Chapter Text
SUMMER 2011 —
Azathoth, Maruki muses, is quite a lot different than anyone gives it credit for.
It seems far-removed from its source material: less gibbering, amorphous void-mass and more– well, Maruki imagines it’s not much of anything independent of himself. It has some substance of its own, that much is obvious, but most of the time it feels like it’s just a blank slate for Maruki to write in. The Persona reflects the user; the user reflects the Persona. He hopes that Azathoth is becoming a kind god.
It certainly feels like a kind god when he starts learning how to use it in earnest. Azathoth’s presence is like another set of hands quietly slinking over the reality around him, smoothing things out and giving him little baubles of information. He collects them like pearls and uses them to string fine necklaces of happenstance. The woman down the street, the retired painter, is missing her late granddaughter terribly– and the girl a block over needs someone to talk to about her art projects. If they happen to meet one day on the street, it’s all just plucked strings and chance made manifest: one moment after another falling into place.
He keeps the scale of his interference small and infrequent. Any more than once a week throws him into fatigue for days, which would be worse if he had anything to do.
This, of course, is not true: Maruki has a staggering amount of work to get to, besides singlehandedly holding the world’s happiness aloft. He has considered many of these questions and answers as he teeters on the edge of a PhD, between handing audio files off to graduate students for transcription and staring at literature reviews and, defying all reason, actually putting his thesis together .
He has a distinct memory of his father, on the eve of his own PhD (in organic chemistry, so about twice as complicated as Maruki’s area of study), deciding that now was the time to get the weeds out of the garden bed. Maruki, age four, had watched his mother yell at him from the porch about how “your damn thesis is due tomorrow ” while he was up to his elbows in hydrangeas.
Maruki, age 30, does not have a garden to weed, but he does have a world to patch up. He might as well get started, one day at a time.
—
He is, of course, unique among contemporary cognitive psientists with his access to hands-on experience. At first, Maruki imagined that this whole experience would invigorate his studies. He couldn’t have been more wrong– not only is using Azathoth time-consuming and exhausting, he’s given himself the extra step of combing through his thesis to remove any mention of anything tied to Azathoth and related endeavors. Citing the entity that lives in your soul typically doesn’t pass peer review.
Speaking of peers and reviews, Shibusawa, bless his heart, has been looking over Maruki’s shoulder to help the process along from beginning to end. He has a knack for ironing out the worst of Maruki’s garden-path phrasing into something readable, and every time he fixes something up Maruki feels the need to buy him a six-pack or a Rolex, whichever he can afford (it’s the six-pack every time, and they usually just end up splitting it).
Today, Shibusawa has managed to unbalance the scales yet again by bringing Maruki a can of iced coffee. Maruki almost stutters his way out of accepting it, but ultimately caves under the promise of caffeine and a listening ear.
“I really just want this all to be over,” Maruki says, taking a sip and letting it slide down his throat, soothing some of the hoarseness gathering there. “I want to be making a difference in the world already.”
“You are,” Shibusawa says, his own iced coffee in hand. “Once this is out, I’m sure you’ll blow the lid off the whole field of cognitive psience, and then there’ll be any number of papers and techniques and tools all citing you. Shoulders of giants and all that, yeah?”
“I suppose.” Maruki smiles, despite himself. “It sure is a lot of work constructing a giant, though.” Shibusawa laughs, and Maruki turns back to his screen, wondering whether he has enough lymph and joint cartilage to make it the rest of the way.
—
Maruki’s apartment is too large for one person to inhabit. He does not let this fact enter his mind; he replaces it with diaphragmatic breathing exercises and gentle, internal chastisements that this is an irrational thought to have. I am comfortable here. There is nothing wrong.
The emptiness of it still looms in each corner every time he gets home from the university. Every time he thinks about it too deeply he slaps another label onto the disobedient notion, like he’s collecting distorted variations on the same automatic thought: catastrophizing, dichotomous thinking, regret orientation, emotional reasoning. He’s got them all, and the terminology at his disposal somehow doesn’t actually smooth out the thought itself or the feelings trailing along behind it, like trash being pulled along by a haggard old whale.
So: this is why the device goes in his own bedroom rather than either of the two guest bedrooms.
The desk it sits on is a cheap old thing, all particleboard and plastic veneer. Some of the plastic has melted in odd spots from the heat given off by the collection of computer parts wired together on top of it. Maruki is not an engineer; he is not an electrician. Azathoth abides.
The console looks an awful lot like a computer monitor with a spyglass wired to it. There’s a keyboard, but Maruki largely treats it as cosmetic. Azathoth knows what he means when he uses it. Maruki hasn’t actually heard very much from Azathoth recently, but he doesn’t necessarily want to go ascribing human social norms to an unknowable deity-slash-cognitive-entity, so he decides not to be offended about it.
He opens his eyes, opens The Eyes, and gets to work.
—
Early on– back when Maruki felt a little bit like Azathoth could just be a well-ordered delusion– there was some fear inherent to Azathoth’s communications. It spoke to him primarily in dreams, which he could never quite remember but would always understand, and only when it began speaking to him in the waking world did Maruki realize oh, this is real.
He first notices it in the small in-between moments: movement in the gap between a dewdrop falling from a leaf and hitting the ground. The shadow of a tendril augmenting his own shadow as he passes by a streetlamp late at night. When he learns to expect it, it’s almost comforting if he thinks about it in the right way. It’s like he has a friend at his side.
His friend has something to say tonight.
Maruki bolts upright. He may or may not have been sleeping, but he doesn’t remember what he was doing before he yanked himself back into conscious awareness.
There is a mirror hanging across the room. It’s off-center, to make room for Maruki’s dresser, so Maruki can only see a blurry sliver of himself out of the corner of his eye. He almost goes to put his glasses on, but he hesitates; he’s not sure what he’s going to see if he does.
When he speaks into the darkness, he keeps his tone as neutral as he can manage. No fear, no anger, no joy. “Why did you tell me your name?”
For a while, nothing moves: there are far-off sounds, unidentifiable and muddled, and Maruki vaguely feels like he’s somewhere deep beneath the ocean trying to pick out whale-calls from the roar of the earth. When Azathoth communicates, it only occasionally does so through actual words. More often, it’s just ideas and directions that get placed into his head. Pure concepts.
This concept, however, has words attached to it: I am you , it says. The implication trails along behind the words like a remora to a shark. My name is your name.
Maruki waits for his heart rate to go back down before he settles back into the covers, still looking straight ahead at nothing and everything. He knows Azathoth has nothing else to tell him tonight; if it did, it would have put together bigger frameworks in his mind to provide adequate foundations. It builds entire structures, sometimes, stacking ideas on ideas and reinforcing them with pylons of rhetoric.
Maruki does not think about the megastructures looming in his mind as he drifts back to sleep.
—
Despite receiving regular direction from something akin to a deity, Maruki can’t help but feel directionless from time to time. Against the full tide of the world’s suffering, he imagines it’s natural to feel powerless, even with the perfect tools to fix it all in hand. It doesn’t help him feel any less powerless, but the thought seems to count for his optimism.
He’s had to cling close to that optimism in these late nights– the ones he should be spending editing his thesis. He hasn’t been able to make any reasonable progress fixing anyone up, between a stagnating caseload and the Eyes, but the difference is that he can open the Eyes right up as soon as he gets home. Not a single wasted hour; not a single wasted motion. Everything he does has to be purposeful.
Therefore, he’s already feeling frustrated when he enters his second hour of picking through souls and their troubles this evening. The range of actualizations he can perform right now is fairly limited, both in scope and intensity, and in a city where everyone’s life seems to touch everyone else’s there are plenty of issues he has to work through to perform even one miracle. The opportunities he has to hunt for are narrow enough that sometimes he wonders what the whole point of this is if he’s only been given a taste of his own potential.
Patience, he tells himself. Breathe, he tells himself. What he does not tell himself is that he should rest for tomorrow, and so he keeps staring into the screen. It doesn’t hurt his eyes like the old screen at work does; it’s more like looking through the window of a high-rise than anything else. He looks down, down, and–
There is a ragged, deep tangle embedded into one home in particular.
Maruki has often wondered why Azathoth has depicted souls the way it has. The vast majority of them are bobbing little lights, vaguely person-shaped but losing their form the further out you get from them. The troubled ones go tattered or wispy at the edges, burning too bright or too dim. There are always patterns to hold onto, though, and he’s figured them out quick as anything. Deep anxieties make them fizz and sputter, anhedonia dulls their shine, and dependencies link souls together, whether familial or pathological.
So when Maruki adjusts the controls and takes a closer look, he knows this soul is like nothing he’s ever seen before.
He looks closer. “Looks” is, perhaps, a misleading word– Azathoth doesn’t show him any visual details, it just feeds him information. Facts pop into his head like abandoned balloons drifting through the sky: this is a little boy. The people in the room outside are not his parents, though they do take care of him. Or do they? The images Maruki sees of them through the boy’s eyes are brief and fleeting, dyed in monochrome. Brighter, though, are the images of the boy’s mother as she–
Maruki draws back from the Eyes, stomach twisting. He whispers a hushed little “oh, God…” into the empty room. Before he turns away, he considers the boy’s soul as he saw it: tangled, yes, and warped with so much rage and hatred, but it hasn’t calcified yet. There’s still time.
Maruki blinks. His memory is insufficient; he has to lean back in. The Eyes refocus to a less informationally-dense view, and he considers the boy’s soul once more. He has to concentrate for a moment before he sees the spark within him. Azathoth tells him what it means.
Against his better judgment, the first thing Maruki thinks is: another one like me?
—
He sleeps the discovery off. He has to– the exhaustion and caffeine-drop caught up with him too fast for him to do anything else. When he wakes up in the early morning he goes to work and pointedly does not think about the boy with the Persona sparking to life in some forgotten corner of the city.
Even when Maruki gets home, he takes the time to sit down over a cup of tea and consider, in depth, why he’s thinking the way he’s thinking. It’s all a grand tapestry of thoughts-feelings-behaviors up in his head and out in his hands, and he picks it apart thread by thread. The trouble is that some of the threads set him on fire when he even goes near them, like you’ll just make his situation worse and you thought about being a father once before, didn’t you . He tacks those thoughts to past lives; they aren’t relevant anymore. He sits. He breathes.
Maruki knows what a Persona means for its user. He also knows what a Persona manifested under the weight of broken bonds can entail, and his professional judgment and intuition converge to say that if this is allowed to continue, he will fall to ruin .
He isn’t sure who he’s making his promise to– himself, Azathoth, or the boy– but he makes it all the same.
—
AUTUMN 2011 –
Troubles pile up quickly, like overripe apples. Maruki already knows the basics of child & family law as a mandated reporter, but jurisprudence can’t help him when he investigates far enough to slam directly into a brick wall: he’s a single parent. Family courts don’t like making exceptions for unrelated people to swoop in and take over foster care, and they certainly wouldn’t take kindly to a haggard man on the eve of a PhD thinking he can actually do the whole childcare thing.
The thought doesn’t leave his head, though, and he knows he’s going to have to see this through to whatever end he can manage. Thinking about the vastness of the guest bedroom in this context is preferable to thinking about it in its other context– to framing it against a hospital room and a hollow word– and he sinks into daydreams about decorating and furniture placement between sessions. Some of those daydreams actually turn practical, and he takes a few evenings to put the apartment back into perfect order and delve into one of the guest bedrooms to conquer the worst of the dust bunnies and useless clutter.
He’s in a department store wandering through the children’s furniture section when he suddenly gets the thought oh, this is real once again, and it comes with a rush of deja vu. The concepts of Azathoth and childcare exist on the same level in his head, eldritch topologies sitting somewhere next to a dresser with flower decals on it.
He decides the flowers might be a bit much, partially because there’s a cheaper, flower-less dresser a few feet away. He needs a notebook to do proper budget math– in his head, everything flattens down to too much or not enough. Dealing with inadequacies is second-nature for all graduate students, Maruki included, and he starts a few calculations in his head as he wanders through the depths of the department store.
Something occurs to Maruki as he finds himself standing between rows of shelving units: a long-lost remnant from a long-lost developmental psychology course he took back in undergrad. It just has to be good enough, he thinks to himself, and he feels like he’s discovered the perfect signpost to guide his path. It just has to be good enough for him.
—
Maruki, in the midst of another ceaseless hail of research and planning and kilometer-long to-do lists, wonders whether Azathoth knows he’s about to try his hand at fatherhood. He’s thought quite a lot about how Azathoth chooses to share its thoughts with him– what sort of heuristics and frameworks it uses to decide what to reveal and then– but he hasn’t considered the extent to which Azathoth has access to his thoughts. He never really imagined it mattered that much to Azathoth; what good are the thoughts of a mortal when compared to (what he suspects is) a near-omniscient god? How useful could he really be? There’d be no reason to hear his thoughts if they weren’t useful to it, after all.
It seems to hear the most important parts of his ideologies, though. It heard him clearly enough when he pleaded for a single bandaged mind and a repaired world to go with it, and that was where it really counted, so he imagines Azathoth understands the priorities attached to human ideas. It may have just sensed the emotions pouring from him, the ones that splattered over the floor and stained the walls. Maruki has been thinking less about hospital linoleum lately. He’s grateful for the reprieve, even if it feels like he’s performing surgery on himself– excising something from himself– without anesthesia. The final result will be perfectly fine, but that doesn’t mean the pain in the interim never happened.
He briefly considers the macabre process of tinkering with his own memory while he works on looking through his pantry, conducting an inventory and trying to adjust his food budget on the fly for not only two people, but two people who need to eat healthy and balanced meals. Maruki’s fully aware that the national dish of graduate students everywhere (whatever can be obtained in 300 yen or less, paired with large quantities of caffeine) is not suitable for a boy, let alone the almost-professional trying to take care of him. He manages to start conceptualizing basic tables of meal possibilities in his head, comparing what little nutritional data he knows, and the entire problem gets a lot easier when he thinks about it like data, temporarily stealing away any practical meaning. He’ll return it later. A semi-abstract set of numbers is one thing; an empty belly is another.
His battered old laptop helps him through nutritional tables, and he jots down basic calculations in a yellow legal pad. When he returns meaning to the numbers and cultivates a simple set of meal plans– of easy ideas one can return to on tired nights– he surprises himself by wondering why he didn’t do this earlier.
The simple answer floats just out of reach: that he didn’t think he was worth it.
—
At some point, he has to stop preparing.
At some point, he has to make the calls and talk to the social workers and show them around the apartment and speak to the boy and–
This is not that point.
The first wish Maruki ever granted was his own. It was a selfless thing, cradled in his hands like a dying sparrow, and he handed it to Azathoth and told it what he wanted. Even so, it could only ever be so selfless– by nature, it was never truly altruistic. Maruki knows this to be true: agape comes from without, and can only ever be reflected onto the inner self and cultivated within the cage of one’s mind and body.
Maruki also knows this: the wish that’s been sparking to life in his heart is perfectly selfless.
It has nothing to do with distant thoughts of fatherhood, repainted in the rearview mirror. It has nothing to do with the power– the entity – growing within the boy in need of a guide. It has nothing to do with the fact that Maruki has added one more sorrow atop the heap he bears within himself, the one he will remain yoked to for as long as he lives.
The only reason behind it is that he has seen a mote of pain out in the world and he can correct it. He has the means; he has the ability. Why leave such a rift unhealed?
He picks up his phone and begins to dial.
—
Maruki has died hundreds of times on the grand battlefield of grant applications. The bureaucracy of the adoption process– the fees, the interviews, the waiting– means nothing to him. He kicked the Rube-Goldberg machine off on an early September afternoon and by late September he’s waiting on a call from the review board to either ask him for more documents or shut him down. The research he does for it all feels exciting in a way cognitive research doesn’t: he knows he’s on track to tangibly enrich another’s life within just a few short months.
It’s the research that eventually trips him up, though. He’s poking through a website he’s visited three times already– all earlier in the process, too, since it’s just basic information– when something sticks out to him. There’s a table of expected timeframes, made simple for skimming parents, and Maruki considers the timescales with growing apprehension. Even the first step of the process (his first sheaf of documents and the first set of interviews) should have taken months .
The steps themselves map onto his experience, but the timing is utterly, deeply wrong. He compares accounts of single parents to the table and back to his again. Tension settles in the lines of his wrists and he gets up from his laptop, rounding the dining room table, pacing. Only one answer occurs to him, and he knows who he’s going to get it from. “Azathoth,” he murmurs, and it takes him a moment to work up the courage to raise his voice. “Azathoth, come.”
Maruki feels strange and small as he issues a direct order to Azathoth, despite the fact that Azathoth has been under his command the entire time. Part of him has assumed that Azathoth could wrest back control at any time– certainly that it was holding back– but none of these thoughts should mean anything. He knows exactly how Personae work, and he knows Azathoth will arrive, and he knows Azathoth cannot act against his will.
The brief moment of fear he has, as Azathoth’s presence melds into the empty space around him, defies thought.
Azathoth isn’t visible, but Maruki feels it there all the same. “Azathoth,” he intones, and some of his professorial sternness manages to float to the surface. “Have you– have we performed any actualizations lately?”
Our hands have reached many, it says, between the space of one shimmer and the next.
Maruki considers his phrasing, and whether he left any cracks Azathoth might have squirmed through. “Azathoth, grant me names of the people we have performed actualizations on since the beginning of last month.”
Azathoth projects a quick list of names into Maruki’s mind. The information is cold, like Azathoth has placed coins into his bare palm, and it rings with familiarity. Some, he recognizes faintly from the Eyes, and others…
Maruki breathes. There are at least two he doesn’t immediately recognize, and he can already sense the connections stemming from them– those had to have been complex actualizations, and he doesn’t remember doing them at all.
He doesn’t have to tell Azathoth to leave. It retreats back to the inside of his skull the moment he gets the idea to usher Azathoth away. Fear and anxiety slither around his head, joining his bones together like slip joins pottery. If he has unconsciously pulled strings, he can’t even get the luxury of knowing the full extent of what he’s done.
His fear tempers itself. He knows he would only do so for benign reasons, and his actualizations are only benign things, perhaps even by definition. White-knuckling the back of the chair he’s leaning on, Maruki tries to imagine a world in which he would perform an actualization to harm another person. He finds none.
With that thought and a loose exhale, the last of the acute fear is jettisoned away. Bureaucracy does not benefit the individuals trapped in it, he reminds himself, even as he feels the need to seal his thoughts away for fear of warping the space around him. Everything he’s felt in Azathoth’s wake has made sense thus far: of course it makes sense for him to want to grieve his old life, of course it makes sense for him to feel like a child learning magic.
What he did not expect was for the world to feel unstable beneath his feet. If a careful thought can reweave reality, who’s to say someone hasn’t already thought up a reality for everyone else?
Maruki knows exactly what he’s doing, delving into philosophical questions too large-scale for him to answer. He knows he’s looking for comfort in megastructures– if he looks up at the endless towers, he won’t have to look down at his own hands. He knows this. He knows so much.
Maruki rounds the table, sits back down at his laptop, and checks his email.
—
His first-draft dissertation ends up a monstrous thing, and Maruki feels bone-deep satisfaction and marrow-deep dread when he drops it onto Shibusawa’s desk. He figures he’s earned a little melodrama– for the past few weeks he’s had to wear his coat to work in the coldest, tiniest office in the building.
Shibusawa looks up from his own computer a full thirty seconds after Maruki slumps down across from him. “First draft, eh?”
“First draft.”
“Well! That’s an achievement, isn’t it?” Shibusawa grins and awkwardly reaches over his desk to slap Maruki on the shoulder. “Come on out and celebrate this evening. We’ll hit up a nice place, yeah?”
‘Nice’, in Maruki and Shibusawa’s personal lexicon, has come to mean ‘probably not suffused in cigarette smoke and stale beer’. Maruki’s mouth would normally water at the thought of cheap fried izakaya goodness, but he’s been eating better than usual lately and part of him doesn’t want to break his streak. That part is firmly ruled out by the rest of him, which is apparently still a freshman in college who would do anything for a beer and something salty to go with it. “Sounds good,” he intones.
Later in the evening, when they’re fully entrenched in a low-lit booth, he’s thinking vaguely about social-worker interviews when he realizes he hasn’t actually told Shibusawa about his latest project-in-progress. ‘Project’ isn’t the best term for it, but it has been a multi-stage process with a parade of paperwork and interviews trailing along behind, so if he’s not paying attention it does end up feeling like any other project he’s put his mind to.
“What’re you gonna do after it’s published?” Shibusawa’s dexterous fingers tap over the neck of his beer bottle. “Gonna keep splitting research and practice like you have been, or dive into counseling full-time?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” Maruki says, and it’s the truth– he really isn’t sure. The landscape of possibilities that will be open to him feels peripheral to the boy, the Eyes, everything resting at his fingertips. Even now, he feels Azathoth just out of sight.
It occurs to Maruki that now is a perfect time to introduce at least one of those concepts to Shibusawa. He buries some of his apprehension in a deep drink. “I do know,” he says, “that I’m probably going to be fostering a child in the near future.”
Shibusawa half-chokes on his drink, pounding a fist on the table before he whips his head up to gape at Maruki. “You’re– you’re kidding. ”
“I’m not.” Despite himself, Maruki smiles.
“When did– you and her– what the hell , man?” Shibusawa has a brilliant mind, Maruki knows that much, but it’s clearly struggling under the one-ton weight of the alcohol and the ten-ton weight of the realization sinking in.
“It’s not, ah… it doesn’t have anything to do with me and her. It’s just me that’ll be taking care of the boy.” Maruki knows his name– Azathoth told him– but it feels premature to speak it into being now. Names are powerful things, if the one they both keep sidestepping means anything. “Now that you mention it, it probably would be better for me to jump into practicing full-time instead of playing more grant roulette.”
Maruki laughs, and Shibusawa is utterly immune to his efforts to make this conversation even a bit more casual. “I… I don’t even know where to start with you. I mean, I’ve never known you to be a parental guy– hell, you remember the conversation we had a couple years back about you potentially getting the snip?” He stares down into his plate with no small amount of bewilderment. “Why not tell me sooner? Don’t answer that,” he adds, “just– start from the beginning, I guess.”
“Well, I had my first interview with him recently–”
“That’s not the beginning! When the hell did you get it in your head that you wanted to pick up a kid in the first place?”
Maruki blinks. He was actually looking forward to telling Shibusawa more about the boy, despite the fact that the interview wasn’t that eventful at all. All he really gleaned was that the boy was quiet, sullen, and suspicious of him, which are things Maruki could have extrapolated from what little data Azathoth had handed him. He makes a quick adjustment to his story where it lies in his head. “I knew his mother in passing before she died,” he lies. “That, and I just… saw that he was in need and that I had the ability to provide a home to him. That’s all.”
The second part of his statement is truthful, and he says it with enough earnestness bleeding into his voice that Shibusawa can’t help but focus in on it. He laughs, still incredulous. “Alright, alright. That tracks for you– makes plenty of sense. Still doesn’t mean this was a rational decision, let alone a reasonable one. You’ve still got the apartment with–”
“Still do.”
“Huh.” Shibusawa looks like he’s turning something over in his head, if the way he’s tracing circles on the table with the bottom of his bottle means anything. “You’re better prepared for this than I thought you were.”
“Somehow I thought you might say something like that.” Fondness has long since made its place known in Maruki’s voice– it always does, in private moments like this.
Shibusawa peppers him with more questions as the evening wears on. All of them register to Maruki as thinly-veiled inquiries into his health and whether or not he’s actually, really prepared to do something like this, which is why it’s such a shock when Shibusawa rips the veil away and outright asks “Are you really sure you can do this?”
Maruki looks at him. Shibusawa hasn’t gotten another beer since he polished off the one he had, and the flush over his cheeks is beginning to fade. “I mean it,” Shibusawa says, and the frown over his face is deathly sober. “If you take him into your home and all you’ve got is more instability for him, you’ll just be doing him harm in the long run.”
Maruki feels defensiveness rising up in him like a tide. He fidgets in his lap, his fingers curling and uncurling. “I can’t say I’m the most prepared new single-parent on the block, but I’m not not prepared. I’ve got plenty of experience studying developmental psychology, so I–”
“Honestly, that’s why I’m worried.” Shibusawa tilts his head and folds his arms just so. “You’ve got plenty of book knowledge, and you’re a great clinician, but… look, all us academics? We’re terrible at hopping out of our books and offices and into the waking world. You’re gonna think you have a textbook case of so-and-so or this-and-that and I guarantee you this kid is gonna surprise you at every turn. I was like that with my parents, remember? Both doctors, and they couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on with me.”
He laughs mirthlessly, and for a brief moment his eyes go somewhere else over Maruki’s shoulder. “I’m getting ahead of myself, though,” he says, continuing on. “I honestly don’t think you should pull out your expertise with this kid in the first place.”
Maruki considers Shibusawa’s languid pose and dead-serious tone. “As in?”
“As in, don’t go diagnosing the kid, or conceptualizing him, or– you get what I mean. He’s not gonna be a patient, and you can’t help him like one.” Shibusawa shrugs. “I don’t wanna sound like I don’t have confidence in you, because I do, and I doubt you’d get yourself into something like this if you weren’t sure of yourself. Just don’t– eh, forget it. I’m glad you’re helping the kid. That’s it.”
Maruki nods. “I understand what you’re trying to get at, though.” He hadn’t outright made that commitment to himself– hasn’t dropped a wall between his clinical and parental selves– but he imagines he can construct it as he goes.
Shibusawa smiles, and the evening starts feeling a little less off-kilter. “Right. Wow. And hey, if you get any cute dad pictures you gotta show me, yeah?”
Maruki mirrors his smile.
—
WINTER 2011 –
The placement is scheduled for the week before Maruki defends his thesis.
The timing could hypothetically have been worse in some other world– say, the week before the zombie apocalypse broke out, or the week after Azathoth opened its eyes to Maruki– but in this world, this is about as bad as it gets. Maruki is noonday neck-deep in reviewing suggested edits from Shibusawa when he gets the call, and at the same time tomorrow he’s walking home down a wind-shorn street with the boy at his side.
In the first interview, Goro had appeared to him in his school uniform. There was nothing distinctive about him– nothing to distinguish him from any other boy who had been at school earlier that day. Here, though, when Maruki watches Goro emerge from the agency building into the cold sun, he is dressed in an ill-fitting coat and carrying a trash bag with all of his possessions in it. It paints an image that Maruki quietly tucks away in the back shelves of his memory.
Maruki waves, full-armed, and the social worker at Goro’s side gently urges him on. “Here we are,” she says. Goro is pointedly not looking at her. “It’s always such a momentous occasion, isn’t it?”
Goro hefts his bag over his shoulder as he takes a couple of steps forward. Maruki doesn’t see any hesitation in his stride, but he doesn’t exactly seem enthusiastic, either. He wasn’t expecting to find any enthusiasm, though. A boy torn away from this many homes isn’t going to set himself up to accrue more ragged edges.
“Are you ready?” Maruki asks him. Goro briefly meets his gaze, in open defiance of any sort of filial piety, and he’s about to open his mouth and say something when his eyes drop to the empty duffel bag at Maruki’s side. Goro blinks at him for a few moments in a silent question– or maybe a string of them.
Maruki can give him at least one answer. “Ah, this is for you. I figured you might want something nicer to take your things home in. If you want, we can go pack everything up over on that bench real quick before we get going.”
Again Goro looks like he’s going to say something; again he merely nods. The social worker waves goodbye to them both as they collect themselves on the sun-warmed bench. Maruki holds the bag open as Goro sorts his few things into it: a small pile of clothing, a couple of books, a dog-eared journal, a handful of pens. When all is said and done Maruki hands the bag to Goro, but not without asking whether it’s too heavy for him to carry.
“I’m fine,” he says, and these are not the first words Goro’s ever said to him– but they might as well be. Maruki sees, with unclouded eyes, that these are the first true words he has spoken in a long time.
The bright coldness of early-December noon threatens to swallow them both as they trace their way down the block. “I should have everything you need at home,” Maruki says, half-talking into his scarf. “If I’ve forgotten anything, or if you have anything in particular you need, we can go shopping for it tomorrow. I figured you’d like to get settled first, though.”
Goro’s brow is furrowed, as if he’s inspecting the world around him for something in particular. “Is it really just you?”
Goro’s voice is scratchy. Maruki stops himself from theorizing whether it’s from disuse or misuse and starts wondering whether he has a fresh bottle of honey somewhere to make tea with. “It sure is,” he says. “Just me. You might have to come home before me on some days, depending on my clinical schedule, but you won’t be alone for long. Probably just long enough to enjoy the quiet and have some time to yourself.”
Goro considers this with a startling amount of concentration. He narrowly avoids bumping a woman striding past them. “I thought there would be someone else.”
Maruki watches the crosswalk signal change. “Why did you think that? I mean, I thought I talked about what being a single parent would entail in our interview.”
Goro shrugs as he measures his footsteps: he’s trying to step only on the white bands of the zebra crossing. “I don’t know.”
“I don’t blame you for thinking as such.” Maruki steps up onto the opposite curb and waits a moment for Goro to catch up. “It’s not exactly common for a single parent to go out on a limb and adopt someone, unless there’s special circumstances at play.”
Goro looks up to meet his eyes. The top of his head is level with Maruki’s shoulder, but everything Maruki’s read about developmental science tells him he’ll be eye-level with him soon enough. “Are there special circumstances?”
Maruki smiles into the sunlight to obscure the second world at both their fingertips. “There are, actually,” he says, wary of how many secrets can be placed on Goro’s spine before it breaks. “But they’re not really relevant right now. I promise I’ll tell you later, alright?”
Goro doesn’t look upset. If anything, he looks invigorated , with a new kind of energy collecting at his heels as he walks. He doesn’t even react when his hair whips about his chin in the wind.
Maruki decides to let Goro have his idiosyncrasies. He’ll discover so much more in due time, and the prospect imbues him with a strange kind of joy: another being to learn to love. “We’re just a couple blocks away from home,” he says. “It’s not a long walk.”
“No,” Goro says, his eyes blinking in the wind. “It’s not.”