These titles just keep getting longer, don’t they? XD The chapter is not very long, however. I’m not 100% satisfied with the philosophical discussion.
Chapter 4: Antarctic Primavera, Chapter 6: Divergence Hariolation
Chapter 5: Ventral Pallidum Insomnia
It was August 12th on the sixth or seventh time leap. We’d made some progress, after I convinced him to help each time, although a lot of it was theoretical since neither of us wanted to risk rebuilding the Phone Microwave and jumping worldlines again. Yet, at least. This meant that understanding the ‘how’ of the matter was pretty much beyond our reach. But we could still try to figure out the ‘why’, and that could lead me to useful answers.
Okabe had confessed that his migraines were actually moments when he’d start seeing and feeling other worldlines, which sort-of-but-not-really explained why there would be moments when he was there and then not there, and then there again. So far, the only situation in which anyone had been physically moved out of or within a worldline was if there was a time machine involved. But again, we weren’t going to learn ‘how’, not yet, anyway.
“I believe that Steins;Gate is unstable,” he announced one day, and I stared at him in disbelief.
“You can’t be serious,” I said. “Is that why you’re popping in and out? Do you think it will happen to the rest of us?”
“No, I don’t think that it will happen to you… but it’s definitely not stable. It only exists because of manipulating time, yet there is no way to manipulate time that exists within its frame. Isn’t that impossible? And what if,” he continued, leaning his lanky frame against the whiteboard and tapping a marker against his scruffy chin, “it’s that I spent so much time rewinding that one worldline, the one in which Mayuri first died, that I’m more… ‘anchored’ there than in this one? My mind considers that worldline to be more real than this one, and somehow takes my body along for the ride. Does that make any kind of sense?”
I thought about it. “That’s a very difficult question to answer, but… reality is directly linked to our perception. I see this marker, I feel it in my hands, so I accept it as real because that fits in with my understanding of the world around me. If I didn’t believe you, I would have called your experiences hallucinations: perceptions not influenced by stimuli within the collective reality the rest of us are experiencing within this worldline. Perhaps caused by a seizure within the temporal lobe, causing both these experiences and intense feelings of deja vu…”
“But I do believe you. I’m not going to write off the idea that you’ve had seizures entirely, but normally people don’t reject the reality they’ve been experiencing so hard that they physically enter a different one, even when having seizures. That’s…”
“Impossible,” he finished for me, with a grimace.
“Exactly. As for your mind considering it to be more real than here and now… Your hippocampus is probably deeply scarred by experiencing similar traumatic events over and over and over, as you said… You’ve ‘practiced’ living in that worldline. Living in this worldline, without repetition – except that caused by my stubbornness – it’s far less practiced, isn’t it? One take, no edits. So it’s no wonder you have trouble accepting this reality.”
“You’re right… A lot of my flashbacks are of… that time.” His face closed down and he shuddered, just slightly.
I resisted the urge to hug him, to stroke the tension out of his lean shoulders. “How sad… no matter how much we may wish to forget them, some memories will remain with us forever…” Like the ones triggering his disappearances. “All that strong sadness and fear you experienced, all the undeserved guilt and self-reproach you still carry… No one can erase it… And yet the worldlines steal you from us and every memory we ever had of you, even though we want to remember you very much!”
“It’s an odd juxtaposition, certainly,” he said, glancing at me with a shadowy smile on his face.
I almost didn’t see it, still musing. “And you see the same people, the same places, hear the same words, and ‘deja vu’ isn’t merely an odd feeling, a temporal discrepancy between long and short-term memory, or even what ‘normal’ PTSD survivors go through, but an action that places you back where you shouldn’t be… Memories that are real when they shouldn’t be… You won peace for this world, is there no peace for you?”
“Maybe not,” he said quietly. “But you’re working so hard to find out that I can’t help but support you.”
I shook myself out of my melancholy reverie and got back to business. “So you’re not ‘anchored’ properly in this unstable worldline, and the anniversary of that event is dislodging you, because time is cyclical too. The fluctuations are picking up on all the ‘practice’ you did of being ‘not-here’ and using space-time magic to put you where your brain thinks you should be. Okay. Let’s take that as our hypothesis for now. What can we do to change that? Does there need to be something new happen in this worldline that’s never happened in any other worldline ever for your subconscious to accept this as reality?”
His eyes were distant. “Maybe.”
“Well, I told you I loved you, and I’ve never done that before. Does that count?”
He finally looked at me, amber eyes warm, mouth curled up in amusment. “But surely you will tell me that eventually in a number of worldlines, which doesn’t make this one unique. I don’t mind hearing it again, though.”
I was flustered and blushing and trying not to show it. “Well! Um! Oh, I have a good question! What happens when you leave this worldline? I’ve rewound it enough, you should remember something, especially with your Reading Steiner.”
He blinked in surprise, thinking. “You know what? You’re right, but… it’s… it’s actually difficult for me to remember. Maybe it’s because I’m not the Observer this time around, because I have no control over the time travel or worldlines?”
“I suppose that’s possible. Do you remember anything at all, though?” I pressed, clutching my marker with both hands.
His gaze trailed off into the distance, his smile flattening out. “It… I remember being… horribly lonely. It’s lonely on that worldline. There was no one I knew… possibly no one at all.”
“An empty worldline?” I was appalled.
“There were still buildings and things. I was still in Akiba. But I don’t remember crowds in the middle of the day, when there really should have been.” He came back to himself. “That’s all I have right now. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I said, making notes on the whiteboard. “That’s not your fault. So it’s definitely not the same worldline as any of the ones in which Mayuri – or I – died.”
“It doesn’t seem to be,” he said, and that actually made him seem kind of hopeful.
I wrinkled my forehead. “I wonder… This is pretty far-fetched, but I wonder if I could remember things from other worldlines that my present consciousness hasn’t been to yet.”
“Huh. That’s not something I’ve considered before. You think that we might dream about it?”
“It’s like when I was talking about deja vu… But how would I recognize it as a memory from another worldline? I might get the feeling I’d seen or done something before, but I wouldn’t know how to process it or put it into context since my present consciousness didn’t directly experience it. Not even as dimly as my present consciousness experienced the worldlines before Steins;Gate. For deja vu experiences that could be from a completely different worldline, one that neither of us have been to… all I can do is be suspicious.”
“It’s something to think about, for sure. I’m pretty sure Reading Steiner is only for worldlines I’ve experienced directly. When I was thirteen, when Mayuri… no, it’s not important.”
“They haven’t passed through the hippocampus, so there’s no imprint to leave… Although that was one of my main problems with time travel in the first place. How can anyone who’s not the Observer remember anything, even as dimly as we do, without having had these signals physically fire in the brain? What do our dreams mean, whether caused by time travel or not?”
“That’s definitely not my area of expertise,” he said with a grimace.
I smirked at him. “Well, I’m not going to think about it now, although I’ll make a note of it. Dreams were going to be my next thesis anyway. But I’m not going to touch it unless we can’t find any other way to reach you.”
“All right.”
It was painful to watch him, over and over, clutch at his head and wheeze in pain, before and after he would vanish from before my eyes and my very memories of him began to fog over. He seemed to be in so much physical pain and even more emotional and mental pain… but I doubted that ordinary painkillers would do anything for him. Whatever the fluctuations in the worldlines were doing to him, it was something that was beyond the scope of modern medicine. He was so wounded, and as he progressively got worse between August 10th and August 13th each time, I wanted to hold him, as if my touch would sooth these incorporeal hurts. I didn’t dare, though.
I still took to buying him painkillers whenever I looped back.
We had take-out for dinner, too busy to even think of cooking, and then I stayed too late to go back to my hotel that night, so Okabe kindly put the pillow and blanket from his own bed in the back room onto the couch for me. It wasn’t the first time it had happened in these rewound brainstorming sessions, and I was prepared – I had my toothbrush, I had my hairbrush, and I planned to sleep in my clothes instead of my pyjamas.
He appeared in the doorway of his bedroom, without his ubiquitous lab coat over his t-shirt and wearing sweatpants instead of his trousers. It was hot. Wait, what? “Do you need anything else?”
I looked up from where I lay on the couch. “I think I’m fine, thanks.”
“Just call if you think of something.” He rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly and disappeared back into his bedroom behind the curtain, and I heard the squeak of his bed as he lay down.
I couldn’t sleep, my mind still buzzing with our discussions of the afternoon. I was tempted to study the whiteboard that was hanging just above me and to the side, but I restrained myself. It would be there in the morning. I already knew what was written there. I needed to relax.
Easier said than done.
About an hour later, I hadn’t heard anything from Okabe; I assumed he was asleep. I pulled out my phone, going to @channel to see if anyone had any links to anything useful. I’d done it before; there was no reason to think there would be anything different from the last three or four times I’d rewound time, but I still checked compulsively.
I heard a step on the floor and looked up guiltily. “Okabe?”
“Kurisu… I saw your light. Couldn’t sleep?”
“No, not yet. I thought you were.”
He shook his head, only very faintly illuminated by the light of my phone. “Even without the… the memories intruding, it’s hard to sleep these days.” He slumped down, sitting on the floor and leaning back against the front of the couch. “Knowing that I’m going to vanish… knowing that you’re working so hard to save me, even though we don’t know how without trying something dangerous… It’s pretty heavy.”
“It is really heavy,” I said, sitting up and putting my phone back on the table. Did I dare…? Sure, why not. It was always easier to be honest when it was dark. I reached out and ran my hands through his hair, stroking it back from his forehead. I felt him first tense and then relax under my hands as I kept my soothing motions going. “And I’m starting to understand what you felt when you did things over and over and nothing changed, how helpless you must have felt. But I think about how hard you fought for me, and that steels my resolve.” I changed my gestures to massaging the base of his skull, and felt him relax further.
“That feels nice,” he murmured.
“I haven’t even gone back hardly as many times as you did. And you’ll notice I did learn from your experience – I asked you for help right away, because if you couldn’t solve that problem alone, then I can’t solve this one alone. So I have an advantage there, too.”
“You’re always the smart one,” he said softly.
I smiled wistfully. “Not smart enough to do it alone. You’re not afraid, are you?”
“For myself? No. For you… yes, because I don’t know what you’re going to do, and I can’t… I can’t help you if it goes wrong. And yes, I did fight so hard for you and Mayuri, and while I can’t prevent you from doing anything you really want to do, and it wouldn’t be fair if I did…”
“To let me choose as an adult, instead of a glass doll you’re afraid of getting broken,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, that… But if something does happen to you… I’m going to feel extra-terrible, you know that?”
I let go of his head and put my hands under his arms, tugging him upwards. “Come here, sit beside me.” He did so and put his arm around me, and I pulled the blanket over our legs and snuggled into his side. “It’s too late for guilt-trips. I have no wish to invalidate your struggle by getting myself hurt.” Or killed, but I didn’t want to say that. “Just let others protect you for once.”
“Says the woman huddled under my arm.”
I snorted. “Shut up, Okabe. …And don’t go anywhere.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Christina.” Yet.
I rolled my eyes, but my head was comfortably resting on his shoulder, my left arm was draped across his front. I could feel his breathing, could faintly hear his heartbeat, and his warmth was all around my shoulders. Just this simple pleasure of being near the person I loved, of holding and being held, of being honest to the darkness of his lab/apartment… I’d jump though time until my consciousness failed to save this.
…He wasn’t going to remember this, at least not clearly, if I had to jump again. And I would probably have to. I still didn’t have enough answers yet.
I adjusted my arm across him and fell asleep, carried by his breathing…
Chapter 4: Antarctic Primavera, Chapter 6: Divergence Hariolation