Fanfiction: Dreaming by Day (Zero Time Dilemma)
It was beautifully sunny today, and I sat in the garden for four hours and handwrote this fic in a notebook, start to finish. An extremely pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon!
There's a definite pattern emerging in my Zero Escape fanfiction, but at least I managed not to include Carlos/Akane in this one.
Title: Dreaming by Day
Fandom: Zero Time Dilemma
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2,000
Summary: Carlos hasn't even heard of Dcom. Why does he have all these memories from it?
It’s Reverie Syndrome. He knows it is.
Carlos presses his back against the wall, breathing hard, trying to ground himself in the here and now.
It isn’t contagious, but it tends to run in families; he’s been told to watch for the early symptoms in himself. It took his sister, and now it’s coming for him.
How is he supposed to get the money she needs if he ends up unconscious as well?
They’re so vivid, the daydreams. He can see how they might overwhelm a person, how they’re going to end up overwhelming him. They feel like things he must have actually lived through at some point. Sometimes they feel like things he’s living through right now, more real than the day-to-day cycle of the station and his apartment and the hospital.
(He hasn’t told the hospital about it yet. He knows it’s irresponsible to keep working when he’s sick; he’s putting himself in danger, he’s putting the people he’s supposed to be rescuing in danger. But he has to keep earning for as long as he can, for Maria.)
They’re so vivid he actually looked up whether Dcom existed. His imagined experiences there... weren’t great, exactly, but if it turned out to be a real place, if he really had a chance to earn five hundred thousand dollars-
It’s not real, of course. No Mars project, no money, no fucked-up sadist kidnapping a bunch of people. Just an elaborate nightmare that’s slowly replacing his waking life. Before long he won’t be able to tell the difference between hallucination and reality.
He remembers dying so many times, in so many different ways. No, he doesn’t remember it, he’s imagining it. He has to keep it together. He has to keep himself anchored here, for as long as he possibly can.
He guesses that means the people he met at Dcom weren’t real either. He’s sorry to know that; he liked them a lot. Well, most of them. Akane and Junpei in particular; he’s been through a lot with them, under very intense circumstances, and it feels like it’s forged something between them.
But they aren’t real. They’re just dreams.
-
Maria’s fingers tighten slightly on his. He squeezes back, although he doesn’t know if she can feel it.
When he’s looking at her, it doesn’t seem like she’s in a coma. She stirs sometimes, her expression changes, her eyelids flutter. It’s like she’s sleeping. She just... doesn’t wake up.
What is she dreaming about? He hopes it’s something nicer than the dream he’s steadily sinking into, forced to kill or be killed in an underground shelter.
(In his head, they roll dice again. A three and a two and a five.)
“How’s she been?” he asks, stroking Maria’s hair, watching the flicker of her half-closed eyes.
“You’re her brother, aren’t you?” Diana asks.
He stands so sharply he knocks the chair over. Diana flinches back like she expects to be hit.
Diana. Diana.
He’d vaguely registered that it was a new nurse, red hair, but he hadn’t really looked at her, he’d been so focused on Maria, he hadn’t realised-
This can’t be real.
“Sorry.” He stoops to set the chair upright. He just needs to focus on the chair for a moment, and when he looks back it won’t be Diana, he’ll be back in the real world. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
He turns around.
It’s Diana. That red hair, those unmistakable bright blue eyes.
It’s happened; he’s finally reached the point where he can’t draw a line between his hallucinations and reality. He’s probably not even here; he’s probably seizing on the floor of his apartment. Will anyone find him? They’ll notice when he doesn’t come in for work, right?
“Um,” Diana says, “are you okay?”
He laughs; he can’t help it. “I’ll be fine. Not enough sleep.”
He should tell her it’s Reverie Syndrome. He should get himself admitted, just in case he actually is at the hospital, somehow projecting Diana’s face onto a real nurse. But he can’t. The moment he’s admitted, he becomes useless to Maria.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I have trouble sleeping myself. I could give you some unofficial medical advice?”
“Nah, don’t worry about it.” He holds out a hand. “Guess we’ll probably be seeing a lot of each other, if you’ve just started working here. I’m Carlos.”
Will they be seeing a lot of each other because he’s visiting or because he’s in a hospital bed? That’s the question.
God, she looks so like Diana.
“Nice to meet you,” she says, shaking his hand. “My name’s-”
He can’t resist. “Diana?”
She frowns. “Do we know each other?”
That can’t be good. How deep does this hallucination go? “No. Sorry. I just thought you looked like a Diana.”
“Are you sure?” she asks. “I feel like there’s something really familiar about you. I can’t pin it down, but if you know my name...”
This whole thing is ridiculous, and it’s probably not even real, so he might as well press down the pedal and see where it takes him. “Well, if you ever signed up for a Mars cohabitation project that only exists in my head-”
Diana screams. Carlos stops talking.
Diana falls to her knees and presses her hands into her temples and screams, and Carlos crouches next to her, trying to - help her, something, he doesn’t know what to do, and the door bursts open and there are people helping her up and hands dragging him away and the door closes and he’s outside it, divided from his sister and Diana.
In his head, he rolls a one, but the others roll fives, and the bullets tear through them like they’re paper dolls.
-
“She’s stable,” Dr Martinez says. “She says you didn’t attack her. You’re free to go.” She shakes her head. “I’m so, so sorry about all this.”
“It’s okay. I know it must have looked bad.” Everyone’s been very apologetic about having to hold him at the hospital until they know whether he did something to Diana; the staff here all know him pretty well. “Can I speak to her?”
“She needs time to rest,” Dr Martinez says, “but come back tomorrow. She’s asked if she can see you as well.”
-
He’s not sure what to expect when he’s led to her room after work the next day. But she still looks like Diana. The same hair, the same freckles, the same striking eyes. It’s been twenty-four hours and he’s still seeing Diana.
Is it possible that she’s really here?
“Carlos,” she says, smiling at him from the bed. There’s warmth in it, but it’s somehow uncertain. Her gaze moves to the nurse next to him. “Would it be possible for us to speak alone?”
The nurse nods and leaves.
And then it’s just Carlos and Diana, alone in the room. It feels like they’re enclosed in a bubble and the weight of everything that didn’t happen at Dcom is pressing in from the outside, ready to break through and overwhelm them at any moment.
“I remember you from Dcom,” she says.
“Dcom isn’t real,” he says.
“I know,” she says. “I still remember it.”
He lets out a long breath. “Me too.”
-
“I’m probably imagining you, you know,” he says. “This can’t be real. Right?”
“I’m real,” Diana says. “I think. I feel real.”
He shrugs. “Well, maybe you’re imagining me. I’m not sure I feel real.”
She laughs a little. “Maybe.”
She stretches, settles back against his couch cushions. He keeps realising he’s staring and having to look away. Diana. Here, in his apartment. It’s surreal.
“Or neither of us is imagining things,” she says.
“The morphogenetic field,” he says.
“The morphogenetic field,” she says. “Maybe it’s real. Maybe we met in another history.”
“And something happened, and there was no Dcom in this one?”
“Maybe there was no snail,” Diana says.
Carlos starts to laugh. “God, why wouldn’t he stop talking about that snail?”
-
In all the timelines where they both escaped alive - well, all except the one in which he really screwed up - Akane gave Carlos a number on which to contact her. But he never memorised it; he just entered it into his phone. So, whether his memories of other timelines are real or not, he can’t pull that number out of them.
He finds a freelance Japanese translator online. Scrapes together the money to ask if she can find any contact details for Akane Kurashiki or Junpei Tenmyouji; he hasn’t had much luck in the English-speaking corners of the Internet. She asks what characters they use to write their names, and he has to apologise for not knowing.
He’s not really expecting her to have any luck with Akane, if Junpei wasn’t able to find her either. But she comes back the next morning with the number of Junpei’s detective agency.
Maybe there was a snail, after all, if Junpei still ended up there.
He has to wait most of the day so he won’t be calling Japan in the middle of the night. When he finally enters the number into his phone (he’s done his best to memorise it, for the benefit of any alternate-universe versions of himself), his hands are shaking.
The phone rings a couple of times before it’s answered in Japanese. He probably should have anticipated that.
“Hey,” he says. “Uh, do you speak English?”
“Yeah,” the voice says, and it’s Junpei. Carlos is hit by the strange sensation of someone tightening a fist around his heart. “You sure you’ve got the right number? We don’t get a lot of American callers.”
“Junpei, it’s Carlos.”
“Who?”
Somehow he’d expected Junpei to just know, but he guesses Akane’s the timelines expert. Hadn’t Junpei said he lost his morphogenetic field connection before Dcom? “It’s Carlos, I know you through the morphogenetic field-”
“Jesus Christ,” Junpei mutters, and hangs up.
Carlos stares at the phone in his hand. A moment later, it starts to ring.
“Sorry,” Junpei says. “Reflex. Do you know Akane?”
“Yeah. We were all locked in-”
“Do you know where she is?”
“I was kind of hoping you could help me find-”
Junpei hangs up again.
-
Carlos drops by the hospital in the evening, to visit Maria and to catch up with Diana. From the look on Diana’s face, he suspects she hasn’t been having much more luck than him in her own search.
“You haven’t found your team?” he asks. Her team which is... also sort of her family? He’s still not sure he knows what’s going on there, but he guesses she and Sigma are together. Or were, in another universe.
It’s possible he’s getting too used to all of this.
“I found Sigma, actually,” she says.
“What, really?” he asks, looking sharply at her. She still doesn’t look happy. Is something wrong with Sigma? Is it just that he doesn’t remember her? “How is he?”
She hesitates. “He’s very... young.”
“Like, a kid?” Is it possible for the same person to be born at different times across different universes?
“He told me he was a sixty-seven-year-old in a twenty-two-year-old body,” she says. “I wasn’t sure I believed it. But the Sigma I spoke to today was twenty-two.”
To be honest, this is not helping Carlos to understand Diana’s family situation.
“No Dcom to infiltrate, I suppose.” She gives him a sad smile. “You know, it was such a terrible place, but I almost miss it.”
Carlos thinks about Junpei, who doesn’t want to talk to him. About Akane, unreachable. Beyond all the death and the fear and the horror of Zero’s twisted game, they had each other. He’s never known that kind of bond with anyone but his sister.
“I kind of know what you mean,” he says.
Diana touches his arm. At least she’s here. At least they’re not alone in this.
-
It could still be Reverie Syndrome. Maybe he’s nuts to believe this is real. SHIFTing? The morphogenetic field? It’s all impossible, right?
But these people are important to him, and he’s going to believe in them for as long as he can. He owes them that much.
There's a definite pattern emerging in my Zero Escape fanfiction, but at least I managed not to include Carlos/Akane in this one.
Title: Dreaming by Day
Fandom: Zero Time Dilemma
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2,000
Summary: Carlos hasn't even heard of Dcom. Why does he have all these memories from it?
It’s Reverie Syndrome. He knows it is.
Carlos presses his back against the wall, breathing hard, trying to ground himself in the here and now.
It isn’t contagious, but it tends to run in families; he’s been told to watch for the early symptoms in himself. It took his sister, and now it’s coming for him.
How is he supposed to get the money she needs if he ends up unconscious as well?
They’re so vivid, the daydreams. He can see how they might overwhelm a person, how they’re going to end up overwhelming him. They feel like things he must have actually lived through at some point. Sometimes they feel like things he’s living through right now, more real than the day-to-day cycle of the station and his apartment and the hospital.
(He hasn’t told the hospital about it yet. He knows it’s irresponsible to keep working when he’s sick; he’s putting himself in danger, he’s putting the people he’s supposed to be rescuing in danger. But he has to keep earning for as long as he can, for Maria.)
They’re so vivid he actually looked up whether Dcom existed. His imagined experiences there... weren’t great, exactly, but if it turned out to be a real place, if he really had a chance to earn five hundred thousand dollars-
It’s not real, of course. No Mars project, no money, no fucked-up sadist kidnapping a bunch of people. Just an elaborate nightmare that’s slowly replacing his waking life. Before long he won’t be able to tell the difference between hallucination and reality.
He remembers dying so many times, in so many different ways. No, he doesn’t remember it, he’s imagining it. He has to keep it together. He has to keep himself anchored here, for as long as he possibly can.
He guesses that means the people he met at Dcom weren’t real either. He’s sorry to know that; he liked them a lot. Well, most of them. Akane and Junpei in particular; he’s been through a lot with them, under very intense circumstances, and it feels like it’s forged something between them.
But they aren’t real. They’re just dreams.
-
Maria’s fingers tighten slightly on his. He squeezes back, although he doesn’t know if she can feel it.
When he’s looking at her, it doesn’t seem like she’s in a coma. She stirs sometimes, her expression changes, her eyelids flutter. It’s like she’s sleeping. She just... doesn’t wake up.
What is she dreaming about? He hopes it’s something nicer than the dream he’s steadily sinking into, forced to kill or be killed in an underground shelter.
(In his head, they roll dice again. A three and a two and a five.)
“How’s she been?” he asks, stroking Maria’s hair, watching the flicker of her half-closed eyes.
“You’re her brother, aren’t you?” Diana asks.
He stands so sharply he knocks the chair over. Diana flinches back like she expects to be hit.
Diana. Diana.
He’d vaguely registered that it was a new nurse, red hair, but he hadn’t really looked at her, he’d been so focused on Maria, he hadn’t realised-
This can’t be real.
“Sorry.” He stoops to set the chair upright. He just needs to focus on the chair for a moment, and when he looks back it won’t be Diana, he’ll be back in the real world. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
He turns around.
It’s Diana. That red hair, those unmistakable bright blue eyes.
It’s happened; he’s finally reached the point where he can’t draw a line between his hallucinations and reality. He’s probably not even here; he’s probably seizing on the floor of his apartment. Will anyone find him? They’ll notice when he doesn’t come in for work, right?
“Um,” Diana says, “are you okay?”
He laughs; he can’t help it. “I’ll be fine. Not enough sleep.”
He should tell her it’s Reverie Syndrome. He should get himself admitted, just in case he actually is at the hospital, somehow projecting Diana’s face onto a real nurse. But he can’t. The moment he’s admitted, he becomes useless to Maria.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I have trouble sleeping myself. I could give you some unofficial medical advice?”
“Nah, don’t worry about it.” He holds out a hand. “Guess we’ll probably be seeing a lot of each other, if you’ve just started working here. I’m Carlos.”
Will they be seeing a lot of each other because he’s visiting or because he’s in a hospital bed? That’s the question.
God, she looks so like Diana.
“Nice to meet you,” she says, shaking his hand. “My name’s-”
He can’t resist. “Diana?”
She frowns. “Do we know each other?”
That can’t be good. How deep does this hallucination go? “No. Sorry. I just thought you looked like a Diana.”
“Are you sure?” she asks. “I feel like there’s something really familiar about you. I can’t pin it down, but if you know my name...”
This whole thing is ridiculous, and it’s probably not even real, so he might as well press down the pedal and see where it takes him. “Well, if you ever signed up for a Mars cohabitation project that only exists in my head-”
Diana screams. Carlos stops talking.
Diana falls to her knees and presses her hands into her temples and screams, and Carlos crouches next to her, trying to - help her, something, he doesn’t know what to do, and the door bursts open and there are people helping her up and hands dragging him away and the door closes and he’s outside it, divided from his sister and Diana.
In his head, he rolls a one, but the others roll fives, and the bullets tear through them like they’re paper dolls.
-
“She’s stable,” Dr Martinez says. “She says you didn’t attack her. You’re free to go.” She shakes her head. “I’m so, so sorry about all this.”
“It’s okay. I know it must have looked bad.” Everyone’s been very apologetic about having to hold him at the hospital until they know whether he did something to Diana; the staff here all know him pretty well. “Can I speak to her?”
“She needs time to rest,” Dr Martinez says, “but come back tomorrow. She’s asked if she can see you as well.”
-
He’s not sure what to expect when he’s led to her room after work the next day. But she still looks like Diana. The same hair, the same freckles, the same striking eyes. It’s been twenty-four hours and he’s still seeing Diana.
Is it possible that she’s really here?
“Carlos,” she says, smiling at him from the bed. There’s warmth in it, but it’s somehow uncertain. Her gaze moves to the nurse next to him. “Would it be possible for us to speak alone?”
The nurse nods and leaves.
And then it’s just Carlos and Diana, alone in the room. It feels like they’re enclosed in a bubble and the weight of everything that didn’t happen at Dcom is pressing in from the outside, ready to break through and overwhelm them at any moment.
“I remember you from Dcom,” she says.
“Dcom isn’t real,” he says.
“I know,” she says. “I still remember it.”
He lets out a long breath. “Me too.”
-
“I’m probably imagining you, you know,” he says. “This can’t be real. Right?”
“I’m real,” Diana says. “I think. I feel real.”
He shrugs. “Well, maybe you’re imagining me. I’m not sure I feel real.”
She laughs a little. “Maybe.”
She stretches, settles back against his couch cushions. He keeps realising he’s staring and having to look away. Diana. Here, in his apartment. It’s surreal.
“Or neither of us is imagining things,” she says.
“The morphogenetic field,” he says.
“The morphogenetic field,” she says. “Maybe it’s real. Maybe we met in another history.”
“And something happened, and there was no Dcom in this one?”
“Maybe there was no snail,” Diana says.
Carlos starts to laugh. “God, why wouldn’t he stop talking about that snail?”
-
In all the timelines where they both escaped alive - well, all except the one in which he really screwed up - Akane gave Carlos a number on which to contact her. But he never memorised it; he just entered it into his phone. So, whether his memories of other timelines are real or not, he can’t pull that number out of them.
He finds a freelance Japanese translator online. Scrapes together the money to ask if she can find any contact details for Akane Kurashiki or Junpei Tenmyouji; he hasn’t had much luck in the English-speaking corners of the Internet. She asks what characters they use to write their names, and he has to apologise for not knowing.
He’s not really expecting her to have any luck with Akane, if Junpei wasn’t able to find her either. But she comes back the next morning with the number of Junpei’s detective agency.
Maybe there was a snail, after all, if Junpei still ended up there.
He has to wait most of the day so he won’t be calling Japan in the middle of the night. When he finally enters the number into his phone (he’s done his best to memorise it, for the benefit of any alternate-universe versions of himself), his hands are shaking.
The phone rings a couple of times before it’s answered in Japanese. He probably should have anticipated that.
“Hey,” he says. “Uh, do you speak English?”
“Yeah,” the voice says, and it’s Junpei. Carlos is hit by the strange sensation of someone tightening a fist around his heart. “You sure you’ve got the right number? We don’t get a lot of American callers.”
“Junpei, it’s Carlos.”
“Who?”
Somehow he’d expected Junpei to just know, but he guesses Akane’s the timelines expert. Hadn’t Junpei said he lost his morphogenetic field connection before Dcom? “It’s Carlos, I know you through the morphogenetic field-”
“Jesus Christ,” Junpei mutters, and hangs up.
Carlos stares at the phone in his hand. A moment later, it starts to ring.
“Sorry,” Junpei says. “Reflex. Do you know Akane?”
“Yeah. We were all locked in-”
“Do you know where she is?”
“I was kind of hoping you could help me find-”
Junpei hangs up again.
-
Carlos drops by the hospital in the evening, to visit Maria and to catch up with Diana. From the look on Diana’s face, he suspects she hasn’t been having much more luck than him in her own search.
“You haven’t found your team?” he asks. Her team which is... also sort of her family? He’s still not sure he knows what’s going on there, but he guesses she and Sigma are together. Or were, in another universe.
It’s possible he’s getting too used to all of this.
“I found Sigma, actually,” she says.
“What, really?” he asks, looking sharply at her. She still doesn’t look happy. Is something wrong with Sigma? Is it just that he doesn’t remember her? “How is he?”
She hesitates. “He’s very... young.”
“Like, a kid?” Is it possible for the same person to be born at different times across different universes?
“He told me he was a sixty-seven-year-old in a twenty-two-year-old body,” she says. “I wasn’t sure I believed it. But the Sigma I spoke to today was twenty-two.”
To be honest, this is not helping Carlos to understand Diana’s family situation.
“No Dcom to infiltrate, I suppose.” She gives him a sad smile. “You know, it was such a terrible place, but I almost miss it.”
Carlos thinks about Junpei, who doesn’t want to talk to him. About Akane, unreachable. Beyond all the death and the fear and the horror of Zero’s twisted game, they had each other. He’s never known that kind of bond with anyone but his sister.
“I kind of know what you mean,” he says.
Diana touches his arm. At least she’s here. At least they’re not alone in this.
-
It could still be Reverie Syndrome. Maybe he’s nuts to believe this is real. SHIFTing? The morphogenetic field? It’s all impossible, right?
But these people are important to him, and he’s going to believe in them for as long as he can. He owes them that much.