Chapter Text
The heart bleeds,
but it is not lost;
we shall see where
next we must go –
ushered forth by
Heaven’s Compass.
-Sint
3 Days Before the Festival
Overlooking the Tama River
Fear and loathing were acceptable when the heart was sundered and the soul left vacant. It was not enough to feel love, hate, which were all the same: it needed more. The heart was not satisfied with such paltry things. The heart
needed more. It needed
sacrifice. It needed
blood. It needed
fuel. And it needed
To be used.
Empty of blood was a vessel of silent woe. It cried tears unheard and left little else but a shaded, miserable concourse.
It was a foregone conclusion. Her heartbeat stilled as her breathing calmed. She had come, at last, to the terminus of her life — the story at its end. The triumphs, the defeats, the great drama, and the downfall; all were lessons well learned, but all were draughts of poison pumped into the core of the self. She’d risen just to fall. She’d lived just to die.
This, of course, was the swan song of Hitori Gotoh. Was anyone particularly surprised?
She smiled to herself in a small way as she stepped up onto the edge of the bridge. The traffic was light, as the day had really only just begun — that was, the day had only just begun for most. It was only what, 7.00? And yet, she'd been awake for some time. When was the last she’d slept? It felt like she had never slept, and had spent her life in a fugue that had only lifted one month ago.
They’d all tried. But it had been put quite well by a certain someone… she was a burden.
At least if she fell now, the fish would not think of her like a burden. Not unless it truly did turn out that it was not just her spirit that was toxic, but the totality of her being. That’d be the ultimate conclusion to her tale. Too poor tasting for even the bottom feeders.
The festival was only days away. September 18th — to think that she made it as far as the 15th, what fun! Her soul could be pulled for so long.
She peeled the bandages from her wrists and felt the cool breeze brush against her scars; freedom at last had come. She closed her eyes and drank in the air. It tickled her nose.
No thoughts flashed in her mind. No memories ran in front of her. She cared for nothing and felt less. Soon, in the moments to come, she’d finally know nothing, too. A relief. From the shoulders of Atlas would the world be delivered, and at last, he could rest his weary back. She let that moment hold. She didn’t know why, really. There was no reason to hesitate, and she wasn’t exactly hesitating per se, but she didn’t immediately make the leap. Her feet remained anchored as she enjoyed what may have been her final breaths.
For whatever reason, she said something. Her words were hoarse, ripped from a throat left raw by the ardors of her life, “It’s so clear to me now.”
“In a world of empty meaning,” she said to the wind, “This is the only way to make it.”
The search for meaning had led to it, at last. The final, and perhaps only true, meaning was before her. To die was to have lived. So then did your story bear weight; all tales bore a compulsion for endings.
Her’s was nary more than a tall tale. But it finally felt so freeing to know that her life meant something. This fable… it was something that she owned.
It felt warm. She stepped forward —
Yet the world refused. She couldn’t move any further, as she realized the warmth was not from within. Hands tightly held her across her middle and refused to let her go. Like a steel rope had been fastened to her hips, she couldn’t buck to break free. A cold disappointment blossomed outwards across her chest. The cycle began once more.
So alone.
Yet never alone.
{ ~ }
???
The Missing World
A fetid sea as far as the creature could sea, her lungs fills with poison, as her little legs would drag further and further into the deep. This was simply how it was. Some beings were meant to drown, to feed the denizens of the waters. It was designed.
Her chops were salty as she licked them dry, her tongue begging for that which is life sustaining — that which is not found in the endless abyssal stream. They who dwelled upon the land could not harvest life from this place. Even the dwellers of the sea were antagonized by it, as with each and every bloated corpse that surfaced, the livable zone shrunk ever moreso. Moreover, it was not just death that choked the sea. Great shapes poured over it, dumping refuse in endless heaps from their sides. Once, the seas were ruled by giants. But then came things larger, more hungry, more powerful. Uglier.
Their taint had spread so quickly that the world couldn’t help but grow sick. This poor beast had no choice in the matter. One of the shapes she had clung to, her body and soul so dearly hateful of the place she had left behind — that she hadn’t considered the poisoned waves — only to be cast from the side of one of the gargants. Like garbage. Was she, too, meant to destroy the world?
All things came from the water. All life relied on it yet still. Every water way was connected, and so too was life connected therein. Alas, such was the fate of all things. No system was free of gravity, and all things were pulled by one another’s attraction.
The creature, left feeble by the noxious stench of rotting fish and sulfurous exhaust, could hardly move. What little energy she had was waning. Maybe it would be simpler to drown, to let go.
To sink below the waves and join the chorus of quiet in the deadzone of the deep blue sea. It would be an end to this struggle… this pointless struggle. She’d fled something else, and what for? What had it wrought? Pain, that’s what. For whatever reason she had fled death once before, only to now face it again — why?
But she spluttered as her maw tipped below the waves. The creature padded herself towards a piece of debris in the water, and with a defeated whimper, watched the giants in the water float by; they were as dead as the sea that they had killed. Perhaps they had never been alive at all.
This disturbed her little mind. What could be born into the world just for the sake of destruction? What lived, but did not live? Had these things always existed, or had they only occurred now as a form of consequence? So large, so inescapable, and yet… so insignificant. They had no names, no faces, no lives. They were simply bodies. And from them spilled sickness. It was like the world was being destroyed by nothing. A true negative, adding nothing and taking everything. What a monstrous thing…
It was a terminal illness. As far as she could tell, this would never cease. Destruction was more than assured, it was rapid and effective. You could only escape it for so long. And yet, despite the inevitably of it all, she could not urge herself to drown. The poisoned air, the toxic water, the engines of doomsday roaring around her — she felt an urge to swim. To get away. Away from her pain, and away from this pain.
She could not suffer anymore. But she still didn’t know how to die.
The yawning void in her chest was not born of hunger, even though her ribs were quite apparent even beneath her vibrant pink fur. It had arisen in the face of despair. A gulf had emerged between expectation and reality. She’d expected to grow, to become happier. And yet, that was a false hope. So, then she prayed to die, and to let it all go. That too was proven fallible. Then what? Reconciliation —!!!
The sickly greens and gloomy greys were overtaken by a sudden burst of orange and red. The air became hazy as smoke rained down from on high. A destroyer had burst at the seams, its metallic carcass had split from within; its gluttony had overtaken its means.
Even the cold hearted destroyers of the world could not withstand the terminal velocity that everything hurtled through time with. In the end, to be sundered was to have ever existed.
Her body limp, the creature felt warmed by the feeling. But the moment passed, as a piece of the gargant slammed into the water and cast a chilling wave over her. Startled awake —
That’s right.
It’s 29 Days Before the Festival
And she’s in Shimokitazawa, right?
— she opened her eyes and saw a tile ceiling and felt a pain in her chest. She coughed and hacked and snarled, dislodging sludge from her throat and clearing her airways to fully breathe again. Her hands shivered as she clutched to the sides of her porcelain liferaft, pulling herself upright to the best of her ability with a few unsteady pulls. She could barely see. Her ears were ringing. What was… what… was… what was happening?
Another droplet landed on her chin. Soon enough, she realized that it wasn’t water at all. Nor was it cold — she was cold.
She was bleeding. A gash in her forehead…? She felt her stomach turn, and with it, so did the world. She started to panic. Her breathing grew short as her hands searched in vain for any purchase they could make; she didn’t know where she was, she couldn’t remember a thing. Well, that wasn’t true.
To say she’d forgotten everything was a pure lie. She was Hitori Gotoh, 19 years old, and she and Ikuyo Kita (her new girlfriend???) had gone over to Sasaki’s place. It had been… spur of the moment. A choice to flee from familiar places and to enjoy the silence for just a day. So then, why was she on her back? This was a bathtub. She was in a bathtub. Had she done drugs? Was she high?
She didn’t feel good. But she was bleeding from the head…
A hand brushed hair from her face. And what followed was a warm towel, which wiped across her forehead. Another pair of hands came and applied pressure to her head wound, and after a few seconds of an awful noise, she felt a new presence on her head. Gauze? It must have been. The ringing began to fade… and so too did her vision begin to reform. It was time to wake up and smell the roses. And, she smelled roses…?
No, no. She smelled perfume. Trembling hands came to hold her head, to stroke her forehead and to check her temperature. They were small and slim, gracefully slender like those of a pianist’s; they, however, belonged now to a guitarist. Hitori was familiar with those worn fingertips. She smelled good…
Hitori could finally make out voices. “Sh-should we call an ambulance?” Kita. She sounded terrified.
“I already have.” Sasaki. The nerves put an edge into her typically even voice, as the typically listless woman had been sent into overdrive. They must’ve still been in Sasaki’s apartment. Sensibly so, she was freaking out about the prospect of a friend dying in her bathtub. “They told me to wrap up her head… I hope it’s enough. That gash… eugh…”
“Are you afraid of blood?” Kita sounded incredulous.
Sasaki gulped back her nerves. “A little bit. I get the jitters every time it’s time for my period.”
“That sucks.” Maybe she’d leapt into small-talk as a means in which she’d escape her fear, for it appeared that – when her focus shifted – her hands had begun to shake less. Kita indulged in this small conversation. “I already get shaky when it happens. Don’t… don't lecture me, I know I need to eat more. It’s just – I just – it’s difficult, alright? B-but, ah, eh… yeah, it sounds pretty tough. My mom always told me that the pain was normal and that I was being needy for complaining about it, so if I had to deal with being afraid of blood, too? Yeah, I… I’d be unhappy, for sure.” Kita removed a hand, and if the half-dead Hitori was to guess, it was to nervously tuck a bit of her hair behind her ear. Kita never could stay still.
“Geez, okay. Tell me about your family trauma later, girl,” Sasaki shot back. Fair enough. What Kita’d said had hit Hitori’s ear the wrong way, too. With the whole of her body in some kind of pain, either feeling like it’d been electrocuted or hit by a car (how she knows that feeling is a story on its own), Hitori imagining Kuruyo Kita being beat by a sack of lemons made her feel a bit comforted.
“O-Oh…?!” Kita flinched and nearly dropped Hitori’s head. Thankfully, she wasn’t that out of sorts; her hold remained and she even sort of fixed a crick in Hitori’s neck by almost-dropping her.
Hitori’s vision cleared enough to see more than vague outlines of tiles as a blob of green popped into her view. She dumbly said, “Tree…” before that green smudge vanished out of her view again.
The owner of the blob, definitely being Sasaki and her big round dome, sighed out pretty loudly. “Oh thank goodness… I really didn’t want you to die in my place, Gotoh. Can you imagine trying to explain to the manager of your building why a girl died in your bathtub? Hell, I’d have to explain that to the feds, too. No thanks! You did me a huuuuge favor not dying. Oh, and also I like you better alive. Like, a lot better. I should’ve – I-I should’ve led with that, huh…”
Thwack. Sasaki yelped like her little poodle. “Hey! What was that for?”
“Your bedside manner is almost as bad as your rapping skills, Sattsu.” Kita’s body lightly rocked with her laughter, a motion that Hitori was not at all bothered by – even though she really probably should’ve hated being jostled in her current stupor. Her fingers didn’t dig into Hitori’s head as much anymore, which was definitely a plus. All in all, if not for the throbbing pain in her head, the aches and numbness across the rest of her body, or her inability to see straight – she’d be quite comfortable. It’s not every day that you get to lay in a nice smelling lap. As bone thin as she was (concerningly so), Kita’s thighs were thankfully still soft. Maybe it was all the running she did. Did runners cultivate good thighs?
She snapped back to reality, fully remembering that she was in Sasaki’s bathtub, nursing a pretty bad head wound. Hitori almost tried to sit up, but she was pretty forcefully kept down by a shove from her current caretaker, and though she groaned a bit in protest – she got the memo.
“Please stay still, Hitori.” Kita’s voice washed over her; it was so full of concern that Hitori decided to listen to everything she said, just so she didn’t make the poor girl’s heart burst. She really would’ve preferred to be anywhere else, though. “I wanted to bring you to the couch at first, but we figured that it’d be easier to take care of you in here. All of Sattsu’s medical supplies are in the drawers, plus we’re closer to the door for when the paramedics get here.”
“I also didn’t want her to bleed all over my new couch,” Sasaki piped up with a casual tone; the fear of Hitori’s death had seemingly exited her mind, “Do you know what a bitch it is to get blood out of something white? Now couple that with me constantly shivering like I was ass naked in the Siberian tundra while trying to scrub it out… not a pretty picture, right? Well, aside from my ass.”
“We can talk about your butt never, Sattsu,” Kita’s response was pretty full of bite, “We should stay focused.”
She turned her attention back to Hitori. Hitori smiled like a drunk, her lips only partly curled and teeth barely bared, her eyes half open as she looked up at Kita. She could see Kita now. Even while she was scared, exhausted, and sort of unwashed, Kita was insanely pretty. You could shave ice with those cheekbones, and since her chin was pointed and her forehead was fairly wide, it was like her face was a perfect heart shape. It was fitting, frankly, that a girl like Kita was literally shaped like a heart. At least, Hitori thought so in her slightly clouded thinking. Had she always… looked at Kita like that? Hitori thought about it for a moment. When had she ever even spent time wondering about the shape of someone’s face? It may have only ever come up when she’d gotten a bit fat over Winter, and she’d felt like she looked like a cheese puff when looking into the mirror.
But no, Kita was so delicate. Like a tea-cup fairy. Hitori could imagine a dress up doll looking that way, as they’d been perfectly designed to be appealing, but a human person? They usually came with awkward parts. Like Hitori came top heavy. She felt like her shoulders were too wide, and her long and well-documented (within her head) struggle with her breasts dated back as far as the start of her adolescence. She knew that some people saw this as something appealing, but Hitori just wanted to be able to comfortably fit into most clothes. Instead, she had to fight being perceived, and being perceived by people she absolutely didn’t want to see her – and bras were a pain to shop for. The wire ALWAYS dug into her, without fail. To put it lightly: she envied Kita. Kita was lightly built, perfectly proportioned, and ethereally pretty even while she was sweating bullets trying to ascertain if her girlfriend was going to die or not.
Girlfriend. The thought pinged off of Hitori’s head like a thrown dodgeball. Right.
That’s where she was.
She wanted to curl into herself. She wanted to cry, and so she did both of those things. There were a lot of things that she wanted to do, frankly, and they all involved self-destruction. It’d been less than a day.
Only twelve hours between this very moment and the end of Kessoku Band. Had that been the very last time she and Nijika would ever see each other? It sure felt like it. She’d trampled her friend’s dreams pretty thoroughly, and for what? Her own ego? She had been soaring the high of asking Kita out on a date, yet what did that actually mean for her? She was sure on death, and yet she couldn’t help but drag others down with her, now even bringing this beautiful woman’s heartbreak into the picture. Without fail, Hitori had to internalize that she could only make the worst possible decisions. The very thing that landed her in this pit had risen again and again – itself being greed. Or was that just a new excuse? Could she truly point the finger at greed, given what she knew about herself? Frankly, she couldn’t know the answer to that question. What had landed her here was a chain of destruction that found its genesis point at an unknown date, and the latest in the catastrophes was this morning. Another consequence of her actions – a punishment for her arrogance. It would’ve been too simple that she just woke without trouble. No, like everything that came to Hitori Gotoh: it came with strife.
They’d run off to Sasaki’s apartment. It was the only place either of them could think about going, as home was much too painful to face in their current states of mind. Plus, the excitement of being in love… well, they had no reason to assume they’d be able to get up to much in Sasaki’s home, but it was still a positive to be away from family.
So Hitori might’ve panicked a little when she woke up in an unfamiliar house. She might’ve freaked out to see Kita tangled up with her, with her poor short term memory failing to recall that they’d fallen asleep just watching OhTube shorts about sea lions and VTubers, instead going to the ‘worst’ places (worst for someone like Hitori), and so she leapt out of their shared bed mat and proceeded to have a stress induced seizure. Her face slammed into the corner of something – that which she did not remember – and so she ended up here.
How stupid was she? She was in no state to be on her own, and these two were not inclined to take care of a person in NEITHER her physical NOR her mental condition. Selfishly, of course, she’d chosen to be the young fool instead of anything even vaguely approaching sensible. And so, with no recourse other than to cry – she did. Hitori started blubbering incoherently as tears began to rain down from her eyes. It was as pathetic a sight as one could see, other than maybe watching a turtle try and flip off of its back.
“Hitori?” Kita’s brows knit together in worry as she leaned in to see what was wrong. “Hey, Hitori? Is there something wrong? Did something happen –”
“I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry…” Hitori brought both of her arms over her eyes. She quivered as wracking sobs ran through her body. “I’m so sorry. I-I-I…”
“I wish I could stop.”
“I just wish I could stop.”
{ ~ }
Sit with me in this final hour.
There is no solace, not now, nor again –
Such a thing has been driven from me, to scour
The world of my pain and woe
I, left in the afterglow
The fuel of hope burnt in vain:
No longer does my heart beat.
This, the agony of dreaming, a deceit –
It leaves memories in its wake,
As its nature is sublime:
I was a fool to ever break.
Was my inspiration not intime?
{ ~ }
‘I just wish I could stop.’
It echoed in the back of her mind
like it was a recurring nightmare.
29 Days Before the Festival
Shimokitazawa - Sasaki’s Apartment
The flashes of blue and red washed over her face, making the image of concern transform into something rather expressionate. Kita watched as Hitori vanished into the back of that ambulance without blinking, without moving a single muscle. She was a statue — the Thinker.
Sasaki put her hands into her pockets and deeply exhaled. Nothing would let her take her attention free of the event horizon, off of that woman. A writhing thing roiled and gnashed within the sheltered hollow of her mind, and it did so unceasingly, until it broke free of the subconscious to sinuate into more cognizant principalities. It flowed through the egress of her overwrought mind and into the forefront — unbidden on its chariot of black woe. Sasaki recognized it as it rose. That ache of thirst; it was need. Covetous pruriency surged up from the deepest pits of her being and cast her mind into discord.
Was it not enough that she had done the necessary things? She’d worked on herself; she’d buried this cadaver and left it to rot, and so to feel it rise once more? It was a carnal, contemptible fragment of herself that she despised more than liars and good basketball players — it was her love for Kita.
The profligate scum she was, Sasaki had already begun to think about the relationship between the one she called ‘Gotoh’ and her beloved Kita. Did it slightly trigger something invidious within her? For sure. The hate and the envy were impossible to shake, even as the rational core of her mind attempted to dislodge them and fling them back into the abyss. What was worse was the excitement.
She finally pulled her eyes from Kita, worried that her lustful delusions would mar the good relationship they held as friends; friends alone now stung once more. It was as if she’d only shoved the Sasaki of the past aside, failing to reconcile her feelings with her needs.
To think that she’d surrendered Kita only to feel this toxic cocktail of emotions erupt from her heart upon witnessing her newfound relationship with Hitori. To think that that was all it took. Kita was gorgeous and kind, she was so many things and all of them were beloved, even the wicked parts that she unconsciously chose to hide. And Hitori was funny and interesting, and well… Sasaki didn’t wish to prove her lust to be the victor this day.
She swallowed and tightened her jaw. It’s painful, whatever it was.
Instead of wallowing in her shame, Sasaki did the right thing and approached her friend; her heart still pounded out a horribly needy beat, but she had to push that away for the sake of this special person. By happenstance was the day overcast, reflecting the inner worlds of the two women present. Her face obscured by grey, Sasaki roamed to Kita’s side, and chose to say, “Hey. I don’t want to bug you, but are you going to tell me what this is all about? I’m not stupid. You two didn’t run off together and choose my beat up little box to celebrate in.”
Kita remained silent. But Sasaki didn’t feel urged to push, as she reckoned that her dear friend was consumed by a gnawing storm of emotions. Instead, Sasaki continued on. Her eyes were filled with as much care as she could muster, as her features softened, and her voice grew warm, “You know that I wouldn’t turn you away. Even if we were fighting, our claws out with bruises on each other’s faces, if you needed a place to stay: I’d still let you in. Hitori’s the same. Heh, well, maybe not exactly… but you get what I mean. I wouldn’t just let you stay on the street. But, seriously girlfriend, what’s going on? I’m not going to do anything about it, I just feel like I deserve to know.”
As usual, she chose a soft handed route. It wasn’t in her nature to rock the boat nor even approach a difficult situation. She liked to poke and prod and pick, but to actually push? That wasn’t her thing.
Kita had enough things to worry about. The light in her eyes dimmed as she finally looked at Sasaki. Her voice sounded so truly defeated when it finally came, “It’s a lot.”
“It’s just…” So tired, Kita’s chin dipped down as she came to stroke her brow, her voice slow and heavy, “Since it’s you, I’ll talk about it. About her.”
‘Since it’s you.’ Sasaki’s heart twisted as it tried and failed to not be filled with the pain she tried to ignore. Her fists balled in her pockets, though she said not a word.
“I think our band is finished. At least, I don’t think we play a leading role in it anymore. It sucks, but it’s what she chose. And I chose her over them.” She sighed. “This is where I belong. I’ve fought day after day to remain by her side, and so I’m not about to let that go. She just makes it…”
“…Hard,” Sasaki finished Kita’s sentence for her.
And Kita merely nodded. “Yeah. Hard.”
Rubbing the back of her head, Sasaki shook it gently to alleviate some tension she felt. It was like shaking out demons or ghosts or whatever else might’ve hitchhiked in the taxed recesses of her mind. This wouldn’t do. This feeling would get them nowhere. And so, boldly stepping forward, Sasaki chose her method of attack. She gave Kita a hug. It wasn’t a deeply affectionate thing, of headpats and back petting, but the type of hug you gave a cousin you didn’t know very well at a family gathering. She let go of Kita pretty quickly, not keen on letting it go overlong. Though she desired that connection – so much so that her fingers itched as she let Kita loose – it was not her place, nor her time to indulge herself. On the way out, she patted Kita on the shoulder like they were members of the same sports team. Sasaki only half-way forced her smile this time. “Hey. I’m not any good at this sort of emotional stuff. I-I’ve been trying to grow out of that, y’know, since I’m not a kid anymore. But there’s no saying that effort by itself is good enough, right? What I’m getting at is… I think stewing in this won’t do you any good.”
“She’ll be okay. What’s all this effort for if she’s not gonna be?” Sasaki pushed her hands back into her pockets and turned towards her door. The paramedics closed the back of the ambulance and moved to set off with their patient in tow. In the motions revolving, Kita remained a stoic fixture, unbending to the whims of time – and yet, once all came to conclude, Kita herself was different. She came alive. Her arm grabbed, Sasaki was stopped before she could go inside.
And so she turned to face Kita. Stardust trails ringed the edges of the eyes of the seraphim as it wept for the sundered world. With tears brimming, Kita asked, “Did I do something wrong?”
“I don’t think I’m the right person to ask.” Her smile flattened out, but Sasaki still sustained some semblance of it as she responded. “I let things within my grasp slip through my fingers… but you shouldn’t. Don’t be like me.”
They left it at that, as neither party deigned to respond. The air, heavy, stifled whatever else they could possibly say at the moment. That latent charge was drawn out as the ambulance wheeled away, as Kita and Sasaki knew that the core of their strife was currently being taken elsewhere, the means to address her properly were now flying away with her. As it went, as it goes, no human was predisposed to the knowledge to solve all woes. All they had was what they knew. Their tools limited, their wherewithal scant, they had to face what little facts they had at hand – no true power to push beyond ‘what they can’t’. Sasaki nodded to herself and went inside, alone.
Kita remained outside – to watch the ambulance disappear behind buildings and the curvature of the Earth itself. Kita had always felt somewhat small. She was shorter, her build was petite, and society had its pernicious means in which to minimize female success; though that was less of a burden on her mind compared to what currently plagued her. But, she always saw other people as giants. Their heads held high, even through consequence and circumstance, pushing onwards and onwards because it was naturally ingrained into them. She wished she could engrave such a driven passion into her own heart. Instead, she felt cowed even by the shadow of Sasaki’s apartment complex. It was short, far from the shining pillars of central Tokyo, as it was down to Earth not unlike the rest of the area. Despite sharing a name with Shimokita, she herself felt far from ‘Earthly’. The Earth was too big. Everything that surrounded humanity was so monumental as to make her feel so meager. What she felt now was a fear of the world and its people. Perhaps that was the trigger behind Hitori’s own anxiety; the billions of lives out there, the incomprehensible weight of the world, these were objective metrics that a singular primate was not meant to reckon with. Her love, her experiences – they felt so real – were just a part of the timeless current of human lore.
A story so small as to be swallowed up by the coming tide. How could she hold her head high when she was just one out of so many? Even within her own country, even within this single city, she was an infinitesimally small portion of an inconceivably vast number; it was the idea of arrogance to think she stood high enough to view her own struggle as special. This fact hadn’t seemed to stop other people from excelling. Even someone like her Hitori (a thought that made her heart ache) was a gargantuan presence, as she could fight against her instinct to flee, for the purposes of excelling beyond her base nature.
Kita only knew her base nature. Her desires, her instincts – that was it. Her fundamental being was constructed to ‘go along with’, not to ‘make of her own’. The terminating line of the self was rather near.
She went inside after some time. The humid summer air that clung to her skin like a wetsuit was peeled away by something that clung to her nose and filled her lungs. Cold and stifling, an odd duo. She clambered through the halls to seek out the proper room number – all the while, people peered at her through the cracks in their doors, around corners, and quite visibly as they stood around and socialized. It had been quite the event. It wasn’t daily that EMTs descended upon a place to salvage a person, especially when said person was a stranger to the place. And Kita was another stranger, connected to this strange event. Their attention wasn’t exactly untoward – she had no reason to flinch at it, but she still found herself urged to speed up. The feeling did not come from a need to protect herself. She figured, like most things, that it was because she was considering other people. Sasaki… and Hitori doubly so. The door swung open and clamped shut. It quieted the outside attention but did nothing to quiet Kita’s mind.
Sasaki was nowhere to be seen. She was likely asleep in her room, leaving Kita the run of the place. There was a faded sofa abreast to a coffee table with a slight lean, sat across from a dated television set that was stacked up on a few assorted boxes and crates. The light flickered as she flipped it alive.
She fell into the couch and found no instinct to turn the TV on. Nor did she reach for her phone. All she did was press her palms together, then curling into herself, to stare at the floor.
Maybe an hour passed. Maybe five did. Time was an arbitration decided by perception and when perception declared it null, then it would simply have to be. Music seemed like such a vanishingly distant thing. Had they truly been brought together by it? It would more aptly seem that the glue of their bond was not in chords or riffs, not in sonorous notes nor in harmonic dreams — it was in the crisis of their faith. Faith needn’t be a spiritual or religious experience. Faith bloomed outwards from all of mankind, as an expression of the power of the unknown and the unpredictable.
Kita had no faith. Such a thing was alien and foreign to a base creature such as herself. Driven solely by instinct, how could she hold faith?
Hitori was similar. Insofar as lacking faith, whether or not she ever had it notwithstanding. It took no genius to see faith in the actions of a fearful person making strides to vanquish said fear. One almost required it. To surpass nature itself was to invoke a mysterious, inner power that very few truly knew to control. Even the wisest men and the greatest thinkers of today and yesteryear had often failed to grasp their own sense of will. It was an immaculate thing, immaterial and immortal, which drove humanity to adapt to the changes around them.
To harness the power of adaptation, to overcome adversity from within, was no small feat. Its fuel was faith. But if there was no faith, then there was no change. No chance for it as all it could have been had been delivered to perdition.
Then Kita heard footsteps. She blinked and saw that day had gone far away, and that she’d swirled in her own darkness for the entire day. Sasaki sat down on the edge of her coffee table. Her hair freshly wet from a shower, dressed in her work clothes — she was off to work. But for this moment, those chartreuse eyes sought out Kita’s soul.
She folded her hands between her knees and sighed. “I knew that you were going to rot,” Sasaki then halfway scoffed as she continued on, “You’re really predictable, y’know?”
Kita didn’t need to hear that she was predictable. Instead of bringing anything to the discussion, she let her neck sink further, her eyes now no longer oriented towards the ground. Like the serpent eating its own tail, she coiled ever inwards; her body sought its ultimate stasis.
“It makes me nervous to think about her by herself. It used to be that we all were trying to get her to do things on her own — that hopefully she didn’t need to be babied the whole way. But now I just feel… bad. I don’t think she’s going to do anything, but I can’t know for sure; plus, it’s just not a good time to be alone. I know that I’d feel crazy cooped up in a hospital bed. L-like like, seriously,” She said this all with her head in her hands. Little regard was given towards this rather peculiar position until she was long into her diatribe. She laughed bitterly, “I sound nuts.”
“Lil bit.” Sasaki nodded.
“Heyyy… You’re supposed to comfort me.” Kita’s head shot up so she could fire a withering glare at her bestie. But the humor was lost on her as she saw the look on Sasaki’s face. It was unmistakably diplomatic — she obscured her concern with the attempt to wear a silly smile, but it had too much thought behind it. The regular Sasaki would’ve just smiled. Autonomous of anything else, she wore a loose smirk like most people would wear socks. “But I guess we did drop this on your head. I-I’m sorry about that.”
“Don’t be.” Sasaki stood up and ruffled Kita’s hair. “I let you in. Apropos of anything else, that alone can tell you enough. Uhhh, so… If you don’t wanna get food delivered, there’s some takeout in the fridge. Gyudon from yesterday, so it should still be good.”
Sasaki fixed her shirt and gave Kita one long look. Like a soldier off to battle, she offered the object of her affections one final, indulgent gesture; as she wasn’t sure if she’d come back to see her. They stood on the edge of a long mile. To turn back along the road was to risk the dangers repeating. But to push forward, well, it was to risk the road’s end; there may have been nothing at its conclusion, just a cliff and some jagged stones. The pieces of her that wished to stay longer and hold onto this feeling were overtaken by more responsible synapses, as it was the cruel reality that she had to endure her work, otherwise it would risk her own livelihood and humble living. For the world to be kind, however, Sasaki would’ve needed to act years sooner.
And the world may have turned its head, all the same. She briefly closed her eyes to chase away the shadows of her mind, and in finding such clarity, she felt like she could face Kita properly. This time with a real smile. “Hey. I’ll be back probably before you’re even awake. Get some rest. If not for me, do it for her.”
‘Do it for her.’
Victim of her conscience as she was, could Kita deny such a request? Such was the new law of their lives: this would be how their lives would be lived. Until time had had its due, from growing bored of toying with the threads of fate that bound them, they wouldn’t know the sunrise.
The horizon blinked as the Sun lost track of its cycle.
{ ~ }
Prithee and pray tell,
Have you the wit to acknowledge my death?
As my voice springs up from Hell,
Are you still there, with bated breath?
Though I have fallen so far as to be hidden,
My clarion call still rises unbidden –
O’fearful thing that quivers at my cry
Do not look away or try to deny
That which you crave, truth
That meaning forsooth.
The wheel of fortune spins and turns,
And so the sea of time roars and churns,
And so am I left at the ungracious end:
Emptiness greets me, its forever friend.
{ ~ }
28 Days Before the Festival
The Clinic
The only drama of her choices weren’t her own emotions. She had no means in how people chose to face the results of what she had to do; they had chosen the trajectory of the future. And they had chosen wrong.
At least, so said her heart as she sat at the edge of a bed in a clinic. Day had turned to night. Hitori had been fussed over and given the treatment expected for someone suffering from a head wound. Thankfully, in the eyes of medical professionals, it didn’t seem as though her cognition had been impaired any more than it already was. In a way, Hitori wondered if that was a curse, too.
She wanted to stop thinking.
The walls loomed over her. White, clinically white. They were clean, sparse of anything but framed pictures of animals and diagrams of the human body. You’d sooner find expression diving in a dumpster than seeking it here. They climbed and climbed, reaching their pinnacle now in places deeply cast in shadow, where they met more white. All the colors were found in white light. But white light only promised potential, it did not offer it itself. You had to carve out something from it. And to Hitori’s mind, such a sentiment was grim at best. Creating something from nothing? Was that not, by principle alone, impossible?
She beheld the prism that could have split color from this white box she was imprisoned within. As it turned in her thoughts, she imagined a rainbow splashed across each and every corner in sight; finally bringing something to the nothing that once was. No more would she have to bear these smooth, faceless walls. No longer would they impart nothing upon those who came.
The sight was… intrusive. The placid blue was mellowed by the dim lighting, as day had ended and night had come, rendering all things, even the light, in shade. It faded into obscurity. Vibrant yellows that would have been enlivened by sunlight or bright light indeed had become muddy, as the color now bled into other things, losing intensity as well as focus. It was too much, overbearing in its mediocrity.
Red stood out the most. Red was the loudest color. It demanded attention like no else. No matter if it was in bright light or low, it was and would always remain the color that humans saw first. What it was was passion. Many things were otherwise applied to the color. Anger. Lust. Danger. Excitement. It was blood, it was meat, but it was carnations as well as cherries. The rose and the tips of its thorns. Red. They all linked together in passion. Should a man ever raise his fist not in the passions of his rage, should he even be considered as man? Or has he become something else, more human than human?
In the dark, bright red became a foreboding deep color. Dried blood. The passion faded as life begat death, the spray of lifeblood splattered upon the wall.
Hitori didn’t like it. These things just filled her with discomfort, and it disconcerted her that she preferred the pale white to the colors of her life. Even as she attempted to fill her mind with noise to escape the rages of the malcontents within her mind, she failed and found herself unable to put them away.
She was here, again.
She had fallen, again.
Again, and again, and again…
It was a karmic cycle. It wasn’t enough to live or to want to live. Most people didn’t ‘want’ to live. They simply lived, unthinking of their mortality or what could steal it away from them. The ones who wanted to live were the ones already present at the cusp of Death. At his door did they knock, the belligerent few, as they sought to awake the Reaper who slept so gently in the quiet night. That very night, Hitori found herself knocking again. She did not fear the Reaper. Surrounded by pale walls and dark halls, Hitori felt that she was in the ideal position to question the Reaper once again.
Why hadn’t he taken her?
Was there something she still had to do? There must have still been worth within her, at least more than the value she could provide the dirt with her body. In this dark place, she only could search her own soul for the answers she sought, and it proffered little more than the beliefs that she already held; there were scant little things left that she held to be true — such things were a paltry mercy when faced with so much despair; it ran rampant, it overwhelmed all that she was — that thing, that finality; her grief of being alive had swallowed the entirety of her being. Life alone was not a cruelty. But this form of living? It was the greatest cruelty of them all.
It was dissatisfying to be back in this place. She’d cycled back exactly to the place she’d begun in — so full of that self hatred that she felt like there were ants marching beneath her skin, biting through her arteries and splitting her from within. No growth had been made. No growth, perhaps, could even be made.
She was supposed to be dead. The bugs that crawled in her waking flesh were perhaps the signature that she was yet still the walking dead. Her eyes traveled to her wrists and saw them emblazoned in fiery red, the marks of her self-murder still evident as the ooze of blood and pus dribbled out from within, the shredded pork of her pulled apart skin as evident as it was now as it was when she’d done the deed. Thin, weak pieces of fibrous meat zig-zagged like a lattice in between the fetid lines, holding together what little flesh it could — these tendons being all that could hold together this shattered glass girl. The stained window that she once was had been blown apart. The shards shredded her body like knives and left her threadbare and fractal.
But she blinked and saw the bandages. Her wrists were heavy and achy; they were still whole. The drama of her overactive mind overflowed into her vision… and twice had it happened in one sitting.
The mind returned to disappointment. Growth was an arterial part of the human experience, as all humans were born as these lumps of unformed clay; they had nowhere but up to go, so to say. No masterful hand individually sculpted these things into something beautiful. It was a collective effort, from those beyond, and from the one who’d been born at all. In a sense, it was nothing like true sculpture work. David hadn’t been sculpted by an army of hundreds of craftsmen each trading their own marble with Michelangelo; it had been hewn from one block by one man.
As much as people differed from a master’s work, they still held one condition with one another that was truly shared. A single master decided his composition. And so did a single human decide their development.
You couldn’t force a man to change. As much as his change may have come unconsciously, his unconditional core and desire to be committed to his true personality was not something shaken by sentiment, by action, nor even by crisis. His determination to alter even his unconscious self was a lifelong commitment. To change the sculpt of one’s make was to require the dexterity of a master’s hand.
Hitori was no master. She’d found that the core of her self was a selfish, snarling thing that hungered evermore for things well beyond her grasp. And this beast couldn’t be tamed nor quelled by her faith alone.
In the past, she’d simply ‘get carried away’. Their band was experiencing modest success? It was time to shell out tens of thousands of yen on an expensive new jacket from a designer brand — only for it to then turn out that their ‘modest success’ was 50k views on a new music video. Not even twice the ad revenue would pay back her jacket.
That had been the tell-tale sign. She wasn’t like Ryo, who’d simply spent because she had no sense not to (rich parents did something to your brain), she was a slavering fiend that had a deep pit in her heart that had to be filled. Was success the thing that would fill it? No. Love? It stirred little, she feared. Friendship, familial kinship, connection and commitment… nothing, nary even a bite.
She’d baited her hook and sunk the line only to pull up translucent shells and wakame. Her golden tai was nowhere to be seen; the sea burying her hope deeper than even the deepest trench.
This thing with Kita… was it the same? The same as all of the rest? Had she asked her out just to fill the gap in her soul? She couldn’t do that to her. Not to Kita — not to anyone.
To turn away now would only break Kita’s heart, though. Disappointed, Hitori fell back in the clinic’s bed and rubbed her heavy eyes. To her surprise, the ceiling of the clinic was nowhere near as sparse as its walls. She wondered why — but then her mind traveled to the reality that children were likely dreadfully terrified of a place like this. There were drawings stuck up in the stucco. Each of them was of varying quality. Blurry strikes on a page made by an array of crayon colors that made a drawing that elicited the idea of a hippo. Elegant strokes and simple shapes that illustrated a heroic face not unlike the ones found in the panels of Dragon Battlers. And there was even a page with thick, shapely lines made by ink brush that carved out a haunted, perfectly beautiful Japanese landscape. There were dozens of them. And the one above her head, just now?
It was of a girl and her mother. Yellow hair, with a signature antenna — a young Nijika and her dearly departed mother.
Hitori’s heart ached. That was a path that could not be taken. The bridge blazed in the periphery of her gaze, and her footsteps, already unsteady, would surely cast her into the river if she even dared try. That outrage almost felt performative, now.
Nijika was right. They all were right, of course. How could they possibly be wrong about replacing someone like her? This monster, this beast…
This thing of ill repute.
Repugnant by nature and repulsed by her own thoughts and deeds, Hitori tugged her head down as far as it could go, as her neck soon touched her bosom — her head buried so she could see nothing but the white shirt she wore and the white blanket that fell over her prone form.
She deserved to be alone tonight. To be in the arms of comfort with the girl she may have loved was undeserving for the thing she had become.
{ ~ }
28 Days Before the Festival
Shinjuku - FOLT Green Room
It wouldn’t be nice to spend the night alone.
Those hands were stronger than her own, as they trailed up her spine and sent shivers through the whole of her body. Her knees knocked together, she bit her lip — she looked into eyes that were almost the same color as her own. Yet the ones opposite to her were fiercer. They were smoldering embers from a fire which threatened to blaze once again, her body their kindling.
Yoyoko pushed back a little. “Didn’t think you were crazy for me, Ijichi. Get in line with my other adoring fans — especially behind the ones that don’t stink of alcohol.”
Nijika Ijichi had texted her out of the blue just a day before. There Yoyoko had been, minding her own business (none shall ask why she was crying to her mirror, nobody witnessed it), when she got a text message — that very message had almost been left on read.
Okay, since you’re asking, yes. Yoyoko had gotten rejected. Again. It’s hard being a super cool, stylish, popular, intelligent — we’re cutting the rest for time — young woman in this day and age, as everyone expects just a bit more out of the popstars when compared to the rest of the masses. At least, Yoyoko thought so. But if you’re like Yoyo, you’re going to put 110% into everything you do. And these college lesbians like the energy for the first few dates… and then they realize that their Ohtsukin was a bit of a demon.
Poor Yoyoko suffered yet another rejection, and she really thought this one was going well (she’d even filmed an OhTube short with her!) until she got stood up, dumped over text, and blocked before she could even apologize. Tearfully, she deleted that video and unraveled in her bathroom.
For whatever reason she actually picked up that phone, it thankfully led her to touching base with someone she actually could rely on.
[NJK Sent You A Message]
Yoyoko opened their chat, which she’d jokingly named [Heaven or Hell: Let’s Rock!] to see how her rival band leader was doing.
[NJK
have you ever felt like you were drowning]
Yoyoko’s grasp on her phone tightened. That’s right, Nijika never told her how the band meeting had gone… and so she texted back.
[YYK
that’s cryptic ijichi]
Dots for a little while. Then a message.
[NJK
its like i forgot how to swim
idk
its stupid
i shouldnt bug you]
Yoyoko sat crosslegged in the middle of the bathroom floor. She focused on that screen. It didn’t take a genius (like her) to put two and two together to make four, here. Nijika had gone to battle to find out the fate of her band. She was now texting like Kikuri while sober.
[YYK
you’re going to bug the hell out of me if you keep dragging me around. spill it or don’t text me back.]
[NJK
i fucked up
really bad]
Yoyoko’s brows furrowed. She couldn’t imagine Nijika losing to anyone but herself. So then, how could she sound so defeated? That meant that Yoyoko really only had one path ahead of her: interrogation.
[YYK
i do not care enough about your personal life to get vagued around ijichi
get your head out of the starry skies or else im going to punch you so hard you can actually taste the rainbow in your name]
[NJK
okay okay i get it. we got invited to rockin’.]
That’s cute, okay – and then, for a moment, the world spun around the solitary Yoyoko who had become so dense as to offset the planet’s gravity. Kessoku Band had done it again. Despite everything she’d built, despite the successes of SIDEROS even as it had remained independent of any labels or contracted deals, she had been shown up by the younger, less experienced band. She could fight as hard as she wanted, and yet, KB would prove its excellence. Something in her heart started to fizz up like someone’d dropped a tablet in her cola; for whatever reason, the feeling made Yoyoko want to bite something.
She wouldn’t let this show. No weakness, not even in front of Nijika. Especially not in front of Nijika.
Nijika's texts are erratic. Her thoughts, scrambled. [NJK
i didnt tell them.
i told myself that it was safer that way. idk
like imagine getting their hopes up like that only to be told that the band that pulled out is fine. or they found a better person to fill our spot. itd break their hearts.
i shouldve just told them]
That feeling started to burn at Yoyoko’s throat.
[YYK
ijichi.]
[NJK
i didnt know she was feeling that way. i shouldve known. its my job to know but i didnt know.]
but would it have been taken well if she was healthy? its running wild in my mind. ryo told me that things always go wrong whenever im being reckless, but i thought i was being smart this time. i thought] She stopped typing.
It was like heartburn the way it brought fire to her guts and spilled up her esophagus. An invisible hand composed of smoke and wrath clutched at her neck like an abusive lover may have throttled her.
[YYK
ijichi!]
Dots fading in and out for a few agonizing minutes. Yoyoko felt her blood pressure spiking. A text made it through.
[NJK
i was doing it right. theyd never know and never be disappointed, or theyd learn it and be so surprised and excited! but i was just being selfish. reckless, just like ryo warned me about. whats wrong with me? im a villain. i should be put away, behind bars, and the key should be thrown away. i really hurt her. i destroyed my own band.]
[YYK
NIJIKA IJICHI IF YOU DONT STOP TYPING I WILL COME OVER TO YOUR HOME (I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE) AND THROW YOUR PHONE OUT OF THE WINDOW]
Yoyoko stared at the screen. Irate, she was so sure she’d have to make good on that promise – she’d dealt enough with the sprawl of her own inner monologue to have to deal with another person’s grueling self-deprecating diatribe. There was no way on Earth she’d let that fly. So, as she glared burning holes into her phone, she was almost 100% certain that Nijika would continue to piss her off. Yet, there was nothing. Not a peep. The bubbles didn’t even pop up.
[YYK
Okay. Good. You’re going to listen to me now. We’re going to hang out. You don’t get to say no. You’re going to tell me what happened, and if you start whining even for a second about how evil or bad you are for making a mess, I’m going to hit you.
Rely on me. I’ll clean up your mess for you.]
And somehow that had led Yoyoko straight into the lion’s den. She was dutybound, of course, to save her juniors – they looked up to her (didn’t they?) and had always marveled at just how good she was (or at least she assumed they did) – because that was just what a good senpai did. None of them called her senpai, of course, but that part didn’t need to be said. Everyone just understood that to be true. After all, she was Yoyoko Ohtsuki, leader of SIDEROS, winner of the Mikakunin Riot, economics major, with over 500 thousand Twitta followers, 500 million OhTube views, and 1 million monthly Songify listeners. It was just natural to feel like you were a dog chasing cars when compared to her.
Sure of herself and in any situation she could possibly end up in, Yoyoko had wisely chosen the location of their hang to be in a place Nijika liked – that meant they ended up in STARRY, of course, as that little live house had somehow stumbled its way into being the nexus of the lives of the Kessoku Four themselves. Though it’d been shut down for nearly the whole month of August, and would remain closed until the first week of September, people like Yoyoko were given a free pass to come and go.
She kind of expected Yamada or the older sister to be there. Whyever would the manager of her own store, not to mention the person who lived on the third floor, be anywhere but here? But then again, Seika Ijichi was in her 30s… a woman had to live, sometimes.
But no Yamada? She thought that the two were like conjoined twins. Siamese if you pleased.
Instead, she was where she was now: in mortal combat with a yellow-headed fool with her inhibitions completely broken down. Yoyoko hadn’t seen Nijika drunk. In fact, Yoyoko didn’t even know Nijika drank at all. STARRY had booze in it, sure, but would Nijika ever skim their bottles? Doesn’t seem like her.
A lightbulb dimly flickered alive above her head as she removed handsy hands from her arms — Kikuri, in her only moments of coordination aside from strumming on her guitar, had stashed a few caches of spirits all around the joint. She’d been here enough, right? And that sharp, heady smell… that was the cheap beer she was always chugging down because it had a price tag cheaper than what you’d need to bribe a child to keep a secret. Yoyoko sighed through her nose and gripped onto Ijichi’s heat-seeking wrists, “I understand getting overly excited about me coming by, it’s not every day you get to hang out with a bonafide celebrity icon (in the independent music scene), but to break out the bottles in advance? That’s advanced rocker girl shit, Ijichi. I’d be impressed if you weren’t pawing at me.”
“Soooorrryy~, you’re just like…” Nijika’s head rolled hither and thither, her words slurred together. Her face was so bright red as to make her own eyes look dull. “Pretty.”
‘This is such a rocking way to come out. I wish I’d've come up with it.’ Of course, the logic center of her brain fired active basically the second after she had such an inane thought. Maybe it was pure luck. Or maybe she’d learned a lesson or few as her years as a rocker. Whatever it was, it flew through the open window of her consciousness and slammed smack dab against her bedroom door. There were no surer clarion calls than that. ‘Consider your surroundings.’
See with those cynical eyes. Nobody surged onto stage in the era of the pop singer and the rock band belting out her wails of brimstone tinged hellfire without a skeptical, or at the very least, sardonic worldview. The devil’s testament was her testimony. And so, with a discerning scrutiny such as her own, what did she see? Ohtsuki bent her neck ‘round the way of Nijika’s obstructive head, fueled by the devil’s own curiosity, leering as she navigated the shadows within STARRY, cast by the lights that were on at the wet bar.
There was nothing to see. But then, everything revealed itself to her. Call it the instinct of a professional that’d been tossed into enough seedy dens to be able to smell them out from an email alone — STARRY was in a rough state. It was supposed to reopen next month? The first week of September…. how? There were holes in the walls. Panels in the ceiling were missing and left the wiring exposed. Light fixtures dangled from their wires, pulled out and left to hang whilst the place was being gutted and refitted. Yoyoko got the sneaking suspicion that ‘a new sound system’ was only a part of what Seika actually was getting done around the place.
The tape around the edges of the stage only made that more apparent. The STARRY of Theseus, she supposed, was in the process of being taken apart and reconstructed in a new form – one that had little to do with the original, other than being named the same and carrying the same vibes. It was like someone had paused midway through shelling a crab and had left all the sinewy, tender parts hanging from the hard shell. Yoyoko was no crabber, and so she felt somewhat repulsed by the thought. Mayhaps that had something to do with the odd atmosphere she felt within the live house; the half-hollowed out innards of a viscera laden carcass of a once vibrant and lively musical venue were the definition of disconcerting, and so to come inside and drink with one of the familiar denizens of this now deathly place filled Yoyoko’s heart with a moderate amount of dread – such a feeling arising from the same reason most people fear ghosts and the dead. It was not due to the fear of death itself, but instead…
Due to the fear of the unknown and of change itself. The transition between life and death was full of unknowns and unknowables, things that science could never hope to answer, and so it had always been a latent subject; it remained obscured even within Yoyoko’s own mind. But in this moment, as she fended off a girl deep in her cups – Yoyoko imagined that Nijika had already found the answer to what she’d considered unknown, and that Nijika was not exactly comfortable with the answer. Or worse, she’d uncovered the truth but could not answer to it, leaving her entirely rudderless.
“You know, pretty is a pretty big understatement. I’m a straight up killer. People turn their heads so fast to see me that they snap their necks and,” she stuck out her tongue, “Bleh! Drop dead. I’m a dark-world diva, a sexy savant of the salacious, and so on and so on.”
Yoyoko didn’t know where the next part came from, but as she saw Nijika’s bottom lip quiver, she did something rather bold. She placed her thumb on Nijika’s bottom lip, letting her voice rumble low in her throat as she said, “Do you think I’m some kind of cheap prize, Ijichi? You get a little tipsy and all that sense in your cute little head goes haywire, huh. That’s funny. I guess you can’t be blamed. Who wouldn’t throw themselves all over a catch like me?”
She boasted, as ever. There was no domain that Ohtsuki wouldn’t delve into for the sake of puffing up her own ego. The prideful fool that she was, she stared directly into this absolute disaster and thought nothing of trying to dodge out of the way. No, you see, Yoyoko had figured to catch this car crash with her teeth.
Nijika’s hair was undone – that only went to remind Yoyoko of her rather devilishly catching older sister rather than her own typically ‘cute as a button’ self. Seika was a slight, sardonic lady who wasn’t exactly the image of ‘elegance’, but beauty came in a strange variety of forms – Seika herself proving that. One did not need all the curves under the Sun to prove the majesty of nature’s menagerie. She was sleek, sharp, and angled; her eyes alone could speak a thousand words, and most of them were threatening. Nijika was not too far off from that. She was small, compact, and likely could fit in your luggage. But within that petite frame was a spectrum of colors and lights; she was gorgeous in the way that a dolphin was. Powerful, svelte – her features were less sharpened than her big sister’s, but her rounded cheeks and more doe-like eyes gave her a charming innocent look. Though, Yoyoko knew that she could still channel the same cutting glare that Seika wore like second nature.
As much as Yoyoko had boasted about her own ‘sexiness’, she was taken by surprise by just how much she liked how Nijika looked. So when Nijika’s lips sealed around her thumb, Yoyoko jolted back with so much force that it was as though she’d been electrocuted.
She had been sitting on a bar stool, just centimeters away from Nijika, but the force of her flinch sent Yoyoko back half a meter or more – she was on her feet, hand now splayed across her own chest, as she looked at Nijika in rapt awe. Unbelievable. The raw gusto in which Nijika had done something so utterly taboo, at least in Yoyo’s own view, was quite literally the most insane thing Ohtsuki had been witness to in what likely had been years. A river of panic now flowed into her; had she taken advantage of a drunk girl? Had she…
The terrible thing about desire was that one never had a choice in whether or not it should surface. In a solitary moment of self-induced braggadocious egotripping, Yoyoko Ohtsuki had stepped over the lines of what she’d view as ‘right and just’ in any given social situation, breaking her social contract almost completely – that had come about as the end result of her chasing this thought of Nijika Ijichi to the absolute limit. And she’d pushed the limit beyond what was acceptable, at least to herself. There was a lot of red tape and rules to this ‘relationship’ business, see, and Yoyoko, like she also wasn’t a crabber, was also not a lawyer. She didn’t understand where to cut and where to peel; she only knew that the rules were in her way. Desire struck her like a bolt from the black. Desire to see where this could go, desire to see Nijika like this again, and a desire to –
To begone from this place. She looked down at her thumb, still glistening with saliva, and glanced back up at Nijika herself; the girl smiled back at Yoyoko dumbly with her ruddy cheeks and her hair, so sweaty, that her bangs had stuck to her forehead. Yoyoko’s heart pulsed and then pounded, and she knew that she had to go… but to leave Nijika alone?
She swallowed thickly and felt her palms begin to grow sweaty.
There was something coiling around her body and soul, born of the heart and disdainful of the mind. It tasted of Yoyoko’s crimson and yearned to taste more.
What a twisted sensation, that thing we call love.
Perhaps love was the delusion of grandeur that rotted out the rational, sensible core of a person. Or perhaps it was a far-flung dream, so distant as to be kin to starlight. Maybe love was to sacrifice the whims and will of your own heart, so that another heart could be embraced, and so that you both could become one. Then again, such thoughts made love sound so frightening. It was fear, it was dread, and it was truly inevitable. You could not escape it. Not past denial nor death itself; it was constant and unflinching, truly a transcendental force.
Yoyoko was not the only woman at a crossroads this very night. And so she stood at the terminus, the end of something she did not fully witness, unaware that she was about to step forward into something else – something bigger.
So it was and so it would be.
Did she deserve this? Did she deserve anything, at all?