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It would have been easier if they’d died with Maya. This is Lisa’s first thought – horrible, unfair, but unavoidable – after Philemon enacts his bargain and they realize the full implications.
There is a new world where everything goes right if only the five of them don’t remember – that much is true. What Philemon didn’t tell them was that they wouldn’t be the ones to live in it.
“Did you think it would be that easy?”
Nyarlathotep’s voice sounds all around them as they return to consciousness, still in this nightmare world under his control.
“Did you really think you could trade away your memories and be free of the world that made you?”
Eikichi screams something incoherent, drowned out by Nyarlathotep’s laughter on the swirling winds. Lisa wraps her arms around herself, trying to hold back the icy air in this city above the clouds.
But it’s Jun (of course it is) who is the first to realize, to fall to his knees next to Tatsuya’s unconscious form, to look up at the others in wide-eyed alarm. “He isn’t waking up!”
Lisa turns, glares at the empty air where Philemon had last stood. “What did you do to him?” Her voice cracks on that last word. “We took your deal – we did what you said! You can’t just leave us here like this and take him from us! Not after Maya!”
Philemon is silent, but someone else is more than happy to fill that void.
“Took his deal? Oh, you took the deal, yes – naïve little rats that you are, running blind in your maze! You took the deal, and so did the two friends who stand with you!”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Lisa screams. “We all took the deal – Tatsuya too!”
But she can’t feel quite so certain now, as the laughter echoes around them, wild as the winds and infinitely colder.
Yes, it would have been easier to die with Maya. That’s the only thing Lisa is still sure about.
***
The last thing Tatsuya remembers is tripping on the sidewalk in front of that dark-haired woman. He must have hit his head, because there’s nothing but darkness after that.
Darkness, and then waking up in this place. It looks like Sumaru City when he opens his eyes, but the chill of the winds around him is nothing like his home.
“Tatsuya! He’s waking up!”
Tatsuya doesn’t know the slim young man kneeling over him, and the sheer relief on his face is too intimate an expression for a stranger. Tatsuya draws away, and the boy’s relief turns to surprise and hurt, which isn’t much better.
“Hey, man, you had us worried there for a minute,” a blue-haired boy says, approaching and offering Tatsuya a hand to get up. “I knew that crazy monster was full of crap about you, you’d never sell us out like that.”
Tatsuya doesn’t take the hand, choosing to struggle to his feet on his own instead. He looks around at the platform, at the other person standing there with them, a blonde in a battered Sevens uniform. He’s seen Lisa Silverman around school before, which is more than he can say for the two Cuss High boys, so he addresses her.
“What happened here?” Tatsuya gestures around the platform, and out at the city. “This place – it looks like Sumaru City, but – it isn’t.”
“You mean you don’t remember?” Lisa asks.
“Should I?” Tatsuya says.
He looks around again, but the trio’s faces are closed, guarded, and hurting beneath that. They want something from him, he can see that, but people always seem to want something from him. He doesn’t understand why these three think they should be different.
“Do I know you?” Tatsuya asks, because it almost feels like he should – like there’s something important he’s forgotten. And if only he knew the right questions to ask, these three could tell him.
The slim boy turns away at the question, stalks to the edge of the platform and looks off into the distance. The other Cuss High student follows him, rambling in alarm about falling.
Lisa stays, and she stares at Tatsuya like she’s trying to see through to his soul. Tatsuya doesn’t even try to meet her eyes.
“You don’t know us,” Lisa says, and there’s a broken strand of betrayal woven into the words. “You’re not him.”
“Him?”
“Our Tatsuya,” Lisa says, which doesn’t actually explain anything. “Nyarlathotep was telling the truth. He didn’t take Philemon’s deal after all.” She steps back, her face twisting with a sob. “Wherever that other world is, where everything will work – he’s there, and we’re stuck with you.”
The platform lands back on the city then, but the ground they hit still isn’t solid. The city is still in the air, still flying, and Tatsuya still doesn’t understand any of it.
The three students leave, head off into the cold streets. Tatsuya can hear noise out there, screams and wailing and fear, and the trio is heading for it all.
Lisa looks back over her shoulder once, before they disappear, and opens her mouth as if to say something. She looks into Tatsuya’s eyes one last time, though, and shakes her head and turns away.
They leave, and Tatsuya is alone on the fallen platform with his questions. He stands over a bloodstain on the golden tiles, and he wonders. Maybe he did hit his head when he fell in front of that woman. Maybe he cracked it open and died, and this place is his own personal hell. Where no one will tell him what he did wrong.
***
And so the betrayal festers, as Nyarlathotep knows it must. The brats from this world abandon the boy from the new reality, even as their own Tatsuya destroys the world they traded their memories to create. And this world, torn open by the darkness of human souls, is no place for a soft little school boy who never had the chance to fight.
Or it shouldn’t be, at least. Nyarlathotep watches in surprise as even the weak, untrained Tatsuya holds his sword and calls up personas that can stand against the demons that have been unleashed on this world.
“He is stronger than you give him credit for,” Philemon whispers, directly into Nyarlathotep’s consciousness.
“He is weaker than you believe,” Nyarlathotep replies, as the worlds crack and bleed into one another through Tatsuya Suou’s soul.
***
Lisa spends her time mourning Tatsuya, when she has a moment’s thought to spare from survival in this twisted abandoned world.
She mourns the boy who left them, who couldn’t trust them enough to stick to the bargain they’d all made. He’d gone to the world where Maya was, no matter the cost to the rest of them. That can’t stop Lisa from loving him, but it does mean he isn’t the boy she wishes he could be.
And she grieves for the other Tatsuya, too, the one she’d never gotten the chance to know. They’d left him on the platform alone, in a city crawling with demons. Only later, after fighting their way to shelter, had they realized it would be a death sentence. Jun had gone back to search, but the platform had been empty.
“I drew a spider lily there,” Jun says, when Lisa asks if he left a message. A tear rolls down his face. “For abandonment.”
That makes Lisa cry, and she can’t afford to indulge in so many tears. She knows she will never find Tatsuya again, and goes on knowing it right up until the moment when she sees him.
Tatsuya is fighting demons in the street, and for a moment Lisa could believe it’s the version of him that they lost. But then he turns and sees Lisa standing there, with Jun and Eikichi beside her, and their Tatsuya would never look at them so indifferently.
“You aren’t dead?” Lisa doesn’t mean for it to be a question, but the words come out like it anyway.
Tatsuya shrugs. “Not yet.”
He turns, prepares to walk away.
“Wait!”
Lisa isn’t sure which of them calls out first – Eikichi, angry as much as he’s hurt, or Jun, stretching out a hopeless hand, or herself, broken and desperate.
Tatsuya stops, looks back impatiently. “What?”
“Come back with us,” Lisa says, stepping towards him.
Tatsuya steps away. “So you can pretend I’m him?” he asks, and there is a harshness to his words that wasn’t there when he first woke up here. “So you can treat me like the sort of person who throws someone else into the mess he made?”
“So that you aren’t alone,” Jun says. “So that none of us are.”
“You can’t keep fighting by yourself forever,” Eikichi says.
But Tatsuya doesn’t look convinced until Lisa says, “He left all of us behind here, not just you.”
That makes Tatsuya’s mouth twist, like he’s trying to smile but has forgotten how. “Yeah,” Tatsuya says. “He did.”
When the four of them return to the makeshift shelters the survivors built in the city center, Lisa knows that at least she has one person less to mourn tonight.
It doesn’t make her feel better.
***
Tatsuya knows when something begins to change in the world. The demons become even more frequent than they already were, and they are crueler, more likely to attack on sight than to bargain. And more than that, there is a change in the air – something heavier, pressure building somewhere that needs to be released.
“It isn’t Nyarlathotep again, is it?” Eikichi asks one evening, as the four of them huddle around a small fire. “Do you think he’s still plotting something?”
“Probably,” Lisa says, shooting a dark glance up at the sky, as if that’s where she thinks Nyarlathotep is.
But Tatsuya shakes his head. “I think it’s him,” he says. “The other Tatsuya.”
That silences the other three. They always try not to mention the missing members of their group, which suits Tatsuya just as well. He doesn’t want to hear about the selfishness of his double, or about the dead woman he betrayed them all to find.
And maybe Tatsuya is as selfish as his double, because when he feels the end coming, he doesn’t say goodbye. The others are asleep, curled up in their little corner of the shelter.
Tatsuya looks down at the trio for a moment before he goes. They always drew closer in sleep, closer than they were while awake. Lisa’s hand entwines with Jun’s now, though it hadn’t been when they’d fallen asleep, and Eikichi’s arm flops over both of them.
It is a picture of friendship, of comfort, of a moment’s peace drawn from a disordered world, and Tatsuya envies them a little. He can’t remember reaching out like that for anyone in his life, asleep or otherwise.
He leaves without waking them, walking into the dark and silent streets. It’s always cold in the flying city, but tonight the chill is deeper than the air.
The pressure is worse than ever as Tatsuya looks out at this sliver of remaining world. Something is coming – something or someone. And it’s coming now.
“You’d better take care of them,” Tatsuya says, in the moment before the pressure becomes too much to bear.
Before the darkness rises up to take him, Tatsuya just hears his own voice say, “I will.”
***
It is lonely to be the only person left who remembers an entire world, but Maya only learns this after Tatsuya fades out of her life.
It isn’t bad all the time, of course. Maya has her friends, her job, her whole life ahead of her, and a moment’s sadness doesn’t mean much against all that. She thinks it’s a small price to pay for the existence of the world.
That doesn’t stop her from crying a little to herself, the night she sees Tatsuya drive past her on the street on his motorcycle.
She has nearly exhausted her tears when she hears a knock on the apartment door – probably Ulala having lost her keys again. Maya sighs, wipes a hand across her eyes, and trudges over to open the door.
It isn’t Ulala.
Tatsuya stares at her, arms folded, a shadow over his face that wasn’t there when he disappeared.
No, when the other Tatsuya disappeared. Maya sees that now – this is the Tatsuya from this world, looking at her like she’s a puzzle to be solved.
“Can I help you?” Maya says, hoping her voice doesn’t betray everything she’s feeling.
Tatsuya shrugs. “I wanted to see the woman he did it all for.”
Maya might not know this new Tatsuya, but she recognizes the loneliness in his eyes.
And she smiles. They might be lonely, but they don’t have to be lonely alone.