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smashconTitle: a man gone mad
Author: LoneGothic (LINK)
Rating: PG
Prompt: "It is said that the darkest hour of the night comes just before the dawn." - quote by Paul Coelho
Fandom/Series: Steins;Gate (anime)
Word Count: 3991 Words
Disclaimer: All original work owned by creators of Steins;Gate (5pb, etc.) - fanfiction is my own work
Summary: Okabe Rintarou is a man gone mad (in the heart and in the head.)
a man gone mad
"It is said that the darkest hour of the night comes just before the dawn."
Okabe Rintarou is a man gone mad (in the heart and in the head.)
alpha
Occasionally, maybe once in a blue moon, when Okabe Rintarou has time to sleep between fighting off SERN agents and running away from them, he thinks of Makise Kurisu. Dreams of her, even, if dreaming is still possible in the handful of hours between collapsing and being jolted awake from a nearby explosion.
(It’s still possible. You mostly just need REM sleep for that, Kurisu told him once while she invaded his personal space. Then she snatched the Dr Pepper out of his hand. And for sleeping, you need to be not stealing all my caffeinated drinks.)
All his dreams of, about and with Kurisu are just that: fleeting, whimsical dreams. The last time he saw her was on a giant TV screen, like the ones at Shibuya Crossing: the Mother of Time Travel giving an exclusive interview (to what was left to the wrecked world) on a propaganda news channel, talking about her sincere hopes and progress for the future. Makise Kurisu, going on thirty and still as beautiful as the last time he saw her; more so perhaps, because the last time he saw her, he and Daru were making a break for it after four months of captivity, and Kurisu was crying and clawing at his arm, begging him to let her go.
Okabe remembers it like a scene out of a light novel, in that it was rushed and it ended all too soon; but it didn’t have a happier ending, or a farewell kiss, as much as he would have hoped for one. (Dreamed about one, even.)
The Mother of Time Travel had cut her hair short – chin-length at the front, sharp at the sides, and tapering off to the nape of her neck at the back. It was harsh, choppy, and looked as if it had been done by a madwoman with a pair of blunt scissors, which was likely to be the truth, but it was far away enough from the image of the cultured, intellectual woman SERN presented Makise Kurisu to be. One inconsequential act of rebellion, he mused. Still lovely, as lovely as Kurisu, even if she was older, and her eyes had less sparkle in them from when he last remembered. But he held the interview in his mind: Kurisu and her flame-red hair, and the tiny overlooked sneer at the side of her mouth when she talked about how proud she was to be working on neuroscience research, how there were no other scientists or laboratory members she would want to be doing this with.
That’s my girl, he thinks, before he sees the Rounders crossing the square, and gives the signal to blow the crossing to kingdom come.
---
The last time they had talked, he yelled: if you don’t leave, you’ll die.
If I leave, Kurisu shouted, her face as red as her hair, then my father will die. Don’t you see? They’ll kill him. They might not have any hostages left to hold over you, but this is my father, and I’ll always love him no matter—
Despite the fact that he left you, that he looks down on you, that he’s still offended because you’re more perfect than him. A scowling, angry bastard, Doctor Nakabachi was, even with the gun to his head, and Kurisu’s scientific genius staying the finger on the trigger.
He let go of her.
Once, he’d held Makisu Kurisu close and told her he cared about what happened to her, because she was a lab member, because his lab members were nakama.
But that was before Mayuri took a bullet between her eyes, before Moeka took their lab hostage.
And Okabe Rintarou no longer had hostages dear to him, or the Future Gadget Laboratory, or any lab members left.
Goodbye, he didn’t say. There was nothing good about this.
Don’t let them kill you, he said. He didn’t add: but let them kill Doctor Nakabachi, he’s nothing but dead weight and once there’s nothing holding you here, I’ll come back for you. I promise. You’re still precious to me.
You too, Kurisu said. She folded her hand back to her chest; turned away like she didn’t want him to see her crying.
There’s no need to be so tsundere about it, he thought. Up until the point you break out or I come back, you’ll miss me.
And then he hurried off after Daru, not knowing that she would never break out and that he would never save her, and that really had been the end of it all.
---
Okabe Rintarou is a man gone mad, his comrades whisper. He doesn’t sleep often, because when he’s not leading a freedom fighter group against SERN, he’s muttering about time travel and attractor fields and timelines, heaven knows why. When he does sleep, Makise Kurisu’s name comes up in his choked breaths, a curse made to darken his days.
---
This is how Okabe dreams his last farewell to Kurisu should have gone.
(It’s only a dream though, but his dreams can still be safe from SERN, who are fixated on time machines and not on psychic ability, ESP and mind reading. He can do whatever the hell he wants in his own head.)
Wait for me, he says stoically. No, not stoically – solemnly. Solemn is more suited for making life-binding promises. Play your part, lead them astray, and keep your father alive if you really want to. But wait for me. I’ll get help. I’ll come back for you.
Okabe, Kurisu will say breathlessly, one hand clasped to her throat and the other to her heart. Okabe – I never thought—that you—and me—
My name is Hououin Kyouma, like the phoenix that will be reborn, the truth that will come from atrocity, and don’t you forget that, Lab Assistant, because—
And he’ll never finish that line, because Kurisu will have thrown her arms around him, will have kissed him until he forgets to breathe, and that kiss will reverberate in his bones long after he peels himself away from her.
I knew it, all this time, so please— come back to me, Okabe.
And because he does need a lab assistant after all, he will.
---
This is how Okabe really dreams it should have it gone: that it’s not a last farewell. That he, Daru and Kurisu make it out alive, together, the last remnants of Future Gadget Laboratory; and Nakabachi gets gunned down a few days later; and that Operation Valkyrie rises stronger than ever, with three of them and the memory of Mayuri and Feyris and all their lost friends behind them.
If—when Kurisu finally kisses him, it’s infinitely more romantic than a kiss goodbye. It’ll be a kiss—well, not hello, but a welcome one, not a farewell one, and it’ll become a second kiss, then a third, and fourth, and so on, with so much more time and less urgency than when they were in SERN’s underground bunker.
It’s just a dream, of course. Fleeting and whimsical, but safe from SERN, who will never peer into this shadowy corner in his mind and make him spill his guts (literally) about Operation Valkyrie.
It’s the best and worst one, because when Okabe Rintarou wakes up from this dream, he knows that he’s more likely to resurrect Mayuri from her grave than see Kurisu ever again.
---
When the Rounders catch up to Okabe at long last, he makes sure Daru’s made it out of the building before he lets out his long-forgotten mad scientist cackle. Stall them for a little longer, perhaps.
It’s been years since he had cause to laugh like this, but this one isn’t too bad. It’s arrogant and loud enough that he can remember it being like before, when it was a scorching hot summer and he was eighteen, playing at things he didn’t understand. Long before the Rounders mutter something about him being a madman (and they don’t know how right they have it, standing before a mad scientist and all), he can already see Mayuri sighing, Daru shaking his head, Feyris and Ruka and Suzuha good-naturedly or shyly playing along, and Kurisu face-palming.
(When his world ends, he’s well aware that SERN is waiting for him to slip up, to say something incriminating at the very end. He yells every name that comes to mind, even foes like Moeka and Mister Braun, and imagines that when everything he sees turns to red, it’s Kurisu’s hair he’s buried his face into.)
beta
Truth be told, Hououin Kyouma thinks of Makise Kurisu extremely infrequently. There’s no time to between his research, and pondering on his failures as a mad scientist, and drinking away the memory of Kurisu. In another lifetime, Amane Suzuha of the alpha timeline told him he led the freedom fighter force against SERN, that he’d built the Divergence Meter to guide him in all his other worlds, that he was going to be the saviour of the world.
Amane Suzuha believed he would succeed, while he went off and ruined the happiness of the friends he treasured. Feyris’ father went back to the grave; Suzuha went back to a timeline where no one ever remembered fixing a time machine and then celebrating on a rooftop together; Ruka went into a body he didn’t want; and Kurisu— Kurisu went back to being a corpse in a closet, as if she was never meant to have another future ahead of her.
And back then, with a handful of stolen kisses seared into his hippocampus, and Kurisu’s blood on his hands, he had thought: it was worth it, all of it, so long as Mayuri didn't die in the wretched ways she did in the alpha timeline. There wouldn't be cars or trains or bullets between her eyes. It didn't matter that part of that vow was for himself, because he couldn't stand to face her death one more time, or that when he looked at her, he'd see the price of that vow: Kurisu on the linoleum floor, bathed in her own blood. Once, the world was worth changing, not because he was a mad scientist, with mad visions to change the world's ruling structure. It was worth changing, so that Mayuri could live.
(Because he’s selfish – as selfish as a mad scientist Hououin Kyouma has to be – the world is worth changing again, so Kurisu can live too.)
---
Between the bombs falling and World War III burning down Japan around him, Okabe Rintarou has his own world, in his own laboratory, prying into the secrets of timelines and time travel, and no one, not even Mayuri or Daru, can drag him out of it.
Before the war started, he would never have considered being a participant in the Time Machine War. With Russia and America setting the world on fire, he puts aside time travel to reconsider: was this too the choice of Steins;Gate? The inevitable ruin of all things?
Divergence points, Amane Suzuha informed him years ago and one attractor field away, are where the world changes from one attractor field to another. The years 1991 and 2000 – with the Gulf War, and the fall of the Soviet Union, and the dawn of the new millennium, those are divergence points, where the world changes.
But convergence points, Okarin, there’s where the world stays the same in the end. What passes here will pass in every world line within this attractor field. In the alpha attractor field, Shiina Mayuri is doomed, but if you make it past the 1% divergence point to the beta attractor field, you can change history.
There’s no SERN-run dystopia in this world line, but there is a time machine arms race, and really, even if the end of world was put off for a few more years, Okabe wants to cry or laugh or drink or to ask Suzuha, if she’s ever born into this world (hopefully not; Suzuha from whatever world line deserves better than a wretched world to grow up in) about how much better this beta world line is, next to the alpha. History changed. The world changed. And it was bought with the happiness of Ruka and Suzuha, the lives of Kurisu and Feyris’ father, with what he can never hope to repay or undo.
Two bottles of Sapporo beer later, he figures: the alpha world lines have a dystopia, and the beta world lines have the Time Machine War, and what do the gamma world lines hold? A nuclear arms race? Chemical warfare? Okabe Rintarou might make it going from world line to world line, trying to build a time machine for years and years persistently, and all he might get out of it is the knowledge that with each success, there is corresponding failure. The Reading Steiner is a curse. The time machine – the thought of a working one – is a curse.
And Okabe Rintarou is nothing but cursed, in this time line and the next; so Okabe stops being Okabe, and sticks to being Hououin Kyouma, a selfish mad scientist who is out to change the world’s ruling structure, who drinks himself to a stupor to forget Suzuha and Kurisu and all the dead surrounding him in the dark of the night.
---
Hououin Kyouma is a mad scientist, not a historian.
Still, he teases apart the structure of the world, goes back from the Time Machine war, back to the beginning of the arms race, back before the world started burning, further and further back.
And the end of it, he finds, much to his despair, is Doctor Nakabachi, newly arrived in Russia, and his thesis on time travel. He doubts it’s really Doctor Nakabachi’s thesis, because he still remembers years and years and one attractor field ago, on a moonlit night in a children’s park, Kurisu staring away and confiding in him. How tsundere of her, he remembers – Kurisu open and closed at the same time, sharing secrets and turning away in alternating moments.
That, he realises when the moment passes, that’s your divergence point, Suzuha. Year 2010, where Kurisu is stabbed and her thesis is stolen and rescued from a plane explosion, because of a metal Oopa in the folder. Where Okabe Rintarou sees her and sends a D-mail and goes from the beta attractor field to the alpha, and ends up as a wreck in the middle of a time machine war.
When he stops laughing, he starts crying; and when he stops crying, he puts the drinking away, because for all that Hououin Kyouma thinks extremely infrequently about Makise Kurisu, it turns out Makise Kurisu is still somehow the centre of his world after all these years. Makise Kurisu is the centre of the whole world, through and through, if her thesis is to stop World War III from coming about.
Okabe Rintarou puts Hououin Kyouma away too, because there’s no need for him at the moment; not when there’s a time machine to build, and a message to send fifteen years to the past, and a plan to build, if he’s to change the future from the beta attractor field to—to what exactly, he’s not sure. To a future where Mayuri lives, and Kurisu lives, and there’s no dystopia or war to darken their days.
(Going from beta to alpha to beta again informs him that this new world should most likely to be referred to as gamma.
But Hououin Kyouma will never be put away, not completely. It’s only right, really, to refer to the world in which he puts all his hopes in as The Steins Gate.)
---
The video he makes is short, direct and mysterious enough to be satisfying.
And I’m the one who named the target world line Steins Gate. You know why I named it that.
He smiles, in spite of himself. This is the darkest hour of night, of all the nights of all the years where he’s dealt with his losses, where Makise Kurisu comes extremely frequently to mind even when he tries to bury her. Her ghost slides around his shoulders, forever eighteen, with kisses that don’t even exist in his hippocampal memory.
It doesn’t really mean anything.
He can console himself with the fact that even if it goes wrong in 2010, he has years to figure this all out again, to be haunted by Kurisu’s ghost over and over.
In the meantime, there’s a time machine to build. He raises a glass to whoever it is who still cares now – Daru or Mayuri or whoever still pays attention to the mind of Okabe Rintarou – and to the prayer of Steins Gate, shining like the dawn of a hopeful future.
It’s a new dawn, he hums to himself, it’s a new day.
(Kurisu presses her lips to himself, all her whispers drowned out by the rain around them. Relativity theory is so romantic and sad.
The Reading Steiner is still a curse, but this is as close to feeling good as he’ll ever get.)
steins;gate
There were times Okabe Rintarou wondered he wasn't that much of a mad scientist he claimed to be, when his (genius, grown up child prodigy of a) girlfriend was... infinitely madder. Not in a 'mad scientist' way – not in this world at least, where she never built a time-travelling microwave – or in a 'trust me, natto beans and grapefruit segments make for a perfect salad' inedible cooking way.
Mad, but mostly in a good way – except for now, he thought, as he watched her staggering and yelling and flailing, with a tumbler in hand; all composure gone out the window as she took the lead in an argument with her Harvard colleagues.
"A bit of whiskey to open the mind," someone had said with a chuckle half an hour before, as he passed Okabe a half-full glass. "Harvard tradition. Helps the debates."
Certainly, it helped the debates, but it made Kurisu a wreck. Her face was as red as her hair (and being the lucky bastard who got to bury his face in it while he slept, he knew exactly how red), but her English was still perfect. He wanted to know how that worked, when he could barely string together a cohesive sentence sober.
"We'll go now," he said politely to her colleagues, as he wrestled the whiskey tumbler from Kurisu's hand. Kurisu made a noise of complaint – or was it a word? He couldn't tell over the noise, but he hauled her over his shoulder and carried her out, taking a good kick to his ribs while he did so.
Damn Kurisu, and damn her pointy-toed ankle boots.
"Okabe! Okabe, let me down right this instant! " she shrieked.
His ribs were suffering, so he acquiesced, and almost dropped her what with all the flailing. But the noise his girlfriend made sounded like she was in pain, so he settled down right next to her, back against the wall.
"I didn't mean to—"
"Why'd you take me out of there?" she said, with a moan of frustration. Not pain, at least. But she'd be turning that frustration at him next. He braced himself for the good hard slap on his head, the sort tsundere girlfriends seemed to have a knack for.
It was only a whack to the shoulder. It was a small relief.
"I was winning the argument with Dr. Ando! I was this close to disseminating his stupid theory on tumour fluorescence—"
"I know," he said patiently.
"—he's completely wrong and he won't admit you! You—you don't even like neuroscience, and you know he's wrong!"
"I know," he repeated.
Kurisu rambled, her tirade fuelled by the whiskey that had 'opened her mind' but by the end of it, she was drowsing and her head knocked against his shoulder. He wanted to say something unkind about Dr. Ando, and maybe make up an awful nickname for him too, but Kurisu beat him to it.
"Did—" she started, "—did you carry me out of there because I was making a fool of myself?" She made another noise, and this one, he realised, was a sob. "I don't—I don't want you to think your girlfriend's an alcoholic, or some sort of sore loser who can't stand losing an argument—"
He thought about her father, about the knife and how desperate some men (pathetic men) were to prove their points.
"—or or or that I embarrass you, or as much as I can embarrass you when you go around embarrassing yourself all the time—"
Still so tsundere.
He touched the side of her face, blindly, with only the glow from distant lampposts to guide him. Kurisu's face – probably still as red as her hair, and still warm against his palm – stilled, then pressed into his hand.
"I'm embarrassed," Okarin said, "because I still love you when you're like this."
---
Okabe Rintarou is a man gone mad, some of Kurisu’s colleagues said. It wouldn’t be enough that she excelled past them, or that she was a genius who understood the true awesomeness of a lab coat (and posing in a lab coat, or his personal favourite: wearing just a lab coat and nothing else), or that she was perfect beyond all measure. Making cheap shots about how she was dating below her scientific status was fairly lousy, but it didn’t matter.
Falling in love was a bit like madness anyway, and when he saw her face in Nature journals or television interviews or scientific presentations, he couldn’t imagine a world where Kurisu wasn’t with him, because Kurisu shone like the dawn and lit up the world like sunrise, and the world was darker when she was overseas at conferences and not around to steal his Dr Pepper.
“You’re clingy today,” she commented when he pulled her to him and buried his face in her hair, “I wasn’t gone that long.”
“It’s nothing,” he said, and told her all about what research he’d done and how this was definitely going to make 3D gaming into a thing, and shrugged off how Kurisu protested about how it would be corrupted into changing 2D waifus into three dimensional evil. “I was just thinking how I’d changed the ruling structure of the world for you.”
Kurisu, for her part, laughed and rolled over to pin him down to the bed, and kissed him until he felt it reverberate in his bones.
A/N: based mostly off the Steins;Gate anime, and all other information from different Steins;Gate media was gleaned from http://ibm5100.net/steinswiki/story/chronology/ and http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/2000121-anime-and-manga-other-titles/60319191
Alpha refers to the alpha world lines between 0 and 0.99%, where Mayuri gets killed in the Rounders raid of the laboratory; Daru and Okabe become terrorist/freedom fighters; Kurisu is referred to the mother of time travel; and Suzuha refers to herself as Amane Suzuha and doesn’t know who her father is, and the time machine Suzuha has can only go to the past.
Beta refers to the beta world lines between 1 and 1.99%, where Kurisu was killed in July 2010; her father escapes to Russia with her thesis; the WWIII/time machine arms race happens; Suzuha has a time machine that can go backward and forward in time, and refers to herself as Hashida Suzuha/knows who her father and Okarin are; Okabe sends himself the garbled movie mail, part of the grimdark future of episode 23, where Okarin saves Mayuri from the alpha timeline, grieves over killing Kurisu and realises that to avoid WWIII and the alpha world line dystopia, he has to change the past in episode 24.
Steins;gate refers to the world line of 1.048598, where the end of episode 24/all of episode 25 occurs.
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Author: LoneGothic (LINK)
Rating: PG
Prompt: "It is said that the darkest hour of the night comes just before the dawn." - quote by Paul Coelho
Fandom/Series: Steins;Gate (anime)
Word Count: 3991 Words
Disclaimer: All original work owned by creators of Steins;Gate (5pb, etc.) - fanfiction is my own work
Summary: Okabe Rintarou is a man gone mad (in the heart and in the head.)
a man gone mad
"It is said that the darkest hour of the night comes just before the dawn."
Okabe Rintarou is a man gone mad (in the heart and in the head.)
alpha
Occasionally, maybe once in a blue moon, when Okabe Rintarou has time to sleep between fighting off SERN agents and running away from them, he thinks of Makise Kurisu. Dreams of her, even, if dreaming is still possible in the handful of hours between collapsing and being jolted awake from a nearby explosion.
(It’s still possible. You mostly just need REM sleep for that, Kurisu told him once while she invaded his personal space. Then she snatched the Dr Pepper out of his hand. And for sleeping, you need to be not stealing all my caffeinated drinks.)
All his dreams of, about and with Kurisu are just that: fleeting, whimsical dreams. The last time he saw her was on a giant TV screen, like the ones at Shibuya Crossing: the Mother of Time Travel giving an exclusive interview (to what was left to the wrecked world) on a propaganda news channel, talking about her sincere hopes and progress for the future. Makise Kurisu, going on thirty and still as beautiful as the last time he saw her; more so perhaps, because the last time he saw her, he and Daru were making a break for it after four months of captivity, and Kurisu was crying and clawing at his arm, begging him to let her go.
Okabe remembers it like a scene out of a light novel, in that it was rushed and it ended all too soon; but it didn’t have a happier ending, or a farewell kiss, as much as he would have hoped for one. (Dreamed about one, even.)
The Mother of Time Travel had cut her hair short – chin-length at the front, sharp at the sides, and tapering off to the nape of her neck at the back. It was harsh, choppy, and looked as if it had been done by a madwoman with a pair of blunt scissors, which was likely to be the truth, but it was far away enough from the image of the cultured, intellectual woman SERN presented Makise Kurisu to be. One inconsequential act of rebellion, he mused. Still lovely, as lovely as Kurisu, even if she was older, and her eyes had less sparkle in them from when he last remembered. But he held the interview in his mind: Kurisu and her flame-red hair, and the tiny overlooked sneer at the side of her mouth when she talked about how proud she was to be working on neuroscience research, how there were no other scientists or laboratory members she would want to be doing this with.
That’s my girl, he thinks, before he sees the Rounders crossing the square, and gives the signal to blow the crossing to kingdom come.
---
The last time they had talked, he yelled: if you don’t leave, you’ll die.
If I leave, Kurisu shouted, her face as red as her hair, then my father will die. Don’t you see? They’ll kill him. They might not have any hostages left to hold over you, but this is my father, and I’ll always love him no matter—
Despite the fact that he left you, that he looks down on you, that he’s still offended because you’re more perfect than him. A scowling, angry bastard, Doctor Nakabachi was, even with the gun to his head, and Kurisu’s scientific genius staying the finger on the trigger.
He let go of her.
Once, he’d held Makisu Kurisu close and told her he cared about what happened to her, because she was a lab member, because his lab members were nakama.
But that was before Mayuri took a bullet between her eyes, before Moeka took their lab hostage.
And Okabe Rintarou no longer had hostages dear to him, or the Future Gadget Laboratory, or any lab members left.
Goodbye, he didn’t say. There was nothing good about this.
Don’t let them kill you, he said. He didn’t add: but let them kill Doctor Nakabachi, he’s nothing but dead weight and once there’s nothing holding you here, I’ll come back for you. I promise. You’re still precious to me.
You too, Kurisu said. She folded her hand back to her chest; turned away like she didn’t want him to see her crying.
There’s no need to be so tsundere about it, he thought. Up until the point you break out or I come back, you’ll miss me.
And then he hurried off after Daru, not knowing that she would never break out and that he would never save her, and that really had been the end of it all.
---
Okabe Rintarou is a man gone mad, his comrades whisper. He doesn’t sleep often, because when he’s not leading a freedom fighter group against SERN, he’s muttering about time travel and attractor fields and timelines, heaven knows why. When he does sleep, Makise Kurisu’s name comes up in his choked breaths, a curse made to darken his days.
---
This is how Okabe dreams his last farewell to Kurisu should have gone.
(It’s only a dream though, but his dreams can still be safe from SERN, who are fixated on time machines and not on psychic ability, ESP and mind reading. He can do whatever the hell he wants in his own head.)
Wait for me, he says stoically. No, not stoically – solemnly. Solemn is more suited for making life-binding promises. Play your part, lead them astray, and keep your father alive if you really want to. But wait for me. I’ll get help. I’ll come back for you.
Okabe, Kurisu will say breathlessly, one hand clasped to her throat and the other to her heart. Okabe – I never thought—that you—and me—
My name is Hououin Kyouma, like the phoenix that will be reborn, the truth that will come from atrocity, and don’t you forget that, Lab Assistant, because—
And he’ll never finish that line, because Kurisu will have thrown her arms around him, will have kissed him until he forgets to breathe, and that kiss will reverberate in his bones long after he peels himself away from her.
I knew it, all this time, so please— come back to me, Okabe.
And because he does need a lab assistant after all, he will.
---
This is how Okabe really dreams it should have it gone: that it’s not a last farewell. That he, Daru and Kurisu make it out alive, together, the last remnants of Future Gadget Laboratory; and Nakabachi gets gunned down a few days later; and that Operation Valkyrie rises stronger than ever, with three of them and the memory of Mayuri and Feyris and all their lost friends behind them.
If—when Kurisu finally kisses him, it’s infinitely more romantic than a kiss goodbye. It’ll be a kiss—well, not hello, but a welcome one, not a farewell one, and it’ll become a second kiss, then a third, and fourth, and so on, with so much more time and less urgency than when they were in SERN’s underground bunker.
It’s just a dream, of course. Fleeting and whimsical, but safe from SERN, who will never peer into this shadowy corner in his mind and make him spill his guts (literally) about Operation Valkyrie.
It’s the best and worst one, because when Okabe Rintarou wakes up from this dream, he knows that he’s more likely to resurrect Mayuri from her grave than see Kurisu ever again.
---
When the Rounders catch up to Okabe at long last, he makes sure Daru’s made it out of the building before he lets out his long-forgotten mad scientist cackle. Stall them for a little longer, perhaps.
It’s been years since he had cause to laugh like this, but this one isn’t too bad. It’s arrogant and loud enough that he can remember it being like before, when it was a scorching hot summer and he was eighteen, playing at things he didn’t understand. Long before the Rounders mutter something about him being a madman (and they don’t know how right they have it, standing before a mad scientist and all), he can already see Mayuri sighing, Daru shaking his head, Feyris and Ruka and Suzuha good-naturedly or shyly playing along, and Kurisu face-palming.
(When his world ends, he’s well aware that SERN is waiting for him to slip up, to say something incriminating at the very end. He yells every name that comes to mind, even foes like Moeka and Mister Braun, and imagines that when everything he sees turns to red, it’s Kurisu’s hair he’s buried his face into.)
beta
Truth be told, Hououin Kyouma thinks of Makise Kurisu extremely infrequently. There’s no time to between his research, and pondering on his failures as a mad scientist, and drinking away the memory of Kurisu. In another lifetime, Amane Suzuha of the alpha timeline told him he led the freedom fighter force against SERN, that he’d built the Divergence Meter to guide him in all his other worlds, that he was going to be the saviour of the world.
Amane Suzuha believed he would succeed, while he went off and ruined the happiness of the friends he treasured. Feyris’ father went back to the grave; Suzuha went back to a timeline where no one ever remembered fixing a time machine and then celebrating on a rooftop together; Ruka went into a body he didn’t want; and Kurisu— Kurisu went back to being a corpse in a closet, as if she was never meant to have another future ahead of her.
And back then, with a handful of stolen kisses seared into his hippocampus, and Kurisu’s blood on his hands, he had thought: it was worth it, all of it, so long as Mayuri didn't die in the wretched ways she did in the alpha timeline. There wouldn't be cars or trains or bullets between her eyes. It didn't matter that part of that vow was for himself, because he couldn't stand to face her death one more time, or that when he looked at her, he'd see the price of that vow: Kurisu on the linoleum floor, bathed in her own blood. Once, the world was worth changing, not because he was a mad scientist, with mad visions to change the world's ruling structure. It was worth changing, so that Mayuri could live.
(Because he’s selfish – as selfish as a mad scientist Hououin Kyouma has to be – the world is worth changing again, so Kurisu can live too.)
---
Between the bombs falling and World War III burning down Japan around him, Okabe Rintarou has his own world, in his own laboratory, prying into the secrets of timelines and time travel, and no one, not even Mayuri or Daru, can drag him out of it.
Before the war started, he would never have considered being a participant in the Time Machine War. With Russia and America setting the world on fire, he puts aside time travel to reconsider: was this too the choice of Steins;Gate? The inevitable ruin of all things?
Divergence points, Amane Suzuha informed him years ago and one attractor field away, are where the world changes from one attractor field to another. The years 1991 and 2000 – with the Gulf War, and the fall of the Soviet Union, and the dawn of the new millennium, those are divergence points, where the world changes.
But convergence points, Okarin, there’s where the world stays the same in the end. What passes here will pass in every world line within this attractor field. In the alpha attractor field, Shiina Mayuri is doomed, but if you make it past the 1% divergence point to the beta attractor field, you can change history.
There’s no SERN-run dystopia in this world line, but there is a time machine arms race, and really, even if the end of world was put off for a few more years, Okabe wants to cry or laugh or drink or to ask Suzuha, if she’s ever born into this world (hopefully not; Suzuha from whatever world line deserves better than a wretched world to grow up in) about how much better this beta world line is, next to the alpha. History changed. The world changed. And it was bought with the happiness of Ruka and Suzuha, the lives of Kurisu and Feyris’ father, with what he can never hope to repay or undo.
Two bottles of Sapporo beer later, he figures: the alpha world lines have a dystopia, and the beta world lines have the Time Machine War, and what do the gamma world lines hold? A nuclear arms race? Chemical warfare? Okabe Rintarou might make it going from world line to world line, trying to build a time machine for years and years persistently, and all he might get out of it is the knowledge that with each success, there is corresponding failure. The Reading Steiner is a curse. The time machine – the thought of a working one – is a curse.
And Okabe Rintarou is nothing but cursed, in this time line and the next; so Okabe stops being Okabe, and sticks to being Hououin Kyouma, a selfish mad scientist who is out to change the world’s ruling structure, who drinks himself to a stupor to forget Suzuha and Kurisu and all the dead surrounding him in the dark of the night.
---
Hououin Kyouma is a mad scientist, not a historian.
Still, he teases apart the structure of the world, goes back from the Time Machine war, back to the beginning of the arms race, back before the world started burning, further and further back.
And the end of it, he finds, much to his despair, is Doctor Nakabachi, newly arrived in Russia, and his thesis on time travel. He doubts it’s really Doctor Nakabachi’s thesis, because he still remembers years and years and one attractor field ago, on a moonlit night in a children’s park, Kurisu staring away and confiding in him. How tsundere of her, he remembers – Kurisu open and closed at the same time, sharing secrets and turning away in alternating moments.
That, he realises when the moment passes, that’s your divergence point, Suzuha. Year 2010, where Kurisu is stabbed and her thesis is stolen and rescued from a plane explosion, because of a metal Oopa in the folder. Where Okabe Rintarou sees her and sends a D-mail and goes from the beta attractor field to the alpha, and ends up as a wreck in the middle of a time machine war.
When he stops laughing, he starts crying; and when he stops crying, he puts the drinking away, because for all that Hououin Kyouma thinks extremely infrequently about Makise Kurisu, it turns out Makise Kurisu is still somehow the centre of his world after all these years. Makise Kurisu is the centre of the whole world, through and through, if her thesis is to stop World War III from coming about.
Okabe Rintarou puts Hououin Kyouma away too, because there’s no need for him at the moment; not when there’s a time machine to build, and a message to send fifteen years to the past, and a plan to build, if he’s to change the future from the beta attractor field to—to what exactly, he’s not sure. To a future where Mayuri lives, and Kurisu lives, and there’s no dystopia or war to darken their days.
(Going from beta to alpha to beta again informs him that this new world should most likely to be referred to as gamma.
But Hououin Kyouma will never be put away, not completely. It’s only right, really, to refer to the world in which he puts all his hopes in as The Steins Gate.)
---
The video he makes is short, direct and mysterious enough to be satisfying.
And I’m the one who named the target world line Steins Gate. You know why I named it that.
He smiles, in spite of himself. This is the darkest hour of night, of all the nights of all the years where he’s dealt with his losses, where Makise Kurisu comes extremely frequently to mind even when he tries to bury her. Her ghost slides around his shoulders, forever eighteen, with kisses that don’t even exist in his hippocampal memory.
It doesn’t really mean anything.
He can console himself with the fact that even if it goes wrong in 2010, he has years to figure this all out again, to be haunted by Kurisu’s ghost over and over.
In the meantime, there’s a time machine to build. He raises a glass to whoever it is who still cares now – Daru or Mayuri or whoever still pays attention to the mind of Okabe Rintarou – and to the prayer of Steins Gate, shining like the dawn of a hopeful future.
It’s a new dawn, he hums to himself, it’s a new day.
(Kurisu presses her lips to himself, all her whispers drowned out by the rain around them. Relativity theory is so romantic and sad.
The Reading Steiner is still a curse, but this is as close to feeling good as he’ll ever get.)
steins;gate
There were times Okabe Rintarou wondered he wasn't that much of a mad scientist he claimed to be, when his (genius, grown up child prodigy of a) girlfriend was... infinitely madder. Not in a 'mad scientist' way – not in this world at least, where she never built a time-travelling microwave – or in a 'trust me, natto beans and grapefruit segments make for a perfect salad' inedible cooking way.
Mad, but mostly in a good way – except for now, he thought, as he watched her staggering and yelling and flailing, with a tumbler in hand; all composure gone out the window as she took the lead in an argument with her Harvard colleagues.
"A bit of whiskey to open the mind," someone had said with a chuckle half an hour before, as he passed Okabe a half-full glass. "Harvard tradition. Helps the debates."
Certainly, it helped the debates, but it made Kurisu a wreck. Her face was as red as her hair (and being the lucky bastard who got to bury his face in it while he slept, he knew exactly how red), but her English was still perfect. He wanted to know how that worked, when he could barely string together a cohesive sentence sober.
"We'll go now," he said politely to her colleagues, as he wrestled the whiskey tumbler from Kurisu's hand. Kurisu made a noise of complaint – or was it a word? He couldn't tell over the noise, but he hauled her over his shoulder and carried her out, taking a good kick to his ribs while he did so.
Damn Kurisu, and damn her pointy-toed ankle boots.
"Okabe! Okabe, let me down right this instant! " she shrieked.
His ribs were suffering, so he acquiesced, and almost dropped her what with all the flailing. But the noise his girlfriend made sounded like she was in pain, so he settled down right next to her, back against the wall.
"I didn't mean to—"
"Why'd you take me out of there?" she said, with a moan of frustration. Not pain, at least. But she'd be turning that frustration at him next. He braced himself for the good hard slap on his head, the sort tsundere girlfriends seemed to have a knack for.
It was only a whack to the shoulder. It was a small relief.
"I was winning the argument with Dr. Ando! I was this close to disseminating his stupid theory on tumour fluorescence—"
"I know," he said patiently.
"—he's completely wrong and he won't admit you! You—you don't even like neuroscience, and you know he's wrong!"
"I know," he repeated.
Kurisu rambled, her tirade fuelled by the whiskey that had 'opened her mind' but by the end of it, she was drowsing and her head knocked against his shoulder. He wanted to say something unkind about Dr. Ando, and maybe make up an awful nickname for him too, but Kurisu beat him to it.
"Did—" she started, "—did you carry me out of there because I was making a fool of myself?" She made another noise, and this one, he realised, was a sob. "I don't—I don't want you to think your girlfriend's an alcoholic, or some sort of sore loser who can't stand losing an argument—"
He thought about her father, about the knife and how desperate some men (pathetic men) were to prove their points.
"—or or or that I embarrass you, or as much as I can embarrass you when you go around embarrassing yourself all the time—"
Still so tsundere.
He touched the side of her face, blindly, with only the glow from distant lampposts to guide him. Kurisu's face – probably still as red as her hair, and still warm against his palm – stilled, then pressed into his hand.
"I'm embarrassed," Okarin said, "because I still love you when you're like this."
---
Okabe Rintarou is a man gone mad, some of Kurisu’s colleagues said. It wouldn’t be enough that she excelled past them, or that she was a genius who understood the true awesomeness of a lab coat (and posing in a lab coat, or his personal favourite: wearing just a lab coat and nothing else), or that she was perfect beyond all measure. Making cheap shots about how she was dating below her scientific status was fairly lousy, but it didn’t matter.
Falling in love was a bit like madness anyway, and when he saw her face in Nature journals or television interviews or scientific presentations, he couldn’t imagine a world where Kurisu wasn’t with him, because Kurisu shone like the dawn and lit up the world like sunrise, and the world was darker when she was overseas at conferences and not around to steal his Dr Pepper.
“You’re clingy today,” she commented when he pulled her to him and buried his face in her hair, “I wasn’t gone that long.”
“It’s nothing,” he said, and told her all about what research he’d done and how this was definitely going to make 3D gaming into a thing, and shrugged off how Kurisu protested about how it would be corrupted into changing 2D waifus into three dimensional evil. “I was just thinking how I’d changed the ruling structure of the world for you.”
Kurisu, for her part, laughed and rolled over to pin him down to the bed, and kissed him until he felt it reverberate in his bones.
A/N: based mostly off the Steins;Gate anime, and all other information from different Steins;Gate media was gleaned from http://ibm5100.net/steinswiki/story/chronology/ and http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/2000121-anime-and-manga-other-titles/60319191
Alpha refers to the alpha world lines between 0 and 0.99%, where Mayuri gets killed in the Rounders raid of the laboratory; Daru and Okabe become terrorist/freedom fighters; Kurisu is referred to the mother of time travel; and Suzuha refers to herself as Amane Suzuha and doesn’t know who her father is, and the time machine Suzuha has can only go to the past.
Beta refers to the beta world lines between 1 and 1.99%, where Kurisu was killed in July 2010; her father escapes to Russia with her thesis; the WWIII/time machine arms race happens; Suzuha has a time machine that can go backward and forward in time, and refers to herself as Hashida Suzuha/knows who her father and Okarin are; Okabe sends himself the garbled movie mail, part of the grimdark future of episode 23, where Okarin saves Mayuri from the alpha timeline, grieves over killing Kurisu and realises that to avoid WWIII and the alpha world line dystopia, he has to change the past in episode 24.
Steins;gate refers to the world line of 1.048598, where the end of episode 24/all of episode 25 occurs.
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