Conscience, Nagasae/Ichikawa, G, one-shot

[iesika]

Title: Conscience
Author: iesika
Rating: Very mild
Characters or Pairing: Nagasae and Ichikawa
Status: one-shot
Disclaimer: I do not own Sukisyo
Summary: Late at night in the chemistry lab, Nagasae and Ichikawa argue the nature of evil.

 


 

Conscience

Gaku Ichikawa slams his hands down onto the worktable. The racks of glassware he’s been washing up shake with the force of impact, but thankfully nothing falls over and breaks. That would have been very embarrassing, even if he is very angry at Nagasae right now. “Stop it,” he begs, “he’s a horrible person and I can’t bear to hear you defending him!” 
 

Nagasae freezes in place, pen hovering over his equipment log. His expression goes quickly from shock to sadness, and he takes off his glasses to massage the bridge of his nose. “You forget, I think,” he says, face hidden behind his hand, “that the man you hate is my father. It is not so easy for me to set him aside.”

“It should be! He’s a monster! He did terrible things to my friends!” And to you, Ichikawa thinks.

“That doesn’t make him a monster. It’s the things he’s done that were terrible, not him as a person. I’ve done many of the same things, Gaku-kun. Do you find me monstrous?”

Nagasae drops his hand and stares at Ichikawa. Watching my face, Ichikawa thinks. Looking for signs of disgust? Ichikawa blushes under his regard, and picks up another test-tube to wash, just so he won’t have to look at him. “That’s different. You wanted to help your father. You said you were young when you first started to help him. Of course you wanted to please him.”

“Of course,” Nagasae allows, “but there was more to it than that. I didn’t just assist him in small ways. I didn’t just wash his glassware.”

Ichikawa picks up another tube and tries to remember if acetaldehyde can safely be disposed of down a drain. Stable, he thinks, miscable, but flammable vapor. He caps the tube and sets it aside.

“I’m a scientist at heart. I was as fascinated by the experiment as he was. It was interesting work. Unethical, but interesting.”

“Unethical!” Ichikawa snaps, and nearly breaks a test tube when his hand jerks. “It was wrong, Nagasae-buchou. It was evil. He was doing horrible things to little children-“ 

“But it didn’t start out that way,” Nagasae interrupts, raising his voice for the first time. “It was a legitimate experiment, in the beginning. There was nothing horrible about it when he started. The subjects were adults, and volunteers. I’ve read his notes and reports from that time. He was the best researcher in the world, when it came to subconscious memory and behavior modification. His work was groundbreaking for the treatment of trauma, dissociation, repressed memory, all of it. His work was legitimate, well-funded, and peer reviewed. But he took it too far, and that’s where the abuses started. He was shut down after Hashiba and the others escaped. Not everyone pulled their financial support, but enough did to make continuation of the study nearly impossible.”

Ichikawa has filled one rack with clean, empty test tubes. He pulls a second one closer and picks up a dirty tube. “You can’t mean that there were people still willing to pay him for what he was doing,” he says.

 
“Of course there were. There always are. That protected your friends, you know.” Not Sunao, Ichikawa thinks. “My father knew Nanami could go public at any time, if he became willing to implicate himself. So he left them alone." Nagase shuts his log book and leaned across the counter. “Nanami could have stopped it, if he weren’t so afraid of the consequences. Do you think he’s a monster?”

Ichikawa doesn’t know what to think. He hasn’t thought about it that way. “None of that excuses what Aizawa did, though,” he finally says.

“No,” Nagasae agrees. “Nothing excuses it. We did wrong, all of us. My father and myself and even Nanami, and there’s no excuse for any of it. But there are explanations, and that’s really all I have.”

Ichikawa frowns and pushes away the second rack of tubes, now clean. He starts to collect beakers. Most of them are out of his reach, closer to Nagasae on the other side of the worktop. He’s angry, though, and doesn’t want to ask for anything from Nagasae right now. He thinks about walking around the long counter to get them, but he’s afraid of looking silly.

Nagasae solves the problem by sliding the beakers across the worktop, into Ichikawa’s reach. “Have you studied psychology at all?” he asks.

Ichikawa wishes, right now, that he had. “I’m more interested in chemistry,” he says, which seems like a safe answer.

Nagasae makes a low noise, like “hmm,” and he smiles a little. “You’re good at it.”

 
Ichikawa scrubs furiously at his beaker. If he doesn’t look up, maybe Nagasae won’t be able to see how badly he’s blushing. “You think so?” he asks, before he can stop himself.

“Oh yes. You have a steady hand for measurement and you’re very conscientious about safety procedure.” The beaker is clean but Ichikawa keeps scrubbing. “And you’re passionate about science,” Nagasae continues, “that’s very important.”

Ichikawa tries very hard to remember how angry he was, a few minutes ago.

“Psychology isn’t like chemistry. Psychology is the only science where the experiment can come to control you.” Nagasae pulls out a stool and sits down. Ichikawa is just glad he’s stopped looming. “Have you heard of a psychologist called Zimbardo?”

Again, Ichikawa wishes he knew more about the topic they’re arguing. He usually knows the names of the chemists they discuss, both in club and after. Nagasae always smiles when he jumps in with a comment. But all he really knows about psychology is what he’s learned in the last few weeks, since what happened to Sora and Sunao. “No,” he tells Nagasae. “I haven’t.”

“He’s an American researcher. He did a study years ago that’s become very famous. The study was supposed to be about something else, but it went too far, and now it’s our model of how evil is born. How good people become bad people, at least for a little while. Do you want tea?”

“Um,” Ichikawa says. Nagasae leans far over the counter and selects a large beaker, still damp, from the drainboard. They are technically not supposed to eat or drink in the lab, and especially not to use laboratory glassware to do so. Nagasae has scolded him and Hano, after catching them making ramen noodles. He is the lab director, though. “Sure,” Ichikawa says, though he thinks it sounds like a question.

“Zimbardo’s study took ordinary students and made them guards and prisoners in a jail he built in a basement on campus,” Nagasae told him as he filled the beaker from another sink. “They were all mentally healthy. The guards and prisoners were given their role at random. None of the guards had any history of violence or sadism. The study was supposed to continue for two weeks. They had to stop it short, though.”

Nagasae returns to Ichikawa’s table and lights a Bunsen burner a few steps away from the sink. The beaker goes on a ring stand. Nagasae stares at it, waiting. “Zimbardo set himself up as warden,” he continues. “That was his big mistake. He involved himself in the experiment. Like my father did. Like I did.”

Ichikawa finishes with the beakers and brings two small ones over to where Nagasae is standing. Nagasae doesn’t look at him. He stares fixedly at the beaker, and so Ichikawa does, too. There are tiny bubbles clinging to the inside of the glass. They look like beads of mercury.

“It took three days to spiral out of control. The guards turned into monsters – they were cruel and vicious, willing to do anything to keep control. Prisoners rebelled. They barricaded themselves into their cells, went on hunger strikes, openly revolted. Threatened self-harm. But Zimbardo was too involved to see what his experiment had become. He saw the prisoners as his enemies, disrupting the experiment. He let the guards run wild, let them do whatever they felt was necessary to keep order. Other researchers came and watched what was happening, and said ‘what an interesting experiment,’ and went home to their families, and didn’t stop it.”

The water begins to boil. Nagasae turns off the burner and waits a few seconds for the bubbles to subside before producing a tea bag from the pocket of his lab coat and dropping it in.

“That’s horrible,” Ichikawa says, because the silence is painful and he doesn’t know what else to say. And because it is true.

“It is,” Nagasae agrees. He pulls two paper packets of sugar from his pockets and places them on the counter by the beakers Ichikawa has provided for cups. Two packets. Ichikawa blushes again, but only a little. “But the experimenters couldn’t see what they were doing. They were too close. The guards couldn’t see it. The prisoners, even. There wasn’t really anything keeping them in that basement. They could have walked out at any time, but they forgot it was an experiment, too.” He removes the tea bag and stirs the beaker with a glass rod, watching it swirl pale green. Ichikawa finally takes the rod from his hand and, with a pair of beaker tongs, pours the tea into their makeshift cups. A packet of sugar in each, another stir, and he is handing a warm beaker to Nagasae, who smiles at him.

“How did it end?” Ichikawa asks. When Nagasae doesn’t respond at first, he guesses, “Someone died,” because that is the only answer that would explain Nagasae’s sudden seriousness at the question.

“No,” Nagasae says. He sips his tea. “A woman stopped him. An assistant.” He’s watching Ichikawa’s face, now, and smiling again. Ichikawa’s tea is still too hot, but he drinks it anyway. “She said, ‘what you are doing to those boys is a terrible thing,’ and he opened his eyes and he realized what he’d done. What he’d become.” 
 

 

“Just that?”

 
“Just that. She spoke with the voice of his conscience, and told him what he should have seen all along. That he’d gone to far, in the pursuit of knowledge.” Nagasae sets his beaker down on the counter. “He loved her for it.”

 
“Oh,” Ichikawa says. He sips his tea and blames the sudden warmth he feels on that.

 
“He ended the experiment,” Nagasae says. “He sent the boys home.” He takes a step closer to Ichikawa, who wants to leap forward and to run away, all at once. Nagasae is standing very close. “He went on to become one of the most famous prison reformers in a century. And,” Nagasae reaches out and takes Ichikawa’s cup away. He sets it carefully on the worktop. “He married her. His conscience. To have her always nearby. He calls her his hero.”

 
Ichikawa looks down. He can’t help it.

“Gaku-kun,” Nagasae says, and Ichikawa makes himself meet his eyes. “Thank you.”

 

 

End

 

 

Author’s Note: Dr. Philip Zimbardo is a real person (as is his wife Christine, the hero of the story). The story presented here is (very) simplified, but true. The Stanford Prison Experiment is one of the most famous studies in modern psychology. You can read the full story, in the words of Zimbardo and the study participants, in his book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding Why Good People Turn Evil, which I highly recommend (an understatement - I think it should be required reading for membership to the human race). For an introduction to the experiment and to Zimbardo’s work on the problem of evil, try this short video from his speech at TED.

 

Comments

[moonypadlover.livejournal.com]

Sounds interesting. ^^ And it sounds like a nifty anime as well. I've been watching Elfen Lied, so I understand messed up stuff being a little hard to take. ^^

So, on a completely different note, have you seen Dr Horrible??? You must, must, must!!

[iesika.livejournal.com]

You would like Sukisyo (Suki na Mono wa Suki Dakara Shoganai!). It can be got at www.boxtorrents.com, or watched on youtube (uploader thedisembodiedvoice for the better copy). It's 12 episodes and an a bonus OVA. It reminds me rather a bit of Gravitation - very silly day to day interaction between the characters, plus deepdarkangsty pasts.

[moonypadlover.livejournal.com]

Lovel told me I'd like it too. ^^ I might try and watch that tonight..^^

Sooo...about Dr Horrible....Neil Patrick Harris can sing! Omg!
^^

Love ya Gorgeous.^^