FLCL Fan Fiction ❯ N.O Return Address ❯ S.I.E.T.E. ( Chapter 7 )

So I'm sitting in this room.

 

My hoodie smells like vomit and my left heel is blistering from running in my not-running shoes and all of my hair is matted together with sweat.

 

I have no idea what's going on beyond that the lights are off save a spotlight pointing on me and the uncomfortably small chair I'm sitting in. It's too dark to tell how far away the walls are but the space kind of echoes every time I breathe heavy, so I'm guessing it's big.

 

I'm sitting alone in this great big fucking room and every part of me is miserable except -

 

"Your head should have stopped hurting, at least."

 

My head is absolutely, perfectly fine.

 

He says it right as I realize it and it is the first thing he says to me, followed by "Your friend out there mentioned you'd been having some discomfort. You'll find that after our last incident with Raharu, this facility has been equipped with state of the art devices that nullify N.O activity up to a certain level. We aren't taking any more chances."

 

If I could talk I would say "Yes sir." He has a "yes sir" tone in his voice.

 

He takes a few steps closer and his echoing footfalls put him right at the edge of my lonely little light. It blasts the features of his face into this deformed sort of relief but there is no mistaking him. No mistaking those eyebrows.

 

"My name is Commander Amarao."

 

"I know," my dry bile-washed throat cracks out.

 

"Really?"

 

I nod.

 

"Perhaps you should tell me what all has happened."

 

And so in the darkness I tell. I try to begin at the beginning but it feels like I am perpetually having to back up and insert more pieces of things that I've left off, like how Reiko is a paranormaphile and how my mother is away on business so no I have not told her. He's not taking notes or anything and actually he barely seems like he's listening except for the gasps of recognition he gives me when I detail events my brain stole from Raharu's that he was present at.

 

"Do you know why," he asks when I am through, and I can already tell that I don't, "when foreign matter comes through the N.O, it assumes the form of the hand so commonly?"

 

And yes, my answer is no.

 

"The human hand," he continues with his eyes fixed on his own, "is one of the first distinct shapes a newborn child learns to recognize. His own hands, his mother's hands, the hands of his peers in the nursery or the doctors in the hospital. When an N.O-transported organism tries to assume a form that will be compatible and recognizable by the beings in this world, it is often unable to access data from our world for more than a few nanoseconds. In that time, the knowledge it can glean from the human brain is, on average, everything up to the recognition of that hand."

 

I don't know where he's going with this but I do know that it's enough to cause me to look down at my own hands, baffled, mystified.

 

"The hand is a tool, by function. Humans and apes with opposable thumbs, for example, are able to accomplish much more specific and delicate tasks than creatures with blunt claws or pads. The refinement of this, combined with the knowledge in a human brain, is what sets us, mankind, apart from more primitive creatures."

 

I'm still lost.

 

"The N.O units only occur in children - mostly boys - between the ages of nine and eighteen. On the child's eighteenth birthday, the N.O will shrink, rupture, and all but vanish. In adults, it is still accessible, when manipulated by the right elements, but the output level is far from satisfactory. It can also be closed before the age of eighteen by an outside source, but the process is very painful." This last part is tacked on, I am sure, by the sudden shocked expression on my face. "You don't have too long to go, so it's not worth it.

 

"Tell me, Taro, do you ever stick your hand into a box, or a jar, or a dark corner, if you don't know what might be in there?"

 

"…Usually not, sir," I reply honestly.

 

"So why do you think, then, that N.O units in our world nearly always bring things in, instead of letting things out?"

 

I have to think and thinking is very difficult because my head is reeling and then rejoicing because reeling doesn't make it hurt. Reel, rejoice, think, Taro. "Because…on the other side…they can see in, to what's here, for that brief second. But on this side…it's just some guy's head…and they can't - can't look back." It makes more sense to me the more words I squeeze out.

"You're a very smart kid, Taro. Would you like an antacid?" He holds them out to me and drops them into my hands - three of them - like sugar cubes into a teacup. Deliberately. Stares me in the eye.

 

"You're also a very unique kid, Taro. See, there have only been four documented cases of reverse N.O action - sucking instead of blowing, if you will - worldwide, since the nineteenth century, back when they had no idea what the hell it was and called them demons and dream-creatures. It's a shame you're about to close, because you could have been much more beneficial."

 

With that, he takes my outstretched hands that I was staring at and that still have the antacids in them and slaps on a pair of thick metal-black handcuffs with a cold echoing snick.

 

"Taro, kid, I'm afraid you're going to have to stay here for awhile."

 

He claps me on the shoulder like I'm the son he never had and his hand shocks me and knocks me out.

 

~-~-~-~

 

"You get one courtesy call, sonny." It's the blue-haired woman who was speaking to Kitsurubami before.

 

Yes, one courtesy call, because they've stripped me of my clothing and taken away my cell phone and cleaned me up, thank god, but thrown me in a smallish white room with no windows and nothing but the giant logo of a seven-pointed star plastered on each of the four walls for decoration.

 

Or furniture.

 

She slides the phone on its tray through the flap in my door that is just for that purpose, to pass me food and a pan to piss in I suppose. My hands are still cuffed together and I can barely wield the receiver.

 

"Moshi moshi?"

 

"Mika," I breathe-pant-gasp. "They've locked me up, Mika. I don't know what to do. I'm cuffed - stuck in this gray jumpsuit - my head doesn't hurt though - I just - "

 

"Shut up, Taro. We're coming. I need to figure out how to borrow money from my mom. Where's Suzume?"

 

I gasp in realization. "I don't know. I don't think they'd have let her get away after making it so far, though, so she's got to be somewhere around here. Maybe she escaped! Oh, fuck it all…"

 

"Shut up, Taro. Just please, whatever the fuck you do, do not die. I reserve the right to kill you myself for making me ride the coach train."

 

"That's fair."

 

The other end of the line clicks and I don't know what to do other than put the receiver back and nudge the tray out with my toe and lean against the wall and cry. I get some strange relief out of knowing that I didn't de-man myself on the phone with Mika though.

 

~-~-~-~

 

Twenty minutes later Amarao stops by to pass me a write-up of the exact reason for locking me up.

 

Koutaro:

 

The reversed state of your N.O makes you invaluable to our continued research. I regret the need to detain you but I was almost completely certain that you would not comply willingly with our demands. Keep in mind that we will only need you until your N.O unit ruptures, and then you will be free to go. I am aware that this will be a period of nearly five months, but surely you understand that in the face of scientific improvement and the protection of our planet and society such sacrifices must be made.

 

The development I am referring to is, of course, a possible "round-trip ticket" for the N.O-released terrors that might invade our world. According to our surveillance on the Medical Mechanicca mainframe computer network, there are currently 731 N.O units in their "unlocked" state in existence in the eastern hemisphere, and a good four thousand more children who possess dormant N.O units. Medical Mechanicca is struggling to reduce the violence these organisms and their subsequent extermination create, so rather than destroying them entirely, our facility is seeking to use your N.O - and the technology we may hypothetically create based on similar principles - to return these organisms back to their natural habitats.

 

The rations we feed you will from here on out be supplemented by tablets of rickenbackium, the compound that unlocks and wedges open N.O units for their usage. As N.O activity within this facility has been contained, nothing should "come out." You will be fine.

 

You're their ticket home, Taro. Good luck.

 

I only need to read it once. I am frozen in this white room with my head full of swirling italicized words that basically tell me I am a slave. My tears have all been cried out but I ache, I ache in ways I didn't know I could and I keep having all these thoughts about what they're going to do to me.

 

It just sounds like rape when it all boils down to it.

 

I am scared the most of the process itself. When it almost happened - with Raharu - I received her memories extremely strongly like there were two people in my one brain. Will that happen with the monsters that they shove into my head? Will the hands reach in and wrap around my brain and squeeze, so much like a great big fruit, until I can't think straight any more because I've got every past thought of the lives of seven thousand different things from other fucking planets?

 

Will I go crazy? Will I die? Will I ever see Mika again?

 

I can hear her voice now as it sounded on the phone, as it always sounds, a fusion of her mother and her sister and the deadly harsh seductive nngh purr of cartoon snakes. I can smell her bedroom and see her bedroom and feel her bedroom as it would feel if we were in it together, with the air sparking two parts antagonism and one part eroticism every time we touched or made eye contact or I said something utterly stupid.

 

And so damnit, I jerk off in one corner and I see stars and cherries when I come and then I curl up in the complete opposite corner to sleep.