ACT III: The Road To Hell

Link to article: ACT III: The Road To Hell.
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The water is soft, lapping against the sand. It drags at it, throwing clumps of spray up and back again. The black of the sky shines down, and O5-3, in the cold light of his headlamps, stares at the edge of visibility, of all things seen and unseen.

He is sitting on a sand dune, waiting. He sips at his beer, his eyes clouding gradually as the evening stretches on, and on. He wonders what’s on the other side of the sea. He pictures a daytime scene - a beach hut, children building sandcastles, a pier stretching out into the waves.

He picks up a handful of sand and lets it trickle through his fingers. He sighs, and then starts as a shadow peers over him.

“It’s time,” says the Administrator.

O5-3 creaks to his feet, willing his limbs to move. He takes a final look back across the water. Where does his sight end? How far across can he see? He isn’t sure. The sea and the sky blend together. If a man drowned out there, nobody would witness his death, would ever be able to picture the desperation as he clung to life, flinging himself up, up, out of the waves until he was sucked down beneath.

He thinks about that, about moments erased from time. But this isn’t the hour for that. The Administrator is waiting besides the car, and O5-3 trudges towards him, slouching forward to his doom.

-----

The car is cold, and O5-3 feels himself shivering. He turns on the radio, low. Shostakovich twists from the speakers, pricking the goosebumps on his arms still higher.

The Administrator is staring out of the window, looking through the trees. The forest is dense here, whispering needles through the wind. O5-3 just stares straight ahead, watching as the road cuts through two emerging hillocks, flashing light dancing between them.

“You said he lives in Rostwick?”

The Administrator blinks, turning at the question. “Yes.” He turns away again, his chin on his hand.

O5-3 doesn’t remember the last time he had a full night’s sleep. The hours just tick by him, scratching at his mind, urging him onwards. When he was still Yoshihide, he was careful to be well-rested. His work came first, and he had to ensure that his duty was done properly. The Work was bigger than he was, and he couldn’t let it down with his own poor choices.

But now, he has a broader view of the matter. The Work flows from him and through him. Burning his way through the night, working to the point of exhaustion, simply alters his state of consciousness. As long as his intent is pure, it continues – the ideas, the methods, are simply different.

The Administrator does not understand that, of course. He watches as the other man sighs, sitting back in his seat. “Did I ever tell you what my father thought of hell?”

He, O5-3, does not turn. “He thought hell was dying. The process of dying.”

“Yes, he did. Well-remembered. My mother disagreed, of course. She thought hell was the living, waking world. She once painted a mural on our kitchen wall. It was a strange thing, one I held a great deal of affection for.”

The wonderful thing about driving is that O5-3 can concentrate on that, instead of this. He has lost so much, shed so much, that it's a wonder the Administrator’s words still have the effect they do. Maybe it's the pile of bodies, or Yuzuki’s face as she was dragged away, but each one feels like a cold, sharp nothing.

“She wasn’t a well woman, you see. Nervous spells, paranoid delusions. Looking at that mural, I felt I understood her better. It made her outbursts make sense.”

A memory flies by him. “I thought that your mother died before you knew her.”

The grin, like a flash, a blinding streak on his periphery. “Very good! Top marks today, O5-3. Yes, you’re right. I never really knew her, but I could see the effect she had on my family. Maybe I wanted to understand that, to reach through to her. Maybe I could heal the family.”

“And did you?”

It slips out, and he curses himself. But the Administrator doesn’t seem angry. He just turns those eyes, those dark, shaded glasses, onto him.

“Don’t you think you should be watching the road?”

They continue on, in silence, watching as the moon falls down across the sky, spreading black ink among the stars.

-----

The cabin is sitting in the woods, waiting for them. A single light shines from behind glass as the pair of them trudge towards the door. The ground is wet, a thick mud that squelches up to their ankles. Their flashlights scrabble for the path, but they can’t find it.

The cabin is a small log affair. It’s not well-maintained; the timbers look like they’re starting to rot. O5-3 raps on the door, attentive, alert. An owl hoots dimly, far in the distance, as the reeds wave in the gloom.

A chair scrapes inside. There are footsteps; the sound of a metal cane, tapping on the floor. The Administrator starts to whistle, staring up at the moon.

The door opens to a middle-aged man, in his early 40s. He is rake-thin, his face bristling with a light, wiry stubble. He looks at them both, blinking against the cold, and then sighs. “Yes, of course. Come in, then.”

O5-3 shares a look with the Administrator, and they step into a warm, cramped space. A thin wire bed dominates the far wall, and a wooden desk and table stand in front of them. Papers and a pen are strewn across the desk.

The stranger sits down, looks them up and down, and gestures to the bed. The pair of them sit on it, side-by-side, awkwardly tucking their knees in. O5-3 feels like a child again, like an absurdity. A warm bulb hums gently above them; a fly bounces off it, whining.

The stranger takes out a box of cigarettes. They both decline, so he shrugs and lights himself up, still staring at them. “Thought you’d never find me, if I’m honest.”

“You were quite… difficult to track down, I must say.” O5-3 glances over; the Administrator speaks carefully, with intent, as he scans the stranger’s face. “But I knew I’d see you again. I never forget.”

The stranger smiles, puffing smoke into the air. “And now you want to lock me up, is that right?”

“No.” O5-3 shifts, leaning forward. The man doesn’t look at him. “Or, perhaps. We have – there’s a job we want you to do. If you do it for us, we’ll leave you alone.”

The Administrator is staring upwards, and says nothing. O5-3 coughs and continues. “There’s an anomaly. A dangerous one. One that has plagued us for years, and which has taken countless lives. You could be a great help, not only to us, but to -”

The stranger snorts. “He’s got you on SCP-001, has he?”

O5-3 pauses. He looks at the Administrator, who is still looking up, ignoring him. “I didn’t realise you’d been briefed.”

“I haven’t. I just remember the last one. You know this isn’t the first anomaly to take that slot, right?”

O5-3 turns back, sharply. “It isn’t”?

The Administrator nudges him, and points upwards. O5-3 looks up, and gasps.

The smoke from the cigarette is coating the ceiling, billowing around its edges. A picture is forming, through the haze and the gloom; a smoke-filled dragon, its wings flapping towards an open sky, there and not there all at once.

“That was mine, you see. That’s what he wanted me to deal with. He had another fellow, too, just like you. O5-9, I think it was. Whatever happened to him?”

“My colleague is fine,” he says, stiffly. He’s still staring up at the image, watching it twist into and out of itself.

The stranger glances at him, smiling. “Pretty, isn’t it? The trick was to send it back to its own non-reality. It was a lie, and to a lie it returned.”

He sticks out a gangly hand. O5-3 takes it, gingerly. The stranger tilts his head. “Chōkōdō Shujin, weaver of miracles.”

//He doesn't know what we're going to do to him//, he thinks, as clear as day inside his mind.

“Type-Q reality bender,” murmurs the Administrator. O5-3 watches as his boss stands up, still staring at the ceiling, admiring the waveforms.

“Call me what you like, old man. It’s all the same to me.” Shujin curls up in his chair, holding the cigarette away from him. His eyes are beetle-black, fixated on O5-3’s gaunt, aging face. The overseer instinctively reaches up to the back of his head, willing his dead hair to return.

The Administrator snaps back to the world. “It’s a simple offer, Shujin. Return with us now, help us out, and I’ll leave you alone. For good, this time. Stay, and we’ll send a team after you.”

“Type-Qs are in short supply”, explains O5-3. “I’ve determined it’s our best bet. We need to undermine the anomaly’s -”

“- moral sense, yes. I remember. It was the same, back in the day. This isn’t about physics, it’s about narrative, about the lessons taught and learnt. Old E’in, his problem was the lies he told, and he drew the foolish to him. It was an easy one. Yours, though…”

“The selfish.” O5-3 feels a little sting of pride, remembering the snapping thread and the gasping crowd. “Those who only think of themselves, their own petty concerns. It’s a vague criteria, and it’s cut through – well, through hundreds, now.”

The eyes don’t move. There’s a warmth to them, a crackling fire behind them, pinning him to the wall. “Fascinating. No wonder you’re scared.”

Shujin stands up, and starts putting a handful of scattered items – papers, a book, a toothbrush – into a canvas bag, haphazardly and randomly. O5-3 blinks, and rouses himself. “So you’ll come with us?”

“Of course he will.” The Administrator heads to the door, opening it wide. The cold air rushes in; the lightbulb flickers. “Come on. We don’t have all night.”

Shujin looks at him, and shrugs. He shoulders his bag, and the three of them step out into the dark.

-----

Site-01 isn’t too far away. O5-3 wondered about that, before, about why a reality bender would hide under the noses of the Foundation’s highest offices. But now he feels that he knows. There’s a quiet confidence in Shujin’s tone, his manner of speech, the way he moves through space. He knew they’d come for him, eventually; what was the point in delaying the inevitable?

The pitch tar of evening still surrounds them, an evening that stretches into the small hours, retaining the same sense of time, of anticipation. The Administrator has called ahead, making sure the arrangements are made. They’ve been planning this for months, ever since O5-3 first hit on the idea. He feels himself there again, one late night in his office, watching the ceiling refracted through the ochre tint of whisky, the lines spiralling out of his control.

The Administrator is sleeping now, dozing off in the back seat. Shujin stares straight ahead of him, tapping in time to the music from the radio – Schoenberg, late Schoenberg, screeching out dissonances into the flashes of cats-eye light on the road. O5-3 clears his throat.

“Was he always like – well, like this?”

Shujin smirks. “The Administrator? Oh, always. A cold, predatory lizard, that one. I’m surprised he came out here with you. You’d think he’d have better things to do.”

O5-3 nods. “Every time I’m on the edge of something, about to finish something – there he is, hovering at my elbow, reminding me of this. SCP-001. He wants it to be me that does it, and I don’t know why.”

“Maybe he thinks you’re well-suited for the job.”

He snorts. “At first, sure. I caught quite the lucky break, to start with. Made a huge breakthrough, got everyone’s attention. Since then, though… I don’t know. Other projects, other containments, I can get done, big things, grand things. Not this, though. It’s always eluded me. Everything I try, just… fails.”

Shujin nods. “SCP-001 is a tough one. Always was, for all of us.”

“Us?”

But Shujin doesn’t answer. The trees rear up, flashing beside his face, leering through the window. They lapse into silence for a while, before the strange man speaks again.

“Do you know how many there have been?”

O5-3 frowns. “How many what?

“Iterations. Of 001.”

There’s a snore, a jerking noise, from the Administrator behind him. O5-3 turns the wheel, concentrating for a moment on a curve, trying to suppress his rising panic.

“The number of events it’s caused is - “

“No, not that. I mean how many bodies there have been.”

He knew he wasn’t the first. He knew  - he presumed, rather – that the Administrator had plucked others from obscurity, other lost souls like himself. But the question was terrifying. How many had there been? Did 001 mean anything? Was it just a name for – for something else? A test, a coming of age?”

“You don’t know, right?” Shujin’s face, smiling, peers up at him. “Yeah, they don’t, usually. He’s got something on you, right? Something you want?

He feels guilty. He has barely thought of her this whole time. “My daughter.”

Shujin nods. “And so you’ve done so much, sacrificed so much, to manoeuvre yourself here? To finally be in a position to help her, free her?”

When he became an O5, donning the blackened suit, stepping into that charcoal room, he thought he’d do it right away. Requisition her, an anomaly //required// for testing, set her up away from them all. Under his protection. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to see her, maybe he’d have to stay away, but she’d be //free// - 

But there had been that little nagging voice, sitting in that room, whispering to him. Sure, you might get her out, for a day, a month – but sooner or later, they’d know what you’d done. They’d come for her. Best to wait. You’re not immune, even here. Best to build up your position, make sure you’re safe, first. Prove yourself, to them. To him.

The Administrator had sat, at the end of the table, staring into him, powering his mind and energy through those dark glasses. It was another refraction, but every beam of light and shade had bounced back on a central point, an icicle stabbing into his brain, scattering it and making it his own.

In the present, he shakes himself. “Yes.” He feels the dampness growing around the corners of his eyes.

Shujin nods, and pats his arm. “I know. I’ve seen it all before. And before that, too.”

There is one more great, echoing silence, as Yoshihide wipes away his fright, his pain. The trees are taller, here, slashing themselves across the windows, bleeding the same dark and the same needles and the same pine freshness that they always do, binding and blinding back into himself, as a pit opens up beneath. He knows what’s down there. He knows what part of his soul is dwelling there.

He asks, “And what happened to the others? Did they – were they free, when it was done?”

But Shujin doesn’t answer. Yoshihide, O5-3, hears nothing more from him. He looks ahead, and continues on, through the road as it curves and strains, hacking its way through the night. It’s a road that always seems like it’ll bend back on itself, take you to where you were before, but it never does.

And behind him, his slitted eyes halfway open, the Administrator's gaze bores into the back of his skull.

-----

The chamber was an office, a long time ago. O5-3 has learnt not to think too hard about that. He asked the Administrator, once, who SCP-001 had been. He had not received an answer.

A complex of rooms has been built around it. The observation deck looks down from above, towering from one side. Like it has clipped outside the world and is examining a scene from a film, but from the wrong angle. The actors – the cocoon, the threads, their newfound friend – will be playing out the little drama without seeing their faces, so high up, staring down below.

Standing up here, his hands on the rails, O5-3 feels a rare, surging power. The ceiling has been replaced with glass; it looks so fragile, the winding silk pressed up against it.

Inside it, behind the creeping strands that tie themselves, over and over, is a corpse. It's an old corpse, now; it cannot be seen, its stench is contained, but it must still be there. Binding and rebinding himself over and over, constantly repeating the same actions, the same phrase...

It's not enough to read about it. He watches it stick, shift, move, its pale and sickly limbs reorganising themselves endlessly, grasping at walls that have no purchase.

In the last few years, he has spent so much time here, in this spot. It’s like an old friend, a comforting wound. Below him lies an imperfection, an affront to the Work, an insoluble problem. He has spent so many hours on it, thinking up new ways to assault the problem. Black chains of cursed iron. The shredded horns of a teetering owl, hooting in anguish and pain as its powdered pride was thrown, urged, pumped into the threads. And nothing happened, and each time, he knew with crystal certainty that it would never work. It would never be contained.

Then the idea came to him. It had seemed inevitable. The way the anomaly worked, tugging on people’s fingers, slipping into their blood and bone. This was a drama, a grand melodrama, played out again and again. Like Passion Week, or Ashura, or Māgha Pūjā; the same single moment in the past, playing out over and over again, making it real once more while the people flock and preen around.

And now he’s here. The kindling has been stacked below. He has journeyed forth, seen the world, and now he’s returned, standing here at the precipice, the gates at the end of the road.

The door behind him opens, and the Administrator walks in. O5-3 nods at him; he almost smiles. Finally, today, he wins. Finally, today, it will be complete - 

And Shujin walks in behind him.

O5-3 frowns, confused. “But you’re not meant to be here. You’re meant to be in the chamber.”

The Administrator smiles, a smile that widens, and widens, and widens like the holy, blessed moon, white teeth arrayed like tombstones. The first day he came into his office, he had smiled like that.

“There’s been a bit of a change of plan. You see, Yoshihide, I wasn’t entirely honest about what Shujin is doing here.”

Shujin himself can’t meet his eye. He simply walks over to the rail, and looks down. O5-3 feels the jaws of a trap around him, but he can’t tell where, from what. His mind pushes out, confused, unclear.

“He’s not a Type-Q, in fact. His skills are… something else. No, as far as I can tell, there’s only one Type-Q in the country right now. Only one capable of bending truth and lies apart.”

He turns, and looks down. He frowns, again, but more slightly.

“But, sir, there must have been a mistake. That’s Yuzuki down there.”

The Administrator places a hand on his shoulder. “Yes. Precisely.”

-----

A Type-Q is a blasphemy. That’s how he has started to think of it. It’s something that shouldn’t exist, something that he doesn’t want to exist. They may appear to change an object’s shape, its size, perform miracles of transformation and transmutation, but in point of fact, they reach into other worlds, other possible branching times. They take what could have been, and make it not a lie, but a truth.

So say you’re sitting in a restaurant, God knows how long ago, and laughing with your daughter. Say she takes a fork, and presses it, and moulds its shape into something else. Like a spoon. All she’s really doing is looking back at another world – a world where her mother might be alive, her father warm and present – and takes something from that place, barely realising it. A fork becomes a spoon. A dead hope becomes alive.

Yoshihide screams. He rushes across the room, heading for the microphone – why is it so distant, why is it where it can’t be reached? – but the Administrator’s hand, claw-like, grips him in place, roots him to the floor.

“Let me go, let me go, you bastard, it’s //her, she’s not safe, she’s -//”

The Administrator drags him, with impossible strength, back to the rail. He takes a hand and forces it on Yoshihide’s head, making him look down. There, amidst the threads and silk, there is Yuzuki. She’s older, thinner – she’s lost too much weight, he thinks, between the throbbing screams – petrified, her back against the wall - 

“They’ll do nothing without an order. We didn’t tell anyone, remember? We didn’t tell anyone what we were going to do.”

The cocoon moves. It shifts, in anticipation. It’s not harmful to the touch; it consumes slowly, inexorably, its victims picked and plucked from day to day, elsewhere in time and space. The body’s dead hand picks according to its own designs, shifting from victim to victim. //The order hasn’t been given. He just won’t give the order, he won’t -//

“And I’ll let you go, Yoshihide, as soon as you want me to. But – do you want me to?”

He yells, spitting in his face, “YES! Let me go, let me go //now//, I have to get to her -”

“But you don’t.”

Shujin’s voice is quiet, resigned. He’s holding a notepad, his pen poised above it, leaning over the rail. A lit cigarette wafts behind his ear. “I’ve seen you. I’ve noted you, Yoshihide, recorded you. Just like I did the others. You know what you want.”

The black thread reaches up inside his head, yearning, stretching, breaking. The Administrator’s hand feels almost warm, now – almost comforting. He leans forward, and whispers in Yoshihide’s ear - 

“There are no other Type-Qs we have access to.”

And O5-3 stops struggling. He stops moving. He just looks down, down, into the pit of Yuzuki’s haunted face.

He knows what will happen now. He sees the lines react, intersect, converge. He sees the point around which it all turns, has always turned. The writhing bodies, slathering to the forest floor. The axe, rebounding again and again along the wire.

He claws, he wails, he pleads with himself - but at last the calm descends. He knows he always wanted this. He wanted, the little child bouncing on a mine cart, to slice the thread entire, to give himself over to hell. He wanted the box, and only the box, forever.

“It’s the work, Yoshihide,” whispers the Administrator. “I told you, long, long ago. No room for discrimination. We are the keepers of the box.”

So many years, so much spilt time, to contain SCP-001. To burn the cocoon from the inside. He stares down at Yuzuki’s face, its mournful, oval shape, its black O where her mouth should be. She looks up, and for a second, their eyes meet. She is incredulous, she is pleading, she is broken on the wire. She cannot understand what she sees.

He places a hand on the glass, the tears washing down his cheeks. Then he looks away, into the dark walls around, the winding chimney of a tower that breathes and breaks around him.

He wanted to contain the world. He wanted perfection. And now he’s here, sitting by the side of the sea, staring into black.

The Administrator releases him. O5-3 straightens his suit, adjusts his tie, and walks to the microphone. He grips it, hard, and speaks clear and straight into it.

“Administer Q-Alpha.”

And he forces himself to watch, as her blood slams into the wall, as it starts to shift planes and truth and lies, altering the molecules and atoms, confusing the body that screeches and retches against himself. He watches as her form twists, and shatters, and drowns, and burns, all her deaths merging and collecting into one. He sees her possibilities, her lives and unlives, warping into the silk, infusing it, merging into the fine mesh of string and paper that scatters all around, forever.

“Now you know,” says the Administrator. He is weeping, tears of unbridled joy. His hand is gripping  his shoulder; he is supporting himself on O5-3's weight. “Now you see hell, Yoshihide. Now you see it as an ending, as it truly is. No more suffering, for her, right? In this torture, she doesn’t have to think. That burden is lifted. And containment, perfection, for us. We’ve done it. We’ve //ended// it. No more.”

He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s not relevant, it’s something else, some mission or journey of its own. He has eyes only for the stars below, ripping into sky and night, twisting on a fulcrum axis until they’ve worn themselves out, blown like whining bulbs, a lid on the beasts at last. A little brass monkey rears up from the noise, moaning, tearing him to shreds.

-----

And then there’s another day.

O5-3 returns to his office. He’s arranged it in the same way as it was when the Administrator first entered it, back at his old site. The walls and furniture are different, yet the same. Just the way he likes it.

He sits down at his desk, and performs eight hours of consistent, unspectacular work. Yuzuki is there, voiceless, screaming at him, but he ignores her. There are procedures and principles to fix, maintain, induce.

Outside, it grows dark, clouds covering the sun. There was no body, but a grave marker has been placed out there anyway. As he returns from lunch, O5-3 glances at it, on the way back to the desk. He hears her wail, but shrugs, wiping his mouth. An egg and cress sandwich.

He sits on his chair, at the desk, reading his papers. A wall of bodies cascades onto him, moaning, a hunter with a knife leering out at him. He shakes them off himself, and continues, sorting the new procedures for an obscure anomaly placed under his jurisdiction. He books tickets for a flight to Brussels, as he hurtles down a slope and into an avenue of swords, over and over again, his flesh and memory sliced and rent apart. His expression does not change as they pierce his flesh and remould his image.

The grave is there, but he has eyes only for the door. He imagines the moment the Administrator will enter again. He blinks, and it is years ago, and a secretary - he hasn’t learned their names yet - pokes his head into the office.

"A visitor for you, Director," he said.

Yoshihide sits up straight in his chair. This wouldn't be his first encounter with an O5 liaison, and he knows enough to never let your guard down around these people. Liaisons are vipers, persons who had abandoned all - 

Shujin walks through the door, closing it behind him.

O5-3 stares. He blinks, hard, and motions his guest to sit. Shujin does, shuffling over, lighting a new cigarette. His eyes burn and crackle, a smile playing around his mouth.

“Is something funny?”, he, O5-3, asks.

“No. I’m sorry. I get nervous, quite often. I never like having to do this. I’m sorry we deceived you.”

The smile //is// a sad one, he concedes. He straightens up. “I’m not bothered. The work was done well. It was a neat containment.”

The smile doesn’t go away. “I’m sorry, all the same. I know it doesn’t seem like it now, but – well, she was your daughter. That matters for something.”

Last night, he was reviewing some old personnel files. He stumbled across a ghost file, one that someone hadn’t deleted properly. The old O5-3’s file. His blood type, it seems, had been B.

“What were you there for? What was the point of fetching you from your cabin?”

Shujin gets up, and walks to the window. Why is his cigarette not setting off the smoke alarm? He shrugs to himself – the man //is// a reality bender, of some kind. Who knows what their powers entail? He doesn’t, any more.

“I was there to record, to act as a witness. A scribe, if you like. I keep the memory, you see. I keep the memory of your change.”

He frowns. “What change?”

Shujin shoots him a look. “You didn’t feel it? I’m surprised. It happens to you all, in the end. Something breaks in you, and you die. Suicide, martyrdom, a desperate bid for revenge. He thinks he’s stopped it, now, but…”

A nightingale calls to its mate, outside. Yuzuki slashes his face with a carving knife. He wipes away the blood, and turns back to Shujin, listening to the thin man as his voice turns to a whisper.

“When it’s happened, you see – when you become an O5, //really// become one… your death is no longer a normal death. It’s something else. And I record it, you see. In here” - he taps his head – “and on the page. He thinks he can control the narrative, make it his own. Rashōmon, he calls it. Each life stealing from the last, until you reach hell, you reach an ending.”

He blinks, hard. His hand starts to shake.

“But that’s never how it goes, Yoshihide. He doesn’t realise that, as I do. I can write on the face of time, but the words will fade and die, all the same. The Administrator is a fool. He doesn’t know hell at all.”

Shujin flicks the cigarette away, heads to the door, and turns back, his hand gripping the handle.

“He couldn’t if he tried.”

He leaves. Yuzuki dies again, frail, in his arms. He weeps for her. She dies again, drowning in the swamp. He reaches for her arms, and fails.

Then she sits inside a carriage, in a noblewoman’s death, as an Emperor sneers, willing it on, and he watches, staring, unmoving, as she is choked into a blackened ash.

-----

All he is is contained within four walls. The office is the only reality left to him, now. Beyond those doors are mirrors beyond mirrors, byzantine halls leading back to him, his own self divided along the road.

He pats his pockets, but remembers that he already sent the note. He tightens the noose. He makes sure the chair is firm. It has to be firm. It has to fall away just right, for this to work. Yuzuki nods at him, encouragingly, her eyes black orbs lost in the mists beyond.

He pauses, one hand on the chair. He looks across at her grave; distant, fragile, a stone too far removed to make out the shape of. He stands on the chair for a better look.

He sees trees beneath clouds, behind the marker. He sees her, opposite him, laughing at his jokes over dinner, swapping stories, each to each. He sees his wife, her figure shaded in the trees, staring up at him.

Once, when Yuzuki was very small - 

“What are you doing?”

He turns to the door. The Administrator stands there. His face is apoplectic. He is terrified, horrified, furious beyond measure. He steps forward, and Yoshihide puts his face into the noose.

“No. No. You can’t do this to me. You’re //not// doing this to me. Not again, not //now//!”

The Adminstrator lurches forward, and Yoshihide lifts one foot. The Administrator pauses, sweating, balling his hands into impotent fists. His glasses slip, crashing to the black and marble floor.

“I made you.”

Yoshihide stares back, listening. He starts to feel himself in his own throat, bubbling through.

“I made you. I made you like I made the others. You are not exceptional, or an exception, Yoshihide. You are rote. I took you because your mind was useful to me. Containment as art, as the perfect art! Ridiculous, and yet it was there. I could use you as a lid on the chaos.”

The wire tightens, as Yoshihide pauses, fascinated.

“The work isn’t some paltry fantasy. It’s not a game.” His boss’s breathing was slow, laboured, heavy. “It’s the only control we have. Come – come down. We can talk about this. My God, the – the //arrogance// of you, the //presumption// -”

“What is hell, sir?”

The Administrator blinks. “What?”

“What is hell, sir? Where are its contours? Your father thought it was dying, but dying implies an ending. You said it //was// an ending. You don’t know anything, do you? You just try to impose yourselves, again and again, on us, me, all the rest, guessing your little games on your petty little stage.”

The chair teeters. His nemesis draws in his breath. The corpses wait, ready, stretched almost to the point of bursting.

“I’ll tell you what hell is, sir. Hell is for the living. Hell is ever-changing, ever-adapting, an inferno of our lives. Hell does not stop. Here. Let me show you.”

And O5-3 kicks the chair over, watching the Administrator recoil, flailing, to the floor, sprawling as she had sprawled. O5-3 kicks, and silently yelps, scrabbling at his own throat, and then expires, swinging from side to side like a pendulum - 

//But Yoshihide is exalted. He is in the walls, he is in the air, he creeps up and about and within, red and black and gold. His fire ignites, spreading, rushing in a blinding, screaming pain. He looks up, spreading his arms, burning, burning, burning.//

//Above him is Yuzuki’s face, pale and shining, a thing in mourning. She reaches down as he reaches up, feeling the fire lick his soul, catch it, bind him down and down. He extends a hand, and feels a taut and snapping thread. Then she is gone, gone forever, extinguished.//

//The Administrator flees, and Yoshihide is all alone, reaching out, struggling for a forever lost to him.//
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ACT III: The Road To Hell

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