I was reading comments over on the Steins;Gate wiki, and someone pointed out that Kurisu’s journey is a lot like Okabe’s journey through the Beta worldline – she goes through time twice to try to save him, and fails the first time… Okay, I understand that, but I wish she’d shown more gumption about it, instead of falling over and declaring she knew how he felt.
On rewatching her first time-leap, leaping back to the party and all the cues there was really subtly effective; it’s too bad it didn’t really fit in this worldline. I did use the sad confrontation scene almost verbatim, because that was a really great monologue. There are a lot of really great scenes in this movie! I love the voice-acting so much. I also added a couple things I felt Kurisu should have brought up.
I also don’t like overusing Suzuha. I feel Suzu spends a lot of time jumping back to hang out with her teen-aged dad, and it feels too convenient sometimes. Oh, she’ll show up in my fic, I can’t get to kid-Okabe any other way, and in the end I couldn’t get to adult-Okabe without her either, but she gets less time here and is not the primary reason Kurisu bothers to do anything. Save her for the future, darnit!
Chapter 2: Relive Atrophy, Chapter 4: Antarctic Primavera
Chapter 3: Vetitive Liaison
I was doing pretty well on my latest Japanese trip. I gave my lectures, focusing around my new thesis about dreams, and there were people there, and they asked interesting questions, questions that would help me refine my research. And of course I visited my good friends Daru and Mayuri every day, and we went about together often, or just messed around with Daru’s latest inventions in the lab.
And yet… about a week after I’d come to Japan, I started feeling strange. Not physically strange, no. But I just had this feeling, a feeling I couldn’t even define.
It got stronger as the days went by, eventually coalescing into a certainty that something was missing from my life. What was missing, though? I had everything I needed to bring in my luggage… my hotel room was comfortable… my lectures were going as scheduled, and I was getting paid for them properly… my friends were all where they ought to be, and I was able to spend time with them…
That last gave me pause. I had the strong feeling that I’d fought with them more in the past, the first time I’d been to Japan. But Daru was a pushover, and no one could fight with Mayuri unless they were completely heartless… and the others, Ruka, Feyris, Moeka, I didn’t know well enough to fight with. Yet I was certain: I’d fought with someone, explored scientific discovery with someone, even cared very much about this someone, though I didn’t want the someone to know. There was a piece of my mind sealed off, something of my memory, and even with all my studies in neurology, I didn’t know how to unlock it…
“What are you thinking about, Kurisu-chan?” Mayuri asked at that moment, sitting on the couch next to me, stitching away at her latest costume.
“I’m… not sure,” I said slowly, staring at my happy-face fork; I’d just eaten lunch. “Do you ever have the feeling that something is missing?”
“Hmm…” She paused and put a finger to her chin, thinking hard. “Mayushii’s been having a feeling like that, yeah. Like there used to be more excitement around here?”
Excitement was one way to put it, sure. “Or you, Hashida?”
“Hm? What’s that? I almost have an ID, hang on a minute.”
“What are you doing?” I asked, standing to move over to his computer.
“I’m hacking into CERN!”
I blinked. “Why?”
He looked confused. “I’m… not sure. Why not? They must have all kinds of cool science secrets we can use in our Future Gadgets, right?”
“I feel like there was another reason,” I mumbled to myself. “Why do you have all this Dr. Pepper in the fridge? No one here drinks it.”
“Mayushii buys it!” Mayuri piped up. “But Kurisu-chan is right, Mayushii doesn’t remember why.”
“Someone is missing,” I said, more certain than ever. “There ought to be someone here… if only I could just think!” I looked wildly around the lab, and my eyes fell on the perfectly ordinary microwave in the back. Microwave and Dr. Pepper…
An evil laugh… a white lab coat… nonsense words and Norse mythology… a head bowed in grief and pain… a wistful smile… a… kiss…?
“If only I could go back like a week in time…” I muttered. “I just know the answer is back there somewhere. Maybe I should go see a therapist and look into hypnosis… No! Hypnosis is bunk. Unreliable. Easily manipulated.”
“But isn’t time travel impossible?” Mayuri asked. “Mayushii isn’t smart enough to understand it, but time just flows on without stopping or changing, doesn’t it?”
“It might not be so impossible,” Daru said. “You connect a phone to a microwave, and you need the 42” CRT in the shop downstairs to be on…” A funny look crossed his face. “How do I know that?”
“I know there’s a theory about time travel using black holes to work,” I said slowly, turning to the whiteboard to organize my thoughts. Half-remembered formulae crept from my marker, punctuated by expressive smiley faces. “Maybe that’s why you’re hacking into CERN? The LHC is said to create miniature black holes, after all.” Deja vu, deja vu, deja vu.
“World…lines?” Mayuri wondered, watching me and my work. “Time leap?”
“Yes,” I said hesitantly, wondering why I was so sure this would work. “I can make a headset that will transfer the information of your hippocampus, which is where your long-term memory gets processed, into data, compress that through the LHC, and send it back in time through a phone. And if I have the memories of now in my past self, I can figure out how to solve this puzzle.” I stopped and stared at Daru. “This is ridiculous. I even wrote a paper on time travel-” which my father had stolen when he tried to kill me, and which then was destroyed in a plane crash “-but that doesn’t mean it’s easier to do than a hundred other ways to figure out what’s wrong.”
“None of which you’re suggesting right now,” Daru said. “So let’s do some time travel!”
I blinked and brought my phone down from my ear, checking the date. My phone said 10:00 PM, August 12, 2011. That was the day I’d chosen, all right. A day close to when my memory felt funny, but before that. Wait, what had I just been doing? I was building… a thing… a device…? And Daru was hacking into… CERN? Why would he do that…?
I was standing in the middle of the street near the Future Gadgets Lab, and I continued the rest of the way there, uncertain of past or future, climbing the stairs as if in a dream, sitting down on the familiar green couch…
“What is it, Zombie?” came a deep mocking voice over to my left and I looked over to see – tall, skinny, lab coat, messy black hair, curious amber eyes, taunting smile. “Spacing out again?”
“Okabe,” I said in a tiny voice. “Okabe Rintarou!”
He looked confused, then worried, then angry. “Did- You didn’t just-”
“Just what?” I demanded defensively.
“You just time-leapt, didn’t you!” he exclaimed, stepping forward to loom over me. “Don’t you remember how dangerous that is!? Didn’t I specifically say never to mess with time under any circumstances?”
I wasn’t about to be loomed over and jumped to my feet from the green couch. “Well excuse me, you vanished into thin air and then no one could remember you, let alone anything you said about time travel! How did you know, anyway!?”
“You walked in here as if you didn’t know where you were, and then looked at me like you’d seen a ghost! I’ve done that enough times I can guess what it looks like!” He looked furiously upset, grabbing my shoulders tightly and shaking me until my head rolled around. “Why did you do that!? Even if you find out how, you should never, ever build a time machine!” His voice cracked, desperate, terrified.
“O-okabe!” I whimpered, panicking in fear from his anger, on the verge of tears. “You’re hurting me!”
He looked horrified, and his grip loosened and fell away. “Sorry.” His voice was a hoarse whisper. He collapsed on the couch, arms resting on his knees, head bowed. “Why? Why would you do it? After I’ve warned you not to?”
“Because you’re going to disappear tomorrow!” I cried out. “You’ll disappear from this worldline, and it’ll write over you like you never existed! But we remember, not clearly, just enough that it’s obvious something’s missing – that you’re missing! And I’m not going to just leave a nagging feeling like that sit around uninvestigated! And now that I know… if I don’t do something, you’ll disappear forever!”
“And what if you fail?” he demanded, standing again to loom over me, eyes more serious than I’d seen them in waking memory, haunted by spectres I couldn’t see. “If you choose to ‘do something’ by altering time, and it doesn’t go well?” He bowed his head. “The answer is simple. You’ll do it again. You’ll keep going to the past until you succeed. As long as they have the means to go back in time, that’s what people will do. But it will only increase the suffering. A change in the past will always affect something else. It will never change in a way that is convenient for you. If you save someone… you will lose someone. Dreams you finally fulfilled won’t exist anymore. Your long-held desires will be snatched away, eradicated. And when the change you hoped for doesn’t happen, you will keep having to face that inescapable reality, again, and again, and again, and again!”
He was almost crying, and I was fixed in place, unable to reach out to him. He pulled himself back together with an effort. “Do you realize the pain of continuously repeating all that, while bearing the responsibility for all those losses? Do you understand the fear of losing your humanity while it wears you down?”
He was speaking from deeply personal experience, and it chilled me. “But-”
“Even if you have the means, the past must not be changed. You must not turn chance into reality. No one knows the future. It’s because the past cannot be undone that people can accept all sorts of pain, adversity, and cruel accidents, and still move forward.”
“Then what are you going to do, Okabe!?” I lunged forward and grabbed his lapels. “You’re going to disappear! I saw it… I saw a world without you. A lab with only Mayuri, Hashida, and me… Where no one remembered you… It would be worse than death! Any mark or meaning of your existence will disappear! We won’t even remember your name!”
He stared past me.
“I don’t care.”
I gasped, let go, took a step back.
“All I wanted was for Mayuri and you to live in peace and keep walking towards the future. Nothing more. It’s fine as long as that comes true.”
I stared, and he turned his back on me and walked out.
I followed him.
We walked in silence for many blocks. It was dark, and there was little to no traffic and no pedestrians.
He turned to look back at me. “How long are you going to follow me?”
I wasn’t going to admit what I was up to. “I’m not. I’m going back to my hotel.”
He looked left and right. “That’s not in this direction.”
“I have somewhere to go first,” I said.
“Where?”
Calling me on my bluff? Heartless jerk. “That’s my business, not yours.”
He kept walking, and I kept walking in the same direction.
He came to the plaza in front of the train station, empty at this time of night. He stopped there, and I waited. Finally, he turned around.
“Kurisu.”
“Yes.”
“The moment I disappear tomorrow, the people around you will think I never existed, but since you leaped through time, you might remember.”
“Yes…” I said quietly. “I suppose I might.”
“To a small degree, Reading Steiner is present in every human.” What I’d been saying about deja vu in the laundromat? But he didn’t remember that, because it would happen tomorrow. Except now it wouldn’t happen, because how could we just go and do our laundry and chat about dreams after tonight? “Since you’ve been moving through time, you may experience it more than others.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Forget.”
I gasped, just a little. I thought he would say it, but to hear it so bluntly spoken…
“Forget me. Just like the others, think that I never existed. This moment was just a dream. Remembering something no one else can is a painful thing. You can’t talk to anyone about it. No one will understand you. You’ll be alone. So… just go on with your life.”
“So that’s how you’ve been feeling all this time?” I asked. I shouldn’t have pushed him away so much! We spent so much time fighting, I had no idea how he had really felt! If only I’d reached out to him more during the year, he wouldn’t have felt so alone – maybe I wouldn’t have believed him easily, but I could have helped! “Then…” I bowed my head, and tears spilled from my eyes. “Then it’s no good!”
“Kurisu,” he whispered.
“It’s no good! You have to exist!” I plunged forward until I collided with his chest. He stood silent and unmoving, his arms not coming up to hold me, letting me vent on him. “If that’s what I did for you on another worldline, then do the same for me! Stay by my side! Listen to me!” I sniffled. “Suffering alone… then disappearing by yourself… That’s… That’s too selfish!” I screamed the last words into his chest.
Now he put his hands on my shoulders. “As long as you and Mayuri are alive and happy, that’s all I care about. That’s what I fought so hard for. Please… don’t worry about me.”
“Th-that’s not fair!” I cried, looking up at him. “You struggled and suffered and almost died to protect us, because you care about us, you care about all your friends, but you won’t let us care about you!? You won’t let us protect you?”
He didn’t even hesitate. “No. Not if it risks your safety. It’s better that I disappear quietly than that we struggle again and again, distort the worldline, break Steins;Gate.”
“What if it doesn’t?” I said. “We can’t know until we try! And I would do anything-”
He shook his head. “No. It’s too dangerous. Please, Kurisu…” His voice was very soft, but cracking around the edges again. “Forget me. Live your life. Be happy.”
I looked up into those sad amber eyes, the eyes of a tired, desperately broken man. It froze my heart. “Do… do you want to die?”
His eyes dropped away from mine and I had my answer. His eyes were already dead…
But I was here now, the whole group was back together – except for the one person I couldn’t remember who they were – so that should give him more hope, shouldn’t it? Had he just been existing all this time, going through the motions for Mayuri and Daru’s sake? And now that an easy way out came to him, he would just let himself go without even trying?
“You can’t,” I choked out. “You can’t leave me. I won’t let you.”
“There’s no need to worry. Daru is my right hand. You can rely on him whenever you’re in need.” His expression softened, looking at me tenderly. “Mayuri might not seem like it, but she’s more mature than you in some respects. During the hard times, you can cry on her shoulder. She’ll always be there. Feyris and Rukako, they’ll help, too.” He smiled. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Idiot! That’s not what I’m trying to say-
He bent his head and I froze. A hesitation, a breath, and then he kissed me full on the mouth. My breath caught in my throat, my words died with my breath, all I could sense was his arms around me, his breath on my face, his mouth on mine. All I could do was kiss him back, clinging desperately to him.
“Oh,” I said when we parted, more tears falling down my cheek, “you are cruel. You tell me to forget you, and then you go on and make a memory that leaves a deep impression in the hippocampus…”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, his eyes bleak.
“You’re so cruel…” I reached up and kissed him again as more tears flowed, pressing my lips urgently against his. His arms tightened around me, and my grip tightened on the lapels of his lab coat.
I would do as he asked, if I could. He was always protecting us, even at the cost of his existence…