#43: Fic: Setting Sail
Title: Setting Sail
Fandom: Arashi (Inception crossover)
Summary: AU/Inception crossover. This must be what it is like to dream freely.
Word Count: 13,000
Notes: An expansion of The First League Out From Land.
Part I
The fish he’s reeling in is a big one, and the rod jerks in his hands even as he attempts to brace his feet more firmly on the deck of the boat. He’s got the wrong rod for this particular catch, he knows, from the precarious way it is bending towards the water. He tightens his grip on the handle of the reel and keeps turning, but the tension in the line is too great to bear. Just as he decides to let the fish go, there is one last, powerful tug from the water, strong enough to snap the line and send him stumbling backwards.
Ohno laughs.
It’s starting to rain; just a light drizzle that promises to get heavier, judging from the clouds amassing in the distance. Ohno looks out at the horizon and wonders if he should cast another line.
There are days when Ohno thinks he catches sight of other boats in the distance. Some days these are large boats, cutting past over the horizon in the middle of some greater errand. Others are mere specks in the distance, smaller boats like his, navigating the wide expanse of ocean in perfect, contained solitude.
He dreams of Sho. Sho, in the darkness, looking wordlessly across the room at him while the others lie asleep around them. Jun and Aiba and Sho and Nino; Ohno can just barely make out their profiles.
“It’s late,” Sho tells him, “you should go back to sleep.”
“I am asleep,” Ohno wants to reply, but he can’t seem to form the words.
And then Aiba is hovering over him with miso soup and - how did he get there, Ohno wonders; it must have been while he wasn’t looking - and Nino’s saying something else that Ohno cannot make out. About socks, perhaps.
This must be what it is like to dream freely.
He is by himself, for the most part. It suits him just fine.
Ohno has never minded being alone; discovering fishing was what made him fall in love with it. There is no past, out at sea, and the future is not worth fretting over. All he needs to focus on is the task at hand: handling tackle and rod, watching the weather. Waiting. He lets these things fill his mind where once he had filled it with cities.
To say that he has forgotten would be a lie. What Ohno has done, however, is stop remembering. There is nothing on the boat to remind him of the others, no token or talisman kept for sentimental reasons. Certainly, there are no photographs. All Ohno has are the images in his mind - Nino, frowning in concentration as he surveys a blueprint; Jun’s face as he takes aim and prepares to fire his gun. These are memories of dream-images, buried, in Ohno’s consciousness, by neglect.
They are fifteen minutes into an extraction, and Ohno is sitting in a van.
Ohno is fine with that - he’s never had problems with waiting, and inside a van is better than out on the street, where the projections from their mark’s subconscious will undoubtedly begin to take notice of him. Jun, however, is getting slightly antsy, and he alternates between tapping his fingers irritably against the wheel and checking his pocket watch. They’ve gone through the plan dozens of times but Jun’s policy when it comes to things like this is that anything can go wrong.
So Ohno waits, and tries to breathe as quietly as possible while attempting to guess at a pattern in Jun’s rhythm.
There is a sudden buzzing from the phone; Jun swipes it off the dashboard and answers it.
“Okay.” He turns to Ohno. “Nino’s out; let’s go.”
They’ve done this before - one of their first jobs, if Ohno remembers correctly. The setup involves no safes or vaults; just an envelope delivered by Nino masquerading as one of the mark’s close associates. In the first act, the combination of Nino’s discomfiture and a second, half-opened envelope poking out from Nino’s briefcase is enough to suggest to the mark that there is something inside the first envelope that will be used for blackmail.
All Ohno needs to do, now, is pick his pocket.
“- Kaname’s on the seventh floor, headed for the fourth,” Jun tells Ohno, rounding a corner to get them closer to the building’s side entrance.
“Short cut,” says Jun, indicating a rather well-hidden side door concealed behind a protruding pillar.
Ohno grins. Mao, it seems, has thought of everything.
“Nino says it’s probably in the left inside pocket of his coat,” says Jun, “but that he’s also carrying a briefcase.”
“I’ll check both,” says Ohno, pushing open the van door and stepping out into the street.
Mao’s short cut is a hidden elevator that opens on each floor behind a fire escape door. Ohno reaches the fourth floor just moments before Kaname steps out of the elevator; it’s enough time for him to pull a cell phone out of his suit pocket and start a very agitated conversation.
“What do you mean the translator doesn’t speak French?” Ohno demands, by all appearances a powerful executive about to have his grand expansion plans thwarted by the incompetence of his halfwit underlings. In fact, Ohno is so furious that he walks headlong into Kaname and the hapless-looking coffee deliveryman following close behind.
“Terribly sorry,” says Ohno, catching hold of Kaname before he falls.
“Oh hell, there’s coffee everywhere,” says Kaname, his features twisting into a scowl. “Sorry - if I hadn’t been so distracted-”
They spend a flustered minute fumbling about with paper napkins and apologising profusely to each other, while the deliveryman stands slightly apart from them, bowing deeply and repeatedly in shame.
Kaname Jun leaves this exchange with one less envelope and five thousand yen in compensation for his stained clothing. Ohno Satoshi walks away enough leverage for Case Corporation to control one of Vyes Incorporated’s most powerful board members.
It appears that they have underestimated the extent of Kaname’s anxiety over the potential blackmail material in the envelope, however. Ohno is barely six steps down the hallway when Kaname says, “Stop.”
“Yes?” says Ohno, turning round to see the other man still feeling around his inside pocket.
Kaname looks up at Ohno, his eyes narrowed. “You’ve taken something from me, haven’t you?”
“Have I?” Ohno asks, glancing further down the corridor to make sure that the coffee deliveryman has already ducked out into the fire escape.
The door swings shut; Aiba is clear.
Ohno turns and runs.
He manages to get into the elevator and shut the door before Kaname can reach him, but it will only be a matter of minutes before Kaname’s projections zero in on him. The elevator climbs steadily up - the fifth floor, then the sixth; Ohno hits the door open button the moment he reaches the seventh, gun at the ready.
There are two guards waiting for him when the door opens; he takes them out easily enough. The only way Ohno can conceivably make it out of the block he’s in is to take the short cut he came in by, but no matter how quickly Aiba moves it will be impossible for the elevator to come up in time.
His only option, it seems, is to wake up.
Ohno pulls out his cellphone and dials for Jun.
“Where are you?” Jun asks. From the shots in the background and the frantic screeching of tires it is evident that he is taking gunfire.
“I’ve got the envelope and everything’s inside -” here Ohno empties the papers from the envelope and begins sifting through them. “Bank account numbers - he’s embezzled a ridiculous amount of money. I’m going out on my own, so don’t wait up.”
“Wait, how exactly are you planning to do that?” Jun shouts, but he’s interrupted by a loud thud and a series of gunshots.
Down the corridor behind him, the elevator door opens - Kaname’s made it, but Ohno doesn’t bother to look. Instead he gives the evidence one last, long glance, before cocking his gun and pressing the barrel against his temple.
“Wait!” someone shouts, coming up behind him to wrench the gun from his hand. Ohno grabs the man’s arm and wrestles him to the ground, sending the gun flying across the corridor.
“It’s me,” gasps Ohno’s opponent, “so stop trying to kill me and let’s go.”
Nino.
Ohno releases his grip as soon as he realises this. Nino scrambles to his feet, still rubbing his neck where Ohno had pressed his forearm against it.
“I thought you got out already-” Ohno begins.
“Thought you might need some help,” Nino replies, heading for the nearest door. “You have everything, I hope?”
“Yes, it’s time to go,” says Ohno, making for the gun, but Nino’s already kicking the door open.
“We’ll take the window,” he tells Ohno, striding across the room. “Hurry.”
Together they climb over the windowsill to stand on the ledge; Ohno can hear the projections bursting into the corridor behind them.
When Ohno turns to look at Nino he sees that he is near laughter, his face alight with something like exhilaration; something like the wild, hopeful joy Ohno only remembers seeing in their youth.
“It’s good to have you back, Oh-chan,” says Nino.
They fall.
“Your mind is impossibly small,” Yuko tells Nino, the second time they meet, “and I don’t mean it in a good way.”
Yuko is a writer by profession, and she constructs her cities like one: lets a concept germinate in her mind and follows it as it unfolds into a mazelike sprawl of delightful, illogical twists and turns. Her cities feel like they could go on forever if she were given enough time to fill out the blanks before and after the outermost street. She mirrors sections of certain avenues against each other like overlapping, halfway-familiar retellings of the same passage, laying out all the tricks and traps of perspective and point of view she can assemble.
“You’ll get nowhere if you play this labyrinth like level thirty-four of Super Mario,” she says, not bothering to hide her amusement.
With anyone else Nino will make a witty comeback, but it’s different, with Yuko. With Yuko he just nods, and follows, and tries to solve the puzzle in hopes of a grasping a clue into the greater mystery standing before him.
The first time Nino meets Takeuchi Yuko, he is seventeen and she is twenty. He falls in love with her at first sight, after successfully picking her pocket in the middle of a busy street.
Yuko isn’t in the business of stealing things; instead, she steals into the dreamscapes she has created in search of her next story.
“That’s fascinating,” Nino tells her, and is immediately dismayed by how it comes out like small talk; feigned interest. “I really mean that,” he adds, hurriedly.
“I know,” says Yuko, beaming at him, and Nino isn’t quite sure how anything could be more mesmerising than her expression in that moment.
(When Nino meets Yuko the first thing that comes to mind is Ohno.
Ohno’s early constructions always give Nino the sense that they will end at the edge of the canvas in an abrupt drop. They proceed like Ohno’s art: loud, off-kilter lines and corners, with distracted offshoots into forgotten alleyways and tangents, boasting a bizarre sort of logic and perspective incomprehensible to all but the architect himself.
This is why, when Nino and Ohno first get into the business, Nino’s immediate priority is hiring another architect, because Ohno cannot always be the dreamer. They find Sho, who is more than competent, and who also proves to be a lot more than just an architect.)
“You look like you could be an actor,” Yuko tells Nino, the first time they meet.
“Really?” Nino asks. He’s still enchanted; he’s only just walked her to a bus stop seven blocks in the wrong direction from his apartment.
“Maybe,” says Yuko. “Probably.” She laughs. “I have a knack for telling.”
He ends up following her back to her house above a convenience store and into the small room that she calls her office.
That afternoon, they spend five days wandering through Yuko’s dream city pretending to be a whole host of other people; Nino is an old man, a soldier, a young woman, a crime lord - anything Yuko wants him to be.
“You’re good at this,” she tells him, after a particularly dramatic escape to a large garden in the city that Nino’s subconscious has somehow filled with butterflies. Yuko herself flits between identities with almost frightening ease, changing the lines as she pleases and making up new rules as they go along.
She is glowing when they awaken; incandescent, almost, as she picks up her pen and notebook and writes for the better part of an hour. Nino watches her fill pages and pages in frantic shorthand, and wonders more than once if he is still dreaming.
He asks her to dinner, that evening. She tells him that she’ll call and that they’ll go another day.
She doesn’t.
“I completely forgot, and by the time I remembered it I was too embarrassed to bring it up,” Yuko tells him, the second time they meet. “I did send you a copy of the novel, though - did you receive it?”
“I read it,” says Nino. “Thanks.”
Yuko is twenty-five and married with a baby on the way, and the moment she answers the door Nino understands that he was wrong in thinking that he’s fallen out of love with her.
“I need help with something,” Nino tells her.
“Surely not acting,” says Yuko, with a bit of a wink.
“I need help with waking up,” says Nino. He’s come to her because he knows that she often dreams alone, because he’s seen her unorthodox kick once before and still isn’t quite sure how she does it.
Yuko raises an eyebrow. “How deep are you planning to go?”
“Two levels, maybe three,” says Nino. “I need to know we can get out.”
That afternoon, Yuko introduces them to Nakamura Shidou, who shows them how the percussive snapping of the bachi striking against the body of a tsuguru jamisen can filter down to even the third level of a dream. While Ohno and Jun sit in Nakamura’s study and count along to the rhythm of his shamisen, Nino follows Yuko into the kitchen.
“Thanks for volunteering to help with the tea,” Yuko says brightly, when she catches sight of him standing in the doorway.
“I see you found a real actor,” Nino says. He means for it to be like a joke, but it comes out more bitter than wry.
For a moment Yuko looks slightly dismayed, but when Nino smiles and shrugs she relaxes somewhat.
“I don’t remember any shamisens, the last time,” says Nino.
“It’s a good method,” Yuko replies. “The shamisen comes through so prettily, like a clock ticking amidst a storm of sound.”
“Show me how you used to do it,” Nino says.
Yuko glances round at him, her expression mischievous. “And what will you give me in exchange?” she asks.
Sunlight is streaming in from the kitchen window and Yuko, eight months pregnant and rinsing teacups in the sink, is even more beautiful than Nino can ever imagine.
“Anything you want,” he tells her, meaning it.
Nino catches something like recognition on Yuko’s face, like she knows exactly what he’s promising, and why, but almost immediately the moment is gone, and Yuko is just looking fondly at him and saying, “But Kazu-kun, what else could I possibly want?”
She shows him, anyway. Or tries to; Nino wanders the haphazard streets of Yuko’s city for the rest of the afternoon and doesn’t find what he’s looking for.
“It’s not a good method for the ordered mind,” Nakamura tells him kindly. (Nino finds himself thinking that in another reality, they might make good friends.)
“The shamisen works nicely, thank you,” says Jun, settling the matter somewhat. He returns to their workshop satisfied; Nino returns confused and dissatisfied and inexplicably empty.
For days when Nino closes his eyes all he can see is Yuko’s dream city, its streets a puzzle he still cannot comprehend, and Yuko’s brilliant smile.
“Don’t dwell on it,” says Ohno.
“How can I not?” Nino asks.
Ohno shrugs and offers no answer, but he lets Nino sleep at his house that week and feeds him all the non-mouldy food he can find in his refrigerator.
They are three levels deep in a dream and Nino has lost track of the time.
Then the rhythm comes, lightly but suddenly, in a series of counts that is familiar at any speed.
“That’s pretty,” Ohno murmurs.
It’s a clock ticking, amidst a storm of sound.
Nino nods, and readies himself for the kick.
“Sho-kun was running tests for Case Corporation,” Aiba tells Ohno. “I mean, after... after that happened, there was even less work left for us to do that was legal, and you know how Sho-kun hated us stealing for companies. So we agreed to go different ways.”
“And what happened?” Ohno asks.
“It seems that someone on Sho-kun’s team slipped up with the compounds,” Nino explains, from where he’s curled up on the slightly battered sofa with his DS in hand. His voice is flat, somehow, and he doesn’t look up from his game as he speaks. “When they called me the exact words used were ‘a deep state of dreaming’.”
“They say he’s stable,” Jun tells them, coming in from the back room where he was reporting their findings over the phone, “but Case is making it very clear that we’ve got to finish the other job before they let us anywhere near him.”
While Ohno had chosen to step away from their activities two years ago, the others had stayed on, continuing, he presumes, to take on a more or less steady flow of shady jobs for faceless corporations. Ohno still remembers a time when he and Nino had still considered themselves artists and explorers - before the apprenticeship, before Koichi-kun or Joshima. Now they’re just thieves, slowly but surely losing parts of themselves - or potentially everything, in Sho’s case - as they tear through other peoples’ dreams.
“We don’t have time to finish the other job,” says Mao, “it’s just not possible.”
“How long has he been under, exactly?” Ohno asks.
“Far too long,” says Jun. “If he’s in Limbo-”
“We’re not certain that he’s in Limbo,” Nino interrupts sharply. This time, he glances up at them, almost daring anyone to disagree. “They’ve been monitoring his brain activity. We’ve not lost him yet.”
“If they’d let me look at the chemicals I might be able to figure out what exactly went wrong,” says Aiba. “But they won’t.”
“Break in, then,” says Mao, “break in and steal it.”
“While running the second job at the same time,” says Nino.
“That’s insane - the first job took us a day and a half already,” says Jun. He glances around at them. “Even if we plan as much of it as we can in an accelerated dream space - even if we’ve done something similar - the second one can’t be done in time.”
Nino sits up. “Do we have a choice?” he asks
“What’s the job?” asks Ohno.
“Case believes that Saori Industries is developing a new chip prototype in its artificial intelligence wing,” says Jun.
“They want us to steal that prototype design,” Nino continues, “and since we can’t possibly remember and reproduce a design for a microchip, we need to bring in an expert-”
“-which Case will be providing,” Jun finishes. “Oh, and the mark has probably been trained for defence against extractions.”
There is a pause in which everybody just looks at Ohno, each trying to decipher his expression. Ohno gazes back at them and wonders why they’re looking to him when the answer is so clear.
“This was the job you called me out for, wasn’t it?” he asks, finally.
“Yes,” says Nino, after a pause.
“And if we don’t do this there’s no way we can get to Sho without bringing Case Corporation down on our heads.”
“Yes.”
Ohno nods. “We’ve attempted this before, it shouldn’t be a problem.”
“All right,” says Jun, looking inordinately relieved. “All right. Let’s get to work, then.”
Nino is the first to meet Sho, at an exhibition put up by the Tokyo University department of Architecture; Nino’s not supposed to be there but he finds his way in anyway. Their first conversation is an argument that takes place in the stairwell just behind the gallery, after Sho overhears a conversation in which Nino cheerfully explains to a guest what exactly inspired him to design a model that Sho clearly remembers drafting and building.
“Yes, but you didn’t tell her, in the end,” Nino says, putting his hands in his pockets and shrugging as he leans against the wall. “You just joined in the conversation and found a way to politely drag me out of the gallery. Why is that?”
“What?”
“You could have just denounced me in front of her,” says Nino. “You had every right to.”
“That,” Sho tells Nino, “would have been petty and immature.”
“And justified,” Nino adds. “Face it - you’re curious.”
“Curious about what?”
“Curious to know why I even bothered to make all that up.”
Sho rolls his eyes. “It could be compulsive.”
“Compulsive?”
“Yes, you could just be a compulsive liar.”
“I don’t lie for fun,” Nino replies, sounding genuinely indignant. “In my line of work,” he adds, “it’s a prerequisite.”
There is a pause while Sho looks incredulously at Nino.
Then, “That is the worst attempt at recruitment I have ever heard.”
Nino is the first to meet Sho, but Ohno is the one who convinces him to join them.
“How did you do that?” Nino demands, when Sho turns up for work one morning.
“We talked,” says Ohno blandly, “and I persuaded him.”
“But I talked,” Nino protests, “and all I got for my efforts was security escort off the Todai campus.”
“Well,” says Sho, pausing in the middle of finding a home for his multiple computer monitors, “you didn’t drug me and hook me up to a PASIV beforehand.”
“When you asked me to help you,” says Ohno, “Jun told me you made a mistake. What did he mean?”
“He meant that we shouldn’t have let Sho dream with people who weren’t us,” Nino replies. “Who weren’t as good as us.”
A pause.
“We also made the mistake of letting you go.”
“Oh,” says Ohno.
Nino shakes his head. “That won’t happen again.”
The third time Nino meets Yuko, it takes him quite a bit of hunting and a significant amount of money to track her down.
The Yuko he meets is no longer married, but she is not, by any stretch, a shadow of her former self. When she sees Nino she smiles as dazzlingly as she used to, and while her novels have taken on a rather more desolate tone her words are still as magnetic as ever.
“I hope you’re well,” she says to Nino, ushering him into the doorway.
“Not all of us are,” says Nino.
They are both older now. Nino looks less like the boy he still was at twenty years of age; when he catches sight of himself in the mirror or in recent photographs he sees something hard in his eyes that was never there before. Yuko, on the other hand, is still the same woman; more vivid than ever, even. Something about age - age and separation - has made her even lovelier, Nino thinks; sadder, but lovelier.
“You need my help, then?” Yuko asks.
“I need help,” says Nino, “with waking up.”
“The last time you asked,” Yuko says, “you said you’d give me anything.”
“I still would,” Nino replies, and he finds that he’s not lying.
Yuko smiles, and reaches out one hand to touch Nino’s arm, but they both know that their time, whatever time it was supposed to be, is long over.
“There is more than one way of waking up,” says Yuko, “but I suppose you already knew that.”
They are in her office once again. It is considerably larger than the one from years ago, and from the only window in the room Nino can see that it is snowing outside.
“I dream alone now,” Yuko tells him. “I make my own way out.”
“How, other than waiting?” Nino asks.
“I’ll show you,” says Yuko, “and you’ll take me to dinner.”
“Dinner?” asks Nino.
Yuko laughs. “Just dinner,” she replies.
In every city Yuko constructs, there is a series of turns and landmarks that, when traversed, makes it clear to her that she is still within her dream. She has done this so regularly for so many years that this end route has become almost part of her subconscious. The exact configuration of these streets and buildings is known only to Yuko, which is why Nino, all those years ago, had no means of finding the labyrinth’s end.
What Nino does know is that every end route finishes in a fall. A road cuts off abruptly into a cliff; a staircase ends; a chasm opens. Yuko steps off the ledge, and wakes up.
“This is how I know,” Yuko tells him. “In the days after Shidou-kun and I separated I used to wander the streets of Tokyo hoping to find my end route. I never did.”
“It won’t help you in someone else’s dream,” says Nino.
“No, it won’t,” Yuko agrees. “Which is why I’m curious to know where you’re headed.”
“I’ll call,” says Nino, when the afternoon is done and it is time for him to leave. He has a flight to catch, and dreams to forge and enter. “I’ll call and we’ll go for dinner, soon. I’m not the sort to forget.”
“I know,” Yuko says. “I have a knack for telling.”
Mao’s workroom gives one the sense of a tornado having just recently swept through it, and when Ohno pauses at the door he finds her muttering to herself as she pores over a set of carefully-drawn blueprints.
“I’ve met you before, haven’t I?” Ohno asks abruptly, causing Mao to jump in fright. “Before this job, I mean.”
“Possibly,” Mao replies, scrambling up and wading through a sea of things on the floor so she can pull up a chair for Ohno.
Mao’s is the sort of face that wouldn’t stand out to Ohno in a crowd - it’s not to say that she’s not pretty; she is rather lovely and looks adorable when she’s concentrating - but it’s not the sort Ohno would notice immediately or remember for long. He’s sure he has seen her before - someone must certainly have mentioned her before, because it’s impossible for an architect of her calibre to go entirely unnoticed - but he cannot, for the life of him, remember.
“You’re friends with Jun-kun, aren’t you?” says Ohno, still trying very hard to place her.
“Yes, but Ninomiya-kun was the one who contacted me for this job,” says Mao. “We’ve worked together briefly before this.”
“Oh.”
She’s nothing like Sho, Ohno thinks, glancing at her desk. Sho always had somewhat of an obsession with neatness; entering his carefully ordered workspace sometimes made Ohno want to upset something just to break the rigidity of it all. He always had his pencils on one side, diagrams and boards on the other, and all models sat on a separate desk that he could easily turn around to examine.
The only thing Mao and Sho have in common is the careful beauty of their designs - their mazes are intricate, their short cuts elegant - and their thoroughness with detail.
“You’re doing a good job,” says Ohno. “With that first building, I mean. Simple, but effective.”
“Thank you,” Mao replies, looking awkward.
“I’m not sure if Sho-kun could have done a better job,” Ohno adds.
“Thank you,” says Mao again, beginning to blush. “That’s - well. He’s a brilliant architect.”
There is a silence for a moment, in which Mao fidgets with her pencil and Ohno isn’t quite sure where to look.
“Well,” says Mao awkwardly, “you’re not dreaming either level so I won’t have to teach you the layouts.”
“I shouldn’t be disturbing you,” says Ohno, slightly embarrassed. He rises to leave.
“Wait-” says Mao. “I wanted to ask you about something.”
“Yes?”
“I tried asking Jun-kun and he didn’t seem like he wanted to talk,” Mao explains hurriedly, “and Ninomiya-kun’s just... he didn’t look like he wanted to answer any questions the last time I spoke with him, and you know how he gets when he’s just sitting there with his DS-”
“Inoue-san,” Ohno interrupts, “what was your question?”
“Sorry,” says Mao, slightly sheepish. “You caught me in a ramble there.”
“It happens,” Ohno tells her, shrugging as he reaches out to fiddle with a discarded post-it on her desk.
“The Ayase job,” says Mao. “No one’s told me exactly what happened.”
“Oh,” says Ohno. Two years have passed but he still feels that unsettled dread when she mentions it. “You should have tried asking Aiba about that,” Ohno tells her.
“I did,” says Mao. “He told me to ask you, since he didn’t actually enter the dream. He said you went down to the last level, whatever that means.” She glances up at Ohno. “Did you?”
“Yes,” Ohno replies. “To the last level, but not beyond.”
“Beyond?”
“Inoue-san, what else have you heard about the Ayase job?” asks Ohno.
“Nothing more, really,” Mao replies. “Aiba-kun said it was rather similar to the one we’re planning now. I just want to know why everyone’s so unwilling to mention it.”
“That’s right, actually,” says Ohno slowly. “The two jobs are rather similar-”
“Ohno-san,” says Mao, “Who is Ayase?”
“Ayase Haruka,” says Ohno. “It was a government job; she was the mark. We were supposed to be helping them monitor the classified projects some firms were developing. Ayase was one of the key team members in a firm that was making rapid advances in cybernetics.”
“And you were going in to steal the idea?” asks Mao.
“They called it surveillance,” says Ohno, “but we were bringing government representatives in for these jobs. I don’t know what they did with the information we gathered for them.”
“So this wasn’t the first job?”
“By that time we’d already extracted from a number of different companies, but this job was different,” Ohno tells her. “This particular firm had already hired other extractors to train their team to defend against extraction.”
“So Ayase could defend herself?” asks Mao.
“We found out about it two days before we were supposed to go in,” says Ohno.
“What did you do?” asks Mao.
“Three levels,” someone interrupts. Ohno turns; it’s Nino, standing at the entrance to the room with his shoulder resting against the doorpost. “We decided to build three levels.”
“Kazu-chan,” Ohno begins.
“A dream within a dream, within a dream,” Nino continues. “We had never done it before, but the plan was to try to extract the information from her at the deepest level first. If she realised that it was a dream, we’d still have the second level to work with, and if that failed, we’d still be able to extract the designs from her by staging a debriefing in the first level for the attack she averted.”
“Which is, essentially, our plan for this one, isn’t it?” asks Mao. “What went wrong?”
“The formula for the compounds,” says Ohno.
“Wouldn’t Aiba-kun have been the one making that?” Mao asks.
“He wasn’t sure he could develop something with a strong enough sedative to keep a dream at that level stable, so we consulted another chemist,” Nino explains. “The sedative was stronger than we expected, yes-”
“Stronger than we expected?” Ohno interrupts. “It was far too strong, Kazu-chan. You knew that, and you should have told me.”
“It was too strong,” argues Nino, “but that wasn’t the reason why we lost her.”
“How strong was it?” Mao asks.
“Twelve years, on the third level,” Ohno says flatly.
“Twelve years?” Mao repeats, incredulous.
“That deep, and with that strong a sedative, killing yourself isn’t going to get you out of the dream - we all know that now,” says Ohno, “but Ayase didn’t.”
“We didn’t even get to the second level,” Nino says. “She shot herself the moment she realised it was a dream. She went into Limbo instead.”
Ohno remembers this with extreme clarity. He remembers the pressing heat of the third-level dreamscape Sho had created; how they had unlocked the safe and retrieved an envelope of plans that had proven to be blank. The government representative swearing as they turned round to see Ayase standing behind them, gun pointing not at any one of them but at herself.
Jun had thought of the possibility of Ayase shooting herself to end the dream, and they had discussed it briefly, but Ohno had not properly realised its implications until it had actually happened. When he had come out of the dream, riding the kick back up to the waking world to a botched job and a mark who was quite clearly never going to get up again, it was the thought that he could have stopped her that haunted him; the thought that he could have moved to disarm her just a little faster.
The thought that he could have followed her into Limbo and rescued her.
“Did you try to save her?” Mao is asking.
“Yes,” Nino replies, “Ohno tried-”
“No,” says Ohno. “I didn’t.”
“Oh-chan-”
“You weren’t there,” says Ohno. “I left her behind and came back up.”
Part II
Fandom: Arashi (Inception crossover)
Summary: AU/Inception crossover. This must be what it is like to dream freely.
Word Count: 13,000
Notes: An expansion of The First League Out From Land.
Part I
The fish he’s reeling in is a big one, and the rod jerks in his hands even as he attempts to brace his feet more firmly on the deck of the boat. He’s got the wrong rod for this particular catch, he knows, from the precarious way it is bending towards the water. He tightens his grip on the handle of the reel and keeps turning, but the tension in the line is too great to bear. Just as he decides to let the fish go, there is one last, powerful tug from the water, strong enough to snap the line and send him stumbling backwards.
Ohno laughs.
It’s starting to rain; just a light drizzle that promises to get heavier, judging from the clouds amassing in the distance. Ohno looks out at the horizon and wonders if he should cast another line.
There are days when Ohno thinks he catches sight of other boats in the distance. Some days these are large boats, cutting past over the horizon in the middle of some greater errand. Others are mere specks in the distance, smaller boats like his, navigating the wide expanse of ocean in perfect, contained solitude.
He dreams of Sho. Sho, in the darkness, looking wordlessly across the room at him while the others lie asleep around them. Jun and Aiba and Sho and Nino; Ohno can just barely make out their profiles.
“It’s late,” Sho tells him, “you should go back to sleep.”
“I am asleep,” Ohno wants to reply, but he can’t seem to form the words.
And then Aiba is hovering over him with miso soup and - how did he get there, Ohno wonders; it must have been while he wasn’t looking - and Nino’s saying something else that Ohno cannot make out. About socks, perhaps.
This must be what it is like to dream freely.
He is by himself, for the most part. It suits him just fine.
Ohno has never minded being alone; discovering fishing was what made him fall in love with it. There is no past, out at sea, and the future is not worth fretting over. All he needs to focus on is the task at hand: handling tackle and rod, watching the weather. Waiting. He lets these things fill his mind where once he had filled it with cities.
To say that he has forgotten would be a lie. What Ohno has done, however, is stop remembering. There is nothing on the boat to remind him of the others, no token or talisman kept for sentimental reasons. Certainly, there are no photographs. All Ohno has are the images in his mind - Nino, frowning in concentration as he surveys a blueprint; Jun’s face as he takes aim and prepares to fire his gun. These are memories of dream-images, buried, in Ohno’s consciousness, by neglect.
They are fifteen minutes into an extraction, and Ohno is sitting in a van.
Ohno is fine with that - he’s never had problems with waiting, and inside a van is better than out on the street, where the projections from their mark’s subconscious will undoubtedly begin to take notice of him. Jun, however, is getting slightly antsy, and he alternates between tapping his fingers irritably against the wheel and checking his pocket watch. They’ve gone through the plan dozens of times but Jun’s policy when it comes to things like this is that anything can go wrong.
So Ohno waits, and tries to breathe as quietly as possible while attempting to guess at a pattern in Jun’s rhythm.
There is a sudden buzzing from the phone; Jun swipes it off the dashboard and answers it.
“Okay.” He turns to Ohno. “Nino’s out; let’s go.”
They’ve done this before - one of their first jobs, if Ohno remembers correctly. The setup involves no safes or vaults; just an envelope delivered by Nino masquerading as one of the mark’s close associates. In the first act, the combination of Nino’s discomfiture and a second, half-opened envelope poking out from Nino’s briefcase is enough to suggest to the mark that there is something inside the first envelope that will be used for blackmail.
All Ohno needs to do, now, is pick his pocket.
“- Kaname’s on the seventh floor, headed for the fourth,” Jun tells Ohno, rounding a corner to get them closer to the building’s side entrance.
“Short cut,” says Jun, indicating a rather well-hidden side door concealed behind a protruding pillar.
Ohno grins. Mao, it seems, has thought of everything.
“Nino says it’s probably in the left inside pocket of his coat,” says Jun, “but that he’s also carrying a briefcase.”
“I’ll check both,” says Ohno, pushing open the van door and stepping out into the street.
Mao’s short cut is a hidden elevator that opens on each floor behind a fire escape door. Ohno reaches the fourth floor just moments before Kaname steps out of the elevator; it’s enough time for him to pull a cell phone out of his suit pocket and start a very agitated conversation.
“What do you mean the translator doesn’t speak French?” Ohno demands, by all appearances a powerful executive about to have his grand expansion plans thwarted by the incompetence of his halfwit underlings. In fact, Ohno is so furious that he walks headlong into Kaname and the hapless-looking coffee deliveryman following close behind.
“Terribly sorry,” says Ohno, catching hold of Kaname before he falls.
“Oh hell, there’s coffee everywhere,” says Kaname, his features twisting into a scowl. “Sorry - if I hadn’t been so distracted-”
They spend a flustered minute fumbling about with paper napkins and apologising profusely to each other, while the deliveryman stands slightly apart from them, bowing deeply and repeatedly in shame.
Kaname Jun leaves this exchange with one less envelope and five thousand yen in compensation for his stained clothing. Ohno Satoshi walks away enough leverage for Case Corporation to control one of Vyes Incorporated’s most powerful board members.
It appears that they have underestimated the extent of Kaname’s anxiety over the potential blackmail material in the envelope, however. Ohno is barely six steps down the hallway when Kaname says, “Stop.”
“Yes?” says Ohno, turning round to see the other man still feeling around his inside pocket.
Kaname looks up at Ohno, his eyes narrowed. “You’ve taken something from me, haven’t you?”
“Have I?” Ohno asks, glancing further down the corridor to make sure that the coffee deliveryman has already ducked out into the fire escape.
The door swings shut; Aiba is clear.
Ohno turns and runs.
He manages to get into the elevator and shut the door before Kaname can reach him, but it will only be a matter of minutes before Kaname’s projections zero in on him. The elevator climbs steadily up - the fifth floor, then the sixth; Ohno hits the door open button the moment he reaches the seventh, gun at the ready.
There are two guards waiting for him when the door opens; he takes them out easily enough. The only way Ohno can conceivably make it out of the block he’s in is to take the short cut he came in by, but no matter how quickly Aiba moves it will be impossible for the elevator to come up in time.
His only option, it seems, is to wake up.
Ohno pulls out his cellphone and dials for Jun.
“Where are you?” Jun asks. From the shots in the background and the frantic screeching of tires it is evident that he is taking gunfire.
“I’ve got the envelope and everything’s inside -” here Ohno empties the papers from the envelope and begins sifting through them. “Bank account numbers - he’s embezzled a ridiculous amount of money. I’m going out on my own, so don’t wait up.”
“Wait, how exactly are you planning to do that?” Jun shouts, but he’s interrupted by a loud thud and a series of gunshots.
Down the corridor behind him, the elevator door opens - Kaname’s made it, but Ohno doesn’t bother to look. Instead he gives the evidence one last, long glance, before cocking his gun and pressing the barrel against his temple.
“Wait!” someone shouts, coming up behind him to wrench the gun from his hand. Ohno grabs the man’s arm and wrestles him to the ground, sending the gun flying across the corridor.
“It’s me,” gasps Ohno’s opponent, “so stop trying to kill me and let’s go.”
Nino.
Ohno releases his grip as soon as he realises this. Nino scrambles to his feet, still rubbing his neck where Ohno had pressed his forearm against it.
“I thought you got out already-” Ohno begins.
“Thought you might need some help,” Nino replies, heading for the nearest door. “You have everything, I hope?”
“Yes, it’s time to go,” says Ohno, making for the gun, but Nino’s already kicking the door open.
“We’ll take the window,” he tells Ohno, striding across the room. “Hurry.”
Together they climb over the windowsill to stand on the ledge; Ohno can hear the projections bursting into the corridor behind them.
When Ohno turns to look at Nino he sees that he is near laughter, his face alight with something like exhilaration; something like the wild, hopeful joy Ohno only remembers seeing in their youth.
“It’s good to have you back, Oh-chan,” says Nino.
They fall.
“Your mind is impossibly small,” Yuko tells Nino, the second time they meet, “and I don’t mean it in a good way.”
Yuko is a writer by profession, and she constructs her cities like one: lets a concept germinate in her mind and follows it as it unfolds into a mazelike sprawl of delightful, illogical twists and turns. Her cities feel like they could go on forever if she were given enough time to fill out the blanks before and after the outermost street. She mirrors sections of certain avenues against each other like overlapping, halfway-familiar retellings of the same passage, laying out all the tricks and traps of perspective and point of view she can assemble.
“You’ll get nowhere if you play this labyrinth like level thirty-four of Super Mario,” she says, not bothering to hide her amusement.
With anyone else Nino will make a witty comeback, but it’s different, with Yuko. With Yuko he just nods, and follows, and tries to solve the puzzle in hopes of a grasping a clue into the greater mystery standing before him.
The first time Nino meets Takeuchi Yuko, he is seventeen and she is twenty. He falls in love with her at first sight, after successfully picking her pocket in the middle of a busy street.
Yuko isn’t in the business of stealing things; instead, she steals into the dreamscapes she has created in search of her next story.
“That’s fascinating,” Nino tells her, and is immediately dismayed by how it comes out like small talk; feigned interest. “I really mean that,” he adds, hurriedly.
“I know,” says Yuko, beaming at him, and Nino isn’t quite sure how anything could be more mesmerising than her expression in that moment.
(When Nino meets Yuko the first thing that comes to mind is Ohno.
Ohno’s early constructions always give Nino the sense that they will end at the edge of the canvas in an abrupt drop. They proceed like Ohno’s art: loud, off-kilter lines and corners, with distracted offshoots into forgotten alleyways and tangents, boasting a bizarre sort of logic and perspective incomprehensible to all but the architect himself.
This is why, when Nino and Ohno first get into the business, Nino’s immediate priority is hiring another architect, because Ohno cannot always be the dreamer. They find Sho, who is more than competent, and who also proves to be a lot more than just an architect.)
“You look like you could be an actor,” Yuko tells Nino, the first time they meet.
“Really?” Nino asks. He’s still enchanted; he’s only just walked her to a bus stop seven blocks in the wrong direction from his apartment.
“Maybe,” says Yuko. “Probably.” She laughs. “I have a knack for telling.”
He ends up following her back to her house above a convenience store and into the small room that she calls her office.
That afternoon, they spend five days wandering through Yuko’s dream city pretending to be a whole host of other people; Nino is an old man, a soldier, a young woman, a crime lord - anything Yuko wants him to be.
“You’re good at this,” she tells him, after a particularly dramatic escape to a large garden in the city that Nino’s subconscious has somehow filled with butterflies. Yuko herself flits between identities with almost frightening ease, changing the lines as she pleases and making up new rules as they go along.
She is glowing when they awaken; incandescent, almost, as she picks up her pen and notebook and writes for the better part of an hour. Nino watches her fill pages and pages in frantic shorthand, and wonders more than once if he is still dreaming.
He asks her to dinner, that evening. She tells him that she’ll call and that they’ll go another day.
She doesn’t.
“I completely forgot, and by the time I remembered it I was too embarrassed to bring it up,” Yuko tells him, the second time they meet. “I did send you a copy of the novel, though - did you receive it?”
“I read it,” says Nino. “Thanks.”
Yuko is twenty-five and married with a baby on the way, and the moment she answers the door Nino understands that he was wrong in thinking that he’s fallen out of love with her.
“I need help with something,” Nino tells her.
“Surely not acting,” says Yuko, with a bit of a wink.
“I need help with waking up,” says Nino. He’s come to her because he knows that she often dreams alone, because he’s seen her unorthodox kick once before and still isn’t quite sure how she does it.
Yuko raises an eyebrow. “How deep are you planning to go?”
“Two levels, maybe three,” says Nino. “I need to know we can get out.”
That afternoon, Yuko introduces them to Nakamura Shidou, who shows them how the percussive snapping of the bachi striking against the body of a tsuguru jamisen can filter down to even the third level of a dream. While Ohno and Jun sit in Nakamura’s study and count along to the rhythm of his shamisen, Nino follows Yuko into the kitchen.
“Thanks for volunteering to help with the tea,” Yuko says brightly, when she catches sight of him standing in the doorway.
“I see you found a real actor,” Nino says. He means for it to be like a joke, but it comes out more bitter than wry.
For a moment Yuko looks slightly dismayed, but when Nino smiles and shrugs she relaxes somewhat.
“I don’t remember any shamisens, the last time,” says Nino.
“It’s a good method,” Yuko replies. “The shamisen comes through so prettily, like a clock ticking amidst a storm of sound.”
“Show me how you used to do it,” Nino says.
Yuko glances round at him, her expression mischievous. “And what will you give me in exchange?” she asks.
Sunlight is streaming in from the kitchen window and Yuko, eight months pregnant and rinsing teacups in the sink, is even more beautiful than Nino can ever imagine.
“Anything you want,” he tells her, meaning it.
Nino catches something like recognition on Yuko’s face, like she knows exactly what he’s promising, and why, but almost immediately the moment is gone, and Yuko is just looking fondly at him and saying, “But Kazu-kun, what else could I possibly want?”
She shows him, anyway. Or tries to; Nino wanders the haphazard streets of Yuko’s city for the rest of the afternoon and doesn’t find what he’s looking for.
“It’s not a good method for the ordered mind,” Nakamura tells him kindly. (Nino finds himself thinking that in another reality, they might make good friends.)
“The shamisen works nicely, thank you,” says Jun, settling the matter somewhat. He returns to their workshop satisfied; Nino returns confused and dissatisfied and inexplicably empty.
For days when Nino closes his eyes all he can see is Yuko’s dream city, its streets a puzzle he still cannot comprehend, and Yuko’s brilliant smile.
“Don’t dwell on it,” says Ohno.
“How can I not?” Nino asks.
Ohno shrugs and offers no answer, but he lets Nino sleep at his house that week and feeds him all the non-mouldy food he can find in his refrigerator.
They are three levels deep in a dream and Nino has lost track of the time.
Then the rhythm comes, lightly but suddenly, in a series of counts that is familiar at any speed.
“That’s pretty,” Ohno murmurs.
It’s a clock ticking, amidst a storm of sound.
Nino nods, and readies himself for the kick.
“Sho-kun was running tests for Case Corporation,” Aiba tells Ohno. “I mean, after... after that happened, there was even less work left for us to do that was legal, and you know how Sho-kun hated us stealing for companies. So we agreed to go different ways.”
“And what happened?” Ohno asks.
“It seems that someone on Sho-kun’s team slipped up with the compounds,” Nino explains, from where he’s curled up on the slightly battered sofa with his DS in hand. His voice is flat, somehow, and he doesn’t look up from his game as he speaks. “When they called me the exact words used were ‘a deep state of dreaming’.”
“They say he’s stable,” Jun tells them, coming in from the back room where he was reporting their findings over the phone, “but Case is making it very clear that we’ve got to finish the other job before they let us anywhere near him.”
While Ohno had chosen to step away from their activities two years ago, the others had stayed on, continuing, he presumes, to take on a more or less steady flow of shady jobs for faceless corporations. Ohno still remembers a time when he and Nino had still considered themselves artists and explorers - before the apprenticeship, before Koichi-kun or Joshima. Now they’re just thieves, slowly but surely losing parts of themselves - or potentially everything, in Sho’s case - as they tear through other peoples’ dreams.
“We don’t have time to finish the other job,” says Mao, “it’s just not possible.”
“How long has he been under, exactly?” Ohno asks.
“Far too long,” says Jun. “If he’s in Limbo-”
“We’re not certain that he’s in Limbo,” Nino interrupts sharply. This time, he glances up at them, almost daring anyone to disagree. “They’ve been monitoring his brain activity. We’ve not lost him yet.”
“If they’d let me look at the chemicals I might be able to figure out what exactly went wrong,” says Aiba. “But they won’t.”
“Break in, then,” says Mao, “break in and steal it.”
“While running the second job at the same time,” says Nino.
“That’s insane - the first job took us a day and a half already,” says Jun. He glances around at them. “Even if we plan as much of it as we can in an accelerated dream space - even if we’ve done something similar - the second one can’t be done in time.”
Nino sits up. “Do we have a choice?” he asks
“What’s the job?” asks Ohno.
“Case believes that Saori Industries is developing a new chip prototype in its artificial intelligence wing,” says Jun.
“They want us to steal that prototype design,” Nino continues, “and since we can’t possibly remember and reproduce a design for a microchip, we need to bring in an expert-”
“-which Case will be providing,” Jun finishes. “Oh, and the mark has probably been trained for defence against extractions.”
There is a pause in which everybody just looks at Ohno, each trying to decipher his expression. Ohno gazes back at them and wonders why they’re looking to him when the answer is so clear.
“This was the job you called me out for, wasn’t it?” he asks, finally.
“Yes,” says Nino, after a pause.
“And if we don’t do this there’s no way we can get to Sho without bringing Case Corporation down on our heads.”
“Yes.”
Ohno nods. “We’ve attempted this before, it shouldn’t be a problem.”
“All right,” says Jun, looking inordinately relieved. “All right. Let’s get to work, then.”
Nino is the first to meet Sho, at an exhibition put up by the Tokyo University department of Architecture; Nino’s not supposed to be there but he finds his way in anyway. Their first conversation is an argument that takes place in the stairwell just behind the gallery, after Sho overhears a conversation in which Nino cheerfully explains to a guest what exactly inspired him to design a model that Sho clearly remembers drafting and building.
“Yes, but you didn’t tell her, in the end,” Nino says, putting his hands in his pockets and shrugging as he leans against the wall. “You just joined in the conversation and found a way to politely drag me out of the gallery. Why is that?”
“What?”
“You could have just denounced me in front of her,” says Nino. “You had every right to.”
“That,” Sho tells Nino, “would have been petty and immature.”
“And justified,” Nino adds. “Face it - you’re curious.”
“Curious about what?”
“Curious to know why I even bothered to make all that up.”
Sho rolls his eyes. “It could be compulsive.”
“Compulsive?”
“Yes, you could just be a compulsive liar.”
“I don’t lie for fun,” Nino replies, sounding genuinely indignant. “In my line of work,” he adds, “it’s a prerequisite.”
There is a pause while Sho looks incredulously at Nino.
Then, “That is the worst attempt at recruitment I have ever heard.”
Nino is the first to meet Sho, but Ohno is the one who convinces him to join them.
“How did you do that?” Nino demands, when Sho turns up for work one morning.
“We talked,” says Ohno blandly, “and I persuaded him.”
“But I talked,” Nino protests, “and all I got for my efforts was security escort off the Todai campus.”
“Well,” says Sho, pausing in the middle of finding a home for his multiple computer monitors, “you didn’t drug me and hook me up to a PASIV beforehand.”
“When you asked me to help you,” says Ohno, “Jun told me you made a mistake. What did he mean?”
“He meant that we shouldn’t have let Sho dream with people who weren’t us,” Nino replies. “Who weren’t as good as us.”
A pause.
“We also made the mistake of letting you go.”
“Oh,” says Ohno.
Nino shakes his head. “That won’t happen again.”
The third time Nino meets Yuko, it takes him quite a bit of hunting and a significant amount of money to track her down.
The Yuko he meets is no longer married, but she is not, by any stretch, a shadow of her former self. When she sees Nino she smiles as dazzlingly as she used to, and while her novels have taken on a rather more desolate tone her words are still as magnetic as ever.
“I hope you’re well,” she says to Nino, ushering him into the doorway.
“Not all of us are,” says Nino.
They are both older now. Nino looks less like the boy he still was at twenty years of age; when he catches sight of himself in the mirror or in recent photographs he sees something hard in his eyes that was never there before. Yuko, on the other hand, is still the same woman; more vivid than ever, even. Something about age - age and separation - has made her even lovelier, Nino thinks; sadder, but lovelier.
“You need my help, then?” Yuko asks.
“I need help,” says Nino, “with waking up.”
“The last time you asked,” Yuko says, “you said you’d give me anything.”
“I still would,” Nino replies, and he finds that he’s not lying.
Yuko smiles, and reaches out one hand to touch Nino’s arm, but they both know that their time, whatever time it was supposed to be, is long over.
“There is more than one way of waking up,” says Yuko, “but I suppose you already knew that.”
They are in her office once again. It is considerably larger than the one from years ago, and from the only window in the room Nino can see that it is snowing outside.
“I dream alone now,” Yuko tells him. “I make my own way out.”
“How, other than waiting?” Nino asks.
“I’ll show you,” says Yuko, “and you’ll take me to dinner.”
“Dinner?” asks Nino.
Yuko laughs. “Just dinner,” she replies.
In every city Yuko constructs, there is a series of turns and landmarks that, when traversed, makes it clear to her that she is still within her dream. She has done this so regularly for so many years that this end route has become almost part of her subconscious. The exact configuration of these streets and buildings is known only to Yuko, which is why Nino, all those years ago, had no means of finding the labyrinth’s end.
What Nino does know is that every end route finishes in a fall. A road cuts off abruptly into a cliff; a staircase ends; a chasm opens. Yuko steps off the ledge, and wakes up.
“This is how I know,” Yuko tells him. “In the days after Shidou-kun and I separated I used to wander the streets of Tokyo hoping to find my end route. I never did.”
“It won’t help you in someone else’s dream,” says Nino.
“No, it won’t,” Yuko agrees. “Which is why I’m curious to know where you’re headed.”
“I’ll call,” says Nino, when the afternoon is done and it is time for him to leave. He has a flight to catch, and dreams to forge and enter. “I’ll call and we’ll go for dinner, soon. I’m not the sort to forget.”
“I know,” Yuko says. “I have a knack for telling.”
Mao’s workroom gives one the sense of a tornado having just recently swept through it, and when Ohno pauses at the door he finds her muttering to herself as she pores over a set of carefully-drawn blueprints.
“I’ve met you before, haven’t I?” Ohno asks abruptly, causing Mao to jump in fright. “Before this job, I mean.”
“Possibly,” Mao replies, scrambling up and wading through a sea of things on the floor so she can pull up a chair for Ohno.
Mao’s is the sort of face that wouldn’t stand out to Ohno in a crowd - it’s not to say that she’s not pretty; she is rather lovely and looks adorable when she’s concentrating - but it’s not the sort Ohno would notice immediately or remember for long. He’s sure he has seen her before - someone must certainly have mentioned her before, because it’s impossible for an architect of her calibre to go entirely unnoticed - but he cannot, for the life of him, remember.
“You’re friends with Jun-kun, aren’t you?” says Ohno, still trying very hard to place her.
“Yes, but Ninomiya-kun was the one who contacted me for this job,” says Mao. “We’ve worked together briefly before this.”
“Oh.”
She’s nothing like Sho, Ohno thinks, glancing at her desk. Sho always had somewhat of an obsession with neatness; entering his carefully ordered workspace sometimes made Ohno want to upset something just to break the rigidity of it all. He always had his pencils on one side, diagrams and boards on the other, and all models sat on a separate desk that he could easily turn around to examine.
The only thing Mao and Sho have in common is the careful beauty of their designs - their mazes are intricate, their short cuts elegant - and their thoroughness with detail.
“You’re doing a good job,” says Ohno. “With that first building, I mean. Simple, but effective.”
“Thank you,” Mao replies, looking awkward.
“I’m not sure if Sho-kun could have done a better job,” Ohno adds.
“Thank you,” says Mao again, beginning to blush. “That’s - well. He’s a brilliant architect.”
There is a silence for a moment, in which Mao fidgets with her pencil and Ohno isn’t quite sure where to look.
“Well,” says Mao awkwardly, “you’re not dreaming either level so I won’t have to teach you the layouts.”
“I shouldn’t be disturbing you,” says Ohno, slightly embarrassed. He rises to leave.
“Wait-” says Mao. “I wanted to ask you about something.”
“Yes?”
“I tried asking Jun-kun and he didn’t seem like he wanted to talk,” Mao explains hurriedly, “and Ninomiya-kun’s just... he didn’t look like he wanted to answer any questions the last time I spoke with him, and you know how he gets when he’s just sitting there with his DS-”
“Inoue-san,” Ohno interrupts, “what was your question?”
“Sorry,” says Mao, slightly sheepish. “You caught me in a ramble there.”
“It happens,” Ohno tells her, shrugging as he reaches out to fiddle with a discarded post-it on her desk.
“The Ayase job,” says Mao. “No one’s told me exactly what happened.”
“Oh,” says Ohno. Two years have passed but he still feels that unsettled dread when she mentions it. “You should have tried asking Aiba about that,” Ohno tells her.
“I did,” says Mao. “He told me to ask you, since he didn’t actually enter the dream. He said you went down to the last level, whatever that means.” She glances up at Ohno. “Did you?”
“Yes,” Ohno replies. “To the last level, but not beyond.”
“Beyond?”
“Inoue-san, what else have you heard about the Ayase job?” asks Ohno.
“Nothing more, really,” Mao replies. “Aiba-kun said it was rather similar to the one we’re planning now. I just want to know why everyone’s so unwilling to mention it.”
“That’s right, actually,” says Ohno slowly. “The two jobs are rather similar-”
“Ohno-san,” says Mao, “Who is Ayase?”
“Ayase Haruka,” says Ohno. “It was a government job; she was the mark. We were supposed to be helping them monitor the classified projects some firms were developing. Ayase was one of the key team members in a firm that was making rapid advances in cybernetics.”
“And you were going in to steal the idea?” asks Mao.
“They called it surveillance,” says Ohno, “but we were bringing government representatives in for these jobs. I don’t know what they did with the information we gathered for them.”
“So this wasn’t the first job?”
“By that time we’d already extracted from a number of different companies, but this job was different,” Ohno tells her. “This particular firm had already hired other extractors to train their team to defend against extraction.”
“So Ayase could defend herself?” asks Mao.
“We found out about it two days before we were supposed to go in,” says Ohno.
“What did you do?” asks Mao.
“Three levels,” someone interrupts. Ohno turns; it’s Nino, standing at the entrance to the room with his shoulder resting against the doorpost. “We decided to build three levels.”
“Kazu-chan,” Ohno begins.
“A dream within a dream, within a dream,” Nino continues. “We had never done it before, but the plan was to try to extract the information from her at the deepest level first. If she realised that it was a dream, we’d still have the second level to work with, and if that failed, we’d still be able to extract the designs from her by staging a debriefing in the first level for the attack she averted.”
“Which is, essentially, our plan for this one, isn’t it?” asks Mao. “What went wrong?”
“The formula for the compounds,” says Ohno.
“Wouldn’t Aiba-kun have been the one making that?” Mao asks.
“He wasn’t sure he could develop something with a strong enough sedative to keep a dream at that level stable, so we consulted another chemist,” Nino explains. “The sedative was stronger than we expected, yes-”
“Stronger than we expected?” Ohno interrupts. “It was far too strong, Kazu-chan. You knew that, and you should have told me.”
“It was too strong,” argues Nino, “but that wasn’t the reason why we lost her.”
“How strong was it?” Mao asks.
“Twelve years, on the third level,” Ohno says flatly.
“Twelve years?” Mao repeats, incredulous.
“That deep, and with that strong a sedative, killing yourself isn’t going to get you out of the dream - we all know that now,” says Ohno, “but Ayase didn’t.”
“We didn’t even get to the second level,” Nino says. “She shot herself the moment she realised it was a dream. She went into Limbo instead.”
Ohno remembers this with extreme clarity. He remembers the pressing heat of the third-level dreamscape Sho had created; how they had unlocked the safe and retrieved an envelope of plans that had proven to be blank. The government representative swearing as they turned round to see Ayase standing behind them, gun pointing not at any one of them but at herself.
Jun had thought of the possibility of Ayase shooting herself to end the dream, and they had discussed it briefly, but Ohno had not properly realised its implications until it had actually happened. When he had come out of the dream, riding the kick back up to the waking world to a botched job and a mark who was quite clearly never going to get up again, it was the thought that he could have stopped her that haunted him; the thought that he could have moved to disarm her just a little faster.
The thought that he could have followed her into Limbo and rescued her.
“Did you try to save her?” Mao is asking.
“Yes,” Nino replies, “Ohno tried-”
“No,” says Ohno. “I didn’t.”
“Oh-chan-”
“You weren’t there,” says Ohno. “I left her behind and came back up.”
Part II