Archive of Our Own ^beta

There is pain where his left eye should be.

He keeps walking. There’s nothing else to do.

The buildings pass by in different shades of strange familiarity. They blur together, mixing with memories he can’t grasp and sinking in the fog of his mind. He’s not sure if these ones are new or if he’s been walking in circles.

He’s seen this part of Tokyo — he knows it’s Tokyo, somehow — before. Shinjuku, his mind helpfully supplies. He has been here before. He cannot recall ever visiting this place.

Someone passing by gives him a strange look — concerned or startled, maybe. He touches his face and his fingers come away streaked with red. Ah. That’s why.

There is emptiness where his left eye should be. That’s why his vision is lopsided, though he cannot recall what seeing with both eyes is like.

He does not have a left eye. He has an empty socket that flares with pain. He’s not sure when that happened. It can’t have been long ago.

There is wetness on his face, beneath his not-eye. He wipes it off. His hand is now rather red, with a substance he knows is blood.

He has seen blood on his hands before. He can’t remember when. He wonders if it was his.

He is still walking. He was running before, maybe, but he’s gotten slower. He was running from somewhere, he thinks. He is not going anywhere except away.

His eye hurts. Because it’s gone. He remembers realizing that, several strange-familiar buildings ago. It’s one of his earliest memories.

There is, he imagines, a reason his left eye is gone. He cannot think what that reason could be.

There is nothing where his memories should be.

There should be something. He feels the absence the way he feels the emptiness of his eye socket.

Even now, memories are still slipping through his fingers like sand. He catches what he can, and it’s building up, but it’s not enough. The pain slicing through his skull keeps breaking his grip.

He is still walking.

A woman is standing in front of him. He stops.

She’s looking at him with something like recognition, eyes wide.

She is dressed in shadow black and blood red, with loosely tied brown hair and sharp eyes. She is familiar. She is a stranger. His head is pulsing.

Her face is wary now. She says something. A question, a name. “You’re… Saito Sejima?” He knows that name. He knows it. He does not know what it means but it catches on the edges of his mind. 

He tries to grab hold of it, but it’s no use. It’s already falling through the cracks of the mind he is still piecing back together. It was a name, wasn’t it? Was it his?

Her gaze is intense. “Hm, I guess not.”

He doesn’t know what that means.

“Sorry,” she says. “I just had a feeling.” She’s saying something about prototypes and losing communication and she’s talking like he should know what it means but trying to understand is like trying to hold water in his hands.

His voice still remembers how to speak. “Who are you?” he rasps. He feels almost like he knows her. She looks at him like she knows him.

She sighs. “Just as I thought. You’ve lost your memory.”

He still doesn’t know if he’s supposed to know her. She knows he’s lost his memory. She knows something, which is more than he knows.

She’s thinking. When she looks up, her gaze is decisive. “All right, from now on, think of me as your boss.”

“Boss?” he echoes.

She smiles. “That’s right. That’s what you’ll call me.” She reaches out a hand. “Come with me. To where you belong.”

“Where I belong?” he repeats. He doesn’t think he belongs anywhere. He doesn’t feel real.

“Yep. We’ll talk about it.”

“Who are you?” he asks again. “Do I… know you?”

“Oh, right, guess I should introduce myself a little more formally. I’m Shizue Kuranushi. I work for the MPD.”

Metropolitan Police Department. Funny, that he still knows what the acronym means when he can’t remember ever hearing it.

She didn’t actually say whether he knew her.

“Who am I?” he rasps. That’s the obvious next question. Well, not normally, he doesn’t think, but now.

“Strange question to ask someone else,” she says. “But I guess you really don’t know, do you?”

“No,” he agrees. It’s all he can say. He wonders if thinking was always this hard, or if he’s supposed to feel ready to collapse at any moment. He thinks the answer is no. “Do you know? Who I am?”

“We’ll see,” she says, which is not an answer. “Shall we go? My car’s parked nearby.”

“Where are you taking me?” he asks.

“The hospital, first. That eye’s gonna need to be looked at, which’ll probably take a while — you’ll need surgery, probably. But once that’s done, I’ll take you back to headquarters, where we can see about figuring out what happens to you from here.”

She turns to leave, but he hesitates. She’s the first stable thing he’s found, in the blurry, winding mess of the city streets he’s walked down. He’s a stranger to the world and himself, but not, it seems, to her. And yet… he wants answers she hasn’t promised, and he still can’t think straight, and he still can’t remember how he knows her.

She looks back at him. “Hay—” she starts to say, and stops. He wants to cling onto that syllable and pry whatever it was she meant to say from her lips, but it’s hard enough to keep standing right now. “You coming?” She examines his face, then sighs. “Look,” she says. “Do you trust me?”

Yes, says one of the outlines traced in the emptiness of his mind.

No, says a wariness born of knowing absolutely nothing.

I don’t have a choice, is the answer.

“...Yes,” he says finally.

“Good. So let’s go, shall we?”

He manages a nod, and follows her as she turns and begins walking away. It feels better to be walking towards something, even if it’s only a person a few steps ahead.

“Boss,” he manages to say. He’s not sure he remembers what she said her real name was, and it's what she said to call her. She turns back to him with raised eyebrows. “Will you be able to help me? My memories… is there a way to get them back?”

She hesitates a moment. “We’ll see how it goes. I’m not an expert on this sort of thing, but I know some people who might be able to help.”

It’s still not really an answer, but it’s a hope, and that’s all he really needs right now.

He’s not sure how long the walk to her car takes. His head is aching and his eye socket hurts and he doesn’t have any energy left for talking. He just walks, one foot and then the other, following her because there’s nothing else to follow.

“Here we are,” Boss says. He almost runs into her. “Get in.”

He doesn’t realize he’s tired until he sits down in the passenger seat. It’s solid beneath him, in a way the ground wasn’t, even as the car begins moving. He watches Boss at the steering wheel and wonders if he knows how to drive. There’s no real way to know, without getting behind the wheel and seeing if muscle memory does the work.

A new trickle of blood has started down his cheek. He wipes it off. Looking down at his hands, he notices for the first time that he’s smeared blood on the seat. He quickly pulls his hands away. “Sorry,” he says. It’s only polite.

Boss glances over. “It’s fine. This car’s seen a lot. It can take a bit of blood.”

He nods, but folds his hands in his lap. He stares out the window. The city is moving by, strange and familiar all at once. He doesn't feel any more detached watching it go by than he did walking through it.

“Hey, you.” He turns. Boss is glancing at him out of the corner of her eye. “Sorry, but without a name, ‘Hey you’ is about the best I can do.  Anyway, I was gonna say. There’s some facts I’d like to get straight.”

“Alright,” he says. He doesn’t know what she hopes to learn. He doesn’t have any facts straight.

“Your eye. Any idea how you lost it?”

He reaches for his eye socket unconsciously. “No. It’s been like this… as long as I can remember.”

“How much do you remember?”

His head hurts. “I… think I woke up, somewhere.” His first moments are a hazy blur. He can’t remember if there were people there, or what the building he’d woken in had looked like. “A… building.”

“A building, huh?” she says. “Specific. Okay. What was the city around it like? Was anyone else there? Were you on a floor, a bed, some kind of machine?”

Machine? “I… don’t know.” 

“How long did it take you to get to where I found you?”

It could have been hours or minutes. It’s impossible to know. The strain must show on his face, because Boss drops the subject.

“Alright, I need to make a call, if you don’t mind. Just a sec.” She pulls out a cell phone and dials a number one-handed, holding it to her ear as she drives.

“Hey, Pewter,” she says. Is that a name? “Something’s happened. I… found someone. He’s with me right now. I can’t tell you the details now, but his left eye’s missing and he’s got amnesia. …That’s exactly what I’m implying. …I’m sure of it. No, I haven’t said anything. And you won’t either. Look, I’m taking him to the hospital now, but after that I’m bringing him to ABIS and arranging to get him a job there. …Yes, I’m serious. He’ll need a job, I want to keep an eye on him, and I know he has the potential. I’m in charge here, aren’t I? We’ll iron out the details later, but I’m doing this no matter what. …Sure, sure. Anyway, as for the prototype, I still don’t have any leads as to the location, but it’s gotta be somewhere around here, and now we know who took it. …Yeah, him. Listen, can you check and see if anyone’s brought in Rohan? And if not, get people looking. …That’s all. Sure. Later.”

He listens to her conversation, or the half he can hear, but it doesn’t tell him anything he can understand. The name Rohan almost seems to spark some sort of familiarity in him, but it’s not enough.

“What’s ABIS?” he asks as she puts the phone down. “What did you mean about getting me a job there?”

“It’s my team. The MPD’s Advanced Brain Investigation Squad. I’ll explain the details later.”

“Are they the people you said could help me get my memories back?”

“Yep. But…” She glances over at him, gaze thoughtful. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”

“What?”

“I mean, from a certain point of view, isn’t this a good thing? It’s a fresh start. Anything you did before, anything that happened to you, none of it matters anymore. You can leave all the bad stuff behind, start anew.”

The bad stuff. But there’d been good stuff too.

Hadn’t there?

Boss was still talking. “Isn’t that what everyone wants, a second chance? You’re a blank slate. You get to start all over. A new life, a new you.”

He thinks about that. He doesn’t know what to say.

This doesn’t feel like a new life. It feels like an old one hollowed out and abandoned; a haunted house empty of furniture but creeping with ghosts.

There’s no new life or new him. There’s no him to speak of.

He catches sight of himself in the rearview mirror. It’s the first time he’s seen his own face. It’s neither familiar nor surprising, simply a stranger in the way the world is a stranger; blond hair trailing down over his face, one eye green and the other lid closed and crusted with blood. The half-up style he doesn’t remember putting his hair into and the white turtleneck and blue suit jacket that have been stained with dirt and blood should tell him something about himself, but he doesn’t know what those things are.

“You know who I was,” he says, startling himself with the words. “You think it’s not worth remembering.”

“I never said that.”

No. She hasn’t said anything. “I’ll have to find out no matter what. I’ll need… official identification and all that. I’ll need to know who I am.”

“Not necessarily. If we can’t find out who you are or if you don’t want to, we can get you a new name, new identity.”

“Why wouldn’t you be able to?”

She’s silent for a moment. “Just preparing for every possibility. People don’t show up in the streets with amnesia very often. Your situation’s probably… unusual.”

She knows already. She knows who he is. She has to know. 

“Someone’s going to report me missing, right? Someone who knows me.”

The long silence that follows is an answer in and of itself. Boss speaks anyway. “Obviously we’ll be keeping an eye on that. If anyone sends in a report, I’ll let you know.”

He doesn’t think that’s a lie. That doesn’t make it the truth.

“Look,” she says. “I’m trying to help you. I promise.”

Then tell me the truth, he wants to say, but that’s not what she promised, and he’s too tired to argue.

He stares out the window, and wonders what he did to screw up his old life so badly that he ended up like this. He wonders who did this to him, because surely eyes and memories aren’t things that disappear by accident.

Maybe Boss is right about starting over. Maybe his old self wanted that.

That thought doesn’t make this feel worth it. If he wanted this, before, then he was wrong to, because a fresh start is defined by possibilities, and he has none. It’s hopeful, and he doesn’t remember what hope feels like.

This is, he supposes, a beginning. It doesn’t feel like one. Just an in-between.

“We’ll be there soon,” Boss says. “You doing alright over there?”

“I’m fine.” They’ll be there soon, and they’ll fix up his eye socket, and maybe his head will finally be clear. Is a clear head a good thing, or will it make the emptiness of his memories all the more obvious? He supposes it doesn’t matter.

He’ll go to the hospital, and then he’ll take Boss’s job offer because what else does he have going for him, and maybe he’ll figure out who he is or more likely he’ll do what she said: start over. He doesn’t even know where to begin.

The buildings pass by the same as they ever were. Maybe he’s gone down this street a hundred times, or maybe never. He keeps searching for familiarity in the signs and the faces passing by, and there’s still nothing. There must be people besides Boss who know him, places he has been, but he doesn’t even know where to start looking.

If he were an optimist he might hope that they’ll immediately find his name and his life and give it all back to him, that he’ll find someone who knows him and is willing to tell him so, that it will all come rushing back like it never left.

He does not remember his old life, but he doesn’t think he was ever an optimist.

He leans his head against the window, and he waits.