2024-06-17: The Engineer's Solution! Koji Kabuto Gets Away With Asking A Lot Of Questions
- Log: The Engineer's Solution! Koji Kabuto Gets Away With Asking A Lot Of Questions
- Cast: Yuliana Kafim, Koji Kabuto
- Where: The Photon Power Labs
- Date: 2024-06-17
- Summary: Koji finds Yuliana after she runs out on a therapy session, and tries to help her figure out the truth herself by asking the right questions. Shockingly, he survives, and even manages to ease her troubles. (CW: Domestic violence)
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Yuliana Kafim delayed leaving the PPL for a week after her latest round of Photonic Neuromodulation Therapy finished... because Leina was able to help her admit that her wife was unhappy with her progress, and unhealthy besides. It's been difficult for her care team to speak with her about it, though -- while the diversional therapist Alectros did help her to make some attempt at a safety plan, and Dr. Kimura has been trying to help her define her boundaries, Yuliana struggles with the idea her wife could hurt her. Certainly, she doesn't want to leave. But...
... a few days ago, another visitor unexpectedly ran into Yuliana. Lucine met her like an enemy, but Yuliana didn't know who she was. Without knowing the situation, she demanded explanation for Elisa's actions -- and then explained what those actions even were. She told Yuliana what she was doing wrong, by her wife... because she was trying to help her.
Elisa may well thank Lucine for the help, but ever since, Yuliana has been sullen and withdrawn, pecking at her meals and insisting in her therapy that she's at fault. She's a thorny woman, she says -- so she just ends up stabbing her wife. (And everyone, she adds, in petulant afterthought, with Dr. Kimura noting a concerning backslide in her empathic progress. When she's so focused on her wife, there's no room in her mind to consider everyone else as more than a brief aside.) She snaps at any implication her wife is doing wrong; she insists she's the problem, and they ought to fix her.
Which might have even been progress, in another context.
She also insists she's going home tomorrow -- against Dr. Kimura's strong recommendation it wouldn't be safe. She has to, she says, and says she's done enough damage on top of it. She has to get back to her wife...
"I've already hurt her enough," she says, dismally, to Dr. Kimura. "Just stabbing her and stabbing her..."
"Yuliana," Dr. Kimura says, "do you remember what I said about Ms. Azul?" The staff of the PPL identified her, for her, when she finally managed to mention her suit. It was a better proposition than letting Yuliana reduce her to that girl, and they assessed the threat of telling her to be low, since her wife already knows.
"It doesn't matter if she didn't know why I was here," Yuliana scowls. "That just means she's more honest. You're just telling me what I want to hear... you realise I've just wrapped you all around my finger, don't you?" She sinks into her chair, arms wrapped about her midsection. "... idiot."
"It's not just that she didn't know why you were here," Dr. Kimura points out, patient, "but that she only knows you from rumours and fear. You effectively created a reputation for yourself, Yuliana... and all Ms. Azul could draw on, when she spoke with you, was that reputation and her own experiences. Really -- what she told you reflects more on her. Those are the things she found useful in understanding herself and her relationship... and you must understand that your relationships are different, Yuliana."
"Didn't stop her from reducing my marriage down to a cautionary tale!" Yuliana snaps, shoulders tensing.
"The advice she gave you," Dr. Kimura says, firmly, "was for a relationship which was not abusive like yours is. In a healthier relationship, the blame of hurt is shared between parties, because neither side means to hurt the other. But you are being hurt deliberately, Yuliana. When the hurt is deliberate, the fault lies with the person who inflicts that hurt. When you're ready to revisit the way you interact with the world at large, this thorn metaphor might suit you better, but right now you're using it to take the blame of Dr. Kafim's actions onto yourself."
Yuliana claps her hands over her ears. "Shut up!" She cries, shaking her head wildly. "Shut up, shut up, shut up!" She stands, and barges from the room, yelling -- "I'M GOING!"
It's not the first time she's run out of therapy, since that encounter. "All these things still out there... maybe I left the field too early," Noburu Kimura sighs, and doesn't follow her. He can guess where she's going. Just zoom out a little --
-- and there she is. Of course she runs straight to the gym, because the punching bag there is designed to be punched. (She can at least be that considerate.) Unfortunately, it wasn't quite designed to be punched by Yuliana, so a long trickle of sand has begun running down the chain locking it to the ground. (Not, thankfully, up the chain connecting it to the ceiling.) She didn't stop to put gym clothes on, of course, or even take off the denim vest covering her SNAFU ZAKU band shirt... but she's too agitated to be bothered by a little thing like sweat. So long as her purple scarf remains secure around her neck, it's fine.
"Rrrrgh!" She growls, as she plants one fist in the bag, and then the other. It's a good thing it is secured tightly -- and remarkably tightly -- because it's not difficult to imagine her punching a flimsier setting apart. The bag is certainly suffering, but... it's still mostly intact, and that's saying something. "AarrrrrrAAAAGHH!"
Well, she's certainly not difficult to find, yelling like that.
<Pose Tracker> Koji Kabuto has posed.
The fact that Yuliana has been in the gym yelling angrily for some time has had a knock-on effect - the lab staff are deliberately avoiding it so as to not become the new subject of ire of someone who can keep up with Testuya Tsurugi's workout regime. Perhaps you'd need to be some kind of idiot to deliberately walk into the blast radius.
... So, obviously, Koji is the one who enters, dressed for a workout rather than for work and heading over to something that resembles a cross between a rowing machine and an open version of the Hover Pilder cockpit. Rather than immediately clamber into it, though, he perches himself on the machine, watching Yuliana bully that poor reinforced punching bag. His eyes track upwards to the bolt securing the bag to the ceiling, then back down to her.
"Rough day, huh," he ventures, carefully.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
On the one hand, Yuliana hasn't directly assaulted anyone in the Labs yet.
On the other hand, why would anyone want to be lucky number one?!
Oh, hi, Koji.
Yuliana is too wrapped up in beating up that poor punching bag -- which is made for punching so punching it DOESN'T COUNT -- to notice him coming in, which might be his first hint that she's addled. She was a black ops agent; situational awareness was one of her essential skills. She usually knows what's going on around her...
... unless she's doing quite poorly, because she's never been the most stable person.
Her head snaps over when he speaks up, though, at least -- her ears still work. (Despite all the yelling.) Her lips curl up over one too many teeth -- she has a fang, there on the right side of her face, opposite her scarring -- but after a moment, she takes a shuddering breath, dropping the tension from her muscles as her shoulders sink down.
"Dr. Kimura is saying awful things about my wife again," she sighs, and at least her volume is more normal now. "He said she's hurting me on purpose. I don't want to listen to nonsense like that!"
(Elisa is glad when she doesn't listen to heresy, after all.)
<Pose Tracker> Koji Kabuto has posed.
"Awful things, huh?" Koji repeats, drumming his fingers against the side of the machine. His brow furrows as Yuliana elaborates. He's aware that matters regarding her treatment have grown much more complex in the recent months, but in the interest of respecting her privacy he's left the situation mostly up to Sayaka and Kimura to handle.
"Not wanting to hear this stuff is pretty normal," he says. "You're like 'obviously the doctor is wrong how could my wife who loves me be deliberately hurting me?' Is the problem that he's saying it, or that you're listening?"
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
"Yes!" That is to say, it's both a problem that Dr. Kimura would say it, and that Yuliana would listen to it. "It's stupid," and she's pouting, as she says it.
She sinks down, sitting cross-legged beside the punching bag, poking sullenly at the sand leaking out from the seams. "I broke your shit," she mutters, sullenly. Maybe it was going to be an apology, before it crossed over the asshole centre of her brain and came out as sulking instead, but she can at least recognise the damage.
"While I'm here, my wife is gallivanting off to go appear in other women's mirrors to try and figure out why I'd abandon her," Yuliana explains, still quite sulky. "People she'd left alone for a while, I suppose... well, I never asked that girl when her machine was claimed, so maybe it was all much more recent. I don't know. She was too busy blaming me for it," Yuliana scowls, bitter at the injustice. "But... since I encouraged my Elisa to connect more with the world, she... of course she'd ask the world why I would leave her alone like that. It's a question that would bother anyone."
Somewhere, buried in Yuliana's petty jealousy and concern for her wife's loneliness, she's buried the lede:
Yuliana didn't come home, so Elisa went out to bother other people for answers. People she'd apparently hurt... before.
<Pose Tracker> Koji Kabuto has posed.
"Eh. We haven't developed a bag that can survive a full round with Tetsuya yet. Infinite stress tolerance isn't a thing, even for Super Alloy Z," Koji points out. "As long as it breaks before the brackets do and we aren't digging you out from under plaster and concrete, it's fine."
After all, that would require them dragging Yuliana down to their medical wing to expose her to more doctors. That would be the worst possible outcome.
He walks over, squatting down next to Yuliana. "You know, that's odd. If she had a problem with you staying here longer than planned, why would she go bother somebody else instead of confronting us?"
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
"Oh, a little concrete never hurt anyone," Yuliana says, but your experiences are not universal, Yuliana.
(Besides, she's overexaggerating her capacity to withstand blows to the head. She's not invincible; she'd just say she was.)
When Koji comes down to her level, she looks over to him, shoulders sinking as she slumps forward. "She doesn't have a problem with it," Yuliana says, but there's a frustrated whining tear to the edge of her voice which makes it a more complicated statement. "Sure, she thought some of the things they were saying were unnecessary, she was glad I didn't entertain their stupid ideas, but... you know, that girl, that -- that Lucine, she told me how lonely my Elisa was! She questioned our love, she used it as a cautionary tale... but she said that I was all made of thorns and stabbing my wife, too. Of course I was terribly upset... I rang her at once to apologise... but when I said I'd come home, she told me to stay until tomorrow, like we'd discussed."
She pokes at the sand, sullenly. "Because I said it was important... and she wanted me to have everything I needed. If she had a problem with it -- why would she tell me to stay?"
Perhaps it's because Yuliana shakes her head, and insists: "She cares about me. I was frightened when I thought she might have sent someone to find me, but... but it shouldn't have scared me. She would've just wanted me to be supported..."
And in a way, it is an answer to Koji's question.
This isn't about them.
<Pose Tracker> Koji Kabuto has posed.
"I'm sure," Koji replies deadpan as Yuliana waves away his concerns about concrete falling on her.
"She doesn't have a problem with it, except that she went out of her way to seek out someone else and tell her at length how lonely she was, in a way that made Lucine come looking for you to tell you you were hurting her, frightening you as well?"
Koji frowns. "And then when you call her to apologise she tells you to stay?"
He lets that hang in the air, before volunteering: "... Does that add up?"
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
"No, she -- she just -- she wanted to know why that Lucine was willing to let her man out of her sight if she loved him so much. She -- she was trying to figure out how to be okay with it," Yuliana insists, one hand curling over the other as she worries at her wedding ring.
"And I didn't even do anything to her," Yuliana adds, impressively adding another five points to her sulk score. "I didn't even know her name, for God's sake! The Doctor had to tell me what it was. Tch... I guess she wasn't looking for me, though, even though I thought she'd come for me. She... just found me." Because Yuliana was crying. She carefully elides that part.
Complaining about Lucine handily means that Yuliana can avoid calculating Elisa's reaction, too -- for a few moments, anyway.
"But..." She sighs, at length. "But it doesn't make sense to me," she admits. "It was always such a burden on her that I was here... but when I wanted to come back... we had to stick to the plan. I guess I don't understand because I'm so selfish... I just can't understand how she'd sacrifice so much, just so I can get help."
<Pose Tracker> Koji Kabuto has posed.
Again, Koji thinks, that's something Elisa could have reached out to him or Sayaka about, given their at least lukewarm relations with the Silent Castle. His brow furrows again.
"It's... hard, trying to figure out how other people are feeling, and why they feel that," he agrees. "Took me years to learn properly." How does he put this in a way Yuliana's past helps her approach?
"I know you did a lot of... wetwork," he begins, carefully. "How would you deal with a target that the REA didn't want dead, just discredited?"
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
"I don't get it," Yuliana huffs, all stormclouds, when Koji talks about how people feel. But --
"Oh, that's easy!" Yuliana brightens immediately when Koji gives her a problem to solve, because she's not just a wetworker, she's an engineer wetworker. "So first you hack into their online accounts and have them follow someone it's inconvenient for them to follow -- like the old Australian Minister of Finance? Remember him? Yeah, Letda signed him up to follow some extremist Blue Cosmos material, and then we just used an account mill to 'break the story' about his ties to Britannian authoritarianism. He couldn't prove his account had been compromised, and the way he tried was to admit he accessed them on insecure devices -- that's the trick, with this guy he loved posting two am To-Witters so it was dead plain he was just using his personal phone, but of course he'd always denied it until he thought it would help him. But we spun that story with some online rumours about how he was leaking secrets through his personal devices, and suddenly it didn't even matter if he really had ties, he'd admitted to enough to sink him!"
Well, on the bright side, she's smiling again. That's... good? Is that good? That's probably good.
<Pose Tracker> Koji Kabuto has posed.
"Damn. So that's what happened to Lesdale." It was years ago, and he can't quite hide how it stings that Yuliana picked an OCU official as her example... but it works. "You pushed him into a place where you had him coming and going thanks to exploiting an obvious weakness, and no matter what he tried to defend himself with he was playing into your hands, huh?"
He weighs up whether or not to continue speaking, and opts to wait and see where Yuliana takes his own summation of her explanation.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Of course Yuliana picked an OCU official as her example! She doesn't expect Koji to keep up with Britannian politics!
"That's right," Yuliana nods, still quite animated. "Or -- I suppose I'll have to explain this one -- the old head of Birmingham Press? Don't be fooled by the name, it's Britannian, they're based in Pendrago now. Anyway, she was just too critical of the State's apparatus, but unfortunately it's harder to make foreign members of the press disappear, particularly if they're high-profile. So instead, we went with the culture and sent a disguised Letda in there to seduce her. Of course it didn't go anywhere -- which was a relief for him," she asides, "he's quite gay -- but the photographs we got of the implications were more than enough to cast suspicions on her fidelity. From there, it was easy to tear down her character, and eventually we wove that around to her being incompetent and having slept her way to her position. At the same time, we were building up the opposition we'd prefer to have in the role -- someone much friendlier -- so that when the time came for the vote of no-confidence and subsequent appointment, we didn't even have to be in the room to make sure things went our way. Funnily enough, the last I heard of that woman, she'd thrown herself off a bridge? Apparently she couldn't live with being such a terrible person."
She grins, canting her head, and summarises cheerfully: "... you see, it's all about lying! A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth, because people think that if they've heard it often, there must be something to it. Turn the world against someone, and they'll even turn against themselves, eventually."
Zero self-reflection on that one.
<Pose Tracker> Koji Kabuto has posed.
If Koji's expression is a little plastic - well, Yuliana just described a woman's suicide with the same tone of voice as someone else might exult over a piece of fine carpentry or architecture. Not for the first time, he wonders if they're doing the right thing sheltering her.
As ever, he holds onto his father's dying wish as his lodestar.
"If someone was conducting such an operation against you... what would you look out for?"
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Yuliana would point out, of course, that he asked. She does pick up on his stiffening expression, though, and puffs out her cheeks. "And obviously that was bad," she adds, with a distinct hint of obligation. "The Republic wasn't having us do good things. I was just good at my job, okay?! Of course it's awful she drowned herself." She adds, grumbling, "... but the Major was happy about it... and Elisa was quite charmed by the story, you know."
Some people appreciate her passion, Koji.
She rests her elbow on her knee, and her chin on the heel of her hand, breathing out. "But if it was against me... haha, you're not building a case, are you?" She asides, chuckling, a cover for her nervousness. It's more vulnerable when it's her vulnerability. She shuts her eyes, as she says: "... but that's where I'd start. You know, the... I wasn't always a... I did make a lot of people's lives worse, back then. And... it's fairly well-publicised that I was... an experiment. It would be easy to guess I'd find it difficult to change... so I'd just seed the idea that I couldn't. It wouldn't be hard to get that idea into my own head, that nothing would ever change. It's more comforting, isn't it? Being immutable. It's less effort. And if I can get everyone else believing that, too... I'd just abandon myself before the rest of the world could get to me. At least it would be under my control, then."
She doesn't sound so cheerful, any more. "... if it's someone like me, I'd just use public opinion to get in my head. If you can turn someone against themself, that's always going to be the most effective option."
<Pose Tracker> Koji Kabuto has posed.
"I'm just trying to help you get it all sorted out in your head," Koji says, managing a more genuine smile here. "Like you said - nothing makes sense to you right now, right? I bet you feel guilty for having been frightened, at all?"
He sighs. "It's easy to say you 'shouldn't' have been scared, but... the fact of the matter is you were scared. If we can figure out why, then... maybe that'll help you going forward."
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
"Yeah," Yuliana sighs, her shoulders sinking. "I guess... mm..."
She keeps her eyes closed. She'd rather not face it. "I... felt differently about it, before that girl, that -- Lucine -- found me. Staying here, I mean. I was scared... but... I was scared because there were things I couldn't discount. I felt... fragile. But there were a lot of things I didn't tell Elisa that I ought have, for a little while. She felt so neglected, she even poured more attention into the children than me... like, when they found out my bracelet was a beacon with a medical monitoring chip inside, I sent her a message saying how confused I was. But -- but that I loved her. But I didn't tell her why I was so upset... and she didn't reply. She was too busy. I was -- quite beside myself, then. I wasn't thinking straight. I even said too much to Yaka... but I didn't tell my wife why I was so upset, that night, when I called her. I just -- I just said it was confusing. I don't know."
A moment's pause, as her teeth worry at her calloused lower lip.
"Then... then that happened, and... I resented having to be here, when I just wanted to go home and fix it. I started telling Elisa more again -- and my mother, too. She said I should make peace with Elisa. I didn't even want to eat... which is strange, because I enjoy food, most of the time. I guess I've been storming out of sessions more, too... like this."
She pauses, and repeats, again, haplessly: "I don't know."
<Pose Tracker> Koji Kabuto has posed.
Koji's image of Yuliana is someone who is immensely confident, grinning and daring the whole world to come and get her. Seeing her like this is... quite the sea change, and yet not that surprising, somehow.
The tracking bracelets... the lack of contact... but... "You didn't want to eat?" That is the part he focuses on - he adjusts his own position so that he's cross-legged and facing her. "Because you felt like you should be there, and not here?"
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
"Yeah," Yuliana nods, eyes still tightly shut. "And it's not that the food was bad -- the cafeteria here is really quite nice -- it's just..."
Her lips press together, tightly, too. "Mama took her side," she says, quietly. "Even a stranger... was mad at me. I just kept thinking -- Elisa didn't have to send her -- because anyone could see it, with just the barest hint of her side. I must have just been manipulating all of you... I do regret that." And she does sound legitimately remorseful over the idea of having pulled the wool over everyone's eyes; the concept of gratitude isn't totally alien to her.
"It's my fault," she adds, softly. "It's obvious it's my fault."
<Pose Tracker> Koji Kabuto has posed.
"Hold on." Koji frowns. "That doesn't add up, either. Why would you manipulate us to help you confront these feelings you have about Elisa? What do you gain from that?"
Her mother took her side, Yuliana says. "... What does your mother's culture say about how a married couple should treat each other?" He ventures. "The Republic is pretty traditionalist about 'staying together', isn't it?"
"... You shouldn't blame yourself for how you feel," he points out. "I don't think you're the kind of person who would decide to antagonise someone she cares about for no reason. Bad reasons, maybe... but I think you value those connections too much to discard them on purpose, because I used to be that kind of person."
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
"I... I don't know... sympathy? I'm always too hungry for sympathy." It's adjacent to insight, anyway. It might become real insight, over the next year of work.
Right now, though, it's mostly another weapon she can turn on herself on Elisa's behalf.
(Not that Elisa would ever want that.)
She frowns, ducking her head as her shoulders curl forward. "Mama made sure to assess my wife herself," she says, quietly. "She's sure Elisa won't hit me. Not even to correct me. She says it's normal for things to be like this... when you marry a forceful personality like that. Like how ayah was always yelling at the television, I guess... but of course we have to stay together. She even said -- the whole world hates me. If I didn't have a strong wife like my Elisa, I'd surely have been executed, by now. I just have to make peace in my heart... that's all."
She takes a shaky breath. "I don't like discarding them," she says. "It -- it happens -- all the time -- but I don't like it. Sometimes I have to -- because it's all ruined anyway, so I've got to get out ahead of it, but... but not with her. Not with my wife. She's the most loyal woman I ever met... the most faithful... the way I've been acting, I don't even deserve her," and her hand shifts, lifting so she can bury her face in it, instead. She can feel her eyes getting damp, and she knows Koji could see that, even if she's refusing to look.
"Oh," she gasps, and swallows, trying her best not to make a fool of herself again. "Does it -- ever get better? I don't -- I don't see how -- it does, Koyan. Not with me. Maybe I'm just... not like you."
Elisa's said it so many times, after all.
<Pose Tracker> Koji Kabuto has posed.
"I don't know about that," Koji replies. "You're hotheaded, stubborn, and willing to throw down with a kikaiju regardless of personal safety, so we're not that different." He grins. "Our lives just got... pulled in very different directions." He shrugs. "That doesn't mean you can't change."
"If it helps any," he admits, "I used to walk out of therapy a lot, too. The main reason I decided to stick it out was realising that I didn't understand myself and why my emotions were such a mess all the time."
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Yuliana does have to laugh, at that summation, though it's a tad choked -- coming out of her throat at this particular moment. "A..ahahaha..."
They just got pulled in different directions... huh?
She lowers her hand and opens her eyes, finally, so she can look at Koji again. (It's a little strange, now they lack pupils, but she's definitely looking at him.) "I do wish I understood that," she says. "They -- um -- they give me sheets for that, like --" she pauses, and digs through her pocket for a worksheet, unfolding it and handing it over.
"Like this," she says, and it's a page from a DBT skills manual she's tried to fill out on how her thoughts might be distorted. The entry she's written goes like this:
Thought: 'I'm a terrible wife.'
Cognitive distortion: All-or-nothing thinking
Objective response: 'I'm a good wife most of the time, and Elisa will forgive me when I slip up. If Elisa was mad at me, she would tell me. I haven't done anything wrong.'
... it's an effort, anyway.