"And? Did you tell Ruby that I really don't know who Ai is?" Aqua asked Akane.
"Huh, what? Oh, yeah." She looked up from the documents in her lap. "But she still can't visit for the next few days. It's something with B-Komachi."
"And you couldn't even remember what that something was?" he asked, sounding a bit disappointed.
A small pout crossed Akane's face. "You know, I come every day just for you, not even mentioning all the time I spend on researching laws. All this just for you to have the audacity to be disappointed when I tell you that you'll have to live with me instead of Ruby?"
"Aww, is there somebody jealous?" Aqua teased.
"No, I'm not," Akane jealously responded.
"..."
"You know?" Akane shut her briefcase. "Since I had to spend my time with Ruby on your behalf yesterday, I didn't have much time for any new revelations regarding your case. Therefore, I thought we could use the 30 minutes we have still left over to finally talk about what happened that night."
A conflicted look crossed Aqua's face for a moment before he quickly masked it with a smile. "I would rather talk about anything else right now."
Akane smiles softly. "But I want to talk about this."
"Alright." Aqua sighed as he leaned forward. "Tell me everything that you still remember, and I'll tell you what you forgot."
Akane's eyes filled with hope. "It's actually as I said; I can't remember a single thing that happened on that day."
"But are there also holes in your memory when it comes to the days before?" Aqua continued to poke.
"Uhm… I think so. But that's okay. I probably have enough memories when it comes to these days."
Aqua sighed quietly as he leaned back in the chair. "The problem at hand is: I also can't remember everything. For example, I don't even know what my ritual was for. I know it was something important, but I just can't remember what. I still remember that you came and stopped me and Tera… You know Tera, right?"
Akane nodded. "I remember his ordeal with Tsukuyomi."
"Said ordeal was stopped by you that night. I can't remember anything else, sorry," Aqua said.
"Don't apologize… It's okay, I can't force you to tell me things you don't know."
After that their conversation quickly evolved into more casual banter for the first time in weeks. Though said banter couldn't be fully enjoyed by either. Most topics they touched upon — life, family, friends, and more — were things Aqua might not get to truly experience for a very long time, or altogether. They had nothing really to talk about anymore 5 minutes before their time was up, so they just sat in silence until Akane quietly said her goodbye and left.
Later that day Akane sat at her desk, her head deep inside a folder of files. Her mother should've probably started to charge her rent for the amount of printer paper and ink she used on the files that were scattered all throughout her room, but she obviously didn't.
I'm really at a dead end here. If he would just finally make me his official lawyer, I'd have access to so many more documents and files regarding his case. I'd have him out of there by next week.
As of now, all I can work with is the little amount of information Miyako gave me… And well… The case files I stole from my dad's PC… It's only illegal if I get caught, afterall.
I just can't help it but feel underappreciated by him… I'm using all my free time while also risking my butt trying to save his, and when I try to talk to him about it, he brushes me off. This isn't fair, it's just no-
"Ouch," Akane yelped in pain as she clutched her hand with the other. "Paper cut, goddamn it," she groaned. "I should really just switch to digital…" She slowly opened up her grip to inspect the wound more closely. However, when she saw it she quickly hid it right back. It was deeper and bleeding way heavier than she had expected.
"I gotta pay more attention," she said to herself as she got up and strolled to the bathroom. The water from the faucet, which she had turned as cold as possible, burnt on her wound for a few seconds before it turned numb. Her stomach churned uncomfortably, her crimson blood mixing with the clear water, creating some muddy mix of both. "Why was my name written on the floor of that old house…? I was inside that room before, I just know it," she murmured to herself.
"I swore to myself I wouldn't treat Aqua any differently until I have proof to support my theory… But it's just so hard."
Her eyes lost focus as she pulled back from reality and retreated back into her own mind. "I must be missing something here, but what could it be?"
Akane turned the faucet back off and quickly wrapped a small piece of old cloth around her finger, unable to be bothered to wrap it inside an actual bandage.
"Think Akane… What are you missing?" She lay down on top of her blankets, spreading her limbs out in every direction.
"Aqua acted really weird earlier… At first he looked annoyed when I told him I would be the only one visiting, and later he looked downright horrified as I told him to tell me what happened on that day…"
Akane rolled over onto her side.
"He told me that I should tell him what I remembered first… But wouldn't just telling me everything he remembered be faster? Unless… Unless he is hiding something from me and lying about it… Lying in a way that could possibly conflict with the memories I still have."
"Could it be that he still remembers Ai? That he didn't lose his memories at all? But why would he lie about this to me and Ruby?"
Akane lay still for a good few minutes, every passing second making it more apparent that she hit a dead end. "I should go to sleep. My brain is clearly not braining right right now," she mumbled as she stood up from her bed and let her clothes glide down her curvy figure and pool at her feet until she was completely in the nude. "He wouldn't lie to me like that… He just wouldn't," Akane whispered, crossing her arms in front of her chest, her voice just as vulnerable as her bare body.
"I shouldn't be thinking so badly of him. My sleep deprivation is just toying with my fears, that's all," she yawned, by now wearing her purple nightgown and lying snuggled deep into her bed. It felt wrong; the soft blanket weighed almost nothing yet kept her warm, while her mattress sunk in just the right amount for her body. Aqua had none of this. 'He probably sleeps on top of a stack of bricks right now,' she thought. Even if they were just thoughts, thinking that ill of him while he was in such a predicament just didn't sit right even a single bit with her.
"Goodnight, Aqua," she mumbled; the lids of her eyes turned heavy before they eventually plunged her entire world into darkness.
…
"CHOOSE, NOW! IT IS EITHER HER OR YOUR MOTHER." A gutwrenching shout made Akane's eyes shoot open. Her body felt like it was covered by a billion fire ants, biting every millimeter of her skin a hundred times over per second. She wanted to scream out in pain, but no sound came out of her lungs as the billion ants also kept her from moving her body just an inch.
Or rather they were the ones moving her body for her; at least this was the only explainable scenario since she wasn't standing still, but neither was she the one moving her body. Then she saw what she probably should've seen from the get-go. Standing right before her was she herself, staring right into her eyes with a determined yet slightly frightened look on her face.
The room they stood in was completely unfamiliar to her and honestly looked like every other room she had ever seen.
"Aqua, I love you," the other Akane said before she leaned in and kissed her. She wanted to pull away from this, but she only felt how her body leaned into it. It felt breathtaking; she didn't only feel the sensation of being kissed. She also felt how her other self was doing the kissing.
But something felt terribly off about all of this. Underneath the gentle sensation of the kiss, as well as the billion fire ants, which had calmed down slightly, was something else. Something she only felt once, and a moment later she also knew what it was.
A pain so extreme it was impossible to put into words coursed through her body all of the sudden. It should've been mindnumbing, but the numbness was a thing she wasn't granted. Every last nerve of hers screamed as she felt pressure build in her stomach and, a moment later, dissolve again.
When the kiss ended, she saw the cause. The other Akane's lips were as amaranth as the flower, while her skin looked about as pallid as the moon. Wordless, she tumbled through the room, never once breaking off the eye contact. Quickly, her movements turned less coordinated and more desperate before she came to rest at the base of the door.
Akane didn't want to turn around; she wanted to help herself by pressing down on the gushing wound. However, the rightful owner of the body she was spectating from had other plans, slowly turning away from the body of which she was still feeling the pain.
She blinked once, and time felt like it contorted around her. By the time the average of 250 milliseconds blinking takes had passed by, the body she had stolen had turned around again. Judging from the amount of blood that had pooled around her, 2 minutes passed since her actual body collapsed against the wall and stopped moving.
"Akane, you were smart, I have never had a single doubt about that." It was unmistakably Aqua's voice that came out her mouth, colder than she had ever heard it before. "But in the end… In the end, you were no match. You cou-"
Before Aqua could finish his sentence, Akane was gone.
She was walking down a deserted road. To her left was Aqua, strolling alongside her without saying a single word while everything but the road immediately before them was engulfed by the shadows.
Even though this was now her own body again, she had just as little control over it as over the last. She couldn't do anything but walk with Aqua, step after step, meter after meter.
"I really appreciate that you found time for me, Akane. I must tell you something important." His voice chilled Akane to the bone. It sounded distorted and wrong.
"Why didn't you just tell me at home?" Akane asked, or rather, she was forced to ask this exact question — no autonomy whatsoever. But she didn't actually mind it that much; it was a good question after all.
"As I said, it's something really important, so I wanted to pick a really special place to tell you." Aqua continued to look straight ahead, and her naive self continued to follow him.
"Welllllll, could you at least give me a hint then?" Akane asked.
'What kind of stupid question is that?' Akane thought as she heard her own question.
"No need for that." Aqua's voice was monotone.
"Huh, why's that?" she asked.
"Because we are there."
The darkness around Akane was stripped away from her, and the loud world returned. Cars passed by, electrical wires hummed, the wind whistled, and distant human crowds could be heard talking. They were on top of an overpass; no, they were on top of the overpass. "Why did you take me here?" This was the place where he saved her life not once but twice, while she also saved his here in another sense, too. Almost every pivotal point of their relationship had been exactly here on this bridge, and so was this one.
"I took you here because this place is very special for the both of us. I think you know why." Aqua leaned on the railing and watched the cars below speed by them, not paying any real attention to Akane. "You know, before that day I frankly didn't care about you even one bit, but when I saved you, something inside me changed." Aqua stepped back from the railing and took a single step towards her, looking deep into her eyes.
"Akane… I hate you so much it hurts," he said, his voice as clear as day. Then she felt it again, the sharp sting in her abdomen.
Akane practically shot upright in her bed. *Thump,* a dull sound. Followed by Akane, who had just fallen out of her bed, crawling over her floor.
*Bwaaahhhh,* *Bwwwwaahhh,* *Bwahhh,* echoed through her room as she emptied her stomach's contents into her trash bin. She could barely hold her hair back well enough to not be hit by the stream of vomit.
As soon as the violent shutters stopped again, she wiped across her mouth with the back of her hand, determination sparkling in her eyes as she looked up. "I have to find out what happened that night."
…
Even though the two dreams combined only spanned about 10 minutes, easily 12 hours passed between her falling asleep and throwing up. So by the time she had bought everything she needed for her plan and was back at the old abandoned house she thought she would never go back to, ready to get to the bottom of this, it was already way past noon. This time around the house looked far less intimidating than the last time… A good thing, right?
She clutched the knife she had brought along with her — just in case that weird guy was there again — tightly in her hand. 'I'll only use this to scare him away… He already ran when he saw my eyes. But just to be sure, this knife will keep me safe.
She pushed the front door open. Either this door had no lock, or that guy didn't learn from his mistakes; either way, she moved on. She passed by the rooms to her left and right without paying much attention to them. Her sight was only set on the door right ahead.
"Yes!" she quietly cheered as she could just push it open, no lock securing it this time around. The room looked exactly according to the memory she kept from her last visit with Ruby. It was practically empty. Just two monitors and a PC next to them stood centered in the room, pushed against the back wall. With a shabby mattress she couldn't have seen last time pushed into a back corner, the man's possessions were complete.
However, none of this interested Akane the least bit. "Let's see if-" she whispered, kneeling down right where her body was propped against the door in the dream she had last night. "Fuck," she mumbled as she spotted a large, almost perfectly circular, black spot right where she knelt. Up until now she hadn't really believed it would actually be there, but now the facts were almost undeniable.
"Okay, this doesn't mean anything. It could still be somebody else's blood. I mean, in the dream I clearly died, and since I am not dead, I must be missing something. There is only one way to find out…" She pulled the knife out and began to scrape the remnants of the blood off of the floor, filling a small glass vial with it.
Once she was sure it was enough, she put a small lid onto the vial to seal it tight. "Now I'll just have to send this to a DNA testing center, and then I'll know for certain if it's really my blood."
This was obviously not legal. No testing center would just test random dried blood you brought them; however, they could technically do it, and that was all that counted. At this point in her life — especially after what it did to Aqua — Akane saw the law more as friendly guidance than as a set of rules. Apart from that, experience had also taught her that the right people would do anything for a generous tip, so nothing stood in the way of her test.
She put the vial into her pocket and just turned to leave; yet, just as she took the first step, she stopped again. The PC that she didn't care for even a bit just a moment ago had become really interesting. 'If Aqua really stabbed me in here just a week ago… How is somebody living here already?' she thought, shutting the door and approaching the PC.
Today must've been the luckiest unlucky day of all time since the PC didn't have any kind of lock either. 'So this house is still connected to the power system, huh? Such a waste of electricity.' She logged into the only account available.
The desktop was filled to the brim with applications. Akane only knew some of them. All of which she knew were visual novels, so she could go out on a limb and guess that the rest would fall into the same category.
"Huh, so that guy is a B-Komachi fan… Maybe he wouldn't have attacked us if Ruby wouldn't have been all covered up," Akane mumbled, referring to the background: a photo of Kana, MEM-Cho and Ruby striking some over-the-top poses.
She clicked onto the only thing that wasn't a visual novel or a browser: an unnamed folder. "Now what do we have here?" her voice dropped even further as she dug deeper into this guy's personal belongings. A list of videos loaded, none of which had a preview image.
Her curiosity was just about to click onto the newest one when a cold shiver ran down her spine. The front door clearly just opened and shut again. "No, not already. No, no, no," she panted.
Her blood ran cold. She gazed at the boarded-up windows; her only way out was right past whoever just entered. "That weird guy is coming back," she mumbled to herself. The mouse pointer was already hovering over the 'shut down' button when she changed her mind. She brought it back to the list of files and double-clicked a random one.
The moment it took to load, Akane used to silently hide herself behind where the door would be if he opened it. The circle on the screen kept spinning and spinning before it finally began to play. The loud sound of splashing water filled the room; the video connected to it let an expression of disgust run over Akane's face. She had just stumbled onto this guy's porn folder and accidentally opened up a video of some blonde girl showering.
She didn't get a clear enough look to make out anything else though, before the door swung open, almost strong enough to hit her, and the guy ran in. "Wad de dug? (What the fuck?)" he shouted as he ran deeper into the room to turn the loud video off again.
Her chance.
She stepped out from behind the door.
Her body was already half turned to leave when a loud creak rang from the floorboard beneath her.
The bulky man whipped around, and their eyes met, glaring at each other.
Akane froze while he didn't. Instead, he retargeted and leapt towards her.
She ducked, narrowly avoiding his fist that tore through the air where her skull was just a second ago.
Having regained her composure, she jumped back as he now aimed for her abdomen. Once again just nearly avoiding his barreling fist.
Before he got another chance, Akane made a run for the front door.
The adrenaline that coursed through her body made her so much faster than usual. However, the heightened heart rate that came along made everything else 100 times harder as compensation.
She had crossed the entire hallway in no more than 2 seconds. With the door she had less luck; no matter how hard she tried, she somehow couldn't get a hold of the knob to open it.
Loud steps that came closer by the second screamed behind her. She knew she couldn't turn and needed to keep trying, but the sheer uncertainty almost made her faint.
Finally, as the steps were so loud they could've originated inside her own mind, she pushed the front door open and basically jumped out of the house.
She still felt something brush against her hair, but it was too late for him. Akane needed not more than another 2 seconds before she was off the lawn and 10 more before she was already 2 houses down the road.
Out she was, but she didn't stop. She kept running; the air blew through her hair as well as the droplets of sweat that had formed on her forehead away. The quite bulky man, who didn't even try to keep up with her, wasn't why she ran, though. She knew she was in the clear.
The revelation she had come to as she hid behind the door was the reason she didn't stop. She was fast, so she thought she might outrun it, though to have a realistic chance at achieving this feat, she would've most likely needed to fly back through time at light speed with the spaceship of some alien race.
'Please be wrong, please be wrong, please be wrong,' she thought over and over again. The only logical explanation for Aqua's behavior she could come up with also being the worst one out of all of them.