Was kind of annoyed at how many people get slapped in this show. Can’t believe Kurisu would just put up with it, even in the depths of her despair. So she doesn’t.
I also messed with worldline formatting to make the R worldline the extra-special thing it ought to be. : P
I know in the movie, it’s Operation Norn… but Fenris is a different operation, a different worldline, a demon wolf who bit off the hand of Tyr when the Aesir bound him and refused to let him go.
I keep editing the end of this story. Hopefully it reaches a final form by the time I post it over on ff.net where people actually read it. Also HUGE thanks to chestnutchris over there, who went to the trouble of putting together a complete chart of which honorifics which characters use for whom. I thought I had a reasonable handle on Japanese honorifics, but man is the system complicated!
Chapter 6: Divergence Hariolation
Chapter 7: Dreamworld Poiesis
I popped back into myself, throwing my arms over my head reflexively and waiting for a deathblow that never came. The world was still in place, nothing was exploding, everything was fine… It was several days earlier, out at May Queen. Okabe was looking at me with concern. “Another failed future?”
“I… I need a minute,” I mumbled, and jumped up from the table, rushing to the women’s restroom. I locked myself in a stall and tried not to hyperventilate, tried not to cry hysterically. What had I done?
I had done the best I could. And I needed the extra power in the time machine to reach the time between worlds, that was what all my calculations said. But in that worldline, Makise Kurisu had actually destroyed Akiba. Had failed not only to bring Okabe Rintarou back, or even to contact him, but also evaporated the future for Mayuri and Suzuha and hundreds, maybe thousands of other people in Akiba. The fact that there were infinite other timelines didn’t make my failure less horrifying. I covered my mouth with my hands and rocked back and forth, crying silently.
How could my future self have known what would happen, and still send Suzuha back in time? How could I have experienced that, and not stopped it?
Perhaps I had amnesia? I had been caught in the blast too, but I must have survived in order to build the time machine… No wonder Suzuha had stared at me when she saw me in that worldline. I couldn’t have survived unscathed, and amnesia was very likely, either from physical trauma or psychological trauma, or both. How was it possible that I’d survive at all? The forces inside that machine would have obliterated all of Akiba, possibly all of Chiyoda, hopefully not all of Tokyo. It was impossible for me to have survived. It was good that Daru, at least, had been in another district…
No! I couldn’t hide behind such a painful and false hope. Whether or not future-Kurisu had amnesia of the events leading up to the destruction of the time machine, it still remained that I had messed up. Maybe Okabe was right. Maybe I should give him up, give up time travel. Never see his scruffy smiling face again, never hear his obnoxious Kyouma declamations again, never feel his warm mouth on mine ever again…
I wasn’t ruthless enough to sacrifice our friends to bring him back. That wouldn’t make him happy. That wouldn’t make me happy. The image of Suzuha impaled was burned into my mind, her body dead before she had time to react. I rested my head on my knees and sobbed.
“Kurisu-chanya?” Feyris’s voice. “Ku-chan, are you in there, nya? Kyouma’s lurking outside like a naughty boy, nya, so I promised I’d check on you…”
“I failed,” I whispered. “I failed… I killed everyone… I failed, Feyris-chan! I-I can’t do it!”
The stall door opened. Hadn’t I locked it? Feyris was standing there, looking adorably angry. “Yes, you can! So you messed up once, how are you going to solve time-travel without making mistakes ever, nya?”
“I destroyed everything!” I shouted. “He would be so angry if I told him-”
Slap.
I reached up to touch my stinging cheek. “Did- did you just slap me?”
Feyris looked uncertain for a second, but then rallied. “Do you always destroy the world in every future? No! So this isn’t one of those fixed events, this is an accident-”
“Don’t you dare slap me!” I screamed at her. “That’s not going to help ‘pull myself together’ or whatever you think is going to happen! I know what I did! I know what it means! The fact that it wasn’t convergence, that I can try again, doesn’t negate it! Don’t be ridiculous!”
Feyris fell back, looking regretful. “I’m sorry, Kurisu-chan. I’ve seen Kyouma like that before, and it’s helped him in the past… I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to regain control over myself. “Just… give me a minute to freak out. Go feed him Dr. Pepper and omurice. Put it on my bill, not his. I’ll be out in a minute and then we’ll tackle this again. It wasn’t the whole world, just…” I had to squeeze my eyes shut and turn my face away miserably.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll do that. I hope you feel better, nya. What should I tell him?”
“Just… just tell him it didn’t go well, and let me explain it all to him later. He’ll be angry, but I’m the one he needs to be angry at.”
“He only gets angry because he’s afraid,” Feyris said very quietly. “Under all the evil laughter, Kyouma is very fragile.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m trying not to hurt him. But I won’t let him go, either.”
“I support you, Ku-chan. Nya.”
I told him later the same evening, and he was angry, but I cried… I cried so hard, he softened and held me, stroking my hair as I finally vented the pain and horror and grief. “Please,” was all he said.
Please stop. Please don’t hurt yourself or the people around you again. Please let there be an end.
Please let me die.
I clung to him tighter in response. Maybe I will.
It was hard to go about my daily life after that. Especially my lectures, which I’d still been having to do loop after loop after loop, just in case that loop happened to be the last one. I could give them by heart now, and did, but the next day… My boss took me aside after my first lecture. “Makise-san, are you all right?”
“I’m really not feeling well today,” I said, which wasn’t a lie. “I can’t explain it… I just feel terrible.”
“You look terrible.” My boss was not known for being particularly tactful. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off, and tomorrow too? If you’re getting sick, it’ll help minimize the effects. Let me know if you’ll be in to lecture the day after.”
“Thank you,” I said, and went home to my hotel to hide in my giant bed for most of the day.
But come evening, I was up again, organizing my notes on my laptop, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
I couldn’t sleep, but I did manage to rest a while that night, and the next day I felt more like myself again, walking over to the lab as soon as I could to see what was going on, even if I didn’t bring up time travel while Okabe was still around. I didn’t feel I could ask him for help right now, after I’d failed and made him upset, even though he was one of the very few people who could help me.
Instead, I tried to help him with his air conditioner project; it had been neglected through most of the loops and this change would be good for me. I’d decide on whether to keep going later.
The 13th came. Okabe left. I still dithered, still obsessed over the notes on my laptop, still tried to forget Suzuha.
The 15th came. I got a text from Suzuha. I wondered if I could bear seeing her, but forced myself to go anyway.
She was alive and well, smiling as she saw me on the roof of the lab. I couldn’t help it and sank to my knees, bursting into tears.
“Oh no, oh no, what’s wrong, Ba-chan?” Suzuha asked, putting her arms around my shoulders. “Did something happen? Did you have a fight with Kyouma before he left? You didn’t say anything about that before I came…”
Her concern was overwhelming, and it was a while before I could speak again. “I’m-I’m sorry, Suzu-chan. The worldline before this one… I messed up so bad…”
“It’s okay, it’s okay. We’re in a different worldline now. Whatever happened, it’s over now. I’m here to help!”
I blinked through tears up at the time machine. “I guess I’m still trying to reach Okabe, aren’t I.”
“Yup! Before I left, you told me some things to tell you. Firstly: this time machine can move laterally through worldlines without doing anything to change the worldline itself. Normally you have to change the world to move to a different worldline, right? You’ve managed to break free of that. We tested it in 2036, although it’s a little bit awkward to meet… basically other versions of people you know! I met some weird versions of Tousan and Ruka-san… Oh! I even met Kyouma!” She giggled. “He called me Part-time Warrior, I’m not sure why. But I like it. I like him. So I’m super-ready to help you get him back.”
“You met… Okabe?” That proved it, that this machine could move through worldlines. But could it reach outside of worldlines…
“The other thing that I was supposed to tell you is that the reason why things didn’t go well in the last worldline is because you just increased the power and sent a message to everywhen without providing proper coordinates. So that’s one thing we have to do first, is find out what the coordinates for the R worldline-”
“The R worldline?” I asked. “Why did I call it that?”
“I’m not sure. I thought it might be for Rintarou, but you never used his given name except when being formal or exasperated, and then only with his family name. So I don’t know. Anyway, that what you called it, so I call it that too.”
“So it is a worldline?” I asked. That would be nice to clarify.
“Kiiiind of… I don’t really understand it, but I brought notes!” Good, notes. I could just read the notes. That didn’t mean I’d build anything.
I looked at her closely as she brought me a large sheaf of print-outs. “Is there anything I should know about in this worldline? Am I deformed or scarred at all? Were there any horrific accidents or disasters in places where I lived? You mentioned Urushibara-san, do you also know Mayuri and Feyris-chan and Kiryuu Moeka-san?”
She thought for a moment. “Nothing bad has happened to you as far as I know, at least you look pretty much the same twenty five years from now. Which is pretty good, Ba-chan!”
“Don’t call me Ba-chan,” I told her, blushing.
“Heheh, sorry. Habit! Don’t know of any horrific accidents, although there have been some close calls with people almost discovering the time machine… But no one found it before I left, and you said that you’d destroy it when I returned to the future, so that no one could take over the world with it. And yes, I know all those people! They’re all in the Future Gadgets Lab that you run!”
“I run?”
“Yup!” She grinned. “You look so surprised! But hey, no one else was better for it!”
“Except that maniac,” I muttered, turning back to the pages in my hand. My own notes were rather confusing, and I pored over them for the rest of the day and night. Suzuha came to stay at my hotel room again, and her warm liveliness did more to dispel the horror of her death than anything else.
If I got her killed again, I’d never forgive myself.
Okabe had lived through Mayuri’s death until he’d come to doubt his humanity. I doubted I’d get that far. I wasn’t as strong as he was.
My notes theorized a few things that set me off on new mental paths. Future-Kurisu talked of something called a divergence meter, which apparently I could find in the Future Gadget Lab somewhere, which would tell me what worldline I was on. Relative to what, I didn’t know. It wasn’t important, apparently, as the time ‘outside’ time was apparently a worldline that was… embryonic.
I frowned. I had such a way with words, but it didn’t help me understand – ah, here! Future-Kurisu apparently meant that it wouldn’t register on the divergence meter, as it didn’t have enough digits to show. It was one of the many worldlines that only existed because of infinity, containing nothing but impossible possibility: a 21st century Earth with no living humans. Besides Okabe, hopefully.
I’d have to find the divergence meter to know what I was talking about.
A day later, as I was poking around the lab, looking for this mysterious meter with digits, I came across a binder full of code. “Hashida, what’s this?” I asked him, since he probably wrote it.
“Oh, that? That was the code for Operation Jormungandr. That was one we did soon after I joined the lab, the one to find some girl Okarin met once. It was pretty complicated, because it wasn’t so easy to find people on the internet back then, and we didn’t end up finding her any-”
“And what’s this?” Suzuha asked, picking up a rack with some glowing red numbers on it. 1.048592β, it read.
“Uh… that, I don’t know. I think Okarin made that. You’ll have to ask him about it when you see him.”
I frowned at it, reaching back into my dreams from a year ago… “It’s… it’s the divergence meter I’ve been looking for.”
“Huh? Really?”
“I think so. Apparently it doesn’t have enough digits to show the worldline Okabe is currently in.”
“How are we going to find him, then?” Daru was pouting.
“I have to finish reading my notes. But I already have some ideas…” No! Ideas bad! People could get hurt or killed! Even the future evil dystopian dictatorship Okabe told me about had started with a single text-message!
But… I couldn’t know until I tried, right? “Suzu-chan, you’re sure there are no evil regimes with time travel in the future?”
She giggled. “As far as I know! I know you’ll be careful with tests, don’t worry!”
You died once already, I thought at her. I’m just going to go ahead and worry, even while I venture into the lion’s den once more. “Hashida… is there a way to adapt the code to find Okabe instead of some girl?”
“Hmmm. I could try. But it’s really only designed for the internet.” He flipped through the code in the binder. “Hey, I remember now. He was looking for a girl who had red hair and blue eyes. Like you. But she was older than you.”
“Did he say when he met her?” I asked, but I had the feeling I already knew the answer.
A week later, and we’d managed to use the code anyway, along with the divergence meter and my neurological studies, to turn the time machine into a sort of radio scanner, looking through the ‘frequencies’ of the worldlines for the one Okabe was in. Suzuha suggested the completely crazy idea of returning to Steins;Gate directly and hoping he would show up, but I was pretty sure he was the key to that endeavour, that the universe would align once he was recovered and there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it anyway. I didn’t even know what worldline Steins;Gate was.
I was sweating and shaking the first time we tried it, but nothing exploded this time. I’d made sure no one except Suzuha and me was around in the first place, though, although if it went nuclear again there wasn’t much that would really help. There was one place where the time machine beeped a positive result, the last digit flickering between a 6 and a 7, though mostly on 6. Then it was on to stage two: confirming and testing.
A day later, and we had completed our preliminary tests involving text messages and bananas without incident. Okabe didn’t text back, but the messages went through to the unlisted number, and the bananas vanished without appearing as gel anywhere, although that particular test didn’t mean much. The only way we were going to get any more answers was if I tested it myself. I certainly wasn’t going to ask Suzuha to test it for me. I would save her this time if it was possible to save her.
“We did it,” I said to Mayuri, Suzuha, and Daru. “And this time it works. It won’t destroy the world. It won’t change the world as we know it. It won’t kill the people inside. It won’t end up in wierd places in Earth’s gravitational field. All it will do is bring him home.” And, of course, bring this worldline’s Suzuha home after we were done with it. But first it had to get to the worldline outside of time.
Worldline 1.0485961β. The R worldline. The one that shouldn’t exist.
“Okarin will be so proud of you,” Mayuri said, clapping her hands together.
“And of you, too,” I said. “Let’s begin Operation Fenris!”
“You remember all the controls I showed you?” Suzuha asked.
“I do,” I said. “Mayuri, if I’m not back within a day, if I completely mess up, go use the time-leap device and tell me it didn’t work.”
“Roger!” Mayuri chirped, saluting cutely.
“If you do make it back but don’t find him the first time, it’ll take the batteries another week to recharge,” Daru warned me, turning the power on and disconnecting the cables, but he had a smile on. “Go get that idiot.”
I stepped into the time machine, a determined grin on my face. “Well, as he always said… El. Psy. Kongroo.”
“El Psy Kongroo!” Mayuri chirped back as the door closed.
Time travel was impossible. I’d always believed it to be so. To move against the current of time or to skip ahead through it, to take the very fabric of the universe itself and do as you would with it, was beyond the power of mortals to accomplish.
And now I was sitting inside a machine that I believed would not only do that, but escape time itself. It was beyond impossible. But he had gone before me, as he always had.
I set the coordinates and laughed as he always did, to cover my mounting nerves. “Ohohohoho!” I really needed to practice that to equal him.
The street was a familiar one to me, one of the main roads through Akiba. It should have been full of hundreds, thousands of people, marching about on their own business; the thrum of humanity should have filled the air, or at least the buzz of the cicadas.
It was silent in this worldline, except for the wind and the soft tap of my footsteps on pavement as I ran, looking for the one living being who should be here. I could feel it in my heart, in my bones that he was here, and my heart beat wildly, urging me onward.
There. I stopped. Just ahead of me, a solitary figure in white, hunched slightly where he sat in the middle of the road, looking at his phone with a painfully wistful smile. He was watching the test video I’d sent through to the space between the worlds. And there was a small pile of banana peels beside him.
“What are you gawking at? Pervert!” I teased him. He jumped and turned, and gave me a truly glad smile which I returned. “There you are. I’ve been looking for you.”
He turned away, putting his phone to his ear without dialing. “It’s me. I’m seeing and hearing hallucinations- The choice of Steins;Gate?”
“Okabe.” I held out my hand to him. “Come back to Steins;Gate. You don’t belong here. You belong with us. You’re trying to come back, anyway. You remember how you wandered through worldlines a year ago, looking for the right one? And I was always at your side? And all your friends, Mayuri, Hashida, Urushibara-san, Feyris-san… even Suzu-chan.” I shook my head. “You were arrogant to think that you had to hold up the weight of the world by yourself. No matter where you are, you will never be alone. I will always find you, and always ask you to come home.”
He looked at my hand for a minute, then lowered his head to make another resigned smile – but without sadness now. He reached out to accept my hand and let me pull him to his feet. “Anywhere with you.” Amber eyes stared into mine so tenderly.
“G-good,” I said, ruining the moment a little with sudden embarrassment. But he hadn’t let go of my hand yet. In fact, he pulled me into his arms, and we just held each other for a moment. “You’re real.”
“I think so. And so are you.”
“My feelings reached you across time,” I said poetically. But I couldn’t stay poetic for long, not with Okabe around. “And so did my intellect and my actual self.”
“But without your feelings, you wouldn’t have made it anywhere,” he said, grinning. “…Thanks.”
“Just come home. That’s all we want.”
Hand in hand, we walked through the silent sunlit streets back to the lab, to the roof where the time machine was, stationary within Earth’s gravitational field. We came onto the roof and he stopped short, gaping in astonishment. “What- how-”
“It works,” I said simply. “My future self built it, Suzu-chan brought it to me, and taught me how to use it. It only took a bit of tweaking to find you.”
“I… wow. Have I ever told you how amazing you are, Kurisu?”
I felt a blush coming up. “Not without burying it under a million stupid nicknames.”
He laughed. “Nothing went wrong this time?”
“Nothing. I learned. And if all goes well, it will vanish once we get back to Steins;Gate, it will stay in the worldline with Suzu-chan. Steins;Gate has no time travel. Because you won’t have disappeared in the first place. No World War III, no dystopian dictatorships.” I dropped my voice. “Although Suzu-chan didn’t give me the lottery numbers or anything…”
His laughter pealed out loud and clear and my heart warmed almost painfully.
I made him get in first. I didn’t want to lose sight of him for a moment. No Orpheus in the underworld here. Even though that wasn’t Norse.
He looked around in interest. “It’s impressive. Different from the ones I’ve been in before. How exactly are we getting to the time we ought to be in?”
“Thanks. And I’m just going to set the time to when I left. There’s no actual time here, which is why you’re not dead of starvation, so just returning to ‘normal time’ should automatically set us onto Steins;Gate since I’m alive and Mayuri’s alive and you’re alive.” I tried to hide from him how nervous I was, even though I was babbling embarrassingly.. I’d been nervous coming to find him, yes, but now that his precious self was with me… I’d never tried it with someone else before… if something should happen now…
He leaned forward, getting my attention. “Hey. Stop worrying.”
I jumped, blushing. “How did you know?”
He sat back again, smirking. “I always know how my assistant is feeling. But truly, there’s nothing a strong, intelligent, determined… perverted genius girl can’t do.”
I squawked at him indignantly, but my hands were flying over the controls, setting them to the same time that I had left, adding five minutes so as not to hit myself. I hit the big red button – he grinned on seeing it – and the worldline hop was set in motion. “We should arrive at 3:17 on August 24th. Hashida’s going out tonight with Yuki-chan.”
“You know,” he said very quietly, not looking at me, “this is the only time you’ve come to save me.”
I stared at him, my heart beating more quickly at the implication. “So- you mean…”
He looked back at me and smiled, giddily. “It’s going to work. You’ve changed things. My brain won’t be messed up anymore.”
“That was the point!” I said, looking away and blushing. “Oh, I hate this part…” I hunched over, grunting, as the forces of time travel kicked in. I was tense from head to foot. Please, don’t let anything bad happen… Don’t let him disappear from in front of me, don’t let the time machine crash, don’t turn us into jelly…
I felt his hands take mine tightly, and looked up to see his encouraging smile, though he was also painfully braced against the forces. I smiled back.
Whump! We re-appeared on the roof, with such force that our hands were torn from each other and we landed on our backsides. “Ouch, ouch, ouch!” I cried; across from me, Okabe made a pained groan. There was no sign of the time machine or of Suzuha.
“Tuturu!” Mayuri chirped, as if we hadn’t just appeared out of thin air. “You made it back! Together!”
Together… I scrambled to my feet, he was doing the same, and launched myself into his open arms. He held me tightly, and I wrapped my arms around his waist and clung to him. It was over. He was back. And now he knew truly that I would never let him go. That I… loved him.
Mayuri was giggling at us, and Daru was catcalling from his laptop. I glared at him around Okabe’s arm. But that only seemed to encourage him. “It’s about time, lolz!”
Okabe kept a tight hold of me with one arm, but he freed the other one to point dramatically. “Let it be known that Hououin Kyouma, by the courage of his faithful assistant and the aid of his minions, has returned to Steins;Gate!”
I rolled my eyes. “You nutcase.”
Mayuri clapped her hands as she skipped to the stairs. “Mayushii is so happy Okarin is back! Everything is okay now, right?”
“We should have another party to celebrate,” Daru said, picking up his laptop to follow her.
“Certainly we should! Let the world tremble at the news!” Kyouma boomed. Then he wilted slightly. “Ah, but I can’t really afford it right now… I spent all my money on the party for Christina.”
I sighed. “Always the same story. I’ll cover it, this time. After all, it’s only fair. And there’s no ‘tina’ in my name!”
He cleared his throat. “Right! Then, uh, thanks.”
“Let’s plan it right now!” Mayuri said.
The others didn’t want to leave, understandably, but eventually they went home – Mayuri had a train to catch, Daru had that date with Yuki… We’d set the party for tomorrow night with hardly any tsundere waffling at all.
Okabe walked me home to my hotel. “Are you sure you’re going to be all right on your own?” I asked him. “I kind of don’t want to let you out of my sight, but you must be tired.”
“And you must be tireder, with all the work you’ve been doing,” he answered, then added with a smirk. “You’re not inviting me up to your room, are you, perverted genius girl?”
I slapped his shoulder. “I was going to, but now you can go home on your own, perverted idiot.”
He captured my hand in his. His hands were so large and warm. “I know what you mean, though. Being here… now… with you… It’s too good to be true. But that’s the will of Steins;Gate, isn’t it?”
“It better be, because it’s the will of me,” I said, and relented. “All right, come up. The bed’s big enough for three, so we can maintain propriety. And if you try anything I will smash your face in.” But I was smiling, although I was also blushing.
He smiled back. “Nothing you don’t want. Promise. Just to make sure no one vanishes.”
“Exactly.”
He bent his head and kissed me, and my grip tightened on his hand possessively.