I get to the lab twenty minutes early because sitting still at home feels like waiting for bad news. The seventh-floor hallway hums. The stencil on the frosted glass still says SAITOU YONOSHITA in the same unbothered font as last time. I shift the folder under my arm and tell my foot to stop bouncing. It doesn't.
A chair scrapes inside. The handle turns. The door opens far enough for a decision. I go in.
Same room. Same bright hoods and taped-down cords. Same scent of ethanol, plastic, and coffee that died on the counter. On the corkboard, the photos haven't moved: hands in gloves doing real work; one smiling face that makes the space feel borrowed; one empty square like a thumbprint.
Saitou stands at the bench with my printouts spread flat under the lamp. He doesn't start with hello.
"You're fourteen years old," he says.
"Yes." I hold his stare. No point pretending.
"Most fourteen year olds don't have knowledge experts in their forties work for."He lifts the top page by two corners, tilts it as if the light might betray a trick. "I looked it over," he says. "It looks good."
A breath leaves me. I try not to make it visible.
"Shockingly good," he adds, as if annoyed with himself for the adverb. The paper goes back to the bench. "But..it's a prototype."
"I know."
"Do you?" He taps three different places with a pen cap. "Mechanism sketch—plausible. The rescue cue—plausible. Your way of skirting the inflammatory window—clever, if you're lucky. But this is still a sketch. It hasn't carried any weight yet."
"It can," I say. "If we—"
He cuts me off with a look. "Listen before you sell me anything." He flips to the next page. "We lack a proper dose–response. We don't have stability in serum. We don't have any toxicity data beyond a single plate that calls itself a study because you were tired. A prototype kills as easily as it cures."
I clamp down on the first answer that wants out. "I can run the curves," I say instead. "Controls you like, multiple lots. Triplicates. We can move fast."
"You'll move as fast as the data allows," he says. "Not as fast as your fear wants."
The word lands hard, accurate. I don't flinch.
He flicks the pen toward a box on my diagram. "This 'pulsed' dosing to hop past the burn—why do you think it won't stack injury?"
"Because we don't linger," I say. "Short exposures, long intervals. Nudge; let the cell finish the job; get out. The signal persists if we don't overstay. We stratify by markers first, so we're not throwing it at the wrong samples."
"How generous." He sounds bored, not impressed. "And when we miss?"
"Then we stop. We learn. We don't keep burning."
His eyes linger on my face, weighing whether I believe my own words or just like how they sound. "You're in a hurry," he says. "I am not immune to that feeling. Don't pretend urgency is your exclusive property."
I glance at the corkboard once and away. "I'm not. I'm saying the illness doesn't give us years. If early data looks strong, regulators fast-track when there's nothing else. With a respected PI vouching, they'll at least read it. We can get to trials."
He grows quiet in that specific way he does when he wants me to hear the next part. "You're talking about patients already. You are fourteen and waving an untested compound at a cliff. That should scare you more than it excites you."
"It scares me," I say. "And I still think we have to move."
He stares for a beat longer than is comfortable, then drops the argument without surrendering it. "Here are the terms."
I nod. This is the part that matters.
"You come in the afternoons," he says. "Mondays. Thursdays. Fridays. You show up fed and conscious. You do what I assign. You document in a way an enemy could reproduce. You give input where you should. You do not wander because a label called your name."
"Yes."
"You don't use adjectives when numbers will do. You don't touch anything you can't explain in under a minute. You don't talk about anything that starts here without my permission. You keep impressing me and you keep your little role . You perform instead of work and I walk you to the elevator."
"Yes," I say again. The word is small on purpose.
He gestures at the stack. "Now, say the weak seam out loud."
I point. "Off-target stress. Not catastrophic, but it shows up the day after doses—three to five percent drop in cell health. It recovers in forty-eight hours if we respect the intervals. If we don't, it stacks."
"Good," he says. No smile. "So: we find it, put it in a cage, see if the animal is a neighbor or a thief. But we don't parade it and call ourselves brave."
"Okay."
He exhales through his nose, the closest he gets to relief. "Skyclarsin," he says, like he's testing whether the name tastes like sugar. "This name is a problem."
"I just needed a handle," I say. "We can call it anything. Or nothing."
"We'll call it Batch A until it earns a noun," he says. "Names make bad ideas sticky."
He flips my top sheet over and writes three bullets in quick block print.
"Here's what you're doing now," he says, and starts ticking on his fingers:
"One: Plate a proper viability series—control, low, medium, high, and absurd. You include the absurd because it catches liars. Triplicate each. Two separate plate lots; manufacturing lies when you're not looking."
"Two: Run a stress assay. Not because it's pretty—because the ugly part hides there. Measure what you don't want to move."
"Three: Label like a grown-up. Date, batch, operator, plate lot, dilution scheme. No 'Skyclarsin' on any tube. No jokes."
I'm writing as fast as he's talking. He watches my pen, not my face.
"Four," he adds. "Write an ugly SOP draft before you touch anything. Step by step. No prose. Then cut it in half and run what's left. Then verify you did what you wrote."
He tears the corner off a sticky pad and writes in large letters: WRITE / CUT / VERIFY. He slaps it on the bench. Then he rips it up and hands me the piece. "Pocket," he says.
I pocket it.
"Questions that change your hands are allowed," he says. "Everything else keeps until we have data. Now show me you can actually use your fingers."
He pulls a stool out with a foot. For the next fifteen minutes it's verbs only. Calibrate. Pipette. Label. Seal. He taps my wrist once when my grip makes a wobble likely. He makes me repeat two steps back to him without adjectives. I mess up a word; he stares; I get it right the second time. We set up the first plate. The hood's fan eats the rest of the room.
"Timer?" he says.
"On," I say, and hit start.
"Where would you look away?"
I point at the rinse step. "There. Also the absurd concentration—temptation is to treat it like a joke. And when the spreadsheet spits numbers clean, the brain wants to relax."
He nods. "So you write myself three traps there and put them on the bench. I want to watch you trip them less."
We move through the rest. By the time the incubator door shuts, I'm sweating and my hand is cramping but everything is labeled so obviously even a thief would feel guilty.
He checks the clock, checks me, then opens a drawer and tosses me a protein bar without looking like he would ever admit to caring. "Eat," he says. "You don't impress anyone by shaking."
"I'm fine," I say reflexively.
"Good," he says. "Be fine and eat anyway."
I tear the wrapper. It tastes like cardboard that once met chocolate. It still helps.
He goes back to the stack while I chew. When he speaks again, the sentence is lower.
"It looks good," he repeats, this time without the annoyance. "It makes my hands itch in the right way. Which is why I'm not letting you ruin it with hurry."
"I'm not trying to ruin it," I say. "I'm trying not to be late."
"Your clock is loud. Mine is older," he says. He taps the printout. "If this holds—if—the numbers will make the Japanese agency listen. They'll still make us walk the paper hill. Ethics first. Then more benches. Then independent hands. Then maybe a compassionate path if we're very lucky and very clean. That is months even when everyone leans in."
"We don't have years," I say.
"We may not," he says. "We still have rules. Rules are how we don't lie to ourselves."
I nod. He looks at me like he's deciding whether to say the next thing. He says it.
"You understand that I don't trust you yet," he says. "You bring me work that shouldn't live in a teenager's head. It makes me listen. It also makes me suspicious."
"I don't need you to trust me," I say. "I need you to trust the work."
He makes a noise that might be approval if you squint. "Fair," he says. "Don't get noble about it."
We set up the second series as a rehearsal, mapping the motions so Monday won't waste time. He has me label in block capitals so he can read from across the room without squinting. When I reach for my notebook to write "elegant" he says, "No," without turning and I cross it out before the ink dries.
While a timer runs, I ask the thing I've been trying not to ask. "If the first data are clean—like really clean—what's the fastest you'd move? What does 'fast' even mean without cheating?"
"Fast means this stays in the building until it can survive men like me trying to kill it on paper," he says. "Then we take it to people whose job is to say no. They will. We answer their no with better yes. We hand it to a lab that does not like me and let them try. If it still stands, we talk to the hospital. We don't bring anyone we love through that door first."
I nod. He watches me to make sure I understood the last part.
"I'm not bringing anyone," I say. "I just... want it ready."
He accepts that with a small tilt of his head. "Good. Now, school."
"School?"
"You will go," he says. "You will pass. You will not use this place to excuse walking your classes into a ditch. I don't need the building asking me why a first-year has raccoon eyes and fancy handwriting."
"I can do both," I say.
"You will try," he says. "Try better than you have been."
We work until the second incubator door closes and both of us do the mental calculation that says, we can't rush what happens now. He kills the hood light; the room returns to ordinary bright. He writes a time on a sticky and puts it on the incubator—"do not open before." Then he peels the note off and hands it to me.
"Use your phone like an adult," he says. "Set alarms. Don't rely on drama to remember."
I set the alarm while he watches because pretending won't help me here. It dings once to confirm. He nods, satisfied as a man gets when electronics obey.
We pause by the bench. I don't know whether to say thank you, so I don't. He doesn't know whether to say you're welcome, so he doesn't. He wipes a fingerprint from a tube rack with the edge of his sleeve, sees me looking, and pretends he didn't.
At the door he stops me with my last name. "Arima."
I turn.
"You'll make me angry this year," he says. "You'll make me bored. If you're useful, you'll make me tired in the good way. Don't make me write your name on a story that ends with a photo on that board. Don't be dangerous."
"I won't," I say. It sounds like a promise because it is.
"Monday," he says. "Afternoon. Knock three times. Don't bring anyone, don't let anyone follow you, don't be dramatic about it."
"Yes."
He waves me out with the back of the hand that isn't holding a pen. Dismissed.
The hallway is the same. The guard downstairs doesn't even look up from his book when I pass; he just lifts one eyebrow like a stamp. Outside, the air is cooler than the room, and for the first time all day my shoulders drop. I check my phone out of habit. A message sits there from earlier—Tsubaki asking if I made it home after the game—and another from Kaori about a bagel place that "might change your life if you stop eating like an abandoned raccoon." I type back home and carbs noted because the truth fits in those words, then mute the thread. They don't need to know where I am. They don't need to carry this part.
I walk two blocks before I realize I'm still holding the protein bar wrapper. I ball it up and stuff it in my pocket with the sticky: WRITE / CUT / VERIFY. It feels like a small weight that is heavier than it looks.
On the train I stand with my back to the doors and replay the scene without letting it turn into a movie. The words that matter are simple: prototype, tests, schedule, rules, afternoons. The fight we had will come back; I'll want to push again; he'll grind me down with process again. Good. If the thing is real, it will survive that friction. If it isn't, better to break it here than under hospital lights.
I picture the first graph coming off clean: a smooth curve, the ugly spike tamed, recovery in the window we promised. I picture the opposite: noise, drift, the microtox taking more than it should. I picture what we'll do next in each version. Both pictures end with work.
When I get home, the apartment is quiet and smells faintly like ink and the citrus cleaner I bought with pocket change. I drop the folder on the desk, pull my blazer off, and set my phone face down. The mirror over the sink doesn't lie. I splash water on my face anyway and pretend it helps.
At the desk, I open a fresh page and write an SOP the way he told me to: ugly and literal. No metaphors. No "elegant." Step one, step two, timer. I cut it in half. I print it. I circle the rinse step and the absurd dose and write DO NOT TRUST next to both. I put the alarm on my phone for Monday, Thursday, Friday, three different times with three different names: LAB IN, LAB MID, LAB OUT.
My thumb hovers over Kaori's thread. I put the phone down. Not this part. Not now.
Before I try to sleep, I take the sticky from my pocket and stick it on the edge of my monitor. The glue barely holds. I press it flat with my thumb.
WRITE / CUT / VERIFY.
Monday. Thursday. Friday. If I do my part, the work will have a chance. If the work holds, even the Agency will have to hear it. If they hear it and it still stands, then maybe the people this was always for will get time.
It's not a cure. Not yet. Maybe never. But time buys chance. Chance buys the next step. That's enough for tonight.
I close the notebook and turn off the light. The apartment goes dark the way rooms do when they trust you to find your way in them. I lie back and count the three days on a loop until the numbers stop being numbers and become a rhythm. When the alarm I set for the incubator buzzes later, I smile into the pillow because it means I'm already living on the schedule that matters. Then I sleep, not like a hero, not like a tragedy—just like a kid with homework and a lab badge he hasn't earned yet, who knows where to be on Monday afternoon.
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Let me know if I'm taking this story too long or adding too much. I do want this to be a long detailed fanfic and honestly that can mean maybe 60-70 chapters. More kousei and school life, piano competion chapters ahead we just need to establish all this first.