ENTITLED. Vocation Termination
FANDOM. Psycho Pass
LENGTH. 3,400
SETTING. First series.
DISCLAIMER. I sincerely wish.
NOTES. Quickly, write something before the crying starts!
SUMMARY. Sex is dangerous. — Akane, Kougami

She visits her Grandmother one Sunday in April, just after the new school year begins. She has just barely turned ten. Just them in the room, tea brewing in the old-style ceramic between them. Her grandmother glows at her from across the table. "Hey, Akane-chan, is there a boy you like?"

"No," Akane says firmly. She does not waste time with being coy.

"A girl?"

"No, Grandma. People don't do that anymore." What she doesn't tell her grandmother: a boy from the grade above had confessed to a girl from Akane's class the week before. She had rejected him. The boy was confined to therapy now, and the girl had been absent since Tuesday.

"Oh, my," her Grandmother sighs. She looks out the window for a long time, her lips parting gently as a cherry blossom drifts past, and falls lazily to the earth. Akane watches, too. She has never minded silence. "The times we live in," her Grandmother whispers.

This moment, in the future, will bother Akane for a long time. But now, she looks up into the old, loved face and boldly asks, "Do you miss Grandpa? Is it worth it?"

Her Grandmother, still gazing out, smiles as she always does when she thinks of her late husband. "Of course. Of course, how could I ever not? But, you know. I've kept this place inside of me open for him, just the same now as when he was alive. I like to think that one day he'll be able to fit back into it. I'm sure he will. He was a funny, irritating man. He could never leave me alone. You're already smarter than me, Akane, but here is something that age has taught me. One day you will meet someone who you just can't leave alone. Don't let go of them, no matter what. Because the space that they make inside of you, that space will never go away."

When she is thirteen Akane hears from one of her classmates that a girl from the grade just above them had given someone a blowjob, and as a result of whatever had happened, her psycho pass had shot up fifty points. When Akane thinks about it, she feels as though she is choking. She worries on the way home, imagining the diagrams she has seen in anatomy textbooks, the pictures dredged up from the internet. What she had initially assessed to be ridiculous and embarrassing takes on a new sense of violence.

She eventually confides this in her grandmother, who makes a funny face, some parts amused and some parts sad. "You know, when I was young, anybody could love anybody and you were allowed to do whatever you wanted. There were repercussions, sometimes, you had to be a little careful, but never on a state level. It was never public, this sort of thing."

She sighed, stirring the pot of curry on the stove. There were faster, less traditional ways of cooking that Akane never mentioned. "People are so rigid now," her grandmother went on, musing. "There's so much pressure to find the right person, the perfect person, and to lock everything into place. So much fear. Love shouldn't have to be that way."

"I don't think she loved him, grandma," Akane said. She picked up a knife and started slicing a freshly washed cucumber.

"Cut the slices a little thinner, please. And you're likely right, Akane-chan. Fourteen is horribly young. But not uncommon, or at least, it used to be that way. Poor girl."

By the time she is almost an adult, almost legally recognized as a citizen with sexuality, Akane has resolved to abstain from sex completely. The decision fills her with a kind of cleanness, a clarity. She is her own, self-contained unit, invaded by none, watchful of only her own body and it's functioning, her own smells, her own anatomy. What she strives for is not so much purity as it is simplicity, minimalism.

Her grandmother says, "Of course that's fine, Akane-chan. You are my only granddaughter, and I love you very much. It's your decision, not mine."

"I thought you would be disappointed in me," Akane admits. She is freshly graduated, studying now for higher education. Her grandmother tips her head to the side and laughs.

"What a silly girl. Here is what I think, Akane—that there is great joy to be found in loving another person. Of course, that doesn't always mean sex. Perhaps one day you will change your mind, perhaps not. Either way, you remain my family, and I love you.

Akane thought about her grandmother's words for a long time. A tiny voice within her wondered how other people were able to learn these secrets about love, that most dangerous weapon of all, that ruiner of minds. It was hard to imagine it as a positive—that utter lack of control, the hurtle towards another human, as equally terrified as you were, two sets of arms thrown wide to catch hold of one another.

It isn't until almost three years later, when she meets him, that Akane realizes fully how right she had been, how well placed her fears were.

At first, she convinces herself that what she feels is admiration, perhaps even fascination. He is so devastatingly different from anyone she has every met—all of them are, but Kougami especially so, in a way that she struggles to explain. He is, of course, a handsome man. There is nothing wrong with thinking that, Akane reassures herself. It is natural to desire the presences of the aesthetically pleasing, and biologically, her attraction to Kougami is ordinary, is even similar to her attraction to Karanomori and her abundant sexiness.

But.

That's not all.

She starts to feel like she needs him, and in no way she can fully describe. It's so frustrating—to be so competent, to be weapon and administrator and office worker, all at once, to do each of those things well and then spend the entire day glancing over her shoulder, wondering where he'd gone off to, the questions she'd invented for him dying somewhere inside.

He's dangerous, Akane reminds herself. She's seen his number, she's looked into his face. She knows perfectly well the darkness of his mind, his grim ability to remove himself from emotion, his arrogance in assuming judgment over others, in the place of a proven system.

"Do you want to see a trick?" he asks her, and the Dominator goes off in her hand with a flash. She jumps around, her heart frantic. He leans quietly against the wall of the firing range, watching her.

Technically, there's no real need for a firing range. The Dominators are largely automatic. Their sensors lock on to a heartbeat.

"This is a real gun," Kougami says. He shows her something that gleams silver and elegant.

"That's contraband," Akane says. Kougami shrugs at her.

"My father gave it to me when I became an inspector." He offers it, barrel towards the floor. Akane glances at the cameras. If she were doing something wrong—wouldn't the system have done something about it by now? She takes hold of the weapon, and points it towards the targets.

"What are you side-angling for?" he laughs.

"This is how they do it in the old movies," Akane defends. He moves behind her, and then leans his body lightly around her own, correcting her grip, shifting her hips.

"It's a little different from a Dominator. You don't need such a wide stance—the recoil won't be as large, because what you're firing is much smaller. This is more about precision. The most stable position is lying down—prone form—and the second is with one knee to the floor. Standing like this is the least stable for marksmanship."

Akane squints one of her eyes closed. She can feel herself wavering slightly, no matter how rigidly she holds her muscles. The human body likes to quiver. The man pressed against her from behind was probably not helping.

She swallows.

"A hand pistol isn't really used for marksmanship in the first place, though," Kougami said. "They were more designed for being able to fire quickly. Still. The best way is to take a long, slow breath in, hold it for a second, and then fire as you slowly exhale. Don't lock your elbows."

Akane sights, exhales, and fires. She can feel Kougami flinch behind her with the bang—a sudden ringing fills her ears, and for a second she wonders if it's going to last forever, if she's permanently damaged her hearing—then it fades away.

"—didn't think you'd actually pull the trigger," he says, and tone filters in on the very end of his sentence. She thinks maybe he'd sounded rueful. "I only have five bullets."

"Oh!" Akane flinches and he hastily retrieves the gun from her. "I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to waste one."

"It's fine. Let's see how you did."

He hits a button, and the paper target begins gliding towards them. "I'm impressed you're in here. Most inspectors never bother practicing with their Dominators."

Akane's eyes flicked down. "I thought a lot about what you said during training. It's a fact that in a physical fight, there's probably not much I can do. I'm not a large person—most likely, my opponent would be stronger than I am. I thought I could make sure that I had this one thing down, at the very least."

"Strength isn't everything," Kougami said, and unclipped her target. There was a hole the size of a pea punched through the paper, perhaps half an inch to the right of the target's center. "Not bad."

Akane flushed, accepting her paper, feeling as though there should have been a sticker or encouraging comment scrawled across the corner. "Thank you for showing me. I'm sure I'll never have to fire anything other than a Dominator, though."

"You never know," Kougami said, storing his weapon in a case, and returning it to his locker, both of which he locked. "Maybe the batteries will run out someday."

The first time he is rough with her in a sort business operation way, all systematic and brusque and with the assumption that she knew, and Akane keeps her mouth shut tight in case she let the truth wobble out.

His body is so hard and so beautiful that when he turns her away, both of them still so nearly fully clothed, she has to bite her lip to numb her desperate, stupid pleas of no please let me look at you and can't you take your time with me?

And she thinks afterwards that he maybe feels guilty, because he won't quite look at her but he still forces himself to speak, still forces himself to ask if she's alright, if she needs anything. She snaps her tights back into place and brushes down her skirt and for a second she thinks, she really thinks she is going to cry and how embarrassing but instead her chin rises and she remembers the wild, sexual fever dream of her grandmother's youth, the way that things used to be, when people could just have sex for a thousand different reasons, none of which were love.

Akane smiles and asks him if he's hungry, if he wants to get lunch.

And after an uncertain moment he does not quite smile back but he sort of relaxes towards her, and says, "Yes."

She checks her psycho-pass that night. Her number has risen by a solid two points. She sits down on the floor, strangely reluctant to acknowledge her furniture, and presses hard upon the thud below her breastbone. Twenty years old, and now, not a virgin. She has the feeling of doing something incredibly illegal, and yet here was the system, mandating her as clear.

Still, two points. To most people, that was nothing. To Akane—who had been exposed to some of the most brutal simulations a computer could generate during her training, and whose number had never once crawled above a .2 point raise, she had to wonder. If she slept with him again, would things continue to add up, bit by bit? Had she overestimated herself in this one matter, dabbling in a thing that was ancient and instinctive, a thing that could alter the very chemistry of her brain?—could she really say with any degree of certainty that she had held onto herself, exactly as she was before?

Before her eyes, her number wavered, and climbed up by .01.

She disengaged the scan, and threw herself back into a sprawl, studying the dark ceiling. Of course, it could never happen again.

She had never realized the sensory delight of touching another's skin, the soft pliancy under her fingers, the heat, the muscle that could be searched out below the skin—here and there, a knob of bone. It was as though she was discovering secrets just below the surface of his skin, and she had always been the sort of person who needed to know things.

In a never-specified time, a never-specified place, they come together again and again, each time leaving her reeling, each time making her ache for more of him. Her skin begins to smell like smoke. Karanomori tells Akane she walks different, and then grins. Akane watches her own psycho-pass number climb, bit by bit, which everyone else thinks is attributed to the harshness of her job—and anyway, her number was still so low. After a while, the climb slows down, then ekes out. When she reveals all of this to Kougami, he looks at her with his usual slow assessment. She interprets this as surprise—probably because she hadn't stopped, she'd kept looking for him, she'd started things or responded to them.

"I guess there's a limit to how much I can corrupt you," he says wryly, and taps off his cigarette's ash.

"I corrupted myself," Akane says primly, little nose in the air, and ignores him when he scoffs.

Her grandmother would want to know, would want to meet him. Akane keeps her mouth screwed shut. It would be just like her grandmother to disregard a man's incarceration—to raise her eyebrows towards Akane and murmur, "I always knew you'd go for troublemakers. When can you get him out for brunch?"

Horribly, this makes Akane cry.

"What is it? What's wrong?" he asks her.

She can't think of a way to tell a man like Kougami that he's trapped. He'd raise his eyebrows at her and say something quiet but reproachful, and go cool towards her like he did every time she said something really, hopelessly stupid or naïve. And that wasn't really the problem, anyway, because Akane knew—she could feel that he wasn't unfulfilled, that he believed his work had purpose, that he could be both the commander and the tracker and while this made him dangerous, volatile, it was also the thing that made her trust him, that made her look the other way as he crossed the line again, and again, and what made her follow his directions, rather than demanding he follow hers.

The real problem was, she could never take him out for brunch, she could never show him her grandmother's garden, the scars cut into the kitchen beam to track Akane's height at every birthday. The real problem was that she could never have a life with him.

How boring that was. Akane wasn't an arrogant person, but her potential was quantified, undeniable. She could do anything, and the work she had chosen was meaningful, purposeful, dangerous. But, but, here she was, imagining how this man would look in a department store, would look in pajamas, how he would look in anything other than a suit, in blue-white lighting, overworked and under-slept and caged, most of all. Caged.

But who said he wanted those things, too?

"Nothing's wrong," she told his shoulder, his skin muffling her, warm and smooth and kissable as it was. "I'm sorry."

"Do you want me to stop?"

"No."

He brushed at her cheeks. "Well, I think I have to."

She laughed a little, then stopped when he got on his knees before her and held her steady by the backs of her thighs, and she thought he looked up at her but it was hard to tell in the dark.

"You're young," he said. "I forgot."

"Like you're so old," Akane teased. Her heart was racing. She always felt too young.

"Twenty eight," he said slowly. His hands trailed over her. "You're right. I guess I forget a lot of things."

Akane shuddered.

Remember: the first time.

She can't.

Over and over again she reexamines her memory, trying to pinpoint the moment when the scales had tipped, the tension between them had shifted irrevocably. What had he said, what had she done? One minute she was telling him about some report, some software problem she was still learning her way around—(she was so young, so young)—and he had showed her how to navigate the picky computer, had showed her a few judo throws, had showed her one of the better corners of the rec center, a place nobody really came, but she could if she wanted to—if she promised to be quiet, if—

Had either of them ever asked?

Never forget who you are.

Her grandmother had said this to her, for every birthday and every heartbreak, clasping Akane's face between her dry, warm old hands, and smiling gently into her granddaughter's face. That is the secret. You are yourself, you will always be yourself, remember that I will always love you.

Nobody can ever take that away from you.

("Don't forget yourself," he'd said, which was the same thing, it was the same thing but when he said it the words clasped around her most essential organs and wrenched at them, because she realized when he said that he was going to give up everything, everything—not just because of her but of course, of course she was one of the reasons.)

Never forget who you are. Nobody can ever take that away from you.

"No, no, no," Akane whispered, staring at what others would call a crime scene, what she saw as a sacrifice, and her stomach bottomed out. The part of her that was logical, rational, and empathetic could understand what Kougami had done. She could look at Makashima's body and see Kougami's sense of duty, his inherent righteousness, that unending protective streak. She could respect, even admire this decision.

She also saw a dead man.

Behind her logical, better self, Akane was crumbling, was denying, was still begging someone, anyone, to change things, to make them different.

Nobody can ever take that from you.

True and false.

Because what happened when you accidentally gave a part of yourself away?

Her number, after he leaves, clicks up five points. For most people, this is morning traffic, this is a slap to the face, this is messing up on a date.

For Akane, this is despair. This is hollowness crowding into her, and an odd sense of satisfaction as she looks at the monitor, at this quantifiable proof that she could be damaged, that he had indeed taken something when he left. She is not broken, but she is unquestionably changed.

She refuses to even consider therapy. She doesn't need it. This is her wound.

The next time she sees her grandmother, safely nestled in the kitchen that remembered her, that was real and substantial and not even a little bit projected, Akane slumps into her tea. She says, "I think I fell in love but then he had to leave. I could never have had a life with him, anyway. I feel—I feel—"

She looks at her grandmother helplessly. The old woman smiles. She accepts. She reaches across the table and holds Akane's hand and says, gently, "That's alright, isn't it?"

Somewhere deep inside herself, Akane trembles. She swallows, and says, "Yes, it's alright."

"You'll see him again," her grandmother says. And from that same place of silent loss—Akane smiles.

"I know," she agrees.