Archive of Our Own ^beta

He was surprised to learn that for other people, pulling the trigger on the Evoker was a difficult thing to do. That it was not just difficult, but almost impossible, a draw of the arm upwards, a microscopic contraction of the index finger, a slow breathe out, and a squeeze - these small, effortless movements, he almost couldn't find it within himself to understand why anyone would anyone ever struggle to do it.

That night on the rooftop he sees Yukari there. She's pointing the barrel at the her forehead, her teeth grit, muscles wound and tensed like the arch of a bow, eyes wider and fuller than the Moon. Her finger's there, wrapped tight around the trigger, and all she needs to do is pull. There is an impossible being in front of her, and it is going to kill her, and all she needs to do is pull.

He stares helplessly as she doesn't. She's thrown to the ground a second later, the Evoker clattering a few feet from her, and without a word he races to pick it up. The metal is heavy, deliberate in his hands. His arms draw up instantaneously, before he can think any other thought, feel any other feeling. There is an impossible being in front of him, and it is going to kill him, and then it will kill her, and all he needs to do is pull.

He pulls.

–

There are entire years of his life he doesn't remember. He doesn't remember the months leading up to the move to Iwatodai, he doesn't remember his first birthday party at kindergarten, he doesn't remember graduating elementary school. It's May 2011, a month after he's moved in, and he doesn't remember January 2010 to March 2011. Sometimes he tries to summon some memories, not out of some sense of mourning, or guilt over what others called his 'lost childhood', but rather because he feels strange when Junpei or Yukari talk about their experiences as children and he has nothing to add to the conversation. He recognized this loss of memory as some abnormal behavior, some errant misfiring of his brain that needed to be fixed.

He asks Kotone sometimes - did we have any friends when we were kids? Did we use to play on the playground, talk with our classmates at kindergarten, did I have a song I really liked back then? Kotone remembers everything, because Kotone knows everything, and she tells him - yes, you used to love the slides, the other kindergartners typically avoided us, and you loved this one theme song from this children's show. When she recounts these things to him, these simple facts of life no more trivial than the sky being blue or a fire being warm, he feels he is somehow more detached from his own body. That things should be familiar, all these things should be. But they never are.

He's staring at the ceiling, headphones plugged in as they always are. It is 3am. Kotone's sleeping in the room adjacent, and he thinks about her. He loves her, obviously. This much he knows, some concrete, provable facet of his life he can anchor himself onto, a big hefty rock upon which he can build the church of himself. He carefully enumerates a list of these facts:
- My name's Makoto Yuki.
- I am part of SEES.
- I am a wildcard, and that is special, somehow.
- I have a sister, and I love her.
- Our parents died when we were 7.

As he thinks of it, he remembers - yes. They died when we were 7. We moved to some different school, then some other one after that, then some other one after that, and now we're here. Our parents died when we were 7. He repeats the sentence to himself, our parents died when we were 7, our parents died when we were 7.

It registers in his mind that he does not remember how his parents died. He knows he was there, he knows he saw it. He knows Kotone was there and saw it too. He says it again. Our parents died when we were 7. Our parents died when we were 7. As if it is some mantra, some spell that will get his memories back of the incident, or maybe it is some spell that will beam Kotone's memories into his brain, and he can get back this piece of himself that he has only now realized he has lost.

He says it a few more times, loud enough that if Kotone were awake she may have heard it through the walls. But she is asleep, she doesn't hear it, and maybe if she was awake he could have asked her. Our parents died when we were 7.

He does not end up remembering that night. He will eventually hear the story recounted to him, months later, and that retelling will still not make him remember. He will die not remembering.

–

A few years ago she found him on the windowsill. The moon was full, and the breeze was rough, fierce. It punched through the gap in the window he'd opened, and could have nearly knocked him back inwards. She opened the door to his room that night, and he was just sitting there, back faced to her, legs dangling six storeys up, headphones plugged in as they always were. All he needed to do was jump.

She ran as fast as she could through his room, over sheets of undone homework and past the CD shelf and past the wardrobe with the school uniforms hanging on black hooks and past the made bed and past the note on the table (a note she will later steal from his room when he is not looking), and she pulled him backwards by his shoulders and he fell onto his back on the floor, and when he realized that she had found and saved him and now she was here, hands on his shoulders, her tears falling down onto his face all he could think to say was sorry, and he wasn't sure what he was sorry for, he just said sorry because that's what you have to say in these stories, these situations where your loved one finds you as you're about to kill yourself. You have to say sorry, you have to cry, you have to do something, anything to make sure they know it's not their fault. You have to do this, and he knows this, and so he told her this, over and over. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

–

It's an evening in the middle of May, and he's sitting opposite Yukari as she eats her food. Exams are soon, and they've elected to take a break together, just the two of them. The food doesn't taste like much - food has never really tasted like much for him - but she seemed excited to eat here, so he is excited as well. He finds that he doesn't have to make himself excited, the way he would often have to if it were Junpei or any of his classmates that aren't in SEES. He is happy because she is, and that is all.

Yukari starts talking about the exams. She's nervous, of course. She's a good student but she's not a perfect one, and the exams for her weakest subjects are just around the corner. She's worried she's not prepared enough, even though he's seen her work herself to the bone these past few nights. He tells her it is alright, that she'll do great, and that he believes in her. She smiles up at him, a wide sunbeam of a smile, and they lock eyes for a moment that passes too quick. He commits that smile to memory. The image of this smile will flicker through his mind intermittently, a lightning bolt in the perpetual cloudy storm of his brain. It will strike when he's about to sleep, or during an exam, or as he's washing the dishes in the dorm. It will never stop striking.

–

He wrote the note because he read in books that you're supposed to leave one. It took a long time to figure out what he wanted to say. He settled on "I love you, sister. It's not your fault." He meant to put it in his bag before he went to bed, but he forgot, and it's left on his desk for the next few days until the night Kotone finds him.

It is not like living is a difficult or a painful ordeal for him. In the books where he learned you're supposed to leave notes, the characters always talked about some insurmountable, impossible pain that permeated their entire being, some all-consuming ache in their soul that hurt so much to live with that dying was preferable to bearing that ache for another day. But he didn't feel this way.

The reason is, often he would lie awake at night trying to imagine his life 2 years, 3 years from now, and nothing would show up. He would try to summon some fantasy scenario, some potential future that he would exist in and without fail everything would be blank and gray, an empty slate, an empty mind. He could not imagine a future, nor could he unearth his past, and the present, well.. the present was nothing, too. It was empty schooldays and empty weekends and empty holidays and empty winter breaks. It was empty friendships and tasteless food and boring TV shows, empty smiles, empty words.

And he concluded that this, this and death, they must not be so different after all.

–

They walk to the bulletin board where results are released together. It's an angry, busy day, with the other students almost falling over themselves as they rush to the same board the two of them are headed to. Yukari wanted to walk slowly - she told him that she felt she was about to die from the nerves, and needed to slow down. So they walk slowly.

Hearing Yukari talking about almost dying, even metaphorically, triggers some twinge in his gut, some cord in his heart to tense. He has seen her almost die. That first night on the rooftop, a few unlucky battles in Tartarus. He's seen her eyelids shut firm over her eyes as she's knocked out cold on the ground, he remembers touching her wrists or hands and feeling intense relief that her body was still warm.

He has a recurring dream of her dying in a car fire. A bridge late at night, green skies. He's crawling on the road and she's trapped inside, hands pressed against the glass as a bullet flies, an engine ignites, and a fire grows, grows, and grows, swallowing her whol-

"Ugh, I'm just so.. nervous," she says, snapping him out of it immediately. "I'm still so worried about Math - I feel like I totally screwed some of the questions."

"I saw how hard you were studying," he says, quietly smothering the images from his nightmare to death. "I'm confident you didn't."

She smiles that smile at him again, that smile that stops his heart in its tracks, filling his brain, rewiring his synapses. Their hands brush against each other as they walk to the bulletin boards, a subtle, quiet little gesture that neither of them acknowledge.

That night he falls asleep with his hands holding each other.

–

Sometimes he wonders what his parents are feeling. Not what they felt a decade ago when they were still alive, what they are currently feeling now. He imagines them as incorporeal entities floating through some black ooze, maybe they're looking over him from wherever they are. He imagines them as beings who can still think, feel, and see, and they're thinking and feeling whatever, seeing over whomever. It's a comforting thought sometimes, that they're still out there in some dimension parallel to his, and they can see him and Kotone.

He knows it is not true, though, and when he was on the windowsill that night he knew it was not true, and he knew that that if he jumped that that was it. That right now it was something, and it would be nothing very soon. There is no parallel dimension where he will go after he jumps, and he will not be able to meet them after he jumps because they are dead and he will be dead. But he did not mind.

–

Yukari's father died, too, and unlike him, she remembers it. They're by the beach and the moon is waning, a perfect yellow crescent above the water, and she's standing there, staring at him. She is a great big burning ball of everything that he is not - she is angry, driven, passionate, nervous, confused, conflicted, hateful, and it all comes out in her words, her fretting hands, her teary eyes.

He is here to fulfill a task - say the right combination of words, talk her down from the invisible ledge, calm her down. He walked down there armed with his options, wearing his reserved demeanor like a suit of armor. He was prepared. Here to do a task. Let's get Yukari back. It's late.

Yukari never makes it that easy. He sees her at the beach and all the preparation falls out of a hole in the side of his skull. She is standing there, bitter and angry and confused, and all the things he could think of saying feel stupid. But he tries his best, as he always does, as he's good at doing, and he finds some correct answers, some wrong ones, and. And when she looks at him tearful and doe-eyed, he goes for it. Not because it is the right option, or because it would fulfill the task of getting her back to the others, but because it feels right. When she hugs him back, he feels the delicate lines of her hands etch themselves slowly and surely into the surface of his skin, an invisible, permanent mark he will never let go of.

–

Maybe it runs in the family. They never talk about the night Kotone finds him on the windowsill, and likewise they never talk about the disinfectant and gauze she keeps hidden in the medicine cabinet. It is a tacit agreement between the two of them as siblings, an agreement formed through fleeting glances and wordless walks back to the dorm from school. It is better this way, he thinks.

Sometimes he wonders if she has tried it, too. He has developed a hypothetical where he gets home from school and she's in the bathtub, and he pulls her out by her hands, not her wrists, and then he calls emergency services. The Makoto in this hypothetical is calm, collected, and detached. He knows exactly what to do the instant he sees it, latches onto the task that's developed in front of him. Kotone is not his sister bleeding out, inches from death, she is a problem that needs to be solved. He does not cry or scream, and his hands do not tremble as he takes her out of the bathtub. And when the hypothetical paramedics come and they let him in the back of the ambulance with her, he puts his headphones back in and presses play.

–

It's August, and him and Yukari are back at the restaurant. The food tastes good and he didn't bring his headphones this time.

–

He tends to zone out a lot. He has spent countless lessons in school with an earpiece hidden underneath his hair so the teachers couldn't see, and countless nights staring at the ceiling in the dorm thinking about things like his sister dying and his parents dying and him dying. He knows this, recognizes it as another errant dysfunction of his brain, and takes careful efforts to fix it. In Tartarus he tries to keep a steeled-over, determined focus. A focus worthy of being their Leader.

He is usually good at maintaining this focus. The high, life-or-death stakes of Tartarus demand nothing less than it. They're here to do a job, after all, and the team depends on each other but they depend on him more than anything else.

Ever since August he has found this focus brittler, coming apart slowly at the seams. It starts when Yukari presses the Evoker to her forehead, a well-trained action she no longer struggles with, and for a vanishing, infinitesimal moment Makoto hallucinates as if the Evoker was a real gun. He sees Yukari pointing a gun to her own head, squeezing the trigger, and blood spraying out the back of her head like a torrential fountain, like a faucet, like the gentle ocean breeze gliding over the two of them that night at the beach with her hands on his waist and his hands on her ba-

He's knocked flat on his back by an attack he didn't see coming, Evoker flying out of his hands. Shit. Yukari casts a quick heal spell, chides him for not being more careful. She extends a hand, and he takes it, and as he's helped to his feet he realizes he's avoiding her eyes.

–

The thing about thoughts like these is that they never really go away. The urge is always there, writhing around in the back of his mind like a parasite, like an infectious worm whispering itself into his thoughts. He hears it when he's on the rooftop with Fuuka and he sees the barriers the school has installed. He hears it when Shinjiro passes him the knife so they can prepare food together. He hears it when he talks to Kotone about anything at all. They are the constant background hum of his everyday, the tinnitus of his being, and when they get too loud he puts his headphones back in and presses play.

Lately the thoughts affect him in a way they never have. At his best they used to be a minor annoyance, at his worst a sickly, macabre indulgence, scenarios compounding atop scenarios - here is Kotone crying when she finds his body, or the picture they use of him at his funeral, or the color of the soil they bury him in. She would scream, she would cry when she finds him, she would be ruined forever. These used to be the familiar paths the thoughts would make him tread downwards, the footprints in the grass.

Usually it would always be about Kotone. It is not always about Kotone anymore. Instead a distraught, shrieking Yukari takes her place in the hypotheticals, and his mind, sick as it is, conjures up the exact pitch and sound of her scream as she finds him dead on the ground. The sound pierces the heavens, separates the clouds, shatters windows. It stabs his eyeballs and the space under his fingernails, it turns him inside out. It is a sound he never wants to hear.

How awful is it that an entirely fake sound can feel so real?

–

Shinjiro dies in October. They attend his funeral a few days later, and during the procession he puts his headphones on and turns the volume as high as it will go.

–

It is almost comically perfect, the way it plays out. They're at the school rooftop, and the Sun is flittering through the clouds and turning the sky shades of pink and orange he's only ever seen in paintings. Yukari's standing in front of him, staring downwards at her own shoes because she's too nervous to meet his eyeline, and after fretting her hands and adjusting the neckline of her top she goes for it, she says those magical words he's had dreams about. Dreams he never wanted to wake up from.

"I love you."

"I love you too."

They kiss soon after that, and he will remember every second of it.

–

It's the middle of October, they're back at the restaurant, and the food tastes even better.

Somewhere in between the sixth bite and the seventh he realizes, as he looks at Yukari, that he no longer wants to die. That when he imagines his future he can finally think of something, and that something is a future with Yukari. Maybe they will move in together after graduation, get jobs after all the SEES stuff blows over, and in the mornings he will brew her coffee the way she likes it and serve her mugfuls of it as she lies in bed. Maybe they will go to theme parks, watch movies together, raise children - that's a thought. Makoto Yuki, leader of SEES, having children. Who could've guessed? Not him, that's for sure.

But that will all come later. Right now, she is sitting opposite from him, taking in messy mouthfuls of food. She's talking about Junpei again, complaining about something he did one way or another, and her voice is something sweet and beautiful, and her face is something sweet and beautiful, and she is something sweet and beautiful, and he is just happy to sit there and soak it in.

–

Ryoji arrives soon after that.

–

The answer to Ryoji's question is obvious. He doesn't think about it for more than a minute. He does, however, think about how much less obvious the answer would have been had Ryoji come 6 months earlier. He tells himself that the reason he could answer Ryoji so quickly is because now, he has found something to live for. He has found sweet little fantasies of the future, these saccharine snippets of a life that could come to pass. These idle thoughts of coffees and early mornings and apartments together and holding hands under the table during dinner and all these corny romantic-comedy naive hypotheticals he dreams up but the truth of the matter is he is not fueled by the urge to live. It is something much, much simpler.

For the first time in his life he does not want to die.

–

He imagines asking Kotone all the questions he cannot ask her.

When our parents died, were they afraid? How did it happen? Was it quick? Did they know they were going to die or were they dead before they knew it? When they were alive did they ever worry about the prospect of dying? Did they ever go on dates together, with this creeping feeling in the back of their mind that they were going to die some day, did they ever stare into each other's eyes and know that it was never going to last?

He imagines her sitting there, answering all his questions in some inexplicable magical way that would take away all of his fear. She would find the right words to say, words that he cannot tell himself because he does not know what they could possibly be.

–

It's December, and he falters again. It's a stupid, stupid reason to falter - it's a routine Tartarus trip like any other. How many of the guardians have they killed now, twenty? Thirty? The exact number doesn't matter - the fact of the matter is that he should be used to this by now. They're Shadows, they're not alive, they never were alive, and they're trying to kill your friends. They're trying to kill Kotone, and they're trying to kill Yukari.

But it's never rational, is it? And so when the Shadow in front of him is on its last legs, and a quick stab to the throat could end it, he hesitates. He finds that picking up his sword and finishing the job is, out of nowhere, an impossible hurdle. His muscles just outright refuse to do it, to end this illusion of a life. His legs are glued to the floor, his arms glued to his sides. He stares the Shadow in its eyes because it is all he can do.
Kotone finishes the job for him, and the thing dies a quick death, as they usually do. Just like that.

–

He finds Ryoji in the music room.

"You know… I know it won't last, but I could get used to this," Ryoji says, sitting down on the piano stool.

"Used to what?"

"Walking, eating, breathing, attending school, talking to all of you. It's nice." Ryoji's staring at nothing in particular.

"Nice in what way?"

"In the way that… I don't know. It just feels right, you know? Like this is what I'm supposed to do. Like I was meant to live."

He understands him. He takes a seat next to Ryoji, and without a word shared between each other they begin to play.

–

Yukari's sitting next to him by the fountain. The Christmas decorations are up, hologram snowflakes on the ground. When he's sure no one's looking he touches their shoes together and puts an arm around her shoulder. He offers her his jacket, she insists she's not cold, even though she is.

He tries his best to relax, to melt into the girl next to him. He feels like a bundle of taut wires, a bundle that does not loosen even as he sidles next to her, feels her warmth on his, the fabric of her top, her fingers as they find his.

"What do you think we'll do when this is all over?" Yukari asks.

He doesn't have the heart to tell her what he really feels about that question, that in the nights leading up to today he has died a thousand little deaths thinking about what might happen "when all of this is over". He doesn't want to say that maybe there won't be an after, maybe we won't make it out of it. Maybe it will win. Maybe we will beat it but one of us will die. Nothing is certain, and even if we make it to February alive, maybe you'll get hit by a bus, or maybe I'll get cancer, or maybe an air conditioning unit will fall on me and it will be all over. It could be over in so many ways, don't you understand, Yukari? Every waking day it could be over.

He swallows it all down so hard he thinks he might vomit.

"We'll go out somewhere", he says weakly.

–

He catches Kotone putting the bandages and disinfectant back under the dresser. How long has it been since he's caught her doing this? The last time was a year ago, before they moved into the dorms together, but who knows if she's kept doing it without him noticing. It's three a.m. on a Tuesday, only the two of them are awake in the dorm, and for a brief moment they share a knowing look at each other as she walks past him without a word. The Makoto of 6 months ago would not have said anything, but he is no longer the Makoto of 6 months ago.

"Are y- are you.." is all he can say.

"I'm just stressed," she says through gritted teeth.

"Yeah. I am too."

"Yeah," Kotone says, an empty word to fill the silence.

"Just.. just be safe about it, okay?"

"Don't worry about me. You know better than that."

And he does know better than that, so he lets it go. He watches as she walks back into her room and shuts the door behind her, and spends a few minutes staring at the dark empty hallway before going back to his own room. For a split second he imagines catching Yukari doing this instead of Kotone, and he gets so sick he can't sleep for the entire night.

–

The 31st comes. They all meet at the usual spot in the dorm, and nobody wants to say it but they all share the same thought:

This might be the last time we ever see each other. This might be the last time we ever share this space, breathe each other's air. There are some people here that used to be here, and aren't anymore, and even if we succeed we will never bring them back. If we don't succeed we will all die. What was something will become nothing, and we all pretend that we are okay with it, but we are not. We might die today, and even if we don't, we will die eventually. It is not okay.

He tries to look at Yukari but cannot.

–

They leave Jin to die.

If they had not abandoned him there to the Shadows, maybe Makoto would have heard his final words, and how they were about Takaya. Maybe he would have thought about how at every step of the way, everything Jin did, it was for him. How Jin staked his life, his sense of self, his drive, all of it was built upon the foundation of Takaya, that Takaya was the rock upon which Jin built the church of himself. Maybe Makoto would have realized that they are not so different, him and Jin.

But it does not matter, because they do not try to save him, and they do not hear his final words. He dies as he lived - meaninglessly.

–

So, this is it.

He will not remember much of what is about to happen. He remembers floating, colors, a landscape, the Moon. He remembers walking, sword in hand, staring down at the impossible thing that is Death and seeking to kill it. Death is ugly, pulsating, shapes and rifts and tendrils and cracks. Death is something amidst nothing, a landmark in an impossible place. Death is death, and he's here, and he's staring at it. He has no time to feel scared or frightened, so he doesn't. No time to indulge in another hypothetical about Kotone dying or Yukari dying or his parents dying, no headphones, no breeze through the windowsill. He just walks, walks, and walks, because it is what they would want from him. This is his final task, and it needs to be done.

He hears a lot of voices, none of them are his parents' because he doesn't remember what his parents sound like. He hears Kotone's voice, a voice he will never forget. He hears Yukari's voice, and it's the one voice he needs to hear at this moment. She's telling him that she believes in him, and that he has to do what needs to be done, so, he does it. Just like that, just because she told him to.

–

For a little while, everything is alright.

–

He doesn't tell Yukari that in a month, he will die. He owes her that much. They go back to the restaurant, and the food tastes alright. She talks about her mother this time, and they make plans for him to meet her that will never come to pass. He tries not to meet her eyes because he knows it will be painful to, but she's Yukari, and it is impossible not to look at her. Eventually, he grows weak - he steals a glance while she's eating, and there she is, laid out all before him like a map, all the reasons he does not want to die, in her eyes and nose and hair and eyelashes, in her lips and jaw and cheeks.

It is here that he realizes that after all of this, after everything, he still is afraid. How could he not be? How could he not be afraid? How could he ever make peace with something like his own mortality, how is it ever possible for anyone to? There is something here. She is here in front of him, and she is beautiful, and there is the fan above his head on the restaurant and there is the firm wood of the table they eat on and there is the sound of the other customers eating, there is something, there is always something everywhere he has gone and everywhere he has looked. And in a month, there will be nothing. How is it possible for anyone to just be fucking okay with that? How is it possible? How? How? How? There is no earthly way anyone is ever capable of making peace with this. It is dying. It is death. You are programmed to thrash against it, to shriek and wrestle and fight against its clutches, they write songs and stories about not wanting to die, they write poems about refusing to go gentle into the night. He needs so much more time. He needs an infinite amount of it, he needs to squeeze out every last second, every little moment he needs to grasp in his hands and strangle until all the life comes sputtering out. The seconds keep passing like sand filtering through his fingers and he can't get a grip, he can't stop it from slipping past. Every day that's passed, every day that has gone by, every day that he's forgotten, what a fucking waste. What a fucking, fucking waste, that he spent it all being so miserable and pointless when he could have been here looking at her, being with her, talking to her, and now there is no time left. There is never any time left. For him, for Yukari, for his parents, for Kotone, for everybody in his life. He will die and then they will and then what was it all for? For nothing? Everyone that they saved, their time will come too. Why did they even fucking bother saving them? None of it matters anymore, none of it, none of it. He's going to die and it's unfair and it's evil and it's not right and it's-

He excuses himself to the bathroom, locks himself in a cubicle and cries until he realizes that he is wasting time by crying, so he gets up, washes his face in the sink and runs back into the restaurant and kisses her.

They go out every day, from then on, until he dies.

–

When he dies the last thing he sees is his friends.

There is, as he predicted, no dimension of black ooze you float through, where you can look down at your friends as they live a life without you. There is no spectator seat, no waiting room, no nothing. It just was, and now it isn't anymore.

He knew it was coming, knew it since the 31st. It was a miracle he lasted for so long, a testament to his willpower to thrash and thrash and thrash against the clutches of Death before it finally took him.

Soon that sound that used to keep him up at night, the sound of Yukari finding his dead body, it will happen. It will come exactly as he imagined it. So will the sound of Kotone finding his dead body. They will run up to him, lay hands on his wrists and neck and feel that coldness, the coldness a body should never feel, and everything will collapse from there.

It is the tiniest of mercies that he will not be able to hear it.