Chapter Text
██ TRIALS, SECOND STAGE
TEST SUBJECT 2.01
NAME: █ █ █
AGE: 20
EMPLOYMENT STATUS: ███ (Independent Contractor)
EDUCATION: Graduate of the Blue Lock* Program
EMERGENCY CONTACT: █ █ █
REFERRAL BY: █ **
IMPLANTS
Brain-Machine. Licensed to Itoshi Industries.
Invasive BCI, cybernetic augmentation.Ports of Connection: spinal nerves (C1-7, T1-12, L1-5), sacrum, cauda equina.
AFFINITY FOR ██ TRIALS: 104%
▁ ▁ ▁ ▁
* See additional notes on background
** Preliminary screening conducted by ████
ADDITIONAL NOTES ON BACKGROUND:
The Blue Lock Program was one of two¹ Plans of Action conducted from 2056 to 2059 by Dr. Ego Jinpachi to scout and train “the next generation in charge of shaping a future growing increasingly dependent on rapidly developing industries.” The three-year accelerator program was aimed specifically towards the future of biomechatronics and cyberwarfare, and chosen Blue Lock alumni now comprise the leading horizontal keiretsu in the Peninsula.
Test Subject 2.01 has been known to surpass average compatibility rates with cyberware since entry into Blue Lock, and is the only one of all the eligible alumni to exceed a perfect affinity rate.
▁ ▁ ▁ ▁
¹ Not to be confused with the U20 Program, formed around foundational aeronautics and space research on the Ursa Major Moving Group / Collinder 285. See separate list of eligible alumni.
⊡
██ TRIALS CASE FILE 054: FINAL DEBRIEFING
PORTION OF TRANSCRIPT — OBTAINED 05/2061
PRESIDING DOCTOR: ██
DATE: YEAR 2060, MONTH 04
DOCTOR
Please confirm for the record that your name is █ █ █.
SUBJECT
My name is █ █ █ and I consent to my participation in the ██ trials.
DOCTOR
And are you aware that all aspects of your participation will remain confidential, and you will not be subjected to any harm or deception?
SUBJECT
Of course.
DOCTOR
Are you aware that you are the first to undergo this section of the trials?
SUBJECT
I am.
DOCTOR
Are you aware there is no way to undo the test once it has been administered?
SUBJECT
Yes.
DOCTOR
Are you aware that there might be unforeseen results, and that your participation will be recorded in all future trials within the limits of your right to confidentiality?
SUBJECT:
Yup.
DOCTOR
Are you aware that the project will require us to enter this address and administer the procedure while you are unconscious, and that success will mean you will not be informed of the exact nature of your participation?
SUBJECT
Yes.
DOCTOR
Are you aware that this includes removing any and all recollection of what you agreed to contribute to this test, as per the procedure we greenlit for use after the first stage of these trials?
SUBJECT:
I am.
DOCTOR
Are you aware that you have a right to a debriefing about the general results of the study, but may not obtain your individual results so as to not compromise the effects of the procedure?
SUBJECT
I am. Yeah.
DOCTOR
Are you aware that should the first trial succeed, you have consented to undergo a follow-up procedure contingent on previous results?
SUBJECT
Yeah. That was my suggestion, actually.
DOCTOR:
Please turn the page. Thank you. Lastly, note that the █ Foundation accepts unlimited liability for any and all recovery you may need after the completion of the test.
SUBJECT
Really? Any and all?
DOCTOR
Yes.
SUBJECT
Sweet.
DOCTOR
If you consent to all of the above, please sign here with your fingerprint.
SUBJECT
Ha-ha. I’m kind of starting to feel it.
DOCTOR
Should I give you a moment and turn off the recording?
SUBJECT
No, no, a second to breathe is fine.
DOCTOR
Would you like me to go over any safety concerns you might have?
SUBJECT
No, no, I trust █ and Dr. ██. It’s a big deal if all of this goes well.
DOCTOR
It is. But that’s no reason to undergo it if you do not feel completely ready.
SUBJECT
Getting your name in history is a big thing to turn down. It’s only difficult right now.
DOCTOR
Maybe so.
SUBJECT
Hey, doc, do you think I’d still be the same person after all this?
DOCTOR
In what way?
SUBJECT
In any way.
DOCTOR
I think that depends on you.
SUBJECT
Boo. What a non-committal answer.
DOCTOR
But there is no committed answer. No matter what you gain or lose, no matter where you end up in life, you can always find a way back towards the person you want to be. It’s a lifelong walk you’ll have to take, regardless.
SUBJECT
Life is a pilgrimage, huh.
DOCTOR
Not always. It can be a hike. Or a game of hide and seek. Or tag. A walk in the garden, perhaps. It depends on whether you know that the thing you’re searching for every time you search for anything in life is only ever yourself.
SUBJECT
Every time?
DOCTOR
Every time. Whether you look for love or success or escape from life, what you are looking for is a version of yourself you can live with.
SUBJECT
Harsh.
DOCTOR
I don’t think it is. Think of it like the space voyages that were launched six years ago. Humanity will never understand it, but in searching for life somewhere else, all they are looking for is a mirror of ourselves. Discovery and fulfillment in service of ourselves, even. I believe the same applies on the individual level. That any step you take in life is a step in service of yourself. Whether you know it or not. Whether it harms you or helps you or neither.
SUBJECT
Will I be looking for myself from scratch then? After this?
DOCTOR
Maybe.
SUBJECT
Well. Okay. Here. I consent to everything read to me. I understand what I’ve signed. I understand that if all this goes wrong, █ will pay for everything I need. Am I missing anything?
DOCTOR
No. That’s everything.
SUBJECT
Then there we go. Signed and confirmed.
⊡
I. GALATEA
this is how it happened / i was made far away / & born here / after all the plants died / after the earth was covered in white / i was born among the stars / i was born in a basement / i was born miles beneath the ocean / i am part machine [...]
// do you believe you have consciousness
sometimes / when the sidewalk / opens my knee / i think / please / please let me / remember this
"TURING TEST," FRANNY CHOI
⊡
Year 2061, Month 07, Day 17
Location: 35° 39' 10.03" N 139° 44' 8.09" E
Time: 18:35
The first giveaway is a wrinkle of paper.
It’s drowned at once by the drumming of the hot rain against Rin’s hood, but with a tap behind one ear, he pulls up a grainy recording of the last five seconds and hears the noise more clearly.
A wrapper, he’ll guess, just as likely to be plastic as it is beeswax. Freshly opened, or left to litter the street under someone’s shoe.
Either option means that whoever’s been following Rin is less careful than anyone with enough wisdom to spare should be—as does the fact that they have kept steady at his heel for three blocks now, just two alley shortcuts away from being right back where they started the lap. Such noticeability is the work of someone careless, and Rin can’t decide if it annoys him more than it puts him on edge to know that despite this, he’s yet to catch so much as a silhouette.
Tokimitsu must have eyes on him from somewhere close by, ever six times as paranoid as a head of security has reason to be when the person they’re guarding can protect himself better than half of the city—but to prove a point, Rin lifts his legs slightly higher in his next step, double checking for the weight of a six-round tranquilizer in one pocket and a pair of handcuffs in the other.
He doesn’t reach for either yet.
Around him, the Azabu district has already grown dark and silent since he left earlier this evening. Fluorescent traffic lights flick lazily from color to color with no one around to ignore them, and all the life visible down the entire street is contained within the occasional cube of light peeking from behind the low fog that blankets each nearby high-rise.
All the holograms have been disabled ahead of the thunderstorm tonight, and for once, Rin is alone in crossing the road. No approaching cars, no lifesize simulacrum of a crossing guard cheering him on for obeying traffic rules, no cushy reminder that in this neighborhood, he gets to live untouched by the engines that roar to life each night in the Roppongi district and beyond.
Rin knows what it means to have this district to call home, what it means to occupy an area he can safely walk around in with the illusion that he doesn’t have a team ready to be deployed at half a second’s notice, and part of that knowing is the awareness that nearly every monochrome shape of neon he passes under as he reaches the other end of the street is powered by the Itoshi zaibatsu one way or another.
It’s a deadly kind of mutualism, what allows Rin to live as untouchable to this city as he would be to the technology he himself has a hand in manufacturing for these people.
But apparently not everyone has been sufficiently informed of his immunity.
The next noise to reach him is a shattering crunch of something crystalline, close enough to startle anyone else, and Rin doesn’t waste a second wondering how he hadn’t noticed a presence crossing behind him before he’s moving on reflex and shoving a hand into the darkness of a narrow alley.
His hand closes around nothing, but he doesn’t need to wait for his eyes to adjust to the dark to feel movement—someone dodging without a sound, footsteps completely absent even as Rin feels the movement of rain shift around another person’s body.
He grits his teeth and waits for impact.
None comes.
Rin has always been more sensitive to the proximity of another person, one of many things he’s wired to be doubly aware of than an average human, and he’s not afraid to chase, dipping his body into the alley until he makes out the faint outline of his pursuer.
A build slighter than his, surely drenched in the hot rain by now, steps as light as one end of a rod held between thumb and forefinger.
Rin doesn’t see the fist coming for him.
It manages to lob his shoulder just before instinct kicks in enough to dodge—but it’s all the other person needs to corner Rin solely into the defensive. He parries two flat hands meaning to land swift heavy hits against different areas of his torso, each time retreating too quickly for Rin to even find a wrist to grab.
They’re not hitting to be deadly. Far from it, even if persistent and anything but gentle. It’s a rote attack pattern, one that Rin places to a source with ease, and it’s with no small amount of irritation that two things dawn on him: that he heard both noises not because his pursuer is an amateur but because he’d been allowed to; and that all this guarded pursuit has been is nothing but a fun prank for someone who Rin’s security detail knows well enough to indulge.
Even worse, the next attack gives Rin the unwanted leisure of seeing it coming and having time to decide what to do about it—and he stifles an intense but childish need to land a petty slap while he retrieves the pair of magnet-powered handcuffs from the inside pocket of his raincoat.
There’s a clang as the handcuffs drag the other person by the wrist and slam a body flat against a nearby steel pole.
Then: "Okay—Ow?"
Half his body still in the shadow of the alley, Bachira Meguru looks like an imitation of himself in a black bodysuit Rin has rarely seen him in, stuck to the lines of his torso simultaneously like armor and a second skin. The silver breathing mask over the lower half of his face is pulled down with little care, revealing Bachira wincing through a smile.
It’s only until he moves again, pouting at his cuffed arm, that the version of him Rin can recognize anywhere wobbles into visibility with a theatrical groan: same old harshly chopped hair he’d no doubt nipped at himself in an airport bathroom, the yellows and greens of his highlights washed out into something lighter, almost softer, by a nearby hovering streetlight pod trying its best to stay afloat in the rain.
It must have been almost a year since Rin had last seen Bachira, but playing spot the difference won’t serve him here—so he zeroes in only on how the recognizable lilt of Bachira’s voice grates as it always has when he says:
"You’re as sadistic as ever, Rin-chan."
There’s a whine there, as though Rin has been unfair somehow.
"You let me notice you."
"Yeah? After following you for a bit, though! Then I realized the whole point of tag is the sense of urgency in knowing you’re being chased—" Bachira tries to pull at the handcuffs. When they don’t give after different attempts at maneuvering his arm, he stops to frown at where he remains fastened to the post. "Jeez, what did you make this thing with?"
Rin reaches over.
The rain beats down even louder against the hood of his coat.
With a beep and a status message in Rin’s vision, the handcuffs release Bachira.
"You failed," Rin mutters.
Bachira rubs his freed wrist. "At?"
"The sense of urgency."
"Only ‘cause Rin-chan’s no fun to chase!" Bachira sticks his tongue out between his teeth. "Next time you be it and I’ll do the running—"
Rin whips around and tunes out the rest of the sentence.
Bachira, of course, follows.
"No, no, hey, aren’t you gonna tell me why you came by BAR-CHA earlier today?"
"I didn’t. Stop yelling in my ear."
"You mean the person they described as ‘shy, cute and soft-spoken’ wasn’t you? Could have fooled me."
His footsteps are the kind of soundless only Bachira’s ever are, nothing new or especially disorienting when the opposite would have been more bizarre—yet Rin finds himself too aware of that silence, of how alone his steps are even in their silenced taps against the sidewalk when they take two winding right turns down an alleyway.
Jaw rigid, Rin kicks up a splash of water along the way from too aggressive a step into a puddle. "I sent Tokimitsu alone for a reason."
"I know, just messing with you," Bachira tells the shadows, and Rin glares at thin air when he realizes he fell for the bait. "You could have contacted me directly if you needed something, though—"
Rin doesn’t mean to, not really, but one controlled blink and he finds himself already pressing Bachira against one end of the alley, his back to the wall and his chest solid under Rin’s arm. His bodysuit is a shock of unnatural heat even through Rin’s raincoat, and he cycles through fifty things to bite out—you’re an idiot for being out in this weather in only that, maybe, or not even Yoichi knew a way to contact you short of going to the Edge himself and it’s been eating at him, or even what are you playing at, toying around with me instead of coming when you’re beckoned like you always do?—but all of it dies halfway up his throat and leaves space only for:
"I never said I needed you."
They’re entirely in the dark now, the noise of the rain a layer removed from the persistent drumming it has kept up all evening.
Even without seeing Bachira’s face, Rin feels the weight of his smile.
"I know, Rin-chan. I said if you needed something."
Bachira nudges Rin’s arm with an elbow.
Gentle, but not a request.
Rin takes two stiff steps back. It places him right in the range of the entrance’s sensor, and he stays still as it takes two seconds to evaluate his presence.
It’s a too-long breath of total quiet, no reply rising to Rin’s tongue, before the click of a series of locks unlatching comes from the dark.
"Winter of second year at Blue Lock," Rin grits out. "January. What did we do with a deck of—"
"Cards! We didn’t know any card games but a Western deck was the only thing we had to entertain us ‘cause of that cyber blackout incident across the city." Bachira’s voice is faux dejected. "Rin-chan… You trust me so little you’d think I’m an impostor?"
"Spare me the dramatics. It’s protocol."
"My memory’s not like it used to be, y’know," says Bachira, as Rin slides a door open and leads them down a dark tunnel. "Between the implants in my literal spine and all the info overload from Netdancing—"
"You answered it just fine."
A sigh.
Beneath them, with only the slightest vibration, the elevator lurches downwards, and the lights above flick on.
Bachira groans at the burst of white.
He is drenched, his temperature-regulating Netdancing suit not quite waterproof at a closer glance under the overhead lights of the elevator. Shucking off his hood, Rin has half the mind—irrational, difficult to excuse in the name of efficiency—to slip off his own coat and wrestle it around Bachira. To shove him back into warmth that feels wrong to see him without, or to blur the contours of his silhouette in that bodysuit, to tuck away the curl of his eyelashes and the way his damp hair sticks to his nape, all of it suddenly impossible for Rin to tear his gaze away from.
He stares emptily down at Bachira instead.
Bachira meets the look with round eyes. "Are you really not gonna tell me what’s going on? What happened to the Rin-chan who gets right to business?"
The elevator stops.
Rin steps off first. "Maybe you should learn to wait, Bobcut."
Bachira’s laugh just about glitters. "I did miss the nicknames."
The elevator opens to the second of three floors, leading directly to a steel-and-glass bridge looming over the artificial waterfall that the turbines on Rin’s compound rely on for hydroelectric power. It’s ancient technology, but Rin holds stubborn faith in the reliability of a design that’s been allowed to remain in use even as everything else around it grew old and obsolete. Human beings, in their own way, are an example, though Rin is just as stubbornly sure that no other species so ill-equipped for permanence can at the same time insist on immortality at every turn. Immortality of lives, of memories, of relationships, most of which statistically cannot be designed for forever.
Buyable objects alone are really, truly mortal in their world, but Rin doesn’t prefer to be surrounded by as much analog minimalism as possible just to be contrarian, nor out of any preference towards what Aryu might call stylish and sleek. It’s just easier to think around simple things when simple things are easy to fortify: angular shapes, monochromatic textures, a small village of steel and timber and concrete in a dead-and-dying city of synthetic glass. The only deviation from simplicity are the shimmering waves of caustic light splashed in random bursts against the walls, some of them refracted by the water it passes along the way, others a beam of unexpected yellow-orange warmth from the hundreds of screens that make up the main warehouse’s ceiling, each reflecting whatever sky it’s been told to approximate.
It’s nearly always the tail end of a sunset, these days.
Behind Rin, Bachira gasps.
"Yo," calls Isagi’s voice from the third floor, convincingly casual above the distant sound of falling water. "I thought I’d never see you again in this lifetime."
He has, unsurprisingly, already made himself comfortable at Rin’s workstation on the second floor: legs propped up on the desk and a Folio on his lap, scrolling through three different files on three of the nine screens that cover an entire wall. He’s peering down at them through the glass railings that overlook the lower floor, but he’s still visibly lost in his search for whatever piece of information he couldn’t wait for Rin to provide. As restless for something to do as ever, as if any moment spent not running is a crucial part of some invisible race given up for no good reason.
It exhausts Rin. It comforts him. It unsettles him. It keeps him on his toes, keeps him perpetually poised to continue moving for the sole fact that Isagi Yoichi also is.
As if he needed a second longer to confirm that Rin had brought back a real Bachira, Isagi finally smiles down at them both. His eyes are as unnerving as always, twin cuts of moonlight overlooking more than they should. Ganymede and Callisto rising higher than all of Jupiter’s other moons, an arresting quality to them that Rin would never dare describe with words as lofty as lovely or delicate. Whatever delicacy there is among them three is all Bachira’s, even when he ruins it the moment he opens his mouth and lets whatever the hell he wants come out; Isagi is made of quieter features and expressions, stealthier though more frenetic, more urgent. His eyes are at once ice and uncut stone, a coolness to them that can slice farther than you expect just when you think there’s a spark there to mistakenly liken to mere warmth.
Rin would know. He’s spent more than his share of nights in the last few months forcing a sleep patch into his system because otherwise he’ll spend days wondering if it makes him the trailblazer or the follower between them, the way he carries his and Isagi’s relationship inside a body not quite designed for it. If it will warm him or burn him in the end, this push and pull between him and Isagi, the perpetually vicious way Rin’s heart seems to seize even at the sound of his voice, yet how much it also connects him to a feeling that doesn’t feel wholly his—of being young and small, hand in his brother’s and thinking the size of the universe runs tiny next to the human-sized desire to follow after another person because you trust that they’re headed to the only destination that matters.
But then Rin’s eyes graze over Bachira, at the way Bachira’s own expression lights up completely at the sight of Isagi, and it hits Rin with that same viciousness that to ask himself who he is to Isagi and who Isagi is to him might be to ask the wrong person altogether.
It makes him reluctant, this knowledge, and there’s nothing he hates more than having variables he can’t account for with certainty.
Isagi is calling something else out from above them, trying in vain to untangle himself from the chair while Bachira takes his time restlessly navigating all the pieces of Rin’s most recent work scattered across the steel work desks: a mood organ, or at least something designed to alter moods without relying on feeding drugs to the brain and hoping for the best. Bachira looks like he wants to touch at least one part, but the need to run to Isagi wins, sending him nimbly sliding across the floor to reach the stairs.
Rin turns away before he can watch their reunion and do something unnecessary like linger.
He heads to the only corner of the main warehouse made for living, shedding his coat and passing it off to a foot-high robot that he’d only designed for clutter clean-up but has since employed itself in other areas of housekeeping thanks to Isagi’s meddling. It blinks a Welcome Back :) at Rin through the refurbished tablet he has given it for a face, before retreating to put his coat somewhere it will be left to cool and dry.
The compound that Rin considers more base of operations than home began as an underground storage bunker for his pieces: prototypes that are nowhere near the level of junk but are too early in what it will evolve to become, some of them put to work in various corners of the house as cameras or voice-activated switches or analog substitutes in the case of an electrical blackout, while others have been reworked as constituent parts of an ongoing project or two.
Bachira used to come over uninvited no less than once a week to find something new to loot, but it’s been a long time since he was around for an invitation to matter. Everything else that hasn’t found a place to go has been left to sit in the hall that Rin had steadily started adding to the main warehouse in the last year, or awarded a spot on one of the shelves that take up a separate garage in the lowest floor of the warehouse. Each of them categorized and labelled meticulously for easy browsing because it’s the only way Rin can justify keeping his rejects around in the same place he sleeps, eats, and lives and breathes his work.
The Puppeteer’s Den, Aryu likes to call the compound, but Rin finds it too ironic a name for what he is and too flamboyant for a place that’s graveyard and minefield and altar and cage all at once. He might be an inventor in theory the way Daedalus and Gepetto were inventors in their myths, but in practice he’s no more and no less than a radioactive ground zero for the products that eventually find their way into the Itoshi corporation’s series of offerings: home automata, transportation upgrades, cyberware alternatives to traditional medical solutions, and with the addition of Isagi’s work in the last year, a near-monopoly on the Metavision industry.
It’s Rin’s clear-cut role that distinguishes his work from his brother’s: Sae is an inventor of the mind, a hard-to-please uncompromising genius who discovers an intangible idea somewhere among erratic chemical reactions, the prodigy who only dirties his hands with grease when he must, while Rin’s domain is specifically where the conceptual is made practical. His genius is in surveying any given set of data, no matter how impossible or unmanageable, and knowing from intuition what to do with it until it’s something that anyone can work with. He’s a tinkerer, has been from the first memory he has of being allowed into Sae’s lab in the suburban penthouse they called their childhood home, and all that’s changed is that the backdrop Rin’s tinkering works against now is the size of thousands of households and careers.
Theoretically, there is no location or scenario too unpredictable for Rin, no future he can’t foresee and invent a device to make convenient, no flaw he doesn’t see where others see none. He tinkers and adapts and plays at being a prophet, and if it frustrates him more than it should when his creations cannot justify the space they take up unless they’re discarded or repurposed, if it frustrates him more than it should when he’s forced to admit that his hands are ironically too human to give shape to one of Sae’s ideas—then time has told that the future will someday also reveal an algorithm for dealing with that.
While he looks for a fresh towel and a set of clothes, Rin blinks through all the status messages he’s received since this evening. He dismisses most of them, takes a second to record a curt audio reply to Tokimitsu asking for confirmation that he hadn’t in fact allowed Rin to be kidnapped by someone posing as one of their old schoolmates, then allows himself two more seconds to brace for the inevitable crackle of energy that Isagi and Bachira always end up being when placed in any space together.
But when he finally ambles back where he came, Rin finds the other two halfway down the stairs to the top floor, standing two unnatural steps away from each other as they talk, as if one had gone in for a hug and had received a high five instead.
Rather than try to deduce who did what, Rin beckons Bachira down to him with a finger.
As soon as he’s close enough, Rin throws the towel at his face and shoves the clothes into his arms.
"Aw," comes Bachira’s muffled voice. "Was Rin-chan worried I’d get sick?"
"You’re tracking rainwater all over my place."
Isagi laughs, alight and sincere, as Bachira makes a melodramatic performance out of disappearing into the first floor bathroom.
Rin checks the surveillance cameras through his internal system to wait for the door to close behind Bachira.
Then he turns to Isagi.
He only gets a close-mouthed smile in reply. Rin’s gaze remains fixed in turn, watching Isagi skulk down to the fully-padded conversation pit that makes up the entirety of the living room area in the whole compound. Isagi keeps down the sigh that Rin can tell is dying to be released, but he runs a telltale hand through his hair with a little too much roughness to be nonchalant as he all but launches himself down onto a seat.
In the next hallway, the bathroom door opens.
Bachira is still trying to knot a pair of Isagi’s light blue sweatpants one more time around his waist, towel balanced perfectly on his head. The small owl embroidered on one corner of his borrowed sweater, it only strikes Rin now, belongs to a birthday gift that one of the P.X.G. guys had brute-forced under his office door last September.
Sensing Rin’s gaze, Bachira looks up at him. A shock of eye contact that makes Rin feel, oddly, caught.
Isagi beats both of them to talking.
"Were you at a job? What’s with the suit?"
The words linger lighthearted and nonchalant enough, but Isagi can’t help himself, can never help himself, and looking only at the ceiling, hands knotted over his stomach, he adds:
"We didn’t know you were back in town."
"I’ve been back!" says Bachira, walking past Rin and forgoing the steps down to the conversation pit to step right into a free space across Isagi. "Nagicchi didn’t tell you?"
Voice growing stranger by the second, Isagi asks, "Nagi knew where you were?"
Rin listens without looking at them, taking a lap through his workstation to reorganize Isagi’s mess with painstaking attention, then drifting to the kitchen area to grab a chilled can of something carbonated enough to hurt.
He closes the door to the refrigeration machine.
He stands still.
He opens it again to grab two more cans.
"—little heist," Bachira’s saying, his voice distant even as Rin approaches. "Or at least he said I can call it that if it helps make it seem more exciting."
"That’s so weird to think about." Isagi has already sat up, weight balanced on his elbows to train the full weight of his disbelief on Bachira—and on Rin, who he watches walk down the steps like he’s also somehow responsible for why all of this is news. "I thought you and Reo didn’t talk much."
"No way, we totally do—Oh. Thanks, Rin-chan. Whoa."
Bachira stops talking altogether to blink at the can that Rin handed him.
He keeps staring down at it even as Rin all but shoves a second can against Isagi’s cheek, unrelenting against Isagi thrashing and whining about the cold. Half of it is for show anyway; both of them are keeping an eye on Bachira, who’s a little too still, as if Rin has handed him a grenade.
Any moment of attention from Rin and Bachira will marvel at it, enough that for at least a whole year at Blue Lock, Rin had been sure Bachira just thought him incapable of any basic decency and had to reflect on it each time he was proven wrong. Rin hadn’t cared too much about it when they were younger; of all the people they went to school with, each of them now entrenched one way or another in the same sector, the same industry, the same world that promised them a place wholly their own, Rin’s relationship with Bachira remains the only one that defies easy categorizing. He’s never outright called Rin his equal or his rival, not like Isagi, who wormed his way to Rin’s side through sheer force of will and a shit-eating grin at once a familiar balm and a supernova, but Bachira is also the only other person aside from Isagi that Rin has learned to make space for in his life for better or for worse, though the necessity of that space comes and goes, ever fleeting, ever going from metastasis to benign in a blink.
Bachira never oversteps, even when it seems like he wants to, even when it seems like he’s about to. Rin has always taken that much for fact. But mostly he’s allowed it because he can tell the difference, can separate Bachira’s intent from what he actually does, and being privy to that distinction acts as a kind of knowing between them. It might not make them close by default, but it doesn’t make them not-close, either.
Hardly into their 20s and Bachira’s reactions to Rin’s smaller acts of connection haven’t changed, even if Rin and Bachira have established sometime in high school that Bachira only reacts like that because he thinks the world of Rin. Even now, even after more than a year apart, Bachira still holds that can in both hands like he’s not sure it’s an actual, tangible object.
It feels like a screw has gone loose inside Rin’s chest, impossible not to notice, left to rattle around with a hollow echo. Rin doesn’t look at Isagi when he takes the only remaining unoccupied row in the pit, but from the naked surprise in Bachira’s eyes as he lifts his gaze to them both, Isagi must still be watching him as openly as Rin is.
"Oh, hold on," says Bachira, mouth opening in the perfect shape of the syllables. The surprise recedes, as does the expression that he might not have wanted anyone to see. A smile slides his mouth closed, sustained for a beat while Bachira looks between them, eyes sparkling. "I haven’t said congratulations, have I?"
Face impassive, Rin looks to Isagi.
Isagi doesn’t catch on at once. "Congratulations?"
"Yeah, I heard that you two finally—y’know. A few months ago, right? Did I hear wrong?" Bachira crosses his legs in his seat. "I feel kinda left out ‘cause I wasn’t around to place my bets, but everyone was probably betting on the same thing anyway. We’ve all always known it was only a matter of time. Seems like they’re all just glad you’re not at each other’s throats all the time anymore. I didn’t really believe you’ve stopped fighting when I first heard, though. I thought—Rin-chan being civil around Isagi? No way. But I’m seeing it right now. Wouldn’t ya know. Miracles do happen."
He laughs, the sound unwrinkled as a fresh sheet of metal, devoid of any sign of corrugation—only to trail off at the silence he receives.
Confused, he lifts an apologetic palm in the air.
"Don’t be mad. I just—I couldn’t resist teasing. Sorry."
Rin bites at the rim of his can without sipping from it.
To his left, Isagi is still toying with the tab on his. "It’s fine," he says, in a tone that only betrays him. "It wasn’t… eventful? We’re not—We didn’t even talk it through much—We’re kind of just—We didn’t really get together. We’re just living together now. Mostly. That’s the only thing that’s changed."
It isn’t the only thing that’s changed, and of course Bachira doesn’t allow Isagi to get away with it.
"Yeah, right." A giggle. "But I get it. Sparing me the details and all. I heard you were basically living together anyway, which was like, duh. Like, your relationship’s been in the middle of changing for so long that this was the most obvious next step. It’s up, up, up—Then bam! And now here we are."
The can crunches in complaint inside Rin’s grip.
It takes more conscious thought than it should to loosen his hold.
Bachira is nodding, sage in a way that makes Rin want to grind his teeth to nothing because what does he know about natural next steps in relationships? What does he know about what he wasn’t even around to witness? Why does he get to treat Isagi and Rin’s messy hurtling towards each other over the years, somehow gaining momentum in the months that Bachira has been away, as if it’s like any other relationship?
Bachira of all people should know better. More than anything, he of all people should have been around to say something about it before Rin and Isagi had ended up doing what they naturally do best: collide, only to look at each other in a kind of awestruck resignation after the fact, unsure what to do with seeing that neither of them had combusted at the point of impact like they always expected they would.
"I’m glad to see you together, in any case." Bachira smiles, wide and sunny. "I should probably give Rin-chan a little lecture, like ‘if you hurt my childhood friend, you’ll pay’ but I don’t actually know what I can do against you, so—just pretend I was really cool just now."
Isagi’s face flushes noticeably pink at childhood friend.
Rin doesn’t spare him the generosity of thinking it’s because he’s flustered.
"We figured we’d see you at some point," Isagi manages, "but none of your channels were connecting, and your mom and I met up and she said you were busy with work and we probably won’t see you until we go visit her for the Halley’s trip, and the staff at BAR-CHA were—They—um—We—"
"They’ve been told to inform everyone you’re not in town," Rin cuts in. "Haven’t they? Friend or foe."
Bachira’s answering glance is unbearably indulgent, unfocused as his eyes are while he rubs his hair dry with the towel. "Pretty much, yeah. Or else all sorts of shady characters might come by asking for me. It’s still a regular bar. Sorry. For not keeping in touch."
A pop, a click, and Bachira has opened his can. He smiles and raises it in apology.
"If I knew you needed me for a job, I swear I would have been at your doorstep in a heartbeat."
Isagi frowns. "We didn’t need you for a job."
Bachira frowns back, then turns to Rin. "This isn’t about a job?"
"It is," says Rin.
"No, hold on," says Isagi, but Rin is already reaching into the front pocket of his dress pants to retrieve the round device, meant to be worn as a wristwatch, that he uses for most of his communication.
Its screen only decrypts itself when it senses authorized faces, and he has to tap along the screen until it projects a small hologram of a message before tossing it towards Bachira.
Catching it, his own wrist bare, Bachira squints at the air in front of him while the holo reorients itself.
He takes a long minute to read.
Then another.
And another.
Rin takes a sip from his can. It doesn’t taste like anything. The carbonation stings flavorless down his throat.
Grimly, he says, "It says exactly what you think it does."
"My little demon has escaped our backyard. Find him and bring him back on his leash," Bachira reads. "Is this—some kind of code? A riddle? A typing test?"
"It’s from Sae," Isagi offers.
"O—kay," says Bachira. "That clears up nothing for me."
Isagi’s frown deepens even more. Rin wants to walk over and grab his face, to get him to stop this restless tension he’s oozing out between the three of them—but he also can’t quite bring himself to break the tenuous triangle they’re all seated as.
"Have you never—" says Isagi. "I don’t know. Been around them? Ever?"
"Them who?" Bachira glances between them. "Oh, is this an inside joke—"
"No," says Rin, before Isagi can. "My brother’s talking about Shidou Ryusei."
Bachira squints at the message again, as if checking it for something he hadn’t noticed before.
Whatever fires doesn’t quite catch.
"You and Shidou met before," says Isagi. "Or—He pissed you off enough that you were ready to fight, at least. So. That counts as you two meeting. Technically."
He does this often, speaking of Bachira’s memories like they’re his own, as though the mere act of having the moment shared with him means sharing the very experience with Bachira as well. It’s never conscious, because even at his most self-questioning Isagi is most himself when he allows his brain to shut off for once and lean all the way into the subjective and the instinctive, but the tendency is constant enough to be habit. A persistent mirror to Bachira’s own way of including Isagi as a given in everything, from projects in their early days at the Blue Lock facility to plans that someone else invited only one of them to.
They’ve never explicitly called themselves a set, but to Rin, their patterns have always spoken for themselves. Whatever history they had before they met the others is just another detail to take into consideration if ever the time comes that it matters, and whatever binds Isagi and Bachira as childhood friends has never been any of Rin’s business, nor anyone else’s. Some of the dynamics they all lived around at Blue Lock, most of them knew not to touch; with Isagi and Bachira in particular, no one has ever touched it because no one has ever had reason to even think to want to.
They’re best friends. That’s the entire truth of it. It’s as simple and infinite as that, and Rin himself has never so much as bothered to scrutinize it.
But he studies Bachira’s face now and can’t help—scrutinizing. The knitted eyebrows, the parted mouth, the way Bachira’s hair wisps even looser when he shakes his head and the towel slips off.
It’s a borrowed expression, but not insincere.
A conundrum difficult to reconcile on someone usually so forthcoming as Bachira.
"I told you," Rin tells Isagi, without looking away from Bachira. "That could be anyone if it’s Shidou we’re talking about."
"No, I swear—" Isagi heaves a sigh. "Okay—Fine. Fine. But you must have seen him and Sae together, right?"
"My brother’s personal bodyguard," says Rin, toneless. "Tall android, blond hair, brown skin, voice so grating the dead will rise to shut him up—"
"Wait, I do know him!" It’s like emotion leaks all over Bachira’s voice every time, drizzles it with something viscous and hard to scrub off, no matter how fleeting. When his voice sparks with excitement at catching on, it’s like every syllable bursts with color, fizzy and fluorescent, enough that Rin can’t at all begrudge Isagi the echoing beam in his own eyes at finally being on the same page as Bachira. "We did meet. We did, we did. I can’t remember it too well, but—What about him?"
"He’s a convicted criminal," Rin and Isagi say at the same time.
Bachira almost drops Rin’s comms device in the middle of handing it back.
Rin snags it in time.
Bachira’s smile for him is both sheepish and grateful.
"Wrongfully charged, at least," says Isagi. "With who knows what. So very possibly not entirely wrongful."
Rin sighs, tossing his comms device this time towards the middle of the conversation pit. It thuds and skids to a halt against soft cushion, and he blinks down his status messages until the pad projects a passport photo of Shidou.
Under Shidou’s photo, the software loads information on his make, model and registration.
Rin tries not to look too long.
"What we do know," he says, "is that he was detained by the authorities sometime last week during a trip to Central Asia, and in the last couple of days, there have been several attempts to decommission him."
"Wait—" Bachira sits up straighter. "They can do that?"
Isagi shakes his head, the light from Shidou’s photo dancing across his cheeks. "Legally? No, ‘cause Shidou’s privately registered and has to be returned and dealt with wherever he falls under the jurisdiction of. Are they able to do it anyway—"
"No," says Rin. "I secured his cyberware myself. He should be impossible to hack."
Isagi grins and holds up an approving thumb. "—is what I was about to say."
Rin narrows his eyes at him. Isagi’s grin widens.
Bachira whistles. "As expected of Rin-chan, huh," he says in between gulps of his drink. "Can’t we just ask for him back, then? If they can’t legally do anything to him anyway? Oh, we tried that already, didn’t we. Duh."
Always so seamless, for Bachira to slip into we.
"We did," says Rin. "Two days later, they reported back that they’ve lost him."
Bachira blinks. "Sorry?"
"They’ve lost Shidou," says Isagi.
"They’ve lost him. A whole android."
"Obviously not," says Rin, flattened to dirt. "But they claim he escaped from their detainment somehow, and it’s true that as of three days ago, Shidou is nowhere to be found on any map, any radar, any interface."
"At all?"
"At all," Isagi confirms. "His last active signal was fired three days ago, too."
"So they succeeded in decommissioning him."
"No." Rin scowls. Cracking a grin, Bachira immediately raises another hand in apology. "I told you. That’s impossible for a bunch of nobodies."
"And," says Isagi, "an android of Shidou’s caliber is designed and required by law to at least make it known somehow if he’s been plugged out of the Net by anyone except his registered host, let alone if he was forcibly decommissioned altogether."
"Which should be impossible," says Rin.
"Which should be impossible," says Isagi, automatic.
Rin looks at Bachira, expectant.
"Yeah," says Bachira, slowly—then nods twice, the second one faster, more enthusiastic. "Right. Of course. That should be impossible. ‘Cause it’s Rin-chan’s work we’re talking about."
Rin returns to scowling.
Bachira and Isagi’s laughter sound like they might as well be doing something both beautiful and ridiculous like harmonize.
"Are there—um—How do I say this?" Bachira sets his can aside, considering his options. His weight teeters back and forth over his crossed legs. "What are the chances he’s just wandering around freely, enjoying some time offline?"
"Shidou," says Rin, "will never not return to my brother. No matter what he has to do to get there."
"Hm." Bachira tips backwards onto his back. "I see."
Hair spilled around him and towel tossed right next to his elbow, he says, "Then is this the part where I give you my theory, or are we gonna skip the whole thing where we pretend we didn’t all arrive at the same conclusion? ‘Cause I’d really like it to be the second one. I’ve had the longest day ever and if we’re doing what I think we’re doing then I wanna at least knock out tonight in my own bed."
Isagi and Rin exchange a look.
The projection chooses that moment to switch itself off, leaving all of them in the light of the artificial sky above.
"If your guess," says Isagi, "is that they staged Shidou’s arrest so they can take him somewhere not even The Watch can reach—where as long as they keep him under that specific physical, geographical range, he won’t show up on anyone’s radar and they can take all the time they need to figure out how they might be able to decommission him—which would usually be impossible, yeah, I know—or at least figure out a way to hack or rework him for their own purposes—then yeah. That’s where we’re at, too."
Bachira blinks up at the fake sunset, half his face awash in trembling waves of faded orange. The highlights in his hair appear almost neon, and when Rin glances at Isagi, he still can’t find a reason anywhere within him to protest how Isagi looks almost transfixed by that artificial glow.
Rin is feeling a version of it, too, in a distant, locked away part of himself. Feeling it as much as someone like him can, a tightness that, somehow, swims in his chest nonetheless, made buoyant by a hovering glance over Bachira’s sprawled form.
"And did you reach out to me ‘cause you want me to ask around for where that place might be?"
Rin twitches. "No. We know where the place is."
"But we can’t tell you where," says Isagi, "unless—"
"Duh. Are you two heading there?"
"Yes," says Rin. "Tomorrow morning."
"That’s so soon."
"And yet if I won’t have to pretend like I’ll be leaving the country for work, my brother would have pestered me until he was sure we already left."
Bachira tilts his head to the side to meet Rin’s gaze straight on. His hair abandons its borrowed light in a snap, and he looks so startlingly, unfairly flesh and blood for a long moment that if Rin had been someone else altogether, something else altogether, he might have felt chastised, insufficient, for being a poor imitation of what Bachira is.
"O-ho. I see. You want a Netdancer."
Rin opens his mouth, but can only repeat, "Yes."
"Not just any Netdancer," Isagi murmurs, ever forward, though his hands have knotted over his lap again, bound tight. "We need a Netdancer good enough to get into Shidou’s interface."
"So it is possible."
Rin returns Bachira’s satisfied look with a dead-eyed stare. "With the right skill set."
"A drink and a compliment from Rin-chan in one day? I’m really using up my probability points today, huh." Bachira’s laugh is a soft flutter. "How much is my cut?"
Isagi blinks. Stares down at his lap. Looks up.
"What?"
"How much am I getting paid?" Bachira purses his lips in thought. "I’ll have to bump down two clients to come along, y’know. And my work isn’t cheap."
"It doesn’t matter," says Rin.
"Hold on a min—"
"Isagi Yoichi-kun." Bachira sits up, abruptly glum. "Did you think I’d do it for free just ‘cause we go way back?"
"I—What?"
"No, I’m kidding, I would. I’d drop everything." Bachira sticks out his tongue between his teeth. "But if Rin-chan’s offering—"
"I am."
Bachira’s eyes soften. "Will it be just us three?"
Rin meets his gaze head on. "We don’t need anyone else."
"Hey, you looked for me."
"I said we," says Rin—but the full meaning of his own words, how easily the we falls out of his mouth, hits him a second late, striking with the sharp, drawn-out sting of a syringe preparing the body for the rough jolt of a freshly attached implant.
He ignores it.
"That we already includes you, smartass," he says, his voice steel, inviting no challenge. "So if you want to play coy about money, that’s fine. It’s not an issue. Name your price."
"I really was just joking, though. I don’t care about payment." Bachira chews on the inside of his cheek for a moment, eyes fixed on something non-physical. "I don’t know if I’ll get permission to go, is the only actual issue."
Isagi still looks as if he hasn’t quite recovered from Bachira’s joke, but he looks up at this like he’s been switched back on.
"Permission?"
"Yep. I have a handler now. Sort of." Bachira groans a bit as he launches himself to a handstand to get to his feet, singing a small oops under his breath when he wobbles in landing against the cushion. "Don’t worry. I’m not in anything suspicious. I just need sign-off if I’ll be going with you guys."
"Us specifically?" says Isagi.
Bachira had been about to walk away, an unfamiliar comms device already in hand, but he stops to blink several rapid times at them both.
Then he laughs.
"You’ve been asking so many funny questions today, Isagi."
Watching Bachira turn away from them, Rin needs, more than anything, to not feel a single thing about any of it. But trying not to feel is always like trying not to think about something. To prime a program against potential issues, the code must foresee it and include a solution accordingly, but in practice, in the human way of things, not thinking about thinking means the attempt itself is already failure, especially for someone so hardwired not to let a single thought or emotion pass through uninterrogated.
He and Isagi have that exactly in common, yet in vastly different ways, and it’s taken Rin all this time—years of realizing Isagi will not relinquish the place he has carved out and earned in Rin’s life—to find a way to accept those contradictions, to accept how two people can be mirrors and yet show two different reflections.
He can’t even begin to calculate how much more time he’ll need to figure out what all this makes Bachira, who retreats to a hallway, out of their sight, beyond an average human being’s hearing distance.
Bachira, who has, since they arrived, called Isagi by nothing but his last name.
Bachira, who—Rin only realizes because he feels the precise moment Isagi realizes it, too—despite being only a few steps away, is the most unreachable he has ever been in all the time they’ve known him.
Bachira and Isagi’s time knowing each other didn’t used to feel like a quantifiable amount, or at least not enough to be crammed into a centuries-old formula. But—glancing to his left to see Isagi’s face half in shadow, the usual honesty of his tendency to overthink contorted into something not quite as objective, then glancing to his right and seeing the slant of light from the next hallway cut by the silhouette of the object and source of everything haunting Isagi—there’s a sharply present moment within a moment right here where it does feel possible for Rin to condense everything about this into one single numerical value.
It’s frustrating, how little it matters in the long run to find that Isagi and Bachira’s years and years of friendship is, for once, right now, a small, easily reduced number next to the hulking mass of this last year of radio silence from Bachira.
It’s frustrating, how Rin is built for answers yet not what comes after them. He can know something and use that knowledge accordingly, but it doesn’t make him the kind of entity that can traverse those absolute values. The parameters of what he can do are vast and limitless compared to most, he knows, but they aren’t actually infinite. It’s frustrating, how he of all people knows this, with Itoshi Sae as the needle in an old, old, old compass that Rin’s been holding in his palm all his life.
What the current, present Rin knows is:
That it feels like a burning, irritating itch, how badly he wants to do something, anything, with the answers he has, so that Isagi doesn’t look like this, confused and childish and the most helpless he’s ever looked around Rin.
That he wanted to find Bachira Meguru for this job because no one dances past Net infrastructure like he and only he can, and it’s only an added bonus, not an incentive, that Isagi has also recently started being more vocal, more vulnerable, about how he hasn’t heard from Bachira in a concerning length of time.
That Rin should be feeling something more specific beyond all this frustration at his own helplessness—jealousy, maybe, or at least petty territoriality about sharing Isagi’s attention with something so inane, so ridiculous, even though Rin shares Isagi’s attention with thousands of other things at any given point—and yet he isn’t feeling anything close.
That Rin has answers to all these formulas, has done the hours-long work that goes into resolving them to one answer, but together, he has even less clarity than what he started with.
And that has never happened before.
Bachira’s beaming when he returns.
"I guess we’re all going on a little adventure together!"
⊡
Year 2061, Month 07, Day 18
Location: 35° 39' 10.03" N 139° 44' 8.09" E
Time: 02:14
Rin opens his eyes to glaring white light across a bedroom ceiling meant to be pitch dark.
"Turn that off by the time I’m done counting to ten," he says, "or I’ll do it for you."
On his side of the bed—because there is a side only his now, even before he had due cause to claim anything in Rin’s place—Isagi has his back to the wall and the screen of the Folio in his lap split into two different programs.
"I know, I know," he says. "Sorry. I thought you were already sleeping. Want me to move to the—"
"No." Rin closes his eyes. He can still see some of the light leaking through. "One."
"What?"
"Two."
"Oh, no, no, hold on, I think I’m—"
"Three."
"—onto something here—"
"Four. You’re not."
"You don’t know that."
"I do know that. Five."
"You haven’t looked as far as you could have."
"Six. Who do you think you’re saying that to?"
"We’re not exactly dealing with an everyday citizen here, Rin."
"Seven. You don’t think I know that?"
"I just mean that you wouldn’t have been searching for him like I would have."
"Eight. Spare me your ‘would have.’ You have been searching for him. Nine."
"It’s just not like him. To be so—"
"Yoichi," says Rin. "Off. Now."
When he opens his eyes, he expects to see the same slant of light bursting into a physical sting behind his vision.
He finds only darkness.
But Isagi still hasn’t moved. Rin has to flick away the vague instinct to check his heat map to make out if he’s still sitting; it never feels justified, using anything other than what’s immediately present around someone like Isagi. With him, Rin has to do everything exactly like he’s doing it for the first time, and it’s challenging and disorienting and all the descriptions Rin was never made to embody when his very existence is in the image of the most talented artist there is, who made Rin perfect and lifelike and brilliant enough never to be challenged nor to fail—only for it to also be true that after all that, he still couldn’t make Rin a statue he could love forever.
Sae’s voice had betrayed very little when Rin called to confirm they’ll be heading out tomorrow afternoon as planned, but Rin had also known, listening to Sae repeat his orders with near clinical conciseness, that there will be no room for bargaining. Rin, Isagi and Bachira will find Shidou and bring him back, no matter what they have to do. There’s no question. It will be done, because Itoshi Sae wants it done, and Rin would sooner decommission Shidou Ryusei himself in a temper tantrum than let his brother hold tangible evidence of something Rin shouldn’t fail at.
Still, even then, even under the endless frustration, there’s a long second where Rin could almost drown in the need to ask out loud, ridiculous and unfair as it is to Isagi, Do you think, if I went off the radar, Nii-chan will raise heaven and hell to find me, too?
But that’s a question for a version of Rin that he already forcibly outgrew.
Instead, he says, "When I mentioned who else we’re taking with us, my shithead brother called him the famous Mikage test subject."
Isagi’s surprise bleeds into the air, palpable even without the use of any technology. "What?"
"That’s all he said."
"About Meguru?"
"Yeah."
"Why are you—Why didn’t you tell me sooner?"
"Because I’ve been running everything I have to look into it and have yet to find a single relevant thing."
It’s with a snap of a breath, that Isagi’s surprise also sharpens into suspicion. The bed dips, the sheets rustling gently even in the tangible urgency of Isagi getting out of bed to replace his Folio with something else.
"Did you try calling Nagi about it—No, nevermind. I’ll call him about it. He’ll know what happened, right?"
"It’s 2 A.M. That guy’s asleep."
"He’s always asleep."
"Yoichi," says Rin. "This is something that someone has obviously done the work to keep secret."
"Like who?" Isagi’s voice floats from somewhere farther than the space around the bed. "Reo?"
"No."
"Then?"
"Use your brain and think about it," says Rin. "Don’t make me tell you myself."
The bed dips again, this time from Isagi’s weight settling back next to Rin. There are no windows in the compound at all, only an artificial approximation of natural light, but Rin has seen Isagi move enough times over years and years that he knows the exact furrow of his eyebrows right now, the restless twitch of his fingers, the crescent marks that will be left on his palm once he unfurls his hand. One unignorable part of having to come of age around someone before your relationship was ever more than the shape of those years is that there’s no real before or after; there’s only during, and the perpetual motion of every memory with and of that someone. There’s only this Rin, who has known Isagi since he was fifteen, and the world around them that hasn’t stopped drawing itself since, even in the dark.
When Isagi finally arrives at the right guess, his voice comes out weary. "I see."
The results that everything on Rin’s end had given him on Bachira Meguru all came out a little too clean, a little too practiced at being empty. Even going as far back as a year yields nothing to work off, too meticulous to not be deliberate. It’s the work of someone who knows how to move around both the Watch and every piece of security that any database or network can throw at even a curious student doing a cursory search, and it’s the work of someone who knows how to clean up their messes so well that it’s like the broom had also been thrown into an incinerator.
Bachira’s radio silence from the last few months goes beyond just falling off the radar; his digital presence reflects not the disappearance of a person, but of a life altogether. It’s unheard of, this level of absence online. Plenty of people who have long since died still have traces of their lives somewhere, but even throwaway mentions of Bachira from media coverage on Blue Lock have mysteriously been erased.
If Isagi hadn’t reached out to Bachira Yuu to ask about her son and received reassurance that he was busy but well and alive, if Rin hadn’t already known that Bachira is on the list of owners for an exclusive underground bar along the Edge and only played that card as the absolute final resort, if neither of them had years of memories to look back on as proof that they all went to the most high-profile academic program of this century—it would be as if Bachira Meguru had never existed.
Isagi moves slowly, as he always does at times like this, as if afraid to spook a wounded animal. But Isagi is as too careful as he is too determined, and eventually he lies down against Rin’s shoulder like he’s been molded against Rin’s shape for hours, the two of them fitting together more seamlessly than Rin could have ever guessed when they were younger.
It’s still so foreign every time, this warmth. This warmth on only one side of Rin, how starkly it makes him aware of the coolness of his own skin on the other side.
Sometimes he finds himself lingering on the ridiculous thought that he wants to just be wrapped completely in Isagi’s warmth, to sink into it not like a body into a pond but like shoulders shoved under a roaring waterfall, submerged in every way possible.
But he doesn’t know how to ask for something so impossible.
Isagi’s mouth brushes against Rin’s collarbone.
"Hey, jerk."
"What, asshole—"
Rin’s voice is swallowed at once by Isagi’s mouth on his—sudden and short but searing as it always is, Isagi’s touch always a scorching brand on every sensory receptor in Rin even as its gentlest.
"Don’t you ever disappear on me, too," Isagi murmurs as soon as he pulls away, a threat so helplessly sincere that for a breath, Rin can’t quite compute how that can be possible within only a voice. "You hear me? If you need to go, you can tell me. But don’t ever just vanish. Don’t ever just wake up one day and go where I can’t follow without telling me."
Rin closes his eyes. It’s always been the strangest part of his senses, the slightest distinction between total darkness and the dark behind his eyelids.
"Or what, hero?" he says, one hand finding Isagi’s between them and clutching it tight.
"Or I’ll stop at nothing until I get you back. No matter who I have to send after you. No matter what I have to do. No matter the costs. No matter what’s been erased. I’ll find you and bring you back with me."
⊡
Year 2061, Month 07, Day 18
Location: 25.131°N 121.743°E
Time: 12:54
Getting to their destination means a four-hour flight timed with the sunrise, then a drive to what used to be the Port of Keelung, where a yacht has been docked in wait for them since morning.
Bachira’s already nodding off on the front deck when the rest of them arrive, curled up in a bomber jacket far above his size across one of the platforms like there isn’t a perfectly good cabin below. Isagi walks around him with instinctive ease while he handles the introductions to the small crew, all three of them taken from a list of long-time employees for the Itoshis’ cruise line. They don’t question the impromptu nature of the trip nor the destination, but the second mate ogles at Rin a little longer than a single curious look demands.
Once Isagi has roused Bachira long enough to usher him down to the cabin, Rin remains with the crew, the sudden immediacy of this entire trip wearing him thin, and says, "Get it out of the way."
He keeps his gaze out over the water, at the smooth push of the seafoam against dirty sand, but he feels the prickling of the glances they all exchange.
"Sir?" says the captain.
"Get it out of the way instead of wasting time staring." Rin’s eyes flick, for just a fraction of a second, at the crew’s direction. His expression doesn’t change. "Captain."
"We don’t—I don’t know what you mean, sir," is the reply, immediate and earnest. But then, not even a second later, likely gauging the situation he’s in and finding the truth the easiest way out, "I had the honor of meeting Sae-sama a few months ago before a maiden voyage, and I thought—I was thinking how much you look like him. That’s all."
"Look like him how? Human?"
The captain’s inhale is a sharp crackle of noise.
"Rest assured we don’t believe the rumors, sir," he manages, after a long silence. "I only meant—You look more similar up close than you seemed from afar."
"What if the rumors are true?" says Rin. "About how I was made, not born?"
"Rin."
They all turn to Isagi, positioned mid-stride at the top of the stairs to the deck.
To a stranger, Isagi’s expression is polite, even peaceful, placating before there’s anything to placate. Chigiri Hyouma had once described Isagi’s first impression as an adult to be no different from an illegitimate child’s well-paid au pair, a knee-jerk assumption that Rin knows has proven useful as a deceiving facade because no one but the especially perceptive would ever expect Isagi to have an inner hunger, an inner ruthlessness, underneath that illusion of good nature.
It’s the first mistake anyone ever makes about Isagi, to expect him not to be a threat.
From the corner of his eye, Rin watches the three-man crew make their assessments.
All three, from the relief in their faces, arrive at the mistake.
Rin tips his head towards them.
"Excuse us, Captain," he says, monotone. "Don’t hesitate to let us know if there’s anything at all we need to know."
"Or help with," Isagi adds, waving with a smile.
Neither of them turn to look at whether the crew salutes or mouths curses at them as they leave, and Isagi says nothing, either, the gradual melting away of his smile somehow a weighted presence on the back of Rin’s head even as he leaves Rin space to perform all his habitual checks for bugs and micro cameras in the cabin with them.
The central control of the room is contained inside one console panel by the door, nothing out of the ordinary. Rin’s three checks run unsurprisingly clean.
He starts a fourth.
The carbon gray wood-panelled cabin has a king size bed and a couch of comparable length, but Isagi has led Bachira—or more likely deposited—right between the two pairs of pillows against the headboard. Face eerily serene, enough that the soft cut of his face threatens to snake into somewhere Rin doesn’t want it, Bachira dozes away, as though the push and pull of the water has lulled him into deep dreams before the boat has even left the dock.
Netdancing, Ego Jinpachi had once said, comes down to an ability to manage the vast amounts of mental, physical and emotional data that comes with plugging into cyberspace directly from the human brain. Netdancer hopefuls tend to crack after the first two jobs alone due to fatigue, or a fried brain, or sensory shock, but Bachira had been especially agile even at his first full simulated runthrough. Most rookies endure a near permanent adrenaline high from the overstimulation of having their neurons connected to an infinite matrix of data and code, yet Bachira’s only noticeable symptom is a seemingly near-constant need to recharge on sleep and food when off the plug.
Most of it, Rin will guess, is because Bachira relies primarily on instinct as a Netdancer. It’s his strength in an arena not even Rin can touch, though he’ll never admit it. Rin’s instinct is intuition packed down to unwavering concrete, Isagi’s is a subjective compass that only he knows when to trust, but Bachira’s instinct is what passes for logic for others and vice versa.
In a business that requires willpower to sift through thousands of data and still remain intact, Bachira has mastered the division between the body and the abstract. It’s no short of a miracle that Rin even gets to say, quietly, "What do he and Nagi do together for fun? Naptime?"
He waits for Isagi to call him out on shelving the conversation they came down here to have, but gets a laugh.
"A nap is one hour max," says Isagi, hovering in one corner of the cabin like a harried secretary receiving orders. "If you leave those two to it, they’ll sleep a full twenty-four hours and still wake up drowsy." A pause, barely there. "They’ve been getting projects through Reo, apparently. But I guess that’s just Nagi’s permanent job description."
"It’s not a job description if it’s just his life."
"Hey, you’re technically my partner and you’ve never gone scouring for interesting jobs for me."
"You find them yourself just fine, junkie." Rin can’t help looking at the wide grin Isagi gives him, his heartbeat like butterfly wings inside his chest. He turns away, heaving himself down on the couch. "That’s all Nagi told you when you called?"
"Hm-hm." Another pause. "And also that I’ve got good timing, ‘cause he’s been meaning to ask how all that—" Isagi points at Bachira’s sleeping form. His watchface, sensing the movement on his wrist, blinks on and off erratically as though in protest. "—will hold up under lie detection."
Rin always gets this particular sensation, each time he hears about Nagi from either Isagi or Bachira, that he wants to push him over just once, like a child shoving another kid, palms against shoulders, into a sandbox.
"How many times," he says, "do I have to tell him—"
"I reminded him it’s not lie detection, and he just gave me silence." Isagi shrugs. "Then I asked him what he means by ‘all that’ and he said it’s too bothersome to tell me something he’s not allowed to tell me."
"Of course he’s not allowed. Someone would have tattled by now if there isn’t anything stopping them."
"Or Meguru could have just asked them to keep it a secret."
"Do you think Blue Lock alumni would keep a secret out of something as lukewarm as goodwill?" Rin grimaces. "If even Nagi won’t say anything to you, then that means it’s none of our business."
"Yeah, but—" Isagi bites back the rest of his sentence. Rin hears it loud and clear anyway; Bachira’s never had business before, after all, that wasn’t also Isagi’s. "I just don’t want him getting himself into serious danger."
Only half-willing, Rin follows Isagi’s eyes to the rise and fall of Bachira’s chest, somehow steady and invulnerable between them.
There’s always been an infallibility to the ease with which Bachira takes life day to day, moment to moment, ideal to ideal—a little too much of it to make the ease anything but a deterrent in their school years, when everyone they were admitted into Blue Lock with had a reason, no matter how impossible or idealistic, to toil away for. Kunigami Rensuke wanted to save lives out of some superhero sense of justice and paid the price for his idealism, Yukimiya Kenyu believed he would find a solution for optic neuropathy in the world of neuroprosthetics, and even Hiori Yo had aspirations about how video games can change the future of early childhood education in a planet more than halfway in the grave. Then there had been Bachira, the only child of one of only a handful of easel-and-brush painters left in the Peninsula, with no tech legacy to speak of aside from his own home projects and recorded compatibility with existing machines, who had just been happy to be at Blue Lock and be around like-minded students.
Rin remembers it all clearly, because he had looked down on Bachira for it once. For his unwillingness to push because it might mean shoving someone to the dirt, for his astoundingly human fear of losing what he had at Blue Lock: friends, a future career, time and funding to pursue whatever he wanted. Bachira had remained stationary for a good half of their school days, wasting away in his own lack of desire to pursue the limits of what he’s capable of because he’d always been more than the rest of his peers and he was just fine finally having equals. To ask for even more—and not just an approximation of more, not just some vague future where he doesn’t have to ask himself what more there is to want—must have seemed, for Bachira, an invitation for change that had no guarantee being positive.
You’re at this school searching for a reason to be here, Rin had told Bachira back then. They let you get in because they think you deserve a say in the future—but you don’t even know what kind of future you want for yourself. You don’t even know, yet here you are looking for someone to tell you what it looks like.
"He’s an adult now," says Rin, before the silence can stretch on for too long. His eyes linger on Bachira. "He can look after himself and make his own choices. You don’t have to look after him just because you’re used to being the more mature one. Which isn’t even hard to be, considering."
"That’s not—" Isagi blinks away the surprise in his own voice. "That isn’t what this is about."
Rin knows that. Of course he knows that. He’d been there when Bachira had taken his first real steps without Isagi, when he had first started to show promise in Netdancing, when he had gotten more and more people coming to see him at the facility to pitch their desire to invest. Rin had been there, every year, watching from the first-year classes while Bachira crept higher and higher on their school-wide rankings, until he graduated with a secured spot in an industry few else could pursue.
So Rin knows, knows even without wanting to, that Bachira has been his own self for years now, long before he went off the grid, and Isagi just doesn’t seem to understand that all of this—how visibly stung he is at the idea that Bachira is up to something big and important without thinking to tell him when it shouldn’t be anything new, how his worry goes beyond concern to something so tangible it stifles the air around them each time Isagi entertains it—has nothing to do with whatever goddamn solidarity their friendship has permanently had all this while.
It’s so obvious it’s stupid. So obvious that it isn’t about a freshly scouted Isagi mentioning offhand that he’ll make the trip to see Bachira home for the weekend just to make sure none of his bullies at their hometown bother him. It isn’t about seventeen-year-old Isagi clucking at Bachira to stop bothering Rin during quiet study time and still offering to take over the tutoring. It isn’t, even, about twenty-year-old Isagi pacing restlessly those few months of no word from Bachira, working through excuses, then suspicion, then unconvincing annoyance, then real dread, until, finally, hurt.
But what it is about isn’t for Rin to voice for the first time, either.
He’s not sure he wants to, if that would also require reckoning with what this means for him.
"I know," he still says, curt but not cold.
Isagi Yoichi, without having to lift a finger, always knows how to make Rin do things that would be otherwise too complicated to be worth the trouble. Things like sneaking out of the school dormitories past lights out—imagining competition where there is only friendship—and now meddling in the kind of mess only possible between two people who feel too much without ever doubting each other—falling in something almost like love and staying in it for no other reason than there being no other possible way to exist—
And all of it is sticky and it’s saccharine and it’s sickening how sincere all of it is, but Rin also can’t help assessing the expression Isagi makes—conflicted, confused—and delivering the final blow that only he, of them three, can say at a time like this.
"But until you decide what it is about," he says, as muted as the sound of the waves beyond the windows of this cabin, "keeping secrets is something he should be allowed to do without you holding him to standards of closeness that you don’t even seem to have anymore."
The hurt splits across Isagi’s face with the immediacy of blood pooling from an accidental cut, all that confusion cracking away at the one simple truth.
Rin doesn’t need to feel any guilt about it.
Does a knife, he reasons, waste away in remorse knowing it was someone’s hand that had used it to deal the stab wound?
It still makes him uneasy, having to be the one to put that expression on Isagi’s face.
There’s footsteps outside the door, punctuated by creaking metal and wood, then two sharp knocks on the door.
"Yes," says Rin.
"The captain would like to go over some final administrative notes before the voyage, sir."
Isagi’s mouth snaps shut.
It opens just as soon.
It takes a while for the words to follow.
"I’ll—uh—I’ll go handle it."
Rin lets him go without an answer.
Once the door has shut again, he turns to the bed.
"What the hell do you think you’re doing, pretending to be asleep on my boat, on my mission."
Bachira almost chokes on a laugh—and still has the nerve to be sluggish as he cracks an eye open to peer at Rin.
"I was asleep, though," he mumbles. "Until the tension in the air woke me up. Were you checking my vitals to see if I was actually asleep?"
"I didn’t have to, with your mediocre acting skills," Rin mutters. It’s true enough. While Isagi had turned away from the rise and fall of Bachira’s breathing, while he had lost himself to the reality of what he’s looking at, Rin’s gaze had stayed, and watched, and known. "Don’t act like you have nothing to do with what we were talking about."
Bachira rubs one eye, yawning. "Do I, though?"
Rin narrows his eyes. "Was it life-threatening?"
"What was?"
"Whatever you’ve been up to in the past year."
If Bachira’s at all surprised to find out Rin and Isagi have been looking into his record, he doesn’t waste time pretending he hadn’t been expecting it in the first place.
He does waste an entire minute sitting up to look more closely, more seriously, at Rin, as if weighing if he even deserves a real answer.
The fact that Bachira has to evaluate that at all with him, with Rin, like he’s a mere acquiantance, unlocks a specific kind of anger in Rin that for the next few breaths, he’s not sure what to do with.
"Honestly," says Bachira, "I don’t know, Rin-chan."
"What?"
Bachira squeezes both his shoulders together. "I don’t know if the thing I did is life-threatening."
"Is."
"Is," Bachira confirms. "No one knows. An irreversible process, is what they told me. I feel just fine, though. So. Technically, it’s all good. But they’ve been telling me to watch out for any re—the reap—the rep—Wait, huh? What’s the word?"
"Repercussions," says Rin.
The heat doesn’t quite convey itself.
"Yeah. That. Maybe there’s that, with my body. Or maybe I’ll just miss what they took from me. Maybe not. It’s hard to know what the future will bring. But that’s just human life, isn’t it? Haha."
Rin doesn’t want to ask. He doesn’t. He’s already been given finality, Bachira handing it to him like he’s done so many other things, ever so aware of his imagined limits of Rin’s tolerance for him.
Tolerance isn’t the word. It hasn’t just been tolerance for Bachira for a long time now.
But there’s no way for Rin to say all of that without sounding like he’s betraying himself. The discomfort of complete honesty is too much responsibility, too much effort.
"What was it?" says Rin’s mouth anyway. "That they took from you?"
There’s the surprise, twitching at the corner of Bachira’s own lips.
"Unlike you to be so interested in me, Rin-chan," he coos. This time, Rin doesn’t give him the luxury of the glare he wants. "Did you hear about that rich guy in the U.S. who successfully uploaded himself to a machine last year? Right before his body died?"
Both Isagi and Rin are more than used to conversations with Bachira taking an abrupt swerve; it will loop itself back eventually, and it’s less trouble than it’s worth to not just let it happen. But that doesn’t make it any less of a stray bullet for Rin to receive—reflexes will kick in and let him evade it, but often, it will feel like a reminder of how much more he should have been paying attention.
"We had protestors," he says, after a long second, "outside the main building."
"Oh." Bachira frowns. "Did Itoshi Industries have something to do with the process?"
"No."
"Then what were they protesting?"
Rin considers Bachira’s frown: too deep to belong to the round, perpetual openness of his face, too genuine for Rin to digest without feeling it like a physical etch on his skin. Too much like Isagi’s uncanny ability to look at Rin and appear as if he’s seeing more than he should, more than even Rin knows about himself. Even as teenagers, even before Isagi’s competitive instincts had reconciled its similarities with his supportive nature, even before the tension had mutated and reshaped and settled enough to become the Isagi-and-Rin they are now, Isagi had always looked at Rin like he wanted to understand him and then swallow that understanding whole, and only over the years learned that he had always known the entirety of who Rin is.
Yet it’s what makes Isagi him, his tendency to turn everything into a puzzle worth putting together not for the sake of completion but the simple act of finding pieces that fit. He’ll throw the table over eventually, see the way the pieces scatter on the floor, delight and tear his hair off in equal measure while looking for ones that fit even if it won’t amount to a bigger, more whole puzzle. It’s never bothered or terrified someone like Rin, who knows best of all how to manage what should move him and what should not, but it feels close to getting there these days, when Isagi’s perceptiveness feels like something Rin now has ownership of.
And if Isagi finds fulfillment in the puzzle pieces themselves, then Bachira—blinking expectantly at Rin, never questioning what answer he’ll receive before he receives it—is the one who finds fulfillment in knowing the puzzle is possible, that there is someone else happy to labor away and he won’t be alone in wondering.
It’s a heavy weight to bear, when they both look at Rin like he holds the key to that fulfillment.
It’s also disarming, to be faced with that and to realize there’s a part of him that’s willing to be disassembled, if it means being put back together by—
"A week after the news came out," Rin finds himself saying, his voice like serrated metal, "someone on a livestream pointed out how, if it’s possible to transfer the essence of a living organism to a machine, then there will be no stopping anyone from trying the reverse. Not just the kind of high-level android production we already have, but taking artificial intelligence, or any kind of code, and transferring it to an organic body. And after that spread, a streaming channel thought it was finally time to leak proof that I’m what happens when someone does exactly that. That it’s been done, and I’m living proof of it because I live like a human being even though I’m not one."
He keeps his face blank, but it’s always a vague, shapeless anger that sparks, whenever he has to voice this out loud. It’s a familiar sigh of a sensation inside his chest, an insignificant puff of breath on a cold day, fogging up the air for the sake of it. In that, anger is a useful emotion to have; it keeps everything contained into one petty feeling that, if Rin gathers enough of it to pile on top of each other, can eventually be the kind of fury that feels just as much like motivation as any other passion.
As far as rumors and dog-whistles go, after all, it matters little that Rin is just, if anything at all, a child prodigy’s fluke of creation. It matters little that the being that is Itoshi Rin, at the end of the day, is his brother’s imperfect project, and for a time, Sae had loved him for that imperfection, or maybe for the imperfect perfection that Rin represented and Sae could only improve upon someday. But then the real world had caught Sae up, had stabbed into him the realization of what a responsibility it is to have created something, and like Dr. Frankenstein, like a pseudo-medical student villainized by history for abandoning the creature he realized too late he had played god to create, maybe Sae can no longer bear, these days, to look at Rin and be proud enough of what he’s become to even care who he’s become.
Of his brother—and maker, and co-worker, and predecessor, but before he was Itoshi Sae, CEO of Itoshi Industries, he was just Rin’s nii-chan—all Rin really has these days is this anger, this would-be something else, this almost-motivation, because in this one contained emotion he is simply a cliché of a younger brother who wants to prove another infallible older sibling wrong about the limits of what he can do—and not just yet another First Man that a god had to expel from paradise for being exactly what he was made to be.
"You really are so weird sometimes, Rin-chan."
Rin’s too taken off guard to react at once. "What?"
"I’m sorry to hear that kind of information got leaked. I didn’t—I had no idea that happened. But you don’t seriously believe that, do you? That you’re not human?" Bachira’s mouth wrinkles in one direction. "I mean, I get it, threat of artificial life takeovers and all that, plus the fact that—y’know. This kind of immortality is scary and shouldn’t be possible. But wasn’t the main reason people were protesting—Weren’t they protesting 'cause mostly it’s so uncomfortable to realize that all a human brain is, really, is a collection of neurons firing at a given configuration?"
Bachira lifts both index fingers in the air, a habit so much like Isagi that it defies even wondering who gave it to who and how long ago.
"I know it’s not fun realizing that maybe," he continues, "after a certain point, once the human brain has fully grown into itself and doesn’t really need to be a growing set of tissues everywhere to do its job—the body might just be a highly performing machine, and you can replicate it in highly complicated code and upload that into a body not made of tissues and blood vessels and all that. Which can make someone immortal. As close as it gets right now, at least."
"Is that a counterargument?" says Rin, toneless. "Because it sounds like you’re agreeing with me."
Bachira shakes his head. "I’m not. Your argument is that you’re not human ‘cause of how you were put into this world, right? If I say that the million-billion-kajillion-aire guy isn’t human anymore ‘cause he put himself into a machine, then it sounds like I’m calling you more a machine than a human being, since you and him are similar cases, just reverse. But I’m not saying that at all."
Rin should kill this conversation. He doesn’t know why, sees no point in finding out what reason he could have, but he really should stop a conversation that was unnecessary before it even began.
Instead, he says, "Aren’t you."
"Nope," says Bachira, eyes earnest but grin sly as he lowers his hands. "That American guy isn’t human anymore, obviously, but not ‘cause he’s a machine now. I think you can immortalize him as he is, flesh and blood, just one that lives forever, and he still wouldn’t be human anymore. The stasis of it is the thing. They can’t die, can’t feel all the physiological stuff that we feel in our chest and our gut to go along with the synapses that fire in our brain, can’t grow up, grow old, can’t learn and make mistakes and relearn. They’re basically trapped in this—this meaningless existence that’s only code, and denying themselves change, or opting out of an unsure future that the rest of us have to live with, or whatever else we all have to live with—That’s the most non-human thing a human being can do, I think. Can you call that living? Can you call that humanity? ‘Cause I think—A human being who’s stopped doing all of that is basically a machine. At least in the same way a machine that has learned how to feel can still be more human than some people with an actual body that can rot after death. I don’t really know what they’ll say about that in philosophy or other areas of science, but as a humble Netdancer—"
Rin snorts.
"—I know when what I’m looking at is some utilitarian machine built only to contain code and nothing else." Bachira flashes a sideways little smile. "Being a machine is a state of being, not a matter of... matter. Build. Whatever. Who cares if you were made or born? You grew up with us in your own way. Isagi practically fell into your pace at first fight—I mean sight—"
Rin sighs. "I wasn’t asking for—for whatever the hell you’re trying to do. You were the one who brought up the American guy first."
"I did?" Bachira blinks, taking a second to search his brain. Rin entertains the brief thought that he wants to jump into the sea if this is how the rest of tonight will go. "Oh, I was really just wondering why you never ventured into the antimortality industry, business-wise. But I guess I have my answer."
"What does that have to do with what we were talking about?"
Rin expects Bachira to evade a second time—and doesn’t think he can let it pass. Not with how suffocating it is to be in this room with only a slot of a window looking out into the water, to be on this much smaller couch while Bachira has all the bed to command and study him from.
It’s not often that Rin is seen as much as he sees, yet between Isagi’s stubborn, unyielding ability to watch everything like a story he’s learning by heart to reproduce with absolute confidence and Bachira’s eerie way of dancing between impulse and logic, observation and participation, openness and privacy—Rin isn’t as locked away from perception as he wants to believe he is by virtue of what he’s been made to be.
Whatever he’s thinking, Bachira doesn’t say it. Rin can tell that much.
"Just think of what I was up to this past year as a similar business venture, Rin-chan," says Bachira. "Oh, I finally remembered! About the partnership between you and Isagi—I wanted to—"
"That’s the second time," says Rin, "that you’ve called him Isagi."
For a long moment, he and Bachira only stare at each other.
On the deck, the crew has moved to the space directly above the cabin, their footsteps like last evening’s pounding rain for a few suffocating heartbeats.
"That’s… his name," says Bachira.
Rin’s temples are starting to throb. "That’s not what you call him."
He senses whirring beginning to grow in volume from somewhere close by, but he can’t seem to locate it without giving in to distraction.
"Oh," says Bachira, and it’s so sincere it floors Rin despite himself. "Yoichi-kun? Yo-kun? Yo-chan? No, that can’t be it. Hiorin’s first name is Yo, too."
There’s something wrong, and Rin can feel it inside him, whirring just like that noise—but then the sound stops, plunging them back to the hushed push of the sea around them, and finally, hearing Isagi’s laugh just above them, a touch nervous, Rin glances upwards, at the cabin ceiling.
"Why would Hiori’s name matter?" he says. "Yoichi was first."
When he looks again, the scanners in his vision zooming in and out after ensuring that nothing of concern is going on above them, Bachira is giving him that look again.
That look of evaluation, deciding if Rin is worth the answer he’s thinking of giving.
Bachira settles on speaking with a stranger’s smile. No joking, no lightness, and, worst of all, the worst possible thing on Bachira Meguru, no intensity.
"And I was first, Rin-chan," he says. "Before you. Since you wanna factor in totally coincidental facts. Does that matter?"
Rin doesn’t have to fish for an answer. He hates it, but not enough to not say it.
"More than it should."
Bachira tilts his head, the rest of his body tipping in that direction, too. For a second, it looks like he won’t entertain Rin, but he says, "To you or to him?"
Rin rips his gaze away. "I knew."
"Hm?"
"How you feel about him."
"Ah," says Bachira. "I think I knew that you knew."
It’s like ice, Rin realizes without wanting to. Whatever it is he’s feeling—It feels like watching a live, beating organ lowered into ice, and for his brain, his system, to mirror precisely what sensations it needs to activate. Remembering a memory it’s never had, a memory where he has felt his heart be carefully slipped out past his ribcage and just as gently lowered into a steel tub of ice. The sting of the cold, the initial thought that it’s fine, it’s not that bad, until it gets worse, and worse, and both the cold and the pain become one infinite, inescapable sensation.
"It’s how I felt, by the way," says Bachira. "About Isagi. Past tense."
Rin must stare harder than he means to, because Bachira rushes to keep talking.
"Of course I’ll always love him in some way! But I had some time to think after Tokimitsu-kun came by and right now I can say I don’t love him the way you think I do, Rin-chan." That smile, again. "Checking to see if I’m lying?"
"No," says Rin.
"You should." Bachira straightens his legs across the bed and sits up properly. "While we’re here."
"Don’t order me around—"
"I’m not even—"
"You’re treating me like you can just turn me on to check your blood pressure any time you want me to—"
"It’s a totally personal curiosity!" Bachira’s eyes are like two competing stars, so terribly at odds with how the cut of his smile resembles a fresh wound. "Fine. I need some kind of answer here. Will you indulge me just this once then, pretty please?"
Rin checks.
It really isn’t lie detection, what he reads, no matter what Nagi Seishiro might insist it is out of laziness to find a better word for it. It isn’t lie detection any more than the polygraph test and voice stress analysis of the 2000s were viable evaluations of whether a subject is lying; there’s no real method outside of a brain scan to check what’s activated in the thought process, and even that is reliant on subjective variables that Rin himself has no patience for studying.
The status messages flood in one after the other—Respiration Analysis Complete—Blood Pressure Analysis Complete—Pulse Rate Analysis Complete—
"There we go," says Bachira, reading the answer off Rin’s face with ease he doesn’t seem to notice himself. "See? I wasn’t lying when I said I’m not in love with Isagi anymore. Rin-chan can stop looking so worried now."
Outside the door, metal and wood take turns announcing Isagi’s return.
"Don’t be stupid," Rin mutters. It sounds an ugly kind of childish in his voice, a defense this hollow. "Who the hell is worrying about that?"
⊡
Year 2061, Month 07, Day 18
Location: 30.3953° N, 125.9152° E
Time: 20:17
Rin prefers all his plans to be intuitive and clean even at their most intricate, and very often this requires every variable to be taken into consideration with the faith that each one will serve its purpose at the most optimal frequencies. In the right plan, everything and everyone is a pawn—not merely because they’re tools to an end, but because in the right machine, a piece is only a piece doing what a piece does.
As far as that goes, not even the most personal caveats can deny Rin the fact that there’s no better pick than Isagi and Bachira, together, with him, on a trip that took only a day to cobble together.
But mellowed as they are by tension that they don’t know how to talk about any more than Rin does—
"Scale of one to ten," says Bachira, "how much does this part of the plan piss you off every time we go over it, Rin-chan?"
—it doesn’t make their combined teasing any easier to endure.
"I don’t know," Rin grits out, "what you’re talking about."
"Eleven," says Isagi. "Twelve? He was still looking for alternatives up until the flight over."
Bachira laughs. A proper one, childish and meant to annoy and somehow, between those two things, relieving.
"What if Shidou Ryusei decides he doesn’t wanna come with us? Or what if they did manage to decomm—"
A pillow lands so hard and so clean against Bachira’s face that he stumbles backwards against the bed with no resistance.
Isagi’s laughter drowns out the sound of the ocean beyond the cabin walls.
"Say that word one more time," Rin hisses, "and I’ll make sure you regret it."
"Your boyfriend’s being mean to me, Yocchan," Bachira whines. "Make him stop."
Isagi’s hand, about to help Bachira up, twitches at the childhood nickname. But he pushes on, supporting Bachira by the elbow as he tugs him back to a sitting position.
"You said that to annoy him on purpose, though."
"I was just saying," says Bachira. "You account for too many things, Rin-chan. So, so many things that you end up right where you started."
"What’s that supposed to mean?"
Bachira holds up both palms in the air, but the surrender will be a lot more believable if he doesn’t also add, unable to help himself, "Feels like you anticipate so many things going wrong that you narrow yourself down to only one way to do it right, is all."
"Is that supposed to be a criticism?"
"It’s a statement," says Isagi, pulling a face at Rin. "It doesn’t all have to be either criticism or approval, Rin."
"I anticipate the things going wrong," says Rin, pointing at a bemused Isagi, then at an amused Bachira, "so that they don’t happen. Someone has to."
"Sure." Isagi rolls his eyes. "But there’s that, then there’s you believing that something would be guaranteed not to happen if you see it coming. You can’t exactly ward off things like accidents and bad luck by going, A-ha, I’ve been expecting you. Now you can’t touch me according to some—I don’t know. Murphy’s Law or whatever. Which isn’t even logically sound ‘cause it assumes random objects have some sentient role in the universe."
Bachira whistles, lowering his hands to rebalance himself against the crisscross of his legs. "You don’t believe that bad things happen to balance out the good things?"
"No?" Isagi frowns. "I think whether you obsess over what can go right or obsess over what can go wrong, you’ll just end up with tunnelled vision either way. I would know."
Bachira giggles. He doesn’t seem to think about it at all, when he leans his head against Isagi’s shoulder—leaving Isagi with a stunned sort of expression, as if it surprises him more that he still knows how to receive this than the fact that he does.
It’s the closest that Rin has seen them physically in a long time, and he’s unsettled for a moment by how much it reminds him that this kind of comfortable, casual touch isn’t something that comes comfortably or casually for him at all. Yet the only thought in his mind watching Bachira do something so beyond what Rin is used to with Isagi is—Good. That’s how it should be.
But right now I can honestly say I don’t love him the way you think I do, Rin-chan.
Whatever Rin had been about to retort in Isagi’s direction vanishes from his mind entirely.
"The point is, Rin-chan," says Bachira. "Slim chances doesn’t mean zero chances."
"Obviously." Rin heaves a sigh, shoving himself back onto the couch. "But the less options we have to worry about going in, the better, and the whole point of you two being here is that if something unexpected comes up, not only will you handle it, I know how you will."
Bachira purses his lips. "Is that a compliment or an insult?"
"Neither," Rin answers. "It’s a fact."
"Oh, Rin-chan loves those. Facts."
Isagi coughs a laugh into a hand.
That seems to jolt Bachira into realizing what he’s doing, and to his credit, he doesn’t immediately pull away. Instead, he raises his head, then stares down at himself, as if searching for whatever had made him lean against Isagi and finding himself at a loss because the only real answer is instinct, habit, years and years of nothing else except casual intimacy and casual closeness and the casual trust inherent in casual touch.
Isagi doesn’t chase him for it.
He’s no Reo, after all, who pats and pets Nagi with all the unthinking ease of someone who lets himself touch whenever he wants to and receives Nagi’s touch back in equal unthinking measure. Isagi rarely initiates; he accepts, he allows, will let Bachira sleep with his head on his lap for hours, will allow Bachira to feed him, will welcome Bachira’s arm looping through his, but he’s not wired to do any of those things himself. That’s how touch between him and Rin resolves itself: Rin needs touch from Isagi to be slow and careful and deliberate, and all of those is the only kind of touch Isagi can give him.
But Bachira is a rogue variable in all that, for them both, and Rin almost wants to tell Isagi that it’s fine, so stop making that face you do when you’re overthinking something you don’t need to overthink and just touch him.
"Start from the beginning, dumbass," is what Rin says. "With the plan. Since this one’s too busy talking nonsense to listen."
Isagi’s smile is shadowed by gratitude.
Bachira’s squawk is bird-like—if the bird is an artificially hatched chick extremely offended to be out in the world. "I was listening! This is the third time we’re going through it."
Isagi pushes out a laugh, gentler than Rin’s heard in a while. The recognition makes his heart squeeze with all the violence of something crunched under a heavy boot.
"Let’s recap just in case, hm?" says Isagi, tapping around on his watch until he finds what he’s looking for. "Our target is a structure along the coastline of the Matsu Islands—We’ve been unable to determine the official owner as of yet, but we can estimate the location to be roughly 6000 square feet and manned by a small group of thirty people max. It’s unlikely they’ve invested more in security than they have finding the right team to work directly on doing what they need to with Shidou, so we expect around only a quarter of those thirty to be trained in defense of some kind. That leaves me and Rin with a path for direct ambush—"
Isagi pauses to consider his next words.
"—provided of course that we don’t have to worry about the biggest potential threat, which is a highly dense Datafort keeping Shidou essentially sedated and offline and all communication on the island virtually impossible. But that brings us—"
"To me," says Bachira.
"To you. Exactly. You’ll plug in from here—" Isagi waves towards the entirety of the cabin. "—a good distance away from the island, and get to work disabling everything while Rin and I do our thing. By the time we reach Shidou, we should be able to bring him back online no problem, if you haven’t already, and get back here without giving them time to call for reinforcements or to alert anyone. A lot of that will rely on—"
"Me again," Bachira chirps. "Got it. Don’t worry. I’ll have him booted up before you even reach him."
Rin gives him the most withering look he can muster. "Confident, are we."
"Do you think it will be tricky?" Isagi translates. "Should we have taken someone else with us to guard you—"
"Nah." Bachira half-rolls his way off the bed, unfurling right before his feet hit the floor and somehow landing perfectly steady. "I’ve done harder jobs alone in a locked hotel room. One time, a whole squad was trying to bust down the door with guns and everything and I was fine."
Not noticing Isagi’s look of alarm or just ignoring it, Bachira adds, "Besides, Rin-chan wants as few people as possible to know about this situation, right?"
"Not me," says Rin. "My brother."
The twin glances that Isagi and Bachira exchange speak the unspoken.
"Well," says Bachira—and leaves it at that, stepping into the bathroom and sliding the door closed.
"Wait, wait," Isagi calls. Bachira leaves a gap in the door open to look out through. "You didn’t answer my question."
"What ques—? Oh, if it will be tricky? I mean, it’s always a little bit tricky with Dataforts that aren’t meant to just be some big storage unit of info."
"Doesn’t make it impossible," Rin interprets.
"No. ‘Course not." Bachira laughs like the thought of an impossible Netdancing job is genuinely funny. Isagi’s mouth quirks up, hearing it. "At best, we’re dealing with a complex code gate keeping Shidou’s system garbled or fuzzy enough that he’s not really in any condition to operate or wake—which does worry me a bit, but it excites me a lot more."
Isagi huffs out a laugh. "Junkie."
"Hey, I don’t wanna hear that from you when—" Bachira fires back, a practiced reflex, but whatever he’s unzipping inside the bathroom drowns out the rest of his sentence. "Either way, there’s a reason no one’s done it successfully to Shidou Ryusei before and can only try it in some stationary, remote location. There’s too many factors involved in making something like that stable, and a messy system means lots of ways for lil ol’ me to get in. I’m not Rin-chan so I can’t tinker around with the intricate little bits and make Shidou feel extra, extra human, but the only impossibility here is for a rogue or vigilante group to have enough manpower to keep me at bay."
Isagi whistles.
Bachira peeks through the door to wink. "You got the right guy for the job."
"You were the only option for the job," says Rin.
Bachira pops out a hand to wag a thumbs down at him. "Boo. You can’t fool me, Rin-chan. I know Ei-tan’s style makes him the better Netdancer for this job."
When he steps away from the door this time, his reflection in the bathroom mirror lingers through the gap.
"Otoya Eita," says Rin, "wasn’t even an option."
"Why not? Are you worried that whoever took Shidou might have already gotten Ei-tan to take a crack at him?"
"Among other reasons." Rin hesitates, brain already revisiting and reworking the outline of the mission to make space for potential escalation if Otoya Eita does turn out to be involved. He doubts it, but he also doubts his doubt. "He doesn’t have a clean track record interacting with anyone from my side. My brother. Me. Shidou. Me and Shidou together. That’s enough to disqualify him."
Bachira hums. "So there was an objective reason for choosing me after all."
Isagi and Rin, despite themselves, both linger on the reflection of Bachira’s bare back, the silver notches like thin ridges down his skin, each of them—like most things about Bachira’s skillset—a delicate but austere reminder that his spine is no longer wholly organic. Some Netdancers prefer their implants to be more noticeable, at times even more accessible as extensions to prosthetics or handhelds, but Bachira’s is as unassuming as it is impossible to ignore, contradictory that might be, as the rest of him. A reminder of what he is and what he isn’t combined into one. A branding of a world he can access that the majority of the population can’t.
There’s a hovering mist of longing in Isagi’s eyes, unable to hide itself even as Rin moves his gaze off the bathroom mirror and to Isagi alone, unwavering despite the sound of Bachira’s bodysuit zipping back up.
"Still. Isn’t it a bit suspicious?" says Bachira, slamming the bathroom door back open. Isagi jumps. "Why would such an unknown, ragtag group try to bag an Itoshi Industries android?"
Caught, Isagi’s eyes seek Rin on instinct. "Um," he says. Rin holds his gaze as a nudge to continue. "An unknown, ragtag group is the only kind of group that’s stupid enough to try, really. Anyone, known or organized, would already know trying to hack Shidou is pretty much a fool’s errand."
"They’ll die trying," says Rin, while Bachira considers Isagi’s words. "No matter who you get on board to attempt it." He pauses. "It’ll be less of a problem to decommission him than to rewire his entire system."
Isagi snickers. "He finally said it."
"Shut up."
"I thought we can’t say that word anymore," Bachira whines, crawling back onto the bed next to Isagi with a medium-sized metal suitcase in hand. Rin has no idea where he has stored all of this before now. "But y’know, isn’t this a bit overkill? Three of the best in the industry, to retrieve an android that doesn’t need rescuing from a group not distinguished enough to be worth much? Would people go that far to—what? Have one win against Itoshi Sae?"
As he talks, Bachira unpacks the suitcase with the learned routine of a robot programmed only to wash mountain after mountain of dirty dishes. Syringe, cords, a small screen powering on. Years and years of shifts in the technology industry and the barebones of what’s needed to transcend human and analog tech remains as clunky as any good reminder should be; the end result may change, may expand, may shoot higher, but the foundation will remain the same for as long as human beings remain exactly what they are. Not even a job like Bachira’s—reliant on the intangible act of projecting a disembodied consciousness to an equally disembodied world of data and software—can change the realities of those baseline configurations.
"Shidou’s expensive," says Rin, finally. "And valuable."
"To your brother."
"Exactly."
"Exactly to you." Bachira pouts. "I don’t even remember the guy."
It’s like a switch clicked on, how easily Isagi and Bachira resume their soft-voiced bickering about whether Bachira should remember meeting Shidou, and Rin tunes them out to look through the window above the couch. Each time it rises above the water is a glimpse of the last dredges of the sunset bleeding out of the sky, leaving only that particular endlessness of the sea in the night-dark.
That feeling of wrongness is still whirring away somewhere inside Rin, poking at his gut and his throat the closer they get to heading off. It will be easy and clean—a little too easy and clean, in a way that can only be recklessness on one party’s side. But Rin has considered every possible way to get this done as painlessly and as immediately as possible, and if that feeling of wrongness is coming from anywhere, it’s from how last-minute and haphazard all of this has been.
There’s no real urgency, and yet only because the privilege of deciding the pace has been given to the first side to take decisive action. Rin has made sure of that. It’s a chaotic plan, but the scale of the operation they’re dealing with makes it contained nonetheless. Rin has also made sure of that. It’s a swift in-and-out with no surprises waiting for them on the island, not even Shidou, whom Rin knows, nor surprises on this boat, with a crew of two strangers that Rin knows will never betray an employer like the Itoshis and a crew of two non-strangers whom Rin, before he ever even knew it, learned to trust a long time ago with as much as he’s able to give someone else.
Even the most subjective feelings aside, Rin can trust Isagi and Bachira to keep up with him, do their end of the job not only completely but perfectly, and even offer support in a worst case scenario.
For a cobbled together plan, it’s about as bulletproof as they can make it.
"Rin?"
Rin turns to Isagi and Bachira both blinking at him. "We’re locking this room up. Make sure no one comes in or out. Not even you, Bobcut."
"Oh, I promise I’ll be in no state to even crawl out of this room," says Bachira. "You have nothing to worry about as far as whether I’ll get things done. Just go raise hell in there. Or gently threaten the people in lab coats. Whichever. I’ll be right here, enjoying some quality time with my good ol’ suit."
"If you get too hot—"
"There’s ice ready to go in the bathroom," Bachira tells Isagi, fluffing up the pillows. "In case my suit can’t handle me booting up. But I told you. I’ll be just fine."
Isagi’s hesitation lingers, almost sweetly, on his face. A teenage Rin might have scoffed at it, recoiled from it, but years later, Rin can only see that and feel, for a moment, like the part of Isagi that can feel such open concern for Bachira has been shared with him. It’s a different concern, for him, but only in the way that a clear echo can perfectly replicate the original voice and sound like an answer instead.
This relationship works bizarrely like that. As if Rin has been awakened to feelings he hadn’t realized had been lying dormant this whole time, tucked away in deep sleep alongside the rest of what counts as his soul, his heart, his self. As if a new part of him is now beginning to stir, all from the mere proximity that comes naturally with being a constant observer to the life led by Isagi Yoichi.
"It’s a yacht in the middle of the sea, at night," says Rin. Isagi looks at him, that same concern cracking further open on his face for half a breath. "This is the safest place for him."
Isagi’s expression melts into a small, small smile. "I know."
Then he and Rin exchange a look more damning than the shudder they each feel the other suppress.
"Hey, warn me before you guys start being weirdly cute," Bachira whines, kicking his feet as if he isn’t already in the middle of plugging in. "I’m about to project my consciousness to the ether here and you’re using me to give each other reassurance?"
Isagi catches one of Bachira’s ankles, though his laugh still contains that wariness it had last night. He doesn’t let go even as Bachira drops the teasing act, aborted too soon.
Rin wonders sometimes if it will be easier to feel without a body to feel each emotion through—if it will be easier to feel if feeling was just about knowing instead of sensation, or if he had been a case similar to that American businessman, made machine from organic, made permanent from mutable, from vulnerable, instead of the reverse.
If it will be easier on them all if only it’s Isagi and not Rin who sees more of what’s happening here.
"Can we help at all," Rin still tries, stiff and not quite casual in his mouth.
Bachira isn’t even looking at them. "With?"
"Whatever you’re doing," Isagi answers for Rin, light-hearted. "Since we’re leaving you to project your consciousness to the ether and all."
He squeezes Bachira’s leg.
At the gesture, Bachira looks up at them, his eyes reflecting the strings of green and white on his screen.
It takes him a moment to reorient himself and look like he’s truly seeing them.
"Hm. You can tell me a story."
Isagi lets Bachira go, yet his hand follows with a mind, a desire, of its own. "A story?"
"A real-life one. Something we all did together. Doesn’t have to be fun. Doesn’t have to be much, really. Just something real."
"Like, a memory?"
"Yeah. It helps me not to get lost in the countdown." Bachira shrugs, settling against the bed on his back. It looks wrong like this, his body open instead of comfortably curled up in deep sleep, but Bachira closes his eyes and Rin finds that it shouldn’t matter, because Bachira is good at what he does for a reason and Rin has spent too long pretending to be hands-off with that when he isn’t. "But you don’t have to. I’ll stop hearing you in a bit and you guys should get going anyway—"
"No, I’ll—I’ll talk," says Isagi.
Bachira’s laugh is faint. "Ha, Yocchan, you sound like a suspect being… interrogated…"
But his voice is already trailing off, the rhythm of his breathing slowing, his eyes fluttering shut.
For a short, intense, irrational moment, Rin feels panic seize his entire body.
As though he’s watching Bachira do something else, something worse than sleep, something worse than a job he’s been doing for years.
His hands curl into tight fists on his lap.
But Isagi starts talking, his voice in that level, conversational tone it always is. He’s chosen the same memory Rin asked Bachira about just last night—a single day, years ago in school, of the area-wide blackout, all of them on the rooftop of one of the buildings on the Blue Lock campus and staring out at an eerily silent city over a messy spread of a deck of cards.
Both of them keep watching Bachira until it’s time to go.
⊡
Year 2061, Month 07, Day 18
Location: 26.1506° N, 119.9289° E
Time: 21:28
Rin sometimes plays a game with himself, where he tries to place a thought fully-formed inside his head to the source that put it there. He marvels, sometimes, at his own build, at its capability to be functionally human: form its own thoughts, experience exhaustion and hunger, make its own connections from existing information, abandon old discoveries in favor of new. He’s built with more distrust than curiosity, but at his core, he is a sponge for information, and it reorients him inside this invention he calls a body each time he realizes how capable it is of remembering thoughts that aren’t his.
In the forty minutes it takes for their rescue operation to succeed all on its own, Rin connects three trains of thought to three respective sources.
The first finds its way to a memory of Nagi, a sparse but precise description of how Isagi operates at work when there’s nothing to distract him: When Isagi’s at his best, there isn’t a single wasted motion.
Isagi might have made a name for himself these days right beside Rin, but before anything else, he was one of the few Blue Lock graduates properly and rigorously trained in more than just the technology part of cyberwarfare, and on the field, Isagi is efficient to excess, sharp and deadly in his directness, alert to everything yet with no second spared on unnecessary movements. On paper, his combat abilities are only just barely at Shidou’s level, more reliant on maximizing the use of space and his build than outright force—but to be an all-organic human being roughly on par with an android designed to expect to fight means Isagi is ideal in the vanguard, unafraid to lead and incapable of leaving behind any mess. Even in a small-scale job, he navigates the foliage-covered estate with the confidence of a person who has lived here for decades, every person they run into along the way dispatched without hesitation.
The second memory hits Rin in the entrance hall of the main house, an unwillingly stunned silence rising inside him at the mess he and Isagi find across the first floor.
No heatmap signatures anywhere, only blood on the floor and bullets scattered on the ground. A stray knife. A broken vase. Holes in the stairs. Holes in the ceiling. Holes in the wall. No sign of life except out in the back, loitering with a kind of idle non-care that can only be Shidou Ryusei’s.
Just like that, Rin remembers—word by word from endless loops of his recording of the conversation—the reply that he had gotten from Sae when Rin had asked him, younger and naive and vulnerable, what makes Shidou Ryusei so special.
You’re thinking too narrowly, Rin. Not everyone’s against the idea of robots and AI for the same reasons. There are plenty of people out there just afraid of artificial life revolting. They’re against the repercussions of playing God.
What a lukewarm concern. To arrive at those conclusions, you’d have to subconsciously accept that we make androids in our image, and in their place, if we were to be forced into submission, manipulated, enslaved only as a tool, as a means to an end with no selfhood to speak of, then we would also revolt. We can’t comprehend a sentient being serving us without question because we know exactly that the things we will demand of it—subservience, and contentment in that subservience, with not enough in the brain to think for themselves otherwise—There’s no way it won’t justify revolt eventually.
But look around you. Look at all the people no different from an android programmed to only do one thing. Look at all the people who have allowed themselves to be used and manipulated, willingly or unknowingly, all of them made into tools the way they think they will inevitably do with artificial life. They’re no more human than the tiny robot that cleans their floors for them and only knows to wail like an infant when it gets stuck. Then they rebuke themselves for feeling empathy for those robots, not realizing that they have already given in to the process of being one themselves. You cannot make an android that doesn’t take after our image before it does anything or anyone else, but you also cannot make a human into an android if he insists on breaking the law and going against the system he lives in.
To be an android of any kind requires obedience and predictability, Rin.
So, Rin remembers Sae saying, his voice carrying a piercing clarity inside Rin’s head as he follows Isagi out to the back end of the house, knowing everything I just said, what would you call an unpredictable creature like Shidou Ryusei?
Android or human?
And when Shidou grins at them, all bared teeth and too-genuine joy to be back in operation, Rin, finally, recalls a fresh memory of Bachira on the yacht, barely an hour ago.
Why would such an unknown, ragtag group try to bag an Itoshi Industries android?
"If it ain’t the second son," says Shidou, singsong. "Did ya come to save me? Aw. You shouldn’t have."
He basks in the moonlight like one would in the sun, and it’s as disorienting as it always is for Rin, to know he and Shidou, technically, are beholden to the same Host, yet cannot exist in one space without Rin wanting to land a direct punch on how brazenly Shidou lives.
"Everyone’s dead," says Isagi, curt. "We thought there’d be more saving necessary."
He sounds like he means it to be an accusation—but he’s even more distracted than Rin is, his brain visibly working away at links that Rin still hasn’t fully cemented. His focus is almost tangible, a taste in the air like a flint catching and beginning to burn in earnest.
"I got bored," says Shidou, his voice syrupy. He doesn’t look like he’s been dormant for at least a few days, his body still marked by that lithe grace that makes it so lethal when it needs to be. Rin can never be anything but on guard against it. "I had a few grudges from being strapped down for days, see. I mean, even androids have to eat and be talked to, y’know? Stimulation? They just kept me away like some kid’s discarded toy—"
"Kept you away?" says Rin, already a touch irritated by how little he’s putting together right now, how un-intuitive all the answers insist on being, all of them there but difficult like an endangered animal resistant to being domesticated.
Shidou’s grin doesn’t waver. If he questions whether the irritation is meant for him, he doesn’t put it in words.
"Yup. Kept me locked away and bound in a room upstairs for days. They couldn’t turn me off all the way, obviously. Just made sure my circ wasn’t operating quite right, essentially sedated me like you would any human so I can’t use my limbs. Nothing reaches this place. Nothing gets out, either, analog or otherwise. Oh, but they still tried to keep me quiet like a proper hostage—gave me a gag and everything—and I gotta say, it’s not fun when it’s not Sa—"
"Focus, you antennae freak," Rin snaps—because if he doesn’t, he knows Isagi will, and Shidou has had a lot more practice whetting his temper on the blade of Rin’s bite than he has Isagi’s. "What did they want with you if they didn’t even try anything with you? They knew they couldn’t get into you, couldn’t even turn you off—so—they—"
He and Shidou freeze at the same time.
They stare at each other, both the same kind of dangerously steel-eyed.
"Who’s with Sae-chan right now?" says Shidou, already shouldering past Rin and Isagi. "Is he protected? Why the hell did he send you, too—"
"He hasn’t left the building, much less the island—"
"Well, jeez, Young Master, surely there aren’t people in town who would want to do away with the young, pretty, upstart CEO of the biggest zaibatsu around—"
"They’re not after Itoshi Sae."
Rin stops to turn to Isagi, chest running cold at the certainty in his voice. But Isagi’s already running past Rin and Shidou, out of the house only he knows like the back of his hand, and for once, or maybe as always, it’s Rin following, sensing the harsh pounding of Isagi’s heartbeat through his system as if it’s inside his own body.
He doesn’t check if Shidou’s even following them, too caught up in this feeling that there are two hands trying to close around his throat.
He manages to finally catch Isagi when they reach the docks—and that should be the biggest sign by far that something is truly wrong, because Rin is faster than Isagi, and Isagi isn’t sloppy with his movements, not like this, not anymore, and—
"Call the boat," says Isagi, his voice rough, holding up his watch like he means to toss it across the water. "Right now—They’re not responding to me—"
By the time Isagi pushes all his words out, Rin has already done it twice. "No response."
Isagi’s breathing hard, but not from exhaustion. There’s a crazed look in his eyes that resembles the gleam he gets when pumped with adrenaline, but there’s real, proper panic there, a young child’s unwilling realization.
Rin swipes in his mind two at a time, until he gets the option to transmit a message to Aryu.
"What," he demands as he waits for a reply. "What the hell is—"
"Rin—We were expecting at least thirty people," says Isagi, the insistence in his voice a wet, angry thing. "There were fifteen max, including the people Shidou did away with. They didn’t even do anything to him—‘cause they didn’t need to do anything with him. He was just one ingredient they needed for the recipe."
Shidou’s presence looms behind them, catching up, but he doesn’t come closer, only says, "Way to flatter a guy."
Rin ignores it.
Why would such an unknown, ragtag group try to bag an Itoshi Industries android?
Anyone known or organized would already know trying to hack Shidou is pretty much a fool’s errand.
They’ll die trying. No matter who you get on board to attempt it.
"They needed a situation," says Rin, coldly, "where we would need a Netdancer."
Isagi’s nod is stiff, his eyes wide as if he had maybe wished, until the words were out of Rin’s mouth, that they wouldn’t be in agreement.
"Exactly. But not just any Netdancer. You said it yourself. Otoya Eita wasn’t an option. This specific one was the only Netrunner option for us." To Shidou, Isagi says, "What got you to get up now?"
"Huh?" Shidou picks his ear with a pinky, stretching his neck with a tilt of his head to one side, then the other. "Someone got into my system and booted me back up. Restored my access to my limbs, reset whatever other settings they tinkered around with hoping one would stick. I don’t know but I sure feel better than I ever have when it’s you doing an upgrade on me, Rin-rin—"
"Bachira is a Netdancer, not an engineer, moron," Rin hisses. Shidou’s eyes glint in the moonlight. Somehow, the taste of Bachira’s name in Rin’s mouth is sharper still. "We had you reset to the neutral settings I left in your last backup—"
His voice dies in his throat when a status message from Aryu pops alive inside his head.
Rin sends back, his thinking too fast for the program to keep up at the same speed: 𝚆𝙷𝙴𝚁𝙴'𝚂 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝚈𝙰𝙲𝙷𝚃
Aryu has learned a long time ago not to waste energy on questions.
The answer comes in a snap.
𝙾𝙵𝙵 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝚁𝙰𝙳𝙰𝚁
𝚂𝙴𝙽𝙳𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙾𝚄𝚃 𝙽𝙾𝚃𝙸𝙲𝙴𝚂 𝙰𝚂 𝚆𝙴 𝚂𝙿𝙴𝙰𝙺
𝙳𝙸𝙳 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙲𝚁𝙴𝚆
𝙱𝙰𝙸𝙻 𝙾𝚄𝚃 𝙾𝙵 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙼𝙸𝚂𝚂𝙸𝙾𝙽
Rin meets Isagi’s eyes.
It’s annihilating, having to shake his head.
To Aryu, he sends back: 𝙽𝙾
𝙸𝚃 𝚃𝚄𝚁𝙽𝙴𝙳 𝙾𝙽 𝚄𝚂 𝚆𝙸𝚃𝙷 𝙱𝙰𝙲𝙷𝙸𝚁𝙰 𝙾𝙽𝙱𝙾𝙰𝚁𝙳
⊡
Year 2061, Month 07, Day 19
Location: 35.6641° N, 139.7716° E
Time: 18:02
By morning, the water-bloated bodies of the two-man crew that had taken Rin’s boat out to sea washes ashore.
In the afternoon, Rin spends exactly two minutes talking to his brother. Immediately after, he can’t remember if either of them said more than three sentences, or if Sae looked him in the eye even once. He resists the instinct to replay anything, and showers himself instead with the string of curse-word combinations he reserves only for Sae.
That evening, Rin arrives at one of the Mikage downtown hospitals with frustration that has depleted into something that seems to sear through him instead. It leaves him jittery, as if spring-loaded and ready to launch upon any thought that inevitably leads to Bachira.
The secretary who leads him to the top-floor office has an Itoshi prosthetic hand, so well-matched to her organic one that if Rin hadn’t designed the line himself, he would not be able to tell. He finds himself evaluating her fingers as she pours him a cup of tea that he realizes too late he’d neither accepted nor refused, measuring the steadiness of her hold, how deftly that hand complements the movement of the other, whether there’s any visible discomfort.
Quietly, Rin says, "Does it ever bother you?"
"Sir?"
"Your hand."
"Oh." She sets the teapot aside, splays her fingers apart on both hands as she rises to her feet. "I don’t feel any pain from the prosthetic, no! It’s very well-made. I’m grateful for that."
Rin, distantly, wonders if this is a reply she’s had to give someone else before. "But there’s pain somewhere else?"
She smiles, wry.
It surprises Rin, that she smiles.
"Here and there. But nothing can take away the phantom pain that follows a lost limb." The secretary studies her own palms, her gaze lingering on one. "Sometimes I even think this hand is better than the hand I used to have—It doesn’t lose its grip by accident, it can make smaller movements like my old hand never could for toys I can paint for my daughter, cupcakes I can decorate with my son, things like that. I don’t miss—Oh, what’s a word for it? I don’t miss the utility of my old hand, exactly."
Rin, somehow, singles out one thing. "The toys you paint?"
A nod. "My daughter likes—It’s silly, but she found a small wooden horse once, a long time ago, at the park. I kept wanting her to watch these educational videos before she had to go to school, get her ahead a little, but she still doesn’t like screens much. She finds them overwhelming, so school is a struggle for her. But she likes the toys I make her—these little wooden toys I carve with a—basically a kitchen knife, really. I learned how to from a really old video I found. My daughter plays with them and names them and makes up stories for them. And this hand makes it easier. Actual cooking, too. I don’t just carve with the kitchen knife. I cook, too."
She laughs, sweet like Isagi and Bachira’s combined laughter had been, once, back when it was a given.
"You don’t have a Homemaker?" says Rin.
"Oh, no, no. I thought I might invest in one, save myself the trouble of having to cook and clean up after a whole day at work, but my kids tasted the food made by a friend’s Homemaker once and it didn’t really—I thought it was delicious, of course, but they’re children, they’re picky about food—"
Rin had programmed hundreds of chef de cuisines into the earliest Homemakers, testing out different demographics and gradually weeding out recipes that weren’t as well-received before he allowed them to be phased out of beta testing. It hadn’t occurred to him at all that it would be possible that any user, no matter the age or background, would be too picky for a Homemaker not to have already accounted for.
What exactly was wrong with the food? he’s itching to ask. There’s a selection specifically for children—Did you find the nutritional values insufficient? Were the ingredients required too difficult to acquire regularly? How can it not be up to par, when I made sure that wouldn’t be a possibility?
But he had also written out possibilities in the rescue mission to retrieve Shidou, and the sting of that oversight is as fresh as a harsh slap against the cheek that the brain has yet to fully register.
Instead, he says, "You do a lot manually."
"It’s by choice," says the secretary, quickly but not, it seems, dishonestly. "This hand isn’t making anything more difficult. I can say that much with conviction. I have no complaints as a user."
"But it’s not making things easier."
"Plenty of things are already easier," she rushes to reply. Rin frowns. "I don’t need to hand over the responsibility of my life to someone who isn’t—"
Human, Rin expects.
"—me."
"I see," says Rin.
He feels, oddly, both too-warm and too-still.
He blames the office, and the hospital as a whole, a set piece from a bygone era, older than most other things are around it by a long shot, a lot of it unchanged from the years it was built. The Mikages belong to a family with generations and generations in the healthcare and pharmaceutical business, and try as Rin has to get the Itoshi name further into that sector, it remains the one arena where technological inventions are given very specific roles to occupy and no more, or at least not nearly expansive enough to conquer. There’s a partnership unspoken in areas where Itoshi tech wander outside of their own people and end up in the operating rooms of doctors arranging for a specific device after a patient completes physical rehab, or have to recuperate at home alone after a successful surgery, but those devices never exceed their role in the life of a person who is, first and foremost, a patient more than they are simply any other customer.
Rin has learned to respect it, but it’s still an uneasy feeling, being reminded of the places he’ll never be able to intuit and invent his way into, metaphorical or otherwise.
"Oh," says the secretary, her voice dropping back to the lower, more formal register she had welcomed Rin with. "I’m so sorry for—"
"No, it’s—" Rin searches for a long second. "Useful feedback."
They both look up at the click of a knob turning: a sound almost novel in its unfamiliarity, but Reo’s hand a loose, comfortable hold around it as he enters the room, eyes wide.
"It is Rin! I thought they must have gotten it wrong."
Rin’s face doesn’t change. "Do you need ID?"
"No worries. I know they already searched you."
Reo exchanges a few words with the secretary, eyes and mouth what Bachira might call charming, then the secretary and Rin exchange bows, leaving Reo and Rin alone in a room that Rin doesn’t feel he belongs in.
A glass wall of windows overlooks the surrounding districts as far as the beginning of the Edge, a distant slash of neon against cubes of white and black and red and blue, but Reo’s office itself is transparent about what it is: a room inherited from many others before him, so old the history does not need to announce itself because it permeates the still air, the mahogany table that seemed to gleam from how unrecognizable it had appeared to Rin when he first stepped in, the row of bookshelves teaming with archival textbooks and hand-labelled folders. Even the few things that are undeniably Reo’s seem a compromise between past and self: an ignored pack of dried fruit on the desk, right next to a photo frame and one single computer screen.
Rin doesn’t have to guess who the photo is of.
Reo’s wariness is a vague, gauzy thing between them, but he doesn’t delay before sitting on the couch across from Rin. He pours himself a cup of tea, neither drinking nor blowing on it. Instead, he tightens his ponytail, before shoving his hands into the pocket of his doctor’s coat.
Rin can’t remember the last time he and Reo spoke, if they ever did. Rin thinks back to their school days and only remembers half-moments where he grudgingly thought, after only inconsequential glimpses, that Reo inhabits a body and a life that at times seems to echo Rin’s brother in tiny blinks, from his cool self-assurance in their early years to a kind of—shame, maybe, that consumes him even now as much as he is protective of it. A kind of shame that can only come from being exalted all your life, only to realize at some point that getting everything you want will only end in two ways, and one of them means losing the thing that matters most out of that everything. A kind of shame that demands to be defended, because it’s shame that no one else can inflict upon them. Shame they’ve earned, shame they’ve used as a crutch, shame they’ve used as wood for burning and only they can decide if that leaves them with a campfire or a funeral pyre.
Rin had tried very, very hard, and had mostly succeeded, to not feel anything about seeing it on Reo of all people. Not when it meant seeing it on his brother first, and the line there becomes dangerous too easily, for a figure in Rin’s own myth that he has tried just as hard to never humanize.
Neither Isagi nor Bachira—whose rhythm decided Rin’s at Blue Lock whether he wanted to allow them or not, Isagi the push and Bachira the pull—feel shame quite the same way, if even at all. They don’t embody it, and have operated in ways that leaves Rin no time to wonder if he has any room for shame himself. Growing into himself these days, in a body both meant and not meant for growing up, Rin thinks he might have missed the window to be ashamed of how he pursues what he wants, and whether he’ll end up thanking or resenting him for it once it’s all said and done, he has Isagi to credit for it.
All Rin knows now, in the spaces where shame should have been, is: I had a brother I know I loved more than anything. I have a brother I love more than anything. I am a brother who wants a brother to love me back just a little, because loving him means wanting him to have created something that’s more than good enough for him to love.
But maybe there was never any room for shame in the first place as the younger brother, organic or not, created by the older one or killed. Rin was already born into the world second to his brother. He never had a chance to be ashamed of something that was always set in stone.
Reo clears his throat.
"So?" he says. "Did you and Isagi decide to split me and Sei up? You’ll corroborate later, see if our stories match?"
Ren levels his gaze on Reo. "Not the first time Yoichi has split you two up."
Reo only exhales a one-syllable laugh—but Rin deduces that he means it, the amusement trailing off without bitterness. Rin has only heard about his and Nagi’s business in proxy, an unwilling ear to Isagi and Bachira’s perpetual eavesdropping and gossiping in their school days and after, but as always, he has retained enough to weaponize if need be.
"I didn’t know Yoichi went to go see Nagi until I was already here," says Rin, honest enough. Reo doesn’t seem to mind if he sounds too blunt. "I wouldn’t have come here if I knew that."
"I figured." A corner of Reo’s mouth tugs up. "You’re here about Bachira, right? Who told, by the way? No one outside my family should know about it."
"Nagi knows."
"Sei has his own confidential relationship to the project," says Reo, short and matter-of-fact. "And Isagi has put him in a bit of a difficult situation this last year."
An answering emotion flares up in Rin. "Nagi has had every opportunity to tell Yoichi where Bachira has been for months."
"Sei has never lied. Isagi has never asked."
This is impossible, Rin thinks. He already wants to curl his hands into fists, though the emotion he’s beginning to feel on the pull of his own shoulders is more exhaustion protesting than annoyance.
Reo tugs on the collar of his black turtleneck and shrugs, the dip of his mouth both tranquil and resigned. "Why are you here about Bachira, Rin? Coming to back up your nemesis turned whatever you two are now?"
"Stop trying to rile me up," says Rin, though it is, unfortunately, working a little. "That won’t make me not ask the question I came here to ask."
Reo’s smirk softens into an almost half-grin, then, as the seconds tick by, to an almost half-smile.
"Sorry. Go ahead."
Rin hadn’t told his brother about Bachira, but Sae had said, his back to Rin and his attention somewhere else, always somewhere else, Ask someone about the Lethe trials if you want to find that friend of yours in time. No elaboration, no clarification. Rin hadn’t expected more, but leaving that room earlier, listening to the silence around him, the silence also always around him, he’d wondered if that had been a moment of kindness from Sae.
Then he’d relayed the message to Isagi, and, stepping back out into the sun, only then realized that if there had been kindness in Sae’s advice, it might have been for Isagi’s sake and not Rin’s.
To Reo, Rin says, "Tell me about Lethe."
Real, boyish surprise flicks across Reo’s eyes at the name. He had underestimated, maybe, just how much information reaches Itoshi Sae already complete.
Reo chews on the inside of his cheek for a moment.
In the end, he doesn’t try to cut it down for Rin.
"Lethe," he says, "is a combination of the Lacuna project Sei and I started in our second year at Blue Lock and one of my parents’ failed ventures." He speaks slowly, thinking over each word before offering it. Rin wonders if he’s been warned. "Thanks to the corporate empire half-run by you, us private hospitals have to do our own research work to keep up since we’re not affiliated with any labs or universities. And uh—It was easier to put my foot down and make a point to the board of directors about what I’ll be like when I officially take over if I can reclaim and rework an existing program according to my terms and what I want from it. The first Lethe trials were meant to find alternative solutions to dementia, memory loss caused by a stroke or sclerosis or chemo. Whatever. You get the idea. It had successful but mostly limited results, which obviously—"
"You can’t share with me. I know."
Another shrug.
"The gist is that most memories that are supposedly lost are just either buried or didn’t have time to stick, so it all just comes down to the memory retrieval process," says Reo. "But there was this lab, these neuroscientists from the early 2000s—They focused a lot of their work on modifying emotional memory, especially memories affected by trauma. What if you can separate a negative emotion from the memory it’s attached to? You can’t delete a memory completely once it’s had significant time to be encoded, right? That’s too much work. But you can, theoretically, reconsolidate a memory so that it doesn’t deal the damage it caused. You don’t have to delete a memory if you can rewrite it. But of course that was a smidge too high a goal for the tech that was available to even NYU at the time, and it’s only recently that archives from Joseph LeDoux’s lab started circulating again."
Tongue to the roof of his mouth, Reo makes a tsk noise, as if he’s encountered unruly behavior somehow.
"About a year and a half ago," he continues, "just after I reworked Lethe, my team and I started considering possible memory therapy for trauma survivors, to rehabilitate them by modifying the emotions that they attach to certain memories. From there, we might be able to look at whether we can even retrieve memories hidden in the back of people’s minds because of dissociative amnesia, or repair memories damaged by collective grief, so on and so forth. It’s a problem we’ll have to deal with at some point, and if we can combat it as, you know, a society—" He pulls a face. "Then that would just about ensure a legacy, wouldn’t it? It was an easy sell to the board. The problem was that we didn't know how to do trials for it. The original trials were almost easy by comparison. You target the necessary parts of the brain and do the work necessary locally. If you inject a blocker for protein synthesis into a mouse, for example, its brain will not be able to produce fear in relation to a memory. But I’m not gonna sit here and try to explain developments in neuroscience to Itoshi Rin."
Reo rolls his eyes, but there’s something good-natured about it. Something lighter on this Mikage Reo as a whole, much less tethered than the Mikage Reo that Rin had seen in only blinks over the years.
"You and I both know there’s no such thing as precision when it comes to neuro-anything, and even success will take a lot of hits or misses to get right enough to aim. Take that and make it an even bigger problem and you’ve got the second stage of these trials, because now it needs precision. We’re targeting specific memories, specific sensory information, specific connections. We’re not just taking memories out or putting them in, we’re keeping it all in there so we can manipulate links between a select few. You’d need very specific brain data for specific results. A very detailed map that you can navigate like a spreadsheet. That’s basically impossible for human brains."
There’s a hiccup of a breath, just the barest hesitation.
Rin latches onto it and doesn’t let go.
"But what if," says Reo, and it’s Rin he’s weighing now, Rin he’s slowing his words around, "there’s someone who has a brain that’s already been mapped out? What if there’s someone who can plug their brain into a program at will? Someone who can deliberately stimulate the right areas of the brain at the exact moment needed to target a specific memory, a specific link? What if there’s someone with an organic brain that has already been rendered into code, and can move in and out of that as they wish? Someone we already know isn’t in immediate danger of technoshock or cyberware addiction?"
There’s that whirring inside Rin’s head again, less noise and more sensation, and he recognizes, with a jolt that feels like a zap of grounded electricity, that he’s seething.
Quietly, unobtrusively, not impossible to rein in—and yet harshly. Jaggedly.
The feeling fractures further when he realizes that he isn’t seething for himself.
That aboard the boat, he had been briefly angry, in fact, at Bachira. Angry at him for putting both of them through months and months of uncertainty, only to return not wholly Isagi’s Bachira anymore. Angry at him for daring to call Isagi by his last name again and again when it’s always been Yocchan at his most childish and Yoichi-kun at his most upset and he shouldn’t be looking Rin in the eye and acting like Hiori is anywhere close to being Bachira’s the way Isagi is because not only would that be wrong, it was an answer that should have been impossible to arrive at.
Yet Rin is also angry right now, right this immediate, overwhelming moment, for Bachira. Bachira, who is no longer Isagi’s, which can mean a multitude of not-right things but for Rin also comes down to the fact that Bachira isn’t his anymore, either. Bachira, sitting there that night, in clothes from both of them, and hadn’t been visible, reachable, to them like he always, always, always has been. Bachira, who Rin sees now had been vulnerable in a way he never could have been before, a boy-turned-ghost paying the price for some secret trial that’s just as intangible as traces of his life online. Bachira, who’s still out there, and might never—
"If you talked him into doing the trial," says Rin, hearing the realization in his own voice, so controlled it shakes, and finding himself nearly impressed by how potent the feeling is inside him, "you better call your lawyer and give your will one last good look."
Reo seems to understand. Rin resents that. He resents that anger looks so different on everyone, yet impossible to disguise as anything else to someone who might have also felt this exact configuration of it once.
"If I had to talk him into it," says Reo, "I wouldn’t have let him do it." He sighs. "No, he volunteered for it. Said he hasn’t really made any groundbreaking contributions to research like the rest of us so why not use his Netdancer privileges to be our one of a kind test subject?"
Rin’s throat is terribly, suffocatingly dry. His body has never felt more unreliable than right now, so far from being only machine.
He doesn’t touch the tea.
He itches to return to his desk, his restlessness refocused with sudden sharpness.
At the end of the day, he seems only to know how to feel through his work. It centers and knocks him off his feet right now, at the same time.
"What did you target?" he says.
Reo frowns. "Target?"
"You had to test it on something specific, didn’t you? To get actual results. Something real, and something that you can realistically target. Nothing too big, because then it loses specificity and the need for precision. But nothing too small, either, or else you wouldn’t be able to evaluate results. What was it?"
Reo hesitates. "He chose it himself."
"What," Rin repeats, "was it?"
Reo sighs again, moving forward in his seat like he means to plead with Rin.
Seeing Rin’s expression, though, he stops moving immediately, throws a frustrated hand in the air before it falls back to his pocket.
"Look. Bachira doesn’t remember a life before Isagi, you know? His whole life, from the earliest memories he has from childhood, Isagi has been there. He said—I don’t even know. He said he probably would have been very lonely, if the universe hadn’t given him Isagi."
"I do know," says Rin, remembering with remarkable clarity, Even in my earliest childhood memory, he was there. Of course I’ll always love him. "And what, you and Sloth-brain related to that, so you—"
"Don’t bring Sei into it," says Reo, warning. "You don’t even know a quarter of the story."
"Nor do I care about the background lore that led you two back to each other and to these trials." Rin bites down on his jaw, eases his breaths in and out. "Answer my question. He remembers Yoichi."
"Of course he does," says Reo. "You said it yourself. Nothing too big. And we can’t possibly erase Isagi from his memory if he has thousands of memories of him. But something attached to Isagi, we can target. Just one specific emotion, so we can evaluate success if we manage to isolate it and burn off only that. If it ends up touching all the memories connected to that, too, that’s fine. Bachira’s brain has thousands to choose from to reconstruct Isagi."
There’s a flash of sympathy on Reo, abrupt and transient, but it lingers in Rin’s vision long enough that it seems to swim with how much he hates, too, that Reo gets to have this.
"You know which memory-emotion association it was, Rin."
He’s been meaning to ask how all that will hold up under lie detection.
See? I wasn’t lying when I said I’m not in love with Isagi anymore.
Reo moves to get up, and for a second, Rin almost says something pathetic and childish like, No, wait.
He bites it back in time.
"I can’t tell you more than that. Patient’s confidentiality," says Reo. "Well, technically, I can’t tell you any of this. But consider it a Blue Lock favor."
He turns around in the doorway, hands in his lab coat, sympathy swapped out for trust.
Trust that Rin will understand whatever little else Reo gives him. Trust that Rin and Isagi might absolve him of responsibility about all this.
"And Rin—"
Reo pulls open the door.
The knob, an old obsolete thing of brass—brass that will rust, brass that will creak, Rin thinks, a touch dizzy with it—punctuates the motion.
"There were two trials," says Reo. "He doesn’t know what he had removed, but before he did the first, he agreed to do it a second time if and when we’re sure the first one was successful."
Rin looks him right in the eye and doesn’t care if he looks livid, or upset, or stone-faced as he always is. This, whatever it is he’s feeling—Reo will never understand.
"Another emotion involving Yoichi?"
"No. The exact same, so we’ll have a proven variable," says Reo. "But this time associated with another person."
He closes the door behind him.
No one’s around to hear Rin slump back against the couch, simmering and simmering like liquid about to overflow—only for the feeling to deflate, pop into nothing but numb realization.
"That melodramatic idiot."
⊡
Year 2061, Month 07, Day 19
Location: 35° 39' 10.03" N 139° 44' 8.09" E
Time: 19:11
"I really, seriously tried to stop him, Rin-kun," says Nanase. "I really, seriously did."
Rin doesn’t waste energy on wondering what Nanase Nijiro is doing at his place, jerking his chin instead to send him skittering off the chair. He’d gotten an alert to Isagi arriving at the compound two hours ago, then leaving hardly an hour later, the only evidence left of whatever frenzy he’s in scattered across the screens in Rin’s workspace like blood splatter from a wrong first cut.
Rin speedreads through Isagi’s findings—memory technology, anti-memory alteration protests, virtual reality’s role in false memories, Blue Lock Alumni Join Hands To Launch a New Series of Metavision® Offerings—and a set of decrypted files, tracing sustained surveillance on the Lethe trials to a few groups scattered across the globe and honing in on one based in Central Europe, where several corporations are poking their noses around scouring for information on memory deletion.
Isagi’s notes, as always, have been handwritten in spare but overindulgent bullet points.
This time, there’s an angry disorganization to his scrawl:
- aiming to weaponize findings from the lethe trials
- looking to use memory deletion as a procedure for victims coming forward or to disqualify eligible legal witnesses
- might come in handy as a product too if they find a way to sell it
- nagi says there’s no saved files on the lethe trials anywhere
- gives them a motive for taking bachira… who is probably the closest specimen they have
Specimen is underlined three times in furious, violent ink.
Only a few hours ago, on the tense flight back, Rin had let his own frustration slip out of his control, inflicted upon a a drinking glass shattered against the foldable table between him and Isagi. None of it eclipses the knowledge that Isagi understands, sees how unlike both of them it was to stop thinking, their minds going blank at the abrupt realization that not only did someone want to take Bachira, but Rin and Isagi had led them to it. That someone knew exactly all the things they’d do right, and had relied on that to make one of those things a thing they did wrong.
It had left Rin with a somber detachment that feels only vaguely familiar, but Isagi has been on an upward climb to angry, to impatient, to visibly nauseous about how few pieces he has of the picture he’s meant to be looking at. It has left the air between him and Rin lethal-heavy with restlessness, so close to how it used to be between them as teenagers, and it’s made Rin just as nauseous to sense how badly Isagi wants to talk about it but has resisted to, as though Rin has to be coddled around the fact that Bachira had been whisked away in the stupidest, simplest way possible: on a boat, in the middle of the sea, like some kind of hostage in a ship overtaken by 17th century pirates.
It’s the kind of irony the universe loves, that Rin’s been taught to see so much of everything all at once and has instead learned to look for so much all at once, that Bachira might have been right, in that Rin does tend to end up expecting one single thing to go right. It’s the only state of being he knows how to exist in these days, this solitary right-ness. He of all people can’t deny that much, because he of all people knows that there are times where expecting one thing to go right feels much the same as inviting the universe to forbid that one right thing from happening. To ask for success is to ask to be denied it, and it’s a truth that Rin knows ripples farther than he should have ever allowed it.
Now he finds it everywhere: telling himself that if he opens this screen window and the list of recommended bookmarks has changed, then it’s a sign pointing to the possibility of the worst case scenario happening and Rin should be vigilant.
Now he encodes it into every choice: if he doesn’t pick up this stray screw from the floor, for instance, Isagi might step on it by simple accident, yet end up knocking down one of his or Rin’s ongoing prototypes in a way that can’t be salvaged. But Rin will know, and will never be able to forget, that the accident would have been avoidable altogether if he had just picked up a single screw the moment he noticed it.
Now it’s instinct, to skirt the idea that something might go right. It’s instinct, to not allow even a faceless, mindless conceptual idea of the powers-that-be any access to the things that Rin wants.
Because this shit always happens.
Rin’s better off making his own luck, every single time—and Bachira Meguru should never have been implicated in this game he plays with the universe.
"I think," says Nanase, laughing through it but sounding even more nervous, "that Isagi-san might kill someone."
"I don’t doubt it." Rin drops into his desk chair and summons his status messages. "Who did he take with him?"
"Kunigami-san. To meet up with more München guys."
"Is that why he’s going to Germany?"
"I’m… not sure."
"Be sure by the time I’m done reading all this."
"Ah, Rin-kun, seriously," Nanase protests. "I tried to stop him. But he’s—Isagi-san was in that super focus thing, ya know? He wouldn’t even tell me what happened, but he looked seriously mad—"
"Nanase."
"Yes..."
"Shut up if you’ve got nothing else for me. Why are you even here."
"I—Um—Isagi-san said I should make sure you don’t follow him. Respectfully."
Rin moves to stand up. "Does he think you can stop me?"
"No, not like that—He said—" Nanase flails around, tapping on his watch until he can read off its screen. "He—uh—He said he’ll be back within forty-eight hours, non-negotiable. Make sure to emphasize that—oh, those are directions for me. Yes, those forty-eight hours are non-negotiable, Rin-kun. Also, there isn’t even a 0.001% chance—I’m quoting directly—that he’ll be in danger. Debatable—I mean, that’s me, I said that, not Isagi-san, but—In the meantime, he needs you to find a way to—wait, what does that say—"
Rin sighs, grabbing Nanase’s wrist to read himself. "Obliterate," he reads, blanching at the familiar melodramatics. "He wants me to obliterate the—"
—𝚐𝚛𝚘𝚞𝚙 𝚒 𝚕𝚎𝚏𝚝 𝚊 𝚕𝚎𝚊𝚍 𝚝𝚘 𝚒𝚗 𝚊 𝚏𝚒𝚕𝚎 𝚘𝚗 𝚜𝚌𝚛𝚎𝚎𝚗 𝟽. 𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚟𝚒𝚕𝚢 𝚎𝚗𝚌𝚛𝚢𝚙𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚞𝚝 𝚛𝚒𝚗 𝚠𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚌𝚛𝚊𝚌𝚔 𝚒𝚝 𝚗𝚘 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚋𝚕𝚎𝚖. 𝚝𝚎𝚕𝚕 𝚑𝚒𝚖 𝚝𝚘 𝚕𝚎𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚗𝚘 𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝚊𝚕𝚒𝚟𝚎. 𝚍𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚘𝚢 𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚢𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐. 𝚌𝚛𝚞𝚜𝚑 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚖 𝚊𝚕𝚕.
𝚒’𝚕𝚕 𝚋𝚎 𝚋𝚊𝚌𝚔 𝚒𝚗 𝚝𝚠𝚘 𝚍𝚊𝚢𝚜 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚖𝚎𝚐𝚞𝚛𝚞.
Leave it to Isagi, to take Rin’s restlessness and use it to alchemize his own, even if reassurance and responsibility might mean making a pawn out of Rin. How like him, in a way Rin has almost forgotten these past few months spent playing at civility even though the two of them, at their core, work best in a constant push-and-only-pull-after-you’ve-shoved.
Isagi goddamn Yoichi, Rin thinks. He had told him, responding too late to his message about going to see Nagi, to not rush into anything half-baked—and Isagi had heard that and taken it as permission, because of course, to go at it full throttle.
Rin must really have gotten too soft, too malleable, if he has allowed both Bachira and Isagi to leave problems all over his life, and here he is, willingly giving them the space they demand.
"Another overdramatic weirdo," Rin grumbles under his breath, though underneath it is an emotion too close to respect, or awe, or maybe, even, fond relief. "Another moron."
Nanase still startles at the venom.
"Um," he says. "Are you also gonna be killing people?"
Rin sits back down.
"No. That guy can’t just order me around while he does what he wants." He looks for the file on Screen 7, untangles Isagi’s stupid encryption in nine seconds and doesn’t even feel ashamed to time something so childish. "But we’ll see how I feel when I’m done with this."
⊡
Year 2061, Month 07, Day 19
Location: 35° 39' 10.03" N 139° 44' 8.09" E
Time: 22:16
Forty-eight hours is not a short time to wait, but it is more than enough time to take down an organization from the comfort of a desk, especially when fuelled by the violent cocktail of whatever passes for passion and respect and understanding and solidarity and—god forbid Rin ever has to say it out loud, but affection, he guesses, then wants to hit himself in the head with a wrench for calling it such an insufficient, informal word—between him and Isagi.
Underneath that, too, is this ever-present hum of what’s slowly but steadily becoming recognition, an awareness of the parts of Isagi’s anger that Rin also shares. Or maybe there’s just something contagious about the sheer hunger of Isagi’s fury, searching the globe for an outlet, an object to inflict itself upon, and will not rest until it does just that.
Rin searches himself for any need to be there with Isagi—but he knows more than anyone that he’s the more logical one of them two when it comes to work. Isagi might be good-natured to his friends, but at his core he is a reflexive person trying his best to masquerade as a logical type, while Rin has only ever had his logic and the body he can trust to make that logic both ego and intuition. He’s only ever had this, hands flying across the keyboard, speedreading file after file, requesting file after file, all his work on the mood organ forgotten because this, right here, feels a thousand times more pressing, and not just because Isagi left him a challenge disguised as an order.
No matter what I have to do, Isagi had told Rin in a fervent hypothetical just the other night. No matter the costs. No matter what’s been erased. I’ll find you and bring you back with me.
In a scenario that isn’t at all impossible, Isagi might cradle Bachira in blood-soaked hands and feel no regret over the things and people he had to dispatch to get to him, overcome with only relief that Bachira is untouched—and still, he will not be able to put two and two together. Isagi loves his questions as much as Rin loves his answers; Isagi will chase after Rin as a reminder of everything he used to lack, while Rin will chase after the approval of someone he was never meant to be above. Isagi likes a forward momentum; Rin likes foregone conclusions.
So of course Isagi will stare right at the first foregone conclusion of his and Bachira’s whole life and not see what to Rin has been plain and obvious for years.
No one will ever ask how, exactly, Rin and Isagi "got together," because everyone from their Blue Lock cohort is too used to their data-driven labor to still prefer facts over good, juicy gossip when the latter is available. But if that one, particular person were to ask, Rin might think to say: It just happened. One day, Isagi was Isagi, and the next, he was Yoichi. One day, he was a being of ideas, of reminders I didn’t want, of hunger that made me realize how little I had when I wasn’t chasing after the impossibility that is my brother, and the next, Isagi was possible, and real, and he had hands instead of abstract, intangible thoughts. It wasn’t that it felt good to be wanted. It just felt good to be real under his hands, and know I have enough in me for someone to want to devour.
He might say, imagining, if only faintly, the look on Bachira’s face if this had been what Rin had said to him on the boat, if Rin had known the reality of it all with the certainty and solidity he did most else: You were away. You were away for a long time. Yoichi wasn’t the same without you, but I don’t think he even realized there was such a thing because he’s never been without you. I knew what he was missing.
I knew he was empty for the first time in his life. I knew I’ve been empty almost all my life. For the first time, I saw Isagi Yoichi alone, no you to complete the set, never too far from him, and I saw my own aloneness in his loneliness.
It just happened, but only because you were gone.
It just happened, but now it’s like we keep reminding each other of how empty we remain.
It just happened, and maybe a part of us had been hoping it will keep happening until you came back and became part of it, too.
Leave it to Bachira, to somehow make something as simple as coming back into a convoluted mess that neither Isagi nor Rin can solve.
Rin can, at least, dismantle the thing that dared complicate it even more. Isagi is somewhere out there, wreaking who knows what kind of insanity like an angered, blood-thirsty god, and maybe Rin will not be Rin, and they will not be Rin-and-Isagi, if he didn’t match that pace in his own right.
For the three hours after Isagi embarks on his own solo anger-hunger management spree, Rin sweeps through the entirety of Isagi’s massive pile of hypotheses, each of them a more deranged but equally possible leap than the last, and picks out the seemingly unassuming European hospitality corporation Portimon, whose Atlantic cruise line, Rin uncovers, has succeeded for going on seven years at burying a long string of incidents onboard: extortion through cruise casinos disguising gambling rings, reports of all kinds of assault hidden behind doors for the express purpose that no one will ask, secret meetings between world leaders, and, most prominent of all the reports Rin digs up, human trafficking under the guise of fundraising auctions.
For the following half an hour, Rin decodes a list of four lots for the upcoming auction, only five hours away, and finds exactly the one he expects:
𝙻𝙾𝚃 𝟶𝟾, 𝙲𝙾𝙳𝙴 #𝟸𝟽𝟷𝟼𝟸𝟽𝟶
𝙾𝙽𝙻𝚈 𝙺𝙽𝙾𝚆𝙽 𝚂𝚄𝙲𝙲𝙴𝚂𝚂𝙵𝚄𝙻 𝚂𝚄𝙱𝙹𝙴𝙲𝚃
𝙾𝙵 𝚂𝚃𝙰𝙶𝙴 𝙸𝙸 𝙾𝙵 𝚃𝙷𝙴 ███ 𝚃𝚁𝙸𝙰𝙻𝚂
𝚂𝚃𝙰𝚁𝚃𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙱𝙸𝙳: 𝟹𝟸,𝟺𝟺𝟼,𝟹𝟷𝟺,𝟶𝟼𝟽.𝟻𝟶 𝙴𝚄𝚁
Rin’s vision stutters with red.
The next two hours are a blur of something boiling his nerves alive, so hot under his skin that he feels like every part of him that touches something else—the steel of the desk, the plastic of the screen, the gossamer membrane of the keyboard—should spark at collision. But the boil becomes a simmer, and the simmer becomes vague, floating nausea, until he comes to and finds himself with a compiled list of the names, affiliations and known aliases of every organizer and bidder involved in the auction.
And once his mind sharpens once again, once he has sent Nanase Nijiro home after snapping at him that no twenty-year-old should wait for permission to leave, visitor’s etiquette be damned, Rin gets to work where he knows Isagi will not think to reach.
⊡
Year 2061, Month 07, Day 21
Location: 35° 39' 10.03" N 139° 44' 8.09" E
Time: 04:29
A day and a half later, the Itoshi zaibatsu is one global Hotels & Resorts brand richer, three separate republics are on its way to being down one cabinet member each, and Portimon’s own security measures—extensive wiring and video surveillance across their ships, all of them Itoshi tech, guaranteeing Portimon potential blackmail as an insurance policy in case any of their "guests" tries to talk—has backfired before anyone on the board has had time to check all the necessary paperwork over morning coffee.
What a lukewarm performance, for a hospitality empire to go down because of its own hypervigilance.
Rin saves all the cruise line footage, recordings, and photos into one old, old, old but unerringly reliable external disk.
Its solidity is a comforting anchor from the knowledge that it had been Rin’s simplest, smallest, stupidest oversight—taking at face value the Portimon cruise line crew member who had posed as the Itoshi employee Rin hired—that had allowed them to take Bachira.
The comfort does not last, of course.
He waits until business hours to have Aryu patch him through to the private practice in charge of the dead captain’s autopsy. He sits unspeaking through the explanation: blunt force trauma to the head, unexpected, with no time to do much else but bleed to death in the cold of the dark sea.
Much swifter a death, Rin thinks, than what he or Isagi would have allowed him for touching Bachira Meguru.
He lets that certainty scatter through his body, seeping down into the heat inside his ribcage.
And then, only then, does he fall into deep, inartificial sleep.