[Arashi] [Cyberpunk!AU] Open Your Eyes (17)
[Title] Open Your Eyes (17)
[Author] honooko
[Rating] R
[Notes] Hey, so I live in Japan now? Not dead, I swear.
The cellblock was honestly not hard to find, which left Nino feeling completely guilt-free about his decision to separate from the group. He was far too busy being anxious about other things to have room for concern about whether or not Jun could be counted on to walk in a straight line as directed by Sho.
Unfortunately, Sho had much less confidence in himself.
"Nino!?" he squawked in Nino's ear. "Nino, where are you!? What are you doing?! Ni-"
"Shut up," Nino hissed. He was walking down a fairly crowded hallway that branched off from the main route towards holding. If he spoke too loudly, he'd draw attention to himself.
"What the hell are you doing!?" Sho said again, and Nino noticed that Sho seemed to be the only one questioning Nino's disappearance at all.
"You've got something to do, right?" Aiba's voice said calmly, carrying over the silence after Sho's question.
"Do it properly," Jun added, equally serene. Nino felt a wave of warmth just knowing that they understood; there were a few things he had to do. It didn't mean he was leaving them to the mercy of the Ment-he just needed to get some answers.
"Be safe," Ohno added quietly. When had Ohno started to understand him so well? When had he really had a chance to get this close to people so quickly? When did Ohno's approval become something he wanted to have?
"Sho-chan," Aiba said, "turn to channel two. It's just you and Nino on there."
Of course Aiba had planned for this. Of course. There was a faint buzzing and a click sound, before Sho's voice came through again. He sounded less terrified and more irritated.
"Are you going to scold me?" Nino said lightly.
"It wouldn't help," Sho said, absolutely resigned.
"Not in the slightest," Nino agreed, glad no one could see his face under his mask. He shouldn't be smiling, not even wryly. "I need directions to the biggest computer terminal you can find."
Sho made a humming noise of consideration before offering, "There's an intake hub near lock up-"
"Bigger," Nino said. "It's probably unmarked, but has a lot of power redirected to it. Follow the electricity, not the floor plan."
"Is this how you broke into my house?" Sho asked.
"No, your house was much easier than that," Nino assured him. Before Sho had a chance to respond, Nino was grabbed by the arm and jerked backwards into a dark hallway. A voice hissed in his ear.
"If you make a sound, they'll hear us. So don't."
Nino tired to figure out how to signal Sho without speaking, but it turned out he didn't need to. A woman loomed close to his masked face. She was young, probably not much older than Nino himself, but her face was cautious and calculating. She had long, dark hair and a tattoo of a vine of some kind curling delicately around her throat and towards her shoulder.
"Tell Sakurai he owes me. A lot."
"Sho," Nino said, "There's a woman here who wants you to know-"
"Mao," Sho sighed with relief. "She found you. I will give her anything she wants, I already promised her."
"Mao-chan?" Nino said hesitantly.
"That's Kobayashi-san to you," she said in an iron-clad tone of voice. Nino swallowed his teasing immediately, because he got the impression she would kill him and leave his body out for all to see if he mildly annoyed her. "So what, exactly, are you looking for?"
"A computer terminal," he said. "I have to look something up." She raised an eyebrow at him, but didn't comment or inquire further. Nino was rather relieved. She stepped out into the hallway boldly, and he hesitated behind her. She looked over her shoulder, nodding her head curtly.
"Hurry up," she said, her voice crisp and commanding. "I don't have all day."
"Mao works in the security division of the Ment," Sho said. "She's our main insider. I sent a message saying you might need help, but I wasn't sure she'd get it. I wasn't sure she was still... well, alive." Nino realized he could follow her wherever she went without getting a second look because she actually belonged here. This was better than any plan he'd slapped together himself.
"Lead on, my mistress," he said, strolling just behind her. "I am at your command."
"Punk," she said with a smile.
~
"I don't understand," Aiba said in a hollow voice. "Where is… everyone?" He looked around the cellblock, unable to process the sight of every single cell being not only open, but completely unoccupied.
"Did they move them?" Jun asked, scanning around the room for a message or instruction of some kind. He saw nothing of the sort, and buzzed Sho.
"Whatever you're doing over there, we need you here," he snapped. Sho responded with remarkable speed and Jun once again found himself pleased they'd ended up with him on their side.
"What's wrong?"
"It's empty," Jun said. "Not a soul in sight and we never heard anything about moving people to another block. If our information is bad, we're in trouble."
"I don't think it's our information," Ohno said quietly. "We calculated that they'd be filling up, right?"
"Yeah," Aiba agreed. "They were going to run out of space pretty soon, and then-"
"Then they'd clear house," Ohno said. "There's no reason to keep anyone around that they don't plan on releasing." He flipped open the panel on his wrist guard with a map on it, tracing a line on the display with his fingertip. "They don't have a proper holding yard or anything, so the best place to put a crowd you don't care about killing each other is probably either here, or here." He jabbed his finger at two large open rooms.
"What's in there?" Aiba asked.
"I think it used to be for trials," Ohno said. "Before all of this, anyone arrested got a fairly good chance of getting to explain themselves and possibly be cleared of charges."
"But then the Ment decided it was never wrong about charges, and they dismissed or eliminated all the legal personnel," Jun added. "I remember it from school."
Ohno nodded. "They took out all the furniture, but the room still has a door with a lock on it, so it's likely they're just shoving people in there for now."
"Do you remember where they are?" Jun asked, already looking around and trying to get his bearings. It was all well and good to memorize a map, but real life was proving a bit harder to follow thanks to several 'updates' that hadn't been recorded in the floor plans. Ohno led them to the suspected holding pens, but on the way, they hit checkpoints.
"What the hell are they so jumpy about?" Aiba said under his breath as they made it through a third. Ohno shook his head, having no answer.
"There's a lot of people in here, and they're talking to each other," Jun pointed out.
"That would make anyone nervous," Sho agreed, "although this is pretty extreme, even for them."
Ohno made a noise in his throat, and attention snapped back to him. He hesitated before actually speaking, considering the situation carefully and trying to decide if his instincts were doing him a service here, or hindering him. Sho made the choice for him.
"Tell us," he instructed firmly.
"There's something weird about all of this," he said slowly. "More than what's happening here. Why did they snap in the first place? Why have they suddenly gone from stamping everyone down to rounding them up? Things were working before this. We had the outer limits, but it was under control. As far as I know, there still wasn't anything like an organized rebellion about to happen."
He glanced back over his shoulder to the last checkpoint down the hallway.
"Why would they risk people seeing how many of them there are in comparison to the Force?" he finished.
"We're missing something," Aiba guessed. "Something big. They still have an advantage of some kind, or they wouldn't be doing it. The Ment is cruel, not stupid."
"I just don't know what it could be," Ohno said, shaking his head in confusion.
"Let's worry about that later," Jun said firmly. "We've got other things to be worrying about than why they've lost their ever-loving minds."
They made it to the makeshift holding pens without further incident. Ohno turned the handle, pushing a huge door open, before stopping dead in his tracks. Aiba and Jun bumped into his back.
"What?!" Jun snapped, rubbing his elbow where it had collided with a doorframe.
Ohno said nothing. He just pointed.
The room was large and old. The flooring hadn't been removed, and there was a heavy layer of dust on every surface-except the places where people had clearly been shoved in. Hand prints dotted the place, and personal items like gloves or scarves littered the floor. Several wet spots marked where especially frightened prisoners had sat and lost control of their bladders. The entire room had taken on a horrible smell, but the three couldn't detect it through the masks of their uniforms.
It was also completely empty.
"This isn't right," Ohno said, beginning to sound panicked. "This can't be right. They had to be here, there isn't anywhere else. They were here." He wrapped his arms tightly around himself, trying to stave off the fear rising in his throat. His mother was here, somewhere, and he couldn't save her if they couldn't find her. They had to find her. He had to find her.
Aiba put a steadying hand on his shoulder.
"Breathe," Jun reminded him, ever calm and collected. Ohno felt a small wave of relief wash over him; as long as these people were with him, they could do this. He had to believe that.
He didn't know what would happen if that stopped being true.
"Hey, guys," Aiba said, pointing at the wall. "Do you think we could follow that?"
There was a drag running along the side of the room, dust having been wiped off by someone's shoulder. If the room had housed people, they would be filthy now. And as they examined the doorframe, all three realized the dust left a highly visible trail.
"Sho, we're going off the map," Aiba said. There was no reply. "Sho? Sho!"
"I'm here," Sho buzzed in, sounding distracted. "I think they're getting close to me, though. There's a lot of noise upstairs."
"They can't find the house," Jun assured him. "It's underground for a reason."
"Noted," Sho said, his attention clearly elsewhere.
"Let's go," Jun said to the others. Together, they followed the filth down the long hallway, away from the check points. The smears continued an already ugly story: intermixed with the brown-grey dust were more worrying colors only Ohno could see. A long swath of red, the edges darkening as they dried, told a tale of violence none of them really wanted to consider. It was too hard to deal with everything right now; they just had to keep moving and hope they found their way.
The trail ended at the door of a large room. The door was clean and stark, cold steel set into solid concrete. The hallway leading to it was quiet and the door had no handle; there was a small panel to one side, with three glowing buttons. One green, one red, one blue.
The air was also dead still.
"What the hell is this?" Jun asked the empty space. "Another holding room?"
"No," Ohno said. "That's not right. It's something else. Sho, tell us something?"
"It's on the map, kind of," Sho said. "It's not labeled, but it's got tons of power going into it. I thought it would be a computer room of some kind."
"Computer rooms don't have huge, fuck-off doors," Aiba pointed out.
Ohno looked at the wall of steel in front of him. It bothered him in a way he couldn't explain; there was something wrong here. It was too quiet, too empty. This room clearly meant something, but he couldn't put his finger on what it was. He just felt a sick writhing in his stomach, nameless apprehension of something unknown and dangerous.
That was it. It felt dangerous.
"Guys," Ohno started, "I think-"
There was a clatter behind them. They turned around, and found themselves face-to-face with a full unit of Force. They saluted, but no one except the leader moved. He stepped forward slowly, and each man behind him raised their weapons, point straight at Ohno, Aiba, and Jun's chests. Jun stepped in front of the other two, instinctively placing his body between them, but he was violently shoved aside. His back hit the wall, hard, knocking the wind out of him. Aiba tried to help him, but he got clubbed in the head with the back of a Barracuda for his trouble; he landed on his knees, dizzy as stars danced across his vision.
"Ohno Satoshi," the leader said, and Ohno felt his heart stop.
"Sir," he said, sounding calmer than he felt.
"I wouldn't have pegged you for a deserter," his old boss said casually. His tone was betrayed by his aggressive stance. "I definitely wouldn't have guessed you were a traitor."
Ohno tried to think. He needed time, but there was no way the Force was going to let him have it. His boss growled the command to take them, and before anyone had the chance to fight back, they'd pulled open the huge door and shoved them in. All three men ended up on the floor; Jun even felt his helmet clunk on the floor.
The door slammed in front of them, clicking as a lock slid in place. They were trapped in darkness.
"Fuck," Jun said eloquently. "Sho?"
There was silence. He looked at the others, but they hadn't reacted to his statement either. Frowning, Jun looked at his uniform.
Every light was out. He pulled off his helmet.
"Guys?" Jun said. "We've got a problem." Aiba and Ohno pulled off their helmets too, having realized that communications were dead.
Ohno felt a hand on his elbow. He turned, ready to smack the touch away, when a quiet voice stalled him completely.
"Satoshi?" his mother asked.
Chapter 18.
[Author] honooko
[Rating] R
[Notes] Hey, so I live in Japan now? Not dead, I swear.
The cellblock was honestly not hard to find, which left Nino feeling completely guilt-free about his decision to separate from the group. He was far too busy being anxious about other things to have room for concern about whether or not Jun could be counted on to walk in a straight line as directed by Sho.
Unfortunately, Sho had much less confidence in himself.
"Nino!?" he squawked in Nino's ear. "Nino, where are you!? What are you doing?! Ni-"
"Shut up," Nino hissed. He was walking down a fairly crowded hallway that branched off from the main route towards holding. If he spoke too loudly, he'd draw attention to himself.
"What the hell are you doing!?" Sho said again, and Nino noticed that Sho seemed to be the only one questioning Nino's disappearance at all.
"You've got something to do, right?" Aiba's voice said calmly, carrying over the silence after Sho's question.
"Do it properly," Jun added, equally serene. Nino felt a wave of warmth just knowing that they understood; there were a few things he had to do. It didn't mean he was leaving them to the mercy of the Ment-he just needed to get some answers.
"Be safe," Ohno added quietly. When had Ohno started to understand him so well? When had he really had a chance to get this close to people so quickly? When did Ohno's approval become something he wanted to have?
"Sho-chan," Aiba said, "turn to channel two. It's just you and Nino on there."
Of course Aiba had planned for this. Of course. There was a faint buzzing and a click sound, before Sho's voice came through again. He sounded less terrified and more irritated.
"Are you going to scold me?" Nino said lightly.
"It wouldn't help," Sho said, absolutely resigned.
"Not in the slightest," Nino agreed, glad no one could see his face under his mask. He shouldn't be smiling, not even wryly. "I need directions to the biggest computer terminal you can find."
Sho made a humming noise of consideration before offering, "There's an intake hub near lock up-"
"Bigger," Nino said. "It's probably unmarked, but has a lot of power redirected to it. Follow the electricity, not the floor plan."
"Is this how you broke into my house?" Sho asked.
"No, your house was much easier than that," Nino assured him. Before Sho had a chance to respond, Nino was grabbed by the arm and jerked backwards into a dark hallway. A voice hissed in his ear.
"If you make a sound, they'll hear us. So don't."
Nino tired to figure out how to signal Sho without speaking, but it turned out he didn't need to. A woman loomed close to his masked face. She was young, probably not much older than Nino himself, but her face was cautious and calculating. She had long, dark hair and a tattoo of a vine of some kind curling delicately around her throat and towards her shoulder.
"Tell Sakurai he owes me. A lot."
"Sho," Nino said, "There's a woman here who wants you to know-"
"Mao," Sho sighed with relief. "She found you. I will give her anything she wants, I already promised her."
"Mao-chan?" Nino said hesitantly.
"That's Kobayashi-san to you," she said in an iron-clad tone of voice. Nino swallowed his teasing immediately, because he got the impression she would kill him and leave his body out for all to see if he mildly annoyed her. "So what, exactly, are you looking for?"
"A computer terminal," he said. "I have to look something up." She raised an eyebrow at him, but didn't comment or inquire further. Nino was rather relieved. She stepped out into the hallway boldly, and he hesitated behind her. She looked over her shoulder, nodding her head curtly.
"Hurry up," she said, her voice crisp and commanding. "I don't have all day."
"Mao works in the security division of the Ment," Sho said. "She's our main insider. I sent a message saying you might need help, but I wasn't sure she'd get it. I wasn't sure she was still... well, alive." Nino realized he could follow her wherever she went without getting a second look because she actually belonged here. This was better than any plan he'd slapped together himself.
"Lead on, my mistress," he said, strolling just behind her. "I am at your command."
"Punk," she said with a smile.
~
"I don't understand," Aiba said in a hollow voice. "Where is… everyone?" He looked around the cellblock, unable to process the sight of every single cell being not only open, but completely unoccupied.
"Did they move them?" Jun asked, scanning around the room for a message or instruction of some kind. He saw nothing of the sort, and buzzed Sho.
"Whatever you're doing over there, we need you here," he snapped. Sho responded with remarkable speed and Jun once again found himself pleased they'd ended up with him on their side.
"What's wrong?"
"It's empty," Jun said. "Not a soul in sight and we never heard anything about moving people to another block. If our information is bad, we're in trouble."
"I don't think it's our information," Ohno said quietly. "We calculated that they'd be filling up, right?"
"Yeah," Aiba agreed. "They were going to run out of space pretty soon, and then-"
"Then they'd clear house," Ohno said. "There's no reason to keep anyone around that they don't plan on releasing." He flipped open the panel on his wrist guard with a map on it, tracing a line on the display with his fingertip. "They don't have a proper holding yard or anything, so the best place to put a crowd you don't care about killing each other is probably either here, or here." He jabbed his finger at two large open rooms.
"What's in there?" Aiba asked.
"I think it used to be for trials," Ohno said. "Before all of this, anyone arrested got a fairly good chance of getting to explain themselves and possibly be cleared of charges."
"But then the Ment decided it was never wrong about charges, and they dismissed or eliminated all the legal personnel," Jun added. "I remember it from school."
Ohno nodded. "They took out all the furniture, but the room still has a door with a lock on it, so it's likely they're just shoving people in there for now."
"Do you remember where they are?" Jun asked, already looking around and trying to get his bearings. It was all well and good to memorize a map, but real life was proving a bit harder to follow thanks to several 'updates' that hadn't been recorded in the floor plans. Ohno led them to the suspected holding pens, but on the way, they hit checkpoints.
"What the hell are they so jumpy about?" Aiba said under his breath as they made it through a third. Ohno shook his head, having no answer.
"There's a lot of people in here, and they're talking to each other," Jun pointed out.
"That would make anyone nervous," Sho agreed, "although this is pretty extreme, even for them."
Ohno made a noise in his throat, and attention snapped back to him. He hesitated before actually speaking, considering the situation carefully and trying to decide if his instincts were doing him a service here, or hindering him. Sho made the choice for him.
"Tell us," he instructed firmly.
"There's something weird about all of this," he said slowly. "More than what's happening here. Why did they snap in the first place? Why have they suddenly gone from stamping everyone down to rounding them up? Things were working before this. We had the outer limits, but it was under control. As far as I know, there still wasn't anything like an organized rebellion about to happen."
He glanced back over his shoulder to the last checkpoint down the hallway.
"Why would they risk people seeing how many of them there are in comparison to the Force?" he finished.
"We're missing something," Aiba guessed. "Something big. They still have an advantage of some kind, or they wouldn't be doing it. The Ment is cruel, not stupid."
"I just don't know what it could be," Ohno said, shaking his head in confusion.
"Let's worry about that later," Jun said firmly. "We've got other things to be worrying about than why they've lost their ever-loving minds."
They made it to the makeshift holding pens without further incident. Ohno turned the handle, pushing a huge door open, before stopping dead in his tracks. Aiba and Jun bumped into his back.
"What?!" Jun snapped, rubbing his elbow where it had collided with a doorframe.
Ohno said nothing. He just pointed.
The room was large and old. The flooring hadn't been removed, and there was a heavy layer of dust on every surface-except the places where people had clearly been shoved in. Hand prints dotted the place, and personal items like gloves or scarves littered the floor. Several wet spots marked where especially frightened prisoners had sat and lost control of their bladders. The entire room had taken on a horrible smell, but the three couldn't detect it through the masks of their uniforms.
It was also completely empty.
"This isn't right," Ohno said, beginning to sound panicked. "This can't be right. They had to be here, there isn't anywhere else. They were here." He wrapped his arms tightly around himself, trying to stave off the fear rising in his throat. His mother was here, somewhere, and he couldn't save her if they couldn't find her. They had to find her. He had to find her.
Aiba put a steadying hand on his shoulder.
"Breathe," Jun reminded him, ever calm and collected. Ohno felt a small wave of relief wash over him; as long as these people were with him, they could do this. He had to believe that.
He didn't know what would happen if that stopped being true.
"Hey, guys," Aiba said, pointing at the wall. "Do you think we could follow that?"
There was a drag running along the side of the room, dust having been wiped off by someone's shoulder. If the room had housed people, they would be filthy now. And as they examined the doorframe, all three realized the dust left a highly visible trail.
"Sho, we're going off the map," Aiba said. There was no reply. "Sho? Sho!"
"I'm here," Sho buzzed in, sounding distracted. "I think they're getting close to me, though. There's a lot of noise upstairs."
"They can't find the house," Jun assured him. "It's underground for a reason."
"Noted," Sho said, his attention clearly elsewhere.
"Let's go," Jun said to the others. Together, they followed the filth down the long hallway, away from the check points. The smears continued an already ugly story: intermixed with the brown-grey dust were more worrying colors only Ohno could see. A long swath of red, the edges darkening as they dried, told a tale of violence none of them really wanted to consider. It was too hard to deal with everything right now; they just had to keep moving and hope they found their way.
The trail ended at the door of a large room. The door was clean and stark, cold steel set into solid concrete. The hallway leading to it was quiet and the door had no handle; there was a small panel to one side, with three glowing buttons. One green, one red, one blue.
The air was also dead still.
"What the hell is this?" Jun asked the empty space. "Another holding room?"
"No," Ohno said. "That's not right. It's something else. Sho, tell us something?"
"It's on the map, kind of," Sho said. "It's not labeled, but it's got tons of power going into it. I thought it would be a computer room of some kind."
"Computer rooms don't have huge, fuck-off doors," Aiba pointed out.
Ohno looked at the wall of steel in front of him. It bothered him in a way he couldn't explain; there was something wrong here. It was too quiet, too empty. This room clearly meant something, but he couldn't put his finger on what it was. He just felt a sick writhing in his stomach, nameless apprehension of something unknown and dangerous.
That was it. It felt dangerous.
"Guys," Ohno started, "I think-"
There was a clatter behind them. They turned around, and found themselves face-to-face with a full unit of Force. They saluted, but no one except the leader moved. He stepped forward slowly, and each man behind him raised their weapons, point straight at Ohno, Aiba, and Jun's chests. Jun stepped in front of the other two, instinctively placing his body between them, but he was violently shoved aside. His back hit the wall, hard, knocking the wind out of him. Aiba tried to help him, but he got clubbed in the head with the back of a Barracuda for his trouble; he landed on his knees, dizzy as stars danced across his vision.
"Ohno Satoshi," the leader said, and Ohno felt his heart stop.
"Sir," he said, sounding calmer than he felt.
"I wouldn't have pegged you for a deserter," his old boss said casually. His tone was betrayed by his aggressive stance. "I definitely wouldn't have guessed you were a traitor."
Ohno tried to think. He needed time, but there was no way the Force was going to let him have it. His boss growled the command to take them, and before anyone had the chance to fight back, they'd pulled open the huge door and shoved them in. All three men ended up on the floor; Jun even felt his helmet clunk on the floor.
The door slammed in front of them, clicking as a lock slid in place. They were trapped in darkness.
"Fuck," Jun said eloquently. "Sho?"
There was silence. He looked at the others, but they hadn't reacted to his statement either. Frowning, Jun looked at his uniform.
Every light was out. He pulled off his helmet.
"Guys?" Jun said. "We've got a problem." Aiba and Ohno pulled off their helmets too, having realized that communications were dead.
Ohno felt a hand on his elbow. He turned, ready to smack the touch away, when a quiet voice stalled him completely.
"Satoshi?" his mother asked.
Chapter 18.