[Arashi] [Cyberpunk!AU] Open Your Eyes (16)
[Title] Open Your Eyes (16)
[Author] honooko
[Rating] R
[Notes] For still_ciircee this time! Believe it or not, this was supposed to all be in chapter 15. I grossly underestimated how many plot points I could fit in one chapter, ha!
Aiba really pulled all the stops out on replicating the Force uniforms. He had them finished in a matter of hours, complete with ID tags that generated false ID information if they got checked. He couldn't make them barracuda attachments though, as Ohno's uniform never had one.
"I don't think I could have made one anyway," Aiba said quietly to Nino, and Nino knew he wasn't talking about a lack of ability.
They fit perfectly; Jun was extremely impressed at Aiba's ability to judge their relative sizes and change the pattern accordingly. Aiba was the tallest of the group, but he still didn't look out of place. There were four uniforms including Ohno's; Sho would be staying behind.
"I memorized the code book," he promised them, "so I should be able to interpret whatever they shoot your way."
"And I changed your ID tag," Aiba told Ohno, "so they won't know who you are."
"How's my mom?" Ohno asked. Nino was zipping up his own uniform, full of mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, he felt much safer knowing that he'd blend right in. On the other, there was something absolutely sickening about dressing like the men that had murdered so many people he cared about. He glanced at his laptop, the tiny blinking dot showing she was in her cell. There were four other people in it now; the Force had started overloading the cells to hold the extra people they were arresting as they trawled the City Limits.
"In her cell," Nino said. "Sho will tell us if she moves."
"Are you ready to get us past patrols?" Jun asked Ohno as Aiba adjusted his helmet. Ohno was going to be their street guide; he thought he could probably get them past most of the other patrols by actually following them in a slightly modified pattern. Instead of looking like they were extraneous, they'd look like they'd been added to a pre-existing patrol.
"I can get us to HQ," Ohno said, "but I've never been inside lock-up, I have no idea what it's like in there."
"I do," Nino said. Sho and Ohno looked at him, waiting for him to elaborate. He didn't.
"Nino's going to guide us once we get in. If we get off track, Sho's got an old map to reference that should give us some idea," Jun repeated, making sure everyone was on the same page. "The most important thing is keeping together and not doing anything to draw attention to ourselves. We need to get in and out quickly."
"Guys," Nino said quietly, "If anything goes wr-"
"Nothing is going to go wrong," Aiba interrupted him. "Don't jinx us."
"So are we ready?" Sho asked, holding the laptop. Nino guessed it was only in his hands so he could resist the urge to hug everyone.
"Gentlemen," Aiba said with a grin, "Let's go break the law."
"Which one?" Ohno asked.
"All the laws," Aiba said, clapping his gloved hands together and rubbing them eagerly.
Privately, Ohno thought Aiba was actually kind of scary sometimes.
~
Ohno had never made it very far up in the ranks of the Force. He'd never led a patrol, he'd never been senior to anyone except new recruits, and he'd never arrested someone by himself. But he'd watched his Patrol leaders do all these things with the eyes of someone who remembered what power looked like. Most importantly, he remembered enough to imitate it.
Nino didn't need much instruction; he'd been chased by Patrols often enough to pick up all the most important mannerisms. But Jun and Aiba were having problems staying in formation and remembering not to speak. Aiba had rigged their communicators to work a bit differently from the real thing; they could hear other transmissions, but in order to transmit on the same frequency, they needed to press an extra button. The automatic frequency they were sharing along with Sho was a rarely used one that had limited interference. Ohno kept having to remind them to stop looking around so much.
"We have to look like we know where we're going," he explained after the fourth time telling Aiba to stop gaping.
"Pretend like you've been outside before, please," Nino drawled at him.
"Sorry," Aiba said sheepishly. "It's been a few years since I left the Limits."
They were only a few blocks from HQ when they ran into a second patrol. Ohno stiffened immediately; something about the posture of the leader rang upsettingly familiar to him, and he realized it was his old patrol leader. They couldn't see each other's faces through the helmets, but he held his shoulders back like a steel rod ran between them.
If they spoke, he might recognize Ohno's voice. Quickly, on the frequency only their small team could here, he said, "Guys, I think that's my boss."
Jun didn't falter. He stepped forward, back straight and voice snappish as he said on the Force frequency, "Sir. We've been alerted to a possible fugitive in the area, Sir."
"Fugitive?" Ohno's former leader said, sounding suspicious. "Explain."
"A defector, Sir," Jun said smoothly. "A conscript. He was seen four blocks from here, possibly injured."
"Injured?" The man said. He paused as if considering what Jun was telling him. Then the stiffness in his shoulders relaxed, and he stepped closer, speaking in a more relaxed tone.
Ohno's hackles rose. Something was not right. He couldn't remember ever seeing his boss like this; the man was practically made of steel; he never bent, he never relaxed, he never gossiped. His entire existence was stiff formality. This wasn't him being friendly to a fellow patrolman; this was something else.
It was a trap.
"Damned defectors," the man said. "I read that memo this morning about the pair from unit 49."
There.
"Jun," Ohno said on their private frequency, "There's no unit 49. There are no units with the numbers 4 or 9 anywhere in the Force."
Jun's spine stiffened even more as he caught the tone of desperation in Ohno's words. It was a trick, designed to give them away. He injected a practiced tone of pure rage into his voice before answering the officer.
"I wouldn't be too concerned about defections from imaginary units, when we have actual cowards among us, wouldn't you agree?" His voice was pure venom, and Ohno got the feeling the fury was completely real. Jun had a lot of anger towards the Force, and all of it was funneled into this single communication.
To his credit, Ohno's old boss seemed convinced. His shoulders snapped back and he made a complex gesture with one hand that caused all the men standing behind him to straighten their weapons.
"If the rat bastard is here," the man hissed, "we'll find him."
"Glad to hear it," Jun snapped. "We'll be returning to headquarters for assignment updates." He made a complex hand gesture of his own, and Ohno realized that Jun must have memorized it as the officer had done it. Once again, Ohno found himself relieved that Jun and the others were on his side; he'd really hate to be up against them now.
As they turned the corner and went down the street leading to HQ, Sho's voice rang in their ears.
"How'd you know about the trap question?" he said. "It's not in the handbook anywhere."
"It's a hang-over from pre-Ment sensibilities," Ohno explained. "The old word for 4 sounds the same as the word for 'death', and 9 sounds like 'suffering'. It was traditional not to use those numbers when naming things, so when the first patrol units were being defined, they automatically skipped those numbers out of habit."
"Okay, but that doesn't explain how the hell you knew that," Nino pointed out.
"I used to speak the old language in school," Ohno said, "and my mother speaks it at home. She believes in the superstition."
"I'd forgotten about that," Sho said, sounding nostalgic. "I think my mother believed it too, actually."
"Handy," Aiba said, "but we still need to get moving, guys."
That's right; they were working on a strict timeline. Ohno's mother only had hours left, and they still had to break into one of the most heavily fortified buildings in the Ment.
It had just better work.
~
Nino was mapping everything as they went along. His memory was working on overdrive to commit every turn, every street, every door to his visual perception of the place. The Force uniform dulled his sense of colors, leaving him less to work with that usual. He'd studied the maps given to Sho very, very carefully and asked Ohno a few pointed layout questions, but he had to be careful not to make it seem like he was looking for information unrelated to Jun's plan.
He didn't want them to know what he was planning; it would only endanger them unnecessarily. It was best for everyone if he did it alone.
They reached HQ a few minutes later; it was chaotic. Patrols were driving up with huge vans full of people they'd arrested from the City Limits; Jun, Aiba and Nino had to bite back cries of horror as they began to recognize faces. Aiba made a noise in his throat, low and pained, when he saw a pair of Force patrolmen dragging a young woman from a van. She'd been beaten almost beyond recognition, and it was unclear if she was merely unconscious, or dead.
"Mariko," Aiba said, sounding like the name physically hurt him to say.
"Oh god," Jun said, horror in every breath.
Nino couldn't watch. It was too much like that day, when his mother had been beaten into some horrible, broken thing that wouldn't talk with him again, tease him again, hold him again. He couldn't stand watching even more people that he couldn't save.
"Guys," Sho's voice said gently in their comms. "You need to go."
"Why," Aiba asked, his voice cracking. "Why are they-"
"Let's go find out," Ohno said, his voice darker and laced with an anger none of them had heard from him before. Suddenly their mission became something more than just rescuing Ohno's mother. Suddenly, they knew that they couldn't just leave this place with one, lone woman.
"We're going to get them all," Jun said. "Every last living soul is coming out of there with us."
No one had any argument to that.
"There's a group going in," Nino pointed out. "If we hurry we can grab the door right behind them."
"They'll be checking IDs-" Ohno started, but Sho's voice interrupted him.
"I don't think they are," he said. "The numbers of people they're dragging in there are in the hundreds by now. There's no way they have time to be checking every single ID, and they don't have any reason to suspect someone entering in a uniform. Most defectors would be staying as far away from here as they can."
"So we just walk in like we belong?" Jun said, sounding skeptical.
"Well," Sho said, and suddenly he sounded extremely uncomfortable. "Actually, you're going to have to… probably, um."
Nino made the leap. For a second, his vision swam with a combination of fury and disgust.
"We're going to have to take a prisoner in," he finished for Sho. Everyone whipped around to look at him, and Nino didn't need to see their faces to know they were horrified. "We can't walk in empty-handed. It's suspicious."
"I can't," Aiba said, taking a step backwards. "I can't, Nino. I can't-those people didn't do anything, I can't just drag my friends into that place-"
"We don't have any choice," Nino snapped. "We have to take them in if we want to get anyone out!"
"How can you do this?" Jun asked. He sounded so angry, but controlled. "Your mother-"
"I couldn't save her," Nino said, before the words could leave Jun's mouth. "But I can--we can save them. Guys, it's the only way."
"He's right," Ohno confirmed sadly. "They won't stop us if we have prisoners."
"But-but what if-"Aiba started, but Nino cut him off.
"Don't jinx us," he said. For a long moment, they all stared at each other in silence. And then as one, they turned towards the vans unloading, and began to walk. They got in the queue of Force patrol men lifting people from the vans. Nino led them, heaving an elderly man from the floor. Ohno picked up a little girl; he put his gloved hands on either side of her head to keep her from turning it. Outwardly, it looked like a controlling gesture, but Nino realized Ohno was doing it so she couldn't see the gruesome beatings on either side of her. Jun picked up a young man; Aiba, a young woman.
He could hear Aiba speaking across their locked communications line.
"I'm sorry," he said. "It's only for a little while. I'm so sorry. I'm-I'm so sorry."
It got them through the doors. They lined up, handing off their prisoners to the warden checking each new arrest into the computer system. Ohno watched the little girl go, shoulders hunched guiltily. The warden looked pretty damn upset himself, Nino noticed after handing off the old man. Aiba's apologies didn't stop until the young woman disappeared from his sight.
"Alright," Jun said. "Now we've got to go down to the cell blocks."
"It should be about 400 meters ahead of you," Sho said in their ears.
"Wait," Ohno said suddenly, looking around.
"What?" Sho asked. "Is it different from the map?"
Ohno looked around, before saying slowly, "Where's Nino?"
Jun, Aiba and Ohno looked around them. There were Force members everywhere, carrying prisoners and loading weapons, talking to the warden, talking to their lead officers-and every single one of them were real Force.
Nino was nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 17.
[Author] honooko
[Rating] R
[Notes] For still_ciircee this time! Believe it or not, this was supposed to all be in chapter 15. I grossly underestimated how many plot points I could fit in one chapter, ha!
Aiba really pulled all the stops out on replicating the Force uniforms. He had them finished in a matter of hours, complete with ID tags that generated false ID information if they got checked. He couldn't make them barracuda attachments though, as Ohno's uniform never had one.
"I don't think I could have made one anyway," Aiba said quietly to Nino, and Nino knew he wasn't talking about a lack of ability.
They fit perfectly; Jun was extremely impressed at Aiba's ability to judge their relative sizes and change the pattern accordingly. Aiba was the tallest of the group, but he still didn't look out of place. There were four uniforms including Ohno's; Sho would be staying behind.
"I memorized the code book," he promised them, "so I should be able to interpret whatever they shoot your way."
"And I changed your ID tag," Aiba told Ohno, "so they won't know who you are."
"How's my mom?" Ohno asked. Nino was zipping up his own uniform, full of mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, he felt much safer knowing that he'd blend right in. On the other, there was something absolutely sickening about dressing like the men that had murdered so many people he cared about. He glanced at his laptop, the tiny blinking dot showing she was in her cell. There were four other people in it now; the Force had started overloading the cells to hold the extra people they were arresting as they trawled the City Limits.
"In her cell," Nino said. "Sho will tell us if she moves."
"Are you ready to get us past patrols?" Jun asked Ohno as Aiba adjusted his helmet. Ohno was going to be their street guide; he thought he could probably get them past most of the other patrols by actually following them in a slightly modified pattern. Instead of looking like they were extraneous, they'd look like they'd been added to a pre-existing patrol.
"I can get us to HQ," Ohno said, "but I've never been inside lock-up, I have no idea what it's like in there."
"I do," Nino said. Sho and Ohno looked at him, waiting for him to elaborate. He didn't.
"Nino's going to guide us once we get in. If we get off track, Sho's got an old map to reference that should give us some idea," Jun repeated, making sure everyone was on the same page. "The most important thing is keeping together and not doing anything to draw attention to ourselves. We need to get in and out quickly."
"Guys," Nino said quietly, "If anything goes wr-"
"Nothing is going to go wrong," Aiba interrupted him. "Don't jinx us."
"So are we ready?" Sho asked, holding the laptop. Nino guessed it was only in his hands so he could resist the urge to hug everyone.
"Gentlemen," Aiba said with a grin, "Let's go break the law."
"Which one?" Ohno asked.
"All the laws," Aiba said, clapping his gloved hands together and rubbing them eagerly.
Privately, Ohno thought Aiba was actually kind of scary sometimes.
~
Ohno had never made it very far up in the ranks of the Force. He'd never led a patrol, he'd never been senior to anyone except new recruits, and he'd never arrested someone by himself. But he'd watched his Patrol leaders do all these things with the eyes of someone who remembered what power looked like. Most importantly, he remembered enough to imitate it.
Nino didn't need much instruction; he'd been chased by Patrols often enough to pick up all the most important mannerisms. But Jun and Aiba were having problems staying in formation and remembering not to speak. Aiba had rigged their communicators to work a bit differently from the real thing; they could hear other transmissions, but in order to transmit on the same frequency, they needed to press an extra button. The automatic frequency they were sharing along with Sho was a rarely used one that had limited interference. Ohno kept having to remind them to stop looking around so much.
"We have to look like we know where we're going," he explained after the fourth time telling Aiba to stop gaping.
"Pretend like you've been outside before, please," Nino drawled at him.
"Sorry," Aiba said sheepishly. "It's been a few years since I left the Limits."
They were only a few blocks from HQ when they ran into a second patrol. Ohno stiffened immediately; something about the posture of the leader rang upsettingly familiar to him, and he realized it was his old patrol leader. They couldn't see each other's faces through the helmets, but he held his shoulders back like a steel rod ran between them.
If they spoke, he might recognize Ohno's voice. Quickly, on the frequency only their small team could here, he said, "Guys, I think that's my boss."
Jun didn't falter. He stepped forward, back straight and voice snappish as he said on the Force frequency, "Sir. We've been alerted to a possible fugitive in the area, Sir."
"Fugitive?" Ohno's former leader said, sounding suspicious. "Explain."
"A defector, Sir," Jun said smoothly. "A conscript. He was seen four blocks from here, possibly injured."
"Injured?" The man said. He paused as if considering what Jun was telling him. Then the stiffness in his shoulders relaxed, and he stepped closer, speaking in a more relaxed tone.
Ohno's hackles rose. Something was not right. He couldn't remember ever seeing his boss like this; the man was practically made of steel; he never bent, he never relaxed, he never gossiped. His entire existence was stiff formality. This wasn't him being friendly to a fellow patrolman; this was something else.
It was a trap.
"Damned defectors," the man said. "I read that memo this morning about the pair from unit 49."
There.
"Jun," Ohno said on their private frequency, "There's no unit 49. There are no units with the numbers 4 or 9 anywhere in the Force."
Jun's spine stiffened even more as he caught the tone of desperation in Ohno's words. It was a trick, designed to give them away. He injected a practiced tone of pure rage into his voice before answering the officer.
"I wouldn't be too concerned about defections from imaginary units, when we have actual cowards among us, wouldn't you agree?" His voice was pure venom, and Ohno got the feeling the fury was completely real. Jun had a lot of anger towards the Force, and all of it was funneled into this single communication.
To his credit, Ohno's old boss seemed convinced. His shoulders snapped back and he made a complex gesture with one hand that caused all the men standing behind him to straighten their weapons.
"If the rat bastard is here," the man hissed, "we'll find him."
"Glad to hear it," Jun snapped. "We'll be returning to headquarters for assignment updates." He made a complex hand gesture of his own, and Ohno realized that Jun must have memorized it as the officer had done it. Once again, Ohno found himself relieved that Jun and the others were on his side; he'd really hate to be up against them now.
As they turned the corner and went down the street leading to HQ, Sho's voice rang in their ears.
"How'd you know about the trap question?" he said. "It's not in the handbook anywhere."
"It's a hang-over from pre-Ment sensibilities," Ohno explained. "The old word for 4 sounds the same as the word for 'death', and 9 sounds like 'suffering'. It was traditional not to use those numbers when naming things, so when the first patrol units were being defined, they automatically skipped those numbers out of habit."
"Okay, but that doesn't explain how the hell you knew that," Nino pointed out.
"I used to speak the old language in school," Ohno said, "and my mother speaks it at home. She believes in the superstition."
"I'd forgotten about that," Sho said, sounding nostalgic. "I think my mother believed it too, actually."
"Handy," Aiba said, "but we still need to get moving, guys."
That's right; they were working on a strict timeline. Ohno's mother only had hours left, and they still had to break into one of the most heavily fortified buildings in the Ment.
It had just better work.
~
Nino was mapping everything as they went along. His memory was working on overdrive to commit every turn, every street, every door to his visual perception of the place. The Force uniform dulled his sense of colors, leaving him less to work with that usual. He'd studied the maps given to Sho very, very carefully and asked Ohno a few pointed layout questions, but he had to be careful not to make it seem like he was looking for information unrelated to Jun's plan.
He didn't want them to know what he was planning; it would only endanger them unnecessarily. It was best for everyone if he did it alone.
They reached HQ a few minutes later; it was chaotic. Patrols were driving up with huge vans full of people they'd arrested from the City Limits; Jun, Aiba and Nino had to bite back cries of horror as they began to recognize faces. Aiba made a noise in his throat, low and pained, when he saw a pair of Force patrolmen dragging a young woman from a van. She'd been beaten almost beyond recognition, and it was unclear if she was merely unconscious, or dead.
"Mariko," Aiba said, sounding like the name physically hurt him to say.
"Oh god," Jun said, horror in every breath.
Nino couldn't watch. It was too much like that day, when his mother had been beaten into some horrible, broken thing that wouldn't talk with him again, tease him again, hold him again. He couldn't stand watching even more people that he couldn't save.
"Guys," Sho's voice said gently in their comms. "You need to go."
"Why," Aiba asked, his voice cracking. "Why are they-"
"Let's go find out," Ohno said, his voice darker and laced with an anger none of them had heard from him before. Suddenly their mission became something more than just rescuing Ohno's mother. Suddenly, they knew that they couldn't just leave this place with one, lone woman.
"We're going to get them all," Jun said. "Every last living soul is coming out of there with us."
No one had any argument to that.
"There's a group going in," Nino pointed out. "If we hurry we can grab the door right behind them."
"They'll be checking IDs-" Ohno started, but Sho's voice interrupted him.
"I don't think they are," he said. "The numbers of people they're dragging in there are in the hundreds by now. There's no way they have time to be checking every single ID, and they don't have any reason to suspect someone entering in a uniform. Most defectors would be staying as far away from here as they can."
"So we just walk in like we belong?" Jun said, sounding skeptical.
"Well," Sho said, and suddenly he sounded extremely uncomfortable. "Actually, you're going to have to… probably, um."
Nino made the leap. For a second, his vision swam with a combination of fury and disgust.
"We're going to have to take a prisoner in," he finished for Sho. Everyone whipped around to look at him, and Nino didn't need to see their faces to know they were horrified. "We can't walk in empty-handed. It's suspicious."
"I can't," Aiba said, taking a step backwards. "I can't, Nino. I can't-those people didn't do anything, I can't just drag my friends into that place-"
"We don't have any choice," Nino snapped. "We have to take them in if we want to get anyone out!"
"How can you do this?" Jun asked. He sounded so angry, but controlled. "Your mother-"
"I couldn't save her," Nino said, before the words could leave Jun's mouth. "But I can--we can save them. Guys, it's the only way."
"He's right," Ohno confirmed sadly. "They won't stop us if we have prisoners."
"But-but what if-"Aiba started, but Nino cut him off.
"Don't jinx us," he said. For a long moment, they all stared at each other in silence. And then as one, they turned towards the vans unloading, and began to walk. They got in the queue of Force patrol men lifting people from the vans. Nino led them, heaving an elderly man from the floor. Ohno picked up a little girl; he put his gloved hands on either side of her head to keep her from turning it. Outwardly, it looked like a controlling gesture, but Nino realized Ohno was doing it so she couldn't see the gruesome beatings on either side of her. Jun picked up a young man; Aiba, a young woman.
He could hear Aiba speaking across their locked communications line.
"I'm sorry," he said. "It's only for a little while. I'm so sorry. I'm-I'm so sorry."
It got them through the doors. They lined up, handing off their prisoners to the warden checking each new arrest into the computer system. Ohno watched the little girl go, shoulders hunched guiltily. The warden looked pretty damn upset himself, Nino noticed after handing off the old man. Aiba's apologies didn't stop until the young woman disappeared from his sight.
"Alright," Jun said. "Now we've got to go down to the cell blocks."
"It should be about 400 meters ahead of you," Sho said in their ears.
"Wait," Ohno said suddenly, looking around.
"What?" Sho asked. "Is it different from the map?"
Ohno looked around, before saying slowly, "Where's Nino?"
Jun, Aiba and Ohno looked around them. There were Force members everywhere, carrying prisoners and loading weapons, talking to the warden, talking to their lead officers-and every single one of them were real Force.
Nino was nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 17.