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oatbrew · 10 months

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bugs in amber

prompt/summary: He had built an algorithm out of his rage. Rage could execute his body with purpose and focus his vision on one solid vector of machine logic.

But it was these moments he made monuments of, encompassing and embracing around his calcified grief. They could stiffen his knees into worship, nail his feet to the bedrock of the earth with warmth and affection and love and render it impossible for him to move ever again.

Ko is determined to make good on his revenge. That doesn’t mean they’ll make it easy.

(A non-linear character study in fragments heavily inspired by Slaughterhouse-Five and written for the @pp10thtribute zine.)

note: Also please check out this fantastic paired piece by @lucidink!

“To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.”

Anne Carson, Red Doc>

“Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

The thing is: he doubts Sasayama had much time to consider his life flashing before his eyes when he was dismembered.

It must have hurt beyond hell, he thinks. Sasayama’s brain must have receded into the baser impulses of stopping the pain and insisting upon the next breath.

So his mourners, alive and decidedly not dying in the immediate next moment, consider his life for him with the humanity and time he wasn’t afforded.

They don’t hold formal ceremonies for dead Enforcers. Kunizuka hosts a drinking session in her room with others who had known the man well. He can practically hear her subdued yet insulting toast about the bastard followed by raucous laughter from the others.

In his room, Kogami labors.

The truth is: Ko can no longer remember what Sasayama looks like based on memory alone. He only appears intact in photographs. He keeps one of the man—grinning, alive, and joyous. The others are very much not.

Sasayama’s plasticized statue secretes patterns, motivations, and agendas in the twists of its limbs and the macabre hollows of its eyes. Kogami observes even as he relives.

He doesn’t recall exactly what happened that night. But ironically, he swears his own life had flashed before him.

Not his memories, but, rather, what would come after. Almost like steps, instructions of where he would go, what he would do after this. His entire life laid out in a linear strip, cutting off just after the part where he would enact justice for the way they made Sasayama resort to the indignities of a dying animal.

Like his future had arrived into the present and that it had come—it will only ever come—to this.

And so it does.

A part of Ko had always acted as an audience to his actions. Or worse, Enobarbus himself caught between narrator and character on the eve of his death, simultaneously living and telling a story that was already set in the past at the same time it was happening.

The second he pulls the trigger, audience and narrator intertwine knee-deep in déjà vu. Like he had already done this before, over and over, and would continue to do so the day after.

In some ways, the profundity of something like fate arriving at his heels is so overwhelming that he wants to dry heave. Finally, he thinks, but after—

The blood coagulates, the wind whistles, leaving silence long after the echoes of the shot have gone and his ears have stopped ringing.

So in other ways, it feels like any other Thursday.

It is so mundane and banal it feels a little anticlimactic. The world should have stopped here, he thinks like a confused, petulant child.

He’d read enough tragedies to expect the catharsis. The moment of resolution in laying down the weight of his labor, making good on his vow as his final offering to lay Sasayama’s wandering spirit to rest.

But it is a Thursday, he has just killed Makishima, and somehow, he is still in this body with its old aches, his stomach hollow from a missed lunch, his head throbbing with an incoming migraine.

Somehow, he’s still him.

A long embattled victor in front of his fated adversary’s loss, and all he can think of is Masaoka, similarly leaking his life onto the floor. He looks beyond where Gino had clutched his dead father and wonders if the foregone rules of the narrative had warranted a loss for a win. All he can think is that he is here instead of there and the utter ambivalence of it—the fact that there is more to continue and to lose—is more staggering than what he has just done.

This is what dislodges his feet.

Life moves on.

So it goes.

And so it does.

He is running now, losing count of the seconds.

But he has a plan even if it had been made with some irony that surely he wouldn’t reach this point to worry about the logistics. Surely, he wouldn’t have made it this far. He’d arranged his supposed escape and felt it ridiculous and utterly serious.

Because absurdly he wants it. He wants it so bad his teeth ache. He wants to see what he can improvise, what could come after even if he can’t imagine it.

Akane probably could. Maybe even with her disillusion, she would still understand and imagine a better continuation for him.

The thought keeps his legs steady. His lungs ache but it barely warrants acknowledgment as his calves burn and keep him onward and on, feet pounding onto the dirt and through the grass—

“Got you, you little freak.”

That he hadn’t registered the approaching footsteps from behind douses him with a sickly feeling before it’s replaced by a force more resounding in its sudden appearance than any actual impact.

Oh, he spoke too soon, didn’t he—

The side of his left cheek burns when the force throws a punch and starts pummeling the soft, fleshy parts of his face. But even his harder edges—parts like his forehead, his cheekbone—feel susceptible to the molding hands of his opponent’s artistry. He lifts his stick-thin arms feebly in defense and the base level of his brain triggers his tear ducts. He hasn’t cried in two decades. And the humiliation, the fear, the pain, the weariness, the utter failure—

Oh, fuck you, he is so tired of being on the floor.

And it is a bit like slipping into the roles of audience and narrator, his own individual god, witnessing his body retaliating. His opponent is stronger but the rage of futility hasn’t stopped those stick arms from reaching and arching knuckles into claws.

Children rarely have compunctions for boundaries they’ve yet to be taught. But he thinks even if he wasn’t a child that nothing could have stopped him from doing this.

He plunges his fingers into his bully’s eyes and the boy screams like panicked quarry. The only reason why he stops from progressing further is from the saving grace of their teacher who has arrived just in time.

“Kogami Shinya!”

An even larger body pulls him away, caging squirming limbs in its arms. And he thrashes because that’s what he does when he’s six and in the throes of an anger fugue.

He doesn’t think he even recognizes where he is until Mama arrives. They keep him out of the office as they talk, which is stupid because what information would they need to shield him from when he was literally there doing the thing they’re talking about in the first place.

Grown-ups are so stupid.

“Shinya, let’s go home.”

Mama’s carefully held body is standing by the doorway. Her face is a pacific mask.

Well, shit.

Shinya clings even as he squirms to escape. Anger and adrenaline seep out until he is dead on his feet. He’s still young enough to indulge Mama carrying him to their car without shame. But he glares at his classmates clamoring to rubberneck the scrap that had toppled the Goliath of their year. And the defeated himself encircled by his entourage, face adorned with bandages—but his eyes, unblinking and set on him.

He’s not blind, Ko thinks with disappointment. But in the other’s gaze was something better: a tightening in recognition of a better predator. And injured but victorious cub in his mother’s arms rumbles with satisfaction as she tucks him behind a seatbelt and drives away.

The week after his suspension, there are no more looks. Quite the opposite, it seems as if everyone is doing everything but look.

His spine stiffens as he walks to class, aware that there is a berth of at least five feet between him and another person. No one stares but he can feel how carefully they don’t do it.

Later at lunch, he confronts his lone friend, another loser just as scrawny as he is.

“Why are you avoiding me?” he demands.

The boy looks frightened before defensiveness compels him to raise his head. “Everyone saw what you did, Shinya.”

“So? Wasn’t that the point? Wasn‘t that what we wanted?”

“I didn’t ask you to do any of that.”

His stomach clenches. And here at such a young age, he starts seeing the line between himself and others. The way they separate from him and alienate without having to say more.

Someone had to do it. What choice did he have after weeks of torment? After watching them push the weak ones onto the dirt? Did they expect him to lie down and take it?

“Can you please just leave me alone?”

Ko watches in silence as the other boy uncouples from his gravity and joins the rest of the flock.

Mama never ends up lecturing him about it. Instead, she starts taking him to judo lessons. On weekends, she teaches him kendo.

The only thing she will say about it is an adage: “Never start a fight that you cannot finish.”

Ko is initially offended. Did Mama think he was so incapable and weak?

It is only as he grows that he realizes that it was never about starting. She had been worried that he would never finish, never stop once he started.

When he saves another boy, in another time and another place, he begins to think her worries are founded. Unlike the first time, Gino does not take advantage of Ko’s honed skills and protectiveness as Ko tackles the other boy’s bully onto the floor.

They become friends. He can’t regret it since Gino looks at him like he’s not a live wire.

Like he’s a person. Like he’s good.

So when Gino declares his intentions to follow in his old man’s footsteps, Ko follows, too.

“Are you certain?”

His voice is wry. “I’m hurt. You don’t think I’d be good at police work?”

“On the contrary,” Gino bristles, perpetually prickly when teased. “You’re good at a lot of things. You could be anything you want. I don’t see why you have to take such a hard route.”

Gino sounds so sure that Ko is a little embarrassed. He’ll never admit but a romantic 17-year-old version of him obsessed with Beat authors does entertain notions of being a novelist.

But contrary to Gino’s perceptions of his talent, he’s never had the kind of head for creation. Nor the hands. They’d only ever been good to crush, break, and deconstruct.

He feels like a walking, talking cliché.

Perhaps if he analyzed further, he’d indulge the possibility of his interest in literature as compensation for a perceived lack. Even then, what would he do with the realization? Best to leave originality with those who have more poetry in their souls, like Tsubasa or Kunizuka.

This is why it is all the more baffling when Akane remarks upon seeing his physical book collection, “You have so many. Have you ever considered writing one?”

He’s flabbergasted but doesn’t show it. “Don’t have the spirit for that kind of work.”

“Are you serious? I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone as willful as you.”

“Is that another word for stubborn?”

She laughs. “I feel like the whole world could bend and you’d be the only one still standing straight. What does an artist require more than conviction in their individuality?”

Imagination, he wants to say but he keeps silent. The indulgent part of him wants to laugh as well but not for the same reasons.

The less generous part is tempted to disappoint her on purpose, redirect her admiration to someone else. Not necessarily because he’s particularly self-hating but because he knows the truth of what he deserves.

Sometimes, Akane could very well be a mirror image of his younger self in all her earnestness, naïveté, and drive. But even at this age, she is more than he could ever strive to be. Akane can see possibilities in anything and anyone. She can will alternative realities into existence, her imagination surpassing beyond his own.

He doesn’t know how to tell her or Gino that he’s never known how to diverge and make his own path. He’s looked ahead enough to know that there has only ever been one possibility for him. His own will no longer has anything to do with it.

Once he starts, he cannot stop. Once he begins, he will never finish.

Sometimes his anger forgets.

Any extreme emotion is hard to sustain at its peak constantly. It comes in waves, and what remains when it recedes far enough is the periphery of everything else happening.

Kagari invites him to eat something other than the pre-made lifeless offerings in the cafeteria.

In a rare moment of stillness, he silently watches the old man paint an entire landscape.

Kunizuka asks a question about office gossip he’d referenced offhandedly in the paddy wagon on the way back to headquarters.

Aoyanagi and Karanomori squabble with him about the stupidity of a newly released sitcom during a lunch break.

Sometimes after a particularly hard day, he’ll catch Gino’s eye long enough to see something there that isn’t just careful detachment or barely concealed resentment. Like they forget they aren’t supposed to recognize each other, both too mutually exhausted from the same bullshit of everyday inanities to keep the pretense of Inspector Ginoza and Enforcer Kogami.

And just as quickly as it appears, it is all swallowed up when the wave returns.

“Has your memory always been fractured since the incident?”

Ko’s gaze is steady. “I’ve never been good at remembering anyway.”

The doctor smiles benignly as if gleaning some hidden truth from the off-handed way Ko has adopted to speak to officials and people with any kind of authority.

“You know, it’s nothing to be ashamed of if you encounter some blank spots or confusion. PTSD is a very complex diagnosis, and recovery for Inspectors who’ve managed to turn their hue around has been an equally complex journey.”

“I can imagine.”

Another smile. Ko tags it as genuine. He’d feel bad for the guy if he didn’t hate the entire farce of this in the first place. His title as an Inspector is a sham of a formality at this point. It’s only a matter of time before he slips and careens forward.

“Anything you want to share with me before we start?”

“Nothing in particular.”

He takes a beat as if to give Ko all the opportunity to change his mind. “All right. How’ve you been sleeping the past week?”

“Well enough.”

“What about your dreams?”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t what?”

“I don’t dream.”

“That’s bullshit, dude.”

“What’s bullshit?”

“Ko says he doesn’t dream.”

“Well, maybe he doesn’t.”

“I don’t.”

“Everyone dreams,” Kagari insists, voice garbled with chewed popcorn.

“How do you know?” Kunizuka says from her perch on Kagari’s beanbag, strumming absently in tune with the movie score. Ko distantly watches the action on the screen. They’ve screened this film for the fourth time that month at Kagari’s insistence.

He knows the mindless explosions and cheesy dialogue by heart. So does Kagari but he reacts like this is the first time he’s watched this movie.

“Holy shit! Did you see that!” He stuffs another fist of popcorn into his mouth. “Anyway, everyone dreams. If you think you don’t, you probably just don’t remember it when you wake up.”

He and Kunizuka continue to bicker good-naturedly. Ko does not have the heart to tell them about his night terrors. The way he wakes with his heart in his throat, ready to crawl and leap out of his chest.

He can never recall visuals clearly but the sensations, the visceral physical reaction of his body in the middle of a mental break imprint the cartography of his skin and veins like muscle memory.

His recollection is shot, but he carries souvenirs anyway. Perhaps he does not even have to say anything. Kagari and Kunizuka must have souvenirs of their own.

Onscreen, the supporting man explodes in a fiery inferno after pushing the main hero’s love interest out of the way.

“Why are we watching this again,” Kunizuka grimaces. But it’s rhetorical; they don’t talk about the Division 3 Enforcer who’d hit the ground spine first from up the roof during a scuffle earlier that week. Ko does not bring up the subsequent way in which Kagari has been acting recklessly, almost with relish at his mortality in the following days. They don’t hold formal ceremonies for dead Enforcers so this was the next best thing for someone Kagari considered a friend.

“That’s the goal, isn’t it?” Kagari pipes up. He takes a swig of beer.

“To get caught in a gas explosion?” Kunizuka plays along dryly.

“To die in a way more meaningful than how you lived.”

“I think I’ll stick with dying of old age, thanks,” she says after a brief, painful pause.

“What about you, Ko? How’d you like to leave?”

He doesn’t even take a beat. “In my bed. With a really good book.”

Kagari’s half-shitfaced expression breaks into joyous laughter. “Yeah. Leave the heroics to the rest of us.”

Ko does not say that heroics don’t exist here. That if they do, it won’t take long before you’re punished for it. No good deeds and all.

They all have ways to cope by joking and pretending that things exist.

Later that night, after the alcohol has addled their minds into oblivion, Ko will push Kagari to sleep somewhere other than the floor, Kunizuka already adrift on the couch. Kagari leans heavily on the other man as they stumble forward.

“I lied. Don’t really give a shit how it happens…” he slurs.

“What?” Ko grunts as he pushes him to lie on the bed. Kagari flops on his belly like a starfish, his voice muffled.

“I don’t care how I die. But…” he pauses, adding, “Just bury me with friends, and I’ll rest easy.”

The moment is so genuine that it’s almost uncomfortable. But Ko feels like he owes it to him to allow space for it. He softens his voice, almost unused to the way words form in the shape of his mouth.

“Don’t know if you’d like being stuck with the rest of us for all time. We’d all get sick of each other eventually.”

The younger man snorts. “I’ve been by myself my whole life. Pretty tired of it. I figure I’d deal, even if it meant having to put up with your bitch ass ghost for the rest of eternity.”

He punctuates the moment with a laugh, drunk on humor. It is neither sarcastic nor irreverent. He sounds impossibly young like the child he never got to be.

Ko can’t help a chuckle at that, even if he also can’t help his envy.

“All right, sure. If it comes to that, I promise I’ll haunt you the second I die.”

What a thing that must be: to be defined by what you love at the end of it all.

The thing is: Kagari is right. Ko does dream. They’re not all bad. He just doesn’t remember, too busy having a panic attack just as he wakes to recall minute details.

When he sleeps, he conjures Sasayama exactly as he thinks he saw him last. They are in the living room of his quarters, some Enforcers congregating in celebration of someone’s birthday—he doesn’t remember. In the kitchen, he can hear the commotion of cooking. He even thinks he can hear Amari laugh, Akane responding in kind.

A memory? No. A dream for sure, rationale tells him. On his lap is the gun he will kill Makishima with. Has killed. Yet to be killed.

He doesn’t know where in time he’s situated but the anxiety is constant whenever he is.

“What if it’s all bullshit,” Ko asks, as Sasayama blows smoke into the air. He’s mid-story, Ko remembers. The man had regaled them for half an hour with an anecdote that ultimately went nowhere and received the jeering with glee.

Ko interrupts the script, the memory, the dream, whatever.

“What if I can’t do it?”

Or worse: what if I can, and nothing changes?

Sasayama stubs his cigarette on the ashtray. “Then you don’t. So what?”

“All of those years hunting. It can’t have been for nothing. I can’t have you killed like an animal for nothing.”

“Ah, well. We all die like animals in the end, don’t we.”

“You don’t understand. All I’ve done—none of it will have mattered if I can’t do this.”

Sasayama laughs but it does not sound like him at all. He thinks he hears Pop’s gravelly voice for a moment in his place. Or is that his mother’s low timbre?

“If none of it matters,” the voice continues, gentle and lethal, “then why am I still here anyway? Why are you still trying to keep me here, Ko?”

This is new, Ko thinks, shaking breath visible in the morning, as lingering sleep clears from his eyes to fix onto the intruder sitting at the foot of his cot. Underneath him, the metal floor of the ship he’s escaped to creaks.

The other man looks preserved and clean like he’s never had his brain matter spattered on the back of his head by Ko’s hand. His pristine hair glows white in the dark of the cabin.

“New? And here I thought you were clever,” he drawls, amber frozen with contempt and amusement. “Don’t you remember, Kogami? I’ve been here before.”

I’ll be here again is not said but the promise is heard all the same.

Underneath them both, the ocean rolls and moves even as it stays in one place.

The anger, the grief, the terror, the trauma are as constant as time.

(But he hears a warm laugh somewhere, somewhen. A man claps a friendly hand on his shoulder. He smells his mother’s curry. Next to him, Pops watches the sunrise from the rooftops, his face serene with eternal forgiveness.

Ko summons them all and keeps them here.)

Because for better or worse, so are they.

And so it goes.

#psycho pass #kougami shinya #kogami shinya #.#fic.#kept saying i needed to post this and then continually proceeded not to post it #very delayed! please read the other fanworks if you havent yet

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