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I should be working on RCC right now
He kept staring down the street, watching the carts rattle by and the still-few shop fronts, still with that strange thoughtful expression, and she waited, watching him with her nerves on edge, waiting for something to happen, for the explosion that so often happened when he acted differently.
"You built a real city," he repeated softly for the third time, then suddenly his gaze shifted as he looked at her - looked, as though seeing her for the first time, as though he was trying to place who she was. She waited, her words caught in her throat by a fear she couldn't show. He'd always remembered her - remembered his crew, even if he forgot other people or events. What would she do if he forgot her...?
His next words came unexpectedly. "We aren't teenagers anymore," he said, still softly, and finally looked away again, back down the street. "We haven't been for a really long time, have we."
"You built a real city," he repeated softly for the third time, then suddenly his gaze shifted as he looked at her - looked, as though seeing her for the first time, as though he was trying to place who she was. She waited, her words caught in her throat by a fear she couldn't show. He'd always remembered her - remembered his crew, even if he forgot other people or events. What would she do if he forgot her...?
His next words came unexpectedly. "We aren't teenagers anymore," he said, still softly, and finally looked away again, back down the street. "We haven't been for a really long time, have we."
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She laid out lemons, sugar, cold water - three luxuries she was very proud of. The lemons were greenhouse-grown, the sugar refined maple sugar. But it was all from her city, every bit of it.
It steadied her, let her remember to be calm, peaceful. When Leo stood beside her, she gave him tasks, squeeze the lemons, grate a little zest. It was all so peaceful, so ordinary.
"It matters to me," she said, softly, looking at the lemonade pitcher. It was chipped. She could have had someone fix it, but she'd Found it chipped and, somehow, she'd grown fond of it that way. "It's always mattered to me."
She was calm. She was peaceful. The lemons were stinging her eyes, that was all.
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He paused, half-cut lemon in hand, and quickly retraced events back to the last thing he'd said. Does it matter? That was it.
"I don't know," he said quietly, picking up his task again. "I mean, if I'm-- well. I don't know if my knowing makes a difference."
Glancing over at her, he stopped again in surprise. "You're crying."
Cya didn't cry. Cya was-- Cya was the calm one, the one who never got upset, who always had an answer for everything, who always kept things going when he and Zita were off doing... His train of thought derailed as he thought back to him-and-Zita. Fighting monsters, right? But all the memories... they looked wrong. Felt wrong. They were distorted somehow, almost... cartoonish, exaggerated.
He stared back down at the lemon, at the knife, and carefully put them both down on the counter, feeling sick to his stomach. There was something wrong with his memory, more than just forgetting things. But what if it wasn't his memory that was the problem...?
It was starting to sink in that 'insane' might mean a lot more than he'd thought.
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How much should she tell him? How much was it worth telling him? Not for the first time, she wanted to dip into his mind, to see if a well-aimed Jasfe might fix things. Not for the first time, she stopped herself.
Cya sighed and looked back at Leo. "Sometimes, you and 'new' haven't led to good places. This... this seems different, though."
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Hawthorn shackles, bolted and chained to the floor. A small room in the barn. Cya sitting in front of him, a plate of food on a cot next to him.
He blinked. Was that... that was a memory. A real memory. He...
He gently pushed the lemon and knife back away from him, turning the water on in the sink, running his hands under it to rinse off the acidic juices. She'd locked him in a room, with hawthorn shackles. Multiple times, he realized, though the memories were... fuzzy. Yes. Fuzzy was a good word.
He didn't remember what he'd done to earn being chained up in the barn, and he decided he didn't want to know. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
"How bad..." How bad did it go, the other times? He stopped, swallowed back the returning nausea, and rubbed at his eyes. There was still a little bit of lemon juice on his hand - just enough to sting a little. It was fine. He almost appreciated it, to take his mind off of... things. (Being locked in a cell. Cya crying.)
"I think," he tried again, "I want to sit down before having this conversation."
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"How bad..." Tha... that was a question she wasn't sure she could answer - not to Leo, not to anyone.
Cya finished the lemonade with hands that did not shake, because damnit crying was bad enough. She was not going to act like a twit and let her hands shake.
If Leo wanted to talk, Cya was more than willing to talk. She wiped her hands slowly on a towel. "Sitting down sounds like a good idea." He couldn't bolt if he was sitting down. He... of course he could use that damn sword, but at least it would slow him down. "Sitting sounds good."
As if everything was normal - it was normal; Leo acting off was and had been her normal for decades, when everything else had gone or changed or fallen to shit - as if she was not counting the ways this could go bad, Cya smiled just a little bit - smile too much and people wonder what you're up to - and carried the lemonade into the living room.
She settled in the armchair so he could take the couch. She sipped her lemonade and tried to see the problem from all sides. If-
No, first things first. "Do you want to have this conversation?"
And what would this conversation end up being?
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Then, he picked up his glass of lemonade and took a sip. It was good lemonade, and tasted like lemonade, and it helped him feel less nauseous. He and Cya were just hanging out in her living room, everything was normal and okay, there was nothing to worry about. Part of him noted that lying to himself used to work. It wasn't much comfort.
He took a second sip and then, finally, he considered his answer. I want to know what's going on. I want to stop feeling confused. I want to understand what you meant when you said yes, I'm insane.
"...Yes. I do." He carefully rested the glass on his knee, looking at it, not at Cya. He wasn't sure he could handle it if she started crying again. Not right now. Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes. If anyone knew anything, it would be Cya; he had to ask. "Tell me about my... my insanity. Please."
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She could just look. She could always just look.
But she wouldn't. Not when it was important.
She could watch him come to a decision anyway. She could hear him come to a decision.
"Tell me about my insanity."
Cya swallowed. It was the right word. It still stung.
And now that he'd said yes, she had to figure out where to start.
She discarded four or five ways to begin, thought about telling him that she wasn't a professional, considering yelling about Eriko. In the end, she set her lemonade down, unfolded her hands like opening a book, and watched his face, even as he didn't watch hers.
"The world is - was? - was a story, and you were the hero." She kept her hands still, even as things played back in her mind. Leo running off to save the world. Leo running off to... she hadn't asked.
Her eyes had slid away from him again. She looked back at him. "I could usually keep track of it by watching anime. I've watched quite a bit of anime over the years," she added, a little dryly. The stuff that seemed to drive Leo's delusions wasn't exactly her favorite genre. "Sometimes you'd be very direct about it; 'the hero can't... such and such,' other times you'd seem completely coherent."
It seemed stranger than anything, discussing this with Leo, discussing this in the past tense.
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It fit. It fit too well, and he had to stop and make himself relax before he broke the glass and got lemonade all over everthing. If he really believed himself to be the hero of an anime (and from what he could remember, he could tell exactly what kind of anime) - and one where he knew how the story should go, then he would have known... all the things he kept feeling like he should know.
Except they would all have been made up. None of it... none of it was real. He thought about his memories. None of it was real.
Carefully, feeling on the edge of something like hysteria (or insanity? ha), he lifted the glass to take a sip, then changed his mind and, just as carefully, placed it on the coffee table. If none of his memories were reliable... if everything he knew was made up... if everything he'd been was made up? What had he really been doing? Who... who had he been fighting? What had he done (Things that made Cya cry. Things that got him locked in hawthorn shackles.)
He put his head in his hands, feeling the familiar-strange length of his hair against his fingers. "I don't..." I don't want to know. He couldn't run from it, not forever. Maybe he didn't need to know right now, or even this week, but eventually...
Assuming he stayed like this. Assuming it wasn't just a brief moment of clarity and he wouldn't go back to being... being insane. At least if he did, everything would make sense again. It would just all be lies.
He wanted to hide, to cry, to lash out at something until things were okay again. He wanted Zita. He...
He sat motionless, head in hands, and breathed. Rough, ragged breaths. Calm down.
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She put her arm around Leo's shoulders, heedless of (but never really forgetting the possibility of) the danger. "Leo? Leo, it's..." It wasn't really okay. There was really no way to pretend it was. "I'm sorry. I thought-"
She'd thought he was ready to hear it. She'd thought he was in a clear-headed place. This... this wasn't clear-headed. She didn't know what it was... but it wasn't clear.
If he looked up at her and everything was okay again, if he'd shut it all up somewhere and moved back to anime-land... her heart was going to break.
She patted his shoulder gently. "I'm here." It wouldn't be the first time her heart had broken. She'd be fine. The trick was keeping him stable.
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Leo risked a glance up at her, lowering his hands and lifting his head just a fraction - just enough to see. She wasn't crying; she looked reassuring. A little apologetic. She looked, in other words, as calm and collected as she always did.
And he... was not. But he wasn't going to break down, not completely, not now. (Not this time? Had he done this before?) He was... was he still insane?
Sitting up (he noticed himself unconsciously lean into Cya's arm and didn't stop himself), he took a slow, deep breath, exhaled just as slowly, and considered the question.
Cya had said he believed he was an anime hero. An action series, he thought, the kind that went on for years, like Naruto or Bleach. He could feel it when he tried remembering things - it was like looking out through someone else's eyes, watching himself doing things. Fighting monsters, fighting enemies, winning battles, losing battles, everything you'd expect in that kind of a series, and all with this same exaggerated distortion. Like a bad video filter.
And right now... right now he didn't. Everything looked real, felt real, felt... unpredictable. Separate from himself. There was no story, no character tropes, nothing. So did that mean this... all of this confusion and anxiety, this was sanity?
"If this is what being sane feels like, I can see why I ditched it." He looked at Cya again with a smile - a crooked, self-deprecating half-smile, but real.
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He was asking questions he never would have asked. He was listening to answers. He was not shutting off.
Was he... coming out of it? For years after Addergoole, she'd thought it had been a temporary issue, the sort of thing that could be cured by getting away from the cause.
For a while, she'd thought he'd grow out of it. The kids were gone. Then Zita was gone, wandered off on her own. And... and Leo was still Leo. Maihallr was born... and Leo was still Leo. more coherent around her, but he'd always been a little bit better around the kids.
"If this is what being sane feels like, I can see why I ditched it."
She raised her eyebrows at him, not trying to hide the sudden urge to laugh, cry, and hit him all at once. "If this is you..." She swallowed. "If this is you being sane, Leo, don't you dare ditch it again."
Please?
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That was possibly the worst part. He didn't know what had happened; why he'd, apparently, been crazy and delusional all these years, why he'd suddenly stopped, why he felt confused and miserable and sick. And if he didn't know that, how could he know if it would all start again?
And maybe... maybe everything would be better if it did. Don't you dare - Cya's words echoed in his mind. She didn't think it would be better, and he had no reason to believe his (flawed, deluded) perspective was any better than hers. Plenty of reason to believe the opposite. Either way, he still didn't know.
But he could figure out all those answers, he realized. Some of them he would have to ask Cya, but some he could figure out on his own; he just needed to... to think about it. His chest knotted up and he felt sick again. Thinking about it was bad, it was a bad idea, he didn't know why it was bad but if he knew anything, anything at all right now, it was that thinking about why he might have gone insane was a bad idea.
Breathe. Calm down. He shook his head, focusing on his breathing, on keeping calm, on being able to continue the conversation. "If I have a choice."
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"This..." She frowned and tried again. She was cy'Drake, she should be able to put it in words. "...I don't know what happened, Leo." She knew when he'd broken, but she still didn't know exactly why. Eriko, of course, but not specifically why. She didn't know what had clicked that had led him to ask her if he was insane. "But.."
But what, that was the question. She hugged him sideways instead. "We'll figure it out." That, they could do. Boom could always figure out anything. She was pretty sure that was still true.
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Instead, he nodded and managed to pull a faint smile out of somewhere, hugging her back. "Thanks."
He didn't want her to worry. Pretend everything is okay. He couldn't. Go someplace else. He could-- he could do that, if he just did it naturally. Take his leave, go somewhere else, then... well, he would figure out what he was going to do after he got there.
"But I shouldn't take up any more of your time." He stood, carefully, and glanced across the sofa towards his sword. "I..." Where could he go? What... aha. "I think I'll look around your city some more, then find a place to stay for the night."
She might offer to show him around, but he could think of plenty of reasons to refuse. She might even offer him a place to stay, but he could think of plenty of reasons to refuse that, too. It would be fine. (It wouldn't, not really, but at least it gave him something to do - something that he could figure out.)
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"You have a house here, you know," she answered, not sounding - she hoped - nearly as concerned as she sounded. "I can show you where it is."
She wasn't sure what he was gong to do. He hadn't -- he hadn't gone away, but something still seemed wrong.
Wronger than Leo suddenly asking if he's insane?
That, she couldn't answer. She watched him, suddenly on edge. If he faded again... if he went insane again...
She'd lived with it this long.
"Look, come around once in a while? Promise you will?" It was purposefully vague. She added a little smile. "Mai likes you being around." And so did Cya, but that wasn't as important.
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"I... no, I didn't know I had a house." He couldn't imagine it. Having a house of his own - a home, not at the Ranch (and without Zita, he thought with a painful twist in his chest).
He looked around at Cya's house, then at Cya, then down at his sword. It wasn't what he'd had in mind, but... it could work. (Maybe if he went along with it, she would stop worrying?) One more weird new thing wasn't going to make things worse than they already were... Hopefully.
Looking back up at Cya, he started to speak - how is Mai-chan? What's she up to? - but the words caught in his throat. He didn't want to see her - he didn't want her to see him. Not like this, not while he felt like everything could fall apart any moment.
"Sure, you can show me where it is." Her request that he visit remains notably unanswered.
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(She remembered when he'd gone off to fight... whatever he'd gone off to fight. She remembered tracking him down. She remembered locking him in her barn. It wasn't fair, she supposed. It wasn't giving him freedom. Sometimes, she thought about just letting him go. The thought never lasted long.)
"It's a few blocks away." She gestured out the door. She'd spent a lot of time thinking about where to put Leo's house - and other residences. She wanted her friends, her crew, close. She didn't want to suffocate them or herself. "This way."
It was a nice house; all of the houses were nice. She'd built them herself after all. A low wall separated it from the neighbors, and inside she'd furnished it with minimal, Japanese-style furniture.
She'd been fine, leading Leo to the house, showing him inside. She was fine until she looked at him again. She swallowed hard around a lump.
"It's all yours. As long as you want it - no." She shook her head. "Forever. this corner of my city is yours."
Her city had no corners, of course. It was made in circles. It was a ridiculously poetic and inaccurate thing to say. But instead of trying to fix it, she took a step backwards. "If you want some time alone...?"
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By the time they got into the house (his house), he felt like he was practically vibrating with the tension from holding himself together passably. And inside... He blinked in surprise, though he really shouldn't have been surprised. It wasn't as though his interest in Japanese... things was a secret. Almost self-consciously, he tugged at the sleeve of his kimono, looking around the room.
"It's nice." It wasn't the right thing to say. It wasn't even a particularly accurate thing to say. It was... more than he deserved, probably. (He was not thinking about that.) "Thank you."
He rested a hand on his sword hilt - not to draw it, but just... because it was there - and glanced around again before looking at Cya. It wasn't that he wanted time alone. What he wanted... well, he wanted Zita. He wanted a place to hide.
This was as good a place as any.
"I have a lot to think about." He pulled another smile out of somewhere, this one barely a shadow of the expression and probably exhausting his smile reserves.
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She did her best not to be offended by the nice. She didn't even know if he was seeing the house, what he was seeing. She hugged him, briefly and carefully, and stepped back as quickly as she could without making it look quick. Her heart was not breaking. She didn't have room for melodramatic shit like that.
"I'll be around." She smiled crookedly. "It's my city, after all."
She hesitated for a moment in the doorway. "There's rice in the cupboard and canned veg, some whole spices. The milkman comes around once a week, if you want dairy."
She stepped out of the door, wanting to say something else, having nothing else to day. "...Take care of yourself, Leo, okay?"
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Leo looks around at the room again; the house, built by Cya for him, furnished especially for him, stocked with food for him. He couldn't possibly deserve it. (They were crew, this is what crew did, wasn't it?) (But he couldn't possibly...)
It was, in short, entirely too much. Everything, not just the house, but the city, the realizations, the everything, it was too much.
You're being rude, whispered a corner of his mind, and it was true, and he didn't want to be rude, especially not to Cya, not after this, not while she was worried about him, but honesty, he thought, was beyond him at the moment. He looked back at the door just behind him, at Cya just outside, and on an impulse he gave an abrupt bow of gratitude.
"Kouei ni zonjimasu." His voice wavered as the words almost - almost - wouldn't come out. (She probably didn't understand them anyway, but that... that was less important at the moment.) Then, hurriedly before he broke down completely, he closed the door.
(Scene?)
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Oh, I love this.
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