul, who wouldn't be horrified at such a scene as the one laid out in front of him?

Except he wasn't. Or half-wasn't. The Tohya part of him just stared blankly while pain burst in his skull until that, and only that, was too much to bear and he curled inward.

He didn't know when he drifted off after that. He wasn't in the room of gold when the throbbing in his head finally subsided. He wasn't in Kuwadorian either. It was somewhere he'd seen recently though, and it took a moment longer to pierce it together. The chapel after he'd fallen into the headlights.

Why even was there a chapel upon the island? It made sense now to be a construct from the Endless Sorcerer to mourn the fallen and his predecessor but it didn't explain why it had been there before. Unless it hadn't.

Except there, above him, was inexplicable proof that it had. Unless of course, the space had warped to accommodate it. There was a portrait of Beatrice where the door should have been and that hadn't been there before. It couldn't have been there before because the chapel would need a door: a way in and out.

But hadn't the chapel also been the setting of a closed room scenario? He couldn't recall which. It didn't really matter. It gave little proof or speculation. The closed room scenario in itself was part of the dream world, or the meta world. But the other wall that opened up into the underground… Was that the path that led to the gold? Or was that simply the open exit in which his body had moved here by itself.

Did it even matter? The layout of Rokkenjima wasn't the puzzle he came to solve.

Then what was?

The Endless Sorcerer was suddenly there, offering a handkerchief to him. He stared at it, confused. The mirror image of his past smiled and gently dabbed at his cheeks.

Hachijo Tohya might have been clear eyed, but Battler Ushiromiya was still crying.