Iris was crouched down and focusing in her Timeline. Her sight coupled back upon itself as her spider crawled back to her, its extended webs containing the labor of an epoch, the movement of objects long hauled away from here, the length between those points made sensible by the dissection of that the time which linked them.
She wondered occasionally if this was why most people galled her, for they were unpredictable things. They were not objects that moved linearly according to the motion of other objects, but ecosystems of causation and reciprocal cessation, the reinforcement of a blueberry moment of a pie cooling upon a windowsill and the softness of memory when faced with what one enjoys, regardless of any logical reason for such.
This was what Iris thought as she viewed Suki before letting her know Timeline was done, for Suki seemed not to have that same curious nature herself. For Iris, she would scan an object and its chronology would shriek into her senses; how its raw materials were mined, transported, melted, cooled, manufactured in a country far from here and the complexity of that web of social interaction it underwent before reaching this place.
Suki could recognize such things if explained them by Iris, but she would turn left and see that mine in China. Turn right and she would see its factory. In front of her was the fully-formed object. For Suki all events of history were compressed into wherever she currently stood, yet Iris would occasionally see her stop in the middle of what she was saying or linger before a reply. Her emotion occasionally seemed separate from the present of others, however logically located it was still there in Suki's emotional firmament.
Yet, how could a woman become separate from herself? Suki did not understand questions like this at an intellectual level, nor in a swell of revelation like Iris had, but at an emotional level she had vague grasps of such. In a sense she was an amoeba able to spread herself over concepts she did not understand, and her senses would provide the experiences necessary to feel them. She envied Iris, for she seemed able to partition herself into separate slabs of identity; yet Suki could not, for her core consciousness always leaked into all expressions of herself. There was an ideal of herself that she seemed unable to loose into rigid reality; whenever she was with a woman sexually she would feel this and hate others for triggering it.
"I don't know." said Iris. "The ice is from a Revenant and there's no sign of a struggle before the lake, so my assumption is he led the other boy out here, dared him to do something idiotic like go out onto the ice and see if it would support his weight, then deliberately thinned it so he would collapse into it and drown. Wouldn't appear all that different from the type of suicidal masculinity teenage boys already engage in."
"You think it's another teenager?"
"Most likely." Iris reverted the lake until it was once more covered in Revenant-ice. "It's cold enough that it has to be a Revenant, but Timeline can't breach through a Revenant's protection like that unless it's a particularly weak one. Combine that with the weight of their imprints in the snow and it's likely a fresh activation." She shook her head. "Hoping he's at least at the age of culpability for it."
"Yeah, whatever, we can just go kill the bitch."
Iris looked to Suki, and was against reminded that where for Iris there was at least the dim wave of other figures and moments in her mind, for Suki all wisped rather easily into the chill; she was not entirely stupid, yet simply walked dimly through the present. She was no agent of meaning nor arbiter of introspection for her own life or others; she simply continued in ways that the movement of her emotions told her was good, or at least familiar. "Still, I'd like to see if there's any other supposed drownings recently that could've been from this host. Can't hurt to have more information about him."
Iris did not wish to talk to the police, but thought still another source might be useful. She spoke to and met up with a local crime journalist named Megan Maroney at her office, who Suki noticed had a bisexual pride flag phone case.
"I already know it's a host, but I thought it might be useful to gather more information on him while I'm tracking him down. Any apparent drownings or missing teenagers in the past few months would be a good start."
"And might I ask your interest in such?"
"He drowned a child in a nearby lake."
"Mm. Well, if that's what you came to ask, I do need to return to work. If I find myself with enough time between current stories, I suppose I could work on your request."
And while Iris would eventually, without much of Megan's help, find this teenage killer and deal with him as they did any other, Megan's life would remain unintruded upon by a students for a few days. She had often thought herself the sole intelligent presence in her workplace, or at the least the only one with any knowledge of what dark, seedy things went unnoticed by others.
At least, this was what Megan thought of as she sat at her desk and procrastinated on a piece due tomorrow. She thought herself a keen observer of others, although not one with much sentiment; she liked to tell others she was not cynical, but realistic. She heard someone talking with security, looked up from her desk, and was soon looking up at Suki. "Hello. Are you the student who was asking around here yesterday?"
"Yeah, um. Hey, I don't want to bother you or anything like that, but u-uh, I've just been thinking about you for the past few days and wanted to ask... are you attracted to women?"
"I am, and I would assume so are you."
"Yeah, I am, umm... Would you ever date a student?"
"I can see myself dating a lot of women."
"Can that include me?"
Megan smiled and moved her hands under her chin. "Why?"
"Because, um, I mean, I just saw how you were sitting around here just now, and how people kept coming by to interrupt you and berate you. You're not that appreciated around here. But I think you're like me in that I was never really cherished much as a kid, so I wanna cherish somebody else. Maybe we can do that through sex, okay, but I'd like to get to know you, too. So, um, what do you say?"
"What's your name?"
"Suki."
"Mm. I think you're very interesting, Suki." She took a card out and wrote her number on it. She handed it to Suki. "I get off at 5. Text me around then so we can go out for something to eat, alright?"
Suki smiled, and she felt that things were on the upswing as she left.
She thought Megan beautiful, and because Suki had seen that Iris had her own beautiful thing, she needed her own beautiful thing as well. What she did not realize was that in Iris's love with Olivia there was a joining and unity, yet for Suki there was the hope of reconciliation of her inner tapestry with the idea of herself inhabiting the minds of others. She had sought to control that idea of herself, buttressed about she had been by a realm of mental fictions and emotions of others, that to her was made most understandable by the levelization of such into hatred of her. It was not the attainment of a beautiful thing that would make herself valuable, rather that it objectified her as a protector of valuable things. While Iris had shirked from such attachments, Suki amplified them.
Thus for Suki a relationship was a good deal -- the avenue to sate her sexual desires and likability, and to show others that she protected a beautiful thing, proving that she existed as an individual thing outside of the mind of others.
Later that night she texted Megan and went with dinner with her after work.
"So, how does someone like you become a student?" said Megan. "Saving civilians, criminal investigations, and…"
"Oh, I mean, I just like fighting. I mean, I looked at all students like Matoi Kujo, shit-talking punk dykes who pulped bad guys into mist. I used to fantasize about taking some dude who thinks he's hot shit and breaking him down into pieces, so that's kinda why I joined.
"Well, it must have been nice never needing to go through the host evacuation drills in school."
"Oh yeah, they tell civilians all that crap, but it doesn't matter. If a host wants to get you, there's nothing a civilian can do. I run at like eighty miles an hour transformed."
"Well, for a student, yes, but we can at least hide if-"
"Not really. If I wanted to find someone, I mean, if I was rogue, then I'd just vomit acid on the entire building and everyone in it would be disintegrated in seconds. I'd try to protect you if someone attacked, but there's stuff even I have to dodge." Suki continued eating, and was unsure why Megan seemed to watch her now, but smiled.
"…well, you mentioned you used to fantasize about being a student. How has it worked out coming up against the reality of it?"
"I dunno, I feel the same, I guess. I didn't change much. I know I gotta be a student and I gotta be a professional, so that's just what I'm gonna be until I die or get killed. I mean, I kinda like having that all determined out for me."
"Mm. I couldn't be like that. I have to reinvent myself every few years, some sort of refreshing myself with each new dawn on the earth's horizon. I only became a journalist in the past few years. Before that it was cosmetology. In another few years I may be living in a different city as a detective."
"Well, maybe, but Urasaria has a train that goes everywhere."
"Depending on whether the Democrats or Republicans are running the state."
"No, it's in New York. I think that's, ummm… I dunno who runs that." said Suki. "I mean, umm, I've moved around a lot too. I was sleeping in a bunch of different houses when I was younger. I never had any location to my life, so I didn't have much to center myself around. But, umm… I didn't ever really have a good sense of where the fuck I was, right?"
"Well, you had to deeply invest yourself into something. I believe people are always dying to give their lives away to something. God or Satan, politics or grammar. There's a will to utterly give oneself away into something."
At the end of their date Suki smiled and turned. She tried to make herself look alluring for Megan. "So, are we going to your place or mine?"
"Why?"
"I mean, you know. So we can fuck? It's fine if you live in an apartment."
Megan frowned. "Is that what you're interested in?"
"I thought that was kinda the whole point of this."
"Suki, it's one thing to agree to go to dinner with someone and another thing entirely to have sex with them."
"But I do want to have sex with you."
"I don't. I barely know you."
Suki sighed. "W-Well, you knew that I wanted to have sex when I asked you out, so why did you s-say yes? I-I'm not a bad person. I'm not threatening you or anything."
"No, you just think it would be appropriate to go on one date with me and then ask me if I'd like to go home with you and fuck you. What are you actually interested in, really?"
"You're making it sound like I'm just interested in you for sex. T-That shit's not true. Fuck, what's up with that? You're blaming me for not acting the way you w-want me to act, but I'm just being... I'm just being Suki."
Suki started tearing up, and a rage held her in place. She put her hands in her pockets and transformed them into Metamorphosis's claws.
"Well, I have to be honest. If this is who you are, Suki, then..."
"No, don't say it."
"Say what?"
"Don't say it, or I'll… I know you're going to say I'm being too weird or clingy or some shit like that. I get told shit like that all my life. Suki's too gross. Suki's nose isn't right. Suki dresses too weird. I didn't hit you. I didn't threaten you or a-anything. Fuck, y-you just think I'm this little sex-obsessed freak you can look down on, but that shit's not true. But even if I was, if I was prettier or fitter, then that shit wouldn't matter, huh? I know I get misinterpreted 'cuz I'm ugly and I don't dress right. People wanna tell me that shit isn't true all my life, but I know that's how it is."
"Suki, maybe you just need some air. I... look, I really need to be going. I'll call you. I promise."
"I'm not stupid. You w-wanna act like this isn't permanent, but I know it is. Fuck, did I lie to you? Y-You wanna look at me like I'm some freak to study?"
"I will call you. I will. Just take some time to relax, alright? I'll call you."
Suki looked away, then grunted in approval after a few seconds. But when she returned to Iris she crouched up and refused to speak to anyone for a while. It was not only that she had wanted sex but Megan refused, but that for Suki there was no boundary between her sexuality and the rest of human activity; sex was nothing special to her; thus Megan's rejection of sex seemed a rejection of herself. Even as a teenager she had always had difficulty befriending those she could not fuck; it had seemed to her an assumed piece of socialization, in that its absence crumbled the reason for the rest of it.
But eventually Megan reached out to her and said she would go out with her again if Suki agreed to be less forward, so she did. The oddity of her attractions was that in times of rejection she would discard such traits, then re-admit their existence at times better suited for herself. In a sense she had learned to squeeze herself into what emotions were best suited for her, albeit rarely chosen with any consideration of others.
After they finished killing another host in the area and Suki carved out their heart, Suki crouched down and took a picture of the corpse, to which Iris asked why. "Oh, Megan and I were talking last night, and she asked if I could send her a photo of any host I kill. I guess she reports on it early."
"Makes sense." said Iris.
What Megan would usually do with these photos was show them to her contacts in the police, who would work to identify the body based off of their face, then let her know where their parents lived so that she might confront them with a camera and inform them that their child is dead. This is common practice among journalists, and is generally the modal act of local journalism in America.
Eventually Megan arranged for another date between herself and Suki. When they met at the restaurant they hugged, yet Suki felt Megan's hugs were that akin to a woman afraid of catching some disease from her. But if she were not with this woman, then that meant she was alone, which meant she was humiliable compared to Iris, thus she tried to be nicer to Megan throughout the night. Still their airy nothings masqueraded as depth, such as when Megan noted her recent kills.
"They're good, right?" said Suki. "I mean, I hope it's helping you. I can take video if that would help."
"Oh, no, you've done fine." said Megan. "But you seem to take a lot of enjoyment out of killing and mangling something, don't you?"
"Well, umm, I mean, I'm a student. I have to kill people who are trying to kill me. I mean, those are violent criminals. Hosts are pretty dangerous."
"But not you."
"Not me, no. I mean, um, unless you're implying something about me."
"No, merely making interesting conversation."
"Is this about what I said last time? Because um, maybe we just misinterpreted each other. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable or anything. I mean, sometimes I just think about sex differently than some people do, but that doesn't make me a creep or something. It just makes me Suki."
"You certainly are Suki, Suki."
Suki smiled.
At the end of their date Suki tried to make herself look good for Megan, but winced at what had happened last time. Occasionally when she was to think over past events it would trigger the same emotion in her, as if her memory had no degrading nor refining element to it. She was at this situation again, and was not sure how she could act outside of herself.
"You can kiss me." said Megan.
Suki kissed her, although in a controlled way. Megan said goodbye and went back home, and Suki felt good for not asking about sex, but she did masturbate later and think about how nice Megan's lips felt. She desired sex in odd ways, stamped upon by her essential Sukiness, that she thought her body a currency to others, a commodified form of attraction and ingratiation, however much she might later internally brag to herself that it had been herself in control rather than another woman. She needed, but needed to recontextualize sexuality as a thing she created herself rather than something that could be determined or molded by others.