A/N: Another sideways step. Naoto meets an infuriating doppelganger with a penchant for lab-coats.
Pronoun choice from Naoto's perspective. Those of you who've read Quicksilver (first "Naoto in secret base" fic I wrote) will notice more than a few similarities. Once I've seen a scene it's impossible to un-see it - headcanon - but Quicksilver's style is completely wrong for this particular story. Therefore: you may be reading the not-quite-same-but-fairly-close thing twice. Apologies, guys.
"I will ask again. Who and what are you?"
"And I will ask this: why is interrogation your sole method of communication?"
Naoto stared dully at what absolutely wasn't herself, no matter what form it had taken. It wore her face and her clothes. Those were the only similarities. It was impossible to tell what the clone was even supposed to be: girl, boy, girl, it shifted between them with the light.
Make up your mind, she almost snapped - then paused, took a deep breath and forced her pitch low. "You are avoiding the- -"
"Ace detective." The clone's lips curled around the words. "The perfect justification for your inadequacies. Everything an investigation, the whole world a puzzle to be solved." He - she - no, it, it tipped its head. "What happens when you can't?"
"That isn't even-"
"All you have is this," it trilled, tapping a labcoat-covered hand against Naoto's head. She jerked back with a hiss. "Nothing else. If you cannot solve this case, what use are you, Naoto-kun? Who would ever need you?"
Naoto gulped, trying to swallow past the tightness in her throat. This... clone, duplicate, fraud - the moniker hardly mattered - was clearly designed to unsettle her. An illusion of some sort. She had wasted her time attempting to speak with him. Her. It. "You are a- a construct. You are irrelevant. I wish to speak with the culprit."
"The culprit. Who would that be?" When Naoto didn't answer, the clone threw back its head and laughed. "And you call yourself a detective!"
Remain calm. Analyze. Rationalize. After the lurch as she'd swung through empty air, then the painful impact with the ground, there was nothing. Naoto had woken up with her wrists and ankles strapped to a metal table, blinked clear her blurred vision, and seen herself. Or not herself.
Absolutely none of this made sense.
"I am," she muttered - intending to follow through with a more persuasive argument, but her head was fogged and the room had begun to occasionally tip at unpleasant angles. Drugged. She was drugged and dreaming. That, however, would not explain the bruises on her arms. Naoto prodded a particularly vivid one near her left wrist; the sudden throb of pain left her biting her lip. Which hurt too. Awake, then.
Rationalize. Ignore the clone, focus on escaping. Where could the culprit have constructed a place such as this? A warehouse, perhaps. But such elaborateness served no purpose, and how would they have known that-
"You aren't listening!"
As always, the pitch was higher, weaker; feminine. Childish.
Naoto's jaw tightened.
"Nobody pays attention, it's not fair!" The clone rocked back and forth on its heels, sleeves wrapped over its head. This had happened countless times. Erratic shifts from disdain and supercilious insults to... to this. A child in ill-fitting clothing who sobbed and clung to Naoto like a shadow.
Naoto kept her gaze fixed on the steel floor. The air burned her throat with each breath; an odd mix of formaldehyde, plastic, and motor oil. "I-I have things to think about."
"Always cogitating, Naoto-kun." The deep voice had returned, seeming to echo off both the walls of the room and the inside of her skull. "Your entire life, an endless, relentless analysis of everything around you. Except yourself."
Which was perfectly reasonable. Naoto thrived on questions and mysteries, but only those that had been solved. Answers came via investigation. Answers did not come via others, because some people preferred the questions never be asked at all.
Analyzing herself? Purposeless. There were no question marks.
The clone lurched forward, eyes suddenly wide. "Questions upset people. You upset people. If you stayed quiet we wouldn't be alone!"
"Speaking with you is a futile endeavour," Naoto muttered. "Unless you can conduct yourself in a sensible and consistent manner, then-"
"Stop talking like that!" The clone shrieked, thumping its fists against the floor. "Big words, pretend voice... you're so stupid! Nobody believes you!" Its face contorted into another sneer. "You don't fool anyone."
Naoto felt her fists ball up. She forced her fingers to relax. Remain calm. "You are just-"
The clone's hand snapped around her collar, jerking her forward. "Focus, Naoto-kun. We are the same." It smiled, stroking her chin with a crooked finger. "Would you believe me?"
Their faces were inches apart. Wide eyes, long lashes. Angled cheekbones, thin lips - but the jaw was undefined and the skin far too soft.
How had she ever convinced- -
Naoto growled deep in her throat - stupid, stupid, as if this creature knew anything - and pulled back. "You, you're a fraud. A flawed copy, a fake!"
"I see, I see! The Detective Prince is a hypocrite."
It was an absurd nickname. Naoto had not chosen it; had no idea who'd devised it; had never even liked it.
"A prince who doesn't exist and a detective who excels at self-delusion. And underneath?" The clone grinned; everything about it looked wrong. "A scared, stunted little boy-girl-nothing."
Stay calm. Analyze. Rationalize.
Naoto drew her knees up to her chest and tugged at the brim of her cap.
She would evaluate her situation. Ignore the clone. So far, she'd felt neither thirst or hunger, suggesting that little time had passed. Except she was certain it had - but her watch had stopped, the screen a garbled mass of pixels, despite the lack of any visible damage. Naoto had tried dismantling and reassembling it using the tools scattered around the laboratory, which the clone had found simply fascinating. It had curled around her as she sat on the floor, fists tangled in her shirt.
Shortly after she'd woken up, it had released her from the restraints in a childish fit of tears, begging her to stay and talk and look at its inventions. The comments about the planned alteration process hadn't ceased since. Naoto had her suspicions about what that actually involved.
She turned to look at the clone, who was sprawled stomach-down on the floor. "At... at least tell me where we are."
"You know where we are. You made it."
"Nonsense. I've never seen this place." Naoto tipped back her head and grit her teeth, concentrating on the wires and pipes that snaked across the ceiling.
"You made it," insisted the clone, voice breaking, "and it's your fault we're alone."
Nothing made sense. She'd missed something, hadn't paid close enough attention, had put far too much faith in- -
"We should've asked them." The clone was now sitting upright with its knees curled to its chest. Naoto straightened her own. "Th-they would've helped us."
I did ask, Naoto thought. She had questioned them at Port Island, received some cryptic nonsense about televisions and shadows - then asked Tatsumi again days later and been offered only evasiveness. He'd been kind to her in the hotel corridor; for some idiotic reason, she hadn't recognized that for the pity and condescension it had truly been.
"The visit was pointless to begin with, Naoto-kun. A ludicrous waste of time."
Naoto didn't recall speaking out loud. "I had to," she mumbled. "The school required it."
The clone rumbled with laughter, a deep and exaggerated sound that resonated around the room. "Did the school require you to visit a nightclub? Or require you to shop for souvenirs, or to bore them all rigid with your- -"
"Shut up!" she snapped - then caught herself, tensed her muscles. "It, it was for the investigation, I had to- -"
"Admit it, Naoto-kun. You wanted friends. We don't have any."
(In the early summer, before any of this had been real - when the case had been another puzzle box, and all she needed to do was find the right sequence of actions - Grampa had sent her a letter explaining the arrangements he'd made for her to start at Yasogami High in September. A detective still needs to finish high-school, Naoto. You might make friends. Naoto had thrown the letter in a drawer.)
Naoto blinked. Why had she remembered-
"That's why nobody's looking for us," the clone said quietly. "Nobody's even noticed."
"Of course they have, I made it perfectly clear what I- -"
"Did you, now? Vague hints and barbed comments. Oh, but they should've listened to the child genius, shouldn't they? So sharp, so brilliant, provoking a murderer just to prove a point!"
("I'm not a damn babysitter," Dojima had snapped, slamming his coffee cup against his desk, five minutes after they'd first met. Naoto had been explaining the errors he'd made in the investigation so far, the missed opportunities and the disregard for the disappearance of Kanji Tatsumi; an action he had not appeared to appreciate.)
The clone crawled closer. Naoto felt a cold hand stroke over the back of her neck. "Why would they even want to look for you?"
The inside of Naoto's chest felt suddenly tight, as if something were trying to break through her ribs.
"They need me," she managed.
"Why? What use is a lonely child? One who can't even decide what they are?"
(She'd made the decision at thirteen. At the time, it had seemed both ideal and trivial; merely an extension of her existing behavior. Men's clothing that never quite fit. Bindings and vests that hurt. The constant need to monitor her voice. It was always worth it - she was strong, in control, felt right - until the moment each night when she remembered that, for an ace detective, she'd proven remarkably good at selling lies.)
"I will ask you my question again," Naoto said slowly, deliberately, fists clenching then uncurling, "who and what are you?"
"Two. That's two questions." The clone held up two fingers, the labcoat sleeve draping back over its wrist. "Who and what. Naoto-kun, you're slipping."
Of course she wasn't. Dizziness, that's all. The room was spinning more and more, nothing looked right, this ridiculous fake didn't and couldn't look right.
"Trapped in your own creation. Unable to solve a trivial case." The clone leaned closer and whispered against her ear. "Watching children answer questions you never even asked."
(What all the newspaper articles and that absurd interview on Niteline had never mentioned were the cases that hadn't worked out as they should, the two times Naoto had failed completely. After the first, Grampa had told her it was impossible to be right every time. Naoto's first thought had been why not.)
"Shut up. J-just shut up. You don't- -"
Stay calm. Analyze. Rationalize.
The chemicals in the air must have thickened; the walls seemed to disappear behind fog.
"You're tired, Naoto-kun." Fingers still at her neck, tangling in her hair. "You're broken."
The room spun. Naoto screwed her eyes shut.
"But we'll fix you," a voice murmured. It sounded far too much like her own.
"Wake up! Wake up!"
Naoto's eyes flew open.
Metal floor, green light, bitter chemicals in each breath. She hadn't escaped. Her head was swimming.
Nobody had- -
The clone dashed from console to console, yanking at levers and slamming bunched-up fabric against buttons. "It's all your fault! They're trying to find this place!"
Seta and his team? Impossible. They didn't need her. A false alarm, then.
"We need to lock the doors, set up the defences," the clone continued, yellow eyes frantic and wide. The voice continually shifted now, echo to shriek to something unnerving between the two.
Still curled on one side, Naoto swallowed, her mouth dry. "I thought you said... nobody was coming."
"Shut up! Shut up! They won't find us anyway, won't even find the base, we'll keep them out. We know how to do that, don't we? We've always known how to push- -"
The rest faded into background noise. Naoto stared at the floor.
Certain things were impossible. The team finding her was not. That was merely improbable, a statistical unlikelihood, and those could be surpassed. At least, by Seta. On some level, Naoto had always intended to rescue herself...
...But certain things were impossible.
Naoto sat up shakily - fighting another bout of nausea - then pressed her back against the nearest wall, and waited.