Chapter Text
The first time it happens, you're not sure what to make of it. One moment you're retreating, gaining as much distance as you can from Narukami and his friends and the looming unfamiliarity of the way they make you feel. The next, a cloud of butterflies overtakes you and the floor beneath your feet simply falls away, fleeting as a cloud. With an abrupt start, you recognise where you are. That rumbling engine, those blue walls…
“I turned you down before, you know,” you say, scowling.
Before? asks a voice from inside your head, one you… hadn't quite expected to hear again. You feel a rush of barely-disguised relief at the familiar presence, turning to stare down Igor with a renewed sense of purpose.
“I don't want it,” you say, flat out. You aren't going to waste time - you have precious little of it as it is…
Don't you?
That seems… strange. For a brief moment you experience the indescribable sensation of… two lives, laid atop each other. Some inexplicable sense of déjà vu, the details fading from you with each moment. You claw for them for a brief moment with desperation that you don't understand the cause of, feeling at once bewildered and… bereaved, there's no other word for it. Like you're losing something you'd never known you needed, and now the hole it leaves in your chest is ragged and bleeding rather than numbly scarred over.
Sho, what did you mean by “before”? Minazuki asks again, and you feel some of your panic mirrored in his own urgent voice. You can't answer him. Far from meeting Igor's gaze, you're staring at the floor, eyes distant as you feel some indescribably precious thing slip away. Dimly, you register that Igor is talking.
“Are you certain you have no interest in our offer?” he asks, unflappable as ever despite the total breakdown you seem to have just gone through over… nothing. The absence of something. But you don't have a problem with absence. You know absence, are used to it - it doesn't matter much to you. Still, that hollow remains, an uncomfortable sense of a loss that never was. Minazuki murmurs in the background of your thoughts, never willing to let your burdens go even as he allows his own to crush him. You feel a wave of sadness that you can't quite pin down at that thought. Grief, at a death that hasn’t even happened yet.
Igor tilts his head in a considering manner, and you feel as though it's not your words he's thinking on. He has to know, doesn't he? What just happened to you? Without a thought, you're on your feet, bracing against the motion of the car. “Don't fuck with me,” you hiss. “What did you just do?”
Igor smiles, and it's worse for the fact that you can't see any malice in it. You wouldn't trust him either way, but it's worse for the fact that he seems to have no hard feelings for you. Even as he sends you reeling with whatever half-remembered dreams you just grasped for, you can't find any cruelty in the way he looks at you. Only an unstated offer of help, and that can't be right. Nobody has ever wanted to help you.
Except… you think they did. In those brief, scattered impressions you can still reach. Even pouring through your fingers through so many grains of sand, you can feel that thread of care. Of concern, of genuine kindness offered to you. A hand outstretched not to hurt, but to lift you up. No tether holding you down - a string to lead you out of the labyrinth, instead. You think, despite yourself, that you want to find that again.
Your heart aches. Your head does too. Whatever Igor is expecting to see in you, he seems to find it, as he smiles and sets a card upon the table. It flips face up. The Wheel of Fortune. He raises an eyebrow, though at the same time he seems as though he saw this coming.
“How very interesting…” he muses, and you feel your footing fall out from under you once more. As you wake with a gasp, halfway to rolling onto the floor of the safe house library, the memory of the dream further recedes. Scattered smoke in the wind, that's all.
And yet…