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It was only three days before the Plan finally came into effect when Akane collapsed once again.
"Akane! Shit. Shit!" She was feverish again - Aoi could feel the heat radiating even through the layers of fabric that separated them, and ground his teeth in frustration and fear. Her eyes fluttered open, looking a little clouded, as they did sometimes. Far too often.
It took her a second to recognize him, or maybe recognize what had happened. "A-Aoi. Oh no, I'm...." She squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her fists, face twisting in defeat and disgust.
"What is it this time?"
"I don't know. Bad," she whispered through lips as dry as paper, and closed her eyes. It was with some effort that she raised a trembling hand to her face, trying to press her abilities to their limit, and find what was different from the True Path. This happened far more often than it should by now too - there were days that Aoi felt that he'd already lost her anyway, no matter what the outcome was, to visions of the future. It should have been harder for her to access the field like this, even as hard as it already was. But her life had constantly been in danger for the past 9 years, and she'd had almost a decade of practice. The problem was how often everything could change, and even after all this time Akane usually couldn't catch very much, when she caught anything at all.
She held still for a very long moment, and Aoi held her and waited, closing his eyes and concentrating, trying to focus and help her, if he could. They were siblings, surely that had to count for something, surely two minds reaching for the answer to an unsolvable puzzle was better than one- but everyone here was playing with things that nobody understood, the damn morphogetronic field and the damn theories associated with it and everything else that nobody except goddamn Cradle Pharmaceutical had ever bothered trying to look into. It didn't help that they were working towards a plan that only Akane fully understood, if she did understand it.
Most days he thought that his trying to help did something, or hoped it did, but the truth was that even if it was all useless to Akane (it felt useless, sometimes), it probably had kept Aoi from going insane. There were times that he hated looking at her, especially when she was feverish - her skin looked like onion paper, translucent and delicate and ready to tear, and she was so pale that when she was flushed with fever it looked like she was burning.
"Something went wrong, I think," she said a few moments later. "One of the puzzles... something didn't...."
"In Building Q?" Aoi asked, and she whispered something that sounded like "yes" in reply.
"Shit. What the hell is everyone doing? What the hell do we pay them for? Why isn't anyone doing their goddamn job?"
"I hate this," she said, with more venom in her weak voice than her brother would have believed his baby sister was capable of, before the beginning of all of this. Maybe she hadn't been capable of it. But, of course, that had been then, and this was now.
“I know,” he answered quietly. “I hate it too. Akane, what do you need? I’ve gotta go, I have to check-”
“No,” she’d interrupted, struggling to sit up as her breath was ragged in her chest. “I still need to get there too, remember? A-and not all the bedrooms are so bad, I can go lie down there just as well as here. Maybe you’ll need me, and then once things start I have to be there anyway.”
Aoi sat still for a moment, Akane shivering in his arms despite the heat radiating from her skin, and then deliberately said every swear he knew, in Japanese as well as English. She was smiling a little before he was done, wry and forlorn.
“Mom would be shocked to hear you say things like that. Remember how she always used to tell you to… to watch your language?”
It was the wrong thing to say, for Aoi, and maybe the right thing too, because it brought back memories of two sensible shoes swinging gently about a foot from the ground and a kicked over chair and the promise he’d made both Akane and himself to take care of her.
“Yeah, maybe,” is what he said. “Do we have enough time to fly to Nevada before I start collecting our lucky contestants? I don’t think you’re in any shape to try and help.”
“Probably not,” she acknowledged. “I don’t know. Maybe not. But take me anyway, I can sleep in the plane. I’ll call someone on site, see if I can figure out what’s wrong.”
Aoi swore again at that, under his breath this time, because there wasn’t time for all of this nonsense, it was the one thing they needed and couldn’t buy more of.
“We’ll be done after this, Aoi,” Akane said softly from behind him. One way or another, she didn’t add. “Done with this part. This is the end of the time loop. Don’t worry, we’ll get it right eventually.”
He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “Yup. Last push and all that shit. I’ll call the airport.”
“Thank you, big brother,” came whispering from behind him like the ghost of a memory, and Aoi tried to forget how often they’d already cheated death to get here. They were already almost ready, and after that all there was was one last game.