jamais vu
She sits alone in her apartment, kneeling on the floor where her futon usually goes, and stares across the room at her suitcase. The TV babbles at her across the room but she tunes it out with the ease of long practice. It's background noise, not entertainment, a habit picked up shortly after waking up that she hasn't been able to shake. It goes hand in hand with the lamp she leaves on all night every night. There is nothing in the world so frightening to her as a quiet dark; she's had enough of silence to last her a hundred lifetimes.
She looks down at the letter in her hands, a crinkled remnant of what it used to be courtesy of being worked over by her fingers too many times. The message is barely three lines long, far too short for all the attention she's paid it, far too strange for her to have held onto it all this time. She kept it because she was curious, or so she tells herself—not because she thinks there's any truth to it. But her lie sounds fragile even to herself when her suitcase is packed across the room.
I will give you one-half of a secret, Fujimiya Aya, the letter says, and if you want the second half, you will go to the Arrivals section of Narita International Airport on February 1st, 2015, at 4:36pm. You will know who you are looking for when you see him.
A letter unsigned, waiting for her at an Osaka apartment she moved into a year after waking. She remembers the troubled look on the office manager's face when she signed the lease; it took the older woman a week to remember why Aya's name bothered her. She flagged Aya down on her way out one day to offer the dusty envelope. A letter given to her over a year ago, the woman said, with profuse apologies for the delay. A letter handed over with a hundred thousand yen to ensure it survived to Aya's waiting hand. The manager waited so long to deliver it she'd forgotten until she heard Aya's name again.
A foreigner, she said later when Aya quizzed her about it. He was very tall. He did not give me his name.
She presses her fingertips to the string of numbers at the bottom of the messages. Coordinates, she knows now, that took her nearly two months to decipher. Coordinates that led her to another clue, and another, in a scavenger hunt she almost gave up on too many times to count. It took two years, almost, for her to finally find what her correspondent left behind for her: a disc, buried in the back garden of the house that had replaced her childhood home. A disc she'd watched enough times to break it, giving her truths she'd never asked for, that left her feeling emptier than she'd thought possible after three years of a dark and sinking sleep.
She wishes some days she'd never found it, wishes she'd let it lie the fifth or sixth or twentieth time she felt like the letter was sending her on a wild goose chase. She wishes she didn't know these truths, about Weiß and Schwarz and Kritiker and Estet and her role in everything, because how is she supposed to have a normal life with these dark secrets eating her alive? She thinks sometimes she should have sought Kritiker out—considering what a role they played in her brother's life, she is sure they would have been easy to alert with a couple indiscretions—but she's never been strong enough to reach out. She doesn't know what she'll do to the people who used tragedy to turn four good boys into hired guns. Instead she's drifted, city to city, job to job, looking for purpose and closure and finding none of either.
Her phone rings, and she knows before she answers it's the taxi service she hailed. She murmurs quiet assent into the phone when she answers and slowly gets to her feet. The letter is folded up and tucked deep into her pocket, and she spares one last look around her apartment. She wants to remember what this looks like—not this place, but this fake normalcy. She knows everything will change at 4:36pm. Either she will have answers this voice promised her so long ago, or—more likely—she'll realize she's held onto this letter for fifteen years for no reason whatsoever. The disappointment will kill her, she knows, because she believes this promise despite every attempt to discredit it.
The simple solution is to not go, but that isn't a decision she can make, so she rolls her suitcase out the front door and locks up behind herself.
.
The train gets her to Tokyo shortly after two. She'd warred with departure times for months, thinking she should arrive as close to the scheduled time as possible so she wouldn't have much of a wait but fearing deep down what would happen if a delay made her miss the encounter. She knows the chances of a train getting delayed are about as good as the chances of someone actually waiting here for her after all these years, but fear overrides logic and she has two and a half hours to kill when she makes her way to the airport.
She stops drinking at three, not wanting to need the restroom when her time comes around, and finds a spot to stand smack dab in the middle of Arrivals. She hangs onto her suitcase handle with a white-knuckled grip and watches the crowd shift around her. She stands there for minutes, for days, for years, afraid to look down at her watch lest she look away at the wrong moment.
Finally she can't stand it any longer, and when the next body moves too close in her peripheral vision, she blurts out, "Excuse me. Do you know what time it is?"
"I don't speak Japanese," is the response, and the pronunciation is off enough that Aya looks away from the crowd for a split second to consider the boy she's disturbed. Definitely not Japanese, but she can't narrow it down any further than "white". Smiling her apology is automatic, and although Aya is far better at reading English than speaking it, she translates her question over without hesitation. He checks his watch and answers, "It's 4:32."
"Thank you," she says, and turns her attention back on the crowd.
She's so intent on her unknown quarry, so worked up knowing she's just four minutes away from real answers, that she doesn't realize the boy hasn't left. It startles her when he speaks again to ask, "Is this Arrivals?"
"Yes," she answers without looking at him.
It isn't permission to wait with her, but she notices this time that he doesn't leave. He politely puts a bit more space between their bodies but doesn't move further into the airport. She wishes he would, because he is tall for someone who is obviously still a teenager, and he has a couple hands on her. It's hard enough to see through this crowd without having someone creating a new blind spot beside her. She contemplates all the best ways to ask him to move and has almost decided tactlessness can be forgiven in a situation like this, and then he moves on his own—just a startled step forward, mouth open on a call he doesn't voice. He catches himself and withdraws almost immediately, mouth firmed to a hard line, and she doesn't mean to follow his gaze across the room.
She does—and her heart stops.
There are a thousand other people in here, but her eyes see only one. There is a boy standing maybe a hundred meters back, a frozen stone amidst the swirling crowd as he stares into the distance. A high collared coat is buttoned up to his chin and the bulkiest headphones she's ever seen are kept in place over his ears with two pale hands. She can read the tension in him from this far away and she knows it's fight-or-flight. Whatever brought this boy to Arrivals, it isn't enough to keep him—he's one second thought away from booking it back into the airport.
Aya takes a faltering step in his direction, then another, suitcase forgotten in the middle of the room. She is nearly to him when he feels the weight of her wide-eyed stare, and he rounds on her like he's expecting a fight. She feels every hair on her arms stand on end, feels a prickle down her spine that shudders all the way to her stomach, and her instincts scream danger. But she can't slow, can't stop, and she reaches out for him without caring about the risks. She doesn't know why he lets her pry his hands away from his head. She knows less why he lets her take his headphones. She doesn't care about the why. She cares about too-bright eyes and too-bright hair.
They are not the same person. Eight people fell into the sea and none walked out, the disc told her. They are not the same person. But this face—younger than the one on the disc, younger than she is by half, she knows this face like she knows almost nothing else. She knows this soul, she realizes, because they are not the same person, they can't be the same person, but for three months out of three years she was not alone in the dark.
Four men stole her from her bed to use her as a catalyst, the disc said, but one man was responsible for making sure she was ready. One man used that opportunity to bind her to them instead of the elders she was supposed to serve, twisting the ceremony before it even began. One man sullenly extended those links to four others under orders because should the worst happen they needed a contingency plan. And that contingency plan would mean nothing if there was nothing for Aya herself, no motive for her to help them.
If the worst should happen—like the tower falling into the sea, like eight men sinking broken into the depths and none of them walking away.
The thousand-odd times she watched the disc, she never understood. It was all her mysterious correspondent had to say on the matter, as he'd spent far too much time explaining everything else. But staring up at this boy who has half a hand on her she finally understands. Reincarnation isn't quite immortality, but it is still an effective way to cheat death. This boy that isn't the same person, that can't be the same person, that will never be the same person—is the same person, thanks to the latent power in her soul and the ancient magics Estet liked to practice.
She falls to her knees and wails the way she couldn't cry when she woke up and found out about her family, the way she didn't cry when she discovered too many truths on a long-buried disc. She clings to his coat like he might try to walk away from her, oblivious to the baffled and disapproving looks she's drawing from passersby. All that matters is the truth, is the promise, is a present grudgingly given in exchange for her help: where there is one there will be four, and where there are four there will be eight. There will be eight. There will be Ran.
The boy never pulls away, and when her cries have slowed to thick sniffs he lowers to a crouch in front of her.
"I know you," he says uncertainly. "I was looking for you."
There's a searching look in his eyes like he's trying to place her, like he's trying to make the connections and will a faulty memory into cooperation. If she could breathe through the mess her tears have made of her, she might answer, but she doesn't even know where to begin. She wishes for a fleeting moment she hadn't burned that disc out watching it—she wishes desperately she'd made copies to present this boy with. She has the answers he needs but she doesn't know how to give them to him. She doesn't have to know the how, she realizes a moment too late, because she knows and what she knows he knows. It was what he was born to do.
"Fujimiya," he says, sounding it out, saying it for the first time of his new life. It means nothing to him yet, but understanding won't be far behind with his gift in her head. "You're Fujimiya Aya. But what—"
He looks up then, startled into staring past her, and she looks because she wonders what else has triggered him here. The airport looks the same as it did when she arrived; the airport looks completely different with this boy and his power in it. But a hundred meters back from them is her suitcase, still guarded by the foreign boy she walked away from. And looking at him now she wonders how she could have possibly missed it, how she could have looked past the impossible to not know who she was standing beside.
"Oh," the bright boy says, like it's the first and last word he'll ever speak. He only makes one attempt to pull free of her clinging hands—he doesn't have to make another, because eye contact was enough. The white boy—the American—is heading right for them, walking toward a reunion he staged eighteen years ago, toward the partner he had to save and the only girl who could save them.
"You're real," the bright boy says, never mind that the other boy is just too far away to hear him. He keeps it up, a jagged litany of disbelief and despair, and she hears in him the same fear she's suffered for fifteen years—the fear that this is real; the fear that it isn't. Although he can't walk away from her he reaches out to the one person who makes sense to him in all of this. "I knew you were real, I knew you were—Crawford."
She can see it on their faces when they remember, when Crawford's face and her mind give Schuldig the pieces he's been missing all his life.
Later maybe she'll hate them just a little bit; later she'll remember the truths Crawford assembled for her eighteen years ago and remember the disastrous role they played in her life. Later she'll yell and they'll look away and grumble reluctant apologies because even if they're not at all sorry they know how much they need her to put their missing unit together. Later, much later, she'll understand that they might have taken everything away from her, but they're the ones who are giving everything back. She won't forget it's not about her, and she won't forget how grudging their concessions were when they arranged all this, but it won't matter when she looks across the room at Ran for the first time in over twenty years.
Later she will find them, she will find all of them, tracing the pulls on her soul back to the scattered pieces and using Schuldig's telepathy and Crawford's precognition to pave the way. Later—but for now she watches Schuldig's hands on Crawford's face, watches the wrinkles Crawford digs into Schuldig's coat sleeves, and for the first time in her life a part of that hollow ache in her chest fades away.
END
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