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Neku lives in a place where the dogs don’t bark.
It’s quiet but for his mind; he wastes some moments daily regretting the decision to abandon the city for the sea. The former had been loud with reminders that the world moves ever on by the racket of bike spokes, announcements, train horns, despite the nights when he had thought he could hear the planet winding down on its axis, its unraveling barely audible and easily overlooked. The latter is loud in its abject loneliness, carries itself with the grace of a dying thing still making attempts at dignity. He can hear it through the walls, knitting itself a storm. He only misses the city when he recalls that it does not miss him.
Shibuya does not miss him. It flipped him inside out and then was done, moved on to the next disaster.
He paints the sea now, cold and desolate, the way he had once painted Shibuya: breathing, alive, and devoid of soul entirely. Shiki visits, her hair long, and wearing contacts in lieu of her glasses, and she tells him to paint something beautiful for once in his life. And he tells her that beauty does not depend on the existence of a heart, that despite what of his soul they lack his works are still technically sound (they are), and she smiles as she gently tells him how cruel he can sometimes be. She says he can fool the world, himself included, but that she will always search for him between brushstrokes, and as of yet she had never found him there, he’s only a signature in the bottom righthand corner, only a name, an entity entirely separate from the work, and Neku tells her the artist is dead, and she repeats herself about cruelty before catching the last train home to Tokyo.
Beat emails him photos of the three of them—Shiki, Rhyme, and Beat’s veiny forearm—posing in various locations around Shibuya. Hachiko stands triumphant as Rhyme and Shiki form a heart with their hands. A blurry candid of Beat burning his tongue on ramen. A closeup on Rhyme’s face illuminated by the glow of the summer fireworks. Beat snapping a perfectly-timed selfie with a snowball in motion hurling towards him in the background, Shiki losing herself in a laugh as it leaves her gloved hand.
Neku wishes Beat would stop sending them.
Because every new photograph shaves precious hours off of his already borrowed lifespan. He enlarges them, enhances them, scans them meticulously for reflections that shouldn’t exist, shadows that don’t make sense, light leaks in the vague shape of a person. The smallest of signs. The most hidden of hints. Are you watching? Are you listening? Does your consciousness hang around? You told me you cared, once. Remind me.
Neku saves them all to a locked folder on an external harddrive.
In the beginning he’d been better at excuses. Perhaps the toll of resonating on a human frequency was too much to justify even a brief appearance. Perhaps his work kept him away. Perhaps next Saturday he’d abruptly exist again and they could chat, for a bit, maybe grab coffee at WildKat.
But all the development Neku had undergone once upon another lifetime had done little to shake the fundamental cynicism he still carried to this day, and over time he had once again indulged it, cultivated it, let it fester until it became a bitterness.
So bitter he lies awake at night, and no dogs do bark, and no unmuffled motorcycle engines do frighten away the specters hung like cobwebs from the rafters of his mind.
As he finally brushes his fingers against the door into a waking dream, a loud crash reels him out of it. He sits up, heart beating in time to the downpour outside, and pulls the string on his bedside lamp.
There, standing at the foot of his bed: the phantom he had never found in the photographs, here alive and slightly flushed in the cheeks, and hair slightly frizzed from the moisture seeping in through the ancient windows, and lips slightly parted with surprise, or anticipation, or with other less savory things that Neku’s mind does not immediately suggest because if it had he would have to be very cross with himself.
“You startled me, Neku,” says the ghost. “Isn’t it a little bit past your bedtime?”
“Fuck you,” is the sound Neku’s mouth makes before his brain catches up.
“Oh, he knows what he wants, doesn’t he?” the ghost teases. “But I’m not here for that.”
Neku squeezes his eyes shut and pinches himself.
Before he can open them, the ghost continues: “No, you’re not dreaming. I’m really here. But not for long—unfortunately it’s more difficult for me to keep this form the farther I am from Shibuya, so I don’t have much time...”
“Are you...?” Neku says, slowly opening his eyes. “You’re not. No. No, he wouldn’t do this to me. Not after... years of—“
“But I am,” the ghost interjects, not unkindly. He holds out an arm—as frail as Neku remembers, that pale skin papier-mâchéd over lithe bones and veins that almost seem to glow dark blue—and Neku, swallowing his reluctance along with the mob of other emotions threatening war inside his head, reaches for it and runs the pad of his thumb over the small divot in his wrist. Beneath, the ghost’s pulse hiccups in response.
Neku lets slip a shaky sigh.
So this is where his soul had gone. Yes. His chest recalls its shape. It hasn't disintegrated, hasn't gone missing, has merely chosen to hide away in another place, let itself be kept safe by another until Neku regains the facilities to care for it again himself. And had he?
“Why did you leave?” Neku asks. His voice cracks but it’s from fatigue and certainly not a side-effect of his losing battle against an oncoming flood of violent tears.
“Why did you?” the ghost says.
“You left first.” Breaking, breaking, traitorous vocal chords. “You couldn’t have asked me to stick around like some kind of hopeless idiot, just wasting every day waiting around for you to show up.”
The ghost raises an eyebrow. “You’re still waiting, though, Neku.” He gestures toward the walls of Neku’s bedroom. “The only thing that’s changed is the scenery.”
Self-assured brat, Neku thinks, and that’s more like it. Easier to antagonize the missing piece, force it to hate him, than to have it return but only halfway, mangled and scarred and never again the same.
“Shut up,” Neku tells him. “You can’t blame me for leaving when you weren’t even there.”
“I can do whatever I want. But still, I don’t blame you, Neku.” The ghost lowers himself onto the mattress; Neku brings his knees to his chest and wraps his arms around them. Less surface area for them to “accidentally” touch. Anger wants to make a home of his throat, to ravage and burn with a vitriol he’s long kept caged, but when he looks at the ghost, how the shadows fall around him, all he can think is, He looks beautiful, and the thought is less an organic observation born of him and more a fully-formed statement that occurs to him. Another centimeter more, and this light could be a halo...
“Time passes differently for me,” the ghost says, settling in atop Neku’s bed. “In the UG, I mean. Everything slows down, but it also passes me by at breakneck speed. It feels like I blinked this morning, and ten years were gone.”
“Oh,” is all Neku can bring himself to say. Difficult to understand the sentiment when he himself had experienced every minute of every month of every year in gut-wrenchingly painful detail. Every agonizing second of waiting in vain.
“I tried… to keep an eye on you, you know,” the ghost ventures. Still the same smarmy tone of voice.
“Yeah, well, you could have given me some kind of. I dunno. A sign?” No, that sounds too religious, grants him too much power over this situation. He’s already got the power, doesn’t need to be reminded, doesn’t need to let it get to his head. “Or at least given my friends a message?” If it’s this much trouble just to show up.
The ghost sighs. “Early on I passed the threshold of tardiness where it becomes too late for communication, and past that it only became even more difficult… I’m sorry. I could have said something. You’re right. But the truth is…”
“The truth… ?” Neku prompts after a beat.
“Well, if you ask me, there seems to be a direct correlation between your proximity to Shibuya and your happiness. The farther away from the city limits you travel, the happier you become. And I never could have kept up with you, Neku.”
Neku shakes his head and tugs at a strand of vibrant orange hair that’s found the wrong way to dangle in front of his eyes. “That’s just plain dumb,” he says. “If you feel like you can’t keep up, you should just ask the other person to slow down.” God, he was turning into Shiki. “You never even asked. Besides, you think you couldn’t keep up? Get real. Look at what you do for a living.”
“Neku, Neku,” the ghost giggles sadly. “Even now, you never fail to surprise me.”
“And you’re predictable as ever,” Neku snorts.
A wisp of smoke begins to unfold from the places Neku had touched brief moments ago, and the ghost sighs again.
“Oh, what do you know? That must be my cue to go,” he says. “Seems I’m at my limit. Like I said, I can’t maintain this form here too long.”
Then stay until you dissolve, Neku wants to say. At least that’ll be an ending for the both of us. Some sense of finality. No more half-open doors, just a headstone where lies whatever it was we ever shared.
But instead, he just frowns and crosses his arms. “So what, you show up uninvited after ten years and then fuck back off to Shibuya? Was that some half-assed attempt to give me closure?” Or are you just reopening the wound for the hell of it? Well, Joshua? Which one is it?
The ghost shoots him a dismayed look. “You know I can still hear your thoughts, right? It’s important to me that you know that.”
Begone, thot, Neku thinks as hard as he can. The ghost still covers his mouth when he laughs, and Neku realizes then that the quirk has never been out of politeness, just yet another little addition to that character he plays, the one he never entirely dropped, not even when they were both at their most vulnerable.
“So turn off the light,” the ghost tells him. “Halos never suited me much, anyhow.”
Neku complies, though he furrows his brow at the fact that he’s doing it willingly, not even an ounce of pretend protest. No, he doesn’t have it in him anymore.
“Yeah, but you’ll be back soon, right?” Neku asks, with more hope than he’d really wanted to convey. “You don’t get to just drop by whenever it’s convenient for you.”
But no reply ever comes, and the question hangs in the air like thread unwound.
In the morning Neku wakes and rubs his bloodshot eyes. On the sheets beside him he finds a single silver hair: the last trace of a love that had blossomed, wilted, and then was gone.