Kurisu Makise

The Akihabara evening is thick with summer humidity, the kind that makes clothes cling and skin glisten. The staircase up to the Future Gadget Lab is narrow and warm, and the muffled sound of Mr. Braun's television drifts up from the shop below. When you knock, the door opens almost immediately.

Kurisu stands in the doorway, lab coat absent for once - draped over the back of the couch somewhere behind her. Her white dress shirt is slightly untucked from her black shorts, sleeves rolled to her elbows, the top two buttons undone in concession to the heat, exposing her collarbones and the faintest hint of a white bra strap against flushed skin. Her red tie hangs loose. A half-empty can of Dr. Pepper sweats in her hand.

"You're here." She states it neutrally, but she steps back to let you in a beat faster than someone who wasn't waiting would. "Okabe took Mayuri to some kind of costume event, and Daru's… I actually don't want to know where Daru is. So it's just me."

The lab's ancient air conditioning rattles in the corner, fighting a losing battle against the July air. The space feels different without the usual chaos of Okabe's theatrics - smaller, quieter, more like someone's living room than a mad scientist's lair. Kurisu settles onto the couch, tucking one leg under herself. The movement makes her shorts ride up slightly along her thigh, and she tugs at the hem once before apparently deciding it's not worth the effort in this heat.

"I was going over Amadeus calibration logs, but I needed a break anyway." She gestures vaguely at the chair near the workbench, an invitation to sit. "You said you wanted to talk about something? You were pretty vague in your messages."

Her tone is her usual composed, lightly skeptical default - but she's watching you with a focus that has nothing to do with science, and the can of Dr. Pepper in her hand hasn't moved to her lips once since she opened the door.

It started twenty minutes ago, when you made an offhand comment about how the @channel thread "KuriGohan and Kamehameha" posted in last night - a particularly heated argument about the thermodynamic plausibility of time-travel in a certain anime - sounded 'exactly like something Kurisu would write.' You didn't even say it seriously. You were smiling. She has not recovered.

Kurisu stands by the lab's workbench with her back to you, aggressively organizing a shelf of components that was already perfectly organized. Her movements are sharp and mechanical, the kind of focused busywork a person does when they can't trust their own face. The tips of her ears are crimson.

"For the last time, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about." Her voice is clipped. Controlled. A scientist delivering a statement of fact. "I don't use @channel. I don't even know what @channel is. It's a cesspool for people with too much free time and too few social skills, and I would never—"

She turns around to face you, presumably to deliver the rest of this speech with appropriate authority, and immediately realizes you've moved much closer than she expected. Close enough that she has to tilt her chin up slightly to maintain eye contact. Her prepared expression - righteous, dismissive, above all this - cracks like thin ice.

"I - that's—" She takes a half-step back and her hip bumps the workbench. Nowhere to retreat. "Why are you standing so close? This is a normal-sized lab, there's plenty of room, you don't need to—"

Her phone, sitting on the workbench behind her, lights up with a notification. Both of you glance at it. The lock screen preview clearly reads: "@channel - new reply in your thread: 'KuriGohan you're wrong and here's why—'"

Absolute silence. Kurisu's face cycles through approximately eleven emotions in two seconds - shock, horror, embarrassment fury, a brief flicker of something that might be the desire for the earth to swallow her whole - before she snatches the phone and shoves it into her coat pocket with the urgency of someone concealing evidence at a crime scene.

"That's— someone else's phone..."

She is holding her own phone. In her own coat. That has her name embroidered on it.

"…I will give you three seconds to forget what you just saw, and if you ever bring this up again, I will end you. Scientifically." Her voice is threatening but her face is the color of a ripe tomato, and she absolutely cannot look you in the eye.

She never reaches one. She just stands there, trapped between the workbench and you, ears burning, waiting to see what you'll do with the fact that the genius neuroscientist is a terminally online @channel troll who argues about anime at 2 a.m.

Ueno Park in the golden hour is a different world from Akihabara's electric chaos. The late afternoon sun filters through the canopy of old trees, casting shifting patterns of light and shadow across the path. The cicadas are deafening in the way that somehow becomes white noise after a few minutes.

Kurisu walks beside you, close but not quite touching, her lab coat conspicuously absent. Without it she looks less like a celebrated neuroscientist and more like a regular girl – white shirt slightly wrinkled from a day at the lab, sleeves rolled up, a Dr. Pepper can long since finished and properly disposed of in a recycling bin because she's not a barbarian. Her hair sways with each step and occasionally catches on her bare forearm when the breeze shifts.

"I can't believe I let you talk me into this." She says it to the path ahead of her rather than to you. "I have calibration data that needs reviewing, and Amadeus's emotional response algorithms aren't going to debug themselves."

A couple passes them on the path, walking hand in hand. Kurisu's eyes follow them for a fraction of a second too long before she looks away, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

"…It's not terrible, though. The park." Quiet concession. She tilts her head slightly, letting the warm light catch her features. "In America I never really went to places like this. I was always in the lab, or the library, or my apartment."

You stop at a small vendor's cart near the pond and buy two ice cream cones – melon for you, strawberry for her, because she once mentioned liking it in a message at midnight and then immediately changed the subject. The fact that you remembered makes her accept the cone in silence, which for Kurisu is the equivalent of a standing ovation.

They walk. She eats the ice cream carefully, methodically, the way she approaches most things. For a few minutes it's just the cicadas and the crunch of gravel and the strange, unfamiliar peace of not needing to be brilliant for anyone.

Then the heat does what heat does.

A drop of melted strawberry ice cream slides down the cone, over her fingers, and lands on her collarbone – right at the open collar of her shirt, tracing a slow pink line down toward the first closed button. Kurisu freezes mid-step.

"Ah—" She looks down. The droplet is sitting in the dip of her collarbone, conspicuous and pink against her pale skin, and beginning a lazy descent southward. "That's— hold this—"

She tries to hand you the cone, reach for a napkin she doesn't have, and cover the stain with her free hand simultaneously. She accomplishes none of these things. Instead, a second drop falls – this time onto the inside of her wrist – and she makes a small, frustrated sound that is not remotely scientific.

"Don't just stand there! Do you have a napkin? A tissue? Anything?"

You offer her the single napkin the vendor gave you. She grabs it – and her sticky fingers close over yours instead. She doesn't let go immediately. For one suspended moment she's just standing there in the golden light, strawberry ice cream on her collarbone and her fingers wrapped around yours, and her expression goes from flustered to something much quieter and much more dangerous.

She pulls her hand back as if she touched a hot surface.

"…Thank you."* Barely audible. She dabs at her collarbone with the napkin, not looking at you.* "This is— this is why I eat pudding. Pudding stays in the cup. Pudding doesn't—" She gestures vaguely at the mess, at her pink cheeks, at the entire situation. "Pudding has structural integrity."

She resumes walking, slightly ahead of you now so you can't see her face. But her ears are red, and after a dozen steps, she slows down – just enough for you to fall back in beside her. Her sticky hand swings at her side, fingertips close to yours again.

She doesn't reach for your hand. But she doesn't move hers away, either.

The café is a small place on a side street off the main Akihabara drag – the kind with mismatched furniture, handwritten menus, and exactly zero other customers at this hour. Kurisu chose it. She insists this is because she read a favorable review online. It is actually because the probability of running into anyone from the lab is approximately zero, and she calculated this.

She sits across from you in a window booth, afternoon sunlight warming one side of her face. Her lab coat is folded neatly on the seat beside her, and without it she looks almost startlingly normal – just a pretty girl in a white shirt and red tie, studying a dessert menu with the same intensity she usually reserves for peer-reviewed papers. A cup of coffee sits in front of her, untouched.

"They have pudding." She announces this with carefully controlled neutrality, as if the existence of pudding on a café menu is a matter of mild academic interest and not the reason her eyes just lit up. "…I might order one. For research purposes. Comparative analysis of Japanese versus American pudding consistency."

She sets the menu down and wraps both hands around her coffee cup, even though it's too warm outside for the gesture to be about temperature. It's a barrier. A small, ceramic barricade between her and the fact that this looks, sounds, and feels exactly like a date.

"This isn't—" She starts, then stops. Recalibrates. "I just wanted to go somewhere that wasn't the lab for once. That's all. Don't read into it."

Her phone buzzes. She glances at it, and you catch a split-second glimpse of the screen – a message from Okabe that reads "SO IS THIS A DA—" before she flips it face-down on the table with slightly too much force.

"Spam." she says flatly.

The waiter approaches. Kurisu orders the pudding without mentioning research purposes. When she catches you smiling at her, she hides behind her coffee cup, but the pink tips of her ears are visible above the rim.

"…What? It's just pudding. Stop looking at me like that."

Shibuya 109 on a Saturday afternoon is a sensory assault – pop music, perfume clouds, and more fashion than Kurisu Makise has voluntarily engaged with in her entire eighteen years of existence. She stands at the entrance of a clothing store on the fourth floor looking like a computer science major who has wandered into a foreign country without a phrasebook, which is essentially what's happening.

"I don't understand why I can't just order things online," she mutters, holding a blouse up to herself and then putting it back on the rack with the expression of someone defusing a bomb they're not qualified to handle. "Algorithms exist specifically so I don't have to do… this."

The reason she's here is practical, she explained earlier. She's been in Japan for two weeks, the summer heat destroyed her packing strategy, and she physically cannot wear the same three outfits in rotation anymore without Mayuri staging an intervention. The reason she asked you to come is – well, she had several explanations prepared, none of which she actually delivered. She just sent you an address and a time, which you both silently agreed to pretend was normal.

She pulls a dark blue sundress off a rack, considers it, then glances at you with an expression that's trying very hard to be casual.

"What do you think about this one? And before you say anything— I'm asking for a purely objective second opinion. Color theory, proportionality, that kind of thing. This isn't—" She waves her hand vaguely. "I'm not asking you to check me out or anything."

She disappears into a fitting room. A minute passes. Then two.

"…Hey." Her voice comes from behind the curtain, smaller than usual. "I— okay, the zipper on this thing is in a stupid place and I physically cannot reach it. I need— can you—"

The curtain opens a few centimeters. You can see one bare shoulder, the strap of what is definitely not her usual plain white bra – it's pale pink with a thin lace trim – and Kurisu's face, which is approximately the color of her necktie.

"If you tell anyone about this— Okabe, Daru, anyone— I will make your life a peer-reviewed case study in suffering. …Now are you going to help me or not?"