Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

If Damon closed his eyes, he could see her. The sight would be burned into his memory and etched into his bones until the day he died.

Eva Tsunaka was dead.

He could still smell her burning flesh.

Reality melted into a distant buzz as her shrieks of agony haunted him like they had never stopped. They scratched at the soft tissue of his brain until it was raw. The inhuman screams torn from her throat were indescribable: primal, desperate, cruel. He saw the bright blood as it streamed from her legs. Her eyes, blown wide with pain.

But Eva Tsunaka was gone. She had fallen long ago.

Damon could not breathe.

He gazed at the heart of the furnace, as if his immobility could freeze time. Perhaps time was meaningless to him now, with his sense of self shattered. He felt numb, he felt nothing, he felt despair.

Something tender had been left in him, but it had broken.

The cruelty had been the point. The showmanship was the lifeblood of the game. The inhumane brutality stole the pathetic artificial distance with which he shielded himself, exposing every nerve of his flesh.

He felt it all.

He was the Ultimate Debater. He was supposed to be able to rationalise everything, to articulate even the most tenuous position so compellingly he could convince everyone in a room — even himself. Yet to his ceaseless question, he could deduce no answer.

Why?

Eva had been the blackened. Eva had murdered. Eva had been wrong, but she could plunge that knife through Wolfgang's back ten times over, and she still would not deserve this.

A liar.

His ally.

His friend?

A charred corpse on unforgiving concrete.

She hadn't said a word to him once the trial ended. She would never say a word to anyone again.

His thoughts chanted, ceaseless.

Could he have stopped her?

Was it his fault?

Had any of it ever meant anything?

He was the Ultimate Debater, trained to trace every premise to its logical, wretched conclusion. They spiralled like scales into a fractal beyond his control. The endless paths in his map of hypotheticals burrowed into his soul like the unrelenting roots of a tree. Thoughts cycled through his mind, none of them truly his own. They buried him like soil. Each magnified acutely the weight of every step he could have taken. Every moment he had failed her. Every path to avert tragedy.

The perk. The blackmail. The bullying.

When had the scales of temptation tipped?

It was a logical fallacy. It was a slippery slope. His self-hatred was an ad hominem assault he could never counter. He was a failure. What did it matter? Eva was dead. Eva was dead. Eva was dead.

The unholy weight of sin crushed him: not hers, but his own.

Damon stared into the pit of her death.

The heat of the furnace was overwhelming. All of his endless tears did not douse it. They did not cease.

Tears streamed down his cheek, and his soul poured out with them.

Life passed meaninglessly before him.

One by one, the students filed out of the trial ground. A blank-faced Diana, a trembling Toshiko with her face pressed to Ingrid's side, a barely-conscious Ulysses half-carried between Wenona and Jean.

Damon knew they were not mourning Eva: they were mourning themselves.

Alone, he stood silently until the lights flickered into the all-encompassing shroud of darkness, a high-handed signal from Tozu that he had overstayed his welcome.

He barely registered his own movement as he felt his way to the lift.

He led himself to Kai's room. His shadow fell through the door. The sound of Kai's muffled sobs slipped beneath it, as if in reply. It was the world's worst conversation.

He stared at nothing in a miserable daze.

He led himself to the kitchen. It was silent and eerie as a morgue. Every piece of furniture had been returned to their first positions, like none of them had ever been there at all. He cut a beeline to the block on the countertop. The once-absent knife rested simply in its slot like a universal truth.

He pulled it from its position. He ran the soft skin of his fingertip along its silver edge. Dry. Spotless. He would never know if it was the original, or an identical replacement. It would never matter.

He led himself to the pachinko machine. He could not bring himself to lift his hand to it. Instead, he emptied his pockets into the gachapon, rolling out their worth coin by accursed coin.

The dials spun emptily. A mountain of discards heaped by the soles of his shoes, until he finally found what he had subconsciously sought out.

He led himself to the courtyard, where the artificial night sky mocked him from above. There was no breeze within the glorified, soulless cage of the academy, but its sole characteristic was the freezing cold.

Damon never wanted to be warm again. He just wanted to go home.

So he wallowed in his numbness, futilely attempting to nurse an ache he was too sick to see. Rot festered. Pain could be sterilised.

The bitter sting of rum burned down his throat.

The taste was awful.

"...foolish..."

'"...a coward..."

"Please!"

Damon opened weary eyelids to a landscape running away from him like a carousel of film tape.

He blinked, lifting his head from the smooth coolness of the window. He felt more than he heard the sensation of motion, the thrum of the train beneath him distant and warped like he was hearing through cotton.

He absorbed the familiar emerald faux leather and wooden interior the way he recognised the dread that crawled across his skin.

Disbelief spread through him, the dawning revelation slow and steady like poison. How could he forget the train to Eden's Garden Academy he had stepped on mere days prior?

"Excuse me... Are you okay?"

His neck snapped to the impossible: Wolfgang Akire, the Ultimate Lawyer, chary, composed, and irrefutably alive.

Chapter Text

The sight of him stole every thought from his mind. Damon's disbelief stunned him like a stab of pain, opening the gaping wound of his wretched memories.

They were nothing like the Wolfgang before him, who stood as tall as he did steady, calmly adjusting his lavender tie with a nervous half-smile that was repulsively friendly.

The Wolfgang of Damon's memories had died surrounded by muck and filth, drooling out the last of his life onto concrete.

Damon would know: he had touched his decaying body and turned over the singed flesh of his hands. The boiler room had been unpleasantly warm. Somehow, his body had felt cold.

He blinked. Wolfgang stared back. A rasp of disbelief escaped him, sounding closer to a maniacal wheeze. White-hot fury rose within him; he had never felt more livid. 

Damon leapt to his feet.

"Is this a fucking joke?!" he snapped, infuriated.

He regretted the motion immediately. His head was struck with a sudden lightness, and the wood of the carriage floor seemed to warp beneath his feet as he stumbled backwards.

He felt a grip on his arm, and moved to wrench it away. "Don't fucking touch—"

"Hey now!" Ingrid cut in. "You may not be feelin' right, but that's no way to speak to the gentleman."

Damon shot her a betrayed glare, even as she righted his stumbling skeleton with the delicate efficiency of an artist adjusting a crooked painting.

"I fear he may be... disoriented," he heard Wolfgang say diplomatically. "Please don't trouble yourself, Miss Grimwall."

"What the hell?" Damon hissed. "You can't be serio—!"

The train chugged on, its motion the only noise in the sudden silence. His eyes darted through the carriage. The volume of his anger had caused heads to turn, each expression some blend of wary, disapproving, or shocked.

They stared like he was some madman.

He felt mad.

"Yeesh... Potato-top's not doing so hot," Cassidy half-sang. If she had intended it to be subtle, then it was a pitiful excuse of a stage whisper: half of the ultimates turned to her, and she offered a shameless shrug in return.

Kai sputtered an awkward laugh. "Yeah," he said quietly. "No kidding..."

Damon rounded on them, so irked by their apathy, he didn't notice the golfer until she was two paces in front of him.

"Oi. What's your bloody damage?" Grace interrupted, returning his loudness and anger twofold. "You think you can get away with being a cranky old asshole just because you're some dainty princess? Come off the fuckin' grass!"

Her mint eyes blazed with a genuine anger she seemed to reserve for anything that moved. Anyone except Wolfgang, apparently. The bitterness that rose in his throat was all but instinctive. Of course she would defend...

Except Wolfgang was dead.

He was supposed to be dead, and Grace of anyone would be most infuriated at the sight of him righting his tie like nothing had happened. It made absolutely zero categorical sense for Grace to ever forgive him for that.

That was, assuming she thought he had died at all.

What the hell was going on?

Think, Damon, think.

He was the Ultimate Debater. Logic, deduction, and reasoning were child's play to him, natural and easy as breathing. He had to make sense of it all. Only he had that power. 

"What... What's happening?" Damon asked. He had intended for it to be a demand, and he loathed the weakness in his voice as he searched for the friendliest face he could.

"Darlin'," Ingrid said, frowning at him like he was some kicked puppy. "You collapsed to the floor the second you stepped on the train! We helped you to this bench here and Wolfie's been lookin' out for you. I'm sorry for startlin' you. We really were only trying to help."

"That's..." muttered Damon.

"This is the train for Eden's Garden Academy. I take it you are destination-bound for there, as well?" Wolfgang asked.

It was just like the first day, Damon realised.

Everything was exactly the same.

It couldn't be possible. Had it all — had that twisted game — all just been a dream?

His mind raced, fuelled with adrenaline potent as electricity. A vivid nightmare? He wished it was so easily dismissed. The class trials, Eva's execution, had been evil beyond comprehension. Even he wasn't so sick as to conjure up something so awful.

Yet such an appeal to his own emotions was riddled with fallacy. He needed concrete proof to shut the tap on his doubts. Think. Deduce.

Wolfgang had called Ingrid Miss Grimwall. Ingrid Grimwall was her name, and Damon couldn't have known that from stepping into the carriage and immediately losing consciousness. Grace. Cassidy. All faces and voices he knew.

Clairvoyance was about as real as santa and common sense.

Therefore, it couldn't possibly have been a dream; it followed that factual information from his memories matched reality.

It was undeniable. He had done this before. That only left one plausible conclusion.

Had he... travelled to the past?

Damon pushed all shadows of doubt from his mind. There wasn't time: he was sprinting to outpace a wheel rigged from the start.

"I need to get off this train," he said emphatically. "Now."

Chapter Text

Ingrid's eyes grew as round and wide as saucers. Evidently, Damon thought, she was too baffled by his behaviour to be of use. He pushed past Wolfgang and Grace, who were as clueless as each other. His eyes landed on the exact man he was looking for.

"You," he said.

Jean Delamer looked at him with the appraising steadiness he would expect of a captain moving from tumultuous seas to the eye of a storm. "Yes?"

"My suitcase," Damon said, gesturing to where it had been pushed to the front corner of the train compartment. "Could you use it to smash a window?"

The man frowned, the tilt of his brows betraying an uneasy concern. "I hardly think that will be necessary, aye? Are you feeling alright?"

Damon stifled a mental sigh. As he had thought from the moment he had met him, Jean was an oaf. He couldn't expect him to follow a straightforward question. He pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Listen, just answer the damn—"

"Hey, man," Desmond said, as Damon heard Grace's disbelieving 'is this nutcase fuckin' serious?' behind him. "Let's not get too heated, yeah? I mean, smashing up public property doesn't exactly sound..."

"U-um..." Eloise said quietly from behind him, shrinking even further towards the wall. "M-maybe... Let's not involve ourselves...?"

He heard Wenona huff. "What a pitiful display."

Irritation bubbled in his throat. They were so stupidly ignorant, just as they had all so blindly followed Wolfgang who had proved himself a lunatic in the first class trial. It was little wonder they would treat him like this the one time it mattered. The sands of time were slipping through his fingers, and they were making a game of punching holes in the hourglass.

"I don't have time for this!" Damon snapped, his frustration clawing its way out of his throat. "None of you understand the situation we're in! If you don't listen to me—"

"Man, what's your deal?" Cassidy demanded. "You think you're the protagonist or something?"

Damon spun on his heel, because he was not about to let Cassidy Amber of all people derail—

"Hey," a calm voice interjected, familiar in a way that brushed chills down Damon's neck. "Why don't we give him some space?"

His world seemed to pause, the ground lurching beneath his feet. Suddenly, his anger had vanished as if it had never been there at all. The claustrophobic walls of his tunnelled vision opened out.

In their absence stood Eva Tsunaka.

Damon was no mathematician, but he wondered if she would enjoy the fact her mere presence reduced everything in him to zero. His every thought, emotion, and impulse ceased. It was like an inevitable calculation, or some stat debuff in those games she so enjoyed.

Everything about her was exactly the same: the curl of her hair, the firmness of her expression, the analytical slant to her gaze. Her uniform, pristine and precise and unsplattered with her own blood. Something had been gouged out of him then, and the void of it left tender wounds that throbbed with agony at the sight of her. 

She had died in front of him, burned and stabbed and dropped with only her own screams and misery for company. He should be furious at her, for standing like nothing was wrong. Like she hadn't murdered to satisfy her own warped worldview. Like she hadn't walked her way into becoming a sacrifice on the alter of Tozu's twisted ambitions.

He wasn't.

He couldn't parse what that meant.

Damon couldn't dig a single word from the tangled mess of emotions in his chest any more than he could flick a switch on the laws of gravity.

His eyes burned.

Eva simply stared back. "What? Will you take issue with me as well?" She straightened her glasses impassively. "I suppose that's likely, given I move."

He nearly choked on a breath.

"No," he confessed, his voice quiet. "Not with you."

The train carriage was silent.

"Then, what's the reason for your commotion? I don't mean to sound harsh, but surely you can recognise it appears... erratic."

How had he forgotten? He couldn't do anything against the ill-advised tide of public favour. His memories proved that. He would have laughed if it weren't so criminally ironic. 

Equally, he couldn't let them all die. As devoid of fondness for them as he might be, he was going to drag this useless flock to safety or die trying.

That only left the issue: how could he explain himself?

"I'm an Ultimate," he said. It was a title he had been so proud of. It was all he had, once. The declaration felt so hollow to his own ears now. "My deduction abilities are second to none. I know something isn't right here." He doubted he would have convinced himself in anyone else's shoes, but there was a reason he wasn't the Ultimate Actor: it would have to do in a crisis. "Will you do me a favour?"

Eva didn't move. "Within reason," she said easily.

"Check the carriage doors. I... have a feeling they're locked."

"Oi. That's fuckin' nonsense, mate, I used the bathroom barely an hour ago—!" Grace began.

Eva rattled the handle. Her face seemed to pale a bit.

"Yes," she confirmed. "It's locked."

Damon watched Mark slink to the other end of the carriage.

"...This one's locked, too."

The weight of fifteen pairs of eyes turned to him.

"Okay," Damon said, running a hand down his face. "Fuck. Everyone, listen to me. We need to find a way out of this situation. Anyone with a working cellphone, start texting or calling for help now."

"With respect, Mr..?" Wolfgang began. "It's ill-advised to imply we're somehow trapped here. Not only is it broadly baseless, such an unfounded allegation will cause a panic amongst the individuals here."

Damon squarely ignored him.

"Message failed? The hell? I have the best data plan in the country!" Kai remarked. Damon turned to him. He hadn't expected Kai of all people to listen, but that was valuable information. A reception jammer to stop text messages? Or something more sinister? Kai continued to ramble. "I mean, the last time my story failed to update was, like, I can't even remember!"

Damon wanted to punch something.

"It's all well to contact the company for the faulty doors, but what purpose would smashing the windows serve?" Jean pondered aloud.

Then Damon remembered.

Shit.

How could he have forgotten something so essential?

His eyes fell on it.

"Hey, that bag!" Damon said, pointing to the black duffel bag next to Jett. "Is that yours?"

"Huh? Uh, no! It was here when I got on the train!" Jett insisted.

"That's weird," Wenona said. "Doesn't it smell... strange?"

"How so?" Ulysses repeated. "Could you describe it?"

"Oh, snap! I smell it too," Cassidy said enthusiastically. "Kind of... Chemical-y?"

Damon swore again. He turned to the ship captain.

"There are no openable windows. We need airflow. Do you get it now, Jean?" Damon said, his mind racing. "Whatever's in that thing... Here, use my suitcase to smash the windows."

He glanced back towards the far end of the train, only to see Jett fumbling with the bag's zip.

"Hey!" he called. "What the hell do you think you're—"

A sharp pop resounded through the cabin.

"Cool, you got it open," he heard Cassidy say.

"What's inside?" said Mark.

"Um." Jett said sheepishly. "That... wasn't the lock."

"Morons," Damon muttered.

"Everyone," Eva called. Finally, the situation was starting to dawn on them. Finally, someone else with sense. "Move away from that bag, now! We don't know what's in it. Come to this end of the train!"

Fortunately, Jean had at last spurned into action.

"Stand back, folks!" he commanded. "I'll try to shatter this as safely as I can, but glass may fly."

"I'll help, too!" Ingrid said, scrambling to follow suit. "Excuse me — that tough-lookin' case, can I use it?"

Bodies began to move. In the panic, Damon pulled out his cellphone. 'HELP', he texted, to every number he could. He held his breath as the delivery icon buffered slowly. His heart sank. He texted his parents one final, short message, before shoving his phone in his pocket before he could see whether it reached its destination, too afraid to hope for salvation.

Jean ran at the glass, hefting the suitcase towards the window with a strength Damon expected of a brute.

It rebounded hopelessly off the pane, again, and again.

"You're kiddin'!" Ingrid said.

"Reinforced glass? On a train?" Eva said in disbelief.

Damon felt his head spin.

For once, it wasn't as easy to explain as a betrayal of the mind.

"Hey, um, guys?" Jett said. "I'm not feelin'... too..."

He collapsed to the floor with a thud like a death knell.

"Eek!" Toshiko cried.

"W-why is this happening?!" Diana asked.

Damon felt everything pulling away from him.

"It's okay," he found himself saying. The words were delusional, no doubt induced by whatever sedative was filling his bloodstream. "It's... okay, Toshiko. Diana. Eva... Find somewhere to sit down." That was sensible, wasn't it? They were smaller, or... something... Collapsing on the hardwood would bruise... Hadn't he bruised last time?

Damon's mind slowly slipped.

He watched Mark fall. He didn't hear it.

"You... too... Ulysses..." he said, his mouth heavy. "Don't... get hurt..."

Darkness enveloped him like fate.

Chapter Text

Awareness crept over Damon like a fog rolling in: slowly, imperceptibly, until he was unequivocally immersed.

As sensation settled back into his body, the first thing he heard was the familiar, ceaseless thrum of a room he wished he was unfamiliar with.

His eyes snapped open to the unpleasant sight of rust and grey. Ugly piping trailed along the ceiling, dotted by cheap, flickering lamps that hung from withering exposed wires. It inspired a visceral sort of disgust in him, until he recognised the view. Then the emotion morphed to horror.

Damon hated this damned place.

He was in the boiler room again.

A hot wave of anger burned through him once more, the humidity of the room fanning his fury. He had known. He had known exactly what would happen, and he hadn't been able to do a damned thing about it. To think that ultimates could be so easily tricked.

Then again, Damon remembered exactly the path of idiocy said ultimates had thrown themselves down in the first timeline.

At least, he thought, he had learned something new. Whoever orchestrated that event had premeditated every last detail down to the strength of the windows. The gas, or whatever it was, had been exceptionally potent. He didn't remember it being so strong. Jett had collapsed in seconds.

Jett had been stupid enough to open it in the first place. 

Damon's head swam in a way even the stagnant, filthy water around him did not. The concrete of the central platform was as unforgiving as ever, and the way he shoved himself upright did not help his mood.

Crimson red caught his eye.

His breath caught in his throat.

Stretched out across the floor where her victim had been lay Eva Tsunaka, her palm outstretched like a silent offering. Her chest rose and fell in the unmistakeable rhythm of a girl alive and well. Her unconscious face was pinched as if in pain.

Supposedly unconscious, that was.

Looking twice, it seemed over-acted; a truly unconscious person would have their features completely slack. She may have made a fool of him in the first timeline, but Damon wouldn't falter again.

He should have known.

Eva hadn't trusted him, right from the very first moment.

Only this time, that suspicion was reversed.

"Hey," Damon called without thinking. No response. He hadn't expected one. He supposed he should play along as he had been. "Are you awake?"

Eva barely stirred. It didn't matter: Damon needed time to think.

He sighed, then directed an absent gaze towards the vent.

His position hadn't changed, then, nor had the person he had been paired with. Could he draw any inferences from that? Had the matches been pre-determined, or truly random? Wolfgang and Grace had ended up together, after all, in more ways than one. Frankly, Damon wished that he weren't privy to that particular piece of knowledge, but it did speak to a certain element of allegiance in the pairing system. If Tozu knew of his memories, the logical thing would be to shuffle him around.

Was the timeline proceeding in a fixed way? That was impossible, given Damon had had no qualms about trying to escape this damned outcome. His actions had monumentally changed the events on the train already. For all he knew, he was first on Mara's hit list.

Was it dangerous to act on his memories? For better or worse, he had only surface-level knowledge of the multiverse theory and the butterfly effect. Damon was a debater, not a physicist, ignorant to whether he was dooming the universe by stepping beyond his role.

It wasn't like he could ask anyone, either: in a testament to how useless his classmates' talents were, there were quite literally zero scientists amongst them. They were inane hobbyists: influencing, matchmaking, blacksmithing, of all things. Eden's Garden was marketed as an academy for academic pursuits, yet another lie to toss to the rotting heap. He was on his own.

Whatever the case, it was too late now.

If his actions were having detrimental consequences on the fabric of reality, then he should never have kept his stupid memories in the first place. If there was some supreme deity out there, Damon had some choice words to use.

Of course, it would be fallacious to attribute what had happened to anything fantastical. There was no proof as to the existence of ghosts, or magic, or time travel, or jumping through alternate universes. Cold logic was all he needed.

Nothing came to mind.

Irritated, he leapt to his feet.

He rooted around in the boxes. Everything was the same. He made for the door, the handle unflipped.

"Hey," he said again. "You must be awake by now. Come on." Then, because she still didn't move: "Don't make me leave you here."

Finally, Eva's eyes fluttered open. Their cold blue landed on Damon unflinchingly, and she held his gaze calmly as she rose to her feet.

"Already awake," Eva mused. "What made you think that?"

Her voice was steady, unrecognisable from her guttural exclamations from the class trial. Damon wanted to laugh.

Damon wanted to hate her, too.

She had betrayed him. Then, she had tried to cast him to the wolves. At the end of it all, she hadn't said a word to him, instead focusing her attentions upon shattering Diana's heart. Little did she know it had only strengthened the girl's unwavering, incomprehensible faith.

Eva asked how Damon knew she was awake: the irony was that Damon knew nothing about her, not anymore. The beating warmth of the alliance they had forged was a lie. It had died a miserable death, wounded by a thousand cuts in the class trial. Layers of deception had been peeled away. He wished he could forget.

It left him with nothing but knowledge of the facts, paradoxical as they were.

Eva was the kind of person who would lie about her talent, yet do so by naming herself a liar.

Eva was the kind of person who would test him by pretending to be asleep, then declare her intentions and method as honestly as a saint.

Eva was the kind of person who would kill, then smile at him like she was innocent.

Damon had watched her die for it. He couldn't hate her, but neither could he discard the ghosts of his own lived experience.

Eva folded her arms, still waiting for her answer.

Fuck it.

"You did the same thing in my past life," Damon said.

He was greeted by silence.

Damon wasn't sure what he was expecting. A laugh, a frown. Instead, he received total blankness, accompanied by some vague air of disapproval.

She probably thought he was crazy.

"You have an odd sense of humour," she sighed. "No, there must be an explanation for what gave me away..."

Insecure, his mind supplied from nowhere. Immediately self-critical.

How hadn't he seen it before?

"Fine," he said. "Look at us. We're about the same height and body-weight, aren't we? We were exposed to that gas for the same amount of time. It wouldn't make sense for us to be disproportionately impacted."

For a moment, Eva looked surprised. Her eyes narrowed, then flicked over his body, as if to verify the statement.

"Charming," she commented drily. She didn't seem offended so much as she was unimpressed. "Not one for tact, are you?"

"Find me when tact spares us from assault and kidnapping. I'll sing its praises," Damon remarked.

Her expression hardened, contemplative. "So you've reached the same conclusion I have."

He shoved his hands in his pocket. Inexplicably, when she looked at him, he felt very, very small. He wanted to get out of this damned room. "Why else would they install shatterproof glass on a train?"

"A fair point," Eva acknowledged, adjusting the slant of her glasses. "Well, it would be remiss of me not to ask. What exactly happened on that train?"

I should have left her here, thought Damon.

Chapter Text

In the unpleasant warmth of the boiler room, Eva's stoic gaze sent a chill down his spine. Since she was demanding an answer so forcefully, he had no choice but to acquiesce.

Damon shoved his hands in his pockets, eyeing the room.

"What part?" he deflected. The truth was that he didn't have a credible explanation. He had acted on impulse. Everything was raw and fresh, like rubbed skin on the cusp of bleeding. He needed to buy himself time. "Be more specific."

She levelled a critical eye at him. "What do you know?"

"About what, exactly? Probably as much as you, anyway," Damon huffed. It was a stupid answer. 

"Funny," Eva replied flatly. "I wasn't the one demanding that suitcases be hammered against windows."

"I've had worse ideas," he quipped, then sighed. "Listen, do you really think now is the time for this? If we woke up as a pair, it's likely the others are nearby. We should get our bearings as soon as possible if we want to escape from our kidnappers," he said, even though he knew such a thing was impossible. "Time is of the essence."

She didn't move an inch.

"You're assuming the others are nearby," Eva challenged. "What makes you so certain?"

He barely resisted rolling his eyes in response.

Poking weak logical holes wasn't like her, at least not when she wasn't confronting the impending reality of her own execution. The stronger part of his argument was the latter, anyway, and he could only imagine she was aiming for the first limb because she implicitly agreed.

"Yes, because it's a rational inference. Why else would we be together? It would be easier for an assailant to separate us: fewer minds and hands to put together. Two victims in the same room increases the likelihood of other victims in the proximity. Maybe they rushed, or had some other purpose. It's too early for conjecture."

"Then you'll answer me in time?" Eva pushed. "Your behaviour was, frankly, anything but normal."

"As is our situation," Damon returned. "Listen, I'm leaving. Do what you want."

With a casual indifference, he made for the door. He moved as easily as the roll of a die: a gamble, because his foremost priority was getting Eva out of the basement as soon as was humanly practical.

If he knew one truth, it was that Eva Tsunaka was ruthlessly analytical. Even in the original timeline, her first instinct was to comb over every detail of each storage closet before feigning unconsciousness. It was only a matter of time, then, before Eva discovered the mechanics of the vent, and concocted a convoluted plan using the cables she had doubtless already discovered nearby.

Eva was resourceful. It wasn't just physical objects she collected like a crow: it was knowledge.

Removing an immediate search of the boiler room would limit a critical piece of information, at least for the time being. It wouldn't prevent murder in the long-term, but at least it would damn well make him feel better.

He stepped out into the coolness of the halls. They were as dank as he remembered. The concrete walls were discoloured from rust or mould - Damon didn't care to discover which. A stale smell scratched at his nose as he breezed past the two pairs of closed doors he was familiar with. Walking the length of the corridor felt like walking to the gallows. He couldn't shake the memories of feeling his way through the pitch-black darkness, stumbling and terrified. He couldn't ignore the phantom sensation of his past self's trepidation as it had collected cold sweat on the back of his neck.

The noise of Eva's hasty footsteps pulled him to reality.

"Wait a moment. What about the room we were in? We may have found something near that generator."

He thought of the murkiness of the moat between the platform and metal.

He thought of turning Wolfgang's lifeless hands over to examine his scars, whilst the legs of his corpse rotted in the pool.

"You couldn't pay me to wade in that filthy water," he grumbled sharply.

He paused at the edge of the stairs. The layout, everything, was just as he remembered.

He really was back.

Eva caught up to him.

"We must be underground. We should move carefully," she warned in a hushed tone. "We don't know who might be patrolling If we're caught..."

Damon nodded. He knew there would be no-one, but she didn't.

"Before we go," she said. "I'm Eva. What's your name?"

He had forgotten that they hadn't introduced themselves yet.

"Damon Maitsu. Ultimate Debater," he said automatically. It rolled off the tongue as easily as it always had.

He heard the huff of an almost-laugh escape Eva's lips. "Hah. Figures," she said wryly, as she angled to peer up the staircase.

Damon's eyes snapped to her. "What's that supposed to mean?"

She didn't bother turning to him. "You're quite disagreeable. A proclivity for argument doesn't fall far from the tree."

He felt his eyes narrow. "Debate is an art," he retorted, emphasising each word. "What are you implying? Reducing it to some base urge to argue for the sake of it is- Ugh. Whatever, it's hardly the time."

Curiously, she remained silent, apparently uninterested. Damon followed her gaze. There was nothing to see.

Then an idea sparked in his mind.

"Well then. What's your talent?"

This time, it was his turn to stare.

Half-shrouded in the gloomy lighting of the basement, and barely touched by the warmth of the luxurious light fixtures from the floor above, Eva averted her eyes.

"Just because you're short-sighted enough to disclose yours unprompted doesn't mean I have to do the same in return."

Damon shot her the most arrogant smirk he could.

"If you're talentless, just say so."

The reaction was immediate. Eva's nostrils flared, an expression of anger crossing her features so rapidly, he would have missed it if he wasn't watching.

There was an agonising pause.

"Ultimate Liar," she said finally.

Damon later wondered why the first thing he felt was disappointment.

He knew it was what she was going to say. He had deliberately laid the path to saying it. Was there was a small, stupid part of him that hoped because it was them, she would trust him with the truth? In another life, Eva had coldly acted out a premeditated murder. He shouldn't have the space to be so naive anymore. In this one, he presented as clinically insane.

When he spoke, he was ruthlessly calm.

"No, you're not."