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Elizabeth touches him like they’re two different species, which maybe they are. She knew what she was doing a few minutes ago, and an hour before that, which makes her curiosity even funnier now. She’s playing with his hair like it’s the fronds of an anemone in one of those open tanks at the aquarium. Yukari’s downstairs studying, Fuuka’s at Natsuki’s, Junpei and Ken are walking Koromaru. Sanada and Kirijo are out together doing something that was probably Kirijo’s idea of a distraction. Aragaki’s dead. Makoto’s alive. He’s a few months shy of seventeen and he had no idea sex could be this good.
“Remarkable,” she’s telling him. It’s both charming and bizarre that she says it in the same way she does when he brings her a seashell, or a Jack Frost doll, or a collection of energy drinks. He thinks she has to be older than she looks in a way he can’t understand and she still finds wonder in everything. She’s not like him at all. “You do this often?”
The giggle escapes him, uncharacteristic. “No.”
“Really?” He shakes his head. “Why not?”
He can’t think of a great answer, here and now. “…It’s not always like this.” He thinks some more. “And I have other things to do.” He rolls his eyes. “I guess.”
“Like attending school,” Elizabeth ventures. “Or going to various culinary establishments.” She sighs happily. “There are so many sensory pleasures in the world.”
Only someone who spends most of their time with Igor would describe school as a ‘sensory pleasure’. “How about you?” How does he even say this. “I mean, do you…?”
“This is very new for me.”
He gives her a meaningful look. “…Really?”
“Ah,” Elizabeth says, taking his point. “It is an ancient dance. One cannot live in the gods’ halls—swim in the sea of souls, into which flow the dreams of the living—without knowing the steps.” The dreams of the living. Her blue dress on the floor of his dorm room, her musical voice filling up the usually empty air. No one comes in here, no one ever before. No one real. He wakes in the Dark Hour and doesn’t feel real himself. “You know this too, don’t you? Many champions of life—” She’s running one delicate hand down from his neck to his chest, slowly, thoughtfully. “—of that hunger from which life springs, and so on—many of their shadows walk in yours. Perhaps that’s why you are such a talented dancer.”
“I don’t know,” Makoto says.
He’s trying to say that more, instead of I don’t care.
She’s looking at him like she’s a museum exhibit, like she’s thinking of pulling a heist. He stares at the ceiling. They left the lights on. His bed is small enough they wouldn’t both fit if they weren’t this close, close enough he can hear her heart beat and wonder why she was made this way. Why they both were. A few floors up from here and months ago he felt something tear its way out of him, shriek something to the moon and wait for an answer, and he’s been waiting since then. But for what?
“Are you sad?”
“…huh?” Elizabeth’s strange golden eyes meet his—inquisitive, not worried. He tells her the truth. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Sometimes you seem far away.”
“I don’t mean to be,” he says, and this is also true. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she says. “Sometimes I’m far away, too.”
“…What do you do?” he asks. “When I don’t see you.” Elizabeth shrugs. “…Just wait? That sounds boring.”
“Time is different for us,” she tells him.
“Like it is in Tartarus?”
“A little, though—” She sniffs. “I prefer the Velvet Room to that place. I never did like climbing stairs…though, maybe if one were to install a slide at the top? An exciting ride.”
“What’s at the top?”
“I don’t know.”
“...You live on an elevator.”
“I live between floors,” Elizabeth corrects him. “not on any of them. You have a destination. I do not. This is how it is meant to be.”
This is how it should be, Aragaki says, bleeding out in Sanada’s arms at a nameless crossroads. Pharos, in this room, bright blue eyes that look like his own: The end is coming. “Don’t say that.”
“Oh…?”
Elizabeth draws closer to him then, her body curling around his. Not protective, not possessive. Pleased. She likes when he contradicts her. She likes forceful people, he knows now, even though he got to know her by fulfilling her requests. He’s almost positive she can fight, that she could wreck him in seconds if she wanted but she doesn’t think that would be as fun as this. And she’s right.
“You don’t know what’s going to happen,” Makoto says. “You can go anywhere you want.”