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The pod hisses open as though it, itself, is alive. A swarm of steam, condensed air from whatever tubes are cycling oxygen all throughout it, rolls out in waves from under the lid. It takes seconds (that feel like years) for it to rise. Even from up here, you can hear the scientists muttering amongst themselves. Is that how it’s supposed to happen?
No. There is a light source, inside the pod. There isn’t supposed to be. It’s not from any lamp or lightbulb. None of the tubes are full of neon. It isn’t supposed to be illuminated the way it is. No— the pod isn’t supposed to be. But whatever the thing in the pod is, that’s what’s glowing.
It looks almost like silk. A cocoon, a shell-inside-the-shell that is the pod itself. What is it hiding? What is it protecting?
And then, of course, it moves, and you come to the conclusion that whatever this thing is, this membrane of an egg inside the shell, it’s protecting the outside from the inside. What once looked like strands of silk start to peel apart and flutter in a nonexistent breeze. You realize now, they’re feathers. Unspooling from this core, they move apart enough for a hand, small and pale and starving, to grasp blindly out and reach for the edge of the pod.
It feels like a live wire, connecting this thing in the pod to you, to your group, to the scientists, to everybody else in the room. Even the corpses on the ground— you can feel a connection there too. Fragile, weaker, slowly disintegrating, but the ribbons of electricity weave around the pod like a maypole. You can reach out and touch it, almost, this spark of something floating all around you—
Hope talent power glory hope talent power glory hope talent power glory h—
… hello?
You scuttle backwards from the edge of the catwalk like you’ve been shocked, cowering away from the undercurrent flowing out towards you. There’s another electric rumble, thundering behind you, and you turn to look— Mukuro’s biting into the meat of her forearm hard enough to bleed. The growl is resonating from her throat, you can almost see it vibrate through her voicebox before another high-pitched dial-up whine harmonizes with the din.
Chihiro is shrunk down in the corner, curled in on himself. He looks miserable. If you didn’t already know how sensitive he was to bright lights and loud sounds, you’d be able to figure it out just from looking at him now. His eyes are shut tight, hands clasped as firmly over his ears as it’s humanly possible to get them. Clawing at his own skin, on accident— you think. (Without the same gloves that Mukuro’s got, you can clearly see it— he’s bleeding too, under his nails and out of his ears.)
Byakuya, though. He’s still standing upright, white-knuckled grip on the railing as he stares (as he glares) down at the pod. There’s a crack in the lens of his glasses that wasn’t there before. Usually, he’s got the same cold eyes as you, but right now… They don’t look like ice. They look like steel. They look like static. (It looks like he’s crying blood.)
“Hahaha, holy shit,” you manage to say, golden weight of blasphemy falling heavy on your tongue and you aren’t even mad at the way your body slows because you’ve figured out the pattern now. It’s not a perfect match, your group and the— What are those monkeys called anyway, is there a name for all of them? And there’s only three, right? That leaves no room for you.
But even if you can’t move your body, you can still reach out. It’s easy, isn’t it? Your fingers flex forwards on their own, interlacing with the metal grille that is the catwalk. Below you, far below but still so clear, you can see it— the hand sticking out of the pod reaches back. You can feel its warm hand holding yours.
See no evil hear no evil speak no evil. Curiosity. Pattern recognition, a missing puzzle piece when all the rest have been filled in. Clarification.
It rips the question from you in a way you can only really compare to Chihiro pulling files off a flash drive. You’d say it felt invasive, if you were being dramatic, but. It’s so surgically precise. Only taking from you what you were going to say anyway. (How polite.)
There’s a moment of silence. Like it’s thinking about what to say and how to say it before answering you.
See no evil hear no evil speak no evil do no evil
“Oh, come on, I’m not gonna do anything evil,” you say. And you really aren’t! Not anymore. This is way too fun to fuck up.
Disbelief heretical hope talent power glory here is doubt against all doubt and distrust against all distrust
You start to laugh, while you can. You can move for a second when it lets go of your hand and so you sit up, more comfortable, but you can see— it’s grabbed the edge of the pod and pulled itself up and there are wings upon wings and eyes upon eyes and hundreds of thousands of hands and mouths and teeth and… it is looking at you. Into you. Through you.
Do no evil. Distrust. Doubt. What is despair?
The rush of HOME pulled out of you feels like getting hit with a sack of bricks.
Hope— home? Talent power glory. Contradiction. The missing piece found is for another puzzle. Home?
You have to start manually breathing, now. How do you fucking phrase this? It’s never been something you’ve needed to consciously think about before, let alone convert from words into these abstract pictures of emotions in your heart.
But maybe you just don’t have to think about it. Maybe you just have to take hold of the connection, stare into these myriad red eyes, and pull a little on the string connecting you to it.
Home. Comfort, warmth. Buried under a thousand blankets in the freezing cold of winter. Safety net. Everything means nothing and nothing means everything. Inevitability. When there is nothing left for you, despair is everything. Optimism. Nihilism. Sandcastles knocked over on the beach. The rising tide. Constancy. Entropy. A polar bear alone on the only sheet of ice in a vast and endless ocean. Stasis. Synthesis. Decay. The more things change the more they stay the same. Hope a mountain peak, despair a valley cavern. Two sides of the coin. The wheel turns.
“What is despair?” you mumble to yourself. To it. To everything and nothing that can hear you. “Despair is me.”
What are you?
Laughter. Envy. The crisp crunch of snow on a bright winter’s day. Impossible pink, nonexistent in nature. Beware the jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch. Connection. Empathy. The mouth that laughs and smiles and offers promises of comfort, friendship. Claws impossibly sharp and strong and so fragile at the same time. Soft and tender touch of a bear cub curled up next to its mother. The warmth of a winter coat of fur. The warmth of a summer sun at the beach. Heartache. Despair.
You think you might be crying. It’s not like you can move to wipe any tears away, or blink your eyes. All you can do (do no evil) is stare forwards into red ones. But. “My name’s Junko, ‘s nice to meetcha,” you can say. “What about you?”
Hope talent power glory hope talent power glory hope talent power glory
The chant which does not cease, hasn’t ever stopped for this whole time, only gets louder.
Izuru Kamukura the first. A madman with a mission. Headmaster and heart of the school. Studying skillsets. Studying talent. Power. Glory. Hope. The Vetruvian man. Inheritant. Successor.
“Huh.” That does make a lot of things make a lot of sense, now. The Kamukura Project was named after the school’s founder. Byakuya had talked about it— you can see him, still staring down furiously, murderously even, (even jealously?) down at the pod. (He’s bleeding even more now. Are you? When you can move again, you really should take care of that.)
(But you’re taking care of this first.)
“So, Izuru, huh?” you continue. “How do you feel about busting outta here, maybe?”
There’s a stretch of silence that lasts for far too long. (Guilt.)
He looks away from you.
In the seconds that it takes for time to feel like it starts again, now that the eye contact is broken, everything moves. An alarm goes off in the distance. The scientists swarm, buzzing around the pod like bees to their queen. You can’t quite see what’s in their hands, but you can feel the wave of panic that radiates off of Izuru.
The light he’s emitting gets harsher, brighter. Fluorescent. There’s a resonance you can hear coming from it, from him. The chant that does not cease becomes visual. Words etch themselves onto his feathers, onto the outermost edges of the pod, onto the corpses on the floor.
But there’s a countermelody. Something sharp and whining. It hurts you, and you can hear Chihiro sob from somewhere behind you as it hurts him too, and it hurts Izuru. You can see it.
And then you can’t see much of anything, because all the lights go out. All the sound around you stops, except for whatever batshit static sound this is. It’s acting like one of his pie-hole setups, the things that block trackers and advertisements and waves and frequencies. It’s blocking Izuru’s. You’re trying and trying to re-tune your metaphoric radio back to his signal, but it isn’t working. Like there’s nothing there to find. And even with your real senses, you can’t see him or hear him or anything at all, even when the lights start to turn back on one by one.
You think you hear a sniff, though. You think you hear a growl. And Mukuro’s arm shoots up past you and points into the darkness.
He’s just. Standing there. Just a guy. No wings, no crowns, no words. The normal number of eyes and mouths and hands. Now that he isn’t hidden by a glowing wreath of feathers, he looks so. Normal. Aside from the malnutrition, but one of the scientists is trying to take his hand and— you can see the end of an IV drip plugged into him. A handful of the others are trying to ease a hospital gown on over his arms. His arms are shaking with the restraint it takes for him to not swat them away, you can feel it in the air now that you’ve tuned back in.
Remorse regret (get me out of here) fear resolution. Resolve. See no evil hear no evil speak no evil do not look or listen. Forget (get me out of here) what you saw what you heard what you learned. (Get me out of here!) See how I circle. There is a task that must be done and I must be who does it. I cannot leave yet. (Get me out of here...)
You try to reach out. You can move again, literally, but you’re reaching out for him on a different level because, well. Fuck if you haven’t been there. (And even without all that, IVs are still so scary. You’re lucky you know Mikan now.) Any sympathy you can offer would be in the form of shapes and images and emotions instead of words, but this is such a familiar situation to you that you can’t just not reach out—
But you might be reaching in the wrong direction.
Play along for now. Bide your time and wait. Spider in its web. They can’t keep you trapped. You’re better than this.
Both of you turn to look at Byakuya where he’s still fucking deadpan staring down at the whole scene. “Dude, what the fuck, this is a private conversation,” you say. “Are you like, okay?”
No the hell it’s not. (That should have been me.) Don’t concern yourself (it should have been me) with my reasoning.
He turns bodily away from you (even though it still looks like there’s static in his eyes, still looks like his glasses are broken) and looks only just at Izuru now.
You should ignore that. We’ll still rescue you. But we all should know: where will they take you? The reserve course, right?
There’s a flash of images, of motion sickness, in response. You’re not sure at first whether it’s from Izuru being jostled around by the scientists as he stops fighting them, or if it’s from the answers he’s projecting into your head. Quick, sharp turns down endless repeating hallways. Dizzy, disoriented, like it’s on purpose. Identical doors that lead to identical rooms. Left, right, left, right.
“We’re gonna bust you outta there, I promise.” You lean forward and stick your hand out. Stick your pinkie out. You can see him do the same and you can feel it curl around yours.
Find me.
“You fuckin' bet I will, bestie,” is all you can say before the warmth of his hand is yanked out of yours as the scientists take hold of him and that awful droning pain is back and— everything goes dark again.
(Did you faint?)
(You think you might have fainted.)
“—unko? Junko?”
The next time you open your eyes, everything is… quieter. Simplified. Like the lid on Schrodinger’s box has been closed again and everything you learned got locked away.
It’s Mukuro who’s shaking you. “Don’t touch me with your bleeding arm, ew,” you hiss, swatting her hand away.
“I’m not— what?” She does pull back, at least, and looks down over her arms. There’s not a bite mark or bruise to be seen. No blood, no nothing.
You blink in disbelief. “No, what, you were growling and snarling and biting your arm, like. I thought you grew out of that shit when we were like six, are you good? You were chomping down and Chihiro was crying and curled in on himself like a pillbug and— oh, shit, Chi—”
“He’s alive,” Byakuya says, already leaning down with his fingers to his neck. Checking for a pulse. Other hand in front of his nose and mouth. There’s no blood on Chihiro’s face, though, just on Byakuya’s. “He’s just unconscious. He passed out before you did, and very clearly hasn’t woken up yet, so we might need to carry him out of here. We need to leave, as soon as we possibly can.”
Mukuro nods and moves over to scoop him up, firefighter style. “Both of you are bleeding, though. You’re right, we do need to get going, but.”
“But we need answers,” you say, catching the pack of travel tissues she throws at you. “What the fuck was all of that about? How much about this part did you know? I thought it was gonna be sci-fi mad science, not fantasy mad science!”
Byakuya has his own handkerchief to wipe the blood from his face. “I can’t tell you yet.”
“Then I’m not going anywhere.”
He just stares at you. “Are you going to sit here and wait until you get caught by security?”
“If that’s what it takes for you to spill the beans, uh, yeah! Like what the fuck. Guy with a walking, talking, god complex learns that they ripped a real-ass angel from the sky and gets weird about it, is that what the stick up your ass is today?”
He takes a deep breath and you’re nearly a hundred percent sure he rolls his eyes while they’re still closed. “If I relent and agree to that asinine statement, will you drop the questions and hurry up and get out of here.”
“Uh, no.”
“I hate it here.” Byakuya puts his glasses back on, and— the crack in the lens is gone. “Fine. Okay. I will answer what I can, once we’re back in the dorms. Safely.”
Mukuro's shoulders are mostly hidden by Chihiro's body, but they shake in the way that you know means she very definitely isn't laughing. Yet.
But it's fine. It is funny. And it's a plan you can agree to. “Let’s get the fuck outta here and start planning a prison break, then!”