Taking place one year after the events of the originalanime, the story ofStein’s;Gate: Load Region of Déjà Vupicks right back up with Okabe andhis circle of nerds and waifus, eagerly awaiting the arrival of Makise Kurisu, who’s returning to Japan and Akihabara for a visit. She’s still wrestling with the fact that Okabe’s claimed that on the timeline fromStein’s;Gate, the two of them fell in love, when to her, in this Stein’s;Gate timeline, all she knows of Okabe is that he saved her life once and then visited her once in L.A. where they talked about her dreams that may or may not have been hazy memories from those other timelines she can’t otherwise clearly remember.
Still, there’s certainly something niggling at the back of her mind, even if the events of the OVA didn’t entirely resolve things for her emotionally. It takes her getting drunk however for her to express how much it bothers her that since the last time they saw each other,Okabe hasn’t bothered to keep in touch. Even though, at the same time, he’s nervously waiting until the right moment to give her a present of a monogrammed fork, something she’s been craving, that he knows she’s been craving through the time he spent with her, and for all of that, represents something poignant between them, even if Kurisu can’t remember. It’s clear that they’re both still on very uncertain ground with their feelings, even with one of them having the benefit of remembering falling in love with the other.
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Disappearing Forever
But then Okabe starts experiencing moments from the other timelines overlapping in his mind, forcing him to briefly dip in and out of those other timelines. He starts getting paranoid that the tragedies from thosetimelines are about to repeat themselves, despite his having finally reached Steins';Gate. Then, all of a sudden, he just disappears entirely, as the film switches more to Kurisu’s point of view. Suzuha appears once again, much to Okabe’s alarm, considering he thought he was over and done with the whole time travel thing, given the hell he had to go through just to get things to the only timeline where Kurisu and Mayuri are both able to survive.
The way Suzuha explains it though, she’s here to keep him from disappearing. Understandably, given what he’s been through already, Okabe isn’t willing to risk mucking about with time ever again, even a little, not even for his own sake. Even when Kurisu finds herself growing more and more distraught at the prospect of him disappearing forever.Okabe would rather disappearand just let Kurisu and Mayuri and everyone else forget him and get on with their lives as happily as he has always wanted them to, even if he can’t be in the picture anymore. Their happiness means more to him, with no regard for whether that will still have an effect on those he leaves behind.
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And, as it happens, it does. Okabe does disappear, and the first time he does, Kurisu is as blissfully ignorant as everyone else. Until she starts getting myserious messages from a stranger and is prodded into building the time leap machine same as she did on the other timelines. It’s revealed after Kurisu leaps back that that person was Suzuha, a Suzuha Kurisu’s future self sent back to help her with this crisis of Okabe blipping out of existence on the Stein’s;Gate timeline. Now Kurisu’s in the leaper’s seat, and the momentall her memories flood backabout him disappearing, it nearly breaks her. More so when Okabe insists that she put him behind her, after flipping out about how she’s time leapt once already. He insists that there’s no way to save him, that she’ll just fall into the same looping hell he did, and he’s not entirely wrong to caution her on that, moreover, it only makes sense that he’d want to save her that burden.
The strain of having lived through so many timelines that he, uniquely, can recall, the weight of those memories, many of them traumatic, is starting to break his mind such that the Stein’s;Gate timeline itself is trying to write him out of it, as though he were some sort of anomaly. Despite his pleas for her to forget him, after he disappears a second time, Kurisu finds herself back in the same place she was in before her first-time leap,struggling with this feeling that something’s missing, but she can’t put her finger on it. Doggedly she tries and fails, tries and fails, to the point that she’s able to recall Okabe before having to time leap first.
What They Mean to Each Other
Suzuha tells her that in order to save Okabe from disappearing, Kurisu needs to take the time machine that she herself would build in the future for Suzuha to go back in, go into Okabe’s past, and give his much younger self a memory that’ll lodge so deeply in his hippocampus that it’ll anchor him firmly in the reality of the Stein’s;Gate timeline. After much trial and error, pushing Kurisu to the edge of sanity not unlike what Okabe went through trying to save Mayuri, if on a much smaller scale, she finally comes to a spontaneous solution.
She finds his younger past self during the time that Mayuri was struggling with the death of her grandmother. She tells him about Okabe’s alter ego that he would one day conceive, Hyouin Kyouma, as a means to inspire him, and then, for good measure, gives him his new first kiss.Load Region of Déjà Vuconcludes withOkabe being restored to the Stein’s;Gate timeline, and the confirmation that what she did finally worked for sure is his teasingly asking her for, “his first kiss back,” to which she teasingly replies, “No,” with the hope that perhaps they can finally start work on building an actual relationship, now that they both have better ideas of what they mean to each other.
