Chapter Text
As beings who had come into being expecting their deaths, psychologically speaking, the Misaka Sisters were the most mentally prepared for the real prospect of it.
As beings who had also defied their deaths at the last possible second with the greatest impossibility, the Misaka Sisters were also, counter-intuitively, the most hopeful.
They were formidable scientists of their own right, and many of them already spread across the globe, with immense calculating abilities and resources at their disposal. Where others had given up on discerning the means and mechanisms of the illness, the Misaka Sisters did not. In fact, they were so bold as to set themselves to the task of discovering a cure.
Not only were they the scientists, they were also the test subjects and patients, and the doctors. They confirmed the illness only affected espers, and it affected espers in a strict reverse order. That is, among the espers of the same level, it was the strongest espers who always died first, or those with greater personal realities and AIM diffusion fields. Why this happened though, no matter what experiments they did, they could not determine. Seemingly for no reason, patients would develop a cough which would progress into hemoptysis then acute respiratory failure. If patients were hooked on ventilators and kept alive that way, soon, they would suffer from sudden systemic organ failure with no hope of resuscitation.
They tried every possible kind of medicine known to man. They tried existing pharmaceuticals, developing their own pharmaceuticals, they tried recreational drugs, homeopathic remedies, medieval remedies. They took the claim that the illness was something from God seriously and began to dutifully appeal to God with all the seriousness of scientists, systematically and methodically and completely.
Let it be known that the Misaka Sisters were not without faith. Even as they themselves started to die off one by one, they remained faithful. After all, as we said, they were the most hopeful, too, and in certain ways, hope and faith are just the same words applied in different contexts.
There was, of course, doubt among these proselytes of religion, as there always is when there is religion. One particular Misaka Sister, 18823, was especially shaken by the death of the Prototype, who Mitori and Misaki and others had known as Dolly.
Dolly had been a Level 3, and she had passed relatively early in the line of Misaka Sisters who had been judged as Level 3. Only in around thirty percent of suicides do they leave a note, and while Junko and Mitsuko had not, Mitori had not been so cruel, and in fact, besides leaving a long and detailed and loving note better described as a letter, she had also left behind a gift. (We will forgive Misaki, who did not leave anything behind for Dolly, because people who are in love are also nearly always blinded by it, preoccupied by it to the detriment of all other relationships. For this reason we will forgive Mikoto, too. Let them have their happiness with each other, a romance to the end.)
Misaka 18823, who had been the researcher charged with taking care of Dolly as she deteriorated, had witnessed the intense cheer and optimism that gripped Dolly. Where the other Misaka Sisters had always been more reserved, Dolly was open and wore her heart on her sleeve, and she wore it with smiles and easy affection.
More than once, Misaka 18823 had questioned Dolly if she was lying or being dishonest about her apparent happiness, but each time, Dolly had denied it. It seemed to Misaka 18823 that Dolly had to be lying about something. How could Dolly talk about Mitori so often and with only fondness? Day after day, she would tell stories about ‘Mi-Chan’, she would read the letter, she would shake that glass, lava-lamp like container full of gray-metallic liquid, watching globules and particles rise and fall, the creation and destruction of meaningless shapes, with child-like wonder.
Eventually, Misaka 18823 came to the conclusion that there is a difference between happiness and positivity. Dolly died with a content, peaceful smile. In the years to come, the paper of the letter would yellow and wither away.
There is also, Misaka 18823 decided, a difference between being hopeful and being stupid.
God was not real. God was not going to save anyone. Some of the Sisters went searching for that boy with the miracle in his right hand, because if anyone walking on the good salted Earth could be God or a vassal of God it had to be him, and because he was the one who had saved them the first time around, but no one could find him. Misaka 18823 had the wholly original thought of fuck God, God was dead.
Misaka 18823 had been one of the Sisters who had volunteered for the trial of recreational drugs, and she found herself going back to it. There was once a girl who decided she was going to spend her last days of life doing nothing but watching television and drinking milk and eating ice cream, and this was actually one of the lesser self-destructive coping habits picked up by the occupants of the city.
Addiction is not as easy a habit to kick, though.
Misaka 18823 was shunned and excluded from the network. Maybe what happened to her was a moral failing, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe her dangerous, radical thinking was infectious—better safe than sorry, right? Better not risk it and to just cut it off, isolate it. Nobody else enjoyed the hypocrisy or the irony. In either situation, Misaka 18823 spent her last days alone.
She was not in a dirty alleyway, with scattered needles all around her. There were plenty of empty dorms and apartments in the city. She was quite comfortable in a bedroom, the heating turned on high, absentmindedly dozing, coming into consciousness in and out. It was a very comfortable, some might even describe it as spiritual, experience. She was also higher than a kite.
In one of her last bouts of lucidity, Misaka 18823 was seeing an image: a very specific image. It was the image of an angel. The angel had white hair and eyes colored like rubies and very beautiful wings. He seemed to be shining with pure light, and he was holding his hand out to her, a gesture of ‘come here’, his whole expression one of consolation and comfort. And in that moment, seeing this angel, Misaka 18823 believed. She believed more than anyone else had ever believed, even more than Junko had, and she repented her insolence, deep in her heart.
Even if God isn’t real, who cares. Even if it’s unscientific and irrational and stupid, if it gives a person peace and comfort, who cares.
Last Order was the last one to be created, and so she was the last one to die, too. It also happened that when it happened, she went alone. But she did not feel alone. In her last months she found herself often thinking about that person who shared the same visage as the angel with white hair that Misaka 18823 had seen, who in fact, all the Misaka Sisters had seen in their last moments as they had died. Actually, the image was nothing more than the manifestation and strength of Last Order’s longing and missing for that certain person made real and powerful and tangible, so strong that it passed through to everyone.
It seemed to Last Order the most horrible and awful thing was that no one would remember Accelerator as she remembered him, that in history, he would only ever be seen first as a monster then as patient zero. She was the first person he had told his name to. Teitoku was the second. And she wanted everyone to know his name. She wanted to remember it forever, for it to exist in the world forever, even after she was dead. That was what he deserved.
But nothing lasts forever, and memories are only ever retained in the minds of the living, a trick of biology.